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The Knee Strength Challenge
I’ve had knee problems for my half of my life. I wanted to get the motivation to heal the knee. It started with the Knee Mobility Challenge, which by the way wasn’t even my first knee challenge. Then I started to work on my overall fitness and knee motivation with the JiuJitsu challenge.
This is sort of a continuation of that.
My current goals:
- Lift up my knee and bend it feeling stable, comfortable and strong
- Stand for 5 minutes while feeling comfortable
- Lay on either side feeling comfortable and relaxed
- Sit on my heels while feeling comfortable and relaxed
- Be able to jump feeling stable, comfortable, and strong
- Able to kick a roundhouse while feel stable, comfortable and strong
The Valorant Challenge: From Silver 1 to Platinum 1
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.
Profit in Peace 11: Moving On???
Ok, I decided something weird that I’m not sure is going to work yet.
I decided that I’m going to keep this challenge going on forever and we will have different objective driving it constantly. It will be a sort of daily journal where I get to focus on Profit in Peace, finding my ikigai, tapping into my coaching energy, feeling into my body, working on my challenges, and discovering that the world is a magical place.
It will continue to be labeled like the other challenges, but it is different in the sense that it doesn’t have a specific end date. The end date might be just when this mentality, thinking of this as a Profit in Peace no longer serves me. Which might be never.
You know in a way this should be called Blog Post. Because it is the most blog post of blog posts. The sole purpose of these posts is literally to work on my life through my blog. But “Blog Post” just doesn’t evoke what I need for it to evoke, so we ain’t doing it.
So what is the focus for today?
Today we have a similar bent to yesterday but a little more focused on gaming. In no particular order, I want to:
- Play lots of valorant and create poems about how I feel about dropping to gold 1 and STILL losing
- Cook lots of food, be creative and have fun eating
- Watching another 20 minutes of the VOD review
- Work on my knee challenge
- Go for a run
Yesterday, I went for a short run.
Here is a poem about it:
Tingling in My Back
That’s the feeling when I push myself
My knees not ready for the impact
I want to massage my stomach and back
I’m aware of others watching
I wonder if Alice would be embarrassed of me
I want people to like me
Especially the girls
I think about how I learned to control what other’s thought of me
And that’s when everything went to a place
Shaky and scary
I remind myself
What others feel
Is out of my control
I’m proud of my innovative knee exercises
They make my prickly knees
Feel warm and supple again
I just came back from my most recent run. Today I focused on processing the anxiety being surrounded by everyone’s opinions of me. I realized a couple of things.
Dr Bea Mackay
She told me an exercise
The same one
Every session
Breath in breath out
I realized
It isn’t about other people
They never mattered
Neither did their opinions
I’m them
As a trigger for my pain
The sharp inhale
To take the pain
The release of the exhale
Filling me with warmth
From head to toe
The point was never to win their approval
It was to feel my pain
It is so interesting how Dr. Bea Mackay’s exercises are so similar to Wim Hoff’s. And Wim Hoff’s exercises are about enduring and thriving in pain too, just his are about cold and her’s are about emotions. No wonder so many people talk about the Wim Hoff method bringing them relief from chronic anxiety.
Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)
I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.
After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.
The fear of dying in the game:
- Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
- Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
- Makes me frustrated when I lose
- Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games
I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.
For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.
It will intuitively let me know:
- When to peek
- If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
- How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
- Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times
So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!
I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.
Some takeaways:
- Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
- The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
- The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
- When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
- I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
- I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
- What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
- I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.
My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.
French Challenge 2: A New Lease on Life
Some thoughts:
- I’m stressed out because even though I feel like I’m making progress, I feel that I’m not getting results until I learn specific words
- I am doing unorthodox way of learning language but expecting orthodox results
- The orthodox was of learning is memorizing words – thus your results will be on how many words you memorize
- I feel like I want those results when my methods are completely unorthodox, it makes sense that my results are not going to be the same, at first at least
- I worry about forgetting everything after French practice, but nothing in the subconscious is forgotten, my goal is to harness and bring out the subconscious knowledge
- If I were to state my goal another way, it could be to learn French subconsciously…which means that forgetting actually makes sense, since I am not consciously learning anything (that would be memorization)
- Since I am forging my own path, I want to capture everything I experience and feel because I want to know how this new process works (what should I expect from subconscious learning?)
Overall I feel much more encouraged. This is the right path for me. I feel confident in my methods. I’m forging a path that no one has ever forged before. The point is not to get orthodox results, the point is to capture my progress, my feelings, and my experience. I will continue to use connection theory on French in order to learn more intuitively and use connection theory on myself in order to deal with my feelings of uncertainty and being overwhelmed.