Self Improvement Daily Podcast

When I was driving on the freeway switching lanes, something occurred to me: What was once a scary, uncertain, tenuous situation has become very commonplace.

I remember when I first started driving that I would check the side-view mirrors to see if there were cars in the lanes next to me. But further, I’d look left and right over my shoulders to see first-hand where the cars were. Obviously that’s way more dangerous to do, completely taking my eyes off of the road in front of me… But at the time it felt safer.

That’s because I didn’t fully trust what I was seeing in my side-view mirrors. The cost of getting it wrong was too grave to not verify there wasn’t a car in the lane next to me. Since it was all being reflected backwards, it took some time to be confident about what I was seeing in the orientation around me.

This is a great example of how beliefs work, actually. At first I didn’t have much evidence to suggest that what I was seeing in the side-view mirror was true. I’d look there and look over my shoulder to confirm. But once I did that enough times, I had enough evidence to confirm that, in fact, what I saw in the mirror matched what I saw in real life. I needed enough instances of experience to believe what I thought I was seeing.

Speed up to today where I have many years of driving experience and not a single reason to not believe what I see in my side-view mirror. I fully trust it. The same is possible for any belief. 

Hitting your sales quota for many years will convince you that you’re a good salesperson… 

Having a partner who holds space for you through many difficult times makes you believe it’s safe to be vulnerable with them… 

Our beliefs add meaning to our reality and create the emotional experience we perceive from different life events. And the best way to reshape your belief system is to collect so much proof that it’s unreasonable to believe that anything else could be true.

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In my Daily Check In I was noticing that I was spending more time on social media than I wanted to. In reading my reflections about it, I found that the reason was because I was choosing to watch specific Youtube videos related to soccer highlights or analysis… something I genuinely enjoy and consider to be a good use of my time… And once I finished I was getting caught binging other videos unconsciously.

I devised a solution that would accomplish both goals of enjoying my soccer highlights without being tempted to keep scrolling once they were done: Instead of watching the soccer videos on my phone, I could chromecast them to the TV. That way I could put my phone on the kitchen counter (way out of arms reach). This meant that in order for me to watch more videos after the highlights finished, I'd need to get up to grab my phone and be painfully aware that I’m doing it. And it worked like a charm!

What I just described is an instance of intentional environmental design. Using the law of proximity, I added friction to a negative behavior and made it way more difficult to do. It also prevented me from snapping into the habit unconsciously.

Taking a step back, one of the main factors that indicates how easy an action is to do, is accessibility. If an action is more accessible, meaning it’s physically closer to you or there’s less resistance to initiate the action, it’s way more likely to happen.

This is just another version of saying what James Clear introduces in ‘Atomic Habits’ about making good actions easy and bad actions difficult. It’s the classic example of burying bad food deep into a pantry, or removing alcohol from your house so you need to shop for it when you feel the urge. More resistance leads to less follow through on the behavior. 

This is a simple, everyday example of how you can use environmental design to make good choices easier! It worked for me, and something like this could work for you too.

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It didn’t occur to me how natural time management is for me. I’ve gotten pretty good at designing my days so that I can stay focused and have the time I need to do all the things I want to do. I don’t overcommit myself, sacrifice my health or personal time unnecessarily to accommodate other people’s agendas, or load too much on my plate that’s too hard to handle. 

Here’s a perfect example: I had a call booked for 8am on the same day that I usually do my longer workouts. Looking at the commitments I decided to wake up at 5:30am, do my 45 minute morning routine, get to the gym for my hour long workout, come home, shower, and hop on my laptop for the call. I recognized that the most likely constraint to all that would be feeling too tired in the morning. So I planned for 7.5 hours of sleep, which means lights would need to be off by 10pm (half an hour earlier than usual) and I’d need to start my night routine the previous night 30 minutes sooner. 

The rationale I just described isn’t all that complex. It’s simply putting the pieces of my life together in a way that makes sense for what I’m trying to accomplish. But just because it’s easy for me doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to do. The truth is, time management is a skill, and it’s a skill I’ve been developing for many years. 

Effective time management requires time consciousness. When you actually keep track of how long things take and how much of your energy it requires, you become more aware of the practical implications of committing to it. The more time you spend planning and reviewing a schedule for the day, the better you are at predicting what’s actually doable. The more reps you get, the more skilled you become at quantifying your tasks and making decisions about how to make it all work.

Like any skill, you need to start with a beginners mindset. Do your best to create a schedule for the day. It might take longer than you want it to and when it comes to doing it, you might be overlooking some really important things. Many times people throw their schedule out the window. That’s fine! It’s an opportunity to learn more about your day to day, informing you on how to better manage your time tomorrow.

With practice you build the skill, fluency, systems, and resources to make everything that much more effective and efficient. But that doesn’t happen overnight. It only comes with showing up, trying your best, doing the work, and improving the skill. So if that’s something you struggle with now, today’s the day to start working on it!

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I had a fascinating conversation with a new friend last week, Max Stephens, who was introducing me to some findings from the research he’s conducted about high performance. 

If you follow my work or are interested in this topic, it’s probably because you identify as a high performer… Or aspire to create the levels of productivity, consistency, and discipline required to live a high-performing life. What Max calls into question is the motivation behind that:

Max has discovered something he calls ‘Compensatory High Performance’. This is when you’ve found that high performance is a vehicle of creating feelings of significance and used to overcome wounds. While it’s healthier than most, high performance serves as a coping mechanism used to soothe yourself.

The truth of it is, I imagine most people who identify as high performers are doing it to compensate for the insecurities or psychological pain that comes from our past. It lives unconsciously as a way of addressing an underlying need to be liked, loved, respected, taken care of, or belong.

That’s not to say all high performance comes from this place. The alternative source that Max proposes is ‘Integrated High Performance’. It motivates you to be highly ambitious, disciplined, and achievement-oriented all the same, but this time with a different goal. It’s not to make you feel better, but to make the world better. It’s driven by mission and purpose rather than pain.

I think this is the best way to articulate the difference, and to complete a quick audit on which version might be more true for you: Is your ambition an effort to run away from something you don’t want to admit might be true… Or is your ambition fueled by a desire to run toward the person you want to become, making the greater impact you’re capable of making?

You might find evidence to suggest both are true. I encourage you to be honest with yourself and see what the ratio is between the two. Awareness if the first step to positive change, and that includes healing!

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I heard my friend Nick Hutchison off-handedly say something last week that instantly resonated with me. Like me, he is a recovering personal development junkie. For years he was constantly reading books to hear the latest and greatest the world’s smartest minds had to offer. He learned all about habits, productivity, goal-setting, business, relationships, and so much more one tip at a time.

That’s why what he said was so impactful: “5% of the books create 95% of the change.”

I’ve found that to be entirely accurate. For me, reading used to be a numbers game, and even a stroke to my ego, where I could talk about all of the different books I’d read. It made me feel like I was applying myself, learning, and growing. The problem is it didn’t translate into real life change. For years I was trapped in a cycle of knowing so much yet feeling so far behind. I wasn’t as successful as I thought I should be given how much I knew.

The difference-maker is Nick’s personal and company mantra: “Read Less. Implement More.” Your life changes when you take the best ideas and actually use them in your life. When the words on the page turn into new behaviors that generate new results. 

And the thing is, it doesn’t take many new ideas to radically change your life - Just a few of the right ones. Reinforcing those same ideas, over and over again, and finding new ways to apply them is how you generate real improvement.

For me, there are 2 books I try to read once a quarter because they’re the right ideas for me. There are maybe 3 other books I aim to read once a year. And it’s done so much for me!

As for personal development, there are a few concepts that rise above the rest that are most impactful in building the life I think we all aspire to create. They are ideas I revisit often and try to build my entire life around. I call them the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement and if you want to learn what those are, get my 5 book recommendations, and hear the single sentence that summarizes the best ideas covered on the podcast in the last 8 years… Click here and you’ll get them all!

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Something that so many people desperately want more of, knowing it would dramatically change their life, is to be more disciplined. And for good reason - Some of the most disciplined people in the world have the health, businesses, influence, and impact that we aspire to have in our lives. We figure if we were consistent like them, that if we stopped making excuses and just followed through on the things we know we need to do, we’d achieve that level of success too.

You might think that too and if so, you’re not wrong… But you’re not seeing the full picture. 

Fundamentally discipline is about doing today what you know is best for you tomorrow or further into your future. It’s choosing to take action on things that are in your best interest in the long term. That doesn’t require having superhuman will-power or incredible self-control. You can use those things to make yourself be disciplined, but they’re not required. Discipline can be easy when you set it up to be. 

Your behavior is much more about the conditions you’re taking action within than it is the action itself. You more consistently get to the gym in the morning when you have a personal trainer or workout partner there waiting for you. Going door to door selling something happens way more consistently when you have a hungry family at home depending on you to close a deal. The action doesn’t feel so effortful because it’s a byproduct of the condition.

Mental toughness, resilience, and grit still have a role to play - but now it’s meant to be as a supporting cast. The reason we default to using self-control to take action is because it feels more rewarding. We’ve been taught that something is earned when you work hard for it, and it means less when it’s handed to you. But that’s not a requirement, and that line of thinking causes us to make things way harder than they need to be. 

I encourage you to consider this new perspective to self-discipline anchored around making a positive choice and not fulfilling a difficult action. In that way, being disciplined is a vehicle for living intentionally. That’s the North Star in my life, one that doesn’t need to be hard to achieve, and I hope you consider it to become the point of your pursuit too.

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One of the things that has changed the way I live on a day to day basis is orienting my life around the standards I set for myself. Goals are nice, but they’re often aspirational and require that you stretch yourself to achieve them. Standards are more grounded in who you want to be on a daily basis, the level of expectation you have for yourself, and they serve as the bass drum to your daily performance.

Many people talk about wanting to hold themselves to a higher standard but fail to do so, and I have two hypotheses as to why. The first is that people haven’t clearly defined them. How can you know if you reached the level of performance you expect for yourself if you haven’t outlined what that even means? 

Beyond that, you need to objectively reflect on a daily basis as to whether you did what you intended to do. Your mind can make up some convenient perspective about your performance, but when you state the facts and compare them to the target, you can see them for what they are.

Let’s use the example of holding yourself to a higher standard in your diet. What does that even mean? First you need to define it. Perhaps it means hitting your macros, fulfilling a gluten-free or vegan diet. Or maybe it means not eating processed foods, oversnacking, having more than one serving of dessert, or eating within an intermittent fasting window. The more detailed you get about those daily standards, the more you can objectively compare what you chose to do with what you intended to do.

A standard is not meant to be completely unattainable or overly ambitious. If you’re looking for improvement, you can make adjustments one criteria at a time. Start with a gluten-free lunch before converting your whole diet. Change one serving of dessert to one bite to taste it. Like a dial, your standards evolve one intention at a time.

Your standards also change in different seasons of life. If you have a child, start a new job, move to a new city or have a new condition, that calls for new expectations of yourself that are more compatible with the opportunities, commitments, and limitations you’re currently facing. When you choose to orient your life around your standards, you create the foundational health and productivity you need to strive for bigger goals!

I’ve got a brand new process to share with you. If you’ve been wanting to raise your standard and tap into your greater potential, knowing that you can be more consistent and international on a daily basis, then click here to book a time to chat - I’d love to find a way to support you.

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Here’s something that rocked me and is turning my world upside down. I was chatting with my good friend David about life, relationships, dreams, and self-awareness. Something unexpected surfaced. He asked me why my wife Irene loves me and after a few obvious answers, I continued to say “Because I give her space to be herself”. 

After saying it, I paused. I wondered… “Am giving myself space to be myself?”

For many years I’ve built a certain persona and perception. An identity if you will. I’m a high performer who holds himself to a high standard. This means that when everyone’s having dessert or a drink, I’m not. When people want to go out and party, I go home and get a good night’s rest. When spontaneous plans pop up in the middle of the week, I make sure I cover my commitments before choosing to be a part of them. 

On one hand this is great in helping me to be fit, well-connected, influential, and successful in many people’s eyes. But is that who I am at my core? I don’t know that I’ve given myself enough space to do anything else to find out. 

My current way of doing things, behaving in ways that others know me to be, is comfortable. It’s easier to maintain who I am now than it is to experiment with who I might actually be. On the rare occasions when I do indulge in a meal or have a few drinks or stay up late on a spontaneous adventure… I’m quick to criticize myself and judge it as wrong.

But I’m intrigued to explore it because it’s the root of the way that I receive others. I can’t fully love and accept others for who they are if I haven’t fully accepted who I am. The only reason I have opinions of others is because I still hold opinions about myself. And that’s something I really want to improve.

We are all mirrors to each other. What we experience about everything is purely our own. Sure other people may prompt scenarios that we engage with, but our interaction, interpretation, or judgment of that scenario is a reflection of ourselves.

I want to pose the same question to you: What if who you are today isn’t who you’re meant to be? Have you given yourself space to be yourself?

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