Life can only be lived with foresight yet it is understood in hindsight. In other words, your life is made up of future moments, but the meaning of those moments can only truly be known once they’re in the past.

We know that you can’t change the past. Until someone comes along and invents time-travel, what happened happened. The details, events, and occurrences are permanent fixtures in your history. But your relationship with these events are dynamic. Your associations with your past are constantly evolving as you come to understand more parts of it. What once was a heart-breaking, tragic part of your life can become the source of incredible growth and self-awareness that you are truly grateful for. 

That's not to discredit what happened to you. If anything, changing what you think about past events is evidence of the importance it played in your life. We often don’t know how things are meant to serve us in the moment. Steve Jobs once said that “you can’t connect the dots moving forward”, which means you must be patient to arrive at the full meaning over time upon reflection.

What’s equally important to understand is that you can’t live in the past. You can’t take action in the past. If you continue to put yourself in past situations and reliving past circumstances you’re going to repeat history. You’re going to be stuck in the story of how your life used to be which prevents you from being present in how life is today (and how it can be.) 

When it comes to living a richer, more fulfilling, more gratifying life, you need to play an active role in creating it. That involves you intentionally designing your future through the choices you make. Your future is unwritten and it’s begging for you to take control of it! But many people are stuck holding onto how things used to be, good or bad.

That’s how hindsight and foresight connect. Hindsight gives you the experience and lessons you need to make better choices moving forward. Your past informs your future and helps you angle toward the life you want to have. But without conscious effort around designing your future with foresight, and extracting value from the past through hindsight, you won’t be able to make the same forward strides in your life.

To implement some of this in your life today, ask yourself this question. It’s broad but it serves you - Where have I been and where am I going?

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…)

One of the biggest fears we collectively have as humans is a fear of failure. It’s a fear of falling short and not being good enough. A fear of disappointing others and damaging relationships. A fear of regretting how you wasted time and effort on something that wasn’t worth it. Often when we think of failure we think negatively in these ways, but with a change in perspective you’ll find that failure can be a great catalyst in your life.

In fact, failure is an information rich resource. In general the way that things get better is through a feedback loop. In entrepreneurship it’s the 3 step process of testing, learning, and iterating that leads to making incremental progress. We learn some from our wins but we learn way more from our losses, and within failure there are lessons that will accelerate your learning curve exponentially.

Failure is an uncomfortable thing to experience. It can be embarrassing, awkward, and even depressing. But the more you can embrace your moments of failure and really observe what happened, the more you’ll be able to extract from the experience. If you can overcome your emotional bias to avoid or reject instances of failure, the more present you’ll be with opportunities within it.

Saying this is one thing but implementing it is another, and that’s where I want to share my process. One of the most beneficial things we can do to live a more intentional life is to make decisions in advance. This helps us have an unemotional reference point that represents our best self when making emotional decisions in the moment.

To curb the negative emotions of failure, I have standing periods of personal review where I allow myself to really hunt for the lessons in my life. I do this on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, and in some cases daily basis for my most fundamental habits and projects. This allows me to consistently learn and iterate so that I can make faster progress in my life.

Now that you’re a bit more removed from your latest failure, and that learning is still available to you, ask yourself this question: What is one key takeaway you have from the last time you failed?

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…)

Today's positivity quote features a profound thought from Helen Keller - “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.” There is a lot packed into it so let’s break it down one piece at a time.

First is the word ‘optimism’. There’s an important distinction between optimism and positivity. Positivity is choosing to see the present moment in a more favorable way, whereas optimism is choosing to see the future in a more favorable way. This suggests that optimism is just sustained positivity over time, through all of life’s circumstances.

Optimism is simply a perspective that causes you to consistently see things in a positive way, and your perspective is your choice. It's within your power to frame anything to mean whatever you want it to in your life! When you choose to see the world positively naturally you start to act in a positive way as a natural byproduct of the energy. And taking action is the mechanism for creating results in life.

That’s how this whole quote ties together, and how optimism translates into achievement: Choice leads to action leads to results. 

Being optimistic helps you to feel inspired and capable of achieving what you want to, and it gives you the fuel you need to pursue it! In that way optimism is faith. It’s the positive expectancy of a desirable result. Our brains are always evaluating trade offs to see what’s worth our time and energy, and if something isn’t seen as worthwhile it will shut the idea down and prevent you from taking action at all. 

But faith overrides that process and gives you a reason to take action. It catalyzes the process and helps you take action despite setbacks and adversity. 

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement,” so take care of your mindset, control the conversation in your head, and master your emotions to create the success you dream of! And to make it actionable, you can start right now by reflecting on this question - What are you positively expecting for yourself and your future?

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 think we can all agree that we want to live a meaningful life full of rich moments, priceless experiences, and deep relationships. We all deserve it, and we’re all capable of it, but many of us aren’t living that right now. Why do you think that is?

We’re waiting. Waiting for the right time or for things to be in the right place. Waiting until it makes sense to do it or we feel more prepared. One of my favorite lines in Dr. Seuss’ book “Oh the places you’ll go” is “Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.”

But instead of thinking of it as waiting, what if you thought about your hesitation as postponing? When you postpone that means there are plans in place and they need to be delayed. Well let me tell you this... There are already plans for your life. There are plans for a better future. Every time you delay what your life is calling you to do, you’re actually postponing yourself on your own path.

Of course, be responsible with the decisions you make. But also be aggressive. Play to win and take life on instead of letting it happen to you. The last thing you want is to look back 6 months, a year, 5 years, or 10 years from now and find yourself in the same place with the same things holding you back. In these situations you’ll find you’re much more capable than you thought you were, that you belonged there all along and you didn’t give yourself the chance to see it.

If you’re feeling motivated to take yourself seriously, and really reflect on how this might be affecting you, I challenge you to ask yourself this question: What have you been postponing in your life for too long? Is it taking a chance on yourself? Having that hard conversation? Making that big move on your heart? Answer it for yourself and open up your next frontier of possibility

‍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 having a very introspective year, learning a lot about myself, and hopefully in sharing a little bit about it you feel more capable of understanding yourself.

Who we are today is very much a product of who we’ve been. Over time we grow develop certain beliefs and stories that dictate a lot of our lives. Even though we don’t choose these stories and likely never did, they run the show behind the scenes. It’s only when you start to ask questions about why you are a certain way, and what caused you to be who you are, that you can rewrite these stories and weaken disempowering beliefs.

Here’s a personal example of how this has been true in my life. Even though I was an elite athlete for many years, I always refused the idea of taking supplements. No vitamins, no protein shakes, I even steered away from coffee. My reasoning for this was because I don’t want to be dependent on anything, I wanted to be in control of my energy and health without relying on these other resources. 

But logically, I know the value of taking supplements, and if I want to get stronger there are things I can do to support muscle growth. So I got curious. If my belief was actually preventing me from improving my performance, I wanted to understand why it’s there in the first place so I can overcome it.

The summary of my introspection is - I realized I was projecting independence. Subconsciously I have a strong dependence on others and a fear of not being able to take care of myself. In order to accommodate for that I overcompensated and engaged in behaviors on the opposite side of the spectrum as an avoidance mechanism.

Again getting curious, I determined a root cause. I grew up in a household that was very comfortable, cheerful and loving. I’m so grateful for my childhood. But it was so loving and caring that any time something kind of went wrong, I could walk up to my parents, my brother, or a babysitter and they’d fix it for me. They didn’t want me to be upset and were doing what they thought was best for me. But this meant that anytime I encountered an obstacle I’d lean on others to help me and didn’t develop the confidence or skills to take care of myself. This left an imprint on me and contributes to my subconscious dependence on others.

There’s nothing wrong with what I discovered. It’s who I am, and that’s exactly how I’m supposed to be. But questioning the beliefs we integrated in our past, and questioning if they serve us today is an incredibly valuable practice. The first step to transforming that belief is through awareness, and the best way to gain that awareness is to be curious about yourself.

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…)

We live in the age of information.Got a question? Pull out the device in your pocket, which is more advanced than the tools the US President had in 1980, and you’ll get an answer really quickly. I know that you can’t Google the answer to everything, but having ideas and perspectives so readily available helps inform our own ability to do the right thing.

Knowledge alone doesn’t do much for you. Knowledge is like power in a light switch - It only works when you turn it on. Everything we learn is like wiring your house for electricity. There’s a lot of opportunity but the wiring itself isn’t going to turn on the lights or provide heat to cook food. That energy needs to be translated into something tangible in order for it to benefit you.

There’s a concept in physics called potential energy. This represents what could happen if circumstances change. For example, a bowling ball resting on the roof of a building has a lot of potential energy, because without the roof it will be pulled by gravity forcefully to the ground below. But when the bowling ball is at rest it isn’t actively expressing that energy, it is holding the potential of it.

That’s what knowledge is. It’s our potential to create change in our life through the ideas, perspectives, patterns, insights, and practices we’ve learned. But those learnings do nothing for you unless they are applied.

So my question to you is - Do you have a process around implementing your learnings? Do you have a way to implement the things you know? Because that’s the only way it will do something for you.

My process for this involves my daily behavior tracking sheet. This is where I set goals, design my habits, and make adjustments that affect my life based on what I learned. I made a video here for you here if you're interested to check it out!

This also gives me more focus so that I know what I want to be learning about, what would serve me to develop right now, so that the time I invest in learning creates tangible change in my life.

If you’re in the habit of learning, that’s great! But you need to do more with it for it to really be valuable to you.

I’m an absolute nerd when it comes to understanding how the mind works, and last week I arrived at a conclusion I’d never had before!

One of the greatest opportunities for changing our life is to make new choices. New choices lead to new actions, which lead to new outcomes. In that way the choices you make are the lead dominos that dictate the direction of your life. The fascinating thing is, we make millions of decisions every single day. Our brains are constantly evaluating our surroundings, emotions, resources, other people... everything! And working hard to make decisions that keep us safe. The majority of this is happening without our awareness.

The epiphany was - Choices are simply the decisions we make that we’re aware of. This is the conscious mind electing to do certain things based on drawing logical conclusions. But even so, it's not entirely independent. These conscious choices are biased and contextualized by our subconscious environment. We come to make choices that are rationalized by the needs and information available to the subconscious mind.

But putting that aside for a second, let’s talk about all of those decisions you’re making that you’re not aware of. Those are your habits and routines. They’re your conditioned, habitual way of responding to different stimuli. And for the most part it’s a good thing we have this. Imagine if we needed to make a decision on everything we ever encountered every day. Our conscious mind does not have the capacity, and we’d certainly never have the ability to do anything creative or imaginative.

In this lies exactly why making new positive choices can change your life. When you choose to engage in new positive behaviors you’re teaching your subconscious mind how to make decisions for you. And when that transformation is complete, you start making unconscious decisions that are in alignment with the better life you’re consciously choosing to have.

Now this is a whole other concept in itself, but just to share quickly - This is exactly why you need to be so present in establishing new habits. It takes focus, and attention to detail, and conscious follow through to create new habits because new habits first require taking conscious action. Then through repetition these effortful actions evolve to become unconscious habits.

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…)

This Thursday positivity quote really inspires me. It could be because I truly believe in other people and want to see them succeed, or because seeing ‘possibility’ is a core value of mine. In any case, hopefully this quote inspires you too.

“Your dreams are a preview of what’s possible.”

Your dreams are not these absurd, outlandish, unattainable figments of your imagination. How do I know this? Because someone else has probably already accomplished what you dream to do. They’re human, just like you. Different circumstances? Of course. On an accelerated path? Maybe. But for every one thing you can think of that makes you different from that person, you can probably think of 10 things that make you similar. 

Your dreams are your destiny calling to your potential. The universe is not so mean to give you a dream you aren’t capable of achieving. While you can’t make all of your dreams come true tomorrow, you can put yourself on the path today to making your dreams come true at some point in the future.

That’s exactly what this quote describes to you - “Your dreams are a preview of what’s possible.” When something is possible it means that there’s a real chance it can happen. It can be the reality that you live and breathe every day. That’s what happened for other people that made their dreams come true, isn’t it?

The main thing keeping you from your dream right now is that you’re telling yourself it’s impossible. That it can’t be done. That there are too many conflicts, challenges, and excuses in the way. And that poor way of thinking keeps you from even trying in the first place.

Sure, it could be more comfortable living in the land of make believe, where you dream without any intention of your dreams coming true. But what does that do to change your life? I’m telling you, you can make your dreams come true, and you have these dreams for a reason. It’s your purpose, your soul begging you to do what you were meant to do in this world.

It might not turn out exactly as you planned, in fact it never does, but once you get in the energy of pursuing your dreams you give yourself the experience to allow it to evolve, mature, and settle into your life. But it’s not going to happen on its own.

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…)