Updated February 2024
I discovered that when I do one physical fitness activity once a week, when to go back the following week, I feel rested and much stronger than before. I'm doing Push/Pull Splits on Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively, and running Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. My legs never feel like the fully recover between runs. So I decided to change things up a bit. I thought about swimming on Mondays, cycling on Wednesdays, and then a long run on Saturdays. And then it hit me—something that I've thought about doing for a long time—I might as well train for a triathlon. Thank God they make a Sprint format: 750 meter swim, 17.3 mile ride, 5k run. I'm pumped to get started!
Throughout my experience coaching others, there was a theme that came up over and over again: difficulty working with their boss. I remember thinking years ago that if you can create a business that focused on helping reconcile relationships between bosses and their direct reports, you'd have a billion dollar business. Once it became clear that this was the niche for me to explore, I tried all kinds of marketing tools to capture and communicate that I help in this space. Nothing ever really landed and nothing really excited me, either. And then I heard a phrase that changed everything: managing up. HBR has been writing about this topic since 1980! And I only just recently learned about it. I have fully committed my energy to supporting seasoned leaders manage up. It feels exciting. It feels rebellious; stirring up the pot, so to speak, so that people feel empowered to have way more influence over their dynamic with their boss. There are tons of resources out there for leadership development. But all of it is top down (mostly). I haven't seen much about managing – nay leading up! So that's where I enter and provide support. Not surprising, I built another website on this stack to support this mission: manageup.coach. I'm also posting every day, Monday through Friday on LinkedIn.
Starting in 2021, and certainly throughout 2022, my physical body went through noticeable change. I was gaining weight – for the first time in my adult life. It continued until I had gained about 20lbs beyond my typical weight.
At first I thought it was just a result of my current age. And then I believed that it was caused by a great deal of stress at work. But the biggest misconception was that there was nothing I could do about it...I was wrong.
Right at the end of July 2023, my partner announced that she was going on Weight Watchers. "I want to do that too!," I declared and we started the journey together. In about 10 weeks, I was back to my 'fighting weight.' And I've had a lot of fun during the process. I've truly enjoyed tracking foods, finding recipes, and seeing the wins on the scale. Honestly, I thought that having to "give up" any kind of food was going to be difficult. But, honestly, there's a kind of freedom that comes from fewer choices – it makes choosing easier!
As I started to reclaim my health, I felt inspired to exercise more (which gives more 'activity points' under the Weight Watchers system, which opens up even more food options). I've been running about three times a week since the beginning of 2022. That has increased to five times a week: three to four 5K's during the week and a 10K on the weekend.
Starting in October 2023, a long standing goal to become stronger and more muscular naturally slid into these physical improvements. When I first started Weight Watchers, I used ChatGPT to generate exercises for strength training and weight-loss based the exercise equipment I had at home. Once I hit my goal weight, I transitioned over to just strength training. That's when I learned about Push/Pull splits. These are weight training exercises that focus on Push exercises (push-ups, chest presses, should presses, etc...) for one day and then Pull exercises (rows, pull-ups, curls, etc...) another day. Right now I do a Push day on Tuesdays, a Pull day on Thursdays, and then a Core day on Sundays. My goal is to get to a point where I do Push on Day 1, Pull Day 2, Core and some Leg on Day 3, Rest on ay 4 and repeat.
I'm absolutely seeing the changes in my body and am having fun at watching the transformation.
I've decided to turn this into an article. Check it out at aciern.ooo/ct.
Inspired by Derek Sivers and his incredible instructions, I embarked on the great journey of tech independence. This is a process and philosophy of owning your data and ensuring you have root access to the servers involved. I set up a web server - which is hosting this very site - email, calendar, database, and encrypted mass storage.
In fact, I've enjoyed this experience so much, that I've successfully ported my business website off of Squarespace to my custom web server.
The latest addition to my Tech Independence and coding skills involved building a commenting system (using PHP and PostgreSQL) that's now available on all of my articles and my Inspiration page.
There have been lots of books, movies, people, and experiences that have inspired me in many different ways. I've begun curating these all together on one place: Inspiration
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