Harmony happens when things are working in perfect synchronization. This is well understood in a harmonizing sound, but the same is true with the different elements of your life. 

When there’s harmony things are synergistic. Your time, attention, and energy aren’t split between different things, rather the presence of complementary elements strengthens each individual unit. In that way, “harmony makes small things grow.”

I feel like we misunderstand the opportunity of striking a harmony in life and see things through the lens of tradeoffs. Choosing to be more social cuts into time you could spend working. Choosing to travel could put a strain on your ability to prioritize your health. The reality is, striking a right balance improves all individual pieces. Being social actually allows you to get more work done in less time because you feel more connected, and it improves your quality. Traveling could help provide a psychological reset that helps get out of your mind and back into your body.

When you start to harmonize the different areas of your life you realize that there's no conflict. Everything is fully integrated to create one beautiful mosaic that is you. Creating life harmony and balance helps you to raise your baseline standards regarding your energy, mindset, and creativity. It unlocks a new tier of potential because you are holistically operating at a new level.

So how do you create more harmony in your life? You need to experiment. The only way you can calibrate anything is through trial and feedback, slowly optimizing with each attempt. You can’t expect to know how much sleep you need, how often you need to exercise, how long you should meditate, how long you need to talk to your siblings for, etc. until you try it. And when you do try, you need to bring consciousness around that experience through honest self-reflection to discover how it worked for you.

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…)

There are a lot of problems in this world and a lot of amazing people committing their lives to solving them. But there’s one thing that, if we managed to fix it, would solve just about everything else. That’s why I’m going to amplify a powerful statement shared by an incredible social impact leader named Adam Braun - “The single most wasted resource on Earth is human intention.”

Everyone has great ideas about how to create a better future for themselves and others, and many of those people have a desire to do something about it. But few ever follow through. It’s putting your head down at night inspired to make tomorrow different, only to fall back into old patterns. It’s making a well-intended commitment to someone about something and then failing to deliver on it. It happens every day and takes the form of unfulfilled promises to ourselves. Imagine if we all did what we say we’re going to do? The world would be a much, much better place.

That’s because the things we say we’re going to do, our intentions, are good. Our intentions are an expression of the best version of ourselves and compatible with the way we want to see the world. Tying this back into social impact, many people feel inspired to cure cancer, eradicate poverty, fight racism, or eliminate animal cruelty. They have intention. They want to… They may have plans to… But there’s little follow through. The world’s biggest problems would get solved a lot faster if more people started taking action on finding solutions rather than just feeling like it. Imagine the value we could create for the world if intention were materialized into action.

So that’s the key. How do we convert latent potential (which sits in the form of intention) into real tangible results? This just might be my mission in the world, helping people start living the life they dream of, and making a difference in a way that only they can.

But this isn’t about me, to really integrate this thought reflect on this question - What causes you to not follow through on your intentions?

I didn't plan on doing this... But, if you’re feeling inspired to live out your intentions, click here to check out something new I'm working on.

We’ve been misguided to believe that we need a certain amount of expertise to teach something. We’ve bought into a false expectation that you need to have credentials that give you authority to share knowledge on a subject. While that might be true for some topics and at certain levels, the majority of things fall into a more informal category.

A lot of us rely on credentials to determine who is qualified to teach something, but I think there’s value in deconstructing exactly what credentials are communicating. First, when you get a credential it means that you invested the time to learn a subject. Credentials come on the back end of completing a curriculum on a subject, which gives you the knowledge you need to effectively understand something. But more importantly a credential also gives you permission. Instead of having an internal debate about your level of knowledge on something, the credential tells you that you are fully trained and qualified.

But here’s the thing - Both outcomes of getting a credential can be accomplished in other ways. For example you can learn from personal experience and self-education to acquire meaningful knowledge. Just because it isn’t structured education does not mean that it’s not valuable. 

Now on the permission side, that’s a matter of the ego. A credential creates a layer of protection on top of your ego so that you’re more comfortable taking action. It gives you a strong argument if someone disagrees that you have the authority to talk about something. But setting your ego aside and putting yourself out there accomplishes the same thing. You can give yourself the right to teach and prove your knowledge.

To make this more practical, here’s a benchmark for you. I’ve found that 6 months of studying, experiencing, or reflecting on something is enough time to develop an expertise on a subject. You don’t need to know everything to teach, you just need to know more than the person you’re teaching, and half a year usually gives you a well-rounded understanding that could help others.

You are most qualified to help people who are going through what you’ve been through. That’s the school of “hard knocks”, and the world will be a better place if we all helped each other get through what we’ve gone through.

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…)

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…)