Morning Routine: A Way of Being More Alive?

Playing outside in any season in Mother Nature including biking is definitely preferable to being inside, but for those of us who live in the cold, gray godforsaken corners of the continent, an inside programmable bike is accessible every day, no matter where you are, and no matter what the weather is. For years, I have coupled my bike with an Air Desk (https://airdesks.com/products/laptop/laptop-desk/) which looks like a clear Lexan music stand on which I can read a physical book or an iPad, make notes on in my notebooks or physical books, or occasionally use a laptop.

From years of self-experimentation, I find that I get enormous creative acceleration during the actual workout (not just after) and I love to do scholarship, preparation, or just creative note taking while I am working out. (There are one or two points in the uphill workout that I have to put everything down and concentrate). For over 10 years, I used a heart rate monitor and kept a log. No longer.  I got bored with the humdrum “life logging” of the quantified self—I guess I want my focus on the play, not the work. Although someone sent me an Oura ring recently and I’m about to test that out.  My cardio training is followed by some simple free weights or some simple stretching, depending upon the day. I love high kurtosis—wide variability in all things—and especially in my fitness practice

Breathwork. These days, my metabolic / weights is almost always followed by “breathwork”. What? Breathwork? (Maybe we ought to term it breathplay based upon my comments in the second paragraph). Breath, just like your heartbeat, is part of your autonomic nervous system, right? You don’t usually actually control it. It just happens.  You know you are breathing the same way you know your heart beats, the same way you know you have thoughts. However, if you direct your consciousness towards it, you can experience it, or maybe even adjust it.

A baby is born and the first thing it does is breathe. And when breath leaves the body, life is over. It’s the most basic thing. No breath, no life. Breathe in-breathe out. Yet it is one of our body’s systems that we can most easily direct our consciousness to influence for spirited performance. In fact, the English word spirit is derived from the Latin spiritus “breath.” Scientific research suggests most of us living in the developed world use 10-20% of our breath capacity daily.

Following my curiosity about Wim Hof, I connected with Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece who were interested in the same learning and attended one of their very early XPT weekends (www.xptlife.com). The high points of that weekend for me were the breathwork, using heavy weights under water during breath hold, and the hot-cold work we did by cycling into a hot sauna followed by a 3-minute immersion in a bath of ice and water, and then repeat. I love proficiency with heavy weights under water and add those to my routine if I am at a location or facility where I can do that. Plus, I get enormous endorphin fuel from rapidly “changing my state” using the cold.

During the XPT weekend, I had the chance to meet and spend some time with Brian MacKenzie (https://www.brianmackenzie.com/bio) who masterfully led that weekend's breathwork. Where Wim Hof goes for moving large volumes of air using mouth breathing, a lot of science and thousands of years of yoga practitioners would urge nasal-only breathing.

Brian MacKenzie persuaded me that nasal-only breathing has many benefits such as nitric oxide moving through your nose sending signals to your brain—and I have adopted that technique. Here’s a short little piece on nasal breathing by Brian https://powerspeedendurance.com/the-training-benefits-of-nasal-breathing/.

I very intentionally add to my understanding about the science and efficacy of breathwork. A little less than a year after the XPT weekend, I attended a daylong practical session created and curated by my friend Sarah Tacy Tangredi (www.sarahtangredi.com) that was led by Brian MacKenzie. That took me to a higher level of understanding of the science and hands-on application and from that I have developed my own workout sets of breathwork that are particularly useful to me.

Hot / Cold Practice. I have been experimenting (really just playing around) with hot and cold therapy on my own, including occasionally taking cryotherapy chamber sessions at -200f at Rejuven-Ice just north of Boston (https://www.masscryo.com/),  and have now installed an inexpensive stand-alone sauna at home. After a quick bit of research, I spoke directly to the manufacturer and became confident it was worth a try. As happens in our currently confused market channels, they told me I could order it directly from them, or pay less and have it delivered for free directly from Costco! It’s a four person cedar barrel shaped sauna made by Almost Heaven (https://almostheaven.com/), it comes in a kit and was assembled in 2 man days (plus the electrical line which requires 220V). I am thoroughly entertained, it cracks me up really, and surprised by how much

Kareen and I like it, and how much I use it—daily after meditation if home—frequently followed by some kind of cold plunge (pool or Atlantic), or just a cold shower.

All-in, I invest roughly two hours a day in my morning routine, sometimes more on the weekends in a pool. Naturally, some days headed for an early flight, I don’t have the time in the morning, so I might only do breathwork and TM. Or I might vary it up and do my cardio in the afternoon. I usually work out every day knowing my wide-ranging travel schedule suggests I will get a day off once in a while.

Many high-performing Entrepreneur Owner-Managers (and even some smarty pants intellectual dark web academic types) have found that deliberate stress / recovery physical play helps us change our metabolic and psychological state—and make room for, as my friend Barb Dugan puts it, experiencing our freedom. (http://www.recoveryservices-exeternh.life/blog/). I say it increases our capacity for lightheartedness and play. It’s worth doing for its own sake. Socioeconomic, gender, and racial differences dissipate. I just can’t tell you how much fun I have with it, and how much I look forward to it every day. And here’s a secret positive unintended consequence: it also increases the productivity of our work.

Technology—especially connected technology—has allowed us to do passive work anywhere / anytime and with astonishingly clever devices that rob us of our attention, particularly our attention to the natural world around us. (Quick: what’s the phase of the moon on the day you’re reading this?). And it turns out the conventions of our mass popular culture today are overwhelmingly passive. Sit on the coach, watch Game of Thrones re-runs, and pass the Cheetos. Why are we as a mass pop culture feeling so much craving for self-medicating—for crowding out our mind (whatever your medication of choice is)? I wonder if it’s related to living in a world we were not biologically evolved for.

An active morning routine activates. It illuminates another level of life, a way of being more alive. I don’t know, but maybe it’s a step towards the life we are biologically evolved for.

Of Note: Interestingly, in my professional experience over the last thirty years, I find that many or even most high performing EOMs are not skilled at moderation. These are passionate people. It is often their immoderate burning single-mindedness plus Grit that allows them to create sustaining positive legacy and create a fortune from the Enterprise Value they have worked their lives to build. There is a highly researched, well-known decision cost of moderation, since literally every decision is viewed and weighed as if it could be a possible exception or boundary decision in the choice architecture. That is fatiguing and depletes self-regulation (Baumeister, Duckworth, Mischel, et alia). Many EOMs eschew that cost of choice and instead make one binary decision, or yes / no as to a behavioral choice. There may be great clarity and release from going from the dependence of “I am going to try to eat less refined sugar” to the liberty of “I am not a person who ingests refined sugar. Period.” Perhaps it is related to having no cognitive tax on choice architecture, no depletion of self-regulation? Or possibly it’s just another form of Lockean Exclamation or oppositional defiance—which high performing EOMs disproportionately represent. It’s topic for a separate post.

What I Am Reading / Listening To

Contributed by Amanda Telford

There is a reason self-help books have such a big market. Many Entrepreneur Owner-Managers continually strive to learn and grow, and in fact most of us can benefit by continuing to learn about ourselves and our work. That said, it’s hard to know where to start!

Atul Gawande suggests a different approach in his 2011 New Yorker article, Personal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? Instead of the popularized idea of coaching that pervades society today, Gawande takes a very specific and focused look at how even those of us considered experts in our field can benefit from having a coach.  As the caption to an illustration in the article states, “No matter how well-trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.”

One of the most compelling aspects of Gawande’s article is how he combines storytelling and facts. He weaves in the perspectives of coaching from literature, sports, music – literally creating a piece that has something for everyone so no one is left behind in being able to connect with his concepts. Yet it’s his own story as a surgeon that drew me in from the first page.  With a sentence like, “Or you can just grab whatever part of the appendix is visible and pull really hard,” how can you not want to see how the story ends?  And if Gawande can make his point (and he does) that even surgeons can benefit from outside eyes and ears, as Itzhak Perlman describes coaching, to help make them aware of “where you’re falling short,” it’s hard not to feel “Couldn’t I benefit too”?  Gawande’s writing presents a well-thought out and researched article that gives meat to the argument that coaching is a valuable tool in personal growth.

Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote

“I highly suggest taking a gap year before hibernation.”

-Ken Grass, former President of Astroseal, on his experience after having a capital gain transaction.

In the air headed east from this year’s Abundance 360® throng in Los Angeles, I am reminded of James Carse’s classic work Finite or Infinite Games which colorfully defines two kinds of games in decision theory. One can be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play. Members of the Abundance 360® Entrepreneur Owner’s Group arrived from 32 countries to continue our energy creating infinite play for the seventh year out of the twenty-five-year commitment.

Peter Diamandis, the creator of the Abundance 360® community continues as its curator for now. The conference has been acquired by Singularity University, so interesting changes are likely forthcoming. The framing context for the dialogue has been and is the notion that faster, cheaper, connected computing power is resulting in unexpected convergent consequences in eight domains: Networks & Sensors, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality, Robotics, 3D Printing, Energy, and Health Care. Here’s an observation or two describing near term (2019-2024) breakthroughs on each.