Self Improvement Daily Podcast

Just because I talk about all things high-performance, self-improvement, and life-optimization doesn’t mean that I’m immune to the realities of it. I’m proud of the systems and structure I’ve created for myself… But that doesn’t mean I’m perfect.

Last week I had an unmotivated week - and here’s what I learned from it.

I think the main factor is that I was in a different environment. I was visiting my family in Northern California and staying at my grandma’s house. It’s a beautiful space with family photos and relics everywhere, but my work setup wasn’t ideal… My workouts were less dialed in… And all things considered it made taking action a little harder than usual. 

That plus I’m currently in a season where I’m seeking more clarity. So not feeling like doing things combined with not knowing what to do, it’s no surprise that I wasn’t as motivated to do any of it. 

I noticed I felt this way on the Monday when I had 3 hours carved out to do ‘Business Planning’ to fill in gaps in my clarity. After staring at a blank screen for most of that time not knowing what I wanted to do, I called it quits.

The next day I had more calls booked and direct engagements, but in between I couldn’t get into a rhythm. I was still feeling the drag of low motivation and it made for another low impact day.

With more self-awareness, I felt into what I needed. I noticed that part of the problem was the urgency I was trying to operate with. I didn’t want to waste time so I was putting pressure on making the most of it, but that only compounded the problem. 

So I was intentional about creating more space, drew out my morning routine so I didn’t feel like I was in a hurry, had a slower start to the day, and naturally it pulled me into the energy of wanting to do work. There were certain tasks that I felt like doing that I allowed myself to step into, and once I got started and felt on task, the rest of the day (and week) flowed from there.

All this to say… It’s frustrating to not feel motivated, especially when you have big ambitions, committed goals, and so many things you know you need to do. But don’t take it personally, know that the way you show up is largely influenced by your environment.

If you’re in a season of feeling less energized by your work or less inspired by the content of your day to day activities, it’s totally normal. Sometimes life can feel stale. Do your best to get to the heart of what you’re missing, prioritize it, and let your internal and external environments shift from there.

You got this! And even if you feel like you don’t, you will soon. Just hang in there!

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One of the most critical ingredients to improving our lives is awareness. With awareness comes choice, and we can’t choose to do something differently if we’re not even aware we’re doing it. This goes both for the actions we’re taking and the results we’re getting - there’s so much value to seeing the truth of it because that gives you something to work with.

Yet, many of us have a difficult time being honest with ourselves. It’s scary to admit that a relationship or job no longer feels right. It’s painful for someone to  confess that they’re in a bad habit, or that they’re an addict. That’s why the first step toward recovery is acceptance, which in other words, is awareness - it’s a willingness to let yourself know that it’s happening.

Psychologically we’re hardwired to stay in our comfort zone and keep doing the same things that are familiar to us. We stay in the same patterns of behavior, and root ourselves in the same realities, because they’re predictable and therefore less-threatening to our safety. Choosing to see something for how it is rather than how you want it to be is psychologically destabilizing because it suggests you should be doing something different.

But again, awareness and honesty serve us in the long-term. Our short-sighted bias for safety comes at the expense of our long-term health, wellness, and satisfaction. We will arrive at a more desirable future reality when we disrupt the present. Things need to get worse before they get better.

This tension is something I notice a lot in people who are completing daily tracking in their Self Improvement Scorecard. When they need to answer honestly to the fact that they didn’t go to the gym, avoid social media, or take action as they intended to… It’s easier to skip the tracking process altogether. 

Ignorance feels good today, but it comes at the cost of your growth. Choosing pain and discomfort today facilitates it.

Which is why I choose a different relationship with my daily tracking. Rather than approaching it with judgment and criticism, I get curious. I’m not attached to my performance and instead wonder about the conditions that led to it. When you relate with your shortcomings as breadcrumbs for improvement rather than evidence that you’re not good enough, awareness that could be hurtful becomes helpful.

Honesty is your own willingness to admit the real, unfiltered truth. That truth offers awareness. And with awareness, we can actually change our lives.

If you want to check out my Self Improvement Scorecard, how I track my performance on a daily basis, and how I implement this mindset, check out the video I made about it here!

Central to our life is our belief system. No matter what we go through, our external life events always get filtered through our internal beliefs to create meaning. 

One way we see our beliefs get expressed is through our mindset. When you have the pattern of thinking a certain way, you start to attract a certain result. And that’s not because you change what happened itself but because you change the way you see it and the meaning you assign to it.

It’s the reason why one person can be the ‘victim’ of a negative life event while the next could see themselves as the beneficiary of it… Or why someone can feel the fulfillment in a major personal achievement while someone else feels empty.

Our belief system is very complex. Some beliefs we’re born with, most we learn as a child, and others adjust over the course of our lives. And to make things even more complicated, different beliefs are expressed at different times within different conditions.

This is why I want to talk about what I’m claiming is the ‘epigenetics of beliefs’. Epigenetics is the emerging understanding that our genes get expressed in different ways when in different environments. What this suggests is that we aren’t strictly hard-coded to be a certain person genetically, but that who we become is actually very variable in nature.

I believe the same is true about our beliefs. 

And in particular, I think one of the biggest contributing factors to which belief gets expressed, and therefore the way we relate to life events, is our physiological state. The theory is that the better energized we are, the more positive our unconscious outlook becomes.

Take someone who is ‘hangry’. If someone cuts them off in traffic, they’re more likely to outburst. In part this could be because a belief that “people have bad intentions” surfaces. Whereas the same person who’s fully fed and physiologically cared for, the same stimulus might promote a belief that offers more grace, assuming good intentions in others.

Whether the mechanism of the difference is based in belief or something else, it’s an interesting idea to explore. And if anything, let this serve as a reminder of how influenceable we are as humans - consciously and unconsciously - and our responsibility to design our lives around that.

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Life can be a lot to handle. We’ve get commitments to deliver on, decisions to make, people to appease and situations that call for bringing a good attitude. Over the course of a day, it can wear you down and compromise your ability to show up how you want to.

What I’ve just described is called ‘Cognitive Load’. It’s literally the energy that the mind uses to process information and exhibit self-control. Think of it like carrying a 50 pound weight all day… Eventually your body is going to tire out. The same goes for your mind.

That’s why I want to introduce something called ‘Cognitive Distribution’. This is the intentional process of spacing out moments that require cognitive load throughout the day. Rather than having decisions, commitments, and actions stacked on top of each other, they get spread out and therefore, are less demanding.

The reason why this difference is significant, it´s because your mind functionally pulls from different fuel sources, let’s call it ‘executive function’ and your ‘willpower reserve’. 

Using the metaphor of electricity… Let’s say your executive function is like a wall outlet that can deliver a certain amount of voltage to power a task. For the most part it’s a stable electrical current but, over the course of the day, it’s capacity slowly decreases as we fatigue. 

But, so long as the demands of life are under this threshold, executive function is the fuel source that will be used. Taking action from the wall outlet doesn’t feel hard because it’s tapping into your natural capacity. 

However when you try to pack too much cognitive load into a single moment, and multiple things need to be powered at the same time, the demand of that often goes beyond the capacity of the wall outlet and needs more energy. 

That’s where the extra battery kicks into gear, our willpower reserve, which works to power the task. This feels hard, and the reserve depletes quickly...

To maximize your personal energetic potential, the goal is to use the wall source as much as possible and save the willpower reserve. That’s exactly what ‘Cognitive Distribution’, or spacing out your brain’s processing power, accomplishes.

To make this practical: It explains the difference in energy between preplanning a healthy meal and cooking it vs deciding what healthy meal you want to eat right before cooking it. Or why figuring out what to post on social media and creating the post at the same time is so much harder than deciding what topic you want to cover in advance, and in a different moment creating the content. 

Metaphor aside, the way to practice cognitive distribution is to be more consistent with your planning. Planning is a hack for maximizing your capacity for control and in doing so, allows you to bring your best to more of your day.

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It’s cliche but it deserves restating: We have so much to be grateful for. What a blessing it is to have another day, food in our fridge, a roof over our head, our health, and so much more.

There are people around the world waking up who can’t say the same, so every day we have it, we have a reason to be thankful.

But what I’ve found to be true about gratitude… It’s one thing to say it and an entirely different thing to feel it. We can riff off all of the things we take for granted, all of the things we’re grateful for, and it’s good enough to check the box. It’s superficial and lacks the depth that genuine gratitude can offer.

The process I’ve found that works for me to experience deeper levels of gratitude comes from unpolished, stream of consciousness reflection. Simply extending the thought and elaborating on the details of why you’re grateful gets you out of your head and into our heart. 

“I’m grateful for a roof over my head” turns into “I’m grateful for a roof over my head, helping to insulate a warm house. I wonder how that man I saw under the bridge is feeling right now, and how all he wants is a warm place to be. How lucky am I to be warm and comfortable on a cold day.”

Again for me, the more I go on and on, the more real it gets and the more connected I am to my reason to be grateful.

There are few things that will change your life as much as 30 days of consistent gratitude. It will literally change your unconscious filter on the world. Challenges don’t seem so hard, setbacks don’t feel so bad, and the future looks that much brighter.

Our life is our perception. Might as well shape it so that it’s more pleasant and enjoyable!

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I’m a huge advocate for holding yourself to a high standard, setting boundaries, and not letting yourself make excuses. As someone who has put out daily content for 7.5 years, I know the value of being consistent, disciplined, and executing even and especially when it isn’t easy.

For someone with that level of conviction and track-record, many would say that putting out a new podcast episode is a ‘non-negotiable’ for me. But I have an issue with the idea of having ‘non-negotiables’. While I think the intention is good to have really high standards, I think the message behind it; is harmful.

What does it mean for something to be ‘non-negotiable’? It means that you’re unwilling to negotiate about it. Or in other words, it means that there is nothing that could change your mind about the decision you’ve made.

And I find that really hard to believe…

If you have a ‘non-negotiable’ routine to go for a run every morning, is there really no scenario where the decision that most serves you is to skip it? What if you broke your leg? Or for me, is there no scenario where it would be acceptable to miss sharing a podcast episode? While it hasn’t happened yet, I’m sure there is one.

Being fully committed to doing something, in every single context imaginable, is an impossible commitment to make. And that’s why I think it’s a dangerous intention to set. 

The reason it’s attractive is because it sets the precedent that you will do what you say you’re going to do, and every time you follow through on it, you strengthen that mindset. In a very distracted world and with an evolutionary past that hardwires us to be lazy and make excuses, I certainly see the value in that.

But what it does behind the scenes is: it gets you in the habit of doing things because you said you were going to do it and not because it’s what most serves you. Today’s world is full of nuance, and it’s important we’re set up for success within those conditions.

In summary - I love the sentiment. It benefits us immensely to be more disciplined and resilient when life starts to go off track. The 75 Hard Challenge reminds us of how much control we have over our choices, and many excuses we want to make but shouldn’t. The world needs more of that... But taking it to the far extreme of saying that something is ‘non-negotiable’, and that you’re unwilling to reconsider a commitment you’ve made no matter the circumstance, in my opinion is short-sighted and irresponsible. 

So the way that I navigate this is - I try to have a really high-threshold for changing your mind. I seek to preplan my exceptions so that I know they’re in integrity, and not just an emotional response in a moment. I reflect on my intentions and commitments every day so I can be aware of ways that I might have compromised my commitments, and think through the things that might be getting in the way. 

I set a daily high standard that takes into account the context of the day, and do my very best to execute that with resilience and discipline. If you want to see my process for that, check it out here!.

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Recently I’ve been having an issue with the word ‘selfish’. It has a negative connotation that assumes anything you do for yourself comes at a cost for others, which makes it a bad thing to do.

Logically I know this isn’t always the case. Prioritizing yourself, and taking care of your own needs is one of the best things you can do for others because it allows you to show up with more kindness, compassion, and ability to support. It’s the classic example of putting your own oxygen mask on before assisting anyone else.

But there isn’t a good word for what I’m describing, an additive expression of being selfish. ‘Self-serving’ suggests that whatever you’re doing comes at someone else’s expense… ‘Self-help’ has gotten really complicated and often is associated with recovery…

Anyway, the point I’m getting at, and the insight I heard from Humble The Poet on Ed Mylett’s podcast is: “It’s not selfish to put yourself first”.

And I think he means this not just in ways that end up being additive, but even in ways that cause some inconvenience or come at some small consequence to others. It’s a soft encouragement that it’s okay to prioritize doing things that benefit you because you’re worthy of it.

Let’s connect this to the concept of helping others. It’s noble to want to improve other people’s lives, to contribute to their well-being, and be a positive influence and supporter of their future. In fact we should all aim to be more like that! But what this cannot neglect is that you are a person too. That you are deserving of your own help and take action to contribute to your own well-being. We don’t think of helping ourselves as making an impact… But it is.

And Humble’s arguing not only does it make an impact, but it’s the biggest impact we can have in the world! Which is why the full quote he shared actually goes: “It’s not selfish to put yourself first, it’s selfish to expect others to put you first.”

If we each took the responsibility of taking care of ourselves first, there would be less need to help each other. 

Now I’m not saying that we need to be selfish by all means necessary, but that taking care of ourselves is inherently additive. It’s beneficial to others, to the world, and our ability to impact it. 

So first and foremost, make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Change your life then change the world.

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I was on a coaching call with my friend Henry last week and we got to the root of an issue he was having that I think is actually a really common problem people don’t talk about.

I think it’s so valuable to design your life. When you look at a day or a week at a time, and fill that time with the things you want to do, you’re way more likely to do them because you’re seeing how all the puzzle pieces come together. It helps you establish your desired rhythm so that everything can go smoothly.

So in the spirit of that, many people load up their schedules and digital calendars with their best intentions. Wake up at 6am, have an hour long morning routine, create space twice a week for projects and creative work, all on repeat every day at the same time.

It’s a great idea in theory but often doesn’t translate over to lived practice.

The problem is, if you aren’t honoring the timeblocks you’ve set for yourself, eventually lose their meaning. The commitments almost become invisible because you’ve learned to not take them seriously, which makes it really easy to skip, deprioritize, and overlook them.

But… That’s the time that you planned to do that thing that’s most important to you.. So you’re actually at a disadvantage to do that thing because it’s not accounted for in your practical schedule, and only included in your ideal one.

I’m guilty of this myself. I’ve got a Monday morning week start up block I’ve gotten too complacent with. In fact, it’s no longer really needed - so it’d serve me to just eliminate it so that I have more integrity with the things that are on my schedule.

It’s a similar problem that was happening with Henry. Every Friday he has a recurring hour-long meeting to train a team member, but it often doesn’t happen. This slowly evolved so that over-time, neither he nor his team member are even planning on it any more.

However, it’s still a priority to get done, so I advised Henry that he needed to break the pattern. When we disrupt what’s happening unconsciously, what’s assumed, we bring consciousness to it. And with that consciousness make a new choice.

So Henry sent an email to his colleague saying that he wanted to renew the commitment and honor their training time-block. Now it means something again on the schedule. Now it’s going to actually be prioritized. And now, Henry's actions are more likely to align with his intentions.  

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