Make it work for you

One thing that is true; you are the one who must put the work in. You are the one making it happen, the one putting in the hours, sweating through the discomfort. You are the one making sure to eat right, sleep right and do all the things you need to make it happen.

It’s important to have discipline and enjoy the process, but the goal to be fit and healthy is a lifetime one, there isn’t necessarily a point where you have arrived. So how do we take this list of things we must do to be happy and healthy, and structure it in a way we can continue to put that effort in sustainably?

Cardio is important, but you hate running. What about hiking? It might be leaving your running gear ready at the door or maybe its riding to work instead of driving? You are the one getting it done, so how do you want to do it?

Tracking your food is a great way to learn about your nutrition, but you hate MyfitnessPal and find it annoying. Does keeping an excel document work better for you? Or maybe busting out the markers and a new journal is what works.

Lifting weights is an amazing activity you can do for your health. But you are kind of bored with it. Well there is an almost endless way you can approach lifting weights and a myriad of different goals you can have for it. Which one brings back that spark?

A part of discipline is doing something whether you want to or not, but it is also not mindlessly ordering yourself to do something because that is what you are supposed to do. Too much of this and it all starts to feel like a chore, or a supposedly important task we should be doing but aren’t really sure why, while also beating ourselves up for not doing.

In this time of Covid lockdowns it is even more important. The usual tools and resources aren’t there, we can’t do things how we would normally like. Applying brute force to this problem and telling ourselves to just do it may be met with varying degrees of success.

So, the question is, how do make it all work for you?

Plant your tree today

‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now’ - Chinese Proverb.

One way we could interpret this is ‘the best time to start working towards your health goal was yesterday, the second best time is today’. Ensuring you don’t dwell on the fact you haven’t started your pursuit for better health, now is as good a time as any. The small change you make today, and tomorrow, and the next day, will compound in ways you can’t even comprehend yet.

Too often people dwell on the fact they haven’t planted any trees in their past, and that stops them from planting any today. When it comes to our health, maybe the tree is too big to plant (‘I want to lose 20kg’….that’s a big tree) and it’s better to start by planting a seedling (I want to lose 1kg every 6 weeks by monitoring my food closely and having a coach keep me accountable…that’s a more appropriately sized tree). All trees start small, so focus on planting a seedling, not an oak tree.

The best time for you to go for that walk is today. The best time for you to start lifting weights is today. The best time for you to prioritise health and mobility is today. The best time for you to plant that tree is today.

‘Belief is irresistible’

The title of this piece is a thought Phil Knight has when reflecting on his inability to sell mutual funds and encyclopedias, but has no issue selling shoes.

 He believes in the shoes. He believes they make running better. He believes running makes the world a better place. When you believe in something, it’s conveyed in your demeanour, your behaviour, and your words. The selling almost takes care of itself.

 Selling aside for a moment, take this approach and apply it to any aspect of your life. Trying to convince your friends or family to make healthier eating choices, trying to get them to exercise more often. When you truly believe in those things, and it radiates through you. They will only have to take a quick look at you, to know that those kind of behaviour changes can have a positive effect on them too.

 The same is true within the four walls here at Workshop Gym. We think the path to a healthier and happier individual is through calculated strength work, restorative mobility work, and the right balance of rest and ‘going hard’. It’s not constant HIIT workouts or long slow runs. It’s not grinding through a workout when you’re operating on 3 hours sleep and two espressos. It’s not ‘more is better’. It’s ‘better is better’. Move better, recover better, feel better.

And we truly believe that.

Hip Mobility - What is it and where to find it

Put simply, your hip mobility is defined by your ability to actively move your hip joint through it’s full range of motion.

Your hips can flex, extend, abduct, adduct, externally rotate and internally rotate. Whether you fully understand those terms or not, it doesn’t matter. The point is, your hips can move in lots of different directions, and therefore it’s important to create strength and stability in these movement patterns.

Try squatting down into a deep squat - this is hip flexion - and if you can’t get very deep, that’s okay - it’s just highlighted an area for you to work on. Whilst the source of your inability to flex at the hip may be a result of mobility restrictions at your surrounding joints (ankles / spine), spending more time unloaded in the bottom of your squat will inadvertently help with your ankle mobility as well as your hip mobility. Feel free to use a table or couch to support that bottom position and to keep that chest upright, whilst shifting your weight around in that bottom position. Expect some discomfort here!

Try lying on your belly on the floor. Bend your knee up to 90 degrees (as if you were going to kick your heel into your bum). Keeping your knee at 90 degrees, squeeze your glutes, trying to lift your thigh an inch or two off the floor. This is assessing hip extension past zero degrees. Can you extend your hips without creating any extension through your lower back? If you can’t - it’s just highlighted an area for you to work on. Spend time on your hands and knees, kicking one leg behind you, whilst keeping your other knee and hands on the floor. The focus here is to extend your hips by kicking your leg behind you, and not creating any arch through your lower back. Often if you have an inability to effectively extend your hips, your lower back will do lots of the extension to compensate for it. The focus here is to make sure our hips are our main workers throughout hip extension exercises, not our lower backs.

Whilst this is just the tip of the iceberg, these are two movements you could incorporate twice daily, whilst you’re spending more time at home. Creating a greater level of awareness around your hips and improving their ability to flex and extend whilst maintaining proper positioning, is a great place to start towards an overall healthy and strong body.

Aim low enough

Have there been times when you have set a goal and didn’t achieve it? Maybe it was unrealistic. Maybe it wasn’t specific enough. The feeling of not achieving the goal maybe didn’t sit nicely with you? Either way, things didn’t turn out as planned.

Setting a high goal does have its strengths – it acts as something to aim at - despite achieving it or not. However, having the humility to set what seem like pointlessly low goals, can be the secret to achieving lasting behaviour change. Maybe you want to exercise 3 times per week? Break it down further, and set a goal such as ‘Get out my exercise clothes’. But your room is messy? Break it down further, ‘Keep my room clean’. But you’ve tried to keep your room clean and have struggled in the past. Implement a tactic we’ve spoken about before, from Clear’s Atomic Habits, habit-stacking; ‘When I do A….I will do B’.

‘When I take off my shoes and jumper….I will put them away’. Saying it aloud to yourself can help too. Before long, you don’t have dirty clothes on the floor, and reaching for your exercise clothes becomes easier. Maintain the goal of ‘When I take off my shoes and jumper, I will put them away’. This has nothing to do with exercising three times a week, and may seem like a trivial goal, but before long your room is clean. A clean room means things are easy to get to. This means your exercise clothes are easy to reach. When somethings easy to do, you’re more likely to do it….and all of a sudden you’re going in the right direction.

Assess, correct and solidify

I personally believe in the importance of routine and habits. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Although there are many books in this realm, none of them are groundbreaking (at least I don’t think so) but where atomic habits excels is in practical application.

My chapter is number 20 “The Downside of creating good habits” read it for yourself, but this is my spin on that. We are currently running a challenge with some of the members at Workshop Gym and it has been a good chance to use it, to develop better habits regardless of what that habit is. There’s a system to follow that I believe works.

First, we must assess and become more aware of our current habits and routines to improve on what we can and eliminate what we can’t. Without this step we have no guiding light and are just stabbing in the dark which is a bit like sitting in a rocking chair; there’s heaps of motion but no real movement in any direction.

Second is as simple as it sounds but is up there in terms of difficulty. Once you’ve found the weakness or problem area, you then have the almighty task of changing them for the better. This is where atomic habits comes to the floor with the four laws of behaviour change;

1) Make it obvious- highlight the good, and highlight the bad.
2) Make it attractive - make the good more fulfilling (if I do more exercise my health will improve and I can go skiing with friends without feeling like I’m going to die, apart from black runs, that’s just hell).
3) Make it easy - this one is self explanatory I hope?!
4) Make it satisfying.

Lastly, this is the most important step in my eyes, to solidify the new routines and habits, meaning to do them well consistently over time. There will be bumps in the road that is all part of it, just remember not to follow up a bad decision with another one.

If it goes wrong, accept the error, look at what went wrong and then forget it and fix it. Another glorious rambling for you lovely folks, all three of you that read this. Lastly remember don’t take life too seriously no-one gets out alive anyway.

Science of sitting

We’ve recently talked about ‘positional awareness’ and moving your body as often as possible. Let’s reiterate that this is the take-away message: Move as often as possible, as it’s good for you in more ways than one.  

Let’s take a quick look into the science of sitting, and how posture can effect your lower back. Recently, there was a great Instagram post (credited below), which referenced studies from the 70’s that looked at the angle of your hip whilst sitting, and the subsequent pressure that places on the intervertebral discs in your lower back. The pressure that was produced between L3 and L4 is almost 200% higher, when the hip joint is at 80 or 90 degrees, compared to when standing.

Conversely, when the angle of the hip joint is between 100-110 degrees, the pressure on the discs in the lower back is at it’s lowest. This suggests, sitting slightly reclined, with proper spinal alignment, is the ‘best’ way to reduce pressure on the discs in your lower back.

The takeaway here is that training and ‘corrective’ work will prove very challenging to fix pain if lifestyle factors aren’t considered. The pain you feel whilst in the gym may very well be caused by factors outside of the gym. Food for thought.

Instagram post:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CC-csmgHGbJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Progression Variables

When it comes to our daily lives, each and every single one of us is chasing progress, and honestly it should be a life-long pursuit.

After all, the quickest way to lose interest in something is to stop getting better.  How do you measure progress? Well, that’s entirely up to you. However, when it comes to training, the variables are all too often related to load or volume, whilst neither of those variables do not account for the quality of your movement or your personal goals.

So my question to you is this: What does progress look like to you? For us here at Workshop Gym, we have a variety of performance metrics we use to track our members. This is to ensure we are constantly improving, or at the very least, seeking improvement. This looks different for each and every single one of our members but our main variables for progress are:

Movement quality
Pain reduction
Consistency
Strength
Range of motion
Awareness
Smiles per mile

Not an exhaustive list by any means but it helps our members find what it is that motivates them. Let’s face it, not everyone cares about a 2xBW back squat or deadlift. It’s all about finding out what motivates you to push forward, to get better, to work smarter or harder.

Remember. don’t take life too seriously, none of us are getting out of here alive anyway.

Move that body of yours

 If you’re constantly sitting at your desk, lying on the couch, hunched over phone, take a second to think about your position. Let’s call it ‘positional awareness’.

Think about your spine, hips and neck…they’re most likely in flexion (rounded) and have been for quite some time over the last few months in lockdown.

If you spend long enough in these positions, they’ll get pretty comfortable here, and become reluctant to move as freely as they once did. This is why lifestyle factors are so important for things like posture, mobility, and overall health.

In the same way we would couple a push exercise with a pull exercise in the gym, if you’ve spent half an hour working in flexion (hunched over your computer), take your spine through some extension mobility exercises. Your spine is meant to flex and extend, you’re built that way!

Keep moving your body, as often as you can, in as many planes as you can. Move it or lose it.

Progression is non-linear

If you started your fitness journey and had a 60kg 1RM squat, and added 1kg to your squat every week, after training for 5 years you would have a 320kg squat. Awesome right? Not quite.

Unfortunately, in the gym, and in life, progression is non-linear. Along the way there are injuries, life events (both positive and negative) and drops in motivation, all contributing to the rollercoaster of life.

This global pandemic (July at time of writing) is another example of an event that may be affecting your progress (in whatever it is you are striving towards). The key takeaway here is don’t be disheartened. Keep on keeping on. Stay the course and know that as long as you are trending in the right direction, fluctuations are to be expected, and even better, embraced.

If you feel as though it’s been too long trending in the wrong direction, sit down with those around you and start asking the hard questions. Make small changes that can be implemented daily so that you can keep progressing in the right (non-linear) direction.

I was born ready

This blog goes a little bit into the mindset of Workshop Gym and one of our founding principles. It looks at the "why" behind our programming and our approach to training in general.

But first, one of the most common excuses I've used in my life and I'd bet a pretty dollar you have to, is this; "I wasn't ready". Looking back in hindsight, I find myself questioning what readiness is? The answer is different for everyone I guess, but what today's introspection has taught me is that there is no point waiting until you are ready, no matter the circumstance bury your head and give it 100%.

Accept that obstacles and stall will occur and then find a way to either go over them, around them or if all else fails go straight through it! Ok ok, I went off on a tangent, let me bring it back to our Workshop ethos. At Workshop, we believe in a certain level of general physical preparedness, being the key to sustainable health and fitness. Now that doesn't mean we don't believe in competition, periodisation or peaking for a certain event. Much the contrary, we believe in keeping our members in an "operating window", a point at which it doesn't take much to get them in peak physical condition for whatever event that is. We coined the term S.P.P and it doesn't refer to specific physical preparedness. No, instead we have rephrased it as ‘Sustainable Physical Preparedness’ and put simply, it means being in a state of constant preparedness with easy "peaks" and easy maintenance.

Interested in finding out more about this and all things Workshop? Make sure you keep your eyes peeled for the next blog.

As always don't take life too seriously, no-one gets out alive

Balanced Strength

If you’re getting back into your gym journey, or starting a new one post-lockdown, here’s a pretty good ‘general’ rule to follow. For each exercise you do, do the opposite.

Love pushing exercises? Don’t forget those pulling exercises! Love to squat? Don’t forget to hinge and work on your posterior chain (a fancy way of saying the muscles on your backside).

Only care about bicep curls and working those beach muscles? Don’t forget to hit some tricep extensions too (hot tip: your triceps are a larger muscle group than your biceps….therefore if you get bigger triceps, they will help your arm in it’s entirety look bigger!!)

The takeaway is this – for joint health and integrity, you want balanced strength, providing stability and mobility. If you only work one muscle group, you’re likely to encounter problems down the line, usually presenting itself as pain.

Be strong, balanced and mobile, by training your body as a whole.

Push. Pull. Squat. Hinge. Carry.

The sweet spot

Now this idea is my take on the four burners principle. If you haven’t heard of it before I highly recommend giving that a read. As per usual the advice or information provided is just that, advice so do with it what you will.

When it comes to finding balance in life there are numerous approaches available, each with positives and minuses. The approach I like to use or share with my clients and friends is a simple one. I use the image of a shelf to depict this, so bare with me here.

Imagine a shelf with two mounting points at either end but nothing supporting the middle, now on that shelve we have four planting pots spread out evenly (they each represent an element of our daily lives; friends, family, professional and health). We position each in order of importance or relevance but naturally as we start putting further emphasis on the aspects of our lives each item is either moved towards the centre momentarily or to the edges if they aren’t priority. So, whatever is currently a priority is put in the centre and commands complete focus and attention, everything else is balanced on the shelf, this is life in equilibrium.

Now the alternative - We try to move everything to one location (all centre). This leads to a collapse or a breakdown as the centre of the shelf is not supported. Rather, things are pushed off the shelf and we tend to focus on one thing at a time. Whilst this may seem ideal, it means that the items we have knocked off the shelve receive no idea and that is far from ideal (just imagine the look on your partners face, hell hath no fury like a woman’s wrath).

Hopefully this helps at least one of you find some balance, and as always don’t take life too seriously no-one gets out alive.

The longer long game

You’re most likely going to live until you’re about 80 years old. For most of you reading this, that means you’re not even half way…for some of you, it’s not even quarter-time.

 Yes, life is short...but it’s also the longest thing you will ever do (haha?).

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how long you will be around for, so be patient in your pursuits.

Progress takes time. You can’t become Michael Jordan after playing basketball for one afternoon. Don’t expect those 6-pack abs after one gym session. Don’t expect to be rich after one good financial decision.

Consistently apply your effort, be disciplined to continually show up, and demonstrate patience by adjusting the lens you’re looking at your progress through. Be in it for the longer long game.

Feed the wolves

After such a long lay-off from our regular routines and “normal”day to day, returning to the real world will bring with it a whole host of new problems and questions.

We have a heap of choices and decisions to make because if you are anything like us, the lockdown has given you a chance to objectively review what you were doing before, what was working, what wasn’t working and most importantly how do you improve it or remove it.

Now I know you’re expecting an answer but you ain’t getting that from me, my failings are unique to me. However I will share something that has helped me. This next concept is from an old Cherokee teaching his grandson about life and as always I urge you to take from it what you will.

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil–he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you–and inside every other person, too.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Now what I take from that is two-fold I guess;

1) The Fight is Eternal, the first part of the story is telling us that we can never get rid of the first wolf, the first wolf will always be there. The fight between two wolves is eternal. I’m prone to falling into the trap of trying hard to banish the negative side of myself, because it’s not always pretty trust me. But the truth is that none of us are the perfect finished article.

What we can do is to act in spite of those negative feelings. We can take those fears, those worries, those doubts and move forward anyway. That’s how you feed the second wolf. Imagine if we’re paralyzed by the first wolf, by doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, and getting nowhere. We’d lose the momentum to move forward and indirectly we’d be feeding the very wolf we are trying not to feed.

Small Actions Build Momentum ,one step forward will always be a step ahead even it’s tiny so GO!! Instead of doubting yourself and doing nothing, you can try to learn new things and expand yourself at a slower pace. Instead of focusing on the fears within, start with ONE THING (one of the simple most effective books you can read) you should (and could) do that is right in front of you. Want to lose 10 kg and achieve your fitness goals? Start by walking for 15 minutes a day if you haven’t yet. Then start learning split squats and maybe push-ups with and make slow progress from there.

2) It’s much much easier to feed the first wolf, the first wolf is there to encourage the easier options in life. It’s easier to complain, procrastinate, dismiss, ignore, and give up. There is almost no effort required to do those things, and you’re getting the reward with the sensation of relieving and instant gratification without much action. The second wolf is very different; it’s harder to feed. It’s challenging, tiring and time-consuming to do things like learning, teaching, inspiring, sharing or simply sticking to a new habit. These things take persistence and mental strength. And you don’t usually see immediate results from them.

The curveball no-one expects why we should Feed Both Wolves. “You see there is an alternate route because, if you only choose to feed one wolf, the other wolf will always be around every corner waiting for you to become distracted or weak and attack to get the attention he craves. He will always be angry and will always fight the second wolf. If you acknowledge him, he is happy and the second wolf is happy and everyone eats (wins). The first wolf has many qualities — tenacity, courage, fearlessness, strong-willed that you have need of at times. These are the very things the second wolf lacks. But the second wolf has compassion, caring, strength and the ability to recognise what is in the best interest of all.”

“Feed them both and there will be no more internal struggle for your attention. And when there is no battle inside, you can listen to the voices of deeper knowledge that will guide you in choosing what is right in every circumstance.”

“How you choose to interact with the opposing forces within you will determine your life. Starve one or the other or guide them both.”

The Fisherman story

The following story is straight from Tim Ferris’ ‘The 4-hour Work Week’ and it’s a book I read a few years ago, and a story I have always remembered, and often think about. Enjoy.

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of the fish.
‘How long did it take you to catch them?’ the American asked.
‘Only a little while,’ the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.
‘Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish? The American then asked.
‘ I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,’ the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.’
‘But….What do you do with the rest of your time?’
The Mexican looked up and smiled. ‘I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor.’

The American laughed and stood tall. ‘Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats.’

He continued, ‘Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening up your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually, New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.’
The Mexican fisherman asked, ‘But, señor, how long will all this take?’
To which the American replied, ‘15-20 years, 25 tops.’
‘But what then, señor?’

The American laughed and said, ‘That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.’
’Millions, señor? Then what?’
’Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…’

Kaizen

‘Kaizen’ is a Japanese term when roughly translated means "change for the better" or "continuous improvement."

I first stumbled across this phrase in my old rugby days, when I had a performance review with some of the coaching team (I wasn't pulling my weight). Rather than a roasting, I saw it as a the gauntlet being thrown down.

It was revolutionary in my approach to training, coaching and life I guess….Now I see eyes getting rolled but think of it this way. If we can improve some facet of our lives daily it leads to mass change down the line, but this also comes with the added caveat of 'what's measured is managed'.

Now applying this to our health and fitness is difficult because it's not "sexy". We tend to be very numerical with our goals i.e lose X amount of weight, or squat X amount of weight. Worthy measurements of success, don't get me wrong (if the bar ain't bending your pretending) but they aren't the be all and end all.

Here's a few alternative measures of success to consider especially now as we all return to regularity and back to the gym after a very long lay off:

1) Health metrics (resting heart rate, blood pressure, sleep)
2) Movement quality
3) This one is my favourite; how do you "feel"? Measure, assess and correct. It sounds simple right? But it's much more difficult in practice.

As always, don't take life too seriously, remember no-one gets out alive.

I don't know

You don’t know what you don’t know.

In the fitness industry, and probably in life, people are afraid to admit they don’t know something. It may appear as though it’s a lack of authority (in an environment where you’re supposed to be the authority), but in fairness, you can’t be expected to know everything.

If someone asks a question regarding a particular movement, or what muscle is recruited, or why their knee hurts when they perform a certain task, and we don’t know, we say exactly that.

The good news? We can find out for you. With a wide network in the industry as well as an ability to interpret data, the answer to your question isn’t too far away. The important aspect is however, that we didn’t stumble our way through a jargon-filled, complex (B-S) answer that didn’t actually answer the question. We admitted we’re not entirely sure about the answer, and we care enough to find out for you.

‘I don’t know’ is probably hard for a lot of people to say in a professional environment. Get better at saying it.

Go on….say it.

Find your fitness

Find your fitness, or make it work for you.  

The importance of health and physical preparedness has never been more apparent than right now, right here in the midst of a pandemic. However some people simply enjoy exercise more than others do, and this is a really important but often under-discussed issue.

The gym isn't for everyone and nor should it be, fitness doesn't only happen in the gym nor does strength (some environments just promote better results). Now, whether you fall into the ‘I love exercise’ camp or ‘I'm not so much a fan of exercise’ camp, it's effect on your quality of life is evident. So as the title of the blog states, If you are one of those people who doesn't enjoy exercising very much, or even if you are, but the recent disruption to routine (gosh darn Rona) has made it more difficult than normal, there are some things you can do to stack the deck in your favour.

1) Make it fun (whatever that is to you).

2) Recruit some social support and exercise with a friend.

3) Hire a coach so that you can offload a lot of the thought required, and you simply show up when they expect and do mostly as you're told (shameless plug but we can help with this one).

Results don't come unless you do the work, but that doesn't mean you need to grind yourself into pulp and continue doing something you can't stand. Find a form of exercise you enjoy, and use systems to make it easier on yourself.

As usual Don't take life seriously, none of us are getting out of here alive.

Busy is trendy

Busy has become trendy. 

‘Oh my gosh I’m so busy’ - We tend to hear this more and more. 

It seems as though if you’re busy you must be doing something right. Busy must mean you’re working hard. Busy must mean you’re making money. Busy must mean you’re productive. Hold the phone cowboy / cowgirl. 

Maybe it means your unproductive? Wasting time? Procrastinating? Even losing money? (What’s the cost of your time?)

Maybe try and do a little less, and do it perfectly. Say no to things, become more efficient and be proud of the product. Instead of trying to juggle six things at once. 

‘Everyone should meditate for 20 minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy to meditate, in which case you should meditate for an hour a day’ - Unknown.