2015 Summary in Review

As I wrap up 2015 and wish you a Merry Christmas, I wanted to conclude with a simple recap of what we've looked at. The year-at-a-glance if you will.

Introduction to the Blog (Feb 26) – my weekly blog on effective living, managing and leading was launched just before my 60^th birthday. It  is intended to help anyone who is a lover of life (whom I call, Viphilus) learn how to break the self-destructive blocks of self-limiting, self-defeating, and self-sabotaging thoughts and behaviours. I am basing everything on the lessons-learned through my own experiences and education.  

SLOWING            - a perspective and a prime directive (Mar 9)
                                - a power principle to understand (Mar 16)
                                - getting to know your elephant Mar 23)
                                - how to S-L-O-W D–O–W-N (Mar 30)

The PIE Principle - A Story and a prime directive for engagement (Apr 6)
                                - My own data (Apr 13)
                                - How do you like your PIE? (Apr 20)
                                - Let them eat PIE (Apr 27)

Prime Movers        - The motivation trinity (May 4)
                                - Being driven (May 11)
                                - Being inspired (May 18)
                                - Being passionate (May 25)

Change                   - The good, the bad and the ugly: a perspective (Jun 1)
                                - Principles: 5 truths about change (Jun 8)
                                - Personal: Are you a hammer or a nail? (Jun 15)
                                - Practice: Learning to speak elephant (Jun 22)

Elephant Training- The Ugly Truth about Your Auto-elephant (Jul 6)
                                - Jungle paths: machetes, dynamite and nitro (Jul 13)
                                - Jungle Stories: Old and New (Jul 20)
                                - Jungle Rituals: The Training Ring (Jul 27)

Action Attitudes of Transformation - Surrender (Aug 10)
                                                              - Submission (Aug 17)
                                                              - Suffering (Aug 24)
                                                              - Sacrifice (Aug 31)

Says Your Mom    - Don’t flatter yourself (Sep 7)
                                - Choose ignorance (Sep 14)
                                - Dangerous half-truths (Sep 21)
                                - Sucking on the chocolate fossil (Sep 28)

Character Building  - Breathing (Oct 5)
                                   - Feeding (Oct 12)
                                   - Resting (Oct 19)
                                   - Evaluating (Nov 2)
                                   - Exercising for increased capacity (Nov 9)
                                   - Exercising for strength ….. physically (Nov 16)
                                                                         …… emotionally (Nov 19)
                                                                         …… mentally (Nov 20)
                                                                         …… spiritually (Nov 21)
                                   - Exercising for flexibility (Nov 23)
                                   - Exercising for endurance (Nov 30)
                                   - Exercising for resilience (Dec 7)
                                   - Exercising for FREEDOM (Dec 14)

Happy New Year Viphilus ... God willing, see you on January 4, 2016.

Pete - the Omega Man

CHARACTER BUILDING: For Freedom

Welcome back Viphilus*

My blog has had a single focus since the beginning of October: character building. If you look over the titles for the last 2+ months you will see that I have put forward my ideas on how to build character through a focus on:

Breathing
Feeding
Resting
Evaluating
Exercising (there were a lot of sub-posts on this topic)

Do you see it? Look at the list again. Did it jump out at you yet? No? Here’s the list again 

(scroll down)

(keep scrolling)

Breathing
Feeding
Resting
Evaluating
Exercising

Did the light bulb go on this time?

Building character is the path to freedom, in its truest sense … that being to be free to think and act according to your intentions and not be hi-jacked to different thoughts or actions. If you want to be free … and I mean really B.F.R.E.E., there is work to do … at least until you develop the habits to make the work (effort) automated within you.

I’ve outlined in considerable detail over the last 10 weeks what is required to build character, and ultimately, a powerful life. Today’s post is simply meant to connect the dots so that you can see that building character requires a holistic approach with targeted effort to build / grow / improve in a number of areas in specific ways.

Please come back next Monday and join me in one final post for 2015.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Resilience

Welcome back Viphilus*

OK, last time you’ll have to look at the Capacity Table.

Today we are looking at how to build capacity in the marker of resilience. Resilience is a word that I hear thrown around and from the way it is used, I don’t think it is well understood. Resilience is a measure of something’s (or someone’s) capacity to absorb energy upon deflation and recover upon unloading. So you’re saying, “Say whaaaaaa?”

Clearly, from that dictionary definition, resilience is a term used in the field of engineering. How about this version: it is the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. No? OK, try this one:

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.

Resilience is a measure of toughness. Do you remember the old Timex commercials where they declared the toughness of a Timex watch? “It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking!”  (for a blast down memory lane, click here). 

Now let’s look at the marker of toughness in each of our 4 dimensions:

Physical resilience is our resistance to injury, tolerance of pain and how calloused we are to the external world. Marital arts instructors train students to become “calloused” to pain by giving them exercises that actually develop callouses. Callouses are something that we develop naturally through extensive use of certain body parts, like feet and hands  … but we can speed up that process by intentionally targeting the areas that we want toughened up by subjecting those areas to controlled amounts of stress or pain. The body adapts and learns to deal with the localized trauma by thickening the skin or desensitizing the nerves in the area that it knows will be coming under attack.

Emotional resilience is a measure of our capacity to bounce back from disappointment, frustration or loss. It’s been said that disappointment is the gap between expectation and reality. To lessen the potential for disappointment you need to either bring reality to a higher level or lower expectations. Which do you think is easier? A big (and I mean HUGE) part of the training that I deliver centres around helping people manage their expectations. Now this is a tricky one … it doesn’t mean to lower your standards of what you expect from yourself or others … it means to lower (or even eliminate) your emotional attachment to the results.

I deliver a training program called The Omega Program: a program in which some participants can spend years. The lesson on managing expectations is one of the very first ones taught because that skill/habit, in my opinion, is one of life’s most important ones to develop. So much of our emotional resilience is predicated on our ability to manage our expectations. I could write on this for a year … but I’ll offer this single simple bit of wisdom …do everything in your power to reduce or eliminate your emotional attachment to the outcomes in life that you hope for. [Personally – I have only been able to do that through the power of God … but that’s me].

Mental resilience is the capacity or ability to pursue a solution despite continued failure in trying to find it. This one sounds like it is a combination of emotional resilience and mental endurance … and it probably is. It’s about having the mental toughness to not give up. Other words that come to mind are stick-to-it-tiveness. Maybe the best word for this is grit. It’s the combination of determination to accomplish an objective, combined with the ability to ignore the pain of disappointment.

To be honest, I have no idea how to intentionally exercise this one, other than to find your reason for wanting to achieve an objective, and to let that reason almost irrationally drive you to accomplish it, regardless of failed attempts. It’s the passion of purpose that takes over and moves you in a way that even if you fail, you fail forward. At this point, motivational speakers like to throw in the Thomas Edison legend of how many hundreds (or thousands) of times he failed in his attempt to invent the incandescent light bulb. As the story goes, Mr. Edison never saw those attempts as failures, rather, they simply became a growing inventory of ways of how not to invent a lightbulb. I actually like this story because it is about grit. It comes out of an almost irrational belief (or hope) that the there IS a solution and it WILL be found through sufficient effort.

My exercise solution for this then is to simply find your purpose and pursue it with passion.

Spiritual resilience is needed when your passionate pursuit of purpose is met with the sober reality that the solution is not forthcoming: that a particular “solution path” is a dead end. This is when the belief or hope that things will still resolve somehow becomes truly irrational. Spiritual resilience is the ability or capacity to have hope in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The metaphor that is widely used for this is this: “when God closes a door, He always opens a window.”

As with mental resilience, I believe that exercises that help us intentionally grow in this capacity are indirect at best. My best wisdom on this comes from Scripture. I referenced it last week but held off showing the full quote because I was waiting to connect the final dots. Paul writes to the church at Rome:

We glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. (Romans 5:3-4).

It is clear how suffering or challenge produces perseverance (endurance) … we discussed that last week. And it is clear how endurance produces character growth (which is what this series of post is about – character building). But how in the world does character produce hope? Well, it’s not a coincidence that I worded it that way because … and I can’t state my belief about this strongly enough; hope is not simply an optimistic expectation of an external thing … it is an internal construct that drives the machinery of our character. Character develops hope and hope develops character. They are fused in a way that eludes my understanding or ability to articulate … but I know it to be true and have both seen it in others and experienced it in myself.

Spiritual resilience is about having hope … and that hope is grown through character building, which snowballs back into having more hope.

It begins with a choice … a single word that not surprisingly is an action word.

HOPE!

I hope to see you back next Monday.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Endurance

Welcome back Viphilus*

Once again, let’s start with the Capacity Table, first posted on Nov.16.

So far we’ve looked at exercising to increase capacity in the character markers known as strength and flexibility. This week we look at exercising for endurance: physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Physical endurance is about having sufficient physical energy to be able to prolong physical activity. The most common exercises for this are cardio, or aerobic exercises where a high intake of oxygen is required to ultimately build the heart and lung muscles to increase their capacity. Cardio exercises are anything that get the heart rate up (to at least 70% of maximum capacity … 80% is even better). The result of repeatedly doing this is that it trains the body that you have become a person who requires additional heart and lung capacity for greater oxygenation of the blood … so those two vital organs increase in size. The ultimate benefit is having a heart and lungs that permit physical activity to continue for longer and longer periods of time without fatigue setting in. There are other exercises for increasing duration but this post is not intended to be exhaustive … I simply want to highlight the importance of building endurance in all 4 basic areas of our being.

Mental endurance is about the capacity to sustain focus and concentration (on whatever you are intending to focus and concentrate on) for long periods of time. The generations behind me struggle with a frequently diagnosed malady called Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.) … a term used to describe patterns of behaviour that appear most often (but not only) in school-aged children. The behaviors noted are the inability to pay attention, sit still, or attend to one thing for a long period of time; they may mask their dysfunction by appearing overactive.

I’m not a mental health professional, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion on a potential reason for the upswing in this diagnosis. Children can be found doing their homework in a room with a TV going, IPOD headphones firmly in place, and a hand-held device delivering them emails, FaceBook updates, tweets, instagrams, and a host of other second-by-second distractions. The relentless overstimulation has trained a generation or two that multitasking or task-switching is a good thing. It is not. It creates a highly diminished capacity for sustained attention.

If you want to concentrate for longer periods of time, the most sure-fire way of accomplishing this is to simply practice concentrating. You might last only 10 second before your mind wanders. That’s fine; don’t beat yourself up. Just gather your thoughts once you’ve realized your mind has started off-roading, and get back on track. Oh … and this is important: TURN OFF ALL THE DISTRACTIONS MENTIONED ABOVE (yelling by CAPS intended … to get your attention).  I always get push-back from young people on this … but the proof always remains in the pudding. Just try it and see if you don’t discover that I’m right.

Emotional endurance is about the capacity for patience … the ability to endure under difficult circumstances without acting on anger or other negative emotions. How the heck do you exercise this? Actually, this one is either ridiculously easy …. or ridiculously hard; it is a choice. Let me explain.

The impetus for increasing capacity is stress/strain … push the body or mind slightly beyond its limit, maybe even to the point of failure, and the body/mind learns to adapt to increased stress/strain. In other words, if you want more patience, simply look for or create opportunities in which patience is required … because that’s how you grow it. (remember the old humorous quip: “be careful if you ask God for patience because He will probably just send you something to test it.”)  This is where the choice part comes in. If the only way to grow patience is through trying times, then intentionally acknowledging that to yourself when things get tough will flip an important switch in your head that turns the challenge into a growth building event … one in which the aphorism will be true, “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Spiritual endurance is highly correlated to faith. I like the Biblical definition found in Hebrews 11:1: “faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.”  There may be a crossover here to emotional endurance, but spiritual endurance simply goes to a different level … and I believe it is a much deeper one at that. Faith is “knowing” that things will turn out a certain way, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. In many ways, faith can override the emotions and make the need for patience almost moot.

For some, faith is too irrational. Then call it a belief, or a conviction … it is an almost intangible hope that “I will endure.” And as with emotional endurance and the need for patience, if you ask for it you will likely be given an “opportunity” to grow it. One Bible passage tells us that even faith itself is a gift from God, but that passage doesn’t say whether the gift is packaged in the form of an instant capacity of belief-without-evidence or whether that gift package looks more like a challenging ordeal through which faith can grow. James says that it is through the testing of our faith that we develop perseverance (endurance). Finally, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome by saying that “endurance produces strength of character, which in turn, produces hope.” The posts this month have been about character building … and that can’t really happen without the testing of our spiritual resolve.

I hope to see you back next Monday for the final piece of this puzzle … exercising for resilience.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Flexibility

Happy Monday Viphilus*

Let me begin by reminding you of the Capacity Table which I posted on Nov.16.

Last week I wrote 4 different posts to cover the subject of exercising for the character marker known as strength. And as you see from the table, we need to consider our strength capacity: physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. This week is one post on exercising for character marker of flexibility.

Physically we do stretching types of exercises to train our muscles and ligaments to move in broader ranges of motion. I have a friend who is a physiotherapist and she says that everyone should do these types of exercises their whole life in order to maintain maximum ranges of motion in older age when the body tends to seize up. In particular, we should do stretching exercises in order to reduce our risk of injury and for overall greater physicality.

One of the biggest differences between strength training and flexibility training is the intensity level. In strength training the goal is to raise the intensity so that you fail. NOT SO with stretching exercises … for them you stretch to the point where you just start to fail … to the point of discomfort, not pain. The shift from comfort to discomfort marks the limit of your range of motion so pushing a wee bit beyond that makes the muscles and ligaments uncomfortable. When you hit discomfort, hold there a bit before letting go. Don’t push too far beyond this or you will injure yourself which could take months or years for recovery.

As for frequency and duration, depending on what you are trying to accomplish, something like 2-5 days per week, 5-10 minutes per workout, with 2-5 repetitions per stretch. There are lots of online stretching exercises … here is one. 

Mental flexibility is about our capacity to move between rational and intuitive forms of reasoning as well as the ability to hold multiple points of view (not multiple opinions … simply the ability to see and understand different viewpoints). Exercises for mental flexibility include reading from a wide bandwidth of perspectives. Don’t just read from authors who agreed with you … read from authors who have diametrically opposed viewpoints. The goal is not to become wishy washy in your viewpoints … the goal is to validate them and your assumptions, and if they need changing, then you can change them. As well, it is to be able to understand the perspectives of others for the purpose of empathy and community harmony.

If you want to ramp up the intensity of the exercises, engage in healthy ideological debates with others … but make such events openly-stated safe events in order for those involved to be free to make themselves vulnerable in the sharing of their opinions. Keep things from becoming emotionally charged by stating up front that that is a principle of engagement.

Emotional flexibility is about our capacity to move freely and appropriately along a wide spectrum of emotions without being either rigid or defensive. In some aspects, this is tied closely to mental flexibility because the more you can come to understand varying viewpoints, the easier it is to manage yourself in situations that might otherwise become emotionally charged.

But for the most part, emotional flexibility is about allowing yourself to experience the fullest range of emotions … not restricting yourself so that you don’t show those emotions to others (or even to yourself). Life circumstances might have led your to be emotionally-closed so that when you laugh you don’t let go and belly-laugh around others … or when you grieve you don’t let go and sob deeply … or when you get excited and joyful you don’t let go and celebrate with abandon. Get the point?

How do you exercise this? Sorry … no magic bullets here … this one is simply a matter or practicing. You begin by being intentional in some simple or easy circumstances and permitting yourself to emote. I suggest by beginning with something happy or joyous. If you are screaming inside to let go and be super happy about something … LET GO and let it out so that those around you can experience it too. Trust me … this will be a gift to those around you. When the world doesn’t come to an end because you have let some emotions slip out, then use that knowledge to do it again, for a different emotion.

This is where some might say, “wait a second … if I let ‘the beast out’ that isn’t good either … I thought we are supposed to manage our emotions so that others don’t get burned?”  And you would be right: partially. Life is almost never an all-or-nothing deal … it is learning to balance, and sometimes that means shifting the fulcrum (balancing point). There is a tension between showing no emotion and showing too much emotion … each of us have to find that balance on our own because there is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Find yours by beginning to exercise and experience the full range of emotions … but YES, manage them gently.

Spiritual flexibility is about our capacity to tolerate non-harmful values and beliefs that are different from our own. Being spiritual means having core beliefs and values and principles. As you might guess, there is a strong link between the mental, emotional and spiritual on these things. Mentally we explore the universe for options on values, beliefs and principles … spiritually we decide on which ones we will declare to be our own … and emotionally we passionately build our lives around those, making life choices automatically because those things are core and anchored deep within us. To be spiritually flexible might appear to be unwise, but it is only when you objectively consider other options that you can truly deepen your commitment to your own values or to see when they need to change.

Values and principles get stronger when they are tested … so exercising them will happen naturally as life delivers up opportunities for you to test what they are. I remember listening to a John Maxwell leadership teaching session where he made a statement that stopped me in my tracks. I can’t remember the exact words but they were along the lines: “Principles are core beliefs that you would rather die for than violate … so try not to have too many principles.” 

Principles are core beliefs that you would rather die for than violate.

You don’t need to exercise your spiritual flexibility … you will be given plenty of opportunity to stretch it. But note well … your core values should be inviolably anchored in your soul, until such time as you realize they are wrong … and then change them. In other words … be spiritually rigid in your espoused values, but be ready to change them the moment you know they are wrong. Everything you do and everything you ARE comes from those core values … they decide everything for you, or at least they should.

I hope to see you back next Monday when we look at building character endurance.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Strength (spiritually)

Saturday Nov 21 update …continued from Friday's post

Go back and look at Monday’s post. The table shows that spiritual strength is the capacity to:

1. be committed to our deepest values, regardless of our circumstances;
2. be morally upright and virtuous.

Let’s set aside the second one for this post since not everyone will agree on what those words actually mean. Let’s just stick with number 1 and look at it a bit closer. The table says that strength is a measure of one’s capacity to do work or complete a desired task that requires intense energy. Combine that with #1 above and we see that spiritual strength then is the capacity to be committed to our deepest values, despite any and all circumstances. 

There are times when life’s circumstances seem almost intentionally hostile to our principles and values, and that’s when our spiritual strength comes in to play. If we are spiritually weak then we will compromise our principles and values at the slightest sign of opposition. If we are spiritually strong then we won’t. If we are incredibly strong in our spirit then we might even be prepared to die for our convictions, values, principles and beliefs.

The question is … how do we exercise this to grow in that capacity and get stronger? I don’t know if my thinking on this is the right answer … all I know is how I have grown my own core values and principles … and that is by reflecting on them continually so that the emotional side of me (my real powerhouse) can support the spiritual side through passion.

As I mentioned yesterday, passion can be intentionally sparked in us through purpose and calling. When we declare certain things to be core values and principles and then continually reflect on them, they become such a deep part of our character that it becomes increasingly difficult for us to think/act against them. Therefore, in the case of the spiritual part of us, strength is developed by driving principles and values deep into our core; that’s why they are often called “core values” because they are rooted deeply within us.

Principles and values are our roots. If they are shallow we are weak and topple easily …. If they are deep we are strong and can withstand any adversity against our character.

A strong man or woman is one who is, first and foremost, strong spiritually … meaning they have core values and principles deeply rooted in their character … principles and values that drive virtually everything else.

Are your roots strong? Do you even have any? If not then this explains almost all self-sabotaging behaviours you find in yourself.

Come back next Monday as we shift from strength and look at exercising for flexibility.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Strength (emotionally)

… continued from last post

This is a tricky one because more than all the other dimensions, this one has the potential to hijack us to bad places. It also has the potential to empower us beyond measure because of passion … so let’s start with passion.

What are you passionate about? What do you care about? What gets you excited? Don’t know? Then find it or create it. Just make a choice and then give your heart to it so that it becomes a focal point (focal points fall under Spiritual …. But work with me on this for now).

Our emotions are powerful influencers of our life so let’s do two things:
1. Make them as powerful as possible;
2. Make them work FOR and NOT AGAINST us.

As discussed in a previous post, passion can be fueled by at least 3 things … but this time let me refer to them as 3 exercises for building emotional strength:
1. Be purposeful … do things with intention and for a reason;
2. Follow your strengths … do things which make you feel alive when you do them;
3. Calling … allow yourself to follow the thing that “calls” you (because you can’t help it)

These things alone will actually strengthen your emotions.

PICK ONE and just do it. Consider it like time in the gym in that it will exercise and strengthen your emotional resolve.

You might be tempted to think to yourself that it is way more complicated than this ... and you would be mistaken ... not everything that we need to do for ourselves is complicated; they can be easy. This doesn't need to be hard s don't make it hard. Just make it a process.

Come back Saturday for the final part of this thread ... exercising for our spiritual side.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Strength (mentally)

Welcome back Viphilus*

Thursday Nov 19 ... continuation of Tuesday's post.

Back on August 17 I wrote about the concept of breakdown-breakthrough: breakdowns sometimes furnish the breakthrough in our thinking so that true change becomes possible. The way muscles grow to provide increased strength also comes from a breakdown-breakthrough; the muscle fibres actually breakdown, opening the door for the body’s repair-mode machinery to do its thing, with the result being bigger stronger muscles.

Exercising for Mental Strength

The mind strengthens the same way. Correction: the brain strengthens the same way. The old expression, “use it or lose it,” is quite appropriate for the brain because like a muscle, it will atrophy through lack of use.

If you are a good parent you will know that kids grow through challenge. Mother birds are good parents … they let the hatchlings break out of their own shells and they kick them out of the nests when it is time for them to fly. The fly-or-die model seems harsh but what is actually more cruel is a parent who removes all challenge from their child’s environment, removing every obstacle and making every decision. The result is a child who grows up to be a weak adult, having no capacity for making good rational judgments and who has no problem-solving skills. Good parents know that an environment of mental challenges is essential for their kids to grow mentally strong.

How can you challenge or exercise your own brain (mind)? By tackling problem-solving challenges and then not giving up. The “not giving up” part is a choice, but the funny thing is that making that choice actually strengthens the mind for similar future endeavours because everything we do (for better or worse) creates new neural pathways. With enough time reinforcing those pathways (see my “jungle paths” post) things like persistence and stick-to-it-iveness become mental habits that help us immensely. And as we strive to solve problems … every-day-kinda-problems … our brains get stronger.

What Are Good Exercises?

Internet mind-strengthening games that promise “your path to a stronger mind?” NO! Enough already with the mind games (pun completely intended).  Quit playing games in the hopes that this will make your brain stronger. They just are another way of justifying an excuse to be lazy and avoid real-life. They don’t actually help you. Give yourself something real and useful to do, such as these:

Stronger knowledge – read books that have a technical side to them (or watch videos if you really aren’t a reader … but TRY HARDER to be a reader). And don’t just read for 5 minutes at a time … devote some serious time (as in occasional marathon sessions) because this provides a way for the mind to absorb information that reading-sprints just won’t do.

Stronger memory skills – task yourself with memorizing something. Make lists (again, of something useful) and memorize them. Memorize small portions of classic literature (Bible – favourite fiction – technical material – speeches). For this one you need to be aware of your learning style (for example, I memorize best when I hear vs when I read). Unlike reading, long periods of memorization are NOT the way to do it. Interval training is best for this … spending 5 minutes each day for 7 days will get something into your memory far better than 35 minutes in one sitting.

Stronger problem-solving skills – want to get better at solving problems? Then start solving problems. You get better at anything that you intentionally practice, specifically when you have specific performance goals in mind. Tackle problems individually or as a team … both are excellent. And just don’t give up so quickly. Real life doesn’t provide instant answers or cheat codes (which is why playing problem-solving games often fail to deliver a better brain … because the challenge can be bypassed or you can purchase a “booster pack” to crush the current level).

Stronger concentration skills – same as problem solving. Want to get better at concentrating … then start practicing concentrating. If you want to get better at music, or sports, or public speaking, or …. Well, anything … you practice the thing you want to get better at. And in the case of the brain, intentional practice is the exercising that brings strength.
Stronger visioning and planning skills – if you struggle thinking forward in time because you are a NOW kinda person, then begin in a simple way with the following 4-step process. This may seem juvenile but it really is the process. With time your thinking will slip automatically into this mode as your become a stronger planner and you will naturally apply it to more and more things.

1. Think of a simple goal or objective that you would like to accomplish and then imagine how you will feel when you achieve it. 
2. Make a list of all the things that you need to do to accomplish it.
3. Make a list of all the obstacles to prevent you from accomplishing it.
4. Finally, map out the order of things from 2 and 3 above into one big list (with dates/times) and systematically work your way through the list until you have accomplished the goal.  

About the breakdown part. For each of the things that I mentioned above … if your practicing stops before you start to fail or fatigue, you likely won’t get the full benefit. It appears as though the “stress until breakdown” is a key even to mental strengthening. And of course, as I discussed when we looked at the importance of rest/recovery earlier in November, the break between periods of practice is just as important. Interval training isn’t just for the body … it strengthens the mind as well.

Come back tomorrow as we look at exercising for emotional strength.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Exercising for Strength

Welcome back Viphilus*

As promised, here is the completed table. How did you do?

Today I want to discuss exercising for strength. I will look at it from a conceptual angle, beginning with what is collectively understood in the gyms of the world: how to build physical muscles.

Physical Exercising for Strength

Body muscles require fuel (protein), stress (exercise), and de-stress (rest) to grow. Contrary to what most people think, exercising is not when the muscles grow; they actually grow during a period of rest …. when we sleep. I think it is very instructive to learn a little bit about how muscles actually grow because we will see how this carries over to other dimensions.

When we do exercises like cardio workouts (aerobic activity), the help build lung and heart capacity, in part, because those workouts capitalize on oxygen. True strength-training, or muscle building, comes from anaerobic exercises … activities where the muscles are deprived of oxygen. The process results in lactic acid buildup which ultimately causes tiny (microscopic almost) tears in the muscles, making them breakdown. When we sleep, if our sleep is truly restful, the body goes into repair-mode … like putting the car up on the hoist to fix stuff while the owner goes shopping. The protein that we have digested forms the building blocks of muscle and during repair-mode our body essentially spot-welds all the little tears with more muscle material. And as anyone who has seen a good welding job … the weld is stronger than the original material. And muscle grows.

Oh, one more thing … when you are doing anaerobic exercise, you haven’t actually achieved the state where the muscles are breaking down the needed amount until you can feel the burning sensation of the acid being produced. Until you push to the point where you feel the pain, you will never reach a point where you will receive any gains (cue the slogan).

Let’s recap by seeing the four key, yet non-intuitive, things:

1. Muscles grow by first weakening or damaging them a little bit.
2. Muscles grow during times of rest when the body is in repair-mode.
3. All the exercise in the world won’t help if you don’t supply the building materials (protein).
4. Gain requires pain.

I’ll skip all the instructions about the best kinds of exercises for targeting muscle growth or muscle-shaping. I just want to stick to these essentials.

[FYI - One more thing I picked up about 10 years ago from Harley Pasternak (5-Factor Fitness). One of the by-products of anaerobic vs. aerobic exercise is the duration of the benefits in the area of fat-burning. Doing 30 minutes of aerobic exercise (running for example) puts the body into a fat-burning zone. When you stop, the body remains in that zone for another 40 minutes or zone. Excellent return on investment … more than 2:1. BUT …. And this is a HUGE BUT …. During anaerobic exercise for 15 minutes (weight lifting to the point of fatigue and failure) the body also goes into a fat-burning zone. When you stop, the body remains in that zone for an additional 48 hours!!!  (even 3 exclamation marks aren’t enough). That is a ridiculous ROI … almost 200:1. The reason is simple …. Damaging the muscles in anaerobic exercise puts the body in repair mode which mandates that the metabolism run at its peak until the repairs are made. Simple muscle repairs from this kind of exercise usually take about 48 hours … so if you do 15-20 minutes of strength training every 2^nd day, you are literally forcing your body to remain in repair mode … and hence, fat-burning mode … 24/7 until you stop that cycle).]

OK, now what about the other dimensions? How do you exercise for strength mentally? Emotionally? Spiritually?

I want to give you a couple days to ponder this before just tossing out an answer. This is not a dodge for a few days … it’s actually an important part of the lesson I’m trying to get across … that being that we need to struggle a bit with a problem (mental stress) in order to grow in mental strength. People don’t learn by giving them answers … they learned by solving problems. 

So, come back Thursday, Friday and Saturday to continue this thread … and see what you come up with on how to strengthen your mind, emotions and spiritual states.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"