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San Francisco, Paris, Philadelphia Season’s Greetings and Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!

San Francisco, Paris, Philadelphia Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for a Happy New Year!

Paris, 12/18/14 -

"Part of being human is striving to understand your life's purpose -- that single most significant reason for which you were placed here. Most people do not wish to pass through this life quietly, unnoticed and unremembered once they're gone. Most want to leave behind meaningful legacies as proof that they were here and that they mattered enough to somehow impact the world they lived in."

You need to take this with an enormous grain of salt, here's how: 

Disregard all sense of "supposed to." The operative word in the phrase, "make your mark on the world," is "your." Shed outside expectations - anything your family has told you about how doomed your life will be if you don't become a doctor or lawyer, anything your family has told you about the necessity of finding the perfect spouse - to clear your mind and truly assess what will make the most sense for you and your legacy.

Decide what's meaningful to you. Consider what activities you love, ideas you have, ambitions you harbor, causes you're committed to, or current events you stumble across that send the strongest tingles down your spine. 

Assess your natural talents and acquired skill sets. What are you good at that can allow you to contribute most positively and significantly to those people, ideas, causes or activities you've determined as most meaningful? 

Seize the day. every day. 

Maintain conviction, and view challenges not as setbacks, but as obstacles in place to strengthen you, test your resolve and bolster your commitment

So live. enjoy. share. And read on, and enjoy a few more tips to help you along the way. 

-By Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) 

If you feel like you're just marking time instead of making your mark on the world, here's how to step up your game and start making a memorable difference for those around you.

As leaders, we all want to know that we're making a difference, but most of us have to work at overcoming the lesser instincts of the day-to-day.

Here are some things you can do today to begin living your most compelling life:

1. Be bold. Dare to instigate! Take chances, create opportunities, make things happen. Risk greatness.

2. Find your unique self and wear it like a badge of honor. Turn your back on conformity. Figure out what makes you different, and then embrace it. The world needs what you have.

3. Conquer the unknown. Try something new, and don't cringe at fear. Leaving the safe and ordinary is the only way to get to the extraordinary.

4. Be inclusive. The solitary hero is a myth; your allies are your greatest strength. Those who pride themselves on self-reliance have no safety net, and living a one-dimensional story is pretty limiting.

5. Be confident (but not arrogant). Show your self-assurance. Confidence gives voice to your gifts.

6. Be generous with everyone you meet. Generosity isn't just about money. Make introductions, teach what you know, reach out, send a text, share everything you can.

7. Never miss an opportunity to give a compliment. A sincere compliment is among the greatest of gifts. If you admire someone, if someone does something extraordinary (or something ordinary very well), if something goes right, then say so--in public, if possible.

8. Say no so you can say yes. Not everything that comes along is worthwhile, and not every opportunity is right for you. Say no to the things that drag you down to make room for what matters most to you.

9. Practice humility. When you're sincerely humble in your heart and mind, the connections you make with others take on a different tone. Ask questions, listen, stay open, and remember you don't know everything.

10. Stand for something. Leave no room for doubt about your passion for the people, places, and principles that are dear to you. A compelling purpose is a cause worth sharing.

Above all, to become the most compelling version of yourself, look within to find the heart of all that matters to you. Then go live it.

[EDITED: Read More Here > Thank You Inc.]

phil mora

Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) is an Executive Director and VP, Digital Marketing at Hughes Creative, a startup headquartered in San Francisco (hughescreative.net). Obsessed with creativity, fitness, wellness, work-hacking, finance and high-tech, Phil is a thinker, a designer, a doer, a creative, a hacker, and a leader. Find out more about phil at toppgun.net and philmora.com

San Francisco, California

San Francisco, 11/22/14 - 

You don’t have to be a professional athlete or an Olympic champion to be a successful athlete. Nor do you have to have a room full of trophies, win a state championship, or make the front page of the sports section.

What athletes have in common is that their sport is important to them and they’re committed to being the best that they can be within the scope of their limitations – other life commitments, finances, time, and their natural ability. They set high, realistic goals for themselves and train and play hard. They are successful because they are pursuing their goals and enjoying their sport. Their sport participation enriches their lives and they believe that what they get back is worth what they put into their sport.

Here are a few specific mental skills that contribute to success in sports and fitness. 

-By Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) 

In this article, I’m going to talk about “mindset,” which I consider to be an essential contributor to athletic success and a mental area that has only come to light in my work with elite athletes during the past three years. This topic is also where professional and Olympic athletes offer wonderful examples in which they use different mindsets to perform at their highest level consistently.

Let me preface this discussion by clarifying that my use of the word mindset is different from the use of mindset popularized by the Stanford University researcher Carol Dweck (a perspective, I might add, that is consistent with my own and one that can also help athletes achieve their  competitive goals).

When I talk about mindset, I mean what is going on in your head just before you begin a competition, whether on the field, course, court, track, what-have-you. What happens in your mind during that oh-so-important period sets the stage for whether you perform to the best of your ability.

I have found three mindsets that the best athletes appear to use most. There may be others (and please let me know if you think of any), but I find these three to be the most common.

Aggressive

In an interview after her first World Cup victory of this season, Mikaela Shiffrin, the 19-year-old alpine ski racing prodigy who has already won Olympic and World Championship gold medals, indicated how “I’m trying to take more of an aggressive mindset” that helped her overcome her pattern of relatively sluggish skiing in the first half of race runs.

When I talk about an aggressive mindset, I don’t mean that athletes should try to hurt their opponents. Rather, I think of aggressiveness as a mindset in which athletes are proactive, assertive, and forceful, for example, driving hard to the hoop in basketball, going for a risky shot in golf or tennis, or setting a fast pace in a marathon.

This aggressive mindset is often needed for athletes to shift from solid performance to exceptional performance because it allows them to take their performances to the next level, particularly for those who aren’t naturally aggressive in how they perform. For example, I worked with a top NFL draft pick at linebacker who was so gentle off the field that he wasn’t able to naturally “take it to” the offense while playing. For him to be successful in the NFL, he needed to adopt an aggressive mindset.

An aggressive mindset can be so valuable because many sports these days have become “combat sport,” meaning that opponents or competitive conditions are trying to literally or figuratively beat athletes. Athletes do battle not only with opposing teams and players, but also weather and field court, or course conditions. Only by assuming an aggressive mindset do some athletes have a chance to vanquish those enemies.

An aggressive mindset can be developed in several ways. First, you’re more likely to perform aggressively if your body is amped up a bit more than usual. You can raise your physical intensity with more movement during practice, in your pre-competitive routines, and just before you begin to compete. Simply moving more and being more dynamic in your movements will help you shift to a more aggressive mindset.

Second, you can use high-energy self-talk to instill that aggressive mindset. You can see this practice used regularly in football locker rooms and before weightlifting competitions. Examples include: “Let’s go! Attack! Charge! Bring it!” What you notice is not only what you say, but how you say it. So, your aggressive self-talk should sound, well, aggressive. No pussy cats here; only tigers, lions, and panthers allowed.

Third, you can incorporate an aggressive mindset into mental imagery in which you see and feel yourself competing aggressively which, in turn, helps create more attacking thinking, focus, and feeling.

Calm

A calm mindset is typically best for athletes who get nervous before they compete. Throughout your pre-competitive preparations and when about to begin a competition, your primary goal is to settle down and relax, thus allowing your mind to let go of doubt and worry and your body to be free of nerves and tension. Additionally, a calm mindset can be valuable for athletes who are naturally aggressive and don’t need to take active steps to get into attack mode.

A calm mindset can be created in several ways. First, it’s difficult to have a calm mind if your body is anxious, so focusing on relaxing your body is a good start. Deep breathing and muscle relaxation are two good tools you can use to calm your body.

Second, you can use mental imagery in which you see and feel yourself being calm before a competition. This imagery has a direct physiologically relaxing effect on both your body and mind.

Third, calming and reassuring self-talk can ease your tension, for example, “Easy does it. Cool, calm, and collected. Chillin’ before I’m thrillin’” (I just made that up!). Relaxing self-talk can take the edge off of your nerves giving you the comfort and confidence to perform your best.

Clear

A clear mind involves having basically nothing related to performing going on in your mind before a competition. The athletes who use a clear mindset are those you see before a competition talking to coaches, teammates, or even their competition. They are often smiling, dancing around, chatting it up, or singing to themselves. These athletes can use a clear mindset because they are incredibly talented natural athletes and have years of experience that allow them to trust their bodies completely to perform their best without any interference from their minds.

A clear mind is most suited for athletes who are intuitive (meaning they don’t have to think about their sport very much to perform their best), free spirited (meaning they go with the flow rather than being really structured in their approach to their sport), and experienced (meaning they have a lot of confidence and trust in their capabilities from many years and successes).

You create a calm mindset by thinking about anything except your sport. Talking to others around you, thinking about someone or something that makes you feel good, and listening to music in your head are several ways you can keep your mind clear, thus preventing it from getting in the way of your body performing its best.

Mindset, like all mental states, requires several steps to instill and master. First, you have to experiment to figure out which mindset will work best for you. Second, you need to make a commitment to adopting an ideal mindset. Third, you must focus on your desired mindset in practice and competitions to create that mindset. And, finally, you need repetition in practice and competitions to ingrain your ideal mindset so deeply that, when you begin the most important competition of your life, that mindset just clicks on and it enables you to perform your very best.

[EDITED: Read More Here > Thank You Psychology Today]

phil mora

philmora.com

Digital Marketing + Creative Design

Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) is an Executive Director and VP, Digital Marketing at Hughes Creative, a startup headquartered in San Francisco (hughescreative.net). Obsessed with creativity, fitness, wellness, work-hacking, finance and high-tech, Phil is a thinker, a designer, a doer, a creative, a hacker, and a leader. Find out more about phil at toppgun.net and philmora.com

San Francisco, California

San Francisco, 11/02/14 - Functional Age vs. Subjective Age: Your Fitness Age is the One that Really Counts as new research on the concept of fitness age shows that you’re more in control than you think of the way your body keeps track of time. The good news is that unlike your actual age, your fitness age can decrease. -By Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum)

Many people would agree that we benefit from the increased experience that getting older brings. However, with each passing year, the aging of the body creates its own difficulties in everyday life. There are the inevitable aches, strains, and pains of our aging bones, joints, and muscles not to mention changes in appearance that make it more difficult to feel accepted in a youth-oriented society.

The one truth about aging is that it’s intimately linked with the passage of time. We may be able to alter the clock by setting it forward or backward an hour depending on the season, but we can’t set it back for more than that, much less days, months, or years. No one has figured out how to alter the body’s pace-setter cells that mysteriously link the body’s aging with the number of times the earth revolves around the sun.  

Just as the average person may bemoan the basic fact that aging and time are completely tied together, scientists who study the aging process find their job made far more difficult by this age-time conundrum. Are the changes we think due to aging actually due to social and historical changes? Consider aging within the Baby Boomers versus aging within Gen X-ers. The Baby Boomers had few of the benefits of improved social attitudes toward healthy eating and fitness that characterize the younger generation as they approach midlife. The Baby Boomers also went through different historical periods that affected their social and political attitudes. Because we can’t pluck people out of their own generation and watch them grow older in a different one, we’ll never know how much any individual, much less an entire age cohort, is showing changes intrinsic to aging separate from those related to these cultural factors.

Average people probably doesn’t fret too much about the limitations of research on aging, but they should. Most of what we read about aging in the popular press ignores the possibility that cultural shifts rather than true age-related changes account for a study’s findings. Do people actually become less well able to remember as they get older? Or is it only that older people now had poorer education when they were young and so never had learning skills as solid as their younger counterparts do now? Even if we follow the same people from youth to old age, we don’t know whether they change as a result of aging or as a result of the historical era in which they lived.

Clearly, then, we need a way to separate age from time. Such a feat would also have tremendous potential benefits for health. What if you didn’t have to lose your physical prowess and health as you got older? If you could slow down the biological time bomb counting down within your body, imagine how much better you would feel.

For decades, scientists who study aging have proposed swapping functional age for chronological age as a way out of the age-time quandary. We’ve also thought about asking people to tell us how old they “feel,” or subjective age. This wasn’t a bad idea, but it was not particularly scientific or reliable. Let’s say you’re 28 but you’re coming down with the flu, so you like you’re 48. When you get together you’re your high school pals, though, you feel 18. For a measure of age to perform as an adequate substitute, it has to provide a mood- and illness-resistant estimate.

A biological measure of functional age would seem to have more credibility, but it’s not very practical. Taking all the measurements that you’d need to estimate someone’s functional biological age becomes an expensive and time-consuming operation. In addition to measuring such obvious factors as blood pressure, heart rate, muscle mass, lung expiratory volume, kidney excretion rates, and so on.

To get biological age, you would also need to put people on a treadmill and get their heart and lungs to crank out their maximum capacity- so called “aerobic power.” Even this would not be a complete measure of functional age, but with an average decline of 1% per year after the age of 30 in the ordinary (sedentary) person, you’d have some sort of quantitative index that isn’t completely mixed up with historical era.

Norwegian medical researchers may finally have cracked the code. In a 24-year follow-up study of 37,000 adults, Bjarne M. Nes and his colleagues used a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness based not on actual exercise capacity as measured by aerobic power but instead on the far simpler method of asking people a series of questions, including their age, Body Mass Index (BMI), resting heart rate, and answers to these 3 questions:

How often do you exercise? (5-point scale from never to almost every day)

How hard do you usually push yourself? (3-point scale from not at all to push yourself to exhaustion)

How long do you exercise? (4-point scale from less than 15 to 60 minutes or more)

The cardiorespiratory fitness measure was particularly useful in predicting death from cardiovascular disease among people less than 60 years old. They calculated the odds of dying from cardiovascular disease as well as any cause at all on the basis of 1 standardized unit of fitness defined as a “MET” (metabolic unit) which equals the energy (oxygen) used by the body at rest. The harder your body works during the activity, the more oxygen is consumed. Each MET increase in cardiorespiratory fitness was reduced with as much as a 22% decrease in cardiovascular disease death and 10% less for all causes of death.  

In addition to showing that your risk of death is reduced proportionately to the extent that you exercise, the study’s findings allowed the authors to develop a test of fitness age.

The study’s findings show that if we think of age not as years since birth but years prior to death, it’s clear that you can literally become “younger” (have more years left to live) by maintaining this level of fitness. The expression “add more life to your years rather than years to your life” couldn’t be more appropriate.

Although cardiorespiratory fitness was the main focus of this study, physical exercise has other benefits that can keep your brain “younger” as well. Dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease is, at this point in time, not thought to be preventable. In contrast, vascular disease, which is related to cardiorespiratory fitness, can be preventable through exercise. There are also benefits of exercise to your mood, metabolism, and sexual health.

Of course, exercise can’t prevent everything wrong from happening to you, and there in fact can be risks associated with exercise not properly conducted. You can exercise to the point of damaging your joints, you might become obsessed with it, and you might even suffer more pronounced tooth decay than you otherwise would.

By the same token, leading a sedentary existence can make it even more difficult for you to exercise, starting a vicious downward cycle. Once you start to incorporate a reasonable amount of exercise into your lifestyle, though, it can set up a pattern of reinforcement especially if you notice that your mental outlook starts to lift and you start to feel more alert and energetic.

Once you think of your age as a needle you can move down the scale, you can conceive of your own life in a new and more controllable light. Age can truly become, for you, “just a number,” defined by you, and not just the calendar.

[EDITED: Read More Here > Thank You Psychology Today]

Phil Mora

Hughes Creative

VP, Digital Marketing

Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) is an Executive Director and VP, Digital Marketing at Hughes Creative, a startup headquartered in San Francisco (hughescreative.net). Obsessed with creativity, fitness, wellness, work-hacking, finance and high-tech, Phil is a thinker, a designer, a doer, a creative, a hacker, and a leader. Find out more about phil at toppgun.net and philmora.com

San Francisco, California

If you only travel occasionally, maintaining your health and fitness routine over the course of each jaunt probably isn’t such a big deal. A few days off now and again never hurt anybody, and besides, sometimes a vacation needs to be just that -- a vacation.

But if you’re like me and travel on a regular basis, squeezing in good eating habits and exercise is essential, not only for your physical fitness, but for your mental health as well. Traveling can be stressful and there's no better solution to stress than exercise.

Here are some key items to pack to inject a bit of health and fitness into your travel itinerary:

1. Healthy Snacks When you’re on the go, it can be impossible to find healthy food. Vending machines become your kitchen, and your healthiest option ends up being a $14 salad from an airport restaurant.

Instead of scrounging around for something vaguely healthy, pack healthy snacks like nuts, trail mix, fruit or protein bars. Feeling bold? Think bigger than a snack and prepare a full meal the night before you set off on your trip. You can also find low calorie dehydrated food and prepare it in your hotel room - all hotel rooms have a coffee maker and all you need is hot water!

2. Jump Rope I discovered the benefits of a jump rope while I was travelling the world: it was a tip from my doctor. Not only is a jump rope a highly portable piece of workout equipment, but it can be used practically anywhere, especially in a hotel room. And of course, do your best to use the stairs instead of elevators, it makes a really huge difference!

3. Reusable Water Bottle It's easy to become dehydrated while traveling. You’re lugging around bags and working up a sweat (which is actually good exercise -- carry your bag instead of dragging or rolling it) or you’re too busy hurrying to your gate to find a water fountain and airport security just confiscated your half-full plastic bottle.

By bringing along a metal or plastic water bottle, you control your water supply. Empty it out before going through security, then take a moment to refill it at a fountain once you’re through. 

4. Comfortable Walking/Running Shoes A lot of the times when people are traveling solely for business purposes, they bring only the essentials they need for their business, which generally means dress shoes.

Bring along a pair of shoes that you can either use for running, or that you’ll at least feel comfortable walking around in for an extended period of time. Even if you can’t work in a run, build in opportunities for long walks. Not only does walking burn a lot of calories, it also provides you with a chance to see the location you’re visiting. Taking the time to get some air, relax your mind and take in the sights is definitely good for your mental health.

5. Frisbee It sounds kind of silly, but a Frisbee actually makes for a pretty good piece of travel fitness equipment. It’s flat and can easily fit into a suitcase; all you need to do is find another person and pretty soon, you’re running around, working out your core and upper body and getting your blood pumping in general.

A Frisbee makes for a great way to get in some exercise and pass the time with your travel companions, and if you're traveling solo, it's a great way to break the ice with new acquaintances.

Each of these five items take up very little space, but will go a long way in keeping you healthy and fit when you're on the road.

Do you exercise and eat healthy on the road, or do you take a break from both while you travel? Do you pack workout clothes or equipment like resistance bands or a jump rope? What do you do on the road to stay fit? Leave a comment below and let me know.

phil mora

philmora.com

Digital Marketing + Creative Design

Phil Mora (@orsusvirtum) is an Executive Director and VP, Digital Marketing at Hughes Creative, a startup headquartered in San Francisco (hughescreative.net). Obsessed with creativity, fitness, wellness, work-hacking, finance and high-tech, Phil is a thinker, a designer, a doer, a creative, a hacker, and a leader. Find out more about phil at toppgun.net and philmora.com

San Francisco, California