For years I was deeply frustrated with my own self improvement. I was reading a ton of books, listening to podcasts, and trying to fill every waking moment with more education. I was hoping that the next thing I consumed would have that world-changing insight so that I could start getting the results I had been working so hard for and that I felt I deserved.

In other words, I felt like all the effort I was putting into my self improvement wasn’t converting into anything, and I didn’t know why. But having been through that and studying this challenge in detail, I now know why.

Taking action is the mechanism for changing your life, there’s no doubt about that. Actions lead to results, and in particular new actions lead to new results. Get consistent with these actions so that they become habits and you’ll begin to compound and accelerate your progress in unimaginable ways.

Is probably what you’ve heard before…

I’d agree, it’s all very true but I’d add one very important caveat - Quality. It’s not just about taking action, it’s about taking quality action. And unfortunately when it comes to our habits they decay in quality over time.

When something becomes a habit, the mind's intention is to drive it to automaticity. This allows us to be more consistent in doing this thing, which is great, but it also causes it to become more unconscious. This means we’re less engaged and less attentive to our activity, which leads to lower quality. Like going through the motions of a morning routine instead of deeply experiencing it, or being half-there in a conversation with a loved one that deserves your full attention, the outcome of your actions depends on the level of engagement you have with them.

The solution to this is to live with more consciousness. To live with more presence and intention in everything we do, immersing ourselves deeper in it so that we can add our best to it. As long as you continue operating on the same unconscious habits you’ll be taking action passively and only within your comfort zone.

This leaves you wondering why your health, finances, and relationships aren’t changing even though you are taking consistent action. And it can be frustrating as you feel a disconnect between the effort you’re putting in and the results you’re getting out, making it harder to rationalize that the consistency is worthwhile.

The best way to have more intention and purpose in everything you do is to become more aware of your habits, check in on them on a daily basis, and reevaluate how they serve you so you can make real-time adjustments to your goals and expectations.

If you have a hard time staying consistent, feel like you’re stuck spinning your wheels in a plateau, and feel frustrated because you don’t have the time right now to do anything about it, let me share with you the most efficient way to take your self improvement processes to the next level...

In just 5 minutes a day for 21 days, I can help you install the life-structure and system that generates fast forward progress in every area of your life.  Click here to learn how!

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says that “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” While this is great news because it means that we can create our future for ourselves, it becomes problematic when things get in the way of you actually doing the things you want to do.

Two of the biggest culprits of this are excuses and exceptions.

Simply put, an excuse is an argument you make in your head that uses logic to change your mind on something, or make a new decision. An exception is just a type of excuse that uses the environment and present conditions to build that argument. The caveat though is that this argument is being motivated by unconscious needs and processes. I’ll get to that in a second...

But first, here’s an example. Let’s say that you want to workout on a Monday morning. The alarm goes off at 6am and you’re still feeling tired. While you want to stay firm on your commitment, you may convince yourself that the right thing to do is stay in bed “just this one time”.

Or another example - If there’s a phone call you need to make and you remember it in the evening, you might say “I don’t want to bother them at this late hour”.

In both cases, you’re using logic to change your mind and make a new decision on what you’re actually going to do versus what you said you were going to do. This is textbook self-sabotage.

The factors that motivate your decision-making exist at a subconscious level. While the argument you make is entirely rational and genuinely seems like the right decision at the moment, that’s because your unconscious mind is biasing your thinking. 

Your brain is always trying to keep you preserving energy, so it comes up with this story about why you shouldn’t get up and workout “just this one time”.

Your brain fears the result of the phone call you need to make, so it delays the moment by telling the logical story that it’d be disrespectful to make such a late phone call.

Self-sabotage is an unconscious force that prevents you from taking positive action, from doing the things that you ideally want to do. It reroutes your thinking to arrive at a new, more conservative conclusion.

Now here’s the really tricky part - What if your new conclusions are right? What if you genuinely do need rest? What if it is actually too late to make that phone call? It is incredibly difficult to figure out what is self-sabotage and what is genuine sound reasoning.

This gray area is one of the things that keeps us from defeating self-sabotage and ultimately keeps us stuck right where we’re at. If you find yourself making excuses too often and lacking consistency in key areas, it’s likely because you don’t have a process to keep self-sabotage in check.

I’ve found that the best thing you can do is create more awareness around your decisions. To reflect with curiosity about the choices you made so that you can better understand what’s really at play. And to do it in a moment where you have a rational mind, with all the emotion taken out of it, so that you can sit with just your intentions as the person you want to be.

This is something I can really help you with. In fact it’s a cornerstone to what I help you implement through the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. If you have a hard time staying consistent, catch yourself being lazy, making excuses, or not balancing your life as well as you’d like to, then this challenge is designed to help you start showing up every day as the very best version of yourself in your health, work, and relationships. If you want to give it a try, you can register for the challenge right now.

Let’s outline a very important difference between happiness and pleasure. We must understand this difference because at the end of the day, the common goal we share in our lives is to experience more moments of authentic joy and happiness. However, if we go about pursuing it in the wrong way we may actually be doing more harm than good.

One of humanity’s fatal flaws is that evolutionarily we were designed to seek instant gratification. As James Clear describes in “Atomic Habits”, what is immediately rewarded is repeated and everything else is avoided. In other words, our unconscious pattern is to do things that make us feel good in the moment, which often conflicts with what makes us feel good later. 

To state it another way, our hardwiring for instant gratification creates a short circuit where we engage in things that are pleasurable in the moment but don’t deliver the sustained benefits we’d rather see over the long term.

This is a short circuit - When something feels pleasurable it means that we are experiencing the benefits of doing it in the moment. Here are a few examples of how pleasure can lead us astray: 

We overindulge in a meal, enjoying the taste of good food only to feel sick to our stomach later that night. 

It’s the desire to have sex with a person that feels good in the moment but later complicates things in a relationship or damages your own self-respect. 

We scroll on social media to find little moments of unexpected entertainment and then regret how we wasted our time doing something meaningless.

Ultimately, pleasure can be hollow but it’s enticing nonetheless because our brains crave it. 

In comparing happiness to pleasure I do want to make this addition. You can feel happiness alongside pleasure in a moment. The difference though is that pleasure is only concerned with the present moment and happiness considers much more than that. It’s a reflection of how your activity relates with your core values, facilitates your growth and development into who you want to be, and supports your overall happiness and well-being in lasting ways. Examples of happiness include:

Getting word that you passed an exam you studied hard for, opening a door to a new profession you’re excited about.

Spending quality time with a person who plays an important role in your life.

Feeling gratitude for your life and everything that you have in it.

So if you can be more discerning between the two, happiness and pleasure, pursue happiness. It will lead to a much more enriching life where you feel good about who you are and how you’re filling your life with genuine joy.

Although it may seem like it, today’s positivity quote was not influenced by Taylor Swift… Too much.

Living a positive life is equally about finding productive ways to work through the negative as it is creating more positive. With that in mind, today’s positivity quote is “Shake if off”.

When someone dumps their negative energy on you, shake it off. When you tried something that didn’t go as well as you’d expected, shake it off. When start doubting yourself and take a hit to your self-esteem, shake it off. It’s a very physical expression but it serves an emotional purpose. 

The expression tells you to literally move your body so that you can displace the emotional energy you’re feeling that doesn’t belong, and it suggests that there’s a quick fix to it too. Just a quick maneuver is all it takes to remove  whatever it is that’s causing you to feel a certain way so that you can return to the way you were feeling before it.

“Shaking it off” is a skill and those who can do it quickly and effectively can move forward faster than other people. But oddly, the alternative of “keeping it on” can be more comfortable. It feels good to make excuses, feel bad for ourselves, and complain. It’s easier than doing something about it. But it doesn’t serve you and your pursuit toward your best self.

So when it comes time to ‘shake it off’, here are a few ways to do it. The first is to change your physiology. Instead of stewing in bad news you can choose to get moving, go for a walk, reorient your emotions and come back to a rational mind. Another thing you can do is introspect. Feel into the root of the emotion, learn about what might be causing it, and find ways to soothe the source that is causing the negative emotional response to surface.

Keep in mind, this works for emotional experiences that are quick onset and distracting. This is not a recommendation to push away your feelings but rather a way of handling emotions in the moment so that you can do deeper work later if it’s required. It’s best used in times when you need to restore your previous energy quickly because your life demands it. If there’s more to the emotion you were experiencing, it’s very important to honor it and explore it in an environment that is more appropriate.

In sports, you shake off a bad play so that you can quickly refocus on the next. At work you shake off rejection so that you can get back to work to get your next win. In relationships you shake off a poorly timed slight that didn’t sit well with you.

Our emotions serve a very important purpose, but they also can lead to poor decision making and prolonged dissatisfaction. It serves us to find ways to control our emotions, and one of those ways is to shake them off.

Picture this example with me for a second. Let’s say that you got in a big fight with a family member, and it was your fault. Maybe it involved a miscommunication where you let someone down and got defensive about it, leading to a major disagreement. After all, we are human and not perfect, these things certainly happen. 

In your own head, you might get really critical. You get upset with yourself that you didn’t have more emotional control. You deride yourself for not having more empathy and questioning if you have the capacity to care for others. You go down really negative spirals of thought patterns that all point to how awful of a person you are.

Now let’s look at this example from a slightly different angle. Instead of you being the person involved in the fight that made a few mistakes, you’re a good friend of that person. After they tell you about the event and the circumstances around it, what would you say to them?

It wouldn’t have anything to do with how awful of a person they are… It’d be much more encouraging and supportive. You’d remind them that this happened only one time and in the long run it’s not a big deal. You’d highlight their best qualities and how this was all an isolated incident. 

Now here’s the important question, and the point I’m trying to make with all of this - What if you treated yourself like you are your own friend more often? Giving yourself grace and seeing in yourself all of the things that everyone else sees in you.

We are so quick to find the goodness and humanity in others and the flaws within ourselves. But if we started to take a more third-party approach to the way we relate with the things we’re going through in our own lives, we’ll be able to support ourselves in ways that help us be at our very best.

I was talking to one of my coaches about this recently and he asked “What would Brian the coach say to Brian the client right now?” This simple question invoked this very process and it helped me reframe feelings of disappointment into something more constructive, reminding me that I should be proud of the way I’m doing my best and at peace with the fact that I can’t influence the things that are out of my control.

So the next time you catch yourself criticizing or going through self-deprecating thoughts, ask yourself this question - “What would I tell myself if I were my own friend?”

Sometimes you’re so deep in the woods that you can’t see the trees, and this just might pull you far enough out of your own life to see it.

Let me preface this whole topic by first sharing that I am as strong proponent for hard work. I believe that applying ourselves in something we care about is a key ingredient to a fulfilled and purposeful life. Having said that, I’m beginning to explore some of the beliefs I have around the right ways to think about working hard.

First is the driving force behind working hard. For many of us ‘hard work’ has been instilled as a core value that corresponds with our character. Almost as if we want to be viewed as a contributing member of society, we need to have a good work ethic. The alternative of being lazy is associated with being wasteful and serves as a negative strike against who we are as a person. That someone who's lazy is just looking for handouts.

But what if, instead of labeling someone who doesn’t work hard as lazy, we choose to believe that they just haven’t found something they’re so passionate about that they want to work hard. That there’s nothing wrong with their character and that it’s more a matter of they environment they’re in. It would completely shift the way we treat and relate with the people in our life that aren’t working hard.

And second, many of us have a belief around hard work that is making our work harder than it needs to be. We’ve been taught for many years to conflate hard work with getting strong results. But what if that didn’t need to be the case? What if we looked for more ways for our results to come more effortlessly and in flow rather than from a big push to create them? 

We’re often blind to these opportunities because our minds are more comfortable believing that results are directly proportionate with the amount work we put it. But when we build systems and processes to automate things, when we double down on what’s working best and simplify our activity, we can get better results with less effort. Again, perhaps our relationship with hard work is causing us to miss the easy street right in front of us and go down roads that are more challenging.

Regardless of what you took from this, it’s always important to questions your beliefs. Our beliefs exist within our subconscious mind and dictate the direction of our thinking. In making the unconscious force of your beliefs more conscious, you may find ways to pursue your ultimate life that much more effectively.

Something that has played a huge role in my life, and I know I’m not the only one, is a strong desire to get the approval of others. At times this can take a genuine form where you feel inspired to do right by those you care about and make them proud, but at other times it can take on a destructive form that steers you out of alignment in your life.

It’s perfectly fine to care what others think about you. In fact it’s hardwired into our evolutionary past to be altruistic and consider how we contribute within a larger tribe. This is what makes humans so powerful as a species. It generates a pull to seek the approval of others and in doing so, we become very extrinsically motivated. All this means is that we find reasons for doing things from sources that are outside of ourselves.

Extrinsic motivation itself isn’t a bad thing, but there are a few applications of it that lead to us getting our needs met in unhealthy ways. For example, someone who lacks a sense of self-love may seek the validation of other people to meet that needs, which may pull them to behave in ways that aren’t representative of who they are.

Or someone who lacks confidence might ask a friend or loved one for permission to make a certain decision, opening up the possibility that they’ll be steered away from doing what they really want to do.

Sometimes it’s easier to get your needs met in these superficial ways. The validation is more readily accessible. But over time, this may create a dependency on something outside of yourself to get your internal needs met.

This, in a sense, can be considered an addiction to approval, and the cost of it is significant. It can lead to you be less definitive about pursuing what you want in life. It may slow you down and keep you stuck in the same old things. And it may force you to be okay tolerating things in your life that aren’t the best fit for you.

It becomes a difficult balance to strike, so here are some of my recommendations:

Seek perspective over approval as it will help you make the right decisions for yourself.

Understand that most mistakes can be corrected, so as long as you stay open to feedback you’ll get there.

And when people try to impose their own expectations and preferences on you, remember that they have different goals, experiences, and worldviews than you and that’s a beautiful thing.

At the end of the day everyone want you to be the best you that you can be, and superficially seeking the approval of others in everything you do will hold you back from it.

Do you know that person who always seems to find a way to interject in conversation, dropping in an extra tidbit or humblebrag or namedrop? Without trying to place judgment on them or criticize those who do it, because I’m guilty of it too, let’s think about how this might apply and what we have to learn from it.

Speaking from my own experience, sometimes I find myself trying to add into a conversation just to try and sound smart. Especially if it’s in a social environment where I feel like I’m out of my league or have something to prove, I want to make it clear that I belong and can keep up with the conversation.

Being self-aware, I know some of the things motivating this behavior. It’s feeling like I’m not good enough or not successful enough. It’s trying to sound impressive so that I can get external validation from someone else to appease my ego. It’s putting that extra sugar coat on top of who I am because I don’t have the confidence to own who I am and expose myself to rejection.

Those all sound like negative things, but it’s perfectly normal and common! What I just shared about is something that many people go through, maybe even you, which is why I wanted to add some perspective to it and suggest some ways of relating with it.

So instead of coming off as a know it all, with a fragile facade, we can approach these moments more authentically. When you have something to add, put it through a quick filter to determine if it’s actually adding to the conversation or if you’re saying it for your own reasons. If it’s the latter, you’ve just discovered an opportunity to learn more about yourself and the root of an insecurity or limiting belief you might have.

Having said that, there are strategic times to demonstrate your knowledge. Especially if you’re trying to make things happen and you want to generate some credibility, it may be appropriate to say something that puts you in a positive light. 

But again, it’s being self-aware of the intention behind it. We all need to hustle, I get that. So if there’s a real purpose behind it then go and do your thing. But if you’re flexing your knowledge to fill a hole inside you, being a know it all will feel good in the short term but do more damage in the long term, separating you from your self-belief.