Self Improvement Daily Podcast

You’ve probably heard this excuse before and made it more times than you’d like to admit: “I’ll do it later.”

Need to wash the dishes? “I’ll do it after this show is over”.

Have to follow up with a government agency to straighten something out? “I’ll do it later this week on a day that isn’t so ridiculously busy”.

Planning to workout first thing in the morning? “I’ll do it after work today, I’m too tired right now.”

We all know how this ends - You watch TV late and have a bunch of chores to do, so the dishes way until tomorrow. Later in the week your day is just as ridiculously busy as before and you still feel you don’t have time to make the phone call. If you thought out were tired in the morning you’re completely wiped at the end of a work day and feel even less likely to get a workout in.

Here’s the thing about ‘later’… It’s like ‘tomorrow’. It never comes. It’s permanently pushed off into the future. 

For whatever reason, we underestimate our future capacity. We sense that work will slow down someday soon, but new things get added to your plate. We think we’ll have more energy or motivation in a future moment. But when reality catches it’s just more of the same. So here are a few things you can do to actually follow through on the things that are important to you.

Eckhart Tolle wrote a book called “The Power Of Now”. The only time you can genuinely impact is the present moment. David Meltzer often says “100% of the things you do now get done” and that’s because you’re operating in a timeframe that you have control of - the present moment. So when possible, leverage it.

Outside of doing the thing right then and there, you can take action in such a way that supports you in doing said 'thing' in the future. Here's my process for that: If there’s a new idea that comes to mind or task that needs to get done, I capture it in my Task Management System. I don’t let myself get pulled too far out of my way, but I do take a moment to capture the thought or task in a centralized place. Then every evening as part of my wind down routine, I review all of the things I added over the course of the day and organize them so that I understand their level of urgency and importance.

Here’s why that’s helpful: ‘Later’ is undefined, and that’s why it never comes. There are no specific details to it. However, when you plan something for a future day or time, the calendar catches up. Doing something ‘later’ is different than scheduling it for the future. That’s why I create a schedule for the day. I take all of the things that I have on my list, review them, select the tasks that are most important to get done, and assign them a day and time by putting them in my schedule.

Being more productive on any given day is pretty straightforward - Spend more of your time doing more of the right things. All that requires is more intention and focus. In most cases you need to plan your day to maximize it. It gives you a definite direction to an otherwise aimless intention. So don’t do it late. Do it now, or plan it for the near future so that when the day and time comes, you do it then.

Awareness is arguably one of the most important elements to creating life change. If you don’t know that something’s happening, then you can’t stop it. If don’t know the consequences of an action, you wouldn’t think to question if it’s the right thing to do. If you don’t know what all of your options are, you can’t confidently pick the right one.

Awareness is closely connected to the idea of consciousness. When we’re acting consciously, it means that we’re acting thoughtfully and purposefully with an understanding of the outcomes. When we act unconsciously, we’re doing so without awareness and therefore, are incapable of intervening and the pattern continues.

It’s for all these reasons that increasing your level of awareness (or consciousness) is one of the primary pursuits of personal development. And not just from an enlightenment standpoint through meditation, but as a way to better understand the landscape so that you can operate more optimally within it.

Now here’s an important question… What’s your system for cultivating more awareness?

The truth is there’s a system underlying everything, governing what’s happening behind the scenes. Some people build habits that function as systems, like a journaling practice to slowly reflect and review their day.

Some people have a spontaneous system of asking for feedback from others who will point out blindspots and unknown weaknesses.

And some people haven’t created a system, which means they inherit the one that we all get by default - positive emotions like joy and fulfillment, and negative emotions like anger and stress, that serve as timely indicators that something’s happening.

If awareness is so critical to our growth, it’s irresponsible to not have a highly-effective awareness generating system integrated into our daily routine. If we are serious about maximizing our potential then we should be proactive about seeking out the details we’re missing so that we can make more informed decisions.

If I’m being honest, in everything I’ve done for my self-improvement, doing exactly this is what most changed my life.

I fixed my midday fatigue because I started tracking my sleep and learned that I was averaging under 7 hours a night. I started completing projects faster, and with less stress, because I started planning each next step in advance and reviewing my progress daily. I set the intention to take bigger and bolder action every day, and I started doing it because I had to report back on it every day, and new opportunities started flooding in.

For years I was operating on assumptions thinking I was doing enough to make progress on my goals, but then wasn’t getting any traction. It was frustrating because I was reading books and learning all the right things, but still wasn’t getting any of the improvement. I was putting way more in than I was getting out.

And that’s because I had maxed out my previous system of awareness. I wanted to go faster but my engine was already going at max speed. When I upgraded my engine, aka increased my foundational system of awareness, the invisible blockers were removed and I started accelerating.

Now I'm making progress so much faster and actually hitting my goals. It took me a decade of trial and error to get to this point, but if you’re interested to upgrade your foundational system of awareness, then check out the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge.

It’ll change your life... And you’ll start seeing the results and success you’ve always known you’re capable of.

Wired into me is a deep desire to make an impact in the world, and one of the ways I’m seeking to do that is by leading a campaign called New Year For Good. It’s a fundraiser for charity where I partner with influencers with massive followings, build a New Year Challenge for them for free, and we sell it to their audience and donate every dollar to charity. 

For months I’ve been hustling to open doors and establish connections with influential partners, and my most recent attempt backfired pretty bad. I got blatantly rejected.

The story is: I took a redeye flight last Wednesday night for a happy hour Thursday evening, then traveled home all day Friday. And it was primarily to meet one particular person who’s an ideal partner for this charitable campaign. We’ve been in touch for years and mutually supportive of each other, we had been emailing back and forth as recently as the previous week trying to coordinate a time to chat about collaborating, and I figured that showing up in person would be a great way to accelerate things. 

However, at the event when I saw her and introduced myself to her for the first time in person, she had no idea who I was. And after explaining our history, our recent emails, and how she even introduced me to the person who was coordinating the event we were at, I got the sense that she had no interest to learn who I was. It was a quick and disappointing encounter.

About an hour later after she had settled in more, I went to speak with her again and had a little more time. It was awkward, I stumbled over my words trying to establish any type of connection with her, and she was hardly responsive. I even gave her a small but thoughtful gift, and it didn’t seem to land. 

I’m not sharing this to villianize this woman. I deeply believe in what she’s doing and will continue to support her. My intention is to share the way I’m processing this personal experience with rejection.

I spent half a day preparing for my conversation with her, a day and a half traveling away from home, and a few hundred dollars for this opportunity - just to completely fumble the opportunity.

Did it sting? Oh ya. But am I going to let it weigh me down? Not a chance.

Showing up without notice was a big and bold move, and one that I’ll learn from. But what I realize is, you need to take big swings if you want to achieve big results. When you take a swing, you risk missing the ball. When you put yourself out there and aggressively pursue what you want, there’s a chance you get rejected. 

And while there are many things I’d do differently the next time I attempt something like this, I’m not going to let this experience keep me from trying. I’m actually fired up about it because now I have this story. Now I have this personal example I can lean on the next time a big idea doesn’t pan out. Because it will help me take bigger and better swings. And I hope the same for you.

One of the hardest things to be clear on in life is knowing what ‘enough’ is.

What’s enough money to be making, enough influence to have, enough life experiences to feel like you made the most out of life?

Each person’s answer is deeply personal and highly specific to the context of their life. And that’s why it’s so hard to feel confident that your needs are met, and that you have enough.

Layer onto that the additional complexity that ‘enough’ can mean two different things: One definition being about sufficiency and completeness, and the other about tolerating what’s still not ideal.

That’s why I was so interested to hear Larry Kesslin’s “Enough Equation”, a formula for knowing that you’ve achieved the level of wholeness your soul is seeking. This is what Larry had to say about it:

“Enough Academy for me is about when we have enough, what’s our responsibility back to society. And I don’t think we teach that. So I came up with this ‘Enough Equation’, and the idea of ‘enough’ is killed by comparison. So you’ll never have enough if you compare yourself to somebody who has so much more.

But in the numerator of the ‘Enough Equation’ is being. It starts with being. Being authentic. Plus giving, Giving intentionally without knowing what the outcome of the giving will be. Or just giving for the reason you want to give.

And the last piece is ‘having’. So when we understand the difference between a want and a need, that’s the idea of ‘having’ for me. Having what we need, not what we want.


(Being + Giving + Having) / Comparison = The Enough Equation.”

Let me add my extra breakdown:

Being is about feeling aligned, you’ll never feel complete if you’re not being yourself.

Giving is about purpose, and the fulfillment that comes from connecting to something higher than yourself.

Having what we need rather than what we want is a big differentiator, because there will always be more to want.

And then comparison puts into question  if the extent of your being, giving, and having is satisfactory - which has the potential to disqualify your significance.

If anything, take this as another reminder to live your life by your own rules, and if you must compete, compete with yourself.

This is a snippet from my conversation with Larry about his most recent book, ‘The Joy Molecule’, you can watch the full interview here!

I’m a huge proponent of accountability. Maybe it’s because it’s something that I respond really well to, or maybe it’s because we’re so strongly wired to not want to let other people down. 

Diving into the psychology of it, accountability works because the pain of disappointing someone else is more painful than the effort required to do the thing we committed to. It connects to our deepest evolutionary need for safety, which is compromised if the people in our tribe become unwilling to want to support us.

This is kind of contrarian... But I’ve come to understand that accountability is not doing what you said you were going to do. You might think you’re accountable when you worked out because you committed to it, or met a deadline for a project assigned to you. But if you break down the root words - ‘account’ and ‘able’ - it’s much simpler.

To ‘account’ for something is just to keep track of it. To observe it and know its status.

‘Able’ is just capable of taking action, so you’re ‘accountable’ when you complete the act of keeping track.

So you are 'account'-'able' when you reflect on if you did or did not do something. It doesn’t matter if you did it, you just need to honestly observe it.

That’s why in my opinion, accountability is awareness.

But do know, many people have a hard time holding themselves accountable by this definition. They don’t want to own up to the fact that they missed a commitment, so they avoid it and act like it never happened. They feel embarrassed and spin up a story that bends the truth to explain why something happened the way it did, rather than acknowledging the root of the issue directly. 

Answering to the fact that you made a mistake is meant to hurt, and it’s the possibility of pain that drives us to take action. Accountability is awareness, but it’s a catalyst for follow through. 

When we create the right relationship with accountability, we see every shortcoming as an opportunity to learn and strengthen our weaknesses. It’s no longer this tension of someone always looking over your shoulder, but a mechanism for growing into deeper layers of awareness and self-understanding. 

Accountability feels like a bad word because we think it’s a bad thing, but it’s supportive and empowering in nature. The more we allow ourselves to be honest and true to what’s going on, the more agency we have to change our lives to feel more aligned and integrity with the person we want to be.

In our efforts to become the person who we know we’re capable of being, we know that we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

We unlock our fullest potential when we’re more disciplined and consistent with our commitments, more courageous in the way we show up to opportunities, and more intentional to make better choices on a day to day basis.

The problem is, there’s a reason we’re not already as disciplined, courageous, and intentional as we want to be. It’s because our lives are perfectly calibrated to maintain the level of performance we’re currently at. Our life conditions are designed in such a way that we are pulled toward a specific equilibrium or set point, which is our current level of output.

So if you want to break out of that pattern and raise your standard, you need to disrupt your environment so that your life naturally settles at a new and more elevated level.

When you raise the stakes, you raise your standards. When you put something on the line - your reputation, your pride, your stated level of commitment - you create necessity in your life. You create conditions that require more disciplined, courageous, and intentional action or else there will be consequences.

For example, having a daily podcast requires that I share something new every single day. If I started missing days, people would call me out. There’s accountability embedded in my environment. If the stakes weren’t so high and I didn’t have an expectation to meet, there’s no way I would have kept up with this over 7 years later. But my commitment raised the stakes, and that’s why I’ve achieved a higher standard.

You can’t try to hold yourself to a higher standard just because you want to. But when you redesign your environment and create conditions that make you need to, you’re much more likely to follow through. All it takes is one decisive moment of bold action and things can permanently change. You just need to know what to do, and actually do it, because raising the stakes and cultivating necessity is one of the most impactful things we can do to bring out a higher-performing version of ourselves.

That’s why my first step in supporting you is to invite you to take on a 21 Day Challenge. When you sign up for it, you’ve raised the stakes, and plug into a system that helps you deliver on that higher standard. If that's what you want, give it a look!

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A very natural emotion to feel, which is a derivative of fear, is a sense of worry. You might be worried for someone else’s safety, worried that things won’t go according to plan and create problems, or worried about the news you’re going to hear that is uncertain or might have serious implications.  

Whatever the case: Worrying isn’t helpful. It doesn’t offer any value. In fact it usually creates more problems.

Fear is meant to be an indicator and create awareness for the risk that something presents. Ultimately, fear is meant to inform your decision making and how you choose to navigate a situation. The problem is, when you’re feeling afraid you’re in a compromised emotional space. You can’t be purely objective about something because your state of mind is biased. This leaves you more vulnerable to misinterpreting or misunderstanding what you want to do because you’re being influenced by your emotions. But nonetheless, fear is a meaningful datapoint because it’s adding something meaningful to your decision making matrix.

Worry is different though. Worry is just a chronic, underlying fear that continues to linger after a decision has been made. It takes up your energy and attention but doesn’t lead to anything productive. Is you staying up all night going to actually help someone get home safe? Is you worrying about a medical diagnosis going to change the results of a test? Worrying doesn’t influence the result but it hijacks your experience.

When you notice yourself worrying, the better thing to do is to remind yourself of the choices you’ve made. Choosing not to intervene and tell your friend it’s dangerous to drive alone at night. Choosing to seek two medical opinions and make decisions on your healthcare once you have more information. Are there more things that could be done for these situations? Sure, and leveraging your ongoing fear to take action in those ways is valuable. But worrying for the sake of worrying isn’t productive.

In the case where you’ve made your decisions and have chosen that you don’t want to take further action, the antidote to worry is acceptance. To find agency and ownership in the situation because you’ve gotten involved to the extent that you’ve wanted to.

A personal example of this is: If I’m on an airplane and we start to hit some turbulence, it could be scary. But rather than worrying about the plane’s safety, I run through an internal checklist.

Do I want to say anything to the flight attendant? No.

Do I want to take over the plane myself so that I’m in control of my fate? No.

Is there anything I can contribute to influence the result of if the plane makes it or not? No.

At that point, I accept my fate. And I no longer feel nervous, anxious, or worried because it’s an emotion that doesn’t serve any purpose, and I get grounded in the ways I’m choosing to show up in the situation.

Now that’s not to say that there’s something wrong with you if you worry. Again, it’s a very natural thing to do. But what I wanted to offer today is a perspective around it so that you can process your worry and use your attention and energy in ways that are more valuable.