Mindfulness

Contemplating Death – Stoicism, Deliberate Practice, Planes, Last Time, Calculating Days, Gratitude, Enough

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/@pawel_czerwinski

“Do you have life insurance?”

This was the opening question from my neurosurgeon. My mum and dad were sitting on either side of me.

10 minutes earlier, I’d been in the bathroom trying to compose myself while we were waiting for the appointment.

A day earlier, I’d been at home waiting for my MRI results after a concussion wakeboarding. As the referring GP, my mum was faxed the radiologist’s report.

It said I had a brain tumour.

No driving for 3 months… no exercise… scan in a fortnight… decision about operating… referral to a neurologist…

The neurosurgeon’s instructions blurred.

In hindsight, and now with my own children, I can’t imagine what that appointment was like for my folks.

As I buckled into the back seat of the car on the way home, I completely lost it.

I couldn’t believe this was happening.

I was 25 and terrified.

12 months later it turned out, unbelievably, that it had been a misdiagnosis.

All the testing, scanning, appointments and second opinions ultimately drew the conclusion that it was an unusual myelination pattern in my brain and not a tumour at all.

That outcome still blows my mind. I was so incredibly fortunate.

But that experience didn’t exactly trigger an awakening. I kept moving.

Fast forward 11 years and Mum had two thirds of one lung removed to clear out a growth dangerously close to her heart. All clear thankfully.

The following year dad wasn’t so lucky.

A brain tumour too, but real this time. The diagnosis and treatment sparked questions, forgiveness and shared experiences. 6 months later he was gone.

When Dad died, along side the grieving, I was rocked by the thought that I might be two-thirds of the way through my own life. Dad’s parents had died at ages 98 and 93. He’d been 66.

Genetics hadn’t meant a thing.

And all along the way, there have been so many other reminders of mortality.

Cancer, accidents, suicide, sick children, aging parents and grandparents – all in my immediate circle of friends and family.

The only certainty is that you have your own stories like this. We all have. And if you’re in the thick of it right now, I feel for you and wish you all the best. They can be times of real trial and suffering.

So why contemplate death? Why would I write about it at all?

Because while the death I was terrified about at 25 has become no more desirable, it has at least become more useful in guiding my actions.

And that change has been nearly entirely due to my growing understanding of a school of philosophy called Stoicism.

Stoicism & Contemplating Death

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Stoicism is a philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno in 300 BC.

I first began exploring it in 2009 when I read an article by author and Stoic practitioner Ryan Holiday: Philosophy As An Operating System For Entrepreneurs. (If this sort of thing interests you, I strongly recommend Ryan’s books.)

That sent me down the rabbit hole.

My reading began with Lucius Seneca’s *Letters From A Stoic.*

Seneca’s advice was digestable, actionable and relevant. It was hard to believe that it had been written 2,000+ years ago. It appears we humans haven’t changed much.

In one of his most famous essays, On The Shortness Of Life, Seneca counsels **that we should contemplate death to appreciate life and make the most of the time we have.

As I’ve become increasingly aware of my own mortality, I’ve created more deliberate practices to derive meaning, focus and prioritisation from contemplating death.

Deliberate Practice

Here are three practices that I’ve found incredibly useful for course correcting – overall and in the moment.

Planes

Each time I jump on a plane, I ask myself the following.

If this “tin-can-in-the-sky” goes down:

Do the people I love know I love them?
Am I satisfied with what I’ve done, what I’m doing and who I’ve been along the way?

I’ve found it a quick check-in point. The answers aren’t always comfortable but it’s a useful time and place to “look in the mirror”.

What if this is the last time?

Another practice I’ve been trying to cultivate is asking myself this single question.

What if this is the last time?

I first heard it in a mindfulness exercise by Sam Harris.

It also turns out that Roman Emperor, and most famous of all Stoics, Marcus Aurelius used to say something similar to himself as he tucked his children into bed.

Don’t rush this. This might be the last time you do this. There’s no guarantee that either of you will make it through the night…

In his book The Meditations (also a great read), Marcus reminds himself:

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

This question is an immediate prompt for me to engage fully in the present and an exercise in gratitude, whether it’s truly tasting a slice of pizza, putting my girls to bed, sipping a coffee, spending time with a friend or going for a swim.

If I can bring that question to mind, it at least gives me a shot at being present and taking action in order to be the person I’d like to be.

[At the moment I’m trying to practice it when my children go to war at home… and often failing. If you have any other questions/prompts you’ve found useful for that specific instance, I’d love to hear them in the comments!]

Calculating days

Another way I’ve found to make contemplation of death more tangible is to calculate the shortness of life with these two numbers.

Calculation 1: Days I’ve Been Alive

Multiply your age by 365, or,
If you want an exact number here’s a link that will calculate it for you.

I find this number particularly useful as a proxy to understand time as an ongoing process. It’s recognition of the days already gone.

Just like a software program, I’ve had many “versions” already. It means that I have the power, freedom and responsibility to bring forward the best of those past versions and remove what hasn’t served me. I can make changes right now that can make a difference.

Calculation 2: Days Left To Live

How many years do you expect to live? (I use 80 as the average lifespan for someone like me.) Enter that into your calculator.
Multiply it by 365. That answer might be the number of days you’ve been given.
Now, subtract your Days I’ve Been Alive number.

My two numbers

Days I’ve been alive: v15,816
Days left to live: 13,384 (80 x 365 – number above)

The reality is I may have more, I may have fewer. Ultimately there’s no way to know.

But I check these numbers most days as a part of my daily practice to help me keep focussed on what truly matters today.

It helps remind me that time is limited and not renewable.

Enough

Even if science and tech manage to solve aging as a technical problem, there are always accidents.

Anyway I cut it, time is finite.

But, as Seneca says: “Life is long enough.”

Long enough to try to make the choices today that move me towards purpose, values and the people and things that matter most.

Not in an attempt at perfection, because I’ll inevitably fail along the way, but in the recognition that the work is never finished.

Because finally, when my time does run out, hopefully the people I love will know I love them and I’ll be satisfied with what I’ve done, where I am and who I’ve been along the way.

Maximum Aerobic Function – Ego, Injury, Dr Phil Maffetone, Most Shared Ebook, HR: 180 Minus Your Age, Personalisation, Longevity.

*Image credit: https://unsplash.com/@intothefab*

For someone who thought they knew a fair bit about health and fitness, I’ve had to completely rewire my approach to training in the last few years.

My old approach was built on sayings like:

- More is better.

- No pain, no gain.

- Go hard or go home.

It was about toughening up with sets of 10 x 200 metres freestyle on 3 mins wearing a t-shirt.

I have a clear memory of diving off the blocks in a sprint swim set with the absolute intention of going so hard that I’d make myself vomit.

Even at the 2003 Water Polo World Championships in Barcelona, rather than recovering on our rest days, I’d hit the gym because I was telling myself that “it wasn’t the Olympics”.

It wasn’t just me though, it was coaches at the time too.

And there’s only one word for it.

Ego.

It nearly cost me my Olympic spot.

In January 2004, my huge training volume ended up with inflammation of my adductor muscles 6 months out from Athens that put everything at risk.

Fortunately I had incredible physiotherapists to help – Victor Popov and Ed Fitzgerald. I got through it, competed and thankfully have never had it recur.

I look back now at that time and approach and can see the delusion. There was no science behind it, just an obsession with more is better.

But I didn’t really learn my lesson.

Then life’s curveballs began to pile up:

- Two knee operations from a dislocated knee cap snowboarding in 2008 (arthroscopy) and a subsequent repair job in 2014 (mosaicplasty).

- A full shoulder reconstruction from throwing a ball as hard as I could for 20 years in 2016. (Gory details: bicep tendon slap tear, tears to my rotator cuff and labrum and bursitis.)

- And most recently, hamstring tendinopathy from getting a little too enthusiastic when I started karate 2 years ago. That meant scans, injections, misdiagnoses, periods of excruciating pain. The rehab is still going on today.

And they were on top of baseline lifestyle changes like sitting down for long stretches each day at work and trying to squeeze in exercise amidst the competing time demands of family life.

What springs to mind are the immortal words of Captain Tom “Stinger” Jordan as he was talking to Maverick, played by Tom Cruise in the scene from Top Gun:

“Son, your ego’s running cheques your body can’t cash.”

Guilty.

I’ve become so fed up with cycle of injury, rehab, train, breakdown again, that I just had to try a new approach to health and fitness improvements.

As I’ve laboured under the compound effect of all of the injuries and lifestyle, I’ve been forced to rethink how I train.

How can I rebuild and then develop my physical health for the long term?

How can I stay focussed on the present to benefit from the compound effect of staying fit and healthy and not falling back into injury?

These are tricky questions. No one size fits all.

But I was recently introduced to Dr Phil Maffetone’s Maximum Aerobic Function system.

It’s evidence based, quick to personalise, easy to get started and simple to maintain.

Dr Phil Maffetone & The Maximum Aerobic Function (MAF) Method

Dr Phil Maffetone has quite a rap sheet:

Over the course of his career, Dr. Maffetone has worked with some of the world’s finest athletes in a variety of sports, most notably Mark Allen, six-time Hawaii Ironman Triathlon Champion. Dr. Maffetone has also worked with other endurance athletes of all types, professional baseball and football players, adventurers, NASCAR drivers, and Olympic medalists in a variety of sports. While his work with top-level athletes reads like “Who’s Who,” perhaps more notable, Dr. Maffetone has helped thousands of weekend warriors achieve personal-best performances in their chosen sports.

Outside the sports arena, Dr. Maffetone has coached a variety of people in the entertainment field, including musicians James Taylor and Johnny Cash, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and producer Rick Rubin, and has also provided a system of success for some of the world’s top business executives as well as the United States military.

And his experience is backed by clinical scientific evidence. (You can find his research papers here.)

Why MAF works (An excerpt from Dr Maffetone’s e-book The MAF Method)

I have written about the key components of MAF for decades. This chapter addresses the why. Just why does maximum aerobic function work? With a strong clinical and scientific foundation, the goal of MAF is to help individuals personalize their food, exercise and other lifestyle routines to address causes of problems not just treat symptoms, leading to real, lifelong benefits.

These are not commandments, rules or laws, but basic explanations of a holistic approach to health and fitness I began developing in the 1970s.

Here are nine short points:

1. As an overview, the shortest answer is that MAF helps restore the most natural state of human performance. This promotes optimal physical, biochemical and mental-emotional health and fitness.
2. MAF means maximum aerobic function, reflecting our innate ability to burn (oxidize) body fat for nearly unlimited energy. Reliance on fatburning, a predominant fuel source potentially used for most of our needs, occurs in the cell’s mitochondria, found in muscles, including the heart, kidney, liver and many other areas. Fat-burning also increases production of ketone bodies, useful for energy by the brain and throughout the body, and helps keep energy high, and blood sugar and glycogen stores stable. Maximizing natural fat-burning is a key focus of MAF, directly improving all areas of health and fitness.
3. The earliest humans maximized fat-burning as an essential part of developing better and bigger brains and bodies. It led to increased longevity and more functional aging, protection against chronic -illness, physical speed and endurance, and prevention of excess body fat. In a real sense, max aerobic function is how humans advanced so well from the beginning. We possess this same physiology today, unless poor lifestyle interferes with it.
4. Poor food or exercise choices can significantly impair metabolism and reduce fat-burning. Energy wanes leading to a wide array of abnormal signs and symptoms from fatigue, hunger and depression, to excess body fat and weight. This can lead to poor blood lipid profiles, high blood-sugar levels and other common risk factors, ending with chronic illness, physical impairment and reduced quality of life. MAF offers strategies that help people figure out the causes of these problems, and their solutions.
5. Our aerobic system is where most fat-burning occurs, especially in the slow-twitch aerobic muscle fibers. These non-fatiguing endurance muscles support joints, bones, ligaments, tendons, and anaerobic fibers, promote efficient posture and movement, prevent injuries, and are vital sources of circulation and antioxidant protection. When this system is faulty, it leads to an aerobic deficiency — poor fat-burning and increased fat storage.
6. As a natural holistic approach, MAF considers all physical, biochemical and mental-emotional aspects, and how lifestyle stress impacts us. Included are the physical muscles, bones and joints, biochemical hormones, nutrients and neurotransmitters, and mental-emotional cognition, learning, memory and pain. When well integrated, optimal human performance on all levels results.
7. Various MAF tools help people understand abnormal signs and symptoms, find the causes of reduced health and fitness, and personalize lifestyle remedies. It begins with a simple process of selfassessment. These tools include online digital evaluations that guide the process, the MAF Test, a measure of physical activity at specific heart rates, and the Two-Week Test that helps determine foods that best match a person’s needs.
8. Measurable improvement is an important goal of MAF—not just the elimination of symptoms but enhancing human performance. As such, MAF has been popular with people of all ages seeking weight and fat loss, athletic performance, corporate and academic improvements, addressing physical impairment, including body and brain injuries, those in rehabilitation, and others.
9. Through the process of self-assessment and monitoring, the MAF Method helps take the guesswork out of eating, exercise and stress to continually improve health and fitness. A simple ongoing monitoring system, one that will become intuitive for you, helps ensure progress is made and maintained to prevent relapse.

Where to start

If this interests you, here are two possible approaches:

1. Dive straight in to the whole framework. Download the MAF Method Ebook. It’s the one health resource that I’ve shared most this year. It explores nutrition, exercise and stress and will help you personalise your approach.
2. If you’re looking for a quick start, the MAF heart rate based training heuristic below is what I found helped me take immediate action.

Heart Rate Zones

Heart rate training zones are nothing new.

Google it and a bunch of tables in beautiful colours pop up with tabled heart rates to train at with accompanying recommendations like: “It should be a struggle to talk.” But that’s a tricky thing to measure and be accurate with when it comes time to actually train. And, those zones don’t take into account anything of my personal situation.

So the ability to quickly personalise heart rate zones to my own circumstances using MAF, without in depth testing and the associated costs… that is something I hadn’t found elsewhere.

Armed with my watch (to measure heart rate) and the below calculation, I began the battle of changing my training habits.

Calculating MAF Heart Rate (180 minus your age)

The part I like most about the MAF framework as a launching point is the quick calculation that gives me a personalised specific heart rate range to target.

To quote directly from Dr Maffetone’s ebook, here’s how you calculate your Maximum Aerobic Function heart rate:

The MAF 180 Formula Determining your MAF HR:

1. Subtract your age from 180.
2. Modify this number by choosing one category below that best applies to you:
  1. 1. If you have or are recovering from a major illness (including any operation or hospital stay), are in rehabilitation, have been prescribed any regular medication, or are chronically overtrained, subtract an additional 10.
    2. If you are injured, have regressed or not improved in training (such as poor MAF Tests) or competition, get more than two colds, flu or other infections per year, have seasonal allergies or asthma, are overfat, are acutely overtraining, or if you have been inconsistent, just beginning or returning to exercise, subtract an additional 5.
    3. If you have been training consistently (at least four times weekly) for up to two years without any of the problems mentioned in a) or b), no modification is necessary (use 180 minus age as your MAF HR).
    4. If you have been training for more than two years without any of the problems listed above, have made progress in your MAF Tests, and have improved competitively, add 5.

So my MAF heart rate is:

180 – 43 (my age) – 5 (for injuries) = 132

Subtract an additional 10 for the bottom of my target range.

My target training heart rate range then is: 122-132.

When I first saw this number I thought that was insane. It was so counter to my historic approach.

But the MAF guidelines say that given my current physical health, I should be training at this range for 3-6 months before adding in higher intensity again.

Nothing else felt like it was working. So I decided to give it shot.

Longevity

As of Mar 2023, I’m 4 months into my experiment of training within the MAF guidelines.

When I combine it with my watch to give me the HR feedback, I know in real time if I need to back off or push my training.

By far the hardest part of adopting this has been holding back.

But tracking progress through my watch I’ve seen my resting heart rate drop, my max VO2 increase and most of all I’m finishing sessions feeling better than I started rather than gassed (another core principle of MAF).

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve been able to maintain my basic weekly training for 4 months now:

- 1 x 2km swim,

- 2 x supervised pilates sessions,

- 1 body weight strength session

- and some walking (at my MAF HR) while on work calls.

I have to practice being present to remind myself though that if I can reduce the load and intensity now, then I’ll give myself a shot at compounding the small gains into being able to do more in the future.

And this is the most sustained training I’ve been able to do in 2 years.

I think one of the keys is having that very specific heart rate of 132 as my upper constraint. Inevitably I bump over it every now and again, and have had set backs, but it’s certainly working for me.

My own experiment continues, so let me know in the comments if you give this a try or have had any experience with implementing it.

Acknowledging Country – Fear, Mindfulness, Journey, A Script, Connection

Three years ago, at the Brisbane Powerhouse, 30 minutes before my event Changing The Game of Influence was due to start, my speaking coach said to me:

“You have to do the Acknowledgement of Country, Toby. Google the right words, then say them.”

He was right of course. It was my event.

But it had been a long time since I’d run my own event and I’d never started with an Acknowledgement of Country before. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it in my preparation.

And I was afraid of making a mess of it.

Afraid of missing an important piece of protocol or that I might offend someone.

But it was also really important to me, so I googled Acknowledgement of Country in Brisbane. Then I took myself off to hide in a bathroom stall and run through it as many times as I could before guests arrived.

I kicked off the event using the guidance from Reconciliation Australia:

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Turrbal and Jagera people and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.

As a first time, it felt a bit clunky and awkward, but I was glad I’d done it.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing though.

The day after the event I received some direct feedback that it could have been better. That I had sounded rushed and that I could have slowed down or paused to give it additional emphasis.

That feedback felt uncomfortable too.

It was time to practice.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve practiced and started events, keynotes and workshops with an Acknowledgement of Country many times using that same guidance.

Then a few weeks ago, I was running my Momentum Live workshop back at the Brisbane Powerhouse. 65 people were coming. A critical part of the workshop is the science of mindfulness and how it applies in wellbeing and performance.

One of the common misconceptions of mindfulness is that it is a practice that we do separately. In reality, mindfulness is what we bring to the present moment or an activity.

Rather than doing mindfulness, it’s about being mindful.

So prior to the event I wanted to see if there might be a way to bring mindfulness to the Acknowledgement of Country and really help people connect to it.

The same fears that had shown up three years ago came back even as I considered this.

If I was going to try to bring the two practices together, I wanted to make sure it was acceptable in the first instance and if so, then done in a respectful and appropriate way.

Journey and a script

So I reached out to Dave Williams, a Wakka Wakka man and the owner and Executive Director of Indigenous creative agency Gilimbaa, that specialises in strategic and connected communication.

When I explained my thinking and experience in a phone call, Dave’s counsel was pretty clear.

He shared that everyone walks their own journey with understanding what it means to Acknowledge Country and the connection Country has for Australia’s First Peoples. And that this often starts from a place of discomfort.

So this would become another step in mine.

With his coaching, I developed the exercise and kicked off the event with the below.

I opened with the guidance from Reconciliation Australia again.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today, the Turrbal and Jagera people and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.

Then I invited my attendees to join me in an exercise to bring mindfulness to the Acknowledgment.

We’re going to be talking about mindfulness quite a bit through this workshop, so if you’re willing, I invite you to join me in this exercise.

You can keep your eyes open or closed. I’m going to close mine. Just listen to my voice and follow my prompts.

Just for a moment, notice your breath. [Pause]

Then bring your attention to the sensations in your feet. Notice the texture of your socks or shoes. Spend a moment there. [Pause]

Then extend your awareness into the floor and then down the sides of the building and onto the land on which we gather. I’d like us to pause here for a moment to reflect on and acknowledge the fact that thousands upon thousands of people have walked this land before us, for tens of thousands of years. And that we stand on the richness of the contributions they have made in so many ways. [Pause]

Then I’d like us to reflect on the fact that many, many more will walk this land after us. And that all of those people, will stand on the decisions we make and the actions we take, today, in acknowledging, embracing and bringing forward that very same richness.

Take a moment to reflect on that. [Pause]

And then I’d like us to bring our awareness back up from the land, up the walls, into the floor and pause for a moment back on the sensations in our feet. [Pause]

And then, in your own time, come back to the room and open your eyes.

Connection

When it came time for me to actually deliver this exercise, all of the same anxiety and fears showed up once more.

I’ve run it in a few more workshops since and they still do.

But after each time, I have felt immensely grounded, present and connected.

With mindfulness accompanying the words and really trying to be present, this process has helped me to experience a deeper, more personal connection to country.

I have so much to learn in this space, so I wanted to reflect on my own journey to date and to share this in case others might find it useful.

In direct contrast to my own childhood, I’ve watched my daughters be taught Acknowledgement of Country as a near daily ritual in their kindergartens and primary school.

They do it beautifully.

I feel incredibly grateful that they will have such familiarity with acknowledging and recognising the contributions, traditions and cultural heritage of our land.

Their Acknowledgement of Country has started much sooner than mine and I can only hope their sense of connection will develop to be deep and rich.