Open the Box 1

Card index, file system to register and search...

Image via Wikipedia

So I opened my Kindle and a copy of “Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield showed up a couple of days ago. This book has been touted by Seth Godin for awhile, and I pre-ordered the free e-book about a month ago.  Anyway, I started reading it today and something has already jumped out at me.

I’m really a big proponent of visualization so this exercise stuck with me.  Let me quote:

“There’s an exercise that Patricia Ryan Madson describes in her wonderful book, Improv Wisdom. (Ms. Madson taught improvisational theater at Stanford to standing-room only classes for twenty years.)  Here’s the exercise:

Imagine a box with a lid.  Hold the box in your hand.  Now open it.

What’s inside?

It might be a frog, a silk scarf, a gold coin of Persia.  But here’s the trick: no matter how many times you open the box, there is always something in it.”

OK.  So I did this.  Wow….So what I found in the box is kind of like a Rolodex, but one that is spinning so fast it’s creating a serious breeze.  Each of the cards in the Rolodex is actually representative of another thing I will find in the box.  These are generally the “white bears” that keep me awake at night. (My family has this saying about “the white bear” which comes form the old distraction trick “Try NOT to think of a white bear.”)

I’m planning on commenting on some of the things I find in the box as time goes on.  First I need to deal with the breeze from this Rolodex and start checking out the cards.

Enhanced by Zemanta

4 thoughts on “Open the Box 1

  1. Pingback: Open the Box 3–The Pressure Washer « Authentic Voice

  2. Pingback: Open the Box–Wood Floors « Authentic Voice

  3. Pingback: Open the Box–Steering Wheel « Authentic Voice

  4. Pingback: Open the Box – A Fish?! | Authentic Voice

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s