While all my friends were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this year, I was attending a movement workshop with the renowned Jean-Louis Rodrigue. You’ve heard me mention Jean-Louis before. He’s a genius “movement coach to the stars” but in this particular class he was working with a group of public speakers like myself.
We did plenty of exercises to reconnect with our bodies (anybody else out there always in your head?). Then we had an opportunity to apply what we learned up on stage.
While coaching speakers on that stage, Jean-Louis used two catchphrases that have stayed with me and that I’ve been coming back to again and again since I left the workshop. I wanted to share both of them with you because I believe they can be helpful even if you NEVER get up on a stage.
(Today, in Part I, I’ll share the first expression and on Wednesday, in Part II, I’ll share the second.)
First, IMAX IT.
When a speaker was on stage making small gestures to illustrate her point, Jean-Louis suggested that she think of an IMAX screen. It stretches from floor to ceiling and from one end of the theater to the other. It takes up the ENTIRE space on the theater wall. And he wanted her to the same thing on stage. He wanted her to fill up the entire stage with her body.
“IMAX it!” he said.
How I love this expression!
Because how many of us play small in our daily lives?
We think small, we feel small, we act small, we do small things.
Some part of us feels big, grand, and extraordinary but that part somehow gets lost between here and there while we’re spending time on mundane tasks, caught in traffic, or doing another load of laundry.
But what if, just like a speaker or performer on stage, you IMAX-ed yourself in one area of your daily life?
What if you dug as deep and reached as high and stretched as far as you could in just this one area?
For instance, what if you IMAX-ed your diet? Or what if you IMAX-ed your relationship with your surly teenager? Or what if you IMAX-ed that nagging pull you’ve had recently to learn graphic design?
Imagine what might happen.
Jean-Louis helped me realize that, as a speaker on stage, I have to constantly remind myself to IMAX it and make bigger, grander gestures. But certainly the world needs all of us, me included, to IMAX it off the stage, too, by making bigger, grander gestures to our fellow man.
Not only do we need to IMAX our own lives, but we should constantly be looking for ways to IMAX the lives of others as well.
Then when all that’s taken care of, you may even want to IMAX your fashion. This spring you can do that by selecting a bigger, grander statement necklace like today’s VPOD, a vintage 1970s copper beauty.
It’s a real IMAX fashion find for a Vintage Crusader!
Available at Nomade Exquis.
(To receive the VPOD via email along with detailed size, price and purchase information, sign up for my growing email mailing list here. Your information will never be sold or shared and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.)
