I love love love traveling but one thing I cannot stand is sleeping well in hotels.
Hotels rooms always feel:
Too stuffy somehow, not enough circulation (I hate that you cannot open the window)
Too cold
The mattress doesn’t feel firm enough
Blankets aren’t soft or warm and fluffy (they are thin and scratchy)
I strategized last night to get the best nights sleep and here are the things I did:
Ate dinner in the lobby where the air circulation was better and feels like more fresh oxygen
Turn the heat up as high as it would go (78 degrees F)
Made the bed as comfortable as possible moving the blankets and pillows around to create a nice nest
Took a shower, then went back down to the lobby to unwind
Feel asleep in the lobby then went back to the room to sleep
I feel like this actually was a REALLY good routine but I didn’t sleep well because the spicy wings I ate the day before made my stomach uncomfortable. I’m going to try to see if tonight I can fall asleep like in a coma.
If I could burn their existence and wipe them from the planet I would
I’m so tired of fighting
I’m so tired of having to rely on others to do what I want to do
I’m so tired
I feel hopeless sometimes
Like there is no way out of this horrid existence
Where I am trapped
I breathed and breathed
And in the breath
I remembered
That I don’t need to let anyone control me
Only one person can live my life
No one else can touch me
They can’t hurt me and they can’t control me
I can do things my way
I did a little IFS therapy on myself and here are the parts that came up:
Black Hatred: This is a protector of some sort that prevents other people from taking me off course of what I want to do. It does this through extreme anger against people who don’t understand me and box me into what they feel my limitations are.
Mind Reader: The mind reader is always calculating what other people want in order to prevent the painful feelings around rejection and failure.
I reminded Black Hatred that I am 31 years old and he no longer needs to protect me since no one has any hold over me anymore. I can do whatever I want to do. I promised him that I will remain true to myself.
I reminded Mind Reader that I am 31 and I am fully capable with dealing with failure, and that at my age, failure helps keep the boredom away. I promised him that I will take care of myself and give myself time, space, comfort, and support.
I’m gonna try to do something crazy, which is to try to rise from Silver 1 to Platinum in Valorant.
For all of you who don’t know, Valorant is a competitive FPS shooter. Like all popular computer games that are competitive, it is extremely difficult to progress in rank.
When I first started Valorant I was in Iron 1 and after months of playing, I rose to Silver 1. Now I want to make a similar rise from Silver 1 to Platinum 1. But I want to do it faster this time. I want to do it within the course of 2-3 months.
I want to use this experience as a test of my speed learning skills and also how I can make videos for challenges.
I also believe that mindfulness and self-awareness can bring greater success than any brute force tactic, and I want to prove that with my progress in this game (which will be easy to measure and indisputable).
My current philosophy for speed learning:
Embracement of pain
Lower expectations
Process emotions
Try new things
Self-reflection is KEY
Need to see yourself
Focus on fun
Play when you want with things you like
Small steps
Don’t need to do everything in one day
Do tiny steps if possible
Prepare yourself
Create an environment for success
Specifics:
Embracement of pain
Don’t set goals
Assume I’m gonna do bad
Slow down and process when I’m doing bad
Always try new strats
Self-reflection
LOTS of VOD reviews
Focus on fun
Only play comp when you want to
Other days do light practice
Focus on agents you have fun with (focus on agent abilities that are fun)
Small steps
Find ways to practice in aimlabs, spike rush and deathmatch
Prepare yourself
Work on environment
Work on posture
NEXT: What my plan on filming will be.
Also, got recommend How to Fight Thich Nhat Hanh by a friend on how to work on mindfulness.
I started to understand what it means to have “self-discipline” and using that to build self-confidence.
It isn’t about holding yourself to arbitrary rules and forcing yourself to do things that you don’t want to do (but think you “should do” or that other people think you should do).
It is about challenging yourself. If you have a challenge mindset, you don’t worry about failure, you are interested in the possibility. If you have self discipline in a challenge, it means to focus on that and as you follow through, you start to build confidence.
As Goggins says, you don’t get happiness or confidence from comfort, you get it from facing yourself and facing your fears.
The big issue between people who really understand and those who are fake motivation is that people who are fake push themselves for other people, they push themselves out of fear. The people who understand, have embraced fear, they push themselves WITH the fear. People who don’t understand, disconnect from themselves and ignore fear. The people who understand CONNECT with fear, feel it MORE not LESS.
I’ve been doing pretty well on the social front of the Sales conference, keeping in touch with myself and keeping my boundaries. But the same problems that plague me at home, plague me here.
Specifically, sleep, or lack thereof. I’ve been exploring the feelings that keep me distracting myself with games, videos, and other things. I’m trying to understand this desire, this hunger for stimulation that I have within myself.
It feels like a hunger, and hunger comes from emptiness. I wonder what I am missing in my life. I feel that it might be blood flow. I want to feel like this amazing warmth and flow to my body where my mind and body is open and stimulated.
Meditation has been a great boon to me, I’ve used it to calm down, to get answers and to reduce the inflammation I feel from lack of sleep.
I’ve also explored other physical avenues such as stretching, warmups and self massage.
My feeling is that self-massage comes first, then, mobility exercises and finally stretching.
Here are some of the videos I did today that were pretty good:
But my journey in this has just begun.
I really feel the need to understand what is the appeal of gaming and watching interesting videos internally. Perhaps that isn’t even the key. Perhaps the key is to give myself more freedom and permission. Perhaps this is a trigger for caging myself in and shaming myself so I’m not fully in touch with myself.
I’ll at least give it a shot. I realize there is a big fear in me that if I let myself do what I want, my life will go off the rails. I am going to face that fear and feel it and see where it leads me.
Today in the King’s council, part men’s group, part coaching session, we talked about setting goals.
I didn’t have an idea of what my goals are but a couple of visions came to mind:
Coaching is a large part of my life. I saw about 3 coaching conversations with clients or potential clients every week.
Youtube challenges being a large source of energy in life. I saw myself dedicating a little time every day to focus on an active challenge. This could be writing about the challenge, doing the challenge or shooting videos and thinking about the final video.
I imagined feeling a lot more confident and in control of my challenges. I saw this as having successfully editing and posted a single challenge to youtube.
I saw myself being outside and having a lot more energy. I would spend different parts of my day in different places.
I saw my work-life come alive again. This meant posting posts on Linkedin every week, and engaging with people at work about my life outside of work.
I need to choose three main ones for the intention of the Kings Council.
I will choose the following goals:
To have a powerful coaching conversation with three more people.
To have one paying client.
To have produced three challenge videos and posted them to youtube.
