Our Generations Wake-up Call

It may be time for many in our generation to read the writing on the wall. The recent winds of change have blown away a lot of the haze for so many of us revealing one fact that creates two possibilities.

Fact:

Each one of us will die.

The possibilities:

Accepted that your life is for living and navigating the world as an opened-minded Adult, with an child-like curiosity and joy. Realize that your past has taught you many skills but not necessarily the need to shamelessly and compassionately apply them.

Or continue to wait for something before you begin to engage your world. Be it a degree, children, for children to be older, the perfect body, the cosmetic surgery, an apology or forgiveness, the ideal job, the right person to come along, any partner to come along,… it could be any number of things that simply kick living down the road a little longer.

If you are continuing to wait remember there is always going to be a reason for your life to stay exactly as it is. It isn’t the reason you are giving though, it is the person who is making the excuse.

Five Years Isn’t Just One Year Times Five

“People often overestimate what they can reasonably achieve in a year. But they vastly underestimate what they can achieve in 5 years.” – Steve Pavlina

Something odd happens when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Take a human being for example. I’ve been keen on saying we’re $7 worth of carbon and some other stuff, but each living person can achieve a lot more than a Brita water filter if they do anything at all.

Time is sort of like that. I’ve enjoyed writing for most of my life. It used to help me dream and since my brother is a good writer it gave me something to share with him – another way for us to be similar. I think he’s a better writer than I am, but he’s also an avid reader and he seems to understand words in a way that I don’t. He has a low emotional affect and his prefrontal cortex seems loaded with glucose such that logic seems to be his baseline state.

But Des is one of those mentors who just says do it, fake it till you make it and swing a lot, you’ll eventually get good enough to hit something.

So I started writing publicly more than 5 years ago and now, a half decade later, I’m still writing. This makes me a writer. I’m not as good as I would like to be so my 10000 hours are no where near up, but I’m still plugging away at it.

About a month after I started writing I met Rachel and she directed me towards Larry at SST to get a job. I was hired as a manager but watching how his team of coaches interacted and facilitated change within athletes really excited me. I told Rachel that I thought the coaches were amazing and she said that I could be one of them if I worked at it and she also reminded me that I was in one of the best learning environments in Canada to gain the skills needed. So I asked a lot of questions and Larry didn’t answer many of them, he pushed them back to me to give him the answers and when I did, he’d coach me on the finer points so I was able to apply the principles of science and physiology to get predictable outcomes. One day I noticed that I was a personal trainer and strength coach.

For most of my life I have wanted to look a particular way physically – my upper chest was always kind of small and my shoulders never really looked wide enough for me. My legs were functional but not really well muscled. The skills gained at SST allowed me to create programs to address these perceived short comings. The upper chest and shoulders grow when your legs grow. And the legs will only grow when you train the hell out of them. Squatting, dead-lifting and posterior chain work caused the hormonal release that promotes growth and eating massive amounts of good quality food provides the building blocks needed to make a battle ready body. After years of training like this, I’m still very lean, with a layer of muscle all over that looks more appealing.

In an around the time I met Rachel I decided to become a Group cycling instructor. We took the training together because we were the only two people from our club who were going to do it. She was already a great instructor – strong stage presence, very friendly and happy and intensely strong. She intimated the hell out of me and after the first day of training I considered quitting. When I told her this on the drive in on Sunday she just laughed and said “you have no idea how inspiring it is to see someone work as hard as you do to try and learn something. You HAVE to do this Pat, not just for you, but for the members who don’t think they can do it either.” I just accepted what she said and when I thought about all the puking on the drive home after the first day and all through that evening I handed off responsibility to her and went for it. Five years later, I know I don’t teach like they do in the master video’s but I teach a class that is different but equally effective. I’ve mentored a few instructors and when I see them develop I tell them “I wish I could teach like you.” They laugh at me and say “you don’t need to Pat, you teach like YOU.”

Now all of this is to say that 5 years ago I made some choices to try some new things and if I had stopped any of them after 1 year, I wouldn’t have been all that good at them. But I kept doing them for another 4 years and the improvements were anything BUT linear. You grind it out for months feeling like nothing is happening and suddenly you find yourself lost in the moment wondering how you end up being good at it. It seems easy looking back, but looking forward it seemed impossible.

Half a decade seems like a long time, one year doesn’t. But we get it wrong when we think about how good we’ll be in 1 year and we get it wrong when we think about how good we’ll be after five years of sustained effort. If you start it today, by March 2013 you won’t feel embarrassed by your level of proficiency and by March 2017, if you stick with it, you’ll wonder if you were ever NOT able to do it.

DJ Tiësto – Just Be

Tiësto – Just Be – via Youtube

you could travel the world
but you can’t run away from the person
you are in your heart

you could be who you want to be
make us believe in you
keep all your light in the dark

If you’re searching for truth, you must look in the mirror
and make sense of what you can see
just be
just be

they say learning to love yourself is the first step
that you take when you want to be real
flying on planes to exotic locations
wont teach you how you really feel
face up to the fact that you are who you are
and nothing can change that belief
just be
just be

cause now i know
it’s not so far to where i go,
that I respond, it’s inside me
i need to just be
just be
just be
just be
just be

I was lost and I’m still lost
But I feel so much better

i need to just be…
just be…

This is the racing track on the most recent RPM release (number 54 and 21st since I started teaching). I first heard the song right before I left for my east coast trip with Deb a number of years back and it was loaded onto my mp3 player. Then the plane was my car and the exotic locations were PEI, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In the time between then and now, the plane became whatever compulsion I could indulge and the location was the off baseline state of mind that it create. Now I have settled on simply accepting what my parents created as being worthy of all the love I have to give.

It’s a beautiful song with an important message that was lost in the fog for more than half a decade.

“You Have Never Even….”

There are somethings that I don’t like listening to but really love not reacting to. Like people screaming and blaming me for stuff they did to themselves.

The other day I was chatting with an old friend about the future. It was an interesting conversation because I thought they know me fairly well. The conversation drifted towards children and the prospects of me ending up with someone who has children already – in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t so far from a possibility given that I’m fairly old and that a lot of the women who are close to my age already have children.

They made a really odd comment that initially stung until I realized it didn’t actually mean anything to me. “You have never even baby sat or changed a diaper.” Not entirely true, I changed a diaper when I was 6 and I baby sat a few times as a teenage to make some money for chocolate bars and new grips for my BMX bike. I didn’t say this, there seemed to be some satisfaction in the words so I wasn’t going to rod them of it. The point seemed to have more to do with the big difference between us and I didn’t feel like mentioning that it was only because they’ve done something more times that I had. There didn’t seem to be anything to gain from reminding them that I can ride a bike better simply because I have done it more. Intelligent people know skills are acquired through practice. Intelligent people who *forget* this point are saying something else entirely.

I have never been married and I don’t have children so I didn’t get to practice changing diapers or baby sitting. With every girl friend I have ever had, we talked about having kids one day and I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to have any. Marrying the right person was more important to me than procreating. Kids grow old and move out and before they do, they are children for a long time. A home without my real partner didn’t really stack-up in my view.

Every task that I know how to do, I learned how to do it. That means driving, cutting bread, reading, playing, washing my clothes, creative writing, playing guitar, showering, etc…. Every task that I presently do not know how to do I can learn how to do. I wanted to become a cycling instructor, no one told me that I had never done it, they told me that I could learn. I wasn’t a personal trainer and no one told me that I had never done it, they encouraged me to study and make it my craft and I was able to do it. I was, in my time, a very effective and successful trainer and I got there fairly quickly. This occurred because I wanted to be very good at it and I put the time in to figure-out the best way to make it happen.

In fact, their comment was very helpful because it sounded like something I would say to myself as a justification for not putting in the hard work to learn how to do something.

I just heard their words, considered them, realized that it was the same dismissive tone that I have attacked myself with for a very long time – you’ve never done blank before so why would you think you could do it? The comment made me very happy actually. They were right, I haven’t done the same things they have done. There are many paths through life and ours were just two. But to be maligned for not doing something that wasn’t right for me, my girl friend or any potential offspring is not anything that I need to be a part of. It’s hardly a bad thing to not marry someone I wasn’t completely compatible with. In fact, most of my old girl friends are married, some have started families and the others are partnered-up with people they really care about.

Imagine if, as a group fitness instructor I asked the question at the start of class “is this anyone’s first class?” and when someone replies yes, I say “well you shouldn’t even try because you have never done it before”. Three things happen, 1) I get fired or written-up, 2) I would need at accept that my comment was attempting to say something else to them or imply something about me and 3) people will very quickly see me as a toxic influence who has no interest in creating order in others.

I considered what I heard and just assume it was a throw away comment and made the decision to not receive it as fact. Gifts and insults are like that, if you don’t receive them, they still below to the other person.

When I Feel The Lowest

Apart from a major freakout at 4:45 am a few weeks ago when my brain finally let go of the possibility that my dad was just on vacation somewhere and accepted that he had died, I feel the absolute worst after I workout.

This makes sense because I train really hard and do not to take long rest periods. I’m burning through a bunch of sugar which paradoxically is needed to keep the brain going. Once the blood sugar level drops, the emotional system takes over and my ability to manage my thoughts begins to degrade. I leave the gym crying 100% of the time now. Not sure if people ever get used to seeing a grown man cry, but since I’m not pretending to be a grown-up, they are free to not get used to it. But the emotion needs to be burned out and given my emotional affect, it could be a very long time before that happens.

I really miss my dad like crazy. This is now the longest that I have gone without talking to him and with each day it doesn’t really get any easier, just different. Dead is really gone, not gone like yesterday, it’s gone like my youth.

Food, exercise and sleep are all better than they have been in a very long time so I can only imagine the bag of toys I’d be if I was still just scraping by feeding on the bottom. This is probably a brighter hell than it would have been a few months ago.

Great pdf About Coping With Fears After A Traumatic Event

GoodLife Fitness is a big organization that has a vested interest in keeping their staff healthy and happy. As one of the Canada’s biggest employers they have a strong HR team that work tirelessly to help each of us excel at whatever role we play within the organization. To this end, I’ve reached out to them in an effort to get something to help me move through this transitional phase of my life as quickly and smoothly as possible.

I found a document on their intranet sites that is also available online publicly – Coping With Fears Following A Traumatic Event {NOTE – the original link is no longer active}. Below is an interesting section that helped me feel a little more normal today.

Coping with fear and anxiety after a trauma
It’s normal to feel fearful for weeks, months, or even years after a trauma. If you experienced a personal tragedy or hardship, such as the death of a loved one, difficult emotions can feel even more intense. Here are some ways to cope:

·  Remember that most people are not quite themselves after a trauma. It’s normal to experience some or all of the following symptoms for some time following a trauma:
– sadness and crying
– inability to concentrate
– fear and anxiety
– sleep problems
– distressing dreams
– a general sense of uneasiness
– outbursts of anger
– depression
– irritability

·  Realize that your mood and feelings may be intense and constantly changing. You may be more irritable than usual or your mood may change dramatically from one day to the next.

I’m not going crazy. Watching someone you love die is likely one of the harder things a human being will have to go through. Being both a human and not a rock, life happens as a blur. Trauma is an acute thing, as is my response to it. There are things that can be done to mitigate it from become a chronic issue, but while it is happening, it is real and very piercing.

I have fixed my diet, started exercising again, eliminated a lot of the habits that weren’t doing me any good and worked on establishing my boundaries as an individual and as a member of my family. It is really hard to see my mom cry, it’s really hard to be sad around her as she has lost her husband and best friend of more than 40 years. Theirs was a love that lasted exactly forever for my dad and will burn on for the rest of my mom’s life. There are thoughts going through my head when she is crying and talking about the loss that I almost feel horrible for having, but I have to keep reminding myself that her grief is hers to work-through. It’s a conscious decision that requires a lot of mental energy to not internalize and try to fix. I’m not a bad son for not trying to fix it.

There is actually nothing I can do to fix it.

Admittedly, I’m a little scared for the future, not for the recovery from my dad’s passing, but for the future grief that I will experience. But with the help of my performance coaches, therapist, doctor, family and friends, and myself, I’ll learn how to move through these traumas more effectively and hopefully remain intact when the next one hits.

GoodLife Fitness is a good organization when you get right down to it. Their policies are for service and profit, but when one of their team hits the wall or the bottom, their HR policies supersede those about money and they are there to help them regain their footing. It isn’t about engendering loyalty, it’s about restoring quality and passion.

The Most Astounding Fact – Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson tells us what he thinks the most astounding fact is.

It is without a doubt one of the most important facts that sentient beings need to keep in mind when they float through life.

Matter has not been created in billions of years yet life begins and ends, over and over and over again, with these same molecules.

When I speak of reincarnation, THIS is what I speak about. Our spirit returns in the form of the material that once made us in our current and past forms. Sometimes we get lucky and a lot of the same material is used and we are old souls with wisdom beyond our present years. Other times we are just a small piece of them and need to learn the lessons again.

And one day, one day very soon, our pieces will all return to the mass of molecules that has the potential to become, ANYTHING. Until then, well, we get to choose what we become.

“I Can’t Make Your Feel Anything”

I was chatting with Leigh, an old girlfriend from university a few weeks ago at my fathers service, and the topic moved towards what did we learn from each other that carried with us? I try to mine smart people for gems of information and wasn’t expecting her to say anything other than “I was young once and didn’t mind wasting time having fun” but she floored me with something that I had forgotten I had said.

I had done something that she found really frustrating – I have no idea what it was and it probably doesn’t matter much. She said “you are making me feel so angry” to which I replied “I can’t make you feel anything.”

What struck me as profound about her mentioning this is that Leigh has three degrees, works as a educational psychologist and she said that she has given this piece of information out to a number of people though out the years. She never mentioned that it was to any of her clients so I’ll assume that it was just her friends and people in a non-therapeutic setting. I, however, have and will say this to my coaching clients and basically anyone who needs to see themselves as the source of their own emotional state of mind vs. holding other people responsible for their pain.

As I turn the corner and close off my Childhood I see and feel the truth of this statement made 17 years ago. My grudges are my creation. If I’m annoyed that someone didn’t live-up to an expectation that I created and pushed onto them, that’s my choice. I could have created smaller expectations or none at all. Even if I mentioned the expectation to them and they agreed to abide by it, my disappointment in their decision to look after themselves first is my choice. They can’t make me feel anything.

It is my love, my hate, my compassion, my sense of abandonment, my everything. Adults understand and live by this. They establish boundaries and let others in WISE to the fact that with them inside, the potential to hurt grows. But we own our emotions and our emotional responses to our subjective interpretation of reality. I have too much love to go to waste, BUT I realize, understand and accept that I risk emotional pain by reaching out and partnering with another human being. My responsibility is to look after myself and my interests; to direct this love to me first and then to others. Until I have children, I am responsible for just me. My family, girlfriends, friends, co-workers and peers need to look after themselves and their children / interests.

The only power others have over us is the power we give them. And even then, we choose our thoughts which in turn shape our state of mind and emotional reactions. It’s fine to give love away, but if you cannot handle not getting it back, you aren’t giving out love. You are sharing something dark and sinister.

It was a timely refresher from an old and dear friend. Thanks Leigh!

Reasons To Not Be Afraid

I’ve got a lot, but I am. I have been for years.

Sure, I can continue to wrack my brain, analyzing the hell out of my memories and ripping apart my actions looking for meaning, but that hasn’t gotten me any closer to the truth, happiness or to a level of satisfaction with who I am, my place in the universe and even a reason to keep going. It can’t, I’ve been lying to myself for a long time. I didn’t really realize it. When I was small I told myself a lie, a story, and I went with it. Then life became it, and finally I did too.

That isn’t good enough for me anymore. There is more to this world than these distractions I’ve been seeking and compulsively indulging.

My therapist suggested that I make 2 lists, one of the why’s and one of the what if I stop. I thought it would be tough, and it was kind of, I crumbled and cried and the self-loathing seemed to grow exponentially. But I had a lot to write and the ease at which it flowed out of me help me see that I have been ready for a sometime, but just afraid to step off the cliff and drop to my death. I liked the old me, but he was selfish, scared and offered only conditional everything. Those who knew me saw that things weren’t right, those who knew me really well would leave. My family and close friends were the only constants, and of the friends, only those who engaged me like an Adult, without judgement remain. And that was key unlocking the gate and convincing me to take the leap. I AM an Adult and it is okay to forgive myself for my past actions. Further self-judgment here is pointless.

The why’s of my compulsive behavior:

  • Predictable outcome – good or bad, I knew what would happen and there is some sense of security in that
  • It created a false me / them dynamic that helped me feel like I was different
  • It closed me off from other people, which helped me feel like I didn’t belong
  • It is wildly isolating, alienating and paradoxically not the person I presented myself to be
  • Being isolated allowed me to indulge my thoughts without outside perspective to balance them
  • It helped me feel different and deviant so not as good as anyone else
  • Doing it helped me feel a sense of shame that I could wear and feel inferior to others
  • It altered my emotional state temporarily so there was some escape for the emptiness / insecurity that I felt
  • It was childish and was a calling for some sort of love that I didn’t think I was getting
  • It was proof that I wasn’t okay and therefore not worthy of the things that others may enjoy
  • It helped me get a very nice body that I thought would compensate for my lack of confidence
  • It was easier to keep doing what I was doing vs. put the effort in to change

The what if I stop my compulsive behavior:

  • I will save money
  • My teeth, skin, and body will look better
  • I will feel my baseline, whatever that is, and be able to get the help I need to adjust that
  • I will improve my spiritual health as I become reconnected with the universe and the people on the planet
  • I will save a lot of time
  • I will feel my emotions clearly and in a timely fashion allowing me to properly engage and parse them for the information they are revealing
  • I will be free of the anxiety and guild associated with indulging compulsive thoughts
  • I will be able to recover from my fathers death more effectively
  • I will be acting with self-love and treating my body, mind and spirit with compassion
  • I will be acting more like my mentors
  • I will not be harming myself
  • I will have removed the monkey from my back and will have stopped doing something I am ashamed of
  • I will have gain the knowledge of just what these compulsive behaviors have been doing to me
  • I will be acting responsibly, I will be acting like an Adult
  • I will no longer be acting in a hypocritical way and this will restore my integrity
  • I will be thinking more clearly, my body will be functioning more clearly and I will be reducing a number of very serious health risks
  • I will be in a position for find a partner who complements my life but does not give it purpose
  • I will have a better idea of my actual worth and be able to take more effective actions to help me achieve my goals
  • My public self will match my private self and any dissonance between the two will be eliminated
  • I will not need to be living and managing two separate and incomparable lives

I looked at the lists when I was feeling absolutely crap over the last few weeks, picked an item and mediated on it. It didn’t take long for my chest to puff-up and for the fighter in me to come up to scratch. My actions are my choice so stopping is as easy as just not doing it anymore.

However, there is something going on inside my brain that this exercise was supposed to bring to light and my therapist was happy that it came out. I’m not necessarily afraid, but I am anxious.

I Love You Lungs

I love my lungs, not just because they bring in oxygen and send out CO2, but because they are working hard to keep me alive and to repair themselves from the abuse I was subjecting them to.

It was never personal, I wasn’t setting out to hurt them, I just was.

They are serving me well and over the last few weeks I’ve been clearing out a lot of stuff that I don’t recall breathing in. There’s no way I would sit down and inhale this black stuff that I’ve been coughing out if it presented itself to me as the black stuff in the first place. But it presented itself as a feeling of decreased tension, anxiety, stress, and the cessation of withdrawal symptoms; which are easy to consider positives. Now, a few weeks out, it’s very clear that there was NOTHING positive about them. Withdrawal from poison is a good thing because it means you are healing.

It is kind of shocking though. Some report that you can be clearing the nastiness for months, others claim that nothing ever came-out. I’m somewhere in the middle. Most of my coughing has stopped, but when the shower is really hot or I’m cooking a bunch of food and the humidity in the kitchen is high, I get my cough on and lumps or strains of black come out. I look at them and imagine what my lungs will look like in a few months and years.

For someone who presented themselves as giving a crap about how they looked, I sure didn’t pay much attention to keeping the lungs a nice beautiful pink.