Niall Foley

By simply being a kind person, and by showing other people consideration, you become pretty valuable if you ask me.

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All I can do for you is work on myself. All you can do for me is work on yourself 🤝

You get such a short time to enjoy this life and an even shorter time to enjoy your physicality and masculinity.

Don’t let this society sidetrack you into the feeling that it is somehow wrong for you to strive to be better and to develop yourself.

Self development is a journey. It literally takes you to your fears and self doubt. It reveals to you where your stuck, and whats’s been holding back.

It is the stimulus that creates the opportunity for you to learn, face your dragons (whatever they might be) and grow as a person.

Get out and challenge yourself. Get uncomfortable. Be vulnerable enough to be willing to make mistakes and not beat yourself up about it.

Let’s go 🤙

💯

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Taking ownership of your life can be very difficult. It’s no easy task. And when things go wrong it can be very tempting to curse faith, play the victim, and start blaming everyone but yourself.

But, as we all know this doesn’t fix the problem, and it certainly doesn’t make things any easier.

Extreme ownership refers to the idea that you alone are responsible for how you react and how you decide to respond to any given situation.

You can’t change what happened and you can’t really have much of an effect at all on what is going to effectively happen anyway.

So as tough as it can be sometimes. When you really think it through ownership is the only system that works long term.

Everything else is just sucking your thumb for comfort.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.

Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills and abilities.

By forcing yourself to embrace the stress of cold exposure as a meaningful self-directed challenge (stressor), you exert what is called ‘top-down control’ over the deeper brain centers that regulate your reflexive states.

This top-down control process involves your prefrontal cortex – an area of the brain involved in planning and suppressing impulsivity.

That ‘top-down’ control is the basis of what people refer to when they talk about resilience, mental fortitude and grit.

Importantly, cold exposure has been shown to be a skill that carries over to situations outside of the deliberate cold environment, allowing us to cope better and maintain a calm, clear mind when confronted with real-world stressors. 

In other words, deliberate cold exposure has been shown to be an amazing tool for us to train our mind to be less reactive and less emotionally unstable throughout our day to day lives.

How long?

The latest research shows that doing deliberate cold exposure for 11 minutes per week TOTAL (NOT per session), but rather, 2-4 sessions lasting 1-5 mins each distributed across the week is all we need to experience it’s benefits.

How cold?

The water temperature should be uncomfortably cold yet safe to stay in for a few minutes.

The “you” who you imagine yourself to be (name, age, nationality, accomplishments, failures, occupation, education etc) is nothing more than a succession of thoughts that create the illusory identity you call “I” “me” “myself”. It is a linguistically formatted identity which you use for practical purposes to navigate yourself around. Don’t take it too seriously. It has nothing to do with your total physical organism and it doesn’t even come close to explaining who and what you really are.

Our lives go in the direction of the stories we tell ourselves.

We cannot control everything about our experience. However, we can control how we respond and the attitude we take towards it ❤️

Getting into the sauna 3-4 times a week for just 18-20 minutes at anywhere between 70-90 degrees has been shown to 👇

*Reduce the chances of stroke by up to 48%
*Reduce the chances of heart disease by up to 52%
*Improve blood pressure
*Improve immunity via the increased production of white blood cells
*Improve sleep by decreasing cortisol levels

It’s also an amazing environment to switch off from the outside world, and check in with your internal world of thoughts, feelings, and emotions ❤️

The more you cling to people, places and things the more you suffer. Life and it’s many forms are transient. Nothing is permanent and nothing stays the same. Let go of control and discover how beautiful this life can be ❤️

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Your self talk (the thoughts that you listen to every day about yourself) slip by your conscious awareness on a moment to moment basis and stimulate your autonomic nervous system to create a flow of biological processes, reinforcing the programmed feeling of who you think you are.

Understanding this process and becoming aware of what you say to yourself and believe about yourself is the first step to stepping into a new future.

Our deeply held beliefs (whether conscious or unconscious) effect how we think, and how we think creates our physical reality.

When we listen to music or lose ourselves in a beautiful landscape, dancing, art, or sport, it is as if we are becoming one with it. We are so totally absorbed in the activity that we become totally unaware of our separation from it. And so in the same way when we meditate, and become internally silent, we suddenly become aware that our inside world of thoughts, emotions and feelings, and the outside world of forms and space come together. We begin to deeply feel that the separation that we were brought up to believe in, is in fact only a concept created by our mind and reinforced by our culture. When we feel that and get beyond concepts we innerstand that everything in this universe is simply one unified field of energy. There is no separation.

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Bit deep for a Thursday morning but how and ever 😆💭

Go back to nature. Connect with the land. Find people on the same path and speak openly, honestly and courageously. This is how we heal our wounds. This is how we stop the madness.

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“You have to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I'm always comfortable being uncomfortable. And to be comfortable being uncomfortable, I have to hone my discipline, which to me is doing what I have to do, but doing it like I love it."

Great meeting the champ 🥊 last night. A true gentleman 🤟

Self discipline is the highest form of self love ❤️

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Tall poppy syndrome or famine mentality as it’s often called is real and it’s one of the best ways of insuring that you’ll never be successful or accomplish a cherished goal.

You don’t have to put others down to make yourself seem more than you are. That just makes you come across as small and weak.

Take inspiration from other people’s success. Even if you don’t like them. You can learn something from absolutely anybody providing you have the right attitude! ❤️

First week done ✅

It’s not until you put yourself into a new environment that you begin to realise just how much of an impact it can have on your behaviour and mindset.

As Author James clear puts it in his book Atomic Habits - “Environment is the unseen hand that shapes all human behaviour”

So whatever it is you want to do or achieve, know that the people, places and things that surround you, are your greatest metric for evaluating if you’re going to be successful or not 🤟