3 Facets

The social facet might be the hardest to conceptualize because there is more to this than just the people you interact with. Parts of socializing include communicating, even though the skill of communication is from the mind, the act of communicating is purely social. You could see the act of socializing as a way of trying to spread your idea of who you are and make it match up with how other people see you. This goes both directions, sometimes you learn more about your social self and it adjusts your inner idea of who you are but more commonly you’re expressing your feelings and beliefs to other people and they’re changing their mental model of who you are, this happens millions of times a day with everyone you meet. One example of something that I believe would be social is money. The things that you buy with money can influence all of your facets but simply having a lot of money in the bank would be social in my opinion. Think of money as a contract with other people that says you h

Keeping in line with the plan to dig into each specific facet we're going to be looking at the physical self. The physical self is probably the most obvious facet because it consists of the body itself. There is nothing here beyond what you literally are made up of. You could also call this your “health” but it is made up of anything physical in your body. Things that readily come-to-mind are things that are easy to improve and are malleable over time like your strength, endurance, and immune system but digging deeper this could also be much more difficult things to change and even currently impossible things like your genetics. When we talk about the physical self our goal here is typically to live as long as possible. Our original point is to have an idea and socialize it for as long as you can; this is the "as long as you can" part. We want to be in good health certainly but there's more to this than simply eating your veggies and doing some cardio. Hygiene plays a

I'm going to spend the next few posts trying to dig deeper into each specific facet. I'm hoping to build a baseline for what types of things make up each facet. One of the most important points to make is that just because something is mental for me it might be social to you. It's important to think about things in relation to what they mean to you. I'm going to give you a framework to help you determine for yourself where different activities fall for you. Digging deeper into the mind and isolating it from the other two aspects we find that our inner self is the source of our ideas, personality, emotions, and education. We can improve the mind by learning and understanding how our inner self works. I like to think about this as being who I see myself as. Am I a funny person? Do I know a lot of facts? How quickly can I do addition? There are many pieces that make up the brain and its functions and those would all fall under the mind. Your mind is expanded by new experie

There's a lot of information out there about the power of habits and so I'm not going to rehash that here except to say that habits are extremely powerful tools in building the life that you want and if you're not familiar with how to create new good habits and kick old bad habits to the curb then learn. You may have seen posts on social media that contain something like: $$$$$$$ Morning Wake up before the sun Ignore your phone Meditate - 5 minutes Workout - 30 minutes Eat a Healthy Breakfast Shower Write down your daily goals Start killing it I'm going to refrain from whole-heartedly mocking these types of posts because I feel like they do deliver an important message even if it is only partially complete. This main focus here is definitely your physical facet with a tiny bit of mental and social mixed in. I encourage you to keep your time in the morning balanced between all three facets. As a matter of comparison consider this routine: Balanced Morning Wake up before

Activity: How do you spend your time? Throughout this blog I'm going to be walking you through some activities that you should run through as you read. These activities will help to explain the overall concepts but they will also guide you in evaluating yourself and defining where you would like to work on improving. Each activity is designed to build on the others that came before it, typically taking the output of the previous activity as an input into the next one. For now, start with this one too get an idea of where you currently spend your time. Activity 1 What we’re going to do here is try to find relatively specific buckets in which you spend your time. There is an assumption here that if you spend a lot of time doing something then you’re good at it, I realize that this may not be the case but that’s alright for our first pass at identifying your activities. We’re going to make a list and use it later to determine if you’re going down the path that you want to and if you’r

 I, like so many other people, have started a New Years Resolution to be more physically fit. I've been on a fitness journey for a while now and my resolution is really a renewal of my existing goals. During 2020 I started doing yoga 5 times a week, typically I did this early in the day before work and since work is now entirely remote for me due to the pandemic this has been pretty easy. I'm committing myself to continuing to wake up early this year and continuing to get my workout in before work even after we've been allowed to return to the office. What I'm changing as of the last couple days is also diversifying my workout. It has been almost entirely yoga for the last year or so but I'm adding more cardio and strength training to my workouts. Right now, this looks like running on the treadmill for 2 miles or 30 minutes, whichever comes first, and basic dumb bell/kettle bell exercises. I'm writing this for a couple reasons: To put it out there and be able to