The New Man: Episode 71: Guy Sengstock Pt 2 - Are you trying to get something from the world?
Are you spending your day trying to GET money, ass or attention?
Do you accumulate things in order to feel better about yourself?
And how could you earn a living by helping others transform their lives for the better?
This week, Guy Sengstock is back for part 2 of our talk on finding your purpose and mission in life.
We’re back with Guy Sengstock in our exploration of how to find your purpose or mission in life. In this episode, Guy shares his own personal story of revealing his passion and gifts.
We also make some powerful distinctions around how men use the world as a place to GET SOMETHING -- money, sex, attention, validation, etc. The flip side is seeing the world as a place to EXPRESS SOMETHING -- namely your talents and abilities to provide value or positively impact others.
Guy also walks us through a preview of his year long transformational coaching program. This is a great offering to consider if you’re looking to make some major changes in your life AND develop some skills to earn a living by helping others.
For more information on this year long transformational coaching visit:
http://www.AuthenticManProgram.com/TCLT/
Or contact Guy Sengstock at (415) 290-8385 or guy@aretecenter.com
For more information on what Circling is:
http://blog.authenticmanprogram.com/2009/05/24/guy/#comments
In this episode:
- How Guy found his purpose by following his heart
- Going to art school in San Francisco
- How Circling came to be
- Being gifted at something
- Feeling more alive giving the gift
- Following where he felt most alive
- Following his deepest desire
- The difficulty of speaking your purpose/mission
- How you make your money, the people you hang out with
- The importance of having other men in your life
- The need for feedback from others
- Humans are the only creatures who can lie to ourselves
- The Narcissus Myth
- Falling in love with the reflection
- Agonizing over a yearning for the reflection
- You already are what you’ve been searching for
- You’ve found your purpose when it’s not outside of you “to get”
- A BMW or Confidence
- We want things because of the experience we think they will provide
- What is an expression of your confidence?
- Are you trying to get something from the world?
- Or are you trying to express something in the world?
- Look at what you’re currently doing in life
- Why am I really doing this?
- Start to be brutally honest with yourself
- What does that get you?
- Did you choose this?
- If no, what would you choose?
- Coaching, therapy, men’s groups
- David Deida
- Your death bed
- Guy’s year long coaching program
- How to be fully yourself
- Creating transformational moments
- Year long transformational crucible
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The New Man - Episode 71: Guy Sengstock Pt 2 - Are you trying to get something from the world?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Michael Chabon - Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood
Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood
By Michael Chabon
When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they'd been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.
A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs, pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, "The Star-Spangled Banner," Harriet Tubman, Antietam. And when you went out into those woods behind our house, you could feel all that history, those battles and dramas and romances, those stories. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home. My friends and I spent hours there, braves, crusaders, commandos, blues and grays.
But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the Forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors' yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates' houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers.
Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo's neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack—Bongo was late for dinner again. Between mother and son lay the hazards—labeled angry dogs, roving gang of hooligans, girl with a crush on bongo—of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.
Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.
This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.
A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy presents a chilling version of this world in its depiction of Cittàgazze, a city whose adults have all been stolen away. Then there is the very rich vein of children's literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time. I'm thinking of the Encyclopedia Brown books, the Great Brain books, the Henry Reed and Homer Price books, the stories of the Mad Scientists' Club, a fair share of the early works of Beverly Cleary.
As a kid, I was extremely fond of a series of biographies, largely fictional, I'm sure, that dramatized the lives of famous Americans—Washington, Jefferson, Kit Carson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone—when they were children. (Boys, for the most part, though I do remember reading one about Clara Barton.) One element that was almost universal in these stories was the vast amounts of time the famous historical boys were alleged to have spent wandering with bosom companions, with friendly Indian boys or a devoted slave, through the once-mighty wilderness, the Wilderness of Childhood, entirely free of adult supervision.
Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington's adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain—it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time—and I think this is my key point—absolutely familiar to me.
The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.
The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to Chicago maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on book tours, and yet I still don't know my North Shore from my North Side, because every time I've visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the city's wonders and hazards. State Street, Halsted Street, the Loop—to me it's all a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car.
This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine-year-old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine-year-old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.
The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been aban- doned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children's lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.
The endangerment of children—that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.
What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children's imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?
There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn't encounter a single other child.
Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?
Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
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Monday, July 13, 2009
Combat Psychology and Sports Performance by Craig Weller
Combat Psychology and Sports Performance
by Craig Weller
Guillotine choke: Not as simple in a fight as it was in practice.
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." — Mike Tyson
Picture a large plastic zip tie, about an inch wide. The smaller versions are sometimes used to tie garbage bags; soldiers and police officers use the large ones to restrain people. Anyone could figure out how to thread a zip tie: You put the little end through the hole and pull on it.
In 2001, psychologists from Yale and the U.S. Army imposed this task as part of a scenario conducted in a study with a group of Army Special Forces soldiers. During the scenario, the soldiers who had not pre-threaded their flex cuffs in advance found themselves almost incapable of using them.
What went wrong? Surely this wasn't an inept group of men. They're some of the toughest, most highly trained in the world; the reason for their failure couldn't possibly be inability.
Something beyond physical skills comes into play.
Come Out Fighting
If you're a mixed martial artist, you'll know how to do an armbar and a triangle choke. If you're a football player, you know that you can catch a football or tackle an opponent who dares to do such a thing in your area of the field. If you're a climber, you know how to pull gear off your harness with one hand, place it, and clip your rope into it.
You've done these things thousands of times, and know how to do them well.
Yet numerous people have found themselves suddenly incapable of doing something as simple as dialing 911. They forget the tiniest details, like the need to dial 9 for an outside line, or they inexplicably call 411 over and over.
In my first MMA fight in San Diego, I found myself repeatedly locking my opponent into a guillotine choke, yet I was unable to finish the choke and submit him. I lost the fight by a single point after going into overtime.
Only afterwards did I realize that I'd been keeping my opponent's arm inside the choke and leaving one side of his neck open. It was a mistake that I'd probably made countless times in training, but had always had the presence of mind to correct.
I could lock this choke out smoothly in a training environment, so why couldn't I think well enough to do the same thing during the fight, in front of thousands of people? Why couldn't the Special Forces guys figure out how to thread their flex cuffs? How could a person possibly forget how to dial 911?
Performance Degradation
The scenario being conducted by the Special Forces soldiers was a close-quarters combat (CQC) simulation. It involved urban warfare with their real weapons loaded with paint bullets, hand-to-hand combat with role players wearing impact-reduction suits, an overwhelming noise stimulus, and poor, macabre lighting.
At random intervals throughout the scenario, the SF operators would, without warning, receive a significant pain stimulus to the upper body via an electric shock in order to simulate a gunshot wound.
Under this level of stress, the warriors were incapable of performing unrehearsed complex motor skills, such as threading their zip cuffs to subdue their adversaries.
The same performance degradation occurs with the person trying to dial 911, the climber who bumbles repeatedly while hanging from his fingertips at the crux of a dangerous route, and a fighter who suddenly realizes that what he knows in the gym is not what he knows in the ring.
The skills you possess in a calm, controlled environment will probably not be the skills you possess when it really matters. The impact of stress may mean the difference between victory and defeat, a clean climb and a jarring fall, or even life and death.
The good news is that the effects of stress can, to some extent, be controlled.
Your Body Under Stress
"Fear makes men forget, and skill that cannot fight is useless." — Brasidas of Sparta
The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the body's energy reserves during times of stress. It neutralizes processes controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system, such as digestion, while ramping up secretion of adrenaline and noradrenaline, dilating bronchial tubes in the lungs, tensing muscles, and dilating heart vessels.
It also causes your heart rate to increase.
There's a direct relation between stress-induced heart rate and both mental and physical performance. Too low, such as when you're just waking up, and you can't think or react very quickly. Too high, and one's ability to think and perform motor skills degrades.
Dave Grossman, a psychology professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, former Army Ranger, and author of the book On Killing, uses a color-coded graph to categorize the effects of heart rate on performance.
Heart Rate (BPM) Condition Effects 60-80 White/Yellow Normal resting heart rate >115 Fine motor skill deteriorates 115-145 Red Optimal performance level for complex motor skills and visual and cognitive reaction time >145 Complex motor skills deteriorate 145-175 Gray Black-level performance degradation may begin >175 Black Cognitive processing deteriorates
Blood vessels constrict
Loss of peripheral vision
Loss of depth perception
Loss of near vision
Auditory exclusionGrossman calls the earliest stages of this spectrum Condition White. The boundary between here and the next stage, Condition Yellow, is more psychological than physiological.
We first see major physiological changes around 115 beats per minute. Between here and roughly 145 bpm is Condition Red, which is the range in which the body's complex motor skills and reaction times are at their peak.
Next is Condition Gray, which is where major performance degradations begin to show.
Above 175 bpm is Condition Black, which is marked by extreme loss of cognitive and complex motor performance, freezing, fight or flight behavior, and even loss of bowel and bladder control. Here, gross motor skills such as running and charging are at their highest.
Remember, these effects are the product of psychologically induced stress, not physical stress. An increased heart rate doesn't necessarily mean that you're under psychological stress — you can run a few sets of wind sprints and get your heart rate around 200 beats per minute without forgetting how to use your cell phone.
These lines, however, aren't drawn with permanent marker. It's possible to push the envelope of complex motor-skill performance under stress right up to the edge of Condition Black. It's also possible to reach Condition Black for its gross motor-skill performance benefits, such as sprinting or deadlifting, and then quickly recede to a calmer state to allow nervous system recovery.
This generally occurs with specific, well-rehearsed skills. For example, studies done on top Formula One drivers found that their heart rates averaged 175 bpm for hours on end. These drivers perform a limited set of finely tuned skills with extraordinary speed, under a good deal of stress.
Likewise, the top performers in the Special Forces study had maximum heart rates of 175, while those who were slightly less proficient typically had max heart rates of 180 bpm. In both cases, 175 is the maximal rate before high-level performance drops off.
At a certain point, an increased heart rate becomes counterproductive because the heart can no longer take in a full load of blood, resulting in less oxygen delivered to the brain. That, in theory, could be the cause of the performance decrease seen above 175 bpm.
Stress Inoculation
"No man fears to do that which he knows he does well." — Duke of Wellington
As defined by Dave Grossman in another of his books, On Combat, stress inoculation is a process by which prior success under stressful conditions acclimatizes you to similar situations and promotes future success.
In a classic stress inoculation study, rats were divided into three groups. The first group was taken directly from their cages, dropped into a tub of water, and observed with a timer. It took 60 hours for all of them to drown.
The second group was taken out of their cages and held upside down to create stress. After the rats gave up on kicking and squirming and their nervous systems went into parasympathetic backlash, they were placed in the tub of water. This group lasted 20 minutes before drowning.
The last group was given the same upside-down stress treatment, and then placed back into their cages to recuperate. This was repeated several times until the rats became accustomed to the stressor. Finally, the rats were taken out, given the stress treatment and placed immediately in the water. They swam. For 60 hours.
The repeated bouts of stress allowed the rats to become inoculated against the stressor. Even with an event that had cut the lifespan of the previous group down to 20 minutes, the third group was able to perform at the same level as the group that faced no stress at all.
Immunizing Your System
There are many forms of stress inoculation, and to be most effective, they must be precisely geared toward one's chosen activity. Fighters inoculate themselves by simulating a fight through sparring. Firefighters are inoculated against fire by being exposed to it repeatedly. Skydivers eventually develop a high level of familiarity and comfort with great heights.
As a member of a U.S. military Special Operations force, I know that we wanted our training to be as realistic as possible. Military training has improved steadily since WWI, moving toward increasingly realistic targets. The closer the training scenario resembles the real thing, the greater the performance carryover will be.
This is called simulator fidelity: Switching from simple bull's-eye targets to silhouettes and then to 3D pop-ups was one such evolution, but we would take this a step further.
The first time I jammed a magazine loaded with blue paint bullets into my assault rifle, dove out of an ambushed car, and fired them at a living person while sprinting for cover, it scared the hell out of me. I had such tunnel vision that I could barely see the person I was shooting at, let alone aim. After several repetitions, however, I was able to stabilize myself, turn toward the oncoming fire, and hit my target.
Despite the necessary specificity, there's still a general carryover. Adapting yourself to a stressful situation seems to create a sort of "stress immune system," which allows greater tolerance and more rapid adaptation to other stressful situations.
In On Combat, Grossman cites an example of a full-contact fighter who joined his team for CQC weapons training in a kill house. During the first engagement, the fighter's heart rate shot to 200 bpm, and he dropped his weapon. However, his background in facing other stressful situations allowed him to adapt relatively quickly. By the end of the day, he was performing superbly.
Learning a Motor Skill
The field of neuroscience has a variety of theories on how learning occurs and exactly how the brain functions to create a conscious, intelligent human.
Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence and inventor of the Palm Pilot, has developed a theory that the brain is not a computer (a commonly attempted analogy), but in fact a system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world.
The brain remembers sequences of events and their nested relationships, and then makes predictions based on those memories.
These memories are stored in the neocortex, a two-millimeter-thick sheath that coats your brain. Its 30 billion nerve cells contain all your skills, knowledge, and life experiences. (Fun fact: For all the similarities in brain structure across the animal kingdom, mammals are the only ones with a neocortex. Suck that, reptiles!)
Now let's talk about how you learn and remember motor patterns, so you can understand what's happening when someone throws a ball at your head and you grab it without having to perform physics calculations to figure out that it's on a collision course with your teeth.
The neocortex is divided into six layers that function in a hierarchy. Each layer attempts to store and recall sequences, with higher layers having the ability to put together more comprehensive sequences or concepts than lower layers.
For instance, say you're grappling in a jiu jitsu match. You see an opening, and "triangle choke" flashes through the upper level of your neocortex. This command is passed down to the next layer, which breaks the concept down into the further sequences: "Drag one arm, throw leg over neck, shift hips."
At the next layer in your cortex, these commands are broken down further: "Tighten fingers around opponent's wrist, and pull in such a way as to prevent him from posturing up and escaping."
Now let's say that your opponent pulls out of the triangle choke. The predicted sequence being performed is supposed to end with your opponent being choked and submitted, but it doesn't match the reality. So the new sensory data is passed back up the hierarchy until a suitable sequence is found and passed back down again.
Too Much Information
If you've ever taught someone a movement in the weight room, you've probably been frustrated by the process. Teaching someone a kettlebell swing involves a number of cues which, for an experienced lifter, are ingrained so well and so low in the cortex that they can be carried out without conscious thought.
Not so with the newbie, whose upper neocortex is at full tilt processing and associating commands like "keep your heels on the ground," "neutral spine," and "fire your glutes." This is often when you'll hear the trainee say things like, "There's so much to remember at once."
Within the newbie cortex, the uppermost level is occupied just trying to ingrain one of those completely foreign commands. This doesn't leave room for much else, since the higher a pattern must go to be recognized, the more regions of the cortex must become involved. The sensory feedback in response to those actions is completely novel, so the patterns from something as simple as putting one's heels on the ground create countless new associations.
After a while, the cortex will be able to associate a variety of new sensations with expected forms of feedback. Now, when the trainee hears the command, his cortex will be able to predict what it will feel like to carry it out.
The command can now be relegated to a lower level of the hierarchy, freeing the upper levels to process other commands. The more associations brought on by repetitions of a movement, the lower in the cortical hierarchy the pattern can be relegated.
Think of the first time you ever rode a bicycle. It took all of your conscious energy. But after countless repetitions under varying conditions, you can do it while talking to your buddy about the worlds dirtiest strip club (it's in Mexico, in case you're wondering) — even if something unexpected comes up, like grandma walking in front of your bicycle.
This is why repetitions are so crucial in learning a motor skill. More repetitions equal more associations and a more strongly ingrained motor pattern.
Quality Matters
We know that repetitions create auto-associative memories within the cerebral cortex, which in turn dictate behavior. This process happens for everything, from shooting a basketball to lifting a barbell to throwing a punch.
Since you're ingraining a pattern with each repetition, it's crucial that any sort of technique be drilled flawlessly. Even in a controlled environment, with a punching bag for an opponent, poor technique in training will be reproduced when it matters. You can't train sloppy and then expect to perform well.
Even if two different motor patterns are ingrained, the act of deciding between the two and discarding the poor one will slow reaction time and performance. A study conducted in 1952 by W.E. Hicks found that increasing the range of potential responses from one to two slowed down reaction time by 58%.
This is why running backs are taught to cover and protect the football at all times, even when they're just practicing and nobody's trying to strip it away. For the same reason, a shooter in the military or law enforcement will never place his finger on the trigger of his weapon until he's made the decision to fire.
When the trained motor pattern is relegated to subconscious thought, there can be no question that it will be carried out correctly.
Navigating a New World
So let's say you've been training, practicing, and grooving the necessary motor patterns for your sport or profession. You're ready, and you step into the ring, onto the field, or into the kill house.
You've just entered a new world.
The patterns ingrained in your cortex will be largely unassociated with this new, stressful environment, unless it's been simulated using stress inoculation.
The higher stress levels and the overwhelming sensory feedback from the ongoing situation are going to occupy the highest regions of your cerebral cortex. Your only available motor patterns will be those that have been relegated lower in the hierarchy. If you've just learned a new skill, now would not be the time to rely on it.
Complex motor control is going to diminish as your heart rate increases; the exact heart rate at which this happens will depend on your level of fitness and the degree to which you're inoculated against stress.
As motor control drops off, the first patterns you'll lose are those that haven't been strongly ingrained low in the hierarchy. This applies to the ones with the most variations, the ones you've rehearsed with the fewest repetitions, or those you've learned in environments that least resemble this one.
During my first MMA fight, my immediately available motor patterns were only the simplest: punch, kick, charge, clinch. Even something as elementary as a guillotine choke took on sudden complexity. In my adrenaline-fueled state of mind, I kept making the same mistake as hard and fast as I could.
The same thing occurred with the Special Forces soldiers who found themselves clumsily trying to jam a zip cuff together. The pattern hadn't been rehearsed well enough to be recallable under high stress, and was temporarily lost.
Those who wanted to dial 911 and found themselves listening to a 411 message over and over again were repeating the pattern of keys most heavily ingrained. Their cortex knew they had to dial a three-digit number and went with what it could immediately recall.
The 911 pattern hadn't been ingrained through physical repetition. This is why it's actually a good idea to have your family members practice this. (Just remember to disconnect the phone first.)
The 16-Second Solution
There are three basic ways to combat the effects of stress on physical performance:
• Stress inoculation
• Quality motor-skill repetition in an environment of high simulator fidelity
• BiofeedbackI've already discussed the first two, which brings me to biofeedback, the process of consciously regulating the body's normally subconscious functions.
In On Combat, Grossman teaches a technique called tactical breathing.
Next time you're under stress and feel your heart rate picking up uncontrollably, take four full seconds to draw a deep breath. Hold that breath for four seconds, and then exhale for the next four seconds. Pause for another four seconds before repeating the entire 16-second sequence at least three times.
This practice will immediately slow your heart rate and bring your stress response under control. You'll feel mental clarity and manual dexterity return, and it'll be easier to recall previously ingrained motor skills.
Using Condition Black to Your Advantage
Gross motor skills like sprinting, charging, and picking up really heavy stuff are at their peak in Condition Black, as I've mentioned. That's why you see powerlifters slapping each other, yelling, and generally making a ruckus before a big lift. It's intentional nervous system arousal.
According to a study coauthored by Grossman, these performance benefits peak within 10 seconds. That is, if you need to perform your task within 10 seconds of reaching Condition Black, with your heart rate exceeding 175 bpm, you'll get 100 percent of the benefits. But after 30 seconds you get just 55%. It's down to 35% after 60 seconds, and 31% after 90 seconds. It takes a minimum of three minutes of rest for the nervous system to fully recover from this ordeal.
Prior to a big lift, you can maximize your gross motor skills by artificially inducing stress and creating sympathetic nervous system arousal. For the greatest benefit, you'll have to time it well so that you take your position on the bar right around the 10-second mark.
Afterwards, in order to prevent subsequent drops in nervous-system arousal, allow for at least three minutes of rest. This is where tactical breathing can come in handy, as it can bring your arousal levels back to normal and speed recovery.
Wrapping Up: Preparation Is Power
Sun Tzu wrote, "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
In this case, the enemy is stress, which, as you now know, comes in a variety of flavors. You'll enjoy peak performance in complex motor skills and reaction time at Condition Red, when your heart rate is between 115 and 145 bpm. But even then, your fine motor skills are starting to diminish, meaning that you might struggle to tie your shoe even though you're at the top of your game.
As your heart rate rises above 145 bpm, you might see a real drop in your ability to do the things you can do perfectly well in practice and other less stressful situations. And when you get past 175 bpm, you might not be able to do anything precisely the way you've been trained to do it.
But even then, in Condition Black, you could hit a personal record in the bench press or deadlift, as long as you start the lift within 10 seconds of reaching that state of nervous-system arousal.
And you can mitigate the negative effects of all these states of stressful agitation by practicing your skills and your craft within the parameters in which they'll be most difficult to perform. That's why coaches whose teams are about to play in notoriously hostile arenas will try to simulate that environment in practice by bringing in noise machines or deliberately throwing distractions at their players. And it's why elite military units go as far as they can to simulate battle zones before the soldiers are forced to perform their duties inside a real one.
But, as Sun Tzu wrote, it's not enough to understand the conditions in which you'll have to perform. You have to understand how you react to those conditions. That takes more than practice. It takes the right kind of practice.
The reward? When you perfect your game under properly simulated conditions, you'll be invincible.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
The New Man - How to Find Your Purpose or Mission
How to Find Your Purpose or Mission
07/07/2009 09:43 AM
Is your job a place to just make money or is it something you deeply love?
Do you ever find yourself at work wondering, “What in the hell am I doing?”
And -- be honest -- why are you living the life you’re living? Is it a reflection of what you deeply desire or has it just happened?
This week Guy Sengstock returns to The New Man Podcast to talk about how to find your purpose in life.
Guy Sengstock (coach, Arete Creator and Co-Owner of Authentic SF) joins us to talk about how to find your purpose or mission in life. Guy’s purpose (and career) is basically to help others find their purpose; so who better to have in the hot seat?
We discuss how men get caught up in the WHAT of their lives -- the emails, the to do list, the accomplishments. And yet we have a deeper connection to WHY we do them. This leaves us feeling drained and burdened instead of alive and energized.
Join us as we fumble f--k our way through an exploration of this critical process in a man’s life.
Click here to listen.
For more information on Guy’s year long transformational coaching training visit:
http://www.AuthenticManProgram.com/TCLT/
Or contact Guy Sengstock at (415) 290-8385 or guy@aretecenter.com
For more information on what Circling is:
http://blog.authenticmanprogram.com/2009/05/24/guy/#comments
In this episode:
- The Circling Process
- Purpose
- Finding your mission
- Helping others find their purpose
- Trying to find your purpose kinda screws it up
- The danger of not listening to yourself
- Living under the ultimate male-illusion
- “If you work hard enough one day it’ll be over”
- David Deida
- Striving to feel release, bliss
- Finding the answer means finding freedom
- Men are lost in the content of our lives
- To Do Lists, Jobs, Details, the Grindstone
- Getting lost in emails
- How do you feel after your work?
- Purpose equals context
- Purpose is why you’re doing what you’re do
- Purpose is not the accomplishment
- Year Long Coaching Program
- When work becomes a burden
- The difference between work and living your purpose
- Why are you doing what you do?
- What do you really want?
- What is my desire?
- Separating your voice from the voices of others
- Parents, Friends, Society
- Having the balls to ask these questions
- You always have a “why” for the things in life
- Is it your “why”?
- Your current life supports you to stay where you are
- Feeling drained or burdened indicates you’re not living your purpose
- Start to get honest with yourself
- Be willing to admit that you don’t know what is driving you
- What gives your actions meaning?
- Start with what is your purpose right now?
- Are you living someone else’s life?
- Doing what your told?
- Defying what your told?
- Everything I do is something I’ve consciously do from the heart
- Discovering your prison cell is elating
- You’re not locked in your prison cell
- The beginning of choice
- You can only make choices for things that you’re aware of
- There’s more possible
- Continuously waking up
- Not a utopia
- Is your “why” a chosen why?
Click here to listen.
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Friday, July 10, 2009
Real Men Don't Drink Budweiser, Miller, or Coors
Dark Roasted Blend takes a look at the world of specialty beers, a topic many men should know more about, right up therewith single malt scotch and good wines.
Cheers to Beers!
Cheers to Beers – The weird, the fascinating, the potent and the expensive, from around the world
A selection of beers from around the world that simply boggle the mind
(images via)
Beer is the most popular beverage in the world after water and tea and had been produced for thousands of years. The Alulu Tablet, from the ancient Kingdom of Ur, in what is now Southern Iraq, refers to a “best” beer and dates from 2050 BC.
Babylonian clay tablets from 4300 BC show detailed beer recipes and beer was also brewed by the ancient Chinese, Assyrians, Incas and in ancient Egypt. In 1996, Scottish and Newcastle breweries in the UK used a 3,200-year old recipe found in the sun temple of Queen Nefertiti to brew a thousand bottles of Tutankhamun Ale:
Tutankhamun Ale, The Alulu Tablet (images via 1, 2)
The dawn of commercial beer production was in Germany around 1200 and in 1516, the famous Purity Law came into effect, which determined the only ingredients permissible in beer were water, barley, wheat and hops. The bottling of beer began in the early seventeenth century and today, some 20,000 different brands of beer are brewed in an almost bewildering 180 styles all around the world, including ales, lagers, pilsners, stouts, bitters, cream ales and more.
Owing to the sheer number of different beers produced around the world, for this article, I have focused on just a few of the planet’s more noteworthy beers, whether in terms of the brewing process, alcoholic strength, unusual flavours, distinctive names or other reasons that made them really stand out.
Strong beers
Despite its name, barley wine is a type of ale, with strength of between 8 and 12%, which was first brewed in England in the nineteenth century, but is now produced in many other countries as well. Barley wines can be amber to deep reddish-browns in colour. It may seem a little confusing, but these ales are called ‘barley wine’ because they are often comparable in strength to a wine. However, because their main ingredient is grain rather than fruit, they are really beers. Unlike more traditional beers, barley wine is designed for slow sipping, like a white, red or blush wine, rather than as an instant thirst quencher.
Thomas Hooker Barley Wine, Gold Label Tennant Brothers (images via 1, 2)
Back in the eighties and nineties, the alcohol content of beers climbed steadily. Vetter 33, for example, has a 10.5% abv, while Samichlaus, produced in Switzerland, was at one time considered the world’s strongest beer at 14% abv. The strongest beer brand in current production is Eisbock from Germany, which has 14% ethanol by volume.
Samichlaus, Aventinus Eisbock (images via 1, Patrick Hirlehey)
Baz’s Super Brew, made by Parish Brewery in the UK, is a 23% abv beer and Delaware’s Dogfish Head’s World Wide Stout, with a 21% abv, was sold at UK Safeway locations in 2003. Hair of the Dog’s Dave, at a mind numbing 29% abv, is a barley wine first produced in 1994 and considered to be the strongest beer ever made at the time:
Hair-of-the-Dog, Millennium and Utopia, (images via 1, 1)
In recent years, some brewers have made use of champagne yeast to significantly increase the alcohol content of their beers. Millennium, produced by Samuel Adams, had a 20% abv, but they increased this still further with the 25.6% abv Utopia. However, this beer has a malt, maple-syrup type of flavor that more closely resembles port, so it’s really more like a liqueur than a beer.
Beers that burn a hole in your pocket
If you consider yourself a beer connoisseur and feel like splashing out a little, take a trip to a bar called the Bierdrome in London, the only place in the world where you can buy a custom super-magnum bottle of Vielle Bon Secours for around £500 or $1000. The world’s most expensive beer, this bottle costs an astounding $78 a pint - more info:
(images credit: Edu Passarelli, 2)
Not too far behind in terms of price is Jacobsen Vintage No. 1, produced by Carlsberg of Denmark, a limited edition 10.5% abv barley wine. Only 600 bottles were brewed, priced at around $350 each and primarily marketed to up-scale restaurants in Copenhagen and of course the very wealthy beer drinker.
(image via)
Beers that might burn a hole in your stomach
Produced in Arizona, Cave Creek Chili Beer, with a real chili pepper in each bottle, could possibly burn a hole in your stomach if you decided to consume more than a couple of bottles:
(images credit: Doctor Rose, 2)
Dogfish Head Chicory Stout is a rich and spicy beer, whose ingredients include Mexican coffee, roasted chicory and licorice root. It apparently has a distinct coffee aftertaste, with a hint of cloves.
Dogfish Head Chicory Stout , Rogue Chipotle Ale (images via 1, 2)
Rogue Chipotle Ale is an Oregon ale with a smoky, slightly bitter flavour. It’s actually brewed with chipotle chilies, which you don’t really taste at first, but then feel a real kick just after you swallow.
Unusual flavours
Lindemans Kriek Cherry Lambic is a dark red, Belgian beer, which as the name implies, has a distinct cherry taste. It’s almost like a cherry soda, but has just enough of a beer taste to leave you in no doubt as to it’s true identity:
(images via 1, 2, 3)
In recent years some brewers have added fruit flavours to beer to appeal to traditional non-beer drinkers, particularly women, who represent a largely untapped market for beer. Manufacturers have worked on developing products with sweeter, fruitier and lighter flavours, such as apple, lemon, grapefruit, raspberry, pomegranate or peach, making these beer brands more akin to flavoured alcoholic beverages.
Sea Dog Brewing Company of Maine produces Wild Blueberry Wheat Ale, which has been compared to the taste of a piece of blueberry pie by one reviewer. For the Polish market, Carlsberg has a fruity beer sold under the Karmi brand called Malinowa Pasja Raspberry Flavoured Beer. Basically, it’s a dark beer with raspberry syrup, with hints of caramel as well as raspberries.
(images via 1, 2)
Gösser Brauerei in Austria produces a beer containing 100% natural lemon juice called Gösser Natur Radler, aimed at consumers interested in a light beer with a sweet taste. In the United States, New Belgium Brewing produces a seasonal beer known as New Belgium Springboard Ale, which is brewed with wormwood, goji berries and schisandra.
(images via 1, 2)
Krait Prestige Champagne Lager, claims to be the world’s first champagne lager. It re-ferments in the bottle, which is manufactured to resemble a regular champagne bottle. Targeted to bridge the gap between beer drinkers and those who prefer wine, it combines the taste of both in a very different kind of beer.
(images via 1, 2)
Simply weird beers
Here’s a selection of beers from around the world that simply boggle the mind.
Tom Seefurth’s Mamma Mia Pizza Beer is produced with tomato, garlic, basil and oregano, but unlike the chilli beers, for example, it doesn’t actually come with a slice of pizza stuffed into the bottle. Quite drinkable, according to its reviews, although it has been said to have a slightly artificial taste vaguely reminiscent of chips that are supposedly pizza flavoured.
(images via)
Kwispelbier from the Netherlands is a steak-flavoured beer designed especially for dogs. Yes, dogs. Hard to imagine why someone would come up, with this idea, but it’s non-alcoholic, and really does taste like beef, apparently, although you’d really have to ask the dog. Banana Beer is, not surprisingly, made from bananas, but also includes the fermented juices of sorghum and is brewed in Kenya.
(images via)
What do you get if you combine beer with milk? Bilk of course. In Hokkaido, Japan, when a man in the dairy industry wondered what to do with discarded milk, he suggested that the local brewery could use it to produce a low-malt beer. One third of the product is milk, so it does seem like a good way to use the surplus milk which would otherwise only go to waste. According to reports the beer isn’t that bad, with a somewhat fruity flavour and the brewers hope it might prove popular with women.
(images via)
Chocolate Donut Beer comes from the Shenandoah Brewery in Alexandria, Virginia. Almost as bizarre a combination as pizza beer, this odd brew has nonetheless received good reviews. One stated that it smelled “like you just opened a pack of those cheap waxy corner store chocolate gem donuts”.
Creme Brulee Stout has been compared to dessert in a bottle. Although it isn’t as syrupy as it sounds, it is very sweet, with a subtle stout flavour, but also contains elements of cream, vanilla and maple.
(images via 1, 2)
Tomato flavored beer is produced by Japan’s Echigo brewery. This beer is supposed to have healthy ingredients such as organic tomatoes, and although it’s combined with alcohol, it has 1000 times more vitamin E than normal beer and can act as an antioxidant. This beer may actually be good for you, although no reports on what it tastes like.
(image via)
How about this for a corporate advertising slogan? “Even kids cannot stand life unless they have a drink.” Yes, in Japan there really is beer for children, or rather at least an alcohol free soft drink called Kidsbeer. This beverage began its existence as a regular soda drink called Guarana, based on a Latin American plant. The sweetness was reduced and it became a more frothy drink, in fact, more like beer. The company then decided to produce the drink in brown bottles with old-fashioned style labels modeled on classic Japanese beers for a hint of nostalgia - in the minds of the parents old enough to remember them at least, rather than to the young drinkers the product is aimed at. According to the people responsible for the phenomenally popular Kidsbeer, children will always copy and mimic adults, and now they can all raise a glass together at parties, weddings and other celebrations. Strange stuff, for sure.
Weird beer names
Despite the unusual and at times downright odd flavours mentioned earlier in this article, the simple recipe for beer, based on the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, has remained largely unchanged over the centuries. However, if all beers are generally similar, how does a brewer make its product stand out in the marketplace? With a strange name on the label, of course. There are so many attention grabbing names for beer brands around the world, but here are just a few that caught my eye.
- La Fin du Monde ("End of the World") is from Quebec, a beer for drinking at the end of the world perhaps?
- Fiddler’s Elbow is a wheat beer from the UK and although this is a very catchy name for a beer, Fiddler’s Elbow is also the real name of a tiny village in Wales.
- Old Speckled Hen is the highest-selling premium bottled beer in the UK. An odd name, legend has it that the men who once built MG cars used one particular vehicle to drive around the factory and called this particular model the ‘owld speckled ‘un’. On the famous car’s fiftieth anniversary, the brewery decided to commemorate the occasion with a beer called Old Speckled Hen.
- Seriously Bad Elf is a British version of a Belgian style Tripel beer and with an alcohol content of 9%, this one might even tempt one of Santa’s elves to misbehave.
- The Stone Brewing Company in California is responsible for the curiously named Arrogant Bastard. Is it that good?
- Moose Drool from Montana’s Big Sky Brewing Company tastes nothing like the drool of a moose. However, the name was inspired by a picture of a moose drinking from a lake, which was on the wall of the room when the brewery owners were brainstorming, trying to come up with a name for their latest brew.
- Santa’s Butt Porter is not as offensive as it actually sounds. The name is a reference to a large barrel, known as a butt, and according to reviews, this porter with the odd name is actually very good indeed.
(images via 1, 2, 3, 4)
So there you are. A short, but by no means exhaustive, tour of just some of the weird, the fascinating, the potent and the expensive products available in the wonderful world of beer. If you’re a beer connoisseur and have the good fortune to encounter any of these brews, even the weirder ones, on your travels, enjoy.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Why so many Teen Age Boys are Wimpy, Irresponsible, Unmotivated and Bored . . . One of the Reasons
Why so many Teen Age Boys are Wimpy, Irresponsible, Unmotivated and Bored…One of the Reasons
By Douglas - Posted on July 4th, 2009Recently, on different days, I have had two visitors, both women, who have commented on the lack of initiative or motivation, not to mention the ability to perceive the relationship between cause and effect, among their young male acquaintances. They mention similar lacks among the older young men they know who are still living (nesting) with their parents, and their teen age acquaintances whose only ambition appears to be to get a higher score or position in an online video game. Everything else is boring to them.
They both commented on the ability of these ungrateful young men to take everything from their parents or spouse and give nothing back: no support, no help with family chores, no responsible behavior. As long as they had their car (gifted by their parents), their computer (also a gift) and their meals provided free, they were content with their lives. They went on and on with example after example from different social levels and ethnic groups. I think their drift is clear to you, and you could probably add to the list.
There is a lot to be said for the accuracy of their observations. American boys today are three times as likely to be born with genital abnormalities as American boys in the 60’s. The young male adults today have lower testosterone levels than their grandfathers. Motivation and ambition seem to have declined among our young men at the same time as male infertility is on the rise and the unmarried single mother working miracles of initiative and energy to keep her partnerless existence going for the sake of the child or children is becoming much more common than the old view of a man, a woman and a family as the norm. The family unit is now the exception and in the minority.
Also this week I was sent an article about sexual abnormalities discovered in frogs and alligators in Florida, obviously due to something in the water that was affecting the endocrine systems of these creatures. The article was written in a breathless fashion as though this was an amazing and very recent discovery. Since the effect of endocrine disruptors (ED’s) was known years before 1991 when the term was invented, my only surprise was once again how long it takes what health writers and non corporate scientists know to get into the public view.
An endocrine disruptor is a chemical substance that alters the timing or the normal response of a hormone in the endocrine system by mimicking it. And such substances are very common in America. Chemical industries produce them by the thousands of pounds. And testosterone and estrogen are two of the hormones affected by ED’s.
So, how could these factors be connected to unmotivated teen age boys, as I believe they are? Let’s look just for a moment at spaceship Earth and how things move around on it, a matter that the geographically challenged is not likely to know. Then the connections can be made more clearly.
Twenty one years ago, in 1988 some Canadian scientists collected samples of a brown snow that fell where they were camped near Hudson Bay. They sent it for analysis and asked the meteorologists to calculate where the air mass came from that dumped it. It came from the Gobi desert, just north of China, half way around the world.
Norwegian scientists discovered huge amounts of the pesticide lindane in the air over a group of islands in Norway’s Arctic Circle. It had accumulated from various Asian desert regions. DDT, toxaphane, lead, mercury and radioactive waste have all been discovered in the uninhabited Arctic.
Toxaphane for example is a pesticide banned in all the circumpolar countries. That doesn’t stop the chemical industry from selling it to countries where it isn’t yet banned. India and Guatemala used it in their cotton fields. It is very volatile and those cotton fields are very hot. The vaporized pesticide floats up into the atmosphere where is stays, sometimes for years, before air currents move it northwards, the air cools and down comes toxaphane in the rain. That cycle repeats until it reaches the Arctic.
When the Romans smelted their lead in Italy in the centuries before Christ the furnace fumes went up. Greenland has deposits of that B.C. lead in the glaciers. And cesium 137 from the Chernobyl atomic reactor disaster is now found all over the Canadian Arctic.
The Earth is a space ship. There isn’t anywhere safe to throw anything unsafe.
I hope that everyone reading this already knows how things at the bottom of the food chain become concentrated as they move up the food chain. To review a simple case. Little fish eat tiny algae and zooplankton. Big fish eat small fish. Seals eat the big fish. The vitamin A in the oil of fish that obtained it by eating tiny algae, phytoplankton, is concentrated in the seal that eats hundreds of fish. Its liver is designed to deal with that amount of vitamin A. Then the polar bear eats the seal or seals and its liver too is designed to deal with what is now hundreds of thousands of units of vitamin A per ounce. This phenomenon is called bioaccumulation and takes place everywhere in nature.
Then comes the famous case of the ignorant explorers who killed a polar bear and cooked and ate its liver, as if it came from a deer. Their human livers were not designed to deal with hundreds of thousands of units of vitamin A per ounce of bear liver. That concentration is toxic to humans. Some of them died. So the doctors here began to warn people about the dangers of taking vitamin A, though most people are unlikely to take several full bottles of capsules after every meal. The only thing some doctors knew about vitamins when I began as a health writer was the half truth that ‘you can overdose on vitamin A.’ You can if you are an absolute idiot.
One more background dot. In the northern Pacific Ocean, there is a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents due to a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is a desert in the ocean, called the North Pacific Gyre. You may remember word gyre from the toy gyroscopes we used to get. Due to its lack of large fish and gentle breezes, fishermen and¬ s¬ailors rarely sail through the gyre. But the area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, thousands of tons of it, mostly plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean. It’s in two major blocks, one of them twice the size of Texas.
Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation skimmed the surface of the North Pacific Gyre using a fine-mesh net over an area of more than 100 kilometers. He found it contained six times more plastic by weight than naturally occurring zooplankton. Other researchers found that those plastic bits absorb and concentrate toxins such as PCB’s up to a million times their levels in ambient seawater. Birds and fish eat the bits of plastic because they mistake it for algae or zooplankton. Because the plastic acts as a PCB “magnet," the animals consuming it are getting massive doses of EDs. Being at the top of the food chain, humans have some of the highest EDs concentrations. Bioaccumulation. Nature has no favorites.
OK, those are enough hooks to hang the material on. Now let’s get closer to home than the Pacific and nearer to now than 1991. You already know that important questions cannot be dealt with in six second sound bites. They just tell you what you should say to seem cool or up to date. Sometimes quite a bit of background data is needed before an “obvious” conclusion makes sense.
This took place on the Potomac River in 2006. Most people probably at least know the name Potomac from the legend that Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. Every country has legends in its history. The dollar was first minted in 1794 about five years before Washington died. There was no dollar for the young man to throw across the mile wide Potomac.
Looking at his childhood homestead, perhaps it was the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to the story told by Martha Washington's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, Washington threw a piece of slate, about the size and shape of a dollar, not a actual silver dollar.. While the story has never been historically verified, the feat is a possibility. At the site of the Washington family homestead, the Rappahannock measures only 250 feet across, an impressive but not impossible throwing distance. I and several of my friends could throw a cricket ball that distance as young men, but I certainly couldn’t have thrown something as light as a dollar sized piece of slate that distance.
Since Washington is the site of so much of this country’s and the world’s grief it seems just that the scientific discovery of what may be the basis of so many teen age and young male problems was verified in the Potomac River.
Scientists collected fish from the congested and polluted parts of the river and for scores of miles up its cleaner tributaries. In seven sites they discovered that at least 80% of the male smallmouth bass that they collected were feminized, they were making eggs instead of sperm. A veterinary pathologist specializing in fish concluded that the Potomac River and its tributaries contained large amounts of ‘endocrine disruptors’ the ED’s before mentioned, that mimic the actions in this case of female hormones. Now the hormones themselves aren’t in the river. We don’t yet know exactly what combination of variables produced those results.
Local officials of course said that the water was safe to drink. Though since they didn’t know what was in the water that did the damage they could hardly be sure that they had removed it.
The Washington Post reported on that matter and also on what seemed at the time a separate issue, that more and more young male college and university students around Washington DC are struggling with issues of impotence and disinterest in sex.
This issue is not confined to the Potomac River. Similar stories of feminized wildlife, including mammals have been reported from Florida, as I mentioned before, from the Great Lakes, from Alaska, in Europe and even in Greenland. Could this have anything to do with the attitude to life that so many young men are evincing?
Let’s use the Macrobiotic proverb ‘Every front has a back, and the bigger the front the bigger the back,’ to explore this incursion into male sexuality and motivation by checking on females first.
The first cast iron scientific evidence occurred in Puerto Rico. You must have noticed recently how some ninth grade girls could easily pass as freshmen in college. When I was a boy the girls reached puberty around age thirteen and the boys around age fourteen. The secondary sexual characteristics went along with that schedule. But in the 80’s in Puerto Rico physicians began noticing that girls were going into puberty at about the age of seven or eight. They had the breasts that you would expect to see on thirteen and fourteen year olds.
When it became clear that there were thousands of these girls sprouting up in the San Juan region the endocrinologists joined together to figure out the cause of an undeniable phenomenon.
One of the first things they checked on was the amount of hormones in the meat eaten by the children. Since the 70’s Americans have eaten meat from cattle fed with anabolic steroids, basically sex hormones, to make the animal meatier. Some of these are the same steroids that athletes are told not to take because of he health risks incurred.
There wasn’t a correlation. And the anabolic steroids are usually male hormones anyway.So the next thing tested was the ethnicity factor. They tested Puerto Rican girls living in the Eastern States and those in Puerto Rico. The Eastern State girls didn’t have the precocity. And it wasn’t anything racial or ethnic in Puerto Rico. All the girls in the San Juan area, whatever their race or ethnicity were developing years ahead of Nature’s schedule. So it had to be something very common in San Juan.
Then the scientists picked up on the story of the feminization of the alligators in Florida. The scientists in Florida had already found the cause of the problem there as far as wildlife was concerned, it was the chemical family known as phthalates.
That Scrabble word is short for polyethylene terephthalate, PET for short. You have probably tasted it if you left a plastic bottle of water in the car for a while on a hot day. The tangy taste was some of the phthalate leaching into the water. If you had something like Coke in the bottle with its phosphoric acid content you would have had a stronger taste of the phthalate.
Phthalates mimic the action of female hormones. How did the alligators in Lake Apopka in Florida encounter them. Well Orlando is in the same watershed as Apopka and Disneyland supplies enough plastic bottles for hundreds of them to end up in the Lake. And the hot water leaches out the phthalates and the testicles of the alligators shrivel up.
So the San Juan physicians tested the phthalate blood levels of girls with precocious breast development and those with normal breast development to see if there was any difference there. Pay dirt immediately. The ‘normal’ girls had an average of about 85 parts per billion of phthalate in their blood. The precocious girls had an average of over 500 parts per billion. Note that the ‘normal’ girls had 85 parts per billion of something totally unnatural and in no way a natural part of the human life path.
So an extreme case solved the mystery of why so many girls are now developing at an accelerated rate. Think of the ways in which plastic bottles connect with the lives of American children. From plastic feeding bottles for babies through every kind of beverage sold to the public. The average child is continuously being exposed to modern chemicals that mimic the action of female hormones. Very few mimic the action of male hormones. They obviously accelerate the development of puberty in girls, and the evidence also favors the common sense conclusion that they delay or interfere with the development of puberty in boys.
So nowadays girls have completed their puberty process by age twelve, just about when most boys are getting started.
We aren’t considering just bottled beverages either. Synthetic chemicals delay or slow puberty in boys, and usually only boys. For instance endosulfan is a pesticide used all over. In this country about 750 tons of the stuff is used on food crops every year. In December 2003 scientists discovered that endosulfan blocks the action of testosterone and other androgens in boys, thereby delaying or disrupting their process of puberty. But money is God here. No change in the use of this pesticide and other chemicals that affect only boys has come about.
Well, that’s the gonads, what about the brain? Let’s start with the first drinks. Formula or mother’s milk in a feeding bottle made of rigid plastic. These bottles, used everywhere, leach bisphenol A into the milk or the formula. The bottles are made of polycarbonate and any liquid you put into them will leach bisphenol A into the liquid from the bottle.
Two years to the month after the endosulfan discovery scientists in Cincinnati showed that ANY amount of bisphenol A irreversibly changes brain development in lab animals. And the effects of bisphenol A are not limited to the gonads. Brain areas concerned with memory and motivation are affected, and boys and girls are affected in different ways. Oxford researchers found that the effects are much more pronounced on new born males than females.
Italian researchers discovered that male lab animals exposed to bisphenol A are far less curious about their environment than other animals. They lack curiosity in other words. The young male animals become feminized and not only that, these chemicals damage the nucleus accumbens in the brain, the part definitely associated with motivation that changes emotion into purposive action.
Very young female animals exposed to these chemicals grow up to be more curious and active than very young females not exposed to them. Very young males grow up to be less curious and active when exposed to them. The exposed females often learn some tasks better and faster than the unexposed females and the exposed males learn these tasks less well and more slowly than the unexposed males.
It is now suspected that the soaring rates of ADHD among North American boys in the last twenty years is linked to these chemicals. Scientists have discovered how phthalates and bisphenol A can damage a brain system to cause lab animals to become hyperactive, and unable to slow down, just like the ADHD child.
Do the Dr. Williams thing and find a country that doesn’t have the disease you are trying to cure…China and India have almost no cases of ADHD compared with the US. And water sold in plastic bottles is usually only sold to tourists in those countries.
Boys and girls differ too in their competitive aspects. Successful, high achievers among boys have more testosterone than the boys who don’t care about winning. Boys rely on their hormones for their drive. Girls do not. High achievers among girls don’t have more testosterone than low achievers. The estrogenic chemicals that both sexes are flooded with do not impair the motivation of the girls, but they do make the boys unresponsive and lazy. And more recent discoveries are indicating that these chemicals affect the ability of children to learn.
I’ll just mention that estrogens regulate the size of fat cells. This has been known for dozens of years. Young children of either sex don’t make estrogens. Exposure to estrogens when young increases the chance of obesity. The ‘discovery’ of a totally fictitious obesity gene will be plugged so that Big Pharma can patent a very expensive life long treatment for it.
Look at what we’ve touched on. Delayed puberty, obesity and ADHD occur together much more often than could be expected, but only in boys. One in five boys who had delayed puberty also had ADHD compared with one in thirty girls in the same Harvard study.
And there’s more. By their 15th birthday now some 63.7% of boys have at least one broken bone, compared with 39.1% of girls. The risk of fractures for boys has doubled between the 60’s and the 90’s. Coincidence again? Not likely. Environmental estrogens may strengthen bones in girls but whatever lowers testosterone levels in boys affects the mineralization of their bones.
Maybe you are better off being a boy in the country. Sorry, farmers living in modern agribusiness conditions are heavily exposed to pesticides and fertilizers. They have lower sperm count than men in the big cities, and the big city boys are having lower counts every year.
And those hard to figure out teen age boys have problems ahead of them that their grandfathers didn’t have. They are more likely to have abnormal genitals at birth and are more liable to testicular cancer later on. Today for example, the risk of testicular cancer in Denmark, a very civilized country with LOTS of plastics is about ten times higher than the risk in the less developed Lithuania.
Now we’ve come a long way towards answering some of the reasons that the young male teen will not be the bright and shining citizen you expect. But there are four other major factors too. And for these I refer you to a great book dedicated to this very subject. It’s called Boys Adrift, subtitled, The five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men. By Leonard Sax M.D., Ph.D. I bought mine, used, from Abebooks.com my favourite bookstore, for $1.
I have taught over 10,000 students in all boys’ schools, the kind I was educated in, and coed schools, hospital schools, one of which I founded, coed boarding schools and colleges. I find myself in almost 100% agreement with the author who is a physician and has a PhD in psychology. My two visitors inspired this article and the author gave me some of the recent data I used for one of the factors, the ED’s. And he has some answers to these severe problems too, but listening passively to corporate experts, medical tyrants and educational bureaucrats aren’t among them.