Just like the weather, life seems to occur in seasons. Some times are easy, light, and bright, some times are dark, drury, and despairing. And because life exists in seasons, you can always count on it changing. Nothing is permanent and it’s not meant to be, things are always evolving and recalibrating. 

It’s important to be mindful of what season you’re in. To know what is happening around you, what’s required of you, and which version of yourself you need to be to match everything around you. If you try to force things to be a certain way, life gets a lot harder because you’re fighting against the flow. 

When you’re flexible to the things around you, you’ll find you do better. Similar to how Charles Darwin describes natural selection, it’s not the biggest, fastest, strongest, or toughest that survive, it’s the most adaptable

Outside of up and down seasons in life, there’s another contrast that deserves our attention. It’s the tradeoff between being in 'research mode' and 'focus mode'. Research mode is all about acquiring information, gathering perspective, and better understanding the landscape. Research informs the best path forward and support your effort in being more effective. It’s a very exploratory phase.

This contrasts with its opposite - focus mode. When it’s time to get real results, to really move the needle on things, you need to have a sharp plan of action. Focus mode is about committing to a strategy, trusting that it’s sound, and doubling down. The only way you can get maximal results is if you pursue with maximum focus. It takes courage to go all in on something but when you do, you’ll immediately see the difference.

So of these two seasons, which are you in? Are you seeing what’s out there and exploring your options? Or is it time to dial in and get real results?

The reason I ask is because a lot of people aren’t meeting their season appropriately. They want to start getting elite results but they still have disconnected processes. In other words they’re trying to live in focus mode but are operating out of research mode.

If you’re ready to flip that switch and enter focus mode, giving your full attention to the single thing that will accelerate your growth beyond what you thought was possible, I have an invitation for you...

Join me in a 21 day where I walk you through the 3 step process that takes people from stalled and plateauing in their self-growth to elite levels of consistency and performance. It’s time to take things to the next level, and when you register for the challenge (that starts on Monday) I’ll show you how!

As ambitious high-achievers, we have a big vision for who we want to be and high expectations for what we hope to accomplish. This often leads to us trying to find that competitive edge to differentiate us and support us in getting extraordinary results.

This pursuit often leads to us constantly looking for opportunities to be productive - multi-tasking to get more done, and finding ways to do things more efficiently and effectively.

While I agree with that, I also think we’re missing the mark and telling ourselves a story about our productivity that makes us feel better, but it doesn’t actually work..

The reason we seek higher levels of productivity is because we want our lives to have meaning. We want to feel proud about the difference we’re making, everything we’re contributing, and that we’re making the most of this one shot we have at life.

But the concern is, productivity is a numbers game. It’s about the quantity that we can pack into a day. What’s far more potent, and what we’re actually looking for on a daily basis is not to just simply do more, it’s to feel really good about what we’re doing. It’s about quality, not quantity, which all stems from living with intentionality.

When you live with intentionality you infuse purpose in everything you do. You are constantly making choices that allow you to experience life to the fullest. In that way intentionality can actually guide your productivity because it needs to meet an extra criteria of importance, but intentionality also encourages you to slow down and do less so that you can be more present.

So if we pause everyday to consider how we can live more intentionally, not productively, we find more acute ways to elevate the way we experience the moment. It requires that we make the unconscious conscious so that we can make more positive choices that represent the lives we want to live as it relates to our health, relationships, work, and impact.

If you want a tool that helps you to live more intentionally, providing you with more awareness and accountability around how to be the best version of yourself, I’d love to help you install your Self Improvement Operating System. It’s through this operating system that you can improve anything about your life, from getting rid of bad habits and getting more consistent with good ones, to enforcing higher standards that help you get what you deserve in life.

And implementing this Self Improvement Operating System into your daily process is exactly what we do in the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge!

If you thought you were growing now… This challenge takes everything about your self-growth to the next level, and I can’t wait to share it with you!

Something that we’ve been indoctrinated to believe is that things need to be big to matter. In one way this comes from capitalism and the pursuit of more wealth or revenue. But this has spread into all corners of life creating this constant pressure to do more because we can.

It all leads to a critical misunderstanding that is causing a lot of people to discredit themselves: Great doesn’t have to be big and big isn’t always great.

You don’t need a big house to have a warm home. You don’t need to reach millions of people to change a life. You don’t need to run a marathon to reach a meaningful fitness goal. The size and extent of something does not determine its greatness, rather the intention and quality behind it does.

When people take this thought out of context they compromise their greatness. That’s because they extend themselves too thin and have less quality left within their influence. Many people don’t realize the consequences of pursuing more - it means that you have to split up what you have to offer in more ways such that any one place gets less of it.

Greg McKeown talks about this in “Essentialism”. Imagine two circles next to each other. One has one long arrow pointed out of it, and the other has 6 smaller arrows pointing out of it. Which one do you think makes the bigger impact? The one with only one arrow, because it represents the benefits of having completely aligned, undiluted, undistributed effort.

This is exactly why great doesn’t have to be big and big doesn’t have to be great. But it takes some unlearning to feel okay with it because we’ve inherited a “the bigger the better mindset”.

In fact, I’m a huge believer in the compound effect and how small things make a huge impact when done consistently. It’s the way the world works, and the sooner you can align yourself and your efforts around it, the better.

The greatest example I know of this is the power in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. When you do the right, small things, in just 5 minutes a day for 21 days, you can generate unbelievable progress with little effort and time. And that’s exactly what this 21 day challenge helps you to do - You can get more consistent, conquer self-sabotage, and multiply your productivity by becoming more focused and limiting distractions (so that you stop leaving so much of your potential on the table). Click here to learn more about the challenge, our next live group starts on May 8th!

I doubt the concept of setting goals is new to you, but this understanding of it might be. 

We know that goals are an extremely effective way to structure your effort. You set a goal because it either represents a meaningful outcome or it’s the process behind getting a certain desired result. This allows you to more easily figure out the real things you need to spend your time doing, which then drives your behavior and daily activity.

But if you’re setting a goal in a new area that you’ve never tried before, you might encounter some obstacles. If I were to ask you today how many ounces of water you want to drink in a day, you may not know. Or if you wanted to spend less time responding to emails every day, you may not have a clear idea of how much time you’re currently spending in your email.

Of course you can pull from other sources to inform your expectations, but when it comes to setting a goal that first step might feel pretty arbitrary and random. And that is totally fine! 

You don’t need to wait to have a perfectly defined and thought through goal before getting started. Again, a goal is meant to orient your efforts. So if you have a loose idea that gets you moving in the right direction, that’s mission accomplished! But a lot of people are slow to take those first few steps because they want their goals to be right.

Now here’s why this works. As you begin pursuing your goals, you start picking up more reference points and understanding the details of the context better. You start noticing that you’re drinking 2 or 3 bottles of water a day. You check the clock and get a better sense for how much time you’re actually spending on emails. 

Your experience in pursuit of the first, educated guess of goal gives you the insight you need to make your goal that much more informed. And then once you know better, you do better and you adjust it. As my mentor Jim Bunch says, “Goals are written in sand not in stone”.

So my encouragement to you through this is to just get started. Even if you feel like you might be missing the mark or off base, having a goal in place gets you on the path to uncovering the specificity you’re looking for. 

Another way of putting it - As you get closer to your goals, they get clearer. It’s not that you always need clarity before taking action, it’s that you should always be intentional about pursuing more clarity. And sometimes throwing yourself in the deep end is exactly what you need to accomplish that.

Now as it relates to monthly goal setting, I want to help you with this. If you’ve ever thought about having a monthly process where you review your past goals, set new goals, and determine the timelines to achieve those goals, I have a step-by-step process you can use to have more structure around your efforts. Getting in the routine of doing things like this will bring your daily activity to elite levels, which will help you begin to generate elite results.

I’m hosting an hour-long free workshop on Monday, May 1st, where you’ll leave with exactly that - a full plan that will motivate you and hold you accountable to making May the most impactful month of your year! You can register to attend this live May Momentum event by clicking here!

Someday soon, all of this will be behind you. The problems you’re facing, the challenges you’re experiencing, the opportunities you’re pursuing, the excitement you’re feeling - all of that will one day fade away. In fact, when we get older we’ll look back at these simpler times and want them back.

In other words, “You’re going to wish you had today again.”

Even though things feel hard and demanding, you’ll look back fondly on this opportunity to build your character. Even on the days when you feel tired and you don’t want to exercise, you’ll wish that you still had today’s physical capabilities. Even though you’re stressed out and spent from a long day of work, you’ll wish you were more present with your kids because when they’re all grown up you’ll really want to have just one of those moments back.

We only see today for what it is, the present. And sometimes that means we neglect to appreciate exactly what we have while we have it. We’re living right now in the days that one day we’d give anything to live again.

So what does that mean for us today? Enjoy it! Appreciate it. Sink into it. Try to see the bigger picture from this perspective so that you maximize every moment you get. It might be hard, you might not feel like it, and your mind might be somewhere else… But as long as you remain committed to showing up in your life, you’ll have less to regret when you want these days back.

This applies across the board. You might feel like it'd be a strain to you in the short-term, but taking that chance and betting on yourself is something that you’ll look back on with so much pride, or if not it becomes something you’ll really wish you did and wonder what could have been if you had the courage to do it. You might feel like you’re too busy with too many responsibilities to really give that new business your all, and maybe you’ll have to live with the fact that your fears got in the way of tapping into your fullest potential.

The truth is we only get today once and then relive it forever as a memory. So let’s create more memories that represent that life we want to have, being the person we want to be, experiencing things the way we want to experience them, and being courageous in the ways we know that challenge us. Easier said than done, but it all starts with planting the seed and making the choice, today.

Many of us have a strong desire to be more self-disciplined. The best version of ourselves is more consistent, less willing to make excuses, and more capable of taking positive action even when we don’t feel like it. Discipline has many different elements to it but today I want to talk about one that is very overlooked - Clarity.

Something our minds naturally do is try to take the path of least resistance. It’s hardwired into our minds that we should try to do things with as little effort and energy as possible. This means that when it comes time to be disciplined, we’re fighting against an unconscious force to 'not take action' and it makes things feel so much harder.

Your brain will try to tell a logical story that convinces you that the lazy, unproductive, energy-saving decision is the right one. This becomes problematic when there’s any gray area because it gives your unconscious mind space to draw its own conclusions.

This is where clarity comes in. The more clear you are on your standards and expectations, the less room you leave for interpretation. It’s by having a clearly defined action plan that you can quiet the voice in your ear seducing you to be less disciplined.

For example, exercise. Let’s say you want to workout 3 times a week. When you’re deciding if you want to work out, your brain might try to convince you to save energy by considering that walk you took around the mall as a form of exercise. But if you have clear expectations and specificity on what your exercise activity involves, like a planned 30 minute walk without stopping, you can overrule the emotional bias and follow through.

Or how about eating dessert. If you have clearly defined standards that you eat no more than 2 scoops of ice cream, when you feel tempted to have seconds you can make the right decision and resist instead of succumb to that voice that says “just this one time, you’ve earned it, it’s not a big deal.”

While we more naturally think of self-discipline as pertaining to our health behaviors, it all translates into the way we spend our time as well. And this applies not only on a daily basis but also on a monthly basis. If you have clarity on your goals, deadlines, and intentions for the month, you’ll be that much more likely to follow through on the behaviors required to achieve them.

And that’s something I want to share with you. On Monday May 1st, I’m hosting a free workshop where I walk you step-by-step through a monthly review and goal setting process so that you have full clarity on your focus points for May. This clarity will help you feel less busy while getting more done, and getting the results to show for it! If you want to attend this free live event, reserve your spot in the May Momentum Workshop.

I want to quickly share a perspective I heard about our vision. We have two different eyes that we see through. I’m not talking biologically of course, I’m talking psychologically.

There are two lenses that we observe the world through and today I want to make a distinction between them.

The first eye is the observing eye. This eye is the present experience of how things are objectively in front of you. It determines what is fact and what is not.

The second eye is the perceiving eye. This eye is the more complex representation of how things are. It incorporates additional considerations that help you to assign meaning to what you’re seeing.

Just like we can see better when we use both of our eyes, giving us 3-dimensional vision and more information to work with, similarly we need to employ both of our psychological eyes to see the truth in what we’re understanding.

That’s because we spend 99% of our time seeing through our perceiving eye. We want to know what everything means and how it impacts us, and for that reason we’re constantly evaluating, assessing, and perceiving.

But the process of perception is distorted. It is biased by our current emotions, it pulls from our lived experiences and histories, it’s influenced by our unconscious belief systems, and it manufactures a truth we want to see rather than allows us to see it for what it is.

This will run out of control unless we use the other, observing eye, to challenge what we’re concluding. It helps us to think more holistically rather than in the same patterns we’re accustomed to.

A great example of this is in communication, particularly conflict resolution. Many people share their opinions, judgments, and perspective on the situation to make their point. What they often omit are the undeniable facts that help to level-set the conversation.

The conversation transforms from “You texted me late in the evening and that was disrespectful” to “You texted me at 10:30 pm after I had already fallen asleep, and it made me feel like my time was being disrespected.”

The observing eye takes the color out of the perceptive eye, and sometimes we need that to better see how things actually are rather than how we’ve made them up to be.

The impact of our personal development fundamentally involves one thing. Everything that you're learning about, trying out, and coming to understand is all with the intention that it helps you make forward progress in your life, business, health, and relationships. 

Tony Robbins goes on to say that “Happiness is progress” because there’s a deeply rooted part of ourselves that wants to see what we’re capable of, and as David Meltzer puts it we’re compelled by the idea that “we must be what we can be”.

But chasing this idea of making progress, without a real plan to achieve it, is wasteful. Branching off to another brilliant personal development mind, Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory says that we must understand the physics of progress so that we can leverage it to maximize our growth.

Bilyeu breaks down the physics of progress into 4 parts: 

1) You need a goal. This is the outcome that everything must optimize around, and the more specific your goal the better you’ll be able to evaluate progress.  

2) You craft a hypothesis on the best approach you know of to achieve that goal. This pulls from your own experience, advice you’ve heard, and other data points you have access to. 

3) You run a test. You test your hypothesis and observe the results of how things went. 

4) You evaluate your outcomes against your goal and understand patterns, limiting factors, and new things to consider.

Then you go right back to the top, you start all over again with a new more informed goal and more information to formulate a new hypothesis.

This very closely mirrors the process I use to improve my life and work, which is called the “Think Plan Do Review” cycle. It follows the same steps as Bilyeu’s process to run through an iterative loop that helps you make progress toward any goal. 

If you don't have a process in place to leverage the physics of progress, then it's likely that you're stuck getting the same results over and over again. In order to know what's actually working for you, and what to invest in, you need a way to track performance.

That's just one of the 9 Super Habits that accelerate you toward your personal and professional goals!