25 Ways to Shake Things Up
Just going through the motions? Life seems dull, blah – numbingly routine? Sometimes, in order to shake things up and start feeling as good about yourself as you deserve, it’s necessary to act unlike yourself.
Remember How Free You Felt As a Child?
Use your imagination. Incorporate play, humor, and a light touch to your old, predictable ways. Give your cramped personality a S-T-R-E-T-C-H. By that, I mean try some behaviors that are a bit unusual for you. You’ll be amazed how easy (and liberating) pushing through your previously set boundaries can feel. You’ll experience an immediate – and hopefully lasting – sense of freedom and accomplishment. Your friends will wonder, What’s gotten into her?
Life, that’s what.
Now, I’m not suggesting you run out and be wild and crazy or alter your life altogether, not yet anyway. But just as you “warm up” before a workout, you might want to try exercising a bit before embarking on a new lifestyle. Here goes. Remember, the activities on the following list are just suggestions. You’ll certainly come up with some ideas of your own.
- Keep a set of Groucho Marx glasses in your gloves box. Put them on while driving home from work and wave to people at stoplights.
- Go to a party overdressed or underdress (whichever you think will create more of a stir).
- Take a different route in the grocery store; start in “paper goods.” Or to live really dangerously, in frozen goods.
- Wear mismatched or wildly colorful socks – with shorts! Or how about a polka-dot top with striped pants?
- Give up meat for a week.
- Take a “mini-vacation.” Visit a new part of town or take a bus ride with no particular destination in mind.
- Get lost on purpose. Take back roads you’re unfamiliar with – then make an adventure out of finding your way home.
- Volunteer to be a Big Sister.
- Rearrange your furniture or paint your bathroom hot pink.
- Roll down a grassy hill.
- Put colorful streamers on your bicycle handlebars – and bike to work.
- Go without makeup for a day. Or, if you don’t wear makeup, give false eyelashes and frosted pink lipstick a try.
- Steal a tulip from your neighbor’s flower garden.
- Acknowledge a homeless person with a “Hello!” How are you?” Offer to buy him or her a meal.
- While walking your dog, burst into song–or a least a hearty whistle.
- Do a somersault, cartwheel, or headstand in front of a perfect stranger.
- Be a clown at kid’s party.
- Buy a wig. (You always wanted to be a curly redhead, right?)
- Throw a 70’s celebration. Wear funked-out clothes.. Dig out the lava lamp. Listen to the Stylistics.
- Be a 24-hour shutterbug. Take pictures at work, at the gym, at your dentist appointment, and document “A Day in My Life.”
- Go skinny-dipping – preferably with someone you’d like to know better.
- Start writing that novel you know is inside you.
- Enroll in an acting class.
- Stay up all night. Write letters to your friends, watch Humphrey Bogart movies, dance till dawn.
- Go fly a kite.
The value of some of these “silly” behaviors lies in their potential to serve as a wake-up call. Although none of these suggestions will get you arrested (with the possible exception of stealing the tulip). I’ll bet that most of them actually make you quite uncomfortable.
We can create the rare occasion to appreciate and participate in the moment – the only real place where life happens anyway and the only real place where we have the opportunity to act with mastery and skill – by being willing to break boundaries of thought and behavior. In this way, we not only learn to respond with awareness and alertness, but we add a little zest to the daily grind of living and learn to become mastery-oriented (mistresses of our fates) in the process.
