We Are Always Practicing
I grew up climbing in New England, and then I came out west to find the big mountains. I quickly fell in love with the Northern Cascades.
The Cascade Mountains are wild. They take persistence to get into, and the quality of their climbs is very high. One summer I was climbing one of my favorites, Mt. Stuart, which is an indescribably beautiful peak of flawless granite and long routes. I was on the North Ridge, and near the top is one of the most impressive features in the Cascades that takes you off the ridge itself, transports you over thousands of feet of exposure, and onwards to the summit.
I had a moment on Mt. Stuart — as I led out into the crux section of the climb with so much air under my feet — that defines for me why I have a practice that anchors my life. Everything came into focus for me at that moment, all my travels and hard work, and coalesced into a supreme sensation that quietly flowed into my entire body and mind.
This practice allows me to sharpen my focus as pressure ramps up in my world and it supports me as I take on more and more impossible challenges. All the while, I am never chasing an abstract goal of say money, enlightenment, or making a difference. Instead, I am chasing a sensation of pure focus that is an expression of my mind and body in perfect alignment.
This embodied sensation is so concrete and real that I can commit to creating it over and over again, and I can commit to finding it everywhere: in my work life, while climbing or surfing, or in my relationships.
And my practice is deceptively straightforward. Every situation in my life is an opportunity to recruit more capacity in my nervous system, my mind and my body.
From a physical training standpoint, I do not train to build muscle. Instead, I train to recruit more and more of my connective tissue in the form of tendons and ligaments. In this way I do not move using force and tension, I move using speed and momentum. It is impossible to describe the different quality of power, focus and sensation this kind of training produces — but those that have access to these parts of their body and nervous system know the difference.
From a mental training standpoint, I train myself to develop what I call cognitive vulnerability, which is a fancy way of saying that I train myself to be always on the lookout for ways to jettison my assumptions and beliefs about how the world works in a moments notice. I train to release myself of the tension of being right, and instead pursue the freedom to discover new frameworks for understanding reality.
From an emotional standpoint, I train to see how my emotions are intimately connected to physical sensation in my body. And when I can bring awareness into this relationship between emotions and physical sensation I am much less overwhelmed by the rise and fall of emotional content.
And from the standpoint of purpose, I chase sensation. I know what freedom feels like in my body. I know what it feels like to be free in situations of great complexity and pressure. I know what it feels like to have clarity where clarity is near impossible to attain.
I also know how to create this sensation for others in my work. I know how to train them to find this sensation in themselves and then build a practice around it. So they too can pursue clear focus, expansive speed and power, and emotional agility. This pursuit then opens up in them, as it does in me, new levels of awareness that makes the world bigger.
When the world is bigger I have more choices. At the end of the day, in my experience, creating more choices for ourselves in situations that hold massive levels of ambiguity, conflict and complexity is the ultimate goal of a future-ready practice.
The bottom line is this: we are always practicing. The problem is that most folks are practicing without the aid of awareness at great cost to themselves and to the people around them. They don’t understand that the body, mind and nervous system are always practicing and adapting to changing environments and pressures.
When you twist your ankle badly, the entire body develops a practice of contraction to protect the body against future harm. This practice sets a course for the body for years to come unless it is countered through rigorous physical therapy. Submit yourself to intensive, high stress, high-pressure situations day in and day out, watch as your body and mind contract.
This contraction defines you; unless of course you counter it.
My stand on what comprises a future-ready practice is this: When I look at a person’s body and study their mind I see their history, commitments, wounds, identity, capacity for resilience and flexibility. I see to what degree they possess power and aliveness.
And everyone in the world studies each other in this way — just at lesser or greater levels of awareness.
The kind of leader I want to follow is one that has committed to a practice that supports them mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. This is a leader that moves into the world not only based on their achievements, but through their ability to enable others to find their own freedom to act and create under intensity and adversity.
This person brings energy, focus and openness to the world at a level that tips, techniques and trending fashions can never reach. They embody an awareness and sensation of what it means to be at their very best, and they align this awareness and sensation into everything they touch. This kind of leader is both rare and indispensable because they truly have earned the right to be considered future ready.
