In the graduation commencement speech at the University of Texas, Austin in 2014, Admiral William McRaven shared 10 points to changing the world. One of those points was to make your bed in the morning. 

McRaven commented on how you can set the pace for the day by knocking out the first task with discipline, and no matter how poorly the day goes you return to the promise of a new day and a fresh start. It’s a life-changing insight in what has become one of the most renowned speeches of the century.

But let’s take it one step further. Last week I was talking to my friend Arozo and we got into the extra implications of making your bed. Yes, making your bed is a positive signal at the end of the day, but equally important to consider is how not making your bed can be a negative signal.

As Jack Canfield says, our unconscious mind operates off of a simple formula: E + R = O. Event + Response = Outcome. What happens throughout the day (without us realizing it) is that we are exposed to different stimuli, experience different events, and unconsciously respond to them to produce an outcome.

The example of an unmade bed demonstrates that potential harm in this: 

Event - You get home after a long day, you’re tired and a co-worker is upset with you, and you see that your bed isn’t made.

Response - Based on the emotional context and your prior belief systems, you attribute an unmade bed to your own character flaws of lacking discipline and not being able to do anything well.

Outcome - You take an additional hit to your self-confidence, you have less hope for yourself, and you show up the next day to work more defensive and on guard, which makes you more likely to respond poorly to the events you encounter.

It’s a self-defeating cycle that gets amplified and reinforced over time. That is, unless you do what James Clear of “Atomic Habits” recommends and “make the cue invisible”. If you make your bed, the event doesn’t happen, the thought spiral doesn’t occur, and you don’t receive that negative outcome.

Not only should this bring awareness to the importance of making your bed, but encourage you to be more proactive and disciplined. You never know how your environment might trigger an event that you unconsciously process.

Every day is an opportunity to become more aware of how things work. It all serves you in being better moment to moment.

A great tactic you can use to become a better active listener is called ‘mirroring’. I first heard about this from negotiation expert Chris Voss, who describes mirroring as literally repeating the last thing someone else just said to you in the form of a question.

Beyond what you say, Voss mentions that the intonation of it really matters. Instead of having your question come off as condescending or challenging, your response can be full of curiosity and interest if it’s stated the right way. People just want to be heard, and stating back what they said to you in a non-critical way signals that you were listening.

It’s also a great tactic to get people to share more information. If someone’s explanation about something isn’t complete, you can use mirroring as a way to prompt them to share more. But the great part is you don’t need to come up with a creative question, just pausing on one specific point curiously helps them fill in the blanks of why you might be inquiring.

For example, last week I was talking to one of my coaching clients and he shared that his life is busy right now. “Busy?” I responded with interest. He then elaborated on how busy is good, how he likes to be busy, and overall it was a positive response.

I got so much more information from him simply because I paused and mirrored what he said to me.

The applications of mirroring are throughout communication: 

If someone has a problem with you and something you did, you can take their words and mirror them as an invitation to elaborate.

If you’re trying to understand someone’s core motivation in a sales or business setting, mirroring makes them reflect one layer deeper on where their hesitation might be. 

If someone gives you instructions for something but it’s not clear to you, you can mirror and they’ll go on to explain what they want you to do further.

Overall, consider mirroring to be an effortless tool you can use to further conversations and get to the heart of what lies under an initial statement. Give it a try once or twice in the next few days and see what you find!

You grew today. Grew today? Yes, by learning this now you’re better prepared to build stronger and more meaningful relationships. See!

This one might come as a bit of a surprise to you... Don’t get me wrong, I fully value the power of ‘no’. It’s by saying “no” more that you can make sure you’re staying focused on the things that are most important to you, and not get caught up in things that don’t add value to your life.

It’s such an important detail that Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest people in the world,  is known for saying “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything".

Notice how he articulated that - “Really successful people say no to almost everything". This means that there are some very important, specific things that they say “yes” to. 

What you ‘say yes’ to is what aligns with your values, which are the things that are most important to you, the life you want to live, and the causes and character you want to stand for. Anything else that pulls you away from that alignment and distracts you from what matters most deserves a ‘no’. And trust me, we need more of those.

But when those moments do come up, that are fully aligned with your best self and your best life, that’s when you say “yes”. But many of us shy away from it. Often these opportunities are inconvenient, expensive, risky, complicated, or challenging. There's a compelling argument for why, logically, “no is the right decision.

It’s by overcoming this resistance and accommodating the things that are most important to us that we infuse our life with purposeful and fulfilling fire. Like making an effort to be at someone’s graduation even though it makes no sense for you to be there. Or making sacrifices to lead that nonprofit initiative you really care about but don’t have the time for. Or spending your money on that once in a lifetime experience rather than investing it in something that builds up your future.

Again, these things need to meet an exceptional criteria. But when they do, you can’t miss them! This is what gives life it’s meaning. This is what it’s all for. And this is what you’ll regret if you don’t do it.

One of the best qualities about my wife Irene is how far she’ll go to be a part of something important to her. She’s clear on her values, particularly prioritizing the people in her life, and she’ll go to the end of the Earth for them. 

It’s inspiring, but it’s hers! What are your values, and what moments do you need to absolutely be a part of?

I don’t know about you, but I know that I’m having a good day when I transition from one thing to the next at a fast-pace.

I enjoy the surge of fulfillment that comes from having momentum move me from one priority to the next. As someone who has studied effective task transitioning to maximize it for myself, I wanted to share a few things I’ve found to be true.

First, it helps to allocate time for transitioning. Instead of expecting to tackle tasks and commitment immediately back to back, give yourself the expectation of a 5 minute buffer. This means that when that buffer time comes, you have time to do what you need to do to reset your energy, and take care of small distracting tasks like checking your phone. 

Ultimately, rather than judging yourself for being off task and deflating momentum, you stick to the plan and keep momentum while affording the space to address some of the things you can’t plan for. 

This all requires that you have a plan for the day, so that’s my second recommendation for fast transitioning - Keep a detailed schedule. Rather than diluting your energy and focus getting caught up on what to do next, you’ve already decided what to do next and it’s time to execute. 

I recommend 30 x 30 minute timeboxing with specific tasks so that you can know in detail what is on task and what’s not. “You can’t call something a distractions unless you know what you’re being distracted from” is a brilliant insight from Nir Eyal’s book “Indistractable”. A schedule is your stated plan for what you’re meant to do at any given moment of the day.

Which transitions (pun intended) into the third recommendation - Prevent distractions in your environment. Put your phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’. Close your email and Slack windows, and hide the other projects and tasks you’ve been working on. 

Doing things that we didn’t plan to do makes us fall behind. When we fall behind, we make up for the time required to do something in the next timeblock, and before you know it you’re completely off your schedule. Without the clarity of what to do next, there’s more space to negotiate how quickly you make your transitions. 

Here's my personal system for transitioning fast and making the most of every day. Check it out!

I had a deeply inspiring conversation with a new friend and nonprofit leader named Ariel Moore. Ariel got into the story that has brought her to the work she does today, supporting people in recovery and giving them the resources and humanity they need to make positive change to their life.

Her message about the topic is compelling because Ariel herself was a drug addict, squatting in a vacant lot, and squandering her life away. That was until the police came, brought her to jail, and took her child away from her.

But with years of support and dedication, she has recovered and returned to be really effective in helping people like who she used to be, because she knows what it’s like intimately well.

As she reflected on her life and circumstances, she viewed it from two different perspectives - The ‘then’ version of and the ‘now’ version of herself.

It’s a testament to how we can change as people. We all have that past version of ourselves who at some point made a bad decision, was unethical or out of integrity, or somehow existed in a way we aren’t proud of. Some people let that history control the present.

But what Ariel proves, and what’s fundamentally true, is that you can change as a person. In fact it’s expected! Our interests, morals, values, lifestyle - everything changes with time. So don’t get hung up on letting who you used to be keep you from becoming who you can be.

It’s almost helpful to see the ‘then’ version of you as a separate person. Someone else operating from a different level of awareness with different priorities and characteristics. You can’t change the ‘then’ version of you, but you can do everything about the ‘now’ version of you.

And I’ve got a feeling that who you are today has a whole lot to offer the world!

The most basic, fundamental unit that determines the trajectory of our lives is our choices. The results we get are dependent on the actions we take, and the actions we take come from the choices we make. To achieve the result of a better and more fulfilling life, we need to make better choices. 

We are constantly making choices, positive and negative, consciously and unconsciously, and each choice we make slightly alters the direction of our path. James Clear in 'Atomic Habits' demonstrates this as a tree where for every good choice we make branches up and every poor choice branches down.  Brian Johnson with Heroic calls these "+1s" and "-1s" with the intention to identify and choose the "+1" moment to moment.

That’s what it means to feel good about the choices we make. We know it’s serving our highest good. We know that what matters more is the pride we feel at the end of the day and not the pleasure of indulging in a moment. This should be the filter you use to arrive at making better choices. 

However, there are times we make choices that feel perfectly well-reasoned, only for them not to pan out and lead to negative results. A negative result doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad choice. We can feel good about the choices we make as long as we feel good about the intention we had with it, given the level of awareness we were at.

Our feeling of things is our own perception. The outcome of any event is dependent on the meaning we assign to it, and the same goes for our choices. So let’s have grace when we feel like we did things for the right reasons but didn’t get the result, and let’s have the discipline to try our best no matter the temptations we have or the low motivation we may feel. 

If you make choices with those two things in mind, a good intention and disciplined follow through, you’ll be set up to feel proud of the way you’re showing up in the world.

Recently I’ve been really curious about Benjamin Franklin’s philosophies. As one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, his commentary on the fundamentals of life are timeless. One of his quotes that you’ve probably heard before is "By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail."

This came to mind over the weekend. Not getting political, I had a conversation with a young woman who knocked on my door wanting to talk about a candidate that’s running for office this election cycle. Wanting to reward her for the courage she had to knock on strangers doors, my intention was to make this the best conversation she had all day.

Rather than listening to her script and sending her on her way, I wanted to ask her questions and give her a real opportunity to advocate

First I asked, “What’s your favorite part about this candidate’s position and what they hope to do for the community?” She didn’t really have an answer. Then I asked “Who are they running against?” and she didn’t know the opposition’s name, but in a fluster she shared some details about this candidate that I later found were misinformed. Clearly she was underprepared and in terms of her intention to persuade me to vote for her candidate, she failed.

But I’ll bet that the second she got out of eyesight, the first thing she did was Google who the opposing candidate is. And I bet she reflected a bit on why this is important to her, and reconnected with her reasons for investing her weekend talking to strangers about politics.

I don’t judge her. I’m proud of her! She’s in it! She’s learning! By putting herself out there and exposing herself to failure, she gained an awareness of her weaknesses and knows the areas she needs to be more prepared for. There’s no faster teacher than lived experience!

Beyond complimenting her on her courage to knock door to door, I wish I would’ve asked her if she has her own aspirations to get involved in politics. To have learned more about her rather than who she was speaking on behalf of.

But that’s okay! Lesson learned on my end - Now I’m more prepared to make the most of the next conversation I have with a stranger who knocks on my door!

In college I was lucky enough to take a class from the foremost leader in gratitude research named Dr. Robert Emmons. Not only has gratitude become a cornerstone of my life, but in the class he had us read a really intriguing book that has left an impression all of these years later.

The book was titled “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” by Robert Sapolsky.

It’s primarily about how our evolutionary hardwirings as animals are maladapted to our current world. Built into our physiological process is a stress response that surges us with energy should we need to respond to a threat. It’s often called our ‘fight or flight instinct’ and it’s effective at keeping us alive.

However, today’s society frequently presents stimuli that activate our internal stress response. It’s not just physical danger that we feel threatened by, but everyday instances related to money, relationships, the expectations of others, and so on. 

Even though the nature of the threat is very different, the body only has one way to handle it. Our natural stress response, which is meant to be temporary and acute, has become overactive and is causing chronic health issues our bodies aren’t evolved for. Things like cardiovascular disease, accelerated aging, problems with the immune system and digestive issues.

Thus the title “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers”.

When it comes to combating stress in life, the suggestions are simple: More exercise, mindfulness, social interaction, and focusing on things that are within our control. And even though we feel like our stress is our problem, we can engage others to help us manage our stress, and even be more thoughtful about how they impact our life so that we don’t live in such a stressful environment.

All in all, our society is extremely overstressed and our collective health is suffering as a result. It’s a public health issue, and the best way we can contribute to solving it is by modeling what healthy living looks like for others.