We’ve all had moments where we’ve been so engrossed in something that we lose our sense of time. We can all relate with moments of creative genius or brilliant insight that seemed to come through us involuntarily. It’s one of the most potent, most enlivening experiences we can have, and experts call it being in a state of “flow”.

Popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, people have dedicated their life to figuring out how we can create the conditions of flow to facilitate peak performance. And they’ve arrived at 4 Fs that help anyone discover moments of tapping into their greatest inner potential: Focus, freedom, feedback and 4% challenge.

As it goes for that last one about challenge, there is something called the Flow Channel. You can find yourself in the Flow Channel when you have two things - The right amount of challenge and the right amount of skill. When your skills are being tested to the appropriate amount, and not being over-tested, that’s when one experiences flow.

This theory becomes clearer when you think about the other parts of the spectrum. When someone’s skill is beyond the challenge they’re facing, they experience boredom. Being better than the task does not require that you are engaged in it, and therefore underwhelmed by it and disinterested.

The other part of the spectrum is present when the demands of the challenge far exceed your level of skill. This initiates anxiety as you’re set up for failure and simply incapable of doing the task well.  It’s so far beyond your current skill level that you can’t even learn from it because you’re so disoriented and out of your league.

The formula for finding flow is similar to the one proposed by Anders Ericsson about “Deliberate Practice”. When you practice something that is just beyond your means, just beyond your comfort zone with it, that right amount of challenge is a fertile soil for skill development. Too little challenge and you’re bored, and too much challenge and you’re overwhelmed.

So as it relates to the skill that you’re most dedicated to developing in your life right now, where’s that sweet-spot of engagement? What’s the right amount of challenge? Because if you find it, you’ll lock in deeper than you thought possible!

Everything in our self-growth exists on a spectrum and I wanted to share a personal story that shows you part of it. 

Throughout my life I’ve always really cared what other people think about me. I didn’t always have the courage to stand up for myself and what I thought was right, especially if it was different from what someone else expected of me. 

I was overly influenced by external validation and always concerned with how things would be perceived by other people. It’s something that I knew wasn’t who I wanted to be, but it was my nature and something I committed myself to working on. 

It didn’t happen in massively transformational ways, but rather frequent subtle shifts. I thought extra about times when I was worried about how my actions would be received. I intentionally chose to hold out on talking about some of the things I did to help others to reinforce my intrinsic reasons for doing it. I realized that my judgment came from this same source, so I began to intentionally reframe my thoughts when I caught myself projecting onto others. It’s not like it happens in every moment of every day, but for years it has been a focus for me in my self-growth.

It was only recently that I noticed how far I’ve come with it.

At the end of my runs I like celebrating by putting my arms in the air like a boxer who just won a fight. It’s my way of taking action to remind myself of what I’m capable of, and how I prioritize doing the things that make me a healthier and happier person.

But I used to try and hide it from other people. At the end of my runs, I’d look around to see if anyone was near me and if I was in the clear I’d put my arms up and have my moment. I believe the motivation behind this was that I cared what others thought about me, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was weird or crazy (even though logically I knew no one would think twice about it.)

Well I noticed a few weeks ago, at the end of my run, I was making eye contact with people and walking proudly past them with my arms in their celebratory pose. It wasn’t my first time doing it this comfortably, but it was the time I realized how different my behavior was than it used to be. It served as a timestamp of progress, my current actions and fears compared to past actions and fears, and it clearly demonstrated to me how much progress I’d made over time. 

Again, I share this story because the same is probably true for you. Maybe not about caring what others think, but that thing that you’ve been working on (and you don’t know if it has gotten any better), I’m sure it has and your moment to discover just how much you’ve grown is right around the corner!

I’m curious to know - Is it helpful when I share stories like this to let you in on my own world of growth? DM me on instagram @self.improvement.daily your thoughts , I’d love to hear them!

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Self-belief is one of the most fundamental elements to a fulfilling, purposeful, and high-achieving life. Ed Mylett calls it your internal thermostat and how we’re never going to achieve beyond our self-image. Mel Robbins says that lack of self belief causes us to criticize, judge, and tear ourselves down from being who we know we can be. 

I say it as the intro to the podcast every single day because I believe it to be true - “A better world starts with a better you and yes you can!” If you don’t have self-belief then you don’t have the foundation required to start, and therefore you never will.

That’s why I want to highlight today’s quote: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”

There’s a distance between where you are now and your goals, your dreams, and your aspirations for a better future. It’s not your reality yet, but with the right strategies you can bridge that distance and make it so. 

Believing you can, which is an entirely inner process, gets you halfway there. You don’t need to strain and grind and hustle… Your first step to believe you can, which is the biggest, takes you halfway.

And beyond that believing you can catalyzes what’s required of you to go the rest of the way. With self-belief the courageous actions you need to take to finish the job don’t feel so hard or straining. They’re in alignment, they come with conviction, and they’re just a natural byproduct of how you show up in the world.

Think of it this way: Who do you think is more likely to achieve their goal of running a marathon. A person who believes they can will show up differently for their training on sore days, be more disciplined in their diet, and get the rest they need. A person who thinks it’s a stretch for them and beyond their capacity has more space to make excuses, get distracted, and lose focus.

Now telling yourself that you believe something is true and actually believing it are two different things. Belief takes time. You need to prove it to yourself. And there’s a core subconscious process that is on 24/7 shaping your belief system and governing the way you show up to every moment.

If you want to learn more about how that works, and what you need to do on a daily basis to start getting your beliefs about your money, health, and success to work for you and not against you, I’ve put together a pre-recorded Masterclass about the Identity Behavior Feedback loop that walks you through it step-by-step.

An analogy that I like to use all the time for self-improvement is that of a garden hose. How often in our lives can we relate with the fact that we’re working hard and applying pressure, the hose is turned all the way up, yet only a weak stream of water is coming out the nozzle.

Our natural response is to try and pour more on and work harder, turn up the water even more, when logically we know that there’s probably a kink in the hose that we need to fix. When we become aware of the kink and take measures to fix it, our life can very quickly and dramatically start flowing with only minor adjustments.

However, the tricky part is not all of the hang ups in our lives are that obvious or that dramatic. Rather than there being a big bulging kink, maybe there are a few areas that are leaking or dripping out of the hose.

Let me take a step back. As people dedicated to accelerating on our path and in our self-growth journey, we want to do it all. We want to get into a better morning routine and work on our public speaking and spend less time on our phone and experiment with new productivity tactics and learn a new language and… and… and.

And trying to do it all at once stretches us too thin, causing us to make progress on none of it (or holding ourselves to a standard that is unsustainable).

That’s why our approach should be to address one thing at a time, to focus on one drip in the hose at a time. When we patch up our first, then we can work on our second. And we fix that one we move on to our third. 

It’s unnatural for us to be patient in a world that’s trying to hijack our attention at every moment, but you’d be surprised to find how fast you can get many things done when you do them just one at a time.

This is where I think it’s important to have a focus in your self-growth. If someone asks you the question “What are you working on?”, do you have a simple answer?

While it doesn’t make sense to neglect every part of life in service of just one, we make the most progress, fastest, when we have one emphasis that stands out among the rest.

So what’s your focus right now? What’s your one drip that you want to shore up to get personal and professional results to flow in your life?

If you’re looking for a place to start, I recommend you learn about the 9 Super Habits. These are the 9 most high leverage, most impactful, best ‘bang for your buck’ things you can do to fix your hose and get things flowing to the extent that they should be.

As complex as we can make life out to be, it really operates on one simple rule: Cause and effect.

You put something in and you get something out.

And while the full end-result is influenced by many things, most of which are out of our control, that doesn’t mean we can neglect the opportunity for us to feed into our lives what we want more of.

Using this concept more narrowly, what do we do if we’re feeling lost, stuck, stagnant? Well we need to input something different in order to get something different. Which leads me to something that my friend Ben Chung shared in a presentation we collaborated on last week: 

"If you search more, you’ll find more."

You can’t find what you’re not looking for right? And equally you can’t find anything if you don’t put the effort in to search.

If you need a solution to a work conflict - Search for guidance and advice, engage others with the challenge and get their take, journal to get clear on what you want and what they want to inform your perspective. It’ll help give more direction to what feels lost.

If you want to find your purpose - Search for it by hearing people speak about their passions, testing out a few things for yourself to see how connected you feel to it, introspecting on your own personal story and gain insights into what impacted you. New actions break you out of your current pattern and help you see and experience things differently.

If you want a romantic partner - You’re much more likely to find one if you’re looking for one. You’re clear on the type of person you’re looking for and you tell friends you’re available and ask around. Years ago my Uncle told me “You’re not going to meet the woman of your dreams sitting on your couch.” (With dating apps and everything these days that lands a little differently, but you see the concept.)

If you search more, you’ll find more. So don’t shy away from doing the work because it’s the only thing within your control. Hoping is not an effective strategy. If you want to find something, get something, be something, you need to get up and start looking for it.

The primary theory of transformation I use is a 3 part process that elevates in commitment over time. I learned this framework from my mentor Jim Bunch and have found countless ways to integrate it into my own self-growth, and those who I coach.

The 3 part process is - Awareness, action, and accountability. Let’s talk about each.

Awareness is a requirement for change because you can’t choose to change something you’re unaware of. But beyond it just being required, it is also an extremely effective life-catalyst. The far majority of the bad habits we want to change, the patterns we want to break, and the weaknesses we want to improve upon exist in an unconscious comfort zone. This means that they happen without us even realizing it.

However, this also means that when we become aware of it, we actively and easily choose otherwise. So simply becoming aware creates many quick wins.

This explains something called “The Hawthorne Effect” where performance improves just because it’s being observed. It's why “behavior tracking” is the #1 most recommended way to initiate change - Because it stimulates awareness.

The step beyond being aware of what’s happening is being intentional about what you want to happen. That’s why having a clearly defined action comes next. When you have a clearly defined action it helps you follow through on your good intentions because you know exactly how you’re meant to do. In the sea of options, having a predetermined action helps you arrive at your specific strategy for reaching a goal.

And last, the ultimate catalyst for change is accountability. With awareness and a clearly defined action, now we can layer on expectations. Knowing what to do is not enough... Getting support to actually do it is critical.

When we introduce accountability it suggests that a commitment has been made, and with a commitment your internal decision making no longer is about ‘if’ you’ll take the action but ‘how’. Whether it comes from a friend, a coach, or yourself, accountability is the driving force of change because it forces you do things that are uncomfortable or different, but in your best interest.

Now a quick example - Let’s say you want to improve your diet.

Step 1 is to create awareness. Keep a daily food log, reflect every night on how healthy 1-5 your diet was today, and seek to understand the factors that contribute to your daily food choices. 

Step 2 is action. Pick what diet you want to try, have clarity on how many calories you want to aim for or how many cups of vegetables. Get clear on your strategy for limiting sweets and snacking throughout the day. Action points your awareness in a specific direction.

And Step 3 is accountability. Make a commitment to fulfill that action, outline the expectations, and engage someone else to follow your progress. Knowing that someone else is invested in your success will help you to consistently make better choices.

If you want to change your life, eliminate bad habits, and leverage this catalyzing framework to create the transformation that you’ve been missing out on… It’s all built into the 9 Super Habits. That’s part of what makes them so incredibly effective! Click here to learn about the 9 Super Habits and how to implement them into your life through a simple 15 minute process.

A beautiful thing in life is how different each of us are. One person loves a food that the next person is disgusted by. One person is at their best doing things one way, and another is at their best doing it another way. This is something that should be celebrated and encouraged because diversity is a rich source for innovation.

However, with the limited perspective we have experiencing life through our own lens, at times we can find ourselves projecting our own preferences on others. We assume that our way or recommendation is correct because it’s correct for us. And when we care about something, we want to be helpful and try to improve it. But our way of doing that is often by making it similar to how we want it rather than what’s right.

An expression that touches on this, that I heard from my friend Lina that I love is “Don’t yuck their yum” meaning, if someone finds something else delicious, don’t tell them it’s not. If someone has a certain set of preferences about how they like things, don’t take that from them and tell them it’s wrong. 

If we do, then we’re invalidating their sense of self and disrespecting their uniqueness. We’re telling them that what they want or think is right doesn’t matter in our eyes, and that we know what’s better for them than they do. Clearly, that’s not a supportive thing to do.

Don’t ‘yuck’ their ‘yum’.

And the best way to do that is to approach things with curiosity. Rather than judging how things are and having assumptions about it, explore the context around it and seek to understand. When you see where they’re coming from you’re in a much better position to accept their perspective and find ways to be supportive within the context that has been outlined to you.

Ultimately, wanting to impose our preferences onto others is driven by the ego. It’s our own desire to maintain our self-image and validate our own worthiness that causes us to discredit other people’s preferences. But with tools and awareness that we build through our self-growth, we can show up as a better supporter to those we care about most.

This quote is more existential in nature, but I think incredibly important to consider.

Referring to Steven Covey’s “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”, habit #2 is “to begin with the end in mind.” We’re going to take that recommendation to the furthest extreme and relate it with the ultimate end we’re aware of, which is our death.

That’s where today’s quote comes in: “You can’t take anything with you, but you can leave something behind.”

When we pass, everything that has ever existed about us in the physical plane stays in the physical plane. Our possessions continue on taking up space in the world. Our home occupies the same piece of land even though we’re no longer in it. Even our bodies decompose into organic materials that are recycled and reused by nature.

Everything gets left behind.

And that’s not just the material, tangible things we have in our life, but also the intangible, immaterial deposits we’ve made as well.

This is what it means to leave a legacy. It means that when you’re no longer here, the impacts of your existence are still being felt. The larger the impacts, the stronger the legacy. 

You can leave wealth for your family. You can leave ideas, philosophies, values, and lessons with family members, friends, and followers. You can leave businesses, movements, and projects that continue on with their mission even though you don’t. And importantly, it’s the way that you helped redirect people’s life paths, which then creates infinite ripples into the future.

Our capitalistic society tells us to consume and acquire more things. That the more we have the better. But if we think about what we leave behind through this broader lens, what matters more - The leftovers or the legacy?

So let’s be intentional about what we want to leave behind because it shows us where to invest ourselves today and we can make sure to bring it into our world. 

The truth is, when we reach the end of our life is uncertain. There are people going to sleep tonight who won’t go to sleep the next. Tomorrow is their last day, and they have no idea. While unlikely, it’s foolish to think that person couldn’t be us. 

So how can we show up today so that something meaningful is left behind, that our lives did make a difference. What head start and opportunity are you providing for loved ones? What ideas and lessons? What projects and movements will continue on. What lives have been permanently changed by your presence?

If you’re not happy with the extent of your answer right now, go out and change that, today.

Do you want to make your life a story worth telling? My good friend Gregory Benedikt put together a step-by-step guide to help you define your legacy and take action on it! You can get that guide here!