Moving Well

Our minds, insight, knowledge, biases, and ignorance are not disconnected from physicality and embodiment. 

I have to work at moving out of my head and taking my body more seriously. 

 I enjoy watching GMB.io and other teachers of movement culture using small gentle movements and body weight exercises to work on flowing control. A dance of gravity and strength. 

I definitely feel that I have to make time for exercise, and don't. Particularly when I am desk-bound. I wrestle with deep soaked guilt. Maybe less guilt... and more prioritisation. Even though I *know* I need to move, the bottomless pit of things-to-do always seems to scream loudly. 

 

Movement culture proponents try incorporate movement into life, rather than explicity making time for it. 

How are you working? How are you sitting? While you are making a cup of tea, can you do some stretches as the kettle boils? Building movement into your lifestyle. Like kids, when they have to go somewhere... they run! 

Strength builds endurance. Like weight training where some stress in a controlled environment builds your capacity for when chaos descends. For when you are pushed outside your energy and power comfort zone. 

Flexibility builds resilience. Ideally. you are not just focused on one set of exercises, but you can adapt and adjust to whatever is happening. 

 

Control is the intention behind creativity. Where you move smoothly and consciously, despite - ambiguity, - randomness, and - complexity. 

When you watch masters of calisthenics, their bodies seem to operate according to different laws of physics. Yet their movement looks way more natural than the awkwardness of niggles and knots, when we normally don’t use our bodies then expect them to jump to action. 

Autonomy and Consent

Once you have a deep understanding of yourself and where you are, you can build capacity. To handle the random, ambiguous, and complicated change you are a part of. You will be able to cope. “I am okay now. I will be okay later. I will thrive.” 

Plans are neither static, nor able to remove difficulties. Plans are a tool to create a process to deal with problems as they arise and evolve. Challenge means you are alive. In movement culture (calisthenics) they focus on developing strength, flexibility, and control (see GMB.io). This is the same idea I talk about with financial yoga and stilling the waves of money anxiety. 

Strength is endurance. The building of your muscles through regular controlled stress. Through workouts, varied between Sustained Medium-Intensity and High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). 

Flexibility is resilience. Your ability to adapt and adjust to accommodate different situations. Through calm and relaxed lengthening of your muscles. 

Control is creativity. It is the ability to see, evaluate, decide, act, and get the intended consequences you were looking for despite all the things that are not in your control. 

Moving well gives you an underlying sense of autonomy and consent.

Moving Well

Entry Ticket

You can think of risk as stress, and stress is not all bad. “Discomfort is the entry ticket to a meaningful life”. In exercise, you have High Impact Interval Training. Putting the body under stress in a controlled fashion can be a good thing. That is the way we learn. The body follows a use-it-or-lose-it strategy, and is ruthlessly efficient at redistributing its energy. If you start doing press-ups, your muscles will get bigger as your body responds. If you stop doing those press-ups, your muscles will get smaller. If you go for runs regularly, you will get faster and it will become more comfortable. If you stop running for a while, you start getting tired when you go for random, irregular runs. The body directs resources to where they are needed, and takes them away when they are not used. If you want to build up strength, you put your body under stress in a controlled fashion to build up your capacity for when you are in uncontrolled situations. Developing the strength and flexibility to maintain control when you are not in a planned environment. 

1930s Turnstile

 

Other People's Numbers

Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Good business ideas require the ability to control supply and demand. To create shape and form around an idea through barriers to entry. Demand is not good enough if supply is a free for all. It is easier to control things when you can reduce them to numbers. Which is why STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) typically make better business ideas. They focus on areas that are easier to box into products that can be paid for. A clear ask. A clear offer. Not everything can be boxed. Even good business ideas will be exposed to qualitative questions that cannot be reduced to numbers for comparison. You can force anything into a 1-5 ranking or a Yes/No binary. That is often useful just to force you to think about something, but then you have to avoid being seduced by the numbers. Falling in love with the illusion of control so much that you forget that numbers make better questions than answers. Especially when they are other people’s numbers, and you did not do the work yourself.

Not all Ones and Zeros

See then Nudge

Acceptance is difficult. I have always been a bit of a “try hard”. That was what we called people at school who were constantly doing something. The implication being that you are trying to impress the teachers. Like the idea of a “Teachers Pet” or “Brown Nosing”.

The world is structured towards encouraging activity, and the conspicuous things that we can see. We look for cause and effect, so that we can control our environment. The assumption being that we are the reason for things, and knowledge will allow us to act with dependable outcomes. By acting, we further our goals. Which seems logical, and Cartesian. We think, therefore we are. Think then do. Try.

Through Josh Waitzkin, and his book “The Art of Learning”, I was introduced to the idea of Wu Wei, which means action through inaction. You start by seeing things as they are, rather than living in our minds. Rather than living in how we want things to be. See then nudge. A less anxious way of engaging with the chaos.

Financial Calm

Financial calm does not require you to be loaded. It comes from a level of confidence that you can cope in three dimensions. 

1) With decisions that take you left or right. 

2) With the unexpected bumps of ups and downs. 

3) With the endurance to keep on keeping on. 

Financial calm can come with belief in your plan. Not a crystal ball that sees the future. Instead planned capacity for futures. When you know you are living within your means, then deep soaking calm builds your strength, flexibility, and control. In a way that radiates through how you move. 

Stress releasing from your muscles and joints. Living within your means allows you to expand the length and smoothness of your inhalation and exhalation. Identifying and building the skills and knowledge needed for a source of income. Overcoming the barriers and securing your container. 

Calm is not the size of the ins and outs. 

Calm is the space between the ins and outs.

Up-Down, Left-Right, Forward-Back

Finding Balance

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Balanced Scorecards are ways of managing performance. They are particularly challenging in areas that are hard to quantify and articulate. A lot of my work for money involved taking technical concepts, trying to wrap my head around them, then trying to make them easier for others to wrap their head around. Understanding is incredibly hard to quantify. Trust even more so. It takes years to build, and can be broken in an instant. Particularly if you are looking for reasons or data points to not trust someone. Everyone is holey. Everyone is flawed. A bigger flaw is looking for holes in other people. To look for reasons to distrust. The problem with KPIs is the list gets long fast. So if a task (maintain trust) is “worth 2%” of a year’s assessment, the quantifying or checklist becomes a spurious form of false confidence. Easier is to have a list of things you won’t do. Even better is to have an incredibly short list (three key things), and to trust people. Trusting doesn’t mean being a sucker. You can build buffers, checks and balances. But it does mean accepting that not everything can be controlled or quantified. It does mean building systems that aren’t designed to cut people off like gangrenous limbs.

In the Stillness

The Gambler’s Fallacy stems from our obsession with patterns. Our desire to attribute to the world cause and effect, in our attempt to control it. When something has no memory, history is irrelevant. People have memory. It colours our world and is the basis of our personal hallucination that is our interpretation of reality. Real Reality regularly has no memory. Whatever happened before has no bearing on what happens next. The Gambler will believe that there is more likelihood of a six because there hasn’t been a six for a while. The Fair Dice doesn’t care. The probability is the same. There is something empowering about not trying to make sense of everything. About not attributing cause and effect to everything. Of accepting that every decision is complicated and has advantages and disadvantages. Every decision has unintended consequences. The only thing that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present is Silence. That moment you pause to breathe.

50-50 and the Law of Large Numbers

At the Centre

My income comes primarily from my Engine. I spend very little time managing that Engine. My investment philosophy has become gradually more aligned with that of my Yoga teachers and Natural Bee Keeping Father-in-Law. When students love their yoga classes, they can get obsessed with the teacher. It’s not the teacher, it’s the yoga. In the same way my Father-in-Law sees his primary role as getting out of the way of the bees. It’s the bees doing the work. The key advantage I have with investing is I don’t manage other people’s money. This means I don’t have to do any of the fake work required by our activity obsession. I can let the management and staff at the companies do the work. I can get out of their way. It’s not about me. When a problem needs solving, our intuition is to do something more. I believe the real solution lies in the opposite direction. Accepting that problems will arise. That noise is learning. Building structures that can adapt, adjust, and accommodate. That can listen to change. That can rest, heal, rise, and shed in their own natural rhythms. Learning to hold space rather than fill it with our determination to be in control. Our determination to do something where we are the centre of the story.

Drawing Breath

You don’t learn much about whether a process works, when it is working. The most powerful creative forces are time and consistency. But for the long term to be long term, the process needs to be able to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Strength, flexibility, and control in the face of randomness, complexity, and ambiguity. Like gaps in music, real mastery lies in the ability to draw breath and gain perspective. To step back and gain a broader view of how everything is connected. To use disruption as a learning opportunity. 5Rhythms is a movement meditation developed by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. It takes you through Waves to release obstructions and inspire creativity. You move through flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. The key is movement, and being still is part of that. This too will pass.

5Rhythms

Developing Autonomy

The team at GMB Fitness talk of developing Physical Autonomy through working on strength, flexibility and control. Watching them move so gracefully makes it appear as if the laws of physics apply differently to them. I started Yoga 11 years ago, yet I still have aches and pains which constrain me. I declared Financial Independence 5 years ago, yet I still have costs and pressures which constrain me. The analogies between how we engage with the world physically and financially resonate strongly. Finances aren’t about what you do, they are about how you do it. They are about movement. I love the idea of more people moving through the world with autonomy, agency, and consent. Feeling empowered to make choices. Moving with mastery. It isn’t about having the Financial Freedom to opt-out. It is about releasing the way we engage with the world from the constraints of unnecessary niggles. Then engaging with the pulse, the beat, and the flow of meaning creation.

GMB Fitness - Strength, Flexibility, Control

Heads or Tails

If you toss a coin... and call heads... and it lands on heads... you are as 'correct' in your decision as the person who called tails. Your insight added absolutely no value whatsoever. We like to add stories after the fact to make sense of things. We like to think our decisions carry more weight than they do. It makes us feel more in control of the next thing that happens. History does have value, but less in terms of answers than in terms of more beautiful questions. How we want to think about things, rather than what is. The world is complex, ambiguous and uncertain. Our decisions nudge us along, and separating whether that was luck or control is beyond the understanding of the vast majority, if not all, of us. Life lives us as much as we live life. Through storms, droughts, diseases, falls, and victories. The best we can do is cling to each other. Hold each other. Care. Take the next step, together.

Cookie Cutter

Trade of ideas has a long history. The world's great centres of learning were typically cities on trading routes - Timbuktu, Babylon, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Beijing, London (List of largest cities throughout history). The lesson could then be carried home, and applied in very different ways.

Colonialism is not new. The world was populated by people venturing out. There was absolutely no way the people who reached the New World by foot could have regular contact with the people they left thousands of years before, and far away... until they were reconnected by sea. Colonies wouldn't have been reproductions. They would have been communities, that were influenced by and soaked in the local conditions.

Our ability to control requires tools: Shared language, shared text, shared religion, shared numbers took a long time to develop.

One of the changes with recent colonialism was that those on civilising missions believed they had discovered, and were sharing, answers. They didn't start with questions. It wasn't a conversation. 

Another flaw was an essentialism that gave some a superiority complex. A belief in the idea of a 'Master Race'. The 'divine right of kings' transferred from a sovereign, to a sovereign people. The Enlightenment emphasised the scientific method and started giving man incredible power over the surrounding world. Scientific Racism may be pseudo-science now, but it was just science to start with. Those who believed in Progress were also empowered by Darwin's theories in understanding evolution. This gave many missionary zeal to go forth, and bring light to those places that had not had the truth revealed.

Confidently Expanding

The Enlightenment, 'Progress' and Control

Darwin himself regretted and stopped using 'Survival of the Fittest', and in later editions of his work replaced the term with 'Natural Selection'. The key strength of evolution is not progress, but adaptability. Resilience. Mistakes and differences create an ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

We have a long history of learning from every part of the world we have ventured. Stuffing up. Reflecting. Trying again. A cookie cutter method of taking something that works, and imposing it on the world was not progress. It was a great way to decrease our resilience. Decolonising is equivalent to improving our conversational skills. Decolonising is a way of allowing ourselves to continue learning. To continue adapting. To continue coping.