Feeling Strategic
- Dad wisdom: Strategic feeling > Strategic thinking
- Focus: It can’t all be a grinder
- Fitness: Fix your RDL
- A book, a quote, a dad joke
Dad Wisdom: Strategic feeling > Strategic thinking
I am fascinated by how unserious we are about emotions as a culture. We acknowledge them, certainly. Yet, any time we sit down to do real strategic or planning work, we seem to forget that emotions exist. Does this create problems? Whoo boy…
On our most recent call, we discussed designing our year through the lens of emotion because, if we don’t know what we’re looking for, we may never find it. We focused on two vectors that we collectively value: calm and confidence. Here’s how it shook out:
The question we asked was this: how will you plan your days around these emotions — so that you can access your desired state in your most important moments?
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Focus: It can’t all be a grinder
Ultimately, our ability to perform at consistently high levels means that we are spending a lot of time feeling positive emotions. Gratitude. Progress. Connectedness. A sense of control. That’s what humans need and pretending otherwise is simply not productive. This doesn’t all exist in every performance scenario, of course. Sometimes, you just have to gut things out. However, that’s different from gutting out absolutely every moment of your life. Thriving is off the table with this level of chronic stress. Our ability to do hard things stands on the shoulders of a whole lot of easy things.
When in doubt, start with sleep and other forms of quiet rest. These easy things elevate all other performance.
Fitness: Breathing for Performance with Michael Watts
In this episode, Coach Michael Watts explains functional breathing and its impact on recovery and overall athletic performance. We get into what inspired Mike to get into coaching, some of his thoughts around how breathing and movement can be incorporated into parenting practices or everyday experiences, get an understanding of how our body's systems operate in stressful situations, and get a demonstration from Mike in using functional breath work to recenter, relax, increase focus, or ratchet up performance.
Quote
“And in maintaining such constancy, microbes are crucial. They affect the storage of fat. They help to replenish the linings of the gut and skin, replacing damaged and dying cells with new ones. They ensure the sanctity of the blood-brain barrier-a web of tightly packed cells that lets nutrients and small molecules pass from blood to brain, but bars the way to larger substances and living cells. They even influence the relentless remodelling of skeletons, in which fresh bone is deposited and old stuff is reabsorbed.”
— Ed Yong
Dad joke
What's the best way to watch a fly fishing tournament? Live stream.
