“I look in the mirror and all I see is unactualize potential”

Good, you’re starting to get sick of looking like the sum total of your bad choices. Maybe you even cry about it, thinking how could you do this to yourself? The truth is it’s easy to let the effects of doing nothing healthful catch-up with you. You observe this each time you look in the mirror. Heck, you might have taken to NOT looking at your body in the mirror just so you aren’t reminded of how eating poorly, not listening to your doctor and not exercising is making it look.

But you see it, and you know you should do something about it because deep down inside you KNOW you deserve better than what you are allowing yourself to have. For some reason you made the decision to NOT be all you can be and NOT feel amazing as you age. Now you are angry with what you see and you’re tired of wasting your beauty on being inactive and overeating because you think you have an emotional right to hammer down food.

I’m glad you’re angry. You’re sick of it and you are finally going to do something about it – if you aren’t angry, why would you do anything different now? Because you say you’re going to? That didn’t work before, last year, or the year before that because you didn’t care enough to get angry at what you are doing to yourself. It doesn’t matter what you say, what is important is what you do and getting angry at yourself is a big and critical first step.

So take a moment today or tomorrow to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what you see. If you’re aware that you aren’t seeing you closing in on your potential, get angry, stop hurting yourself and get yourself moving in the right direction. And if you don’t know how to do it, seek out and pay for professional help.

Stimulus Moment Response

Almost 4 years ago I blogged about a conservation with Des about how lengthening the time between stimulus and response will improve the quality of your decisions. By allowing time for any emotional reaction to subside, you will be able to think more logically. It makes a lot more sense to me now than it did then because I’ve become better at lengthening the time between stimulus and response in a number of situations. But it has taken a long time to get to about 95%.

I haven’t been able to stop the internal emotional response completely but becoming aware that it has happened has been extremely helpful in stopping me from doing anything that will keep it going longer than it needs to. When I feel the emotion building I’ll breath and try to clear my head. If it continues to build, I quickly ask myself if I care about what has happened that is causing the emotion, if I need to indulge the emotion and if so, when does that need to happen.

A couple of examples:

Someone cuts me off in traffic. Think “bastard”. Then “don’t do anything, don’t beep, don’t yell, don’t give them the finger or look at them”. Then “I don’t know them, this isn’t important.” Then I allow distance to build between our two cars. Done.

Break-up with Rachel – this was longer lasting in that thoughts of the subject would pop into my head a lot at the beginning; each one representing a stimulus that required addressing. Think “oh my God, I’m so sad”. Then “this will fade with time, but right now it isn’t going away”. Then “does what I’m doing right now (my engagement of the environment) require that I be completely present or can I step away from everything to indulge the feelings of sadness and loss?” Then I either reengage the present situation or indulge the emotion.

One of the key differences now is that I often don’t act. I won’t broadcast anything to the world until I know for sure what it is that I need to do. I now realize that I can’t do anything to completely stop the emotional reaction as it starts (given that it is based on past experiences). I can however begin to shape how and when they are expressed by changing my reaction to the current one.

Lengthening the time between stimulus and response is a challenge. I’ve been at it for 4 years and I’m still struggling with it. However, you can eliminate much of the damage that emotional actions will have on your life simply by not doing anything until you are sure you know how you need to act.

Reflecting On Arrogance

I’ve had some free time on my hands so I figured it would be a good idea to get caught-up with some friends who I haven’t had the chance to connect with recently. The toughest thing I heard was that I’m rather intolerant towards people who don’t follow my advice or embrace my world view. This was a surprise, but after the sting of hearing it faded and I was able to see it, I felt very bad. I spent some time thinking about it trying to see the times when it was true.

In my head make the distinction between my job (training, fitness and wellness) and the rest of my life.

With my job I’m an expert and I know more than all of my clients and most of the people I engage about this subject. If people ask me for advice or pay me for it, I’ve got a right and need to be dogmatic because the approach I have come-up with is extremely effective, but ONLY if the instructions are followed. You can’t eat the way I suggest, add in a servicing of chocolate and still expect the results I’m promising because this ISN’T what I was suggesting. The same applies to sleep/rest, exercise and other lifestyle variables that have a detrimental impact ones progress. Being intolerant to deviations is, in my opinion, appropriate here because people who are seeking improvements in their health/body composition have demonstrated a lack of knowledge or a lack of ability to do the things they need to do in order to achieve what they are looking for. It is simple, if you want my help you need to follow my advice TO THE LETTER. I don’t need you to ask me for my help and I get very little out of dispensing advice that people ignore.

With the rest of my life doing this would be a problem.

But I’m not entirely sure that I engage in the behavior that was described; at least in terms of things OTHER than my job or things related to fitness, performance or body composition. I’m human and will give my opinion and when someone doesn’t agree with me, I’m probably going to try to get them to see my point of view. And if they are able to I’ll get them to explain their point of view. If, in the end, we don’t see eye to eye, we’ll just need to disagree. I haven’t ended an adult friendship over a difference in opinion though.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that there may be some truth in what was said so I think there’s value in being open to hearing what friends think about my behavior. I’ll agree that I’m dogmatic about my fitness solutions and that’s only because they work. Time will tell if this trait applies to other areas of my life. I know I’ll be looking for it!

Happiness Short Cuts

Being happy is a passion of mine! I’d rather laugh, joke, smile and enjoy life than anything else. Usually the joy flows out of me effortlessly but from time to time I wake-up feeling horrible for no apparent reason and need to do something to get my game face on. Below are some of the things that have helped me turn those days around:

Always do your best. When you try to do something to the best of your ability you automatically shift your attention from the past and direct it completely onto the moment. It has been my experience that IF you are in the moment, you will feel very little of anything. The intense focus on the here and now is something that tends to lend itself to mindlessness, which human beings experience as simple existence. If mindlessness is achieved during an activity, the peak state of flow is achieved were pure action just pours out of us. Some will experience this as a bliss state while others will enjoy the escape from their low mood.

Stop seeking approval. This is the most important thing that I have learned in the last 15 years and any time I release myself from needing others approval there is a dramatic boost in my mood and my performance. I stop living in the past – that is to say that I stop doing the things that I have learned will garner the approval of others – and return to living in the moment and trying to do my best.

Learn to like being wrong because it leads to wisdom. You are going to be wrong so much that you need to do more than just accept that it will happen. You need to appreciate it when it happens because being wrong is what will lead you to learn new things more quickly than almost any other method of learning. Learning to make being wrong less painful will make you happier.
Understand that emotion is not thought. This is a huge one. Emotions are real in that there are chemicals released by the body resulting in what we experience as emotion. But emotions are not thoughts and they shouldn’t be given the same consideration as thoughts. Emotions provide information about situations and they tend to reflect the outcome of matching certain patterns but they are retrospective and based on experience. When we make the error that emotions are thoughts, we tend to think about the emotion and therefore keep the emotion going vs. letting it flow and let it go.

Accept that logic and emotion cannot exist at the same time and emotion trumps logic. This one was easy to observe but tough to deal with. Your prefrontal cortex is responsible for logic and rational thought stops having an impact when the emotional system is active. As such, when you are experiencing an emotion, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to logically engage it. Instead, you need to allow the emotion to flow through and out of you and then proceed to the logical engagement.

You cannot control how other people think (frankly, you can only barely control how YOU think). You can try to control other peoples thoughts and you may even have some success, but eventually they are going to think what they want and if that goes against what you are hoping, you’re not going to be happy. It’s futile to try so just stop and accept that other peoples thoughts are outside the realm of your control. Give them the freedom to think and act autonomously and deal with the consequences of these action because this is what you will be doing anyway, regardless of your intentions. Accepting it before you have to deal with them is going to be a lot easier and more fun.

Do not take anything personally. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m the center of my universe – I’m the creator of my conscious understanding of the world and given that I’m the only receiver of my sensory input, I AM the center of everything. But so is everyone else of their own existence. For this reason, you cannot take anything other people do personally because it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the other person.

Pattern Matching Experiences

Sometimes it helps to think about the human brain as a computer. Environmental data gets feed into the system through our senses. The system initiates numerous tasks gear towards interpreting, manipulating and querying new information and storing it in memory. It then determines the next action and the cycle repeats.

One of the tasks is to check your memories for similar experiences looking for matches and make you aware when it finds one through thought, emotion or a gut feeling. A match is good and you get a small reward when you find one. It means you’ve encountered this experience before and therefore have a workable solution in place. This is always true because if you encountered it before what you did before allowed you to live to encounter it again. Deferring to the previous solution is going to decrease mental effort because it requires less thinking and the physical behaviors have already been performed by the body. It’s probably going to feel somewhat pleasant and it is the fastest way to the next action.

You wouldn’t want it any other way in the primitive world we inhabited 15000 years ago. The world was so dangerous that you needed single trial learning because you very rarely got a second chance. You need to be alerted when the watering hole has the same look it had right before the alligator jumped out and killed someone in your tribe because recalling this will keep you alive.

It’s a perfect system for dealing with emergency situation and situations were your previous action was the most effective action. It can be dangerous if the pattern isn’t one that works for us, for example conflict avoidance with a partner or disregarding someones opinion because of a physical characteristic. When a response becomes automatic without being vetted for relevance and appropriateness based on your current understanding of the world you may run into problems.

Given that there is a survival reason to do what you did the last time, you may benefit from taking a moment to make sure your action is going to be your best action. If you are doing it simply because it is easy, you might want to stop doing that if you want to get more out of life. Remain diligent for 30 days and you’ll likely find that you are happier and more productive.

Try Being What You Want People To Think You Are

Some people spend too much time trying to control how other people perceive them. I’m not talking about hair styles, clothes or other image / look type of things, I’m talking about trying to control what other people think about their character, their decision making process, the quality of their relationships, things that are more easily observed than implanted into ones consciousness.

It’s really senseless to me. If you want people to think that you are a person of high moral character BE a person of high moral character; stop stealing, lying, cheating and being a jerk moron and start thinking about the impact you have on other people, try to see yourself as only the center of YOUR OWN universe and allow other people the right to be the center of their own universe. If you want people to think that you are a good partner BE a good partner; be nice to them, listen to what they are saying, think nice thoughts about them when you have a free moment, come up with reasons why you are glad they are in your life. If you want people to think you are someone who has self respect DO the things a person who has self respect does; stop compulsive behaviors, improve your diet and exercise habits, eliminate unnecessary stress and drama from your life, ditch the things that are not working for you and start doing more of the ones that do.

I just don’t get it. Do what it is you want people to believe you do, be what it is you want people to believe you are. Cut through all of the fog and just go straight for it.

Some Signs That You’re About To Be Single

There seems to be a growing number of people who are leaving their relationships. Initially I figured people were talking to me about their pending break-ups because they heard that I was single, but that turns out to be incorrect. They are talking to be because they are in unsatisfying relationships and they look at what Rachel and I did as the next appropriate step in their relationship.

With most of these situations there are some common trends. Below is a list of some of the things I’ve been hearing about why people are thinking of leaving their long term relationships:

You are not very satisfied with your life and when you speak to your partner they are more concerned with keeping things the way they are than your lack of satisfaction. This has more to do with the economics of time and effort than a genuine lack of caring about what you going through. Their actions are selfish because they don’t want the cognitive overhead associated with having to change their relationship with the world. Leaving this person is often enough to cause the changes you are looking for because adjusting to a relationship ending is a lot tougher than changing things enough to allow you to find more satisfaction in life. But keep in mind that the changes MUST be lasting or else you’re back to this game in a few months or years.

You are not connecting with your partner on an emotional level. This is either due to withdrawal by your partner, an improvement in your emotional intelligence or an inability to foster the emotional awareness needed for a reciprocal relationship. Withdrawal is selfish and is under the control of your partner; this is really bad because they are choosing to withdraw. An improvement in your emotional understanding shows that you are evolving as a person which frees your partner of responsibility from this issue; but it’s still not very good because unless they evolve in the same way, the relationship is going to suffer. Having a partner who is incapable of expressing the emotions needed to allow for the connection to exist just shows you how powerful attraction can be because it allows us to overlook huge shortcomings in favor of falling in love.

You are in a relationship with a horrible person and as you mature, you begin to see their behavior for what it is. This is a big one because what attracts us to people serves a reproductive function and oftentimes these things are not what make for a positive relationship. His arrogance was sexy confidence before the kids came along, now it’s just a pain in the ass because he doesn’t believe cooking dinners to be the role of the primary bread earner. She used to be strong willed because she wouldn’t back down during an argument, now she is just stubborn or delusional because she won’t accept the truth. Good luck here. Change is possible, but they’re going to need to see the need for change and until they do, you’re going to suffer.

Your partner is a border-line or complete sociopath who cares more about controlling behavior and perceptions than addressing the wrongs. I’ve yet to see how this one works out well. Staying in a relationship with a sociopath is only an option if there are no children, you won’t be having children and you are not getting abused. If children are involved, consider the impact that modeling your relationship will have on them. They’ll learn that mommy or daddy has one function and that is to service the needs to their partner. Not a healthy legacy to leave for anyone. And children see and normalize this very quickly.

You are with someone who can’t meet your needs. This is sad because it is so emotionless and flat that it’s almost boring to talk about and admit. For example, you have a very broad emotional spectrum and your partner doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just unsatisfying for you because so much of your identity doesn’t get expressed. You’re lucky if your partner is mature enough to accept this and allows you to get your needs met elsewhere but lets get real here, who is that mature? Personally I crumble when a girl friend goes else where to get her needs met regardless of what those needs may be – be it coaching for swimming, someone to hear her problems, laundry advice, etc… even the stuff that I know nothing about.

Your relationship has actually ended but you are with someone who can’t end it. This is so common it’s an embarrassment for our species. One partner has checked-out while the other is still working hard to try and make things work. The checked-out partner won’t end it for some reason – mainly because they can’t have the tough conversation – and the still-trying partner believes the relationship is worth saving. The end result is one person spending all of their remaining relationship building energy while the others sits and wonders how much better life would be if they weren’t in the relationship. I have difficultly with this one personally because I have a tough time accepting that I was wrong about falling in love and seeing my world without my present partner. But the sooner it ends, the sooner the two of you will find happiness again

If you see yourself in one of the above situations, consider taking some time to evaluate your relationship. It may not be over, but you may need to take some steps to get a handle on what is going on.

Removing Some Of The Negative – Keep Removing After It’s Gone

For the last 15 years I have known that human beings suffer from two types of things, physical and mental. Physical suffering amounts to about 15% of it and it includes things like illness or injury (actual pathologies) or biological stress resulting from the acute deviation from biological homeostasis. Mental suffering accounts for the remaining 85% and is comprised of the emotional consequences to our misinterpretation of reality.

What is very funny is that we spend an awful amount of time treating or trying to prevent the physical suffering by taking medication, eating better food, exercising more, etc… but we do not spend anywhere near the same amount of time addressing or preventing the mental suffering, which is surprising given that a similar amount of effort in this area would result in 5 times greater reduction in suffering. I’ve known this for ages and haven’t until recently done very much to capitalize on the life improving consequences of working to see reality more clearly.

Now that I’ve started to work to see my nature, my actions and my view of the world in terms of what is actually happening – the truth – vs. what is being interpreted about the world – my reality – a remarkable observation is starting to present itself concerning how human beings respond to the eliminate of a source of stress.

Initially, when I eliminate a big source of stress in my life, there is a strange out of sorts feeling, like something is missing. It’s kind of hard to shake at the beginning because peacefulness is a change from the normal state of negative arousal. It’s a lot like quitting smoking after a few days – once the physical withdrawal from the addictive chemical has passed – because you KNOW you are not doing something that you used to do (smoking or craving a cigarette is doing something) and you become acutely aware that something is missing. Your brain is used to processing something and it notices that this is not happening anymore.

This can be a wonderful time if you act quickly and put these liberated cognitive resources to work on something useful or purposeful and, overtime, you can actually make permanent changes to what you do with your brain on a daily basis. Doing this will require active attention and effort to teach the brain to automatically focus on something new, but it can be done – just as you taught your brain to focusing on the original stresser. The inverse is also true, the brain will, if you do not actively direct your attention onto new things, find another reason to feel stress and being to make that the new normal. The spontaneous action of the brain is to maintain the present state and, in the absence of a reason for the present state, it will seek out and find a reason, then use the free resources to focus on the new stresser.

It is important to remove as many of the stressful things in your life as you can but if you want to completely free yourself from them, you need to actively fill the hole that they leave when they are gone. If you don’t, the hole will be filled by something that creates the same amount and type of stress that you just eliminated and after a few weeks, you’ll be in effectively the same position that you originally were

1 Smoke Away From Addiction

A friend of mine has started smoking again. He was badly hooked for almost 20 years and made the decision to quit about a year ago. He has started having the occasional cigarette again and doesn’t seem to register that smoking isn’t healthy. He believes his claim that he can have one every now and then and that it isn’t a problem. I’ve been there, quitting and only having the occasional smoke. Problem is with most people who smoked so much or so frequently that they needed to stop doing it is that we are addicted now and likely forever – I know I am and there’s a good chance that he is too.

I LOVE smoking. I found it to be one of the most pleasurable things that I have ever done. I was good at it if that is possible. I could smoke a pack a day, during meals, before and for breakfast, anytime and any place. I joke that I made two big mistakes in life, the first being that I started smoking and the second being that I stopped. I think about it almost everyday and there are times when I crave them. I haven’t been a smoker in almost 10 years and I believe that if I live long enough I will become a smoker again – I would likely start smoking if I had a terminal illness.

I HATE smoking. I find if to be one of the most destructive things that I have ever done. I couldn’t stop smoking at will. I needed to smoke a pack a day to feel normal. I needed to smoke in the middle of meals to enjoy the meal, it needed to be the first thing I did in the morning, it was always on my mind and I didn’t have control over my actions when I was a smoker. I wish I had never started because I wouldn’t be thinking about smoking right now, and again now, and right there again. I hate that there is something on the planet that will make me lose control, something that I could easily fall back into doing that ruins my life.

If you have quit, put the smokes down and don’t ever pick them up again. If you had to quit, you have to keep quitting, over and over again until you are gone. It’s just too easy for the brain and body to fall back into the old behaviors because they are still there and they were so much fun! But you’ll think you have a handle on it until that moment when you realize, with stinking hands and nasty breath that you can’t stop and need to quit.

It’s About Light Bulb Moments – One At A Time

I was chatting with a friend Chris on Saturday evening and we got round to talking about trainers and coaches. he mentioned that when he goes to a yoga class or training session, he expects to work hard and be challenged. However, he measures value not just by how hard the instructor/coach makes him work but by the number of “a ha” or light bulb moments.

He told me that there is an instructor who teaches far away from where he lives that he’ll go to once a month because there will be a couple of critical life changing lessons in every 60 minute session he has with him. Usually it will be about body awareness – he’ll be moved into the right position or verbally cued to change something – and this will reveal the proper way to do a particular move. Chris said that these epiphanies are worth the extra drive because they make all of the difference with his training and each one takes a while to full incorporate.

This got me thinking about the value of the training experience I provide. I do know a lot of these light bulb things and have worked hard to facilitate as many of them as I can with my clients. But there was something about Chris’ “go there once a month” comment that got me thinking that maybe I’ve been overloading people with too much information in an attempt to maximize the value of their training dollar. Maybe 1 or 2 things a month is all people can actually handle because of the cascading effect small changes have on the big picture.

Maybe the better approach is to give people what they came for, a good workout, and give them a little piece of something else every now and then to make sure they have the ability to make the most of each piece of information. This is what I respond to. When Des blows my mind with a small truth, I’m often left with my head spinning for days trying to figure-out how to rebuild my life using this new piece of the puzzle. Other people are likely the same way, and when it comes to movement, new motor patterns do require substantial practice to replace old ways of moving. There really is very little value in overloading the person with information that they cannot use because they haven’t created a strong enough foundation. In fact, my approach was probably hindering their progress.