Little Running Bear

A while ago I asked my personal trainer (PT) if I should ask my friend to get in touch. We trained together a couple of times and my friend had very quickly fallen off the self-improvement wagon. PT told me not to. The theory being that if he wants to become fitter my friend will take the steps required and contact PT himself.

If there is any sense that PT is chasing my friend the dynamic of professional service provider and client shifts. No longer a professional relationship, PT is doing my friend a favour by checking up on him. The relationship is then dependant on a whole different set of emotions. Instead of my friend wanting to improve, and PT is in the improvement business, it becomes a game of guilt. My friend feels guilty because he hasn’t sought his own improvement and that becomes his soul motivation for turning up to training.

That scenario reminds me of dentists and mechanics. How often have we put off going to the dentist or the mechanic because we haven’t taken care of our teeth or cars in the way they told us to? How many times have you had your dentist tut-tut or actually scold you while in the chair. They might think they’re doing it in a friendly way and they’re definitely doing it with your best interests in mind, but that tiny action infantalises rather than empowering.

Guilt does not lead to responsibility. Responsibility comes from a desire for self-control and self-improvement. As such we can’t be responsible for other people. When they want the help they’ll seek it. If they are only doing damage to themselves there is nothing we can do to protect them.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I find myself in a similar position. One of the things I do is help people improve their work/life balance and achieve their goals by helping them understand what’s important and then look at what tools they have at their disposal to help achieve those goals.

In work like this, I sometimes receive partial payment up-front. I put in a lot of introductory work and research to tailor sessions for particular clients and I’ve found that they aren’t always willing to put in their own work. If I don’t get some payment up-front I end up losing out on the deal.

The desire to chase clients, to encourage them to do their homework and contact me to organise a session is strong. It feels like bad customer service to just ignore them until they get in touch. After all, I’m holding onto their money.

Chasing them is not going to help them improve themselves. Efficient work practices and personal fitness are both about taking responsibility for one’s actions. There are penalties we face for not taking that responsibility: bad work/life balance; poor health; increased ongoing car costs; loss of teeth.

Providing a professional service is not doing someone a favour. It is maintaining a business relationship with remuneration for work. The money has been paid up to a point and the services should stop at that point. If there is more take than give in any direction, one party is being screwed and nobody wants to be in that situation.

Mess. I make a lot of it. It might be a simple thing like getting undressed before bed or opening mail in my home office, but somehow I end up with piles of metaphoric crap all over the place.

I used to, periodically, spend a couple of hours cleaning every few weeks, cursing my inability to keep things clean. This was particularly a problem in my home office where there wasn’t anything like the urgency of clothes in need of a laundry.

Receipts, DVDs, cords, paperclips, articles and mail grew in bacteria-like colonies across my desk, in my in-tray and on any surface that was not already so covered in detritus that they couldn’t take just a little more.

A large part of the problem was getting the time to do a major clean. Almost nothing feels better than taking a horrible mess and tidying it, organising it and finishing with a workspace that doesn’t require apologising to visitors. The transformation is tedious and not at all like the make-over montages we see in teen cinema. Nor is it like the instant-tidying clicking that Mary Poppins led us to believe was possible. It’s laborious and mind-numbing. So it’s more than just a time problem, it’s a motivation problem.

Who in their right mind would want to put themselves through that? Yet I did on an irregular basis.

One day recently I found myself with 10 minutes to spare. I started cleaning my office and found that I could actually make some progress. At the end of the 10 minutes I just left it where it lay. But I felt good. I made progress.

I realised that I often have 10 minutes at various times in the day that I used to waste with playing some game on my phone or performing vanity searches on various engines.

The next day I found myself with some time again and this time set a timer. 10 minutes. For 10 minutes and no more I’d file, sort and dispose. The alarm sounded and I walked away.

10 minutes is nothing in the course of a day. It’s a disciplined amount of time and it doesn’t vary. 10 consecutive minutes would sometimes be just before going to bed because it was the only time I had spare but delaying sleep by 10 minutes isn’t going to make much difference.

After 5 days my inbox was clear, there was no detritus on my large desk (I have a door on two filing cabinets) and I could actually start working on other areas like book shelves, filing draws, et cetera.

I am not the sort of person who puts things away as soon as they are used. I never have been and it’s unlikely I ever will be.

A simple restriction and predetermined end point was all I needed to maintain some kind of order in my home office. I extended the same rule to my bed room and it was amazing. 10 minute blocks over a series of days made such a huge impact that soon it was 10 minutes of maintenance or more efficient organisation.

I started to expand the idea of 10 minutes to other areas of my life. Finances, photo-tagging and any other mundane but somewhat necessary bit of organisation I required.

The process fell over. I stopped doing anything. The list of 10 minute things became too daunting. I found myself looking at it and thinking “Well, that’s 90 minutes I require to get all of that done.” Suddenly nothing gets done because I have the same problem of not knowing where to start.

I cut the list back to just keeping my personal areas tidy and organised.

It’s an exercise in discipline of the achievable. I’ll need to adapt that to other things that need to get done. Maybe those are once a week tasks. Maybe once a month. The trick is finding the balance between the time I’m willing to spend and how quickly the rubbish can pile up. It’s an ongoing process.

Recently at the gym I saw one of the personal trainers, a man who had been a weight-lifter, a man who could crush you like a fly, sitting demurely on the couch reading a book. A book about poker. He had only recently started playing poker and, in a recent tournament, had come third. He began to imagine how much better he could do if he’d had a little more knowledge.

The book he had with him was Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen. In the book, apparently, Hansen analyses every hand he played during the 2007 Aussie Millions tournament. Hansen was victorious in that tournament and the theory behind reading the book is that by getting inside the mind of a champion and understanding his decision process, a regular joe can also be a champion poker player.

The thing that strikes me, though, is that it’s not really about the decisions Hansen made. It’s more about the discipline he uses to record every hand he plays. It’s his discipline that got him to be the great poker player he is today.

I have no doubt that JD, the weight-lifting personal trainer, has a similar discipline. After all, you can’t just jump into weight-lifting one day. For him, sitting there and studying Gus Hansen’s book was part of his regime and it might help, but it’s not enough.

Discipline comes not from the study but the practice. I’ve never seen two professional poker players with exactly the same style. It takes a lot of practice to develop strategies for parting people from their money. It takes the guts to make mistakes, live with those mistakes and continue on.

Ever since I spent time in Olympia, Greece, I’ve made sure to never spend more than one night in a one day town. The very basic rule is, if the place you’re travelling to only has one main attraction, then there is no reason to spend more than one day there.

Olympia is famous for being the birthplace of the Olympics, that’s all. Stuck in Olympia for 2 nights I managed to exhaust everything there was to do in the town. I perused both souvenir shops. I discovered the ordinary cuisine in all three restaurants. I saw the hours of nothing that happened in the main street and the tee-intersection.

So when the opportunity to go to Niagara Falls came around I made sure that we spent no more than one night there. In that 24 hour period I had to see the place where Superman 2 was filmed, I had to play some poker at the casino, and I had to eat breakfast at an 80 foot buffet that overlooked the falls.

All of this because, I knew before even getting there, that the falls were the falls and they would be magnificent, but how long can you stare at water falling?

It turns out, a long time.

Niagara, on the Canadian side, is more theme park than town – about a hundred hotels, two casinos, three ghost-trains, two wax museums, a Guiness Book of Records museum and a Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, a Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood.

There are very few places to escape music piped through from somewhere. As we walked from the main tourist street past a Starbucks playing Beatles songs towards the Hard Rock playing Led Zepplin, there is a moment where the two compete for your attention and if you stand very still your ears will melt from confusion.

Even the parks have music piped into them. Really. Escaping the music we finally discovered what it was covering up. The sound of the falls is remarkable. Megalitres of water dropping onto rocks and ice hundreds of metres below makes quite a noise. This noise just doesn’t stop because, of course, the falls don’t stop.

They don’t. That’s the most amazing thing about the falls. They just don’t stop. They keep going and going and going and it’s difficult to fathom (water pun) where it keeps coming from.

Maybe because I come from drought country, seeing that much water pouring out of anywhere just makes me think “Wasters, you terrible Wasters!” At home I’m showering with buckets and here they just pour their water off cliffs for the amusement of some tourists.

But it’s entirely natural and it’s massive and it really is amazing to watch.

The only really touristy thing we did while there was the “Behind the Falls” tour, which isn’t a tour as much as it is a corridor with a fork in it. The prongs of the fork head down to these two viewing platforms where we got to see the Rainbow Falls (they’re the big ones in Superman 2) from a ground view. One prong led to a beautiful view of the falls and the other is full of the ice that forms behind the falls during winter and then takes months to melt.

Just as our time to leave approached we were sick of everything in Niagara Falls and longed for the comfort of New York City. So we made our way to Buffalo airport to fly to Chicago because that’s what our tickets said.

I lost $50 (Canadian) at the poker table.