🌄Leaning into Liminal Spaces🌄
🔥Welcome to volume #00062!🔥
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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🌄Leaning into Liminal Spaces🌄
Nailed it!
The perfect turn of a phrase for the moment got delivered.
Can we press pause and sit with this? We hit those hole in ones every so often, but life keeps rolling. The dah dum plays in our mind, and it's gone.
It's like that hug you give your parents when they drop you off at college. Everyone is excited and filled with positive nervous energy. You want to hold those hugs for a second longer and never let it end. We wave goodbye and cross a liminal space.
How often do we try to hold on to those perfect moments in our life? When everything feels right, and we touch perfection. Then they end.
We need the dirt, sun, and rain to grow a flower. We need a flower to die to appreciate what it brought and reset the cycle.
Most of our time falls into the liminal spaces, where we cross thresholds into the new. Instead of trying to hold on to the pull of the perfect moment, we smile at it and appreciate it happening. We smile as it passes like a cloud.
When we think back to our time as children, most of our time consisted of liminal spaces. The changes come rapidly and dramatically. We become and change to evolve and change again.
We want to embrace and greet our friends, change, and the time between our worlds. We lean into the liminal space with gratitude and appreciation, ready for whatever happens next.
The change always comes.
📓Things to Think About📓
Wes Kao writes on Cohort Based Courses
As a heavy user of online courses, I appreciate the emphasis on the community aspect of the classes. I talked to a reader of the newsletter this week, who just started a cohort-based course, and greatly appreciated getting to know some folks in his class.
Cohort-based courses self-select for learners who are willing to (and can) pay a premium for the perceived quality of content and follow-through. Most learners likely need the accountability and urgency that comes from the time constraints of a live course (with a clear beginning and end date), and from learning with a peer group. When Harvard famously transitioned its case-method courses online and incorporated peer collaboration in 2014, its completion rate rose to 85 percent, while most MOOCs at the time were experiencing single-digit completion rates. At Juno School, a cohort-based coding boot camp, data from 116 students who graduated in the first half of 2020 showed an employment rate of 74.1 percent within 9 months of graduation.
Cohort-based courses could fulfill the promise of online education, particularly as students continue to support each other after they complete the courses — and as the cohort forms a tight, internet-native alumni network.
Coach Willis asks us to seek nuance in the absolute
An issue that seems to plague many today is seeing the world as black or white. Any leakage into gray and folks shut down, but most of life is gray.
The world is full of nuance. It is where true beauty lies. It is the breeding ground of ideas and engagement... the fountainhead of variety and possibility. Nuance is the medium of empathy, understanding and acceptance.
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
The drum comes from the source and returns us to the source
The drum moves us —> like battle drums and drums at concerts
Drums put us in a state of trance
The drummer is the crazy guy of the band and pushes us into states of rapture
The drum drives ceremony and ritual and the drum is scared
There are rhythms to our lives, days, and moments
The heart, mind, and world is a drum
We can change our rhythm to change our life
Brain waves frequencies match the rhythm of the drum
Rock and Roll introduced the trance state to the US and England
📚 Book Breakdowns📚
It Takes What It Takes by Trevor Moawad (Goodreads)
I ran into this book because Trevor spoke to my company on a firm-wide Zoom. The presentation left me wanting more but intrigued. The medium is the message and the book does a better job of diving into his thoughts and ideas vs. a Zoom.
He is best known as Russel Wilson’s mental coach.
TLDR: We can all use neutral thinking to stay in the present and prepare for the next moment because that is all that matters. We prepare ourselves by what we choose to do and most importantly what we choose to not do.
Russel Wilson asks himself
What am I saying to myself?
What am I saying to my teammates?
What language am I using?
How am I impacting myself?
How am I impacting others?
How am I being my best self every time I step on the field?
An attitude is a habit of thinking
The ability to sell to others is valuable but it is not as valuable as the ability to sell to yourself
We talk to ourselves. It's like gravity and even if you don't see it, it is still real
Life can harden us and wear us down. It isn't life though. It is us. We need to be aware and not let it happen. Live in the now and the next word and moment.
It Takes What It Takes to get where we want.
Vince Carter stopped dunking to continue to play in the NBA into his late thirties —> His knees only had so many dunks left and when he dunked he lost time to get back on defense
If you want it, you need to align your behavior with the desired outcome
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Brue Patton, Sheila Heen
To make the structure of a difficult conversation visible, we need to understand not only what is said, but also what is not said. We need to understand what the people involved are thinking and feeling but not saying to each other. In a difficult conversation, this is usually where the real action is.
"Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through. The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance. If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting. Quitting frees you up to excel at something else." ~Seth Godin
Do the Work - Steven Pressfield
When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.
The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh
Few things offer greater return on less investment than praise—offering credit to someone in your organization who has stepped up and done the job.
@Orangebook_ on Twitter
Life-changing choices:
1) Surround yourself with people who strive to become a better version of themselves
2) Read uncomfortable books that make you question your perspective
3) Have a hobby reminding you of the beginner's mindset
4) In doubt, choose the more difficult path
The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow
But a more grown-up, sober-sounding voice reminded me that The Ten Thousand Doors was just a novel, and that novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren't concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all the guile of a piper luring rats into a river.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What liminal spaces do you need to get comfortable with?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Recently started a BJJ journey with my learning partner. Stepping into the liminal space and seeing what happens.
