Self Improvement Daily Podcast

A long time ago I heard a cool quote: “Wherever you go, there you are.” It’s a reminder to be present with what’s immediately in front of you. Our physical bodies take us into physical spaces where we engage with real things. Our minds can be anywhere else, but having a simple mantra like this helps you be reminded to come back to the present moment. 

This quote took an extended meaning last week I was at an event and I heard Mario Wilson, a former Navy SEAL, speak. He said “You are where you are where you are.”

He didn’t misspeak, and that’s not a typo. 

The first part, “you are where you are” directly correlates with the idea of being present. You physically can be nowhere but one place at a time. But the way we show up in that physical space has a lot of variability, and that’s what Mario was commenting on. It’s more than just being somewhere, but the energy you bring to where you are that shapes the experience.

Beyond being physically present, it matters where you are personally on an emotional and spiritual level. The being that you bring into every moment plays a huge role in what it becomes. We’re creating the future and the actions we take today have real impacts on what happens next, and our energetic state is very responsible for what we end up putting into the world.

It’s the difference between showing up bravely or afraid. Abundant or scarce. At peace or stressed. Open-minded or closed off. And while we’d want to choose the former in each of those scenarios, we’re often not in control of it. Our energetic state decides that.

And that’s because our physiology influences our psychology. Our thoughts change depending on what state we’re in. If you’re tired, you're less disciplined. If you’re stressed, you’re more volatile. It’s the reason why being ‘hangry’ is a thing - our state hijacks our mind and brings out a certain version of ourselves. 

“You are where you are where you are” - emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. That’s why it’s so important to take care of yourself, otherwise you might be putting yourself in the right places but compromising the ways you’re actually showing up to them.

In a world that we share with over 8 billion people, I’ve got some news for you: Not everyone wants exactly the same thing.

Shocking... I know... But important because when people want different things, it creates conflict. That’s why one of the most important things for you to do to help protect what you want is to set boundaries.

In some ways, it is confrontational: You need to tell people to call you less often, call out their gossip, or change their plans. But that’s only in the more majorly interventional cases. More often than not, we have opportunities to set boundaries in really subtle ways that protect our day to day lives from outside influences.

Last week, I had two clear instances where I set boundaries, and they were times that the other person probably didn’t even realize I was doing it.

First, I was on a video call with a new connection. We were both excited to meet, and I could tell that based on where we were in the conversation, the call was going to go long. Knowing that I had another commitment I didn’t want to compromise, I said the quick line “By the way I have an appointment I need to get to, so I only have 10 minutes.” I communicated my needs and set a boundary for my time that this person respected.

Another time, I was at a friend's house and had a similar situation - we often get to chatting for a while. But I had other things I needed to get back to, a call on the books to get home for, and wanted to make sure I could do both. So I said to my friend “Hey just so you know I need to get out of here by 2:30”. The request was also respected.

It might be subtle, but notice what happened. I took action in such a way that I designed the environment for what I wanted. A simple line of communication altered the path of least resistance so that it was more likely for me to stay on schedule. Had I not said something, in either case it’s possible that the other person would go on and I’d have the difficult decision to either interrupt them or be late for my next commitment.

But instead, I set a subtle boundary that shaped the environment. It made what I wanted to happen much more likely to happen, and with way less resistance. So it did!

Hopefully that’s a helpful lesson, and an example for how you can be proactive about communicating your needs before it becomes an issue. Give it a try the next time you enter a situation that you’ve had difficulty navigating before.

For decades, the #1 recommendation from personal development leaders has always been the same. If you want to improve anything about your life, the most effective thing you can do is to start tracking it. 

When you track, you create awareness. Rather than a bad habit happening without you even realizing it, you have to look at it every single day when you track it. Instead of just setting a goal for the day and forgetting to do anything about it, tracking makes you report back on how you did with it. Tracking offers a feedback loop that gives you visibility into things you couldn’t see before, and with more awareness, you can make better choices and take better actions that create better results.

However, there’s one important detail to add to the concept of tracking. You need to engage with the data you’re collecting. For example, if you wear a smart watch that’s counting your steps, or your phone keeps track of how many minutes you spend on social media, it does you know good if you never look at it.

With that in mind I want to highlight the two different types of tracking: Active tracking and passive tracking.

Active tracking involves you manually reporting, reflecting, and documenting how you did in any given day. It works really well because it brings to your consciousness all of the little decisions you made throughout the day, and how they impacted the end result. Taking a moment to actively track makes you think about everything that happened when you weren’t thinking about it, and it helps you get an objective view into your performance versus a subjective impression.

For example, you might think you worked out today because you went to the gym, but when you realize that you only spent 10 minutes on a treadmill and went in the sauna, you realize that doesn't meet your standard for a workout. Or you might think you ate relatively healthy, but then you’re logging your food in a nutrition app you remember you went through a bag of chips after lunch when you weren’t even hungry.

Passive tracking is still helpful because the data is collected for you. You don’t need to report or document your performance yourself, there’s a technology that’s doing it on your behalf. And this is great to have available to you, but again, only when you take time to look at what the data says. I wear an Aura ring at night when I sleep. It gives me great insight into how well I slept and how much I slept. But that’s only when I review the data and reflect on what factors influenced it.

In other words: If you don’t pay attention to how you’re performing - actively collecting your own datapoints in key areas or reviewing data collected passively on your behalf - it does nothing for you, and all of the potential you have to improve your life gets lost.

As someone dedicated to maintaining a really high standard for myself and who’s always seeking to improve, that’s why I track my performance every single day in my Self Improvement Scorecard. Without it, I lack the critical awareness I need to hold myself accountable. If you want to see my daily performance tracking process and implement a version of it for yourself in your life, I’ve got a video showing you how I track my performance on a daily basis, and where you can get started for yourself.

Something that you’ve probably heard 100+ times before is that there’s no more powerful force for transformation than consistency. And it's true - People who have good habits are very consistent, and consistent action generates unimaginable positive results over time. So long as we stay consistent, we will continue to improve in the areas that are most important to us.

However, it's not the whole truth. Leveraging consistency requires an extra layer of detail. I believe that consistency is a bit misunderstood, and that’s because consistency actually has two different forms: 

1) Doing the exact same things many, many times

2) Taking a certain type of action that has nuanced variation each time

This is the difference between repetition and iteration.

Repetition is about doing the same thing the exact same way, every single time. Each repetition refines a skill or technique in a subtle way and creates fluency in the action. It’s the path to mastery so that you can reliably do a certain thing nearly perfectly. Like someone practicing free throws, or trying to nail their delivery in a speech, once you know what works you drill it into your behavioral patterning so that you learn to do it unconsciously.

But embedded in repetition is the smallest seed of iteration. Iteration is more of an experiment. You’re still taking consistent action, but the action itself changes as the process gets optimized. Iteration is required to attain mastery because it enables the tiniest adjustments that lead to 1% improvements in output. 

More often though, the action should change more significantly in order to generate progress toward a desired result. Most things in life are dynamic. As the world evolves around you, you must evolve your processes in order to maximize your pursuit of a certain dynamic result. This means that progress-generating consistency must be iterative and not repetitive. 

This is a bit of a disruptive idea because when people think about being consistent, they think it’s something that needs to be done the same way every day. That consistency is repetition. That if it’s not the exact same morning routine, workout, cadence of prospecting for your business, then it’s not consistent.

But the process of optimization requires that you take action, observe the result, understand what caused it through feedback, and try again in a way that’s better suited for the goal. It’s an iterative process that requires repetitions to fuel the cycle. In other words, it’s not repetition - doing the same thing the same way every time - that generates progress, but taking a newly refined action consistently.

This subtle nuance is the same reason why we call something a ‘discipline’ or a ‘practice’. The learning is never done. Environment changes, technique changes, tools and equipment change, what we want changes…

And if we keep doing things the same way we’ll always get the same thing. What we really want is improvement, and to achieve that, we cannot deny ourselves the opportunity to accelerate our growth because we’re pursuing consistency too rigidly.

My personal mission statement is to help convert human intention into action. I believe that if only we were to follow through on our best intentions - in our health, homes, work, and desire to make an impact - the world would be a much better place. 

It’s the reason why more than being productive, being intentional is the Northstar in my life.

I don’t want to just go about life, but I want to choose what I do and how I show up to it. Perhaps my obsession with being intentional stems from my biggest insecurity where deep down I don't trust that I have good intentions, that all the things I do to help people are just for myself, but that’s a topic for another time.

When it comes to following through on our best intentions, and doing all of the things we tell ourselves we should do or want to do, it seems like something often gets in the way. In my time studying it, I’ve found there are 4 reasons that consistently come up to explain why people don’t do the things they know they should do, that we’re all guilty of.

1. We forget. Simple human error! We set the intention to do something, and then when the moment comes we don’t even remember to do it. ‘Remembering to do something’ is an unreliable system for execution, and naturally, things slip through the cracks. That’s why it’s important to create an action plan for an intention and not just commit to it as an empty promise.

2. We get distracted or pulled off track. Life is busier than ever and we have more things vying for our attention than ever. Oftentimes, these things win the battle and whatever we were planning on doing no longer is the object of our focus. Whether the disruption comes from another person, technology, or randomly in our environment, we need to be aware of the patterns of things that distract us. With that awareness we can consciously override what normally happens unconsciously.

3. We don’t feel like doing it. It’s easy to say you want something, but when it comes down to it, it’s much more difficult to actually put time and energy into it. Through our own evolutionary biology, we have a hardwired preference to be lazy and conserve energy. Or in other words, what's normal is to not do anything other than the things that are critical for our personal survival. So a lot of that time, this resistance shows up strong, and we don’t feel motivated to take action.

4. We choose not to do it. The beautiful thing about making plans is, plans can change. In fact they should! When you have more information you can make a more informed decision. However, it’s difficult to know if a new choice is genuinely what’s best for you or if it’s a reaction to the present moment. Self-sabotage creeps in to rationalize choices that are more comfortable or convenient. And it's insidious - just because you think something makes sense in one setting doesn’t mean you’ll agree in the next.

I imagine you can relate to these because guess what - we all do. It’s a problem we all share and a battle we’re all fighting to live the impactful, purposeful, vibrant life we see for ourselves. And as someone who’s fighting this battle myself, I’ve devised a system to help me be consistent, disciplined, and organized in my follow through so that I can actually live up to being the person I know I’m capable of being on a daily basis.

Or, at least I do my best! If you want to see my high performance system in action and get your own template for how to create a version of it for yourself, watch this video where I walk you through my Self Improvement Scorecard - I’m happy to share.

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I was on a group call with Pat Flynn, and what he said was so simple but so deeply true. Pat has invested years in becoming one of the strongest brands in online marketing which he’s done by cultivating real relationships and being human in the way he does business. He even wrote a book called “Superfans” where he talks about all of the tactics he’s used to create a real connection with his many followers.

And it’s with that experience that this one line of wisdom really hit me. Pat said “People are tired of fake.”

Unfortunately, the world is full of fake. Social media creates an impossible expectation we all try to live up to. Artificial intelligence is impersonating people better than ever. People talk in business lingo that doesn’t mean much but sounds smart... 

It’s happening everywhere, and because of that, people are more cautious. They’re slower to trust. They think twice. They pass everything through a very sensitive filter meter to see if something’s legitimate or 'BS'.

The opposite of being fake is being real. And being real is a major differentiator in today’s world. It’s the reason why you believe someone can help you succeed if you first know about their failure. It’s why people crave real stories of real people, which makes them more relatable. In a world where so much is fake we have a deep need for authentic connection

So how can you be more real in a fake world? 

Be honest. Rather than inflating your situation so that it looks better, represent things how they actually are. It’s likely that you’ll meet people where they’re at rather than try to paint an unbelievably impossible picture. 

Be vulnerable. Share the parts of you and your story that aren’t perfect. Relive the emotional moments, the decisions you made, and how it shaped you into who you are today. Rory Vaden often says “you are most qualified to help the person you once were.” Give people the gift of getting to know that person.

Be raw. You don’t need to have a perfectly polished plan. Messy action is magnetic. People want to join you in the trenches because it creates a more realistic expectation of what it actually looks like to do what you do. An objective view into the hands-on, messy process teaches more than telling people how you did it ever could.

Again, people are tired of fake. So whether you’re looking to grow your business, invest in friendships, strengthen a marriage, get healthier, or whatever it is you want to see for yourself - be real about it.

Your real example will inspire more people than you know, and your authenticity will attract people who can help you and want to see you succeed.

A character trait that is widely looked down upon is arrogance. Someone who's arrogant is someone who thinks they’re better than they are, who doesn’t respect or honor the process of becoming and has an inflated sense of self that biases their worldview.

A common expression people use to describe someone like that is to say that they’re “full of themselves”. But looking at that quote directly, I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to be 'full of yourself'. It’s just a matter that you’re filling yourself with the right things.

For example, it’s good to be full of confidence. Someone who believes in themself and their abilities makes bigger waves in the world and plays a bigger game. The problem is when over-confidence becomes a lack of humility, and you overestimate yourself and underestimate the challenge ahead.

It’s good to be full of character and authenticity. If you’re not full of what’s genuinely yours and instead you’re full of what someone else wants for you - that’s a recipe for disappointment. As Bronnie Ware discovered, the #1 regret of the dying is that people on their deathbed “wish they would have lived a life true to themselves, not the life others expected of them.” 

Brian Johnson, founder of Heroic says “You’re the hero the world has been waiting for… And Oscar Wilde says “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

In truth, it’s a tricky balance to find: You’re supposed to be unapologetically yourself, but not so much that it’s over the top and cause for concern. How does one manage that?

My understanding is that you want to maintain equal parts of confidence and humility. Equal parts ambition and receptiveness. As you become more confident and fill yourself up, also become more humble and open-minded. As you get louder about who you are and what you can do in the world, get louder about asking for help and seeking perspective. It helps to maintain the tension.

It's a worthwhile problem to solve because the world needs you on fire! So be full of yourself in all of the best ways, while increasing your checks and balances so that your boisterous confidence is also grounded in reality.

An amazing thing in life is that we don’t just set goals and have dreams, but they can actually come to fruition! What we want isn’t just an empty promise to ourselves but a potential reality that we’re called to create. And oftentimes, we succeed in creating it.

Within the process of that pursuit, something I’ve noticed is that people value their achievement less if they didn’t work hard for it. It’s almost like an achievement is more meaningful when it was earned against all odds and worked hard for.

But why does it need to be that way? Why can’t our dream life just be something that is effortlessly attracted to us? Why can’t success come easy?

I’m of the opinion that we are powerful beyond measure and each have access to exactly what we need to create whatever we want. We have an inherent connection to what we want, and who we want to be - Yet we it's not our reality exactly because there’s a resistance that dilutes our ability to access what we’re connected to.  If only we were to remove that resistance, all that’s left is a direct connection to the skills, character, and beliefs we need to make it all happen.

The reason this seems so unfathomable to us is because of the belief system we’ve been raised in. It’s a collective understanding that people are rewarded for hard work, that there’s virtue in persevering through adversity, and that it’s more meaningful to be an underdog.

And unfortunately it’s creating an unfair expectation, and causes many people to discredit the successes they’ve achieved because they feel it was just a fluke, and it wasn’t earned.

But again, that’s operating from a more traditional way of thinking. If we adopt a new belief system that doesn’t judge the mechanism that creates success, and instead welcome it when it comes, success will show up more often.

Success can come easy when you get out of your own way and let it. Until then, it’ll be the type of thing that you have to keep working hard for.