Self Improvement Daily Podcast

I’m trying to spend less time on my phone when I’m eating and one of the strategies I have is to casually open up a book when I’m downstairs instead of watching videos or aimlessly scrolling my email. It was by peeling through the pages of Marie Forleo’s “Everything Is Figueroutable” that I was reminded of a really important distinction:

Most people say that they can’t do something when the reality is they won’t. 

And it applies to things like: “I’m sorry I can’t make it to your birthday party”... “I just can’t afford that right now”... “I can’t stay up that late, I have a big day tomorrow”.

Saying you ‘can’t’ do something might seem harmless, but our words are powerful. When we ‘can’t’ do something we’re the victim of our circumstances. We’re powerless and vulnerable to the forces that be. 

But when we ‘won’t’ do something we are fully in control, we have agency, and understand that our own unwillingness is the thing that’s getting in the way.

Now this is an important point: That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our willingness is often a careful evaluation of factors and it’s with that awareness we make a decision. It absolutely can be the right choice to skip that birthday party, not pay for that thing, or decline an invitation and stay in.  It means we were thoughtful about what we commit to and have calculated the tradeoff. That the possibility of gain isn’t worth the cost to attain it.

The most common costs or reasons that come up that create an unwillingness to do something are:

1) We’re not prepared to put in the time

2) We don’t want to make the sacrifice

3) We don't want to take on the risk that’s required to do the thing.

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All of these things are valid and should be considered, but at the same time they can be weaponized as an excuse.

Especially when it comes to things that we really want to achieve, become, or grow into it - it requires that we push ourselves beyond our comfort zone. We must do things that don’t make perfect sense today to shape our reality into what we envision for tomorrow.

Because fear and uncertainty get in the way, we often say we ‘can’t’ do something. We suggest that we’re incapable of it. And this is safe psychologically because it means that we don’t have to look at our own weaknesses or shortcomings. But the truth is that we won’t, and that we’re unwilling to put in the time, sacrifice, and risk that would make it possible. 

That level of honesty is harder to accept, but it’s simply more accurate. And as someone who let’s fear, uncertainty, and all types of self-sabotage get in my way of applying myself fully toward what I want, I’ve been taking this honest look at myself too.

So the next time you reason that you can’t do something, catch yourself and consider the fact that you won’t. And whether that’s because you’ve made a thoughtful choice about it or it’s driven by fear, you have something real you can work with.

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Have I mentioned that I’m a behavior change nerd recently? The reason I ask is because last week I was sitting down at lunch and had a proud, textbook example of the power of environmental design and putting into practice everything I talk about.

I was out at a new restaurant and when the food came, the plate was loaded. Knowing that I had my workout scheduled only two hours later and that I really prefer to not have too much in my stomach for it, I decided that I would only eat a reasonable portion of it and take the rest home. 

The first thing I did when the food came out, which was a massive portion, was I turned to my wife and said “That’s a lot of food, I’m not going to eat the whole thing.”

The food was hearty and delicious, and as I got to the level of fullness I wanted, I noticed that I wanted more. I could have kept eating, and it would have met my short-term needs… But I had the presence to know that I’d ultimately regret if I did.  Taking immediate action from that clarity, I pushed the plate just out of arm’s reach on the table.

It worked! I didn’t overeat, had a good workout, and enjoyed my leftovers the next day. But beyond getting the result I wanted most, here’s why it worked:

First was the pre-commitment I made. When the food came out and I said I wasn’t going to eat all of it, I was designing my environment. I now had a point of accountability to act in congruence with my word, which means a lot to me. And if I forgot my intention my wife could remind me of it as a fail-safe.

Then when it was time to stop eating, pushing the plate away was also environmental design. It’s very possible that I’d make the decision to stop eating yet still unconsciously take small bites. But moving the plate where I wouldn’t expect it to be served as a pattern interrupt, and anytime I thought about eating more I was aware of it and could follow through on the choice I’d made.

This is just one example of how simple factors like this are at play at all times in our lives! And when we learn the principles and can implement them, we’re more likely to get what we want and live happier, healthier, and more impactful lives.

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On January 1st on my way to and from the gym I saw two clear examples of people making good on their New Year Resolutions.

It makes me so happy that people not only say they want to be better but they’re actually doing something about it! 

Please note that I didn’t speak to these people about their goals so a lot of this is based on assumptions… But in observing these two examples, I came to the same conclusion about their chances for success, which is the same reason why most New Year Resolutions fail.

Here are the examples:

On my way out, a neighbor around the corner looked like they were having a full on yard sale. Their garage was torn apart, their car was in the driveway with all doors open, and a couple was working hard organizing their things. 

My assumption was that their New Year Resolution is to get more organized. It had clearly already been a long day as the man slowly struggled moving storage boxes in the front yard, but nonetheless they were making progress. And that’s the thing - you can use will power and motivation to take massive action in a single day and put a pretty good dent into things. 

But my question becomes - What are they doing about their own habits and tendencies that caused their life to get disorganized? While they can get things organized in a day, staying organized requires a different set of action steps.

Now for the second group, on my way back from the gym I saw a couple going for a walk and based on the appearance of it, it seemed like they didn’t do it often. It appeared as though perhaps they had set a New Year Resolution to be more active and they were making good on that.

Getting out the door and going for a walk doesn’t require the same amount of effort as cleaning out a garage… But getting consistent with going for a walk is about the same as staying organized after you’ve cleaned up. Both are proactive, ongoing practices that most people aren’t prepared for. 

New Year Resolutions are notorious for people who get started but don’t stick with it. And the reason is… You can use will power and motivation to take action once, but you can’t rely on it to take action consistently.

Showing up as your ‘new you’ is hard to do when you still feel like your ‘old you’, and you’re still operating in the same environment you used to be in.

Maybe you’ve experienced that yourself.

Real progress is made over time, which means you need to keep showing up day in and day out. 

Whether it’s the New Year or not, the opportunity is the same. You can choose to change your life right now. But your effort won’t be nearly as effective or long-lasting if you don’t build the foundation behind the scenes that supports it. That’s exactly what the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge does!

If you’re committed to big professional goals, then this one is for you.

I’m the type of person that very much enjoys what I do, I identify a lot with my work and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my output in service of generating a bigger impact.

One of the perspectives I’ve adopted that any ambitious professional should consider is that self-care is a strategy. 

Taking care of yourself - your health and your energy - isn’t something to be deprioritized… It should come first and foremost. Yet many professionals work through their workout block, burn the midnight oil and don’t get enough sleep, and don’t allocate the proper amount of time for meditation or mindfulness. 

Their argument is that less time spent taking care of themselves means they have more time to be productive. Linearly that’s true, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

Productivity is the combination of quantity and quality, and the energy you bring to your work tasks is majorly responsible for your overall productive output.

While you may have an hour or two less a day to do work, the hours you do spend working are multiplied in effectiveness because you’re more focused, better able to fight off distractions, and more compelling in communication. At the end of the day you moved the needle more because your overall output increased. You pack more work into fewer hours, and you’re way less susceptible to burning out and can sustain a higher level of output for longer.

The reframe to consider is: Taking care of yourself is not a time tradeoff against working hours, but an investment that increases the overall capacity of your working hours.

Self-care is a high-performance strategy. If you want to get more out of anything that you do, you need to start there. You need to make that their utmost priority - or else everything else will crumble on top of a weak foundation and you're potential gets capped by the energy you bring to your work.

As someone who is obsessed with behavior change and has dedicated his life to helping people actually follow through on the things they know they need to do to improve their life and business… It’s actually a really simple process. 

Now I didn’t say easy, I said simple. And it’s best captured in this quote:

One strong decision can change everything, but most days are decided by defaults.

Ask anyone who’s been unfaithful to a partner, had a major outburst to their boss, or got in a serious accident just how much one moment can change your life.

Our futures are delicate and can change in an instant. Sometimes life happens to us in unexpected ways, but more often we make life happen for us based on our action and inaction.

If you have the awareness to know the major action you can take to disrupt everything and shuffle the deck in a positive way, your life can change very quickly. But again, that’s easier said than done. Many of us don’t have the confidence, courage, or willingness to take the big life-shifting action that initiates the change.

These aren’t choices you can make every day, that would create a life that is constantly transitioning, unsettled, and unmanageable. That’s why in the moments and days in between, our life is decided by defaults.

It operates on the systems, routines, and context we’re normally within. It’s a formula where we put the same things in and it produces predictable results. Our lives are perfectly calibrated to the default settings we have programmed into it. So if we want to change what comes out on an average day, we need to reprogram our lives. And it's through subtle and consistent iterations of our defaults that we can shape our lives in the direction we desire.

That’s the simple truth about life change - major shifts can happen in moments, but most of the time it happens through small adjustments to the rails of our environment.

And knowing this all to be true, I’ve created something to help you leverage the way it works to achieve massive, lasting, positive life change. It's called the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge specifically designed to help you build the foundation you need to make consistent progress on your biggest goals. 

The process works when you commit to working it, which is the opportunity you have today. You can take big, bold, decisive action right now by registering for the Challenge. It will change your life in an instant and be the shift your future self has been begging you for. It’ll help you hold yourself to the higher standard you know you’ve been missing and start getting the results you know your uncommon talent, work ethic, and potential is capable of.

As I’m preparing this we’re about to begin a New Year, 2026, and I wanted to capture some of the lessons I learned this year.

Let me start by adding some context. A the beginning of 2025 I found myself in a really unique stage of life - a narrow window between getting married and starting a family. This has given me a time-sensitive freedom, both financially and where I put my time, that I committed to taking full advantage of this year.

So the theme of 2025 was: “Play a bigger game”. It’s an intention I made good on and learned a lot along the way.

Here are some of those things:

Seeing that I won’t be as willing to travel for business when I have a young family, I wanted to spend more time out and about. I joined Masterminds, attended events all over the country, and discovered something critical - things happen so much faster when you’re in person. So I’ll be spending a lot of time traveling to be in places with high-powered people to establish and strengthen relationships.

Another way I chose to play a bigger game in my business is by investing in building out a team. Now I can both delegate lower value tasks and lean on other people’s strengths to improve things that I couldn’t. In particular I had a perfect hire for a Chief Of Staff, bringing my long-time friend and non-profit co-founder Maret into the fold and it has been unbelievably valuable.

Next, I pulled the trigger on things I’ve been putting off for ‘one day’. In particular I  began developing the Scorecard app that people have been begging me to build for years. I also painted a bigger vision for this end of year campaign and have been reaching out to dream collaborators for the last 5 months, people I was waiting for the right time to try to activate, realizing the right time is right now. Through both of these focuses I got real feedback that you should start before you’re ready, and it reshaped my perspective for what ‘trying hard’ looks like.

Here’s the tricky part about 2025… Objectively, I’m way behind the goals I set and where I thought I would be. But subjectively I strengthened so many areas of my life and build the foundation that can actually hold the levels of output and performance I envision for myself.

Heading into 2026 I’m going to hold to the same intention for the first time ever. I’m going to keep playing a bigger game, and now I know what it takes to deliver on that.

It took me a decade to get there, but I’ve built the systems and strategy I need to actually achieve big things! 

And if you want to shortcut the learning curve by a couple of years, I’m handing all of these learnings to you through the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. If you’re like me and feel like you’ve been working so hard but aren’t as far along as you should be by now… Click here, sign up for the challenge, and let’s make up for lost time!

I’m working on a new, unpolished framework that I’m calling the ‘Intention To Action Scale’ and this is the first time I’m sharing about it publicly.

Its purpose is to demonstrate the roles that the conscious and unconscious mind play in our daily decision making and behavior, which ultimately impacts the results we create and the realities we experience. 

Now here’s the framework:

Imagine an old-fashioned weighing scale that has two buckets, one on each side, where if one bucket is heavier than the other it tips the scale in that direction.

For the sake of this metaphor, let’s say that if the scale tips right then that leads to taking a desired action, and if it tips to the left then it leads to not taking a desired action. In order to live intentional, empowered, healthy, and productive lives, we want the scale tipping right as often as possible.

Okay here’s the next step: The buckets get filled with two types of weight. 

The first type of weight is ‘Conscious Influence’, which represents all of the things we deliberately choose with full awareness. This is when we assert our will and take decisive action that aligns with what we want. ‘Conscious Influence’ is very heavy and can tip the scale in an instant.

The second type of weight is ‘Unconscious Influence’, which represents everything that happens behind the scenes without us even realizing it. It’s made up of all the ways we’re predisposed to act given our evolutionary biology, the way our environment is set up, the beliefs we’ve incorporated over the years and even social context. All of these factors add up as light weights in the bucket, and while each is small, they’re high in number and collectively very impactful. 

’Conscious Influence’ tends to add to the ‘take action’ bucket because we’re unlikely to consciously choose something that contradicts our goals... And ‘Unconscious Influence’ tends to weigh down the ‘don’t take action’ bucket because our minds naturally pull us toward being lazy, fearful, and only concerned with short-term feelings rather than long-term results.

Now this is where it gets good. We always have the power to do what we want. No matter how we feel or how hard it is to do something, we can always make ourselves do it. We can use our will-power to add the heavy weight of ‘Conscious Influence’ to dramatically tip the scale in our favor. It is capable of overruling all other weight because with enough effort, we can make anything happen.

But using ‘Conscious Influence’ is easier said than done. If we want to act, we need to have sufficient reserves of will-power to get the job done - which often isn’t the case. But more significantly, the main limitation for ‘Conscious Influence’ is it requires our awareness. We can’t intervene if we don’t know it’s happening, and we can’t break a pattern we don’t even know we’re in. 

95%+ of our lives are lived unconsciously, or in other words, without any conscious intervention...

That’s why ‘Unconscious Influence’ is so critical - Most of the time it makes our decision for us. In the absence of the heavy weight of ‘Conscious Influence’, the scale naturally tips toward the side that has more of the light weight ‘Unconscious Influence’.

This is exactly why environmental design is so important. You can make changes to your life, systems, context, relationships, and everything to change where all that weight goes. Things like accountability, scheduling, action planning, affirmations, and other things can offset the weight of our natural predispositions. 

When you add enough weight of ‘Unconscious Influence’ into the ‘Take Action’’ bucket, it may be enough to completely tip the scale in that direction. And if it’s not enough, it’s still meaningful because now it requires less will-power, effort, and ‘Conscious Influence’ to finish the job. This makes the desired action much more likely to happen, and the life we envision for ourselves much more possible.

Curious to hear your thoughts on that framework! :)

We all naturally find brief moments of motivation. We wish we felt them more often because it’s in these moments that we follow through on all the things we need to do, and have the courage we need to take action on big, bold, life-giving things we’d otherwise hesitate to do.

There’s a version of this that happens at the beginning of every year. We look forward into all the possibilities of the New Year. We feel inspired to make life changes that bring us closer to the life we see for ourselves, and start the year becoming that person.

That is until we’re a few weeks in, the motivation wears off, and we’re right back to where we used to be. When we feel inspired we can step up our game, but when that goes away we revert right back into our previous level. 

And the reason is - nothing changed about your environment, only how you were showing up in it. In the short-term you can overcome the natural pull of life, but eventually its unrelenting force will pull you back. 

In other words, when you no longer have the will power to sustain a higher level of performance, you fall back into your default patterns that are the natural byproduct of the environment you’re in.

So what should you do when you’re feeling motivated? 

The short answer is - Take action in ways that permanently shift your environment. 

Rather than using your temporary spike in will power and motivation to take the desired action, work up the courage to do something else that locks in doing the desired action in the future. In doing so you change the forces influencing your life and make positive, consistent, healthy action more likely to happen.

And here’s what that has looked like in my life: Waiting in line to order food, I told my wife I’ll be ordering something healthy. A quick sentence locks in a future congruent decision. When I decided to write the first draft of my book, I emailed da mentor telling him to expect it done by a certain date. I got it done. Even on social media, with the bold actions I’m taking toward my mission I post about them before I do them, which holds me accountable to completing it.

This is what makes motivation last. Instead of just feeling motivated today, you leverage it today so that it serves you every step moving forward. You get it to work for you when it’s no longer present because of the way it shifted your environment around you.

So if you’re feeling motivated today, as we’re soon to begin a New Year, do something that capitalizes on how you feel so that it serves you all year long. 

And the best thing I can recommend to do that, something that helps you completely revolutionize your health habits and make daily progress on your biggest goals for the year, is to register for the 21 Day Year Of Follow Through Challenge. 

If you’ve been spending a lot of time on your personal development, trying to be more consistent and productive on a daily basis, but you’re not as far along as you think you should be… - this is what you’ve been missing. Click the link in the description or visit www.newyearforgood.com to register for the 21 Day Challenge - we start on Monday January 5th!

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A few weeks ago I had the incredible pleasure to hear Amy Purdy speak. She’s a woman who embodies resilience and the power of perspective. Her life was taken from her when a medical condition caused her to get both of her legs amputated. For years she struggled to recover and restore some sense of normalcy in life. 

Then, she had a profound shift. She stopped being a victim of her circumstances and dedicated herself to making the most of it - becoming creative, resourceful, and optimistic about her future. It’s this mindset that fueled her comeback where she re-learned how to snowboard (eventually earning a silver medal at the Paralympic Games), competed in Dancing With The Stars, and is living proof that while the impacts of life adversity can be permanent, you don’t need to accept their limitations.

She says that her injury didn’t disable her, it enabled her to do things she couldn’t before. She learned to genuinely see challenges as opportunities.

The thought that initiated her mindset shift is a simple one, and it’s one we should all think about ourselves: “If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go?”

Negative life events have happened and will continue to happen. And they can define you if you let them. But they aren’t a life-sentence. Your future is undefined and you get to play a role in shaping it. In other words, you can either allow the story to be written for you, or you can pick up the pen and write it yourself.

The story we choose to tell about our lives is everything. Things only have meaning because of the ways we choose to perceive the things that happen. Nothing is objectively good or bad, right or wrong, helpful or harmful… They just are. We run those things through our own worldview, our belief system, and assign meaning to it.

Jack Canfield perfectly explains it in this formula: E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome.

The outcome of any event is intricately connected to our response to it. Most of the time we produce a response unconsciously, which generates an unconscious outcome… But for any event our response is within our control. This means we can design the outcomes we want to have.

Imagine that no matter what happens, you resolve that everything is always happening in your best interest. How empowering would that be?

And that’s the point. We can write our own story… All we need to do is take control of the narrative. Just like Amy did.

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