DailyJim: I do leadership and training in emotional combat

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is Thursday, September 19th, 2024. Today I want to talk about what, answering the question, what do you do? And really I just want to say, I'm going to try to say, we'll experiment and see how this goes, because sometimes answering that question can be really hard.

I do training, look at that, I flubbed it up already. I do leadership and training in emotional combat.

Now, really curious to say, you know, I think a lot of times practicing what we do is, and saying what we do, is really important. It's really important for how other people understand what we're doing in life, but also for how we understand it. In the confidence that we have in saying it, are we willing to say it even if people feel confused? Are we willing to say it that way even if people feel angry are we willing to say it that way if even if people feel um afraid are we willing to say it that way if people feel ashamed in a way are we willing to say it if people feel guilty or if they feel sad or if they feel frustrated or if if they feel happy, or if they feel energized, or if they feel inspired?

How would we like people to feel? So in saying this phrase, my friend will tell me, or has told me many times, he doesn't like how it's so focused on military, it's so focused on fighting, it's so focused on maybe a negative. And an alternative could be, and maybe I'll end up with that one, or one that I'll use more often is that I do leadership and training in emotional courage because courage can be more uplifting. People want to have courage. People don't necessarily want to have combat. Or I can do leadership and training in emotional combat skills. But even then, a lot of people may not want to have skills in emotional combat. Most people don't like conflict. Most of us really don't like conflict and bringing up the idea of conflicts causes a conflict.

And speaking of conflicts I forgot that on the hour the clock charms chimes and so you will hear that for another few seconds and. Music.

The phone is good, but the microphone is not that good. So, um, yeah. So if I say I do leadership and training in emotional combat, what do I mean by that? So when I talk about leadership and training, um, I see, and maybe I've talked about it before. I see three classifications, formal, non-formal, informal education. Um, I view formal education as being a professor at a university, very structured very hierarchical learning system i view a trainer as being somebody who yes has some structure and some approach but there is some structure and some some hierarchy but tends to be much more flexible in terms of what the learning outcome is and in terms of the institution maybe where it's happening.

I see leadership as doing the informal training sorry the informal education the informal learning the informal teaching of doing it day to day. There's not a lot of consciousness when it comes to that people are intending to learn these things. We just learn and pick them up as we go. So this is the informal conversations on the phone. This is the way that I interact when I go to the supermarket. This is the way we respond when we go to weddings and funerals and just in In daily life, in the workplace, whatever. And so when I think about it, what do I really want to do? Yes, the things that I like to do, I would say I can classify into leadership and into training. Leadership is doing it. So leadership is the podcast where I am reflecting now on deeper things like on Daily Gym. It's having guests on the episode where we have deeper, maybe somewhat conflicting conversations or almost always conflicting conversations in different ways. Maybe one is excited, one is confused, all these micro conflicts happening, but demonstrating it all the way up to maybe macro conflicts where we really strongly disagree. And maybe we start getting into a heated argument or heated discussion, but how to show these skills that where it's possible to talk about really hard things, or it's possible to be really loving towards somebody and still stay in the conversation, stay in the interaction with the person and ultimately go to a deeper level. So leadership being, again, podcast episodes where I'm reflecting by myself or podcast episodes with other people or me volunteering at organizations and interacting with people at the organizations and not saying that I'm doing this from an emotional combats perspective or not saying that the purpose is emotional connection or love, but really just getting out there and loving people. Um, so that can be going to, uh, conferences or workshops. It can be going to, uh, I mean, it could be volunteer opportunities going to a soup kitchen or something like that. It could be having phone conversations with a friend or, uh, somebody who is, you know, people might classify as a stranger, but I would see as a friend, um, basically just having these conversations with other humans. It could be going into a workplace. It's just demonstrating the behavior in multiple ways. It could be writing blog posts. It could be interacting with people on social media. It's just meeting people where they are, even in a bar, conversation in a bar with somebody or a group of people. So that's what the activities I see as leadership. And then when I think about training, I think, okay, let's be more conscious and intentional about this. This is running trainings online. This is running trainings in person on dealing with emotional combat. that. So this is learning how to deal with rejection and guilt tripping and being betrayed and ignored and ghosted and complimented and praised and idealized and suffocated, maybe. Learning how to deal with all these types of emotional attacks, whether that's an online class, it could be a one-on-one class with somebody, it could be a group class, it could be in person, it could be here in the U.S., it could be in Kenya, it could be in Germany, it could be in multiple parts of the world. It could be with individuals that show up. It could be with specific organizations, whether that's a for-profit company or it's a non-profit company. It could be a governmental organization. It can be an informal organization.

And it could be also online audio drills. It could be pre-recorded things that people could learn and train on their own, at their own time. And it's also just for me training. It's me training by myself in the morning or training on different parts of the day, just being more intentional about the training. So that's what I see as the main activities. And I'm saying this because I think a lot of people don't know what I've done and what I want to do. They don't know about the, I don't know how many projects I've done in Germany and in Europe through Erasmus+, that's helping with Make Music Not War, which is a project that brings musicians together from conflict countries. Or It's Up To Me, which is a train-the-trainers program, training people how to be trainers, the skills of facilitation, the skills of training in non-formal education. Whether it's Trainers Library, which is an online platform we built to.

Give advice on how to be better trainers to kind of write this stuff down and not just have the in-person training. Conflict resolution projects we've done out there. It can be the emotional self-defense classes that I've run in Africa and Europe and in the U.S. It can be iFelio that I did back in the day. There's just so much stuff that I've done that I think a lot of people aren't aware of and they're not sure what I actually want to do. And so I'm kind of talking about this and And I definitely feel a bit rushed as I talk, but this idea of just giving a little more clarity on what I've done, but maybe more importantly, more framing on where I want to go and what I want to do. And I like these buckets of leadership and training, the informal and the non-formal education. Education, and I like it specifically as it relates right now to emotions, but emotional combat, emotional combat skills, so that we learn how to deal with the various, conflicts that we have in our lives. We learn to have the courage to stay in the fight. We have to learn to have the ability to respond to almost any situation with love, to respond ourselves with love, to respond to other people with love, even if that love might feel like an attack to other people, to have the endurance to continue to love ourselves and love other people.

So this is just a glimpse at maybe a reflection, maybe even more helpful for me than for you, who knows, but trying to put these into buckets so that people have an idea, so that I have an idea of what are the activities I want to do on a day-to-day basis. Who do I want to interact with? How do I want to interact with them? And I really think the two main buckets of what and how I want to interact are the, leadership and training and these days and who knows for how long but I imagine for probably a long time the concept of emotional conflict or emotional combat really excites me so yeah curious how you respond to this please let me know if you don't want to respond on the gym and friends forum because it's public send me a private note like I'm just really curious to hear about people's reactions to these daily gym episodes and especially something like this so um yeah talk to y'all soon.