What is the difference between prioritizing your schedule, and scheduling your priorities? I’m not going to tip-toe around it. Prioritizing your schedule means you don’t have complete power. People can very quickly fill up your schedule if you’d let them, and you’d have no say in what you do and what you don’t. While it is important to prioritize your schedule and be able to satisfy the tasks in front of you, what is the nature of those things? If important things come up, you may not have the same flexibility to adjust to new demands. In fact prioritizing your schedule is more of a responsive approach to the way you spend your time because you are letting external factors be a leading decision maker in what you ultimately do.

But when you schedule your priorities, you are in control. You decide up front what is important to you and you make sure you allocate time to do it. It’s a very proactive approach in that you design your life in advance with the intention of doing what you want to do and when you want to do it. Whether it’s time with your kids, a significant other, at the gym, self-care, or in a hobby, the fact that it’s important to you means that it deserves your time, and you can satisfy that when you schedule your priorities.

So pull out a schedule, make your best guess at what your pillar time commitments are - work hours, extracurriculars, meetings, whatever - then fill in the gaps with the things that are truly important to you. For me, Thursday night is date night, and unless extremely urgent I don’t schedule calls or work for that evening because that’s something that is important to me. It really is that easy, and there’s no excuse not to try it.

Don’t prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities.

We all wait for the right time to 'feel ready' before committing to doing something different. But that process of ‘waiting for the right time’ often stalls our progress. We inherently have a negativity bias that will highlight all the reasons why we shouldn’t or can’t do something, sabotaging new ideas at the onset because it threatens the current comfort we are experiencing. That’s why motivation is such a convenient excuse... We tell ourselves that there are conditions to when we can try something new.

The primary misconception is - Change doesn’t usually come about because we want it to, it usually comes about because we have to. It’s driven by necessity, and necessity does not require motivation.

Our brains work counter to this and there are a few things we can do to overwrite it. The first is to act quickly. When the impulse strikes, train yourself to take a committed action before your brain gets the chance to intervene and encourage self-preservation. Self-preservation exists in direct contradiction to change, and as Mel Robbins shares in her book “The 5 Second Rule” we have a very narrow window before our brain starts taking action out of self-preservation.

If you don’t feel like doing something, that’s very normal. In fact your brain is influencing you to do that. But you don’t need to feel ready or motivated to do something in order to do it. In every moment we have choice, and inducing change to invest in our future is most often within our best interest.

I am fascinated by evolutionary biology and how evolution has created us to be a certain type of species that exhibits certain traits. But the issue is we’ve created a  society where those traits are so out of place. In her work, Dr. Ellen Vora has identified a few of those misplaced optimizations, with a longer emphasis on the mechanism itself and how it designs us for survival.

"There's three things that are adaptive in the past that are really maladaptive these days. One of them is that we want to be lazy, another is that we really enjoy calorie dense food, and the other is that we're hardwired for survival - Which is a really good design on a savannah where 99% of the time you're not particularly stressed but 1% of the time it's life or death. We live in this flipped script now where we are chronic low-grade stress all the time, and it's not so life or death for the most part. We're sort of designed to be hypervigilant in anticipating negative consequences and to be obsessed about that. There's not survival advantage to being hardwired to be chill. I think the more that we can surrender and trust and show up and say 'all I can do is do my best and then I release the outcome, I don't control that part' then that's the way to push back against our hardwiring for survival."

All of the cognitive biases we have, and the predispositions, and subconscious behaviors were all created as a result of what helped us survive evolutionarily as humans. And as Dr. Vora pointed out one of the most maladaptive forms of that is our stress response. In order to combat our natural physiological tendencies to perceive threats and our hyperactive fight or flight sympathetic nervous systems, we need to detach ourselves from the results and accept them as they are rather than obsess on how we can influence the outcome.

Any time someone asks me “Brian, how do you come up with a new idea every single day?” I respond with one word - “Observation”.

There is so much going on around us in the world, and a lot of it we cannot even perceive. But those things that we can perceive often present themselves in a way that only reveals the surface of what it means, the tip of the iceberg, and when you get inquisitive you can get into some really powerful realizations.

To observe is to notice the things going on around you as they are. While it doesn't sound profound it is very difficult to do because it demands your focused attention, which is being pulled at from all angles. You cannot dive deeper into a thought or concept until you become aware of it, and being observant of your surroundings allows you to access this depth that exists around us.

As you can probably hear, observation is not everything. It is merely the first step in a process that cascades into a much deeper opportunity for understanding. Everything has a history and series of associations tied to it, and gaining insight into that helps explain why that thing exists, not simply that it does. And also important to note, observation is not actionable, it is simply a mental process that provokes action. If you attract the right thing into your life and you observe that it’s there, nothing changes. It’s your exercising that opportunity that reaps the benefit you wanted in the first place.

So I challenge you to observe. Don’t just hear, listen. Don’t just look, see. There is so much out there to be explored and you must first know it’s there through observation before you can dive much deeper into it.

A very misunderstood topic is this idea of opposition. Just seeing the word 'opposition' probably triggers you to get into some kind of defensive mode, and I don’t think that’s necessary or productive. Having opposition is usually representative of someone or something that is trying to limit you or prevent you from reaching a goal or accomplishment. It seems like their existence is meant to directly contradict you.

Well that’s exactly right. Opposition is merely a summary of the term “opposite position”. But instead of framing it so adversarially we can think through the implications of what it means about you if you’re facing opposition.

It means you’re pursuing something you believe in.  No matter what you do there is always going to be someone with the completely opposite opinion, but don’t let the existence of that keep you from standing up for what you think is right. When you are confronted with opposition it means that you are behaving in a way that puts yourself out of your comfort zone, in front of your opposition, which will allow you to grow within that particular belief as well as holistically. 

And when you face opposition, it’s an opportunity to learn. I think society’s fatal flaw right now is that we are unwilling to empathize with the opposing side and try to understand why they think the way they do. This goes from big political issues to daily choices. And in my opinion, as long as there is conflict then there an opportunity to stimulate conversation, which can lead to resolution.

The punchline is - Don’t fear opposition. There will always be opposition. Choose the right perspective when it comes to your opposition and use it as a vehicle to grow.

One thing that we don’t think nearly enough about, which takes up one third of our time and governs the other two thirds of our life, is sleep. Getting good sleep is so crucial when it comes to repairing and restoring your body and mind to be at its optimum state. Fortunately for us, our next SISD guest Dr. Ellen Vora can help us get better sleep by teaching us how to manage our light exposure.

It seems minor but it’s so important. We can let light dictate our circadian rhythm by making sure our devices aren’t disrupting it. Our sleep habits are a major factor in our expression of anxiety, and sleep allows our body to engage in important therapeutic processes like cancer mitigation, decrease our risk of dementia, and do so many other things relating to our overall mental health.

I want to share with you a major realization that completely changed my perspective on our human capabilities for love.

I used to be the type of person that was very protective about my emotions and commitment to others. I would reserve saying “I love you” only for people that in my opinion had earned it. I wasn’t confident being vulnerable about how important someone was in my life, and making sure they knew how much they meant to me. This was true for all types of relationships - Romantic, family, and friends.

But then I started observing people I really admire and saw how they interacted with others, and I chose to begin loving everyone. I realized that everyone is worthy of my love, meaning everyone deserves my compassion. I was hesitant to be so open about sharing my emotions for the logical reason - How can you possibly love people you don’t know that well, or even know at all? I wrestled that for a while until I realized this.

If people can hate for no reason, then we absolutely can love for no reason. 

How we look at people is our choice, and we can set a new standard for ourselves that defaults to having love for others. And I’m not talking about being polyamorous, I mean that you can genuinely want the best for and care for the well being of everyone. There is more than enough in this world, including the love that you have to offer, and your love is one of the most powerful forces you have to create a collective sense of belonging, purpose, and fulfillment.

Today we need to make an important distinction. The two words of happiness and joy are used synonymously but they imply very different things. One is positioned as the byproduct of something and perceived in a moment, and one is more focused on the state of being and the process. One of our time’s most eloquent speakers, Simon Sinek, recently shared his opinion on this.

Simon makes one other really good point. We can’t expect to live in a perpetual state of happiness. Happiness can only be appreciated when observed relative to hardship and challenges, which most definitely will exist in our lives. But joy is more enduring, and can be more consistent, because it’s the byproduct of an aligned and genuine life where you feel like you matter.