Last week I had a lightning strike moment where something really profound clicked for me. If you’re like me constantly trying to find ways to improve, It’s particularly important to have the right relationship with your personal development. This thought helped me get clarity on my own growth process.

Just because you could do better does not mean you didn’t do good enough.

Read that again.

The reality is, you can always do better. Performance is a spectrum but there is no ceiling to it. Even if you are the #1, most elite person in the world at something, you still could do better. You could have done it in less time, gotten a bigger result, optimized or automated a part of it… I’m yet to have encountered anyone who has done anything that could not have been done better.

So if the possibility of doing better is a constant, that can’t be the benchmark of success. It’s literally unattainable because at that point we’re talking about perfection, which does not exist. If your expectation is to be perfect and you aren’t satisfied with your results until you achieve perfection, you are going to be disappointed as you consistently fall short no matter what you do.

That means there has to be a level of performance that is enough to satisfy you. There has to be a level to attain that is significant and that you’re proud of. The word ‘enough’ is confusing because it has two connotations, one being that you’re settling for an amount that is just enough, and the other being that the amount is sufficient and feels complete. We want to pursue that second version of enough and sufficiency.

Just because you could do better does not mean you didn’t do good enough.

The fact that you’ve identified room for improvement does not represent that your performance wasn’t sufficient. The problem is we discredit our accomplishments because we fell short of this idea of “more”. You hit your sales goal but you ruminate on those few deals that didn’t close. You have a good workout but realize you could have done a few more reps. You spend time with a loved one but realize you weren’t as present as you could have been in every moment.

Again, you can always do better, and that’s a beautiful thing. But don’t let knowing that you could do better cloud how well you actually did. When you separate those two concepts from each other you’ll find that you feel more complete, content, and proud of yourself. You can observe your performance with more fair criteria and recognize the impact you’ve made. And what a life that is!

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…)

Have you heard the expression “where attention goes, energy flows” before? The core concept in this is that it matters where you choose to put your focus. If you choose to pay attention to the drama of reality TV shows and gossip magazines, you’re going to create more drama in your life. Alternatively if you put more attention into healthy habits you’re going to experience better health.

There’s a very simple and linear relationship between things. What goes in affects what comes out, and your attention dictates a lot of what you’re allowing into your life. In this way, attention is a fuel source. It adds energy to whatever your point of focus is on, causing it to grow. As described before this is true for all objects of your attention, good and not so good.

Not only does your attention make an impact in the moment, but it also creates a lens that you see the world through after the moment has passed. This is a form of attentional residue and it shapes the way you perceive the world around you.

Understanding this linear relationship and the implications of it, you can leverage it to improve your life! By being intentional about what you’re putting your time, energy, and focus into (which is your attention), you can start bearing more fruits of that in your life.

For example - Let’s say there’s a person in your life that hasn’t been a priority for you recently. In reaching out and giving that relationship attention, the world shifts to grow that relationship. It could lead to being in better touch and more involved in each other’s lives, scheduling a call to catch up, or even coordinating to spend time together in person. All of that comes as a byproduct of you placing your attention on that relationship.

Or another example - Let’s say you want to increase your income. You can start putting your time, effort, and energy into things that make you money. And guess what happens… You start to make more money! Your attention dictates your actions but also the perspective you carry where you’re more likely to see income-generating opportunities well after your immediate focus has gone.

So whatever you want to play a more prominent role in your life - Income, dating, health, education - You simply need to be intentional about giving that thing more of your attention. My recommendation is to determine a core activity you can commit to and let the results handle themselves.

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…)

Reflecting on positivity, I want to provide a different perspective. Life can be hard at times. Unexpected challenges and circumstances can place demands on you that make life less enjoyable. No matter how positive of an outlook you try to have, sometimes you just can’t see the bright side of things. I get it, it's me too at times, nobody is perfectly happy all the time. We’re only human and in fact, difficult experiences are necessary to give meaning to the more positive ones.

But no matter what you’re facing off with now, or what challenges you’ve encountered in the past, one thing remains true - You have survived 100% of your worst days. I’ll take those odds! And the reason I share that is because it suggests something larger about life. 

The despair, disappointment, and heartbreak of life’s challenges will all be a matter of the past at one point. Just like every time before, you will find yourself on the other side. This means that whatever it is you went through, you figured it out. You took what was available to you and worked through it. Could you have done better and could things have gone differently? Of course. But that will always be the case. What is undeniable is that you make it out okay each and every time. 

While this might not be a positive message, it is an optimistic one. Optimism is simply a belief that the future will be better, and thinking about both of our life's experience, the worst time always got better. Yes, life can be unfair, and I don’t want to discredit the pain you might be going through, but you’ve gotten through tough times before and you’ll do it again!

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 want to talk about temptations. I feel like it has a complex context that prevents people from diving in and relating with it as well as they should. Part of that history is that ‘temptation’ is a central theme in this Bible, which creates its own connotations, but it’s also something we interface everyday in our lives. In coming to understand what temptation is at its core, we’ll be able to better navigate living out the best version of ourselves.

The simple definition of temptation is “the desire to do something, especially wrong or unwise”. This suggests that if something is a temptation, intuitively there’s something that feels off about it. It’s almost as if you know it’s not something you should do but you feel the urge to do it anyway.

This internal resistance says something really important about you. It pulls from your values and integrity to flag that something doesn’t feel in alignment. Whether this be in the eyes of God or the eyes of your best self, the source of your temptation could give you some insight into where your needs aren’t getting met.

So in these moments, if you want to really use it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself, explore this resistance. If it feels like a temptation, be curious about why that might be. In the face of making decisions on how you want to behave, also explore the costs and consequences of taking certain actions. You may be tempted to cheat on your partner, but what would that do to your life? You might be tempted to take off work early on a Friday, but what would that do to your self-confidence and the way you relate with your character?

If it’s a temptation you know there will be consequences, that’s why it feels like a temptation and not a genuine desire. But if you can think logically about the implications of your temptations, and make good decisions based on what you find, you’ll feel like you have more power over your urges.

I’m not asking you to be perfect and abstain at all costs, unless that’s who you want to be. But as with everything, there’s a balance and hopefully this broader understanding helps you find it!

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 wasn’t surprised to hear the findings of a set of studies on productivity and happiness. The results are two-sided. As you’d expect, happy people tend to be more productive. Their elevated mood leads to them feeling inspired and energized to be active and get things done. What’s less obvious but equally important - Those who are most productive tend to be the happiest as well.

Through my own self-exploration I’ve found that my best days are my most productive days. It’s when I’m completing the things I need to do, limiting distractions, and spending my time in intentional ways. I am happiest at night when I look at myself in the mirror and (to take Brendon Burchard’s criteria) I feel like I lived, I loved, and I mattered.

I understand that my optimal level of fulfillment and satisfaction is faster-paced than most, but that doesn’t take away from the correlation that productivity leads to happiness. That’s because productivity isn’t just about keeping yourself busy doing things all the time. Productivity is simply a matter of doing the things you want to do. Anything can be considered productive behavior, even playing video games or scrolling social media, when it’s what you genuinely want to be doing.

And that’s why happiness is so closely tied to productivity. If you’re doing the things you enjoy to the extent that you enjoy them, and you’re choosing to do them with full understanding of what the tradeoffs are, you’re going to feel good! 

That can be on the disciplined side of getting yourself to workout even if you don’t feel like it, as well as on the entertainment side having a few extra drinks with some friends. It’s about choosing to do what you want to do. The more aware you can be of the choices you’re making in the moments, and the more reliably you can relate it back to your vision for your best-self, you’ll feel good about yourself and your life. It’s pretty simple. 

I call this living intentionally, which is just choosing as often as possible to do the things you’ve determined you want to do. Being intentional sets the expectation, productivity delivers on it, and happiness is often the result.

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 read the book “The Promise Of A Pencil” by Adam Braun on a quarterly basis, and on this most recent read I caught an insight I’d missed. Sometimes your awareness intuitively knows to rise to the things you need when you need them. 

It’s a book about personal transformation, discovering potential, and taking naive action to make the impossible possible. The line that really stood out this time is “through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define what we are and discover who we are.”

Braun’s implication here is that many of us live an unchallenged life. We live out our defaulted autopilot that has been shaped by years of conditioning, expectations, and cultural norms. Labels are put in place to maintain this core infrastructure and they reinforce us deeper into the conditioning.

We don’t think to question it because it’s how we’ve grown to see the world, and we’re not motivated to change it because it violates our unconscious preference to seek comfort. But when you venture into unfamiliar spaces you trigger your mind to pay attention again because things are new and novel. It activates your conscious awareness and allows you to think more independently about things rather than continue to be influenced by your programming.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the quote - “Through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define what we are and discover who we are.”

What we are is the conditioning. Who we are is our free-will.

We discover who we are by putting ourselves in the unfamiliar and allowing us to live more conscious lives. Instead of accepting that things are a certain way, you’re inspired to curiously question why things are that way. 

This helps you cultivate more self-awareness and from that, more growth. I believe that self-improvement is the convergence of self-awareness and self-acceptance. It’s knowing who you are outside of the labels the world might impose on you (which you discover through new experiences and honest introspection), and being at peace with who you are so you can live in integrity with what you find to be true about yourself.

The more consciously, intentionally, and productively we can live, the more fulfillment we’ll find in our lives because we are investing in the things that light us up. I’m finding it for myself, and I want it for you.

I'm Brian Ford and if you’re looking to believe in yourself and the possibility of the difference you can make in the world, grab a copy of “The Promise Of A Pencil”. It has changed my life, I could not recommend it more, and it will change yours too.

In my past I used to be pretty hesitant to try new things simply because I didn’t know how to do it. I had rationalized fears in my head that I’ll embarrass myself, that I’ll do something wrong and make things worse, that I’ll offend someone, or otherwise come up with some excuse to talk my way out of doing something new.

Part of this was an act of self-preservation. Instead of exposing my inadequacies to the world and being found out for being a fraud (or not as capable as I want to appear to be), I would hide and avoid confrontation of the sort by not putting myself in those situations in the first place.

If you can relate to what I just shared at all, I want to give you and myself some important permission today. It is okay not to know. It’s okay to need things explained to you again. It’s okay to seek guidance to make sure you really get it. 

That’s what learning is, isn’t it? The act of gathering knowledge that can better inform your decisions and behavior. For some reason, we think it’s a weakness to not have all the answers.  But how are we expected to know things without learning it? If anything it’s the sharing of knowledge that makes the world go around.

Now applying this to your life, you don’t need to know to get started with something. You can start a new hobby, be a beginner and make mistakes. You can go for it at a level that’s beyond your current abilities just to see how you do. People aren’t as judgmental or critical of you as you think they are, that’s just your own insecurities projected onto other people. 

You do not need to wait until you know how to do something to do it. There are people on the way who want to help you and lessons embedded in every instance you fall short. And if you put yourself in the worst case scenario where you do embarrass yourself or you do something wrong, you realize how quickly things pass. Life goes on, and now you’re carrying with you a little more knowledge and understanding of how to be better in the future.

Not knowing is not a good enough excuse to not try. It’s okay not to know.

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 believe one of the core things we’re all chasing in life is a sense of fulfillment. It’s a belief that we’re making the most out of our lives, that we’re contributing something meaningful to the world, and we’re experiencing the richness that life has to offer. Fulfillment is being at peace with yourself and feeling bliss and great joy.

These feelings are earned over time. Sure, you can experience fulfilling moments, but to live a fulfilled life you need more than just a one-off positive experience. That’s why I believe “fulfillment is sustained happiness.”

One of the greatest challenges in life is making things last. The human condition causes us to lose focus once we reach a certain level or achieve a certain thing. It causes your drive to fade out and with that, you become less consistent taking the actions required to maintain the result. In professional sports, that’s why it’s so hard to defend championships. With success you lose sight of that next gear and it comes with consequences.

This is partly because humans are hard-wired to prioritize short-term gain over long term reward. In fact I believe this is humanity’s fatal flaw. The reason eating healthy is hard to do is because we don’t see the consequences of eating unhealthy until months have passed, and the joy of greasy or sugary food makes us feel really good in the moment. 

Fulfillment is like that delayed payoff for making the right decisions. It involves being at peace with your decisions and experiencing bliss for the ways you’re living your life. A consistent positive experience is only possible when you take consistent positive action, which sustains your happiness.

Similar logic can be seen in the way Brendan Burchard defines ‘high-performance’. He calls it “creating ever-increasing levels of both well-being and external success over the long-term". It’s real if it lasts the test of time, and whether it be high-performance or your personal fulfillment, it isn’t substantial if it only lasts for moments. Kind of like how we say “it’s about the journey and not the destination”, fulfillment is a constant.

In my opinion, the quickest way to fulfillment is to consistently live fulfilling days, which involves acting in integrity with your best self, applying your gifts and talents in service of the world, being present in life’s experiences, and finding authentic gratitude in the blessed life you live. And guess what? You can start doing all of that… Right now, today! 

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…)