Similar Posts
How to get the benefits of meditation without sitting for hours like a weirdo
Meditation is not the only way into all the benefits that this practice produces. I believe that even though everybody can meditate and benefit from it, meditation is not for everybody. The purpose of this post is to provide some clarity about meditation and give you some ideas on how to use this practice or something analogous to better your life. Hang on to your staches, this will be a wild ride.
Positive Habits of Mind
You see, Mindset is one of those concepts that has become very popular and because of that, it has lost specificity. It is often vague. On top of that, our ideas around it come from academia, especially from the Psychology departments -although not exclusively. This means that we often look at it from one of two points of view 1) a very superficial one; or 2) a pathological one. The first case is represented in the average daily use. When a person says mindset most of the time they just mean attitude. When Henrick tells me: “Juan I went to that meeting with the right mindset, I was ready to crush it.” That’s not a mindset, it is an attitude. The second case means that we have become very good at identifying mindsets that are unproductive. We have identified general trends and their negative consequences. In other words, we are better at understanding the commonalities among the mindsets of people with poor ones, than among those who have good ones. All together, this means that when it comes to Mindset we need a little bit of a Francine attitude in the world. We need to be positive and specific. Just tell people what to do! This post is for you Francine. Let’s do this.
Francy's Rower and Outcome Oriented Mindsets
“How is that working for you?” is a rhetorical tool I use with a lot of my athletes. Whether we are talking about a nutritional habit, a workout strategy, or a marital problem, I have found it to be very productive. This is because it is a grounding experience when one asks it honestly. It prompts the person in front of you to really match what they are trying to get out of their behaviors with reality.
- Close the Gap | Coaching | Finding What Works for You | Fitness | How to be a learner? | Mindset | Smart Practices
Banzo's sword and metric fixations
Are you a victim of your metrics? Are you constantly trying to better your metrics, just to feel frustrated and unaccomplished? I have been there, it is awful. In this post I present to you a set of principles that will help you use metrics to serve you and not the other way around.
Study yourself
This story made me realize that when it comes to nutrition it’s not that we cannot see reality, it is that we have NO IDEA. We were never taught how to evaluate whether our eating habits are actually good or not. We have beliefs about nutrition, but we have no way to test those beliefs and, to be honest, most don’t even feel the need to test them. To make things worse, the internet is full of the next best shiny diet: ketogenic, veganism, vegetarianism, low carb, high carb, carnivore diet, paleo diet, whole 30, weight watchers, organic free-range home-schooled turduckens, etc. Combine genuine ignorance with media telling us that there is such a thing as Good Eating that is independent of our genetics, our socio-economic context, our cultural background, and our present state, that there exists a one-size-fits-all nutritional approach that will guarantee you results, and you are clusterfucked, my friend.
Your own personal culture
I remember the day I spent a full hour talking to an advertiser about creating my own personal brand. It was like if your uncle Phil who just started jogging spent an hour talking to your friend Jody the ultramarathoner about the importance of having the right running shoes. I did not know the concept at that time, but I was deep in my research of the printing press in the seventeenth century. What I was learning was that most writers of the time had a strong sense of branding. They understood their books as objects in themselves and so they cared about every little aspect of them. They usually would include a self portrait in each of their books. Those portraits, man! They were quite literally an intellectual coat of arms. Everything had a meaning and everything was there for a reason. No contemporary nobel prize winner has ever thought so deeply about the cover of one of their books. The cool thing for me is that there was no pretense that they did not care about material, venial, graphical, or commercial things. They put themselves out there and they wanted people to understand them exactly and fully as they were. The advertiser I was talking to looked at me and with a duh-but-warm smile and said: “yeah, it is all about personal branding.” My head exploded a little.
