Figuring out the How To Video Type: Meditation Video

Byjack

I want to figure out how to make the how-to-video type.

The first video I want to make is how to meditate.

Who I’m making it for: A friend at work who asked me about it

Why it matters:

  • Meditation has many benefits:
    • Calmness
    • Clear mind
    • Faster thinking
    • More energy

    • Deeper breathing

When to do it:

  • Tired, overwhelmed, stressed, procrastinating, upset

What you need:

  • Quiet place
  • Ideally, place to lie down
  • A good soundtrack to focus on
  • At least 30 minutes for beginners, at least 5 minutes for advanced meditators

Fundamentals for mastery:

  • Let go of any plan
  • Be patient
  • Wait for the answers, the feelings, the thoughts come to you
  • Focus on the sounds or the sounds of your breathing if you start to feel uncomfortable or restless

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Valorant 26: Back to Basics

Byjack

So I’ve been stuck in Silver 3 forever after the rank reset and it seems that I need to do a second climb to Plat again. Perhaps I just need to relearn the basics better.

So there is a peeking guide by Noted that I’ve been trying to apply for the longest time and I think I finally understand a good mentality and visualization that can make the peeks good. It is interesting because I’ve been feeling so down about Valorant recently but I always tell myself that the lower elo I go, the more freedom I have to innovate, and innovation is definitely the thing I like to do.

So here is Noted’s peeking guide:

He talks in the peeking guide that its just something you “get used to”. But I wanted to find a way to break it down do that anyone could learn it and that you would never overpeak and angle even if you are not far away enough. This idea of drawing a line to the contested “fighting area” allows for a simple visualisation that will ensure you don’t overpeak, and to do noted’s peek, you simply have to think about drawing a longer line.

I demonstrate it here:

Another note, the best way to peak safely with this method is to have the “line” end close to the edge of the wall, allowing you to peek back in if you miss your shot.

The next piece I might need to refine is just counter strafing because that still isn’t that solid for me, especially for moving targets that I need to constantly adjust for. The initial research into this yields that miyagi-do/looking at distance between crosshair and head is the best solution so far. Results have been good, but it hurts my wrist. I am experimenting with a looser grip and using more of the arm to aim.

Here is a good video on it:

Back Home

Byjack

After almost 3 months away from home, I’m finally back and I’m reminded of the life I built here. Peaceful, open, free, and lonely. There are so many possibilities and spaciousness to fill my life with wonderful things.

Today I want to focus my time in building the life that I want to live in the next few months when I will be transitioning to a part time role in my day job in order to spend more time on coaching and building my life up.

Here are some things I want to do:

  1. Unpack
  2. Clean & Tidy
  3. Cut my nails
  4. Look into Gi Doctors
  5. Look into a sleep study
  6. Spend some time with the gf
  7. Cook food
  8. Plan my trip with my brother and sister
  9. Cross off any remaining things on my todo list

Basically, I want to have a clean slate for the next stage of things such as:

  1. Finding a part time gig where I can exercise without hurting myself
  2. Signing back up for jiujitsu
  3. Editing youtube shorts of coaching sessions
  4. Setting up more coaching sessions
  5. Working on sales plays for AI consulting
  6. Researching into buying a house

I went for a morning walk and I wanted to express some appreciation that I gained from my journeys.

Parents House, appreciations for:

  • Health
  • Cooking
  • Playing games with my brother

France, appreciation for:

  • Walking
  • Beauty of old buildings
  • Cuddling

My happiest times in my parent’s house were eating food, and spending time with my brother and parents.

My happiest times in France were spending time with my girlfriend and coming up with crazy schemes.

I was also stressed in both places. In my parent’s house, it was being watched by my parents. In France, I felt very unsafe. Unsafe in stores, on the streets, unsafe in the Airbnb (afraid to break or spill things), unsafe while working (afraid not to be productive).

I think safety is something I want to work on as France is somewhere I would like to feel more at home at.

The Go For It Mentality

Byjack

There are many different mentalities that can offer deeper insight, faster learning and a deeper connection to the present moment. 

My favorite mentalities are:

  • Meditative/Let It Come Mentality
    • Be patient
    • Don’t do anything
    • The right answer will be clear if you keep feeling and noticing what comes up
    • Good for staying in the moment and being yourself
  • Self Reflection/Feedback Loop (learning) Mentality
    • Look for ways to observe yourself by recording yourself somehow
    • Use the objective, nonjudemental self observation to get clarity on where to improve
    • Good for rapid learning
  • Process Emotions Mentality
    • The action you focus on is feeling
    • Use breathing and physical activity to feel as strongly as possible
    • Very good for emotional growth

However, I recently found a new mentality that actually helps with areas of life that I had trouble with recently. I noticed in rapid active situations like social situations (parties), or sports, or dance or singing overthinking can be a major issue. Using the meditative mentality and or the processing emotions mentality is helpful but ultimately keeps you in your head. Staying in your head isn’t always a good thing because it can actually make it very hard for you to focus on the present moment (even though those exercises usually help you reconnect with the moment). 

I’m not entirely sure where this idea came from, but I think it came from daygaming (approaching girls irl). I started using it in gaming then dance and singing practice (all things where being in the present moment is part of the experience).

I call it the “Go For It” Mentality. Basically, you imagine what you want to do (the perfect action) and then just try going for it.

A couple of major points:

  • Everything is seen as practice (and is very useful when practicing in the moment type skills like language, singing, dance, sports etc where thinking is going to get in your way and you want to focus your instincts).
  • Repetition is the goal since it is practice, nothing is seen as the final end all be all.
  • As you keep repeating, you adjust every single time until it feels more and more right. This is one way that you can start bringing in the other tools and mindsets in order to have a really beautiful time.

Deep Reflections Late At Night

Byjack

I was in a men’s support group tonight and I was mulling over some of the recent discoveries I had:

  • I realized that the right person in your life will be someone who will accept everything about you. Someone who isn’t like that may just not be right for you.
  • I usually walk away at the first sign I feel someone doesn’t understand me. I learned not to give up so quickly if it’s someone I love. If they care about you, they will try to understand. It may take some time, but they will. 
  • I realized I have a very deep-seated hatred of women that is shoved down so deep I didn’t know it existed. I feel this has affected my life in profound ways and I want to explore this deeper and understand why.
  • I realized that the way I work myself to death isn’t healthy and I need to find a better way.

I chose to explore the last realization – how I approach work. Through the discussion and coaching, I realized the following:

  • I feel deep shame for asking for help because I feel like this means I’m not good enough and disorganized.
  • I think of everything in terms of lone wolfing everything  – when in fact I work on a team. The work I do benefits the company I work for, my colleagues and my customers (as I believe in the product).
    • There is no shame in asking for help.
    • In the past, when I used to troubleshoot customer issues, I would work until 4 am in the morning and not feel like it is work because I know who it is for, and how  I am helping them (I felt good about it).

I resolve going forward, that every time I get overwhelmed and feel the urge to procrastinate I’ll do the following:

    1. Ask myself who I am helping
      • Myself for the money and experience I will gain
      • My family, and friends because of the money and time, and experience I can share with them if I succeed at my work
      • My colleagues for how my work will benefit their lives and careers
      • My customers for whom my work will transform their businesses and their personal careers.
    2. Focus on doing the work to help them (not just to get it done).
      • I will never forget the story of the teacher who said the moment that teaching transformed for them was the moment that they stopped trying to teach, and focused on helping their students learn. This feels like that moment to me.

I need to be kinder to myself. To enjoy my life when I’m tired and my body is hurting. I should eat out, take breaks, watch tv. There is no shame in asking for help. I’m on a team. Most of all, I should focus on how my work will help others not just myself.

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Valorant 23: Hitting Plat

Byjack

It has finally happened. I’ve hit plat in Valorant. A journey that was supposed to take 2-3 months, but instead took a year and two months (14 months).

Blood sweat and tears went into this challenge, and I learned something interesting at each rank.

IRON

Iron was an interesting rank because it was the rank when I was first learning how to use my mouse and keyboard in a game. I had never played a shooter game on the pc, and haven’t played many serious games at all on the PC. 

Getting out of iron was simply learning how not to make extremely basic mistakes such as reloading out in the open, not getting stuck on walls, planting and defusing the bomb.

BRONZE

Bronze was also an interesting rank. I started actually enjoying the game more here since I had a better idea of what was going on. Bronze rank was still stressful because I would get killed out of nowhere all the time.

I don’t really remember what I did to get out of bronze rank, but I think it had something to do with playing off of my util and learning how to check corners where people hide.

SILVER

I was stuck in silver for a long time. Silver was where I learned a lot about aiming and movement and got quite good at it.

What eventually got me out of silver was learning how to preaim angles.

GOLD

Gold is not a very interesting rank, everyone is pretty much like silver but with slightly better util and aim.

However, perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole challenge is how I got out of gold. I got out of gold primarily by getting more confident.

I did this in two ways:

  1. I focused on a few agents and learned how to get reliable value out of their util (Chamber tp locations, Brim lineups, Sova lineups).
  2. I dealt with some of my underlying negative self talk

I hear lots of things that people say about confidence:

“Stay positive”

“Imagine you are the best”

I always thought these ideas were bogus since I always thought confidence was about one thing: Feeling comfortable in your own skin.

But I started to doubt myself when I say professional Valorant coaching advocating (SEN Zellsis) for the “cocky confidence” mentality and I was stuck in silver.

But I think in the end, I was right. In order to be confident, you need to feel safe and at peace. The real question, is HOW?

Here are the main ideas:

  1. In order to be confident, you need to be ok with not being great (not being smart, successful, attractive, etc.)
  2. In order to be ok with those things, you need to process your traumas and limiting beliefs.
  3. In order to process, you must welcome in your limiting beliefs and incorporate it into yourself.

My limiting beliefs were:

  • “If I don’t succeed, I don’t think I’m worth anything”
  • “I need to beat myself up for every mistake and always think I’m worse in order to not mess up”

Simply by saying those things in my head, made me feel clarity every time I started to stress out and I suddenly felt calm. I gave myself permission to continue to berate myself (or not) but simply welcoming these parts in instead of avoiding them (and having them show up as unresolved stress), made me have a clear mentality that made my rise to plat.

I learned I have a huge amount of power, intelligence and creativity that are locked up by stress and fear. Slowing down, focusing on a few things at a time, and embracing my fears allows me to operate at my fullest potential.

What I thought confidence was:

  • Fake it until you make it
  • Cocky
  • Don’t care
  • Aggressive

What confidence actually is:

  • Ok with failing
  • Calm and clear-headed
  • Balanced
  • Trust yourself

Tired

Byjack

I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m feeling tired lonely and unmotivated.

Feeling into more my feelings, I feel exhausted. Probably need to just hang for a bit.

I went to go hang for a bit and I feel a little better. However, I still feel pretty tired.

One thing that I want to point out is that I at least slept much better last night than previous nights and was able to go to sleep around 1 am instead of 2 or 4.

One of the things that I’ve been struggling with is mewing. Just like last time, I think I don’t know what to do with my jaw. I’m thinking I will focus on keeping the tongue in the top of my mouth and a good posture and not worry about closing my jaw because that feels uncomfortable (and for some reason my mouth gets really dry).

I’m trying to get back into my coaching mindset:

  1. You are in my house – this is a big one because I feel out of control of my life at the moment
  2. Don’t be afraid to be silent
  3. Take risks
  4. Be patient

Well I got an artist interview in about 6 minutes, but after that, I want to go somewhere fun and write about the artist interviews as well as compile my notes.