Faking it… or How to boost your Energy in just 5 minutes

This week’s Postcard from the Edge contains one of my favorite exercises inspired by the book: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In it, you’re invited to let your imagination run with a parallel universe in which you are doing something else in your life, in a different role. You are then asked to ‘fake it’ just a bit, by doing some of that stuff you’re doing over there in that parallel universe over here in your ‘real world’.

What fun?! I love doing this. One of my favorite TV series of recent years was “Faking It” on Channel 4. Here, the producers challenged people from all walks of life to learn in just 6 weeks how to survive (and sometimes even thrive) in a different one. For instance, a Bicycle Courier learned how to become a Polo Player; a History of Art Student became a Graffiti Artist; and a Ballet Dancer transformed himself into a hard-ass Wrestler. Each had expert tuition, often a sort of Bootcamp-style training and nearly all of them went through an incredibly hard time in making the change from role A to role B. The aim was to convince ‘experts’ in their new field that they were genuinely who they were pretending to be. It was a tough challenge. The participants all stepped well out of their comfort zones and not surprisingly, most of them didn’t like it at first.

But as they mastered their newly-learned skills, many of them discovered more about themselves in the brief 6 weeks than they had in the last 6 years, which is why there’s a follow-up program called “Faking It Changed My Life”. I find this series fascinating, because these short, intense experiences are so life-affirming.

This week’s exercise is an invitation to bring some of this into your life right now. It probably won’t be as painful as Faking It, but it may just unlock a few hidden sensations and feelings that would be good to feel, good to bring out in the open and good even to introduce into your business….

Try it now – spend 5 minutes simply imagining yourself doing something else and see how your energy goes as a result – you may be surprised how powerful something so simple can be.

• In the spirit of Faking It, if you were at a social event and someone asked you “So, what do you do?”,  how would you love to reply?

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