Something that I’m affected by, alongside just about everyone, is self-doubt. We are our own toughest critics and we can be really, really hard on ourselves. We know our own truth better than we know anyone else, we see the areas we’re falling short that no one else knows about, and it causes us to lose confidence and belief in ourselves.

When doubt creeps in, it does so really quietly. Doubts are whispers, not sirens. Self-doubt is so subtle that it integrates itself into your normal stream of consciousness and influences you without you even knowing it. Emotions are sirens. They are loud and clear, and you know you’re feeling something when you're emotional. But doubts are discreet whispers.

This makes it very difficult to defeat self-doubt. The first step to changing anything is being aware of it because with awareness comes choice, which helps you to make new decisions that lead to new results. But the nature of self-doubt makes it challenging to identify and therefore, difficult to change.

Self-doubt is a form of self-sabotage. This is your brain’s attempt to protect you from things that are new and unfamiliar by making suggestions to your conscious mind. Self-doubt is the brain’s way of keeping you from believing that you’re capable of doing something new, better, or different. It’s a defense against change, which through years of evolution has come to be perceived as a potential threat. And remember this happens quietly - Self-doubt (alongside other self-sabotaging tendencies like procrastination, limiting beliefs, irrational thinking, and overgeneralization) introduces itself in such a quiet way that it goes unnoticed. 

But no one in their right mind would choose to be held back. No one wants to be the limiting factor to their own success, and the reality is our self-doubt is often the biggest bottleneck to making progress. So to become more aware of your self-sabotaging tendencies, and begin to change them, I’ve put together a self-sabotage quiz so that you can start becoming everything you know you can be, and not just the version your protective brain has allowed you to be.

One tip, one tool, and one point of self-awareness at a time you’re growing into a better version of yourself. Way to be consistent! And to apply today's learnings click here to take the self-sabotage quiz.

This weekend I heard Brendan Burchard say something that I absolutely loved. When he has people over or hosts in any capacity, and people ask what they can bring, he tells them “Bring the joy” and it’s brilliant.

Think about the desired outcome of the party. As a host your objective is to make sure your guests have a good time. There is nothing that will guarantee a good experience more than the positive energy of the people there. So instead of dismissing people who want to contribute to the party, and telling them that everything is already taken care of, Brendan gives people a really impactful way to contribute to the party. In communicating this he establishes the culture for the party, helps people set an intention for their role in it, and truly lifts the overall value of the party in the simplest of ways.

As we know, positivity spreads. Your energy influences others and creates a ripple that then goes on and extends beyond your comprehension. If you want to live in a more joyful world, you just need to bring the joy yourself. It’s finding reasons to be enthusiastic within the mundane. It’s having a good attitude even when the circumstances don’t warrant it. It’s letting your guard down for a bit and expressing yourself in ways you normally wouldn’t. Being joyful is being present to the moment and choosing to inject positive emotions into your own personal experience.

You’re at your best when you can be yourself, and there’s nothing more honest than a joyful moment. Oftentimes we hide from the world to protect ourselves from judgment and criticism. We recoil into what’s comfortable because it doesn’t direct any negative attention our way. But I’m sure that’s not how you’d choose to live. You’d rather be the quirky, goofy, authentic you that you were made to be! And the only way to do that is to bring the joy more often and let it take over!

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

Something that is fundamental to your personal development is understanding the beliefs you hold. Your beliefs dictate a large part of your life because they influence every moment of your day. They live at a subconscious level and put a certain lens on everything you see and shape reality in that way.

You’ve acquired your beliefs in a number of ways. They come from your personal experiences and how you made sense of them. They were picked up during childhood, or during transformative periods of your life. And they were learned from those who raised you and influenced you.

That’s the problem - A lot of the beliefs we have we did not choose for ourselves, and we haven’t had the presence to question them or consider any alternative. It’s a matter of awareness (or lack thereof) that keeps us in our old beliefs, so I wanted to provide some ideas about how you can become more aware of your beliefs.

The first is an “I am” statement. This is how you identify, which is a byproduct of the way your beliefs are influencing your subconscious. Listen to the way you describe yourself to others, but also the conversation happening inside your head that’s commenting about the person you believe yourself to be.

The second form is “People are” statements. This represents how you’ve chosen to generalize others and in doing so, what you believe to be true about people at large. These beliefs affect your relationships with others - How you treat them, what you expect from them, what you think is good or bad for them… And in that way these beliefs shape your life because it shapes how you interact with other people.

Then there are “Life is” or “The world is” statements. These are your beliefs about how things work around you - What you’re in control, what forces are acting on you, and what patterns seem to come up again and again. This highlights your relationship with the big picture and where you see yourself in it.

Here’s the punchline - The beliefs you hold, or that anyone holds for that matter, are not fact. They are simply what you choose to believe. So how about you decide to have the beliefs that support what you want? Who you are, how other people are, and how the world is.

How about you feel empowered to shape your own perception, and live the life you want because you committed to it? You’re always one moment, one decision, one shift away from changing your life, and that holds more true with your beliefs than anything because it changes the filter that everything else is observed through.

I'm Brian Ford and if you want to start upgrading your beliefs so that you live with more enthusiasm and optimism, I show you exactly how to do it in 3 steps and 60 days with my Plateau to Prosperity program. If this is of interest to you, let's schedule a time to chat about how I might be able to support you.

A lot of people get hung up on this one thing in their personal development. They fear that they’re going to lose touch with who they are now when they become someone else. They fear that fundamentally they’re going to change who they are and that seems like too steep of a cost. What does that mean for your relationships? How will that change your interests and what you do on a daily basis? How will that conflict with commitments you’ve already made?

The presumed fear prevents people from really stepping up in their life. It’s the uncertain, unpredictable future that keeps people tolerating the present. Kind of like the devil you know and the devil you don’t, we’re designed to prefer that which is familiar because we feel emotionally prepared for it.

But the truth is, change is unavoidable. As a human being, you are designed to be dynamic - To evolve, to learn, and to change. Whether you resist it or not, change will happen to you. You aren’t meant to be the same person forever, and you can guide the direction of that change to move toward the life you always envisioned. 

Now don’t mistake this for meaning that you’re not ‘good enough’. You are perfect exactly how you are. You are exactly where you’re meant to be. You are complete, and amazing! But again you aren’t supposed to be there forever, circumstances will change, your life will evolve, and it’s just a matter of how.

Now if you can see around the corner and be proactive about your growth, that’s when you really start to get things to work for you. But the perception is that it comes at the cost of your current self. So the question that comes up is, “Are you willing to sacrifice who you are for who you could be?”

Really think about this. It might make you feel a little anxious. The language in the question is strong for a reason. It honors the emotional, deep roots you have grown to maintain things how they are. But that’s the point - Either you’re on the leading edge of your personal evolution, feeling like you’re leaving your former self-behind, or you are unconscious and out of touch with the changes that you ultimately experience.

 Are you willing to sacrifice who you are for who you could be?

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

Life feels busier than ever and we're trying to get as much done as possible so we don’t fall behind. We can all remember that time we were brushing our teeth while doing a squat workout and preparing breakfast, right? As much of an exaggeration as that is, we do find ourselves multitasking very often trying to manage so many things all at once.

But contrary to what we’ve learned and believed we’ve been doing for years, multitasking is impossible. It’s a myth. The conscious brain is only capable of executing one function at any one time. If you don’t believe me, try rotating your right foot in a clockwise direction and then writing the number 6 in the air with your right hand. You can’t do it! And that’s because the brain is occupied with one single task, which causes your foot to adjust to going counterclockwise instead.

You may disagree with this and recall instances when you’ve successfully had your focus on multiple things at the same time. In fact we do this every day! But it’s not multitasking. What’s actually happening is something called task-switching. You can effectively manage multiple tasks at the same time, but your attention is switching from one task to another in micro moments rather than being held in the conscious mind simultaneously.

A leader of the Navy SEAL community, Rich Diviney, references task-switching in his book “Attributes”. He considers it a mental acuity characteristic, and he defines it as an ability to shift focus among tasks back and forth. When someone can do this quickly and efficiently, they are better at doing what we call “multitasking”.

To put it another way, managing multiple tasks is more about switching focus than it is splitting focus, and these switches occur so fast that we aren’t even aware it’s happening. 

Now to make this more applicable for you, let’s relate this with managing distractions. Sometimes you focus shifts without your intention to do so. Like when you’re in the middle of a task and your phone buzzes with a message. When that happens you must redirect your attention back to the task at hand, but often you return to that task less effectively. This is because your brain is still trying to accommodate for the disruption, so it keeps unconsciously flipping back to the text message and consuming your mental energy. This is called “attention residue” and it makes it more difficult to perform well in a task.

So eliminate distractions whenever you can to prevent your attention from being hijacked, and cultivate this attribute of task-switching to increase your cognitive capabilities.

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

In life our focus often goes toward the main thing. It’s the lead singer of a band, the face in the picture, and the food on the plate. What often goes underappreciated is everything else that’s required to create something. What’s only partly understood is how that thing in front represents everything that had to happen in the background to make it all work. But not only that, a lot of the value actually lives in the spaces between the main pieces.

There are a few examples of this - Recently I was taught that “music is the space between the notes”. If there was no space, all the notes would make a chaotic sound being played all at once. It’s our ability to get creative with the spacing that is the real art of making music.

Another example is what we call “reading between the lines”. When someone tries to communicate, they choose their words carefully. But reading between the lines is knowing that you cannot accept the words at face value. The context gives more meaning to the words than the words itself. What recent events, tonality, motivations, emotions, and history are implied in the words. The body language and the energy of the delivery. That’s the space between, because as we know the same words can have very different meanings when said in different ways.

The space between is all about the unspoken, underrepresented truth that holds the majority of the meaning. There’s a process to everything that is carefully crafted to communicate something specific. The problem is, a lot of that space is subjective. It’s open to interpretation because it’s not overtly stated. So our mission then becomes to acquire as much data and context as possible so we can more correctly understand exactly what someone else is telling us. 

This involves being more observant of others. This involves putting our own biases aside so as to not muddy the details. Overall this involves us directing more of our attention to the spaces between so that we can be better informed about everything that’s happening in the periphery, that are implicitly bundled into the ‘main thing’.

So to integrate this for you today, reflect on this question and set the intention to really listen to the space between the music and to read between the lines - How can you be more aware of all the spaces between?

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

I see it but if you don’t see it yet, I want you to know how much of a gift you are. Your presence and love ripples into everything you do, and it truly makes a difference for others. Your intentions are pure, your care for others is clear, and you are a good person. What you have to offer is truly one of a kind and it’s important that you maintain everything incredible that you are. You need to protect your energy.

Everything in life is energy. A table is energy packed into a solid form. Thoughts are vibrations and waves of energy. All of that goodness inside of you I was just talking about is your energy. And just like waves in water, these energetic waves influence each other. So as abundantly as you share your energy with others, which I am all for, you need to also understand that you need to keep your energy safe so as to not spoil it.

It's sad to say, but the main culprit you need to be wary of are other people who are energy drains. Interacting with them can dim your spark and contaminate your energy. It’s important to be aware of who these people are and, when interfacing with them, guard yourself from their pollution. 

I heard advice recently that stated “Don’t pull people further than they want to go.” And it’s really hard. There might be someone you really care about, who you’re committed to supporting, and you want so much for them. The problem is that if they’re unwilling to change, you take on the burden. And if you fall short (which happens often when someone is resisting you every step of the way) it ends up depleting your energy and making you question your conviction.

So to extend the advice that I got - If someone wants to go to the moon, then get ready to meet them there! There does not need to be a limit to how much you can support someone. But if they’re not committed to it themselves then there’s not much you can do about it, and in trying to help them you’ll be exposing your energy to being attacked.

This is hard to navigate, but first know how much of a gift you are. Be confident in your energy, your intentions, and your authenticity. Then be selective about where you invest it because the worst thing you could do for others is allow them to turn down your shine. Guard your goodness and protect your energy, so that you have more of it for more people, more often.

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily

When it comes to creating improvement there are two primary value drivers, which are making things more effective and more efficient. These two ideas are so intertwined that they often are stated next to each other, and even used in place of each other. But not only are they very different things, there’s a specific order that allows for things to truly generate value in your life.

Being effective is about doing the right things. It’s about knowing what things are the greatest contributors to the outcomes you want and focusing on doing those. It’s about quieting the distractions so that the direction of your effort is maximized. Like hitting a bulls-eye, being effective allows for your performance to create the exact results you were looking for because you have successfully narrowed things down. Being more effective is an evaluation on what you’re doing and what’s coming from it.

Being efficient is about minimizing the time and energy spent to fulfill a task. It involves using automation, templates, and reproducible systems to ensure repeatable quality. It’s looking at all the steps and determining what is most essential and where processes can be better. Being efficient is about maximizing the output from your input within a specific task, and in that way it’s more about how you do things rather than what you’re doing.

With that understanding, the order here matters. If you focus too quickly on optimizing a process, it’s very possible that you get very good at doing the wrong thing. That’s why you must first identify what the most effective things to do are, what truly moves the needle unlike anything else, and then once you’re confident you're getting results you can focus on how to make that activity easier and more scalable.

This applies in business and life. In business, it doesn’t make sense to create a system around how to set the agenda for a certain call when that call isn’t valuable in the first place. In life, it will not be valuable for you to build out a full mindfulness practice before you even try it and now that it’s helping you reduce anxiety.

The priority is to first figure out what works, what is most effective in creating a desired result. Then after you've proven that, you can make it more efficient so that it gets to the reproducible level you desire. But you must do it in that order or you might be wasting a lot of time and effort.

If you want to be more effective, and efficient, and to accelerate your self-growth so that you can experience the fulfillment of living meaningful days, I can tell you more about the 3 step process I’ve put together that gets you from stalled in a plateau to full-life balance and prosperity in 60 days.

You’ve probably found goal setting has been an effective way to get more serious about something. As we know, things don’t happen on their own and we need to play an active role in creating it. But when we think of goal setting it’s usually through the lens of achievements and accomplishment. Goals like wanting to workout a certain number of times, wanting to hit a milestone at work, or wanting to start something new. But this same concept can be used on things that are fun to do too!

Have you ever set a goal about how much time you want to spend with friends, or how often you want to do your favorite activity? Goals are simply an expression of your intentions and it provides a more narrow focus on what specifically you’re working toward. And just like normal achievement-based goals, you should be setting fun goals too. And that’s for two key reasons.

First is it makes you feel more productive. Remember, productivity isn’t only about how much you get done in a day… It’s simply about doing the things you want to do. This certainly applies to the fun things you want to do as well, and when you set a goal to do the things you enjoy doing, it makes you feel like you’re making a good use of your time. It makes you feel less guilty and more empowered because you’re living with intentionality. A productive life is a fulfilling life.

The second thing setting fun-goals does is it holds you accountable to actually doing fun things. Just like any goal, if you fall short of succeeding you need to answer to why you didn’t get it done. Why it wasn’t prioritized, why it was neglected. And in that evaluation, you naturally devise ways to correct the error and do fun things more often. This will help you incorporate more joy and fun into your life, which will lift your mood, nourish your spirit, and inspire you to find more delight in your life.

So to incorporate this in your life right now, answer this question for yourself - What thing do you really enjoy doing, that you want to do more of, that you aren’t prioritizing right now? You deserve to serve yourself, and truly enjoy this thing we call life.

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…)

If you’re in the US or Canada, text me at 949-799-0788 and I’ll send you daily text messages that help you grow and discover yourself every day.

Not in the US or Canada? Send me a DM on Instagram to @self.improvement.daily