Self Improvement Daily Podcast

We’ve all heard the expression “Life is a journey, not a destination”, and I completely agree. Life's fullest enjoyment is in the process of becoming rather than the reality that is your life once you’ve achieved it.

No matter how much we know this lesson we still often get it backwards with our feelings of being a success. We allow ourselves to be motivated by the idea that “one day, I will be successful” and we make short-term sacrifices to our well-being and life enjoyment as a means to achieving it.

That’s why I want to share the perspective of Tom Bilyeu, who by many people’s standards is objectively successful - Does purposeful work, has made more money than he knows what to do with, is in a great marriage, highly influential, the list goes on. He’s observed something about people that I want to challenge you to observe about yourself.

“If you achieve the same level of success as someone you admire, you believe you’ll feel that same sense of admiration for yourself.”

Read that again.

But Tom says that’s not true. Do you know why? Because it’s still you looking at your achievements and determining if it’s enough, and if you’re enough. 

In other words, the way you feel about what you've achieved is independent of what you’ve actually achieved. It’s a reflection of how you feel about yourself. So if you feel unsuccessful right now, and you have different’ insecurities, limitations, beliefs, or whatever that’s causing you see your life that way today, all of that will still be there in a different set of circumstances.

This is because of something called hedonic adaptation. We acclimate to how good things feel and over time, they stop feeling as good because we get used to them. It becomes more normal. When things get normal we fall back on the same old patterns and old ways of thinking. 

Your perception of yourself relative to your environment doesn’t change. On paper, the results you get may be bigger and better than they were before, but your perspective is blind to the scale of your external achievement because you’re seeing it through the same eyes. 

Success is an inner-game. Don’t postpone your feelings of success for that future moment because if you do you’ll be disappointed by how it all still feels the same. Start stacking wins today. Be grateful for all of the ways you’re making a difference in the world. Give yourself credit for what you’re contributing.

Are the results today a fraction of what they can become? Absolutely! And you should keep pursuing them and building. But don’t delay your sense of fulfillment about how you’re doing because you’ll feel just the same when those results scale.

Something that's just a part of life is adversity. It’s all of the things that don’t go according to plan, all of the things that are out of your control that are making things harder than they need to be, and all of the ways you feel like you’re being challenged in ways that you’re not choosing.

Our natural human response is to try to eliminate adversity from our life because it can be a source of stress, strain, and discomfort. This causes us to shy away from uncertainty, be more conservative in the decisions we make, and generally not put ourselves in situations that leave us vulnerable to the world.

But even if you do that the universal truth remains - You cannot avoid adversity. At any given moment adversity is 3 things: It’s here right now, it just left, and it’s on its way.

So what does that mean for us?

It means we cannot let adversity slow us down. No matter the form it takes - whether you’re living paycheck to paycheck and worried about putting food on the table, or you live a perfectly comfortable life - We must stand up to our adversity and direct it rather than let it direct us.

The best way to do that is to have certain standards that you uphold. Who are you in the face of challenge? What's your mindset around failure and shortcoming? How do you relate with tragedy?

When you know who you want to be and you commit to being that person, you then get to assert that into your environment.

If you have a project that you need to get done but you’re feeling tired and cranky... You can take action to reset your energy and be accountable for how you want to feel.

If you feel like you’re stretched too thin and people are making requests of you that you can’t fulfill... Honor your boundaries and enforce them.

Adversity is the stimulus and that stimulus will always be there. You are the response. Having clarity on the standards of who you want to be will help you to better manage the adversity. 

While life will always have elements of it that are hard, and adversity is here, just left, and on its way, you get to choose your challenge. And that’s what this work is all for - For you to get better about choosing authentically and wisely!

Often the best thing for our self-growth isn’t to learn some new hack or strategy, but rather to be reminded of what we already know. This idea focuses on our communication and how we can be more appropriate, empathetic, and effective in the way we deliver our message.

In the book Silent Messages, Albert Albert Mehrabian, a UCLA professor, announced the 7/38/55 rule. He says that 7% of meaning is communicated through spoken word, 38% through tone of voice, and 55% through body language. Focusing on verbal communication, this ratio suggests that your tone is 5 times more influential than what you’re actually saying.

And the reason being - We are emotional. We are hyper-attuned to the emotions around us. This is evidenced in the phases of brain development both evolutionarily and within our life-cycle. First comes the instinctual hindbrain, regulating the physiological and psychological processes that are core to staying alive. Then it’s the midbrain, involved in emotional awareness and threat detection. And then finally is the forebrain that executes higher level thinking.

What this all means is that when someone is listening to you, they're listening with their emotional midbrain. They want to know how this new information impacts their safety, security, and state.

What’s equally important to consider is how your emotions then go on to influence your logical thinking. If you’re feeling motivated and inspired you will draw different conclusions than if you’re cranky and hungry. Your logical mind is shaped by your emotional environment.

So now the question becomes - How do we control our tone? How do we make sure our communication is representative of what we want someone to understand about what we’re saying?

We need to pause more often.

Emotions are reflexive. They’re unconscious. The more we can put space between the impulse and the action, the more time we give our higher level thinking to catch up and play a role. So especially if you feel yourself aroused, triggered, or agitated, give yourself some time.

Whatever it is you're feeling compelled to say in the moment, and the tone of that expression, is emotionally motivated. The best version of ourselves gets curious about those emotions, understands them, and chooses how to respond rather than reacts to how we’re feeling.

This concept may not be entirely new to you, but hopefully this helps you remember how you can be intentional about communication. If you found this valuable, please share this article with someone who you think would enjoy it just like you!

My absolute favorite musical artist is Andy Grammer. His music is a refreshing reminder that we’re meant to enjoy life, that we can choose positivity, and that we’re on this Earth to uplift each other. 

Over the years Andy’s message has matured and it’s starting to penetrate pop culture in a meaningful way. Understanding the depth that he has to share, I know his most recent piece is going to make waves. It challenges our value system, makes us question our judgments of each other, and presents an alternative option that if accepted, would make the world a far better place.

He says that “love is the new money”.

Imagine if instead of using someone’s wealth or financial status as an indicator of their value, we asked a question to learn what was on their heart. If instead of taking a quick glance at what people are wearing or driving, we saw their purpose, passions, and ambitions before anything else and drew conclusions about them based on that.

Andy’s big point is that this idea of equating making money with success is a system that we didn’t choose. It’s something we’ve inherited and operate within and it’s run riot without us stopping to examine it.

But the problem is, this quick and unconscious judgment has wide-reaching consequences. It determines how nicely we treat people, how seriously we take people, and how much value we believe they have to offer society. This energy is then felt by them and overtime, accumulates to impact their sense of self-worth and self-confidence.

It’s not fair and not the game that we’d want to play. So why do we play it?

Another leader I’m inspired by, Adam Braun proposes that social impact could perform the same function. Quoting his book The Promise Of A Pencil “I just refused to let the size of my bank account serve as the yardstick of my success.”

My goal today is to further Andy’s challenge to you and make you think about how your own value system is affected by your relationship with money. Hopefully with a little more awareness you’ll be able to interrupt patterns of judgment and criticism before they materialize. We need a wave of leaders to step up and lead this movement, I’m committed to it myself, and I hope you’re with me!

Andy recently released his spoken word all about this topic, and I highly encourage you check it out right now. It’s brilliant, entertaining, eye-opening, and powerful. I have Andy Grammer's spoken word linked here for you to check out!

When it comes to living our dream lives, we often default to all the things that we have. It’s the big house, the fulfilling and impactful job, the loving family, travel, impact... And that’s all great, it’s perfectly fine to want all of that stuff. But if that’s the object of your effort then you’re going to be making things harder than they need to be.

So let’s broaden the lens and look at the 3 different layers that our existence resides in - Be, do, have - And we often have the order backwards when it comes to the chain of command within these layers.

We expect that when we have the things we want it’ll give us the freedom we need to do the things we want to do. Then once we’re taking action in the ways that inspire us, we believe that it will make us feel the fulfillment, satisfaction, and inner peace that we desire.

And it makes sense. We can much more easily perceive tangible things to have rather than the implicit actions we’re taking (or even harder being self-aware of our state of being). So the things we want to have is what we pursue.

But I’ve learned that’s not actually how it works. A state of being is not the byproduct of what you have and what you do, it’s the origin. If you can focus on showing up present in every moment embodying love, you will have a loving family. If you embrace and entertain your adventurous spirit, you’ll find yourself halfway across the world on an exotic trip. 

The natural byproduct of the energy you put out influences the actions you take. Subconscious transformation expert Jim Fortin puts it “What you do is only as effective as the being doing the doing”. This ‘doing’ then dictates the results you achieve, and the things you get. 

This is where we need to slow down and be more potent with our approach. When you picture your dream life, have you considered your state of being? Have you defined the virtues and characteristic traits that you hope to embody rather than the achievements or possessions you’ve accumulated?

I can only speak for myself and say that I’ve had it backwards myself. But the more I challenge myself to tap into the energy of who I want to be, the more I find myself accelerating on my path toward it, picking up everything else along the way.

Something that is insidious and making our lives harder than they need to be without us even realizing it, is interference.

This is when something keeps getting in the way, making it more difficult for you to reach your goals. When you feel resistance to incorporating a new habit or making a bold decision. When you question yourself and your abilities so you don’t take risks with the confidence you’d like to.

The concept really breaks down into something very simple, which is communicated in the word itself. Interference is just “fear” getting between where you are and where you want to go.

And it’s powerful. Fear is a paralyzing emotion. But often when we feel resistance, restriction, or limitation, we don’t always label it as fear. But that’s really what it is - If you are having a tough time doing something new it’s because you’re afraid of what might happen in the uncomfortable, unfamiliar space it would require you to enter.

My mentor David Meltzer says that overcoming interference is our greatest opportunity for getting everything we want. We don’t need more of anything, we are already connected to abundance and more than we’ll ever need. The reason why we don’t have what we want is we’re getting in our own way from accessing what’s already there.

In other words, there's too much interference preventing us from tapping into abundance.

Fear is a form of self-sabotage. It’s a story that the mind produces to prevent you from taking some new action or thinking in some new way that threatens the way you currently see the world. In treating it as such, what you must do is take action despite the self-sabotage, overcome the resistance until you become who you want to be, and have faith that the right things will come to be as a result.

And if it doesn’t go how you expected - Dave Meltzer has another perspective. The universe always gives you what you asked for or better, and it’s just a lack of awareness that is keeping you from seeing how that is true.

There’s an iconic Maya Angelou quote that you’ve probably heard before, that when put into practice can absolutely transform the quality of your relationships. The quote goes “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

In particular, people are missing feeling one certain way - Special. We all live in the center of our own world and see life through our own two eyes. As much as we pursue different perspectives our experience is limited by the vantage point we view. 

Even though we exist in a sea of people, as part of complex cultural and societal systems, we don’t want to feel like just another person. We want to feel like we’re different, like we’re extraordinary, like we’re special, to find more meaning in our lives.

And that’s something that you can help with. You can be intentional about making someone feel special.

Talk about the qualities and characteristics you see in them that you don’t see in most people. Tell them how well they’re doing and how you see them putting in their very best. Validate their uniqueness and give them encouragement that they’re doing things no one else can do, and capable of things no one else is.

If you can successfully start to do this, you’ll find people become really attracted to you.

But the tricky part is, you need to train your perspective to see the good in everyone. You need to be able to reframe their weakness into a strength, see the force in people’s flaws, and have an open-mind to consider how their differences are actually the best thing for them.

It demands that you are secure with who you are so that you don’t project your own limitations and insecurities on others, and you can see them for who they truly are.

So many people are in desperate need of this. They’re questioning their path, questioning their intentions, and even questioning themselves. You can give them a boost by helping them see themselves through your more positive eyes.

Like I always say, a better world starts with a better you. This is true not only for how you see your world, but the impact you can make in other people’s lives by making them feel special.

Let’s talk about the fundamentals of improvement. Improvement is simply a change in state over time where the finishing state is better than the original state. In order to quantify any type of progress or improvement, you need to be clear on how things used to be and how they are now to draw a fair comparison. It’s the difference between those two states that serves as your evidence that something changed, and ideally, that the change led to better results.

Growth follows the same principle. To grow requires that you have a previous capacity that has expanded to be able to handle more, a previous limitation that has been defeated to no longer be so restrictive, or a previous obstacle that has been overcome to reveal new possibilities. 

But these changes don’t happen on their own. No matter the form, in order to achieve growth something must happen that interrupts the way that things are currently going to steer it in a new direction.

With that in mind, there’s one condition that is required for growth - Challenge. Challenge and growth work as a cause and effect relationship. Challenge A leads to Growth A, and Challenge B leads to Growth B. No matter what, you’re going to be facing challenges and therefore, you’re always growing. The opportunity lies in our ability to choose our challenges so that we can dictate the direction of our growth.

This concept is a cornerstone philosophy in what is now known as ‘deliberate practice’. If you want to improve at anything, you must be pushed to perform just beyond your comfort level. What this does is it cultivates a necessity that you must respond to, causing you to develop skills or abilities to meet the need.

Dr. Michael Beckwith agrees, and he says “Without challenge the activation of potential doesn't happen.” That’s because when things are too routine it leads to automaticity, and things normalize and plateau.

You can’t expect to grow if you keep doing the same things. According to Albert Einstein’s definition - “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”  

So if you want to grow as a person - to get more consistent, have better habits, improve your mindset, acquire new skills - you need to take on a challenge. And particularly if you want to grow into the best, most confident, most productive, most inspired version of yourself, you might want to consider taking on the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. It’s specifically designed to cause you to upgrade your structure and organization, your systems, and your daily habits to elite levels so that you can successfully apply everything you've learned. Should you accept the challenge, you’ll be choosing the direction of your growth and accelerate toward the best version of yourself. And all it takes is 5 minutes a day for 21 days.

Worth a try right? The challenge goes live on Monday so I highly encourage you to register for the challenge right now, before you let the moment pass you and you miss out on reaching your potential.