Misconceptions

One of the biggest changes in my life was realizing that things, big projects, don’t have to be done all at once. Not even in one day. I’ve finally figured out that even a backyard project could be pieced out over days. Day 1, measure. Day 2, pick up the lumber and hardware. Day 3, cut. Day 4, assemble and install. It doesn’t have to be done all at once, and it doesn’t have to be done right now.

I’ve lived under those misconceptions for a long time. The idea that something had to be done all at once, right now. And it stopped me from starting many projects because I couldn’t see how to get it done based on those timelines. But things take time, and so it’s ok to take time. Make a plan. Check that it makes sense. Gather who and what you need.

Don’t overcommit to too much in one day. Call it quits when you notice it’s no longer enjoyable (a good rule to live by).

Our lives are filled with small misconceptions about how we should live, that end up dictating our lives, and we don’t even know it. 

Why sharing my writing scares me

I think I’m afraid to share my work because I’m scared that people are going to take the one thing they read that I wrote, and use it to form an opinion of me. Even though its only one thing, one idea, one thought, one observation, or one view out of a million that I have, it’s not going to be the collective one million that makes up who I am in their mind, it’s going to be the one thing that someone reads and doesn’t like.

And that’s what scares me and stops me from wanting to share. Because I see how people form their opinions. I see how they do it to other people. I see how they take something that someone said or did completely out of context and use it to from their whole opinion of that person. I see people do this in front of me all the time, and I don’t believe for a second that they don’t do it to me when I’m not in the room.

I know they do because I know they don’t have enough self control to stop themselves, or pick and choose who gets unjust criticism and who does not. It’s behavior that I’ve observed over and over again in strangers, friends, and family. 

And the thing is, I don’t want to give people any more ammunition than they already have by sharing everything that’s comes to my mind, and all of my intimate moments in this world. I don’t want to. But, I’m also burdened by an uncontrollable and burning desire to share and communicate with that small percentage of the population who actually has an open mind, and who is looking to connect. Because that’s what I want, and the medium that calls to me is writing.

So, I’m throwing caution to the wind, because I’ve decided that when I die, I will have lived a much more fulfilled, authentic, and enjoyable life if I just laid it all out, than if no one ever criticized me, misinterpreted what I said, or used my words against me.

So, on this website, I will continue to try to leave it all to bare.

What’s the point?

That’s the question I have been asking myself a lot lately when things aren’t going as anticipated.

Take a recent ski trip for example. It’s coming to the end of the ski season in Colorado, so my fiance and I planned a trip to the mountains. The goal was to get there early and ski from first to last chair. But that’s not how it went.

We got a late start. We got into a fight the night before (over what I can’t even remember), and it ruined our night and pushed out bedtime back a couple of hours. And we both slept horribly, so we woke up late.

We didn’t get on the road until about 10 am (first chair is 9 am and we live, without traffic, 90 minutes from the mountain). We hit traffic almost immediately, and ended up at a dead stop for 45 minutes. Fortunately after we got moving again it was clear sailing. However, we it wasn’t until around 1 pm that we put in our first run.

To make a bad situation worse, it was spring break, so the mountain was packed, and lift lines were very long. It was 20 - 30 minutes between each run. By last chair at 4 pm we had put in no more than 5 runs. Not a very productive day. Not the day we had planned.

But what was the actual point of our trip? While the original intention was to get in one last full day of skiing before the season ended, wasn’t there another secondary reason that we planned this trip? An underlying reason for everything we do together. That’s what I started asking myself as we sat in traffic after leaving our house.

The point was as much about spending time together doing something fun, as it was about skiing. And once I began to see our day in that light, all of the stress of our fight the night before, the late start, traffic, and busy chair lifts started to roll off. It no longer mattered how much skiing we got in or what time we got to the mountain. What mattered was that we had the day to ourselves. We had the day together.

Perspective is such a powerful thing! It can literally turn what would normally have been a disappointing and stressful day into a great day together, despite none of my previous expectations being met. I think there’s always a view that we can take to make any situation better. It is not always easy to see, but I’ve been trying more and more to find that perspective shifting why. And the more I search for it, the easier it becomes to see. 

To achieve success, visualize success

Chase Hughes spoke about rehearsing before a big fight, or a big event in your life, whatever it might be. He spoke about the importance of visualizing everything. Of seeing it through to the end, visualizing success, and then doing it over. Repeating it again, and again, and again, in your mind. Visualizing and anticipating, so that when you do step into the ring, the office, onto the stage to give a presentation, you are prepared for whatever comes your way. And the more you rehearse, the higher your chances are of succeeding.

It’s something that Charles Duhigg also spoke about in The Power of Habit. He used Michael Phelps as the example. 

Michael Phelps had a very specific routine that he followed every day during training. This was intentional. So that when we woke up on race day, he was able to get right to action without having to think. There was not hesitation. Part of his routine during training was visualizing his race. His launch off the board. His stroke. His breathing. His turn. Visualizing each piece of the race.

He become such a master of visualizing his races, that during one race when his goggles started filling with water, preventing him from being able to see, he didn’t panic. He knew exactly what to do. He had visualized this race so many times beforehand, that he didn’t need his sight. It was already programmed in him, and he won, despite not being able to see.

That’s the power of rehearsing.

But I think perhaps the more important thing that Chase Hughes said was that every time you envision your event, race, fight, or presentation, and that vision is filed with fear, anxiety, things going wrong, and insecurities, that also counts as a rehearsal. A bad rehearsal, but a rehearsal nonetheless. And each time you rehearse in this way, you engrain the opposite outcome in your brain. You begin to engrain failure, because that’s what you see.

It was a very interesting perspective because it is true, and I had never thought about it that way before. It would be the equivalent of repeating the wrong lines or the wrong scene while rehearsing for a movie, or play. If that were to happen, chances are the performance would be shitty.

It’s also interesting to me, because that is what I did in preparing for my trip to the cabin a couple of weeks ago. I thought about all the things that could go wrong. I thought about all the things that were making me nervous. I had planned on going out a week earlier to run reconnaissance  and see what the trail was like. Get an idea of how difficult it might be. Even knowing about the parking situation, and permitting. But I never did it. 

I went in blind, suppressing my fear and anxieties, instead of acknowledging them. So, it should be no surprise that when disaster struck, when I feel in a snow well and was stuck chest deep (aka, my goggles filled with water), I immediately decided to turn back. I had never visualized successfully getting to the cabin. I didn’t know what to expect. I hadn’t planned. So it didn’t take much to throw me off.

Don’t that negative rehearsal a place in your mind. Shut it down. It doesn’t serve you. Worrying and giving yourself anxiety over something you have to do or want to do, is not going to help you be prepared. It’s just going to hamper performance.

Instead take the time to visualize success, from beginning to the end. Anticipate where things might go wrong, what questions might be asked, and then figure out the answers. Step out into the field before your trip, or onto the stage before your presentation. See what it feels like. Get comfortable in the uncomfortable environment.

Take the time to go through the motions. Stay positive and smile. Give yourself the best chance to succeed by visualizing yourself on the other side of success. 

How snow shoeing kicked my ass.

Every sport has its own cadence, technique, strength, and endurance requirements. And while cross over between sports exists, the only way to really excel at a sport is to train for the specifications demanded of that sport. Despite knowing that, I am amazed time and time again at how my fitness in one area, could be exposed as inconsequential in another.

Over the last few months I’ve been exercising 5 - 6 days per week. A combination of running, skiing, hiking, strength training, and kettlebell work. And I’ve been feeling strong and fit. However last week I attempted to snow shoe through deep powder with an overnight pack on my back and got my ass kicked.

My intended destination was a remote and primitive cabin ~5 miles and 2,000 ft from the trailhead. But I never made it. Which is perhaps not all that surprising considering the serious doubts I was having leading up to the trip.

I turned around at 3.5 miles, to total 7 miles on the day. By this point in my trip I had been breaking trail for 1.5 miles, and I was way more fatigued than I had expected to be. I also was starting to feel nervous about being deep in the woods alone. So, at around 1 pm I told myself I’d keep going until 2 pm, and then reevaluate the situation. At 1:30 pm I thought about taking a break for a drink and a bite to eat when I suddenly sank into a snow well that nearly buried me chest deep.

I was able to get out after a few minutes of struggle (if you’ve never been caught in a snow well, getting out is like fighting quick sand, you just make the situation worse), but it was enough of a sign to convince me to head back. The combination of the exhaustion I was feeling and the very real danger I had just experienced, decided my fate.

But I couldn’t believe how fatigued 3.5 miles of snow shoeing got me. I felt drained in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time. To be sure, there were other factors at play other than just my fitness. Elevation had to have played a role. The trailhead starts at 9,000 feet and ascends to over 11,000. Hydration played a role. I planned on stopping every 1 mile for a proper break to drink and eat, but I kept blowing it off. With deep snow covering everything around me, I didn’t feel like I could rest anywhere, so I pushed on with dreams of relaxing once I hit the cabin. Lastly, breaking trail in knee deep snow with a 30 - 40 pound back on is not easy. It’s something I’ve never done before. And it’s definitely not something I was training for in the gym.

In the end it took me 5+ hours to travel 7 miles. A snails pace I’d never experienced before.

But that’s all kind of the point. Snow shoeing to a cabin at the top of an 11,000 foot mountain requires specific training, specific planning, and a specific mindset. It requires a comfortability with being out in the woods with no visible trail. None of which I had been preparing for this winter. And so, I got chewed up and spit out.

For sure my training in other disciplines helped me get as far as I did, and back to my car safely. As did the mindset I developed training for long distance endurance races. That’s the cross over. But the only way I was going to make it to that cabin was if I had someone with me to ease the uncertainty of being alone, and if I had been training for snow shoeing.

I like when I get humbled. With so much fitness experience under my belt I like to think I can jump in and do anything on the fly. Sometimes it works, other times it does not. And the older I get the more it seems to fall into the latter. Regardless, I’ve committed to myself that I will get back on this trail in the near future and conquer my fear and my fatigue.

What can you eliminate?

Everyone talks about all the things you should do to optimize your life. They talk about all of the supplements to take. All of the hacks to incorporate into your day. The type, intensity, and frequency of exercise. But adding more to a busy life with limited capacity is a daunting task. Starting new routines and creating new habits requires consistency over a long period of time, and for that reason, for most people, they usually don’t stick.

That’s why I think that a much easier path is to eliminate the things from your life which do not serve you. Addition by subtraction. Remove what does not serve you and get back time and energy, and ultimately your health.

I think there are three things that almost everyone could eliminate tomorrow with minimal effort that would also drastically and immediately improving the quality of theirlife.

• Alcohol

• Social Media

• Added Sugar and Processed Food (“food that isn’t food”)

Anyone, in any situation, could eliminate those three things and instantaneously be on the road to a better, happier, more productive, version of themselves.

These three substances rob all of us of our mental, physical, and emotional health. They cause unwanted and undetected spikes in stress hormones, and deleterious chemical reactions. They are at the core of depression, anxiety, weight gain, and chronic disease, and therefore at the core of the health epidemic in this country.

And it’s not just our healthy that they wreck. These three substances act as sedatives, muting our intuition, causing lethargy, and interfering with our critical thinking. They block our motivation, and they silence our ambition. They convince us to check out, when we want to be tuned in.

Alcohol, social media, and foods that isn’t food, are collectively and directly responsible for the increased prevalence of disease and mortality. If we could eliminate these substances from our lives then we wouldn’t need to do anything else.

We wouldn’t need to be more active. We wouldn’t need a multi-vitamin or a handful of supplements. We wouldn’t need to view sunlight immediately upon waking up. We wouldn’t need to find ways to disconnect and be mindful. We wouldn’t need to do any of those things but we would, because we would feel such an immense physical, mental, and emotional improvement that it would become immediately clear to us that we wanted to do it all.

Alcohol, social media, and food that isn’t food are mentally, emotionally, and physically destroying us. If we can eliminate them, the rest will take care of itself.

Pay Now or Pay Later

Every night before I go to bed I stretch for 5 - 6 minutes. I stretch not because I want to, but because I have restless leg syndrome. I stretch my calves, my hamstrings, and sometimes my glutes. If I don’t, and sometimes even if I do, my legs will ache with a nervous energy mimicking anxiety. And I can’t fall asleep.

I’ve been doing it for so long now that it’s part of my night time routine. But I hate doing it. Most nights all I want to do is get right into bed. Part of the reason I hate doing it is because it takes time and a little bit of extra effort. I know that after I floss, brush, and pee, I have to stand at the foot of the bed and go through my routine, while my fiancé gets tucked in.

It’s only 5 minutes, but when I’m ready to go to bed it feels like such burden. Which is why I sometimes skip it. Pray my legs don’t bother me, and jump into bed. But I almost always pay for it. Tossing and turning until the aching in my legs becomes too unbearable and I’m forced to get up and stretch.

But what’s the tradeoff? If I stretch, 9 out of 10 times I am able to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep. If I don’t stretch, 9 out of 10 times I’m tossing and turning for 10 - 20 minutes before I get up to stretch anyway.

So if I stretch, it costs me 5 minutes. If I don’t stretch, it costs me an additional 10 - 20 minutes.

Yes it’s annoying. Yes I wish I didn’t have to do it. But sometime you have to do things you don’t want to do. And our lives are filled with examples just like this one each day. When putting in the minimum amount of effort required in the beginning will save us time and effort in the end. But most of the time we still don’t do it.

You really want to be healthy and lose weight, but you don’t want t take the time to prepare lunch for work. So you’re forced to pick something up. Something that is not as healthy. More expensive. And cuts into your lunch break as you wait for it to be made.

You want to get active and start exercising but you don’t want to wake up early to fit in a workout. Days, weeks, months go by, and before you know it you’ve gained more weight, and now you have to dig yourself out of a bigger hole, magnifying the effort required.

You don’t want to waste time going to the DMV to get your license renewed, so you put it off. As the expiration date of your license gets closer you stress about it. Then you miss the renewal deadline. Now you have to go to the DMV anyway, and now you have a bigger fee to pay.

Your shoulder is bothering you, but you don’t want to go to the doctor. So you push through it. One day you feel severe pain running through your shoulder and your bicep. A few months ago you had a small tear, now you have a full tear that requires surgery, physical therapy, and months of being inactive.

Over and over in our lives we create more work for ourselves because we’re unwilling to put the effort in at the beginning. When the issue first arises. When the thought first crosses our mind. But what feels like work and a waste of time now is actually an investment and insurance that you won’t have to deal with it later on down the line.

Pay now or pay later. Your choice.

A Pep Talk on Confidence

A lot of what’s stopping you from accomplishing what you want is confidence. When I think about the reason I need to get a job and start making money, it’s a fear that I’ll run out of money. Even though, luckily, barring a disaster, that day is a long way off.

What I really fear is, that if/when I run out of money, I won’t be able to make any more. Despite all of the things that I’ve accomplished in the past 6 years, none of them made me any money. So, in my mind, I’m afraid I won’t be able to. I lack confidence that I’ll be able to do it, and therefore, I’m afraid. And my fear pushes me to look for money. Despite not wanting or needing any right now.

So, there’s two possible truths. Either, I don’t know how to make money. Or, I haven’t been trying to. All the things I’ve accomplished and I continue to accomplish, are not being driven by money. They were all driven by an interest in exploring, and a passion to push myself.

So, which one is it? Can I turn my interests and passion into a money making endeavor when I need to? Can I focus my energy on earning a living if I need to?

That’s where confidence comes in.

I have to be confident that if I just keep following my interests and passions, that one day when I need it, the money will flow. That I have the talent and ambition to make that happen. Otherwise, what’s the point? What am I doing? What have I been doing for the past five years? Why have interests and passions if I’m not going to pursue them? Put them at the center of my life, and make money doing them.

So, when my doubt start to creep in, I repeat a shortened version of this to myself, and nine times out of ten, it breaks down the negative thought, and stopping it from ever entering my brain.

Go sell crazy somewhere else, were all stocked up here.

Spoken & Unspoken Lessons in My Rehab

You know the most important thing in my rehab journey has been something that my therapist said to me, rather than something he did to me or for me. On one of my very first visits he told me, “I don’t want you to be a repeat customer. I don’t want you coming back to me in 6 months, a year. You have to do the work in between sessions to get better.”

It was a pretty obvious thing to understand once he said it, but shamefully not something that I really thought about before that.

Even after my injury I continued to exercise regularly, and I figured that at some point I would be able to work through the injury, fix it, and get rid of the pain. So, that’s what I did. But, it didn’t work.

During that time I went to a handful of different doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors, and more, looking for the answer. Each in their own way pushed me along on my journey. Some were really good and guided me towards thing I should be doing. Other were not so good and I took their advice as things to avoid.

But throughout all of those visits, I really thought one of them was going to have the magic bullet. That at the first, second, or third visit they’d be able to pop something back in place, release a tense muscle, or do something else that was going to get me back to 100 percent in an instant.

In a way it’s made me understand how people look for the magic pill in fitness. In their health. When it comes to exercise and diet. There just feels like there has to be something that will make everything the way I want it. Now.

But injuries and fitness have that in common. The only thing that works in the long term is consistency. And that’s what my therapist highlighted for me, and that’s what I’ve been practicing ever since. And while I’m still not 100 percent, I am firmly in grasp of healing.

Another thing my therapist gave me was permission. Permission to dig deep into my muscle and tendons even if it was uncomfortable. Permission to contort my body into odd ways to alleviate my pain and improve my range of motion.

Before he unknowingly gave me this permission I would often stop just short of getting into a position that would’ve been beneficial to my rehab for fear of re-injuring myself. But the exercises he gave me to do pushed those limits, and when I did them and realized they were helping, and not hurting, it allowed me to push a little further.

The last thing I would say is that it is also important to be doing the right exercises. When you’re talking about being consistent, one of the key elements that almost ensures consistency, is progress. If you’re seeing progress, you are much more likely to continue. And of course the opposite is true. If you’re not seeing progress, then you’re unlikely to continue.

The exercises he gave me helped. I felt physically better, and that feeling encouraged me to continue.

Some lessons are taught. Some are spoken. Some were not even meant to be lessons. You have to be on the lookout for all of them.