You can’t spell self-improvement without IMPROV

Scared, judgemental, everyone is weird but me. These are my thoughts as I am looking out at a group of nice, young people I have just met. We are standing in a circle about to play improv games and I am thinking about how I could escape. I would add that this is my reaction to every meeting with a new group of humans. When I meet new people I judge. I find reasons why I wouldn’t want to be friends with them so that if they don’t want to be my friend, it doesn’t matter as I have already found reasons to reject them. This sounds like the reaction of a 5-year-old child. And it probably is a reaction I learned aged 5. It's just a pattern that I have not let go of yet. Thankfully, I can notice this now. It goes away with a kind and gentle ‘thanks for looking out for us 5-year-old Richard but don’t worry, adult Richard is here and we know how to socialise a bit better now.’ Given that improv is very much about getting in touch with our playful, imaginative, creative and judgement-free inner-child I knew I didn’t want to scare little Richard away.

Let fear be your guide

So the story is that I signed up for an 8-week improvised comedy class that ended with a live performance in front of an actual audience of people. Each week we met for 2 and a half hours to play games and create improv scenes. If you don’t know what improv is, think “Whose Line Is It Anyway”.

I’m doing this because it scares the hell out of me. The thought of being on stage without any lines to rely on, while being stared at by strangers who expect you to make them laugh is the stuff of nightmares for many. But I am trying to let fear be my guide in life now. If there is something that really scares me, I know that it’s a sign-post towards growth. I have to confront it, or it will hold me back. Thankfully, I am very funny so improv is going to be a cinch for me (lied Richard).

Let’s play make-believe!

Once I get past the hurdle of meeting new people, I am confronted with the next obstacle. I have to create scenes that make sense and are enjoyable to watch. While there is no overt pressure in improv to be funny or great, internally this is what I want to be. In an improv course, you spend a lot of time just playing games with the purpose of getting you out of your head and into the moment. This isn’t acting, it's just fun. The kind of fun you have when you are a child and you play cowboys and Indians or doctors and nurses.

Freedom from self

I have spent a lifetime creating an identity for myself. I am a coach and nutritionist and I wear these clothes and have these opinions. I think I know who I am. But then for one evening a week I am an astronaut, then a superhero, then a witch, then an estranged step-daughter amongst other things. As we grow up, we are put into boxes so that we can fit neatly into our families, our social groups and our society. As I watch others in the group performing I notice that the people who struggle are the ones who are most attached to their boxes (aka their ego structures). They are too tied to their own identity to play the milkman or the astronaut and it is awkward to watch.

When you are doing improv you realise how constricted you are and how easy it is to be someone else. We are all playing characters in our lives, we are wearing masks of personalities, and doing improv showed me how easy it is to make a change. Maybe you are playing a character you don’t like but feel too tied to it to drop. This is an important reminder to me, to see how I can coach people into being someone they are actually choosing to be instead of someone they were told to be.

Mindfulness meditation helps precisely with this. You practice noticing when you are playing your character. When you are on autopilot, reacting to the emotions your character wants you to play. By sitting in meditation for 20 minutes or so, you are stepping out of that character and watching your mind run. The goal of meditation is to be able to take that practice into the real world so you can be aware of when your reactivity takes control.

How do I make people like me?

Many self development and dating courses actually take people to an improv class. Taking a course like this teaches you how to interact creatively, have ‘banter’ and fun conversations. You get this by being at ease with yourself. Have you noticed that the people who are easiest to talk to are simply very comfortable with themselves? They don’t need anything from you, like approval or validation. They already have these things so the pressure for you to give it to them is relieved and you can just have a pleasant conversation. This is how improv helped me. By making me more present in the conversation and less needy for approval.

Listening: you really have to listen to be funny. If you don’t listen during a scene, you will take the plot way off course and the audience won’t follow. The funniest jokes are ones that are relevant to what the other person has said. And if you want other people to like you, you need to listen to them.

As Dale Carnegie says in How to Win Friends and Influence People, “be more interested, than interesting.”

Performing on stage

The final performance took place above a pub in South Bank in front of about 100 people. This was the hardest part. Halfway through my first class I was thinking, there is absolutely no way I am getting up on stage and embarrassing myself. The days leading up to the performance were filled with nerves and stomach butterflies. The live performance is not actually compulsory so I had many intrusive thoughts about how I was going to duck out of it. But again, I used my superhero powers of mindfulness, noticed my discomfort and just allowed it. I allowed myself to feel the fear. You are supposed to feel fear at these times and I told myself that this was okay. Inevitably the fear went away. You can’t be chased by something you turn around and face.

Thankfully, my performance was exhilaratingly fun and not that scary thanks to the support of my classmates. One line went down particularly well and to have 100 people roar at you with their laughter is something I will never forget. The deep sound vibrations of approval hit me and almost knocked me backwards. It was a high like nothing else I have experienced and it came from putting myself in a terrifyingly uncomfortable experience. You don’t get experiences like that from Netflix & chill.

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7 things I learned from 30 days of yoga

I want to be a real boy. That’s what I think to myself at a meditation retreat beginning 3 months of travelling. I'm the youngest person there and the only one who has to sit on a chair. Everyone else is sat Buddha-like on the floor, while I tower over them and stick out like a sore thumb, with a sore back. Real boys can sit on the floor.  Pinocchio probably could too.

I’ve started referring to my 52kg girlfriend as my mule because she has to carry our shared backpack everywhere as it gives me back pain. I am a hefty 82 kgs…the heaviest I have ever been. I can’t do many of the CrossFit movements I have to teach due to a shoulder injury, I can’t go on hikes while travelling because of plantar fasciitis, I can’t play football because of Achilles tendonitis. And these are just the current issues. I could add more if I did as much sport as I would like to.

I am 30 years old and have more injuries than most 70 year olds. My physiotherapist has become one of my best friends from all my appointments. My girlfriend is a Pilates teacher and my house is filled with foam rollers, lacrosse balls, mobility stars, peptides,  infrared lamps and other modern technologies for healing. Yet, the one thing I have refused to do may be the oldest. Yoga.

I coach people on transforming themselves and I am going to rate yoga’s potential to transform you:

Lesson Number 1 - Routines make things easier

For the next few months I will have limited access to a gym. Now is the time to get healthy. And for me, health simply means ‘pain free’. So off I go on a journey within a journey, of 30 days of yoga…mostly in hostel bedrooms. I won’t be able to get to a class most of the time so I am just going to do 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ on Youtube. These free videos consist of 15-30 minute beginners routines. I read good reviews of her videos and didn’t want to pay for a subscription to a platform I could very well have given up on after a few days. I have dabbled with a handful of yoga classes before but never enjoyed them and never went consistently.

So here is Lesson Number 1 – It is much easier to do something every day than randomly throughout the week. When you put something in your routine every day it becomes…routine. And guess what, it worked. Spoiler alert…I did 30 days of yoga in a row.

Lesson Number 2 – Nothing worth having comes easily.

Yoga is really hard for me. Like, way, totally harder than any CrossFit WOD. Not because of a physical weakness but a mental one. In yoga, you have time to think about how hard it is and how much easier it would be to give up.

Lesson Number 2  - Yoga is a great reminder to me, a child of Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now’ generation, that nothing worth having comes easily. The harder something is, the more rewarding it becomes. In this case I have the physical benefits of being stretchier from yoga plus the mental reward of knowing that I stuck to something that was extremely hard.

Lesson Number 3 – Do what you need to do, not what you want to do.

The first few days of the practice go well but on day ten I get the chance to go to a group class in Saigon. This is when I discover what yoga is supposed to look like…tiny Vietnamese ladies doing the most advanced contortionism I have ever seen, while I slosh sweat all over my mat and stumble on the simplest of balances. This is the reminder of why I hate yoga… because I am sh*t at it. Nobody likes doing things they are bad at, do they?

The lesson… Train your weaknesses, not your strengths. Exercisers seem to fit into one of these three categories:

1. People who are already big and strong lifting weights.

2. Skinny people with good stamina repeatedly doing long distance cardio.

3. Flexible people becoming more flexible by doing yoga.

Nobody is really doing themselves any favours, they are simply massaging their egos.

Lesson Number 4 – Get out of your head and into the present

I am a victim of the Calvinist idea of time being limited and running out. (You probably are too btw). I am constantly looking at my watch. I love productivity and ‘getting stuff done’. I’m using a Pomodoro timer right now to measure my work in blocks of 25 minutes.

Towards the end of my thirty days I went to a yoga and Reiki retreat in Cambodia. Every morning we would have a ninety-minute yoga class. (Three times the length of my longest YouTube video!) The first few days were torturous. Although the moves were fine, I got bored a lot and my eyes wandered to the clock. The only thing that could make time go faster was not thinking about time. Every occasion that I thought about the time would be a reminder that I was not being present and an opportunity to come back to the breath and the present. This is essentially what mindfulness meditation is.

Lesson Number 4 - When you’re trying to escape a situation, stop thinking about it, get out of your head and into the present moment. Lesson Number 4 is basically 236 pages of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ condensed into one sentence. Cash Back!

Lesson Number 5 – Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone’s Chapter 18

I have a man-bun and am guilty of the worst kind of crime, looking like a yogi but not actually doing yoga. So, when the teacher sees how bad I am at yoga I feel bad about myself. When I look around and see proper yogis doing proper yoga I feel bad about myself. I sweat a lot and sometimes when I roll up from lying on my back the suction from the mat makes a fart noise, so I feel bad about myself.

Lesson Number 5* - Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 18. I am new to yoga and other people in the class could have been doing it for 20 years. Even better….. Don’t compare yourself to others at all. There will always be opportunities for you to beat yourself up if that’s what you’re in to. Or you can just be present on a yoga mat, doing what you’re doing, not thinking about anything else. Self-flagellation is an easy escape from accepting who you are and avoiding any criticism from anyone else.

Lesson Number 6 – Sticking to things is good

Flash forward to Day 30 and… Yoga works. Huzzah! My plantar fasciitis and achilles tendonitis are gone! I can touch my toes. I can sit cross legged as long as my back is supported. I can carry a backpack. I will continue to do yoga for the next 3 months and go down to 72 kgs.

Lesson number 6* Sticking to things is good. Obvious, I know. But simply sticking to something, anything, gives you a sense of achievement. Giving up gives you short term relief but in the long run you may face guilt. I felt a great deal of satisfaction just because I did something I set out to do.  When people would suggest yoga to me in the past I would fend them off as I had done the odd class here and there. But for me to really understand the benefits of it, I had to do it for 30 days consistently, and unsurprisingly, I got a huge amount out of it.

Consistency matters. The same principle applies to going to the gym, dieting, spiritual/therapeutic practices. If you do one 10k run, if you eat one Buddha bowl, if you go to one therapy session or do 10 minutes of meditation, you will not notice the benefits. Or even if you do a week of eating clean, a month of meditation, a year of Zumba, as soon as you stop, the tangible benefits fade. Stick with it. Make it a habit.

Lesson Number 7 – “80% of anything in life is just showing up.”

Resilience is the most important of traits to cultivate. This is Tony Robbins’ favourite attribute. If you have resilience you can do anything. While travelling I faced many minor obstacles to getting the yoga done and ‘showing up’. I didn’t have a mat, we were staying in hostels without enough floor space, it was so humid that my sweat would drench the mat making it impossible to hold a position, I didn't have yoga blocks, blah blah blah…. But somehow, I cultivated enough resilience to do this and the more I thought about this, the more resilience I found.

As Woody Allen once said, “80% of anything in life is just showing up”. I had crap days as well as good days of yoga. When I just got on the matt, and didn’t worry about how well I was going to do yoga, things were fine. Things got easier. I just got out of my head and got on with it. Sometimes its okay just to go easy on yourself.

So here is the final score for yoga and how much I think it can help people transform their lives.

What happens when you pay someone to let you work for them?

Work As Meditation

Hi, my name is Richard and I’m the idiot who went to an Indian ashram and paid them to let me work there. This wasn’t an internship with a step on the ladder at the end. This was ‘Work as Meditation’. This was me doing crappy jobs like greeting new guests, copying and pasting long talks into order, building IKEA furniture, bag checking for security and taking payments for new arrivals. You work every day for at least 8 hours and there are no days off.

Why would anyone do this, I hear you say?

The answer could be any of:

1. I’m an idiot

2. They brain-washed me

3. I wanted to learn how to enjoy any job and teach this to people in the West.

Now, I say I’m the idiot, but there were many other idiots there and there have been idiots for hundreds of years who have gone to ashrams and worked for rewards other than money. The idea is that anyone can be meditative sat in a silent room while following their breath… but wouldn’t it be nice if we could have that same sense of calm and presence in stressful situations like work?

We spend most of our lives trading our time for money, and spend much of that time dreaming of how we are going to spend that money. All these dreams take place in the future so we sacrifice the only thing we really have; the present.

I’m just going to share what I learnt about work and maybe you can apply this to yourself. I’m not going to try to convince you of why you need to do a program like this. (I’ve done it, so that you don’t have to).

 

Motivation

Many people’s motivation for work is money.

Without money in the equation my reward became praise. I worked hard so that someone could tell me I was a good boy and that I’m special.

Perhaps, your relationship with earning is the same as this.

In 2008 researchers found that people’s levels of happiness increased as their salaries increased but only up to a point. That point was £62,500 (adjusted for inflation). So, if you are earning more than this, money can take on a different meaning too. Your salary becomes a points system. The more points you have the better you are doing at the game of work and the more people can tell you that you’re a good boy (or girl).

Time

What’s your relationship like with time?

How do you think about time?

Time is money, right?

Time is finite, so make the most of it?

Well it didn’t always work this way. If you’ve read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari you’ll know that the way we think about time comes from the Calvinists. There was a time when we thought about time as circular, where we didn’t worry about clocking in, and we didn’t judge others for leaving the office earlier than us. Productivity wasn’t measured with a clock; it was measured by what was achieved.

I am a perennial clock watcher. I am indignant when others are late or waste my precious time. Like the rest of London, I’m very very busy, all the fricken time.

What I learnt about time on this program is that when you are present in the moment, time stops being so important.

I am no longer having my short life sucked out of me by the ever-advancing clock. I am free. I am not anxiously planning the future. I just am. And funnily enough, the more engrossed I became in what I was doing in the moment, the faster time went. This was really helpful to me. Whenever I thought about time or started planning for the future, I gently reminded myself to get out of my head and into the moment.

Taking things too seriously

I am going to reiterate this, as it was something I often forgot during work….I was paying to work there! There was no possibility of future promotions. I would leave at the end of the course and probably never see any of those people again.

However, there were times when I became really, frustrated, angry, judgemental and upset in my job.

Although the ashram was run by Westerners, it was still in India and therefore, extremely disorganised and bureaucratic. There was a distinct lack of leadership and no one really knew what they were doing. Without clear guidelines, its easy to start panicking and blaming. We were just like children, ‘playing doctors and nurses.’ Except the game was work. As you probably know, sometimes games get out of hand. Monopoly money still has a lot of value to some people.

Egos were everywhere. I believe the Buddha once said, ‘before enlightenment a$$hole…after enlightenment a$$hole.’ Or maybe it was ‘chop wood, carry water’. Sadly, there was no one at this ashram who could call themselves enlightened. (There were more than enough a$$holes)  But the two points here are, before and after enlightenment your life is still filled with the same things and if you’re an asshole before going to an ashram there is a good chance you will still be one if you don’t manage your ego.

I often found my ego getting involved in this game. Thankfully, the game isn’t to transcend the ego, it is just to notice it. Once I did notice it, I was able to release the pent-up emotions and laugh at how silly it all is.

The harder the better

When I was faced with difficult emotions, or challenges, or tasks that seemed too much for me I would go through a familiar pattern of thoughts.

This is BS >

I’m paying to be here >

Everyone is an idiot but me>

I’m going home and taking my football with me. 

Once I had finished with that melodrama and I gotten myself through the struggle I noticed big pay-offs. I noticed that the harder the struggle was the bigger the reward was. The more frustrated I got over misunderstanding IKEA instructions, arguing a theoretical point, screaming and shouting in a dynamic meditation…(the more tension that was built up)… the greater the pleasure upon release.

This is something that David Deida talks about in The Way of The Superior Man:

People, (esp masculine ones) like tension and release. That is basically what a sport like football is. Loads of tension and resistance as one team tries to penetrate a defence, then a huge release of emotion when it happens. If you’ve ever been to a football stadium and witnessed the tension of the last few minutes, one team searching for an equalizer as time runs out. A goal is scored. People go mad. The release is huge. You can see it and hear it and sense it. And yes, that is also what sex is, a build up of tension and release.

What I learnt from this was a reframing. I could choose to do something easy so that I could achieve it. Or I could chose something harder that I knew I would get a greater feeling of reward from at the end. When I chose the greater reward, I stopped focusing on the discomfort and focused on how good I would feel at the end. This completely changed my mindset for the task, I stopped focusing on the difficulties because I knew they would be worth something at the end.

Seek big struggles, receive big rewards…. is what I would say if I was a native American shaman.

The mind gym

Meditation is basically like going to the gym for the mind.

The Work As Meditation program was not about things going well. It was not about doing a good job. It was about being aware and awake to all thoughts and feelings. There were many times when my reaction to any sort of discomfort was to think about escaping.

That was just my ego trying to assert itself. Every internal complaint was a chance to exercise the awareness muscle. And every time you exercise it, it gets stronger. This is how any type of mindfulness mediation works.

You have something to focus on, like your breath, and every time your mind drifts off you notice it, and bring the attention back to the breath. Each time you do this it is like doing a rep of a bench press. The more reps you do, the stronger your awareness muscle gets. So those who say they can’t meditate as their mind will drift off too many times will actually be getting a much better workout than the Buddhist monk who only has to bring his attention back once.

My take home messages

I have taken a lot from this process. It has shown me things about work that I would not have been able to see on my own. Having the chance to take so much time to make work better for me was revolutionary.

What I value most is the recognition that any job can be pleasant when you immerse yourself into it totally. 

This program is clearly not for everyone due to the cost of travel and time required so it doesn’t get the highest transformation rating. But if you want to change your relationship to work without traveling to foreign lands I can give you some jobs to do at my house if you like. I won’t charge you that much. Or we could just have some coaching sessions around it.

Transformation Rating

Scores out of 10

Ease of use = 3

You have to go to an ashram and pay so not available to everyone

Lasting changes = 8

I learnt so much about my relationship to work that I hope will last forever

Time requirement = 2

You need to spend several weeks or months to be accepted on the program

Impact = 8

It totally changed my understanding of what it means to meditate.

Final score = 5.25

A pretty average score but that’s mostly due to the travel and time required

Why I'm a life coach....

Who are you?

Have you ever really considered who is running your life?

Could your life be controlled by bacteria or even your subconscious mind?

Did you know that there are more cells of bacteria in your body than there are of your own cells? Is the bacteria living inside of you or are you living inside the bacteria’s house? 

Or, were you aware that our conscious minds can process only around 40 bits of information per second and our unconscious handles 40 million?! This means that 95-99% of your life is controlled by your unconscious.

These are the types of things that experts from Buddhist monks to Sigmund Freud have been saying for centuries. Finally, science is catching up to show how our brain waves, our gut bacteria and our unconscious all affect us. If we never take the time to investigate these things we won’t get what we want out of life. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to understand how all of these areas add up to the outcomes we see on a daily basis?

Now that you suitably confused about who you are, I can tell you about who I am and how I could be of use to you. My role could be as the mechanic to the vehicle of your life or as a self-experimenter making the mistakes on himself so you don’t have to, or the guide walking you through the wilderness clearing a path, a couple steps ahead of you.

A Life Mechanic

I was once described as being “polished” by Dr Andrew Hill, a neuroscience professor at UCLA. He meant that I looked shiny on the outside but was still figuring out within.

Having worked with Dr Hill for over a year on my brain wave patterns at The Peak Brain Institute in LA, I delved further into the world of biohacking, nootropics and neurotherapy. I learnt about neurofeedback and how our brain waves affect things like moods, performance and stress.

Everything I have learnt about neuroscience, nutrition, psychology and spirituality have given me a more rounded understanding of people. By bringing these separate aspects of the self together I can see a bigger picture.

Working with me would be like working with a mechanic on a car that keeps veering off to the left. You don’t know why the car keeps steering off that way, you just know that you are trying to drive straight. We will take a look under the bonnet of your life to discover, together, what is preventing you from heading in the direction you want to go.

The main difference being that I don’t do that sharp inhale that a mechanic does when they’re about to rip you off. We work together and I am transparent with fees!

Where The Magic Happens

Somebody once drew me this diagram and it has stuck with me ever since. Before seeing this, I was someone who wanted safety and stability. After I had realized how much sense the diagram made I devoted my life to finding places where the magic happened. Many years of stepping out of my comfort zone have given me the experience needed to guide others to identify their own magic.

If you’re looking for a coach who was born with the perfect life and just naturally had it all together then I wish you the best of luck finding them. I am someone who has had a lot of challenges that I have overcome and continue to work on. I have been able to do this by exploring  ancient wisdom, my own spirituality and the latest scientific information. My journey has taken me around the world, from LA, to India, to Cambodia and beyond to find the best practices to bring back to London and help you here.

As a devoted self-experimenter I will continue to tread carefully through the jungle of discomfort a few steps ahead of you, clearing a safe path for others to follow.