Mindmap: How to Use Your Body’s Processing Power to Do Deeper Work

How we can build deep, coherent, consistent work using body awareness is sort of the overall topic for today. Why this might be important is we want to be able to harness that quantum processing power and speed of the body more effectively in our work. This allows us to connect a physical intelligence that makes new levels. I know that's a little overused, but new levels of productivity and insight more accessible without having to fight as hard for those gains. Why, back to this one piece of information that really did change my life. The speed at which your body processes information is 10 to 100 times faster than whatever is going on in your prefrontal cortex. Even if you're a very intelligent person, the amount of data that your body is able to handle is millions of times higher than what your prefrontal cortex can manage. Obviously, it doesn't have the same linearity, if that's a word that your prefrontal cortex is going to give you. Which is why having a general practice to drop into our body frequently throughout the day, accumulate data, is our best way to create a lot of volume around moments of body connection, body awareness, so that we can start to see the patterns emerge. If we do this once, we're not going to get a great idea of the patterns of how our body is responding and what its intelligence can, you know, share with us to make things easier. So these are all practices. Before I just give a couple of strategies that you can play with. I do want to say that if you are a person who's experienced trauma, specifically, but not exclusively that involves your body, this will not will, but may challenge your edges around that. That's really not to say that you can't do these things. I am a person with a very high degree of trauma experience, and I have found these to be sort of like a secret weapon. But understand that there is that possibility that it challenges you and pushes you in that area. So I wanted to just give three strategies, not overcomplicate this. First one, I'd love for you guys to think about what you're doing while you're exercising. So there's a really strong tendency to blow through our reps. Get it done. I've only got X amount of minutes, right? Taking the microseconds to feel your body moving as you do your reps, as you do, whether that's. If you're not doing reps and you're running the footfalls, how your body shifts in space as you're running, connecting to what Kelly McGonagall calls the hope molecules that are released in your Body when you exercise. I have a target in my protocol. One, well, multiple for exercise, but also one to simply experience the hope molecules. It's really easy to blow past that sensation trying to get your workout done. This, again, like all of these things, does not take an enormous, enormous amount of time. So just to clarify, I'm not suggesting you do your 10 reps and then, you know, go sit in a corner in the gym and try to connect to your body. I suggest you have a speed bump built into your workout, set a timer, have a target in your protocol to connect to the hope molecules that are being released in your body and to feel your body moving in space and time. You probably heard of the mind muscle connection. That's really helpful in terms of just exercise and form. But having that level of awareness too, having that mind muscle connection does give us the ability to start tapping into this body awareness. Practically speaking, what you can do with this, aside from feeling your body in motion? When I first started coaching, almost all the work that I did happened while I was exercising or immediately prior or immediately after. It was like it unlocked so much for me that while it was kind of a pain in the neck to take a second to record because I want to get my workout done, this really opened things up in a way that was just a lot more effortless for me. Not saying you gotta forever and always do your work around exercise, but consider, can you do something meaningful with the insights that you might have gleaned while you're exercising? Because those come through very strongly when you start connecting to your body. Can you record those and crank out a few minutes after your workout of something related to that doesn't have to be polished, doesn't have to be finished, but can you capture it while also, again, just being really aware of the opportunity for those hope molecules? Simple body connection. So you may or may not have come across the ideas of interoception. Casey and I have chatted about that and proprioception, if you like the terms. Those are what the terms are. But what does it mean when you connect to your heartbeat, when you feel it reverberate in your chest, your awareness of that reverberation is interoception. It simply means you're aware and have a ability to perceive the sensations going on within your body. So connecting to your heartbeat on some regular interval, super useful. Breathing. We all know that breathing is good. Breathing is nice. You can also notice how your body shifts in space as your rib cage expands and then contracts. The ability to feel yourself move in Space is proprioception. So all you're looking for, whether that's as you breathe and you feel yourself take up a little bit more room and you breathe out and you notice that you're taking up a little less room or as you connect while you're working out, you might be moving a little faster, but you're feeling yourself change in that space. You're seeing and feeling yourself occupy the space in different ways depending on how you're situated, what activity, movement you're doing. That's simply. That's the simplest explanation for proprioception. So we're trying to train our sense of awareness around internal body sensations and awareness of how our taking up of space changes as we move. These can be really simple exercises that you run through before you sit down to do your work. If you're doing an oscillation show of hands about oscillating. Is anyone oscillating those micro oscillations every 15 minutes? Okay. These can be really useful to do in oscillations. Please don't feel like you have to really spend, you know, minutes even on this. Just simple checking in. Can you feel one reverberation of your heartbeat? If yes, you have checked the box. We just want to commute, accumulate a lot of those seeds. Right. We've also talked about this strategy a lot but just to kind of bring it to the top. Listening with your body. So when you notice that you're feeling excited or dreadful, those are the two things that really get my attention. Anyway, this is a cue to tune in what's happening. When I say tune in. All we're seeking to do. How does that feel to me? Do I perhaps have a percolation of energy that runs up my spine? If we felt that successfully, we have checked the box, we have done the thing. Maybe we feel our hands get colder. This also counts. These feelings of, of excitement, dread in particular, any strong emotion really will work. Are going to produce some sensations in your body. We want to be able to leverage those and be pretty of engaging with the thing that is in front of us while working towards that microsecond of connection to oh, the hair on my neck stood up. This is why I really love when Brian says goosebumps, right? This is a great example. And he just slides it right in there like it's normal, you know. So it's okay for you to take a second in your own mind to experience that body listening applications typically where this is most useful is when you're engaging with content, learning new material. But really, most situations in life are going to be producing different reactions in your body. I just find it really helpful to especially be focused on this skill when I'm learning or participating in something. Listening with your body is something that I've encouraged you guys to do at various points on these calls, right? So, oh, I got a flash of insight. What does that feel like in my body? You don't necessarily have to like journal these things or, you know, track them in a spreadsheet or anything like that. You just want to be accreting lots of touch points with this. Over time, you're going to generate some insights around sensations related to excitement, fear, dread, resistance. Resistance is a challenging one because it's typically accompanied by some very elegant rationalization that's causing you to feel a little confused. So really starting to hone in. I feel like I might be having one of these rationalizing thoughts. What's going on in my body can help you kind of reduce that confusion in the moment. There's nothing wrong with resistance at all. It's just an opportunity to tune in and get to the next logical step given what you're experiencing. So having a practice to tune in to these cues is all you're really looking for. Like most things, guidance around this, specifically in targets you create, is super helpful because I assume most of you will go to your next workout and completely forget we talked about this, which is not anything wrong with you. It's just a lot going on. Right? So when you miss, blow past that target initially. That's okay. That's pretty much the first step. You just want to make sure that it's not totally falling off your radar. You want to make sure you're not feeling a sense of shame, of, oh, I missed it. Should have been magically been able to hold the millions of things that have come my way in my head and harness them into this moment where I check into, breathe, check into my movement patterns while I'm exercising. That's a lot to ask yourself. So having targets, having some scaffolding around these types of things that are not habitual yet for us can be useful when you miss the target, which you will most likely, unless you don't, which is awesome too really connect with it's. It is okay. It is hard to move in many directions coherently. Most people, because of the challenge around moving coherently in multiple directions, will choose to just go in one direction, which you can also do. But if you have a desire to sort of implement a variety of things across your life that you believe the interweaving of which will really support you quickly recognizing the difficulty of moving. In that way, having patience, excitement when you miss it can be super useful. Just a disclaimer. I say this a lot, but none of this is super hard. Assuming you have overcome the tendency to forget, your next and only real barrier to doing this is going to be in the moment. Willingness to microflex your discipline, to tune in. So you're going to find yourself exercising or breathing, and this stubbornness will arise. Take a second to witness that in all of its glory. We're in practical terms, asking ourselves to do something for a slip of a section second, but our body will be like, oh, not worth it. Not today. I've already done too much. Just really take a second to witness that. You really have to marvel at the brain sometimes. It's so interesting when you see that happen, because this is definitely one of the pitfalls when you see yourself in that resistance, if it's useful to you. I don't smile outwardly, I don't think, but inside, I'm like, smiling really big. Like, there I am, I'm doing it. And I literally get goosebumps at this point. Like, yes. Right. Caught ya. Once you've had a chance to witness that in all of its glory, decide, are you gonna flex that discipline for that microsecond? If you're not, that's okay. At least you made a conscious decision about it, which is gonna give you some information the next time. This another common pitfall similar to meditation. You've probably come across people who for many years get very stuck with meditation because they can't figure out if they're doing it right. Ultimately, what you can observe is that they struggle to have the willingness to even meditate because they're so preoccupied about whether they're doing it right that it just feels trashy. Right. So to the extent that you can intercept these thoughts when you're wondering, am I doing this right? Realize it's irrelevant and often just the perfect excuse your brain needs to encourage you to just skip it. So the question I'll leave you guys with is, what do you want your response to be when you try to implement these things and you have the thought, am I doing this right? Take 30 seconds to just. This is a. Not a definitive answer, but your first iteration on how you want to approach this problem. Got something in mind, like meditation? There's no real way to do it wrong. You're doing it. Yep. Yep. And I really want you to connect with that reality around this too. There is no way to do it wrong. And I think that's a perfect thing to start with in terms of your internal monologue when this might come up for you.

I think we're on the same page with that. Because my thought was just remove the word right? Am I doing this?

Yep.

Yes.

Yep.

Because it's all going to be the iterative steps. Right? It's like always and forever. And so to get to the better version of doing it right that we're always going to classify in some arbitrary sense. The only way you'd get there anyway is by doing it in the first place. So am I doing this? Yes is a better question than am I doing this right?

Yeah. I love that. And just want to reiterate that questions like am I doing this right? After a certain point are mostly just your brain trying to give you an excuse why you shouldn't do it. Which is fine. But them but have a level of awareness. You will totally miss it. Your brain will convince you in a very conniving way to worry about am I doing it right? In some creative way that doesn't resemble the words Am I doing it right? It will loop itself in there. That's okay. These are practices.