Self Improvement Daily Podcast

Many people who feel like they’re stuck, don’t have good habits, and aren’t disciplined enough to achieve their goals consider taking on Andy Frisella’s 75 Hard Challenge. 

To complete the challenge, every day without exception you need to do two 45 minute workouts, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, follow a structured and clean diet, drink a gallon of water, and take a progress picture. And while it’s an extremely effective program, it achieves a certain result that is often different from what people want to get out of it.

What 75 Hard is really good for is proving something to yourself. If you’ve been low on confidence, feeling complacent, or fed up with being overweight, the 75 Hard Challenge is a great pattern interrupt. It requires that you take control of your life and reminds you that your choices are within your control. It’s by prioritizing these daily actions despite adversity, travel and life circumstances that you prove to yourself that you have what it takes to do what you said you were going to do. In that way, it’s extremely effective in reshaping your beliefs and reminding you of the power you have to be the person you want to be in the world. 

But for the far majority of people who take it on, 75 Hard is not a sustainable lifestyle. The level of rigidness that the challenge demands is impractical for real life. We’re often presented with situations where it’s reasonable to make exceptions to the rule. Again, proving that you are greater than life’s circumstances is the value of the challenge, but that comes at a real cost that most people are unwilling to pay forever. So naturally there’s a layer of discernment and choice that we all must navigate when it comes to balancing life, and that’s a skill that 75 Hard does not help you to develop.

And in terms of your transformation, it’s important to consider the nature of a challenge. A Challenge is a temporary pursuit with a fixed end date. In that pursuit is a certain environment where you’ve made a commitment to a certain level of follow through, and you’re holding yourself personally accountable to it. When the challenge ends and that environment fades away, they go back to their previous environment where they’re accustomed to making their previous choices. The same choices they were dissatisfied with, which caused them to take on the Challenge in the first place.

For example, let’s say someone has a tight transfer in the airport for a work trip. During 75 Hard they would make an effort to track down a salad for lunch. After 75 Hard, they don’t have the same commitment to eating healthy and are much more likely to select a more convenient option.

That’s why many people start 75 Hard to prove something to themselves, succeed in doing so, but then slowly slip back into the same bad habits, unhealthy balance, and old routines they used to have. There’s no continuation plan to make the intentionality, discipline, and true prioritization of their health that they built in the Challenge something that lasts. 

For many, the real intention people take on 75 Hard is to begin a new, healthier lifestyle. It's not just to have 75 healthy days. And the truth of it is, the challenge fails to offer that (other than providing a highly-committed and structured to it).

To address that for myself, I’ve created a system for that helps me hold myself accountable to a higher standard 365 days a year, stay disciplined and aware of my choices, and live with more intentionality. It takes only 5 minutes a day so it’s manageable to keep up with and creates the right environment to sustain my higher performance. If you want to check it out, I’ve got a video where I walk you through my Self Improvement Scorecard here!

If you didn’t know it, I’m a judgmental person in recovery. Of course it comes from a place of insecurity, and my need to 'feel good about myself' would cause me to find fault in others, draw comparisons, and criticize. It’d also convince me that I knew what was best for others, that their ignorance or lack of discipline was responsible for their shortcomings, and that their way of doing things was the wrong way.

I don’t blame myself for that because I was doing my best, and I know that I had really good intentions every step of the way. However, it made me want to help people see the fault in their ways and improve. Sometimes I wanted it for them more than they even wanted it themselves. 

That’s when I learned an important lesson: People are not projects.

People aren’t meant to be fixed by others - they’re meant to be supported, empowered, loved, and accepted. Your positive influence on them is meant to be the spark that lights their flame.

I have a great example of this actually with my wife Irene.

For months Irene was talking about wanting to get back in the habit of going for her morning walk. There were days where she’d snooze her wake up alarm, jump right into work, or do something else. I felt myself get agitated by it because I wanted her to become the healthier, more active version she saw for herself. And any time I offered to help ‘fix’ the problem it added pressure, took wind out of her sails, and made things harder for her to do.

Things shifted when I chose to accept Irene exactly as she is. I accepted that she knows when her body needs more sleep, or when it’s the right decision to get to work and manage stress much better than I do. Instead of pointing out all of the reasons why she was struggling, I celebrated her uniqueness.

Literally, every night in my Self Improvement Scorecard I would ask myself the question “What do I choose to accept about Irene today?”. I’d think through what about her choices made me the most frustrated, connected it to a positive quality that I admire about her, and reinforced the belief that I want her to be herself more than I wanted her to change.

I did that reflection enough times until I started to see her that way naturally. My energy toward her was less judgmental and more supportive. I laughed off and lovingly smiled at things that previously irritated me. And like magic, she started feeling comfortable asking for my advice and made fast progress in other areas of her health and life.

People are not projects and you get to play a role in supporting them. If that means they ask for your help, then help! But choosing to accept and love someone is the best thing you can do for them as they seek to introduce positive change in their life.

In a world where things are so loud and in your face trying to get your attention, it’s that much more important to listen. Because of that I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the difference between signal and noise. 

Noise is the chaotic overstimulation of everything in our modern life, and the signal is the specific frequency of sounds that’s most important for you to hear and pay attention to. Knowing the difference between signal and noise, and being able to listen for it, is an incredibly important skill.

Intuition and wisdom are signal. They’re small drops of gold in the sea of everything else. They’re most essential, yet, they’re the quietest. Which means we need to pay extra close attention to even hear it, and extract the value within it.

There are some life lessons that are ‘get hit over the head with a sledgehammer’ moments. Things that are impossible to ignore because they’re so significant. But more often than not, life wisdom comes as littler whispers of suggestion. 

It’s not what a mentor says to you, but what you feel about what they said as your body understands it. It’s not a line in a book, but the spark of an idea that comes from reading it as you interpret the words. The perspective someone offers you is their understanding of how things work and what’s meaningful. Within their sharing is the signal that’s meant to activate you in the most unique and personalized of ways.

Like a real whisper, you can only hear the whisper of wisdom when you get quiet and still. When you pull yourself out of the overstimulation of the world. For me this happens during meditation, prayer, workouts, in nature, and on airplanes. These are times when I’m unplugged and present with what’s around me. I realize the whispers are always there and I haven’t been in the right environment to hear them.

My favorite way of doing this is I’ve created a custom meditation for myself that I listen to. At the end of it, after insight into the choices I made yesterday and the plans I have for today, I ask one of my life heroes to give me some advice. I create the open space during meditation, and the wisdom fills it. It’s pretty remarkable. 

If you want to give that meditation a try, here it is! it’s only 10 minutes long but sets you up to have an incredible day.

In Sahil Bloom’s book “The 5 Types Of Wealth” he introduces us to the idea that is the “Deferred Happiness Plan”. It’s a narrative that many of us have bought into without thinking through what it actually means, or how likely it is to become true.

Have you ever heard someone say “I’ll be happy when…”

“When I get a promotion at work”… 

“When I buy a house I can settle down in”…

“When I lose 20 pounds”...

It’s attractive because it’s oriented around a goal, but it’s a trap because it implicitly gives you permission to delay or defer your happiness to a later date. It gives you an excuse to rationalize that your unhappiness or lack of fulfillment today is okay because it’s an investment in future joy.

While it’s true that we can create futures that are more desirable and enjoyable, and we should pursue that, we must be aware of the cost and the real probability that what you’re working toward will actually make you happy.

Tom Bilyeu once said “Success doesn’t change your insecurities. Most people look at somebody who’s successful with this admiration and they think that when I’m successful I’ll look at myself with the same admiration. All you have is this moment, success is not something in the future where you cross the finish line and feel forever the way you’ve wanted to feel. Success will feel exactly like this moment.”

Underlying the dissatisfaction we have for how things are is exactly what Tom described - a belief system that you bring with you wherever you go. It’s an unworthiness that shapes the way we view every life situation, no matter how much we think we want it. When we get there, it’s not as sweet as we thought it would be, or as meaningful, because it’s painted with a dissatisfied lens. 

If we’re choosing to sacrifice our happiness today as we’re building toward a more desirable future, while knowing that actually being happy when we get there is far from guaranteed, it’s probably not a trade that’s worth making. 

So what should you do instead? As cliche as it is and impossible as it might sound, choose happiness now. Find reasons to be grateful. Reframe your perspective sothat you enjoy your everyday experience. Because when you do that, you’re shifting the belief system you're operating from. You’re training your mind to be happy no matter where you are. 

The destination matters less than you think. What you actually want is how you expect you’ll feel when you get there. And the more reliable path to actually achieving that is to do the inner work, the mindset shift so that you view every day with more positivity, optimism, hope, and fulfillment.

As far as I’m aware, nothing will create that shift faster than daily gratitude journaling. Making yourself consciously slow down to see the good in the world, especially when you were blind to it in the moment, will help you begin to see it automatically.

Give it a try! What do you have to lose? 30 days just might change your life...

Now if you’re the type of person who struggles to be consistent with anything, and knows that being inconsistent is holding you back from experiencing the growth and success you know you’re capable of... Then check out the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. It gives you the structure and organization you need to actually follow through on the things you know you need to do, consistently.

This is probably the nerdiest pet peeve you’ve ever heard. I don’t know if I’m just a stickler, someone who is extremely intentional and wants to represent things accurately, or somewhere in between… But there’s something people stay all the time that I just can’t stand.

When someone says they were going to do something or be somewhere, and they didn’t, sometimes they say “I just couldn’t do it”.

“I wanted to be at your birthday, but I just couldn’t be there because I was out of town.” 

“I was going to get a workout in before getting on the road, but I just couldn’t make it work.”

I understand that people can’t be in two places at once. I get that there’s a lot going on. But 99% of the time, saying they “couldn’t do it” is flat out wrong.  If they were considering doing it, it’s very likely they are capable of doing it, but they didn't because something got in the way.

What they should say is “I chose not to”... Because that’s really what happened.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t be at the birthday, they chose to be somewhere else. Or that they couldn’t exercise before leaving, but that they didn’t plan well enough to accommodate it. 

The truth is no one can make us do anything. We have complete free will. The challenge is that our free will exists within environments where there are consequences to our choices. So while we don’t choose exactly what we want, we can choose exactly what we do after taking all conditions into account.

This is often a hard way to deliver information. Telling someone you’re choosing to miss their big event seems harsh, so we give power to our circumstances. But don’t let that disconnect you from the internal agency you live with every day. 

There’s a layer of this that’s a social norm, and then there’s a layer that generates an internal interpretation that shapes your belief system. My point here is to not neglect the latter, and recognize that you aren't doing something because you’re choosing to do something else.

This makes us live hyper-intentionally. When we’re in the driver seat of our lives, we get to go wherever we want. If we let others’ desires and demands speak loudest, then we’re just on a track lying to ourselves that we’re in control just because we have our hands on the wheel.

A natural part of sharing life with others is disagreement. Two people with two different vantage points and perspectives will interpret the same situation in different ways. And that’s assuming that people are even operating from the same set of information, which often isn’t the case, and it's responsible for added confusion.

This is why disagreement is really good at its core. What it does is bring light to the assumptions and context that’s missing, and spirited debate can be a tool for arriving to a better shared understanding.

Logically, that’s what we want. But there’s this thing called the ego that often turns what’s meant to be a very valuable practice into a process that creates even more separation. The ego is our sense of self. Its goal is to establish our own independent value. Admitting that we were wrong, mistaken, or misinformed means we’re not good enough, that others will invest in us less because we have less to offer, and it negatively impacts our personal survival.

This is why many people get defensive when their way of seeing things is put into question. We react shut off, agitated, and emotionally to maintain our sense of self. And that energy is received by others creating even more distance between us and them.

It’s important to understand this bias so that we can show up in a more constructive way. We can have debate with real disagreement, but do it in a way that’s respectful. It requires a level of humility to know how your ego might be responding defensively out of protection. It requires open-mindedness to accept the holes in your argument and admit that you have blindspots. It requires awareness to know how you might be rationalizing the truth to serve your stance rather than seeing the situation objectively.

Disagreement is inherently good because it’s an opportunity to broaden your perspective. It becomes problematic when you don’t allow your lens into the world to shift given the new information you’ve acquired. A quote that helps me with that, my favorite of all time, is Maya Angelou’s “Do your best until you know better. Then once you know better, do better.” 

It allows you to receive disagreement in a way that’s healthy, helpful, and non-threatening.

The one thing that keeps our world going around is the interdependence we have with each other. One person grows the food another needs, who offers her services to the next person. And so on and so forth the flow of value continues.

We use money as a standardized way of quantifying how much we give and get, but there are many daily things we do for each other in the name of support.

It’s by being on both sides of this energy - giving and receiving, helping and being helped - that we tap into true abundance. The truth is there’s more than enough of everything to go around, we just need to do a better job sharing it.

To facilitate this flow of value exchange, I have a simple two-sided statement you can use to tap into abundance:

“What I really need is someone who can help me with…”

It could be “What I really need is someone who can help me with building a website”… “With figuring out how to buy a house in a tax-advantaged way”… “With taking my kids to practice twice a week.”

When you finish the statement, you’ve identified your biggest personal deficiencies. You’re aware of the things you need to get what you want. What a powerful position to be in! And from there, you get to find the person who is perfectly positioned to help you with that.

Which brings us to the second part: What do you have to offer so that you can be that person for others? What skills, experiences, relationships, and perspective do you have that can help someone else get what they want? This is what you have to give, and you can offer it in a paid or unpaid capacity. 

Whether you’re giving or receiving, helping or being helped, the effectiveness of our interdependence depends on two things:

Clarity, both for what we need and what we have to offer…

And sharing, so that others know what you need and how you can help them.

Imagine the world where people knew exactly who could help them, and who needed their help. That would unlock abundance! That would fully facilitate the share of value, helping everyone get what they want.

And your first step in participating in that world is to practice it yourself. Know what you need help with, know what you have to offer, and start talking to more people about it so that the right solutions can get matched to the right problems.

Last week I made a new friend, Guinevere Stasio, because we were sitting next to each other at an event. We both were invited to speak from stage and Guin said something that I want to share with you, that I’ve known to be true my whole life but never had the right words to express it. 

Whether you want to make a massive difference in the world or not, most of us on our personal development journey want to be helpful for others. Whether it’s providing mentorship or offering a helping hand, it feels good to be of service.

But sometimes we question what help we have to offer. If we don’t have things completely figured out for ourselves, how can we help someone figure things out for themselves? That’s where Guin’s quote hit home. She said:

“10% ahead is 100% helpful to where someone’s at right now.”

We’re all a work in progress. Even if we have our own problems, we’ve already solved many problems for ourselves that other people are experiencing right now. That’s what you can help them with - where they’re at right now.

Does that mean you can help them every step of the way? No. But that’s not a requirement to help them today. And as long as you stay one step ahead, you’ll always be able to help them with the next step.

Here’s another way to think about it. Let’s say you’re playing a video game. You haven’t beat the game yet, you’re on Level 5 out of 10. Because you haven’t beat the game yet, you might think that you can’t help people with it. But of course you can. You have the experience to help someone beat Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4… Because you already have! 

The same goes for everyday guidance. Be generous with the lessons you’ve learned and seek to serve. You have no idea how many people need your help. Don’t deny them that opportunity, and don’t discredit how much you have to offer.