NEIL COWMEADOW - THE EXPERT GUITAR TEACHER IN TELFORD. GUITAR TEACHER AND AUTHOR. GUITAR LESSONS THAT WORK! DEDICATED TO TEACHING SINCE 1999 - ACCELERATED LEARNING TECHNIQUES: LEARN FASTER, PLAY BETTER, AND UNDERSTAND...

The Thursday Thesis  - 25/01/2018


It was embarrassing, and my friend was concerned.

My head lolled around and I could barely keep my eyes open, then my words started to shut down...

It was embarrassing, not to mention weird. I wasn’t drunk: I never drink.

But it felt unpleasantly like being drunk – if I remember correctly how that felt.

Incidentally, if you want to know what’s unpleasant about being drunk, ask a glass of water.

But something wasn’t right: something had shut me down.

Think back, Neil...

Two double espressos, cheese on toast, cappuccino to follow lunch... blah, blah, blah.

Nope, nothing sinister in that list, right?

In fact, with all that caffeine rushing through my system, I should have been wired!

But I was nodding and flopping all over the place, struggling to string a sentence together - what the hell was going on?

I remember wondering if I was having a stroke or some life-altering health crisis: that’s how bad it was.

My friend propped me up in my chair and now tells me that my eyes rolled upwards, then closed and I began to snore like a diesel engine idling.

Flattery!

Twenty minutes later I was wide awake and raring to get on with the day.

Peculiar...

Two double espressos, cheese on toast, a cappuccino...

It bugged me, the way that only a mystery can bug a restless mind.

It’s happened too often, and I kept thinking about it, asking why I had these episodes, these shutdowns and crashes. I thought back about them, looked for a pattern, a possible reason for the mysterious crashes.

Bread.

Bread – or more accurately – wheat. It seemed that every single crash had been preceded by some kind of wheat product: a sandwich, a pastry or snack grabbed from the supermarket en route to somewhere.

Now this was bad, bad news for me, because I LOVE bread – especially fresh bread, still warm and aromatic from the golden oven.

I didn’t want to be right, because I wanted to have bread in my life.

Ah, bread...

A test!

Yeah, that’ll do it – “I’ll go wheat-free for a few weeks and see what happens” I thought. “I’ll prove that bread (aaaah, bread....) has NOTHING to do with my crashes. Then I can have as much bread lovely bread as I want and I’ll be absolutely certain that it’s not part of the problem; well, that’s what I thought.

The cravings were the worst – worse than when I stopped drinking alcohol in my twenties. I’d find myself on autopilot in Sainsbury’s in-store bakery, breathing THAT smell in like it was the half-remembered perfume of a love affair, my mouth wet with anticipation, only just able to wrench myself away without a crusty loaf or a bag of Danish.

But the crashes stopped.

What a pisser. The very bread I loved had been knocking me out for how long – months, weeks, years?

Who knew?

Digging deeper into the mystery I heard stories of increasing gluten content in genetically modified
wheat, gluten intolerance and Celiac disease, and all sorts of anecdotal evidence of other people’s experience. That was all very interesting, but nothing very solid that I could point to for sure. So I decided to just go with my gut and trust the evidence that I’d got, first-hand: at least that was reliable.

That was several months ago, and the crashes receded into memory. So – naturally - I did something stupid: I had a huge cheese butty.

If you don’t know what a butty is, you need to get out more.

That crusty butty was so delicious that I had another – then I had a nap in the car because I was too dozy to drive.

I did tell you it was stupid, didn’t I?

Now, here’s the thing – if I’d not tested the daft idea that bread was my problem, I’d still be crashing after breakfast, lunch and dinner, or even just a snack, because wheat is cheap and abundant it finds its way into all sorts of food – especially cheap foods and fast foods.

If you’ve ever fallen into a Carb Coma after lunch, test what you’re eating. Perhaps you’ll find – like me – that the sandwich you think is topping-up your energy levels is flat-lining you instead.

If it works, you can change, but until we test what we are currently doing we are flying blind, guessing and bumbling through the day.

Life’s like that, isn’t it?

© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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 I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
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Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead....Lines

The Thursday Thesis  - 18/01/2018


It’s Friday – my blog post is a whole day late – Shame on me!

Hmmmm...It’s not like me to run blow a deadline: I’m normally pretty good at that kind of thing.

So what gives?

Truth is that I settled down to do a ton of office work Wednesday night and – you know how it is – lost track of time. Before I knew it the sky was getting light.

“I’ll just do this one last thing....”

Then it was after 9am – definitely time for bed.

So I missed my deadline for Thursday posting to the blog, and I’ve been thinking about deadlines for a fair bit of the day: what they are and what we think they are, and how we all can use them to get a little more juice out of life.

A deadline is a target for completion of something - no surprises there. But what makes deadlines so powerful for us is the limitation of time itself. If we have forever to get things done, that’s usually how long it will take, right?

We will – of course – do double tomorrow, but today’s slice of Elephant Sandwich is left untouched to grow dry, mouldy, and curled-up at its edges.

We’ll eat it tomorrow...

Now here’s the best bit: you’re going to die.

Yep. You, me and everybody else is dying right now. We are mortal, and mortality is the greatest gift mankind ever received.

Death, in and of itself, is the endpoint of your project, the blinking-out of your existence. It is neither good nor bad: it is merely an ending.

Acknowledging the inevitability of death is the supreme focuser.

Wise people regard the future and its end with a steady eye, unblinking and ready. They will have lived to the fullest a life of their own choosing, worked like billy-oh to bring their dreams to life, conscious that every day is a day closer to leaving it all unffinished.

Death is the greatest driver of Progress because people with passion and vision fear that their vision will never be realised before the last tick's echoes fade into silence.

The clock is always ticking.

And for some people the end of their life will arrive unexpectedly, leaving them with no time to learn to play the guitar, write that book, call that friend, say the words...

There’s a deadline on everything, and it’s foolish to ignore that inconvenient truth, because it ain’t going away.

So, before we all meet the deadlines of our demise, let’s set a deadline on living, chasing our dreams, daring to grow, reach, stretch, learn.

Today - before midnight Friday chimes and my day-late blog gets a day older - do something to begin to live the life you really want.

My friend, you and I have a deadline to meet
 

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success"
Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter

That quote drifted into my consciousness earlier today, and I got to thinking about the phenomenon (well, the myth) of "Overnight Success" - the come-from-nowhere band, the unheard of entrepeneur who is suddenly on every social media stream, news channel and billboard ad. 

It's a funny thing, isn't it - the idea of an "Overnight Success"?

Most people look at a successful person or a high-performer and think that they "just are" successful - that it all happened at once. We make the assumption that Successful is just how these people are - that it's an innate or inborn quality, not available to "ordinary folks" - people like you and me.

Now, here's the thing - that kind of mental shortcut - jumping from where we are now to where That Successful Person is -  completely skips over the journey that got That Successful Person to where they are in the first place. 

It's like thinking of Tokyo and wondering why we are not there already, without ever considering the necessity of booking a 'plane ticket and getting to the airport.

But there's a problem here, and it's almost a universal: we envisage making the instant transition from here to there in a single bound - thousands of miles in a single instant. A leap like that is just too much, too big, too far - impossible!

So most people don't even try - it's tragic.
 
But there are ways around the problem - here's my favourite bypass around the perceived mega-leap. Think of yourself in possession of the outcome you want - the destination, and ask "What did I do before that?" over and over again. You will then backtrack in time to figure out  how you got there, right back to the very first step of the journey - the step you can take today.

Take that step.

I confess... last night I bunked-off.
When I really should have been writing this post I was mucking around doing a Facebook live video, aiming to share the way that poor/inefficient technique gets in a guitar player’s way and makes life harder than it need be.
Why do I tell you this?
Because of the responses it produced.
Now, some folks “got it” and liked the clip, but a lot more people didn’t get it and gave me some feedback, suggesting that I am a “soulless hack” and a “limited player” on the basis of me explaining mechanical principles as they apply to guitarists.
This was to be expected though, because I understand that it is our human nature to defend our current belief systems in a drive to prove ourselves “Right”.
As a species we absorb and adopt all sorts of ideas and beliefs, usually without being aware of it happening. If an idea works once, we’ll probably try to do it a second time because it worked before. If it works a second time we’ll use it again and again until it becomes our normal way of operating.
Now here’s the thing – clinging to one idea and refusing to test or consider alternatives locks the mind into a prior point in time, shutting-out the chance to learn and grow, to do something better.
We humans are funny creatures, aren’t we?
What we currently know, we will defend. Opinions which contradict our current understanding of how things are make us feel threatened, so we will usually fight back against new ideas. That’s why the comments were mostly from those who didn’t get it.
The risk is that the scary new thing could be exactly what you need.
That new thing could be the mental equivalent of an upgrade to your computer software that finally fixes that bug...
What we currently know could be causing us to push away the thing we really need to know.
History is littered with the bodies of dead dogmas which have been superseded by innovations and discoveries.
That’s progress.
What do you currently believe that you’d like to be wrong about?
What do you “know” that you’d like to change?
What is it that you are sure of, right now, that you would like to be unsure of?