Week 1 Awareness How often do you tell yourself you have to do something? Or you must, or you should? Those words seem harmless but they carry a psychological cost. They create a feeling of being trapped between doing something you don’t want to do and the consequences of not doing it. This lesson looks…
Week 2 Diagnosis It may already be clear to everyone reading this, but we still need to state the obvious: negative self-talk is not good for you. It’s not good for your internal psyche. It tends to focus your mind on all of the negatives around you. When you say negative things to yourself, it…
Week 2 Diagnosis Negative wants and negative what-ifs are the first two patterns of thinking you need to be aware of in this second week of the course. Week 1 was about seeing your self-talk clearly. Week 2 is about getting specific. Identifying the precise patterns that are working against you. Not the general ones….
Before You Start, Read This. All of It. You talk to yourself constantly. Not occasionally. Not when things get difficult. Constantly. From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, there’s a voice in your head running a commentary on your life. Your choices. Your appearance. Your performance. Your worth. Your future….
Most people confuse being busy with making progress. They work hard. They put in the hours. They stay late and get up early. And at the end of it, they look back at the last six months and struggle to explain what actually moved forward. The effort was real. The results are hard to point…
You’ve got it backwards. You think you need motivation before you can take action. That’s why you’re stuck. That’s why the project stays on your hard drive and never makes it into the world. That’s why you join gyms in January and stop going by February. That’s why you tell yourself you’ll start when you…
It’s the 1% that makes all the difference. For some thirteen to fifteen hundred years, Japanese swordsmiths have forged iron sand and charcoal into tamahagane steel, crafting it into katanas (the really sharp swords the Samurai used). Even today, coke and iron ore combine in blast furnaces to produce steel. This alloy is stronger, harder,…
Most people who struggle to make progress aren’t struggling because they lack intelligence, talent, or desire. They’re struggling because they’re trying to do it alone, surrounded by the wrong people, in groups that are quietly working against them. We’ve already looked at some of the internal hurdles that keep you stuck: the stress that quietly…
Nobody likes being wrong. That’s not a character flaw. It’s human, but some people take it further. They don’t just dislike being wrong, they can’t tolerate it. They’ll move heaven and earth to avoid being proven wrong, to reframe the evidence, to find anyone who agrees with them. Then they make a critical error, they…
This lesson is all about the concept of boundaries in your life; on one hand, they are meant to be pushed, on the other, they create a place of safety within their walls. I see a lot of self-help literature that tells you, in no uncertain terms, to live a life without limits, to tread…