Mind the Beginner

In my view there is one single skill that’s at the basis of all other skills and that’s truly essential to personal development. Although it’s very important few people ever master it. I would even goes as far as to say that without this one skill -although mastering it isn’t necessary- it is impossible to have personal development, personal growth, success, getting things done, meditate, or learn anything.

An essential skill indeed for without it, you’re stuck.

Quite literally stuck, stuck in either the past or the future. Because that’s the whole problem. This one essential skill is:

• Being in the present

There are many variations on this subject but they all boil down to the same thing. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing things can go terribly wrong very fast or on a smaller scale you’ll not remember the name of the person who just shook your hand.

Remembering names and reflecting

If you’ve ever read a book on social skills (Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends & influence people for instance) you’ll know that the single most appreciated word by all people is their own name. If you’re able to remember a name because you were totally present when you heard it you’ll make a great impression if you manage to call that person by his name the next time you two meet.

Whether it’s learning a new skill, meeting new people, writing a blogpost or going for a drive. There is so much to gain from every experience in life just by being present to experience it.

So why is it so hard to be in the present? It’s because we’re constantly either thinking about the past or dreaming up a future. The first can be relived (well, sort of) the second is pure fiction. Reliving the past is completely useless save one thing. Lessons to be learned or in other words, reflecting on what happened to avoid those mistakes in the future. It’s what all students should do after an exam. Check the mistakes and reflect on them.

If left unreflected you might act the same way in a similar event, even though it was the wrong answer/way the last time. Just because you either don’t know what’s the right answer or because you’re not present (thinking of the last time it went wrong) and going on auto pilot.

There you have it, the one skill that is at the basis of everything in personal development: being in the present. For without it you can’t learn, you can’t grow, you’re stuck.

Get unstuck, come into the present, right here, right now is where it’s at. Stop waisting time in the past or future, the past won’t change and the future isn’t here yet.

A small sidenote, not related to this blogpost it’s more of a notification. I won’t be doing a weekend update this weekend as I’m participating in a introductory period at university. I won’t have a pc or wifi where we’re going this weekend.

Cath Duncan from mineyourresources.com made a comment a while back on one of my blogposts (What all the “get rich” Blogs don’t tell you) I’d going to have a closer look at today:

I totally agree that action is what makes the difference in results – even imperfect action. In improv storytelling they have the mantra “it’s all about having as many goes as possible, rather than trying to have 1 perfect go,” and I think this is a great mantra for life, and one of the foundational ideas in Agile Living. – Cath

If you’ve been reading about personal development for a while this will sound very familiar. It’s true in all paths of life actually. Practice makes perfect but better yet failure is the way to perfection as paradoxical as it might seem at first glance.

Embrace failure as the path to success and don’t get paralyzed by your thoughts while waiting for things to unfold and happened like you want them to. They almost never happen like you thought they would.

Failure to meditate

Somehow this all makes me thing of my every day practice of meditation. More often than not it seems a total waste of time. I’m sitting there and thinking of all sorts of things while counting my breaths on auto pilot. The thought crosses my mind to just get up and stop this charade. Stop pretending to be meditating and doing it perfectly. But you know what. I’m actually meditating, although not perfectly. I just fake it untill I make it. There you have it. My meditation is fake, I’m a fraud, I’ve been meditation for little over a year now, spending roughly 130 hours in meditation so far. Can I call myself an expert on the subject? Hardly… Have I failed miserably to meditate the way I want to be meditating? Most certainly!

You could call me an expert at failure. I have over 130 solid hours of failure under my belt, and that’s only in meditation. Or you could call my entire life a failure, in which case I’ve had over 2 million hours worth of experience on the subject. By Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour theory I’m an expert at failure many times over.
And guess what, so are you!

The expert failure

Yes my dear reader, you’re an expert at failing. That’s the bonus of not being content with your own life and reading about personal development and lifestyle design. You wouldn’t be reading about these things if you were totally content with your life now would you?

What’s the value you might think by now, why is being an expert failure useful in my life. Well, the failures we had in our early days were simple: If we failed in staying upright we might bump our heads. Later if we failed to write legible we could fail a test. Failing to apply the brakes when driving created a nice dent in the car. A simple failure got bigger and bigger consequences over time as we got better at spotting what could go wrong. By the time you graduated you had enough experience in failure to spot things before they went wrong and correct them.

If you didn’t learn from mistakes you’d be wearing a crash helmet, not be allowed to drive, couldn’t complete an education and certainly couldn’t develop your person or design your lifestyle. Your life might not be perfect right now, but be happy about it. Perfection would mean you can’t learn anything anymore and what a bore that would be.

• Embrace failure, it’s your best friend in life. Seek imperfection in everything you do. Learn from it and be happy that you failed.

More blogposts, related to this subject:

Taking a chance, it is worth the risk

Settling for perfection

This blogpost is part five in a series of five exploring the Stoic psychological tactics that can be used to rediscover joy in your life.

A lot can be said about meditation and there are countless ways to practice it. None of them are wrong or inferior. They are however all different save one aspect: meditation is undivided attention. On the whole meditations is a way to gain insight in what it is you’re meditating on.

This being said, how did the Stoics implement meditation. Seneca advises us to periodically meditate on the events in our daily lives, how we responded to them and how we -in accordance with Stoic principles- should have responded in stead.

It’s very simple actually, before you go to sleep lay there for a moment (or kneel beside your bed if you prefer) and think about how your day as. This type of meditation is completely unlike the meditation of a Zen Buddhist. Where a Zen Buddhist sits still for extended periods of time trying to think of just one thing, calming his mind and focusing on his breath or a koan a Stoic will be all over the place with his mind. Focusing on all the events of the day and reliving them. Total chaos if you ask a Zen Buddhist, functional if you ask a Stoic.

Level Up

Epictetus takes Seneca’s bedtime-meditation to another level. He suggests that in daily life we should “simultaneously play the roles of participant and spectator” living the moment and scrutinizing it while doing so.

Marcus shares this idea and advises us to examine every thing we do, determine what our motives are for doing it and and evaluate the value of what we are trying to accomplish with this action. “We should continually ask whether we are being governed by our reason or something else. And when we determine that we are not governed by our reason, we should ask what it is that governs us. Is it the soul of a child? A tyrant? A dumb ox? A wild beast? We should likewise be careful observers of the actions of other people.” After all, we aren’t the only ones who make mistakes, if someone else makes a mistake we can learn from it. The same goes for success.

The bedtime-meditation can also be used to review all the tactics. Did we engage in negative visualisation lately? When was the last time we practiced self-denial? Were we trying to control something that was completely our of our control? And how about our goals, are they internalized? Take some time to look at everything.

Changes in daily life

After practicing these tactics for a few months your relationship with other people will have changed. It has to after all, you’re thinking differently about yourself and about life. Has your social circle noticed any changes about you? Be aware here. Perhaps you get insulted sometimes and manage to shrug it off. But also shrug off the praise. Epictetus shares with us his thoughts on the admiration of other people, it’s a negative barometer of our progress as Stoics: “If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself.”

Signs of progress as a stoic (according to Epictetus)

• We stop blaming others
• We stop censuring others
• We stop praising others
• We stop boasting about ourselves
• We stop boasting about how much we know
• We blame ourselves, not external circumstances, when our desires are thwarted
• Because we have a degree of mastery over our desires, we find we have fewer of them than we did before.
• Our “impulses towards everything are diminished”
• Quite significantly, is we have made progress as a Stoic, we will come to regard ourselves not as a friend whose every desire must be satisfied but “as an enemy lying in wait”

How can you tell if someone is a Stoic

A Stoic, although capable of spouting Stoic principles and telling stories will not resort to this for “Those who know… don’t speak. Those who don’t know… speak.” It’s because of this that Stoics will not get noticed a lot especially if they choose not to write a series in Stoic psychological tactics on their blog and thus boast about it. I’ve yet much to learn…

Measuring progress

Seneca took his daily practice to be adequate as long as “every day I reduce the number of my vises, and blame my mistakes.”

Marcus offers us with a great piece of advice I’d like to close this series with. One I think applies to practicing Stoicism but also in all other ventures in life: Continue to practice Stoicism “even when success looks hopeless”.

These five tactics combine to form a philosophy of life and as such, if you practice them they will change your life. I hope you enjoyed reading this series as much as I enjoyed writing it. If there is anything else on this subject you’d like to know please do contact me and I’ll do my best to answer all your questions.

The posts in the Stoic psychological tactics series:

1. Negative Visualisation

2. The Dichotomy of control

3. Fatalism

4. Self-Denial

5. Meditation

 As therapist I often told people who were depressed to just go and take a walk. Preferably with a little bit of fire in their pace. You have no idea how many people have looked at me strangely for suggesting that they take a hike. 

If you are a runner you probably know why, but if you are not a runner have you ever asked yourself why these people go through such lengths to run? They actually enjoy running a marathon for instance and beating their body up. Strange behavior, but according to Darwinian beliefs it must have some sort of benefit.

It has got everything to do with certain types of hormones in our body. Something closely related to morphine and cocaine: endorphins. 

Receptors

It was back in1972 when scientists began to question how and why opiates influenced the brain. After some hypothesising and experimenting they came to the conclusion that the body must have receptors to handle this stuff and make us feel like we do when getting a morphine shot. After that shot the body wanted more of course. But why would the body have such receptors if the body couldn’t make that substance by itself?

Turns out that the body has these receptors because it does make it’s own drugs. A substance that in the right amount causes pain to subside, moods to lift an give you a general “on to of the world” feeling. Substituting this stuff with i.e. morphine will make the body produce less of it so in time we need more morphine to keep the levels up.

After running for about 10 minutes these hormones start to kick in. The first ten minutes of running are agony but after that the pain goes away and we start feeling better with every step. It’s sometimes called as the “runner’s high” and it’s one of the biggest reason people take up running. The same goes for dancing and meditating. 

Agony and discomfort

Meditation isn’t necessarily an eastern invention. It was not so long ago that Christians would kneel on a hard floor for an extended period of time to be alone with their thoughts about God. Muslims pray five times each day with nothing more to sit on than a small rug. Imagine the pain they have in their knees each time. 

People do this to feel better about themselves and I can tell you it does work. Why? What do running, prostrations or sitting perfectly still in a lotus position have in common? The agony, the bodily discomfort of this action and at the same time the programming of the body. 

If the body is in pain it will react in one of two ways (I’m simplifying here). Either it releases adrenaline, or endorphin. It all depends on what outcome we expect. If fighting and running away is in order we’ll get adrenaline. But if we expect a positive outcome and know the current hardship is just temporary and something we need to get trough we get a shot of endorphins. 

The body provides it’s own fix in order to make the hardship more pleasurable. The effect on us is that we feel better and have less pain. The longer and bigger the hardship we endure while knowing things will be alright the more endorphins will be released. 

Thus, accomplishing a marathon gives a greater high than a five mile jog. 

There are roughly four situations in which the body produces endorphins:

1. In general when we feel good
2. When we are subjected to suffering (physically or mentally)
3. When we sleep or rest
4. When we find ourselves in a new and unusual but non threatening situation

Ritualized self-torture

Say you meditate every day for twenty minutes. You hit a small chime to let everyone in the house know you are meditation, you light some incense and contort your body into a highly uncomfortable lotus position and sit perfectly still while counting your breaths slowly. Your knees will start to hurt like hell, your back will tighten, your butt might start aching from the firm pillow you are sitting on. To sum it up, ritualized self-torture. And then the twenty minutes are up and you unfold yourself and stagger back to the living room for a cup of tea while having a huge smile on your face. 

Notice how many things in this ritual hurt you and how many things can be used as cues. After a few months of doing this any one of the cues by itself will trigger a Pavlovian reaction in your body. The smell of incense will get those glands secreting endorphins like there is no tomorrow an the chime triggers a flood. So far so good. And now the real power: Counting your breaths will also trigger endorphin production. 

Although you don’t have a chime with you everywhere and people on your cubicle farm might not like you if you start putting up an incense smokescreen you can always count breaths and trigger the response that calms you down and makes you feel good. 

Imagine that, when entering a boardroom or waiting in a traffic jam and feeling yourself get irritated. Use the cue and get a quick fix of happy hormones. 

Why?

So why do people hurt themselves? To get these happy hormones pumping. Seriously, scientists have administered naloxone to runners (A drug that prevents the receptors in the brain from receive endorphins) and in just a few runs these people no longer felt the urge to run anymore. It didn’t feel good because they didn’t experience the runner’s high anymore.

Although there are many ways to get these hormones to be released into our bloodstream (like eating chocolate) there are few so effective as ritualized self-torture. Every religion on earth has picked up on this long ago and practices it in one form or the other. 

If a therapist tells you to take a hike, please do take the hike, and put some fire in your pace. You’ll feel better afterwards.