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!

when I grow up…..

When I was a wee lad (say five or six years old) and my parents asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up I always had the same response – “First I’m going to play tennis, then I’m going to play football, then I’ll play cricket, then I’ll play soccer and then I’ll play golf and then I’ll come home!” My parents were always very supportive of my young and naive ambition – you can do anything you put your mind to little Andy (only they called me Andrew as mum hates when I’m called Andy!).

Cut ten years down the track and I was going to be a professional tennis player – sure I was sixteen years old, playing local club tennis and training once or twice a week at best while spending most of my time hanging with mates and going to  blue-light disco’s – I was no hack on the court but possibly a little behind where Roger Federer was at the same age!  I did surprise a new coach I started with around this time when she asked me how good a player I wanted to be and I responded with “top ten ranking in the world”.  She was very gentle with my feelings and didn’t shoot me down, but I’m sure she had a good giggle at my expense afterwards!

Add twenty-five years (or so) to little Andy and its finally dawned on me – you can do anything, but you cant do everything! Its one thing to be ambitious and to adopt a “can do” attitude, but to achieve anything worthwhile one must first limit focus to a specific goal and have the discipline to stick with it until its complete. Even those we we recognise as high achievers – professional athletes, actors, rock stars, world leaders and politicians start out their journeys with focused objectives and achievements.

So I guess the trick for all us “young players” is to find that one thing and commit ourselves to it one hundred percent. I also believe that if we find the right ‘one thing’ for us, that captures our passion and resonates with our values, it will be much easier to stick it out to completion!

temporary citizens

When we are closest to death we feel most alive. 

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For the last twelve months I’ve been riding a motorbike, I applied for my licence and purchased a second hand bike and I like to ride in my spare time. I’m pretty cautious, I only ride in dry weather and try to avoid busy roads and highways. I’m very aware of the risks involved and I remind myself constantly while riding that any break in concentration or wrong move could be the end of me!

When I explain this thought process to others I’m often asked “how is constantly worrying about death enjoyable?”. I try to explain that I’m not so much worried about death, but rather very aware of its possibility and I find the intense concentration required to ride the bike almost meditative, I stop thinking about everything else that’s going on in my life and I just focus on the bike, the road and the other traffic. I usually arrive at my destination feeling relaxed and thankful that I’m still around!

My decision to buy the bike has been met with concern by family and friends, and I completely understand this as I would equally be concerned about my child, brother, sister or friend riding a motorbike on the roads. But it was the label “temporary citizen” that has got me thinking (and has lead to this post) about how we view our own mortality and life span.

After all, we’re all temporary aren’t we? We are all met with the same fate at some point and none of us know when our time will be up, death is a part of life.

We tend to avoid thinking about death, we rarely discuss it, the thought of it can make us fearful and no one likes to go to funerals. In fact, to merely bring up death in conversation (or blog about it) would be seen by most to be morbid and depressing.

I think we’re very much detached from our own mortality, we’ve removed it from our minds, possibly to protect ourselves from the unknown and to avoid the discomfort of fear – but is this to our detriment? Does avoiding the thought of our own eventual demise undermine the value of our time alive?

We’ve all heard the catch cries such as “live like there’s no tomorrow”, they’re usually used by companies in advertising and often accompany footage of young folks jumping out of aeroplanes,  bungee jumping or participating in some other “extreme” activity. It seems to be an effective way to relate to consumers and get them to buy your product, but do any of us actually live each day as if it could be our last? Would there be any benefit in having a constant awareness that today could be our last day? Or the last day of someone close to us?

Now I believe that having a constant fear of death would be the worst possible way to live, but what I’m talking about here is the awareness of our own fragile nature and the uncertainly of life.

So I’ve started to wonder how would I live today if I was aware that it could be my last day or the last day of someone in my life?

Would I wake up early to make the most of the day, or would I prefer to stay in bed a little longer and enjoy a sleep in? What would I have for breakfast if I was possibly my last meal? Would I eat alone or prepare breakfast for my wife and enjoy the time together? How would I part ways each morning with my wife if I truly felt there was a possibility I wouldn’t see her again? Would I ever part ways with an unresolved argument and risk the possibility of never resolving it? How would I express my feelings to her so I would never wonder if she knew how I truly felt?

How would I carry out each conversation with someone if I knew that this could be the last thought they had of me? How would I deal with petty disagreements with friends and family? How would I speak to my parents if it were to be my last conversion?

How would I embrace my wife at the end of a day apart, or a family member or friend after a time apart, when I know that there was a possibility that I wouldn’t have this opportunity?

How would my life be summed up if today was my last day, would I be happy with the person that is described at my funeral? Would I be happy with the son, the husband, the brother or friend I’ve been. Would I be satisfied with the life I’ve built?

I think as a society we tend to move away from those things that cause us discomfort and in many ways we lose the appreciation for the value of life, its not until we ourselves or someone close to us has an encounter with death that we appreciate its impact on our lives – life gains a different perspective, priorities are changed and things that were taken for granted become more important than anything else.

Sometimes this realisation and appreciation of death comes too late, we miss the chance to resolve a conflict or tell someone how we really feel and we are left with the sorrow and regret that we didn’t act when we had a chance, and this must surely be the greatest tragedy of life – forgetting that its only temporary!