Ask just anyone the question “What’s the most important thing in your life?” and you’ll get pretty similar answers. In fact, ask yourself the question right now -  What is the most important thing in your life?

The resounding answer you’ll hear, that you might’ve even concluded for yourself, are the people in your life - Their well-being, their health and safety, and enjoying quality time with them. Having strong, meaningful relationships with friends and family members is one of the most enriching things in life. 

The longest survey ever conducted just confirmed this. Having studied many people over many years, they found that the single greatest contributor to a happy life is the quality of your social connections. This was a stronger indicator of holistic wellness than things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism.

The reason I bring this up is because while many people really value their most coveted relationships, they aren’t very intentional about them. It's as though time with friends and family is one of the last things to be prioritized alongside life’s other responsibilities and commitments. Time with other people seems to be squeezed into our lives when convenient rather than built around like a pillar.

I’ve gotten more intentional with my relationships in the last few years, making sure I reach out to my Mom, Dad, grandma, and brother, and I’ve set up a weekly date-night with my fiancé Irene. But I want to take things to the next level, and I just heard a new idea about it that I’m going to start experimenting with.

Brian Johnson, founder and community leader of Heroic (a self improvement platform I’m a part of) introduced me to having “Deep Love Blocks”. Similar to Cal Newport’s “Deep Work Blocks” where you have the intention to create a distraction free work session, we can do the same with the time we spend with our most important people. 

That’s why it’s called ‘quality time’. And if we want to improve the quality of our interactions with people we need to be more present, less distracted, fully engaged, and multi-task less.

Creating “Deep Love Blocks” is easy - Assign a certain amount of time to be with someone and plan to be there. It could be as elaborate as having an activity planned or as simple as choosing not to scroll social media when you’re on the phone with someone. The important part is that you’re in the moment, and doing nothing else, so that you can give the time your best and receive theirs.

I know it may be hard to imagine, but what if when your alarm went off in the morning you got right up, fully energized and ready to take on the day? There’s a popular expression that goes “Rise and shine” to suggest this very feeling, and I want to break it down a bit because its advice is actually very helpful, especially if you struggle to get up in the mornings.

First, rise. It implies getting moving right away. The best way to do that is to keep your alarm out of arms reach so that you physically need to get out of bed to turn it off. Once you’re moving, it’s a little bit easier to do the next thing, and the next thing, to support you in have a strong start to the morning. 

Beyond that, the more quality movement you get in earlier, the better. This helps to wake up your body and mind to kickstart your engagement with the day. Whether it be a morning walk with a coffee, some stretching, or a full workout, the movement accelerates you transition from asleep to alert.

Then the second part of the quote - Shine. There are a few different things to consider. The first is getting sunshine. Our Circadian Rhythm, the body system that regulates our sleep cycle, uses external stimuli to facilitate its process. The primary trigger it uses is sunshine. So getting outside and hit with some sun rays literally helps your body wake up on a chemical, physiological level.

Another part of shine, which ties more into Thursday positivity, is mood priming. When you’re intentional about the first things you do in the morning, to make your internal energy pure and radiant, you set the tone for the rest of the day. Doing things like a mindfulness practice, gratitude reflections, or Mel Robbins “High 5 Habit” helps you to turn on your shine so that you can spend the day in its warmth.

And the final extension of that last thought - This energy is then felt by others. They will take it in, it will make them feel better and your shine will be reflected back to you. We can all think of that one person whose positivity and enthusiasm is contagious, who we want to be more like in that regard. You can cultivate more of that for yourself by following the simple advice “Rise and shine.”

The far majority of people want to be successful. It’s an indicator that we’re maximizing our potential, getting validation from others that what we have to offer is valuable, and as it comes to finances guarantees that we’ll live more comfortable lives.

But what does it mean to be successful? That varies person to person, and I say that the secret to success is defining it for yourself.

What happens though is we get caught up chasing the success that our world’s celebrate. It’s the expectations of the people around us that inform our own understanding of what it means to be successful. It’s the accolades and achievements that we see making headlines, that people in our circles talk about, which shape our own perception of success.

This is all learned. The experiences and lessons that were passed on to your core influencers have been passed down to you. As social learning creatures a lot of our beliefs are “caught and not taught”, meaning that they’re part of the environment we build our lives around rather than intentionally transferred between generations.

So, if you feel like you’ve been living a life that isn’t true to yourself, or achieve some form of material success that feels empty once you have it, then it’s a great idea to evaluate the environment around you that has influenced your understanding of success. What about your family’s history, culture, and past experiences has caused them to see the world a certain way?

Once you get a better understanding for that, you get to decide for yourself - Is that a way of thinking that you want to continue on with?

Different can be scary. It can challenge the way things have been done and people close to you may even disagree with you. But ultimately, you get to chase your own version of success, however you want to define it, and as it long as it’s contributing to your overall happiness then that’s what’s most important.

Do you ever let the fear of failure hold you back? It could take the form of worrying what other people might think if you don’t succeed, not wanting to look stupid by going for something out of your league, or wasting precious time by putting so much effort into something that didn’t come to fruition. If so, here’s a new way to think about it.

What if every time you were rejected it was actually protecting you from something? 

Just consider the possibility - I know it’s not easy to do in the moment but imagine how empowered and resilient you’d feel if you could, as Winston Churchill puts it, “move from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

That would mean that every time you got rejected you would be grateful for the way that your path is being reserved for the people and things that are in complete alignment with your mission.

The reason this all came to mind is it was the central theme of a podcast conversation between Ed Mylett and Jamie Kern Lima. In particular, Jamie had a brilliant elaboration on what this protection actually means. She said that sometimes the value you have to offer is hidden to others because it doesn’t serve you for them to see it. 

The people who reject you because they don’t believe in you, they don’t see the vision, they don’t want to work with you - It’s just a matter of them not having the awareness to know what you have to offer. And while it might feel insulting or like a missed opportunity in the moment, ultimately it’s protecting you from something you can’t see yet.

In order to get consistent with this new way of thinking, so that it becomes a genuine belief and thought you have in the face of rejection, you’ll need to do some work. 

The best way I’ve learned how to cultivate a new mindset like this is to intentionally and consistently induce the thought process. Tactically, this means that if you reflect every night on the moments in the day when you were rejected, and specifically assign the meaning you want to take from the experience, you can teach your mind how you relate with those kinds of experiences moving forward.

At the end of the day, if you manage to change the way you think about rejection so that you cultivate more resilience through it, you will be empowered to take action in remarkable ways with full faith that the right things are happening for the right reasons.

To circle back on this podcast episode I listened to - Ed Mylett’s show is one of my go-tos and this conversation in particular with Jamie Kern Lima was really good. They’ve got a cool special announcement in it too, give the episode a listen by clicking here!

We talk a lot about being less judgmental of others - putting our biases and assumptions aside to appreciate the uniqueness of other people who are different from you. Ultimately, that judgment suggests beliefs that you have about the world and how you view your role in it.

But something that is lesser talked about, but equally important, is the judgment we place on ourselves. We are our own toughest critic and oftentimes most difficult person to satisfy. I believe the reason for this is because we have full access to our own thoughts, seeing the shortcomings and missed opportunities that no one else does, knowing that we could have done so much better. This is in comparison to other people where we don’t have the same access to those thoughts and therefore must draw conclusions from everything that happens externally.

To paint the difference here, let’s use an example.

Let’s say you and a friend got the exact same score on a test, a solid 85%. You might relate with your own score unfavorably knowing that you spent some time procrastinating here and losing focus there, and deprioritizing your studying more than you intended to over the weekend. You see those as all of the reasons why you didn’t score better so you might be disappointed with the end result.

However when you evaluate your friend’s performance, you see it more objectively because you don’t have the same context. 85% is a solid B, which represents that they’re upholding their responsibilities in the class as a solid student. It’s very possible that they procrastinated, they were distracted, they didn’t study over the weekend even more than you did. But you don’t know or see any of that, so you’re not biased by their potential upside and give them fair credit for their result.

This is human nature and unfortunate at times because it can make us question ourselves and negatively impact our self-confidence. So how can we stop being our toughest critic and be more fair to ourselves rather than judgmental?

The first thing to do is to interrupt the unconscious script. When you notice yourself having harsh language in your thoughts, that’s your own limitations projecting itself on you. When you do hear that voice come out, try giving it a name - It helps to separate you from it and observe it better. That’s just “Critical Kerry” or “Judgmental James”.

Once you’ve done that, you can try planting a more empowering thought that’s representative of who you want to be. Acknowledge and celebrate your own self-awareness of your thoughts. Give yourself a reflective prompt that shapes a more positive response to the challenge or judgment you’re facing.

When you allow into your consciousness the way you ideally want to relate with the situation, you immediately create your better, more aligned reality.

Alright I know this is super cliche but please don’t let that keep you from embracing the concept within it.

I hope you can take a moment to appreciate the miracle that is happening. It all started by you winning the lottery when two cells, one from a woman and one from a man to create you. That cell then went on to exponentially multiply in the most intricate of ways to create a functioning body.

This body has more cells than galaxies in the universe and veins that have grown so long that they can wrap around the planet. This is all inside you. Then beyond that, this same process happened to every human you’ve ever encountered, who for whatever reason in space and time crossed your path in big and small ways.

We don’t recognize this miracle that is life because there’s so much hardship and suffering in it. Sometimes we don’t get what we want, things happen that are unfair, or we sad that our spark is slowly fading away. But what if we recognized this incredible opportunity that we have and made the most of it?

“Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

What does wasting life even mean? I can only speak for myself, but I see it as failing to apply yourself to the things that you care about, not allowing yourself to chase what you want and who you want to be, regretting that you didn’t make the impact that you know you’re capable of.

It’s having wings but never having the courage to fly.

But the wonderful thing about life is it takes a life-time to live it. And understand that just because you feel like you haven’t made the most of it yet does not mean that you aren’t on the path to.

Take Damon West for example.

Damon was a college athlete turned meth addict and criminal. He received a life-sentence for it and went to maximum security prison. His life was over and by all accounts it appeared as though he wasted his potential. But in prison he chose to transform his life, learn from his mistakes, commit himself to being of service to others, and by some miracle he was let our on probation after just over 7 years in prison. Now he’s speaking on stages across the world, supporting other addicts with their recovery, and making a real profound difference.

He’s taken this quote to heart and is living out his life’s purpose, which he arrived at in the most unpredictable of ways - “Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

Now what does this all mean for you? Well of course it’s what you make of it.

You can choose to see life through the lens of all the things you have to complain about, or you can choose to see that everything is available to you and you’re the creator of what happens next. Of course we all want to choose the latter, and it’s easier said than done, but knowing the miracles that have already happened around you to get where you are should give you reason to believe that many more are on the way!

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Last week I went through a guided meditation session that inspired a really interesting awareness of myself that I thought might apply to you.

In the mediation I was instructed to visualize myself crossing a golden bridge, where on the other side of the bridge were two paths. In my mind’s eye I visualized them - The first one was straight in front of me, flat, wide, well kept, and you could see a good distance in front of you. The second one took a sharp turn to the right and appeared to be more rugged, less maintained, and you had little vision beyond the turn.

In my visualization I without a second thought took the safe, popular path right in front of me and started walking down it. I don’t know if there was a prompt in the meditation or if it came from my own internal dialogue, but I gave myself a pause to consider what happened. I didn’t make a conscious decision about which path I wanted to take, I just moved forward with the path outlined in front of me.

In my meditation I chose to reroute myself, walk back to the fork in the road, and instead go down the sharp turning path. Immediately it descended intensely down the canyon that the bridge just crossed. I reached the bottom in an instant and saw a steep, treacherous incline in front of me. I started to regret my decision then almost magically I bounded up the face of this cliff in a supernatural way I’d never experienced before.

Of course this is all imaginary so I can only interpret the significance of all of it, but I think there are some interesting insights.

First is we all that path that is laid out in front of us. It’s easy, safe, and expected. It’s taking the job that seemed to fall into your lap, staying in your hometown, and otherwise conforming to the expectations of others. Now there’s nothing wrong with this kind of life, there’s a lot of richness in simplicity, but is this something you chose?

In this visualization I realized that I’m more susceptible to taking the easy path than I’d like to be, and would prefer to be more curious and exploratory of my options to make a decision. I want to choose my path forward rather than just inherit what seems to be in front of me. Also I came to understand that the riskier path very well may lead to the bottom, and make things harder than they need to be. But you never know what the environment might inspire within you, like a superpower you didn’t know you had, to help you elevate to heights you didn’t believe you were capable of.

Again, there’s no judgment about what path you take. If you know that you enjoy the ease and simplicity of a traditional life, you’ll achieve that by pursuing the traditional path. But if you want to do something novel, ambitious, pioneering, and boundary stretching, you’ll need to take a different path.

It’s experiences like this that make me really excited about my personal development journey. In becoming more aware of my beliefs and unconscious patterns, I can find new ways to create the new and improved life of my choosing. Hopefully this inspires you to chase the same too.