Pregnancy

I know we have really neglected this site lately. Mostly because the news hasn't been to great on our end, but we are motivated to change that.

Update on the pregnancy, I am still 2 lbs lighter than before I was pregnant. I have 5 days left and hope to keep it this way. That way I will be on a great start in the right direction.

The Value of Proactivity

For work, I've been reading the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People for the first time.  Now, I promise I'm not going to turn this blog post into a sermon on the 7 Habits - mostly cause I haven't even finished the book - but also because I know there are a lot of people who look at the book as a gimmick.  I know I did for a lot of years and in some ways, I still think it is.  However, there are also a lot of people who have been excited about this book for a long time.  I think it's because the book does contain truth, and when truth is perceived and received, it excites the human soul and motivates us pursue that truth.

So, with that warning in mind, I want to elaborate on a truth I believe is presented in this book and apply it to my own efforts.  That is the first habit of Proactivity.  In relation to health and exercise, I look at proactivity as my own efforts to "become" better - to eat healthier, live a more active life, desiring to be a better dad and keep up with my children as they grow - rather than on the desire to "have" better - have a better looking body, have more energy, etc.

First, a little context.  Covey talks about the idea of a circle of concern: being inside that circle represents all the things that concern us, worry us - weight, health, world peace, car breaking down, war, failing marriage, natural disasters, next paycheck, the econimic crisis, etc.  Within that circle is a smaller circle - the circle of influence.  These are the things we can actually do something about, that we have some control over.  And the process of pushing the circle of influence outward, of growing it to encompass more concerns, is proactivity.

For example, before, I was concerned about my weight and my health.  I didn't want to die of a heart attack or get cancer.  I didn't want to look fat.  I wanted to like exerice or to have a better physique or to wear smaller clothes.  But, during that period, I allowed those concerns to sit outside of my circle of influence - I wasn't actively doing anything about them.  Then, I started to work - I read the blog post on www.acaloriecounter.com about the One Fact of weight loss and that truth triggered in me the desire to be better.  I pushed my circle of influence outward to encompass those concerns and started to take action on them.

The nasty thing about proactivity, as Covey cleverly realized, is that its a habit.  If I don't keep working on it, I'll fall off the wagon.  I'll fall back into old ways.  I'll fail.  On the reverser side, the nice thing is that the habit is transferable - as I learn to be proactive in one area of my life, I automatically aquire the ability to be proactive in others.  Recently, I've noticed this key concept in my efforts and that's what I wanted to share - the value of proactivity in everyday life.

More context - Covey divides the 7 habits into three types - the first three he calls "private victories" because these are things that may never be seen by the world; the second set of three are the "public victories" and are immediately obvious to those around us as we practice the; the last is to restore and revitalise the other six and so is a mix of both.  And context over.

When I first started working on trying to incorporate the proactive habit, of trying to be rather than to have or seem, the first thing I decided to work on was my marriage.  I was feeling a loss of love and a lack of personal commitment, which is odd because I would call myself very happily married.  But I just didn't feel the spark anymore and I missed it.  And since it was all about becoming something more, about changing self rather than others, I decided I was going to be happy, truly happy, when I came home.  Easy enough to do because I really have no desire to keep dwelling on the stuff I do at work.  I also decided I was going to be more helpful - looking for ways or things to clean up around the house and if I didn't know what to do, to ask Stacie.  And it worked!  I noticed immediately that I like being with Stacie more, we had more fun together, we suddenly got better about holding hands, hugging in the kitchen, and teasing in the bedroom.  It suddenly felt new again.  I loved it.  I still love it.  And it can still get better.

But coming back to my key point, that proactivity is transferable, I've noticed a proactive approach to my work has become a lot easier.  It's easier to make myself work on a project I don't want to do because I desire to "be" more productive at work, to "be" a more valuable employee, to "be" a person of integrity and put in the time and effort needed by work instead of being lazy and sliding along.

So what's the next step - to transfer the learning, to apply it to my next area.  Since proactivity is about changing who we are, the "be" nature of our lives, my next item to enter my circle of influence is this - I want to "be" a traceur.  That means someone who does parkour.

Notice, I don't want to do parkour, or have the skills, or have the strength.  I want to BE.  That's the paradigm shift we all have to make.  That's how we become proactive and make it useful to us.

So, what do you want to be? 

Training Journal

Just a quick update - one of the recommended things I've always seen but never been very good at is keeping a workout or training journal. This can help you gauge performance and determine where you can improve or where you may need to pull back and not push so hard.

For right now, my training will consist of a warm-up workout put together by the APK (the American Parkour group over at www.americanparkour.com). A series of body weight squats, pushups, pullups, and agility drills designed to get you warmed up, but I will be using them to actually start training and forming the baseline for getting fit.

Right now, as I'm just getting started I will be working the warm-up drill three times a week. And as Tuesdays and Wednesdays are not the easiest to work out in, it will be Monday, Thursday, Saturday.

When I do a journal entry, it will probably not be too "insightful" - mostly just a log of what I did, how long it took, and how I felt afterwards. But hopefully, it can serve to inspire others to do their own training journals. Look for my first entry after today's session.

PS - This one's for Andrea, but if anyone else is interested, a quick documentary by the "founding" member of a NYC women's parkour group. As parkour had mostly attracted a following of guys, Ann in NYC decided to change some things and start her own jam session with a couple of other ladies from the New York area.

My Best Life

Recently, some of you may have been watching the Oprah special series on making your life the best it can be starting this year. So have I and in some ways its made re-evaluate my life's direction yet again. Yes, you read the name of the author of this post correctly - that would be me, Grant, the guy. Locally, we have a station that rebroadcasts the Oprah show at around 9:00pm and Stacie has been (perhaps cunningly so) making sure that its on when I'm in the room. So, honey, if you were trying to send me a message, it arrived. ;)

But, back to the best life and re-evaluating. The longer my life goes, the more I am coming to understand what is meant by building line-upon-line. Everytime I start to get things in order, something else unravels (this blog being the perfect example). Just when I was really getting into the habit of posting and doing well life kinda fell apart in some other aspects and I was forced to re-balance my time and priorities. The result? I'm back up in weight almost 15 pounds from where I was. That puts me with a total loss for 2008 of like 7 pounds. So, a gain, but not much of one. Part of the year, I feel I was living my best life. Part not so much. So, welcome back to me and to you.

Last year a lot of my posts and my focus were on getting my life healthy. This year will be no different in terms of health, but it will be different in terms of focus. This year is about peace. Happiness can sometimes be transitory, but I believe that peace is eternal and when we have it, we can keep it. I have not been at peace with my own health recently and I've started to change that. The thing that will remain the same - I will still be using calorie counting as my "diet" methodology and I'm going back to the strictest sense by weighing out everything I eat that doesn't come in pre-determined sizes. My exercise will be changing however.

Last year, I started on a quest for 100 consecutive pushups and running a 5K. Those got off track when I figured out I had a sinus infection and the pushups where giving me seriously bad headaches when performed for too long. The 5K went better but was still not completed. I got up to about 2 miles before "seasonal sickness" set in (AKA Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas). These were intended to give me a functional base from which I was going to start practicing Parkour. If you have no idea what that is, a simple Google or YouTube search should end all misunderstanding. ;)

Why Parkour? Because I feel it is the physical expression of my own mental directive. I am inherently a problem-solver. It's why I gravitated to the career I did, it's why I attach myself to projects I enjoy, it's why I hardly ever pay full price for anything, it's part of why I am me. Parkour has a philosophy in much the way martial arts do - a set of guiding priciples that provide both framework and boundary for the practice. That philosophy is about overcoming obstacles, of finding a creative way to make a path and thinking outside the standard and established ways of moving through this world.

Dead????

No we just fell of the face of the earth for a bit. We are still eating good, but have been very busy as you can see in our other blogs.

I have lost 14 lbs in the last 17 weeks. I know this for a fact because:



It isn't fair. I worked my tail off and didn't loose a pound. Now I eat and sit and have now lost 14. Well we will just keep doing what we are doing and hope that it continues.

Is It Okay If I Just Cry Real Soft?

So, I was getting ready to do my push ups on Wednesday evening all resolved to do the lower intensity level as I start week 2 of the push up challenge. And wouldn't you know it? The plan specifically DOES NOT LET YOU! I was so flabbergasted! It says specifically to "not cut corners" which I felt left me no choice.

So I started week 2 of torture. And you know what? Mentally, it's like I made it over the hurdle. Forcing myself to keep going and using the mental discipline to stick to the plan suddenly made it easier. No, the exercise itself didn't get any easier, but it became easier to force my body to keep going, having the mental stamina to keep going on.

I think it had to do with a class that Stacie and I are taking right now to learn about home finances. In the class recently there has been a lot of talk about the idea of personal integrity as a financial skill - integrity to stick to your budget, integrity to talk to your spouse of money and be truthful with you feelings, integrity to keep savings goals, integrity to not splurge.

So, I ask you faithful readers - appears to be only two at this point ;) - do you feel you have the personal integrity to keep your fitness promises to yourself?

Or are you just a liar?



Harsh. Yep. Every time you wimp out, you are a liar. Did that wake you up? Are you angry now? Good. Hold on to that for just a second.

That is the thought that went through my head when I found myself trying to decide if I kept moving forward on the push up plan. You see, I made a promise to myself about getting fit. I made it to Stacie. I made it to the world when I posted it on this blog. I committed myself to reaching certain goals in a certain amount of time using certain plans. And there I was, re-reading the rules and realizing that if I backed down, I was nothing more than a liar. I didn't even have enough integrity to keep a promise to myself.

Now, that's not to say we should try to keep goals that are impossible or that potentially could hurt us. But see, each of the plans I was following - one for running and one for push ups - have ways of adjusting the plan to meet my needs. The running plan says to "jog" - it doesn't specify how fast a jog should be, but leaves it up to me to scale to my abilities. The push up plan says do a certain number of push ups per set, but it lets me vary how much rest time comes between the sets. These variances allow me to adapt these plans to make them possible/achievable for me at this time. However, at the same time they force me to be honest about the weaknesses that I have.

And that is the mental hurdle I cleared, the obstacle that was in my path. So what if I can't do the push ups perfectly or don't run the 5K I'm planning in under 22 minutes? The goal was to run the 5K and finish and do 100 consecutive push ups. So long as I do my best to accomplish those, I have won. I have kept my honor. I have learned to workout with integrity.

So, again, without beating up on yourselves, I ask you - do you have the personal integrity to keep those fitness promises? And if not, what do you need to do to change that?

I realize now that I have not had the personal integrity I need to keep getting fit, especially not in the food department as Stacie will mightily testify to my midnight snacking weakness. Where then does that leave me?

Remember that email about Alma the Younger and repenting and not getting converted all in one go? Take some time to repent and fix things, then move on. Because that's all I or you can do.

New Poll! I'm On A Roll

And so should you be. On a roll. With me. Together both of us will be on a roll. Which is better than a biscuit (unless you're British and a biscuit is a cookie).

And another new feature which some of you may have seen already, we've added a "Followers" gadget, cause I'm curious to see who all is watching this blog. So, if you're a regular reader, hit up the "Follow this blog" link in the side column.