Find Your Life Purpose Without Going Broke

Written by Hans Hageman

Do you know what your life purpose is? Are you living it?

My youngest daughter had a birthday party last week. It went really well – thanks to my wife. I acted busy to cover my extreme shyness. I don’t like crowds but when it’s “Showtime” I can turn it on. I’ve heard that these kinds of people are called “ambiverts.” This wasn’t Showtime so I took my time making sure the pizza and cake were cut just right.

At the end of the party, I was talking to a very nice man who had done some wonderful caricatures – you know, those drawings where the person’s features are exaggerated. He told me that he had seen my bio and mentioned that I had an “impressive career.” That was my cue to explain that I couldn’t hold a job. I said this with humor and sincerity.

Part of my problem has been that I thought I had discovered my life purpose at the age of 6. I convinced myself that I wanted to be a lawyer. With those magical powers I planned to correct the world’s injustice. It would have been parental malpractice for my parents to talk me out of such a noble middle class dream back then.

I did the lawyer thing. I have a policy of living with as few regrets as possible so I’ll leave it there for now. I was fortunate to have some great education opportunities open up for me. I traveled in the lanes that were available to people who could play the game or were brilliant. You can decide where I fit.

There are other lanes open now. In fact, the traditional path to the American Dream looks pretty crazy right now. You can choose to “invest” in the education bubble, incur ridiculous amounts of student loan debt, and, if you’re one of the lucky ones, become a worker pretending you have a career. Another way to go is…

Self -Employment

The life of an entrepreneur, at least the way I’m living it, has not been easy. I don’t recommend abruptly quitting a high-paying job. My family and I have very little financial security. We’ve put everything we’ve had, and then some, into the business.

While we scramble for ways to scale it up, we get to tell our kids “no” to things like eating out and expensive sports camps. We do get to spend a lot of time with them and to have important conversations. I’ll just have to wait and see where they come out on the resentment/gratitude scale.

Despite the challenges, I believe that the life of an entrepreneur can be spiritual and transformative if you remain aware. It’s kind of like how the most difficult people in your life can also be your most profound teachers.

Somebody Should Have Told Me

I wish I had had someone to mentor me in what it took to be successful. I’m still grateful that my mind and body are healthy enough to move on this path in my mid-50’s. I still think I could have learned some of these lessons a little faster with the right guidance. It now pains me to see so many younger people going numb or living with the emotional (and often physical) pain of living without meaning or joy. One day I’ll talk about the distinction I that think needs to be made between “joy” (our natural state) and “happiness” (our “should” state).

The American Dream was to supposed to mean that life would “be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement regardless of social or circumstances of birth” (James Truslow Adams in 1931).

That hasn’t worked out for a lot of the people I know. People from my generation were mostly groomed to be workers in an economy that is rapidly vanishing. Some people rebelled and made art with their lives – as solopreneurs, as social entrepreneurs, and even in corporations.

I’m a husband, a father of daughters, a co-founder of a school for girls in India, and the co-owner of a fitness business that works with women. This next part is for any woman who knows someone like this…

Do You Know This Person?

You did what you were supposed to do. You paid attention in school and worked on your social and academic skills. You were told you could have it all if you just followed the road they laid out for you.

Then life intruded. You sit at a table with a mound of bills in one hand and your paycheck in the other. Like every month, you have the sinking feeling that THIS check won’t cover THESE bills. Those stupid student loans!

But you get up every day and show up to your 9-to-5. It’s boring and some of the people are jerks but you feel fortunate to even have a job. So you swallow your pride and hide your dreams.

Worse than the boredom and the annoying people is the fear. Fear that you’ll never meet your dream partner. Fear that you’ll lose your job. Fear that you’ll stay on this treadmill and never do the things that inspire and ignite you.

You didn’t go to an elite school. Your family wasn’t wealthy. Your parents didn’t give you that network that would plug you into job opportunities. You weren’t the tenth employee of Facebook.

You’d love to take a chance on finding your dream job or starting your own business but you still feel the recession. You know in your mind that you’re still young but your heart tells you you’ll soon be too old to follow your dream. What happened to that personal style that you developed in high school and really rocked with in college?

Life Purpose

There’s something inside of you that wants to make a difference. But how can you figure out what kind of a difference you can make? The daily grind keeps question as a dull ache with no relief in sight. Wanting to have children doesn’t make this any easier.

Sometimes you think it’s about making as much money as you can and buying that car, those shoes, and the nice apartment. Is that all you’re supposed to want? Those things are what your friends talk about all the time. Is there something wrong with you if you want something else? It’s not just your friends’ opinions that concern you. Your family has expectations that you feel pressured to meet.

Your fear and confusion are not your fault. The pressures of modern life have caused us to forget that we are conscious beings with the gift of Free Will. You’ve been lied to. It’s not all about competing and doing whatever it takes.

External factors, whether they are your family or your current finances do not have to keep you from fulfillment.

Take action on your wisdom instead of other’s expectations. Attract abundance by standing in your emotional and spiritual truth.

Are you waiting for the right time, enough money, enough experience? It’ll never happen. Talk to your parents or spend time in a senior citizen’s home if you don’t believe me. We all leave this earth. What will your friends and family remember about how you lived your life? Will it be a story worth telling?

Two Exercises

One of the things I love about my two youngest kids is that they have their own sense of style. I fight a constant battle with myself because while I love that they have such a strong sense of themselves, I know this society will try to beat it out of them. In my clearer moments, I tell myself that being overprotective is just as bad as being abusive. At my best, I pray to God that He will protect them and allow their God-given wisdom to guide them.

I want you to recapture your style, too. Let’s start with a couple of exercises I got from Barbara Sher (not personally, but I wish!).

1. Choose a color that you like. It doesn’t have to be your favorite color. Find something with that color in it and have it in front of you. It can be a picture, a crayon, a piece of clothing, etc.

You’re going to role-play that color. If you’re “orange,” who are you? How do you feel as orange? What do you like to do? What other colors do you like to associate with? I am orange and I…

When you pick your color and express who you are as that color, you are declaring yourself and making a statement as to your style. You’re taking off the uniform that other people have made you put on and you’re making a personal statement. Get in touch if you want more on this.

2. Find someone you love and trust, and who loves you. Get something to write with and set aside five minutes. Ask that person to tell you everything they like about you. They aren’t allowed to be vague and you aren’t allowed to interrupt. You might also want to switch roles. Being both a good praiser and praisee has its benefits.

Too many children are lavishly praised for every little accomplishment. When we become adults, praise is withheld and “honest” self-evaluations are only allowed to include criticism, otherwise we are viewed as being vain. Go ahead and see how it feels to give and receive honest, deep praise.

Since you’ve read this far, I feel comfortable asking to you to Retweet this and otherwise pass it on.

Live with purpose and irony!

P.S. – If you need some help with any of this, call me or send me an email. We’ll talk. It’ll help. I promise.

photo by: Museum of Photographic Arts Collections

Posted in happiness - Tagged going broke, happiness, joy, life purpose

What Is Happiness?

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Written by Hans Hageman

Happiness is always available to you.

Mind, Consciousness, Thought

Inspired by Sydney Banks and Michael Neill

Le me know what you think in the comments section or send me an email – [email protected]

Posted in God, happiness, inspiration, life design, meditation, mind, mindfulness, motivation, Uncategorized - Tagged coaching, consciousness, God, Hans Hageman, happiness, Michael Neill, mind, thought, Three Principles

Gain Muscle and Mobility

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Written by Hans Hageman

Strength coach and religious studies teacher, Dan John, likes to say, “The goal is to keep the goal the goal.” Read that again after we talk about why you should gain muscle and mobility.

Do you have a goal for your training?

I believe that while workouts should have a basic structure, for those of us who aren’t trying to extend a National Football League career, it is also important to have some randomness to our exercise design. Having some randomness in our training can help us deal with some of the random stressors that life likes to throw at us.

Additionally, if you’re over 35, you should probably be focusing on gaining more muscle and moving better.

Not static stretching, not running a bunch of miles – putting on muscle and improving mobility are more important for your longevity and quality of life.

Why Muscle?

Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle size, strength, and function. Medical professionals say it begins during the fourth decade. But if symptoms tell the tale, I’ve seen it in people in their late 20′s and early 30′s (also Google the “Female Athlete Triad”). Unless you’re doing something to maintain and increase it, you’ll start to lose muscle in your 30′s. It’s important, and never too late, to create that “armor” now.

Muscle is so important that it’s maintenance or loss is predictive of the life span of someone with cancer, muscular dystrophy, AIDS, kidney disease, or heart disease.

Please don’t tell me you want to avoid putting on “too much muscle” – unless you’re comfortable with derisive laughter. The only people who need to worry about this are those with access to performance enhancing drugs – and they’ll have other issues to deal with down the line.

As you probably know, you put on muscle with resistance training. The body doesn’t know where the resistance is coming from so it can happen with barbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, your own bodyweight, or machines (last choice). Make the resistance challenging and progressive.

Mobility or Flexibility?

People get these two confused. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that when something feels tight, stiff, or sore, stretching that part feels good. The problem is that the cause of the pain is often not at the site of the pain. In fact, releasing tension in the neck can alleviate some shoulder pain. The lower back can be made to feel better by rolling your glutes on a tennis or lacrosse ball. Heel pain can be helped with a calf massage. The knee bone’s connected to the shinbone but…

You know how your lower back can sometimes be a little stiff? Your go-to remedy to relieve the stiffness is reaching down to your toes, going into a yoga child pose, or lying on your back and pulling one or both legs to your chest. It feels good. You get some relief but the irritation never completely goes away. For too many people, the back problem slowly morphs into other things.

A couple of years ago, you would have run for the bus before it pulled away but you don’t want to embarrass yourself. Moving around first thing in the morning requires its own ritual just so you don’t hurt yourself. You stop yourself before you break into a trot up the stairs from the subway or to your apartment. You’d like to take a bath but it’s a hassle to get up and down in the tub so you stick with the shower.

You wouldn’t even dream of putting on socks or shoes while standing up without something to hold on to. In addition to your lower back, your shoulder, your knee, your hip, or your heel seem to be nagging you as well. Mobility and muscle are lacking.

If this isn’t you, you’re probably under 30 or have been coming to Brownstone Fitness 3x/week for more than a year.

Stretching lengthens the muscle that is being stretched. The muscle generally won’t maintain that length and may even cause it to shorten in a protective reflex if the stretch is too aggressive. Intelligent stretching (certain forms of yoga, PNF, etc.) can help with joint position but when time is precious, you get the biggest bang for your buck with…

…mobility work.

Instead of just the muscle, improved mobility impacts the muscles crossing the joint, the ligaments, and the nervous system. Flexibility looks at the end ranges of motion. Mobility looks at how well you can move through those ranges of motion. Mobility work looks like Martha Peterson’s Essential Somatics,Tai Chi, some Pilates movements, certain flowing forms of yoga, the animal movements we do here, or gentle bending, twisting, and rotations at the different joints.

Do you want me to put up a short video of a mobility routine? Let me know in comments.

photo by: Paul L Dineen

Posted in aging, bodyweight exercise, flexibility, mobility, movement, muscle, resistance training - Tagged Brownstone F, Dan John, gain, mobility, movement, muscle. mobility, strength

Pain – Can You Still Play?

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Written by Hans Hageman

chained 300x200 Pain Can You Still Play?

playing with pain

Apparently, there’s a phenomenon where, after heart surgery, men become more emotional. Well, I haven’t had heart surgery but I find that I spend more time reflecting on human pain and my role in alleviating it.

My children have asked me if I’ve ever gotten into a fight. My youngest daughter asked if anyone has ever given me “booboos,”while my youngest son asked if I’ve ever gotten my “ass kicked.” The smile that accompanies his question makes me wonder if this is part of the sizing up that is naturally done in the animal kingdom. My answer is that, yes, people have given me booboos AND kicked my ass.

I can name some of the perpetrators – Joseph D’Angelo, Shiro Oishi, and Col. Al Ridenhour (my guides in the Martial Way). Life has also gotten some swings in.

The good news is that I have been able to mostly avoid the effects of random violence by either running fast or striking first.

I recently did a quick “booboo” inventory of my body. There’s the nose that’s been broken three times; the ribs that were fractured and had the cartilage between them torn; the scar along my knee where the quadriceps tendon that had ripped from my kneecap was sewn back after holes were drilled in the bone; the bone spur to go along with the arthritis in the same ankle; the two fingers that had to be reconstructed after being shattered into several pieces; and both elbows that don’t completely straighten because all the cartilage is gone and instead of a cushion between the bones of my upper and lower arm, the two bones have ground down into an offset position.

Does it hurt? Yes. It sometimes feels like ice picks are being driven into my joints. But I stand with my pal, T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”).

In the eponymous movie, Lawrence (as played by Peter O’Toole) holds his hand over a flame until his skin begins to burn. His colleague, William Potter asks: “Doesn’t it hurt?” Lawrence responds: “Of course it hurts, Potter. The trick is not minding that it hurts.”

Pain is temporary. Unless we try to deny the truth of what is. Then it will increase.

I catch myself making a deal with God that I will honor the pain if I can avoid the stroke that paralyzed my father or the Parkinson’s that weakened my mother. I stop this when I notice it (see above about denying the truth).

There is a symphony of human movement that is available to all of us. The instruments may be old and missing a string or a key. Practice can’t be missed. The challenge is to play the music that’s inside us to the best of our ability. It brings honor to us and to our Creator.

Are you in physical or emotional pain? Email me. I’ll write you back. We’ll talk. It’ll help.

Hans

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photo by: VinothChandar

Posted in brain, fitness, happiness, inspiration, pain - Tagged coaching, exercise, movement, pain, play

Happiness with Flow

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Written by Hans Hageman

Brownstone Fitness coaching

Finding Happiness Through Flow

How often are you in flow? Flow occurs when you’re engaged in an activity that’s challenging but not outside your skill set. It’s something so deeply interesting that you lose all sense of time and place and you have the feeling that, wherever this is, it’s exactly the place you are supposed to be.

Flow can occur on a job, in an athletic activity, through the creation of art, or in relationship with someone. In this state, your focus gives you access to your essential self. You tap into the source of natural pleasure that is our birthright. As me move into adulthood, this source gets polluted, blocked, covered up, diverted.

Losing It and Finding It Again

I enjoy (and miss) working with young people. Even the teenagers I worked with who had been beaten down, still retained a sense of the possible. For some it was rare, but almost all of them had times when they were able to access that internal flame of simple joy.

As we become adults, we’ve been clothed in “shoulds” and drugged by “must haves.” These paths take us away from the essential.

Bernadette and I think the work at Brownstone is important. There are many nights when we share our frustrations over the (small) group of individuals who pass through here thinking that what we provide is just another commodity. While I sit here writing this, Bernadette is putting in another three hours of study in physiology. She’ll then work on some relaxation visualizations. When I finish, I’ll do some reading on motivation, relieving shoulder impingement, and thinking about exercise circuits. No fast food burgers being served here.

Struggle

Running a small business like this is a struggle on many levels. We are asking people to spend a decent amount money on a regular basis to do something that is hard and that most people don’t want to do. We’re proud of you for engaging in the struggle nonetheless

In the world’s oldest wisdom book, the Bhagavad Gita Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that “you are only entitled to your labors but not to the fruits of your labors.”

Our labor is not dedicated to toned arms and six-pack abs, but to freeing up your child inside, helping you to feel joy, and, when you let us, reminding you that you’re only one thought away from happiness.

You won’t find that in a 24-Hour Fitness brochure.

Posted in happiness, inspiration, mind, mindfulness, Uncategorized - Tagged Arjuna, Brownstone Fitness, coaching, flow, happiness, New York, personal training, small business

Meditation and The Principle of Least Action

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Written by Hans Hageman

There’s a principle of physics called the “principle of least action.” It kind of says that Nature will find the most efficient path from one point to another. This concept is easy to ignore in our workouts and as we make our way through the world. We look for quick fixes in every area of our lives. There are all sorts of “bright, shiny objects” in the worlds of diet and fitness that distract us from the most efficient path to wellness.

I received an email a little while ago from a distraught teenage girl desperate for help with her weight. She had stumbled onto the Brownstone Fitness website and is courageously reaching out for help. There are so many conflicting messages that this young lady has already received about what she is supposed to look like if she’s going to fit in and be popular. At times like these I am reminded that exercise programming and meal planning are only small pieces of the puzzle.

We pay for diet and exercise systems that we hope will get us where we think we want to go. There are at least two problems with this. One is that the conditions and environments that surround us (work, family, media messages, etc.) don’t allow us to work the systems.

A bigger problem is that a slavish adherence to a system blocks our awareness of the wisdom inside and around us. Find a time and a place every day to be quiet and listen for this wisdom. Accessing this wisdom calms the mind and allows the body to realize the healthy and vigorous state it was born for. Some people call this meditation.

Prayer happens when we talk to God. Meditation allows the space for God to talk to us. These may not be easy things but they are simple. You can discover for yourself the principle of least action.

Posted in body image, meditation, mindfulness - Tagged calm, diet, exercise, meditation, Nature, nutrition, reflection

Find Your Life Purpose Without Going Broke

Self -Employment

Somebody Should Have Told Me

Do You Know This Person?

Life Purpose

Two Exercises

What Is Happiness?

Gain Muscle and Mobility

Pain – Can You Still Play?

Happiness with Flow

Finding Happiness Through Flow

Losing It and Finding It Again

Struggle

Meditation and The Principle of Least Action

Catherine Nunez

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