Posting schedule changed

Sorry folks ... need to defer this week's post to Nov 2.

Therefore the scheduled break for Nov 30 is being used this week.

See ya Monday to wrap up this theme

CHARACTER BUILDING: Resting

October 19, 2015 – CHARACTER BUILDING: Resting

Welcome back Viphilus*

Sorry for being a day late … but I wasn’t going to miss a moment of the 2 big games last night: the Blue Jays beat Kansas City and the Liberals beat EVERYONE ELSE! Time for Mr. Harper to take a rest from politics.

… and speaking of rest …

This week let’s look at a critical 3^rd component of character building, and that is REST. We’ve looked at breathing and feeding, both of which are pretty critical to survive-ability, let alone good health. When it comes to our physical side rest is a key recovery practice because without it we become dysfunctional … very quickly. Let’s dig a bit into the subject of rest and why it is foundational to character building.

PHYSICAL Rest
Task: Take a 5-lb weight in the hand of your non-dominant arm and hold it outstretched for 3 minutes. If your reaction is, “sure, I can do that,” then by all means, stop reading now and go and do it and then come back. How did that work for ya? If your reaction is, “that sounds hard,” then give it a try, but kudos to having some insights about the challenge you are undertaking. If your reaction is, “HA – easy peasy,” then stop, go and do it, and come back with your tail between your legs as you use your other hand to operate the computer because the one you just used will be surprisingly DEAD. If your reaction is to shake your head NO WAY then you are wise indeed.

This is a marvelous, yet simple exercise to demonstrate one thing:

Burnout, break down and impaired performance is not the result of the intensity of the exercise but of the duration of energy expenditure without recovery. (The Power of Full Engagement)

A 5-lb weight is nothing, yet it can cause our hand and arm to cramp badly and muscle fatigue will quickly result if we don’t give it a rest, even for a moment. This is why almost all exercise wisdom nowadays extols the virtue of interval training (go hard then take a small break … then go hard again followed by another small break – etc.) 

Physical rest isn’t important only when exercising or doing work … it is also critical for the body’s metabolic machine to complete the work that the exercise was intended to do, and that is to build character (in this case, physical muscles or physical tolerance or physical endurance).  I am now speaking about sleep … that period of rest each day / night when our bodies cease exercising, cease digestion of food, and can focus all available metabolic resources to body repair and improvement. Did you know that muscles aren’t built when you exercise, but rather, when you sleep!  In November we will look more closely at what the exercise actually does, but for now, the key takeaway learning is that without sleep, all the value of exercising is lost … and will actually damage the body.

Physical rest is also important to give the brain a chance to shut down intentional cognitive functions for a while. I was at a seminar one time where an expert on human performance asked the audience this question, “In a hostage situation, what is the most important thing that the police try to withhold from the captors?”  Of course, our room of non-experts said things like water and food. The answer was sleep. The trainer went on to tell us that the human body can go for weeks without food and for 3-7 days without water, but without sleep for even 36-48 hrs the brain starts to shut down and the captors begin making mistakes. By 72+ hours the brain is almost completely dysfunctional and the police simply wait for the captors to defeat themselves.So the police try to keep noise and light levels high so that sleep is difficult.

Most studies indicate that North Americans are a sleep-deprived nation. Modern technology has made possible instant and excess access to … well, everything … and most humans lack the wisdom and good judgment to unplug for a while and get some sleep. I used to suffer from insomnia; I don’t anymore, once I realized what my lack of sleep was doing to me (and my family and my job). I learned that there is a simple test to know if you are sleep deprived; if you need an alarm clock to wake up, then you are sleep deprived. Some of you just got defensive and perhaps angry because you don’t believe that. I am just the messenger … read up on this for yourself on WebMD.

Therefore, through rest, the important work of feeding and exercising is completed and the result is sustainability and increased capacity … whether it’s physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually.. Rest is grotesquely undervalued for its role in production, sustainability and growth.

MENTAL Rest
I was quite fascinated to learn that REST plays a similar role in our other three dimensions as well … analogously, for many of the same reasons. For example, if you enjoy doing crossword puzzles then you have likely witnessed yourself (countless times) get stuck after working at it a long time to the point where you are unable to fill in any words. You set it down, go and grab a coffee or talk with someone or do ANYTHING else for 10-15 minutes. You then come back, pick it up and suddenly you are able to fill in 2 or 3 words. What just happened? Did you get smarter in that 15 minute break? NO … you simply gave yourself a BREAK!  Just as physical muscles become fatigued when they have been worked without a rest (like the 5-ln weight exercise), the brain also becomes fatigued when it is given a non-stop conscious cognitive challenge. And just as muscle fatigue can be explained biochemically because of the production of lactic acid in the muscles due to oxygen starvation, so too, brain fatigue can be explained biochemically because of the depletion of chemicals that drive the receptor neurons in the brain … the parts where messages are passed from one neuron to the next.

We need to rest our minds, intentionally, to actually accomplish more in the longer run. The brain, like the rest of the physical body, works best when work is tackled in intervals. We can go hard … in fact very hard … but then we need rest, even for a few moments, to allow the biochemistry to “recover,” to its initial state so that we can do it all over again … whatever IT is.

One of the chief reasons that people struggle with sleep is because they are unable to shut down the chatter in their heads once they turn off all the other noise. They have so trained their minds to be constantly stimulated that the mental-noise has become more than just a habit, it is an addiction. And like any addiction, the body (or brain) craves more and more of it, even though it is detrimental and actually doesn’t deliver what it promises. Simple diversion exercises (like reading or counting sheep) or meditation (intentionally focusing on what YOU choose, not what your brain simply delivers up to feast on) are helpful techniques.  A word on meditation: we will look at meditation in future posts, but for now, if you are convinced that you don’t know how to meditate then you have simply been taught incorrectly. If you know how to worry then you know how to meditate.

If your mental state is such that anxiety or your stress load is more than you can handle through some simple mental exercises then you might actually need medical intervention (meds) to turn things around … but this is NOT a long-term fix … ultimately, you need to learn how to rest your mind, intentionally and not medicinally.

EMOTIONAL Rest
How do you rest emotionally? What is it that you need to rest from? What does emotional rest look like?

Emotionally, we need breaks from lengthy periods of negative emotions such as anger, disappointment, grief, and frustration, to name a very short list. The trick is to intentionally (Mentally!  Cognitively! Consciously!) choose to pursue a positive emotion, even for a short period of time. Here are some examples:

1. You have been reading some technical material for your work. You choose to set it down and read the funny pages in the newspaper for 5 minutes. Doesn’t seem like much of a change since you went from reading one thing to reading another thing. Reading is reading you might say. Not true. The concentration and learning focus needs to be broken and by switching to the comics, the mental break is given. BUT … by reading the funny pages, you’ve switched on a positive emotion which helps turn off the problem-solving focus of your mental side which gives it a complete rest. In this case, the emotional change facilitated the mental break. As they say, "a change is as good as a rest."
2. You are suffering grief for something/someone you have lost. You can’t imagine ever feeling good or whole again and your emotions are at an all-time low. This is normal and, in the long run, healthy to work through intentionally with the goal of moving forward. BUT, the grief does not have to be continuous … you can choose to take a break from the grief and do something “fun” for 15-30 minutes. You can choose, at least once a day, to NOT grieve. This sounds preposterous to people who don’t know how to shut down the chatter in their heads in general, but it is doable. The easiest technique here (and there are many) is to intentionally spend time with a friend who knows you need the diversion and who will engage you in something for 15-30 minutes that will take your focus off the grief. Make it longer if you can. (when I broke up with my first girlfriend I was crushed, so my brother and sister-in-law distracted me by taking me out to play bingo 2 nights each week for a couple months – it was in smoke-filled halls and I never won … but it was a very important diversion that really helped me a lot)
3. Going through any prolonged period of challenge requires “play time” to balance off not only the mental challenge but also the emotional side. Remember our mothers’ motto: “all work and no play makes Peter a dull boy.” Actually, following my breakdown in 2001 I learned that the motto actually should be, “all work and no play causes Peter to break down.” Intentionally building “play” into life is essential to high performance.
4. Stop taking yourself so seriously. If you can laugh at yourself and at your foibles and at your idiosyncrasies, emotional health will swell up inside you at an amazing rate … and you will feel so much better. When someone suggests that you made a silly mistake, a bonehead error, or a ridiculous judgment, chances are they want to laugh at you … so lead the way and laugh at yourself first. When someone first said that “laughter is the best medicine,” I think they were talking about laughing at ourselves. By doing this it gives us an emotional rest that carries over to all other sides of us.

SPIRITUAL Rest
One of my favourite books on “rest” is called ‘The Rest of God,” by Mark Buchanan. It is a purposefully “religious” book that speaks about developing a Sabbath orientation to our life (and not just a legal spiritual requirement about setting aside one day each week for non-work).  Mark suggests that Sabbath-keeping is a form of mending. This makes perfect sense to me because I know that physical rest (sleep) is what allows our bodies to mend.

When I teach about the importance of practicing solitude for the sake of spiritual rest I like to quote John Bradshaw who was the one who coined the phrase “human-doings,” (no, it wasn't Wayne Dwyer). He used this term to mock our tendency to always be doing something, and to mock our tendency to forget we first are human-beings. Spiritual rest is about understanding the need to cease producing and to just BE. Such times allow us to hear more clearly the quiet inner voice calling us closer to do what we do with a purpose. For me, such times are to draw closer to God and simply listen to Him and what He wants (not to tell Him to listen to me and to what I want). These are the times when a tremendous amount of life-issues can be solved because without the urgency of people/issues/tasks in our face, we can actually focus on what is important, just because it is important and not because of any urgency. It is during times of spiritual rest where we can learn to defeat the tyranny of the urgent. And just like physical rest, spiritual rest is a time when our spirits are mended and made whole again … often even stronger than before we took the rest.

My friends. Choose to include REST into your schedule … otherwise, you will have no control over the kind of character you will be.

I hope to see you back next Monday.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Feeding

Welcome back Viphilus*

Continuing on the heals of last week’s post about breathing, today I want to talk about feeding. In the fire analogy, it takes oxygen and fuel to make a fire (well, in addition to the spark to create ignition). The oxygen part of the fire was covered last week in “breathing.” Today it is about FUEL.

Once again I want to look at the fuel (or FEEDING) component of character building by addressing each of our components: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

PHYSICAL Feeding
I need to confess … I struggle to get this part right in my life. Even now. Oh, I have learned a lot about how to fuel my body and what constitutes proper nutrition. I have learned that food and oxygen are the most important regulators of physical energy. And as for food:

FOOD EQUALS FUEL ………. FOOD DOES NOT EQUAL FUN

I have learned Pasternak’s wood-stove analogy about food and metabolism, which is as follows:

1. stoke the fire in the early morning to warm house (eat within 30 minutes of waking up)

2. feed the fire with wood continually during the day using smaller pieces of wood rather than large logs (eat 5-6 smaller meals, evenly spaced out during the day)

3. let the fire naturally burn down  at night when everyone is sleeping (don’t eat in the evening after supper)

4. next day, repeat

That learning also included the knowledge that it isn’t just the size of the wood that matters but also the type of wood. Food-wise, this translates as: each of the smaller meals should include a blend of a high-quality low fat protein, complex carb, healthy fats and fibre (and of course, water).

Body fat is like unburned wood … which is the result of too much wood for the fire or too little heat for the wood. In other words, too much food for the metabolism or a metabolism that is too low for the food being consumed. To discuss this more fully I will need to get into the upcoming discussions throughout October and November.

I also learned to set aside the wood-stove analogy when understanding the full complexity of the body because it does NOT function like a thermodynamic energy equation where CALORIES IN must equal CALORIES OUT (actually, if you do substantial research you will discover that the whole calorie thing was invented in the 1800s because it was easy to talk about and measure … but was known then to not actually be an accurate way of discussing body chemistry). Which is the next point … the body doesn’t work on thermodynamics … it works on biochemistry. Thermodynamics tells you that 1+1=2 or 3x3=9. In biochemistry, 1+1 might equal 49, depending on what each of the “1s” look like and exactly how they are added together.

Before you react too strongly, let me point out that you already know I’m right by just considering the following. If you are on a 1500 calorie/day diet, do you really think it doesn’t matter what those 1500 calories are composed of? Do you really think that your body will find it’s weight-equilibrium just as quickly if those calories are Twinkies vs tuna … or cheeseburgers vs Chinese cabbage … or bacon vs black beans? Therefore, this is not a calorie-equation exercise. It is much more complex than that. For example, diabetics are taught to use the GI-index (GI) which is a relative ranking of carbohydrate in foods according to how they affect blood glucose levels. Books are published with the GI # for each specific card, but those numbers aren't really accurate in themselves because the true GI value of a food depends on whether it is eaten with a protein or not (the number lowers if it is ... and that's a good thing).

Then there is the consideration of WHEN your “calories” are eaten. If you go too long between feeding then the metabolic fire cools down (which is great for storing fat). If you eat meals too close together then the metabolic fire can’t burn the new food because it is still trying to burn the last food (which is great for storing fat). In keeping with these two things then it is obvious that too much food and too little food are also bad. One of the biggest myths that trip up almost all dieters is the idea that “if I reduce my calories to very little I will lose more weight.” WRONG … you’ll either gain weight or you will plateau (as your body tries to protect you from starvation).

So let’s agree that physical fuel (food) is a complex subject but the bottom line is that it is very important to our physical energy. Our bodies need macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fat), vitamins (A, C, etc.) and minerals (zinc, iron, etc.) in order to function … but each within moderation.

But what are you doing to feed/fuel yourself emotionally, mentally or spiritually? We are all fairly adept at physical feeding, yet as a society we have become quite lax and uninformed about feeding the rest of ourselves. Did you know that you needed to do that? Do you know how to do that? Did you know that by not fueling yourself in those other areas, your overall energy levels will be low, regardless of how much physical energy you may be starting with. Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

EMOTIONAL/SOCIAL Feeding
Your heart also needs fuel. What does your emotional fuel-gauge look like? Are you full or running on empty? The solution is quite simple … just make sure that you engage in tank-filling activities such as recreation and enjoyment. This has a cross-over with next week’s topic of RESTING because participating in recreation can be both a FUELING practice as well as a RECOVERY practice. Setting aside the semantics, it is essential that we participate in activities that will prompt the release of the feel-good hormones such as serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine.

Doing things that you personally enjoy such as reading, riding your motorcycle, walking/running, knitting, playing sports, social activities, enjoying some solitude, simply NOT-working, etc., are all things that can help increase our dopamine or serotonin levels. (Carbs also help produce serotonin, which explains why we crave starchy or sweet foods when we feel down, so we have to be careful and be sure to make healthy choices for the physical part of us as well, such as high-fibre, lower GI carbs).

Make sure that you include social times in your schedule. Obviously the extroverts will do this naturally while the introverts will argue that being around people actually drains their “tank.” However, even most introverts enjoy an increase in oxytocin levels by spending some close-up time with their loved ones (hugs and cuddles boost this hormone in most people). Each of us need people, to varying degrees, so my point here is to make sure that we build that into our schedules; life can get busy and we can forget to fill our tank.

Another key aspect of keeping our emotional tank full is to practice forgiveness. Bitterness, usually the result of extreme disappointment in another person, drains our emotional tanks very quickly, rendering most other things in life to be bland or disappointing. Forgiveness is something we practice to refill our own hearts.

MENTAL Feeding
The mind needs correct information, to convert to knowledge, understanding and wisdom, in order to focus energy and navigate life successfully. We feed our minds by giving it new knowledge. Reading is a powerful way to feed your mind, but just like physical food, it needs to be nutritious … not everything we feed our mind may be good. If you read-for-fun because it fills your emotional tank, just be aware that you also need to read things to give your mind new information and new knowledge. A steady diet of anything comes with a downside so have a well-balanced diet of reading. (I remember one mentor telling me that it was easy to tell when a pastor’s mind died by just looking at the latest date of any book on his shelf … this man saw the value in keeping current by reading as much as he could on a regular basis).

Learning new things and new skills is a way of feeding our minds (this also has a cross-over to the post in a couple weeks on EXERCISING)

SPIRITUAL Feeding
How do we feed our spirit? It needs purpose and direction in order to provide a focal point for using our energy. Giving yourself a purpose or direction for all that you do (whether it is for a given day, week, month, year, decade, or your whole life) is essential in energizing yourself because it is this part that harnesses the energy gained from our other three components and fuels our life.

I will start by telling a story.

A few years ago I was in Alberta putting on a full-day workshop for managers and front-line supervisors. The topic was “engagement” and how to engage employees in sustainable ways that free them to bring their A-game almost every day. There were 30-40 people in the room and most participants were participating well. But I had one guy who was a bit of a naysayer … a contrarian if you will. He argued with almost everything I presented and found a reason to disagree at every turn. I could tell from the rolling eyes that others in the room were used to him being this way. By the time we reached the morning break he had escalated to a high-level of dissatisfaction with the material, openly declaring that my content was shallow and one-dimensional … and he stated as his proof, a strong disagreement with a statement that I used to start the workshop.

I realized (like a comedian faced with a heckler) that I needed to shut him down or turn him around, for the sake of everyone else in the room. You’ve undoubtedly heard about the working strategy to “under-promise and over-deliver.” Well, I am NOT a fan of that bumper-sticker. I have learned time and again that if you really want to WOW someone, or a crowd, the absolute best way to do that is to over-promise, and then still over-deliver on the over-promise. I decided in that moment to take a huge risk and stick my neck way way out there. It was a risk because I was clearly dealing with a cynic … arguably, the hardest types to turn-around in a short timeframe. My following action / statement shocked my heckler … but mostly shocked the room (because they all knew him).

“Oh, I think I have made an error here. My opening statement to the workshop wasn’t an opinion for you to debate … it was a teaching point.” The room exploded with laughter … but not my cynic.

“Tell you what,” I said as I walked right over to him, speaking loudly enough for the whole room to hear. “If you hold back your objections to everything I am saying and stop to consider that maybe … just maybe … you will gain some new insights today … and actually reflect on these things as well as reflecting on how your current methods aren’t actually working for you … then by the time we reach the end of the day, I am going to prove to you that not only was my opening statement completely true, you will also agree that this was the best workshop you have ever attended.”  <crickets>  All eyes darted between me and him. He conceded. We took our break. A few people quietly told me to not take his attacks as personal and that this was just the way he was.

The rest of the morning went smoothly and he became much more engaged. Just before we broke for lunch I asked him in front of the crowd if I had convinced him yet about the truth of my opening statement. I already knew what he was going to say. To the shock of everyone he said, “YES.” The room erupted into spontaneous applause. 

How had I turned him around? It wasn’t hard because he wasn’t a born-again cynic … he was actually a situational-cynic who actually wanted to be a highly engaged worker/manager. What turned him around was my conversation with him following a simple exercise that I do at workshops. I get everyone to think back over their career and make a list of all the times when work was excellent. [A born-again cynic will usually have an empty list. My guy wasn’t one of those.] I then get everyone to pair up and discuss their lists with a workshop partner and see if they can find anything that is common to everything on their list. It is an excellent exercise in self-awareness [the first time I did that exercise myself I couldn’t see the common thread, but when I showed it to my wife it jumped out at her that all my best times were when I was doing time-limited projects that had a creative side to them].

The group discussed their newfound insights but I noticed my challenger was quiet. I gave them all another brief exercise to do on their own but then went to him. I said that I had noticed that he hadn’t responded about his list and he said he was being compliant to my request to not be objectionable, but the reality was that there wasn’t anything in common on the things on his list (I was at least relieved to see that his list wasn’t empty). I asked him to describe to me each of those times when his work was so good. I listened to him describe each with great passion and excitement, and I also listened to the words that he used. When he was finished I said, “I see a very clear common thread in all those … in each case the work you were doing was very challenging, but also in each of those times you had a very clear, unambiguous goal of what it was you were trying to achieve.”

I swear, I almost saw the little lightbulb, floating above his head, turn on … very brightly. I was looking a man who had just had an epiphany. It was palpable. By the time we got to lunch he was now agreeing with my workshop-opening-statement (which had nothing to do with his epiphany by the way). But the real joy came after lunch. Upon return I asked him, in front of everyone, if he would like to share any new insights that he had gleaned from the morning. He jumped up and with the fervour of a tele-evangelist he preached about the importance of purpose-driven work and that “us managers” needed to get much better at creating clear, unambiguous goals and directions for our staff because all of them craved this. I almost felt like saying, "Amen - preach it brother!" He went on for about 10-minutes. I might have been able to convince 10% of the room about the importance of clarity in the work that we do, but my one-time-cynic had just proselytized the entire room. At 4:30 pm as I wrapped up the workshop he was the first to applaud … standing to his feet … and the first to come to me to tell me it was the best workshop he had ever attended.

I hope the story wasn’t too long that you forgot why I was telling it. Our spirit needs the fuel of clear goals, reasons and purpose. With those in place we can become phenomenally energized and life (whether work or play) is amazing. Without those we literally starve and life isn’t worth living. Whether you manage others or just yourself, having a clear purpose in all that you do is vital to being fully energized for life.

I’ve asked you before in this blog, but I will ask it again:

Do you do what you do because you have a reason to, or do you do what you do because you don’t see a better reason not to?  

When you feed yourself make sure you don’t forget to feed your spirit … it will likely inform you as to how/when to feed the rest of you as well.

I hope to see you back next Monday.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"

CHARACTER BUILDING: Breathing

Welcome back Viphilus*

I hope you enjoyed my reminiscences of Mom and the things I learned from her. For the final 3 months of 2015 I am going to introduce to you a new way of looking at character building … and how to actually build character. I will share a lot of information … most of which is available elsewhere … but you won’t have seen it put together quite this way before. This is the foundational way that I think about personal growth and what I use when I serve as a coach, regardless of whether it is performance coaching or simply coaching to inform or inspire.

What does “character building” mean to you? I think I’ve already mentioned in this blog that when I told my son one day that I was trying to help him build character, his response was that he was already a “character.” While I may smile at his retort I understand that it is far more complex and comprehensive than most people think. Going a bit further, I think it is why many (most?) people live unnecessarily shallow, unfulfiling lives … because they have no idea what or how things could be different. People feel powerless to effect change in their life; change that makes them stronger, in a predefined way.

I am going to ask you to have some patience as I do a very slow “reveal” of my overall training framework. If you look at the upper right portion of the blog, in the right margin, you’ll see that I have shown the theme and topics for all of October and November because they are linked. Then in the first Monday in December I’ll reveal the full picture of how it all fits together (if you haven’t already figured it out by then).

Let’s begin with breathing. Breathing is pretty darned important. Without oxygen you’re dead. Just like a fire needs oxygen to burn the fuel, so our bodies need oxygen for metabolism to burn the fuel (food) we eat. And from a physical perspective, the higher the metabolism “fire,” the healthier we are and the better we feel. It’s all about energy … and oxygen is a big part of that equation.

So, how do we obtain oxygen? Well, you don’t actually need to know any of this to actually do it because our autonomic nervous system takes care of operating our lungs unconsciously. Our lungs inhale air … our bodies do some neat biochemistry to extract the oxygen from whatever we breathe in … and then our lungs exhale the useless stuff that the body is finished with after capturing the oxygen. Chemically, we know this to be inhaling O₂  and then exhaling CO₂ to make room for more O₂.

You’re going, “OK, I’m not an idiot … can we move on to something that I DON’T know please?”  But hang on …. Do you really know how to breathe “properly?”

The first time I was confronted with that question I recoiled in disbelief and responded sarcastically, “well, I am still alive at age 50, so … yah … I think I know how to breathe properly,” making a sweeping air-quotes gesture to show my derision. My arrogance turned quickly to humility as I learned in the following hour or so that I, like most people, don’t actually breathe very well. Turned out, many of my higher anxiety moments, like most people, were accompanied by shallow (no diaphragm) mouth breathing … a classic, but ineffective response by the body to consciously obtain more oxygen. I learned that people around the world … FOR MILLENIA … have tinkered with learning to be better breathers. Who knew? I learned that high-performance types like world-class athletes, musicians, special-forces types, all had advanced training in stress-management, which included learning how to control breathing in order to manage stress … in the moment. Who knew? I learned that exhaling through the mouth while inhaling through the nose (with the exhale being twice as long as the inhale) brings a rapid heart rate down incredibly quickly because, amongst other things, the inhaling air triggers receptors in the nasal passage that are responsible for releasing stress-reducing hormones. Who knew?

In a very short period of time I learned how to intentionally avert an oncoming stress response of rapid heart rate and cognitive confusion by simply doing some “proper breathing” for 30 seconds. This was a game-changer on countless occasions before going into stressful situations like media-scrums or live TV interviews (part of my life for more than a decade when I was a national spokesperson for the Canadian Hurricane Centre). I learned how to shut down the chatter in my head at night so that I could fall asleep more easily … which essentially ended a decade-long fight with insomnia. I learned how to create in me a recovering sense of peacefulness simply by controlling my breathing.

Wow … who knew? Why isn’t this stuff taught in school?

With my newfound fascination in “breathing” I did more investigation and discovered that it was ancient knowledge (I should say wisdom) to apply a metaphor of breathing to the other parts of what makes us humans. So, beyond the physical, I learned the importance of mental breathing, emotional breathing, and spiritual breathing. Let me touch briefly on each one just to help get you into the metaphor. I hope you see the value.

Mental breathing is about inhaling optimism, a clear vision of a good outcome, while exhaling pessimism, a clouded view of a good outcome (or a clear view of a bad outcome). I believe that mental breathing is essential for good mental health. I have already written quite a bit about optimism and pessimism (June 15, 2015) so I just wanted to connect that here to the breathing metaphor.

Emotional breathing is about inhaling success and exhaling failure, while recognizing that just as physical metabolism includes the natural process of expelling negative impurities from the body, so exhaling failure is a natural part of the emotional-metabolism process. Too often people assume that failure is a bad thing or a sign of weakness or something to be avoided. Failure is a key ingredient in emotional health … as long as it is dealt with properly … expelled properly, without judgment. This is essential for good emotional health.

Spiritual breathing is about inhaling (engaging in) the things of the heavenly realm while exhaling (distancing ourselves from) the ways in which the worldliness in us tries holding us hostage to the mundane. As a Christian I see this as essential for good spiritual health.

With each type of breathing, there is a need to learn why we do it … to learn that while we may do it automatically at times, we can learn to do it intentionally better all the time … and to learn that there are different types of training depending on what you wish to accomplish with your breathing. For example, the training required for learning to breathe to relax you is VERY different from the training required to learn how to hold your breath longer because you plan on doing some assist-free diving.

For today, let’s keep the take-aways simple and focused through these 4 questions:

1. Do you know how to physically breathe in a way that will relax you instantly, in order to energize you in a sustainable way?
2. Do you know how to mentally breathe in a way that will relax you instantly, in order to energize you in a sustainable way?
3. Do you know how to emotionally breathe in a way that will relax you instantly, in order to energize you in a sustainable way?
4. Do you know how to spiritually breathe in a way that will relax you instantly, in order to energize you in a sustainable way?

As you can see, this is ALL ABOUT ENERGY which should be no surprise because LIFE IS ALL ABOUT ENERGY.

Do you have enough energy? If not …. BREATHE!   But learn to do it properly … find a coach to show you. You’ll be shocked at what a difference it will make.

I hope to see you back next Monday.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"