Self Improvement Daily Podcast

I led a workshop last week about the 4 Fundamental System Upgrades we all need to maintain a higher level of performance and daily output.

Whether we realize it or not, there is an underlying system that is responsible for every action we take. It’s a foundation our ambitions, aspirations, and consistency rests upon. The thing is, many of us don’t know what systems govern the most impactful areas of our lives. This means we haven’t invested enough time in upgrading them and therefore, being the person we want to be is way harder than it needs to be.

Here are the 4 Fundamental System Upgrades:

1) Time Management: Everything we do takes time, and there are many things that we put time into that aren’t as important as other things that we don’t reserve time for.

The default system we all operate from is “trying to figure out what to do in the moment”. And as you can imagine it’s not coordinated, very impulsive, and leaves you vulnerable to getting distracted.

The upgraded system is to have a high-quality scheduling system. This means you’ve thought about the most critical things you need to do and have allocated time specifically to doing them. It means you’re way more likely to do things that actually matter.

2) Follow Through: Beyond knowing what we need to do, we need to actually do it. We need to translate intention into real tangible action. Good ideas, and knowing what to do does nothing good for us if we don’t do them.

The default system is using will-power to make yourself do it. You can put in effort to step into action, but it’s coming from an unsustainable force, and often you won’t have enough of it to do all that you want to do.

The upgraded system is designing your environment so that it's conducive to all the things you want to do. This makes action more effortless and natural as an extension of your surroundings. It becomes a path of less resistance because you have more support.

3) Feedback: It’s really important to know what’s working and what’s not. It’s vital to funnel your effort into things that are actually generating results.

The default system is using your own impression to evaluate how things went. It’s valuable to reflect, but your reflection is limited by your own awareness and inherently biased, so conclusions may not represent the full truth.

The upgraded system is measuring your performance so you can objectively compare results and quantify changes. It’s way more reliable and useful because instead of guessing if something’s working, you can see it without a doubt.

4) Clarity: As we make commitments we need to be really clear on what we want and what we’re going to do to get there. Our futures are fragile and if we’re not careful, we’ll end up in the wrong place.

The default system is trying to think about what we want in the moment. Unfortunately this leaves us at the mercy of seeking immediate gratification rather than placing long-term investments in our wellness and sustained happiness.

The upgraded system is reconnecting to your vision for your life, which is not influenced by short-term impulses but guided by a desire for lasting fulfillment. With a vision you pursue things that are meaningful and create a fuller life.

Implement those 4 System Upgrades and you’ll notice you’re actually doing more of the things that are supporting and building toward your biggest goals. And if you want to take action to upgrade these 4 systems, you can watch the full Workshop to learn how!

Plus, in the second half I’ll lead you through a surprise session that is one of my favorite things to do but I hardly ever talk about it! 

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High performers get this - It’s exhausting to hold yourself to a high standard. It takes a toll to make good decisions in moments when you feel weak. It’s scary to take the bold actions you committed to. It hurts to honestly look at how we could have done better when we fall short. But we make ourselves do it because we know it’s necessary.

It’s demanding to be always on, all the time, and for that reason sometimes we aren’t. No one is perfect - we all slip up, have lapses in judgment, and do things we probably shouldn’t do. We all fall off track… But those who hold themselves to a higher standard can get themselves back on track quickly. 

One thing that separates high-performers from the rest is that they recover fast and don’t let one mistake snowball into many. And there are two great metaphors that demonstrate this:

First is flying a plane. When it starts to veer off track, the pilot makes a micro correction to get back on path. Without that correction, the small error will cause large results as the plan gets further and further away from where it’s supposed to be.

Second is, imagine there’s a car with broken brakes at the top of a hill. Once the car picks up speed and careens down the hill, it becomes nearly impossible to stop without doing some serious damage. However, if you notice the brakes are broken at the very beginning and notice it’s starting to teeter over the edge, you can stop the car with a single hand.

Both of these examples demonstrate the benefits of catching a slip early. The easiest way to stop going the wrong way is to change course before the problem becomes large.

This is a philosophy I put into practice every single day. I reflect on my choices within my exercise, diet, sleep, even social media usage. I’m not perfect and of course I miss a workout, oversnack without realizing it, get less sleep than I need, or waste too much time… But I have a daily feedback loop in place. 

I look at each of these categories every day and reflect on my choices. If I notice something’s off, I can correct it before it becomes too big of a deal. And because of that I maintain a high standard for myself and have the good health, fulfilling business, and amazing personal life that I do.

It’s just a daily system of awareness, and if you want to see how mine works - I recorded a video walking you through my Self Improvement Scorecard.

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Something that many people deal with on a daily basis is anxiety. Whether it’s a diagnosed condition or a short-term response to a life event, anxiety can consume your thoughts and destroy your peace.

I don’t mean to oversimplify what is a very complicated thing… But just about every time someone has an anxious episode it’s preceded by these two things: A lack of control and a lot of uncertainty.

First, human nature very much desires control. If we are not responsible for what happens around us or to us, our mind goes on high alert ready to react to the unexpected. When we don’t have agency and freewill in a situation, we’re left at the mercy of whatever unfolds. As you can imagine, being unable to impact or offset a potentially dangerous situation is likely to make someone anxious. 

Second, human nature very much desires certainty. We want to know what’s going to happen so that we can prepare ourselves for it. This explains why people willingly stay in painful circumstances - at least they know what they’re going to get. It’s the unknown that gives the mind space to ruminate on all of the possibilities. 

Put those two things together - your inability to do anything about something with an unpredictable outcome  - can create an overstimulated thought spiral, especially when that thing might lead to negative consequences. 

If you break down anything that impacts you negatively it always involves your feelings of personal safety and security. So if you ladder it back up and feel like your safety is out of control and uncertain aka not guaranteed, it’s going to be a cause for worry. 

For example: You have a big presentation for work tomorrow. You become anxious about it when you need to present slides a colleague was supposed to prepare (lack of control) and you heard that the organization might have layoffs (uncertainty). Or a family member has a medical condition that doesn’t have a known cure (lack of control) and you’re waiting on test results (uncertainty).

It’s easier said than done but if you’re feeling anxious, the first thing you need to do is regulate your nervous system. Calm down hyperdrive so that you can think rationally and not emotionally. From that space you can see the situation for what it is, what you can or can’t do about it, and make peace with the choices or options you have. 

When you accept what’s out of your control and reason that you’ve done all you can do (or are prepared to do) to shape the outcome, you can see that the anxious thoughts don’t serve a purpose. That they’re worry and not productive, and it helps you restore your peace. 

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One of the most important things we can do for one another is offer feedback. We are all so stuck in our own limited awareness that we can’t see what appears to be so obvious to others. Much of our personal development and growth is a process of elevating our consciousness, becoming more aware of ourselves and how the world works around us, and we need others to point out our blind spots for us.

However, offering feedback can be really challenging. Sometimes you see something that someone else isn’t ready to see, and your mentioning it makes them feel insecure, get defensive, and create confrontation. We hesitate to say anything in the first place because we don’t want to make someone else upset. 

And it makes sense! In times when our understanding is put into question, or ego acts out in an act of self-preservation. Being able to receive feedback is a skill because it requires a lot of emotional control and humility to accept that you have flaws.

Receiving feedback was a big weakness of mine for a long time. If someone disagreed with me, didn’t like my idea, or didn’t understand my perspective - I’d get irritated. It would be difficult to get through to me because my ego held onto how things were so tightly. Fortunately, I now know that it was because of deep insecurities of not wanting to admit that maybe I’m not good enough, so I was unwilling to hear anything that suggested it.

It was an unconscious need that existed in complete contradiction to my conscious desire to grow and improve. And for too long I stopped getting feedback that would have genuinely helped me because I was so unpleasant about it, and it made people more reluctant to offer it knowing that it usually didn’t go well.

But here’s what shifted for me: I started observing my mood more and noting moments that set me off. And in that reflection I saw a consistent pattern that it was related to other people sharing their perspective and feedback with me. 

That practice primed my awareness and 1) Helped me regulate myself in moments where I was receiving feedback, and 2) Caused me to ask for feedback more knowing that I wasn’t getting it. What happened was I started noticing my life improving because of these suggestions, which caused my ego to slowly get quieter.

Of course I’m still very much in progress with this, but now I really value feedback, I welcome it, and I have the awareness to know that any irritation I feel when I start to receive it doesn’t serve me, and I have practices in place to be able to regulate it.

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I wanted to share a quick story to celebrate my friend Raina. Last week she did what we all wish to do - She dragged herself into the gym when she didn’t feel like it. Here’s how:

For starters, Raina was aware of what she wanted. Sitting around and taking it easy for a night sounded really appealing after a long day. She even noticed that she was trying to talk herself out of going. But ultimately she knew that her highest self would wish she went. And she knew this decision is something she’d have to confront in her nightly performance tracking routine where she’s being held accountable to honestly reporting her performance. Plus, she’s been listening to subconscious priming recently that reinforces how important it is that you don’t break the promises you make to yourself. 

Everything I described are fixtures of the 21 Day Challenge I lead, which Raina is a part of. And to take it one step further: At the beginning of the Challenge she made a commitment to be all in and show up at her best. All of this helped pull her into the gym!

This is the power of environment. Clarity + Daily Reporting + Accountability +  Subconscious Priming + Commitment all contributed to Raina finding the will-power to do what she didn’t feel like doing. It was the stack of all those factors that got her overcoming her activation threshold and into action. 

When she and I were talking about her choice to workout, and how happy she was about it, she told me another thing that’s meaningful to her: That if she makes a commitment to friends, she could never let them down.

So I suggested something else she could do to increase her follow through next time - She could sent a text to her friends and tell them she’s going to the gym. Instead of using her small amount of motivation and will-power do the work to get up, get dressed, drive the car, walk in the gym, and get started with a workout… A single text message makes a commitment to her friends that naturally shifts her motivation. The second she hits send, letting her friends down becomes psychologically more painful than putting in the effort to complete a workout, and she gets into action.

If you feel like a challenge like this is going to help you get consistent with all the things you know you need to do this year, I’d love to support you with it.

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Something I’m really trying to be intentional about is restructuring my perception of success. We’ve been taught to measure success based on outcomes, but I want to shift that to something more in my control. 

Results aren’t guaranteed. They’re the end product of cause and effect, which is a process that involves a variety of factors (many of which you can’t influence). This means that a successful result is only possible when “the stars align”, which is too improbable to bet on. Especially since so many people find their self-worth in their achievements. 

What is always fully in your control, however, are the inputs. The time, effort, and reps you put in to execute a strategy.

This is why I’m beginning to view success as an experiment. Inherently, when you run an experiment, you’re curious to discover the outcome of it. In a true experiment you’re not emotionally attached to what comes from it, you simply create the conditions to produce a certain result that you get to observe.

So In the case of the results you want to produce in life - the health, daily output, relationships, experiences, income and impact you believe will fulfill you - what if you measured your success based on how well you executed your strategy? By how closely you followed the rules of the experiment to ensure that the trial was legitimate and implemented well?

Now that’s not to say that you give up on trying to create good outcomes altogether… Of course you should run experiments that you think will ultimately yield what you want. After all what you choose to put into the system has a massive influence on what comes out at the end… But again, instead of determining if something is a success solely based on the result, you measure your success based on how you showed up for the process of creating it.

It’s something I had to take a hard look at recently. I set a goal to raise $100k through my initiative New Year For Good and achieved less than 10% of that target. Clearly not a successful outcome. But looking at the strategy, which was to partner with health and wellness influencers to serve their audiences, and how I executed it, I certainly am proud of the way I showed up. 

I operated with more boldness, creativity, and risk than I can ever remember. I did my best given what I knew at the time, and that shouldn’t be interpreted as anything other than a wild success.

And in the spirit of treating the campaign like an experiment, now I have an opportunity to understand what about the cause and effect dynamic didn’t lead to the outcome I wanted. 

Was it the wrong strategy? Bad timing? Was I missing a compelling case study? Was the offer not attractive enough? Was my demo not impressive enough? 

Who knows! But since I am choosing to see this campaign as a success, because I fully executed the best strategy.I had, I can get into the reflection process with hope and momentum rather than discouragement and embarrassment. And that will serve to shape the result more positively in the future.

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I was listening to Michael Smoak’s Higher Up Wellness podcast and he introduced a really powerful concept that he calls ‘Your Primary Question’. 

Life is going to throw a lot at us. At times it’s going to give us hope and strip it away, demand we work hard and deliver no result, get us excited about a new opportunity only to pull the rug at the last minute, and otherwise spoil plans. It’s in these moments that we apply the ‘Primary Question’.

Essentially, in the face of life adversity Michael recommends you commit a question to memory that reframes your thinking. So that no matter how bad you feel, embarrassed you are, or discouraged you get… You can ask yourself an empowering question to force your thinking. 

Questions like:

-Why might this be the best thing that could have happened to me?

-How is this part of God’s plan for my life?

-What about this makes for a great success story?

-How is this a blessing in disguise?

-How is this pulling me toward my mission?

Because our natural response to life adversity is the opposite. That it’s a bad thing to have happened, that this destroyed our plans and is pulling us away from our mission. But when you ask one good question, your mind quickly changes gears and gets to answering it. Tony Robbins often says “The quality of your life directly reflects the quality of the questions you ask yourself.”

This goes perfectly with one of my favorite frameworks, Jack Canfield’s E + R = O…. Event + Response = Outcome.

When you choose the question you ask about a situation, you determine the nature of the response. This means that for any life event you can control your perception of the outcome, and shape it such that it’s more empowering, supportive, and contributing to what you’re hoping to accomplish.

I want to put more thought into it, but the first draft of my ‘Primary Question’ is: How might this be exactly what needed to happen?

It’s a practice that’s easier said than done, especially when you think about how you need to use it in the face of disappointment. But keep it in your back pocket and it can become a superpower.

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