Welcome to the Camp Reinvention Toolkit

Below you’ll find a few or our favorite after 50 life hacks. Fair warning, like everything at Camp, these are not an intellectual exercise. “I get it” won’t be enough to make an impact on your life.

Like any tool, you’ve got to take them out an use them in order for them to work.

Like any skill, the more you use them the more second nature they’ll become.

Have fun!

 When you’re reinventing, there are three important things to remember about your brain:

1. It has a negativity bias

2. It seeks evidence

3. It makes up stories

These three factors play a significant role in every choice you make - every day of your life - and put you at a disadvantage when you’re trying to lean into something new or challenging.

As you collect decades, your brain collects negative experiences and disposes of most of the positive ones.

• This creates a “database” skewed to your negative reality.

• Your brain then seeks evidence in the world around you to prove what it thinks it knows - that “there’s danger afoot”.

• It then creates a narrative to make it all fit together. “I can’t do that because…”

You can start to shift that database – start creating a mind you can TRUST to guide you – by creating a Mindset Museum™

It’s a simple process:

1. Think of all the things you’ve accomplished or that you’re proud of and jot them down. Jot down things you thought would kill you, but didn’t. All of these will go in your Mindset Museum.

2. Envision your Museum space. It can look like the Guggenheim, the Palace at Versailles, a willow grove, any space that feels powerful for you.

3. One by one recall the events you wrote down allowing yourself to re-experience the feelings of accomplishment, pride, tenacity or grit.

4. Envision an object, or image or word to represent each.  You could imagine a portrait of the actual occasion, a sculpture, a fountain – as long as the image you create in your mind’s eye is clearly associated with the event for you it will work.

5. Now find a space in your museum to house these items.

6. Each time you feel frustrated, disillusioned or afraid of failing, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.

7. Now envision yourself walking through your museum. Allow yourself to re-experience your sense of accomplishment, tenacity or resilience as you view the collection.

8. When positive things happen moving forward, add them to your MINDSET MUSEUM.

Why it works. 

Your brain (through its negativity bias) automatically retains all of the painful, scary or scaring events of your life. It’s evolution’s way of keeping you safe.  It does not however, retain most of the more positive experiences you’ve had. From an evolutionary standpoint, those are less important.   

In creating a Mindset Museum you’re calling the more positive memories you do have into evidence.  By visiting it and adding to it regularly, you’re using the sensory and creative areas of the brain to store memories that it otherwise would have released. 

This creates a body of evidence that is more representative of your whole reality than the one created by your default negativity bias – one that will be far more effective in helping you make choices that serve you well.

 5 Steps To Move You From Panic To Peace

We know you’ve felt it. Everyone has.

Dana and I spend our lives helping people shift their thoughts, behaviors and outcomes. We teach mindfulness. We meditate every day. We practice what we preach…

Still, it happened to me this week.

PANIC.

You can feel the heat rise from your toes straight up through your body.
It spreads across your chest – reaching up until your cheeks blaze with it and your ears are on fire.
Your stomach flips.
Your knees weaken.
The spit in your mouth dries up.

It all happens in about two seconds.

Anything can trigger it - actual danger or a gut feeling that something is unfamiliar, not right, or unsafe. But most often, it’s a simple thought that sets it off.

The all familiar uh oh. (Or if you’re me, “oh f*#%!”)

A thought that sets off a chain reaction in your body, and as you're well aware, can absolutely paralyze you. With a little reverse engineering however, you can set it all right again and move on.

The P.E.A.C.E. Tool

Pause

The pause is critical. It’s what takes you out of the default – which, when you’re panicking, is likely to be a fight, flight, or freeze reaction.

It’s simple to do, simply tell yourself “this panic” That’s it, you’ve paused.

Exhale

Here’s where you’re tapping in to your physiology to get it working for you rather than against you.

Why do I say to exhale rather than just breathe? Because I can pretty much guarantee that you’re still holding your breath at this point.

So go ahead, let it all out. (A big old sigh will work well here too!)

Now that your lungs are empty, your body will automatically inhale. Take a few more nice, slow, deep breaths.

You’ve got your parasympathetic nervous system working for you now, helping to trigger the body’s relaxation response.

Ask

Ask yourself what you want to do next. Some helpful questions may be:

• What do I want to have happen here?

• What is the most useful thing I can do in this moment?

• How do I want to show up?

Choose

This is responding rather than reacting.

There’s no right or wrong here. You’re making your best guess about what to do in this moment. And because you’re out of that default mode, because you’re intentionally choosing, you’ll be able to evaluate how it goes.

Evaluate

How did it go? What would you do the same in the future? What might you do differently?

The process of evaluating your responses regularly and without judgement, provides your brain with data which, over time, will make that particular panic less likely.

This is a spot where your decades of experience and earned wisdom may be getting in your way instead of WORKING FOR YOU.

You’ve probably heard about the difference between a fixed and growth mindset - and if you’re here with us at Camp Reinvention, it’s clear that you lean growth.

What you may not know is that as the years pass, more of your mindset can become fixed unless you intentionally adopt what we like to call a beginner’s mind.

How it happens…

The great thing about experience is that when you have it, you KNOW things. And it feels good to know things, right?

Of course, once you know things, people start expecting it of you - and you start expecting it of yourself - and those expectations don’t always feel good.

In fact, they can make you start should-ing all over yourself.

AT WORK, you may feel like you have to have the answer, be right, or know everything that others do. “I’m supposed to be the expert.”

IN RELATIONSHIPS you may be stuck in old patterns (based on what you think you’re sure of) that undermine the kinds deep connection we all long for. “I already know how (he/she/they) is about to react.” OR “I think (He/she/they) should be doing…”

When it comes to ADVENTURE - new places, new people, or new experiences - it’s easy to think that there is a way you “should be” at this stage of your life that can stop you from fully experiencing the very thing that you set out to experience.

What’s a wise woman to do?

Let go of what you think you know - try looking at your life through the eyes of a child, a newcomer, or a student.

Here are some things to experiment with:

• Try to learn something new about someone you’ve known for years.

• Change up your routine. Have your coffee in a different room, drive a different route, go shopping in a different town, bring up a never-before-discussed topic of conversation…

  (WARNING: this is a serious pattern interrupter which is why it’s so effective. Many of our habits are attached to our routines. That means if you change a routine that has a useful habit as a part of it - (“I keep my supplements right next to the chair I have my coffee in.”) - you’ll need to be mindful that you don’t undo the habit you want to keep.

• Play with your food. Take time to see it, smell it, touch it, savor it.

• Do something you’ve always wanted to try. (Practice speaking a language that you’re still learning, sign up for hot yoga, cook using a completely new spice pallet…)

The most important thing to remember about the Beginner’s Mind is that it has no preconceived notions and it’s wholly experimental. It’s ok if that makes you a bit anxious. In fact, anxious and excited feel exactly the same way in the body.

So get excited, have fun, and kick those expectations to the curb!