ThriveMind Education

Still lugged chicken and rice up this mountain like Sisyphus on a thickness project 🪨

🦈 Do the best surf beaches have the most sharks? Because grizzly 🐻 territory is the most scenic, as it turns out ⛰️

Play along and when you’ve found her in all three photos, comment your favourite emoji if you’d like to see more installments!

I’ll see just how creative (Yuki and) I can get with new settings, within the confines of a one-bedroom apartment 🤔

🔎We’ve been playing “spot the (alien-)kitty” in my Insta stories, with snaps of Yuki hiding in increasingly-difficult-to-spot nooks in our pantry.

🙏I’ve had so much excited feedback about people loving it that I thought I’d chuck some of them up here too.

“This is my new favourite game”
“God dammit Thomas, she’s not actually in this one is she?” (She always is)
“I think I’m blind” - Libby, who may have had 64 slices of American cheese

Scanning for snow snakes 🐍 before the plunder 👑

2022, the winter when I really let the powder obsession off the leash.

This candid was taken an hour before the chairlifts opened, by a guy I met on the chairlift after the fact. He said he’d snagged a cool shot; I cannot recall his name to credit him 😩

Hotham has a unique layout where the ski resort is at the top of the mountain. You ski down into the valleys, then take the chairlifts back up.

My powder morning protocol looked like:

•(Stare out the window for hours the night before, watching the white accumulate)

•4:45am wake up, gear up, caffeine up

•Walking the ~20 mins up the road in the dark in ski boots to the top of Heavenly Valley, the main ski area that opens an hour before the others.

Icy roads, howling head winds, high risk of being run over on a road of blind corners and no refuge from a car spinning out 😂

•Arrive 6-6:30am. The chairlifts would open at 7:30am.

•Take shelter in a warming hut if the sun wasn’t quite up yet, but usually it was becoming light by the top.

•Take my pick of the spoils before the crowds descended. I could usually get in three runs, bootpacking (ie hiking in snow) back up 2-3x before racing down to still be first in the chairlift queue.

But where the crowds were eagerly awaiting 7:30am for their turn to play, I’d already had first crack unimpeded.

•Occasional coffee and Nutella donut breaks, and otherwise ski from ~6:30am to anywhere from 1:30-3pm.

Repeat any and every day that it snowed, and fortunately we had quite a few that winter.

Reflecting on home with a few (of many) of my favourite landscapes from my favourite landscape.

I’ve had a taste of Canadian summer. It’s very nice, but it still doesn’t come close to giving me the same excitement that this time of year in Aus does.

~The desire to change how your physique looks only seems vain to those who’ve never made any significant progress with it ~

🔱Your high standards should be reflected in your physique, physical abilities, and health.

If they’re not, we have to ask ourselves: are those high standards driven by a healthy desire to be my best, or by insecurity and people-pleasing? Because to accept low standards of health is to tolerate low self-respect.

🏀That insecurity was the case for me in the early days, like many others. But that can’t sustain you - although it’s a perfectly valid impetus to get the ball rolling. Over time, you either grow to truly love the process, or you’ll fizzle out.

🏹Physical development is a direct embodiment of the values of growth, respect (for self!), health, and work ethic.

👉Because it simply doesn’t happen without an *enormous* volume of sustained effort over *years*; a conviction to hold yourself to higher standards; a commitment to sacrifice and to withstand others’ expectations for your own health priorities; and a belief that you’re capable of progressing.

Insecurity won’t keep that going. You won’t stay the course through the eating, the cooking, the soul-taking hard sets, the gym nervousness in the early days, the macro tracking, the lifestyle transformation required.

🔑The single characteristic I’ve seen across the board with people who excel at strength, fitness, and muscle development is that genuine love of effort, of challenge, of hard physical exertion.

🌷The beautiful thing about this pursuit of physical betterment is that an absolute beginner, a professional competitor, and everyone in between can ALL reap the same day-day and personal development benefits from the process.

Pride, satisfaction, presence, endorphins, escape, accomplishment, direction, confidence, momentum, control. All available here and now, today, in the micro choices.

It’s all just an expression of the right personal values.

Growth requires asking high-quality questions, and then answering them honestly without letting emotions cloud what happens next.

🏦You pride yourself on your work ethic and your standards, most likely in relation to your career.

🔍So why is that same excellent standard not upheld for your health, the thing that most directly affects your quality of life once the basic cost of living is accounted for?

❤️Well, alongside relationships and friendships, which are another area where “high performers” often tolerate mediocrity.

I’m a firm believer there’s a direct correlation between self-respect, and the standards you tolerate for your health and relationships, the two greatest predictors of our quality of life.

🕰️My health and relationships are outstanding now, but I vividly remember what it was like when they weren’t!

Eventually you have to get to a point where you just won’t tolerate mediocre effort, for yourself or from others.

📈The people I’ve worked with who see the most significant progress in their training, and their overall quality of physical and mental health, are those who already have those high personal standards, and can start to uphold them in regards to their training, lifestyle (relationship with alcohol is heavily intertwined here), self-awareness, and relationships.

🤝When it’s finally time to gain some clarity, confidence, and accountability to higher standards of health this year, shoot me a msg.

All coaching details are in my profile story highlights.

In the meantime, ponder the question and then deploy the 80-20 principle: what 20% of efforts should I focus on that will yield 80% of the improvements I’m seeking?

🔎Full transparency.

It’s not common practice in the coaching world to openly advertise your prices.

↪️You’re instead encouraged to first get prospective clients emotionally committed, and THEN drop the price on them (and if they don’t gasp, it’s not expensive enough 🤮)

❌I loathe that mystery when I’m a buyer, and I detest the games as a coach.

🛒So here’s your ‘Thrive menu’ if you’re curious about investing in yourself.

💬I’ll always happily chat for free with anyone who wants to learn more about coaching, or just to troubleshoot your training, nutrition, and anything relating to your quality of life.

I’m supremely confident you’ll find that even my free content, programs, and conversations are extremely valuable and impactful 🧨 I live and breathe this, and wherever you are on your journey, I’ve been through the same struggles.

❗️Fat loss must be secondary to muscle retention and gym performance.

It’s just an emotionally-neutral tool to better see your hard-earned muscle, and to facilitate better growth of said muscles long-term, as it’s easier to grow from a *lean* starting point.

💬It’s late and I’m deliberating on several approaches I want to take to this caption, so I’ll sleep on that and update it tomorrow.

😵‍💫This fat loss phase is a little convoluted, as I properly cooked it and forgot to get progress photos until I’d already dropped several kilos (mostly water weight of course). Photos are Nov 26th to Jan 8th, but I began a deficit in October.

🍔 The food slide is eye-catching but that represents such a small percentage of meals in the last few months.

Well, except for ‘taties 🥔 They really were consumed in multiple kilograms/week.

💞Cardio: Heaps in the month prior (30+ mins multiple times weekly), gradually substituted with just brisk walking as I became more fatigued and needed to reserve all energy for lifting.

📅My training split feels like I’ve found my absolute sweet spot that I could sustain forever, really.

🔁Two 3-day rotations that I cycle through at 2 days on, 1 rest day. Occasionally an extra rest day, especially if I’ve been skiing/hiking. So it works out around 4-5 days lifting/week.

I’ll expand on my split in another post, but split (ie your program’s set up) matters significantly less than the effort you train with.

Ready to hold yourself to a higher standard of health in 2024? 🎯

Comment 🙋‍♂️ or shoot me a msg to arrange a free ‘Strategy Sesh’ consultation.

We’ll discuss your health and physique goals, and determine if we would work well together for ongoing coaching, truly personalised to meet you where you’re at and have you thriving in 2024.

🛣️Either way, you’ll come away with personalised, actionable strategies for thriving in your training and health, and I’ll set you up with access to some free training programs I’ve created in my client coaching app.

#26 of 28 concepts to help you grow and build a thriving headspace by Xmas 2024:

Like a lot of common self-help/psychological advice on social media, the notion of our inner critic being something to defeat/beat into submission/fight fire with fire is somewhat misguided and doesn't genuinely benefit us in the long run 🙅‍♂️

That 'critic' is just another neglected part of you and the more time we spend belittling/shaming/devaluing/ignoring *any* part of ourselves, the harder we make it to grow and win in life, as well as just to find some peace of mind here and now.

I'll share a podcast episode in time that dives deep on how to nurture and integrate your inner critic, so that it actually benefits* you, instead of feeling like your own worst enemy.

*Yes, the inner critic has a lot of value to add in the right context. For starters, it's frequently right... 🙊 if we let it use flexible, intentional, compassionate language instead of fixed and inhibiting language
(see yesterday's post).

In essence, we can legitimately benefit from (emotions, thoughts, parts of our psyche that we typically view as obstacles) when we understand that everything serves, and stop fighting against our biology and psychology.

You're in the driver's seat of the most wonderfully powerful, advanced system in the universe (the human brain, body, and consciousness).

Let that shape the perspective that everything going on in our minds and bodies can serve us when we harness it right 👍

“I’m a perfectionist” has to be the most prevalent cop-out in human history.

(Trust me, I know - perfectionism, although something I’ve made enormous progress with, has stolen a disturbing percentage of my life).

It’s just fear. Protecting ourselves from a feeling we ironically already secretly harbour - that we’re insufficient.

How to overcome that?

A small sampling of considerations:

Recognise that you’re just avoiding a feeling, a part of yourself. Give it some bloody nourishment.

Get some support.

Make small promises and keep them. Redefine success as being the action, not the outcome.

That’s enough about that for now. The thing you want to do in 2024?

Take the first micro messy step well before the 31st of Dec

💭 If you weren't already thinking it, and insecure about it (ie assigning a negative judgement to it),

you couldn't be fearful (or even have the presumption...) that someone else is thinking it 🤷‍♂️

and of what you'll then make it mean about yourself.

📽️This is an example of how we project our own beliefs about ourselves outwards, particularly the ones we're not fully conscious of.

Reflective awareness is one of the most valuable, empowering, and annoying! self-awareness skills we can develop.

✍️ "What do I get triggered by? What judgements do I fear from others? What do I judge in other people?"

These reveal to us the judgements we already place on ourselves. Parts of ourselves we’ve tried to disown.

🧩 Empathy for someone else's experience or perspective
(*especially* those we dislike or get annoyed or triggered by!)

is the counterintuitive, occasionally frustrating key ingredient in being able to provide that for ourselves.

A great life, and the peace of mind we want in small moments, is constructed from the answers to great questions.

Nothing builds confidence like keeping promises to ourselves- the Latin origin of the word ‘confidence’ means “trust or security”.
Commitment informs our self-perception, and has this fascinating capacity to REDUCE overwhelm because it simplifies decision-making and removes internal conflicts.

Pick one (1) thing you’d like to implement.

Meditation, daily walks, a break from booze or coffee, journalling, reading, creative expression, fitness, something to enhance your business or relationship.

Make it a daily non-negotiable for a week and I bet it then feels routine, with the resistance to it dissolved.

Paralysed to the point of feeling physically ill by overwhelm, perfectionism, and procrastination? Been there 🙋‍♂️

Feeling utterly incapable of squeezing in a single minute for your own health/benefit, even if nothing else is getting done? Been there 🙋‍♂️

So I know well the pains of feeling like you have zero bandwidth, entirely inflicted by stories in your head.

📖 Unfortunately, if you want the results/type of life that the majority don’t have, then you need to become a bit repulsed by the stories that the majority abide by📖

Stories such as “December is just so busy”, full of social commitments you lament “having” to make time for and couldn’t possibly endure sober.

🦅Waiting until January is perfectionism, which is really just fear of small, messy, unconfident actions. Again, I know crippling perfectionism painfully well, so it alerts all of my Spidey Senses.

What’s the smallest step you could take, or choice you could make this week to embody the kind of changes that you’re hoping to make in January?

Paralysed to the point of feeling physically ill by overwhelm, perfectionism, and procrastination? Been there 🙋‍♂️

Feeling utterly incapable of squeezing in a single minute for your own health/benefit, even if nothing else is getting done? Been there 🙋‍♂️

So I know well the pains of feeling like you have zero bandwidth, entirely inflicted by stories in your head.

Unfortunately, if you want the results/type of life that the majority don’t have, then you need to become a bit repulsed by the stories that the majority abide by.

Stories such as “December is just so busy”, full of social commitments you lament “having” to make time for and couldn’t possibly endure sober.

Waiting until January is perfectionism, which is really just fear of small, messy, unconfident actions. Again- I know crippling perfectionism painfully well, so it alerts all of my Spidey Senses.

What’s the smallest step you could take, or choice you could make this week to embody the kind of changes that you’re hoping to make in January?

Flow states are the intersection of high performance, growth, and a thriving headspace.

If I could summarise ~6 years down the mental health/personal development/high-performance rabbit-holes into one proxy to assess quality of life, it might just be
"how often, and in how many ways, do you get into flow?"

We can get flow through physical activities; creative pursuits; work; even conversations!
Literally any task that we're completely engaged with.

It's even the antidote to burnout. Burnout is *not* doing too much, it's doing things misaligned for you, feeling that you're not getting anywhere or don't feel emotionally connected to your work. The exact opposites of flow.

Flow is that realisation that you lost track of time for several minutes/hours, because you were fully immersed in the moment.

It only shows up when we actively care about, and are completely engaged with, whatever we're doing.

Mental health? Flow has the opposite characteristics of anxiety (like a mute inner monologue...), it's as present as you can be;
and you don't get into it without doing something purposeful that requires your full engagement, and feels like you're accomplishing something. Studies have found it to be a strong predictor of life satisfaction.

Growth? A trigger to truly be in a flow state is that you're challenging yourself. Our brains don't sink into this blissfully present and focused state if the task doesn't require all of our efforts! (Technically, the task is meant to be just sliiightly beyond our current abilities).

Performance? It's been shown to cut the 10,000 hour rule in HALF. Productivity also skyrockets in flow.

Skiing is my primary source of daily flow, however I seek it out in a variety of areas to ensure my 🧠 feels nourished.
Creative work (writing, mostly), lifting, running, working, reading, cooking, & stimulating conversations.

Anecdotally, in the most stressed/anxious/flat period of my life a few years ago, I couldn't get into flow for months at a time.

I've seen an almost linear correlation between flow and thriving; learning about it changed my life.

Prompt for reflection: how often, and in how many ways, do you experience a flow state?