Sorry for being quiet on the blog front this past month. I’ve been eyeball-deep into final editing of my book. Title is still pending, but it’s something along the lines of The Guide to Hardcoreless Fitness. It’ll be an expanded book version of some of articles I’ve written in here. Expanded to make it more actionable and (heavily) edited for clarity. (Apparently, at times, I ramble. Go figure.) 

Anyways, I’ll keep you posted as it gets close to being done. 

I did actually have a short thought I wanted to share today. Something rather bizarre I found helpful when dealing with brief moments of low self-confidence.

Black Magic Mind Games

The past four or five weeks I was in a deep improv theater funk. I was in my own head way too much, holding back, nothing was clicking, and most crucially, I was not funny, at all. Each class I did felt like I was standing in a pit of quicksand made out of doubt, torment, and lava. To the point of thinking “why am I doing this?” It would’ve been excruciating to watch. 

And I wasn’t feeling much better before last night’s class. But just before I left for the class a friend, who knew about my improv struggles, made a smart-ass comment whether tonight was finally the night I was going to break the spell of black magic? Whether I was going to levitate out of the quicksand of doubt and torment (and lava). 

His offhand comment gave me a good laugh, and an absurd idea.

I decided that that night (in my head) I was a character in a story who was trying to break a black magic spell… of improv theater. To the point that I thought of myself in third person. Not unlike “The Jimmy” episode in Seinfeld. As in, “Joonas goes to the class and Joonas does this and this because he is trying to break the evil witch’s black magic spell” (wow, that feels pompous to even write).

Essentially, I made my improv struggle into a game where I was the problem solver (and yes, we are still only in my head). 

And I shit you not, weirdly enough it worked. I mean, I didn’t slay it. But I was close to being normal Joonas without the curse of black magic. 

Since I like to analyse everything to the point of sawdust, here’s what I think. Making it all into a game took the pressure off from performing. Instead it turned the class into my own little adventure and a challenge.

A “little” shift in thinking changed the situation from semi-fear-inducing into being liberating. To just be yourself, come whatever may. In the end, none of this matters anyway. It’s all just a game (which it is, really). 

So maybe being an observer of yourself is worth trying at times of moderate self-doubt.

Then again, I think I am finding answers in something that in end made zero difference. Maybe I would’ve broken the improv funk without the black magic, adventure-for-the-ages thinking. After all, I just had to be “brave” to not hold back and to focus on the basics of improv. 

Obviously, putting this much weight, effort and thought into climbing out of improv funk quicksand of doubt and torment (and lava) makes one thing clear: life’s good. 

Sometimes we have some real issues, troubles and struggles to deal with in life.

This wasn’t one of them.