The past few days I have been absolutely buried at work. As I like to say, “Being busy is better than being bored,” so I won’t complain (too much). However, it has become startling clear how debilitating it can be to worry and stress about looming deadlines and projects. It’s a never-ending sense of dread.

Projects and deadlines become stressful for only one reason: fear that you will not live up to your own expectations.

Who creates these expectations? Like I said….You Do.

They could be expectations about what someone else will think of you. Of what you will look like in front of your peers. Of what you will think of yourself later on.

All of these expectations are based on a set of rules and laws that you alone create. Therefore, why not create a set of rules and laws that are motivating and not debilitating?

For example: if you are putting together a presentation for executive management in a few days (which I am doing right now in fact); which of the following inner-dialogs would you rather have running through your mind and body?

1. I need to have the presentation perfect. It needs to have all the right data. It needs to look perfect. I need to be prepared for each and every possible question they could have coming at me!

2. I will have an insightful and well-researched presentation. I will be prepared to discuss the issues with conviction and courage. I will educate others, and also be open to educating myself on other people’s points of view.

If you don’t train your mind to have a positive inner-dialog, chances are it will just run amok. Some people call this “motivation,” when all it really does is wear you down on many levels. Train you mind to have a more constructive and positive outlook. It will free up a lot more energy better tasks….like finishing your presentation!

Now…back I go to work :)

I’ve been in a good workout groove lately. Lifting and running (or doing some sort of cardio) on alternate days. Today it was time for a nice run. With sunshine in Seattle, I headed out to soak in some rays.

Jogging down the sidewalk two blocks from my house I was almost impaled by a giant 7-series. The guy was barrelling through the alley-ways trying to either:

1) make it to Starbucks before his buzz wore off
2) beat the traffic that was already 5 blocks ahead of him or
3) catch the last of happy hour at Joey’s.

Regardless, he literally grazed my kneecaps with his bumper. Good thing his beamer wasn’t hurt. Who knew running could be a contact sport! Be careful out there.

I love walking around downtown Seattle on a weekeday evening. Even at 9pm, the heart of the city seems asleep. It’s like your own private playground. Fresh air blowing in off The Sound. No traffic. Hardly any noise. Coffee shops on every corner in case you get thirsty. I love this city!

I was reading Yoga Journal at the grocery store the other day, and noticed an article titiled “Going the Distance.”

It highlights many of the points I wrote about a few weeks ago, citing John Douillard’s research, and the ancient Indian system of breathing, known as pranayama.

In a nutshell, breathing exclusively through your nose is good for you on many levels; even when exercising. Give it a try!

Note: It is impossible to navigate the Yoga Journal website (IMHO), if you want to read the article, your best bet is to look at the February 2007 edition of the magazine, in stores now.

I have many teachers. I’ve encountered them through many different means. Through travels. Through sports. Through retreats with my family. Through chance encounters. Through blogging. Through friends. Through seminars. Sometimes even through school :).

Your teachers shape who you are. They are quite possibly the most important external factor in determining the quality of your life.

Teachers push you when you think you can go no further.

Teachers expand the scope of what you think is possible.

Teachers explain the most complex of subjects in the simplest of terms.

Teachers hold you to a higher standard than you hold yourself to.

Teachers don’t take no for an answer.

Teachers walk their talk.

Teachers don’t make assumptions.

Teachers are your friends, even when they are teaching you a “tough lesson.”

Teachers smile and laugh more than they yell and scream.

Teachers are more worried about contribution and growth than significance.

You can tell that by teachers, I don’t necessarily mean the schoolhouse-variety. They can come from all walks of life, and be any age. Teachers are many things.

Who are your teachers? How have they helped you get where you are today? Are there new teachers you would like to bring into your life? What steps will you take to find these people, and bring them into your life?

It took me 4 hours to get home today from work. It took me almost two hours to get to work (taking the bus). I live <15 miles from the office. This just isn’t right!

Was writing a business email this morning and noticed something strange with the way I was writing it:

…..I was speaking with the Team X and there is concern about how our charter overlaps with their’s…

The reality was, there wasn’t really concern, there were just a few questions. Some education was in order. I was inadvetandlty setting off the fire alarm when there was not even any smoke, just some dry kindling! I rewrote the mail to focus on the positive:

….I was speaking with Team X and we think there is an opportunity to scope our roles and projects so we have the most cross-team synergy…

Subtle change in wording will convey a completely different set of emotions.

Too much time at the lab. Maybe I need one of these? Or maybe I should just move here! Thanks Ross for the pointer.

Here’s a quick run-down on how some of my life-change experiments are coming along. I’ve talked about most of these on the blog.

Raw Food Diet: I went raw for a while last year to see how my body would react. I am by no means a raw foodist now, but experienced enough profound benefits to see that there is something to it. The experience changed my diet forever. I would say my diet is now consistently 30% raw, and some days I go mostly raw just for the heck of it. The biggest lasting changes are 1) I eat a lot more fruit now, especially tropical fruits 2) I eat a lot more greens, especially wheatgrass and 3) I snack on raw nuts quite a bit.

Vegan Diet: I am sticking with my commitment to go Vegan. I went Vegan over 5 years ago, and after 2 years, switched back to eating some dairy and eggs. I recently decided to weane myself off the little bit of lacto and ovo that I was getting. I am not militant about it (like I was before) which takes the pressure off. I feel great and it is the right thing to do for the environment and my health. So I am sticking with it!

Weight Gain Goals: I have been on a mission for the past year to gain weight. Looking back over my logs, I actually have made negative progress! I started last spring in the low 150’s, and eventually got up to 155 or so during the summer. During this time my bodyfat also dropped quite a bit. Net gain was +10lbs of lean mass.

However, I eventually developed some issues with my neck/back that made me tone down my lifting. While I still trained consistently, I couldn’t lift heavy weights. I also got lax with my nutrition (i.e. not keeping my calories up!). Then, I took December off to travel and didn’t do any heavy resistance training. When I came back from India my weight was down to 148! While my strength was still decent, I wasn’t happy with the weight loss. I am now restarting my weight gain plan, with the goal to get to 165 by April Fools Day (4/1/07).

Photoreading: I starting the technique with a goal to read 30 books in 30 days. In retrospect, this goal was unattainable from the get-go, given that I knew I would be gone travelling without access to lots of books during a large part of the month. That said, I photoread a dozen books during the couple weeks before heading off to India. My experience was enough to convince me that the technique does work (at least to some degree). I am by no means proficient at it, but am very hopeful. I am going to restart my daily photoreading practice soon.

Nose Breathing: This is perhaps the most powerful and life-changing technique I have learned in the past several years. It is so simple yet so profound. I have consistently focused on nasal breathing throughout my entire day, including DURING EXERCISE. I am still not able to run as fast as when I mouth-breath, but am making steady progress.

Meditation: I am still keeping up with my meditation routine. I have modified it slightly, to include a bit more pranayama (yogic breathing) in addition to the meditation, but it is still a regular part of my morning routine.

Getting Up Early: For the past two weeks, I have gotten up between 4-5am every day including weekends….except for this morning! This morning I got up at 8:15am….why? Because I went to bed at 5am last night. I can thank Kapil, Paul and Lee for that. At any rate….I am now officially becoming a morning person, and amazing myself with how much I can actually get done before dawn; even with a fair amount of foot dragging and procrastination.

I wish I could say my Christmas Vacation was as sweet as this.

One byproduct of getting your biological clock all out of wack with international travel, is that it gives you a rare chance to make changes to your daily routine. You pretty much get a clean start. I decided to take advantage of this.

I have been trying for a while to lessen the time I need to sleep each night. Seeing as how I throw away nearly a third of my life sleeping, I figure that would be a good way to be more productive during my days. When I was a kid I used to get up relatively early without much trouble. The older I’ve gotten, the harder it has gotten.

My normal routine is to go to bed around 11:30pm and wake up around 7am. If I didn’t have important meetings in the morning, I would sleep in even later. On weekends I would often stay up until 2am and sleep in to 10am. I would normally exercise after work.

I found that following this routine, I almost always felt a bit rushed in the mornings. I also felt the pressure of having to exercise after work and deal with the massive crowd of people at out gym [the one downside of Microsoft providing a free gym membership is that people often decide to use it at the exact same time everyday].

Perhaps the worst byproduct of this routine was that I would be starving by the time I left work (normally 6-7pm) but wouldn’t be able to eat since I hadn’t yet exercised! My new routine solves these problems.

Coming back from India, I woke up [completely unplanned] at 4am. I was wide awake. I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t. I therefore just got up, got dressed and went to work! The next day, the same thing happened. This time, I went to the gym and then went to work. And so the new routine began. For the past 10 days (including weekends) I have gotten up between 4-5am. While it has gotten slightly harder to get up after the jet-lag wore off, I am still not finding it all that difficult.

In this new routine, I wake up, do my pranayama and meditate, and then head to the gym. I finish my exercise and make it to the office by 7am or so. Some days I take the bus, in which case, I get in by 7:20 or so. Since I get to work so darn early, I end up leaving by 5:30pm at the latest. Frankly, by the time 9am roles around, I feel that I have done more than in an entire day on my old schedule. I also find that I am getting a lot more done at work. My brain is able to concentrate much better in the morning. It doesn’t necessarily work as “fast,” or multi-task as well, but I find the sharper focus to be invaluable. By 7pm I am eating dinner and by 9pm I am pretty tired and head to bed. So the cycle continues.

The biggest plus that I find, is that no matter how bad my day went, or how unproductive I was at work, the fact that I got up so freaking early makes me feel like my day was a success. That is a priceless feeling.

For the past year or so, I’ve had this consistently and mildly annoying, yet sometimes debilitating affliction. It has been a real pain in the neck; literally. You see, I work in a place where you are never more than 5 feet away from a computer. It is your umbilical cord to the mother-ship. It is your best friend. Going computer-less for a day is like getting soft-serve without the sprinkles. It just isn’t right.

Personally, I like to think that my computer loves me as much as I love her. She’s a bit codependent and that’s ok by me. She keeps me mildly entertained and helps me get stuff done. In fact, I have such a good relationship with my computer that I thought it would be a brilliant idea to add another one to my “family” at work. So for the past year or so, I had a laptop and desktop computer sitting right next to each other. I’d read e-mail on one and write documents on the other. Brilliant! I am now twice as productive. Or so I thought.

You see, the monitor for my desktop was about a foot above my laptop. Unbeknownst to me, my head would be doing a quick back-and-forth between the two a couple thousand times a day. I hardly noticed. I only noticed the flurry of emails I could now produce. With twice the screen real-state, my ability to absorb the stunning gossip content on MSN during my lunch had now doubled. I was enthralled.

However, about six months ago, I developed a terrible pain in my neck. I thought it was caused by just using my laptop too much. I cut back on my laptop use and that seemed to help a bit, but the problem persisted on and off.

After coming back from my month away from work (and computers) last Sunday, I was completely healthy and pain-free. I was stunned, however, when on Wednesday I woke up to an incredibly sore neck. My range of motion was 90 degrees (not 180!). The pain got worse on Thursday.

I then turned to my best friend, my computer, for the answer. Turns out, one of the common causes of “Tech Neck,” (no, it’s not contagious) is the exact setup I have been using at work for the past year!

So on Friday I “broke-up” with my second machine, and settled in for a day of 50% productivity. Lo and behold, my neck actually felt fine most of the day. Sticking with this approach the past few days, I’ve seen rapid improvement in my condition. I can’t tell you how many hours of lost sleep and frustration I’ve had to tolerate with my neck issue. I’m just glad I caught the cause before it did irreparable damage.

Lesson learned. Take the time and spare no expense to make your workplace setup as perfect for your body as you can. There are a lot of resources online about workplace ergonomics. Read up!

This blog finally has legs. Not a newborn anymore. More like a toddler. A fast crawler.

I bought this domain name way back in March, but didn’t start blogging for a few months afterwards. Consistent blogging didn’t happen for many more months. Starting in September 2006, I really got into a regular habit of writing things down, and figured I might as well put it out there for other people to make fun of.

I track pageviews and broad site metrics using Google Analytics and my subscriber count through Feedburner. To be honest, the site metrics are interesting, but it is the subscriber number that really matters to me.

There are now 54 total subscribers to Set Higher Standards. Of the 54, 12 have signed up for the Feedburner e-mail delivery service to get the posts via e-mail as opposed to through an RSS reader. This really surprised me. I recommend anyone who wants to increase their readership to add this feature to their site. If you use Feedburner, it is totally free.

I pretty much had 3-5 subscribers throughout the entire summer (myself on two computers and Chuck!). There were a couple of spikes when this site got picked up by StumbleUpon, but aside from that, things have just been trending up slowly but surely.

In terms of site stats, I get an average of 120 visits per day (yes Todd, I exclude my IP address!) and 240 pageviews.

All in all, I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am curious as to how long the growth will keep up.

Rich people I know, fit into one of two categories. The first is wealth by assoociation through inheritance, family or close friends that have “helped them out.” The second is by working damn hard and taking big risks that most other people would run like hell from.

I don’t know anyone that just casually stumbled upon a boatload of money through an easy side business or online venture. I do know some people that joined start-ups at the right time, but they really fit into the second bucket of working damn hard and taking big risks (most start-ups never see the light of day).

I don’t know anyone that manifested millions of dollars through their sheer desire or just asking for the moola really really nicely. This trick might have worked to get a check-out-counter candy bar when you were a kid, but it ain’t gonna work in the real grown-up world.

I don’t know anyone that magically trippled their income by just hoping it would happen because they are one freaking nice person, and good looking to boot.

So basically, if you want to get rich you are really in for it. Better be prepared to work damn hard. What is damn hard? Harder than you have ever thought you’d have to work. Hard work can be fun, but it still takes time and effort. So next time you see a book with “Millionaire” anywhere in the title, just keep walking by. You don’t have time to read it anyway. You’ve got work to do.

It feels good to not have a sweet tooth any more. I used to love sweets. Just couldn’t get enough of them. I used to eat ice cream by the pint.

Lately, I rarely indulge in desserts. In fact, I have a tub of Soy Delicious ice cream in my fridge right now….and I have absolutely no appetite for it. It might sit there for the next month for all I know. I still enjoy desserts very much, it’s just that the craving isn’t there. I think that one of the reasons for this is that I cleaned up my diet. Getting rid of most of the processed sugars. Eating more whole grains. Eating a lot more raw foods. Eating a ton of fruit.

In the past, whenever I’ve made some restriction in my diet, I’ve allowed myself a “treat” every once and a while to satisfy my cravings. Now I know that there is no such thing as “satisfying a craving.” Once you satisfy it, the body will just eventually want even more!

Satisfying a craving is only putting fuel on the fire.

If you want to get rid of a bad food habit you need to give your body time to regulate itself, and have the wherewithal to not let your mind trick you into being lax with your commitment to change.

One of the most irritating things I hear from many people who try to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet; is that their body craves meat. In fact, a good friend of mine has recently gone on a strict vegetarian diet for four months, but is certain that it won’t work for her because she craves fish! Another friend is vegan, “aside from an occasional piece of chicken”…due to the cravings!

The cravings exist only if you let them exist. For both of my friends, they view their dietary change as a penance, where they are depriving themselves of something. There was no strong change in their mental and physical associations with meat and how giving it up would really help them and the planet.

Cravings are like the little kid that begs for a check-out counter candy-bar. If you give them one, you are guaranteed to get a repeat request!

If you can push through the craving, and learn to live an energetic and happy live without whatever you gave up; you’ll eventually find that the constant and never-ending craving and longing will never come back. You, and not the little whining kid in your head, will then be back in control!

During my recent trip throughout India, it struck me how stark the contrast is between the have’s and the have-not’s. The booming Indian middle class, buoyed and funded by technology ousourcing, are experiencing things that many in the United States (or those in any other developed economy) consider their god-given right to enjoy.

Modern shopping malls. New cars. Designer Jeans. Cell-phones. High-rise luxury condos.

The change is drastic. India is becoming materialistic. The poverty, however, is also rampant. Next to these new high-rises are sprawling stinking jam-packed slums. While India is quickly becoming the diabetic capital of the world (thanks to a westernized diet and sedentary work), many are struggling just to put food on the table.

I finally made it to my apartment this afternoon, wrapping up my three-week journey all over the Indian subcontinent. After 36 hours of travelling; one would think that blogging would be the last thing on my mind……but I am on a mission. The mission is to not get jet-lag, that ill-tempered disease of the cross-continent traveller!