Is your life feeling a bit flat? Are you struggling with simple things like being present with your family? By the end of today’s episode you’ll have the stepping stones to getting your life back on track with a positive mindset. Learn the top 5 steps to change your life for the better!
KEY POINTS
You Are Enough – Don’t compare yourself to others, instead compare yourself to who you were yesterday. Set an intention to do your best in the context of each day. If you have a successful day give yourself a W for win or an L for learn. The game is to ensure you don’t get more than 6 L’s in one month!
Action Ends Suffering – Professionals know that action creates feeling. Amateurs believe feeling creates action. Be the professional of your life and take action today, don’t wait around for the next day you feel like it, or it will never get done.
Rejection Is Not Fatal! – Rejection is evidence you’re stepping outside your comfort zone. Your growth and development doesn’t lie within your comfort zone. It requires stress and hard work. Treat rejection as evidence you’re moving in the right direction.
Who Is Your Best Self? – Use alarms to trigger new habits. Set alarms on your phone to remind you at key times of the day who your best self would be in the situation you’re about to step into. For example, when you get home you could set an alarm for ‘World’s Best Parent’ at the gym you could be ‘World Fitness Champion’
Today Is Going To Be A Great Day! – When you say that to yourself at the beginning of each day it takes your day on a more positive trajectory. Notice what happens to your mood when you begin every day like this for the next week.
Are You Happy? – At the end of the day ask yourself whether you did your best to be happy. Score yourself from 1 to 10 on the answer. The happier you are, the more fulfilling your life will become.
TRANSCRIPT
Eric Partaker: Hey everyone. It’s Eric Partaker here. And today I’m going to share with you five steps you can follow right now to break free from doubt, achieve your goals and live your very best life. So let’s get into it.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Number one. Don’t compare yourself to someone today, rather compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And one of the things that I do on a daily basis is I have a calendar in my office, and I simply when I get to the end of the day, I put either a W or an L in that calendar box for the day. The W stands for win, the L stands for learn. And this relates to an intention that I start at the beginning of each and every day. At the beginning of each and every day, I set an intention to do my best in the context of that day. And when I get to the end of the day, I give myself a W, a win, I’ve done my best in the context of that day, or I give myself an L for learn, and then I know, well, what is it that I learned?
What didn’t I do that indicated that I wasn’t showing up at my best in the context of that day. And my simple game that I play is to make sure that I don’t have anything more than six Ls in a month, so I want to have 80% of my days feeling like I’ve operated at my best in the context of that day. And I don’t want more than two Ls in a row. So if I have a bad day, for whatever reason, I want to make sure that I rebound quickly the next day. So in summary, number one, make sure that you’re not comparing yourself to other people today, but to who you were yesterday. And one of the simple ways that I do that is by playing that win or learn game on a daily basis.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Recognize that behavior follows identity. It’s not the other way around. For example, the other day I bought my son a Captain America costume. And as soon as I put the Captain America costume on him, he started running around and behaving like Captain America. And I didn’t have to at any point sit him down and say, “Okay, and this is what you need to do next to behave like this superhero.” He just got it. He knew immediately what to do. And that’s because behavior follows identity. The moment he took on that identity of a superhero, the moment he became instead of behaving like that superhero. And why am I telling this story? Because when I ask you to recognize that behavior follows identity, I’m not asking you to do something that you don’t already know how to do as children. We all knew this inherently. It was just a part of our play. And we would choose to be people all the time.
And then once we made that decision, once we made that choice, it immediately impacted our behavior and how we were showing up and interacting in the world. But guess what? That doesn’t need to leave us. And we can still do that today. And it’s such a critical success tip to realize this. It’s empowering, it’s invigorating. You get to go back to your youth in your quest to become your best. And what I would encourage you to do is choose an identity. Who is it that you are at your best and give that a name. Maybe you’re the world’s best at something, maybe you assume the identity of somebody that you admire, but choose who’s a superhero version of you. Give that a name and see how your behavior, if you constantly remind yourself of that identity will start to follow suit and match who you’re trying to be.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: Number three. Rejection is evidence that you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone. I’m sure you’ve probably heard this before, that your growth and development isn’t within your comfort zone. It requires you to experience some degree of stress. When you go to the gym, you don’t just walk into the gym and stare at the weights and you get stronger. That would be great, but it doesn’t happen. You actually have to stress your muscle and it causes it to grow. And it’s the same with our growth and development professionally and just in life in general, by going through rejection, it’s evidence that we’ve stepped just outside of our comfort zone enough so that we fell, so that we’ve experienced stress, which ultimately leads to our growth and development. Again, you stress a muscle, it causes it to grow. You put some stress on your professional career, it’s going to cause it to grow. So treat rejection as evidence that you’re moving in the right direction and stepping outside of that comfort zone.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: A handful of things that you can do all called triggers to help you stick to your habits. Now, what are triggers? Well, if you’ve read the book, The Power of Habit, fantastic book, if you haven’t read it highly recommend it, you’ll understand that all habits break down into what’s called a habit loop. So the habit loop consists of three parts, and it basically starts with a trigger, or you think of this as like the events that happens right before the behavior or the habit. So you have something that triggers a habit and then you perform whatever that behavior is, and then there’s an aspect of it called the reward, which is why you do the habit because you’re seeking some kind of reward, physical, emotional, mental, whatever that may be. So with this in mind, we can design triggers.
We can design events right before the habit that we’d like to be doing, or we can design triggers, we can design events, things that will happen, such that they remind us to do this new habit. And the more times that the trigger happens. And then the more times that we do the habit, the more that becomes ingrained in our psyche and after a period of time, often we don’t even maybe even need the trigger that we are using to cue or to signal the habit. So let’s go into a few different areas in which you can be using triggers to start creating the habits that you’re seeking to create in your life. So the first area that I want to talk about with regards to triggers are phone alarms. Now I use phone alarms all the time. I have alarm for so many different things. One of my boys, he’s joked around with me before saying, “Dad, you even have a phone alarm that says, brush your teeth.”
I don’t actually need a phone alarm to brush my teeth. I brush my teeth. But the point is that I’ve used my phone alarms quite a lot to trigger new habits, not always, but especially in the early days to get a habit going. But there is one particular area where I’ve used a phone alarm every single day now for years. And it’s to define how I want to be showing up in certain areas of my life. And I think about my life across my health, wealth and relationships. And I’m using this as a little story, a little example of how you could use triggers and phone alarms in particular, to start showing up in a better way to cue certain habits. So what I use in this example is I use my phone alarms to trigger a way of being across those three areas that I previously mentioned in life, my health, my wealth, or my work and relationships.
So at 6:30 A.M. the first alarm on my phone goes off and it says world fitness champion and that’s to cue that identity, that persona, that version of me, who’s going to go to the gym. And it changes the way, it forms this habit of me showing up with a lot more conviction, a lot more confidence, a lot more determination because I’m cuing that version of me. It’s creating this habit of showing up more strongly, all because I’ve simply come up with a little phrase and put that on my phone as an alarm to cue that version of me. Second alarm for me goes off at 9:00 A.M. It says world’s best coach, similar sort of thing to kind of cue that version of me, to create that habit of showing up with my work as strongly and as confidently as possible.
And then the last alarm that I have on my phone is at 6:30 P.M. It says world’s best husband and father to prompt the question, well, how would the world’s best husband and father walk through that door right now? As my work day is coming to an end that I’m transitioning to home life, I want to cue the habit of showing up as my best.
Speaker 2: Key point.
Eric Partaker: In the book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the number one regret was I wish I had allowed myself to be happier and we don’t want to have that regret in our lives. So what are the two things that you can do on a daily basis? Number one, get into the habit of, as your feet touch the floor in the morning and as you’re standing out of bed, just simply say the phrase to yourself, today is going to be a great day. I know that sounds silly and simple, but believe me when you say that to yourself as a first thing to the start of your day, it makes you smile slightly and takes your day on a totally different trajectory. Now, to help remember that you might put that up as a piece of paper somewhere near you, as you’re getting out of bed, but start each day simply by saying, as your feet touch the floor, today is going to be a great day and notice what happens to your mood from the morning thereafter.
The second thing that we can be doing on a daily basis is that the end of the day ask ourselves, did I do my best to be happy today and score yourself one to 10 on the answer. A 10 is you did your absolute best to be as happy as you could in the day. You couldn’t have been happier in the context of that day, of course. And a one is, oh, I don’t want to be around you, you part just hating everything. Do these two techniques, one on the front end, today’s going to be a great day, one on the backend, ask yourself one to 10, did I do my best to be happy today? And you will see a shift in your happiness day after day. And the happier we are, the more fulfilling lives.
