I wanted to pose this question because there are a two opposite angles to it that I’ll get into. Should you trust your experience? We’ve been told from a very young age to have confidence in our abilities and believe that we have the right answer within us. Is that good advice?

Yes, experience is a great teacher, and it is something that is powerful when evaluating how to move forward in certain settings. By living through a situation, you have a set of expectations that will service you moving forward. But, no two situations are the same, so it’s not everything. 

Let’s look at the limitations our experience has that needs to be accounted for. With no two situations being identical, there is always so much more to know and learn that you didn’t get from the previous experience. So, it is natural to seek to learn more. However, you get in a slippery slope of never being completely prepared for any situation, so this approach has its own shortcomings as well.

The truth of the matter is, it is not clear whether you should act on experience or seek to learn more. The way I like thinking about this is as an athlete. It’s the difference between practice and training. In practice, you run through the exact same play, because the situation is going to be consistent enough that following strict guidelines will be effective. In soccer, this is like a corner kick or a goal kick, meaning those areas of the game that are predictable. Then the majority of the game is a group of elements that requires real-time decision making. This is where training comes in, because it helps you gain experience making decisions in a dynamic environment.  

As David Meltzer puts it in his new book, Game Time Decision Making, this can be thought of as situational knowledge, which is basically a learned experience from being in the situation before. Your experience turns into situational knowledge that can be applied to a dynamic and new setting. You can expand your situational knowledge through learning, and when you find confidence in your situational knowledge, you begin to act into your fullest capabilities. 

So, to answer the question, don’t rely on your experience, build situational knowledge.

I feel like the word selfish is misused a lot. I fully believe that I am in a phase in my life where I need to be selfish so that I can develop and be in a position to be selfless.  Does that mean the outcomes from the choices I am making come at the expense of the well-being of others? Of course not! In fact, I’ve been told I am extremely generous with my time and energy. However, the reality is it all is happening in a very selfish phase in my life, and I do believe it is best for me.

As always, it all comes down to intentions! Over a lifetime, my selfish decisions are going to be judged more than my selfless actions. I know that I am doing the right things for the right reasons, and that I give more than I take, even if I prioritize myself more than I should sometimes. I believe what is best for me is my own personal development and self-awareness, which will convert into being able to show up better for others.  

How does this tie into positivity? It’s about having faith in yourself and trusting your process, keeping a positive outlook on your path, and incorporating self-love. You need to have a full bucket before you can fill someone else’s. Keeping a positive mindset through every decision will help you arrive to that final destination.

People do not always get along. And often, there is a lot of resistance to introducing change. However, if we can get people on board with our vision we can accomplish things greater than we ever thought possible. We are going to be listening to process innovation expert, Bill Sanders who talks about how to get the most out of your team in the face of innovation and change. He gives his solution to how to work with those who are resistant to change.

"The first piece is asking the right questions, and the second piece is having empathy for where people are. If you can put yourself in their shoes, and feel the pressure that they are under to produce, the pain that they are under relative to the systems they are trying to work with, and ask questions from that perspective, you will get a lot better response. I do not believe that people fear change. They fear the unknown. They fear what they are going to loose. People spend about 9 billion dollars a year in the U.S. on lottery tickets trying to change everything about their life in one swoop. Their perspective is that is what is going to benefit me regardless of the change involved. So, if you can show people the benefit of what you are bringing, that gets you a test".

The reasoning behind today’s tip is so simple and logical, but the results are compelling.  It’s about making effort pacts. Basically, if there is a negative behavior or routine you want to limit in your life, you just need to make it a little more difficult to do or add small consequences to the behavior. Something that requires more effort. Then, you make a pact to that consequence of how you will reprimand your negative behavior in advance. This topic is covered by Nir Eyal in his new book, Indistractable, and he has a great but trivial example that shows it in action.

So, the small discomfort of killing a virtual tree was just enough of a reminder, and provides that little bit of mental effort that helps Nir reduce taking action on a negative behavior. Another example Mir has used is he has his wifi router timed to shut down at 10 pm. Therefore, if he really wants to browse the internet after 10, he has to go through the work of plugging it back in and setting it up, which just isn't worth his while.

Incorporate an effort pact for that behavior that you want to limit, and get ready to get results.

This lesson was inspired by the experience of Daron K Roberts, an individual who earned his JD from Harvard Law but instead decided to grow his career from the ground up as a professional football coach. In his book Call an Audible, Daron talks about the strategy he employed to slowly gain responsibility. 

At the bottom of the food chain in the Kansas City Chiefs coaching staff, Daron relied on being really consistent and beating expectations on the most mundane of tasks. He started earning respect by filling that role and he began building a reputation, but his involvement grew when he did something very simple. He asked.

Reflecting on his decision, Daron wondered if he was overreaching by asking. Then he reasons that in order to advance in any position, you need to take on new frontiers, and you can either way for that work to be assigned to you or you can ask for it. Well, in his case, Daron was able to secured the responsibility and cement himself as a fundamental contributor to the coaching staff.  

You too can accelerate your progression if you ask for what’s next. As long as you have performed to standard, feel prepared to make the jump, and have confidence the positive results will continue, you can open up the next opportunity on your path.

Have the ambition to overreach, stick your hand in the cookie jar and see if you pull something good out. You’ll realize you have a lot more to gain than you realized!

Let’s celebrate the progress we’ve made. It might feel as though we’re not capable or not ready for something important to us. If that’s you, you are not alone. Our brains are designed to pick out the flaws and faults within ourselves and too often we fixate on those imperfections. You are enough.

The days go slow, but the years go quick. What were you doing a year ago? It’s incredible to think about how much changes so quickly. We don’t realize it all because it happens over time. When looking at your life today it doesn’t always seem like it went according to plan. That will forever be true, so release those expectations and trust what you have today because it’s more than you give yourself credit for.

Sometimes, it’s as easy as getting out of our own way! The limitations we experience are put on by ourselves, crafted from our own beliefs. If you disagree and feel like those limitations are placed on you by someone else, it is only because you have allowed their judgment to affect you.  

The world is abundant with opportunity, happiness, fulfillment, impact, and love! You too are abundant and capable of accessing those same qualities. You already have more than you need to accomplish your goals. Relationships, skills, ambition, and discipline, resides inside you and is ready to be activated. You simply must allow it to work for you and when you do, you’ll know what I mean.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.  Don’t doubt yourself, trust that you have what it takes, and know that you are enough!

"If you are positive, you’ll see opportunities instead of obstacles". 

When a situation presents itself in your life, it doesn’t become a reality until you process it. There’s some computation that needs to take place before it can be encoded and you can decide what exactly it all means. Well, we have more control over that processing power than we might think, and sprinkling that process with a little positivity can go a long way in changing results. If you are positive you’ll see opportunities instead of obstacles.

Let’s think about this from the angle of neuroscience and physiology, which was my college major. Thinking about vision as a sense presents a lot of similarities to choosing positivity. 

The objective of our sight is to translate stimuli in our environment into usable pieces of information. The intricacies of sensory identification, neural transduction, and perception are still unbelievable to me, but what it does is it creates an understanding about the world around us. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do when we’re presented with opportunities and obstacles, we use the information we have to draw a conclusion. With positivity, you can manipulate the way things are being interpreted and paint them in a more positive light. It’s a gift we can all tap into with a little effort and commitment.

Here’s something we can all relate to. What can we do to get less distracted? Well, there may not be anyone in the world more qualified to answer this question than Nir Eyal, behavioral design specialist and author of the soon to be released book Indistractable. Nir would argue we first need to understand what exactly distractions are.

That’s a powerful way to define it. Distractions aren’t inherently good or bad, they are simply different than what you intended to be doing. So, the first step is to gain clarity on how you want to spend your time, what you want to be doing, and make decisions accordingly.