Posts

Battleground God

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Let’s play a game…

Battleground God – Do your beliefs about religion and god stand up to philosophical scrutiny?

Begin

I can’t wait to go hog wild again

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I’m slowing beginning to re-emerge from my wounded cocoon. Mobility in my right hand is edging along nicely, range of motion increasing each day since my release from the day ward.

Of course I want to charge ahead like a mad bull, but I’ve purposefully kept the breaks on to allow this old body time to heal. The 6 days of rest and recuperation has actually healed a couple of other nagging problems like my knee (ha, they gave me some good drugs man, healed everything ?).

I’ll wait until I get the official all clear before I go hog wild again though.

What’s been going on in your world?

C

Culture of conformity

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“The point of uniforms is to make everything  outwardly the same and, if possible, by a knock-on psychological effect inwardly the same too.”

– from Journeys of an Underground Philosopher 

I reject conformity, yet I conform every day. How can you resist the culture of conformity that we are born into? I’d even go so far as to say our conformity starts even before we exit the womb, and doesn’t stop until the day we die. And if all of the Holy books are right, it appears we’ll be conforming well into the afterlife! Maybe conformity is the price we pay to have an ordered society, one which on the surface, we are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

I’m not convinced that conformity is good for us though. It feels like thinly veiled slavery to me.

001: Slow mad burn

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I’m tired and listening to music seems all I’m capable of doing tonight. But that’s cool. I’ve been meaning to make more playlists anyway, reminds me of the old days of making mixtapes on cassettes, although not quite as physical and artful.

So this playlist, slow mad burn, is about where my state of mind is right about now.

slow mad burn

Stealing from Hermann Hesse on destiny

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Stealing from Hermann Hesse…

He wrote that each person has only one genuine vocation and that is to find the way to themselves, to discover their own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and live it out wholly and resolutely within themselves.

Everything else says Hesse, is only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideas of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.
This is a hard gig when you only have what you’ve been taught in school and such like, as a reference.

I shall be contemplating destiny today. What do you think about destiny, is it something we make, discover or are given?

There’s no honest way to explain it

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“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”

Oh Hunter, my spirit guide, you wily devil, deliver me from the ones who would pull back.

Are You Feeling Ok?

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The haunting voices in Pink Floyd’s song, Bring The Boys Back Home, are echoing in my mind this morning:

wrong, do it again
time to go
are you feeling ok?
there’s a man answering, but he keeps hanging up
is there anybody out there?

Ok, yeah, a weird first thought to start the day, but it prompted me to ask you…

Dispatch 08.05.2019 Ottobrunn, Germany

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21:14hrs. Settling back into my workflow after a two day trip to Germany to deliver a customer centricity workshop. Actually, it was a follow-up day to some work I did with this team earlier in the year. We’re half-way through the program now. Next time I see the guys will be in Madrid in July.

It was nice to be back in Germany. I have many fond memories from my time living there back in 1993 – 1996. It was my first duty assignment. I did my platoon leader and XO time with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, which was, at the time, a mechanized infantry battalion attached to the 1st Armor Division – Old Ironside. Good times!

Once on the ground, the first thing I needed to do was make my way to a German pub for schnitzel, pommes frites, and a Hefeweizen. Gotta love Germany, if only for that.

Let me back up a second. On my approach into Munich airport, I posted this:

Well 30 minutes later, I was being escorted to a German police station. Seems I had been a naughty boy…

Listen:

I must say though, the Polizei were very polite. They kept me informed of what was going the whole time. Not once did I feel intimidated or threatened.

We had an early start on Tuesday to try to pack as much learning into the day as we could, especially as people were flying in from all over the place (China, USA, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK) to attend this one-day event. Everything ran to plan – mostly. There’ll always be some tweaking to do keep things running smoothly, if not exactly to plan.

And then it was back on a plane late Tuesday night (22:05) to fly home.

I’m glad today was a non-client day. I needed to catch up on some reading and also record the next episode of the Havana Cafe Sessions podcast with Sarah. We’re talking Star Wars of all things, but not in a way you might think. Sneak peek: I explore freedom versus predetermination through the lens of Star Wars!

Well, tomorrow, I do have some client work, so I better jet and make sure I’m prepped for it. I’ll leave you with a photoset from the journey. Have a flick through:

Incremental Change

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Incremental change…

is a process that adjusts the status quo via minor changes.

Think of Incremental change as a series of small steps, with no single step taking up too much time.

I know there are some folks out there who argue for radical change, but I think that sometimes prevents us from doing anything at all because the change then seems too BIG.

As the proverb goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

But if you take a small step and then another and another you’ll eventually get there.

And for me, a small step is better than no step at all. So today’s challenge is to make an incremental change in your life that gets you one step closer to a goal you’ve been pursuing.

Dark Knight of the Soul

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(1)

That’s right, nobody is coming to rescue you. I have to remind myself of that from time to time. It means, if you want to change your situation, if you want to make life work for you, then you have to turn inward and draw from your internal resources. In the end, the onus is on you! God helps those who help themselves, or so my grandma used to say.

This week has been a hectic one. 

I was going to say I had no time to think, but that’s not true. My mind has been on lockdown wrestling with future plans, looking for the germ of an idea from which to springboard into the future.

While I was internally processing, I still had to carry on with the day to day. There’s no escaping that!

I thought I was nearly done with that mind-trip, but just when I could see the surface, I took a turn down a dark tunnel. Part of me wants to ride it out and see where it leads, but another part of me is ready to get on getting on. Too much stuff to do! 

So state change, find a positive vibe to ride and carry on with the airborne mission.

Last Sunday, I met up Vicki, a fellow personal development junkie whom I actually haven’t seen in real life for a number years now – not since our Merrill Lynch-HSBC days – that puts our last physical meeting at 15 years ago! Where does the time go?!

(2)

In April 2006, I walked part of the Camino de Santiago. It was a life changing journey. Fast-forward to the present, my friend and co-host Sarah, walked part of the Camino for her 40th birthday.  In episode 132 of the Havana Cafe Sessions podcast, we compare our individual journeys and share some of what we brought back with us from that magical trail.

You can catch the FULL EPISODE here.

Also check out the blog post I wrote about my time on the Camino.

(3)

May the 4th is an interesting day for events. It’s Free Comic Book Day, it’s Star Wars Day, and it’s Naked Gardening Day!

I managed to catch the tail end of Free Comic Book day, scored a bit of loot and got a chance to interview Dan Mallier of Leamington ComicCon.

Plus I got to hangout with the Dark Knight.

That’s pretty much the round up this week.

Bonus track

Playlist of the Week


Peace out,

Clay

Labels

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“Once you label me you negate me” – an idea borrowed from Soren Kierkegaard and once you watch this video, you’ll see why and how it starts.

And I’m wondering, what labels do you still carry around that define you in a limiting way…

Shout out to The Epic Classroom- Trevor Muir

Epic!

Peace and love,

Clay

I’ve been in the lab again

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Check it out! I’m excited!

I’ve been in the lab again cooking up some new goodness for you.

As you know, I really dig on audio as a format for self-expression. I love doing audio posts like these. Plus there’s the Havana Cafe Sessions Podcast that I co-host with Sarah Hunt. And more recently, I’ve been making audiograms like these:

And now…

drum roll, please…

I bring you the Coach’s Notes audio experience. I won’t go into too much detail here, because, well you can listen to what I have to say about it in the first episode, which is all about the what and the why of the Coach’s Notes podcast.

So without further delay, here’s episode number 1:

Let me know what you think. Oh yeah, I mention my eAcademy in this episode and said I’d provide a link.

Oh, and one more thing, you can subscribe to the podcast via RSS feed to your favorite podcast listener. You can’t subscribe via iTunes yet because I’m just on episode one. It’ll probably take about a week or so before the podcast is available in iTunes. Of course, you can subscribe to my newsletter and get notified that way too.

Ok, bye for now my friends,

Clay

Morning Notes 16.03.09 – Getting to grips with that old inner life

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Continuing on with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, I noted that achieving happiness is grounded in being able to control your inner life, which reminded me of Epictetus and the idea that if we wish to have inner peace, then we need to focus on the things we can control (which is essentially your inner life) and let go of the things you can’t control.

Let me explain:

Control your inner life