For the next 10 days I will be living exclusively on raw food smoothies and juices.

I will be sharing my 3 meals a day at regular intervals, including some pics and what is in each drink.

Hmmm, The Lotus Elise 111R.  A few weeks ago I had the good fortune of driving a black convertible Lotus Elise 111R for the weekend. This was thanks to the guys from Bentley Cape Town who are also the local Lotus agents.  Hand-Built to deliver exhilaration and exclusivity, the Lotus Elise is a design icon.  Behind the wheel the Elise offers that rare combination of comfort and agility with outstanding pace and compliance. The result is a pure, natural, unforgettable driving experience. A grown up go-kart on steroids......

I spent the entire weekend with a broad smile on my face, looking for any excuse to pop out for a drive.  Even going to do the weekend shopping in it, which proved rather humourous since I ended up looking like an overloaded taxi with shopping bags sticking out from any tiny space we could find.

On the Saturday I got an opportunity to give it a full go.  I had to be on the other side of Cape Town from where I live to attend a good friend's wedding.  What complicated matters is that I had agreed to help with the music at the wedding in terms of playing the wedding march so I could not be late.  Well with half an hour to go the baby sitter had not arrived and we had to make alternative plans.  This meant a high speed chase across the cape peninsula which ended up taking less than 20 minutes.  All I can say is yeeeeehoooowwww....

Some basic specs:
0-60mph in 5.7 seconds
0-100mph in 6.1 seconds
Cross drilled brake discs
ABS with servo assisted brakes....

What a blast!!!

The 2 key principles for me in life are Balance and Simplicity. In response to my blog about the 21 Day Challenge a friend of mine rightly suggested that peoples responses may have been skewed by the fact that it was an excercise based challenge.

This got me thinking about the balance between excercise and the food we consume and the quantity of each we do.  The recommendation from most health professionals is excercise 3 to 4 times per week. On the other hand we eat 3 to 4 times per day and often more if you add in the stops at the friendly vending machine, company snack shop or corner cafe!

My thinking goes that is the days before we wore clothes and tweeted on twitter, we spent a larger % of our time hunting/gathering as compared to eating.  So my question is, have we got it wrong, should we be exercising a LOT more than we do in order for us to be in balance with the way nature intended?  We are all aware of the worldwide pandemic of obesity and the associated conditions such as diabetes and heart conditions.  Maybe, just maybe, we have it wrong and we need to excercise for the same amount of time as we sit around consuming doughnuts and fizzy drinks ?

For me Mind Maps are awesome tools.  Not only do they help you logically and graphically see the ideas around a central theme, they also serve as a to-do or reminder to help my failing memory.  I have been using the free mind mapping software for Mac called FreeMind, which you can Download Here.  It is simple and easy to use and does the job without overly complicating the issue.  it does allow exporting the maps to other formats as well as importing maps from programs like Mind Manager.

There is a nice starter video tutorial series available at Gurushare.  Just watch the first few and you will be up and running quickly.

A while ago I created a Facebook page and subsequently a page on my web site called "The 21 Day Challenge".  The main purpose of the challenge was to excercise for 21 days consecutively for a minimum of 1 hour per day.  I am now on my 3rd 21 Day Challenge and have seen some interesting things which I would like to share with you.

To answer the question posed in the title as to the rationale behind the challenge, it was NOT about the excercise!  The whole idea behind it was an experiment in human behavior.  I wanted to see how people would react to a challenge in general.  There were two distinct reactions:

The first group, which was by far in the majority, immediately threw an excuse at me, often without asking me about any details.  After giving me their excuse, they would begin to gather more information and only after some serious discussion would they even consider it.  I loosely termed this behaviour "safety netting".  The worrying aspect of this behaviour is that it becomes so automated that I can see how a great many people would miss out on opportunities in life simply because their automated way of being closes them off to opportunities and possibilities without the full understanding of those opportunities.

The second and very small group of people just automatically asked me how they can do it and how to take it on, based on the information I provided, they chose to do it or not!  Could there be a link between this kind of behaviour and how successful people are in life generally ?  I think there is......

Balance is one of the words I could write a whole book on. There are several aspects to balance which I will cover briefly in this post. Balance is one of those words that is pervasive but we don't really notice it. One of the most common places where we see balance is between pairs of things. Some examples are: the scales of justice, yin and yang, male and female, north and south. Further to this we get more complex examples of balance. Any mathematical equation which contains an equal sign, is representative of balance. For example E=MC² or F=M x A etc etc. Fundamentally, I believe that balance sits at the core of life. Nature and the universe has a funny way of returning any system that is out of balance, back to a balanced state. 

If one were to assume that this law of balance holds true throughout life, then we start to get access to how we can overcome areas of our life where we experience frustration, anger, upset, resignation or failure.  Simply take a hard look at that area of your life and see if you can find what is out of balance.  This is often easy to fix, but most people simply lack the will power or resolve to rectify the balance.  For example, if we are overweight, the law of balance says that we are eating more food than we are burning off  by exercising.  So to regain balance we simply exercise more and eat less junk.  In relationships that are not working, often there is an aspect of imbalance.  Take a look and balance out work and quality time with your partner.  The results will surprise you.

The second part to balance is subtly different. In his book, The Breakthrough Experience, Dr John Demartini talks about what he calls "The Great Discovery ™". I quote from his book. "At any moment of your life, you will never be put down without being lifted up, nor lifted up without being put down. Positive and negative, good and bad, support and challenge, peace and war - all come together in pairs. They are simultaneously and perfectly balanced, and that is what makes the divine order"

The was one of the most fundamental discoveries for me and I would love to give you access to it. This is the area where I believe a great deal of human failure lives. Why do I say this? Well, I looked at my own life and why I have been able to turn my life around several times when I have been on the planks. The secret lies in the fact that at the point where failure occurred I never focused on the failure but became ultra aware of possibility, even synchronicity.  Without fail, in my greatest moments of failure, my greatest successes were hatched. It was only when I read the book by Demartini that it all suddenly made sense to me. I also realized why so many people remain trapped inside of failure; they remain focused on the failure (even to the point of thriving on the attention their ego gets from being the victim of the failure).  For myself I coined the term "follow the breadcrumbs".  This simply meant that at points of failure no matter how big or small I would start immediately looking for access to the positive which would balance out the failure I was experiencing. 

The next word and the second in this series which I will cover on my BLOG is CHOICE.  Feel free to contact me or comment if you gained some insights or something was not clear.

Ken Metcalf
Life, a journey worth sharing!

Through my BLOG I will share with you what I consider to be the 10 MOST POWERFUL WORDS ON THE PLANET.  I have chosen these carefully due to the direct impact they have had on me and others that share this journey with me. I began the journey that led me to this point over 23 years ago when at the age of 19 I picked up an Anthony Robbins book called Unlimited Power.

My love for books, reading and knowledge is never ending, however, I have come to understand the power of learning through the experiences of others.  The most powerful example of this has been through the courses and seminars provided by Landmark Education.

In the next post I will share with you the first word, BALANCE.  I am doing the list alphabetically as I do not see any one word being more important than the other, which ties directly into the theme of BALANCE…  

Ken Metcalf
Life, a journey worth sharing...