There’s a fascinating but unsurprising psychological principle called “The Audience Effect”. Basically, when you’re being watched by someone else, your performance improves. The Audience Effect is a derivative of “The Hawthorne Effect” which states that performance improves simply by being observed.

But there’s extra power in play when someone else is observing you, and it ties into our hardwired social dynamics. Evolutionarily it serves humans to impress others. When we do it means that others are more likely to place higher value in us, and when that happens it gives us higher placement in the social hierarchy and offers more support for our survival.

This is why we’re ‘on our best behavior’ when we’re around others. We’re more likely to put the shopping cart in the receptacle, choose salad over fries, and be more enthusiastic in conversations with people we want to like us.

I can certainly speak first-hand to how I’m impacted by this. Given that I talk about personal development every day and lead a community of people wanting to be the best version of themselves, I’m constantly held accountable to practicing what I preach. I hold myself to a higher standard because other people are watching what I do. And it helps me to be a better person.

It’s very simple to leverage The Audience Effect for yourself. All you have to do is tell people to start watching and create an expectation to maintain. Tell people you’re going to exercise 3x a week. Tell people you’re going to spend an hour making sales calls a day. Tell people you’re committed to giving 10% of your income to charity.

The Audience Effect improves your performance passively, but it becomes an active tool when you convert it into accountability. A lot of people are resistant to accountability. They don’t want to put themselves on the line for something that they care about or that’s important to them.

To that I’d say, maybe there’s something else that’s unconsciously more important to you that you aren’t aware of. It’s called a ‘competing commitment’. Something else may be driving your decision making in ways you didn’t know. But with awareness, and courage, you can consciously choose what you want to be most important to you.

Engage others in your success and your success will boom. I promise you that.

If you want to be more accountable and follow through fearlessly on the vision that you have for yourself, check this out!

Last week I connected with someone who is becoming a fast friend named Floyd Jones doing phenomenal things in the social impact space. After taking time to share our missions with each other, I offered to support on a specific project that aligns closely with what I do.

When I expressed my interest to get involved, Floyd responded without missing a beat and with a perfectly delivered line. He said “Look before you jump, Brian.”

It resonated on so many levels.

The immediate meaning I took from it is about being thoughtful with what you commit to. It’s a reminder to really know what you’re getting yourself into because getting yourself out of it is harder than getting yourself into it. When you jump, gravity pulls you down. That’s the easy part. But if you want to get back up, you need to climb up against gravity.

The second meaning I took from it after reflecting on the conversation was more insightful. It assumes that you’re jumping, no matter what you see. “Looking before you jump” is a way to prepare yourself for what’s to come. It helps you to orient yourself about where to get started and set yourself up to be as successful as possible with the endeavor.

And the last part that resonates with me is simply having the courage to jump. There’s risk involved. You can roll your ankle on the landing. But anyone who, as Teddy Roosevelt and Brene Brown put it, “Dares greatly” puts themselves in a compromising situation. But it’s the only place where truly innovative and magnificent contributions can come from. So even if you’re scared of heights, those who accomplish great things jump anyway.

It’s true for all of the leaders we admire and the everyday people who take a chance on themselves. And it’s the surest approach we have to minimizing the regret we have in our life. Doing things the same way is the status quo. Jumping in is not. 

If there’s something on your heart that you’ve wanted to focus on more, commit to, or try, and your own rationalizations are keeping you stuck where you are, be intentional and “look before you jump.”

And when you’re ready, make the leap.

One of the great differentiators between those who are successful and achieve their goals, and those who are disappointed that they’re not getting what they want in life, is a willingness to do hard things.

If the big vision you have for your life were easy, then everyone would have it. If the road to changing the world was easy then most people would be at the end of it by now. 

If you’re pursuing something that matters to you and it starts to get hard, that’s a good thing! It’s an indicator that you made it further than most other people would. And that means that you’re on the brink of getting the results most people can’t.

Les Brown says “To be successful, you must be willing to do the things today others won't do in order to have the things tomorrow others won't have.”

I tend to agree.

This is also the core message in Darren Hardy’s “The Compound Effect”. Being able to do the boring, monotonous, repetitive, unsexy and uninteresting work that others can’t bring themselves to do is precisely what separates them from the rest. This is something I do my best to live out because I know it unlocks my fullest potential.

It’s the reason I haven’t missed sharing a weekday podcast episode for over 6 years. It’s the reason I’ve done 50 pushups every day as consistently as possible since I was 13 years old. And it’s the reason why I send a voice note of gratitude to a friend or family member every day. 

And it’s led to millions of downloads, hundreds of thousands of pushups, and many strong and meaningful relationships.

But hard things don’t need to be as hard as they sound. When you invest in setting up your environment for success, hard things become easier. Accountability makes it less negotiable. A standard operating procedure makes it straightforward. Setting and revisiting a goal makes it clear what you’re working toward. 

It’s the system behind the boring, monotonous, repetitive, unsexy action that helps you do it consistently. And when you do, you have the things (like incredible health, an inspiring career, and a loving personal life) that others won’t.

An idea that I believe is extremely important, but has lost its edge because it has been overused, is the intention to add value. Those who add value to a project or relationship tend to benefit from it themselves.

This is a cornerstone to what Jim Rohn says about getting wealthy: “We get paid for bringing value to the marketplace.” In one of his iconic lectures, Rohn talks about how dynamic value is. One person gets paid $20 an hour, one person gets paid $50 an hour, and another gets paid $500 an hour for doing the "same thing". 

And all 3 people probably put in the same amount of effort… What’s different is the value that was created by that effort.

But the amount of value that’s created isn’t only determined by the giver, it’s also determined by the receiver. Value is a perception for how well something satisfies a need, and if someone is of greater need then they assign a greater value.

For example someone might pay a few dollars for a bottle of water. But if that person went 3 days without drinking and there was only one water bottle left for many miles, they’ll pay a lot more for that water. It’s perceived to be of greater value.

Or let’s say someone invested in a new course. The person who hardly pays attention to it doesn’t think it’s that valuable because they didn’t get much out of it, but the person who studied the material diligently places great value in it because it left a huge impression on them.

Value is relative. It’s completely dependent on the circumstances. Understanding that, it serves us to think about how we can position what we do to maximize the value we can offer. When we get more effective at identifying, communicating, and solving people’s problems, the value you create attracts a lot of value in return.

So think about how you can be of service today. What’s the biggest thing you have to contribute, and how do you get yourself contributing that more often?

Something that a lot of busy, purpose-driven leaders struggle with is achieving balance in their life. It’s easy to let our passion and ambition make us too one-dimensional, and as a result the equilibrium of our lives calibrates to an unsustainable level.

While a true, healthy balance is an incredible catalyst in your life, what we actually want goes a step further. It’s not just wanting balance for what it is, we want it for what it does.

Achieving full-life balance maximizes the quality we put into everything we do.

Working long hours means that we're more likely to get behind on our exercise and cut corners in our nutrition, or trade hours of sleep for your health routines. It also means we might be short with loved ones, or rude in situations that don’t call for it, because energetically we don’t have our best to offer.

So if we don’t invest in doing the things that help us to be at our energetic best, then the quality that we put into our work and relationships suffer.

At the same time, ambitious, impact-oriented professionals don’t want to do meaningless work and just check the box to get a paycheck. We draw inspiration from being able to contribute to society, and our best lives include applying ourselves fully to solving real problems and serving others.

For that reason, it’s often preferred to describe balance as a ‘harmony’. Your work, personal life, and self-care don’t compete with each other, they synergize to positively impact each other. Your best work performance comes when you’re in exceptional health. You deepen relationships when you’re ridiculously productive during the day and you can put it away guilt free after hours.

In my life, I’ve found that arriving at my ideal balance requires two things. First is intentionality. When you’re intentional, you’re as aware as possible to make well-informed choices. You’re clear on the desired end result and the implications that come with it, believing it’s the best option for you and all of the factors that go into it.

Second is experimentation. Your intentionality optimizes with feedback. So experiment after experiment, you slowly fine-tune your overall balance based on the objective and subjective results you get from each iteration. Your first pass at balancing life will not be perfect. Experimentation will expand your awareness so that you can keep getting closer. 

This process is something I do every single day as part of my night routine in my Self Improvement Scorecard. I made a video walking you through it if you'd like to check it out!

Even though we have to go back 1.6 billion years to find humanity’s common ancestor with bamboo, we have a lot more in common with it than we might think.

Bamboo grows in two phases. First is the “Establishment Phase” where the plants grow robust root networks and store up their nutrients. And second is the “Shooting Phase” where the bamboo stalk grows out of the ground and becomes visible for all of us to see.

The crazy part is, bamboo plants are in their “Establishment Phase” for 3-5 years before initiating their “Shooting Phase”, where they grow sometimes 3 feet a day and reach their fully matured height in just a matter of weeks.

This means that for years there’s no observable progress. All of the growth and development happens in ways that you can’t even see. Invisible progress compounds until it reaches a tipping point where it transitions into explosive growth that few organisms in the world are capable of.

While this isn’t true of our physical growth as humans, there are elements of it that are certainly part of our personal growth. We work on our communication skills and then all of a sudden, we’re invited to share our perspective on stages. We invest in building a relationship with someone, and then finally it clicks and the level of mutual support quickly elevates. 

We’re making invisible progress in every area of our life, and as long as we stay disciplined and consistent, we’ll meet the day where the growth occurs. But too many of us stop too soon because we don’t think it’s working, or our efforts aren’t effective.

The next time that thought comes to mind, remember the bamboo. Patiently invest in itself and your foundation. One day, when the conditions are right, you’ll shoot toward the sky and realize the new heights you always knew possible.

In our personal development it’s perfectly normal to want a lot of things. We want to improve our health and energy levels. We want to be more productive and get more of the right things done in less, so that we can be more present in our personal lives. But just because you want something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

The best step forward to actually getting what you want is being committed to it. This means that you’re prepared to make sacrifices in the pursuit of making something a reality. Being committed sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but against the alternative it’s not as much as you’d think.

If you’re not committed, then you’re just interested. It means you’d like that something happens but you haven’t dedicated yourself to it yet. And this space is extremely inefficient.

Rather than putting all of your energy and attention into the thing itself, you spend it thinking about if and how you're going to do the thing. Energy gets wasted by indecision, hesitation, and negotiation. It’s like getting to a fork in the road and not making a decision about which direction to go. That thinking time could have been time spent on the road itself.

I’m not suggesting you make a rushed decision, but in most cases we spend way too much time evaluating our options rather than getting started and learning along the way.

When you make a commitment, you make a decision. Etymologically to ‘decide’ means ‘to cut off’, so commitments are just as helpful at eliminating options as it is aligning with them.

And primarily, what you cut out is all the wasted energy of wondering what you’re going to do about something you want and just getting started with doing it.

So to accelerate you forward, you can leverage a commitment device. Take decisive action in such a way that it commits you to a path.

This is exactly what I did when I finally committed to writing my book, telling a mentor the date that the first draft would be done by. No longer was I debating if or when I’d write my book and channeled all of that energy into doing it!