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…]

The afternoon always understands what the morning never even suspected.

Everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head.

Every day. All the time.

YOU are telling yourself a story right now.

And this story is simply a collection of beliefs that ultimately makes you what you are – it lays the foundation for every action you take or don’t take in life. In essence, you build yourself out of this story, one day at a time.

For a while everything aligns just fine, or so it seems, and life is good.

But then at some point, perhaps sometime in your thirties, forties or fifties, you get slapped with a harsh reality [Read more…]

Too often we let the little frustrations of each day blind us to the beauty in front of us. We get caught up in our own heads, and literally don’t know our lives to be any better than the few things that aren’t going our way. We call people to complain or we spew out our gripes on social media. “Life is so unfair!” we yell. And everyone agrees and throws their two cents into the gossip pool.

Other times we talk a big talk about a lot of stuff that really doesn’t matter that much. We scrutinize and dramatize the insignificant until we’re blue in the face, and then we sit back and scratch our heads in bewilderment of how unfulfilling life feels.

But the older we grow, the quieter we become and the less pointless drama and chaos we engage in. Life humbles us gradually as we age. We realize how much nonsense we’ve wasted time on.

Truth be told, the afternoon always understands what the morning never even suspected.

Here are some things we tend to expend lots of mental and physical energy on when we’re younger, that we eventually realize matter a lot less than we originally thought… [Read more…]