Your custom-made happy-place (audio exercise)

This is an audio exercise based on last week's post. It starts with a short visualisation, and is followed by a writing exercise. Enjoy.

Your custom-made happy-place

This is an exercise inspired by the challenges of our current confinement. It was influenced by my writings of people who had suffered much worse imprisonment, like Victor Frankl and James Stockdale. One of their observations is that hoping for or predicting an end-date to the situation can be devastating to those involved. Instead, they …

Sentence stubs

(takes about 30 minutes) This exercise is a guided exploration of feelings and motivations. The extent to which this brings up genuinely new insights will depend on how exploratory you are feeling, and how much you are willing to challenge yourself. Write for 3-5 minutes about each of these topics. Try to “push through” if …

Meet your childhood self

(Takes about 30 minutes) Our childhood experiences can have profound effects on our personality and behavior. While we can’t erase or change these experiences, we can change our interpretation of them. This exercise tries to enter into a dialog with our inner child in order to become more conscious of its positive and negative influence …

Exercise – Bug list

(Takes about 10 minutes) This is an exercise to find problems small and large - from the minor annoyance to the life-stopping dilemma. Why would you want to make a list of these? Because problems can be a source of energy, inspiration and direction. Let me try to show you how. The exercise It’s worth …

Exercise – Rotating perspectives

(takes about 20 minutes) This problem attempts to help you give advice or criticism better and in a way that it is more likely to be received positively. Try to think of advice you have tried to give someone very recently, or are planning to give someone in the very near future. This might be …

Exercise – Energizers

(takes about 15 minutes) This is an exercise of self-exploration through a simple brainstorming exercise. The idea is to gain a better understanding of where our strengths and passions lie - and where not. Some things energize us. That is, once we start doing them we feel more awake, more energetic and happier. Other activities …

To be neither negative nor naive…

This is some background relating to the previous exercise. At every moment we receive huge amounts of ambiguous information which our minds called on to sort, prioritize and complete. This can be something as banal as the face of a passer-by, to speculation about the motivations of other people. Speculations about motivations of other people …

Audio exercise – Negativity realism and cognitive distortions

An exercise to listen to and write along with.

Exercise – What would Hercules do?

(Suggested time : 10-20 minutes) Preparation This exercise required a complex/messy/wicked problem that you’ve been dealing with recently. Preferable it should be one that you’ve become “stuck” after already thinking about it for some time. The exercise (3 minutes) Describe the issue. What is it about? What are the unknowns=Who are the main people involved? …