🔥Welcome to volume 000011!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middleway Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
👀Rickety Stairs 👀
Last week I found myself in Nosara, Costa Rica for a family vacation (and surfing!). When we checked into our hotel, we faced a steep, well-worn rickety staircase leading to our room. The steps included some rotting boards that made you double check they weren’t breaking on you. Carrying a 10 month old baby and some bags at the same time forced you to slowly walk up the stairs. The trip took focus and there was some trepidation with each step.
Fast forward to day three when not only were you bouncing up and down the stairs at a rapid clip, but so was the four year old. What started out as scary turned into nothing at all. The adaptation took a couple repetitions, up and down the steps, until the stairs didn’t even phase you.
How many first experiences turn us off because they make us uncomfortable or push us outside of our comfort zone? If we plow through a bunch of reps, the same experience becomes benign. A challenge fades into the background. Then we don’t even notice "the challenge" or experience any “discomfort”.
What rickety stairs are you needing to walk up and down, until you don't even notice them?
with 📓Articles to Read📓
The perennial wisdom traditions and decades of psychological research point to three basic needs that, when fulfilled, allow people to thrive. Weight lifting offers all three in full:
Autonomy: The ability to exert oneself independently and have control over one’s actions.
Mastery: A clear and ongoing path of progress that can be traced back to one’s efforts.
Belonging: Being part of a community, lineage or tradition that is working toward similar goals.
There’s an old Eastern adage: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” It’s great training advice too.
If everyday were thanksgiving (or pick your holiday) by Seth Godin
Gratitude works.
Gratitude scales.
Gratitude creates a positive cycle of more gratitude.
When in doubt, default to gratitude
Seth Godin’s Thanksgiving Reader (we did this at Thanksgiving Dinner this year and highly recommend it for future group dinners for any occasion)
Asking others for feedback often leads to vague, less useful input, argue the researchers from Harvard Business School.
The authors explain, “Our latest research suggests a better approach. Across four experiments — including a field experiment conducted in an executive education classroom — we found that people received more effective input when they asked for advice rather than feedback.”
The word “feedback” encourages people to think about where they currently are. It’s often associated with the evaluation of past performance, and people who give feedback don’t focus on how you can improve.
“When asked to provide feedback (versus advice), givers focus too much on evaluating the recipient, which undermines their ability to generate constructive (i.e. critical and actionable) input, ” they said.
Don’t ask everyone. “Research shows that those whose advice you don’t take may have a worse view of you afterwards. They may even see you as less competent or avoid you,” according to Hayley Blunden, a PhD student at Harvard Business School and co-author of the study, “The Interpersonal Costs of Ignoring Advice.” Be grateful. Follow up later to let them know how their feedback helped you.
British Cycling metric maniacs or not (via peak performance newsletter)
If you’ve paid attention to the British Cycling/Team Sky drama, we’ve witnessed a clashing of reality and appearance. The appearance was of a cutting edge team. One at the forefront of innovation that was doing everything better than just about anyone else on the planet. It’s hard to square that with what we know now. A team filled with bumbling individuals who can’t keep records, can’t keep their story straight, and admit to never reading books.
How do we reconcile the two? I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide, but it points that when it comes to convenient narratives, our skepticism antennas need to go up.
Love thy neighbor as they self…
Instead, it means: “Since Reality is only the Self (brahman), let your present conduct flow directly from seeing that there is absolutely no essential difference between you and the other. Every being is the Self. The other is not ultimately other, therefore, even if the other is relatively other in terms of ‘name and form.'” In other words, let love be the natural and fullest expression of recognizing that here too (but what does the “too” mean?) is the Self.
I like you as you are
Without a doubt or question
Or even a suggestion
Cause I like you as you are
This is precisely love. To love is to not have any thought or desire or feeling about things–you–being any different from what you ultimately are. Love knows nothing but love. Therefore, love knows only itself.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Copying others to find your voice
Success hurt Andre’s creativity
Place to be comfortably uncomfortable (it’s about our view not others - Andre is stuck where he can’t stop the others view now)
Success made Rick Ruban and Andre3000 feel worse
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
Delivering a difficult message is like throwing a hand grenade. Coated with sugar, thrown hard or soft, a hand grenade is still going to do damage. Try as you may, there’s no way to throw a hand grenade with tact or to outrun the consequences. And keeping it to yourself is no better. Choosing not to deliver a difficult message is like hanging on to a hand grenade once you’ve pulled the pin. So we feel stuck. We need advice that is more powerful than “Be diplomatic” or “Try to stay positive.” The problems run deeper than that; so must the answers.
Lifelong Kindergarten - Mitchel Resnick, Ken Robinson
Finding the right balance between freedom and structure is the key to creating a fertile environment for creative learning
“So because words have this remarkable property of possessing specific meanings, we must take care to use the correct ones? Is that a just statement of what you have said, or am I in error?”
Stealing Fire - Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal
“A Buddhist monk experiencing satori while meditating in a cave, or a nuclear physicist having a breakthrough insight in the lab, or a fire spinner at Burning Man,” he says, “look like different experiences from the outside, but they feel similar from the inside. It’s a shared commonality, a bond linking all of us together. The ecstatic is a language without words that we all speak.”
That’s a wrap.
Please reach out with any comments / thoughts / ideas and forward this along to anyone that you think would find it useful.
Thanks,
Christian
