Sometimes deciding to quit something is the most remarkable bold and courageous thing you can do. If it’s not right for you, if it is sapping your spirit and not part of your ideal vision for your future, then it is something to quit and quit soon.
* Source: Brendon Burchard – Why to QUIT
Every scientific study ever done from neuroscience studies to psychological studies to self-report studies have found over and over the incredible benefits of meditation, from lowering people’s stress and anxiety to helping them have more attention and focus, to literally helping them do better on tests, activities at work, and allowing them to increase their reported happiness.
It is the magic method for improving people’s lives mentally and psychologically, and many people would argue spiritually as well.
This means basically I’m going to give you a word “release” and you’re going to focus on that word with your eyes closed and your whole focus is simple: to have that word “release” repeating in your mind over and over again very softly.
Sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and say, “What’s my vision for life? What do I want my life to be like? Where do I want to live? What kind of work do I want to contribute to the world? What kind of relationship do I want to build?”
That requires thought, brainstorming, and if you don’t know the answers to that, that’s okay, experience the world some more. Go sample different parts of the world, of your community, or ask other people how they discovered what they wanted in life. Start this journey, become a seeker of what your vision will be and the vision will suddenly start to coalesce and you’ll figure these things out.
You have to be hungry to succeed. You have to have a deep desire to move the needle of your life forward. You have to have a desire for a dream, for a mission, for a cause, for something you believe in that’s pulling you forward because you care about it so much.
Desire is built on experience. Desire is built on exposure to things, so go explore the world, read books, ask people what they do, and see what’s out there.
We have to have desire. We have to be hungry for achievement and success, not to just to have achievement and success. Not just for the ends of that experience of money, wealth, status, fame, power, satisfaction, and pride. Those things will come, but we have to have the desire for that journey to grow into the type of person who deserves such a lofty goal. To grow into the persons who would deserve the experience of those things, to really desire that journey.
If you had to give the commencement address to 15k university students as they were about to charge out into life and contribute, make their difference and leave their mark, what would you say?
What is your life philosophy that you would like to teach other people to have? Some simple rules and principles about life that you would love others to have in their own lives, to live a meaningful life, to live a fully charged life.
What’s your life philosophy that you would share with other people?
What are the major practices of leadership that we must enact on a continual basis to be able to have the amount of influence and impact we desire, in our work lives or any role in which we’re leading other people?
The framework for leadership is called E-6. These are six practices of leadership and not six steps, because it’s not like you do it once and then you move on in the process. It’s an active process.
Great leaders envision a compelling, different and vibrant future than what’s here. They have an alternative clear view of what the world could be like tomorrow than it is today. They have a shared purpose. They believe that they and others would be compelled by, interested, inspired by, and want to work toward, and that’s a big deal.
If you’re going to have clarity on something in your life, make it something so big and bright and meaningful that you will get out of bed and chase it until you grasp it or die. Bring forth a desire that is unbounded and even scares you a little bit, that will demand all the best that is in you, that takes you out of your own orbit and into the stratosphere of the remarkable. That kind of desire changes your life, and it changes the world.
Planning comes after visioning, and we can unleash ourselves to experiment with “D.U.M.B.” goals:
Let’s have vision for our lives, not just focus on our tasks. Let’s dream big again and get our heads out of our to-dos. Are the goals we’re setting aligned with our bigger vision for our lives and our contributions?
We have two systems of thought. We have the System 1, which is your automatic, unconscious, immediate thoughts and impulses that come up from your body that usually your brain is saying, “Hey dude, we’ve thought through this before,” or “Hey dude, we’re trying to protect you.” It’s running at a baseline easy energetic level.
Part of becoming a more mature, conscious, enlightened person is to better take control of our System 2, which is the conscious dashboard on our mind, our ability to more directly work, control, generate, and create our own thoughts and behaviors in the moment, not relying too much on just the things that come up for us.
But the people who achieve the peak amounts of success, the highest performers in the world have said, “You know what, I need to discipline my mind to support me even when it comes up with an automatic immediate thoughts, I want those to be positive, buoyant, confident, and strong, something that leads me to healthy decisions for my life not just things that protect me.”