People talk about setting intentions all the time. You can do it before a meditation or yoga session, you can use it to bring more presence to changes you want to see in your life… It toes the line of being a real tangible tactic and a spiritual practice.

Ultimately what intention setting does is it brings your focus and awareness toward something specific in your life. It highlights something as valuable or important in your mind, and it leads to a whole sequence of downstream effects.

By bringing what you want into your conscious mind, and having an interest in finding more of it, you prime your Reticular Activating System. Known as the RAS, this part of your brain is responsible for taking all of the sensory inputs your brain receives and filters it so that you’re only aware of what is most important. It is also involved in pattern recognition. So by setting an intention, you’ve taught your RAS to be on the look out for evidence of this intention being true and ways you can make it true. You’ve specifically established the importance of this area of your life, and in doing so, you’ve written the first line of a story that your brain wants to see played out.

Now this process starts to work for you when two things happen. First, you need to believe you’re capable of your intention. Your brain will only grab onto intentions that you believe to be possible. Second, you need to take action in alignment with your intentions. When your behavior doesn’t match your intentions your brain doesn’t take your intention as seriously.

That’s how this all works! And to apply this in your life, let’s set an intention right now - What values do you want to prioritize this week?

‍If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

Our lives are run by the clock. We have meetings and appointments booked at certain times of day, times when we like to do certain things or complete certain tasks… And it’s all important because it allows us to be effective in our collaboration with other people, and ultimately accomplish more overall. However, this emphasis on using time so rigidly has some unexpected consequences.

As a result we tend to see our activity in chunks. Spend an hour here, take a few minutes there, allocate a few days to complete this. While times helps to provide focus it really distracts from what is most important, which is what we’re doing in the moment. The only thing you can control is what’s happening right now, and sometimes we lose sight of that.

When it comes to truly pursuing and becoming the best version of ourselves, it shouldn’t be about looking back at the end of the day and seeing how you did. It should be about evaluating your performance moment by moment. In that way you’re accountable to being your best self in everything you do rather than looking back at a trend of how you did in general. It’s often uncomfortable to do because you’ll notice moments where you take shortcuts, or step outside of your integrity. It’s easier to dilute those experiences within the full day, but that is the greatest opportunity for growth. 

Do what you want to do, the way you want to do it, all the time. Now that’s a standard of excellence! There’s nowhere to hide and you’ll face off with the reality of who you are in all circumstances. Let me finish by asking you this - What values do you want to hold every minute of every day?‍

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

Let’s keep it really simple. It’s good to be kind. While you may not agree with everyone, or understand why people do things, or even want to spend time with someone, that doesn’t give you the right to treat them any differently. What’s most important is seeing the humanity in another person. Respect that everyone has a story and background that you couldn’t begin to understand. Just be kind.

Kindness is characterized by being friendly and considerate. It’s taking the other person’s emotions into consideration when choosing how you want to interact with them. You don’t need to overextend yourself and invest in everyone you meet, but if you make a habit of being kinder to the people you encounter, it does make a difference.

Even when people are mean to you, try to be the bigger person and treat them with respect. Remember that their malice has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. They’re doing it to provoke you so that they can feel validated, seen, or otherwise fill whatever need they have that motivated their behavior. You are in control of yourself and what you do, and again, just be kind. 

You’ve probably heard of doing random acts of kindness before. What I think is incredible is that you can create good through your own decision to do so. In being kind, you create a disproportionate amount of positivity in the world for the he amount of time or energy you invested in sharing it. The world appreciates positivity, but it needs people to lead with kindness in order to multiply it. You can be that spark, just be kind.

I’d like you to reflect on this - When was the last time you didn’t respond with as much kindness as you should have?

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

I read a message from Brittany Burgunder the other day that really stood out to me. Brittany is a coach that specializes in supporting people with eating disorders, which makes this quote that much more meaningful. The quote is “Mirrors are just glass and you are more than that.”

It’s funny as a society we have this odd obsession over mirrors. Movies use it to cue introspection and deep thinking, there are countless lessons that use mirrors as a metaphor, and even Michael Jackson wrote one of my favorite songs of all time about it. But if you place your sense of value on what you see in the mirror you’re doing yourself a disservice. You are so much more than what is physically reflected in a mirror, and that’s what I’d challenge you to consider.

Let’s go one layer deeper and look beyond the zits, wrinkles, and imperfections of our body that are most prominent in our reflection. Let’s look in our own eyes and see the energy and emotion of our being. Let’s see scars as representations of our life history. At face value a mirror is just glass that reflects light, but it also serves as a portal into our soul and everything about us that can’t be observed by the eye.

You are more than what meets the eye. No one knows your intentions like you do, which makes you the judge and jury of your actions. No one knows your pain like you do, which means that you must be empathetic to yourself because you’re the only person that truly understands. The depth of your humanity is radiant, and anyone who wants to place labels, assumptions, and biases on you based on the little they know about you is woefully uninformed. They see you at face-value but you can give them the gift of learning more about you if you’re open to it.

Yes, a mirror is just glass, but it can become much more. With that in mind I’d like you to reflect on this - When was the last time you let someone see you for who you are?‍

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

Muscle memory is our body knowing what to do without having to think about it. More technically it’s a form of procedural memory where you encode a specific motor task as a memory that you can reproduce. The term ‘muscle memory’ suggests that your body is responsible for invoking the behavior, but muscles are just tools for our brain. The motor cortex of the brain sends signals to our muscles which, through a complex process involving neurotransmitters and ion gradients, creates muscle contraction and ultimately movement. All that to say, whatever it is that’s happening autonomically originates in the brain and not the body.

So let’s make the connection here. Muscle memory involves being able to do complicated movements without much effort or focus. And these movements originate in the brain and not the body. Muscle memory is simply a behavior pattern that exists in your subconscious.

In this way, muscle memory is perfect evidence for what we discussed in the 3 Secrets To Master Self Discipline Masterclass. Through consistent repetition, which is accomplished through discipline, you can create subconscious patterns that start working for you. Imagine if you could use that same power to be more consistent with your exercise, self-care, reading, and other habits that you know are best for you? That is possible when you take action in a way that intentionally affirms the subconscious identity of who you want to be. More on all of that in the Masterclass!

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

I learned of today’s analogy in Will Smith’s book called “Will”. It’s amazing to see the behind the scenes of his life and the lucky breaks he got, the mistakes he made, and the hard work he put in everywhere in between. Unsurprisingly Will Smith has an incredible work ethic that was instilled in him from a very young age.

The book has a theme that supports just about everything else. Will’s life has been a consistent cycle of preparation and opportunity. Smith even likens the process to how school works but he makes an important differentiation.

In school this cycle takes the form of lessons and tests. The preparation is learning the material, doing the homework, and understanding the concepts so that you can successfully apply it when being tested on it. There’s a direct cause and effect and those who are most prepared do the best.

In life it’s different. We don’t know what we don’t know, so how are we supposed to prepare for what we’re going to encounter? For that reason Will suggests that the cycle reverses - You’re first tested and then on the backend of it you’re taught a lesson. With this theory, those who take the time to learn the lesson are those who succeed. There isn’t a cause and effect relationship to it like in school, so it’s unnatural, but it separates those good from the great and it helps people be more prepared for whatever might come there way.

That’s how life is like school - It’s full of lessons and tests, it’s just the order of them are different. Think about how this concept has affected your life in this reflection - What lesson have you learned that took longer than it should have?‍

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.

No one likes a quitter, right? We’ve been taught for so many years to never quit, to never give up, and to always persevere. We’ve created a culture that looks down on people who don’t follow through and locks people into sticking with things much longer than they’d like to and should.

I’m certainly not endorsing that you should give up and quit any time you feel like it, but I do want to share some of the misconceptions we have about quitting and ways we should be thinking about it differently.

The implication of quitting is that when you quit, things are done for good. It’s all for naught. All that effort and time put into it is wasted. That’s simply not true because of the development and growth you experienced while pursuing it. But even so, when people quit it usually isn’t a full-stop. It usually leads to a change of course or a transition.

What’s interesting is this double-standard we’re facing - On one hand we’re told to persevere and work through it, and on the other hand we’re told to be receptive to feedback, and that we need to constantly innovate or change our processes to get better. I think people are reluctant to make changes because of their strong associations with the idea of quitting. But if what you’re doing isn’t working then you should stop doing it. Do we call that quitting? I’d argue we do more often than we should, and it keeps people from making forward progress. 

So what I propose is that we should view quitting through a different lens that doesn’t have such a strong label. Oftentimes quitting is actually just pivoting, reprioritizing, or transitioning. You need to know what’s serving you and what’s not, and have the confidence to try something new.

Let’s bring this concept into your life right now - What do you feel like ‘quitting' that should actually be viewed through the lens of transitioning or reprioritizing?‍

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily prompts that help you get to know yourself better and build a more meaningful life every day. 

If you’re looking to grow alongside a community of like-minded improvers, then click here to join the Better Together Community.