Mental Fitness

Gimmies

Golf is a walk in the park with a small objective. If gimmies are illegal, why are conceded putts common?

What’s the harm in an unquestioned finish? Does picking up that “unmissable” putt really save much time? There are unspoken social factors at play, but so few people are great at golf. Why not relish a satisfying sound of that golf ball dropping into the tiny cup?

Extra Shot

May your feet stay in the fairway.

There’s no harm in keeping things casual to share time however you want, but tacit assumptions do leave room for misunderstandings. The truth is we all give gimmies to be given a break on putts we might miss ourselves.

When we keep score, see how it feels to play without gimmies. Appreciate the missed putts and count those extra strokes. The unequivocal finish feels good and builds confidence for when gifts aren’t up for grabs.

Brewed From Within
#110 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Waiting Rooms

The waiting room is that season where you’re not where you used to be, but you’re not yet where you want to go. It’s the in-between zone. The pause before your name gets called. The place where you’re preparing for something, whether or not you think you know what’s next.

If we move our egos aside just long enough, we can see the beauty here. The waiting room is where character develops. Where preparation happens. Where we create, reflect, and release what no longer serves us.

But we want to bypass it. We grow impatient and intolerant. We think our will, our force, can push us through faster. It doesn’t work like that. You’ll only exhaust and burn yourself out. It’s easy to watch others get called before you. The mental chatter starts: When will it be my turn? Will I ever be ready? Why them and not me?

The problem with watching others is that you have no idea where they are on their journeys. You don’t know where they’ve been, where they’re being called to next, or what’s waiting for them when they get there. Their timeline is not a reflection of yours. It never was.

Everyone gets called at exactly the right time for their highest good. Not a moment sooner. Not because the universe is withholding opportunity, but because love doesn’t set us up to fail. The waiting room keeps us from walking through a doorway we’re not ready for. It’s protective. We wouldn’t hand a nine-year-old the car keys just because they felt ready to drive. Your higher wisdom knows better. That child stays in the waiting room until they’re equipped for what’s next.

EXTRA SHOT

Watch Vanessa narrate this riff on-stage!

No one wants to be in the waiting room, but everyone must pass through it. These pause points aren’t punishments; they’re where we catch our breath, integrate what we’ve learned, and prepare for what’s coming. To often, we take this wait personally. Like it’s evidence we’re not good enough, not ready enough, not deserving enough. We get frustrated. Resentful. Sometimes we even give up.

But your job is to sit in the tension of not being where you want to be without making it mean something’s wrong with you. When we are able to loosen the grip, the pause can be strategic. You can recalibrate here. Gain mastery here. Rest here. The waiting room is the bulb that leads to the flower, fertilized by your patience and who you choose to become while you wait.

EXTRA SHOT

This contribution was written by Vanessa McNeal. Vanessa is a social architect and keynote speaker who helps us transform the nervous system to lead through love.

Life is full of waiting rooms. When the time comes, we move forward and eventually we find ourselves in another waiting room. We create suffering if we believe we’ll arrive one day at a place with no more growth, no more waiting.

That’s not how it works. What would we learn by skipping the journey to reach the destination? How would we develop patience, self-trust, or resilience?

Right now is transitory, but micro-moments add up and coalesce into the story of our comprehensive progress. Waiting rooms are where we become the person who’s ready and open to what comes next.

Brewed From Within
#97 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Conversationalized

Humans have long used technology to communicate. As we taught machines to see, learn, speak, and move, computers were invited into the conversation.

ChatUX is technology that helps computers speak our language with a conversational experience supported by deep learning and large language models (LLMs). ChatUX makes AI easier to enjoy with a potential for accurate, unbiased, and meaningful interactions. This allows the seven types of AI to be so much more than pointless help desks, deceptive lead generators, misleading content, or fake followers on social media. Instead, the objective is to access endless insight with an ability to translate it effectively.

When upgraded this way, ChatUX bridges trust channels to personalize education, enhance business efficiencies, assist customers with empathy, deliver meaningful mental health therapy, and make past tasks irrelevant, all while parlaying multimodality so anyone can effectively express ideas.

As the way we communicate evolves, improvements geared for safety and customizability will keep technology in the conversation. The freedom of speech is a complex topic, but thoughtful guardrails that identify dangerous rhetoric help to keep everyone safe without unwanted censorship. Alongside responsible policymaking, influence layers help to customize ChatUX. This can add depth to personalize an interaction or to provide internal teams with a more reliable source of truth.

With technology conversationalized, prompt engineering became an evolving professional field of reconstructing inputs to optimize outputs. The demand for a brand-new mode of communication reminds us that real skills are required to remain relevant. Fortunately, when it comes to technology, an increased effort here often decreases effort there. In this case, learning to communicate with technology may require new resources, but ChatUX bolsters a paradigm shift where access to knowledge becomes pedestrian.

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When the cost of information is zero, willpower becomes a path to wealth.

We prepare our children with communication skills while instilling kindness, honesty, empathy, integrity, and so much more. From the words we use to the interactions we share, positive traits can be ingrained into technology for good.

Brewed From Within
#81 📖 Technology

By Ben McDougal, ago

Creation vs. Consumption

Before the music, before the crowd, there’s one voice asking a simple question: Can you hear me? Creation starts here. Not with a perfect line or the finished song. But with the smallest test of presence.

EXTRA SHOT
This contribution was written by Corey Dion Lewis. Corey is a leader in healthcare who creates impact networks where care is equitable and shared far beyond the clinic.

Creation over consumption sounds like a slogan, but for most of us it’s a balancing act. Consumption is how we learn from the world around us. It’s also a comforting remedy that helps us reset. This supplement for the soul keeps us tranquil, but in excess consumption mutates into a drug devoured by a subconscious addiction.

We are all imaginative, and being creative makes us happier, but we live in a world where algorithms reward spectators. This has us scrolling, watching, and absorbing everybody else’s thoughts, pain, and opinions before we check in with our own. This does something to our mind, and it’s not neutral. Consumption without creation leads to overload. The American Psychological Association reports that heavy, unfiltered exposure to news and digital content is associated with higher stress, anxiety, and burnout. There’s just too much coming in. This feeds unfair comparisons. Suddenly, everyone else’s life is your own measuring stick. We start to feel like our voice, our story, and our unique angles do not matter as much as the polished content we continuously consume.

As the emcee of your own life, there’s no time to hope someone hands you the mic. We must choose ourselves, make sacrifices to unite an audience, step into the light, and even when our voice is untested, speak to add energy into the room. Whether we succeed or learn, such personal progression brings us to life as we feel the thrill of creation.

That is mental health in action. When we create, we regulate. When we speak, we release. When we name what we feel, it loses some of its power over us. Pressure turns into expression. More thoughts, often the hard and heavy ones, become art. The sounds, images, pages, and other multidimensional content become part of our creative practice. Creation is the path to descriptively understand systems, parts, processes, and how we make things better.

The beauty is, it doesn’t have to be dramatic or impressive. Drawing, even badly, reduces stress and eases anxiety. Gardening can do the same. Cooking with intention—chopping, seasoning, tasting—pulls you into the present. All forms of creativity ask your brain to be active, engaged, and creative. This produces positive emotions.

Creation builds a sense of mastery and progress. This strengthens self-esteem and resilience. It gives you a channel for self-expression, so emotions and experiences are being worked with, not just numbed by distractions. Over time, crafted creations become the highlights of your stories. These bookmarks add depth to future moments and drive toward a joyful side of our own mental health continuum.

While consumption can bump our spirits more toward a depressive state, the goal is not zero consumption. Some of what you consume is nourishing. It feeds your ideas, your learning, and your rest. The balancing act is spending more of your day making, expressing, and contributing than you do scrolling, binging, or buying.

We don’t have to change everything overnight. We don’t need a ten-step plan or a perfect morning routine. We need one small moment each day where we choose to create instead of consume—one page, one sketch, one idea voiced, one boundary set, one feeling named. Creation over consumption is not a rule; it’s a relationship we build with our own voice. Express one true thing in your own way, knowing we need you and await your creations.

Brewed From Within
#97 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago

Front & Center

Music massages the mind.
Live music brings the body in-tune.

As the mind and body respond to a beat, a pulsing pattern guides us to euphoria. In that state, we access elevated areas of the mind. Music anywhere can provide a version of this, but the loudest line is when we’re front and center.

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Listen to EDM when reading this. Visit the Museum on BenMcDougal.com to get a jump start from the author’s wild filmmaking.

Showing up for live music is half the battle. Once you’ve arrived, grab bottled water and float around the venue to expose a variety of views. This takes practice, as wading in a crowd is an art form. As we trap time with content, these pit stops are also a chance to capture angles that set the scene for storytelling later. Securing drinks at a busy bar, spotting an odd perspective, finding a way into VIP areas, and vibing with strangers is all part of the performance.

With the venue scouted, it may be time to push. Your destination is the madness that is front and center.

Find an entry point and wiggle in. There’s no rush. Be considerate, but you will need to get physical, so don’t be surprised when you’re thrown a frustrated look. Before anyone can get angry, dance with these strangers. Share space and give anyone a reason to smile with conspicuous kindness. With that position fully admired, keep moving.

As we maneuver toward front and center, the mob tightens. Once the main act arrives, it’ll be harder to achieve front and center. Time bravery wisely. Arriving early is easier, but you’ll have to survive longer. Wait if you want, but then the push will be harder. As we cut through the crowd, look for party people shorter than you, creases between groups, or wait until someone expires and then take their place.

When you’ve landed front and center, there’s no room to move within this nucleus of humanity, but there’s nowhere else we’d rather be! Stay strong. Feed into the flow that surrounds you, trap time with stable content, meditate for teleportation later, appreciate outlaw logic, and ride this euphoria to a full escape.

Push to feel the front gate if you must, and always stay here longer than you should. When you’ve sensed absolutely everything, begin your descent. Shimmy straight back to remain centered as you politely let others move forward.

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Music decorates time.

It’s impossible to sleep after experiencing front and center. At home, use the earned insomnia to stitch a story together. The faster you tell this story, the wider it will spread when everyone wakes up looking to relive their own euphoria. There’s nothing that compares to being the artist onstage, but this is a very active way to spectate. 

Extra gears and resources are required to arrive, find, and hold down the front and center, but that’s obvious. Two less apparent attributes help fans feel this dazzling splendor. First, a certainty in knowing you belong. This boldness may need to be faked at first, but with repetition, pure confidence comes from grasping the radical effort required to get here. Along with knowing we belong, honest self-awareness ensures we know our own limits. How wild can we live when it’s safe and so easy to conform? Push beyond your limits, but there’s no time for short-term mistakes that leave a long-term burden.

As we age, co-pilots are harder to find, so test yourself with solo missions. The lightness is liberating, but beware. When you consistently create content, you may land a media or even an onstage pass. If you manifest this heaven on Earth, poise is tested. Remain affable, make all feel appreciated, and know you are not the show. Be a daring shadow, embrace every single second, and ship the art to feel euphoria all over again.

Brewed From Within
#104 📖 Life & Happiness

By Ben McDougal, ago