It’s time for a completely different perspective for our blog post today. Not one of our facilitators but a willing participant this time, shares her view of the inaugural event “Awaken Your Dating Force” at RSL Community Space (two doors down)
Run by Collective member, Jessica Paton who heads up The Date Shack and works with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques to help people find their dating feet, this Speed dating, without the awkward bits, got our new space off to a flying start.
Over to our mystery guest…
“When I agreed to attend the Date Shack event at RSL, two thoughts flickered through my mind, and like a pendulum I swang from one thought to the other. This is going to be a cringe evening with awkward silences (because in my mind I was imagining Speed Dating) and I pondered as to why I agreed to this. The other thought was more positive with… get out your comfort zone, you could potentially meet some great people and hey what’s the worst that could happen? You talk to no one, but then you don’t have to see them again, or you could come out of it with a good friend.
I went in that Monday with the intention of just having fun and possibly meeting interesting people and maybe making a few friends. I walked into the venue; it was vibrant and a little quirky but that’s what I liked about it. The tables were assembled randomly in shape, size and colour, which made me smile. It signified the individuality and personalities of people attending that evening. There were some drinks and snacks on offer, that calmed everyone’s initial nerves and the host was bubbly, which helped with putting us all at ease.
The host spoke about some of the tasks that we’d be doing to get to know each other and to see if there was a potential spark. There were 8 tasks such as posing as a superhero whilst looking in the mirror, and watching the faces pulled with my partner, we did fall over laughing at one point about how ridiculous we looked, but all part of the fun. One of my other favourites, I think was quite a few people’s. I will try to describe and do the task justice. The task involved shapes on a sheet of paper – you and your partner would draw onto the shapes and then write an adjective to describe the picture, which then referred to your life and how you viewed things. If it didn’t give my partner insight into me, it sure did give me insight into myself and my odd but wonderful personality.
So the evening went well; no awkward silences that I conjured up in my head beforehand, the tasks kept you engaged so there wasn’t time for that, and the night was filled with a lot of laughter.
I would like to thank the host for a wonderful evening that was organised so brilliantly”
The Date Shack’s next event will be coming to RSL Community Space sometime in March. Please check in with thedateshack.com for updates.
Writing and M.E. 