DODGING around slightly over friendly horses that insisted on coming to welcome me to their paddocks, I skipped and squelched my way across flooded sections to the top corner of the paddocks where my recalling of the map took me. Fences pinched together and the puddles were the same constant ruin of a mess. The mud the same light brown waterlogged shade. I plodded on, finding the driest spots and step stepping over and around the water. BOOM; I am shin deep. Step forwards to keep my balance, boom, two feet up to the knee! Start the extreme wading. Step, step, step, heaving, pulling, lugging my legs with me. Still deep. Remorseless. The horses watch me curiously. Wade on. Look up. Look back. Look ahead. A puddle stretches across the path, both sides flooded. If it's eighteen inches deep here, that'll be worse. Turn around, wade back. Heave. Pull. Lug. "Every success is plagued by repeated and frequent failure." SOMETIMES you just have to turn back. Sometimes there is no other way. To go on is foolish, dangerous or just too uncomfortable. Turn arounds are not failure. They are measured decisions. What was I balancing? Depth of water, potential of taking a muddy swim - in water that could be five inches and could be five feet, probably five degrees - dodging the unknown I heave and pull and lug back to a broken down 'that can't be the way' stile that I scrabble over and then find a footpath that peters out, a Staffordshire bull terrier (friendly) and an electric fence (not friendly!) Turn around. Again. TURN arounds fill with them moments of fear. Moments of feelings of being conquered and beaten and defeated. We are not allowed to turn around. Not allowed to retreat. Being beaten is bad. That is the way we are going and we are going that way. No retreat. No excuses. "That is the way we are going and we are going that way." NO chance. Any success is beset on all sides by potential paths of winding broken trails of fear and trails of failure. Every success is plagued by repeated and frequent failure. Failure is the footprints of success, following it surely and steadily. You have to lose much to find success. THE victorious podium is shadowed by failure. The footprints that lead to it are faltering, they stumble here and there, wander off distractedly now and then, come back to the trail wearily and return again. And again. "Make positive performance out of your everyday simple actions. " FAILURE is fear-full; that is full of fear. It is something we have been trained to escape from, avoid and dodge. Our failures are the stepping stones across the rivers. They show us where to go, where not to go and they help us to navigate true to our values and to find the way across to the safe shore of success. FEAR too is a navigating tool. Fear guides our internal radar, telling us what our body can do, what might be risky, what could be dangerous, where we may be set back. Attuning your mind to your fear is a sure way to foresee the potential pitfalls in plans and actions. FEAR is a sign that we are making progress. Fear is a sign we are pushing hard enough. Pushing well. Fear shows you the way to turn, or where you need to resolve (re-solve!) and clarify your vision in order to make positive performance out of your everyday simple actions. NEXT time you feel the pinch of fear, tune in to it and listen to what is being offered. Fear as well as courage can be a fine guide. Words of caution will take you safely across the river too. Listen to what Fear has to offer, and re-invent your plans accordingly.
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I have been absent for a while. No apologies for that. Only that dull aching feeling of 'Should'. THAT sensation of 'I should be blogging...', 'I should be doing this...', 'I should be feeling this, or that, or the other...', 'This is distraction, I should get on with the important stuff...' Locked up in my mind for a while with the monster of Should rattling the bars and roaring at me. BETTER yet than Should, I turn to the monster and face him level-eyed, staring him down and spit out my truth, 'Maybe you're right. I Could. Why am I not doing it then.' A crucial part of mental training is the language that I frame it in. Care-fully considering how to phrase a question or suggestion or idea or logic. Should is a debilitating word, it is the monster that shakes the cages, it rattles the bars and roars at me when I want to sleep, and howls when I am busy running to keep up with all those important little things that need to happen. As I run the Should nudges and shoves at me, do this, what about that, over there, and don't forget to do the laundry. STARING down the Should Monster and rewiring him with a Could liberates my time, my life, my words, my actions and my decisions. I could be blogging, why don't I. I could get up earlier and do this work, what reason do I stay in bed for? I could continue to not eat sugar and feel better in my body, what is my pay out in consuming? THE Could can be turned back around to a question. The Should is only highlighting with bright burning spotlights the problem. This is the issue, here, look at this, ha ha, I found one, Should be doing this. This one, right here, forget that stuff, look what I found. I don't like the Should Monster. He does not serve me and I do not want him in my life. WHAT you focus on grows. And when I take heed of the Should Monster's words and listen and throw my attention on his problems what do I receive? I receive more. More problems, more spotlights, more Should. The first one never served me, so why keep accepting these suggestions from this monster? MEANWHILE, all the time I have been stumbling through dark chasms of grief, past and present with occasional snapshots of the dark moments of the future. Should shoving me and telling me that this is not what is important right now. Forget that, do this. My mind un-prepared and un-willing to engage. Just needing to do stupid things to re-fill with empty crisp goodness. Shinning and scuffing my way up climbing routes, winding a canoe across a lake or down a river. Cycling the long way home and hitting long sections off road with no lights and starring at the fractions of full moon splintering through the trees and digging out my phone to navigate the river side path by the flash light on the top! Stupid, pointless, late-night distractions. YET all so valuable in my steady re-covering of this death, and those deaths of old that I paint over with my grief to allow in and forget all at once. To let me sit down here again, as 7am approaches and the lights plays over the curtains casting yellow and blue strips across the room. AND here I am. Again. Re-starting. Ok. Let's go play. Thank you for your patience. ACM The Rainbow Curtains in the Living Room.
Sometimes crazy ideas work really well! No, you are wrong. It is ok to fail. I encourage it. I whole heartedly embrace the principle of failing. To be creative you have to fail. And that’s ok. GOOD, now I’ve cleared that up, what is holding you back? You really are afraid of failing. What will happen when you create and put it out there and then fail? DO you know how old I will be when I succeed? SAME age as you will be if you continue to fail to create. Fail to dare to fail. (#) ACCEPT the process of artistic failure; accept the process of indulgent failure. Throw all your effort into your next possible failure. Release your judgement, before you being, before one brush stroke lands, or one letter hits the pain-fully white page, or the first note frees itself from the string. Accept the possibility. Then release your judgement. And go create. IF there is failure, so be it. YOU can step up and create again. Nothing is saying that failure is the end. Failure is not the end. Failure is the beginning of better beginnings. LETTING your-self fail is intensely liberating. It allows you to realise the truth, the truth that you can fail, you can get up, you can begin again. You must begin again. Never mind what the Crowd say, you are not in this to please every-one. Nothing ever can. The most printed book in history is fervently ignored by most people in the world. The Bible. To try to involve and please every-one is the ultimate in ironic notions. Nothing will ever please every-one. Aiming at this will be guaranteed to fail, you will always not please someone. And therefore you will have failed. INSTEAD focus on who you want to reach. Who do you want to connect to? What do you want to tell your people? How do you want to let your work affect their life? What can you do to add value to their life? ONCE you are connecting with people in ways that you believe in and spreading your truth then you will not fail. You cannot fail. Even when you only reach one person. That is success. Honour that success. Then do it again. Go create. Dare to fail. Thank you ACM Positive Passionate Power-full Performance (#: Paraphrased from Julia Cameron’s seminal creative textbook (bible) The Artist’s Way. Free excerpts available on App Store for iPhone, check out the intro and some of the work book, then launch into it. Cameron says: ““Do you know how old I’ll be when I can play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?” Yes... the same age you will be if you don’t. So let’s start.” Page 30, The Artist’s Way, 1994, Souvenir Press Ltd.) Hoping the rock doesn't move! The Cantilever, The Glyders, Snowdonia, North Wales.
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.
IRONICALLY, whenever you most need your strength, whenever you most need your love and acceptance and to be able to see the good in people and in the world, is often the time that it is hardest. WHEN we are concerned by illness of relatives, and floored by exhausting work schedules, and thrown off balance by our family life, and wasted by our hectic travel to and fro and here and there. Those times the world rushes past in a flurry and a blur. When there is not enough time for everything every one else tells you you need to be doing, let alone time to do the things you think you ought to do, and the things that you think you should do - no chance. And when life gets like that, how often do we create time for the things we would like to do! HEADWINDS are these moments in life. As a long distance runner and cyclist I can guarantee a few things about headwinds: 1) Headwinds can go on all day. Agonisingly even on a circular ride! 2) Headwinds are often confusingly assisted by sideways blasts and gusts. 3) Headwinds will drain every last bit of energy from your reserves, and keep going after you have given that last bit, so, if you are still going, what are you giving? Where is this coming from? 4) Headwinds make you strong. No pain, no gain. It is something I will contest, though that is a different story, headwinds are a pain. Headwinds will sap your strength, your energy, your motivation. Headwinds will blast at your self-confidence, your self-pride, your self-belief. HEADWINDS will test any (and every) positive belief you have about your-self. ACTUALLY, I will rephrase that, Headwinds will test any (and every) positive belief you have about your-self that you let them. NOTHING can afflict you that you do not let afflict you. The Great Uncle of my wife is dying of cancerous brain tumours. We visit a couple of times a week, my father-in-law (his nephew) is visiting most days and still working full time. The situation is a headwind. The emotional experience of visiting a dying relative is totally draining. It is like everything in your body suddenly runs out of holes in your feet and you feel completely hollow. Like there is nothing left within you. Then you stumble on, trying to act like you think every one else expects you to act, chin up and carrying on. TRAVELLING is a headwind. Since writing this blog our Great Uncle has been moved locally, before his move he was in Haywards Heath. We fortunately have very close friends in Haywards Heath - the Guide Parents of my eldest son - yet we rarely visit, the travel is out of our personal geography. It is immeasurable, it includes the M25, it is 'a long way'. At 90 minutes it is the same distance as my father, only in a different direction, my father's home is a route I know very very well. M4, A404, A43, A5 done. The travel south however is a headwind, it is draining, a constant fear that something will get snarled up and slowed down and we'll be stuck in traffic for hours. And hours. And my boys don't like being stuck in the car, like all young boys ought not to! HOWEVER, headwinds give you strength, they test every belief that you have about your-self, that you allow them to. Once you come out the 'other side'. Once the wind abates and you can lift your head up and maybe even experience a following wind, you find that you are stronger. The extra drive that the wind has given you, the extra power in your legs and affirmation in your mind and the willingness to carry on just that little bit further are assets that you will carry with you as you move on through life. MY mother, grandmother and grandfather died of cancers of various kinds when I was still a teenager. Walking into a headwind situation and towards confronting death - again - is something that washes over me with sorrow and fear and dread. Then I step back and remember where I have been, who I am and how I have travelled through this before. I know I have the strength to do this, I have worked on tools to deal with this. NOW is my time to offer up those tools to my beloved family who need them. To find ways to allow them to work the tools. Tools of self-care. Tools of self-love. Tools of self-acceptance. Tools of self-belief. Facing my seventeenth birthday as a family unit of me, my dad, my absent older brother, my aunt was a fear-full moment. I got through the time, A-levels and all the trials of late teens, by finding time for me. Collapsing in front of the TV before cooking myself dinner, walking the dog, getting on with homework and coursework and revision and my Saturday job and my Duke of Edinburgh's Award work. Life was frantic and hectic and there was this huge headwind blowing in my mind. I screamed out and did some stupid things. I also did some amazing things. I found time in my swimming club to lap up and down the pool steadily, washing away the problems of life. I took my anger and fury out on the badminton court, hammering shuttles right out to the wall! I found solace in the solitude of long long walks with our dog, who revelled in the walks for about three days, then realised I was not going to let up and an hour and a half was going to be our new normal for a while. She was fantastic about the whole thing. WHEN headwinds turn on us and drain and sap at us, our action must be to turn inward to find our answers. "Nothing happens that we are not able to deal with in this life." The way may be tough, the trail unknown. We may be dancing blindly over coals. One day we will step into the cool waters of peace again, feel the water lap around our ankles and watch the sun set on the day of the headwind. Then we can look over what we have learnt. Learning to pause and breathe. Exhale. Find a moment to enjoy this view, or that joke, our accept the kind words of a friend, smile into the eyes of gentle caring relatives. Indulging in gratitude for all the things we do have, Now. Indulging in acceptance of our Now, and allowing your-self to be present. FUNERALS are good places to learn presence and acceptance of Now. You are totally there, you are totally present, your mind does not drift off to the bills, and payment plans, and that project or this one. You are wholly and completely present. Yes, the presence and the situation hurt. They hurt a lot. They are, however a place where we experience ourselves fully, expressing what is within and letting it come out. And that is permitted, so often we are expected to gloss over it all. ILLNESS and funerals and headwinds are healing places, places of forgiveness and gratitude and approval. When the positives are sung out and the successes hard won are glorious triumphs shouted out from roof tops. Nothing else really matters at that time. Just revelling in the glory of life, the little steps that someone has taken to achieve all they achieved. All the little projects they took to, and all the huge efforts that they threw themselves into. HOW best to prepare your-self for headwinds? That, I suppose is where we end. Habits. Form habits of self-awareness. Looking into how you are feeling and how you can choose to feel different - better - in this situation. Form habits of approval, approval of your-self, your opinions, your decisions. Form habits of gratitude, giving thanks for all the things that you do have, rather than fearing on what you might not have soon, and what you do not have. Form habits of self-love, know that your love for your-self will allow you to share your love and your belief in your-self and your abilities with others and they too will then enjoy your unique gifts and talents, finding space for self-love in themselves too. TODAY you have a headwind, you know what it is. Express gratitude for your headwind, whatever it may be. Accept it in your life and know that it will make you stronger. Express and share gratitude. Speak it out to those around you, have a two minute timer on when no one can interrupt if responses seem challenging. Look to what you want to find from the situation and what you expect to learn: humility; strength; mental fortitude; compassion. Express and share gratitude for those things too, for what you have, for what you will learn. I love and approve of you just the way you are. Thank you for this opportunity to grow. I love you. ACM Borrowdale Valley and Derwent Water from Glaramara, July 2013.
The Lake District: Resting place of my ancestors. TRUTH is challenging. This is very challenging. You will find arguments against it, find ways to explain why I am wrong and how ridiculous and simplistic this is. Ready? LIFE is a series of choices. EVERY-THING that happens to us, everything we experience, everything that we feel, do and say, how we act, respond and think; Every-thing is a choice. Every-thing is a choice. CHOICE happens consciously and unconsciously. Our reactionary choices are caused from what we experience in the moment and in our past experiences, how we expect our lives to pan out. Still, the actions and thoughts and decisions are all choices. FANTASTIC news; everything is a choice. This means that all your life is down to you to decide how to respond. How you respond creates the makeup of your future experience. TAKE traffic lights. The bane of the modern road user. Are they always on red? Constantly? Surely they must be. But why does this annoy us? Why does a red light cause a rise in our temper? Because when we are on the road we are going somewhere, we have a destination and we want to get there. We have made a choice to use our time and our energy and our effort to travel from one location to another, maybe under duress of some duty - which we have chosen to take on. SUDDENLY, our compulsion, our motion, our choice is interrupted. A little disk of glowing lighted up plastic pops up in our way. It is culturally accepted and anticipated that red lights are something to be annoyed over. ON the other hand, we frequently cite the pace of life being too frantic, too hectic, and yearn for 'days gone by' when life was slower and simpler and the only thing that gets in the way of a good commute is a herd of sheep in the road. Red lights also give us time to do other things in relative safety too, such as retune the radio, skip to a different song, adjust the seat, apply mascara, sort out our hair, check out the driver next to us, watch the clouds... the list is endless. On a green light you have but one choice: Go. HOW else does this choice affect our life? How can we embrace the use of our choices to perform better? We can choose to look positively and openly at our tasks. We can choose to visualise mindfully before we begin. We can choose to take lessons from the hard times and how we are being forced to improvise through difficult times. We can choose to take positive lessons from a failure. Nothing needs to be taken as a negative experience when we choose to make it positive. Or you could get frustrated, scream, shout, throw things, stamp your feet and yell petulantly. You have that choice. SHAKESPEARE said: “There is nothing either good nor bad, only thinking that makes it so.” (from Hamlet) Today it is your choices that create your reality. Your choices make your life positive or negative. Choose today to redress every event positively, to see all things that happen to you as benefits to your life and see how much of a difference it makes to your life. More on Conscious Choice and focusing the mind to improve performance in my e-Courses, find them HERE. Alternately, sign up for my FREE 4-Week course in Visualisation, coaching how to focus on what you want and to create power-full images to help you succeed. ON learning: We do not learn to climb. We do not do a three week beginners course and then suddenly, pop, we can ‘climb’. We learn by doing. We learn by getting onto a wall and climbing. When we are two holds up, half way, one hold off our first glorious victorious ascent, are we learning? No, we are climbing. WHEN we begin training and getting better we are not learning new techniques and skills. We are doing them. We practice our drop knee, and our rock over, and our crimping. WE learn by doing. WHERE does this doing occur? To best achieve use an environment that lacks danger, stress, worry, terror. We first step on to – usually – grade 3 routes. The reason we learn on easier routes than we are be capable of is because the brain can only handle a certain number of stresses, generally accepted as three. ‘Learning’ of new skills is a stress on the brain. Add in panic about the height and danger, Fear of falling or not being ‘any good’, and the usual mix of worries when beginning new skills and our brain cannot easily take in the new information that is being sent to it. COMFORT is what is needed to do these new tasks and to become capable of repetition, for this is what ‘learning’ is, really. The ability to repeatedly do the same action, over and over, with the same result. SO when taking up new challenges in climbing it is best to begin new skills and techniques on routes of lower grade than you may expect to climb at. This is how redpointing works; you take part of the stress – the leading and big falls element – out of the climb. Practice doing the moves, do them again and again, repeating the route until you feel sure that you can do it. TAKE the favourite analogy of riding a bike. We do not begin by being pushed into the traffic at 6 o’clock in Piccadilly Circus. We begin on flat grass with a soft landing and a guiding hand on the back of the bike. It is wise to take the same approach to new climbing techniques, even – maybe especially – with the mental training. USING techniques of visualisation and route planning on your hardest possible grade is undoubtedly vital, however, when you step back a couple of grades to use the technique and to practice it you find that you can read the route and the moves easily. This allows you to practice the process and get familiar with it before applying it to harder routes where you have a lot more difficulty and danger involved to get derail your efforts. WHEN you have new techniques, skills and strategies to practice, step back and think of that grassy meadow and the gentle hand on the back of your saddle. Practice gently and soon you will naturally discover that the hand is not there anymore and that you are doing it beauty-fully on your own. MORE on visualisation is available in the Free Mini-Course available by clicking HERE. Taking the Leading Outside at Birchen Edge, Autumn 2004.
ON learning: We do not learn to climb. We learn by doing. We do not join a four-week beginners course and then at the end, pop, we can ‘climb’. We learn by getting onto a wall and climbing. When we are two holds up, half way, one hold off our first glorious victorious ascent, are we learning? No, we are climbing.
WHEN we begin training and getting better we are not learning new techniques and skills. We are doing them. We practice our drop knees, and our rock overs, and our crimping. We learn by doing. WHERE does this doing occur? In an environment that lacks danger, stress, worry, terror. The reason we learn in easier terrain is that he brain can only handle a certain number of stresses. ‘Learning’ of new skills is a stress on the brain. Add in panic about the height and danger, Fear of falling or not being ‘any good’, and the usual mix of worries when beginning new skills and our brain cannot easily take in the new information that is being sent to it. COMFORT is what is needed to do these new tasks and to become capable of repetition, for this is what ‘learning’ is. The ability to repeatedly do the same action, over and over, with the same result. We become capable of successful repetition after taking an action and repeating it time and time again, by doing that action. Learning by doing. SO when taking up new challenges it is best to begin new skills and techniques in a safe place. In canoeing, go into a swimming pool, in climbing take a top rope. Take part of the stress out of the situation. Practice doing the moves, do them again and again, repeating the process until you feel sure that you can do it. TAKE the analogy of riding a bike. We do not begin by being pushed into the traffic at 6 o’clock in Piccadilly Circus. We begin on flat grass with a soft landing and a guiding hand on the back of the bike. It is wise to take the same approach to new climbing techniques, even with the mental training that is my focus. USING techniques of visualisation and route planning on your hardest possible climbing grade is undoubtedly vital, however, when you step back a couple of grades to use to it you find that you can read the route and the moves easily. This allows you to practice the process and get familiar with it before applying it to harder routes where you have a lot more difficulty and danger involved that may derail your efforts. WHEN you have new techniques, skills and strategies to practice, step back and think of that grassy meadow and the gentle hand on the back of your saddle. Practice gently and soon you will naturally discover that the hand is not there anymore and that you are doing it beauty-fully on your own. MORE on visualisation is available in the Free Mini-Course available simply by following the link at the top of the page. |
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AuthorAndy Clubley-Moore: joyful outdoor sports activist, writer, father, husband. Lover of life, activity, success and barefoot living. |