Something I’ve allowed to affect my life more than I’d like, is comparison. At times I’ve found myself so preoccupied in someone else’s life that I forget to live my own. I’ve gotten a lot better at this over the last few years, and I want to share a few things to practice to have a better relationship with comparison.

First, don’t judge or think negatively about yourself if you catch yourself playing the comparison game. It is a natural behavior embedded in our subconscious psychology. As social creatures we need to understand the dynamic of where we fit relative to others, this is the entire pursuit of the ego, and it’s necessary. Comparison is okay, but being so negatively affected by it is not. So that must be the focus - To improve our comparative tendencies.

Knowing that comparison is going to happen either way, our task is to create a healthy relationship with it. You can easily do that by being intentional about how comparison is serving you. When you approach comparison from the lens of curiosity instead of judgment, you can learn a lot about yourself. You can become aware of the people, environments, and circumstances that cause you to feel insecure. You can begin to note what needs of yours need attention. You can discover that safely by being curious about the root of your motivation to compare.

Then also, to contextualize comparison, you need to realize that your perspective is limited. Any conclusions you try to draw from comparing yourselves from others, they’re going to be under informed because you simply can never know everything about anything. 

This is most clear when you compare your performance to someone else’s. Let’s say you and a colleague give a presentation. You evaluate your performance one way because you know every detail that was going on in your head, the things you didn’t touch on that you meant to, etc. … Whereas with your colleague you can only judge their performance based on what they said and did. But trust me, they are in their own head as well and noticed all of the little imperfections and slips in their performance too.

At the end of the day, comparison can be harnessed into a great tool. You can see the example of others and let it inspire you. You can uncover things about yourself that you didn’t realize were true and get to work on healing or growing. And you can flex your empathy and perspective muscles for yourself and others, knowing that there’s more than meets the eye in just about everything. So don’t reject comparison in your life, use it in a healthy way to serve you and your best self.

I don’t want to just tell you about this, I want to help you with it. If you feel like you often compare yourself to others, I've put together a 3 step process that you can use the next time you have comparative thoughts. It takes only 15 minutes and will help you turn any comparison into a superpower.

I’m sure you’ve been told “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet or see on tv”. It’s good advice because what is being presented to do you is biased, opinionated, altered, and positioned to achieve a certain outcome. 

What if I told you that your brain was the same way? 

In many ways the thoughts you have are no different. They are shaped, crafted, and ideated in ways that you aren’t even aware of to meet needs you didn’t know you had. For that reason, I’m going to add that you shouldn’t believe everything you think.

Your brain is filled with cognitive biases - Negativity bias where you’re hardwired to find and care about negative things around you. Confirmation bias where you overvalue the information that lines up with what you already think... A great example of this is endowment bias. In a research study, a group of people were split into two groups. One group was given a coffee mug and asked how much they’d sell it for, and the other group was not given a mug but asked how much they’d pay for the same coffee mug. The group that perceived it as theirs, who were given the mug, said they’d sell it for over $5 on average and the group that was buying it valued the same mug at $2.5 on average. The only difference is the mind’s environment in determining the value of the mug. That is bias.

Just because you think something doesn’t mean it’s true or that you mean it. What’s happening is your subconscious mind, with its biases, is informing your conscious mind about the context of the decisions it’s making. Your conscious mind is not aware of the context, it is simply responding to the emotional environment created by your subconscious mind. But with the right awareness, you can override all of this and make more intentional decisions - You are in control of your conscious thought.

The natural question becomes, 'If I can’t trust my thoughts, what can I trust?' You can trust your process. The way you’re curious about the thoughts you have to explore what might be motivating and influencing them. You can trust your own evaluation to determine what’s real and what is manipulated, what serves you and what doesn’t, so that you can choose to reshape your thoughts in a way that is in alignment with the life you want to live.

To implement this today in your life, let me ask you this - What are the checks and balances you use to manage the thoughts you have? Believe it or not, your thoughts are your choices.

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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I know it’s easier said than done, but today I want to encourage you to change your relationship with failure. This is one of those things that I struggle with, where logically I know the meaning I want to assign to coming up short or not getting the outcome I want, but when it comes down to it I still have old subconscious beliefs that override the training and make me feel bad about myself.

Ideally, we see failure as an opportunity to learn a lesson. We take Albert Einstein’s philosophy of “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that do not work.” What Einstein brilliantly does here is he detaches himself from the outcome and he treats every attempt as a way of getting more data. With that data he’s more prepared to do better moving forward and ultimately succeed, without being held back by 'not being good enough' or 'having figured it out yet'.

The best way to define that perspective is to treat everything as an experiment. Instead of being so emotionally attached to creating a certain result, experimenting helps you to observe everything as a third party. It prevents your ego from getting too wrapped up in the outcome, and therefore, helps you persevere when the feedback you get is unexpected.

I had a realization about this last weekend. I was spending a few nights at my friends Juliana and Martin’s house, and I wanted to take a shower. I didn't know which way to twist to make it hot or cold so I guessed. I made small adjustments and tested the water until I was confident about how to change the temperature. 

It was all an experiment and I didn’t think twice about it. Now imagine if I would have given up because the first setting I tried wasn’t hot enough. That would be absurd, and similarly in life, we need to experiment more and give ourselves more opportunities to understand exactly how to effectuate what we’re trying to do. It’s all experimentation.

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.

The choices you make, the things you choose to do, the way you treat people. It all matters. But most importantly, you matter.

But I know that it might not always feel like it... You might feel like a cog in a machine at work and if you left today someone else would be there tomorrow. It might feel like you’re doing what you need to do to get by with very little time for anything that’s not immediately in front of you. No matter how you perceive yourself to exist in the world, trust me, you matter.

Your emotions are real. Your joy, anger, anxiety, and fear is equal to anyone else’s. And you deserve to feel more positively about your life. Your influence is real. Whether you realize it or not, the things you do and the example you set directly and indirectly affects the well-being of those around you. The world would genuinely not be the same without you. And most importantly, you have a purpose. There is a reason you’re put on this Earth in the exact circumstances you have with the exact history you have. You have a real role to play in the world and we all need you to fulfill it. Mark Twain captures this idea in an incredible quote - ​​"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."

This is not a one-way street - People want you to succeed. People want you to reach your potential and maximize your abilities in this world. In general, people are good and want what is best for you. Don’t lose sight of that.

In the grand scheme of things, everything we’ve come to know about today will be gone and erased forever. So either everything matters, or nothing matters. I encourage you to choose to matter. See the effects your good will has on others, create what’s on your heart, speak what’s on your mind, and help others have a more compelling and enriching experience as they go through the moments of their life. You’re in a position to do that in a really meaningful and significant way, because you matter.

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 heard the concept “Fake it till you make it” before, and you might have a mixed opinion on it’s efficacy. I see both sides of the argument. On one hand, you need to step into the energy of having what you want if you want to manifest it. But on the other hand, that energy isn’t pure or authentic because you know that you’re crafting it to appear a certain way.

A less extreme way of sharing the same thought is to “Act as if you belong”. What this does is it helps you step into that energy without projecting any kind of intentional deceit. When you find the right balance some really incredible things start to happen for you.

First, when you act like you belong, people will start to treat you like you belong. It’s unfair to say but the truth is, everyone holds judgments about each other. In fact our ability to quickly evaluate others is fundamental to our survival as we constantly identify threats in our environment. When you put yourself in certain spaces, and other people are responding to those spaces, you generate associations that cause people to create certain judgements.

For example if you’re an aspiring venture capitalist, people will find you more credible if you meet them at a conference for venture capitalists rather than on the street where they have no meaningful reference points. This means that they’re much more likely to connect you to opportunities, take you seriously, and play a role in advancing that goal.

But beyond the way it changes the ways other people treat you, it affects the way you start to view yourself. By putting yourself in the environments you hope to be in, and becoming more fluent in the language of whatever that is, your identity will start to change. This is because your identity is made up about the beliefs you hold true about yourself, and there’s not stronger evidence to validate those beliefs than your behavior. By showing up and doing the things that make you fit in, your beliefs will actually start to shift so that this act that you’re putting on starts to feel more authentic.

If you want a promotion, start taking on responsibility and treating others as if you already have it. If you want to make friends in a new social group and hobby you’re not familiar with, show up and give yourself the reps you need to learn and develop.

Half of the battle is overcoming your fears to get the exposure you need that will transform you, and acting as if you belong will accelerate that process on all of these levels.

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. 

Have you ever set goals that are so big and daunting that you feel paralyzed to even get started.?Sometimes your ambition can be so big that it blocks out the sun, casting a shadow that makes you feel unequipped and unprepared to move forward. Or you’ve somehow assumed the responsibility of a massive endeavor that now you need to deliver on. 

There are many expressions that relate to this - People call it being ‘in over your head’ or ‘writing checks you can’t cash’, but today I want to use the expression ‘You bit off more than you can chew’. This brings me to an age old question - How do you eat an elephant?

This is a metaphor of course where eating an elephant is that massive undertaking you have in front of you. How do you possibly expect to complete it? How do you even start? What’s the benefit of doing it anyway? These are the thoughts that come up, generated by your ego which is trying to protect you from failure.

But the answer to the question is… One bite at a time. That’s all you can do to make progress on any big task - Get started and commit to doing the basic actions required to make incremental progress.

Now let me ask you, what are the elephants in your life? Is there that one ominous goal you’ve always wanted to pursue but it has felt too big to take on? What’s that life change you haven’t had the courage to make that would improve the quality of your life?

Many people rule out their dreams and aspirations before they even try because they figure it’s too far out of reach. But what I’ve learned, and what I want to share with you, is that when you commit to something and consistently make small progress toward it, you get there quicker than you expected. 

Not only that, but you separate yourself from 99% of the other people who’ve had the same thought but didn’t take action. My mentor David Meltzer says “the last mile is always the emptiest”. If you want to be great and live up to your potential, you just need to be good on a consistent basis.

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.

There’s a term established by Martin Seligman called ‘learned helplessness’. The term basically describes how some people choose to stay in discomfort because they’ve become accustomed to it, even when there’s a clear way of escaping it. Examples of this include staying with a partner who you know doesn’t treat you well, showing up every day for work when it’s a toxic environment, or sticking with the same unhealthy diet even though you know it’s bad for you. 

Taking a step back, the entire theory revolves around the idea that people perceive things as out of their control. There are two really significant implications to learned helplessness. First, it creates a lack of agency. While it’s not often talked about, agency is a fundamental human need. This might be more clear when you see it through the lens of two of it’s relatives, which are free-will and freedom. A person with agency is a person that has the ability to make decisions for themselves. They can observe, reflect, and decide. As it relates to learned helplessness, people are so occupied and desensitized to what’s happening that they lose their sense of agency within it.

This leads to the second implication, which is that people with learned helplessness have no interest in changing. On one side, they have no awareness of the fact that things can change (or need to change), but more critically they have no motivation to pursue things that are different than how they currently are. They’ve simply accepted things as they are and in doing so keep themselves stuck in the same repeating patterns.

Now how does this affect you? Well like anything else, learned helplessness is a spectrum. It’s possible that you’re crippled to the extent that you choose not to remove yourself from a situation that is obviously bad for you. But what’s more likely is that you interface with learned helplessness in very small ways. Do you consistently find yourself in financial stress, knowing how to budget but choosing not to? Are you tolerating the way someone is treating you, refusing to report them or confront them about it? That’s learned helplessness. And if you feel like any of this might apply for you, hopefully this has given you extra awareness to consider how you can improve your circumstances.

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.

Tell me if you’ve ever been here… You have a ton of urgent deadlines, travel plans, people you already planning on seeing, and a bunch of other random commitments. That’s a lot on your plate and it might not sound too far away from how things are for your right now.

In the face of it all, maybe you’ve told yourself that when things calm down you can really settle in and prioritize doing what you’ve really been wanting to do. But has that ever worked?

Let’s be honest. Things never slow down. Life seems to constantly be going at a faster pace than before, and it can be hard to keep up with it.

If you’re always waiting for things to slow down to pursue something new, exciting, or important, that day will never come. You won’t start. Getting into that new routine or habit will always be two weeks away. The diet and exercise program you want to try will always be pushed off. If you want to live your best life you can’t let that happen.

The only day you can truly effectuate is today. The only decision you can make is in the now. The goal is not to postpone what’s important to you hoping that you can accommodate it later. Instead you need to make it a priority and integrate it in a manageable way immediately.

Reading this at the beginning of July, when we've just begun the second half of 2022, you’re at an inflection point. You can choose to start doing it and take the rest of this year to prove to yourself that you can build the life you always dreamed of, or you can keep waiting for the perfect day that will never come. If you’re ready to make that switch and step up to the next best chapter of your life, and you feel like you've been postponing making it a priority, you'll want to check this out :)