Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

Taking The Good From Leaving Chatham Ontario

My life over the last few months has been tremendously different. I’d have to say since I quit my last real job at Chatham in January 2006 things began to take a turn that makes a lot of things possible. Below are 6 important lessons I have taken out of the experience over the last 18 months:

1) Sometimes you need to follow advice, particularly if the giver never tells you what to do.

Des told me to “get the heck out of Chatham” around 2:30 am boxing day. We had been drinking and he came right out and told me to do it. Des doesn’t tell me what to do. He suggests alternative ways of looking at things and supports me when I make silly choices, but he NEVER tells me what to do. Except this one time, so I listened.

A few months ago Tony made a comment to me that I was like a venues fly trap when it came to dating because I would grab hold of whoever was around me instead of taking the time to look for someone who I was more compatible with. It was one of those comments that cut pretty deep because it was true and because it meant that I was either lazy and didn’t want to take the time to find a suitable partner or that I didn’t believe that I deserved the happiness that true partnership affords us. He was right about me, only so far as it concerned my past because I had taken a couple of years off of dating because I had noticed the same thing. His was a warning comment not to go back to my old ways. It is advice that I don’t think I’ll need to take again, but when a friend who is usually silent tells you what to do, just make sure you listen.

2) There are consequences to things but they are not what you think they will be.

I had wanted to leave Chatham for a few months before I actually gave my notice that I was stepping down because I was pretty unhappy and felt that I wasn’t going to be able to do the job I was hired to do. I had wanted to leave right after Suzanne moved to BC about three weeks after I took the job but stuck it out because I felt I owed it to the person I was when I made the decision to take the job. I tried as hard as I could for 6 months until I realized that I wasn’t going to be successful and Des told me to leave.

There was no fallout worth mentioning. Okay, I’ll never get the chance to manage another GoodLife Fitness club and I don’t get to see a lot of people I met while I lived in Chatham, but the world didn’t stop spinning and no one hated me for leaving – my friends there understood that I had to go because I wasn’t happy. After a couple of days back in Milton, I felt fantastic because I was back to living the life I liked.

3) I am a reflector and am almost incapable of spontaneous displays of a mood.

I’m generally happy, but if someone around me is miserable I will be come miserable almost immediately – I socially reference to a fault. It makes me very engaging if you are engaging, very bitter if you are bitter and one of my clients if you believe that I know what I’m talking about.

Des pointed this out to me the day before my 33rd birthday. As soon as he did, I saw what he was talking about and realized that I had always been that way. A few days later, I stopped hanging around people who tend to put off a negative vibe and I noticed that my level of happiness improved dramatically. Then I cleaned house and stopped spending time doing things that made me unhappy or created negative feelings within me.

This quality is a mixed blessing. It allows me to be very engaging with others and it helps me connect to people in a way that many cannot. But it can also see me feeling very poorly about a lot of stuff and, in many ways, I’m kind of lost. When I’m with someone who is the same way, my general level of happiness tends to come out and shape the interaction as positive, the same thing happens when I’m with someone who is happy or when I’m alone. But when I’m with a dark force (a black hole as I tend to call them) things do downhill very quickly. Des telling me that I am a reflector was a huge step forward in my self awareness and it liberated me from these black holes because I was finally able to see them for what they were to me.

4) What you are looking for is an understanding and not a thing that exists anywhere other than in your own head.

When I quit my PT job, one of my clients Kim gave me a card saying “… I hope you find what you are looking for on your travels and when you don’t, I hope you realize that it has been within you all along.”

She was right. I found a lot of things during my trip to the east coast but what I was looking for was not one of them. There were moments when I almost stumbled upon it – I took a wrong turn down a trail in Fundy National park and had to hike with my bike for about 2 hours down and up some valley – it was the hardest I have ever had to work and there were times when I thought I’d have to put the bike down so I could crawl out just to save my life but I got through it without finding what I was looking for. I already knew I was strong and had a poor sense of direction.

I found what I was looking for about 5 months later when I got sick and thought I was going to spend the rest of my life relying on kidney dialysis. I’m still not sure what I found but on a conscious level I’m acting like my life is ending soon and I’m making the most out of each moment. I think that was what Kim was getting at when she gave me the card. When I asked her want she meant she said that I’d know when I found it. I’ve always feared that I was going to die one day, but now I realize that I am going to so today I must live because it’s all going to end eventually.

5) I am going to be horrible at most things the first time I do them.

I did the RPM training the first weekend of February 2007 and I almost didn’t go back for the second day. I still think the only reason why I did go back was because I was car pooling with Rachel. I got rather sick after the first day – I over did it and was physically exhausted. I got sick a couple of times on the way home from Waterloo. I had the worst head ache I have ever had that Saturday evening so I didn’t get to practice. However, I got through it. I wasn’t very good at instructing the tracks I had been assigned as homework, but I had an intensity that Rick and Carole (the national trainers) felt could make me a good instructor once I learned how to do it. They were right. Many of my participants like my classes because it’s clear that I’m working really hard and have a passion for it.

The same thing is true for blogging, learning power lifting exercises and learning how to play guitar – until I know how to do it, I’m just trying to do it and I’m not very good at it. Everything takes practice but if you do it enough times, you will get better at it and eventually you will become it (an instructor, blogger, power lifter, whatever). The key thing is to accept that you’re going to be dreadful the first few times and that this is something that you share with almost everyone else on the planet.

6) People know more than they give themselves credit for but may not listen to themselves because they do not believe that they have a right to be great or happy.

It serves an evolutionary function to feel this way. Smug people tend to be alienating and we regard their arrogance as a negative thing because it is dangerous – listening to them in our evolutionary past would more likely lead to our death than ignoring them given that they don’t know what they are talking about.

People who know themselves are confident and NOT smug or arrogant. They are aware of how the world is and exist within it in a calm and peaceful way. They are attempting to shape their own opinion of the world through learning and not trying to shape others opinion of them.

It’s important to keep this in mind when considering your own place in the world because there is nothing wrong with being confident IF you have a clear understanding of what is going on. If it is based on reality, it isn’t smug or arrogant and you SHOULD listen to yourself. Only a fool would continue to make a mistake after they have learned that it is a mistake. Unfortunately, many people keep doing the same thing over and over again in spite of knowing how it will work out.

Sometimes Bad News Is Good News

Last November I got really sick. I have no idea what it was but at the time I was certain that I was dying. My lower back and neck hurt, I was waking up soaked from a fever and I was tired and weak. I lost about 7 pounds because I wasn’t eating and I couldn’t go to the gym. When I finally went to the doctor the preliminary urine test was positive for protein. A quick search on the Internet revealed that protein in the urine is a bad sign, often an indication of kidney problems and there didn’t seem to be any non-serious reasons for it being there.

So I did what I do best, I thought about the implications of kidney failure and planned the rest of my life. I was scared and sad. At 33, if the test was accurate, I was in for some big changes. It was a tough couple of days before I went to my doctor to get the result of a formal lab test. It was negative for protein. In fact, the test was normal for everything. The doctor said that I’d die one day, but it wasn’t going to be from kidney failure related to what I was sick with at that moment in time. He didn’t know what it was and since I wasn’t feverish anymore or in any pain, I should just go back to living my life and assume that it was just an infection of some kind that my body killed.

And that’s what I did, for the most part.

It was a warm November day when I got out of the doctors office and as I walked to the GO train station to find my way back to Port Credit where I parked my car, I was smiling and happy. The news that I was going to die eventually was good news to me because I thought it was going to be a lot sooner. I bought a coffee and read a few chapters of “Way Of The Peaceful Worrier”. I’ve read the book before but on this particular day, the words seemed to resonate with me more than usual. I felt a little out of sorts; I felt wiser for some reason and I was more grateful than I had ever been.

That feeling is still within me. I wake up most mornings with a profound sense of joy for being healthy. I’m still eating better and taking pretty good care of my body. I’m sticking to my workouts and trying a lot of different training approaches with new exercises. The biggest change has been my movement towards doing new things in general, be it food choices, fitness activities, hobbies or new attitudes towards things, my life is more enjoyable now than any time before.

I think it was because I had started to prepare myself for a fractured life revolving around an illness that I didn’t end up having. The uplift from thinking that I was going to die from something to realizing that I wasn’t going to die from it clearly demonstrated to me that my mood has very little to do with the reality of a situation and almost everything to do with my perception of the situation. I’ve had this lesson before but this is the longest it has stayed with me. I hope it sticks around.

I Can Stop Feeling Bad Now – The Lactic Acid Myth Gets Busted!

A couple of weeks ago I subbed a class for one of the morning instructors – it was the long weekend and I think he went up north on Thursday evening after work. Since I don’t normally teach at that time of day, my head wasn’t on just right. In my attempt to motivate them I made the following comment “that pain in your legs is lactic acid and it can’t hurt you.”

I’m not sure how effective the comment was at motivating the participants to keep working through the pain but it sure did stick with me for a while after. It turns out, that while my comment wasn’t inaccurate, it did contain some misleading information.

The Lactic Acid Myth Gets Busted!

This study is a final installment by the group from New Mexico and it’s a doozy. I’ll start at the end. The conclusion that will soon hit some truly premier biochemistry journals is that lactate is a good guy, not a bad guy. It isn’t responsible for your burning quads on the twelfth rep of quad extensions. It sure as heck isn’t the reason for delayed-onset muscle soreness (for those few who might still think that).

I personally liken it to an innocent bystander at the scene of the crime. Here the crime is “metabolic shutdown” due to acidosis in an intensely working muscle. You see, hydrogen ions, flying off of the glycolytic pathway, are the real culprit, not lactate. The lactate, which is basically just pyruvate carrying hydrogen (acidity) out of the muscle, can even be used by other tissues for energy and gluconeogenesis (creation of new glucose).

In fact, the term “lactic acid” was condemned as the “Voldemort” of biochemistry. It’s a bad word; just don’t say it or bad things will happen… like mis-education.

There’s so much more to this but boring readers with competitive binding between phosphates, protons and magnesium ions is not high on my to-do list. Suffice it to say that lactate, not lactic acid (shudder), is your friend. I wouldn’t even be surprised if some form of lactate dehydrogenase supplement (LDH can form lactate) doesn’t appear when the college textbooks start changing and informational “trickle-down” occurs.

Too much acidity CAN damage the body, otherwise the body wouldn’t work to remove it from the muscle and it does cause the muscle to shut down. But there isn’t such a thing as lactic acid (at least that’s what I’m taking out of that excerpt). That being said, my comment was as meaningful as “Unicorns can’t harm you”.

Some Interesting Nutrition Findings

Experimental Biology 2007 by Mike Roussell of T-nation.com talks about some of the findings presented at this years Experimental Biology conference in Washington, DC.

Of particular interest was the review of Dr. Barbara Rolls talk:

1) People given either 500 grams or 1000 grams of macaroni and cheese. The ones who received the larger portion ate 33% more calories and reported the same levels of satiety and hunger compared to the people given the smaller portion. These findings did not differ between lean and obese people.

2) 69% of chefs are responsible for the portion sizes served at their restaurant. How they determine the portion size is dictated by the following (in order of importance) — presentation, cost of food, customer expectation, calorie content.

3) Restaurants serve 3 times the recommended amount of all types of food except fruits and vegetables.

4) When people were provided all their food (in caloric excess) for 11 days, they ate 400 calories more per day than needed and consumed more of all types of foods except fruits and vegetables.

5) Drinking water with a meal won’t decrease energy intake, but if you add the water to the meal (i.e. to make a soup or stew), then you’ll consume less calories.

6) Eating a small salad before a meal leads to a decrease in total energy consumption for the entire meal.

7) How much people eat is determined by how much the food weighs not how many calories are in the food.

I found it very interesting that people will eat more if more food is made available to them but will tend to report feeling just as full as they would if they ate less. It is also unusual that soup or salad before a meal lowers over all calorie consumption but water alone does not – I wonder if it has something to do with flavor?

I didn’t find it surprising that people will tend to NOT over eat fruits and vegetables. I don’t believe that these foods serve a survival function, at least not from an evolutionary point of view. They do improve the quality of life but animal flesh and sugar rule the day when dealing with energy storage. The antioxidant qualities of green leafy vegetables are of no significance to a creature that is about to enter the food scarcity phase that winter tends to facilitate.

Stimulus -> Response? No It’s Stimulus -> Moment -> Response

Des once told me that there is a moment between stimulus and response and how we use that moment will determine what type of people we are and the quality of choices that we make. He said that once you realize that there is a period of time, you can then work to expand it and make more logical decisions instead of emotional reactions. That was a few years ago. It made logical sense at the time but it making practical sense has been long time in coming.

Well, yesterday I caught myself almost getting angry and in the moment when I realized the rage was building, I stopped and asked myself the question “why are you getting angry about this?” I was boiling water for tea and left the kettle in the kitchen. When I came back a few minutes later, I didn’t realize that someone had used the water and just turned the kettle on again to make sure the water was hot. If you didn’t know, it’s better for kettles if they have water in them when they are on. Nothing bad happened but I was told that you need to make sure there is water in the kettle before you turn it on.

I don’t know why, but having someone tell me this really got under my skin. It bothered me so much that I actually took the moment to try and figure out why it bothered me. My internal reaction was so strong that my initial guess what that I felt that someone was attacking me personally and unjustly. I asked myself what I was afraid of and why the words “you need to run it with water in it because it’ll break otherwise” caused such a visceral response. As I talked myself through it I realized that my interpretation of the sentence was what was causing the problem. I heard a lot of stuff that wasn’t said and I had started to react to that. I made assumptions about what the person was implying and didn’t stick with just the facts.

The fact was, I ran the kettle with very little water in it and that will ruin a kettle.

What I took out of the comment “you need to run it with water in it because it’ll break otherwise” was a negative value judgement about me and my intelligence. The person was saying that I didn’t know how to use a kettle, that I was too stupid to figure it out and that I always did that type of thing. I don’t think my response would have been out of line if I had actually been told that I was stupid but, that wasn’t what was said. The other person stated a fact because they saw me doing something that didn’t make any sense. Which is fair because they hadn’t seen the other person slip in and use the water while I was out of the room.

What was odd about yesterday was how quickly I stopped the anger from building and tracked down its source. Normally the reaction takes hold and I’m left to let it run its course, only to figure it out later. This time I KNEW the rage feeling wasn’t appropriate so I checked out of the process and took a moment to identify what I was feeling, why I usually feel that way and how I took what was said to me as I did.

It was kind of cool because I stopped the emotional reaction dead in its tracks. It’s one of the first times that I’ve been able to grab hold of it mid process, engage it and take corrective actions to stop it from continuing. I’m also very happy to have identified my reactive tendency towards taking neutral comments as criticisms. Taken together, it’s a big step forward in my awareness of what is going on unconsciously in my brain.

Des was right about the existence of that moment of time, now I start to work on lengthening it.

Blink Experienced – Seeing The Big Picture

I went to Ottawa last weekend. Deb and I left after my 8:30 AM class on Saturday and we got there around 4:30 PM. I didn’t speed very much because there were so many police along the 401 – 4 or 5 radar check points on Saturday and 3 or 4 on Sunday on the way home. They got a lot of people, I get the feeling they paid for one of their nice new cars this weekend. People broke the law and they got caught, that’s all there is to it.

Deb doesn’t drive but she’s a great passenger. She has a skill for reading the road for potential problems. She seems to know when there are police around. It’s a weird skill, but it became very clear this weekend what is going on. We happened upon a blink moment were the world made sense. Her’s is a skill that we all can possess but most fail to take advantage of.

Deb is very bright and since she doesn’t drive so she has to entertain herself other ways. I’m pretty bright, but I’m distracted when I drive because I have to focus on not crashing the car or driving off the road. My role is basically to keep the car and the passengers safe. I focus only on what can potentially harm us which means the east bound lanes if I’m driving east and the west bound lanes if I’m driving west. But Deb is free to look at whatever she likes and she does. She picks up on patterns that I have to ignore. Specially, as it applies to keeping the police away, she does look at the other side of the road and she notices when the cars slow down.

There is an order to the way people drive. When traffic volume is low and allows for people to drive how they choose, as you find along the 401 between Toronto and the 416 cut-off, people generally drive a particular way. There is a normal distribution of car speeds much like the curve associated with IQ scores with most cars travelling within 15 Km / h of the speed limit. There are a couple of things that will lower these speeds consistently, one is a car crash the other is a police office with a radar gun or manning a speed trap.

Like a car crash, the speed trap will only slow the drivers down for a short period of time – we habituate the threat rapidly and return to our normal driving speed within 3 or 4 Km. However, a speed trap will slow down traffic on BOTH sides of the road not just the side that is getting monitored. What this means is that if you notice a sudden decrease in the speed of on coming traffic, there is likely a police office around.

Sure enough, this is what we noticed. There is a decrease in the speed of oncoming cars as you near a speed trap. It is subtle, but it does exist and it makes complete sense that one would be able to pick up on it. Deb is open to this piece of information because she doesn’t have to focus just on the traffic in the lanes in front of her. She is able to see the big picture and create an understanding based on these extra pieces of information.

Regardless of our ability to predict speed traps based on the behavior of other drivers, you shouldn’t speed because it’s dangerous.

Socialization 101

My world made more sense when I realized the following things:

  • Things are the way they are because the environment favored those who possess the traits we presently possess. Natural selection favors the best suited and these traits get passed along to their off spring. All human beings have these traits.
  • We possess the traits of human beings 10000 years ago and they are best suited for survival in that era. However, technology has increased so dramatically since then that our environment is no longer then same but we have not adapted to the changes yet.
  • The goal of the individual is to survive.
  • Before society an individual could not survive on their own, they needed to be part of a group.
  • Before society, human beings were somewhere in the middle of the food chain. They needed to be cautions and afraid all the time in order to survive.
  • The world makes a lot of sense when we are older and looking back at development, but it does not make sense looking forward. When we relate to children we need to remember that they have very little concept of the future.
  • Classical and Operant conditioning work with human beings more effective when they are young and before they are able to think about the world in an abstract way (e.g. formal operational stage).
  • The brain does not treat thought and reality as different things – functional mri scans indicate that only the motor cortex shows a decrease in activity when someone thinks about something vs. them actually doing it.
  • Human beings are very effective at encoding and matching patterns.
  • Thinking about a conditioned stimulus will evoke the conditioned response.
  • Most often we are unaware of the conditioning therefore it is an automatic response.
  • Reconditioning takes more effort than initial conditioning.
  • We create survival rules to increase the likelihood that we’ll survive.
  • Once we notice a pattern and form a survival rule concerning it, we rarely test the rule because historically to do so increases the chances of dying.
  • Emotions serve to draw our attention to a particular moment.
  • Adaptively emotions will alert you to a pattern in the environment that you have encoded before. Action may be required.
  • Mal-adaptively emotions can become conditioned responses to unrelated things.

We’re All Equally Alive And Aware, And The Same

I am constantly forgetting that everyone has a unique experience of consciousness. What exactly that is may be the same, but each individual feels as alive and aware as I do. It’s so easy to forget because I’m the only perspective of my conscious experience. It’s hard to believe sometimes but the other people I interact with are not part of the movie I’m watching. They have the same potential for pretty much everything that I do – joy, sadness, learning, injury, cognitive distortions, hunger, dreaming, etc…

Each one of them is as real as I am and they feel too.

When I’m not forgetting that they are real, I am forgetting that they are very similar to me. One of my university professors claimed that all human beings are almost genetically identical to each other, that any diversity we see is the result of differences in a very small percentage of the genetic code, he said less than one percent. That means there’s a very good chance that many people will respond to certain stimuli the same way I do, that we’ll think in similar terms and that we’ll have similar abilities. Why then is it that when someone bumps into me with their shopping card I concluded that they are probably stupid but when I bump into them it’s because I wasn’t able to navigate through the tight aisles? Because of the fundamental attribution error.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for us to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external environmental factors that may have impacted the individual. We don’t judge ourselves like this because we have an understanding of our external environment which clearly explains our behavior. But this understanding doesn’t help us explain someone else behaviour and since we don’t have their understanding we manufacture one that usually has them being a sub par human being.

It works both ways though. Sometimes people will be so taken by another that they are unable to see their internal traits in a negative light and blame the environment for all negative outcomes. The experience of first love can be like this as it is all consuming and often at odds with reality. Another example is the person you know who is just really unlucky and has all the bad things happen to them. At some point it becomes evident that they are making some poor decisions that are leading to very predictable outcomes that they attribute to bad luck. In this case, the fundamental attribution error would not be an error.

Why would it be our tendency to make guesses about others character based on their behaviour instead of the environment, as we do with ourselves? Obviously this tendency kept our ancestors alive through out history. I think it has something to do with magical thinking and our desire to gain an advantage over others. Attributing other’s behavior to their underlying character allows us to determine the motives of others that will help us make predictions about them, these predictions with help us save energy by eliminating the need to think.

I make this claim because it works with both negative and positive behaviours – we will assume someone who does nice things is a good person regardless of any environmental influence. For example, how many times have you heard someone play down their heroic actions by saying “I did what anyone would do in that situation”? Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong, but the sheer number of people who act like selflessly in crisis situations does tend to lend support to their notion that people act with kindness and caring when they are faced with difficult environmental conditions.

It would seem that in our quest to stay alive, we conserve energy in whatever ways we can. One of these ways is to compartmentalize our understanding of people by eliminating the potential role the environment plays in their behaviour. And this makes sense because the environment is ever changing, creating an understanding of others that is static makes interacting with the world that much easier. But, it doesn’t change the fact that others are exactly as we are, alive, aware and full of humanity.

What Is My Purpose And What To Expect From Me

What is my purpose?

I followed the instructions on How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes by Steve Pavlina and came up with “my purpose in life is to try and create beauty were only its potential exists”.

But what does that mean exactly?

For me beauty is many different things:

  • Energy
  • Happiness
  • Vitality
  • Satisfaction
  • Actualizing potential
  • Passion
  • Confidence
  • Efficiency
  • Symmetry and balance
  • Spontaneity
  • Fluidity of motion
  • Confidence
  • Love

Examples of things I think are beautiful:

  • Good posture
  • Teaching / learning a new task, refining the task and then successfully using the skill
  • The way new mothers look at and engage their children
  • Good scenery
  • Sunshine
  • Laughing
  • Gratitude
  • Creating something – art, pottery, music or writing
  • The prefect line through the trail / down the hill
  • The way people look when they’ve lost a lot of weight
  • The look when someone achieves a goal
  • Seeing two people who are in love
  • Observing two adults engaging each other in a conversation
  • Empathy
  • Synergy or serendipity
  • Open mindedness and non-judgment

Ways to create beauty in the real world:

  • Help someone lose weight
  • Help someone achieve something that they want or one of their goals
  • Help someone increase their energy
  • Make something out of nothing – art, music, and writing
  • Help facilitate a new experience
  • Confirm something that people want to be true
  • Help someone achieve a Zen or flow state
  • Introduce someone in their passion
  • Indulge someone’s passion
  • Have or help someone else have an epiphany
  • Help someone learn something
  • Get someone moving
  • Engage the mind of the willing
  • Make someone laugh
  • Make someone smile

From a practical stand point, everything I do should be facilitating one of these things. Otherwise, I’ll be deviating from my ideal life path and creating karma.

Now as interesting as this whole experience has been, now I am left to wonder and see what I do with this knowledge.

Update – like many articles, I’ve sat on this one of a few months because it didn’t feel finished. It was written in the middle of February 2007 so I’ve had the opportunity to integrate the new information into my world view and to make manifest this understanding. Well, how am I doing? It’s tough to say, but I think it’s going alright.

I’ve see the value of the classes I teach to the participants so I try to get them to have that “oh my God I CAN do this” experience. One person has related to me that they had it, that they “haven’t worked that hard since high school”. That’s delivering one to the gate and allowing them to take the steps in to improve their own life. I felt really good when they told me that it had impacted them so strongly.

I’ve engaged the mind of the willing and let mine be engaged. Rachel and Des have thrown a number of new ideas my way and they’ve changed the way I view the world. These interactions are mutually enlightening.

I’ve become a lot less judgmental, particularly of myself. Learning that I desire to try and help people framed a lot of my history in a different light, one that I have an easier time accepting as a reflection of my true nature vs. the seemingly randomness of my past decisions. There is continuity to my choices and I can understand why I found so many of them unfulfilling, I was hoping that people would be successful as opposed to being happy that I tried to help them achieve success or a new level of awareness.

I’ve had to learn to keep smiling during class so that has made me happier. I’ve also had to perfect and model body position on the bike which has improved my posture. A lot of my coaching to the participants has to do with “keeping proud posture” and being strong while driving power to the peddles.

There’s a lot less cognitive dissonance in my life now, so, if for nothing else, Steve’s exercise has been worthwhile because my life has less stress in it. But since I have taken a lot more out of it, his exercise was been one of the most valuable experiences facilitated by a web page I’ve ever had.