The Wall returns

Context International returns to Toronto with their first offering of The Wall after a lengthy absence. This video is a tribute to the participants of the May 2011 "The Wall" weekend.

Hello, Bruce!

I’ve decided to go do some shooting on the Bruce Trail this afternoon. Planning to shoot around the Southern Cairn in Queenston.

Putting on my old hiking boots, squeezing my feet into them. Baby needs a new pair of hiking boots. Especially before I go to Machu Picchu.

Going to try out the Cine mode on my camcorder for that dramatic look. I’ve got lots of memory capacity available on my camcorder and about 80 minutes of battery time so that’s my critical operating constraint.

Course to Southern Cairn is plotted and laid in. ETA is 17 minutes with traffic. That’s one thing I love about living in St. Catharines, is its proximity to the Bruce Trail. I would be remiss if I did not drop by and say hello while I was in town.

2:46pm There’s the cairn. For all the fame and celebrity accorded to it yet it just stands there, unassuming, without ceremony, as though it was just plopped into place. Hello old friend. I’m back.

The earth is awakening and she has dabbed on her fragrance, a familiar and warming scent.

It is spring, and spring means mud. I have encountered the muddy side of Bruce.

5:30pm I’m well past the point of no return. This is much harder in my fourties than it was in my twenties. Thank God I’ve been doing those squat exercises!

It’s almost not even fun any more; it’s almost just sheer survival. Almost, but not really. However, I am driven. I want to get to where the trail crosses the highway so I can pick up my shooting from there on the next turn.

Goodbye Mr. Glicksohn

Mr. Glicksohn – although you taught Math rather than English, my longest lasting memory of having you as a teacher in two Grade 13 classes is that you inspired me to research and write an essay about the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars as my explanation of why I missed school on the day of Ukrainian Christmas.

Perhaps I had additional motivation in hearing a rumor that there may be a prize awarded for the most creative note of absence, and perhaps I had additional motivation in the rumor that the prize would be a 40 ounce bottle containing a liquid that I was too young at the time too drink. I never did receive that bottle but it’s just as well for it would have been long ago emptied by now.

I was largely a slacker in my early high school years and it was in your classes, Relations & Functions and Algebra, that I learned what results I could attain when I truly applied myself. This was a lesson by which I transformed from a slacker in high school to a student who worked hard in university, and beyond.

Mr. Glicksohn – as a teacher you were cool, you were fun, you gave and commanded great respect.

Goodbye Mr. Glicksohn. Be sure to say hello to Douglas Adams and Georg Purbach in your new journey.

Three minutes of entertainment

The phone rings. I answer it. “Hello, Orest here.”

The silence and the click are my first clues that this is a telephone solicitation call.

A moment later she speaks. “Hello, is this Mr. ...” and she mangles my last name. If she had paid attention when I answered the phone she’d have known who this was. “Did I pronounce your last name correctly, Mr. ...?” she asks and mangles my last name again.

“No,” I say in an unfriendly tone.

She just continues with her script. “This call may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes.”

Excellent. This recording should be an educational case study for whoever ends up reviewing the call. Perhaps I should have told her “This call may be blogged for entertainment purposes.”

She asks me a bunch of questions such as “Do you have a personal computer”, and “Do you make purchases online”, to which I answer no to all, in the same tone.

She just continues with her script and tries to sell me insurance anyways. She is using the “assumed close” approach. I let her go through her script, during which period I become all the more convinced that I do not want to buy what she is selling.

She finishes her script and asks me the question to confirm my identity so that they can send me their package which I can cancel after so many days if I don’t want it.

“Thank you for your call. I’m going to pass on your offer. Have a nice day,” I tell her in a kind, final, and guilt free tone. I decline without actually using the word "no". Verbal kung fu - I give her no resistance that she could push back against.

She thanks me for my time. I say goodbye and hang up the phone.

I think about the Tony Robbins lesson about the noisy train that goes by and disrupts one of his seminars, and how he responded.

Woo hoo! A telephone solicitation call! Three minutes of entertainment, and I get to practice saying no, and I get to contribute to the amount of quality in the world. Woo hoo!

Revisiting the spirit of Fiji

It's coming up to one year since my trip to Fiji. I've been working on my Fiji movie and it's shaping up nicely. Or, to restate that using the language of ownership - I am well pleased with where I've been taking it.

Why am I making this video now, almost a year later? I had previously made a short video last year that I had posted to my Facebook account, and a couple of slideshows using iPhoto, but none of those projects encapsulated the full scope of the video that I envisioned making while I was there. I've just really really really wanted to do it, and I've been having a slow period with regard to client projects, so I just started doing it.

While I was in Fiji I did the pole-climb. I also took over 400 photographs and recorded several hours of video. I had it in my mind that I would make a movie out of all that and I started thinking about what my soundtrack would be. One song I kept hearing was Faith of the Heart. That's the theme song from the series Star Trek: Enterprise, performed by Russell Watson.

I was really hearing that song, I was really hearing the words, and they seemed totally, completely, appropriate for the experience I was having in Fiji.

It's been a long road
Getting from there to here...

It certainly was a long road getting from Toronto to Fiji. I took something like five planes, crossed the International Date Line, crossed the equator, and crossed so many time zones that I'm not even sure how long it took me to get there. I think it was about twenty four hours.

Physically, it was a long road getting from here to there, but also metaphorically - my life journey has been a long road.

Some of the other lines I was hearing...

I'm going where my heart will take me
I've got faith to believe
I can do anything
I've got strength of the soul
And no one's gonna bend or break me
I can reach any star...

Those words - I could just hear those words and they completely went with the images I had, climbing the pole. It's what the pole climb is about - I can do anything, I can reach any star.

It's now, almost a year later, I'm going back to that video and man, I need that inspiration now. For a couple of weeks now I've been feeling down and discouraged about my fund raising efforts for the trek in Machu Picchu for Joints In Motion. As I'm watching the pictures of me climbing that pole and hearing that music and listening to those words, I feel a reconnection with inspiration.

I've had some kick-ass wins recently so it seems irrational that I should be feeling down and discouraged. I should just focus on my wins and feel positive, right?

Maybe, but I don't believe in so-called Positive Thinking. I equate that with putting on a mask. I think I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge my negative feelings to myself and pretended I didn't have them. I think that sweeping them under the rug allows them to gain power over me. I've learned that I become stronger in the end when I acknowledge and respect my negative feelings and know that I won't stay in them for too long.

They're not gonna hold me down no more, no, they're not gonna hold me down.

I will see my dream come alive at last. I will touch the sky.

Playing the game like it matters

Tonight at my men's team meeting we took a break and played a game of street hockey.

I did not want to play. It was cold, I was feeling stiff, I wasn't feeling up to playing.

I didn't want to be a suck either so I agreed to play goalie. At least I wouldn't have to move around too much, wouldn't have to chase the ball down the road in the dark, wouldn't be getting jostled and bumped by guys bigger than me trying to get the ball away from me, or me futilely trying to get the ball away from them.

For a good three quarters of the game I had a really sucky context - how much longer will we be playing?

The opposing side scored at least four goals on me where I was just moving too slow to block the ball. A few of them just went right between my feet and through the goal line. How much longer will we be playing?

When I heard one of the men call out "Next goal wins!" I felt relief. At least the game would end soon. I didn't care which side scored that winning goal because either way would mean that the best team won.

Then I started thinking, what if I played this game as if it did really matter? What if I played it as if I really did have something on the line? There is a saying that the way we do anything is the way we do everything. I have a revenue target of $180,000+ for 2011. I have a fund raising target of $8,000 that I'm raising to help find a cure for arthritis which affects 4 million Canadians. Am I going to play the revenue game, the fundraising game, the way I've been playing this hockey game?

And then the hockey game did begin to matter, and it mattered which side got the winning goal. It mattered because now I had something on the line. I had $180,000+ revenue on the line. I had $8,000 fundraising on the line. I had 4 million Canadians with arthritis on the line.

Once I shifted those thoughts into my mindset I started noticing different results. The ball didn't just roll through my feet over the goal line, it bounced off my stick. Or it landed right under my foot and stopped. I noticed that the big guy who had been repeatedly scoring against me was losing control of the ball more often when he came near me.

Yes, the game was taking longer to finish now and that was okay because now it mattered. And in the end it was our side that scored the next goal and thereby won the game.

It makes a difference to play the game like it really matters. For those 4 million Canadians with arthritis it matters.

In Motion for Joints In Motion

I gave a successful presentation at the MDI Division meeting this week in Oakville.

I had a dilemma because on the same evening I also had the completion evening for the recent Pursuit of Excellence workshop that I attended. I ended up coming for the first hour of the completion event and made it for the second half of the Division meeting.

After I gave my presentation men started coming up to me with twenties in their hands. They ended up contributing over $300 towards my Joints In Motion fund raising campaign. That was with only half of the Division being present at the meeting.

I have a lot of thank you's to write.

A homeopathic approach

I met with my rheumatologist last week and he told me that my CRP and ESR levels are elevated and increasing. I saw the chart - if it was a stock chart I'd be buying. They're not stocks though, they're indicators of inflammation. My rheumatologist wants to put me back on meds; I've been off meds for about three years now. I've decided to pursue homeopathic and naturopathic remedies for the next few months and if the markers in my blood work don't show a noticeable improvement within the next few months then I will start the meds.

I've talked to a homeopathic doctor that I know and she assures me with a great degree of certainty that as the cells in my body renew themselves, the joint damage will not only halt but can actually reverse itself.

Pick up your mat and walk...

Day 6 at Date With Destiny

Day 6 - integration day, completion and celebration.

I had my most profound experience during the Earliest Memories exercise. I've never been able to access a lot of my early childhood memories. During this guided meditation today I unexpectedly received a vision in which I saw my birth. I even held the baby.

I have completed my Date With Destiny today (Saturday). Throughout the week Tony Robbins made me cry numerous times with his inspirational stories. Later in the week the participants made me cry with their breakthrough stories. Today I made me cry by having this vision.

Life will never be the same again. Life is changing.

My soundtrack songs for today:
Flowers of the Forest, Mike Oldfield.
One, Mary J. Blige and U2.
Life, Haddaway.

Days 4 and 5 at Date With Destiny

Day 4:

Say yes to life more often.

Get some sleep after the night ends instead of staying up to update Facebook status and write new blog post.

My soundtrack song for today: Spy Dytynko Spy, Dunai.

Day 5:

Paraphrase of biblical passage "As you seek so shall you find" is "As you seek so shall it find you".

Most people decide too soon what something means. We decide too soon what a relationship means.

There were days and days this week that Tony made cry. Today it was the participants, with their breakthrough stories, who made me cry. The buggers.

Soundtrack theme song for today: Don't Stop Believing, Journey.

Day 3 at Date With Destiny

Some of today's lessons - No often means Yes, in the language of women. Understanding that is important to understanding women, but there will still be conflict and confusion in relationships.

Inside all of is is an animal and a spirit. They both must be fed.

Dance first, eat later.

The skill of forgetting when properly employed can eliminate a lot of pain.

What a day today was. Tony exercised a few interventions and there is something I realized after one of them. The answer to the question "why did I come to this event". I had a few results I wanted that I have written down somewhere, and those results are still important, but the real reason I came was to feed myself with the energy that was in the room tonight.

My soundtrack song for today: Let It Be, performed by Jennifer Hudson.

Day 2 at Date With Destiny

Inspiring quote for today: "If you don't quit you don't fail". This quote gives me a new tool to use in answering some soul searching questions about running my business for the next quarter to a year.

Our team motto (Team 6):
"Change is easy, change is fun,
My new life has just begun."

Lesson learned at Day 2: my old primary question was "What am I missing?" My new primary question is "How can I appreciate even more of the love and abundance of God that is already within me?"

My soundtrack song for today: Blessed Be Your Name", written by Matt Redman".

Day 1 at Date With Destiny

"This is not the place to calm down. This is not the place to settle down. This is Date With Destiny."

That bastard Tony - he made me cry on the first day with the boy on the tricycle story.

It was so cool to learn that the couple from Tony's Breakthrough program were here today. It is so cool to think that they are in my Date With Destiny.

Lesson learned today: There is a price associated with making Significance and Certainty be my top two driving forces. What would happen if I made Love and Growth be my top two driving forces instead? I don't have the answer to that question but I think it is a good question to have.

My soundtrack song for today: Living on a Prayer, Bon Jovi.

Aerial Tramway Adventure

6:57am "Wake up at dawn, it's a brand new day, so many places to visit, things to do".

Today's mission: take a ride on the aerial tramway. But breakfast first.

8:07am I had the complementary breakfast at the hotel here.

What next? I inquired at the front desk about how to get to the Aerial Tramway. The lady at the counter started giving me a data dump of driving directions. I told her that I don't have a car and asked if I could get there by transit or taxi. She gave me a business card for a cab company. I suppose my next step will be to call the cab company from my room.

The Aerial Tramway - it is described as the "world's most spectacular aerial ride" according to the literature I've found in my hotel room. The Mountain Station is located at an elevation of 8,516 feet and has 54 miles of hiking trails.

I've called the Aerial Tramways information line and learned that the round trip fare for the tramway is $23.25. It is a 10 minute ride up to the top of the mountain and trams depart every half hour. There are two restaurants at the Mountain Station. There is also an area where they show movies about the tramway. All of this sounds reasonable to me. The catch is that the taxi fare is $55 one way only. It could cost me over $100 just to get there and back! Perhaps I'll look into a car rental instead.



2:42pm It's almost three o'clock before I get to the park where the tramway is located. I've rented a car for the purpose of making this side trip, having that decided that the cost would be about the same or less than what it would cost to take a taxi, plus it would give me a bit more flexibility. It will give me a bit more logistics to work out as well since I will eventually have to drop off the car and still get to my hotel from the drop off point.

Joe, the guy from the car rental agency, gave me a map so I had no trouble finding the park even without GPS. As I drove in on the long road that led to the parking lot for the tram car signs warned that this was private property that was monitored by TV, that the climb was steep and to turn off air conditioning. The climb may have been steep but it was deceptively so. I drove past a sign that claimed an altitude of 1,000 feet. Several minutes later I drove past another sign that claimed 2,000 feet. The intervening road felt mostly flat to drive on and the only physical sensation that I had of any ascent was the feeling of pressurization in my ears, like being on a plane.
















3:01pm I'm at the top now at Mountain Station, elevation 8,516 feet. It is cool up here and there is snow on the ground. The trip up the mountain on the aerial tramway took eleven minutes and it seemed like a short ride. We climbed from about 2,000 feet to over 8,000. We are not quite at the top though; the peak of the mountain is actually over 10,000 feet high.

4:29pm I step out on the deck and take a few more pictures from the other of the station. The cold temperature discourages me from undertaking even a short hike. I thought I was overdressed for the Palm Springs weather but I am actually under-dressed for the mountain top weather.

The battery in my iPhone is down to 50% so I question the wisdom of relying on it as my primary camera on future travels.

9:34pm I'm back from my Aerial Tramway Adventure. I had a late lunch while I was at the Mountain Station. After I finished lunch I stopped in at the theater room and watched the two documentaries about the park and about the building of the tramway. By the time I finished watching the movies it was dark already and I decided to head back down. The descent - in the dark - was a whole different way to experience the ride.



Would I recommend this adventure to travelers to Palm Springs? I would. I would recommend making a day trip rather than a half-day trip as I did, and take some time to explore the hiking trails. I also recommend dressing for the weather at the top of the mountain; it can be much cooler up there than it is down in the valley.

A Fiji reunion

I have been feeling under the weather this week and I left Toronto hoping that 30,000 feet of altitude would be enough to get me above the weather.

My first flight was Toronto to Dallas. I had a one hour stopover on Dallas which was really no time at all. Enough to find the departure gate, buy some water and snacks, try to access a wi-fi network, and then the boarding call comes.

I'm about to get on the plane when I hear someone call my name. Now what is the chance that I would bump into someone I know here? Surprisingly high, since I can't be the only one traveling to Palm Springs for Date With Destiny. The more I network and get around the higher the chances of bumping into someone I know as I travel around the world.

Christine L., whom I met in Fiji, is on the same plane. I also meet a few other people on the plane who are bound for Date With Destiny.

And who did I see when I arrived at the airport in Palm Springs but Annette F., my buddy from Fiji who helped me put together the class roster! Annette has rented a car here and she was kind enough to give me a ride from the airport to my hotel. I also learned that Glenda and Wilfredo are here also, and noticed on Facebook (which I can access on my iPhone thanks to free wi-fi access at my hotel) that Tracey L. is coming too. This is going to be like a little Fiji reunion!

I'm looking forward to seeing them all again, and I'm not feeling so under the weather anymore.

The Storm Before the Calm

12:28pm I am in the "storm before the calm" phase about THIS WEEK's trip to Date With Destiny. Yes - it is THIS WEEK already, I leave on Friday. Ay, so much to do, so much to do.

And yet, is there really that much? Or am I just manufacturing this sense of hysteria for myself for some perverse reason?

2:18pm When there much to do and little time to do it in, it seems to me that the most reasonable course of action is to... take a day off. It can do wonders for one's sense of perspective.

I am at the mall, having lunch at the food court. I think I will also treat myself to a Booster Juice smoothie while I am here. How about a Citrus Swirl! With the ginkgo biloba booster - that should help my mental acuity.

I really needed to get out of my apartment today. Heck, I needed that yesterday too.

For one thing, it's sweltering hot. I don't know what's up with that because a few weeks ago it was cold and I decided to buy myself a portable heater. So shall I now buy myself a portable air conditioner? Let's reconsider that line of thinking.

For another thing, my eyes are going buggy from so much time on the computer. Yes, I have work to do that requires me to be on the computer but now and then I need to rest my eyes, give them a break.

Enough. Let's go get that Booster Juice.

Joints In Motion

I once made a list of one hundred things I wanted to do, be, or have, if I had a billion dollars. The purpose of this exercise was to create (or discover) my life vision by identifying the things that I would do if money were no object.

One of the things I came up with for my list was to find a cure for arthritis.

It was quite a number of years ago that I came up with this list. I don't have a billion dollars in my account and I don't even have my first million yet.

I recently started asking myself what could I do to advance this part of my vision with the resources that I do have.

One of the results of asking myself this question was finding out about the Joints In Motion program. It's a fund raising program where participants get to wall, hike, or trek in various parts of the world. I found a tour that appealed to partly because the timing was right: a hike in Machu Pichu in August 2011.

I've sent in my registration form already. This is going to be a big challenge for me, both the physical part of the hike and the fundraising effort.

It also makes quite the bucket list item.

Between my upcoming Date With Destiny event in Palm Springs, Leadership Tune Up Weekend in Calgary in May, and Machu Pichu next August, I'd say I've got quite a year of adventures lined up.

It's going to be a year of living large!

Backlog

I've got a backlog of video projects on my plate, which is a good problem to have. I want to get to the point that I have more projects on my plate than I can handle myself so that it creates a growth opportunity for my company.

A few weeks I set up a day plan in which I was going to work on three different projects. As it turned out that plan didn't work. In order to fit in three projects, I had blocked out two hours for each one, for a total of six hours of production work that day. What I found was that just as I was picking up momentum on one project it was time to switch modes to the next project. My new rule of thumb now is plan to work on only two projects in a given day. Then I'm more likely to hit my objective for each project for the day.

Won Club Table Topics contest

Last week I won the Table Topics contest at my Toastmasters club. That means I'll be advancing to the Area contest this week.

I had recently given a 10 minute presentation at my BNI group. Despite my feeling like inspiration had abandoned me and that I was underprepared, it actually went well and I received a lot of positive comments. (And also a few referrals, which is good for business and is what the whole purpose of being in a BNI is all about).

I had incorporated the subject of Star Trek into my presentation, and talked about the influence it had on me while I was growing up (I mean while I was younger and growing up - I'm still working on the growing up thing!).

With all of the positive feedback I received from giving my presentation, I started thinking about making my next Toastmasters speech (I'm due to give Speech #8) be about Star Trek.

So Star Trek was on my mind when I was called to the front of the audience for my turn in the Table Topics contest and I was given my topic: Imagine if....

It wasn't a far stretch to go from Imagine if... to Star Trek. I even pulled out my flip style cell phone out of my pocket and demonstrated how much it resembled a communicator... or a hand phaser.

To my surprise I ended up taking first place. I've concluded that I can't go wrong to speak about Star Trek. I don't think I can get away with using the same trick again at the Area contest though.

My next dream trip

I had a phone conversation last week with Lori, from Extraordinary Learning. They're the company that offers the Twenty First Century Leadership program that I attended in 2007 and again in 2008, in Seattle.

After thinking over my conversation with Lori I've decided on my next dream trip - go to Calgary in May 2011 by train and attend the Twenty First Century Leadership Tune-Up weekend while I'm there.

I am putting this out there much in the same way that I put it out in July that I would move to a place of my own. That it, as a leap of faith. I'll let the Law of Attraction work for me to help me get there.

What an adventure it will be.