Category: Doing Something New

This category covers things that relate to trying something different. It is a sort of catch-all category that contains things are more verb-like than noun-like. These things like be new movements, new ways to think, or a specific suggestion that you try something that you may never have tried before. It’s a big category because humans are action oriented beings that are kinesthetic learner who benefit the most from interacting with their immediate environment.

Interesting Stuff About Conflicts of Interest

When there is a conflict of interest, people can easily abandon their ethics and serve their own needs. Even good people. Not because they are complete jerks (or jerks at all), but because they don’t actually see what they are doing.

In this clip, Dan Ariely tells a story about why you shouldn’t trust your dentist. The dentist has something to gain from selling you dental services / products but you don’t necessarily NEED the service / product. Gray / silver colored fillings are functionally the same as white once yet the white ones tend to be sold first.

The entire conversation is great, shocking actually. But it gave me some insight into why I despised selling supplements when I was a trainer – because someone was gaining from them being sold and it usually wasn’t the person who buys them.

So what?

By knowing that your service providers are capable of shifting their ethics when they stand to gain from a particular outcome that they can influence, you will maintain a level of objectivity that will empower you to make the decisions that are right for you. Keeping this in mind is always the correct thing to do, particularly when faced with the fact that they may not even be aware of their subjective bias.

Their lack of knowledge is actually what obligates you to maintain your objectivity as it serves your best interests and helps them to maintain their ethical identity.

Why is it so tough to call someone on their bias?

As Dan states in the video “once you meet someone face to face it is incredibly unpleasant to mistrust them.” It can seem like (and be received as) a slap in the face to them and it serves as a reminder that we can’t actually trust ourselves when it comes to vetting bull-crap. The second point is true for everyone so the first point is irrelevant – so what if they or you feel mistrusted, the science supports the fact that people CANNOT be trusted when there is a conflict of interest. When someone stands to gain something, there is a very good chance that they will lie without realizing that they are lying.

Your call to action

Stand-up for your best interests. Ask them for the proof when they make a claim. If something is described as better, find out if this is based on evidence or is just an opinion. Educate yourself. Perform your due-diligence before you buy. Learn to accept that bad feeling you get when you say “no” to someone by realizing that you can buy later. Notice the way you feel when being engaged by others and become aware that being manipulated feels like something; if that feeling is triggered, understand what is happening and move on.

Training Is Action, All Types Of Action

Often forgotten or repressed is the fact that body composition changes are the result of 1000’s of small actions over a sustained period of time. Oftentimes, people simply regard their time in the gym or exercising as their training and neglect the rest of the important steps.

Food consumption is training – eating 5-8 good quality meals per day can be a challenge, more of a challenge than an intense 45 minute workout. But eating frequently is critical in creating new eating behaviors, regulating blood sugar and optimizing metabolic functioning.

Food preparation is training – making 5-8 good quality meals per day can be a challenge. But since food supplies the building blocks needed to remake our bodies, preparing meals of a high quality is essentially MORE important than the workouts we do to break down the tissues that serve as the catalyst for adaptation.

Getting sufficient rest and recovery is training – being asleep before 11 pm has been shown to be extremely important in regulating anabolic hormones and the hours of rest between 11pm and 3am are some of the most critical times for recovery as they represent the best opportunity for falling into the deepest stages of sleep. The body does not recover when it is moving, so lying down and being still (as we are when we are asleep) is important for making the most out of the time spent training.

Reducing stress is training. Cortisol is released in response to stress. It is a catabolic hormone breaking down protein to create sugar to fuel fight or flight responses. ANY stress can cause the release of cortisol so it is important to reduce the stress response and limit the amount of stress that we experience.

Looking after your tissues is training. Rigorous exercise causes muscles to tighten-up, which can place increased stress / pulling on joints that can lead to pain. Maintaining flexibility requires dedicated time to stretch / foam roll.

The notion that 4 hours of physical exercise is sufficient to create a body transformation is not accurate. It is a great start, and they create a critical foundation from which to base all other self improvement actions, but they represent about 50% of the effort that is required.

“Playing Full Out” – 10 Signs That You Are

A few weeks ago I attended a Toronto Power Group Meeting. It was both the first session of the season and my first session. The host got the things started by setting some ground rules for success and to help us get the most out of the time there; and our time on the planet.

One of the things he recommended is “play full out” which is effectively giving 100% of our passion, intensity and energy to the task at hand. It’s what athletes and most highly successful people do. It doesn’t ensure success, but it goes a long way at guaranteeing you don’t regret or ask the question “what if?” later in life.

What does playing full out looking?

Barbara Stanny has posted 10 Signs You’re Playing Full Out and it captures a lot of the behaviors, and how it looks and feels.

  1. I know what I want and am committed to getting it. (And if I don’t know, I devote time and energy to figuring it out).
  2. I am so focused on my vision that I don’t get distracted or scattered  by irrelevant, draining, or conflicting tasks.
  3. I am willing to experience whatever it takes—defeat, embarrassment, even humiliation—to achieve what I want.
  4. I am constantly doing things I’ve never done before and/or don’t want to do.
  5. I make at least one unreasonable (i.e. scary) request a week.
  6. I don’t say ‘yes’ when I really want to say ‘no,’ even if it means rocking the boat or upsetting another.
  7. I regularly seek out support, and refuse to spend time with or discuss my dream with naysayers (even if they’re related)
  8. Every time I’m afraid to do something, I force myself to do it anyway. (And I  catch myself when I try to justify not doing it.)
  9. I am rigorous about the thoughts that I think and the words that I use, making sure they’re positive, supportive, and appreciative (of myself and others).
  10. I take time to relax and pamper myself so I don’t burn out.

It’s an interesting list and definitely worth considering. In most cases, the only thing that is stopping us is our own mind and the lack of possibility it allows us to see.

Goal setting – Go To An Expert

Setting a goal is easy. Come up with something you want, set a date for when you will have it and then create a plan of the things you will need to do in order to achieve it. Do this and you will have done more than most people will do when it comes to changing their future.

But it doesn’t mean that you’ll achieve your goal, and it doesn’t mean that you will do anything different.There are a number of reasons why most people do not achieve their goals and a very good reason why some people ALWAYS achieve them. If you are looking to achieve something you have never achieved before, there is a chance that you are going to need a lot of help in making it a reality. This is common and it is the very reason why most people will never transform their life.

First off, those who always achieve their goals are good at it because they have practiced it. Many of them were taught how to do it – either through coaching or because of circumstance. Having a parent or role model show you how to behave in order to attain something new can be critical in learning how to make goals a reality.

Having to achieve something is another great way to learn how to achieve it; this tends to be a lot less effective and a lot more stressful but it can be a sure fire way to create the winning mind set needed to achieve almost anything. E.g. a lot of people mature very quickly once they have children or move out of their parents house.

Moving forward, those who constantly achieve goals have a clearer understanding of the world so they create goals that are inline with how their world operates. There is a congruency to what they are hoping to achieve so everything naturally lines-up. They identify themselves as someone who can and deserves to achieve the goal, they believe that they can act in the goal achieving way so therefore just need to put in the hard work.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about and seem to be having a tough time achieving your goals, it is likely time to enroll someone more qualified to help get things lined up.

The 6 layers of effective goal setting:

  1. At the lowest level is your environment. This deals with the where and the when of your goal. It’s a time frame component and it primes the brain for something in the future. E.g. in Mississauga on July 1, 2013
  2. Next is behavior. What is going to be the thing that is happening. E.g. I am weighing 25 pounds less.
  3. Strategy is next and deals with how this goal is going to be achieved. E.g. By having eaten good quality whole food and exercising 5 hours per week.
  4. Belief is above it and addresses the why of the goal. E.g. I have done this because I am a successful person.
  5. Identity is next, and concerns itself with who the goal setter is. E.g. Someone who is unstoppable.
  6. Finally, is community or spirituality – who else will be impacted by your having achieved your goal? It’s a reason bigger than ones self. E.g. Others are inspired by me for having achieved this goal, my children respect their bodies more and they are seeing appropriate exercise and eating behaviors coming from their father.

When setting goals, you need to have 6 things all line-up in order to ensure that the goal can happen with the only need being lots of hard work.

This contains a lot more information than the traditional “needs, goal and time frame” model but the level of granularity does illustrate a number of key underlying variables that will mean either success or stagnation. If someone doesn’t isn’t progressing towards the behavior (of weighing 25lbs less) it is likely because they don’t have the strategies. If they develop the strategies, they should begin to progress. If they have the strategies, but are not progressing, it could be because they don’t have the belief.

Effective goal setting has all of these items in alignment and the person putting the hard work into the endeavor. Doing this will make the impossible possible and spark new progress into unfamiliar avenues.

NLP – Feel The Processes Working

On our first date, Heather listened intently and then challenged me when I said that I manipulate clients at my job – as a performance coach, it’s my job to see, hear and do the things that they may not want to see, hear or do in order to become something that say that they want to become.

Her challenge was to see how I respond to the same thing that I put my clients through. It was unexpected and unnerving because first dates tend to be light-hearted, surface skimming affairs that leave the two people with an answer to the questions “will I spend time with this person again?” As first dates go, this one wasn’t going like any that I had been on before.

Heathers questions were direct, hard hitting and required an intense type of intersection that I usually save for my clients who need to have their world view challenged in order to jump start a transformation. “Why do you think your future relationships will be any different from your past relationships?” was one question that came pretty close to flooring me. During the conversation that was my answer, I became aware of that sick feeling I get when someone is manipulating me; it’s a feeling of excitement or anxiety, and is indicative of a level of arousal on some level. I wasn’t 100% aware of it at the time, but Heather would lean in, make a comment that required some thinking and then lean back. While she did this, I would lean back to receive the comment and then lean in to answer.

This went on for an intense few minutes before I got up and went to the wash room. I splashed water on my face, grounded my self and returned to the table.

“So did you think of something to say?”

“I don’t know if my future will be better than the past, I don’t have a plan other than not doing the same things I did in the past, so different may end up being better.”

There was a change in the conversation immediately after this comment. Heather’s body language loosened and she seemed to be more at ease. The topic of NLP came up and she mentioned that she had taken a course.

“Oh my god, you were fu(king with me” was my impulsive replay. And her smirk said “yeah.” “You said that you controlled people so I needed to see how you could handle it yourself.”

“How did I do?”

“Fine, you squirmed a lot, but you didn’t fold. You stayed engaged and basically went with it.”

“Thanks,” is said, kind of smiling and doing everything I could to not give off that what she had done and just said actually lifted me up. Not surprisingly, I ended-up signing up for the same course she took.

Now, as first dates go, I don’t plan on having another. There was something almost aggressive about the conversation. Not disrespectful, but confrontational; not between her and me but between me and me. I get why she is a successful leader at work and helps people achieve more of their potential, often more than what they believe they can achieve.

But something started happening to my awareness of myself that seems to have opened the flood gate of possibilities. There is no mistaking it, Heather engaged me using some of the NLP techniques she learned. There wasn’t any manipulation involved, but her choice of language altered the way I process things. It had a profound impact on the content of the scripts I use to manage my involvement in the world and these change reality, dramatically.

The NLPWorks course is outstanding, bringing to conscious light many of the things that I was doing but without any knowledge. It is reassuring to have a road map that outlines my behavior so I can repeat it in a predictable way. The processes are powerful and through practicing them with the other participants they have brought needed resources to certain challenging situations.

One thing that has changed in how I describe what I do. Gone from my description is the term “manipulation,” replaced with the phase “I show, tell and get people to feel the truth in order for them to achieve their goals.”

I remain very curious to see how NLP will continue to impact my world, my functioning and my life.

Creating Mentors Vs. Averaging Down

It has been said that you are the average of your 5 closest friends – this is a big reason why big life transformations are often accompanied by a change in friends.

To a lessor degree, the same thing applies to work – the people you work with will tend to become more like you and you will tend to become more like them.

It also applies to the gym you go to, the church you belong to, the sports team you play for, the places you shop, the school you attend, etc… – the longer you spend with people, the more similar you become to those people.

So what?

At its simplest, if you are having a crappy life, you may want to consider the company you keep. But before you completely overhaul your friends and cut off people forever, take a few minutes to uncover your own identity (how your view yourself in terms of worth and the life experience you believe you are entitled to). If you identify yourself as a loser, a drug addict, someone who has a crappy job, etc… there’s a very good chance that you’ll know a few people that match one or more of these characteristics. If you connect with a group of people that match your identify, swapping them out for a new group of people will likely only introduce you to a new group of the same. Fix your identity issue, engage a professional if you have no idea how to do that.

Assuming your identify isn’t an issue, a small change in attitude in this area can take you a very long way, and save you the challenges of finding a new peers group. The thinking here is that if you view those around you in a particular way (even if they are NOT as you view them) you will slowly start to become as you view them. Consider this for another moment. You begin to become how you think your friends are. You begin to become the same type of worker, parent, student as you believe your coworkers, spouse, and student friends to be. Reality doesn’t interfere with your notion as you become your thoughts about them.

In this case, the easiest way to progress and develop is to improve your attitude about your friends / peers / coworkers and view them as potential mentors – realize that they have something unique and important to teach you and notice that your differences are simply just differences in upbringing and experience, not flaws in personality. Adjusting your view of them in this way will create a clearing in your mind that will shift them into a place of power and helpfulness, allowing you to grow.

Remember, your mind controls the average that your friends are so flipping the switch to view your peers as amazing, outstanding and stand-up people may be what is needed to trend the average up.

What Neuroscience Says About Over Eating

Doctor Daniel Amen does a lot of research with the brain. Along one of the paths, tracking brain injuries with football players, he uncovered some very interesting things about the human brain:

As weight goes up, brainpower goes down. The size and function of the brain diminishes as BMI goes up….the larger people were, the smaller their frontal lobes were, and that’s a disaster because the frontal lobes run your life! Not only are we finding that overeating and overweight cause changes in the brain, but we’re seeing that brain patterns can influence how we respond to food.

It goes both ways. If you have low frontal-lobe activity, as is common with attention deficit disorder (ADD), for example, you’re much more likely to be obese. The frontal lobes are critical to making decisions such as food choices…

Consider the ramifications of this two way street. We’re born magnificent, capable of developing to our full potential and living a long illness free life. Our prefrontal cortex doesn’t develop until we’re in late childhood / early teenage years and grows throughout puberty – if we make it through most of childhood, there is a very good chance that we can have it all.

But along the way we get fat. It could be that our folks are too busy to cook healthy dinners, they didn’t know what to buy and cook, you were a picky SOB, whatever, you ended-up fat. As a result, your prefrontal cortex does not develop optimally and your brain in general is smaller than it would have been had you remained lean and optimal.

Moving through life, with a smaller brain, you suffer the consequences of having reduced executive functioning. Your working memory isn’t as good, your will power is compromised and your ability to anticipate the consequences and deal with the future just doesn’t hit on all cylinders.

Staying fat is easier because you don’t have the tools needed to think your way out of it, or at least, control your behavior out of it. You may never see a healthy weight again.

I don’t mean to scare you because you do have options here, but if you are over weight or have a tendency to over eat, you may need to consider enrolling an expert in helping you gain the skills needed to reverse the path of destruction you are on. Let them be your proxy until your brain repairs itself and can anticipate and plan for a better future.

Why I Challenge My Friends And Clients

It turns out that the brain needs to be challenged in order to operate more effectively; not just the consciousness parts of the brain but the entire thing. If stimulated correctly, repeatedly and for a period of time, it will begin to adjust its functioning to improve the quality of operating and this will have a dramatic impact on all parts of the body.

For the last number of years I have been engaging my clients and friends in a particular fashion which helps to facilitate these changes. I have done this not because I knew it was helping them but because I personally find it to be a better way to engage the world. The goal is to feel better, think more effectively, and feel more connected to others. By boosting resilience in 4 areas, you will not only improve these things but you will actual live longer.

The four key areas are:

  1. Physical resilience – you need to move. It doesn’t need to be intense physical activity, but sitting or lying around without moving do nothing positive for the body or brain. Exercise teaches you brain that you behaviors matter. Moving will increase your ability to handle stress and recover from illness.
  2. Mental resilience – you need to think about problems and increase your ability to concentrate and focus your attention. Doing this will alter the physical make-up of your brain – increasing the complexity of the interconnection between the neurons – and it will allow you to solve problems more effectively which will boost productivity and potentially lower stress.
  3. Emotional resilience – you need to be able to find reasons to be happy or grateful. Happy people are sick less frequently, they have lower rates for illness and their stress response is shorter lived than their bitter or sad counter parts. Finding reasons to be happy is self reinforcing – it is rewarding from a chemical point of view – feel good neurotransmitters are released – and once it becomes a habit, you’ll find more and more reason to feel happy. This alone is well worth the effort taken to get good at it.
  4. Social resilience – you need to be able to see yourself as part of something bigger than just your own body. Those who feel connected to other people tend to be happier and experience stress less severely. A sense of gratitude is a perfect way to increase social resilience, physical touch is even better. Those who shake hands or hug others have an enhanced chemical response that increases feelings of openness and trust.

What does this all mean?

Well, on the simplest level, a better life is fairly easy to achieve but it may require some new behaviors and the creation of some new habits. If you are the type of person who doesn’t feel comfortable touching others or being open about gratitude, the social resilience aspect of having a better life may present a challenge to you, but in my experience, people don’t mind being thanked or hearing genuine expressions of positive emotion.

Realize that all of these are well within your grasp. You have been moving all of your life, so why not add in a little more if you notice you have been sluggish recently. Solving problems and challenging yourself mentally will cause the release of reward neurotransmitters which will feel good; the brain does this automatically if you just focus on a problem.

The tough one is the emotional resilience. We’re programmed to be fearful, so finding reason to NOT be scared doesn’t come naturally. But it’s a problem to be solved, and if you use this as one of the tasks to improve mental resilience your brain will be clearing off two items at once!

Going Every Direction From Now

Something funny is happening to my understanding of time. I noticed it starting to shift when I started taking my NLP course and the instructor asked where the past is. I pointed to my right, some people pointed behind them and others pointed to the left. I used to view it to be located to the left, but since I teach so much and spend a lot of time directly across from other people that I’ve reversed the location of my past.

I didn’t think it mattered much until I notice that I didn’t understand time.

Time is a word, it isn’t a thing. Most people have an understanding of time, an abstract odd kind of thing that they can’t put into words very well. We’re all good at using cliché to create a feeling of what it is, but these don’t move us closer to an actual understanding of what, if anything, it is.

I maintain that time is simply a way of looking at past, present and future. A shared understanding of an imaginary line in our heads which goes right and left, or forward and back from a point in the middle that we consider now. It helps us organize our memories in a way that allows us to see events as happening before or after other events. It seems like a straight line and there are nicely spaced increments understood to be minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc….

But this understanding isn’t very accurate for me anymore. It implies that there is a future and a past, and that the past is an unchanging thing existing somewhere to the right, left or behind us. It implies that there is one future laying in the opposite direction of the past. The only thing I like about this understanding is that there is a point on the line called now which seems to move magically along the line.

What no longer works for me about this model is that the past does change, it isn’t set in stone and the future is made up an billions of possibilities. The line is a cone shaped in the future and an imaginary cone shape to the past.

The abstract piece of my developing understanding is that while we cannot go back in time and alter what happened physically – in the case of the above time cone, what the light does – we can go back in time and alter what we think about what happened. Doing this will shift the location of now and create new possibilities for the future. And we are free to go back and alter whatever we like, whenever we like and make it whatever we want. All of this is possible because of the nature of time. Remember, time is a word and not a thing. Things don’t change, words can have many meanings.

So what?

Making the decision to see the history as changeable and not static opens up a world of new possibilities. For example, the crappy things that happened to you, they can be lessons instead of moments of victimization. The great things that happened can be moved back into the future and experienced over and over and over again. Your strongest moment can be cut and pasted into any times of weakness, and your weakest time in the past can have present or future resources carried into it. You can take the resources from someone else, even someone make believe, and add them to your past, present or future. All of this can happen if you accept that time isn’t a line but a ball of possibilities branching off in all directions.

“I want to feel safe, not be protected”

Part of what came out of the conversation about hard tactics to gain compliance was my antiquated belief that my girl friends want me to protect them. Heather has been fairly upfront about her requirements in this area. She wants to feel safe with me, she doesn’t want me to protect her.

These two things are not the same and I’d mention that they are more different than they are similar.

Protection is about controlling a situation or people. It is about preventing things from happening. While it has its place in certain instances – life or death moments, or moments of complete absentmindedness – it isn’t appropriate most of the time in a loving relationship that is based on trust and mutual respect.

Given that it is about control, protection is selfish and fear based. It is an attempt to immunize oneself from a future, a fatalistic prediction about a possible outcome that creates a sense of loss. There is important information contained within the projection, so a need or want to protect someone who is independent reveals a lot of useful information and while it should not be actioned upon, it should not be ignored.

Allowing or helping someone to feel safe is altruistic in nature as it is about the other person feeling safe. It is a fearless way to act in that it is freeing. Safety, in the context of relationships, doesn’t require that someone control a person or situation, it means that the other person has the liberty to act as they feel appropriate.

What does feeling safe in a relationship mean? It means having the freedom to be self-expressed, it means having the option to act as you feel is appropriate without the power struggle, it means acting with a win:win outcome being the goal, it means you get to create your own environment and act naturally within it. Ultimately, it means being able to exist in a relationship in a natural way, free from the others will and live a life rich with the experiences you each bring to it.