How we begin
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.
Make the right estimates
They say we overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.
That’s about expectation and perspective.
If we can arrange those in ourselves to serve us, there’s no limit to what we can do across our lifetime.
More human
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
Learning backwards
“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?
We always have a choice
I love to remember that we always have a choice. The other day I went and got a coffee, and it wasn’t that great. The service wasn’t good. I felt kind of like a nuisance.
I was walking home, my mum was there, and I was imagining forward to the conversation I was about to have. You know, “How was the new place? Did you try it out?”
And I’d say, “Oh, the service wasn’t very good,” I was collecting all of these complaints, and I was quite satisfied having all these kind of negative things to say, even though my experience wasn’t that great. And then I suddenly realized it’s kind of pointless.
Why have that conversation with my mum? ‘Because how it’s gonna is, “How was the coffee place?” “Not that great.” … “Oh.”
It kind of kills energy in a way. So instead my mum asked, “How was the coffee place?” And I said, “Great.”
And then we kind of moved on.
It’s like the interactum- it’s like the interaction was additive as opposed to subtracting to the general energy of our day. And it makes me think, you know, we always do have a choice.
Even if we do have a not great experience, we can choose our orientation to it or just move on
A living language
Teaching my first class, I thought it was about sharing a few kapa haka songs.
I was wrong.
What it’s really about is bringing a language to life. Waiata happens to be a brilliant way of doing that.
Our waiata are oral histories that come alive again with each performance. They also have the language built right into them.
A language that is alive is a language that is used, that is seen, heard, felt, valued and is growing each day.
It might look like learning a few songs, or integrating a couple of phrases…
… but your weekly kapa haka session or daily te reo time are really building blocks for a living language.
I just heard Derren Brown say…
This is the only life we have and we if can engage with it charismatically we’ll get the best out of it and put the best into it.
Magic moments
You MUST track them. Write them down, take note, reflect, record, remember.
It might not feel like you’ve had any ‘magic’ moments this past week, but I guarantee if you take 5 minutes to ask the question, you’ll find some.
That unexpected moment with a stranger.
The smile from your friend.
That moment you cracked up laughing.
If you don’t track them you’ll definitely forget them. But the moment you’ve noted it and remembered it, your perception of your life begins to shift…
Suddenly you see it’s full of these little moments you love. And after all, a life well lived is nothing more that a collection of a million little moments you love.
Don’t short change yourself.
Record your magic moments.