Fix Your Problems Using Mental Clarity

No clarity, no change. No clarity. No goals. No clarity. Nothing to measure. No clarity, no growth. So, striver, tune in. Every day is a great day to gain a little bit more clarity about who we are, where we're heading, and what we want our lives to be about. Today, I thought the topic is in your personal development. And this growth journey we're all on together would be about clarity. So much in our lives hinges on the levels of clarity that we have about who we are, what types of relationships we want to have, the meaning or fulfillment we get from what types of pursuits, from how we need to change or grow or achieve abundance or live an extraordinary life. No clarity, no change. No clarity. No goals. No clarity. Nothing to measure. No clarity, no growth. So, striver, tune in. Every day is a great day to gain a little bit more clarity about who we are, where we're heading, and what we want our lives to be about. I love the New Year's because at New Year, everyone starts seeking clarity once more. They kind of go through much of the year on autopilot, responding to obligations, handling life's dilemmas and emergencies, trying to be good people and parents and servants, and at the same time lacking true clarity or lacking the ability to seek it more consistently. We so struggle, and we go a decade without real progress or breakthroughs. We go three years in our business, and it's just kind of like static. We go into the relationship and it just feels the same old, same old. Clarity is required. But if you've read my book High Performance Habits, which I hope you have, or you've actually leveraged the tool you have here in Growth Day, and you went and accessed the High Performance Habits Builder in the Growth Day app. And you'll see there's a full training under clarity. So if you're struggling in any area of your life to gain clarity, please go watch that training. It's transformed millions of people's lives. I'm sure by now this simple concept that I share and I teach about seeking clarity. Notice I didn't say get clarity. Because we never have a total certain outcome. Knowledge, understanding, or truth. Those things change throughout our lives. Our understanding of things change throughout their lives. But what we learn from the world's most successful people is that more often than underperformers, they sought clarity. That means each day they asked, what am I about today? What do I want to achieve today? What's my intention today? What's my outcome today? What's my outcome this week? What am I trying to do here? They asked more questions to gain greater understanding about how to progress than underperformers. Notice I didn't say they had a higher IQ or came from the right perfect background or everything was great in their life. They were the ones who just asked more questions which gained them greater self awareness, which helped them develop greater competence, which helped them contribute more. And all of a sudden people say, wow, this person sure came out of nowhere. No, that person came out of seeking clarity instead of just accepting things as they are all the time. They said, hmm, how could I improve this? Instead of going in the next meeting unprepared, they thought, hmm, what should I be prepared for going into this meeting? Who were the people in this meeting? How could I serve each one? What are the needs of each person coming to this meeting so that I can add value here in every single way and the simple, subtlest ways. High performers seek clarity. They're always in learning mode. In other words, they don't have a fixed mindset. They're open to the world, they're thoughtful about things, they set intentions. And all of those actions, all of that journaling you do, all of that efforts to plan your day here in the Growth Day app, all of the reasons that you are seeking personal development, teachers, coaches, experiences, content, is because that seeking part of you is something that is inherent in all of us. Somewhere along the way, we were seekers and we got discouraged, we got hurt, someone broke our heart, someone said no, someone took advantage. And all of a sudden we stopped looking so much for what interests us. We just accepted what jobs came our way versus being intentional about what kind of team do I want to work on? We stopped being intentional about raising our own ability to have greater abundance in our lives because we thought, well, I'll just take what's what I got. I guess we stopped growing because we stopped asking the hard questions. Am I showing up each day as my best? Am I playing my A game? Am I being responsible for the people who I've committed my life to or who I'm in service with right now? We just stopped asking the questions and kept going through the motions. And that's where people get in trouble. That's where I was so Inspired. After interviewing 300 of the most extraordinary people in an academic research study, not for my podcast, in an academic structured research study to try and figure out what was the common elements. High performance habit number one. Seek clarity. Seek clarity. Are you clear on what you need to do this week? Are you clear on what will help you feel alive? Are you clear on, on how you want to treat or appreciate a member of your family or someone your friend. Are you clear on what's a simple thing you could block out of some time? You know, what's the hour of block time that you have for your self care or for your personal passions or interests that aren't obligation driven? Like where's your vibe, essence or joy in this week? Is there some time if I, if I open up your calendar? Can, can I see a block of time where, oh, this person sure has clarity on what's important to them because they blocked out some time? I always believe that clarity without calendaring and I use calendar as a verb because I think it's the most important thing. And I like calendaring versus scheduling because scheduling sounds like a task and calendaring sounds like a creative strategic thing. So forgive my dorkiness over here, my friend. I just want to make sure that you're intentional about your time. Ultimately, life is awfully short. We only have so many days and so many weeks and so many months. And let's not blaze through them. Failing to ask the questions, failing to be intentional, failing to block time out for things that are important to us. If any area of your life you're struggling, gosh, I don't know what the right next move is for me, or I don't know why I feel this way, or I don't know where I'm going. I promise that clarity chapter will start opening up the worldview. It won't give you all the answers, but it will give you some direction today. Because clarity isn't about having all the answers. It's about having understanding and intention to keep moving forward and to keep getting better. Because you know it. Every day is a good day to grow. You woke up this morning. What were your first thoughts? You woke up and you took a deep breath in and some thoughts came to your mind. Maybe you thought, I gotta get that coffee. You know, maybe you're trying to push the kids off you as they jumped into bed and woke you up. Or the dog. Maybe you were just thinking, I got these things to do. Or maybe you were blessed with somebody by your side and you kiss them awake. Maybe you decided to worry about something. Some thoughts just came to mind, even of just concerns tasks you have to do. What thoughts came to your mind this morning? Also when your mind switched from that unconscious kind of just thoughts coming to your mind or reacting to what was in the morning, what were your thoughts? Purposeful thoughts, what we call your deliberate thoughts, the ones you kind of put in your brain, the Self talk or the sentences you gave yourself to do or to focus on. I'm a person of faith, so I wake up and I'm grateful for life. And whether you have faith or not, I hope you have reverence for life. It's a common theme of my teaching all these years because I feel so blessed to be alive. One blessing I had in my life was touring Europe with Wayne Dyer on a trip for Hay House. And I remember Wayne teaching how he would wake up in the morning, take a nice deep breath in, roll over, put his feet on the ground and say, thank you, thank you, thank you. He began the day with deliberate thought about gratitude, reverence for life, giving thanks to his Creator. And maybe you're a person of faith, or maybe you're not. But I wonder, those first deliberate thoughts every day of your life, what is it saying? Too often we meander through life very unconsciously reacting, reacting, reacting. Give your thoughts to gratitude. Give your thoughts to grace, God, spirit, faith, universe. Or just thinking dumb luck and chemistry and the impossibility of the universe creating you, whatever it is. What if you did that? What if you took a pause each morning to really give thanks? Not just, you know, sort of passingly, but maybe you woke up, first thing you do, you go to your journal and you write all the things you're grateful for or you're thankful for, or you boil that cup of green tea and you sit there and you stare off out into space and just think of how good life is. Even though we'd all love more in the bank account, even though we'd all love to achieve more, even though we are not done just to give gratitude for what we do have. Wouldn't that be beautiful? You know, I have some practices that help me keep spirit, keep perspective. And I believe that those things are useful. One of them is that deliberate self talk. What am I going to say to myself? Well, I'm going to say thank you for this gift of life. Thank you for the presence I feel in my life. Thank you for the potential I feel like I'm growing into. Thank you for the passion I have for and service of other people. Thank you for the purpose I feel or I create each day, even when I feel like I've lost it. I praise other people in my life. Oh, my mom is so great. Oh, I have such great siblings. I'm so lucky to have such incredible team. Oh my God, my wife, Denise Sunshine. She's so amazing. I praise other people. I ask for guidance. Please make me an instrument of thy faith. I Ask for power, the ability to activate myself. Please allow me to have the personal power to react well today, to rise today, to serve today, to take this day with joy, to bring joy and honor the struggle. I ask simple things. It's just self talk. It goes on. And it's something I've programmatically built into my life. I talked about gratitude for perspective. What I do is a little twist on our little growth day app here. I like to fill out the monthly Whole Life assessment on Sundays. I know it's meant to. I'm supposed to do my weekly reviews and I do those. As you all know, usually I like to do weekly review or the weekly score. If you go into life scores, I like to do that Fridays or Saturdays, Sundays for me, I like to do the whole life assessment that's in your life score section. And when I go through that, I do something unique. I don't just score myself on like how am I doing? I also just spend a few seconds on each one going, I'm so blessed in this area. I'm so blessed in health. I'm so blessed in family. I'm so blessed in friends. I'm so blessed in learning each of those areas. I just take a moment because the Whole Life Assessment is meant to look at every area of your life, from your research relationships to your health, your mission. And I just say I'm so blessed in those. Even though sometimes Listen, I'm not done. You're not done. We're still striving. But if you can't feel the spirit in the striving, we're doing it wrong. If we can't feel the gratitude and the reverence and the joy even when it is a difficult week, then guess what? It's going to be a lot of unfelt, awful, difficult weeks. You can have difficult weeks, but you can feel them in a good way. You can have difficult weeks and you can sense the stretch, sense the challenge, sense the duty. There's something about it. Something about it. So few people in the world really work on their personal development because they so don't get the importance and the realization that by working more to self actualize our potential, we more greatly self actualize the gifts we've already been given from above. I appreciate you being in the Growth Day community. We're doing something most people don't know about. Maybe you go right now into your community area and just do a simple post. Just do one post. Contribute back to this community. Don't just take from the tools. Contribute to the community or just share something, anything that would help, that gives people that perspective, that blessed hope that we all need. There's always a bigger spirit and a bigger story and a bigger community. It's all being built for us. And I believe that. And I believe that Growth Day Community will ultimately be one of the most powerful and positive communities in the personal growth and development world that's ever been developed. Not because of me, because you build it, you contribute. We give each of us our heart and our spirit every day to goodness. Have hope. Connect with spirit. Think big. Have perspective. Be grateful. Remember, you are stronger than you think. And every day is a good day to grow.