But when you’re separated by a safe distance it is awesome to see this massive, wild creature do its everyday thing.

Here’s the problem with being in threat mode in your daily life: your brain is putting your AWE sensors in Sleep Mode. As long as there’s still a threat to deal with, it dims your sense of wonder, of delight. It prevents you from being captivated by pretty, beautiful, excellent, inspiring things that already surround you, or arrive unexpectedly.

Add to it, not only is our unconscious dimming our sense of wonder, many of us have learned a form of cynicism to protect ourselves from being taken advantage of. In a world where it seems like everyone is selling us something, when is it ever safe to be impressed, excited, or delighted by something?

We hold our cards close to our vest, downplay our reactions, and try to engage others without making ourselves vulnerable. This cautious posture toward life's threats is a major enjoyment stealer. Letting yourself actually feel and savor wonder and delight will do more to restore your quality of life and energize you for life's challenges than an expensive vacation or month off work.

3: Be Wild

There are a lot of ways to be wild. Here at Wild + Brave the Wild tends to point toward the wild ideas that can change our lives if we’re willing try something new, experiment, and think differently. But today there’s a very special way I mean for you to be wild.

Think about that wild bear again. What doesn’t it have? Table manners. Compulsive self-censoring. Culturally Acceptable Pants.  😀

Wild means putting down the baggage of overthinking, and asking yourself what actually makes sense, what genuinely resonates, what you could do wholeheartedly if you weren’t over thinking other people’s responses, expectations, or even your own previous assumptions.

Tame Responses tend to start with

We’ve always done this this way...
These people expect that...
I’ve never tried that before so I can’t now...
Do what’s expected...

Wild Responses:

“I wonder what would happen if we tried___”
“What if we changed this thing…”
“How could this be a little easier?”?
“What if this could be fun?”
“What part of this actually matters? How could we focus harder on that and let the unnecessary stuff wait/go?”

I’ll admit, I grew up wild. I had to learn "how most people do things" as a second language. Often when I do something my friends find surprising or “innovative” it’s because I didn’t know there was a "normal" way to do the thing.

But in my work as a coach, I’ve come to realize most of us need to get some practice forgetting all the constraints of “expectation” that are hanging over us.

Because normal is a creation of your mind anyway.

We create this sense of what’s expected of us, what we have to do, what is “necessary” as we go. It’s built of our experiences, and the witnessed reactions of how others have felt about those experiences. It doesn’t mean that our accumulated sense of how the world works isn’t real…but it does mean that we are continuing to co-create our sense of how the world works.

It means it's our responsibility to keep feeding good information into our “reality filter.”

So today, if you want to enjoy your life more, feed some wildness into your reality filter. Pick a rule that seems to make life more boring, less fun, and ask how you might handle that thing if you were a little bit wild. What would have made sense to you naturally, if you didn't know the way others were accustomed to doing it?