Month: February 2012

Goal Oriented Action – A Great Proxy For Confidence

“You are being so insecure” was what Leesa said when she finally said anything. The timing was conversationally accurate yet a situational non sequitur. What I had been saying was revealing a huge hole in my confidence but what I had just been doing didn’t embody the complete lack of skill that said confidence would help manifest.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me when I say it out loud. Feels kind of stupid actually.” That was true. I’ve known Leesa for a couple of years and we go climbing a few times a year. She navigated her way through her recent divorce in the same way that most people don’t handle a parking ticket. There are few random movements in my life so I was suddenly getting the feeling that there was something going on under the surface.

There were a few moments spent listing the things I do well, this interested neither one of us. I KNOW what I do well. This was a game and I was feeling it.

When someone presents themselves with insecurities we can engage them in three distinct ways – like a parent and try to solve their problem or demand a change, like a child and play with them or hurt them with it, or like an adult and coach them through the issue or establish a boundary so as to not get impacted by the other (ANY interaction between 2 people will be engaged from these POV with each member shifting roles; self talk will also take on these roles).

Whatever I had said created an Adult observation with a Parent response of “you are being so insecure” for her. My reply was Adult, and in this case it was Adult, but there have been times in the past when I responded to this exact mixed reply with a Child or Parent response. It can be useful in meeting girls because everyone has something that they don’t feel 100% about and, having codependent tendencies the only way I can get someone to do something for me when they don’t want to do it is to have them approach the task as though they were a parent. In this case, I was seeking coaching so we were able to dispense with the Parent / Child roles very quickly.

Once the interaction became Adult : Adult the information started flowing from her and the conversation took flight. You have to do stuff, everyday, for weeks and months and years. The things you do need to either cultivate your intellect, your emotional intelligence or your physical being. This will begin to manifest itself as a shift in ease at which life seems to flow. This is your spirit healing and growing; the invisible piece of you that others pick-up on as they observe your interactions with the world.

The truth is, we don’t gain confidence when we are involved in goal oriented action, we lose insecurity. Focusing on the action shifts our consciousness onto the present, which is reflexive but not usually consciously regressive. Going up the wall, I’m not thinking about every fall I ever took, I’m not really thinking about the foot or handhold I just moved from and I’m not thinking about the sales goal for the week. I’m mapping out a route from where I am and where I want to be and I’m determined to close in on my target. When I come off the wall, the focus widens and life begins again.

Confidence is the knowledge that you will try something and being in the habit of trying.

When I Died

The last few weeks have been an existential stew/spew.

Here’s the thing: for most of my life I have not had a soul – I’m an atheist. Not having a soul and having lived a life with a concept of spirituality that was hard wired so to impulsively think “soul” and just tune out, I haven’t been engaging the world as effectively as a someone who is in balance with the universe and those within it. Obviously….

I don’t believe in prayer. Seemed kind of unnecessary to do something pointless. It would be to me I guess, but it isn’t to the person doing it. I say this not because those who pray tell me it isn’t pointless, I say it because I believe their prayer serve to cultivate something that is very important in peoples lives. It’s something that has been missing from my life for a very long time.

I have found a need for a spiritual piece in my life. I have lived an extremely good life, with a great family, great friends, great girl friends, a life with more privilege than 98% of the worlds population yet I don’t feel that way subjectively. My life has been series of temporary experiences most neutral, some great and some bad. But in general waking-up each day is both a blessing and a drag.

But it isn’t always that way. There have been times of extended bliss, when I exist in a child state with the brain of an adult; when I would play, shameless and with out fighting anything. I was okay and the world was okay. During these times I didn’t actually realize what it was that I was feeling, it just felt right and I floated along knowing what I had to do next, starting it with a smile and a sense of excited anticipation. Thinking about it now, those moments / periods were the times in my life when I was cultivating my spirituality in that my thoughts, feelings, movements and purpose were aligned and I was moving forward with pure intention.

For a long time I have blurred the lines between religion and spirituality. To foster a sense of each, one need only do the same things – align their thoughts, feelings, movements and purpose and move forward with pure intention. Praying is similar to mediation, particularly when you know the prayers verbatim and trance out while saying them. In each case, the attention is highly focused on something and this will have a very similar impact on brain waves. Going to a church retreat is very similar to going to any social event that has a theme – a Star Trek convention is not a religious experience in the traditional sense, but it has a lot of the characteristics and the same group-think mentality. Both events serve to create a union between many people and allow for the shameless existence for all participants.

I have always been a spiritual person but I have actively worked against this aspect of my nature because I am an atheist. It has become clear that I do not enjoy a lingering sense of peace due to my lack of attention to fostering a sustainable ME. A strong spirit will continue for a while even without active cultivation. But it needs to grow first, and before that, it needs to be encouraged and allowed to take root.

Spirituality then is about my relationship with the universe. Relative to the rest of the universe, I’m moving really quickly away from everything. Relative to what is on the earth, there is a very dynamic interaction of everything. The essence of my life, of my spirit, is mostly here on earth. Most of what I actually interact with is contained within my body. Most of the nurturing needs to be spend on aligning my thoughts, feelings, movements with my purpose.

When I gave-up the notion that I had a soul I died because that washed away most of the objectiveness about spirituality. This prevented me from seeing the benefit that altering my thoughts, feelings and movements will have on creating a unified ME that has the power to continue to exist even when I am not thinking about it.

“Stop Making Excuses For People”

My mom was almost yelling it. My ears felt like they went back the way a cats do when you sing to it. I rarely feel a wall of anything other than joy coming from my mom so when the chill hit me I shut my pie hole.

I thought we had been talking about the way past experiences can manifest themselves in the present and that by understanding ones past relationships of significance you can make a good prediction on future behaviors and get a notion as to why someone may act in particular ways. Valid but basically trivial information to me in every case other than my own life. It’s potentially damaging when it is used to explain away an action that had a negative impact on me personally.

In the theater of recovery, it’s therapy information. In the theater of a relationship / friendship, it is an excuse for things to remain exactly the same.

“Okay” was what I said when it was safe to say anything at all. Life can shape people in a particular way but they choose to act as they do. It’s better to leave them alone, stop making excuses for people and let it go.

Why Losing My 67 Year Old Father Is Only As Bad As Sad

When Natalie got killed many years ago there wasn’t anything anyone could say or do to make it right or make it feel better. It was going to be unpleasant because there wasn’t much of a silver lining to see. There still isn’t, there never will be because 21 is an awful young age to die for someone who should have come much closer to their life expectancy.

Some death is like that, unjust and tragic. It’s outside of the natural cycle of things and you do what you can to manage the whole thing. It will remain that bull shit event in the past and you may be able to manufacture a meaning out of it, but you’re just as likely to end up addicted to drugs to numb the pain. The waves of this type of death ripple forward into the future, carried along on impossible “what if” questions.

Cancer in someone who is almost 70 is not the same thing as dying at the wheel of a drunk driver at 21. Someone dying closer to their life expectancy is at worst unfair. The ripples from the death of a much older person are from the past and they’re good because they are the answers to the “what if” questions. Some think this too clinical, a little Vulcan, unkind or uncaring and I’m good with that. The thing about thoughts on how I should carry my business is that they aren’t of any consequence to the catalyst for in this situation. Cancer controlled what happened.

I had an honest and complete relationship with my father, I challenged him as a person and as a dad, I am not the same type of thinker as my father so he’s had to learn how to engage me as I have had to learn how to engage him, we always liked and respected each other and while there may have been things that we didn’t like about how the other acted, we cared enough about each other to not really care that much about those things and to actually learn why the other person felt or acted that way. We were not the same but we liked how the other was.

All of this is to say that my dad was a good guy who loved his family and friends and he had a great relationship with Des, my mom and me.

As adults we talked about a lot of the things people don’t really chat with their parents about. I asked my dad what it would be like to have a son die – unjust, unfair and something that he’d get past but never over. I asked him what it was like when his dad died – sad, a real existential struggle to piece together the rightness of his father and the wrongness of losing him at 60. I asked my dad what he thought the purpose of life was – I don’t know, I don’t think it has one other than what we give it. Try to have as much fun as you can without hurting others. Why didn’t you focus on making more money as opposed to focusing on delivering what you promise – because you’ll just spend the money and have to live with yourself for not being your best. What mistake did you always make – I didn’t stick at anything long enough to reap the rewards of being really good at it, once I did it, it got boring. What mistake do you always see me making – you feel the need to get into relationships. When you die, what do you want me to do – keep building the panel business, look after your mother, maybe be a little sad, but don’t dwell on things. Life was going to end, it has to. The world doesn’t need that many old people.

I laugh at the last answer a lot. My dad knew he had his run and that it would end eventually. He was satisfied with it. At the end it was peaceful. A comfortable wind down chatting with the people he cared about, eating great food and maintaining the perspective that his time had come and that it is good to not linger when it does.

Why Relationships Ruin Me

About 6 months ago I wrote Relationships Ruin You discussing the growing ease I had accepting some of the truths my father spoke. The post got spammed commented this week and when I reread it sang a slightly different tune to me.

For some reason it made me think about being in the hospital a few weeks ago. The nurses needed to reposition my dad and the pneumonia had made moving painful. Things were least bad when his body moved as one unit as opposed to bending at the center or twisting around the core. The first time I offered to help I felt clueless. I thought there was a lot I could do wrong, and there is, but for the most part, if you remember that you’re moving a human being you’ll do very little wrong. As the week progressed, all of us got better at it. The goal was to minimize unnecessary movements and this was achieved best when we all worked together on a coordinated solution. For me it seemed natural to treat my dad with the care he always treated me with and pooling resources seemed an effective way to do this.

I bring this up in this context of why relationships ruin me because there was something in the experience of helping in the hospital that I have felt before in-spite of the fact that I have never lived through anything like it. In fact, there have been very few times in my life that I went without feeling the same sort of thing for longer than a month. I get the feeling any time I provide a particular type of service to people who play a particular role in my life. For a long time I’ve been aware that I like helping people but it wasn’t until the feelings were the same that things lined up.

I keep damaging my life by NOT treating myself with the full compassion that I am capable of. If I approached making a meal with the same care I took moving my dad it would be a really good meal. The fact that I throw together whatever is easy says something about what I think about how I deserve to be treated; if only to me, there’s a lot of actions that indicate that I’m not worth the trouble. When I’m single I spend more time in the gym. I do it because it feels good and because it makes me look better. When I get into a relationship my gym behavior stops as I shift my attention onto the relationship. Whatever “me” was developing disappears as soon as I have someone else in my life to really care about. Progress is killed by my behavior. Over and over and over again.

I am capable and only too willing to show others a love that I will rarely bestow upon myself and this is why relationships ruin me.

The Lost Potential For Social Media Sites

Facebook can be a lot of fun. It’s stimulating, you’re reading and thinking up things to say, there’s pictures, videos, games and apps. The timeline feature really works with the linear way people think about their life – from beginning to now. The whole thing is well put together to massage a number of human tendencies that keep people logging in. The site learns from your actions and presents you with stuff that may be interesting to you. If their goal is to make the user experience better, they have succeeded. Some of the comments my friends friends make are funny, “liked” and over time more and more of their stuff appears.

What I’m not sure about though is just how much of the actual information they have that they are giving us. With so many users, there have got to be 100000’s of patterns of behaviour emerging. Liking someones comment does indicate a certain level of interest. Then viewing their profile and  clicking on some of their links will indicate a higher level of interest.

But what does looking at their profile 4 or 5 times in a month mean? What level of interest does that indicate? Then they become friends, and a few weeks later they are tagged together in a photo with someone who works for a particular bank. The bank person “likes” the photo. 2 weeks later, the wife’s profile of the bank person is checked by one of the 2 people who were tagged in the photo.

What will the outcome be in 6 months?

There isn’t enough information there for us to guess, but there is enough data in FB to make a prediction about who will be “friends” and be “liking” the stuff in 6 months. I’d wager some money that one of their data miners would be able to tell us when two people are about to break-up based on their FB actions. And I think the miner would know there was a problem with their relationship well before either one of them knew.

As interesting as it would be to have a dialogue pop up and say “looks like you are about to experience some relationship trouble – click here to view report or click cancel to keep your head in the sand” it would END FB because being stripped naked by the obviousness of your actions is chilling. We’d like to think that we are holding our cards close and out of sight, but our actions reveal our cards. FB remembers all of your actions so it will be able to identify when you start to repeat a pattern; any pattern.

It will also be able to compare your pattern of actions of other patterns and be able to make predictions about the future outcome. The message box saying “there’s a lot you need to know about how you are going to interact with your new friend” or “we noticed that you changed your relationship status to say that you were in a relationship with someone who isn’t on the site. based on some of your new friends, “likes” and profiling viewing habits we’d like to ask you to reconsider this recent update” or “you are about to tag yourself in a recent picture with your old boy friend from 3 years ago. based on some of your new friends, profiling viewing habits and you taking a similar action in the past, we’d like to ask you to reconsider this action.”

It can go on, but given that people tend not to change much overtime, the site could become more and more useful in helping people identify and avoid the unworkable situations they keep putting themselves into. Kind of like an older and wiser friend who tells you what they see but never tells you what to do about it.

I don’t think FB will take the leap and actually start churning out the information they are mining. There is little doubt that they know they are sitting on a reserve of sociological theory and practical knowledge that will push our understanding of human interaction forward dramatically. But since this information is base on millions of individual case studies, the individuals are not likely going to agree that they want to see it. It’s hard having someone read your mind and tell you want you are doing BEFORE you know why you are doing it or even before you know you are doing something.

Action, Recovery and Consequence

As I close in on my 40’s I’m starting to notice a pattern in the world – order continues to form, exist and disintegrate. Philosophically, psychologically, physiologically, in the living and in the inanimate, large and small, matter combines and separates for reasons that are now almost completely understood. Once you understand the science and see the pattern, the mystery is gone and the beauty remains.

Dealing with human beings (me in particular), the order that constitutes me is my body. It is made up of particles that are governed by rules. It’s a complicated bag of matter so many of the rules we have now are general guidelines based on statistics. It doesn’t make a difference what way you look at the numbers though, the longer something exists in an organized state, the less likely it is to continue to exist in that state. Everything is falling apart….

Fortunately there is a repair mechanism built into living things to stop them from falling apart and with young healthy humans it will replace most of the cells of the body within 3 months and many within hours. This is an enormous undertaking – manufacturing most of the component pieces that make-up 1 human being and ordering them to be an almost exact copy in one fiscal quarter. The body gets it right over and over and over again until it doesn’t. Then it sets out to keep making itself over and over again while attempting to not write-in the mistake.

Eventually something breaks down or the error is replicated and we get a disease or suffer ill health. If this isn’t addressed, the body will quickly disintegrate into the less-ordered state, death. Once dead, the particles that make up the body break down and find their way back into the environment to become part of something else, eventually.

There is a relationship between what you bring into your body, what it has to recover from, and the speed of the decline – a toxic internal environment will impair or inhibit recovery / repair and can disrupt accurate cell replication. You can increase the toxicity of the body by bringing in toxins, allowing toxins to build-up and by causing too much damage for the body to completely recovery. Smoking and drinking are obvious stressors with a fairly well established consequences. Dehydration and sleep deprivation are known to impair normal functioning as acute events. Getting a concussion during a football game may require a few weeks or a lifetime to recover from. As a general rule though, the younger and healthier you are, the greater your potential to recover from the stresses of life. Young living things tend to have more resiliency when it comes to maintaining high levels of vitality. There are fewer consequences to their actions because they can recover more completely.

EVERYTHING we do has consequences. While it is unlikely that one single action will cause disease the battle to maintain order is a war of attrition. Each reaction takes a toll. Every calorie too much or too few does damage to the body that must be repaired. Every chemical reaction can increase the oxidative stress and damage the cells – too much exercise, not enough sleep, holding tension in muscles because they don’t relax, poor posture, constipation, uncomfortable working positions,….

Treating your blood like the sewer at a chemical factory will also have big consequences on your ability to recover from living life.

The body evolved to maintain a fairly tight range of environmental conditions that promote optimal vitality and can handle most acute deviations outside of this range that result from us ingesting something. But there is a cost to homeostasis both in terms of oxidative stress and the long term effectiveness of the mechanisms used to restore the optimal range. Insulin and cortisol are important for regulating blood sugar. They are two chemicals that the body produces naturally but which have a toxic effect on the body in acute high doses or chronically elevated levels. Too much insulin over time will increase insulin resistance and impairs the body’s ability to regulate sugar (associated with obesity and a slue of other health issues). This leads to more oxidative stress and the cycle continues to worsen. Prolonged elevated levels of cortisol destroys tissue, creates inflammation and increases oxidative stress. People who don’t eat enough or who exercise too much tend to have higher levels of cortisol

These two chemicals are mentioned because they are destructive and because our actions dictate when they will be released. Insulin needs sugar. Without an increase in blood sugar, the body will not need to release insulin. We get sugar from the food we eat. If we eat less sugar, we can improve our sensitivity and recover some of the lost homeostatic functioning. Cortisol is released in response to stress; any type of stress – getting scared, thinking about something bad, getting hurt, not getting enough sleep, not going to the bathroom regularly, having too busy a work schedule, children, relationships, your sex life / lack of one, going shopping, ….. doing ANYTHING will create some stress. The issue begins when there is no escape and recovery from the stress and the cortisol the body releases. Consider it like low grade adrenaline – it gets the body going, but it damages the body a little bit each time it is released. If this damage is not repaired before the next stressor, the body grows weaker. This wear and tear begins to compromise function leading to disease. Getting away from stress can be a little tougher than not eating junk food for 5 days, but most of the things that cause us stress usually have very simple solutions.

The statistical story says there’s a relationship between the amount of pollution we bring into our bodies and the occurrence of disease. Every action has consequences and a need to recover. We DO have control over a lot of the internal environment so we do play a big hand in maximizing our vitality. Our bodies deal with our choices.

Grief Is Like A Concussion

For someone who hasn’t experienced grief it is tough to get a handle on what it is like to go through.

Astounding is the amount of pain you can feel and the lack of control you have over it at times. Science covers it – the experience of grief is chemical and it is dynamic in both time and make-up such that you experience different things at different times and the interval between the spontaneous grief moments is random. You cannot expect a linear recovery when a loved on dies. Some moments will be filled with a paralyzing sadness, then you may feel a wave of guilt followed by laughing. Your wit can be sharp and draw out the humor of the situation then you can seems to chew on your words unsure of what they mean and why you are saying them. Healing from it is not like the recovery from a broken leg.

Healing from grief is like healing from a concussion as the symptoms and nature of the injury are very similar. With head trauma, the brain has been injured changing mental function and forcing recovery / adaption. With grief, mental functioning has been changed forcing adaption and an enormous revision of your world view. In both cases, other people can’t see the injury and both are all in your head.

The experience of a concussion isn’t nice. You feel wrong and dumb. There’s something missing from the way you think, it’s slower, not as sharp and the spontaneous answers seem grid-locked inside a haze. Emotionally you’re fine, then you’re crying wanting everything to be over, then the mania or elation, followed by being fine….It is crazy behavior. It feels real enough as all of it happens, but during the fine times the lows don’t seem possible.

The part of the reason why I find healing from grief so unpleasant because the pain is coming from inside me and in an ongoing way. With a traumatic body injury, a broken leg for example, there is a linear improvement once the injury has been stabilized. With grief, months later the pain can feel as fresh as the moment when you first heard the news.

Someone could get good at the grief process because it is a skill. There’s a way to manage it that reduces the stress to those around you while letting you continue to be fairly productive. But as processes go, it is one with no clear end point. Flesh and bone heal in 2-3 months, the brain recovers when all of the old functionality has been restored through reorganization and rewiring.

Nothing Means Something

I forgot to charge my iPod before the gym. This is usually a pain in the ass because the music at the gym doesn’t always inspire. And it didn’t on this day, though it didn’t matter, the place was January busy. A glut of new members is all that many long term lifters need to get it going. When contrasted with the new people we look outstanding and this makes us trying harder. The average of the place drops creating new outliers and it’s nice to suddenly look and feel a little more successful. We try to pay it back by bringing our best and being polite and helpful.

This day it was a couple of the new members that made my day.

Two average early 20’s guys. The one who knew more about training was setting the tone for their workout; the only thing that struck me about the program was that the new guy didn’t seen to need the amount of rest, and that only registered because I was able to hear them talking.

The more experienced guy (J) is pretty confident. He looks like he does well with people. What he’s saying is fast, funny and non-offensive. The new guy (H) is kind of rigid, being out of his element, but as the workout continues it seems like the confidence is rubbing onto him. He seems taller, his laugh gets deeper, there is an emerging swagger.

The hot female trainer walks past them being trailed by her client who is sort of slugging a trail of sweat behind her. “Huh, she does have a clue,” my thought, is not copied by the two training dudes. The confident guy thinks something that fires him up. There’s a slight twitch and his energy grows. He seems larger now, maybe taller, I don’t know, but there just seems to be more of him. The opposite seemed to happen to the new guy. It wasn’t just the contrast thing, it wasn’t just that he seemed less large, it was that he was actually smaller. His shoulders were rounding again, his face was longer and the floor was in his line of sight. The trainer killed the fan of this wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tubeman. I keep lifting, slightly unsettled.

I pick-up the conversation between the two guys a few minutes later. J is giving H the gears. He has seen the same thing as me and he is now telling H the reason he needed the gym was because of girls like her.

“You don’t feel equal or worthy of them. She’s interesting, not my type H, but honestly, she’s got your sense of humor. Lift hard, level the field and everything will be fine. Oh, and actually talk to her as well.”

“How?”

“Like that, Jesus Christ man, what the hell did someone do to you? Smile, say hi, ask a stupid question, tell her something stupid, or interesting, see what she does.”

“What am I waiting for?”

“The Kool-Aid man. That’s how it goes, he crashes through the wall when soul mates find each other…. I actually sometimes hate you. You are waiting for anything. Think about it, if you ever go out with her you’re gonna need to talk about stuff. On dates, most of that stuff is just questions. But before you get the chance to bore the hell out of her with your life, you need to find-out if you can talk to her about anything. Actually, you need to know if she’ll talk back to you at all. It’s pretty obvious man, people who are interested in you will talk to you. If she doesn’t talk back or it’s too much effort to get her to talk, you shouldn’t have taken your shirt off.”

I’m laughing inside. There’s wisdom in his words.

People communicate with those they are interested in. If the girl thinks the boy is interesting, she’ll talk to him. If a guy starts to like a girl he’ll make the efforts to be around her. All of my relationships have started with a smile and a hello, and then us riffing on something. Every relationship that I didn’t have started the same way but with one or both of us not getting enough out of the conversation to bother having a second one.

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong – TED Video

What does it feel like to be wrong? The answer will probably surprise you.

Another fantastic TED video, this one by Kathryn Schulz and the topic is “On being wrong.”

How does it feel — emotionally — how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing — thank you, these are great answers, but they’re answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you’re wrong? (Laughter) Realizing you’re wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny… But just being wrong doesn’t feel like anything.

I’ll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there’s this pathetic coyote who’s always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there’s a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he’s a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what’s funny — at least if you’re six years old — is that the coyote’s totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he’s in mid-air. That’s when he falls. When we’re wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we’re like that coyote after he’s gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we’re already wrong, we’re already in trouble, but we feel like we’re on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

That resonated with me. Mistakes only feel like mistakes when we realize them to be mistakes. Until the error is realized and accepted by us we feel like we are correct. We can roll through years of life after a mistake is made before the light goes on and we change direction.

Emotions are handy. There’s a very good reason why a human being will feel confident after they make a decision. ANY decision that is made that does not injure us IS an effective action because we did not get injured. It feels wrong to make the decision to do something that we know will injure us. The spontaneous emotion (feeling wrong) tells us that there is a pattern in the immediate environment that matches something from the past in a particular way. In the absence of both an emotional response and a logical reason not to do something, we feel nothing, which is to say we feel correct.

Experts in an area understand this more than most because very often they feel the errors before they can identify them. When coaching movement, seasoned trainers will tell you what the issue is with a client before they can tell you how they know. When you ask them about this many will say that they got a feeling about the imbalance or recruitment issue and then noticed the symptoms.

Sadly though, this doesn’t just apply to work. It applies to ALL areas of life. Everything that feels right does so ONLY because you didn’t get hurt before. But this is a very low quality way of moving through life as it only helps us avoid situations that were injurious. Things that are an aggravation, cause us to remain average, or simply don’t work for us anymore don’t feel wrong because they aren’t hurting us enough to register that way.