Self Improvement Daily Podcast

We all share this world but we experience it so differently. Our own two eyes shape what we see. Our own two legs move us around to determine our vantage point. And most importantly, our own experiences cause us to relate with the things around us in our own way.

It’s all a matter of perspective. I love the visual of casting a shadow on a cylinder. If the cylinder is standing upright and the light hits the long face directly, the shadow is a rectangle. But if you lay the cylinder down like you’re rolling it and you cast the light from the same angle as before, now the shadow is a circle. It’s the same object and the same light, but two very different outcomes. When someone asks you about the shape of a cylinder’s shadow, there are two right and wrong answers.

The reason I bring this up is because it’d serve us to have the same understanding for the people we encounter. We don’t know what they’re going through, we don’t know what they need, and we don’t know how they’re feeling. To account for that, and help contribute to a brighter world, it’s a good idea to always be a little kinder than necessary.”

This plays in all settings. Someone you’re really excited to see - how do you make them feel that enthusiasm and a little more. Someone who you hardly know and you’re interacting with them - surprise them with the genuine care and attention you give them. Or someone who’s making you angry and you’re arguing with them - cool your emotions down and treat them with a touch more kindness than what is coming up in the moment.

Looking back at these situations, you’ll never regret having been kinder than was required. However, it’s very likely you’ll regret being meaner or nastier than you should have been. 

So keep that in the back of your mind. As you approach new situations in your life, how do you show up a little kinder than necessary? Try it on for a few days and see how it makes you feel. There’s no faster way to create positivity within you than to ignite it in others.

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 talk a lot about getting better every single day. Even if it’s just 1%, every little bit counts, especially when you do it consistently. But have you ever done the math on it? Do you know what it takes to actually dedicate 1% of your day to improvement?

When I met Brian Cane, the host of a podcast called Mental Performance Daily, he simplified this thought for me. He said that 1% of 24 hours is just 14 minutes and 24 seconds. If we want to transform our life by getting 1% better every single day, we don’t need to invest more than a quarter of an hour. I don’t care how busy you are, if you really care about your future and maximizing your potential you can find 15 minutes in a day to do so.

But as you know, your growth needs to be intentional. As I see it there are two ways to grow - either you raise your standards or you stretch your capacity. In either case, it’s going to feel uncomfortable because you’re doing something different. But therein lies the key - If you want to truly maximize the time you’re investing in your development, it’s important that you pursue genuine, uncomfortable growth.

So let’s make this practical, you truly want to get 1% better every day, what does that mean? It means you need to start doing something differently than you used to, that is representative of a better version of yourself, for just under 15 minutes a day.

According to Brian Johnson from Heroic, the group that introduced me to Brian Cane (I know there are too many Brian’s!), there’s one question that will help you truly identify this opportunity for growth within yourself. He asks, “What’s the one thing you could start doing that you know will most radically change your life if you started today?” 

Think about that. 

What’s the one thing you could start doing that you know will most radically change your life if you started today?

Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to engage in a version of that behavior for 15 minutes. For me, it’s to better manage my energy throughout the day. I have a 3 minute energy revival routine that, if I do it 5 times over the course of the day, it will transform my energy and my life.

That’s what it takes! It’s doable, but it takes commitment. It’s not going to happen on its own. In order to get new results you need to make new decisions to take new actions. Simple as that. And hopefully, this perspective around your growth inspires you to take a bold step toward the best version of 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…)

I heard this metaphor recently and it added some interesting perspective, so I wanted to share it with you. As we go about our lives we’re constantly observing things around us. We're making sense of things for ourselves and understanding how others relate with different environments. It mostly entails us looking out at what’s around us and finding meaning in it. 

This is kind of like looking out a window. Through your own two eyes, from the perspective of where your feet are planted, you can see the world for how it exists around you. You can find reasons that justify why people made certain decisions. You can attribute a cause and effect to the circumstances you encounter to note the relationship things have to each other.

But if you look really closely into the window, what do you actually see? You see your own reflection. Your silhouette is reflected back in everything you see on the other side of the window. You are always in the picture but until you draw your attention to it, you’re pretty unlikely to see it.

This applies for the conclusions you take from what you see. Your perception of things is not simply as they are, it’s always how you see it. A part of you is always contributing your beliefs, assumptions, expectations and biases to the situation you’re observing. As long as it’s you looking through the window, your reflection will always be integrated into what you’re seeing.

This is why self-awareness is so critical. Once you realize that there’s a part of you in your perception of everything else, you can start gaining insights into that part of you that you may not have had access to before. Getting curious about the conclusions you draw gives you the space to consider how the end results are more a reflection of you and not the situation. And the great part is, once you see this truth, you can’t unsee it. You will carry this awareness into your interactions and be able to show up with more humility.

So to wrap this up, let me ask you this question - Is there a part of you you’ve been unwilling to see in the things around you? That thing that’s causing you anxiety, it’s unfair, or it’s beyond your control… Is it possible you’re playing a role in making it so?

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 get to work! The New Year is here and I hope you feel motivated to bring positive change to your life. Now’s the time where things are really being put to the test - You’re no longer in the fun and excitement of possibility and you’re officially in the trenches of making it a reality.

What must happen now is your intentions must shift into actions. Ideas don’t change your life, it’s the materialization of them that does. The world operates through activity and if you want anything to change, you need to get active. Fortunately though, intentions help to shape action. Our intentions create a subconscious priming and accountability that helps us feel more motivated, more inspired, and more committed. This then gives us the energy we need to follow through on taking action.

But intentions run out if they’re not acted upon. Your brain is constantly trying to find evidence to confirm what it believes to be true about the world around you. If you don’t take action on your intentions, that’s the proof your brain needs to conclude that it must not actually be a priority, and the motivation and inspiration slowly fades away. Or alternatively, if you get consistent taking action, it affirms to your brain that this new way of seeing the world is legitimate and it will sustain a positive relationship with the intention for longer.

Now to be real with you and to tell you what’s coming around the corner, even if you’re perfectly consistent, the inspiration from your intention will go away. That’s because another part of the brain is designed to actively resist change. This new way of thinking about the world is unfamiliar and therefore threatening, and it will make things harder than it has to be. This is self-sabotage, it’s a killer, and you certainly will encounter it as you attempt to bring positive change into your life.

So your goal for the next month should be to establish a routine around taking action on your intention. If you want to get healthier, make choices congruent with that in your diet and exercise until it becomes habitual. If you want to stop wasting so much time on social media, enforce time limits and make a habit of spending time away from your phone.

This is the landscape you’re entering! And I hope to support you through it so that you can make 2023 the best year of your life, yet! If you’re open to it, I’d love for you to share with me your New Year intention or resolution or commitment to the type of person you want to be. This will help you in a few ways:

1) an external representation of your intention will help it hold more value

2) It will require you to get really clear on what exactly your intention is

3) I can provide specific resources or recommendations that will facilitate you being successful!

So if you want to share, fill out the quick form here and I'll check it out!

I hope you’re feeling as fired up about the New Year as I am! We have an incredible opportunity to reflect on what we really want out of life, make changes that support you in becoming the person you want to be, and set intentions or goals or resolutions or whatever you want to call them to really lock in this next chapter of your life.

I’m honored to be a part of it and I hope you see how much opportunity and possibility is ahead for you!

You deserve to have it all, the energy and vibrancy for life, the work that lights you up and serves a larger mission you believe in, the connections and relationships that provide something in life that nothing else can… And it’d be a disservice to all of those things if I didn’t ask you this very important question: What’s your plan?

You want to prioritize your health more, what does that look like and what are you going to be doing differently to get different results? You want to be more focused and productive, limiting distractions and concentrating more in your work. How will you specifically achieve that?

I find that a lot of people use the New Year to realign with what they want, but they try all of the old ways that didn’t work to go about achieving it. Then after a few days or weeks, once the excitement wears off they slowly regress to how things used to be, finding themselves in the same spot with little to zero progress made.

So I’ll ask you again, what’s your plan? And be honest with yourself, do you have one?

Well I’m grateful to share, I have a plan for you. But it’s a plan that will only work for you if you’re ready to take it and yourself seriously. 

I have a 3 step process that helps you go from stuck and stalled in your growth to unstoppable in your habits, routines, and mindset.

And the first step is to interrupt your current patterns and take on the 21 Day Best Self Breakthrough Challenge!

In this 21 day challenge, together we will:

- Install your self-improvement operating system, giving you a clear process to master any area of your life

- Build the habit of self-discipline so that you have the power to follow through when you're will is being put to the test

- Make real strides toward the best-version of yourself that will last long after the excitement of the New Year has worn off

This is my promise to you: By the end of the challenge, you will have shifted your mindset so significantly that you will be capable of achieving anything you set your mind to, and you'll build the infrastructure for your growth that will support you in making real progress in your life faster than ever before! If you’re ready for that, click the link in the description right now to join the challenge because it starts on January 2nd!

Now if you’re already ruling this out, I’d like to add perspective. You might be feeling like there’s already too much going on and you can’t handle any more on your plate. If you’re okay with tolerating feeling over-stretched and unavailable all the time, that’s one thing. But if you want to find a better balance, this challenge will give you the discipline and clarity you need to break the cycle and not only manage everything more naturally, but it will help you do everything even more efficiently and effectively than before and expand your capacity.

Or you might be thinking that you’re not ready for a challenge, that it sounds hard and you don’t want to fail. Well I’m sorry to say it but you’ll never feel fully prepared to do anything new, and if you wait for that day to come you'll have wasted a lot of time and left so much potential unfulfilled. Besides, the challenge is easy - it’s only 5 minutes a day to complete a very simple activity.

So here’s the plan - Register for the best-self breakthrough challenge right now, before you can talk yourself out of it and go another year wondering what could have been if you’d taken yourself more seriously. This is your plan, this is your ticket, this is the breakthrough you’ve been looking for! Join the challenge right now and get ready to take off!

If you’re like me, you want to do big things in the world. You want to live a meaningful and purposeful life where you feel at your best and you make a difference for others. You want to push the boundary for what’s possible and really tap into your fullest potential. 

I mean I know for a fact that’s who you are because you’re reading this right now… 

If you simplify things and realize what all of the accomplishments and aspirations are for, it comes down to just one thing - Fulfillment. There is nothing that creates a more genuine feeling of inner-peace and self-acceptance than the feeling of fulfillment.

I recently heard a definition of fulfillment that I really liked, and no surprise, it came from Tony Robbins. He says “fulfillment is growing and giving”. When you prioritize those two things in life you’ll find yourself on the fast-track to bliss.

So first, growing. There is something innately hard-wired into us that values growth. It’s witnessing that you’re making progress on a problem, claiming control of your life because you’re more aware of your patterns, and realizing that you can create your future when you apply yourself. Plain and simple, it feels good to know that you’re taking yourself seriously and making the most of what life has to offer.

But then fulfillment has a second component - Giving. We all have an understanding that there’s something bigger than ourselves. When we give we contribute to that larger collective mission, and we’re rewarded in unimaginable ways. We have evolved to be emotional beings and there’s no faster way to infuse positive emotions in your life than to give to others. With giving comes faith that when you take care of someone else you’ll always be taken care of. 

These are the two ingredients to finding fulfillment, growing and giving, but there’s one last part - the order.

You’ve probably heard the expression “You must fill up your own cup before you can fill up someone else’s”. I firmly believe that. I believe that the best thing you can do for the world is to be at your best. I believe that in order to help as many people as possible in your lifetime you must first help yourself. In fact, giving is a natural byproduct of growing, which means that finding fulfillment is just a matter of making sure you’re really taking care of yourself first.

And congratulations! You’re already showing up for yourself and on the path. But maybe, things aren’t clicking for you as quickly as you’d like them to. Maybe you feel like you’re stalled or stuck in your growth because you aren’t following through on the habits that make you feel energized, inspired, and productive. The reason might be because you’re thinking about consistency the wrong way and setting yourself up for failure, keeping you watching on the sidelines instead of in flow and in the game. 

I put together a free 30 minute training all about how you can get consistent once and for all to build momentum in your life, accelerating your growth and your pathway to fulfillment. You can watch that training right now, and be sure to watch until the end because I’ve got something special for you at the end that will help you make 2023 the most transformational, inspired, and accomplished year of your life. Click here and I’ll share with you the 3 keys to unlocking a life-time of consistency!

I heard a really cute expression that I thought would be perfect to share for Thursday positivity. It goes “a smile is happiness found right under your nose.”

If you don’t think that smiling can change your life, try again. When you smile you can scientifically measure a spike of positive neurotransmitters in the brain. This means that your physiology is actually responsive to your body in a bottom-up kind of way. This is just another point of proof that mood follows action and motivation is created once you’ve already gotten yourself in motion.

But I think the more interesting interpretation of the quote is a metaphor. You’ve probably heard the saying “it was right under my nose” before. To summarize, it suggests that something was hiding in plain sight, that it was there all along, but for some reason you weren’t able to see it.

As this expression suggests, “happiness is found right under your nose”. Happiness has always been there and always will be. It's is not something you need to create, it’s something you must broaden your awareness to rediscover. 

That’s why daily gratitude is such a powerful practice. It allows you to step back, assess your life, and uncover the happiness that has been hiding in plain sight the whole time. When you prompt yourself to think about the blessings you’re surrounded by, happiness starts to reveal itself. It takes the form of good memories, perspective shifts, and grand realizations. You’ll find you have so much to be proud of and so many successes to reflect on. It’s just a matter of seeing what’s already there, right under your nose, to start believing it.

So there are two takeaways here. First, smile more. You can control your state simply by pulling the corners of your lips closer to your ears. You've always had this and it can transform your experience instantaneously. Then second, you already have so much happiness stored up in your experiences that you can tap into. Your bliss is already there and you just need to claim it.

If you made it this far, I wanted to quickly mention one last thing. I put together a 30 minute training about the 3 keys to unlocking a lifetime of consistency. If you want a more disciplined, more consistent, more productive 2023, your first step is learning the game-changing lessons in the training. Click here to watch the training, for free, right now!

There’s an expression that we’ve come to accept is true but I don’t think we’ve truly ventured to think about why that is. It’s the idea that "less is more". How can that be possible? Literally less is the opposite of more... So it doesn’t make logical sense. But that's because there’s more to the statement than what meets the eye.

When you assess the objective value of something, you must consider both the quantity and quality of it. It’s not just the amount of something that determines it’s value, but rather how good or effective that thing is. A relatable example is the price of a steak. You can go to a diner where they have $9.99 all you can eat prime rib, which is a lot of quantity but not great quality, or you can go to a fancy restaurant where they serve you a small cut of steak that is prepared with the purest ingredients and sourced from the best vendor. That is quality.

What “less is more” literally translates to is less quantity creates more value. In order to understand that, we need to look at a simple equation:

Value = Quantity x Quality.

So if quantity decreases (which is “less”) and value increases (which is “more”), then the quality must increase disproportionately to make the equation valid. 

This is what happens when you simplify. You allow yourself to have the clarity you need to focus on the highest-leverage, most impactful activities that create the most value. Not only that, but you can do them well because you’re giving yourself the time and attention required to do a superb job. 

That’s how less can be more - it’s because they’re speaking about two different but connected things.

Applying this directly to personal development, the same concept is true as it relates to your self growth, with an added layer of complexity. Doing less allows you to be more consistent, which creates compounding results in your life. One of the reasons many people fail to get the results they desire is because they’re trying to do too much, to do more, and it comes at the expense of the quality in everything they do.

This is so fundamental to maximizing your potential that I consider it to be one of the 3 keys to unlocking a life-time of consistency. In fact I just made a 30 minute video training about this topic so that you can get consistent once and for all and experience a level of flow in your life that allows you to easily and effortlessly live productive days, gain confidence, and feel on-fire.

Click here to access the free training!

Instead of spending years struggling to figure it out for yourself, start setting yourself up for success so that you can create momentum in all areas of your life!

I was having a good discussion with some of my colleagues in a Mastermind and I wanted to share the conclusion with you. We were talking about the two versions of acting out of character, one negative and one positive, that exist in complete opposition to each other.

When most of us think about acting out of character it’s related to doing things out of integrity. When someone does something unethical, deceitful, or out of alignment with their best self, that’s typically thought of as being "out of character". This is because you have a certain set of values that you aim to uphold in your actions, and any deviation from that standard is considered out of character.

This has negative consequences for yourself and others because you’re not showing up at your best, compromising all of the goodness you have to offer others. Obviously that’s not ideal and in this way we should try to avoid acting out of character.

But then there’s a second, more creative, more positive way to act out of character. This is when your behavior is inspired by your character. It comes from your character. When you feel pulled to act in accordance with your values, and to be held accountable by them. With a positive reference point you can keep your good intentions top of mind so that they guide your moment by moment decision making. This serves to proactively shut down any potential lapses in character, being able to soften the power of temptation and the allure of making exceptions in pursuit of upholding your values.

What’s really empowering about this distinction is that both options of “acting out of character” surface at the same time.  And given how opposite the two definitions are, it presents you with a binary decision. Either you can use your character to inspire you to act in accordance with your values, or you can act in conflict with your higher self. It’s a choice we’re constantly making but we’re often unaware of it. In creating more consciousness around who you want to be, and understanding that you do have a choice in more than you realize, you can follow through on being the best version of yourself.

It requires discipline to consistently make the right choice. Contrary to common belief, self-discipline isn’t something that you just have. It is developed and improved upon like anything else. And the benefits of being more self-disciplined are limitless because it touches all areas of your life, not the least of which is helping you live in alignment with your values and character.

The New Year is fast-approaching and if you aren’t intentional about it, it will pass you by before you ave the chance to make the most of it. Or you can make the choice to get ahead of it and build a foundation that will allow you to conquer more in the New Year than you thought possible. This includes building the habit of self-discipline, and that’s exactly what I’ll help you to do in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. If any part of you knows you’re leaving some potential on the table, click here to register for the challenge right now!