I’m in my fourth season of downhill skiing, and it always takes me right to my learning edge. On a recent trip to the slopes, I felt stiff and hesitant and less competent than I had felt so far this year. During the first run, every move was a battle between rigidity and utter loss of control. (Oh no—not loss of control!) <br><br>Clearly I was not ready for the intermediate slope, so I sent my patient companion away and stayed on the bunny hill, riding the painfully slow lift up the hill only to stutter down again. On the fourth or fifth uphill journey, I started thinking about play. The notion of play has been showing up a LOT in my life and work, and I remembered a story from Inner Skiiing (by Robert Krieger and Tim Gallwey) about a class that freed their best performances by pretending to be animals chasing each other down the hill. I asked myself: what game could I play so that I, too, would let go and ski up to my ability?<br><br>This led me to explore what had constituted play for me as a child. I realized that pretending had always been the key to the absorption, delight and ease that I was after. I decided to create a “pretend” for the coming run. Immediately, I knew that I would be Lauren Bacall in a Hunphrey Bogart movie. With relatively little effort I pushed aside the clamor of critical voices who wanted to “help,” and I fleshed out my script. Here’s how it went:<br><br>Humph, who had butted in to my business (against my will) to protect me from the bad guys, was injured at the top of the hill. I had to get to the bottom to get help. I was mad: I wouldn’t be on the darn mountain if he hadn’t butted in. I’m also in love (what can I say?), so I’m gonna get the medicine if it’s the last thing I do. I don’t happen to know how to ski but I am fabulously beautiful and a superb natural athlete. <br><br>My script in mind, I stepped off the lift and pointed my tips downhill. What a hoot! All manner of technical things fell in to place (beginning with leaning down hill), but the key to all of them was giving my conscious mind something to do so the rest of me could do what it knew how to do: ski. It worked beautifully and repeatedly, until I took myself over to the intermediate slope where it worked again. Pretending transformed me from a knock-kneed victim of fear to a determined, capable amazon on skis. Way cool.<br><br>I’m convinced that the power of such pretends is available to us whenever we are willing to tap into it. Are you stuck or frozen in a repeating pattern—one that you perhaps understand but seem powerless to alter? Stop looking for ways to manage or discipline your way out of the problem and start playing with it. Write yourself a movie script that gives you a motivation for shifting and a character with the competence you want for yourself. Then go for it. All you have to lose is your limits.<br><br><br> WORKING SOLUTIONS: Getting to Completion<br><br>It’s easy to lose focus, energy and attention by letting old ideas and half-completed projects linger in our work or head space. Here are three simple steps to clearing that space and getting to completion so that you can move on.<br><br>1. Take a minute and look around you. What  tasks are left over tasks from yesterday, last week, last month? Write them down.<br><br>2. Classify them:<br><br>a) Those you never really wanted to do and don't really care about. <br>b) Nagging commitments that won't go away but that you manage never to do very well or very completely.<br>c) Near crisis-status must-do-now items.<br><br>3) Take action:<br><br>a) Take 30 minutes to throw out; recycle or otherwise remove visual traces of the things you don't really need to do and won't do. This requires you to get realistic and honest with YOURSELF about what matters to you and what doesn't. (If 30 minutes is not enough, repeat this action daily until you are through.)<br><br>b) Set aside an hour each day to work through the chronic backlog of things that are important but which you've been putting off. Make this the same hour every day so that you build continuity and confidence in this process.<br><br>c) Schedule time to complete important  urgent tasks. Be specific, first assessing how much time each task will require. If these are recurring tasks (quarterly taxes, monthly accounting) schedule them in to your planner for the next time they should occur so that these become part of the rhythm of your life instead of crises which interfere with it.<br> <br><br> 2008-10-06T17:35:56Z -16.238 400 1868 true 17 7670 the-power-of-pretends-working-solutions 3 2008-10-09T05:33:48Z 2008-10-09T05:33:48Z

Try something new. Learning to pretend may be just what you need to get off of the mountain.

0 2009-02-24T09:46:23Z