The one thing that will never change about life is that change is constant. Life is so dynamic and responsive to the environment around us that we constantly need to evolve ourselves to keep up. 

This leaves us all with an interesting opportunity, if things are changing around us, what’s our role in it? There are two different ways that things go. You can just inherit the way that things naturally shift around you and try to do your best with it, or you can be the force that initiates change and shapes the way the future is being created.

With that in mind I want to share today’s positivity quote - “It all can be different tomorrow.” 

It’s within your power to wake up tomorrow morning and mend your relationships with that person who means so much to you. It can be the day that you get serious about your health and wellness by committing to a new fitness plan. That you take on that overwhelming task you’ve had on your mind to create peace of mind. That you find the confidence to stand up for the value you offer in your work.

That is you creating your future, being in charge of what happens to you with ownership and agency. And the day that you accept that responsibility as yours is the day that you begin to control your destiny.

Jim Rohn is an iconic personal development orator, impacting millions of people in his lifetime, and he has a classic line that goes “I didn't change your life. I was just the last person you were listening to when you chose to change your life.”

Perhaps, right now, I can be that person for you. If you know that you’re operating at a fraction of your potential and you just need an infusion of motivation, some accountability, some new habits and systems that are more representative of who you know you can be, then make the decision right now to change your life.

And the way that you make that decision is to focus on the foundational pieces of self-improvement that most people are overlooking, and it’s the reasons why they’re struggling to be more consistent and feeling held back. 

We can address that together in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. The Challenge only takes 5 minutes a day for 21 days but that’s all it takes to install of the life operating system that you can use to improve anything about your life, reach elite levels of consistency and productivity, and build momentum that inspires you to show up as the best version of yourself in every moment of every day.

I can’t change your life, I wish I could, but I can be the person you listen to when you choose to change your life. You can take that step for yourself by registering right now for the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. And seriously, do it right now because it’s a live challenge and we’re getting started on Monday, so don’t make a mistake and miss this opportunity.

One of the things that will most quickly, most fundamentally support you in being more productive and improve the quality of everything you do, is building systems. A system is a procedural way of doing things that allows for predictable outcomes to be produced with less effort and resources. If you feel like you don’t have enough time and energy in the day to do everything you want to do, your way out of it is systems.

Not only is this true on the side of making improvements to your life, it also applies to the challenging aspects too. In “Atomic Habits” James Clear says “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This means that if you want to turn your game up a notch, and deliver on it consistently, you need to have systems.

If systems are clearly so good and effective, why don’t we have more of them?

The answer is in human nature - we are lazy and because of that we’re often unwilling to put in the work required to build the system. In order for the work to be done efficiently, you need to invest in building the system. 

Instead of doing the thing, you apply your time and effort doing things that help you to do the thing. It seems like a waste until you have the system in place and it supports you in doing the thing over and over and over again, making each time way easier than it was before. But many people aren’t interested in doing the little extra in the short-term that creates huge efficiencies in the long-term.

So if you want to become more efficient and open up your capacity to do all of the things that are important to you - consistent exercise and self-care, reading more, progressing in your career - you need to implement a system. It’s going to take a little work, but if you have 5 minutes a day for 21 days, I will help you to implement a life operating system that gives you the motivation, accountability, and daily step-by-step routines you need to truly take things to the next level. 

Again, 5 minutes, 21 days to revolutionize your life and tap into the next level of your growth. This is the simple task in the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge.

You can be the person that does it all, and you don’t need to settle for less!

Do you ever look back at the end of the day and ask yourself “What happened?” Even though you had all of these great intentions for how the day was going to go, by the end of the day it all seemed to fall apart. Maybe you made unhealthy choices, you procrastinated bad on some important tasks, or you acted lazy rather than attacked the day.

Instead of having days that you later regret, how about you commit to living full, productive, meaningful days that make you proud when you look in the mirror?

Your days are a reflection of how you spent your hours, which are made up of minutes and moments. Do you know what dictates your moments? 

Choices.

Make better choices and you’ll have better moments, better minutes, better hours, and better days.

There are two types of choices that we make - the ones that we know we’re making and the one’s that we don’t. The choices we know we’re making are driven you your motivation and purpose, and needs. It’s a balance of tradeoffs that we think through and make decisions about. However, moments offer temptations, and your mission is to choose to pass on those in the short-term to support the overall goals you have in the long-term. That’s making the right choices.

The choices we aren’t making are driven by our beliefs and environment. They happen without our awareness but they determine our path all the same. Honestly the majority of our choices happen unconsciously which is why doing the inner work to change our state is so foundational to changing our lives. This is what people mean when they talk about your frequency or energy - it’s all related to how you unconsciously manifest certain results from the actions you do or don’t take, which are dictated by your choices. 

To start making choices that you’re proud of more often, there are two different things to address. First is to become more aware of the choices you’re making. Instead of having your unconscious mind influence your daily decisions without regulation, when you introduce moments of consciousness you can begin to see all of the ways your behavior came from the choices you did or didn’t make.

Then with that additional awareness, you can make the right choice easier to do. Set up your environment to make desired behaviors an extension of your surroundings, have clarity on exactly what you want to do so that you can follow through on it specifically, and introduce accountability in your life to keep yourself to a higher decision making standard.

If you want to start making better decisions more often to achieve the health, finances, and lifestyle you desire, I’d love to help you with that. The Self Improvement Operating system that you install in the 21 day Best Self Breakthrough Challenge gives you the specific awareness, clarity, accountability, and process you need to make better choices and reach elite levels of your self-improvement. If you want to be a high-performer across the board so that you fulfill your potential and make the very most out of life, your next step is to take 5 minutes a day for 21 days to implement this operating system through the challenge.

>> Click here to learn more about the challenge!

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Ask just anyone the question “What’s the most important thing in your life?” and you’ll get pretty similar answers. In fact, ask yourself the question right now -  What is the most important thing in your life?

The resounding answer you’ll hear, that you might’ve even concluded for yourself, are the people in your life - Their well-being, their health and safety, and enjoying quality time with them. Having strong, meaningful relationships with friends and family members is one of the most enriching things in life. 

The longest survey ever conducted just confirmed this. Having studied many people over many years, they found that the single greatest contributor to a happy life is the quality of your social connections. This was a stronger indicator of holistic wellness than things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism.

The reason I bring this up is because while many people really value their most coveted relationships, they aren’t very intentional about them. It's as though time with friends and family is one of the last things to be prioritized alongside life’s other responsibilities and commitments. Time with other people seems to be squeezed into our lives when convenient rather than built around like a pillar.

I’ve gotten more intentional with my relationships in the last few years, making sure I reach out to my Mom, Dad, grandma, and brother, and I’ve set up a weekly date-night with my fiancé Irene. But I want to take things to the next level, and I just heard a new idea about it that I’m going to start experimenting with.

Brian Johnson, founder and community leader of Heroic (a self improvement platform I’m a part of) introduced me to having “Deep Love Blocks”. Similar to Cal Newport’s “Deep Work Blocks” where you have the intention to create a distraction free work session, we can do the same with the time we spend with our most important people. 

That’s why it’s called ‘quality time’. And if we want to improve the quality of our interactions with people we need to be more present, less distracted, fully engaged, and multi-task less.

Creating “Deep Love Blocks” is easy - Assign a certain amount of time to be with someone and plan to be there. It could be as elaborate as having an activity planned or as simple as choosing not to scroll social media when you’re on the phone with someone. The important part is that you’re in the moment, and doing nothing else, so that you can give the time your best and receive theirs.

I know it may be hard to imagine, but what if when your alarm went off in the morning you got right up, fully energized and ready to take on the day? There’s a popular expression that goes “Rise and shine” to suggest this very feeling, and I want to break it down a bit because its advice is actually very helpful, especially if you struggle to get up in the mornings.

First, rise. It implies getting moving right away. The best way to do that is to keep your alarm out of arms reach so that you physically need to get out of bed to turn it off. Once you’re moving, it’s a little bit easier to do the next thing, and the next thing, to support you in have a strong start to the morning. 

Beyond that, the more quality movement you get in earlier, the better. This helps to wake up your body and mind to kickstart your engagement with the day. Whether it be a morning walk with a coffee, some stretching, or a full workout, the movement accelerates you transition from asleep to alert.

Then the second part of the quote - Shine. There are a few different things to consider. The first is getting sunshine. Our Circadian Rhythm, the body system that regulates our sleep cycle, uses external stimuli to facilitate its process. The primary trigger it uses is sunshine. So getting outside and hit with some sun rays literally helps your body wake up on a chemical, physiological level.

Another part of shine, which ties more into Thursday positivity, is mood priming. When you’re intentional about the first things you do in the morning, to make your internal energy pure and radiant, you set the tone for the rest of the day. Doing things like a mindfulness practice, gratitude reflections, or Mel Robbins “High 5 Habit” helps you to turn on your shine so that you can spend the day in its warmth.

And the final extension of that last thought - This energy is then felt by others. They will take it in, it will make them feel better and your shine will be reflected back to you. We can all think of that one person whose positivity and enthusiasm is contagious, who we want to be more like in that regard. You can cultivate more of that for yourself by following the simple advice “Rise and shine.”

The far majority of people want to be successful. It’s an indicator that we’re maximizing our potential, getting validation from others that what we have to offer is valuable, and as it comes to finances guarantees that we’ll live more comfortable lives.

But what does it mean to be successful? That varies person to person, and I say that the secret to success is defining it for yourself.

What happens though is we get caught up chasing the success that our world’s celebrate. It’s the expectations of the people around us that inform our own understanding of what it means to be successful. It’s the accolades and achievements that we see making headlines, that people in our circles talk about, which shape our own perception of success.

This is all learned. The experiences and lessons that were passed on to your core influencers have been passed down to you. As social learning creatures a lot of our beliefs are “caught and not taught”, meaning that they’re part of the environment we build our lives around rather than intentionally transferred between generations.

So, if you feel like you’ve been living a life that isn’t true to yourself, or achieve some form of material success that feels empty once you have it, then it’s a great idea to evaluate the environment around you that has influenced your understanding of success. What about your family’s history, culture, and past experiences has caused them to see the world a certain way?

Once you get a better understanding for that, you get to decide for yourself - Is that a way of thinking that you want to continue on with?

Different can be scary. It can challenge the way things have been done and people close to you may even disagree with you. But ultimately, you get to chase your own version of success, however you want to define it, and as it long as it’s contributing to your overall happiness then that’s what’s most important.

Do you ever let the fear of failure hold you back? It could take the form of worrying what other people might think if you don’t succeed, not wanting to look stupid by going for something out of your league, or wasting precious time by putting so much effort into something that didn’t come to fruition. If so, here’s a new way to think about it.

What if every time you were rejected it was actually protecting you from something? 

Just consider the possibility - I know it’s not easy to do in the moment but imagine how empowered and resilient you’d feel if you could, as Winston Churchill puts it, “move from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

That would mean that every time you got rejected you would be grateful for the way that your path is being reserved for the people and things that are in complete alignment with your mission.

The reason this all came to mind is it was the central theme of a podcast conversation between Ed Mylett and Jamie Kern Lima. In particular, Jamie had a brilliant elaboration on what this protection actually means. She said that sometimes the value you have to offer is hidden to others because it doesn’t serve you for them to see it. 

The people who reject you because they don’t believe in you, they don’t see the vision, they don’t want to work with you - It’s just a matter of them not having the awareness to know what you have to offer. And while it might feel insulting or like a missed opportunity in the moment, ultimately it’s protecting you from something you can’t see yet.

In order to get consistent with this new way of thinking, so that it becomes a genuine belief and thought you have in the face of rejection, you’ll need to do some work. 

The best way I’ve learned how to cultivate a new mindset like this is to intentionally and consistently induce the thought process. Tactically, this means that if you reflect every night on the moments in the day when you were rejected, and specifically assign the meaning you want to take from the experience, you can teach your mind how you relate with those kinds of experiences moving forward.

At the end of the day, if you manage to change the way you think about rejection so that you cultivate more resilience through it, you will be empowered to take action in remarkable ways with full faith that the right things are happening for the right reasons.

To circle back on this podcast episode I listened to - Ed Mylett’s show is one of my go-tos and this conversation in particular with Jamie Kern Lima was really good. They’ve got a cool special announcement in it too, give the episode a listen by clicking here!