Billy, Life Coach

[billy-lifecoach]

Reflections on being sick

I have covid 19. While I'm still alive and hanging through, it is definitely not a pleasant experience. Prior to getting sick I was working a lot on self awareness, basically noticing my thoughts and how my body reacts. With this new found awareness I noticed an overall theme to the experience of being sick.

In well-being, you experience things in waves. You breathe in, you breathe out. You eat things, you poop things. You move your body, you rest your body. You sweat, you cool down. This sinusoidal rhythm is what keeps our system in equilibrium range. When you're sick, the opposite happens.

Your circulatory system induces you to breathe through your mouth, which starts the process of locking up the body by triggering the sympathetic nervous system. You lose appetite because your throat and mouth dries out due to excessive air travel. Your digestive system stops working and you become constipated. You have no energy to move so you're lying down all day. You're physically hot but feel cold with a fever but you can't sweat it out to cool down.

Being present during a wave of sickness gives you a grander viewpoint on the human experience. This locking up and being sick is also part of a grander wave of physical condition. Are there times when I am physically healthy but I lock up due to hesitations? Are all of my emotions flowing in and out? Am I not allowing a certain feeling to enter me? Am I hesitant to let a thought go? Look at each wave with wonder and curiosity. Each one will tell you about itself, and in turn - about you.

[billy-lifecoach]

The issue with scarcity mindset

I coach clients who frequently say, “I don’t have the time to do X”. Not having the time to do X may be small in scale - like 24 hours is not enough to fit all the activities I want to do in a day - or it may be a bit larger in scale - like a full time job means I don’t have enough time to try a new passion.

This “not having enough” mindset is what I call a scarcity mindset, which can be associated with not only time but money or stamina. It’s a mindset you choose to explain your inactions. This mindset says, with a finite amount of resources, if there simply isn’t enough for me to take it is impossible to take as many as I want.

We can tackle this thought without addressing the root mindset. For example if our client says I want to have a YouTube channel but I don’t have the time to go out and film / edit / upload, then we can ask if YouTube is something that the client really wants? If you really wanted to have a channel, you’d sleep less / use paid time off / do other activities to shave time off of your regular day. 

Tackling the main issue of scarcity mindset can help the client apply the abundance mindset, which is the opposite of scarcity mindset, to other aspects of their lives. So what exactly is the issue with scarcity mindset?

Scarcity mindset prescribes your possibilities into a range that the realistic mind can imagine, versus what the free mind can imagine without any boundaries. When you ask children what they dream to be, they say presidents or Nobel Prize winners without any hesitation. As we grow old we see what it realistically takes to become presidents or Nobel Prize winners. We associate those realistic stepping stones to achieve those dreams as out of boundary for us, and steer our lives into something that can only live in our comfort zone.

What is your dream right now? Maybe you will say to travel internationally. That’s a fine dream, but you might constraint yourself into locations you can only travel within budget, or for number of days you can afford the lodging for. This is prescribing your possibility into a monetary range. What if money wasn’t an option? What if you could literally do anything, and money/time/stamina/resources wasn’t a constraint because the world is overflowing with it? Your answer to this question will be much less realistic, but your mind can imagine it only if it is free of all boundaries defined by the scarcity mindset.

Another issue with the scarcity mindset is that it prevents our most powerful brain, the prefrontal cortex, from actively engaging and managing our primitive brain. Solving a problem creatively is one of the most powerful experiences you can have as a human being, and it is certainly what makes us a higher functioning animal among the animal kingdom. When you were a little kid and your parents set some rules against something you want, didn’t you try to cheat the rules to have that cookie or ride the bike? Your prefrontal cortex comes up with brilliant solutions to problems that you normally consider impossible. 

So the next time you think you don’t have enough of something, think “what if I had an unlimited amount of resources?” Think of this answer first and engage your prefrontal cortex in how to get to that state. You don’t have to get there in one step. Even stepping into that mental zone and dreaming your wildest dreams, unbound by any tether, is an experience worth it on its own.

[billy-lifecoach]

Training With Purpose

When you learn of some techniques you want to do but don’t have the necessary muscle memory to do it in live rolling, you know you need experience in that move to perform it. However during your roll you always end up doing moves you feel confident in or moves that your body is accustomed to, never giving your body the opportunity to use the move.

There’s actually a reason behind this: your primitive brain. Your primitive brain seeks instant gratification and comfort, and also hates new things whether they’re good or bad. This is just how your primitive brain is wired to protect you from actual threats that can cause harm to you.

The primitive brain is countered by your prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain that is future focused and is involved with planning. Engage this part of the brain by thinking of one move that you want to develop for the next day, and committing yourself to only using that move for that day during training. Your primitive brain will scream and shout, do the move you’re used to! But when you make plans for training a specific technique beforehand and commit to that, you can actually devote time to developing a new technique.

[billy-lifecoach]

Briandito Priambodo 🇵🇸 on Twitter

“I hate being an adult. Because adulthood comes with expectations. And I did not expect that. Part 1/4”

This comic is a wonderful example of how your thought can change your feeling, your action, and the life that you live - and how you are the result of multiple thoughts interconnected with each other.

On a large scale, our character’s thoughts changed from “I hate being an adult because I do things expected of me” to “I free because I don’t  think about others’ expectations of me”. However, the circumstances surrounding the character hasn’t changed at all; the world still exists, the people who surround our character still exists, the city and the country the character resides in still exists; the one thing that changed is the thoughts.

Picking apart some other smaller thoughts introduced in the comic, our character notes “Just like everyone else, I’m just playing the ‘role’ of an adult”. Thoughts create feelings, and feelings cause actions. The thought of needing to “playing the role” causes the character to have the feelings of difficulty, resentment, or pressure. This causes our character to do things they’d not rather do, and this action ultimately brings out an interesting result: it causes our character to act the role of an adult, just like everyone. 

This may seem like an obvious statement, but the character may think this misery of playing an adult is an unavoidable consequence of living in a society as an adult. On the contrary, it is only the thought of needing to play the role that leads to the undesired outcome of living a pretend life. 

The comic shows very well what kind of mindset or outcome you can have when you choose an alternative thought. What if you believe “I don’t need to fulfill other people’s expectations”? That thought will create feelings of inspiration and strength, and can lead to choosing actions that lead to a more desired lifestyle. Nothing changed but the thought. The character’s age, appearance, people surrounding them, society; nothing else changed but the thought