I want to touch on something I’ve been hearing recently but I haven’t gone deeper with it yet. It resurfaced when John Assaraf was on the virtual panel of the FashInnovation Worldwide talks, and it’s about our awareness and what it provides us with.

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He mentions that our awareness is external, meaning that we can acknowledge the way things have been that we didn’t recognize at first, which I imagine includes subconscious behaviors. Then, when we gain that awareness, we process it and internalize it, adding a new layer to the awareness which is our perception. It’s within that perception where we choose how to take a responsive action, which is more deliberate than merely reacting to our new found awareness.

Awareness gives us choice, it’s within our choices that our freedom lies.

Imagine if everything you wanted you got on the first try? You set your sights, made the effort and poof, it worked! How easy would life be? We all know that’s far from reality, but that’s what we should be thinking about right now. 

I don’t know about you guys, but sometimes when I put myself out there I fail to get what I wanted. Then, I get discouraged and self-critical and lose confidence. That doesn’t need to happen, and that shouldn’t happen. If it’s something we really want, we should try again and give it another go. Get more creative or specific about what you want and how you’re going to get it.

Good things in life don’t come easy, which means we should expect to fail a few times before achieving it! We don’t take this philosophy because we don’t hear people talking about how they failed to reach their goals, but it happens. I imagine that wouldn’t be the case if you tried again and continued to pursue it with persistence.

We can flip the script in a few ways. We can rewire the meaning of no. What if I told you what you wanted was 10 no’s. How excited would you be to hear your first no? That’s a David Meltzer mentality. Or, what if you measured your success by the number of responses you got, yes or no, and find validation in that. Would you be more likely to keep asking and keep pushing?

"If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.  Don’t give up too easily persistence pays off in the end."

Are you familiar with Parkinson’s law? It’s the idea that work expands to fill the time you have allotted to do it. Let’s first use an example from my own work. For preparing an intro for a Self Improvement Sit Down guest, I could either allocate a full hour to write the intro, or only 20 minutes. Either way, the time I allocate is how long it will take to me complete the task. Now, that we understand the principle, let’s quantify the trade-off.

Doing it in an hour means I can really pull in information. I can review all of my notes on the guest, re-listen to intros of the guest on other podcasts, and take my time on the way I position every word. Or, in 20 minutes, I act more on the intuition I’ve built up previously in my preparation, focus more on not missing any major concepts rather than the perfect flow of the words, and get it done in a third of the time.

This trade-off between “quality and speed” is something we all experience across the board, but with respect to Parkinson's law there’s one other factor that’s important, which is urgency. When I have less time, I work with more focus and apply more mental energy because it’s required of me. And I find that in this particular case, the impressions I can get down in 20 minutes is 95% of what I could accomplish in the hour, and the trade-off for time is worth it.

So, to summarize Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time you’ve allotted to doing it. Experiment with yourself and some of your tasks to see how you perform under different time constraints, and evaluate the quality of your work so you can quantify the trade-off for yourself.

I wanted to bring back and elaborate on something that I talked about last weekend in the SISD with Dr. Sangeeta Sahi. We talked about this idea of perfection, and why we are so desperate to strive for it. But, guess what! Nobody’s Prefect!

It’s hard to see that because we see the “perfect” version of everyone else. Why that is? It’s because that’s all they choose to share. I want to present an alternative opinion that we touched on in the conversation, it’s that perfection is actually a disadvantage, and once you understand that for yourself, you won’t want to be prefect either.

The dictionary definition of perfect is, “having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be”. What this suggests, but doesn’t overtly state, is that perfection is observable and external. It doesn’t speak at all to the means required to achieve that end. Behind the scenes, the people and things that appear to be “perfect” were produced through processes that aren’t sustainable or flexible. This means that they were designed specifically for one application, which has already come and gone given the speed that the world is changing at, making perfection virtually unattainable.

That’s why Darwin’s theory of natural selection and “Survival of the fittest” operates in a different way. Darwin states, “it’s the species most adaptable to change that persist and thrive”. Don’t strive for being perfect, nobody’s prefect. Instead strive to be authentic and diversified, also known as unique. Because the more adaptable you are to the things present in the current environment, the more amazing things that happen.

I want to highlight a great TedX Talk and the lessons embedded in it, which was delivered by, Lisa Bilyeu. In the talk, Lisa reflects on the beliefs and perspectives of the people in her life, how that interfaced with her perspectives and aspirations, and the way she understands those influences now.

Lisa grew up being told that women were supposed to stay at home and raise children. This was a perspective Lisa adopted because at that point she didn’t know any other way to think, so she put her aspirations aside to fit within that expectation. She then gained an awareness around what she wanted, which was to be an academy award winning filmmaker, but her father disapproved because he wanted her to be a housewife. Even before her wedding, Lisa’s grandfather told her that she needed to “Obey your husband” in order to have a happy marriage.

So, when life started to happen for her, Lisa slipped into the beliefs and perspectives she was comfortable with, an ideology she had grown accustomed to which was being a housewife, and did so for 8 years.

It’s so powerful to reflect on that because of what Lisa has accomplished now. Lisa helped grow Quest Nutrition to a billion dollar company and empowering other women to step into what lights them up and what they authentically enjoy doing.

But the final point is if you spend your entire life accommodating to the perspectives of others, you might be missing out on a world of opportunity.

There’s one layer deeper I want to go that I wasn’t aware of until speaking with this weekend’s SISD guest Dr. Sangeeeta Sahi. I asked her about how psychologically people are being affected by the quarantine.

It’s brilliant. The unconscious scripts we usually have in our head aren’t the predominant thought in our head any more, and the conscious brain is literally being woken up by this pandemic. What Dr. Sahi elaborates on more in the interview is how bringing consciousness to our habits is also bringing consciousness to existentialism and our sustainability.

"Be nice to yourself, always”. This should be our number one priority. It’s unbelievable how sensitive our minds are to the information we fill it with, and when we start to talk in a self-deprecating way, it leaves an impression. For example, when I do something dumb, maybe a typo in an email or I make a silly editing mistake, I jokingly say aloud, “Stupid Brian”. Also, when my girlfriend is in the room and hears that she immediately jumps in and says, “hey, don’t talk to him like that”.

We laugh about it but it’s true! It’s important. Yea my conscious mind acknowledges that it’s a joke and I don’t actually believe what I’m saying, but my unconscious mind doesn’t have the same presence, and it processes whatever it’s exposed to without context. I think that’s why my girlfriend and I have this conversation about me in third person, because it really is something completely separate with a mind of its own.

This self-criticism comes out of something that we all share. We are our own toughest critics. We hold ourselves to unreasonable expectations that we couldn't possibly ask of someone else. So, when we fall short of those expectations we express our disapproval in unacceptable ways. To reiterate, our brains are sensitive. We need to be careful before we start believing the lies we tell ourselves.

So what can you do? Be nice to yourself. Always. You deserve your own respect and patience. Yea things are going to come up and not go according to plan, but remember to take care of yourself before everything else.

Are you showing up fully in your romantic relationships, or is something holding you back? The reality is, something from our past might have greatly influenced us, and the way we allow ourselves to connect with others. Cordelia Gaffar is an emotions opener, and she employs empathetic listening tactics. Cordelia uses a 3 question sequence that unlocks the emotions we’ve been holding back.

Her 3 phase process stars with releasing what you’ve been wrestling with, let it go if it’s not serving you. Then you restructure our awareness and how you experience emotions, often giving yourself the permission to feel. Then you refresh and build your emotions back up in a positive and authentic way. I can personally relate to this, realizing recently how some experiences that happened in pre-school and junior high school shaped my understanding of romantic relationships.