As should be obvious to every reader of this blog, I've recently started taking better care of my body, both through diet and exercise. The plan has always been to complete this by beginning to dress better and by taking better care of my skin, hair and beard.

For that reason, I've just decided that - from now on - I'll only be buying skincare products, including shower gels, deodorants, perfume and so on, from Lush, The Body Shop and Bulldog.

I've already got the face wash, deodorant, eye roll-on and moisturizer from Bulldog. It's a great brand, and I really enjoy both the texture and the smell of their products. Now that they have their own shower gel, it stands to reason that I've just got to buy it. I've been recommended to try Cosmetic Lad from Lush, and will probably give it a shot, but I've been so pleased with the Bulldog products so far that it's going to be a very hard sell.

I've also got four different body butters from The Body Shop. I wanted to get the one that smells like coconut, but a certain somebody that I spend a lot of time with absolutely hates the thought of coconut smells, so there's very little I can do there. Luckily, the satsuma body butter and the sweet lemon body butter both do the job perfectly.

The problem with the body butters, I find, is that it's very easy to take just a little bit too much and be left with a greasy and sticky feeling for the rest of the day. Here, it really pays off to take just a little at a time and apply a little more until you're happy with the result. The same goes double for the absinthe purifying hand cream, which can leave you feeling extremely greasy if you take just a little bit too much.

I'll be replacing my shampoo, conditioner, and shower gels with products from these stores within the next couple of weeks. 

Overcoming Insecurities

Note: This entry might seem to ramble and contradict itself. This is because I learned a couple of things about myself while writing it. The person writing the first and last words are not entirely the same person, and I've decided not to go back and edit for clarity.

While I generally tend to be very secure in what I want out of life - where I'm going and what people I want to have around me (and in what relationships) when I get there - I've often found that I can be crippled by enormous insecurities in the day-to-day things that surround me. I've been brutally insecure about how people like me, where I am in a relationship, how things are progressing and so on. I'm not at all sure where this comes from, however. Maybe it's a childhood issue, maybe it's something that happened due to a negative experience in my teens, or maybe it's just a random series of events that made me hardwired this way. Whatever the cause, it's a fact of my life that I'm painfully aware of.

Overcoming my own insecurities is, in many ways, one of my largest priorities in life. It is sabotaging some of the most important things - some of the most important relationships - in my life, and I can't allow that to continue any longer.

Imagining that something is bad and then believing in your imaginations over the real world situation that you're actually in is a horrible way to live a life. You're tormenting yourself, which only leads to sabotaging the situation that you're actually in. You're imagining that people have feelings that they might not have, that they have motivations that they might not have, and that they are taking decisions that they haven't even considered taking.

One of the biggest steps that I've taken so far, I believe, is to admit to myself that I have all of these insecurities. Admitting to myself that I'm irrationally fearful over certain things, that I have thoughts that are without basis in reality, is a huge step in the right direction of fixing things. I've even come so far as to now be able to identify when I'm being insecure, even though the feelings still continue to arise within me.

The problem, at least for now, is trying to figure out how to push the insecurities to the side when they do arise. Being strong enough to say "I'm being insecure right now and need to stop it" is still a big step away from me. "I'm imagining a problem that doesn't exist". Some of it, I suppose, comes from my trust and control issues. I've been let down pretty badly in my life and learned that the only person I can trust in fully is myself, but that's hardly a way to live a life. Even if you don't fully trust somebody - yet - it should still be okay to open yourself up and be vulnerable. Irrational fear doesn't have to enter into it.

I need to accept that the relationships that I enter into, whether they be romantic or friendly, can be in any specific way that they turn out to be. I do not control them, nor should I even try to. Many of these insecurity issues come from my lack of ability to control a situation, which is madness, now that I stop to think about it. Why should I even try to control a situation? A relationship? Why should I have such a fixed idea about what kind of a situation I want to be in instead of taking things as they come? I'm my own man, I'm secure (enough) in myself, and I shouldn't need to try to control the situations that I end up in! I shouldn't need to try to steer things in one direction or the other. If I'm strong enough, I know that I'll be able to do the right thing in any situation that arises and not have any regrets.

I need to give myself, my friends, my family and - most of all - my partners, some room to breathe and be themselves without imposing myself onto their lives, controlling them and steering them in one direction or the other. I need to stop trying to read their minds and imposing my own ideas about what they think onto them. I need to stop forcing their hand.

Insecure people, a group that I've always felt a kinship with, look for signs of things that are not working. I want to start looking for signs of what is working, even if that is just my own strengths.

Things feel very different, all of a sudden.

Expansion and Romance Novels

One of the things that's caused me no little concern is the scope of this blog. I started it with the goal of documenting my workout routine, my health and my fitness. It quickly evolved into something else, and now I'm beginning to ask myself what kind of a blog it is. How much of myself should I expose on these pages, and how personal can I be? How many aspects of myself should I focus on here, or should I just focus on all of my personality? Should I continue to write about my self-improvement efforts or should I just talk about my life?

Eventually, the simplest option of them all won out. I'll just write about what it is that feels relevant and current at the moment, censoring myself as little as possible. Hence the following admission:

I'm reading a whole lot more than I used to, and have reduced the amount of podcasts that I listen to down to the bare minimum. The literature, however, might not be what people expect me to be reading, as most of it - at the moment, at least -  is what one would tend to call 'erotic chick lit'. You know the type, books with titles like The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh and covers of bare-chested men or women in sophisticated dresses. What interests me about these books is that they are so far removed from what most men seem to think they are. Men hear about romance novels and think "porn for women", but it's definitely not.

These aren't books about sex, even though sex is definitely a very important part of them. These are books about seduction, foreplay and - as the genre name would suggest! - romance. The one I'm reading right now, a book called Seven Secrets of Seduction, is already more than half way over, and the lead lady and the man we all know she'll end up with have barely touched yet. Despite that, every single page is dripping with seduction, innuendo, charm and what I can only describe as an enormous hunger for touch. She's trying, in vain, to resist his charm and his burning desire to be with her. There's not even a hint of the 'Wham, Bam, Thank you, Mam' of pornography, which seems to have as its only goal to put as many penises in as many vaginas (and other orifices) as quickly as humanly possible - and preferably from as many angles as possible.

Now; it's impossible to generalize this and say that "men want porn and women want romance novels". It's impossible to say that the men described in these romance novels are the sorts of men that women want. Hell, it's even impossible to generalize and say that the women who read and write romance novels desire to experience the same sorts of relationships as the ones described in the books.

Still. One has to admit that there's definitely something to the drawn-out seduction and constant passion in these books that are so much more interesting than what I expect the script to a porn movie would be like.

Goals and Metrics

Introduction

I hate to sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but one of the single most important things you can do for yourself when performing any sort of self-improvement work is to have actionable, measurable metrics. In the immortal words of Tony Horton:

“How do you know what to do, if you don’t know what you did?”

Measuring what you've done, comparing it to what you're doing and looking at how this affects your results is a hugely important factor when it comes to measuring success. Putting it as simply as possible, if you notice that a single exercise gives you a better effect than another exercise, it's obvious which one you should be doing. By measuring base things like your resting pulse, weight, hour slept, exercises/weights and so on, you can get a really good grasp of where you are and how your progress is going. If you're feeling brave, combine this with regular blood tests, cholesterol, blood pressure, body fat percentage measurements in a BodPod or similar, lung capacity measurements, and anything else you might think of that's measurable and changes thanks to your self-improvement work.

If you're curious about getting started in tracking your progress, others have written about it far better than I can. What follows is a thought experiment on my own self-improvement regime and how I'll be tracking it.

My Progress

I'd like to talk, for a moment, about my own progress, my own goals and how I'm going to be measuring the various things I'm working towards. I've got a couple of points planned already, and intend to work out more details in each and every one of these.

1. Self-Employment

This one is a no-brainer. I want to work fewer hours and get more out of it. The best way to do so is to follow my passion and get CSICON to where it needs to be. We've already begun getting the first monthly donations to the site from our most dedicated listeners, and I would love to see more people giving somewhere between $2 and $10 every month. While it's not a lot of money to every individual person, it adds up really quickly and makes a huge difference to my bottom line. If a thousand people were giving $5 each, I could live off of that.

I also need to work on getting sponsors to the site. Unfortunately, building these relationships is a full-time job in and of itself, and there's currently very little time I can spend on it. Hopefully, this will change over time and the ball will pick up momentum, but - for now - it feels like fighting uphill.

Here, the measurement and metric used is very easy, since it breaks down into simple dollars per month, compared to the dollars received the month before. Over time, the trend should be towards larger and larger sums, of course. Also, the various other projects that I've got in mind - there are three - need to be started so that they have some chance of earning me a revenue.

2. A Body to Love

Lean Muscle Mass - my body type goal

I've had an ambivalent relationship to my body for more or less all of my life. I was clinically underweight for the majority of my teens and twenties - just a hamburger away from anorexia at any one point - and suddenly turned into a tubby round man as soon as I hit my thirties. I'm now working towards a set goal weight and a set goal body fat percentage, and finding it far easier than I thought.

My ambition is to reach 85 kg with somewhere between 7% and 9% body fat. With my current body composition, this means that I need to lose almost 10 kg of fat and gain about 30kg of muscle. It'll be a challenge, but one that I'm looking forward to. So far, the grilled chicken/salad dinner meal plan is working well, and I'm reducing almost all sugars from my diet except as post-workout treats.

Metrics, here, are a pretty easy thing as well. Simply eat better, weigh myself regularly, work out and do weight lifting exercises, coupled with a BodPod-measurement of body fat percentage every three months. These figures should be traced in a spreadsheet and followed up with a weekly analysis of some sort in order to track progress and make adjustments.

3. Grooming and Clothing

If there's one area in which I've fallen behind, it's here. Many mornings, I just grab whatever clothes are the closest, forget to trim my beard, forget to comb my hair or skip applying aftershave, deodorant or similar. I often forget to floss, gargle my Listerine, use my tooth-whitening products or similar. I've got lots of old t-shirts with silly motifs that I no longer want to use, and no real 'style' to anything that I wear.

Going from here to where I want to be is going to be tricky, and not really measurable in any one way or another. Instead, what I think works best here is a series of specific tasks that are accomplished in order. These include throwing out (or donating to charity) all my old clothing that I no longer want to wear, figuring out what 'style' I want to follow, and simply purchasing more of that sort of clothing. Maybe having a total of 10 different 'outfits' that I can mix and match from with each other is the way to go here.

I also need to expand on my vanity schedule so that brushing my teeth isn't the only thing I do in the mornings and evenings. Regular moisturizing, hairdressing, and all the rest of it needs to be taken care of on a regular basis as well.

4. Mental Health

Meditation

I'm already meditating on a semi-regular basis, but I need to up the ante here. Instead of doing it when I feel like it, I need to simply start scheduling meditation and doing it every day. That way, just like a regularly scheduled gym routine, I don't have any excuses and I don't let my mental 'muscles' begin to atrophy between sessions.

I'm also going to have to look into various different types of meditation, since I'm quite sure that there are tips and techniques that work better than the very basic type that I'm following right now.

Victim Mentality

There's something that's become more and more obvious to me in my meditations of late, and that's the vast mass of problems that we continue to create for ourselves. I've been no exception to this, of course, but I think I'm learning. What happens is quite simple, really. We all have situations in our lives that we're unhappy with. We all have things we don't like. Most of the time, however, these are things that we have no direct control over, but still we allow them to become villains in our minds. By putting the problem outside of us, rather than owning the problem, we're removing any power that we had to solve the problem.

Say you're sick and tired of your job. A lot of people can probably identify with that statement. You might blame your boss for your misery, even though he's just a cog in the same machine as you are and might be just as unhappy. By making him the villain in your mind, you're going to continue to be unhappy with your job until your boss changes himself, which is probably not going to happen. Far better, instead, is for you to change yourself or move on to work elsewhere. Realize that you have the power to change your own situation instead of blaming somebody else.

The same, of course, goes for your relationships. If your partner isn't making you happy, it's not her fault. Blaming her in your mind is not going to solve anything, it'll just lead to bitterness and resentment. The only person who should be responsible for your own happiness is you. Far better in a situation like this, of course, is to figure out why you're not happy and what you need to do/have in your own life to get there. Maybe you just haven't told her that you're unhappy and assume that she's making you unhappy on purpose? Maybe you just haven't explained what it is you need from this relationship? Realize that you have the power to change your own situation instead of blaming somebody else.

What about your dream life? The life you want to lead, but you're too busy at your job because you have a mortgage? Or because you've got a family to feed? Or because you don't want to let your parents down? Or because it would be a shame to put that education of yours to waste? All of these things are external factors that you vilify and blame for your inability to live a better life, but the truth is far simpler. You're the only limiting factor in your life.

You have the power to change your own situation, all you need to do is own your own problems.