One of the things I like to do with clients is give them tasks to do in between our sessions. The tasks are varied and are designed to get the client focussing on something else whilst at the same time providing some hidden benefit to them as they do it. One such task is juggling.
Juggling is one of those tasks which is quite easy to begin to learn, it has just enough stretch to keep a person engaged and trying without them getting fed up or bored. It provides a number of benefits to the client.
Firstly it’s a good distraction tool, whilst they’re focussing on the juggling it makes it difficult to engage in the problem thinking that brought them to me.
It also engages the mind and body together and keeps you focussed on the present moment. It’s very difficult to daydream whilst learning to juggle.
The fact that the juggled items are passing across the mid-line of the body repeatedly also means that the left and right sides of the brain are engaged together, making anxiety difficult to produce (try it for yourself).
Juggling is also a hotbed of metaphors and analogies for life so it provides fertile ground for the follow up sessions and a way of the client relating to the messages in the session.
There’s a lot to be learned from learning to juggle, it’s one of my favourite tasks. If you’re struggling in some way in your life right now, I guarantee juggling will improve things for you. Try learning it. There are some great YouTube videos around to help you learn.
You’ll also learn how easy and natural it is to learn, how awesome you are at failing forwards, how easy it is to get focussed on the wrong aspect of a task so that it takes you further from success and how easy it is to make leaps forward just with a few tweaks on your technique.
There are lots of other lessons in juggling, but I’ll leave you to discover what they are. If you’re interested in learning juggling a great place to start id to learn to throw well.
Most people think juggling is all about the catching, but if you learn to throw well you’ll find the catching much easier.
Finally, as in all things in life, don’t be afraid to get it wrong. A friend of mine once said, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly to begin with.
