Joel Kampf, Coach helps fifty-plus folks stay fit, active and engaged to 80 and beyond.

Slapping yourself upside the head.

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 10:01:55 -0800

I can’t remember how many times I’ve said, “Everything’s Connected,” these past few years.

I’m currently building a curriculum for working with White leaders to approach Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as an opportunity to Improve Business Performance by engaging in the dismantling of Personal, Organizational/Institutional and Structural Racism. As part of my research, I’m reading Heather McGee’s The Sum of All of Us,” which immediately filled my head with new ideas…

In 1956, 65% of White people believed that the government should provide them with a job and minimum standard of living. At that time, 31% of White people believed Blacks to be inferior - Biological Racism. When Blacks marched on Washington in 1963 for the same “White-Popular” ideas of a jobs guarantee and a raised minimum raise, along with the end of discrimination, the foundation of White racism began shifting from Biological Racism to one of “Racial Resentment.”

As Heather McGee stated, “The most dominant story most white Americans believe about race adapted to the Civil Rights movement’s success, and a new form of racial disdain took over: racism based not on biology but on perceived culture and behavior.” The data showed that, although, “White support for the principles of racial equality and integration have increased majestically over the past four decades, their backing for policies designed to bring equality and integration about has scarcely increased at all. Indeed in some cases White support has actually declined.”

When the people who hold the reigns of power in society, financially and otherwise, harbor resentment toward a people - framing them as undeserving and inferior, consciously or unconsciously, their perception of the “Other” as undeserving affects their self-perception of being the deserving ones. So much so that they’ll, “Tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Their definition of the public becomes conditional.”

Racism,...Read More

"Is a fish aware that it swims in the water?"

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 14:00:28 -0700

On the first day of my solo bicycle ride across the country in 2015, I left my hotel in Williamsburg, VA and rode through old town onto the Capital Trail, a thirty-five mile bike path that took me through Jamestown, to the Tidelands, on a three day pedal to begin a steep climb over the Blue Ridge Highway, crossing the Appalachians.

About an hour out of Williamsburg on that 98° May 12, I saw a large cluster of kids ahead on the path. I slowed to glide through the bunch and someone said, “Where you going?” I said, “Going home to Seattle.” And they all shouted like I scored a touchdown in the Super Bowl - and continued to cheer and shout encouragement as I pushed forward with a feeling of excitement, adventure, curiosity and pride like I’d never known… and I was so excited, that for the next 65 miles, I forgot to drink water.

About five miles from my first night’s destination, one of my hamstrings blew and I dropped the bike and rolled onto the hot asphalt, seized up in pain, draining my hydration pack.

Always striving to be mindful when I experience something negative, I affirm it, allow myself to feel it, and then choose how to respond to it. But this time, the positive stimulation took over and felt so good, I just rode it, literally. Not much awareness on my part.

I dropped into my “shadowy self,” the self we don’t see that often determines what we do and say. We’re all guided to some degree by our stories… and a lot of the time, they are so engrained into what we think we know to be true, we don’t see them hovering in the dark.

Over the 78 days I spent in the saddle crossing the country, I had the longest, consistent time to just be with my thoughts than I’d ever experienced… I realized that my body was so much more capable than my mind ever gave it credit for - and that it was me holding myself back from opportunities all my life, not external circumstances.

I learned that the most important thing I can do is to...Read More

Learn More, Talk Less

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 11:16:12 -0700

Now that everyone has the technical ability to share their thoughts with the entire world, we’re all experiencing a lot of subjective thinking with very little or no data to back it up.

Maybe people should put a little time into learning about something before they begin presenting it as doctrine and suggesting solutions based on their erroneous thoughts? I’m sure Carmen Best would agree.

Yes, it’s finally good to hear the words “Institutional Racism” everywhere now, but as people start throwing out knee jerk ideas on how to dismantle it, I really need to learn more before I chime into solution-based conversations with value.

Because not only do we need well thought out, strategic solutions, we also have to reconcile that almost half the populous live in an alternate, cult-like reality only hearing the dogma spewed from their unaccountable leaders, intent only in controlling followers through erroneous, emotionally charged indoctrination.

So I began asking myself more questions. I questioned how we all went through decades on this planet believing things we’re a certain way, only to have everything turned upside down. Which took me back 35 years to when I began graduate work in Western American History.

The first pre-requisite class I enrolled in was American Historiography - the study of changing historical interpretations, shifting emphasis, and different methodologies. It looks deeply into how two historians using the same facts may come to with two different interpretations of a historical event. Like how contemporary British and American views of the battles of Lexington and Concord would likely differ because the two sides held different assumptions. And how subsequent historians with different assumptions built on a past historian’s work go on to develop their own subjective take on events… and so on and so on.

Historiography looks deeply into the historian - what was their background, who taught them, and who taught...Read More

Pedaling through these times...

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 10:23:57 -0700

I made it across the country on a bicycle by staying in the moment. One mile at a time.

And sometimes, when I found myself thinking thoughts that took me out of my flow, I chanted a simple mantra to snap me back, “Just pedal.”

Because that’s all that I had to do in my daily life. Life was so simple.

Today, I find myself reaching for some kind of a mantra again - or anything to help better ground me when it comes to navigating these times.

Our culture feels like it's hurtling toward 1984 on steroids… along with watching almost every societal element that I once considered stable and grounding, evaporate daily. Who’d of thought that democracy itself would be up for grabs?

I believe that we are where we are in the country and the world, because of low adult development and lack of education.

Developmentally, the majority of people operate from a Reactive mind-set; they play for themselves, not to lose, to play it safe, to get short-term, gratifying results… all based on what they think they know (their stories), and highly influenced by how they believe others will think of them.

When you have a society where the majority of members put individual needs and wants above the needs of the aggregate, you get what we now have; a headless chicken running in circles getting ever so close to the drain.

Recently, I reconnected with an old college friend with the hopes of rekindling the good times we had. But I couldn’t get past it when he shared his fervent belief that Trump is not a racist and he treats everyone the same. And I knew I didn’t have the energy to try to open his mind to a more developed worldview.

Sure, if I could get him to read, Robin DeAngelos “White Fragility,” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-racist,” maybe he could see that that he and I are both guilty of living as white supremacists. And that White Supremacy is far more than Alt-right, anarchist, nut jobs - it’s the long established...Read More

What the Covid is going on?

Tue, 12 May 2020 13:34:22 -0700

Twelve weeks into our quarantine, and I’m feeling pretty steady about the change of life we all have adopted. We’re both healthy and hopeful… just missing our kids like crazy.

On a day-to-day basis, fortunately, LaVonne and I have two floors so that our home offices have enough separation to effectively work - although since we’re both coaches and a therapist, and concurrently on Zoom calls, we’re constantly monitoring our volume… which is not a bad thing. We’re so grateful to have the work, especially because we seem more needed now, than ever before.

I go to the market once or twice a week and that’s pretty much it for getting out, other than my daily bike rides. I was thankful for cycling prior to Covid, now so, even more. I take longer rides on the weekends, when I get to see big swaths of Seattle. I was out for four hours (50 miles) on Saturday and saw a lot of kids in the parks playing basketball, baseball, as if nothing has changed.

We had our first warm weekend of the year, and social distancing has fallen behind people’s need to get out and play. The shot of Alki Beach in the banner above was taken from our bedroom deck - just another summer-like day… not many masks and not a lot of space between folks. I guess it doesn’t matter that we had 231 more cases in Seattle today, and 14 more folks died - bringing our total dead to almost 1000.

As an executive coach, that’s a running theme with a lot of my clients. People are so subjective. They can’t seem to think outside of what they want, and they let their stories and biases lead them through life unaware of how much harm they may be causing others. And as I work through coaching to open their eyes to it, I also work internally to not dwell on the disappointment. Just the opposite, I focus even more on my little microcosm of the world, with the intent of making a positive impact. And I admit, it’s not always easy.

But I can’t stop looking for the good. The streets of West...Read More

“Death is the antidote for taking things for granted.”

Sat, 23 Nov 2019 17:32:38 -0800

As I turn sixty-five in a few weeks, I’m at that stage where we and a lot of our friends are dealing with friends and family end of life issues. Combine that with the research I’m doing around aging and ageism, and it’s pretty impossible not to think about your own mortality.

One of my current reads, Nick Owen’s “The Salmon of Knowledge,” devotes a chapter of stories about, “Themes of Impermanence, Acceptance, and Letting Go.”

Reading that chapter triggered a memory from 1995 when I lived in the mountains above Philipsburg, Montana and commuted 80 miles round trip over a pass to Anaconda to teach middle school. My principal walked into my class one afternoon and said to go call home, there’s an emergency and he’d take my class.

I phoned home to the news that my brother Albert had been diagnosed with Leukemia and I needed to head to Seattle immediately - so I drove my truck over the snowy pass to make a pit stop at home to swap out vehicles and pack a bag. Upon arrival, I found out that while enroute, my mother had called to say that my dad was in critical condition in Ventura, California and I’d better get to there ASAP.

My other brother Larry stayed in Seattle with Albert and I flew to LA, where my father passed the following day. Albert started treatment and made it through the end of the year, giving me a chance to drive back and forth to Seattle and spend precious time with him.

Some months later, when I received the call on a frozen Sunday to tell me that he passed, I was dealing with another reminder of the impermanence of things. My dog, the first one I ever raised, had cancer. The vet drove up to the farm and checked him out that previous Friday and suggested we take the weekend to say good-bye and bring him in on Monday to be put to sleep.

At around 2:00 am Sunday night, during a howling blizzard that had completely shut down the roads, my dog Shadow woke us with awful sounding screams. When I got to him, I saw...Read More

It's your choice...

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 16:24:05 -0800

June 11. 2015. The only time I entertained that I wouldn’t be able to complete my cross country bike ride was on a super-heated, roller coaster stretch from Ellington, MO to Eminence, MO, to crest the Ozarks. Although the road consistently climbed all-day long, it tried to fool me into thinking that there was some respite along the way in the form of little ridges that offered brief downhills before the next one.

The conundrum came from knowing that if I rested my legs on the short downhill, the uphill would feel slower and longer. The most bearable way to tackle this type of terrain is to pedal as hard as you can on the down and subsequent incline, so that your momentum took you two-thirds of the way up the up… which made each little downhill almost mirage-like in my mind; it looked like down, but it required an uphill effort.

Six or so hours into the 70 mile, 8 hour climb, I thought for a minute that I might have bit off more than I can chew. I was sweating profusely and felt my eyes tearing up - which is very much not like me, so I pulled over for a few minutes. The road had obviously been chip-sealed recently and the metal cleats on my bike shoes sunk into the melting, fresh tar, forcing me into a balancing act with my gear-laden bike while using my pocket knife to cut the tar out of the cleats so they would snap back in my pedals.

I thought about camping where I was, but the Ozarks looked too much like a jungle full of snakes and spiders… not to mention that I really needed a hotel with AC if I was going to recover to ride the next day.

My thoughts ran to who I would be letting down if I quit. In the space of a minute, I went from my daughter, to my wife, to my brother, friends… until I realized it was me who I just couldn’t let down.

This was all about how much I trusted myself. I thought that when faced with decisions in life, it’s okay to ask advice, but in the end, we can’t make important decisions based on what other...Read More

Slow is how I roll...

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 10:35:45 -0800

In January of 2015, I was deep into planning for a Spring departure for my ride across the country… and then all of a sudden it was May 15 - the day I flew out. I’d put in a ton of miles training, packed and repacked my bags ninety times and felt ready to go.

The only hard part was the thought of leaving my wife - after all, we were just married on April 17 and I was heading out for three months. But then I thought back to when I brought up the idea of the ride with her almost a year earlier. As soon as I shared my desire, she put all my hesitations to rest by immediately saying, “All the fulfillment you get from it, you’ll bring back to the relationship… so do it… you have to!” Who was I to argue?

That day I left, I double-checked with the bike shop in Williamsburg, Virginia to ensure they got my bike and put it back together, I re-checked that hotel was booked, investigated where to buy fuel canisters for cooking and pepper spray for the dogs of Kentucky (I eventually went through one and a half canisters), and I was ready to go… minus the thought of leaving LaVonne.

When she dropped me off at the airport for my 10 pm. redeye to Norfolk via Philly, I was feeling bittersweet excitement. I was super ready to ride, but not ready to leave her. So I went to the bar, had a shot and a beer, and boarded my flight.

As my grandpa used to say, “You don’t buy beer, you just rent it a while,” which had me headed for the lavatory on the plane before we left the gate. When I exited the Lav, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw my wife sitting in an aisle seat ready to fly.

She told me that there was no way she was going to let me take off on this journey with no one to see me off. So she decided she would surprise me, spend the day with me preparing in Williamsburg, then see me off in grand fashion - she had a big banner designed to be held up as I pedaled away.

Nobody had ever done anything like that for me before, and when I...Read More

"I could never do that..."

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 08:38:00 -0700

On Memorial Day, 2015 I pedaled in to Council, Virginia, to spend my last night in the state, ready to enter Kentucky the next morning. My Trans-am map told me that the town had no restaurants or motels, and that I could camp in the city park, where I could find some food at the swimming pool complex. And with the temperature hovering around 99° along with ridiculous humidity, the pool was sounding pretty good.

The entire populace of the town must have been at the pool to enjoy the holiday. Although Olympic sized, there wasn’t much wiggle room left. I had started my journey twelve days back, already realizing that I was a “Stranger in a Strange Land,” but the Memorial Day crowd in Council really drove the point home. Everyone, other than toddlers, seemed to be smoking, and Confederate Flag tattoos were the rage.

It’s always nice to see multi-generational families enjoying time together… but in this case, it was kind of weird in that a lot of the grandparents appeared to be in their thirties and forties, and the great-grandparents younger than me. Like Kentucky, these folks lived in “Hollows,” pronounced, “Hollers,” which are mountain drainages/valleys that head back miles from the road to dead-ends. Families, for generations, lived in isolation, with very little outside influence, resulting in a perpetuation of familial mores from generations back.

Needless to say, I stood out and very few people approached me.

After filling up on junk food, my only choice, I headed over to a nearby covered picnic area and made camp for the night. Since it was covered, I set my air mattress up on a picnic table, with no need to set up a tent. That’s when a car pulled up and a couple got out and approached me. The wife took the lead, while the husband clearly had no desire to be there.

She looked at my bike and said, “What y’all doing?”

I explained my trip. I told them I was 12 days into what I thought was going to be an 80 day trip to...Read More

I wonder what's over the next hill?

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:32:48 -0700

When I rode my bike across America, I experienced the mind-body connection tangibly. From my website: “When you’re six hours into an eight hour ride, and you start feeling it in your legs, the key is to daydream - to put your mind somewhere other than on the bike. Then, whether it’s 30 minutes or maybe an hour later, the thought strikes you that, ‘Hey, I don’t even feel my legs at all,’ and that’s when the pain returns with a vengeance, and you start the process all over again.”

That experience validated that most things in our lives are connected.

As a corporate coach, regardless of what organization I am working with, I assist my clients in establishing their goals and reaching them. Regardless of their goals, they quickly find out that achieving them has less to do with smarts or skills and everything to do with Emotional Intelligence (EI). EI is defined as:

Our ability to know and be comfortable with the good and bad about ourselves.
Our ability to control disruptive influences before acting.
Internal Motivation - our ability to pursue goals with energy and persistence.
Empathy: To be able to understand the emotional make-up of others.
Social Skills: Our ability to build and manage relationships and networks.

The lack of EI is responsible for the ridiculously high attrition rate (48% in first year) of new hires in corporate America. It’s peoples’ lack of ability to deal with their emotions that keeps them from succeeding, not their smarts, experience or skill level.

Absence of EI also severely hampers our ability to be curious.

And as I said earlier, work, life… everything is connected.

Curiosity sparks our desire to learn and grow and is an essential ingredient for Active Longevity; staying physically, emotionally, cognitively and spiritually active...Read More