Self Improvement Daily Podcast

An amazing thing in life is that we don’t just set goals and have dreams, but they can actually come to fruition! What we want isn’t just an empty promise to ourselves but a potential reality that we’re called to create. And oftentimes, we succeed in creating it.

Within the process of that pursuit, something I’ve noticed is that people value their achievement less if they didn’t work hard for it. It’s almost like an achievement is more meaningful when it was earned against all odds and worked hard for.

But why does it need to be that way? Why can’t our dream life just be something that is effortlessly attracted to us? Why can’t success come easy?

I’m of the opinion that we are powerful beyond measure and each have access to exactly what we need to create whatever we want. We have an inherent connection to what we want, and who we want to be - Yet we it's not our reality exactly because there’s a resistance that dilutes our ability to access what we’re connected to.  If only we were to remove that resistance, all that’s left is a direct connection to the skills, character, and beliefs we need to make it all happen.

The reason this seems so unfathomable to us is because of the belief system we’ve been raised in. It’s a collective understanding that people are rewarded for hard work, that there’s virtue in persevering through adversity, and that it’s more meaningful to be an underdog.

And unfortunately it’s creating an unfair expectation, and causes many people to discredit the successes they’ve achieved because they feel it was just a fluke, and it wasn’t earned.

But again, that’s operating from a more traditional way of thinking. If we adopt a new belief system that doesn’t judge the mechanism that creates success, and instead welcome it when it comes, success will show up more often.

Success can come easy when you get out of your own way and let it. Until then, it’ll be the type of thing that you have to keep working hard for.

I heard Chris Williamson define a term that explains one of the biggest problems in my life. It’s sad to say, but if I had a weekend to myself at home, where I didn’t have any plans and I couldn’t work - I don’t know what I’d want to do. I love having fun but in my adulthood I feel like I’ve forgotten many of the things I like to do just because I enjoy doing it.

This is what Chris Williamson calls ‘Productivity Purgatory’ - things you do for fun only because they create more productivity later.

For years I’ve called this ‘Compulsive Productivity’ and it’s exactly what I do with my free time. It's the desire to want to get a really good workout in, challenge myself to a long meditation, go for a walk by the beach, watch an intellectual interview on Youtube, or do something that contributes to my long-term well-being in my free-time.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but if you’re like me and have a hard time seeing past that on an average day, then perhaps you’re in productivity purgatory too.

For me, I’ve convinced myself that doing things that refresh my mind, body, and soul are fun. I really like the idea of filling my time with rejuvenating things today so that I take care of the vessel I’ll be using tomorrow.

But I also acknowledge that it’s healthy to have hobbies, activities, and outings that you do just for the fun of it. And in that category, fewer things come to mind.

I think the main point I’m trying to make is - Trying to do productive and healthy things in your down time contributes to the narrative that we always need to be doing something. That if we aren’t making the most of an opportunity, we’ll later regret the things we missed and wonder how high we could’ve climbed had we applied ourselves.

So for a moment, let’s reject that notion and just do something because we want to. Because it’s fun to do! And weave in grounded joy as a counterbalance to our big ambitions.

The most undisputed, most valuable thing that we have in life is time.

The classic question that proves this is: “If I gave you $1 million but you died tomorrow, would you take it? What about $10 million?” For the far majority of people, the answer is ‘no’. There’s no amount of money that’s worth more than another day of life. 

William Penn is known for saying “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." Isn’t that interesting? We believe that if only we had a few more hours a day we’d be able to take care of ourselves better, spend more quality time with loved ones, pour ourselves into the hobbies we enjoy, build up a new project we’ve had in mind for a while… Then our lives would be exponentially better.

We do those things and our health, careers, relationships, life experiences and fulfillment will flourish

The irony is, we have the time to do all of it. We just aren’t using our time well.

Proper time management comes down to three things: Knowing what to do, doing it, and doing it really well. It’s the trifecta. 

From the sea of everything, you have to know what to do. These are the things that are most important, most urgent, most impactful, and most likely to generate the results that you want. That level of discernment requires both organization and strategy, helping you commit to the things that are most aligned with your goals.

You’ve got to follow through and actually do it. The best plans do nothing for you if you don’t put them into action, and action is unlikely to happen unless you’ve created the right environment for it.

And this is a bit of a bonus, but if you want to reach the levels of success that you envision for yourself, you need to do things really well. This requires that you hold yourself accountable to a higher standard of quality. You get a lot out for what you put in by creating leverage through having the skills to do it well, and you give tasks your best within the time by having the energetic capacity to focus.

What I’ve described are the ways that you unlock your personal productivity, getting more of the right things done day after day, so that you can live the healthy, influential, meaningful life you’d be excited to wake up to.

And if you want to learn not just what to do… But how to become more productive on a daily basis... I created a Masterclass called “The 6 Productivity Fundamentals For Overbusy Business Owners”. It goes over the exact 6-part process I just described but in way more detail, with specific action steps. You don’t need to be a business owner to get a lot out of it, and if you want to watch the replay from when I presented it live, it's available for free when you click here.

Something that passionate, ambitious high-achievers strive for on a daily basis is to give it their all. To give their 100%. 

The intention is good but the problem is, any time we give less than 100% we begin to judge ourselves. We question how committed we are to our goals and becoming the person who’s capable of achieving them. It’s discouraging to fall short of the expectation you set for yourself.

And the reality is, in today’s world, giving 100% is really hard. 

Unexpected things pop up in your family and work every day that suck your energy and attention. Our bodies go through natural rhythms, cycles that are impacted in known and unknown ways, that carry a certain energy or attitude into the present moment.

There’s a reason for the expression “give it all you’ve got”. Some days you have more to give than others. Your 100% looks different every day.

And with that in mind, there are two important things to consider:

First, a lot of what you ‘have to give’ is in your control. By making good lifestyle choices, you can do your part to offset energy drainers and protect yourself from their influence. When you can act with discipline and do what you know most serves you when you feel tired, inconvenienced, or overly busy - that’s how you can decrease its impact on you. So always do your best to make good, healthy choices.

And second, you must be fair with yourself. Be self-aware of the circumstances around you and how you’re receiving them. If you’re in a season of demanding work, choose to decrease your exercise commitments. If you’re on vacation, give yourself permission to splurge on some dessert. You're human and the variance is okay.

However, this all needs to be done with guardrails. Rather than slipping to the far extreme and giving yourself permission to take unrestricted action you’d later disagree with, you need to be clear on setting a fair level of commitment. Maybe it’s not an hour long workout every day, but 15 minutes of bodyweight exercise on a day when you’re traveling. And maybe it’s not having as many drinks or slices of cake as you want at a friend's wedding, but 2 drinks over the course of the night and a reasonably sized piece of cake to try. 

Evaluating what your 100% is on any given day, and how you want to show up in different areas of your life from that space, is a dynamic process. 

The way that I do it is I have clearly defined standards for myself: A high standard that is a doable challenge every day, and a minimum standard that is the amount required to maintain progress. From that reference point I tap into how I’m feeling, what I’ve got going on, and set an intention for how I want to show up.

Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting stuck on my phone more often than I’d like. Yes, even the guy who talks about this stuff all day struggles with it. Why do you think I talk about it?

In particular, going on YouTube on my phone has been a slippery slope. I usually turn to it when I want to put on something mindless to help me reset my mind. This can be during a meal alone or just for a midday break. There’s nothing inherently wrong with social media, the real issue is simply doing something you don’t want to be doing. 

The technology is literally designed to hold your attention, and a few days in a row I stayed on longer than I wanted to. And I knew that because every night I reflect on my social media usage in my Self Improvement Scorecard. This brought to my awareness my vulnerability for it, which helped me make some adjustments.

There was a day a few weeks ago when I wanted to take a break and watch some YouTube. But knowing that I wanted to watch on my own terms, with control, I decided to take a few steps of intervention.

First, before I started watching I set a timer on my watch for 10 minutes. That way I would know when my usage started to get into undesirable territory. I also voiced to my wife “I’m taking a quick break, if I’m not back in 20 minutes, tell me to get back to work.”

Because I implemented those two strategies, I was very intentional with my time on social media, got the mind reset I was looking for, and went back to work right on time.

And I can explain why this worked so well in one word: Environment.

Rather than entering the same environment where I’ve been struggling to control my time on my phone, I shaped it in my favor. The timer interrupted my consciousness so that I knew exactly when my time was up, and it allowed me to make an empowered choice. The accountability I established with my wife added a layer of commitment to the plan, with painful consequences of letting my wife down if I didn't follow through, which made it easy to close the app. 

When you take action to shape your environment in your behavior, what you want to happen becomes way more likely to happen. And that’s simply because you change the path of least resistance. A supportive environment takes you closer to where you want to go.  

I have endless examples of how I’ve shaped my environment for my success, but it all comes back to having critical awareness in my Self Improvement Scorecard.

Perhaps the most critical element to living the incredible, impactful, fulfilling life you know you’re capable of is awareness.

And that's because our lives are shaped by the actions we take. Consciously and unconsciously, we do things that interact with the world and thus, shape it. 

Undesirable results in your health, finances, and relationships are the byproduct of making poor choices or failing to make good ones. Or similarly you make positive shifts to your life when you take new, aligned, empowered actions that open up new possibilities and prime the road to success.

None of us want suffering, hardship, or disappointment in our lives - yet that’s what many of us experience. And it’s simply because we aren’t doing things that create improved and more favorable realities.

Our lives have perfectly calibrated to the types and levels of the actions we take.

This is where awareness comes in. Many of us live in deep cycles of action or inaction that continue to manifest into the same unwanted results. We stay stuck in those cycles for far too long because we don’t have the awareness to know what we’re doing to cause it. 

But with awareness you’re given the opportunity to choose something else. You can see what you’ve been blind to, understand the causes that create the effect, and disrupt the pattern by deciding to do something different. 

And the thing about awareness is - it’s always available to us. When we pause to reflect, diagnose, pick apart, and understand, we discover so many details that were hiding in plain sight. They were always there, perfectly explaining the shortcomings or missed opportunities you’ve been experiencing.

This is one of the reasons why cultivating more awareness in your life is among the most recommended practices in personal development. If we don’t have it, we can’t do anything to change it, and we’re at the mercy of how things are. But with it, we are empowered to shape our lives how we want them.

With that, the work is never done. As humans we are designed with limited awareness. We only have 5 senses to experience the world and one perspective that we see the world through. Embracing that truth is my encouragement to you today - become more aware of your limited awareness.

Here are a few ideas for how to do that: 

What about your beliefs and worldviews are causing you to interpret a situation a certain way?

What tendencies and preferences are affecting the way you show up to things?

What boundary is getting crossed, or intention isn’t getting fulfilled, that is causing you to tolerate a version of life that’s short of what you see for yourself?

With awareness you can detect the pattern and then breakthrough it to create something better.

I was listening to Chris Harder’s podcast and heard him say something that made a lot of sense to me: Math is the path.

If you want to improve anything about your life, you need to be able to measure its change over time. We all seek this vague idea of ‘improvement’, and we don’t have the insight to know if we’re achieving it without having numbers to calculate. 

For something to improve means that it produced a more desirable result. Your mile time improves when it takes you less time… Your income improves when you get a bigger check at the end of the month… Your diet improves when you reduce the grams of sugar or number of carbs you’re eating on a daily basis.

Each of these examples have the same thing in common - numbers. Math.

You can measure how things were, compare that to the measurement for how things are now, and if the current measurement is closer to what you want than the past measurement, then you can conclude that things improved.

I once heard Tom Bilyeu say “If it can be math, it should be math” and it’s for the same reason. Having objective data helps you directly compare two results. Otherwise, it’s a subjective comparison that isn’t standardized and therefore, vulnerable to bias and misunderstanding.

That’s not to say that improvement, progress, and growth are strictly a science. There’s a lot of art in it too. The factors that go into producing the numbers are complex. It’s often difficult to attribute one thing to causing change because it’s nearly impossible to isolate all variables but one. 

This is where interpretation comes in. You take what you know and what you’ve come to understand, and you apply that to create the reasons you think a result changed. 

You objectively ran a faster mile… Why? Was it a stricter diet, a better training plan, more energy on the day of?

Or your business objectively did more in revenue this month than last month. Why? Is it because of a better offer, a strong marketing campaign, or the fruits of something you did a while ago that’s finally paying off?

Every result we have in life must comply with the law of cause and effect. Certain things went in to produce a certain output. Improvement involves clearly understanding what that output is by having a standardized measurement. Interpretation comes in to figure out what is most responsible for creating that result.

This is exactly why the first step of the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge is to implement a foundational layer performance tracking in your life. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and this gets you in the habit of consistently measuring how things are going so you can actually know if you’re improving, or not.

There are so many things in life that we’ve come to accept as normal and take for granted. Circumstances related to our well-being and safety, our health and wellness, our access to resources, our mental faculties… All blessings that we've come to know to be a part of our everyday life.

And we don’t realize that we’re taking these things for granted until we encounter a situation where we see the consequence of not having it. It takes a moment of awareness and perspective to realize how good we have it, and this comes in two different ways:

When something gets taken away from us, or when we see that someone else doesn’t have what we effortlessly enjoy.

We don’t realize how lucky we are to have a healthy family until someone in our family becomes unhealthy, or we hear about a health issue or tragedy in someone else’s family…

We don’t realize how lucky we are that we have the capacity to walk until we get injured and need to get around on crutches, someone near you gets injured and you see them debilitated, or you see someone on the street in a wheelchair with a permanent disability…

We take for granted a nice warm shower until our water is shut off for a day, or we visit a part of the world where they don’t have the infrastructure to take daily showers.

I remember coming back from my first time in Mexico for a house build impact project. I was so deeply grateful for my shower at home - something I’d never thought to appreciate.

We had showers where we stayed, but the water was dirty so you had to be careful to not open your mouth, and it only got to lukewarm temperature. Not to forget the family we were building the home for, they were living on dirt surrounded by flies and feces in very unsanitary conditions.

So many layers of gratitude which came from so many layers of awareness. 

We take it for granted until it’s being taken from us or we see it being taken away from someone else. It shifts perspective and makes us realize how good we have it. That’s why I’m such a huge proponent for gratitude journaling. Literally taking the time to pause and see the goodness in your life helps you realize how abundant it is, and how lucky you are to have it.