stress management

What are your secret internal moves, your cues? I'm eternally curious about how we navigate our worlds, and the tricks, jumps, hops, and skips we use.

Sports coaches have cues for all kinds of things. "Follow through" in golf, tennis, and throwing generally. "Chest up, hips back, knees out" for a back squat. "Light feet" or "quick feet" for agility training. 

These cues aren't attempting to be accurate descriptions of the world from a physics point of view. They're an attitude/orientation that helps a human do a thing a little better.

My contention: we each are an entire compendium of little skill orientations that we use all the time. But because they're second nature and interior, they're funcionally invisible and don't often get shared or talked about.

Wouldn't it be neat if we talked about them?

Some examples from me:

• "Can I do this with less effort?" Physically, this applies to anything. Sitting, pooping, walking, standing, reading. It's an immediate invitation into my body and more relaxation. There is often habitual extraneous muscular/mental/emotional tension in the system.
• If I'm feeling small, stuck, contracted, tense – it can often help to "get as big as the room". It's not something to really think about or analyze too much. Just… become as big as the room. When I do so, there's often more space for the knotted stuff to just be and/or move. This also works great even when things are good.
• I don't have a convenient handle for this one, but it's something like: "fall into wonder as you observe (from within) your body just doing simple things". Doing the dishes or making coffee could be a chore – or I can switch into looking through this lens and just be astonished at how intricate and skillful the dance of it all is. There's no way I could thinkmanage it all, and yet somehow it all happens anyway.

So what are your cues? Nothing is too simple, silly, or obvious.

My therapist says... if you have a disorder (I’d call this an undesired response + occurring regularly), don’t apply any strategies, any self-regulating methods to meet the stimulus. Don’t try to lower the fear. Any safety strategies will likely keep it in place.

When you do any kind of method you tell your nervous system this is truly dangerous. You need to show your primitive brain that this isn’t dangerous: I don’t have to do anything.

…

This feels so right in me. What a relief actually!

It feels related to what Jordan said earlier, that naming safety creates feelings of unsafety, making us more aware of what could go wrong.

Similarly, naming trauma encourages people to feel into their traumas, leading to distress…creating the opposite of what is intended.

Showing up to a disorder with a strategy is like an invitation to experience more of it.

What do you guys think?

From Brain into Body. When not knowing what to do next, rather then trying to logically figure it out with your brain, ask your body... 

what do you desire? 

See where it takes you

Political Theater. I find myself bracing as I watch. Pervading sense of mistrust and cynicism.

I am relating to the debate as political theater. If I could rank what I’m seeing on this platform it would be red arrow down, repeatedly.

What if everything was low stakes? I’ve been learning to rope flow for several weeks. It’s a challenge to learn new movements and coordinate my body but it’s fun. I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself to do it. What’s amazing is that I can spend time practicing, take a break from it for a few days, and then come back to it with more mastery than before the break.

The way I’ve approached learning rope flow has changed my experience of learning to dance the Argentine Tango. In the past, I would put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right. In my mind, the stakes were higher because I was dancing with others and I believed that getting it right would prevent being judged as a bad dancer. The problem was that no matter how hard I worked at it, it was never right enough and I wasn’t having any fun.

Then I realized that learning Tango can be like how I’m learning rope flow. Be easy on myself. No pressure to get it right. I’m just learning skills. Since this shift, I’ve been having more fun learning and dancing. And, I’m getting better faster.

So this got me thinking about how I’ve been approaching my coaching business. I’ve been putting a ton of pressure on myself to get it right because the stakes appear even higher. I need to earn money, pay bills, etc. But honestly, it has felt like a chore, I’m not having much fun, and it doesn’t feel like there’s much traction.

Does this actually have higher stakes? Perhaps I’ve merely assigned it as so.

I start to wonder what’s possible if I approach growing my coaching business with the same low-stakes attitude as I have with learning rope flow or Tango.