Posted on June 1, 2010 - by Denis

30 day trial: Daily CGW Style Power Exercises

Yesterday I tweeted this:

new #30daytrial starting today: #CGW style power exercises every day; today: Looking Stupid on the Vegas Strip! Suggestions welcome!

12:48 AM May 31st via web

So as I yesterday was the first day already, I want to give you a quick report on how it went:

Stephan, who is hosting me in Vegas at the moment, and I went out on the strip. He had a strong desire to go check out the New York New York roller coaster and I felt like joining and that it would be the perfect opportunity to get some power exercises done right after the ride. The ride was really crazy, much better and “challenging” than I’d expected. I really enjoyed and loved it!

Afterwards we then stayed right in the casino and somehow ended up in a Master-Servant situation where Stephan told me what discomforting thing to do and selected my “targets”. The master role was not that clearly defined as we kept negotiating back and forth a lot of the time, but in essence he was the master and I was the servant, which was really good because like this we both got to learn a couple of lessons, not just me.

After asking random people some stupid questions, like “Is gambling legal?” of an casino employee, or “Heck, which casino are we in?” of a bunch of confused looking guests, I understood that it’s actually not hard for me to initiate a more or less meaningful connection with a random stranger, especially if the subject I use for doing that is not too silly and I can expect to get an at least neutral or slightly positive response. It was actually quite fun and I asked Stephan to challenge me because I didn’t feel enough discomfort…

Well, he did deliver on that. During the next 2 hours or so I had to tell some of the most beautiful and dressed up girls in the whole casino how beautiful they were and how much I simply looooved their red dress when it was actually blue. I had to ask girls for where the lesbian bar is (confusion, but nice response), guys for the gay one (not confused, not very open or helpful), random dudes for the closest brothel (doh, that one was hard… definitely outside my comfort zone), others if I can hug them (to get rejected… and I did… that was hard!), … and my final target, that I actually selected by myself, turned out to be a really cute, nice girl from Vegas that I ended up having a half-hour conversation with and exchanging cell numbers… isn’t that sweet?

Lessons learned:

- I don’t have real fears around striking up social interaction
- it’s rather my mind going rampant, making up wild stories about why I can’t do something, reasoning about success or failure and the possible outcomes, paralyzing me, making me procrastinate
- I’m not too bad at making up believable stories that explain odd circumstances
- what I really do fear is plain old rejection
- what I also fear is looking like an idiot, which is what happens if I do not have a good story or just don’t use one… that creates a kind of disharmony or lack of understanding between me and the other person and that makes me feel hugely uncomfortable
- I guess then it’s also about the flawlessness that I’d like to see and keep in my internal image of myself… but which is only an illusion of course, so I can just as well get rid of it… that’s uncomfortable, doh! But who cares about keeping the limiting aspects of self-image?
- I love roller coasters
- from the interaction with a number of very attractive and wonderful people of the opposite sex I can tell even more that I won’t limit myself to the one relationship that I have, even though it’s the best relationship ever, which is something I already said and my girlfriend and I even agreed upon from the beginning… and yet so far I “left that potential untapped”, so to speak. It was fine, because it was not time for that yet, but now it is. Exciting!
- my personal growth is not just about me… from interacting with many people over a short period of time it becomes very evident how much of an influence I am on my social environment. How do I act to inspire the people around me, even so-called strangers, on a daily, interaction-by-interaction basis? What do I do to take them a bit out of their comfort zone, to wake them up just for a moment by doing something unexpected? What do I want to do to resolve those parts within myself that cause homeless people to be homeless? (I’ll tell you the story that brought up this question soon… for now just know that we had an interesting encounter with a person sitting on the street, begging for money.)

How to improve today and in the future:

- find ways to think less and jump into action as soon as I know what I want to do — that will also help me in general, i.e. with the regular projects I’m working on as there I also tend to hesitate for no good reason other than overthinking
- find some exercises that are more fun to the strangers and turn them into active participants having fun (= targeted at creating more engaging social interaction)

New ideas for exercises:

- some of them I’ve posted on Facebook
- Las Vegas Strip Fun Committee: act as if I was someone the city hired to entertain its visitors and play some fun power exercises with them if they want to, with me being the master, them the servant Goal would be to create some social interaction between strangers and give more people the chance to get out of their comfort zone by giving them permission to do so.

All in all this 30 day trial is going to be challenging and also tons of fun! I’m really curious about what kinds of challenges for myself I and others like you will come up with, especially the “standard” ones stop scaring me, and then also what long-term effect this thing will have… Already I glimpsed what it could be like when you feel like you can talk to anyone about anything, regardless of what you want from them, if there is no such thing as a “social interaction initiation comfort zone” — that would be huge for me, and probably also for some of you

I love that you’re with me on this journey, feel free to be inspired to do your own crazy stuff and tell me about it!