Category: Conscious Experience Described

This category covers things that relate to the experience of consciousness. It deals with the aspects of thinking that people become aware of because they directed their attention onto them, their attention was drawn to them, or because they just came to mind as a result of some underlying mental process.

Demystifying Depression Article – The Cumulative Effect Of Stress

A number of years ago my brother sent me an article called Demystifying Depression – Part I by Name of Feather – Name of Feather is the username under which the article was originally posted in May 2005 . Over the years the article has disappeared and reappeared on a number of occasions as the websites it was hosted on have changed owners or simply just shut down.

The major thesis of the article is that depression is a physical disease and, more specifically, a disease that is the manifestation of an inability to recover for the day to day stress of being alive.

In general, human beings have a finite ability for cellular repair and depending upon the amount of stress, stimulation and tissue damage they experience they will require a specific length of time to fully recover. For example, a person may have the ability to repair 48 units of damage per day, or 2 units per hour. If they have an easy day that causes 12 units of damage, it will take them 6 hours to recover. A much tougher day that causes 48 units of damage, will, assuming no further damage occurs, require a full 24 hours to restore things to normal.

Something that is less than helpful is the nature of recovery. Unused potential simply evaporates and cannot be stored. If it was not used when it was available, it is just no longer available. Which is a problem when we consider the following example: Someone has an exceptionally stressful day and generates 96 units of damage, mandating the need for 2 full days of recovery. Not a problem, so long as the time is taken to recover and allow the body to return to baseline, the individual will be fine – think about someone taking it easy on the weekend or going to bed a few hours earlier for a couple of days. Now what happens when to the recovery queue when, on the day following that 96 units of damage, the person has an average day of 48 units?

96 – 48 + 48 = 96.

After a full day or recovery they remain in an un-recovered state; effectively in the same position there were in when their day ended yesterday. It is this cumulative characteristic that creates the possibility that the recovery queue will grow larger and larger over a period of days and weeks.

The body is generally able to keep going for a while when it is over stressed or overworked. This resilience is a survival trait allowing us to push hard when we need to and recover once the work is done. In fact, our ancestors lived in a time that alternated between scarcity and abundance, which favored individuals who were able to carry-on under suboptimal circumstances. Sooner or later things would improve and the opportunity for recovery would present itself. Baseline functioning would be restored after the required period of time.

Human beings run into problems when the opportunity for recovery is never given or not sufficient enough because our ability to continue to function normally is dependent upon the ability to spend adequate amounts of time in a fully recovered state. When this does not happen there are metabolic and physiological consequences. Initially the negative impact is small – a person might have a more difficult time regulating emotions, maintaining skin health, falling or remaining asleep, concentrating or recovering from physical exercise – but after a short period of time the effects will begin to grow – changes in body composition, personality changes, increased susceptibility to infection, or reduced cognitive functioning – and eventually the body will begin to shut down impairing digestion and immune functioning allowing disease to take hold, which will eventually lead to death.

The article outlines all of this, but most importantly it details how to avoid it from becoming a problem in the first place and how to adjust your behavior in the event it you have dug too big a hole to recover from with a few days of rest, some extra sleep or a couple of weeks vacation.

This to me is the most valuable part of it. So much is known about optimal or normal physiological functioning that it is very easy to miss some of the more critical parts of it. The experience of anxiety and its associated stress response are completely normal and very predictable BUT only as long as the processes that support them have the adequate opportunity to recover. The moment they start to get impacted will mark a change in how the organism will handle any stress. These impairments will have a cascading effect on seemingly unrelated systems, which will cause further negative effects. The example recovery potential of 48 units per day will, once a threshold has been crossed, begin to drop and will not be restored to normal levels until the body has the chance to fully recover. It becomes 47 units, then 46, and it continues to drop until the person consciously takes recovery, breakdown occurs which forces recovery, or the person dies.

The dose is the poison here. The higher the stress, the longer the recovery. The longer one spends in a non-recovered state, the greater the level of physiological impairment and the longer it will take for normal functioning to return. In fact, it is both possible and likely that extended periods of time spend running at a diminished capacity will result in permanent changes to many metabolic functions including the ability to recover from stress.

Consistently receiving nominal amounts are fine, as are occasional periods of time with very large amounts as long as there is the opportunity to completely recover. The potential problems begin when recovery capacity is not able to keep up with the damage and when this damaged state is sustained for periods of time. At this point, the individual will begin to show diminished capacity and this will include their long term resilience.

Which brings us to the actual problem with stress. We handle it very effectively and for a while, until we don’t, and at that point it is already too late. We have created a lot of damage that we need to recover from, and some of that damage is to the recovery processes and to the processes that create stress resistance. But we are blind about this simply because dealing with stress is so natural and doesn’t have a lot of symptoms.

If you haven’t read the article before give it a read and consider making a copy and saving it on your computer. It is very useful and given its tendency to disappear without warning, there is no guarantee that it will always be available to you when you need it the most.

If It Was Supposed To Be Easy, It Would Be Easy

Winters in Ontario can be brutal. It isn’t so much the cold and the snow that grinds you down, it’s the variability that gets you begging for spring. This winter has been no exception. It snows, there is a deep freeze and then everything melts. Just as you start to believe that it might be over, the temperature drops, the sky opens up and there’s another foot of snow to shovel.

In the second week of January there was a spring-like thaw that cleared everything up just in time for winter to return and overcompensate for its absence by causing a big drop in temperature that lasted for a few days before returning back to being just unreasonably cold – a day time high of minus fifteen and a overnight low of minus twenty-five; these are Celsius degrees which made it slightly warmer than Fahrenheit, although “less brutally cold” is probably a more accurate way to state it. If you were a plumber you call it “earnings season” as pipes freeze and burst.

This is what happened at Heather’s cottage. When we arrived on Friday evening and turned on the water pump it started raining behind the shower wall. All at once a bunch of things float through our minds. The first is to turn off the water and assess the damage and magnitude of the problem. It turned out to be only a single pipe, which was good. And it was in one of the pipes that sent water to a small half bathroom – the kitchen and main bathroom with the shower were fine. But with no way to turn off the water flow to the impacted pipe we were going to need to get a plumber in to fix it or close it off. There was no water damage, at least not anywhere that mattered – the cottage was built over sand and the pump had been off, so the water that was in the pipes had leaked out, down and into the sand.

The second consideration was about what we would do right now. We were without running water, so no showering or flushing the toilet, but the gas and electricity were still working. There was plenty of drinking water because we bring it with us, and more than enough food. I figured it made more sense to stay than to go home because we were already there and it’s easy enough to fill-up the water tank to flush the toilet. Heather agreed, so we made dinner, watched TV and went to bed as if everything was fine.

We talked it over the following morning and decided to stay for the rest of the weekend. We made a quick trip into town to get more water to make sure we didn’t run out and the rest of the weekend was more or less normal.

The final consideration was on how to deal with the burst pipe. We didn’t need it fixed right away because we had water, so we were good with saving the ton of money a weekend emergency plumber would charge. The question then became “when would we get it fixed?” Heather had been planning of replacing all of the piping anyway because it is old, copper and was run against the outside walls; the pipe bursting wasn’t entirely unexpected. It had been in the realm of possibility and while it made for a crappy couple of hours digging through the snow to get access to the basement to assess the damage, the work was going to be getting done soon anyway. If anything, the deep freeze just moved the start date forward by three to six months.

And this marked the beginning of one of those “firsts” moments that couples have in their relationship. This was the first time we would be dealing with a home repair that wasn’t part of a well planned schedule with a clear start and end date. Together we would need to figure this out, kind of on the fly, and with people who were on the phone – either the plumber or Heather.

Every relationship has the potential for a bunch of these firsts; although many relationships end after the initial one. The reason they are relationship killers is because they bring to the surface who a person really is. There isn’t enough time to put on whatever mask you have been wearing because the problem needs to be addressed. A sense of urgency is remarkably unveiling. And lets be honest here, most people are kind of messy from a psychological point of view. It is not that we are awful or bad, it’s that we are just people. We’re animals that learn, remember, and talk. Sometimes we listen, but we only really hear from a position made possible from our life experience. This means that the people who understand us the best are our immediate family. It also means that we understand our romantic partners from our own perspective and NOT from a position of actually understanding who and what they are, or from actually understanding their motivations for doing things. Worse still is that we usually have no idea why we ourselves do anything.

Think about that for a second. There Heather and I were with a problem to solve. There are consequences to every possible solution and many of the solutions are mutually exclusive. Since I work from home, I will be meeting with the plumber while she is at work. BUT Heather has greater vision in terms of what she wants done with the cottage in the future so, therefore, how the plumbing should be fixed and how it might get rerouted.

Individually and in isolation the solution is both simple and obvious. And this is the exact opposite of how relationships work. I want the pipes located away from the outside walls so they never freeze again. Heather wants this too, but she also wants the kitchen updated so the sink will be moving six feet to the left of where it is now. Plus there will need to be a water filter for drinking water and eventually a dishwasher and possibly a washer and drier because they will increase the resale value.

We are very different people. There is nothing wrong with this at all, I think it makes for a better relationship because she is many of the things that I am not, and vice-versa, but crisis situations are moments when there isn’t enough time to put on the mask of understanding. While she can appreciate the practicality of my vision – it’ll get things back to what they were before and dramatically decrease the possibility of another plumbing issue for the next fifteen years or so – it is completely lacking in the enhanced usefulness or aesthetics actualized by her solution. But the increased choices and possibilities created by her solution do not spontaneously enter into my mind. The kitchen is fine, I do the dishes and the only time we are there for long enough to possibly need to do laundry is in the summer when we’re at the beach most of the time, which means we aren’t wearing a lot of clothes.

My life experience is shaping how I see things as her life experience is shaping how she sees things. And in crisis moments we are not capable of seeing this, or that there is a different way to look at things. All I know is all there is, and all she knows is all there is. Except there’s at least one other way of viewing things that is critically important in that moment.

During one of the conversations about what the plumber had suggested, it became crystal clear to me that nothing was crystal clear to me. When I asked Heather what she wanted, and she told me, I was left kind of gobsmacked. All at once everything made sense to the two of us. She realized that I had been solving a different problem and I realized that I had been trying to solve the wrong problem.

We wondered out loud why the whole thing was going down the way it was and we tracked in on what seems like a decent enough answer. It isn’t that life is hard, although it is, it’s that relationships are not easy. If it was supposed to be easy, it would be easy. It isn’t just the relationship that Heather and I share that is not easy, it is almost every relationship that has ever or will ever exist, with most of them being deemed too difficult to even continue.

We are fortunate to be self-aware enough to notice when there is more friction than normal and to be curious about the reasons why. Neither one of us make the other person wrong and we reach the point of accepting that we are just different. This process is transformative and it gets us to the end of the situation quickly while sustaining the middle of our relationship.

The best part about all of these “firsts” is that by getting to the end of them they just evaporate. They never come-up again as “seconds” because of what we learned from the initial experience. We just get along better and live with a little more ease.

The Next Generation Gap – Post Revisited

Around 12 years ago I wrote the post The Next Generation Gap in response to reading the New York Magazine article “Say Everything”. The article was like nothing I had ever read before and it was a kind of wake-up call that reminded me that I was 34 and no longer in the drivers seat in terms of determining what was new and cool. My generations run at the front was over and we had been replaced with something that was so much different from everything that had ever come before.

The essence of the New York Magazine article was that the young people had always known the Internet and had come of age when broadband and the exceptionally low cost of storage had eliminated the need to be selective. Gone were times of film and chemical development that took time and money, replaced with digital cameras, unlimited pictures and the ability to store them online. Capturing a moment is just a matter of taking a bunch of pictures, switching to review, thumbing through what you got and keeping the ones that you want. It didn’t matter because there was no cost associated with taking a picture and you got to see it instantly to make sure your hair was right and that no one was blinking.

2007 was still very early days in whatever it is was we were going through and at the time of my post, the iPhone was about three months away from US release. Looking back on it now, it seems quaint to think about a world without the cloud, without instant access to Facebook, twitter or whatever social media applications matter right now. But 2007 was the calm before the explosion, and the younger people at the time were carving themselves a long lasting identify by capturing and posting large portions of their life online, for almost anyone to see, forever.

That was the essence of the article. With a no rules and no holds barred approach to making everything available, what the heck were these people doing to their future? There would be no secrets and anything they did would come back to haunt them. The article didn’t predict this of course, it was just so obvious that it would be the outcome given that no generation had ever existed so transparently before. They were young and naive. Actions have consequences, even for those who lack the foresight to predict them. Give it a few years, a decade at most, and the day of reckoning would hammer down on those too willing to share everything.

Except that isn’t what happened. The day of reckoning arrived, sure, but the hammer avoided those who shared so much. It turned out that living out loud and in constant public view served to immunize them from the fall that comes along with finally being outed as a closeted asshole. Except that wasn’t how it happened. People did simply not grow tired and immune to all things shocking – if that was the case, when the hammer dropped it wouldn’t have made a sound or crushed anyone. By growing up in a time when everything you say and do will be documented by someone, posted on line, and be instantly accessible forever, you learn to behave like a person who is one day going to have to account for your actions. Who you are is well known to anyone who is willing to take the time to find out. All of the bad things you have said or done are as accessible as all of good deeds you have bragged about or made public. Lives have been destroyed, but mostly those who are members of the older generations who managed to control the message and manipulate everyone’s point of view.

Smart phones were tools that young people knew how to use and they had potential consequences for bad behavior that were obvious to them at the time and have become obvious to the rest of us over the last decade. When you are in public, either physically or via broadcast, there are NO secrets and nothing will be forgotten. This isn’t brand new, it’s just that before powerful people were predictably able to shift opinion before by slut shaming, buying favors or silence, changing the subject completely, lying or controlling the narrative to such an extent that demonstrable facts didn’t matter. Powerful people are less able to do this now, so for a much larger portion of the population, there is no escaping the past.

Being held to account for your transgressions is a good thing, particularly when the fear of that account acts as the disincentive for transgressions in the first place, because the world is a better place when people behave and treat others as they want to be treated themselves.

There is a down side though, and it has to do with the volume or quantity of stuff that is being created. There is a devaluing that is going on, which paradoxically explains why making everything available to everyone all of the time has had the impact of causing people to feel like they don’t matter or that they cannot keep up. A quick comparison between social media streams clearly indicates that most people live a life that is way more exciting and just plain better. Envy is the more common response when we see the Instagram photos of an influencer who has been able to parlay their genetic lottery winnings into a life of unreasonable amounts of fame, fortune and fun. Our May “two-four” and “August long” weekends at a friends cottage are great experiences and fantastic memories until we see how the real The Weeknd or Kylie spend their time. Then we feel kind of crappy because our twice a year indulgences don’t keep up.

It’s everyone’s social media stream though. And when people notice the crappy feeling associated with being average, they share more and more stuff in an effort to lift their Klout Score or its current alternative. And in response to sharing more, other people feel worse and try to medicate the crappy feeling of being average by sharing more. This of course leads to billions of experiences being shared and made available to everyone which results in a reduction of the value of any individual experience. The joy is lower and it has a much shorter half-life. Whatever sense of elation we got from witnessing the solar eclipse evaporates the moment we see that Sally saw it from a cooler location when we look at the photos she posted. We may choose to not experience it all, instead opting to watch the HD video the next day on YouTube or watch people watching it.

Which gets us to the problems with sharing everything. The goal is no longer about having an experiences, it’s about sharing us having them, which is not the same thing. The result we might be seeking, although we won’t say it, is to trigger a negative emotional response in the people who consume our social media stream. The inevitable outcome is that everyone else is doing it. This results in most people having two types of experiences, those of documenting what they are doing and those of looking at the experiences that other people have documented. Neither of which is the same thing as being present and engaged in what you are doing from moment to moment.

The upside to sharing everything has probably been an improvement in civic behavior because we all know that we’re not going to get away with anything for very long. The down side is that there is a growing mood of collective melancholy as we are constantly reminded of how much better life can be but isn’t for us.

And that makes me a little curious about what the next generation will do to shift culture in response to living out loud and wide open. Time will tell, it always does….

Reasons To Not Be Afraid – Post Revisited

About seven years ago I wrote what I still regard as the most honest, vulnerable and personal thing I have ever posted. The title of the post was Reasons To Not Be Afraid and it represents as close to bottom as I hope I ever go.

At the time, it had been about six weeks since my father had died and after taking the month of February to rot, drink, overeat, smoke, and basically spiral down, I had a moment of clarity. It was around 4:55 AM on the morning of Wednesday February 29. For some reason, probably because my brain had stopped enjoying the experience of being inside my body, I was snapped awake with the realization that my dad was dead. While this was obvious and something that I was clear on, given that he died on January 29, a part of me had been pushing it away. But through the fog my brain was able to do its thing, reconcile all of the sensory information, interrogate my long term memories and force into my consciousness the painful reality that he wasn’t on vacation and that he was never coming home.

I lost my shit! Waking-up angry is one thing, this was an entirely different animal. My body was already filled with a chemically induced rage courtesy of my medulla dumping the previous months share of adrenaline into my blood stream a few moments before my eyes opened. The worst part was that my eyes opening was not the first action I took that morning. My body had been up and moving around for a while before I joined the party and it was my joining in that slowed everything down; not right away though. I was along for the ride watching my body wrecking things as I tried to get a handle on a tsunami of grief, a growing pain in my right foot and the feeling that something should be ringing in my ears that people get when they are smashed awake by a threateningly loud noise.

There were a few things wrecked in my room, nothing of much value and nothing that was ever missed, but destroyed nonetheless. A fan, a pair of old headphones, a plastic water bottle, stuff that had been near my bed when my hands decided that those items needed to be as far away from me as possible and the rest of my body agreed. The predawn peace had been shattered by things exploding against the wall that had done nothing but try and hold up the house. Its answer? Make sure everything stayed on the inside of the room by providing the perfect surface to convince a few million molecular bonds that their partners were not worth holding on to. It was the noise of their scream as they let go that was responsible for waking me up.

Oh, and I had kicked something.

What does bottom look like? Well, it depends on the person I suppose. For me though it was kind of unremarkable. Bottom was sober. Bottom was clear headed. Bottom was a profound sadness. There wasn’t regret, my dad and I had been very close. His death wasn’t the shock that him getting cancer had been. When someone is given 6-12 weeks to live you know full well what is in the mail.

I was just tremendously sad.

Hitting bottom didn’t look anything like the view on the way there either. And in fairness, even the journey there wasn’t something that would make anyone shake their head in disgust. In the month between his death and me finally accepting it there had been a lot of drinking, over eating and too many cigarettes. Too much sleeping and too much time spent by myself working on a Morrissey flavored depression that was equal parts self indulgence and self pity. But there had been a lot of writing, a lot of insights and a lot of unconsciously coming to terms with the reality that my life was unworkable and had been for a very long time.

With my dad gone, I needed to grow-up – I needed to grow-up anyway, his passing must forced the issue. And as I lay on the floor of my room bawling that morning I accepted that my journey had begun.

Writing the “why’s” and “what ifs” lists in the Reasons To Not Be Afraid was good therapy advice that I had been putting off because the thought of the pain looking that deeply at my life might cause seemed too much to bare. This was an inflection point, a moment when the polarity reverses and the pain of continuing along a path becomes greater than any conceivable pain that would come from seeing what I had made of my life. While I didn’t particularly like what I saw and I detested the fact that I had become someone so afraid of the world that I was compulsively avoiding it, I knew that these were just feelings. If things were different, I would probably feel different.

That was the switch flipping. I had no idea if the future was going to be better, if I would attack the world with confidence and become a man of powerful and pragmatic action. That post, and the lists contained within it, were a reflection and the manifestation of untested beliefs. By doing different things, I would be able to find out if the beliefs were accurate and I would be able to feel something different. That was enough for me. It was clear that I was the one who had been making the decisions and choosing my actions, so I was free to make different decisions and choose different actions. And that is what I did.

Life got better, much better. It turned out that I had been living a lie. While the world is every bit as bad as I thought it was, living in it and being a part of it is a lot easier than avoiding it. While the “why’s” list did contain some accurate reasons, it also included some ad-hoc justifications for indulging in compulsive escapist behaviour. We’re all very good at coming up with reasons to support doing whatever it is we think we should do. The gold though was in my lack of imagination in the “what ifs” list. I was right about most of the things. As I changed my behavior, life got easier and it changed for the better. But I had been negligent in my consideration of the outcome of sustained small actions. Any action taken eliminates an almost infinite number of potential futures while simultaneously creating the possibility of an almost infinite number of alternative ones. It wasn’t just that I would no longer be hiding away from the world, it would be that I was actually engaging it, and that meant doing things, things that I hadn’t even considered being things before let alone things that I would be doing.

Seven years on the only thing that I would change about the post is the last line “I’m not necessarily afraid, but I am anxious,” which was more wishful thinking about the future than anything else. It was too early to make a definitive call on what the experience of change was like. The truth is that I am both afraid and anxious of doing new things and of the unknown in general. And I think I always will be. Life doesn’t start being less scary. There isn’t a desensitization effect as a result of doing stuff.

The main difference now is that I accept that I am afraid and I do it anyway.

Why I Keep Quitting Fitness Instructor Jobs

I have started instructing again after more than a year away. I am subbing for an instructor for a few months while she takes some time away to have a baby and start her family.

When I stopped last time it was right at the peak of the most successful period of my instructing career – I had been given the opportunity to create and lead a program that we called AfterBurn that used heart rate monitors and combined weights and indoor bikes to create full body work outs that challenged and improved the participants cardiovascular heath. It was really amazing to be a part of and I’m very glad that I did it. But I left it, right when it was becoming a draw for the gym. I came up with a number of reason why I stopped doing it, but it didn’t become clear until yesterday when I finished teaching a class.

Teaching a class, for me, is a performance, it isn’t a job. The lead-up is nerve-racking. It feels amazing to do, and there are times when I am sure I have helped people change their life, at least take a small step forward towards a goal, but I don’t think about it in the same way as I do about personal training, or making panels.

Personal training doesn’t feel like anything. I’m confident in my abilities and there are many right ways to go about training someone. It has been years since I was nervous about it. I’m prepared with the program and if a client shows-up with an injury or issue, we change the workout to accommodate for it. It’s really simple, almost mindless and automatic, and it doesn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary the night before work or as I drive there.

Instructing is very different. It feels like something beforehand and after 10 years and more than a 1000 classes I would have expected it to feel less and less like something. I get nervous before every class and there is a lot of anxiety. There isn’t anything else that I do in life that has this impact on me. I have been at it too long that I have to accept that the feeling is there to stay.

And I don’t like the feeling. It sucks to be completely honest; although when it leaves I do feel AMAZING and it know that the increased heart rate and being worked up does help me perform better. After 30 seconds the feeling goes away and is replaced with something else, something that is easier interpret as excitement or being on. But the build-up is negative and it does take a toll.

Being prepared doesn’t diminish the feeling much. I still remember the first class I taught, and the one I taught last night felt almost exactly the same. I have less self doubt now – even me being at my worst is still going to be an okay class. The feeling isn’t about believing that I am not good enough, not capable, or incompetent, it’s about being able to deliver a performance that is worthy of peoples limited fitness time.

And that feeling is what prevents it from being a job. Needing to be on to entertain is probably something that is fun to do, but the sense that I need to be on to be more than just an entertainer increases the stakes, and it ties my stomach in knots. It’s a feeling that is easy to turn your back on, and walk away from.

Why Your Life Is Fine

In my post about the Dunning–Kruger effect I spoke about the inverted bell curve shape between the amount of knowledge someone has about a subject and their level of confidence in the subject – those who are experts and those who know very little about a subject will display the same level of confidence about the subject while those in the middle will show low levels of confidence in the subject matter.

Your life is fine because you rely on shortcuts to make a call as to who to listen to. One of these short cuts is the level of confidence a person displays. ‎As a consequence you’ll trust an amateur as much as an expert. Welcome to you fine life.

Dunning Krueger applies equally to yourself though. Often times you’ll believe you know an enormous amount about a subject when you know practically nothing. The end result is that you feel confident cherry picking information that confirms your point of view while you close off to anything that doesn’t match your world view. This tendency is called a confirmation bias and given that wealth of information that is easily available on-line, it is hard not to find opinions, studies and data that support any point of view.

Think about it this way:

When you listen to someone talk about a subject, you’ll approach it from one of three places. The first is that the person is correct ‎because what they are saying matches what you know / believe to be true. The second is that they are wrong because what they are saying doesn’t match what you know. The final way is from a place of curiosity about what they are saying, why they are saying it and how did they end up believing it. They aren’t wrong, they are correct in what they are saying not because they agree with you but because human beings are completely logical even if one of their assumptions is inaccurate.

Few people spontaneously approach things from a place of genuine curiosity; they either nod and think “yeah, thats how it is” or shake their head and say “what a load of nonsense.” Both approaches are a flawed, dangerous, and hurting the quality of your life.

Consider what would happen if you were to, as soon as you hear something and feel agreement or disagreement, immediately go to the other side and come-up with reasons as to why you disagree or agree. It’ll force you to think about things in a very different way, to try on some unusual thoughts and feelings and help you find out ways to be right about something that is wrong. After you come-up with 3 or 4 possible reasons, allow your mind to return to its initial state and then move forward as you deem appropriate. The goal is not necessarily to change your point of view, it is to take a moment to get away from knowing and open-up to other possibilities.

When you do this, you’ll find yourself becoming more curious about what is actually going on and very soon realize that you’ve started to learn more about something you thought you knew a lot about. This is going to take your fine life and make it so much better!

“Systems” – A Dangerous Buzz Word In The Fitness Field

Systems are sales tools and things used by business owners to maximize profit. There is nothing innately wrong with them or with how they are used but we should be upfront about what they are and why they are being created.

Sales people need to be confident that what they sell will be what is delivered to the customer. The creation and implementation of a system gives them the certainty that their promises will be honored. In this area, they are a tool used to eliminate doubt thus freeing-up those resources to focus on making the deal.

Business owners love them because they ensure a baseline level of service that allows them to hire almost anyone to perform a role within a company thus lowering the cost of labour. The benefit to profit from hiring less skilled and less talented staff is huge given that highly skilled talent demands fair compensation.

“Systems” is a buzz word that triggers an automatic response within people. Using it will effectively lower resistance in potential customers and instills a sense of confidence in what they are buying.

Many of the big automakers focused on systems. This allowed them to sell millions of cars and trucks that had defects some of which ended up killing and injuring people. It allowed them to remain unresponsible for the outcome because their system had a flaw. What some would consider negligence can be perceived as a growing pain. Regardless of what it is called, it was for profit taking and it allows for inferior cars and services to be delivered.

In a service industry that calls itself personal training, systems have very little place because they are impersonal and ensure that the cookie cutter approach is upheld while the talent gets a smaller cut of the profits and the customer gets only what the system dictates.

Again, nothing wrong with this so long as seller, business owner and customer are aware of their role and what is happening.

Cognitive Biases – Some Reasons Why Nothing Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Self-Talk Might Be Holding Them Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affective Forecasting

It never cease to amaze me just how wrong I can get it. So much so that as I get older I make fewer and fewer predictions about how something I have never done is going to make me feel when I do it. There’s just no point in trying to figure it out because I don’t get it right. There are just so many ways it can go, so many emotions to feel that the likelihood that I’ll get it correct is close to zero.

When I started working out again, after I moved on from being an IT manager and began working for GoodLife, I wanted my abs to be visible. Maybe I had been that lean before, but if I had been, it had been years before when I was in high school. So I worked at it. I trained and ate well and projected myself forward into a time when I would have abs conditioned myself to feel amazing about it. And when that day came when I looked in the mirror and saw my abs three things hit me. Initially I had a rush of excitement thinking that I had achieved my goal. After about 15 seconds the excitement was replaced with a feeling of loss. Now what was I going to do? And then came the realization that NOTHING had changed. Big deal, I had a six pack, I was still bitter and unhappy, looking for something that would make me better than what I believed I was.

And that’s the thing about the future. It isn’t going to be much different from the present, particularly if the present is very different from the past. Just because you achieve a goal doesn’t mean the world is any different. It doesn’t mean anything is any different. If you are a 6 out of 10 in happiness you’ll return to being a 6 out of 10 in happiness pretty quickly after you reach your goal.

Human beings are dreadful with affective forecasting. We have no idea what our emotional state is going to be in the future in response to some future event. The best predictors are how we feel right now and how we felt when a similar thing happened; which is probably going to be very similar to how we feel right now.

I’ve known a few people who have had cancer. After the initial shock of being told that they are going to die sooner than expected, their lives went back to normal. I’m inclined to say that the last 6 weeks of my dad’s life were happier than the five years leading up to them. He laughed more, ate whatever he wanted and generally didn’t give a crap about all the stuff that, when we take a real hard look at, doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe my dad was sad, but when I asked him he seemed more concerned about my mom and her future than he did about his upcoming death. He didn’t seem sad, he didn’t really seem to care in a way that I would have imagined he would have cared.

He did remark a few weeks before the end that he was wondering why he wasn’t feeling bad about it, that maybe there was something wrong with him not feeling like there was something wrong. I said maybe he didn’t regard what was happening as anything other than what was always going to happen – rather trite and useless, but my dad was a pragmatist and realized that everyone dies.

For anything other than the most extreme cases – beating cancer, a loved on pulling through a dreadful illness, a child being recovered alive from a kidnapping, etc… – a human beings ability to predict their future emotional state is going to be poor, and this is something that I keep in mind when I am coaching people or talking to them about about training and goals.

I’ve seen it too many times to count, someone believing that the world will be different if they lose weight, gain muscle, do this or that thing, but their world isn’t different. All of them say the same thing after a few months: “I’m glad I did it, but not much has changed.” And this is why, in the fitness industry, there are so many relapses with body transformations – an awful lot of people return to their old habits and regain the lack of health & vitality they worked so hard to shed.

For those who are actually interested in helping their clients, it is best that they take the time to unpack the clients motivation and reframe their expectations in terms of the likely outcome. For example, every person who gains strength will notice that life just gets easier. But very few people seek out the help of a fitness professional to make life easier in the ways increasing strength will make it easier. In fact, most people do not realize the positive impact that a stronger back will have. Picking-up the laundry basket is as hard as it is, until it gets easier, then you will realize how hard it used to be.

Most of the really positive outcomes of improving your fitness are unknown until you improve your fitness. Having low energy is normal until you do the work needed to have high energy. The fog that dulls your thinking is always there until it is gone. The slowness of your digestive system is only noticed after it speeds up when you start eating real food and moving more.

Given that people are poor affective forecasters, to make sticky the changes your client makes, you’ll serve them better by finding-out why and how they ended-up in front of you and by pointing out all the good things they’ll notice that other people have noticed. You’ll help them more by ignoring or speaking very little about the things they believe they’ll enjoy about achieving their goal because they’ve probably got them wrong anyway.