Thoughts from a Deck Chair

In this episode the Slow Coach discusses how manners are so important to the idler, how to improve them and why they are good for you. In an expirement he has also posted the transcript on www.tortoiseknowsbest.com

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In this, very belated, new podcast, the Slow Coach takes a break and talks about what do to if you find yourself speeding up when you want to be slowing down…

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I said in a recent slowcast that I don’t think London will slow down in my lifetime. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a go!

The people over at Slow Down London have just launched “Living Life in Real Time” Week from today (24th April) until the 4th of April.

I urge you to get involved if you can, or at least check out the website:

www.slowdownlondon.co.uk

Go to the events page to find details of “Living Life in Real Time”.

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When was the last time you sat down and did nothing? I mean absolutely nothing, not watching tv, not reading or playing with your phone, but NOTHING?

Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment, to do that we need to build our concentration levels; something that is being constantly eroded in our modern society. To build our concentration we need to see how little we have at the moment.

So, just sit down and do nothing. See how long it takes before your mind starts racing with things you really SHOULD be doing instead of being sat there, see how long it takes for you to start getting twitchy and notice itches, aches and pains in your body, before you start becoming bored?

The first stage of Yoga (often the only one we do) is about being able to hold you body still for long periods, it is essential for mindfulness that we still the mind, so that we take our attention outside of our heads and start paying attention to what is out there rather than to our thoughts, ideas and feelings.

So, find yourself a nice quite spot and sit still for 5 minutes. See what happens, pay attention to any thoughts and feelings that arise.

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PS, Lotus position is optional! You can just do it slouched in a chair…

One of the key tenants of the Slow Philosophy and one of the most important abilities to cultivate is mindfulness.

Mindfulness comes from Buddhist philosophy but has been picked up in the last few years by modern western psychology, mainly by someone called Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness is attracting increasing interest among western clinical psychologists and psychiatrists as a means of dealing with stress, anxiety, and depressive mood states.

But it is not limited to only helping in those conditions, by becoming mindful you will find you will have more energy, concentration, less worries and concerns (therefore more relaxed) and appear to be able to act more spontaneously and relevantly in a given situation (hence increasing your confidence).

So, what is mindfulness?! It is simply paying attention to what we are doing NOW. Very few of us actually pay conscious attention to what we doing.

Our brains are designed to ‘habituate” repeated experience. What this means is when we do something over and over again, we stop paying conscious attention to it and it becomes an automatic unconscious habit.

It is thought that we do this for survival purposes, our conscious minds have limited attention, so our habituation means we stop paying attention to what doesn’t change (we don’t need to) and only pay attention to something that changes (which can mean danger).

But where it works against us is that much our day is spent doing the same things and having the same stimuli. We stop paying attention and start sleepwalking through life. Our lives begin to appear mundane and we yearn for something new to stimulate us.

If we saw a sunrise once in our lifetime we would consider it one of the most beautiful sights we have ever seen, because we see it almost daily, we stop paying attention, we miss the beautiful richness of “every day” life.

Slowing down is about paying attention to that daily richness, to appreciate the beauty that is all around us.

Luckily we are not stuck with the results of our habituation and can reset the process so that we can live richer and fuller lives a process of ‘mindfulness’, or deliberately paying attention to every day habits.

A lot of mindfulness exercises are in the forms of meditation, where we sit and focus on something (often our breathing) for long periods of time. Although this is very, very powerful it can be quite overwhelming for a beginner and the power of mindfulness is to use it every day life, not to be able to sit for hours on end.

So I have developed a series exercises, experiments and activities to help you bring mindfulness into your every day life and start to build towards a meditative practice.

I will begin those exercises tomorrow and run a short series of them for the next few posts.

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PS, a new slowcast will be up tomorrow.

I like April Fools day, I think it is a very Slow thing to do. Although I couldn’t think of  decent prank to do here!

Obviously, there are always people who take it too far and do something stupid, cruel or mean, but we cannot judge something by the actions of the idiot few (I am not going to go any further with that, it may get a bit heavy!)

SO, why do I like April Fools Day and think it is a Slow thing to do?

Well, firstly, Slow is very much about being aware of the present moment, something I touched on in the post last Friday, and something I am going to go more into in the next few posts. A good way to be mindful of the present moment and the passing of time (rather than letting it all blur into a mess, like so much of us do) therefore slowing time down and allowing us to savour it is to celebrate all the festivals. We do some of them in a BIG way; Christmas, Easter, Halloween etc, but some of the smaller festivals are disappearing. Find all the old festivals and holidays, global and local and celebrate them all!

By getting involved in the festivals and doing something to celebrate them you will have to get other people involved. Slow is about community, it is not a solo pursuit, so find other people to help you, get your friends, family and neighbours involved!

And finally Slow is about fun, it is not a serious pursuit! However humour has some very serious benefits. It is essential, it helps us be more flexible on or behaviour, if we can laugh at a problem we are having it often ceases to be such a big problem. Smiling and laughing releases a cocktail of chemicals in our body that are very good for out physical and mental health.

So, go off and celebrate April Fools day! Do a (nice) prank on someone!

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We finally got the season premier of “The Mentalist” over here in the UK. I know it is about half way through it’s first season in the States and has been getting rave reviews. I have been looking forward to seeing it for some time, mainly, because when I very first got into NLP and coaching I got into mainly to explore human behaviour, and it was about the time Derren Brown started to make a name for himself. I caught his first ever TV show way back in 2000 and was fascinated by what he did, so I started to explore magic and mentalism (which incidentally has several meanings in the UK, not all of then good!) and got somewhat fascinated by it and started doing tricks and techniques on friends, doing cold reading (fake psychic readings) etc. I played with the idea of doing it professionally for awhile, but my coaching and training business was just taking off and developing the level of skill to be able to do that stuff would have taken too much time. But I still keep involved in the field and dabble with it now and again.

So, anyway, how can slowing down make you appear psychic? Well, one the big keys of being a good mentalist is about paying attention, or what NLP people fancyingly call “sensory acuity”, noticing little bits of detail that we usually miss, much like good old Sherlock Holmes: “By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuff - By each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.”

“Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman’s sleeve. In a man, it is perhaps better to take the knee of the trouser.”

By slowing down and becoming more mindful and observant you will start to notice things that other people miss, and start being able to make reasonable assertions based on those observations.

There are lots of techniques to aid building your mindfulness, observation skills and concentration.

One way I like, that is a bit of fun is the “30 second profile”. When I am people watching (a great pastime if you are waiting for something) or if I meet someone new, I always build a “30 second profile”. I will look at their clothes, jewellery, eye colour, hair style, the way they walk, stand carry themselves, the way they talk, accents, catch phrases, descriptive words and build an idea about that person in my head. The idea I get about the person maybe wildly wrong and is purely a bit of fun on my behalf. But it helps me to get used gathering information.

Give it a go and next time I will talk you through another technique for increasing your mindfulness. SO you can become a Slow Psychic!

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Sorry, I should have labelled yesterdays post with a “part 1”

Todays surprisingly slow book isGetting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity by David Allen.

Again it is another book about how to organise your workload so that you can be more efficient, but I love the subheading, which gives it away as a secret slow text “The Art of Stress free Productivity”. Now, isn’t that what the Slow Philosophy is a lot about?

It is an excellent guide (and so obvious in places you will think “Why aren’t I doing that already?!”) that helps you develop processes to deal with all the “needs’ that you have in a very organised, practical and most importantly, stress free way.

I highly recommend it!

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Site News

Just a little bit of site news. As you may have noticed, I have been tinkering with the content on the About page to give you more information about me and the Slow Movement. I am also in the closing stages of having a new shiny blog built. Not that I haven’t enjoyed my 2 months here (and this site will stay up for podcasts only), but I think it is time for a proper site. I am just finalising choosing a designer.

I am also putting the finishing touches to a “Slow Start Guide” ebook, that will get going from hare to tortoise in no time at all. I would love to give it away, but I do have bills to pay, so I have priced it at (what I hope) is a very reasonable $4.99, a sneak peak will posted soon.

Finally, a new SlowCast will be up this week, reviewing and finishing the “How to Be Slow in a Fast Environment” series that I started awhile ago. I am hoping to start doing a SlowCast weekly until Deck Chair TV starts up again.

In the next two posts I am going to draw your attention to two books that, on the surface, appear to be totally opposite to the slow idea, but underneath  are actually very slow books.

The first one is “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey

But, That book is for those annoying high achievers! The sort of “fast” people who are the antithesis of Slow!!” I hear you cry.

True, true, that is who reads it and who it marketed to.

But inside are jewels that can help you slow your life down. Remember, being slow is not about not doing things that need to be done but about doing things in a way that gives you the space to be slow. It is about eliminating the unnecessary and organising everything else such a way that is easy, simple and stressfree (and enjoyable) to do.

That is what this book is about!

But, the difference between how “Hares” and “Tortoises” is that “Hares” organise their life in this way and then FILL THE GAP THEY CREATE WITH MORE STUFF TO DO! Which is just silly.

Tortoises (like you and me) create the gaps and then use those spaces to create time to be slow.

Make sense? So, use the tools of the “enemy” (if you fancy being melodramatic about these things), against them. Become highly effective and then just be slow…

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Right, we are onto the last step of de-cluttering your mind. Tomorrow I will post a short review of the steps.

The final step is to deal with those annoying “shoulds”, you know the things on the list you found it very difficult to get rid of or cross off because they seemed very important you think you should be doing them.

Well, who says? We spend a lot of our time doing and stressing about things we think we should do. Yet we rarely stop and question why we should be doing them. They are things we have picked up as habits from other people telling us to do things. Often we have picked them up at an early age and just do them over and over again, until they become habit and we carry on doing them even though the reason we did them (if there ever was one) is long gone.

So, if there is anything on your list that you feel compelled to carry on doing even though it doesn’t have an obvious reason or creates as obvious result, or you have thought of a better way of doing it it, it is probably a “should”.

How do we deal with “shoulds”? Well it would be very easy for me to say “jut stop doing them”, but it isn’t as easy as that is it?

So what I propose is a series of “should” fasts:

Get the list of things you think may be “shoulds” , start at the top and resolve to stop doing the first one for two weeks, just two weeks, that is all. If there is a need for you to do it, you will notice within those two weeks and you can start doing it again. If you don’t find a reason or doing it in those two weeks, cross it off the list, never do it again and move on to the next list.

Why one at a time and for two weeks?

Well, remember the best way to slow down is slowly, if you try and slow down too fast you will end up getting in a mess and fluster and be back at square one before you know it.

SO by doing one at a time you can focus on it and make sure you do it properly, and the 2 weeks thing  is to give you enough time to consciously break the habit.

Make sense?

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