Josh Allred's Blog

There are a lot of factors when trying to predict an avalanche. You have wind, aspect, elevation, snowpack, storm snow, slope angle, temperature…

So, instead of trying to predict, it is far better to have a set of rules to help you make decisions. Based on those external factors, you can then decide how much risk you are willing to take.

It turns out, we can build a similar system in our day-to-day lives. You can choose to spend your time, emotional energy, resources on:

Things you can control

or

Things you cannot control.

We can’t control people or how they will act, we can’t control the weather, we can’t control whether someone will follow social distancing.

Yet, we can always control our attitude. We can choose to lift where we stand.

The reality is there are only a few things we can ever control. The things we can control need to be taken very seriously. And then let the chips fall.

It’s impossible to move a fully grown Redwood. But it is much easier to manipulate a sampling.

We can’t assume that people automatically get wiser with age. People can get wiser. For sure.

Yet…

As we get older, for many, the more we stay the same. That is why it is so difficult to change our minds the older we get. We would have to admit that we have been wrong this whole time.

It’s not about right or wrong or fault-finding but rather, “Knowing what I know now.”

“Knowing what I know now about how the meat industry affects the climate, I am going to eat like a vegan.”

“Knowing what I know now how pornography contributes to human exploitation, I am going to quit watching it.”

“Knowing what I know now…” that’s really the key to change. We are either evolving or we are hiding.

We have a really difficult time with pauses.

For some reason, we have this incessant need to fill in our everyday conversation with something. Even if we fill it in with just garbage.

Um

Well

Ahh

Yeah

So

You know.

Like.

It turns out, that most conventional speech is broken down into short pauses (0.2 seconds), medium pauses (0.6 seconds) and long pauses (1 second). Except the long pauses are actually not that long.

Great public speakers can hold a pause for 2 to 3 seconds.

…

It just isn’t in our speech either. We have a difficult time pausing our careers, the market, economy. We cannot stand when our lives are on hold. And COVID-19 is exposing this.

Why?

Pausing creates tension. Just like watching a magic show, after the trick has been performed we want to know the magician’s secrets. If she reveals the secret, it’s no longer magic but simply a trick.

Adults struggle with this tension. We spend a lot of time wishing for it to go away. Instead of wasting our time trying to avoid it, the alternative is to learn to lean into it, to dance with it.

Jim Collins tells a great story about Admiral Jim Stockdale and how he survived being captured and tortured 20+ times.

In Stockdale’s words, the ones who didn’t survive captivity were “the optimist”.

The optimist believed that they were going to be rescued by Christmas. And when they weren’t they died from heartbreak.

It appears that social distancing is working (at least here in Utah).

And it’s tempting to say, we need to reopen up restaurants, go back to work, go back to church, see a movie…go back to normal. Some will even argue that our liberties are at stake and that we have to take risks.

Here’s the truth: We are not going to be returning to any sense of normal until we have a vaccine.

When we have enough PPE for healthcare professionals, enough ICU beds, enough ventilators, and we have a high volume test and trace program in place THEN it’s time to talk about how we can start opening some things back up.

Until then focus on the milestones and not the date.

When you truly have someone beat and have the opportunity to make a public example out of someone, you have a choice.

You can choose to carry out your actions and forever make an enemy or…

You can choose to make a friend.

That’s the power of forgiveness.

Before the Coronavirus, it’s easy to talk ourselves into being too busy.

“I am too busy to _________ (read, sleep, exercise, eat better, play with my kids…).”

And now during Coronavirus?

“I am still too busy to _________ (read, sleep, exercise, eat better, play with my kids…).”

We can always find time for excuses.

Time is not the issue here.

Priorities.

GI Joe was famous for saying, “Knowing is half the battle.”

Except this isn’t true.

We know we need to eat more fruits and vegetables. We know that social distancing works against Coronavirus. We know that eight hours of sleep carry huge benefits.

And yet…

We misbehave. All the time, in fact. We stretch and justify. Knowing is not enough to change behavior.

Knowing may be the first step but our willpower is simply not enough to follow through. What we need is to do is focus on building the correct system.

Is the idea that when we are successful, we point to internal forces that got us there. We are likely to give ourselves credit for making the right moves.

When we fail though, we are more likely to blame external forces. “The dog ate my homework.”

That’s because our narrative works overtime to protect us from ourselves. We don’t want to be wrong, we don’t want blame, we don’t want to be judged. Everything is okay.

But not everything is always going to be okay.

Often, we make mistakes. We don’t need to blame the weather for running late when we should have left the house earlier (which really means we should have just gone to bed earlier the night before). And when things are working in our favor, if we are actually being objective, we can point to an area where we have received advantage.

Understanding advantage is an important step in developing humility.

Never too high. Never too low.

All highly resilient people have is this ability to say this phrase:

“The story I’m telling myself is…”

When we can take adversity and turn it into a learning experience, our quality of life improves.

It doesn’t change the fact that you were just diagnosed with a debilitating disease, or if your partner dumped you, or if your cat ran away.

What changes is what we believe, how we feel about the situation.

We can’t control all the elements and circumstance but we can choose how to respond to them.

If we tell stories without hope then we become more desperate.

Running a four-hour marathon takes practice.

Depending on where you are at physically, it isn’t unreasonable to start training six months (or even more) prior to a race.

Race day is but a small moment. Think about it, you’ll disproportionally spend four hours running the race and over 500 training for it.

This means that most goals we set, our time is spent not running the actual race but in preparation for it.

As a result, we get too caught in this mindset that we have to emphasize more training.

Let’s be clear though, training is an easy place to hide. Sure, we want our doctor that is preparing to do open heart surgery to have finished med school. And at some point, you have to show up for surgery.