I heard a really interesting framework around how to limit negative communication. Often times we say things we don’t mean, that we’ll later regret, and wonder why we even said it in the first place. We wonder what caused us to not have the self-control required to show up better in the moment.

When it comes to things you wish you wouldn’t have said, or said in a certain way, it’s usually a matter of feeling emotional. Our emotions bias our logical reasoning as an environment that shapes our thoughts. It happens unconsciously in emotional moments causing us to misrepresent our truth.

So before you communicate, especially when you’re feeling impulsive, halt. Pause. Take a minute to audit how you’re feeling. In particular reflect on these 4 things:

HALT is an acronym - Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. When you’re feeling any of those things you’re more likely to make mistakes in your communication. When you feel any of these ways, you become more likely to say something you didn’t mean because your mind is fixated on addressing specific needs in the short-term that conflict with what might be best in the long term.

This is in my mind humanity’s fatal flaw - We have evolved to do the things that serve us in the short term (immediate gratification) but that often does more harm than good in the long term (rejection of delayed gratification). 

But once you can label what’s happening, understand that in the moment you’re feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, you can decrease this unconscious force. Simply by calling it out, you give your logical mind the information it needs to make the right decision, knowing how certain factors and feelings might be motivating things in certain ways.

Bringing this back to you - The next you time you feel agitated or like you’re getting impulsive or confrontational in a conversation, halt. Pause to reflect on how hungry, angry, lonely, or tired you might be. Connect the dots around how that might be causing you to relate with things a certain way. And if you feel like it’s not allowing you to represent your best self, now you know and you can choose to do something different.

Do you identify with being an all or nothing kind of person? It’s time to get fit so you commit to 5 days a week in the gym, a new nutrition plan, and maybe even a personal trainer. Or you want to meditate more so you dive into 30+ minute long advanced visualization sessions.

If so, and I did for a long time it’s a great characteristic trait. It means that you’re willing to be uncomfortable, you’re prepared to take bold action when you feel inspired, you’ll push yourself to levels far beyond where the average person could go, and you generally run life a high-speed.

Until you don’t…

What I’ve found to be a weakness of 'all-or-nothing' people is the relapse. While the momentum can pick up really fast, it’s volatile, fragile and can crash really quickly. You miss a day in the gym, or have a cheat day in your diet and you get really hard on yourself to the point that it all falls apart. You travel for a few days, get out of your new mindfulness routine, and have a really hard time getting back into any version of it.

That’s why it’s called all or nothing - You can be flying high one day to go back to square one the next. With all of that in mind, let’s talk about how to harness the positive sides of this mindset while managing the downsides.

On the first side of the mindset, think about applying the energy toward something sustainable. When you take the conviction of an all or nothing mindset and focus it on something more basic, you trade intensity for consistency. This works because intensity is something you can adjust in the moment whereas consistency is more foundational and baseline. 

An example of this is committing to working out in some capacity for 15 minutes a day, anything from a walk to a full sweaty gym session, knowing they all count the same.

Then on the other side of the mindset, there are two things to consider. First is how you can be aware that the ‘come down’ is coming. It requires a consciousness around your behaviors and circumstances to know how things are going and how they might be changing. The tool I use, that I teach about in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge, is to have a daily reflection routine that helps you to pause and think about how things are going. 

Once you’ve done that, the second piece to navigating the potential fallout of an all or nothing mindset is to have contingency plans. When you lose consistency or make a mistake or overlook something (which you certainly will), do you have a plan in place to get back on track? Instead of trying to figure it out in an emotional, disappointing moment, how about you have an idea already prepared around how you might want to respond. 

Let’s say you have a cheat day and miss your diet. Instead of feeling bad about yourself, you can journal on the reasons why it happened and move forward into the next day with a renewed commitment.

Anyway, all that to say that if you have an all or nothing mindset, there’s a lot of opportunity in it! But also some pitfalls that might keep you stuck where you’re at. So be intentional about how you work with it so that you can make real improvements to your life!

if you know anyone with an all or nothing mindset, who runs at a high strung fast pace, share this article with them!

We all can think back to when we were kids and asked to make a wish before blowing out our birthday candles. Many people joke that instead of thinking hard about your one wish, you can just wish for more wishes. Yet we don’t. For some reasons, something that is so simple and logical to do feels like it’s cheating the system. Why is that?

While this is just a basic example it’s representative of a larger trend. For all of our lives we’ve been taught that we can’t do things. You can’t just quit your job and start your own business. You can’t move to a new town just because you want to. You can’t just go on a trip at a moment's notice. 

Are you sure you can afford it? Have you considered the consequences? Is this the responsible thing to do?

But the truth is - We can. All of those things - going into business for yourself, moving towns, going on a spontaneous trip - are extremely doable. In fact people do it every single day. 

What keeps more people from doing it is this learned tendency that we can’t, which has been handed down for generations infusing itself in our subconscious belief systems.

Just like you can’t wish for more wishes, right? Well of course you can! And you should.

Someone who is telling you that you can’t have what you want is just projecting their insecurities and limitations on you. Do you want to believe them, or do you want to believe the voice of possibility in your head that is telling you to go after your dreams?

The main thing keeping people from pursuing their dreams is taking the small first step of committing to doing it. They don’t have the courage to go against the fold and wish for more wishes. 

I say it every single day on the podcast - Yes you can! Maybe it’s time you start challenging the constraints that you’ve allowed into your world and probing into the unlimited life you want to live. Allow yourself to dream big. Listen to your intuition and path over the critical voices around you.

It’s okay to dream big and get what you want in life. You deserve it! And you can create it for yourself once you stop getting in your own way and start playing your game of life and not anyone else’s.

If this helped you have a perspective shift today, please share this article with someone you care about and invite them onto this journey with you.

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One of the most fundamental components to our self improvement is our habits, and today I hope to offer a new more technical perspective around them. 

First we need to understand what a habit is and its purpose. A habit is simply our patterned way of doing something. We usually think of habits through the lens of the actions we take, but it also includes the recurring patterns of our thoughts and feelings. 

The reason we have habits is because they provide a cognitive shortcut for the brain. If you do the same thing over and over again it becomes inefficient for you to have to think about it every single time. Therefore, a habit is an unconscious way for your brain to do something consistently without the demands of your logical reasoning.

This process is so strong that our brain’s natural state is to drive things to automaticity. It prefers that things become habits. But the conflict of that is - When we have ingrained habits, the brain also prefers to maintain them as is.

Given that this is a psychological process, there are different levels of depth that correspond with your habits. While there’s no perfect rule, it’s generally accepted that you can form a habit in 21 days or 21 significant instances of doing something. Workout for 21 days and you’re in a habit. Cold call for 21 days and you're in a habit. You’ll know it has become a habit because the resistance to doing it has decreased. It no longer feels so uncomfortable or painful to do. This suggests that your unconscious mind is now more supportive of this new habit and is permitting it rather than trying to prevent it.

But then there’s another layer to habit formation that happens at around 300 days or instances. When you’ve done something so many times, for so long, it eventually creates a compulsion. It gets to the point that it makes you feel uncomfortable when you don’t do it. This creates identity based behavior change - Your sense of self becomes so closely tied into your behavior that they are codependent.

This is a powerful threshold to hit when you have it working for you, but it also can be dangerous if this is the relationship you have with bad habits (which many of us do).

This is why consistency is key. Everything you do is providing a vote for your habits. Your subconscious mind is always using your actions to determine your identity. Harness it in the right ways and you’ll start seeing everything transform around you.

The topic covered today, as well as many topics surrounding it like understanding the root of self-sabotage, the identity behavior feedback loop, and even a bit more about me and my background was featured in an interview I did for another podcast with my friends at The Alignment Show. If you’re curious to check that out, I’m linking two different ways for you to give that a listen.

On Apple Podcast | On Spotify

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One of the best indicators of the progress we’re making on our self improvement is to take a quick look at how we spend our average day. It’s a meaningful metric because it represents your baseline level of operation. No boost of motivation, no big deadline that you need to hustle to hit… Just you and your daily processes.

Our baseline level is the byproduct of four major things coming -  Habits, standards, systems, and routines.

Habits relate with the specific positive behaviors you engage in consistently. Your standards reflect what you’re willing to tolerate and surround yourself with. Systems allow you to be more efficient in creating high quality outcomes with less effort. And routines are bundles of habits and behaviors that allow you to connect multiple elements of your life and build momentum.

When you improve your habits, standards, systems, and routines, you elevate your baseline. This means that your highs are higher and your lows are higher than they used to be because on your bad days, now you’re falling back to a higher platform. 

This is how your previous best becomes your new normal.

With more discipline, consistency, and clarity in the foundational areas of your life, your average day gets better. It’s really that simple. And as you continue focusing on raising your baseline, it will improve to such an extent that your ‘every day’ is as good as what used to be your ‘best day’.

The problem is that most people miss this opportunity for growth. Instead what they do is strain themselves trying to induce change by 'getting outside their comfort zone', but when they're done exerting themselves and it’s time to recover they just fall back to their old habits, standards, systems, and routines.

This is why people feel stuck and stalled in their self-growth. They feel like they’re putting in the time and effort to grow but then things don’t change in their life. It happens because the effort is being applied to impact the wrong things.

In order to sustainably improve your life, you need to raise your baseline. Improve your habits, establish stronger standards, upgrade your systems, and build powerful routines. If you’re feeling ready to start pursuing your self-growth the right way, with the right structure and guidance so that you start getting fast improvement and results in your life, today (Monday May 8th) is the first day of the 21 day Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. 

And it is not too late to step up to the challenge! If you’re ready to take your self-growth to the next level, these next 21 days will help you to revolutionize your habits, standards, systems, and routines so that you can really start tapping into your fullest potential and getting the results in your health, productivity, relationships, and finances that you deserve.

Click here to step up to the challenge now! (And be sure to use the promo code CHALLENGE21 to lock in a discounted rate!)

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Alright I have a question for you - Do you want things to get better? Do you want to have a better future that represents the life, habits, environments, accomplishments, and fulfillment of a more meaningful life?

Of course you do. That’s what being so committed to self-growth and your personal evolution is all about. I don’t mean to state the obvious, instead my intention is to call out the process required to actually achieve it.

Many people have the dreams, desires, and destiny that they’re going to reach their goals. That while they may not be there yet, someday soon they’ll wake up and realize that everything shifted for the better. 

Now that’s entirely possible, you can transform every aspect of your life - your health, finances, relationships, impact, fulfillment - faster than you might think. But it doesn’t happen on its own. You need to be the agent of change that initiates the shift.

In other words, a lot of people want something different but they’re unwilling to do something different in order to achieve it. Often times this happens unconsciously. People don’t realize that they’re neglecting to do the things required of them to reach their goals, and they get frustrated wondering why things aren’t changing, even though they genuinely believe they’re doing everything right.

Elite executive coach Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book called “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” It’s all about the 20 habits we engage in that keep us where we’re at. You’ll keep getting the same results if you keep doing the same things, and if you want to elevate your life, you need to elevate your processes.

That’s why my encouragement today is - Don’t wish, act! If you want something different then you need to do something different. If you’re inspired right now to figure out what is that new action, that new process, that new thing you can do to take your life to the next level, I’d like to make a recommendation.

Take action and register for the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. Through this 21 day challenge I walk you step-by-step through a process where you install the one habit that will most improve your life, you master self-discipline, uproot self-sabotage so that you’re not so held back by fear, procrastination, or limiting beliefs, and instill a new sense of agency and self-belief that will inspire you to confidently pursue your best life.

This is a live challenge and your moment to claim your best self is here - We’re getting started on Monday. If you register today and use the promo code CHALLENGE21 the investment is only $21, a dollar a day. Just the same as another self-help book but instead this investment will show you how to implement the tangible process that will take your daily operation to elite levels.

Especially if you know you do well with more structure, this just might be the missing piece to getting the outstanding results you deserve from all of the hard work you're putting in!