You Breathe Just Like Me; You Bleed Just Like Me (Creative Status: Episode 70: Dr. Ford Dyke)

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.

Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

Join us on Creative Status for a real conversation with Human Performance Optimization expert, Dr. Ford Dyke, as we explore the foundational truths about life and our relationship with ourselves.

In this thought-provoking conversation, Dr. Dyke introduces the powerful acronym HUMAN—hydrate, unplug, move, aspire, and nourish—as a roadmap to optimize our connection with our bodies and reclaim our authenticity.

Meet Dr. Ford Dyke: Delve into the expertise of Dr. Dyke, whose multidimensional approach integrates years of experience as a Team USA Athlete, Performance Coach, and educator. From high-level executives to elite athletes, Dr. Dyke collaborates globally to optimize human performance and wellbeing.

Return to Your Body: Dr. Dyke emphasizes the importance of returning to our bodies to unlock our full potential. Explore how the HUMAN acronym—hydrate, unplug, move, aspire, and nourish—serves as a guiding light on the journey to self-optimization and authenticity.

Foundation in Truth: Drawing from his roots in the seaside community of Jupiter Beach, Florida, Dr. Dyke reminds us of the elemental truths embodied by nature. Discover how reconnecting with these foundational truths can enhance our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.

Optimize Your Human Experience: Tune in as Dr. Dyke shares practical insights and actionable strategies to optimize your human experience.

Whether it’s hydration, digital detox, movement, aspirations, or nourishment, discover how small changes can lead to profound transformations in your life.

Creative Status: Where Wellness Meets REALNESS

Join Dr. Ford Dyke and Oli Anderson for an episode that redefines our relationship with ourselves, our bodies, and life itself.

Learn how to transform your life by embracing the HUMAN acronym and returning to foundational truths about life.

This episode is your invitation to treat your body as a temple, not a theme park, and embark on a journey of holistic wellness for REALNESS.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson

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Episode Links:

Dr Ford’s website: ⁠https://www.forddyke.com/⁠

Ford Dyke on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/ford-dyke/⁠

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Show Transcript: You Breathe Just Like Me; You Bleed Just Like Me

Tapping into your realness through the creative process

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using your creativity to improve your life by using it as a vehicle for becoming more real. More real means that you’re more connected to yourself, your body, your mind, your emotions, your soul – if you want to go deep into it – you’re more connected to other people and more connected to life itself, because you’re not resisting life with ego.

You’re actually breaking through the ego and integrating your shadow, the hidden parts of yourself, so that you can have a deep connection to the way that things are. If you do that, then you’re living the philosophy that real always works, and you’re going to be able to get better results from life itself and from the goals that you have. Because where else are you going to be able to get results apart from reality itself?

Today’s interview is with Dr. Ford Dyke. He’s a Human Optimization Specialist, and we’re basically exploring the idea of real always works through the lens of his work, which is about helping people to be more efficient, to optimize their relationship with their bodies and with their minds and the way that they go about life. So he’s well suited to state the obvious for the conversation. Dr. Ford has an amazing acronym that he uses, to help us understand how we can return to some foundational health habits, mental and physical health habits that are going to change our lives, help us to be human in this real always works way.

The acronym is explored in the conversation, but it’s H-U-M-A-N, which stands for “Hydrate”, – which is kind of self-explanatory – “Unplug”, which is about focusing on adequate sleep and getting into good habits with a routine of sleeping and all that kind of thing. M stands for “Move”. We all live sedentary lifestyles, or many of us do, and simple movement can make a big difference in our lives.

“Aspire” is about understanding, that we need aspiration so we can keep growing. One of the main themes of this podcast is that reality keeps changing and evolving, and so if we want to be real, we need to be too. So the aspire thing is super powerful, and then finally, N stands for “Nourish”, bringing it back to some of the, real food stuff that we’ve covered on the podcast, and just an understanding that actually what we put into our bodies is fuel for our bodies. So this is a really good conversation about being real – it’s very practical.

Dr. Ford, thank you so much for your time and your energy and your insight. Everybody else, hope this gives you some value helps you make some tweaks, if need be, so you can be more real. Thanks a bunch. Here we go. Boom.

Interview

Oli: Oh, hi there, Ford. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status. We’re going to be talking, I assume, initially, and then we’re probably going to end up somewhere totally different about one of my favourite topics, which is ultimately how we can optimize our humanity and how we can align ourselves with our human nature so that we can get better results from life by aligning ourselves with the philosophy, basically, that real always works.

Exploring human performance optimization as a lever to optimize health and wellness

So that’s what I’m assuming we’re going to talk about but before we get into all that do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you do, why you do what you do, and also, if you don’t mind, what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to dive into?

Dr. Ford Dyke: Well, first of all, thank you, Oli. I appreciate the introduction. Looking forward to the conversation on your show. My name is Ford Dyke. I wear a bunch of different hats, in no particular order. I’m a professor here at Auburn University in the sports science realm of kinesiology. I also am the director of mindfulness at Auburn, which is an evidence-based platform for performance, health, and well being. And I serve as the performance coach for the Auburn wheelchair basketball team.

As an aside, I also run my own platform called For Humans, that is incorporating human the element itself into the word performance. What I’m hoping to get out of this conversation today is explore human performance optimization as a lever to optimize not only our performance, but also our health and our wellness. Without those facets, I don’t think you can perform at a high level.

Oli: Yeah. So let’s dive right into it. Should we begin by defining our terms? So, when we talk about performance, what do we really mean? Like, I work as a performance coach as well. I call myself a creative performance coach because most of the people I work with are creatives. But what exactly are we referring to when we say we’re helping people to perform?

Is it simply just about getting results, or is it something deeper, in terms of their relationship with themselves and their relationship with life and all that kind of thing? If that’s not cracking this open too much to get going.

Ford: I think the one word definition…the one word answer here is have your audience and your listeners think of the word efficiency. And what I mean by efficiency is being able to perform at your highest level with minimal effort. I think the misconception that a lot of individuals have is performance optimization is only really applicable to elite athletes, when in fact, the reason I’ve incorporated the word human and the element itself into the word performance is because I believe, as a global society, we’ve lost touch with how important we are in that equation to elevate our performance and so perform humans is really all about starting with the basics.

The five elements of H-U-M-A-N hydrate, unplug, move and nourish. And this is not just for elite athletes. I happen to be a performance coach in the athletic realm, but I also work with clients in the military realm, in c suite, executive levels, various facets of performance. I think every single human on this planet performs to some level, and it’s all relative. And while we’re here, which we’re not here for very long, don’t we want to perform at our highest level without sacrificing our health and wealth? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think everyone’s answer to that is, of course, yes.

Oli: Yeah. There’s a theme that always comes up in these conversations about two fundamental approaches to life that people can take. One is where we’re trying to perform and get the results that we want by just forcing everything. So we become outcome-dependent.

We pick some goal that we think is going to give our life meaning and allow us to feel a sense of worth and all that kind of stuff. And then no matter what, we turn into a human doing, where we’re just constantly forcing our will against life, trying to get this result because it becomes the panacea. so we thing that’s going to solve all of our problems.

If we take in that approach and just forcing things, all we end up doing is adding unnecessary tension, which eventually turns to stress. And then we may achieve the goal, but actually we haven’t achieved the ultimate goal, which is to feel good and balanced within our humanity. That’s how I see it. The other side of the coin is where we try to find a sense of flow.

And I think there’s a healthy sense of flow, or a real sense of flow, which is basically when we do everything that we can and then let go of the rest and give it to life, if that makes sense, and we just trust the process to give us what we need. But then there’s another kind of flow where we become so open minded that, our brains fall out, we don’t do any of the work that we need to do, and then we don’t get the results, and then we just end up blaming, I don’t know, external circumstances or whatever it is.

And so I think there’s kind of a sweet spot where we’re flowing by doing what we can, being as real as possible, but then accepting the reality that we can’t control everything. And I suppose that’s the way I like to see things when I’m coaching people, is that if we can align with that flow, then we’re ultimately aligning with the truth about life -and that involves accepting what it means to actually be human.

So I’m throwing loads at you, but how does that align with the work that you’re doing with people? And I guess the lessons you’ve learned by, I guess, helping people reconfigure their relationship with performance?

Ford: First of all, incredibly well said, and I’m glad that you brought up the notion of human doing. I think we forget about the fact that we are organisms, and it takes specific resources and intentions for us to be. Hence why my whole tagline of be human, just be. We get on this wheel and we start running the rat race, and we become doers, and before we know it, we become out of balance. And our bodies don’t thrive when they’re out of balance. We thrive when we’re in balance.

Finding those homeostatic set points, the equilibrium, the equanimity, is truly what leads us to greater vitality, increased performance, more sustainable health and wellness.

So what I work on with clients is starting with those five elements:

All too often, people are dehydrated. They don’t understand the value of simply hydrating with water. So,  for your listeners, a great way to start half of your body weight in terms of ounces per day. At 200 pounds, I require 100oz per day. That’s baseline more. And more often than not, people look at me like, I guess I’m not drinking enough water. I guess I am dehydrated.

Our brains need water. Our heart needs water. Our lungs need water. Our eyes, all of our organs, even our bones, our hair, our skin, our nails, all rely on water. We are water based creatures. Of course, that percentage changes from those early stages of infancy, when we’re about 80% to 85% water. Adulthood, somewhere in the 60% to 70% range. And then as we age and become elderly, somewhere back into that 65, even 55 range.

But through the course of our lives, as we’re interested in performing at a high level, hydration is the first element for a reason. It serves as the foundation. So that’s where I start.

From there, we work into unplug how do we take time to recover? We know the value of restoration, whether it’s active and or passive. Something like sleep, naps, meditation, et cetera. But sleep is a pandemic. Sleep is an epidemic. No one’s talking about it, but it’s a really big problem on our planet. And working through the principles that help get better sleep, both from a quantitative standpoint, but also from a quality standpoint.

Move more, sit less, move more. All too often, humans are sedentary.

Now you come to the fifth. Excuse me, the third pillar, the fulcrum: Move. All too often, humans are sedentary. With sedentary behaviour and physical inactivity, we’re not able to perform at a high level. We must get moving. And notice I’m not saying, Oli, you need to join a strength conditioning gym, a CrossFit gym. You don’t need to become an elite athlete.

All I’m saying is move more, sit less, move more. Something as simple as walking ten minutes a day, three times a day, 30 minutes, 150 minutes a week. It’s small, it’s bite size. It’s really simple, but doesn’t mean it’s easy but it’s the foundation of us as human beings. Aspire, is letter a. Setting, intentions. What is it that you look forward to? What’s on the horizon? How are you going to get there?

Not just goal setting, but what’s the step by step process that you’re able to lay out to ensure that you’re meeting the markers you intend to meet to get to where you want to go? The notion of having your hands on the wheel, understanding that the windshield is a much bigger piece of glass than the rear view mirror. The rear view mirror is something to look in, to reflect on, to use information from the past to help you move forward. But if you continue to look in that rear view mirror, you’re probably going to run into a situation. It’s an analogy for our lives.

And lastly, nourish. I keep food for last because I think we look at it a little bit backwards, especially in developed nations, in global north nations, the notion of diet restriction, limitation, paleo, vegan, all the different options. Keto.

Hey, look, let’s roll it all back and let’s keep an understanding that our bodies require energy. They require energy, they require a battery to support the physiological state. And so where can we start? When I mention diet, all I’m referring to are foods you habitually consume.

So asking yourself as an audience member, what is your diet? What are foods you habitually consume? And we’re not going to change anything. We’re just going to start adding good stuff. We’re going to start making smoothies in the morning. We’re going to start adding fruits and vegetables to our plates, turning our plates 50% colour, allowing ourselves to recognize how we feel. And these basic changes. Oli, H-U-M-A-N. Hydrate, unplug, move, aspire, nourish. That serves as the foundation, that serves as the baseline.

And now we’re able to build awareness of how we start to change, how we start to feel, that then circles back, and each day, each week, month, year, ideally decade into your life, those chapters. Feeling better, performing better, feeling better, performing better, feeling better. Performing better is a sustainable approach to human performance optimization.

How do we balance the being and the doing in a real way?

Oli: Yeah, I love how you’ve simplified what people usually make. Very complex. I think a lot of the time we need things to be complicated as a way of avoiding the basic truths of our life, which are ultimately what you’ve summed up with your acronym around human. That there are foundational things we all need to do with our bodies, and, to some extent, obviously, with our, relationship, with life.

In terms of seeing ourselves as constantly growing and evolving. With the aspire thing, there are foundational things that we need to do to kind of tap into an alignment with reality. And the way that it works, the way that I see it, is ultimately we’re designed in a certain way, where we have the mind body system, and what’s good for the body is good for the mind. The same basic principles which we can get into.

And if you nourish and treat your body in a real way, rather than just been a kind of theme park instead of a temple, then you’re going to be in a very good position to tune into the sense of being that you need to inject into your doing. If your body’s stressed, if your nervous system is just completely erratic and having all kinds of crazy sensations and stuff, then you can be present in life. And if you’re not present in life, then you can’t move towards your aspirations in a real way. And a real way, I think, means that you’re injecting your being first and foremost into your doing.

So you are a human being. You’re still doing things, obviously, because you can’t get anywhere in life without action. But because the being comes first, and your body and your relationship with your body is supporting that being, you can actually ensure that the things that you do do are an expression of your being, rather than something that you’re just doing for the sake of doing it – so you can mask your existential pain and the stress and the tension that you’re carrying in your body without even knowing.

So I suppose to open this up, how do we do that more? How do we balance the being and the doing in this kind of real way that I’m talking about? Because I think ultimately that is the theme that’s kind of emerging here this idea of balance. If you get the being right, you can get the doing right and you can move forward, or you can flow with life and you can become more real, move towards wholeness, as I like to say it, without stressing yourself out unnecessarily. Something like that.

Ford: Without question. And I think you hit the nail on the head. It starts with balance. And with balance, it starts with awareness, understanding that perhaps an individual is out of balance. And the systems that we have in place within our organism are really smart systems. And if we take time to pause for a moment and tune in, our systems will tell us what we need. And this can be seen by way of inflammation, by way of visceral fat mass, by way of arthritis, stiffness, in the knees, the hips, the ankles, the joints.

You see this in skin tone, skin elasticity, hair, nails. There’s a lot of different signals that our body will give off that indicate imbalance. There’s also a lot of signals that our body will give off to indicate balance. But all too often we’ve gotten so far away from our own, intelligence that happens within side of our vessel because we get our frontal lobe in the way.

The frontal lobe is an amazing facet of the brain. It’s the neocortex. It’s the newest portion of the brain, evolutionarily speaking. However, it’s a double edged sword, Ali, and it can get in the way of a lot of really fundamental basic systems, obviously, highly technical, but very straightforward systems that we have as far as our homeostatic set points. The temperature that we’re supposed to be at, the weight that we’re supposed to be at, the satiation versus hunger responses that we’re supposed to be at, the energy versus restoration that we’re supposed to be at.

These get out of balance because the frontal lobe just keeps going more…do instead of be, as you mentioned. And that’s why I think it’s so important to just be, be human and take a step off the wheel for a moment, assess what’s happening and lean into these principles of the five elements.

Oli: I think, in a way, what we’re talking about when we talk about that front part of the brain is our identity. I think for most people, because most people are struggling with human doing instead of human being. They ultimately been driven, like you said earlier, by what’s in the rear view mirror.

They’ve got no vision for the future because unresolved emotional stuff, normally shame, guilt, and in the worst cases, trauma, has caused the kind of inner split or sense of fragmentation, where they end up disowning all kinds of parts of themselves, good and bad. I’ve said this so many times on podcast, but it’s ultimately about something that has shamed them in childhood, causing them to split off from themselves.

When that happens, they create this kind of false, fragmented version of themselves to survive life. And that is ultimately where the human doing side of things comes from, because they’re ultimately filtering everything that happens to them, and that they’re chasing through the ego in an attempt to outrun whatever’s in the rear view mirror, which is actually already gone. They’re just holding onto it because of their trauma and stuff like that.

When we’re filtering life through the ego like that, that’s when we ultimately start to put friction between ourselves and life itself – and if we don’t understand that, that’s when we end up becoming totally dysregulated in relationship to our own bodies. We’re living in the mind instead of the body, which is in the present moment.

And it reminds me of this old Taoist thing. I think it was Taoism. I read it years ago. It said, basically, if you’re hungry, eat. If you’re tired, sleep if you’re thirsty, like drink. But actually these days, because so many of us are, distracted by the world at large with all the social media and all that stuff, but also because we have this filter of the ego that we’ve attached to we eat because we think it’s going to bring comfort, we either drink or don’t drink, because we’re bored or we’re distracting ourselves or whatever it is, and we sleep according to our, I’m going to sound like a Marxist or something, like our sociocapitalistic routine, rather than the rhythms of nature itself.

And all of that, ultimately, is because we’re living conceptually instead of experientially. And I think that’s why the stuff you’re talking about getting back in touch with your body, ultimately, and then moving towards your aspirations once you’ve done that, is a super powerful thing. So in relation to the identity stuff, how do you think that is affecting people’s relationships with their humanity and the kind of balance that we’re talking about?

Ford: I’m glad you bring up the notion of identity, Oli, because it’s really interesting when working with clients, and I hand them a sheet of paper and it says the letter I, space am m. And then just a line. So I am. And I ask them to fill in the blank. And nine times out of ten, typically, people typically will write down the identity of who they are and the occupation that they reside in.

So “I am a student athlete”, “I am a chief financial officer”, “I am a mother”, “I am an F16 pilot”. Whatever. The role that they assign themselves with becomes their identity. And I think what happens is we start to look externally into that space, which disconnects us from those internal processes like we referenced earlier, all of the set points that we have. And what happens then after time?

We’re talking five years, ten years, 1523 decades down the line. We look back at the driver’s seat to go back to the windshield versus the rear view mirror analogy, and we don’t even know where the steering wheel, the accelerator, the brake, the wing mirrors. We’re so disassociated from the vehicle, from the vessel, that we’re not really sure where we’re headed anymore. And we feel like we’re lost. We feel like we’re going in circles. But we become so accustomed to the identity. That’s who we’ve referred to ourselves as. We forget first and foremost, we’re human beings.

So I want to spend time here breaking down the rear view mirror versus the windshield analogy even further. What I mean by that is that as you’re sitting in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, you have your hands on the wheel, you’re looking out the windshield. We spell windshield. W-I-N-D shield. Those first three letters, win is an acronym for “What’s Important Now”.

Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not what happened three weeks ago, not what’s going to happen next year: What’s important now.

What’s important now is not in the rear-view mirror. What’s important now is not in the wing mirrors. It may provide you information about the present moment, meaning reflecting from the past in order to set intention and aspiration for the future. But what’s important now is happening in that windshield. That’s going to allow you to drive the vehicle in the direction that you want to drive it into. If there is an obstruction in the way you can manipulate, you can manoeuvre to go around that.

If you need to speed up a little bit or slow down a little bit, that’s going to allow you to regulate the accelerator versus the brake. But until we assign meaning to what’s important now, in other words, the present moment, we will constantly be searching for information in those wing mirrors and in that rear view mirror. And before we know it, the vehicle is still moving forward, because that’s an analogy for life. We can’t stop time. We can’t speed it up or slow it down. It’s going to constantly move forward.

We become into our elderly age, and we look back and say, what the hell happened? And if you start to observe society as a global unit of organisms, eight plus billion now, as of November 2022, we hit 8 billion with a b. It seems like the large majority of humans don’t have their hands on the wheel. They’re not looking through the windshield. They don’t recognize what’s important now because of the distractions, as you indicated, social media, technology, et cetera. And we’ve become so far detached from that true driver one position.

Oli: I think a lot of this work that we seem to be doing with our clients is showing them that they can take control of that steering wheel and also showing them that what’s important now is something that they have a lot more choice over, than they may initially think. I think a lot of the time, if people are, too attached to these nouns that they identify with, so “I am a whatever”, then it limits what they think is possible.

And so what they are choosing to be of importance is often still a reflection of the past because of their self-limiting beliefs, or just the way that the identity that they’ve attached to is blocking the full expression of who they are, because it’s keeping the shadow self at bay, or all those different things.

And ultimately, if you can help people to reconfigure their identities and to realise that it’s about that constant evolution, it’s about constantly changing and evolving, then they can ultimately decide, “Okay, how am I going to navigate life to work with the change that is out of my control, to get to a place that is aligned with what I do want to control about myself”, if that makes sense.

And I think, again, to go back to the human thing, it all starts with that. And in a way, the balance of human being and human doing comes back to accepting the holistic nature of human beings as being beyond good and bad and being these kind of nondualistic entities.

If you want to say like that, where we’re just a cocktail of all these things, ‘good’, ‘bad’, and anything in between – shades of grey –  and only if you embrace that, are you going to be able to, I suppose, escape from that need that people have to fill the void with all these distractions and everything that we’re talking about.

Being human is about valuing the truth more than anything else.

One thing I’ve really been thinking deeply about recently is just how there’s the void itself, which comes from this disconnection that we’ve kind of alluded to, where people are shamed in childhood and so on and so forth. And so they create this false identity for themselves that they don’t realize is false. They think it’s real because it becomes habitual.

But as they put that out into the world and it dictates what’s important now, they constantly have this kind of restless feeling. And unless they understand, like, your work helps people understand that it’s about returning to their humanity, they’ll try and fill it with all kinds of things. They’ll fill it with all the distractions that are common in the modern world, like alcohol or porn or whatever it is that people decide they need to fill it with. That just makes the situation worse.

And then eventually, all of these things that they’re trying to fill the void with, they become a kind of void within the void because they become like gremlins that need feeding. They get withdrawal symptoms when they’re not scrolling through social media, or they get withdrawal symptoms when they’re not engaging in empty relationships that they just kind of become co-dependently involved with to fill that void inside themselves and all that stuff.

And so being human, ultimately, is about switching your focus from all of these addictive things, I guess, and these distracting things just back to the truth. Like, I don’t know if I’m making that too simplistic, but for me now, that’s really how it seems.

Being human in the realest terms is just about valuing the truth more than anything else. Letting go of those distractions, which are ultimately a substitute for a relationship with the truth, which is why we feel the void in the first place, because we become disconnected. And if we can do that, then we kind of reach a state of humility, if you want to use that word, where we realise, “Okay, I’m a human being, but I’m also a human doing”. And the balance is letting go of control as those two worlds, if you want to say that, kind of collide, I’m really ranting and raving now. I don’t know if I’m making it too convoluted.

Ford: I’m tracking you, Oli. I’m tracking you.

Oli: How does all this, I guess, track for you in terms of the addiction stuff? And just all of those distractions make life way more complicated than it needs to be. And if we can value just our own nature, really like our own realness, then a lot of the problems kind of dissolve and we find that balance that we’re talking about.

Ford: I think what coincides so nicely with your show and with your platform is that word realness. And to go back to the data metric of 8 billion on November 2022, it’s the first time as a planet we hit that number.

Now I think we’re at about 8.1 billion as a collective population. But when you start to think about that number, break it down further. The realness, the truth, Oli, is the fact that 99.99% of us, as an organism, as a homo sapien sapien, is exactly the same. Until the zero 1% of race, colour, creed, sex, national origin, preference, et cetera, starts to express and provide us our uniqueness as individuals, even twins are still individuals.

We’re not robots, we’re not machines, we’re organisms. And to our knowledge, which is kind of weird to say, as a caveat, we are the most intelligent creatures on the planet. I do take that with a grain of salt – but because of the way our brain is structured, which is truly our hardware, if you think about it that way, m the frontal lobe is where the mind resides, and our mind is our brain in action. Now, that’s our software.

But until we align software and hardware, we’re just going to continue to pinball around, to be disconnected. To think that because we have x amount of followers on pick, whatever social media platform is of preference, I have this many followers, I must be disconnected.

In fact, it’s doing the opposite. It’s creating disconnection. And if your audience doesn’t believe me, next time you go into an airport or a subway or a train station, just look around. Look how many people in that facility have their faces inside of a six to seven inch screen, searching, like you’re saying, for the next squirt of dopamine in their brain.

The like, the subscribe, the follow, the comment, the swipe, the endless scroll, when, in fact, life happens. When you pick your head up, when you allow all of your sensory modalities with olfaction, audition, gustatory, tactile, haptic, visual, auditory, all of the different sensations that we have that we’re able to label, in addition to sensations that we’re not even able to understand or describe, that’s where life happens.

Life doesn’t happen with interaction against a touch screen and against an LCD monitor. But that’s, I think, where we’ve gotten it a little bit backwards. And that’s the part that’s a little scary for me. And I understand the value of technology. I understand the value of networking platforms. I mean, hell, this is how we connected onto this call here onto your podcast, is by way of a professional network. Fantastic. But you have intentionality with it – you’re using it with purpose. You’re not using it as an escape from reality.

Oli: It’s exactly that. Technology is like anything, right? It comes down to your intention behind using it exactly like you said. But you can only have a real intention if you have a real vision. And so ultimately it comes down to purpose.

I think ultimately, the main thing that causes human beings to be kind of chasing all these distractions and addictions and feeding the gremlins that arise because of them is because they’ve become detached from inspired action, basically.

Like, I think if we can get in touch with our being in the way that we’ve talked about quite a lot now and then put the being into our doing, then the doing that we are doing, which is a weird sentence…

Ford: I’m with you, though.

Oli: It makes sense, I promise. It’s inspired action instead of just action for the sake of masking or distracting this split within ourselves because of all the shame and the things like that. And if we understand that, then it’s going to align us with our nature.

And I think exactly like you’ve said. If I understood what you were saying properly, there’s 8 billion of us on the planet. That’s a huge number, to state the obvious, but I think sometimes people don’t realize how big that number is. I heard a thing, and I can’t remember it exactly so the numbers I’m about to give are bullshit. But the point is not bullshit.

It was something like, if you count backwards to a million, that doesn’t make sense. If you count to a million, it’ll take you like, ah, three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is. If you count to a billion, it’ll take you like 27 years. And like I said, those numbers are not the exact numbers, but it’s something like that. And there’s 8 billion of us on the planet. That is a crazy amount of people.

But ultimately, even though there are differences in the scenery of our lives, the contingent things that have happened in our experience and, our own individual neurotic patterns and all that kind of stuff, the fundamental structure of being a human being is the same. And if you understand that and you align yourself with it, then you’re more likely to have a healthier relationship with reality.

And if you have a healthier relationship with reality, then you’re not going to get caught up in identity and the illusion of stasis that comes with it. You’re going to be able to let go of identity and to move towards wholeness instead of just fighting for the fragments of sense that you’re holding onto in order to avoid the truth in the first place.

And when you can live like that, I think there is a kind of a natural sense of purpose that arises. You kind of get feedback from your unconscious as it becomes conscious, because you’re not blocking it with all these nouns that people identify with. And the next step becomes clear. And then maybe there’ll be a period where you don’t know what the hell is going on, but you can trust until the next step becomes clear, and then the next one, and then the next one. And you don’t just distract yourself by doing things for the sake of doing things in the way that we’ve been talking about.

And I think this is all linked because you can only really navigate that path if you can navigate uncertainty and if you’re not in touch with your body, because the simple, foundational things you’ve talked about, you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not hydrated, you’re not nourishing yourself.

All these things you’ve said, if you’re not in your body in a healthy way, then your nervous system can’t handle the chaos and uncertainty of life. And then you freak out. And in freaking out, you become more and more of a control freak. You get more and more attached to that identity that we keep talking about, and then you end up distracting yourself to try and maintain that identity as, the chaos of life just keeps kind of moving around something like that. And so it all ultimately comes back to aligning ourselves with our natural design, but also ensuring that our nervous system can handle the natural stress of life instead of running from stress as though it’s a bad thing. Something like that…

I’ve learned this from doing yoga. I do yoga every day, and I really think it’s just made it so much easier for me to handle stress and to take risks and, to manage uncertainty without feeling like I’m losing myself. Because my body ultimately knows that my identity is secondary to the body itself. If that makes,.

Ford: Something you said earlier, Oli, that you might not even have realised how brilliant it was. You said theme park versus temple. And when we’re in this theme park mentality, how could we find balance? Right?

Dopamine’s through the roof, serotonin’s through the roof, cortisol is through the roof. And yet, when we’re in a temple, we’re quiet, we’re calm, we have equanimity, appreciation, gratitude. We’re able to assess a situation. That’s a brilliant analogy. And I think the universal truth of all of this comes down to a lyric I just reflected on the other day and lead up to our conversation.

The lyric is very simple. It’s out of a song. And he says, “you breathe like me, you bleed like me.” It doesn’t matter your height, your weight, your race, your creed, your sex, your preference, your national origin. It does not matter if you are a human, a homo sapien sapien, if you are that organism, and there’s eight plus billion of us, we all breathe, we all bleed, and it’s exactly the same.

Those are the universal truths of the human experience. So why not take time to optimize the human experience through human performance optimization?

Oli: Yeah, it’s a no brainer, really. I think, there’s an element that people, they fear their own humanity. Like most people that are running around out there in the world as human doings, or as the opposite of that. People that have become too passive. They’re trying to either be more than human, which means they’re basically neurotic. They’re trying to control everything. They’re trying to be big heroes, they’re trying to be omniscient and omnipotent, basically.

Or they’re trying to be less than human, where they basically constantly having an existential crisis, or they think that they don’t have the strength and the power to just handle life, which I think is an illusion. Because if you tap into your realness, then you’re going to have the power, because, like we’re saying, you’re built to deal with life itself, the uncertainty and the chaos and the change and all that stuff.

And so if most people have either been more than human or less than human, or trying to be, and being human is actually this solution to most of their problems, including their spiritual problems, because only, if you embrace your humanity, then you have to embrace your humility in the way that we talk about, which means that you understand that life itself is bigger than you, ultimately, and so you can feel a sense of awe and gratitude and all that stuff.

So if being human is the way forward in a very real sense. What do you think it is that causes people to fear their humanity? Like, is it just a fear of death or is it, I don’t know, just a denial of the responsibility that comes with being in these human bodies. What is going on, in your opinion, with that?

Ford: I think part of the fear, let’s call it, because I do think a lot of projection comes from fear, is as you said, we know as humans because we have a frontal lobe, we have awareness and consciousness and metacognition, that the human experience is a limited experience. There’s a start date and there’s a shelf life, and there’s an end date.

We know our start date. Everyone generally knows their birth date, right, for the most part. But very few of us know our end date. And that’s, I guess, a good problem to have. And it comes down to the whole notion of we’ll live life like every day is your last. I don’t know if that’s feasible, I don’t know if that’s sustainable. But I do understand the premise of that.

And I think what it’s indicating is living in the present moment is the most important space to reside, because that’s truly all we have and we’re not guaranteed tomorrow. And yesterday has already passed. We can’t go back. And just like time, we can’t speed time up, we can’t slow time down, but we have full control of what’s happening in the moment because we have full control of our physiology.

And I think a lot of us, as humans, are uneducated. And what I mean by uneducated is we’ve been misinformed on how important it is to get in tune with our bodies. We’ve been told how to write with handwriting properly, we’ve been taught arithmetic, we’ve been taught how to read, and we’ve been taught science and all the basic principles of history, all great things.

But health science, human sciences, is lacking as a global education platform. And then we look around and wonder why obesity is becoming a pandemic. We wonder why physical inactivity. Wonder why the healthcare industry has become a disease care industry. We wonder if pharmaceuticals rule the world. Well, there’s a lack of education, and it’s a systematic problem that has become systemic.

And it’s quite shocking, it’s quite frightening. But if we’re able to take matter into our own hands, if we’re able to grab the wheel and recognize that what’s important now is in front of us and spend time daily. And it’s not very difficult. It’s keep as simple as possible. But again, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. And being patient with the process, as you mentioned at the outset of our conversation, it is a process from the first inhalation you take as you enter this human experience to the last exhalation that you process as you transition outside of the human experience. Those are your bookends. That is the human experience.

So being aware of that process, which it usually takes about 15 years to become aware. Right. If you think about the first five years, not too aware, the next five, you’re ten, you’re a kid. The next five, you’re 15. Okay, maybe I start to understand what day of the week it is. The next five. Okay, now I’m 20. Cool. Okay, now 25. Working class. Okay, now I’m 30, starting a family. Now I’m 35, 40, 50. Shit, I’m halfway to a century. Uhoh. Right. Midlife crisis, shock, culture shock. Awakening in the mirror. What day is it? How did I get these wrinkles? How did I lose this hair? How did I, how did I.

Oli: How did I. Yeah.

Ford: And before we know it, we’re 55-65-75-80…if we make it that long.

Ultimately, we’re all going to die, and we need to make the most of life.

What m was our life? What was our purpose? What was the experience that we had? Were we so inundated with titles and responsibilities and tasks that we forgot how to enjoy the process? And what I mean by process is the collective experience of being a human on this beautiful planet.

Oli: I was going to ask you for some final words of wisdom and to sum all this up, but I think in a way, you just kind of did. Like, ultimately, we’re all going to die, and we need to make the most of life. And only if you embrace that you don’t know when you’re going to die, are you going to be able to embrace the uncertainty and then actually start valuing your time enough to let go of all the bullshit, basically, and just focus on being present by being present in a way where you know that you could die tomorrow or even today, but that you might not.

And so even though time is limited and life is short, we don’t necessarily need to be, like, hedonistic or anything like that. We can actually just use the present moment to merge the past, present, and future, if that makes sense, by kind of navigating what arises in alignment with our vision.

But only if you know that you’re going to die, really, are you going to face and have the awareness to realize that that is coming. And that’s when you start asking some of these bigger questions, I guess, about the human condition and what it means to truly be human and to accept that humanity and then do something with it. So, yeah, sorry, I got lost there. I was just kind of dreaming in my own words…

Ford: Really good. And I think what’s so cool about it is that you mentioned be human. 8 billion. As we indicated in our conversation today, if you ask any of those individuals, what does it mean to be human? E

very single individual is going to have a different response in all the languages and all the cultures and all the regions of the world. What does it mean to be human? You will have 8 billion different answers. I think that’s the beauty, that’s the power of that word, is we know who we are, so let’s just be who we are.

Oli: Just be. Basically, that sums it all up. Do you have any actual final words of wisdom? Like if you were going to sum all this up, if that’s even possible, how would you do it? And, also, can you remind people of your website and where they can find you if they want to – I don’t know – have a coaching call or anything like that?

Ford: Absolutely. And again, Oli, I appreciate the platform, man, the microphone and the headphones. It’s always a cool opportunity to know different thought processes and experiences that I’ve had. Bouncing you as a mirror has been a lot of fun. So thank you again for having me on your show.

I think to sum this up is what we’ve said: Life is short and why not maximize the opportunity that we’ve been given? It’s a pretty special experience in my opinion. Maybe biased, but I do love the human experience. I’m quite obsessed with it, hence why I’ve gone so deep into this field. People can find me on my website. First name, last name F-O-R-D-D-Y-K-E. It’s forddyke.com.

Also on LinkedIn, of course, I’m an active user. Send me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Schedule a virtual coffee and just discuss potential collaboration opportunities. But Oli, thanks again, man. I really enjoyed this conversation today.

Oli: I appreciate it, Ford. The feeling is more than mutual. This has been like, awesome. So thank you so much. I’ll share all your links and stuff in the show notes, but yeah, thanks, it’s awesome.

Ford: Thank you, Oli.

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