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My maternal grandmother was Margaret Dunbar, but I always called her Foxy Lady because that was her C.B. handle. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the 70's craze, C.B. stands for Citizens Band radio. My grandmother used to drive herself back and forth from Atlantic City New Jersey to her trailer in South Florida every year until she was in her late 70's. This was no small miracle given that her other nickname was Mrs. McGoo because she was so nearsighted, she was almost legally blind. (She once asked a chubby 10-year-old girl in a restaurant When are you due? thinking she was looking at a pregnant adult.)
Foxy Lady would sign on to her CB radio somewhere south of Maryland on I-95 and scope out the speed traps Any Smokie's south of Santee?..over!.
She moved on to the next adventure in 2005 at 92 years old, but she was and will remain one of my most favorite people on earth. Though she was a Shiks (a gentile woman) my grandmother was the biggest jew-a-phile you would ever meet. Most of her friends were Jewish, and I think the only thing she admired about my father was that he was mostly Jewish. She had many little Jewish sayings and she was never more adorable than when she was coughing up some Yiddish expression in her over-the-top guttural pronunciation. She was a reader's digest of philosophical slogans and she had plenty of non-Yiddish expressions too. One often repeated bit of wisdom was act the way you want to be and you will be the way you act.
This one always bugged me. Foxy don't you think there is enough denial going on in the world without that? I would ask only half teasing. The way I heard it was: when you're sad, just stuff it and pretend. Since I was constantly sad as a kid, I considered this saying to be another way for the world to invalidate my experience and judge me as wrong for what I was feeling. It took me many years to get it, but I finally understood that act the way you want to be and you'll be the way you act was actually just a positive affirmation.
Acting the way you want to be doesn't demand that you deny your current feelings but rather you choose to set the tone for how you want to feel. It is actually a radical idea since most of us just go along in life stumbling upon whatever default feelings arrive at our doorstep, especially when it comes to how we feel about ourselves.
In my experiments with act the way you want to be, I found that the subconscious seems to respond in remarkable ways. I tried it once before a job interview with some amazing results.
I was a month late on my rent and spent the previous four weeks submitting my resume to virtually any and every job that I saw on Craig's list. I was so desperate that I actually found myself on the fence about whether or not to travel to Hoboken on an interview for a position that the woman on the phone said would require me to be injected with radiation.
What?! I asked startled.
Oh don't worry. It's only tiny levels. She said in a tone that belied the fact that she clearly lost most of her potential candidates at this point in the conversation.
I finally had a good lead on an internet marketing job. I arrived a few minutes early for the interview, sat in my car and tried using act the way you want to be. I sat there acting as though I were someone who was unattached to the results of the upcoming interview, you know, one of those fully realized beings who is so surrendered to the will of the universe that they are calm, alert and peaceful.
I went into the office for the interview and kept pretending that I was this just open to whatever would be Gods will person.
The interview was a breeze. I felt that I was that surrendered guy. Not only did they give me the job, but I negotiated a salary with great benefits that was about $30,000 per year more than they were offering and I stayed for three years.
To play the game yourself, take a moment right now to act the way that you want to be. Just for about three minutes. Do you want to be someone on fire with joy? Do you want to be someone able to handle anything that life throws their way? Try standing up and walking across the room, perhaps drinking a glass of water as that person.
It is an exercise that works for me and I know it worked for Foxy, she acted just like the person she wanted to be until her last day.
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