How long can this absurdity keep going? I’m finishing my 2nd day in Detroit and my final will be tomorrow at least for 4 more weeks until I come back for Speaker Training with some pretty cool professional speakers. Day one of this 10 day course focused on us. If we aren’t healthy, rested or focused, management is impossible. We can’t manage people if we are mis-managed ourselves. The first day focused on meditation, breathing, diet, exercise and how well we deal with stress and anxiety. It felt like a crazy crash course in self-care and it wasn’t going to solve our problems in a day but it got everyone talking and sharing. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
At the end of the first day and I have to really preface that I am always the most team-player and self-aware person. I really give everything a go no matter how silly it may seem at first but we had a roundtable of 14 participants and were asked to discuss what changes we were going to make among the many lessons taught today. I said that I’m going to move more. Exercise more and do more. That’s necessary and as I get older will become far more important.
The rest of the exercises weren’t useless. They were food for thought but I feel very well balanced on everything else. I eat well, don’t go to bed buzzed or drunk, don’t take medication and get a full night of sleep every night. Heck, I don’t even use an alarm clock so I felt like I wasn’t quite in the market for today’s work but the lack of sleep and things like anxiety and stress do have a huge impact in us office workers. I just don’t feel like I have that issue.
There is a caveat though. My 2nd job is causing some stress but removing that is a quick fix. I could walk away and be perfectly happy so I manage that stress, keep it in check and have been at this high paced lifestyle long enough to know when I’m reaching a point of burn out. I’ll keep that in check and never let it impact my full time career.
Detroit is fantastic. Ha Well Novi is nice. It’s full of strip malls, amenities, pavement, not many trees and lots of red light runners. I feel like I could live in any metro area at this point and they’d all feel the same. San Francisco city will never feel like any of these sprawling metros and New Hampshire (north) will never feel like this either but Detroit’s NOVI area could just as easily be Atlanta, Cleveland, St. Louis, Dallas, and on and on. It’s boring to sit in traffic all day and pass the same chain restaurants and deal with the same BS but 2/3 of the USA population live in places that all look the same. Not really the American dream.
I’m looking forward to waking up in New Hampshire on Friday.