Self Improvement Daily Podcast

A few weeks ago I had the incredible pleasure to hear Amy Purdy speak. She’s a woman who embodies resilience and the power of perspective. Her life was taken from her when a medical condition caused her to get both of her legs amputated. For years she struggled to recover and restore some sense of normalcy in life. 

Then, she had a profound shift. She stopped being a victim of her circumstances and dedicated herself to making the most of it - becoming creative, resourceful, and optimistic about her future. It’s this mindset that fueled her comeback where she re-learned how to snowboard (eventually earning a silver medal at the Paralympic Games), competed in Dancing With The Stars, and is living proof that while the impacts of life adversity can be permanent, you don’t need to accept their limitations.

She says that her injury didn’t disable her, it enabled her to do things she couldn’t before. She learned to genuinely see challenges as opportunities.

The thought that initiated her mindset shift is a simple one, and it’s one we should all think about ourselves: “If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?”

Negative life events have happened and will continue to happen. And they can define you if you let them. But they aren’t a life-sentence. Your future is undefined and you get to play a role in shaping it. In other words, you can either allow the story to be written for you, or you can pick up the pen and write it yourself.

The story we choose to tell about our lives is everything. Things only have meaning because of the ways we choose to perceive the things that happen. Nothing is objectively good or bad, right or wrong, helpful or harmful… They just are. We run those things through our own worldview, our belief system, and assign meaning to it.

Jack Canfield perfectly explains it in this formula: E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome.

The outcome of any event is intricately connected to our response to it. Most of the time we produce a response unconsciously, which generates an unconscious outcome… But for any event our response is within our control. This means we can design the outcomes we want to have.

Imagine that no matter what happens, you resolve that everything is always happening in your best interest. How empowering would that be?

And that’s the point. We can write our own story… All we need to do is take control of the narrative. Just like Amy did.

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To those who celebrate it, Merry Christmas! And to those who don’t, I wish you a very happy Holiday Season. 

Regardless of what you believe, this time of year is a vibe. It’s a time full of connection, positivity, dreaming, helping each other, and thoughtfulness. 

And it’s with that energy that I want to share some of my Christmas Wishes:

I wish that we all start to see ourselves for who we are and not what we do.

I wish that we have the courage to do what feels right and the willingness to do what scares us (but we know is in our best interest).

Equally, I wish that we each find the courage to try our best and become more willing to fail.

I wish that we all get called to a greater purpose and clearly see the difference we’re meant to make in the world.

I wish that we recognize the fleeting moments we have with loved ones, and choose to be more present while we have them.

I wish that we find fulfillment in our lives, meaning in our struggles, and growth in our challenges.

I wish that we feel more empowered to be ourselves and that we’re warmly accepted by others for it.

I wish that we invite more playfulness in our lives, because life is meant to be enjoyed.

I wish that we see the many reasons why we’re similar and on the same team, not the few reasons why we’re different.

I wish that those of us who have more than we need share more of what we have.

I wish that we’d ask for help more often because it’s a gift for everyone involved.

I wish that we all view our bodies as the miracles they are, and choose to see that over any of the imperfections we might see in the mirror.

I wish we can all be a bright light in the world that illuminates other people’s darkness.

And I wish that we all come to understand that we’re right where we’re supposed to be.

I wish this for me, you, all of our loved ones, and everyone else that we have the honor of cocreating the future with. Keeping it short and sweet! Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and let’s change the world.

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If you couldn’t tell by now, I am a behavior change nerd. I am obsessed with understanding the factors that go into influencing behavior. It’s fascinating to observe how the design of life around us plays out, and how our unconscious mind interacts with things to make decisions.

A ridiculous example of this happened last week when I was putting some food in my refrigerator. I had just gotten back from the store and I had a pre-wrapped salad kit. Normally I’d put it in the bin at the bottom with the other produce, but this time I put it square in the middle shelf of the fridge. 

I closed the door, realized what I had done, and thought deeply about why it happened. 

Normally, the shelf isn’t wide open like that. It’s a prime spot so usually it’s occupied. It was clearly the easiest and lowest effort place to put the salad kit, and knowing that the human mind always wants to take the path of least resistance, that’s what I unconsciously decided to do - the easy option within that environment.

The resolution to the riveting story is: When I put it all together, I chose to move the salad kit to the appropriate bin. At any moment we can use conscious will to overcome the design of our environment and our unconscious tendencies. But that requires that we’re aware of what’s happening. Otherwise, we’re blindly susceptible to the way things are set up around us.

Here are some other arbitrary, household examples of the unconscious force that is environmental design:

When you’re in your living room, you choose to sit on the couch. It’s the obvious, comfortable choice - especially when compared to sitting on the floor or on a table. Yet we don’t consciously choose to sit there, we naturally do.

Or when you enter a dark room you automatically flip on the light. Why? So you can see! But more importantly because being able to see is the safer thing to do, and you’re at less risk for injury. Also because it makes whatever you’re trying to do easier, so you waste less energy trying to do it.

Like I said… Silly, everyday examples that are almost too obvious to make a meaningful point. But that’s exactly it - our lives operate based on our environment, which is so deeply embedded in the way things are that it’s ridiculous to think it would be any other way.

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Many of us go through periods of reflective cycles where we revisit our strategies, commitments, and goals in order to realign our efforts. One of those cycles happens as one year ends, and we use the fresh slate of a New Year as a new beginning. 

And while this introspective work is important and the intentions are good, it also needs to be practical. Often during these times we think of all of the things we want to be doing - eating healthier, exercising more, growing our business, consistent with date nights - and it sets us up for failure.

Just think of it logically. Our lives are already overfull. We’re busy doing so many things, with so many commitments, and we hardly have the capacity to do anything else. Wanting to add more to that without taking anything away just contributes to the problem and sacrifices quality across the board.

That’s why I want to encourage you to think about shedding what doesn’t serve you. Your plate might be full right now, but is it full of 10/10 things? Or are there things that aren’t quite as impactful, important, or desirable that you’re doing anyway?

If you want to invite more of the right things into your life, you need to create space for it.

And it’s not just things that take up your time, but things that take up your energy. When you take things on and have a high tolerance for anything that’s out of alignment, that inability to discern comes out in other ways. It becomes a consciousness that consumes all parts of your life, and it’s about much more than just the thing in question.

Here are two things that I’m choosing to shed:

First, I am no longer doing the Heroic app on a daily basis. It’s a quality app that helps a lot of people, but it wasn’t doing much for me. I have other systems and tools that I use, and this was just another thing that I was doing on a daily basis. I want to have a higher threshold of excitement and value than that for things I take on, so I’ve chosen to remove it from my routine.

Second, I am no longer doing my daily pushups. This is a big deal because it’s something I’ve been doing for 20 years, and my identity is woven into it. But, it has negatively impacted my posture and has pulled my shoulders forward. The pushups don’t serve me, and it’s a habit I’m replacing with an alternative exercise that does.

Shedding is painful and causes grief. We’re getting rid of the things that make us who we are, and that can be scary, stressful, and uncertain. But what it also means is that you’re committed to getting better, that you’re self-aware of your needs and willing to take action to meet them. When the initial emotion of separating from your old self wears off, it cultivates a sense of empowerment and control that will guide you forward into your desired future rather than hold you back in your past.

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I was listening to Ed Mylett’s podcast and he said something really interesting, that only a handful of people can truly relate with. He was talking about what it’s like making money, being successful, and arriving at the lifestyle you’ve always wanted for yourself:

“What would you do if you had all the time in the world to do whatever you wanted to do? You can only play so many golf courses. You can only sit on so many beaches. You can go to an incredible restaurant. And it’s going to make you very happy. But there will be a point where it’s just not enough to be happy. You’re going to want to be fulfilled.”

I like the contrast he presented. He started by saying that it’s nice to have nice things… But the allure of them wears off. Over time the experience becomes less rich and special, and it doesn’t have the same impact on you. That’s why he finishes saying that fulfillment is the ultimate thing we’re after, because it resonates at a more grounded and spiritual frequency.

It reminds me of the famous Jim Carey quote: “I wish everybody could get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”

David Brooks wrote a book about it called “The Second Mountain”. At first we climb the mountain of material wealth, accolades and achievement. And when we get there we realize it doesn’t feel as good as we thought it would at the top. It’s at that point we climb the second mountain where the priority is impact, contribution, and authenticity because that’s what truly meets our deepest human needs. It’s a predictable process - most people only know about the second mountain because they already climbed the first, and it wasn’t right.

If I’m being honest, I’m somewhere in between both mountains. On one hand I pour a significant amount of myself into impact projects, somewhat at the expense of my income potential. But on the other hand, I notice that I’m attracted to the idea of being influential and doing really big things. 

The story I choose to tell about it is that the influence and fame will serve in amplifying my ability to impact, and that it has good intentions, but there’s another part of me that wonders if it’s not about the impact, and it’s just my way of boosting my own self-image.

Life is tricky. We all want to be happy, fulfilled, and contributing. We want our existence to be purposeful. Yet at the same time, we’re all humans being biased by our own psychology, and the more aware of it we are, the better.

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You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule, a moniker about the time it takes to become a master at something… But have you ever heard of the 1000 minute rule?

How long is 1000 minutes even? Let’s do the math: 1000 minutes is 14 hours and 40 minutes. And for those of us who sleep for 7 or 7.5 hours, 1000 minutes every day is filled with what we choose to do during our waking hours.

The 1000 Minute Rule is something I heard Ryan Serhant talk about. He says, imagine that you have $1000 to spend every day, and every minute you spend doing something, that’s how you’re choosing to spend your money.

The reason this is so effective is because we’re accustomed to looking at money through the lens of how much value you get for it, whereas for time we don’t naturally think about the value we get from where we invest it.

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The 1000 Minute Rule highlights two things primarily:

-First, it holds you to a higher standard for how you choose to spend your time. It feels wasteful to doom scroll on social media, or take twice as long on a task because you aren’t focused. Every minute is a dollar spent, and if you’re putting it into things that don’t do or produce much for you, then you’re going to end the day feeling empty.

-Second, it helps you put bad things into perspective. Ryan uses the example of a call gone wrong. It could ruin the rest of your day if you let it, or you could call it what it is - a poor way of spending $5. Are you going to let a bad decision on $5 keep you from making the most of the $995 you still have left to spend? That would be silly.

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The overall lesson is that in every minute you’re investing your time, and if you want a richer life, you need to protect it and put it into the highest value things you can. It requires constant consciousness to check in and adjustment to redirect it. 

It won’t be perfect right away, but so long as you set the intention and commit to raising your standard, slowly but surely you’ll find the most valuable ways to invest your time.

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At an event last week I heard NYU professor Dr. Wendy Suzuki speak, and there was one thing she shared that both blew my mind and wasn’t surprising at all.

She demonstrated it through a really compelling experience where she ran an experiment in real-time. She had us all report how we felt via an online form, led us through 2 minutes of high-positivity movement and dancing, and then at the end had us report how we felt again.

As you can imagine, the results were starkly different. It’s remarkable what just a few minutes of movement can do for your attitude.

But the thing that I didn’t expect… The #1 most common answer that people put before we did the movement, by a wide margin, is that they felt “tired”. 

What this affirms is how chronically under-slept our society is, and how we’re unknowingly deprioritizing taking care of ourselves to accommodate whatever else life wants from us.

The reason tiredness is so pervasive is because we’ve acclimated to it. We forgot what it’s like to not be tired, so feeling tired has just become our normal. In our mind it’s not something we need to fix because we aren’t even aware that it’s broken.

And beyond just getting enough hours of sleep, it’s harder to have quality sleep than ever. Screens are offsetting our circadian rhythm… Snacking and having dinner late in the day spikes our heart rate… Social media and news use fear to stimulate a survival response… All of it makes us physiologically dysregulated and unprepared to actually get the rest we need.

And when we’re tired, we don’t have our best to offer. The quality of our work goes down so we’re forced to spend more time doing it. We’re less present when we’re around others so our relationships suffer. We have less emotional control and make worse choices in our diet. 

All of it adds to this chronic problem of having too much to do, and too much being compromised, fueling the cycle over and over again.

I used to be this way. I’d get midday brain fog, fight off the need for a nap and power through my day with less to show for it than I’d like to admit. I tried everything, but it all changed when I started getting 7.5 hours of sleep consistently.

It’s ironic, but I say that the most disciplined thing you can do is go to bed on time. Give it a try for a week or two and I can almost promise that you’ll feel like a new person.

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I was at an event last week and I got to hear Dr. Gabrielle Lyon speak, which is a treat because we’ve been connected for years but never met in person. Plus we’ve got some exciting collaborations in the works.

During her speech she taught an exceptional framework, and I want to forward the lesson along to you. It’s specifically for people like us who desire massive growth in our lives. And it explains why we need to take a strategic approach to it or else we’ll give up, get bored, or overextend ourselves.

In this framework, Dr. Gabrielle focuses on two interwoven elements: Challenge and capacity. ‘Challenge’ is about how difficult something is, and ‘capacity’ corresponds with our energetic ability to meet the challenge.

From those elements, we’ll create a quadrant with ‘Challenge’ and ‘Capacity’ as the axes:

When you have low challenge and low capacity, that’s ‘stagnation’. You aren’t really doing anything that disrupts your current flow, and you don’t really have the energy to do anything about it. It’s a feeling of being stuck.

Next, when you have low challenge but high capacity, that’s ‘recovery’. It’s when you have more to offer than you’re currently giving, and sitting in that state serves to rejuvenate and reignite desire.

Then flip the factors, when you have high challenge but low capacity, that’s ‘breakdown’. It’s when you can’t keep up with the demands of life. This is a main cause for stress, burnout, and just trying to survive the day because life is asking a lot from you, and you have to muster up everything you can inside you to address it. 

And last, when you have high challenge and high capacity, that’s ‘growth’. When you need to step up beyond what’s casually comfortable and you do, because you can. It’s an opportunity for you to establish a new baseline for yourself, one that’s slightly more productive, intentional, and results-generating than it used to be.

Personally, this is really validating because for the last 6 months I’ve been in the Growth zone. I’ve committed to playing a bigger game and being more aggressive with my business development, implementation, and movement building. 

The way I’ve been describing it is “I’ve sped up my pace. Not for a short sprint, but to see if I’m actually capable of holding it. To see if this is how fast I can actually go for the long-term.”

And to that point, I’ve learned a lot about myself. And I feel I’ve unlocked my next level!

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The tricky thing that I’ve found to be true with the idea of improvement is that it’s hard to quantify, which often makes it subjective and vulnerable to our own interpretation.

Simply put, improvement is a positive change in result over time. This means that things used to be one way, now they’re another way, and if the new way is better than the old way in that it’s closer to what you want… Then you can reason that it improved. 

Accurately labeling something as ‘improved’ requires a few things: A measurement for how things were at the beginning, a measurement for how things are now, and clarity on what you want the result to be (which ideally can be measured as well). 

For example - If you used to weigh 200 pounds, now you weight 195 pounds, and your goal weight is 180 pounds, then you improved. Or put in a different order, if you want your business to be doing $20k in monthly revenue, you’re now at $10k and you used to be at $5k, then your monthly revenue improved.

But it’s not as simple as that. While it’s pretty objective to determine if things improved, it’s completely subjective to reason if the improvement was enough to be satisfied with.

Especially in cases like losing weight, building a business, or addressing things that you’re emotionally connected to… It can feel futile to put so much in only to get just a little improvement out. It can feel discouraging to think that things aren’t happening fast enough, which then may make you second guess your approach overall.

That’s why, rather than viewing yourself and your performance through the lens of improvement, try viewing it through the lens of progress.

No matter how incremental the gain is, it’s all progress. And progress feels good. Progress feels productive. And progress is the engine that generates the larger improvement you desire.

And that’s the takeaway. Many of us change plans and undo the benefits of consistency because things aren’t changing like we want them to. But that’s a trap. In most cases, changing strategy is a distraction and it resets the compounding benefits we’d start to experience if we just stayed the course. 

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