I so appreciate you for following along on my journey and message, but I want to call something out about it…

I bet that most of what I share isn’t all that new to you. 

You’ve probably already heard it before in books, Youtube videos and Ted Talks, on podcasts (and even in some of my past episodes!).

Yet it’s still valuable, and here’s why.

The information requires context. When you learn you relate it to your immediate environment. This gives the same ideas different meanings in different settings, and different points of application. 

This is the exact reason why my ratio for reading books is that I reread two for every new one. I’ve found this to be most impactful for me because I can take the same insights that I already know are really good and use them in an entirely new way.

I also do this because retention is important. Hearing the same ideas over and over again helps you recall it more naturally. It also increases the impact the lessons have on your life.

And of course, I’d be remiss not to mention that acquiring information alone isn’t enough. In “The Compound Effect” Darren Hardy says “Knowledge isn’t power, it’s potential power.” It works like electricity in a light switch in that the information is only valuable when you turn it on.

The other metaphor I use to explain this is about a car.

When we’re spending time learning new things it’s like filling gas in the tank. You need gas to go, but the gas itself won’t cause you to go anywhere new. You need to turn the engine on and press the accelerator to actually start moving.

On your self-improvement journey, and with the abundance of resources that are available to you, I can confidently say that you already have enough information.

You have a full gas tank.

Now if you don’t like how well your car is performing (or feel like you’re not living at the level that you’re capable of) you’re better suited to work on improving the engine rather than getting more fuel.

Practically, in our lives that involves creating new systems, setting higher standards, and changing our environment so that it more positively influences us.

All of that is built into the 9 Super Habits, it’s what makes them so effective.

To improve your self-improvement engine and better your health, get more organized and focused in your work, and become more self-disciplined in your life, I highly encourage you to implement the 9 Super Habits now so that you can reach that next level of performance that you’re after.

I heard a quote that I believe can be attributed to former Navy SEAL Alden Mills, and it shines a light on something that I think most of us have a hard time seeing.

The quote is: “Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.”

The reason this quote is so attention-grabbing is because of how it describes the common person. It suggests that the average person is both underachieving (in that as a society we accept a low standard for ourselves) and completely capable (with gifts and strengths that aren’t being expressed).

If that’s true, it makes you wonder why.

The bridge that people are missing, that I think Mills is alluding to in this quote, is hard work. Having talent isn’t enough.

As Angela Duckworth says in the book “Grit”, combing talent and hard work generates skill. Then working hard to develop your skills leads to success. In other words, hard work counts twice.

There are a few things that come to mind as reasons why people aren’t working hard and therefore, are chronically unsuccessful. 

First is a matter of weakness.

Our lives are so comfortable. Especially compared to just a few generations ago, our problems are not that serious. This means that we’ve had less opportunities to cultivate resilience and what we think is “working hard” isn’t actually that demanding.

Second is a matter of convenience.

Anything we want is available for overnight delivery at the touch of a button, and endless entertainment can be found in our pockets. Frankly we don’t have the attention span to work hard any more because we get bored with it so quickly. Impulsively we jump to something else just to keep our minds occupied with something stimulating, which we’ve grown too accustomed to.

And last is a matter of clarity.

Maybe we are putting some good quality work in, but we’re working on the wrong things. We’re investing our time and effort in ways that lead to fractional results. Because things are so fast we struggle to slow down and get strategic about what exactly we could be doing to make progress.

Because of all this, many people with a world of talent settle for falling short of the level of success they’re capable of. This is the majority. However it’s also a massive opportunity. Those who can apply their talent toward the right things, be resourceful, and practice resilience do work their way to the top.

It’s easier to win than ever because we have access to so much and everyone is doing so little with it. So if you delay gratification, do the boring and mundane things others are unwilling to do, and stay consistent, you’ll find yourself achieving more than you thought possible.

As ambitious and growth oriented individuals, an important skillset for us to develop is to be more influential. To influence means ‘to impact the way something happens’. Ultimately, we want to be a positive influence on others to hit our personal goals and shape the world around us.

The best thing we can do to be more influential is be the example. Your personal choices reflect your character, and the expression ‘actions speak louder than words’ is really true. When we live in a way that others respect and admire, people believe us more. It causes our message to get delivered with more authority and credibility.

The reason I mention this is because when giving guidance or advice, we must understand the order of operations: People must first believe in you, and only then will they consider what you have to say.

They will not hear the content of your message unless they think the content of the message is worth listening to.

So that’s the first step - If you don’t believe the messenger you won’t believe the message. No matter how good and sound the advice is, the evaluation of the person comes first.

I feel like this is the biggest point of conflict people have with authority figures. Bosses, parents, and others in superior positions try to influence others’ behavior. But if they’re not respected, trusted, or a living example of the mission they promote, then it creates resentment. 

In order to be a person others believe and want to follow, we need to hold ourselves to higher standards. We need to be disciplined and do what we say we’re going to do. We need to demonstrate the character traits and qualities others want to see in themselves. And that comes from showing up, day in and day out, for the betterment of ourselves and others.

Be a believable messenger.

And if you want to reach the levels of discipline and daily performance that other people will feel inspired to follow, I encourage you to learn about the 9 Super Habits. These are the small micro-actions and micro-routines that work behind the scenes to help you follow through on consistently making good health choices and increasing your daily productivity.

>> Click here to learn about the 9 Super Habits and how to implement each in 15 minutes a day!

We’re all going to face adversity and difficulty. Our path to having the health, career, personal life and relationships we desire is not perfectly smooth. We are often confronted with challenges that make our life and progress harder than we expected it to be.

It can be really tricky knowing how to navigate it. On one hand, there’s the growth-minded philosophy that “obstacles make us stronger”. We trust that the challenges are there to serve us in our personal evolution. But on the other hand, there’s an equally valid argument that resistance might be an indicator for us to try a different way.

So when do we know when to push through and when to change course?

Of course it’s entirely contextual, but there’s a larger framework to consider that connects to the two forms of stress. There’s ‘distress’, which is more harmful and does not contribute to our overall wellness, and then there’s ‘eustress’ which is the minor agitation of doing things outside of our comfort zone.

Resistance takes these two forms as well. One is helpful and one is not. Our approach should be to embrace the resistance that causes us to step up and grow, and not invest too much in resistance that is obtrusive to our goals.

So when you’re facing off with resistance, here’s a series of questions you can ask to figure out how to proceed:

1. Is there an easier or different way?

When you’re prompted to think through a present challenge, give yourself the perspective of the various ways to approach overcoming it. We often neglect to even know what our options are.

2. Is this resistance necessary?

There’s a psychological term called “learned helplessness” that causes us to tolerate something we don’t want because we’ve accepted a state of hopelessness. This puts your current path into question.

3. Does doing it this way maximize my character development?

Everything we do evolves our character in one way or another. There’s value in going through unnecessary hardship. But that’s why this question is powerful - If there’s a specific weakness that has been holding you back, then that’s the maximum opportunity and the resistance is serving you in addressing it.

Ultimately there’s no right answer. It’s intuitive. But when you ask better questions you can have better insight into the nature of the resistance and how it’s impacting you, so that you can shape your perspective accordingly.

As Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory puts it, there’s a 4 step loop that he calls the physics of progress. You can check out a past podcast episode here, but in summary the 4 parts are:

1. You establish a goal to determine the desired outcome

2. You hypothesize a strategy that you think gives you the best chance to reach that goal

3. You run an experiment to see if the strategy worked

4. You evaluate the results.

With that information, now you’re in a position to update your goal and strategy based on what you learned.

I personally call this the “Think, Plan, Do, Review” cycle which essentially mirrors the same 4 steps.

Tony Robbins says “happiness is progress”, and per Maslow’s theory of self-actualization ‘making progress’ is a core human need. But that doesn’t mean we need to be making progress in all areas at all times. In fact that could be slowing down our overall progress.

This is where I want to introduce the 3 options we have when deciding how we want to move forward at the end of this cycle: To elevate, maintain, and step back.

To elevate our goals and standards is traditionally what you think about when making progress. It’s improving the quality, quantity, efficiency, or output of whatever it is you want to do. It’s elevating your workout plan from 3 times a week to 4, or it’s improving your relationship with emails by checking only 2 times throughout the day rather than constantly. To ‘elevate’ adds more demand to your life to hit the new target.

But we can’t be elevating all things in our life at all times. That’s unsustainable. There are certain seasons that require that certain things are prioritized more, and that’s where the two other options come in:

You can choose to maintain.

That means you’re content with the level you’re currently doing things at. Especially when there’s a strain in your life like getting extra busy at work, or a transition like moving to a new town, maintenance is often the fair approach to supporting your overall wellness without overdoing it.

And sometimes, it even makes sense to step back.

Functionally this decreases the commitment you’ve made to something to create more space for yourself. This is necessary when the current demand is too high. This solves for that by choosing what you’re willing to compromise in the short-term in order to accommodate. This is choosing to decrease your working hours to make time for a sick family member, or taking it easier on your workout routine to recover from an injury.

All three options are perfectly acceptable. What’s most important is that you choose what you want to do.

When you choose to elevate, then you feel motivated to step up to the new standards you have for yourself.

When you maintain you accept that your current level is suitable for your goals.

And when you decide to step-back you can do it with less guilt, self-criticism, and self-judgment because you’re clear on why it’s the right thing to do.

At the end of the day, it’s all about being more intentional. It’s about thinking through in advance what you want, and what most serves you, so that you can take action in alignment with it. Having the humility to know that you don’t need to elevate everything at all times is itself an indication of growth!

Perhaps the most powerful force that governs the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the results we get in our lives are our beliefs. Beliefs are the building blocks of identity and dictates how we show up in our lives.

Knowing this, something I’ve always struggled with is knowing what my beliefs are. We’re told on our growth journey to challenge our beliefs... But it’s impossible to do that if we’re not even aware of what our beliefs are in the first place.

Narrowing in from this much larger topic, let’s get a hands-on glimpse into what beliefs are by focusing on one type of them: Preferences.

Our preferences are simply what we prefer in our life. Or in different words, our preferences are an implicit understanding of what we like and what we don’t like.

When we think of our preferences they seem to be really superficial, like preferring vanilla to chocolate or sleeping in a cold room vs a warm room, which doesn’t seem to impact our lives that much...

But when we dive in a bit deeper you’ll see that your preferences are much more integrated in everything we do.

We have preferences for everything: The way we like to do things, the way we like to feel, the way we like to receive feedback, the way we like to make decisions… I could go on forever.

What’s underlying each of these preferences is it leans us toward a certain way of thinking and a certain way of acting. So what might seem like an arbitrary preference actually guides the direction of our lives.

Let me give a personal example that shows you just how far it ripples: I have a preference to feel productive with my time over not being productive.

This preference acts as an unconscious filter in everything I do. In many settings it is helpful to keep me on task, but in other settings it has consequences.

It leads to more disorganization because I don’t always invest the time in putting things away. It influences me to be less present in conversations when I’m running over time because I value being on schedule. And more fundamentally, it impacts my feelings of self-worth as I reflect on the quality of my day, potentially discrediting how good it was because I see all the things I didn’t get done.

This is happening constantly, unconsciously, and in everything we do. And this is just one example of how a preference influences everything else!

It’s harmless until it’s not because it steers your life completely off course.

Motivational speaker Inky Johnson shared an incredible quote that I wanted to expand on today. He says “Champions do daily what everyone else does occasionally.”

Regardless of if you aspire to be the very best at what you do or not, we have a lot to learn from champions.

They are the ones who achieve the highest level of excellence possible. They’re the ones who, though their performance, prove the exceptional ability they have cultivated over the course of years of preparation.

A champion wasn’t born that way, they earned it. And that’s what this quote gives insight into: How they did it.

“Champions do daily what everyone else does occasionally.”

Everyone has days where they show up. When they move the needle, improve, and make progress. But for most people these days only happen when they feel like it, when it’s convenient, when they’re full of motivation and connected to their reasons for doing it. In other words, they do it occasionally.

But on the days when they don’t feel like it, champions show up anyway.

They do not negotiate with what is required. They have a plan that they’re committed to and faith it’ll take them where they want to go. Just like anyone else they have convincing reasons why they should change course or take a break, but they do not let those reasons beat their commitment.

If you look at people at the highest levels of anything - Business, sports, self-respect - they all do the same thing in their own ways. They know the fundamentals and practice them religiously. 

So what’s our takeaway today as we use this example to inform our growth and development?

It’s a reminder of the power of consistency. If we want to excel in something, our path forward is to be disciplined and execute the fundamentals. And not just do it when we want to, but to show up every day regardless because daily incremental progress is what separates ‘good’ from ‘great’. 

In my years of studying high-performance I’ve found there are a few universal foundational elements that people must practice consistently to maximize their potential. It’s from this foundation that you can become great at whatever you desire.

Especially if lacking discipline has been holding you back from having the quality of health, career success, and relationships that you desire... I have identified 9 Super Habits that accelerate success behind the scenes, no matter what success looks like for you. 

If you’d like to learn what the Super Habits are and how to implement them consistently in just 15 minutes a day, this is for you!

As complicated as we try to make it sometimes, there’s a simple sequence of events that dictates what happens in our lives.

That sequence is: We make choices, that lead to actions, that produce results.

Now let’s walk through each step.

Choices are the bedrock of our sense of agency. Because we have personal freedom, it means that we have the opportunity to make choices in our lives. This is very empowering because at any given moment we can make a new choice that changes the trajectory of our life in big and small ways.

In fact, we are making choices in every moment of our life. But the majority of them are subconscious and driven by our unmet needs and belief system.

Then when you make a choice, it leads to a certain action. Another word for this is ‘behavior’. Both actions and behaviors are the external expression of the internal choice. It’s what causes your choices to actually impact the world within you and around you.

But not all actions are the same - Some are healthy, productive, and supportive of who we want to be, and some are not. Unconscious choices lead to unconscious actions, and conscious choices lead to conscious actions.

Which ultimately produce results. The actions we take interact with the world around us. We are incredibly powerful in that we underestimate the influence we have on the world and our world. Every action shifts the balance of things and in doing so, manifests in your life a certain outcome.

Now here’s the important part to understand. If we don’t like the results we’re getting right now, or want more of the good ones we’ve earned, we need to step our way backwards in the sequence.

That is only possible when we first clearly define the results we want (or don’t want)...

The from there, we can understand what actions we do or did not take to generate that certain result...

And gain insight into what underlying choices lead to each of those actions.

Now here’s one additional piece. In order to make high-quality choices more often, and steer ourselves away from the bias of our unconscious mind that keeps us in our comfort zone and reproduces the same results we’ve been getting…

We need to focus on cultivating more awareness.

When we raise the level of consciousness we live at, we become better aware of the choices we’re making, the actions we’re taking, and the outcomes that come as a result.

You’ll want to cultivate more awareness in your life, and supplement this foundational concept with other fundamentals that will accelerate your growth, I’ve put together some of the best episodes from the past that summarize the 7 Fundamentals to Self Improvement. Click here if you want to check those out!