Month: September 2014

Cognitive Biases – Some Reasons Why Nothing Changes

With the sheer amount of sensory information that bombards us at every moment it is not surprising that our brains have evolved to use shortcut to help filter the important information out of the noise. These shortcut serve us well, but the automatic nature of them can present us with challenges when we neglect information or make a decision to act without getting more information.

Cognitive Biases by Drake Baer and Gus Lubin on Business Insider gives a list of automatic ways of thinking that can lead to errors in thought. The list is important, not just because it outlines some of the ways that the human brain can deflect accurate perceptions, but because of their nature, we cannot automatically notice them occurring. This is critical. You can combat them using direct conscious effort, but this will take effort and may never become automatic.

Consider the Conservatism bias, “where people believe prior evidence more than new evidence or information that has emerged,” for a moment. This bias may be active within you right now as you look through the list of the cognitive biases and think that they are false and don’t exist. The fact of the matter is, they are real, and over time your brain may begin to accept them as true and alter your understanding of the world to accommodate for their existence. But for the time being, before your brain assimilates this new information, everything you know about how the brain works says that it is a logical information processing machine that puts the same weight on all information it receives.

Why someone would feel this way makes sense. If we are still alive, everything we did before contributed to our survival. Anything new that we learn may not contribute to our survival so we resist it. Why accept untested information when the consequences can be so dire?

Okay, a few thousand years ago. But given that our brain hasn’t evolved much in the last 20000 years, it is no wonder that these cognitive biases exist. Our brain is the product of an environment that ceased to exist eons ago but is still running the same software with the same intention and now both need to be updated.

Read the list and notice some of the instances in your life were these cognitive biases has played a role in your thinking. You may not commit all of them and are likely very good at preventing some of them from happening. That’s great, it means that we are not powerless to their impact. We can, with conscious effort and practice, become aware of them, observe them happen and reprocess the impacted moment bias free. Taking this moment before acting will make your life better, and much closer to what you want it to be.

“The Fog Of War” – Eleven Lessons Applied To Personal Training

Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ during the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He had an interesting life with many jobs, but as he got older he opened-up a lot about Vietnam. He had no lust for war and had reservations about it while he was in a position of influence. When he left office in 1968 he had already suggested that the sunk cost of the Vietnam war was too high and that the US should transition their direct fighting role to the South Vietnamese. These suggestions were not accepted and the fighting continued.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 documentary film about Robert McNamara. What is interesting is that he admitted to his mistakes and expressed that he had done some very wrong things while Secretary Of Defense. He learned from his actions and tried to move forward applying these lessons.

From the movie, the 11 lessons are:

  1. Empathize with your enemy
  2. Rationality will not save us
  3. There’s something beyond one’s self
  4. Maximize efficiency
  5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
  6. Get the data
  7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
  8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning
  9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
  10. Never say never
  11. You can’t change human nature

When I read the list, I considered how these lessons would apply to personal training. This is possible if we regard war as a partnership between two countries / groups to fight; in a fashion similar to the partnership between client and trainer. Maybe it’s more of a thought exercise and that I have defined the players in a way that allows me to apply the lessons to something that they were never intended to cover. And that is fine, what matters is if something is useful, not that it is right.

1) If a client wants to change, you’ll benefit from gaining an understanding about how they are suffering and what is motivating them to change their course. While you may not know what it is like to be in chronic pain or how unsatisfying seeing your reflection can be, a moment or two spend considering these things can soften the most dogmatic trainer enough to actually connect with a client to establish the trust needed to guide them towards a more fulfilling path.

2) Burning more calories than we consume is, for the most part, how people lower their body weight. That is a logical and rational thought. People know this yet it does not help them achieve their fat loss goals. Their choices are based on something less rational so the solution is likely going to flow out of uncovering or addressing the illogical something that is making life unfold as it is.

3) Often, people will only change for other people. Having enough energy to be an fantastic mother is one of the biggest motivators for a women to begin to exercise and improve her cardiovascular health. Being told that you are 6 months away dying from a heart attack moves people to make the changes they need to in order to enjoy eventually seeing their children graduate, get married and start their own families.

4) Busy people do not have ample time to do all the things that are needed to quickly achieve optimal health. If they are able to create 3 hours a week to dedicate to to improving it, these three hours need to pack in as much of the most effective movements as possible. Stretching, while important, is not going to improve strength or boost energy as much as lifting weights and increasing movement intensity to elevate heart rate. In this case, there is an enormous opportunity cost to stretching or low intensity exercise.

5) If your goal represents a 5% change in your body / fitness, you need to dedicate a small amount of time to it. If the goal is a 50% change, proportionately more effort is needed. Both the client and the trainer will spend a lot more time and effort at the beginning that then will towards the end simply because there is less to achieve towards the end.

6) Great trainers, like great people, make great decisions when they have all the information they need to make a great decision. Without the information to guide your decisions, your solutions will be incomplete and maybe even geared towards solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Listening without judgment is critical for collecting the highest quality data. You’ll remain open to what is actually occurring and this will shape your counsel.

7) Cognitive biases impact our perceptions in such a way that we see what we believe we see and we find the evidence we need in order to support our beliefs.
The things we see may not exist at all and the real world is likely somewhat different from how we perceive the real world. Effective personal trainers are always aware that they have the capacity to see things that aren’t there and to believe things that are not true. These keep the trainer open to the world and bring them closer to seeing the truth as it unfolds in front of them.

8) Progress is a state of constant change and each change may impact the next action. Effective coaches re-examine their clients course regularly and select different actions when they are called for. They know the reason for doing particular things and will not continue coaching something if a better action exists.

9) Doing good work for your clients is going to mean that you engage the worst parts of their behavior. You may not track in completely on their reason for over eating chips and under eating veggies, but to do the good work as a trainer, you are going to have to engage your clients evil and self destructive actions.

10) Everything that is possible IS possible and will come to be with the correct strategy and enough hard work. If the possible remains impossible it is simply because the strategy is incorrect or the work has not been done. “Never” is something that is said at the end of life or in the event that someone quits working towards their goal.

11) You cannot change human nature and as a personal trainer, you need to be aware of your clients nature. In some cases you can just tell someone to stop eating candy and they will stop eating candy – it’s not these peoples nature to eat candy. Regardless, you will need to work with a persons nature to help move them towards their goal. Someone who loves eating candy will probably always love to eat candy so they need to be allowed to eat candy every now and then because their nature will be expressed if repressed for too long, and these unplanned expressions tend to be over the top and extreme. You can work with their nature by asking them to eat good quality food 80% of the time, and have some candy once a week.

It’s probably fair to say that any good lesson can be applied somewhat to any other area in life. The Fog Of War does present some lessons and growth opportunities for personal trainers.

Your Self-Talk Might Be Holding Them Back

Fitness professionals spend a lot of time talking – they give instructions, coaching, advice and wisdom. They listen to their gut and to their clients say out loud the solutions to the problems their intuition identifies. And it is not just fitness professionals who do this, it is a habit of almost all people. Assume something is wrong, identify what it is and come-up with a solution.

There are many areas in which problems do need to be solved quickly – areas of survival and imminent threat – but the fitness field is not one of these areas.

The fitness industry is an area of choice and not of survival. Those who engage in fitness activities are usually working towards improving the quality of their life, NOT just surviving it. Any work in the area of choice requires a different approach than the innate problem / solution automatic approach all humans exhibit.

When we, as fitness professionals, listen to our guts and point out the problems we perceive in our clients, we kick the achieving of their potential down the road even further. Problem / solution approaches require obedience and eliminate choice.

The better approach is to give the clients choices, many of them, and let them know the ones that will lead them to the life they want to have. Your knowledge comes into play when you educate them about the impact of each of these choices, along with knowing which choices there are to make. You’ll use your skills to coach them when they make a choice and to keep them on track. Your wisdom will be called upon when you frame their previous choices in terms of serving exactly what they were about at the time – they choose the exact amount of movement and to eat the exact amounts and types of foods that made their life exactly what they wanted, needed, and what it was. Your role is to contribute to their self-awareness that they have exactly the power they need to make real the life they need to live, to shine a light on the fact that they have been wielding this power for years and that they can use it whenever they want, to make different choices and to create a new experience. They are free to choose, not because there are right choices or wrong choices, but because there are only choices.

So, when you notice yourself feeling that one of your clients needs to do something different, stop yourself from speaking and consider what is going on for a moment; is your-self talk playing out the role of problem solving when there is no problem to solve or is something else occurring? If you have identified a problem, make sure you adjust your thinking so you voice the choices that exist and leverage the clients own power to make and follow though on the choice THEY make.

Fight the urge to believe that YOU know better and accept that the client knows what is right for them REGARDLESS of what your self-talk is claiming.

Some End Of Life Considerations You May Not Have Considered

Everyone dies. Until that changes, there is a very good chance that you will need to deal with the end of life of someone you care about; maybe even yourself.

The challenge in dealing with these issues is that death is an emotionally charged subject. As such, your logical thinking capabilities are going to be turned-down or off and your actions will be automatic. The goal of this post is to outline some of the things that can happen and offer-up an alternative possibility that will serve your interest more effectively. Keep in mind that almost everyone is selling something and there are people who will take advantage of your decreased resistance and get you to buy things you don’t want, need or have options about.

1) Parking – for some reason the parking garages of many hospitals are now regarded as profit centers to help bridge the gap between costs and funding. This may be true, but it is a poor justification for charging the loved ones of a terminally ill person $16 a day to park. This cost can grow very quickly and may eventually become a reason for NOT visiting. $112 a week is money that can be better spent.

What To Do: If you cannot get a ride to and from the hospital consider finding a parking lot that is close-by and does not cost anything. If you do need to pay for parking, look for a weekly / monthly pass. These passes may be transferable so you can share it among your relatives and other loved ones.

2) Bringing your own casket / urn – in Ontario you are allowed to supply your own casket / urn and the funeral home legally must use them. This can save you thousands of dollars because you remove another tier of profit takers.

What To Do: Google “casket outlet” and check out some of the sites. You’ll quickly notice that the caskets look great; the same as the ones you will be offered at the funeral home. The outlet will deliver the casket to the funeral home so after you buy it, you can focus your energy on the more important things that need to be addressed.

3) Embalming is not necessary if there is only going to be a single viewing. The tips of the fingers and the finger nails won’t look the same, they’ll likely appear slightly discolored and a little shriveled, but the face will look effectively the same. Having seen both the embalmed and un-embalmed it is a fair statement that neither looks like a living person.

What To Do: If there is only going to be a single viewing, talk to the funeral director about not embalming. They’ll likely try to sell you the service, but they’ll be able to explain the visual differences.

4) You can barter with almost everyone involved in the end of life industry. There is a huge mark-up in everything associated with funerals so you are free to ask for discounts, ask for different vendors and to supply your own. There are a few items / processes that must be taken care of by government regulated companies – there is no DIY cremation for example – so anticipate “no” on a few items, but there is no good reason to pay a 400% mark-up on flowers or catering.

What To Do: Know your budget and be firm with it. Tell the funeral director your budget and always be aware that the amount of money spend on a service has no connection to the life the person lived or the amount of love you feel towards them. The directors are going to suggest more expensive services, upgrades and add-ons that will balloon the cost in no time. They want to create a beautiful experience so their suggestions are probably fair. But only YOU know the experience that is appropriate so stay firm with that. Paying more money for the same experience may not make sense so take the time to consider all of the options and to ask for a lower price.

Every life will come to an end. It can be sad but this sadness should not mean that you get ripped off. Knowing what you want for yourself or for your loved one will arm you to make good decisions that mean you pay only what you need to pay and that you get only what you want. The intensity of the grief will fade and, when it does, it doesn’t need to be replaced with regret or hours of work to pay for stuff you were sold unnecessarily.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial

Heather and I took a trip to Washington DC on the Labor day weekend and spend a couple of days walking up and down the National Mall looking at the many sites.

I was particularly moved by the quotes at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial.

What landed on me most of all was that the quotes apply to no person or group of people specifically, but to all of mankind. His language was inclusive, he referenced an almost universal struggle against the injustices suffered by any person. The quotes are from a time in human history when a number of different groups of people were pushing society to give them the same rights as the most privileged of any society. He was a man of colour, but before that, he was a huMAN and powerfully communicated the equality of all people.

Reading the quotes and noticing all the people who were spending time at the memorial it was both fantastic and frightening. Fantastic that a member of our species was capable of communicating so clearly what is right and needed for society to truly prosper. Frightening that some would regard this as so dangerous to their way of life that they would be compelled to murder him, and so many who were working to move society forward.

Society has made some strides towards embracing the dream he had, and we’ll continue move in that direction. But at the core of the love and hate that people share and act upon are beliefs. There is nothing unique about people today who view equality as a guiding principle. Had they been born in the 1940’s there is a good chance that they would not considered race or gender to be just tiny differences between people. They may simply believe differently than we do today because they were taught something different.

The quotes are worth reading and reflecting on even if you are not at the memorial. They apply as much today as they did when he spoke them, and they’ll always apply no matter how enlightened we may become.

Dreams – Meaningless? Maybe, But Something Is Realigning

During my coaching conversations I ask about sleep and dreaming. The answer to these questions are import because they can indicate a lot about a persons level of stress, their readiness for change, and they uncover a lot about unfulfilled expectations. This is not an opinion that is supported by a lot of scientists so I accept that I’m flirting with pseudo-science here.

Sleep is important for recovery. 6-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is critical for most people to push reset on their brain and bodies, consolidate their daily memories and repair their muscles, joints and nervous systems from their daily activity. If there has been a change in sleeping patterns recently, or if someone isn’t getting sufficient amounts of uninterrupted sleep, we’ll try to unpack the reasons for it. Usually the things that wake someone up in the middle of the night tend to reflect some unresolved conflict or identity issue that needs to be resolved.

I have notices that during times of unrest / upheaval, someone may begin to dream a lot more. After my dad died, I experienced months of vivid clear and memorable dreams the likes of which I had never and have never again experienced. Again, the scientists cannot make any claim about the cause, but anecdotally there seems to be a connection to changes in dream patterns and life or transformational stress.

The key reason why I’ll ask people about there dreams though is to help build rapport and to give my clients the opportunity for some introspection. Last night I had a dream that I was one of the characters in the television show “The Walking Dead”. It felt real and I was filled with a sense of despair that one of the walkers was going to get me. Now I know that it is fiction and has no baring on my real life, so it was a random experience that brain cultivated, right? Well, maybe not. I have been spending a lot of time reading about the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. It is possible that my brain, in an attempt to consolidate some of what I have learned, integrated some of the Ebola information into a freaky dream about zombies and imminent death if they get you.

Since there is no universal mean of dreams, we are free to interpret them however seems most fitting. This is a great way to get people to talk about the things that are on their mind. When they interpret a dream, they tend to do so using the information that is immediate available to them at the time. Often times, they’ll attribute the dream to something that they didn’t speak about before, but that is having a big impact on their progress. Even if the scientists are correct and that dreams are meaningless, the conversation and insight that that the dream analysis can be valuable. Given that the goal of training is to move the client forward, I’ll use any ethical means available.