Self Improvement Daily Podcast

A very natural emotion to feel, which is a derivative of fear, is a sense of worry. You might be worried for someone else’s safety, worried that things won’t go according to plan and create problems, or worried about the news you’re going to hear that is uncertain or might have serious implications.  

Whatever the case: Worrying isn’t helpful. It doesn’t offer any value. In fact it usually creates more problems.

Fear is meant to be an indicator and create awareness for the risk that something presents. Ultimately, fear is meant to inform your decision making and how you choose to navigate a situation. The problem is, when you’re feeling afraid you’re in a compromised emotional space. You can’t be purely objective about something because your state of mind is biased. This leaves you more vulnerable to misinterpreting or misunderstanding what you want to do because you’re being influenced by your emotions. But nonetheless, fear is a meaningful datapoint because it’s adding something meaningful to your decision making matrix.

Worry is different though. Worry is just a chronic, underlying fear that continues to linger after a decision has been made. It takes up your energy and attention but doesn’t lead to anything productive. Is you staying up all night going to actually help someone get home safe? Is you worrying about a medical diagnosis going to change the results of a test? Worrying doesn’t influence the result but it hijacks your experience.

When you notice yourself worrying, the better thing to do is to remind yourself of the choices you’ve made. Choosing not to intervene and tell your friend it’s dangerous to drive alone at night. Choosing to seek two medical opinions and make decisions on your healthcare once you have more information. Are there more things that could be done for these situations? Sure, and leveraging your ongoing fear to take action in those ways is valuable. But worrying for the sake of worrying isn’t productive.

In the case where you’ve made your decisions and have chosen that you don’t want to take further action, the antidote to worry is acceptance. To find agency and ownership in the situation because you’ve gotten involved to the extent that you’ve wanted to.

A personal example of this is: If I’m on an airplane and we start to hit some turbulence, it could be scary. But rather than worrying about the plane’s safety, I run through an internal checklist.

Do I want to say anything to the flight attendant? No.

Do I want to take over the plane myself so that I’m in control of my fate? No.

Is there anything I can contribute to influence the result of if the plane makes it or not? No.

At that point, I accept my fate. And I no longer feel nervous, anxious, or worried because it’s an emotion that doesn’t serve any purpose, and I get grounded in the ways I’m choosing to show up in the situation.

Now that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with you if you worry. Again, it’s a very natural thing to do. But what I wanted to offer today is a perspective around it so that you can process your worry and use your attention and energy in ways that are more valuable. 

We live our lives in our own minds. Our perception comes from our perspective, and since we can’t view the world in any other way, we don’t think to question it. But you are not your thoughts. 

Even though our thoughts are produced from our minds, they cannot be taken as truth. They’re biased by years of conditioning and teaching from unverified, unregulated sources. And it’s hard to understand because we don’t know any different. Like an animal that’s lived in captivity, we don’t have the perspective to imagine anything else. But that doesn’t guarantee our thoughts are right or accurate. It simply our best interpretation of events that's filtered through the small slice of consciousness we’ve acquired.

I’d heard this insight before but it landed again in conversation with a friend and mentor of mine, Larry Kesslin. This is what he said:

“I always believed that my thoughts were me, and for 61 years of my life that’s how I lived. And that I’ve been through a few experiences that have gotten me outside of my being, and that I’m more than my thoughts and I’m more than my feelings.

So in the first chapter of the book I talk about this concept that we’re three parts: We are mind, body, and soul. And our soul is the guide.

Our soul is the sky, our thoughts are the clouds, and the weather is our feelings. The sky just sees the clouds and experiences the feelings. It is not the clouds and it is not the weather. So who are we?

And as soon as I realized that I am more than my thoughts and feelings, I started to gain agency over my thoughts and my feelings. When I could get to the point where I’d have a thought and say ‘I don’t like that thought, next’, life started to change.”

What I make of this is, we can acquire a whole new perspective when we separate from our thoughts and feelings, and observe them. They’re not you, they’re just things being expressed by you externally. So when you have a negative, scary, or disempowering thought that doesn’t serve you, you don’t need to believe it. And because of that you don’t need to get so critical or judgmental that there’s something wrong with you. You can choose to believe what you want to believe about yourself, and act from that frequency instead.

This is just a snippet from a longer conversation I had with Larry where we go into way more detail about his new book, ‘The Joy Molecule’, and he tells some incredible stories about how he and others have found a deeply fulfilling joy.

Watch a recording of that conversation!

Order a copy of 'The Joy Molecule'

One of the most foundational ingredients to building a thriving and fulfilling life is having a growth mindset. Tom Bilyeu argues that having a growth mindset is evidenced in that you have the only belief that matters:

“If you believe that when you put time and energy into getting better at something, you’ll actually get better at that thing.” 

This one belief unlocks improvement in every  area of your life because it unlocks your ability to acquire the skills in whatever way is required to produce positive change. A growth mindset means that you’re in control of your fate and your future, not at the mercy of whatever you’re given. 

Taking the opposite perspective - if you believe that your results are fixed, predetermined, and unchangeable - then no matter how hard you try all attempts to improve are a waste of time. Why would anyone invest in anything if they didn’t think that they’d get what they want from it?  I wouldn’t either. This is what’s known as a fixed mindset and it cripples so many people. 

I bring this up because I want to help you recognize one subtle way that having a growth mindset shows up in the world. 

You know how some people are stubborn, adamant, and dictatorial in the way they approach things? How they have a ‘my way or the high way’ mentality where they think they know the right way to do something? Contrast that with someone who always thinks that there’s a better way to do something. They have good ideas and will advocate for them, but also have an open-mind to other possibilities. 

The way someone shows up to collaborative situations demonstrates whether they have a growth or fixed mindset.

For example, let’s say that you’re trying to load up a van for an event. Boss #1 has done it before knows the exact orientation that worked in the past, so they insist it’s packed exactly the same way again because it’s predictable and works. Boss #2 has similar experience, but is open to innovating and seeing if there are other configurations that are more favorable. Perhaps there’s a way to pack the van so that the passenger seat is open and you don’t need to take a separate car to the event.

Boss #1 has a fixed mindset that accepts reality as is, and doesn’t think to improve upon it. Boss #2 has a growth mindset and explores different options that can streamline the process, or create a better result from the same raw materials.

While you can’t control other people’s collaborative approach, you can be aware of your own. So get curious about how you receive new ideas, if you carefully consider them or not compared to the current ways of doing things, and learn something about how strong your growth mindset actually is versus what you believe it to be.

People are obsessed with having good habits, and for good reason. Good habits lead to consistent positive actions that generate the results (and realities) we envision for our lives. And while I agree that it’s important we have good habits if we want to be more successful, many people don’t actually know how habits work.

Fundamentally, a habit is an unconscious behavior pattern - a mental shortcut that makes you do things without having to think about it. It’s an evolutionary invention that ensures our limited attention and effort doesn’t get wasted on doing the same things over and over again. It’s an adaptation that helps us save our mental bandwidth for things that need to be thought through more.

So when people talk about focusing on building a new habit, what they actually mean is that they want to get consistent with a new action with the hope that the mind will learn to do it automatically and it becomes a habit. And the reason I make that distinction is because the process of getting to that point is one a little different than what you might expect. 

Starting any new action is going to feel hard to do. Our mind will want to hold onto the comfort and familiarity of the way things are, and in an attempt to do so will create resistance. This is commonly known as self-sabotage. That means we must overcome the headwind keeping us from taking action in order to follow through on it.

Most people’s approach to doing that is to use willpower, to grind their way through. But you’ve probably heard that willpower doesn’t work, and that’s because it has two limitations:

1) Willpower is finite and mental fortitude fatigues as it’s being used.

2) Willpower is a conscious process, so in the moments when you aren’t actively telling yourself to ‘push’, you won’t operate at the higher standard you want to.

Instead, the more sustainable intervention is to design your environment. You can architect a ‘wind at your back’ so that conscious action doesn’t require as much effort and you reach the threshold for action more consistently.

And that’s the thing. When you design your environment to support taking action and do so consistently, you’re training and repatterning your unconscious mind. You’re teaching yourself how you exist on a daily basis. Once that’s integrated at an identity level and within your belief system, then you start doing the thing that was once difficult by default. 

That’s what ultimately makes it a habit - the action happens automatically as a part of what you naturally do. And that’s your opportunity to get truly consistent with your best self practices. But we must first earn the right for something to become a habit, and we do that by designing our environment to support our effortful consistency with it until it becomes unconscious.

One of my favorite concepts in Napoleon Hill’s timeless classic ‘Think And Grow Rich’ is “the seed of equal or greater benefit”. 

Here’s the main idea: In everything that happens to you, desirable or not, there is always something better conspiring for you. 

It argues that what might appear to be a setback, challenge, or failure is actually a set up for something even better that you didn’t even realize - A lesson you didn’t know you needed to learn, an experience you didn’t know you needed to have, or an opportunity you didn’t even know you were missing. 

Napoleon Hill encourages you to have faith that there’s always a seed of equal or greater benefit at all times, and that it’s upon us to install a consciousness that can identify exactly what that might be.

For example, let’s say you’re filing for divorce. Something like that could feel like the biggest failure you’ve ever had in your life. The opportunity is to explore how that situation might be serving you, your future, and your personal evolution. The possibilities are endless for how devastation could turn into divinity. Now that’s not to say it’s not supposed to hurt, but to share that it has purpose.

Ultimately, this means that there’s no such thing as bad news. Everything at all times is working in your best interest. Either you get what you want or better! Everything that happens to us is a gift to us.

But, that’s not always material in the moment. Failure doesn’t turn into favor in a moment. And that’s why he calls it ‘a seed’.  Seeds take a while to grow, mature, and bear fruit. They lie latent underground and invisible until they sprout.

All this to say, just because things are conspiring for us does not mean that we have immediate evidence that it’s happening. In fact most times we don’t. But again that’s why we must act in good faith as if it is, so that we don’t miss the fruit when it’s ready for us.

Like a farmer with his crop, be patient. Nurture the kernel. Believe in its possibility. Trust the process is working even if you can’t see it. Live with that intention, that everything has a seed of equal or greater benefit, and your life will prosper.

In a post about recent life lessons that Codie Sanchez shared on LinkedIn, she said “You don’t need more time, you need more deadlines”, and I think she’s right.

I mean getting more time would be great… Theoretically it means we’d be able to do more research and run through more revisions to prepare something. And you'd think that means we we’d be able to do more things with more capacity. 

But let’s be honest… If you had extra time, you’d just do more of what you’re already doing with the time you already have.

You couldn’t reasonably expect anything different. So if that means you already spend too much time putting out fires or scrolling on social media, you’d fill the extra time with more of the same.

If the goal is to get more and better work done, the stronger intervention would actually be to decrease the time you have to do it. The constraint would squeeze out the waste. We value what’s finite, and having a limited amount of time would make us use it more wisely.

The best way to manufacture that is by imposing deadlines, and that’s for a few reasons:

1) Instead of having an indefinite amount of time to do something, you create your own constraints. This operates as a forcing function that requires you stay focused on only what’s most critical.

2) It makes you push things to completion. Rather than spending so much time tinkering in your work, undoing and redoing efforts to try and get something from 90% to 95%, you must accept that your finished product will be imperfect. In that way, you waste less time doing redundant and low-leverage work so that you can transition to doing something more valuable.

3) As an extension of that, just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean that you sacrifice quality. We each have our own internal standard for what we put out into the world. That means if we have less time to do something, we’ve simply have to get to a higher level of quality faster. And when that’s the task we get more creative, resourceful, and direct to meet levels of output that we’re unwilling to compromise on.

What if it were that easy? What if rather than being a victim to Parkinson’s Law (which states that our work will expand to fill the amount of time we’ve allotted to doing it), we use it to our favor and compress our workdays into more intense, impactful, high-quality sprints?

It’s worth a try isn’t it? Set a deadline for yourself, actually enforce it, and see what happens.

I’m just getting back from a mini-vacation where I spent 5 days on a cruise in the Caribbean. It was a good balance of work and play, but interestingly for me, it was also an opportunity for indulgence.

Typically I try to limit the amount of sugar I eat. I often decline dessert and avoid sweets because I know how it impacts my mood and sleep. However, for this cruise I chose to give myself more leeway and enjoy a reasonable amount of dessert (one serving a night) as my way of enjoying the all-inclusive experience.

I bring this all up because I had a personal development spotlight moment on the flight home. For whatever reason, as part of the in-flight snacks I was offered two Oreo cookies. I reached out, grabbed them, and unconsciously started eating the first. 

One of my food rules is “don’t eat things whose ingredients you can’t pronounce”, so mid-bite I read the Oreo wrapper and realized I had violated my rule.

Now I had a decision to make: Was I going to eat the other cookie or not? Typically it would be an easy “no”, but since I was transition out of having dessert on the cruise, I was starting to justify that I could have sweets until I got home, rationalizing that the flight home still counted as vacation.

I picked up the second cookie and was about to eat it when I asked myself an important question: “Will I regret this, or will this feel out of integrity when I reflect on this tonight?” The answer to that was a quick “yes”.

So I took fast-action and put the cookie down back in the wrapper out of arms reach. Then when the flight attendant came by with a trash bag, I tossed it without hesitation. In both ways I leveraged environmental design so that my behavior aligned with my intention.

I know eating one more Oreo cookie wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would have been a harmless thing to do. But by taking action as definitively as I did, I reestablished my higher standard and set the course for my transition back into my normal routine.

No matter how high-performing or high-achieving you are, everyone goes through phases of life where they’ve lost momentum, progress stalls, and no matter how hard they try they just can’t move the needle. 

In other words, everyone gets stuck.

Having worked with hundreds people at this point, I’ve found there are reliable patterns that explain what’s getting in the way. In particular there are 4 types of ‘stuck’ that keep people frustrated, disappointed, and discouraged as they try to improve their life. And not only that, but they come up in a specific order where at each step, you get closer to breaking through.

The first type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t know what you want. It’s hard to make progress on anything if you aren’t clear on what it’s all for. You’re going to keep feeling misaligned if you don’t have a definite direction established. This shows up as feeling lost, aimless, and unexcited about doing the work.

The second type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t know what to do next, or what to take action on. There are a lot of ways to make things happen, and lacking a clear strategy makes it that much harder to execute. Often just taking one action step in the right direction is a catalyst for more, but you still need to know what that first step is. This shows up as feeling overwhelmed, indecisive, out of ideas.

The third type of ‘stuck’ is not knowing how to do something. Let’s say you've determined what action to take… If you don’t have the know-how or ability to do it, you won’t follow through on it. This is an education and skill gap, and until you bridge it, you’re going to be motionless. It shows up as fear, self-doubt, and self-deprecating thoughts as you muster up the courage to make an attempt without looking stupid.

The fourth and final type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t feel like doing it. You know what you want, you know what to do next, you know how to do it… Now it’s just a matter of following through on it. But something is still getting in the way - you’re not feeling motivated or enthusiastic about your path forward, which is keeping you caught in a web of inaction.

Your breakthrough is on the other side of overcoming these versions of being 'stuck'. Each one you overcome brings you closer to breaking yourself out of your rut and kickstarting momentum. It first involves doing the strategic work upfront to create an action plan you believe in, and then executing it.

And if you’re feeling stuck right now, start from the beginning and work through each layer. Slowly but surely you’ll climb your way out and get back to firing on all cylinders, just like the world needs you to be! 

Or, if you already know what you want and it’s to hold yourself to a higher standard and maximize your potential, I can show you what you need to do next and how to do it. That’s what the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge is all about, and if you want to go from feeling stuck to feeling unstoppable, I encourage you to give it a try!