Something I want to encourage you to question is your relationship with stress. The physiological definition of stress is “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” Notice in this definition how there are two different conditions that cause stress. The first is in adversity and the second is upon extreme demand. What’s not nearly well enough understood about stress is that is plays a purpose in both positive and negative situations.

As it relates to adversity - This is when something isn’t going right and the stress provokes concern, doubt, or worry. This corresponds with the first version of stress which is called distress. Distress is associated with negative emotions like anxiety, sorrow, and pain. It’s something that we want to avoid at all costs because it really affects our well-being. While that is a good intention to have, when you are feeling distress it’s simply indicating that things aren’t where you want them to be in your life, and it’s an alarm for change. So in that way, distress is meaningful and useful.

The second circumstance is when you’re doing something very demanding. This happens when you’re working out hard, pushing yourself through a project, or doing something outside your comfort zone. We don’t often equate this to stress because the challenge experienced creates short-term moments of pain and strain, but it doesn’t carry lasting negative emotions. But this is in fact stress, and the term for it is eustress. Eustress is the strain you experience when you place temporary demands on yourself, often intentionally, and it is an incredible source for growth because it allows you to access new frontiers in your mind and body.

Despite what we’ve come to learn, stress is actually really good for you. It’s only when it becomes chronic and unrelenting where it can cause health issues. But once you learn how to manage it, and induce it in controlled ways, you’ll start to really see the benefits.

Now reflect on both sides of this right now - What is causing you distress right now, and what is an opportunity for eustress?

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…)

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As taboo as it might be, something that is very closely tied to our personal well-being is our finances. The reality is money is a huge source of stress and challenge for many people, and while I’m far from an expert on financial management (which is why I don’t talk about it much), I wanted to share a basic principle that relates to your spending, which is about being intentional.

Just like anything else, the way you spend your money is your choice. And when it comes to making choices it’s important that you make your decision through these two lenses: 1) Is this something I actually need?, and 2) Is this a value exchange I’m willing to engage in?

Whether it’s our time, money, energy or attention, we must be aware of the fact that we’re vulnerable to manipulation. We can be persuaded to think a certain way based on the emotions we feel or the urgency, scarcity, or prestige associated with the decision. And particularly with money, marketing has gotten really good at making us feel a certain way to bias our decision making process and purchase things that we wouldn’t with a clear mind.

So the lesson today is to double check your spending. Get really clear on what things you’re investing your money into just so that you can be aware of your habits. Many people, myself included, have a tendency to avoid their finances because it feels uncomfortable and even embarrassing to feel so incompetent or negligent. And it’s easier to just ignore it. But keeping it in the back of your mind affects you more than you realize. 

When you have the courage to dive in and address your inadequacies head on, you’ll realize how liberating it feels to give attention to something you’ve been neglecting. It takes a weight off your shoulders and opens up your capacity to do more. This certainly applies with your personal finances and the best way to audit your financial choices is by simply looking at your spending.

Now if you’re like me, and you feel like this all applies to you but you don’t know where to get started, or you need extra accountability to actually follow through on something like this, I want to invite you to a free 24 hour wealth challenge that my mentor and coach Jim Bunch is hosting. It starts tomorrow, and in this challenge Jim will give you a step by step process to identify where you’re spending money unnecessarily and the encouragement to take action on it, helping you save hundreds of dollars a month. If this sounds like something you need you can register for this free challenge right now.

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There’s a lot of buzz around the New Year that causes a lot of people to reflect on their lives. "Who do I want to be? What do I want to stand for? What am I passionate about doing more of? What’s important to me?"

It’s a great opportunity to pause and align, so much so that New Year Resolutions have become somewhat of an expectation. While setting these resolutions often don’t work for people, there’s a great intention to it that I want to bring forward now.

Think about it. Exactly one year from now, you’re going to be in the groove living your day to day. You’re going to have different projects you’re working on, people you’re investing time with, plans that are coming up. It’s going to feel like just another day, but what happens on that day is still very much to be determined. You’re building toward it right now, and who you are and what you’re passionate about a year from now is the result of the decisions and priorities you hold right now.

Your future will not change if you do not change. We all desire a better life, and as the years pass, we hope that things keep on getting better. But hoping is not enough. As poet William Ernest Henley put it “You are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul.” Well today, in this very moment you’re listening to this, you have a world of opportunity in front of you waiting to be seized.

There’s a very clear path to getting what you want in life but many people aren’t willing to do what it takes to have it. First you must decide what you want. Cultivate that strong vision for how you want things to be. Then you need to backtrack and think of the intermediate things you need to do to create that vision. It can be uncertain and ambiguous, but having any sort of plan helps you to get on the path to then start navigating. Then finally, you need to do the things you’ve determined you need to do. You know this, there’s no replacement for doing the work and taking action.

To get you started on this process I’m going to ask you to reflect on this question - One year from the present moment, who do you want to be, what do you want to do, and how do you want to show up in the world?

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’m sure you’ve experienced a time when you’ve been in chronic pain. It’s uncomfortable, limiting, and exhausting. It puts a heaviness on top of everything, making everything harder to do because of the physical and emotional energy it takes to get yourself moving.

Something that is less physically debilitating is a toothache. But if you’ve ever had one, you know how consuming it is. It takes up your entire existence because you cannot ignore it or act like it’s not there. 

When you have a toothache the only thing on your mind is "Man, I wish I didn’t have a toothache! Things would be so good if only I didn’t have a toothache.” The crazy part is, all of the time you spent in your life without a toothache, you never thought twice about it. You didn’t even notice it. But now that you no longer have a pain-free mouth, it’s what you want most, and you realize how much you took it for granted.

The toothache is a metaphor for many things in life. What blessings do we pass by every day that we’ve grown accustomed to just being part of our lives? Running water, a garbage person who comes and hauls your trash away, your ability to walk, speak, and think. Your ability to call a parent, kiss your partner goodnight, drive to get groceries. Like a toothache takes away a painless mouth, imagine if any of what I just mentioned was taken away from you. Your quality of life would be different and you’d be envious of how good you had it.

That is how good we have it right now! We’re living in these privileges and blessings. It’s incredible, but we don’t think about it. But the toothache reminds us that things can change quickly, and we should be better at appreciating what we have before it’s gone.

Do you want to live blindly and passively, unaware of the good fortune you live with? Or would you prefer to exist in a state of gratitude and appreciation for the quality of life you have? To make that tangible for you today, take a moment to reflect on this - What have I taken for granted my entire life, and how can I acknowledge it right now?

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.

Take this moment to pause and see how great you’re doing! In self improvement we’re constantly looking for ways to strengthen our mindset, hold more self-love, strike a better balance, whatever it might be. And often it’s hard to know that your efforts are working. But trust me, whether you see it in the moment or not, things are getting better.

Just because you don’t have a measurable or noticeable outcome does not mean it’s not working. This is because of something called invisible progress. Often you need to invest in building toward something for a little bit before anything changes about it. A great example of this is boiling water. When water is heated up to boiling temperature it doesn’t immediately start vaporizing.

The physics of this is fascinating. What happens is there are additional invisible bonds and forces between water molecules that need to be broken in order for liquid water to change into a gas. So for a time, with extra heat it appears as though the temperature is not changing nor is the water starting to boil. It looks like nothing is happening. But in reality the heat is supplying energy to complete a process that is invisible to us.

Similarly, the reps you put in at the gym might not show physically on your body right away. The ways you limit technology usage around bedtime might not lead immediately to feeling more energized the next day. But does that mean it’s all doing nothing? Of course not. Over time, if you stay consistent through it, you’ll start to get noticeable results.

Your job in this is to trust the process. Know that you’re investing time and energy into things that are worthwhile. The overwhelming reason people try new things and don’t get results is because they didn’t give it enough of a chance to work. But with time, it will work, and you’ll be so glad you pushed through!

Let’s wrap this up by reflecting on this question - What can you be doing to make more progress in your 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.

Do you feel busy right now? Like when you look at the week do you see an overwhelm of meetings, commitments, errands, plans, and responsibilities? Not just your plans but also the plans that involve others in your care and life? It so I’m with you, but it’s not necessarily how we want things to be or what's best for us.

When you think of being busy that means you already have so much on your plate that you don’t have the space to take on anything else. This means that you’re spending time maintaining things how they are, doing just enough to keep your head above water. A growth oriented life involves doing new things, new ways, with new points of excitement and challenge. Being too busy to take any of that on prevents you from creating that growth.

Or when you do add something even though you don’t have the space for it, which we do all the time, it will integrate with the wrong energy. Instead of being a source of excitement this new commitment immediately becomes a source of stress, and you immediately associate it as something that is making your life more difficult.

But why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we choose to live in a way that is overly demanding and busy? It all relates back to our basic human needs to belong, to be liked, and to be appreciated. We live in an achievement-rewarding culture, and for us to gain the acceptance of others we need to live in a way that fits the mold and is worthy of their praise and attention. So we stretch ourselves to do and achieve even when it’s not the best thing for us.

But the more influential piece to this is our ego. This also relates to our need to belong but addresses it in a different way. We’ve learned to associate what we do with what we’re worth, and in order to communicate our value to others we need to show that our time is valuable… So valuable that we don’t have much of it! So we choose to be busy and less available so that others value time with us more. This loop for external validation is completely driven by our ego.

Now the consequence to this is pretty significant. Being busy means we have less time to do things. Having less time to do things means we can’t take on new things that help us grow. If we’re not growing then we don’t have the momentum and excitement we need to pursue our dreams. And if we don’t pursue our dreams then we may look back at life and have regrets about how we spent our time.

Be busy doing the things you enjoy doing, of course, but that’s not all you’re busy doing. To make this real let me ask you this question - What are you busy doing that you don’t want to do or need to do?

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.

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One of the most human things about us is our ability to think. We can take complex topics and make sense of them, use memory and reasoning to understand the nature of our emotions and past, and create our future because we can use the present to plan and strategize. But have you ever thought about what exactly thinking is?

Ed Mylett has a great theory on this. He says that thinking is the process of asking and answering questions for yourself. While we don’t always recognize it as such, our brain thinks by constantly oscillating between thinking about what it wants to know and figuring it out. 

The same applies for negative thought patterns. Any time you hear that negative voice in your head, it’s simply a negative response to an open loop in your mind. Question: Do I really think I can do this? Answer: No, I’m not good enough. Question: Why are they so successful and I’m not? Answer: I must be falling behind in life.

But within this process there’s an incredible opportunity. We shape our thoughts with the questions we ask ourselves. Therefore, we can control our thinking by changing the questions themselves.

For example, after you do something, instead of asking yourself “How did I do?” you can ask yourself “What about that went really well?” The question requires you to provide a more positive response. Or if you notice something about someone that you’re jealous about, instead of asking “Why is she so much better than me?” (which would cause you to list all the ways why you see yourself as worse than them) you could ask the question “What about this person inspires me?”

To succeed with this process you need two things: Awareness that a question is being asked at all, and a plan for how you want to be thinking so that you can insert the question that provokes it. So let’s create some momentum there right now - What are some of the negative thought patterns you have that you’d like to improve?

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.

Something that has completely unlocked my ability to pursue my best-self, and stretch toward my potential is having a keystone habit. When you think of a pyramid, everything on top of it rests on the base. It’s the foundation. Like the pyramids of Egypt at one point there was nothing, but once you put the work in to build that first layer then there’s something tangible you can grow upon. The same goes for your habits and having a consistent, reliable, effective keystone habit will propel you to build positive habits everywhere in your life.

One way this works is through something called “habit stacking”. When you have one habit that you do frequently you can use it as a trigger for your other habits. One of the most difficult pieces to succeeding with starting a new habit is remembering to do it, bringing your awareness to remember to take the action. Your keystone habit can become that trigger that brings awareness to everything else that you want to do to improve your life.

What also happens is succeeding with one habit creates a new sense of self-belief and self-confidence. You start building momentum that carries into other areas of your life, and your success with your keystone habit makes you genuinely believe that you’re capable of success everywhere else. The voice of self-doubt in your head won’t be as loud. And your self-sabotaging tendencies like having limiting beliefs or irrational thinking won’t be so prominent because you have proof to suggest otherwise.

To get this all working for you, you need to invest in building that first first keystone habit. It will feel harder than it needs to be, your brain will try to convince you that it’s not important or doing anything for you, but all of that suggests that it’s working. Then through consistency and dependability you’ll break through those barriers and unlock a whole new level of possibility for yourself.

My keystone habit is my nightly behavior tracking routine. It is something that I do every night with very few exceptions. Within it I see how I spent my time during the day, review my energy and sleep, note progress on my goals, and audit life systems. But it didn't start there. It all started with the simple act of getting in the habit of checking in with myself every day. It helped install the habit of self-discipline, which has grown to become the strongest character traits about me and it has supported me for years.

This is a tangible, real, immediate step you can take to change your life. And if you’re interested to get the exact same keynote habit that I use working for you, then I’m inviting you to join the private group I’ve put together. It’s free and you’ll need to earn your place in it, but when you join I will help you live more intentionally with better habits, rock-solid systems, and more balance. If you’re ready to look back at the end of 2022 and be proud of the person you’ve become, and everything you've accomplished, you can get started here.