One of the most fundamental components to our self improvement is our habits, and today I hope to offer a new more technical perspective around them. 

First we need to understand what a habit is and its purpose. A habit is simply our patterned way of doing something. We usually think of habits through the lens of the actions we take, but it also includes the recurring patterns of our thoughts and feelings. 

The reason we have habits is because they provide a cognitive shortcut for the brain. If you do the same thing over and over again it becomes inefficient for you to have to think about it every single time. Therefore, a habit is an unconscious way for your brain to do something consistently without the demands of your logical reasoning.

This process is so strong that our brain’s natural state is to drive things to automaticity. It prefers that things become habits. But the conflict of that is - When we have ingrained habits, the brain also prefers to maintain them as is.

Given that this is a psychological process, there are different levels of depth that correspond with your habits. While there’s no perfect rule, it’s generally accepted that you can form a habit in 21 days or 21 significant instances of doing something. Workout for 21 days and you’re in a habit. Cold call for 21 days and you're in a habit. You’ll know it has become a habit because the resistance to doing it has decreased. It no longer feels so uncomfortable or painful to do. This suggests that your unconscious mind is now more supportive of this new habit and is permitting it rather than trying to prevent it.

But then there’s another layer to habit formation that happens at around 300 days or instances. When you’ve done something so many times, for so long, it eventually creates a compulsion. It gets to the point that it makes you feel uncomfortable when you don’t do it. This creates identity based behavior change - Your sense of self becomes so closely tied into your behavior that they are codependent.

This is a powerful threshold to hit when you have it working for you, but it also can be dangerous if this is the relationship you have with bad habits (which many of us do).

This is why consistency is key. Everything you do is providing a vote for your habits. Your subconscious mind is always using your actions to determine your identity. Harness it in the right ways and you’ll start seeing everything transform around you.

The topic covered today, as well as many topics surrounding it like understanding the root of self-sabotage, the identity behavior feedback loop, and even a bit more about me and my background was featured in an interview I did for another podcast with my friends at The Alignment Show. If you’re curious to check that out, I’m linking two different ways for you to give that a listen.

On Apple Podcast | On Spotify

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One of the best indicators of the progress we’re making on our self improvement is to take a quick look at how we spend our average day. It’s a meaningful metric because it represents your baseline level of operation. No boost of motivation, no big deadline that you need to hustle to hit… Just you and your daily processes.

Our baseline level is the byproduct of four major things coming -  Habits, standards, systems, and routines.

Habits relate with the specific positive behaviors you engage in consistently. Your standards reflect what you’re willing to tolerate and surround yourself with. Systems allow you to be more efficient in creating high quality outcomes with less effort. And routines are bundles of habits and behaviors that allow you to connect multiple elements of your life and build momentum.

When you improve your habits, standards, systems, and routines, you elevate your baseline. This means that your highs are higher and your lows are higher than they used to be because on your bad days, now you’re falling back to a higher platform. 

This is how your previous best becomes your new normal.

With more discipline, consistency, and clarity in the foundational areas of your life, your average day gets better. It’s really that simple. And as you continue focusing on raising your baseline, it will improve to such an extent that your ‘every day’ is as good as what used to be your ‘best day’.

The problem is that most people miss this opportunity for growth. Instead what they do is strain themselves trying to induce change by 'getting outside their comfort zone', but when they're done exerting themselves and it’s time to recover they just fall back to their old habits, standards, systems, and routines.

This is why people feel stuck and stalled in their self-growth. They feel like they’re putting in the time and effort to grow but then things don’t change in their life. It happens because the effort is being applied to impact the wrong things.

In order to sustainably improve your life, you need to raise your baseline. Improve your habits, establish stronger standards, upgrade your systems, and build powerful routines. If you’re feeling ready to start pursuing your self-growth the right way, with the right structure and guidance so that you start getting fast improvement and results in your life, today (Monday May 8th) is the first day of the 21 day Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. 

And it is not too late to step up to the challenge! If you’re ready to take your self-growth to the next level, these next 21 days will help you to revolutionize your habits, standards, systems, and routines so that you can really start tapping into your fullest potential and getting the results in your health, productivity, relationships, and finances that you deserve.

Click here to step up to the challenge now! (And be sure to use the promo code CHALLENGE21 to lock in a discounted rate!)

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Alright I have a question for you - Do you want things to get better? Do you want to have a better future that represents the life, habits, environments, accomplishments, and fulfillment of a more meaningful life?

Of course you do. That’s what being so committed to self-growth and your personal evolution is all about. I don’t mean to state the obvious, instead my intention is to call out the process required to actually achieve it.

Many people have the dreams, desires, and destiny that they’re going to reach their goals. That while they may not be there yet, someday soon they’ll wake up and realize that everything shifted for the better. 

Now that’s entirely possible, you can transform every aspect of your life - your health, finances, relationships, impact, fulfillment - faster than you might think. But it doesn’t happen on its own. You need to be the agent of change that initiates the shift.

In other words, a lot of people want something different but they’re unwilling to do something different in order to achieve it. Often times this happens unconsciously. People don’t realize that they’re neglecting to do the things required of them to reach their goals, and they get frustrated wondering why things aren’t changing, even though they genuinely believe they’re doing everything right.

Elite executive coach Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book called “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” It’s all about the 20 habits we engage in that keep us where we’re at. You’ll keep getting the same results if you keep doing the same things, and if you want to elevate your life, you need to elevate your processes.

That’s why my encouragement today is - Don’t wish, act! If you want something different then you need to do something different. If you’re inspired right now to figure out what is that new action, that new process, that new thing you can do to take your life to the next level, I’d like to make a recommendation.

Take action and register for the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. Through this 21 day challenge I walk you step-by-step through a process where you install the one habit that will most improve your life, you master self-discipline, uproot self-sabotage so that you’re not so held back by fear, procrastination, or limiting beliefs, and instill a new sense of agency and self-belief that will inspire you to confidently pursue your best life.

This is a live challenge and your moment to claim your best self is here - We’re getting started on Monday. If you register today and use the promo code CHALLENGE21 the investment is only $21, a dollar a day. Just the same as another self-help book but instead this investment will show you how to implement the tangible process that will take your daily operation to elite levels.

Especially if you know you do well with more structure, this just might be the missing piece to getting the outstanding results you deserve from all of the hard work you're putting in!

Just like the weather, life seems to occur in seasons. Some times are easy, light, and bright, some times are dark, drury, and despairing. And because life exists in seasons, you can always count on it changing. Nothing is permanent and it’s not meant to be, things are always evolving and recalibrating. 

It’s important to be mindful of what season you’re in. To know what is happening around you, what’s required of you, and which version of yourself you need to be to match everything around you. If you try to force things to be a certain way, life gets a lot harder because you’re fighting against the flow. 

When you’re flexible to the things around you, you’ll find you do better. Similar to how Charles Darwin describes natural selection, it’s not the biggest, fastest, strongest, or toughest that survive, it’s the most adaptable

Outside of up and down seasons in life, there’s another contrast that deserves our attention. It’s the tradeoff between being in 'research mode' and 'focus mode'. Research mode is all about acquiring information, gathering perspective, and better understanding the landscape. Research informs the best path forward and support your effort in being more effective. It’s a very exploratory phase.

This contrasts with its opposite - focus mode. When it’s time to get real results, to really move the needle on things, you need to have a sharp plan of action. Focus mode is about committing to a strategy, trusting that it’s sound, and doubling down. The only way you can get maximal results is if you pursue with maximum focus. It takes courage to go all in on something but when you do, you’ll immediately see the difference.

So of these two seasons, which are you in? Are you seeing what’s out there and exploring your options? Or is it time to dial in and get real results?

The reason I ask is because a lot of people aren’t meeting their season appropriately. They want to start getting elite results but they still have disconnected processes. In other words they’re trying to live in focus mode but are operating out of research mode.

If you’re ready to flip that switch and enter focus mode, giving your full attention to the single thing that will accelerate your growth beyond what you thought was possible, I have an invitation for you...

Join me in a 21 day where I walk you through the 3 step process that takes people from stalled and plateauing in their self-growth to elite levels of consistency and performance. It’s time to take things to the next level, and when you register for the challenge (that starts on Monday) I’ll show you how!

As ambitious high-achievers, we have a big vision for who we want to be and high expectations for what we hope to accomplish. This often leads to us trying to find that competitive edge to differentiate us and support us in getting extraordinary results.

This pursuit often leads to us constantly looking for opportunities to be productive - multi-tasking to get more done, and finding ways to do things more efficiently and effectively.

While I agree with that, I also think we’re missing the mark and telling ourselves a story about our productivity that makes us feel better, but it doesn’t actually work..

The reason we seek higher levels of productivity is because we want our lives to have meaning. We want to feel proud about the difference we’re making, everything we’re contributing, and that we’re making the most of this one shot we have at life.

But the concern is, productivity is a numbers game. It’s about the quantity that we can pack into a day. What’s far more potent, and what we’re actually looking for on a daily basis is not to just simply do more, it’s to feel really good about what we’re doing. It’s about quality, not quantity, which all stems from living with intentionality.

When you live with intentionality you infuse purpose in everything you do. You are constantly making choices that allow you to experience life to the fullest. In that way intentionality can actually guide your productivity because it needs to meet an extra criteria of importance, but intentionality also encourages you to slow down and do less so that you can be more present.

So if we pause everyday to consider how we can live more intentionally, not productively, we find more acute ways to elevate the way we experience the moment. It requires that we make the unconscious conscious so that we can make more positive choices that represent the lives we want to live as it relates to our health, relationships, work, and impact.

If you want a tool that helps you to live more intentionally, providing you with more awareness and accountability around how to be the best version of yourself, I’d love to help you install your Self Improvement Operating System. It’s through this operating system that you can improve anything about your life, from getting rid of bad habits and getting more consistent with good ones, to enforcing higher standards that help you get what you deserve in life.

And implementing this Self Improvement Operating System into your daily process is exactly what we do in the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge!

If you thought you were growing now… This challenge takes everything about your self-growth to the next level, and I can’t wait to share it with you!

Something that we’ve been indoctrinated to believe is that things need to be big to matter. In one way this comes from capitalism and the pursuit of more wealth or revenue. But this has spread into all corners of life creating this constant pressure to do more because we can.

It all leads to a critical misunderstanding that is causing a lot of people to discredit themselves: Great doesn’t have to be big and big isn’t always great.

You don’t need a big house to have a warm home. You don’t need to reach millions of people to change a life. You don’t need to run a marathon to reach a meaningful fitness goal. The size and extent of something does not determine its greatness, rather the intention and quality behind it does.

When people take this thought out of context they compromise their greatness. That’s because they extend themselves too thin and have less quality left within their influence. Many people don’t realize the consequences of pursuing more - it means that you have to split up what you have to offer in more ways such that any one place gets less of it.

Greg McKeown talks about this in “Essentialism”. Imagine two circles next to each other. One has one long arrow pointed out of it, and the other has 6 smaller arrows pointing out of it. Which one do you think makes the bigger impact? The one with only one arrow, because it represents the benefits of having completely aligned, undiluted, undistributed effort.

This is exactly why great doesn’t have to be big and big doesn’t have to be great. But it takes some unlearning to feel okay with it because we’ve inherited a “the bigger the better mindset”.

In fact, I’m a huge believer in the compound effect and how small things make a huge impact when done consistently. It’s the way the world works, and the sooner you can align yourself and your efforts around it, the better.

The greatest example I know of this is the power in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. When you do the right, small things, in just 5 minutes a day for 21 days, you can generate unbelievable progress with little effort and time. And that’s exactly what this 21 day challenge helps you to do - You can get more consistent, conquer self-sabotage, and multiply your productivity by becoming more focused and limiting distractions (so that you stop leaving so much of your potential on the table). Click here to learn more about the challenge, our next live group starts on May 8th!