Learn Life Skills for Extreme Situations

The sun was blazing, the terrain barren and unforgiving, and the instructors were working us hard.  The extra twenty pounds or so of gear we were wearing just added to the fatigue – a Kevlar vest, knee and elbow pads, sometimes a helmet, a pistol strapped to the right thigh and an American M4 or Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle in hand…

                            At the firing range, carrying an M4 assault rifle

That was last week for me.  I was privileged to attend an elite training course down in the deserts of the south-western US, a course taught by special forces veterans and frequently attended by everyone from members of such elite organizations as the British SAS or Canada’s JTF2, to ordinary people facing deployment to the world’s most dangerous trouble spots. 

(The trip also allowed me to explore some issues of leadership, teamwork and corporate culture with these people.  Did you know that what we consider the most advanced leadership and corporate culture solutions in the corporate world today were actually developed by special forces units decades ago?)

The “Yang” Side of Resilience Training

You may have noticed I like to divide resilience training into its “Yin” and “Yang” aspects.  And I tend to talk more about the Yin or “soft” aspects, such as meditation, mindfulness, Qi Gong, Yoga, nutrition, relationship skills and the like. 

However, we should never forget the other side of the coin – those Yang skills that will keep us and our loved ones alive when the unthinkable happens.

In North America we live the pleasant delusion that we personally will never face an extreme situation.  That situation could be street crime, a home invasion, a natural disaster or something as commonplace as a car accident out in the country, where you’re on the scene and the nearest first responder is still twenty minutes away.  Meanwhile, the accident victim on the ground in front of you may only have two minutes to live, not twenty, unless you personally take some very specific and simple actions.  Do you have the skill sets required?  Do you have the right medical kit with you?  What if that victim were your spouse or child? 

  

                            Rescuing a man down, moving him and applying 

                                          a tourniquet to save his life

Our delusion is the ingrained belief that we don’t need those skills because the paramedics will save the day.  Likewise we assume we don’t need to know how to carry an unconscious person out of a burning building or know how to defend ourselves because the firemen and police will do it for us. 

Yet the stark reality is that when the s**t hits the fan, you will more than likely be on your own for the first five to fifteen minutes of any serious event.  And by then, it’s very often too late.

The Value of Acquiring Extreme Skills

One of the most challenging features of last week’s course was that you never knew what challenge the instructors would throw at you next!  This is when you find yourself worrying about whether you’ll screw it up and look like an idiot, whether you’ll have the energy, and whether the back muscle you pulled yesterday will hold out…

                            Participant learns how to escape when tied up

                                          with rope, hand-cuffs, etc. 

And then you realize that you just need to surrender.  You can either continue wasting energy worrying about what comes next, or you can surrender, live in the present and mentally let it all go.  So one of the greatest benefits of the kind of training that tests your physical and mental limits is that you learn a lot about yourself. 

Some of the other specific benefits of learning some of life’s extreme skills are:

• Improving your personal resilience
• Passing on these skills to those around you
• Boosting your self-esteem
• Becoming a greater asset to your family, workplace and community
• Acquiring the confidence to face extreme situations
• Learning how to function effectively under extreme stress

                                          Clearing rooms and rescuing hostages (hint: 
                                          the way you see it done on TV shows will get
                                          you killed)

So although the Yin side of resilience training (improving your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health) is absolutely vital, it’s important not to forget the Yang side of resilience training, where we acquire the personal power and the critical skills to handle life’s most extreme situations. 

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

The Educational System and Personal Resilience

Apropos of our educational system, the following is an excerpt from my Resilience 2010 Special Report:

Sparta was certainly a warrior culture by any definition, and those blind to its many virtues are quick to condemn it as “militaristic” or “violent”. In reality, whatever its flaws, Sparta was based on high ideals of honor and justice. 

The Greek historian Xenophon writes about an incident he witnessed personally:

An elderly man was trying to find a place to sit and observe the Olympic Games. As he went to each section, all the other Greeks laughed as he tried to make his way through. Some ignored him. Upon entering the Spartan section all the Spartans stood and offered the elderly man their seats. Suddenly the entire stadium applauded. All the Greeks knew what was the right thing to do, but the Spartans were the only ones who did it.

Sparta was widely known for its educational system for both boys and girls. The system was very demanding physically and produced people who were exceptionally tough and resilient in every way.

The purpose of this toughness and resilience, though, was to inculcate a strong sense of self-identity, values and a virtuous character, as Xenophon’s story illustrates.

Without a strong sense of who you are, of what you stand for and the inner strength to act on those values, you have no real chance of achieving real happiness or a fulfilling life.

It Has Always Puzzled Me...

As somebody who's been through the modern Western educational system from one end to the other - Kindergarten to PhD - I can tell you it's always left me totally perplexed.  It claims to want to achieve certain laudable goals and then does exactly the opposite of what it says.

That's why I have a lot of time for anyone who's willing to stand up and tell the truth about the educational system - that it's failed us and it's failing our children even more.  And that's why I'd encourage you to go and see the new movie, Waiting for Superman - and no, it's not about the guy in the blue tights and red cape ;-)

Here's one of the trailers:



I certainly plan to see it myself, because my personal commitment is to bring the cultivation of personal resilience back into the educational system, so that our schools can once again start guiding the young toward lives full of health, self-confidence, intellectual honesty and diligence, self-fulfillment and superior leadership.  

And the educational system that does this will not be the same one that:

•  Repeatedly gave my then grade 8 daughter pictures to color as a regular homework assignment in French class.  How the f#%! do you color "in French"??!!
•   Developed an entire high school curriculum for languages like German and Latin where you didn't even hear about key elements of grammar essential to make a basic sentence during the entire first year
• Drove lots of kids away from their natural fascination with science by boring them to death with tedious equations about stuff that didn't interest them
• Had me going to the dean of a graduate school to protest a final exam I considered so insultingly simple as to be a joke (masters level students getting 10 identification questions to be answered with no more than one sentence each??).  Imagine my shock when the dean informed me that several students had failed!  

Education has long since degenerated into the (largely) state-run babysitting service.  Isn't it time to do something about an educational system that's manifestly inferior in several important ways to those of many ancient cultures?  

Be sure to go see this movie!!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

Overwhelmed By Everything (OBE)? Here's Your Exit Strategy...

Turn up your speakers or read the text version below:

In the world of personal resilience, one of the toughest nuts to crack is beating the OBE syndrome.  Yes, when you're chronically overwhelmed by everything, you simply won't see the EXIT signs that are right in front of you.

It's surprising how many people can take positive action to take back their health, their fitness and other areas of their lives, while still remaining run off their feet from day to day.  In fact, lots of high performers in all walks of life are very unhappy workaholics. 


So listen: if you need to get a grip on your time and energy, there is hope.  Just follow these infallible steps to building your exit strategy:

1. Drill this Into Your Skull:

You cannot beat overwhelm by doing more stuff.  You can only beat overwhelm by a) doing less, and b) doing what you do more efficiently.  

2. Identify Your Key Results:

What results are you actually responsible for?  In every area of your life, what are the top 1-3 results that you are primarily on the hook for?  What does your employer really need you to do?  If you're not quite sure - and that's distressingly common in the business world - go and ask!  What do your spouse and kids need most from you?  What 1-3 results do you need to see with respect to your health?  Write all this down.  Then distill it down further until you have a list of not more than 5 things that, if you were to accomplish them in the next 12 months, would give you an outstanding life.

3. Identify the Activities that Will Produce Those Results:

For each of those key results, identify the 1-3 activities that will contribute most to bringing them into reality.  Now you know what to focus on.  Of course, you should always get a sanity check from several people whose judgment you trust.  But once you're sure what they are, you're light years ahead of 99% of the population.

4. Identify the Activities that Contribute Least to Your Key Results:

What are the time wasters in your life?  Does your job have you stuck in endless meetings that go nowhere and contribute little to the results your employer really needs?  Then you need to stop attending (yes, there are creative strategies for handling this, but there's no time to go over them here ;-).  Are you buried under a mountain of admin you hate and, for that matter, aren't very good at?  Do constant interruptions plague you?  Once you know what's in the way, you can take measures to eliminate these time-sucking energy vampires.  This alone could save you up to 3 hours per day!

5. Block Off Time to Work on Your Top Priorities:

Open an Excel spreadsheet.  Don't worry if you're new to Excel; you'll figure it out.  Personally, I suck at Excel, but I won't live without my weekly spreadsheet.  So label the sheet Monday to Friday across the top and put the hours of your day down the side.  Now block off the time you need.


Let me give you a hint.  Do NOT start by scheduling everything else in your week first.  If you do that, you may find there ARE NO blocks of time left.  You take the blocks you want FIRST.  And make them early in the morning, when you're fresh and motivated.  Yes, you can schedule other blocks later in the day if you wish, but stake out the early morning.  And if anyone or anything gets in your way, threaten them with grievous bodily harm until them back off.  Okay, just kidding.  But unless you FORCE everything else out of your way, you won't get the time you need.


Why early morning?  Easy.  You're most likely at your most productive.  And you're setting yourself up to finish your major priority for the day by 10am.  Try this and you'll see.  If you can get the really important stuff done before lunch, you'll feel absolutely wonderful!  For the first time in ages you'll feel you've taken back control of your life.  

6. Review Your Priorities Every Night:

If I were to wake you out of a dead sleep at 2am and ask you exactly what you'll be working on in the morning and what time you're going to start, you should be able to blurt it out even before your eyes open!  Clarity is the key.  You must be totally clear on what you're about to do.  This eliminates the wasted time that comes from indecision and guess-work, and it also allows your subconscious to work on the issues while you're asleep.  

7. Eliminate Interruptions and Force Your Schedule on Others:

Yes, it sounds brutal and egotistical, but I can tell you now that unless you build the schedule that works for you and stick to it, other people will "invent" your schedule for you and you'll be miserable and frustrated because, despite the flurry of useless activity they force on you, you won't get a thing done!  


Refuse phone calls during your key result working time.  Refuse meetings.  Block off the time in your Outlook or Google calendar at work and at home.  As for that time-sucking monster called email, don't you dare check it more than 3 times per day, and never before your first block of working time.  

8. Get Rid of Low Value Tasks:

When you find yourself spending hours doing work you hate or work you're not good at on a repeated basis, that task is a prime candidate for elimination.  You've got to get it off your plate.  Your choices are a) delegate it to someone else, b) outsource it to someone else, or c) just ignore it until it goes away (yeah, it's shocking how much of the work in most enterprises is so useless that, if it's not done, there are no consequences!).  


So take this blueprint as your exit strategy and start using it right away - it'll make a huge, positive difference in your life.  And if you want to know more, if you want more help, come to this Wednesday night's teleclass to learn even more.   Reserve your spot right here:

http://www.innercircleportal.com/Home_Page.html

I hope to talk to you then!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Warrior Wisdom from the Klingon Empire - Part 1

We engage in all kinds of practices to improve our resilience: we do Yoga, Qi Gong, running, Pilates, meditation, eat good food, and much more.


Yet, in the end, you can never be more resilient than your own personal foundation is. What is that foundation? It's your CHARACTER! And character is composed of the fundamental virtues
of courage, honor, self-discipline, self-sacrifice, loyalty, trustworthiness, duty, gratitude and much more.


You can pump iron all day long and become the strongest person on the planet, but if you don't have that solid foundation of character, you'll forever remain a pathetic weakling and an idiot.




TODAY: WISDOM FROM AN UNUSUAL SOURCE


Today's Resilience Tip comes from one of Hollywood's most highly developed fictional cultures - Star Trek's Klingon Empire. In the video below, veteran classical actor Christopher Plummer
reprises his role as Klingon General Chang, a role he originally played in the 1991 movie "Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country".

As Chang welcomes young Klingon officers to the elite command academy, he says, "Past achievements mean nothing here. I don't care about the names of your fathers or your family's lineage."


Of course he doesn't - warriors have a very keen sense of reality. They won't abide the falsity and political correctness that all cowards readily hide behind. Chang cares only for what's real.
And only concrete RESULTS are real.


Without this dedication to reality, to the TRUTH of things, you can never become resilient.


Then he goes on to add, "What I do care about is your breaking point, how you conduct yourselves in battle..."


It's only when you are taken to your breaking point that you can discover your character. You can lie to yourself about it until then. But the breaking point always reveals the truth.


That's why all true athletic training, military training, and definitely all true SPIRITUAL training takes you to your breaking point. It's the only way to find out what you're really made of.


Don't take my word for it. Here's General Chang himself to talk to you:


http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ValiantClan#p/u/52/4PSIzeItOjk


If you want to become a resilient person, you need to take all this to heart!



KapLa!


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger


Warrior Coaching International - transforming


your mind, body and spirit into SOLID STEEL...


...wrapped in cotton ;-)

Resilience Tip: The Immutable Truth...

Do you want to become resilient?  Do you want to live up to your true potential as a human being?  Are you ready to take life by the throat and suck out all its marrow, as Thoreau put it?

Then give up the idea it's going to be easy or comfortable.  Give up looking for ease and pleasure and start looking for challenge.  Teach yourself to revel in challenges and difficulties, spend your time devising tests for yourself and thinking of ways to make yourself tougher.  

Confucius said, "The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor can the human being be perfected without trials."  This principle is immutable.  

"No one ever became holy being coddled in his mother's arms," said the Eastern Christian sages. 

You have to know fatigue, exhaustion and even failure if you want to become a "real person".  Failure, by the way, is not defeat.  Defeat only occurs when you give up!  The person who falls and yet never gives up is a true warrior.

We can't boast about our civilization until we're worthy of it.  In ancient Greece it was said that being born in Sparta doesn't make you a real Spartan.  In ancient Rome they said that being born Italian did not make you a Roman.  These names were to be won by sweat and blood.  


Need inspiration?  Try these:


http://bit.ly/5tNZ2O


http://bit.ly/arKsfK


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Fitness and the Fallacy of Overtraining

Hi all,

I've spent a good deal of effort emphasizing the fact that you need to maintain a baseline level of physical fitness if you want to enjoy:

- Superior health (since health depends partly on fitness)
- Peak performance (since energy level and focus depend on it to)
- Self-confidence (since fitness goes a long way towards providing that)

As you know from experience, everybody's stiff and sore after starting a new exercise program or even a single new exercise. I know, for example, that if I go a week without doing any squats, I'll pay for it when I start up again.

Then there are the inevitable minor aches and pains of training. Yes, they're inevitable and no, they're not going to go away. On the other hand, they're a testimony to the fact you're actually doing something!

Unfortunately, though, the first thing that seems to pass through our minds when we feel a twinge here or an ache there is, "Oh, I must be over-training. I should take a few days off!"

Indeed, the myth of overtraining has been so drilled into us that it's become part of our mentality. Why's it a myth? Only because most of the people who think they're overtraining are NOWHERE NEAR overtraining and probably haven't overtrained a single day in the last twenty years.

Now don't get me wrong; real overtraining DOES exist. You'll find it among professional body builders, for example, who have actually damaged their muscles and created large amounts of scar tissue in the process. You'll find distance runners who have damaged knees and shins through repetitively pounding the pavement. But all this is much different from the minor aches and pains of ordinary training.

You see, the vast majority of people UNDER-TRAIN. They may only do 2 or 3 days a week, they don't push themselves or they're none too regular about what they do.

If you want your fitness program to give you the results I mentioned above - superior health, peak performance and enhanced self-confidence - then you absolutely need to train seriously at least 3 times a week and do a lighter workout at least twice a week. Anything less won't get you anywhere. In a future article I'll talk more about WHY this is. For now, though, I'll simply ask you to trust me on this one.

Remember that, if you're serious about becoming a more RESILIENT person, you need to train the BIG 3 - strength, flexibility and endurance - in a balanced way. This means thinking of overall health and fitness as you train, and not just focusing on your immediate goal of toning your derriere, building your biceps or running the 10K in X number of minutes.

Of course, if you have any kind of pre-existing injury or medical condition, you need to take that into account. But if not, your fears of "overtraining" are probably unfounded. And when you stop undertraining, you'll discover a whole new level of fitness (and therefore health, performance and confidence) that can be yours.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Peak Performance Training: Step Three to Personal Power

Welcome to the third in our 5-part series on building your Personal Power and taking back control of your life.

By now you’ve understood that Personal Power is just a new word for an age-old concept, a concept that the ancient world’s best schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts were well aware of. Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change your life and yourself at will. My guess is that you don’t know a lot of people who fit that description, but you’d sure like to become one of them!

This time, we’re continuing with your mindset. If you want Personal Power, you’ll definitely need to get serious about what’s going on within, about the thoughts you entertain and the attitudes you’ve allowed to rule your life.

Authentic Ancient Traditions – i.e., the ancient world’s top schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts – realized we are all very deeply conditioned by the culture we grow up in and by the events that have taken place in our lives, especially when we were young.

They realized too that if you don’t deal with all this stuff and “take the garbage out” you’ll always be:

- A slave to the emotional traumas of your past
- Wasting energy by subconsciously trying to prop up your vision of the world and your pet opinions and attitudes
- Shackled by your fears, doubts and self-limiting beliefs
- Recreating the same negative situations in your life because you live in a puddle of negative emotions you don’t even see.

Step One: Arm Yourself with the Best Weapons

I highly recommend to all my clients that they learn and start using either the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Be Set Free Fast (BSFF). These are two different and equally effective energy psychology methods that can almost instantly eliminate any fear, doubt or self-limiting belief. These tools are easy to learn, quick to use on yourself and you must have one. You can use it to blunt any attack by even your most serious mindset demons.

Step Two: Find Out What’s Really Going On Inside

For this step, you’ll need to track your negative emotions for one week. Every time you find yourself dwelling on something negative, just jot it down on a piece of paper. Why should you bother?

Simple. Most people think of themselves as nice, fun-loving and positive. In reality, that’s just the way they want to appear to others. However, if they were to take stock of what really goes on between their ears, they’d find a veritable avalanche of negativity.

To accumulate Personal Power effectively, you need to learn a new way of relating to negative emotions. You need to see them as a wake-up call, a signal that when you sense their approach, you’re starting to lose Personal Power. The easiest way to reverse this downward spiral is to turn your attention immediately to something you’re thankful for. Gratitude is the strongest positive emotion and part of cultivating peak performance and Personal Power is realizing you’re surrounded by things to be grateful for.

In other words, you need to start taking responsibility for your own emotional life and decide to be happy, joyous and optimistic. No one else can do that for you.
This means refusing the subtle emotional payoff of negative emotions. There’s a payoff to anger, rage, even fear. That payoff is related to the victim mentality, the mentality that absolves you of all responsibility for the quality of your own life. Needless to say, there ain’t no Personal Power there!

The good news here is that once you begin cultivating your peak performance and Personal Power on an ongoing, consistent basis, you’ll find yourself becoming more and more impervious to other people’s negative emotional energies. And that brings us directly to Step Three…

Step Three: Stop Associating with Negative People

The negative attitudes of people around you can suck your Personal Power, especially at the beginning. So if you’re surrounded by whiners and complainers, it’s time to do something about it. Seek out people who are peak performers, who are strong, positive and definite in their approach to life. You’ll begin to notice significant shifts inside you that come from this.

Following these three steps consistently can literally remake your emotional world within a matter of weeks. And no amount of exercise, no nutritional program and no daily visualizations will magically give you peak performance and Personal Power unless you take back control of your emotional life. So resolve to begin today!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Get your FREE Special Report on the secrets of Personal Power and resilience here:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

Peak Performance Training: Step Two to Personal Power

Welcome to the second in our 5-part series on Peak Performance Training and building your Personal Power to take back control of your life.

Last time, you learned that Personal Power is just a new word for an age-old concept, a concept that the ancient world’s best schools of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts were well aware of. Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change your life and yourself at will. If you think about it, most people you know have never demonstrated this ability and my guess is that you’d like some help too.

This time, we’re continuing with your physical body, since your body is really the key to peak performance training and to control your mind you must work through your body. Last time, working through your body meant leaning proper diet and introducing periodic detoxification cleanses. This time, we take it to the next level.

1. Get that Wet Noodle of a Physique into Shape!

Why would you want to do this and what does getting in shape have to do with Personal Power? Just this:

You’ll feel better physically and have lots more energy
You’ll realize you can generate energy on demand
You’ll find yourself dealing with fewer negative thoughts
Your self-image will improve
You’ll start to dig your way out of the unseen spirals of disease creation that you don’t even recognize (see below)

How Should I Get in Shape?

You can use any exercise program or combination of programs that develops the following in equal proportions:

Strength (of muscles, tendons and ligaments)
Flexibility (of joints and soft tissue)
Endurance (cardio vascular)

Please note that developing Personal Power doesn’t require cultivating extremes of fitness. In fact, the extremes of the tri-athlete, the marathon runner or the body builder can actually cause long term damage and in themselves won’t help you on your quest for Personal Power.

2. Get Internal Exercise

What’s that? Well, internal exercises include such things as Tai Chi, Qi Gong and Yoga. These are systems designed to produce both health and fitness at the same time. And remember, you can get really fit without producing health. We want to build them in together in a balanced way.

The greatest advantage of internal exercise is that it does a much better job than our usual external exercise at overcoming the “7 Deadly Spirals of Disease” – these are downward spirals resulting from lack of proper maintenance that begin around age 30, accelerate after age 50 and produce serious medical challenges. Internal exercises will:

· Take all your joints through their total range of motion
· Cleanse your energy meridians
· Inject potent energy into your bodily tissues
· Cleanse and energize your internal organs, muscles, tendons, ligaments, bone marrow, skeletal structure, blood cells, central nervous system, fasciae, diaphragms and skin

Personally, I believe the top 5 Qi Gong systems are the fastest and easiest way to get these results.

The Personal Power Payoff

If you start working on your body with these internal and external methods, you’ll notice the payoff in terms of health, energy levels, self-confidence and sense of control over your life is one thousand percent.

There’s lots more that goes into peak performance training and accumulating true Personal Power. However, without a strong foundation in your physical body, the rest won’t help you much. So start now so that you can experience the overwhelming joy that comes from realizing you really can change your life!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger
Warrior Coaching International

Watch the video here!

For more information on mastering internal exercise, defeating disease and building true personal power, go to:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/RSHQG/index.php

Peak Performance Training: Step 1 to Personal Power

Feeling lately like your life is just out of control? If you’re getting hit with health challenges, faltering relationships, increased stress, and other things all at once, you’re probably asking yourself how this happened and what you can do about it.

If I were the standard self-appointed guru of modern times, I suppose I’d tell you to visualize what you want, take a particularly magical nutritional product or use some other simplistic solution. However, none of that will change your life unless you first recover what you’ve lost. And what you’ve lost is your Personal Power.

Personal Power is a relatively new term for an age-old concept. There is no true peak performance training without Personal Power. At the most basic level, Personal Power is the measure of your ability to change anything in your life – and especially yourself – at will. Ask yourself how many people you know can do that - you’ll be lucky to name even one. Yet it’s the birthright and the calling of every human being to exercise their free will to become the master of their own life.

After decades of studying the ancient world’s top approaches to spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts, I realized these traditions were able to consistently turn out people who were exactly that – masters of their own lives, graduates of the ultimate peak performance training of their time. And yet in my pastoral work and counseling and coaching it became quickly apparent that most people are exactly the opposite. They are so short of Personal Power that they have been reduced to “coping” with a life they don’t like but can’t change.

“Authentic Ancient Traditions (AATs)” – as I’ve called them in my book, The 5 Pillars of Life – were those ancient traditions capable of proving that they consistently got the transformational results they claimed. Among them are certain schools of Buddhism and Taoism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the direct continuation of the ancient Christian approach), some native American approaches and yet others worldwide.

They all know that Personal Power is the vital foundation for all spiritual development and for true happiness. They also know Personal Power is the fruit of “resilience” – becoming physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually stronger, more effective and more resilient than average. And knowing you can only develop resilience by deliberately facing tough challenges created for that purpose, these traditions put their newbies through some pretty tough stuff. To be real and produce results, peak performance training has to challenge your mental, physical and spiritual capacities.

So how can you start to develop Personal Power today and take back control of your life? Simple. You absolutely must proceed methodically, step by step, and the first step is your body.

The Body and Personal Power: Diet

If you want to develop your Personal Power and take back control of your life, you must get really serious about your body. There are some deeper reasons for this I’ll explain later, but for now here’s what you have to put into place:

1. First, you must stop eating all harmful foods at once. This includes all white flour, white rice, white and brown refined sugars, table salt, trans fats and preferably also meat that’s been subjected to antibiotics and growth hormones.

Once you start to hydrate yourself properly, eat what your body needs and not what it’s craving, you’ll find your energy levels go way up.

2. You need to cleanse your body from accumulated toxins. That means you’ll want to do a week long cleanse at least twice per year (fall and spring are often the best times) and once a week you’ll want to take a day where you go really easy on your digestive system. You see, modern research on mice and ancient research on monks came to the same conclusion: if you reduce the burden on your organism’s digestive system, you’ll quite likely live a lot longer.

3. The Mindset You Need. To make all this work, you need to create a burning desire to do it. And, strangely enough, that’s easier than you think! Here’s what to do:

Take time every day to visualize your body-mind organism as absolutely pure and functioning perfectly
Visualize yourself in perfect health
Visualize yourself with boundless energy

If you do this every day for a month, you’ll find your cravings for junk food will disappear on their own.

Is it easy to build up your Personal Power? No. Is it a magic pill that will fix everything you’ve screwed up over the years so you can continue in the same self-destructive behaviors with no negative consequences? Nope!

If you find it’s tough to take charge of your diet at first, just ask yourself, “How much do I want to live a powerful, deliberate and stress-free life?” “Am I willing to go back to the life I’ve known so far and spend the rest of my days this way?” Accumulating Personal Power and true mind-body transformation aren’t the result of pills, gimmicks or quick fixes. They take commitment and persistence. So if you’ve got what it takes, you’ll want to read this whole 5-part series on Personal Power and discover a whole new approach to what it means to be human.

And there’s a free special report for you on Personal Power, resilience and how to transform your life at:
http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Watch the video here!

Self-Improvement Books? They Won’t Change Your Life, But This Will…

Chances are you’ve already read a ton of self-improvement books and attended lots of seminars and workshops. And did any of them transform your life? Unless you’re part of the 5% who eventually report experiencing significant results at some point in their lives, your answer will probably be a somewhat embarrassed “Ah…no… not yet.”

After three decades researching and practicing the personal development systems of the ancient world and about half that long doing coaching, counseling and pastoral work, I’ve come to realize there are some fundamental reasons why our physical and emotional lives are such a mess and why our attempts to “fix” them seldom work. So if self-improvement books aren’t doing it for you, you’re not alone. There are good reasons why you’ve failed to transform your life so far…

Obstacle One: Your Culture

As someone brought up in a Western (or westernized) culture, you’ve been taught a specific way to relate to your physical body, to your mind and to you own thoughts – you see your body and mind as separate and you identify your Self with your thoughts. And you’ve been thoroughly but subtly indoctrinated into interpreting the world around you according to the defunct paradigm of Newtonian physics – meaning you see the world around you as solid and real, and you give your physical senses a monopoly on providing the information you build your interpretations on.

This particularly dangerous combination gives rise to the unprecedented rates of neurosis you see around you (and perhaps within you) every day.

Obstacle Two: The Mentality of Specialization

Your culture has taught you to assume that every “problem” needs its own solution. If you look at your own life and start to list these problems - the things that aren’t working the way you want - you could easily come up with a list of twenty or thirty such “problems”. Of course, taking the standard “self-improvement” approach is great for the industry because it means you’ll be buying twenty or thirty new titles in a vain attempt to fix your life!

We’ve all imbibed this mentality of “specialization”. In other words, if you want to develop your willpower, fill your wallet or reduce your waistline, you assume the person most qualified to help you is someone who thinks about and writes about nothing else. Unfortunately, this blinds you to the fact that each of those problems is just a symptom and that until the root cause is dealt with, those problems or similar ones will simply recur. Know anyone who’s tried to lose weight several times?

Obstacle Three: You’ve Been Educated!

You’ve come through an educational system that also sees your mind and body as very separate realities. This system is based on the faulty premise of classical liberalism that if you feed people all the facts, they’ll make good choices in life. Alas, if only it were that simple!

In contrast, the best educational systems of the ancient world, from North America to the Mediterranean to the Orient, all focused on the acquisition of character development, values and integrity rather than just facts. And they all understood that the only way to master your mind is through your body, so their educational systems were very physical. And, unlike people who went through these ancient educational systems, you’ve come out mentally and emotionally fragmented and probably predisposed to making dozens of choices per day that make you weaker instead of stronger.

The Solution

The ancient world’s top traditions of spiritual life, health maintenance and martial arts all knew something we’ve long since forgotten: until a person develops physical, mental and emotional resilience, he or she will live a fragmented life of “coping” and low personal effectiveness. This will inevitably translate into feelings of powerlessness and victimization, failed relationships, poor health, financial problems and non-stop stress, among other things.

Fortunately, these traditions – all of which still exist, by the way – had a solution. They taught an approach we would call “holistic” (and they would call “bloody obvious”), an approach that gives those who practice it a deliberate, powerful and stress-free life of continual inner and outer achievement.

All of this rests on their understanding of how your mind-body organism was designed to function and what it’s really capable of – which goes far beyond what you’ve been taught to believe. And, paradoxically, that’s an understanding that modern science, with its recent forays into the study of consciousness, sub-atomic physics and genetics is more and more likely to support.

Acquiring resilience is the basis of personal power, which in turn is the basis of transforming your life. Until you have resilience, you can read all the self-improvement books you want, go to workshops, go to church, go on a diet, go to the gym and more, and none of it will transform your life in any significant way.

You see, all those nifty self-help techniques you learn are like seeds – how well they do depends on the quality of the soil you plant them in. And in this case you are the soil. So if you want to become soil that produces phenomenal results, you’ll need to adopt an entirely different, holistic approach to your life and acquire resilience.

Next time, I’ll talk about what you can do to acquire this resilience for yourself, so that your many of your challenges in life will dissolve on their own.

If you want to get off to a running start, just pop over to this address and grab a copy of my Special Report on resilience for free:

http://www.warriorcoachinginternational.com/specialreport/index.php

- Dr. Symeon Rodger