Three Hugs
taken from the "Career Repair Kit" by David Royston-Lee
One of my clients named this exercise, although for many people it might be properly called the 'painful process'!
You need to obtain a small note pad, small enough to stick in your pocket. This is important for three reasons:
- It is a reminder that you need to be ‘detached’ from yourself, so having something a little bulky in your pocket reminds you that you need to be more aware of how you are operating.
- It is also there for you to jot down anything that comes into your head that you want to remember for later to do with your future .
- The exercise is to write three times a day how you are feeling.
When you get up in the morning, some time around lunch, and some time before you go to bed you need to write three numbers against the date. The numbers are from a scale of 1- 10, where 1 is suicidal, 5 is boringly normal and 10 is ecstatic. Each time you write the number, you must also write next to it the answer to the question “What can I do to get to the next number up the scale?” (This doesn’t mean you actually do it).
After a full week of doing this look back on what has happened…has there been any change in the numbers over the period? Is there a theme emerging from the question you are asking three times a day?