Choose Passion

I really enjoyed putting together my thoughts on choices this month!  I think the capstone of my thesis occurred last week with my blog on Bold Choices, and the importance of making them on the improv stage or in real life.  To wrap up the journey I want to encourage everyone to make passionate choices.

In my musings I talked about unconscious choices, how to illuminate them, and push them towards our goals.  I then evaluated the daily choices we make in our lives, and to top that off I discussed how to harness all of those choices, and use them to make bold choices in all aspects of our lives.  While it is important to make bold choices to live a more fulfilled life, what is the use of running around making willy nilly bold choices all over the place unless they are focused.

When I interview people for employment I want to know what they are passionate about, within the job and in the outside world.  I am always most impressed with a person when they can articulate what those passions are.  I believe we live our best life, when we find areas of passion and pursue them.  Maybe that is why I love working on a college campus, on a daily basis I get to see students discover themselves and their passions, and maybe their interactions with me are a small part in moving towards living out those passions!  So go forward, find out what those passions are, and lock all of your choices into making your passions a reality.

Bold Choices

Every improviser develops their own school of improvisation, with their own theories about the best way to develop a scene.  My theory centers on the act of making bold choices.  I am especially excited about today’s post because it is the central piece of my series on choices!  The best scenes on the stage start and are heightened by bold choices which further the action in an exciting and funny way.  In our everyday experience we live the most engaged lives by making bold choices to enrich ourselves on a regular basis!

On the improv stage some people argue it’s all about scene work, for others it’s about picking strong characters, and the list goes on and on with ways improv can work, but for me it’s all about bold choice.  Improv starts with a suggestion from the audience, and that suggestions can be merely used to get a location or some sort of theme, but when we take that suggestion and make a bold choice to twist it or use it in an exciting way, the scene is already 8 million times better than what would have originally played out.  For example, if the suggestion was a really small room, you could play the scene in a doctor’s office, or a bathroom, or small bedroom, but if you play that scene as two children from England fighting over a doll house, the suggestion already has that much more texture!

One of my best scenes ever involved the suggestion iceberg.  To start the scene I brought out another improviser and told them I was so excited to bring them on our honeymoon to the iceberg, even though she was always talking about a Caribbean island.  This was a bold choice, to take a honeymoon to the iceberg, and set up an interesting game where I bought my wife to the alternate place of where she wanted to go.  This scene created such interesting dynamics, and was so much fun to watch and play.  The scene ended with a dramatic break up, and someone swimming off the iceberg.  So bold choices all around!

In life we have the opportunity to make bold choices every single day.  I in one of the boldest choices I have ever made, I moved totally across the country.  I lived in Pennsylvania my entire life, and when I was looking to go to graduate school I wanted to pursue living in a completely different place. I applied and was accepted into the University of Arizona, so I moved there and had one of the most rewarding and different experiences.  That is something I would not have received if I stayed with my other schools which were located in the northeast.

Companies also have the power to make bold choices, and the company I currently see making the most is Apple.  All of their products are bold and new, the greatest thing about Apple is they will take the step to push things to the next level.  They create new products, new operating systems, and design features.  The make the bold choice to figure out not what people currently want to own, but create demand for products people have never used before.  Most people go into an Apple store and play with an iPhone, or an iPad, which means they are coming into a store and using a product they have never used before, now that is bold choices!

I do not want to get this theory placed in crazy left field.  I am not suggesting every single choice or thing you do in life should be something totally out of the ordinary.  Hear me loud and clear, that is not what bold choices are!  In your everyday life, bold choice could be trying a new restaurant or type of food you have never eaten before, it could be creating the time in your schedule to start an exercise regimen, it could be taking a Sunday to go for a hike instead of doing the same old routine.  Bold choices are the things you can do in those every decisions to live a more empowered and engaged life.  On Monday when you go into work, maybe you tell the boss about that brand new initiative you have be thinking about the last six months but were afraid to verbalize, maybe you make the decision to change careers and start the longer term process of schooling, or finding a new job.  The possibilities are limitless, but when you take that step forward make it bold!

With this I would like to unveil a new hash tag for the Twitterverse!  Whenever you make a bold choice, share it with the world on your Twitter stream, and mark it with #BoldChoices.  Share your boldness with the world, and together we will have the courage to live our most engaged life!

Daily Choices

Last week I discussed the idea of unconscious choices, and how we make numerous of them on a daily basis.  Today I want to talk about the general choices we make every single day.  The difference with these choices is they we are conscious and we are aware of them, but may not consider the magnitude of the cumulative effects for those choices.

Around 10 o’clock PM, I usually get ready to wind down for the day.  For me winding down usually involves getting in front of the television and catching up with the TiVo’ed shows I missed.  The next logical step is to get out some snacks, as and settling into unconscious eating.  While I find it very enjoyable to relax and turn off my mind, I also waste several hours of time where I could be more productive, never mind the pile of calories I ingest before going to sleep .  I do not think I should be completing the to do list at midnight, but there are much more positive things I could be doing.  I could pick up a book, I could work on some writing, or I could get into bed earlier and get more sleep.  When I attended the Ignite Durham event one of the speakers discussed how people claim they want to write a book, but argue they are too busy.  She brought up graphs and showed the amount of time the general American sits in front of the television, and recommended we reclaim that time and put it towards production.

On a daily basis I make a lot of general decisions that pull me away from people.  This is disheartening since I am an extrovert, and my general philosophy is to choose people first.  When I am in the office I will choose to get through a few more emails besides walking out to the main office area to chat with some of my staff members who might be hanging around.  Sometimes when family members or friends call on the phone I will continue to work on email, surf facebook, or try to do another task while we speak.  The shame part is I am making a conscious decision to not give my whole self to the people who are on the phone.  I recently made the decision to reclaim that time and to immediately stop what I am doing and give 100% of myself to the people I love!

In an improv scene improvisers make hundreds of choices right off the bat and throughout the scene.  It is important to continually evaluate all the decisions the improviser is making and to choose the right one.  My improv teachers Zach Ward describes how good improvisers can see the range of choices to be made at any one moment, and how we always need to choose the one that will provide the funniest outcomes, and heighten the scene the most.  It is also important to not make too quick of decisions and push a scene a long too fast.  Every line of dialogue is important, and as an improviser we need to explore each piece of dialogue to the fullest extent.  When you watch a scene you can tell when those awesome ideas fly by, and you just want them to come back, explored further, and are sad they disappeared so quickly.  It takes a strong improviser making excellent choices to really heighten and pace a scene appropriately!

Take the time today to think about the choices you make on a regular basis.  What decisions are wasting time and not allowing you to move towards your goals or positive outcomes?  What decisions take you away from the important people or things in your life?  What decisions interrupt the pacing of your daily interactions?  Look at them externally and evaluate the cumulative effects of all those choices have as their outcomes add up!  The great things about having a CHOICE, is you have options.  Figure out the options you do not like, harness your choices, and focus them for positive.

Unconscious Choices

Today starts the beginning of a four part series; each Friday I will post an article about the choices we make, and how we can utilize our choices to be more creative!  My analysis will move from the small to the big choices!  Today I am going to look at unconscious choices, those little things we do every day, that most of the time we do not even notice. My recent post about microtransactions really sets the stage for this post, as it talks about the small things we do intentionally every single day.  Today I want to talk about the flip side of that, the small things were do every day without thought.

Ultimately I want to harness my unconscious decisions for my benefit, instead of them just flitting away without notice.  I hate to use this example, but it works out so well!  If you ever pick up a financial self help book most of them use the latte example.  If you buy a Starbucks latte every day for $3.20, and you stop making that purchase, in a month you will have saved $96.00, and in a year it would add up to $1152.00 of savings.

In our everyday lives hundreds of unconscious decisions slip by on a constant basis.  When you put on clothes in the morning you make a conscious decision on what to wear, but an unconscious decision to accept what that company stands for.  In my apartment I have a can for trash and a can for recycling, before I made that distinction, I unconsciously threw away everything whether it was recyclable or not. 

On the improv stage, the performer makes a lot of decisions right off the bat.  What character will they play, what accent do they use, what is the characters physicality?  Good improvisers can harness the whole body into the character being discovered, and that is when a character truly comes to life!  If the improviser is not careful, personal characteristics unconsciously trickle into the characters presented on stage.  Improvisers need to make sure personal physique does not sneak it. How does the character stand, how do they breathe, how do they walk, and what patterns of speech do they utilize? When these things become our personal self the character lacks the depth and creativity of a powerful and deeper improvised character.

On the everyday level we need to evaluate the unconscious decisions we make on almost a minute to minute basis.  While the environment is an important personal value, on a regular basis I unconsciously used products harmful to the environment like soap, cleaning products, and laundry detergent.  Until I fully evaluated those decisions, and made an effort to be more sustainable, I did not recognize the full impact I was having in the environment.  Unconsciously I watch television and snack on food way more then I should.  Until I made the decision to cut back on those unconscious patterns of behavior, and substituted them with more important values like writing and reading, this blog would not have come to be.  So evaluate your everyday, and figure out the unconscious decisions you make, and harness them into the positive outcomes you wish to see in your life!

Choose People

Picture of my staff team from Halloween Night

In my current position our department is down an employee, and I have stepped up to take over another area of campus.  While this is a fun position to be in because I get to challenge myself and work with a whole bunch of new people.  The difficult part is I am stretched, and while everything is going well I do not get to build as deep of relationships with people and fully take the time to take my activities from good to great.

As a person who works very closely with college students, one of my goals is to develop mentorship relationships with students, and to go deeper so I can help them grow and develop into successful citizens of society once they leave campus.  This year, I seem to always be running to meetings, or walking between my two buildings to deal with the daily activities of running two separate places.  This extra stuff really prevents me from having the time to “hang out” in the main office area in my buildings and just be with my students, until today!

Today I found a pretty open block of time in my schedule, I do not think I have seen that much time together uninterrupted in three or four months.  There were some things I could have worked on and got ahead of, but I made the decision to be with the people in my office.  I was pretty lucky because five or six of my staff members showed up in the office during that period.  It was great to relax, joke around, and enjoy the time working with them.

Through this experience I realized that I have a choice.  Every day I get to decide what is important to me and then to enact those decisions.  It is easy for me to say relationships are important, but if I don’t reflect that in my schedule, then it is not true.  While I have a lot of meetings and responsibilities to accomplish on a daily basis, I need to make time for the people in my life and for the things I find most important.  Balance is the ultimate goal, because I do not work to live or live to work.  It’s time to choose people!