Steve Barnes outlines a minimal personal-development system across three areas: physical health, career, and relationships. He recommends diaphragmatic breathing five minutes every three hours, the Five Tibetans starting at three reps and building to 21, and writing one sentence daily for 30 days. The whole practice takes about an hour a week.
Questions this video answers
January 3, 2022
LifeWritingPodcast.com
Around Sunday, January 9, 2022
Diaphragmatic breathing 1 minute once every ~3 hours (≈5 minutes/day, ~25–30 minutes/week)
The Five Tibetans: start at 3 repetitions, add 1–2 reps per week, progress toward 21 reps each; at 21 reps the sequence takes about 10–12 minutes.
Chapters
Hello, this is Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. This is the first one of the new year and I really, really want to say hello to everyone to welcome you to 2022. I hope everybody survived because if you didn't survive, then I have some questions about who it is that's watching this. But I think it might be useful for me to kind of reintroduce myself. I'm Steve Barnes. I'm a novelist, husband and father, martial artist. And what I love doing more than anything else is sharing my understandings of how to get the results that you want from your life. So I'm here to tell you that you can do it. And I understand that some people have a problem with that, in which case I'm not going to be to their taste because I believe in people, I believe in you. I believe that you can do these things. So this year I'm going to be focusing on. We're going to be doing things a little bit different. My wife and I, the Amazing tanadariep do, are going to be doing a weekly podcast. You're going to be able to find out about that@lifewritingpodcast.com the first one should be up next Sunday, the 9th of January, I think. So it's not there yet, but you can, you can go and you can, you can write that down in your book. LifeWritingPodcast.com during which we'll be answering questions and talking about our lives and talking about just everything, just really kind of going forward in that sense. Because what I want is to not just level up my game and my family's game, but your game. That's what I really want. I really want a community. I want friends, I want family. I want to be able to, to help you. I want to be able to share with you if you'll let me. So I'll be doing, I do my daily posts and I'm committed during the month of January to doing a daily video. But they're going to be short. These are going to be short. So I don't feel like I'm going to burn out if I do this. So today just, you know, we're going to talk about, well, what is it that we're going to be focusing on? What I want to focus on is the notion of, of the minimum necessary amount of work, the atomic amount of work that you need to do to move your life forward in all three arenas. Those three arenas would be your physical, your health and fitness, your career. And I'm going to focus on writing because that's what I know the best. But you'll notice that the principles are going to apply to lots of different things. Lots of different things. And then the third thing is relationships, your relationship with yourself, your own heart, your own creativity, and your relationship with a loved one. So the soulmate process and sustaining a family and sustaining a relationship once you found that relationship, things like that. So the notion is that you can make fantastic progress if you can spend about an hour a week, let's say six days on, take Sundays off, about an hour a week. Now, let me briefly what that would be is the five minute miracle, you know, to stop and breathe deeply. Diaphragmatic breathing five times a day, once every three hours. That takes five minutes a day, about 25 minutes a week or 30 minutes a week. The next thing is the five Tibetans. Now, if you start with the lowest number of Tibetans, which is three, and your concern is, do I make the time for this? Do I take the time to take care of me? So I want you to take care of you. I want you to turn stress, to look at the stress, identify the stress as fear, and then use that fear to generate energy to move your life forward. That's exactly what I want. That is exactly what I specialize in. It's exactly what my teachers gave me, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. And it's what I want to give you. I really want to give it. And Stacey Robinson. Hi, Stacey, please. Yes. Do I want to be your therapist? If you will let me. I will be your coach and I want to be here every day. Maybe we'll try to do it regularly at noon Pacific. I don't know. What I can promise is I'm going to do this more often. I'll be posting these, cross posting these on YouTube and so forth and so on. And I'll be inviting you to come to, to the podcast, which is lifewritingpodcast.com so the first two again are five minutes a day of breathing, one minute at a time, once every three hours. Deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing. If you're not familiar with how to do that, find a yoga teacher, a Tai chi teacher, maybe even a singing instructor, an opera teacher. How do you breathe diaphragmatically? Because if you can breathe, if you can breathe as if you are relaxed and feeling empowered, your body will believe it. And stress will not hurt you. Stress will not hurt you. Stress only hurts you when it becomes strain. And strain is stress that is more stress than you can healthfully process. If you can process the stress, it actually motivates you to excellence and growth. Your body actually needs that. Your mind needs stress, but if you get too much of it, it rips you apart. Make no mistake, more stress than you can handle will just chew you up and spit you out. So that's the first thing, is to learn how to turn your stress into energy. And the first thing to do is to change the way you think and move physically. What do you think about stress? How do you use your body to respond to stress? Every three hours, set your alarm on your phone or whatever it is, and breathe. And the five Tibetans are a very specific set of movements. You can look them up on YouTube. We might talk about those more in the future if you'd like. But it's good basic stuff if you can't. If you do those five exercises, you start at three. You add no more than one or two per week, and by the time you can do 21 repetitions of each of them, it doesn't take more than about 10 to 12 minutes. But you are actually in pretty good shape, there's no question about it. And the third thing for writers is write at least one sentence every day. At least one sentence every day, if you will start with that. Just guarantee that for the next 30 days, if you promise yourself for the next 30 days, you will write at least one sentence every day. I can get you there. I can get you there. So those are the things that I want to do. You can ask questions here or on the Life writing page, and we're going to be giving you as much as we possibly can, and we want you to come to our podcast when we're doing that. Once again, that's lifewritingpodcast.com and, you know, leave your questions for me. Ask anything you want. And during these daily sessions, I'll try to give you a little bit of what it is that you're looking for. But once Again, welcome to 2022. I hope you and your family are in for the best year of your lives. Love you guys. You take care.
