For about two years, I start my day with morning pages. And I wanted so badly to share great things from that ritual. Apologies for waiting for so long.
This article is about the power of a warming up. Warming up, through writing. Or about the power of the conversation before the conversation. We need that, because we keep overlooking that moment. We keep moving on, if not punishing ourselves claiming it’s a waste of time.
Let me start with how I sometimes start them, first. And then, we will reflect about that – what I call “warming up communicative experiences”.
That kind of morning pages
These are morning pages.
Oh well, and here we are, again.
Working, writing, advancing, aren’t we?
I here write, one paragraph, two paragraphs.
And I know, I write in a way that some may think it’s arbitrary.
Oh, well, I wonder how much I should worry about that.
Today I know that that flow works. That that flow is better.
Oh well, it may be about getting the morning going, it may be about warming up.
Here I am, warming up.
I have seen that kind of writing, through these morning pages. So that’s me, protecting. Now protecting that arbitrary warm up. Not protesting, like I used to do.
So I did for so long, judging in real-time, when it’s time to do the thing. Such as to write. But hey – now defending – we meet friends and then we do that ping pong talk, don’t we? We pass the ball, we warm up. And with colleagues too, we throw things in the air, don’t we? One lifts, the other hits, goal. Yeah, high five, we do that. And we laugh too, out of the sudden. And we out-of-the-sudden too were suddenly awake. A spark. We have warmed up, it happens. So we know about that – that thing generally lost now – that warm up ritual that comes before:
Shit happens
But of course, it is not my intention to miss what life has given us, warned us: when we keep on dancing, forever there, wasting ourselves. True, we have learned – the hard way – that endlessly being there leads to when “shit hits the fan”. Perhaps because we have been hurt, we came up with the idea of not respecting anymore – that warming up moment.
Warming up communicative experiences
Let us pause the morning writing, briefly, and switch to the board of directors. Glenn, from Redfin, reminds us of how a CEO moves too fast when talking with important people – like board members. His talk, Building Your Board with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, is enlightening in many ways. Here is what he used to do – before warming up:
I used to just call on them – randomly – with the most bizarre, difficult questions. And say, what do you think? And then, they would stare at me: What are you doing?
There is a lot in Glen’s talk about slowing down and about reminding ourselves that we already know how to do better. We have seen that game:
Have you ever seen a soccer player come into a game in the middle of the game? Everybody else is all warmed up. But, they just pass the ball to him, like three times, in a row. They just kick it to him, he kicks it back, kick it to him, he kicks it back. And they’re just trying to get him into the flow of the game.
This is Glenn Kelman recognizing what comes before real communication:
So now, when I bring an executive in, I actually tell [talk with] them. Now I say: when we get to the subject, the first person I’m going to ask is you, and this is the question that I’m going to ask.
And he concludes:
And I know we don’t want too much stagecraft in a board meeting, but I’ve just found that that person is better able to concentrate and engage on the real issue if that first touch on the ball has been a successful one. So that’s sort of the first order of business.
About that place of dissonance, impressed by whatever or whoever is in front of us, it’s easy to see now. From far. But not when we take the steering wheel. It’s even laughable, from the stands. Mr. Khan from Khan Academy recounts the bizarre moment when he met Bill Gates:
“We met .. and it was just one of those surreal times in your life where 20% of your brain is trying to speak in a cohesive way, and the other 80% is saying – that’s Bill Gates, that’s Bill Gates! And you just try to deal with it.” (Kleiner Perkins, 2014, 19:32)
Thank you Glenn, for reminding us that we are humans, for supporting us consciously soften our conversations. And thank you, Sal, for having captured that moment.
See you tomorrow – morning pages, essays, and meetings
So now I say, from my morning pages:
It’s okay.
It’s okay to have that conversation, that warming up ritual.
The essay version of that? The same, it’s okay. For me, it solved that situation, when I was pressured, or impressed, by that first paragraph. Expecting it, or trying to control it. Blank page, sad place.
That is why, back to morning pages, I say THANK YOU to you, to Julia Cameron. Julia of
I have seen, later, it working quite well; after I let go trying to capture that first paragraph. After warming paragraphs, now, I don’t capture them. I witness them being born:
Oh my dear first paragraph, there you are, my friend. Oh, I see you here, at paragraph 9?
This is how I vouch for it: It works for the day, for writing, for the new player entering that ongoing soccer game, for the CEO in the board meeting. It works for life.
And I know that we are all worried about that other thing – ourselves wasting time, our capacity to be dancing, endlessly. We fear meetings. Yet, and exactly because of that, we should embrace this idea. If we can’t see, we won’t know. Less is more.
