Entries Tagged 'Journal' ↓

What is the central skill of optimism? It may not be what you think.

Does positive self talk make you want to puke?

Yeah, me too. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to summon my inner Stuart Smalley on many occasions. Each one has left me feeling ill.

But there’s good news here for you regardless of whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person.

Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and author of Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism writes that positive thinking and self talk is best used to quiet your inner critic.

“We have found over the years that positive statements you make to yourself have little if any effect. What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of non-negative thinking. Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.”

A few months back I did a mental inventory on my own thinking and practices and found that my negative self talk had seized the bully pulpit! Since they I’ve enjoyed greater peace of mind by quieting my inner critic and stopping what Seligman refers to as catastropic thinking. I’ve also been able to acknowledge in my own way the things I’ve done right. What’s amazed me the most about the difference this has made is the striking speed of change that these internal shifts are having.

What say you? Are you optimistic by nature or have you found certain ways to embrace optimism?

FindingALT
Seek. Practice. Integrate. Share.

Today I remembered. It’s not all about me. 

Remembered.

Kinda thought that it was important to put this out there before I drifted off into the dream land.

Progress perhaps.

Shannon, my love, gave me an audio book chapter to listen to from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love. It is chapter 17 on her depression. I listened to chapters 17 through 20 on my walk with my dogs this morning along the South Flagler Intracoastal waterway here in West Palm Beach. She made some observations that I connected with and others there are not of my experience. I enjoyed her words none the less.

A few minutes later I set out on my run, a practice I’ve mostly given up from the physical pain it causes my two ruptured or herniated discs in my neck. Despite this pain my running has been calling me back lately. It is an undeniable part of me.

I just returned from that run on this hot summer day in South Florida. It is July 27, 2008. I listened to the Foo Fighters song Come Alive, off their latest album Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace. I played that song for the 45 minutes of my run. It is a song about finding yourself through the help of love, in the form of an outside agent – a person, a lover, an angel.

I have remembered that I love running not because of the runner’s high, but because it is the only place outside of music where I find great insight. This run was more insightful than most.

I realized that I have a life long addiction to materialism. By materialism I mean an outright reliance and addiciton to the outside world. This manifests most strongly in a desire for things and food which leads to trouble with money, weight, and spiritual health. These are the major symptoms of my addiction to materialism.

I realized I must let go of that addiction if I am to become whole.

I realized that I already have everything I need to become whole.

This includes a memory of love and compassion for myself, my love for Shannon, my children, my family, and my friends.

This includes belief.

I realized for me now, in this time, in this place, that what I am searching for cannot be sought. It will only present itself through great listening in mind, body, and spirit. I have reached the place where listening must eschew searching. This is my mantra now. ‘It’ is already here. ‘It’ will be realized, not discovered. ‘It’ will come, or ‘It’ won’t. I accept this.

I realized that my whole life I have slayed my addiction and my depression with a sword. I have killed it over and over. I have fought bravely. I have fought with honor. But I cannot win this way. I have known this for a number of years. I put down my sword.  It has left me defenseless. I have been killed over and over by my demons in this time. They have rejoiced in dancing on my spilled innards as I have lay bleeding and dying. They have cackled in delight at my death for taking so many of them with my sword.

I fight a compulsion to pick up my sword and kill them all. To vanquish them. But I know now that once the last of the demons falls to the floor, new ones will enter the room from doorways in the shadows that I have envisioned. I cannot rid these demons with my sword. I must heal myself. I must listen to what these demons are trying to teach me. I must stop fighting ‘it’.

Today, I relinquish my materialism.

I was having a nice chat with my good friend Ami just yesterday. We covered a lot of topics as we typically do from social mores, business, social networking, media, philosophy, blogs, web development, family, psychology, and I think a couple of others.

I was explaining that I get overwhelmed by blogging because I have so many blogs. Hard to keep up with them all and I don’t! He told me he had an answer to that and directed me to this new site http://amitaigivertz.blogspot.com. It’s an Ami Portal page of sorts – an aggregation of everthing Ami online. Like me, Ami has a lot of online presence to manage and he found that using blogger (Google’s off the shelf and ever so popular and easy to use blog tool) along with a leveraged use of RSS feeds has delivered him unto us. Perfect.

I’ve had this exact idea in my head for at least a year now. I already own my own name as a url and I would aggregate content on my name for all my different properties. Of course I would have to launch another blog and then find a good wordpress tool to accept all the feeds. I know they’re out there I just don’t use them and so don’ t know their names. The idea is that if I was to aggregate my blogs you would see that I actually DO update my personal blog pretty frequently. My other blogs run in spurts. BUT, if I (and you) knew without having to check that there was activity on my other blogs I would find it easier to stick with my other blogs (because I do REALLY like posting to them all). I could have one blog about everything and this is a perfectly good solution but it doesn’t work for people who find blogs because of a specific interest. I would have the satisfaction of seeing the efforts of my work in one place.

Rather than wank on with all the technical stuff as I am want to do Ami just used blogger and he’s done. Rather nice that. I imagine it didn’t take him long to do it either. He accomplished everything I want to do and he’s already done. I think that’s just fantastic. That’s the power of using off-the-shelf web apps and not worrying yourself over silly things like custom urls which don’t really matter in the end anyway. People just need one address – one place, a jumping off point to launch you into everything you are doing online.

Ami, you asked me to drop by your site and I have and I will. I love that I can find out what you’re doing by going to your site EVEN though I already track your every move on Google Reader. I like visiting sites. I will enjoy visiting yours. You have inspired me to get my online life aggregation finished – one way or the other.

And about that web 3.0 definition you wrote about (aka the semantic web.

I like to summarize web 3.0 or the semantic web as the personification of the web. I’m sure I nicked that off someone but if so I couldn’t tell you when or who. I believe that all the amazing underlying technology that is being developed to drive the next generation of the web will and should have only one purpose – to make the web more human – to make the web even more intuitive – to amplify and more accurately represent US – the people.

There you have it, my wank is done for the day.

[tags]lifestreaming[/tags]

Sometimes you need a little – sometimes you need a lot.

Back in January 2001 I was in Phoenix Arizona and I needed a lot. I met an angel there and we were reborn, rising up together through the ashes.  I believe that Shannon and I knew each other from another time, that we have come together again in this time, and will find each other again in the future.

To celebrate our re-connection I took Shannon to get a Tattoo of an infinity on her birthday of that same year. I got the same one – mine rides along on my strong arm – my left. Hers sits on her back. The infinity is our symbol, a representation of our knowing each other through time, of our connection, of life that does not end.

Since then we have often discussed getting a Phoenix tattoo and we have always made it a point to look for Phoenix symbols that we liked for the purpose. We’ve found many visual representations of the Phoenix that we’ve enjoyed but none that ever seemed quite right.

Friday night, May 18, 2007 we were driving over to South Beach in Miami when Shannon said…

“We should go get our Phoenix Tattoos.”

She happened to have her laptop in the car (god I love her) and she was connected to the Internet so she started looking up images of the Phoenix. The first page she brought up under a keyword search of “Phoenix Tattoo” found this one that we hadn’t seen before:

We both immediately knew it was the one we had been searching for.

Where to go for the ink?

Miami Beach has no shortage of overpriced Tattoo parlors and good artists to go along with those prices. We decided we’d try Miami Ink just for fun, and as you might expect, they were very busy (with T.V. fame and all). None of the artists we’ve gotten to know from the T.V. show were present either. Most importantly the guy at the counter just had a really bad vibe. In other parlance, he was rude. It seemed obvious that to get a Tattoo here was all about being part of a T.V. show and had little to do with the experience we were enjoying. We had passed a place on the way to Miami Ink called The Mosh Pit that does tattoos. We liked the name and headed back there.

We were walking along and just one store away from The Mosh Pit when Salvation appeared – Salvation Tattoo Lounge that is. It seemed appropriate.

Needless to say we got our Phoenix Tattoos there. Sharky, a Tattoo artist for over 20 years performed the work. He’s from the Village originally and has been down in South Florida for a few years. He seemed competent and we liked him so it was off to the races.

I went first, putting the Phoenix on my right arm. Shannon followed with her vision of weaving the tail of the Phoenix into her existing infinity.

There you have it. It was a magical evening where we shared a great time on South Beach, a wonderful dinner at Perricone’s (run there don’t walk) and before that a fantastic time looking at Triumphs and Ducati motorbikes, which we’re hoping is in our near future (Ducati S2R800 specifically).

Well, there are a lot of reasons that I shouldn’t podcast, mainly that I talk too much, and mostly because I say too little. At least when I write I can edit out some of the drivel. In the end though I’m too interested in technology, social media, and the Internet to let everyone else make all this user generated video content and not play around a bit with it myself.

Equipment has always been a barrier for me – especially finding a decent web cam to use. I read recently about using your camcorder as a high-end web cam and the hack attracted me. I wanted to set up a good web cam for me and the kids so Shannon could see us on her business travels and Max and Charlie could see me from California. We’ve tried this before but it’s never really worked. Perhaps using the camcorder will help make it a more permanent solution. That and video podcasting.

I purchased a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable (aka IEEE 1394 cable) from CompUSA today so I could hook my Mac Powerbook up to my 7 year old digital camcorder. Everything worked the first time I plugged it in. I then signed up with the free service called ustream.tv that lets you both record and stream live web cam podcasts. The most popular content creators are now attracting thousands of viewers for their live shows and it’s actually pretty fun to watch some of them.

So, here’s my test on ustream. The audio is horrid, as is the content, but it’s a start. First order of business is to figure out a decent and inexpensive microphone.

The tax deadline in the U.S. usually falls on April 15th, but this year for reasons I haven’t even bothered to look up, the deadline was the 17th. We survived it once again – somehow.

In celebration of being done with our taxes we got a new Weber bar-b-q and some torches for the nasties that like to fly around and bite you (bloodsuckers).  We promptly assembled it, drinking Dos Equis Amber all the while, and got her fired up. Her name is Evelyn – the grill that is.  I had to take some pictures of the innagural event which are appearing here as a set on our Flickr account in all their glory. Featured here are the virgin grill (above) and THE MOST random picture I have ever seen (below). Shannon took a self portrait and in the background John is sprawled on the ground while I am cleaning the grill in the far background. Who the hell knows where Julia was…

I have a lot of occasions to be thankful for Shannon but last night’s version stood out from the crowd.

Shannon left work and after an hour and a half she still wasn’t home (takes 45-60 minutes normally).  I was just about to call her when Shannon beat me to it.

“I’ve been stuck behind a huge wreck on I95 and I’m just about to get past it now.”  Thankfully for the truck driver, there were two off-duty Fort Lauderdale Fire Fighters on the Highway that pulled him from the wreckage of his burning big rig.

We commiserated as fellow commuters will.

“I’ve used up so much gas idling that I have to get off the freeway now and fill up.”

“OK Shan, drive safe and I’ll see you in a bit.”

10 minutes later…

“Julian I’ve just narrowly avoided a horrible accident!”

Shannon went on to explain that just after getting back on Interstate 95 two cars in front of her collided at high-speed. The only way to not run into them was to punch the accelerator to get around them. She had to swerve aggressively to the left, punch it, and watch as the cars spun around careening into each other, hoping that she’d out run them.

She did it. She went all the way from the second to right lane of 95 into the far-left breakdown lane and right up to the freeway divider wall. As Shannon squeaked by the wrecking cars she found herself steering back to the right and traveling at far too high a rate of speed. She applied the break a little. If you’re into driving you may know what comes next. Drift. The breaking lightens up the rear end of the vehicle and when combined with a little steering it induces a drift.

Imagine if you will, just avoiding a high-speed freeway accident in front of you and in your recovery mode you now find yourself in a high speed drift going down the middle of the freeway. Shannon said that after wards she realized that in that momentary drift she closed her eyes for a fraction of second while she waited for the vehicles behind her to smack into our Toyota 4-Runner. Fortunately, her instincts stayed true and she turned into the drift with a counter steer move. If she had gone the other way with that steering wheel it would have been a horrible rollover.  Shannon’s not in to driving like I am, and she hasn’t practiced drifting and counter steering as I used to on the snowy roads back in New Hampshire, but her driving instincts were good all the way around.

Those instincts may have saved her life yesterday, from the initial move to get around the wrecking cars, to punching the accelerator, to the counter steer move to extricate herself from a potentially lethal high-speed drift. The force of the avoidance and drift moves slammed her head into the side of the door jam and she has a bump on the head to remember her near-miss by. Shannon also has the typical post-accident muscle soreness to boot. You have to say that it’s amazing as well, that the 4-Runner, with its high center of gravity, never rolled. Good on ya Toyota.

All I can say is THANK YOU. For whatever real world driving skills and unseen forces that brought her home to us safe last night. THANK YOU.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!

Just this morning mum sent me a commercial that has fun with the typical ‘women driver’ stereotype. I’ve had the good fortune to be around a lot of good women drivers – starting with my mum.  On the topic of my mum’s driving: don’t ever take her on at a traffic light – she’ll shame you.

So for a little contrast to this story I post this piece of fun in celebration of our good fortune. Good on ya Shannon, I love you!

Shannon and I had the great pleasure and honor to reconnect with our mutual friend Ed del Campo recently. Shannon and I both knew Ed before we even met that fateful day in Phoenix 6 years ago. Ed lives in Miami and worked with Shannon at the online arm of The Miami Herald, while I know Ed because he helped me lead the national sales team I ran at Knight Ridder in San Jose.

Ed wrote a very inspiring comment and dedication for my marathon recently and just this past Tuesday he was in West Palm Beach and we had the chance to visit with him. It was the first time we’ve seen Ed in years. What’s particularly inspiring about Ed is that he’s managed to overcome two serious bouts with cancer. Ed is a fighter in every sense of the word and his faith, tenaciousness, love for life and love for his beautiful girls have kept him with us. Now, Ed is fulfilling his life long dream to become a Fire Fighter! He’s spent the last year completing the academic study needed to earn his EMT and Fire Fighter certification and he’s already got a job lined up with Palm Beach County. Provided Ed passes his physical (which was the reason for his visit to West Palm Beach) he’ll be on board for the 90-day Fire Fighter Academy. We may even have the opportunity to host him while he’s attending the Academy so he can avoid the arduous commute from South Miami. Ed, you’re truly an inspiration to us.

Julian here, wearing the hat of master of the obvious. It is one of my favorite roles. Here’s the version and subject of this particular slice of obvious that I was just playing in my head.

I was wondering today why I actually run and how I compare the idea of running vs. the actual experience. The actual act of running is at best difficult (physically) and if you’re pushing yourself hard then it can be downright painful. Despite this, when I think of running, it is more often than not a positive association. I think of quiet time, the feeling of satisfaction from accomplishing something, from the real and subjective physical and mental health benefits, and very much, the time to listen to music. Oh and one more important one: ideas usually come clear to me when running or I will find the resolve to take action on something I’m procrastinating about. Powerful stuff indeed.

These are all things that happen when I run. Most of these benefits, or things that I look forward to, are mental. Physically, running is hard. It hurts. Your muscles can burn as can your lungs. There is a period in most every run where everything starts to feel good, as the endorphins are released and you experience a runner’s high. In contrast to this, I have the exercise that I want to do but have a really hard time sticking with – strength training. This is true whether it is actually lifting weights or my more favored calisthenics that include push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, chair lifts, leg lifts, squats, etc. The idea of strength training is unattractive to me in every way. My friend Eric, who is an accomplished lifter had this to say to me once about my difficulty in strength training: “It’s hard and it’s boring – not a great combo. It takes a certain kind of individual to like it” He had a glint in his eye as he said this. No wait, that was a phone call we had so it must have been a note of something in his voice. With strength training I don’t get quiet time, I don’t listen to music (because I’m in the house), I get interrupted by any number of outside stimuli (I can’t multi-task) and I don’t usually have my breakthoughs in thinking, or the stress relief that I get with sustained aerobic activity because of the typical start/rest/start nature of lifting. There’s no continuity. When I really think about the physical work though, in many ways it is easier than running (at least how I strength train). Eric would make this point. I don’t life heavy weight or strength train like a mad man. The pain is over quickly and there is an immediate feeling of greater strength and well being from all that blood pumping into your muscles in response to the tax you’re placing on them. Hell, you can even look better right away because your muscles get pumped up. While I can imagine that a girl might not see this as a win, a guy like me who has ‘always wanted’ to be built it is highly attractive. My point is that the idea of running, despite its actual physical pain is attractive due to all the ideas I have about what it does for me and the greater pleasure that it brings. Versus my strength training which in many ways is easier physically (again my qualifier is that I’m not doing gut busting 250lb bench presses) but mentally is 50 times more daunting.

The difference in what I actually do most of the time is more based on my mental picture of pleasure and pain and it is not directly correlated to my physical reality.

I can see how this plays out in all areas of life. As a procrastinator a task that I put off for a day, month or year because of the idea of it is almost never as bad in reality. I end up, as most people do, asking myself why I didn’t get on with it earlier. I even find myself enjoying some of these tasks or challenges! Do you? Now to be fair there are tasks that we find JUST as unpleasant in reality as the idea of them. Frightfully, some are even worse. But my point is that those are actually pretty rare. The mental anguish we procrastinators put ourselves through is far worse on our mental well being than the reality of avoiding reality for prolonged periods of time.

There it is. Julian, master of the well known and obvious.

Like many ah-hah moments, there is nothing remarkable or new about this one and my mastering of the obvious is only a temporary respite from my normal mode of thinking. Isn’t it? Why do we forget our mental ah-hah’s and return to our normal mode of thinking?