Self Improvement Daily Podcast

A beautiful feeling we all get is motivation. We probably wish we felt it more often because it causes us to show up differently in the world - with more discipline, focus, courage, confidence, and speed.

But, motivation is unreliable. It’s something you can’t count on to be there when you need it. That’s why I want to introduce you to what you should do with motivation, so that you stretch out the impact it has on you for longer than just in the moments when you feel it.

When you feel motivated, I call that being in an enriched environment. It’s a moment when things are light, hopeful, and optimistic. It’s when life is helping you get what you want more than it’s fighting against you. But as is the nature of motivation, these moments are brief, and it’s what you do within an enriched environment that dictates how much it actually influences you.

Ideally, while you’re feeling good and motivated, what you do is take an action that has long-term consequences. You precommit to something big, brave, or bold and in doing so, you reshape your future environment so that it’s more conducive to you doing the thing you want to do now.

For example, I was feeling motivated to write the first draft of my book. I could have written for a few hours right then and there, but when the motivation goes away so too goes the writing. Instead, what I did was I capitalized on that motivation by sending an email to a mentor saying “I will have the first draft of my book written by my birthday.”

I had the courage to ‘hit send’ because I was feeling motivated, and eventually that moment faded, but my commitment didn’t. Now I’d created an environment that forced my behavior. Either I write the book or I let my mentor down, someone whose opinion I care about immensely.

I converted short-term motivation into long-term staying power not because I got more motivated, but because of how I took action while I felt motivated.

A silly example of this: Let’s say you want to paint a wall in the house. What if, while you had the motivation and commitment to take on that project, you put a big line in marker on the wall. That would force you to paint the wall, even if you didn't feel like it, or else you’d have to deal with an ugly streak on your wall!

The concept is the same. Take action when you feel motivated so that you’re forced to take action when you don’t feel motivated. If you’re feeling motivated right now, feeling hopeful you just learned a new technique that will actually change your life, then capitalize on that motivation by taking on the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge.

Signing up is a simple action that will put you on the path to becoming the most consistent, productive, and focused version of yourself. Just sign up and the Challenge takes care of the rest! It’s amazing how far one micro-moment of courage and believing in yourself could take you.

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I love using the metaphor of climbing a mountain to demonstrate principles around progress. The top of the mountain is the destination and each of us are on a path trying to get there.
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But here’s the thing: In life there’s no one way to get somewhere, there are nearly an infinite amount of paths. And there’s no one way that will work for you, many different strategies can help you achieve a goal. Yet we get hung up on the idea of making sure we’re on the right path, that’s best for us. And what I’ve found is, people waste so much time deciding what path to go on that they miss all of the positive progress they could have made, had they committed and gone.
Maybe you’ve heard the expression “you have to go back to go forward,” and I have issues with it. While it may seem like you’re ‘undoing’ your progress because you end up right where you started, it doesn’t mean that your effort was wasted. When hiking a trail someone doesn’t walk backwards, they turn around and walk forward the opposite direction.

In reality, that’s often necessary because there will be obstacles. Let’s say you encounter a locked gate blocking the way and you can’t get past it. When you started, you didn’t know the gate was there. It’s only once you got there that you acquire information you were missing. You didn’t know what was required to succeed on that path. Before you get started, by all means you should ask people who’ve gotten to the top of the mountain before telling you what you need to know. You should do your research and make sure you’re prepared. But the path is never the same twice, and waiting until you know everything you’ll need to know will never work.
Because you took the path, you learn that paths might have gates, so go back to the bottom to grab a ladder that you bring with you. Or you call someone who can teach you how to build a ladder out of the forest.
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That’s why, the way I prefer to think about it is that there’s only one path, and on that path you only ever go forward. Sure, taking that path might lead you in what seems like the wrong direction. It may take you downhill when you know you need to go up. But if that’s the only path, then the only way to get to the top is by continuing to move forward. One step forward is one stop closer to the top, even if it’s a step downhill.

I share this to remind you how important it is to take action, show up, and do the work. That’s the only way you get the critical feedback you need to increase the likelihood you’ll succeed. It reveals what it actually takes to make progress in ways theory never could. And if that’s what you want, then that’s the path ahead of you. So take a step.

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Something I really pride myself on is that I hold myself to a high standard. It’s something a lot of people talk about but many fail to do because they don't have all the pieces they need in place to fulfill it.

First, holding yourself to a higher standard requires clarity on what that standard is. You can’t expect to hit a target if you don’t know what to aim for. Second is you need to be disciplined - to reject distractions, vices, and impulses that try to pull you off track. And last, you need to reflect and measure your performance so you can compare how you did against the intention. It’s a process I go through daily in my Self Improvement Scorecard, and it’s changed my life.

But standards aren’t meant to be as rigid as they appear to be. I have an issue with the idea of things being ‘non-negotiable’ because that always reaches some breaking point where what you committed to does more harm than good, and it doesn't actually serve you. And if that’s the case at the furthest level, isn’t it also true on a smaller level?

So this is my approach to it. I have two clearly defined standards for myself: A ‘High Standard’ that represents my ideal performance in an area of my life, and a ‘Minimum Standard’ that represents the smallest meaningful commitment I want to be held accountable to.

From there, with those two in place, every day I set my intention for the day. Life happens, there are situations that call for changes in plan, and rather than being set up for failure I can adjust my approach.

For example, the ‘High Standard’ I have for my fitness is to exercise every single day to a sweat for at least 30 minutes, including at least 10 minutes of cardio. My minimum standard is that I complete 15 minutes of dedicated movement, could be a walk, bodyweight workout, or time at the gym.

Now what if a day calls for something else and I can’t dedicate the 30 minutes to hitting my high standard? Does that mean I just have to accept that I’m going to fall short for a day?

What I choose to do is, given everything on my plate for that day, set an intention for what my ideal ‘exercise plan’ is and hold myself accountable to executing that. Could be a day I have a cross country flight and I’m up at 4 am. … I commit to only doing a 15 minute walk. Or on a day when I’m recovering from being sick, I choose to take a rest day.

When I do that, my intention becomes my standard for the day, and I use my pre-defined standards as a reference point to determine how I want to show up. In my opinion, when you forecast your day and make a ‘meaningful exception’ to the rule, that’s not making an excuse… It’s being intentional about knowing what you want to do in advance.

These aren’t just words. This is a process I complete daily in my Self Improvement Scorecard. And if you want to check it out, watch the video I made showing you how it works.

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With Thanksgiving later this week, I wanted to share a reflection (and a few ideas) you could incorporate into your time with loved ones. The intention is that you can take something you learn here to make this Thanksgiving the most thankful yet!

Gratitude is one of the most abundant things in the world. It’s a gift to everyone involved - the giver gets to reflect positively on the positive impact someone has made on them, and the recipient gets to receive a genuine reminder that they’re loved, seen, appreciated, and valued.

It’s such a powerful force that every day I play a game I call ‘Gratitude Roulette’ where I go in my contacts list, flick my finger to pull up a random set of names, and pick one person in that set to reach out to and let them know I was thinking about them, and recognize them for the good I see them bringing to the world.

Thanksgiving is among my favorite holidays because it normalizes gratitude, and serves as a gateway to more of it. So this Thanksgiving, challenge yourself to be one step more intentional about how you integrate thankfulness into your day. And here are some ideas that I’ll be doing to make this Thanksgiving my most thankful yet. 

First, you can send out dozens of messages. Even if you copy and paste it, sending out messages that say “Happy Thanksgiving! I’m grateful for you and having you in my life.” makes people feel warm because you were thinking about them. Extra points to personalize it with a short reason why, or making it a voice note so that they know you put the time in specifically for them.

Another thing you can do with the people that you’re visiting is tell them directly that you’re thankful for them. As people are mixing, chatting, and preparing the meal, you can put more substance into the conversations you have. More than just catching up, but genuinely acknowledging someone for what they’ve brought to your life. It doesn’t need to be overly sappy, but a quick moment of real connection goes a really long way.

And last, especially for those who will be at a huge feast, is to be grateful for the abundance you live with. To literally look at counters full of food and realize there are so many people who hardly have enough to survive, and you get to enjoy more than you could ever need. Put up a short prayer or meditation reflecting on that and you’ll feel how full your life is. 

Those are just some ideas! I know that some of these things might feel uncomfortable, but they’re well worth it. A grateful life is an amazing life, and I hope you get to feel and share all of the blessings you have this Thanksgiving.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, who spoke from stage about mental performance. She works with professional athletes and executives to help them be more resilient, specifically helping them quickly disrupt negative thought patterns that would affect their performance. 

She taught her powerful 3-part process, a quick exercise anyone can do at any moment to realign and refocus, and I wanted to share it with you.

The process is: Learn, Burn, Return.

First, in the face of underperformance, Dr. Cindra encourages you to take a quick look at it. There’s probably something you need to learn - a pattern that you need to be aware of, environmental factors you need to keep in consideration, or some other insight that’s relevant to the next attempt. Don’t dwell, it’s meant to be a quick audit.

Then, you burn it. Forget it ever happened. Move on emotionally, removing any attachment to the poor result. You integrated what caused it and keeping it in your memory no longer serves you. Confidence is built by having an overwhelming number of positive instances that prove your capabilities. Don’t let one bad move spoil everything else. Dr. Cindra recommends you have a ritual you physically do to shake it off.

And last, you return. You go right back into being fully focused on the present, undistracted by what just happened - whether that’s a game, a presentation, or something else that demands your best. The truth is, you can only do your best when you give your best.

In one case, one of her athletes, Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Adam Thielen dropped a big pass. He ran off the field (processing the mistake and learning from it), when he got to the sideline he made a hand gesture flushing it down the toilet (burning the memory), and dialed right back into the game (return). 

His next opportunity, he made a big play that won the game. And it was only possible because he used the ‘Learn, Burn, Return’ process to restore his high-performance.

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What if life, growth, and improvement were as simple as completing a two step process? What if everything you’ve ever wanted, and the version of yourself you’ve always wanted to become, was on the other side of consistently engaging in just two things?

My mentor Jim Bunch originally taught me a 3 part framework for transformation that has become central to my understanding for behavior change:  Awareness, action, and accountability. 

-Awareness is critical because positive change lacks direction if you don’t have clarity for what you want, or where you want to go… 

-Action is the world’s only mechanism for creating change, and the extent of that impact is only as strong as the quality of the action and your ability to execute it…

-And accountability adds follow through because without doing something, all you have is another idea for how you could change your life.

You have those elements in place and you create alignment that serves as a powerful force forward.

However, dissecting this further, I’m realizing that the process is even simpler than that, and that this 3-step process is actually just a never-ending cycle of awareness and action.

And that’s because accountability is awareness. True accountability is an honest observation of if you did or didn’t do what you intended to. It’s a feedback loop that informs you on how things went, brings consciousness to weaknesses or influencing circumstances, and prepares you to do better next time.

This means that the 3-step process just became a cycle: Awareness <-> Action.

As long as we are always seeking feedback and refining what we want, we are always cultivating more awareness. Then in order to materialize that awareness into reality you need to take action, in the best way you know how.

It’s a cycle that mirrors Jon Assaraf’s ‘Think-Plan-Do-Review’ and Tom Bilyeu’s ‘Goal-Hypothesis-Test-Evaluate’ that he calls the “Physics Of Progress”’

But seeing both of those through this new perspective, both of those are just two parts awareness (what you want + feedback) and two parts action (planning + follow through), connected in a never-ending cycle. 

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Humans are hard-wired to be hyper-responsive to our environments. Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, argues that ‘the most adaptable survive’. This means that it’s highly advantageous to process what’s around us and reposition ourselves to fit better within it.

For that reason, the biggest lever we can pull to positively change our lives is to redesign our environment. Like a stick in a river, we unconsciously go wherever the river’s current is taking us. When we change the direction of the current in our favor, we go in a more favorable direction.

That’s why, one of the best things we can do for our personal development is take on a challenge. A challenge creates a certain environment that causes us to show up, take action, and make decisions differently. A challenge’s influence temporarily pulls us into a higher level of performance, and when done right, makes that newly discovered higher standard permanent.

Why is a challenge such a powerful fixture and tool for environmental design?

First, a challenge is time-bound. With a definite timeline, your mind can quantify the effort needed to fulfill the expectations you’ve set. So rather than rationalizing that a new habit or routine isn’t sustainable, you can get yourself to do it because your mind sees it as temporary.

Second, when you take on a challenge, it often involves some form of commitment. This makes us more willing to do things that are hard or inconvenient. We can rise above our emotions and act with more discipline. Making a commitment puts your integrity on the line and if you don’t make good on it, it suggests things about yourself that are painful to admit. So you follow through to prove those things wrongs.

Which leads well into the final element - A challenge welcomes competition. Competing brings out your most resilient, dedicated, persevering self. You’re less willing to make excuses and more consistent with getting the job done. This becomes even more powerful when there are leaderboards or gamification introduced into the challenge, because then you get to see your performance relative to others, which is motivating.

People show up differently in a challenge because the environment of a challenge brings it out of them. It creates the right conditions for real life-change and success.

And this is what I’ve seen from people taking over 1000 people through the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. It’s a perfect storm of commitment, clarity, and competition that all come together to help you hold yourself to a higher standard for 21 days. It proves to you what’s possible when you really apply yourself, while building the foundation for a healthier, more focused, more productive life. 

If you know that you have so much more to give, and that you have so much more potential but you’re too inconsistent to make good on it, check out the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. It’s the jumpstart you need to reach your next level.

I was at the grocery store and was exposed to something I’d always known to be true but never thought deeply about the implications of it.

I was in the produce section grabbing some salad kits and a woman was kneeling in one of the refrigerators. She was being supervised by another employee and being trained. As she was pulling out bag after bag of romaine lettuce, I overheard her ask a question:

“Wait, so what happens to all of this expired food? This is so sad.”

She’s right. It is sad. Yet, when we have the great privilege of going into a store and picking out whatever we want, it doesn’t make us sad. We hardly think about what happens to all of the food that goes bad. Maybe it’s something you keep in mind when you shop, maybe not. But in either case we’ve learned to accept that’s just the way it is.

Because this woman was in training and throwing away the food herself, she had a new perspective on it. Rather than being desensitized to the reality of the waste, she confronted it. And she allowed herself to feel it.

There are things throughout life that we just learn to tolerate over time. Things that aren’t ideal and violate our values, yet we don’t worry about them or do anything about them. What was impossible to understand becomes commonplace, and what we used to feel passionately opposed to becomes normal.

Some people create businesses and movements to address the problems they can’t stand to see in the world, but most of us don’t. Most of us just live our lives and forget about it. And that’s not a knock on you or me, but a reality of the human condition. Over time, we acclimate to our surroundings. We desensitize to issues and experience things less intensely because they become less novel.

My recommendation today is more challenging, but necessarily so. I don’t want you to grieve, but I do want you to allow yourself to feel more. Admit that some things are unfair, unjust, and unsustainable. Have a problem with the systems society operates within. Because when you do, you become a brighter advocate for what you want to see in the world, and in the smallest of ways, play a bigger role in fixing the problems you can’t stand for.

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I was on a group call with Stanford Professor and author Jeremy Utley, and he offered a really interesting perspective. 

As an entrepreneurial advisor, when starting a business, he notices that people often get ahead of themselves. They think about the business´viability (if something has a sustainable business model) and feasibility (if they have the skillset to develop a product or service at the level they need to) to evaluate the opportunity.

What Jeremy recommends, though, is that those evaluations hold no bearing if they don’t have a validated foundation of desirability. In other words, if people don’t actually want what you have to offer, then everything else is useless. And it’s for that exact reason that he recommends any entrepreneur does rapid ‘desirability testing’ before starting any venture, to make sure there’s real market need.

While that’s a great business lesson, there’s a fitting corollary into personal development as well. In our self-growth and pursuit of positive change, many people are approaching things in the wrong order.

Here are a few examples: 

Say someone wants to be more disciplined and mentally tough so they buy an ice bath at home. But then they’re not in it consistently because the only time they can use it is in the morning, and it prevents them from getting a workout in.

Or say someone wants to start a side business so they pay a designer to create a logo and build a website for them. But then, when it’s time to work on it, they realize they don’t have as much free-time as they thought, and it causes unintended consequences at home with their family.

In both cases, the person in question thought they knew what they wanted, but they didn’t see the full picture. And before making big moves on it, they could have tried it lightly. 

Instead of buying an ice bath, they could have hopped in the community pool for a few weeks and see if it’s a routine that works for them… 

Or before investing so much in starting their business, they could have gotten their first client to see what it was like.

The lesson is, what you think you want in your head could be very different in practice. So be intentional about allowing yourself to taste it, and validate its desirability before investing more time and energy into its viability and feasibility.

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