We have all had those times in life when we get presented with a task that, at face value seems too much for us to contemplate achieving.

We slam the door in the face of the idea and shout profanity’s through the letterbox until it goes away.

Eventually, when the moment has passed and we have got away with not answering the door to growing pains, we can get back up and continue with our mediocre unchallenged existence, complaining to anyone that will listen how we are bored.

Its often not the case that we are incapable of doing the task presented to us, but rather its how we perceive it as a snap shot, usually in its entirety, in full technicolor and a perfect showroom finish.

To illustrate this idea, a friend of mine recently enrolled in a new science based college course.

During his first few weeks he has had to get familiar with cellular biology.
Part of this biological soiree has required him to draw some 3d images of cells and label them as part of his course work.

This was not a task he was not relishing, due to his lack of belief in his skill with a crayon mixed with the seemingly complex construction of the diagrams he would need to replicate.

It was due to this Complexity of plant and animal cell illustrations that he remarked he was really struggling to commit to put pen to paper and getting it done.

A friend of mine who runs very large electrical projects once said to me about the multiplicity of some of the circuitry he was dealing with that really ‘everything’s just a switch’ and ‘a hotel is just a repetition of one room. If you can do one room you can do 100.’

As I’ve also written before about when things seem to grandiose for us to entertain, its often worth taking the time the break the request down into smaller units before we slam that door on potential to grow and improve.

https://younglobal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/break-it-down/?preview=true&iframe=true&calypso_token=41777a2b-e36c-4941-92ef-0aa1a1ed2129

I’ve got a design background and a lot of the type of art and design work I do has a strong leaning towards a 3d appearance, so I offered to help.

Initially my friend point blank said ‘No I want to do it myself.’

But still hearing the lack of enthusiasm in his voice, and not liking to turn away from a challenge, I asked him Show me the drawings.

I’m not going to do it for you, I said, but I can sort of ‘see’ in 3D.

Not because I have X-Man like abilities, but because, similarly to when an optical illusion is explained to us, once we see the other image, we can always see it from then on.

Likewise with learning to draw and sculpt, we begin to seeing how things go together three dimensionally as we construct then or reverse engineer them.

My experience just meant I could simply break it apart into easier shapes or ways of seeing, rather than seeing it as the finished computer generated example.

I see the illustrations as components. He was seeing them as a seamless and seemingly complex whole.

For example

The basic shape of a animal cell is sort of like a circle with a heart in the middle with a line drwan through the middle.


This is – crude I admit – but a circle with a heart in it with a line drawn through the middle are shapes we all know how to draw already. Its a lot easier to explain something when its relates to something we already know.

We did this to several others and their components.

I wasn’t telling him how to draw it. I wasn’t even telling him a final solution or the actual way he should go about it.

I was simply showing him a different way to see the bigger picture.

That’s what I attempt to do with my own challenges or if I’m working professionally with someone on something that’s causing them confusion or discomfort.

It’s a lot easier to see your way out of a problem when it’s been broken apart and laid out.

Looking at it from these perspectives we are much more likely to step back and then, with the skills we do have, formulated a plan.

Once we’ve had time to process the information it’s more likely we will be able to construct a clearer way of doing something.

Several days later he did it his own way with relative ease.

Whether it had anything to do with my crude illustrations of miraculous and complex cellular architecture I don’t know.

I haven’t asked.

Maybe it’s more correlation than causation or indeed a necessity to get it done due to a deadline that really made the shift and put pencil to paper.

A friend recently said to me, ‘for someone like you who dislikes ambiguity in preference to a more clinical trial set of black and white results, you have chosen a field that has many more questions than it has tangible answers.’

Whether anything specific the therapist or coach orchestrates, does actually grease the wheels towards desired change, its often hard to conclude, even for the person making those changes.

But there’s no doubt as I’ve written about before, breaking complex or seemingly solid issues down helps massively to break the freeze and fawn or Fight and Flight response.

And asking and being willing to see someone else’s perspective of a problem, or of ourselves, is also a quick way to resolve what often appears to be an insurmountable event or challenge.

Some days just start out as a shit morning and continue to hang on like a dog on a tyre regardless of what we do to change how we feel. 

Those mornings where getting started just feels like trying to run away in a bad dream.

Or those sort of mornings that entrenched apathy means you’re no longer even attempting to run and instead are staring into the abyss silently questioning what you are doing with your life, only to be deafened by the silence of an answerless echo.

Often, all we can do during such mornings  is focus on getting to lunch time and hope that being fed and watered sorts it out and resets us for a better afternoon.

And if it doesn’t, which it often won’t do, we can look a bit closer at what else could be ‘doing our nut in’, or making us so sluggish or irritable.

It will be common stuff that you probably already know about yourself. 

For me, a simple and standard operation is to clear my work station if chaos has insidiously ransacked the area. Dehydration also is a key cause to a deterioration in patience and general well being, so I know then to drink some water.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the sun comes out or I feel like doing a jig round the room, but it can often help.

Like switching the power on and off to fix the computer, these approaches are simple and often effective enough to get us rebooted and functioning properly.

However, again It may not.

When this is the case, which in real life and away from self help gobble-de-gook, it often doesn’t, it becomes about management rather than extinction of a situation.

And we also need to come to terms with the idea that, if the initial rectification methods have failed to resume play, it’s most likely a 24 hour problem and an acceptance that only ‘a good nights sleep and try again tomorrow’  attitude is required for these heavily skid marked and characteristically stubborn stained underpants type days.

I read this quote today that I thought was quite apt considering my day and my reflections on it afterwards –

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea’.”

-Chuck Close, American artist who achieved fame as a photorealist through massive-scale portraits.

Sometimes inside these days, if we simply get to work the best we can, either on the job at hand or on perfecting our self management systems, and adopt a one foot in front of the other mindset on the road to a hopefully better tomorrow, it’s possible something positive can still be salvaged – or indeed discovered that other wise wouldn’t have been excavated about ourselves on a good day.

There’s an idea in Stoicism called ‘turning it inside out’ which basically looks at how we can turn adversity into something advantageous.

For me it gave me the opportunity to observe these type days from inside the eye of the storm. To use my knowledge of human psychology to try some ideas out and see what really worked for me and what to do when it didn’t and then make field notes for this post as I went along.

Then on my walk home, I pondered in my said lethargic state, the idea of why change can seem so hard to do.

Its not because changing something is necessarily hard, but because of how we are feeling at those times when we imagine we must change something.

Most of the time changing anything significant, I thought to myself is hard because of the state of mind we are in at that time.

It is similar I thought to having not slept for the last 72 hours and then told we need to go for a run, that to complete it, requires us to keep running until we reach the finish line which is erected at the end of a distance that can’t be disclosed. 

And the cherry on the cake is we’ll only know how far we must run at the end…..that may never come. We just have to run on faith.

That’s why we stay ‘as we are’ so much of the time.

The perceived pain of change inside the lethargy we are already consumed by, often seems worse than the pain of what we are currently experiencing. So we stay where we are.

And from that thought, although I knew the distance and where the finish line was, I overrode the desire to slump in front of the TV with a beer and instead, pushed myself to go for a run.

I know from previous experience, that the power of movement to break a state is very powerful and I also wanted to go through the process of doing it even though I didn’t want to.

Again I could observe this process and understand it from inside out rather than theoretically.

When I got home I felt better. 

And on reflection, when I sat down in my improved mood, I realised my whole day, that day that earlier had felt shit, could be viewed as a simulation day for me as a social scientist to observe and report back what I found.

Can you imagine if that was something I could produce in a workshop or course!? 

‘Simulation training days to test your skills outside the workshop and inside the real world?!

Some of us would pay….and pay handsomely for such things…..and yet here they are all for free, all inside of every shit day or challenging event!

However, still failing all this, we can simply climb under the duvet, bid the cruel world adieu until tomorrow, and attempt to sleep it off.

And let’s face it if nothing’s working and going to bed is the only thing we feel we can do, even then we can look at it as a positive action. Because it may not be a psychological issue to be analysed and instead one that is more a physiological condition that needs addressing, that’s as simple as needing a good night sleep to restore order to our world.

As a old wise man once said to me
‘sounds like someone just needs a good poo and a sleep’.

 

Yesterday I had a shitty day.

And because of it, yesterdays mood carried into today.

I find in these states, the slightest things make me want to fly off the handle.

Lashing out isn’t a sustainable resolution, especially when we find ourselves losing our temper over situations that in reality, we have no control over or in isolation are very minor. 

I always want a better way to manage these emotional states, ideally before I’m emotionally sabotaged by a situation.

However this is not always possible. When we lose our temper, the best we can ask for is to afterwards be able to have an opportunity to reflect on what happened.  To look at our response to it and then how to and work towards a better solution when similar incidents occur in the future.

And its not only looking at ways to prevent losing control in that moment, but how we can reduce the incremental build up of negative emotions prior to that event that are often caused by smaller areas of annoyance days, weeks or even months before hand –
( like the bin not being emptied when its spilling out of the top, or the dishwasher not being emptied etc)

Its often these smaller areas, that if not addressed, are the areas that lead to the big explosion which from an outsiders frame of reference, seems to be totally over reactive!

And its not just the build up and the reaching climatic threshold to consider.

Events that play over and over in the mind, making us relive the event days later. (inside of our interpretation of what it means to us, or about us, or how others could be taking advantage of us etc –  regardless of what the reality of the situation is to everyone else. )

Finding ways to break these cycles early on is imperative I think.

Not only at surface level, or even just mentally, but perhaps physiologically at a cellular level, which may lead to something serious happening  to our health and over something that in comparison – especially looked at from the perspective of a terminal illness for example –  is very minor.

Regardless of knowing this, it can be hard to break these cycles when we are inside them and it often takes something from outside of us to snap us out of the vortex of certain mental tortures.

As an example of this, as I walked to work ‘inside of yesterday’s problems and tomorrow’s hopelessness’ a sign on the floor caught my eye. 

It was written by a homeless person on a piece of old card.

Regardless of whether it was a accurate narrative on the sign, or simply a ploy to generate sympathy and in turn the acquisition of money for survival, the fact I acknowledged in that moment was that it wasn’t ‘my sign’.

It wasn’t my sign.

If it was mine, then I’d genuinely have a problem and a right to feel a sense of hopelessness.

It’s not to dismiss our issues, but rather to get a sense of perspective. To see our complaint from another view point or through someone else’s eyes. To enquire as to whether what we are thinking is really true.

Its simply looking at ways to help us break away form these vicious energy sapping cycles, so our focus can get back to appreciating what we do have and what we want to change going forwards.

It’s always a work in progress and not fool proof. I think it always will be a bit snakes and ladders.

In fact the sign certainly wasn’t the final solution for my issues. In the end what I needed was something equally as simple to help me resolve my negative mindset, which ill share next time, but the sign certainly was great way of helping me break out of  my toxic hypnotic trance for that morning that would have leaked into my day and onto those that worked with me.

From my experience there’s no ‘one method’ that fixes everything and certain issues certainly need more time and effort to rectify or come to terms with,

And its because of this that I believe its good to keep looking for clues and signs that we can add to our mental arsenal that can help us escape – even if its only a temporary rest bite from our current state of mind that is keeping us in pain, because it all helps.

And it helps because inside of the rest bites we get chance to connect with what is really causing us discomfort and what actually needs to be done to bring peace back to our ‘tiny skull kingdoms’,

I’ve been getting back into a routine in my training this week, but at the start of any new program its often as much mental as physical challenge to get going and keep going and to be consistent.

This was today’s session, and like anything that tinkers on the brink of failure before its even started, I needed to do some mental bartering with myself to ensure I at least began what I intended to do in the session.

The main thing to do is break the problem up, down or apart, depending on your preference when it comes to dissection.

Once its in simple components we can see what we’ve got and how we can reassemble it to look like something we can live with.

So lets take today’s session.

First thing I did was half it. So instead of 2 miles running, lets agree to do one.
Instead of 60 snatches lets do 30 and so forth.

Then I take it apart a bit more.

Instead of 30 snatches lets do 10 snatches and rest. Then instead of doing another set of snatches, mix it up and break the 30 clean and presses up to 10 rep sets and do a set of 10 reps next and rest. Then repeat until 30 of each is done.

So I did the run and completed the broken down half session for time as I mentioned, which was what I agreed with myself was enough for today.

But as it often works and why its good to break things down into mentally manageable chunks, was that once I was done, I continued the bartering game with myself,  because I knew even though I was a bit fatigued, I still had more in the tank.

So what I did next was to change it up a bit more with 5 snatches followed straight away with 5 clean and presses. (As you can see in pink chalk. Another technique is to find a way to record your reps and sets, because when you start getting fatigued its amazing how instead of thinking truthfully that you’ve done 3 sets, somehow you believe you’ve done 5!)

I’m doing the same work but I’m not allowing myself time to think negatively about what I’m doing as I get more a more fatigued. By the time I’m starting to panic about the discomfort of the snatch and if I can do any more or fold under the bar,  I’ve switched and distracted my chimp brain by a new movement of the clean and press, and by the time I’m slipping into my inner primate brain about he clean and press, the sets done.

Then I did the 60 press up in reps of 30 – 15 – 15 with 30 seconds rest in between.

And then, I convinced myself to that the run would be a good warm down to do in the sunshine.

Again once I got running, the warm down went out the window as I naturally zoned in and got a little pace going to finish the session.

This isn’t exclusive to physical training routines either. It is exactly the same thing I do with my clients when it comes to psychological issues, which is simply to break it down, down, down and then deal with each section bit by manageable bit!

And I’m not an advocate for lying to ourselves. I don’t think we can.

I know full well what I’m doing when I barter with myself really.

I know I’m likely to convince myself to finish the job or that the part of me that wont quit will kick in half way through the session and take over, but I’m also giving my worrying, failure averse self permission to get started and say that’s enough for today and not feel bad for doing it should it all go tits up.

By knowing how I think personally, by breaking it down and bartering with landmarks, I’m basically setting myself up for success. The only way I can lose is by not starting.

If something seems to be bothering you, break it down and deal with it each bit at a time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.’

Whether that’s true or not I’m not sure, and I certainly think the old patterns of behaviour stay cryogenically present until we reach a new threshold, one that the new adopted neural connections have not been conditioned enough to cope with.  That’s  why, even after years of abstinence, something crappy happens to us and we jump back onto our old train tracks of behaviour for express relief!

However yesterday at work I queried something that had been bothering me about a building that can be seen from the window of our workspace.

It appeared to me that the first three quarters of the building was almost covered in, for want of a better term, cladding rather than glass. Then on top of that it looked like a glass viewing area which again was preceded by more cladding.

Firstly I did not know what the constructive material was instead of the usual ‘glass’ that had been used, and most importantly why it had been deemed a viable idea to have such a small inhabitable area to live or work in for such a large building.

At first my friend looked bemusingly at me , waiting for a wry grin that showed I was attempting to lure him in to a game of ‘state the obvious answer’ to then ridicule him for doing so.

When he realised I was being genuine he matter of factly said ‘it’s all glass, but what you see is just the reflection of the other building on the glass. I know this because I saw it from a different position a few days ago’.

As soon as he told me, I saw it straight away!

Like being shown an optical illusion, I could still see my old interpretation, but only as an illusion and not as the truth.

(You can see here from this different angle/perspective that I investigated from, that the reflection has changed and its obvious what’s happening.)

How poignant is that, especially for those of us living in London at the moment with the recent tragedy this week at Westminister and the very subjective opinions strewn around, not least by the media and on social networks.

My friend saw it ‘as it was’ because he saw it from a different position’.

And to highlight that even more, prior to him explaining it, a few other colleagues, who also as unaware as I was of ‘the truth’ about this buildings lack of glass, had gathered and offered different opinions for what the building was clad in.

And had my friend not been there, we probably would have adopted the most plausible explanations, passing it on to the next person who asked, rather than perhaps actually walking over to the building and finding out what was really going on! 

We all sometimes need ‘new eyes’ on how we see and interpret the world. 

How we see the world isn’t how it actually is, but rather, ‘how we are are’

What we think we see ‘out there’ are reflections of our own thoughts, beliefs, bias etc not how it ‘really is’. And that’s being human.

What is also human is that we are sometimes afraid to say what we think, whether it’s our opinion on what we have seen or felt in certain situations in a fear of looking stupid or judged, especially in today’s PC trolling fear driven society.

But in order to change, and to see another view point, or to understand how things really are, rather than simply as we interpret them, it’s imperative we have the courage to voice our opinion. 

Not in ignorance or defiant arrogance, but in terms of open minded enquiry and a willingness to learn. 

And in the real world, of course there will be those who will ridicule you, oppose and abuse you for how your current perspective or lack of knowledge.

Change takes tenacity, resilience and courage and it’s easier to follow the crowd and be accepted. That’s also normal human behaviour and all for good reason.

But if we perceiver and hold firm, the intelligent and informed ones among us will not judge, or more accurately probably…definitely will judge us, but instead of being a prick about it, will find ways to enlighten and educate us to perhaps, (and not always) a better truth and way of seeing the world.

We should always attempt to keep an open mind that perhaps, dare I say it, we could be wrong, despite how hard that may be for all of us to acknowledge, and even though the new way off seeing things may not be a totally objective view point, it may well be a more constructive way of perceiving the world around us.

‘Honestly I just don’t get it!! Sorry this ones totally lost on me!’

This is what one of my close friends said to me the other day when I shared a video of me practising my latest challenge of swimming in freezing cold water during the winter here in the UK, and I understand why she would say it.

But for me it makes perfect sense and it’s quite simple.

Granted, the act of me climbing into cold UK winter water for no apparent reason may seem a mental health issue in its self and on the surface seem pointless.

However, symbolically I think it’s the perfect metaphor for any change work.

Many people come to me, hoping that I will hypnotise them in order to instantly make the changes they want under a magic trance that allows them to do nothing themselves, but yet magically wake up and reap the benefits of a new and improved version of themselves, minus all the bad stuff.

And I don’t blame them. It’s what’s been sold to us in an ever increasing barrage of pseudo-science and self-help mumbo jumbo.

And even when this instant turnaround is the case, those issues are often resolved without any understanding or awareness by the individual of what that is.

And because of this, more often than not, they just develop another equally deliberating condition or habit to replace the old one, because under the surface nothings really changed, other than the fact that we’ve simply taken away the very survival strategy that used to pacify the underlying and still existing problem.

I don’t know or have any magic wands or individual techniques/methods that can make the often painful process that is required ‘to get us from where we are to where we want to be’, available.

I just don’t have a totally pain free solution for change.

Like I said, many people come to me looking to avoid ‘the process’ like getting an instant degree but without doing three years of graft.

But I don’t know if it really exists, or that it even should, because I think that we almost rob ourselves of the solution to our problems by metaphorically asking to get flown straight to the summit.

Let’s not kid ourselves, being Heli dropped onto the summit of Everest would no doubt be amazing and remembered for ever.

However it would be dwarfed by the experience, memories, life lessons and the self-discovery of someone who had conquered the Summit after having struggled to climb there for months, often in pain and despair, drained all their resolve and tenacity, especially at the last stages of the Accent,

When I get home after doing things like the WHM I feel a sense of contentment that like many of us, I very rarely get from my day to day existence.

It is a bit of a sad fact that the majority of us do not feel at the end of the day that our potential quota for that day has been fully used up.

When my clients ask me to give them confidence, I tell them I’m not the right person to help them.

Why? Well let’s take today for example. Sitting on the train going towards the Lido I felt the same nerves I’d have going to a competition, a race or an interview.

I don’t actually consider myself as a particularly confident person especially where I have to step into uncertainty or against convention.

I especially dread the idea of doing things that could make me discover I’m not the man I think I am or wish I was and instead that I am actually a man I resent.

Safety is a funny duality.

On one hand it does what it implies.

It keeps us safe or at least anaesthetised to the pain we feel in certain situation or how we anticipate certain scenarios panning out.

It keeps us away from ever feeling the crushing feeling of defeat and self-loathing at full volume.

However it also prevents us feeling alive and on the edge of who we are and can be.

It prevents us ever having to look at our real selves in the mirror.

It prevents growth and the feeling of elation when we conquer what only a few hours ago seemed impossible or an opponent we just didn’t believe we could beat.

It prevents us the opportunity to re-evaluate who we are and what we are capable of.

Safety may keep us from experiencing failure, to help us prevent serious injury and even death but with its gift comes the restraints of our liberation to explore and to discover what we are really capable of.

Whatever I do or learn that promises to eradicate this familiar reality to many of us, nothing really changes how I feel before a new endeavour because of this duality I mentioned.

But I know this and to a degree accept it.

I know that ‘one foot in front of the other’ is a powerful and true mantra when we need to take action as it my ‘Dav I’m shitting it’ statement prior to a strongman competition, which my mate Dav responded to me ‘so am I, that’s why we have to do it’

I think I will always ‘shit it’ when faced with an event that offers potential failure, but what keeps me going is the desire to be courageous – and even more so not to think of myself as a coward – regardless of my fear.

And this is what I promote and help develop in others.

Courage rather than confidence is what I believe is the foundation of personal discovery and where change work takes its first step of ‘one foot in front of the other.’

And that’s what this latest challenge of the WHM is about for me.

And it’s not about just being daft, sitting in an ice bath of an evening or splashing around in a pond and whether you think I’m talking a load of old bullshit or not, but rather it is a great metaphor of what change really looks like.

It’s easier to stay in the warm than to take action which is inevitably uncomfortable or in the case of the WHM, bloody painful at times both mentally and physically!

And let’s face it just because I’m doing this today, after the initial euphoria of following through, life tomorrow will be the same.

Nothing magically transformative is instantly going to happen, I’m unlikely to have a life changing epiphany afterwards and I’m still going to be me.

Whether it’s quitting the fags, stopping eating cakes, trying to be less anxious and more confident, losing weight or gaining weight, getting a beach body or after listening to this, being less depressed or any other of the plethora of conditions people want to change in their mental and physical lives, the reason most change efforts fail is because there’s often more pain than pleasure, especially at the start and progress is often a lot slower coming forwards than we would like.

However it’s in the discomfort that the real knowledge of our underlying issues are exposed rather than band aiding over them.

Nelson Mandela said something that I think is really poignant in terms of any personal change work we want to embark on, including the WHM, especially if we are doing it independently.

He said ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.’

Prior to actually taking action and getting in the water it I was worried I would fail. I could not help playing over and over in my mind a film of me turning out to be the type of man I would resent being, crumpling into the foetal position mumbling to myself, unable to get into the water before being carried away from the ponds edge.

And that’s what the Wim Hof Method is about right now for me.

Learning to corner and control my inner animal instincts of fight, flight, freeze and fawn.

I’m interested in Individual potential. Almost obsessed with finding ways to hack our limiting beliefs and emotional responses, recognising sticking points, adapting to them and overcoming them.

What’s important to me is that I show people what I consider the truth about change work rather than a heavily marketed version, one which I think is predominately detrimental to our success and self-esteem.

By going first and showing myself struggling despite having studied extensively many different models and techniques in personal development and therapeutic change, I want the penny to drop for everyone and there’s no magic bullet. But despite this change is possible!

I want to show a very human reality rather than a marketed finished and hugely idealistic version of what real change looks, feels and sounds like.

So once again ‘Why the WHM?’

It’s the curiosity of the ‘impossible possibility’ of it for me.

There’s people who will make what you struggle with look easy – but what you are experiencing is all you should be focusing on and working with if success is to be obtained.

People talk about ‘get out of the comfort zone’ but it’s just a throwaway line these days. It’s easy to say but the process is always bloody hard to do.

I heard the expression today from some Irish outdoor swimmers regarding ‘Going into the water to drown the miserable man.’

For me the WHM is about ‘going into the water to build the courageous man’.(or woman!)

Here’s my coverage of today’s WHM adventure from start to finish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch…