Not quite feeling like your Rockstar self?
Let’s sort that!
Physiology
When your body-system is suppressed, everything feels effortful, so first we need to turn this around.
1. Find footage of an Olympic gymnastics, swimming, boxing, fencing… final. Now re-enact the gold medal winning performance. No one will ever know.
2. Go to YouTube or Spotify and search for a song you loved as a teenager. Preferably something as fast and embarrassing as you were back then. Dance like a thing possessed then exit the executive bathroom and go back to your corner office.
3. Think of the most charismatically charming or wildly bizarre person on the planet. Move around the room for ten minutes (cooking, tidying, working…) as an exaggerated version of them. An optional extra is to charge friends & family for tickets to witness this glorious feat.
4. Go to Pinterest and find a photo of someone oozing ease and confidence. Practice imitating every part of their stance, their gestures, expression and attitude. How different does this feel from your norm? How could you out-awesome them?
Identity
We act in accordance with who we believe ourselves to be, so when we recall the most vital aspects of our being, or when we redesign who we’re showing up as, the best versions of ourselves become unleashed.
5. What moment in your life are you most proud of? Go back there in your mind and describe it out loud as if pitching it to a Hollywood Exec as a scene from a movie worth backing.
6. Who is one person you massively admire even to the point of envy? What are 3 words you’d use to describe this person? How might these three values or characteristics also apply to you?
7. Write a short summary designed to introduce you to an audience made up entirely of people you admire (maybe Steven Pinker sitting beside Judi Dench). What would you most want the MC to say? Now double it.
8. You have no choice in the matter, you have to spend upwards of five thousand pounds on an outfit for yourself. What does this look like and why? Who will flock to you as you don this garb? Who will run screaming?
Interesting.
Small action steps
When it seems as if there’s just too much to do or when you aren’t clear on the next steps, it becomes easy to feel lost and overwhelmed. Your ability to take the necessary action to change your world is unlocked always through the gentlest, babiest of steps.
9. Focus on something that’s been annoying you for a very long time; a spill in the garage, an unopened bill, that unreturned email, a button hanging loose from a favourite jacket… Be brave for 5 minutes and show yourself that you can do pesky things and live to brag about it. Now make yourself a badge that says, ‘I was unbelievably brave for 5 minutes today.’
10. Identify a task that’s an aspect of you building the next level of your dream life. Imagine that task as already completed and notice what the first tiny thing was that you did. Now just do that first tiny thing. If you’re a proud geek you can think of yourself as Bilbo Baggins pushing his keys into Gandalf’s hands. Or not.
11. A qualified person is always a great next step. If you could reach out to someone to get you back in your New York groove (extra points for knowing these lyrics) who would that someone be? Just find a face.
12. Who can you ask to do something for you? Can you hire someone even though you’re capable of doing it yourself? Could someone else in the family make dinner or take the car in for an oil change? (Try to keep threats or blackmail to a minimum because, you know, karma.)
Dopamine kick
When we are looking forward to something happening in the short- or mid-term future, the chemical dopamine gives us that heady rush of anticipation which encourages us to get moving toward a desired goal.
13. Go on to a travel site and plan an outlandish vacation that perhaps you can’t afford yet. If it doesn’t involve camels, crowd surfing and a private concierge, you might not be doing it right.
14. Everyone becomes habituated to the particular flavour of dopamine dished out via the Internet. Design a 48 hour period where you will be completely off-line and unplugged. This will allow your system to re-engage with higher quality forms of excitement. Don’t do this in Vegas as it will defeat the exercise entirely.
15. Imagine a fantastic moment from your future, one that you have no idea how you’re going to make happen. Perhaps acting on a large stage, being friends with a Nobel prize winner, meeting the love of your life. Now bring something current, everyday and familiar-to-you into that picture.
This could be imagining your battered toothbrush in a theatre dressing room, that old favourite sweater around your shoulders as you meet your idol, a book that you own and love that you are now handing over to the person you are destined to marry. This makes it more believable to your brain and thus more exciting.
16. Call or message a friend and make a plan to meet up in person, face-to-face for a simple catch-up chat. Just because you’re an astonishing and deeply complex person doesn’t mean that the simple things won’t work. This one will then take care of your oxytocin/serotonin needs also.
Story
The stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible or impossible, what’s right or wrong in our lives cause us to feel and act in particular ways. It’s time to take charge of your story.
17. What old story or life narrative do you need to move away from? That ‘one that got away’ might right now be causing utter misery to your replacement. Stories often slyly create narratives of ‘because this then this.’ Declare your own Plot Twist!
18. How might someone else tell the story of you? This can give you new perspective and release you from beliefs of stale certainty around how things have been and how they are. Ask someone who knows and loves you to tell you the story of your life so far.
Beyond the comfort zone
We think that moving outside your comfort zone will involve hideous amounts of exquisite pain. It doesn’t have to, not unless you’re into that sort of thing.
19. Go directly for something that you want without any tightness or expectation around whether or not it’s going to come true. Ask or be damned! In fact the less likely you are to get a concrete result the more useful this is, because you’ve shown yourself there’s no danger in doing big things and getting rebuffed. So call the Oprah Winfrey show, flirt with that person who’s out of everyone’s league even yours, ask someone to lend you their holiday villa…
20. Remember that you’re still going be OK, more than OK, even if you don’t do any of these things.
Life is all made up and you get to do it whatever way is best for you and in your own timeline. It’s all good. You’ve got this.
No AI was used in the creation of this.
Judymay Murphy
