When someone acts courageously and boldly, especially in the face of fear, and gets a good outcome from it, people use the expression - “It takes nerve”. Have you ever slowed down to think about what it actually means?

When we encounter fear, distress, or high-stakes opportunities it provokes a host of emotions. In major cases it could be the fear of death or harm. Poor performance could lead to less respect. Those who perform best in these situations have a way of being able to deal with the stress and anxiety of the situation so that it doesn’t affect them.

In other words, these individuals are great at calming down their nervous system. “It takes nerve”. It takes self-control and nervous system regulation so that their skills are not compromised by the emotion of the circumstances.

That’s what emotions do, they hijack the brain. They make us feel a certain way, causing a physiological response that then changes the mind’s environment. This is why people ‘freeze’ from speaking when they’re nervous, or why they’ll agree to (or say) something something they normally wouldn’t if it weren’t for the heat of the moment. Our cognitive ability is impacted by our emotional environment.

Like a surgeon who makes the perfect cut in a complicated procedure, or the pro athlete who hits the shot when the game is on the line, the people who ‘have nerve’ do a great job of not letting spontaneous emotions impact their overall abilities.

Another more formal term for this is equanimity. It’s a stoic philosophy of not getting too invested in your current emotions because it could lead to biased judgment and performance. 

If you want to get better at performing when the stakes are high, so you can maximize the opportunities in front of you, I’m going to share two things to consider for now. 

First, per this expression, the more you can down-regulate your nervous system, the less distracted you’ll be by your emotions. Slow and deep breathing is a great tactic for doing that. 

Second, preparation is a great antidote to underperforming in the moment. With preparation and repetition you create stronger subconscious imprints for yourself, helping you to take action even when your conscious mind is flooded with emotions.

Overall, the better you start handling these challenging moments, the more self-confidence you’ll develop and the easier it will get to have ‘nerve’ and equanimity moving forward.

One of my good friends, David Terzibachian, taught me an analogy about a picture frame that I’ve found creates a really compelling point around perspective.

In each of our own lives we experience the things around us through the very narrow lens that is 'us'. We’re limited by our own perception, we shape things to fit into our mental models and beliefs, and we struggle to take a truly objective look at our choices and reality because we’re emotionally invested in it.

The analogy is - Each of us are figures in a picture frame. We’re the main character, front and center, dominating the picture. But since we’re in the photo we have a limited awareness of what’s happening around us in the rest of the photo. We might have some idea about what’s going on, but we cannot see the full-picture because we are in it.

When you acknowledge that you have a limited understanding of your own life, and you embrace what you don’t see with an open-mind and curiosity, you can allow yourself to see the bigger picture and accept yourself. You can forgive yourself for mistakes you make because they came from a limited awareness.

In other words, to fully understand ourselves and to maximize our potential, we need to see the full picture. But if a lot of what’s in the picture are things we’re incapable of seeing ourselves, or unwilling to see ourselves, then how are we meant to accomplish it?

This is where other people can come in and inform you on what’s happening. Other people are not in your picture, which means that they can take a step back and see more than you can. 

Have a hard time seeing the blessing and lesson learned in failure? Someone else might.

Not realizing how a belief is guiding your behavior and manifesting the same problem over and over again? Someone else could.

Reaching your goals and making serious progress but you don’t even see it? Someone else is already celebrating for you.

Now this isn’t a perfect process because when it comes to sharing what they see, everyone brings their own biases, judgments, and assumptions into their conclusions, which may or may not be helpful. That’s why it’s recommended to have a coach, or someone you trust to give you feedback, to tell you what they see.

In the last 2 years I’ve been working with a coach who is helping me to see my full picture and I cannot understate how much it has accelerated my growth and self-awareness.

To wrap this up - You are too close to your life to see everything that’s happening around you and even who you are within it. If you’re committed to breaking through your current limitations and grow into the next best version of yourself, you need an expansion of awareness and perspective to tell you what you’re not seeing, and that often comes from someone else who can see the full picture.

An incredibly effective way to orient your behavior and achieve a certain outcome is to set goals. Having goals in place gives you the clarity and focus you need to actually make progress on one thing and not get distracted by the infinite amount of things that are asking for your attention. 

However, it can be discouraging when we set goals, work hard for them, and then don’t reach them. It can make us feel like we failed or like we’re not good enough. And that’s where I want to introduce an alternative way to think about setting goals, with all of the same benefits, but without the guilt.

Something I learned from Brian Johnson at Heroic - Instead of setting goals, what if we set targets. This gives us something tangible and concrete to aim at but also is understanding of the fact that the end result is often out of our control. In aiming at targets, it transitions our focus from the outcome to the process. Your behavior, which is the input required to achieve a goal, is within your control - So that’s where your attention should be.

This also accounts for something else that people struggle with related to goals, which is that they change. And that’s what should happen. As you get more information, familiarize yourself with better context, the details of the goal may reveal itself. You get more clarity on what you actually wanted to achieve, what an actual good result would be, rather than the lesser-informed intention you set to get you started.

That’s why treating it like a target is helpful too. As you get closer you can narrow your aim even more, or you can change your aim altogether. Again, all a goal is meant to do is direct your behavior, and if seeing that force as something more dynamic and ever-changing, it gives you more permission to adjust your processes.

One day, you’re going to miss the way life is right now. You’re going to miss the pain and challenge of today because you’ll be so grateful for how it shaped your world of tomorrow. You’re going to wish you had today’s moments with your loved ones where you could ask them questions about their current perspective, experience one more thing with them, or share one more hug.

I think we undervalue the present because it’s a given. It’s all we’ve ever known and we’ve acclimated to it as a form of hedonic adaptation. It isn’t until it becomes something more novel, like a memory that you reflect on, when you can fully appreciate the moment for everything it is.

Speaking for myself, there’s one video I have of my nephew that makes this real for me. It was around Christmas time and we were playing with some of his toys on the couch. I remember at that moment realizing “This is the exact moment I’d trade anything for a few years from now.” It stood out to me because it so strongly contrasted with how I was feeling, counting down the minutes until it was his bedtime and I could get a break for the night. 

But recognizing how that moment would come and go, and how I’d later regret not making the most of it, I was able to immerse myself in the experience and be deeply present with my nephew. It has become a cherished memory for me and fortunately I had the awareness to record a video of it. Watching it back often only a few years later, I already want that moment back. I miss it.

You’re going to want today back. It might be hard to see but what’s happening in your life right now is a formative time in our lives that everything else is built on top of. It’s an incubation period for your future and that’ll only make sense once the future has arrived. So don’t wish that it passes, be present with it, enjoy it, and experience it. 

Whether times are simpler or more challenging, free or more restrictive, you’ll think back fondly on it all and want to be able to experience it all over again. 

I don't know much about how cars work, but I’m definitely aware of some of the things that cause them not to work. One of the most common issues people have with cars is they have a dead battery. Whether that be because someone made a mistake and left the headlights on overnight, negligence because the car wasn’t maintained well, or general wear and tear, having a dead battery renders the car non-functional.

What’s fascinating though is how a car is capable of producing its own energy but it loses that ability with a dead battery. It has so much wasted potential because it cannot self-start and initiate the process that could fix it. However, a small outside spark is all it takes to kick the engine into gear so that it can return to its normal energy producing processes.

I believe there’s a similar process within ourselves, but instead of it being useful when we’re out of electricity, an outside force can help to reignite our self-belief. 

We intrinsically have the ability to create more self-belief. We can take action in ways that drive results, build our confidence, and demonstrate our value. But in the face of a major setback or failure, sometimes we find ourselves completely drained of self-belief and incapable of restoring it.

This is where an outside spark comes in. All it takes is a little encouragement, a small pick me up to jumpstart your self-belief and get you back on a better path. We need more people in the world seeking out opportunities to help each other. We need more people seeing the good in others that they fail to see themselves. And the more people that are being uplifted, the more people that are available to spark other people’s self belief to create a more empowered world.

There may be someone in your life who is struggling. Someone who needs to be seen, acknowledged, and supported. Something so simple as checking in on them, telling them you love them, telling them you’re grateful for them and how much they mean to you could be the tiny spark that they’ve been missing.

My encouragement to you is to be that person that helps others, in big and small ways, to make the world a better place. Think about a text you can send or a phone call you can make to someone who might need it, and share your goodness with them right now!

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Something that many people struggle with is decision making. They overwhelm themselves with the different options and the tradeoffs of each and it can become really ineffective when you are stuck and can’t make a final choice.

At a certain point, you’ve gone through all of the information you have and the indecision comes from trying to understand what is uncertain. But fortunately there is a way to find confidence in the unknown so that you can move boldly forward into whatever’s next.

What if you believed that no matter what, you’re going to make it work? That regardless of which road you go down you’ll achieve your goal?

This completely shifts the dynamic in the decision from fear to possibility. You’re not choosing what’s less bad, you’re figuring out what’s more good. This allows you to arrive at a final informed decision sooner, without trying to fill in all of the blanks, because you believe that you’ll be able to craft a positive result.

And honestly, that’s how it needs to work. Just like innovation and iteration need us to get real feedback, it does not serve us to spend too much time evaluating unproven assumptions. The idea here is that if you take a step in the wrong direction, you’ll be able to take two in the right direction before you would have taken your first overthought step.

How do you do that? Think through the evidence you already have. You have survived everything you've experienced so far. You have countless examples of how the ‘worst case scenario’ never came to fruition. Remember that most decisions can be undone and redone, and people don't care as much as you think they do when you make a mistake because guess what - they make mistakes too.

So take the pressure off of yourself. When you trust your ability to figure it out (even when it doesn’t go perfectly at first) you will begin to accelerate progress because you’re facilitating a fast-learning feedback loop.

With anything in life, all we can do is our very best. There’s nothing more gratifying than knowing that you gave it your all and you’ve applied yourself fully.

Having said that, I want to open your mind to something that should be really encouraging. Your very best can get better. This means that just because you tried your absolute hardest on something does not mean that you’re going to be stuck achieving a certain quality of result. The ceiling of your capabilities is not fixed, it is dynamic and ready to be pushed and expanded upon.

On one hand, understanding this allows you to accept the results that you get. If you did your best and still fell short, that just means your best wasn’t good enough - yet. You can improve, your best can get better and grow to the extent that it meets and exceeds your goals! So don’t feel sorry for yourself if you aren’t there yet, because if you stick with it, one day you will be.

On the other hand, this should inspire you to really pursue your growth, to test your limits, and to expand what you’re capable of! At the end of the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge I talk about how the work we do in it increases your zone of capacity. 

The very best that you have to offer today exists within the constraints of your current life. There may be certain limitations or circumstances that cause you to only rise to a certain level. Like how an illness in the family may take up your time and keep you from maximizing your health routines.

And similarly, your best is dependent on the tools you have access to and your ability to use them. Like how the internet has transformed our ability to access information and communicate with others.

The single most transformative thing I know of that will quickly and permanently elevate how good you are when you’re at your best, is to install a high-quality Self Improvement Operating System. It’s the baseline process and resource that you can use to accelerate improvement in any area of your life. 

This will take you from good to great, from lacking consistency to mastering self-discipline. I help you implement this Operating System step-by-step in the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. Today, Monday July 10th is the first day of the Challenge and it’s not too late to join.

Register for free now so that you can breakthrough to the next level of your potential, and it takes just 5 minutes a day for 21 days.

So here’s the truth of it - Your life, circumstances, and results are a direct reflection of you. The things around you have been created by you, in conscious and unconscious ways, to perfectly represent the ways your skills, beliefs, and mindsets interface with the world.

This means that if you’re not exactly where you want to be in your health, finances, relationships, or your outlook on life - it’s because of you. And as long as you keep doing the same things and thinking the same ways you’re going to continue manifesting the same circumstances.

I imagine you don’t want to be where you are right now forever. You have dreams and aspirations beyond your current life. You want to explore yourself and the boundaries of who you can be, and what you can accomplish in the world. We’re not meant to sit still, our lives are dynamic and evolving, and if you want all of this change to be an improvement then you need to be really intentional about the direction of your growth. 

With that in mind I want to ask you a very important question - What does your ‘next level’ look like?

We talk about wanting to take things to the next level, but what does that mean for you? Have you defined it? What would that open up for you in your life?

It could be growing in your career or business so that you have more influence, authority, and control of your finances. It could be in your health so that you have more enthusiasm for the way you show up in every moment of every day. It could be in your relationships and learning how to put your ego, trauma, and judgment aside so that you can appreciate the people in your life for who they are.

Talk is cheap so let’s get real. If you’re ready to start doing things differently, that challenge you but shape you into the best version of yourself, so you can start changing your circumstances and tapping into your fullest potential every day, I have a suggestion.

Join me in the next cohort of the Best Self Breakthrough Challenge. This is a 21 day process to transform your mindset and daily routines so that you can truly reach your next level again (and again and again and again) until you’ve built the life of your dreams. It all starts with investing 21 days of focused, intentional action to install the core operating system that you can use to improve anything about your life.