Self Improvement Daily Podcast

This message is powerful. I encourage you, if that strikes, to let yourself be emotional. It features a spoken word poem performed and written by Adam Roa.

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“Treat yourself like someone you love.” It’s so moving, and so true, but hopefully this helped bring awareness to areas where you are unfair to yourself.

Let’s remember what it’s like to live like a kid.

This came to mind because over the Holiday I got to spend a lot of time with my nephew. The way he treats other people, looks at life, and is present in the moment was really beautiful to see.

First, the way he treats other people. He is too young to be socially conditioned, and worry about what others expect of him to change his behavior. He stares into your eyes, and isn’t worried about catching awkward or extended eye contact. When a stranger walks by, he says an adorable “hi” just because he enjoys interacting with other people, with no expectations, criticism, or judgment. When he’s looking for some love, he isn’t afraid to walk up to someone he trusts and ask to be held. 

And as a child, he’s not worried about tomorrow. He takes life moment by moment, doing what he wants and feels right then and there. And in these moments, he is always so observant to learn about everything going on around him, and finds joy in the things right in front of his eyes.

Of course, it’s not realistic to drop everything and live like a child. That would be extremely irresponsible. But, we can incorporate a few of these ideas, and approach life more often through the eyes of a child.

I am reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Steven Covey. I want to touch on something that is the baseline layer to those habits. It’s this thing that he calls the P/PC balance, which stands for Production and Production Capability.

The best example he shares is a story, as the story goes, of a poor farmer has one goose that every day lays a golden egg. The farmer then sells this egg and can provide for his family and everything they need. That egg is his lifeline and escape out of his situation, and he begins to depend on it. But one day, the goose stopped producing the golden egg, likely because the farmer wasn’t taking good enough care of it. This personifies the p/pc balance.

Essentially, it’s a trade-off between the valuable asset (production) and the ability to consistently create the valuable asset (production capability). With too much of a focus on the production, you won’t have sustainable value. With too much of a focus on the production capability, you won’t have enough short-term sustained value to see the long-term payoff.

Covey describes that this precise balance between the two is effectiveness. It’s an ability to not only generate results, but to be able to sustain them, rely on them, and consistently produce them.

We all have something in our lives that hasn’t settled into a good equilibrium, or reached its proper balance. What you need to do is diagnose and see if you’re taking good enough care of the goose, or if you’re not receiving enough golden eggs.

There’s value in being there for someone else. We know this because we all have experience, both, in sharing that value as well as in receiving it. This can take a few different forms, and it’s a relationship I want to explore with you today.

What is the difference between helping someone and supporting someone? And in what situations is one better applied than the other?

First, let’s look into the dictionary definitions. They both involve providing assistance to someone else, but the key difference is in how they do that. To Help is , “to provide assistance and make it easier for someone to do something by offering one’s services or resources, or to be of benefit to”.

To Support is, “to provide assistance by giving approval, comfort and encouragement, or being capable of sustaining”.

If you didn’t hear the difference, I’ll break it down here. When you help, you do so with a specific end in mind. There’s a desired measurable effect to achieve, and it’s through help you can make progress in working towards it. It’s also a little more transactional and time-bound by nature. With support, it’s more of a constant, enduring assistance that doesn’t really have a defined end goal or time frame. 

Knowing this now, how can we apply it? Well, we need to listen to the way it is being asked for. If someone mentions an end goal, offer to help get them there. If someone is looking for relief, then support is probably the better option. 

It requires a little reading between the lines, but if you want to be as effective as possible in giving someone the assistance they need, then identify you need to help or support.

Positivity is a spectrum and always relative. I sometimes lose sight of this, but positivity isn’t always about adding more good, it’s also about reducing some bad.

Something we do subconsciously is fixate on the threats in our life, which are often things that are undesirable. It’s human nature and in our evolutionary history to pay close attention to threats, as it was an important behavior in our survival. But things are different now, and we are in more control.

That's the first thing we could do to reduce the bad in our life: Stop letting it have power over us! 

I had a interesting experience recently that totally relates to this. A colleague and I were talking about imposter syndrome, which is a feeling that you don’t deserve the success or authority you have. Interesting enough, after I had that conversation, I felt imposter syndrome stronger in my life. The energy I spent talking it through with my buddy about how I had to relive my major bouts of imposter syndrome to relate to him, renewed the sentiment which began to effect me. I, then, had to restructure it in a positive way by talking through the issue rather than internalizing it. I also had to move the emotion on and out. 

You can call it the law of attraction or vibrations or spirituality, but the common principle here is that the energy you put into something emphasizes that component in your life. So emphasize positivity and you’ll be surrounded by more of it!

This is inspired by my weekly goal sheet, and the reflection I consistently have that I call wins of the week. What this does is it forces me to acknowledge the positive work I did, and give myself credit for the progress I made. This exercise is more impactful when thinking about the entire year, and I encourage you to write out your 3 wins of the year!

For me, my 3 wins of the year are: 

1. Moving to San Diego and building a great community for myself. This includes strengthening the relationships I already had with my coworkers and girlfriend, as well as forming new relationships with aligned individuals like those at Greatness Collective.

2. Grinding out some really impactful and influential partners in my full-time position. We are poised to activate in a big way in many different areas, and it took a years worth of work to get these partners onboard.

3. I have discovered the person I want to be, how I want to live my life, and what is meaningful to me. I am clearer than ever on who I am and what makes me happy. I know this will change, maybe even tomorrow, but for now It’s motivating to know that I don’t need to search too much, and now I can just execute!

Let me know, what are your three wins of the year?

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about goal setting, and I want to take a different angle on it, especially as we are drafting our New Years Resolutions. Not much changes from the previous conversation. Use smart goals that are specific measurable attainable realistic and time bound. Leverage some of the principles in habit formation like starting small, being consistent, making sure you find a way to reward yourself to drive the cycle. This is all good and important, but I realize it’s missing what is most important, the bottom of the pyramid so to speak that everything depends on.

Before setting a goal or committing to a habit you need to know your reason why! You won’t have the discipline required to achieve your goals if you’re not motivated to achieve it, and your reason is that motivation. It’s best summarized in the timeless quote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”.

So, as you’re setting goals and getting ready to hit your stride in this new decade, ask yourself why those plans even matter. For me, my overarching “why”, the truest motivation I have, is I want to impact others and leave this world better than I found it. After gaining that clarity, we can brainstorm themes that contribute to our why, and find the tactics and resolutions themselves that support those themes.

The conventions we use limit our ability to think, and words are at the root of it. So, if we change the words, we violate the conventions and can explore new ideas. The reason I say all this is because I am going to share an example brought to my attention in a podcast episode featuring Jim Kwik that leverages this concept.

Typically, we ask the question, "how smart are you, or how smart are they?". With this question, you’re using the standard definition and metrics for intelligence, and seeing how they fit into that general expectation. Someone might respond by referencing their IQ, or talking through a time when they thought they were clever or creative. Sure it could help as an ordinary point of reference, but it doesn’t add much beyond that. The question in itself is limiting because it asks you to answer with standardization.

But let’s change the order a bit. "How are you smart?". Sounds different doesn’t it? It’s open ended, which lends the respondent to really showcase something about themselves. It helps you get to the real quality of it and uncover the areas where someone is at their best. I mean, that’s what you want to know about, what makes someone different or special, not just how they compare to the average, right?

The same goes for our internal messaging, and piggybacks off of Albert Einstein’s famous quote, “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a goldfish by it’s ability to climb a tree, it’s going to live its whole life believing it’s stupid”.  Don’t fall for it, and don’t ask yourself the question, “How smart am I?”, ask yourself the question “How am I smart?”. That’s where you should be spending your time and attention.