Today I feel tired. My kidneys ache. They feel bloated and stagnated. My stomach feels slow. My head iches on the top. My eyes are dry. I feel burning inflammation up my back and spine. My skin is flaking on my face.
These past few days have felt exhausting, extremely stressful, and demoralizing. Last night, I asked myself the question, how do I get out of this.
I didn’t know the answer then, but my answer today during my walk was to take my stress seriously.
And just now, I had a realization that I have the systems developed to do extraordinary things. I just need to utilize them and follow their principals.
Systems in place:
Daily walk to ponder questions I am stressed about
Daily workpost to grow myself, plan for greatness
Clean space to deal with stress, clean place = clean mind
Meal prep strategy for healthy cheap meals with little stress – fridge containers, tacos, lettuce wraps
Whiteboards to write strategies
Off computer working systems (working while walking, running errands, working out, eating out)
Todo list strategy – focus on one thing at a time, prioritize
Clean after working hours to transition, decompress
Crawling to get cardio in small space
Walking backwards and tibialus for knee
Hanging for shoulders and posture
Working out after and before meals for better absorption, muscle growth, and recovery
Journaling to ask myself questions at night
Walking with no effort
I have absolutely everything I need to build a life where I can do almost anything I want, achieve anything I want.
Right now, I want to focus on two things: recovery and priming
Priming are stuff like cleaning, wiping off my whiteboards, clearing out tabs, filling markers, mealprep, todo list grooming
Recovery means lots of sleep, rest, hydration, and exercise. Specifically paying attention to anytime I want to game to see if I feel stressed or uncomfortable, taking a break when that happens.
To top off this post, I want to attach something that I want to erase from my whiteboard, but want to save forever:
Reasons Why I’m Ready
I’ve developed very deep and powerful life theories (flow, connection) → these theories can give anyone direction in darkness, I forget them but they come back when I need them
When faced with pain I’ve always come out stronger (ACL) → pain is the greatest teacher
I’ve proven that I can complete hard challenges (knee, sova) → I can achieve the challenges I set my mind to
I can solve problems few people can solve (triage, nikola) → normal rules don’t apply
I’m deeply attuned to emotions (coaching, art, philosophy) → makes it much easier to connect with people
I used to walk up to girls on the street → Nothing is something I can’t handle. There is nothing that I can’t ask for
No matter how badly I fail there are people who still love me
The point is not to get there, be productive or succeed, the point is to find a meaningful problem, problems we want to solve → we will never have no problems but we can choose which problems we want to contend with
Happiness doesn’t come from acing the past but seizing the now → its never too late to be happyIt’s near too late to fix it with a degree in engineering and parents who don’t mess with me
I have lots of assets and saving and a degree in engineering and parents and a sister all with money saved
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:
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.
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.
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:
I need my own time, I do not want to work any later than 5 consistently or earlier than 9 consistently.
I need to be treated with respect, for my time and opinions to be valued, my accomplishments and skills recognized.
I want to be honest to myself and others.
I want to work with integrity and empathy.
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.
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:
Unpack
Clean & Tidy
Cut my nails
Look into Gi Doctors
Look into a sleep study
Spend some time with the gf
Cook food
Plan my trip with my brother and sister
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:
Finding a part time gig where I can exercise without hurting myself
Signing back up for jiujitsu
Editing youtube shorts of coaching sessions
Setting up more coaching sessions
Working on sales plays for AI consulting
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.
Start with purpose, later you manage purpose not employees
Delay gratification
Culture has to be client centric
Hacking luck is about persistence
Taking risk increases luck
How to deal with failure
Don’t let things own you
Do not let short term ego go (enjoy looking like a loser)
Learn to embrace getting a D
Take your time
Don’t ask yourself what you will do when you grow up, ask yourself what problem you want to solve
Write down in detail what person you are looking for in a cofounder
Opposite of what you love to do
Same moral code
Post it everywhere
Sell the sizzle, not the steak
Build sales relationship
Do they need you?
Do you like them?
Marketing is about experimenting and connecting with people over time
Marketing is all about the process and the system
Marketing is about having fun
Write press release like its the actual story, do all the work for the journalist (high res photos)
Lean into marketing for other brands you like and they can lead to brand sponsorship
Something I was thinking about in this video is how I love challenges, but I don’t like failures. But maybe the most important thing to do, or a really good outcome for a challenge is failure, and I can focus on failure if I want to. I think maybe a big part of failure, is unexpected outcomes. It isn’t important that you didn’t succeed at what you originally went for, but how you grew in the process of trying and discovering what unexpected things were on the other side.
The cofounder part is also really interesting in writing down what I want so I can recognize someone when I see them.
Sales relationships makes me think about reaching out with all my goals and involving people on a journey because that is the thing that interests me the most, it is the thing that I can connect with people on very easily and naturally.
Marketing is making me think that failure might also be about the story you can tell afterwards. The story is not about success, it is about the exciting hook and premise. Failure is one of the most interesting ends to a story, although it can be depressing.
Yesterday I was vlogging a guy \asked me if I was a YouTuber, and he asked me all these questions like what my channel was about and how many subscribers I had.
I felt REALLY self-conscious because I AM a YouTuber, but not a famous or successful one and I feel like I’m disappointing people when I tell them that I have three hundred subs. I realized a few things when I felt the feelings of shame:
People LOVE the idea of youtube, you don’t need to be big for people to be excited about it. Sure some people will judge you but I think most people like the idea that you are trying to succeed and are probably curious enough to look me up and subscribe. In fact, isn’t that what I want? People who are legitimately interested in my journey subscribing to me?
I’m always REALLY self-conscious when people stare at me when I’m vlogging and I always try to solve the problem by either NOT vlogging or trying to ignore the embarrassment. I realized that there is a third better option. Any time I’m feeling embarrassed, I should just feel the feelings until the right path becomes clear to me. Usually, I feel so uncomfortable I will do ANYTHING to avoid the feeling, but I should just embrace it as I should do in any uncomfortable situation.
