On New Decade's Systems, Freediving, 2023 Books & Courses

This quote from Zora Neale Hurston is your reminder to breathe easy if 2022 brought more questions than answers.

It sure has for me.

Allow yourself to ask questions without immediately needing to have the answers. See where it takes you.

Thank you for being here & see you in 2023!

🤸‍♀️ IN THIS WEEK'S STRETCH:

• New Decade's Systems. Long-term thinking in a short-term world.

• Freediving. Like meditation, underwater.

• 2023 Books & Online Courses. Doubling down on what works.

📈 New Decade's Systems > New Year's Resolutions

Forget about goals and resolutions for 2023.

The mindset to cultivate is strategic patience: prioritize simple habits and systems you can stick with for the next decade.

Writing. Meditating. Walking.

The kind of actions you have little to show for at the end of the day, month or year, but when done consistently, lead to exponential results in the future.

The challenge is our biological wiring and environment (social and economical) make it difficult to see those exponential possibilities and trust them. We want tangible results now, and we want other people to notice what we're accomplishing.

I think the secret lies in keeping things extremely simple.

Here's my system:

For the past 2 years, I've been using a habit app called Done. At the start, I used it as a streak-tracking app.

The problem with streaks is they can start to feel like an all-or-nothing situation. If you miss a day and lose your streak - that's it. You've now failed.

That's not very motivating.

Missing a day doesn't matter. All that matters is you don't miss another day. Just get back into it as quickly as possible.

So I've stopped caring about "not breaking the streak" and focusing on "hitting as many days as possible".

The bar is intentionally quite low:

• Writing - Something, anything related to writing online. Can be 1 hour of writing, or can be 1 Tweet that took me 5 minutes.

• Meditating - Guided, unguided, eyes closed or open, walking or sitting, at home, or on the train. As long as I've had at least 10 minutes where I've been focused on my breath and my body.

• Walking and movement in general - Morning and afternoon walks, and a general bias for movement (stairs vs elevator, walking vs car, etc.).

Now, when you do that for a whole year, by the end, you get to experience the awesome moment of seeing your 'completion rate'.

For writing, I'm at 91%. This means I've managed to do something related to writing for 333 out of 365 days. Not too shabby.

Meditation has been harder to prioritize every single day, but I still managed to do something 78% of the time.

My intention for 2023 and beyond is simply to keep going and improve those percentages. No fancy goals or metrics.

Oh, and speaking of playing the long game:

I completed my Year of Creative Experiments. This year-long experimental 'no expectations' approach has been transformative, and I'll keep going next year.

My final December experiment was a live workshop around how to start (and stick with!) your own Year of Creative Experiments. It went well, and I am bursting with ideas on how to take this concept forward. I'll be running more sessions, so if you're interested to stay updated, just hit reply to this e-mail. 💌

🤿 Freediving - Like meditation, underwater

Me - doing 'free immersion' where you use a rope for the descent and ascent

I just finished a Level 1 Apnea Total freediving course in Tulum, Mexico. 🇲🇽

What an incredible - and deeply misunderstood - sport.

Freediving is a form of underwater diving that relies on breath-holding until resurfacing, without any breathing apparatus like in scuba diving.

Most people think it's dangerous, or there's not much to it.

But here's what I've learned:

The depth you can go on a single breath is directly correlated with your ability to relax and lower your heart rate. At its core, it's about understanding and controlling your nervous system.

In that state of calmness, humans have been able to reach depths thought impossible by scientists (the current world record is 253m!).

I found it to be a fascinating combination of meditation, interoception, breathwork, and yoga.

To prepare for a dive, you go through a minutes-long process called 'the breathe-up': a series of breaths aimed at relaxing the body and mind.

Here's how it works:

• 3-5 minutes of belly breathing. 4 seconds inhale - hold - 6 seconds exhale - hold. And repeat. You focus on inhaling into the belly, not the chest. You do this as you're floating facedown, using your snorkel, or holding on to a small float. And you do this for as long as you need. The longer exhales activate your parasympathetic nervous system, lowering your heart rate and blood pressure, ensuring the maximum oxygenation of your blood.

• Once you feel you are properly relaxed, and your mind is calm, you do 2-3 deep sighs of relief. Silent in-breaths, loud out-breaths. Here, my instructor told me to widen my visual field (speaking my language, Esteban!) and soften my gaze.

• Take a deep 5-seconds inhale, from the belly to the chest.

• Remove the snorkel, equalize your ears, and go underwater.

As you pull yourself deeper and deeper, head first, the mind is quick to panic. The art is in calming the mind as you focus on equalizing your ears and focusing on the body.

There's so much to learn here about the mind and body connection, so I'm excited to have discovered this sport and continue my certification in 2023.

👩‍🏫 2023 Books & Online Courses

Start more books. Quit most of them. Read the great ones twice. - James Clear

I am going to try really, really hard not to buy any new books or sign up for new courses in 2023.

Instead, I'll re-read the books & re-take the courses I loved and made a difference.

I want to understand the ideas in depth, write about them and have them available to navigate my mind and life.

Books

1. Four Thousand Weeks

2. The Brain

3. Incognito

4. Breath

5. Why Buddhism is True

6. Trying Not to Try

7. The Joy of Movement

8. The Leading Brain

9. The Pathless Path

10. Effortless

11. Deep Work

12. Storyworthy

13. The Power of Strangers

14. The Psychology of Money

Online Courses

1. Hate Writing Less by Sasha Chapin

2. Nervous System Mastery by Jonny Miller

3. Expanding Awareness by Michael Ashcroft

4. Power Writing by Shaan Puri

5. Drawing for Writers by Salman Ansari and Nate Kadlac

Thanks for reading and being part of my 2022 & see you on the other side! 👊

Charlotte