Archives: Learning

It’s the end of January and the end of my first month of habit change.

What with everything that’s been going on for the last few weeks, I’m actually surprised at how well my meditation practice has been going. I’ve missed a couple of days here and there, and some of the days I did it my mind wouldn’t let me focus, but that’s not a bad record.

What I love about the Headspace app is the way it guides and supports you in achieving what you need to, as well as the way it explains meditation. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few weeks:

Meditation can be a habit like any other

I meditate first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. It’s 15 minutes of my morning that sets me up for the rest of the day. The days I struggle with it are when my routine is disrupted for some reason, like at the weekends.

If I don’t have an alarm set and wake up naturally, I find it harder to settle myself and do a meditation session. I suspect this is because on weekdays my habit trigger is the alarm going off – I know what my first 2 hours of my day looks like and it’s kicked off with the alarm followed by meditation. Perhaps I need to find a different trigger so I don’t lose momentum when I’m not setting an alarm.

It’s OK to think

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that meditation is not about not having thoughts, but rather about noticing those thoughts and bringing your focus back to the breath.

The problem I always used to have with meditation was getting cross with myself for thinking things and losing focus. Now I just recognise that I am thinking and bring my attention back to my breath. This has been particularly useful when I’ve been trying to meditate at times of high emotion and stress.

Anyone can do it

If you’ve ever thought that meditation just isn’t for you, give Headspace a try for free – their Take 10 programme is perfectly formulated to ease you into the process and learn more about yourself and the practice.

You will feel calmer

I used to be a very short-termpered person. It really didn’t take much for my fuse to be exhausted, and I’m not going to pretend that my new-found calmness is due to the last 30 days, but it is thanks to the collective experience of meditation in fits and starts for the last months.

That’s also not to say I’m now a picture of zen or incredibly boring; I still have the same passion and drive, the same energy and enthusiasm I’ve always had, I’ve just learned how to let things that I can’t do anything about slide past me without letting them annoy me or make me angry. And that makes commuting a lot more pleasant.

Give it a go

You’ll have gathered that I’m a fan, and I’d love you to try it. Check out Headspace or any other guided meditation app, or just read up on getting started from someone like Leo Babauta.

In February, I’m going to make sure I’m writing 500 words a day. Read more in tomorrow’s introductory post.

When I started this blog it was about trying to keep on top of things, those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Shakespeare told us about. It was about charting my journey up to and beyond transplant and all the weird emotions and exciting opportunities it brought.

Now, though, I want it to be more than that. Partially because I’m now blessed to have a life that’s much like anyone’s: I have a full-time job making a real difference in people’s lives, I have a loving wife and a beautiful home to come home to every night, I have everything I ever wanted from my extra time in life, bar a few of the more outrageous and/or longer-term goals I came up with beforehand.

So I want this blog to be about more than just me and my journey, but to stay true to the principals under which it began.

This year, I’m going to set out to make Smile Through It a place where you can come for inspiration and education of all kinds. (Except the bad kind of ‘education’ that just made you suddenly wonder if you want to come back here at all, I won’t be doing any of that stuff.)

I want this blog to become a place where you can discover and share stories of living life in the most honest way possible. That doesn’t mean people going on crazy adventures: an honest life is simply about living authentically to yourself. And if that’s a little too ‘new age hippy’ for you, think of it like this: happiness comes from living the life that fits you, nothing more.

This, then, will be a period of adjustment for me as I work out how best to make all of this happen, but it will involve lots more storytelling (because I’ve not done nearly enough of that on here in recent months), it will involve a lot more of other people’s stories, and it will hopefully involve more than just reading.

I’d love to hear from you to know what you get out of this site and what you’d like to get from it. What posts really inspire you and make you want to do things, what bores you to tears and never makes you want to come back, and what would you love to see more of from me?

Please get in touch however you’d like: you can email me (or use the contact form on my personal website to be sure of passing spam filters), you can Tweet me, you can even find me on that weird and lonely place they call Google plus (however amazed you may be that it’s still going).

Smile Through It is a philosophy on life that I’ve let slip in recent weeks and months, and it’s time we got back to what mattered. So here’s to a 2015 full of growth and development for me, for this blog and, hopefully, for you, too.

After the emotional overwhelm of 2014, I wanted to try to keep myself on a more even keel this year. I also want to dedicate myself to something that goes a bit deeper than “trying to be better”, so I’m going to take up monthly challenges to start changing my habits and giving myself the space and mindfulness to enjoy life and be grateful for my blessings.

I’m kicking off this month with daily meditation. I’ve been attempting to get into this for the last 18 months and have dipped in and out with varying degress of success. What I have picked up, though, is that it really, really works for me.

I’ve always had quite a temper, a short fuse that’s easily lit and explosions that could be quite uncontrolled. Granted, as I’ve got older I’ve managed to get them under control to the extent that they are usually aimed purely at inanimate objects, but I know they are a trait about me that K likes least.

Reflecting on that, and wanting to be the best husband I can, I set about trying to embrace mindfulness to keep things in check and I was amazed at the results. When I mediated regularly (my longest stint being about 3 weeks, I think), I was instantly calmer and more relaxed about everything. And that feeling stayed with me even when I let things slip.

I read a lot of the teachings of zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who helped me see the impermenance and realtive unimportance of the wide variety of ‘things’ that happen to us in our daily lives. Maintaining a half-smile and letting other people worry about their own days is something that has made my daily commuting through the busiest of London stations so much smoother than it would have been even a year ago.

“Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

If things are going well, then, why do I need meditation to be my first habit change of 2015? Because I can always be better at it.

There is one more important element to it that reflects on my own skills and experience, too: I need a quick win. I’ve tried before to change habits – something that most experts will tell you takes a minimum of 30 days to do – and my best intentions fall by the wayside quickly.

Meditation is something I know I can do, but haven’t maanged to keep it up daily yet. That means through January I will not only see the instant daily benefit (the reward feeling that my brain will definitely need), but also be better able to keep it going.

I’m going to be using Headspace, an app I discovered for guided meditation that draws you into meditation without dumping you in at the deep end and expecting you to sit in the lotus position and float off into trancendental bliss in your first session. It’s simple, practical, and starts with just 10 minutes a day. It also has a huge number of extensions so you don’t end up stuck with the same old 20 minutes of guidance every day.

If you’re interested to join me, get Headspace for free and Tweet me that you’re joining in and how you’re getting on with it.

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

When I first started blogging, back in the dusty days of 2006, I began with a Statement of Intent. At the time, it was designed to remind me of the reasons I started the blog in the first place as well as letting people know what they could expect from me and it.

Over the years my blogs have changed faces many times, but this new facelift is something more. The simplified design and stripped-down visuals serve to remind me of the meandering thoughts and intentions that I let take over here and to keep me sharply, intensely focussed on what this blog is becoming.

You’ll notice the old name, SmileThroughIt ((and I’ve moved all of the archives onto this single site, instead of stripped across two blogs)), is back because rack my brains as I may, I couldn’t think of a better way to sum up the purpose of this site or the ideas I live by.

What is SmileThroughIt? Put simply, it’s a philosophy of life that helped carry me through some of my toughest times. While waiting for my transplant, not knowing if it would come in time, I learned to focus on the good things in life. More than that, I learned that if I could find just one thing every day that made me smile, that day had been worth it.

This site is here to help me make the most of the second chance I’ve been given and if, through that, I can help, inspire or motivate other people, so much the better.

Before the lengthy break in updates, I’d started blogging to please others, to write what I thought people wanted, to ‘optimise’ my posts. But looking back over my archives, both on here and the original site’s archives, I saw that my best writing and the most effective posts came not from targeting an “audience”, but rather writing something for myself.

Although I hate to admit it, it’s not just my blog that has been through many twists and turns and a distinct loss of focus. Everything that’s happened in this blog has been mirrored in my day-to-day life and it bothers me that I feel like I’m letting this second chance slip past me without grasping every second.

This blog will reflect my change in mood, attitude and approach to my second chance at life and, hopefully, will help guide others through similar changes in their own life.

This story has no planned ending, no final goal, no means by which to measure its success or failure. This blog, like all of us, just is. And what it is comes from what’s inside and the people who read, contribute and support its aims, ideals and author (that’s me) along the steps of its journey.

Come along for the ride.

This week I have been engaged in numerous discussions of the organ donation system in the UK, mostly spurred by my appearance on Channel 4’s 4Thought.tv strand which asked, “Should Organ Donation Be Compulsory”.

Over the week, the show has featured a variety of views both for and against presumed consent and organ donation as a whole. One of these was Derek House, a Jehovah’s Witness who believes that all organ donation is fundamentally wrong.

While his views raised ire among the transplant community, it struck me that Mr House isn’t the man we need to be targeting. His religious beliefs preclude him from supporting organ donation: we’re not going to change that.

If we want to see the number of organ donors in this country increase, we need to tackle the vast disparity between the 75% of people who say they would be willing to donate their organs ((the oft-quoted figure of 90% is, infact, the people who support the idea of organ donation; 15% of people support the idea, but say they wouldn’t donate their organs)) and the 26% who have signed the organ donor register. Those people don’t need convincing of the merits, they just need to be drawn out of their apathy.

Focusing our energies on a battle we’re already winning seems like a better use of resources than fighting one we will inevitably lose.

The same goes for any kind of battle you may be facing as an artist or entrepreneur: look at the fights you face and work out which ones are worth your energy.

Picking your battles is not the same as taking the path of least resistance. It’s about using your focus and energies on strategies and tactics that will make a difference, not banging your head against a brick wall.

In yesterday’s post I talked about how mistakes are now open for public consumption thanks to the permanence of the internet.

What does that mean for innovation and leadership?

It means you have to fail bigger. Fail better. Fail publicly.

Too many people see the increased visibility of failure as a reason to go all out to avoid cock-ups.

Au contraire. The bigger, the more significant, the more noticed the fail, the quicker, the stronger, the more good-humoured the recovery, the deeper, the longer, the more profound the admiration will be.

Set an example. Tell the world it’s OK to fail before you get things right.

Such was the inspiration factor from the Gary Vaynerchuk video I posted yesterday, I’ve got two more posts looking at some of his ideas.

Today, I want to pick up on his phrase, “everything is exposed”.

Using the ‘net as extensively as we do, it’s so important to remember that every single act of ours in the public arena, from social networking sites to job sites to personal blogs, is being followed, copied and archived around the world.

We no longer live in a world where mistakes simply disappear, confined to the annals of history and remembered only by those most directly involved. Now, if you make a mistake, it’s everywhere.

Facing the reality of the permanence of our online interactions is key to making sure we always consider carefully what we’re saying, doing and thinking out loud. Posting a Tweet, updating your Facebook, uploading some photos? Think. Look before you leap.

Do you want your great, great, great, great grandkids to see what you’re about to put out there? Because they will.

Do you really “gotta fake it ’til you make it”?

The truth is, when you put on the façade of confidence to give yourself a boost, you’re not actually faking it at all – you’re accessing your inner confidence and bringing it to the front.

Everyone has confidence. Each of us have something in our lives – even if it’s just one, tiny thing – that we know in our heart of hearts we’re good at. Something that gives us that often-elusive state of flow whenever we are engaged in it.

The process of faking it is, in fact, a process of accessing our inner confidence through physical and emotional triggers that put our minds and bodies into the feeling of that flow state.

The next time you’re finding yourself in a situation where you’re trying to posture yourself into a major confidence boost, remember: you are not faking it, you’re simply accessing and living your inner confidence. Where that confidence takes you is entirely up to you.

Thanks to the great Chris Richards for helping me realise all of this.

You’ll remember that my Lent resolution this year to give up fear, inspired by my Twitter-buddy Jeanne who consistently inspires people with her utter lack of fear and her stubborn unwillingness to give in to it at any point.

Giving up on fear is at once much, much harder than you may first think and much, much easier, too.

–The Easy–

It’s easy to ‘say’ you’re giving up fear. It’s definitely a plus to be able to get the words out and feel emboldened by the commitment you’ve just made.

It’s easy to stop yourself fearing the everyday kind of things that used to bug you – it’s a conscious choice whether you’re going to allow yourself to worry about how you pay the bills or if your energy is better focused on how to generate the income that’s going to cover them. A fact that’s especially true for freelancers like me without a steady paycheque ((or paycheck for our American cousins)).

It’s easy to take advantage of the initial freedom that giving up fear brings you. It’s easy to float yourself away from the day-to-day issues and focus on your fear-free living–for the first week or so.

–The Hard–

It’s hard to genuinely beat your brain into submission when it tries to stir the old fear about those everyday items you shrugged off in the euphoria of your first few days or weeks. The rumbling in your subconscious feels like it’s never going to go away.

It’s hard to tackle the “new-found” fears that crop up without your being able to plan for them. You land a new job and you’re suddenly worried about being “the new guy”. How will you fit in, will you get on with your co-workers, will you be good at your job? All these things that life throws at us are wont to prompt a significant rise in our fear levels that isn’t easy to ignore.

It’s hard knowing that this new way of life is forever. There’s really no point in giving up fear for a few weeks or a month ((or 40 days)) – it’s a lifetime commitment. And that is scary.

–But, But, But–

When you’re successful, when you manage to rise above your fear, to master it, control it and stop it from being the boss of you, it becomes very, very difficult to revert back to your old ways. The idea of being scared becomes almost laughable when you think of your old fear of making that phone call, or attending that networking event on your tod or of introducing yourself to the hottie across the room who’s been making eyes at you all night.

When you truly commit to stepping up to the plate and facing Fear’s most crippling fastball, you can do so in the knowledge that you’ll swing for it, you’ll hit it and you’ll be running for home before you can say “I’m scared of getting my kit dirty”.

A large part of our lives is taken up looking for new and exciting things to do; peering into the future to see what we could be doing six months, a year, five years from now.

I see things differently. Perhaps because of the perspective two-and-a-half years on the transplant list gave me – knowing little else from sitting, getting worse and waiting for (a) death or (b) a second chance – I don’t see the point in looking that far into the future. Six months is about my limit.

Even now, my fiancée is being incredibly patient as we try to plan our wedding for July 2012. I’m just about grasping it, but it’s a long way off.

I prefer to live a life that focuses not necessarily on the cliché-heavy ‘here-and-now’, but rather on the soon-to-be. Not focusing on what I dream of down the line, but on the actions – however small – I can take now to take a step closer to those dreams.

As I move forward in my own, personal brave new world, I’m already committing to things, exploring things and taking action to make them happen.

If your life is full of things you’d love to do ‘some day’, be they personal, professional or otherwise, now is the time to take the next step, the next action and set the wheels in motion for whatever it is you most want to pursue.

Just because it’s not laid on a plate, doesn’t mean it’s not there for the taking.