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cristinaaalt-blog · 6 years ago

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*“We Believe: The Best Man Can Be” Willing to Destroy a Self*

I will be exploring the following critical question(s): What is the appropriate position between maintaining and destroying a self? Does this artifact find that position?

To investigate these questions, I examined Gillette’s “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” short film. I aim to argue that this short film intends to persuade those who identify as men to destroy the problematic self (toxic masculinity) not only within themselves but other men as well, in order to adopt and maintain a “better” self, because they can and should know better. I personally believe that Gillette maintains a balance between destroying a self and maintaining a better self. This is particularly productive for society because it showcases that just as how societal norms are changing, that we too have the ability to adapt or remain as is as a response to these shifts in our culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

The “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be” short film begins by posing the question “is this the best a man can get?” It targets toxic masculinity, which is the stereotypical ideal of manliness, where strength is essential while emotional expression, particularly those deemed “feminine,” is considered a weakness. Not all masculinity is toxic, however. Toxic masculinity is what happens when stereotypical gender expectations make men feel as though they must perpetuate these roles, with hypersexuality and aggression being at the top of this list. The film starts off by showing several moments in which boys are being chased and bullied by other boys. In one scene, a mother is holding her son as text message bubbles from his bullies, taunting him, appear on either side of them as she holds him, crying. The film then goes on to feature clips of males objectifying, degrading, and sexually harassing women. The jump from scenes showcasing boys humiliating other boys to men showcasing inappropriate behavior towards women is an intentional choice that aims to show a correlation between the two. There are clips from older TV shows (even cartoons) of males making sexually suggestive gestures towards women, particularly when their backs are turned. This intends to show how long this behavior has been around: forever. It also demonstrates that younger audiences see these advances too. The video makes it a point to show a variety of everyday situations in which this behavior is present: at work, at home, at school. One clip, in which a man interrupts a female coworker by putting his hand on her shoulder and proclaims to a table full of business professionals, “what I actually think she’s trying to say” as she looks into the distance, is one of the most chilling moments in this video. This is also known as “mansplaining,” which is when men basically try to explain something to a woman on terms she can “understand.” It is often condescending, inaccurate, and overly confident, however. The mansplainer takes away the business woman’s agency; he is geared up to redefine her ideas, which is unprofessional beyond belief. Another focal point of this short film is the line of men eerily proclaiming “boys will be boys” in unison. By writing this toxic behavior off as “boys being boys,” the boys and men exhibiting this behavior are given a pass; they can continue to perpetuate and justify this behavior because they are males. This is when the film takes a different direction; it begins to showcase clips of various news reporters discussing sexual harassment and sexual assault openly. Following this, there is footage of men holding other men accountable, not only in interactions with women but in situations with other men too. Eventually, the short film ends with footage of younger boys looking hopeful, perhaps even contemplative.

The course concept I believe is relevant to this artifact comes from Hauser’s “Making Commitments through Rhetoric.” First, his commentary on maintaining a self emphasizes that “not only can rhetoric bring us to a new self-awareness, but it can also support and sustain an existing self” (52). This is reinforced in the short film’s assertion that “men need to hold other men accountable, to say the right thing, to act the right way...some already are.” This establishes that a respectful version of the self does indeed exist; in fact, some men are willing to intervene in situations where toxic masculinity presents itself. Gillette makes it a point to frame the clips in such a way that audiences don’t know whether or not the men in them will make the right choice. For instance, the clip of the two boys in the yard fighting one another; at the clip’s beginning, the male figure (presumably the father) watching the two boys “play” in the yard simply writes the situation off as “boys being boys,” but at the film’s end he breaks up the fight between the two, proclaiming that “that’s not how we treat each other, okay?” Second, Hauser deems that rhetoric can also destroy a self. Audiences can see this in how the short film shows men holding other men accountable; the most notable instance being a man checking out a girl and getting ready to follow her as another man watches him with distaste, holds him back, and says “bro, not cool, not cool.” These moments encourage the toxic masculine figure to consider his actions, especially because he is being called out openly. Gillette is sending a message to men that it is not enough to destroy one’s own problematic behavior; men are also responsible for holding other men (and younger boys too) to a higher standard and intervening upon witnessing unacceptable behavior. By nipping toxic masculinity in the bud from a young age, the boys of today can become the best men that they can be tomorrow.

Despite the backlash this short film has received from a suspiciously similar demographic (privileged white males), Gillette’s message presents more advantages to the public than it does disadvantages. The creators of this artifact were obviously inclusive, considering the short film features a diverse cast of men and young boys. There is also diversity in the problematic situations that are shown, which is crucial to note because this highlights the reality that toxic masculinity is deeply embedded within our society, to the point where it has become normalized in everyday situations. This concept is advantageous in particular because it explicitly calls men out for displaying a range of toxic behaviors; sexual assault is not the only instance where a man showcases a lack of respect for women. An advantage for the female audience put simply, is Gillette’s acknowledgment of the misogynistic scenarios women have no choice but to deal with every day. It sheds an honest light on the female experience and shows news reporters discussing women bravely coming forward to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault. Another productive aspect of this short film is its intentions to push men to do more than just the bare minimum. The line “some is not enough” sticks out in this regard because it holds men to a higher standard. This is not to say that Gillette completely shames men, which may be a criticism of its “haters”; rather, it challenges its intended audience to always strive to be better, because “it’s only by challenging ourselves to do more that we can get closer to our best.”

In “Marketing Manhood in a Post-Feminist Age,” Kristen Barber and Tristan Bridges highlight the notion that “shifts in masculinity do follow a curious pattern: they are reactive rather than anticipatory...when women enter into historically 'masculine' arenas, like sports or the workplace, they shift the boundaries of femininity. And those are the moments when we get anxious about masculinity, claim that it is ‘in crisis,’ and find groups rallying around ‘solutions’ to this suddenly pressing social issue” (40). This absolutely holds to be true in the case of Gillette’s “We Believe: The Best Man Can Be” because this content is a direct response to the shift in our culture; women are coming forward to bravely speak about sexual harassment and assault. It is inevitable for our society to go several days without seeing these or similar stories on various social media and news platforms; women are tired of being silent, feeling hopeless, and waiting for someone else to be the change they need. The short film challenges men to be the change they want to be for what is right. Barber and Tristan’s aforementioned claim can also explain the negative responses to this carefully constructed content. Perhaps the people who don’t agree with Gillette’s call to action feel anxious about aspects of their masculinity being openly critiqued; they can’t fathom this toxic part of the self being destroyed. Gillette, on the other hand, is able to highlight the problem with toxic masculinity in the first place and rebrand itself as a company that does not condone such behavior. Rather than ignoring the female experience, this company attempts to not only understand it but to push its consumers to align themselves with what is right.

In summary, the “We Believe: The Best Man Can Be” short film is a thoughtful commentary on the work our society needs to do to be better, which is undoubtedly productive for society. Although women are at the forefront of the feminist movement, this culture is changing; men are part of this equation too and are therefore part of the process. The problematic and harmful masculine behaviors attached to the self must be destroyed in order to better this world as we know it. This short film comes at a crucial time for our society; we are in the midst of having open, honest, and real conversations about how toxic masculinity destroys our society’s ability to truly understand and respect one another.

Hauser, A. Gerard. “Making Commitments Through Rhetoric.” Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, 1986.

Barber, Kristen, and Tristan Bridges. “Marketing Manhood in a ‘Post-Feminist’ Age.” Contexts, vol. 16, no. 2, May 2017, pp. 38–43, doi:10.1177/1536504217714257.

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bonesandblood-sunandmoon · 6 years ago

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Lycanthropy::HIV

I’m certainly not the first person to approach this topic, but in the process of writing an HP fic with an HIV+ character, I’m really being forced to look at the world building of lycanthropy in comparison to HIV.

Just a sampling of other articles:

Remus Lupin and the stigmatised illness: why lycanthropy is not a good metaphor for HIV/AIDS [article link] - Goes into Lupin as the “good outlier” compared to other werewolves.

Dear JK Rowling: Being a Werewolf Is Not Like Having HIV [article link] from TheBody, an HIV/AIDS resource - Goes into the queercoding and problem with isolation being a tactic to manage werewolves, among other points.

While it’s easier to google ‘HIV and lycanthropy’ and get takes like this, I can’t say it’s an example of everyone being in agreement. Some of the more astute fans were able to make a connection during PoA when it was just another element of Lupin’s queercoding, and I vaguely remember a ‘foot in the door’ attitude since this was supposed to be a YA series started in the late 1990s. (But, well, JKR was JKR, and some story elements don’t age well.)

#1: Historical Presence

Lycanthropy: In universe, there’s no origin werewolf, but the wiki entry includes a reference to the Werewolf Code of Conduct of 1637 and werewolves wanting to create their own societies, which isn’t terribly surprising for a population that’s been around for at least 350 years, if not longer [Werewolf HP Wiki link].

HIV: Testing old tissue and blood samples and virus sequencing has been able to trace a likely origin for the first non-human to human virus transmission (circa 1910), the emergence of strains that could pass from human to human (1910 - 1950), and some people who died prior to the 1980s from secondary infections brought on by AIDS [Timeline of early HIV/AIDS cases; Transmission from non-humans to humans; and Emergence of HIV]. However, at the height of the epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, this was not common knowledge, and I wouldn’t expect an HIV+ character to know this within a story or think HIV wasn’t a ‘new’ thing.

#2: Transmission Method

Lycanthropy: Being a werewolf is supposedly only possible via being bitten by a werewolf in their wolf form, while an injury from a werewolf in their human form creates “lupine tendencies like a fondness for rare meat” without the ability to transform into a wolf form [Werewolf HP Wiki link]. (Because Bill’s attack from an untransformed Greyback is relatively late in terms of how long fans were writing about werewolves, some continue to ignore that any side effects result from human form injuries, like scratching and biting, and/or human saliva because it retroactively creates issues for some foreplay and sex scenes.)

Prior to Bill’s attack, canon created an impression that wolf form saliva meeting human blood is the only means of transmission so human form blood, saliva, and other bodily fluids were ‘safe’, which removed the sexually transmitted infection aspect and stigma. There was also an impression that scratching and the resulting facial scarring were not the primary means of infection, but after Bill’s attack which primarily featured human form scratching, canon became a little less clear on the exact mechanism that results in lycanthropy. (Only wolf form saliva? Both human and wolf form saliva? Something transferred into the bloodstream via scratches that isn’t saliva?)

HIV: According to CDC numbers from 2015, spitting and biting have a “negligible” risk (technically possible but unlikely and not well documented) [CDC HIV Risk Behaviors]. Generally, the risk is so low that spit swapping varieties of kissing are included under myth busting questions about how HIV isn’t spread.

HIV is spread through certain bodily fluids - blood, semen (cum), pre-seminal fluid (pre-cum), rectal fluids, vaginal fluids, and breast milk - coming into contact with mucous membranes, damaged tissue (ex. open cut), or being directly injected into the bloodstream via needle or syringe [CDC HIV Transmission]. While sexual activity is not the only means of transmission, it is unavoidably a well known one that factors into how people reacted to HIV and AIDS.

#3: Transmission Rate

Lycanthropy: As far as we know, the transmission rate from a wolf form bite is 100%. It’s only with Greyback’s human form attack on Bill that there’s discussion of not all werewolf attacks resulting in passing on lycanthropy, but that’s transferring the analogy about variable transmission rates for HIV from ‘wolf form bite’ to a general ‘attack’. There’s not really a lycan version of an undetectable viral load in this analogy.

HIV: Fun fact, this does not have a 100% transmission rate. I can’t give you the ole razzle dazzle with a bunch of math because there are different high/medium/low risk activities, ways to reduce transmission (PrEP is pre-exposure, PEP is post-exposure), and variables that mean you are not guaranteed to get HIV from the same activity every single time, particularly if you factor in an undetectable viral load. Granted, some elements of this weren’t known in the 1990s, but given that JKR wasn’t writing and releasing her books then, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some of this nuance to be given consideration.

#4: Management via Medication

Lycanthropy: The expensive ingredients and difficult brewing instructions for Wolfsbane Potion do work within this analogy for difficulty affording and accessing early antiretroviral therapy (ART). This is part of how lycanthropy could get interpreted as a metaphor for HIV by readers before JKR weighed in, but I must admit that her world building to give lycanthropy at least a 350 year history makes it harder to understand Wolfsbane Potion only getting invented in the 1970s. The framing of Remus missing one dose just one month in PoA also sets up an unsettling “if you miss one dose, you are in fact a danger to everyone” scenario.

HIV: This is an area where it takes some careful phrasing with search terms because today’s options for medicine are not exactly the same as what would’ve been available in the 1990s. Generally speaking, the combination options that offer two or three medicines in one pill sound like they may have been more likely to be separate, and some of the side effects were different (more likely to be more severe when it came to effects on the liver, unless I’m misinterpreting). Most sound like they were once or twice a day, everyday prescriptions, and it was likely you would need various supplements and ‘not really treating the HIV but still needed’ other pills. However, I haven’t tried to definitively track the minutiae of differences in medication between then and now, so I must admit that I have a general impression more so than exact details. The biggest component in relation to the lycanthropy aspect is that it takes more than one missed dose to undo the effects of being medication compliant.

#5: Management via Isolation

Lycanthropy: Because Wolfsbane Potion is more literally a sedative that just reduces a wolf wanting to attack humans, really the “best medicine” is isolation. It comes across as an easy solution since the Shrieking Shack was devised while Remus was at school before Wolfsbane Potion was invented, but it feeds the encouragement of social isolation for werewolves in their human form, particularly those too poor to access the Wolfsbane Potion. (Hint: Probably the majority.)

HIV: There’s a bit of a history with AIDS patients and isolation, but I must admit that I’m unsure if it’s more USA specific than a universal experience. Remember how no one wanted to visit the wizard who had just been bitten in OotP while Arthur was in St. Mungo’s over the holidays? Well, magnify that, so the wizard wasn’t able to be on the same floor as non-lycans, staff would avoid bringing food and interacting, and he might have to be sent to a separate facility that only catered to lycans.

At any rate, a fair amount of people liked the idea of isolation with HIV+ people because they wanted to avoid getting HIV and had inaccurate ideas of how that happened (breathing the same air, social touching, touching an object after an HIV+ person, etc.), so someone should’ve reconsidered how isolation was used for werewolves.

#6: Life Outcome

Lycanthropy: From the sounds of it, when Greyback isn’t involved in an intentional death, you’ll live but hate yourself, and society will hate you because they somehow still think you’ll turn people as a human even after over 350 years of knowing about werewolves. Plus, the wiki cites (from a page that used to be on Pottermore) “tragic tales are told of knowing victims begging for death rather than becoming werewolves” [Werewolf HP Wiki link].

There’s really no beating around the bush - that sounds incredibly depressing. For fuck’s sake, there’s no sense of community and making the best of your life even if it is different now that might sound like there’s still a chance to have a life. (Greyback having an underground society of werewolves who hate the Wizarding world because they’re hated so much isn’t exactly a positive example of community, by the way.) The main canon example of werewolf life expectancy (Remus lived 33 years after infection) doesn’t provide a judge of all werewolves when Wizarding Wars have also factored into reduced life expectancy.

HIV: Admittedly, it depends on when you’re writing about getting a diagnosis. The height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and into the 1990s is not the same as the late 1990s and early 2000s or the present day (2019). Another factor is the particular diagnosis of Stage 1 (acute HIV; the first few weeks of infection), Stage 2 (chronic HIV, which can be asymptomatic), or Stage 3 (AIDS). A person who doesn’t seek out ART could be at Stage 2 for about 10 years and Stage 3 for another three years, but that’s not a guarantee or reflective of life expectancy while on medication [The Stage of HIV Infection].

#7: Inheritability (or Transmission to Offspring)

Lycanthropy: Strictly speaking, it takes a bite from the werewolf parent in wolf form for a child to acquire their parent’s lycanthropy. However, the concern and “this is new so no one knows” quality of Tonks’ pregnancy created an air of uncertainty that means some fans attribute Teddy not being a werewolf to Tonks being a Metamorphmagus and/or lycanthropy only being transmitted to the child if the pregnant person is infected.

Bizarrely, the Werewolf Wiki claims Teddy Lupin is the only known case of a werewolf having a child in human form, which doesn’t sound plausible when werewolves have been around for over 350 years and, y’know, monsterfuckers exist. (Yes, this is a YA series and getting into the nitty gritty would be inappropriate for the genre, but JKR specifically planned out Teddy Lupin, so a little critical thinking about werewolf/human is necessary.)

HIV: I must admit most resources turning up are within the last few years and may not be 100% transferable to the 1990s, but it is certainly possible to have an HIV- child if the sperm providing person is HIV+ by reducing the risk of transmission to the egg providing person, who faces a higher risk of transmission to the child [HIV and Family Planning]. It’s not a guarantee that a child will acquire HIV if the person carrying the pregnancy is HIV+, but exposure to blood during delivery and breastfeeding do carry a risk.

(I suggest that link provided earlier for more information in this area because I don’t know much about family planning options other than IVF being available in the early 1990s.) I must admit that using this element of transmission in the metaphor with lycanthropy would keep every instance from coming across as “intentional bite from monster”, and having some sort of rules for whether a child could have lycanthropy would come across as more purposeful world building than a slapstick view that Teddy Lupin is the only known case.

#8: Good Exception versus Bad Actually Dangerous Group

Lycanthropy: Of course the anti-lycan bias and discrimination doesn’t make sense when it’s Remus Lupin, but it’s a totally different story with Greyback, who climbed into Remus’ bedroom via a window and bit him as a child (Predatory Gay vibes anyone, plus a side of Sexual Deviancy with some of his other lines at women). Most werewolves align with the Dark Side and Greyback wants to turn as many children as possible in order to outnumber the Wizarding world and take over (Older Predatory Gay wants to “recruit” our Good -Het- Normal Children anyone?).

HIV: The first example that I can think of is admittedly an example of a child in the US who needed a blood transfusion acquiring HIV. Instead of being an example of HIV being transmitted via blood and not synonymous with gay sex, Ryan White was a virtuous exception to ‘God is punishing the gays’ narrative. (This isn’t to say that this is exactly how the White family presented their son’s AIDS diagnosis, but it does factor into how other people used this case and how people remember the comparison between a hemophiliac child ‘who didn’t do anything to deserve this’ and ‘the people who did do something to deserve this’.)

#9: The Elephant in the Room

Lycanthropy: A metaphor for HIV, a disease that impacted queer communities and is still incredibly associated with queer men by some people, carries an element of queercoding. While HIV is transmitted through various bodily fluids and does not require sexual activity, there’s still an association with receptive anal sex, which is associated with queer men. Depending on where you live in the 2000s, this perception of who is more likely to be HIV+ may not be queer men, but I can’t make guaranteed statements about the 1990s. Admittedly, some of this may be US heavy, but it’s certainly an element of HIV’s historical context that a writer has to face when writing a metaphor for HIV. Whether JKR likes it or not, this is a part of why Remus has been interpreted as a queer character and shipped with other men by fans.

HIV: While sexual activity is not the only way to transmit the virus, it is indeed a factor of how people reacted to those who were HIV+, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. It intersects with other social attitudes around sex education (who tells the teens about sex when, talking with other adults about sex, condom usage and access), sex work, drug use (particularly if needles are shared), and the “you may not like it, but it’s there” areas of bathhouses / hooking up and BDSM in queer history. (Loads of the people doing kink were queer. Sex is not mandatory but can happen in a scene. Some kinky activities don’t look like “penis going into something” sex, but bodily fluids can still be present for potential sharing, including blood.) It’s an overlapping area of homophobia, biphobia, and other queerphobia with the association of a sexually transmitted virus meaning sexual deviancy sort of connection. Werewolves don’t have to check off these boxes like some sort of prerequisite list, but some of this baggage tags along when writing a metaphor for HIV, particularly when a teacher loses his job because he can’t be around the children for their safety.

#10: Government Action

Lycanthropy: No offense, but if actual irl Great Britain managed to hunt their native wolf population to extinction by the 1700s, if not earlier in some places [History of Wolves in the UK], I don’t see how the Wizarding world didn’t do that well before the 1990s with werewolves through sheer indifference to stopping Muggle hunters. Full offense, but I don’t trust a government that has a Werewolf Registry and a Werewolf Capture Unit to not also have ulterior motives around forced sterilization (whether by design or indifference to wolf forms being sterilized), designated living areas “to protect others”, surveillance measures (because some werewolves hate the Wizarding world and are ‘anti-Ministry’), and attempted control of that population.

There are plenty of seeds for some serious anti-lycan bias and discrimination that would in fact mirror how different ethnic, racial, and religious groups have been treated if a writer wanted werewolves to face that in a magical universe, especially if werewolves have been around and hated for over 350 years. This is an area where the historical presence works against the metaphor because, as one example, there would be an expectation that employment discrimination like the bill passed after Remus left Hogwarts would already be in place. If lycanthropy is an established stigmatised chronic condition, keep that history in mind during world building. If lycanthropy is a stand-in for HIV, keep the relative ‘newness’ for a story set in the 1990s in mind.

According to the Werewolf Wiki, the Werewolf Registry is by volunteer basis so it’s not up to date, but that sounds like a cop-out when the Ministry of Magic can track the births of magical children, know when an underage wix performs magic, and has all kinds of literal magic that one can track and monitor with. Yeah, they were comically bad at finding Azkaban escapees, but in the hands of someone wanting to flex government surveillance abilities, you can start at microchipping and work from there. (How many people would bat an eye at a wolf getting a microchip in the 1990s, particularly if the Ministry was involved in some sort of ‘we’ll eventually share with the Muggles’ reserve?)

HIV: I must admit this is an area where I would have to carefully make sure I was looking into UK specific information because not every administration in every country took a silence and indifference route (or fed into certain religious arguments). Granted, the social stigma that leads to employment and housing discrimination that leads to underemployment, unemployment, and living in poverty that are attributed to werewolves certainly isn’t a stretch in the metaphor.

Conclusion

Writing lycanthropy as a metaphor for HIV resulted in some areas of successful interpretation by readers, but I can’t say I’m surprised that fans often tweak werewolf canon to address holes in the metaphor. I don’t have every area mapped out in the exact details of difference here, but overall, I don’t think it’s going to be impossibly difficult to delineate HIV-as-HIV in this fic as separate from lycanthropy. One element that doesn’t have an irl parallel (and can’t be factored into the metaphor) is that by not actually including HIV in the Wizarding world, canon doesn’t provide a blueprint for addressing whether certain viruses or diseases ‘originate’ from Muggles and thus feeds into anti-Muggle bias. Not that this excuses serophobia, but it would undoubtedly affect Ministerial response to HIV+ wixen (ex. the Wizarding version of the NHS won’t cover ART because “that only happens to Muggles”).

{I must admit that I am not an expert on this topic, and there’s no pressure to signal boost this post or completely throw out the lycanthropy as HIV metaphor. It’s fine if followers elect to ignore me poking at world building / expansion for a particular fic.}

#My writing #HP #queer history #werewolves #fanfiction

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years ago

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THE ESSAYIST IS MANY THINGS: egotistic is definitely one of them. This cuts both ways, however. Essays can be focused on the writerly self, but they can also offer an escape. As Montaigne said well over 400 years ago, one gets rather wrapped up in oneself. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me — a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” Yet the essayist also retreats. Emerson saw his reflections as solitude, where “all mean egotism vanishes” and he becomes “a transparent eyeball,” a “nothing.” The essay is much more than that too, of course. A riff or a sally, a fight or a laugh. A journey, a ramble, a wandering about. Beyond such meanderings — the digressions on which the essay thrives — the nature of the form is itself formless. It might be “short or long,” as Woolf wrote in 1922, “serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza,” or — recalling Samuel Butler — “about turtles and Cheapside.” But so often, as she wrote on Montaigne, the essay turns back to oneself, “the greatest monster and miracle in the world.”

Fast-forward almost a century and we have Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant by Joel Golby, which takes up (and takes down) his own monstrous ego with delicious panache. You probably know of his work. He’s a crusading hero for twenty- and thirtysomething UK renters who frequently lambastes the hellish property market in his regular “London Rental Opportunity of the Week” column for Vice. From an exposé of a toilet jammed inside a shower at the foot of the bed, to a Beckettian litany going over and over the nature of a bedsit with multiple sinks but no adequate space for a mattress, Golby wages a single-handed war against that peculiar subspecies of human: the landlord. He’s massively popular, not least with those of us destined to forever move from one overpriced grief hole to the next. Golby does absurdist humor on other themes, too. A piece asking questions about why Pete Doherty was seen “aggressively eating” a massive breakfast outside a greasy spoon in Margate; 101 ways to ruin a party; “deep dives” into property TV shows; the likelihood of certain celebrities eating worms if they go on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! One recent column on “The New Rules of Being a Millennial” is both caustic and community-building. If Lena Dunham (as a “voice of her generation” — that now somewhat hackneyed joke in Girls) was a member of the precariat and grew up in Chesterfield, she might turn phrases like this:

The problem with the “us” thing is that we (Us) do not have a collective term for ourselves which isn’t wildly inaccurate or painfully cringey. “Hipster” suggests a level of effort that I think we’re all big enough to admit we don’t subscribe to. Does “millennials” work? Sort of, but not. It’s too broad. Plus, “millennial” is more-or-less a slur these days, isn’t it. Nobody self-identifies as one. It’s just something your dad calls people with university debt. It’s nothing. The people I’m talking about are the ones who know what De School is and don’t really know what a “James Arthur” is.

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant is a gathering of 21 new essays and three updated pieces, and arrives at a time when emerging writers are voicing their histories and outlooks in hilarious and poignant ways that befit modern anxieties. The Chicago-based blogger-turned-writer Samantha Irby’s debut collection, Meaty, and her second, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, both offer takes on bad sex, Crohn’s disease, life as a woman in her mid-30s, loss, and more, and recent collections from Hanif Abdurraqib, Chelsea Hodson, Scaachi Koul, and others reflect an exciting boom in the genre in the last few years alone. The essay has made a comeback, but it was always powerful. Again, Woolf said it best. “You can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other,” she wrote in “The Decay of Essay-Writing” in 1905: “its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities.”

There’s definitely something about essays, in their long-held comic tradition — “the joke” of literature, as G. K. Chesterton framed them — that resonates strongly today. After all, they are easily digestible, and in turn digest ideas. They are often simply “brain soufflés,” as David Lazar puts it in After Montaigne: a “walk-in closet of self or selves” ever more popular in our era of selfies and accumulations of followers on social media. Indeed, contemporary essays are often thoughts that gestate online, developed from blogs or one-off pieces: the sort of text with “14-minute read” under a byline for the crushing commute to work. They can also be surprisingly long and detailed, putting pay to the redundant idea that millennials cannot focus on anything beyond a shakshuka brunch, or — as the Daily Mail might interminably trot out — avocado toast. Caity Weaver’s epic quest to eat limitless mozzarella sticks as part of a TGI Friday’s promotion requires a good chunk of your time. John Saward’s classic reflections on Mike Tyson are as astute and amusing as Hazlitt. But with Golby we’re treated to two things at once: the pleasure of his wit and style as he ranges his themes, and a sustained, near-Swiftian satire on the very real and material challenges driven by the United Kingdom’s housing crisis. It’s not as simple as just laughing at £1,894 for a fold-out bed in Marylebone, or hedonism gone wrong; in Brilliant, we find a writer gunning for a fight.

In “PCM” (“Per Calendar Month”), Golby lays out the vagaries of dealing with the feudal overlords that might kick you out or take your deposit at the drop of a hat:

The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means “I am insanely deranged,” but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate.

Golby intersperses his stories of the worst offenders with brutal, bloody fantasies of decimating each and every one: “The sound a landlord makes when you nail their toes down into the wood floor beneath them is, ‘This isn’t the definition of normal wear and tear.’” This is followed by an adroit move to his notion of “capsule coziness”: the kind of Scandinavian homely warmth called hygge that people were raving about a few years ago that in actuality equates to a herbal tea, a candle, and a “heather-colored blanket” you have to pack and move with every time the tenancy is up. Yet for all his inherently socialist leanings — this piece includes a well-researched outline of the real estate sector going back to 1986 — Golby is the first to admit that he is a slave to late capitalism’s charms. “Monopoly is the best game because the Actual Devil lives inside it,” he writes in another piece, before confessing to his rapacious greed and inhuman dealings on the board. “When I play Monopoly,” he writes,

I am David Cameron rimming Maggie off, I am Edwina Currie fucking John Major harder than he can fuck her back, I am a roaring-drunk Boris Johnson, I am Tory to the core-y, I am shaking hands with property developers in shady backroom multimillion-pound deals, I am blocking social housing to build luxury apartments in an effort to squeeze an extra £200K into my own private account, I am wearing a panama hat in the Cayman Islands and laughingly lighting a cigar with a £50 note.

In the United Kingdom there is a generational moniker: “Thatcher’s children.” If you were born in the ’80s, so the tag implies, you’ve been raised on rampant conservatism — the assumedly money-grabbing offspring spawned by her regime. But in truth we’re more conflicted. Society has raised us to believe getting on the property ladder is of paramount importance, but the reality of life-long renting and being pushed out of the city draws a big line between those who gained and those who lost under and after Thatcher. That Golby spins comedy gold from such a sorry state of affairs is testimony to how much we need a voice like his. Given his toothsome fight against oppressive property-owning profiteers, it is tempting to ascribe a cohesive political drive to Brilliant’s author. I asked him over email if he was interested in the horrors of capitalism, given how much of a theme it is in his work. “Mm, yes and no,” he responds. “My politics are, like baby-level deep. I was on a podcast the other week and everyone kept saying ‘neoliberal’ in a natural, casual air that made me sweat. I know the right and the left and vaguely where I fall on that spectrum … but beyond that I don’t feel qualified to talk. I don’t have the vocabulary.”

A similar modesty emerges with the very title of the book, even in its absurd egotism. “The title was initially there to make me laugh,” Golby explains, “then over time it became supremely annoying. It’s hard to pronounce without counting the Brilliants on your fingers: naming the book in this way has become the ultimate self-own.” One also finds this “ultimate self-own” in Golby’s approach to the book’s other major theme: masculinity. He riffs on the ineffable quality of “Machismo” (Golby’s brand is “soft knits and high necks” and a complex skin-care regime that includes the joys of an eye mask), offers an exhaustive, obsessive overview of all the Rocky films ranked in order of greatness, and marvels at Lenny Kravitz’s ability to pull off a leather jacket. (Golby decidedly cannot.) This deconstruction of masculinity accounts for some of the book’s funniest moments:

I realized a way of upgrading myself from a 5-out-of-10 to a solid 6 is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: “£55 for a moisturizer? Hell fucking yes!”

I asked Golby why masculinity can be so funny. “Well, because it’s absurd,” he replies, “but also it’s been one of the overriding influences on culture for the past million years, and we’re only just — just! — cracking out from that shadow … A lot of the things every man who has ever lived or ever died, a lot of what he has ever done, has been due to some deep roiling well of masculinity.”

I wonder if Golby is quite apart from the hegemonic masculinities (as initially theorized by R. W. Connell) that he decries. Brilliant arrives on the shoulders of gender theory: generations of feminist work with which emergent men’s studies became conversant in the 1980s, in works by Peter Schwenger, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lynne Segal, and many others. A major subject of such studies was the “New Man” figure that appeared in popular culture in that decade — an emotionally more intelligent, respectful of women, post-yuppie incarnation — which in turn led to the “New Lad” of the 1990s. Integral to the British “lad culture” associated with the Britpop musical genre, the “New Lad” has been characterized by Rosalind Gill as an ironic, “beer and shagging,” Nuts- or Loaded-reading, cheeky manchild. We found him in David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s comedy and the “Three Lions” football anthem, for instance, in the TV series Men Behaving Badly and in the fiction of Nick Hornby and Martin Amis. “Ladlit,” as Elaine Showalter named it, is a direct forerunner of Brilliant, which — over 20 years after the classic “lad” film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and in the light shined on shameful male behavior by the #MeToo movement — inherits and plays with its own genre heritage.

On the one hand, Golby retrenches old notions of manhood. “The Full Spectrum of Masculinity as Represented by Rocky in the Rocky Movies” tangent is a somewhat limited list that veers between brute force and fragility, relying on tired myths as the joke. There’s a familiarity in this move, a well-worn trope. After all, as Steve Connor wrote in 2001 (in “The Shame of Being a Man”), talk about being a man usually has “tucked into it a snicker at its bumptious presumption”: “[W]e find it hard to take masculinity as seriously as we suppose.” That Golby turns his comedy on this theme so frequently suggests a reiteration not wholly free of its antecedents. On the other hand, however, he’s doing something utterly new with the late 2010s permutation of “lads.”

Golby’s Instagram is often one long stream of captioned images sending up exhausted “haway the lads” lager-swilling clichés with a belligerent repetition of “love and appreciation to the lads” — men and women — until it goes from funny to irritating to funny again. He’s also aware of the ways in which, as Connor puts it, “to write is to be unmanned, meritoriously to unman oneself.” Golby embraces such “unmanning.” He explores his own sensitivity and offers a catalog of “All the Fights I’ve Lost.” He’s part of a new generation that knows (yet still laughs) at how, as Connor again writes, “[m]en are spent up: masculinity is a category of ruin, a crashed category. It’s a bust.” Golby is also aware of its persistent homosocial nature: the values and relations exchanged between men, as Sedgwick’s ground-breaking work revealed. “I have to have a very small-voice conversation with myself every time I put a selfie on Instagram,” he tells me. “‘Is this … lame? Will the other boys … mock me?’ It’s an insane and stupid thing to be under a thrall to.”

The homosocial dimension of Golby’s thoughts on masculinity might explain the book’s main oddity. Brilliant has no women in Golby’s love life to speak of. No formative crushes, sex, dating stories — nothing except an encounter with a man in Barcelona selling state-of-the-art sex dolls. The cringeworthy, non-erotic nature of these scenes made me wince with the uncanny feeling Ernst Jentsch and later Freud associated with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s automaton doll Olympia in The Sandman. They are, as Golby puts it, “eerie”: “balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaw w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberized vagina, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill.” Again, we’re less in the realm of sexuality and more in gendered constructs. Golby offers a feminist take on AI and consent, yet feels disquietingly shorn of “the pulsing core of straight masculinity” when surrounded by these uncanny valley robots. He has it both ways: exceeding the “busted” category of manhood, yet circling back to it for a laugh. Is this a new new laddism? The book provokes such a question.

There’s an adolescent immaturity to Golby’s writing, to be sure, but a joyful one, with a comedic suaveness that demands attention. He consistently delivers the jokes through distinctive stylistic moves. Words and phrases pile up in heaps until bam! — the thing tips over and you’re laughing, rereading. He even manages to pull off some comedy in the opening essay, the moving yet funny “Things You Only Know If Both Your Parents Are Dead” that appeared in an earlier form on Vice and more recently the Guardian, about being orphaned at 25. He repeats “My parents are dead” no fewer than 22 times, yet still finds humor in grief, in um-ming and ahh-ing over which kind of beer basket to plump for for a neighbor, or buying vol-au-vents at Tesco. (There was more about the ubiquitous supermarket Tesco, but it was subbed by the US editor for being a bit too British. Other Britishisms include: the cheap pub chain Wetherspoons; the cigarette papers Rizla; tights.) This is perhaps one of the most powerful things about the book: people have reached out to Golby after that essay’s first publication, “as if I am some sort of griefsaver,” but, as he says to friends, “no two griefs are the same. They are always different spikey, awkward shapes. There’s no clean, easy way to vomit grief up out of your system. It just works its way through you in whatever way it chooses to.”

In some ways, as with his romantic life, Golby keeps a lot back, but aspects of Brilliant, like his loss, are totally up front — a juxtaposition that gets us back to the question of ego. I wonder if he considers himself private. “I don’t know if I’m wildly private,” he tells me. “I tend to tweet every thought I have, Instagram my dinner with a forced hashtag and wrote an essay [“Ribs”] about attempting auto fellatio — so let’s not worry too much about that.” Golby still harbors a strong, endearing desire to go to America and “hole up in a motel room with every snack I’ve ever seen on TV and watch 24-hour news.” (He’s wanted to do this since he was about eight.) He admits that his book is all about him, as he has had to convey what it’s about to many an editor’s bemusement with “a blank stare and say something along the lines of: ‘things that I like. I am the theme.’” Ultimately, he confesses, “more than anything else it is, still, fundamentally, just an ego trip thing. I have an enormous ego. An insufferable one.”

In the end, it is Golby’s satire that carries most weight. I ask him one final question, which was always on my lips as I read his columns and choice bits of the book. Is it possible for a human being to become a landlord without turning into a monster? “No,” he replies, firmly. “It’s not possible to become a landlord without turning into a monster. It’s not even possible to conceive of the idea of becoming a landlord without some hollow part of you already being monstrous. No landlord can escape the curse of their own landlordism. Their soul is condemned before they even pull up outside the auction house.”

Cathryn Setz is an Associate Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

The post The Ultimate Self-Own: On Joel Golby’s “Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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oovitus · 7 years ago

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23 expert tips to help you overcome the most common coaching challenges.

If people turn to you for health, fitness, and nutrition advice, you probably face a daily list of coaching challenges. Waning motivation. Irrational resistance. Obstacles and setbacks.

To help you (and your clients/patients) get past them, here are 23 excellent tips from our Precision Nutrition Certification Facebook group, where PN’s renowned coaching experts offer mentoring and time-tested guidance.

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As a PN Certified coach, I have a lot going for me as a professional:

Broad and deep nutrition knowledge; an in-depth understanding of how nutrition affects health and fitness; a comprehensive toolkit for using behavioral psychology to guide people to real, lasting lifestyle (and body) transformation.

But I still hit coaching roadblocks… fairly regularly.

I need fresh ideas for the client who just can’t seem to get motivated.

Or the client who’s so stressed that just putting on pants in the morning feels like an epic task.

Or the client whose measurable progress has plateaued and, even though I know she’s still making behavioral progress, I need a creative way to show her that, and keep her engaged.

Helping people with their health can be hard.

Whether you’re an experienced professional, or brand-new to health / fitness / wellness coaching, you’re bound to run into challenges.

That’s why I rounded up these coaching tips from the PN Certification Facebook group, where our renowned experts share tips of the day, weigh in on group questions, offer time-tested guidance and mentoring, and more.

These tips get me (and fellow PN coaches) through our most frustrating moments.

Actually, they’ve turned my darkest coaching hours into some of the brightest, proudest moments of my career.

Feel free to read through the whole list from top to bottom, or click on a coaching category to jump to specific tips.

Also, to keep this article a manageable length, I abbreviated many of them. To read the full tips, in context, there are links to the originals below. Many of them have additional insights and action steps to help elevate your coaching game.

About our experts How to keep people motivated How to support people through setbacks How to have difficult conversations How to work through client/patient resistance How to handle your own mistakes and uncertainty

About our experts

Dr. John Berardi

Dr. Berardi (a.k.a “JB”) is a co-founder of Precision Nutrition, which has become the world’s largest and most respected nutrition coaching and education company. He’s an advisor to Apple, Equinox, Nike, and Titleist, and was recently selected as one of the 20 smartest coaches in the world and 100 most influential people in health and fitness.

Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon

With nearly 20 years of experience in adult education and curriculum design, Krista is the intellectual powerhouse behind the Precision Nutrition coaching method, which powers PN’s professional certification programs. Once the ‘kid picked last for every team’, Krista sees health and fitness as pathways to a bigger goal: changing people’s lives.

Coach Craig Weller

The creator of Precision Nutrition’s exercise coaching systems, previously Craig spent six years in Naval Special Operations as a Special Warfare Combat Crewman (SWCC), and close to two years on the High-Threat Protection team for the U.U. Ambassador to Baghdad in Iraq. Craig has been published in a host of journals and is now studying how human performance relates to motor and perceptual learning.

How to keep people motivated

Praise behaviors, not results.

Whenever people lose weight, lower body fat, drop inches, or experience positive health changes, it’s very tempting to hug (or high-five) them and lavish praise.

But Coach JB shows us the risks of doing this.

“Results are somewhat unpredictable. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to praise metrics. Because they’re fickle. And clients have limited control over them.

On the other hand, behaviors are controllable, and consistent behaviors often lead to long-term, sustainable outcomes.

So, when you praise behaviors (instead of outcomes), people will associate taking action and showing up — not dropping numbers on the scale — with smiles and high-fives.”

The next time someone shares an exciting milestone with you, try praising them for the habits that got them there — for example, consistency in showing up to appointments, making more home-cooked meals, going to bed earlier, etc.

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Change the system, not the symptom.

“We often think that changing behavior is about motivation or willpower. But, more often, it’s simply about changing the environment,” Coach Craig says.

Craig gives the example of his time in the military, when he had to wake up at 3am for special swim training sessions.

“Sometimes I would have died to stay in bed a few minutes longer. But being even a few minutes late could mess up my whole team’s schedule.

Instead of trying to muster more motivation to get out of my warm bed and into the cold, dark night, I simply moved my alarm clock across the room.

I had to leap out of bed as soon as it went off before it would wake my roommates up. Problem solved, no willpower needed.”

Before you try to wrestle more motivation or willpower out of your clients/patients, see if you can help them build an environment that more naturally and easily supports their goals.

Examples: keeping cooked grains stocked in the fridge, a packed gym bag in your trunk, and moving social gatherings from bars and restaurants to parks and gyms.

To read Craig’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Address stress levels first.

At some point in you’ll probably hear a client or patient say some version of this:

“I was doing great with my workouts but then this thing happened and I got stressed / overwhelmed / busy and I stopped.”

Coach Craig explains that there’s a reason for this: It’s neurobiology.

Research has found that stress literally changes the parts of your brain involved in decision making, pushing us away from goal-directed behavior (“I do this, I lose weight”) in the direction of habitual behavior (“Me tired, me stay on couch”).

“No amount of lecturing or motivating will break the cycle of a bad habit.

Help clients out of their anxiety, and they’ll have a brain that’s capable of making goal-oriented decisions instead of habitual reactions.”

If stress is a perpetual consistency blocker for certain clients/patients of yours, try helping them implement some stress-calibrating techniques. Managing stress will not only have physiological benefits, but these psychological ones too.

To read Craig’s entire tip, in context, click here.

How to support people through setbacks

Separate the person from the problem.

You may notice that clients or patients will often tell you what they “are.”

For example, “I’m a sugar addict” or “I’m a failure”.

Notice the grammatical construction: I AM a thing. I AM a label.

Coach Krista suggests rewording this identity crisis by separating the person from the problem. For example, instead of validating what they “are”, respond by saying:

“It sounds like you struggle with sugar.”

“It sounds like you’ve had a few setbacks.”

Now the problem is something you have, not something you are.

Using language to untangle the problem from the person isn’t a quick fix but, over time, it gives both you, and your clients/patients, the space that’s needed to see challenges objectively and work toward overcoming them.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Help them turn knowledge into action.

Many people already know what to do to get healthier. They just struggle with doing it consistently.

“Behavior can’t develop without first having the knowledge to inform it. But most people stop at knowledge and feel like they’re done — as if behavior magically follows knowledge,” says Coach Craig.

“They’ll often express frustration when knowledge hasn’t brought them their desired state, and inaccurately believe that the issue will be resolved by knowing more.”

Progress-stalled clients or patients who seem to want to focus on granular nutrition topics might be caught in this “knowledge trap”. To help them start doing, work with them to set behavior-oriented goals that build toward their desired outcome.

To read Craig’s entire tip, in context, click here.

When things look bleak, re-frame.

When a client or patient experiences a perceived setback, Coach Krista reminds us of the importance of the “re-frame” — offering alternative perspectives that encourage self-compassion, inspiration, and hope.

For example, if someone comes to you with a story of “failure”, you might use reframing to show them where they did succeed, or where they have an opportunity that seems very manageable:

“You could tell that story about this, yes. A story that comes to mind for me, though, is…”

“I know this seems like a setback, but I noticed something you missed: You actually stayed focused on Priority X. That took a lot of strength.”

“Some folks use this type of situation as an opportunity to…”

“That’s one way to look at it. Another way you could think about this is…”

Remind your client or patient that their current story is just one perspective (rather than objective reality). Then highlight opportunities for learning and for focusing on their strengths.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Keep it simple.

One of the best things you can do is help clients keep things simple, especially when they’re experiencing times of stress, difficulty, or setbacks.

Coach Krista explains, “A big part of a coach’s job is to find the one thing a client needs to know, focus on, or do right now.

Practice distilling your complex advice into simple, prioritized, actionable takeaways, prompting your clients or patients to walk away after each session saying, ‘Hmm, I can manage that!’”

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

How to have difficult conversations

(Gently) give the reality bomb.

One of the jobs of a coach is to gently bring people from the child-world of magical thinking into an adult-world of reality and evidence.

“When you grow up, you realize that being an adult means confronting truths that are often… disappointing,” Coach Krista says.

“There is no Santa Claus, and you don’t always get what you want.

Whenever you catch a client in a fantasy that could be hurting them in the long term, ask yourself: ‘Is it time for a reality bomb?

Is this client ready and stable enough to hear the cold, hard, facts?’

If it is time, ask permission to share your perspective, keep it factual and simple, and make it OK to find reality difficult. Encourage the client to take time to process, and check in later with how the client has received the information.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Ask the two questions that matter.

Coach JB reminds us that when people feel groundless or uncertain in the face of change, you might see them grasping for certainty and asking all kinds of nit-picky questions, like:

“What about this supplement, or that?”

“What do you think about this theory / guru / article / study?”

“What about when (unlikely, unforeseeable future event) happens — what do I do then?”

“These kinds of questions, although intended to provide a sense of security, don’t reduce anxiety at all.” Coach JB says

Instead of getting swept up in these kinds of details, direct your clients or patients back to the only two questions that matter:

‘What should I do today?’

and

‘How do I do that?’

Use the above two questions to lead people toward calm, focused action. In the face of frenzied questioning, help your clients focus on what’s needed right now.

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Draw on your own experience.

Sometimes clients will come to you with pain that is beyond your own personal experience.

These situations may make you question “How am I supposed to know what to say/do here? How can I understand?”

Coach Krista reminds us that in these moments, you don’t have to experience the exact same thing as your client to understand.

“If a client comes to you with sadness, think about your own experiences of sadness. If a client comes to you with anger, think of your own experiences with anger. If your client comes to you with physical pain, recall your own injuries and soreness.

As you think about your experiences, recall what helped, what you learned, and how you moved forward. Offer this compassion, insight, and hope, drawn from your own experiences, to your clients, and share in your common sense of humanity.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Know what to control.

Often, people get distressed about lack of control.

Maybe they’re trying to exert control in an uncontrollable situation. Or maybe behaviors that used to make them feel in control don’t work anymore.

The interesting thing is that, when obsessing about lack of control, they often miss places where they do have control, such as particular behaviors, choices, or mindset.

When these freak-outs and confidence crises hit, Coach Krista suggests asking this one powerful question:

“Right now, what is actually within your control, and what is not?”

With this one question, you can cut through the clutter, and help them open their minds to discover perspectives (and solutions) they weren’t seeing before.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Know that sometimes, just being there is powerful.

When things get really rough for clients or patients, sometimes just your presence is powerful.

Coach Krista reminds us, “It’s a rare and special thing to have a person who cares about you, and who listens with full engagement, compassion, curiosity, and non-judgment.

Coaches can be that person.

You don’t always have to say the ‘right thing.’ Sometimes, all you have to do is simply be there.”

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Say ‘thank you’.

Coach Krista reminds us that, as a coach, one of the most impactful things you can do during difficult conversations is to say… thank you.

Especially in the weird or awkward moments, when you might not feel like saying it.

For example, when a client or patient discloses something big, you might say: “Thank you for trusting me with this. I appreciate that it might have taken a lot of courage to share that.”

Or when you get feedback: “Thank you for being so honest with me.”

Or when you end a challenging session: “Thank you for taking the time to come in today. I know you are busy.”

Have a spirit of gratitude with your clients, even when you might not feel like being grateful. Make them feel understood and validated by telling them how much you appreciate them.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

How to work through client/patient resistance

Stay on the same team as your client.

Sometimes your client or patient will come to you with a belief or idea you blatantly disagree with.

And all you want to do is tell them that they’re wrong.

Don’t do that.

JB shares some counterintuitive truth:

“The harder we try to convince someone of something, the harder they will push back from the opposing side. We’re emotional beings, and if someone argues for one side, we tend to respond by arguing the opposite.”

In other words, if someone comes to you with, er, controversial opinions, don’t try to convince them to change their minds with research, articles, or lecturing. If you do, all you’re likely doing is further entrenching them in their position.

Instead, try exploring why they think/feel what they do.

Listen to and honor your clients’/patients’ perspectives to build trust and cooperation, and a sense of being on the same “team”. It’s only from this foundation that people are able to be receptive to different perspectives and learn from them.

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Keep in mind that all behavior is an attempt to solve a problem, even if it seems destructive.

Coach JB swears that once he learned this coaching lesson, it changed not only his coaching practice, but his whole life.

“Behaviors will often look confusing, or sometimes downright self-sabotaging. But they’re usually there for a purpose.

For example, consider a client who desperately wants to lose weight but also compulsively overeats.

Overeating appears to contradict the client’s goal of being healthy, but it may also be doing a terrific job of meeting other, perhaps less-recognized, goals of alleviating immediate pain.

The reality is that humans have multiple goals, or “competing commitments”. Competing commitments look something like this:

‘I want to get healthy… and at the same time, I want to stop feeling stressed.’

Knowing this helps us see that people aren’t usually chaotic and irrational. Behaviors almost always make sense, and they’re usually there to solve a problem.

Solve the problem in a different way, and the undesirable behavior is no longer needed.”

In conversation, help clients or patients dig a little deeper to understand what’s motivating their behaviors. Next, help them practice a (new, goal-promoting) behavior that solves the problem — before the overeating swoops in to solve it.

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Emphasize choice.

Choice is essential to human motivation.

In order to feel engaged in an action, we need to feel like we can choose.

Coach Krista suggests that, when appropriate, coaches emphasize choice with their clients or patients.

Got a gym session booked? Let clients choose:

the music;

the exercises;

the level of difficulty / resistance;

the location (e.g. inside or outside); etc.

Choice encourages people to feel like active participants in their own health/fitness journey, thereby naturally building empowerment and motivation.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Allow and accept the possibility of non-change (for now).

If a client or patient you’re working with doesn’t change, what have you got to lose?

A lot.

Confidence. Results. Security. Your livelihood.

So it’s natural that coaches feel anxious about their clients’ progress… or lack of it.

Coach Krista notes that when coaches feel anxious, many of us move toward our “worst self coaching”. We push, lecture, worry, interrupt, cajole, etc.

Ironically, the more anxious we feel about change, the less likely we are to get it.

Paradoxically, it’s only when we accept and allow non-change that our clients become more ready, willing, and able to change.

With clients, aim to play the long game. Change may stall for long periods of time. Learn to sit with your discomfort, and focus on supporting your client wherever they are, at whatever pace they’re working at.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

How to handle your own mistakes and uncertainty

Embrace feedback. (Even when it’s negative.)

We need feedback, says JB.

“To learn. To grow. To go beyond the ‘you’ of today and become the wiser, more learned, more experienced ‘you’ of tomorrow.

But we tend to be pretty bad at receiving feedback. We only want it on our terms. Under certain conditions. When we’re in the right mood. When it’s delivered just so. And only in certain contexts.

Work on getting past this.

Instead, be open to and even seek out feedback from your clients or patients. Our ability to receive and apply quality feedback pretty much determines how awesome we’re going to be, not just as a coach, but in life.”

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

When a client expresses discontent, get curious.

When a client comes to you and expresses discontent about the effectiveness of your program or their slow results, the instinctive response is to tell them their feelings are wrong.

You might say:

“No, it’s not too slow. Here’s why.”

Or,

“Actually, this program is incredibly effective. Look at all the research and success stories I have to support it.”

Although your intention here may be to educate and support your client, what you’re actually doing is invalidating their feelings.

At times like this, JB says:

“Get curious. Respecting and hearing the person’s concerns will help them feel validated, and will help you understand them better, which makes it more likely that you can help them move forward. Give yourselves time to process concerns, then come back another day with suggestions.

The best case scenario is that you retain the client or patient, who is now happy to stay because you listened to their feedback. The worst case scenario is that you lose a client but gain valuable information on how to make your coaching better.”

To read JB’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Set clear expectations.

As a health / fitness / wellness professional, you may feel uncertain or even overwhelmed at times — especially if you’re just starting out.

For example, how do you know if you’re giving a client enough of your time, or too much? How do you set boundaries? How do you make sure you’re living up to their expectations… and getting what you need?

Coach Krista says it’s all about setting expectations.

“Ideally, you should have a conversation about expectations during the initial consultation (although you can also do this at various intervals throughout the coaching journey process).”

“In this conversation, you will want to discuss:

what to expect of the program;

what YOUR expectations are of them;

what you’d like them to expect from themselves; and

what they can expect from you.

“This conversation will define clear actions and boundaries for both you and your client. No mind-reading necessary.”

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Don’t run from failure. Anticipate it.

Failure is part of life.

But most of us are pretty crappy at interpreting failure. We think that if we fail, we are a failure.

Not so.

Failure is just an opportunity for learning.

Coach Krista counsels coaches to anticipate failures, and learn from them.

“Learning from failures helps us build systems and support networks around our weak points.

“For example, if your ‘failure likelihood’ is following up with clients, don’t get mad at yourself! Just build a system around it, like setting calendar reminders to check in with your clients at regular intervals.”

Know your potential failures (and be open to discovering ones you weren’t aware of), and plan to put a little extra effort into those areas of your practice.

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Never stop experimenting.

Coach Krista reminds us that the only way to keep learning and growing as a coach (and as a human) is to experiment.

“Experiments invite us to:

create a hypothesis;

decide what data/metrics to gather;

collect and analyze the data;

draw conclusions; and

decide what to do next, based on the results of the experiment.

Experiments help us stay curious, observant, and detached as possible.

They also help us discover new things about ourselves or new systems that work better than older versions.

Experiments encourage a lifetime of learning and growing.

So, rather than trying to get everything right the first time, embrace an experimental mindset.”

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

Recruit a team.

Sometimes the needs your client or patient brings to the table will be out of your scope of practice.

Coach Krista says:

“No shame in that. People are best supported by a team.

As you develop your practice, build a support network of trusted professionals in other health/fitness/wellness fields you can refer clients or patients to when appropriate.

This ensures that you don’t feel obligated to deal with everything, that you don’t go outside your scope of practice, and that your clients/patients get the help they need.

Additionally, consider your own coaching mentor and team of specialists. You need support too!”

To read Krista’s entire tip, in context, click here.

And when you’re feeling the frustration? Just feel it for a minute.

Then… reset.

Put your coaching hat on and remember what you’re here to do: help people. Think, “How can I help this person move forward today?” and focus on that.

Yes, helping people can be hard.

It’s also enriching and fulfilling. Especially when you use the coaching challenges you face to level up your game and become the kind of coach who can get results for everyone, in every situation.

If you’re a coach, or you want to be…

Learning how to coach clients, patients, friends, or family members through healthy eating and lifestyle changes — including helping them with meal transformation — is both an art and a science.

If you’d like to learn more about both, consider the Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certification. The next group kicks off shortly.

What’s it all about?

The Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certification is the world’s most respected nutrition education program. It gives you the knowledge, systems, and tools you need to really understand how food influences a person’s health and fitness. Plus the ability to turn that knowledge into a thriving coaching practice.

Developed over 15 years, and proven with over 100,000 clients and patients, the Level 1 curriculum stands alone as the authority on the science of nutrition and the art of coaching.

Whether you’re already mid-career, or just starting out, the Level 1 Certification is your springboard to a deeper understanding of nutrition, the authority to coach it, and the ability to turn what you know into results.

[Of course, if you’re already a student or graduate of the Level 1 Certification, check out our Level 2 Certification Master Class. It’s an exclusive, year-long mentorship designed for elite professionals looking to master the art of coaching and be part of the top 1% of health and fitness coaches in the world.]

Interested? Add your name to the presale list. You’ll save up to 33% and secure your spot 24 hours before everyone else.

We’ll be opening up spots in our next Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certification on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2018.

If you want to find out more, we’ve set up the following presale list, which gives you two advantages.

Pay less than everyone else. We like to reward people who are eager to boost their credentials and are ready to commit to getting the education they need. So we’re offering a discount of up to 33% off the general price when you sign up for the presale list.

Sign up 24 hours before the general public and increase your chances of getting a spot. We only open the certification program twice per year. Due to high demand, spots in the program are limited and have historically sold out in a matter of hours. But when you sign up for the presale list, we’ll give you the opportunity to register a full 24 hours before anyone else.

If you’re ready for a deeper understanding of nutrition, the authority to coach it, and the ability to turn what you know into results… this is your chance to see what the world’s top professional nutrition coaching system can do for you.

The post 23 expert tips to help you overcome the most common coaching challenges. appeared first on Precision Nutrition.

23 expert tips to help you overcome the most common coaching challenges. published first on

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marymillera6 · 7 years ago

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2018 State of the Union: Healthcare Recap

What did you think of the State of the Union address? I won’t get into all the policies and positions put forth by President Trump, but I will review his statements related to health care.

And we are serving our brave veterans, including giving our veterans choice in their healthcare decisions. Last year, the Congress passed, and I signed, the landmark VA Accountability Act. Since its passage, my Administration has already removed more than 1,500 VA employees who failed to give our veterans the care they deserve — and we are hiring talented people who love our vets as much as we do. I will not stop until our veterans are properly taken care of, which has been my promise to them from the very beginning of this great journey.

The VA Accountability First Act of 2017 provides the government with “the authority to expeditiously remove, demote, or suspend any VA employee, including Senior Executive Service (SES) employees, for performance or misconduct”. It would also increase rewards for whistleblowers and increase the financial penalties for employees due to misconduct, poor performance or even committing a penalty.

Was the law effective? The Washington Post states that the 1,500 firings is “inaccurate”. They write: “It’s true that more than 1,500 firings at the VA have occurred so far during the Trump administration. But more than 500 of those firings occurred from Jan. 20, when Trump took office, to late June, when the new accountability law began to take effect. That means roughly one-third of the 1,500 firings cannot be attributed to the new law.

To speed access to breakthrough cures and affordable generic drugs, last year the FDA approved more new and generic drugs and medical devices than ever before in our history.

This is true. As NPR’s Alison Kodjak writes in their fact check: “The FDA approved 56 new drugs last year and 1,027 generics, a record in both categories. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the agency is on track to approve even more drugs this year.” The focus on expedited review times is real. However, the drug development process takes years or even decades, so clearly changes in government policies this year–while having the potential to change approval rates–will have little effect on current innovation, but could incentivize additional investments which would lead to future innovation.

We also believe that patients with terminal conditions should have access to experimental treatments that could potentially save their lives. People who are terminally ill should not have to go from country to country to seek a cure — I want to give them a chance right here at home. It is time for the Congress to give these wonderful Americans the “right to try.”

As the Hill reports, “Last year, the Senate passed the bill, known as “right to try,” by unanimous consent, and groups backed by billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch are pushing the House to do the same. ” Right now, the bill is before the House to come up for a vote.

Even if the legislation passes, this may not be as revolutionary change as some might believe. As reported in STAT, “More than 30 states already have laws that allow some patients access to experimental treatments, and the FDA itself already has a pathway for granting expedited access to treatment to patients with terminal illness.”

These reforms will also support our response to the terrible crisis of opioid and drug addiction. In 2016, we lost 64,000 Americans to drug overdoses: 174 deaths per day. Seven per hour. We must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge. My Administration is committed to fighting the drug epidemic and helping get treatment for those in need. The struggle will be long and difficult — but, as Americans always do, we will prevail.

The increase of opioid overdoses and deaths in the U.S. has been astounding over the past 20 years. It is a problem that needs to be addressed. Trump framed the issue of one of increased law enforcement rather than an issue to be addressed by the medical community. Most experts argue that drug addiction is a demand-side problem, and improved treatment and support typically work better than additional law enforcement.

We eliminated an especially cruel tax that fell mostly on Americans making less than $50,000 a year — forcing them to pay tremendous penalties simply because they could not afford government-ordered health plans. We repealed the core of disastrous Obamacare — the individual mandate is now gone.

This is the repeal of the individual mandate. Generally, the individual mandate was not popular; people don’t like being forced to do something. Additionally, the cost of this insurance–even for many with subsidies was burdensome.

Without the individual mandate, however, healthy people generally leave the insurance pool driving up rates for those who are remaining. There is a risk of an adverse selection death spiral, where rates would continue to rise.

The CBO estimates that repealing the individual mandate “would reduce federal deficits by about $338 billion over the 2018–2027 period and increase the number of uninsured people by 4 million in 2019 and 13 million in 2027.”

The point came as House and Senate Republicans mull passage of a bill to fund cost-sharing reduction payments and a reinsurance pool to try to stem premiums for unsubsidized enrollees in the exchanges next year.

One of my greatest priorities is to reduce the price of prescription drugs. In many other countries, these drugs cost far less than what we pay in the United States. That is why I have directed my Administration to make fixing the injustice of high drug prices one of our top priorities. Prices will come down.

This was one of President Trump’s campaign promises. Vox notes that to date, however, bringing down prescription drug prices has not been a priority–although that of course could change.

However, it is not clear how exactly this promise would be implemented. Would the government negotiate with pharmaceutical firms directly? HuffPost is skeptical that this would occur since “Republicans want nothing to do with that. (Plenty of Democrats don’t either, by the way.)”

There is general skepticism about the implementation. As reported at AJMC, “There’s certainly been a gap between rhetoric and reality,” said John Rother, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC).

One potential way to reduce costs is to facilitate generic drugs coming onto the market after patent expiration. New HHS Secretary Alex Azar seems to be in favor of this approach.

Pharmaceutical firms responded that despite the high sticker price, many drugs provide great value. Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks disagreed with President Trump and said that prescription drugs, “they remain the best deal going in health care.” PhRMA has a “Let’s Talk about Cost” campaign to bring some transparency to why prescription drug prices are so high.

Another question is what the President means by “prices”. Are these the prices that health plans pay? Or is this the out-of-pocket cost that insured patients must bear? Both have been increasing, but with the share of people insured through high-deductible plans rising (28% of those on employer plans as of 2017), patients are no longer insulated from changing drug prices.

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realselfblog · 7 years ago

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2018 State of the Union: Healthcare Recap

What did you think of the State of the Union address? I won’t get into all the policies and positions put forth by President Trump, but I will review his statements related to health care.

To speed access to breakthrough cures and affordable generic drugs, last year the FDA approved more new and generic drugs and medical devices than ever before in our history.

This was one of President Trump’s campaign promises. Vox notes that to date, however, bringing down prescription drug prices has not been a priority–although that of course could change.

One potential way to reduce costs is to facilitate generic drugs coming onto the market after patent expiration. New HHS Secretary Alex Azar seems to be in favor of this approach.

2018 State of the Union: Healthcare Recap posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com