Posts Tagged ‘Inspirational’

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Steam Up Your Brain


06 Jul

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Here’s what I think: Beliefs are a liquid medium.  (See what I did there?)

They are malleable, subject to change and revision, flow from one container to the next, and can get heated.

Our opinion and beliefs often become held as truths.  When that happens, they freeze into solidity and can be very hard to move, shift, drop or change.  Really though, they are all temporary.  At some point, we did not have these beliefs, but they got poured into us by culture, family, friends, experience and zeta-rays from Beta Centauri.  (Sorry, Betans, I believe someone had to say something…)

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People relates a story illustrating how liquid, and changeable, our beliefs can be.  He was on a New York subway train on a Sunday morning enjoying a quiet ride.  All the passengers were keeping to themselves and resting peacefully.  At a stop a man gets on with two boys in high gear.  The man sits quietly down in a seat next to Covey and closes his eyes while his two boys run rampant around the car, making lots of noise and bothering people.  Finally Covey decides to say something to the man, suggesting he should rein in his boys.  The man replies slowly, “I suppose you’re right.  We just came from the hospital where their mother died an hour ago.  I don’t know what to think, I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Instantly, Covey’s view on this man and the whole situation was radically shifted.  His beliefs were re-arranged in an instant.

Here’s an awesome clip of Sean Stephenson relating how he helped shift a little girl’s beliefs in a way that forever altered her life:

Beliefs are not true. They are not facts.  They are beliefs.   They are opinions.  They can be changed.  I have found that the best way to help this happen is to heat up your beliefs with friction.  Move them around.  Bump them up against each other.  Spin them on their heads and see what they look like from different angles.  Ask questions about them.  Invite questions about them. Entertain alternatives.

Doing that, can keep your belief system (your BS) mobile, fluid and quickly adaptable to whatever reality may deliver to you.

So, how do you keep your beliefs moving?  I’d love to know!  Please leave a comment below.

Cheers!

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3 Good Things


27 May

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Hola!  I hope this finds you well.  My week has been stellar.  More on that in another post.  For now I wanted to give a quick “Hell’s yes!” for a suggestion I took from the Action for Happiness website and Martin Seligman, Ph. D, the father of positive psychology.

The suggestion is simply this – For one week, at the end of the day take 5 minutes to get out your journal (or a piece of paper, or a text document, if that’s what you have or prefer) and write down three good things from your day.  Then take a moment and jot down a line, or two, about why each of those is a good thing.  That’s it.  Dr. Seligman asks that we try this for a week and see what the results are  for our general level of happiness.

I don’t know what your result will be, but if it’s even remotely like mine, Do It!  NOW!

Here endith the preaching.  ;)

Cheers!

PS – If you haven’t read Authentic Happiness by Dr. Seligman, I highly recommend it.  You can pick it up here.

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Learning With You


21 May

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I love learning! I have an absolute passion for it.  It makes me feel alive, engaged and like I’m evolving.  Learning rocks!

When I first started teaching Aikido something very cool happened.  My own Aikido mastery took a quantum leap forward.  I learned that I learn more from teaching than I do from learning.  It took me a while before I connected the dots and saw that as a teacher I am also a student.  I learn a great deal by externalizing what I have internalized and expressing that successfully to another human being.  That then becomes a reflection back to me as I learn what’s really effective in the outside world as opposed to what I have taken as effective in my internal world.

Some statistics on how we retain information:

  • 20% of what we hear
  • 30% of what we see
  • 50% of what we hear and see
  • 70% of what we discuss or do
  • 90% of what we create or teach

To me this indicates a virtuous circle.  We learn so that we can teach so that we learn, and as we learn, our teachers learn because of our efforts.  This seems to give lie to the phrase, “I want to learn from you…”

So, that’s my new distinction: I want to learn with you.

By the way, this is an awesome way to read a book – envisioning that you will teach a class on what you have learned some day to someone important to you.  Combine that with taking margin notes and liberal underlining and you can literally consume a book rather than be entertained by it.  Not that being entertained is bad, if that’s the goal.

[SPOILER ALERT: The following clip is both amusingly demonstrative, and the ending climax of one of my favorite movies.]

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A Small Conversation That Changed My Life


20 May

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A long time ago, in a body far, far away…

As you may know from my blog I am a fan of 1,000 day vows.  My first one was to do Tai Chi every day, without exception, for 1,000 days.  As you might imagine there were some challenges along the way.

The challenges came in many forms, but a little over half way through, 521 days in to be exact, I was feeling a bit despondent about the whole thing.  I was 22 years old at the time and at a party.  As I sipped my beer I spoke with a dear friend, confiding in her my feelings that it really didn’t actually matter.  I mused that if I stopped the only one who might notice was me. I was feeling pretty blue about the whole thing.

She offered several counter arguments, but the one that got me was this, “If you stop now you will lose all that time and you would have to start from day 1 if you ever decided to do it again in the future.” (That’s not an exact quote.  My memory is not that good.)

That got me.  It called on a central character trait I used to consider a flaw, but now consider a strength: laziness. It may not seem lazy to have decided to forge ahead for another 479 days of Tai Chi, but the truth is I never wanted to face another 1,000!

It got me through.  Of course I did do another 1,000 day vow later in life, but that was for meditation so at least I got to sit through it.  ;)

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A Little Dab Will Do Ya


12 May

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I have been reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Body on my Kindle and loving it!

On great take away so far has to do with not sabotaging our exercise goals at the outset.  We have all had those moments (many times!) where we get pumped about getting fit and commit to an exercise regime we believe will get us into great shape. The trouble is that we often over-commit and set ourselves up for failure.  Let’s say we become convinced that walking daily would be the best thing ever.  (EVAR!!!)  We jump right in and promise ourselves that we will walk 30 minutes a day, every day, until we are lean and ripped and desired by everyone we meet.  We know, from past failed attempts, that externalizing that promise helps keep us accountable so we blog it, journal it, write it on post-its and stick them on the refrigerator door and the bathroom mirror.  We tell our friends and family and every stranger we can pin down for 2 minutes.  Then we get to it.  Right there we hit a problem.  Going from 0 to 30 minutes a day is a leap!  We aren’t clear on where to fit it in.  We had that thing to do, and that meeting, and we’ll need new shoes… etc.

In short – we bite off more than we can chew.

Now, I know that 30 minutes a day is not actually all that much.  Especially when compared to the benefits.  But, if we go whole hog out the gate we are asking to fail.

Tim’s advice on this matter is simple – Don’t set a time goal.  Set a frequency goal and then do what you can.  Walking intentionally every day is a really good idea.  Just start there, nothing more.  Put on your shoes, walk out the door, circle the block and come back.  5 minutes, no big whup.

Make a daily habit of doing X, not doing X for time interval Y.

Genius.

This is a much better way to set ourselves up for success.  It also allows for healthy variance.  We might not be able to get in 30 minutes on a given day.  But, chances are we can get in 2.  Just walk to the corner and back and then celebrate the awesomeness of you since you are, in fact, keeping to your goal.

This dove-tails nicely with my love of Wilson’s 23rd law.

Set yourself up for success.  Take a small nibble.  I am confident that in short-order you will be rocking that walking hard!

Cheers!

P.S. – I went out for a 5 minute walk today and enjoyed the heck out of my 24 minute stroll.  ;)

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Travis Eneix

Dedicated to looking at the self.