As we near the end of the year, it’s common to reflect on what we’ve achieved and who we’ve become over the course of these last 12 months. For many, this reflection is bittersweet because there’s a sense of pride for how you showed up but also an undeniable acknowledgment of how some things didn’t change, or didn’t change to the extent that you wanted them to, over the course of the last year.

But as with anything, our reflections exist on a spectrum. It’s not that you grew or you didn’t. Had a successful year or you didn’t. Implemented better habits or didn’t. It’s a matter of how much. And often we discount the amount of growth we experienced, or success we achieved, because we’re seeing the gap between where we are and where we wanted to be versus the gain from where we were to where we are.

Let me share an example that comes to mind for me from this year.

I’m still not where I want to be as it relates to how I want to respond in emergencies. I want to be the type of person that springs into action and is very helpful. In college, a friend of mine in a new comical stunt jumped off my couch and hit his nose on a beam. He went down hard, started bleeding from his face, and I froze. Other guys I was with sprung into action and took care of him, but I froze.

Different story: Only a few weeks ago, I was having a peaceful picnic at a park and all of a sudden there was this vicious barking as one dog started to attack another dog. I hesitated when it happened, but was one of the first to jump up and help separate the dogs and fortunately, there was blood but no serious injuries. In the aftermath I was there to support the woman whose dog was attacked to see how I could help, but in a semi-traumatized state left the park.

I criticized myself a bit because I didn’t respond as quickly as I would’ve liked to, although I did respond, and didn’t think to offer her a wipe to get the blood off her arms.

But look at the growth from that first incident with my friend to how I responded in this dog attack! It’s a great step in the right direction, and I’d miss that if I only saw the gap between where I am from where I wanted to be rather than the gain from where I am to where I was.

If you want to give yourself credit for your growth this year, the first part of the New Year goal setting workshop is to walk through a facilitated year in review exercise. In this workshop you’ll also set your goal for the year and establish a plan to make it infinitely more likely you’ll achieve it. You can access the video session for that immediately by clicking here!

A lot of people wonder if affirmations even work. The idea that saying something to yourself can fundamentally change your life seems too good to be true. If that’s you, once you understand the chain of events that comes from affirmations you’ll start to be more of a believer.

Saying affirmations is just a technique to begin controlling your thoughts. The majority of our thoughts are unconscious and based on old patterns that we’ve learned and reproduce. An affirmation is a conscious thought that breaks your unconscious thought pattern and makes the suggestion that something new might be true. The strength of that belief grows over time with consistency until eventually it has reshaped your thinking.

That’s why we call it reprogramming the mind. Affirmations help replace the previous thought pattern with a new one of your choosing.

This shift doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a while for a new belief to take root and become a predominant thought. For example, let’s use the affirmation “I am abundant”. We won’t all of a sudden start living completely free and unattached from things because we’ve told ourselves to be more abundant.

However, what will start to happen immediately is a new awareness and accountability toward the affirmation. Because you’ve primed your brain with an affirmation, it will start to notice more instances where that new belief is at play. This new awareness creates consciousness, which then serves as an opportunity to follow through in alignment with the affirmation.

To extend this ‘abundance’ example - Let’s say someone asks to be introduced to someone you know. Your natural, scarcity based approach may be to protect that relationship, but you’re more likely to make the intro and act abundantly because your brain flags it as an opportunity to be abundant.

I deeply, deeply believe in this, which is why I use affirmations as a tool every day to prime myself to be self-disciplined. I believe that having the power to follow through on making the right choice on something, when you do have the awareness, is a fundamental ingredient to changing your life. The habits, routines, to do lists, and growth moments don’t happen if you don’t have the discipline to get yourself to do them.

That’s why every evening I listen to a subconscious audio program called Discipline On Demand to reinforce my self-discipline, so that when I encounter moments where I’m more likely to make an excuse, or collapse into comfort rather than step into growth, I seize the opportunity and accelerate forward.

The affirmation is the consistent thought that over time rewrites your belief system. It basically trains you to start thinking differently, and with new thoughts and beliefs, you have an entirely new life!

A belief in abundance and being self-disciplined are just two of the three most fundamental beliefs we need to have to be the best version of ourselves! Find out what the last one is, and incorporate all of them in just 21 days when you install the Super Habits System

Featured by one of the most appreciated and enjoyed artists in modern history, the singer and songwriter Jewel, today’s positivity quote takes on an extra depth of meaning. She said this on Ed Mylett’s podcast: “Make your life your greatest piece of art.”

When we think about how we can be more creative in our lives, we default to thinking about traditional expressions of creativity like painting, dressing, singing, writing, dancing, or whatever it might be. And what’s interesting about is is how we approach the act of creating for these purposes - We have more patience, we’re willing to experiment more, we don’t judge ourselves harshly when things don’t turn out how we envisioned it, or even we’re open to liking things more once we see how new unintended styles come out.

Have you taken that same level of curiosity and openness to how you approach your life? Do you experiment with the balance you have between your work and play? Do you try new products, supplements, or diets to see how it changes your energy levels? Do you change the way you show up, tolerate, or enforce boundaries in relationships to see how it’s received by others?

This is what Jewel meant when she said to “make your life your greatest piece of art.” It requires some innovation, some trial and error, some ‘knowing how not to do things’ in order to really understand how you like to do things.

There was an experiment run in a ceramics class where half of the students were told they’d be graded based on the quality of a single piece of work, and the other half of the class would be graded based on the quantity of pieces they produced. At the end of the semester, it turned out that the group who created more pieces actually also created higher quality pieces than the group that had been working on one project the entire time.

What if that’s the same for our lives? What if we need to live multiple versions of our life to really know which is our best one?

Now I’m not suggesting that you completely uproot everything in the name of self-growth, but I am inviting you consider how this approach might be incorporated in more subtle ways to give you more feedback to work with. So what’s one thing that you want to experiment with in your life to help you incorporate the spirit of an artist in the way you live?

If you’re open to taking on a 21 day experiment, maybe you’d benefit from having a new life-operating system! I call it the Super Habits System where you incorporate the structure I’ve optimized for a decade to build new productivity routines, improved awareness in your health, real ways to upgrade your mindset, and a baseline process to run more micro experiments in your life in the name of finding your best version.

Advancing in our lives is a constant game of going from where we are to where we want to be. Another way of putting this is we have the current reality we are living in the present moment, we have a future reality that we feel inspired to have instead, and we want to bridge the gap in between the two in order to attain that new future reality.

It’s going from overweight to being in the best shape of our lives. From wasting too much time on social media to having indistractable daily focus. From growing apart from a friend or partner to creating extraordinary levels of intimacy and love. From having a bold idea you’re too scared to take action on to standing on the mountain top announcing it to the world.

While it might be a simple concept to understand, when it actually comes to achieving our goals and covering the distance between our current and future reality, there are a lot of things that get in the way like self-doubt, uncertainty, distractions, confusion, limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome…

But there are also a lot of ways to do it once you understand all of the options, resources, and approaches you can take to it. Let’s use the metaphor of driving from LA to New York as an example of where you are and where you want to go.

How might you navigate that journey?

Well first you might want the specific address of where exactly in New York you’re going to.

You might consider preparing yourself and studying the highway systems that connect the two cities, and the milestones along the way.

You might want to use tools like Google Maps to help you stay on track.

You might ask someone else who’s done it before for their advice to see if they can share insight into making your trip smoother and avoid making some mistakes.

And then when you’re on the road, you’ll rely on the feedback from signs reflecting back on the path you’ve already taken to help guide you forward.

Or maybe even you’ve been on this road before and your memory helps to make things more familiar to you. 

Why do I share all of this? It’s because it’s the same raw materials will help you get anywhere.

Knowing the exact destination is having a clearly defined goal.

Orienting yourself on the highway systems is knowing the overall plan moving forward.

Google Maps is a tool that helps you stay on track.

Asking for advice from others helps you avoid making common mistakes.

And signs on the road give you feedback and confirmation you’re making progress.

Plain and simple, the more of these things you have in place, the more likely you are to get where you want to go, no matter what the destination is. 

Now like driving in a car, it’s very important that we know what’s in our blindspot. So let’s do a quick audit. Do you have clearly defined goals and a solid plan to achieve them? Have you talked to other people who’ve achieved something similar to what you want to achieve to ask them for advice? Do you have tools in place to get feedback on how things are going? 

Because if you don’t, then it’s not surprising how you might get lost, or not have the confidence to even take the trip in the first place. And if that future reality is important to you, where you have the life, health, and career that makes you feel alive and purposeful, it’s a disservice to not have these basic elements in place.

Give yourself your absolute best chance to reach your goals, and live an extraordinary life and making an extraordinary impact, by taking on the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge. In just 3 weeks you get the structure, plan, tools, and routines you need to become navigate forward toward the best version of yourself.

If we were to boil all of life’s complexity down to one thing, the single thing that completely determines the trajectory of everything, it would be your choices. In every moment of every day we are choosing what we do and what we don’t. What we think and what we’re not thinking about. What we allow into our lives and what we don’t tolerate. Everything is governed by our choices.

In “The Compound Effect” Darren Hardy puts it like this: “You make your choices and your choices make you.”

It’s very, very simple, but it’s not easy. There are a lot of factors that go into the choices that we make. 

Our choices are impacted by how we feel in the present moment, the ways we’ve been primed to think or react to certain things, and the competing needs and interests we have that go to battle in tradeoffs. And further a lot of the choices happen unconsciously without us even realizing it.

As I see it, here are some of the pillars to making good choices.

First we need awareness. If we’re unaware that we’re making choices then it’s going to be very difficult to make a different choice.

Second is we need self-discipline. And not discipline through the lens of having ‘will-power’, but discipline to follow through on the things that we know are best for us.

And third, we need standards. The more we can define who we want to be and how we want to show up before making a choice, the easier it is to be accountable to making a better choice because it requires less energy to figure out what to do.

The way I make sure I’m set up to make as many good choices as possible is through my daily Keystone Habit which is to fill out my Self Improvement Scorecard. Through this Scorecard I can bring awareness to choices that I didn’t realize I made, like moments where I was snacking too much without realizing it.

It’s where I build my sense of self-discipline with a subconscious priming audio I complete every night called Discipline On Demand. It’s where I have predetermined standards for myself like spending less than 30 minutes on social media, sleeping 7.5 hours a night, or accomplishing my goal for the day, and I review my day’s performance against those standards to stay accountable to making the right choices.

When we realize the power of our choices, making good choices more often and harnessing them in service of our goals and dreams, we become unstoppable. 

If you want to incorporate everything I just described about my self-improvement systems, which has taken a decade to get just right, for yourself? This is for you!

People ask me this question all the time - “If I could have one single habit, that would most quickly, radically, and positively transform my life, what would it be?”

Before I answer, let's talk about what habits are. 

Habits are a patterned way of doing something. Our brain relies on habits so that we can effectively do things without dedicating our full attention or awareness to it. People want to be in really good habits because it allows them to consistently do the things that make them healthiest, happiest, most productive and most fulfilled with little effort. 

Now as it relates to the question about the one most transformative habit we could have in our lives, my answer is the ‘meta’ habit. 

For something to be ‘meta’ means that it has layers to it and it refers to itself. It’s like thinking about thinking or a wish to have more wishes.

That’s what the ‘meta’ habit is - It’s the one habit that leads to you successfully completing every other habit.

It’s also the habit that most people don’t have. We pour our energy into being the healthiest, happiest, most productive and achieving version of ourselves, and all of that becomes exponentially easier when we have the ‘meta’ habit.

What is the meta habit itself? Essentially, it’s having a structured process to reflect on your day. It’s your opportunity to measure your progress, prompt your awareness, complete other high-leverage routines, hold yourself accountable, and keep yourself more organized all-in-one.

Built into this process are the 9 Super Habits that most directly impact your well-being, but now instead of trying to do them one at a time, they come naturally as the byproduct of just one, single, meta habit.

It’s something that I’ve been doing for a decade and I can confidently say it is the single greatest contributor to the growth and success I’ve achieved in my life.

I host a 21 Day Challenge to help you install the Meta Habit, and all 9 incredibly powerful Super Habits, so that you start experiencing the growth and success that you know you're capable of!

Click here to learn more about the 21 Day Super Habits Challenge!