OPTIMIZE with Brian Johnson | More Wisdom in Less Time

Lanny Bassham won a gold medal in rifle shooting in the 1976 Olympics. But he didn’t win that gold until AFTER he kinda fell apart in the 1972 Olympics where he took home a silver.   He used that disappointment to fuel his mental toughness training and bring home the gold in his next attempt. Since then, he’s been teaching people how to Optimize.

For those of you in the States celebrating today, Happy Independence Day. For everyone else around the world, Happy 4th of July! smiling face with open mouth The 4th of July. Of course, today we’re celebrating Independence Day. But it’s important to note that we’re not celebrating the day we *won* our independence. We’re celebrating the day we DECLARED our independence.

In her great book Self-Compassion, Kristin Neff shares a little equation that can help us reduce our suffering.   It goes like this:   Suffering = Pain x Resistance.    Here’s what we need to know:   Pain, as the Dalai Lama tells us, is inevitable.    Suffering, on the other hand, is optional.   The trick is to keep the pain “clean” so we don’t suffer unnecessarily.    And the key to doing that is to reduce our RESISTANCE to the pain we’re experiencing...

In our last +1 we talked about Spinny Fingers and how to quickly regain our equanimity when life spins us around.    Here’s another way.    Mark Divine is a former Commander in the Navy SEALs. He tells us that in the chaos of war, elite SEALs are taught to “simplify the battlefield.”

Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner are two of the world’s leading academic researchers on the science of leadership.   They offer us a few Leadership Laws.   Here’s their First Law of Leadership: “If you don’t believe the messenger, you won’t believe the message.”   In short, people follow people they TRUST. Earning the trust and loyalty of those you aspire to lead is the absolute first step in leadership. You do that by building a credible foundation.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote to himself in the journal he never intended to publish that we now know as Meditations that “The impediment to action advances the action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

The very first thing Phil Stutz taught me in our very first session together was the fact that Speed Is a Force.    He told me that the longer we wait between feeling inspired to do something and actually doing it, the more our confidence and self-respect erodes. 

So, we’re ready to go ALL IN and make that 100% commitment with super bright lines.   Fantastic.   But here’s the deal.   First: We need to make sure we make that jumbo-ALL-IN commitment on ONE thing. Not one HUNDRED things. ONE thing.

We all have areas of our lives we want to Optimize.    Stephen Covey tells us to think about our “Roles and Goals.” Tony Robbins calls it “Categories of Improvement.” The challenge with those is that we can get confused with a near-infinite number of Roles and Categories.   I like to boil it down to my Big 3: Energy + Family + Service.

This is a quick-reading, simple, practical guide to, as the sub-title suggests, “Stop Worrying and Quieten Your Mind—Featuring the Buteyko Breathing Method and Mindfulness.” If you’re looking for a general introduction to the power of Oxygen, I’d recommend you go with Patrick’s more recent and more all-purpose Oxygen Advantage. If you suffer from anxiety and/or panic attacks, this might be a great place to start. Big Ideas we explore: The #1 rule of breathing, the 2 key benefits of putting your attention on your breath, why CO2 is your friend and how to play nice, avoiding rat poison and becoming a good mind gardener.