I’ve got a guest post this week that covers some of the risks of what I love, extreme sports…  The author, Trevor is listed at the end of the article as well.

An adrenaline junkie is a person that seeks out thrilling activities and the adrenaline rush they produce. Adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands in the brain. When engaged in a particularly exciting or dangerous activity, these glands dump huge doses of the pleasure-inducing hormones into the bloodstream, which increases the heart rate and ups oxygen levels, creating an overall feeling of euphoria that can last for hours. People who seek out this adrenaline high tend to engage in high-risk activities, such as, but not limited to, skydiving, car racing and mountain climbing.

An Addictive Feeling

It’s no coincidence that people who enjoy activities that produce adrenaline are identified as adrenaline junkies. In fact, engaging in action sports produces neurochemicals in the brain that are more potent than illicit drugs. According to Psychology Today, one way to mimic the effect of an adrenaline-producing activity is by combining deadly amounts of cocaine and heroin. And similar to the action of drugs on the brain, once you grow accustomed to regular doses of adrenaline, you need to take even bigger risks in order to achieve the same level of euphoria — which is one of the main reasons why adrenaline junkies get hurt. When the excitement of, say, snowboarding down a particularly steep hillside no longer produces the desired effect, a true adrenaline junkie will seek out an even steeper mountain, or add tricks to his routine, like jumps and flips.

Avoiding Injury

Without taking some simple steps to prevent injuries, an adrenaline junkie can easily find himself seeking out not the next big wave, but rather, an experienced medical professional. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) understands that as long as there are skis, bikes, boats and skates, people of all ages will speed down hills, careen off ramps and ride huge waves. Fortunately, instead of preaching the importance of couch surfing, the AAOS offers those hooked on adrenaline a variety of tips to avoid getting hurt. For instance, stretching for a few minutes can help minimize muscle and ligament injuries. Always have a partner with you. Avoid overheating and dehydration by taking frequent water breaks. Wear the appropriate footwear and protective gear for your sport, including helmets, padding for knees, elbows and wrists, and goggles.

Understand the Risks

After observing the behavior (and also lifestyle) of some of these so-called adrenaline junkies it would be quite easy to conclude that many of them won’t take a break from danger until they find themselves looking for a long term disability lawyer. However, it’s important to understand that nearly every significant outdoor or physical activity – such as driving, jogging solo, or even walking down the street – carries risk; the critically important thing is to carefully and thoroughly measure the risks involved with each type of activity, and determine whether the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs. For many individuals, adrenaline-filled activities present substantial benefits, such as stress relief and personal enjoyment, and these benefits more than make up for the risk. Whatever your extreme activity may be – race car driving, extreme cycling, mountain climbing, or something else – it’s vital that adrenaline seekers be fully aware of the risks associated with their activity of choice.

Trevor Diamond is a freelance writer who focuses on career development, professional training, disability claims, workplace culture, employment trends and other like subjects.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

Any personal development program for your mind and knowledge also deserves some attention to your physical health as well.  While I’ve not written much yet on personal training or living actively, I figure its due time to cover a few areas of fitness that I’ve learned and want to share some stories from.  So, lets venture into this realm of personal development and see what there is to learn!

Making Fitness a Priority

Without getting into all the details of the million programs, changes, hopes and promises so many companies and people make about health and well being, I want to look first at fitness from a very general perspective.  My take is the only way to truly stay healthy is to have and make fitness a priority in your life in some way.  It doesn’t need to be difficult, its a mindset and so as with any change you want to first make a decision to include some fitness in your lifestyle.  I don’t suggest setting goals for physical body results until you have the knowledge to know what is reasonable for your body and lifestyle to make an informed target.  Many people jump into fitness only because they are after some result of weight loss, or strength achievement in a short time frame.  I think it is far more important to answer the question of why do you want to be more fit with a longer term goal of including fitness into your lifestyle.  Being active with fitness leads to better health, happier living and a longer life, regardless of what you can bench press.  So, think of fitness in terms of making it a priority in your life for the long term and progress slowly. Making fitness a priority means it sits among a list with other priorities as well, it doesn’t need to replace them or overcoming everything else in your life. You will have to set the priority based on your current level of fitness and what you want to change relative to your other life priorities and goals.  Don’t take on more than you can easily handle as you want to make it something that lasts.

Making Lasting Habits

Making some plan that lasts is best by making it a habit.  Habits are creating by repeating something on a regular basis, learning to enjoy and appreciate it and making it something you start to do automatically, without always needing reminders or added incentive.  This works perfectly for fitness because good fitness really needs to be a regular part of your lifestyle to make it automatic and long lasting.  Focus on building new habits or improved habits, don’t worry at all about breaking or stopping bad habits, even if they prevent the fitness level you want.  It’s much more effective to build new habits, be encouraged by them and let them push out other bad habits.  The only way to really eliminate a bad habit you don’t want is to replace it with some new habit in its place anyway.

A great way to build a new fitness habit is to:

1. Setup a plan or schedule to repeat your fitness activity on a regular basis
2. Plan only what you are absolutely confident you can achieve
3. Leave a lot of room for flexibility and interruptions to that plan
4. Get some accountability for this activity

I think these are pretty self explanatory except the last one.  By get some accountability, I mean, you need to connect a way to care about forming this habit that is personal to you.  This could be by getting help from a friend or family member who can encourage you and help you keep any commitments.  Another method is to ensure you make visible your progress and can track results for this habit and fitness to help motivate achievements and stay on track. Perhaps you need a reward or punishment system to keep you focused.  Whatever it is, it should be connected to other important priorities you have so it has significance to help train you.

Easy To Do Fitness Activities

A fitness program is going to need you to be active, getting physical, playing sports, or working out in some fashion.  The easier these activities are if you are not already doing them, the better success rate you will have and the easier it is to form habits with such activities.  For example, it’s much easier to plan a short work out in your garage if you have equipment already a couple times a week then it is to drive 50km to workout at a gym you don’t know anyone at.  You are much more likely to be successful when the activity is easy to do.  This is very important for forming habits and you need to ensure any fitness training is easy to get into based on your lifestyle now.  The smaller the change you can start with, the better.  There are many ways to do this, I have listed only a sample of some that might work for your lifestyle:

• Get into a sport you have played previously that you know you enjoy
• Do more of any physical activities you already enjoy (like walking or biking if you already do these)
• Take simple tasks and make them more fitness oriented, like taking stairs instead of elevators.
• Pair up with a friend to meet for training
• Find a nearby gym that is on your daily route and works easily with your schedule
• Get some home gym equipment or dust off what you already have and make it easily accessible
• Make current activities more fitness oriented (such as working out while watching TV)
• Read and learn more about fitness to inspire and motivate yourself to be more active
• Take up bodyweight training so you can train with minimal to no equipment, anywhere.

So, there are many more ways to take on easy to do fitness activities and so I’d love you to add your ideas in a comment below and in my next article, I’m going to cover how bodyweight training is a excellent example of easy to do fitness and I’ll cover what some of the benefits are to this style of training.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

Great Blog Resources

Lightning Photos I’ve taken in the last few storms of the fall season (Fork Lightning & Sheet Lightning) 100 Ways to Be a Better Father - A spawn from a cycle of other 100 lists, and a good list it is! 17 Unspoken Rules of LinkedIn Etiquette Top 50 Leaders in Leadership - I was fortunate to be pointed out by Steve McMillan that I am on this leadership list.  There are so many other great leadership sites / blogs on this list, I just had to share it! 8 Timeless Tips to Achieve Excellence in Life 2012′s Top Ten Insights on Leadership, Innovation, and Strategy - This is a great list of links to some fantastic articles and resources on strategy, leadership and innovation from this past year. Isn’t Life Beautiful at the Bridgemaker blog. Everyone Wants Better. No One Wants Change

Videos

Athletes are everywhere, doing what they love Speaking of Athletes.  Here is an awesome video of mountain unicycling. People are Amazing 2012

Posted by Mike King under Life | 4 Comments »

Today I add a new guest post from Samara Brown, on a subject I’ve not explored here at LearnThis before, all about thinking about consciousness.  I hope you enjoy the questions, insight and quotes that Samara has written.  You can see a bit more about her at the end of her article.

The most easily accessible quote that I have ever read about consciousness would have to be this one from the German theologian and philosopher Albert Schweitzer:

“True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness: ‘I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.’ ”

It is a very beautiful and simple explanation that I think even a child would be able to understand and appreciate. It leads my mind on to thinking about the intrinsic nature of life itself: the instinct of survival; and how all forms of matter have a tendency to integrate and thus develop greater and greater levels of complexity and order. Many theories or elaborations on the subject of consciousness are so ethereal or convoluted that I often find it very difficult to grasp the meaning intended by the writer. But if you are patient and search carefully enough you can find some very interesting insights, such as this one from Daniel C. Dennett:

“Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about – yet….. We do not yet have all the answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them… With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist – and hope – that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.”

It is interesting that Dennett points out the fact that often a sophisticated mind will struggle with mysteries such as the meaning of consciousness. History shows us that often with a great insoluble problem the answer is actually quite simple and that it will not necessarily be someone with a high intelligence quotient (I.Q.) that will be able to solve it. There is a new theory emerging recently that goes further by suggesting that what the world requires today are in fact people with a high soundness quotient (S.Q.) Soul soundness, a less corrupt or alienated person. Dennett also suggests in this quote that many people prefer mystery, superstition and dogma over knowledge-based understanding and scientific enquiry. This point is reinforced by this last insight by Terence McKenna:

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

McKenna stresses the point of the importance that humanity should be placing on science to provide answers to our most pressing and critical issues. We need to quickly become more conscious of ourselves, our place in the world, and to find solutions to the problems which threaten our very existence.

In terms of addressing these issues that are threatening our society, I would say that one of the most amazing thinkers that I have come across is a biologist called Jeremy Griffith. He seems to me to explain and deal with human consciousness and the problems associated with by far better than anybody else that I have come across. Although, I must admit that I am not particularly widely read or knowledgeable. Griffith says that:

“We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological human condition, not an instinct- derived, stimulus-and-response-driven animal condition—it is unique to us.”

Our fully conscious brain is very obviously unique on this planet, and we are clearly the only animal that can fully understand cause and effect in our lives and can make conscious adjustments according to what we learn from different events and outcomes. So it would seem to me to make perfect sense that that is where our problems stem from. Sure any animal you like to make an example of in the world around us is carrying out all kinds of behaviors and actions, but they are not conscious of why they are doing them, they are ruled by their instincts. A lion cannot explain why he needs to kill the zebra, he just does it and doesn’t have the ability to understand why or to think about carrying out an alternative action. It is only a conscious brain that has the ability to assess outcomes of behaviors—and more importantly asses or wonder whether the action they carried out were right or wrong? Goodness!, now I’ve said it—right and wrong? Good or bad? Are humans fundamentally good, and more specifically, am I? Am I good or bad? According to Griffith, you have come to the question of questions or in other words the human condition. Griffith describes the human condition as:

“The human condition arises from the existence of so-called ‘good and evil’ in our make-up. We humans are capable of shocking acts of inhumanity like rape, murder and torture and our agonizing predicament or ‘condition’ has been that we have never been able to explain and thus understand why. And even in our everyday behavior, why are we competitive, aggressive and selfish when clearly the ideals are to be the complete opposite, namely cooperative, loving and selfless?”

I am going to leave it there for people to make of Griffith’s work what they will, but surely Griffith has got one thing right at least that our issues as humans are psychological based ones, they are based on our conscious brains needing to understand what is going on within and around us. Surely he is right in the sense that biology does need to find understanding of our conscious behaviors to make this planet a better place for us all?

BIO

Samara is primarily a thinker… hence the title of her post! Thankful to be raised in a Christian household and trusts in her faith however determined to never stop wondering and questioning the world around her.  Her email if you want to contact her is thinksandlearns at gmail dot com.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 5 Comments »

I was contacted by Katie working at Quicken Loans where she was participating in a leadership development program with an assignment to reach out to various leaders and get a set of relevant questions answered.  These were the questions and responses that I provided.  I think it is great to hear about such a program at Quicken Loans and since Katie would not use these outside the course she was on, I asked to publish them here with my responses to get people to discuss these points with their own ideas as well.  How do you answer these questions?  Please add your comments below.

1.  What are the 2-3 most exciting technologies that you use or are watching?

2.  What is the top trend that you are watching or think people should be watching?

I really don’t have a favorite as books need to address areas of interest topics so there isn’t one book that fits all and I’ve read far too many to have a favorite book.  Some of my favorite authors are Patrick Lencioni and Malcolm Gladwell as I highly enjoy their respectively, fable style of writing and  data backed discoveries.  Some of my favorites are: Win Friends and Influence People, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, The Other 8 Hours, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Goal

5.  What is your favorite website?

6.  If you could recommend one book for people to read, what would it be?

Posted by Mike King under Life | 18 Comments »

Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World

Author : Chris Guillebeau

Overall, I loved this book and didn’t really know what to expect when I first picked it up, but the title and subtitles caught my eye.  The book reinforces  many of the believes I’ve always had and Guillebeau’s introductions and thoughts on the subject were quickly reinforcing my own beliefs on the subjects of doing whatever you feel passionate about, regardless of influences or social peer pressure.  The book is separated into 3 sections:

• The remarkable life
• Reclaiming work
• The power of convergence

Posted by Mike King under Life | 6 Comments »