What needs to be true to create a life of delicious adventure?
Coming soon as The Delicious Adventures Podcast with Justin Lodge
When I first started to write the first of my four books, I thought that if I could help one man to stop him from harming himself or someone else then it would have been a great success.
My purpose for writing and speaking has changed and evolved - but the underlying message remains the same is to inspire people to step up and take responsibility for their own emotions, to lift their spirits and choose to create delicious adventures.
Twice I’ve camped in the Kalahari desert close to crocodiles, baboons, hippo and lions. I’ve sailed a 30ft ship in the Cook Strait which has some of the most consistently fearsome wind in the world. I’ve skied down an active volcano and canyoned down raging rivers during winter floods. To raise money for charity, I swam naked together with 1000 other people in Sydney harbour. I’ve lived in five different countries and was a solo parent with three boys for five years.
Twice I have hypnotised myself not to feel fear and then jumped out of a plane to experience what it’s like to skydive without fear. And to see, feel and taste the clouds while freefalling at 200km/h towards the earth.
I’ve had many delicious adventures that many other folks would never even think of attempting.
One of the greatest adventures I’ve had was not a physical and scary challenge.
It was becoming an author - because in order to become a four time best selling author, I had to get my shit sorted out. I had to face into the emotions that kept me stuck in the drama. I had to be willing to do the introspection to look at my own shadows to make my own darkness visible. The darkness was the unconscious fears and limiting beliefs that kept me small.
And the reward for getting my shit sorted out was a life of delicious adventure. Relocating to Singapore, working in a thriving metropolis where western culture and eastern culture meet. Learning to publish and launch four Amazon #1 bestsellers, and training myself to lead my clients and myself into delicious adventures.
Welcome to Episode 1: What needs to be true to create a life of delicious adventure?
Last weekend, I had a great weekend of delicious adventures here in Singapore.
As is customary on the first Friday after St George’s day, I attended the installation of a new worshipful master in my Freemason’s lodge here in Singapore. Our festive board was a magnificent four-course meal with the most tender roast beef and followed by a cheese board with port.
There were 90 of us from at least five different countries and more than 12 nationalities in the room, and we had visitors from the French, Scottish, Irish, Queensland and West Australian constitutions. Getting to know new brothers from other cultures and cities across Asia is always fascinating and listening to their stories of adventures in life and in business. And, we raised more than $50k in funds towards the roof repairs for our building.
A friend asked me to explain Freemasonry last week. I said “It is a safe place to learn to deal with change, to be a good brother to each other despite our failings, to contemplate and challenge ourselves to become a better person, to practise both acts and deeds of charity and benevolence and to celebrate life itself. And, it’s not just for men, there are women in my family who have also chosen to become Freemasons.”
On Saturday night, I went out to dinner with a friend from South Africa to an amazing French bistro called Gaston, and I got to listen to how he uses biodynamic and organic techniques in his vineyards near Cape Town and then travels the world selling his wine to very select customers around the world.
It’s an amazing life of delicious adventure that he leads - despite some very significant and challenging economic conditions for wine producers he is still doing well because he chooses his customers well. I got to meet one of the best wine experts, a sommelier, in Singapore and she had the most fascinating and hilarious stories about keeping the bistro business running during the recent pandemic. And we got to taste the most interesting wines in their cellar.
The food and wine on both nights was beautiful - but that’s not the point of delicious adventures - it’s about the people that you meet and the shared experiences of the highs and lows of life.
The common denominator this weekend was high EQ and high SQ - many folk I met demonstrated that despite some very challenging circumstances, they had come through the lows and recovered their spirit and their emotions. They all had stories of delicious adventures to share.
Most of us have heard of IQ - intelligence quotient.
We know what low IQ and high IQ looks like.
Some of us have heard of EQ - emotional quotient.
That’s a bit more tricky, but it’s kind of analogous to IQ but with respect to a creature’s capability to manage emotions or not. Notice I say ‘creature’, because even in the lab, it’s being recognised that even some insects have the ability to feel fear, and that experimental ethics have to be considered when designing experiments with them.
Do you even think about what your EQ might be? What do high EQ and low EQ even look like?
But, have you ever heard of SQ - spiritual quotient? What the F*** IS SQ? And, what does low and high SQ look like?
I’m not talking about some monotheistic religious BS dogma from a money-grabbing church here.
I’m talking about where your spirit is at. Are you down in the dumps? Are you high as a kite? With or without the ingestion of stimulants ;)
Let us start with EQ. We don’t think about breathing all the time, but it’s a learned behaviour. As are our emotions.
If we consciously choose to stop breathing - we get the urge to breathe once our carbon dioxide levels in our blood get high enough to stimulate us to breathe.
If we’re free-diving then we train our nervous system to both absorb a large amount of oxygen, and suppress our urge to breathe as the carbon dioxide levels climb while we’re under the water.
It’s the same with coffee. The caffeine in coffee blocks the nerve receptors that detect that fatigue levels are high in our nervous system. It’s not a question of coffee boosting our energy levels - it’s about the caffeine blocking the fatigue signals. We train ourselves to reach for the coffee every morning, even if we don’t actually need it.
It is the same with emotions, we have learned behaviours that our nervous system has been trained to adopt - just like breathing, playing tennis or driving a car. And once learned, these behaviours become ‘muscle-memory’ in our bodies, and we are unconscious of them.
And it is the same with the unconscious emotions that we’ve learned. Once learned, these emotions become muscle-memory in our nervous system in our bodies, and we are unconscious of them. They have us locked into drama, and we allow these emotions to unconsciously control our behaviours.
Our unconscious does the decision making for us in what we choose to pay attention-to based on our learned behaviour filters. It blocks the emotional signals that we don’t want to hear just like coffee blocks the signals of fatigue.
Becoming aware of the emotions that block us is the starting point for growing our EQ.
Our unconscious addiction to drama is what makes our EQ low. People with low EQ are easily triggered into drama, and go looking for drama because they are addicted to it. Clearing the unconscious patterns that have us addicted to drama, like we are addicted to caffeine to combat fatigue, then creates the conditions for high EQ.
People with high EQ are emotionally resilient, they have relaxed nervous systems and they allow the drama to flow around them.
To make a clear distinction. I’m not talking about someone who has been highly trained to ignore their own emotions and keep calm despite the situation going to hell around them. Like a soldier, firefighter or a paramedic, who are trained to be that way, and they end up with PTSD after the battles have been fought.
They are trained to bottle up the overwhelming emotions and keep “fighting” until they are dead. Their nervous systems are always on high-alert. And they use drugs and alcohol to depress the nervous system to allow themselves to relax.
People with high EQ are able to observe their own emotions without being consumed with them. They feel emotions just as intensely as everyone else, but they have just that little extra ability to recognise that then choosing to act on those emotions is a real choice.
When drama happens, as it always does - they recognise it and carefully choose if they are going to jump on the latest bandwagon of outrage, or not. This is high EQ.
Then they have the ability to recognise when they’ve been triggered and they have practical effective tools to manage themselves during the period it takes to get their nervous system back into some kind of equilibrium. They recognise when their EQ is low, and they take positive steps to manage themselves.
So what makes people addicted to drama? It is a question of spirit.
When our spirit gets crushed by the circumstances of life then we have low SQ.
Modern-life is full of changing circumstances.
Maybe we are betrayed by a previously trusted partner or close friend that chooses to be mean to us. Or maybe, by seeing hard-working good-people getting retrenched at a workplace while the long-time CEO that’s the accountable party for the business failure that causes the retrenchments continues to get paid a nice fat bonus. Then our spirit drops because we feel bad, as we see the injustice, disruption and drama that goes along with that whole process engulf our colleagues.
People with low SQ react to modern-life changes as though they are in a famine or war because they are stuck in survival mode. And they react with anxiety, or depression or both.
There’s a school of thought that says that there are only two real emotions, the rest are just variants of one or the other. These emotions are love and fear.
Our states of anxiety and depression are when we have low SQ.
Depression is fear of the past. Anxiety is fear of the future.
These are the fear states that we find ourselves stuck in.
High SQ is when we recognise that changing circumstances are normal, and that feeling bad about them is also normal. High SQ people also recognise that staying stuck in the fear is a trap, and that when one door closes then it gives us a chance to choose from a whole set of new open doors.
People with high SQ look to be of service in the new circumstances, and in doing so surrender to the changes and rapidly find their way forward to some place new where they can thrive.
It doesn’t mean that they are immune to anxiety and depression, it’s just that they know how to look after themselves and recover when they do get stuck there.
People with high EQ and high SQ have real courage, not bravado.
And that courage in the face of change is what delivers a life of delicious adventures.