October: Words, Breath, and Zeros.

I spent last weekend at The Business of Speaking, Jacqueline Brooker’s conference for people who believe in the art and science of the spoken word.

A room like that is rare; everyone in it understands that what you say and how you say it is the whole business. I love the meeting of minds and language, and the wrestle with self to bring forth truth that resonates with our own narrative and the human collective.

Joel McKerrow was a highlight, a master and scholar of language, and a poet who’s represented Australia at the World Poetry Slam Championships. But for me the joy was in hearing the stories of the people who landed in that room and the thought they stimulate long beyond the event. One example was Paul Hawkins, who teaches NASA’s own framework for building high-performing teams. He has me thinking about where individual performance can support team performance and how they can integrate for mission domination.

Some mornings, showing up is the whole performance.

My last post opens on a Friday morning after three hours of ceiling-staring, a 6am costume crisis, and a sports bra fished out of the bottom of the dirty washing basket because there wasn’t time to find a clean one. I went to the gym anyway. I didn’t push a personal best. I just didn’t put up a zero.

That idea, that some days the win is simply staying in the game, turned into a piece about what 39% of us are actually up against: overwhelm that’s affecting our performance at work, with most of us never taught what to do about it beyond push through.

The fastest way to bring a spiked nervous system back down. No equipment, no privacy required, about twenty seconds start to finish.

Repeat once or twice if you need to. This double-inhale, long-exhale pattern pops open collapsed air sacs in the lungs and clears carbon dioxide fast (Balban et al., 2023, Cell Reports Medicine). More detail on the context and pattern of use in: Some Days, It’s All I Can Do to Not Put Up a Zero