When I was a high school freshman, a 260-pound freshman girl showed up for track and field tryouts right alongside me.  Her name was Sara, and she was only there because her doctor said her health depended on it.  But once she scanned the crowd of students who were on the field, she turned around and began walking away.  Coach O’Leary saw her, jogged over, and turned her back around.

“I’m not thin enough for this sport!” Sara declared.  “And I’ll never be!  It’s impossible for me to lose enough weight.  I’ve tried.”

Coach O’Leary nodded, and promised Sara that her body type wasn’t suited for her current weight.  “It’s suited for 220 pounds,” he said.

Sara looked confused.  “Most people tell me I need to lose 130 pounds,” she replied.  “But you think I only need to lose 40?”

Coach O’Leary [Read more…]

Maybe it’s the life lessons I was forced to learn the hard way, or the toll of loss and failure I had recently endured, but fifteen years ago, in the midst of a panic attack on my 27th birthday, I had to admit to myself right then and there that the youthful world of possibility I once felt now seemed dead inside me. I wanted to feel light and free and ambitious and passionate again, but I didn’t know how. Luckily, I had a wise mother nearby who gave me some good advice. She told me that she could still see a positive, passionate young man inside of me, but that I needed to do some soul searching to reconnect myself to him.

As I attempted to follow my mother’s advice, I remembered that I used to have two quotes written on post-it notes hanging on my bedroom wall when I was a kid: [Read more…]

Mental strength is incredibly important. Take care of your mind and the way you speak to yourself. Don’t let negative self-talk weaken you today.

Life changes every single day, and so can you.

That’s the truth, and yet oftentimes so many of us feel hopelessly stuck against our will.

Why? Because the changes we seek breed uncertainty, and life can be hard to navigate when we’re uncertain about things.

We feel confused and displaced, and we begin filling our gaps of understanding with stories about how life is. But these stories often do us more harm than good.

Reminder: Our 6th annual Think Better, Live Better conference is taking place May 28-29, 2022 in Orlando. We just released 10 more discounted early bird tickets that are still available right now (while they last). Check out the 2022 event here.

Imagine you’re in the [Read more…]

What we ultimately do comes out of who we believe we are.

A good friend of mine, who graduated with honors from Cal Berkley several years ago, is now the co-founder and CEO of a successful start-up in Silicon Valley. Throughout grade school she struggled with reading and writing disabilities. She spent kindergarten all the way through 12th grade in English ESE classes. During a parent-teacher conference when she was a freshman in high school, two ESE teachers collectively informed her mom that it was highly unlikely she would ever graduate.

So how did she do it? How did she push through and overcome the odds? “Affirmations,” she told me with a serious smile when I interviewed her recently for a side-project I’m working on. “I literally told myself that they were wrong about me. I told myself exactly what I needed to hear, every single day, to move my life forward. It may sound like a cliché to some people, but it’s not. It’s powerful stuff!”

I love her sentiment and I agree with her 100%. In fact, there’s a good reason why training our minds with positive affirmations works wonders like this.

Just like every muscle in the body, the mind needs to be exercised to gain strength. It needs to be worked consistently to grow and develop over time. If you haven’t pushed your mind in thousands of little ways over time, of course it’ll crumble on the one day that things get really challenging.

A mind well trained with positive affirmations has the right thoughts queued up and ready for retrieval at a moment’s notice.

If you’d like to begin (or enhance) this practice in your own life, here’s a selection of affirmations I often suggest to our course students, as starting point: [Read more…]