We talk a lot about being less judgmental of others - putting our biases and assumptions aside to appreciate the uniqueness of other people who are different from you. Ultimately, that judgment suggests beliefs that you have about the world and how you view your role in it.

But something that is lesser talked about, but equally important, is the judgment we place on ourselves. We are our own toughest critic and oftentimes most difficult person to satisfy. I believe the reason for this is because we have full access to our own thoughts, seeing the shortcomings and missed opportunities that no one else does, knowing that we could have done so much better. This is in comparison to other people where we don’t have the same access to those thoughts and therefore must draw conclusions from everything that happens externally.

To paint the difference here, let’s use an example.

Let’s say you and a friend got the exact same score on a test, a solid 85%. You might relate with your own score unfavorably knowing that you spent some time procrastinating here and losing focus there, and deprioritizing your studying more than you intended to over the weekend. You see those as all of the reasons why you didn’t score better so you might be disappointed with the end result.

However when you evaluate your friend’s performance, you see it more objectively because you don’t have the same context. 85% is a solid B, which represents that they’re upholding their responsibilities in the class as a solid student. It’s very possible that they procrastinated, they were distracted, they didn’t study over the weekend even more than you did. But you don’t know or see any of that, so you’re not biased by their potential upside and give them fair credit for their result.

This is human nature and unfortunate at times because it can make us question ourselves and negatively impact our self-confidence. So how can we stop being our toughest critic and be more fair to ourselves rather than judgmental?

The first thing to do is to interrupt the unconscious script. When you notice yourself having harsh language in your thoughts, that’s your own limitations projecting itself on you. When you do hear that voice come out, try giving it a name - It helps to separate you from it and observe it better. That’s just “Critical Kerry” or “Judgmental James”.

Once you’ve done that, you can try planting a more empowering thought that’s representative of who you want to be. Acknowledge and celebrate your own self-awareness of your thoughts. Give yourself a reflective prompt that shapes a more positive response to the challenge or judgment you’re facing.

When you allow into your consciousness the way you ideally want to relate with the situation, you immediately create your better, more aligned reality.

Alright I know this is super cliche but please don’t let that keep you from embracing the concept within it.

I hope you can take a moment to appreciate the miracle that is happening. It all started by you winning the lottery when two cells, one from a woman and one from a man to create you. That cell then went on to exponentially multiply in the most intricate of ways to create a functioning body.

This body has more cells than galaxies in the universe and veins that have grown so long that they can wrap around the planet. This is all inside you. Then beyond that, this same process happened to every human you’ve ever encountered, who for whatever reason in space and time crossed your path in big and small ways.

We don’t recognize this miracle that is life because there’s so much hardship and suffering in it. Sometimes we don’t get what we want, things happen that are unfair, or we sad that our spark is slowly fading away. But what if we recognized this incredible opportunity that we have and made the most of it?

“Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

What does wasting life even mean? I can only speak for myself, but I see it as failing to apply yourself to the things that you care about, not allowing yourself to chase what you want and who you want to be, regretting that you didn’t make the impact that you know you’re capable of.

It’s having wings but never having the courage to fly.

But the wonderful thing about life is it takes a life-time to live it. And understand that just because you feel like you haven’t made the most of it yet does not mean that you aren’t on the path to.

Take Damon West for example.

Damon was a college athlete turned meth addict and criminal. He received a life-sentence for it and went to maximum security prison. His life was over and by all accounts it appeared as though he wasted his potential. But in prison he chose to transform his life, learn from his mistakes, commit himself to being of service to others, and by some miracle he was let our on probation after just over 7 years in prison. Now he’s speaking on stages across the world, supporting other addicts with their recovery, and making a real profound difference.

He’s taken this quote to heart and is living out his life’s purpose, which he arrived at in the most unpredictable of ways - “Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

Now what does this all mean for you? Well of course it’s what you make of it.

You can choose to see life through the lens of all the things you have to complain about, or you can choose to see that everything is available to you and you’re the creator of what happens next. Of course we all want to choose the latter, and it’s easier said than done, but knowing the miracles that have already happened around you to get where you are should give you reason to believe that many more are on the way!

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Last week I went through a guided meditation session that inspired a really interesting awareness of myself that I thought might apply to you.

In the mediation I was instructed to visualize myself crossing a golden bridge, where on the other side of the bridge were two paths. In my mind’s eye I visualized them - The first one was straight in front of me, flat, wide, well kept, and you could see a good distance in front of you. The second one took a sharp turn to the right and appeared to be more rugged, less maintained, and you had little vision beyond the turn.

In my visualization I without a second thought took the safe, popular path right in front of me and started walking down it. I don’t know if there was a prompt in the meditation or if it came from my own internal dialogue, but I gave myself a pause to consider what happened. I didn’t make a conscious decision about which path I wanted to take, I just moved forward with the path outlined in front of me.

In my meditation I chose to reroute myself, walk back to the fork in the road, and instead go down the sharp turning path. Immediately it descended intensely down the canyon that the bridge just crossed. I reached the bottom in an instant and saw a steep, treacherous incline in front of me. I started to regret my decision then almost magically I bounded up the face of this cliff in a supernatural way I’d never experienced before.

Of course this is all imaginary so I can only interpret the significance of all of it, but I think there are some interesting insights.

First is we all that path that is laid out in front of us. It’s easy, safe, and expected. It’s taking the job that seemed to fall into your lap, staying in your hometown, and otherwise conforming to the expectations of others. Now there’s nothing wrong with this kind of life, there’s a lot of richness in simplicity, but is this something you chose?

In this visualization I realized that I’m more susceptible to taking the easy path than I’d like to be, and would prefer to be more curious and exploratory of my options to make a decision. I want to choose my path forward rather than just inherit what seems to be in front of me. Also I came to understand that the riskier path very well may lead to the bottom, and make things harder than they need to be. But you never know what the environment might inspire within you, like a superpower you didn’t know you had, to help you elevate to heights you didn’t believe you were capable of.

Again, there’s no judgment about what path you take. If you know that you enjoy the ease and simplicity of a traditional life, you’ll achieve that by pursuing the traditional path. But if you want to do something novel, ambitious, pioneering, and boundary stretching, you’ll need to take a different path.

It’s experiences like this that make me really excited about my personal development journey. In becoming more aware of my beliefs and unconscious patterns, I can find new ways to create the new and improved life of my choosing. Hopefully this inspires you to chase the same too.

I don’t mean to assume but I’m guessing that the reason you’re reading this is because you want to positively change your life. You know that you need to become something different in order to have something different, with that something different being more joy, purpose, impact, fulfillment, peace, bliss, or whatever it is for you.

But doing the right things to evolve into the next best version of ourselves is a daunting task.

Where do you start, what do you focus on, and how do you know it’s going to work?

There’s no one right answer to that, but I do want to offer a perspective that might be different than anything you’ve ever heard before that could give you a new thing to try.

Fundamentally we want to change ourselves. With improved mindsets, emotional intelligence, physical fitness, habits, and routines we become capable of more than we were before. We want to make improvements to how we operate at our core. People call this your identity.

So how do you change your identity? Aristotle says that “We are what we repeatedly do.” This suggests that what we do, our behavior, is the vehicle for transforming who we are in our identity.

The truth of this philosophy is confirmed through the validity of expressions like “consistency is key” and “the compound effect” and “take imperfect action”. They all make the same argument to emphasize how critical our behavior is in our personal development.

Now let’s take it one step further, and this is the step most people miss. What is required to take consistent action? You might think it’s will-power or motivation. Those are both unsustainable sources that might work in the short-term but won’t last in the long run. The most enduring, effective, unrelenting influence to your behavior is your environment.

Surround yourself with people who are fit and you’ll find yourself working out more and getting in better shape. Immerse yourself in the wisdom of successful business people and you’ll learn the right actions to take to make your business succeed yourself. Use accountability and commitments to encourage you to make better choices that lead to healthy and productive actions.

If you want to change your life, change your environment and everything else will flow from there.

This is the change yourself chain: New environments lead to new actions lead to new identities.

So change up the layout of your office, work at a new coffee shop, boldly share an ambitious goal that you have to make you feel more accountable to pursuing it,  or make a pact with a friend. Try doing things that change the physical, emotional, and social environment around you, and see how it goes.

You could probably attest to the fact that people are busier than ever. In fact you may even feel that way about yourself.

As you know, being so time-restricted can have some unfortunate consequences - Important things are neglected or deprioritized and daily expectations aren’t sustainable, basically acting as a ticking time-bomb that will inevitably go off and create fallouts within your physical health, relationships, and sanity.

If any of this sounds like you, the good news is you can still do something about it. Except for in extremely dire circumstances, nothing in life is permanent. There are always new balances to strike and new ways to design your life inputs so that it creates new outputs.

The first, most fundamental shift you can make to achieve more work-life balance is to establish your order of priorities. So many of us allow everyone else to determine the way we spend our time, causing us to be more reactive to the things around us rather than proactive about how we want them to be.

More specifically, the shift is to schedule your personal life before your work. The way you spend your time is a reflection of your priorities, so if you feel like you’re neglecting important things, it means that you need to reevaluate the way you structure your time.

If you feel resistant to this idea, isn’t it worth a try? Just try blocking off portions of your calendar and enforce it. You’ll find that this causes everything to shift to accommodate the new intention, and by necessity you’ll start to create efficiencies and stronger criteria around what actually deserves your time so that you can make it all work.

To put it another way - You are a person with a career, not a career with a personal life. Start getting the order right and you’ll find that not only that this is best for you, but it’s also best for your career. Subconscious transformation expert Jim Fortin has a quote that goes “the doing is only as good as the being doing the doing”. 

If you feel like you only have 50% of yourself to give because you’re burning the candle at both ends, then maybe it’s time to start adding more quality to your life. This will change everything from the inside out!

When it comes to living a full and high-quality life, all of that needs to point to one specific thing that it’s all about. Some people call it happiness and joy, others call it fulfillment and life peace - Only recently have I been encouraged to think about it through a new lens, which is bliss.

When you imagine bliss in your life it involves a few things. It’s the serenity of feeling fully safe, secure, and untroubled. It’s being overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for all that you are and all that’s to be. It’s having a full and expanded consciousness around your current state, allowing you to be deeply in the present and clear on your life’s purpose.

Bliss is the catch-all that everything good fits within.

As someone who is pursuing a more blissful life for myself, I’m realizing that it’s more about what you don’t do than what you do. Feeling so self-assured that you can reject the temptation to judge or compare to others. To never compromise your values or integrity in what you do. To live without worry or doubt and a full faith in the process around you.

Just like we’re always connected to abundance (and our mission is to remove all of the things getting in the way of us having a clearer signal), we already have bliss inside of us in every moment and we need to peel back the layers of things that are keeping us from seeing it.

Bliss is a state, meaning it’s a physiological and emotional presence. It’s not determined by the intensity of an achievement, it’s more enduring than that and lives on long after the moment has passed.

At the moment I’m pursuing bliss by cultivating more mindfulness in my life, more intentionality in the choices I make, more clarity in the things I want to do and be a part of, and more gratitude for the way life is beautifully unfolding before me with divine design.

Do I still have bad days? Of course. Do I still get upset, ticked off, and frustrated by things that aren’t worth it? You betcha. But those things are becoming less frequent and my overall life experience is improving by pursuing this beautiful thing called bliss.

When we encounter a problem we typically want to solve it as fast as possible. If it’s a problem that means that it’s creating some form of discomfort, and we’re extremely motivated to alleviate it as quickly. However, if we go too fast we may implement a solution that only lasts temporarily and creates a recurring problem.

So the advice is to find at least 3 different solutions to a problem before taking action on it. Yes, this extends the amount of time you’re in immediate discomfort, but it allows you to arrive at a better path forward to more adequately address the problem. The pause to find different perspectives allows you to be more intentional about the future you’re choosing, with all implications considered, rather than take action in a way that is appealing in the short-term.

The way to see things through different perspectives is to ask different questions about it. For example, if you reflect on a certain situation by asking the question “How is what’s happening actually the very best thing that could be happening right now?”, you’re going to get some really optimistic ideas. 

To really make this point clear, consider the difference between these two questions: “What do I want to do about this that is the best decision in the long-term?" and “What do I want to do about this that solves this problem the fastest?”

Tony Robbins says “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask.” Unsurprisingly, it was a Tony Robbins suggestion to try to find 3 solutions to a problem before moving forward with any of them.

So the next time you find yourself trying to solve a problem - whether it be in your personal life, at work, in relationship with someone else, or wherever it might be - think about the different perspectives you can employ to arrive at three unique solutions, and make your best decision from there.