Self Improvement Daily Podcast

Whether you’re brand new to my work or have been with me for a while, let’s take a trip down memory lane. I’ve had the great honor of keeping up with Self Improvement Daily for over 7 years, resulting in over 2200 episodes to date. The impossible question I get all the time is, What’s the #1 most important lesson or idea you’ve shared on the podcast?

I’ve thought a lot about it, and here’s my answer: 

What happens in life isn’t random… It’s by design. And it’s within your power to take ownership of the design of your life so that you get more of what you want.

In my opinion this connects a lot of key concepts, so let’s break it down.

First, everything we do in our self-improvement is in service of us getting what we want. Efforts to improve your life are worthless if you don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve, or what outcomes you want to create. That’s why everything about our growth should be reverse-engineered from our goals, which is simply just what we want to achieve in life.

Also, it captures the self-efficacy piece. The intro for the podcast for years was “Take ownership of your personal development one tip at a time” because there’s nothing that will change your life more than taking full, radical responsibility for everything. If you view yourself as the one responsible for it, then you can do something about it. If not, then it’s out of your control and you get whatever you get. 

And last, the most underrepresented component of personal development is improving your life’s design. Your life-design is a product of your environment, which is constantly influencing you in known and unknown ways. It’s the guiding force that shapes the choices you make, the actions you take, and ultimately the results you get… And it does that without you even realizing it.

There are a few main things people know they need to be doing better to have the healthy habits, highly productive days, and strong relationships that they want out of life - Being inconsistent, wasting time, lacking discipline, being overstretched due to poor time management, not having clarity, not being focused - And it’s causing many people to underachieve, and fall short of the big ambitions they have for themselves and what they can do in the world. 

But here’s the thing: These aren’t character flaws… There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re undisciplined, unfocused, and unmotivated… They’re the symptoms of having a poorly designed life and an unsupportive environment. 

So when you take ownership of the design of your life, and adjust it so that it begins to shape the future you see for yourself, that’s how you get what you want. 

If you want to overhaul your life-design so that good habits come easier and you have highly-focused, productive days that generate traction in your life and business… You need to install a new foundational life operating system. Your life-systems make up your life-design.

That’s exactly what you do in the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. This is where I’ve taken all of the most effective ideas from past podcast episodes and countless life-changing books and walk you step-by-step through a 3 week process that takes 10 minutes a day to do.

If you’re ready to start being the most high-performing, unstoppable version of yourself that takes your life and career to the next level, register for the Challenge and let’s get to work!

One of the things that causes a lot of disruption throughout our days and workflow are the requests of others. Someone needs this, asks for that, thinks one thing is more important than the next… And if you let their agenda overpower your own, then you’re living by someone else’s design.

In the book “Essentialism”, which I read once a year, Greg McKeown dedicates an entire page to highlight this one quote:

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

Essentially, what this means is that your time can either be filled with the things you want to do or the things that others want you to do. And the more you allow others to use you as a vehicle to get what they want, the more they’ll use it.

Prioritizing your life involves two things - Being clear on what you want, and being strong with your boundaries so that you can enforce them. It might be overly simple, but that’s all it takes to make sure your life is filled with the things that matter to you.

Setting boundaries is one of those things that’s ‘easier said than done’. You can have the intention to stay focused on what you're doing and decline a request, but when that decision gets challenged it becomes harder to follow through on that intention. It's especially difficult when someone comes from a place of authority or there’s a power dynamic at play, like having a ‘no work boundary’ in the evening to prioritize personal time but a client or boss makes a request.

Strong boundaries come from having self-respect. If you genuinely value your life and what you want, then you can confidently communicate that to other people who might try to compromise it. It’s an energy that influences others. I’ve found that the more you own your standards and what you stand for, the less people try to push you to get what they want. Because they know that you’re serious about it, and they’re more likely to respect your boundaries once you’ve established that you respect yourself.

I put this into practice this past weekend. I was at a friend’s birthday dinner and she wanted to go out to a bar afterwards. She didn’t really ask me to come… She told me to. And I responded with my boundary that I was going to go home. She pushed harder but I didn’t give in, and eventually it was resolved.

No one wants to say “no” to the birthday girl, especially when it’s someone who’s so important to you. It would’ve been easy to let her win and accommodate her request, but out of self-respect and a commitment to doing what most serves the life I want to live, I declined.

You prioritize your life by holding strong to it. By knowing you deserve to get what you want, and that your ways of collaborating with others need to fit within your terms. Th self-respect required to enforce your personal boundaries is built one interaction at a time. So the next time you feel like your boundaries are being put into question, communicate your side of the story, ask for their compassion, and stay strong.

As people dedicated to becoming the best version of ourselves, we all want to be successful. And that’s not just in the way society has painted it to be with the wealth and influence, but in the ways that are unique to us and represent the lives we want to live.

In case you didn't know, the secret to success is defining it for yourself.

But regardless of what success looks like, author David Schwartz says there are 4 common excuses people make that’s holding them back from achieving the results they want in life:

Excuse #1 - Poor Health. People think that in order to excel in their career or have a fun and social lifestyle, they must compromise their personal health to accommodate. They view taking care of themselves as a tradeoff that takes time from other important things… 

But the truth of it is that good health is an investment that facilitates more quality in everything else. And for those who are in poor health, it becomes such a dominant focus that it takes away from being able to prioritize other desires.

Excuse #2 - Low Intelligence And Being Underqualified. As people reflect on the vision they’ve casted for themselves, who they can be, and the level that they can contribute at... Often they feel like an imposter. They reason that they’re not smart enough to excel, or don’t have the degrees or schooling they need to be taken seriously. 

But your goals don’t care how educated you are. All that matters is the extent of action you take toward what you care about, and if you’re not “good enough” to meet the required standard, the fastest way to bridge the gap is with hands-on experience.

Excuse #3 - Being Too Old Or Too Young. Some people think that their time has already passed. That they no longer have the drive, energy, or work ethic to keep up… And that new technologies and ways of doing things have passed them by, and they’re too far behind to catch up. Some think that they don’t have the experience yet to command the respect they need to be effective.

But anyone can learn anything. You can teach an old dog new tricks, and youngsters can catch up fast. That is, as long as the individual has the desire to invest the time required to learn. 

Excuse #4 - Being Unlucky. The most successful people in the world would admit that luck has played a major role in their success. Opportunities had to present themselves. And for those who haven’t had their stroke of luck, or where the timing just didn’t work out, it’s easier to explain away why certain things didn’t happen.

But we’re not just the recipients of good fortune, we’re also the creators of it. The old expression goes “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” You can certainly prepare, and in some ways ‘knock on doors’ which will cause more to open. Richard Branson puts it perfectly - “Everyone’s lucky. I’ve just managed to do a lot with the good luck that’s come my way.” And golf legend Gary Player is known for saying “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

These are the 4 most common excuses holding people back from success... But what’s an excuse anyway? It’s just an explanation for why something out of your control caused you to not get what you want, or do what you wanted to do. 

And every time you make an excuse, you give your power to everything else. It makes you powerless, and that’s not a recipe for achieving your goals.

One of the most iconic brands in fashion and retail, JCPenney, hasn’t been successful by accident... It’s a testament to a foundational culture built into the business, “Just do what’s right.”

When you build the habit of doing the right thing, things tends to work out.

“Just do what’s right” is the life mantra of the founder James Cash Penney. In practice it’s pretty simple: Act with integrity, treat people fairly, and act in good conscience. It’s an intention to do what’s in the best interest of everyone involved, and being willing to take on personal sacrifice to achieve it. Doing the right thing might have short-term costs, but as a law of the world, good karma always seems to come back around and provide in unexpected ways when you do what’s right. 

Interestingly, Mr. JC Penney learned this lesson from his first business partners, where he bought into becoming a partial owner of a new location associated with the “Golden Rule” stores. As you’ll probably remember, the Golden Rule is to “treat others the way you want to be treated.” Doing what’s right is doing exactly that.

It’s with that spirit that JC Penney turned a ⅓ stake in one store into 1400 stores less than 30 years later.

In our lives, we’re tempted to not ‘do what’s right’ in an effort to save some money, time, and our reputation. But when we go down that path, we know it’s out of integrity. There’s something about that choice that doesn’t sit well with us, and it’s a feeling we need to live with. Sure, in the short-term we took the path that was easier, more convenient, and came with more personal benefit… But it quietly eats away at our confidence and puts our character into question.

Doing what’s right often involves being the bigger person. Perhaps JC Penney is somewhat responsible for the expression “the customer is always right”... But doing what’s right involves a lot more than just conceding an argument. It’s also apologizing and acknowledging that you made a mistake, or that you did something that negatively affected someone else. It’s taking responsibility for something you played a part in, even if you can easily point the finger. It’s making things even when someone else doesn’t even know they’re being wronged, because it’s the right thing to do.

The right thing to do is always the right thing to do.

Not only are you rewarded for it in the long-term, but you also feel good about yourself, you can proudly look at yourself in the mirror because you’re a person of integrity, and you can’t put a price on that.

Tuning into an event Toby Robbin’s hosted last week, he introduced a new framework that I found to be really compelling. As most of us look to find ways to improve in our lives, we’re trying to uncover new strategies that will boost our chances of success.

Successful strategies can be found all over the place - books, podcasts, courses, videos - and they come from a place of credibility because often they’re being shared by people who’ve used them to achieve their goals. The strategy is meant to guide our actions, which ultimately materialize into our results.

But going a layer deeper, we each have a personal relationship with the strategy we choose.

We have our own perception of how likely it is to work, and how much it is actually working. This is the ‘story’ we assign to the strategy. The 'story' basically provides an explanation for the result we achieved and shapes the way we view it.

The 'story' is unconsciously written by a few different things… One of the primary factors being our belief system. Based on past experiences, a life-time of lessons, and social conditioning we formulate our understanding for how the world works. And it becomes our lens into reality.

Something that plays into that, contributing to our ‘story’ is our energetic state. How we feel predisposes our minds to think a certain way. If we feel good, confident, safe, and in control, we’re more likely to relate with a situation positively. If we feel tired, scared, and stressed, we’re more likely to respond to that same situation much more negatively.

The reason Tony chose to bring this all up is because we spend so much time working on our strategy to improve performance... When in reality the most impactful thing we could do is manage our personal state.

Our energetic state influences the story we create, which is responsible for the way we show up to executing a tactic. A more positive state leads to more convicted, ambitious, consistent, empowered action… Which leads to better results.

When we feel on fire we bring more resilience, discipline, and confidence to everything we do. And we can control that… It simply involves being more intentional about taking care of our bodies, disrupting lazy patterns, introducing movement throughout the day, and creating a more energized and aroused state.

So join me in giving that a try for a week! When you feel tired, lazy, burned out, or unmotivated, change your start with some pushups, breathing, dancing, or something to get your blood flowing. Having focused a lot on my state management in the past, it feels really good, and it works!

In trying to improve anything in life, we’re doing it in order to achieve one thing: better results.

We workout to get a positive result in our daily energy levels and body type. We put our phone down at dinner to get the result of having more connected and informed relationships. We read books, invest in courses, and seek perspective not just to fill our time, but to use what we learn to positively change the realities we experience.

And there’s only one thing in the world that influences the results we get, which are 'actions'. Our actions, and the actions taken around us, are the only things that have the power to shift how reality exists.

Knowing that action is the key to changing anything about your life, let’s oversimplify what goes into taking positive, empowering action.

First is knowing what to do. This is a process of getting clarity. Clarity on what you want to change and what you can do to create that change. Often times people stay stuck in inaction because they don’t know what action is most likely to produce the desired result, so they overthink it. Ultimately this means they lack the clarity they need to believe that doing the thing is going to be worth the time and effort. 

Second is knowing how to do it. This is a process of becoming more skilled or knowledgeable about the action. There are better, higher quality ways to do things, and the more you know how to take a certain action, the more leverage you create in the result you get out from it. The results produced from an action aren’t fixed… They exist on a spectrum. Becoming more effective and efficient in your action-taking helps you to get more from less.

And last is actually following through on doing it. This is a matter of discipline, doing what you most serves you, consistently, despite the circumstances around it. Even when you don’t feel like it or you’re afraid to do it. To overcome the internal resistance we feel to taking action, it’s helpful to put a system of execution behind it so that there’s a plan, commitment, accountability, and streamlined process that makes taking action easier. 

It’s no more complicated than that. To take action you need to know what to do, know how to do it, and to follow through on doing it. And there’s an unbelievable amount of opportunity for improvement within each of those areas.

But if all this serves to improve your life, which means to quantifiably improve the quality of your personal and professional results, then you need to be obsessed with taking the right actions.

I call this living intentionally, and being thoughtful about every choice you make and action you take. Every day I reflect on my choices, actions, and results to fine-tune my approach to creating my best life in my Self Improvement Scorecard. It’s my personal intentionality system, and if you want to see what it takes to get consistent in doing the things that achieve your goals, watch this video where I show you my Self Improvement Scorecard in action!

Two times last week I noticed myself getting frustrated over the same thing. I was taking calls with people offering my support with the intention to be helpful. These were calls I didn’t need to accommodate... And was doing it as a favor and benefit for the other person. In both cases, two different people showed up to the call with poor cell service while taking the call on-the-go in their car.

Initially I felt like my time was being disrespected. I dedicated a portion of my day to support them and they didn’t have the decency to plan well enough to make the most of the time on their end. 

Fortunately, the frustration didn’t last long. Instead of carrying this negative energy into the conversation, I accepted the conditions and chose to be of service and generously share whatever I could. And I’m so glad I did. In both cases, these individuals gave deeply personal, vulnerable updates on their life situations that more than explained why they had to take the call from their car.

It was a reminder to hold back your initial judgment. Our engrained response-system acts virtually instantaneously. Daniel Kahneman calls it “fast-thinking” where we immediately process any stimulus we’re faced with, seek to understand what it means, and produce a response to it. It’s hardwired into our evolution because In threatening situations, the difference between life and death is our ability to act fast.

One of the main factors that goes into our “fast thinking” is our ego. It’s part of what’s ingrained in us to achieve self-preservation. But our ego often influences us to respond in ways we don’t want to because it gets easily agitated by the actions of other people. In an effort to maintain our own self-image, it finds fault in others to make us feel better about ourselves.

That’s exactly what my ego did in this situation. It immediately caused me to feel offended by their choices, attacked by their rudeness, and wanting to belittle their character. It all happened unconsciously, and I’m grateful that I’ve done enough inner work to quickly identify what happened and consciously choose a different response that aligns with the person I want to be.

It’s easier said than done, but try to hold back your initial judgment because it’s often being fueled by your ego. Give yourself time to process what’s happening and determine how you want to show up versus how your mind is telling you to. I’ve found that meditation has been a really helpful tool for quieting the impulses of the ego so that you can select a more thoughtful response. That, and reflecting on moments where you feel triggered to create an awareness of the conditions around it, so that you’re more likely to recognize those conditions the next time you’re in them.

Author of “The 5 Types of Wealth”, Sahil Bloom introduced a really helpful framework related to being consistent. When we think of building good habits, we naturally believe that we need to be really consistent with doing a specific thing. But sometimes and under some conditions, it’s really difficult to take action to the extent that would keep you consistent with a commitment. 

We all encounter days where we don’t have the time, energy, capacity, or ability to follow through with our intentions. And when that happens, the alternative choice is that we break our streak and lose our consistency.

But that doesn’t represent our options fairly. Sure, it’s ideal to follow through fully, but on the days when you can’t take full action, you can still do something. Something is better than nothing, right? And Sahil argues that executing a Plan B, or Plan C, is extremely meaningful in maintaining momentum.

So for any habit you want to implement, Sahil recommends that you build out three variations of it: A, B, and C. He calls them ABC Goals and Habits. Here’s what they are, and some examples.

‘A’ is the version that is ideal and you strive to do on a daily basis. That’s spending an hour a day marketing and prospecting for your business.

‘B’ is a managed approach where you still take a significant amount of action, but it’s not the full amount. This is following up with all the leads who have gotten back to you and are awaiting a response, which might take 10 or 20 minutes.

‘C’ is just enough to get the smallest rep in, that’s a meaningful amount in reinforcing the original intention. This is sending one message out in whatever capacity that is relevant to your marketing activity, and it could happen in 30 seconds.

In the name of consistency: Plan A is what you’re building toward, Plan B is meaningful action, and Plan C is enough to not completely break your rhythm.

Sahil argues you can do the same for the goals that you set: One best case achievement, one middle-ground indicator of progress, and one that minimally completes the commitment.

The real insight embedded in all of this is that we need to accept partial action as significant, and we can’t let ourselves off the hook on the days when we can’t take action in full. In fact, it’s on these off days that your character gets to shine through, and real momentum gets built.