Issue 384 - Mon 18th Sep 2006

Hi,
I hope everything is ok where you are.

My return to marathon training after my strain has brought up material for 2 articles, but I can't decide whether to make them into one or not.

Last week saw me suffering with shin splints for the first time, and some quick online research showed me that there are plenty of searches done for that subject, 3-6 keyword phrases.
This means it shouldn't be that hard to optimise a page for those phrases, and rank well.
The visitors would then get the helpful content, created by myself, and bingo, free traffic.

That traffic can then be monetised in a few ways.
Sometimes it can be as simple as that.
I think I'll call the article 'Shocking Shin Splints'.

Today though, I'll use the material for an article called 'The Groin Groin Grass of Home.'
I was going to call it 'From One Groin to Another', but the Groin Groin Grass title is a more pleasing way to feature 2 groins.

Regular readers will know that I strained my right groin, and I took a few weeks off training to let it recover.
I'm still not 100% sure that it wasn't my arsing around when playing bass that did it instead of the running, but there we are.

Speaking of 100%, I also wasn't sure that the injury had totally gone when I resumed training.
I took the first couple of sessions very gingerly, and was pleasantly surprised that my right groin felt fine.

Here's the thing - after a couple of sessions, I started to feel a twinge in my *left* groin.
'Interesting,' I thought, which was just about all I could do until I got home, as I 've mentioned before, groin fondling in public is not to be advised.

I quite enjoyed the twinge, because it made me consider the way the brain works, bringing a smile to my face.

The concept of pain is the brain interpreting the messages it is fed from the rest of the body.
The original pain in my right groin told me that something was wrong, and allowed me to address the problem before it became much worse.
When I got the pain in my left groin, which may have been psychosomatic, my brain concentrated on that, and stopped looking for a pain message about my right groin.

Can you see where I'm going with this?
Our brain interpretations can be a wonderful tool to help us, but it is easy to get our brain used to these messages, so much so that body messages can then be misinterpreted.

So it was pain from another part of my body that broke the cycle of waiting for pain messages about my right groin.

As I say, now I am in the midst of shin pain, but that's another story.
With habit and practice, we can build solid pathways in our brain's message network, embedding ways to act and ways to think.

We can use this to develop good habits, and break down old ones.
In fact we use this process all the time, we just don't do it consciously, so we need to be careful not to develop bad habits!

Ok, that's it for this week, have a think about what bad messages you may be ingraining into your brain, and to help break out of it, just consider my groins!

Have a good week.
'Til Next Time,
Health and Happiness,
Gordon
Get my self-improvement book at:
http://www.transformyourlifenow.com