Challenge: Ask a stranger to take my photo, but lay down and plank before they take the picture!
Reflection: My very FIRST challenge…
I am the newest edition to the Social Dive team, which meant that I needed to get cracking on these challenges. The team showed me what they had done in the past and so I took it upon myself to complete a few of the challenges they had already done themselves.
Before: Leading up to the challenge, I was extremely excited to participate in these silly tasks. They sounded like a ton of fun and at first sounded fairly easy. I’ve always thought that I’m a decently outgoing person who is comfortable being silly in public. However, once I started thinking about it in class about half an hour before, I started getting kinda nervous.
During: After class got out it was “Challenge Time”. Oh sh*t…I was so scared all of a sudden. My heart started pumping; I started making excuses for myself: “I don’t want to bother this person, they look like they are on their way to class” or “Uhhh this person doesn’t seem very approachable.”
After walking across campus and back, which took about 30-45 minutes, I finally told myself “JUST DO IT” (not in Shia’s voice…), I convinced myself that the next person I saw I would stop them.
I asked a guy who was walking with who I assume to be his girlfriend if he’d take my photo. I was so nervous I can’t remember what I had said, but I said something along the lines of “Can you take my picture? Try to get all this beautiful landscape” or something like that. When he was ready I asked him to wait for a second and laid down in plank position. Instantly I heard the girl laugh and say “what is he doing?!?! HAHA”. At that moment I felt a little bit of comfort sink in and I just laughed back and asked the guy to take the photo.
After: I stood up and took my phone, we both awkwardly chuckled and I gave him a fist bump, thanked him, told him to have a great day, and we parted ways. After it was all said and done, I came to the realization that it wasn’t all that bad, there was no reason for me to be nervous. It was just a funny thing to do, and quite out of the . Thinking about this experience made me truly feel like I was able to do something that I previously wouldn’t have before. I’m very interested to see what challenges come next and what else can help me expand my comfort zone.