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.

Jay Shetty talks about the 3 Cs of changing you life. If you want to really make positive strides, you need to consider all 3 - Coaching, community, and consistency.

First, coaching. The role of a coach is to provide instruction that improves your performance. It usually comes from a place of experience or level of understanding that is more comprehensive than your own. The reason this is important is because it provides a blueprint and targeted action steps that help point you in the right direction. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to pay someone to induce a positive change, but you do need to identify an individual whose example you can learn from.

Next is community. You're probably familiar with the idea that you’re the combination of the 5 people you spend the most time with. If that’s the case, then you simply are mirroring the behavior of the people around you. If you want to create change in your life, simply change the people you surround yourself with and the things that influence you will be more aligned with the behaviors of those people.

And last is consistency. This is the heart of positive change. You must be dedicated and accountable to taking action in order to make progress in a significant way. The results of your actions compound over time and begin creating larger results from the same input. Consistency is very difficult, especially for positive behaviors that provide delayed gratification, but it’s important to invest in being consistent up front to get the ultimate payoff you desire in the future.

If you’re serious about growing in a certain way you need to be intentional about incorporating all three of these elements - Coaching, community, and consistency.

Our behavior is so complex and exists on so many different levels. When we take action, we very quickly seek to find the meaning in that decision. We as humans are meaning making machines and we will continue to process decisions until we have achieved some sort of understanding, or we’ve alleviated an internal disagreement called "cognitive dissonance". Unfortunately this is often maladaptive because our brains are reflexively looking to rationalize behaviors, and do so on more of a superficial level rather than tapping into the true cause.

When we do get to the root motivation of the behavior, we find it’s a matter of meeting a deeply engrained human desire. Common human desires include a need for safety, a need for belonging, and a need for comfort. These desires are generated from a lifetime of experiences, with a focus on creating strategies that compensate for needs that weren't met in the past. This means that we can overcompensate and try to meet needs beyond capacity, resulting in dysfunctional and distracting behavior. With this understanding, we should attempt to identify these areas and redirect this energy toward more productive areas.  

The best way to do so is by auditing the fulfillment payout. Basically, when a need is successfully satisfied, we need to evaluate how much joy or comfort it actually provides. It’s a very difficult process because it asks you to see in your blindspots, but with the right instruction you can begin to see the areas that are unnecessarily sucking your energy and attention.

Want to hear a well-known truth? People can’t read your mind. And why is that important to know? As clearly as something might be in your mind, it is based on information that isn’t available to others. But understanding that there’s a gap between what exists in your brain and what others know is the first step to overcoming it. The clearest way to get someone to do what you want them to do is to make as specific of an ask as possible. By stating exactly what you want, and providing the context and emotion around it, you are more likely to get what you are looking for.

Let me go through a few examples in different environments to conceptualize this. You and your partner are making Holiday plans. You mentioned that Christmas was an important holiday to be with your family, but did so 6 months ago. When the plans are being made it is important to ask for it again specifically in the moment rather than rely on the past communication to come to the resolution you want. In business, when you make a pitch, don’t leave the call to action open to interpretation. State exactly what action you want the other person to take to move the deal forward. And with your spirituality, ask the universe as narrowly as possible for what you want to manifest. Changing the world in a massive way, and changing the world for the better in a massive way are two very different things, and the extra specificity is crucial. 

Making a specific ask requires vulnerability, because you’re stating things exactly how you want them. But this level of transparency is important so that others can interact with you in a perfectly aligned way.

Optimism is an expression of positivity. It’s about seeing things in the best way possible and expecting the best things to happen. An important clarification to make is that it is not about being overly idealistic. Everything has positive and negative elements built into it, and being optimistic is choosing to focus on the positive elements and expecting those to prevail. 

Ultimately, when you’re optimistic you have an overall belief that good defeats evil in this world. You can find evidence for that in seeing how one particle of light can undo millions of particles of dark. Or think about this Vedic principle that monks adopt - For every word of gossip or negativity they speak about someone they are required to say 10 positive things.

You’ve heard this before in the expression “The glass is half full”. If we break this down, we’ll see that this is just a perspective and a choice against the alternative “The glass is half empty”. It’s all about seeing the positivity and possibility in the situation, which is your decision to believe that good beats evil in this world.

I think this concept of optimism is articulated very well in a Winston Churchill quote that goes as follows, "A sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Confidence as I know it, is a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities.

When it comes to self-confidence I think there’s a fundamental piece that needs to be addressed - It is very dependent on the circumstance. Let me demonstrate this with an example. If I were to tell you that you had to go on a stage in front of 1,000 people, that could be pretty nerve-wrecking. But what if your task was simply to start clapping? Do you think you could do it? That’s a much different task than lecturing to the audience on a difficult topic… 

The factor that matters most within self-confidence is your comfort level. In fact the only time that our confidence comes into question is in times of discomfort, and our perceived confidence is just our internal measurement of how well we think we can do given the uncertainty within the discomfort. The further you stretch out of your comfort zone, the less certainty you have about how well you’ll be able to perform in that space.

But therein lies the opportunity. If you want to build self-confidence, you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to prove to yourself that you have the abilities and qualities necessary to perform. Putting yourself in a position to fail is a necessary ingredient to building self-confidence, and I’m confident you’ll realize how capable you are once you give yourself the chance.

This provides a whole extra layer to perspective and is something that can change your life because it’s so tangible. We are singularly powerful in that we can control our external world by making the right choices within our internal world. No one has mastered this like Charlie Rocket, an individual who has a special quantum magnetism to him.

I’m on a winning streak! How simple is that? It’s just like the Wayne Dyer quote “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” If you see yourself as a winner, and everything that happens to you is just an extension of the streak you’re on, then you’ll continue to find wins in your life. This conversation was framed by the idea of momentum, and keeping momentum allows you to continue on in the direction you want to go.

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Those goals that you have, the dream life that you aspire for, that perfect relationship and job… Is that something you’re interested in having or are you committed to making it happen? It’s a very important distinction, and something that John Assaraf mentions in his book "Innercise".

If you’re interested in something then it exists as an idea, a possibility in your life for how things can go. The problem is there’s no definitiveness, no decision, and therefore no pressure or accountability toward making it happen. It’s a very passive approach toward the things that you want. If you are committed to something, then you are acknowledging that you’re going to do what it takes to make it happen. By committing you put yourself out there and begin to take positive action where failure is not an option. With this intention, a possibility becomes a probability and things will start to fall into place so that it does happen, because it must happen one way or another.

The key difference is this - When you’re interested in something, your focus is on the "If". There’s doubt about if this thing is going to happen or not. When you are committed to something, the focus is on the "How". It’s going to happen, now it’s about how to make it happen. 

So I ask you to be critical of yourself. How do you approach the things that you want. Are you interested in them happening, or are you committed to making them happen?