The French Challenge: The Plan

Byjack

So I have a new challenge I’m working on.

To summarize my goals in order of how much they resonate with me:

  1. Be able to communicate and connect on a deeper level with my girlfriend, her friends and family
  2. Discover a whole new undiscovered world, the French world
  3. Understand and empathize with others better, understand and empathize with myself better
  4. Challenge myself to do the impossible
  5. Maybe win some cool points in learning French written language
  6. Learn more about French food

Timeline: 31 days (not counting today) from December 15th to January 15th

I’ve always wanted to learn French in a way that isn’t conventional. Not the Duolingo or the Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur way. None of those programs really worked for me. Maybe on the surface level they work…like if I spent enough time learning and studying those programs it would work but the way they were structured was all wrong for me. It just felt so dry and boring and something alive about the language was lost. I love how personal language can be. I want it to be personal for me.

But in order to do so, I’m going to have to rely a huge amount on connection theory because learning a language is incredibly difficult and I will need to really come up with something next level to learn a language without following one of these programs.

So let’s think about it. While I would love to plan out all 31 days of this, I simply cannot. That is too damn hard. Because I don’t have enough experience in learning languages, I need to try to learn it in different ways and understand and feel the feelings.

Some things I want to try:

  1. Write a story in French. Get help from a large language model in doing it.
  2. Write a comic in French, and also get help from AI.
  3. Learn through mimicry. Watch a YouTube video or movie in pure French. No subtitles, no explanation. Just imitate and copy the entire language. Don’t even try to understand what is being said.
    1. This is how babies learn and how large language models learn
    2. This might be my entire strategy in the challenge
    3. What I train on might be important, for example, if I watch a lot of comedy, I might end up being a very jokey person in French
    4. This is probably by far the hardest but most profound way to learn a language, need to be extremely comfortable with feeling the feeling of confusion (one of the most painful feelings for humans)
  4. Leave a message to my girlfriend in French every day. Let go of pronunciation or grammar. Focus only on trying to communicate as much as possible without looking any French up. When I need to look something up, don’t try to memorize it. The point is to communicate a lot, not memorize or get things perfectly right.
    1. This makes a lot of sense because my primary goal is to connect with my girlfriend.
    2. It makes sense to let go of anything that would prevent me from wanting to leave a message, namely
      1. Being afraid to pronounce something wrong
      2. Annoyed at having to look something up
      3. Annoyed at having to memorize words I look up
    3. By talking a lot, expressing a lot every day, and potentially looking up the same words over and over, I will start to absorb them
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Profit in Peace 16: Saying No

Byjack

It is funny because I said no today to the real Profit in Peace challenge today to say yes to my own personal challenge that I created for myself. Today he had a bunch of giveaways and gave away a product for $1 but I realized that it is going to take too much of my attention away. I don’t even want it for $1, maybe not even for free.

I’m very stressed today for all the stuff I have to do for work, I’m very proud of myself for finding a really awesome amazing transition from work to gaming last night and always having a good peaceful nighttime, it is what I always wanted and I finally got it.

Today I need to post my update for the knee challenge, already have it recorded, but need to post it.

I also need to kick off things for the French challenge. No idea how that is going to go.

Finally, the Profit in Peace challenge sparked something in me. I realized that I bought Alex Hormozi’s book $100 Million Leads which will be SUPER helpful in building my coaching practice…actually will help me in my overall career as well. I think there is some super valuable information in there.

On top of that, now that I’m thinking of it, I have some other really good books for business and sales and coaching, Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Subi and The Prosperous Coach by Steve Chandler.

Lots of interesting things going on. I feel like really much more in balance than I have been in a long time.

Routine-wise, I’m better than I’ve ever been. I have a routine working hours, good bedtime, great winddown time, and a great morning routine. I’m keeping up with the breathing and I love yous and it is going great.

I suppose that only thing that I want more of is more friends and interactions outside myself.

Perhaps it will help when I get more time in the morning. Today I will really try to do some work outside of my apartment even if it isn’t in the morning.

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It’s Valorant Time

Byjack

I love gaming. The competition. The graphics. The speed, the maps, abilities. The headshots, the camaraderie.

Today I asked myself a question. How do I get to the level of gameplay that I want to get to? How do I play Valorant in the way I want to play it?

I listened to my body and I used connection theory. Your body is tired. It’s aching. Your mind is cloudy and distracted. Your eyes are dry and tired.

I need to feel the magic that Valorant can be.

I turn on the Dark and Dangerous playlist:

It is time to turn off all the lights. To go into my closet. To let everything go silent.

I feel scared and anxious and my head hurts, but my body knows it’s okay to relax now.

I lay on my bed to meditate. Long enough to wonder when I should stop. Long enough for my mind to wander to think of my colleague who left today and wrote a very nice email. Long enough for the magic of nighttime to sink in, for me to want a hot drink and settle down for a night of gaming.

Turned off the lights again. Fired up the playlist again. It feels like the mood.

Had a good few games where I team MVPed every single game until the last one with a smurfing reyna on both teams. The one on my team was classic only, the one on the enemy team was not. Didn’t really like my duo, he annoyed me. Also bottom fragged every game.

Pretty pissed off about that last game.

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Profit in Peace 15: Workplace Reflections

Byjack

I had quite a stressful workday as I expected but I wanted to jot down a couple of reflections today:

  1. Reminding myself of my boundaries (time, respect, honesty, empathy, and possibility) really helped
  2. It also helped to note down what I cannot control before every major meeting (usually something related to how someone felt about me)
  3. I noticed that keeping pace with my todo list was helpful:
    1. Keep all tasks that come to mind in my todo list (use it as a mental trashcan to throw all my worries)
    2. Reorder todo list to whatever I am working on right now (move something to the top if I am currently working on it)
    3. Do tasks immediately if they are low-effort
    4. Do sweeps (try to do everything on the todo list)
  4. Focus also helped
    1. Close as many tabs as possible
    2. Focus on one thing at a time

I was thinking about how to transition from work to Valorant more effectively since I usually start to feel dead and I end up watching youtube and ordering food and that kind of makes it hard for me to stay sharp when gaming and I end up feeling even more stressed and awful.

I think cleaning is a really good transition point. Cleaning reduces stress and is a great way to transition slowly…if I’m worried that there will still be a call coming in and I might have to go back to work, cleaning makes it easy to go back to work without feeling like I am not ready to transition to the next thing. In fact, if I clean, even if I go back to work, I will still be more ready to game after the work is done because my space is now clean.

I also like the idea of a mental dump to write down everything you are thinking about at the end of the day so that you can pick it up at any point today or tomorrow or the day after.

Finally, I like to look at the schedule for the next day and mentally prepare for it to know what you can do today to give you a lot of spaciousness tomorrow.

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Profit in Peace 14: Looking For A Solution

Byjack

Ok, it has been three days and every single day this week, my peace has been disrupted. Things are blowing up at work yet again and I don’t have the space and time that I need to think and introspect and work on my own things.

A couple of big wins:

  1. As per my sleep challenge, my sleep routine has never been better. I’m sticking to the 11 PM bedtime and go to sleep before 11:30 PM. I enjoy the nighttime winddown with journaling and cupping.
  2. My morning routine remains steadfast and strong. Even though sometimes I only have 30 minutes, or I have to get up at 4 AM, every single morning, I get up and check in with my emotions. I’ve added the breathing, I love you, and left handing brushing routine and it has been going well.
  3. I have a pretty clear boundary where I end work around 5 PM, and I don’t really stray very much from that.

So today’s challenge is not about working to further my coaching practice in any way, to work on reviewing VODs or editing my Instagram page or Instagram videos. It is simply about how to transform the chaos and stress that dominate the middle of my day and transform it into peace.

I have the French challenge coming up, and I want to be able to reliably work on that without being pulled all sorts of directions.

A little of introspection and meditation about it reveals to me that the reason why I’m so stressed is because I’m trying to control things that are out of my control. However, I feel the need to control things because I feel that there are many things threatening my boundaries.

The key maybe to have strong clear boundaries and needs, and to work on communicating them and to let go of controlling everything else.

Boundaries & Needs:

  1. I need my own time, I do not want to work any later than 5 consistently or earlier than 9 consistently.
  2. I need to be treated with respect, for my time and opinions to be valued, my accomplishments and skills recognized.
  3. I want to be honest to myself and others.
  4. I want to work with integrity and empathy.
  5. I want to operate with the idea that anything is possible.

What I would like to do today, is before going into any meeting, remind myself of these boundaries and needs and ask myself, what is out of my control, what is within my control.

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New Coaching Instagram Page

Byjack

I had a really rough day today. I woke up at 4:30 AM in order to get to the airport and fly to Houston. Coming back I hit so much traffic, my uber took almost 2 hours and I was late for my flight by 2 minutes. Luckily, there was no one in line for security, I blazed through, ran to the gate and somehow they hadn’t departed yet.

While I was in the car for 2 hours seeing the time tick down and knowing that I was probably going to miss my flight, probably get on the next one, be stuck in the airport for another two hours, and get home at around 10 PM, I tried to make the best of my bad situation. I thought about my Instagram page for coaching, specifically posts and videos.

I had some ideas for the posts, having a dark gray background with a simple serif font. Also, I was thinking about doing some digital painting for my posts.

The videos were a little bit harder.

I stopped making the reminder videos because I felt so stuck and frustrated with them and I wanted to use connection theory to come up with some solutions.

I think there are a bunch of steps in the video-making process: shooting, editing, and final polish. Each has its own challenges and solutions that came to me.

Shooting

This is hard because I felt a lot of anxiety and overthinking about saying the right thing, and coming off as clear and interesting. Using connection theory, I felt that what I needed is to focus less on the words that I am saying and focus more on evoking feelings through my delivery (my voice and my expressions). They say when someone is talking, verbal queues (literally what they are saying) is only 10% of communication and non-verbals (your tone of voice, inflection, facial expressions) account for 90%. I want to really focus next time not on what I say, but how I say it. Also, I want to try spending something feeling into the reminder and shooting broll that evokes it in a non-verbal way. In general, I want to focus on non-verbals more.

Editing

This is hard because there is a lot of overwhelming decisions that I face at this stage. I am conflicted with staying true to what I originally shot vs any new visions on how to convey my thoughts. I feel often that I avoid emotions or lose touch of emotions just looking at the transcript without hearing the delivery and when I hear the delivery I am conflicted on what to cut out or change. I often feel the original work is no longer recognizable afterwards. I feeling into connection theory, I felt that fear dominated my ability to think, feel, and be creative and I’m thinking about using the law of contradictory intentions by “trying” to be unclear, trying to make no sense.

Final Polish

I didn’t think about this too much because it isn’t really a challenge except for maybe logistically (takes a long time). i was thinking about using the syllabus method, or batch a bunch of videos for the weekend to finalize and publish.

A quick silly example of what this might look like:

  1. Reminder: Today’s reminder is to eat chocolate
  2. Shooting: Focus on how to deliver the words. “Chocolate…mmmm. We want to crunch it!” Shoot broll of breaking chocolate. Of inhaling the chocolate smell.
  3. Editing: Try to make it a bad video.
  4. Editing: Try to find a song that doesn’t fit.
  5. Polish: Add it to a queue with instructions on what needs to be done to finish it off.
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Bedtime Challenge 2: Wavering and Innovation

Byjack

I’ve done it, started to waver on my sleep challenge. The main issue is that I no longer take a hard stance on when I go to sleep, but the one thing that is holding over, is that I get to my bedroom by 11.

I want to recommit to getting into my bed by 11, even if I continue to stay up after.

However, despite wavering, and getting into bed at 11:30, I have started to innovate and think more carefully on how I spend the rest of the hours of my day:

  • I stop playing Valorant at 9 (or in the case of yesterday, don’t even play Valorant)
  • I started writing in my journal every night before bedtime to process any feelings that need to be processed
  • I started doing cupping before sleep to improve circulation
  • I also usually work on posture and my knee exercises

Now that I think about it, I actually succeeded pretty good at this challenge because I’m starting to feel like doing all sorts of things before bedtime such as drawing and reading books.

Another thing I like to do at night is listen to videos that are about AI and are interesting to me to keep up with the latest AI news.

I really like where all of this is going, and writing this at 5 AM in the morning makes me feel like it is nighttime and I’m feeling the vibes. I want to spend more time at night creating worlds. Either drawing, writing a novel or learning.

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Profit in Peace 13: Peace Disrupted Again

Byjack

My peace is disrupted, again. Today I have to get up even earlier and start preparation for work even earlier because I have to travel, and get on the plane for an early morning flight.

I am frustrated because of the complete stinginess in the finances, I have a lot of stress in terms of asking for a better setup such as traveling the day beforehand.

As a result, I didn’t sleep very well (if at all), and now feel tired and stressed.

I have a couple of things working in favor today though:

  • Because I woke up at 4:30 for a flight that boards at 6:40, I do have some nice free time in the morning where I can spend on myself and reconnecting with myself
  • I get to do my favorite thing of sleeping on the plane

Howling Winds in My Heart

I feel the howling winds

In my heart

The internal blizzard

Unforgiving

Being buried my a mountain

Of worry

The pain of the winds

In my ears

Today I did this. I felt much better afterwards, especially after the breaths. Those are really important as I discovered with the Bea Mackay and Wim Hoff methods. Saying the “I Love You” felt strange, especially since I’ve been feeling that I don’t like my face recently, just thinking I gained too much weight, but saying them I think I did feel the anxiety go away and I feel much more at peace, less stressed about work and everything.

In fact, I feel like going back to sleep.

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Profit in Peace 12: Peace Disrupted

Byjack

My peace today was disrupted by work early. It is nice to have time to talk about strategic leadership things. I usually don’t have that much time during the week.

However, it’s not the type of morning that I aim to repeat.

I intend on reclaiming as much peace as I can in this 20 minute span.

I feel that respect is a really important need for me in work, and I feel that this need was not met at my previous job, it remains to be seen whether or not it is met enough in this job. I have my doubts to be sure.

Today, I woke up feeling much better, even though I went to bed a bit late. It’s because, on top of journaling, I also did cupping on my body to unblock anything that was blocked. Turned red on my chest, I guess a lot of blockages there specifically.

I feel with the level of stress this morning with no peace and no running I’m feeling surprisingly good.

I wonder how to push back on blatant hostility and disrespect in a way that I want to. I suppose some rage journaling should help and maybe my coaching mindset.

Today I want to focus on making a video on how to handle lack of respect in the workplace.

I don’t know how that is going to go but that’s what I want to do.

Perhaps I need to meditate on it some more.

Maybe finally watching another 20 minutes of the coaching call will be nice as well.

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Valorant Poems

Byjack

Today I will be playing a lot of Valorant and hopefully processing a lot of the stress and feelings I have around Valorant through the use of poetry.

Pregame Stress

I’ve got knots in my stomach

What if it is another day

Of humiliation

That drop in my stomach

Feeling helpless

Like I’m worth nothing

I go down in rank

The more I play

What is wrong me

That I cannot get better

I hate this

Myself

Me

Hands Sweaty

On my keyboard

Heat on my face

Clenched stomach

It is no wonder

Valorant has such a big impact on me

I wish to let go of my fears

And remember the satisfaction of shooting

I starting to find it a challenge to write poetry because my mind always turns to thinking strategically and thinking in terms of sentanaces and bullet points. I’m going to roll with that. If that is how I feel, we are just going to write in sentences and bullet points.

I feel a bit tired like I’m walking through a haze. I’m scared to start a ranked game, and yet there is an eagerness to gain rr. Gold 1, what could go wrong? Yet I’m scared. HOW DID I GET TO GOLD 1? That’s unhead of. It gives me so much anxiety that I don’t know what is going on.

I want to remind myself of my main valorant tenants:

  1. Think of it as a 1v5
  2. Follow your feelings, peek when you are ready
  3. Keep wrist relaxed, use movement keys to aim

Some additional tenants:

  1. Find a space angle to hold, something that feels safe
  2. Peek expecting them there
  3. Notice things about aim, don’t try to change them, noticing is the pathway to the unconscious mind

Goddamn, this fucking omen can’t hit him while he’s moving . Why is Silver Movement so good?????

WHY IS THE RAZE HIDING IN THAT AREA? NO FUCKING COMMS? I hate this team. Why can I not hit shots.

I think I wasn’t aware of the danger I was in when clearing heaven. Maybe need more of that 1v5 mindset. Also, maybe need to notice where my shots are going. Scared but playing again. It is silvers I am with WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY KILLING ME. Counterstrafing, one tapping me??? WHAT DO I NEED TO DO?

THIS IS LIKE GOING BACK 2 FUCKING YEARS. I guess what I thought before is that I would never drop this low because I can beat them on gamesense alone.

I feel tired. Why are the braindead idiots getting more kills? I feel a bit better now. I adjusted and I was able to get a bunch of kills in the end. I guess its just about holding better angles.

I don’t like this bullshit bottom fragging. I feel so tired and awful and I feel hungry.

It is interesting that with these reflections I was able to drop 39 kills in one of my games.