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...

Episode 101 - That First Date...

The Thursday Thesis  - 31/05/2018

As first dates go, this was a stinker – the food was divine, the service immaculate, and my date was... well, beautiful, graceful and vivacious.

So she was not the problem, but there was something going terribly wrong.

“Aha!” I got it, I knew what it was. Her friends had shown up, uninvited and en masse. Our cosy little table-for-two, tucked away in a tastefully lit corner of a carefully chosen Italian restaurant, was being overwhelmed by their incessant chatter.

I didn’t invite them to join us, but they came anyway, the bastards!

She reached across to pick up her phone once again, did the screen-swipe thing and stared at me.

I raised my eyebrow – a silent question...

That was the last time I saw her phone that night. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw her, too.

It seems she didn’t like the message I’d sent to her across the table, via satellite: it read “Look at me. Talk with me. Put away your phone and let’s be human with each other, please.”

She texted to say that it wasn't going to work, but that wasn't exactly any kind of news to me.

“No biggie...plenty more fish...” I reasoned.

Look around you: you see it everywhere – people together, but estranged. From the couple at dinner to the family at play, phones intrude and headphones exclude.

How stupid have we become?

When you’re with someone, really be with that person; give them your undivided attention and show them some Love. Don’t put the things that matter most at the mercy of the things that matter least: don’t make your kids, your wife, your date or your friends play second fiddle to a Tweet, Facebook update, text message or anything else.

Be with them.

Be with them completely, and pay attention.

Leave your phone in your bag when you are at dinner with your date, partner or spouse. Leave it in the car when you’re with your kids.

Believe me, nothing that is more important than the person you are with will come through your phone in the moments you are disconnected from it.

Be with them.

Your antisocial media will still be there in all its self-indulgent glory when the special time is over and you’re back on the hamster wheel again.

Failing to honour the real, face-to-face skin-and-bone people is tragic and it is immoral. Taking a slice of time from someone’s life to be with them and then offering them only the fag-end of what’s left after you’ve “kept up to date” with everything else is a bloody insult to them. Don’t do it.

Be with them.

Look around you and you’ll see masses of people, hooked up to – and hooked on – their phones. Notice how often they (we) check for new messages – even at inappropriate times? We’re like a bunch of crackheads in need of a score every thirty seconds – it’s pathetic and it’s tragic.

Ask yourself, honestly, do you own the phone or does it own you?
 
Now do yourself a big one - write this down: Leave your phone in the car, put it in your bag, silence it completely.

If you have balls of steel you could even turn it off – if you think you’ll be able to cope with the anxiety that you will feel should you dare to do such a thing.

Put your headphones away and grow up!
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 24/05/2018

“One HUNDRED blog posts! How cool is that?” I gushed as I drove Alex to school last Thursday morning.I'd jammed my moonface into "Smug" mode and It wasn't getting any better...

The Urchin wasn’t impressed: he never is these days.

This week his affectation is being “utterly indifferent” to all suggestions and ideas that don’t involve him spending his entire weekend playing games online with school-friends.

The joys of parenthood...

“So, Dad” he asked, “why do you write your blog – what’s it actually for?”

I paused, and said “It’s a good question, when you stop to think about it: why does anyone write, especially when there is no expectation of reward?”

“So...?” he said.

“Firstly, Alex, I write for you. I hope that you’ll read my ramblings and “get it” – that you’ll have access to some of the things I’ve found useful, and have that access at a younger age than I did.”

“And secondly, I write for myself because I love the process of writing - the great distillation and clarification that I get when I write about things. When you think on paper you can handle bigger, more important things, I think.”

“But deep down, right at the bottom of everything I  do – teaching, writing, landlording, coaching, mentoring, blogging and podcasting – I really just want to help people – anyone, anywhere – to see themselves as better than they have been told they are. I hope that, in some small way, my words will resonate with another person - I suppose I'm trying to send out a ripple into the World.: I may never know that person, but if just one idea in just post helps just one person to raise themselves up and have a better life in some way, then it will have been worth my time and energy writing a hundred posts.”
 
Isn’t that what life is all about, too?

I ask you, please, to DO something - right now - to lift someone else up.

I don’t care how small or big a thing you do, just do it.

A smile, a hug, or a kiss; a kind word or a thoughtful act: do something.

To you, it might only be a smile you give away: but that smile might just change a tiny something in another person’s life.

It’s only a ripple, but it’s a start.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, unicorn and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
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The Thursday Thesis  - 17/05/2018

I could have kicked myself.

Come to think of it, I felt so stupid at that moment that it would have been a better idea to hire someone to kick me instead.

There had been a dim recognition, somewhere in the deeper recesses of the old grey matter, that I’d soon bepublishing the 100th  post of this blog – The Thursday Thesis: I knew I’d been posting once a week for almost two years, I just wasn’t sure about how many posts I’d made.

My inner troublemaker was playing up again, telling me how awesome I was to have been so consistent and got something out every single week. He also said I should have a celebration to mark the event, and to be proud of myself for yada, yada,yada...

But I had a problem – I didn’t know how many posts I had actually made. I’d always posted by date, rather than by episode or post number, and I had no easy way to accurately track the number of posts.

Bum!

It takes a lot of work to re-name all the posts in a blog and add an episode number, then to re-name the original document file in the archive. It’s also intensely dull, unless you can transmogrify the process into a game and make it fun for yourself – perhaps by thinking of the process as “capturing and branding” the wayward episodes.

Life’s like that, too.

So, here’s the thing I want to share: start out as you mean to proceed.

When you begin something, be it health, relationship, financial, or whatever – begin with a vision of how things will look when they are done.

I hadn’t started the blog that way: I just thought it might be fun to share some of the things I wish I’d learned a lot sooner.

So I didn’t think of how many posts I might make, about the milestones and celebrations I’d miss out on if I didn’t keep score, or how to refer to previous episodes.

It was an embarrassing planning failure, frankly.

Next week I’ll post the 100th episode on this blog, so I am going to celebrate the milestone. Celebrating is something we could all do a lot more of – especially me.

When I was awarded a First I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of attending a graduation ceremony – I think that I was secretly afraid of being rumbled as the imposter I knew myself to be. Fortunately, my then-girlfriend was a lot smarter than me and persuaded me to collect my degree in person. Without her intervention I would have missed a memorable day and more or less dismissed my achievement, so I’m grateful for her wisdom.
But we all do it, don’t we?
We all seem to dismiss our achievements; it’s a British thing, I reckon.
There’s a daft idea that anyone who celebrates their achievements is arrogant, big-headed and probably not very nice.

It’s totally wrong-headed, of course, but it’s very common.

One friend of mine has gone from not running at all to running 10km, solo, in less than six months: not too shabby for a woman in her sixties, is it?

But she’ll have none of it: none of your fancy-pants celebrations, no “well done” messages, and no recognition of her achievements in her own mind.

Personally, I’m impressed by people who set themselves a target, plan their trajectory, and launch. Oddly, their actually hitting the target is not the main thing for me – it’s the intention and the action that matter most, in my opinion. The medals, certificates, and T-shirts are just markers of what has been achieved. In themselves they are mere trash, worthless clutter – but they are concrete evidence of what happened before race day and before exam day.

If we examine each fresh new day we can find something to celebrate, every single day of our lives. Embracing our own achievements can release a spurt of dopamine (your brain’s feel-good chemical) into your system, setting-up the anticipation of more and greater rewards.

What’s your celebration going to be about, today?

What awesome thing was it that you did?

How awesome are you, today?

Write it down...

Do it more...
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, unicorn and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

Why Your Haters Hate You...

The Thursday Thesis - 03/05/18

A little while ago I posted a short Facebook Live video into a large-ish group aimed at guitar players. The clip was a simple explanation of the biomechanics behind one aspect of playing the guitar.

I was clear, unambiguous, and put my points across logically and sensibly.

That was when the hate began.

Oh my word – I had no idea that demonstrating reality meant that I enjoyed giving same-sex oral pleasure! At least, that’s what one hater said, in not so many words.

Other “keyboard-warriors” piled-in to demonstrate their ten cents’ worth of ignorance and intolerance, clearly angry that I should question their beliefs and their gods – their blessed Clapton, Vaughan, Hendrix and the rest of ‘em...

Then I got it: they weren’t talking about me at all – they were telling me about themselves.
It was beautiful – rather than consider the facts and my reasoning, the haters attacked and proclaimed their own positions.

I’d never seen it so clearly before: haters don’t hate You, they hate how you make them feel; and that’s a big difference. At the time it was a radical idea, but now it seems obvious.

Whenever you or I step outside of what other people think and believe to be right, we risk the opprobrium of those other people.

You see, when we suggest a different way of seeing things, a different opinion, or ideas which conflict with the groupthink, we provoke a defensive response from the group. The group tightens and “circles the wagons” to defend itself from the perceived danger of being outdone, bested, proved wrong or foolish. Very often, internal divisions within the group are set aside to defend the common interest against the outsider, the blasphemer, the heretic.

Such is life.

It’s never comfortable being different: ask anyone who has challenged the status quo, a governing elite, the prevailing wisdom of “experts” and the conventions of academics about the backlash and ostracism. That’s how power and influence are exercised.

Some people just hate you, and you are going to have to deal with that fact if you are to be of any consequence in the world, because the only way you are not going to upset someone is to be so insignificant and inoffensive that you might as well have never lived at all.

Getting your first hater is a marker, if you will, of significance: somebody, somewhere was so influenced by what you did, said, wrote, sang, painted, danced to or drove that they took time out from their lives to comment on your life.

How cool is that?

The hater gave more attention to hating you than they did to pursuing their own life!

So, get over one simple thing: whatever you do in life somebody, somewhere is not going to like it.

You’ll probably never meet that person, and they don’t know you well enough to hate you for who you are. They are strangers who didn’t like how you made them feel when their prejudices came under pressure from your ideas. That’s all a hater is – a faceless person who feels bad because you made them uncomfortable – lashing out at someone who dared to think differently.

It’s dangerous and stupid to shut ourselves down and censor our thinking or beliefs because it upsets someone we’ve never met.

Remember that the ultimate rational position is to please at least ourselves. Remind ourselves that other people’s opinions of us are inconstant and beyond our control, so remembering to please at least ourselves is the only logical course to follow.

Some people will hate you for saying “X”, others will revile you for uttering “Y”, and then there are those fanatics who go berserk when you dare to impugn their sacred “Z”...

Look, whatever you do in this life of yours, you’re going to upset someone, somewhere.

Deal with that fact and crack-on with living your own life.

The bottom-line is that haters always hate someone, and today might be your turn; so, take the hate – when it comes - as a compliment and a testament to your significance, then wave at them with one finger and carry on with making a difference in The World.