How To Stay Focused When You're Out Of Your 'Zone'
Zoom out and count to 80.
. . . being on the road throws in your face aspects of your life that you wish you were better at or want to progress more fully. It then gives you the mental space to figure out how to approach those aspects the right way.
Hey reader,
Last week I returned from a 15-day trip spent primarily on a splitboarding expedition in Kyrgyzstan, where we camped six-deep in a yurt for a week and toured the Tien Shan Mountains each day. It was incredible. But the remoteness of the location gave me a lot of time to think — and today’s essay is the result.
I hope you enjoy and find a takeaway to apply to your own travels.
Community shoutouts
Welcome to the 16 new subscribers since last week’s dispatch! Today’s newsletter is a personal deep dive, not uncommon, and I’m glad you’re here for it.
My longtime buddy John has launched a Substack called Bleeding China, in which he turns his own adventure of teaching English in China into a screenplay-style narrative of living abroad with hemophilia. It’s phenomenal, and I highly recommend checking it out.
Now, let’s tick some boxes.
How To Stay Focused When You're Out Of Your "Zone"
One of the most thought-provoking (and anxiety-inducing) aspects of international travel is that it removes you from your typical zones of comfort. Stepping away from your day-to-day forces you to look at your routines while you’re not currently involved in them, and from outside your normal thought process.
This provides a 30,000-foot-view of your daily life and what needs to change.
To be sure, looking at your life from outside the box, when you aren’t in your typical position of “control,” can be a total mind f*ck. A changed perspective makes it easy to identify problems and shortcomings or to ruminate on “cringe moments” — conversations or situations that you may not have handled the way you should have but hadn’t realized until you looked back with a fresh perspective.
These moments of rumination tend to come when you’re least prepared for them. Any who have spent significant time abroad, solo, have had moments of panic: “What the hell am I doing over here?”
And that’s when it hits.
Over the past decade+ of regular travel for work and recreation, I’ve had plenty of these moments. They tend to come when I’m alone in a hotel room, missing my family and friends and familiar comforts.
Rather than spinning down a rabbit hole of anxiety, I’ve taught myself (slowly, over the years) to use these opportunities to conduct an “80/20 analysis” — also known as the Pareto Principle — on my life. This rule implies that 80 percent of the gain comes from 20 percent of the effort, or as I’ve come to apply it, 80 percent of what’s working in my life comes from 20 percent of what I’m doing (for more on this principle, check out this article from Mark Manson, author of uber-popular book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck).
By honing in on that 20 percent, you can make every aspect of your situation more efficient by focusing on what’s actually driving results. The rest is just noise.
In the context of what I’m talking about here — being on the other side of the world, looking back at myself from a place far removed — the goal is to find things I want to update, add, or eliminate, in order to be a better, more effective person in all pursuits, both personal and professional.
Step 1: Zoom out
In 2016 I signed up for Headspace, a guided meditation app that walks users through 10-minute sessions of mindfulness. Seven years later I’m still no zen master. But one thing I took away from the app is the concept of zooming out and looking back down at yourself.
The goal is to see yourself as part of a larger whole, as part of a living organism that is bigger than one. By zooming out and looking back at yourself in the moment, it’s easier to see that your immediate stress is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Most of the things you’re worried about are overblown, including any in-the-moment anxiety.
You can then take that perspective to calm the mind and look at what is directly in front of you with confidence, whether you’re on a crazy backcountry adventure or trying to find your footing in a foreign city.
I’ve done this at the top of intense snowboard lines and once took a break while biking The Whole Enchilada in Moab to collect myself in this manner after a particularly rough stretch of trail. It’s also immensely helpful in those solo hotel moments.
Step 2: Make a list of action points to enact upon return
Zooming out occurs somewhat naturally when you’re removed from your routine. The primary way I’ve found to harness this technique to reign in anxiety is to build a list of action points. These are aspects of my life that I plan to address when I return home. Some are quick — buy those new sleep-aid gummies I saw on Instagram — while others reach deeper into my lifestyle or routines. Many are ways to progress whatever it is I’m currently working on or doing that I want to continue doing while at home.
I tend to have this list going throughout a trip and add to it as things come to me. Here is an example of the list I developed while in Kyrgyzstan/Turkey earlier this month:
Action points:
Start researching hard boot setup
New beacon - BCA 3 at least -- and longer probe
Keep better snack bag in pack. More chews. Grab stuff whenever get chance.
Trip resume - X
Sleep gummies in photos - X
Consider a dramatic restructuring of social media, particularly Instagram, to make it reflect a portfolio. Most personal stuff is gone; highlight work with photos, video, and then url written out in text.
Book a day tour or small trip on glaciated terrain to gain more experience roping up and using crampons, dealing with those hazards.
Most of these points are easily doable and are things I could very easily have thought of without venturing far and wide. For whatever reason, though, they never happened, or — as is the case with the desire to switch to a hard boot setup for split touring — I didn’t realize how badly I needed to act until I was in the moment (seven straight days touring in soft boots had my ankles throbbing).
The 80/20 rule typically applies to these action point lists because much of what is already happening in your life, or mine, is likely already working, but could be better optimized. It takes being removed from your typical situations to see what those things are and how to best act on them. Small action points help to take the 20 percent that is driving the best results and expand it to a higher percentage by making processes better and pushing out things that aren’t working.
I’ll share an example of the summer I spent in Southeast Asia in 2017. For most of this time, I was in Bali. I was 33. For the three years since I’d hit 30, I’d had two very significant life goals that I was struggling to reach:
Restructure my diet to be healthier and better optimized for outdoor recreation and general health, without adding additional factory-farmed meats or poorly-sourced supplements/products/food items.
Restructure my approach to drinking alcohol in order to be an adult who enjoys a drink rather than someone who regularly drinks with the intention of progressing a buzz until the end of the night.
I’d tried so many approaches to both. While I was in Bali, progress on each happened organically. This is how:
Portion sizes are far smaller there than in the United States. Without having to cut myself off mid-meal, I naturally taught myself to eat less at a time. Food is fresh and largely plant-based. Also, because I wasn’t at home with a snack cabinet readily available, I snacked less throughout the day.
The expat and digital nomad culture in Ubud is built around wellness and self-progression. Nightlife is inherently limited, and social interactions tend to happen around events at the coworking space, hiking, rafting, surfing, etc. rather than meeting for drinks.
About halfway through the trip, I began taking notes on what was happening. I was eating fresh fruit first thing every morning, a practice I committed to keeping. I was meeting friends through the coworking space, and while going to dinner or happy hour was common, our relationships were based on travel experiences rather than drinking.
I began thinking about my friends back home and realized that in many cases, friendships I’d had since high school or college were built around partying, and even as we’d gotten older and regardless of whether we were snowboarding buddies or whatever, it’s tough to reframe a friendship beyond what you’ve always done together.
I committed to being mindful of this when making friends going forward.
Being away from my typical routines at home allowed me to have these experiences and put together the differences. Note-taking and action lists helped.
It doesn’t always have to be so serious
Another thing that struck me on this recent trip was a burning desire to restructure my wardrobe. While in transit on the front end of the trip, I became lost on a connection in O’Hare airport while trying to find the international departures terminal (turns out, you gotta take a bus). While staring at the departures board in agony after posted signs failed to direct me to my gate, I met a Swedish girl in the same situation. We ran around together in circles for a few minutes and both must have looked quite helpless because a local guy approached and offered to help.
The point isn’t my lack of airport wayfinding skills, but that this woman, about my age, was so well-dressed that I felt like a total slob standing next to her in a pair of Vans and a Roark hat. I developed on the plane a way to up my “aging mountain bro” style just enough to where (I think) I will not feel underdressed the next time I meet someone who is so well put together, but in a way that is also not unattainable for a sloppy guy like me. I made many notes and when I got home, I ordered a bunch of new clothes.
Hopefully, this pans out.
Regardless, the action point list comes through again for the win — and it took me being away from my norm to feel the desire to make this change.
As for myself, I’ve noticed significant benefits from making these small changes that I failed to initiate at home, even when I knew they needed to happen. Being out on the road helps me disconnect and when I return I am somehow able to better enact and maintain these changes because I saw the need for them from the other side, from a different perspective.
These action lists also help to bring a part of my travel thought process home with me. This adds a dose of excitement to a daily routine that can sometimes seem mundane and repetitive. In essence, when I’m traveling, I make a note to prioritize these small things that I fail to do or convince myself I’m too busy to do when I’m at home. Then, once I get home, I follow through, if only because I don’t want to let my “travel self” down.
Many of these tasks are similar action points that take anywhere from five minutes to an hour to do at home but make a huge difference. I tend to do them at night after my daughter goes to sleep, and after I’ve finished all other responsibilities for the day.
I had an idea on this trip to create a “snowboard expedition resume” to have on hand for guides or media hosts of future trips (as seen in the example list above). I wrote that up this week.
To summarize all of this jargon, being on the road throws in your face aspects of your life that you wish you were better at or want to progress more fully. It then gives you the mental space to be able to approach those aspects the right way.
Mountain Remote news and further reading
The practice of zooming out I described above is also known as “distanced thinking.” Here’s more.
This challenge to free up your time that I published here last year seems relevant to today’s essay.
We close this week with the latest No Blackout Dates podcast episode, in which I read the article I wrote about a heli-ski trip to Northern British Columbia.
See you next week!