Strong Lifestyle

What we can learn from the Olympics: view from the second story

Watching Olympic athletes, we see the triumphs, the tragedies, the broken records, the broken bones, but we know only a little of the first movement of the full symphony, just a trill of melody, a fugue maybe, framed between the opening and closing ceremonies, and we miss the second movement completely,  even if we're affixed, asphyxiated before the TV.  Just this small sample taken from the measure of these people - living, breathing human beings in spite of appearances -  makes clear these are not your standard deviations, these are anomalies of achievement, their personal best looming so high over the average person's performance it's evident they live on a mountain top and not in our valley.  This blog is about our own best lifestyle, our optimal performance, so what do they bring down to us from Mt. Olympus? What does this pantheon of storied gods and goddesses offer to us mortals to pack into our usual picnic basket of daily routine?  What then can we truly take that we can use from all this glory?      

Achievement always has two stories. The first is the story of each individual's struggle to arrive, the obstacles overcome, the equipment used modified or discarded, the advice used modified or discarded, the discipline of the hours and days, the hunches, some diverging from some pivoting toward today's destiny, all the ebb and flow of the push, all the choices made to direct that push to the podium, the entire mighty effort in the end much like the game of curling, with each decision a brush sweep to guide the stone into that ultimate goal sweepers call the house, the podium where the anthem is played, the flag raised, the medal bestowed, all these events of tribulation and triumph. But... what about the second story, and why is it so important?  

What if someone stole your moment of triumph? What if someone bolted from the stands with theft their own Olympic event, evaded the guards and took the medal, grabbed the glory,  jumped on the train and left the country with that hard round medallion and its ribbon? What if some wild presence just tore it out of your hands like those parents lunged for the last Cabbage Patch doll that unruly Christmas so long ago  - shtick - the shimmering round disk gone even if it is the Olympics and should be sacrosanct - would that get your attention? 

The second story is not about the passage, the pilgrimage, the hero's journey. It's about what happens the day after "they all lived happily ever after."  What happens next? This story is not about the getting,  it's about the having,  and it's the hidden deal-breaker for many successful achievers.  There you are, standing with the medal around your neck, your personal best, the moment you've been striving for,  and what happens?  If you're not ready, that medal will be ripped from your neck and it will be gone... First comes your moment of glory, when you, the 20 pounds lost,  pants 4 inches smaller around the waist, you, 30 points lower on your systolic, ecstatic about  the new improved blood pressure possible to live with, you, at the moment where you could have might have - often - fought with your loved one and right now you didn't fight but rather created a new path you could both enjoy instead, you, the moment when you enjoy that medallion for so short a time, and then AFTER that moment comes the theft, the violation, the loss, and this WILL happen to you, days or weeks later, if you don't  plan to HAVE it, planning instead to GET it.  Get it? I know this gadfly moment we're having right now might be annoying, but it's even more annoying to lose what you've achieved. 

So, if you want to HAVE and KEEP a good lifestyle you need two tales. Two tales, two plans for building your future. There's the story you tell yourself of how you got to your best lifestyle, and the story of what you do AFTERWARDS.  You don't need to be an author, you already know the drill here.  Jot it down on paper; your high school English teacher isn't looking. There's just you.  Write only enough detail to feel it, similar to a good story you share with a friend, a comfortable person on the phone with you and you're telling about your vacation. There are these two parts.  There's the journey to your destination, the steps you took to get there, the stops along the way,  and there's what you did on arrival, how you got around town, the day you had. Write 'em, say 'em aloud, make them yours. Read them both to yourself, daily.  Will these stories change?  OF COURSE they'll change. The story of your success is the story of how you filled in the blanks.

The view from Olympus. Sometimes sunny, sometimes cloudy. There are those Olympic athletes who will suffer because they didn't plan to have the medal, they only planned to get it, and they are not ready for life with the medal. Are you ready for your personal best? 
Ready for your best day when you have that shimmering round goal in hand? Ready for the day when you're familiar with your new habits, comfortable with the routines, used to that particular story of success?  Sure, in that story you can still be appreciative, deeply grateful even - but the dazzle is gone because that's who you ARE in that future. Do you know those stories? Do tell.

Offline networking bytes

Social media, Facebook and Twitter among others, rock. You can engage the world w/o tripping the offline trapdoor that regularly plunges you into a familiar pit of conversational hell. The pit is worth avoiding;  odds are good you still bear scars from the 2nd and 3rd degree burns you've earned there. And how will detailed info about this trapdoor be relevant to your life? If you're expecting that a strong lifestyle has only the usual strategies on how to store cabbage in the refrigerator or 5 tips to manage stress, if you think lifestyle has nothing to do with how you talk to people face-to-face or make business contacts, or if you've given up on letting people know how your product or service can benefit them - maybe it can't - or if you're convinced that the recession has fallen on your act much like a heavy curtain ends a light comedy, and because the play is over you've given up on networking entirely, then you shouldn't pay much attention to this posting, celebrating as it does a laser treatment of what to say when someone asks us, "What do you do?"

This is a cultural question, a navigation question about how we maneuver through our own particular world of contribution and compensation, a question considered rude in many cultures but business as usual here in ours. The question looms over you like  Mason the bully llama stands over a little alpaca. (previous post) Business as usual needs - demands - no response beyond a self-typing category: "I'm a medical technician... a teacher... housewife... own a paint store... student... consultant... I help people plan their financial future..." that glues and labels us against the  biologist's slide, the gluing and labeling a skill we've all acquired from years at school and at home.  If you answer the question like most of us, your connectivity is toast, your answer the equivalent of a full syringe of novocaine right into the prefrontal cortex of the brain of your partner in communication crimes and misdemeanors. If conversation is a dance, you've just killed your dance partner: gone, eyes rolled back in their head.

"So, what do you do?" There's no avoiding it; the question has been asked and now it lies there, uncooked, flopping on the plate. Having witnessed hundreds of these moments of quiet agony while the face freezes and the smile forms a frozen rictus of civility as the answer makes its tortuous way out of the speaker's mouth, his or her slow loris eyes wide with the angst of already knowing this song will be seriously off-key. Déjà vu, all over again.  I am not an innocent in this; we all know this one.  We're usually bored with the question AND the answer. (Can ears glaze over or is it just eyes?) We tune out, we lose focus, we wonder if we fed the dog. It's all there imprinted on our neurons, firing off in some areas of the brain, shutting down in others, a house bright and partying here, dark and unoccupied there, with sometimes the entire neighborhood closed down dark like a garment district at night. We've lost our listener. Forever.

What to do?

1. Listen to this audio file below if you want a path out of this polite purgatory.  Ann Convery.  I talked to her and yes, now I'm happy to be affiliated with her, and you'll see why when you hear what she says about the brain and communicating. Make it easy on yourself if your living depends on answering this question: "What do you do?"  Lots of insight you can use immediately. She's good. 

(Click below if you want the full audio interview)

Download Ann Convery Interview

2. No time? Need to save your business NOW? Go here:

"Speak your business in 30 seconds"

When habits go bad: the 300 pound bully in your living room

Mason has gone home. He was never a team player but rather a somewhat misguided youth who used his 300 + pounds of bulky llama-hood to muscle around his smaller cousins the fuzzy alpacas gracing our pasture and sometimes the barn when he let them inside, his towering line-backer presence a hulking guard at the barn door. Lately he was even preventing them from freely eating hay, their winter food.  I could feel guilty but I saw how faithfully he kept his bond with his former owner over this last weekend, recognizing her immediately, accepting the touch he never tolerated from either me or my wife, agreeing to the move.

We liked him but he was never sure what to do with us, those strange, unpredictable bipeds with the awful appendages that might reach out to him in a futile attempt at alien contact. The original idea was for him to chase off predators; there were times he was a formidable bouncer but always at his own club. He knew the drill. The alpacas all knew the drill.
A subtle snort, his head bobbing on that unnaturally long neck, his modified Shrek ears plastered back in a combat feint, was plenty of incentive to send the little fur balls scurrying where he wanted, interrupting their plans for the day or evening as easily as he dismissed the occasional pheasant or rabbit.  With him gone, there's peace once again in the pasture. 

I've been thinking about bullies.  Do you feel bullied sometimes by a stronger presence inside yourself when you want to do something wise and warm and positive such as connecting better to your people, getting fit, eating less junk,and yet... your usual routines prey on you instead,  shaking you down - again and again- for a quick 350 or 400 or 600 calorie payment or its moral equivalent, like a gangster loan shark you can never pay back?

New Year's resolutions have pretty much hit the shredder by now, haven't they?Don't give yourself a hard time - you know WHAT to do, you just don't know HOW to make changes. If you haven't signed up for The Recession-Proof Lifestyle Program you're in luck - it's still available and it's still free. 

You need some new ways to dance with the bully, to finesse all that heavy momentum of habit pushing you in a familiar direction, often the "wrong" direction but a comfortable
one just the same. You need to tame the beast, to befriend him or send him home.
We spend way too much time on what to do rather than how to really do it, falling into the trap on whose walls I've etched a lot of graffiti myself, the trap of thinking knowledge is sufficient. It's easy to believe that siren song: if we understand it, that's enough. This happens routinely when we read a book and think we've "got it" - until life tests us for how well we've integrated the material.  If it's in our head, it's in our hands is a strategy that only works in our head, otherwise we wouldn't have to eat food any more, would we? We could just read cook books.

If you've gone through my free program you'll know that you need to sow more SEEDs, those Supportive Elements of Environment Design that make change easier, turning it into a dance and not a fight.  You'll also know ways to deal with resistance, strategies to tame the bully we've been talking about, hitch him to a surrey, put him and his powerful bulk to work for you, and pull you down the road of your choice. Change your habits and restore your destiny to its rightful owner.  The email program is free and you can ask me course-related questions.  There's plenty of hay in the barn and we're all welcome, except for bullies of course.

The Twilight Saga and Your New Year's Resolutions

What on earth does Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga of a vampire and a clumsy adolescent girl have to do with your losing weight, or getting along better with your family, let alone feeling happier?  More than you may realize. Not a fan? Relax, I'm NOT going to suggest you go see the latest movie, New Moon, but there is something to be learned here from how this story got written.  

Twilight began with an image: the star-crossed lovers, lying down in an open field of flowers. (Contrary to popular opinion, Forks, one of the rainiest towns in America, can produce and nurture flowers, so that's not fantasy). That bucolic scene was in the middle of her first book, but the image was compelling enough for Stephenie Meyer to craft her entire 4-book epic and create the saga that has pulled masses of people, both adolescent and adult - mostly female - into America's theaters in search of a good romance. Box-office records were broken. Harry Potter is now a vampire...

Meyer has described during interviews how this image was the seed from which the whole story grew, so what can we learn from this?  There is an image that is the seed for your own best life. Images have great power to shape the lives of "ordinary" individuals as well as famous ones: Einstein had the image of riding on a beam of light and it inspired him to develop the theory of relativity.  As impressive as that may sound, it isn't restricted to physicists; we all have images.

Stephenie Meyer may be easier than Einstein for most of us to identify with, and  speaking of her, here's a confession.  Twilight, New Moon, and the rest have been a guilty pleasure, sending me (together with my bemused and understanding wife) on an alien quest along with fellow pilgrims possessing generally shorter vocal cords and no Adam's apple, to view the first two movies nearly as soon as they emerged from their seedpods (the movies, not the audience).

So, what IS an image? It's an internal event, in your mind. It's a summary of a particular future, maybe holding hands with your life partner, seeing the numbers on a bathroom scale, or dancing with your family. Of course, the way many people exercise their ability to create images is to worry, but I don't recommend it unless you really do want that negative experience.

I've suggested visual images, but they don't have to be visual.  Maybe it's a voice telling you, "Congratulations." Maybe it's a specific sensation, but there are conditions. It needs to be compelling TO YOU.  It also has to be emotional to work. Intellectual and reasonable just don't persuade our insides. If you hooked us up to functional MRIs while in an excited state, you'd notice our amygdala and hypothalamus lighting up like little  Christmas trees in our brain. For PC enthusiasts, Chinese lanterns or a menorah might do, but they don't work as well -  maybe  those chains of firecrackers for the Chinese New Year? Anyway, loosely speaking, those sparkling clumps of color illuminated in our brain scan are the strings of lights associated with emotion. You need that "lighted up" state for an image to pull enough energy to power your efforts, to meet your challenges. You don't need the power to move a mountain. You need "just enough" power.  For example, if you're wanting to be fit and healthy, you just need more power than a cookie... (I know they're powerful; fortunately, they don't make Mystic Mints any more. Sometimes the Big Roulette Wheel throws one in our direction) 

For Meyer, her creation all started with a single image.  The deal is, do you have a compelling image of what you want to create, of your best life?  If you don't, you need one. In The Recession-Proof Lifestyle Program (it's free - go sign up if you haven't already)  I've described what to do.  It's a curious thing. You need to get comfortable with this image of your best life at the same time as it inspires you to move through all the inevitable challenges you'll face in creating it. You could paint it or sing it, or email it or try raising it (not a promising scenario), but the easiest way to develop an image is to create a narrative of your desire - a story. A single internal experience that emotionally and powerfully sums up that narrative is your image.  I know most people aren't writers, but you don't have to be! You only need to jot down a rough description of your own success.  But, here comes a warning -  you'll need a way to hold on to your image, to keep it.

We're generally talking about routines of lifestyle here in this blog, so find an image that's powerful enough to sustain you and your new habits. Find an image that supports both getting AND having your success.  This is not rocket science, and it's not relativity - you can do it! Scribble down a description of your best life as though you're telling a friend about what you did last weekend, and remember it needs to support BOTH getting there and being there. 

Getting there isn't enough. Being there is equally important. You need to get used to your own best life. Stephenie Meyer got there. She's there now, but if she doesn't have an adequate image of being there - of living out her success - chances are she's going to encounter a lot of rough weather in her new life.   Fields of flowers don't do well in rough weather.  I wish her luck. I think she can thrive. And so can you.

Good news about the Recession - and it's not what you think!

Trying to find something good in the Recession is like trying to figure out what's great about going bald...Oh, wait! - that's possible. Not only do I save money on haircuts, I save a lot of preening time, and I have a distinctive excuse for poor ideas:  "I just washed my head this morning and I can't do anything with it." Also, it reflects more light - maybe if I'm lost in the desert, I can signal planes...

Actually, the Recession also has its shiny side. New research from the University of Michigan on life expectancy has found that during the Great Depression, as well as during several small recessions before and after the Depression, people not only lived longer (by six to eight YEARS),  their health improved! This pattern of better health and greater longevity REVERSED when there was an economic upswing. What's up with THAT? 

We can speculate freely here (and I will), but it appears that during "hard times" we make healthier choices. We eat less, we sleep more (which usually means we finally start getting enough sleep), and we look for people - "misery loves company" with whom we can share our woes.  We may even go for walks and get some exercise. 
 
I believe that when the economic roller coaster dumps us on the ground, we find that at least the ground is solid. I'm obviously not talking about extreme poverty here - which is a different story entirely - but by turning away from the American Dream and its focus on money, we uncover a revelation that unlocks an old treasure chest.  There are some personal mysteries you finally get to solve when you look in the right place.  That nagging sense that’s something’s wrong, something’s been missing, has been right.  You discover that what’s really important has been there all along – your health, emotional and physical; your relationships to all those important people in your life; and your happiness. 

In future posts of this blog I'll add even more detail to the Recession-Proof Lifestyle Program. If you've signed up for this free program, you know the secrets it shares:  most of us already know WHAT to do for a better life, but not HOW to get ourselves to do it.  My blog will suggest some ideas you can use to do both.  I'll put together new discoveries about how we can create happiness, plus some useful tools from the latest research on how our brain works, along with years of experience helping people to make changes. We'll grapple with how to create and maintain habits to support a great life, even as we concede our multi-millionaire dreams. If you can't be rich, maybe you can be healthy and happy, with a more close-knit family. Funny, isn't it, that your best life may have just begun as a consolation prize for the loss of a beloved dream?
 
    But, don't worry - I haven't given up my membership in the Institute for the Dogma-Challenged! There is no sacred creed in this blog, and I'm going to stay open to challenges and questions.  Absolute certainty is a luxury we can't afford any longer,  so you won’t have to avoid sitting in the front row to protect yourself from the flying spittle and ringing ears that come from possessed preaching. This is also not a “dummy” blog – it's for people smart enough to know something's gone astray with the American Dream, and who want to do something about it.

   Growth has its costs, and the price often is giving up old beliefs. In this blog I will challenge you to question some of the beliefs you may be carrying around that aren't doing you any good.  Maybe some beliefs are useful, maybe not - but like all the stuff we have down in our basement, they all need to be aired out from time to time.  This can make for lively dialogue and challenging each other to think and to question assumptions.  Here's the challenge I'll begin with, and I'll state it baldly:  

    We have confused our most fundamental values with our cultural icons of success to the point where a kind of perversion of original identity has occurred; we no longer recognize the child of our self but rather embrace his clothes.  In our rage for success, we have become trapped by its trappings.  It’s not about the money. The power of the illusion has made monkeys of us - we fight over the stick used to get the banana, while the banana lies within reach. The American Dream is an illusion.

In my next post, we'll take another look at how you can clarify your best life.