Adaptability, bargaining, and resilience.
I'm tired. Writing and publishing daily is hard. I love it, but that doesn't mean it's always shiny and spectacular.
For as long as I can remember, I've been very impressionable. Not gullible, impressionable—I absorb a ton of information, all the time, non-stop. When I was a kid, I'd watch movies and then regurgitate impressions of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey. I can reenact the entire live-action version of Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas. Much like a parrot, I can mimic accents after hearing them. And I can even copy people's mannerisms. But it wasn't until much later that I'd come to appreciate the true diversity of that skill set.
When I started working as a sales associate at The North Face, we were taught to disarm customers by mirroring their body language. TNF wanted us to know how to do that because it helps people let their guard down, and opens the door to conversation. Those are um... my words. Theirs had a lot more to do with hitting sales quotas and such. What I remember most is being genuinely shocked that this was considered new information. Looking around, people were nodding as if completely fascinated by this newfangled wizardry.
Wait... y'all don't do this already??
I didn't know that what I was doing all those years ago was called "mirroring", and I hadn't realized I'd perfected it by high school when I worked as a bar-back and ski instructor. It makes total sense now. I mean, I'd stumbled my way into doing that as a childhood safety mechanism. Unsurprisingly, those same chameleon skills followed me into adulthood. My hypervigilance, and the deescalation tactics that grew from it, are what showed me that I could change my mood at will. I can still parrot accents and impersonate movie characters, too. But mostly, these days, mirroring just looks like disarming myself rather than others.
Like today. Today kinda sucked.
It's the Monday after Daylight Savings, it's rainy, I moved over the weekend, and it feels like I have a million more things piled up on my to-do list than I can realistically get to. I wanted to say "fuck it" and come back tomorrow. I wanted to mean it—to just hit the ground running in the morning (or, you know... slowly, but steadily while slurping coffee).
But I didn't... I compromised. Begrudgingly, I impersonated someone who gets shit done, so that afterward I could play the role of someone who sits on the couch in their sweats.
And it worked. The kid's still got it.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
64/365
Do you bargain with yourself? What's it sound like? How's it feel?
(Bonus points if your inner monologue features a great accent.)
onward.
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