Self Improvement Daily Podcast

I recently learned about a term that I have been misunderstanding for my entire life and the same might be true for you. 

When something is inconvenient, frustrating, or overly demanding, we call it a burden. Think of the last time you felt burdened by something. Whether it was that you had to run an extra errand, a person in your life needed extra support or caregiving, there’s a pain on your heart that’s been weighing you down, or a big purchase you’re slowly paying off… A burden in your life doesn’t feel helpful or additive.

But when you look at the true definition, it actually has nothing to do with the feeling of emotional difficulty. It’s way more matter of fact: A burden is the job that needs to get done. This means that your burden to bear is just your part in it. 

Think of it like lifting a heavy rock. A group comes together to move it, your contribution is the amount that you need to lift for the group to achieve its goal. The burden is the load and your burden is the amount you carry. It’s more similar to your responsibility than it is the challenge you’re being presented with.

That extra errand is the thing you need to do to lead your family. The support you offer a loved one in their weakness is your role to play in their wellness. That injustice you’re feeling affected by is an indication that you’re in a position to contribute your part. 

A burden doesn’t guarantee personal hardship. It’s all in the way you approach the task at hand. You can bring a cheerful spirit to a mundane task. You can feel honored by the opportunity to be able to help. You can find gratitude in your circumstances and share what you have with others. 

A great life involves burdens. Each one you choose. You don’t need to do anything, but you step up and play your part because it’s the person you want to be and the world you want to see.

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Last weekend I was sitting down in church, hosted in a theater, and realized halfway through that I was using both of the arm rests. Was that a rude and selfish thing to do? If I didn’t use them, would the people next to me want to use them to be more comfortable themselves? 

It highlighted how different perspectives lead to different conclusions, and the uniquely internal experience we have about the outside world. For example, maybe I was making the person next to me really frustrated. They viewed my behavior as a personal attack, that I thought that I was more important than them, and that’s why I chose to use the arm rest instead of them.

Or maybe they were feeling really generous and found joy in offering something more comfortable for me, and saw that my using the arm rests was actually a byproduct of them being in service to others. Who’s to say that wasn’t the case? 

Or maybe, what’s most likely, is that for a while they didn’t even notice. Then when their arms got uncomfortable they wanted to use the support, saw it was occupied, and forgot about it.

These are just 3 vantage points that apply to the same scenario, and it leads to 3 radically different emotional outcomes. It’s the exact things that Jack Canfield points out in his book “Success Principles” with the formula E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome.

The event is neutral and has no meaning. The fact of the matter was, I had my arms on the arm rest and they didn’t. That alone doesn’t suggest anything to be true. It’s our response to the event, where we determine what the event means, the produces the outcomes we ultimately experience.

When people talk about “giving benefit of the doubt”, this is what they’re talking about. Are there not perfectly justifiable reasons why someone might do something? If you get creative enough, you’ll be able to come up with it yourself. 

And even if it isn’t true, isn’t life a little better when you presume that people are nice, care about your well-being, and aren’t actively doing anything to harm you? That’s the power of having the right belief system. Your beliefs inform your responses, and your responses drive your outcomes.

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One of the dangers of having a high standard for yourself is that it can actually take a lot of joy out of life. If your standard is to never have sugar, then you miss out on the delights of a casual dessert. If you’re committed to getting to bed by a certain time, it means you’re going to leave events early and you miss the best parts. 

Something I don’t hear people talk about enough is the casual cost of high-performance. We want to be the healthiest, most productive, most impactful version of ourselves for what purpose? To be as happy as possible? To serve God? For something else?

One of the things I’ve found to be most difficult about a life like this is knowing when you really want something versus when you impulsively want something. The truth is, I fear being impulsive and don’t want to do anything I regret, so I often reject the thing I actually want because I’m worried that it’s actually something that just satisfies me in the short-term.

Short story: Last week I, for whatever reason, was really craving pretzels. Like I had the softest taste of pretzel salt in my mouth and wanted them. Normally I wouldn’t even entertain the empty calories or consider giving into something that’s clearly a short-term craving. But this time, I did, just to see what happened.

Sometimes we need to cross the lines we set and experiment on the other side of what we’ve decided for ourselves. Every time you push the boundary you get a little better insight into where it actually is for you, and not where you’ve been saying it is.

This is a practice I’ve been relentlessly incorporating into my high-performance called ‘Standards Based Intention Setting’. It’s a real way to continue molding your expectations as you and your life evolve. The right decision or expectation in one season of life will not forever be the right decision for you, and being proactive about updating your standards helps you stay clearly aligned with what’s best for you.

I’ve had the tendency of being too locked into a routine and single way of doing things, and I’ve noticed that it causes you to miss so much in life. It caused me to optimize around the life I didn’t perfectly want.

So extend yourself some grace, try something new, and see how it makes you feel! It’s all feedback, and the more of it you have, the better positioned you are to make the right choice moving forward.

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As you may have gathered by now, consistency is kind of my thing. I'm 8.5 years deep into sharing a message every day, excluding Sundays, and it has transformed me. One of the main reasons I can keep up with a cadence like this is because it’s a natural expression of who I am. I am a consistent person, and it’s something I built within myself.

Many people don’t know this about me but starting at the age of about 13 years old, I would do 50 pushups a day. It was as close to a non-negotiable as I’ve ever had. There were times I would realize that I didn’t do my pushups for the day in the middle of the night, wake up, get out of bed, and do them half-asleep.

I wasn’t perfect with them but I was really, really good about it. I estimate that there were maybe 7 days a year I’d miss, whether I forgot or because I was recovering from an injury. My reason for doing it was really strong - I wanted to prove to myself that I was working harder and doing more than others. 

Every day I connected this simple act with the belief that I’m the type of person who will work harder than others, who is more disciplined than others. So many years later, it’s one of the main reasons why consistency comes more naturally to me.

But here’s the craziest part. At the beginning of this year, I decided to quit. Even though I had done it for so many years and had such a high count. I realized it was no longer serving me. It had negative effects on my posture and my longevity was more important to me than the habit. 

We’re not meant to take action for action’s sake. It’s meant to drive us in the direction we want to go. When I had the awareness that it was doing the opposite, I had to make a change. 

There was a ton of resistance. All my best friends admired my dedication to doing pushups. My identity was wrapped up in being that person. I feared that I’d think less of myself without it. But isn’t that what happens any time we make a change?

The intention was to replace the pushups with shoulder mobility that’s better for my posture. But if I’m being honest, I’ve only been fairly consistent with it. 

It’s fascinating to understand all the little details and factors that go into everything we do. We’re each our own little experiment! We ought to pay attention to how things are going, and if what we’re doing is actually working in the ways we want it to!

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The Buddha says "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." It’s a powerful distinction between the objective facts of a situation and our personal experience with it. Nothing has meaning until we assign it meaning, it’s just a neutral event to have occurred. Pain will happen and it’s the way you respond to it that determines whether you suffer or not.

What’s not stated in this quote that I think is really important to capture. Suffering isn’t all bad. Don’t get me wrong it’s certainly not desirable, but by definition suffering involves grief, sacrifice, and discomfort. It wouldn’t be suffering if it didn’t have those components to it. But whose to say that a temporary negative experience is bad for you?

In fact many people know and say that “growth is on the other side of your comfort zone”. Growth requires an element of suffering. It also can help you experience a certain perspective that changes your worldview moving forward. Once the suffering is done, it gives you new eyes to appreciate the life you have that much more.

I had a really powerful experience with this recently. It’s really hard to explain, but I was deep in a visualization that pulled me further and further away from the life I had today. Almost as if what I’m experiencing right now is the dream and I was about to wake up from it. 

I got to the point where my life as I know it today was about to be over. I was never going to see my wife again. I was never going to be with my family again. In the visualization, I was saying “goodbye” to all of the things I loved. The depth of emotion I was experiencing caused me to break down into tears. For a few minutes I was in a state of absolute, life-destroying suffering.

But when I came out of it, I had a whole new perspective for how much I value my life. I was deeply saddened by the idea of losing it, to an extent I wasn’t even aware of. Since then I’ve been treating my life, and everything in it, with the love and care it deserves. Now I know how deeply I actually care about it. 

All that to say, the best way to suffer is in a way that ultimately transforms you. That miserable endurance competition renews your spirit that you can do anything you set your mind to. That business hardship reminds you how committed you are to pursuing your dreams. 

Andy Grammar has a song called “I WIsh You Pain” and it’s hard to accept as true, but it is. We’re better off from our adversities when they build us up into a better version of ourselves. 

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When it comes to achieving our goals, so many people resort to the wrong strategy: Hope.

They hope that they’ll get the promotion, that their book will be a best seller, that their marriage improves, that they’ll run a marathon someday. You can sense the doubt.

Hope is a great quality, but it’s in service of something else that actually drives results: disciplined and committed action. When you’re hopeful you’re more likely to take a bigger swing about a collaboration idea you have. It makes you more willing to do the things that seem unsustainable because you believe they’ll pay off.

The vision you have for your life is a possibility. It’s something that might come to existence on its own. But that’s like hoping to stumble randomly into an extraordinary life. It’s very unlikely to happen. Every time you take action on something, you increase the probability that it will happen. 

Action doesn’t guarantee results, but it does pull the possibility of it happening that much closer to you. When you systematically take action toward something, every repetition stacks the odds a little bit more in your favor.

I was reminded of all this when I was talking to a friend who has the dream to buy a camper van. The first step is the idea, where you become clear about what you want. Your first action step claims it. For him, he was already in action. He’d been demoing some vans and thinking through how to organize his finances. 

His dream is that much closer because he got proactive about making it happen, and not hoping that it would happen.

That’s the lesson I want you to flip on yourself. What’s that thing you’ve been telling yourself you want, want to do, want to achieve, or want to have? Then get honest with yourself - are you actually doing something about it, or letting lay stagnant?

The wildest part is your dreams can be yours. We have them for a reason. They're the source code for our most authentic and enjoyable life. Do not deny yourself the opportunity of experiencing it.

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Here’s an insight I’ve been putting into practice recently and while its focus is in a business context, it can be applied toward anything.

One of the big projects I’ve taken on this year is developing an app called Follow Through OS. It’s an intention setting and performance tracking tool that helps people be more consistent, accountable, and hold themselves to a higher standard.

I’ve been giving a lot of demos of the technology to other coaches and online community leaders who want to offer a better tool for their clients. In my 3rd demo of the technology a few months ago, the person I was sharing with gave me a great piece of advice: 

“Don’t show people the technology right away. Ask them a few questions to understand what they’re already using, and what already matters to them, so you can structure your demo to talk about those things directly.”

What an obvious idea! If I want people to be excited about the technology and provide real feedback on how they’d use it, I need to have more context. And the best way to get that was just to ask them.

Since then I’ve taken that tip to a further extreme and for a handful of my demos done research in advance to understand the details of their program, build a custom protocol in the app that they can see, and conduct the demo from there.

The redeeming point is that your message is so much more persuasive when you meet people where they’re at rather than sharing vision from a place they’ve never been.

This idea of capturing context before communicating with someone on something is resonant throughout life. If a child doesn’t want to eat their greens, understand why before presenting your argument why they should. If someone cancels plans on you, ask why before giving your response. If you’re helping someone make a decision, get to the heart of what matters about it to them before making any suggestions. 

Communication is so much more effective when we speak to things directly and not try to guess what matters. And the best way to do that is by asking! Get context before you communicate

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When I was in the airport a few weeks ago I saw the most brilliant invention. New ideas and products are best when they solve a real problem in a simple and accessible way. We come across problems every day without even realizing it, many we’ve learned to tolerate and we don’t think to solve them. This problem was exactly that.

When I stepped into the men’s room at the airport I noticed something unique. There was an unmistakable line of LED lights on the bathroom stall door. Some showed green, others showed red. It was brilliant! The red lights indicated the stall was in use, and the green lights indicated it was available.

How often have we walked into a bathroom, wanting to use a stall, and not knowing if it’s occupied. We awkwardly tug on the door and hope it opens. If not, we’ve startled someone and their privacy. And also how often have you waited in line to use a bathroom when one was available the entire time and no one was using it because no one thought to check?

As first world and non-consequential as it was, this is a real problem. Anything that inconveniences, slows down, or negatively impacts your natural flow is a problem. The red and green lights were a simple and creative solution to that problem, and you know it’s a good solution because people understood what it meant immediately. 

There’s a world of opportunity that exists in solving the everyday problems we encounter. In fact, in everything there’s a problem to solve. Every system performs to its biggest constraint. When you identify the constraint you can then increase capacity. 

The question becomes, what’s the value in removing the bottleneck and increasing capacity? When the upside is significant, now you’ve identified a noticeable problem. If there’s not much value to the change, that’s a lesser problem. 

It’s a good lesson to take in life and business. Everything has a constraint which means that everything can improve. But what problems are worth your time and effort in solving? You can’t do everything for everything, you need to be strategic about what you choose to address. 

Clearly for the KPIs of the custodial department, the weakest scores came from customer satisfaction in using the stalls, and the constraint to that was how aware people were of what stalls were in use or not. So they fixed it! And the improvement is obvious.

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