Self Improvement Daily Podcast

One of my favorite concepts in Napoleon Hill’s timeless classic ‘Think And Grow Rich’ is “the seed of equal or greater benefit”. 

Here’s the main idea: In everything that happens to you, desirable or not, there is always something better conspiring for you. 

It argues that what might appear to be a setback, challenge, or failure is actually a set up for something even better that you didn’t even realize - A lesson you didn’t know you needed to learn, an experience you didn’t know you needed to have, or an opportunity you didn’t even know you were missing. 

Napoleon Hill encourages you to have faith that there’s always a seed of equal or greater benefit at all times, and that it’s upon us to install a consciousness that can identify exactly what that might be.

For example, let’s say you’re filing for divorce. Something like that could feel like the biggest failure you’ve ever had in your life. The opportunity is to explore how that situation might be serving you, your future, and your personal evolution. The possibilities are endless for how devastation could turn into divinity. Now that’s not to say it’s not supposed to hurt, but to share that it has purpose.

Ultimately, this means that there’s no such thing as bad news. Everything at all times is working in your best interest. Either you get what you want or better! Everything that happens to us is a gift to us.

But, that’s not always material in the moment. Failure doesn’t turn into favor in a moment. And that’s why he calls it ‘a seed’.  Seeds take a while to grow, mature, and bear fruit. They lie latent underground and invisible until they sprout.

All this to say, just because things are conspiring for us does not mean that we have immediate evidence that it’s happening. In fact most times we don’t. But again that’s why we must act in good faith as if it is, so that we don’t miss the fruit when it’s ready for us.

Like a farmer with his crop, be patient. Nurture the kernel. Believe in its possibility. Trust the process is working even if you can’t see it. Live with that intention, that everything has a seed of equal or greater benefit, and your life will prosper.

In a post about recent life lessons that Codie Sanchez shared on LinkedIn, she said “You don’t need more time, you need more deadlines”, and I think she’s right.

I mean getting more time would be great… Theoretically it means we’d be able to do more research and run through more revisions to prepare something. And you'd think that means we we’d be able to do more things with more capacity. 

But let’s be honest… If you had extra time, you’d just do more of what you’re already doing with the time you already have.

You couldn’t reasonably expect anything different. So if that means you already spend too much time putting out fires or scrolling on social media, you’d fill the extra time with more of the same.

If the goal is to get more and better work done, the stronger intervention would actually be to decrease the time you have to do it. The constraint would squeeze out the waste. We value what’s finite, and having a limited amount of time would make us use it more wisely.

The best way to manufacture that is by imposing deadlines, and that’s for a few reasons:

1) Instead of having an indefinite amount of time to do something, you create your own constraints. This operates as a forcing function that requires you stay focused on only what’s most critical.

2) It makes you push things to completion. Rather than spending so much time tinkering in your work, undoing and redoing efforts to try and get something from 90% to 95%, you must accept that your finished product will be imperfect. In that way, you waste less time doing redundant and low-leverage work so that you can transition to doing something more valuable.

3) As an extension of that, just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean that you sacrifice quality. We each have our own internal standard for what we put out into the world. That means if we have less time to do something, we’ve simply have to get to a higher level of quality faster. And when that’s the task we get more creative, resourceful, and direct to meet levels of output that we’re unwilling to compromise on.

What if it were that easy? What if rather than being a victim to Parkinson’s Law (which states that our work will expand to fill the amount of time we’ve allotted to doing it), we use it to our favor and compress our workdays into more intense, impactful, high-quality sprints?

It’s worth a try isn’t it? Set a deadline for yourself, actually enforce it, and see what happens.

I’m just getting back from a mini-vacation where I spent 5 days on a cruise in the Caribbean. It was a good balance of work and play, but interestingly for me, it was also an opportunity for indulgence.

Typically I try to limit the amount of sugar I eat. I often decline dessert and avoid sweets because I know how it impacts my mood and sleep. However, for this cruise I chose to give myself more leeway and enjoy a reasonable amount of dessert (one serving a night) as my way of enjoying the all-inclusive experience.

I bring this all up because I had a personal development spotlight moment on the flight home. For whatever reason, as part of the in-flight snacks I was offered two Oreo cookies. I reached out, grabbed them, and unconsciously started eating the first. 

One of my food rules is “don’t eat things whose ingredients you can’t pronounce”, so mid-bite I read the Oreo wrapper and realized I had violated my rule.

Now I had a decision to make: Was I going to eat the other cookie or not? Typically it would be an easy “no”, but since I was transition out of having dessert on the cruise, I was starting to justify that I could have sweets until I got home, rationalizing that the flight home still counted as vacation.

I picked up the second cookie and was about to eat it when I asked myself an important question: “Will I regret this, or will this feel out of integrity when I reflect on this tonight?” The answer to that was a quick “yes”.

So I took fast-action and put the cookie down back in the wrapper out of arms reach. Then when the flight attendant came by with a trash bag, I tossed it without hesitation. In both ways I leveraged environmental design so that my behavior aligned with my intention.

I know eating one more Oreo cookie wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would have been a harmless thing to do. But by taking action as definitively as I did, I reestablished my higher standard and set the course for my transition back into my normal routine.

No matter how high-performing or high-achieving you are, everyone goes through phases of life where they’ve lost momentum, progress stalls, and no matter how hard they try they just can’t move the needle. 

In other words, everyone gets stuck.

Having worked with hundreds people at this point, I’ve found there are reliable patterns that explain what’s getting in the way. In particular there are 4 types of ‘stuck’ that keep people frustrated, disappointed, and discouraged as they try to improve their life. And not only that, but they come up in a specific order where at each step, you get closer to breaking through.

The first type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t know what you want. It’s hard to make progress on anything if you aren’t clear on what it’s all for. You’re going to keep feeling misaligned if you don’t have a definite direction established. This shows up as feeling lost, aimless, and unexcited about doing the work.

The second type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t know what to do next, or what to take action on. There are a lot of ways to make things happen, and lacking a clear strategy makes it that much harder to execute. Often just taking one action step in the right direction is a catalyst for more, but you still need to know what that first step is. This shows up as feeling overwhelmed, indecisive, out of ideas.

The third type of ‘stuck’ is not knowing how to do something. Let’s say you've determined what action to take… If you don’t have the know-how or ability to do it, you won’t follow through on it. This is an education and skill gap, and until you bridge it, you’re going to be motionless. It shows up as fear, self-doubt, and self-deprecating thoughts as you muster up the courage to make an attempt without looking stupid.

The fourth and final type of ‘stuck’ is you don’t feel like doing it. You know what you want, you know what to do next, you know how to do it… Now it’s just a matter of following through on it. But something is still getting in the way - you’re not feeling motivated or enthusiastic about your path forward, which is keeping you caught in a web of inaction.

Your breakthrough is on the other side of overcoming these versions of being 'stuck'. Each one you overcome brings you closer to breaking yourself out of your rut and kickstarting momentum. It first involves doing the strategic work upfront to create an action plan you believe in, and then executing it.

And if you’re feeling stuck right now, start from the beginning and work through each layer. Slowly but surely you’ll climb your way out and get back to firing on all cylinders, just like the world needs you to be! 

Or, if you already know what you want and it’s to hold yourself to a higher standard and maximize your potential, I can show you what you need to do next and how to do it. That’s what the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge is all about, and if you want to go from feeling stuck to feeling unstoppable, I encourage you to give it a try! 

Living our best lives involves living with self-confidence. And not with arrogance or a distorted sense of self, but grounded and humble self-belief.

When you break down the roots of the word ‘confidence’ you get ‘con-fidere’, which in Latin means ‘intense trust’.

This means you have wholehearted conviction that you’re capable of creating a desired result, or performing at the level required of you. It also means that when you stretch yourself and risk failing or not meeting expectations, you have the self-esteem to keep your life intact and move on without it completely destroying your momentum.

When you get to that level of confidence, you’re showing up for life with more boldness and speed. It’s what we all want, which begs the question: “How do you build confidence?”

Ed Mylett says you build confidence by keeping the promises you make to yourself. The more times you do that, the more evidence you have to believe that when you say something, you mean it. Conviction is earned through instances of delivering on your commitments.

Layer on to that what Heather Monahan says, which is that confidence is the byproduct of action. When you show up every day and take action, even when you’re scared or you’re not fully ready, you build confidence. You earn intense trust in yourself because you prove that you are above your circumstances and can make yourself do hard things when you don’t feel like it.

Now here’s the kicker: What you do in private does so much more for your self-confidence than anything else.

When others know your commitments and have expectations of you, other factors are influencing how you show up. There are external consequences to the choices you make that impact you unconsciously. But when you strip away of all that external influence, your true character comes out and you face up with who you really are, and if you can really count on yourself. 

If you keep the promises you make to yourself in private… And take action in brave and empowered ways even when no one is watching… It reinforces authentic self-belief.

So take yourself seriously. Understand what’s at stake. How you do one thing is how you do everything, especially when it comes to your confidence. Because when you hold yourself to a higher standard at all times, no matter who knows it and even with the small things, you prove to yourself that you’re the type of person who does what they say they’re going to do.

If you’re looking to connect better with others, come to understand what’s really going on at a deeper level, or even do the same for yourself, here’s a really powerful phrase to use:

What that really means is…

Often, our conversations and understandings stagnate at a superficial level. The entry point to sharing our thoughts and feelings are the things that are most present. The things we’re already thinking about the most and most aware of. But in every case it’s just the fractional expression of what lies underneath. It's the tip of the iceberg that is visible above water but not representing the fuller truth below.

When you ask someone “What does that really mean?” it pierces that layer deeper. The nature of the questions asks them to get introspective, discover, and share on that next level. It takes the frame that the current discussion is the symptom of an underlying root cause and asks them to identify it.

It invites vulnerability. They shared at a superficial level because it was more comfortable and familiar. Understanding what something really means deep down gets them speaking into what they are also aware is true but didn’t want to say. And it’s not that you’re making them share a secret, but offering to hold space for something they haven’t had the opportunity to give voice to.

Take the same line of thinking and apply it to yourself - See what’s presenting and explore what that really means. It’s a practice that makes you way more self-aware in that it points out your blindspots, stories, and things being blown way out of proportion. It gets to the heart of what’s actually happening so that you can change the way you relate with it. 

Let’s look at a few examples: 

“I’m sick of my job”, but what that really means is “I feel like my time is more valuable than what I’m doing 50% of my waking hours.” 

“I’ll do it next time”, but what that really means is “I don’t have the confidence right now to try, and I want to feel more prepared and ready before I give it a go.”

Or “I can’t move forward with this program”, but what that really means is “I’m scared I’ll fail and look stupid, and have to face up with the fear that I was never capable of the success I see for myself in the first place.”

There’s a reason why it’s a popular question to ask in a sales call or use in sales copy. It brings to the surface what’s really going on, the real problem someone is facing. With that awareness they can face off with the problem head on. Otherwise, it might not be something that motivates them enough to change.

Something that has become central to my understanding of behavior change is that your environment is everything.

We live unconsciously 95% of the time, which means that for most of the day we are just drifting in whatever direction our environment is taking us. We make the choices, take the actions, and get the results that are perfectly calibrated to our environment.

Things don’t happen by mistake or chance, they’re the perfect byproduct of our design.

Environment shows up in many ways you wouldn’t even realize. Our belief system is an environment where we unconsciously assign meaning to the world around us, which shapes our thoughts. Having clarity and an action plan is an environment because it highlights the path we want to take, and helps us avoid getting hijacked by confusion. 

But the environment I want to elaborate more on today is our physical state. Your state is your internal environment.

The health, energy, and vitality that you experience internally plays a huge role in what manifests externally. You’re more likely to get in the gym when you’re not exhausted. You’re less irritable and argumentative with people when you’ve eaten. You can better put off distractions and stay focused when you’re feeling good.

Why? Because you’ve created a supportive internal environment, one that promotes more of what you want and less of what you don’t.

This is why it’s so important to make healthy choices. Quality exercise, diet, and rest increase your energy levels. With more energy, not only do you have more conscious control of yourself and your feelings, but unconsciously you’re being pushed in a more empowered direction.

A positive physical state helps you show up to everyday moments with more presence, focus, and quality without even having to think about it. It’s a filter that goes on top of everything you do.

If you know that you’re not living the healthy lifestyle you want, and you’re ready to really start prioritizing it (even through busy life with endless responsibilities that make it hard to do), you should sign up for the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. It will make you unrecognizably disciplined as you consistently make the healthy choice by walking you through a step by step process that takes only 5 minutes a day to do.

One of the most consistent pieces of advice we’ve all been given is a reminder to “focus on the process”.

It connects in with other common guidelines: Finding validation in the day to day and not getting too attached to outcomes… It’s the journey not the destination… But it’s a recommendation that goes beyond finding fulfillment. It’s also the direction of generating results.

In business, people talk about  KPIs - "Key Performance Indicators". These are the metrics that determine if things are headed the right direction. Businesses are complex so it’s helpful to have one datapoint that you measure to know if your actions are driving meaningful change. 

But those are related the outcomes, the tangible shifts in reality that occurred. Equally important to measure is the consistency with which we’re taking strategic action, which we do in good faith that they’ll steer the outcomes in our favor.

That’s why as far as KPIs go, there are two types: Leading metrics and lagging metrics.

Leading metrics refer to the inputs that are in your direct control - the actions and the way you’re working the process. Lagging indicators are the results that come about based on those leading actions, which represent the ultimate transformation you’re trying to create.

The reason I make that distinction is because when we talk about focusing on the process, there's an acceptance that the results are out of our control. We can commit to taking actions in ways that we believe are most likely to generate the results we want, and that’s exactly what we should do, but the results aren’t guaranteed. 

Cause and effect is real. Certain inputs tend to generate certain outputs. And that’s where the art and science comes in - How do you take in feedback to change your approach so that you maximize your ability to obtain a desired outcome? This is a strategic process. It’s not part of the day to day and should only happen at certain intervals.

The balance is: We define the strategy in one focused session (to support our success toward achieving lagging indicators) to then allocate the majority of our attention focusing on the process (executing the plan consistently to meet leading indicators). 

Daily actions are derived from our committed strategies, which support the achievement of our stated goals. And you need clarity at each step to ensure your efforts are materializing into what you want.