I’m not a gifty person, I think gifts and tokens were lowest on my Five Love Languages assessment, but I gotta tell ya, I recently nailed one particular gift.
The Down Dog yoga app* has been with me and my bestie since COVID began. Many nights a week we Zoom from our homes, thousands of miles away and Chad, the voice actor from Down Dog, guides us smoothly through our yoga and meditation practice. We’ve tried other voices but Chad’s smooth, calm, Australian accent is the only one for us. Every night we invite him into our respective bedrooms and as our yoga winds down, he says, “Thank you for sharing your practice with me, Namaste.”
And Bestie and I say, “Namaste, Chad.” It’s a lovely way to end the day. We really felt Chad was talking just to us.
I thought it might be a cool surprise for Bestie to have personalized audio ‘hello’ from him. So despite not knowing his last name, I tracked him down – not in a creepy way – more in a fan-sort-of-way! #ChadVoiceActor #ThankYouInternet
With joy, I found him on Instagram and explained the situation and our connection to him. After his shock wore off, (he didn’t normally receive feedback) he agreed to do a little something special for Bestie.
And special it was – he did a 6-minute personalized video for her and she was soooo surprised and soooo happy and that made me soooo happy!
The unexpected benefit of this is that now when we do yoga and meditate ‘with’ Chad we really feel like he is talking to us. Later he told me that hearing from us reminded him that people all over the world hear his voice but he virtually gets no feedback. Now he ‘knows’ us, he can see our faces in his mind’s eye and he’s not just talking to an invisible landscape.
Chad did this for us, as a gift; he made no money, he went above and beyond, just because.
So my questions for you to ponder this week:
- What do you want/need/desire – that will only come, if your step up and out and ask?**
- Sometimes we do things that are ‘nice’ and sometimes we do things that are a ! What one thing can you do to add a ‘wow’ factor to someone in your life?
- Who would appreciate some positive feedback from you?
Namaste, friends, Steph
PS – Want more ideas to Revitalize Your Life? Enjoy this 25-minute Your Wellness podcast with Lisa Lounsbury – we talk about wellness, mudita, and much more!
*Right now the DownDog app is free for teachers and healthcare workers and very reasonably priced for everyone else – I have no affiliation with them, btw.
** The Harvard Business Review points to an interesting study…“Perhaps the easiest way to overcome the pain of asking for help is to realize that most people are surprisingly willing to lend a hand. When Vanessa Bohns, a professor at Cornell University and a leading researcher in this area, recently reviewed a group of experiments that she and her coauthors had done, she found that compliance—the rate at which people provided assistance to strangers who asked for it—was an average of 48% higher than the help seekers had expected. Clearly, people are much more likely to be helpful than we think they are. Studies also suggest that we underestimate how much effort those who do agree to help will put in.”
.jpg)
