Phase Two
KindEdge360 Foundation for Change
When you start to implement change toward one goal, you’ll soon realize that any barrier of any sort can sabotage your efforts.
A bad night’s sleep can dilute your resolve to finish a simple task the next day. A lack of exposure to positive people, inspiring messages, or just fresh air can cloud your mind. And a lack of emotional security or self-confidence can drive you to surrender your goals to invasive demands of others.
You cannot achieve a career or personal goal if any source of energy is being sabotaged. Any leak in your mindset, your health, or your clarity of purpose is going to drain you. I spent two decades expending every drop of energy just to tread water.
I’m grateful for a series of unfortunate events in my life that all hit in one grand perfect storm, and I realized: “I’m dying. We all are. Running in place is no longer acceptable. I need visible, uncomfortable, risky but flexible change to reclaim my remaining life minutes and make them matter. I want to leave a stamp on the world, and some small legacy to my kids before I die.”
This is where I dug in to identify how I—a professional change management process manager—could be getting stuck in the same types of plans I manage and execute every day for my clients.
By making my progress visible, I finally narrowed down where I was getting stuck. It had nothing to do with my organization skills. It was about my fortitude—mental and physical—to stand up to all the forces in life that just seemed to demand I “delay” my goals for another year.
I realized I needed to change how I think, how I manage my physical energies, and how I view my purpose here on Earth. This gave birth to KindEdge360 as the necessary foundation for succeeding at any lifestyle change.
KindEdge360 places a new lens on every part of your life to ensure the foundation for change is solid.
You must inoculate yourself against any attitude that does not buttress your dreams. You must prepare to disappoint the nay-sayers and time wasters and commit to a vision that only you can define.
KindEdge 360: Mind
Help your neurotransmitters help you feel good and get in flow.
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Every day we are bouncing off all the jagged edges the world presents. How we bounce is a choice. Sometimes we allow old, reactive patterns to hold far too much power. From immediately accepting an inconvenient schedule change, to putting physical exercise at the end of the day where it’s at risk of being overridden by emergencies, to unconsciously avoiding a tough conversation because we prefer the false sense of perfection by being people-pleasing and approval-seeking.
In these and so many other cases, the power we have is given away to random events in the day. We regain power and focus when we train our minds to pause and distill these events to their essences. Very few people and things around us truly require our compliance. Turning down requests of others is normal, and we should expect to do it often. When we train our minds to let go of the anxiety of saying “Kind thanks, but no, let’s try an alternative…” we smooth out all the jagged edges in our lives.
The world can only hijack our goals if we let it. Each of us holds incredible power to redirect and refocus our minds to calmly drive toward our macro goals.
KindEdge 360: Body
Know how to maintain the one irreplaceable, non-disposable machine in your life.
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Whether you are riding high on a roller coaster, or are face-planted in your mattress, you’re not in a position to achieve much of anything. But many of us live in exactly these two places. From the chemicals we pour into our bodies, to the spikes of glucose in our veins, to the variance of punishing workouts and punishingly-long sitting sessions, we are not maintaining the machine we live in for optimal performance.
New scientific research being published daily continually confirms this: the body need KINDEDGE to work.
Kind: Repeated, sustainable, rewarding, recovery-inclusive behaviors and nourishment.
Edge: Spikes of exertion distributed throughout the day that push you past your edge.
If your big goal is cerebral in nature… getting a degree, becoming a chess champion, changing a relationship, writing a book… do not ignore the reality that the mind needs you to provide a consistent cadence of physical exertion and exposure to nature and movement if it is going to deliver all the focused thinking you expect of it.
And beyond thinky-things, any goal that involves emotion requires your physical fitness many more times over. Whether you are preparing for a Ted Talk, or recovering after a nerve-wracking interview, your body’s efficiency in using oxygen, and quickly recovering to a calm resting state is critical.
And far more important than any one goal you have today, your physical fitness helps you live long enough to achieve many more goals in the future.
KindEdge 360: Soul
Purpose and meaning are the root of all and make work effortless. Fortifying the soul starts with clarifying your purpose and the meaning in all that you do.
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The day is comprised of micro tasks, but the overall arc in your days, and the pattern that plays out over the years, represent your purpose.
Busy is not a purpose. Busy has no meaning.
All the things you invest your time in should have some connection to your greater purpose. Therefore, as we work toward any goal, and make tough choices about what we then do not have time to do, we need to be very clear on why we are making those choices. We need to consciously define what people, places, things and environments better connect us to our purpose. To do that, we need to have a very clear image of our purpose and carry it with us every day.
Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor who developed a detailed psychotherapy method, believed, quite incredibly, that even the horrors of the holocaust had value if we could find meaning in it. There is no bad day, not even when mourning the death of a loved one, that is worse than what Viktor experienced.
I myself have taken very hard times and transformed them into great moments in my life full of meaning, change and growth. I anchor to concepts I defined as “the kind reframe” and “every challenge brings a lesson and a gift.”
Setting the foundation for all that feeds your soul and brings meaning into your goals and daily activities requires effort toward self-discovery. KindEdge and these related resources can help you dig into that path.
KindEdge 360: Environment
Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. By your own design, everything that you allow in through your five senses will return either further good, or further garbage.
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Purge and consciously re-select all that we behold in a day.
I learned from decades of sabotaged plans that securing my “change-readiness health” was a critical component for successful change. To see material progress happen I.R.L. (in real life!) I needed to stop the “project tasks” and invest time on redefining the world around me.
I changed literally everything. I completely redefined the arc in my day to serve my brain and my energy cycles. I changed how my finances work (read: contract to expand). I changed where I lived which fundamentally transformed how every minute in my day was spent. I changed what types of people and conversations I engaged with, and I re-selected the news and media I let in.
This took years of experimentation. I still wake up every day at 5:30am, but I found the aspiration of a first-thing workout all seven days per week had a residually draining effect such that I’d be a robot on a beautiful, sunny Sunday. So, I refined the flow of days and weeks based on my own energies and the mix of work and play behaviors that keep me sustainably energized.
Read more about redefining your environment below. At the core, the key is to continually experiment, discard, and refine what influences you permit to be part of your day. The learnings and reflections you document in your KindEdge notebook are always a better guide than any guru.
As is my dumb-simple but true and tested mantra:
- Run Tests.
- Ask “What Works?”
- Do That. and…
- Run More Tests.
Do whatever works for THE PROJECT OF YOU.
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The Kind Reframe
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