Author: Craig Constantine

Alan Tran: Journaling, Reflection, and Looking Ahead →

Published August 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 11  ·  

Alan Tran: Journaling, reflection and looking ahead

How does the process of reflection and self-improvement shape personal growth and teaching methodologies?

Alan Tran is a parkour coach and collaborator from Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s the founder of Enso Movement and is a director for both the Art of Retreat and the United States Parkour Association. Alan continues to serve the parkour and movement community through active service and outreach.

I carved out the space to de-evolve and reinvent myself. In many ways, it wasn’t intentional by any means, at the start of my personal practices. But in many ways, it was a way for me to redefine who I was, who I wanted to be, and where my work would lead to.

~ Alan Tran (29:36)

The discussion weaves through themes of reflection, journaling, and the impact of vulnerability on personal growth and teaching. Through daily journaling practices, the importance of documenting emotions, achievements, and challenges emerges as a way to identify growth and patterns over time. Cultural connections, like the preservation of family history through photography, also highlight how past experiences inform one’s values and identity.

The conversation also explores innovative teaching techniques inspired by training a dog using communication buttons. This segues into reflections on coaching methodologies, the value of structured progressions, and how spontaneity plays a role in both teaching and personal development. By examining challenges like preparing for workshops under time constraints and balancing intuition with structure, the dialogue emphasizes growth through experimentation and self-awareness.

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Self-perfection →

Published August 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 11  ·  ,

Every man, from the king to the poorest pauper, should seek his own perfection, because only self-perfection improves mankind.

~ Confucius

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Your best →

Published August 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 11  ·  ,

To me, quality means doing the best you can with what you have to work with. Your environment. Your equipment. Your voice. Your experience. Your level of comfort. All of those things are part of your overall “working with” toolset.

~ Evo Terra from, «https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/making-your-commitment-to-quality-podcasting»

This is something I often struggle with. Terra is writing about podcasting specifically—something I spend a lot of time doing—but I have this problem more generally. It would serve me well to be thinking: Is this the best I can do now, with the tools, knowledge, situation, and skills I have now? If so, terrific! That’s great enough.

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Speak more →

Published August 10, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 10  ·  

If you want to stop a person from action, ask him to speak more on the topic. The more people speak, the less desire they have to act.

~ Thomas Carlyle

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Never how it actually goes →

Published August 10, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 10  ·  

This is one of the main obstacles to forming habits. Our hopeful idea of how it will go, and then our disappointment and frustration with ourselves when it doesn’t go that way.

~ Leo Babauta from, Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits – Zen Habits Website

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Nerd alert: I’ve always appreciated that Babauta takes the time to craft the URL paths (often called the “slug”) by hand. They’re not simply auto-generated from the titles of the posts. I love that this particular one, about perfectionism, has a single-word slug that contains the word “perfect”.

While writing this post I spun off to discover Grammar Monster. Yikes! Driven by my perfectionism, that’s the sort of thing that I could spend hours in. I backed away from it very slowly.

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Unwholesome incarnations →

Published August 9, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 9  ·  , ,

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. But he shouldn’t regret this entirely, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as any of us can be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be reached.

~ Marcel Proust

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It’s a lot of work →

Published August 9, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 9  ·  

Granted, cultivating a slipbox is a lot of work. This morning, as I regularly do, I was rereading journal entries. A year ago I had made note of a book, Trust Yourself, and how it had spurred some specific thinking. Finding mention of the book in my journal caused me to reflect on what I had written: Was it still accurate? Journaling for the win.

I had also made a little note, “(2tu1)” of the book’s slip in the slipbox. It took only a moment to flip there… and to discover I had written out 9 slips under the book with some take-aways and key learnings from the book. A crash refresher on the book, completely unbidden; A gift from my self-from years past.

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Opportunities to lose focus →

Published August 8, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 8  ·  ,

The first element to consider when creating a more realistic “ideal day” is that unlike Franklin, we have many more places to be and many more opportunities to lose focus. We have to account for this, not fight against it.

~ Maneesh Sethi

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This I hope for you →

Published August 8, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 8  ·  

This simplicity was disorienting in a way. Many times a day I would finish whatever activity I was doing, and realize there was nothing to do but consciously choose another activity and then do that. This is how I made my first bombshell discovery: I take out my phone every time I finish doing basically anything, knowing there will be new emails or mentions or some other dopaminergic prize to collect. I have been inserting an open-ended period of pointless dithering after every intentional task.

~ David Cain from, What I Learned During My Three Days Offline

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It is still uncommon for me to be without my phone. I have to admit that sometimes I carry it simply because I have a flat pince-nez stuck to the back of my phone. Recently it’s dawned on me that I have another, identical pair in a tiny flat case not stuck to my phone and I sometimes just carry those and not my phone. Regardless, you’ll never see me whip out my phone—unless we have a question, what’s the weather, where’s the nearest…, and so on. It’s a tool I sometimes use, like shoes.

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Thoughts on Conversation →

Published August 7, 2022  ·  All posts on Aug 7  ·  

A few weeks ago I finally got around to starting a dedicated newsletter for my thoughts on conversation over on called Open + Curious. This new, weekly newsletter is free to subscribers through Substack—you can read it on the web or via email.

Over on Substack I’m publishing more polished work. I’m sharing what I’ve learned and hopefully engaging in discussion.

The blog here at constantine.name remains the same; same posts, same quotes, same same. Here on the blog things are messy as I’m working with garage door up. There’s a lot of discovery and reflection happening here. If you’ve not been to the actual blog web site in a while, you may want to swing by my Projects Page to see what I’m up to.

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