failure

How to turn self-criticism around

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

To continue in the vein I started down earlier in the week, I thought I’d share one thing I do when I find myself in a firestorm of self-criticism (like the one I was in last Friday). It can come on you so suddenly, can’t it? That’s why it’s important to be aware of your own signals — because you are the only one who can tell when your body is slipping over from “I’m a little hungry” to “EAT NOW,” or from “I’m not feeling so great,” to “I HAVE A HORRIBLE CASE OF THE FLU,” or from “That didn’t go so well” to “I AM A MISERABLE FAILURE.” Because when you catch yourself at the first signs, it’s easier to turn it around gently.

In other words, try not to do what I did — try to catch the signs before the storm is raging around you. But you know what? That is another thing I have to remind myself of all the time — that this is not a game of self-evolution, not a thing to win or do once and be done. This is something we are working on all the time. It’s an ecosystem, with checks and balances and weather systems that fluctuate.

So. Here is how I pulled myself out of the frenzy:

STEPS TO REVERSE THE SELF CRITICISM

Step 1: Write down what your inner critics are saying

Here’s what mine were saying last week: 

  1. You’ve got too much to do
  2. You wasted your day AGAIN
  3. You can’t get this right
  4. You are a stressful person
  5. You suck at managing time
  6. You made a mess of it
  7. This always happens  (this = trying to do too many things
  8. You can’t get anything done
  9. You couldn’t even do ONE thing right today!
  10. WTF is wrong with you

Step 2: Make a list of things that are the opposite of that (and that also feel true)

Here were some opposites that felt true to me, and/or made me laugh out loud:

  1. You have just the right amount of things to do.
  2. You did good work today
  3. You can get this right
  4. You are a calming person. You want to help people.
  5. You suck at wasting time. You could be better at it.
  6. You get too focused on organizing
  7. This does not always happen
  8. You can get things done
  9. You did lots of things right today
  10. WTF is not wrong with you. Why the fuck is nothing wrong with you?

Step 3: Read that list out loud

Are you being too hard on yourself?

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking today about why it’s so easy to be hard on yourself.

I hear it from women I talk to all the time, and I catch myself doing it too: getting tired, getting overwhelmed and suddenly finding myself caught in a frenzy of self-criticism.

In fact, on Friday AS I WAS COMPOSING THIS POST ABOUT BEING TOO HARD ON YOURSELF, I got sucked into a vortex of being too hard on myself.

Here’s the short version of what happened — see if you can relate: I was writing in MS word. At 2:00, after about an hour of writing, I was 99% finished, so I closed my laptop to head home, thinking I’d finish there and post it before driving to pick up my son from daycare.

But when I got home and opened my laptop — the document had disappeared.

Word hadn’t crashed, I hadn’t saved it somewhere weird — it was gone, as if I hadn’t written it. This was baffling. I started questioning my sanity — had I written it? And then my inner critics showed up in force.

They started saying things like, Oh god, this ALWAYS happens, you ran out of time again. You should have kept it simple instead of making it too big to pull off LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO. Why can’t you get one thing done like a normal person?

I used the exercise I talk about in my new workbook to identify and give a name to one of the critical voices in my mind. He’s Randolph the pencil sharpener shark and he’s constantly barking at me to be stronger, smarter, faster, better.

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Randolph was upset. And after doing some dialoguing with him over the weekend, it’s clear to me now what he is scared of: being left behind, being unprepared, being eaten by bigger sharks, being swallowed up by the world.

This morning, after looking back on the wreckage I abandoned on Friday, I started over.

And ironically, by giving up Friday afternoon and admitting things were a jumbled mess and I couldn’t fix them, and by letting myself go through the process of being hard on myself and then pulling myself out of it — I achieved what Randolph the pencil shark wants. I now am feeling more clarity about why I am too hard on myself, and when it happens, and how to get out of it (I’ll write more on that later!).

Anyway — that’s what’s going on in my world. If you are being too hard on yourself too — know that you are not alone.

With love from me, Randolph and my inner champion, Wild Coach Helma — here’s to growing and stretching and learning to go easy on ourselves.

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Who is your failure hero?

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

Prince, of course, has been on my mind. It’s great to have heroes who show us what is possible – who shine like a beacon blazing a supernatural path*.

But I’ve been thinking — it’s also good to have heroes who show you what it looks like to stumble. Who blaze a trail of shit so you can say, hey, look at them – they made an ass of themselves, and I love them anyway.

So today I would like to encourage you to think about someone whose failure inspires you. Someone who has done something messy or ill advised or wrongheaded or ridiculous —  and despite all this, or maybe BECAUSE of it, they spoke to you.

For me, one of my failure heroes is Neil Young. He has many beautiful albums, but he also has some terrifically bad ones. One my favorites is Sleeps with Angels**. Half the songs on that album are transcendent and beautiful, and the other half fall flat. I don’t know why, but this is what makes it my favorite. It makes me feel like I know him. It lets me into his process. It lets me appreciate the easy magic of the beautiful songs even more.

Another hero for me is Jean Auel, the author of the Clan of the Cave Bear series. No disrespect to her, but each book is like 800 pages long, the characters repeat themselves, the moral lessons are easy to spot  and there are long, flowery, detailed sex scenes. I hope it doesn’t sound like I am criticizing her books because I LOVE them. I love that they exist in the world exactly as they are. They resonate with me and fill me with delight even as I am aware of how clunky they are.

Scene-from-the-film-version-of-Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear

(This is not the first time I’ve asked, what would Ayla do?)

Is there someone or something like this for you – something ridiculous or shlocky or embarrassing that you love?

Study it, and take some lessons from it. What challenges could you take on from your hero?

For me, I can think of a few:

  • I could make an album of bad songs
  • I could go to an open mic and accompany myself on the 3 chords I kind of know how to play on guitar
  • I could sing covers of only the bad Neil Young songs
  • I could map out a novel of my ideal fantasy world
  • I could create a character who is a stand in for my ideals
  • I could let myself write a blog post that goes on way too long and says the same thing over and over
  • I could add a terrible sex scene to that post
  • Or I could come up with a series and every post in that series is a variation on the same thing. Like I could make this a series – the Failure Hero series – and just keep writing the same post over and over

What ideas do your failure heroes inspire for you? I would love to hear! (And if you want someone to help you embrace failure like the glorious hero that YOU are, contact me to set up a navigation session. It’s my offer of support and encouragement as you set out on your journey.)

footnotes:

* of course, it’s also good to remember that Prince did not feel like everything he did was a success. Apparently he thought he made an ass of himself in this incredible moment with James Brown and Michael Jackson – whereas I see someone effortlessly taking command of the stage and transforming it with ridiculous, sexy confidence. You never know how people are responding to what you think is a huge failure.

** this is weird: I am writing this in a coffee shop, and as I paused to gaze off into space and decide which album of Neil Young’s was my favorite, Razor Love came on.

I suck, I’m great

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

New exercise in my Quick Ideas for Creative Action series, called: I SUCK, I’M GREAT.

This is a great one for flipping your own expectations around about what you’re supposed to be good at, and what you’re supposed to hide.

Simple idea: make a list of things you suck at, switch each one to its opposite, then say out loud, I AM GREAT AT [opposite thing].

Because think about it — if I suck at being on time, I must be great at being late.

I walk you through it here, and I’d like to draw your attention to my fabulous skills in rambling and repeating myself and abrupt video editing:

Announce a mistake in advance

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

I made a video as part of a new series I’m doing, Quick Tricks for Creative Living (note: I can’t decide if the name for this series sucks, so I might change it in the future*) (I’m already demonstrating the power of this exercise by announcing a potential mistake in advance!) 

These are short, easy exercises you can try as you’re going about your day, to help you diffuse obstacles, reframe expectations and engage creatively and proactively with the challenges life is throwing at you.

Today’s trick: ANNOUNCE A MISTAKE IN ADVANCE

I don’t know about you, but I hate making mistakes. I’m a recovering perfectionist and an oldest child so I get stuck in “if I’m not doing everything right I’m LETTING THE TEAM DOWN” narratives.

That’s why I was so delighted when someone in one of my workshops had this idea (as a way to deal with stress at work), to pre-emptively neutralize criticism by announcing what you might do wrong before you do it.

So say you’re stacking a bunch of onions in a display case. You would announce to everyone around you, “I am about to arrange these onions precariously so it’s impossible to take one out without sending them all rolling.”

When this idea first came up, we all cackled at the idea, and then had a blast thinking up examples.

I am about to awkwardly introduce myself to that woman over there.

Hold on, I need to try and parallel park and end up 3 feet away from the curb.

I am heading out to a meeting, and will take the most roundabout, least straightforward way and hopefully get stuck in traffic on the way.

The more examples we came up with, the more I started to think it might actually be a brilliant idea. So I’ve been trying it out since then, and without fail, it lightens the energy, relaxes the (self-imposed) pressure and more often than not, helps me to NOT make the mistake!

I’ll walk you through it here — give it a shot and let me know how it goes!

 

*UPDATE: I have indeed changed the name, it’s now Quick Ideas for Creative Action!

SXSW recap: stories and tacos and dirty dancing, oh my!

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

Whoooooo boy. I got back to Portland a week ago, after almost a week in glorious Austin, Texas for the huge, sprawling cascade of ideas that is SXSW Interactive.

I’m still trying to figure out what the hell happened, and I thought it would be a good idea to do this publicly.

First of all, this happened:

Screen Shot 2016-03-18 at 5.33.31 PM

I led my crazy workshop, Creative Living in an Alternate World! It happened! People attended! We created alter egos and dream projects, we bragged about what we suck at, and we danced badly!

I can’t tell you how nervous I felt 30 minutes before. But here is the power of an alter ego: I put on that electric blue jumpsuit and headband and stepped into the room totally confident in my ridiculous abilities.

Confidence, as I’ve written before, is a moving target — but that doesn’t mean you can’t get better at channeling it when you need to.

So I feel pretty great about the workshop. It was not perfect, and there are things I’d do better next time — I’d do less exercises and take more time with them, and I would go ahead and embrace power point instead of dragging my easel and laminated Stevie Wonder poster around with me.

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But all in all, I prepared as much as I could, and the things I learned, I could only learn by jumping in and doing it.

And when I talk about embracing failure, that’s what I mean. I don’t mean that you don’t prepare or that you toss off something you care about. I mean, you train as best you can, but when it’s game time, you step in and play the game, ready or not. Because you love it, and you’d rather play and lose than not play.

Is this metaphor working? Maybe this one is better: you run every day, and on the day of the race, you run the marathon. And you come in last. The next day, you get up and keep running.

I like sports metaphors because they have a built in high drama structure. Life isn’t always so clear cut — you can’t always tell when you’re winning and losing or where the finish line is.

And in this case, to be honest with you, I’m not sure if doing my workshop at SXSW Interactive was the best fit. The workshop itself went great, but navigating the rest of the festival was exhausting. Kind of an introvert’s nightmare, and my attempts to live it up and party (in the McDonalds Lounge) proved fruitless.

There were amazing moments of insight though, like Brene Brown’s talk about vulnerability and applying the Shitty First Draft concept to our thoughts (which helped me reign in my social anxiety and question it lovingly and turn it around.)

Kate Hayward and Natalie Currie led a fantastic session on reframing networking as storytelling and listening, complete with this visual note-taker:

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And I went to a beautiful workshop led by filmmaker Amy Hardie around the themes in her documentary, Seven Songs for a Long Life (which I didn’t get to see, but hopefully will soon!) She had us pair up and ask each other four questions:

  1. What counts as a good day?
  2. What qualities would you like to be remembered for?
  3. What actions do you take that express those qualities?
  4. If you were given a life-limiting diagnosis today, would you change those actions?

Simple questions but INTENSE, man! Maybe it’s because I was on day 5 away from my family, but I ended up crying with the person I partnered up with (who it turned out was the music director for the film), then cried again when we all sang a song from the film together.

I was also surprised to realize that my answer to question #4 was: I wouldn’t change much. I have made some big changes in my life over the last two years, and for the most part (give or take some money anxiety here and some sleep frustration there) I am doing exactly what I want to be doing on a daily basis.

Speaking of which, my big fear — that leaving my son with my husband for SIX DAYS would be a nightmare and they’d be traumatized upon my return — proved to be entirely unfounded. They did fine. I did fine. My fears, as they so often are, were entirely in my imagination.

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that’s me and my boy

And you know what? For all my questions and mixed feelings, here is what I know: when I submitted my proposal to SXSW Interactive nine months ago, the failure I thought I was risking was how to make a big proposal and get rejected. Then when they accepted my proposal, I thought the failure would be having no one show up, or having it totally bomb.

But it turns out, none of those things happened. By risking failure, I stepped up my game and did something I did not think I was ready for: I flew by myself to a huge conference and got a roomful of strangers to put down their phones and dance wildly to Dueling Banjos.

Someone else wrote about their experience of my workshop over on The Verge:

We were told to envision the perfect world for our alter ego to exist in, and to imagine being very happy there. Then we were told to “breathe that vision out into the world; drop it; don’t make it happen.” We came up with projects we would never do, character flaws we would never try to correct, and people we didn’t feel like apologizing to.

And:

My favorite thing about Faith was that she yelled “DOES ANYONE WANT TO DO THE DIRTY DANCING LIFT WITH ME?”

Even though no one did the lift with me, something about this makes me proud of myself for standing confidently in the power of my weird ideas.

STUPID SOLUTIONS TO A BIG PROBLEM: GUN VIOLENCE

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

One exercise I do in my failure workshops that’s always a surprise hit is ‘Stupid Solutions to Big Problems’. We form teams and brainstorm stupid solutions to huge, urgent, seemingly intractable problems. It’s strangely cathartic, and often the weirdest, wildest ideas are actually kind of great.

I bring this up because today, once again, I am confronted by a horrifying, endlessly repeating problem: gun violence.

And I cannot bear to see the same old helpless questions and dialogues and discussions and nothing happen in response.

So I thought: why don’t I brainstorm some stupid solutions? At least it will distract me from the sheer awfulness for a while. And so I present to you:

STUPID SOLUTIONS TO A BIG PROBLEM: the gun violence edition

  1. Mandatory support groups for all gun owners to talk about their feelings. Like you can’t buy a gun unless you attend two meetings involving group hugs, crying it out and learning how to speak your anger.
  1. Someone hire clowns to trail the NRA and freak them out until they do something about this. Clowns with guns? Is that too much? Can’t be worse than what we already have.
  1. Stop talking to any friends with guns until they shut down the fucking NRA.
  1. This might be a good idea actually – can we boycott the NRA? Obviously the NRA doesn’t give a shit if I boycott them, but could responsible gun owners boycott the NRA? Would you do that, guys? Would you boycott hunting – refuse to buy any hunting gear, licenses, guns and whatever else you buy when you hunt until the NRA backs down and legislation is passed?
  1. Fine anyone who sells a gun to a mass shooter a million dollars. Like the OLCC does for bartenders who serve alcohol to someone who goes on to get in a drunk driving accident.

Here’s what the OLCC says:

Q: What will happen to me if I allow a visibly intoxicated person to continue to drink alcohol?

A: You could be fined and your license or service permit suspended. Repeated violations could lead to the cancellation of your license or service permit. In addition, you could be held liable in a third party liability law suit if the visibly intoxicated person injures another person or damages someone else’s property.

OK, call me stupid, but couldn’t we do the exact same thing if someone sells a gun to a shooter? Just swap out ‘visibly intoxicated’ with ‘visibly planning to shoot someone’.

  1. Give mass shooters an infantilizing nickname and never use their actual picture, instead use a cartoon image that makes them look ridiculous, like this:

Lots of Kids Dead in Mass Shooting by Loony Lardface

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Fantastic. Well, I feel a little less consumed by rage and horror. If you have some stupid ideas to share, I would love to hear them!

Shitty first drafts, or learning to love failure

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

Anne Lamott talks about the importance of the shitty first draft when starting a new writing project.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page.

I want the Fail Zone to be a space where we can practice the shitty first draft of whatever we’re working on.

What is the equivalent of a shitty first draft for a dance piece, or an elevator pitch, or cleaning out your closet?

We’ll find out this Sunday! Bring a project, an idea or a goal, and we will find a way to practice it with romping, child-like glee.

Here are some ideas to of how it might play out:

GOAL: get a fantastic new job. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: We take turns asking you questions and you answer them as badly as possible. Or you could draft a shitty resume with crayons.

GOAL: rock a karaoke power ballad. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: sing it in front of us as badly as you can. If you want, we can back you up with shitty backup dancing/singing.

GOAL: get your 2 year old to sleep through the night. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: brainstorm stupid solutions with the group and put together a ridiculous, wildly inconsistent sleep plan.

GOAL: make a full length dance piece. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: choreograph a shitty 5-minute version of the piece you imagine. Show it to the group.

GOAL: submit a grant application. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: write a self indulgent way too long project description. Read it out loud to us.

GOAL: keep your house clean. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: what is the laziest, dumbest, least efficient way to clean up a mess? Brainstorm with the group. Or practice cleaning up a corner of the room like a 3-year-old.

GOAL: perform a standup comedy routine. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: try out some awkward, tasteless, not funny jokes on us.

GOAL: do a keynote presentation at a conference. SHITTY FIRST DRAFT: put together inane powerpoint slides and practice bombing in front of us.

There are so many ways this could go. Bring anything. Or come with an empty mind and receive a wild card failure assignment from me.  

And if this is making you anxious, let me assure you: the point is to make it FUN and EASY to fail. No one will be forced to do anything. This is an opt-in, laugh at yourself, take the pressure off situation. If it feels hard, that means we need to rethink it until it’s ridiculously, stupidly easy for you to do.

Ready for failure practice? YEAH! Dig out your ripped up sweatpants and an old t-shirt and let’s do this.

My grand experiment

/ Faith Helma / 1 Comment

This weekend, I performed my manifesto-in-training to a fantastic crowd at the Risk/Reward Festival here in Portland.

Can I be honest, guys? (Or as Joan Rivers would say, can we talk?)

Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue with this strange performance experiment that I’ve spent the last year working on. I thought this might be the end of the road, at least for a while.

It’s been a beautiful experiment. When I started, the aim was to see if it was possible to make a show that fit into my current lifestyle, and that actually improved my day to day life instead of requiring sacrifice. I used to make shows as if they were the sun and I was the moon. Everything I had went towards making them. And that’s okay! For a long time it was exciting. And then slowly it became unhealthy. And then when I gave birth to my son it became impossible. So with this show, I wanted the sun to be me — my body, my life, my family, my actual son — and the moon to be this show. It would exist to serve me, and not the other way around.

When I first had this thought, it seemed radical. I had a lot of questions:

  • Could I make a show whose #1 goal was to make my life better?
  • Could I use the show as an excuse to procure resources that I want in my life?
  • Could I rehearse a show by jotting things down in a notebook and inviting people to watch me try out those ideas once or twice a month? And could those ideas just be stuff I think about in the shower?
  • Could I make a show with zero collaborators?
  • Could I make a show with no set or costumes aside from what catches my eye at goodwill?

The short answer is: yes. I rehearsed at a very lackadaisacal pace (at least, compared to how I used to rehearse). I had a notebook next to the shower, and much of the material for the show came from what I mused about in there (or while nursing my son at 2am). Here’s what I spent money on:

$12 – jumpsuit

$14 – shitty easel (I wanted to return it and buy a better one, but it turns out easels are nonrefundable)

$10 – big paper

$24 – 2 fuzzy blankets on clearance, 2 pillows and one “carpet” which is really a bedspread from goodwill

$5 – an “altar” from goodwill

$15 – tape, markers and small objects for the altar

$27 – laminating 4 sheets of big paper

————————————–

$107 TOTAL

(Oh and of course, childcare — but I won’t include that number since I have a small seizure whenever I see it.)

I had no official collaborators and thus no meetings or emails or stress — but I did have help making the show from great artists I love and respect, whose insight I’m grateful for.

I wasn’t able to do all the things I originally built into the plan/budget — for instance, I still want to do intensive hypnosis training in Tacoma, and as I talk about in my show, originally I was going to pay a costume designer to make me a fabulous outfit. But I did in fact procure everything by wandering into thrift stores and seeing what caught my eye. And even though the Seattle Times thought that “with more polished production design it could easily become a ruby,” I am very happy to be a defiantly unpolished rhinestone.

So all in all, I’d have to say it’s an experiment that WORKED, and that is what I’m most amazed by. I always knew it would result in SOMETHING. But I didn’t know if that something would be good, or interesting to other people. And it turns out, it is! And the thing I’m second most amazed by is that I honestly don’t care (much) if people think it’s good or not. Somehow, after giving birth and embarking on all this self-exploration and Creative Guide-ness, the part of my brain that cares about what people think of me or my work onstage has switched off. (Or maybe not off, but to low burn.) I feel comfortable onstage. I feel comfortable talking about my work with people offstage, no matter what they think. If they don’t like it, that’s okay with me. Maybe this sounds like a small thing. But for me it is HUGE.

And I’m grateful and surprised as hell that the result of my experiment is a show I love warts and all, and that other people love too. And the upshot of it is, I want to continue this grand experiment, and make it into a 45-minute hybrid performance/seminar/ted talk. I want to keep doing it my way — no meetings, no emails, no crazy expectations, and if I can, money for pedicures built into the budget. And I want to take it all the way to Vegas. Well, maybe not to Vegas (though Celine, if you need an opening act, I’m available). But maybe to SXSW Interactive, the Canadian Fringe, the World Domination Summit…

Are those big goals? Does it seem a little nuts? Well, a year ago this whole idea sounded beautifully nuts, and I pulled it off.

So let’s drink a toast to following our beautifully nutso dreams and dance badly for 2.5 minutes to Celine Dion singing I Drove All Night.

ALSO: if you’d like to get some practice failing, flailing, falling, sprawling and doing things badly, come to my Sunday Morning Fail Zone workshop! Next one is this Sunday (July 19) at 10am. When we fail, we learn, evolve, grow and become stronger. We might as well enjoy the process.

How to Fail, part 2

/ Faith Helma / Leave a comment

We had our workshop last Sunday and it was a great success. Meaning, we failed fantastically. Here are some of the things we did – and good news, you can try these at home.

WORST FEET FORWARD

We picked our least favorite body part, and instead of hiding it, we drew attention to it. (Interestingly, for most people the body part of choice was their belly. I know for me, it felt cathartic to stick my belly out instead of sucking it in, to take pride in its softness). Try this when you’re walking around your house by yourself – emphasize the body part you usually hide, and see how it feels to show it off.

I APOLOGIZE

We apologized to the group for everything we had done wrong this week, big or small.

I think this exercise is especially powerful for the ladies. If you’re a strong, smart woman, I bet you spend a lot of energy stopping yourself from apologizing. It’s good to stem the tide of reflexive apology, but it’s also nice to give yourself room to go the other way. Clearly we have a great need to apologize, so why not get it out of the way? Apologize for everything, even if it’s not your fault! Apologize profusely, apologize way too much, apologize from the bottom of your heart.

To do this on your own, try this: get some paper and write down everything you did wrong this week. Made the coffee too weak? Forgot to call your Mom back? Snapped at your partner? Felt like the vibe at work was weird and maybe it was because of something you did? Write it all down. You can use this format if it helps:

I apologize for _____.

I [wasn’t thinking / didn’t prepare / got angry…] and I [messed up / bungled the presentation / hurt your feelings…].

I apologize about that.  

When you’ve filled up a page, read them out loud. Add in “I am so, so, so, so sorry” or “please forgive me” when/if appropriate.   Then rip it out and throw it away. You’re done! Apology accepted.

BAD POETRY

We wrote bad poetry, which included odes to phlegm, folding chairs, red leather chaps and the winning entry:

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If you want to write bad poetry, it’s easy: pick a thing (could be something abstract like love, or mundane like a granola bar). Write ODE TO [THING] at the top of a sheet of paper. Now write the worst poem you can about that thing.

Some techniques to try: bad rhymes, going on way too long or not long enough, stating the obvious, reveling in self-indulgence, making bad jokes, using “I” as much as possible, dragging a metaphor into the ground… there are SO MANY WAYS! Start and find out what your personal worst is.

BIG PROBLEMS / STUPID SOLUTIONS

We brainstormed stupid solutions to big problems, like racism, climate change and feeding hungry kids.

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You can try this too, with either a big global problem or a problem in your life. Pick the problem, set the timer for 5 minutes, and come up with as many dumb solutions as you can.

Here’s an example from my life: a problem I’m experiencing lately is how to get my 19-month-old son to sleep at night. Here are some stupid solutions:

  • I could write a 5-page essay on the merits of sleep and read it aloud to my son
  • I could perform an interpretive dance every night called “Bed Time”
  • I could walk outside in the middle of the night and cry to the heavens, “WHY?!!!!”
  • When he wakes up in the middle of the night, I could just cry with him
  • I could give him a shot of whiskey [remember, these are STUPID solutions, not things I would actually do!]
  • I could play him these ‘power of positive thinking’ tapes someone gave me
  • I could find a boring financial podcast and play that on repeat
  • I could post a question about it on facebook [full disclosure, I know this is a stupid solution because I have done it]
  • I could make flyers that say HELP ME GET MY SON TO SLEEP and post them around town with my phone number

You get the idea.

FALLING

We practiced falling, and then practiced doing a big confident walk across the room with a spectacular fall in the middle.

If you want to fall right, here’s how: count to ten, and do a slow motion fall so you’re on the ground by the time you get to ten. Then count back from ten to one, and get back up on your feet in slow motion.

Do it again, but with a five-count. Now do it to a count of 3. Look at that! You’re falling!

BAD ELEVATOR SPEECH

We ended the workshop with super awkward, meandering, oddly confrontational elevator speeches.

Want to try? Imagine someone you deeply want to impress. Someone you would love to meet and get a chance to talk to – maybe it’s a leader in your field, or the boss of your boss, or the hot guy you keep seeing around town.

Now imagine that you walk into an elevator in a building, and GET OUT OF TOWN. They are standing right there. Now is your chance!

Imagine what you would like to say to them in the two minutes you have in the elevator – the words you would use, the way your body would move, how they’d look at you.

Now stand in front of a mirror, and do the opposite of that.

Say exactly what you would NOT like to say, using words that you would not like to use, doing things with your body that are embarrassing or awkward or weird, and imagine their face looking back at you in horror.

Bonus round: do your best confident walk, and say the best version of your elevator speech, but halfway through launch your spectacular fall.

There! Doesn’t it feel good to get all that out of your system?

Hey! Want to work some of these ideas out in person? I’m available to do one-on-one sessions, or you can hire me to lead a workshop for your organization!