I’ve spent a lot of time during the second half of my career training and reconditioning Olympic athletes and I learned a lot from every one of them.

These next few weeks we get to experience the phenomenon of the Olympics.  Wrought with controversy and massive costs, it still evokes a sensation in those who care to watch that is unmatched in the sports world.

True, there are incredible sporting events every year on our calendars, and each has its special nuance and calculus.  But nothing seems to match the incredible spectacle of the Olympic games.

Perhaps because there is a sport there somewhere for just about everyone.  You’re bound to find an event that you find interesting.  And even when you don’t, the intrigue of following a sport you know nothing about, but pits the best of the best against one another, simply stimulates fascination in even the most skeptical.

But it’s really in the finality of it.  The fact that there is only one gold medalist, only one person gets to be anointed with that precious metal.

And, everyone has to wait for four years to get that chance, and if they miss……it may be the last time they ever get that chance.

Sure, numerous athletes have competed in multiple Olympic games, but very few have been adorned with gold in every attempt.

My good friend Dom Gauthier, himself an Olympic athlete and coach once used a great analogy to bring context to the almost impossible mission of winning a gold medal.

Imagine for a second that you want to be a doctor. On your first day in med school, you sit down in the massive auditorium with 100+ other aspiring physicians and wait for those first words from your professor.

Your professor walks in and stands behind the podium at the front of the class and begins by saying, “You are all here to become doctors, but unfortunately only one of you will graduate and attain that recognition.”

Imagine what you would feel.

Would you stay seated, or simply walk out of the room?

Most reading this would say it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Yet that IS the effort and the requirement assigned to winning a gold medal.  Four years at least of toiling and training, effort, failure, and success to simply be able to compete.  

Winning the gold is like no other impossible task because it’s just simply meant to be that way.  It’s a filter that eliminates the faint of heart, those who won’t do the extra, and those who won’t get up when everyone else has decided to sleep in.

I think we know this of the task, even if we’ve never experienced it. That’s why it’s so incomparable to watch.  You know how hard it was for every single athlete to get there, and now, amongst their peers, they seek to stand on top.

No easy task.

But there always seems to be some who will take it on. Thankfully.

Here’s to a few weeks of watching the impossible become possible for a special few.

Do you wake up each day inspired?

Just a question. Per last week’s blog, I have no judgment here, I am just curious.

Should we wake up in that state of mind each day, or at least most days?

Maybe we need to get our first dose of coffee into us to feel it, but after you’ve woken up, how do you feel about your day?

The reason I ask this is that we keep having this circular conversation about happiness, what it means to be happy, and how we should strive to be happy.  But I for one, don’t believe that is a real aspiration.

I think there are too many factors affecting each day that can render a shift in our immediate state of mind.  Being happy, at its best, is always going to be a moving target.

You can’t control or constrain happiness, it’s an outcome of your mindset, your circumstances, and how you react or cope with those circumstances.

But the concept of inspiration is an aspirational pursuit.  It’s like the dimmer switch on the wall of a room light.  You can turn it up or down as the day goes, but the light is always there.  It’s the light that draws you in, just like a porch light attracts moths in on a hot summer night.

Inspiration is the thing that attracts you toward your work, play, activity, connection, and communication.  It’s the thing that sets your table each day and pushes you when you don’t even know it’s there.

It gets you past the days when things just aren’t going well, or things aren’t right.  It’s what you look towards to remind you about why you do what you do.

My inspiration is the idea that I can create change, challenge convention, and stimulate thought through my actions, and example.  I am inspired to inspire others.

When I asked you if you wake up inspired, I didn’t mean, do you wake up to the sounds of a choir and an aura of light?

What I meant was, do you wake up with a sense of direction?  Do you feel drawn to explore your day, or do you feel resigned to face your day?

What is it you want others to feel when you are around them? 

What is it you wish to bring to the party so to speak?

The essence of how you wish to contribute to others, how you want to impact those you meet and interact with each day is the essence of your own inspiration.

If you’ve never contemplated this question, I offer it for your consideration.

If you have contemplated it, and you do know what inspires you, are you allowing it to inspire you each day, or only sparingly?  Are you constraining your inspiration, or exploring it each day?

If you know it, and you feel it each day when you wake up, then keep sharing it with the world.  You are leaving your mark.

The news this past weekend has caused me to further reflect on judgment.

It’s become the nature of society today, likely always being a part of society and humanity.  We love to judge each other, we love to judge ourselves as well.

But when self-judgment becomes toxic or unbearable, our minds look elsewhere to serve our internal need to feel better about ourselves by looking down or at someone else.

I’m guilty, I’ve done it, way too much. Still do it.  It’s not an easy habit to shed. It’s in our DNA.

Maybe because our neurological foundation is all about self-preservation, we just naturally need to define our environments, circumstances, relationships, and pretty much anything we need to interact with or be connected.

But most of what we judge today has nothing to do with self-preservation, and everything to do with pushing the mirror away.  We want to be right, and we want them to be wrong.

Unfortunately, there is very little right and wrong and a whole lot of grey.

Opinions reign down constantly.  Everyone has them, they are like ass-holes…..heard that one before?

I am fascinated by when something like this past weekend’s news occurs, how fast people can leap to conclusions, define what they saw, believe they are right, or demonize others simply through their lens of perspective.

You have to know you don’t have all the information.  You have to know you are creating your narrative to satisfy something you already believe, no?

How can we come to so many conclusions so easily without all the information?  

Sure, you might share a thought or observation, but to then take the leap of faith that based on that you know there is a conspiracy a plot, or an over-reaching agenda? 

That’s judgment, not curiosity.

If we want to change our society and contribute to being better stewards of our world, we need to shift our narrative from judging others to being more curious about others.

More recently, I’ve begun to watch different news sources, cultivate alternative opinions, and listen more to what is being said.  I felt I was reasonably good at it, but I needed to re-double my efforts.

Why?

Because the internet drives judgment. Judgment sells. Judgment creates fear, and fear motivates.  If we don’t understand something, we become scared of what it might mean or could become.  We build a narrative around the information, we categorize it, and we limit it.

We love to define it, because we can manage our feelings around what we know, but we don’t know what to do with the nebulous possibilities….that’s scary.

The truth is we don’t know, there is no perfect, right answer, and most certainly with the limited information we usually have, we have no right to conclude.  

We need more information!

How do we get more information….we ask more questions.  We look around, explore, remain open, try out different perspectives.

We seek to call ourselves out on what we believe.  It’s not easy, but it IS necessary.

We’ve become polarized because polarization creates a false sense of security, but security just the same.

Security is comforting, and comfort is our happy place.  

But comfort is also a place of stagnation.  If we want to grow, we need discomfort, we need to feel a little out of sorts.

We don’t always have to feel out of sorts, but we also don’t always want to feel comfortable, and worse, feel we are right and they are wrong.

Today, more than ever before, we must be more curious. We must start our conversation with better questions and a desire to better understand instead of telling others what we think or believe we know.

Double down on curiosity, and never stop seeking.

How often do you find yourself answering this question; “How are you doing?”

“Busy.”

Or how often does someone you’re reconnecting with say that as well?

Or maybe we say, “All good, busy, but good.”

It’s become the default response. No one tells you how they are doing, that would take too much time, and you wouldn’t care to hear it all either, right?

We ask the pleasantry question, “How are you doing?” because it ticks all the boxes, it says we care, it says we want to know about you, and it says hello all in one fell swoop.

But the truth is we don’t care, we don’t want to know about the person in this immediate conversation, and we want to most likely get to the point of the interaction.

Worse still is the fact that the person we are talking to says they’re busy because that’s a better response than, I’m down, I’m depressed, I’m tired, I’m burnt out, or I’m happy, I’m doing great, I’m excited. All of these statements kind of lead to a response from you, like further elaboration is required.

I’m busy kind of hits you in the face and says all at once, I’ve got a lot on my plate, I’m overwhelmed, and you need to be succinct and focused in your response to me. Don’t waste my time, and I won’t waste yours.

Still further challenging is the fact that it’s true. Most people these days are completely overwhelmed with work and trying to achieve the dream.

How many times have you gotten in an UBER in the last year and spoken to someone who is doing UBER as a third job during the day to make ends meet?

How often are you running into friends who have so many plates spinning, you can’t imagine how they keep them all in the air?

How many plates are you spinning?

Life today is frenetic, and on top of it, the social media gods have decided that if we are not busy enough, they will fill all our extra time with useless scrolling.

Even with all of that, our business has become a badge of honor. We default to this language because we don’t want people to think we aren’t busy. God forbid we would have it all together, not be busy, but somehow be successful in everyone else’s eyes by luck. Luck isn’t acceptable, it’s gotta be earned!

We think that being busy is a precursor to being successful. Success is defined sociologically by what you can accomplish, what you can get done, how much you can take on. Get after it, right!

As I’ve shared in the past, I like the Nightengale quote, “Success is the pursuit of a worthy ideal.”

It’s all about the intent, the expression, the connection to purpose, and the worth while effort. It’s not about how much effort, the intensity, or the occupation with it, it’s simply about pursuing in a way that allows me to feel it, own it, live it.

For me, the pursuit of a worthy ideal; challenging convention, creating change and inspiring others through the work and life I live is my success.

These days, when someone asks me how I am, I usually say; “My life is good, it’s full and it’s rich.”

I am content and joyful in my work, and I do have time to think, explore, and reach.

How can you be a better responder?

Most likely the solution will be found in your sense of purpose. Are you living the way you love, or the way you feel you have to?

A worthy question for all of us.

This week Canada turns 157 years old, and our friends down south will be celebrating their 248th Anniversary of Independence on July 4th. Usually, such events are celebrated with fanfare and fireworks, and most of the time, an appreciation for the long weekend.

Sometimes, with big dates, like any anniversary of importance (our centennial in 1967, or their bi-centennial in 1976) there is more lamenting on the state of the nation, the accomplishments, and the feelings toward bygone years.

For me, this year in particular, I want to reflect on what our nations are supposed to represent to the rest of the world, and what they seem to be losing daily.

Democracy, for all its fractures and fissures, still stands for the ideal of freedom of will and accomplishment.  The ideology that any person should have the opportunity to accomplish what they set out to achieve, and live a life they steward themselves.

It’s supposed to represent a place where diversity of opinion, and belief can reside as neighbors, collegially and safely.  Without a sense that sharing one’s belief or opinion might result in one’s harm or restraint.

It’s supposed to feel like one can travel and move about with relative ease, without any constraint other than those self-imposed by budget, time, or the constraints agreed upon civilly through means of a government built by the people, for the people.

In other words, we make our own rules and we live by those rules, and if we don’t like them, we use the political constructs built by our forefathers to change them.  We amend them, we create new ones, and we delete old, outdated ones.

This is the Kool-Aid I drank for most of my life, I guess it allowed me to feel comfortable that what we had made sense, that what we were doing was somehow better than them, whoever they were.

But throughout the last half of my life, since the early 90s, I’ve seen a slow and insidious degradation of all that I grew up with (however flawed) a slow burn of our flags, and what they represent.

Six significant elements have contributed to the destabilization of our democratic fabric in my estimation, and one more that is just beginning to make it all exponentially worse.

The first is the advent of 24-hour news in the mid-eighties and the politicization of that news through opinion pundits.  Ratings and greed began to shift the news from reporting and holding accountable, to defining what was happening through a curated perspective. 

Still more disturbing was the monopolization of media by a few media oligarchy who decided to politically bias the news to favor the corporations who would  spend millions upon millions of dollars on advertisements.  Soon the adoring pundits became all too comfortable with lying simply to make more money.

Cue the internet, which begins to take this reality and redefine it again. Now we have curated content on demand. Now, without us knowing it until it’s too late, we receive confirmation of biased opinions, and we get bespoke news and information to satisfy our beliefs. People get sucked into clickbait rabbit holes only exacerbated by the social media explosion that follows.

The shift in corporate greed instigated in the early 80s saw more and more corporations move their focus from high-quality products and services, manufacturing, and consideration for the workers (never perfect by any stretch, but better than now), to outsourcing manufacturing, downsizing employment, and focusing on shareholder gain. This was the oxygen for the fire that was burning the fabric of our flags.

Social media dropped jet fuel on the fire.  No one saw it coming.  No one could  even begin to contemplate what this new medium would mean.  It has done some good, but I’d have to say that for the most part, much of what it has done has been downgrading our social fabric. Most certainly it is reinventing the way our youth sees the world and we are only realizing how this change is truly affecting the next generation of adults and businesspeople.

These ingredients shifted our moral compass. No longer would one need to face their foe and speak their truth knowing there might be ramifications for their bullying or vitriol.  All the cowards who wanted to say something however true or false could now build literal empires and followings on the backs of followers who no longer received variable perspective, or actual truth.

Truth?! What is that really?

The cost of this cesspool of fallacy and immorality has been the slow insidious shift of our political leadership from people who sought to contribute through public service (yes, they had their flaws and foibles no doubt) and try to create a better set of circumstances for their children than they experienced growing up.  

Getting elected required money and alignment with the private sector, but not to the extent that it does today.  Today, the cost of getting elected can only be born of the private sector corporate conglomerates who choose their team and set the rules. Our leaders are owned and operated by those who seek profit over people.

The pandemic amplified this ugly mess, and made everything more evident.  It eroded the public trust in institutions, and it seemed that on a daily basis new fractures exposed themselves in public institutions we had trusted implicitly for so long.  Was it right for us to doubt, most certainly, but the level it has ascended to at this point renders these institutions dysfunctional and further exacerbates the end user, the public.

On a daily basis, everything seems normal.  Life goes on, and we get up each day and get it done, but there is this buzz in the air around us, constant and unnerving, that something is going to break.  I don’t know when or how, but something will break and what lies afterward is uncertain.

Cue the next great invention, AI.  We don’t really know where this giant experiment with reality will lead, but one thing is certain, there is much that will be different, some for the better, and some for the much worse.  The potential to take everything above and simply fabricate a truth, create a false reality, now that is an experiment with much possibility to go wrong.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – 1995

On this Canada Day, I want to celebrate my country and those that I love, but I also find myself at a loss for how we got to where we are, and more difficult to contemplate is how we find our way to something better.

Not to leave you, the reader, with a sensation of bleakness, but I do think our way to something better is instigated by how we treat one another, and what we aspire towards.  

Let’s focus more on being better humans to one another each day. Let’s aspire to be better versions of ourselves.  Let’s de-emphasize our focus on money and wealth, and shift to a focus on the wealth of health, family, and community.  It’s not cliche, it’s common sense.

Let’s make a greater effort to inform ourselves through multiple sources, and embrace critical conversations and curiosity.  We must not become complacent, tribal, and protective of what we have.  We need to learn more about one another, recognize our differences, and celebrate our similarities.  We all want something better for ourselves and for our children.

Here’s to hope.