Lessons from my grandfathers part one

My dad’s father had a little ritual when going swimming: he would go to the edge of the water and splash a little bit of water over his chest before getting in. He used to say he was getting his heart ready for the swim.
I tried it and it helps a lot to minimise the shock of moving from warm to cold temperature quickly. At first I thought it was a bit odd, but then I tried it myself and it made a lot of sense. It makes your swim in cold water (cold compared to the air temperature) comfortable from the start, rather than having those initial moments where you go through a not quite pleasant adjustment period.

Babysteps

It is good to aspire to lofty ideals, but it can also be quite intimidating if you can’t imagine how to get to there from here.  Looking at people that have achieved the mastery you aspire to can be intimidating, until you realise that they too started from where you are and that there are intermediate steps that you need to go through before reaching their level. You have to pay your dues. Continually challenging yourself is a way to ensure you continue progressing and do not become stagnant. Another aspect of the process is to be honest with yourself about your current skill level. This is especially important in more risky pursuits. You can push yourself, but within limits. You can jump in the deep end of the pool, but it might not be a good idea to attempt crossing the English channel just yet. Keep track of your ability and extend and push yourself, but do not over extend. Be patient with yourself; this is easy if you compare your current ability with where you started from and see how far you have already progressed. Even if you think you are worse now than when you started, at least now you know enough to know this, whereas at the beginning you may not have had enough knowledge to assess your level. Keep chunking up and enjoy each step as part of your journey to mastery.

Challenge yourself

Practising the basics lays a good groundwork for more advanced skills. Combining this with challenging yourself can help you progress even faster. Taking on more advanced practices may seem daunting and humbling as people find themselves struggling with something more difficult. The payoff of getting good at it is self-evident. Less obvious is that the more basic skills will also improve. An example would be how practicing scales at double speed makes you play better at your normal speed. Jumping in the deep end may make you swallow a lot of water, but it makes you better at dealing with the shallow end.

The importance of showing up

Gradual small improvements tend to outlast rapid sweeping changes. Tending a plant on a daily basis is more effective than irregularly spending large amounts of time and resources on it.
The total improvement is greater than the sum of the individual improvements because of the time in between each engagement, just like music is defined by the space between the sounds. Finding a rhythm makes our efforts count for more than if we performed them haphazardly.
It can be tempting to skip a session, but just by showing up, even if the result of the session is not impressive in itself, over time we earn compound interest on our efforts.
So next time you are tempted to skip it, just remember: all you have to do is show up. The rest will take care of itself

Dealing with panic

Lots of people experience paralyzing fear or panic when they are faced with high pressure situations, or what they perceive as high stress situations. The problem is that they freeze up in exactly the situation when they should be most responsive and need to react effectively and efficiently, like during exams.
I find the following to be effective in dealing with this problem: imagine, using all your senses, what you would experience firsthand after successfully dealing with the situation at hand. Normally this is enough, but in some cases it can be necessary to downplay the seriousness of any potential negative outcome that may be triggering the panic. This is done by facing it head on. Think of the negative outcome as if it is happening on a movie screen and you are in the audience. See the repercussions playing out on the screen and how they are dealt with successfully and in a satisfactory way. The negative outcome may even lead to better opportunity. This will minimise anxiety and the positive imagining will motivate.

Keeping your New Year’s resolutions?

We all set out to turn over a new leaf and change some bad habits for good ones at the start of a New Year. For a lot of people, making this change last proves to be all but impossible. Now I know you are one of those that can make change stick. I am talking about other people out there and one of the obstacles that they face, namely secondary gain.
Secondary gain can sabotage even goals set with the most vivid full-colour 3D surround sound moving picture vision with smell and taste on top. It is essentially secondary “benefits” people gain from a bad habit. For example smoking could have the secondary gain of social interaction or camaraderie with other smokers.
Ideally, what they should do is to acknowledge the secondary gains attached to the unwanted behaviour and then come up with a different strategy to get the benefit without the unwanted behaviour. In other cases just acknowledging the secondary gain exists and uncovering its nature is enough to make a difference.

Beginner’s Mind

The map is not the territory. In any area, you are considered an expert if you have a firm grasp of the “map”, the conceptualisation, of the specific area. This knowledge truly is power and makes the expert effective and efficient most of the time.
For some problems, the map, by it’s very nature, does not provide the information necessary to come up with a solution. Sometimes we need to get rid of our concepts and their interrelationships and truly look at the problem space as a beginner would. Sometimes the emperor wears no clothes.
Expectations are also antithetical to unconditioned mind. Regaining the childlike wonder we had as beginners can provide new inspiration and invigorate our creativity.

Vote with your wallet

We live in a consumer society. Nothing you say or do can change that. Rather than be a dirty anti-consumerist hippie, you should embrace this fact and make the world work for you.
Ok, now that we’ve moved from denial to acceptance I propose that consuners should vote with their wallets if they want to make a real difference.
Buy products from companies that sponsor sports/charities/causes that you care about. Boycott companies that use photoshopped ads that make women you care about feel inadequate. Spend money on environmentally friendly products. Use the power of consumerism for good, or evil if you are that way inclined. As long as you do it with conscious awareness.

Robot precision II

So far so good with using the robot metaphor to increase the speed of my piano playing. I have added an enhancement. When the robot makes the same mistake more than once, I basically let it loop and at the point before it makes the mistake I consciously play the right note. This is similar to ‘punch recording’ where you replace sections of a music recording with better versions by quickly punching in, play the section correctly, then punch out again.

Yule

The fact that the Ancients put their biggest holiday at the darkest, most inhospitable time of the year gives a lot of insight into their minds. I see it as a defiant and positively optimistic affirmation of the fact that the darkest moment is just before the dawn. Their wisdom shines on in the legacy they’ve left that lives on despite opposition and subsequent co-opting by the Early Church.
This is something I only came to realise since moving to the Northern Hemisphere. In the south Christmas is of course the height of summer