Practice Session #52

Welcome to my show notes for this week’s session of Practice!

We record these sessions every Sunday. I try to publish the audio on the same day of recording, but I may get delayed now and then due to various reasons.

Also, I will usually have the AI-generated transcript and my initial notes published on the same day of recording as well. On Fridays, I’ll (try to) go back through and proof the transcript while I add all of my notes.

I’ll be utilizing this opportunity to clarify and elaborate on points that I may not have conveyed as well as I would’ve liked to. I’ll also provide links to further information and resources.

So, on Friday, I’ll intersperse all my notes with the transcription from the audio below (unless I don’t 🤷).

Intro.

[00:00]

Pam: Truck coming.

CK: I have a lot of it gone.

Pam: I didn’t want it right in the beginning. Here we go. There’s a stop sign up there. So it takes a while to go pass. There’s two more cars going

CK: There we go.

Heyo! I’m CK, and you’re listening to Practice. I’m your functional systems integrator, and this is my podcast where practice is not just the theme of the show, but the whole purpose behind it. What started out as a practice of podcasting, as well as speaking in general, has evolved into a practice of self-coaching and self-reflection while espousing half-thoughts and providing unsolicited advice.

As always, I’m fortunate to be joined by my Practice partner and partner in life: Pam.

Pam: Hey, that’s me.

CK: Pam is also my pattern awareness manager, and every Sunday we reflect on the past week and my progress with this practice, along with other lifestyle practices, as well as theories and ideas behind the virtues of practice itself.

We’re doing this on the fly, and our dialogue here is unedited, so don’t hold me responsible for what I say here. Make sure to check out my show notes where I’ll provide some fact-checking, self-psychoanalysis and commentary on things I could have done better. You may find this and more information about this project at ForcesOfEqual.com/Practice.

Catch up with the Anomaly and the Linchpin.

CK: We’re recording today on Sunday, February 21st of 2021. And have I been saying 20, 21, the last few podcasts? I feel like I might’ve been saying Tony. It sounds weird saying 20, 21 now. So I have to go back and check. That’s funny. Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m I feel like I’ve been saying 20, 20

Pam: This is the current equivalent of writing the wrong year on your check saying the wrong year in your podcast

CK: this is the new age. So yeah, this is episode number 52 practice session number 52.

Pam: a whole year of weeks.

CK: that’s crazy. This is even more special in that. We’re totally changing up how we’re recording today. And we are currently in our car, in the neighborhood next door under some shade. And yeah, we’re all cozy. Close it up here in the front seats and some of our sound blankets covering the dash and get the windows closed up.

And you’ll probably hear some traffic coming through. We’re on one of the main roads in the neighborhood. It’s not one of the main streets, but it’s still one of the more trafficky roads in the neighborhood. But yeah, I’m here and, uh, we’ll get more into our setup and stuff in the podcasting segment, but let’s start off with the quote for the week.

And this one came up a couple of days ago, then in the middle of the week. And I really liked it short and sweet, and it comes from Epictetus stoke philosopher who I’ve quoted many times before. And it goes like this circumstances don’t make the man. They only reveal him to himself. That’s, uh, along the same lines of the Viktor Frankl quote from last week in terms of circumstances versus.

The person or, you know, the person or situation debate as I was trying to articulate with the fundamental attribution error. And this is similar in that sense. And we’ve had quite a week pretty stressful, I’d say, or a lot more stressful. It’s been a departure from what we’re used to. Yeah, it’s a huge departure.

So we may go into that a little more during our weekly reflection, but yeah, that’s why that quote came up and maybe we’ll be able to tie it in throughout. And so let’s get into our weekly status reflection. So do you want to start?

Pam: You went first, last week. Do you want me to go this time? Um, okay. So the, the rules here are that we rate mental, physical, and social.

CK: exactly. One to 10, 10 being the best.

Pam: Okay. So, uh, I would say my mental over the last week has probably been like, uh, Um, I dunno, I, I would say a six, maybe borderline seven. Like I was, I was doing well mentally as far as like intellect, but it’s been a little stressful towards the end of the week here with everything that we have going on.

So, um, docked off a point for that. And then also, because I didn’t sleep well. Where I slept a lot, but I got up at three 30 this morning, so I’m a little off right now. Um, and then physical, um, I would say like, uh, I’m going to go with a six borderline seven again there as well, because I felt fine, but I didn’t get to keep my normal schedule and doing normal workouts because we had to take down some of the equipment in the house.

Uh, so that got off a little bit and my knees bothering me a little bit. And then, um, social, yeah, go with an eight. That’s fine.

CK: All right. So like a six and a half, six and a half. So that’s a total of 21, which isn’t too bad. It’s a good, good week. And last week you were at nine and nine. Yeah. So that kind of illustrates the. Difference from this week and last week, and, uh, definitely reflects what we’ve been going through.

So mentally, I would say my week was at a six on average and that’s a little low, but still fulfilling. And right now today, I would say the better put it in a seven or eight, but overall during the week would say a six. And that goes to speak towards my practice of practice and our Sundays and having some.

Regularity and routine, even though we’re out of our routine right now, but because of my routines, I incorporate it as much as I could. And just having some of those things allowed me to kind of returned to my happy place, you know, get back to my steady state level out a little bit. And so, yeah. Oh, okay.

So, uh, Yeah, we might be talking about our mic technique during the podcast segment. If you hear a difference in my audio here.

Pam: Cause it’s hard to not talk with your hands while you’re holding a mic.

CK: So I’d say mentally overall six, and then physically, I would say physically in eight, I had a pretty good week and I’m feeling better. My hip impingement is getting a lot better.

And it’s pretty much gone. I would say I’m just a little, I think maybe there’s some nagging or kind of maybe posts. It’s not like post traumatic, but

Pam: You’re worried about it coming back. Are you like you keep thinking? Sorry.

CK: there. Yeah. And I’ve been implementing more exercises and hopping into some of Pam’s warm-ups for her workouts. So. Yeah, I’ve been progressing physically, so that’s good.

And then socially, socially, I would say socially, like nine. Because I totally ramped up my social health over the past week. And I went live on live streaming on Facebook to my friends and did that for real. And I did it on Wednesday and I’m kind of planning on Wednesdays being my live streaming to Facebook friends day during my doodling evening, noodling sessions.

And Wednesdays have become kind of my creative they use. So, yeah, I, I loved doing that this past Wednesday and kind of realize that I’ve been ready for it. And I didn’t really do anything special. I’m still kind of testing things out and practicing and exploring the whole live streaming format and all that stuff.

But even that, like I had a lot of audio issues actually. And it, I think I discovered it had to do with an internet connection. And so, yeah, Wednesday was fun and caught up with a bunch of friends. A bunch of people were watching and they seemed to enjoy it and, you know, you’re just hanging out and if people want to join in, then they can join in.

So yeah, I, I liked the. Aspect where I just put myself out there and if people want to come hang out, they can join.

Pam: You haven’t said what you’re doing on your life.

CK: Yes. I’m just basically noodling with my music and my music gear and trying to practice laying down beats and tracks and getting my workflow or figuring out my workflow and getting used to the. Here and instruments in how to use them so I can get better and faster and figure stuff out more because I haven’t done.

I haven’t been to. Regimented, or I haven’t put too much focus on the music stuff yet because I’ve been so focused on all the podcasting and audio and post production and all that stuff. So with the music stuff, I didn’t just kind of dabbling and just experimenting or just. Playing around whenever I found time found time or maybe some inspiration, but now I kind of want to want to make it a little more regular and more deliberate.

That was a big truck. And. That way I’ll get more out of the practice. So yeah, we’ll see where that takes me, but that was so fun on Wednesday that I did it again on Thursday night. Like I couldn’t wait to get back on and it’s like, my, you, you had asked me, uh, if you thought that, so I also dealt with some insomnia this past week, so I kind of fell back on that end.

And you had asked me if maybe the live streaming. What was affecting it. And I think the live-streaming is helping everything, you know, rather than hurting anything because it’s fulfilling to me and I don’t really have to do much to get it up. There’s like no stress around it anymore. And on Thursday I figured out the connection and the audio issues and it sounded great.

Like I was so surprised for one and very pleased for two. And the, how the audio quality came out because, um, for that, for the live streaming, I’m using the SM seven B, which Pam uses for our podcasting while I use the need King bee for podcasting. But the neat thing B is a condenser mic, which is more sensitive.

Which is good for picking up details in dialogue and instruments and other things. But because of that, when playing music and stuff, it’ll pick up my movements and hitting the keys and all that kind of stuff. So I’m using the SM seven B for the music noodling stuff. And because the SM seven beam is a lot of game.

Because it’s a very quiet mic and he’s more power behind it. And with more power introduced, introduces more noise. So I was worried about that, but in the feed, as I watched back on Facebook, especially my second recording on Thursday, there was less noise then. I work with when I’m processing pens, podcasts, audio, which, so that was really interesting.

So I don’t know if Facebook does anything to the audio. In their system or algorithm or whatever they use to process their audio. Uh, they might use like a noise gate or some kind of noise reduction or some kind of equalization or some kind of processing. I don’t know. Uh, I may look into that, but I do know that some platforms like YouTube compresses audio.

So I’ll look into that, but it was interesting. I was really surprised at how well the audio came out and I had fun myself watching myself back. So I hope there there’s others, you know? I mean, like I. Came to this because I enjoyed watching other people live streaming. So I hope other people, there are others that enjoy my live stream as much as I enjoyed it.

So I’m going to keep trying that. And then eventually I’ll go on to Twitch and YouTube, and it’s going to kind of be an extension of practice actually, because. I want to relate complex systems and my functional systems integration with music and how it’s been helping me with my mental health and overall health and everything.

And we can go into philosophies and I’ve been relating a lot of stuff with audio to complex systems. So yeah. Hopefully eventually be able to talk about all that stuff while I’m playing around with music as well. So yeah, that’s, what’s going on with that, but that again, long winded status check-in. So, yeah, that’s why my social status is at a nine this past week.

And I did also catch up with my parents and my brother and some other friends. So yeah, it’s been really good week socially. So what was my mental? Mental is six. Physical was eight in social is nine. So 1723. 17. Yes, 23 total. So that’s a pretty good week considering how low my mental score was, but yeah.

Pam: I think that’s the first time you’ve ranked higher than me.

CK: Yeah. And that’s interesting because it was still a trying week, but. Yeah, we’ll get into that. So let’s get into the next segment with our practice with podcasting. And like I mentioned, right now, we are in our car because there are people looking at our home.

Pam: We’re selling our condo. So we’re doing showings today.

CK: Yeah, and we did shines all day yesterday too.

And this whole process has been crazy. We basically met up with our realtor on Monday and. Sign papers to get our house listed. And our home went up on Friday and within a couple hours, we already had an appointment set for Friday night,

Pam: Within four hours, we had 12 or 11 appointments set for.

CK: Oh, we had a whole, Oh, wow.

Yeah. I think within like an hour we had someone outside looking at the house. Yeah. This market is nuts. And then so yesterday we actually went down South a bit to see a house that we were interested in and that was a whole circus. So yeah, it’s been really stressful. And I just want to recognize that.

We’ve been very consistent. Like our days have been very, very consistent and we’ve found a level of comfort with how our days have been progressing and we have a rhythm. Yeah. And this totally knocked us out. So it was very stressful. And just especially yesterday, and I. Plus we are both on limited sleep this past week and I’m dealing with him son insomnia again.

And whereas I think last week I kind of cut back up this week. I fell all the way, all the way, way back down. And so, and it was, it’s like the worst timing too, considering we’re going through all this life stuff this week. And so sorry. So now yeah, my mic technique is, uh, so maybe we can talk about that, but uh, let me finish up my previous time.

Um, so yeah, I think, you know, in considering that I think we’ve been dealing with things very well. And interestingly, yesterday, I can, I could see myself spiraling and it was interesting to be mindful of it and kind of even watch myself from outside myself and kind of see that happen and still not being able to do what I want to about it.

Like my. Brain was ready to give up, basically.

Pam: Just a certain point when there’s nothing you can do in your brains. Like, look, I’m done. I am done.

CK: Yeah. And I think maybe the point of that point of this is that sometimes you’ll reach those low points and it’s okay. You can get out. It’s not always going to be like that. And so. There’s several different techniques you can incorporate in terms of curbing your biases or getting your health, your mental mentality I was thinking of too, at the same time, I was thinking of mindful. Miss and perspective and mentality and all that. So yeah, that’s where my brain is at now. But yeah, getting your mentality right. Still stumbling over that word, but yeah. So, you know, there’s tools like mental contrasting and. Um, uh, stoicism, obviously you can go into philosophies about what you can and can’t control and thinking about all that stuff.

So, yeah, it was interesting because I was trying to incorporate this stuff while my mental power and willpower was low and kind of watching myself. And observing myself deal with this was really interesting, but I think it’s been very beneficial to even know and be aware of trying to do that and being mindful of how you are acting.

And yeah, we, we w we kind of talked through a lot of things yesterday. I don’t know. Do you have anything to say about all that?

Pam: Um, no. Well, I think the key takeaway is that you have to take everything into context with what’s going on in your life. And. You kind of get to a point of system overload and you can recognize that and you can be in it and not be able to get out of it, but you can do things to make sure that it doesn’t get worse.

So like, can be all, you know, as mindful as you want and it doesn’t, it may not get you out of it, but it can put you in the mindset of being like, look, I’m in a bad mood, so I’m not going to take it out on other people or I’m going to do, like, what you did yesterday was you gave me a warning. You said I’m crashing.

I don’t remember what your exact words you said. Like I’m not in a good place. Yeah. It was something where you were, you were giving me a heads up that. At any moment, you could be real crabby. You could take something the wrong way. You could say something that would, that I would take the wrong way. Like you just, you took the step to just say, Hey, this is going on with me.

And you also knew that I was. Yeah, cause we spent all day in the car together. So Austin we’d had a little argument. So I think that, um, that was that’s. The big thing for me is, um, taking that step to not just be mindful of yourself, but to be mindful of how you are with the people around you.

CK: the situation outside yourself. You’re a super system

Pam: And just giving people a heads up then dramatically change

CK: Yeah. So I think that kind of relates to the third, fourth or the third space that I have. I discussed that before, where it’s, you know, when you’re in an interaction, it’s not just you two, it’s not just. The speaker and the receiver there’s context. There’s that third space, that third force. And this also can be by associated with complex systems where, you know, one plus one doesn’t equal two, it equals more than that.

It can go three or four, meaning that it’s not just. C K plus Pam equals decay and Pam is CK. Plus Pam equals decay and Pam, and then together. And like, because I have my own things, Pam has their own things and it’s not just my things and Pam things together, our things together and make up a whole nother thing. So, I don’t know if that makes sense, but, or if I made enough sense out of that, but, um, yeah, I mean, it goes into our quote for the week where circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself. So we were in some stressful situations. Okay. It’s not like those stressful full of situations created something.

Inside us that didn’t exist before. It’s that, you know, it just brought out stuff in us that isn’t normally brought out. And so in that sense, your situations can kind of show you how you react to them. And then in turn, You can learn how to respond differently or respond better, or, you know, as long as you’re mindful of that, there’s potential for you to control it somehow in some manner you can influence the situation.

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess we’re kind of mixing our podcasting segment with still our status of the week, but you know, that’s what we do here.

Pam: You want to talk about the mix?

CK: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I’m using the zoom. H five is a field recorder. It’s like a portable kind of pocket. I mean, it fits in your pocket, but it’s pretty bulky. Just handheld recorder. Yeah. It’s a handheld field recorder and it comes with. An X, Y capsule, Mike, I’m not exactly sure of the details, but I just looked it up and it’s two condenser mic capsules, and it’s a very, very little and unsurprised third condenser because when I just listened back, there was very little Mike bleed and background noise.

And. There’s less of that actually then Tams SM seven B and P. And that’s a dynamic Mike, which just supposed to reject a lot of that. So this little mic is pretty impressive. I don’t necessarily like how my voice sounds on it. Nearly as much as it does on the King being the King bee is. Very much more suitable for my voice.

But, um, but you know, in spite of that, I’m really impressed with the audio quality of this little mic. I mean, it’s not, I think it retails for $80 or something like that, but it comes with the zoom H five, if you purchase that. And I think the zoom H five, I think I got it for around 200, but I think it retails for two 50 or something.

But yeah, I mean, we use the zoom H five as Pam’s audio interface typically. So this is the same setup for Pam, but we’re, we are hand-holding our mics. So we may be a little off with our mic technique. I keep bumping my chin and, and then. Realizing that I’m not close enough sometimes. So my audio quality and maybe might be changing throughout the spot podcast session.

So that’s why, and similarly with Pam, we’re not used to holding their mics in her. No, this socks and pants.

Pam: Heavy.

CK: Yeah. Oh yeah. The Shure SM seven B is accused of a mic. So yeah. Well, we’ll have to deal with that. So yeah, we, yeah, we have some sound blankets set up in here. Um, and yeah, everything’s closed up, but we’re on a, a little bit of a traffic extreme.

And of course there’s always the airplane and helicopter noises, but I don’t know, this is kind of fun and it’s really fun to have it fall on our 52nd episode. So yeah. Do you have anything you can think of that I might’ve missed or anything else you want to say?

Pam: I don’t think so.

CK: Okay. Yeah, I’m trying to think of other podcasting things. Oh, so I, um, my buddy Shane hit me up yesterday about dealing with noise in podcast audio. So it seems like he might be going through a lot of the noise issues that I went through. When we were starting out and yeah, I can totally empathize because if you guys have been listening to me here and you’ll know all the trials and tribulations, I went through with the audio for this podcast, and now I’m realizing I’ve been listening back to some podcasts and listening more critically to podcasts that I like and think are good.

And I’m realizing. How, well, I don’t know how to say this exactly, but I’ll just say it. I’m, I’m realizing how good our audio actually was. And I’m really realizing how not as good that audio is on projects that I thought. It was good. So, yeah, because when I listened to our audio I’ll I listened to it several, several times in several different ways and through different monitors and different volumes and I’ll turn it all the way up even versus, you know, podcasts that I like and listened to.

I’ll just have it at a normal volume and just listen to it like that the whole time. So I’ve been kind of taking more of that kind of approach when listening to R. Podcasts and processing them, just listening them closer to a more normal volume and analyzing it and processing it that way. Of course, I’ll be a little more critical and it sometimes, but I won’t be, I won’t process it as much in that way.

I’ll get to retain a lot of the original audio. And a lot of that is actually pretty good quality with the setup that we’ve. Progress with right now. So yeah. Um, I feel like we’re at a good place with our audio. And so, I mean, Kind of excited to talk with Shane about his audio and seeing what we could possibly do to help him and maybe trade notes and see what he’s dealing with.

But yeah, it’s, it’s interesting just talking to someone else. Who’s starting to deal with all this stuff after having gone through all that, but yeah, that’s fun. So yeah, let’s move on to our next segment and we are. Oh, it’s time for the weekly ForceCast and this is the part of the podcast where we talk about.

Oh, so, okay. So, okay. So

I mean, yeah. I don’t know what else. So yeah, we’ll start out with Podspo where we talk about a podcast that may have inspired us over the past week or so, and I am not ready for this.

Pam: I don’t really have anything.

CK: Okay. So I’ll just skip that. Actually. I’ll just reiterate podcasts that I mentioned before, because they always have good episodes and every week I enjoy them and, you know, I could talk about.

There are episodes every week. And those include Ted talks daily and wave, and I’ll leave it at that. I recommend tech talks daily and short wave. She’s always been producing some awesome episodes lately. So yeah, check that out. And Ted is always good. So. Check those out if you haven’t already. And then the next portion of the podcast is Linchpinspo where Tim might provide us with some inspiration from the cards or the stars or the planets or herself.

Pam: Um, yeah, I’m, I’m not terribly prepared for this today, but I will say that we are out of mercury retrograde at his station direct. We are still in the retro shade periods. So there might still be a little bit of tomfoolery going on there for a little bit. Um, and then we’re in Pisces season now. So. So we, um, are into a more, um, emotional couple of weeks or three to four weeks still.

Yeah, four weeks still. Okay. So a little more emotional, uh, feeling a little more. I’m connected to other people and. Yeah. Being more, um, concerned with, um, with emotions and less we’re out of our heads now and out of our thoughts and more into an emotional season. So, um, we’re wrapping up the end of the calendar year for, um, the, the Zodiac.

So this is the, the end where we are, uh, reviewing what needs. To be let go from the past year and preparing for the forward action. That will start when we move into areas.

CK: Cool. Cool. Yeah. Thank goodness. Mercury’s retrograde is over it. I’ve been dealing with so many issues on the technical side. But, uh, lately I think things have been okay. My computer has been acting up, so I don’t know. It’s it did that thing with the monitor again, where it got all crazy and yeah, I’m, uh, kind of beefing up my audio connections for live streaming and.

Trying to figure out some signal flow logic on Dannon, but it’s still been fun. I’ve been really enjoying that kind of stuff. And I kind of. I figured out why I’ve been enjoying the whole process with music and even this whole audio production and post processing stuff too. And it all goes into complex systems and all the logic behind it and all the research and analysis I get to do.

And yeah, it’s not just about the music for me. It’s about. The, you know, researching the gear and figuring out the signal flow and learning about, but all these processes. And I just love the whole thing. Like I don’t even have to make music. I can just mess around with all the machines and, uh, be in my happy place.

And yeah, before we leave off, I think I just want to continue on a little longer and. Especially since this is our 52nd episode, maybe adding a little special bonus here, but I don’t know how much of a bonus this is. It’s just more, more half thoughts coming up, coming out of my mouth.

Pam: Hopefully their full words.

CK: I can’t promise that, but Oh, shoot. Um, hold on, let me, I think it was good. Uh, do you have anything that can fill in dinner for a second?

Pam: That’s that’s asking a lot from someone who’s been up since three 30.

CK: Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, I don’t remember. Um, Actually what we’ll do here, it’s getting hot. So we’ll take, we’ll take five, but I w I want to get this idea out. I forget what it was. So, yeah, we’ll take five. Cool. Off for a second. And hopefully I’ll remember what I was going to say.

Yeah. Okay. And we’re back. And I still don’t remember. I totally lost it. Lost my train of thought. And we’ll just start closing out now.

Pam: Sorry, I interrupted you with my joke.

CK: What was your joke?

Pam: So you said you were going to give half thoughts and I said, I hope they were full words this time.

CK: Yeah, it’s all your fault. So you guys complained Pam.

Pam: I have deprived you of the wisdom of suitcase half awake brain.

CK: Yeah, it was whatever I was going to say was really, really good. Probably the best thing that I’ve ever done. So yeah, we lost that forever.

Pam: Sorry, forever.

CK: So, yeah, I guess, uh, first time for everything. Now, this is the first time we’ve taken a break and return to the podcast everything’s happening on this 57, 50, 52nd episode. So yeah, I guess we’ll start closing out. So before we leave off, Pam, do you have anything else that you want to add? All right. Well, where can people find

Pam: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter where I am at Pamela underscore Lund.

CK: And you might be able to find me on Twitter at CK disco. And thank you to Pam for joining me as always first time in the car. It’s kind of fun. It was a interesting hope. It sounds good. We’ll see how that comes out and yeah. Thank you guys for listening. So I hope you all come back next week and keep on practicing.

Toodaloo!