Prescriptions may not be dangerous? Mental framework and self-reflection

Wondering from where the purely “natural” approach to solving all ills came. Always a devotee of the religion of good exercise and good diet (though I’ve changed denominations many times: mostly cardio and bodyweight, lift only, low carb, high fat, high carb, eat more often, eat less often, I still haven’t dabbled that vegan sect), this idea of “not taking drugs” to heal or enhance life seems to have been added to the canon in my 20s. At 20-something, I was as physically indestructible as I was ever going to be, and my outlook was filtered through that lense: “Drugs are for weak, old, sick people.” “I can do anything on my own, including conquering aging and my genetics.”

Confirmation bias was reinforced by reading many articles sub-titled: “The best holistic, natural approach to lowering your cholesterol and/or boosting your testosterone without the need for those dangerous drugs. ” Though the reader is assured the articles’ authors have no financial stake in selling you a prescription, like those colluding, morally compromised doctors and their big pharma drug reps, the authors are instead selling products that compete with allopathic medicine for mindshare, and ultimately dollars: books and supplements. The authors rail against the dangerous doctors that “only have 15 minutes, max, with a patient, will shrug off any new research because they just can’t keep up with it all, and think that everything can be simply fixed by taking this dangerous pill that I’m going to write you a script for, forever.” Emotionally and intellectually convinced, I was wholly decided that I could conquer anything with the right plan and hard work. That plan, now supported by a body of scientific-sounding blog research, included the right exercise, “natural” supplementation, the right diet, and none of those dangerous prescription drugs.

It’s unfair to lambast your past self and say “I was young and stupid.” You were always younger than you are now. 10 years before you were 11 you were still babbling and shitting in diapers, 10 years before you were 21, you were 11 and all that pre-adolescence carried. In my teens, I knew it all and told it to everyone largely in absolutes. I unconsciously pent up internal conflict with many of these absolutes and turning the conflict outward to defend them; “If I can’t convince myself, then at least I’ll make you uncomfortable with the idea of even suggesting otherwise.” Coulda, woulda, shoulda, but I would’ve loved to have just slaughtered some of those sacred cows and frolickling bathed in their blood rather than beating other people away to defend those ideas. My adherence to absolutes cost me some valuable relationships.

As I aged through my 20s,  I became OK with the conflict internal of ideas. I struggled to consciously bring conflict to the fore, and to not insist on always finding resolution. Instead I started to learn to be in the in-between, suspended on a wire between towering concepts, penduluming between the two, holding both in balance, being at peace with indecision for a time, being rocked hypnotically by that perpetual motion, back and forth. If balancing two or more ideas for an action altering decision, I discovered there would always be as much time as needed to decide. With the amount of preparation or information you had at the time: no more, no less, necessity itself would push the decision forward.

Self-Imposed Short Memory in Sales

Sales and sports can share common psychological themes. Mark Bowden’s complete volume on the Philadelphia Eagles of the early 90s, Bringing the Heat, is a sometimes scientifically detailed report on the inner workings of the team. These observations turn to psychology on page 298: “Football players, and athletes in general, learn early the importance of not looking back. It’s a discipline that is drilled into them from the first week of organized play: Forget about what happened,  that’s in the past [...] Things that happened in the past, good things, bad things, whatever, they could only hurt you. [...]  The important thing is to leave them behind. Unburden the mind [...] Forget value judgements, critical analysis, self-doubt, worry; it’s just next play, next game, next season. That’s the cold logic of pro sports- You’re only as good as your next game- and that is how you had to proceed. [...]The pressures of the game are heavy enough without carrying mental baggage of with you out on the field. At its ideal, it’s like practicing Zen. You live entirely in the moment, fully alive and open to new opportunity, unmuddied by the past, unformed in the future.“

Bowden calls it Zen, I call it Stoicism in the classical meaning of the word. The concept is the same. You only have your present actions now, today to drive you forward, and once the day is done, it’s now, today, again tomorrow.

Don’t dwell on your past wins; no one else cares. Management needs you to produce the same as last year and then some. On a good year, you’re down 20% over last year, before you even start due to: non-repeatable projects, your accounts being acquired or going under, rubbing someone the wrong way and getting fired outright or seeing her spend with you decline to the minimum, having your best spending contact have his budget slashed or move to a different role, your offering is no longer relevant, you just get straight beat by a competitor. New customers you’re trying to acquire won’t care how many awards you’ve won. Their needs demand your attention not in the past, but in the now. Current customers aren’t stepping into the same stream twice, as they and their industries face the day to day change as you. Your customers need your best service, consultation, and offerings not in the past, but now.

Don’t dwell on your past losses; only you care. Debrief, actually write notes down, as over time, your memory tells you false narratives that build false assumptions (read Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)). Even a complete set of notes about a lost deal are only your side and will be missing multiple crucial pieces of information you’ll just never know (see Black Swans from Mike Voss’ book Never Split the Difference.) Commit the notes to paper and the learning from the loss to memory.

Tell yourself about all your previous wins and losses: “that’s in the past,” and compete for the opportunity before you now.

How to Thrive Rather than Survive on the Spinning Rock: Sleep

Lights Out is an entertaining, sometimes nutty/crunchy read; it teaches the importance of syncing daily rhythms with those of planet. If the gravity of the moon pulls the oceans that cover 70% of the surface area of this giant space rock rushing and spinning through space, we're foolish to think that we little creatures are somehow unaffected by the relative movements of this planet and the sun.

Turn off the lights soon after the sun goes down and go to sleep. Sure, we can stay up past sunset, but remember that until the electrification of lighting, there was evening and there was morning, the next day. Do not fool yourself thinking that this light/ dark cycle is not impressed on your genes from generations past. Don't fight against your body and the movement of the celestial bodies. 

Wind down your day at 9. Do no more task-based work. Go to bed at 10PM. Wake up when the sun wakes you. The value of 8 hrs of sleep from 10PM- 6AM is greater than the value of 9 hours from 11:30-8:30. The more synced you are with a natural light/ dark rhythm, the more you're in harmony with the rhythms of the universe. Now who sounds crunchy?

The current health/disease state of my heart: Part 1: I am afraid for good reason.

*** Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, this is not medical advice. This is my own story and observations.

We’re all going to zero, but still need to look forward to that future, however long it may last. It’s fundamental to not go gently into that good  night. This is my story to plan for my future and to execute on that plan before this timeline executes me.

The general fear of death is a fact of human existence. That fear stays in fuzzy abstraction because none of us know the hour. But what if you knew statistically how you would die? As smart, rich, (and desperate) technocrats are planning to live forever, outlasting death generally and cancer specifically. The big C is a gotcha that can getcha from so many different angles, in such slow and horrible ways, people seem to forget about the biggest risk of any early demise: heart attack, specifically soft plaque rupture causing and choking off of a coronary artery.

“But we shouldn’t worry because only poor, dumb, fat people die of heart disease, right?” It seems so easy to solve for the runaway largest killer: “Just don’t be fat: eat right and exercise, watch your cholesterol” is about the best information commonly offered. That advice helps, but doesn’t come close to solving the problem. Avoid going broad and equating only the metabolic syndrome (diabesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia) with risk, because if avoiding a heart attack as as easy as “don’t be overweight: exercise and eat right, “ my mom wouldn’t have had a heart attack at 48, and I wouldn’t have walked into my first cardiologist appointment with a diagnosed 50/50 shot of having a MI at some point in my life.

While it’s good to be afraid of the quickly painful, “dropping dead of a heart attack,” (cardiac arrest), it’s more realistic to be terrified of surviving a heart attack (soft plaque rupture causing myocardial infarction) only to be physically debilitated by the fractional strength of your heart, or mentally incapacitated by having oxygen cut off to the brain too long, or dragging around a crate of high dosage meds, and all the side effects that go with them. So far I’ve learned it’s smart to be afraid, and to use that fear to help solve for my own unique risk puzzle.

PRI Reshapes Thinking about Torso to Scapular Positioning.

Check out Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) for a number of reasons, including relieving shoulder and hip pain, as well as turning down the sympathetic nervous system via learning full exhalation. In traditional physical therapy models, one assumes that the smaller portions of the joints are the mobile ones and that they articulate around the larger portions. We all know the knee bone connects to the ... thigh bone and the ... thigh bone connects to the ... pelvis bone, and the scapula bone connects to the ... well it only really has that one very small articulation at the acromion process and beautifully floats in the musculature on top of the rib cage. Because the relative un-stability of the scapula, it makes for a perfect example of how to use the PRI model to reshape our thinking about scapular positioning.

Traditional training/ PT models focus on scapular depression and retraction to improve posture and shoulder mechanics. People do a bunch of PT drills like rows with the cues to bring your shoulders back and down to your rib cage so that they aren't riding up high and making your shoulders round forward all scrunchy. PRI focuses on re-building the base, the larger part of that entire "joint." Instead of bringing your scapula to your rib cage, you just bring your rib cage to your scapula.

Next time you're standing in the same spot for 10 minutes, take a break to reinforce good torso  (not shoulder mechanics). Start with a PRI basic cat-back drill: all fours, hips over knees, hands under shoulders, push down on the floor and twist in the outsides of the palms (feel the rotator cuff fire), then breathe to expand your upper back, blow out out all your air, and let your full exhalation draw your back into a catback, pelvis tucking under hard so  that the abs fire. Hold this position. Keep the neck long, looking 2 feet ahead,  and breathe into the  middle of the upper back only, right between the shoulder blades (resist any additional urge to breathe in the belly and therefore relax it, also resist breathing into the neck) , feel your upper T-spine expand, keep pushing away with the the pelvis tucked and  again breathe out all the way until your abs cramp. Repeat 2 more times.  This drill reinforces the opposite of chest out, shoulders back and down, overextended "bro," upper-lower open scissor, and automatically drops both your hips and shoulders into a calm relaxed repose. Return to standing and note the difference.

In Between Sonar Sweeps ... Ping...

To fellow salespeople,

 It gets quiet and lonely in the submarine when you're pinging out into the ocean for treasure.   

Sales is many no's, some yes's, and even more silence, where sometimes the only feedback you're getting back is the echo of your own messaging on trench walls. The hardest part of sales is the silence in between pings: calls, emails, meetings. The more type A, or high D you are, the more anxiety you have about delays. As a high D and all that goes with it, I like actions and outcomes, a clear "yes!", a clear "no!", or "let's keep talking," to which I follow-up with "when?" to get a "yes" on an agreed plan of action. (Asking a customer to give you one of three answers is a known limiter to the nuances of human interaction, so I'll take suggestions on how expand possible outcomes.) 

I've heard good advice: "If someone doesn't get back to you, assume they have perfectly good reasons." I think about my own life: a car needs repair, you get sick, you have a day-long customer meeting, a day-long sales meeting, a half-day training, vacation, a customer fire drill; things just get pushed. Add to a normal stack of time demands a micro-manager boss directing and redirecting your time or your initiatives, or kids at home (I have neither), and my empathy for people instantly triples. Delays in response should be expected; silence is normal.

And yet, that crummy little inner voice creates a one-sided dialogue in that silence between pings. It starts by asking: “ What’s the customer thinking about this next step? Are they thinking at about it at all?” Then the voice chirps with indignant accusations like: “It's not fair! I get judged on my response time, but I can’t get a reply when I need it." And then self-doubt: “Did I bug them too much? Did I not follow-up enough? Did a competitor blow away my price? Did the budget get slashed? Did they pivot to another project? Does my advocate still work there? Did I provide enough value? Is my customer relationship strong enough? Does my customer trust me?"

Crush this inner dialogue like a submarine beyond its depth with these two strategies: 1) Trust that your anxiety, your feel of failing, as evidenced by this inner-dialogue, drives the right behaviors. 2) Trust that the right behaviors, the correct actions you take as a result of this dialogue, will be enough, in so far as you can affect the outcome. As an earnest, but rather poor student of Stoic philosophy, I try to live by one its principles: “Think about only those things to which you can directly or indirectly affect the outcome, act to affect the outcome, and don’t second-guess your actions afterwards.”

 What’s the hardest part of sales for you, and how do you solve for it?

Eating: Distillation of concepts to that sweet nectar

There are 100s of ways to get control of your fatness. Distillthe 100s down to putting pen to paper and plan out your meals for the week. Out of planning comes: semblance of a macronutrient ratio plan (if your meal plan is making you fat, change your ratios), portion control plan (you need to plan how much you're going to cook),  nutrient timing plan (you know when you're going to eat, as you can predict prep time, or better yet, have it prepped ahead of time), quality control (no one plans to eat cold pizza for breakfast and grab McDonald's twice a week) satiation (no one spends time cooking a planned meal and then adds in 3 Cheetos snacking sessions to make up the hunger delta), money cost savings (predictable budgeting, eating in is less on average than out, also factor in cost of gas driving for fast food), time cost savings (batching prep and reheating is less than time in the car getting every incemental meal either from the grocery or a fast food joint),  brain power savings for decision making (you don't have to switch tasks to come up with something to eat multiple times per day, instead batch the decisions to 20min/ wk).

Physical Training: Budokon: stability in movement

On Friday, 20 other people and I met  in a sweaty, low cielinged basement in Narbeth, PA for a 2 hour Budokon 101 class. I was interested in the martial arts/ yoga/ quadruped crossover method to improve fluidity in my warm-ups and morning "mini-sessions."

I latched onto Yogi Adam Marcus' instructive comments about one of the movement series' start and endpoints, paraphrasing: "the middle, the transition, is where you develop strength, mobility, and stability." As he demonstrated point a and point b, he showed how you can just stay tucked up and tight, in a little ball, and hop from one position to another (think Golem) or you can find the full range of motion for the entire movement, by taking the transition as long and as powerfully as possible (think Cirque de Soleil).  By taking the movement through it's full expression, you unlock your body's reflexive lengthening and shortening, relaxing in one area, contracting in another.  Each person's body adjusts around their respective anthropometry and limitations, and therefore each movement looks different for everyone. 

My AM routines usually involved several corrective exercises intended to mobilize joints, usually my hips as priority. Most exercise have reps with distinct start and endpoints that are intended to move the joint through full range or shortened ROM to emphasize a single configuration, eg. full hip ER and extension in the butterfly bridge. This Budokon class reminded me that we largely live in the middle of these ranges, and full body motions allow for  reciporcal compensations via a series of cross patterns (front to back, side to side, top to bottom spiraling). Quadruped movements specifically unlock crisscrossing neural pathways (see Gray Cook, Postural Restoration Institute, Common Compensatory Pattern). 

Beyond correctives, apply this contrast of Budokon to lifting barbells. Until I was 19 or so, most of the instruction I got on lifting was from books and especially bodybuilding mags, showing photos of the start and end positions with nothing in between. Even in my Crossfit days, the "points of performance for a movement" were the start and end of the movement. In powerlifting start and finish are essential, as they are the common standard of competition. Even for training purposes, you can contend that the beginning and the end of most lifts are paramount; for example, a deadlift starts with setting up and bracing (start) before entering the "loading tunnel, " where start position ideally stay constant (don't round your back as you pull) and finishes with full hip and knee extension (end).  (Side note, you could contend that how you lift the weights in bodybuilding style training is also more important than the beginning and end point, but that's a whole other discussion). For Budokon, and probably by further extension practices that incorporate style points, eg, dance,  the middle of the movement is key. It's not ending up at point B, but the "how" you do it.  In Budokon, it's best to express the full transition between A and B. People can identify qualitatively the additional effort to cover that distance with more effort as style, fluidity. It will give you more total training benefit, especially as an adjunct to "I lift things up and put them down" style weight training and it just looks cooler.