🔥Welcome to volume #00037!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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🖼️Frames🖼️
Another C? What the heck?
I handed in art project after art project and watched my pride evaporate when Bs and Cs followed my efforts. I was a straight-A student minus art and handwriting. Grade school was throwing me shade.
I went from enjoying art class to mailing it in. My creative juices got squeezed out of me due to poor grades. I framed myself as a person that can't create art. I never practiced and improved, proving my belief correct. I let grades frame up my abilities and avoided creating any future art.
Fast forward to 2016 after I picked up the Sketchnote Handbook and began doodling notes in meetings. Ever improving figures and bubble letters started to come together.
Then I'm sitting in a Toastmasters meeting doodling away. Two fellow members note how "artistic" I am. The smile hits my lips and won't fade away.
My framing shifts as I become “artistic”.
What changed? Nothing and everything. My sketch notes get better because I believe in myself, and I don't judge myself. I then draw more, creating a positive feedback loop.
Frames are how we see the world. Like looking out of windows, we only see a partial picture. We forget that we can look inside to out, outside to in, upside down, and from multiple windows.
We need frames to create understanding. We need to make the right frames for ourselves and others. Like pictures, we can get stuck in the wrong frame. The borders aren't real, but we make them real. This limits our abilities and possibilities.
We get stuck in a fixed mindset due to the frame.
What happens when we remove the frames that limit us?
📓Articles to Read📓
A Guide to Creating Games as a Transformative Experience by Robin Arnott and Heather Ray
This treatise focuses on the yin and yang of game decisions and making the player end up in a better place for having played the game. How to drive flow states, immersion, and keep the player feeling full vs. the constant dopamine craving.
We need to find the Yin and Yang when creating games.
Yin
Calm-centeredness in the face of novel stimulus.
Enjoying increased complexity, even to a point beyond comprehension or mastery.
Relaxing our attention into release and bliss.
Yang
Sharpening our responses to stressful stimuli.
Bringing complex situations under control.
Sharpening our attention into focus and flow.
The Power of Writing as a Self-Coaching Practice
Fellow Flow Genome Coach Rob Gronbeck is writing a 750-word blog post a day for Blogtober. Day 22 he riffs on the power of using writing for self-coaching.
Coaching has been explained to me as a balance between supportiveness and challenging. That is the sweet spot and each person will require a different ratio of each.
Here is where journaling and 750words can be remarkable for self-coaching.
Support includes emotional and cognitive skills/capacities like empathy, compassion, forgiveness, encouragement, positive regard and praise for effort.
Challenge includes emotional and cognitive skills/capacities such as ambition, future envisioning, setting boundaries, accountability, stretching the self-concept, and questioning the status quo.
I believe with written daily journal practice we can both support ourselves when we need it, and challenge ourselves too. We see our thoughts, feelings, and musings in front of us.
Then, we can review what we’ve written, our thoughts, our trains of thought.. and see what destinations they are landing us to.
Can we question ourselves more?
Are there specific questions we could ask to both encourage self-compassion and self-determination?
Can we use our writing to pick 3–4 key themes in our lives, or 1 big event, and write about it in a supportive and challenging way?
I believe we can.
Could Roger Feder be good at badminton?
A friendly reminder that where you play might matter much more than how you play. Success includes a lot of luck.
Likewise, a company’s choice of industry matters a great deal—more than many realize. When we tracked the economic profit of the world’s 2,393 largest companies over 10 years, we found that about 50% of a firm’s performance compared to the broader corporate universe is driven by what’s happening in its industry, highlighting that “where to play” is perhaps the most critical choice in strategy. Your industry trend is the single biggest factor shaping your odds of outperformance.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Sharon Sulzberg on Krista Tippet’s OnBeing Podcast - (Spotify / Transcript)
Tippett So you wrote, “We practice in order to cultivate a sense of agency, to understand that a range of responses is open to us. We practice to remember to breathe, to have the space in the midst of adversity to remember our values, what we really care about, and to find support in our inner strength and in one another.”
One of the things that I’ve heard you say across the years, and I think have never taken it in so gratefully, and it has never been so helpful before, “The healing is in the return … Not in not getting lost in the beginning.” But that’s such a relief. That is such a liberation.
Tippett:Well, it’s a Lesson 101 in life, too, right?
Salzberg:And it’s the most precious thing. I use it every day. [laughs] Like, it’s still the most significant thing I’ve ever learned from meditation and that I use it every single day — because we do. We have to start over and do a course correction, or pick ourselves up if we’ve fallen down, every day.
Tippett:It’s frustrating, isn’t it, that this is true. But there’s something about accepting it, and even accepting it as a gift, that kind of does what you also are so clear about, is that we can’t change, often, the conditions or circumstances that are immediately in front of us, but we can change our relationship to our experience of them, and that that can change everything.
Salzberg:And I think it gives us the basis for trying to change the circumstance, but from a different place: not because we feel defective or deficient or desperate — that’s a lot of “d” words — but because we have that sense of compassion for ourselves and compassion for others, and we can move forward toward something, even without necessarily an immediate result.
And I think if we can have that basis of recognition — OK, this is the way things are right now, and I can see them; I don’t have to be afraid of what I’m facing; I can see them for what they are — then we can move forward in a different way.
Salzberg:Sometimes people feel, or they say, “If I hear something like ‘generosity or kindness will help you feel more free, and free up that energy which you will need,’ then I think that’s selfish. That’s bad, because then my motive is impure.” And I usually say, “Well, that’s not greed. That’s science.” If you devote your energy in a certain direction, you’re gonna be depleted, very likely, and you’re gonna feel more alone, and you’re gonna suffer, and that’s not the basis for trying to make a difference. And so, what can we do that’s gonna actually have us feel some sense of renewal and some sense of possibility? Because things are so bad, in so many ways. But to remember, oh, people can find one another, and we can understand one another in a different way. How do we get back to that, just, conviction that it’s possible? We do need energy for that. And so what is gonna have that energy come forward and be something that can serve us in some way?
And I remember my father saying something in one of his brief visits back, when he was so trashed mentally, and he said something like, “You can’t let people affect you.” And I was like, really? Is that the lesson that I’m supposed to absorb? But I did absorb it. And then you get to look at those things in your own mind, and all these things that you’ve believed, like, “vengefulness is really gonna make you strong.” And you look at it and you think, well, that was a myth. Look how painful that state is, to be closed in that way and shut off to anything else. And things like, “compassion is stupid and make you too weak.” And really? Look at that. Look at the state itself: it’s not like that.
And so we get to discover all the things that are possible for us, and we see, you know what? I don’t want to live a life that is based on “it’s a dog eat dog world.” And I don’t want to feel that alone. I don’t want to feel that frightened. And I have possibilities. There are choices, because if I can see those assumptions arise in my mind as they’re arising, not seven years later but as it’s happening, then I can say — it’s just the same thing; it’s probably all the same lesson; everything’s like a fractal, in the dharma — you open the door, and there’s the visitor, [laughs] and you say, “Oh, there you are. Have a cup of tea. Sit. I’m not going there again.” And it’s the gentlest thing. It’s not angry at yourself, and it’s not full of shame and trying to avoid what’s going on. It’s just saying, I don’t need to go down there again.
Manila Killa Soundcloud mix. This has become my go-to mix for writing, juggling, and finding a flow state.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Goodreads)
Amor worked as an investment banker for over 20 years and then transitioned to writing beautiful books. When I finished last week’s recommendation, the author, Blake Crouch, mentioned this book as his favorite recent read. It lives up to expectations.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
There’s only one way to come to understand the other person’s story, and that’s by being curious. Instead of asking yourself, “How can they think that? !” ask yourself, “I wonder what information they have that I don’t?” Instead of asking, “How can they be so irrational?” ask, “How might they see the world such that their view makes sense?” Certainty locks us out of their story; curiosity lets us in.
The Lost Art of Good Conversation - Sakyong Mipham
Reflect on your skills in building connections and developing trust. How flexible are you when you don’t know someone or she disagrees with you? Are you able to compromise, accept the results, and let go? Or do you measure the result against your expectations?
The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli
The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
Superforecasting - Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner
“No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,” he wrote. That statement was refined and repeated over the decades and today soldiers know it as “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” That’s much snappier. But notice that Moltke’s original was more nuanced, which is typical of his thinking. “It is impossible to lay down binding rules” that apply in all circumstances, he wrote. In war, “two cases never will be exactly the same.” Improvisation is essential.
TechGnosis - Erik Davis and Eugene Thacker
“Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods.”
That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What frames are holding you back? It might be how you frame up your abilities, others in your life, or your view of possibilities.
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
