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.

Maybe I’m just speaking for myself, but have you ever found that you give such good advice for other people but have a hard time taking it for yourself? Instead of feeling confused or like a hypocrite about it, hopefully an explanation and new perspective can help you unlock all the value you have to offer.

First, if you’re giving good advice, that means you have the information. This is great news! With good information you have good ideas about how you can solve problems in your life, relate with situations in better ways, and get resourceful to implement positive change.

But again, if you have all of this information but you have a hard time applying it for yourself, that can feel hypocritical. But don’t believe that it means there’s anything wrong with you. There’s one fundamental difference between the advice that you give to others and the advice you integrate for yourself.


That difference is emotions.

When you’re giving advice, you can step into a more objective awareness, allowing you to see the big picture and assess how everything comes together. This is much harder to do for yourself because, well, it’s your life. There’s so much more pain and connection to everything going on that you draw conclusions that are biased. Understand that this is happening unconsciously. 

Our emotions create an environment that our rational mind makes decisions within. The challenge is that we’re often not aware of the influence our emotions are having on us in the moment. This causes the thoughts we have to seem to completely logical when truthfully they’re coming through the filter of your current emotions.

This is one of the reasons why it’s good advice to “sleep on it”. Instead of making a big decision or responding to something that upset you in the moment, you give yourself the space to return to a more unbiased state of mind to review what you actually want to do. 

So when you’re in the depth of a moment, with all of the emotions that it brings, and it feels hard to take your own advice, that’s why. The advice doesn’t seem as practical or valuable because your thinking is biased to see things a certain way. And that disconnect causes your mind to create a story about why the advice won’t work, or doesn’t apply, or you should do something else - which then discredits the quality of the advice.

One of the most important factors to long term, sustainable growth is patience.

Understanding the nature of how compounding works, whether it be in your bank account or in your own improvement, we know that it takes time to get the massive results we’re looking for.

Logically this can make sense but for many people their behavior is different, falling short of the big payoff they’re due. The main reason of this is the way our minds have evolved. We are wired for immediate gratification. When we experience pleasure or a reward shortly after doing something we feel compelled to repeat it.

This mechanism is in place because, back when humanity was evolving, we needed to be really attuned to the things that kept us alive in the short term.

However, now that we live much more advanced lives, the things that are “best” for us don’t usually provide immediate gratification. It’s not about doing things that keep us alive in the moment but rather doing the things that prepare us with the health, productivity, and relationships that make us feel most fulfilled. Again, sometimes that’s not the fun thing to do in the moment.

That’s why patience is such a critical link. The more we can practice patience, and delay the gratification of what we’re doing for a later moment, the more consistently we’ll be able to choose the proactive behaviors that create good results for us over the long-term.

Now let’s say that you are making the right choices. You’re eating healthy instead of indulging in sugary and fatty foods that taste good. You’re investing in building a skill in the short term that will become a pillar to your career a few years down the road...

You still may not feel like you’re being patient. You may feel frustrated the results aren't coming fast enough. You sense yourself getting distracted and your focus being pulled into other things...

But what’s really important to note is that patience is not about how you feel, it’s all about your behavior. As long as you’re engaging in patient behaviors then you’re continuing to place those deposits in your future. You’re feelings towards it are less important.

Now worth noting, there are definitely some ways to make behaviors that offer delayed gratification more pleasurable in the moment. Things like gamification, reward stacking, and self-acknowledgment can be used to close the reward loop in the short term for behaviors that work for you in the long-term.

No matter the approach, there’s not getting around the fact that great things take time, and the more patient you can be through it all, the bigger the pot is at the end of the rainbow. And there’s nothing that feels better, or is more worthwhile, than that.

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I think a lot of people can relate with having a desire to be more self-confident. When you’re self-confident you’re more decisive, you stand up for what’s right and what you want, and you give yourself a chance to succeed at the highest level. It takes courage to take a chance, call in a favor, or speak your mind - especially when that little voice in your head uses fear and anxiety to try to talk you out of it.

This is something that I’m actively working on. I know that on the other side of big bold actions are big bold results, and I have huge aspirations for who I want to become, what I want to create, and the impact I want to make in life. 

I have the same fear, doubts, insecurities, and mental roadblocks as anyone else, but what’s different is I’ve implemented some strategies to support me in being bolder that I wanted to share with you.

First is routine. I’ve added “make a bold ask” into my morning routine. The stress of it diffuses because it’s bundled into a bunch of other things that I’m doing, and I capitalize on that momentum to be able to follow through on the action. 

But even still, I found myself diluting the boldness of the action, doing just enough to convince myself that I had completed it. That fear, worry, and doubt was still coming up. The routine helped me to get into doing something, the next step was to improve the quality of the action.

So what I’ve been doing is doing my ‘bold action’ immediately after completing my breath work and meditation session. This allows me to maximize the effects of the state change I create in this practice. It leaves me less hindered, less inhibited, and less mentally restricted so that I can access that next level of boldness, and do that thing that I want to do but maybe I’m too afraid to do.

Now I haven't been doing this for too long, but I imagine that in time my threshold for what I’ll classify as ‘bold’ will continue going up. This means that over time I will systematically increase the bigness and boldness of my actions as part of this routine which will lead to more big and bold results.

To summarize what I’m doing to make being bold easier - First I’ve created an expectation that I’m going to do it every day. I’ve also attached it to a routine where I know I’ll have momentum to take action. And finally I’m inducing a state change to get over the things keeping me from being bold so I can tap into a richer sense of confidence.

If you’re looking to develop your self-confidence, get in the process of doing something consistently and it will naturally increase over time.

As we go through our lives, we want to feel good. Physically we don’t want to be in pain, we want to feel able and capable of being athletic and fit. Emotionally we don’t want to be in a dark and despairing place, we want to find hope and optimism in the world where we’re genuinely excited about everything happening around us. In relationships we don’t want to be overlooked, criticized, or put down, we want to feel self-confident and strong in who we are.

Well the good news is you can have all of that, even if you don’t feel like you have it right now, and that’s because “Feeling good has never been so easy.”

Of course, one of the main factors to how we feel are our circumstances. If we have money then we can afford things that make us feel physically comfortable, like a massage. If we’re free from tragedy in our lives we’re more likely to be in a better emotional place. And if we’ve been connecting well with our romantic partners and family, we’ll naturally feel more strength in our independence.

But circumstances aside, because they’re not permanent, how is it that ‘feeling good has never been so easy’?

It’s because we’ve lived more of our life. We have our full life’s experience to have the self-awareness to know what we like, what we don’t like, and what we want. This makes it easier to feel good, and as long as you keep on living, things will just keep getting easier as you pick up even more self-awareness.

So find solace in the fact that things are improving, things are getting better, even if they don’t presently feel like it. Sure, life has its ups and downs, but it’s always trending up over time and that’s because of the self-awareness we build. 

That’s not to say it’s easy to feel good, it’s certainly not. It takes a special person to be able to reroute a bad mood in an instant. But it has never been easier, especially when you incorporate the optimistic mindset that everything that happens to you is just another point of reference that helps you home in on exactly what you like and want.

I was on a mentorship call with Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and he provided a really insightful perspective. He challenged the normal definition of productivity, breaking down the assumptions of it so that it can be observed plainly for what it is. 

Personally I’ve always defined ‘productivity’ as “doing the things you want to be doing”. I believe that we’ve slowly been seduced into thinking that you need to be creating or building or making progress to be productive, and with Jason’s insight I was finally able to arrive at why that’s genuinely not true.

Hang with me as I dissect this.

The word productivity is just the combination of two words - Productive activity. It’s to be active in productive ways. A simplified way of restating ‘being active’ is just to call it ‘doing’. So we’ll leave that one there.

Now let’s dive deeper into the meaning of ‘productive’. ‘Productive’ is simply having the high ability to produce. This is where interpretation comes in. To produce what? Society and culture have taught us that we must always be thinking about producing results, revenue, and efficiencies. But can’t we also choose to produce joy, presence, mindfulness, and connection?

Ultimately, you get to decide for yourself what you want to produce. It’s your life, your time, and your attention. To think that the only ingredients to a full, worthwhile, meaningful life is knocking off all the things on your to-do list is extremely short-sighted...

A fulfilling life is finding the harmonious balance of everything that’s important to you and unique to what you want. Excelling at work, yes, but also taking care of yourself, growing strong relationships with people you care about, collecting unforgettable experiences, and living with integrity..

That’s why productivity is actually just “doing the things you want to be doing”, because in that broader definition you get to fill in the gaps of what you uniquely want to produce.

Just to recap how we got there: Productivity = Productive activity = Doing things that produce the results you want = Doing the things you want to be doing. 

At the end of the day, the result we’re all looking for is to live a harmonious high-quality life. Anything we do that contributes to that goal then becomes productive.

What’s amazing is when you live by this truer definition of productivity that is intentional and represents the balance that is authentic to what you want, you’ll ignite flow in your life and multiply your experience with less effort. 

Hopefully now you see how productivity has been misunderstood, and you have a new, more empowering way to relate with it that makes you feel less guilty when you do what you want to do within the big picture of your life.

One of the core focuses in my personal development is to be more intentional. I want to have more awareness of the fact that I’m making choices in every moment, and I want to improve the quality of those choices so that I’m living in alignment with the best version of myself.

This means that throughout the day, especially when I start getting distracted or feeling unmotivated, I’m trying to catch myself so that I can reroute my thoughts and behavior. The questions I’ve been beginning to ask myself, that I’ve found to be really powerful, is “What do I want to do and how do I want to do it?”

Instead of mindlessly scrolling on social media, I can interrupt the pattern and immediately re-establish my intention - What do I want to do and how do I want to do it?

As I catch myself daydreaming and procrastinating, I am bringing myself back to the core thing in front of me - What do I want to do and how do I want to do it?

The second part of the question is especially important. It’s easier to just go through the motions and not really be engaged in what’s in front of you. But what’s of the utmost importance is the quality that you bring to what you’re doing. And bringing to mind how you want to do things can really wake you up and hold you accountable to be more present with what’s in front of you.

At the end of the day, we usually know what we should be doing, what we want to be doing, what we’d rather be doing. Pair that with an awareness of how you want to be doing it, you create an incredible force for good.

Take the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge for example. Many people signed up for it, they decided what they want to do, but they never determined how they wanted to do it. And if it’s not treated like a priority, if it’s not given serious attention, then it’s going to be just another unmet commitment that makes you feel worse about yourself.

So whatever it is for you, especially when you catch yourself not showing up as the best version of yourself, interrupt that by asking yourself “What do I want to do and how do I want to do it?”

Many people misunderstand what it means to be self-disciplined. They think that it involves taking action at all costs, having the will-power to grind it out, and to never make excuses. This is just a sliver of the full definition that we hear most about because ‘hustle culture’ gives people the motivation they need to take action. 

But what I just described isn’t self-discipline, it’s self-control, and certainly there’s a time and place for it - To practice restraint and not have that extra dessert, to get up and get in the gym even when you’re feeling tired, to make yourself step into a cold shower even though you know how uncomfortable it is.

But there’s so much more to self-discipline than self-control. There are subconscious elements to it and environmental factors that are more influential in your self-discipline than your conscious will alone. Practicing self-control requires that things need to feel hard, that you’re actively restricting yourself from something that you feel like you want. Self-discipline is much more grounded and when you set yourself up in the right way, being self-disciplined can actually be the easy thing to do. And here are a few of the ways you can do that.

First is to build a self-disciplined identity. I call this your “Best Self Reflex”. This means that when there’s a choice to be made, you pick the option that is in alignment with the best version of yourself on autopilot. You don’t need to negotiate with yourself or convince yourself of what you want because your default response is an expression of your best intentions. This requires that you build an identity of being self-disciplined, stacking evidence of all the ways that you’re practicing self-discipline, until it incorporates as a subconscious belief you hold about yourself.

Then the second way to set yourself up for self-discipline success is to structure your environment. James Clear talks a lot about this in “Atomic Habits”. If you want to make a desired positive behavior easier to do, set up your environment to decrease the amount of effort and strain required to do it. For something you want to do less often, add friction and pain to make that behavior less desirable.

Get these two things working for you and you can reserve your self-control and will-power for when you really need it.

Now if you feel like you’re not as self-disciplined as you’d like to be (making excuses and exceptions more often than you’d like to admit) or you aren’t consistent doing the key behaviors that you know prime you to show up for your personal and professional life at your very best, let’s start thinking about self-discipline differently and do something to change that...

Take on the Super Habits Challenge and reprogram your mindset to make self-discipline automatic.