Second Breaks

Lou Blaser (00:00:00) - You're listening to Second Breaks, the show where we talk about feeling better, doing better and being better in midlife and beyond. I'm Lou Blaser. Hello. Hello. My listener friend on the podcast is technically on a break. We are in between seasons, but I wanted to pop in quickly on the feed to share one segment of my 2022 reflections with you. So I do a pretty involved reflection process. I regularly sit down in December for some year end reflection and New Year planning as probably you do as well. And I go through a series of questions that helped me review my year as completely and objectively as possible. Like I said, it's a pretty involved process that I've developed at this point because I've noticed that it was very easy for me to sort of like let the whatever prevailing sentiment or emotion or frame of mind that I have in December to sort of influence my year end review. So I end up forgetting or minimizing all that has happened earlier in the year. So what I did was I created a set of questions 20 all in all that guide me so that I can do a better job reflecting on the entirety of my year.

Lou Blaser (00:01:38) - Now, one of those 20 questions asks me to reflect on the lessons that I've learned during the year. I have to say, of all the 20 questions, that is probably the most important one. If I were to like sort of prioritize that, if I only have time for one, that is probably the question that I will definitely make time to answer. And I would say that if you also don't do anything else but answer that question what have I learned this past year? I think you'll do yourself a huge favor. Wisdom, as we all know, does not come automatically with age. It is the act of sitting down and reflecting on our experiences that creates the wisdom. So what did all your experiences in 2022 mean for you? What knowledge have you gained? What have you learned about yourself? Which is like a very interesting question to ask, if I may say so. If there were things that you felt were a failure or miss, what did you learn from going through all that and from all the things that went well? What did you gain? What would you take away from those experiences? So in this episode, I'm going to share my own reflections, the five lessons that I learned in 2022 that I will take with me going forward.

Lou Blaser (00:02:59) - My hope in sharing these with you is that you'll find something here that might apply to you as well. We can learn from other people's experiences after all. At the very least, I hope that this bonus episode will give you some ideas about what you might want to think about or what you might want to reflect upon as you think about 2022. Before I start, let me just put this in context. You're going to find, as I did, that these are not like breaking news or new revelations. It's not like I've uncovered some new lesson that I had never, ever heard of or did not know beforehand. Rather, my experiences in 2022 reminded me of them and led me to relearn these lessons. Okay, so here we go. Here are five lessons from 2022. Number one Starting and intention in the morning sets your day on the right course. So stating an intention before any activity or interaction is one of the most powerful habits that I've cultivated this year. It's like I'm calling all my internal resources to channel all my energy towards a stated intention.

Lou Blaser (00:04:34) - It's like an instruction to all my internal systems to work together towards that one mission. It may not proceed perfectly, but by setting the intention ahead of time, I'm being intentional. Hello. And and giving myself the advantage. And the thing about this daily intention habit that I started in 2022 is that it's specific to whatever is going on in that day. Whatever event or interaction or task or errand that I have planned for that day. So I set my intention based on those things so that it's practical and relevant to my day to whatever's going on. Setting an intention in the morning has made such a difference in the quality of my day. I find that I've become more intentional about how I proceed and engage in my activities. And to be honest, I kind of like myself better at the end of the day because I feel like I've done my best and showed up with my very best intention. Now, if you have never set an intention before, the easiest way to do this is to think about how the person you want to be would act or behave.

Lou Blaser (00:05:46) - That's how I do my. Basically, I say, okay, the person I want to be is or behaves this way. So try it. It works wonders, I think. Okay. Lesson number two. What feels impossibly difficult in the beginning will get easier over time.

Lou Blaser (00:06:18) - So, about three months ago, I started doing these leg exercises. That may be easy and simple for you, for others, but felt completely impossible for me to complete. Basically, you lay on your back and you lift your legs up in the air, and then you do like these combination of wide scissor motions with your legs. So it's a combination of wide and pulsing sort of scissors motion. Let me tell you, the first time I tried them, I could barely do five. I was so sad. And I'm looking at the other people who were doing this with so much ease and I could understand why in the world I it was just so hard for me. Well, I do know why they were hard for me.

Lou Blaser (00:07:07) - It's because I've never done them before. And the muscle group that makes the scissor movements, they've not been used for a long time. And so it was hard. But I stuck with them and I kept doing them most of the time, laughed at myself because I couldn't I could barely do them. But guess what? So at first time I did that was back in July and end of July this morning, as I record this episode January 1st, as I'm recording this, I did 60 of them, 60. I surprised myself sometimes. So this seemingly impossible action became doable and got easier and easier over time. But it's because I kept doing them. I kept at them daily. In the morning. I may have skipped a day or two, but for the most part I did them every morning. And so this is a good reminder for me that almost everything in life gets easier over time. With practice and reps, it's all about the reps. And so now this legs up in the air doing like wide scissor motions.

Lou Blaser (00:08:18) - This is the picture that I am going to think about every single time that I am attempting to do something that may or may not be exercise-related, but anything really that is hard and seemingly impossible to do. I will think of this image and I will remind myself that what may be like seemingly impossible in the beginning, we'll get easier over time. Hey. Hey. We're going to get back to the show just now. I just want to mention quickly that this podcast is made possible by midlife cues. Now, Midlife Cues is a weekly digital newsletter for midlife ERs or anybody who self-identifies as a midlife or really. And it's about intentional living and being our best in the second half of our lives. I invite you to give it a try. Head on over to midlife cuz that's midlife. See you is one word.com to sign up. Okie dokie. All right. Let's get back to the show. Okay. Lesson number three. You may not know the end result, but you can definitely help put things in motion.

Lou Blaser (00:09:36) - So for this one, I'm not going to go into details because it's a bit personal in nature. Let's just say that back in June of 2022, I got brave and put in motion something for which the end result was unclear for me. I didn't know what will come out of it. I mean, you know, obviously, I have a wish of what might happen, but in reality, when I put this thing in motion, I didn't know what will come out of it. I didn't know how it might pan out or if anything will come out of it even. But I decided I mean, hey, you know, there is no harm in trying. There's no harm in putting things out there. As it turned out, it was a massive success. As these things go, my quote unquote, putting it out there started a chain reaction, basically. And what came out of it was more than I could have ever imagined and wished for. And I'm so grateful for the turn of events. But none of those things would have happened if I didn't get brave enough to put things in motion to begin with.

Lou Blaser (00:10:47) - If I let the fear of uncertainty stop me from even trying. Sometimes we get stymied to take action because we can't see a clear path forward. We're not sure if it will pan out or if we'll be happy with the final results. And this is especially true when we need something else to happen that is kind of beyond our control. So we stall or delay action until we can be a little bit more certain, until we can close to guarantee a successful outcome. My experience this year reminded me that there are times when it's going to be impossible to tell what might happen until we actually put things in motion, we can guess what the likely outcome might be. But that's really all that we're doing. We're guessing we have to like cause the effect, as they say, by taking steps forward, even if things are unclear. And it takes courage to do that sometimes, but at least that taking steps forward, that's totally within our control. So let's help ourselves by putting things in motion, put it out there, see what happens.

Lou Blaser (00:12:18) - Lesson number four. Always start with what you want. Okay. This is such a silly incident that happened to me in a bar in New York City last year. I was having a drink with an old friend in the lobby bar of the hotel where he was staying at. And after we had received our drinks and we had already started drinking, he remembered that he had a couple of drink coupons that we can use. So he gave it to me and I said to him, I wasn't sure if we can still use them because we didn't tell the server that when we gave our order that we intended to use coupons. So I didn't know if it was going to be honored anymore. He looked at me with like this, like his eyebrows or like way up in the ceiling. Like, what in the world are you talking about, Lou? And then he said, in all seriousness, he goes, Lou, always start with what you want. And I know this is such a silly incident and you're probably thinking, what is the big deal with asking about coupons, Right, using drink coupons.

Lou Blaser (00:13:27) - The funny thing is that we or I should say I, I do this in other areas of my life as well. I don't ask for what I want because of anticipated or presumed objections. But by doing that, I'm basically ensuring that I don't get what I want, which sounds really ridiculous if you think about it. And so the lesson for me is to always start with what you want, even if you think that the other party is going to object or will reject it or whatever, ask for it anyway, see what's possible. You can always adjust accordingly. And lesson number five. You can't just hope. You have to have a strategy and an approach. No matter how much you want things to happen, no matter how important your goal is to you, if you do not know how you're going to get there, it's going to be a directionless uphill climb. You must know the route that you're going to take, at least, you know, to try, you know, the route that you're going to try first.

Lou Blaser (00:14:46) - You can adjust along the way, but you have to have at least the basics of a plan as you head out the door. In the beginning of 2022, I set a business goal that I really, really wanted to achieve. But the thing was, I didn't identify a strategy that I will focus on, let alone a process to follow. As a result, it was impossible to figure out what was working or not or what to adjust. It felt like I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Now, towards the end of the summer, I stumbled upon a strategy completely by accident. I wasn't even looking for one and doing this strategy. Finding the strategy made all the difference in the world. As soon as I started following a process, I saw results. But most importantly, now that I was following a process, I could figure out what to fix or what to adjust. I was no longer stumbling in the dark. As they say, hope is not a strategy. We cannot just set a goal and then not identify at least an initial strategy or an initial approach for how we're going to achieve the goal.

Lou Blaser (00:16:02) - So even if, you know, we don't know much, at least we have to at least identify, okay, I'm going to try approach A and then see what happens and then adjust as I get more data. All right. That completes the five lessons that I'm taking away from 2022. If you haven't done this exercise yet, I encourage you to take a pause right now before you get too busy with 2023 and you forget totally what happened last year. Ask yourself, what lessons have I learned in 2022? Or a slight variation. Today's question could be What have I learned about myself last year? I guarantee you, you will do yourself a massive favor by articulating the lessons that you've gained from your own experiences. That's all I have for you today. The podcast is still on a break and we'll return in February. But you know, you may hear me from time to time or beforehand with perhaps another bonus episode. I don't know. We'll see. But for sure, we're returning in February for the 2023 season.

Lou Blaser (00:17:16) - Until then, like I always say, keep on making your dent, my friend. Cool beans.