Self Improvement Daily Podcast

I’m a huge proponent of accountability. Maybe it’s because it’s something that I respond really well to, or maybe it’s because we’re so strongly wired to not want to let other people down. 

Diving into the psychology of it, accountability works because the pain of disappointing someone else is more painful than the effort required to do the thing we committed to. It connects to our deepest evolutionary need for safety, which is compromised if the people in our tribe become unwilling to want to support us.

This is kind of contrarian... But I’ve come to understand that accountability is not doing what you said you were going to do. You might think you’re accountable when you worked out because you committed to it, or met a deadline for a project assigned to you. But if you break down the root words - ‘account’ and ‘able’ - it’s much simpler.

To ‘account’ for something is just to keep track of it. To observe it and know its status.

‘Able’ is just capable of taking action, so you’re ‘accountable’ when you complete the act of keeping track.

So you are 'account'-'able' when you reflect on if you did or did not do something. It doesn’t matter if you did it, you just need to honestly observe it.

That’s why in my opinion, accountability is awareness.

But do know, many people have a hard time holding themselves accountable by this definition. They don’t want to own up to the fact that they missed a commitment, so they avoid it and act like it never happened. They feel embarrassed and spin up a story that bends the truth to explain why something happened the way it did, rather than acknowledging the root of the issue directly. 

Answering to the fact that you made a mistake is meant to hurt, and it’s the possibility of pain that drives us to take action. Accountability is awareness, but it’s a catalyst for follow through. 

When we create the right relationship with accountability, we see every shortcoming as an opportunity to learn and strengthen our weaknesses. It’s no longer this tension of someone always looking over your shoulder, but a mechanism for growing into deeper layers of awareness and self-understanding. 

Accountability feels like a bad word because we think it’s a bad thing, but it’s supportive and empowering in nature. The more we allow ourselves to be honest and true to what’s going on, the more agency we have to change our lives to feel more aligned and integrity with the person we want to be.

In our efforts to become the person who we know we’re capable of being, we know that we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

We unlock our fullest potential when we’re more disciplined and consistent with our commitments, more courageous in the way we show up to opportunities, and more intentional to make better choices on a day to day basis.

The problem is, there’s a reason we’re not already as disciplined, courageous, and intentional as we want to be. It’s because our lives are perfectly calibrated to maintain the level of performance we’re currently at. Our life conditions are designed in such a way that we are pulled toward a specific equilibrium or set point, which is our current level of output.

So if you want to break out of that pattern and raise your standard, you need to disrupt your environment so that your life naturally settles at a new and more elevated level.

When you raise the stakes, you raise your standards. When you put something on the line - your reputation, your pride, your stated level of commitment - you create necessity in your life. You create conditions that require more disciplined, courageous, and intentional action or else there will be consequences.

For example, having a daily podcast requires that I share something new every single day. If I started missing days, people would call me out. There’s accountability embedded in my environment. If the stakes weren’t so high and I didn’t have an expectation to meet, there’s no way I would have kept up with this over 7 years later. But my commitment raised the stakes, and that’s why I’ve achieved a higher standard.

You can’t try to hold yourself to a higher standard just because you want to. But when you redesign your environment and create conditions that make you need to, you’re much more likely to follow through. All it takes is one decisive moment of bold action and things can permanently change. You just need to know what to do, and actually do it, because raising the stakes and cultivating necessity is one of the most impactful things we can do to bring out a higher-performing version of ourselves.

That’s why my first step in supporting you is to invite you to take on a 21 Day Challenge. When you sign up for it, you’ve raised the stakes, and plug into a system that helps you deliver on that higher standard. If that's what you want, give it a look!

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A very natural emotion to feel, which is a derivative of fear, is a sense of worry. You might be worried for someone else’s safety, worried that things won’t go according to plan and create problems, or worried about the news you’re going to hear that is uncertain or might have serious implications.  

Whatever the case: Worrying isn’t helpful. It doesn’t offer any value. In fact it usually creates more problems.

Fear is meant to be an indicator and create awareness for the risk that something presents. Ultimately, fear is meant to inform your decision making and how you choose to navigate a situation. The problem is, when you’re feeling afraid you’re in a compromised emotional space. You can’t be purely objective about something because your state of mind is biased. This leaves you more vulnerable to misinterpreting or misunderstanding what you want to do because you’re being influenced by your emotions. But nonetheless, fear is a meaningful datapoint because it’s adding something meaningful to your decision making matrix.

Worry is different though. Worry is just a chronic, underlying fear that continues to linger after a decision has been made. It takes up your energy and attention but doesn’t lead to anything productive. Is you staying up all night going to actually help someone get home safe? Is you worrying about a medical diagnosis going to change the results of a test? Worrying doesn’t influence the result but it hijacks your experience.

When you notice yourself worrying, the better thing to do is to remind yourself of the choices you’ve made. Choosing not to intervene and tell your friend it’s dangerous to drive alone at night. Choosing to seek two medical opinions and make decisions on your healthcare once you have more information. Are there more things that could be done for these situations? Sure, and leveraging your ongoing fear to take action in those ways is valuable. But worrying for the sake of worrying isn’t productive.

In the case where you’ve made your decisions and have chosen that you don’t want to take further action, the antidote to worry is acceptance. To find agency and ownership in the situation because you’ve gotten involved to the extent that you’ve wanted to.

A personal example of this is: If I’m on an airplane and we start to hit some turbulence, it could be scary. But rather than worrying about the plane’s safety, I run through an internal checklist.

Do I want to say anything to the flight attendant? No.

Do I want to take over the plane myself so that I’m in control of my fate? No.

Is there anything I can contribute to influence the result of if the plane makes it or not? No.

At that point, I accept my fate. And I no longer feel nervous, anxious, or worried because it’s an emotion that doesn’t serve any purpose, and I get grounded in the ways I’m choosing to show up in the situation.

Now that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with you if you worry. Again, it’s a very natural thing to do. But what I wanted to offer today is a perspective around it so that you can process your worry and use your attention and energy in ways that are more valuable. 

We live our lives in our own minds. Our perception comes from our perspective, and since we can’t view the world in any other way, we don’t think to question it. But you are not your thoughts. 

Even though our thoughts are produced from our minds, they cannot be taken as truth. They’re biased by years of conditioning and teaching from unverified, unregulated sources. And it’s hard to understand because we don’t know any different. Like an animal that’s lived in captivity, we don’t have the perspective to imagine anything else. But that doesn’t guarantee our thoughts are right or accurate. It simply our best interpretation of events that's filtered through the small slice of consciousness we’ve acquired.

I’d heard this insight before but it landed again in conversation with a friend and mentor of mine, Larry Kesslin. This is what he said:

“I always believed that my thoughts were me, and for 61 years of my life that’s how I lived. And that I’ve been through a few experiences that have gotten me outside of my being, and that I’m more than my thoughts and I’m more than my feelings.

So in the first chapter of the book I talk about this concept that we’re three parts: We are mind, body, and soul. And our soul is the guide.

Our soul is the sky, our thoughts are the clouds, and the weather is our feelings. The sky just sees the clouds and experiences the feelings. It is not the clouds and it is not the weather. So who are we?

And as soon as I realized that I am more than my thoughts and feelings, I started to gain agency over my thoughts and my feelings. When I could get to the point where I’d have a thought and say ‘I don’t like that thought, next’, life started to change.”

What I make of this is, we can acquire a whole new perspective when we separate from our thoughts and feelings, and observe them. They’re not you, they’re just things being expressed by you externally. So when you have a negative, scary, or disempowering thought that doesn’t serve you, you don’t need to believe it. And because of that you don’t need to get so critical or judgmental that there’s something wrong with you. You can choose to believe what you want to believe about yourself, and act from that frequency instead.

This is just a snippet from a longer conversation I had with Larry where we go into way more detail about his new book, ‘The Joy Molecule’, and he tells some incredible stories about how he and others have found a deeply fulfilling joy.

Watch a recording of that conversation!

Order a copy of 'The Joy Molecule'

One of the most foundational ingredients to building a thriving and fulfilling life is having a growth mindset. Tom Bilyeu argues that having a growth mindset is evidenced in that you have the only belief that matters:

“If you believe that when you put time and energy into getting better at something, you’ll actually get better at that thing.” 

This one belief unlocks improvement in every  area of your life because it unlocks your ability to acquire the skills in whatever way is required to produce positive change. A growth mindset means that you’re in control of your fate and your future, not at the mercy of whatever you’re given. 

Taking the opposite perspective - if you believe that your results are fixed, predetermined, and unchangeable - then no matter how hard you try all attempts to improve are a waste of time. Why would anyone invest in anything if they didn’t think that they’d get what they want from it?  I wouldn’t either. This is what’s known as a fixed mindset and it cripples so many people. 

I bring this up because I want to help you recognize one subtle way that having a growth mindset shows up in the world. 

You know how some people are stubborn, adamant, and dictatorial in the way they approach things? How they have a ‘my way or the high way’ mentality where they think they know the right way to do something? Contrast that with someone who always thinks that there’s a better way to do something. They have good ideas and will advocate for them, but also have an open-mind to other possibilities. 

The way someone shows up to collaborative situations demonstrates whether they have a growth or fixed mindset.

For example, let’s say that you’re trying to load up a van for an event. Boss #1 has done it before knows the exact orientation that worked in the past, so they insist it’s packed exactly the same way again because it’s predictable and works. Boss #2 has similar experience, but is open to innovating and seeing if there are other configurations that are more favorable. Perhaps there’s a way to pack the van so that the passenger seat is open and you don’t need to take a separate car to the event.

Boss #1 has a fixed mindset that accepts reality as is, and doesn’t think to improve upon it. Boss #2 has a growth mindset and explores different options that can streamline the process, or create a better result from the same raw materials.

While you can’t control other people’s collaborative approach, you can be aware of your own. So get curious about how you receive new ideas, if you carefully consider them or not compared to the current ways of doing things, and learn something about how strong your growth mindset actually is versus what you believe it to be.

People are obsessed with having good habits, and for good reason. Good habits lead to consistent positive actions that generate the results (and realities) we envision for our lives. And while I agree that it’s important we have good habits if we want to be more successful, many people don’t actually know how habits work.

Fundamentally, a habit is an unconscious behavior pattern - a mental shortcut that makes you do things without having to think about it. It’s an evolutionary invention that ensures our limited attention and effort doesn’t get wasted on doing the same things over and over again. It’s an adaptation that helps us save our mental bandwidth for things that need to be thought through more.

So when people talk about focusing on building a new habit, what they actually mean is that they want to get consistent with a new action with the hope that the mind will learn to do it automatically and it becomes a habit. And the reason I make that distinction is because the process of getting to that point is one a little different than what you might expect. 

Starting any new action is going to feel hard to do. Our mind will want to hold onto the comfort and familiarity of the way things are, and in an attempt to do so will create resistance. This is commonly known as self-sabotage. That means we must overcome the headwind keeping us from taking action in order to follow through on it.

Most people’s approach to doing that is to use willpower, to grind their way through. But you’ve probably heard that willpower doesn’t work, and that’s because it has two limitations:

1) Willpower is finite and mental fortitude fatigues as it’s being used.

2) Willpower is a conscious process, so in the moments when you aren’t actively telling yourself to ‘push’, you won’t operate at the higher standard you want to.

Instead, the more sustainable intervention is to design your environment. You can architect a ‘wind at your back’ so that conscious action doesn’t require as much effort and you reach the threshold for action more consistently.

And that’s the thing. When you design your environment to support taking action and do so consistently, you’re training and repatterning your unconscious mind. You’re teaching yourself how you exist on a daily basis. Once that’s integrated at an identity level and within your belief system, then you start doing the thing that was once difficult by default. 

That’s what ultimately makes it a habit - the action happens automatically as a part of what you naturally do. And that’s your opportunity to get truly consistent with your best self practices. But we must first earn the right for something to become a habit, and we do that by designing our environment to support our effortful consistency with it until it becomes unconscious.

One of my favorite concepts in Napoleon Hill’s timeless classic ‘Think And Grow Rich’ is “the seed of equal or greater benefit”. 

Here’s the main idea: In everything that happens to you, desirable or not, there is always something better conspiring for you. 

It argues that what might appear to be a setback, challenge, or failure is actually a set up for something even better that you didn’t even realize - A lesson you didn’t know you needed to learn, an experience you didn’t know you needed to have, or an opportunity you didn’t even know you were missing. 

Napoleon Hill encourages you to have faith that there’s always a seed of equal or greater benefit at all times, and that it’s upon us to install a consciousness that can identify exactly what that might be.

For example, let’s say you’re filing for divorce. Something like that could feel like the biggest failure you’ve ever had in your life. The opportunity is to explore how that situation might be serving you, your future, and your personal evolution. The possibilities are endless for how devastation could turn into divinity. Now that’s not to say it’s not supposed to hurt, but to share that it has purpose.

Ultimately, this means that there’s no such thing as bad news. Everything at all times is working in your best interest. Either you get what you want or better! Everything that happens to us is a gift to us.

But, that’s not always material in the moment. Failure doesn’t turn into favor in a moment. And that’s why he calls it ‘a seed’.  Seeds take a while to grow, mature, and bear fruit. They lie latent underground and invisible until they sprout.

All this to say, just because things are conspiring for us does not mean that we have immediate evidence that it’s happening. In fact most times we don’t. But again that’s why we must act in good faith as if it is, so that we don’t miss the fruit when it’s ready for us.

Like a farmer with his crop, be patient. Nurture the kernel. Believe in its possibility. Trust the process is working even if you can’t see it. Live with that intention, that everything has a seed of equal or greater benefit, and your life will prosper.

In a post about recent life lessons that Codie Sanchez shared on LinkedIn, she said “You don’t need more time, you need more deadlines”, and I think she’s right.

I mean getting more time would be great… Theoretically it means we’d be able to do more research and run through more revisions to prepare something. And you'd think that means we we’d be able to do more things with more capacity. 

But let’s be honest… If you had extra time, you’d just do more of what you’re already doing with the time you already have.

You couldn’t reasonably expect anything different. So if that means you already spend too much time putting out fires or scrolling on social media, you’d fill the extra time with more of the same.

If the goal is to get more and better work done, the stronger intervention would actually be to decrease the time you have to do it. The constraint would squeeze out the waste. We value what’s finite, and having a limited amount of time would make us use it more wisely.

The best way to manufacture that is by imposing deadlines, and that’s for a few reasons:

1) Instead of having an indefinite amount of time to do something, you create your own constraints. This operates as a forcing function that requires you stay focused on only what’s most critical.

2) It makes you push things to completion. Rather than spending so much time tinkering in your work, undoing and redoing efforts to try and get something from 90% to 95%, you must accept that your finished product will be imperfect. In that way, you waste less time doing redundant and low-leverage work so that you can transition to doing something more valuable.

3) As an extension of that, just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean that you sacrifice quality. We each have our own internal standard for what we put out into the world. That means if we have less time to do something, we’ve simply have to get to a higher level of quality faster. And when that’s the task we get more creative, resourceful, and direct to meet levels of output that we’re unwilling to compromise on.

What if it were that easy? What if rather than being a victim to Parkinson’s Law (which states that our work will expand to fill the amount of time we’ve allotted to doing it), we use it to our favor and compress our workdays into more intense, impactful, high-quality sprints?

It’s worth a try isn’t it? Set a deadline for yourself, actually enforce it, and see what happens.