Children Early In Life or Children Later In Life

Having waited until at least 38 to start a family, I’ve had a lot of time to think about being a parent without having to actually BE a parent. Had I become a father when I younger, it would have been during a period in my life when I was most energetic and healthy. Since I wasn’t a horrible person I probably would have been an okay parent. But I was not ready because I didn’t have much of an idea how the world worked or that my perceptions about the world were not the same as how the world actually was. While not a dangerous or necessarily delusional, it was detached enough from reality to make passing along irresponsible.

Most of us begin to gain insight into who we are beginning in the late teens and it will continue to develop so long as one has enriching experiences that reveal the self. The more self revealing experiences one has, the greater their self awareness will be. As individuals each of us is on a different path – some will become completely self-aware before they are 20 while others will only become 5% self-aware in their entire lifetime. What matters in not age, but experience and the interpretation of these experiences. The brain adapts to life events in much the same way it adapts to movement – by becoming more efficient with increased repetition. If we have more diverse experiences that present a challenge to our world views, our understanding of the world will become more robust and a better reflection of reality. Reading, talking, therapy, introspection, meditation, exercise, diet, etc… are all things that can help us experience clarity.

I have had most of my enlightening experiences in the last 15 years, from the age of 22 on; right around the time many people are coupling-up and starting families. While I was reading books and chatting with my brother about thinking and how my the underlying narrative sets the tone of my thoughts, my married peers were sleeping 2 hours a night in 20 minute blocks because a child or two needed feed, or to go to the bathroom or do one of the 1000’s of things that children need to do. I was able to build myself while my same-aged peers where building children. “I” became the thing I put my energy into because I knew I needed to and because I was able to.

This is a blessing and a curse. I do believe that self aware people will have an easier time with certain parts of children raising – if I start a family now, I’m doing so KNOWING what I am about to do. I fully understand that my personal development will be slowed dramatically as I shift my focus from me to them. Having this knowledge BEFORE embarking on making a family will go a long way in insuring that I offer my children and wife the benefit of complete attention that should provide the entire family with an enriched environment from which each of us can grow. However, waiting until almost 40 to start a family means that I may not have as much energy as I would have had in my 20’s – I won’t be teaching any of my children how to ride a half pipe or do rail-slides down the stairs of the local library because I’ll be 50 something when they are able to ollie high enough slide that rail – I’ll be a spectator in their pursuit of adrenalin sports; not the participant I could have been had I started a family at 20.

The very thing that will make me a decent teacher to a child is the very thing that will make me less of an activities partner, my age. While I have a lot of experience with abstract things and have a good understanding of emotions, it has taken me almost 2 decades to formulate this understanding, and these were 20 of my most energetic years. While I wouldn’t have been a great role model in terms of appropriate behavior, I’m pretty confident that anyone who was able to keep up with me physically would now have a remarkable level of fitness and skill on a snow board or a bike.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. I’m not 20 so starting a family young is not going to happen. For one reason or another I have delayed having children until at least now so I’ll be looking at the positives when the time comes. I think my level of maturity will make for an easier experience because at some point I will tire of personal development and will welcome the opportunity to create something more than a different me.

How To Fall In Love Again

1) Give in and accept that your ex partners are always going to have some power / influence over you and your thinking. Take the necessary steps to stop that influence from derailing your forward progress. The best approach here is to just not talk to them for a while and then slowly phase them back into your life if you are able to keep their influence in-check. If you can’t do this, don’t worry, most people can’t. They are your ex for a reason, usually because their and / or your influence did not move you both towards mutual happiness.

2) Accept that your past demons are going to have an influence on your present thinking and actions. Question things that disrupt the flow of the relationship or your partners life. Talk to your partner about these things. They aren’t likely to go away so acknowledging and working through them is a lot more effective and intimate than trying to ignore them. There is nothing wrong with your past and your future can be different. Embrace it and love the life you have lived because it has taken you to your new love. Once you know the life you have lived, you’ll be better equipped to deal with your present life because you’ll accept that there are patterns in your behavior.

3) Take the time to watch the way your partner moves, talks to people and engages the world. Learn to notice the way they are. Look at their hands, their arms, their face. Try to notice all of their features and the way their mouth moves and eyes squint when they smile deeply. Feel the excitement build as your look at them. Learn to associate that excitement with the essence of them. Say to yourself and to them what it is that is beautiful about them. Create a linguistic understanding of who they are, not just a visual understanding. Take the time to touch them, particularly their face, neck and hands. Hold them close, feel their heat and energy against and within your body. Learn to identify the way they feel next to you. Massage them, rub their backs, find out where they are ticklish. Create a tactile understanding of who they are. Listen to their voice, the sound of their breathing, the sound of their foot steps when they are walking. Hear the way they move objects in the kitchen, the shower, the sound of the cutlery when they are eating a steak dinner. Create an auditory understanding of who they are. Smell them. Smell their clothes, their hair, their skin. Condition your nose to identify them by their smell or things that smell like they do. You are to immerse yourself in their essence and notice them, not just the things they do, but the way they are when no one is watching. If you love them, you will take the time to stop and notice all that there is to love about them.

4) Do things together that you would do on your own, but keep doing these things on your own some of the time. Sharing passions will helps to bring two people closer but you must maintain your independence with a part of them in order for you to hold onto your identify. Your partner is attracted to you because of who you are, this will go away when you combine everything and you stop being yourself.

5) Be recklessly open about who you are and what you want out of life. This stuff needs to be shared or else it won’t come true. A common goal empowers the relationship to become more purposeful and progressive. Even if they don’t directly participate, having them on your side will go a long way in helping you be more successful.

6) Challenge them and allow them to challenge you on your choices, motives and decisions. Therapy is a great tool, so a loving relationship will also contain a certain level of therapy-like behaviors. The objective here is allow your partner to empty of whatever is on their mind from the day, to have their feelings massaged out about the things that are troubling, and to basically be given a chance to talk things out and feel better. The hard part is not taking what you hear personally or injecting your opinion or solution into the conversation. You love them, but they need to suffer their own issues alone. Your role is to listen without hearing and ask questions that allow them to feel whatever it is they can’t get rid of.

7) Accept that you will never know how they truly feel about anything and, as such, you MUST remain open to the fact that their world is not the same as yours. Take the steps needed to NOT force your views upon them and to not allow them to force theirs on to you. Agree to disagree and accept compromise with both winning vs. you losing. If you can’t do this, and your new partner needs to maintain their identity, you MUST release them from whatever it is you’re a building because it isn’t a partnership.

So, these are 7 things that will help you create a climate that is conducive to the creation and expression of compassionate and intimate love. But when it comes right down to it, these are actions one would take when they are trying to figure out, as quickly as they can, IF they are with someone who is worth giving-up being alone for. Step 3 will also serve as the most powerful diagnostic tool you can get access to without going to school to learn how to identify motives based on the analysis of behavior – when you know how someone maintains eye contact during a conversation, you’ll know when they aren’t holding it the way they normally do and be able to ask quickly “what is going on?” These things change when a relationship shifts from being something good to something that is in trouble.

How I Have Excelled With My Clients

Looking back about 3 years on my training, I can now see a few ways that I have provided my clients with excellent service. This is the follow-up post to How I Have Not Served My Clients Adequately. Below is a list of 5 things I regard as having been the right things to do:

1) Established the importance of following and recording effective, sensible and sustainable eating behaviors. With body composition, food is key. Good quality whole food, eaten in small amounts every few hours will do more for your appearance than anything else you will do. That’s all there is to looking and feeling amazing. You stay on track by recording what you eat and reviewing this with someone else every few days who asks you to explain and justify your actions.

2) Trained the mid and low traps, along with the rotator cuff muscles to improve shoulder stability and posture. They may be stronger than they need to be, but their shoulders are drawn back and down, so now only my most athletic and strong clients make any reference to neck pain – which is muscle pain associated with lifting or performance. Also, all of my clients report no or a big reduction in shoulder pain; which is fantastic given that there are 3 clients who came to me with chronic shoulder pain being a key area to address.

3) Taught my clients to work almost as hard as they can. All of us have an upper limit when it comes to how hard we can work but very few of us know just how hard that is. Most clients underestimate their upper limit and pull back the intensity prematurely. After repeated efforts, we begin to drive harder and harder, because our fitness improves and because we realize that we can drive harder. Eventually the client finds this upper limit without external motivation and at this point they become trainee or an athlete, no longer a client.

4) Being present and engaging. We share the moment of working out. They know that while I may not be suffering with them, I’m well aware of what is happening with their bodies and we work together to get the most out of it. I firmly believe that you raise the performance of a client when you engage and keep them in the present moment. If that means I need to challenge them on what is going on in their mind when we are training, I go at them about that. I want and they need their bodies to do as many things correct as they can, so emptying the stress tank before training can go a long way in freeing-up mental energy to focus on form and breathing.

5) Providing good value for their money. People come back to train because they believe that their money is being spent wisely. You do this by delivering what you have agreed to deliver in a caring and fun way. You do this by being honest with people and getting them to question their motives and actions. And when we are not able to get the results the client is looking for, I tell them and we reevaluate the training relationship. Accepting when you don’t have the answers or when your solutions are not working helps to keep the trust alive and, while it may cost me clients, it helps to generate referrals.

How Do You Know It’s Time To Make A Big Change?

A few months ago, a friend asked me how I knew it was time to make a change in my relationship. At the time, they were experiencing a number of things in their relationship that didn’t work well for them.

There are a number of considerations but a big one for me was KNOWING that I needed more from the current situation than what I was getting, had been getting or was likely going to be able to negotiate. It took a long time to accept that I wasn’t getting as much out of life as I could have been and Rachel actually saw it a lot sooner than I did. About a year months ago I came home from work and she was crying. When I asked her why, she simply mentioned that she wished we had met after she had finished school.

The other factor was dreading going home or dreading hearing Rachel come home because I knew that I was going to feel something that wasn’t within my easy control – I would feel bad, under-accomplished, unlovable or lost. I would feel this REGARDLESS of the conversation I had with her or what was going on. Being in her presence was enough for me to start automatic behaviors that I didn’t consciously trigger. That is scary as far as I am concerned because I like being in control of my emotions.

It all comes down to the same thing though. When you open-up to the possibility that things need to change, they needed to change a while ago and that you actually NEED them to change in order to restore the minimum level of happiness to your life, your choice becomes a lot clearer than “hang in there”. Once you accept this possibility that change is needed, you’ve likely come too far to go back to thinking everything will be fine.

On The Mindless Menace of Violence

On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy delivered a speech that is referred to as On the Mindless Menace of Violence. Wikipedia has a version of the text which is fairly close to the audio posted on YouTube.

Much of the physical violence that he makes reference to is behind us but the message is still valid. We, as people, should work hard to not inflict suffering upon other people. People need to be afforded the dignity to be who they are without fear of intimidation, violence, ridicule or abuse.

Whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

I cry when I read that. I feel a tremendous amount of shame each time the words register with me. I get no sense of satisfaction knowing that I have done everything reasonable in my power to ease human suffering. I hurt because my actions are hurting others. I haven’t been the man that I can be.

Better is still something that I need to do.

Robert Kennedy was shot and died two months after he gave the speech. The world lost a leader with enough compassion to motivate good men to stay strong in the face of frightening change, to empower them to facilitate the social shift that will eventually become equality of all people. More than 40 years after his death, we are not there. We can get there, but only when each one of us make the decision to judge people not for their race or colour, not for their views or their beliefs, but for their hearts, for their potential for good, and for the actions they take to help ease suffering and promote well being as these are the essential qualities that make up everyone’s humanity.

“Thank You” Even If You Moved On

I think it is very important to remain grateful. It’s really hard not to be happy when you are feeling this way, so I do try to hold onto reasons for why I am grateful.

What’s startling is that there is a huge number of people who have positively impacted my life who are no longer in it. There are lots of teachers, professors, coworkers, strangers and old friends of varying degrees. The biggest old players tend to be ex girl friends given the abundance of time we spent together growing and cultivating a relationship. Yet, for all of their guidance, time and compassion, I hardly ever speak to any of them. Our paths do not cross often and when they do, other stuff bubbles-up that seems to be more important than looking them in the eye and saying “thank you” for the impact they played upon my life.

And it isn’t surprising that I get very little from seeing most of my ex girl friends. With my older ones, there isn’t much of anything other than a remarkably odd sense that to feel a little as I go is unnatural if not slightly cold. With the most recent ones, there is something, but it isn’t gratitude for the time they gave, but bitterness for the time I gave to them. Below that there is the knowledge that I am where I am in my life, the oldest, most self aware and content that I have been is in a large part due to their impact on my life; but this wisdom is only starting to break through the self-loathing that tends to accompany the eventual end of an expired relationship.

So, I forgive myself for investing in something that wasn’t what I thought it was, and I don’t hold Rachel to account for it. We were as aware of what was going on as we could have been and I moved onward because I believed that to be the best thing for her and for myself. I exited the relationship in a much better place than I entered it. I have started a career that Rachel helped me find and take the first steps in. I teach an all terrain cycling class, the training for which Rachel signed me up. I wear great looking Lululemon clothing because Rachel introduced me to it. I have a well developed sense of self and emotional intelligence that was created in response to how the relationship made me feel and think. I am healthier and look better physically now because, in a small part, the relationship never got comfortable that way. For these reasons, because it’s really nice out, because it’s a few months on and because I’d rather feel something happy than anything else I say “thank you Rachel!” I’m not sure where exactly I would be if you had not come into my life, but now that you are gone, I’m able to see that you helped to build me. It wasn’t what I was looking for from you, but, frankly, I’m better off for having received what you were capable of giving and NOT getting what I thought I wanted.

We have moved on and while you will never be on my sideline cheering for me, cleaning me up and sending me back onto the field, the person I have become tends to stay on the field playing life as hard as he can because you showed me that some dreams are worth giving everything up for, relationships, friendships, memories and the potential for something different. You showed me that you don’t dream hard to make dreams come true, you work hard to make them happen!

Men and women are built by other men and women through their actions, through their thoughts, and through the expression of their hearts. Even those who have moved on played their role and who I am today is dependent upon every person who has shaped me. Today, finally, my heart goes out all of them. Thank you for helping me find today!

The Saddest Truth – Never Seen It, Never Do It

Recently the world has lost a lot of its fog and I’ve been able to see some truths a lot more clearly than before. The saddest truth is that of why some people act like complete jerks, heartless, thoughtless and generally a complete pain in the butt to be around. It pains me because as a rule, they weren’t born this way, they were raises this way.

In terms of socialization, children are effectively blank slates when they are born. Certain personality traits are innate, but the degree of their expression is going to be determined by the experiences a child has as they grow up. For example, most human beings are capable of experiencing empathy. We learn through watching our parents and peers that the feeling we get inside when we hear of something troubling happening to someone is called empathy and that a small expression of the emotion is an appropriate response to bad news for someone else. Happiness, love, anger, sadness, guilt, shame, etc… are all the same way. We have the capacity to experience them and we learn how to manage their expression through observation and practice with the people we socialize with. These early experiences lay the groundwork for what becomes our emotional spectrum in terms of expression, thoughts and triggers. So our caregivers from birth to age 10 play an enormous role in determining how we handle ourselves as we interact in the world.

But imagine the possible consequences to a system that relies on a small number of people to enrich a young person with all of the experiences that are needed to effectively create an objective understanding of the world and ones innate emotional potential. For one thing, this approach is very narrow in scope and it engenders an almost carbon copy of what the caregivers believes. While not necessarily a bad thing, it doesn’t actually offer a lot of diversity and can lead to adjustment issues once the child experiences different points of view or a different world view; as each new experience must be assimilated or repelled to maintain a consistent understanding of the world. Also, by virtue of the small number of primary care givers, many experiences will be missed because these they fall outside the scope of what these people know. Finally and most seriously, there is not sufficient redundancy in such a small system to safe guard for the deluding influence of a deviant role model; anti social or maladaptive behaviors are assumed to be the norm by the child very early. Their struggle with the world begins well before they have an capacity to understand what it is about their behavior that isn’t appropriate.

Love, self-image and anger are the three main emotional areas that are most negatively impacted by absence or inappropriate childhood behavioral modeling.

Love is complicate in the self-aware adult, it’s a ball of confusion for a child. First thing, parents and adults are capable of loving each other in the same way a child loves a parent and also in a completely abstract way that doesn’t make any sense to a child. But that’s “love” modeled for a child. Assuming the care giver is capable of expressing love, the child will begin to generate an association between the feeling of love and the actions that accompany it. If the feeling is paired with loving actions – smiling, cuddling, holding, talking, singing, basically the things that make one feel happy and secure – the child’s understanding of family / caregiver love will well established in reality which will serve them well as they move forward. But if the care giver models something other than loving actions when the child is expecting love erroneous emotion / action pairing begin to form and the child’s view of love will corrupted. For example, an abusive parent who yells, hit or punishes their child for being afraid of the dark, painting outside the lines or not being immediately successful when trying something new. Care giver actions like these teach the child that no one cares when you are afraid, that love is conditional upon you being successful at everything you do and that creative efforts will result in emotional or physical pain. That becomes their understanding of love. It’s ugly, it’s damaging it, and it occurred before the child was old enough to identify any of what was going on.

Self-image depends upon care gives identifying our talents and efforts during critical periods in life. Between 3 – 7 children need to be acknowledged and recognized for how they engage their world. This is critical because they are starting to branch-out and their understanding of the world is expanding as their brain matures – their social circle is growing as they go to preschool and then to school. For the first time in their lives, they have the cognitive capacity to consider that they are not the same thing as other people and that each person is separate. In order for a child to properly form an accurate image of themselves, they need to be taught about themselves. Care gives who recognize a child’s actions and talents help them associate these actions and talents with the image they create about who they are. Care givers who do not draw the child’s attention to their achievements fail to help them connect the dots between actions and self-image, often leaving the child fixate on this phase of development. The end result can be insecurity and narcissism as the developing child struggles to satisfy a need for a positive self-image but having never been given the tools needed to consolidate it out of real life experiences.

Anger and its expression is in many ways the most damaging outcome of inappropriate modeling as anger tends to motivate drastic action that lacks consideration of the future. Anger is natural. It is a very useful survival tool as it can motivate irrational murderous rage, which is exactly what would be needed to fight off an attacking animal. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often but it needs to be considered that deep within each of us lies the potential to go bizerk and destroy life. Anger needs to be experienced and released, but it needs to be let out in a controlled undamaging way whenever possible. A care giver who takes the time to let out their anger in a control non-volatile way will teach the child the appropriate way to let the emotion flow out of them. However, the physically abusive parent who channel their life frustration onto their child in the form of abuse teaches the child that they are simply an object on which other people beat when they are angry. It doesn’t take very long before the child learns to be helpless and retreats into their head knowing that the violent world will always lay a beating upon them. Worse still in how this lesson makes its way through the generations as the grown child, who has only seen abuse (hitting their children) as the model of anger expression, pays this pattern of behavior forward.

Socializing human beings is a tough, time consuming task, made even more challenging by their tendency towards unquestioned single trial learn and a brain that doesn’t full mature until early adulthood. The key thing with it is to model and teach a child appropriate actions and appropriate responses to external events and emotion evoking occurrences. Our emotional system is well established and it comes on-line will before our brains develop the capacity to work with all of the abstract information that tends to create our understanding of the world. Keep in mind, if a person has never seen it, they are not likely going to do it. If someone is failing to behave in a way that is appropriate, there’s a very good chance that they don’t even know that what they are doing is not appropriate because they haven’t seen anything else, and they haven’t had someone tell them that their actions are alienating and simply don’t work for them.

The Relationship Paradox

The funny thing about relationships is that, unless you’ve know the person for a while, the persons life essentially begins when you realize you’ve meet them; at least your understanding / experiences with the person begin then. Both partners likely see the future in the other – that is, the hope of what can be in a period of time when everything is possible. It’s wondrous and pure, a time of magical excitement. It lasts for a while but in most cases, the past begins to show itself.

It’s the past, it’s why you are the way you are and there’s little you can do to stop it from showing its face and painting doubt on many of the dreams for the future you had been creating. It’s also the reason why your partner struggles to figure-out what the heck happened to fun and even flow what was the budding relationship. You change, not because your dream changed, but because your haven’t stabilized the past in the past, so it come out again to guide your life towards the same experiences. The past helps us change from author of a love story to actor in a modern tragedy because most of the time we do not question our motives for making a decision. We advance, on auto-pilot, sleeping through the decision making process, into the past.

So your initial movement and dreams of the future, being replaced by the automatic behavior of your past, is going to bother your partner because they don’t have any idea about your past. They see amazing, they see beauty, they see an unstoppable, bulletproof partner who will help them grow into their greatness. Thing is, their partners see themselves as all the things their previous experiences conditioned them to see about themselves. And most of this stuff is going to be a lot darker than the dreams their new partner has been manufacturing. Insecurities, assumed dept or unpaid obligations, open loops, guilt pinning actions, mental baggage from relationships, thoughts of wasted potential and in-honorable deeds – things that hurt to think about let alone say out loud and admit to someone you are falling in love with.

Your actions and fears don’t make sense to your new partner because they don’t know you like this. Your birth, in their world view, was the moment they noticed you so they aren’t going to recall your pain when, in grade 4, your answered a question wrong and the teacher laughed, or when you father didn’t show-up for the school play, or when your second boy friend decided to move to Vancouver to live with his wife. But you recall the pain. Your understanding of the world has been shaped by each of these, and 100’s more, disappointing events. Each thing taught or reinforced a new lesson about how the world was and your brain takes each lesson and manufactures a world view with these events as most probably outcomes in similar situations. This is how our past becomes our future.  The lessons shape how we engage the world regardless of the extremely isolated nature and absolute uniqueness of the experience. It’s one trial learning at it’s finest and it is, for the most part, why your current relationship is going to hit some rough water.

You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, maybe.

This relationship paradox, of you being the past and your partner seeing the future, isn’t a problem for self-aware people or those individuals who find themselves to be well adjusted in terms of their world view matching the way the world is. But for the rest of us, we had better get good at feeling the sensation of the past trying to express itself and stop the expression or start talking very candidly with our new partners about why we are the way we are. Let them know about the feelings of disappointment when someone didn’t show-up as planned when you were 6 and how this makes you feel like you are simply waiting to be disappointed by everyone. Let them know that you have some concerns about honesty because your last girl friend was able to lie very convincingly. Explain to them why you act in ways that seem to go against what they view you to be. They may not like hearing the stories, but they’ll benefit from knowing them because they’ll have a better handle on who you actually are because they’ll know what you are coming from.

It’s very simple. Good partnerships thrive when each person is able to predict the thoughts and actions of the other. To do this, each needs to know who the other person actually is as well as knowing  their hopes, dreams and potential. This won’t happen by accident. It takes work, open conversation, and an ability to accept that there are things about you that aren’t working for you anymore. The past is going to try to show itself again and again. With good teamwork and some frank discussions, you can identify the role your past plays on your present and shape your future to be much closer to what your new loves see it to be.

How I Have Not Served My Clients Adequately

Looking back about 3 years on my training, I can now see a few ways that I have not provided my clients with adequate service. Below is a list of 5 things I am now doing differently:

1) Sell small numbers of sessions during the initial few months. Some people will not keep doing this and while it is good for them, getting them to do it actually makes their life worse. It SUCKS to be out of shape and it can be even worse trying to get back into shape. And maybe, just maybe, selling someone a years worth of training when they are feeling excited in January is going to hurt them a lot more than help them. Give them the option to leave early on, and give them plenty of chances. You don’t want to train those who do not want to be trained.

2) Focus on getting them to properly engage their core. Humans need to be able to rotate their upper and lower bodies independently, but they also need to be able to prevent this rotation. If you do not set the ab muscles correctly when you lift, energy is going to be wasted and you will not lift as much weight. Worse still, is that if you ruin your back with relative ease when you lift without properly engaging your core. There has been an enormous increase in the level of satisfaction with most of my female clients now that I stay on them throughout the set to keep their core tight. The initial reduction in load is a small price to pay for the improvement in posture and function that accompanies appropriate core recruitment.

3) Focus on flexibility, joint mobility and function. This is one that annoys me because it was completely selfish. I don’t like stretching much (at all) and while I understood the importance of having adequate flexibility and proper joint range of motion, I didn’t place enough value on this for a long time. Fortunately all of my clients remained injury free so this shortcoming in training didn’t have a major impact on them now that it is being addressed.

4) Focus 70% of the strength training on eccentric phases. The lengthening phase of a working muscle is called the eccentric phase. It’s easiest to build strength and most of the micro trauma that forces muscle recovery occurs during this phase – these mean that if you have a lot to lose by not focusing on eccentric work. At its simplest, when you are lowering a weight you just move at 1/2 to 1/4 the speed that you would when you are lifting the weight. I don’t think you’ll lose fat as quickly if you avoid 4-5 second eccentric phases.

5) Focus on psychology with the people who don’t follow instructions. Athletes listen and do. People who want to change their body composition shut-up and follow the advice that is given. But what do you do when the people say they want something but fail to do what is needed to achieve their objective? You have two choices, the first is to fire them and get a new client, hopefully someone who will follow instructions and work towards their goal. The second choice is to get into their head and try to point out exactly what you are seeing and what it indicates. Doing the second consistently is what separates the good coaches from the great ones – and I’m hoping to be one of the great ones – because you’ll be able to get people to change who could not have achieved it on their own.

I have started to spend more time addressing these areas with my current clients, but I’m sure there will be a new list of shortcomings in the coming months and years, and that’s a good thing! We only improve the process when we admit to that which is not working and seek to change it.

Feeling The Past? Beat It Back To Live Your Future

Spending so much time in my head – because I ride by myself so much – I’ve started to develop an awareness of the moment when my unconscious moves an idea into my conscious mind. It’s startling to experience the influence of a past pattern trying to rekindle its influence and it is wonderful to sense my emotions begin to build as that influence almost takes hold. I’m starting to be able to observe the process start as opposed to allowing it to continue, only to reflect on the poor choices later. Stopping the emotions allow me to return to logical thinking; which tends to render a much easier and quicker movement through whatever it was that almost triggered my past to begin again.

This skill is developing because I’m able to spend a lot of time by myself, thinking about stuff then thinking about nothing and repeating over and over again. Hard bike riding is meditative to me because the intense efforts or challenging terrain make necessary a silencing of the mind and a shut-down of that audible internal narrative that causes me to believe I am the center of the universe. It is of practical advantage because the trail eventually gets easier or I tire from the exhaustive effort and slow down; both of these things tend to shut off the meditation, re-empowering the voice to remind me that I am all that matters. The key thing is, after having consolidated your consciousness into the present moment, you become aware of things that you had stopped considering or had not normalized.

For example, my clothes don’t matter when I’m 3/4 of the way up a big hill. What the guy who cut me off on the way to the gym yesterday thinks about me doesn’t come into my awareness when I’m about to lock up my front wheel on gravel just to slow down enough to not launch over the escarpment fence. This stuff doesn’t exist then because I can’t manufacture it into existence. And when I’m not so tired or so focused on not crashing this knowledge carries forward into my conscious mind. I KNOW it doesn’t matter so it’s much easier to push the thought out of my head or simple justify them out of existence because I know they are the creation of something from my past and not necessarily the reflection of what I want for my future.

That is a summary of course and it represents the evolution of an aspect of self-awareness that has taken close to 15 years to move from not being considered, not just as a possibility but at all, to a well organized reality that I am able to engage, observe and manage.

So what? Well, given that we are pattern matching machines with a tendency to unconscious automation of anything that requires effort, we are most likely going to repeat patterns over and over and over again until we do something to stop repeating them. We KNOW something isn’t working for us, but we just keep doing it like a mindless computer following a program that has been written because we are, in many ways, mindless computers that run programs that were written in the past by our experiences and interpretations. Given this, one is not likely going to escape their past (stop running the program) until they accept that it is happening, which can take a while. They must then learn how to interfere with the program by preventing it from starting (avoiding the triggers entirely which is really tough to do) or observing the program beginning to start and stopping it dead. One gains a tremendous amount of independence and self-control by learning how and what these these old programs feel like, so in many ways self-awareness is the solution while avoidance is a treatment.

Our pasts become our future when we allow old patterns to become present behaviors. If these patterns are not working for you, you NEED to break them and you need to gain awareness and feel them before you are able to stop them. It can take a while to gain this awareness, but once you have it, you’ll be able to beat back these old patterns and create your future based on what you decide as opposed to what you did in the past.