Blessed

Another morning of plodding my mile and a bit route, hoping that I'm not doing more harm than good.

I've really been spoilt over the last five and a quarter years. I've only had a handful of colds and most of them have fizzled out in a day or two.

Rather than feeling sorry for myself (you know what it's like when us men get colds, or man flu), I'm deciding to use this harsher cold to remind me just how lucky I am.

Maybe my daily mile out in the fresh air helps keep colds at bay, or maybe it's just a coincidence. It doesn't really matter. I'm grateful for this cold reminding me how blessed I am.

Is that the secret?

Well I got round my mile-and-a-bit circuit again this morning, but it wasn't any easier. My tissue grasped in my glove was one of my most important pieces of kit this morning.

It reminds me of my first marathon back in 1988, when I suffered through the last ten miles of the route telling myself that I must run to the next lamppost, then I'd allow myself to walk. Then I'd tell myself the same thing again.

Isn't it funny how we can fool our minds with such obvious tricks?

I guess it's about making small commitments and then recommitting again, and again, and again.

Is that the secret of success?

Fingers crossed

It's one of those few days I've had in the past 1,903 days when I've gone out for my run with a stinking cold.

On days like today I wonder if my running streak will come to a sudden end.

If I can drag myself round tomorrow morning I will, providing it's still no more than a cold.

It's all part of the game I guess. It just doesn't seem quite as much fun at the moment.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow morning.

A smile each day

I typed a smile each day by accident one day when writing about my daily mile, but when I noticed what I'd done I decided that perhaps my fingers had some wisdom of their own that my brain hadn't thought of before.

What difference do you think it would make if you were to smile at people each day for no other reason than just because you chose to?

When I remember to, I try to do this, when I manage to get out of my own head and stop thinking about my day, my challenges, my problems, and put my focus on the person I'm coming into contact with.

I did this on Saturday morning in a take away coffee shop on my way to a train the trainer workshop, and was amazed when the barista told me that my cappuccino was on the house.

When I asked him why, he said it was because I was so smiley, as he smiled back at me.

I can't tell you what a lift it gave me, and is obviously still giving me, all for the price of a smile.

Touching my life

I found out yesterday that a friend and colleague of mine who I worked with two years ago, who is probably about fifteen years younger than me, is in the last few days of his life.

While thinking about him, and his loved ones, it's also made me think of my own mortality and that of my own loved ones.

It's also reminded me of the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and helped me gauge how I'm measuring up against them. In case you haven't come across it, these are the top five:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I'd let myself be happier.

My thoughts are with you and your loved ones at this time G. 

Thank you for touching my life, however briefly, and for making my life richer just from knowing and working with you.

Using forfeits

I’ve just come across a really good idea about maintaining positive powerful daily habits, once again from Leo Babauta’s latest book, Zen Habits.

I’ve been very successful with my run a mile each day habit, but not quite so good with other habits, such as daily writing or daily business development work.

In Zen Habits Leo theorises that when you miss a day of your daily habit, you often beat yourself up, which makes it much harder to pick the habit up again the next day. 

I completely agree with this and I’ve had situations where this has been the case.

When you’re feeling bad, perhaps guilty and thinking that you’re a bit of a failure, you’re not in your most resourceful and creative state. 

What you should be doing when you miss a day is coming from a positive state of mind, working out what derailed you and what you need to do to adjust things so that it doesn’t happen again.

So if you set a rule that it's OK to miss a day, but set yourself a forfeit if you miss two days in a row, it works better.

That way you’re in a more positive state of mind to ensure you don't miss the next day, and to adjust your plans so it’s not so easy to miss another day for the same reason.

I’ll give it a go and let you know how it pans out.

The best Friday the 13th

This morning was my 1,899th consecutive day of running my mile each day. It feels like it's a good number.

It's also Friday the 13th, which to me always feels like it's going to be a great day, although others can often feel nervous about it.

Superstitions are interesting aren't they. They're prime examples of how we take experiences, or learnings from others, and project those learnings into our future. 

Why should a day that has a particular combination of the day of the week and day number of the month end up being any better or worse than any other day? It doesn't make any sense.

Every day has the potential to be the best day of your life. 

In fact every day is the best day of your life. After all, we have no idea whether or not it will be the last day of our life, so as it's the only day we absolutely know that we have, how can it not be our best day?

It's the only one we know we've got, so it's not a good day to put off something that we'd love to do until tomorrow. We never live in tomorrow, only today.

Have the best Friday the 13th you've ever had today. How can it be anything else?

Feed the right wolf

There's a story of an elderly cherokee brave telling his grandson about life.

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, jealousy, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

"The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

"The same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one you feed."

Which wolf will you feed today?

Same words, different meaning

Someone taught me this useful sentence to demonstrate the ambiguity of language, especially when it's written and not delivered face-to-face or over the telephone.

"I never said he stole the money."

Let me demonstrate by stressing different words in the above sentence...

I never said he stole the money

I never said he stole the money

I never said he stole the money

I never said he stole the money

I never said he stole the money

Can you see that those five sentences above contain exactly the same words spelt in exactly the same way, and yet each of those sentences has a different meaning from the other four.

Be careful of the written word. Other people can choose which word they want to stress and therefore the meaning they make out of what you write, whether you intend it or not.

Water the plants

One of the most powerful aspects of my mile each day habit is that I didn't set out to achieve anything from the habit. There is no end I had in mind, and therefore there's never been a possibility of me being disappointed because I've spent so much time on it and not achieved my goal.

Leo Babauta talks about this in his excellent new book Zen Habits. He describes it as like planting a seed and watering it each day and simply seeing what comes up and if it bears any fruit or not.

I have been very lucky and ended up with a monthly column in Running Fitness magazine, but it certainly wasn't a goal of mine, it was an unexpected fruit.

It's very different to starting a habit because you have a definite end goal in mind, where there's a chance that should it look like you won't achieve your exact goal, you may become disillusioned and give up on the habit.

There's a lot to learn from nature and the natural growth cycle. Something we seem to have largely forgotten.

Start new habits because they support the life you want to live.

As James Allen said, "Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny."

Any body knows

When you've been injured or ill it can be incredibly frustrating when you start running again after a prolonged lay off.

As is often the case your mind is telling you one thing while your body is telling you something else.

I find that when the two are out of alignment invariably it's the body you need to listen to.

If you were to strap a heart rate monitor on, your body would tell you that although your mind is frustrated because you're running slower than before, your body's actually working harder than it did before you were knocked off course when you were running faster.

Similarly when you look outside and it's wet, windy, dark and unwelcoming, it's your mind that rebels against the idea of heading out for a run.

The more we learn to listen to our bodies and not let our heads dominate our decisions, the better we will be as runners and as effective functioning human beings.

Oh, and by the way, you know what's a great way to tune in to your body?

Go for a run with no technology, no music, no watch or any other gadget. 

Just run free with no plans and no expectations. 

Enjoy the thrill of your body moving and communicating with you the way it's supposed to.

The attraction formula

I have a network marketing business in addition to my coaching, and in the past few months I've not given it any attention, and therefore the business has been static.

In the past few weeks I've begun to spend some time on it, not huge amounts but I've tried to be more consistent (as in a mile each day).

What's curious is that since I've been working on it a bit more, not only has my personal business started to get going again, but so has that of my team. In fact their businesses have grown even more than mine.

And I haven't been cajoling or trying to fire them up.

A colleague in the business said to me a little while ago how strange it was that whenever they were in consistent action on a daily basis, not only did they start to generate more business but it's also like business is attracted to them, and people seem to start calling them to ask about it when they never do that when they're inactive.

Once again, it's that magic mile each day formula.

Connecting the dots

Day 1,890 of my experiment to see how many days I can run at least a mile each day.

This is one of those days when it's just about putting one foot, or one mile, in front of the last one you put down.

Even when you can't remember why you're doing it, you just do it. After all, you always feel better for having done it and that's a good enough reason for me.

Sometimes things become apparent over time. 

As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect the dots when you look back. They're not often apparent looking forwards.

The light never goes out

When it's dark because it's night, because it's stormy, because it's winter, or because it's cloudy, the sun never goes out, it just becomes obscured from our view. This is even true in the Arctic when the sun doesn't appear for months.

It's the same with us humans. When the light seems to go out of our world, when things are really dark in our lives or we think we've lost our capabilities, our confidence or self belief we used to have when we were younger, it hasn't gone, it's just been obscured.

The light is always there. We don't have to start again or create a new light, all we have to do is find the light that's become obscured.

These late winter / early spring morning runs I'm having are great metaphors for that very thing. As I run these mornings, unless it's cloudy or stormy I can see the sky starting to slowly lighten up as the dawn gets nearer.

Freeing your victim

When everything feels like it's on top of you, you can't move and you don't know what you can do to free yourself, you're very likely in victim mode. You have no control of your situation, everyone and everything else is to blame and there's absolutely nothing you can do.

Or is there?

When you're feeling like a victim, you're generally focused on the problems you have, and what happens when you focus on something? 

In my experience, the more you focus on something the bigger it gets. Think of looking through a magnifying glass, binoculars or a telescope.

So if we know that about focus, the logical course must be to focus on the solution, and then surely that will get bigger.

But the snag is that when you're in victim mode you are not at your most resourceful. You are not at your creative best, and not in touch with your intuitive side. You are likely stuck in your head, trying to keep up with those endless problem thoughts, along with doom and gloom scenarios, going round and round.

So you can't see a solution.

But what if you were to forget about trying to find a solution, and ask yourself, "If I had thought of a solution, even though I have no idea what that might be right now, and I had also followed that through and solved the problem, what would that be like?"

Pretty soon you'd have a much rosier picture, perhaps images, thoughts and feelings of relief, excitement and being successful.

You're now in resourceful mode, no longer a victim.

Now's the time to think of potential solutions.

By the way you can do all this on a reasonably short run.

Just saying...

The power of team

As a coach, I'm often working with clients on my own and when I wonder whether I could have done things differently there's no one else to chat it through with. That's why most coaches use supervisors, and what works even better for me is supervision groups.

What I frequently learn from these groups is that when I feel that I must be the only one with these issues, I invariably discover that there are others who are thinking the same thoughts and feeling very similar feelings.

It's very empowering to realise that not only are there others who are in a very similar situation to you, but that there are others who have a different perspective and can provide some new ideas. 

It's also great that you are able to help colleagues who have different issues by shedding a slightly different light on a situation that they are challenged by.

Although I'm working on my own, it feels like I'm part of a team and that when I coach someone it isn't just me, I'm connected to my team of like minded people, who are right behind me.

Who is in your team?