Category: Improving General Wellness

This category covers non-specific things that improve the quality of life or fitness but that do not really fit into any of the other categories.

Arguing – You Need To Know Why

Part of a series on arguing.

You need to know what why you are arguing and what you want out of the interaction

Fundamental to doing your best at anything in life is knowing what you are doing and maybe why you are doing it. This applies arguing because if you don’t know what you want out of the situation, you’re just going to give the other person what they ask for, usually after a dispassionate defense from their verbal onslaught. If you don’t know what you want, you get what you get.

Every goal you have every achieved started off as a something impossible, a clearly defined and measurable objective, sometimes with a do by date. Once you create it, your brain and body set out to make it happen. This is the way human beings achieve things. In exactly the same but entirely opposite way that you are not setting an argument goal in your head and letting your powerful brain figure-out what to say to create a compelling case to win, person who is going to argue with you next has and is doing these things.

The chronic arguer is working on these things all the time, so if you end up talking to them, there’s a good chance that what will come-out of their mouth will be manipulative and calculated. Unless you want to argue with them, set the goal of getting out of the conversation as quickly as possible. Create a couple of fixed responses and fire them out whenever you are being engaged – “sorry, I have to check on my kids / parents / pet stocks quote, etc…” or “that is an interesting point of view but don’t have time right now, I have to go.

If you do want to argue with them make sure you know what you are fighting about. If it’s a ongoing thing, you are not arguing to change someone’s point of view (if this was possible it would have happened by now), you are arguing to change someones reality (unless their world changes they are not going to change). Make sure you know what that is before you set out making it happen.

It is important you look out for your best interests. Knowing what these things are before having to defend them will go a long way in guarding yourself from manipulative people. When someone engages you in an attempt to change your point of view take a moment to figure-out what you want out of the interaction and work diligently to achieve it.

Forbidden Relationship

The beauty of a forbidden relationship is that it only exists for the moments that the lovers allow it to exist. When they part ways it stops, when they reconnect it begins again. During their time together the relationship burns so completely because they know it dies when their time together ends.

It is both marvelous and profoundly sad. The lust, passion, closeness, desire and exhilaration can never be shared with others. It can never exist. Life, for the lovers, will be a series of dazzling moments dancing on the waves of what is otherwise an endless sea of longing desperation.

They listen with consummate focus to each others words that they then become the thought the other is emoting. This experience of completely shared moments will be later milked of every memory in a futile effort to bridge the gap between encounters.

I suppose I shouldn’t be imagining the secret lives of squirrels as I watch them gather their winter food but the clocks went back last night and I didn’t sleep in.

The Last Day Of This Life

Tomorrow I get braces. I need and want them. I need them because my top front teeth are very worn down because of where they are and because I grind my teeth very badly when I sleep. I will wear then through or break them in the next couple of years. I want them because the smile I see in the mirror doesn’t match how my smile feels.

It is supposed to take 18 months for the teeth to move and set so today I am having a few apples and chewing a bunch of gum. People have told me that it can be a little uncomfortable and there will be adjustments that leave my mouth feeling a little punched. I’m not looking forward to that, but I’m welcoming it. I have felt ugly for a long time and other than getting braces, there wasn’t anything I could to about the way my smile looked. I hide it some of the time and then just gave-up trying. But thoughts about what other people thought about my teeth would pop into my head when I was talking to someone new.

It’s a first world problem and frankly I’m lucky to have it, but living in Canada, I have an expectation of dying with most of my original teeth so I’m going to buy that future. I’ll trade my time now for my teeth later. It’s a good investment.

Tomorrow at lunch, when I leave the office my smile will be something different than it is today. It will be a vision of a brighter future because I am taking action about something that has bothered me for a long time.

Because We Need To Know You Don’t Know

“I don’t know” is not an apology. There’s no shame. It’s a simple statement of fact, is the key line in Penn Jillette’s special comment to cnn.com as a follow-up to his interview on Piers Morgan. He then compares his answers during the interview to Piers’ answers to the same questions. They are saying exactly the same thing it’s just that Penn admits it. Neither one of them knows how to look after all of the people in the US but Piers’ answer “the government” does shifts the responsibility of answering onto something that isn’t part of the discussion. It’s distracting and it can be a very effective tool when trying to convince someone of non-existent expertise. Piers HAS answers to the questions he just doesn’t know the actual answers.

That’s the thing with bullshit. No matter how you shine it, gloss it up, and air the room, it’s still bullshit. The only way someone is not going to see it as bullshit is if they don’t want to see it as such, they CANNOT see it for what it is or they do see it as bullshit and they don’t tell you that they know you are full of shit.

Penn’s comment comes at a time when I have grown particularly open to the fact that I don’t know a lot of that things that I thought I did. I’m starting to know what I don’t know and that makes me wiser, if only slightly. Long term it means that I may end up actually knowing these things because I’ve emptied the knowledge hole of the bullshit so it’s ready and waiting for the facts to fill it.

I’ve always sort of admired people who say “I don’t know” because I find their honesty refreshing. It’s time saving because you don’t have to think about the quality of their answer. The process of internalizing a lesson someone gives you is resource heavy because you have to vet the quality of the information they are giving you, ask qualifying questions, collect more information about the topic to allow you to store it in a way that is easy to retrieve, then unconsciously the brain does whatever it does to assimilate the information into a world view that is consistent with the real world.

Now imagine someone makes something up instead of saying “I don’t know.” You move forward on the belief that it is true – you fill the knowledge hole with bullshit – and fully believe that you are right about the topic. Confident and passionate because you got it from a good source. When you spread the lie later to someone who respects your opinion, you burn a little piece of your credibility.

Overtime two things happen that take a major toll on the quality of your life. First, people stop trusting you because a lot of what you say is incorrect yet you fail to see it or even consider that it could be wrong. Second, your “knowledge” starts to become a liability to you because it cannot be counted on to represent the way the world actually is but you have full confidence that it does represent the world – worse than not knowing or not knowing that you don’t know, you believe you know yet don’t. It may not be your fault that some of the people you considered to be mentors or sources of wisdom misrepresented themselves, but it sure is your problem.

Over the last 6 months and more and more recently I say “I don’t know”, “I’m not sure”, “what do you mean by that”, “what impact does that have on you”, “what impact should it have on me” and “what do you need/want me to do”. I say these things because I’m growing more and more confident that I don’t speak the same language as everyone else, and that maybe most of the people speak a different language from each other.

I’ve known my dad for almost 40 years and we’re now asking each other more questions to get an understanding about what the other is talking about. For a very long time I believed that I understood him, but as we chat now, it’s evident that we have a very different understanding of many words, concepts and things. My mom, dad and brother are the people who I have spend the most time with in my life and after almost 4 decades of interaction the only thing that they can say to me that I know I fully understand is “I don’t know”.

This is liberating. It shifts me from participant in life to scientist-participant in life. I need to seek high quality information from reliable sources. The new challenge becomes the vetting of the sources, and here I’m really lucky. The people who know me the best and who I respect the most answer questions with “I don’t know” often enough from me to realize that facts are the critical currency when it comes to talking / mentoring / educating me. Ones ability to say “I don’t know,” to be comfortable without knowing and to be curious to find out the answer is the first thing I’m using to vet the quality of my sources. So:

  • If you always know the answer, you don’t.
  • If having an answer is more important than having the correct answer, your answer isn’t important.
  • If you KNOW you know and don’t need to check current research, you may not know anymore.
  • If you are emotional when you are learning something, you don’t know it yet. Be cautious when dealing with facts with overly emotional reactive people as emotional states tend to impair the brains ability to store memories accurately.

What does my world look like after I’ve vetted my sources and realized where the wisdom lays? It’s very interesting. I’m learning more, that is true. But I’m also having some really great conversations with people. By cutting out the chaff you free up a lot of time to engage other people, or the ones you like more frequently. I realize that I know at least 50% less than I thought I did, but that knowledge build my confidence that most people know a lot less than they think they do so my expertise in certain areas are actually a lot higher relative to my peers. I know a heck of a lot about 10 things and bits and pieces about other stuff. If you can admit when you don’t know something, talk to me about the other stuff if you know and listen to me when I talk about the 10 things. Otherwise, we can just talk sh!t and have a good time.

Making It Real So Logic Can Crush it!

And we pick this one up mid way through:

…so here’s the thing about the challenging conversations – they are what extract the lessons from our pasts. We need to mine our minds for the wisdom. And that requires cracking a sometimes stable state of mind by blasting into it with anxiety, insecurity, and most important, a voice with volume.

Life can be a shit ride when we bathe in our own life filth. Sometimes we gotta wash it away by giving it to someone else. But others tend not to embody it when we give it to them. Instead, it rinses off a similar film that they have been carrying.

At least with those who see that they have work to do.

When you give voice to those feelings, you build a shield to them. When you silence them like they have no right to exist you embolden the mind to stay with them and make them a reality.

You spoke last night with some encouragement and we still danced, ate and had fun together. Imagine the evening if those thoughts had sat on the tip of your tongue and never moved…

A Note From The Recovery Road

Got a great email from friend the other day. She is one of a group of about 5 people I am fairly close to who ended a long term relationship in the last year – a marriage of more than a decade. Her reply was in response to a message I sent talking about a sense of having forgotten who I was and having very few clear memories of the preceding 6 months. I love what she says, particularly about transition friends can be here today and gone tomorrow. In these times of regrowth, we take was we need from where we can get it. It can come from unexpected places and doing unexpected things.

Yes it sure has been a wild ride for me and I am getting my life back together. You mention the spring, but I think the whole year has been a blur, for me at least! The waterfront trails are amazing and you are more than welcome to drop by. I sent you a few pics last night. I have been there for 2 weeks now.

I know exactly what you mean by losing interest. I went through the same thing. It does come back though. I have had a couple people at work telling me that they think I am sharper at work now. I think your personal life tends to overlay over your professional life even if you don’t want it to. Time does heal and I know what you mean about losing your identity. That is why I am open to new experiences now and this is about self discovery. And I will be going camping for the first time in my life this week end with a girlfriend and her family. I know nothing about it, but I am keeping an open mind. At least I will try it.

There are times when I feel like I need someone and the loneliness comes in, but I can divert myself and when the time is right, I will meet someone. You can’t force it and should not need someone there. But this is when friends can play a big role. And these transition friends may be here today, but not here tomorrow.

Keep your spirits up and keep working on the family business and everything will fall into place like it should. It all works out in the end. Do enjoy your summer and your time outdoors, since it is really short.

Why You Are So Screwed-up – Part 1 Nature

Okay, you aren’t that screwed-up, but you aren’t entirely right are you? Life doesn’t seem to flow the way it does for other people. Everyone else seems to have an easier time with things. Happiness for others is simply a matter of smiling, for you it’s a matter of getting or doing something to be happy about. Success for others is easier too, they just seem to put the time in and everything falls into place while for you, you work and struggle and battle the inertia of mediocrity for months to get the smallest piece of the pie only to find that it’s not apple, it’s made out of liver and dirt and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

But the thing you may be missing is that everyone is you. We all have the same types of struggles as you and we are all prone to make the same mistakes as others. They are suffering life as you are suffering life and they look at you and think the same things you do when you look at them – life is so easy for you while I have to struggle. It’s people, it’s our innate perspective to view us as the center of everything, struggling against all the odds to carve out a tiny piece of happiness, that everyone else is trying to steal.

And as weird and paranoid as all of this may sounds, it is true from an evolutionary and therefore genetic point of view. Your body is running a program, the foundation of which was written during a period of time when the above, based on scarcity, was true. EVERYONE and EVERYTHING was out to take what you had; be it your shelter, your partner, your food, your off-spring or your life. Our ancestors did have to take on this me against the world approach or else they would get killed or not reproduce. Simply put, the paranoid attitude that flows out of us so easily is there because we’ve evolved to have it as our default emotional state.

But this program is antiquated. It hasn’t really been relevant in western society for a long time because of an excess of everything. We have specialization of labor, shelter, and laws so we now have the ability to engage the world in reflective ways vs. immediate or survival terms. Our ability to fire our fight or flight response using thoughts is actually a hindrance in an environment of excess because there is no real need to empower a reactive logic-inhibiting system. The successful happy people spend as little time reacting to their emotions because they understand the role they plays and what they are good for, and what they are really bad at.

What does that mean?

Well, simply put, you need to start using logic or rational thinking more and your emotional system less. Very very simple to say, tough to understand and even tougher to put into practice until you know what it feels like.

What does that look or flow like?

Your actions are direct and goal orientate; something in your environment will change as a result of the decisions your make and the actions you take. This is different from the emotional approach which tends to engender a sense of fear and loss which stirs fear / anger and then action to address these negative feelings as opposed to the trigger. There should be a sense of peace and a feeling of improved momentum – as though you are building up speed and power on a purposeful journey. And your life will get better! Not only will things begin to get easier, but you’ll soon notice that a there are a lot of people in the world who aren’t out to get you or wanting to see you fail. In fact, you will begin to draw in people who take the same logical problem solving approach to their life.

In conclusion to part 1, you are screwed-up because your biology favors you acting in a way that promotes a sense of scarcity and therefore a strong desire to hold onto what you have; even if this means acting in a wildly illogical way. This is because the environment from which our species evolved favored those individuals who possessed this trait – the code that shapes behavior is selfish because it was written when being selfish offered a survival advantage. Part 2 will deal with the nurture aspect of the equation, which we have a lot more control over and which has a much bigger influence on us than foundation program that influences consciousness.

Living And Loving With Blinding Passion

Living and loving with blinding passion, the gift of life, for me at least. Dropping into the moment in high gear and building speed. Eyes closed seeing what I want to be and acting like it is. The world outside a medium for to move, control and shape, to make whatever is firing me exist as it feels it should be.

Cycling, training, writing, hiking, lifting weights, instructing, all done with almost all of my effort, when I am dialed in and bleeding passion. And I enjoy a tremendous amount of success with action activities when I’m present and burning for them. Single minded and unstoppable. It’s great to observe someone pour all of themselves into something and it’s even better when I pull back to myself and realize that I have been watching ms. It’s flow and it feels pure energy and absolute power. And in many ways it is. I’ve created a world in which I am moving effortlessly, taking positive action in service to the passion I’m feeling about, whatever.

A lot of my life is fantastic. When I’m fulfilling my passions I float happily building more and more passion. It flames hotter and hotter, and there’s no way, when I think about it right now, that I’m engaging the world logically. Which doesn’t matter much with most things, in fact, approaching training and athletic stuff with moderate intensity gets you about 50% of the results. Achieving your potential in anything requires 100% of your effort so an overly active passionate emotional response or drive is what is required. People like seeing results of intensity and they need to be coached and trained with passion. I’m doing a lot of the right things in my life because most of the time there is very little push-back when I attack the world with my passionate needs expecting to be expressed.

But, the gift of living completely in a moment has a big down side. A lot of what is going on is only going on in my head. And I make the mistake of interpreting a lack of push-back as confirmation that the world is actually behaving the way it is for the reason I think it is; which is really easy to do when you’ve throttled up the passion and started taking action to make it happen. When the push-back comes, I start to suffer very quickly. I become unhappy and begin to take action to remove the obstruction. Fired up with intensity I engage the road block to restore things to how they need to be. This gets the hill climbed, the weight lifted, the class working to exhaustion. But when the expression of your passion is linked to another person and when its actualization depends on a shared objective and agreed expectations, any misinterpretation caused by the state of passion can be a future problem. Unlike a dead-lift, what other people feel and think isn’t something that can just be lifted out of the way.

Sometimes I forget this, sometimes when I’m really passionate I get angry at my clients for not following the nutrition advice they asked me for and said they would follow. Sometimes I’ll get frustrated when someone else is using a bench that I want to use with a client. I can get thrown off slightly when people talk in my class, and I think to myself that maybe they should shut-up.

Romantic relationships is an area which is most susceptible to distortions when it comes to expectations and objectives. It can take a while to discover who you are around someone you are falling in love with so for the first while, who they are is who you think they are and what they are going to do is what you expect they are going to do. But do you know this? Unless you’ve had a clear conversation about expectations, moving forward based on your own assumptions will eventually lead to disappointment. The degree of disappointment is going to be proportionately related to how heavily my passion has been invested in the expectation that was distorted.

All in all, my approach is fairly good, but it’s just in need of some adjustment. Now what that adjustment is, I’m not entirely sure but I’m confident it will be uncovered very soon!

Feeling The Past? Beat It Back To Live Your Future

Spending so much time in my head – because I ride by myself so much – I’ve started to develop an awareness of the moment when my unconscious moves an idea into my conscious mind. It’s startling to experience the influence of a past pattern trying to rekindle its influence and it is wonderful to sense my emotions begin to build as that influence almost takes hold. I’m starting to be able to observe the process start as opposed to allowing it to continue, only to reflect on the poor choices later. Stopping the emotions allow me to return to logical thinking; which tends to render a much easier and quicker movement through whatever it was that almost triggered my past to begin again.

This skill is developing because I’m able to spend a lot of time by myself, thinking about stuff then thinking about nothing and repeating over and over again. Hard bike riding is meditative to me because the intense efforts or challenging terrain make necessary a silencing of the mind and a shut-down of that audible internal narrative that causes me to believe I am the center of the universe. It is of practical advantage because the trail eventually gets easier or I tire from the exhaustive effort and slow down; both of these things tend to shut off the meditation, re-empowering the voice to remind me that I am all that matters. The key thing is, after having consolidated your consciousness into the present moment, you become aware of things that you had stopped considering or had not normalized.

For example, my clothes don’t matter when I’m 3/4 of the way up a big hill. What the guy who cut me off on the way to the gym yesterday thinks about me doesn’t come into my awareness when I’m about to lock up my front wheel on gravel just to slow down enough to not launch over the escarpment fence. This stuff doesn’t exist then because I can’t manufacture it into existence. And when I’m not so tired or so focused on not crashing this knowledge carries forward into my conscious mind. I KNOW it doesn’t matter so it’s much easier to push the thought out of my head or simple justify them out of existence because I know they are the creation of something from my past and not necessarily the reflection of what I want for my future.

That is a summary of course and it represents the evolution of an aspect of self-awareness that has taken close to 15 years to move from not being considered, not just as a possibility but at all, to a well organized reality that I am able to engage, observe and manage.

So what? Well, given that we are pattern matching machines with a tendency to unconscious automation of anything that requires effort, we are most likely going to repeat patterns over and over and over again until we do something to stop repeating them. We KNOW something isn’t working for us, but we just keep doing it like a mindless computer following a program that has been written because we are, in many ways, mindless computers that run programs that were written in the past by our experiences and interpretations. Given this, one is not likely going to escape their past (stop running the program) until they accept that it is happening, which can take a while. They must then learn how to interfere with the program by preventing it from starting (avoiding the triggers entirely which is really tough to do) or observing the program beginning to start and stopping it dead. One gains a tremendous amount of independence and self-control by learning how and what these these old programs feel like, so in many ways self-awareness is the solution while avoidance is a treatment.

Our pasts become our future when we allow old patterns to become present behaviors. If these patterns are not working for you, you NEED to break them and you need to gain awareness and feel them before you are able to stop them. It can take a while to gain this awareness, but once you have it, you’ll be able to beat back these old patterns and create your future based on what you decide as opposed to what you did in the past.

Therapy Is A Good Thing

Therapy works. Talk to people who have seen a therapist, joined a self-help group, or counseled with a qualified spiritual counselor and you will always hear positive things about their experiences. If you are open minded and follow the guidance of the therapist you will gain insight into your life. This is a good thing! Your improved ability to engage the world productively will transform your life completely. There is a freedom and lightness of responsibility, a sense of liberation, a rebirth into a world now understood and no longer resisted.

People moving through the experience of self discovery view it as a good thing, after they pass the threshold of it making a difference. It’s hard work to tear down a world view that has been forming for 20+ years. People resist that kind of change. It hurts, it requires energy, it runs against our immediate needs in both reflex and survival. Many will walk away before they hit the threshold. For them, old programs make a resurgence and press pause on the treatment. Understandable, but unforgivable when you realize what is being sacrificed. You shouldn’t walk away from recovery.

For those who see it through and break through the clutter and noise, the world beckons forward possibilities thought impossible, if thought at all, months before. It comes down to one moment when the light goes on and you see everything clearly. You work at it for months for that instant when everything changes. A switch flips and you are transformed. Eyes open, seeing the world simply as it is. You can’t go back to not knowing so you move forward and do what you now have to do.

What this means and what this will feel like is going to depend on how damaged you are; although it doesn’t really matter if you are recovering. Once you accept the help of a qualified therapists they will guide you through it and you will get better. Therapy is a good thing.