I’ve been doing a lot of “How Not to Change Your Life” posts lately, so I want to change it up this week and do another 3 Things I’ve Learned. I enjoy these, and people seem to like them.
Something else I enjoy is kayaking. I bought a kayak last year in response to blog posts by Johnny B. Truant and Catherine Caine. (Yes, blog posts do result in people taking action sometimes. I remember my own example whenever I start to doubt the usefulness of blogging.)
Johnny’s post, My So-Called Rockstar Life, is about how a lot of the things we dream about may be achievable now, in their essentials, if we really want them. Catherine’s List of Awesomeness is about making a list of the things you really want to achieve someday-maybe, and then doing one of them – so, the same general idea.
Kayaks don’t usually get names, but if they did, mine would be called the Catherine B. Truant.
Because I’d been thinking for several years, “I live near the coast. It would be cool someday to get a kayak.” I’ve been on day kayaking trips in the past, and really enjoyed it; I even, briefly, owned a kayak (it was collapsible, but not, I found, de-collapsible, at least not by someone with my level of physical strength). So I knew I liked kayaking, and dreamed of owning a kayak someday.
What Johnny and Catherine helped me see was that there was no particular reason to put off “someday” any longer.
So I now own a kayak. Also a roof rack, some lycra gloves (never thought I’d own anything made of lycra), and a waterproof GoPro HD Hero 960 video/still camera, which I used to take this footage on a recent trip to the Bay of Islands:
(I strap it to my head. You look like a dork, but you get good video.)
Anyway, I promised to talk about three things I’ve learned from kayaking. Here goes.
1. Flow, don’t brace
Strictly speaking, I didn’t learn that from kayaking. I learned it from Cynthia Bourgeault, the well-known kayaking instructor meditation teacher. In her talks on Centering Prayer, the form of meditation I’ve practiced (somewhat infrequently) over the past few years, she presents the idea of not being in a state of “brace” – where you’re ready to defend your ego against threats. (I’m getting similar messages from my improv class, which I’ll talk about in a future Three Things I’ve Learned post.)
When you’re out on the sea, especially if there’s a bit of a wind, the kayak starts rocking and rolling on the swell. My natural instinct is to brace and fight it. What works much better, though – for my energy, for the movement of the boat, and for how enjoyable it is – is to become aware of the waves and flow with them.
In a sea kayak, you’re very close to the water, and you’re not just sitting in the boat like being in a rowboat – you actually have a spray skirt around your waist that fits over the cockpit, so it’s a sort of ocean-going centaur scenario. It feels very much like the boat is part of you. When you flow instead of bracing, the whole kayak-person unit flows. You rise up the waves and drop into the troughs. If the waves are from the side (which you try not to let happen), you rock from side to side. It’s very physical.
It’s the kind of thing, incidentally, that does very integrative things to your brain, because movement involves lots of different brain areas, especially when paired with vision, and even more so if you have to pay attention to your balance. Between that, the physical exertion, the sea air, the sunshine and the beautiful natural surroundings, I always feel very integrated when I come in from a paddle.
I’ve heard the message from Cynthia Bourgeault (and my improv teacher). I’ve felt it in the kayak (and in improv class). What does it look like in life to flow instead of brace?
Well, you say “yes” a lot. You pay attention to what’s going on around you and think about how you can fit in with it (not how you can control it, because generally you can’t). It’s thrilling. It’s also a lot less work than bracing is. It’s scary – but being in the waves is scary whether you flow or brace. At least if you’re flowing, it’s exciting scary.
2. Time in the boat requires time out of the boat
When I was dreaming of having a kayak, I was vaguely aware that there would be some practical messing about involved. I’ve done this kind of thing before and I know that.
It’s different when you have the actual kayak, though. By the time I get all the gear out and load it in and on the car, drive to the launch point, get all the gear off and out of the car, and then do the same thing in reverse on the way back, plus wash down the boat and the gear, it adds up to about an hour and a half of out-of-boat time.
Up until recently, the out-of-boat time was exceeding the in-boat time. As I’ve become stronger, though, and more efficient at handling the gear, the proportions have improved – both because I’m spending more time in the boat and because I’m spending less time out of it.
In life, as well, in order to do what you want to do, you have to do other stuff that isn’t as much fun. But as you get more practiced and apply some thought to it, you can reduce the proportion of not-fun. The first time I created and released one of my online courses, the proportion of administrative messing about to creative course-writing was enormous. Now, I’ve got it down to a much smaller proportion.
3. I can paddle harder for longer if I’m with someone
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not physically very strong. Most people (men and women) are stronger than me.
That means that if I’m paddling with a group, or even one other person, they will probably paddle faster, harder and for longer than me without getting as tired.
I’m proud (up to a point), and I’ll put out extra effort to keep up in those circumstances. In consequence, I’ll go a lot faster, harder and for longer than I would by myself. It’s not even that I’m consciously slacking off when I’m alone. It’s just that without a pace-setter, I don’t put out as much effort before I decide I’m tired enough to stop.
This week I’m starting the free Half-Hour Habit Help sessions that people have been signing up for through February. (It’s still February somewhere at the point that this is published – if you’re quick, you can still sign up.) I’m looking forward to being the person who helps them paddle faster, harder and for longer.
And if you want to work with me on changing your life, please get in touch.
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I used to live in an apartment complex next to a beautiful park. The apartments were built in the mid-1960s, which made them slightly older than me, but they were well-constructed and in good condition. I would have been very happy there – except for the neighbours.
Not long after I moved in, I discovered there was a long-standing fight going on among the owners of the other apartments. The supposed issue would be tedious to describe (it was to do with the unusual legal format of the ownership of the property). I suspect, though, that by the point at which I came in, it wasn’t even what was driving people any more.
The real problem was that two sides had spent so many years fighting over it that they thoroughly despised each other, and weren’t going to yield an inch of ground to the hated enemy under any circumstances. It was like living in the Middle East, or, occasionally, a seagull colony.
On one side were mostly elderly residents who controlled the governing board and were, to put it mildly, stubborn and curmudgeonly in their resistance to change. On the other side were a middle-aged couple and their few allies, who wanted to change the legal structure.
The reason that couple had few allies is that they consistently alienated people by their behaviour. I probably would have voted with them if they’d gone about the whole thing in a measured and reasonable way (in fact, they probably would have carried the issue years before I got there). Instead, they periodically put ranting letters in everyone’s mailboxes accusing the Board, and especially the chairman, of a long list of crimes and heaping personal abuse on them. (One particularly memorable letter compared the chairman to Adolf Hitler and Slobadan Milosevic, which wasn’t well calculated to help them hold on to the support of one of their few remaining allies, a holocaust survivor.)
I left that apartment complex years ago, basically to get away from the fighting. I’ve wondered a few times what’s happened since I left. One thing I’m confident of, though: the leader of the opposition will not have changed. I know this, because he was always right.
I foolishly got involved in the fight at one point and tried to mediate, pointing out that there were faults on both sides. “Nothing,” he declared, “could be further from the truth.” As far as he was concerned, he was totally right and without fault, and whatever tactics he used were justified by the righteousness of his cause (the noble moral issue of the legal structure by which some apartments were owned, let’s not forget). His many defeats by fair democratic process never dented his confidence even slightly. I never saw him retract, apologise, concede a point or back down in any way.
Progress by mistakes
Personally, I’ve learned some of my most important lessons by being wrong. No, I’m wrong there. I’ve learned some of my most important lessons by being able to admit that I was wrong.
Let’s face it: we all screw up. There’s not a person alive today who hasn’t made mistakes, often significant ones. Read any successful person’s biography. If it’s an honest biography, there will be at least one major mistake in there, I guarantee. And the other thing I guarantee is this: That person learned from their mistake. It was an important step on their path to success.
Looking back on my own life, I can identify many of these. The time I decided that I wasn’t cut out to be a youth worker. The inappropriate joke I posted on the office door, and confessed to when my scary boss hit the roof. Several times when I’ve offended my wife. All the times when people have criticised me and my first action has not been to defend myself, but to listen.
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias works by discarding, dismissing or reinterpreting any evidence that you’re wrong, and keeping only the evidence that you’re right. It’s seen in science, in journalism, in politics, and in everyday life. When we see it in people who we disagree with, we think less of them, but we all do it. It’s part of how we get through life. If we changed our opinion every time we got new evidence, we’d be all over the road.
At the same time, confirmation bias is a problem when we get too good at it. On the one hand, there’s the person who’s convinced they can never do anything right, and will discard any evidence to the contrary – and they definitely have a problem. But on the other hand, there’s the person – like my former neighbour – who is convinced they can never do anything wrong, and they are dangerous. You can’t work with them. It’s their way or the highway.
And they are deliberately cutting themselves off from one of the most important pathways to change – the feedback of other people.
Feedback
In engineering, a feedback loop works like this. You have a target setting, say on a thermostat (that’s the classic example). You also have a range around that target setting that’s “close enough”. When a measuring device, such as a thermometer, detects that the situation is outside that range – it’s too hot or too cold – it provides feedback to the machine, which then works to return to the target. When it’s there, again it gets feedback, and shuts off.
The reason feedback from others is so important is that we can’t always trust our own judgement. Our measurements are biased, and they come from only one perspective. This isn’t to say that every criticism you receive is correct, of course, but every criticism (or praise) is worth listening to for what you can learn.
(Sometimes, what you learn is that the other person is an idiot. But that’s their problem.)
Action Now
Who do you have around you who can help you to get things right by telling you how they think you’re getting them wrong?
Talk to that person. Ask them to be honest, and listen carefully, without defending. Then go away and think it over. They could be right.
This seems like a good moment to mention that I’ll be offering half-hour free consulting sessions, for a limited time, starting next week – more about that in next week’s post.
And, of course, feel free to disagree with me in the comments.
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.
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?
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