the best advice

I must admit that I am one to give advice.  I’m interested in people and I like to help when I can, and if I am to be completely honest with you, it makes me feel good  to be able to give well received advice.

What I’ve come to realise though is that sometimes the best advice is to not give any at all.  It was actually something J (my wife) said recently that got me thinking about the best way to support others and when and what type of advice to give.

We tend to be most assertive and forthcoming with advice to those who are closest to us; siblings, parents, other close family and friends, and I took some time to think about what motivates me to give advice and how effective this advice is. After some introspective soul searching I came up with the two primal motivators of love and fear.

Love; if you care for someone you want to help them, simple enough yeah?  On the flip side you also want to be loved and one way to feel loved is to feel valued by someone you love.  Both very strong motivators I’d say.

Fear;  if you care for someone you also share some fear for their well-being, and the level of this fear will vary depending on your own level of anxiety and your view of this persons capabilities -  if you had 100 percent faith in the persons ability to make the right decisions when required you wouldn’t feel the need to give any advice, of course the opposite is also true and this is where I’ve drawn the conclusion for this post.

So when we give advice, we are seeking love and appreciation and playing to our fears.   Although often meant with the best intentions, we’re trying to control the situation and by doing so we’re sending a message that we don’t think this person has the ability to make their own decisions – in short, that we don’t believe in them.  Not to helpful really!

So what to do?  Instead of offering advice in the form of suggested actions, I believe the best way to help someone in need is to simply offer love and support – tell them you care about them and that you believe they will make the right decision, that they’re up to the challenge.  By taking this stance you’re sending a strong message that you believe in them and you’re empowering them to take hold of their own life and decisions.

To further help them along the way, rather than offering direct advice you could try to ask questions that help them to see their situation from a few different angles which can be helpful if they are feeling stuck.  Just so long as they come to their conclusions by themselves.

Wrong decisions;  we’ve all made mistakes in our lives its part of the human condition, and often our mistakes are a necessary part of our own  journey.  It’s very hard watching our loved ones take a fall, especially if we can see it coming and it takes a lot of restraint by us to let them make their own mistakes (especially for a parent I’m sure), but we have to let go – there is too much at stake. Whereas our mistakes often lead to growth, lack of faith in ourselves to make our own decisions and choose our own path is in my view the greatest obstacle in life and the most difficult to overcome.

79 years

no-one told me there  was a limit

my time to walk this place,

nowhere was it written

my days would soon be passed,

by my  means I discovered

life’s dark conspiracy,

for 79 years is all she’s offered

providing fate will have it,

too short this time,

too short my stay,

for it was half way over

before I knew it begun,

what now I know this truth

shall I prove my worth,

how to celebrate this bitter-sweet life,

and what part of me will I entrust

to those I leave behind,

for once my bones have turned to dust

only memories last,

I choose this day to make a mends

for wistful youth and wasted days,

I pledge from this time forward

to never miss a day,

I will wrestle life for all its worth

and cherish every moment,

what more could I seek from life

than the love of those around me,

for days come and months leave me

and all I ask is this small feat,

that I tasted life and loved completely.

correcting course

A few weeks ago I was having a discussion with one of my mentors (Lindsay Galt) about where I am at the moment with my professional career and where I am planning on going.  I was a little despondent about some things that haven’t worked out the way I’d planned and I was feeling a little stuck, unsure where to go from where I was.

Lindsay explained that the path of any journey takes a similar and predictable route, we start and head in the direction we are planning to go and then we take our bearings and correct course as we need to along the way.  Whether we’re driving our cars, taking a flight or just walking to the local shop we use the same principal, we take a non-liner path as we zig-zag our way to where we want to go.

For me, looking at my life in this way was very liberating.  It helped me to see my current position in a different light, as a point in a journey rather than a static position.  With this mindset my past mistakes and wrong turns become a vital part of the journey also, no longer seen in a negative way but rather as some necessary lessons that needed to be learned early on the journey.

Its a very simple idea but for me it has profoundly altered my mindset and helped me to move forward.  It has also helped me realise another truth about any journey we take in life, the most important step is to start! There will never be a right time and we will never have or know everything we need for the journey, so we must start now in the best way we can and correct path as we go!

its complicated

Lately I’ve been reading a few great blogs about simplicity and some of the insights I’ve gained have helped me rethink the way I approach my time. What I’m wondering though is why is simplicity so difficult to achieve? I mean logically simplicity should be easier to achieve than complexity right?

When you think about it life by its own nature is inherently complex. Our own bodies, our environment and planet are all amazingly complex systems and even the things we create – the buildings we live in, the machines we invent and the communities we build are extremely complex.

But despite these layers of complexity, life is also incredibly simple. For you or I taking a breath is possibly the simplest thing we do, we don’t think about it and we never had to learn how to do it, we just did it and we did it without any regard or understanding of the complex process the body undertakes with every breath. Driving a car is also very simple, we can learn how to drive in a few minutes and can become a competent driver within hours, and we do this without any thought or knowledge of the complexity and science behind the combustion engine.

What I’ve realised while thinking about this post is that we choose the level of complexity we have in our lives, we can delve into the deepest depths of complexity or wade in the shallows of simplicity. If we want to simplify our lives we need to simplify our thinking.

blood, sweat & tears

Leading on from my last post about my 3 hour diet I want to tell you a little about my new exercise program. My main goal for both the change in diet and exercise program is to increase my energy levels. I’m not trying to lose a great deal of weight, maybe three or four kilos less should see me back to my “fighting weight”, so I’m not going to obsess over calorie intake or take up with a new personal trainer. I want to create a sustainable exercise habit rather than a short term fad as I’ve done several times in the past – I once held a gym membership near my office for over twelve months and only ever used it for taking showers before meetings!

So I’ve come up with a very basic routine which consists of a daily walk with my dogs each morning and two or three high intensity workouts per week.

So this sounds great yeah? But you know its not the first time I’ve got all pumped up to get in shape only to lose momentum after a couple of weeks, days or even hours! So what’s going to be different this time? Well four things;

1. I’m setting a realistic and simple program that wont require a large time commitment and therefore wont conflict with my business or social life.

2. I’m rounding up training partners to join me – its much more enjoyable to train with friends and much harder to cancel a training session when you’ve committed to meet others

3. I’m setting some goals to help motivate me- I’m planning on participating in some open water swims in the up coming season. Swimming is a great sport for the body, it doesn’t take long to train and I have a pool around the corner from my house.

4. I’m creating some accountability by telling you about it!

3 hour diet

Have you ever heard the saying “if you want to lose weight eat more”? I like the ‘upside down’ logic to this and I’ve been experimenting with a 3 hour diet – basically I eat a small meal every three hours (five meals per day).

I decided to focus on my eating habits because I was running out of energy each day at around 3pm, I would hit a wall and feel like curling up on the couch and sleeping.  Its any wonder why, I’d fallen into the bad habit of skipping meals and relying on coffee hits and sugar to get me through the day. Not only was I running out of energy, I was also starting to put on weight (probably due to a combination of a slowing metabolism and a decrease in exercise due to my lack of energy).

So my strategy now is to eat small portions of good healthy food every 3 hours to avoid feeling hungry at all. Eating when you’re hungry is a little like shopping for food when you’re hungry, you tend to overestimate what you need and eat way more than you should. I’ve cut down my coffee to 1-2 per day, and I make sure that I don’t have coffee before a meal as it acts as an appetite suppressant and I tend to forget to eat!

The results so far, well its early days and I still don’t quite fit into last years jeans, but I have noticed a big increase in my energy levels and I’ve found that its a lot easier to be disciplined with my food intake when I’m not hungry.

What I’ve found interesting with this exercise is that if we want to achieve results we often need to reverse our thinking, our intuitive thoughts aren’t always accurate and if we turn them on their heads and do the opposite, we often get the results we’re after!

Are you normal?

For most of us when we were in the school yard growing up our goal was to be normal. We wanted to be like the other kids and the idea of standing out brought the fear of ridicule and humiliation. As we move into our adulthood we often carry this fear with us, we try to blend with the crowd and be like everyone else. We worry about what others will think about our actions or what others would do in our situation and this can influence our decisions and steer our direction. The problem is, in adulthood being like everyone else can greatly diminish our success and happiness and being different can open up new doors and exciting possibilities.

When you think about it the advantages of being different in almost any arena are obvious; going for a job interview you want to be different from the other applicants, trying to court a partner you want to stand out from the other suitors, in business marketers speak about the advantage of having a ‘point of difference’, and in sports your difference is often your natural advantage!

The irony is that whereas a lot of us spend our lives trying to be normal, we admire those who have the courage to step out of the square and be different.

So how do we become different? We be ourselves! There isn’t another person on the planet exactly the same as you or I and we know this, we’ve known it all along – its what we’ve been trying to hide!

When we stop trying to fit the mould and start being our own person we start to transform our lives.  It may be uncomfortable at first but it is the only way to find your own success and happiness!

bang for buck

I had a weak moment this last night, I wanted to hang with J (my wife) so I agreed to accompany her to our local shopping mall (Chadstone for any Melbournites reading). I usually try to stay away from Chadstone as finding a car park can be a nightmare and I’m not a huge fan of shopping in general – its not that I don’t like buying things or that I’m not into fashion, but I just don’t feel comfortable dealing with shop attendants – I know what I like and don’t really want any help choosing it! My ideal clothing shop wouldn’t have any staff (besides a security guard on the door), you would help yourself to the clothes, try them on and self pay at the counter.  I would buy everything from a shop like that!

But I’m not writing this post to give my views on how retail outlets could operate  or to discuss my lack of assertiveness with salespeople! The shopping mall was very quiet, especially considering the end of financial year sales that are currently on and it got me thinking about how we’re spending money and how it has changed over the last twelve months, and I thought I would share my thoughts on how the mood has changed.

I’ve noticed a changing trend with my business dealings as well – running a business in the building industry I work very closely with my Clients and I’ve noticed quiet a change in attitudes towards how they’re spending their money. In the last few years extravagance has been the order of the day. Everyone seemed to want to out-do their friends or neighbours and most seemed to put cost second to ‘prestige’. One couple I dealt with were adamant they wanted the “best house in the street” and they spent a fortune trying to achieve it. Marble bench tops, European appliances, imported light  fittings, there seemed to be no limit to what people wanted to spend, and at least a very flexible approach to how much money they were prepared to borrow from the bank to fund this opulence.

Cut to today and I would argue the mood has changed, there’s a new economy – the value economy, and everybody wants a piece of it! There’s still plenty of demand and lots of money being spent, but everyone wants to know they’re getting a good deal. People are taking longer to make decisions, they’re weighing up their options and are quite often choosing better value products and services over their more prestigious and expensive competitors. There’s less money to borrow so they borrow less and stretch it further!

So if you’re looking for a silver lining in the grey cloud that is the GFC, I would have to ask – which of the two climates above sounds like the more ideal? In the past we’ve been in a consuming frenzy, buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have, getting waist deep in debt, feeding the economy and blowing it into a bubble so big we thought it was the sky! Yet now we’re treading more carefully, making informed decisions, looking for value and “bang for buck”, avoiding the frivolous things we don’t really need and spending time and money on the things we really value.

It seems to me that although this financial meltdown has caused a lot of pain to many people, it may well have been exactly what the doctor has ordered – it may well help us see what we truly need and value and what is just excess!

watch where you’re going!!!

One of my favourite hobbies is to snowboard. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager and I’ve been lucky enough to ride at some amazing locations throughout the world – Canada, Austria, Japan, New Zealand and of course back home in Australia. Riding all day in the mountains with your mates and then heading back to the chalet for a couple of bevies in front of an open fire – now that’s a holiday!

As much as I could rant on about snowboarding for ages, what I wanted to write about in this post is a skill I discovered early in the learning process and have since found it to be a key skill in may other sports as well as in life in general……..to look where you want to go!

Now this may sound obvious but stick with me here, its not always as easy as it sounds.

When you start a new sport (in this case snowboarding), you first need to learn the basics – how the board moves, where to position your balance, how to turn and how to stop. This is a really exciting (and often painful) part of the experience and the learning curve is really steep; at the end off your first day you see huge improvements and by the end of the second or third day you are carving down the hill! During these early stages you are usually very focused on your feet and the board and often only look a little ahead of yourself. Your body is often stiff and you fall very easily, you haven’t learnt to relax and let the board glide.

Once you learn the basics and you’ve trained your body to move and balance itself you start to gain confidence and start to ride faster, you make lots of turns and look further ahead of yourself to where you want to go. You feel pretty dam cool riding down in front of your mates – but then, you hit a rough patch or some ice and you panic, stiffen your body and look at the snow right in front of you – you bail! You’re covered in snow, your gear is up the hill and your mates are laughing! You dust it off and go again – great fun!

Now you’re heading down the hill and once again feeling pretty flash, you head over a roller and see a guy laying on the snow fixing his gear and you panic, you really don’t want to hit him, you look at him and slid towards him, the closer you get the more you panic the more you focus on him – you bail and slide into him – crack! He calls you a name, you tell him he’s stopped in a stupid spot and you couldn’t get around him – you slide away from each other – great fun!

A couple of seasons later and you are looking the goods, you’re a style master and you make it look easy. You glide down the hill listening to your ipod, you look a long way to the right, nice big carve, then switch to your heal and look way out left, you are heading towards a couple of skiers and at the last minute one of them turns right into your path – you act quickly, you look to the right of the skier (not at him), jump back to your toes and glide past him – they abuse you for getting too close and you can’t help but throw a wry grin.

It takes some practice to get to this point, you need to be able to look way off in the distance and have confidence that your body will do what it needs to. Sometimes I fall back into the habit of focusing right in from of me (especially when the snow gets rough), its a defence mechanism but it actually makes your riding worse. It’s also very hard to ride in fog for this reason – you cant look far enough into the distance. Your vision needs to steer your body!

I’ve also come across this same principal in the last twelve months learning to ride motorbikes, you learn the principals of cornering but the hard part is actually committing your vision and weight to the direction you want to go, you have to look at the path out of the corner rather than the corner itself. I expect that any activity that requires momentum would also require this skill, your vision directs your momentum!

I think this is a valuable skill to practice in the other areas of our life. We need vision and momentum to keep us on our own path, most of us have goals and a vision of what we want our life to look like, but from time to time we hit obstacles that cause us to lose momentum and shift our focus away from where we’re going. We may experience a financial loss or crisis such as a loss of income, we may have a relationship break-up or we could lose someone close to us. When such things happen we can  get stuck – we focus on the problem, the loss, the debt, or the crisis, and we can lose our long term vision and direction, and sometimes we may even bail out of it.

Life throws all sorts of obstacles at us and we need to be able to maintain poise and confidence and  navigate around them,  make some adjustments if necessary, and then correct course and focus our vision on where we are planning to go!

just say no!

NO! There I’ve said it and I’m glad to get that off my chest – its one I’ve been struggling for quite some time. It’s such a simple word and yet for some reason I find it extremely hard to say.

Kids say it right? I’ve heard them, its one of the first words they say right after ‘mum’; eat your veggies – No! Clean your teeth – No! Go to bed – No! Kids love saying no and they cant say it enough. I must have said it when I was a kid, so why do I find it so hard now?

I love saying yes, I like the feeling I get when I solve a problem, do someone a favour or prove myself useful in some other such way. Its how I identify myself – I am Andy, I’m a nice guy and I want to help!

But saying yes all the time is not really working for me, there are times when ‘no’ is the only appropriate response to a request – no rocket science there, trying to please everybody all the time is a fools pursuit and often leads to broken promises, frustration and resentment. I know this intellectually, but emotionally I still find it very painful to say no, and I’ve gone to some extreme lengths in the past to avoid having to say it!

So whats holding me back from giving a short simple and honest ‘no’ when I know I should? I think its because I associate my own value as a person with my ability to help people, when I say yes it affirms my identity as a helpful person and I feel validated – when I say no I’m at odds with my my identity and I feel a lose of value as a person. This can surface in emotions such as guilt, and often lowers my self esteem and confidence.

So how does one push through such an identity crisis with confidence while maintaining self esteem? I think it calls for a re-alignment of how we value ourselves – to value ourselves for who we are, as worthy individuals in our own right. If I truly value myself, to answer yes or no is a simply to ask myself if I can help rather then to question my own personal value!