I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes for people to show up at their very best, every moment of every day. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again - A good life is made up of good years, good months, good weeks, good days, good hours, good minutes, and good moments. The only thing we truly have control over is the present moment, so we must place our focus in the present to have a more meaningful life.

Living in the moment is mindfulness. It’s being fully aware of the environments around you and self-aware of how they’re affecting you, and how that makes you feel. The more you can direct your attention toward the present moment, and not reliving the past or forecasting the future, the more mindful you’re being.

Now as it relates to what we do in those moments, we’re best suited to draw inspiration from the vision of the life we want to live - The values we embody, the standards we uphold, the boundaries we enforce, and the activities that deliver the most benefit to our lives. This is accountability.

Now here’s the important connection, the marriage of the two - When you live a fully accountable life (taking ownership of everything that you do and happens to you) and you’re doing so with full awareness and mindfulness in the moment, now you’re living with intentionality.

To live intentionally is to have a purpose behind everything you do. It’s to realize you always have a choice and you’re accountable to making the right choice, having fully evaluated the implications of each decision. It requires mindfulness to honestly quantify those tradeoffs so that you can make the decisions that cause you to live with more alignment.

The North Star in my personal development is to live with as much intentionality as possible. Having the idea is one thing and following through on it is another, which is why I’ve created an intentional living process that I call my Self Improvement Operating System. It is incredibly powerful in how it holds me accountable to making the right decisions consistently throughout the day, helping me to experience life with more peace, excitement, discipline, and consistency.

Of course I am a work in progress, and so is this system, but if you want to incorporate the exact process I use to improve every aspect of my life, which has been fine-tuned for almost a decade now, that’s exactly what we’ll do together in the 21 day Best Self Breakthrough Challenge.

At the end of the day, this challenge will help you to show up as the best version of yourself in every moment of every day. Want to maximize your potential and the mark you’re capable of leaving on this world? These next 21 days could be the kickstart you needed to live your best life.

I just started reading my buddy Case Kenny’s new book titled “That’s Bold Of You”, which inspired today’s reflection.

Do you feel like there’s any part of you that people don’t get to see enough? Interests that you’re embarrassed to practice, wisdom that you’re keeping yourself from sharing, or ambitions that you aren’t pursuing? If even the smallest part of you feels like that might be true, I want to tell you you’re not alone.

Many people struggle with an unconscious bias called social conformity. This is hardwired into us through evolution as a way to keep us safe. As cave-dwelling homo sapiens, if we fit in with the other people in our tribe then that meant we’d be taken care of, ensuring our best chance for survival. 

A bit more relatable - The evolutionary root of this bias is also responsible for our fundamental need to belong. The modern version of this is we want to be liked, appreciated, and a part of something. We don’t want to be viewed as weird, draw negative attention to ourselves, or put ourselves in situations where we could fail. It’s all centered around how we’re perceived by others and it connects to a very human need - to belong.

But what’s the cost of this? It means that you’re only allowing yourself to live at a fraction of your fullest potential. You slow down your pace to match other people. You delay your dreams because they seem too ‘out there’ or unachievable right now. You tolerate living at a level lower than what you know you’re capable of because other people are resistant to your transformation and project their own securities onto you, knocking you down.

To water yourself down is like putting water in a juice. The taste is sharp, sweet, and tangy… So much so that you need to dilute the flavor so that it’s more manageable to drink. But unfortunately this is exactly what happens to us as we relate with our dreams, our truths, and our missions. And that’s unacceptable.

If you were to give advice to a friend that you knew wasn’t showing up as the person they could be, what would you tell them? You’d tell them to go for it, to get on the road and never look back. Now the tough question is, are you willing to give yourself the same permission?

If you’re ready to step into the best, most energized, most productive, most ambitious and achieving version of yourself, I’d like to invite you to something. On Monday March 6th I am starting a live, 21 day challenge called the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. In the challenge you will install the 2 habits that most rapidly and radically accelerate your growth. And the best part is, it only takes 5 minutes a day to add these habits to your life.

If you’re feeling inspired to step up to the challenge, click here to learn more about the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge!

Arnold Palmer, one of the world’s most successful golfers, was quoted saying “It’s a strange thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.” I don’t think he’s alone in that sentiment, luck is more predictable than it might seem, and you can leverage it for yourself when you start thinking about it the right way.

You’ve probably heard the expression that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” I really like this definition, and when you dissect it you’ll see there’s actually a formula to getting lucky. 

It’s within your power to prepare. It’s the extra reps you put in to feel more confident with a presentation. It’s the craft you’re perfecting and continuously improving. More preparation is simply more practice, which involves you allocating more time to focus on developing in a specific area.

Then there’s opportunity. We often think of opportunity as something that spontaneously landed in your lap, but that’s a disservice to the real mechanism. You can create more opportunities with strategy. All it involves is you planting more seeds and putting yourself in more positions for things to materialize into something beneficial to you.

The more people you tell about something you want, the more likely it is that an opportunity will pop up that’s in perfect alignment. Why is that? You’re giving the universe more pathways to deliver, allowing it to come to you through more channels.

Whether it be through the lens of preparation or opportunity, you can create your own luck. So instead of resigning yourself to accept whatever comes your way, you can be empowered to create the results you want.

The manner in which they come may seem like a “lucky break” or “being in the right place at the right time”, but isn’t that somewhat earned? Isn’t that a skill to be in the right place for you to capitalize on an opportunity to get what you want?

My encouragement to you is to stop hoping and wishing that something will be and instead play an active role in its becoming. It will arrive to you sooner than you expected, so much so that it might even catch you off guard and feel like luck when it happens.

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

As we pursue becoming the best version of ourselves, it’s very important that we think about the habits that we are building. Simply put - Habits are just a routine way of doing things. It’s the brain's shortcut to executing a certain task without your awareness so that you can reserve your energy for more meaningful things.

Habits are more operating more broadly and diversely than you might realize. Sure, habits are about getting consistent doing certain things like meditating, exercising, or making your bed, but some habits are more subtle and less observable, like your patterned way of thinking (aka your mindset). You can be in the habit of seeing the best in a situation, or the habit of receiving failure as a lesson and an opportunity for growth.

So with all of that in mind, and to share today’s positivity quote - “Make it a habit to brighten someone’s day.” 

All that means is you consistently and naturally make an effort to play a supportive role in other people’s lives. I do this very intentionally. As part of my morning routine I send a voice note of gratitude and encouragement to someone in my life. It makes me feel really good to receive these messages, so I figure if I can take 30 seconds to make someone else feel good, it’s always worth it.

What’s really impactful about this simple, intentional habit is the way that is has shifted my psychology. Over time, making the choice every day to brighten someone's day has shifted my identity. While the morning routine is very conscious and deliberate, this energy of genuine encouragement and appreciation carries into my other interactions. 

This has instilled within me a habit of appreciating and acknowledging the good in people. This has become so natural to me and now it's a normal part of my personality, which is in alignment with who I’ve determined is the best version of myself and how I want to show up for others.

As a side note - The exact same thing happened with gratitude. The deliberate action of daily gratitude journaling shifted my mindset so significantly that I naturally default to seeing the good in the world.

I share my own experience about this with the hopes that a tangible example will help you commit to doing the core behaviors that will transform your mindset and life. And it all starts with one action, one step, right now. So send this article to someone you care about, tell them you’re thinking about them and that you want the best for them.

On your personal development journey, you need to be sure you have the right foundation in place. Discover the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and instantly accelerate your growth! (Who knows what you might be overlooking and how it’s holding you back…)

I was introduced to this topic through the work of a man named Justin Welsh, a thought leader I’ve been following a little closer lately. In today’s overstimulated world, we easily fall into the trap of “Shiny Object Syndrome” where we jump to new ideas or projects really quickly because it looks appealing. It has this fresh, new shine on it that is attractive and fun. So we commit to it without much intention and find ourselves overwhelmed with having too much on our plate, none of which are really advancing to a level that is concrete or valuable.

Welsh says that we have a similar tendency to chase “Shiny Outcome Syndrome”. Instead of having clarity on the few results we want to get, that we know are the most meaningful to achieve, we add on new milestones and objectives simply because we can and we’re kind of already doing it.

The trouble here is that it distracts you from your point of optimization. If you’re trying to fine-tune a process so that it gets better results, you need to have a clear metric for that result that you’re optimizing around. If new key results pop up and become the short-term focus, you’ll constantly be undoing and redoing your work. Obviously this is extremely inefficient but it’s a natural inclination we all have.

This concept parallels what Greg McKeown calls the Clarity Paradox. He says that once someone gets clarity on something, they start to get positive outcomes because they can be more effective about concentrating their efforts. Then once you have a little success, a whole new wave of opportunities comes to you and causes you to get distracted. And if you succumb to these new opportunities and distractions, you lose the clarity that made you successful in the first place and regress back to underperforming.

That’s why in the intentional living coaching I do, I have people determine their optimization quotient - the single metric that is most representative of how they want to feel and experience life. You can try new things and observe how that data point changes, but ultimately all the effort is centered around one key objective.

The antidote to Shiny Object Syndrome and Shiny Outcome Syndrome is clarity. It’s the disciplined pursuit of less but better, and the more you can resist the urge to diversify, the faster and further you’ll go.

I’m still working on my understanding of this and would love to hear your perspective on it. There’s a subtle but fundamental difference between knowing something and believing something. They carry different energies and they’re more appropriate in different settings. I think there’s a lot of value in exploring that difference.

So far my take on it is - When you know something, it comes without a doubt. There’s a level of certainty and conviction. It’s about a set of facts and sure, the same details can be interpreted in different ways, but when you know something there’s really sound reasoning behind it. Knowing is connected to knowledge, which is more a reflection on the way things work and specific details.

When you believe something, it acknowledges more openness and room for interpretation. It suggests that you’ve drawn a certain conclusion and you’ll defend it, but it’s still negotiable. New information could conflict with what you currently believe and you’ll have to incorporate that into the next version of your understanding.

What’s really important to mention about belief, though, is there’s a lot of passion behind it. There’s more of a wanting or longing behind a belief. You’re invested in it and feel like whatever it is that you believe impacts you. It’s more emotional.

Comparing knowing and believing more directly, the core difference is the level of certainty assigned to it. But that’s to to say that more certain is better. When you believe something, you rely on faith to fill the void of the certainty you lack. And that can be an incredibly inspiring, motivating, and empowering force.

Life calls for both knowing and believing. Both are ways that you relate with the events and figures of your life, but they provide subtly different experiences.

Human attention is at a premium right now. Marketers use clickbait headlines to make you curious and pay attention to their products. The people in your life send you text messages hoping that you’ll get back to them quickly. Your work wants you to apply your skills, talents, and time in service of their mission. There’s a lot going on where we’re being pulled in a bunch of different ways. 

But let me ask you this question… When was the last time you gave yourself your undivided attention?

A time when you just sat and reflected on what you want… When you slowed down to check in on how you were feeling… When you silenced all other inputs and allowed yourself to just be and not do…

Saying it out loud, it sounds like such an obvious thing to do, but it’s so rare. It seems as though the moment our attention frees up there are two things already there to claim it. And it also seems as though when we consider how we want to spend our time the one thing we most fail to prioritize is ourselves.

You deserve your undivided attention. You need to make sure that you have what you need, that you’re taking care of yourself and prioritizing your own well-being.

The reason why it might not be as natural for you is because it’s hard. It’s hard to sit with yourself, unstimulated. In fact we often add more to our plate and keep ourselves “busy” to avoid the unfamiliar feeling of being alone with our thoughts.

If you’re open to it, let me suggest a few questions you can ask yourself to check in: How energized have you been feeling? How productive have you been feeling? How is your mental health? What are you working towards, and how is it going? What are you most excited about?

Turn off technology, turn off the roles you feel like you need to play, and even turn off the other people in your life. Be intentional about giving yourself your undivided attention.

We know it’s the best thing we can do for everything else, isn’t it the same for ourselves? When you do you just might learn something new! Then once you know better, you can do better. 

Recently I had lunch with some friends and left really inspired. My buddy Timmy told us about an expression that he and his team have been building around. And it’s a very simple expression - Today can be the day!

Today could be the day that you meet the man or woman of your dreams. Today could be the day that you discover that new passion. Today could be the day that you finally get started on that thing that you’ve always wanted to do. Today could be the day that you’re fed up with the way you’ve been living, the life you’ve been tolerating, and you decide to make a change. A new day brings endless possibility and every moment of it is unknown yet full of opportunity.

But equally important to consider, today could be the day you get in an accident and die. It could be the day that you learn about an unfortunate medical diagnosis. It could be the day where you hear some bad news about a loved one or get in an awful fight with a friend. Just as much as the day has shades of optimism, it has layers of despair. There are people that wake up every day who have no idea that there life is going to change forever.

Today could be the day.

So what’s our task within this? The truth is, everything we have right now could be gone tomorrow, so live with overwhelming gratitude. The richness and possibility of life is constantly around you but it often goes unnoticed or unaccessed. 

Instead of missing the opportunity to meet your new best friend, be present and courageous to take what the moment is giving you. Live as if something amazing is going to happen because then something will! It’s always out there, it just needs to be uncovered.

Today will come and go, and then it will become yesterday. Don’t live with regret about what you wish you would have done, or who you wish you would have become. 

Today could be the day! For what? That’s for you to figure out. And when you do, it’ll be a day unlike any else, and it’ll make you feel like you’re really living!

I’m committed to making more out of my days, unlocking new possibilities, and giving this life all I’ve got! I’m not going to be where I want to be tomorrow, but I can get a little closer. And so can you!