Generate Excitement (because you can)

 

BURNING QUESTION:

What is your relationship to excitement?

Confession time. . .I’m easily excited.

You weren’t really surprised, were you?

Truth is, some days it hardly takes anything at all and I’m lit up like a roman candle! 

I think of it as a way of being AND my relationship to the world.

Maybe that sounds Pollyanna-esque.

Maybe you think I’m wearing rose-coloured glasses, totally out of touch with reality.

But (and this is a very important but). . .

if it feels good and empowers you why would that be a problem?

I’ll tell you why; because our conditioning begins in childhood with phrases like:

• Rein it in.
• Settle down.
• Don’t show off.

And you learn how to turn your excitement right down to a manageable level or even worse, suppress it completely.

That my friends, is a sad state of affairs.

sup·pres·sion

noun: conscious inhibition of an impulse; a pressing under
related words: curtailment, crushing, quelling, stifling, inhibition

Why, oh why would you want to stifle this glorious, breathtaking feeling of excitement when it’s where the juice in life flows?

“Fear is excitement, without the breath.” – Gay Hendricks

Oh, right.

Fear and excitement go hand in hand, like smoke and fire, and where there’s fear you’ll always find the the lizard brain.

But if fear and excitement are so closely related, here’s the part that’s always boggled my mind. . .

Fear and excitement show up the same in your body, so if you were hooked up to a machine that monitored all your physiological responses, you’d get pretty much the same reading.

And if the body can’t tell the difference, why not choose the emotion that feels better?

Sounds like a rhetorical question but unfortunately it’s not! That damn conditioning is still at work and it takes practice to begin choosing excitement as a way of being.

It takes practice and intention and reminders and rewards – and that’s why you so often default to fear.

But fear doesn’t have to be the default that stops you, and it certainly doesn’t have to keep you stuck. Not when excitement is right there waiting to be chosen, waiting to inspire your next action.

Life. Is. Exciting.

And suppression be damned!

Consider excitement a state that you can generate at will. Meaning, you not only choose it, you become the source of it. 

Because here’s the truth. . .

I don’t wake up excited every day. In fact, some days I have no idea where my rose-coloured glasses, and I am annoyed and frustrated waiting to happen.

Until I remember I can consciously, intentionally generate excitement.

gen·er·ate

verb: to produce or bring into being; create

I’m not talking about looking outside of yourself to find something to be excited about (although I understand, some days that’s as good as it gets).

Nope, uh uh, I’m talking about unleashing that life-force we’re all born with.

I’m talking little kids at a playground kind of excitement, because haven’t you ever noticed they find anything and everything exciting?

Amazing how it bubbles out of them.

You? Can feel that too.

And as Danielle LaPorte declared in today’s burning question post. . .

more excitement, more often = way more to be excited about

 

Over to you:

Tell me, what’s got you fired up and excited today?

 

Inspired by Danielle LaPorte’s Burning Question.