The human mind is designed to do primarily one thing: Keep us safe. It is vigilant about seeking to understand situations, details, and circumstances and how they might be impacting our safety. It’s this primary objective that is responsible for the scarcity mindset, negativity bias, and the natural inclination to be lazy that we must fight in pursuit of being our best self.

Central to this threat detection system is a dislike we all have for uncertainty. The reason being, if something is uncertain that means it’s inherently unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen next and therefore, whatever it is could pose harm.  But it’s this resistance to uncertainty that keeps us in our comfort zone, living out familiar lives that produce familiar results. If we want to do something else we need to break the pattern.

The opposite of uncertainty is faith, surrender, and trust. It's a deep, intuitive knowing that whatever lies on the other side of uncertainty is what’s meant to happen. Difficulties are fuel for growth, opportunities are divinely planted, and all of it is part of a larger plan that is nearly impossible for us to understand.

Faith, surrender, and trust must happen consciously before they integrate unconsciously. You have to teach yourself to believe these things are true for them to become true. You surrender by accepting and allowing. You have faith by choosing to assign a positive meaning to life events. You trust that everything around you is perfectly placed to facilitate your personal evolution, even when it hurts.

Again, it’s the uncertainty of the situation that makes it all difficult to do. But the uncertainty is just a perception that you might be in harm’s way, and when you recognize that most of the things we worry about aren’t a matter of life or death, and that our worst fears are often unfounded, we can embrace surrender, faith, and trust more fully. 

To make the most basic elements of this thought more actionable, here’s an affirmation you can use the next time you start feeling resistance: “It’s true that I’m safe and secure, so I choose to accept the uncertainty in my life.”

Our growth and development is primarily driven by our environment, and one of the things that we can do to manufacture a more positive, inspiring, go-getting environment is to set goals. In order to get anywhere in life we need to know where we’re going, and a clearly articulated goal gives you that destination to work toward.

However, there’s a science and art to goal setting. Some goals are too big and impossible to comprehend that they don’t seem achievable, and paralyze you in inaction. On the other hand some goals are too uninspiring or easy to actually motivate you to make any major adjustments to your life.

That’s why we need to have the right tension for our goals, and the way we do that is by ensuring our goals are two things: Difficult and doable.

When a goal is difficult, it creates a demand on you. In order to achieve a difficult goal you need to do things that are difficult for you to do. As Jim Bunch puts it, goals are in place to “evolve you” and it’s the personal evolution you experience in pursuit of a goal that causes you to become capable of achieving it. 

When a goal is doable, it means that you see a path forward to achieving it. You’ve seen others accomplish something similar or even you’ve already done it once yourself. When a goal is doable it inspires you with a willingness to try.

I’ve found there are 3 ways to know if you’ve found the right tension for your goals. First is based on your own past experience. If you have metrics or reference points that you can build around, it helps you find that right degree of difficulty and doability. Second, if you don’t have personal experience, enlist someone else who does. They can fill in the gaps of your awareness and offer reference points that help you home in on the right amount of tension for yourself.

And last, there’s the intuitive way that you feel. Good goals are meant to make you feel a little nervous. You want to feel the quiet anxiety of knowing that pursuing this goal will challenge you, because not sensing that means your goal isn’t difficult enough. You pair that with the confidence to know that you’re prepared to give it your best. You notice yourself already stepping into a heightened state of focus and resilience, and if you don’t have that response then maybe the goal isn’t difficult enough. Your intuitive feeling layers on top of the reference points you’ve established to help you confirm that your goals have the right tension

So based on whatever is most important to you right now, set a goal that strikes that right tension. As Jim Bunch also says “Goals are written in sand not in stone,” so if you gain more awareness or information that your goals need to be adjusted to match the optimal tension, then make those changes.

There are almost 8 billion people in the world today and no two people are the same. We have different genes, were raised in different environments, learned different lessons, had different life experiences, and came to value different things. Everything about you comes together to make you who you are.

And because you’re the only person to live a moment in your body and experience the world through your eyes, “No one knows what it’s like to be you.” 

On one hand, this is why it’s so important that you communicate with other people to help them understand. It’s important to articulate the ways that you feel and the factors you’re weighing in decisions you’re making - otherwise you’re operating off of unclear and potentially misaligned assumptions. And people may not be giving you what you need even when they’re doing their best to.

On the other hand, it asks that you have patience and grace with others. Be aware of the fact that others don’t have the perspective you do, and perhaps that’s why there’s disagreement or frustration. It’s by keeping an open mind about the differences you have with others that lets you collaborate with them better.

And equally important to note, just like no one knows what it’s like to be you… You don’t know what it’s like to be anyone else. That’s why it’s best for us to approach others with curiosity and not judgment. It’s the reason why your ideas and solutions aren’t always well-received. We all live at our own level of consciousness, which means that we we see, experience, and perceive is unique to us.

So if you’re going through hard times and other people are having a hard time giving credit to what you’re experiencing, it’s because “no one knows what it’s like to be you.” Or if you have big goals and dreams that other people don’t understand or find worthwhile, it’s because “no one knows what it’s like to be you.” 

If anything, let all of this be a reminder that you deserve to be the most authentic version of yourself. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” Get clear on what you want out of life, pursue it relentlessly, and when necessary let others into your world by telling them about it.

The single greatest influencing factor that determines your actions, and as an extension your results, is your environment. It provides an ever-present pull force that guides you in a certain direction. Take the metaphor of being in a canoe on a river. With no effort the river’s current will take you exactly downstream. In order to go anywhere else, you need to fight the current and row.

Your environment is a collection of all the forces that are acting on you at once and determine the flow of your river. It determines the path of least resistance, and it’s so impactful that Jim Bunch is known for saying “Everything is an environment and environment is everything.”

I was reminded of this in a very simple but relatable example: My alarm going off in the morning. I’ve had a lot of success putting my phone on a charger across my bedroom so that I need to get up to turn it off. It’s textbook environmental design.

However, a few weeks ago we were experiencing a heat wave so I was sleeping with a fan on. The noise of the fan drowned out my alarm, so I made an adjustment. I started setting my alarm on the Amazon Alexa device next to my bed. When the alarm went off, instead of being forced to get up and turn it off, all I had to do was speak. I found that it made getting myself out of bed way harder than it used to be because it required more will-power than necessity.

So I made the switch back, am putting my fan on a lower setting so I can hear the alarm again, and have been getting up in the morning with more ease.

When it comes to life change, many people overlook the simplicity of changing your environment. We think about willing ourselves into new actions until we build habits, but the far more effective approach is to change your environment so that the desired behavior is a natural byproduct of the design. That what you want to do is downstream, and all you need to do is let your river float you to it.

I’ve found the most effective forms of environment are incorporating accountability to add consequences for poor choices, and implementing systems that make impactful things easy to do. If you want to change your environment in the most positive of ways so that you become extremely consistent with your health habits and choices, and ridiculously productive and focused in your work, check out what I’ve put together about the 9 Super Habits. They make an extraordinary life effortless.

Recently I’ve been using a new expression to add more resilience, spontaneity, and adventure into my life. Feeling like I’m fully alive is one of the things I’m pursuing most in my life right now, and I’ve been choosing to do things that are memorable to create more life-giving experiences.

The expression is "When’s the next time I’ll be this close to (insert blank)."

Asking myself this question has pushed me one level further than I was planning to go. It pops the bubble of comfort that I find myself naturally staying in and puts me in more vitalizing spaces. There are two examples in particular I’d like to share.

A few weeks ago I went to Atlanta for a Running event called Runningman. Basically it’s a wellness festival where lots of vendors, health related activities, and camping are crammed into a mile long trail loop. On the Saturday of the event everyone runs the loop as many times as they’d like to. I trained for a half-marathon, which I had never done before, and when I completed it I felt an urge to continue on. What if I doubled it? When’s the next time I’ll be this close to running a full marathon? So I did. 

And as I was running that, I learned that a 50k was only 5 miles beyond a marathon. So when I finished it, I asked myself “When’s the next time I’m going to be this close to doing 50k?” Well it requires that I run a marathon again… So I completed another 5 laps. I achieved a physical feat that I didn’t even know was possible simply because I used a mantra that pushed me outside my comfort zone.

Another example - I’ve driven the 500 mile stretch of the 5 freeway between Northern and Southern California dozens of times, and many times I’ve considered stopping off at a random lake in the middle of trip called Pyramid Lake. As I was pulling up to the exit for it I asked myself “When’s the next time I’m going to be this close to it?” So I pulled off and made my way to the sand. Then when I got to the sand and enjoyed the view, I asked myself “When’s the next time I’m going to be this close to swimming in Pyramid Lake?” Well it would require that I disrupt my trip another time. So I went in!

The point is, there’s more life to capture in the moments we already have. But fear and excuses keep us living at our current level. When we push just past it and invest that little bit of extra time or effort, we experience disproportionate returns.

Something that is fundamental to improvement is feedback. Feedback fuels a cycle of giving something a try, observing the result, understanding the factors that led to the result, and trying something else. Tom Bilyeu calls a version of what I just described the “Physics Of Progress” and John Assaraf has his process of “Think Plan Do Review”.

What I wanted to highlight today though is how commonplace feedback is, and how we’re constantly using it in ways we aren’t even aware of. And I want to demonstrate that by providing a few examples.

Earlier this week I was preparing lunch and trying to get a thin plastic film off the top of the container. I gripped it with my fingers once and slipped off. Twice, and slipped off. A third time and slipped off. Then I took a corner of the shirt I was wearing, pinched the film through the material, and was able to rip the plastic off.

The results of the first three attempts gave me feedback that my technique wasn’t working. I identified what the problem might be, having wet hands, neutralized that with a different technique, and it worked.

Another example - I’m focusing on my hydration right now. Two days in a row I missed my goal for the day, so I paused to understand why. I had realized that for those two days I wasn’t using hydration salt and was drinking flavorless water. So I took that feedback, made an adjustment by prioritizing using my hydration salt, and started hitting my hydration goal again.

And the classic example, someone who puts their hand on a hot stove. They experience pain, associate the pain with the stovetop, and change their behavior to be more careful next time. That all happens unconsciously as a feedback loop.

Feedback is simply observing the results you achieved, interpreting them to understand how they vary from what you expected or wanted. With feedback you can then take action to implement a new strategy that you think will get you better results, do it, then observe and interpret those new results. 

When you seek feedback from someone else they’re doing the same thing - Observing the results and interpreting them. They’re communicating their perspective on why things went the way they did, pulling from their experience. Multiple perspectives on a problem present a more well-rounded understanding, which accelerates your ability to solve the problem.

If you’ve been trying to improve or get more consistent in an area, but you’re doing so blindly and don’t have an intentional feedback system in place, I’ve got something for you to check out.