I’ve been observing people for quite some time, particularly evaluating them through the lens of their productivity, and I’ve found that there are 4 levels of progression that we must go through to feel like we’re making the most of our time. That progression is bored, busy, balanced, and bliss.

Starting with being bored, this is when you’re simply under-stimulated. You have extra time on your hands, you’re at a loss for what you’re passionate about, and you find yourself doing things you don’t really care about to fill the day. In our crazy world, this is uncommon because there are so many things that are requesting our time.

A step up from that is to be busy. This is when you have full days with things going on and places to be. It seems like there’s not enough time in the day to get it all done, and it feels more fulfilling because at least you’re not wasting time being bored. We’re all familiar with what it’s like to be busy…. But the problem in this phase is that you don’t have enough meaningful engagement, or the things you’re engaged in have large costs to them.

This brings us to balanced. So you’re not bored... And you have full days, you’re not just busy doing things that are taking up your time... Being balanced is having the right amount of the right things. I prefer using the word 'harmony' because that’s really what happens here, all your activities synergize to produce wonderful days with a full breadth of experiences and outcomes. Being balanced is only possible when you can discern what is a valuable use of your time, cutting out the excess so that you can address all of your needs.

And then, following that is bliss. It’s a state of fulfillment, peace, and ecstacy. You don’t feel rushed or pressured to do anything but instead feel presence with everything you do. I believe that our ultimate pursuit is to create bliss in our lives.

Interestingly, these 4 phases exist as a cycle, with variations on two criteria: How much you have to do, and the level of alignment of what you’re doing.

You start with boredom, where you don’t have a lot to do and you’re not living in personal alignment. Then there’s busy where now you have a lot more to do but it’s still out of alignment. Then you get to balance where you have a lot to do and now it’s aligned with who you want to be. And finally is bliss where you again don’t have much to do but what you do is fully aligned. And once you lose that alignment, you get bored.

If you want a visual to see how the cycle works, check it out here!

As a huge proponent for establishing high standards for myself as the focus of my self-growth, I’m always intrigued to understand how other people talk about it. Inky Johnson recently came on Ed Mylett’s podcast and shared what he believes the difference is between a standard and an expectation.

They seem pretty synonymous, don’t they? Both relate to a level of performance that you hope to achieve. Both relate to being accountable to clearly established criteria... However, Inky says that a standard is born internally and an expectation is imposed externally.

The best organizations and individual performers are built around having standards. Standards are intrinsic. They are woven into the fabric of how things are done, without concern for what others think. When you have a standard it means that you’re unwilling to allow yourself to fall below the level of intentionality, quality, and consistency that you have for yourself. Failing to meet a standard is a matter of integrity and character.

That’s not to say that expectations aren’t helpful, they absolutely are. But know how they impact you. Since expectations come from the outside, they come with more pressure. There’s more space for disagreement or miscommunication. Expectations can be motivating because other people are invested in your performance and you don’t want to let them down. If you respond well to external accountability, having expectations could be extremely effective. 

Inky was a star football player before having a career ending injury, so let’s use a football example. The standard of a football team is reflected in the way they prepare and compete on the football field. It’s the culture they bring to every moment, ensuring that they give themselves the best opportunity they can to win.

The expectation of a football team is that they beat a weaker team, attract high quality talent, and don’t make any game-losing mistakes. In other words, the expectation is about a result and the standard is about the process. 

Your standards establish your personal baseline. The higher your standards, the higher your baseline. And if you want to raise your baseline and hold yourself to a higher standard in the way you approach your health and work, understanding and being consistent with the 9 Super Habits makes high-performance inevitable. If you want to learn about the 9 Super Habits and how you can implement all of them in just 15 minutes a day, this is for you!

We’ve all had moments where we realize that we just wasted our time.

It’s working on that project only to realize that one of the first details as wrong, and you need to redo the whole thing. It’s getting caught in a research or social media rabbit hole and when you snap out of it you can’t believe that hours passed. It’s putting your heart and soul into arranging a present for someone that they hardly appreciate or never use...

Our natural response to this is to get discouraged. We ruminate on all of the other things we could have been doing and that would have been a better use of our time. We feel frustrated because we have so much going on and couldn’t afford to lose any more time, yet we did. 

But the problem is - When you disparage and get upset with yourself about all the ways you wasted your time… You’re just wasting more time and creating even more time debt.

It doesn’t serve you to focus on lost time.

Our way out of any form of debt is to get more efficient with the resources we have available. Rather than incurring more debt and digging ourselves into a deeper hole, we need to offset what we lost with more positive production.

So as it relates to time debt, our solution is to then find ways to get more done in less time. 

Now how do we do that? 

We create efficiencies. We get more out of what we put in by being more focused and organized, by streamlining our processes to reduce waste, and by increasing the quality of what we do.

Practically, this means that when we find ourselves having just wasted time, we need to take corrective action. We need to get right into productive activity that makes up for the lapse we just experienced.

Now this is kind of meta - Preparing this thought for you, I was pulled off schedule helping my Mom with some chores around the house. Not wanting to get behind for the day, I was intentional about transitioning quickly out of that into undistracted work on this. And because I set that intention, I was able to get this done faster and make up for some of the time debt I incurred.

Tony Robbins says “Where your attention goes, energy flows.” So let’s put our attention on the right proactive things to do rather than get stuck on the mistakes we made, making them even bigger mistakes!

If you’re looking to create efficiencies in your time management and daily focus, three of the 9 Super Habits are dedicated to helping you become exponentially more productive. Click here to learn what they are!

I’m sharing this because I care. I realize that as I’m saying this I’m not talking directly to you, but trust me when I tell you that I am talking to you. 

You’re a beautiful, flawed, one of a kind, perfectly imperfect human being. 

You’ve made mistakes and you’ll make some more. You’ve fallen short of being the person you know you can be but you’ve gotten back up. You have what it takes inside you to overcome any obstacle because that’s exactly what you’ve done every time in the past (and if you haven’t overcome it yet then you’re simply in progress).

I imagine you’re one of your toughest critics - Finding fault in big and small things, and not giving full credit to what you’ve accomplished. But know that it’s not a bad thing! It means that you have high standards for yourself and that you genuinely care about the contribution you’re making to the world and others.

In order to start meeting expectations and showing up as everything you know you can be, you need to quit beating yourself up.

Think about what that term translates to. When you beat someone up it means that you assault them, injuring them and leaving them stranded. You violate their safety and create damage that takes time to repair.

While we don’t do this physically to ourselves, on a daily basis we do a version of it emotionally and spiritually. We’re so hard on ourselves when we try something and fail. We turn a mistake into a personal attack on our character and capabilities. Our self-esteem can so easily be shattered by the smallest lapses, and it’s no wonder why our self-confidence is so fragile.

But you can replace this negative voice with one that’s empowering and understanding. You can lead with grace and come from a place of self-love, even when you feel like you don’t deserve it. Any time you catch yourself criticizing your actions, choices, or level of results, transplant your disapproval with acceptance.

How? Pick a mantra to say instead. Catch yourself in the negativity and consciously replace it. And every time you use it and interrupt the previous pattern, you train your brain to think differently. Pick a mantra that’s authentic to you so that it resonates and impacts you.

Unknowingly, the mantra I’ve been using is “I’m in the game! Good for me.” To me this reminds me that I don’t get disappointing results without trying new things or allowing myself to dream bigger, and in saying this mantra I acknowledge that. 

I say all of this for one reason - You are a genuinely awesome person, with a ton of potential. And when you stop allowing yourself to think otherwise, imagine how fired up you’ll be when you start seeing it too?

Creating a better life for ourselves is actually pretty simple. Rather than overcomplicating things, my mentor Jim Bunch has it broken down into 3 tiers of thought that support us in actually making meaningful progress in our lives.

Those 3 steps are: Goals, strategies, and tactics.

When we have a goal, we have defined the end result that we want to create. It’s a possible reality that we believe will improve the quality of our lives, and we dedicate ourselves to achieving our goals.

The way you do that is by having a strategy. Just like you need a strategy to win a game, we need strategies to achieve our goals.

And once we have a game plan, then it’s just about taking the specific tactical actions that serve as the implementation of the strategy.

Something that I have seen often in others and in myself is having empty goals. This is basically setting an intention for something you want but not really doing anything about creating it. Going back to the 3 steps, a goal needs a strategy and too often we don’t have one. And that’s where I want to highlight something…

Hope is not a strategy.

If we haven’t committed to a specific game plan, that we believe will lead to the desired result if executed, then we’re just hoping it happens on its own.

And while hope is a powerful force in life, in a more practical sense it’s not a true strategy. When you rely on hope you forfeit the idea that the result is within your control, and therefore you're way less likely to take the necessary actions required to make it so.

Let’s say you want to double your business’ revenue this year. What’s the strategy to make that happen? Double clients? Double life-time value? Create another product or offering? All of those are perfectly acceptable strategies that lead to very different daily action items. Hoping that your business will double without a specific idea about how… That’s unlikely to change anything.

Or let’s say you want to decrease in weight. It’s great to set a goal like that, especially if it’s connected to a powerful why. Is the plan to exercise more, change your diet, or both? Or is it just an intention that you have and you don’t know how you’ll do it, you just know you want to?

Anyone who has tried to decrease in weight could tell you that just wanting to will not make it happen and that there are certain strategies that work best for them.

To elaborate on that last example - Of course achieving your goals takes more than just the strategy. There are many people who tell themselves that they want to exercise more and eat healthier, but they don’t. Having the discipline to execute the strategy is what actually creates the results you’re after.

If you want to start achieving your personal and professional goals, and not let your own lack of self-discipline or follow through get in the way, I encourage you to learn learn more about the 9 Super Habits. These are the daily small actions behind the scenes that help you live out being the best version of yourself on autopilot.

As someone who is extremely impact-oriented and wants to make a huge difference in the world, I am fascinated by what it means for us to have a purpose.

A lot of people put pressure on themselves to discover what their purpose is so that they can passionately fulfill it in their life.

Abraham Maslow, best known for Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, had a theory about purpose that I’ve come to accept. He says that everyone actually has the same purpose.

What is this shared purpose? It comes down to two things: Giving back to the world and becoming all that you can be. In other words, we all exist to reach out fullest potential and use our skills and talents in service of others.

But clearly we’re not all meant to do the same thing... Or be the same person... We’re very different with our own strengths and uniqueness to offer.

The differentiation is that while we all share the same purpose, we’re each tasked with our own mission. And in this way each of us contributes something that no one else is capable of.

So if you feel like you’re lacking purpose in life, understand that your purpose is the same as mine, which is the same as everyone’s. What you’re actually looking for is a worthwhile mission, one that you believe in and that inspires you to dedicate yourself to.

Now here’s the thing - The idea of having a mission is way more temporary. Military operators have many missions that they complete one at a time. So rather than feeling this overwhelming pressure to find your forever life purpose, what if our task was just to be committed to our current mission?

While some people have one life-long mission, many of us have a number of different missions that follow the seasons of our life. If there’s a specific cause you want to impact, it can be your mission to support it through the fundraiser you organize. If you have a young family, your mission can be to take care of their well-being. Even as you’re establishing yourself, your mission could be to prioritize your education and give yourself opportunities.

Our purpose is expressed through our current mission, and knowing that our mission can change gives us permission to pour ourselves into more. It doesn't need to be forever for it to be right. So what do you feel called to do right now? What’s your way of using your gifts and talents in service of others right now? 

When you have more clarity on that, you’ll find that your life becomes a whole lot purposeful because you’ve given your innate purpose a vehicle to be expressed.

We’ve all had moments where we’ve been so engrossed in something that we lose our sense of time. We can all relate with moments of creative genius or brilliant insight that seemed to come through us involuntarily. It’s one of the most potent, most enlivening experiences we can have, and experts call it being in a state of “flow”.

Popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, people have dedicated their life to figuring out how we can create the conditions of flow to facilitate peak performance. And they’ve arrived at 4 Fs that help anyone discover moments of tapping into their greatest inner potential: Focus, freedom, feedback and 4% challenge.

As it goes for that last one about challenge, there is something called the Flow Channel. You can find yourself in the Flow Channel when you have two things - The right amount of challenge and the right amount of skill. When your skills are being tested to the appropriate amount, and not being over-tested, that’s when one experiences flow.

This theory becomes clearer when you think about the other parts of the spectrum. When someone’s skill is beyond the challenge they’re facing, they experience boredom. Being better than the task does not require that you are engaged in it, and therefore underwhelmed by it and disinterested.

The other part of the spectrum is present when the demands of the challenge far exceed your level of skill. This initiates anxiety as you’re set up for failure and simply incapable of doing the task well.  It’s so far beyond your current skill level that you can’t even learn from it because you’re so disoriented and out of your league.

The formula for finding flow is similar to the one proposed by Anders Ericsson about “Deliberate Practice”. When you practice something that is just beyond your means, just beyond your comfort zone with it, that right amount of challenge is a fertile soil for skill development. Too little challenge and you’re bored, and too much challenge and you’re overwhelmed.

So as it relates to the skill that you’re most dedicated to developing in your life right now, where’s that sweet-spot of engagement? What’s the right amount of challenge? Because if you find it, you’ll lock in deeper than you thought possible!

Everything in our self-growth exists on a spectrum and I wanted to share a personal story that shows you part of it. 

Throughout my life I’ve always really cared what other people think about me. I didn’t always have the courage to stand up for myself and what I thought was right, especially if it was different from what someone else expected of me. 

I was overly influenced by external validation and always concerned with how things would be perceived by other people. It’s something that I knew wasn’t who I wanted to be, but it was my nature and something I committed myself to working on. 

It didn’t happen in massively transformational ways, but rather frequent subtle shifts. I thought extra about times when I was worried about how my actions would be received. I intentionally chose to hold out on talking about some of the things I did to help others to reinforce my intrinsic reasons for doing it. I realized that my judgment came from this same source, so I began to intentionally reframe my thoughts when I caught myself projecting onto others. It’s not like it happens in every moment of every day, but for years it has been a focus for me in my self-growth.

It was only recently that I noticed how far I’ve come with it.

At the end of my runs I like celebrating by putting my arms in the air like a boxer who just won a fight. It’s my way of taking action to remind myself of what I’m capable of, and how I prioritize doing the things that make me a healthier and happier person.

But I used to try and hide it from other people. At the end of my runs, I’d look around to see if anyone was near me and if I was in the clear I’d put my arms up and have my moment. I believe the motivation behind this was that I cared what others thought about me, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird or crazy (even though logically I knew no one would think twice about it.)

Well I noticed a few weeks ago, at the end of my run, I was making eye contact with people and walking proudly past them with my arms in their celebratory pose. It wasn’t my first time doing it this comfortably, but it was the time I realized how different my behavior was than it used to be. It served as a timestamp of progress, my current actions and fears compared to past actions and fears, and it clearly demonstrated to me how much progress I’d made over time. 

Again, I share this story because the same is probably true for you. Maybe not about caring what others think, but that thing that you’ve been working on (and you don’t know if it has gotten any better), I’m sure it has and your moment to discover just how much you’ve grown is right around the corner!

I’m curious to know - Is it helpful when I share stories like this to let you in on my own world of growth? DM me on instagram @self.improvement.daily your thoughts , I’d love to hear them!

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