It’s worth considering how you begin something. With yourself, another or with a new group of people.
What do they need to know? What needs to be said? Who needs to be thanked or acknowledged?
Before rushing ahead with the ‘thing’, be sure that you start well.
It sets the tone, it releases anxieties and and the ‘thing’ will be better too.
AI means that the blank page is no longer a problem.
How good is that? It will help us along with buckets of ideas and possibilities.
Like a really enthusiastic friend.
But that friend is also a robot.
So our new job isn’t only generating ideas or dumping clay on the moulding table.
Our table is to make things more human. Simpler, more connected to our truth and more uniquely human.
That’s not a bad place to be, I reckon
“How do you learn all those lines?”
Actors get asked this all the time- and honestly I don’t know the answer!
But here’s what I’m trying…
I started learning the script from Act 2. Then I worked my way backwards through Act 1.
Why?
Act 1 Scene 1 is too loaded.
Even in the line learning phase, it’s hard not to imagine, dry mouthed, pupetting yourself out onstage for that first moment of the show.
I’d also end up going over that section over and over again if I started there.
So I just mixed it up. Actor’s are time travellers, anyway. We don’t relate to sequence, we relate to emotion; that’s our only timeline.
Is the order you’re doing something in helping or hindering you?
What kind of evening do you want to have?
If I want a gentle evening, I make sure it looks and sounds like one.
For me that just means I make the lighting soft, I don’t move or speak too quickly and I make sure the volume of the house is low.
If you are ever having an experience you do not want to have, you need only look at your environment and see how it is contributing to the way you feel.
You can change your environment to change how you feel.
Special things require special places.
A beautiful gift is seen as beautiful because it’s in a lovely and thoughtful box.
We remember to use our tooth brush because it has a little home in the bathroom.
I’m about to begin rehearsing a show and I wondered why my relationship to the actual script wasn’t feeling as strong as other projects.
I realised it was because the script was floating around the house in random places; it didn’t have a home.
So yesterday I hole punched each section and put it neatly in ring binder. Everything I need to do that work is in one place.
When I look at the folder I get a little gleeful flutter. That project has a little home now and I’m much more likely to do do productive work with it.
There’s this story I love about the creation of Disneyland.
On the opening day, a reporter asked Walt’s brother a question:
“Are you sad that your brother never got to see Disneyland completed before he died?”
Walt’s brother turned to the reporter and said:
“You’re only seeing it today because he saw it all those years ago”
That’s vision.
Nothing teaches you the truth of ‘one step at a time’ like a really heavy weight.
You hear that all the time, don’t you? Just take one step at a time. The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, the journey of a thousand steps begins with the first one.
Yeah, we GET it. One step at a time.
But I had a great experience where I actually felt how important “one step at a time” is.
Have you ever done a front squat? It’s where the bar is laid across your upper chest- it’s really hard and easy to curve into a human question mark shape.
ANYWAY…
I was doing one of those and had increased the weight from what I had done last week. I knew that I had to get to 12 reps.
Not 11
CERTAINLY not 7.
12!
So I began- and I started thinking about the 12th rep right there at the beginning when I was only doing the first one.
Sure, they say picture your goal, shoot for the moon and all that…
But thinking about the last rep felt like an AGE away while I was just on the first, holding something very heavy and trying not to fold in half like an envelope.
So I forced myself to just think about the first one. Then the second… then the third and on and on and on.
This was the embodiment of one step at a time. And it worked. Hooray!
It’s easy for these adages to remain as sayings: one step at a time.
But when we find little ways of making them real for ourselves, we get to take away the learning and benefit from that wisdom in a very real way.
And sometimes you just don’t have enough data.
You can’t go to the gym for a couple of weeks and give up because you don’t have abs. It feels like a long time in the moment- but you don’t have enough data yet to know what’s working or not.
It’s so tempting to draw conclusions early.
It’s also tempting to do the same thing for too long expecting different results.
The solution is to remain awake.
Awake to the feedback you’re getting. Knowing the difference between ‘good’ difficult and ‘going nowhere’ difficult.
It’s knowing when to keep trying, when to adjust slightly and when to change tac completely.
When in doubt keep trying a bit longer.
When theres something coming up soon that you want to do a great job at, you have some options about how to think about it…
You can try and ignore it.
You can picture yourself doing a bad job at it.
You can picture yourself absolutely nailing it (and having fun in the process).
It seems a bit of a no brainer, right?
But how many times do you find yourself picturing the thing not working out?
For me, it’s a regular internal conversation; I picture the thing and it’s a version that I kind of dread.
I have to change it on purpose.
What would it look like if it wen’t really well? What would it look like if it were easy? What would it look like if it were actually a lot of fun?
It’s easy to forget, but we can change the pictures we make in our head to match what we want.
We all know what we need to do to get what we want, more or less.
The trouble isn’t the recipe, it’s the implimentation.
Our focus then shouldn’t be on finding more recipes, but how to get ourselves to use that ones we have.
The trick is how you think about the thing you need to do.
You want to get fit, you know you need to get more daily steps in, but when you think about walking you think about dying trying to get up a steep hill.
If you can take the thing you want to do and think about it in a way that makes you excited to do it, that’s when life starts getting interesting.
