This is about the dynamics and pressures we feel as being a part of a group.The founder of Lead By Impact Michael Vargas breaks this down for us so we can better understand: 

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So, the best thing we can do as a member of a group is actually what we shouldn’t do. We should not attribute right or wrong to a thought, and we should not view another opinion as worse than our own.

I wanted to send forward a lesson that has left an impression on me lately. I learned this through Darren Hardy and it relates to not taking negative action or giving in to negative habits.

There are two ways to go about doing this. You can either avoid, or you can resist. More specifically, avoid the stimulus or resist the urge. I’m just going to tell you up front that you should want to avoid. It all comes back to the habit loop. If you’ve been presented a stimulus and have been prompted to action, then you’ve begun the habit loop and your brain will crave the reward at the end until it receives it. This is very distracting and requires a lot of mental energy, and it is exactly the distinction I am trying to make. 

When you choose to avoid, you prevent the stimulus from happening in the first place. You, therefore, avoid initiating the poor habit, never starting the habit loop and don’t experience the urge to take the action at all. You can do this by keeping your phone away from you or off, closing unnecessary tabs in your web browser, or throw out the unhealthy foods in your pantry.

When you resist, it’s because you were already presented the stimulus. You feel the mental pull to take the action, but you know it’s not what you want to do so you fight against the urge. This requires a lot of energy and no matter how much will power you have, you need to actively use it to resist. This means that you have less cognitive energy to focus on what you are trying to do. This creates poor performance and frustration, which then affirms your brain’s desire for validation and strengthens the craving you’re experiencing.

This is the reason you’re told to keep your phone out of your bedroom at night, delete social media apps, and get rid of your TV. The most effective thing you can do to not take negative action is avoid it altogether.

You want to hear something that doesn’t make any sense, but we do it anyway? We hold ourselves to different expectations than we hold for other people. And the unfortunate side-effect of that is we fail to support ourselves in really important ways. Our favorite dietitian and mindfulness expert Gina B says it best:

Just like Adam Roa say’s, “Treat yourself like someone you love!”

Lets talk about self-development books. Some people love them and feel like their life is changed by them, and they admire the authors and take a special interest in their work. However, some people think it’s a bunch of placebo and new books are just reiterations of the same ideas and information that are presented too broadly to be catered to you.

Whatever you believe I respect, but I find myself to be the former. I’m a believer that if you want to sit in the throne you’ve gotta watch the king. And that’s what these books are for me, they are a synthesized download of the information brilliant minds have processed and tested into an easy to understand format. Sure the information might be redundant, but the perspective is always novel. What I appreciate most about self-development books is how people come to the same conclusion in different ways, which gives me hope that I can arrive their in my own way.

What I’ve found with this so far, is it has presented just the right balance. If you’re feeling motivated and alive on an idea, maybe it’s not always the right time to view it from the lens of practicality or implementation. Many ideas don’t come to life because they aren’t supported initially, and this is our system to indirectly tell each other if we want feedback or if we want objective support.

Of course, that feedback is important and more than welcome, but in the right time and place. Setting the intention to share unrestrained positivity and optimism for an idea might be exactly what is needed to get it off the ground and address the immediate concerns built into the idea.

So, I’d encourage you, if you have an idea and you aren’t looking for feedback yet, to tell whoever you’re sharing the idea with that you want positive thinking only.

I wanted to highlight something that came up in the Discover Your Purpose Digital Summit. It’s the idea of trusting and following your heart. Sarah King, who facilitated the event, called this radical obedience, and obedience is listening to what your heart is telling you. It’s about yielding and surrendering to what you’re pulled to do and whatever is pulling you in that direction.

Another word for this is faith, and a participant, Leo Galofre, put this in the chatbox. "Faith - Fully attainable in the heart".

That just really stood out to me because it’s so comprehensive. First it counteracts the doubt we have within ourselves and other press upon us because it “hasn’t been done before” or it’s “not completely thought out”. This suggests that you don’t necessarily need those pieces in place and if you truly yield and surrender to the process those question marks will be answered by exclamation marks and the solution will naturally present itself in front of you.

When we can shed ourselves of that layer of societal doubt and criticism we recognize so much more is possible than we first thought. And that’s your first sign that you should do it and keep chasing it.

One of my favorite books, The Promise of a Pencil by Adam Braun, has a line in the book that goes as follows, “Go chase the footsteps you want to leave behind”.

This suggests that you are following your path, the path is already there, you just don’t see it yet. But, when you surrender to the process, and believe that it is fully attainable in the heart, the path will light up for you.

What if we were to celebrate others’ success as if it were 98% our own? What would that look like, and how excited and inspired would we be in that acknowledgment? From someone you don’t know, like an Olympian at the top of the podium, or a girl who successfully fundraised so that she could go on a field trip, or a CEO who doubled revenue.

Just about everything in life would be worth celebrating.

Well, here’s a thought for you. Your body is made up mostly of water, air, and food. What makes you different and unique from other people is your genetic code which is only a fraction of who you are. Then, 98% of those genes can be found in all humans, and more than 50% of those genes come from yeast.

So, if you’re willing to think through that logic, almost all of you is identical to and lives in everyone else. So, when they succeed, you succeed!

As mentioned in the interview,  it’s so common for us to see the differences we have from other people because it gives us a sense of our individuality. And while that variation is important and powerful, we can also view it from the other end and recognize how much we are the same! This is one of the factors that goes into the cycle of service, relating the two ends of humility to mobilize resources, (humility being a willingness to give without expectation and a willingness to ask for help which helps). When you choose to support someone else, you are supporting yourself because most of what they are is also you in its makeup. And through that lens, we can make the world a better place for all, which is a better place for ourselves.

This concept has always been personal to me, and a competitive advantage that I chose not to share publicly. Thinking about it more recently, I realized that there’s no secret sauce and I want you to know about it.

Since I was 12 years old in Junior High School I have been doing 51 pushups before bed. Originally my reason for doing pushups was to be a better soccer player, and it worked. I played D1 college soccer and developed into a pretty good player and then played a few years of semi-pro too. But I chose to do 51 pushups because I refused to be outworked, I always wanted to one more pushup than everyone doing 50. So every evening I had it in my mind that I was going to do what others won’t to earn in life what others don’t.

But something interesting happened. When my soccer career ended, I still found myself on the ground doing pushups that first evening, the next evening and the next. This made me reflect on my reason why.

I realized the pushups were never about soccer. They were about committing every single day to the person I wanted to be. A person who is devoutly disciplined. A person who appreciates the value of hard work. And at that point it wasn’t a choice anymore, it was just me.

Now, I’m 27 years old which means for 15 years I’ve been doing this. And have I missed a night? Of course I have, I’d say conservatively I’ve done pushups 90% of the time. But check this out. By that math I have done 246,375 pushups.

There’s no secret here. It’s the daily commitment to disciplined hard work. And my success with my pushups is the same success that helps me produce a new episode every single day for you for the last two years. It’s also the same reason I believe I can achieve the massive goals on my horizon. Because every day I know I have it in me to get done what needs to be done. I believe that your ceiling for your potential can be determined by your daily habits. I encourage you to think about what you choose to do on a daily basis, and what that means for your future, because “how you do one thing is how you do everything”.