Something that is core to personal development is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization, or becoming one’s fullest potential, sits at the top of the pyramid. When everything else is taken care of, that final need that motivates your behavior is the desire for self-mastery. The evidence for this need being met is that you perceive meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in your life.

I believe that self-actualization is all about increasing your personal capacities. Becoming a better, more well-rounded, more aligned human being. But what is it all for? In my opinion it’s to give it all away. To share it with others so that you can contribute to the well-being of others and betterment of the world. Time and again you hear the wealthiest people in the world say that ultimately, making a difference is what makes them the happiest.

Your personal fulfillment is rooted in serving others and you don’t need to wait until you’re older and wealthier to start. You can do more today to help others, and I promise that you’ll feel a level of fulfillment you haven’t been able to access before.

Let me add a complementary opinion to this. Tom Bilyeu, a personal development and business luminary has his own definition. He says that fulfillment is “working hard at something to achieve a positive result.” It’s not fulfilling if something is handed to you, you need to go through the challenges, obstacles, and setbacks to give meaning to the journey. And that’s exactly why self-actualization is such a potent way of pursuing fulfillment. It’s a day in, day out process that makes you earn your growth and your capabilities to serve. Pair that with hard work and now you have this incredible concoction that marries intrinsic growth with applying your skills and talents to serve others. In my mind there’s nothing better or worthwhile.

But that’s me, let’s figure out what it means for you - What is the most fulfilling thing you’ve ever done in your life?

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.

You’ve probably heard this line in an action movie before. Someone is walking a tightrope, or hanging off the wing of an airplane, or crossing a rickety bridge, and then you hear someone say “Don’t look down.” Well of course, the normal human reaction is to do exactly that - to look down. Why is that?

It's almost impossible to not look down, and that’s because of our negativity bias and threat detection systems. Our brains are looking for information in our environments that might be evidence of harm. When you hear the suggestion to not look down, your reptile brain takes over and creates a strong urge to look down and determine the nature of the threat. This happens all the time in life - We rubberneck when we encounter a car accident, we eavesdrop when we overhear an argument… Our brains are designed to prioritize negative information like this. That’s why we look down.

The challenge then becomes, what do we do about it? Well, instead of looking down, look forward. When you’re walking the metaphorical tightrope you are more likely to fall if you are consumed by what’s under you instead of what’s in front of you. If you direct your attention toward the end goal you find the path to get there. It’s a matter of what you’re attracting into your life and there are two options. You can look down, fall, and get what you were trying to avoid, or you could look forward, persevere, and get what you want. You look past the roadblocks, obstacles, failure points, and immediate challenges and instead pay attention to the opportunities, possibilities, and lessons in front of you.

Simply put - When someone tells you not to look down, they’re right. And the more you let the danger below take up your headspace, the more it will affect you and restrict you from performing how you want to. I know this is kind of an abstract concept but let’s make it more tangible right now - What negative things in your life are you paying more attention to than you should?

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.

Just like you I am always experimenting and trying new things on my own personal development journey. For example, I recently learned of a 30 day exercise created by Alex Banayan, the author of The Third Door. If you feel stuck in life, and you don’t know what your next steps are, or that you’ve been stagnant where you’re at for too long, then this challenge is for you. Will you join me?

Banayan calls it the 30 day purpose challenge and this is how it goes. Every day for 30 days straight, no exceptions and no missing a single day, you take 15 minutes to reflect on 3 questions. Those 3 questions are: What filled me with enthusiasm today? What drained me of energy today? What did I learn about myself today?

Again, every day for 30 days, you write down with a pen and paper your answer to those 3 questions. If you only have one sentence to write about each, fine, but you must sit there for the full 15 minutes. This is meant to be a free-flowing, unstructured stream of consciousness as you reflect.

The goal is to reflect without judgment, just share how things are, and don’t look back at any of your entries for 29 days. Then on the 30th day, you read through all of your responses and find the trends in your answers. At that point you answer 3 similar questions - What filled me with enthusiasm this month? What drained me of energy this month? And what did I learn about myself this month? The caveat here is you don’t answer in long form. You write one punchy headline for each of the 3 questions. That becomes your north star and a strong indicator for your life as it is right now, what you want to do more of, what you should do less of, and it presents it in a way where it can’t be ignored.

Again, if you want to get to the truth of how things are for you right now, and get a few ideas about where you want to go next, this challenge will be really good for you. That’s why I’m doing it!

I’m fired up and I want you to be fired up too! I mean think about it, we can go out and pursue whatever we want in life. It’s our choice to do so. But that’s exactly it, you can’t get what you don’t go after, and you really need to want it. You’ve got to get hungry.

‘Getting hungry’ is synonymous with getting motivated because it references how certain things have the ability to take over and consume you. Just like a lion in the savannah, when it gets hungry it has one objective. Eat! When it comes to your goals, aspirations, and dreams, imagine if you had that same amount of focus and desire. It would unlock a whole new level of commitment to what you want.

You’ve probably felt something like it before. You’ve gotten a taste of your potential and the impact you can make in the world, and you want more of it. You can’t fake that hunger, that feeling that genuinely and uncontrollably excites you. So if you want to live a charged up life, where you have a clear sense of purpose, you need to get clear on what you want and what interests you. Lasting intrinsic motivation can only be found in the things that you truly believe in. You’ve got a lion inside of you and it’d be a shame if shame if you never let it roar.

I’m not suggesting you uproot your life to live out your passions, it’s not as simple as that, but I am hoping you’ll ask yourself the question - What lights you up the most in the world and how can you get more of it?

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.

Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most inspirational humans to ever walk this planet. As an incredible peacemaker and inspiring activist, who experienced unfathomable injustice in his life, we have a lot to learn from his lived experience. 

One of the many lessons is featured in the following quote - “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

What Gandhi does so effectively in this thought is he separates out the 3 different ways of representing the self - What you think, what you say, and what you do. And he argues that happiness is having congruence  among those 3 selves.

What you think is your ultimate truth. You cannot hide from yourself in your own mind. And while your brain may attempt to protect you and change the things you think, it does so in a way that it becomes your truth. What you think cannot be shared with others, it is yours and yours alone, and it’s something you must always live with.

The thoughts you do choose to share come in the form of what you say. Now this isn’t a direct translation of your thoughts, it is a filtered version that is designed to be received by others. It can be truth, it also can not, and in that way it introduces variability.

Then there’s what you do. This is your actions speaking for you. Actions are louder than words, and the things you do are the way you interface with the world around you. It goes one layer deeper in that you’re putting your thoughts and words to action, which suggests a certain level of belief you have in their truth.

Now let’s bring back the quote - “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

When all three of these selves are in harmony, without contradictions or exceptions, that’s when you experience happiness. And to me the word that captures the essence of that is integrity. When what you do and what you say are in integrity with what you think, you’re living an aligned life. Reflect on this idea, and how closely aligned your actions, words, and thoughts 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.

No one likes the person that makes a lot of excuses, and I’d like to think you don’t want to be the type of person that makes excuses. Yet, myself included, I think we all fall into that trap every once in a while. It’s all driven by our ego. On a psychological level our ego is designed to keep our self-confidence intact and sustain psychological safety. In doing so the ego constantly places us relative to others - We have a need to know our position in the hierarchy and ideally perceive ourselves as better than others. That’s the root of why we make excuses.

But this is a very slippery slope, and Robin Sharma shared a quote that shows the real consequences of this. He says “If you recite your excuses long enough you’ll start to believe they’re true.” The implication here is that what you do to protect yourself will actually harm you in the long run. Our beliefs are dictated by what we’ve experienced, and each encounter molds our beliefs in the subtlest of ways. If you give excuses enough times, eventually it will represent a disproportionate amount of your understanding for how things are. This is dangerous because if there are certain times when you fall short and make excuses, your brain associates excuses with the stimulus until eventually, it becomes the default response pattern.

Now what can we do about it? The antidote to excuses is accountability. When you take responsibility for outcomes in your life you retain the power and agency to influence your life. Yes, it threatens the ego in the short term, suggesting you’re not good enough and makes you prone to making excuses. But in the long term, taking ownership builds a more empowering mindset. It affirms that you are in control and it gives you psychological freedom.

In short - While it may be tempting to slip into the safety of making excuses, we don’t want to do that. So let’s call it out right now - Thinking back, when was the last time you made an excuse?

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.

There's a lot of talk about mindset and how we can use it to change the way we see things. It closely correlates with perspective, which is a huge opportunity for impacting our lives. Wayne Dyer said it best - “If you change the way you look at things, then the things you look at change.” So yes, that’s one of the positive outcomes of having the right mindset, but when you strip that away what is the make up of your mindset?

Your mindset is simply your patterned way of thinking. It’s the thought patterns you have both consciously and unconsciously. Consciously we can choose to see the world in a certain way and believe certain things to be true about the world. Take gratitude for example. If something happens in your life that causes issues or problems for you, let’s say your power goes out for the day, how do you relate with that? Instinctually and emotionally you’re frustrated, but consciously you can reframe things so that you choose to be grateful for about the situation. How is what’s happening meant to serve you? You intentionally change the way you relate with things, what you believe to be true about it. Ultimately that’s a conscious shift in mindset.

But then there’s also the unconscious beliefs you hold. These are the default thought patterns you engage in, the scripts that play out and influence what you do without your being aware of it. It’s very sneaky because it still feels like you’re making decisions for yourself, but those choices are through the lens of what your subconscious wants you to believe. This often leads to behaviors that protect us, that is the role of the subconscious after all. But through repetition and consistency you can actually install new mindsets that become authentic beliefs you hold about the world and therefore, become your default patterned ways of thinking.

That’s your mindset, and with that in mind I want to ask you a question - What do you want to believe to be true about yourself or the world?

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 think there are many instances in our lives where we choose to play the victim. After something you experienced, which could be as serious as significant trauma or as subtle as losing an argument, it’s natural to seek some form of soothing behavior. This is meant to produce feelings of security and add layers of protection by getting the attention of others, asking for sympathy, and helping us believe that it’s not our fault (or that there’s something wrong with us).

Playing the victim accomplishes something similar - It deflects the blame, shame, and responsibility of something so that you don’t need to internalize it as yours. This generates a sense of security, and gives you a reason to complain about what happened to you. 

The problem here is when you play the victim, you have no desire to find a solution. And if you're not motivated to change something then the same roots will keep producing the same fruit, and you’ll continue to be victimized.

Ultimately, when you play the victim you’re giving your power away to the external world. No longer are you responsible for or accountable to the things that are happening in your life. You are merely affected by everything else going on that seems to be out of your control. Relating with your life in this way deepens into helplessness and dependency, which then ripple into the ways that you think and talk about yourself.

I don’t think anyone wants to play the victim, but sometimes we’re so in it that we can’t even see it happening. That’s where I really want to challenge you to take 100% ownership of your life. I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through, but what I do know is whatever that is, it doesn't serve you to let it label you.

With that in mind I want to ask you a question - What is something negative that happened to you that you deemed was out of your control?‍

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.