It’s easy to get excited about your self-growth when you think about how good things can be. Consistent habits, dialed in routines, and a perfect harmony of your personal and professional lives where you make a lot of money making a huge difference, while still sharing incredible experiences and a fun lifestyle with the people you love.

On the other side of all that ‘good’ is the potential that things aren’t so good. Where good habits are sporadic or painful. and it's hard trying to motivate yourself to get up and out of bed for an early morning workout. Your routines get interrupted or disrupted by other people’s plans. You fail to strike a good balance at all as the demands of your life exceed the capacity.

But as it turns out, these two realities are two sides of the same coin.

Darren Hardy talks about success like a pendulum. If you want to travel to great heights, you need to be willing to pull the pendulum back far enough so that the momentum carries it forward. It’s like the concept of big risk, big reward. The upside of one thing is closely dependent on the downside of it.

This is why I want to talk about willingness. Your capacity for success in anything is equal to your willingness to fail in it.

We need to be willing to get rejected for the sale if we want to close it. We need to be willing to get our heart broken if we want to deeply love. We need to be willing to face the consequences of missed deadlines if we want to push a fast pace in our work.

And unfortunately many people are unwilling to expose themselves to the chance of something bad, which limits their ability to achieve something good.

Willingness, taking risks, and being bold, is a skillset. And the way you improve a skill set is by training it. 

In my life, this was an area I wanted to grow in. I wanted to make bigger moves, push my boundaries further, and accelerate forward. So as part of my morning routine I started doing one bold thing. This held me accountable to making an ask of someone, or a commitment to something that made me nervous, every day before my day even started.

Over time, my tolerance to doing bold things grew stronger and I found myself stepping into more difficult tasks throughout the day with less hesitation. I built the skill, and the improvements I experienced in my life elevated as a result.

And all that changed was my willingness to do things that were hard, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar. And I systematically built a mindset that has pushed the overall ceiling for what I’m capable of!

If there’s a change you want to make in your behaviors or mindset, you can do it! I promise you that. But you just need to be willing to try.

We hear a lot about making sacrifices. Being in a relationship or marriage with someone involves sacrifice. Passing up a passion to support your kids and their well-being is a sacrifice. Living near family instead of in a different city is a sacrifice. Not drinking alcohol any more is a sacrifice.

What I don’t like about the idea of sacrificing is the implication that there’s something unfair about it. It almost makes you the victim of circumstances and that you’re being held back or restrained by these other things you’re sacrificing for.

Now I fully understand that life is a series of tradeoffs. What I’m going to propose is to change the perspective we take towards these things that we call sacrifices.

The reality is you can do anything at any time. Some things are unfathomable because of the different responsibilities you have, commitments you’ve made, or values you hold, but nonetheless you can do anything at any time. And seeing that every detail of your life has been intentionally or unintentionally constructed by your choices is the first step to changing this perspective.

Rather than seeing the tradeoffs of life as sacrifices, what if you were to see them as decisions? You’re not sacrificing your career for your family, you’re choosing your family over your career. You’re not sacrificing your dream lifestyle in Hawaii, you’re choosing to be available to your family.

This gets more difficult when there are things that have happened in the past that created new tradeoffs. Things like family health issues, injuries, financial hardships, or irreversible mistakes. Even in these moments you still get to choose how to relate with these tradeoffs, and ultimately the path forward is within your control. You can’t choose for the past to be different but you can choose what you do about it in the present.

Self-efficacy and agency are some of the most powerful things any one person can have. You may not have a say on the hand you’re dealt, but you sure to get to choose how to play them.

When you see that life is within your control, and rather than being the victim of circumstances you’re the creator of your future, you get to enjoy the choices you make more. You don’t live with your mind on what could’ve been and instead get to focus on how to make what’s happening now fantastic.

It’s easier said than done, but with this awareness you’ll be more accountable to it. With that in mind I want to share a prompt that can help you adjust your perspective.

What’s one thing that you haven’t let go of, that you feel like you’ve compromised on in your life, and how might you be able to think about it differently so that it’s something that you chose?

This positivity quote comes from an unlikely source. One of the most brilliant entertainers I’ve ever come across is a guy named Bo Burnham. He’s a musical comedian who has bits that are all over the place, from crude and raunchy, to brain-twistingly clever, to deeply insightful.

In one of his songs he takes the perspective of how God relates with mankind. It’s got a lot of bad language and at times has an insensitive candor to it, but the final line of it really makes you think. So let’s focus on that - Bo says “If you want love then the love has gotta come from you.’

Isn’t that true? That fastest way to get anything is to give it away. You want respect? Give respect. You want friendship? Give friendship. You want to be more self-confident? Make someone else feel self-confident. You want love? Give love.

The irony of this line has another story. Bo Burnham took 5 years off from performing because he was getting panic attacks on stage. I imagine the pressure to perform and being constantly judged by others impacted his own sense of self-love. 

That just goes to show you that no matter what’s happening externally in your life, all the achievements, accolades, and success, our happiness and self-worth is an inner game. It’s easy to give and receive love when things are going great, but what about when things are not so great?

So to use Bo’s words, “the love has gotta come from you.” What does that mean? In my opinion, it’s taking an extra moment to put more thought and care into everything we do. It’s being more patient with yourself and others. It’s intentionally choosing to see the hope, possibility, and gratitude in life’s circumstances.

Trust me, I don’t know everything about love and I’m learning more about it every day. But what I’m finding is that “love” is a verb. There are ways that you act that are more loving than others, and the more we incorporate that into our lives, the more love will be returned to us.

Earlier in this same song, Bo has one other line that I’m not going to elaborate on, and I just want to leave you with. He says “Maybe life on Earth could be Heaven. Doesn’t just the thought of it make it worth a try?”

One of the most challenging parts of pursuing something meaningful is that we want to know exactly where we’re going before we get started. We’ve evolved to be careful with our time and energy, and if it seems like there might be a chance that we waste it, then we find ways to talk our way out of getting started. After all, one of the main functions of the brain is to conserve energy.

But here’s the truth to it - It’s very difficult, if not impossible, for us to know what the end goal is supposed to look like at the beginning. Just like anything, the details become more apparent the closer we get to it. And in order to get closer, we need to take real steps forward to unveil the full picture.

What this requires from us is that we evaluate the limited information we have on hand and faithfully get started. It’s not going to be perfect, we’re going to make mistakes, but it’s all in service of forging our path.

Then once we’ve begun and committed to a direction, we need to give ourselves permission to change our goals once we start pursuing them. My mentor Jim Bunch says “goals are written in sand and not in stone.” Goals are meant to be flexible and dynamic. We can update them and adjust them. Goals guide our behavior, and once we have more information and context available to us, then of course it makes sense for us to make adjustments. But for whatever reason we resist it.

Here’s a real example that I’m actively in the process of. At the beginning of this week I started sending daily emails that highlight the tip of the day in one sentence. At first I didn’t know when or how I’d do it, or even what all needed to be included in those emails. But it became clearer to me once I got started and took a step forward, and now I have new systems and details that I’ll be implementing to make it all more doable.

Our first step doesn’t need to be complex, overthought, or overengineered. It just needs to happen. And once that first step takes us to a new place with new problems, we solve those problems and stack on necessary complexity. So don’t let the lack of clarity keep you from getting started because the fastest way you’ll acquire the clarity is by getting started.

Do you want to be more resilient? Do you want to strengthen your self-discipline, follow through on the commitments you make in your life, cut out making excuses about things and show up powerfully in difficult moments?

There’s actually a process to getting better that Greg Anderson calls “microdosing adversity”. When you intentionally expose yourself to challenging things, you train yourself to have more control and respond more intentionally in unpredictable challenging circumstances.

It makes a lot of sense to me: The more repetitions you have in a certain environment, the more familiar it is to you. When things are familiar they are less scary, less threatening, and more manageable. 

But the interesting part is how this translates to positively impact unforeseen events that you’ve never been in. Independent of what stimulus causes the adversity, when you face moments of adversity often you learn how to regulate your nervous system. Our natural response is to fight, flight, or freeze in dangerous situations. The more often we experience stressful states, the better we get at controlling their impact on us no matter where the stress is coming from.

Learning of this philosophy and seeing how it fits into my practices, I see a few ways where I have unknowingly been microdosing adversity. 

First is with cold exposure. I start every shower as a cold shower. This has been training me in two ways. One is teaching my body that “when I say “go” we go. This helps me take more bold action despite anticipating something uncomfortable. The other is when I get in the cold shower I repeat to myself “I like the way this feels” as a way to practice reframing my perception so that when I encounter other unpleasant things I can take the sting out of them.

The second practice is starting Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. When someone puts their full body weight on your neck, it creates adversity. But the goal is to not allow that discomfort to dominate your thinking, and to respond thoughtfully and tactically to navigate into a new situation.

Other ways to microdose adversity are through fasting, talking to strangers, or taking on difficult workouts. To be more resilient, think through what you can do to put yourself in uncomfortable situations and get better at having control within them.

We live in a very difficult and polarized society where it seems like no matter what side of an issue we’re on, someone has a problem with it and we’re doing something wrong. So we respond by walking on eggshells and being very careful not to interrupt the status quo.

An unfortunate outcome of this is that we’re more afraid to take chances or stand out because we know that criticism is right around the corner if something starts to go wrong. And it holds us back from living to the extent we’d want to and experimenting more in our lives.

But you don’t need to prove anything to anyone. In a world where we’re seeking approval and acceptance, it’s more comfortable to get permission before doing anything that others could criticize.  It’s a way of hedging our bet in case things turn sour because we got an endorsement from someone else.

Instead, what if we just went for it? What if we understood that innovation and improvement require making mistakes, and we embraced uncertainty rather than turned away from it? We’d make significant progress so much faster and so much smoother.

When we try to prove something it puts a pressure on us to get it right. Of course the overall goal is to do things right and get positive results, but the fear of getting it wrong keeps us from trying at all. So let’s get rid of that fear and give ourselves more space to see how it goes.

And here’s how: We have a threshold where we’re comfortable moving forward because there’s a certain likelihood of success. If we were to lower that threshold and take action with less certainty, we’d actually give ourselves more chances to succeed.

I want you to reflect on a big goal or dream you have that you’ve been too scared to communicate to others - a career switch, a passion to pursue, a new lifestyle to enjoy or personal milestone to accomplish. Who’s judgment, criticism, or disagreement are you avoiding? And what do you feel like you need to prove to them?

Awareness takes power away from the negative unconscious influences that run our life. So take yourself there and see what you find.

One of the biggest contributors to the lack of wellness and difficulty that many people experience in their lives is stress. But stress in itself isn’t a bad thing, in fact with a new perspective you’ll start to see it as a great thing! To reframe our relationships with stress, today’s positivity quote is “Stress is a powerful driving force.”

This quote comes from fitness legend Bill Phillips, and it carries extra meaning because fitness perfectly demonstrates what stress does to us. We literally are choosing to add stress to our bodies and do something challenging because we know that it creates growth and endurance.

It’s the stress of an elevated heartbeat that improves your aerobic fitness, and you literally need to tear your muscle fibers in a workout so that they repair bigger and stronger.

This isn’t the form of stress that comes to mind when you feel anxious or worried about your safety. That’s because this healthy, empowering, productive version of stress is different - it’s called “eustress”. Eustress is an intentional demand you put on yourself in the short-term knowing that it will create positive benefits in the long-term. And it’s the exact reason why “stress is a powerful driving force.”

However, the version of stress we are more accustomed to, that is crippling, is called “distress”. This is when we’re worried about being able to pay our bills, regretful about how we handled a conversation, or fearful about our own safety or someone else’s. This often creates a chronic stress-response that damages our health and well-being.

However, with these two lenses of stress, we can choose which one serves us more in a “middle of the road” scenario. Let’s say that you’re feeling strained by meeting a tight deadline at work. Is the way that you’re feeling eustress helping you expand your capacity, or is distress causing anxiety? 

When we choose to see life’s challenges as a force for positive transformation in our lives, we step up to the challenge and maximize our growth potential from it. This is where the mindset “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” comes from, should we choose to receive the demands of stress in a productive way.