Free hugs for X-mas!!!Have you ever seen that wonderful clip on YouTube? If you haven’t, go check it out at www.youtube.com. Search for  ‘free hugs campaign’. Well, we just did that!
With 8 of my wonderful colleges at TalentFirst, this was our Christmas challenge: in the center of Amsterdam, we went out to contribute to the joy of the world by giving people free X-mas hugs. Wonderful!!! Amazing what happens if you step into that experience! Of course, quite a lot of us had two thoughts at the same time when this challenge came up: one was: O yeah, that’s fun, let’s do it!  And the other one was O my Goss, do we really have to? Where can I hide out? The fact that we were together, made it a whole lot easier. Like every challenge you take on in live: if you find some people to join you on your path, it’s easier and more fun!And it was so interesting what happened to ourselves and to the people we encountered!Although we all are coaches who have stepped out of our comfort zone before, lots of us felt some threshold in stepping forward to people and just give them a hug. And just like in real live, once you start doubting shall I, shall I not, it’s getting more difficult. Like the window of opportunity is closing again and it’s getting harder. Also, if we were just holding our signs with  Free Hugs, people would look, some would smile, some would frown, but very rarely someone would come up to us for a hug. But when we opened our arms, smiled and approached people in a nice way, hardly anyone refused the hug. How interesting! Where do we do that in life? How often are we holding back, while people really would like to be approached by us, in whatever way?And then, this is just great, some people just have to grow into a new experience… And because we were with 9 of us, they had the opportunity… they would hide away at the first approach of a free hug, then there would be a second they would say no thank you to, but when the third came up, they smiled, gave us a hug and smiled even bigger as they walked on….And that is what can happen from a just funny challenge: we stretched our selves, overcame our fears, had lots and lots of fun, opened our hearts, connected to people of all ages, races, rich and poor and made them smile and feel great too.Funny detail: since we were in Amsterdam center, there were a whole lot of tourists, who were eager to get a hug AND a picture, so if you see my face in a Japanese magazine with the text this is what the Dutch do for X-mas… now you know!