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25.01.2022 A blog I wrote on handling pressure and how the ground beneath your feet can stabilise your nerves.

25.01.2022 RH Podcast #18 - Dr Paris Williams. This week we have a discussion with Dr Paris Williams. We discuss the transition that took Paris from World Champion hang gliding athlete, to the depths of an intense personal inner transformation and awakening that led him on a journey of exploration of the human condition. Paris attained degrees in ecology and psychology, specializing in humanistic, existential, transpersonal, somatic and ecological approaches to understanding human natur...e and healing, becoming a registered Clinical Psychologist and Hakomi Teacher. His exploration led him to conduct research on extreme states, trauma recovery and deep personal transformation, as a result he published the widely acclaimed book, Rethinking Madness. The podcast theme revolves around human metamorphosis, interwoven with a message of hope for those people who suffer and struggle with self definition and purpose. This is one for both the athletic and general community. It speaks to power of coming to understand the deeper existential truths of the self that impact our enjoyment of the outside world, our place in it, and our impacts on it. Many of us get stuck in our struggles or find ourselves falling down in life, however what we can fail to realise is that the fall is often a stage in a metamorphosis. The first stage in an important process of transmutation that can move us directly into our own power. Paris uses a metaphor of the chrysalis in the stage of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the chrysalis stage, the bulk of the caterpillar’s pudgy mass is recycled into the adult features that are meshing together inside the tough shell of the chrysalis. The interior is, at this stage, mostly a nutrient soup, feeding the embryonic imaginal discs as they complete their delayed development into butterfly. In our lives we can go through a similar experience of inner transformation that will first expose us to our own darkness. It's very easy to get stuck in these first intense stages as we hold on for dear life, when often what is required is a letting go. In this sense depression and anxiety can be seen as part of that chrysalis, two of the drivers that can alert us that something is not right. When we are in the depths of despair, it is often hard to see it as movement of hope and opportunity. This podcast shines a light onto the darker areas of the process that illuminates a path of hope, not just for the benefit of humanity, but also for the planet we live on and the impacts we have on it when we are not fully awake in life. Life is for living and living is for life! Thank you Paris. Link is the comments section

24.01.2022 A PLAN TO FAIL If you want to fail, simply set a structure that is too rigid. Set it out too far into the future and life will quickly show you how out of sync ...with reality your plan is. Life is dynamic. It does not follow any given principle and who would want it to! Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans! How hard we resist and try to argue with life’s dynamic nature, we want it to be static and in control and it is simply not interested. Yet in sport and in every other genre where performance of some sort is required, we invariably try to control the uncontrollable and contain the uncontainable. Now there’s the crux of it, not only is life uncontrollable, it is totally uncontainable. In sport we are obsessed with planning, fail to plan and you plan to fail, that is the party line. However if we try to contain the uncontainable all we do is lose the power of that uncontainable energy, we narrow it down to its lowest common denominator. You can write as many longitudinal plans as you like, but the further out they reach, the further into fantasy and illusion they delve. Use any model you like, sport, business, relationship, the arts, education the only gold you have access to is the presence you are able to bring to it. A relationship without presence is a cardboard cutout of a relationship, if there’s no relating, there’s no relationship. Two stay isolated and alone and simply occupy a dysfunctional space. The definition of a true relationship hints at a profound truth, the two become one. Synced and aligned through the truth of the present moment, so the word relationship means two into one. This applies to all areas of life. You are in relationship to everything and nothing at the same time, when you are completely present with a process or a person the duality dissolves and the relationship becomes one. The evolution and development in any modality whatsoever has only one route of efficacy, only one path that is straight and true, the level of our presence in it. Using the covid 19 situation as an example, the only thing that has been effective in its management has been the collective decisions we have made in the moment in response to it. This is the definition of successful management, not projection, fear, doubt and judgment. We distanced ourselves physically but came together at the same time, the many became the one. If Covid taught us anything, it is how unseparated we actually are. We learn from the lessons that are provided to us in the moment they occur. In many modalities though we are obsessed with finding some external way of saving ourselves. Coaches and athletes are obsessed with plans and short cuts, if I just follow this plan and this structure I’ll be fine. No you won’t! If you are not present with it you will be bound to repeat your mistakes again and again, this is the lesson that our plans teach us. From a coaching perspective in any performance orientated endeavour, if you try to funnel people down a narrow corridor, a few people will get through and the rest will get stuck! What can you do? Let them be who they are, be who you are, make adjustments in the moment. Encourage others to stop focusing on the plans, the structures, the outcomes, the projections, the post analysis and the consequential thoughts and beliefs that get us trapped in them and enslave us to the model, there is no model. If you are working on a model, you are living in the past. The model is the past, best practise based on that model is an oxymoron. Best practise can only occur here and now. Success cuts a path through the present moment like a ship cuts a path through water, the second the ship has moved through, the water closes back up behind it. There is no way to revisit that disturbed water other than in our minds and in our thoughts about it. The past is as real as our thoughts make it. You can stay there and dream it if you want to but it is little more than a dream state, you need to come back here if you want effective development and evolution. Evolution has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with now. Nothing ever evolved in the past or in the future. Our obsession with charting, graphing and projecting is out of kilter, the chart and the graph simply give us the feedback to bring a sharper sense of awareness to the process. Anything else is at best stalling progress or at worst slamming the process into reverse. We have to accept that the path of progress is uncontainable, just stop trying to contain it or looking for useless ways to try to short cut it, they don’t exist. Accept what is hard in the moment and it’s no longer hard, it just is. Acceptance is the path of least resistance, there is only one question worth asking, what do I do NOW? Now is the only truth you’ve got. Start using it. Gilesy.

22.01.2022 Roaring Heads Podcast #20 with The Waterman Mick Di Betta This week we are talking to waterman Mick Di Betta, the inaugural World Champion Molokai to Oahu prone Paddleboard Winner. Mick has been a top 10 fixture in that event for nearly 21 years, which is an amazing feat in of itself. Mick is also a coach who has coached many champions to the world championships, working both online and physically with his group "Just Paddling". Many of the world's top 10 paddlers follow Mick...s programs, and his knowledge of the ocean and the Molokai strait is second to none. Mick is also a level 3 surf coach so has the perspective of both the athlete and the coach. The straight is not referred to as the "channel of bones" for nothing, it has a fierce reputation as one of the world's most dangerous pieces of ocean. So we thought Mick would make for a great podcast on the importance of staying calm and centered in an ever changing environment like this, and to speak of the reality of what mental strength means when not just facing performance pressures, but also instinctual survival pressures. If you are interested in what it means to balance performance, headspace and survival all at once spoken by the true salt of the sea, this one will hit the spot! Link in the comments section

22.01.2022 CONTINUITY Nothing continues. Athletes often make the critical mistake of wanting to have things stay stable and familiar, you know the old saying - train, eat..., sleep, repeat. The problem is development is dependant on change, challenge is the stressor that causes the adaptions in an athlete that helps them to directly improve. If you are resistant to change, you are resistant to development and unconsciously resistant to success. This is a conditioning in us all, not just athletes and it’s wrapped up in our resistance to the transient nature of our physical lives, we are afraid of death. We would do almost anything to make ourselves immortal. Hence we often chase the success to leave a mark of immortality. Mans quest for immortality hints at something deeper within himself that already exists that is in of itself immortal, we already have this inbuilt intuition, this is important for athletes because it can remove our resistance to transience and change. We can find only one thing that does not and cannot change, and it’s not a thing. What is it? Awareness! If you want a changeless state to underpin everything that is happening and changing, you already have it, you already are it, we just overlook it. That would be awareness, our natural state which of course by itself is a stateless state. It just is, and because it just is, we overlook it. We ignore what is right under our own noses because it is so close, so intimate, we explore everything outwardly and find nothing. In the finding of nothing we desperately want everything to stay the same. Freeze frame me now so I can explore my talent, you are not exploring it in that philosophy, you are losing it. Immortality is not continuity because nothing continues, everything arises and dissolves. Hang in there athletes, I am getting to the point. There is only one constant law of physical life and that law is change! Stop looking for continuity, it’s destroying your potential. If I just keep repeating this session I will get better, if I just keep repeating this internal mantra my mind will get stronger and stable, no it won’t, no it don’t, and that’s not what you need. The desire for continuity is resistance to what is taking place now, especially if I don’t like it and go into judgment instead of staying present with it. An athletes life is a constantly changing canvass of stress, recovery, adaption, challenge and setbacks. We want the adaption but we certainly don’t want the setbacks, but setbacks are part of the moving canvass. The desire for the continuity in the adaption sets up the resistance to the setbacks, we need to move back so we can see the whole picture, not just the parts that we want, that requires a level of impartial awareness. The parts that we resist are as much responsible for the success as the adaption is, do you know why? Because the setbacks are also adaption in process. I’m not saying for one second that you have to like them, what I am saying is that you have to work with them, get into flow with them, accept them and move with them, stop trying to halt your adaption at comfortable and stable. An athletes physical life is not stable nor comfortable, what is stable is the stateless state of awareness that you bring to your process, in other words bring yourself to your process. Don’t just bring your conditioned thinking and belief system that has you hypnotised by a continuity of a one sided accepted mind based adaption that does not exist. The sooner you realise that all matter has antimatter the sooner you will accept that there is always an opposite. Light is always tempered by darkness, how could you know light without it? There is only one source of constant light that shines into this ever changing world that is unchanging and that is you! Bring that to your process and you will know the true power of the only continuity you’ve got. Gilesy

19.01.2022 OVERREACHING Many years of coaching and deep self-exploration in myself have unlocked a lot of realisations about the athletic journey, and the smoke screens we use to bullshit ourselves into a false sense of security. Our lack of honesty with ourselves can divorce us from the potential inside of us, that goes far beyond the capacity of the mind to understand....Continue reading

16.01.2022 BE-CAUSE You are the beauty in which the music plays. The cause of the beauty which is heard. You are the beauty in which the sunset is seen....Continue reading

09.01.2022 THE GOLD STANDARD We all talk about the gold standard, but what is it? Let’s explore what it is isn’t. Sometimes the truth requires a removal of all that is no...t true to reach the truth. What then does mediocrity look like? Mediocrity means we settle for the middle ground, the comfortable ground. Our gold standard may also be tainted by our own bias on what the gold standard means to us, or what society has told us it should look like. We may have a gold standard training environment and a mediocre psychological support system, or even a toxic one. Better the devil you know, right? Most of our coaching courses fail to address the psychological, interpersonal skills related to honest and open communication. In fact society in general spends most of it’s time hiding behind a mask built to protect the fragile heart inside, we’d rather project an exterior of strength and toughness. We can’t even be honest and communicative with ourselves let alone others, and that makes the territory tricky, hence why we tend to leave it out, but when we leave this aspect out of a human endeavour we are leaving the protein and the vegetables off the dinner plate to eat only the bread. It’s a pretty bland representation of the truth. But we can’t know what we don’t know. There’s also a difference between knowing and understanding. I can know something without the experience of it, but it will never be as fully understood as if I can get inside it and understand it. So we have to ask ourselves a question in regard to athlete communication, is this fertile ground for evolution and development, or is it the safe ground? Am I wearing my mask or am I being transparent? Am I simply doing it the way it’s always been done because that was what I was taught? If I am going to do something different as a coach or an athlete, I have to do something that hasn’t been done before and what is that? What could that look like? What could I do that is different to what others have done? I could be fully me, I could trust myself to bring my own uniqueness and see what happens. If you do that, especially as a coach, you hand over power to the athlete to also be themselves and bring this uniqueness, and to vastly enhance open communication. Even the unspoken can be a form of communication if the channel is open. The athletes may not know it but they will most certainly feel it in you. They’ll see your self trust and as a consequence they will trust you. Being seen for what you are is not a weakness, it’s the greatest of strengths. Wearing the mask is the weakness. It doesn’t matter what they think of you, they may think you are eccentric or different but never the less, you will have their trust and their confidence. For an athlete their race day will be as real as it gets, there will be no putting on a mask here, they will be seen to thrive or fail, they must find a way to survive both. If the coach really wants the athlete to thrive, they must bring what is real to the table, what is authentic. Although we don’t admit it to each other we know when we are not being authentic, we also know most of the time when the person we are communicating with is not being authentic, or is wearing the mask. When there are two masks in play bullshit is the only winner. You can spend your whole life talking and never say a thing and never hear a thing. How many conversations have you had when you knew the person you were talking to wasn’t really listening? Probably busy thinking about what they are going to say next. Listening is a skill, speaking is a skill! Communication is a skill that requires the one who is speaking to speak from their truth, and the one who is listening to listen from stillness. The listener creates the space and the speaker transfers their truth. In that process magic happens, transformation can occur, understanding can arise and development can thrive. Houses built on sand slide into the sea. Gilesy.

08.01.2022 X-FACTOR If you really want to find the x-factor of the athlete in you, there’s only one rule to apply. Refuse to impersonate. ... We are conditioned to impersonate others, not just in sport but in all areas of life. We are taught to model on our hero’s, heroine’s and peers. However when someone stands out from the crowd in terms of realising their talents and potential, it is certainly not due to the conditioning or habit of modelling or following the behaviours of others. They stand out because they strayed out off that projection and wandered into an introspection that allowed them to access something that no one else has, the deeper personal intuition that’s says no or go. We could call that intuition self trust! Self trust is most often found in self exploration. In sport we tend to follow best practise, these are the qualities of said modelled athletes, these are the parameters we need to chase, here is the protocol, here is a nice graphed progression model and here are the projected outcomes, let’s get after it. Let’s get after what? Someone else’s past? The mobs most travelled path? Your best work as both athlete and human is carried on the wind of your own unique talent, and we all have access to it. If we truly look at the greats we can see the proof, all great athletes and performers have the x-factor and that factor is multiplied by the power of the present moment and divided by the awareness of intuition, drive, heart, guts and pure will. From the outside those athletes can look ruthless, because true presence has no flavour, no judgments, no refusals, no send backs, everything is fodder for advancement. It’s about coming back to your natural state of presence and awareness and realising that you have been disconnected to it through mind based projection and models that you tried to apply to your own existence, and you never can because you are all you’ve got. It’s your life, only you can live it. If there is a refusal to it, it is the refusal to speak or think against the self, that requires a deep level of self trust, you don’t earn self trust by modelling or comparing yourself to someone else. You won’t find your x-factor out there, it can only be found in here. If I sit an athlete down and ask them, I want you to tell me honestly what you believe you are missing as an athlete, the answer for the most part looks similar for the majority of people, here’s an example- I need to get stronger, I need to get faster, I need to do more core, more gym, more kms, I need a more detailed plan. Rarely if ever will you hear the words, I need to explore my own depths a little deeper and work out how I can find self trust. I need to overcome my conditioning and my limited thinking and beliefs. People don’t really have belief or limited thinking, belief has them. Here’s something else, if you think you’ll find self trust by only addressing the physical components you are way off base, even if you vastly improve, you will still have the limitation of the limited self on board. A projected self is a limited self. No matter what happens you must first remove the words and projected reasons that form the belief I can’t. If that thought was formed, it can also be broken. To break it you have to travel through the portal of challenge, failure and discomfort, into a level of presence that allows you to access the deeper drivers I mentioned earlier, being heart, will, guts and the intuitive drive. Thought and belief are like an autopilot, they keep plotting the same damn route over and over again. They keep taking off and landing in the same places, if nothing else it is tedious. If you want something authentic and different you must break the chains of your own belief system that keeps you stuck in projection, which basically means stuck in your head. You need to come out of the story of me compared to him or her and own your own journey. If you make it, great, if you fall short, great, you’ve given it your best shot and there are no regrets. Regret is farmed and harvested on the back of your projections, the deeper side of you that knows you didn’t travel your own instinctive path. Regret is a lack of trust! It keeps you seperate from your potential because it keeps you away from your own deeper truth. Guilt, shame and judgment are just some of the tools projection uses to keep you away from yourself and in line with the status quo you were taught to adhere to. Yes that’s right, the autopilot. Run with the herd if you want to, nothing wrong with it, it’s a comfortable way to live, but understand that the zenith of performance is going to demand the dissolving of your alignment with that herd and the dismantling of the limited belief systems it carries. If you really want to know what you are made of, you are going to have to move against the flow of adherence to the mob. It is going to demand that you walk out on the standard path. If you wanna dance, you gotta pay the band. We are all individually so much more than that. Regardless of whether you realise it or not. You are the lightening rod life uses to deliver it’s power to the ground. Gilesy

07.01.2022 Roaring Heads Podcast #21 - Intentional Resilience Yes the podcast is back! Intentional Resilience is power made of many aspects. No athletic goal moves anywhere without desire and intention. The power of dreams is an internal process that drives a physical outcome. That internal drive can look a little like this:... Desire, inception, intention, inspiration, enjoyment, motivation, enthusiasm, heart, guts, will, acceptance, non resistance, and the ultimate outcome of resilience and trust. Without these critical drivers our goals and dreams are little more than a concept. All of these inner qualities demand a healthy dose of the reality of the present moment in order for them to force a transformation. The present moment is the source that holds these qualities together. Athletes tend to go off track, make things too complex, too rigid, they tend to project and dissect and rarely do they introspect. The outer goal has its core at an inner level, if we are disconnected from it we lose our ability to know what true resilience means. If you are feeling frustrated by your endeavors in just about any sense, this one is going help you. You'll find the link in the comments Gilesy.

06.01.2022 RH Episode #22 - Fear and Doubt, Memory and Imagination Fear and doubt rely on two critical aspects of mind that feed them their meals, those two mind based asp...ects are known as memory and imagination. They wreak havoc on our sense of peace, they take away our presence, limit our awareness and separate us from our true sense of self. You could call these mind based aspects "the separate self" as one great teacher Rupert Spira refers to them as. This resonates because they are literally a form of separate self, they disconnect and divorce us from our deeper sense of self. When we live this way we dissociate from the deeper aspects of the true self to live a life of stress, pressure, anxiety and depression. When we disassociate this way, we are dissociating from the natural world, ourselves and others. We live a life of projection that leads to us feeling empty, apathetic and ineffectual. The separate self fuels itself on memory and imagination, it fuels and feeds the doubt and fear on illusion, projection, self judgment and worry. The antidote is a damn good dose of reality, a look into the deeper aspects of the true deeper sense of self that society spends most of its time running away from. We can never expect the outside world to look different while we are wearing smoke coloured glasses on the inside, the outside world will forever look dark and smoky while this is the case. We need to move away from delusion, illusion, memory and imagination, doubt and fear, and until we do we will continue to fruitlessly search for answers to anxiety and depression in the outside world, we will continue to boost the bottom lines of drug companies while we move further and further away from the truth. What's the truth? The answers are right under our noses. The first step is the step we take to look inwards and to accept what we find with compassion and care, and then to slowly and gently align ourselves with the true light of our own existence, for the ultimate benefit of everyone. Link in comments

04.01.2022 RH Episode # 19 - Mark Turner Fear and Doubt in High Performance Programs This week we are talking to coach Mark Turner.... In this podcast we wanted to open a non judgmental discussion about the nature of high performance sports programs and what can be done to remove the toxic elements of doubt and fear. All sports programs, even down to the grassroots level, suffer from some degree of politics and conflict. Often we find that doubt is a personal driver that infects the collective. Doubt is the cynical thought process that leads to protective beliefs, and limits the expansive lateral thinking that leads to a well oiled collective machine that creates athletic success at the end of the chain. Psychological safety is a big component within a well functioning collective. In this podcast we discuss the power of vulnerability, authenticity and honesty as a route to making a sustainable change to the high performance model, in order for us to best serve the purpose at the end of the chain; great, well adjusted, fully developed athletes that are capable of performing at the top level with a background of solidity and solidarity. There is something in here for everyone, coaches, athletes and administrators at all levels. Link is in the comments section

02.01.2022 REFRAME THE GAME I’m going to give you the most direct route to athletic success I can possibly give you. Go Deep or Don’t Go!... Look for your opportunity's hidden within each session, they are there, if you can't find them, it's because you are not engaged either in the process or within yourself. Bring your attention right into the process, which by the way is occurring inside you, not out there. Look for something you don't know about yourself, specifically finding your areas of weakness, an aversion to a certain session, weather conditions, sense perceptions, check them out, enquire into them, "I don't like this" Ok what is it about it you don't like specifically? Find out what thoughts the dislike is made of and then reframe the game, can I relax and accept this dislike as part of this process? Yes I can is the reframe! Followed by acceptance, a letting go of the thoughts that are made of resistance, the more you do this, the more you realise that in actual fact the thoughts are not made of resistance at all, resistance is made of thoughts! What can I do? See it clearly, stop it in it's tracks. We need then to change the way we think about our athletic process and the subsequent behaviours that are formed by those thoughts. The unconscious habit is to form behaviours that fit a patterning that minimises stress and risk, modern man has made it his goal to increase his comfort, this is our learning and we have to challenge it if we are going to move past it. Comfort equates to apathy in an athletic goal, and even in a life goal pathway. You can’t achieve your goals from a comfortable armchair. You saddled up for it so commit to resting in comfort when you are dead. This sounds like a cold steel edge doesn’t it? People often think because I speak of non-duality, love and compassion that it means going soft, no it does not! It means nothing of the sort. In my capacity as an athlete coach, mental skills coach and mentor, I know challenge and discomfort are key to growth, development and a deeper sense of being alive, being vital and with purpose. I often speak of inner revolution and growth, there is absolutely nothing comfortable about it, inner growth is no different to an athletic goal, if you open that pandora box, you have signed up for challenge and discomfort. So it’s good to be aware of the following immutable fact. Growth can be painful and comfort can kill you! If you fail to hit the mark, or lack the required physical talent so what? Failure is not fatal. Embrace discomfort. Your long term athletic and personal growth depends on it because the development begins where the comfort ends. Strange that the very thing we most often avoid, discomfort, often leads to a deeper sense of peace and pleasure. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment~Marcus Aurelius There is no way out of this life conundrum. If you try to avoid pain, you will ultimately be in pain trying to avoid it. The second we have gone into blame or an excuse is the second we have tried to chose comfort over pain. Shifting the feeling is not dissolving it, if anything it empowers it. The patterned thinking and behaviour that tries to move you into comfort, actually moves you into pain. If we allow this process to go on unabated, or if we stay unconscious in it, we end up giving up, the mental exhaustion will supersede the physical effort and we will cave in. Everybody talks about the mental game, people often say the process is 70% mental. But how many people actually follow through to look into, and to accept the discomfort that is hidden in it? A lot of the time I simply don’t see athletes align themselves with the goals they want to achieve. Equipment and the physical is less than 50% of a process that takes place at an unseeable depth. A new bike is much more glamorous than an uncomfortable ride into your own depths right? But which one do you think would create the greater time saving? What are you really willing to trade for your goals? What the goal and true inner commitment really does is what we are most frightened of. It’s strips us bare of all our bullshit. It removes all the untruths and exposes the soft underbelly. All the nooks and crannies we hide ourselves in. Committing to the mental game is being willing to strip away all that you are not! To be willing to remove all illusion, all projections and dissociations and to accept reality the way it is served. We can only accept reality when we are laid bare of the ways we hide within ourselves. The alignment with the goal means that we are willing to fall vulnerable and exposed in front of ourselves and everyone else. To be naked with the goal, to be honest in front of it. Challenged, uncomfortable and trusting the discomfort to move us into the window of personal revolution and athletic evolution. As it does! Everything else is rhetoric. Gilesy