Day: May 7, 2012

On Instructing Well

It turns out that I have been teaching a good cycling class for a long time. I haven’t really been sure if I’ll be able to do it in the hours leading up to the start of class, but each week the right words seem to flow out of me; and for this I am grateful. I have taught for more than 5 years and been on stage for 500 or 600 times, spend 1000’s of hours practicing and am moving towards being an expert.

Something odd was happening though, I was getting better and better, participants were saying that they really enjoyed my classes, but it was never clear to me why they were. I always thought it was because I would work hard and deliver a high energy performance. This is part of it, but it isn’t the entire thing – and I’m not sure it is very much of it now. I posted the following to facebook this morning:

If you anchor the feelings of athletic performance, accomplishment, fun and success to your class participants they will fall in love with your classes, your performance and their Group Exercise enrollment. Get them to feel their heart beating faster, the pain in their muscles as they grow stronger. Have them hear their quickened breath and the sound of the room gasping for air. Ask them to look are their hands, arms, legs and the other members of the class to see the sweat and glow of extraordinary effort. Coach them to notice what their highest moment looks, sounds and feels like and start being their most powerful inner voice.

THAT is why I am getting better. My classes remind people of just how great their bodies can make them feel when they are training. I take them on a physical journey that connects many of the things that are what it means to be truly alive – hard work, passion, intensity, fun, crushing limitations, creating and being new possibilities, love of life and existence in the moment – and anchor these to the room, the bikes, and the experience that is a class.

Life gets clearer, a little bit each day!

60 Days Into Act 2

It has been about 60 days since I gave-up smoking, alcohol, sugar, compulsive eating, compulsive anxiety, compulsive exercise and compulsively blaming other people for the outcome of my decisions. I feel better than I have in a very long time. As well as I can tell, I haven’t felt this excited about the possibility of my future since right before we moved to Canada when I was 9. I feel more energized than I have in my adult life. I’m a 39 year old child! Joyful, passionate, fearless, authentic and with a well developed brain, well trained body and a spirit that is grounded in the essence of the universe.

I’m almost 4 decades old and now firmly entrenched in the possibilities of the future that will become my present. There is a growing sense of joy and gratitude for all that I have been through, the people who have come into my life, the experiences we have shared, the joy, the pain, the choices that makes life what it is now and the realization that just because I have been doing something doesn’t mean that I will continue to do it. My future is wide open, loaded with anything.

During a coaching session today, Sean got me to consider the areas in my life that haven’t been working out or for which breakthroughs have not occurred. The only area that hasn’t seemed to get positive traction is in the area of Love, Sex and Romance (SLR). I have noticed that while I do get closer and closer with each relationship, I’m still not getting it effectively; now this isn’t to say that I haven’t found, dated or been in a relationship with my future partner, it’s just to say that to date my track record has not demonstrated a clear breakthrough in-spite of the progress I’m making in other areas of my life.

The coaching in this area is fairly straight forward because if I keep doing the same thing and, until I know what I’m looking for, I cannot authentically make a call on what I want for the rest of my life. My future will be better served if I take a more active role in uncovering what I am actually looking for in terms of SLR. The advice seems accurate because in almost every other area of my life I have tried out a lot of different experiences, fine-tuning each one in an effort to create the possibility of the career, body, friendships, spirituality that will touch, move and inspire me each day of my life.

To this end, I love my friends, I love the jobs that I am doing, I’m extremely happy with my body and health and proud of the spirit that is taking root in my identity. I know with certainty that my least enlightened actions have already occurred and I have learned a lot of lessons from all that I have done. It’s the lessons that I have yet to learn from the things I have NOT yet done that remain, and the goal of the session was to help me see and accept that my breakthroughs are waiting my new and different actions.

It is with a sense of anticipated trepidation that I consider the next moves in terms of SLR. The thoughts themselves don’t cause anxiety, I’m actually excited about the possibility of being more spontaneous and doing things very differently than before. What is perplexing is the unknown – I have no idea what these things will be, and that is part of what act 2 is all about – being the unknown.

My LandMark Forum Part 9 – The 6 Weeks Following

On the weekend of March 23, 24, 25 I attended the LandMark Forum in Toronto. It changed my life in a very profound way. I cannot credit all of the transformation I have and am undergoing on the weekend but it played a big role and remains a new starting point for my new being. I was more than 3 weeks into complete sobriety and the end of my compulsive behaviors and stopping as much as I stopped will change a human being very dramatically. I’ll just say that I was ready for the experience and the timing of the things couldn’t have been better.

My focus has been outstanding! I have a much cleared head that I ever remember and my thinking seems to be more effective. There are fewer open loops in my life because I am being integrity – whenever I realize that I’m drifting off course, I correct it as soon as I can.

My energy has never been better! When I am on purpose and just being, the energy of the universe just channels through me. Gravity seems to decrease and I almost float around. I know I’m off course when my energy level nose dives – time in the car is a lot more challenging than any other moments I live now – this is the opposite to what I was experiencing a few months ago when I would feel more alive when I was by myself driving.

My dreams are wild and anything but normal. This is what I have been expecting. I am not the same person I was before the LandMark Forum weekend. This is a battle going on in my brain to assimilate the world and universe into my antiquated world view. This takes time and each day I am faced with something new and many things that I find scary. I acknowledge that fear that exists, I accept that there is a survival benefit to trying to keep things as they are but that the universe does not remain static even for an instant. Emotions and dreams are the key ways – and are likely the fastest ways – to uncover what is going on in the unconscious mind. When I’m dreaming or feeling, something is matching or resonating with past memories. The nature of the match may not be clear, but there is information being given to my consciousness and it is irresponsible of me to ignore it.

I’m seeing where and why my life hasn’t turned out as I had hoped and as I am being integrity, my future actions become clearer. And some of the possibilities that fantastic – a sustainable relationship with a girl that adds value and enjoyment to both of our lives, being in a partnership that helps cause greatness in both of us – and the path to those possibilities is scary – my path to this moment, while a very real creation of myself, a product of my will for a specific future needs to change because my relationships are not working for me or the girls I date.

Life is scary, dangerous and when I embrace this, I become bold, fearless and indestructible. I speak frankly about this fear now, be it sitting in front of a new performance coaching client, a new or old girl friend, in front of a cycling class, my family, my friends, a stranger. I believe that life is lived fully when we acknowledge this fear and allow it to tune our performance up vs. shutting it down. I’m aware that I’m going to get rejected, have breakdowns, have things not go the way I want, but none of these things matter because they are always there and have always been a possibility. I may not want them to happen, but I grow more when things don’t go the way I had hoped they would. And I live more when I take the chance and start being the possibility of the life I am here to live.