I love the idea of "attraction" and think it offers a really compelling and accurate visual for us to understand. In order to attract something you need to be magnetic, there needs to be some quality that pulls other things toward it because it’s in an aligned or matching state. The thing about our magnetism and attraction is you can choose your polarity, you can set the frequency, and therefore you can get very specific about what you attract. I believe that at all times we are subconsciously attracting and pulling things toward us, good or bad, and gaining an awareness of what that might be could be a great first step.

Now let’s talk about chasing. Chasing in my opinion isn’t all that bad! On one hand you can chase a partner or standard that you’ll never reach, but on the other hand you can chase a goal that really motivates you and gives you a sense of meaning and purpose. In either case chasing involves going against the grain and taking the more difficult and effortful route in pursuit of something. The chase is more of a game and if that’s something that you respond well too then there’s definitely a place for it.

I believe we should be both attracting and chasing. We should be the beacon that pulls things into our lives passively while still taking chances and putting ourselves out there effortfully. What’s important is that you are attracting and chasing the right things in order to realize the life you wish to have.

Despite the chaos and uncertainty we’re facing in life, especially now, there’s a lot of good happening that we’re not focusing on. It’s natural to be hyper-aware of the negativity, but just for a moment let’s bring your awareness to all of the positive. So much is going right in your life.

The reason you don’t think about some of these good things very often is because it’s just the way it is. However when something good is taken away we realize how good we had it and that we weren’t appreciating as much as we should have when we had it. Like a missed call from your Mom or Dad - That’s something you’re going to wish you had some day. Or the sweat and soreness of a tough workout while you're physically capable of it.  Or your health in general and how you go to sleep without chronic pain, or how you don’t have any difficulty breathing. These are all things that we may have in our life that we don’t think twice about, and they deserve more credit. 

It’s important to draw your attention to these small things because it initiates a cascade of gratitude that compounds and picks up momentum in your favor. When you train your brain and body to acknowledge more of the good, which surrounds you at all moments, it will begin to attract more of it in creative and valuable ways. And those things that seem like they’re going wrong? Well you can overwhelmingly counteract them with all of the examples of how things are going right, and start to build new associations and understandings that will help you overcome them. 

So I encourage you to take a 30 seconds right now to think about how much is going right for you in life, as small and simple as they might be, so that you can appreciate those elements before they’re gone.

A palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware conducted a study as people were near death and asked them one question, “What is your biggest regret?” The overwhelming response by people at the end of their life said something along the lines of "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

I bring this up because the concept embedded in this thought is the biggest obstacle we face today - We let life live us, we don’t live life. We choose to be responsive and reactive to the different things that are thrown at us, making the most of it, but also not being ambitious and looking to create an alternative for ourselves. We are so strongly influenced by others’ expectations that we default to meeting their standards rather than setting our own.

This influence is so subconscious, so deeply engrained in our decision making, that it becomes the greatest regret of the dying.

So what can we do to overcome this? To gain an awareness on this so that we don’t fall into the same cycle?

Be intentional. Set your own values. Make your own decisions about where you should put your time and energy. Determine what fulfillment, joy, happiness, and success mean to you and not everyone else. When you begin to think independently you attract opportunities in manifestation of those thoughts. You slowly find alignment in your life and the passionate inspiration that comes with it.

This is a difficult topic to talk about it, but I want to add some perspective to it. It’s the idea of pain. Pain comes into our lives in so many way - Physical pain after some kind of trauma or chronic condition, emotional pain as people come and go in your life, and spiritual pain as you weave in and out of integrity through your actions and choices.

I don’t want to undermine any of the pain you feel or have felt in your life, but I do want to change the label we place on it and frame it in more of a constructive way. Pain is simply a biological way of getting our attention. It’s a message from our body to our brain that something is wrong and that we should change our behavior. If that’s the case, then is it a stretch to say that the primary purpose of pain is to teach us a lesson?

If we see pain as a trigger that brings our awareness to a lesson, then it provides an understandable purpose to the pain. Instead of giving yourself time and wishing the pain goes away you can be proactive about discovering how this pain is meant to serve you. In the discomfort and emotion of pain it is hard to think rationally and positively, but by setting the intention in advance you can work through pain in a more productive way.

If your heart is broken by a breakup, how is that pain signaling the self-growth you’re meant to experience? If you were let go from your job, or not hired for a dream position, how does the pain of disappointment encourage you to reflect on what you could have done differently? If you feel dejected about breaking your own trust what values did you violate and how can you prioritize them in the future?

Pain is a signal, and it’s up to us to perceive the signal. I believe pain is merely a trigger for a lesson that you need to learn in order to attain the fulfillment and satisfaction you seek.

No matter where you are in life, what you’ve done, how long you’ve been doing it, this is true for every single one of us - You’re just getting started.

When something begins it indicates a change of state.  A change from nothing to something, no activity to activity. Things in our life are constantly in motion and every single day we start and stop and start again. While this might seem like something that prevents us from picking up momentum, it actually functions more like a cycle that constantly renews itself and redirects itself. 

This happens because when you’re at the beginning of something, there’s this energy around it, a tangible excitement, that encourages you to invest more of your attention in it and dedicate yourself to it. This fuels your ability to pick up speed at the task and soon be going faster than when you left off!

But now more on the experiential side let’s debunk something important. How is it that you can be doing something for 10 years and you’re just getting started? Well what I’ve found is that as you spend more time on something and dive deeper into it with more expertise, you realize how much more there is to learn and grow into. It raises the capacity and you realize that you are even earlier on in the process to mastery than you originally thought because there’s more to achieve.

No matter where you think you’re at developing a skill, building a business, or achieving a project, you’re just getting started! And that’s the best thing that could happen because then you can approach your work with a more youthful energy.

This is a really important but implicit distinction between price and value. For convenience sake we label things a certain price to communicate their relative value, but that sells things short because it doesn’t account for the very complex nature of our decision making processes. As people we actually prefer to transact with value because it feels more equitable. There’s no one better in the world to make this distinction than the author of the incredible book “The Go Giver”, Bob Burg.

As it is with many things in life, creating, receiving, and evaluating value is an empathetic process. It requires self-awareness to know how your life history allows you to draw certain conclusions, and understand how someone else may perceive the transaction and value built into it differently.

This thought is inspired by a great and inspirational leader, Winston Churchill. Well known for his resilient and positive perspective, he is known for the quote  “The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Every single day and in everything you encounter, you are making choices about how you perceive things to be. Things are not inherently good or bad, they are as they are, we are the ones who assign meaning to it. It’s the glass half full approach - The pessimist looks to see how much is already gone, and the optimist looks to see how much is left. It’s the exact same amount being perceived in two entirely different ways.

Obviously the preferred approach is to be the optimist. Our lives are so much richer when we choose to see the positivity and possibility around us, but this contradicts the negativity detecting beings we were evolutionarily designed to be. Like anything, overcoming our nature and being an optimist takes practice. It requires gratitude even when you don’t feel like it. It takes consistent mindfulness upon receiving the privileges we take for granted. And it asks you to see the silver lining in situations that are far from ideal. 

It’s not going to happen over night, but with the intention to grow in that way you can replace the pessimist who sees the difficulty in every opportunity to  become the optimist who sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Something that I have come to love in my life are systems. Systems are important because it helps you to generate consistent and reproducible outcomes. Many elements in our lives are very simple and operate similar to a function, which is basically the process of an input being altered based on some rules to produce a new output. What a system can do is it can help package the input into something easier to use and optimize the function to generate the specific outcome you desire.

For example - Let’s say you want to get better at flossing at night. Very simply you can create a system for your toothbrushing routine that incorporates flossing. Maybe you start storing your floss on top of your toothbrush, triggering you to interact with it in order to brush your teeth. Or maybe you keep your toothbrush in a new place, like a cup, bristles down as a reminder to look for the floss you placed in the cup as well.

Easy enough right? And it’s very reliable. But if it’s so easy then why don’t we do it more often? It’s because building the system takes a little time and effort upfront to establish. But something I firmly believe is that you need to invest in building the system in order to make consistent progress in your life. It is the one decision that helps you make the right future choice over and over again.

These systems can be applied for just about anything - From exercise to sleep to social media consumption to relationships to self-care to fun! I’m being really intentional about designing systems in my life that correspond with things I want to prioritize, my values, so that the important things are represented in the actions I’m taking and the results I’m generating.