In reading Ryan Holliday’s newest book “Discipline Is Destiny” I encountered a really interesting misconception. When you normally think of temperance, you think of abstaining from something that is a vice or an outlet. Historically the idea of temperance is closely associated with prohibition when alcohol was outlawed in the United States through the 1920s.

Holliday takes an even older approach to temperance and uses the original definition practiced by the stoics. Temperance has nothing to do with eliminating something from your life and everything to do with striking the right, best-fit balance with it.

So what does this mean? Temperance isn’t about never drinking alcohol, but it is about only drinking for the right occasions and under the right conditions. It’s not to say that scrolling social media or playing video games is a bad thing, but rather that those things should be done in moderation to meet genuine needs and desires.

Benjamin Franklin agrees with this and says “Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation”. Temperance is the first of his 13 virtues because he understands the effects practicing temperance has on your life. It emphasizes intentionality in every choice you make, ensuring that it’s being done for the right reasons, and builds the habit of self-discipline to follow through on other virtues.

Temperance is about setting yourself up for success by acknowledging the honest balance you hope to achieve. Every piece of your life is meant to be in harmony with every other part, allowing you to create a fully-harmonious existence. This will allow you to immerse yourself in the things you enjoy doing without guilt, come to terms with how much you exercise or meditate without judgment, and optimize every part of your life so you can show up as your best self to others.

Is that a balance you want to strike in 2023? Where you're at your best for yourself, the people you care about, and the mission that you serve? If so you need to install a self improvement operating system. It’s not enough to keep learning about how to make the most out of your life is a start, or have good intentions but no follow through, you need to apply it, and that’s exactly what a self improvement operating system gives you.

If you want to make 2023 the year you look back on where everything changed for the better, I got you! I’ll share the exact operating system I’ve created with you so that you can be more productive, energized, and fulfilled!

There’s a man I met in college that dedicated his life to understanding the way different people relate with compassion. He would literally stand on a street corner having conversations with people about it to refine his definition. 

Being compassionate is about being kind and caring toward others. It’s being empathetic to what they might be going through and trying to be there to emotionally support them. The world would be a better place if we saw the depth of humanity that exists in each one of us more often. Every person you encounter has a life-time of experiences, challenges, dreams, and setbacks. As Rumi puts it, “you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.”

Compassion is incredibly powerful in that it helps people be seen and respected for who they are. This idea leads nicely into today’s positivity quote - “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.”

When someone is upset or frustrated about something, learn more about what might be causing those feelings and hold space for them to share. When someone is going through a personal tragedy, remind them that their well-being matters just as much as anyone else’s. Instead of quickly making judgments about who they are and what they’re experiencing, approach people with more curiosity and unbiased presence.

Simply being acknowledged, heard, and seen can give someone a greater sense of meaning and ultimately, happiness. Each person is beautifully unique and deserving. They’ve been through a lot. Seeing the goodness within them, with patience, goes a long way in communicating that someone else cares about them. This is practicing compassion.

And you’ll find that just as much as your compassion impacts them, it impacts you. That’s the good thing about doing good - it’s always a win-win!

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 apologize if I push your buttons today but I’m doing it out of love and I promise it’ll be worth it. I want to know, what irritates you?

What are those things that frustrate you and hijack your focus and mood? These things that make your heart race and create anxiety for you are actually a great source for personal learning.

Maybe what irritates you is something that you’re afraid to admit is true about yourself. Almost like being a hypocrite - You complain when people are running late but you very often run late yourself, or someone makes an unhealthy choice and you judge them but you don’t have the best diet yourself. 

The comparison that can come out of this can sometimes be a projection of your own insecurities and how you fear you are viewed by others. So psychologically it helps you feel more at peace to find evidence where other people are violating something you’re afraid might be true about yourself (and unwilling to admit it).

Also, tapping into your irritations might help you affirm your standards. If someone else’s choices or behavior irritates you it might be because that thing is just so important to you, and it pains you to think about the consequences of compromising it. So instead of irritation being an avoidance mechanism, it can actually be a feedback signal telling you where your alignment and integrity lands on the subject.

In both cases, your irritation has everything to do with you and nothing to do with them. It’s your perception of their behavior that irritates you, not the behavior itself. The irritation is you reacting to things and not the thing itself.

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…)

A lot of people have a hard time setting boundaries but it's extremely important to do. The reason it can be hard is because it feels selfish and even rude at times in the way you need to interact with people and enforce them. It can get uncomfortable communicating your boundaries to someone and it might even feel like you’re creating confrontation in doing so. 

But when you do establish boundaries for others, what ends up happening is you protect yourself. It helps you maintain certain things as a priority and honor the previous commitments you’ve made. It aids you in removing distractions, temptations, and other circumstances that pull you away from what you’ve determined to be most important. For example, telling people at work that you won’t respond outside work hours is a boundary. Letting someone know that you don’t want to talk to them if they keep complaining is a boundary.

Having boundaries doesn’t only keep things out of your life, it helps you to stay in it. They give you a clear and objective criteria around the things that you simply aren’t willing to consider doing. Not drinking alcohol on weekdays is a boundary. Not watching TV until you’ve finished your mindfulness practice for the day is a boundary. Boundaries are dynamic and can adjust once you get some good feedback, but that adjustment happens best after the boundary has been enforced rather than allowing yourself to make an exception in real-time.

Every part of this process requires something really fundamental - that you’re honest. You need to know what you want and stand up for it. That needs to be represented in the way you invest your time and you must guard it so that you don’t get derailed. This is both in setting boundaries with other people and establishing them for yourself. 

It’s easy to build the expectations, protocols, and standards of your life around what already is. However, when you really start to understand what you want and disrupt the current pattern you need to enforce that change by implementing stronger boundaries.

So now let me flip this on you - What boundary do you need to set to stay accountable to the life you want to live?

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…)

People who don’t practice personal development sometimes misunderstand this one piece. To them it suggests that you must not think you’re good enough as you are if you want to improve. Of course we know that’s not true, that pursuing your own self-growth is actually an expression of self-love, but I think this perspective adds something really important to consider. 

You are incredible just the way you are, you are worthy of having a fulfilling and meaningful life, and you already have everything you need inside of you to become the person you know you’re capable of being.

Let’s zoom in on that last part. You already have everything you need to become the best version of yourself. Each one of us is born with greatness fully-loaded inside of us. We each have the tools and capabilities to accomplish things beyond our wildest dreams. Just look around at what humanity has accomplished throughout history, from all walks of life, with all types of backgrounds, and you’ll realize that each and every single person has a revolution inside of them.

From more of a spiritual angle, this is all because we are connected to something bigger and draw our power from this source. Call it God, call it the Universe, no matter what you believe to be the form of this potential you already have direct access to it. The problem is, we’re getting in our own way and restricting our access to what is already there.

So if something needs to change, it’s certainly not you. You don’t need more, you are fully loaded. What needs to change is the strength of the connection to that universal source of abundance, potential, and limitlessness. The restrictions placed on us are that of our own psychology, the lessons that have been handed down to us that we’ve come to believe as truth, and the limits of our own perception in a 3 dimensional world with 5 senses.

You are perfect exactly how you are and self-growth helps you start to let all of that goodness shine. In pursuing self-awareness, mindfulness, intentionality, perspective, better health, and all of the things that we work on to improve our lives, we clear up our connection to this universal power and start allowing it’s light to shine through.

Our greatest limiting factor is and will always be ourselves. Once we stop getting in our own way, talking down on ourselves, belittling what we think we’re capable of, and adding unnecessary resistance to our own lives, that’s when we really get to access our fullest potential! And that’s all you, you’re fully-loaded with it, now your mission is to share as much of it as you can with the world as possible.

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’ve been spending years setting and pursuing goals but what I just learned might change all of it. I’m still processing exactly what my conclusions are, but I thought I’d share it with you in real-time.

Regardless of your experience setting and working toward goals, you’ve probably heard about how effective they are. You cannot achieve something that isn’t clearly defined, and taking the time to set goals helps you get clear on exactly what results you’re hoping to reach. Good specific goals sound something like “Run a Marathon by December 2023”, “Hit my $100k sales quota in March”, and “Give my first paid keynote speech by June 2023”.

If you’re setting goals like that then you’re already advanced in the way you think about it, but I want to share one shortcoming. How are you supposed to attain these goals? They're clear and inspiring, but what’s the process to making them reality? When we define our goals we often connect to our vision, which is abstract and dynamic. It’s great to tap into what you want to achieve but it takes you further away from knowing how to achieve it.

Instead of setting goals, maybe we start defining desired outcomes. Functionally it’s the same thing -  “Run a Marathon by December 2023”, “Hit my $100k sales quota in March”, and “Give my first paid keynote speech by June 2023”... But it suggests that there’s a process to it. An outcome is something that comes as a result of doing something else. Crafting your ambition as an outcome makes it more actionable and process based, which will hold you more accountable to doing the things required to achieve the desired outcome.

And in a strange way, it also separates you emotionally from the end result. When you don’t hit your goals it all feels like falling short. Of course 90% to quota is better than 50%, but psychologically hitting a goal is more binary. Either you did it or you didn’t. When you pursue a desired outcome, you acknowledge that there’s a spectrum to it in the very nature of it. It recognizes that there are other possible outcomes and many of them would be a good end result.  You give yourself more space to consider that when you frame it up as a desired outcome rather than a goal.

I’m curious to know what you think about this. Send me a DM on Instagram @self.improvement.daily or an email to brian@selfimprovementdailytips.com and we can chat about it!

Something that having a positive mindset really does for us is it helps us to be optimistic. But there's a difference between the two - Positivity is presently seeing things in a good way, and optimism is seeing that things will be good in the near and far future. Often times present positivity shapes your perspective to be more optimistic.

The reason I mention it is because I want to relate positivity and optimism back to feeling encouraged. We often see encouragement as coming from someone else but the real magic is how it translates to create change in your life. When you’re feeling encouraged it means that you’re more willing to go for it, take risks, and put yourself out there. You’re listening to the positive voice in your head telling you that you can rather than the cynical voice saying you can’t. It’s literally in the word itself - you are acting "in courage".

Utilizing encouragement requires action both in creating results in your life and feeling that way in the first place. You know the relationship that exists between actions and results - If you want to live a more inspired and positive life you need to do the things that create it.

The problem is, many people wait to feel a certain way to take action. They wait to feel motivated, inspired, or encouraged before actually bringing themselves into the activity itself. But that’s an unfair expectation that will leave you falling short of what you want. Mood follows action, not the other way around, so if you want to feel more encouraged you need to take encouraging action first and allow that to shift your feelings.

So here’s something practical you can do. If you’re struggling to take action and procrastinating or delaying, say this to yourself - “I’m feeling encouraged”. Or ask yourself the question "What would I do right now if I felt really encouraged?" You’d be surprised how influenceable your mind is and how tricking it in a small way will help you to start getting into action, which will change the way you feel.

Speaking for myself, I want to feel more alive, inspired, and passionate more often. It helps me feel like I’m bringing my best to every moment and fills my life with more significance and meaning. Hopefully this perspective encourages you to feel more encouraged about your ability to create the life of your dreams.

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…)

Let’s talk about achieving your goals and making your dreams come true. A worthy topic right?

A lot of us have heard the idea of the ladder to the top, which suggests that there’s a single path we can stay on to get where we want to go. While I am a huge advocate for crafting a plan and being disciplined to it (cutting out distractions and being clear on what’s required of you), I’ve found that getting to the top is a lot more like a jungle gym than a ladder.

It’s not as simple as climbing one rung at a time. It’s getting to the top of the ladder to find a dead end, jumping across to a net, climbing down and swinging over to rock wall, scaling it halfway and jabbing your foot into a small crack to grab a rope… you get the picture.

Reaching your goals requires that you’re flexible, nimble, and resourceful. Sometimes you need to be really creative to maximize an opportunity, take steps backwards to go forward faster, and change plans when your route doesn’t look as promising. 

Kind of like a puzzle, some jungle gyms are more complex, and some are straightforward. But in both cases, in order to succeed you must constantly evaluate and reevaluate your plan to innovate, optimize, and improve. That’s the art of the whole process - you need to give your well-thought out plan a fair chance to work but also know when it’s time to pivot.

I’ve found two things that are really helpful with this challenge. First, create opportunities for reflection. When you take a step back and look at the system rather than make decisions from within it, things became way clearer and you’re less emotionally attached to it. This helps you make better decisions. Second is, to surround yourself with other people who can add more perspective to you understanding. Again you might be too close to see the full picture.

Life is anything but predictable, and the path to you dreams is anything but linear. You might some wrong turns and get stuck in some tough spots, but as long as you’re committed to the process you’ll find your way.

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…)