#3 Echo Chambers, Making Waves…

I am trying to understand why I decided to do this sprint of writing daily emails and one of the things that keeps coming up for me is that I like to share ideas that fire me up. You hear a lot about how the internet has divided us into “echo chambers”: groups who get together to amplify and maintain a world view. The toxic echo chambers are the ones that keep on repeating lies, hatred, etc… But there are also positive echo chambers. Whatever you repeat over and over you eventually believe.  I want to be part of positive echo chambers, ones that keep repeating timeless truths in new ways so you have a chance to absorb them and use them in your daily life.

So I am going to keep returning to some basic themes and drive them deeper into my own mind and hopefully do the same for you.

Yesterday I talked about how meditation gives you more space in your mind to allow you to think more clearly. But there is also another thing that meditation does for you. It is a form of recovery that works by giving you contrast. In the classic book “The Power of Full Engagement” subtitled “Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, you hear a lot about  the need for building recovery time into your life.

If you get sucked into go go go go go the you end up in what these guys call “the grey zone”. The grey zone is when you can’t fully concentrate or fully relax.  You are at home but thinking of work. You’re at work but thinking about the news or all sorts of open loops in your life.

I was listening to a podcast last night while working on some reed plates and the topic was using AI to grow your business. I ended up getting more interested in some of the off the cuff remarks and digressions than I was in the main topic.

One of the moderators of the discussion described his business as ” a marathon of sprints”. That idea really spoke to me for a number of reasons. Brian Johnson talks about managing your energy and focus by “making waves”. Full effort (a sprint) followed by taking a complete break. To me the idea of “a marathon of sprints” means developing a way of living  that has real contrast throughout your day and bakes in deep recovery at frequent intervals throughout your day.

It does not need to take a lot of time. Try taking a long deep luxurious in breath while you read this sentence. Now a slightly longer out breath. Try it again without reading any more at this point (go ahead, I will wait for you)…

That, my friend, is a minaiture moment of recovery. Extend it to a couple of minutes and you can really feel a huge shift in your state of mind and body.

Contrast that with jumping on to msnbc or huff post just to take a break by changing the channel and draw your own conclusions. The breathing exercise does not load your mind up with open loop high drama stories that linger on when you try to go back to whatever it was you were doing.

Make waves – full engagement is only possible when you have enough of it’s opposite in your life.

Thanks for reading this!