You’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again - Everyone makes mistakes. We’re all human and we aren’t perfect. Occasionally we make a silly error, or read a situation wrong, or get forgetful about something. What’s important to think about is the perspective around those mistakes.

Maybe this is top of mind for me today because I made too bigger mistakes lately. In the last interview I recorded I had the microphone turned around backwards, so the audio quality was worse than usual. Whoops. And then with a live presentation I was giving on Zoom, I didn’t know until the end that my slides weren’t changing. My bad. 

The unfortunate part to making mistakes is that there are real consequences to the action. It feels bad because you either let someone down, you feel vulnerable, or it hurts your confidence. However, people are usually pretty tolerant, because everyone makes mistakes, and if you acknowledge the error you can quickly make things better.

An important piece to this too - If you’re in a position to make a mistake then you’re trying! You’re putting yourself out there in a situation that you aren’t 100% confident in, and you’re giving yourself the opportunity to grow. With the lessons in your mistakes you become more self-aware, start seeing some of your blindspots and hone in on what are your strengths. Just like you can perceive rejection as one step closer to a “yes”, you can view a mistake as one lesson closer to understanding.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, mistakes are good - When you let them serve their purpose.

Let's dive into a subtle line in an iconic song, “It’s a small world”. The line goes “smile means friendship to everyone.” Fundamentally, wouldn’t the world better if everyone was our friend and we had no enemies? Well it’s not as far away as you’d think, The simple gesture of extending a smile to someone communicates a lot. In such a simple way, it expresses that you see them and respect the journey that has brought them to this very moment. It’s inviting and demonstrates not only that you’re not a threat to them, but your intention is to support them, and that you want the best for them. These are all things that your best friends would be thinking, and all of it is conveyed in a smile.

As you’ve probably heard before, it requires far fewer muscles to smile than to frown. So… smiling helps others, it’s easy to do, and last it’s good for you! Smiling serves as a bottom up trigger that informs your brain on its current emotional state, and causes it to secrete positive neurotransmitters.

Smiling is a universally good thing, it’s a mannerism that transcends culture, and at an evolutionary level it signifies that you’re not a threat. If you're not a foe then you must be a friend, and I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to say that “smile means friendship to everyone”.

Goals are effective in helping us package our dreams and desires into attainable elements. They are milestones and checkpoints that you can reach to understand that you’re making progress and on the right path. It’s helpful to set goals because then you have something tangible and objective to orient yourself toward, but what’s equally important is knowing what the goal represents, so that you’re doing something you genuinely find meaningful.

Let’s say a dream of yours is to hike Mount Kilimanjaro. Sounds like a tall task (literally) that requires a lot of preparation. You could set intermediate goals to help make sure you can achieve that dream. For example, what’s the progression in training required to accomplish such a feat? You can set goals to make sure you're physically prepared. What are the requirements when it comes to travel, accommodations, visas, and everything that’s needed from a logistics standpoint? You can set a goal to get all of that done with enough advanced planning. And the resources required to do it, do you know what equipment you need?

The dream itself is made up of smaller, incremental actions that are required to pursue the dream, and the best way to do that is to set goals that quantify your progress along the way. So dream big, absolutely that’s one of my core values actually, but also be practical and actionable in pursuit of those dreams.

You’d probably agree that in general, people are not very patient. Between the quick fixes, fast hacks, one day delivery and access to the internet at our fingertips, we don’t really need to wait around for things anymore. But what if I told you that impatience is actually an unnatural state? Just like other animals, humans evolved to be patient in order to secure resources that either exist in scarce quantities or require a long time to obtain.

So what’s happened here? It’s not that our nature has changed in any significant way. It’s that our expectations have changed, and those expectations are being inappropriately applied to areas where they shouldn’t have influence.  This expectation was created by the very technologies I mentioned earlier, as well as the marketing we are exposed to that guarantees results immediately. But technology is a man-made intervention, it is unnatural, and therefore doesn’t work well when dealing with natural processes.

To provide a personal example - I started using the affirmation “I am worthy” every morning as part of my morning routine. I’d expected to feel instant results, because that’s just how things work these days… but after a week, or two, or three, I didn’t feel any differently. I even felt like I was faking it, but I chose to stay consistent. Then after 3 months of reciting the same affirmation everyday, a switch flipped and basically overnight I started feeling authentically worthy.

I say this to demonstrate that when it comes to the natural process of personal development, things take time. It goes against the precedent technology sets for you. But with consistency, and a faith in the process, you can succeed. And showing up for yourself day in day out will bear fruits three months from now that you couldn’t even imagine.

March 8th, 2021 is International Women’s Day. It’s a day dedicated to celebrating the social, economic, and political achievements of women. If I’m being honest, I didn’t realize there was a difference between how men and women were being treated in the world and in the workplace until I went to college. I think that’s a testament to the incredibly strong women I have in my family - my mom, grandma, and sister in-law, but it’s also something I’ve tried to be more aware of so that I can be part of a more equitable future.

So let’s speak some truth today! Women are incredible. The strength, resolve, and selflessness of women throughout the world inspires me to be a better person. If you identify as a woman, then take today to own it! Get involved and amplify this message so that girls who come after you are brought up in a world with better treatment and equal opportunities.

If you don’t identify as a woman, then get introspective. Think about the potential biases you’ve held, the ways you’ve taken action in a sexist or non-inclusive way, and commit to being better. Send a note to a woman in your life that you love and respect acknowledging her for her gifts and contributions. That’s not to say you’ve been treating women poorly your whole life, but explore that room for improvement so you can best advocate for women and their future. 

No matter who you are or where you come from, I encourage you to take this simple action today. Learn more about She’s The First. This organization ensures that women and girls in more oppressive areas are given opportunities to thrive!

‍

As it relates to the work you do, you need to spend time applying certain skills. In relationships you can only make time for so many people. In service, there is only so much you can do to counteract the inequities you see in the world.

That's where Tammy Tibbetts, founder of the international women’s rights and advocacy non-profit She’s the First, comes in. Tammy has made a huge difference in her life and career but only when she narrowed her focus and began applying her resources in a specific way.

If you don’t concentrate your resources on a few things then it’s very possible they will be diluted among many things, and not really move the needle. As Tammy said, just because you pick something small doesn't mean you’re neglecting everything else… it’s important that you feel aligned with where your resources are going so that you can play your role in the change you wish to see, and have faith that others will serve alongside you to fill in the other gaps you see.

Let’s bring it back to what it’s all about. Ultimately in life we should enjoy what we do and the moments we are a part of. We deserve to be happy. And we don’t need to overcomplicate it, you already have everything you need. “Happiness is within you.”

I truly believe this. You are capable of being happy and your intuition knows what makes you happy, but one fundamental piece of it is that you need to define happiness for yourself. You need to have that north star to pursue in order to start making progress toward it. 

What keeps many people from accessing their happiness is living to the standards and expectations of other people. This creates barriers to happiness because you are prioritizing someone else’s desires over your own. But you are in control - Every thought you have originates from you. It is your interpretation of the context around you that produces the thought, and it’s your relationship with different topics that creates the way you perceive things.

Your responsibility in life is to keep yourself happy. Does that mean sometimes you need to do things you don’t like to do? Of course, but it’s because those things are necessary to make sure you are fulfilling your personal, overall priorities. Things like making sure you have a roof over your head, you are physically and emotionally safe, and that your loved ones are taken care of. 

Whatever happiness means for you, how you want to feel when you show up in the world, the right answer is already inside you. You just need to listen to it and trust it. “Happiness is within you.”

I love thinking about behavior change, and in the coaching and programming I offer it’s the majority of what I teach. I wanted to share how my philosophies are very much based on what I’ve learned from others who have pioneered the space, one of those people being the legendary psychologist BJ Fogg.

BJ Fogg’s behavior change model is a formula: B=MAT. Behavior = Motivation x Ability x Trigger.

To talk about each of those elements one by one:

The behavior is the activity you do. Good or bad, the activity is dictated by the other parts of the formula, which holds the keys to positive behavior change.

Motivation is your desire to do it. It’s how appealing a reward or incentive is at the end of doing the behavior, and the source of that motivation has both extrinsic and intrinsic forms.

Ability is how possible it is that you can do the behavior in this moment. You need access to the resources required, the physical capabilities to do it, and the time necessary to complete it. That all is bundled into ability.

And last is the trigger. Something needs to prompt you to take action. As Nir Eyal puts it, It could be an internal trigger which originates from your own feelings, positive and negative, as well as external triggers and the various ways you’re notified of the happenings around you. 

Put it all together and you have your reason to take the action, the realistic possibility of taking the action right now, and the prompt to take the action. All of these components are present in obvious and non-obvious ways, and you can learn a lot from being curious about how they play a role in the different behaviors you engage in throughout the day.

This is a difficult topic to tackle, but let’s try. It’s not necessarily about having regrets, or why they exist, but more a perspective around regrets that might be new to you.

To quickly define it, you feel regret when something happened that didn’t produce the result you wanted, but more particularly, you realize that you could have done something differently that would have influenced the result.  This goes for steps that you did or didn’t take, and the action or inaction that in hindsight was the wrong decision.

What happens with regret is it consumes us. We let it hold more mental bandwidth than it’s worth and preoccupy us. But in every moment we are making more decisions that generate results, and if we aren’t as present as we should be in those moments we’re more likely to do things incorrectly and do things we’ll later regret.

For example - And I don’t know the first thing about this but let’s say you almost bought Bitcoin 10 years ago. You regret having not taken action, and that regret distracts you from seeing the opportunity to invest today, because it very well still could be the right decision.

Or, let’s say you didn’t study a topic as hard as you wish you did in college because it would be valuable for you now. You could feel sorry for yourself and regretful for not making the most of that opportunity, or you could take the time to bridge that knowledge gap right now.

Regrets have a compounding nature to them, one thing leads to the next and leads to the next, but being mindful that you’re still making decisions about that thing today allows you to start correcting it.