I’m at work with the craziest, meanest sugar headache that I’ve had in months, and I’m absolutely ecstatic. I ate a muffin and this was the result.

Now while you might be wondering if I have an affinity for piercings, dental drilling without Novocaine or brain freezes, there is actually a rational reason why I’m thrilled about this. It’s because it means that I’m becoming sensitive to sugar again.

Yes, for quite some time, and I mean quite some time, I have been eating like crap, and one of the first thing that happens when you eat like crap is that you desensitize to sugar, which allows you to eat a ton of it, hoards of it, mountains of it, all of the time. You get the picture, sugar desensitivity is sort of like the evil baby brother of insulin resistance and we know where that leads.

So I’m thrilled because while I’ve been working absolutely crazy hours, I’ve begun to commit myself to a few basic things that I know are tried and true (heck, I’ve been successfully using them with clients for years) and will help me to get back to the Coach Adam of new.

Now I’m not going to go into goals setting, which is a particularly favorite topic of mine, but I will say that writing down your goals and then publishing your goals are two very important steps in the process. You also might notice that my goals are not outcome goals, they are process goals. I’m happy to go into the difference between the two if anyone cares to ask, but suffice it to say that if you achieve all of your process goals, your outcome goals are essentially faite complete.

The chart you see above displays the basic process goals for weight management that I have used for years with my athletes:

• Eat every three hours
• Write down everything you eat
• Eat fresh whole foods
• Avoid junk foods and sweets
• Eat protein first at every meal
• Do a minimum of 45-mins of cardio each day
• Do resistance training
• Sleep a minimum of seven hours

I also added in a couple more goals specific to me including stretching daily and then walking the 1.5-miles each way to the train for a little extra outdoor fun.

Now being the intelligent soul that you are, you can see that I’m just getting started and it looks like I’ve sucked in most all of the categories. And that’s the cool thing about process goals, they’re binary, you either did or did not accomplish it within the time frame you set. And in most cases during my first week, I didn’t fully accomplish those goals, and there is not a half check mark for not fully accomplishing it, so I get no credit. That said, I have gotten credit where I’ve simply done what needs to be done with most of my focus so far having been on establishing a routine around my running. And happily I’ve done pretty well with this. And while I’ve been sucking at the other stuff, we all know that this is interrelated and establishing one routine certainly helps with the others.

You might be thinking, “Uh, you have ‘don’t eat crap’ as one of your process goals and this entire post is about eating a muffin and furthermore you’re excited about it”. And you’d be right to think that, except what you may be missing is that while I haven’t been nearly perfect…ok, my diet still sucks, the good news is that my body is coming around to help. Today, for the first time, when I ate that muffin, I felt like crap. No, not like I felt guilty, I mean I genuinely felt like crap with my head killing me, and that’s because of the running routine that I’ve gotten back into and the fact that while I might have had one thing that was crap each day last week, it was still an improvement from my prior behavior of eating dinner at the office at 11:30PM from the vending machine.

Now I know that if I continue to eat sugar, the headaches will eventually go away because I’ll desensitize to them again, or I could enjoy the misery for just a little while longer and remember that running and exercise have the same effect as eating sugar on my insulin levels. So if I can get out of here at a reasonable hour and get a run in, then that too will help to get rid of this headache.

Hopefully I’ll choose the latter.

I recently read a post by Jim Storer, entitled Five Questions to Ask a Social Media Expert which identified five questions you would want to ask of a so-called socail media expert before engaging them to help you with your strategy, or I supposed before hiring them to work for your company.

The five questions were:

1. Do you have a blog?
2. How many comments do you average per blog post?
3. Have you ever managed a community?
4. When did you get started in community/social media?
5. Should I have a blog?

Commenters then added even seven more, including:

1. Why are you positioning yourself as only knowing one facet of business/communications? (from Jennifer Leggio via Twitter)
2. How long have you been on Twitter and how do you use it? If they say to sell things, then don’t talk to them further. (from Jason Peck)
3. Who have you worked with in the past? Were they successful? (from Sean Bohan)
4. Do you have an “war stories” from your past clients? (from Sean Bohan)
5. What tools do you use regularly? (from Alex Jones)
6. What tools have you seen or used that didn’t quite make it and why do you think it happened? (from Alex Jones)
7. What are the top 5 social sites you would say are essential to know about in social media? (from Eric Mertz via Twitter)

While I think these are all interesting questions, I’m not sure I understand why the information request for social media should be any different than for any other type of consulting or advisory type engagement, albeit with some slightly different twists for this specific subject.

If taking this approach, then the questions I would ask expect to be asked would include:

• Who are you? Why do you feel you are uniquely qualified to be helping us to address this issue?
• Why should we be considering the use of social media?
• What is the breadth of your capabilities and experiences?
• Specifically, in which area(s) of social media is your expertise? (e.g., SEO, community development, community management, vendor selection, strategy, business case development, feasibility analysis, assessment, design, implementation, measurement and monitoring, business intelligence, systems integration, marketing, online marketing, operations and use of business intelligence in operations, enterprise applications, etc…)
• Where have you done this before?
• What was the impact?
• What is the extent of your network to bring additional resources to bear?
• Do you have access to peer benchmarking data?
• What do you expect to achieve?
• What is your point of view on the areas in which you have demonstrated experiences and success?
• What reports/thought leadership have you published? What was your point of view, what positions did you support or refute? How did you support your research?
• What is your availability?
• Are you the same people that will be delivering the work or are you just a customer service/account management person?
• Are you part of a team and if so who is that team comprised of?
• In which industries and sectors have you applied your services?
• Fees, Rates, hours, etc…?

I think all of the personal stuff asked above about your activity on the web is interesting fodder for conversations, but it is secondary to the services you’ve already delivered and your actual experiences. Even more important is understanding and describing the impact your services have had, because that shows that you are vested in their success. In short, where you have done the same or similar work before and what was the result?

Perhaps it’s because this space is still so new and so many folks don’t have actual experiences that they need to rely on a more general description of awareness of social media – and by definition, that means that you aren’t an expert, you may be a knowledgeable enthusiast, but you are not an expert.

I am an expert in exercise physiology and endurance training, and I am an expert in business strategy and strategic communications and I can provide solid and compelling responses to the questions above in those areas to support that. I can have a targeted conversations backed up with analytical reasoning and quantitative support around those issues – it goes far beyond cocktail conversations and enticing rhetoric.

As a part of business strategy and communications, I have had numerous conversations with organizations on how to begin to incorporate social media into their overall strategy, but I do not consider myself to be an expert – I invite the experts into the conversation – the right ones for the right conversations, for example, how many reading this actually know what to do with the information that they collect in an online community? How to set up systems so that the information is incorporated into an overall business intelligence strategy? How to systemetize this into the organization’s current Oracle or SAP implementations? How to build in specific security and identify management plans to ensure the integrity of the system?

Individually, you don’t have to be an expert in all of these areas but in today’s business discussions, I find it increasingly apparent that you need to “bring” experts to the table in more of, if not all of, these areas when you are talking about social media and business. That means that I’ll bring a community management expert into the discussion if that’s the issue we want to address, or I’ll bring a network analysis expert to the table of that’s where the conversation goes. But I’ll bring the experts, not just the enthusiastic participants.

Our friend Adam Tinkoff, The Zen Runner, recently published an article in a UK publication entitled Running Free, in a column called Both Sides Of The Track. He was profiled as the Zen side of the argument of running. His opponent is Gary Palmer, a well known UK exercise physiologist and endurance coach. Gary took the scientific side of the debate.

This is not a new discussion topic and one that people come back to more often than not as they progress through their evolution of running, swimming, biking, rowing, kayaking, cross country skiing, triathlon or any other type of endurance activity that becomes more than just a sport, and certainly a significant part of, if not a way of, life.

Both authors raise some very interesting issues although the lead into the debate seems to create the impression that the discussion will be focused on the scientific vs the zen debate over sports nutrition which in my mind it doesn’t really address. That said, there are some really useful take-a-ways for newbies and reminders for veterans, and it’s always great to reflect back on where we are in our own evolution because like most things, the pendulum swings back and forth on fairly regular intervals and knowing where you are in that arc can be really beneficial in finding peace and balance within your life and your training.

Check out Adam Tinkoff’s “Both Sides Of The Track” article and let us know what you think.