Activity 4 - 30 days living the 3 A's
The talk
This activity is based on Neil Pasricha's talk The 3 A's of Awesome. This talk was very interesting talk for two reasons. Firstly, on a very basic level it allowed me to discover Neil's blog, 1000 Awesome Things, which is very cool. More importantly though it presented a set of very inspiring but seemingly simple ways to try to achieve greater joy in your life.The 3 A’s of Awesome are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity, which mean:
Attitude - life doesn't go according to plan but you always have two choices sink or swim. You can choose to have a good attitude and try to rise out of it.
Awareness - small children are completely aware of the world since they are experiencing it for the first time. Remembering that once you were seeing everything for the first time as well, and trying to re-embrace that enthusiasm.
Authenticity - be you and be cool with that, to follow your heart and get more joy out of life, leading to fulfilment.
The challenge
This challenge is really about trying to rediscover the simple beauty and joy in the world and trying to bring more happiness into my life.Another challenging activity that will focus on the basic way that I deal with the world and the people in it. I don't think that Awareness will be overly difficult, especially on the back of mindfulness and the better listening exercises.
Attitude will be a challenge, particularly around christmas since I am going 'home' for five days. Like most people, my family has a complicated history which makes for some intriguing relationships. For the majority of the time it will just be a case of keeping my cynicism in check, but over that five days it will be a little more of a struggle.The aspect that I think will be really complex for me is Authenticity, since I've come to realise that being more authentic is really one of the underlying theme for this entire Project, so I really don't expect that I will come to peace with it in this activity. But I figure if I focus on it in a number of different activities, from a number of different aspects, then I might be able to find a way to reach my peace with being me and being happy with that.
The Authenticity part will also be particularly challenging when I go home, I don't think it will do much for my relationship with my parents if I am truly authentic during that period of time. But having said that it is only five days out of the entire 30, and if I can at least identify the times that I am not being authentic during that time, and why then I'll still be happy with my progress.
The activity
So what does this all mean, it means practising the following:
Attitude - I will try to maintain a positive attitude during this activity, and choose language and actions that express that.
Awareness - maintaining more wonder about the world around me and seeing the beauty in things that I now take for granted, which will hopefully be fun.
Authenticity - I'm not going to go all out on authenticity for this one, because as mentioned this is an underlying theme of the entire project. This will include being more aware of when I stop myself from being myself, and if I am stopping myself then why. I think it is quite a slow process to really discover the authentic me, especially after hiding it for so long.