Everything has a Season
š„Welcome to volume 0008!š„
IāmĀ Christian Champ. This is the āÆļøMiddleway NewsletterĀ āÆļø. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
Everything has a Season
As the days get shorter and the temperatures drop, we get reminded that all of life is a cycle. Itās death and rebirth.
The seasons provide a perfect opportunity for us to adjust our focus, what we are working on and how we spend our time. We get to sync with the natural rhythms of nature. Adjusting our days to the darkness and the opportunities the weather provides. Pivoting from being outside during the long days of sunshine to indoor activities.
How can we align more with the ecology around us? How can we take advantage of the changes of the seasons to create rituals and traditions that line up with days of the year? What should we focus more on as the days get shorter?
šArticles to Readš
Ed Batista Stanford MBA Art of Self-Coaching Course
He includes the slides and a list of readings for each week. Check them out.
Reminder Coaching Tools
Ask, Listen, EmpathizeĀ
AskĀ
Humble:Ā open-ended questionsĀ
Diagnostic: Focus their attentionĀ
Confrontational: Challenge their narrativeĀ
ListenĀ
HearingĀ ā ListeningĀ
Make them FEEL HEARDĀ
Empathize
Not "look on the bright side", Or "my problem is worse", or "here's some advice"Ā
Avoid judgementsĀ
Sense and Validate EmotionsĀ
Convey understanding (ā Agreement)
How we tell the people we love and care about one thing when we actually mean something else
Colin Champ wrote a piece about Winning the War for your health (yeah that is my brother)
His newsletter is also highly recommended
Language is the Scaffolding of the Mind
Anna Ivanova wrestles with the idea that language and thought could be separable.
To fall in love, to make change, to unlearn and to say goodbye.
Russel Wilsonās Mental Training
While I donāt spend much time watching sports, reading about it and modeling the behavior of top performers is a strong interest.
"I've lived in this world [of mental conditioning] for 18 years, and superhero gifts are not the defining factor," Moawad said. "Elite behavior is the deciding factor, and you take people with average talent and great behavior -- they're going to make it. Russell is a collection of world-class behaviors. ... He has very good gifts, but he has exceptional behavior. But if he didn't act the way he acts, he wouldn't be who he is."
The two will tell you that it isn't by accident that Wilson is a Super Bowl champion, a six-time Pro Bowler and the owner of the richest contract in NFL history. Nor do they believe it's any coincidence that a few days after reliving that 2015 performance against Pittsburgh, Wilson was equally brilliant -- three TDs, no picks and a career-best 82.5% completion rate -- in a two-point victory at Heinz Field.
Positive thinking, Moawad says, requires a change of mindset that's too fast for most people, so they give up. And positive language doesn't always resonate in skeptical ears.
"And so early on, we taught these concepts around non-negativity, and then eventually we came to the idea of neutral thinking and neutral behavior, which is a recognition that the past happened, but the past isn't predictive," he said. "Your next behavior is predictive."
"So when you say, 'How did he throw 34 touchdowns and seven interceptions the following year?' That's how," Moawad said. "Because his behavior is always ahead of his success."
šĀ Books to ReadĀ š
Letās Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy - (audible/book)
Iām not a Wilco fan nor do I know any of their songs, but ran into this recommendation somewhere and it didnāt disappoint. Like Russ Wilson, itās always interesting to see how peopleās process works.
Inward by Yung Pueblo - (audible / book)
It contains some great thoughts like his instagram feed:
Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright - (audible / book)
Jho Low steals a couple Billion from Malaysian (which quasi-government consent) and hangs with Leo D, Jamie Foxx, Swiss Beats and Alicia Keys while blowing a 100M+ of it
šļøĀ Listen / WatchĀ šŗ
How to Control Your Attention with Nir Eyal - The Kevin Rose Show
All distractions are the result of either: An internal trigger, an external trigger, or a planning problem
āBy understanding the source of the distraction, we can do something about it the next time aroundā
With to-do lists, instead of listing the outputs (finish taxes) list the inputs (work on my taxes for 1 hour)
Kevin Kelly on The Future Fossils Podcast
Technology changes us and we change technology (it is all change)
We donāt know what is going to happen with technology until it does and that is why we need to experiment and be open (prohibition, outlawing and banning are bad ideas)
Technology like us is a complex adaptive emergent system (ie you canāt control them ā which also foots back to KKās first book āOut of Controlā)
KKās website is a great place to check out all his work. He is someone I consider a mentor, who Iāve never met before.
Ken Burns on Tim Ferrissā Podcast
In a world of prefrontal cortex domination, donāt forget to listen to your heart
If you experience a wholehearted (or whole-body) yes, itās definitely a project or piece of work you should be taking onGo, See, Do, Be
Ken recalls this advice from one of his mentors,Ā JeromeĀ Liebling
Go ā Get out into the world
See ā Look around you
Do ā Make something beautiful
Be ā Take it in
š£Words of Wisdomš£
Fred Rogers - āTo see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it. . .Those are my heroes.ā
Present Shock - Douglas Rushkoff
For all this to work, however, the storyteller is depending on a captive audience. The word āentertainmentā literally means āto hold within,ā or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this, and traditional media viewers could be depended on to sit through their programming and then accept their acne cream.
Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson
And it may also have begun to dawn on me, around that same time, that history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries.
āHave you ever watched that classic science-fiction film The Matrix?ā she asked. āI remember loving that movie when I was a kid, even though the special effects were absolute trash. The campy slow-mo won me over, dodging bullets and kicking ass. But what stuck with me afterward was the idea that the world we perceive isnāt realājust a membrane concealing a deeper reality. I began to see things everywhere that I thought were real but were really made up. Teachers told us that our grades mattered, but really they were just an inaccurate and ineffective bureaucratic sorting mechanism. We werenāt allowed to vote until we were eighteen, but the distinction between child and adult was totally arbitrary, just a number that someone decided on one day. We called politicians leaders when they were often the most corrupt, vain, and impotent people around. Suddenly, everywhere I looked, I saw facts revealed to be fiction.ā
What is your focus for the fall sesaon? Winter?
Thanks for reading.
Any thoughts or comments, please reach out.
Namaste,Ā
Christian
