Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I like being comfortable.

I’m whatever the opposite is of the people who are into S&M.

I don’t go as far as my sister, who refers to any place that doesn’t have room service as “camping”. But my definition of “extreme sports” is, let’s just say, larger than most people’s (and includes actual camping).

I’m hardly unusual in this. Modern Western society is built increasingly around convenience. It seems we have only two speeds: Stressed and slumped. And the stress is used to justify the slump.

The problem is that between the health effects of the stress and the fact that we don’t walk any more (because cars are so convenient), we’ve created a whole new set of illnesses for ourselves that were almost unknown to our ancestors. Our ancestors had their own problems, but diabetes, for example, was rarely one of them. Between convenience foods and the convenience of not having to actually move very much, we’re creating the conditions of our own demise.

Challenge: the third way

I’m reading a book at the moment called Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. It’s fascinating stuff, and I’ll probably talk about it more later, but the key point I want to mention here is what the author (scientist John J. Ratey) has to say about challenge.

Muscles only grow when you exercise them to the point of challenge. And, it turns out, the same is true of brains. We make new brain cells all the time, but they only become permanent parts of our brains if there’s a use for them – if we’re challenging ourselves with new experiences that need to be remembered and learned from.

So there’s a third gear, if you like, a middle path, a third possible way of approaching life.

• We can be in stress mode and wearing out our resources faster than we can restore them, and that’s not ultimately sustainable (for an individual any more than for a world).
• We can be in comfort-and-convenience mode, making so little use of our natural abilities to move and create and problem-solve that they wither up and die.
• Or we can find appropriate challenges, which keep us stretching and growing and improving at a pace we can sustain and in a way that helps us feel in control.

And when we do that, it feels fantastic.

Stress is a leaking away of life. Too much comfort and convenience is an avoidance of life. Challenge is bringing ourselves to life. (Sid Savara recently talked about it as “choosing your own adventure“.)

I’m in challenge mode at the moment. For example, I’m doing the 100 Pushups program. I first started it in February, when I could do about 7 or 8 pushups in one go. I restarted in April, and again in October, when I could do 13 pushups. At my last test, I could do 38. I’m going to keep doing it until I reach at least the hundred.

Now, I’m not a muscular guy – very far from it indeed. But with the right structure and with perseverance, I’m going to be able to do 100 pushups. How cool is that?

I recently bought a kayak, too, and I’m enjoying that no end. It uses a lot of the same muscles as the pushups, happily.

The challenge of 2011

I’ve got big plans for 2011. At the moment I’m blogging twice a week, on average (once here and one guest post somewhere else). Next year I’d like to ramp that up so that I’m eventually blogging five times a week. I’ve started a new blog on how to publish your own book, and I’ll be creating a book out of that blog as a demonstration of what I teach there. I’d also like to get back to my fiction writing.

I’m planning to start a podcast, as well, interviewing experts on personal development and health about what they do.

I’m planning to continue implementing the advice in Steven Aitchison’s excellent How to Become an Advanced Early Riser program, which has already created space in my life for exercise (meaning that I feel more energetic even though I’m now getting less sleep). That should create the time and energy for the blogging and my other plans. I haven’t even mentioned the biggest one yet, because I’m not sure what words to use to talk about it at this stage.

I’m doing an improv class in 2011, which is as scary as anything I’ve ever done but feels completely like the right thing to do. I’m probably going to join Toastmasters and do their public speaking program (my wife wants to do that with me), and I already have a speaking gig booked at the 2011 conference of the hypnotherapists’ association I belong to.

It’s going to be an interesting year.

Action Now

So now it’s over to you.

Are you in stress mode? (If so, I recommend my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course to help get you out of it, so you can shift into challenge mode instead.)

Are you in comfort-and-convenience mode? Bored with it yet? (You might try my short, free 7 Steps to Effective Personal Change course to get you out of your rut. Because, frankly, when you’re in a rut, you need to change something – anything – to get you moving again.)

Are you wanting a challenge but feeling nervous, unresourceful, resistant, unmotivated, not sure how to start? (Check out Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding to build the strengths you need to succeed at starting – and finishing – your challenge.)

Or are you rocking your own challenges already?

I’d love to hear what challenge you already have or want to start in 2011. Leave a comment and share it with us. And please share this post with others through email, Twitter or Facebook, so they can also start moving towards challenging themselves to life.

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