Series: 3 Things I’ve Learned « | Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Aug 31

3 Things I’ve Learned from Superhero Comics

Posted in Background

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

I’m a comics fan.

Not comix (which are quite a different thing, much more intellectual and anarchic). Comics. Superhero comics. (Various webcomics, too, but I’ll talk about those another time.)

This surprises even people who know me well. For one thing, I’m more or less a feminist (if a man can be a feminist, and I know this is fiercely debated), pretty nearly a pacifist, and have a master’s degree in English, whereas superhero comics are full of women in skintight costumes whose breasts are bigger than their heads, contain pretty much wall-to-wall fighting, and are generally considered not too intellectually demanding. (That last point has a lot to do with why I like them, actually.)

As Walt Whitman said, though, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Somewhere deep down inside me there’s some kind of consistency. (I can only assume.)

Anyway, here are three life lessons I’ve learned from superhero comics.

1. With great power comes great responsibility

photo credit: Eneas
Spider-Man has been through a lot of changes and reinventions since his creation in the 1960s, but at the core he’s always a decent, human guy who is continually crapped upon by life from a great height, but (with a few exceptions, which only serve to humanise him further) does the right thing anyway.

His Uncle Ben’s wisdom – that with great power comes great responsibility – is familiar enough to seem trite. But when you really think about it, especially in the context of Spidey’s life, it’s all about living up to your potential and using what you have in the service of others.

Great power inherently carries the risk of exploiting others. When you’re really powerful, you can do what you like because very few people will try to stop you. Glance at the celebrity news from time to time (then look away quickly) to see how well that generally works out for people.

I’m white, male, middle-aged, middle-class and heterosexual. To have any more hegemony I’d have to be dead. I’m also a hypnotherapist, which is kind of a low-level superpower – not over other people so much (that only works inside the comic books), but over my own body and mind. It’s up to me how I use all that. Great responsibility.

What great power do you have that you can use for others’ benefit?

2. You can’t beat a good team-up

photo credit: Willrad
One of the most popular formats for comics is the “team-up”, where two or more superheroes join together to face a threat that they can’t defeat individually. There are also some great team comics – the Justice League, the Avengers, the Teen Titans, the Fantastic Four.

Team-ups work much better for heroes than they do for villains, and there’s a simple reason. Villains are always out for what they can get, while heroes have a higher purpose, a dedication to the welfare of others.

I can’t always triumph over my challenges alone, either. Sometimes I need to team up. That’s one reason I’ve been doing a lot of guest-posting lately. I also get coaching from several other people, because there are things they see (and know) that I don’t.

Who could you team up with?

Everyone has a weakness

photo credit: Randy Son Of Robert
I thought a lot about this last one. Should I use “No truly important character ever dies permanently?” “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry?” “You’re a person if you act like a person, regardless of your appearance?” All good lessons. But I went for “Everyone has a weakness” because it’s so fundamental to comics that it’s just silently assumed.

No matter whether the character is an Olympian god, the Last Son of Krypton or an immortal being who eats planets, there’s always some way to defeat them. There’s always a balance, always a solution, always a way to carry the day. (And it’s not just because someone who just automatically won all the time would be unbelievably boring. Life’s really like that.)

And the inevitable consequence is this: Great power or not, there’s some way in which you’re vulnerable, and only by connecting up with your team are you going to be able to overcome that and then find the inevitable weakness of your opponent. (You see what I did there?)

One of my weaknesses is that I enjoy thinking about things more than doing them.

What vulnerability do you have?

If you’d like to team up with me for any purpose, including to work on your weakness or develop your great power and its responsible use, contact me and let me know. I’d love to partner with you.

comments: 2 » tags: coaching, hypnotherapy, life lessons, personal change

Dec 14

3 Things I Wish I’d Learned Earlier

Posted in Background

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

This is part of my occasional life lessons series, Three Things I’ve Learned, but with a small twist this time. It’s also part of an internet-wide Life Lessons Series started by Abubakar Jamil, in which personal development bloggers (like me) reflect on things we wish we’d known earlier in life.

I’m a lot happier now than I was when I was younger – I experienced depression intermittently from my late teens until about my late 20s or early 30s. Life lessons are often things that you can only learn by living them, of course, but here are three that I wish I’d learned sooner.

1. Exercise is good for your brain

As I mentioned last week in Conveniencing Ourselves to Death – or Challenging Ourselves to Life, I’m reading John J. Ratey’s Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain at the moment. He starts the book by talking about a revolutionary approach to physical education in a particular school district in Michigan, USA. Reading about it, I really wished that I’d been taught PE like that.

See, when I was at school, the emphasis was on sports. There were people who were good at sports and people who weren’t, and I was one of the people who wasn’t. I still had to do the compulsory fun run (nobody could ever explain to me why, if it was fun, it had to be compulsory) and all the other sporting nonsense, with the outcome being that I became convinced that a) I’d never be any good at sport, b) it wasn’t enjoyable and c) I would stop participating in it as soon as possible. Which I did.

The approach Ratey describes has the emphasis on fitness. The teachers set out to teach the kids, not rules of sports that they’ll never play again, but how to work with the bodies that they have to get the best out of them. Even if that is never going to be running as fast or jumping as high as some of the other kids.

They put heart rate monitors on the kids, and rather than measuring how fast they’re moving they measure how hard they’re trying. You get marked based on your physiology, not the physiology of the next kid who might be a future Olympian. And the teachers expose the kids to as many options as possible to find something that they’ll enjoy doing that gets them moving, breathing, and increasing their heart rate.

Because it turns out that when you move, breathe and increase your heart rate, you get better at learning and produce more brain cells. Your body and mind both become more efficient, and your mood generally improves as well. And you have more energy (something I always struggled with).

If exercise had been sold to me like that when I was 13, I might have done more of it when I didn’t have to. I’m now getting fit with the 100 Pushups challenge and kayaking, and thoroughly enjoying it (I’ll have more to say about fitness challenges next week). But I missed out for years.

To be fair, nobody really knew any better in 1985, but I still feel a bit cheated.

2. Emotional expression is OK

My family were never very good at emotions. My father lost his father at the age of 9, during the Depression, was raised by a very strange mother who was mentally stuck in the Victorian era, and then fought in World War II, and he had a lifetime’s practice at avoiding his emotions. My mother aided and abetted him in this.

When I was 30, I figured out that I wanted to be able to express my emotions more freely. My solution was to take an acting class. It worked pretty well, too, and just as well – right about the time the class finished, my father died suddenly.

I was able to grieve much better than I otherwise would have. What’s more, over the following two years a friendship I’d had with a woman I knew via email became a romance (the first real one I’d had) and then a marriage – a marriage which I’m continuing to enjoy today. I’m pretty sure that both the acting class and the emotional shock of my father’s death enabled me to open up and become someone who could have an emotionally intimate relationship.

A lot of things would have been easier earlier on if I could have done that at a much younger age.

3. Suffering is only pointless if you learn nothing

I’ve done some very stupid stuff, and it’s been immensely educational, though usually in retrospect. Was it Oscar Wilde who said, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want?”

The worst time of my life came just after university, in my early 20s. It’s pretty difficult not to do stupid stuff at that age. I made some major mistakes – not the kind that kill anyone, fortunately, and most of the harm came on me, but at the time it all seemed pointless.

My favourite episode of Star Trek (TNG, naturally) is when the all-powerful alien Q gives Captain Picard an opportunity to change history so that he didn’t make a particular youthful mistake. The thing is, though, it turns out that without the mistake, instead of becoming a bold leader, Picard ends up a hesitant, unpromotable junior ranker of no great significance, and he pleads to have things put back the way they were. I love that episode, because it’s the story of my life too.

Without the bad decisions that plunged me into stress breakdown for a couple of years, I wouldn’t be very kind, very gentle or very understanding of others’ struggles and failures. I was an arrogant young pup, not smart enough to know that constantly showing yourself to be the smartest guy in the room isn’t a formula for success or happiness. Though I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, I also wouldn’t wish to have avoided it – because I’d have had those lessons to learn sooner or later. (Or, far worse, not learned them at all.)

It might have made it easier, though, to get through those times if I’d known that.

How about you? What do you wish you’d learned earlier?

comments: 16 » tags: confidence, decision, emotions, exercise, life lessons, personal change, stress

Jul 20

3 Things I’ve Learned from Climbing the Walls

Posted in News

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

Time for another Three Things I’ve Learned post.

I recommend this as a personal development exercise, by the way. Even if you’re not a blogger, though it’s obviously easier if you are.

Each time you have a significant experience in your life, sit down and write about three things you’ve learned from it. It makes the difference between learning them and knowing you’ve learned them.

Anyway. For my birthday, I went rock climbing at an indoor climbing wall. The idea was to celebrate the fact that I’d overcome my fear of heights.

I shot a bit of video with my head-mounted camera, and my friend Duncan took some photos for me, and I’ve pulled them together into this video/slideshow thing:

Fun, right?

Here are three things I learned.

1. Progress short of perfection is OK

What you may or may not have noticed is that, while my friends were climbing to the top of things, I wasn’t.

I could certainly climb a lot higher than I ever could have before. And what I felt, when I reached those heights, wasn’t fear as such. It was caution, an unwillingness to climb higher.

As I talked about a while back, when I was training as a hypnotherapist, my esteemed sensei Roger Saxelby demonstrated the “Fast Phobia Cure” on me. Since then, I’ve been perfectly comfortable climbing ladders and standing on balconies, where once I had trouble going upstairs in a glass stairwell. But part of the Fast Phobia Cure as Roger practices it (and quite rightly so) is to remind the client to practice reasonable caution in the former phobic situation.

Climbing the Walls The thing with phobias is that phobic people tend to avoid the situations which trigger their fear. This means that they’re not used to dealing with them, so it’s appropriate to give them the suggestion of caution.

That caution is still with me, and I haven’t yet reached the point where I subconsciously trust the automatic belaying devices at the climbing wall to keep me safe. I can climb to about a two-storey level comfortably, but that’s it. For now.

I’m disappointed that I wasn’t as far on as I’d thought, but I’m also pleased that I’ve made the progress I have.

2. Sometimes doing is more healing than resting

I’ve had problems with my shoulder for a couple of months. I was sitting at an unergonomic desk for a few weeks, and it’s my mouse-using side that’s causing the trouble. Then I strained it doing a new kind of situp that the US Army are talking about introducing, which involves your hands being up over your head. I had to go to the physiotherapist a couple of times, and it’s troubled me intermittently since.

It was bothering me when I went along to the climbing wall, but I’d booked it a month in advance to commit myself to doing it, and I wasn’t going to back out. I put chemical heat pads on it for a couple of days beforehand and hoped for the best.

Since the climbing, though, it’s been fine. Apparently what it needed was not rest, but exercise.

I had a cold, too, but again, I wasn’t going to pull out. And again, I felt better for having done something.

My tendency, and maybe yours, is to think that if I feel bad that’s a good reason to do nothing, to rest, to pull back. And sometimes it absolutely is. But sometimes, getting active is exactly what I need in order to feel better.

The trick is in telling them apart – knowing when I need to rest and when I just want to rest (but would actually benefit more from pushing on).

3. Pre-commit to doing what will do you good

Which, of course, leads into my third point.

One reason that I join groups and classes is that if I do, I’m more likely to do whatever it is. I have a time, a place, and some people who are, however casually, expecting me to turn up. It’s booked. It’s in my calender.

I’ve recently been thinking about how to make my ecourses more useful – not by changing the content, but by improving the way that people engage with the content. I have a few ideas, up to and including an iPhone app, but one of the key ideas is to encourage people to book a time for doing the course into their calendar or diary.

Over 500 people have got the second email for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, for example, but fewer than half of them opened it, and only just over half of those have clicked on the link in it to get their ebook.

I can’t blame them. I do that too. I have a course that I’ve paid for sitting mostly unread in my inbox right now, because when I’m checking mail I’m checking mail, I’m not doing a course. When I do open an email for a course, I rush through it. I don’t have time set aside.

When I was planning to start up exercise again, I didn’t do so until I figured out where in my day I could fit it, because I knew it just wouldn’t happen otherwise. There was no point in “committing” to do it in a general sense. I had to commit to doing it at a particular time.

I often say, “I’m planning to do such-and-such”. But unless I have a scheduled time, a booking made, a commitment in place, I’m not really planning to do it. I’m inclining to do it. I’m wishfully thinking about doing it.

I’m not, by nature, a highly organised person. I’m not one of those counsel-of-perfection people who have an empty inbox, an uncluttered house and everything scheduled down to the minute. My filing system is that I generally know where I’ve put things, more or less. But for that very reason, I have to schedule things that I really want to do, or else they’ll get pushed out by the ordinary day-to-day doing.

Action Now

The service I provide here is not that I learn personal development lessons so you don’t have to.

It’s that I learn personal development lessons the hard way so that you can learn them much more easily, by listening to me.

But you haven’t learned them until you’ve acted on them. Personal development always has a practical exam.

So:

What could you make some progress on, even if you don’t achieve perfection?
Is there something you’ve been avoiding doing in order to “rest” or “heal” or “keep safe” that would benefit more from taking some action?
And when are you going to schedule doing something about it?

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