How close are we to true data portability? It depends who is asking the question as to how it gets answered.

As one of the chief catalysts for the current wave of discussion and (some) action, Chris Saad, points out none of the current high profile implementations are completely true to the overall understanding of portability.

Writing on his blog, Chris sees Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s Data Availability as important first steps. They are the first shots across the bow to the industry that a data portability battle is coming.

That battle will involve a squareoff between the user: me, you – and the networks collectively.

I like Chris’s address book analogy:

DataPortability is about a different social contract – a contract more closely resembling the one found in the email address book.

My address book is my own. When you email me, or when you communicate with me, you are revealing something about yourself. You define a social contract with me that means that I can use your information to contact you whenever and however I like – I could even re-purpose my address book for all manor of other things.

If, however, you violate that trust, either directly or indirectly, you break the social contract and I will tend to not deal with you again. We can not perfectly engineer these sorts of contracts into systems – we can try, but in the end social behavior will be the last mile in enforcing user rights.

Also, the dichotomy between who ‘owns’ the data is false. In my mind there is shared ownership. While you use a service, it is a shared custodianship of the data. By giving the service your data you’re getting something else in return – utility. In many cases free utility.

You personally, however, have shared (and overriding) ownership over your data. This has been declared as universally true by all the vendors I’ve spoken to.

The question is not one of ownership though, it’s one of control. If you own your data but can’t control it as you choose then ownership is a mute point. Further, the question is not one of if you own it, but rather how much of it you own.

For example, do you own your friends profile data since you have access to it via the social tool you are using? Or have they only granted you access within that social context and under that social contract. These considerations blur the analogy of the purely personal address book.

So where does this leave us. The industry continues to engage in discussion and analyse the meaning of both data portability and the current implementations. As long as this dialogue continues the looming squareoff will remain just that – looming. We are in a honeymoon period in which users are coming to grips with their rights and freedoms and comparing the various networks to determing whether and to what extent they are being violated.

For now, data portability continues to have relevancy and I do not believe our rights have been flushed away. However, I would encourage all players to listen very carefully to the conversation going on.

As I’ve said many times: the Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away – and it can do both with blinding speed. This is especially relevant for Facebook, given the current meme around its intentions started by Umair Haque.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble has a sound analysis of the situation, after an initial misunderstanding on his part. Have a read, the best part is him putting his participation on the Gillmor Gang on mute, having a shower and then coming back on the show. I know it’s been hot in the Bay area the last few days, but this is hilarious and about all the GG seems good for – cooling off.

[Picture courtesy of willgrant]

This was definitely drinking-from-the-fire-hydrant week in California for high tech startups. Three days of TC50 demos, parties with Scoble-Mooregate verifying the echo chamber effect is alive and well in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood (if you believe Valleywag, that is) and Jason Calacanis venting steam while still miked up for all on uStream to hear.

As I tweeted yesterday, while the event may have been marred with a few second year mishaps, all in all kudos to the organisers (aka Tyler and his team) for providing an excellent tech showcase.

Two questions emerge – firstly, what will the landscape look like next year. Can Chris Shipley and Calacarrington kiss and make up in time for the first DEMOCrunch event. Or will a professional competitor come in from left field and clean up the space?

Secondly, what was the final set of take outs from the three days. I’m sure we all filtered the event in different ways but for me here are the salient points:

* Product placement as an up and coming business trend ran through the conference as a theme — highlighted by a comment from prolific angel investor, Ron Conway: “it’s a multi billion dollar business emerging right before our eyes”;

* Yossi Vardi once and for all categorized business plans: “as a great sub genre in the science fiction section”;

* Collaborative venture capitalist Peter Thiel defined the holy grail of creating business value: maximizing optionality. He felt that Facebook’s $15bn valuation is justified through the company’s extensible optionality. This is a theme to explore more in the coming months;

* And lastly fellow South African and Sequioa venture guy, Roelof Botha urged startups to “trim down their aperture and focus on key user pain points”.

The rally cry for the event though had to be one startup founder’s response to the question of whether he would sell to Google: “Never!”

I have a huge amount of respect for Robert Scoble. His intellect, his dedication to his task of curating trends and his personable approach make him a stand out in the Silicon Valley community…, no wider than that: globally!

That’s why I wanted to share with you his talk at Stanford University last month. In it he talks about how people like Scott Monty are humanizing the brands they work with, how new Zappos employees are forced to tweet to connect them to their brand and the concept of doubling pennies.

He finishes in true Scoble style with an understated truism – we all have a burning desire not to connect with thousands of ‘friends’ that we hardly know, but with just four people, the right four people…and that is all it takes to change the world, just four connected, passionate people.

Connect the dots – the right four people who have cracked the formula for building doubling pennies – an extremely powerful combination.

Definitely worth watching:

Australian serial entrepreneur Ben Keighran is starting to make waves in Silicon Valley again with his new venture Chomp. With fellow Aussie co-founder Cathy Edwards and funding from Ron Conway, Blue Run Ventures and other Valley notables the business is aimed at enabling iPhone users to find apps.

Chomp has received some solid coverage on TechCrunch and an interview with Robert Scoble (embedded below) in which Ben explains their value proposition:

As evidenced by numerous surveys, growth is the major enduring focus for business leaders. However, growth is tackled ad hoc across many organizations. Leading companies drive rapid, sustained growth through a concerted front strategy.

More and more companies have a leadership mandate to achieve growth, a vision of what growth needs to be and an understanding of a growth culture.

They embark on various growth initiatives, but these are mostly carried out in silos.

Leading organizations not only undertake numerous growth activities, but they also conduct them using a concerted front strategy.

They start by formulating a view across all their growth activities. They then translate that view into a business-wide operating system.

As their concerted activities mature this operating system shifts to being driven by a dedicated growth group that works across the business.

I’ve written a Growth Report that explores the concerted front strategy used by leading companies to achieve rapid and sustained growth.

The report starts by highlighting key aspects of the 10 facets for driving business growth, then considers what a dedicated growth group should consist of and what to look for when hiring the right people for it. It concludes with suggestions on how to create a 100 day growth dialogue.

You can download the full report from the EXOscalr website at the following LINK.

EXOscalr is proud to launch its world leading Entrepreneur Growth Program, which is designed to provide early to mid stage companies invaluable insights into achieving high growth.

The Program runs over 6 weeks and gives senior executives practical advice, algorithms and methodologies that will significantly boost the velocity of their growth.

Announcing the Program, EXOscalr CEO Rand Leeb-du Toit said, “Growth is the perennial focus for business leaders. Yet it is often misunderstood and mismanaged. The Entrepreneur Growth Program dispels the myths and delivers an unfair competitive advantage.”

“This advantage firstly delivers the impetus for growth through a suite of tools designed to achieve a growth boost and secondly, delivers methods for harnessing the ensuing chaos and ensuring it is directionally correct.”

The Program is available to companies globally and brings cutting edge insights from leading high growth organisations, in Silicon Valley and internationally, directly to entrepreneurs and business executives.

In addition, EXOscalr is releasing its 2016 Growth Report which highlights the 10 facets for driving business growth and how to create a concerted front strategy and business-wide operating system for achieving the levels of growth only seen by leading companies.

“Growth is not all lead generation and pitching. There is a much wider set of activities that must be undertaken by dedicated growth groups working across a business. Anything less is tantamount to stagnation in today’s dynamic business environment,” said Mr Leeb-du Toit.

The Growth Report explores what a dedicated growth group should consist of and also what to look for when hiring the right people for it.

The Report can be downloaded from the EXOscalr website and expressions of interest in the Entrepreneur Growth Program can be made directly to Mr Leeb-du Toit via email: rand@exoscalr.com.

The topic of depression in startup founders is becoming more prominent. It is an important discussion that was highlighted when outspoken serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis was asked his views by a journalist.

He replied, “Running a startup is a mentally-challenging pursuit, with the chances of failure being absurdly high and the effort required being so extreme. Most of the people attracted to changing the world via a startup are highly-driven and quixotic, but sometimes they are manic.”

“I don’t think startups cause depression, but I do think depressed people can be lured into the chemical rush of running a startup without understanding how trying it really is.”

My personal view on the topic is that being prone to depression should not be a contra-indicator to becoming an entrepreneur.

Instead there are methods for dealing with depression, fostering resilience and reducing fear (of failure, of success) that while important for all entrepreneurs become imperative for those who need to fight their shadows more than others.

The most likely accelerator for depression is not being true to one self. Do a startup for the right reasons that resonate at your soul level, not because it is cool. Not being true to yourself creates emotional friction that will wear down your resilience and let the shadows in.

There is also a misunderstanding about what generates depression and people often oversimplify this very complex issue. It is not as simple as “just getting over it”.

This comment from a Reddit thread on the topic points to the complexity involved:

“The solution to depression is to be happier and stay positive, but doing that involves rehauling habits, improving one’s environment, setting goals, having the proper environment and support, and putting consistent work into changing the way one thinks, day after day without fail or else one runs the risk of undoing every step of progress. By the way, you have to do all of this while your mind tells you how pointless everything is and leeches away your capacity to feel pleasure or pride about a job well done, so any progress you do make provides no intrinsic motivation.”

Many entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed by the sheer number and weight of the decisions they face. Do I hire this person? Do I fire that person? Should I take funding from them, or them? Who is giving me the right advice? What are the consequences of releasing a new product feature – too early, or too late? Should I sell the business to them, at that price? And on and on.

These decisions can mean life or death for their business. Yet for people living with anxiety, every single decision, no matter how small they may seem to others, feels like they have life or death consequences. Factor anxiety into the mix for an entrepreneur and they become far more prone to depression and even suicide.

Another Reddit comment highlights how someone with anxiety thinks:

“It’s like a life or death game of chess. You have to think ten moves ahead and have a move for every situation in advance. The fear of death gets worse with every possible move you analyze. And if life makes a move that you didn’t see coming, instant breakdown, no matter how small insignificant the move was.”

Nor is depression a tap that can be turned on or off at will. It is with someone constantly as another poster to Reddit said:

“Every day of my life! Normal people don’t get it. They think you are acting crazy and irrational and treat you like you can just turn it on and off whenever you want, like it’s a choice. It’s not. I’ve learned to “deal” with it and suppress it a bit but it’s always there.”

Unfortunately there is a rise in suicide rates across all demographics, not only entrepreneurs. A 24% rise between 1999 and 2014 in the US has been attributed to concerns about jobs and personal finances. These issues can be exacerbated amongst entrepreneurs worried about how they keep supporting their staff and feeding their families.

It is important for entrepreneurs to realise that there is no direct causal link between being in the grip of fear and spiralling into depression. Realisation and resilience are key to staving off the shadows. Former Google and now CEO at Accompany, Amy Chang said in an interview recently, “I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. I have those ‘3am wake up and can’t go back to sleep moments’ all the time. It is good for people who are just starting their careers to know that too, so that when they are totally scared out of their minds of failure, or whatever else, they know it is 100% normal.”

My advice to entrepreneurs, be they new to the game or old hands, is tread the entrepreneurial path with eyes wide open. Do not be afraid to talk about your fears and anxieties and seek assistance if things get more serious.

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This post was initially published as part of the EXOscalr BeFierce newsletter. You can subscribe here:http://eepurl.com/bxGzD1 .

Entrepreneurs are faced daily with so many unknowns, so much chaos and survival pressure.  Adding fundraising into the mix can often feel overwhelming. How do they keep their heads above this murky water and avoid the many obstacles that lurk below the surface? I’ve distilled out five rules that apply to all fundraising activities as a series of guiding principles.

1. Timing is everything.

Sharks can detect a drop of blood from a long way off. Investors can similarly detect fear from a distance and this can negatively impact their view on investing in your company. At worst they will walk away, at best they will command a much lower valuation and more onerous terms.

The worst time is when you have little capital left and a very high burn rate. It would be far better to close a fundraising round ahead of needing to increase your burn rate.

Similarly, putting your product out into an unprimed marketplace that ignores it or does not deliver the level of hockey stick growth you were wanting will send a negative signal to potential investors. It would be far better to raise capital so you can use it to generate the right level of publicity and interest in your product ahead of its release so that there is pent up demand for it.

2. Fundraising is not transactional.

Think of raising capital as a continuous process that starts when you launch your company and ends when you sell it.

Always be raising based on your continuum of growth needs. But never be raising at some juncture when it is critical that the funds come in or your business will falter, as per the point made above.

Also factor in that however long you thought it would take to close a round is probably only about half as long as it will actually take.

3. Funding marketplaces are cyclical.

Be aware that the climate for funding can shift markedly. At one moment there can be a funding frenzy with investors desperate to get into specific opportunity spaces. This will drive up valuations and give you a feeling that funding is easy, that you can demand better terms.

However, just as quickly the market will freeze over and it can become much harder to raise money either for a specific sector or overall.

Currently we are in the middle of a slowdown. The frenzy is over. Investors are taking their time doing due diligence and forming relationships before they ink deals. At this point you need more patience and to be more realistic on valuations than a few years ago.

4. Leverage funding inflection points.

Make sure you raise the right rounds of funding to match your position on the growth continuum.

And raise only enough to progress through the risk reduction you aim to achieve in that round. Too much funding may allow you to skirt through this risk reduction process and continue down a flawed pathway, building a delusional sinkhole that you cannot escape.

Continuously pare back on opportunities that present themselves to focus on core activities that progress you through each round’s inflection point.

Seed funding should be used to build a basic, but demonstrable validator for your hypotheses. Ideally this should be scalable – starting with a bare minimum validation but then progressively adding to it so that your product begins to approximate, but not reach product market fit. Remember to listen carefully to market feedback at this point and don’t power ahead into that delusional sinkhole when all the signs are there that your hypotheses are not being validated.

Series A funding is raised to get you to product market fit and the subsequent market traction that this enables. Investors prefer to come on board when they can see product market fit on the horizon as this allows them a more reasonable valuation than when customers are banging the door down to get to your product.

Series B funding is used to deliver scalable growth. You’ve built the rocket ship, you now need to scramble out of the growth engine room and into find the command console so you can steer your business into directionally correct territory that sets you up for the next round of funding.

Series C funding is perhaps the hardest round to raise as it is the real truth seeker. Up until now you could have relied on buzz to generate growth, but now you need to prove that you have the right unit economics in place to ensure sustained, profitable growth. This is a crucial time to be aware of that delusional sinkhole again. If you’ve raised too much money you could be plowing it into revenue growth and delaying the hard conversation you need to have around the economics of your unit growth. Revenue growth must convert into positive unit growth or you will sink your business as you expand it.

There are always exceptions, but raising outside of these inflection points is exponentially harder.

Coming back to the key point that timing is everything you should factor in about two years between each of these funding rounds. That gives you enough time to focus on growth for a full year before picking your head up for six months to raise the next round, while maintaining a six month contingency as a buffer.

5. Optimise your fundraising for success.

Does the investor or group of investors you are bringing into a round have what it takes to support you, over and above the capital infusion?

If you answer a resounding yes, then find an approximated win win deal and close the round. You could keep negotiating them down on deal terms or look elsewhere for a higher valuation, or a bigger named venture firm. But that would be a distraction. A financing deal is one moment in the growth continuum of your business. Keep your eyes on the prize: business success.

You are taking on a venture capital partner because you want to build a bigger business at an accelerated pace to what you could without their funding and guidance. Don’t over obsess about your equity stake. Think more about how much more you can grow your business with their involvement so that you all win, big. Keep that goal in mind and view each funding round as a mile-post on that journey. It is an important enabler, nothing more, nothing less.

By investor I refer to the sponsoring partner at a venture capital firm, not the firm itself. Your relationship with them is going to be a lifelong partnership, not a transactional, deal-based one-off interaction. Are you comfortable they would take your call at 3am in the morning or delay their Wednesday afternoon golf game to attend an emergency board meeting? Think of them as talent you are bringing onto your team. Talent you are prepared to take advice from and whose counsel you would trust implicitly.

I hope these rules assist you in your capital raising endeavors and provide you with much needed perspective to view funding as a part of your growth journey.

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This post was initially sent as part of the EXOscalr BeFierce newsletter. If you want to receive it directly  you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/bxGzD1

Fear is the ultimate tool of oppression.
Dictatorial regimes and bully bosses are past masters at using it as a tool for controlling their citizens and staff, respectively.
People can be manipulated to do terrible things through fear.
As individuals we use fear to achieve self-oppression.
Some of us are masterful at tapping into the pervasive undercurrent of fear percolating within our deeper layers of consciousness.
By doing so we reveal specific fears:
the fear of saying the wrong thing; the fear of being laughed at; the fear of being betrayed by a loved one; the fear of losing your job; the fear of being diagnosed with a terminal disease.

Recently my father was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Coming less than two years after my own sudden cardiac death experience, this hit me hard at first. He is the toughest man I know; I always saw him as indestructible. It may sound counterintuitive, but to now see him in the fight of his life fills me with hope.

Briony Scott, herself a lung cancer patient, sums up how hope can overcome fear in a beautiful piece she wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Hope, knocked down, gets up. The spirit bends towards life. Surrounded by those who know the worst and yet focus on the best, those of us sidelined by fear are able to pick ourselves up, shelve the grief, and do what needs to be done. The force wielding the gun is just as deadly but you care less. You have choice. To spend whatever is left of your life in fear or to get on with living. You do everything you can to extend your life but you will not spend it waiting for the end to come.”

“One year on, I am back running a school, doing what I love. But I have changed. I am intimately acquainted with both fear and hope. They merge and cross from time to time but with an extraordinary team of people working quietly and persistently towards a cure, for all types of cancer, and especially for lung cancer, fear will not win. Hope does and will; again and again, and again.”

Such powerful words, but how do they apply to us in business?

What do we do in a work context when fear arises?
Do we confront it or push it away by working harder?
Fear needs to be confronted, directly, by the team facing it and collectively they need to brainstorm solutions to overcoming that fear.

The team’s initial instinct is to rather work harder at solving the problems that are causing the fear, for example by closing new customers. This amounts to busywork and is being done to mask the fear. Tensions will continue to rise until people on the team feel like the business is unraveling.

The real work requires the team to be fierce and confront the fear together, deciding together what solutions are best for them to pursue. This is the best way for a team to find sustainable solutions to dealing with the fear. It will also bring them together as a more cohesive unit, mending relationships and bringing people back together. While it may feel like the tougher option in the moment, it will provide the focus needed to shift the business to a higher level.

It does not matter what the underlying cause of the fear is, confronting it directly, as a team, is the only way to solve for the long term.

How can EXOscalr help?

Our work is focused on guiding people to be fierce, with themselves, their relationships and their businesses and to tackle their personal and business fears with hope.

We take our clients on a journey of self-discovery and powerfully guide them to go deeper into themselves and step into their greatness; we are bold truth tellers and guide our clients to be the same; EXOscalr is fuel for the soul; we give our clients an audacious wake up call and assist them to find and reclaim the innate powers they possess; we are their compass, challenging them to find their direction and go beyond their limitations; within themselves our clients find compassion, joy, personal power, timeless wisdom and unconditional love; we strip away everything that no longer serves them and give them the tools and inspiration to rebuild their faith in themselves, while showing them how to live a bigger, more true life.

We work with our clients individually one on one, as well as with their teams; we meet our clients where they are, combining insights into personal development and business growth.

Fear.

It’s always there.

It can either liberate or bury you.

It all depends on how you deal with it.

Compare fear with the wind. When it is a gentle breeze against your cheek, you hardly notice it. However, when it tuns into a howling gale you instinctively brace into it.

No matter its strength you only become mindful of the wind when you notice it, gently rippling over or buffeting your whole body. In that moment of mindfulness you can decide to enjoy nature or cower from its power.

Fear is always blowing.

At times with ferocity.

Choosing how you confront fear puts you in power.

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As much as we sometimes fear fear itself, it is an integral part of our overall energy system.

I’ve pitched for millions of dollars in funding; I’ve given many keynotes and run countless workshops all over the world; as a lawyer I delivered numerous arguments before packed courtrooms; and yet, every time I take the floor before an audience, I feel the familiar butterflies rising in my gut.  Instead of railing against them I embrace them.

I know that the more of them there are the greater high I will feel after my talk concludes successfully.

You see fear is a raw emotion that arises from deep within us and it can be harnessed and converted into a powerful energy that drives us to step up and achieve more than we may have without it.

Without that fear I may become nonchalant and try to wing my talks. Previous experience has shown, for me at least that this can be a disaster.

I need that fear to achieve at my best.

I choose to harness it, rather than let it debilitate me.

No matter when or how strongly motivated you are, behaviour change is hard. The best of intentions can still lead to a low probability of turning a decision to adopt a new habit or break an old one into a long term behaviour.

How do you go about making change stick?

Today I’m going to share with you two mindsets that can help significantly and also give you a methodology for making behaviour change that I’ve successfully tested.

BUILDING A PRACTICE

In my case my overall objective was to build up a regular yoga practice and I decided to do 100 yoga sessions as a means to make it a habit. The key word here is ‘practice’: change is not a one off event, a lever you pull down one day and it then stays down indefinitely.

Building up a practice requires conscious commitment in three stages.

In the first stage I made the decision to increase my mindfulness and overall well being. I also chose to do so through yoga. I did contemplate building up my running regimen or joining a gym again, but decided that yoga was the best approach.

The second stage was all about doing the work: the hard slog of showing up; day in, day out. This was harder in the early stages of building the practice as I was yet to notice the benefits; my body was anything but supple, which meant even the most basic yoga poses were tough.

The third and final phase is about maintaining the practice. Once I’d reached the peak of my practice and done 100 yoga sessions, I could not slack off; I had to keep showing up. Yoga is a great behavioural change teacher because the longer you miss your daily sessions the more you punish yourself when you finally do a session; your muscles have tightened, you struggle to get into the zone. This gives you a very direct, short term incentive to keep the practice going

POSITIVE TRIGGERS PERSIST

What is motivating you to attempt a behavior change? Negative drivers like guilt or fear are much less likely to produce long-lasting change. Instead you should find a positive trigger for change, one that is self-motivating for you.

This has a lot to do with the power of visualisation. Seeing yourself affected positively by the change will drive you through the slumps when you don’t feel like showing up and doing the work.

In my case I saw myself more focused and fitter, happier with myself and in greater balance with the universe. These were all powerfully positive triggers that have persisted as I used the behavior change system below to create a yoga practice.

IMPLEMENTING A BEHAVIOR CHANGE SYSTEM

I firmly believe in the mantra: no plan, no progress. How can you know you are on or off track if you have no plan and are not analysing your performance data. I’m going to share with you a system that will empower you to map yourself from plan to data to progress and ultimately to creating a practice.

You will need a notebook. You are free to use whatever form of notebook works for you: paper or digital, as long as it is readily available to you.

I use Evernote for most of my working notes, collating research for my various projects and as an avid foodie, for my favourite recipes. I have set up an easily accessible system within Evernote for tracking my annual objectives. If you are interested I’d be happy share this system with you.  One of those objectives was to set up a regular yoga practice.

And so I set up a note in Evernote titled ‘Build up to a regular yoga practice’. This could be a Word document, or a dedicated set of pages in your diary or journal, whatever tool works for you.

My page was divided into three main parts:

– Affirmation of Intent – a positive visualisation motivating me to complete the objective
– Next Actions – a to-do list of what I needed to commence and complete the objective
– Key Results – a collated set of data tracking my progress.

AFFIRMATION OF INTENT

I visualised myself having achieved this objective. I asked myself how this made me feel? I then made a declaration affirming my intent. From this I could extract my main motivators for building up this practice. I listed my top 3 motivators. Remember that the stronger and more positive these motivators are the more likely you are to continue with the exercise and achieve your objective.

I visualised myself being more centred and relaxed. I saw myself smiling more, treating others with greater empathy because I was more in tune with their rhythms and the energy of the universe. I was fitter and more flexible and saw myself partaking more in one of my favourite sports, stand up paddle surfing.

Here are my motivations for having a regular yoga practice:

– Increase mindfulness
– Increase body flexibility
– Increase fitness

NEXT ACTIONS

In this section I listed the specific and detailed actions I felt I needed to take to bring me closer to achieving my objective. I made these as specific as possible and created a to-do list so that I could check off when I had completed each action.

Here is my completed list:

[x] Get an app that coaches me through yoga

[x] Use Yogaglo for trial, if OK then continue using

[x] Check in half way – at 50 sessions

[x] Final check in at 100 sessions

KEY RESULTS

Without data you cannot know if you are progressing. In this section I tracked my progress by using my daily exercise as a measurement. I set this out in table format as per below:

I set out the date and numbered each yoga session numerically. My aim was to get to 100 yoga sessions and I had a real sense of satisfaction adding in each session straight after I’d completed it and watching the numbers go up and up. I then listed the name of the yoga session, what level of difficulty it was (Yogaglo sessions range from 1-3, with 1 being easy, 3 being advanced), how long it was and who the teacher was.

Initially I also listed on which platform I was doing the session. You may want to alternate some live classes with a local yoga teacher. You may also want to try out a few online platforms. I used Yogaglo initially and then tried out a few others. I found that I preferred Yogaglo. I was really comfortable with some of their teachers. In addition their format most approximated a live class (to me), yet had the convenience that I could do it at home or on the road any time of the day. It also helped that their monthly cost was equivalent to the cost of one local live yoga class.

I successfully completed my goal in 5 months, interspersing yoga sessions with walks, stand up paddle sessions, the occasional minor health interruption (a cold, a tummy bug) and intra-week exercise breaks.

Here’s my final check-in note:

Overall this worked well as a tool for inspiring behaviour change. By tracking my sessions it prompted me to ensure that I did them regularly and also by giving myself a mini key result aim of 5-6 hours of yoga a week I pushed myself that much harder to do sessions.

I found the ease of being able to simply set myself up in a room with a mat and launching yogaglo was far easier than going to physical classes. I also found a mix between doing different sessions to break any chance of monotony was balanced by doing some regular classes that I enjoyed more than others and where I could get into flow quicker without having to think about each move as I new what was coming. For example I did the 60 minute Sacral Chakra Flow with Jo Tastula at least once a week. I also thoroughly enjoyed synching to the universe and doing the Contemplative Full Moon Flow class on the day of a full moon. Interestingly even though I had access to about 20 teachers I tended to stick with one above all others because I was most comfortable with her style.

I played around with the ideal class duration. On Yogaglo sessions range from 15 to 90 minutes. I did a few short sessions, one or two 90 minute ones and a good few 30 minute sessions on days when I felt short on time or had low energy. However, the bulk of my sessions were 60 minutes. I enjoyed the cadence of this hour long classes. There was enough time for an initial meditation, we spent longer on chakras and ended with a nourishing shavasana. As I have done some yoga before I quickly moved from Level 1 to Level 2, but I aim cognisant not to over extend my capabilities and cause injury and so did very few Level 3 classes. I did have the occasional pulled muscle where I pushed too hard on a yoga move, but with the help of some anti-inflammatory treatment I recovered quickly.

NEXT STEPS

Use this method to set yourself up with a regular yoga practice or for any other behavior change you want to achieve. It definitely works. Personally I’m a huge fan of yoga and cannot more highly recommend you build a practice for yourself. Namaste!

Health Tonics

Last week I shared with you a method for creating meaningful behavior change. This week I want to share some further practical advice, this time around boosting your energy and your immune system.

All three of the tonics listed below are designed to keep your body in balance and ward off stress-induced illness. Add them to your daily routine and enjoy the benefits that come from having more energy.

Daily Squeeze

Squeeze up to half a lemon’s worth of juice into a mug. Add a teaspoon of honey and fill the mug up with boiling water. Have this as you first drink of the day. It is a great anti-inflammatory.

Turmeric Tonic

This is another, more powerful, anti-inflammatory and immune system booster. Have a small glass of this daily. Note that your body absorbs turmeric better when ingested with black pepper so sprinkle some ground pepper into the glass.

Add 50g (quarter cup) sugar, or preferably honey, and 60ml water to a pot and heat on medium until dissolved. Remove to cool.

Pour the mixture into a 1 litre bottle or jug and add 180g (three quarter cup) of squeezed lemon and 500ml of cool water.

Use a juicer that can masticate and grind an unpeeled, chopped 5cm piece of ginger. This should yield 2 teaspoons of ginger juice, add to the bottle.

Do the same with 12 x 5cm pieces of turmeric root to yield 120ml (half a cup) of juice. Add this to the bottle.

Screw on lid and shake the bottle well.

Chia Fresca

This is an energy booster and your body will slowly absorb the chia throughout the day. The best time to have this is at the start of the day before going for a run or gym session.

Combine 1 teaspoon of dry chai seeds with half a glass of cold water. The seeds absorb 9x their weight.

Stir the mixture a few times over 10 minutes to ensure they don’t clump together as they swell up. After 10 minutes they should form a gel that has the consistency of yoghurt.

Add half a lime’s worth of juice (2 teaspoons) and 1-2 teaspoons of xylotol or agave syrup to sweeten. Drink immediately.

Breaking Out of Your Trance!

After my sudden cardiac death I remember feeling sad as I lay on a hospital bed in intensive care. I was sad at the thought of never being able to glide through the water on my beloved stand up paddle board. I was watching the sun rise at the start of a pristine summer’s day and yet I felt that life wasn’t co-operating. This sadness bordered on anger. Underlying this feeling was the emotion of fear. I was caught up in my separate self, consumed by my problem. I didn’t feel like I had a choice in how I related to this situation; I was a victim; I was oppressed; ultimately, I was disempowered.

What I really wanted to do was to control things. I sensed that my health situation meant I wasn’t going to be able to do what I loved; my life wasn’t co-operating and so I grasped for control of my health; I also became a victim of my circumstance and tried to take control by judging myself. In doing so I was entering a trance.

DISRUPTING CONTROL

You can enter this control trance through any number of things: losing your health; someone you love gets sick; your financial situation drops off a cliff; your relationships unravel. Common to all these circumstances is a grasping on your part to try control all aspects of your life in that moment.

You feel disempowered and insecure and this fear leads you to grab for control.

You feel disempowered and insecure and this fear leads you to grab for control. This has a negative effect on other parts of your life and can cause a downward spiral; it leads you to hurt others; it results in you ruining both personal and business relationships.

The challenge is to see this trance for what it is; to see that any solution you try to secure when in this state will not work.

You need to wake up from the trance and do a complete reversal.

You need to wake up from the trance and do a complete reversal: counter intuitively shifting from insular and controlling to open and trusting; shifting from seeking power to tapping into the source of all power. By connecting to the universe, by plugging into the source, you can replace your grasping and insecurity with profound awareness, love and deep security. By breaking this trance you empower yourself; you become free to choose your attitude, to choose how you respond to whatever is going on, no matter how disruptive that situation may seem.

GET THE FULL STORY

The brain is our search engine – using a universal algorithm it indexes the world according to our limited human capability. Over time we build up an ego, which uses a secondary set of algorithms to filter the indexed world according to our unique context.

The ego determines how we see the world and ourselves.

The ego, as gatekeeper, provides us with manageable information it deems most relevant to us. The ego determines how we see the world and ourselves. Our context is determined by the experiences we go through and how they shape us.

Our actions are mostly determined in other parts of the brain than where the ego resides. This means that even though we are led to believe by our ego that it is determining our path through life, much like the distinction between story and plot, other parts of our brain are providing the plot, the what and why we do what we do, while the ego presents us with the story, how we are doing it.

Your greatest challenge is to break out of the trance your ego has created.

Your greatest challenge is to break out of the trance your ego has created. Your ego filters the world so that your awake awareness is only comprised of what it predetermines is good for you. As such you have been living on automatic, in a reactive mode, grasping for control when life doesn’t seem to be co-operating. To break the trance you must bring into awareness aspects of the world that have been hidden by the story your ego has created for you.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO BREAK OUT OF BOTH THESE FORMS OF TRANCE?

In trance many of your energy centres remain closed up; you find power from within your sense of separate self; you operate from a very limited and contracted place; you are within the illusion, the fairy tale, that has you grasping for power and fulfilling a false need for control. When you break from the trance you enter universal flow; all your energy centres open; power comes through the universe to you and it is unlimited; you access your innate super powers of compassion and love; you achieve full empowerment.

Design your own wake up call and become a better leader.

I want you to join me in an exercise in expanding your mind and opening your heart. The objective of this exercise is to help you become a better leader so it is worth your while to play along.

Imagine with me for the next few minutes that you are someone else entirely.

Your name is Sam.

You’ve spent the last few years in the web of a double life that has finally caught up with you.

Last week you were sentenced to 15 years in jail with no parole for smuggling drugs into the United States.

You had realised that your life had two sides to it, but it is only now that you have been delivered a huge wake up call.

You realise that your actions will devastate your colleagues, but more importantly, your family as well.

What do you do?

How will you survive one and a half decades in prison?

Would you turn to violence? Would you play the blame game, seeing yourself as a victim of circumstance?

This is an exercise in fantasy for you and me, but for one young person it was far from that. It was reality: at the age of 24, convicted of drug smuggling and destined to spend part of the 1980s and 1990s in a US federal penitentiary.

For the sake of consistency let’s call him Sam.

As he did his time Sam came to understand that there are three key things he could do to survive and thrive in this situation:

1. Completely owning your experience
2. Catalysing your awakening
3. Reclaiming your inner wisdom

I believe that this is also a pathway to becoming a better leader and Sam’s approach fits with my mantra of being fierce, removing our masks, tapping into our innate capacity for compassion and taking heroic action.

Completely Owning Your Experience

Sam realised that the only way to survive, the only way for him to finally walk out of this nightmare was to completely own the experience. He accepted that he was at fault and that his destiny was of his own making.

He decided to transform his life through developing a practice of meditation and deep contemplation. He went on to have a major impact on the lives of many prisoners by advocating for and providing access to mindfulness practices. Since his release from prison Sam has widened his work to influence people all around the world.
During his time in prison he came to see the world and his place in it for what it truly is.

He realised that if we simply allow ourselves to live an unexamined life we find ourselves on the evolutionary path with our mammalian drive for survival overriding everything. In this way we set ourselves up to follow fear based, habitual, mechanistic and survivalist lives. Layered on top of this we co-create a culture and set of institutions that are also blame and fear-based, habitual and mechanistic.

Even the most highly functioning of us are susceptible to and have the propensity to live unaware that we have condemned ourselves to follow such a fear-based, mechanical path.

You live your life in quiet desperation; you wait for a light bulb moment that never comes; you never really deeply examine your situation and you don’t realise that you are roving like a hungry ghost, finding fleeting security in whatever confirms your existence or your sense of worthiness; finding home in external confirmation of your ‘success’: your bank accounts, your job, or your relationships.

You  haven’t really done the internal work necessary to find your true place, which has been residing within you all along yet has been cloaked by your an evolutionary override and peer-based cultural mask. You have an innate basic goodness that saturates and permeates through you. You can tap into this goodness through your tenderness and your vulnerability.

Catalysing Your Awakening

Finding yourself in a highly charged situation, facing your version of 15 years in prison, you have a choice. You can condemn yourself to continue living a habitual, fear-based life.

Or, preferably, you can use that moment as a catalyst to awaken yourself, increasing your compassion and becoming even more vulnerable. In choosing this awakened path you open yourself up to living a life of service to others, which is one of the highest things we can aspire to do as human beings. By doing so you not only give your life exponentially more meaning and fulfilment, but you also turn your compassion inwards and satiate your hunger for external confirmation.

Reclaiming Your Inner Wisdom

How do you get to the point of making such a choice, particularly if you are really struggling with the situation you have gotten yourself into?

You need to use self agency to break the conditioning so that you can start being more than a victim of this conditioning and the world you and society have constructed around you.

You need to use this self agency as a springboard for self empowerment. This will heighten your level of awareness and empower you to reclaim your inner wisdom, your innate goodness.

No matter how much the world seems to have conspired against you and convinced you of your unworthiness, you know, somewhere way back inside of you, you know this is all a mask and that you are innately good, you are innately wise.

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This post was initially sent out as part of the EXOscalr Be Fierce newsletter. If you don’t want to miss out you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/bxGzD1.

I want to share with you some thoughts around how we can change our relationship to negative feelings through meditation.

Our aim in meditation is to form a different relationship to things we are feeling or experiencing. Initially this is true for us while we are in practice, but over time our objective is to expand this relationship into our everyday lives. Take for example a feeling of irritation we have at somebody for something they have done or failed to do.

What is your relationship to that feeling?

Are you stuck with that feeling, is it replaying over and over in your mind? This constant replay is a form of reinforcement. Neuro-plasticity works both ways.

Can you step back from that feeling? Start by recognizing it, deconstructing the various elements of that feeling into its constituent parts.

Can you now start to change your thinking about that feeling? Hold back your initial, troubled reaction to it and replace that with a sense of calm, a sense of spaciousness.

Does this create a space between their act of doing or not doing and your feeling towards it?

Does it help you separate out the act and the emotion it initially gave rise to?

We want to get to the point where we are no longer reinforcing the negative and instead are linking a difficult feeling with the deep well of open, untroubled awareness that exists within us. This leads to a relaxation of the need to react to a negative feeling and immediately disempowers that feeling.

We find ourselves less controlled by such feelings; we find ourselves less in fear of being in situations that may give rise to them and therefore less likely to avoid such circumstances. This is at the heart of being fierce.

And when we are more relaxed overall we find ourselves being less fatigued, more productive, more emotionally intelligent and we make more strategic decisions:  this is at the heart of being better leaders.

When we arrive at the understanding that we can change our brains through our minds, we empower ourselves to transform our lives.  

By peering mindfully into our lives when we meditate we can start to establish patterns and see what is transpiring in our personal, societal and work relationships. This leads to us seeing, sometimes for the very first time, when we are thinking negatively and inviting chaos by reacting emotionally to similar situations that repeat themselves at regular intervals in our lives. For example, we may find that at around two years into a personal relationship our voice of doubt gets louder and we become jealous and react in a relationship-destroying way, or we may find that there is a time frame in a job when the honeymoon is over, we become bored and we start negative behaviors that are career-limiting.

A Guided Self-Awareness Meditation

I’d like to finish with a guided meditation that focuses on embodiment: a great way for us to quieten negativity. In this exercise I will ask you to connect to a mindful awareness of your feelings both at a mental and physical level. I will ask you to go deeper and deeper into this awareness and lower any barriers that exist. I want you to feel that you are in a safe place from which you can delve further into this awareness and lower any barriers that exist.

The aim of this practice is to increase your awareness of the full range of embodied feelings that may arise and to be comfortable with them even if some of them feel uncomfortable. The stretch goal of this practice is to open your heart to feeling the strong connection that exists between all of us and the universe.

I suggest having your computer read this out to you at a slow speed. Alternatively, you could record yourself reading it out slowly and then when you are ready to do the meditation play the recording back.

Find a pose that is both comfortable for you and that also feels uplifting and relaxed.  If you can sit cross legged with ease that would be ideal. If not, try sitting on a cushion or bolster so that your body is slightly higher than your legs. Kneeling is also a good position.

If you prefer to remain active while meditating then go for a slow walk, preferably in a place that is relaxing to you. The aim is to come into some posture of stillness that doesn’t feel contrived. You are inviting your body to settle.

If you are stationary you can close your eyes to go more inward for this moment. Alternatively, and especially if you have chosen to walk, keep your eyes open, but shift your eyes downward to soften your gaze. There will be nothing visually important or interesting happening around you and by closing your eyes or dropping your gaze you will have more of an opportunity to connect to the imagery that may arise during this practice.

Gently start bringing your attention into one place.

Thoughts may continue to come from all over, they may continue to pull you in multiple directions, but start centering on your breath. Feel the passage of air entering your lungs and then leaving them.

When thoughts do pull you away, return gently to your breath and to the felt experience of being alive and present in your body. Feel your embodiment: in your legs, how you are sitting, the arch in your back, the angle of your head and through your hands.

Shift your mind from feeling your body conceptually to really feeling it at the physical level.

Gently allow yourself the pleasure of feeling your breath and your body as tactile physical sensations that are always in motion, rising and falling.

When your mind wanders, gently, yet fiercely, bring it back to your breath and your body, again and again.

Allow yourself to feel all the sensations that arise, both pleasant and unpleasant, familiar and unfamiliar; feel the movement of your breath; feel the rising and falling of your chest; feel the movement in the air around you and feel the air crossing the skin just below your nostrils; feel your skin and its contact with your clothing; feel the heat or cold; feel the dryness or humidity in the air; feel your contact with the ground.

Deepen your curiosity about your own experience and allow yourself, in this moment, in the now, to feel the full range of whatever arises: this may be pleasurable or it may be painful; this may be comfortable or it may be uncomfortable.

While you are allowing these sensate feelings to arise at an increasingly deeper level, keep bringing your attention back to centre.

The barrage of thoughts may start to slow, but they may also be sparked off in different directions by your physical feelings.

Continue deepening your felt presence, breath after breath, moment after moment.

Start to really feel your embodiment at a much more heightened level.

Allow other sensory perceptions to arise as you go deeper: feel your heart beating; notice your emotions; notice your overall mood – contentment, frustration, happiness, sadness –  and if you are around others feel the overall mood and emotions that are present in your home, in the office, on a train, on a plane.

Purposefully exclude nothing; opening your mind further and further and dropping any barriers that were in place or that instinctively arise during this meditation.

You are alone with your thoughts yet you are at one with the universe, you are in a safe place.

Feel everything that arises; feel the innate beauty in everything; feel the innate beauty in our humanity: in every possible emotion, sensation and thought; feel our shared humanity.

Go deeper still and feel our greater connection to the universe. Stay at that level and feel the wholeness that exists all around us. Exclude nothing, allowing yourself the deepest permission to just be, as you are, in this moment.

And now, bring your attention slowly back to focus only on how it feels to breathe.

Notice what is present for you are we conclude this meditation. Make a conscious choice to reengage with this present moment and the rest of your day.

Namaste.

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Do a google search on the phrase reinvent yourself and you quickly realise that this is a pervasive and perennial question: google tells us that related searches include how to reinvent yourself at 30; it seems we are still looking a decade later as another related search is reinventing yourself after 40; and again ten years later we want to know the answer to how to reinvent yourself at 50; and finally we ask the question how to reinvent yourself at 60?

Many people dream of a future that is radically different from their present: they want to quit the big city commute and live close to the beach; they want to get off the corporate treadmill and build a passion business as an entrepreneur; they want to move back to or away from family and where they grew up; they want to write novels rather than conduct endless business meetings or they want to leave a loveless relationship.

The challenge, though, is that getting to the point where they are fulfilling this dream can be tough. There are significant forces that contribute to this inertia and which can prevent reinvention. For example, we tend to exert more energy dealing with issues closer to hand: immediacy wins out over future concerns and dreams; we find it easier to simply deal with the day to day than plan for and progress towards achieving future-oriented goals. This is exacerbated when the future we dream of is very different from our present.

We may see a misty, day-dream-like version of ourselves doing something else, but we may have very little understanding of what it would take to actualise this dream. The stark reality is that we are likely to end up in an alternative, less fulfilling future before we know it: if we don’t achieve absolute clarity on where we are at today and where we want to be in the future ; if we don’t also implement an operating system that empowers us to crystallise goals, set clear objectives for achieving them and generate results-oriented data that ensures we are on target.

We all undergo some level of modification of our identities, both personal and professional as we traverse our lifespans. But there can be an underlying angst for people who are not fulfilled in their lives. They may want to make a radical change, but for whatever reason hold back on doing so. This increases their level of angst.

“What if I leave it too late?”

“I’ve been a software programmer for 30 years, it’s all I know, how can I now expect to become a musician?”

The good news is that it is never too late to reinvent ourselves. With sufficient intensity and resolve we can undertake significant positive change at any age. That being said, we do need to acknowledge that reinvention can take time. Learning a whole new discipline may take us years and we need to make allowance for the time it takes to get up to speed with our new goals. Being on the path to achieving such life changing goals will us new meaning, which in and of itself is a major benefit. After all, reinvention is more journey than destination.

Jim lost his son to an aggressive form of cancer and was then retrenched from his executive position at a multinational company. Instead of jumping back on the corporate treadmill, he drew inspiration from the fight his son had put up before succumbing to the cancer that ravaged his body; Jim decided to realise his passion for storytelling and wrote his first novel. Three years later he has published eight books and is well on track to publish many more.

There are four steps we can take that will help us achieve a successful transformation:

1. Finding Passion

In order to truly reinvent ourselves we need to find our passion. This requires a process of self-inquiry or self-evaluation: the aim is to determine our underlying drivers, strengths, fears, weakness; we cobble together our narrative, our story; we find out what intrinsically motivates us; we discard the blinding, extrinsic indicators of shallow success. We focus on what really drives us at the soul level: which unlocks a much higher probability of fulfilment, ensures we are less depressed; builds our resilience so that when things get tough and distractions and obstacles arise we can still achieve our goals.

2. Slogging It Out

And things will get tough. We have a tendency to be overly bullish about the future, overrate our abilities to make the necessary changes to reinvent ourselves and underrate the amount of effort this will take. We may think about the future for over 10% of our waking hours, but putting this into action is not something we necessarily excel at.

3. Connecting Before Committing

Once we know what area we will focus on in our reinvention we need to make a point of getting to know people in that space who are already achieving the kind of results we aspire to achieve. What do they see as the challenges, how would they go about entering that space if they were to do it again. Be inspired and then go ahead and commit.

4. Building a Reinvention Operating System

As we embark on the journey of reinvention we should implement a system that helps us change our habits, set objectives, track our behaviours and results so that we can determine how we are progressing. This can be a multiple year journey and it can be far from linear, we need to ensure we have the right practices and tools to assist us.

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Imagine for a moment what it would be like working in an organisation that is under huge pressures to grow, to transform itself and to beat the competition; an organisation that is mandated to do more with less and to do more differently rather than following the status quo. For many of us this is a daily reality. We can palpably feel the sense of urgency these pressures create.

Every moment of every day such an organisation is very likely to be under real existential threat: existing competitors are trying to grab our customer base and startups are gunning to make us irrelevant with disruptive solutions. Now imagine that your leaders not only fear organisational irrelevancy and death, but also fear their own professional and actual death:  these leaders are caught between the need to change and charge ahead and the paralysing fear of not existing.

Two main questions arise from this all too common situation: firstly, how can such leaders lead well when they are stuck like deer in existential headlights worrying that they could drop dead at any moment; and secondly, how can a person survive and thrive when they are working in such a company for such fearful leaders; how can people be expected to find purpose and meaning in their work; how can they remain engaged when they are working within such an environment of existential fear?

The short answer to both questions is that they cannot and the workplace surveys reflect this: big time. There is a paucity of purposeful leadership: by purpose I mean a goal that is bigger than our company’s results or share price. There is also a massive breakdown in staff engagement within the corporate universe.

To tackle this problem leaders need to be able to overwrite their fears; alter their reality and reinvent themselves; they need to be happier with greater overall life satisfaction, more in tune with a higher purpose and completely devoid of their previous fear of death.

This is not a trivial problem to solve for and the two overarching questions that emerge are: how can we as business leaders find a solution to this paralysing and very real corporate pandemic; how can we help our executives to deal with their fear?

The answer lies in confronting that which we fear most: no matter how uncomfortable it may feel, we need to stare death in the face. On the face of it this may not seem possible: how can we truly confront death without dying ourselves? Surely that would defeat the purpose?

There is an elegant solution: exploring death through the eyes of people who have been there and come back, exploring death through people who have undergone a near-death experience. Why them? Many NDEers no longer fear death.

In a study published in 2004 on near-death experiences and their impact on the  temporal lobe, Brown University’s Willoughby Britton made a startling discovery: people who had transcendent encounters during life-threatening events scored exceptionally higher on tests of overall life satisfaction than people who hadn’t. She referenced thirty years of research to show that while most people were negatively impacted and traumatised by their near-death experience, a subset who had experienced some form of transcendence had an atypical response: they exhibited off the charts happiness and life satisfaction, including feeling that their lives had meaning and a higher purpose.  By transcendence I refer to some experience that has the quality of being beyond the normal constraints we feel: linear time collapses; the well-defined sense of self dissolves; there is unity between the internal and external senses; there is reconnection back into a larger, collective otherness than the present life experience. Not all NDEers experience this transcendence, but a great many have.

Further research has demonstrated that this is not a one-off feeling that dissipates in the short to mid term. People who have undergone a transcendent NDE have had their brains permanently rewired so that they do not fear death. As long as a decade after such an NDE, those who have experienced it feel the same level of happiness, reverence and lack of existential fear.

Three years after my own transcendent NDE I can personally attest to this: yes, it took me a while to deal with the shock of my sudden cardiac death, there were moments of emotional turmoil along the way; yes, it took me a while to recuperate from my illness as only another major operation 10 months laterremoved the arrhythmia that had caused my cardiac arrest; but yes, I have absolutely overwritten and have no fear of dying whatsoever; and resoundingly yes, I have completely reinvented my life and have off the charts life satisfaction as I pursue a far greater purpose than my own selfish success or that of one organisation.

It would be impractical for organisations to only use transcendent NDE survivors as their leaders, but I would encourage dialogue with people like myself who are open to sharing our experiences and key learnings; people who are focused on improving leadership skills and helping executives to reinvent themselves with many of the traits that transcendent NDEers exhibit such as deeper compassion and wisdom.

There is also greater understanding of how to create an on tap emulation of the effects of a transcendent NDE and I encourage you to follow this growing activity more closely.  It is an area we are exploring at EXOscalr. There will be a lot to gain from having first mover advantage in being able to recreate altered states of consciousness.

I’ve been surfing for over 40 years and still love it. To me it is a fantastic way to build up brain waves conducive to entering an altered state of consciousness and especially acts as a trigger for getting into a state of flow.

It’s even been shown that just 5 weeks of exposure to surfing can dramatically reduce Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I wanted to share with you this fantastic video shot at one of my favorite surf spots in the world, Wategos Beach in Byron Bay on the far north coast of New South Wales, Australia. I hope it inspires you as much as it does me and I look forward to seeing you in the line up!

MCTAVISH TRIM -FURTHEST UP THE BEACH 2017 from McTavish Surfboards on Vimeo.

This is a spiritual contemplation on rebooting the ultimate universal program. Find a quiet space to read through it slowly, breathing deeply and slowly and let a feeling of deep peace come over you.

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The challenge many of us face is that we know too much to see the universal truth: the transcendent, fundamental and spiritual reality.

In order to be able to receive this reality we need to clear out our systems; we need to empty our minds. Using the analogy of a room, our windows have become murky with ego-induced fog and the dusty grime of past knowledge. To see the truth we need to open these windows and let the breeze empty out our memories, presumptions and thoughts; in modern technology terms we need to clear our cache and wipe our entire operating system before rebooting ourselves with the ultimate universal program. Only once truly clear can that same breeze gently carry the truth into us.

For many of us, our logic states that knowledge is truth: absolute knowledge is absolute truth. However, when we observe how we acquire knowledge we start to see the flaw in this logic: knowledge requires us to firstly observe something; secondly we need to understand what we are observing; and thirdly we commit that observation and understanding to memory and classify that as knowledge.

What we are then able to recall from our memories on any given topic is what constitutes our knowledge of that topic.

The challenge with this logic is that a memory by its very nature is from the past. Knowledge stored in memory is a recollection, it cannot be of the present. We start to see the fatal flaw in this logic when we realise that there can be no memory in the present, yet the truth cannot exist in the past. The truth exists only in the present; the truth flows and pulses continuously; the truth cannot be grasped and converted into knowledge.

Our minds are unable to comprehend this universal truth until we empty them of all structural layers; until we deconstruct the self-created constraints and societal barriers; until we cease our incessant striving to acquire more or to be something or not be something.

When our minds become empty, the silence creates the space for the universal truth to be revealed: the truth becomes comfortable within us when we are not trying to hold onto it and convert it into knowledge; by letting the truth be and allowing it to achieve equilibrium it becomes as comfortable within us as it is without. We become one with the universe.

To contemplate further on the delicate dance between emptiness and universal truth, I am sharing this beautiful piece by the Tibetan monk Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, as translated by Erik Pema Kunsang:

The Mirror of Essential Points
A Letter in Praise of Emptiness

I pay homage at the lotus feet of Tenpey Nyima,
Who is inseparable from lord Longchen Rabjam
And who perceives the natural state of emptiness
Of the ocean-like infinity of things.

A letter of advice I offer to you, my noble mother Paldzom.
Listen for a while without distraction.
Staying here without discomfort,
I am at ease and free from worries
In a state of joyful mind.
Are you well yourself, my mother?

Here, in a country in the west,
There are many red and white-skinned people.
They have all kinds of magic and sights,
Like flying through the skies
And moving like fish in the water.
Having mastery over the four elements
They compete in displaying miracles
With thousands of beautiful colors.
There are innumerable spectacles
Like designs of rainbow colors.
But like a mere dream when examined
They are but the mistaken perceptions of mind.

All activities are like the games children play.
If started, they can never be finished.
They are only completed once you let them be,
Like castles made of sand.

But that is not the whole story.
All the phenomena of samsara and nirvana,
Although thought to be permanent, do not last.
When examined, they are but empty forms
That appear without existence.
Although unreal they are thought to be real.
But, like an illusion when examined, they are found to be unreal.

Look outward at the perceived objects.
Like water in a mirage
They are more delusive than delusion.
Unreal, like a dream or a magical apparition,
They resemble a rainbow or the reflection of the moon.

Look inward at your own mind!
It seems quite exciting when not examined.
But when examined there is nothing to it.
Appearing without existing it is nothing but empty.
It cannot be identified, you cannot say, “that’s it,”
Because it is evanescent and elusive like mist.

Look at whatever appears
In any of the ten directions.
No matter how it manifests,
The thing in itself, its very nature,
Is the sky-like nature of the mind
Beyond the projection and the dissolution of thought and concept.

Everything has the nature of being empty.
When the empty looks at the empty,
Who is there to look at something empty?
As it is illusion looking at illusion
And delusion watching delusion,
What is the use of many classifications
Such as `empty’ and `not empty?’

Whatever you do is all right.
However you rest, you are at ease
In the effortless and sky-like nature of the mind,
The vast expanse of awareness,
The natural state of all things.
This was said by Jetsun Padmasambhava
And the great siddha Saraha.

All conceptual thought constructions
Such as duality or nonduality,
Leave them to be spontaneously dissolved in themselves
Like the waves on a river.

The great demon of ignorant and discursive thought
Causes one to sink into the ocean of samsara.
But when freed from this discursive thought
There is the indescribable state beyond conceptual mind.

Other than mere discursive thoughts
There are not even the words `samsara’ and `nirvana.’
The total subsiding of discursive thought
Is the suchness of dharmadhatu itself.

Not made complex by complex statements
This unfabricated single sphere
Is emptiness, the natural state of mind.
Thus it was said by the Sugata.

The essence of whatever may appear,
When simply left to itself,
Is the unfabricated and uncorrupted view,
The dharmakaya mother of emptiness.

All discursive thoughts are emptiness
And the observer of emptiness is discursive thought.
Emptiness does not destroy discursive thought
And discursive thought does not obstruct emptiness.
The mind nature of fourfold emptiness
Is the ultimate of everything.
Profound and quiescent, free from complexity,
An uncompounded, luminous clarity
Beyond the mind of concepts.
This is the depth of the mind of the victorious ones.

In this there is not an object to be removed
Nor something that needs to be added.
It is merely the natural
Looking naturally into itself.

In short, when the mind has fully severed
The fetters of clinging to something
All the points are condensed into one.
This is the tradition of the supreme being, Tilopa,
And of the great pandita Naropa.

Such a profound and natural state as this,
Among all the different kinds of bliss,
Is the one known as the wisdom of great bliss.
Among all kinds of delights
It is the king of supreme delight.
Among all the tantric sections of the secret mantra
It is the supreme fourth empowerment.
This is the ultimate pointing out instruction.

The view of samsara and nirvana as inseparable,
And that of mahamudra, dzogchen, the middle path and others,
Has many different titles,
But only one essential meaning.
This is the view of Jamgon Mipham.

As an aid to this king of views
One should begin with bodhicitta
And conclude with dedication.

Through skillful means, in order to cut off
The fixation of ego, the root of samsara,
The king of all great methods
Is unsurpassable bodhicitta.

The king of perfect dedication
Is the means of increasing the root of virtue.
This teaching is the specialty of Shakyamuni,
Which is not taught by other teachers.

More than this is not necessary
To accomplish complete enlightenment,
But less than this will be incomplete.
This swift path of the three excellencies
Called the `heart, eye and life force’
Is the approach of Longchen Rabjam.

Emptiness, the wishfulfilling jewel,
Is unattached generosity.
It is uncorrupted discipline.
It is angerless patience.
It is undeluded exertion.
It is undistracted meditation.
This emptiness, the essence of prajna,
Is the meaning of the three vehicles.

Emptiness is the natural state of mind.
It is the nonconceptual refuge
And the absolute bodhicitta.
It is the Vajrasattva who absolves evils.
It is the mandala of perfecting accumulations.
Emptiness is the guru yoga of dharmakaya.

To abide in the natural state of emptiness
Is the `calm abiding,’ shamatha.
To perceive it vividly clear
Is the `clear seeing,’ vipashyana.

The view of the perfect development stage,
And the wisdom of bliss and emptiness in the completion stage,
The nondual great perfection,
And the single sphere of dharmakaya
Are all included within emptiness.

Emptiness purifies the karmas
and dispels the obstructing forces.
Emptiness tames the demons
And accomplishes the deities.

The profound and natural state of emptiness
Dries up the ocean of passion.
It crumbles the mountain of anger
And illuminates the darkness of stupidity.
It calms down the gale of jealousy,
Defeats the illness of the kleshas
And is a friend in sorrow.
It destroys conceit in joy
And conquers in the battle with samsara.
It annihilates the four Maras,
Turns the eight worldly dharmas into same taste
And subdues the demon of ego-fixation.
It turns negative conditions into allies
And turns bad omens into good fortune.
It causes true and complete enlightenment
And gives birth to the buddhas of the three times.
Emptiness is the dharmakaya mother.

There is no teaching higher than emptiness.
There is no teaching swifter than emptiness.
There is no teaching more excellent than emptiness.
There is no teaching more profound than emptiness.

Emptiness is the `knowing of one that frees all.’
Emptiness is the supreme king of medicines.
Emptiness is the nectar of immortality.
Emptiness is spontaneous accomplishment beyond effort.
Emptiness is enlightenment without exertion.

By meditating on emptiness
One feels tremendous compassion
Towards the beings obscured by belief in a self
And bodhicitta arises without effort.

All the qualities of the path and levels
Will appear naturally without any effort,
And towards the law of the unfailing effect of karma
One will feel a heartfelt conviction.

If one has but one moment of certainty
In this kind of emptiness
The tight chains of ego-fixation
Will shatter into pieces.
This was said by Aryadeva.

It is more supreme to meditate on emptiness
Than to offer all the infinite buddhafields,
Filled with the wealth of gods and men,
To the sugatas and their spiritual sons.

If the merit of resting evenly,
Just for an instant in this natural state,
If it would take on concrete form
The element of space could not contain it.

Shakyamuni, the peerless lord of the Munis,
Threw his body into pyres of fire,
Gave away his head and limbs
And performed hundreds of other austerities
For the sake of this profound emptiness.

Although one fills the world with huge mounds
Of gold and jewels as offerings,
This profound teaching on emptiness,
Even when searched for, is hard to find.
This is said in the Hundred Thousand Verses of the Prajnaparamita.

To meet this supreme teaching
Is the splendid power of merit
Of many aeons beyond measure.

In short, by means of emptiness
One is, for the benefit of oneself,
Liberated into the expanse of the unborn dharmakaya,
The true and complete enlightenment
Of the four kayas and the five wisdoms.
Then the unobstructed display of rupakaya
Will ceaselessly manifest to teach whoever is in need,
Stirring the depth of samsara for the benefit of others
Through constant, all-pervading and spontaneous activity.
In all the sutras and tantras this is said
To be the ultimate fruition.

How can someone like me put into words
All the benefits and virtues of this,
When the Victorious One with his vajra tongue
Cannot completely elucidate them all, even if he speaks for an aeon?

The glorious lord, the supreme teacher,
Who gives the teachings on emptiness,
Appears in the form of a human being
Though his mind is truly a buddha.

Without deceit and hypocrisy
Supplicate him from your very heart.
Without needing any other method
You will attain enlightenment in this very life.
This is the manner of the all-embodying jewel
Which is taught in the tantras of the great perfection.
When you have this jewel in the palm of your hand
Do not let it go to waste meaninglessly.

Learning, like the stars in the sky,
Will never come to an end through studies.
What is the use of all the various kinds
Of teachings requested and received?
What is the use of any practice
Which is superior to that of emptiness?

Do not aim at many disciplinary costumes,
Such as carrying a staff, wearing braids and animal skin.
The elephant is already in your house,
Do not go searching for its footprints in the mountains.

Mother, meditate on the essence of mind
As it is taught by the master, the vajra holder.

This is the quintessence of the essence
Of all the eighty-four thousand teachings.
It is the heart substance of a billion
Learned and accomplished ones.
It is the ultimate practice.

This advice from the core of the heart
Of the fallen monk Jamyang Dorje
Is the purest of the purest essence
From the bindu of my life blood.
Therefore keep it in your heart, mother.

These few words of heart advice
Were written in a beautiful countryside,
In the palace of the spacious blue sky
That competes with the splendor of divine realms.

To the devoted Chokyi Nodzom,
My dear and loving mother,
And to all my devoted students
I offer this letter of advice.

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