Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

“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.

Keystone Habits – Becoming A Dieter Through Exercise

Over the years an unusual pattern / occurrence has come to light with most of my body transformation clients – if they exercise more than 3 times per week their diets improve, they stop smoking and they reduce their consumption of alcohol.

The inverse is not true though, those who fix their diets, quit smoking or reduce drinking do not spontaneously start exercising.

This is significant because when it comes to improving the quality of life, correcting nutritional habits is a bigger player than exercise. If you want to reduce body fat, which is associated with reduced risks of most illnesses, diet is a lot more effective at achieving this than exercise. Many forms of cancer are associated with poor dietary choices and the debilitating effects of diabetes can be severely reduced by cessation of sugar in all forms.

However, bang for your buck, working out 4 times a week will contribute more to improving your health and health related behaviors than just trying to fix you diet IN SPITE of the fact that fixing your diet is actually what will help you the most.

Exercise is special because it is a keystone habit – a keystone is the center stone in an arch, the final stone to be placed and the one that holds the entire arch together. Exercise serves this function when it comes to living a healthy and the highest quality life possible. It teaches the body / brain that actions matter and this creates the momentum needed to start caring about the consequences of other actions. Those who exercise more, eat better, drink more water, sleep better, smoke and drink less, have better sex, make better decisions and save more money.

Quitting smoking, improving ones diet, or reducing alcohol consumption, while all critical in improving the quality of life, do not play a keystone function with behavior. As such, they rely on will power to maintain and tend not be to self-sustainable over the first few weeks or months. Relapse tends of occur when routines are disrupted or when one is challenged outside of their normal day-to-day levels. Further more, cessation of anything that replies on willpower alone to achieve tends to be associated with higher levels of stress which themselves increase the risk of failure.

Improving your life without starting an exercise routine is possible, but it is much more challenging and relies on the creation of new habits that are rewarding in the long run but represent short term sacrifices. This is unlike exercise because exercise is rewarding almost immediately, and in the long term benefits are undeniable.

To this end, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone who is over the age of 35 to try and address their weight concerns through diet alone. In fact, the best thing they can do to improve their diet is to exercise more. Frankly, the best thing they can do to improve any aspect of their life is to exercise more.

It doesn’t take much. 4 hours of moderately intense exercise each week will quickly begin to reverse some of the signs of aging on the body and begin to motivate your brain to correct other habits that are not working for you.

Get out there and start moving more! Join a gym, start play a sport you love, take-up cycling. It doesn’t matter what you do so long as you get moving. Do it for a few weeks and be pleased to notice the positive changes in other areas of your life.

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.

Some Information About Landmark Education

For the most part, I am content with my experiences with Landmark Education. The information they offer is interesting and has its place, some of the coaches and unpaid staff are friendly and professional, and many of the participants are interesting, open and arrive with compelling stories. Up until two weeks ago I would have passively recommend the Landmark forum to most people. The only group I wouldn’t have recommended it to are those individuals who have (or are) borderline personality disorders or those who have some psychological issue because the unpaid staff isn’t qualified to handle the acute breakdowns that the intensive stress that participating in the forum places on a person.

I have changed my mind on that. I would only suggest Landmark Eduction to the same individuals but only after they read-up on the organization and watched France 3 documentary: “Voyage to the Land of the New Gurus” along with some of the reports / descriptions available on the site.

The video is captivating! The techniques of the French leader are a little more aggressive than those that I witnessed, but the essence of the experience remains identical; mind you, I mentioned that I had a blood sugar issue and needed to eat frequently so I was allowed to get-up and leave whenever I wanted and I didn’t spend a lot of time sharing, listening instead and offering my opinion of the story that was being told.

My experience with the organization has soured considerably since my forum weekend. I previously described the unpaid workers as “distant, guarded and lacked something that those who suggested I would gain from attending possess in abundance – authentic fearlessness” and this opinion hasn’t changed much. Almost everyone I have talked to sounds like they are using a script – I did mention this to one of them and was told that I was being obnoxious; a fact that I do not dismiss.

They attempt to sell constantly and have a very misleading way of articulating what they mean by “enrollment conversations”. Most of the participants, when told to go out and have enrollment conversations have them about enrolling other people in the Landmark forum. My enrollment conversations where about enrolling others in the possibility that I created for myself – of being authentic, creating a strong brand and helping people through my coaching activities. Less than 5 people at the forum and follow-up seminar regarded what I was doing in anyway at all, the rest simply wanted to know who I had enrolled in the forum and why I was so resistant to sharing it with others.

I did have an offline conversation with the seminar leader about this and she informed me that another male had gotten the same impressing from her (that enrollment conversations are about getting people to come to the forum) and that she was sorry that we had been given the impression. I thanked her for clearing it up, but she was on message about who are you sharing the Landmark forum with for the next special event the next time she was in front of the group.

Other than the some of the processes that they teach, the key thing I take from Landmark is their effective use of psychology to control the participants. The environmental manipulation is only a part of it – they control breaks, treat the people like children (including the unpaid staff) and create a contrived order in the room. But how they engage the people to create fear, a sense of ostracization, and a group think mentality is alarming in its aggression and effectiveness.

Admittedly, I was impacted by some of the techniques. I felt them happening but didn’t take the time to interrupt the process to ask and answer the question “so what?” While I never found myself seeking the approval of the leader or the people in my group, I felt off because I wasn’t getting along with them as well as others appeared to be. My allergic reaction to the sales stuff was noticed and not appreciated. Members of my group told me to get off it and just enroll people, as they had attempted to do. I personally felt stupid even considering it given that the first 3 months of anything are leveling period. I haven’t been in a position to know what I would have been advocating for until recently; and now that I am, I’m not advocating for it. The only egg on my face comes from my actions and these I can live with as they are both life lessons for me and chunks of information that I am passing along.

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.