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Workpost 19: Rejection

Byjack

I am slowly getting back into things. After completely messing up my bedtime, getting it back, getting sick, losing my bedtime again, I am finally getting back into the swing of things.

I want to refocus on the things that I set out to focus on: Health, AI Consulting, Art Coaching.

I want to have an 11-12 PM bedtime, journaling at night, morning walking meditation, and morning todo list and blog post.

Today on my morning walk I contemplated rejection.

You know I always felt that working on yourself made you more prepared for life in general and I always felt my fear of rejection was holding me back from a lot of things in life, initially from getting a girlfriend, but later from being a life coach.

Recently I had the experience of meeting with a client for a free session for which they were super impressed by but when I sent them my rates, they did not respond. This immediately triggered the rejection wounds within me. I also just had an artist interview who was late to our conversation, did not agree to the full hour, and did not want to schedule another time to complete our conversation which triggered rejection wounds within me.

I feel scared that if I ask for things, people will reject me. I’m afraid it will be awkward to talk to them afterwards, I’m afraid how others will view me after getting rejected.

This morning I came up with a couple of nuggets to handle and process rejection:

  1. Take up space: there is a part of me that wants to hide when people reject me. I want to take up as little space as possible. This concept is doing the opposite. I deserve to be here like everyone else. Take up space! Make the ask!
  2. Enthusiastic yes: I don’t want people to feel pressured. I am going to follow the philosophy on the Prosperous Coach. It’s either an enthusiastic yes, or its a no. Maybe is a no. And tell them that. If they are not sure, they know where to find you.
  3. Slow down: I realized this new revelation in Valorant has implications in life too. When I feel stressed about rejection and awkwardness, shame, and judgement, slow down. I usually try to speed up, to move past it. Slow way down, focus on what is going on before charging ahead.
  4. Stay busy, focus on the process not the outcome: one thing that I noticed, when I’m busy doing what matters, I won’t care as much about anything else. I want to focus on health, coaching and consulting. Don’t let anyone’s rejection take away from that. It’s like what they say about cold calling. Focus on the process, not the outcomes (focus on improving your process for cold calling, not for the outcome of every call).

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Workpost 11: Mentalities for Happiness

Byjack

Today I woke up feeling pretty awful from going to bed at 4AM last night.

I was feeling super overwhelmed with many many things in my life.

Today, I chose to wake up slowly, get to work slowly, and here are some of the mentalities that helped me:

  1. Cleaning is incredibly healing. Any time of cleaning, cleaning your workspace, your body, your clothes, it all is very therapeutic.
  2. What can I do for future Jack. This is the Matthew McConnehey’s idea of leaving breadcrumbs. Instead of the common idea of letting your future self deal with a problem (let future Jack deal with the dishes, let future Jack deal with talking to this person) think about what you can do now to make your future self happier. This can look like everything from cleaning, to setting up a super nice workspace, cooking yourself a really good meal.
  3. Focus on challenge and growth. I think oftentimes I get overwhelmed because I think about how hard things are. What helps me is thinking about everything in terms of challenge and growth. How can I challenge myself? What can I do to grow?
  4. Live in the hierarchy of being true to oneself. I was talking to a friend the other day about hierarchies and choosing the right one (don’t compete in a hierarchy you don’t believe in such as money). I want to compete and live in a hierarchy of being honest and true to myself.

I still feel a quite a bit of stress of the difficult conversations I’m anticipating, and the difficult tasks I have in front of me.

Unwelcome World

I feel sometimes

I am living in a world

Where every step is heavy

But the gravity only pulls on my heart

And the future feels unknown

Scary and not comfy

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Aim Technique Ideas

Byjack

Takeaways

  • Prefiring is not about shooting them before you clear a corner, a prefire is about shooting before your brain registers that they are there
  • Try jiggling with OP, when you repeek shoot without even knowing they are there
  • Try to understand their tempo and timings for when a peek is happening and adjust your predictions of their patterns
  • Can be strong in eco or save rounds
  • Crosshair placement doesn’t replace aim, crosshair place IS aim
  • If you can place crosshair faster and more accurately, you can also clear faster and prevent bad timings
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Mewing and Tongue Position

Byjack

I’ve always had trouble finding a relaxed position for my tongue at the roof of the mouth. I always felt that I was forcing it and in the past when I tried to “mew” I got terrible headaches.

However, I noticed I spend a lot of time breathing from my mouth and I wanted to fix things so I used a bit of connection theory to come up with an idea on how to hold my tongue and I came up with this simple technique:

  • Imagine your spine ending at your tailbone and reaching up all the way and ending at your tongue
  • Imagine keeping your spine open at extended

This imagery has a couple of benefits:

  • Most importantly for me, this allows me to move my body and my tongue without feeling like I cannot maintain tongue posture (mewing always felt static and forced to me)
  • Simple and seems quite relaxing to me
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Knee Strength 7: Walking

Byjack

Yesterday I was walking around a lot when I felt a lot of pain on the interior side of the meniscus of my right knee.

I was really concerned, but this experience helped me get back into the knee challenge to focus on my knee and how it is moving.

When I used connection theory, I noticed that I was using my legs too much (specifically calves) when walking.

The steps for proper walking:

  1. Use hips to step out
  2. Flex and stretch out leg fully
  3. Only use calf muscles at the end of a stride

Also, stretching the calves helps.

It is actually incredible, I went from pain in every step to no pain at all even though I walked for a long time.

Also, I tried connection theory on walking on uneven ground and some tips for that:

  • Keep the ankles active
  • Relax the hips
  • Bend the knees slightly

When this is done properly it should feel like walking talks no effort.

I also did a big on climbing stairs:

  • Center the weight on the leg stepping up
  • Keep everything controlled and centered while stepping up

Finally, in terms of relief, the only exercise that really helped when my menicus was hurting was the Gentle Knee Spacer exercise in this post.

Nothing else really helps, what surprised me is that the foot scrape actually caused pain.

I still haven’t figured out how to sleep on my side safely, but my intuition tells me that I need to build up more muscles in the legs.

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Video Making: A Breakthrough

Byjack

I just made a breakthrough in making videos and/or content in general.

I have huge anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed when I make content because I want things to be perfect the first time, yet the thought of making it perfect feels like an impossible task.

I end up not making anything at all.

The question becomes, it is better to make a lot of bad content? Or very few good content?

The idea is probably to strike a balance. You don’t want to make tons of bad content because there is no point in making content if it is all bad. But at the same time, it is impossible to make perfect content because until you make bad or mediocre content, you will never learn how to be good.

I have an idea of how exactly to strike that balance….with time boxing.

With time-boxing content creation, you address both concerns at the same time, making content good but also not taking forever to make it.

I remember reading Alex Hormozi’s book $100 Million Dollar Leads, I was struck by this conundrum as well. He talks about making a lot of content, but at the same time he talks about how it has to provide a lot of value. He talks about giving away value for free and the more you give away the more leads you get. But I wonder, how do you address the fact that it can take too long to make all that value to give away?

Time boxing answers this question too.

Here is my formula:

  1. Set an amount of time you want to spend making the content
  2. Come up with a plan (syllabus method) if needed
  3. Create the content, for video focus not on what words you are saying but the emotions behind the words, they are far more important
  4. Use the remaining time however you feel makes the most sense
    1. One option is to spend the entire time editing.
    2. Another option is to spend it doing more takes, or gathering more footage.
    3. Either option is totally fine and can be a mix of both.

My big realization is this: I thought that I wanted to make really good content and was just too lazy or stressed out to do it. That isn’t true. I want to make really good content, but good content comes at a hidden cost…time. I need to balance the quality of the work with the amount of time I am willing to spend on it. It cannot take an infinite amount of time because that would mean I am getting less reps in.

It is all fine a good to give away tons of free value, but it is better to give away tons of free value while requiring a low time cost from you.

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Bedtime Challenge 4: The Marathon

Byjack

I just came up with a sort of solution for the issue of continuing a healthy sleep cycle while ending the challenge.

It is sparked by something my dad said to me. He told me that life is a marathon not a short race. You have to think of things in the longterm in order to stay healthy.

I was thinking about this because I have a technique I use when I need to do something that takes time and patience. For example, if I feel antsy while working at the gym, I ask myself, “when will this be over?” and I start looking at the clock and feeling impatient.

I address with a technique that I call the Forever method. It’s called the forever method because I answer that question with “imagine it will go on forever”. And not in a bad way. In a way that is comforting. This is your new life…and I can let go of figuring out how to rush onto the next thing. I can just focus on the present moment, and focus on doing the movements in a way that I CAN do it forever. That means with good form, without pushing myself too hard.

I realized I can think about life the same way:

  • Bedtime that I can sustain forever
  • Working hours that I can sustain forever
  • Eating in a way that I can sustain forever

This makes a lot of sense for maintaining boundaries. Often we tell ourselves, oh, I will just bear this insult for today, I will just work a little harder today. But in those situations, we are violating our own boundaries. Which means we will build up resentment. It is NOT something you can sustain forever.

So as I close out this challenge, I plan to live in a way that will enable me to live forever.

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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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Setting Boundaries With Others

Byjack

I recently had a situation at work where I felt like I needed to set some boundaries. In order to get more strategies on how to do it, I went with my trusty expert Thais Gibson, who I feel is the absolute best when it comes to coming up with scripts and strategies with processing feelings, dealing with attachment styles and setting and enforcing boundaries.

Taking what Thais says in this video and adding in my own knowledge, I have come up with the follow step process for setting boundaries.

  1. Rage pad: write down or record yourself saying everything you want to say to the person. This gives permission to anger and allows you to process it.
  2. Determine whether or not a boundary was crossed, and if so, what specific one?
  3. Try to empathize as to why that boundary was crossed
  4. Communicate in this format:
    1. Communicate in the positive the boundary violation (what they did, not what they didn’t do). <Insert empathy> At the same time, this is not acceptable under any circumstances.
    2. Explain what you want instead
    3. If repeated violations, add in consequences

Make it really obvious to the person what is going on.