Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! 

If you like it, please share it on social networks!

Share 💡JC's Newsletter

🔎 Some topics we will cover this week

• Managing stress and changing your mindset

• What people can control in their lives ( efforts, beliefs, actions, and attitudes)

• The pillars of integrity

• The role of stories and drama in people's lives

• The difference between a practice and a ritual

Managing Stress

👉 Things You Control (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• Always focus on what you can control

• Things you control: 

  • Your effort. 

  • Your beliefs.

  • Your actions. 

  • Your attitude. 

  • Your integrity. 

  • Your thoughts. 

  • The food you eat. 

  • How kind you are. 

  • How reflective you are. 

  • How thoughtful you are. 

  • The type of friend you are. 

  • The information you consume. 

  • The people you surround yourself with.

Integrity

👉 The Knowledge Project - Jim Dethmer (The Conscious Leadership Group): The Pillars of Integrity (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• Mindset:

  • About stopping to blame external factors for our problems and taking responsibility for everything we do. 

  • How to fight those personal threats 

  • Acceptance is the antidote to fear.

  • How to fight the negative patterns of our life.

  • Facts never cause drama. Stories cause drama. 

• Can we become a ritual? Can we become something beautiful in the daily life of our members?

Change your mindset:

• It begins with a team deciding do we want to play the blame game or do we want to take responsibility?

  • So it begins with me declaring to myself and deciding, I want to play a different game in life. I want to play the responsibility game. I don’t want to play the blame game.

What to do when you blame:

• I drifted off my commitment to end blame and criticism, and I was blaming you whether outwardly, inwardly, I saw myself as a victim at the effect of your energy. 

  • “I take responsibility for that, Deb. I was the cause of my experience. You didn’t do that to me.”

• When I drift, I just recommit. 

• So it begins with a clear commitment inside of yourself. 

  • Then it begins with growing in self-awareness. 

  • So you can feel the difference between blaming and criticizing and taking responsibility. 

  • And then it moves to a very simple practice. And the simple practice is this, I’m triggered. It always begins with noticing I’m triggered. Because when we blame, we are triggered. I’m in a threatened state.

• I feel threatened. Again, it’s a threat to my wanting to be approved of, to have control over her, a threat to my safety and security and a threat to my wanting oneness.

• I feel threatened. No big deal. 

  • Just acknowledge it. 

  • And then I say, well, that’s all because I’m scared. 

  • And can I just accept myself for being scared for just a moment? 

  • Acceptance is the antidote to fear. 

  • And until the fear gets met and faced and felt and relaxed, there isn’t an option for a non-reactive behavior. It’s a really important principle. 

  • So then I accept myself, then I say, am I willing to choose claiming 

Fighting your patterns:

• Then we have a set of questions we go through when we’re claiming responsibility. Questions like:

  • How did I create this experience? 

  • How is this familiar? 

  • How is this a pattern in my life? 

  • What are the payos I’m getting from creating this experience? 

  • How do I keep this experience going?

• How do we interrupt the pattern when it’s occurring? 

  • How do we metaphorically tap ourselves on the shoulder? You said, what if somebody tapped you on the shoulder? 

  • You’d go, “Hold on a minute. Let me take a breath. Yeah, this is crazy what I’m doing.” How do we do that? Okay, again, that tap on the shoulder, that interruption, that pause doesn’t occur naturally. 

  • We have to train for the pause. You have this fight. You both get into your pattern. You’re going, na, na, na, na. That pattern you’ve been to a million times before.

Stories & drama:

• Facts never cause drama. Stories cause drama. 

  • And then you learn that you are the source of your stories and that your drama is caused because you’re wanting to be right about your stories, prove you’re right and make the other person wrong.

The four core wants of all human beings: 

• The first core want is approval. 

  • It’s the desire to be liked, loved, valued, respected, wanted. 

• The second core want is for control. 

  • It’s just simply the desire for the world to be the way we think the world should be. 

• Third one, which is security, safety, survivability. 

  • Literally, it means I don’t want to die. 

  • But it’s not just that, it’s I don’t want to experience harm. I don’t want to experience ego dissolution. 

  • I want my identity to survive.

• And then the fourth one is oneness, which is just simply a sense of connectivity. It’s probably, ultimately, a deep thirst for spiritual oneness.

What is a practice & ritual:

• A practice is just something that I do, that I have a desired outcome and I want to accrue a benet. 

  • It could be that I want to do cardio training three days a week, so now that becomes a practice I’m going to do HIT or something like that. 

• Now, discipline is that I’m going to show up and get on the bike with some regularity, and discipline, of course, is the whole idea that I’m going to postpone gratification. 

  • That’s the basic idea of discipline. 

• To me, the difference between a practice and a ritual is if you look at the word ritual, it comes from traditions, open spiritual traditions, ecclesiastical traditions. 

  • What a ritual was, something that I or we did in the physical realm that pointed to something in the other realm. 

  • Rituals, they’re actually beautiful things. 

  • There’s a big difference between whether I’m doing a practice or a ritual and whether I’m exercising discipline or devotion.

• The difference between discipline and devotion is

  • discipline is this idea of delayed gratification. I love it. It’s essential. 

  • Devotion is this idea, it’s like I’m offering, I’m offering something. It’s a very different energy, and when I’m devoted or in devotion, I’m offering my attention. I’m offering my time.

Interacting with others

👉 Robert Greene: Alive Time vs. Dead Time - The Knowledge Project Ep. #35 (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• Start with the assumption that you don’t know people, and ask genuine questions 

• Ask questions to understand people deeply, listen deeply

• People love to talk about themselves. I mean, that’s law number one of human psychology.

  • The favorite subject for anybody, myself included, is myself, because we never really get to talk about it enough, we never get to be the star in our own show. 

  • People are dying to talk. 

• So there’s an art to asking the kinds of questions. 

  • What is it that they want to talk about? It changes with each individual. 

  • Some people, I’m always fascinated, want to know about their childhood and their parents, because to me, that holds keys to their psychology, and it’s endlessly fascinating to hear about people’s peculiar backgrounds, often so very different from my own. 

  • And there’s a way to do that that’s kind of fun and not so heavy, and you don’t go, “Well, you know, did you dream about sleeping with your mother?” There’s always an elegant way to broach the subject, but getting people to talk about the things they don’t normally get to talk about—their desires, their ambitions, their experiences, their childhood—it’s really not difficult to do it.

• And I want people to have the Socratic idea that this person that you now are having coffee with, that you’ve known for several years, start with the assumption that you don’t know them. 

  • Throw out all the things that you’ve assumed about them. Like Socrates says, “The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.”

  •  And so, when you’re asking a question, you’re like a child, you don’t know. 

  • You feel weak and vulnerable, and you don’t know, and you’re curious. 

  • So you ask a question to understand them, and you listen deeply, and you ponder what that could mean. It’s a great way to make people feel connected, when they get to open up to you.

Habits & Learning!

👉 Leverage Time (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• How to commit to stuff. I try to do the same. 

• Reading More: The solution I devised for myself is a simple one: 25 pages a day. That’s it. Just commit to that, and then do it. — Source

👉 Unthinkable (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• Another great quote about consistency, fight the pain and wait for the next day. 

• The most practical skill in life is learning to do things when you don’t feel like doing them. Anyone can do it when it’s easy, but most people drop out the minute easy stops.

• Muhammad Ali was asked how many sit-ups would do to prepare for a fight. His reply: “I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. When I feel pain, that's when I start counting, because that's when it really counts.” 

• True to Ali’s mindset, our coach would only start counting the sprints when people started falling over. Inevitably someone on the team would say they wanted to quit. The coach would shout back a bunch of things that can’t be repeated, but he’d finish with “If you really want to quit, you can quit tomorrow, but you can’t quit today.” No one ever quit the next day. The person who is consistent outperforms the person who is intermittent every time.

👉 Default Choices (Farnam Street)

❓Why am I sharing this article?

• What internal rule can you make for yourself to be consistent not because of willpower but practice.

• Eventually, everyone loses the battle with willpower. The only question is when.

• Several years ago, two of my friends started eating differently around the same time. One of them went on diet. The other thought a diet was too complicated and created a rule about eating the healthiest thing on the menu no matter where he was.

• The dieter relied on willpower and was inconsistent. The rule-follower, on the other hand, flawlessly executed his algorithm.

• Rules are an effective way of creating an artificial environment.

• Automatic rules turn the best choice the default choice.

• When you find yourself using willpower to make the choices your future self wants you to make, try creating an automatic rule instead.

It’s already over! Please share JC’s Newsletter with your friends, and subscribe 👇

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!