Month: July 2019

The “New” Canada’s Food Guide – A Brief History and What Is Missing – Part One

Body fat is stored energy and the process of storing it when we eat too much and burning it when consumption drops below the levels needed for maintenance represents livings beings best efforts at dealing with periodic food scarcity.

This is the first installment of a post that talks about the new Canada’s Food Guide, its history, and some interesting facts about human beings that make us resistant to the efforts of the government to nudge our eating habits in a more positive direction.

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A few months ago the government released the 2019 Canada’s Food Guide. This is something that they do every decade or so with the goal of helping to further educate the public about what they should and should not be eating. It’s the government so it’s important to take their advice with a grain of salt because, in spite of their best intentions, they have a country to run so there is a big disincentive to making a very specific claim about the healthfulness or its direct opposite about any particular product given their reliance on the tax revenue generated by Canadian businesses – it would be very unwise to state that “meat is bad for people and should be avoided” even if it is true, which it isn’t, because the meat industry in Canada is huge. This means that the guide is going to be a combination of facts, some speculation based on science and marketing based on the needs of special interest groups and industry lobbyists.

When we look at the first version of the food guide – the Official Food Rules released in 1942 – we notice a single serving of potatoes per day as the recommendation as was a serving of whole grain products along with 4-6 slices of Canada Approved Bread. Milk was recommended for everyone with children drinking twice as much. It appears below:

These are the health protective foods. Be sure to eat them every day in at least these amounts (use more if you can).

MILK- Adults- 1/2 pint. Children- more than 1 pint. And some cheese as available.
FRUITS- One serving of tomatoes daily, or of a citrus fruit, or of tomato or citrus fruit juices, and one serving of other fruits, fresh, canned or dried.
VEGETABLES- (In addition to potatoes of which you need one serving daily) – Two servings daily of vegetables, preferably leafy green or yellow and frequently raw.
CEREALS AND BREADS- one serving of a whole grain cereal and four to six slices of Canada Approved Bread, brown or white.
MEAT, FISH, etc. – One serving a day of meat, fish, or meat substitutes. Liver, heart or kidney once a week.
EGGS- at least 3 or 4 eggs weekly

Eat these foods first, then add these and other foods you wish.

Some source of vitamin D such as fish liver oils, is essential for children, and may be advisable for adults.

It’s important to keep in mind that this was released during the WW2 and while food scarcity wasn’t necessarily a problem in Canada, it was not a time of plenty for most Canadians and the primary reason why organ meat was recommended. Plus, it was also 70 years ago meaning that the availability of particular types of foods was seasonal. Canada is large and it has definite seasons meaning that very little grows in most of the country for 6 months of the year. The robust transportation systems we enjoy presently did not exist meaning that fresh or fresh-ish vegetables from South America or California were simply not available. Flash frozen or canned vegetables were about the only types of garden vegetables that would be available for a large portion of the year.

The food supply chain was very different and much of what we presently have access to did not exist. Sugar was glucose from tropical sources and not sucrose, which is a combination of glucose and fructose, which is primarily sourced from corn. And it was very expensive so it wasn’t used very much. Boxed cereals and boxed anything were not as abundantly available as they are now and the chemical industry, while it did exist, was not such an integral part of what we consider the food industry. It was a simpler time, with fewer choices and with local foods contributing to the overwhelming majority of what was available to buy.

This is not good or bad, just different. The eating habits of people had less to do with food preferences and more to do with what was actually there to be eaten. People would go hungry because of a lack of availability and would find that what they ate would be more connected to the time of year or the seasons than anything else.

The Food Guide was the government’s effort to ensure that the people would receive adequate nutrition, and it didn’t have a lot to do with big business because big business wasn’t really a thing that had much of a foot hold in the food supply chain. Potatoes were recommended because they store well, so Canada had a lot of them. They didn’t grow nearly as much corn or grain as they do now and many of the things that flour allows us to make spoil very quickly without the chemical preservatives that presently exist, so these things would only be made as required.

In the years and decades that followed the introduction of the Food Guide, things changed dramatically. Spoilage stopped being a concern, food processing allowed for the creation of things that would last for months or years, and the things that human beings find palatable or irresistible, became cheaper to grow and manufacture. Food science became a thing and the chemical industry contributed their part to the creation of low cost, low nutrient, high energy foods that have an extended shelf life and trigger all of the reward centers of the brain that were historically only stimulated with rare, hard to find and scarce food. For example, ripe fruit and honey were available seasonally and then not at all. Food science put an end to this scarcity meaning sweet high calorie food stuffs were available year round.

Food choice and preferences took over. We no longer needed to be content with simply satisfying hunger, we could now begin to focus on satisfying a craving for a particular thing. The canned apples or peach jam were replaces as the winter time source of sweetness with things like boxed cookies, candy, or low cost chocolate. Say what you like about the health effects of eating too much fruit, or its relatively low nutritional content, but when given a choice between preserved fruit or modern candy, our species will get more nutrition and less energy out of things that grow than things that are manufactured. Again, this is not good or bad, it is just a thing that is true. Small amounts of manufactured and boxed candy is fine for healthy people, it just isn’t as beneficial as a similar amount of grown food.

The reasons for this are very straight forward. In order to put something in a box for consumption at some point in the future it cannot spoil and it cannot change form. Spoilage is prevented by adding things that prevent it or by removing the things that cause it meaning that preservatives are added or minerals are removed which result in novel combinations of chemicals that have never existed in nature before, let alone been consumed as food by anyone. These products maintain their form though the creative use of stabilizing agents that were discovered by the chemical industry. The traditional oils that were used to make things like bread and cookies were replaced with chemically altered oils that are solid at room temperature meaning the bread and cookies look and taste the same for months. These solid oils or fats are man-made creations and completely new to human beings – we have no evolutionary history with them meaning we have no idea how they will impact our bodies or what role they will play in gene expression.

In this case, this is bad, and for a few different reasons. The first is that adding hydrogen molecules to fat to make it more stable is, in essence, the creation of a new chemical. While it is safe to say that swallowing an individual hydrogen molecule or a few thousand of them along with each mouthful of food will be harmless to human beings, when these molecules are joined to other molecules to form a solid, they are no longer the same thing. Hydrogen is an element and an important gas that becomes a solid at -260 degrees C.

But when combined with other elements, it will help the resulting compound to form a solid at higher temperatures. Our species and anything that is alive on the planet now, only has an evolutionary history with hydrogen containing solids that exist in nature and only in the amounts that occur in nature. The manufacturing of trans-fats to create more stable oils artificially manipulates the ratio of their availability and it makes it available in a way that does not exist in nature – dairy and meat does have some trans-fat, but it also has other things that manufactured trans-fat does not, things that might work synergistically with the trans-fat to reduce or eliminate its harmful effects. The fact is that we KNOW the impact of too much trans-fat on human health, it is bad.

The second reason why adding hydrogen molecules to fat to create a more stable fat can be bad is because of how it will impact the brain. Fat is high energy (calorie) so our species has developed a taste for it because any members of our species that were motivated to eat it would seek it out and consume it whenever they could. This would mean they were consuming more energy than they were burning, and would lead to weight gain in terms of increased body fat. This extra body fat would be used when food was scarce giving these individuals a better chance of surviving a famine. Over time this survival advantage would be passed onto the following generations resulting in the tendency for human beings to find eating fat to be rewarding. By the same token and method, we also find eating sweet things to be rewarding and in a way that is proportional to the level of sweetness. When paired together, sweet things that are high in fat are almost completely irresistible to human beings. We learn very quickly that high fat sweet things give us a reward and we begin to seek out and consume these things. Sweet and fat have existed for as long as there have been people, but the combination of them, or the ease of access to things that contain a combination of them, is much more recent. Manufacture fats ensured that the food industry could supply these types of foods, in a stable form that will not spoil, in a constant and uninterrupted supply.

The food scientists have used our genes against us and created a food that we are almost powerless to say no to. Factor in the health damage that the manufacture fat causes to us and the size of the problem becomes evident. Narrative speaking, we are programmed to seek out and over eat the very things that will, in the long term, destroy our health and hurt our well-being.

For the sake of keeping this on track and because it isn’t entirely clear that GMOs and fertilizers are harmful to us, or as harmful as overeating trans-fat and sucrose, I’m going to return to the topic of the most recent version of the Canada Food Guide after stating that today, thanks to technology and the development associated with corporations and capitalism, we have access to an abundance of food, and year round access to almost everything that we are able to eat. Seasonal eating is no longer a thing that we have to stick to. While local foods will be cheaper at certain parts of the year, these food will be available year round if we have the money to buy them. This means that a lack of availability can no longer be cited as the reason why someone does not follow the Canada Food Guide – a lack of money to buy imported fruits and vegetables remains a reason but, as I will outline, it isn’t a valid reason for most of Canada’s population that live in larger and more populated areas.

A big change with the most recent version of the Guide is the elimination of a recommended number of servings. The previous version still provided a number of servings of each of the 4 food groups broken down by sex and age and it seemed to be geared towards getting adequate nutrition and adequate energy. Be aware, these two things are not the same. Nutrition is the vitamins, minerals and protein a food provides while energy is the stuff that the body will metabolize as fuel to power all of the physiological processes required to sustain life. For example, the body needs a certain amount of vitamin B12 to function optimally and it will get most of this vitamin from the meat you eat. Without the B12, things begin to breakdown and the body will start to direct any available B12 to the most critical processes. This means that a deficiency in a vitamin leads to reduced functioning of specific processes and not a global failure; this is a very good survival approach and is one that is used by most living things because it sustains life giving the organism the opportunity to seek out and consume the missing molecules. Your hair may fall out or your digestive system may become less effective, but you are still able to think and move – to hunt – and find some meat to replenish the B12 levels.

Energy is different from nutrition because it is the fuel for the metabolism. You need to consume energy fairly consistently to keep things going. When your food does not provide sufficient energy, your metabolic rate will begin to slow down and certain physiologically processes will begin to go off line. Non-essential processes will be first to drop off, things like hair and nail growth, followed by muscle repair and replacement of dead cells. Given long enough, the body will begin to consume its own tissues for energy – wasting diseases like AIDS and various late stage cancers are examples of this. However, unlike disease, if someone finds and starts to eat food, the body will start-up these processes and attempt to repair whatever damage was done and take care of whatever needs to be taken care of.

Body fat is stored energy and the process of storing it when we eat too much and burning it when consumption drops below the levels needed for maintenance represents livings beings best efforts at dealing with periodic food scarcity. You can be sure that within the genetic material of all people are combinations of DNA that code for this process and, as a result of the natural selective breeding that periodic famines caused, all of us are exceptionally good at storing body fat. Our potential ancestors who did not have the good genes for storing body fat died off during times of food scarcity leaving nothing but people who were uniquely coded to store fat.

The distinction between nutrition and energy is important because allows for a clear understand for the existence of malnourished people who are obese. The opposite can also be true although much less common given the huge difference between energy and vitamin requirements; one group of people who have a tendency towards adequate nourishment but insufficient energy consumption are those who are trying to extend their life through intense calorie reduction. This group eats large amounts of garden vegetables while refraining from foods that contain carbohydrate, fat and excessive protein. They will still desire to eat more as they will be hungry, they will just choose to not eat and, over time, learn to ignore food cravings and become accustomed to being hungry.

For everyone else hunger serves to motivate us to eat and it does not necessarily reflect our actual needs. It serves our survival needs.

Think about it this way: our genes have coded over-eating into our operating system because historically, those who over ate survived to reproduce. This means that we are coded to do the very thing that causes an increase in body fat. This tendency manifest itself in many different ways, or exists for a few different reasons, one of which is a latency between the time when we have eaten enough in terms of food volume and when the stomach sends the signals telling the brain that it is adequately filled. Rough estimates put this latency period at between 10 and 15 minutes; the exact length of time is less important than understanding the consequences to this phenomenon. The outcome is that we continue to eat past the point at which we should stop if replenishing our energy was our actual goal. This only makes sense IF overeating was in fact the goal for human beings.

Another powerful mechanism, one that I have already mentioned above, has to do with motivation. Human beings will have a tendency to do things that they find rewarding, and we find eating sweet or fat foods rewarding and find eating things that are a combination of sweet & fat to be incredibly rewarding. And it doesn’t take very long for us to figure out what we like and then to go after consuming it. Once we have uncovered it, we will over eat it at any opportunity and will often find ourselves continuing to eat it will after any reasonable amount of calories have been consumed. Some of us will, in fact, ignore the body’s “I am full” signal and continue to eat, and eat, and eat.

This makes sense given the relative scarcity of sweet and fat things in our ancestral past. It was better to gorge when the opportunity presented itself because it would usually only happen during the harvest season when fruit would fully ripen and when animals had enjoyed an abundance of food throughout the summer. Remember, all mammals have a significant amount of their genes in common, so they share the mechanism of storing body fat through over eating with us. Animals have more body fat at the end of fall / beginning of winter than they do at any other time, so they will contain more of the stuff we have learned to crave at this time of year. Coupled with an abundance of ripe fruit, we are going to be highly motivated to eat as much as we possibly can and to overeat, during harvest feasts. This allowed our ancestors to store the maximum amount of energy in the shortest period of time, which helped them get through the winter when food was scarce.

All of this worked perfectly, as evident by our species survival. Historically, we were able to get through the tough time because we over ate during the good times. Those who didn’t over eat, didn’t survive long enough to pass along their genes. While we rarely sat down to eating massive amounts of highly nutritious food, we were probably adequately nourished because the large amounts of higher energy food we did eat contained enough vitamins, minerals and protein for our bodies to function effectively. And it is worth considering the slow burn that nutrient deficiencies have on our ability to function, particularly when compared to the rapid onset of the negative consequences associated with a deficiency in energy consumption.

However, it works too well and it is now a major problem for modern people simply because we are running the identical code that we were 15000 years ago before farming of any type afforded us the freedoms associated with the elimination of food security.

Take a moment to consider what life would have been like before farming. We would exist in small groups and would have to follow the food. We’d eat as much as we could whenever we could, and then go periods of time when there wasn’t enough to eat. We’d live off of our body fat and we wandered around looking for animals to hunt and collecting whatever plant stuff we could that would provide us with anything useful. Life would be hard, a lot of our energy would go towards generating heat to maintain an appropriate body temperature and most of the rest would go toward finding our next meal. There would be very little specialization of labor because there wouldn’t be enough food to free some-up anyone from having to hunt or gather. There would be constant hunger separated by the occasional moments of gorging.

In a world were this was the norm, the ability to store energy when possible and the motivation to do the very thing that was needed to create a caloric surplus that storing energy required were essential.

Fast forward to 1942 when the first Canada Food Guide known as the Official Food Rules came out. Sure, we were running the same code that had us seek out and overeat high calorie foods and to overeat whatever food we had available, but we were not living in an environment of abundance. While it wasn’t necessarily a place of constant scarcity, given that farming existed and we had learned how to preserve enough things to make them available during the winter when nothing grew, it was not a place where there was unlimited food available to everyone. The more affluent did have improved access and they had higher body fat levels as a result, but in general, people looked more or less the same as they had for thousands of years; although there is some evidence to suggest that we were slightly taller and slightly bigger in terms of muscle and bone structure. Obesity was a very, very rare thing and being undernourished in terms of a deficiency of vitamins or minerals was more of a problem.

There was enough energy to go around but there would be seasonal droughts in terms of nutrients. This was not great, but it was a much smaller problem than having your population starving. So the government set out to solve this smaller problem and created the Official Food Rules in an effort to combat it.

Take a look again at these rules and notice how little food is actually being recommended in terms of servings, the language “when available” with reference to cheese and “at least these amounts” and the second last line “eat these foods first, then add these and other foods you wish.”

In my life time, I do not recall there ever bring a shortage of cheese, it has ALWAYS been available as far as I can tell. Regardless, they wanted to make sure everyone got enough calcium and believed that dairy was the best source of it. Next, they believed that if you were able to consume ONLY the outlined food that you would receive adequate nutrition in terms of vitamin and minerals. Finally, you had free range over what you ate AFTER you consumed the outlined food. You were fine to eat other things, like cookies or chocolate, and probably beer, but to do so only after you had eaten the other prescribed items. They are not limiting what you eat, they are saying eat at least these things before you eat other stuff. This form of languaging paints a picture that, as they viewed it at the time, did not include a significant number of people who were eating way too much. Obesity statistics are hard to find for this period of time and, while not statistically sound to say this, the lack of easily available statistics coupled with the available statistics of ~10% 1970, it is probably safe to conclude that obesity wasn’t much of a consideration let alone a problem.

The guide continued along in this fashion for about 3 decades until the 1977 Canada’s Food Guide when it began to take on a more graphical / metaphoric form. There are a few reasons why a flat text list of rules was no longer deemed sufficient enough to capture and maintain the attention of the population, like the availability of colour television, leading to a need to make things entertaining. The colour wheel that featured a smiling sun that was licking its lips is more playful and has pictures of specific food items of each type or category. It is easier to look at and is presented as two sided with more specific textual information on the back.

The name and number of recommended servings per day for two of the categories changed between the 1982 Canada’s Food Guide and the 1992 Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating. “Breads and cereals” was changed to “grain products” and the recommended servings increased from 4-5 to 5-12 as “fruits and vegetables” was changed to “vegetables and fruit” and the number of servings increased from 4-5 to 5-10. These changes reflect an increase in the availability of both grain and fruit along with a refocus on the importance of getting enough vitamins and minerals as indicated by the re-ordering of vegetables before fruits.

I remember this guide very well. It came out the year I graduated high school and it was what was in use when I took a nutrition class at university. It was also what was around when I first got exposed to the Atkins diet – an extremely low carbohydrate eating approach that causes people to enter a state called Ketosis meaning they are burning fat for energy vs. sugar. According to the recommendation in 1992 Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating, it would be impossible for someone get into ketosis if they followed it, even if they only consumed the lowest number of recommended grain servings. We were taught, and I believed, that ketosis was a dangerous state to be in and that it should be avoided at all costs. What wasn’t clear to me at the time was that ketosis was a completely natural state to get into and it was, in fact, the very state that we used to go into every time our food supply was reduced and we began to burn body fat for energy.

For what it worth, 5 servings of grain is a considerable amount of carbohydrate, while 12 servings is a massive amount and much more than most people should be consuming. According to the guide, one serving is 30 grams of cereal which has an average of 20 grams of carbohydrate, or 80 calories. This means that they recommend people eat between 100 and 240 grams of carbohydrate per day or 400 to 960 calories of carbs per day. Eating this amount of well above the threshold for ketosis. While ketosis is not the only way people will burn body fat, it is the most effective way, and the way in which our ancestors would have gone about it given that is what happens when the food supply is interpreted.

While there had been a trend of an increased number of servings of grain products in the newer versions of the guides, 1992 marks a huge increase from a max of 5 to a max of 12, while offering very little in terms of justification for eating more or less of them other than suggesting that teenagers should eat more while adults should eat somewhere in the middle.

The significance of this is very important and it has had a big impact on the number of people who are considered obese in the country. The early guides offered minimums and a suggestion that you could eat more AFTER you ate all of the recommended food, the 1992 guide gives vague advice and doesn’t explain the consequences of eating too many serving. This is a problem because there was no longer any food scarcity. There was an abundance of food, particularly grain products, which are high energy, and a massive selection of refined or processed grain products, which have a lower amount of fiber and therefore a higher percentage of calories that the body will metabolize for energy. Without clear instructions, with a higher recommended number of servings and a lack of food scarcity, people would just eat more because the guide said that they could or should.

Almost 6 Months Later – Post Revisited

The brains response and adaptation to death is logarithmic and not linear. Most of what it has to deal with occurs very early on, then there is a very rapid drop off. However, it has a non convergent property meaning that your life will never meet back up with the normal that once was. It will be new and it will be fine, but never again will it be the same.

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Seven years ago I wrote the post Almost 6 Months Later which contained some thoughts about the things that had happened in the six months following my fathers death. I believed that at that point I had moved most of the way through the grief process. 90 months later, I am certain that the process doesn’t ever have an end point. Instead, we get better at dealing with it as life moves on and our brain adjusts to create a new normal.

I am not sad and I do not believe that this is a pessimistic view. The fact is that we never stop developing and adapting to the stimulation we bring into our brains, so there is no reason to believe that adjusting to the death of a loved one ever stops. Our brains grow from the beginning of life and probably continue to grow for a few minutes after we take our last breath. They are complex organic computers that spawn and prune connections between billions of neurons to form long term memories and create processes that allow it to handle the world more effectively the next time the world brings it the same type of stimulation. They are never still and the only time they ever go dark is when we die.

In the original post, I spoke about someone who I met whose father had been given the diagnosis of a very slowly developing cancer. She was upset and having a tough time processing the news while her dad was very matter of fact about it. He was well into his eighties and didn’t really care all that much. He was old, had lived a complete life, and since he wasn’t actually running out of runway, he didn’t think it was worth the energy to worry about or to consider the diagnosis. He felt that there was as good a chance that old age would take care of things before the cancer did and since he wasn’t worrying about old age, it didn’t make any sense to deal with the fact that the doctor had told him that he had cancer.

A year later, Heather’s father was diagnosed with a few different types of cancer – no one was sure where the original tumor had been, but it had metastasized to the point that it was in his bones, throat, and possibly his brain. They said possibly because while he did have a brain tumor, it didn’t seem to grow at all between the scans; unlike the other tumors that ate his spine and began to close over his throat. Unlike my dad, who stood to gain very little from treatment, her dad was able to under go radiation and chemotherapy. The radiation worked wonders on his throat, opening it up again and allowing him to eat and drink anything he wanted, which he did. The chemo was less well tolerated, and he stopped it a few weeks in because of the side effects. After the tumors, the skin is the next place to begin to show the side effects of the chemicals – most of the chemotherapy medication that has traditionally been used in treating cancer works by killing tissue. It is reasonably specific in so far as it will primarily target the type of cell that makes-up the tumor, but it is not perfect and is not isolated to JUST the tumor cells. With chemotherapy there will be collateral damage and with him it began to take a toll on the skin of his lips and neck. Given that he was never going to be cured, he made the decision to stop the treatment and put an end to these awful side effects. He was close to seventy and had more or less made his peace with the life he had lived. He died the following July.

While at the time of my dads death, I was unable to find anything good about it; the possible exception being that since his GBM wasn’t painful, he got to enjoy the final 6 weeks of life as much as anyone can enjoy any six week period. The post I wrote six month later, I made mention to feeling useful to my friend because of what I had just experienced. With the sad news about Heather’s dad, I was able to be even more useful. This was a good thing, and it did, in a way, give my dads death a little more meaning or value. It wasn’t that I knew what Heather, her sister, and the rest of the family were going through, I didn’t, I couldn’t possibly know what their experience was like. But I did have experience with the process. So while I lacked the specific knowledge of what they were going through, she had someone to talk to about the feelings she was having and the thoughts that were popping into her mind with someone who was a little further along in the grieving process. I was able to talk to the very odd sensations and feelings that accompany your loved one seeming to improve with whatever treatment they receive and how there are feelings of disbelief that there is actually something wrong.

This is like an emotional time bomb that makes normal living close to impossible. No matter how good you feel, there’s a monkey on your back that at some point in the future something very crappy is going to happen. When you feel bad about what is going on, there is the thought that you need to cheer-up and enjoy your remaining time together. No matter what you are feeling, a thought pops into mind to tell you that you should feel something else. It’s a destabilizing experience, as though you are gas lighting yourself, and over time you begin to not trust how you feel or to simply allow yourself to experience whatever is occurring from moment to moment from any place other than the certain future when your loved one has died.

Her dad, just like mine, did his best to address this thing by encouraging his children and the rest of the family to go about their life’s as well as they could. There wasn’t any point in cycling on the future because it was going to happen when it was time. Until then it was just something to deal with later. On his advice, Heather and I took a trip to Mexico, our first big trip together. I don’t recall any specific moments of overwhelming sadness and the trip was a lot of fun.

Years later, Heather and I both have moments when we think about our dads. Speaking to my moments, I don’t get sad anymore, although there can be times when I wake-up feeling stunned that my dad is gone. These I know are just the emotional chemicals that my brain has released in response to some mental process that my brain has drawn a connection between and thoughts about my dad not being there. There have been a number of times in my past when I had these feelings, and they seemed to link-up to conscious thoughts relating to something that always was but was now no longer. Adjusting to dramatic change is tough and the brain isn’t very good at doing it all at once. It needs a lot of time and stimulation to eventually land in a place that doesn’t feel painful or register as loss, but is just a feeling of “offness.”

Of course, I have done a lot of stuff in the meantime that has had a big impact on how I approach the experience of being alive. There is no doubt in my mind that how I handled my father’s death served as another example of how some of my ways of operating were not helpful or were contributing to the level of difficulty I was having living from day to day. I accept this, and realize that dealing with death is not something that we are taught or that most people have much experience with. Improvements in healthcare, food availability, sanitation, safety regulations, and vaccinations have boosted life expectancy, meaning that the initial experience with the death of a loved one do not occur until much later in life. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it is great that people are living longer. Being alive is at least something, so the fact that more than twenty years have been added to the average life span in North America means twenty more years of that something. But on the other hand, it means that, statistically speaking, the first exposure to the death of a loved one is going to occur twenty years later than it would have before.

The significance of this delay is best understood when considering the compounding effect of experience over time. Someone who has been writing for twenty years is going to be much better at it than someone who has been writing for five years. In the case of physically writing, the fifteen extra years will give them much better physical control over their hand and finger movements, allowing them to become an expert in terms of handwriting. In the case of writing words that capture ideas, those extra years of practice will mean that the brain will have adapted more completely to whatever the mental stimulation that brings those ideas to consciousness and then to paper represented. This is much more to the point. The grief process is long, possible permanent, and it does represent one of the more significant things that a human being will have to deal with.

Death is real, it’s a thing that happens, but it is less significant than the experience of grief would have you believe. My view of it has changed over time, as I mature and my brain works its way through the grief processes that have been triggered in my life. When you are in it, it feels awful. You are almost incapable of thinking about it in real terms, and will instead deal with the abstract aspects of it. This is not good or bad, it’s just what happens with most people. But it is not a pure reflection of reality.

Consider it from a materialistic point of view. People are bags of molecules but a “person” is a rich narrative understanding that is a collection of things. My dad married my mom and they had two children. This is a biological thing and it can be measured. But the relationship that I had with him cannot be so easily understood. He did do a lot of stuff to change the physical environment that I lived in – he worked to make money so that we had food, shelter and clothing – he took physical actions in the world to make sure that the family was safe, secure and mostly free of worry, and he talked to me to teach me things and to alter some of my decisions or actions – the ideas that he had were captured by the air flow that left his lungs and passed over his vocal chords allowing these ideas to be generated in my head when that air vibrated my eardrums, creating the electrical activity that my brain converted into the understanding of the words from which the ideas were created. That is no small feat. Make no mistake about it, my dad did a lot for me and he did almost all of it through the same methods that human beings have been using throughout their entire history.

My present understanding has nothing to do with trying to diminish anything about the important role he played and that all parents and caregivers play. But when you detach from the whole thing and break it down into the material or objective reality, it all becomes so much less than the story we are living when we are gripped tightly by the hand of grief.

When my dad died, I lost my father, yes, but he had already completed 98 percent of the “father” things that he had the potential and willingness to do. From this point of view, his death makes almost no difference to my playing the role of “son.” The role I get to play is not the same as it would have been had he not died in 2012, but that doesn’t actually mean anything. Only one thing happens, so there is only an alternative experience or outcome when we take the time to think about it. Any notion about what it would have been like if he had continued to live for another twenty years is immaterial. It can only exist as a thought and even then, it can only exist in the brain of the person who is thinking it. This is vastly different from the 98 percent of the things that he did that contributed to his playing the role of father. Some physical matter was impacted by those actions and that makes these actions real and of material consequence.

Sure, we can make an argument that, by him dying, he was no longer able to take action and that therefore is a material difference. This is true, but we’d be hard pressed to say with complete certainty what those actions were. Okay, I have every reason to believe the family would have continued to enjoy Sunday dinners, so his passing very likely marked the end of them; or at least him eating dinner with us. But the truth is that this is only the most probable outcome. Something else could have happened that put an end to the Sunday dinners. We’ll never know, and that is the point of it. While someone is alive, we can say with certainty the material impact that their actions have on the world – what molecules they put in motion, which ones they stopped moving or prevented from moving, and which ones they impacted to change their direction and velocity. When they are dead, or did not exist, we can only engage in a game of speculation about how they would have impacted the physical universe.

The initial phases of grief are awful, not because the person is dead and they are no longer impacting the physical world in a way that make their loved ones feel good which is perceived as bad. The intensity of the early part of the grief process is magnitudes larger than that. The reason, I believe, why it starts off at such a high level is because their death is interpreted as the loss of EVERY SINGLE possible impact they could have had on the physical world. It has very little or nothing to do with the present moment. The genesis of the feelings is an unconscious and automatic loop that has the brain cycling on all of the future possibilities that are now off the table. This happens fairly quickly, and unless the person has the ability to clear negative emotion faster than the brain creates it, they can find themselves getting overwhelmed.

The feelings the person is having are real. The chemicals that cause the body to experience the emotion can be measured and the increased brain activity in the areas that are responsible for processing negative emotion can be observed with an fMRI machine. BUT since these changes will not occur in the bodies of people who did not know the deceased person, their cause is purely perceptual and the result of specific mental activity in the brain of the bereaved. So while death is real, and the emotional response to a death of a loved one is real, this response does not have a direct physical cause. It is an abstract interpretative reaction that is triggered in the brains of almost all human beings and many animals. It is a part of the genetic code that evolved over millions of years and is a deeply seeded part of our operating system.

Now given that it is a natural and genetically coded process, we are innately equipped to handle it. It is a mechanism that evolved because it improved our fitness in terms of survival and reproductive success. This is the problem we are running into now, because as life expectancy grows, the necessary experiences that trigger and shape gene expression are delayed. This delay is at least twenty years – given that life expectancy has grown by this amount over the last century – but it is almost certainly longer. Regardless of the time frame, every previous generation of human beings lived much shorter lives and had to deal with infant mortality rates that were in the double digits. This means that exposure to the early death of a loved one was a way of life not so long ago, and it was a fact of life for every ancestor (prehuman) in our evolutionary past; even if they were not capable of relating to someone as a “loved one” many of their species died young ensuring that those who survived long enough to reproduce had figured out how to get back on their feet again.

Maybe a more concise way to phrase this would be to suggest that only recently and only within our species, that death has become increasingly more abstract as our direct exposure to it has been delayed for decades. The positive is that we are living longer, the negative is that for many of us, our first exposure to it comes well after our brains have fully developed. While this may seem like a bonus it isn’t because children and adults do not process stimulation and information in the same way. The prefrontal cortex of a child is much less well developed than that of an adult meaning the younger a person is, the lower their capacity for thinking about the future and for generating timelines. As a consequence, children do not have the same grief experience as adults.

So returning to the compounding effect of experience over time comment, it’s very easy to imagine a child 2000 years ago having their first experience with death and grief at age 10. It means something to them, but it cannot mean the same thing as it does to their 30 year old father because they do not have the same hardware. However, the child has the experience and the process runs its course. Meaning that, over time, their brain processes and reprocesses it, and as their brain fully matures, they have been working through the experience for 10 or more years. And they have probably had other death experiences that influence and play their part on the grief process. By the time they are 30, they will have a level of resilience that is the result of wisdom and NOT the result of willpower or wishful thinking. They know it sucks but they know that in time they will feel better because they will have gone through it a few times and have become aware and desensitized to it.

Even when their brain is fully formed and capable of peak levels of abstract thought, their life experience will have populated their long term memory with sensory information that reflects the truth about death. When compared to their contemporary counterparts, their reactions will not be the same in terms of magnitude and may actually differ completely in terms of content.

My first exposure with the death of a loved one was when I was 21. There is no comparing this to the second experience I had almost 20 years later. Yes, there was sadness and a sense of despair, but there was also a wisdom of knowing that I didn’t need to think about it all of the time and that I was actually free to NOT think about it if I didn’t want to. The first month was tough the second time round, but things were only as bad as they could be for a couple of weeks, and even then this was only when I thought about it; or when I was not able to NOT think about it.

And that is really the value of what I went through. I knew what it was all about in terms of the human experience of grief and its innate emotional experience. It’s intense and rough at the beginning as the brain works its way through the list of EVERYTHING that is lost, but then it calms down and starts to get a grip. Over the weeks and months it narrows its assessment to what might have been lost and focuses on what was actually lost. What begins as thousands becomes 4 or 5 things that you can honestly say are gone because you know you would have done them. For example, I miss talking to my dad about things. He was curious and kind, and he had a lot of life experience that helped to provide perspective about what those things actually meant or what they meant 20 years ago when they happened, and 40 years ago when they happened. I miss his laugh, not because it was a particularly good one, although it was, but because when you hear someone laughing like that, you know with absolute certainty that they are in the moment and it is a great moment to be in. And I kind of would have like for him to meet Heather because she’s awesome and he was awesome and I think they would have become good friends. But none of that stuff is worth crying about and even if it does make me sad from time to time, it does not make me death date +2 days sad.

Which is the point of all of it. Had I known what I would miss and be sad about and focused only on that stuff, I would have had a much easier time with it and would have been a lot more use to my mother, brother and sister in-law, and whoever else was negatively impacted by his passing. But technological progress has liberated us from having to have the experiences that make human beings effective grievers. We have the genes to make us good at it, we just don’t have the experiences to bring about their expression.

At this point in my life I do not think much about the future deaths of the people that I love. It is something that I am capable of doing but choose not to because it makes me feel lousy. I know I will be subjected to grief again unless I’m the first one to go, so I’ll deal with it when it comes along. What I do know is that most of what the older people say about death and how to navigate through the first couple of months after the loss of a loved one is solid advice. Look after your health as well as you can. Do your best to stay nourished. Take the time to do the things that you know work for you. Put in the effort to reestablish your sleep schedule as soon as you can. And go easy on yourself, no matter how you feel. It is fine to not think about it, just as it is fine to take some time to bawl your eyes out. Over time, you will feel better and adjust. The brains response and adaptation to death is logarithmic and not linear. Most of what it has to deal with occurs very early on, then there is a very rapid drop off. However, it has a non convergent property meaning that your life will never meet back up with the normal that once was. It will be new and it will be fine, but never again will it be the same.

That Time We Tried To Domestic A Kitten

The kitten jumped up on to the porch, ate a little and didn’t run away when my mom picked up the bowl can put it down inside the room. It followed, and when reached the bowl it sat down and began to eat. All good, and this was the moment it would become a pet. It had walked past my mom to reach the food, ignoring her and me. As it ate mindlessly my mom made eye contact with me right before she gently closed the door. And that was it, the kitten was domesticated…. And it was for about 5 seconds.

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About twelve years ago, I went over to my parents house to visit them. I said hi to my mom when I got to their house. She was hanging out in the back yard, something that she did a lot during the summer, gardening and trying to feed the various animals that happened to come around during the warmer months. She replied and then refocused her attention on what seemed to be four or five kittens that were milling around.

I went into the living room, sat down beside my dad, and started talking with him. After the usual how are you doings and small talk we got round to taking about the kittens. He was a little bothered by them and wasn’t getting any of the same joy that my mom was. His concern was not about now, they were fine and my mom was doing a good job feeding them. Their mother was always close by and it was a healthy family for all intents and purposed. The litter had remained the same size from the first sighting a few months before meaning that there was plenty of food and sufficient shelter to stop predators from getting at them.

My dad was concerned about the winter because it can be brutally cold and domestic short hair tabby cats are not very well equipped to deal with sustained below zero temperatures. Nature is indifferent and cruel, so whatever has food and shelter will live and whatever is lacking either will die. He wasn’t much of an animal lover, but he didn’t dislike or hate them either. He was more of an animal tolerater, accepting that they are living being and there their experience of life has many of the same characteristic as the life experiences that human being have to deal with. Whatever else they may go through, it was clear to him that they experienced moments of contentment or satisfaction and the counter part experience of pain and the need for something.

There were five kittens, he knew this because my mom had named them. And to him, these were going to be the best moments in the lives of four of them. From this moment forward, their lives would only ever be this good, or worse. The remaining one would make it though the winter and live to enjoy this peak experience next year.

“Son, it’s a lot of suffering that doesn’t need to happen.”

This was a stinging contrast to the joy I noticed with my mom a few minutes before. There didn’t seem to be any connection to the sight of the playing kittens and the conjured image of frozen kitten corpses that winter would inevitably cause. I started to feel a little sick about it.

“We’re going to trap them and bring them to the humane society. They are taking the food that your mom is giving them, so they’ll find their way into the cages.”

This made me feel a little better. I have no idea what their future would be like when they ended up in a shelter, they were, after all, feral cats. Their parents were feral and with the exception of their minor contact with my mom, they regarded human beings with near absolute suspicion and kept their distance. Cats are killing machines that are simply not acting on this killer instinct when they pretend to be tame while playing the role of “pet.” But when they do not learn these domesticated behaviors when they are young, it is probably not going to happen. Of the five kittens, only one of them had journeyed close enough to my mom for her to gently touch it. The rest of them acted like wild cats and made sure to keep enough distance to book it if they needed to.

“She thinks she can tame them, and that might make them more adoptable.” This was said with a level of optimism that was eclipsed by the near certainty that he would soon be taking my mom to the emergency room to get stitched-up and rabies shots after the kittens made it clear that they belonged to no one and that they would let her continue to feed them so long as she stayed far enough away.

We chatted about work, news and the usual subject before I went out to see my mom and find out about her plan.

I found her in the mud room. It’s a small room, with three doors. There is a door into the kitchen, which I closed behind me. The other two doors lead outside. The one leading to the front yard was closed, while the one leading to a small porch with four or five steps to the back was open. I glanced out and saw my mom with a bowl of soft cat food that she was placing down on the ground near where I could see five kittens and a fully grown cat. As the kittens would come close to the bowl, my mom would pick it up, move closer to the steps and put it down again. We made eye contact and I understood what she was doing. Saying nothing, I continued to watch and she moved the bowl 6 or 7 more times, slowly making her way onto the porch.

“I only need one, the rest will follow.”

I instantly had her shared vision. The animal shelter has a lot more success finding homes for friendly lovable animal. By getting one to warm-up to her, the rest would follow and when they ended up at the shelter they would be adopted out to good homes and enjoy an easy life. Very simple, both a good idea and a solid plan to make sure my dads concerns would be addressed.

One of the kittens was more curious and risk taking than the rest. They were the target for the initial domestication and would then relate the message to the rest of them that it was all good.

The kitten jumped up on to the porch, ate a little and didn’t run away when my mom picked up the bowl can put it down inside the room. It followed, and when reached the bowl it sat down and began to eat. All good, and this was the moment it would become a pet. It had walked past my mom to reach the food, ignoring her and me. As it ate mindlessly my mom made eye contact with me right before she gently closed the door. And that was it, the kitten was domesticated. This was evident from the fact that it just kept eating. This was going to be so much easier than anticipated.

And it was domesticated for about 5 seconds. At this point we learned a very valuable lesson about wild animals that you would think two adults wouldn’t have to learn.

The kitten looked at me, then back towards my mom. This was the instant it became obvious that it did not share the same assessment of the situation as doctor Dolittle and her idiot son. It wasn’t a pet. The wildness switch in its brain had not been switched to off. In fact, it had suddenly been dialed-up as it realized that it could no longer see the outside let alone leave at will. It started running, but with no where to go it started running faster. This didn’t open any doors, although it did open my moms eyes. It wasn’t just the metaphoric eye opening that marks the obliteration of a piece ignorance, it was the actual physical eye opening that marks an unconscious need to bring in more sensory information because what was coming in is not sufficient to make sense of what was going on.

The kitten was now running as fast as it could, but with nowhere to go, it is running everywhere, all at once. It isn’t paying a moment of heed to me or my mom other than the brief moments when it is running over us as it does laps of the small room. Faster and faster, going higher and higher up the walls as it tries to spin its way towards freedom. Maybe it saw the light from the windows as the way out, maybe it is the inertia and centrifugal force, whatever the reason, the kitten was running along the walls about two or three feet off of the floor as though it has never been taught to obey the laws of gravity.

For what seemed like minutes it ran and I stood there slack jawed and dumb. When my eyes met my moms again there was a series of thoughts exchanged in the silent and certain way only a mother can relate to her child. In order they were “what the fuck,” then “this is not how it works,” leading to “this might be how it works,” to “this is how it works,” closing in on “how do we stop this,” ending with “the door caused this, maybe the door can stop it.”

The door opens and the kitten launches itself out like a bullet, flying over the porch and the steps before touching down on the grass on its way past its siblings and out of sight. It’s moving so fast that the other kittens move in slow motion as they react to the blur it leave as shots past them. Whatever had been going though their heads about where it had gone was quickly answered with “past us” in hurry. It was the bravest one so its sudden reappearance was the spark that lite a fire of absolute terror that seemed to explode the back yard into a chaotic frenzy of supercritical “save yourself” panic.

Then it was over. The back yard was empty. Everything was silent. The moment of insane action had faded into this short-lived one of complete calm and near serenity. As the seconds passed, it became obvious to my mom and me that something was going to need to be said because we had both witnessed something for the first time in our lives that had never been imagined by either one of us. No, not two grown adults doing something remarkably stupid with an absolutely predictable outcome. Well, not just that. We had also witnessed in a matter of seconds how cats work, how nature works, and how domestication does NOT work.

I cannot remember who spoke first or what exactly was said but I do remember my brain flashing back to the “as God is my witness….” scene of the Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati when Arthur Carlson they gave out turkeys.

My dad had heard the noise and came out to see what was going on and when we explained what we had learned he just kind of nodded and went back to the living room to watch TV. I didn’t stay for dinner, and left a few minutes later a changed man. No matter what else has happened in my life since then, any time I see a stray cat and feel the need to pet it, I always make sure to never stand between it and its fasted path to safety. The only thing that saved my mom and me from getting viciously attacked was the kittens relatively young age. It had not yet figured out just how useful its claws and teeth were at prompting other creatures to stay away and to never corner it. It had been, up until that point, successful at running away without having to attack, which was the only reason why my mom and I did not have to go to the hospital. That was it. It was dumb luck which, when accompanying dumb action, is the only way things will work out okay.

A few weeks later the kittens and their mother were trapped and brought to the humane society.

In the spring of the following year, my mom stopped feeding the animals in the back yard. It was a pretty brutal and long winter that year. This, when paired with the experience that triggered her to realize that wild kittens are wild animals, gave her the insight that in the long run it was better for everything if there wasn’t any easy to get food. It meant fewer wild animals that she was powerless to domesticate.

Burn The Calories BEFORE You Eat The Crappy Food

Oh, wait a minute, there is a chocolate pie. It is right there for your present self to enjoy. For YOU to enjoy. Future self does not need to know about it. You can just have a slice and never speak a word of it, to them, to anyone. It will be like it never happened. Except if it does happen it DID happen.

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It is probably going to happen to you. You are a healthy eater, you like yourself enough to do the things that your future self will be grateful you did. Heck, you LOVE your future self and are really looking forward to meeting them. For them you would do almost anything. They do not exist yet, but you are willing to do almost anything to make sure they have the best life possible. Good for you! They will thank you for it.

Oh, wait a minute, there is a chocolate pie. It is right there for present self to enjoy. For YOU to enjoy. Future self does not need to know about it. You can just have a slice and never speak a word of it, to them, to anyone. It will be like it never happened. Except if it does happen it DID happen.

Saying no all the time can be tough. It is possible and there will be a time in the future when you are glad you did. But life is not necessarily all about the future. The present moment, now, is actually a lot more real than the future. There are a lot of things to be said about getting the most out of each moment and sometimes that means saying yes to something that is a small speed bump in your journey.

You should give yourself permission to say yes to the things you like but that hurt your progress so long as you are not addicted to them and so long as they do not trigger an all or nothing type of event. Alcoholics are best to always say no to that first drink. X smokers are always better served to never take another puff. People on a massive weight loss journey are best to stick with the program until they achieve their predetermined celebration milestones. If this is not you, if you are a healthy eater who avoids sugar and baked desserts and do not have any celebrations lined-up, saying yes to the chocolate pie occasionally is not a big deal and, if done with planning, can have a very small impact on your progress.

Pay your bill BEFORE you eat. If you are going to enjoy an occasional 750 calorie dessert, create the 750 calorie deficit before you get stuck in.

If you are going to eat it on Sunday, in the 4 or 5 days before, eat 125 calories less than what you normally would or burn off an extra 125 calories with exercise. So long as doing this does not drop your calories below 1200-1400 on any of these days, it will be a wash and everything will work itself out by Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week.

Better than the lay away approach is to burn the calories as close to before the meal as possible. An intense work out primes the body to shuttle the calories into the cells that need them for recovery before moving them into fat cells for storage. If you have depleted 500 calories of muscle glycogen just before you eat a piece chocolate pie, many of the sugar calories you consume will be help replenish this energy. The sugar will spike your insulin which will also help with protein synthesis further aiding recovery and possibly help you gain some lean muscle. From time to time it is fine to look at food as molecules void of any context, provided you have done the work right before the use the molecules as you would if they were just individual ingredients.

Chocolate pie is NOT the same thing as coco, glucose, fructose, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, and water. The ingredients interact with each other to do things that the individual ingredients would not do on their own. Glucose and fat consumed together create a massive release of reward chemical that glucose or fat on their own do not. The whole is great than the sum of its parts. But occasionally and when done mindfully these treat experiences can promote a great sense of well-being with very little or no negative impact on future you. Just make sure you pay the bill before eating.

When You Know What You Are Looking For, You’ll Be Willing To Pay To Get It

Is the person willing to pay the bill before they start – do they know the value of what they are about to do and do they know why they are enrolling you in their possibility? Are they clear on why it is important to them today and for the person they are going to become? If the answer is yes, if it is obvious that there is only one way forward, success is inevitable and this mutual partnership will work.

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When it comes to personal training and basically any type of training, there are two type of clients, those who do what they are told and everyone else. Those who do the work are generally self-motivated. They may not know exactly why they are doing what they do, but when pressed on it they can come-up with a good reason, or two, or more. Intuitively they understand that they must pay the metaphoric bill before they eat the metaphoric meal – the bill is the work and every decision that moves them forward while the meal is the results they are seeking. For me, these clients are moderately interesting to work with and most of the joy comes from the validation that my methods and programs work and from the empathetic joy of seeing someone work hard, get what they earn, and feel good about it. I enjoy the conversations as well because these types of people have a lot to teach and I have a lot to learn.

Everyone else acts like training is a meal at a fine dining restaurant. It’s an experience to have and the bill will be paid at the end after they know that the experience was worth it. These people are a lot more work. There is a different problem to be solved and I may not know the answer because they don’t know the question. They don’t necessarily do what is being asked of them because they don’t really know why they are in front of me, asking for my help, on a journey that they may not even have started. It’s messy with a much lower success rate. The best case is that they actually start the journey and figure out why it is important OR that a light gets shined on the life they are living, the future that this will create for them, and a sense of peace about both.

The truth is that it is much more important to me that they find out what their goals actually are and not important at all that they achieve a goal that was never theirs in the first place.

I like my life and I believe everyone else should like their life too. If I can be of service and guide / help them automate the making of the life of their dreams then all the better. Sometimes they are already living the life of their dreams and just have never taken the time to notice it. They may not realize what is involved with chasing down a goal and that the actualization of the goal can be rather unfulfilling. After you reach your goal you are still you. You may be a leaner, more muscular, faster you, but at the end of the day, you remain you.

I used to believe that everyone should work out and improve their health. This is something that I no longer believe. I know everyone will benefit from moderate exercise, improved nutrition, reduced stress, and a more mindful approach to life, but that doesn’t mean everyone should go after these benefits. Sometimes these benefits actually make people miserable. Having single digit body fat is hard work and requires a lot of sacrifice. Once you achieve it, it requires continuous effort to maintain because it is a possession of sorts. It is now YOURS to lose, and this knowledge can generate a considerable amount of negative mental energy. And regardless of what you do, if you live long enough, you WILL lose it. Everything that arises will pass away, your discipline, your 6 pack abs, your youth, even your earthly existence.

A quick conversation can unpacked that a person just want to feel happier with who they are, the solution for which is meditation. After a few months of twice a day practice is all that is needed for the laws of nature to reveal themselves, and equanimous acceptance is bound to follow.

An effective consultation can reveal that the goal is simply to feel better. The prescription here is simple, improve posture through the use of structural balance movements, core and breath training. When we automate standing up straight when your head back and breathing deeply into our belly our psychological mind set shifts towards confidence, security, and contentment. The experience of pain is reduced and we feel and act more capable.

Cultivating and maintaining mindfulness is very easy and will add tremendous value to your life because of the compounding effect of experience over time. Improving and maintaining posture and appropriate breathing requires 5 minutes a day of work and offers similar compounding lifelong benefits. These things are easy, and anyone can achieve them. And if they are actually what the person is seeking, it is better for everyone in the long run to just go straight for them.

I am not suggesting that someone should not work out to improve their health. They should, most people should, but it is even better if the person actually wants to do it. There is no downside when someone works hard to get what they want AND need. The same cannot be said when someone gets what they need but do not want. Needs and wants are not the same and when they are not aligned who are we to decide what another person needs?

I find this approach helpful when it comes to training and coaching. Is the person willing to pay the bill before they start – do they know the value of what they are about to do and do they know why they are enrolling you in their possibility? Are they clear on why it is important to them today and for the person they are going to become? If the answer is yes, if it is obvious that there is only one way forward, success is inevitable and this mutual partnership will work. Anything other than this is an indication that they do not really know what they want or that they have not taken the time to get clear on why they want it. A simpler solution likely exists for them, one that has them invest a lot less time and allows them to go directly to what they want.

What You Say Is Not Necessarily What They Hear – And That’s Your Fault

While the conversation will be taking place in the present moment, the words are being translated by a unique dictionary that was written by and for them. Even the most skilled, clear, and concise communicator will be plagued with having to relate ideas through an interpretive filter that is a reflection of the listeners’ life.

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Language is both amazing and clumsy. Amazing, because there is nothing quite like it for taking an idea from one person’s head and putting it into someone else head. Clumsy, because there is no way to be sure that the idea that is recreated in the other persons hear is the same as the one that was intended to be shared. As far as we can tell, human beings are the only species with this problem because the communicative intentions of other creatures are rather primitive in comparison. “Get away,” “stay back,” “come here,” “danger,” “I like you,” and “let’s get it on” are about as deep as the verbal communication gets with non-human animals. While they are capable of communicating more, most of the rest is communicated through modeling, which has the learner watch the actions of the teacher. It needs to be said that gorillas and chimpanzees has been taught to communicate with humans using sign language, and most of the great apes in the wild will use a variety of hand movements and gestures to communicate with their group.

Communication with human beings is many levels above what exists in the most articulate of primate species. We are able to talk about things that are not real, are not present, or are abstract in nature meaning there is a near infinite number of things that we are able to share.

The problem is that we do not have any method of evaluating the accuracy of communication on the fly and are faced with the choice of continuing to try and share our message or disrupting the conversational flow by asking the other person if things are still on track. Because we favor the first option, we tend to rely on non-verbal indicators or verbal placeholders as an indirect way to make sure the message is being received. Head nodding, eye blinking frequency and speed, facial expressions, shifting eye gaze patterns, and single word / sound vocalization serve as an inaccurate but highly utilized proxy for asking “are you following me?” or “what did you hear me say?” These things are really only accurate for indicating confusion, disengagement or overwhelm. When we notice that our conversational partner squints their eyes and kind of scrunches up their face, we instantly know that they didn’t understanding the last thing we said and likely need us to step back and take another run at it. But when we see them nodding or hear them say “right” we take this to mean that the idea that is in our head is being reformulated inside of their head and there will soon be a shared and complete understanding.

This is a mistake. All these communications mean is that AN idea is being formed in their head. This idea is going to be based a little bit on the words you are saying and a lot of their life experience with reference to those words. In fact, what is coming up for them is mostly going to be a reflection of their past both in terms of the literal meaning of words and the feelings those words evoke. While the conversation will be taking place in the present moment, the words are being translated by a unique dictionary that was written by and for them. Even the most skilled, clear, and concise communicator will be plagued with having to relate ideas through an interpretive filter that is a reflection of the listeners’ life.

Almost everyone knows this but chooses to ignore it because of the ease afforded by the assumption that our words are the same as their words. What’s the point of getting wrapped around the axle by being overly pedantic about the meaning of “okay” and “uh huh?” Except it isn’t even remotely pedantic and a good argument can be made that by NOT taking the time to get clear on the differing definitions of the words we journey deeply down the road of confusion and misunderstanding.

When I took an NLP course a few years ago, they have a number of presuppositions that help to define the field and determine the role that each of us play when communicating with other people. There are more than a dozen of them, but one of them struck me much harder than the rest and it relates to this post:

“The meaning of communication is the response you get.”

Embedded within this statement is a rich understanding about the world. It captures what I was making reference to with the first portion of this post, that human beings may have a shared vocabulary but this vocabulary does not necessarily have a shared meaning. It also captures the essence of taking an idea from one person head and putting it into another person’s head as being a stimulus / response transaction, action / reaction exchange or a cause / effect relationship. And it talks to a level of responsibility that the speaker has when it comes to the meaning the listener generates from the communication.

It was a course, so it is obvious that those who choose to attend it are invested in getting something more out of life and will therefore be willing to see themselves has having the power to get it. In environments like this, it is not unreasonable to see the locus of control shifted onto the participants or students in an attempt to get them to realize that at the end of the day, THEY are responsible for generating the outcomes they want and are therefore responsible for the outcomes they get.

But there is an irony here that people seem to miss, and one that is having a negative impact on communication accuracy. It has to do with the polarity of the left and right in terms of who is responsible for what. Specifically, the responsibility movement holds that everyone is responsible for their own actions and is therefore responsible for the outcomes they get. The opposite of this holds that the powers that be are responsible for the outcomes that people get and are therefore responsible for making things better for the people they are controlling or oppressing. Like most polarized things, the reality is somewhere in the middle – people are responsible for their actions but not in control of the outcomes. With reference to communication, the speaker is in control of their words (their action) but they are relying upon the listener to generate a meaning (the outcome). The irony with that is the speaker is the person who is motivated to share an idea and has the incentive to have an accurate meaning generated in the brain of the listener. Okay, that isn’t ironic on its own, but when combined with the prevailing notion that the listener is responsible for the meaning that THEY generate, it becomes rather thick.

Think about it this way, when someone doesn’t take the time to check in to determine whether or not the generated meaning is the same as the intended meaning, they are abdicating their responsibility for ensuring the accuracy of the communication. Sure, they’ll fall back onto the talking point of the responsibility movement and suggest that the other person is responsible for their own action, but this changes nothing while enriching the speakers’ belief that they have done everything they could and any misunderstanding is solely the result of the listeners’ shortcomings.

This is pretty screwed-up, and it makes me a little bit angry because it lazy, careless, and completely avoidable. It is also very short-sighted on the part of the speaker. If they have a point of view or an idea that they need to communicate, why does the listener suddenly become responsible for the successful rendering of that POV or idea inside their own head? Of the two parties, the listener has the least incentive to do this work yet the responsibility movement dictates that they are the one who has to do it.

It lands on me like arrogance because it implies that what the speaker has to say is so valuable that it is worth it to the listener to put in the effort to completely understand it. There are times when this is the case, but these are few and far between. Most of the communication that comes from speakers is self-serving. It is for their own benefit so they should do the work.

It would understandable if human beings had limited working memory and storage capacity in their long term memory, but this is not the case. When communicating one on one or in small groups, there is an ample supply of bandwidth to ask the question to ensure the message is getting transmitted and received accurately, sufficient working memory to manage the specific concerns or word meanings that the listener has, and plenty of long term memory to store specific details that will ensure smooth and more complete communication in the future.

Instead, they just want to talk, be understood and play no role in making this clearer or better in the future.

The truth of the matter is that, for honest operators, pushing the work onto them will result in them doing an unconscious benefit cost analysis of the interactions. If they pay off is sufficient, they will continue to put in the work, but they are doing it only because there is an incentive to it. When the payoff is not sufficient, they will begin to disengage and start to not care about what the speaker is saying. This means that we’ll listen to our bosses when they continue to force us to do the work to understand what exactly it is that they are talking about. It also means that we will begin to withdraw from our peers and friends when we notice that they take no steps to adjust their communication approach towards us when they realize that there is a gap in the shared understanding of words or meanings.

Personally, I dislike it when someone replies with “uh huh” when I say “thank you.” “Thank you” followed by “you’re welcome” is a behavioral pattern that is nearly always transactional and automatic. It probably doesn’t mean anything at all, and is just a carryover from our parents teaching us to be polite.

Much has been written about “uh huh” being a replacement for “thank you” and I am willing to say that I might just be old. “You’re welcome” apparently, is loaded with meaning that serves to dis-empower the person who says it and the person it is directed at. By saying “you’re welcome” you might actually be implying that the listener SHOULD have said “thank you” or was obligated to say it. In this case, saying “you’re welcome” is an act of dominance that will lead to feelings of inferiority and eventually a state of servitude.

I did not know this.

This is actually the fault of the person who says “thank you” (apparently) because by hearing “thank you” the listener is powerless to feel anything other than the need to dismiss their actions as being nothing or as them simply playing their role in a social transaction or fulfilling their obligation in a business contract.

So there you go.

I’m not in a position to say that any of this is in fact bull crap but I feel comfortable suggesting that it does kind of have a manure smell to it. But I do need to take the time to consider my own role and actions in it.

I say thank you when someone does something to which I am the beneficiary. This is me, it’s a part of my programming and I am not going to make any apology for it. IF the person I am saying it to takes it as a negative, they are completely free to never do that thing for me again. While it isn’t my intention to suggest that I appreciated the outcome of their action, actually, it is. That IS my intention. Even if they are doing their job and have no choice in the matter, I am still slightly better off as a result of their action. I went to the hardware store and bought a drywall knife. I paid cash and said “thank you.” No matter how transactional that is, I went into the store with some cash and a need of a drywall knife and I left with slightly less money and no longer in need of a drywall knife. My life is better and the cashier played a role in that. So I express my gratitude by saying “thank you.” If I go over to my in-laws house for dinner and I eat any of it, I will say “thank you.” I’ll say it even if dinner is take-out or the food was delivered. If a co-worker or a manager does something that is within the scope of their job I will say “thank you” even though they didn’t really have a choice and are doing it only because they want to remain employed. It’s the same thing, my life is slightly easier because of their action and I am grateful for that.

I am willing to accept that maybe my saying thank you is unnecessary. I am also beginning to open-up to the fact that maybe my saying it is triggering negative feelings inside of them as the feel the dynamic shifting because of their perception of a shift in the dominance hierarchy. My intention of sharing my gratitude shouldn’t be the trigger to someone else’s suffering – I can be grateful while remaining silent. As “the meaning of communication is the response you get” presupposition suggests, if my words are causing the other person to respond in a negative way – that is, they do not catch on to my intention of relating my gratitude to them for their action and instead take it that I am suggesting that they are somehow less now as a result of it – that is in fact the meaning of my communicating “thank you.”

Framed like this it is completely reasonable that they will respond poorly when I tell them that they are a piece of crap, which explains the noise “uh huh” that the cashier gave me in return. “Uh huh” is not the same thing as “you’re welcome.” It holds none of the power of tradition that the click whir reply “you’re welcome” possess. It is also not the same thing as saying “no problem” or “don’t mention it,” nor is it the same as saying nothing and smiling or saying nothing at all. At least for me and to my ears, it is two syllables of mouth and nose sounds that land as compendious as opposed to transactional. It is so much more than uttering something that serve to acknowledge our interaction has come to an end. It lands on my like our interaction should never have begun and should never be re-established.

It is a sound that is loaded with a lot of negative meaning to me. I do not recall when the conditioning occurred, but when I hear it, it triggers feelings that have a pain-like flavor. It is a psychological punishment in that regard. When I hear it, it initiates that innate unconscious process that all living beings possess that sets to track down, isolate, and eliminate the actions that immediately preceded the punishment. However, being a human being, my brain deals with context when tracking down this cause of the punishment. I don’t get all that bothered when I hear someone use “uh huh” as a substitute for “yes” when they are in agreement with something. It only fires up when it is used as the closer to the “thank you” “you’re welcome” interactions. When it is used in this context, and particularly when I am on the receiving end of it, I tend to just stop saying “thank you” the person for anything, even when they go above and beyond or actually do something extraordinary.

And before today, just a few moments ago actually, I hadn’t realized that there was even a possibility that this is actually what the person want. In my arrogance, I had assumed that “thank you” means the same thing to everyone. It hadn’t even entered into the realm of possibility that when I say “thank you” I am communicating something that makes the other person feel bad. Since they do not like feeling bad, they do what they need to do in order to stop it from happening again in the future and administer a punishment. This works well because I stop saying it.

The funny part of it is that I was thinking that they were being rude without ever considering that it was ME who was being rude. There they were, minding their own business, not bothering anyone as they try to do their job and I show up, mock them, and effectively tell them that they suck by saying “thank you.” I bully them by projecting my understanding of the term “thank you” onto them without understanding the complexities and nuance of the social interaction that is paying for something or being grateful that someone did a part of their job that allows me to keep doing mine.

Thinking and writing the previous paragraph hits me like I am being sarcastic and possibly irreverent. I don’t actually know why people respond with “uh huh” when I thank them for something. I selfishly made it about me feeling slighted as opposed to being open to the possibility that something else was going on. It could be that they are just trying to save some energy by avoiding the speaking of three syllables by mouth nose sounding a substitute. But I am going to start asking when it happens because maybe I don’t know what is going on and maybe they don’t know what is going on.

I’m sure the reality is somewhere in the middle. They are not being rude and have no ill intent with saying it, but they also have no real desire to engage in a social interaction that serves no purpose and which only exists because our parents wanted to teach us that manners and politeness are behaviors and not a state mind.

Labeling A Mistake A Lesson Means You Will Probably Not Learn From It

The funny thing about an honest person who actually believes nonsense is that they are telling the truth when they are lying to people.

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In many of the leadership books and blogs, the notion of mistakes comes up a lot. To be a leader, you need to take action and any time you take action, there is a chance that this action will not lead to the desired outcome. Mistakes are a big part of learning and the best leaders in any industry tend to make more than their fair share of them.

It makes a lot of sense to regard any mistake as lesson. This will make them more powerful because it will reduce the long term consequences of the action. Letting go of a poor decision is easier when we know that we are less likely to make the same decision again in the future.

But I question the validity of the assumption that actual learning has occurred when one habitually label mistakes lessons, given the apparent tendency for people to do the same things over and over again. What may actually be occurring is more akin to a karmic cleanse vs. a real lesson. It is easier to call something a lesson and to state that the outcome was the result of a lack of knowledge / experience than to really dig into what happened and to accept that you had the resources to think the thing through and still chose to act impulsively.

To be clear, I’m not talking about innovation here. Making something new that performs its function perfectly necessitates it having been made and NOT perform that function perfectly more than once. Each previous iteration was not a mistake because the inventor could not have known better. Each version is a lesson that builds upon all of the lessons from before. The outcome was not a result of having information / resources and choosing not to use them.

What I am talking about are all of the times when taking a few minutes to think things through beforehand would likely have revealed a lot of the blind spots or things that did not immediately come to mind.

For example, I used to say “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” without any sense of irony. I had heard it when I started working at a gym and it was something that we were encouraged to say to new or potential members to let them know that changing course to move towards a more healthful life requires some effort but that the effort doesn’t really need to be sustained (3 weeks was all that was needed before the body would do it on its own). The lack of irony was due to my missing the fact that I had created the habit of saying that saying in about 30 seconds.

Some behaviors will require 21 days, others 1, some 261, etc. I was wrong. I wasn’t learning a lesson, I was making a mistake every time I lazily repeated a simple phrase that served a sales purpose. It turns out that I was lying because I should have known better than to repeat something so trite and catchy. If I had taken the required 3 moments to consider what was going on in the context of my own life I would have realized that 21 days was not an average, was not an actual and did not reflect how things progressed in my own life. When I was learning to become a cycling instructor, I started practicing every day the day after the training workshop ended; so less than 48 hours to create the habit – I didn’t need to convince myself to practice, I was excited to do it. When I decide to wake-up earlier in the morning, it takes me about a week of deliberately getting out of bed at 5:15 am before I find myself walking around at 5:16 am without a desire to push snooze and stay in bed. The habit of mindfulness as it applies to my baseline level of anxiety has yet to full take hold, even after years of knowing that I can be an anxious person and will seek out the experiences that will create anxiety. My journeys down the rabbit hole though are much shorter than before but I am still starting them.

On some level I knew I was talking nonsense. However, it was my job to sell gym memberships so I just kept saying the line over and over again. I got good at it. Prospective members believed me and I think I started to believe me.

The funny thing about an honest person who actually believes nonsense is that they are telling the truth when they are lying to people. Someone who is that convinced that life will be completely different in 3 weeks is able to convince other people of that “fact.” There I was, pouring out sincerity, stoking the flames of hope that their future would be better and all it would take was a few weeks of effort before the body just did the work willingly. I closed a lot of sales because I believed what I was saying, and that made it easier for the people on the other side of the table to believe it too.

It didn’t take long, about 22 days after my first sale, before the evidence began to grow that my silly little phrase wasn’t true. Over a few months it became evident that I wasn’t going to be able to excel at selling gym memberships for much longer because it was clear that people have a baseline and it can take months and maybe years for it to be updated.

I moved on to management, then personal training, and finally fitness class instruction growing further away from the notion that “it takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit.” For me, selling gym memberships for that club was like convincing someone to convert all of their dollars into the currency of a country that doesn’t exist anymore – it was something that can be done but was probably going to be a mistake and when it came time to correct it, the exchange rate would ensure that the customer lost money. Going from zero to a sustained full speed, which is what is required when someone makes the decision to transform their body composition, is going to require that they create a bunch of new behaviors, put a lot of effort into continuing to do them, and endure whatever sense of loss going without the things that got them to the position of needing to change their body composition in the first place causes. It is possible, but for almost everyone it is going to SUCK.

And that is the power of labeling a mistake a lesson in the fitness industry. There is no cost to it, so doing it eliminates the incentive to actually change future actions. In fact, there is a disincentive to changing because you move away from doing what you know works and into the realm of the unknown. The new actions may not work so you will be, at the very least, going without the sense of certainty that what you are doing is going to be effective, and, more likely, be going without the money. Better to call it a lesson so you get to continue to do what you did before and get the same outcome. This is what immunizes the fitness professional from the pain associated with making a mistake because the reframe allows the “lesson” to be the cost of knowing something and because it ultimately is the responsibility of the member / client / participant to put in the work. If the habit doesn’t take after exactly 3 weeks it is probably the clients fault for doing something wrong. The mistake was not in the BS statement, it was to belief that the client or member was willing to put in the work to form that new habit.

So long as there is no pain associated with the action, the motivation to do anything different will never grow. The client will experience the pain. When, on the 22nd day, going to the gym and eating more healthful food is not the automatic, they will begin to feel the pain of their blown expectation. And this is the problem with not being completely honest with people when it comes to the fitness industry. People are hopeful about their future and very much want to believe that it will not only get very easy to do, but that it won’t take very long for that to happen. “It takes 21 days to learn a new skill and make it a habit” is tailor-made to capitalize on their vulnerable state of mind. They are coached into thinking “sure, it’ll be tough for a couple of weeks but then it will get easy and after that, it’s only a matter of time before I look and feel amazing.”

That just isn’t true. Well, the second part of it might be, that it will be just a matter of time before they look and feel amazing so long as they continue to consistently put in the work in the gym and the kitchen. But for 95% of the people who take-up fitness it can be months or years before their body and brain make the pursuit of physical improvement automatic. Until then, and even occasionally afterwards, it will require will-power. In my experience, the only people for which the 21 days saying actually applies are for those who have taken a short period of time away from their exercise habit. For everyone else there is an almost 100% chance that the saying is false and for those who sign-up for services based on their belief of it will be disappointed and have less money because of it.

My approach now is almost complete honesty and to even attempt to talk someone out of joining or starting because a lot of people do not want to improve their fitness, they simply want to be happier. While becoming a regular exerciser can improve happiness and improve someone’s feelings of well-being, it can also contribute to a lot of suffering, misery, and feelings of shame and inadequacy. If you don’t believe this, consider what goes through someone’s mind when they hit day 22 and find that they haven’t really learned a new skill and have definitely not made it a habit. When they find going to the gym on week 4 to be as tough as or even tougher than they did on week 1, what are they going to think about themselves? When they start to compare themselves to the other members who seem to be showing up 3-5 times a week without any effort and when they remember the certainty in which the sales person or personal trainer told them that it would only take 21 days it will be nearly impossible to not be flooded with feelings of inadequacy and failure. Experiencing these feelings is not conducive to being happy.

I made a mistake and I changed course because I felt horrible for lying to people when they were vulnerable, easily influenced, and when I stood to gain from saying something that sounded true but was clearly false. When I had to face myself in the mirror I realized that I had been using BS to harvest peoples hope in an attempt to help sell them gym memberships. And morally I felt awful because I knew that I had contributed to their suffering. It wasn’t a mistake because I SHOULD have known better and it wasn’t a lesson because I already knew better.

This brings me to some of the other things I was told when I was learning how to sell gym memberships. The sales managers and sales coaches tried to make me feel bad for applying what I knew about people. The statement “how are they supposed to believe in themselves if you don’t even believe in them?” was directed towards me more than once. As was “who are you to judge them for something that might happen in the future? Who are you to deny them the opportunity to have a better life?” These statements feel like they might be true, except I knew that they were not. It wasn’t that I was a pessimist, it was that I was both a realist and someone with a back ground in psychology / human behavior. I believed in the prospective members as much as I believe in people. I knew what it took for me to change my behavior and I knew a lot of the theories about what is required for human beings to be ready for change. The truth is that there are only a couple of short cuts to the process and unless someone arrives at the gym for the first time having taken one of them, having had one of the requisite experiences OR is actually ready to change, they will have extreme difficult making the changes.

Informed consent is a thing that is very important and it was the only thing that we were NOT seeking. We needed and wanted their consent in terms of a signature on a legally binding agreement to allow the gym to access their bank account to withdraw the membership dues. The act of informing them of the actions they were going to need to do was vacated in favor of cultivating their hope and filling their mind with grand ideas that do not hold up. When they failed to form the new habit it was their decision and completely their own responsibility. When I would talk about my concerns about the entire transaction I was reminded that maybe the habit didn’t take because I didn’t believe in the member enough. The fact that behavior change is hard and requires sustained unreasonable effort was completely ignored. My crappy attitude was probably contributing to the member’s challenges in automating a difficult set of complex behaviors that are both physical challenging and are experienced as psychological pain. Initially I adjusted my attitude but it became obvious very quickly that my sincere belief in other people is not sufficient to move them to do anything more than to sign-up and come in a few times during the first few weeks. The heavy lifting needed to be done by them.

This all comes down to the following couple of facts:

The first is that people operate using a system of rewards and punishments. Rewards serve to fuel action and to repeat an action that lead to the reward. Punishments serve to reduce action in general but specifically the action that caused the punishment. At the shallowest level, things that feel good are rewards and things that feel bad are punishments. With references to the “it takes 21 days” line I learned, it was initially reinforced because it seemed to be effective at getting people to sign-up for a gym membership. The closing of the sale felt good because it meant that I had performed my job well and would result in higher wages come pay-day. However, after the first month, I began to notice that the new members were not that much different from me and many were having difficult forming that habit. Their pain and eventual disillusionment started to weigh on me. They had a desire to finally make the life of their dreams and started with such hope that it would become a habit very quickly. Reality landed on them HARD after the first few weeks turned into a month and it remained a constant challenge to eat better and drive to the gym to do movements that are not innately rewarding. Either because they were telling me this, I was reading it on their faces, or because they stopped coming into the gym, I was getting absolutely clear that the exercise habit is a tough one to create. The words that had once been powerfully reinforced though sales began to be experienced as punishments when I realized that I had lied to the people who had trusted me.

On a deeper level, the pleasure and pain can be perceived as either reward or punishment, and this is the area that my NOT taking the effort to more fully inform them of what would be required to become an habitual exerciser and more effective eater came back to haunt me. At this deeper level, were pain can be viewed as a reward and pleasure can be viewed as a punishment, the person needs to take the time to think about what is going on in order to manufacture the meaning that matches reward or punishment. For me, as a sales person, closing a sale would only feel good when I made it as clear as possible what the first few months of the gym would be like for them and the sense of loss or sacrifice that comes along with changing your diet to remove sugar and junk food while increasing the consumption of highly nutritious foods. My aim became disclosing as possible about how long it would take to reach their goal and the number of times they would have to say “no” to something they wanted and “yes” to something that felt uncomfortable in the short term.

Of course two things happened here. The first was that the sales managers and coaches did not like me going off script and tried to move me back on course; which I wasn’t having any of because I had grown tired of feeling like a lying jerk. The second was that the members who signed-up became active members because they were fully aware of what was about to happen, had considered it, and had still made the decision to join. When, 8 weeks later, they still found that they had to call upon their willpower to come to the gym at the end of their work day, they were not plagued with any feelings of “why hasn’t this become a habit yet?” or “what is wrong with me, why can’t I like this?” They did not like it, but they accepted it as something that they were going to have to do in order to get the thing that they wanted. This, more than anything else, is the formula for success – consistent hard work over time. They were able to view showing-up and making it to the end of a workout as rewarding in spite of the fact that NOTHING about it brought them any measurable pleasure. They manufactured a meaning that served as a proxy for pleasure to allow their brain to reward the behavior.

This is what is called the “discipline high.” You trigger chemical rewards in response to doing things that are hard, require will power, and for which there is a big disincentive to doing. Pain becomes pleasure-like, pleasure becomes pain-like and the person takes the actions they accepted as part of the journey. This type of meaning manufacturing might have been what the “21 days to learn…” statement was getting at, but it was never outlined or explained to me this way.

Now it turned out that because of my updated approach, the powers that be thought that I would be a better manager than sales person and I got the opportunity to perform that role at a different club. I employed the same updated approach with managing the team as I had with selling memberships and they responded in more or less the same way. Improving at anything will take sustained work, a lot of which will not be directly rewarding. The sooner you accept this fact and just start doing it the better the process is going to go for you.

Years later, when I look at those first steps into to the fitness field I smile and feel grateful that they are behind me. At the time I didn’t realize that it is a self-help industry and that no matter what I bring to the table the members, participants, or clients will need to perform the work. I can motivate, want, coach, etc. until I’m exhausted, but if they do not put in the effort there will be NO transformation. They need to help themselves and until they are willing AND doing it, nothing is going to happen.

It is a fun job for many but for me it is only fun when there has been full disclosure and the person is agreeing to perform their role KNOWING that it is going to be hard work, mostly thankless, void of any physical reward and is not something that feels good initially. Each of us have the potential to learn how to work our muscles in a way that causes them to release feel good chemicals but reaching this point requires the body to work at a particularly hard level for an unpleasantly long period of time. Put another way, you need to be very fit, have strong muscles, and the ability to tolerate a large amount of discomfort before the body will respond by releasing endorphins to numb the pain and boost the pleasure. This can take 3 to 9 months, which is a lot longer than the 21 days I used to promise. BUT when you know that it will happen and that the journey towards that moment might just suck completely, you are much more likely to accept the work as part of it and just do it.

I’m now much more inclined to consider a mistake both a mistake AND a lesson. It is a mistake because the pain is a necessary part of the process. It reduces the chances of me repeating an action that causes pain. This simultaneously creates the opportunity of a future perceived contrast reward in so far as any elimination of pain is experienced as pleasure when contrasted to the possibility of that pain. The pain eliminates the actions that do not work as the prospect of pleasure serves to fuel different actions in the future. In the absence of certainty that an action WILL lead to a rewarding outcome, we leverage this hope of a rewarding outcome to keep trying.

Don’t let yourself off the hook by labeling a mistake a lesson. Your brain learns better when there is something on the line so keep it there and learn from your mistakes.

That Time I Said Something Wise

This sounded familiar to me because when I started practicing [meditation], I had the same belief that it would fix things. After years of practice I had come to accept that it did not fix anything. In fact, it does not do much of anything OTHER than make you more aware of what is going on from moment to moment. What will be will be, you just seem to feel it more intensely

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If someone was to ask me about that time I said something wise I would tell them about the last full day of my third mediation retreat. But of course I would, because that was a moment when there was no doubt that the words that came out of my mouth were demonstrably truth, wise, and an act of complete compassion.

The retreats that I go on last for 10 days and are silent from 8 PM on the evening before the first day until 9:30 AM on day ten. Basically you meditate as much as possible from 4:30 AM until 9 PM, day after day after day. There are people around you, but you don’t talk to them and instructors recommend that you do not even look at other people, at least not in the eyes. It is just hours on end of you and your mind sitting quietly with your eyes closed, noticing the sensations of being alive. Vegetarian food is made available two times a day, at 6:30 AM and 11:30 AM, and there is a video discourse every night at 7 PM. There are four group sittings each day, three hour long ones at 8:30 AM, 2:30 PM, and 6 PM, and a shorter one from 8:30 to 9 PM. The rest of the time is spend mediating, resting, or looking after personal hygiene or laundry.

It can be remarkably boring, extremely intense, profoundly insightful, or a flat neutral experience. There is nothing to distract you, no phones, no TV, no music, and nothing to read. It is all you all of the time and this reveals the nature of your mind with untempered clarity.

I LOVE it and I HATE it and no matter how many times I go, the experience is never the same but always follows the same sort of pattern. It is kind of like walking along a forest trail at different times of the year. The route or path is the same but the journey is always different depending upon the season.

My wisest moment arrived at around 11:35 AM on day 10. This is the final day and at 9:30 AM the silent portion of the retreat ends. We are allowed to talk to other people if we like and it is presented as an opportunity to slowly re-integrate ourselves into the real world by communicating with the other participants. At this moment in time, each of us have more in common with each other than almost everyone else in the world. By ramping up our conversations with each other, we are in a better position to reengage the world the following morning when we leave the center.

I have no opinion about the accuracy of this and tend to find the elimination of silence to be jarring and unpleasant. As happy as I am to have the retreat wind down, the contrast between silence and people talking is almost too much for me to handle. But so is life from time to time, so maybe that is the point of it.

There tend to be three types of people who go to these retreats. The first are psychonauts. These are the people who have found out about mediation, think it is cool, and relish in the thought of completing a retreat as though it is a badge of honor or an accomplishment of something. The second are the mindful-curious. These are the people who have, for some reason, started to consider the possibility that consciousness is not the thing that they thought it was. They are not sure what it is, but they are interested in finding the true nature of the mind and what existence is all about. The final group is the psychology skewed. These people have, for one reason or another, an internal operating system that doesn’t serve them as well as it could. They are not necessarily, or even likely, to suffer from a psychological pathology that is chemical in nature or for which they need to be medicated. They just engage the world, their mind, and their brain in a way that to some degree less than optimal. This causes them existential difficulties in so far as their life is tougher than it needs to be or is lived with a sense that they are living slight out of phase with the real world.

I am a member of this final group, and I rediscovered mediation when I noticed the thought that life was tougher than it needed to be. I’ll eventually write more about the specifics, but generally speaking, I have a tendency towards feeling anxious and would have labeled my prevailing thought patterns to be those of something approximating generalized anxiety disorder.

The flavor of the conversations you have on day ten will be determined the group that you belong to and your group affiliation will be obvious based on the level and nature of the energy you give off once you begin talking again. Basically it will be one of three things – “I made it” pride, “I realized” curiosity, or “I am like this” acceptance.

I was talking to a guy from the third group on our way back from lunch when he mentioned that he was going to ask the instructor a question at the end of the next group sitting. I asked him if we was willing to tell me what he was going to ask and he mentioned that it was about anxiety. Specifically, when he was younger, about fifteen years ago, he was diagnosed with anxiety because he was having panic attacks at school. The solution was medication to be taken when an attack was starting. It worked in so far as it treated the acute nature of the attacks but it didn’t stop them from occuring. As he got older, they occurred less and less frequently and he hadn’t experienced one in five years since he had graduated from university and started working. However, earlier that morning he had experienced what felt like the start of one during the group sitting. This was a concern because he thought he was cured, so he wanted to ask the instructor how long he would have to meditate for before he would be cured. He believed that after developing and continuing a practice for a few months or years that the brain would clear itself up and he would never have anxiety again.

This sounded familiar to me because when I started practicing, I had the same belief that it would fix things. After years of practice I had come to accept that it did not fix anything. In fact, it does not do much of anything OTHER than make you more aware of what is going on from moment to moment. What will be will be, you just seem to feel it more intensely. You still get angry, you just realize that you are angry sooner and feel the anger more. You still get sad, you just realize it sooner and feel it more profoundly. Mediation helps me because these two things work together to more quickly move me through whatever emotional experience that I am having. The end result is that I feel more and suffer less, which is a positive. I am still the same as I ever was, the same code is running, I’m just a little more in tune with what I am experiencing from moment to moment and this awareness gives me the clarity to not get so wrapped up in it. I react less and more often choose to respond by doing nothing.

So I asked him what he thought the instructor was going to say and then what did he hope they would say? I don’t recall the exact words that he used, but the essence of how he replied was a single answer to both questions. That it is normal right now and that everything will go away completely within a couple of months, and maybe as long as a year.

I try to do things that reduce suffering in other beings, and baring that, I try to avoid doing things that will cause suffering. I did not know how the instructor would answer the question, but I knew how I would answer it, so I asked him if he wanted to know what I thought the instructor might say. He said sure, so I answered. Be aware that by answering the question I was trying to reduce his suffering in the long run but knew full well that the action I was taking had the potential of causing it in the short term.

“I used to want the same thing, but I come to realize that it is never going away. I am prone to experience moments of intense and almost overwhelming anxiety and went on my first retreat because I was almost certain that there was a better way to experience life. And I was right and I was also wrong. The fact of the matter the anxiety is still there and it is probably always going to be, but it doesn’t mean what it used to. It used to be something that I wanted to get rid of, so I’d resist it and approach it as a problem to solve. Maybe there were times when I was able to make it go away, but I always feared that it would come back again. I wanted to be free of it so I could just go about living my life the way I believe everyone else does.”

I paused for a moment to make sure he was still with me and started-up again when I realized that he was.

“But what meditation has taught me is that there isn’t anything wrong with me and there is no reason to actually want to get rid of the anxiety for ever. Most of the time it is just a drag, but some of the time it is actually helpful, so I know my life wouldn’t be the same if it never came back. It’s natural and normal for me, so there is no point in battling with it or labeling myself as defective or less than other people. We are all equally worthless, sentences to live out our live on this planet in the middle of more or less no where. The universe is just so big that my anxiety and your panic attacks can’t actually mean anything in a cosmic scale.”

I pause again and notice that the wheels are starting to spin a little faster in his head.

“I still get anxious. Probably just as often as I used to. It kind of feels worse now than it did before, but there is a big difference now. Now I know that it is going to pass, just like everything else. It is temporary and if I wait long enough it will go away. And you know what, then I’ll be glad it is gone. It’s kind of like the opposite of feeling happy. Happiness doesn’t mean that same thing that it used to any more because I know that it will pass and when it does I will no longer be happy. But just like the anxiety, it will probably come back in the future and I can be happy again, for a moment before it leaves.”

This pause was different, at least what I noticed was different. There was a look of pain in his eyes, and his face wore that heavy weight of the world look. This was the suffering I had anticipate causing.

“All I can do is choose what I pay attention to. That’s it. I can’t control what my brain and body do from moment to moment, at least in terms of a anxiety showing up. But I can choose to be completely happy when happiness rolls in and enjoy it for what it is, just as I can choose to notice what anxiety actually feels like. When I’m anxious I can direct my attention to the sensations on my body and notice what the moments of anxiousness actually feel like, and if I feel them all over, it it feels the same on different spots, and if my noticing the sensations of anxiety change how my brain deals with. I’m free to pay attention to it, to ignore it, or to play around with it and try to think about what it reminds me of. If I needed to act, I would have acted. Since I didn’t, there is no survival trigger for the anxiety so it doesn’t matter very much.”

He was still with me.

“But it isn’t going to disappear, or it might. I hasn’t for me, and I haven’t read or heard from anyone who has eliminated it from their life entirely through meditation. But by paying attention to it as an experience in the moment as it is happening, as opposed to treating it as a problem to solve, it starts to mean something else and this I have found to be a lot easier to deal with. But it isn’t going anywhere and meditation isn’t going to fix you because there is nothing wrong with you. You just get anxious from time to time and you have convinced yourself that it is bad. It isn’t good or bad, it’s just an experience you have from time to time. Be curious about it and teach yourself to notice what it is actually like as an experience as opposed to giving it power by making it into something it isn’t.”

There was a little back and forth, but not much that seemed to matter. I had crushed his dream that mediation was a solution to this problem and obliterated the hope that he was one day going to be free of panic attacks and anxiety in general.

A few hours later, after the afternoon group sitting, I asked him what the instructor had said and he told me he didn’t ask. When I asked why, he said that during the sitting, the anxiety started to fire-up again and he choose to just notice it as an experience as opposed to react to it as a problem. It hadn’t been all that bad. In fact, it was just something that was happening that wouldn’t be happening for very long. It wasn’t that it disappeared instantly, it just seemed to shrink in significance and became the rushing sensation that was his experience of anxiety. I thought this was great, but when he continued, I realized the wisdom of what I had shared.

“If it isn’t going to go away, I’m going to be living in fear that it is going to show up. And that thought is actually one that kind of begins to trigger it. That is unreasonable. I’m either going to be having panic attacks or living in a state of fear that I’m going to be having one. So if I just accept that they will show up from time to time and really make the effort to uncover whether or not they are a problem, I’ll at least know if I need to do something more about them. If that last sit is anything to go on, they are just kind of shittie, like the feeling you get after running up some stairs or trying to catch a train that you’re late for. My heart was going faster than normal, but I was free to direct my mind onto whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to pay attention to it. This didn’t make it go away, but it made it just a thing that was happening.”

I smiled and replied with “that’s cool, and kind of a powerful insight eh?”

The retreat ended the next day and I drove home with the radio off, happy that it was over and excited to be seeing my girlfriend again.

In the days and weeks, and months that followed, as I continued to practice, anxiety still continued to show up, and I think it will always play a role in my life. Most of the time I’m able to just label it by saying “there’s anxiety” and it fades away. Other times it gets a grip and I have a moment of wondering if I ever didn’t feel it or if it will ever go away, but then I catch myself and start to pay attention to the sensation it triggers, or the sensation that triggers it. I notice just how similar it is to excitement, or too much coffee, or to the moments after a tough working set in the gym that causes my heart rate to fly. The key is that after all of the mediation, I’m able to notice when it rolls in and make the decision to do something about it if doing something will help or to just let it be.

I am not cured, and I have very little reason to believe that I ever will be, because there is nothing to be cured from. This is how my brain operates. I’m just free to choose my approach, so by deciding to view myself as normal, and to act with curiosity when it comes along. Because it is going to come along and realizing this fact was a moment of wisdom.

“So what?” – When It Isn’t About Money

When someone has a skill and they are asked to answer the question “so what?” when it concerns their skill, what comes next is an outline or list of some actions that they can take using their skill that other people might value and will be willing to pay for. A clear so what answer is effectively the instructions on how to capitalize upon a skill


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Last week I had coffee with a good friend with whom I used to work. She left the company a few months before I did, and this was our first opportunity to catch-up. She and I have what I would consider actual conversation. Neither one of us view the other one as being wrong, less than, or in need of assistants or help; unless of course one of us asks for it.

The consequence to operating this way is that every conversation we have is about me; and from her perspective, it is about her. When there are no problems to solve, predatory listening ceases to be something that is helpful. Instead, you listen to what the other person is saying and you actually take the time to hear it – listening is what the words do to your ears, hearing is what the words do to you brain. It is engaging and while the conversation may have a starting point, there is no map and definitely no ending point. It goes where it goes and it lasts as long as it last. And when it ends, our brain continues to process the conversation and make whatever hay out of it that it can. This is what I enjoy most about talking to other people, and it might be the reason why I have a tough time making small talk and talking about the sports.

She left the company to work for a company in a different industry and is enjoying the learning opportunities that her new role is giving her.

When I left the company, it was to pursue writing, or coaching, or, well, something other than working for a company doing a task that I was good at but had no real connection to. I was competent at my last job, but it wasn’t alivening and it wasn’t a manifestation of who I am or the expression of what brings me the most fulfillment in terms of using my brain and body.

As conversations like ours do, it moved on to what I was going to do next, and generally what was I going to do to generate an income. Her asking gave my brain the task of thinking more about the question “so what?”

The way I see it, the notion of value is connected to the answer of this question. Specifically, when someone has a skill and they are asked to answer the question “so what?” when it concerns their skill, what comes next is an outline or list of some actions that they can take using their skill that other people might value and will be willing to pay for. A clear so what answer is effectively the instructions on how to capitalize upon a skill.

For example, someone who knows a lot about exercise can answer so what by saying they can teach other people how to exercise, they can exercise safely themselves, they can teach other people how to coach movements, and they can review the quality of other people’s exercise programs and offer helpful advice. Some of these things are jobs because they will allow the person to act as a proxy or stand-in for the lack of skill other people have concerning exercise.

I have been wondering about the “so what” of my skill set for a while now. The first moment of it in the most recent phase was about six months ago during dinner with one of Heather’s friends and her husband. I have known this lady for about four years and have always had extremely intense conversations with her. She’s exceptionally bright and having lived a very different culturing life, she has a very different way of looking at the world than I do. It’s a welcome change although it can be a big challenge to manage being so absolutely clueless around someone who is so intelligent. I lean into the discomfort because if nothing else, I will get a different perspective of things if I swallow my pride accept that I do not know as I listen and hear what she has to say. True to form, this was one of those moments.

It was nice to have her say some lovely things to me. She mentioned that I always had a way of talking about subjects that was free of judgment, loaded with information, and lacking the normal dogmatism that tends to follow people who have thought a lot about something. Talking with me was always going to be interesting because what I would say would land somewhere between unique way of looking at something and profound insight. I made her think, and since she enjoys thinking, time with me was rewarding. She was always going to be better off at the end of the conversation and at no point would she feel like I had attempted to use manipulation to drive home a point. “You know you don’t know, and that doesn’t stop you from voicing your theories because you almost seem willing to be wrong so that you don’t have to be wrong like that again.”

In fairness, this is arguable the nicest thing someone as intelligent as her could say to me, so I just keep being me around her and the talks are always outstanding.

This dinner was more of the same, although I had a lot less to say because I do not know the world from which she was speaking. She has an MBA, has recently moved on from her last corporate job to start a consulting company; which generated more revenue in the first three months than she was making in the previous year, and she understands how to deliver services when there is a demand for those service. She’s very clean on her own “so what,” and she is more than capable of setting up the service delivery once someone else has figured out the answer to their “so what” question.

This is where we ended-up during dinner, and it was a painful place to be.

“What is your USP Pat? You have a lot of skills and a ton of information, but what is your unique selling proposition?” As we talked – she talked, I listened – it was evident that I didn’t know what she was talking about, or what my unique selling proposition is. All I knew was that I really enjoy learning and figuring things out, and left to my own devices, I would do this full time just for the sake of understanding the world more clearly.

I didn’t know, I still don’t, and after a few days and weeks considering the conversation, I began to realize that knowing my unique selling proposition was the same thing as having a clear and concise answer to the question “so what?”

Heather is crystal clear on her unique selling proposition and she knows the answer to the so what question about her skill set. She is a shaper and leader of corporate culture, she is able to get people to generate the solutions to their problems, and she is able to get large groups people moving together to achieved a shared goal. It’s frightening and remarkable all at the same time. Frightening because she is so good at it and remarkable because people end up figuring out and choosing to do the things they need to do. She’s kind and smart, and plays her role without anyone feeling that she’s pushing them to do anything. At worst they let out a sign, announce that she’s doing it again, and play their role in solving their own problems, but most likely the people are unaware that she’s helping them and only tend to notice a few months later when their existence has improved dramatically.

Now of course I would be crazy to not attempt to enroll her in helping me surface my USP, but it would be even more crazy for her to try. Relationships work because each partner plays a role, and they work best when there is a complement between the two. There is a risk associated with one partner taking on a non-established role this far along in the relationship – we give each other the space to figure out stuff on our own because neither one of us want the responsibility of having to manage any aspect of the others life. Had she taken on the role of leading me at the beginning, our relationship probably would not have progressed very far. It’s a catch-22 of sorts, and as much as I would love to get her help, we both know that it isn’t going to happen.

The conversations we have shared over the last six months have been helpful, but they amount to conversations the one would have with a spouse and NOT to the ones they would have with their coach. All of this being said, I have been thinking about my USP and trying to figure-out the answers to the “so what” question of my skills.

Last weekend when the conversation between my old work friend and me landed at the “what next,” I felt the urge to talk about the “so what” question. The reason was very simple, I do a lot of my thinking through talking out loud, so the perfect moment presented itself.

I have a thought that maybe the “so what” answers are not as clear cut as they could be. I have no difficulty understanding how someone can take an inventory of their skills and figure-out how they can use these things to earn an income. It’s a matter of figuring out how to use them to add value to lives of other people. The challenge I am running in to, at least I think I am running in to, is that I don’t share the same definition of value that is captured by that question. I don’t care about money all that much. I have a relationship with it, but it is a second cousin type relationship, as opposed to a sibling type. Heather likes money, but more than that, she knows she needs it. She’s been able to work hard to cultivate her talents to the point that she is able to bring immense value to other people and that this value can easily be measured using money. Money is a place holder or proxy for something else that she needs, wants or likes, and she has been able to establish a direct relationship between taking specific actions and earning money. I don’t have the same relationship. Money is more of a nuisance to me than anything else. I don’t really want anything other than the opportunity to learn, write, and think. Sure, I need some money to pay of things like rent, food, Internet, and transportation, but once that stuff is taken care of, I just don’t seem to give much consideration any more.

For a very long time I didn’t actually believe that I would get much older, so I never conditioned myself to believe that saving for retirement or a rainy day was something that I needed to do. That isn’t one of my habits or automatic ways of thinking. The reality is that I am now much older than I ever thought I would be and each day I wake up, I move further away from the expiration date I had created in my mind. The truth was that for too long there didn’t need to be an answer to the question “so what” because I wasn’t going to be around to deal with there having to be an answer. I was able to do what I wanted and what felt good because bills and money didn’t matter. Money is only a thing that has value in the future when you are earning because it is a way of circumventing the need to trade time today for goods and services later. But for me then, later didn’t exist to the same extent or in the same way it does now, so I would pursue what I found rewarding vs. what I found lucrative. This was the habit I instilled and for a very long time I was able to take the mental steps that were required to continue this line of reasoning.

But it became unworkable simply because the world doesn’t operate that way. Other people set about generating wealth and saving for their future. When they connect with me, I am a mark for them because I don’t care about money so if they are able to provide me with fulfillment, I am satisfied. They get to keep the money because I got what I wanted. But sooner or later I was going to die, which would take care of things, or I was going to reach the point that money would become important because it would come to represent the future. When that happened, I would be stuck trying to figure everything out and would need to determine what my USP in order to demonstrate value and bring services of market.

What I love doing, and what Heather’s friend highlighted as a unique skill, is not really the easiest thing to bring to market. I love figuring out how the world works, how people think, and why things are the way they are. I’m not all that focused though – a mechanical engineer is focused on how machines work, and can therefore bring a very specific set of skills to the market place, a corporate lawyer understands a very specific set of rules and is therefore of great value to those who need access to those rules – I am as interested in how a hydro dam works as I am about the innate reward system of the brain, so am not all that driven to learn all there is to know about a specific subject. This is not to say that I know with certainty that I cannot train myself to focus my drive onto the pursuit of learning everything that I possibly can about a specific subject, just that I am not innately driven to do this. In fact, there have been periods of my life when I did go after specific things with all that I had and each time I did this, I was able to bring on board a lot of knowledge and I did show a very large improvement in those things that surrounded the subject.

So this is where I stand right now, it’s a good place to be, but it isn’t prefect. If I didn’t need money I would just keep devouring information and learning whatever I could that I was moved to learn. However, I do need money, and there is a part of me that is beginning to grow annoyed at the ongoing nature that a need for money creates.

Now is the time to shift course slightly and focus more of my efforts on generating a substantial enough income that I no longer need to spend any time having to address the need for money. To either generate sufficient enough income that I can quickly save enough money to cross its pursuit off of my list or sufficient enough residual income that I don’t need to think much more about it.

What is my unique selling proposition? Well, I don’t exactly know, but I have a very good chance of figuring it out. Just because I have never consciously set about trying to figure it out before does not mean that I haven’t every taken advantage of it in the past. The answers are there, I just need to spend the time looking for them. The “so what” is not a matter of money, it’s a matter of freeing up the time to do the things that I want to do, and maybe that reframe is all that I need to get after it….