Tag Archives: attitude

Soaking up the sun

It’s 3:35 in the afternoon and I’m sitting in my back yard with no shirt on, just soaking up the sun. This is absolutely amazing weather for October in the Vancouver mainland. It looks like this might be the last week of it before the temperature dips. But wow, what fantastic weather we’ve had for the past couple months.

I feel like we deserve this because we had the coldest May and June that I can recall in the last 25+ years of living out here. But the term ‘deserve’ suggests some sort of fairness and weather doesn’t play fair. So I’ll just say that we have been very lucky!

I feel like im dosing up on sunshine before the dole-drums of winter hit. November and February are historically the 2 months I hate living in a northern rainforest. Ahead of us are entire weeks where I won’t know where the sun is during the day. Cloud cover will mask the exact location of the sun and the sun sets before 5pm. December and January aren’t a lot better, but November and February are definitely the wettest and toughest to handle.

But not today. Today the sun feeds me natural Vitamin D, and I bask in the glory of a bright and warm afternoon. Today I charge my batteries for the dark days ahead. I’ll need to remember days like today when the rain comes and feels like it will never leave. And hopefully next year we won’t have to wait so long for the return of this wonderful weather.

Small gains

I’ve been doing some Physio stretches almost every day since I was given them to do in June. I have an Enya song I listen to twice, once for each leg, doing the same stretches. Then one more to do some lower back stretches and a couple rather painful roller stretches on my quads.

I’ve made some small but positive gains in my flexibility, and it occurred to me that I would never have noticed them if that was the goal. If that was the goal, I would have given up long before I saw the gains… they are too small and took too long to be realized.

I think that the mental shift from ‘I want to see benefits from this’ to ‘this is a good habit to have, and I want to be someone who commits to stretching as part of my health routine,” was a big part in getting me here.

I now stretch for 3 songs, 10 minutes, almost every single day. I probably won’t notice any new gains for a couple months, but if I continue this for a couple months I will indeed see gains. If I was doing it just for the gains, I probably wouldn’t make the commitment because the results are too slow and too small to give me the reward I would be seeking.

No, I’m just someone who values stretching daily. And hopefully I’ll have less back pain and back issues in the future… and some small positive gains along the way.

Making good choices

Sometimes there are big choices to make, and they are hard. Some things aren’t cut-and-dry and easy to determine that, ‘this is the best choice to make’. These big decisions are often literally about cutting away possibilities. The good and right choice isn’t always clear.

But there are other choices we make that don’t demand a lot of choice and energy. They are tiny moments of little thought, not big decisive moments… yet they can make a huge difference.

A car slows down in front of you causing you to break, then they put their indicator on just before turning. Do you aggressively attack your car horn? Do you swear and call the driver a foul name? Or do you take a deep breath, and go on your merry way.

You have an exchange with a coworker that doesn’t go well. Do you gossip behind their back? Stay angry all day? Go back to try to resolve the issue? Seek advice? Or even just move on, not allowing a small issue to grow larger in your mind?

You wake up and your morning doesn’t go as planned. Do you decide it’s just going to be a crappy day? Do something to make yourself feel better? Or just decide that it’s still going to be a great day despite the small issue that didn’t go as planned?

We spend a lot of time thinking about the big decisions in life and often don’t realize the 1,000 little decisions that we don’t think as much about matter just as much or more.

Often we build up habits of mind that make these decisions for us. I don’t want to curse at the idiot driving in front of me but when I pull up behind someone at a red light, in the left lane of a two lane road with no left turn lane, and then they put their left turn indicator on only after the light turns green, profanity escapes my mouth. I don’t even think about it, but then I drive away angry.

This isn’t a good choice to make, but it’s like it is made for me… decided in the moment without choice. Times like this are when good choices are hard, but healthy. Good choices sometimes need to be intentional. Good choices take effort when the choices in similar situations beforehand led to less than desirable choices.

We can build a good life by focussing on choosing better small choices throughout the day, and interestingly enough, this can help us choose the right path when the bigger, harder choices come our way.

Reducing Complaints

I heard this on the Daily Jay, with Jay Shetty, on the Calm app this morning:

“Complaining is like chewing the same bite of food long after it has lost its taste. You’re just expending energy, for no positive purpose.”

Have you ever noticed that complaints live in your head far longer than you spend sharing them?

There is the initial thought that brews in your mind, percolating and flooding your mind with frustration. Then the complaint pours out of you, and you want to share every detail, fill other people’s cup with your bitter tasting brew. Then it chills down in your brain, but not immediately, it takes a while for the steam to be released, and your thoughts remain on your cup full of objection and protest.

“I can’t believe what she said.”

“The nerve of him thinking he could get away with doing that.”

“The worst service I’ve ever dealt with.”

The moment is gone, but the complaint lingers. With an opportunity to share it again later, the full emotional turmoil reruns.

“That was so upsetting!”

It was upsetting, or it is upsetting? Did it happen again? The verbal complaint makes it feels so.

What is it that the person who upset you the most deserves? Do they deserve your future attention, energy, and time complaining? Do you deserve to relive and retell, and expend time and energy on them?

If you’ve truly been wronged, do something about it and feel good about standing up for yourself. But if you’ve been annoyed and the moment is gone, let it be gone, because ‘I could have…’ or ‘I should have…’ didn’t happen, and complaints are nothing but wasted energy brewing in your mind, and also in the minds of those you complain to. And neither you nor they need to spend time sipping that bitter brew.

Brighter days

It’s so much easier walking up at 5:15am when it’s light out. It’s easier to wake up before my alarm, and there is no need to stumble around in the dark. I love the longer days of summer! We still have 21 days of getting a bit more time with the sun above the horizon.

I didn’t grow up with this in Barbados, where there are no real seasons and the sun would stay out 12-13 hours no matter what time of year it is.

Now I live in Vancouver where daylight will exceed 16 hours in the summer and be under 8.5 hours in the winter. Coming out of winter and moving to these wonderfully long days is so uplifting! It makes me want to just seize the day.

Half empty

I remember this really funny card my aunt once gave her son, my cousin. He had a spell of bad luck that included being robbed at gun point at work, his parked car being hit and run, and then after being repaired the car was vandalized a day later. The card was a picture of a giraffe’s head looking up. It said something like, ‘When life gets you down, remember to look up…’ and inside the card it said, ‘It will probably rain down your nostrils’.

Things got better for my cousin. He really just had a string of bad luck all at once, and it didn’t take long for him to turn things around. He isn’t someone who acts like a victim, he doesn’t expect bad things to happen to him. But we all know people who do expect things to go wrong, who believe the world conspires against them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Imagine how hard it is to live a life where your glass is always half empty. The system is out to get you. You feel picked on, and you ‘know’ that you are always being treated unfairly. How hard would life be? How bitter would you get?

It reminds me of Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, except that he is passively expecting the worse. When people live glass half empty lives, the glass gets emptier, and the responses to anything bad get more and more bitter. It becomes easy to see and believe conspiracy theories because everything conspires against you.

“The system is corrupt, it is designed to keep me down. We are all victims of the system.”

What a hard life to live. I wonder what it would take to change a person like this so that they don’t see the world as undermining and targeting them? What kind of event or experience would change this person? What would it take to help fill their glass a little? Or would they just empty it to where they expect it to be?

You build habits on your bad days

I touched on this in my post, Just show up:

We live in a society now where there is so much pressure to do well; to be your best; to shine. It’s not easy. But sometimes the message doesn’t have to be ‘you are awesome’, ‘you have so much potential’, or ‘push yourself’. Sometimes the message of ‘just show up’ is all we need to hear.

  • Don’t plan an hour workout, just show up at the gym.

  • Don’t worry about how much you have to do, just start.

I’d like to expand on this idea a bit. When you ‘really really don’t want to go’ to the gym or start your workout, you still need to go. You don’t need to do anything amazing, you just need to get started and know that you are doing something good.

Not going is a slippery slope to a bad habit. If you decide not to go or get started when you ‘really really don’t want to’, that makes it easier to not go when you ‘really don’t want to’. And that makes it easier not to go when you ‘kinda don’t want to’… and so it becomes easier to break the habit.

It’s easy to maintain a habit when you are having good days, it’s the bad days that are the problem. It’s the bad days that break the pattern, or that solidify your commitment. Doing the hard work on the tough days are what keep good habits going.

Some days you’ve got to play your ‘B’ game rather than your ‘A’ game. An excuse that you are not up to your ‘A’ game is not a good enough reason to not show up. On the contrary, your ‘A’ game gets better when you do the work even on your bad days

Everything is an 11

I don’t know what has changed but it seems that whatever the concern is that people have, on a scale of 1-10 that concern becomes an 11. Anything bigger than a 6 out of 10 just skips on by 7-10… if it’s more than a 6 it’s an 11.

No nuance, no compromise, no quarter.

Miscommunication? No they lied to me!

Apology? Not enough, I want retribution!

Compromise? No, full concession!

‘Why aren’t you following up on this right now, can’t you see that this is the most important thing in the world? This… This is an 11/10.’

I’m not saying it isn’t important, but I am saying that escalating concerns like this doesn’t often get the result people want. Animosity doesn’t enhance cooperation. Anger doesn’t promote resolution.

I’m reminded of the saying, “When you have one eye fixed on the destination, you only have one eye with which to find the way.”

Further to this, I think that when things escalate to 11, the chance of reaching that destination that was the original goal moves farther away. Reactionary, angry, point-for-point volleying of minutiae doesn’t allow for solutions to be found.

I have two friends that I’ve known for decades. One of them is always having to deal with incompetence around her. It’s unbelievable how much the people around her screw up. And if you ask her how her day is going, the idiot that screwed up is what she’ll tell you about.

I have another friend who always has things go her way. She’ll have an issue with something not going well and the first thing she’ll say is, “I’m sorry, I’m really trying my best not to be a Karen, but this doesn’t seem right.” She’ll specifically say things like, “I don’t need you to fix this for me, I just thought you should know.” And she gets thank you’s in the form of gift cards, free food, upgrades, etc.

For the first friend, everything is an 11, and she has to deal with 11’s all the time. For the second friend nothing is over a 7, and by the time things are done, they are actually a 2, or not even an issue anymore.

Maybe, just maybe, short of losing life or limb, nothing is an 11… And if you believe that, maybe, just maybe, you will find that life is a little easier, and happier, when you don’t ramp things up so much.

What’s the end goal? How can you get there in a way that makes you and the other person feel good about the outcome? I doubt you can do that while you are at an 11.

The opposite of depression

I shared a quote by Derek Sivers yesterday. It came from his podcast, which was actually him being interviewed on another podcast, Cathy Heller – Don’t keep your day Job.

In the podcast with Derek, Cathy says this:

“I feel like the greatest human need is people want to feel seen. But really when it comes down to it, what I’ve also noticed is that the opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s purpose. And so somehow when we help other people feel seen, and we give that to other people, that’s like the greatest feeling and then you do feel seen.”

A lightbulb went off in my head when I heard, “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, it’s purpose.”

Happiness is fleeting. It doesn’t sustain itself, not like depression can. Happiness isn’t a formidable foe to depression. But purpose is. Purpose can be maintained, and sustained. Purpose doesn’t dissipate when something goes wrong, like happiness does. Purpose forces you to look forward, to look ahead, to see promise beyond the moment.

The opposite of depression is purpose.

Negative conjecture

Part 1: The world is out to get me

I was fairly new to administration and I was dealing with a student who had parents who seemed to believe the entire world was out to get them. Everything that happened to them and their child was not by mistake or circumstance, or by choices made by their kid or themselves, these things were planned and designed to make their life difficult. In my dealings with them I too was part of the problem, I was an extension to the system trying to knock them down. So were the teachers and youth worker. We were all, in their eyes, conspiring to make their lives miserable.

Imagine living your life thinking and believing that you were a victim of the world. How would that impact your daily life? What would your thought process be when something, or in your eyes everything, doesn’t go your way? Imagine believing that everything that happens today is simply evidence of the continuation of everything bad that has happened before.

Part 2: The things we didn’t do

I spent a lot of (younger) years wishing I had taken up karate. My uncles and an aunt trained and I watched them. Now decades later they are instructors and leaders in their club back in Barbados. I was a tiny 7-year old kid when they started, and my mom didn’t want me getting hurt. Later, in high school, I took up water polo and that led me to some amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Coaching water polo is what inspired me to become a teacher. I’m not sure I would have followed either path had karate been my thing as a kid. I no longer look at this as a regret.

How many people do you know that define the world by what they didn’t do, on what they missed out on… on what could have been. How many people imagine the life choices they didn’t take, and see that life as so much better than their own?

I remember an English teacher in Grade 10 who told us how he was good friends with Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, and how Jim asked him to join along on this new venture. This teacher told us he didn’t regret his choice, but it was late enough in the year and we knew him well enough when he told us this, that we could hear the regret and disappointment in his voice. Strange that this is just about the only thing that I remember from this class.

Regret, disappointment. These thoughts define some people. People who live in a world that could have been, and never will be.

Part 3: The things that never happened

How many scenarios have gone through your head after you dealt with a scenario poorly? There was the thing you did and said, and there were so many other things that you could have done, could have said. ‘I wish, oh how I wish I could have handled that differently’. But your imagination doesn’t stop there. No, you go over the scenario again and again. Each time something different, something better happens in your mind. Your mind is filled with events that never happened; un-lived experiences; fictitious, more successful experiences.

Epilogue

Today is a new day, with new choices and new opportunities. We are shaped by our past, but our past is not our present. We learn, we grow, we make new choices. The world does not conspire against us. New opportunities will present themselves. Our choices we make can be different and better than the choices we made in the past. We are better off living our lives with positive conjecture… The world will conspire with us, not against us.