Friday Finds: Goats, Maximum Aliveness, Owning Your Story And On Being Too Old For This
Photo by me of my giant feet. I don't care!
Writer Dominique Browning reflects on the things she's now 'too old' for, like self-loathing and office politics and toxic people. All of us, no matter what our ages, could do well to be 'too old' for the limiting and energy-wasting things in our lives. I officially declare I am too old to care if people think my feet are too big and/or look like canned hams wearing shoes (those are my size ten feet and they might look like canned hams and I don't care!). What are you too old for?
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Here is an entire Twitter feed about goats. You are welcome. And a story about a designer who wanted to see what it was like to be a goat, so he tried living as one for a few days. I am all for life experiments. This fellow has seriously raised the experimentation bar!
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Then there's this guy. I love this guy. He's figured out how to engineer his life for maximum aliveness, working six months out of the year and spending the rest of his time touring the world by bicycle. He has figured out what's important to him and he's arranged his life accordingly. Tip of the coaching hat to you, sir.
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My favorite part of this Fast Company piece on the health benefits of reading is this: "Reading can offer richer, broader, and more complex models of experience, which enable people to view their own lives from a refreshed perspective and with renewed understanding," ... "This renewed understanding gives readers a greater ability to cope with difficult situations by expanding their repertoires and sense of possible avenues of action or attitude." In coaching, we often experiment with ways of seeing an issue, from many perspectives. This can open up choice and move people out of stuckness. Hooray reading!
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In the spirit of looking at things from a different perspective, look what's possible when teachers choose to view students challenges with math not as mistakes but as 'sense-making' in this piece from KQED. Where the heck was this teacher when I was struggling through all my math classes?
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I love it when my clients recommend books to me. A recent one is Kelly McGonigal's newish, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How to Get Good at It. For those of you with immediate gratification issues (like me), here's a TED talk she gave a couple of years ago on the subject, an under-fifteen-minute reframing of how we can view stress as helpful and why that's important. Uh, hello, heart attack anyone?
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This thought-provoking long read from The Atlantic looks at how "In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you're on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are." The coolest part? We are "both the narrator and the main character of [our] story,” ... [and we're] actually in charge of [it]."