Success is a difficult thing to measure, perhaps because it means something slightly different for everybody. For some, success is all about financial security while for others it could be about climbing to the top of your game in your chosen career. For others, success might be defined by work/life balance. 

Once you know what success looks like for you, the next hurdle is making success happen for yourself. One important step in that process is to cultivate your own success mindset. This mindset can help you visualize a life where you have achieved the goals that will make you successful and follow a path to make that happen. After all, once you figure out how to change your mindset, you can accomplish just about anything.

What Is a Success Mindset?

A success mindset is one that helps people achieve, personally or professionally. It can include many facets, including positivity, goal-setting, self-discipline and resilience. Developing a success mindset involves retraining your brain to approach life in a way that will help you realize your full potential. 

This type of mindset can help you develop habits and attitudes to help you stay focused, resilient and motivated as you work towards your goals, especially when it comes to facing setbacks and roadblocks. With a success mindset, people are able to believe in their own potential for growth. They also strive for genuine clarity of goals, as well as consistent positive self-talk. It also involves holding yourself accountable when it comes to the decisions you make along the way. 

A success mindset can help you foster a clear vision of what you want, stay open to continuous learning along the road and see failures as teachable moments. Ultimately, a success mindset can help you see yourself growing and set goals for how you are going to become successful.

Why Mindset Matters for Success

You set a firm foundation for your future when you take steps to develop a success mindset. This success mindset will help you reframe your failures as opportunities to change and grow, and it can help you build confidence in yourself and your goals. This can help you stay motivated on the journey toward your desired results. If you train your brain to believe in yourself and your own future success, you are also combating one of the greatest threats to success: comparison. 

You can learn to celebrate your own progress rather than following someone else’s journey. Comparison can sometimes lead to beliefs that you are simply not as good, not as successful or not as worthy. Putting your energy into changing your mindset can help you be successful not just in business but in relationships and other areas of life as well. You can learn to communicate effectively and with emotional intelligence, build strong teams and work well with others to achieve goals. 

Despite concerns about issues like inflation and rising fuel costs, many entrepreneurs feel optimistic about the future, according to the JPMorganChase Business Leaders Outlook Survey. John Simmons, JPMorganChase Head of Commercial Banking, asserts that business leaders have focused on turning “obstacles into opportunities.” In other words, their ability to succeed can be at least partially attributed to their adoption of a success mindset. 

Stress can have negative impacts on our health. Negative self-talk can be damaging to creativity and productivity. Life is going to get in your way, and there’s not much you can do to stop that. However, you can change your mindset to set yourself up to be resilient in an unpredictable world.

How to Change Your Mindset to be Successful

There are several different practices you can implement into your life to foster a success mindset.

1. Visualization

Being able to see yourself as a success is the first step. You might want to consider creating a vision board with a collage of quotes, images, dreams and symbols to remind you of the future you are working toward when times get difficult. If vision boards aren’t your thing, you can get a bit of daily inspiration through daily affirmations or mantras. You can buy affirmation cards if you struggle to come up with some yourself and place them on your mirror to repeat at will. You might also benefit from repeating mantras like “I grow through every challenge,” or even simply “This day is my day” when you are having a difficult time.

Keeping a daily journal is an excellent practice both to monitor your progress and sort out your thoughts, and it should help you map out a visual timeline of milestones you hope to meet.

2. Self-Reflection

Being honest with yourself is all about asking “why” you are doing something to find the real motivation. Why are you growing your business, for example? To take care of your family, financial freedom, creative outlet… whatever the answer might be, you are the one who needs to ask it. 

You should never underestimate the importance of self-reflection, according to the Harvard Business Review. It also needs to be a daily practice. Check in with yourself in the morning to see what sort of mindset you need for the day. Consider keeping a weekly win and lessons learned log to document both successes and setbacks. 

3. Goal-Setting

Set yourself clear, actionable goals, like reframing negative self-talk by committing to positive affirmations for 30 days to help your success mindset. You can also set financial goals, like saving $5,000 over a period of time by tracking weekly expenses and getting rid of unwanted subscriptions to see results. If you’re hoping to benefit from a new learned experience, try setting a goal, like joining a networking organization or improving your public speaking by taking part in a Toastmasters club for a short period of time.

The key ingredient here is being realistic about your goals. Setting an unattainable goal for yourself will only harm you in the long run.

4. Cognitive Reframing

Learning how to reframe the way you interpret events is no easy feat. We all have lifelong training from the people in our lives and our own histories, but sometimes seeing the world through that old framework holds us back from a more positive future. Cognitive reframing is all about changing the way you look at the facts in front of you rather than changing them. 

Certainly therapy can help you with cognitive reframing, but there are other useful daily tools you can implement as well. If, for example, you find yourself thinking, “I’m never going to be successful,” you can catch that thought as it happens by asking, “Why am I thinking like this?” Then you can challenge that thought by asking, “Is this true? Will I never be successful?” before reframing the answer. “This isn’t true. I’m just suffering from a setback. I have the tools to build a successful life.” Repeat as needed.

5. Lean on the Experts

We are fortunate to live in a time when we have so much access to research, and there are some incredible tools that have been created by experts along the way. If you want to dig deeper into the timeless philosophies of success and mindset mastery, check out the master himself at JimRohn.com. Rohn shares tips on how to cultivate an environment for success by surrounding yourself with positive influences, shares great tips on how to set goals that work and more. If you’re a podcast person, consider listening to this episode of Unscripted to hear how mindset plays out in real life.

The Power of a Success Mindset in Everyday Life

There are so many factors to finding success in your everyday life, and some factors are simply beyond our control. Which is why it is so important to develop a success mindset over time even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Using tools like visualization, achievable goal-setting, positive self-talk and cognitive reframing can help you stay on track with your business and your life. Remember that a success mindset is a practice. It’s something you can come back to every day as you work towards your dreams.

Photo from PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock.com

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.”
Albert Schweitzer

“A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.”
Amelia Earhart

A very simple way to spread more happiness in your own little world is through kindness. It’s often an easy and quick thing you can do as you move through your daily life.

But we sometimes forget about it. Or don’t remember how it can help us all.

Three things that I like to keep in mind and that help me to try to be a kinder person are these:

• I get what I give. Yes, some people will be ungrateful, miserable and not reciprocating no matter what you may do. But most people will over time treat you as you treat them.
• By being kinder to others I am more likely to be kinder to myself. It may sound a bit odd but my experience is that when I am kinder towards others then my self-esteem goes up.
• It creates a happier place to live in. Being kinder simply makes my own little world a nicer and happier place to live in.

So how can you start spreading the kindness and happiness in your daily life?

Here are 15 simple ways to do it.

Pick one of them that resonates with you and start using it today.

1. Express your gratitude. 

Think about what you can be grateful for about someone in your life.

Maybe that he is a good listener, that he often is quick to help out or that he always adds great songs to a Spotify playlist. Or simply that he held up the door for you.

Then express that gratitude in a simple “thank you!” or in a sincere sentence or two.

2. Replace the judgments. 

No one likes to be judged. And the more you judge other people the more you tend to judge yourself.

So despite the temporary benefit of deriving pleasure from the judgments it is not a good or smart long-term habit.

When you feel the urge to judge ask yourself: what is one kind thing I can think or do in this situation instead?

3. Replace the unconstructive criticism. 

Try encouragement instead of excessive criticism. It helps people to both raise their self-confidence and to do a better job.

And it will make things more fun and more light-hearted in the long run.

4. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. 

It is quite easy to resort to unkindness when you see things just from your perspective.

Two questions that help me to see and to better understand other viewpoints are:

• How would I think and feel it if I were in his or her shoes?
• What parts of this person can I see in myself?

5. Recall how people’s kindness made you feel.

Just sit down for a few minutes and try to recall one time or a few times when other people’s kindness really touched you and helped you out.

Then think about how you can do those very same things for someone in your life.

6. Express kindness for something you may often take for granted.

It is easy to remember and to feel motivated to express kindness when someone is having a rough time or have just finished an important project.

But also remember to express kindness and encouragement for how someone continues to put so much love into the dinners you eat. Or for being on time every day and doing their job well and keeping deadlines.

7. Hide a surprising and kind note.

Leave a small note with a loving or encouraging sentence in your partner’s or child’s lunchbox, hat, tea-container or book that he or she is reading right now.

That minute of your time will put a smile on her face and joy and motivation in her heart.

8. Just be there.

Listen – without thinking about something else – when someone needs to vent.

Just be there fully with your attention.

Or have a conversation and help someone find his or her way out of fear and to a more constructive and grounded perspective.

9. Remember the small acts of kindness too.

Let someone into your lane while driving. Let someone skip ahead of you in a line if he’s in a real hurry.

Hold up the door for someone or ask if they need help when you see them standing around with a map and a confused look.

10. Give someone an uplifting gift.

Someone in your life may have a a tough time right now. Then send him or her an inspirational book or movie. 

Or simply send an email with a link to something inspiring or funny that you have found like a blog, podcast or a comic.

11. Help someone out practically.

Give them a hand when moving or with making dinner or arrangements before a party.

If they need information, then help out by googling it or by asking knowledgeable people that you know.

12. Help the people in your life see how they make a difference in their lives.

When you talk to someone about his or her day or what has been going on lately then make sure to point out how he or she also has spread kindness and happiness.

People are often unaware of the positive things they do or they minimize them in their own minds.

So help them to see themselves in a more positive light and to improve their own self-esteem.

13. Remember the 3 reasons for kindness at the start of this article.

It will help you to be kinder even when you may not always feel much like it.

If you like, write those reasons down on a piece of paper and put that note where you can see it every day.

14. Pay it forward.

When someone does something kind for you – no matter how big or small – then try to pay that forward by being kind to someone else as soon as you can.

15. Be kinder towards yourself.

Then you will naturally treat other people with more kindness too. It is truly a win-win habit.

A simple way to start being kinder toward yourself is to each evening write down 3 things you appreciate about yourself and about what you have done that day in a journal.

 

Let’s start off here with a simple question:

Why do we always take things personally?

There are admittedly quite a few valid reasons to consider. But the one Marc and I have found to be most common through 15 years of working with our coaching clients and live event attendees is the tendency we all have of putting ourselves at the center, and seeing everything — every event, conversation, circumstance, etc. — from the viewpoint of how it relates to us on a personal level. And this can have all kinds of adverse effects, from feeling hurt when other people are rude, to feeling sorry for ourselves when things don’t go exactly as planned, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect.

Of course, we are not really at the center of everything. That’s not how the universe works. It just sometimes seems that way to us. Let’s consider a few everyday examples…

First, imagine someone storms into the room in a really bad mood, huffing and puffing, and addresses us in a rude way. Immediately we think to ourselves, “What’s going on here? I don’t deserve to be treated like this! They should know better!” And we’re left feeling offended and kinda angry. But the truth is the other person’s behavior has very little to do with us. They got mad at something outside the room, and now they’re reactively venting their frustrations in front of us. We just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This reality doesn’t justify their behavior, but it needs to be consciously acknowledged so we don’t waste too much of our energy positioning ourselves at the center of the situation and taking everything personally.

Now, let’s assume for a moment that a person’s actions actually do seem to relate to us directly — we inadvertently did something that annoyed them, and so they’re reacting very rudely to us. A situation like this might seem personal, but is it really? Is the magnitude of this person’s rude reaction all about us and the one thing we did to trigger them? No, probably not. It’s mostly just a statement about this person’s reactions, snap-judgments, longer-term anger issues, and expectations of the universe. Again, we’re just a smaller piece of a much larger story.

And likewise, when someone else rejects us, ignores us, doesn’t call us when they said they would, doesn’t show they care, or flat out disrespects us… these reactions have much less to do with us than they have to do with the other person’s history of personal issues. We can learn to acknowledge their issues and set healthy boundaries without taking their words to heart.

But again, because we see everything through a lens of how it personally relates to us — a lens that often does a poor job of seeing the bigger picture — we tend to react to everyone else’s actions and words as if they’re a personal judgment or attack. Thus, other people’s anger makes us angry, other people’s lack of respect makes us feel unworthy, other people’s unhappiness makes us unhappy, etc.

If you’re nodding your head to any of this, it’s time to start gracefully deflecting the senseless negativity around you. When you sense negativity coming at you, give it a small push back with a thought like, “That remark (or gesture) is not really about me, it’s about you (or the world at large).” Remember that all people have emotional issues they’re dealing with, and sometimes it makes them rude, rambunctious, and downright disrespectful. They’re doing the best they can, or they’re not even aware of their issues. In any case, you can learn not to interpret their behaviors as personal attacks, and instead see them as non-personal encounters (like a dog barking in the distance, or a bumblebee buzzing by) that you can either respond to gracefully, or not respond to at all.

Of course, this doesn’t come naturally — NOT taking things personally is a daily practice…

It’s time for some “Notes to Self.”

Like you, I’m only human and I still take things way too personally sometimes when I’m in the heat of the moment. So I’ve implemented a simple strategy to support the practice of watching my response. In a nutshell, I proactively remind myself to not take things too personally. Anytime I catch myself doing so, I pause and read a couple of the “notes to self” listed below. Then I take a deep breath…

If you’d like to practice along with me, I recommend copying a few of these notes, tweaking them as you see fit, storing them in an easily accessible location (like saving them to your phone), and then reading them whenever you catch yourself taking things too personally. (Note: For the sake of not being tediously redundant, I only wrote “Note to Self” as a precursor on the first note below.)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Some thoughts on addressing offensive people.

When someone insists on foisting their hostility and drama on you, just keep practicing — reading your “notes to self” and setting a good example. Do your best to respect their pain and focus on compassion. Communicate and express yourself from a place of peace, from a place of wholeness, with the best intentions.

With that said, sometimes handling offensive people directly is necessary! As mentioned earlier, Marc and I have worked with hundreds of live event attendees and coaching clients over the past 15 years who have struggled through this very predicament. And we gradually guided them through several useful strategies that work wonders. I want to briefly review a few of these strategies with you here, in hopes that you find value in them too…

1. Take positive control of negative conversations.

It’s okay to change the topic, talk about something positive, or steer conversations away from pity parties, drama, and self-absorbed sagas. Be willing to disagree with difficult people and deal with the consequences. Some people really don’t recognize their own difficult tendencies or their inconsiderate behavior. You can actually tell a person, “I feel like you ignore me until you need something.” You can also be honest if their overly negative attitude is what’s driving you away: “I’m trying to focus on positive things. What’s something good we can talk about?” It may work and it may not, but your honesty will help ensure that any communication that continues forward is built on mutually beneficial ground.

2. Proactively establish healthy and reasonable boundaries.

Practice becoming aware of your feelings and needs. Note the times and circumstances when you’re resentful of fulfilling someone else’s needs. Gradually build boundaries by saying no to gratuitous requests that cause resentfulness in you. Of course, this will be hard at first because it may feel a bit selfish. But if you’ve ever flown on a plane, you know that flight attendants instruct passengers to put on their own oxygen masks before tending to others, even their own children. Why? Because you cannot help others if you’re incapacitated. In the long run, proactively establishing and enforcing healthy and reasonable boundaries with difficult people will be one of the most charitable things you can do for yourself and those you care about. These boundaries will foster and preserve the best of you, so you can share the best of yourself with the people who matter most, not just the difficult ones who try to keep you tied up.

3. Make extra space for yourself.

Difficult people who wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions are obviously hard to handle. They want others to join their 24/7 pity party so they can feel better about themselves. And you may feel pressured to listen to their complaints simply because you don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s a fine line between lending a compassionate ear and getting sucked into their emotional drama. If you are forced to live or work with a difficult person, then make sure you get enough alone time to relax, rest, and recuperate. Having to play the role of a rational adult in the face of relentless moodiness can be exhausting, and if you’re not careful, their negative attitude can infect you. So remember that even people with legitimate problems and conditions can still comprehend that you have needs as well, which means you can politely excuse yourself when you need to. (Note: Marc and I discuss this in more detail in the Self-Love chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

4. Let them know that you, respectfully, do not care.

This one is essentially a last resort. If you’ve tried your best to communicate respectfully with a difficult person, or to gracefully distance yourself from them, but they insist on following you around and attacking you for whatever reason, it’s time to speak up and tell them that their words are meaningless. In such situations, I challenge you to make this your lifelong motto: “I respectfully do not care.” Say it to anyone who relentlessly passes public judgment on something you strongly believe in or something that makes you who you are.

5. If their offensive behavior becomes physical, it’s a legal matter that must be addressed.

If you’ve survived the wrath of a physical abuser, and you tried to reconcile things… if you forgave, and you struggled, and even if the expression of your grief had you succumb to outbursts of toxic anger… if you spent years hanging on to the notions of trust and faith, even after you knew in your heart that those beautiful intangibles upon which love is built would never be returned… and especially if you stood up as the barrier between an abuser and someone else, and took the brunt of the abuse in their place – you are a hero! But now it’s time to be the hero of your present and future. Enough is enough! If someone is physically abusive, they are breaking the law and they need to deal with the consequences of their actions.

And obviously, this is just one short essay that doesn’t cover every possible scenario.

Most of the time, though, it’s just a matter of reading your “notes to self” and giving yourself some extra breathing room.

Now it’s your turn…

Before you go, we would love to hear from YOU.

Which “note to self” above resonates with you the most today and why?

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear.

It’s so easy to get stuck in it. To let it hold you back.

I have been there many times in my life.

The fear has, for example, held me back from:

• Trying new things. It has held me back from trying something new for lunch or a new hobby because I feared I would have a bad experience or fail. And so I stuck to my usual routine and choices.
• Asking someone out for a date. Because I didn’t want to risk being rejected or looking like a fool in eyes of other people.
• Living my life like I deep down wanted to. The fear has held me in its grip and calmly explained to me that it would be best and most comfortable for me to stay where I am and to do nothing new. And many times I have sadly believed the fear and gotten myself stuck in a place where I honestly deep down didn’t want to be.

The fears we have are based in how we think about things. Destructive thought habits can create a lot of fear that is really unnecessary and damaging.

But there are also ways to handle these habits when they pop up and to – over time – replace them with healthier habits.

So today I’d like to share 6 destructive and fear-inducing thought habits and what to do instead of letting them roam free in your head.

1. You keep the fear foggy and undefined.

As long as your fear of doing something is foggy and undefined and just floating around in your head it will hold you back and often grow stronger with time.

What to do instead:

Ask yourself this question: what is the worst that could realistically happen?

And don’t just take a second or two to answer it.

Sit down with a pen and piece of paper. Take time to really think about it and to write out the realistic worst-case scenario.

This will:

• Bring a lot of clarity to what you truly fear.
• Defuse quite a bit of fuzzy fears or disaster scenarios that may have been bouncing around in your mind.
• Help you to realize that you can often bounce back pretty quickly even if the worst-case scenario somehow becomes reality.

2. You keep the fear to yourself.

When you keep the fear to yourself then in my experience it can easily take charge of your imagination and build a horrific and paralyzing nightmare in your mind.

Just being alone with the fear makes it is easy to lose touch with reality.

What to do instead:

Writing it out as mentioned above can certainly help. Another step you can take is to share your fear with someone else.

By sharing and getting some level-headed input from a friend or family member that nightmare can often be quickly deflated and seen for what it really is.

And just talking about it to someone who truly listens will release a lot of your inner tensions.

3. You focus on aspects that will keep you stuck.

If you just focus on the negative things that could happen if you face your fear then it will be very hard to start moving forward.

What to do instead:

A change in perspective is needed.

You can get it by talking to your friend or family member and by exchanging ideas and experiences about what opportunities lie ahead if you move forward.

You do it by focusing on the positive and on why you want to move towards what you fear.

A few questions that have helped me to find the more constructive and positive perspective when I have faced a fear are:

• What are the potential upsides that I want and can have by taking these actions?
• What are the potential upsides in one year if I start moving on this path? And in five years?
• And how will my life be in five years if I continue on the fearful path that I am on today?

Talk these questions over with someone. Or take out a piece of paper and write down the answers. Or do both.

4. You misinterpret the often little information you have.

It is easy to take very few experiences – maybe just one – and start seeing them as evidence of something permanent and frightening in your life.

What to do instead:

Question your fears and what they are based upon.

Again, sit down with that pen and a piece of paper. Think back to what evidence you have in your memories for a fear and a belief of yours.

Try to see the situation(s) that created your fear with fresh eyes today. Instead of the way you may usually see them.

Doing this helped me to for example reduce my fear of social rejection.

I looked back at a few situations from my past that formed and fueled that fear.

And I realized that:

• Honestly, I may have just misinterpreted being rejected in some of those situations.
• I often wasn’t rejected because it was something wrong with what I did but simply because we weren’t realistically a good match for each other. Or because the other person had a bad day or because he or she simply wanted to push me down to feel better about himself or herself in that moment.

This was an eye-opening experience and also helped me to understand that everything is not about me and what I do. And that our memories can often be pretty inaccurate and unhelpful if not reexamined later on.

And that our minds love to create patterns and conclusions based on very little evidence or few experiences.

5. You try to push the fear away.

When you try to deny a fear in your life, when you try to push it away or not think about it then it can often grow stronger.

What to do instead:

I have found in recent years that pushing the fear away can certainly work and help you to not be paralyzed from taking action. But I have also discovered that it can sometimes be more helpful to accept the fear.

To accept that it is there instead of for example trying to tell yourself to focus on the positive like a laser-beam.

That may sound a bit vague so here’s how I do it.

• Breathe. Take a few breaths and focus only on the air going in and out to calm and center yourself a bit.
• Tell yourself something like: “Yes, the fear is here. It simply is at this point in time.”
• Take that feeling of fear in and just let it be there in your body and mind. It will be uncomfortable. But just for short while.

Because if you do let it in then after a while – often just after a few minutes of discomfort in my experience – the fear starts to lose steam. It becomes a lot smaller or just seems to float away.

And it becomes a lot easier to think clear and constructive thoughts again.

6. You make it harder than it needs to be to take action.

If you think that you have to take action in a big, heroic and risky leap to overcome your fear then that may often lead to more fear and to not taking any action at all.

What to do instead:

A more helpful way to go about things is to not go all in at once. But to instead just dip your toes in. To take a small step forward but to do it today or as soon as you can.

And to take that first step slowly if you like.

The most important thing is that you start moving. That you start building momentum forward so that you can take more small and perhaps slow steps forward.

Doing things this way will not only build momentum but also self-confidence and expand your comfort zone. And all of this will make it a lot easier to take a bit bigger steps later on too if you’d like to.

 

We ultimately become what we habitually do. If your daily habits aren’t moving you forward, they are holding you back. Here are four widespread examples of the latter that often drain people of their true potential, day after day, and some strategies for turning things around if you’re currently stuck in that cycle…

1. Most of us hold on too tight for too long.

Twenty years ago, when Marc and I were just undergrads in college, our psychology professor taught us a lesson we’ve never forgotten. On the last day of class before graduation, she walked up on stage to teach one final lesson, which she called “a vital lesson on the power of perspective and mindset.” As she raised a glass of water over her head, everyone expected her to mention the typical “glass half empty or glass half full” metaphor. Instead, with a smile on her face, our professor asked, “How heavy is this glass of water I’m holding?”

Students shouted out answers ranging from a couple of ounces to a couple of pounds.

After a few moments of fielding answers and nodding her head, she replied, “From my perspective, the absolute weight of this glass is irrelevant. It all depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light. If I hold it for an hour straight, its weight might make my arm ache. If I hold it for a day straight, my arm will likely cramp up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor. In each case, the absolute weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it feels to me.”

As most of us students nodded our heads in agreement, she continued. “Your worries, frustrations, disappointments, and stressful thoughts are very much like this glass of water. Think about them for a little while and nothing drastic happens. Think about them a bit longer and you begin to feel noticeable pain. Think about them all day long, and you will feel completely numb and paralyzed, incapable of doing anything else until you drop them.”

Think about how this relates to your life and your recent endeavors over the past year or so.

If you’ve been struggling to cope with the weight of what’s on your mind, it’s a strong sign it’s time to let go and put the figurative glass down.

2. Most of us try to control everything.

We must remind ourselves that we can’t calm life’s storms. What we can do is calm ourselves, and the storms will eventually pass. The most powerful and practical changes happen when we decide to take control of what we do have power over, instead of craving control over what we don’t.

So be honest with yourself: How often did you aim for full control this past year?

It’s OK. But it’s time for a release…

As you read these words, you are breathing. Stop for a moment and notice this breath. You can control this breath, and make it faster or slower, or make it behave as you like. Or you can simply let yourself inhale and exhale naturally. There is peace in just letting your lungs breathe, without having to control the situation or do anything about it. Now imagine letting other parts of your body breathe, like your tense shoulders. Just let them be, without having to tense them or control them.

Now look around the room you’re in and notice the objects around you. Pick one, and let it breathe. There are likely people in the room with you too, or in the same house or building, or in nearby houses or buildings. Visualize them in your mind, and let them breathe.

When you let everything and everyone breathe, you just let them be, exactly as they are. You don’t need to control them, worry about them, or change them. You just let them breathe, in peace, and you accept them as they are… so you can find inner calmness, and be on your way. This is the foundation of what letting go is all about. It can be a life-changing practice. (Note: Marc and I discuss this in more detail in the Adversity chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

3. Most of us tell ourselves stories.

Many of the biggest misunderstandings in life could be avoided if we simply took the time to ask, “What else could this mean?” A wonderful way to do this is by using a reframing tool we initially picked up from research professor Brene Brown, which we then tailored through our coaching work with students and live event attendees. We call the tool The story I’m telling myself. Although asking the question itself—“What else could this mean?”—can help reframe our thoughts and broaden our perspectives, using the simple phrase The story I’m telling myself as a prefix to troubling thoughts has undoubtedly created many “aha moments” for our students and clients in recent times.

Here’s how it works: The story I’m telling myself can be applied to any difficult life situation or circumstance in which a troubling thought is getting the best of you. For example, perhaps someone you love (husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc.) didn’t call you or text you when they said they would, and now an hour has passed and you’re feeling upset because you’re obviously not a high enough priority to them. When you catch yourself feeling this way, use the phrase: The story I’m telling myself is that they didn’t call me because I’m not a high enough priority to them.

Then ask yourself these questions:

• Can I be absolutely certain this story is true?
• How do I feel and behave when I tell myself this story?
• What’s one other possibility that might also be true?

Challenge yourself to think better on a daily basis — to challenge the stories you subconsciously tell yourself and do a reality check with a more objective mindset.

4. Most of us say yes too often.

We all have ongoing opportunities and obligations, but a healthy and productive routine can only be found in the long run by properly managing your yeses. And yes, sometimes you have to say “no” to really good opportunities and obligations. You can’t always be agreeable — that’s how people take advantage of you. And that’s how you end up taking advantage of yourself too. You have to set clear boundaries!

You might have to say no to certain favors, work projects, community associations, volunteer groups… coaching your kid’s sports teams, or some other seemingly worthwhile activity. I know what you’re thinking: it seems unfair to say no when these are very worthwhile things to do — it pains you to say no! But you must, because the alternative is that you’re going to do a half-baked, poor job at each one, be stressed out, feel like you’re stuck in an endless cycle of busyness, and eventually you’ll reach a breaking point.

Truth be told, the main thing that keeps so many of us stuck in a debilitating cycle of overwhelm is the fantasy in our minds that we can be everything to everyone, everywhere at once, and a hero on all fronts. But again, that’s not reality. The reality is you’re not Superman or Wonder Woman — you’re human and you have limits. So you have to let go of that idea of doing everything, pleasing everyone, and being everywhere.

In the end, you’re either going to do a few things well, or everything poorly. That’s the truth.

A four-step exercise for building better habits:

If you feel like your daily habits have held you back in recent times, this actionable closing exercise is for YOU.

Choose any area in your life that you want to improve, and then:

1. Write down the specific details about your current circumstances. (What’s bothering you? Where are you stuck? What do you want to change?)
2. Write down your answer to this question: What are the daily habits that have contributed to your current circumstances? (Be honest with yourself. What are you doing regularly that actually contributes to the situation you’re in?)
3. Write down a few specific details about the “better circumstances” you’d like to create for yourself. (What would make you feel good? What does an improved situation look like for you?)
4. Write down your answer to this question: What are the (new) daily habits that will get you from where you are to where you want to be? (Think about it. What small, daily steps will help you gradually move forward from point A to point B?)

Now it’s your turn…

Yes, it’s your turn to not fall back into your old regrettable habits and patterns of living simply because they’re more comfortable and easier to access. It’s your turn to remember that you’re changing certain habits and patterns for a reason: to improve your life and make the very best of what’s ahead — because you can’t move forward if you keep falling back.

But before you go, please leave Marc and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

Patience is not about waiting, it’s the ability to maintain a positive outlook while working hard for what you believe in.

Have you ever told yourself that you’re going to make something happen and then nothing happened? All details aside, it’s because you didn’t have the right habits in place — the little things you do every day that build up to something bigger. Your habits truly make or break you. Because in all walks of life you become what you habitually do. You will never make progress or change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is always found in your daily habits and routines.

In other words, regardless of your unique life situation or how you personally define success, you can’t become an overnight success. You become successful over time from all the little things you do one day at a time.

Failure occurs in the same way. All your little daily failures (that you don’t learn and grow from) come together and cause you to fail…

• You fail to check the books.
• You fail to make the calls.
• You fail to listen to your customers.
• You fail to innovate.
• You fail to do what must be done.

And then one day you wake up and your business has failed. It was all the little things you did or didn’t do along the way — your daily habits — not just one big catastrophic event.

Let this be your wake-up call.

YOUR LIFE IS YOUR BUSINESS!

YOUR HABITS ARE YOUR BUSINESS!

So today, let’s discuss some super-common daily habits Angel and I have seen plaguing dozens of our coaching clients and conference attendees over the past decade — little things many people do over and over again that waste nearly all their time and potential in life:

1. Change nothing and expect different results.

There’s a saying that the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Take this to heart. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Oftentimes the only difference between a successful person and a person who makes little progress is not one’s superior abilities, but the courage that one has to bet on their ideas, to take calculated risks, and to take steady steps forward.

Truly, some people sit and wait for the magic beans to arrive while the rest of us just get up and get to work.

2. Keep waiting for the right time.

Even when we have productive intentions, too many of us waste so much of our time waiting for ideal paths to appear. But they never do of course, because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting. So stop waiting today…

Think of today as the beginning — the conception of a new life. The next nine months are all yours. You can do with them as you please. Make them count! Because a new person is born in nine months. The only question is: Who do you want that person to be? Now is the time to decide.

And no, you shouldn’t feel more confident before you take the next step. Taking the next step is what builds your confidence and fuels your inner and outer growth.

3. Believe good things come fast and easy.

A goal is a point of achievement that requires effort and sacrifice. There are no esteemed goals worth participating in that don’t require some level of effort and sacrifice. My 90-year-old grandmother once told me, “Decades from now when you’re getting closer to the end, you will not remember the days that were easy, you will cherish the moments when you rose above your difficulties and conquered challenges of magnitude. You will dream of the strength you found within yourself that allowed you to achieve what once seemed impossible.”

So don’t just do what’s easy today, do what you’re capable of. Astound yourself with your own abilities. And as you struggle forward, remember, it’s far better to be exhausted from little bits of effort and learning than to be tired of doing absolutely nothing. Effort is never wasted, even when it leads to disappointing results. For it always makes you stronger and more experienced in the long run.

4. Refuse to accept necessary risks.

Living is about learning as you go. Living is risky business. Every decision, every interaction, every step, every time you get out of bed in the morning, you take a small risk. To truly live is to know you’re getting up and taking that risk, and to trust yourself to take it. To not get out of bed, clutching to illusions of safety, is to die slowly without ever having truly lived…

Think about it. If you ignore your instincts and let shallow feelings of uncertainty constantly stop you, you will never know anything for sure, and in many ways this un-knowing will be worse than finding out your instincts were wrong. Because if you were wrong, you could make adjustments and carry on with your life, without always looking back and wondering what might have been.

5. Make the rejections of yesterday the focal point of today.

Be okay with walking away when the time comes. Rejection teaches us how to reject what’s not right for our well-being. It won’t always be easy, but some chapters in our lives have to close without closure. There’s no point in losing yourself by trying to fix what’s meant to stay broken.

All too often we let the rejections of our past dictate every move we make thereafter. We literally do not know ourselves to be any better than what some opinionated person or isolated circumstance once told us was true. Of course, this old rejection doesn’t mean we aren’t good enough — it means the other person or circumstance failed to align with what we had to offer at the time. It means we have more time now to improve our thing, to build upon our ideas, to perfect our craft, and to indulge deeper into the work that moves us. And that’s exactly what YOU need to do, starting now.

6. Refuse to take responsibility.

You aren’t responsible for everything that happened to you, but you need to be responsible for undoing the thinking and behavioral patterns these outcomes created within you. Blaming the past for a limiting mindset today doesn’t fix it. Change your response to what you remember, and step forward again with grace.

A combination of your decisions and external factors for which you had no control brought you to where you are today. Negatively blaming someone else, or some past circumstance, will change nothing. Positively taking full responsibility for the next step on your path forward can change everything. Leave the unchangeable past behind you as you diligently give yourself to the present moment. In this moment is every possibility you seek. Take responsibility for it, and bring these possibilities to life.

7. Close your mind to new ideas and perspectives.

Remember that success in life does not depend on always being right. To make real progress you must let go of the assumption that you already have all the answers. Even as you grow wiser with age, you must remind yourself that an understanding is never absolutely final. What’s currently right could easily be wrong later. Thus, the most destructive illusion is a settled point of view.

So don’t stop learning! Don’t stop investing in yourself. Study. Read. Devour books. Engage with people, including those who think differently. Ask questions. Listen closely. And don’t just grow in knowledge. Be a person who gives back. Use what you’re learning to make a real and lasting difference. (Note: “The Good Morning Journal: Powerful Prompts and Reflections to Start Every Day” is a great tool for keeping yourself on track with this kind of fresh daily perspective.)

8. Let a few negative people continuously distract you.

Your mind is your private sanctuary; do not allow the negative beliefs of others to occupy it. Your skin is your barrier; do not allow others to get under it. Take good care of your personal boundaries and what you allow yourself to absorb from others.

Of course, there will inevitably be a few people in your life who will be critical of you regardless of what you do or how well you do it. If you say you want to be a dancer, they will discredit your taste in music. If you say you want to build a new business, they will give you a dozen reasons why it might not work. They somehow assume you don’t have what it takes, but they are dead wrong! Let that sink in…

It’s a lot easier to be negative than positive — a lot easier to be critical than correct. When you’re embarking on a new venture, instead of listening to the few critics that will try to distract you, spend time talking to one of the hundreds of people in this world who are willing to support your efforts and acknowledge your potential, respectfully. And go ahead and leave us a comment down at the bottom of this post if you think you can’t find one.

9. Hold tight to something that’s not real.

Remind yourself right now that not everything is meant to be. Sometimes you have to track the data, review the data, and seriously sit down with yourself and come to grips with the fact that you were wrong about it all along. It was just an illusion that never really was what you thought it was.

It’s one of the most difficult realizations to accept, to realize that you feel a sense of loss, even though you never really had what you thought you had in the first place. The key is knowing this, learning from it, letting go, and taking the next step forward. (Note: Angel and I discuss this in more detail in the Adversity and Growth chapters of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

10. Maintain rigid expectations every step of the way.

Simple things become complicated when you expect too much. Rigid expectations truly are a root cause of heartache. Don’t let them get the best of you. Every difficult life situation can be an excuse for hopelessness or an opportunity for personal growth, depending on what you choose to do with it. So start by choosing to let go of the expectations that aren’t serving you.

A mistake doesn’t hurt, expectation does. A rejection doesn’t hurt, expectation does. And so it goes…

Remember, the mind is your battleground. It’s the place where the fiercest conflict resides. It’s where half the things you feared would happen, never actually happened. It’s where your expectations get the best of you, and you fall victim to your own train of thought time and time again. So don’t lower your standards, but do remember that removing your rigid expectations in life is the best way to avoid being disappointed by everyone and everything you encounter.

Truth be told, one of the most important moments in life is the moment you finally find the courage to let go of what can’t be changed. Because, when you are no longer able to change a situation, you are challenged to change yourself — to grow beyond the unchangeable. And that changes everything…

An Exercise for Building Better Daily Habits

If you feel like you’ve wasted too much time and potential on one or more of the points above, this quick actionable closing exercise is for YOU.

Choose any area in your life that you want to improve, and then:

1. Write down the specific details about your current circumstances. (What’s bothering you? Where are you stuck? What do you want to change?)
2. Write down your answer to this question: What are the daily habits that have contributed to your current circumstances? (Be honest with yourself. What are you doing regularly that actually contributes to the situation you’re in?)
3. Write down a few specific details about the “better circumstances” you’d like to create for yourself. (What would make you happy? What does an improved situation look like for you?)
4. Write down your answer to this question: What are the daily habits that will get you from where you are to where you want to be? (Think about it. What small, daily steps will help you gradually move forward from point A to point B?)

Now it’s your turn…

Yes, it’s your turn to not fall back into your old patterns of living simply because they’re more comfortable and easier to access. It’s your turn to remember that you’re leaving certain habits and situations behind today for a reason: to improve your life — because you can’t move forward if you keep going back. And it’s undoubtedly your turn to reclaim some of your time and potential, and make today count!

But before you go, please leave Angel and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Leonardo Da Vinci

One of the biggest and most common problems with improving your life or the success you want out of it is that you may not take consistent action over a longer time period.

Now, consistency isn’t the sexiest or most exciting word.

But it is, coupled with time, what will give you real results in your life.

Sticking with the program and doing something consistently – and not just when you feel inspired or something like that – is very, very powerful.

This is something I have struggled with a lot in the past. And on some days I still do.

But over the years I have found a few things that really help me with this.

1. When you’re taking action, focus only on the process.

I use this one, for example, when I do my workouts and when I write. I don’t take responsibility for the results in my mind.

I take responsibility for showing up and doing my workout/the writing. That’s it.

The results come anyway from that consistent action. And this makes it easier for me to take this action because:

• I know that is all I need to focus on. And so my energy and attention is only focused in one direction and I do a better job.
• I feel a lot less pressure on myself. And so I’m more relaxed and prone to continue compared to if I stare myself blind on the potential results that never come as quickly as I may want and if I’m on an emotional roller coaster from day to day.

2. Remember why you are taking action.

Find your top priorities and reasons for why you are doing what you are doing.

It could be to provide for your family, to save up for traveling, to get the job you really want or to improve your self-confidence. Or something else.

To not lose track of why you are taking action and to stay focused:

• Write down your most important reasons. Take a few minutes, sit down with paper and a pen and write down the top 1-3 reasons for why you take action and want to keep doing that in your life right now.
• Put that note where you can see it every day. Like for example in your workspace or near your bed so that you see it every morning when you wake up.

3. Reminder: you don’t want to hurt yourself.

When you disappoint yourself and don’t think and do as you really deep down want to you hurt yourself by lowering your self-esteem.

Whatever you do during your day sends signals back to yourself about what kind of person you are. Do the right thing like being effective, kind, going to the gym or simply rest and you feel good.

Get lazy, negative or just plain mean and you tend to feel worse after a while.

You don’t get away, there is no escaping yourself. And there is always a price to pay.

4. Take smaller steps on the days when the big ones seem too daunting.

On some days getting started with any of the the most important tasks may seem daunting. And so you start to procrastinate.

When that happens, one thing that has worked for me is to be kind.

To nudge myself forward instead of beating myself up.

So at such times I take:

• A small step. I may make a deal with myself to just work for 5 minutes on a piece of a bigger and more difficult task.
• An even smaller step. If that small step feels like too much and I start to procrastinate I make a deal with myself for 1 or 2 minutes of work.

Sometimes that results in a few dents put into a big task, a couple of smaller tasks being completed and many breaks being taken throughout the day.

And sometimes the easy start or restart to the day is all I need to get going again and to have a good and very productive time before the evening arrives.

Either way, I move forward instead of standing still.

5. Celebrate what you did today.

When you appreciate your good work you feel even better about your life and yourself.

And over time taking more action with less inner resistance becomes possible and you associate action with more positive emotions than you may at this time.

So…

• Take two minutes at the end of the day to think about what you can appreciate about what you did today. Or write down a couple of self-appreciative things in your journal.
• Have a tasty treat or a bigger celebration.
• Tell someone how nice something turned out, how you learned a good lesson or how proud you are over something important you did today.

Reward yourself for the things you did right today to strengthen your action taking habit.

And remember to be kind to yourself for the things you may have missed or not gotten done.

No point in trying to beat yourself up. No point in trying to be perfect.

See what you can learn from it and perhaps try another solution tomorrow and see if that works better.

 

Jones, who has blonde highlights and well-defined cheekbones, says she has worked with a host of start-ups and CEOs of small companies to help improve teamwork and boost productivity. Some people, like her, are using knowledge of human design within their own families to help foster more harmonious relations. “My daughters both have entirely different designs than mine, my husband does too,” she says, explaining that she is a projector, like many other coaches like Day. “It’s been so useful to be like, ‘I’m not expecting either my daughters to be anything like me’.”

Human design was born in 1987 when Canadian former advertising executive Robert Krakower, a rumored ketamine enthusiast who had been living like a hippie and residing in a dilapidated casita in Ibiza, claimed to have had an intense transcendental encounter with “the voice” over the course of eight days. As origin myths go, his makes Moses at the burning bush sound almost low-key.

Krakower, a bearded Mufti headdress-wearer who worked part-time at a local school, was walking with his dog when it picked up a scent and approached an abandoned house, noticing a light beneath the door. He shouted at the door and demanded to know, “Who’s there?,” he recalled once in a lecture in Germany. Once inside, the heavy smoker said he heard a voice he imagined to come from “a cigar-smoking 155-year-old woman.”

Then Krakower claimed he started gushing with sweat from head to toe. He went back to his nearby home and said “the voice” instructed him to place his Bible, Bhagavad Gita and Stanford biology textbook together, along with a chessboard and a copper coil. He was told to burn a combination of herbs from the shelves and said a series of cosmic revelations ensued, spanning the Big Bang, the nature of being, the “crystals of consciousness,” and “rave cosmology,” a far out prophecy he went on to make, predicting alien influence in a prophesied influx of disabled and mute children born in or after 2027.

All of this information would help Krakower—who soon renamed himself Ra Uru Hu, a play on his name Robert, a word from “the voice”, and the moment when he demanded to know who was behind the door—forge the pseudoscientific human design system and the bodygraphs which help uniquely define each person according to a series of numbers in his 1992 guide, The Black Book. “Madness is an interesting thing,” said Krakower, who was a “splenic manifestor” and died in 2011 of a heart attack at age 62. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Like, caught in this incredible, choiceless movie.”

In accordance with Krakower’s prophecy, Richard Beaumont, the director of Human Design UK, who worked closely with Krakower for years before his death has already purchased the domain name silentbabies.com. “There’s going to be a new species coming in February 2027,” he says, while sipping a glass of white wine in front of a human design chart over Zoom from his home in the west of England.

“They’re not going to be human, but they will come through human women.” (The human design school Krakower founded, the Jovian Archive, sells an online course centred on the alien prophecy for $2,079, and the organization warns of “imitators and unlicensed black marketeers” across the global network of licenses, trademarks and authorized teachers.) Human design is not a belief system, says Beaumont, who has 38,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. “This is an endless knowledge … We’re not here to interfere with who we are; we’re here to decondition.”

A good morning, and thus a good day, aren’t experiences that magically happen — they are created consciously.

Most of us are distracted from the get-go every morning. Trivial activities like checking social media, watching TV, and worrying about things we can’t control often set the tone of the day. And that means we waste our most well-rested time on things that don’t matter, while gradually losing touch with the significant, controllable parts of our lives that actually do matter.

We simply forget that the morning hours are enormously important — they form the foundation from which the day is built. We forget that how we choose to spend these hours can be used to predict the kind of days we’re going to have, and ultimately the kind of lives we’re going to live. So if you feel like you’ve been getting a rough start lately, and stumbling through your days with diminished intention and focus, it’s time to consider some small shifts in your mornings…

Your morning habits gradually make a big difference.

Before we get to the habits, I’d be shocked if you haven’t been told to do these things in the past. I know my husband (Marc) and I have both preached about them numerous times here on the blog. The problem is most of us slack off on the things we need to do for ourselves even though we know better. And Marc and I used to be just as unintentional with our morning hours as anyone else. We used to awake in a hurry and then move through our mornings at the mercy of whatever came up, stumbling into work and errands and client meetings in a fog. It was awful, but it was our morning routine. We didn’t know any different, so we didn’t think we could change things. Thankfully we were wrong.

Marc and I gradually implemented the three morning habits covered below and everything changed. Our mornings are now solid foundations from which we consistently yield positive results, and we’ve been going strong now for nearly two decades. In addition, we’ve helped hundreds of course students, coaching clients, and live event attendees implement these habits in their lives too, and many of them have come back to us later to say, “Thank you!” My hope is that YOU find value in them as well.

And please note how I mentioned “gradually” above. If you aren’t doing any of these things right now, start with just the first one, then add the second in a couple weeks, and then the third sometime in October or November…

1. Wash your dishes.

You are eating the most important meal of the day, right? Good.

Now you can leverage your breakfast to strengthen your self-discipline. And self-discipline is a vital skill to be honed. It is the ability to overcome distractions and get the important things done. It involves acting according to what you know is right, instead of how you feel in the moment (perhaps tired or lazy or distracted by something else), which typically requires sacrificing immediate ease for what matters most in life.

A lack of self-discipline for most of us is often the result of a lack of focus. In other words, we tell ourselves we are going to do something, but then we don’t. One of the easiest and most effective ways to build and maintain daily self-discipline?

Start small every morning. Very small…

Simply wash your dishes after breakfast.

Yes, I mean literally washing your dishes with your own two hands. It’s just one small step forward every morning: When you eat your oatmeal, wash your bowl and spoon. When you finish drinking your morning coffee, rinse the coffee pot and your mug. Don’t leave any dirty dishes in the sink or on the counter for later. Wash them immediately.

Form this habit one dish at a time, one morning at a time. Once you do this consistently for a few weeks, you can start making sure the sink has been wiped clean too. Then the counter. Then make your bed. Pack yourself a healthy lunch. Start doing a few sit-ups. Meditate for a few minutes. And so forth (more on the latter two — exercise and meditation — below).

Do one of these at a time each morning, and you’ll start to build a healthy habit of self-discipline, and finally know yourself to be capable of doing what must be done, and finishing what you start.

But again, for the next few weeks, just wash your dishes after breakfast. Mindfully, with a smile.

2. Use exercise to train your body and mind (for 15 minutes or less).

Exercise is the simplest and fastest way to change your life, not only because it strengthens your body, but because it also strengthens your mind. It’s a self-initiated activity that imposes a necessary level of mental and physical effort to fuel growth. And it almost instantaneously instills a positive sense of self-control into your subconscious, even when other circumstances in your life seem chaotic.

In a vast world that is often well beyond your control, exercise becomes a personal space where you are able to train and regain mastery over your world. Only you can move your body. Only you can put one foot in front of the other. Only you get to decide how far you will push yourself.

When you start your day like this — grounded and in control — the wider world is far easier to navigate.

Furthermore, a consistent daily exercise habit literally changes the physical inner-workings of your brain. In the bestselling book, “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain”, Dr. John Ratey discusses data he collected through years of researching the neurological changes exercise causes in the brain. Exercise physically elevates a specific protein in the brain that Dr. Ratey calls “Miracle-Gro for the brain.” He states, “Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function. Aerobic activity has a dramatic effect on adaptation, regulating systems that might be out of balance and optimizing those that are not — it’s an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to reach his or her full potential.”

Marc and I have come to very similar, although less scientific, conclusions on our own too. With over 16 years of experience working one-on-one (or two-on-one) with our course students and coaching clients, we have found that exercise truly is a universal medicine to nearly all human mental ailments. It drastically reduces mild and moderate depression, lowers anxiety, counterbalances the negative effects of being overstressed, and more. And the best part is that exercise is obviously not just a mental workout, but a physical one as well — you’re hitting two birds with one stone.

So if exercise is that wonderful, why am I recommending only 15 minutes of it each morning? Because in the beginning that’s enough without being too much. Starting small is important. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but again, so many of us forget to follow good advice. Start with a morning habit of exercise that lasts 15 minutes or less. If you feel incredible resistance and fail at 15 minutes, drop it to 10 minutes, or 7 minutes, and then stick to it for at least a full month before increasing the duration again.

3. Establish presence through meditation (for 15 minutes or less).

The same principle of starting small that we just discussed above applies here as well. With that said however, a morning meditation habit of only 15 minutes is no easy feat for most beginners. During the first several attempts at meditation, most novice meditators tend to find it near impossible to quiet their mind. Because of this, many of us try meditation once or twice and do not see the value in it — it does not immediately instill the same sense of control over that exercise does. But with practice and patience meditation can be far more powerful. And that’s why Marc and I meditate every morning for 15 minutes.

Meditation is indeed a vital morning habit in our lives, and in the lives of hundreds of students and clients we’ve worked with over the years. While it may not as easily instill the level of control that exercise does, meditation provides a deeper level of control which ultimately brings out of us what has been stuck inside — it connects us with our truest selves by allowing us to access all the areas of our mind and body that we are usually distracted and disconnected from.

Details aside, the most basic and practical benefits of meditation are twofold:

• lowers mental stress
• increases mental presence (awareness)

And when we bring a more relaxed presence into our morning hours — into the foundation of our day — it makes everything that happens from there much easier to deal with. Because we take the next step more mindfully — without pent-up resistance — fully aware and accepting of the tenseness in our shoulders, the little bubble of hope in our heart, or maybe even the haze of sadness in the back of our mind. And with this awareness and acceptance we find better solutions, healthier ways to cope, and a general sense that people are friendlier and cats purr louder.

On the contrary, when we are stressed out and distracted in the morning hours, our mind is split and frayed. One part is firmly focused on whatever is pressing in upon us, while the other part is giving minimal attention to whatever tasks need to be done quickly in the meantime.

Let me give you an example (from my own past life) to make things clear. Imagine that you are late for work and you’re rushing around your house in preparation to leave. If a loved one starts telling you something important about what they are going to do today, how much of your attention is going to be focused on what they are telling you? Not much.

But when we become more present — when we gradually establish more awareness and acceptance of the present moment through meditation — we stop being as distracted and preoccupied. In the space that opens for a moment, we can breathe deeply and listen deeply. For a moment, stress slips off our shoulders. And with practice we can learn to have more and more moments like this in our life.

A course student of ours recently wrote (shared with permission):

“Every moment is a new opportunity. The next one is as fresh and full of promise as the thousand before that you missed, and it is completely empty of any judgment whatsoever. Nothing is carried over that you take with you. You don’t have to pass a good-person exam before you enter, it is totally unconditional. It’s as if it is saying… ‘Okay, so you missed me the last 10,000 moments, but look! Here I am again… and again… and again!’ And you are welcomed with open arms.”

Here’s how to establish presence through morning meditation (note that there are many meditation techniques, this is the one Marc and I are presently practicing):

Sit upright in a chair with your feet on the ground and your hands resting comfortably on your lap, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing for 15 minutes (or less in the beginning if 15 minutes feels like too much). The goal is to spend the entire time focused only on the feeling of your abdomen inhaling and exhaling, which will prevent your worried mind from wandering and overthinking. This sounds simple, but again, it’s challenging to do for more than a couple minutes, especially when you’re just starting out with this habit. And it’s perfectly fine if random thoughts sidetrack you — this is sure to happen, you just need to bring your focus back to your breathing.

Consistency is everything…

Remember that the three morning habits above mean nothing if they are not acted upon consistently. One morning of cleaning your dishes, exercising, and meditation by itself won’t cut it. It is the compound effect of simple, seemingly mundane actions over time that leads to life-altering, positive results.

For example, there’s nothing exciting about putting one foot in front of the other every day for weeks, but by doing so, many normal human beings have climbed over 29,000 feet to the top of the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest…

And there is nothing exciting about cleaning dishes, exercising, or sitting quietly in meditation for a short time every morning, but by doing so, Marc and I (and hundreds of students and clients we’ve worked with) have drastically better lives.

Just like every muscle in the body, the mind needs to be trained to gain strength. It needs to be worked consistently to grow and develop over time. Which is exactly what the three morning habits in this post allow you to do. If you don’t proactively push yourself in little ways every morning, of course you’ll crumble later on when things don’t go your way…

But you have a choice!

Choose to clean your dishes when it would be easier to leave them in the sink.

Choose to exercise when it would be easier to sleep in.

Choose to meditate when it would be easier to distract yourself with something else.

Prove to yourself, in small ways every morning, that you have the power to take control of your days and your life!

(Note: Marc and I also build small, actionable, life-changing daily habits with our readers in the New York Times bestseller, “Getting Back to Happy: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Reality, and Turn Your Trials into Triumphs”.)

Now it’s your turn…

Yes it’s your turn to focus on the small morning habits that can help you grow in the days and weeks ahead.

But before you go, please leave Marc and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

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