Testing 123

I miss concerts. The music, the dancing, the good vibes, all of it. One of the last shows I saw before the pandemic was Hootie and the Blowfish, with special guest Barenaked Ladies, at the Minnesota State Fair in 2019. I am a big fan of the band Barenaked Ladies, having seen them a handful of times, including twice sitting in the first few rows. My younger brother was with me for those particular concerts, and one time he actually snagged a drumstick because we were so close. I am optimistic that we will be able to go see concerts in 2021, and it is going to be awesome.

The exhilarating activity of going to concerts came to mind today. I woke up feeling the need to create something original, beyond the writing I have been doing lately. Over the past few weeks, I have been building the skill of how to produce a finished podcast, I ended up in working in Garage Band on my Mac. I produced an original musical introduction for a project at work. Even added a little cowbell for good measure. This is an awesome platform to exercise my creativity, and a fun way to spend some time today.

My thoughts came back to this concert — Barenaked Ladies have this track called Testing 123 (here’s a video of a live performance). The title got me to resume thinking about setting my intention for 2021, as Michaele and I have been writing about the last few weeks.

Agile Best Self Principle #12: At regular intervals, reflect on how to become your best self, then tune and adjust.

This led me to an idea before I commit to an intention for 2021. An ideal place to leverage Agile Best Self Principle 12 — the practice of regular reflection, then adjust and tune our behavior. What would happen if I took it out for a little test drive? The idea was not to share the word with others and asking for feedback, but to actually show up with that word as intention to get the feedback I needed by paying attention to how I felt when I was trying to apply that new intention. How did it feel to show up differently? Where did I feel it? Would it be something I could replicate by showing up with that intention more often?

These experiments must involve stepping outside my normal comfort zone, into this new intention, and get uncomfortable. Experiments, by their nature, are also often done in environments where the stakes are not too high, so if they go awry, nothing hurt. But, you get the data you need.

By running these experiments today, and collecting that valuable feedback, I was energized by how I felt. I had stepped out of my comfort zone a little bit, and liked how it felt. Both experiments were successful. I’m ready to move to the next step and finalized my 2021 intention.

How will you test your 2021 intention? What feedback will you be watching out for to know whether or not you got it right?

If you are interested in our upcoming Agile Best Self Intention Workshop, to help you set your 2021 Intention, please click here.

For now, I am getting back to some music. Testing 1-2-3, can anybody hear me…

Copyright © 2018 – 2023 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson