Being Well and Being Better

What does be well mean? It's a hard question to frame. More specifically, if you can bring to mind some of your bucket list items, the things that you still want to do in life, whether you're my daughter Jess, age at 15 and what she wants to do, my mum, who is older than 15, but I know not to name that special number because I'll pay for it later on. But what are the things that you still want to do? Be it physical, mental or crazy challenges in life. And then think, what do we need to do those things? And ultimately what we need to achieve those things is what is known as health span. Lifespan is how long we live. Healthspan is how long we live a life of good health, free from chronic diseases and illnesses, maintaining good physical, mental and emotional well being to enjoy life to the fullest. And what I've Learned over my 5 or so years of studying this and 4 years hardcore is the journey to that is through a mental fitness practice. And mental fitness is this broad encompassing thing beyond just movement. That's what we eat, how we recover mindfulness, empathy, curiosity, how we socialize, how we regulate our emotions. And then when you step into some of the craziest stuff around, cold and hot therapies. Let's say you want your next five years to be the best five years of your life in any way, shape or form. Let's say your next five are going to be awesome and you might go, well, it can't be. Well, if you say you can't, you are absolutely right. If you say you can, you might. So why could your next five years not be the best in your life? You know, what's getting in the way, what needs fixing, what needs change. So let's make the assumption we need to do some work on ourselves and change something. But change isn't achieved through information, inspiration or changing. Sorry, shaming, sorry. Change is achieved when it's aligned to personal values that inspire us. And the inspiration follows an action. But the action the inspiration comes from is our own action. There is no motivation, fear. We start our own inspiration. And it is mostly action that is caused by discomfort. And that's what drives us to improve. So change doesn't come from nights like this. It doesn't come from the greatest book you ever read in your life. It happened when you did something, when you actually physically enacted the change process. So on that, let's do a quick whistle stop tour around change in habits and just how much they impact who we are and what we do. Change begins with awareness. So what I'm going to do make it easy. There's a great mafia quote which is start by removing the pebble from your shoe. So we wouldn't take the pebble out of our shoe unless we knew it was there. We tend not to respond to something unless it's annoying us. So the awareness generally comes from this culprit. Back in the 70s, there was two people, James Truska and Carlo de Clement, who proposed what is now known as the transtheoretical model of change. And they broke the change process for sustainable change, meaningful change, into six steps. First was that awareness. It's pretty much pedaling shoe analogy. The next part that comes after the awareness is contemplation. There appears to be a pebble in my shoe. Keep walking. Then preparation, sort of. I've got to do something about this pebble. Now, where coaching comes into it is between this third phase of preparation and the fourth phase of action, where we actually start doing something about it. And that's when coaching is effective, because you can't work with someone who isn't actually ready to do so. Then after this buildup of process, we go through a maintenance phase where we're living through these new behaviours and new change. We're no longer jumping in the pebbles, we're walking on the path, we've got new boots, we're not walking our own in thongs. We've got these processes in place. Invariably, though, there is then a fallback or a relapse phase where those habits just haven't quite stuck. And two things happen to that is, it's either we get back on day one, can start all over again, or we remember that time that we nearly achieved that great thing and that's where the relapse really kicks in. But then what happens when we're in this change process is we start to see this thing everywhere, that the problem we see or the symptom or the thing that we are responding to appears to be everywhere. This is known as awareness amplification or selective attention or selective awareness. This is part of our brain called the reticular activation system. Basically its purpose is that as we focus our attention on a new piece of information, be it a thought, a desire and attention, something that is annoying us or whatever, our reticular activation system selectively filters the information around us and we see it everywhere. Now, there is a great example of this known as the Baader Meinhof phenomenon, which is talking about frequency illusion. Let's say you decided you're going to buy a white 3 Series BMW, BMW. They are suddenly everywhere. Actually there's no more white BMWs on the road. It's just that our mind is now tuned into focused system, this thing. And where this becomes really important is the reticular activation system. Can triggers, but it can also be used to help us build momentum in change. And I'll touch on this a little bit later on. So if discomfort is the root of change and it stimulates change, would you deliberately insert discomfort into your life if you knew that the change would be for the better? The smooth sea doesn't make the best sail. But if you go back to the best thing you ever achieved in your life, that moment where you were the rock star, to keep the goal, the pay rise, the delivery of the project, the painful birth, whatever the most astounding thing you've ever achieved was which you are now going to better because your next five years are going to be the best in your life. Was that thing you did easy? Did you have to rise to a new level through taking on a new challenge? Did you do something for the first time? Did you have to go above and beyond anything you ever thought possible? Happiness doesn't come when we win the lottery. We all know that they'll lose their money, they all end up miserable. Happiness comes when we earn. It's about the change in going after the things that really matters. 12 second reflection. Consciously pausing to acknowledge a great decision. Easiest one would be the smoker who's trying to give up smoking. And they look at the cigarette, the same trigger evolves and they go, no, that's a cigarette. It might be the donut, the beer, picking up the phone, yelling at the child, whatever it is, that moment where you catch yourself and go no. Taking 12 seconds to then ponder that great decision engages our brain's reward system. We release dopamine. It enhances the sense of accomplishment and the value that we place on the action that we just carried out. Strengthens the neural pathways associated with the behavior and in turn increases the chance of us doing it again by 30% more next time they're pregnant. 12 second consultation. So back to this mental fitness. What is mental fitness? Well, mental fitness is a resilient mind that thrives in the chaos of life. It's putting focus, purpose and emotional balance. And if you think about mental fitness practice as a gymnasium for the mind, we'd be open 24 7, we'd be training in boot camps with other people. We'd be focusing on what we eat, how we move, mindfulness, resistance training and recovery. These Are the practices that when focused on, contribute towards people. These are the things that we need to do. And if you look at mental fitness versus mental health, and you look at mental health as something that takes place in a hospital where we are recovering from something that we were not equipped to deal with, whether it be an emotional trauma or a physical trauma, we're searching for a cure. A mental fitness practice is all about elevating our threshold. So when the unknown shit happens, we're able to stay present in the moment, be it physical, mental or emotional, maintain our calm and continue to operate at our very best level under depression. And if you put that though, in that context of that mental gymnasium, or think about it as going to a gym, you know, 70% of gym memberships finish after three months. So many people, vast majority of people let their gym membership slaps. So why do we stop going even though we know we should? Why do we stop doing the things we should be doing? One of the fascinating aspects around coaching is understanding that emotions by far override logic when it comes to implementing meaningful change in our life. Which is why marketing appeals to our emotions, not about the facts, the problem products that we are purchasing. And so if I put that in the context of whys that don't work in the gym analogy, I'm going to the gym to get fit. Why do you want to get fit? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to look better or have more energy? What are you going to do with that? It's meaningless. Why would you bother getting fit for the sake of it? It actually doesn't achieve anything. So in the context of health and wellness coaching that is sort of ascribed in Australia, sort of three or four main aspects to it. The one is that what we have at the very, very top is the vision, the North Star, the guiding principle, the thing that pumps us, that gets us up on the day when we do not want to do the hard stuff. The vision is what gets us out, is what stops the cigarette, it stops the drink, it makes you eat the good meal, it stops you having the cheat day on the donut. But visions are often a long way away. 18 months, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. So what we do in coaching is we tend to work on a three month principle. Three months is about as far as humans can plan ahead logically. Because when we plan, the further it gets away, the less actual idea we have of how something is going to pan out. Because the moment you start, you have more information and things change. So we work on three Month goals and we tend to pick three big three monthly goals, elevation and performance across three different areas of our existence that would lead to towards that vision. So if you like, the vision is the why, the three monthly goals of the how and then it's a 13 week program, a 12 week program. So 12 steps up to achieving that three month goal. So the weekly sessions are about what can I do right now? Because what can I do right now is really important. So if it was, you know, in three months time, I want to be able to run five kilometers, you know, five days a week or week one is go buy some shoes, week two is go find a few different places you can run out. Week three run 300 meters, then walk 500, then go home until it's five days or 5Ks. It's that gradual stepping up the role of the coach in all this is to keep people motivated, inspired, not to give them answers to their questions, but to show them how to question their own answers. If you tell someone what to do, they might follow. People align much more to their own drivers and, and are significantly more likely to follow through with change if it's their own reasoning and their own idea and their own. To bring about change takes about three months and we need the emotional connection to the why for it to work. Some whys that have worked in both coaching and life that I've experienced that have really sustained people through really tough periods of time, real physical, mental, emotional discomfort have been things like I want to be fit and healthy enough to run around in my. You can visualize, you can see that I've decided to stop drinking and exercising more because my dad's been having microscopes and he always drank a lot. And I've got the same sort of things going on in my body. But I want to have an active life. I want to be physically fitter as the company just brought forward my retirement age and I want to grow my own fruit and vegetables to feed my family. These things is where we actually visualize what we are doing. One of the aspects about coaching and setting goals is we should not focus on outcomes. We cannot control outcomes. Coaching and setting goals are significantly more successful when we have goals about what we're going to be doing. But to change ourselves, we need to know ourselves. It's one of the really cool things I've come to understand is reality is a construct. So my reality right now is different to your reality right now. 20 odd of us in same room, only one person talking, but 25 different reasons for conviction. It's not very natural. Your reality is different as you're looking at me and I'm looking at you. Einstein, who is a great science geek, summed this up with A human being is part of a whole called by us the universe, a part limited by time and space. The human experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. And this delusion is like a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only a few people nearest us. And our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. What he was touching, he was about empathy. We see reality through a filter of experience, values, bias, chemicals, natural orientation. Everyone's reality is different.