Tag: Adults

People come to a gym regularly and they come in numbers, which makes it a public space. Public spaces run on a few basic courtesies, and here those courtesies also keep everybody safe.

Several things, then, are best not done.

Do not interfere with equipment in use

Somebody on a machine has the machine. Should you need it, the polite move is to ask whether you may work in between their sets.

Do not use your phone on the floor

Phones and gym floors go badly together. Take emergencies only, and when one comes, step outside, deal with it there, and return to your training afterwards.

Do not swing the weights

Control them through the whole movement. Swinging is how people injure themselves, and dropping heavy plates is how floors get ruined.

Keep a spotter close enough to be useful.

Do not improvise on the machines

The leg press is not for crunches, and equipment generally is not for experimenting with.

Have somebody show you, at least while you are starting out, and carry on alone once you can do it comfortably.

Do not raise your voice

Shouting and loud conversation both carry. Other people are training all around you, and the room belongs to them as much as to you.

Do not sing or whistle

It irritates people, and in a quiet room the sound travels a great deal further than the singer imagines.

At her dining table one evening, a young woman sat worrying. Taxes were owed. The house needed work. And the following day the whole family would be arriving.

Gratitude was not what she was feeling.

The homework

Glancing to one side, she saw her small daughter bent over a notebook, writing furiously.

The class had been set an unusual paragraph to write, the girl explained, on the subject of negative thanksgiving. They were to list things they were grateful for, but only the ones that feel unpleasant at first and turn out well in the end.

Curious now, the mother leaned across and read what her daughter had put down.

Grateful for final examinations, on the grounds that they mean school is nearly finished. Grateful for medicine that tastes horrible, on the grounds that it works. Grateful for being woken by an alarm clock, on the grounds that being woken means being alive.

The same list, read again

And the mother realised that her own evening would take the same treatment.

So she went back through it.

Taxes were owed, which meant there was employment to owe them from. The house needed work, which meant the house was hers. A family had to be fed, which meant there was a family to sit down with.

The habit underneath

Complaining about the bad things comes naturally to most of us. Turning them over to see what is printed on the other side does not.

Which makes one question worth putting to your own day. Inside your negatives, where is the positive?

Find the better half of today, and let today be a good one.

Anybody who wants a life of better quality has one important job in front of them, which is to throw out as much waste as they can find. The purpose of the clearing is space, and the space is for whatever genuinely matters and genuinely adds value.

Opening the bags

It starts with a warrior taking charge of where their own life is heading. Somewhere on that road a teacher or a mentor will encourage them to unfasten the bags and inspect what is being carried.

What follows is a sequence of realisations, arriving one after another.

That a great deal of this stopped being necessary some time ago.

That hauling it about for no reason has been slowing us down.

That we have been complicating our own lives and exhausting ourselves in the process.

That further along the road a good deal would have been lost, if nobody had looked inside the bags when they did.

And that without the teacher, the bags would never have been opened at all. Which produces the uncomfortable question: why was the teacher not listened to sooner?

The questions to sit with

How long has it been since you last looked inside? How long since anything unnecessary was taken out? And what is the argument for not doing it this minute?

Unfasten what you are carrying and take out a single item that has outlived its use. One is enough to begin with.

Suppose that every morning we were handed only the things we had given thanks for. On that basis, the unwanted can go.

Why it usually takes a shock

Illness will teach it. So will a relationship coming apart. Suddenly the business of putting things in order of importance makes complete sense.

An enormous share of our limited and valuable hours goes to tasks that do not matter. The encouraging part is that where your attention is spent remains yours to decide.

Wake up now, and spend it on the essentials only.

A great many people dread the contest. Every performance becomes one, and so does every audition, and so does every interview, and the dread is of losing.

In that frame the panel or the audience turns into the opposition, an enemy to be beaten. The fear grows until it seems to occupy everything.

Four fights at once

Examine the feeling closely and several separate struggles are going on together.

One is with the audience, over whether their attention stays with you. One is with the panel, over whether they continue to see a serious contender in front of them. One is with the other candidate. And one is with yourself, over whether enough belief survives to carry on competing at all.

It is a state of mind

What this dread amounts to is a state of mind, a small and trifling habit of thought picked up somewhere along the way.

Being a state of mind, it can be altered. That is the entire reason for naming it plainly.

It was never really a battle

Then comes the observation that dismantles the first one.

Battles are not what most presentations are, nor most performances, nor most auditions, nor even most interviews. None of it is a competitive sport. The people listening are not competing against you, they are not your enemy, and no fight with them is under way.

What they actually want

An audience is hoping to be entertained.

A room full of business people is hoping, at bottom, to escape with the afternoon intact. Enjoy themselves and they are delighted.

As for the panel at an audition, they have a role that needs filling. They would very much like it to be you.

Women behind the wheel have never been so numerous. Across a twenty year stretch the figure doubled, and it has gone on climbing since.

But the two sexes tend to come unstuck in opposite directions. Over-confidence is what trips up a great many men. A shortage of assurance at the wheel is what troubles a great many women. What follows is aimed at making that seat a more comfortable place to sit.

Always be learning

Five years of driving, or ten, or twenty, convinces a lot of people that there is nothing further to know.

That belief is mistaken, and it is dangerous. An attitude of that kind is precisely what raises a driver’s chances of an accident.

Learn from professionals instead. Additional training is worth a great deal, and for a nervous driver it is the single most effective thing there is.

Go by the book

Read the manual, which is to say, do what most men never do.

Get to know every control until the car holds no surprises. Fog lamps and rear screen heaters exist for bad conditions, and bad conditions are exactly when you will not be able to find a switch you have never once looked for.

Get the position right

Seating position matters as much as any of this, and it is the detail most often got wrong.

Drivers who are short frequently end up almost against the wheel, because that is what it takes to reach the pedals properly. It feels like a solution. In practice it makes safe steering harder, not easier.

Going somewhere has stopped being a matter of seeing the sights. Nor is language the only thing pulling learners abroad any more.

What travellers now sign up for is broader and odder than that. Ballroom dancing. Filmmaking. The growing of grapes. In some cases, the making of hats.

Learn a language

Brief courses in everyday conversation are easy to find in the countries where the language actually lives.

And the course itself is not really the attraction. The attraction is that everything happening around you while you study is reinforcing what you are studying.

Learn modern art

Theatre, ballet, modern art, jazz. Every summer the great art cities fill up with people who have travelled in for the short courses that studios across the city put on.

Most of those summer courses are built on a two or three hour model, which hands the rest of the day back to you.

Interesting short courses

The variety catches people out. Shoe design, taught from the beginning. Tea, taught as a subject. Art history, taught over a summer.

Expertise before arrival is required by none of them.

Worth considering before you book

Anyone planning a trip abroad should at least weigh up the idea of learning while they are there. Whatever your interests happen to be, something exists.

There is also a reason this works better than it sounds on paper. A journey teaches innumerable things that no book ever really gets to.

However organised a person believes themselves to be, a reminder about the productive handling of time does nobody any harm. Here are several habits that work against success and are worth dropping.

Too much work

This first one hides well, because from outside it looks like a virtue.

People who are successful and content generally do work hard. They are also clear-eyed about where their own ceiling is. Piling up commitments you volunteered for is not evidence of good time management, whatever impression it creates.

Understand where your limit sits. Nobody is without one.

Technology distractions

The degree of attachment people now have to their devices is close to embarrassing.

Hours lost to social feeds are not how productive people spend an afternoon, and nor do they leave a phone ringing at full volume beside them while they work. Handle the technology sensibly, and apply a little discipline to yourself.

Not having a plan

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. The saying has been worn thin by repetition and it irritates people, which has no bearing on whether it is correct.

What a plan saves you from is the aimless what-shall-I-do-now state that swallows the opening hour of a working day.

Nor does it need to be elaborate. A short list of the things to be done covers it entirely.

Not being focused

Priorities that keep rearranging themselves are a poor habit to carry.

The focused person can tell you, for today, what the first job is, what the second is and what the third is. Holding that focus is how order gets put in the place where the chaos used to be.

Domestic chores are only part of what a woman in employment has to carry, and the rest of it arrives fresh every morning as a new set of demands.

Which makes the handling of time not optional but essential. Give the day a structure, put honest effort behind it, and very few of those demands remain unsolvable.

Become an early riser

Get up ahead of the house, and put the thoughts of the office aside for a few minutes.

Begin instead by ordering the work according to what matters most. Doing that is what buys you the clear head to deal with the chores actually in front of you.

Manage in order to save time

Clearing the domestic work in the early part of the morning is the gentlest possible way into a day, and it pays out in the evening. Come home from work and the hours belong to your family, or to you.

Where the workload is genuinely more than one person can finish, bring in help. And cook things that are quick to prepare without losing their nutrition, so that the evening is not swallowed by the kitchen.

Keep a memorandum for weekend chores

Household shopping belongs to the weekend. Scattered across the working week, it simply lengthens the list on days that are already full.

Write out, in advance, everything the weekend has to absorb. Through the week, as items occur to you, note them down and put each one in its place.

The practice earns its keep twice over. Nothing gets forgotten, and what does get done is done in a sensible sequence. Reminders on a phone will carry the same load if you prefer to let the device remember.

Use the minutes that are already free

Some chores run themselves once started. When that happens, do not stand and supervise them absent-mindedly. Fill the gap with another job.

Water heating on the stove is time enough to fold clothes, or to put a lunch together. It sounds like very little. Counted across a year, the practice is anything but.

A start-up enterprise formed in the expectation, and on the plan, that money will come out of it at the other end is what the term business venture describes.

Small business is the label most people reach for instead, and reasonably so, since these things normally begin with one idea and a modest amount of capital behind it. Backing usually comes from one investor or several, on the hope that profit follows.

It begins with something missing

Ventures are generally born out of a gap. Something the current market does not supply.

That gap may take the shape of a service, or of a product that customers keep asking about, or of something built to serve one particular purpose.

Identify the gap and the thing can begin. What it then needs is a shrewd investor or a small business person with two assets: the resources to develop the new commodity, and the time to take it out to the open market.

Who puts the money in

Initial funding almost always traces back to one investor, and that investor is frequently the owner of the small business, or whoever thought of the idea to begin with.

Later, once something exists to look at, other investors may come in. They bring support and venture capital, which pays for further development and for making the venture better known. Their intention is a larger profit, divided among all of them.

The plan that should come first

Writing a formal business plan at the outset is the recommended practice, and its job is to set out on paper what the business is for and where it intends to go.

A plan that works will also carry a measurable method for finding additional capital and for lifting profitability.

It carries one further thing that hopeful founders tend to leave out. A way to get out, if the business fails.

Some rules of life are never written down anywhere, and they will carry you past almost any obstacle you meet. It makes little difference where the obstacle sits. It may block a career, a relationship, a social life or a private one.

Apply these principles and the thing in the way stops being the end of the road.

Treat every obstacle as a challenge

Reclassify the thing. Call it a challenge rather than a problem, and it becomes far easier to get past.

The difference lies in what you expect of it. An obstacle understood as a threat will be avoided. An obstacle understood as a contest is something you intend to win.

Go to a specific counsellor

Whatever has gone wrong, in a relationship or at work, somebody handles that exact thing for a living. They can be approached.

A career blocked calls for a career counsellor. What you gain is an expert opinion formed outside your own head, and objectivity of that kind is frequently what produces the solution.

Change your approach and your way of thinking

Sometimes nothing is wrong with the obstacle at all. The flaw is in the approach being taken to it.

Examine the situation properly, and ask whether anything in your own conduct or your own actions could be done differently to useful effect.

That is frequently the whole of the matter. The obstacle never moved. The approach did.