I felt on top of the world
I was swimming in the deep end and firing on all cylinders just to keep my head above water. The challenge felt nearly insurmountable – but I was thriving at my outer limit.
I had mastered a delicate juggle of leading complex technology teams at work, fitting in 3 training sessions a day in pursuit of my 2020 Tokyo Olympic goal, and being present as a husband and father in my family.
Then Life Happened
The first curveball came in August when we learned we were going to be expecting the fourth member of our family April – Tash was pregnant! How exciting I thought… No big deal, we’ve got lots of time to think and plan our way through it.
The second curveball in immediate succession came with the decision to sell our home in Vancouver and look for a bigger place east of the city. It seemed like without a second thought we sprung into action, getting our house ready to show and sell within 3 weeks. In the meantime we began looking for our new home.
With a quick and successful sale I felt like we were kicking life’s ass.
Then I ran head first into “the Wall”
I woke up one more a few days after the sale feeling like I had been hit by a train – mentally and emotionally exhausted. My body was on a downward spiral into full sickness mode. I shook it off (as I normally do) and made a few quick course corrections to ensure a quick recovery. I thought “no problem, I’ll sleep for another hour (it was 5:30AM) take some oil of oregano, vitamin C and be at work before 7.”
7AM came and I could barely motivate myself to get out of bed. Yes, I was coming down with a cold, but this was different. Something was missing.
I decided to give myself 30 more minutes of rest and recovery before finally getting my butt into gear.
30 minutes turned into 4 hours, and I was feeling worse.
It felt as though my body, mind, and spirit were in free fall.
“Where did this come from?” I wondered.
The patience to rest turned into anger and frustration towards myself (how’s that for a type A symptom). Firstly for getting sick, but more importantly for somehow completely losing my Mojo, that spark that propelled me through tireless 14 hours days just the week before.
“Hello, my name is Tyrell and I am a burnout junky”
It took me the whole day to acknowledge that I wasn’t going to be battling back to full health in 12 hours. The deeper realization that this was something much more significant than a chest cold didn’t sink in for another couple of days.
As my energy continued to plummet and burnout sunk in I began a full fledged 2 front attack on my recovery.
My Body is my Temple
First, my physical state. I needed to give my body everything it could to fight this illness. As usual, I increased my sleep and fluid intake, in addition I added a couple of treatments that have remained even since getting better:
- I began to drink a home-brewed tea created by Tash consisting of a mix of grated ginger and ginseng, fresh lemon and honey.
- I did a course of IV vitamin treatments at the IV boutique. In high school while working towards my BHAG of winning championships and playing NCAA basketball, I gave myself mono… Twice. IV was a critical part in giving my body the upper hand it needed to fight that illness.
- I continued my Wim How breathing and meditation which I continue to find calms my mind, body and soul.
With these pieces in place I felt like I was prepared for the battle on the physical front.
But this wasn’t the real recovery I was concerned about. I needed to get to the root cause of why my energy, motivation and psyche had literally vanished.
What put me over the edge?
An Energy Awareness Strategy
I decided to put myself through an exercise that would help me uncover what was really going on.
1) Values & Pillars
This started with a post-mortem on my values and the three key pillars I had architected in my life.
Career – Leadership
As I reflected back on the past several weeks I firstly acknowledged the amount of stress and overall energy I was outputting on a daily and weekly basis. I had increasingly moved into a pivotal leadership role between our executive team and the teams I led at BuildDirect. I loved the added pressure and challenge of this opportunity, but admittedly it kept me up at night more and more.
Discus – Olympics
While my Discus training was going really well, because I was doing up to 3 sessions a day the simple energy output equation was easy to quantify. There were days where I would be literally running from one appointment, meeting or workout to the next from 7AM to 830PM. To be honest, that wasn’t unusual.
Family – Presence
Tash was doing an incredible job as the leader of our family, raising our daughter and keeping our home running smoothly. She has super power qualities in this regard. Our relationship was open, honest and transparent – we were able to voice and work through what the other needed and support each other as individuals and as a united couple. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt something may be missing here.
2) Alignment through Reflection
With these three pillars in place, I took a closer look at the last several weeks of my life and immediately saw something I hadn’t before. An energy blip that had somehow been flying under the radar – sucking mental, emotional and relationship energy from my daily life.
I had committed to this story in my head that buying and selling a home in under a month would be routine and straight forward. List our house, sell it, see some other houses, buy one.
In reality, getting our home ready to sell became a full time job for Tash (increasing her overall stress and energy output levels), and a mental and emotional investment for both of us. Combined searching for a new home, writing offers, having building inspections fall through meant this was no simple walk in the park.
And this, I realized, was the hair that broke the camel’s back.
Here was this thing that had come into my life out of no where (first the news of a 2nd child, then the move) and demanded energy and attention from me. Because I was already firing on all cylinders – I never took the time to pause and ask “how are we going to manage this new pillar in your life”… Instead, I just sucked it up and did it.
It made so much sense. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. And that thought made me realize there is a much deeper narrative at play here.
The Bottom Line.
Everything we choose to be a part of our lives physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally has an energy toll – this is a universal truth that cannot be swept under the rug or ignored.
Take a look at your life. Use today as an example.
How many of the things you are doing today did you intentionally choose because they are the most energy enriching things you could possibly be doing in your life?
My guess is you’ve already identified a handful of activities, conversations, experiences that aren’t serving this purpose.
Back to my Deep Dive…
For a second I thought it was okay to stop my analysis there. I had found the root cause and knew that from here on out I would need to intentionally address how we treated this pillar in our lives. But I had come this far… Why not do a thorough pulse check and see what other ‘energy sucks’ I had been sweeping under the rug?
The Energy Equation
I pulled out a flip chart and wrote down three simple questions…
- Where am I currently spending the majority of my “cognitive load”?
- What things feel like ‘energy sucks’ in my life right now?
- What do I absolutely LOVE about my life today?
This is a 10 minute exercise I would recommend to anyone. But it comes with a warning – before doing this exercise you must be willing to put all your cards on the table. Be fully honest and open with yourself – there may be things that come up that you didn’t expect – write those down – let them sink in.
Cognitive Load
1) Home purchase
2) Work
3) Finances
4) Public Speaking, personal brand and Olympic fund
5) Intimacy and relationship with Tash
6) Discus
Energy Suck
1) Home purchase process – our emotional attachment to it
2) Constant stress and demands of work – exec pressures combined with too many priorities to juggle
3) Financial Management – bookeeping for Olympic fund and Tash’s personal business
4) Distractions – bouncing between too many high priorities AND constant distraction of phones/social media
Love in Life Today
1) Great Discus training progress
2) Leading teams at BuildDirect
3) Self exploration
4) Public Speaking
5) Exploring deeper intimacy and relationship with Tash
As I looked at the list some answers seemed like they were right where they were – while others shocked me.
A Real Example – ‘Opening the Komono’
A great example is my relationship with Tash. For the past several weeks our relationship has been completely transactional and functional. We were working as a well oiled unit to pull off our crazy lifestyles- long days, 2 jobs, Olympic training, child to care for, house to sell, etc. But with all of our cognitive load and energy being placed on the things we deemed ‘important in life’ we let go of the single most important intangible part of our relationship – the intimacy and deep connection to each other. This wasn’t ruining our relationship or putting our marriage at risk – but increasingly everyday without us knowing it there was more tension, resentment and disagreement between us.
As I thought about all of the areas of my life where the energy equation could have a significant positive impact – I acknowledged that this relationship was probably the biggest pendulum swing we could both respectively realize.
What Needs to Be True…
I moved right into a follow up exercise where I asked “what needs to be true for me to let go of this cognitive load or energy suck.” On a separate page I was able to brainstorm several strategies that would help me remove the items which were not critical priority from the list. For example actually taking a structured course to help support Tash and I’s relationship was a strategy I thought would drastically move that pillar in the right direction.
Taking the Time to Work on Ourselves
I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my back. Still coughing and feeling achy, I took a breath and celebrated the fact I just learnt something completely new about myself and had laid out a re-usable process for uncovering these imbalances in the future.
I began scribbling notes, sending emails, and taking the action steps to bring my life into a clearer picture, a more balanced focus.
What Dream are You Chasing?
If you’re chasing a dream (which I hope you are). Life is going to get hard. You’re going to hit the wall, over and over. It is going to feel beyond impossible at times.
And it will suck. But it is one of the most perversely desirable feelings to encounter – because you know you are on the right path, and you know others will give up were you persevered.
You can do it.
And it is strategies and processes like the one I described above that will help you get there.
I’d love to know if you were brave enough to give it a shot.
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Living Life by a Simple Hypothesis
Sometimes I think we overcomplicate things in life. I find that when I live in tune with the hypothesis below, I am happy, fulfilled and feeling as if I’m doing my best work in the world.
I am at my best when striving towards a pursuit that intrinsically motivates me, is aligned with my values in life and challenges me beyond my comfort zone.
I refer to this state as “The Deep End” of life and I aspire to access this environment for as long and frequently as possible. Why? Because the opportunity it provides me for deep, paradigm shifting learning and growth is unrivalled.
I believe that over the long game of life — years and decades — this learning and growth compounds to create exponential value and results.
So far so good? Hopefully you can think of an experience in your own life where you have experienced the rich learnings from a dive way out of your comfort zone in the Deep End.
There’s one problem I have encountered with the Deep End, it is not actually where we capture our greatest learning and growth.
Let me explain further.
How We Learn: The Present and the Future
I believe our most significant learnings don’t actually arise when we are immersed in the present experience — but instead come long after, when we are intentionally reflecting back on our adventure in the Deep End. In my experience, 90% of my most valuable learning and growth comes through the act of pausing to reflect after the experience itself is over.
Had I not spent the time to intentionally sit down and think, reflect, journal, meditate and mentally deconstruct my experience – that learning and growth would remain trapped in my subconscious and eventually lost.
In a world that increasingly is too distracted, addicted to devices, ego driven, and without foundational framework or guide for living – we are losing sight of the art of learning.
Now let’s take a look at what we’ve learnt from the science.
Learning and The Conscious Brain
Our brain’s are incredible.
They are the reason we are here, standing upright, talking with others, and the dominant species on this planet. The brain has adapted and evolved over millions of years to help us thrive in this world.
Kevin Simlar and Robert Hanson, authors of “The Elephant in the Brain” make an argument that it is in fact this very ability to learn “post-experience” that has differentiated us from all other species on this planet. As we developed this capability hundreds of thousands of years ago to store and analyze past experiences we could update our set of actions to better optimize for survival. More on this shortly.
The facilitator of this capability for conscious thought and decision making is called our pre-frontal cortex (PFC). Whenever you are engaged in active thought — focusing on a new task, considering a set of decisions — this is your PFC at work. Unbeknownst to us, our brains have already done a lot of work in the milliseconds leading up to us forming a conscious thought. The main task is the parsing and prioritizing of millions of raw data points being collected by our brain via the brain stem at any given point in time. Before that conscious thought takes place our brain has already culled and stored 90% of the data it received and formatted the remaining 10% for our conscious processing in the PFC.
Here lies the gap.
When immersed in the present moment, we only have access to the information our brain deems most important to navigate the immediate decisions at hand.
This results in the “surface level” learnings and insights seen in the iceberg visual.
So, what happens to the 90% of information we don’t consciously get access to?
Accessing the Iceberg of our Subconscious
One of the most simple heuristics that has helped me understand how to access the iceberg of wisdom and knowledge hidden within our own subconscious mind is this:
As long as we are mentally preoccupied with an activity in the present, we cannot access our the iceberg of subconscious knowledge.
In other words, whether we are pursuing a goal in the Deep End of life, drowning in thoughts of stress and anxiety, or immediately jumping from one task to the next without pause — we are forgoing the opportunity to learn and grow from the depths of our subconscious.
Sidenote: Dr.Matthew Walker, author of “Why We Sleep” suggests that this also has a significant negative impact on our ability to fall asleep quickly and get deep restful sleep. By foregoing opportunities to pause and reflect throughout the day, our brain’s are forced to begin this activity just as we are laying our head down on the pillow.
Reflection & Inquiry
While we are only just beginning to understand the neuroscience of our brain’s processing of subconscious information, we have intuitively known the art of reflection tens of thousands of years how to access this information. The answer is simple and as a result is often overlooked.
Pause. Be still.
Quiet the mind.
Find Flow.
Rest. Recover.
Reflect. Inquire.
Slowing down, stillness, a quiet mind
A prerequisite to accessing the wisdom of our subconscious is the quieting of our conscious Pre Frontal Cortex powerhouse. This is one of the incredible benefits to breath-work, mindfulness meditation, and frankly any other activity that causes us to detach from our conscious thought — eg, going for a walk where you are simply focused on the awe of Mother Nature that surrounds you.
Non-Performance Flow States
Finding ‘Flow States’, or more specifically the act of being fully immersed and focused on a task that is intrinsically motivating, engaging, challenging and rewarding is another way to stimulate our subconscious processing. Inherently, Flow States are partially subconscious by nature (to access a Flow State you must have practiced the activity enough for our brain to have laid some “unconsciously competent” neural wiring) and don’t need to be performing a sport at an Olympic level. For example the walk described above (walking and general navigation being two of the activities with “unconsciously competent” wiring — can provide the right person with a Flow state). When it comes to using Flow States as a vehicle for subconscious processing I think it’s important to make the distinction between Performance Flow (intentionally using Flow to access a Peak Performance state) and Non-Performance Flow (fully immersed and engaged in an activity without the intention or requirement of Peak Performance).
Sleep
It turns out that REM sleep, occurring in the latter half of a full 7+ hour of sleep night (not to be confused with 7 hours in bed), is where our brains begin making ‘new’ connections between different streams of raw data that have been captured in the previous day. Compromise on sleep and you automatically lose this super hero power.
Reflection & Inquiry
Iceberg metaphor as it relates to conscious and unconscious learnings
There’s something about the iceberg metaphor that is staying on my mind. The most recent thought is the idea that every experience, adventure and journey we go on in life has the potential to represent significant learning and growth. Whether the outcome is good bad or ugly it actually doesn’t matter. As we walk through the experience we have access to the top half of the iceberg, the 10% of conscious learning that comes from the immediacy and present experience of whatever we’re going through. The problem, however is that it takes longer for our subconscious, which is capturing 90 to 95% of the information that we don’t consciously process to make sense of what we’re going through. This bottom half of the iceberg, the 90%, can only be accessed through intentional reflection, inquiry, And self reflection over time. When we choose to raise from one thing to the other, or to avoid the challenging self reflection that may come with failure, negative stories or deep scary vulnerabilities we lose and forfeit the opportunity to capture the 90% of growth and learning that we could otherwise apply to the long-term trajectory of our lives.
Where to from here?
If you want some help establishing your foundation, upon which you are able to jump into the Deep End, I would recommend taking some time completing this free Human Performance Assessment I have developed as part of the Human Performance Project.
Once your direction is set and you are up the High Dive or off into the Deep End, it’s important to build in intentional reflection time at different periods.
I founded The Human Performance Project to equip humans, teams, and groups with the roadmap and tools required to pursue audacious goals, dreams and aspirations in the Deep End of life.
You can learn more about this work here.
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