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.

The one constant in all of your relationships is you. You are one-half of all of your relationships. So, guess what? If you have a certain thing that comes up in a lot of your relationships, it might be time to think about how you are part of that problem, and more importantly, what you can do to fix it.

But, let’s expand on that, and necessarily so, because we have many types of relationships. First thing we think about are relationships with people, but we also have relationships with things like money, power and influence. We have relationships with past experiences like achievements as well as trauma. We have relationships with our emotions, relationships with our issues, with just about everything! And that’s because our relationships simply are our understanding of how things work, and how we perceive ourselves to exist within that understanding. 

The opportunity here is, if we are a major part of our relationships, then it’s within our control to change them for the better. This requires self-awareness, and figuring out what energy you’re putting off and therefore what you’re attracting. Often, we find things happen in our lives, good and bad, with no explanation. I would argue that your energy attracts more of the same, and your default way of seeing things will change the energy you’re giving off. To me, this is reinforce and reaffirm positivity, optimism, and gratitude in my mind, so that it attracts more of the same. And in doing so, and changing your state, you change half of your relationship with everything else! 

I think we can all relate to the dangers of social media consumption. We almost unknowingly open up the app just to quickly check our notifications and find ourselves swiping for another 20 minutes thinking “How the heck did this happen?”. If that sounds like you, give this a try.

Move your social media app icons to a different place on your phone. It’s so simple, but really powerful. Over time, we’ve become conditioned to opening social media as an outlet to earn a quick hit of dopamine, or to easily access entertainment. And the repetition of reaching for our phone for these reasons ends up encoding as a habit on a subconscious level. By moving the app icon, you disrupt the normal subconscious habit, bringing your awareness to the activity, and introduce some friction to exercising the habit itself.  

What all of this does is it makes opening the app a conscious decision. In that moment when we realize we can’t execute the subconscious habit, our conscious mind takes over and asks, “Do I really want to be on social media right now?”. It gives you the power to choose when your social media apps are open instead of just realizing that you’re on social media again minutes after you started.

This is a philosophy shared by two of my favorite habit formation brains, James Clear who’s the author of Atomic Habits and Nir Eyal who authored Hooked and Indistractable. James Clear calls it making the response more difficult, and Nir calls it an effort pact, but they both function the same. It’s about bringing your awareness to the moment of action, which usually occurs with little conscious processing, so that you can make the decision for yourself.

Life is a process. We learn new things, change our beliefs, meet new people, find new interests. It’s not fair to compare the different phases of life to each other because everything is a dynamic progression that adds upon itself to create our current experience.

I can’t help but think of the way we narrow the scope of our own lives, and when we reflect it’s the highlights and the low lights that come to mind first. These are influential moments, but they’re not representative of the life you’ve lived as a whole. Let’s take a step back and think through how this all works.

Something I really enjoy about the English language is the use of the word "practice". Doctors have a medical practice, lawyers have a law practice, nurses have their nursing practice. I love this because despite the years of schooling and hours of investment to learn the craft, it’s still recognized as a dynamic process and in practice. And it makes sense because these fields are changing so rapidly that practitioners need to be able to adjust to new information and standards.

The literal definition of “practice” in this way actually means, “the expected procedure or way of doing something”, and I love how this contrasts with the typical improvement-oriented definition of practice because it creates a beautiful blend of standardized method and dynamic exploration. This blend is best demonstrated in the way it’s used for a yoga practice that abides by the general movements and patterns of the exercise while leaving room for personal preference and self-exploration.

I bring this all up because life is a practice in this sense. There are certain rules and guidelines that we all should follow to have a good general experience. Within that framework, we each have an opportunity to discover how we can optimize life for ourselves! That is our life practice, and it’s a beautiful thing to see how our uniqueness, preferences, and connection has meaning from this lens.

You are the master of your own life practice, and it is a practice, because things will change and you’ll need to adjust. Follow your heart and explore your own practice!

This is a powerful thought, especially in light of the quarantine and related circumstances. We all had to change our plans. People are rescheduling weddings and vacations as well as businesses that are forced to temporarily close. Everyone needs to adjust across the board. We all see this time as extremely inconvenient and disruptive to the way we wanted things to be,but let’s consider the flip side of it. What if all of this is happening for you?

“Everything comes to you at the right moment.”

Who’s to say that the plans we had set were for the best? And how would we know that what we had planned was exactly the way it was supposed to be? There’s an element to this situation that has a novelty that we need to tap into. There’s a greater force or power that has urgently disrupted the way things were for a reason. Instead of rejecting that and seeing it as an inconvenience, we can choose to see it as divine and powerful.

It’s important to place your faith in the universe and it’s creation. Last week, I had a great conversation with Dr. Sangeeta Sahi about how important it is to be flexible and accommodating to the universe’s plan. From our narrow point of view, we are in no position to understand the larger workings of the things around us, and how its meant to serve us. However, we can recognize that things beyond our control are working for us, and that everything will come to us at the right moment.

Even in difficult financial, physical, and personal circumstances, it’s important to see the lessons you are learning and the growth that you’re being pushed into. Its also important to see how that ultimately contributes to your overall well being. I know it’s hard to hear during these difficult times, but it’s important to trust that everything comes to you at the right moment.