Yesterday, I showed you a neat little pattern you can use any time you need to kickstart your life.
Today, I’m going to point out a few pieces of the pattern that I believe make it so effective.
The chance factor
The deck of cards introduces a critical element into our life: chance.
While it may seem trivial to most, chance serves an incredible purpose in our lives. Chance opens our life up and injects new elements into our gestalt, forcing us to rearrange our belief systems, our values and perceptions to take these new elements into account.
We get stuck, literally, because we get completely conditioned into set ways of thinking and behaving. The element of chance, providence or “divine intervention” sticks a crow bar into our experience and opens up new worlds to us. It gives control of our decisions to an other-than-conscious power and thus forces us to be alert and alive in a new and unexpected situation.
This, in turn, creates the necessary condition to overcome the stuck pattern(s).
Pattern interrupts
Shuffling the cards serves as an excellent pattern buster, as it offers physical activity, concentration and coordination.
In fact, almost ANY physical activity that demands coordination will instantly break a pattern as it engages your neurology in entirely new ways.
Other great examples are dancing, juggling or trying to balance yourself on a giant ball.
All of a sudden, your neurological resources are all engaged in the present moment, eliminating any room for superfluous worrying.
Anchors
This pattern sets cool anchors that will fire up whenever you or your client interacts with an innocuous object: a deck of cards.
The perceptual patterns associated to playing cards are present in many different settings of life. Performing this little exercise over the course of four weekends in a row will strengthen the power of the anchor. As such, the deck will become an empowering anchor for a state of resourcefulness, expectation, alertness, creativity and new possibilities.
What a great tool to have at hand at any time!
Ace in the pocket
In closing, I just gave you a few of the many different factors that make this pattern so effective.
Can you identify any others?
Steve, it’s interesting to note that a couple of the most intense workouts I know of involve using either a card deck or dice.
Hey Louis!
Good to hear from you. How do those workouts function? Do they simply involve using a randomizer to determine the sequence of exercises?
Share with us a bit more on those workouts!
Steve
The card deck workout consists of picking 2-4 exercises.
In the army we alternated between pushups and crunches. Whenever the card is flipped, the suit determines the exercise and the number determines the reps. That was a group workout just to entertain the drill sergeants.
Matt Furey has a better version that consists of Hindu pushups, bodyweight squats, bridges and v-ups. I think the fastest I’ve finished that was around 14 minutes.
I just finished reading “Enter the Kettlebell.” The rite of passage training calls for throwing dice to determine how long you’re going to work. Once you have a number between 2-12 minutes, you do 50-100% of your max in an exercise called the swing depending on which day you’re cycling through.
I was actually discounting the idea of using dice until I read your post and realized the genius of randomizing it.