REEL LIFE WISDOM - The LIFE of PI(E)

And a good day to you too...

  

SCENE 4: “The Life of PI(E)”

You guys have both seen Life of Pi, right?

I loved that movie … from the gripping story-line to the fantastic cinematography to the twist ending where you are left wondering if the story actually happened or not. Any movie with a Tiger on the poster is gonna be a hit.

For the final time I am borrowing a movie title because it captures an important truth for me … a lesson for life that changed me forever once I saw it. (OK, I cheated on this one by adding an extra letter to PI … get over it).

This entire BLOG is about PIE so the point I want to make this week is very simple. When you figure out PIE in your life, everything makes sense: everything!

Let me refer you back to my first official post on Feb.28.  I spoke about PIE and why I’m doing this blog and I got a wee bit into the details. In particular I linked PIE to 4 basic questions that everyone asks, starting with: “where did I come from?”

Whether or not you believe the Bible and the details of man’s origin found in Genesis is moot … the story has been around for millennia, and with it, the story of the origin of PIE. Check it out:

IDENTITY
God said, “Let us make man in our image.” So God created the man Adam … which perfectly answers the identity question: man was created in the image of God. He was different from all the other creatures that had been created to that point. His uniqueness was due to the fact that, unlike the other creatures, he had a spiritual component … in particular, God’s Spirit was part of him.

PURPOSE
God’s first act with his newly created Adam was to put him in the garden He had created (Eden) and tell him to work it and take care of it and everything in it … and ultimately fill the earth with more like himself in order to take control of all of it. Adam had a job to do … he had a purpose.

EMPOWERMENT
Everything God had created up to Adam was good; God was pleased with His creation … so far. However, once Adam was in the garden by himself God said, “Wait a second … Adam can’t actually do what I told him to do … he can’t do all this work by himself nor can he reproduce and make more like himself the way all the other animals can … so he can hardly fill the earth and take control of all of it.”

OK, I know you both know the Genesis story well enough to know that that’s not actually what God said. Instead we read that God said, “It isn’t good that Adam be alone . I will make a helper suitable for him.” We go on to read that Adam realized all the other animals had “suitable helpers” … ones able to provide not only help but also companionship and ultimately the ability to reproduce.

Let’s look at the empowerment component in a bit of detail. The Genesis account of creation provides a marvelous example of PIE, and in particular, empowerment.

God gives not just a job, but He gives a BHAG to a creature that He specifically created for that job … and then He fully empowers that creature to execute it well. Imagine for a second that God is a manager … an exceptional manager. Here’s how God empowered Adam:

• He gave Adam everything necessary to get the job done
• Intelligence to manage it all
• Sufficient food and life-resources to survive
• A helper to work with him (one who was perfectly suited for him because the helper was actually made from Adam’s own body)
• A mate to reproduce with to make more workers
• He gave Him full authority over everything that had been created, with only one single rule of engagement (“don’t eat the fruit from one particular tree …all the rest are fair game)
• He let Adam manage things as he wished
• He let Adam take ownership by allowing him to name everything himself, including all the other creatures ... even his own helper (he named her Eve, a name which means that she literally came from him)

The very best bosses that you will have in your life are the ones who do what God did with Adam; they will give you a big challenge that's slightly beyond your own capacity but that's suited to your skills and how you are made, they will give you what you need to get the job done (resources, tools, help), they will give you the authority to make your own decisions about how to get the job done, including the freedom to manage the resources yourself ... and then they will get out of your way.

As I mentioned before, PIE (especially empowerment) is strongly linked to freedom.

I believe the Genesis story completely … not necessarily the way Creation Scientists try to explain it, but in a way that respects both the Biblical text and the incontrovertible discoveries of science*. I believe that Adam and Eve were real and that God demonstrated for us from those first two humans what true identity looks like … what true purpose looks like … and what true empowerment looks like.

I also believe one more thing … when we live our lives in a way that aligns with how we have been created, our lives make complete sense and we live a life free of anxiety because of the power that surges through us when living that way.

It doesn't get any more spiritual than this. And when “spirituality” actually aligns with the honest-to-GOD Creator Himself … well, “sky’s the limit” … the ordinary becomes extraordinary … and the explainable simply defines explaining (well, except for how I've just tried to explain it).

So my big ahha moment a bunch of years ago was simply this… we were made for a life of PIE, and any time that we allow ourselves to drift too far from this results in growing anxiety.

OK … get ready for something a little more dramatic next week; we’re going into battle.

I love you both very much.

Dad


* - more on my thoughts behind the Adam and Eve story (which has nothing to do with today's post ... I'm just including it here as a footnote to the Genesis discussion - skip it if it doesn't interest you ... it might interest your kids some day)

As a scientist I'm not a fan at all of "Creation Science" thinking that says the earth was created in 4004 BC. There's simply too much credible data from cosmology, astronomy, physics, biology and biochemistry to ignore it all and simply say we're interpreting it incorrectly. As a Christian I'm just as quick to declare that the credibility markers for the Bible are similarly too vast to simply ignore. So how can both be true at the same time? Let's set aside the discussion of the 6 days of creation for another time ... it's fascinating but not relevant to today's discussion. Let's just focus on Adam and Eve. Here's what I believe:

When God said, "Let us make man in our image," I see nothing in the text (even examining the original language) to suggest that He created a new phylum (body form) for Adam. In making Adam in God's image is to make Adam a creature with a Spirit. What's to say God didn't take an existing body form that had already been formed through some form of evolutionary process (although not necessarily a neo-Darwinian process) and simply place His Spirit in that creature ... making it a new creation? This could explain how humanoid fossils could have existed for thousands of years prior to Adam ... and it could also allow Bishop Usher's chronology of 4004 BC to be reasonably accurate for the arrival of spirit-filled-humans. The whole debate has always hinged on the assumption that God created a never-before-seen body form when he created Adam and Eve. There's no need for that assumption for the Bible story to be just as true and credible.

[pet peeve - Both scientists and Christians have made far too many assumptions in their zeal to support their dogmas. As both a scientist and a Christian my very strong belief is that both have sufficiently credible evidence and data to declare them to both be true. Our job is to look for the resonance rather than the dissonance. Believe the data ... from both sides ... and see how they fit.  For example ... Christians summarily reject the notion of evolution because they feel that it threatens their belief in the creation story. Yet, when I point out the actual text in Genesis 1:24, which says, "And God said, 'Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds ... ' ", Christians are shocked that the words have been staring at them their whole life ... words that open up the interpretation that animals were produced by the land. Sure sounds like some aspects of an evolutionary process to me. But it also says that God ordained the process (whatever the process looked like) so Christians need not fear that the process is random and eliminates the need for God.]

REEL-LIFE WISDOM - MATRIX REVOLUTIONS (conclusion)

Hey Guys ...

So here is the conclusion ... here is the full matrix with Covey's descriptors along with my stress curves and stress results (I'm adding my name to this since it is an original adaptation of mine).

Quick interpretation:

IMPORTANT - spending time doing important things fills your tank.
URGENT - spending time doing things because they are urgent drains your tank.

Q1 - Relentless urgency creates more stress than can be metabolized, even when most of what you do is tank-filling important; the drain from the urgency is just too big.

Q2 - You can have high stress (world-class stress even) yet still have a full tank. How? As long as a significant part of the important things that you do get done JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPORTANT and not at all because there is a time constraint. Spending time this way fills your tank, and by allowing yourself the right mix of stress and recovery, you will end up with a bigger gas tank (a greater capacity for handling whatever). Note: spending time this way is hard and here lies the greatest potential for such activities to be ignored (to your detriment)

Q3 - This is likely the most dangerous quadrant because you are burning the proverbial candle at both ends, but in a whole different way. The compelling nature of URGENT seems to always trump IMPORTANT and urgent things will hijack you unless you have a very clear
reason for doing what you do (purpose) so that you will have the ability and motivation to say NO to some things. Living in this quadrant drains your tank because of the urgent nature of all that you do, yet you are doing nothing to fill it up. THIS IS KILLING PEOPLE (or at least the quality of their lives).

Q4 - This is just living stupidly. Granted, there's little anxiety from responding to urgent things but there's also nothing to fill the tank. 


GOAL: strive to eliminate all Q3 and Q4 activities from your life.  

PROGRESS not PERFECTION: achieving the goal is very hard but not impossible - just don't be obsessed on perfection because that's a neurotic pursuit.

THE BIGGEST SECRET: Most people live in Q3 (my opinion) because they are doing everything at the whim of others as part of their people-pleasing paradigm (boss - kids - spouse - friends - etc.)   One of the quickest ways of departing Q3 can be to redefine (in your mind/heart) what's important. For example ... you are given a job to do by your boss and it is sucking the life out of you because you really didn't want the job/task. By flipping the switch in your head and making it a point-of-purpose (remember - this blog is all about PIE ... and the P stands for Purpose), you instantly change the anxiety equation that exists within you. You honestly can head-fake yourself this way and I will tell you for a fact that this can be done in the blink of an eye .... at the speed of thought ... by simply changing your mind about something/someone.

OK I will stop here ... there's another 20,000 words I need to say on this, but I'll save it for later.

I love you guys.

Dad

PS .... our 3-way text exchange last night was disturbing, encouraging, invigorating and saddening all at the same time. I'm sorry that I sent the email that started it all ... but I'm also really glad that I did. I got to know both of you a bit better ... and as Martha would say, "That's a good thing."

PPS ... the person who was the subject of our chats lives completely in Q4

REEL LIFE WISDOM - MATRIX REVOLUTIONS

There is no spoon...

  

SCENE 3: “Matrix Revolutions”

One of my favourite movie franchises is the Matrix series. Why do I love it so much? Is it because it was created by the Wachowskis, a couple of brothers from Polish descent (and the whole Polish thing with Auntie Jay)? Nope. I think it’s because it is a modern day allegory of Christianity, but with kick-ass graphics? It’s also because it has some great lines like, “there is no spoon,” and “sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” And I guess I kinda like Keanu Reaves, a Toronto boy like me who has Hawaiian blood. But mostly …. well, mostly it’s because the entire storyline is about one thing … learning to free your mind, as is captured on one of the posters for the original movie.

Unlike the last two weeks where I’m only borrowing the title, this time I’m actually stealing from the storyline theme about what we need to do to free the mind. Therefore, the best of the three titles for this week is actually from the final installment, “Matrix Revolutions,” because what I want to share today is about a matrix (yes, an actual matrix) that revolutionized my life and helped me free my mind.

I first made reference to this in March when I wrote about Pete XR2.2, and said that the new me is “free to put my time into what is important and not just what is urgent.” In that I want to build on what I talked about last week … about putting your energy into what is important.

To do this I’m going to be economical with my time and borrow significantly from what I have already written in my personal/business BLOG back on March 16.

The Matrix

U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower once said something along the lines, “what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” It’s reported that from this, he created the simple 2X2 matrix that you see here and used it to decide how he would spend his time.

The science/math guy in me loves this matrix because it creates a valid 2-dimensional function space with truly orthogonal (independent) variables. Application, in plain English?  It helps us keep two things separate which we find almost impossible to separate, especially in the battle conditions we call real life.

Whether Eisenhower was correct in his statement is less important than this fact; important and urgent are two independent things. Something can be both, either or neither of these, but they mean two very different things.

IMPORTANT – these are things which are:
1. Important to you, although not necessarily to anyone else.
2. Important to you (in an absolute sense), even if you didn’t know it.

URGENT – these are things which cannot be done at your discretion … there is a timeliness about them that is not under your control; this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be done immediately, but they also cannot be postponed just because you don’t have the time to do them.

Think about it. Which are you more likely to respond to (or react to) … something that is urgent, or something that is important? (this is not rhetorical … answer this to yourself). If you are at all like the other 7 billion people on this planet, then you are governed, more or less, by what Charles Hummel called, “the tyranny of the urgent.”

You want a real-life example of how you might respond to urgent even when it is not important (or worse, how you might respond to an urgency even though you know that your response is contrary to what you have declared to be important, leading you to behave incongruently with your beliefs or principles)? Let me give you three:

1. One day you will have a child and he will ask for something, screaming in rage when he doesn’t get it. You give in to whatever he wants, even though you know you are creating a dangerous habit and are training him that all he needs to do to get his own way is to scream. But you do it so that he will stop screaming NOW, even if it is just for 5 minutes. Correcting him takes time and effort (energy) and the rage will not stop immediately … so acquiescence is just easier (though not better).

2. You have a significant report to write and your manager needs it in one week. You know it will take a full day to do it but it involves a lot of mind-numbing data-mining that makes your eyes glaze over, so you defer it to the weekend. You have the time now but the thought of getting started NOW is simply overwhelming. The weekend seems like a better option even though it means you’ll need your spouse (whoever that might be - <wink wink>) to keep the kids busy while you get it done, and your promise of spending the weekend with the family just got broken … but they’ll get over it … they always do. After all … you did.

3. You are really hungry (famished actually) and get home just in time to smell the most incredible dinner on the stove. You wonder what deliciousness your mom has prepared, but instead discover your twin brother stirring a pot of lentil stew. You can’t imagine why it smells so amazing, but all you know is that you haven’t eaten for a day or two, so you demand a bowl. Your brother says, “sure, just sign over your share of the inheritance from Mom and Dad’s estate.” Whaaaaa? Is he insane? For a bowl of stew? Funny thing is you find yourself saying yes before you can stop yourself. All you know is that you are hungry NOW … who cares about anything later … it’s all about NOW!

Would you give up your inheritance for this?

Who would do these things?  Well I watch #1 happening all around me … #2 was a story about me from my younger years … and #3 is actually a guy named Esau (and the brother who took advantage of him?  His name was Israel … as in the guy after whom the nation was named … do you remember this story).

Everyone responds to urgent more than important every day … many times a day. When I teach this topic in workshops or coaching I actually refer to the matrix as the Eisenhower-Covey time matrix, simply because Stephen Covey is the one who really popularized it in his 1989 best-seller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (did you guys ever read that book or is it on a shelf or in a box somewhere?).  

Here is how Covey characterized the people who spend the majority of their time in each quadrant:

My point for today’s post? I just want to get you into the mode of thinking about how you respond to urgency in your life, rather than responding to things just because they are important. It is our over-dependence on urgency that revs us up on the inside and leads us to making poor choices.

Over time we train ourselves that the urgency-paradigm is normal and we even convince ourselves that it’s a healthy way of living. Such distortion can lead to things like procrastination, something not intuitively linked to the urgency-paradigm. See if this describes you; you believe that the pressure of a later, more imminent deadline will focus your thinking and energy and you have convinced yourself that, “I will put this off until the last minute because I work better under pressure.” In reality, all you have done is to confuse the good stress of doing what is important to you, with the bad stress of working under an artificial time-constraint. In the end, you sabotage yourself by seeking out that which is self-limiting and potentially self-destructive. You don’t actually function better ... you simply respond as you’ve trained yourself.

Urgency helps us create artificial emergencies which, in turn, help us to produce adrenalin on-demand. Most people have become adrenalin junkies and believe that this is the best way to live. Adrenalin is a wonderful hormone that gives us instant power to deal with a stressor via fight or flight. That’s it! But, re-arranging our life to create artificial survival conditions is akin to having an IV-bag strung over our shoulder with a permanent adrenalin drip. Sounds great you might say. Nope. Not good. Continual presence of adrenalin in the system causes the vital organs to break down. But long before that happens, the addiction has already delivered exactly what all addictions deliver: increasing craving with decreasing enjoyment/benefit. Oh, and I forgot to mention that a long-term presence of adrenalin in the system also creates chronic fatigue and sickness. What started as a sensational rush has now become a necessity for functioning … with diminished capacity as the legacy.

So I learned about this matrix and it changed me, but only marginally. The real transformation inside … the real REVOLUTION of how I spend my time … didn’t take place until I had an epiphany about the connection between “The Curve” and “The Matrix.” 

This image below shows where we are on the stress-curve in each quadrant, if that quadrant dominates.
Q1 – high-curve stress from having too much urgency
Q2 – middle-curve stress from having purpose (doing what’s important)
Q3 – high-curve stress from having too much urgency PLUS low-curve stress from having no purpose for doing anything
Q4 – low-curve stress from having no purpose for doing anything

Now think about everything I have written so far. Connect the dots. If you could put on a pair of magical glasses to look inside a person under these different stress conditions, what might their inner “gas tank” gauge look like?  (Hey – if you can wear magical glasses than it’s not a stretch to have an imaginary inner gas tank)

Ponder this and come back on Tuesday where I will post the answer … which I hope will shock and awe you as it did me 8 years ago when I first put it all together.

I love you guys.

Dad

REEL LIFE WISDOM - HARD TARGET

Toppa the mornin' to ya both...

SCENE 2: “Hard Target”

OK, so I'll admit to a small guilty pleasure: I enjoy Van Damme movies (most, anyway). 

One good one (maybe because it was directed by John Woo) was Hard Target,  a story about merchant marine (he's Cajun, which gives them an excuse to film it in New Orleans) who helps a girl find her missing father. Their search lead them to a guy (played by Lance Henriksen ... always a great villain) who hunts people for sport. It also has Arnold Vosloo (you know ... the bad guy in The Mummy).  

JCVD is hunted by the bad guys, but they discover that he's a hard target to hit. Add this to your list of movies to see.

So, as in last week, all I'm borrowing from this movie is the title: Hard Target. :-) 

Last week we looked at the stress vs. performance curve and the need to understand it ... the need to live like we understand it ... and the need to find out how to hit the sweet spot.

Imagine trying to hit the bulls-eye of a dart board when the board is moving (up, down, sideways, forwards and backwards). It moves slowly at times and darts wildly at others. How the heck do you hit it?

Oh, and don't forget this part ... you need to learn how to hit it consistently every day ... sometimes numerous times a day. If you don't, you'll end up feeling miserable, stressed-out, unfulfilled, bored, angry, apathetic ... and a host of other undesirable and very unproductive emotions.

Well Christian and Faith … did you figure it out?  Did you guess what was the one thing you need in your life to hit the sweet spot? It is a very hard target to hit!

The answer is PURPOSE (along with its cousins mission and challenge). You might have guessed that it was going to be one of the P.I.E. words because ... well, this blog is not just a series of posts ... it's one long story and the thread that runs throughout it, weaving in and out of every example and every smaller story, will usually be connected to one of the PIE words.

PURPOSE is the “P” in P.I.E. Now is when I share the first big learning on this for me.

Any kind of stress gets us moving up the curve. But without something that tells us when enough is enough we just keep allowing the stress to increase, eventually taking us past the sweet spot (peak) and our declining performance isn't the only problem we run into. On that downward side that comes from too much stress we run into things like increasing anxiety, grumpiness, anger, panic attacks, emotional breakdowns and eventually nervous breakdowns (and potentially, death).

Remember the question that I left you with at the end of March?

Do you do what you do because you have a reason to, or do you do what you do because you don’t see a better reason not to?

As crazy as it sounds, you (meaning, your mind and body) will continue allowing stress to increase ... dysfunctionally ... dangerously ... unless you give it a reason to not. And if you don't, at some point, your body/mind will take over control (the elephant will completely ignore the rider ... maybe even bucking him off the saddle) and you will suddenly find yourself behaving in unpredictable (and most unwelcome) ways. 

Controlling stress requires a reason to control it. Purpose provides you with that reason.

Having a challenge provides the stress to get us moving up to the peak. Having a clearly understood challenge, which includes knowing when the challenge has been completed, helps us to know when to ease off the stress pedal.

When you string a series of challenges together you get something that looks like a mission (or campaign) … and the clearer the mission is, the easier it becomes to know when to say NO to additional challenges (as Stephen Covey puts it … it’s easy to say NO to a request for your time and energy when you've already committed to someone/something else with a bigger YES).

Whether it’s a simple challenge or a more complicated mission, the point is to have a clear understanding of what you are doing and why. And if the WHY doesn't exist ... then create it. The secret to managing stress is having a reason inside of you for why you do what you do. If someone else gives you something to do and you begrudge it or don't believe that it is actually important to you, this creates negative stress and your rider has no way of convincing your elephant when enough is enough. But choosing to embrace the challenge or mission and declaring it to be important to you literally flips an internal switch ... a very very deep internal switch ... that turns the stress into something positive. 

Learning how to flip this switch, at will, is what it means to have purpose. The beautiful thing about learning how to flip this switch is that it doesn't rely on emotions ... it is a choice that can be made and executed in the blink of an eye.

The First Time I Intentionally Found the Target
Remember how I ruined Christmas for the family back in '97 because my job situation had changed? No? Well, your Mom does. At an office Christmas party I learned from my director that I was being assigned to an HR project for about 18-months. I was so upset about this that I was miserable all through Christmas and into the New Year ... and I know I made Deb miserable too. Why was I miserable? After all, this was a great job opportunity that might open up new doors for my future. No sir - all I saw was my dream of being the "king of the hurricane centre" being taken away from me. Taking me out of the operational environment would erode my skills, weaken my science, and open the door for someone else to grab that prize (which, at yet, didn't even exist).

Early in January Deb said to me (in a mocking fashion, with eyes rolling and head shaking), "Why don't you do with this what you do with everything else and make it a point of purpose? If they want you to do this classification project then just make up your mind to be the best bloody classification person that you can be!"

That's all it took. She broke the hysteria and helped me find the switch. The funny thing ... she had watched me do this naturally for more than 15 years, yet I didn't realize myself that I was doing it. In one quick rebuke she made me realize that I can find and flip that switch at will. To make a long (and fascinating) story short ... the next 18 months were amongst the most gratifying of my career, and in the end, the things I learned during that HR project actually made me an "unbeatable" candidate in the eyes of all competitors when the job of "King off the CHC" was posted in 1999. I won the job, had a great 10 year ride as Ops Manager at the hurricane centre, and switched to my calling which is working with people.

Find the switch ... it's the bulls-eye in a constantly changing and moving target. But it's worth it because purpose lights us up. It floats our boat. It is an intrinsic motivator of biblical proportions (literally … but I’ll save the details on this for a while).

In the ideal, strive to have not just purpose … but a longer-range purpose for your life. This can be one of the most powerful things you can ever do to create an effective and anxiety-free life. Supplement it with a personal mission statement (your personal constitution to guide you when saying YES and NO to new endeavours) and you will become someone who is a high performer.

I’ll come back to this on numerous occasions … but my big AHHA that I’m sharing this week was discovering the role that purpose plays in stress-management, anxiety-management and a sense of gratification.

I love you guys .... please be purposeful in all that you do ... it makes everything on the inside so much better.

Yoh Daddy

REEL LIFE WISDOM - TROUBLE with the CURVE

Zup kids?

Reel Life Wisdom?

This month I've picked 4 topics that describe key truths that changed my life. To help make them more memorable I've created a highlights reel with 4 scenes … one for each week, each with a different title that sounds like a famous movie title.

  

SCENE 1: “Trouble with the Curve.”

So there’s a great Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams movie called, “Trouble with the Curve.” It’s about baseball and people with discernment of those possessing latent skills to play the game. This post isn't about that. Baseball has a unique feature that other sports don’t have: a built-in rule to cheat. It’s called stealing. This post isn't about that either, except for the title of the movie … I want to steal that. Bazinga!

Experts who do their thing at, well, the expert level, all know about the curve. World-class musicians know about the curve. Professional athletes know about the curve. Military special-forces types know about the curve. Spies and covert-ops people (at least according to TV and movies) really understand the curve.

Now I’ll be honest … with a degree in physics and a career in science, this curve wasn’t new to me … until I encountered it afresh about a dozen years ago, in its connection with human beings.

Before I tell you what the trouble with the curve is, I better introduce you to it first … but let me do it in limerick:

There’s a curve in the shape of a bowl;
Inverted to serve a great goal.
It’s significance is rife,
In the details of life.
That it’s almost as if it has soul.

OK, perhaps a wee-bit dorky, but I’m allowed a few eccentricities now that I’m collecting two different pension cheques each month.  :-P

Here it is:

“That’s just a bell curve,” you’re saying.  Or maybe upon closer inspection you realize that it is a full wavelength of a sinusoidal (or co-sinusoidal) curve.

Yah – kind of. But it’s not the exact amplitude and wavelength (shape) of the curve that is interesting … it’s mostly just the fact that it is low on the ends and high in the middle. I can rattle off lots of examples of physical things in the world that follow a curve like this, for Halifax:

• sunset time from January to December
• annual temperature February to January
• daytime temperature (in Halifax) from pre-dawn to pre-dawn
• height of the highest tides from first quarter to last quarter

“I got it Dad,” you’re frowning.

OK …but, did you know that it also describes a great number of things relating to humans:

• progesterone levels during that latter half of the monthly menstrual cycle
• endometrial thickness from Day 7 to Day 7 in the menstrual cycle

ok …. so Faith, you might have known this … but did either of you also know that it describes:

• 24-hr body temperature variation from 6am to 6am
• 24-hr cortisol concentration in the blood from dawn to dawn
• 24-hr human growth hormone variation from noon to noon
• plasma melatonin levels during the sleep cycle

It even describes life expectancy from the equator to the poles! ("No way!" you say .... "Yes way!" I say)

Now let’s get a lot more personal … regarding things that we can actually control:

• human performance vs quantity of food

This is intuitive: no food, you die (zero performance) … too much food, you become obese and sluggish and your performance deteriorates. Clearly, there’s a peak in the curve somewhere in the middle. There’s a “sweet spot” of just the right amount of food in order to achieve peak performance.

Of course, it’s not just food. This curve also looks the same for:

• human performance vs quantity of sleep
• human performance vs quantity of exercise (yes, you can exercise too much … although I've never been guilty of that)

OK … it’s like this curve has universal application to human beings. But there’s one more example that I want to share … it’s the one that changed my life, once I understood it.

Our performance is at a peak when our stress is at some optimal level (not maximum). There is a “stress sweet spot,” which affords us with the opportunity to perform/function at peak capacity:

• cognitively … concentration; memory recall; problem solving
• emotionally … sensation of wellness; resilience; capacity to adapt
• physically … strength; endurance; flexibility
• spiritually … be intentional and purpose-driven

So let me ask you, “were you surprised that the curve looks the way it does and that it isn’t simply a straight line going from upper left to lower right?”  Maybe you’ve heard me talk about this so you weren't surprised.

Here’s the problem … here’s the trouble with the curve:

WHY DON’T THEY TEACH THIS IN SCHOOL?

It isn't just world-class athletes, musicians and SEAL-team members that need to know this. Every human being deserves to know this. Every human being NEEDS to understand this.

I've been observing the world around me since learning this and have identified three huge problems that, to me, explain a significant portion of society’s struggle with anxiety (which is the result of un-metabolized stress):

1. Most people don’t know that stress has a sweet spot, and that having too little can be just as bad as having too much;
2. Even when people know and understand this curve, they live as though they don’t know and understand it;
3. Most who actually want to find that sweet spot whenever they need it simply don’t know how to do it.

Question: What is the one thing that you need in your life in order to be able to find that sweet spot of stress in order to optimize your performance?

Hints:

• It’s not balance – the thing I’m talking about helps you find balance
• It’s not happiness – happiness is simply a by-product of optimizing your stress, which happens only when you have this thing
• It’s not rest and recovery – the thing I’m talking about informs you on when to rest
• it's not discipline - actually, discipline is easier to develop when you have this thing

Answer: I’m going to leave this with you  … the answer comes next week. Meanwhile … think about it. Christian, discuss it with Ashley. Faith, same thing with Justin. Heck, do something crazy and discuss it with each other.

I love you.

Dad