KindEdge360: Fortify the foundation for change

When you start to implement change, you’ll realize 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 part of your life is sabotaging you. While in my work I helped large organizations implement massive and complex changes, somehow I remained circling in one place for two decades when it came to making true changes happen in my personal life. It was only when I took every element of my body, mind, soul, and values very seriously that I was able to unveil the invisible barriers, and champion them.

I call this “KindEdge 360.” KindEdge 360 is about placing a new lens on every part of your life and experiences to ensure the foundation is strong in all 360 degrees of your life. Myriad elements of life can sabotage our goals. We may lack confidence to make a career-related request, yet we may hide this lack-of confidence behind excuses like “busy-ness” or martyrdom. We may be blind to how many times our partners or family members fail to follow-through for us, causing us to catch all the balls in the air, and thus delaying our own priorities.

Defining your Direction
- Living North Star
  - Your purpose
  - Your Values
  - Your Vision
  - Clarity
    - Pictures
    - Words
    - More
  - Choices
    - Pruning priorities
      - Prune Priorities; Select for Purpose
      - Use North Star tools as clarity to ruthlessly prune commitments
        No-No-No – Yes card game
        Keep – Discard – Visibly making the choices, and embrace the emotions in you and others when they become real, visceral.
        AIRPLANE MODE: Dealing with reality: your stuff in first 4 hours of day with phone in Airplane Mode, all else is “later.” (Eg errands, appointments, meetings driven by other people vs. you – they get your late-in-day, use your best brain on you, and get your stuff done before asshats sabotage you).
        More
    - Re-framing finances
      - Time worth more than money
      - Treating this year as urgent
      - More
Foundation for Change –
- Your daily arc –
  - Experimentos – Try everything
  - Day Redesign
  - Patterns, vs variety
  - Drive in the groove through daily practice (my checklist became automatic)
- Environment
  - 5-Noun-Ninja
  - Environment is all 7 senses
    - Blog: Totems
    - More
  - Mindset –
    - Kind Reframe
    - Self-Permission
    - Spirituality and Purpose are the Same
    - More
  - Health –
    - Mind
      - Brain health (light therapy etc)
      - Emotions are as physical and chemical as any other thing on earth
    - Body
      - Nutrition (Glucose is suicide)
      - Exercise –
    - Sustainability
      - Recovery – The performance differentiator
      - Eustress – Do hard things; garbage in, garbage out
      - More
Structuring Change – Ensure progress by making it easy to fall into action vs. have to reinvent your plans and resolve each day
- Project Management
  - Goals & mile markers
  - Progress tracking & metrics
- Productivity & Optimization
  - Time management methods
  - Sustainable, consistent progress requires REGULAR INTRINSIC REWARDS.
  - Data is the reward of productivity

Fortify the Foundation

XXX – As you set forth in each exercise in this website, understand the importance of fortifying your foundation. We must inoculate ourselves against any attitude that does not buttress our dreams. Get prepared to disappoint the nay-sayers and time wasters as you commit to a vision that only you can define.

When you start going forward, you are likely to meet with visible and invisible barriers. You’ll realize making a change in one part of your life requires at total transformation of how you think and react to everything. In the decades wherein I made little progress, I could not understand why my professional project management skills were powerless when I applied them to my own personal goals. I did have a handful of successes, but too often they were performed Cinderella-style, wherein I was using spare, stolen

could not plough through barriers to a goal, and I realized too many other things in my life were keeping limp, like weakened prey. I could not give a bold NO to emotional abuse when I was beaten down by daily reactivity and nightly arguments or times of tears that drained every ounce of will in me. I fell into a pattern of consuming self-help books and “self care” coloring books, to more deeply understand the disorder I was enduring… but none of those PROTECTED ME from the disorder. I was being poisoned and weakened at the time it was most critical for me to be energized, clear-headed and ready to fight. So I dug deep and realized I needed to dig into my mindsets… like a business project, and dig into my hours of sleep… like a business project… and dig into who I committed to spend my time with in each minute of the day. This is where I realized my singular professional goal … and the lack of progress therein… was just ONE symptom of a far larger issue: I was not in control of my own life, I was not playing the starring role in my own movie and I wasn’t even getting a chance to edit the script. So I had to back WAY up and see this as a 360 degree project: Deep look at how I fed my Mind, body, soul, goals, passions, values, and more. So for anyone who wants to start just one thing in one area of their lives, for that thing to stick as a sustainable part of the way you live, get ready to pan the camera out to take account of the full landscape of your life. Sustainable change takes a 360 degree look…XXX

I’ve aggregated the KindEdge 360 topics under the following categories. It is critical to look at every category to ensure we fortify the foundation for successful change. We need to flatten all the barriers and feel good doing it.

Fortify Health

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Fortify Mind

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Interoception

Fortify Soul

Fortifying the soul (…and all that entails) is about ensuring your insert into your day the good things that will draw you back again and again with a power stronger than any drug on or off the market. As we develop our muscle for change, the first attempts feel uncomfortable and awkward. Walking into a new social group, a new church, or a new daily practice or approach, will feel like work up front. And there are a lot of proverbial frogs to kiss before you find the practices that click for you and the way your heart and mind are wired and recharged. But over time, you’ll be drawn back to the things that fed your soul.

I had to force myself into certain practices like early wake-ups, early walks, and a commitment to view the horizon and sunrise each day in quiet solitude to trigger positive brain chemicals (and I do some tricky science-based eye movements while walking that further trigger feelings of empowerment). At some point this nerdy work became exhilarating nourishment. I could feel the difference if a given day did not allow me to do my morning practice. The hard work became its own reward. It fired up a sense of trail blazing in me each day so I had the energy to transform every problem into a solution with a smile.

What’s right for you is a journey of discovery, but the KindEdge tasks will help you discover what works for you. And as is my mantra: Run Tests. Ask “What Works?” Do That. And.. Run More Tests. Just keep experimenting, reflecting, purging and optimizing for whatever works for THE PROJECT OF YOU.

Environment by Design

Purge and re-select all that our senses and selves behold in each day.

What we invite our eyes to see
What we invite our ears to hear
What we invite our skin to touch
What we invite our mouths to savour
What we invite our olfactory senses to ingest
Those in whom we invest our precious and dwindling minutes (human- and animal-kind alike)
The places in which we spend our time
The objects, colors and textures by which we choose to be surrounded

Behaviors and Mindset by Design

Every day we are bouncing off all the jagged edges and irregular bumps the world presents. How we bounce is a choice. Sometimes we allow old, reactive patterns to give far too much power to life’s jagged edges. A car can be wrecked, but if the humans inside are safe, the way we react can allow the car, and that event, to usurp too much time and energy. In so many cases, the power we have is given away to any event in the day that we did not predict. When we closely evaluate our relationship with all possible events in the day, and energetically practice new reactions to them, we regain power and focus on a short and enduring list of personal priorities. The world can hijack our goals if we let it. But each of us holds incredible power to redirect and refocus on our macro goals if we have strengthened our awareness of how we react.

Boundaries
New lens on “the primary relationships” in our lives

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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 invest time and focus on fortifying my health on a 360-degree spectrum–mind, body, emotional, spiritual, financial and more. Any weak link could trigger the doubts or fears that hold us back from taking the right risks in life.

KindEdge360 is about analyzing and optimizing your physical, mental, emotional, financial and spiritual fitness. Change is a muscle you must be fit enough to work to failure and then return the next day. The ideal ambition fails if you don’t have the stamina to fight every battle that that will seek to sabotage your plans. After the tenth time a family member complains that you are wasting so much time on your pie-in-the-sky project, you need to have the energy to repeat yet again, with resolve, that this is a critical priority for you and is deserving of your time. When a chaotic day threatens to eclipse your project time, you need to have the energy to push on others around you to recruit support.

Core to KindEdge is the concept of sustainability–“Kind”–making change sustainable and rewarding over the long haul. The “Edge” in KindEdge anchors on the reality that we must be prepared to push hard to effect real change. We must get to the uncomfortable edge, and take a few steps further than we’ve been before. Committing dollars, changing agreements, conducting tough conversations, and more. If the idea in your head is worth having, it’s worth you getting fit to fight.