tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38480340259864358962024-03-12T22:49:13.429-07:00Graham BowerCreative consultant and fitness geekAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.comBlogger35125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-21513639568465718972014-06-14T08:15:00.000-07:002014-06-15T04:40:23.071-07:00Great Creatives Don't Fight Feedback<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Most creatives are not good at receiving feedback. Quite the opposite in fact. They’ve learned to resist feedback, believing that it’s a part of their job to be “misunderstood” and to fight the “suits”. They dig in their heals to defend their ideas. </div>
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And there’s something to be said for this approach. We have to be ready to fight for new ideas because there are so many people who will challenge anything new. Take Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, for example. He mocked the iPhone when it was first launched because it didn’t have a tiny plastic keyboard like all the other smartphones of the time. His lack of vision cost his company the smartphone market, and ultimately cost him his job. If Apple had listened to people like Ballmer, there would be no iPhone.</div>
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So resisting feedback is an important part of every creative’s job. But the very best creatives don’t always resist feedback. Great creatives actively seek out feedback, but the difference is that they’ve learned how to do it effectively, so that it helps them to nurture their ideas, rather than knock them down. There are five key stages to generating this kind of constructive feedback.</div>
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<b>1. Who to ask</b></div>
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Great feedback scrutinises our ideas from an entirely new angle, and reveals strengths and weaknesses that we were not previously aware of. In other words, it addresses our “blind spots”: the aspects of our work that we are unaware of and can’t see for ourselves.</div>
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While we all have our own unique perspective on the world, those closest to us like friends and colleagues tend to share similar points of view. So to address our blind spots we unusually need to look beyond our immediate circle of acquaintances to find the right people to ask for feedback. To do this, we may need to leverage our extended network: a friend of a friend who you’ve never spoken to before may be exactly the right person.</div>
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It can be very valuable to get feedback from people with specialist knowledge in the area you’re working in, but it’s also important to get feedback from people with absolutely no specialist knowledge, since they provide an entirely fresh perspective, untarnished by industry norms and preconceptions.</div>
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Of course, trusted friends can provide great feedback too, but consider carefully how and why you trust them. If you trust them to always say positive things and provide emotional support, then that’s all very nice, but it means they’re not going to provide the kind of candid, useful creative feedback you really need. Instead, choose the kind of friends that always give you honest feedback, even when they know it may not be what you want to hear.</div>
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<b>2. How to ask</b></div>
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Most creative work is developed in response to a brief, so it’s tempting to show someone your brief first, and then show your solution. While this is a perfectly valid approach, it does have some drawbacks. </div>
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Firstly, the brief may be wrong. A factual error, a strategic error, some bias or presupposition in the brief may have lead you in the wrong direction. In this case it may have a similar influence upon the person giving you feedback. Better to get them to look at your work and tell you what they assume the brief must have been.</div>
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A second, equally important issue is that your target audience will not have the benefit of reading the brief first. They will react to your ideas instantly, intuitively and without first being prepared. They won’t think “well that’s OK considering what the brief was”. If you get feedback from people who have first read the brief, you may miss out on this immediate “gut” reaction.</div>
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So, if the person you’re seeking feedback from is in any way representative of the target audience, it may be better to just present them with your idea without having them read the brief first. In fact, without any preamble or explanation whatsoever. If it’s a design, just show them the design and see what happens. If it’s a game, let them play the game! If it’s a song, just shut up and let them listen.</div>
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<b>3. How to receive</b></div>
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Asking for feedback is not the same thing as receiving feedback. If your response to every piece of feedback starts with “yes but…” then you probably have not actually listened to the feedback at all. Instead, you’re focusing on how to defend your ideas. If you are serious about getting feedback, then the only response that is required when you receive it is “thank you”. After all, the feedback is what it it is, whether you like it or not. And arguing with it won’t change that.</div>
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To maximise the value of the feedback that you are receiving, you should make yourself receptive to it on every level. Kids at school are taught “whole body listening”. They are expected to be quiet, stop fidgeting, face the teacher, look, listen and think. As adults, we don’t have teachers to force us to pay attention in this way, but if we really want to receive high quality feedback, this is exactly how we should be.</div>
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Note that whole body listening is not just about hearing - it’s about seeing too. Consider the body language, the expression and the physical state of the person giving you feedback - this non-verbal communication is also a part of their feedback to you.</div>
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As adults, we think we know a lot of things. And this belief can often prevent us from learning. Since the purpose of feedback is to reveal our blind spots by getting feedback from a different perspective, the fact is that we know nothing. What may be true for us looking from our perspective may not be true from someone else's perspective. If we’re constantly trying to compare perspectives, we’re not really paying attention to the perspective of the person we’re receiving feedback from. Instead, before receiving feedback, we need to empty our minds of all our presuppositions so that we can adopt a “know nothing” state. This is a state of genuine curiosity, where we want to understand someone else's perspective by receiving all of their feedback faithfully and without judgement.</div>
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A final important point on receiving creative feedback: always ask for more. People are sometimes not comfortable with giving feedback. They may be anxious about hurting our feelings, for example. So they may be withholding some of their most important feedback, for fear of offending. To help and encourage them to fully share all of their feedback, it’s worth repeating back exactly what you heard, using their words. This demonstrates that you are really listening to them carefully, and without judgement. And that your are open to receiving more feedback. It should give them the confidence to continue. So then, if you say “and what else is there about that,” you might receive more candid and valuable feedback. On some occasions, the “what else” question prompts more than the person giving feedback even realised they had to offer. The “presupposition” that there is more feedback helps them to dig deeper.</div>
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<b>4. How to evaluate</b></div>
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Once you’ve received the feedback and listened to it without judgement, the time finally comes to evaluate it. A great creative doesn’t necessarily take on board all the feedback that they receive. That does not mean that the feedback is not valid. All feedback is valid, because it’s true for the person who is giving it. If you ask someone their opinion, they give it to you. That’s there opinion, whether you like it or not.</div>
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So the purpose of the evaluation stage is not to decide whether the feedback is correct. The purpose is to decide which feedback you are going to address. After all, you can’t please everyone. The feedback you have received may be contradictory. And ultimately, it’s your project - other people have given you feedback, but it’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do with it.</div>
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It’s important to differentiate the types of feedback that you have received. Some feedback will focus on problems, while others will focus on solutions. Oddly, in this context, the problem feedback is usually more valuable than the solution feedback. That’s because there are usually many different solutions to a single problem. When someone precisely diagnoses a problem for you, they give you the freedom to solve it your way. And since most creative endeavours involve many different interdependent parts, the best solutions are often not directly related to the problem.</div>
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Time usually plays are part in this process. Especially when the feedback is not what you’d wanted to hear. It can take days, weeks and sometimes even months to process this type of feedback and decide on a way forward. </div>
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<b>5. How to respond</b></div>
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Far from being a sign of indecision, the ability to change your mind is in fact the hallmark of the truly rare breed. A great creative. Someone whose ego is no so fragile that it overrides their creative judgement.</div>
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Admitting that our creative work is wrong can be very difficult, because we tend to identify with it very personally. A rejection of our creative work can feel like a rejection of us personally, because we put so much of our own personal style and taste into it. So how do great creatives change their mind and move on so effortlessly? </div>
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The answer is simple. While they are passionate about their ideas, they also maintain a certain distance from them. By remaining detached from our ideas, we become much more open to changing our minds. If you choose to own the problem, rather than owning your creative work, then it becomes easy to change your mind and go with someone else's idea, if that provides a better solution to your problem.</div>
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If you don’t recall the last time you changed your mind about something, perhaps its time you started listening more closely to feedback.</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-70209923096000840422014-05-26T03:07:00.000-07:002014-05-26T03:08:06.612-07:00Momentum versus direction - why some organisations don't innovate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When we’re moving forward with a project, it provides us with reassurance. It feels like we’re heading somewhere, and from this we tend to infer that we’re heading in the right direction.<br />
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But this confuses momentum with direction.<br />
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In his book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012">Creativity Inc</a></i>, Ed Catmull, president of Disney Animation and Pixar, argues that it’s essential for their movie directors to have a direction, even if it’s not necessarily the right one. A director must maintain the confidence of his crew, and in this sense, going somewhere is better than going nowhere. It’s a matter of leadership.<br />
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But what if that confidence is misplaced? What if your project is moving rapidly in the wrong direction? All the team moral in the world is not going to save a project if you’re building the wrong thing.<br />
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The risks are compounded in a business context, where a team left idle is a waste of money. As their manager, the business demands that you give them something to occupy them. Fast. So should you begin a project before you know exactly where you’re going, or should you wait for inspiration and risk wasting time and money?<br />
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At Pixar, Catmull explains that they solve this dilemma by encouraging their directors to "fail early". The argument is that you can always adjust your direction once you have set off, as you learn.<br />
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And of course this is true, to a point. To be creative, you need the freedom to experiment and evolve your ideas as a project progresses. But innovation is about more than creativity. These kinds of course corrections are great for incremental refinement of existing concepts. But they rarely lead to anything entirely new… to something innovative.<br />
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In a software project I once worked on, I was asked to design a button, where I didn’t believe that one was required. When I questioned it, I was told that this type of software always had a button there, and that it was not within the scope of this “sprint” (a two week project cycle) to challenge things at that level. The trouble was that there never had been such an opportunity. We had started building things before we’d had a chance to consider the big picture or challenge any conventions, because we were following the “Scrum” project management methodology, which favours iterative, incremental development over a traditional sequential approach.<br />
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Innovation is about taking a totally new direction. Not making minor course corrections to a familiar route. Organisations that insist on maintaining momentum rarely innovate, because they never give themselves an opportunity to stop and plan an entirely new journey.<br />
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In other words, when you confuse momentum and direction, you also risk mistaking incremental refinement for genuine innovation.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-1449139121048342152014-05-10T01:35:00.000-07:002014-05-10T02:07:38.838-07:00How our words shape our experience, and why diets don’t work<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Have you ever noticed how the words you use to describe an experience eventually replace your actual memories of that experience? For example, I ran the New York Marathon last year. When I got back home, people asked me how it was, so I described it to them. After I told the story a few times, it became fine-tuned, and I settled on the most interesting bits to tell people, and the best words to use to describe those bits. Eventually, this description became so well rehearsed that whenever I think of the New York Marathon, I think of my edited description, rather than the actual experience.<br />
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In other words, the words I used to describe the experience became a shorthand for that experience. Rather than digging out loads of memories, my brain is somehow taking a shortcut and playing the edited highlights instead.<br />
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The trouble is that these edited highlights are not just a shortened version of events - they are skewed in the particular way that I had chosen to relate the experience to my friends. For example, I left out the boring bits. I downplayed some of the agony. I focussed more on the fun and excitement.<br />
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So the words we use to describe our experience not only become a shorthand for that experience, but they can start to define and shape the experience as well. This happens not only to our memories of the past, but to our experience of the present as well.<br />
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And that is why the language we use when talking about our experience, behaviour and goals is so important. Take these phrases commonly repeated by people watching their weight:<br />
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<li><i>“I’ve been good, I deserve a treat”</i></li>
<li><i>“I’m not allowed to eat that”</i></li>
<li><i>“I can’t eat that, I’ve been too naughty this week already"</i></li>
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What do these statements have in common? They’re all childish language, implying the existence of a parental figure who allows and forbids certain foods, rewarding good behaviour with treats and punishing bad behaviour. The funny thing is, in most cases, this parental figure does not actually exist. It’s just a metaphor.<br />
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But how does this metaphor operate and what impact does it have upon people who use it? A parent is, of course, responsible for what their child eats. So an adult using parent-child language when talking about their diet is metaphorically relinquishing responsibility for their own eating choices. And this in turn can have serious consequences for their attempts to reach their target body weight.<br />
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Metaphors aside, unless you really are a child, then you and you alone are responsible for the choices you make about what you eat. No one else forces you to eat anything. It’s not McDonald’s fault if you eat junk food. And it’s not the fault of an international conspiracy if you consume sugary snacks and drinks full of high fructose corn syrup. You make all those choices yourself.<br />
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And it’s not naughty for you to eat calorie dense food, anymore than you’re being good when you eat healthily. Because ultimately you’re in charge, and you experience the consequences of your actions. No one else. Something is only “naughty” if there is a parent figure to tell you off. And something is only a “treat” if there is someone to reward you for “good” behaviour. And there is no such person.<br />
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I was discussing this with a friend recently who wants to lose weight. I explained how I choose to eat chocolate on one day a week, because that balances my love for chocolate with my desire to maintain low body fat. She said that was my treat day, and when I explained it was not a treat, she just laughed and said I was “playing with words”. To her it did not matter what I called it.<br />
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And of course, I am playing with words, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. In my New York Marathon example, I showed how the words I used to tell my story not only became a shorthand for that experience, but they came to define and shape my recollections of the experience itself.<br />
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And this happens with my experiences in the present as well. The language I use to describe what I choose to eat has a profound impact on my diet. By avoiding framing my choices in parent-child metaphors, and instead focusing on how I proactively balance my different priorities to work out what is the right thing for me to eat, I’m shaping my experience in real time, and equipping myself with the self efficacy that I need to stick to my goals.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-471798190854560882014-05-04T11:06:00.001-07:002014-05-04T11:06:31.261-07:00Using “Save As…” to navigate the creative maze<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Developing creative ideas is not a steady linear progression of refining ideas to make something gradually better and better. Quite the opposite, in fact. The creative process is something more akin to a navigating a maze. If you mentally prepare yourself for a few wrong turns at the start, you’re more likely to reach the end.</div>
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The creative process is an emotional journey, because you’re looking for what “feels” right. There are no absolute rights and wrongs - you’re ultimately drawing on your own personal aesthetic judgement to determine the right approach.</div>
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And this is why being creative can be so emotionally draining. In his recent book, Creativity Inc, Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios, explains how important it is to remember that you are not your ideas. Creatives should not take criticism of their work personally. But this is easier said than done, because in a sense, your ideas <i>are</i> you, or at least, an extension of you.</div>
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Parents often take criticism of their children very personally because they know they share the same DNA. It is much the same with our creative ideas. We pour our personality, our humour, our sense of identity into our ideas. Their quirks are our quirks. Their shortcoming are our shortcomings. But of course, Ed Catmull is right. As personal as our ideas may be, If we identify too closely with them, we may become blind to their shortcomings, and they can lead us down a blind alley as a result.</div>
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And that brings us back to our maze. As you navigate a maze, you have a sense of where the exit is. But while many paths appear to be heading in the right direction, most will lead you round in circles, or to a dead end. That dead end may be so tantalisingly close to the exit, that you can even see it. But as close as the exit may be, you’re going to need to do a lot of backtracking to return to the correct path.</div>
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Whatever you’re working on creatively, it’s never just a single idea. Any creative endeavour is comprised of many different synergistic ideas. And even if most of these ideas are great, it takes just one bad one to let the whole thing down. That’s because each idea builds upon the last. In the same way, navigating a maze involves many choices of which path to take, and an early wrong turn can undermine every subsequent decision you make. That’s why, even as you get close to the exit, you may never actually reach it.</div>
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Ideally, when we make such a wrong turn, we quickly recognise what we’ve done and turn back before we invest too much time pursuing the wrong path. But of course, it’s not that easy, not only because the path initially looks like a promising one, but also because two traps its easy to get caught in: emotional investment and confirmation bias.</div>
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The longer you spend pursuing one particular path, the more emotionally invested you become in that path. When I was a designer, I’d often spend an entire day trying to make a layout work, and getting nowhere. The next morning, I’d go into work and pick up where I left off. Rather than trying a new approach, I’d continue trying to make the old approach work, because otherwise I’d have to acknowledge that I’d wasted the whole previous day in a blind alley.</div>
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The most famous example of this is what has become known as Concorde fallacy. The French and British governments invested in fortune in developing the worlds first and only supersonic passenger aircraft - even after it become clear that it would go massively over budget and never be commercially viable. The problem was that they had invested so much in it that it became politically impossible to write off these sunk costs.</div>
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Similarly, when we’re building our creative work on top of conceptually flawed foundations, we’ll sometimes do anything we can to avoid acknowledging this to ourselves because it means we’ve wasted a lot of time. And this is where confirmation bias kicks in. This is our naturally tendency to notice all the evidence that supports our point of view, and ignore all other evidence to the contrary. </div>
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This is like reaching a dead end in the maze, but refusing to turn back because you can see the exit over the wall, even though on some level you know the path you’re on will never actually take you there.</div>
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So what is the solution?</div>
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Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that creativity is a process of exploration, and as such it is not only inevitable that you’ll take a few wrong turns. It is also absolutely necessary. If you don’t allow yourself to take wrong turns, you’ll end up with writers block or blank canvas syndrome, where you become immobilised and incapable of embarking on a creative undertaking.</div>
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So wrong turns are in fact a part of the journey. Something to be anticipated, and even enjoyed. After all, a little detour can be scenic and fun. The trick is not to waste too much time on them, and to be able to quickly retrace your steps and get back onto the right path.</div>
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There are many was to solve this problem, but one I’ve found to be consistently effective is “Save As…” Most software offers a save as command, enabling you to create a new version of a document based upon the current version. When you Save As, you preserve the current version, and have a new version to work with.</div>
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Keeping a previous version of your work, makes it feel less risking to start experimenting again, freeing yourself from the constrains of emotional investment. It’s like leaving a breadcrumb trail in the maze, so you can retrace your steps. By saving as, and then working on a copy, you feel free to delete and amend substantially, knowing you can always retrace your steps and get back to where you were if it doesn’t work out.</div>
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When I “save as” on a creative project, I always believe at the time that I’m going to need to return to the earlier version, and yet in practice I rarely do. Over the years, I’ve learned to manage myself in this way - effectively playing a little mind game on myself.</div>
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Save as… may seem like a fairly unimportant feature in most software packages, hidden away under the file menu. But used in the right way, it’s one of the most powerful tools in the creative toolbox. One that is sure to lead you out of the most challenging creatives mazes.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-12706824457889863332014-04-20T05:42:00.001-07:002014-04-20T05:42:48.710-07:00iWatch, the quantified self and the worried well<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkH895klFQ3PUVwZLxhAK9kwEYcppZC9v9F7jFjFkGJ0BDrbJZCJy7zxaXMS_7n-hk_l1jfuDNTvxY8ANrHRtvmU7el51ZBHKjda7IIoliJaCdW1pwniPOy4UypX2Y1i4s5FEiuFGLiSI/s1600/healthbook-book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkH895klFQ3PUVwZLxhAK9kwEYcppZC9v9F7jFjFkGJ0BDrbJZCJy7zxaXMS_7n-hk_l1jfuDNTvxY8ANrHRtvmU7el51ZBHKjda7IIoliJaCdW1pwniPOy4UypX2Y1i4s5FEiuFGLiSI/s1600/healthbook-book.jpg" height="282" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>(image via <a href="http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/17/this-is-healthbook-apples-first-major-step-into-health-fitness-tracking/">9to5Mac</a>)</i></div>
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It seems almost inevitable that Apple will launch an iWatch later this year, and most pundits agree that “the quantified self” will be the main theme of this new device. An emerging tech trend, the quantified self connects wearable devices with online services to provide continuous monitoring of a user's health and fitness.</div>
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This new category has seen some growth, with devices such as Nike’s Fuel Band, Jawbone’s Up and Fitbit generating plenty of press coverage and modest sales. But as with tablets and smart phones before, Apple’s entry into the nascent category could redefine its purpose and massively broaden its appeal.</div>
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I’ve been involved in health and fitness tech for many years, both as a user (tracking my runs on Nike+) and as a developer (I co-created Reps & Sets, the gym logging app for iPhone). So I know from personal experience the tremendous potential that exists for using technology to support people in their health and fitness goals. </div>
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But there’s something about quantified self products that troubles me. We often lazily bundle “health and fitness” into a single phase, but they are in fact two distinct things. After all, you wouldn’t get medical advice from a personal trainer any more than you'd ask your doctor to help improve your bench press.</div>
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Quantified self products cross the line from fitness to health, and in so doing, they pander to the “worried well”: those whose only symptom of illness is their anxiety that they may be sick. Oddly, as medical science has improved our health, this anxiety has steadily risen.</div>
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<b>Be careful what you measure</b></div>
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As any self help book will tell you, it’s best to focus on what you want, rather than on what you don’t want. Fitness tracking products focus on positive goals. The best ones highlight our achievements and progress, providing us with encouragement and motivation to continue.</div>
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Quantified self products, on the other hand, medicalise us, tracking metrics such as blood sugar and blood pressure. These kinds of data may provide insights to qualified medical professionals, but will offer little meaning to the average user. Instead, they encourage us to anxiously obsess over inconsequential fluctuations in our body’s normal functioning.</div>
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In other words, the quantified self encourages us to look for problems rather than to look for progress.</div>
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<b>Looking for problems can create problems</b></div>
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There are two main problems with this. The first is false positives. Health screening can be a highly effective intervention, but it doesn’t always follow that we should screen for every possible kind of sickness. Some types of screening result in high levels of false positives - where a healthy patient may be told they are sick and undergo unnecessary, unpleasant and sometimes risky treatment. Ultimately, scientists must study the data to determine whether the benefits of the screening for a particular disease outweigh these risks. </div>
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No such determination is made with quantified self products. Instead, healthy individuals are subjected to endless ongoing tests for no apparent purpose, and presented with results that they are not qualified to interpret.</div>
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The second problem is the vicious circle - the kind of negative feedback loop you can get into when you obsess about your health. The anxieties created by worrying about non-existant health problems can result to very real stress-related health problems. As a result, the worried well may over time become the worried unwell.</div>
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<b>Track your fitness gains, not your health problems</b></div>
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As a former cancer patient, I know what it’s like to have every aspect of your health monitored. Chemotherapy is not fun. But fortunately for me it was effective. Now I choose to focus upon the benefits of successful treatment, by pushing my body as far as it can go in terms of my fitness. And that’s what I choose to measure: the progress of my fitness.</div>
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Of course, my health is more important to me than my split times on a marathon. That’s why I still go for regular checkups at my hospital, who do all kinds of tests. But I prefer to leave the quantification of my health to qualified medical professionals who I trust.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-90455730608365245322014-04-12T05:48:00.001-07:002014-04-12T08:01:17.502-07:00What’s going on inside your helmet? - Quarterbacks, coaches and patterns of success<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIR1OKpz5oS7iAR1XT-ZylsKCQIFaiJmLFrxktj1dxrGbxjo0MPZYEtoRMwpDweFGU8BiGFA3P8oW18YnNaXbkq6DYTKPtE9WzAwbVGwFvzKw3cfPlhPK4mxd86KpllyUtv3AmxUHqBv4/s1600/quarterback.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIR1OKpz5oS7iAR1XT-ZylsKCQIFaiJmLFrxktj1dxrGbxjo0MPZYEtoRMwpDweFGU8BiGFA3P8oW18YnNaXbkq6DYTKPtE9WzAwbVGwFvzKw3cfPlhPK4mxd86KpllyUtv3AmxUHqBv4/s1600/quarterback.png" height="320" width="252" /></a></div>
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The pressure on a quarterback in an American football game is hard to imagine. They alone are responsible for passing the ball by throwing it long distances across the field. And the longer they wait before making a pass, the greater the chance they'll be tackled to the ground. But they don’t face this responsibility alone. Inside every NFL quarterback’s helmet is an earpiece so they can receive instructions from their coach. It’s the coach’s responsibility to call the plays, deciding what the quarterback and offensive team will do on each down.<br />
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The coach may call for some some long and difficult passes, and if the quarterback fails to complete a few, he might start to panic. Perhaps the negative self-talk sets in, as the defence starts to undermine his self confidence. Typically in this situation, a coach will give his quarterback a couple of easy passes to calm him down.<br />
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If you’re not a quarterback, you probably don’t wear an earpiece for your coach to whisper instructions to you as you work. But perhaps you should.<br />
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A good creative professional needs to be both the quarterback <i>and</i> the coach. Throwing a beautiful pass is a bit like coming up with a great new idea, or solving a particularly difficult creative problem. The more challenging the task, the higher the risk of failure.<br />
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If you’ve spent a lot of time on a creative problem, and you haven’t come up with any great solutions what would your coach tell you to do? He’d give you a couple of easy tasks to do, so you can get your confidence back. In other words, he’d want you to put that difficult brief to one side for a while and have some fun.<br />
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It’s easy to get into patterns of failure, and it’s equally easy to get back into patterns of success, once we become aware of what’s happening. When a quarterback throws a series of incomplete passes, his confidence is undermined, and he get’s into a pattern of failure where his performance suffers. By getting him to throw some easy passes instead, the pattern of failure is broken and a new pattern of success is established. Then it’s time to attempt more challenging passes.<br />
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Whether creative professionals are working in groups or as individuals, these same patterns emerge. Often accompanied by negative self talk. In a group, you can actually hear the negative talk set in, as people start to focus on the problem state, rationalising why they can’t solve the brief, and in the process demotivating each other and limiting the group’s potential for success.<br />
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The solution is always to put the task to one side, do something easier, and come back to the original task when you’re back in a pattern of success. It often helps to “sleep on it” and come back to the brief with a fresh mind the following morning. Or to approach it from a different context, when you’re in a more relaxed mindset. (I often find that I do some of my best creative thinking in the shower).<br />
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<b>But what if there isn’t time? </b><br />
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Managing a creative agency, an issue I frequently encounter is the expectation that if we have quoted 2 days for a team to work on a creative brief, then the client can expect the job to be turned around in 2 days. I would usually insist on at least a week. Clients often don’t like this because they imagine that their work is being held in a queue and not prioritised. But the truth is quite the opposite.<br />
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If you agree to turn around two days of creative work in two days, then you haven’t given yourself any time to put the brief to one side and work on something easier. And you’re potentially compromising the quality of your creative response as a result.<br />
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The answer is to share some of this with your client. Explain your creative process to them. And if they still won’t give you the turnaround time that you need, you should seriously consider finding smarter clients to work for.<br />
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Seriously.<br />
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After all, it’s a question of how good you want to be. Do you want to be known for “quick and dirty” jobs, where you churn through average work at high speed, or do you want to be known for creative excellence, that clients are willing to wait for and pay more for?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-91967204058152667822014-03-21T05:55:00.001-07:002014-03-22T08:08:42.408-07:00Leaky and ambiguous iconsI've created many icons over the years. So I know from personal experience just how difficult they can be to design.<br />
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The objective of icon design is usually to produce the simplest possible image that unambiguously communicates a concept. Sometimes that concept is a thing: like a folder or a trash can; sometimes it's an action: like swiping a card or summoning a nurse.<br />
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There are two reasons why icons should be as simple as possible:<br />
<ol>
<li>they are less cluttered and work in small sizes;</li>
<li>they are less likely it is to "leak" unintended messages.</li>
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The first reason is self explanatory. The second is worth exploring in more detail. As an example, take a look at this icon I found in a hospital. The purpose of the button is to summon a nurse. The icon doesn't attempt to convey the action of summoning. Instead, it shows a picture of a nurse. But is that all the icon is communicating?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEBSvZTdy7UQIUNC2KxC8yweAz6vR05QLuv5AmLseBCO4MSPMR-f-RfDEnkSAyibYWgmPQ3aVlzAaRg6t6U5bAf1S51NHsnls2-SRcW2pKuong3LmZCyUmltgN6FBUh1hfQ6Ex2gk9Lg/s3200/IMG_2411.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEBSvZTdy7UQIUNC2KxC8yweAz6vR05QLuv5AmLseBCO4MSPMR-f-RfDEnkSAyibYWgmPQ3aVlzAaRg6t6U5bAf1S51NHsnls2-SRcW2pKuong3LmZCyUmltgN6FBUh1hfQ6Ex2gk9Lg/s3200/IMG_2411.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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I see several other messages in this icon:</div>
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<li>Nurses are women</li>
<li>Nurses are slim and totter around on pin-like legs</li>
<li>Nurses wear figure hugging clothes with short skirts</li>
<li>Nurses carry items like drinks</li>
<li>Nurses wear old-fashioned clothes, or it is appropriate to be nostalgic about when they did.</li>
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...and there are doubtless many more. The presuppositions and cultural context of the designer are leaking out of the icon. In this case, the ideas leaked are so far from today's social norms that I believe the hospital should consider changing the buttons. A cost that would have been entirely unnecessary if the icon had been a bell, for example.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0D8wd7wAMOmtWt4hvGsJWZOj2nAxh1-_ORx5Y40jQ_g4MbaJ5jJeMdcMtKzHzzhAx9tk6SnXin2x2MBtphP-SNWoPa9hvNGhebONq5zULnlm5h7_srPEn3dH2oKcZFi3uLAG4YDOo2n0/s3200/IMG_2514.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0D8wd7wAMOmtWt4hvGsJWZOj2nAxh1-_ORx5Y40jQ_g4MbaJ5jJeMdcMtKzHzzhAx9tk6SnXin2x2MBtphP-SNWoPa9hvNGhebONq5zULnlm5h7_srPEn3dH2oKcZFi3uLAG4YDOo2n0/s3200/IMG_2514.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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But while too much information can be a problem, an icon can also be over-simplified to the point at which its meaning becomes ambiguous. Take this icon for Transport for London's Oyster Card readers, for example.</div>
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Oyster Cards are the RFID-based contactless ticket system used on the London Underground and busses. The icon indicates where passengers should "touch in" and "touch out" to start and end their journey at the ticket barriers. The only action required by the user it to place their card against the reader. Perhaps the icon is intended to show a card touching against the circular reader. But instead, many passengers interpret the circular shape as a swoosh, suggesting they should wave their card around in circles. </div>
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The problem is that this rotating motion confuses the RFID sensor, resulting in a delay in reading the card, which often causes passengers to wave the card in even more vigorous circles, making a read almost impossible.</div>
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This can be very frustrating to observe if you are stuck behind a card waver at the ticket barrier. Given that this icon is now used throughout the city's transport system, millions of man-hours have presumably been wasted in this way. At who knows what cost.</div>
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The meaning of any communication is ultimately how it is interpreted by the recipient. The recipient is never wrong - a misinterpretation is always the responsibility of the communicator. Great icons unambiguously communicate a message. And to do this, they have to be incredibly simple - eliminating extraneous elements, while maintaining sufficient detail to make their meaning explicit. Finding just the right amount of simplicity is not a simple task. But when designers do this hard work, they make it easier for users.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-81208582519519615092014-03-16T08:30:00.005-07:002014-03-21T04:27:54.127-07:00The skin I live in: a 7 year journey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoyT4oX9JJscHEa8azLxANLlvowRtLk1u3k7pRH3MUMRoqjoPa_WL3iTiqn4RugBzZ0Wa7evXUQdPiDR0nTQAJzoOGNqkXZtSYRwb6hyN6xWvU9xHBHpzWYKCIfhdanWdp0SkaF44dhcs/s1600/graham-progress.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoyT4oX9JJscHEa8azLxANLlvowRtLk1u3k7pRH3MUMRoqjoPa_WL3iTiqn4RugBzZ0Wa7evXUQdPiDR0nTQAJzoOGNqkXZtSYRwb6hyN6xWvU9xHBHpzWYKCIfhdanWdp0SkaF44dhcs/s1600/graham-progress.jpg" height="160" width="320" /></a></div>
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As my latest round of cancer treatment is coming to an end, it has prompted me to reflect upon the mind-body journey I’ve been on.<br />
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I’d had rashes all over my body for many years, without realising I had cancer. But in 2007, I found a big lump in my groin, went to the doctors and was diagnosed with cutaneous t-cell lymphoma with mycosis fungoides - a kind of skin cancer.<br />
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At that time, I was overweight, unhealthy, stressed and depressed. Cancer seemed like the last straw.<br />
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The doctors wanted photos of my rashes, so I was taken to the medical photographer. Standing half naked, with my arms out stretched, my gut hanging over my boxer shorts and my skin covered in lesions, flaking away onto the floor as he took pictures, I felt ashamed.<br />
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Four cycles of chemo later, the tumours in my lymph nodes were gone, but the rashes remained and continued to deteriorate over subsequent years.<br />
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While my skin was getting worse, my health was otherwise improving. I’d never done any exercise in my life before. But the experience of going through cancer treatment had inspired me to get fit, so I started running and weight lifting. I became very interested in fitness and I even became qualified as a personal trainer.<br />
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But by 2013, my skin had worsened so much that I was starting to look like the Singing Detective. I was shedding the top layer of my skin like a snake and I had to stop running because it was just too painful to move. For the second time in my life, it seemed like things were coming to a gloomy end.<br />
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Fortunately, however, I was referred to a new consultant who prescribed photo-chemotherapy: a combination of drugs and ultraviolet light treatment. (Essentially high-tech sun beds). Treatment has given me a deep, even, all over tan. It’s the first time I’ve ever enjoyed a side effect of cancer treatment. And more importantly, it has worked. My skin is looking better than it has done in over 15 years.<br />
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I’ve now got just one more week of treatment to go. My cancer in remission, my skin has cleared up, and my hard work at the gym is finally starting to pay off. Who knows what the future has in store, but right now, this is a pretty special moment for me.<br />
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I'm now looking forward to going on holiday to Greece in May with my partner, Martin. It will be nice, for a change, not to feel ashamed of my skin on the beach, and it will give me chance to top up that tan.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-16986020992103648892013-09-02T05:04:00.000-07:002014-03-21T05:09:26.115-07:00Water fountains, hearing aids, pelican crossings and thoughts on button placement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiup7w5Jc64LJLV_RyssIHip9SkNjncdMhDyu09R1sY1c_fq5Suk0gt_A50Y6wDUYMLUX5WxShpSKmykaK3LzTR7P47TADk2v8lboLC5oEs1cWOXA6Qi_F2Fy3dgdBxWSuYt5qpikv-NS0/s3200/button-water.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiup7w5Jc64LJLV_RyssIHip9SkNjncdMhDyu09R1sY1c_fq5Suk0gt_A50Y6wDUYMLUX5WxShpSKmykaK3LzTR7P47TADk2v8lboLC5oEs1cWOXA6Qi_F2Fy3dgdBxWSuYt5qpikv-NS0/s3200/button-water.jpg" height="177" width="320" /></a></div>
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As designers, when we think about buttons, we tend to focus on what they look like. Should they be shiny, three dimensional and "clickable"? Or should they be starkly simple and borderless? But my experiences this past week have reminded me that there is one feature of a button that is even more important than its appearance - and that is its position.<br />
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This weekend, while I was out for a run, I stopped at a water fountain, waiting my turn behind a rather confused lady who couldn't find how to turn the thing on. I pointed the button out to her, she took a quick swallow and then hurried away sheepishly.<br />
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I'd used this water fountain on many occasions before during my runs. So frequently in fact, that I didn't even think about where the button was as I pressed it. But now, reappraising the water fountain with the critical eye of a user interface designer, I could see it was flawed. The lady in front of me had expected the button to be close to the water nozzle. She had been trying to push the metal shield that curved over the nozzle, expecting the button to be integrated in some way. Not a bad idea at all. But in fact, the button was on the side of the fountain, partially concealed below the rim of the receiving bowl. It was a convenient position once you knew where it was, but I wonder how many users never found it.<br />
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<i>So... button position learning 1: buttons need to be discoverable - locate them where users will look for them. Usually close to the function they perform.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBdEM8vt7eeh8ERchohpf6WDvCZZt4jcgs8j337H-diKuSY1QwPX41kUY1Hsz5iqrcuSX7rkBIJ-RZO5xVhnh6-R85uOjP_QsnUK3fSHga37bRYOg_2dzb1UOdi7PgKKiJB7dOpH-UR1Q/s3200/button-hearing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBdEM8vt7eeh8ERchohpf6WDvCZZt4jcgs8j337H-diKuSY1QwPX41kUY1Hsz5iqrcuSX7rkBIJ-RZO5xVhnh6-R85uOjP_QsnUK3fSHga37bRYOg_2dzb1UOdi7PgKKiJB7dOpH-UR1Q/s3200/button-hearing.jpg" height="177" width="320" /></a></div>
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I may have no trouble using the water fountain, but the position of another button has been giving me grief recently.. Last month I treated myself to a fancy new pair of Siemens Aquarius waterproof hearing aids. They came with a "Minitec" wireless accessory, which is necessary for adjusting volume and making Bluetooth phone calls. Every time I squeeze the clip on the device to attach it to my lapel, I accidentally press the "Call" button, which is located on the opposite face from the clip. The button is located such that it is virtually impossible to use the clip without pressing the button. And every time it's pressed, there's a temporary interruption to the essential function of the device: amplification of ambient sound. In other words, this button position makes me temporarily deaf.<br />
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<i>Learning 2: buttons should not be located where they are likely to be accidentally triggered.</i><br />
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Finally, I was intrigued by a hidden button concealed on an interface we all use every day - the pelican crossing control box. Hidden on the underside of the box is a button (or rather, a nob) which rotates whenever the green pedestrian light is on. It's designed to provide a tactile feedback to those with visual and hearing impairments.<br />
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The nob is so well concealed that you would never know it was there unless you were in the know. So for most crossing users, this extra nob provides no distraction - the front of the control box remains uncluttered, with a single button and a "Wait" light which appears above it. But for those who need it, this essential extra nob is easily accessible.<br />
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<i>Learning 3: reveal extra buttons only to those who need them, without distracting those who don't.</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-42022370857185027802012-09-09T15:59:00.001-07:002014-03-21T04:30:11.526-07:00Time is never wasted when you're doing what you love<br />
When ParalympicsGB's Jody Cundy was disqualified from the C4/5 1km time trial last week over a problem with the starting gate, he was denied the opportunity to compete in an event for which he had put in four years of arduous training. And in the heat of the moment, he said some things that he later regretted and apologized for.<br />
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One comment he made at the time was: "I've just wasted four years of my life." In the circumstances, his frustration was understandable. But when he'd had a chance to cool down, he got back onto his bike, saying "I guess I'll have to do another four years now because there's a kilo title with my name on it. I want it back."<br />
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There are no guarantees in life. We can't always expect to achieve our goals. And sometimes the obstacles we encounter along the way are unanticipated, unreasonable and insurmountable. But that needn't stop us from having goals and striving to achieve them.<br />
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We should do what we love and love what we do. If Jody Cundy loves cycling, then it's never a waste of time for him to ride his bike. Time is never wasted when you're doing what you love.<br />
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And a goal is only as good as the structure it creates. If the structure is good, then the goal is worth pursuing, but if you don't have any appetite to do what it takes to achieve the goal, pick another goal instead. Because you'll spend far more time training than you will relishing your victory, even supposing that you do succeed.<br />
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Life is about the journey, not the destination.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-85616705407838558442012-08-27T06:16:00.001-07:002014-03-21T04:41:15.945-07:00Why I'll always support Lance Armstrong<br />
Lance Armstrong was a role model for me throughout my cancer treatment. I kept reminding myself that he had undergone chemotherapy, just like me, and then gone on to win the Tour de France seven times. I can’t describe how important this was to me. It gave me hope that there would be a future for me after my treatment was complete. And it made me aspire to be strong, like Lance.<br />
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In his autobiography, “It’s not about the bike,” Lance explained that when he was presented with the stark reality of how tough his chemo regime was going to be, he felt confident because it was a physical challenge, and he said that “as an athlete, physical challenges are something that I’m good at.”<br />
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The idea of being an athlete captured my imagination. It couldn’t have been further from who I was at the time – I was not remotely sporty. Far from it. I was unfit and very overweight. I'd never run further than 400 meters in my entire life. But I wanted to be strong like Lance, and I wanted to know that if I ever had to face something like chemo again, I would be ready. I wanted to be an athlete who was good at physical challenges too.<br />
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After successful chemotherapy treatment, five years later my cancer is still in remission, and I’m fitter, healthier and happier than I have ever been in my life before. I took up running and weight training. I lost 42 pounds, and then put on 14 pounds in lean muscle. I’ve given up alcohol. I’m always in training for my next marathon, and for the first time in my life, at the age of 40, I have a six-pack. From never doing any exercise, I now do a 2 hour workout every day, and I’ve recently become a qualified personal trainer.</div>
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And it's all thanks to Lance. His seven Tour de France wins were victories for cancer patients and survivors everywhere, and no one can take them away from him or from us.<br />
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<b>Update</b>:<br />
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<i>Well, I was wrong about that last bit. They did take Lance's victories away from him. It's quite a blow to discover that our heroes are in fact all too human. Lance Armstrong has now admitted that he lied, and that he did in fact cheat. There is no justification for this behaviour. The strange thing is though, that apart from the past paragraph, everything else in this blog post remains the truth. </i><br />
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<i>What Lance did was wrong. No excuses. It's also true that his actions helped a lot of people in dealing with cancer. This is not a justification or an excuse. It's just another fact. Which I think just goes to show how complicated the world is. Few things are black and white. Bad decisions can have good consequences, just as well meaning intentions can sometimes have bad consequences. </i><br />
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<i>I'm really disappointed that a hero of mine turned out not to be the saint that I thought he was. But then, perhaps that's my fault for idolising him in the first place. Now, with a clearer perspective, I see a complicated individual with both good and bad intentions. I suspect though that at the end of the day he'll leave the world a slightly better place than it was when he arrived. And perhaps that's all that any of us can hope for.</i></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-59505724260593723772012-07-22T12:52:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:41:58.362-07:00NLP and CancerToday at <span id="goog_847022836"></span><a href="http://www.sueknight.co.uk/Programmes/Alumni12/sueintro.htm">Sue Knight's NLP Alumni "Inspire Day"</a><span id="goog_847022837"></span> at Bix Manor, Henley, I gave a talk on how NLP techniques helped me when I went through cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy, and during my subsequent recovery. I'm posting an extended transcript of my talk (including content I didn't have time to cover during the event) for anyone who is interested. Check it out after the break.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Cancer survival</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A talk by Graham Bower, 22nd July 2010</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every morning on my way into work, I used to travel in the opposite direction to the rest of the rush hour traffic. I don’t know why, but it had always been that way. It was more than a coincidence. It was a pattern. The choices I made, like where I chose to live, where I chose to work and what transport I chose to take took me in the opposite direction to everyone else. As a result, I always found myself pushing against the crowd. The loner in the group.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It had always been that way for me until last year, when I realized that my life had taken a profound turn in direction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was running the London Marathon when it struck me. For the first time in my life, I was heading in the same direction as the crowd. Together with thirty-five thousand fellow runners, we were all heading towards the same finish line. We share the same purpose. The same goal. The same values. I wasn’t a loner any more. I felt connected. I was part of something bigger.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This was a profound change for me. A long and painful journey had led me to the start line of my first marathon. And it had all started in a doctors consulting room when I was the recipient of some unwelcome news.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“We are the lucky ones”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Three years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare form of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. After lots of tests and surgery, I was prescribed chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Fortunately, I responded so well to the chemo, that it turned out the radiotherapy was not necessary. Although my cancer is not curable, three years later I’m still here and there’s been no relapse. Which makes me very lucky.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My chemo was tough - although not half as bad as the regimes that some patients endure. Nonetheless, I had serious allergic reactions to my drugs, and some very bad infections. It was one of the most challenging moments in my life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And yet, as I look back on the events of 2007, I find that I’m very glad that it happened. The experience precipitated some major changes in my life, and most of them were for the better. It may seem paradoxical, but it turns out that my experience is far from unique. The nurses at my hospital tell me it is quite common for patients to respond in this way.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the autobiography of Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor and world-champion cyclist, he expressed a similar sentiment. When he was initially diagnosed, he received many letters from well wishers. One, from a cancer survivor, said: “you can’t know this yet, but we are the lucky ones.” At the time, wracked with fear and uncertainty, he naturally concluded that the letter writer was crazy. And yet, when he recalled these words after his treatment, he came to understand their wisdom.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Finding the positive intention</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, anyone whose treatment for cancer is successful is lucky, but I don’t think that is what the letter writer meant. He meant that we are lucky to experience cancer - regardless of the outcome. This may seem like a shocking idea. Or even a crazy one. But it’s actually similar to one of the beliefs of excellence in Sue Knight’s book <i>NLP At Work</i>: “behind every behavior there is a positive intention”. We can choose to believe that even cancer has a positive intention towards us. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For someone undergoing treatment, this “crazy” idea can be a very empowering belief. It is also a very general statement, open to broad interpretation. It allows us to negotiate our own path through the experience, and find our own meaning.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is the story of the path I took. My own personal journey through treatment and recovery - and the lessons I learned along the ways from some very wise and brave teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I came to view the cancer as a kind of test, or trial. And to my surprise, I realized that I had passed it. Passing the test did not mean getting well. Credit where credit it due, that was mostly thanks to the doctors. No, passing the test involved discovering that I was stronger than I had ever realized, and that the experience of recovering from cancer was what enabled me to release this untapped resource of strength.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“People never change”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At first, my diagnosis seemed like nothing more than random bad luck. Something else to add to what I thought was my ever growing list of problems. But the truth is that it dwarfed all of my other problems, to such an extent that I knew carrying on as normal was no longer an option. I had got a little too comfortable grumbling. But this was something that I would have to address head on, because, like it or not, it was big, and real, and coming my way.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I had always believed that people never change. That we are born predestined to be the way that we are. But now, I had to hope that I was wrong. I realised that I was going to have to change my ways to survive, and that perhaps this was cancer’s positive intention for me. It was an undeniable, inescapable instigator for change. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But how was I going to change?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“I don’t know anything”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the movie Avatar, there is a moment where the hero is challenged by a tribal leader, who asks him what he knows. Previous visitors to this tribe have been scientists and soldiers. They had all brought their preconceptions with them. But our hero believes that he is not supposed to be there. He was a last minute substitution. So he answers the tribal leader by saying “I don’t know anything”. The tribal leader is impressed, and grants our hero unprecedented access to the tribe in response. He recognises that “I don’t know anything” is the starting point of wisdom.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Through luck rather than judgement, I’d arrived at a point in my life where I didn’t know anything. I had no idea how to go about making the changes that were long overdue. But my need for change would drive me to explore options that I would previous have rejected. I read books that I would once have scorned as “mumbo-jumbo”. One book, in particular, made a deep impression on me at the time: <i>The Way of the Peaceful Warrior</i>, by Dan Millman.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I tried things that I previously had no interest in, like NLP, meditation, running and the gym.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“This is a difficult moment for you. Are you paying attention to it?”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before my diagnosis, I’d lived the first 37 years of my life in a state of lifelessness. Not really happy. Not really sad. Not really feeling much at all. My life had little flavour or colour. And, perhaps most important of all, no sense of meaning. Of course, I wasn’t aware of this at the time. I wasn’t really paying attention as my life went by. I was sleepwalking through it, barely experiencing anything. Always worrying about the future and agonizing about the past, but never really focusing on the present.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Until one day, I walked into a consulting room at my local hospital and the doctor told me I had cancer. That got my attention.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The nurse told me that I must be very shocked. But that’s not how I felt. I felt surprised. Surprised and something else. Like I’d just been abruptly woken from a very long sleep.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Like I was fully awake, for the first time in my life. Perhaps that is why, to this day, I still can describe every tiny detail of that scene, right down to the bland decor of that nondescript room, and the consultant’s unconvincing attempt at a reassuring smile.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Suddenly, I found myself completely focused on the moment. As someone who had never practiced meditation, I was about to get a crash course in mindfulness. For the first time in my life, I was living in the moment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Goodbye reassurance junkie</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Looking back, I realise that I had learned to repeat a certain pattern of behavior over and over again. One that only served to make me very unhappy, and maybe even precipitated the advance of my cancer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I had become addicted to reassurance, or to put it another way, I was a worrier.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As a former worrier, I can maybe explain to those who don’t suffer from this affliction, what it’s all about. Worriers don’t like worrying, even though they spend their whole lives doing it. They crave reassurance. They become so hooked on it, that they’ll belligerently worry about anything, just to experience the high they receive from reassurance when it finally comes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Quite quickly with my cancer diagnosis, however, I realised that this kind of reassurance was never going to come. Diagnosis and treatment was going to take months. And even if the treatment was a success, the doctors were still promising only “remission,” not a cure. However I looked at it, I could see that there was no path to reassurance through this experience. For the first time in my life, I started to see the futility of worrying.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Where it all started</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I believe that we make the best choices that are available to us at the time. Sadly, however, once we have made a choice, we have a tendency to stick to it long past its sell-by date. And as a result, we pass up on endless opportunities to make better choices as time goes by.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Many years ago, I made the choice to become a worrier. I was 12 years old, and I’d recently started at a new school. I was walking home one sunny afternoon, when I realised that I’d forgotten my P.E. kit. I must have left it in the changes rooms at school.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was an obvious course of action at this point would have been to calmly walk back to school, find my P.E. kit where I’d left it in the changing room, and then head back for home. But that is not what I chose to do. Instead, I chose to panic. I ran back to the school as quickly as my legs would carry me, allowing my mind to race as I considered what the worst possible scenario was for my P.E. kit. Even as I was doing this, a part of me knew that my P.E. kit was almost certainly still where I’d left it, and I would experience an overwhelming sense of relief and reassurance when I found it there. And sure enough, it was and I did.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The pattern of behaviour had worked. A crescendo of anxiety, fueled by “what’s the worst that could happen” self-talk, had led to a rush of reassurance. I was hooked and I wanted more. A lot more. Over the following two decades, I would repeat this strategy over and over again. In fact, there was not a moment in my life when I didn’t have something to worry about.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My decision to start worrying had been quick and easy, with far reaching implications. And since it had been within my power to choose to start worrying, it was also within my power to choose to stop. Indeed, the choice to stop was just as simple, with equally far reaching implications. But in order to make that choice, I had to recognise what I was doing, and consciously want to change.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Self fulfilling prophecies</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Something else I learned from Sue’s book was to look out for self fulfilling prophecies. We should always focus on what we want, because when we focus on what we don’t want, we have an uncanny way of making it happen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I realised that my cancer was an example of just that. I’d spent the first 37 years of my life perpetually worrying that something very serious was about to go wrong. And whenever one problem was resolved, I’d almost immediately find a new problem to start worrying about.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As a result, I lived my life in an almost perpetual state of stress, and this stress was beginning to take its toll. I got shingles, which was unusual for someone my age. The doctors told me my stress levels had depleted my immune system and I had to take things easier. But this just stressed me out even more.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Ironically, it seems that my anxiety that something was about to go wrong may very well be the cause of what finally did go wrong. I worried so much about getting ill, that the stress depleted my immune to the point where the cancer progressed to stage two.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The tumor and the rental car</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One event in my life, more perfectly than any other, illustrates the futility of worrying. The night before I was due to go on holiday for a week traveling around northern Italy with a friend, I found a very large lump in my groin. I’d never felt anything like it before, and as I inevitably did back then, I worried about it. The next morning, before setting off for Italy, I made a quick visit to a walk in health clinic, hoping for some reassurance that it wasn’t anything to worry about. The doctor duly obliged, telling me that it was probably just a lymph node draining an infection.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So I went on my holiday. Within an hour of collecting my hire car, I’d managed to put a dent in it. I proceeded to spend the entire holiday worrying about how much the car rental company would charge me for the damage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As it turns out, the dent was so small, the rental company didn’t make a charge. But the lump in my groin turned out to be a very serious tumor.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The irony was perfect. I’d spoilt my entire holiday worrying about a problem that didn’t even exist, when a far more serious problem was looming, that I was blissfully unaware of.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worrying sometimes gives us the illusion of control, allowing us to imagine that we have complete control over what will happen to us. Somehow, worrying feels like a constructive thing to do. If we worry about something enough, then maybe it won’t happen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But this is just an illusion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My trip to Italy made me realise that I didn’t even know what I should be worrying about. Not only did I not have control, but I was actually blind to the future. I’d been worrying about something as trivial as an imperceptible dent on a car, when, at that very moment, there were tumors growing inside me, that came very close to killing me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">With this in mind, I began to realise that there was not point to worrying at all. But how was I going to stop?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>In which I freak out my friends with a deathbed conversion</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My friends were freaking out. We had gone to the bookshop together, and somehow I’d given them the slip. But that wasn’t what was freaking them out. They were struggling to comprehend where they had found me. I was standing in the deeply unfashionable <i>Mind, Body & Spirit</i> section, right at the back of the top floor, surrounded by hippy “earth-mother” types.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days, it’s not so unusual to find me in that section of the bookshop, but back then it was unheard of. None of my group of friends read that sort of thing. And I’m afraid we all had a rather close-minded attitude towards what we regarded as, at best self-help psychobabble, and at worst, cultish indoctrination.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of my friends later confided to me that seeing me in the <i>Mind, Body & Spirit </i>section was the first time that he realized that my illness must be serious. It seemed almost to him like a death bed conversion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So what had draw me out of my normal haunt round the non-fiction and business sections? Had I finally seen the light and embraced Gaia into my life?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The truth is that I hadn’t intended to end up in <i>Mind, Body & Spirit</i>, but the search for a particular book I was looking for just led me there. Ever since I’d received my cancer diagnosis, my mind had started wandering over a movie trailer I’d seen a couple of years earlier. It clearly hadn’t persuaded me to see the movie at the time, and yet now images from the trailer kept vividly returning to my mind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The movie, called <i>Peaceful Warrior</i> was about a gymnast who had a motorcycle accident that shattered his legs. He was told by his doctors that he may never walk again. His entire life had been focussed on qualifying for the US Olympic gymnastics team, and all his punishing effort towards achieving that goal now seemed wasted. The injured gymnast meets a mysterious old man who then teaches him a new way of being that somehow saves his life. Not his physical life - since that was not threatened - but his spiritual life. In one metaphorical scene in the trailer, the old man is shown sweeping up the pieces of the gymnast’s shattered body.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I used to find it very difficult to admit that I needed help. When my doctors had offered me counseling, I’d brushed it off, saying that I was fine. But I wasn’t fine. I was broken, like the gymnast in the movie trailer, and somehow my unconscious mind had been able to acknowledge this fact long before I had consciously come to terms with it. And it had drawn me to the <i>Mind, Body & Spirit</i> section of the bookshop. I was looking for help from the old man in the movie.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The warm rays of insight</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Several days later, I was lying by window on a hospital gurney, with the sun shining down on me, feeling warm, relaxed and optimistic for the first time in years. I was engrossed in the book I was reading, <i>The Way of the Peaceful Warrior,</i> by Dan Millman - the book of the film, <i>Peaceful Warrior.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The subtitle of the book rather immodestly claims to be “a book that changes lives,” and I’m happy to report that in my case at least, this proved to be true. In this book, Dan explains that the greatest battles that we face are within - hence the term “Peaceful Warrior”. I’d spent a lot of my life battling what I perceived were external threats. Like trying not to get sick, trying not to lose clients, trying not to lose money, trying not to offend people or trying not to get ripped off. The idea that the greatest battles I faced were within myself was entirely new to me. And while at first I resisted the idea, somewhere inside me I knew instinctively that this was true.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I had been sabotaging myself with fear, anxieties and self doubt. I’d been making decisions in my life like an inexperienced and nervous driver behind the wheel, careering off course by over-reacting and overcompensating to every twist and turn in the road of life. As a result, I’d had more than my fair share of bumps along the way. Peaceful Warrior helped to raise my awareness to this fact, and as a consequence, it gave me choices that I’d never previously had. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I could choose to be brave. I could choose to fight my internal battles. It wasn’t my job to fight cancer - that was a battle that only my doctors could win for me. My battle was within. I needed to take control of my mind. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was smiling when the nurse arrived with my injection. I was about to have a PET scan, which would accurately determine where cancer cells were active within my body. To do this, I was going to be injected with a radioactive glucose solution. As it turns out, the injection was so radioactive that the nurse turned up with a lead apron and a gigantic crucible to hold the tiny injection in, so that it didn’t come close to his hands as he carried it to me. This toxic stuff was about to be injected directly into my veins, and I was smiling.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because for the first time in a long time, I had a plan. I was going to confront my internal battles head on. I was going to fight the fight inside my head and I was going to win. I was going to start thinking about my own thinking. If it was the last thing I did, I was going to take control of and responsibility for my own choices in life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Breaking the “bad mail” loop</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the months prior to my diagnosis, I’d had various minor misfortunes. I’d got involved in a dispute over a car insurance claim, and the freeholder of the building I lived in was in dispute with the leaseholders. As a result, I’d had a few unwelcome letters in the mail.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I became quite preoccupied by the anxiety of receiving what I called “bad mail”. I got so skilled at worrying about bad mail that I’d devised a routine for doing it. Each morning when I woke up, I’d wonder what bad mail would arrive that day. It would be on my mind at work, and my anxiety would increase on the way home, because I always checked the mail when I got home. By the time I was actually checking the mail, my heart would pound in my chest. And any news that arrived in the mail would go around in my head all evening, as I rehearsed in my mind how I would respond the following day.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My cancer diagnosis shed a new light on this little psychosis of mine. I began to see how absurd I was being, and how I was getting these issues entirely out of proportion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“It’s not cancer”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“It’s not cancer” quite quickly became a useful refrain, as I began to measure all my problems by this new yardstick, I found that I didn’t really have any significant problems apart from the cancer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But there was still the issue of the bad mail to solve. Even though I had come to realise that that it was nonsense, and that it had to stop, I’d got so good at doing it, and it had become such an established routine, that it had become almost involuntary. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The solution that I ultimately arrived at worked perfectly, but not for the reasons that I originally anticipated. I forced myself to leave the mail overnight, checking it in the morning on my way to work, rather than in the evening when I got back from work. I thought that this would make me worry less, because if there was any mail that I need to respond to, I could do so immediately by phone that morning, rather than worry myself to sleep about it in the evening.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The reason it actually worked, turned out to be quite different. Each evening I felt a strong compulsion to check the mail, but filled with resolve to beat the cancer, I resisted this compulsion. After two weeks, the post didn’t seem like a big deal any more. By forcing myself to leave the mail unopened overnight, I’d been sending myself a powerful signal that I was in control of the situation. That the post couldn’t be important because I wasn’t checking it. It could wait. I even stopped checking mail at weekends - leaving two days of mail to wait until I was ready to read it. And it was fine.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After a few weeks, I’d broken the worry routine altogether, and was no longer preoccupied with bad mail. If only I’d addressed my worrying earlier, then maybe I’d never have contracted a stage-two lymphoma. Now that my worrying was addressed, I needed to focus on my treatment. But would getting well prove to be as easy as addressing my worries?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“You can choose to be a victim, or you can choose anything else you’d like to be.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is a special word for ex-cancer-patients. They are called “survivors”. It’s actually quite an immodest term, implying some kind of heroic struggle against the odds. But it is also very empowering. Rather than being a “cancer victim” who “battles against a disease” it gives us an inspiring identity to live up to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve learned a lot about the importance of identity as a result of my cancer experience. Before all this began, I certainly wouldn’t have thought of myself as a survivor. I thought I was weak. And by weak, I mean that I thought I was both physically weak and a coward.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They say that denial is one of the stages you go through after diagnosis. Like the five stages of grief. I couldn’t quite believe it was happening to me. But it was more than that. It was a question of identity. I remember feeling that “this is not who I am”. Cancer patients are brave, and stoic and inspiring and strong. That is not me. I am not any of those things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’m a coward. A moaner. I have no tolerance for pain. I’m even scared of needles. I’m weak, both mentally and physically. That’s honestly how I thought about myself. But I also had two other qualities, at the bottom of my psychic barrel, which would prove to be invaluable and transformative. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Stubborn and vain.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was stubborn and vain.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My stubbornness meant that even though I didn’t think I had the resources to beat the disease, I refused to give up without a fight. And the vanity? Well as soon as you tell people you’ve got cancer, they start telling you how brave you are, (how little they knew). But the vain side of me rather liked this new identity, and came to prefer how people saw me, to how I saw myself. This gave me not only a desire for change, but a map of how to change. I wanted to become the person that people already thought that I was.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I wanted to be brave and stoic and inspiring and strong. I wanted to be a survivor.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My fear of needles vanished with the repeated poking and prodding of chemotherapy. And with each procedure - bone marrow tests, biopsies or whatever - I’d limp back to work as quickly as I could. People told me how strong I was. And it made me feel strong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“As an athlete, physical challenges are something that I’m good at.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Lance Armstrong has an amazing talent for framing situations in empowering ways. He describes chemo as a physical challenge, and explains that, when he was told about his grueling treatment plan, he felt confident because it was essentially a physical challenge, and as an athlete, physical challenges are something that he is very good at.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s easy to think of chemo as being something disempowering, debilitating and overwhelming. But by reframing the situation, Lance Armstrong turns it into something empowering and challenging, like the Tour de France. Not something for weak, sick people, but something for world class athletes, like himself.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How we think about something like chemotherapy has a huge impact upon how we experience it. And how we think about ourselves - our identity - can limit us, or empower us to find the resources that we need.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I didn’t (yet) think of myself as an athlete, but I was starting to think of myself as someone who was brave and strong. Someone who would keep smiling when things got tough.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“You must be going out of your mind with worry”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Because my cancer was very rare, the diagnosis stage took a long time. From my first biopsy, I had to wait months for the histologists to arrive at a verdict. My cells were bounced around from one lab to another, as they marveled at the rarity of my condition, like stamp collectors. My consultant had already told me that I’d need chemo and radiotherapy, but he couldn’t confirm precisely what my treatment would be until the histologists had completed their deliberations.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Each week, I’d call my nurse at the hospital to ask if there was any news. My nurse was incredibly supportive, and I could tell she really felt bad for me. On one phone call, she said “I’m so sorry. You must be going out of your mind with worry.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fortunately, just that week, I’d been reading the chapter in Sue’s book about hypnosis, and so I spotted the embedded command in my nurse’s words. In a well meaning attempt to demonstrate that she empathised with my situation, she was mind reading, speculating that I must be worried. But what she was actually saying was an instruction. She was literally telling me that I must go out of my mind with worry. And as I’ve already explained, worrying was something that I was very good at. It was like giving a glass of vodka to an alcoholic - there was every reason to suspect that my unconscious mind would obey her unintentional command.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So I tried intercepting it instead. I told her that no, I was quite relaxed about it. I found it reassuring that the histologists were taking so much care over my case, and I even joked that I was flattered by all the attention.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I felt my entire body relax as I said this. The humor had somehow dispelled the moment, and I think it helped my unconscious mind let go of the embedded command as well.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“Take it one day at a time”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When you have a chronic illness, a lot of people tell you to “take it one day at a time.” I prefer to think of it as living in the present.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For the first few weeks, I was still waiting and hoping for the doctors to concede that there was some kind of mistake. That everything could go back to normal. But equally, a part of me knew that things could never go back to normal, and I didn’t want them to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My past felt meaningless and hollow. My future frightened me. And so, for the first time in my life, I started to dwell in the present.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But existing in the present needn’t be because of fear of the past and future. In The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman puts it like this:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“You don’t have more than a few years left. No one does. So be happy now, without reason, or you never will be at all.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was halfway there. I was finally focused on “now”. But it would take me some more time to discover unreasonable happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Enjoying the night before my surgery - compartments and boxes</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worry is the act of going over something again and again in your mind. Trying to reassure yourself by asking the rhetorical question “what’s the worst that can happen?” only to terrify yourself with various chilling but extremely unlikely scenarios.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worry is the act of subjecting your body to the harmful and debilitating long term effects of stress, as your hyperactive brain instructs your adrenal glands to spew excessively high levels of the stress hormone cortisol into your bloodstream.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worry is the act of surrendering your attention from the present to dwell instead on your regrets about the past and your anxieties about the future, despite the fact that this is entirely futile, and the only place where you can affect any kind of change is in the present.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Been there, done that, never going back there. </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I remember the night before my surgery, I had a very pleasant evening with my partner. We watched a movie together. It was good, and I gave it my full attention. On a couple of occasions, I allowed myself to reflect upon the fact that I’d be out cold under a general anesthetic on the operating table the following morning, but then I let the thought go and returned to what I was doing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This behavior might not seem so strange. After all, what’s the point on dwelling on something like surgery: it may not be so bad, but it’s hardly something to look forward to. But for me, this behavior was nothing short of revolutionary. Only a few months prior to this, I’d kept myself up all night with anxiety that the doctor might want to give me a blood test the following morning. It had been going around and around in my head, possible scenarios where the doctor would or would not want to subject me to a needle, and how painful that needle might prove to be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The night before my surgery was not the only occasion on which I experienced this calm before the storm. I’d felt similarly relaxed on the night before my first chemotherapy treatment. And throughout the months of my treatment, whatever was going on with my health, I found that when I was at work, I was able to focus on what I was doing without any distraction from worry.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Something had changed within me. A fundament shift. But what?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Five years later, I’m standing on a beach on Lanzarote, waiting to start my first ever surfing lesson. I feel relaxed, confident, intrigued and fully refreshed after a good night’s sleep. As a child, I had been terrified by the sea after being dragged with my family along on sailing trips in choppy waters. I had vowed never again to go near the sea, and up until today, I had been true to my word.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The truth is that returning to the sea was a frightening prospect for me. The very fact that it was an intimidating prospect is what made it so intriguing. My cancer experiences had given me a new appetite to take on my fears, and a confidence that I could beat them. But this still didn’t make them any less scary. So how was I able to get such a good sleep the night before my first surfing lesson?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For the same reason that I was able to enjoy the movie before my surgery, and to focus on my work during my treatment. I had found a way to channel my attention onto the present. And the way I describe this technique is “compartmentalization”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Worry is one of the main culprits from drawing out attention out of the present. One moment we may be focusing on the here and now, and the next moment, we glaze over and go inside ourselves, as if we’re working away on some unsolvable internal problem. And while we’re there, whatever it was that we were doing is left to our autopilot. Fortunately, we rarely, if ever, see ourselves in this state, but it can be both sobering and disturbing to observe it in others. You may see their eyes scanning rapidly from left to right, as if they’re reading an invisible page of text. Their lips open and close as if they’re whispering, but no sound comes out - or even more disconcertingly, sometimes there’s some kind of incomprehensible muttering. Like someone talking in a foreign language to themselves, that only they understand.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You may think you’ve never looked this crazy, but if you’ve ever been preoccupied by worries, there’s a fair chance you resembled this description. So worrying doesn’t look cool, but that’s the least of our problems. The real question is, when we’re worrying about the future, who is left to look after the present? Do we really want to put our lives in the hands of someone in this state?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before cancer, I was becoming increasingly aware that I had a problem with my worrying, and I needed to do something about it, but I had no idea how to change. As I’ve said, the cancer helped me to realize the futility of worrying because I could see no path to reassurance. The “what’s the worst that could happen” game was not remotely reassuring. When you’re contemplating cancer surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, your doctors will be very clear about what the worst possible outcomes are, and they are very far from reassuring. In fact, they’ll make you sign waiver forms to accept that they very worst may well happen, and that you will not hold them liable for the consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">With the stakes this high, worrying became a nuclear option - a truly terrifying and all consuming activity if you allowed yourself to succumb to it. Rather than considering “what’s the worst that can happen” you’re better off putting it out of your mind altogether. But how? The trouble is, of course, the more you try not to think about something, the more you find yourself thinking about it. Try not thinking about elephants right now. Hard isn’t it. You weren’t even thinking about elephants before, but now that I’ve mentioned them, you can’t help but think about elephants, even though I told you not to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The solution I found to this problem was to start packing away these different aspects of my life into separate compartments. The way it worked was that only one compartment could be open at a time. The others were still there and I fully recognized their gravity. But when there was nothing I could do about them, then I recognized this fact too, and I acted accordingly, by storing them in their respective compartments, ready to open up and deal with at the appropriate time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I was packing away these things for later, I would say to myself, “there’s nothing more I can do about this now.” When the time came to deal with whatever was in that compartment, I knew it would all still be there. So on the morning of my surgery, I was ready to discuss it with my surgeon, I was prepared with the questions I wanted to ask, and I was even able to share a joke with one of the medical interns who wanted to photograph my cancer scars.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the night before, that compartment was closed. Out of sight, out of mind. I was in a different compartment. I was focused on spending time with my partner, and enjoying a movie together. And that’s exactly what we did.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I continue to benefit from using this technique now, several years after getting the all clear. And it has enabled me to do things that would previously have seemed impossible to me, like going surfing. On the morning of my first day of surf school, it was only as I was pulling on my wetsuit that the compartment opened in my mind and I contemplated what I was about to do. It made me laugh as I thought “what have a gotten myself into now,” and the great thing was, there simply wasn’t any time to worry about it - I literally just had to throw myself into the waves and see what happened.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">With practice, I have found this technique becomes second nature - so much so that I no longer need to consciously think about the metaphor of compartments and boxes any more. I simply need to act as if there are compartments and boxes that can only be opened one at a time. The key is to genuinely believe that this is the case.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The curse of the red shoes</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Doctors talk about chemotherapy as a “regime”, because it usually comprises many different drugs. Not just the chemo itself, but also drugs like steroids to help your body break down the dead tumor tissue, and antiemetics to help you cope with the nausea that chemo can sometimes cause. So each week, when I went to the hospital for my chemo, they would give me a “goodie bag” to take home, filled with a cocktail of different tablets to take at various intervals. As it later turned out, I was seriously allergic to one of the drugs in that bag.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">With so many different drugs coursing around your body, if you experience an allergic reaction, it can take a bit of detective work on the part of your doctors to work out which one is to blame.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The symptoms were like nothing I had ever experienced before. It started with this strange feeling of restlessness. I would wake up in the night and sit up bolt upright. During the day, I would be incapable of sitting still to read a magazine or watch TV. I just couldn’t rest. I couldn’t sleep, and I was overwhelmed by a sense of unease.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It was like Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale about the girl who put on magical red shoes that forced her to dance perpetually without resting. Eventually she was forced to amputate her own feet in order to be free from the shoes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At first, the doctors thought it was simply that I was struggling to cope with the side effects of the chemo. This was a terrifying prospect. If being on chemo was going to be like this, how was I going to survive several months of it? I was more frightened that I had ever been in my life before, and things were about to get much worse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>A test of mind and body</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before my diagnosis, one of my greatest phobias was a fear of injections and blood tests. Of course, by the time I’d completed my chemo, I’d got over this, but when I started, my fear of needles was still very real. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of the many tests that chemo patients are subjected to is a kidney function test. A substance is injected into the blood stream, and then blood tests are taken every two hours to see how rapidly your kidneys gets rid of it. If it stays in your bloodstream for longer than average, your chemo dosage may need to be reduced.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was already suffering from the mind-altering effects of my allergic reaction to one of my drugs. Now, I had to return to the hospital every two hours to face my fear of needles over and over again. It was like a cruel kind of torture, and one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. I still don’t quite know how I managed to complete the test, but I remember thinking at the time - I have no choice, it’s this or death.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And things were about to get darker still, before I finally reached the dawn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The psychic oil slick</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every experience I had during the time that I was suffering from the allergic reaction became tainted. Like a psychic oil slick that engulfed everything I encountered. If I hear a piece of music today that I listened to then, I start to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s an immediate and powerful reaction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the time, as I was trying to take my mind off that terrible feeling of chemical-induced restlessness, I watched some of my favourite old movies and TV shows. These were all ruined for me. Even today, I can’t enjoy watching them. They have become so powerfully anchored in my mind with that experience. I imagine, with some work, I could desensitise them, and break the anchors, but experiencing the feelings and sensations that they trigger simply don’t seem worth it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I call these anchors “the taint”. I can be going about my business as normal, when I encounter one of these TV shows or pieces of music and it stops me in my tracks, and I’m back there - restless, agitated and terrified. I’ve stumbled across the taint.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Finding the answer by losing control</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The rashes on my back, that the chemo was supposed to be making better, were starting to get worse. Much worse. They were turning bright red, puffy and hot to the touch. When I showed them to the doctors, they immediately admitted me into the hospital for a course of intravenous antibiotics. For most infections, antibiotics are administered aurally, as tablets. But with the kind of severe infections that are possible when your immune system is compromised by chemo, higher doses of antibiotics are required, and these have to be administered intravenously - through a needle or “cannula” directly into your bloodstream.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The trouble with high dose antibiotics is that they kill the good bacteria in your stomach, which can induce nausea and vomiting. To counteract this, the doctors gave me a higher dose of metoclopramide, the antiemetic drug I’d been taking to counteract my nausea. Unfortunately, it turned out that this was the drug that I’d been having the allergic reaction to at low doses. My symptoms on low doses had been bad enough. On a high dose, they were nothing short of spectacular.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My entire body began to convulse uncontrollably. I was terrified. I watched as the nurse tried to help by administering more metoclopramide through my cannula. At this stage, I was beginning to intuitively sense that the metoclopramide was the problem, but I was powerless to stop it. In fact, I was powerless to do anything. I felt tears start streaming down my face and I realized in terror that I’d finally relinquished every last illusion of control over my life. And I could no longer see a way forwards. I remember thinking, “this is it”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fortunately, one of the doctors recognised my condition as an acute distonic reaction, metoclopramide was identified as the cause and eventually, my symptoms subsided. Ironically, the drug that was supposed to be making me feel better was in fact making me feel much worse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Over the weeks that followed, things started getting easier for me. In fact, since that moment when I was lying on the hospital bed, my skin covered in infected cancer lesions, my limbs convulsing while the nurses pumped poison into my veins, things have always been easier for me. Because it was in that moment that I finally learned to let go. I finally came to accept that I was not in control, that I never had been and that I never would be.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Things happen. Sometimes terrifying things. Sometimes wonderful things. There’s only an extent to which we can influence and we can never control. And as I let go of the illusion of control, I let something else go as well. Entitlement. I now believe that the idea we’re entitled to things is one of the greatest causes of sickness in the western world. Lying in that hospital bed, I realized that I wasn’t entitled to be well. I wasn’t entitled to decide what was put into my own veins, and that I wasn’t even entitled to life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When that brilliant doctor correctly diagnosed an acute distonic reaction and made it stop... made all the symptoms of the allergic reaction stop... I had never been more grateful in my life. Gratitude is what you’re left with once you’ve let go of entitlement.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And I’ve been grateful ever since.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>An interesting specimen</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As the rashes all over my body became worse, they started to join up, and I was beginning to look like the Singing Detective. My appearance at this point was so remarkable that my doctors wanted to take photographs of it for their records, so they sent an orderly to take me in a wheelchair from the ward I was in to the medical photography department.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I didn’t need a wheelchair since my legs were working perfectly well, but the orderly insisted, saying it was procedure. He was very friendly and chatty as he wheeled me down corridors and up elevators from one end of the hospital to the other. He spent some time moaning about the patients who were always moaning, and then told me that the patients who were really sick were always the nicest to him. He said that I was a nice guy. It struck me that this was not a particularly reassuring indication of his perception of my health.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The orderly’s kind but disturbing words were still on my mind as I stripped down to my underpants and stood with my arms raised outwards as the bright photographic lights shone down on my disfigured skin. I felt terrible. Not sick, but more humiliated and pathetic. I was reduced to a medical curiosity - like the elephant man. Looking back, I realize this seems a little over dramatic, but it’s how I felt at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I never saw the photos. It’s strange to imagine they’re now being studied by medical students somewhere. I’d never felt proud of my body, but equally, I had never felt dissatisfied with it either. But at that moment, as I stood there, with my gut hanging out, and my skin oozing with red-raw lesions, I felt ashamed. I wanted a better body.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The comfort of strangers</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every week, chemotherapy patients from the lymphoma clinic at the Royal Marsden Hospital meet at the Medical Day Unit to receive their medicine. Most cytotoxic chemotherapy is made from platinum. A beautiful metal when worn outside the body, but deadly when inside it. It kills cells. The trick is to take just the right amount of it to kill all the cancer cells before it kills you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The stuff is so dangerous that it has to be pumped into your veins very slowly, to ensure that it circulates evenly around your entire system. That means sitting still for hours, hooked up to a pump that infuses the chemo into your veins.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So, each week, we’d sit together in a big room, waiting for the chemo to take effect, at which point we’d start to feel sick. I got talking to a few fellow patients, but mostly we all just sat in silence, reading books, or staring into space.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But despite our lack of words, there was something very special and moving about the Medical Day Unit. I think we were somehow all taking emotional strength from each other. There was a extraordinary kind of fellowship and camaraderie between us that I’ve never experienced before. And when a fellow patient completed his or her treatment, we all felt a shared elation for them. Something truly selfless, borne out of adversity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’d never felt connected with people in this way before, and it’s something I’ve kept with me since. I’m always looking for these unexpected, unspoken connections now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Paying attention to tears</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">While I was on chemotherapy, there was one topic of conversation that would always make me cry. My job. I didn’t understand this at the time. The tears seemed to come from nowhere, when I least expected it. But over time, I started to recognize the pattern. Whenever I talked about my job, I started to well up. And I didn’t know why. Was my unconscious mind trying to tell me something?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The doctors had told me to take at least three months off work. They warned that the chemo would be very tiring, and that most people struggled to maintain a full time job. I egotistically thought to myself “I’m not most people,” and I resolved to carry on working regardless. In fact, I didn’t see that I had much option. I was self-employed, running a small business. I was not sure that it could carry on without me, and I felt I would be letting a lot of people down if I stopped working.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But once I had started the treatment, I began to see what the doctors had meant. I was struggling under the pressure, and I was increasingly relying on my colleagues’ support and my clients’ understanding. I had taken too much on and I was failing. I could no longer support myself.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Looking back, I now realize that this is what was getting me so upset. From an early age, I’d learned to rely only on myself. I had been deeply mistrustful of other people and I had become fiercely independent as a consequence. This independence had served me reasonably well as a self-defense mechanism over the years, but it was woefully inadequate in the circumstances I now found myself in. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No one survives cancer without the help of other people. It’s a team effort. There’s not just a patient. There’s doctors, nurses, family, friends and colleagues. They all play an important part. You have to learn to trust other people and put your life in their hands if you’re going to survive.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Good times on chemo</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Life on chemo had its good days as well as the bad. There were days in each cycle where I felt quite well, and on many occasions, I remember having good times. On one occasion, I went with a friend to see a Zaha Hadid exhibition at the London Design Museum. The innovation and visual energy of Hadid’s work transported me from my day-to-day life, and instead I was absorbed in a world of flowing lines and fractured rectilinear forms. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Leaving the exhibition, I felt intellectually recharged. The visual richness of the gallery environment couldn’t have been in starker contrast from the bland sterile hospital environments I’d been spending so much time in lately. Then I sat with a friend by the River Thames and we ate muffins. I still remember that day fondly. Days like that shine out like jewels in my memory, maybe because they were so precious to me at the time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s easy to focus on the bad days when you’re on chemo, but it’s more important to remember the good days. If anyone reading this is about to start chemotherapy, it’s especially important that they know they can have good days too.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Happiness is about more than pleasurable moments</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Each month, when I had completed a cycle of chemotherapy, I would have a CT scan to measure the size of my tumors. After the first month, they had actually grown. The doctor told me that the treatment may not be working, that I might need to switch to tougher regime. The first month had been particularly tough, because of my allergic reaction. The idea that it had all been for nothing and that worse was yet to come was a crushing blow. I went home, by myself, sat down and wept.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I called my partner, who rushed home from work to comfort me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Remembering that moment still makes me cry. This was an extremely important moment in my life, and as frightened as I was, my partner was there to share it with me. And that made me feel better. It also enriched our relationship, and made it even more meaningful to me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As painful as that moment was, it was also very precious. I like to explain it like this. Life is not a bowl of cherries, where you seek out one sweet sensation after enough. It’s far more complex that that. Like a glass of fine whisky. It has its sweetness, but it has more difficult notes as well. With a glass if whisky, you don’t just enjoy the sweetness, you savor the whole thing for what it is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Cancer has taught me that life can be a lot like that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If we treat it like a bowl of cherries, attempting to hop from one pleasurable experience to another, we strip away all of the meaning.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Unreasonable happiness</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I mentioned Dan Millman’s book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. There are many great lessons in this book, but one of the most important, and I think the hardest to grasp is unreasonable happiness. That, no matter what the circumstances, we should be happy. This is how Dan puts it:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Feelings change. Sometimes sorrow, sometimes joy. But beneath it all remember the innate perfection of your life unfolding. That’s the secret of unreasonable happiness.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I struggled with this idea for a long time. How could my life be innately perfect when I had cancer? How could it be innately perfect when I felt sorrow? But in the midst of my treatment, these words started to make sense to me. Even as my mood changed; even as my optimism waxed and wained; even as the chemo drove me to a nadir.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I had come to understand that life was a glass of whisky, not a bowl of cherries, I was learning to appreciate it. I was learning to take pleasure in the small things. I was learning to forgive myself when I was weak, and recognise my achievements when I was strong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The small things in life, like time with friends and family, all suddenly took on a great deal more meaning for me. Rather than thinking “I have to do this” I was starting to think “I get to do this.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was an underlying happiness in my life. For the first time in my life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Diet. Exercise. Rest.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you getting enough exercise? These are fundamental questions. Getting these three things right is essential to keeping well. And when you’re on chemotherapy, being well is not something that you can take for granted.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The kind of chemo I was on is particularly hard on your bone marrow, which manufactures blood cells. Each cycle, when I reached my nadir (my weakest point in the treatment), I’d become neutropenic, which means that I had little or no white blood cells. Or in other words, I had no immune system left.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When you’re neutropenic, you have to take your health seriously. And I did. And I have been ever since. Once you properly start looking after yourself, you never want to stop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said he’d loved to go to the gym as often as I do, but because he was self employed, he just didn’t have the time. I told him about the triangle of wellness - diet, exercise and rest. I told him that, from painful personal experience, I knew that life is fragile, and we have to take our health seriously. And I told him that without his health, he didn’t have a business anyway. I said he should make time. And I meant it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He just laughed and told me I was lovely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I wished I knew how to properly share this lesson with him before it was too late for him, as it almost had been for me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Running on empty and the need for inspiration</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have a vivid memory of one day, sitting in my car, by myself, in tears. I was half way through my third month of chemotherapy and no one was talking to me. My key-worker nurse, Lucy, had been off sick for several weeks, none of my doctors were available and I had an urgent question. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When I had started my treatment three months ago, I was told I needed three months of chemotherapy, followed radiotherapy. I has assumed I was coming to the end of my treatment, but when I checked in for my chemo that day, one of the administrators had given me appointment times for another two months of chemo. I didn’t understand why, and there were no doctors around to ask.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I phoned up my consultants office, and spoke to a nurse who wasn’t familiar with my case. She had a quick read of my file and said, in a matter-of-fact manner tone, that I was down for six months of chemo, not three. There was no explanation given. I managed to choke back my tears in the hospital, but when I got into my car to drive home, I broke down and cried.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They’d moved the goals on me with no explanation. They made decisions which had a massive impact upon my life behind closed doors, and then neglected to tell me about them, let alone tell me what motivated them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It felt hopeless. And I really do mean hopeless. As I sat alone, weeping in my car, I simply had no positive energy left. I couldn’t see anything to look forward to. And all the efforts I’d been making to stay positive seemed like Pollyanna-isms. “They’re never going to let me off the chemo,” I thought. “They’ll keep me on it until it kills me.” That’s honestly what I thought.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Five years later, coming down from the high of completing my second London Marathon, a friend observed that it seemed to be really important to me to keep trying to be inspirational. He asked me why. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but as soon as I thought about it, the answer was obviously. I was transported back to that hopeless moment in the car. That was why it was important.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What I didn’t know back then was that the doctors had decided to extend my chemo because it was working. The tumors were shrinking to such an extent that they had decided I wouldn’t need radiotherapy after all. When things seemed at their most hopeless, my treatment was in fact coming to a successful conclusion. How could I have anticipated back then that a few months later I would be training for my first marathon?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That’s why it’s so important to be an inspiration to others. It’s not just vanity. It’s about hope. Providing hope to people who don’t have any. People who, right now are sitting in a car somewhere crying. Because they need to know that it can get better. It’s not just world-class athletes like Lance Armstrong who survive cancer and go on to live rewarding lives. It’s ordinary people like me as well.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I would encourage any cancer survivor to be as open, honest and visible about their experiences as possible. So that people crying in cars can know that there is hope. Because people need hope like cars need fuel. When the tank is empty, they can no longer operate. I believe that very few people are unfortunate enough to ever find themselves with an empty tank. It gets low sometimes, and our engines start sputtering. But to be all out of hope is truly terrifying.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Someone once told me that they really liked my story because I’m so ordinary. I’m not like a Lance Armstrong or a Steve Jobs. I’m just a regular guy. And that if I can be a survivor, then anyone can. I was so touched by this that it brought tears to my eyes. They had precisely understood the meaning of my story. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Hope</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I learned more about meditation and mindfulness, I came to understand the importance of not allowing my mind to draw my attention away from the present. Learning to let go of fears about what may happen in the future, or to predicate one’s future happiness on a particular outcome. But paradoxically, I found that this didn’t mean letting go of hope.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was a song that kept coming into my mind while I was on chemo. The song has a serene and melancholy tone, with a particular lyric I remembered:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“September again. You come so quick... Like knocking so hard, and trying to get through to Bethlehem’s gates.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In June, as I lay in a dimly lit room, fighting off nausea, with the sunshine blazing beyond my drawn curtains, I would imagine myself listening to that song in September, when the treatment was over. The idea of “Bethlehem’s gates” became associated with hope in my mind (even though I’m not religious). I would find myself singing that song over and over in my head.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the treatment was over and my consultant told me that, to his great surprise, the scans were now clear, the first thing I did was go home, play Bethelem’s Gates and burst in to tears. It was September again, just like in the song and I realised that I was going to be alive for Christmas, and that was what the lyrics of the song meant.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My trip to Italy had taught me that I couldn’t predict the future, and so there was no point in worrying. The same is true of hope - to a point. There’s no point in hoping for a specific outcome, since we can’t know what is going to be best for us. How could I have known, for example, about all of the positives I would get from cancer. But there is an important difference between worry and hope. And it is this: worrying about an undefined negative outcome is destructive and empty; while remaining hopeful for an undefined positive outcome gives us the resources we need to carry on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>I’m still here! What now?</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I hadn’t been expecting to survive. That is the startling truth that I was coming to terms with. For months, the news seemed to have got progressively worse. The cancer might be in my bone marrow. The regime isn’t tough enough. The tumors are still growing. We need to give it another month and then we’ll see... The doctors are trained not to give patients false hope, so whenever I asked them if this might be the last chemo cycle, they would say “we’ll see” with a pained smile on their face.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So when the PET scan revealed no trace of cancer activity in my body, “PET negative” as they call it, it was not only joyous news, but it was also a surprise.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I felt like I’d been following a map for the last few months, and now I was blundering forwards without one. What was I going to do now? Who was I? I knew that I’d grown and evolved and become a different person, but what did this mean?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It took a few weeks for the news to sink in. And I was back to square one - I knew nothing. But there was a difference now. I now knew that it was great to know nothing. To be open to new experience. I just had to wait and allow the answers to come to me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And I didn’t have to wait long.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“Yes, but how do I know what I want to do?”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One way I like to sense-check what I am doing is this. I ask myself, if this was the last day of my life, is this something I’d want to be doing with it? If the answer is no, then I know I need to reappraise my priorities.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Talking to people about my experiences, a comment I often get is that I’m lucky, because I know what I want to do. I know I want to run, for example. They then say “but my problem is that I don’t know what I want.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is a problem that I understand very well, because I felt exactly the same way before my diagnosis. The answer for me was to learn to listen to my unconscious mind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A few months after my treatment was over, I was starting to realise that things could return to normal. But because I’d been so unhappy before, the last thing I wanted was for things to return to normal. I needed a new direction. This left me in a state of ambivalence, that made me more receptive to new ideas than I had ever been before. This ambivalence is what enabled me to start listening to my unconscious mind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It began with an image, that started coming into my head at quite random moments. The image was vivid and clear. I could see a man running through a city. He looked calm, relaxed, confident, strong and healthy. He somehow embodied all of the qualities that the cancer experiences had made me aspire to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Oddly, over time I recognised the image as having come from a TV ad for Nike running shoes that I’d seen many years before. It hadn’t made much of an impression on me at the time, or so I had thought. But how fascinating that my unconscious mind had resourcefully stored it away, ready to make me revisit it at precisely the right moment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>I’m not a sporty person</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Almost without thinking about it, I went out and bought a pair of Nike running shoes, and I’ve been running ever since. I’ve run about 10,000 kilometers in the past four years. I’ve raised a lot of money for Cancer Research UK. I joined my local running club. I’ve run races all around the country. I’ve completed the London Marathon twice and I’m training for my first New York Marathon this autumn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before cancer, I had never run anywhere in my life before. I didn’t do any exercise. I was overweight and unhealthy. Now I run 10km a day, and it’s always one of the most joyful parts of my day. I know that running is one of the things I would want to be doing on the last day of my life, so I never regret going for a run.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, as much as I love running, I realise it may not be for everyone. We’re all different, and we all have different dreams and desires. But if you’re like I was, you may not have any idea about what those desires might be. All it took to work out what I wanted to do was to create some space to allow my unconscious mind give me the answer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>A habit transplant</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every night, when I get back from work, I go for a run. Even if I feel tired. Even if it’s pouring with rain. Even if the ground is covered with snow. Sometime, when the weather is particularly grizzly, I might think to myself “I don’t want to go running today”, as I’m pulling on my running shoes. But it doesn’t stop me. Nothing stops me. I never miss a run. This pattern of behaviour has become deeply entrenched for me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Partly, this is because I know that, even at the end of the most rain-drenched run, I’ll feel better for having got out there by the time I get home. But there’s more to it than that. I’ve managed to substitute a bad habit for a good one. I had replaced my “Bad Mail” loop with a running habit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before cancer, on my way home I would be worrying about what I might find in the day’s mail. And in the evening I would be stressing over what I had found in the mail, or what bad news might be delivered on the following day. It all hinged upon me arriving home from work, which is when I would check my mail. This was the trigger that instigated the habit routine and perpetuated the state. As I’ve already explained, I had successfully disrupted this routine by switching to checking my mail in the mornings rather than the evenings. But with my new running routine, I was taking this further. The same trigger that had once instigated the worry routine was now triggering my running routine, with the same reliable consistency.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The reason that I pull on my running shoes every evening when I got home, regardless of the weather is simply because that’s what I do when I get home. That’s my routine. It’s not something I even need to think about. It just happens.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Underlying the “negative” behaviour of my bad mail worry routine was an untapped “positive” resource - the ability to maintain repetitive tasks consistently and reliably.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“I’ve been good, I deserve this.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s common for patients on chemotherapy to lose weight. This is usually due to loss of appetite and vomiting, which can be side effects of the treatment. Ironically however, I had managed to gain weight during my treatment. This was probably due to my indulging in comfort food and “treats” to reward myself for “being good”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My thinking at the time went something like this. “Poor me, having to go through all this nasty chemotherapy. I’ve been really good putting up with all this. I deserve a treat.” On my way back from the medical day unit each week, I’d buy myself a Magnum ice cream to “cheer myself up.” Whenever I bought myself a coffee at Starbucks, I’d always get a cake to go with it. And every evening, I’d stuff my face with half tub of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream while I sat watching TV.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And so, inevitably, my waistline increased. I’d never been particularly fit, but equally, I’d never been overweight before. But now, there was not escaping the fact that I was well and truly fat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the year after I completed my treatment, I lost 20kg. Of course, my new running habit played an important role in my weight loss, but changes in my diet were also important. Now that I was healthy again, I wanted to stay that way, and an important part of staying healthy is to eat a healthy diet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the heart of my unhealthy relationship with ice cream, cakes and chocolate was these concepts of “treat,” “reward,” and “being good”. In order to make a permanent switch to a healthy, balanced way of eating, I knew I had to reframe my relationship with food. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The first thing I chose to let go of was the idea of “being good”. This concept implies and invisible parent figure who judges whether you are good or bad. It externaises the responsibility for judging our choices to this invisible overseer. Surely, it’s not about being good or bad, it’s about choosing for ourselves what we want to eat by considering both the short and long term consequences of our choices. The second problem with the idea of “being good” is that it is zero-sum. We negate the good eating behaviour by then indulging in “bad” eating. Instead, I decided to work out what amounts of different food types I would choose to eat, considering what I enjoyed eating, and what the healthy impact was. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The next concept I decided to get rid of was “treats”. A treat is effectively a behaviour where we choose to subject our bodies to something unhealthy as a reward for having done something healthy. Not only does this concept suffer from the same zero-sum problem “being good,” but it also implies that eating healthy food is not a treat. Effectively, it divides our eating behaviour into healthy punishment eating and unhealthy reward eating. Surely eating healthily should be its own reward.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Today, I still eat chocolate, cakes and ice cream from time to time, although far less than I ever used to. But I never refer to them as treats, and I certainly never think of them as rewards for being good. They’re simply fun things I occasionally choose to eat as part of a healthy balanced diet. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I know now that the ultimately luxury is being well, and the only “treat” worth having is a healthy relationship with food. Treats play no part in that, and I believe its a word that we could all benefit from not using.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Forget the eraser</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The experience of cancer has changed me so much, that it sometimes feels like I’m a different person today than the one who walked into the doctor’s surgery in 2007. But of course, I know that’s not the case. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I sometimes meet people who are half my age, and already seem to be way ahead of me in their personal development. While I marvel at their emotional intelligence, I don’t regret being a slow learner. Every event in my past led to me becoming the person I am today, and I’m happy with who I am.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As a teenager, I didn’t study a “proper” degree. I went to art college instead. Whatever subject you choose to study, a good art college will make you learn to draw first. It’s an essential skill for any artist, regardless of discipline, because it teaches you observation and honesty.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of the first things a good art teacher will tell you to do is to discard your eraser. Artists never user them. This is not because they don’t make mistakes, although they rarely do. It is because drawing is a process of mark making, and using an eraser negates this process. If you make a bad mark, move on and make a better one. A skilled artist will make bold marks with confidence, allowing the motion to flow from their upper arm. Each mark tells a unique part of the drawing process, as the artist finds her way towards describing her subject.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Tattoo artists are the boldest of all. Not only do they not use an eraser, but their marks are indelible. Impossible to erase. Before cancer, I didn’t understand why anyone would want a tattoo. Why would someone voluntarily make a decision that is irrevocable. But I now realise that I was looking at it the wrong way. Life is like drawing. All of the decisions that we make are irrevocable. We have to make them boldly and with confidence.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Keeping things in balance</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some people believe that we have five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. In fact, the idea of five senses was conceived by Aristotle, and it is arguably a couple of thousand years out of date. Modern neurologists will tell you that there are more than five sense. One that Aristotle missed, the sense of balance, is so fundamental to how we operate that we hardly notice it’s there.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Until it stops working.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Our sense of balance is derived primarily from a part of the inner ear call the vestibular system. I had been having some trouble with my hearing for several years before my diagnosis. Because of this, my doctors decided not to give me the standard chemotherapy treatment for my condition (Cisplatin) but to try a newer drug instead called Carboplatin, which was supposed to be less damaging to ears. While less toxic to the ears, Carboplatin can still take its toll - particularly if your hearing is already impaired, as mine was.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">By the time I had finished my chemotherapy, my hearing had become a lot worse, so I needed to rely on hearing aids to get by. But something else had happened. The first clues started while I was still on chemo. I was vomiting a lot, which isn’t unusual for chemo patients perhaps, but my nausea was getting consistently worse, and didn’t seem to be affected by the stages in the chemo cycle. When I finished the chemo, the nausea and vomiting continued. My doctors could not explain this: when you come off chemo, the side effects should pass quite quickly. I got the distinct sense that they thought my condition was psychosomatic, or in other words, it was my problem, not theirs.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My experience with chemo had got me used to feeling constantly nauseous, so I had already learned to live with this. But the problems didn’t stop there. They were about to become a great deal worse. The bottom was about to fall out of my world.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Vertigo attacks</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Something was going wrong with my vestibular system, causing it to send faulty signals to my brain. These signals was making me feel nauseous, as if I was being perpetually thrown around on a roller coaster. And then, every so often, the problem would suddenly get worse, and I would experience a vertigo attack, which would make me collapse to the ground, whether I was walking along the street, or seated at my desk.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One attack was so severe that it felt as if I was falling from the top of a skyscraper. With my world spinning around my head, incapable of standing, speaking, reading or regular breathing, I was more terrified than I ever had been before. I began hyperventilating so quickly that my hands became numb and started trembling. I honestly believed that I was about to die. I remember thinking “this is it”. I phoned for an ambulance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are moments in our lives that are so intense that they are forever burned into our minds. Psychologists call them “flashbulb” memories. That moment, where I thought “this is it” was a flashbulb moment for me. These are memories that our unconscious mind has picked out and marked with a great big indelible highlighter pen. They are imbued with meaning, and its the job of our conscious minds to explore what that meaning is. To learn what our unconscious mind is trying to tell us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">While some of our memories are vague, with details missing: perhaps we’re not quite sure when they happened, or maybe they’re an amalgam of several different similar events, flashbulb memories have a completeness to them. They are moments in our biographies that seem lit up by spotlights, with all the details appearing in sharp relief. And they are sticky. As we track back through our past, we’re drawn to them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And so it was for me with this memory. I kept returning to it in quiet moments, like a fly alighting on a lightbulb. What was it about this particular experience that set it apart? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’m not sure what it is about that moment that keeps draws me back to it. Perhaps it’s because when I thought “this is it”, it wasn’t. I survived.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The map is not the territory - so stop looking at the map</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The next few months were punctuated with regular debilitating vertigo attacks. I had to stop driving. I struggled with client meetings and presentations, often finding that the room would start spinning moments after I stood up to deliver an important presentation to a roomful of senior executives.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I had assumed that when I finished the chemotherapy, work would become easier, since I would no longer be interrupted by fatigue, nausea and constant hospital visits. In fact, the frequent vertigo attacks were making it harder than ever to do my job. It was difficult to plan my day and commit to meetings when I didn’t know what state I would be in from one moment to the next. And the symptoms persisted for months after I’d finished chemotherapy, with no sign of abatement.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Even walking down my street was a journey into the unknown, since a surprise attack could come from nowhere, flip my world upside down, and I’d find myself lying bruised on the pavement.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So much of my learning over the past few months had focussed on what was going on inside my head. But now, it was my head itself that was going wrong. My neurons were tricking me - giving me the illusion of spinning or falling. I realized that I had to find a different approach to survive with this condition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I needed to get out of my head.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There’s a mental shortcut that we sometimes make, where we think of ourselves as if we are our experiences. For example, in English, the phrase “I am walking” means that walking is what I am doing, but grammatically speaking, it could also mean that walking is what I am. In other words, I am the act of walking. I don’t think this is an accident. I think we tend to construct our identity around our experience, and we receive our experience via our senses. So when our senses become unreliable, due to a disease like vertigo, this can quickly have an impact on our identity - our sense of self.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It goes without saying that most of us spend most of our time looking out of our eyes. As a consequence, what we see tends to be from the unique perspective of the location of our eyeballs - they are, after all little more than fancy biological cameras. It is not as simple as that, however. The information that we receive from our eyeballs has to be interpreted by our brains, where it is synthesized with our knowledge and other senses in order to construct a conscious awareness of where we are and what we’re doing. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">During a vertigo attack, the information from my sense of balance was going wrong, and the faulty signals it was feeding into my brain were corrupting my visual interpretation of the information from my eyeballs. The result was an illusion of spinning or falling rapidly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And the more I focussed on my vision, the worse it became. So I tried a new approach. I chose to switch my perspective. My knowledge of what was going wrong enabled my to disregard the illusion, and instead construct an image of myself seen from above - like a character in a computer game. I learned to adopt a 3rd person perceptual position whenever I experienced an attack. I was able to see myself and my environment in perfect stillness, with no spinning or falling. And this reminded and reassured me that what was going on in my head - the illusion - was in fact not reality. The word was not spinning, and my conscious was capable of discerning that fact and disregarding the illusion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are, of course, limits to using perceptual positions in this way. For example, during an attack, I was not able to read, and I certainly don’t claim that I could do so by adopting a different perceptual position. But I found I was able to control by breathing (overcoming my tendency to hyperventilate during attacks), and I was able to stop vomiting. I even found that I was able to think clearly, and so I would use the time during attacks to plan what I was going to do when the attack wore off.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“Just decide it’s not the running.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My vertigo attacks were getting worse as I steadily increased my running, and I was becoming anxious that the two were related. Maybe running was not good for me. Maybe it was the cause of all my vertigo problems. Maybe I wasn’t a runner after all. Was I was just kidding myself and it was time to take my running shoes off once and for all?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It didn’t help that the vertigo attacks often happened when I was running, and the results could be very frightening. It was bad enough collapsing to the ground when you’re just walking around, but when you’re running at speed, injuries become all the more likely.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, the running and vertigo were probably unrelated. I was running a lot and I was having a lot of vertigo attacks. It was only natural that the two would, upon occasion, coincide. While rationally, I knew this, on another level I was drawn to try and find connections. To make some kind of sense of my sickness. To give myself the illusion of control. When in fact, I was achieving the precise opposite. The belief that the vertigo was caused by running was taking control away from me. It was driving me away from something that I loved.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Fortunately, at this point a good friend intervened with some sound advice. He listened very carefully to everything I had to say about the possible connection between my running and my vertigo attacks, and then he said simply, “I think you’ve just got to decide that it’s not the running.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He was right of course. I’d inadvertently allowed myself to adopt an unresourceful belief. I’d created in my head a self-limiting narrative that I couldn’t run because of my vertigo attacks, when in fact there was no evidence to support this. It gave me a good sob-story to tell my friends, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to my goal of becoming a fit, healthy, confident runner. Quite the opposite in fact. It was drawing me back into the role of being an unlucky sick person.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My friend’s advice was clear and simple. I just had to decide. It was ultimately a choice between two different, conflicting beliefs, with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Either the running was causing the vertigo or it wasn’t. If I stopped running, I’d never find out. If I carried on running, then at least I’d be doing what I wanted to do, and I might find the vertigo was unrelated.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Putting on my running shoes again felt great. As I resumed my running, I intuitively knew it was the right decision. Far from causing the vertigo, I chose to believe instead that the running might cure it. After all, my consultant had told me that vertigo was often brought about by poor circulation to the inner ear. Surely improving my cardiovascular system would help with this, I reasoned.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I carried on running, and the vertigo attacks continued. But steadily, over the months that followed, their frequency and intensity declined. Today, I no longer suffer from vertigo at all. Of course, I don’t know if it was the running that cured it, any more than I know if it was the running that caused it. What I do know is that, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, believing the running could help was a resourceful belief for me. I’ll always be grateful for my friend’s simple advice that day: “I think you’ve just got to decide...”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The red queen’s race</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some cancers can be “cured,” others, like mine, can only be knocked back into remission. But whatever your prognosis, no one is ever going to tell you that “it’s all over, that cancer is not coming back.” The truth is we just don’t know.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So every few months, cancer survivors return to their hospital for a checkup. And during a routine checkup, my doctors found a new lump. A CT scan was required, in order to determine if the cancer was back. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The scan was scheduled for the day after the Bath Half Marathon, my first big competitive race. I’d been training for it for months, and I was fitter than I had ever been in my life before, even though, ironically, I could be back on chemotherapy within days.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In Lewis Carol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen presides over an absurd race, where the contestants must run very fast just to stay still. Being on chemotherapy had reminded me of the Red Queen’s Race. I’d taken great strides forward in my personal development, just to stay in the same place - like running on a treadmill. When the treatment was over, I had carried on running - quite literally - and I felt that I had been making great progress, leaving the treadmill far behind me. Now, the treatment was looming again, and very soon, I thought I’d be back on the treadmill.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Never stop running</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Using all of the skills I’d learned during treatment, I focused entirely on the race that day, and I put in a great time for me, placing within the top 10 percentile. When the scan results came through, they were good news, and I celebrated by signing up for more races.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was moving forwards again. But as I mused over how differently things might have turned out, it suddenly struck me. I’d never left the treadmill, and I never would. There would always be ups and downs in life. Sometimes I’d have to work hard just to stay still. Other times, the treadmill would come to a stop, and I’d hurtle forwards. The Red Queen’s Race is just life. What is important is to keep running.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“You must be very frightened”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After I’d got the hang of running, I started looking for my next challenge. I was taking delight in doing things that I would never have done before the cancer. Things that would surprise and shock my friends.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I joined a gym, for the first time in my life. The running had resulted in me losing a lot of weight, and my hospital was becoming concerned, because unexpected weight loss is a “b symptom” for lymphoma. I thought, what better way to prove I was well than to start putting on weight, but by building muscle rather than fat.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My gym instructor was an energetic young twenty-something. His impressive physique made it patently obvious that he could impart to me the skills that I was looking for. I think I seemed impossibly old to him at first, and he found it amazing that I’d never been to the gym before. The challenge ahead of him in making me fit was evidently daunting. He said “So this is really the first time you’ve ever been to the gym?! You must be very frightened.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I smiled, remembering my nurse’s words twelve months ago, where she had told me much the same thing. I thought about what a long way I’d come in such a short space of time. Before my cancer experience, I certainly would have been intimidated, both by the gym, and by my instructor. But that wasn’t how I felt today.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“No”, I said, emphatically. “I feel intrigued. I’m really looking forward to doing this.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Today, I’ve put the weight back on in muscle, and any anxieties from my doctors about weight loss are forgotten. And I’ve enjoyed learning about the gym so much that I’ve even become a qualified Personal Trainer, so that I can share some of my learnings with fellow cancer survivors.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Being brave</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I believe that we are drawn to the things we fear the most. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some things stir powerful emotions in us, while other things do not. Sometimes, those emotions are “towards” emotions like <i>desire</i>, <i>love</i> and <i>amusement</i>. Other times, they are “away from” emotions like <i>fear</i>, <i>disgust</i> and <i>hatred</i>. And occasionally, it is a bit of both - we a drawn to something that repulses us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A very good friend of mine is disgusted by anything that does not meet her high standards of hygiene. She has meticulous cleaning rituals that she must follow every morning before she starts work. These include spraying an air freshener around her desk, wet wiping her desk and disinfecting her keyboard. While I don’t take my cleaning rituals as seriously as my friend, I do recognize the same structure within me. While I was on chemo, I became fastidious about cleanliness, because my immune system was weakened and I had to avoid infections. Today I still carry around an anti-bacterial hand-wash in my bag, which I use when I’m out and about. But my friend takes hygiene to a whole other level.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then, one day, my friend announced that she was planning a trip to travel around India. She seemed very excited about all the things she was going to see, but as she discussed it with friends, she became fearful, because people were telling her that India is a dirty place. She started to wonder if she could cope, and she postponed her trip.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve read that for someone with a fear of spiders, a possible cure is for them to hold a great big tarantula in their hands. I suspect that there’s some truth to this, because it’s entirely consistent with my own experience. Before cancer, I was a hypochondriac - I was terrified of getting ill. I was also terrified of doctors, hospitals and hypodermic needles. By the time I had finished my treatment, I was no longer scared of any of these things.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I discovered that there is a simple three step process to this:</span></div>
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<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3: no long scared</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In other words, an act of bravery is the process of overcoming a fear. What constitutes bravery is as unique as we are. For someone who is scared of spiders, it is an act of bravery to hold a tarantula. For someone who is scared of not disinfecting their computer keyboard every morning, it is an act of bravery to visit India.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, I didn’t have any choice about undergoing chemotherapy, so that arguably didn’t involve much bravery. But ironically, one of the things that I learned in the process is that admitting we feel scared is an act of bravery in itself. Perhaps the ultimate act of bravery. It is inevitable that from time to time we will experience events that scare us. By acknowledging our fear, we can become brave, and by becoming brave, we can let go of our fear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>BC/AC - Before cancer, after cancer</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In an NLP training session, a delegate pointed out to me that I had a pattern in my thinking of framing everything in terms of being before cancer and after cancer (BC/AC). That everything before cancer was a problem state, and everything after was a desired state. I was intrigued by this observation. While I recognise it’s an oversimplification of the facts, I realised this framing is an important part of how I stick with my health and fitness goals.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is a direction to this idea of BC/AC, and some powerful presuppositions. At the core of this framing is the idea that anything after cancer must be better than anything before. Another presupposition is that any unresourceful strategy before cancer has an equivalent resourceful strategy afterwards. And then perhaps most fundamentally, there is the presupposition that there is no going back. It is entirely impossible for me to return to the before cancer state, because I can’t un-experience cancer - or in other words, I can’t undo what has been done. That is why I know I’ll stick with these changes in my life. There simply is no other way. Trying to go back to how I was BC would be like trying to forget all that I went through during cancer treatment and recovery. Impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>No going back</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A friend told me recently that they saw me as a very determined individual: someone who makes plans and sticks to them. I was flattered by this, but I didn’t recognize the resemblance. I understand how it might appear that way to other people, but reality is rather different. It’s true that since my cancer treatment I’ve successful set and achieved many goals for myself, but I don’t think this is because I’m determined. I think it’s simply because I don’t believe that going back is an option for me. It’s simply impossible for me to return to my old behaviors because if I ever did, I believe the cancer would catch up with me and I would die. So the only option for me is to continue doing what I’m doing. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If a shark stops swimming, oxygenated water is no longer pumped through its gills and it dies, so it keeps on swimming. That’s not an act of determination of the shark’s part. It’s just the way it is to be a shark. And so it is with me. I stick at what I’m doing - whether it’s running, or gym, or learning to surf, or studying my personal trainer qualifications, because that what I do - that’s who I am - and there really is no alternative.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have no wish to go back to the way I was before cancer, but there really isn’t any option for me to do so anyway, so like a shark, I keep swimming.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Framing my appointment card</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Every outpatient at my hospital is issued with an appointment card. This pocket-sized slip of folded paper features line entries for each hospital appointment, scribbled in by a nurse or administrator. I had been using my card for three years. Each and every time I’d had chemo, an entry had been hand scrawled into it. Every time I’d visited the hospital, the card had been hastily stowed in my pocket. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After the chemo was complete, and my appointments became less frequent, the card was not filling up as quickly, but eventually the day came when the final line on the card was filled in.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As my eyes gazed over all the entries on the completed card, I reflected upon the incredible journey that it represented for me. It had been the toughest time in my life, and it had also been a time of incredible learning and personal development. There had been times when I had despised this little piece of card, and all that it stood for.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And now one of the hospital administrators was proposing to throw it away and issue me a new one instead. Somehow that just didn’t seem to be right. I asked if I could keep it, and she gave it back to me with a shrug and a puzzled look. On my way home from the hospital I took it to the picture frames and got it framed beautifully, like a work of fine art.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now it hangs on my wall in pride of place. This crinkled, battered sheeting of blue sugar paper, with multi-coloured pen scrawlings in many different hand writing is a record of one of the toughest times in my life. One of the most important times. One of the most transformative time. Of course, I’m not really attached to that piece of paper, but I have become very attached to the memory of that time in my life, and everything that it means to me. That old appointment card is a powerful anchor. And it keeps me anchored.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Re-learning how to learn: being foolish</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the fifth anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, I’m in Lanzarote with my brother, and we’re learning to surf for the first time in our lives. Our instructor, Richie, has a lean, wiry muscular body, an even tan, sun-bleached blond hair and the graceful, easy manners that seem to be an intrinsic part of surfing culture.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We’re watching a sixteen year old Swedish kid catching an unbroken wave with ease, effortlessly gliding just ahead of the white water. Richie laughs and comments that Scandinavian kids somehow </span><span style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">“get” surfing almost immediately. For others, like ourselves, the process can take a while longer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Many people think that kids are natural learners. They just pick things up faster than adults. Whether it’s learning a language, learning to drive a car or learning to surf. But I see it differently. Kids are good at learning because they have to do so much of it. Not just at school, but in every aspect of their lives. Everything is new to them. So they have to be humble. They have to listen to feedback and observe carefully. They have to be ready to try and fail and try again. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you’re scared of making a fool of yourself, you’ll never learn a foreign language, and if you’re scared of wiping out, you’ll never learn to surf.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Something seems to happen to most of us in our teenage years, where our minds become a little more set in their ways. A little more brittle perhaps. We’ve acquired the skills we need to get by in life, and we decide that’s enough. We become unwilling or unable to learn any more. We become rusty at learning. It becomes “too late” for us to learn a foreign language. Or we’re “too old” to learn to surf.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I don’t believe this for one second. We just become out of practice. We need to re-learn how to learn. We need to reconnect with the curious and humble child within us. The child who is ready to try and fail - who is ready to wipeout, then rub the seawater from their eyes, grab their surfboard and catch the next wave.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When I was going through cancer treatment, I had to learn a lot to survive. I learned to try new approaches. I learned about NLP. I learned to meditate. And I learning to take control of my thinking. My learning muscles, that had been unused for so long, they were a little sore at first, but as with any part of the body, they quickly adapted to new stimulus. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As a consequence, learning tasks that would have been daunting to me before, like learning to run competitively, learning to use the gym, learning to become a personal trainer, became much easier to me. Continuous learning has become a habit for me, and one that I especially enjoy. I’ve found that learning even adds a new dimension to holidays. Hence, where I am today, sitting on a beautiful beach in Lanzarote with Richie, my surfing instructor, preparing to grab my board, attach my leg rope, paddle out into the waves and make a fool of myself once again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I’ve finally realized, fools are in fact the smart ones, because we’re ready, willing and able to learn new stuff. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Learning to turn turtle</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As I bob around at the back of the lineup, waiting to catch my next wave, I realize that big part of re-learning how to learn is learning to surf the waves in my mind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Over the past few days, as I’ve attended the surf school, my mind has been lurching around like ocean swell, from peaks of optimism, where I really believe I’m getting it and through troughs of despair, where I just can’t seem to get up on my board at all. The solution is, of course, to be aware of my emotional state and to manage my mood accordingly. Catching an unresourceful though process is far easier than catching the right wave, but it will never give you a good ride. It can lead only to a wipeout, where you fall off your board and into the ocean in a sprawling, undignified manner.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So the skilled learner gets used to allowing those waves of despair to wash over them, leaving them behind. The waves that tell you “you’ll never learn how to do this” or “you’re not strong enough to do this” or “you’re too old to do this” or “you don’t have good enough balance to do this” will inevitably pass by, like the ocean swell that’s too choppy to ever give you a good ride.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Surfers learn to “turn turtle” by flipping over onto the underside of their boards and passing beneath the waves that they don’t fancy, saving themselves for the perfect wave that is going to deliver them the ride of their lives. And so it is that anyone wishing to learn in life must get practiced at turning turtle to make it through the unresourceful mental waves, and wait for the perfect learning wave that will surely follow.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>“I’m going to do it properly this time”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A song that’s been going round in my head a lot recently is “This Time” by The Feeling. It has a lyric that goes <i>“I’m going to do it properly this time. I’m going to get it right. Gonna get it right. And if my love escapes me this time, I’ll be alright. Be alright. Because I did it right.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These lyrics perfectly encapsulate how I feel about my After Cancer life. I feel like I’ve been given a second chance, and that it’s an opportunity to do it properly this time. To <i>live my life</i> properly this time. And while I don’t know what the outcome of my cancer will be I do know this: if I truly believe I got it right this time, then even if the cancer one day kills me, I will be happy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>At the age of 37, I had finally become an adult</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">During the Second World War, Queen Elizabeth (the queen mother) famously remarked “now I can look the East End in the eye”. Previously, the East End had born the brunt of the bombing raids. This was the first time that the palace had been hit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After my experience with cancer, I had a better understanding of what she had meant. The cancer had been like a bombing raid. It gave me a shared understanding with other cancer patients and survivors. But it went further than that. It had given me a connection with anyone who had been through a tough experience - and, one way or another, that’s most of us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For example, if someone cried in front of me, I previously had no idea what to do. I never used to know what to say or do at a funeral. Comforting someone with a hug at the right moment was outside of my behavioral vocabulary. I felt that it was such a big deal that someone had died, that anything I might say about it would seem false, or even disrespectful. Now, when I saw someone was upset, I could relate to them. Instinctively I knew how to respond.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the age of 37, I’d finally become an adult.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Summary</b></span></div>
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<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Always stay hopeful, but don’t predicate your happiness on a specific outcome</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Embrace every experience, and look for the positives - there are always more than you anticipate</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Live in the moment. Make the most of now, since no one knows what will happen tomorrow</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Focus on what you can do, that gives your life meaning</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you want to know what you should be doing more of, listen to your unconscious mind</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Explore what the positive meaning of cancer is for you</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Seek out activities that bring pleasure now, and build into something more over time</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Don’t be shy to take advantage of the positives - enjoy the attention!</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Experience each day with a heightened intensity, now that you know how precious and fragile life really is</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Use your experiences to build new and unexpected connections with people</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Look out for well intentioned mind reading, and challenge it if you feel that it is limiting your potential for recovery</span></li>
<li style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mind and body are one system. There’s a triangle of well being, that if you keep in balance, everything else falls into place: diet, exercise, rest.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Embracing every experience</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Recovering from cancer is not about leaving the disease behind or running away from it. It’s about embracing it as a part of your life. It is about accepting what is, and adapting. It’s about carrying it with you for ever, and realising that it’s OK. That the experience has become a part of you, and that you are richer and stronger as a consequence. And I believe that this insight, which I found to be true for myself through painful experience, can be applied to any experience, by anyone.</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-754375512674924642012-05-26T13:43:00.002-07:002014-03-21T04:42:42.386-07:00Why should we live every moment as if it's our last?<br />
In response to <a href="http://designsonlife.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/cutaneous-t-cell-lymphoma-poem.html">my poem on lymphoma</a>, someone recently asked me why I thought we should live every moment as if it was our last. This person pointed out that if we always did that, then one day we'd be right.<br />
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My answer is that we're always right. Every moment is our last moment, because every moment is unique. You can't live the same moment twice and each one of us only has a finite number of moments left. We can squander them or savor them. The choice is ours. But the fact remains that there are no ordinary moments and it's down to us to make them meaningful.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-372482204584937992012-04-06T09:44:00.005-07:002014-03-21T04:42:54.833-07:00Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphoma - A Poem<div>
My skin is covered in tattoos. </div>
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They're fiery red and constantly changing, like flickering flames. </div>
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They tell the story of where I've been and they hint at where I'm going.</div>
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My tattoos are what Buddhists call dukkha. </div>
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They represent suffering, but through that suffering, they provide fuel to kindle the flames of my spirit.</div>
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I didn't choose these tattoos, they chose me. </div>
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It isn't easy being marked in this way and sometimes the rashes make people stare. </div>
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But I'm grateful that they are there. </div>
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As the tattoos on my body wax and wane, brimming with the threat of relapse, they remind me to live every moment as if it is my last.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-13542508361665025972012-02-04T07:20:00.000-08:002014-03-21T04:48:27.304-07:00The inspiring simplicity of insect strength<div>
I once watched a beetle that had somehow got flipped over onto his back. His little legs were striving away, trying with all his might to right himself. To me it seemed hopeless, and I wondered why he didn't just give up. Strangely this little beetle was engineered in such a way that once he was on his back, there was just no way he could turn himself over.</div>
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Nonetheless, the beetle did not give up hope. He kept writhing his legs in an effort to flip himself. He never lost his faith. And he was right to persevere. Because I was watching him and, inspired by his efforts, I gave him the gentle nudge that he needed to get back onto his feet.</div>
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Without hesitation, the beetle scurried off, to carry on with his life as if nothing had happened. There was no trace of trauma from the potentially life threatening ordeal he had just experienced.</div>
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The insect reminded me of some of the most inspiring people I know. I don't think there's anything so beautiful as when someone responds to great adversity by getting back on their feet, dusting themselves down and gong back to doing what they love.</div>
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This doesn't always come easy for us humans. We are more complex than insects - capable of sophisticated insight and reflection. We can lose hope. We can experience fear and self doubt. We can be traumatized. We can give up. Whereas insects are far simpler creatures. They are not capable of any of these things. When they encounter adversity, they fight for their life until their dying breath. They never lose hope. They're incapable of it. Instead they persevere.</div>
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Sometimes we make things more complicated than they need to be. We can over-think things and cloud the issue. But when we learn to accept the simple perfection of our life unfolding, we can connect with our own simple insect strength. The results are always inspiring.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-37272009389331933502012-01-22T10:45:00.000-08:002014-03-21T04:48:52.628-07:00The art of running well<div>
There are many schools of thought on how we should run. Some say we should run barefoot, and land on the balls of our feet, while others say we should run heel to toe. Some say we should push our shoulders back, while others would prefer to keep them loose...</div>
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Over the years, I've come to realize that our running style is just as personal as our handwriting. Everyone is an individual and everyone has their own unique way of running. Even top athletes, (like Paula Radcliffe and her nodding head,) have their own unique style.</div>
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But while no two running styles are the same, I have concluded that there is still one reliable yardstick for judging a good running style, and it is this: </div>
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<i>When you run, make everyone you pass wish that they were running too.</i></div>
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If we truly believe that running is a good thing, then we should embody the benefits of running whenever we run, so that others get a real sense of it, and want some of what we've got. And while there may be as many different running styles as there are runners, I've found that there are still some key characteristics that are always present in this style of running:</div>
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<b>1. Smile:</b> let everyone know how much you love running by getting your smile on every time you put your running shoes on;</div>
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<b>2. Relax:</b> allow your limbs to flow in an easy and graceful way;</div>
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<b>3. Focus:</b> zone in on the experience, exist in the moment and become one with your running;</div>
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<b>4. Connect:</b> when you're running, you're a part of a global family. Other runners are your brothers and sisters. Say "hi" to them as you pass.</div>
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If you want other people to get the same benefit out of running that you do, don't just tell them how great it is. Show them. Embody the essence of running. Be the change.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-29458176569440194452011-09-04T11:15:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:49:27.286-07:00The most important lesson in life<div>
After my cancer diagnosis, I explored many different avenues in search of a better way of living. I learned about Buddhism, NLP, Yoga, Psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy... I found important insights and value in all these approaches. I also found a common thread in all of them. One that has had profoundly positive and transformative impact on my life. This insight has been expressed in many different ways, through many different philosophical approaches, but I believe that Stephen Covey in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” says it best:</div>
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“<i>explore the space between stimulus and response</i>”.</div>
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While other animals merely respond to the stimulus they receive, without reflection or self awareness, we are uniquely endowed with the human faculty of consciousness. This enables us to pause for thought. To consider the stimulus we have received, explore the options and choose a positive response that is in line with our purpose, identity and values.</div>
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When someone is mean to us, the automatic response might be to be mean back to them. But the space we uniquely occupy between the stimulus (mean behavior) and the response, enables us to explore other options. Like trying to understand where that mean behavior is coming from, and what this person is trying to tell us. Then, when we are ready to respond, we may do so in a way that entirely reframes the situation into a more positive and constructive relationship.</div>
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When the stimulus is adversity, such as cancer, we can choose to respond as a victim, or we can choose anything else that we would like to be. We can choose to respond to adversity with strength.</div>
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With practice, we can get better at creating this space. It is a liberating and powerful place to be. In fact, it is the only place to be if we want to live a meaningful life. And like all the best ideas, it can be expressed in clear, simple, concise terms:</div>
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<i>“explore the space between stimulus and response”.</i></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-82800417577223089252011-08-01T15:19:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:50:59.382-07:00Spotting excellence at the gym<div>
How often do we miss excellence, when it is actually right in front of us, but we’re so absorbed in our own reality that we fail to look up and notice it?</div>
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Last week, I was talking to two acquaintances at the gym. I only know them well enough to say “hi” when I bump into them. One guy is Polish. He’s a remarkable athlete, with a muscly, gym-fit physique. The other guy is British, and he tends to spend more time in the sauna, rather than lifting weights.</div>
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The three of us got into a conversation, and the Polish guy asked what “sets” and “reps” were. The British guy replied that there are eight reps to a set, and you should wait about a minute between sets. I commented that the number of sets to a rep varied depending on your experience and goals. But the British guy corrected me. No, he was adamant that there were eight reps to a set.</div>
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The Polish guy nodded and said “ah, I see. Thank you.” The Brit seemed pleased that he had been able to share some wisdom, and he walked off smiling. But I was puzzled, and wanted to understand more. The Polish guy was so strong, with such bulging muscles, that I wondered how he had achieved this, if he didn’t use sets and reps.</div>
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He explained that in fact he did use sets, and proceeded to talk me through a sophisticated procedure that he used to work his way down to his one rep max. This is the mark of a serious power lifter. There we had been, me and my fellow Brit, explaining rudimentary gym basics to the Pole, when in fact he was the expert. His question had not been about how to do sets and reps - it was simply a question of vocabulary. He is currently learning English.</div>
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If we had been paying attention, this fact should have been obvious. You only needed to look at the guy to see that he knew more about the gym than us. And yet, my British friend had been so absorbed in his own experience, where a set is always comprised of eight reps, that he missed the opportunity for enlightenment from a true expert. And I had swooped in to correct him, when someone far more qualified was standing right next to me. It was as if we’d been debating music in front of Mozart, or explaining physics to Einstein.</div>
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We benefit so much when we learn from experts - so why are we so reluctant to recognize expertise and listen instead of lecture?</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-37827095475376688942011-07-05T06:37:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:52:46.310-07:00We are all body buildersIn my gym, there are many guys with big muscles. They have consciously chosen to sculpt their bodies in this way. An act of will on their part has resulted in their bodies taking a particular form. Maybe they wanted bigger arms, so they worked on their triceps, deltoids and biceps. Maybe they wanted a six-pack, so they worked on their abs. Whatever their goals, they tailored their workout programme like a precise recipe to achieve the body shape they desired.<br />
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We don't always get to choose the shape of our bodies, of course. Sometimes people are born with bodies that are not as they would wish. Sometimes events that are outside of our control change our bodies against our will - like an accident or even violence.<br />
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But for the most part, I believe that we all choose the shape of our bodies, even if we don't consciously realise we're doing it. Every curve, every crevice, every blemish, every bulge. The shape of our body is the cumulative result of all the choices that we make in life. Our thoughts result in actions. Our actions result in consequences. These can be profound consequences to our body. They may lead to greater well being, or to disease. It's our choice.<br />
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As such, our bodies are physical manifestations of our thoughts. So we are all body builders. For the guys in my gym, their bodies are articulations of their dreams and desires. For others, their bodies might be articulations of fears, insecurities and doubts.<br />
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I used to cripple my own body with anxiety and stress - the sickness in my mind inevitably led to sickness in my body. It's all one system, after all. Now, as I've learned to take responsibility for my thoughts, I've taken control of my body. I choose to have a runner's physique. I have adapted my body to support me in the sport that I love.<br />
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As we realise that we are all body builders, we become conscious of our thoughts and take responsibility for our bodies. As we realise that we are already building our own bodies, we can consciously choose the direction that we wish to take.<br />
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What body have you chosen?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-74017659260046187252011-04-24T06:45:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:55:20.227-07:00By recognizing excellence in others we can be more true to ourselves<div>
Modeling is at the heart of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It is essentially the process of recognizing excellence in others, identifying the model of how they achieve this excellence, and then adopting that model so that this excellence becomes available to us.</div>
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A friend of mine recently said that he thought NLP would be dangerous for him, because at the moment he's trying to work out who he is, and the idea of modeling other people would undermine this process. As if by modeling other people, he would in some way be less himself.</div>
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I've reflected upon this concern for a long time, because it raises some interesting questions. Are we being true to ourselves when we're modeling the behavior of others? At first, this seemed to be a difficult problem to answer. But of course it's not. It's really very simple, provided you approach it from the right perspective:</div>
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<b>Self realization is not about discovering who you really are. It is about deciding who you want to be.</b></blockquote>
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NLP helps us to do this by giving us more choices. When we see excellence in someone else, this is in fact an internal realization. We recognize an aspiration within ourselves - what we value as being excellent. In fact, the very best way to discover what our values and desires truly are is to look at others who we aspire to be like. To ask ourselves - what is it about this person, and what they do that represents excellence to me? </div>
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Spotting excellence in others is like discovering a seed of potential excellence within ourselves. NLP is simply the fertilizer than can help us to nurture that seed. And that's what self realization is really all about.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-54801633161057470752010-09-25T07:31:00.001-07:002014-03-21T04:56:07.063-07:00What would you do for fashion?I saw someone today who appeared to have a form of cerebral palsy. She had difficulty in walking, and yet she chose to wear high heel shoes. At first I thought that she was making a mistake - sacrificing mobility for vanity, and avoiding coming to terms with the reality of her condition.<br />
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But as I reflected upon her choice further, I came to realize that it was very inspiring. You could see from the clothes that she was wearing that she was interested in fashion. The fact that she chose to wear high heels, regardless of how much more this complicated her walking, was simply a sign of how important fashion was for her.<br />
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For some people, fashion is as easy as buying expensive clothes and thoughtlessly pulling them on every morning. For this woman, fashion was a great effort, but one that she found rewarding nonetheless. I don't think I've ever seen anyone putting more effort into their outfit.<br />
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She was providing the perfect model for how we can prevent disease from limiting us. How through bravery and courage we can live with disease and still pursue our dreams, inspiring others in the process.<br />
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In a more perfect world, she would be on the front cover of Vogue.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-42463960547637758232010-06-26T05:54:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:56:26.457-07:00The fear/courage paradoxHere's a strange paradox. Admitting that you feel fear takes courage.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-19674305529842547962010-06-19T05:34:00.000-07:002014-03-21T04:57:18.060-07:00True identity theftThe other day, I was talking to a friend who reproached me for overdoing my training, arguing that I shouldn't be running seven days a week. I pointed out that it didn't seem to do Lance Armstrong any harm, to which my friend responded, "yes, but that's Lance Armstrong, <i>he's</i> a top athlete". The implication being that I'm not a top athlete and therefore I'm not capable of enduring such an arduous training regime.<br />
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I replied that, while I may not be a "top" athlete, being an athlete has become a part of my identity. Of course I don't expect to match Lance Armstrong's physical prowess, but that's never going to stop me from trying. </div>
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After all, what made Lance Armstrong Lance Armstrong? For that matter, who am I? Who are you? And what makes us what we are? Our own sense of identity can limit us, or it can empower and challenge us. The choice is ours.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-63534511522679964002010-03-21T04:58:00.001-07:002014-03-21T04:58:02.510-07:00The Red Queen's RaceLast week, I ran the Bath Half Marathon. It's the first big competitive race that I've ever run, and it represented the culmination of over a year's training, as I built up my fitness and stamina after coming off chemotherapy.<br />
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By a strange twist of fate, just days earlier, my doctors had discovered a new lump, and I was booked in for a scan the day after the run. So even as I was at my peak of physical fitness, I knew that I could be back on chemotherapy in a matter of days.<br />
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Before my cancer treatment, I had never been interested in sport, and I never ran anywhere. I simply did not consider myself to be athletic. But my experience of cancer treatment and recovery forced me to challenge a lot of my presuppositions about myself. I discovered that I possessed greater strength and emotional stamina than I ever imagined. And I realised that my negative self image had been seriously limiting my potential.<br />
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So, even as the chemo had been reducing my physical stamina, it was also like an incubator for a new me. It forced me to raise my game, just to stay in the game. Sometimes being held back is precisely what we need in order to ultimately be propelled forwards. It's like the Red Queen says in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Like running on a treadmill. Imagine what happens when the treadmill stops, but you don't. You start moving forwards… fast.<br />
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And since the chemo, that's exactly what I had been doing. <span style="font-style: italic;">Moving forwards fast</span>. But the looming possibility of a return to chemo threatened to bring my journey to an abrupt halt.<br />
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This uncertainty could have cast a cloud over my run, but that's not how it turned it. In fact, the scan served to heighten the intensity of my experience on the big day. Since my future was clouded, and all of my past year had led up to this point, it caused me to focus entirely upon the day itself. To reside in the moment. The experience was all the more vivid, intense and exhilarating as a result.<br />
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As it turns out, the scan results delivered good news. And upon reflection, I realised that I was glad the scan had coincided with the half marathon. It made me realise that I had never left the Red Queen's treadmill, and I never will. We're all on that treadmill - it's just life. Sometimes it's going forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes stationary. That is outside of our control. All that we can do is to keep running.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3848034025986435896.post-89952876273764475212010-02-21T06:52:00.000-08:002014-03-21T04:58:20.659-07:00TimeLet go of the past,<br />
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Take care of the present,</div>
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And the future will look after itself.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11279417927951294556noreply@blogger.com0