Hi ,

Keeping with our Improv techniques from last month—I’d like to share one that is an invaluable tool for your personal and business life. It’s called, Discover, Explore and Heighten! Why is it so important? Well for one thing it will keep you youthful. Yes that’s right, young and full of life and exuberance!

Here’s another way of putting it. Remember your first walk in a forest, a park or at the sea side. You had big wide eyes and you were looking at everything, you were taking notice of new things, you were curious and interested and you loved to explore things. Eventually, with more walks, you stop looking. You stop being curious and stop exploring. The next step is that you are walking in the forest and not even looking. You may have seen people like this in the street. There are amazing things to see, buildings, people, shop windows, birds, trees, flowers, whatever is going on and yet, you see these walking dead people just going forward—eyeballs straight ahead—lost in their world of whatever their world is. If you try to make eye contact, they will pretend not to notice you. If you say something, they will pretend not to hear.

Discover, explore and heighten is very simple. First step you must be awake to do this. Second step, you discover something. It could be a thing or it could be a person such as a friend, spouse, child, coworker, or boss. Third step, you explore! So for example your thought could be, “Wow, here’s my kid and he’s ten years old and I don’t know what he’s really thinking about life. Hey Ben, what’s your favorite song?”
"Dunno!"Which could be the answer and which is why we have to select a specific topic for most people—it’s no good just saying how’s it going because most people will just say, ‘fine!’

“Well Ben I’m curious to hear some new music and I thought you would be able to help me…”

“I don’t think you’ll like my music.”

“Well let me explore it and discover what it is that you like about it.”

Clearly, I’m just making this conversation up. It could go better than that, or it could go worse. The point is that with this Improv technique, you are being curious. You want to discover something new and you want to explore and heighten it, for yourself and for others. It’s about you bringing new energy to the table—the situation—your work—your home. For men especially, we need a topic to discover. So it’s no good if you are a woman to go home and say,"Let’s talk!"because a guy needs to have something to talk about."Let’s talk about that dream you had ten years ago. Has it gone or are you still yearning after it. Maybe there is some way we can work on it together."

Like the Improv technique last time, “YES AND…” This is a technique for moving things along. No blocks. And June is a great month to do it because I read somewhere that June 23 is LETTING IT GO DAY! So let go of whatever is holding you back in your life from being the most amazing person that you really are…and discover, explore and heighten your life.

All the very best.

Jeff