YOU are the Hero of your life, Hero-You is out there against the world and with the world and in the world. Each day bringing new and exciting challenges to negotiate. Joyous and sorrow-full, the Hero's Journey continues. I wrote a few weeks ago about the Hero's Journey and its relevance in narrative and your life. Hero-You engages in all sorts of activities; mundane and simple, complex and dangerous. Some of the tasks are easy, some are difficult. Some are downright death defying. However, all follow a set pattern; Departure, Initiation, Return. Hero-You sets out on a task, later today I will be going into town on my bike with my son to buy some multi-vitamins. A hero's quest indeed. Under the lens of the Hero's Journey we will depart, to do this we must be prepared, have the correct tools. Including a working bicycle, child seat attached, a bag for the shopping, wallet-phone-keys! Helmets and shoes on, off we go. WHAT will be our initiation? Weaving and wending through the traffic of post rush hour, yes. Finding/deciding where to lock up the bike for my errands, yes. Choosing and deciding on what to buy, yes. Packing up bags and heading home, yes. Simple, mundane, almost dull. AND upon my return, an analysis of the journey, which hills I rode, how the bag rode when packed a certain way, choices I made of cutting through the woods or not. And so forth. EACH errand you run, each task you do; the washing up, the school run, a trip to Spain, climbing a mountain. Each one is a Hero's Journey. Let Hero-You be best prepared. How can you help Hero-You prepare? With On-Ramps and Off-Ramps. Your journey is like the highway (motorway / freeway.) It was specific places that you enter in from and exit from. ON-RAMPS are there to help Hero-You to depart in the easiest and most relaxed manner. We all complete our best work when we begin easily and relaxed. So allow that to happen. My On-Ramps for my errand into town are that my wallet-phone-keys are in a basket near the door, easily accessible. The bag I will take is there too. As are all our shoes - we have a barefoot policy in the house. My bike is stored in the garage, the child seat pops off Vicki's bike and attaches to mine shockingly easily (Hamax brand, brilliant!) ANOTHER fine On-Ramp is visualisation, I scan over my journey and look where I am going and how I expect it to be, where will it be easy, where will it be difficult, where can I rest and for how long? Click HERE for information on my four-week e-Course on visualisation for your favourite sports, activities and life. LOOK over your day, how can you make your departure easier? A climbing partner of mine stores his rope, shoes, harness and gear in his rope bag. Going climbing he has one bag to grab. Done. Easy! I have a small mesh bag that takes my wallet-phone-keys plus diary, finger tape (first aid for outdoor sports enthusiasts), an old pot of lip balm, a 'buff' (scarf / hat), this mesh bag is slung in my locker and stores away everything quickly and safely. OFF-RAMPS are similar, and in reverse! Where are you going to throw things when upon your heroic return? If the weather is bad where do things go that's different? How does the results of your trip affect your return? RETURN and Off-Ramps are also affected by thoughts, feelings, emotions and mentation. You need to be aware that you will return in a very different mental state depending on how you Hero's Journey pans out. This is something that requires personal and specific focus and interpretation by you, or discussion with other parties. How can you most easily do that? A kettle that is ready for boiling is a fine place to begin. HERO-You is honoured and respected when you accept the needs or your journey and you engage actively in the process of departure, initiation and return. Use the tools of On-Ramps and Off-Ramps to consciously help you to find your way. Thank you, ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Starlings and the old pier at Brighton.
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"NO thanks, I'm not eating sugar for a month." as cake is offered around at work. THE team have taken the idea very well, aside from the odd veiled threat to try to get me to eat as much as possible they take my explanation with interest and understanding and occasional response of "My body is a temple." MY reasons are simple. Sugar - by this I mean the refined cane sugar that turns up in confectionary, drinks of all sorts of, chocolate, pickles, chutney, jam, shop-bought-jars-of-mint-raita (!) and certain brands of crisps - has a terrible effect on my body. It is so severely refined that it hits the stomach and intestine and transfers directly, pretty much instantly, into the bloodstream. Result: a massive spike in blood sugar levels. This has the consequence of the body needing to return itself to equilibrium, releasing insulin to respond and to lower blood sugar to more reasonable levels. The insulin released finds errant sugar sets to packaging it away safely, the body burns some off in muscular activity, the rest is pumped into storage and that means fat cells. Blood sugar levels returned to normal, the brain has a sudden desire for the quickening of abilities that the sugar rush created and calls for more, it likes the high blood sugar feeling, the body however does not, so the brain sets off a craving for more, and I think I want more sugar, eat more, repeat effect. Ad infinitum. ANOTHER reason is that early this year my wife, Vicki, took a month long vegan pledge. Be vegan for one month. (Responses on a postcard! "Why would you want to do that?" "That's not healthy." "You need meat to have a balanced diet." "Where do you get your calcium from if you don't drink milk?" (and my favourite) "Oh, that's difficult!") This triggered some LONG shopping trips, scanning ingredients and lists of added stuff to food. Easy when you get the hang of it, due to milk allergies, milk has to be noted on allergy warnings. (Sugar is not an allergen, alas!) However, we learned an important lesson: Food is ridiculous. Just as Chicken, bacon, prawn flavour crisps are frequently suitable for vegetarians (madness), so milk turns up all over the place. SUGAR is exactly the same. My two big discoveries so far are that mint raita from the supermarket has sugar in. As do certain flavoured crisps. Crisps, totally unnecessary. Moral, look at the packaging and don't buy from vending machines - as you cannot check. EASY ride this really, when I note now through your incredulation, that I released chocolate and then coffee and black tea from my life in quick succession around Christmas last year. Knocks out the easy need for sugar - though I never had tea or coffee with sugar! EXCLUSIONS, fruit. I have been questioned for the amount of fruit that arises from my lunch at work, fruit sugar however does not have the spike effect of refined sugar on blood sugar levels. Arguing mineral and vitamin content gets into all sorts of murky waters, like you get calcium from milk chocolate so it's ok to eat. WHAT is my overall ambition in this experiment? To consume less and understand more. Example: bread. Shop bought, mass produced bread contains sugar. We have a bread machine, which is fantastic, and I love. However, the recipes include sugar, it aids the yeast in respiration and therefore creates a fluffier loaf. Great. Try following the recipe exactly, except the sugar. Omit that completely. I've been doing it for two years now and it makes NO DISCERNIBLE DIFFERENCE. At all. Ever. (Just to make sure you're clear on that!) However, when I buy bread from the supermarket it is made, generally, very quickly in the Chorley Wood technique. Which adds stacks of sugar (one loaf is equivalent to a Mars bar, or similar shocking amounts.) The crucial factor in bread quality coming out of my kitchen is that the flour is good quality, prefer organic always. Plus the water and yeast remaining separate till the machine wants them to mix! SO, freedom from sugar, week one in and a few slip ups. More soon from steady blood sugar living Andy! HOW does this link to what I do in my business? What I do with my clients? My sugar free decision is a choice. Every thing we do is a choice, what we choose to do, choose to say, choose to think and how we choose to act and think and speak. The result of feeding my body with wholesome and nutritious food is that I can speak my truth with a clear mind that is not blurred by drugs such as caffeine or sugar or alcohol. Some may say that this is life with all the fun taken out, I say it is life with the lens wiped clean, and I can see, really see, what is happening to me. This means I can truly hear and see and experience life, without the cloudy fog of drugs. I recommend a hiatus, take a week away from something if a month is too long. Or a weekend if that sounds too scary. Give your body, mind and spirit a chance to really see the world. Make a conscious choice to nourish your incredible body fully. Thank you, ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance. Find out more about the guides I have had on my journey, check out Jason Vale - his book Chocolate Busters is fantastic. And Alicia Silverstone - author of The Kind Diet are two fine starting points. I have heard that The China Study is a fantastic book too, it keeps coming up in all sorts of places, though I have not had a chance to read it yet. A Bunch Of Roses!
MY wife, Vicki, has since the age of 18 been a Ms. Vicki stepped out of the world of being a Miss when she became an adult and when we married we refused to accept the title of Mrs. What is our reasoning? THE title Miss, historically, denoted an unmarried female, property of her father. The title Mrs denoted a married female, property of her husband. This is the foundation of the principle of titles for females. The person is always chattel, the property of someone else - specifically of a male. Never their own person, in control of their own destiny. This does not sit well with Vicki, or me. WE were insistent upon our union that we did not become a Mr and Mrs, instead we continued as we were when we met, as a Mr and a Ms. Each unique and each our own person. When we came together to become 'one' we joined to forge together as a partnership, linking our pasts to head into our future. Not as a transaction of property. As a joining of destiny. THIS also explains the reason of our choice of name. We were born as a Clubley and a Moore. We discovered on brief research at the coming of our first child (pre-marriage) that any chosen name can be adopted, with the complicated inclusion of hyphenation of names. We choose to name William a Clubley-Moore. To claim him not to my tribe, nor to Vicki's. Instead to both. A forged link between two unique tribes and a binding promise between them. Zachary also became a Clubley-Moore. SO, as a wholly unique tribe - by my two minutes of research on Google (fountain of all knowledge) - we step out into the world as a collection of individuals, standing together to help each other with our unique gifts and help the world in whatever ways we can. Stepping up to the new day each and every day asking: what can I change today? What can I improve? How can I best serve myself, humanity and my future? As the tribe of Clubley-Moore, and as individuals together. TODAY, is the christening of Baby Albert, he is the son of Vicki's gap year partner, Rachel. Vicki and Rachel spent 1999-2000 together on a wild ride in Zimbabwe. Welcome to the world, Albert, and welcome to your new tribe of Christianity into which I was long ago baptised. Strive to do your best good at all times and in all places, especially when it is hardest to do good. Leave each place you go a little bit better for your passing. Thank you ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Wedding Day. 18th June 2011, Marriage under the trees and sky and loving eyes of our community.
FOR more information on language use and training your mind for better performance check out the Courses page of my website. 4-Week e-Courses, email based, and a FREE course in visualisation practice.
Amazonian Water Lily: The Royal Botanical Gardens, Adelaide, South Australia.
YOUR anger is a map. YOUR fear is a story of your future. HOW will you use your negative emotion? My coaching courses focus on how to optimise performance by use of positive emotion AND how to utilise negative emotion for empowerment, rather than letting them cripple you. WHEN you flush with anger there is a reason, you are possibly not even angry with what is being said or happening at that moment. You are reacting to your memories, feelings and thoughts. Your anger is a map. A map guiding you to change something. When you experience anger it will come with a blast of energy, a flush of power to push you a little bit further. CARE must be taken, poorly utilised anger will lead to negative results. However, consciously felt anger will allow you to be stronger and faster when needed. Also consciously felt and reasoned anger will guide you, anger that you did not catch that train, set the alarm earlier, or walk the dog for less time. ACCEPT the anger, appreciate it for helping to show you what you want. FEARS are narratives of your future, you are afraid you will miss the train, be late for work, be made redundant, have the house repossessed and have to live on the streets. No. Actually, there are safety systems in place. It is only a train to catch. SAYING that, fears - like anger - are a map. They show you where you do not desire to go. Where is this fear directing you, what do you need to avoid. As an outdoor sports enthusiast the fears are related frequently to possibility of a very real injury. It is something that I must balance at all times: see the obstacles, note the methods I use, adapt my technique accordingly and push on through having taken in the fear and released it. AS I listen to the stories of fear I look over them and their consequences, then launch into the most desirable outcome. This is a healthy and positive use for my fear, when climbing and the hold I am hanging on to clip is horrible I look for a better one, I shift my position, I move fast to get through the difficult section. Feeling the fear, I accept it and choose a method to deal with it. TODAY, take note of your anger and your fears and find what they relate to and how they are affecting you decisions and choices. Work out what your anger and your fear are guiding you to. How are you going to get there? What is your very next step? ACM Click HERE to sign up for a completely FREE online course in visualisation. This course is four weeks long and explains the power of visualisation practice, how to do it and how to make it work for you. Dark nights in Queensland, Australia. The constellation Orion as seen in the southern hemisphere, doing a cartwheel! Even the great hunter knows how to play!
WHEN you know what it is that you are after, what your specific goal is, then it is time to arm your mind with the powerful tool of visualisation. PICTURE this: you are at the bottom of a climbing wall or cliff, looking up your project route, you can get to half way, you get that high left foot, push down and then, every time, in the same place, your hand pops, your feet come off and you’re hanging on the rope. Every time. This crux is killing you. STEP back (looking behind you for judiciously placed sand bags, ropes, water bottles and children!) Untie from the rope. NOW: smile, exhale, look at the bottom of the route again, the very first move, plan where both hands and feet are going to be. Then run through the moves, one at a time, all the way up the route. As you look up the route mime through the sequence. Let your mind run the whole route up to your mid-point crux looking at every hand and foot hold. Each one, left foot here, right hand up, push out right on this one. Let your hands mime out the whole route. Easily and simply showing the way up each move. Through the crux, all the way to the top. NOW, tie in and climb the route. WHAT makes visualisation such a powerful tool? WHEN we visualise something; whether it is a project climb, traversing rapids in a canoe, or taking a penalty in football; what is going on in your brain is that you are setting off neurons and sending signals in exactly the same way as you do when your body actually does the activity. THESE messages then go travelling around your body, arriving at the appropriate muscle group and telling them it how it is going to perform a set function; how the hand is going to tighten the index and middle finger and pull the thumb on this pinch, or how the ankle will turn around to allow for that drop-knee. IN this way your brain learns the moves before leaving the ground. The body also learns how the moves are going to be made. The process of visualisation allows the brain and body to interpret the moves required to get through the route before encountering the performance crippling mental processes of stress and the fear of danger comes in to interfere with how they actually perform the necessary processes to get up the route. SO, when standing at the bottom of your route, look up through the route, plan where you are going to put your hands and your feet to get through sequences. Mime out crux moves to really let those moves get hardwired into your brain and body. Let your brain and body have a chance to learn the route, then throw yourself at it; fresh, prepared and ready. MORE on visualisation in my FREE 4-Week Visualisation mini-course. It is completely free, sign up HERE and find out the power of preparing your mind. MENTAL training courses through online, email-based e-Courses available HERE and personal coaching also available, go HERE to find out more. Many thanks, Climb Hard! ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance. Windmill. Wal Wal, Victoria State, Australia.
THE power of the voice that you provide for your past allows your mind to re-member how you choose to perceive it; your choice is what sets up how your mind views your experiences and past activities. WHEN we look positively on an event, then it comes to us in a positive light, and our mind allows us to watch the reruns of our actions and to be able to repeat them easily and smoothly. However, when we choose to take our actions and tell negative stories about our past then the mind accepts this process and when we come to repeat the process then we find it hard to do the necessary movements. Our body seems sluggish and uncooperative, we can’t work out the moves of a sequence, and when it comes to hard sections we fall off. THIS is partly why everyone can get energised and fired up about beginning a new activity. When we succeed in a simple arena, maybe we are on a slab graded at 3 or 4, we get up we are really excited. This leads to our espousing to friends how amazing your climb was. You bubble away happily to a slightly bewildered look and end by telling them ecstatically that you got all the way to the top! IMAGINE being excited to top out! How often is the top just another part of the climb? And you expect to get there, and when you don’t you are down, and then your next climb fails. Then you decide you are having a bad day and take an easier route. But this feels difficult too. So you pack up, muttering something to your partner about being tired and a hard week at work, and go home. Next day you translate this story to another climber, telling them how difficult it was, how you failed on the easy route that you should have flashed and had a terrible day. YOUR mind is taking this in, registering that you had a terrible day, and that it was awful and how you failed even on the easy route. When you come back to it, this pattern begins to show. First you have a bad time on a project route, you mumble something about not feeling very well and step back a few grades, your mind remembers this sequence and how you told it. The easier routes feel tricky, and so the spiral goes on, downwards. WHEN you choose to take any positives that you can from a story and repeat those parts, emphasising the good and playing down the bad then we find that the mind remembers the process positively and the process becomes easier each time. LET the language you view your past in keep you succeeding. Keep me loving every hold! ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Azure Kingfisher under the bridge. Eungella, Queensland, Australia. (The best place to see platypus!)
THERE is no higher act than to love. Forgiveness is love. Love in its pure and honest state. Letting people make their mistakes, letting our errors be acknowledged and recognised and accepted. And forgiven. MY lesson today. How to continue to love and to release and to forgive. There is a far better me, I am my best-self when I forgive, and refill, and overflow again and again with love. As we overflow we become over and over our best self, again and again. TAKE the choice to not forgive, what happens? The well remains empty, empty vessels making empty noises. Rattling with anger and sorrow. Only darkness in our depths, only shadows in the corners. Restless and discontent. Forgiving and not forgiving is a choice. An endless choice in this ruinous and beauty-full world. Nothing you can do to avoid the need to make that choice. It is a decision that has to be made. You must choose, each time you are wronged, and it happens a thousand times a day. Do you forgive and move on? Or not forgive and move on? SURELY forgiveness is a choice that I choose to make and I make the choice in solitude and in care to allow my-self to fill with love. Letting the light of love chase away the shadowy demons that swirl and dance in the corners of the world. BECOMING my best self I rest back in my chair, singing loudly the songs of love and letting them shrill out to fill my world with colour-full sounds. Filling my world with love, making it better, attracting in more goodness, more love, more beauty. FORGIVING is a loving process and a process that I love to engage in. I love to fill my world with the sensations of forgiveness. To feel the discontent dissolving and the anger subside. To feel the refreshing filling flow of love bubbling up through my body and filling me completely. CHOOSING to forgive I choose my best self. The man I want to be. Nothing more, nothing less. Only my best self. And that is who I want to be. No one more or less than my best self that I can be right now. Forgiving and free. ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Skye pulls the horse-drawn tram from Granite Island as a spring storm subsides and a rainbow arches over the island. Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia.
GIVE love like the sun gives light: freely, abundantly. So much that it cannot all be consumed and comes back reflected brightly, shining out from every-thing it touches. Let your reflected love come back brightly reflected from your world to fill your life with vibrant shades. LOVE is self-full-filling. It fills us: fully. Finding the darkest corners and shedding its light deeply into them, filling, glowing through the whole world. As the light of love shines out through our eyes. Love destroys hate, dissolves mistrust. Love forgives the pain and the hurt. ACCEPT love, let those who love you speak to you freely and openly. Let their hands touch yours and let their words from the heart reach yours. Acceptance of love allows it to reflect back, let the light of love reflect back. EXPRESS love, share it with every person you meet. Every-time you meet them. Fill yourself with love for all creation and let it spill over the edges of your-self and flow out through your mouth in your words, let it flow out from your hands in your actions, let it flow out and fill your world with light. EMBRACE this loving attitude, that is your choice that you choose to make. Choose to fume and simmer and boil at those around me, even those who have not erred. It is those closest who receive the wrath in moods this black, turning the knife variously to those uninvolved and slicing variously at them with words and deeds. OR choose to turn to caring ears, to divide distaste for this feeling, choose to share the problem. Will that help the problem to solve? Is a problem shared a problem halved? Or is it multiplied? More tongues to wag, more ears to have to hear, more words sharing the problem. Giving it power and strength each time it is shared. NO, breathe in love and breathe out love. Let it come, let it go. Reflected, brighter, more vibrant. Let not the anger guide you mind and tongue, nor the sadness guide your choice. Let love direct your choice. Choose the light of your love fill these deepest corners and dissolve the bubbling pools of discontent. Evaporating them and replacing them with only love. "Be like the fountain that overflows, not the cistern that merely contains." Paolo Coelho. ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Flat land under big skies. The Yorke Peninsula, South Australia.
HOW do you judge your performance? Do you come off the climbing wall saying “...that middle move was fantastic, I loved the bridge at half height and did you see crimp at the top, beautiful, really so delicate...”? Your talk judges your actions, labelling them as good or bad. This allows the memory of the climb to be seated in your brain. When we judge something, positively or negatively, what we do is shade the memory. IMAGINE you have just touched down after a tough climb; it stretched you physically and mentally. You had it all planned and prepared, it was pushing within your grade, you’ve been working at it steadily and today you did it! Well done! Now is the time to continue exercising the powers of your mind, to allow the successes of the climb to become positive past experiences. THIS climb is going to keep you buzzing for a few weeks, every time you catch sight of it you are going to smile and remember all the little parts of it. After that it will settle into a hazy memory, maybe you will push it aside with other successes, maybe they will re-set the wall and the physical climb will no longer be there. The memory remains. How will you choose to allow that memory to shape your future climbing? WHEN we take an event and judge it positively we find the memory of it uplifting and fulfilling. The thought of the moves at half height and how you finally cracked that little delicate crimp near the top, judged positively can allow our mind to remember that we can climb well on crimps, and this action is a positive thing to do. The mind allows us to shade the process of that climb in a positive and beneficial way. WHEN we take the same event and we judge it negatively, taking the memory of the hard moves and making them difficult remembering the struggle we take the effort involved as the focus. Our focus turned to the negative parts of the climb we put the climb into a different shade. Our mind remembers it negatively. It perceives that the bridge and the crimp and the climb were difficult and negative things, these are things that it does not want to repeat. So it tries to get away from them. THIS difference in how your mind views your past is going to hugely affect how your future climbs go. Allow yourself to take all the positive moments of each climb, and let the negative bits go, allow yourself to release them. THE first step of positively framing for your future begins with the planning stages including visualisation, click HERE to get my visualisation mini-course. A four-week course focusing on how we build positive, power-full visualisation exercises to fill our activity with positive and power-full results. ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance Rainbows, rocks and waterfalls. Near Adelaide, South Australia.
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AuthorAndy Clubley-Moore: joyful outdoor sports activist, writer, father, husband. Lover of life, activity, success and barefoot living. |