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…)

In a society where we can have anything at the click of a button, we've lost our sense of patience. This exists in the micro as it relates to our immediate needs but also in the macro and how quickly we expect to get results in our lives. Things take time to grow and develop, but practicing this philosophy is different than knowing it.

Dave Meltzer shares this concept called the empty mile. When it comes to any race or pursuit, do you know which literal or metaphorical mile is the emptiest? It’s the last, because people quit along the way. But the empty mile is the most fruitful and has multiplied value because it is earned. You want to find yourself in the empty mile. But you can’t expect to reach the empty mile at the very beginning of the race. You need to give it time and earn your way to it.

And there’s a process to that. It’s Dave’s cornerstone philosophy which is that we must enjoy the consistent (everyday), persistent (without quit) pursuit of our potential. When we resiliently focus on taking action in the present moment, and fee fulfilled and validated by it, we aren’t as concerned with the outcomes being produced. This is a great thing because it creates more time for the outcomes to mature.

I’ve very much seen this come to life in a project I’m leading. Outside of the work I do with the podcast I have a social impact agency where we’re organizing a Veterans Day campaign. In our 2nd year, we’re slowly starting to see partnerships open up, opportunities come to life, and the full vision for what’s possible with this campaign to materialize. It’s inspiring but it has only been possible because we have stayed consistent and persistent in the face of setbacks.

You might be curious to hear about it - The campaign is called BurpeesForVets and our mission is to inspire 1000 people to do a burpee for every dollar they fundraise leading up to Veterans Day. Veterans Day is a month away and if you feel inspired to step up to the challenge, or you know a gym owner or leader in the fitness space that might want to get involved in supporting, please be a part of this movement by helping us grow it! Send an email to burpeesforvets@forpurpose.com with any ideas or interest and I’ll personally follow up with you there! And you can sign yourself up for the burpee challenge at www.burpeesforvets.org!

The world around us is one big system. You can look as granular as an atom or the function of a single cell, or as big as the interactions of galaxies and solar systems, everything works as a connected network. It’s a universal quality that exists in all things. These systems involve processes that achieve certain ends and then there are other processes that restore things to how they were.

Take decomposition for example. We take in food, use the nutrients to support our bodies, and we expel what we don’t need. That contains the specific nutrients that make for good soil, supporting the growth of a plant that then produces the food we eat. It’s a cycle.

Slowing down this thought, let’s zoom in on the first half the cycle. There’s a relationship between the input and the output, and in our lives we overlook this relationship. If we want things to improve at the end, we can influence that by being intentional about what happens in the beginning. 

That’s where today’s thought becomes appropriate: Value in, value out. Everything you take in is part of what comes out. This means that if you want better outcomes and results, you should look at the inputs and see how they’re setting you up.

For example, your diet. When you eat good and quality foods, you’re preparing your body to perform at a higher level. We may not realize this on a daily basis, but we certainly do when we have bad inputs - like if you drank too much alcohol or ate a lot of junk food. Similarly with the content and information we consume. If we surround ourselves with ideas that are empowering and inspiring we’ll naturally be a part of more incredible things! But if you are caught up in gossip, drama, and unhealthy comparison online you’ll start creating more of that in your life.

My recommendation is to audit and track your inputs. If there’s a particular area of your life where you feel like you’re out of balance, or whatever you’re doing is not serving you, invest in becoming more aware of that thing. That way you can understand the what, when, how, and why of it, and you’ll be able to take corrective action on that awareness.

The full formula looks like this: Inputs + Process = Outputs. We spend so much time focusing on changing the process to change the outputs, but just as easily you can modify your inputs and see how things adjust 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…)

When it comes to being a better person, or improving at anything, you need to control your patterns of thinking. Our thinking is simply the process of asking and answering questions to ourselves, and if we want to start having better answers in our life we need to start asking better questions.

This might be one of the best ways to ask questions that positively impact your life as 'How might I?' questions.

How might I get a raise at work? How might I be a better friend or romantic partner? How might I get in the best shape of my life? How might I become a more resilient person? How might I love myself more?

Psychologically this expression ‘how might I’ does some incredible things. The word ‘might’ allows you to truly dream and brainstorm without restriction because it isn't meant to be connected to reality. It doesn’t suggest any commitment from you, and therefore, your mind doesn’t resist it because it doesn't feel threatened. 

Without this expression you’d engage in a more diluted form of thinking, which creates diluted outcomes. But with an easy change in vocabulary you can get rid of the governor that hold you back so you can more forward faster!

Now let's add on a layer.  Let’s say you are doing some goal setting and you really want to maximize the experience. On top of asking yourself ‘How might I’ questions, I’d recommend that you also go into a new inspiring environment. What this does is it removes any previous associations you have with your normal spaces and allows you to really engross yourself in the possibility of your answers!

Let me show you what I mean by asking you your first question to reflect on - How might you finally conquer that thing that’s always been holding you back? 

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…)