My wife Irene is remarkable and very inspiring. She grew up doing gymnastics and still trains and competes as an adult, getting back skills that she only was able to do in her prime. Last week she was frustrated though because she has a big competition coming up in a few weeks and she injured herself by twisting her ankle.

Motivated to heal it as fast as possible, she pulled out all the stops - ice bucket, compression recovery, acquiring a stabilization boot, doing physical therapy exercises… Whatever it takes to get better quickly.

As someone who helped to build and a sports recovery technology company that got acquired, and as a former D1 student athlete, I know a fair amount about recovery. And I have recommendations for her... But it’s a fine line to play between offering to help someone and supporting them.

In my morning meditation I forecast the next 24 hours and set an intention for my health choices, my work tasks, and my quality time with others. This was on a Tuesday morning and every Tuesday evening we go for a nice walk near the ocean with friends. Knowing Irene was unsure about if / how she could do the walk, I set the intention to prioritize supporting her. Whatever she reasoned was the right path forward, my intention was to not challenge it even if I disagreed with it.

It’s with that clarity of intention that I was able to show up for her in the best way I knew how. She came up with some ideas to go for the walk in the boot, bring a scooter, ask us to walk slower… And amid all of these options my intention was to support her in doing what she wanted to do.

Interestingly enough when I approached the situation with that energy, she wanted my perspective and recommendations. So I provided them unattached to whether she’d take them or not, and it turns out she did!

The insight here is to connect with your intentions and let that determine the tone of your actions. When you have an intention, you have a specific purpose for doing what you’re doing. This purpose is connected to the highest version of yourself, and it helps you hold yourself accountable to that higher standard.

Intentionality is the North Star that I have in my life, and being intentional over being productive is one of the 7 Fundamentals To Self Improvement. Check out the rest if you want to build up your life the right way!

Perhaps the thing that holds people back the most from pursuing their dreams, taking more chances, and playing a bigger game in life is a lack of self-confidence. When you lack confidence it means that you’re more hesitant, tentative, and unwilling to put yourself outside your comfort zone for fear that you’ll fail... And give yourself more reasons to feel inadequate.

When you break down the etymology of the word ‘confidence’ it’s divided into two latin roots ‘con-fidere’ which translates to “intense trust”. When you fully trust a person or process, you have confidence in them. This means that in order to have self-confidence you need to have intense trust in yourself, that you will show up, perform, and give your best when you find yourself in challenging situations.

I’ve found that in order to build that intense trust in yourself, you need to earn it. And that the best way to build confidence is by doing hard things. When you take on hard things and prove to yourself that you have what it takes to overcome them, you gain confidence.

This is something I’ve been leveraging for myself. Literally today (as I’m sharing this) I’m giving a Keynote speech. Beyond preparing relentlessly for it, I’ve also been reinforcing my own self-confidence by pushing myself in the gym. I’ve been starting every workout by turning the treadmill on faster than is comfortable and holding the pace for longer than I thought possible. And each time I do, it’s giving me more evidence that I step up to the occasion when it’s presented in front of me. I'm doing this strategically to reinforce my self-confidence, which is elevating all areas of my life, but in the short-term is being specifically directed toward delivering on this Keynote.

But there’s an extra layer to it. Beyond just supporting you with the things that are on the horizon and that you’re aware of, building confidence proactively helps you to better manage the things that come up unexpectedly. I hear Mike Posner say “we choose to do hard things so that we can do the hard things we don't’ choose.” 

Life will always present challenges, and the more prepared we are when they arrive, the better we’ll be able to manage them. So if you’re feeling short on confidence, start giving yourself reasons to be confident. And that starts with stepping outside of your comfort zone and giving yourself the opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re more capable than you thought.

The primary purpose of our personal development is to achieve self-growth - to improve the quality of our lives by becoming healthier, more effective, more present, and more impactful. This idea of constant growth suggests that we’re always seeking to tap into our next level and maximize our potential. And as I’ve found in my life, when it comes to generating improvement and growth, there are only two paths to reaching your next level…

The path you take comes down to asking yourself this simple question: Do you know what you should be doing to improve your life?

If the answer is “Yes”, you do know what you should be doing to improve your life, then the path forward is just a matter of doing it. This becomes a process of understanding the roadblocks, obstacles, challenges, and details getting in the way of you doing it. It becomes more of a behavioral design approach to changing your life so that you can get consistent in doing the things that most serve you.

Some people would call this being more self-disciplined, which I define as “faithfully following through on doing the thing that most serves you, consistently, despite the circumstances around it”. Cultivating self-discipline isn’t just about willing your way into action but exploring all the factors around the action, clearing out the resistance, and structuring your environment to be more supportive in doing it.

If the answer to the question is “no”, you don’t know what you should be doing to improve your life, then the limiting factor is your own awareness. This means that the path forward is to go out and find the ideas, perspectives, examples, lessons, and recommendations that will help you improve in the ways you seek to. 

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time, shared by Maya Angelou - “Do your best until you know better. Then once you know better, do better.” It’s a reminder to not judge or criticize how things have been because it was the best you could do from that level of awareness. And then, once you have acquired that awareness, it becomes a matter of being more self-disciplined to faithfully follow through on what you know you should be doing.

The truth of it is… The majority of the time, if you’re being really honest with yourself, you do know what you should be doing to improve. Or at least you have an idea for something to try. So the real bottleneck to your own self-improvement, and reaching your next level, is to get yourself to follow through and take action. Even if it scares you, even if you don’t feel ready, even if you have reasonable excuses to make about it.

My personal process for that, which includes self-discipline subconscious priming, and honest self-accountability, and clarity on my goals and committed areas for growth, is my Self Improvement Scorecard. It's how I take action to elevate to my next level every single day.

There’s a powerful quote attributed to the greek philosopher Heraclitus that goes “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” I love this quote because it reminds us of how rapid, constant, and unrelenting change is. 

Even things that appear to be static are dynamic. Balancing on a bike is not a process of being still but of stabilizing and restabilizing as the rider tilts subtly off-center. Equilibrium in a chemical reaction is not a dormant state of inactivity but a very active process of constant chemistry. 

The quote also talks about the two different faces of change, internal and external. As individuals we are always learning, experiencing, and growing. With every datapoint our brains rewire to update our understanding of the world, creating personal evolution in every moment. We update our beliefs, preferences, and perspective instantaneously causing us to never think the same way twice. This is the man in the river.

The internal change interacts with everything changing externally. We’re constantly acquiring new information, and context from the outside world. The same conditions are impossible to reproduce because there are so many variables that go into it, and so many forces that influence it. This is the river the man is in. 

Given how constant change is, our mission is to keep reorienting ourselves to meet the demands of the moment. As Charles Darwin shared, “it’s the most adaptable that survive” and that’s equally true about who thrives and succeeds in our modern world, which is changing faster than ever. Critical to keeping up with the changes is having strong feedback systems in place that give you the insight you need to know which direction to go. 

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Every moment is unique, internally and externally, and that’s part of the fun! We get to continue improving and growing in the ways that help us maximize our potential and contribution in the world.

Some of the happiest, most abundant, most fulfilled people I know are the most grateful. They have a genuine appreciation for the goodness in the world around them and seem to live in a positivity bubble that insulates them from the chaos of the outside world. I believe that we would all benefit from embracing gratitude as a way of life like they do.

While positivity is something that appears to be based on your personality, I’ve found that it’s something that can be trained. You can intentionally build your mindset to be more grateful, and to start to see the world through a lens of more positivity. 

The way that you do that is by being intentional about finding reasons to be grateful. It’s the consistency of consciously scanning your day and finding the goodness and blessings that you begin to see it unconsciously too. You start noticing the good things that are happening in the world instead of the bad because you’ve literally trained your mind to. 

There are two different depths of gratitude journaling that I’ve incorporated into my life and that I encourage you to try:

For those who are just getting started, it’s as simple as finding 3 things to be grateful for a day with prompts: One thing about your health and body that’s functioning well for you, one thing about the people in your life who’ve made an effort to support you, and one about your circumstances and how good you gave it compared to those less fortunate.

For those who are more advanced, you can try a reframing gratitude practice. It’s also a daily discipline where you recall something that didn’t go well, that was far from ideal and created inconvenience, sadness, frustration, or anger… And you choose to see the breadcrumbs of good within it. 

You get in a car crash and realize how lucky you are to survive, and have insurance. You lose a deal in business and find gratitude in being aware of the weaknesses in your pitch. You get in a disagreement with a loved one and appreciate how most of the time you resolve conflict amicably. 

It's not easy to do, but it's possible, and very effective in shifting your mindset. It’s the conscious reframing of something that impacted you negatively into something positive that you begin to start seeing failures through a more empowering lens.

In any case, being grateful is a super power because it shapes your perspective to find more possibility, hope, opportunity, and goodness in the world. That’s the type of world we want to live in, and it starts with making that the reality of our world. Do that by getting in the routine of intentional gratitude journaling, and soon you’ll be embracing gratitude as a way of life.”

Last week I caught myself in the middle of doing something naughty - scrolling aimlessly on social media while laying in my bed.

When I came to, I didn't even know what happened or how I got there. Obviously it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, but there I was. Thank goodness for my Screen Time App Limits to alert me of my usage keeping me honest!

Every morning I do a form of meditation where I overview the wins and opportunities to be better from the last 24 hours. The next morning, one of the instances that came to mind as an opportunity for improvement from the previous day was my scrolling. During the meditation I took the time to understand the forces that created the behavior. Things don’t just happen on their own, something causes it, and I wanted to diagnose why.

The self-exploration led me to a realization that I was scrolling on my phone as I was transitioning from finishing a workout and getting in the shower. But as per my policy, it was a cold shower, and I realized that subconsciously my mind found a way to procrastinate so that I could avoid the inevitable. 

That’s what the mind does. In an effort to avoid discomfort, it will self-sabotage. It will employ things like procrastination, perfectionism, distraction, confusion, fear, anxiety, limiting beliefs and everything else it can do to try to redirect you away from doing that which is uncomfortable.

But consciously, I know there’s no getting around it. I choose to take cold showers because it serves me, and no matter if I step in right away or 20 minutes later, it’s going to feel the same. The procrastination doesn’t benefit me, so from the awareness I gained in meditation I committed to a new policy where right when I get home from a workout I go straight into the shower. 

The new policy was put to the test the next day. After my workout I felt myself want to distract myself from the looming cold shower, but this time I was aware of it and had the agency to choose otherwise. I got in the shower right away, endured the cold, and felt good about how fast I was transitioning through my day. In the days since I’ve had a similar intention and experienced a similar result.

I share this personal story to highlight the power of choice. We can control what happens at any given moment. We can always consciously override the unconscious pattern. And a little intention goes a long way in helping you orient your actions in the direction that most serves you.

I’ve found that many people are very resistant to adding more structure to their life. They believe that more structure would confine them, limit their ability to be spontaneous, and put them in a box that takes away their freedom. But seeing what structure actually does for people rather than relating with it in an extreme way, I believe there’s a way to reframe structure so that you can see it as a tool that actually helps you live in closer alignment to who you want to be, even as a free-spirit.

One of the complaints made by those who are new to ‘having structure’ is that a structured life is overly rigid. That structure eliminates your independence and free-will because it mandates that you live a certain way. But the healthiest type of structure is designed to be accommodating, with enough flexibility to handle variability in life while still offering some guardrails to make sure that you don’t go completely off course. 

The free-flowing person rejects the idea of “coloring between the lines”, but honestly it’s more representative of their personal bias than it is the reality of having structure. The structure is there to help make sure you as an individual are balanced, organized, sustainable, and effective in whatever it is you choose to do. The constraints in place are only enough to make sure you’re living productively and with intentionality, and someone resistant to structure underestimates how much creative freedom they have while living within those constraints.  

Everything I’ve described is pretty abstract, so let’s make it tangible. A simple structure you could create, that many people are most strongly opposed to, is having a schedule for the day. For some, having a schedule feels too routine and robotic to really enjoy life. That following a schedule for the day means you can’t embrace any of the spontaneity of life and it doesn’t enable you to do things when you most feel like doing them.

But in actuality having a schedule helps you to embrace those nuances. A schedule helps you to quantify the implications, consequences, and considerations of spontaneous things and help you thoughtfully decide if you want to do them. It gives you more feedback for your emotions so that you can choose when to be disciplined, and when to be more flowy. 

What a schedule does is it helps you live even more intentionally because every time you want to deviate away from your plan, now you’re choosing to do that. Previous to that, having no structure and no schedule means that you unconsciously go wherever the wind takes you with little thought or control, and it often takes you off track in ways you wouldn’t want to go. But the structure offers you guardrails against that while empowering you to lean fully into the things that most serve you.

Again, if you’re resistant to structure, perhaps all you need is a perspective shift. Discipline can lead to freedom. Structure can be flexible in design. And your life can become more productive, contributing, and enjoyable when you have a foundation of awareness and intentionality built into it.

Many people are experiencing an internal conflict. On one hand, they’re busier than ever and don’t have any capacity for more. Yet on the other hand, expectations are higher than ever and they need to do more things, be in more places, and make it all work. It’s an unwinnable equation and needless to say people are finding it challenging to strike an appropriate balance. 

The default response is that people realize they need to do more with less. They need to become more efficient, get more done in less time, and pack even more into an already full schedule. Unfortunately this puts them into a reactive, defensive position as they try to manage it all and figure out how to get it done in a way that's “good enough”.

But rather than solving the problem from the perspective of being limited on resources, what if you choose to be resourceful. Rather than believing that you ‘need to do more with less’, you believe that you ‘can do more with less’. A simple reframe charges you with encouragement, creative thinking, agency, and on positions you to be on offense as you seek to solve the problem. It ignites personal innovation and empowers you to come up with something that’s even better than required.

For example, let’s say that you have a work project that has a seemingly impossible deadline. ‘Needing to do more in less time’ might get you cutting corners and doing a good enough job to get by without consequence. But embracing that you ‘can do more with less’ has you repurposing old frameworks and ideas that expand on the original intention. 

Tony Robbins is known for saying “It's not the lack of resources, it's your lack of resourcefulness that stops you.” Embracing the mindset that ‘you can do more with less’, and that there’s hope, possibility, and opportunity on the horizon, is how you create beyond the requirements of your role and excel in ways others won’t.

And at the end of the day, if you absolutely need to get something done, you’re going to find a way to get it done. What I’m encouraging you to do is look more positively on the problem so that you aren’t constrained to the limitations and scarcity of needing to do it, and tap into the abundance of what’s possible.