For years, I assumed I was a bit crazy. I thought I was the only one who had constant, on-going discussions with myself. I did my best to suppress it, to ignore the voice inside my head.

Imagine my surprise when I became aware that we all have this “inner voice.” Some refer to it as “inner chatter.” I like calling it “the stories we tell ourselves.”

As it turns out, the stories we tell ourselves are important, extremely important.

Being present and living in the moment is one of the key principles I’ve learned through my meditation practice over the past few years. Meditation reinforces the principle by having you sit quietly and observe your thoughts. It’s an interesting process, and one that can be unsettling and sometimes a bit scary when you have a mind as active as mine.

Anyways, my meditation practice has encouraged me to look for ways to improve being present when I’m not sitting alone with my thoughts. There are so many things that vie for our attention during the day that it’s easy to get distracted. If I were to list the biggest offenders, the internet and my phone would be near the top of the list, if not at the top.

While I’d like to experiment with disconnecting for multiple days, it’s not something that’s easy to do given my work. So I find it interesting to read (and learn) about others’ experiences. The latest experience came courtesy of David McCain, who runs the blog Raptitude.com. You can read about his full experience here – https://www.raptitude.com/2022/02/what-i-learned-during-my-three-days-offline/

I really enjoyed the post and figured I’d share the things I learned from it.

(Not lost on me is the irony of having to be online to read a post about what I learned about someone else being offline, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Every year I like to do a review of the past year’s fitness goals and set new ones for the next year. This year is no different, even if I’m publishing them over a month into the year.

If you’ve followed my goals from years past, I usually focus on three areas – working out, physical activity, and diet. This year is going to be more of the same.

First, we’ll start by reviewing last year’s goals. Then we’ll move on to the goals for 2022.

2021 was the ninth year for the blog. As I’ve done every year, here’s where I share some stats and the things I’ve learned over that time.

Mindfulness has been a popular buzzword around personal development circles lately. There’s been books written on the topic. Classes have been developed around it. Everyone seems to have a desire to be more “mindful,” but what exactly does that mean?

I was on the fence this year. Really, I was.

This was the year, I swear.

And then, it happened again. The beard made it’s annual appearance.

There’s been a lot of talk of expanding the college playoff field to 12 teams this past season. I don’t like this number. It’s too many.

Don’t get me wrong. Just like 12 is too much, the current 4 is too little. 8 is the Goldilocks number – it’s just right.

I first wrote about the merits of an 8-team playoff back in 2014, and then again in 2016. I’m doubling down on those posts here in 2021.

All the reasons I listed in both of those posts are still valid today, so I’m not going to rehash all of them here. Instead, let’s take a look at which teams would be in my 8-team playoff bracket this year.