5 Must-Do Habits for Personal Growth

I accept life as it is, even if I want to improve it. Because listen, people always get this one wrong. They think you can't have acceptance and ambition at the same time. Oh no. It's through having acceptance and appreciation that we can find and muster the energy to go for those bigger dreams and goals. I like to talk about today how we change. But big picture, what's this all about? If we're trying to change, how does it happen? There's a training I did on the gates to change. I think it's called the four Gates to change. And this is kind of how it all begins. So we'll call it the five A's today. The first A is of awareness. To become more fully aware of who you are, where you really are in your life right now, what you really want, what it's going to take to get there. An awareness, a consciousness, a spirited understanding of our lives. A vital clarity that develops when we're having the honesty and the integrity to look at our lives and ask how we're living it, how we're showing up, how we're serving, how we're growing, how we're thinking. All the good stuff of personal development that we talk about all the time here in growth day. I mean, when we say make self improvement a way of life, it does always begin with awareness. That's why in your journal we give you all those growth prompts so that you're always just asking new questions about your life. So that you're always trying to expand your understanding and awareness of who you are. The second thing that helps us move towards change is today's message of appreciation. Appreciating not only this gift of life, but appreciating what's happening for us right now, even if it's difficult, even if we have to honor the struggle as we don't like what we're facing right now. And appreciation to the challenge, if anything, appreciation to the understanding that what has happened to us will ultimately, if we direct our own minds, make us stronger, even if in the moment we don't like it. And I remember when I was going through a brain injury in 2011 and it was really severe and I was really struggling with energy, struggling with my mindset, with my physical body. Cause I had also threw out my shoulder or broke a couple ribs, I'd snap my wrist clean off. I mean, I was in a hurting unit and I kept saying every morning, okay, appreciate this. Yeah, you threw out that shoulder, but the other one seems to work. Okay, that's a good blessing. Yeah, you know, you hurt your brain. But I didn't get paralyzed and that could have happened. Yeah, I'm hurting right now, but I'm alive and. Oh yeah, well, my brain doesn't work right and I have to see all these doctors. But you know what? I'm going to have a better brain after this thing because I'm going to learn how to really optimize for that. All those things. It wasn't easy. Sometimes the truth is that was called forced appreciation where you have to will yourself to appreciate life when you feel like you don't feel the gratitude. That's why having a gratitude practice in good times is really important because that practice shows up in the dark times. Next. I think we all have to have acceptance. Acceptance of the best of who we are and acceptance of the dark side as well. Accepting reality as it is and accepting the past as it was. Living in a state of acceptance is saying, I'm okay with what the world throws at me. I accept life as it is, even if I want to improve it. Because listen, people always get this one wrong. They think you can't have acceptance and ambition at the same time. Oh no. It's through having acceptance and appreciation that we can find and muster the energy to go for those bigger dreams and goals. You know, a lot of people have ambition because they don't accept themselves. They lie to themselves. They push down their own feelings all the time. They don't speak up when they know they should. They don't follow the path they know they were meant to follow. And so by denying themselves, by denying their heart and their true spirit, they end up poisoning their ability to progress. And so we must accept who we are. And we must still at the same time make self improvement a way of life. Study this personal development right here in Growth Day and, and get better. I can accept myself and also accept that I'm a person capable of growth. I can accept myself and also accept that I got things to improve. I can accept myself and love myself even as I recognize that sometimes my ego trashes the day or I get stuck in a negative pattern, or I'm not perfect, or I fail. I can still accept who I am as being worthy. I can accept the fact that it's up to me to give myself permission to strive and succeed. I can accept myself even if my family doesn't understand or my friends don't get it. The stuff of acceptance can change your life forever. And if you're someone who's been in that tough struggle of hating yourself for A long time. It's time to get that therapist or it's time to get that coach. It's time to talk it out and have a conversation. Because what's happening is you've just got a distorted reality of yourself. People who hate themselves, it's not that they're any more bad or evil as they conceive of themselves versus other people. It's that they haven't had the benefit of perspective and they haven't had a supportive environment to work through their issues. So they bottle them down and turn them into hate versus expressed and worked through them and found their own progress and growth and ultimately joy and acceptance. Fourth, accountability. We've got to take accountability for our lives. We can accept the world as it is and we can have a heart of acceptance and openness, but we also must have that self reliance that we always talk about in personal development. The great teachers in personal development and psychology always emphasize personal accountability or self responsibility or self reliance, whatever you want to call that phrase or that idea that you ultimately are accountable for your life. Accountable to who? To you, to your creator, to the others around you who count on you. It's okay to take personal responsibility and to say, you know what? I gotta pull myself up, I gotta get help, I gotta get training, I gotta do the work. I gotta make personal development a consistent practice to keep expanding and learning and growing. Because guess what? Tomorrow's gonna throw new challenges. We can accept the fact that the future has a lot of challenges. So let's be accountable now and prepare ourselves, learn, master our minds, develop new skillsets, learn new ways of influence. But by being accountable for ourselves and our development now, we are preparing for the realities of a future that does hold both progress and struggle. And finally, action. Action. Action. It's always about taking the steps to improve. Always about taking the steps to try to build, to change, to, to shift, to accelerate towards our dreams, to create things that are awesome. To manifest new ideas and products and tools and processes and team, and to build and to build, not for the sake of building, but for the sake of moving towards whatever our dream is. Maybe your dream has nothing to do with building a product or a team, but maybe your goal is just to get healthier, go to the gym, get that workout in, cook better, healthier foods for yourself. Action. Action. Action. The real mark of a person who has great integrity is they're always in motion towards a better life. Whatever that means for them. As you notice, I hope if you've been with me for a while, I've Been teaching personal development for 20 years plus years now. I don't dictate what your life should be like. I never tell you what the goal is or should be for yourself. I try to illuminate human behavior. I know a lot of things about people after having coached people for this many years at this level. And I can tell you we all have to work through a lot in our lives. But I also know that the people who do it, who change, who shift, who make a difference, who, who build a better future for their families, they are action oriented people. They don't stew in problems forever. They seek the solution. They take an action. They recognize maybe they didn't do something right. They take the action to apologize and to improve. They recognize they fell off, you know, their pattern of behavior or the habits that they want. They're not practicing their high performance habits. Okay, cool. I recognize that. I can be aware of that. I can accept that. I'm going to take account accountability. Let me get back on track. Action, action and action. Hey guys, it's Brandon.

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Just go to progress mode.com what does self responsibility mean? Even you know, we hear a lot about it in personal development and psychology. And to me it basically means you take ownership of your life. And that means specifically five things to me. Number one, self responsibility always starts with your thoughts. You are the director of your own thoughts. Thoughts. You have the power to think and you have the power to direct those thoughts. Now it's true, lots of random thoughts come up. And it's true tons of unconscious thoughts guide us throughout the day. But what makes the ultimate different is those things that we direct our mind towards that if you overreacted to a situation, you got mad at somebody and you kept thinking about it all day, all day, all day, all night, all night, all night. I at some point that's a choice to have that recurrent thought Also, you walk by somebody, you think, oh, she's ugly. Or you scroll by something, oh, they're stupid. Or something happens in your life and you throw a judgment at somebody else. That's a thought, isn't it? And we also have lots of negative thoughts. Negative thoughts about ourselves, about our life situation, about other people. Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for those. We have to know that we're the only ones who can change those, aim those, direct those. It's up to us to be proactive in choosing positive thoughts about ourselves and the world and our opportunities. It doesn't mean we have no negative thoughts. In fact, it's impossible not to have negative thoughts. And negative thoughts are often very, very, very helpful to direct us. But it does mean that we're in charge of our thoughts over a period of time. Of course, we can have a bad day, a bad moment, a negative reaction. But on par every day, we take responsibility and we say, I'm going to aim my thoughts. I'm going to choose them. I'm going to use affirmations or conscious thinking so that I can make sure that I'm motivating myself with my thoughts. I'm honoring myself with my thoughts. I'm honoring others. I'm putting goodness out into the world by thinking positively for others and for the world. Versus just complaining in our head, just feeling bad, just telling ourselves the same old story we told ourselves since high school. No one's going to change those thoughts about ourselves. We must be responsible for them. Second, we are responsible for our feelings. Now, this comes in handy to remember that emotions are different than feelings. Emotions tend to be automatic, impulsive, physical, and often unconscious meaning. Suddenly you can watch something and just feel sad. You can have an emotion that's angry. You can have an emotion that's feeling embarrassed. You can have an emotion that's happy or joyful. You have positive emotions, neutral emotions, and some that. Maybe people wouldn't necessarily approve of me saying negative emotions, but you certainly know when they're negative emotions. Now, emotions, because they're automatic, impulsive, physical, and sometimes unconscious, you don't get to choose all those. Those kind of rise up on you. But what lingers around and what exists a little bit later? Feelings or ongoing feelings. We have a tremendous amount of control over those. And we can choose to generate the feelings through our thoughts and our reactions in such a way that we teach ourselves to be in more positive emotional ranges. It doesn't mean that we don't dip into the negative. It doesn't mean that there's not a spectrum of reaction and emotion and feeling in the world. It doesn't discount the bad ones, and it doesn't honor or celebrate and think you always have to be in what quote unquote, we call the positive ones. But ultimately, you know, if somebody hurts your feelings, you've got to be in charge somewhere there, don't you? Yeah. They did something in the world that you did not like, and it caused an emotion of hurt. But if you're hanging on to that hurt three days later, it's time to get responsible for whether or not that feeling is helpful to you or hurtful to you. A lot of people hang on to their emotions by defining something as cataclysmic or tremendously catastrophic. They define things as personal. They define things as it's going to be around forever. And through their definitions and their labels of the emotion, the truth is they forget that the emotion actually does pass relatively quickly. Some psychologists suggest that emotions actually pass through us in just minutes and they're actually gone. But it's our labels that holds onto it. It's our meaning and attachment to what happened. And now the story and the thoughts we tell ourselves over and over and over that makes a feeling linger days and weeks and months and some folks decades later. It doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means it's time to question whether or not those feelings are helpful. This is where therapy or coaching becomes a tremendous asset. To get perspective from others, to hear about how you're processing things. Because many people process things in incredibly disempowering ways. And the same event that one person experiences, another person experiences because we personalize them. Suddenly one person is empowered and one person is disempowered because they took an emotion, labeled it, put a meaning to it, told a story to it, and repeated it over and over and over without questioning the assumptions behind it. The emotions that actually did happen, the events that were observable, the helpfulness or hurt of their thoughts. I'm not saying there's a right or wrong. I'm saying you should be aware of whether or not your feelings are supporting you. I think everyone wants to be in a positive emotional range. And so we have to sometimes look back to events in our lives that we're still hanging on to in terms of feeling and revisit them, restate them, maybe re envision them, or simply release them. Sometimes we have to look back and honor them in a different way or learn from them. Sometimes we know we can't change it, but we can change what it means to us today as adults. That's about being responsible. We also don't blame other people for our feelings. And that's a hard one. It's very much easy to do that. But I remember the story of the Buddha who when asked how they dealt with somebody accusing him or attacking him, what did he say? He said, oh, when they go to hand me anger, I simply don't accept it. That's their thing, not mine. Now of course, I'm sure that's been attributed to a lot of people and I have no idea if the Buddha actually said that, nor do you. But it sounds like a good story, doesn't it? I love it because it just reminds you you don't have to accept the gift of other people's emotions and feelings either. You have your own internal world, protect it, be responsible for it. Third big idea is we're responsible for our focus, our aim, our goals, whatever you want to call it. I'll just use the language of aim. What we are directing or aiming our attention, our efforts to over a long period of time, that's up to us. Sure, when the kids run in, they can quote, unquote, steal our attention for a few moments or half a day, but ultimately your long term focus over a week, your goals over a week, you're responsible for those. And if you don't believe that, what ultimately happens is you become slave to everybody else's agenda, you become pulled into everybody else's desires, needs attention getting. And of course when you do that, you lose focus on your internal world and what your heart really desires. That's why we gotta be responsible for it. Fourth, we have to be responsible for our results. And people always get all worked up about this. Well, Brendan, you don't understand. I'm divorced. It's not my fault. Brendan, you don't understand. I lost a child. It's not my fault. Brendan, you don't understand. This partner stole from me. It's not my fault. And what I usually tell people, I'm like, it's probably true, you're right. But this isn't about assigning fault. It's not about blame. It's not about pointing fingers. It's about having the personal responsibility to ask what factors could I control during that situation and more importantly, when I couldn't control any of them, what am I choosing? Now I'll give an example. And it's extreme. So forgive me if this sounds callous, but I'm a high performance coach and I'm paid to challenge people I was coaching two people simultaneously who had lost somebody, a family member, and it happened to be the same month and a good six months later, one person was adapting a little bit better than the other. And now the current results in one of their lives were really not good. And as we talked about was all the results they were having, which this is six months later, which were driven, of course by grief, were easy to pin on and blame the grief. And yet another person who's very similar, in fact was coping very differently. Now, neither of them are wrong, neither of them are perfect because everyone copes differently. But we ultimately have to take responsibility for the results of our lives. Even months or years later after something that is true, tragic or traumatic, right? If I am overeating or I am living in a terrible situation, or I am in a situation where I'm enacting other bad behaviors eight months, a year, three years, 10 years later from some inciting incident, the truth is I can't blame the incident anymore. It's gone. That situation's gone, it's passed. And all we can do around is ask the results I'm experiencing right now, what factors can I control or shift or shape? I can't control that loss. I can't control this situation this person has put me in. But what I can control are my thoughts, my emotions, my reactions, my behaviors, goals and focus today. And I can choose to use those to try to get better. I might need help, it might take some time, but I'm willing to do that because I got to figure out what factors I can control now. And it's not about becoming an over controlling person because I hope you heard, I said sometimes you got to get help. But what I do suggest is that we look around and we own those results. I'll give you an example. Right now I can look around the studio where I'm filming and y', all, it is a huge mess. It's a huge mess. Now I can easily say, well, I just moved, I moved countries, I moved studios, I moved multiple homes, I moved all, all this stuff. And you know, you know, me and my wife and doing all these things and the business is doing this and all these deals are happening, oh my gosh, I'm trying to serve, you know, all these millions of people around the world and trying to build this growth day thing with everybody and, and oh, you know what? I, this place is a mess. It's not my fault. It's all those things. But I can say, well, no, the truth is, if I took 10 minutes, I could make it a little better. I got to aim my focus and my time and my attention to give myself 10 minutes to pick up some stuff. 10 minutes today, 10 minutes over. Okay. The next three weeks I could probably get this done instead of bemoaning it and feeling bad to myself. I aim my actions towards taking action. I decide to do something, I don't have to solve it, I don't have to be perfect, I don't have to do it all in one day. But I can start leaning in the right direction, building something more positive, something more supportive of my creative space. Of course, there's times in our lives where there's intensity or loss, but just like our feelings, over a span of time, we have a tremendous amount of personal power in our results. I know, I know. Trust me, I know. If you're having a really hard time today, this is a hard message. And trust me, I've had to coach a lot of people and I've been with a lot of people in hospice. I've been with people, you know, over 20 years in some of the most impossible situations. We're talking about working with elite military members, we're talking about working with people who've lost somebody, we're talking about people who've been disabled, we're talking about people who lost the biggest thing on the biggest stage and the biggest moment of their life. Been there. And in those moments, it's not about saying, oh well, take responsibility for these results. But you know what? Over a three year average, now we're talking about something different. We are, aren't we? Because over a one year, a two year, a three year, the amount of personal power you have over your thoughts, reactions, actions, focus, goal, attention, your results is actually quite tremendous. That's why you always hear in personal development, we really do underestimate what we're capable of in a 3, 5, 6, 7, 10 year horizon. We're super terrible at estimating what we can actually achieve and build over years. And that's why I'm always graceful with people sometimes. You know what? You're a hot mess for six months sometimes. You know what? You had a really tough first year or two with your infant. Sometimes you know what business is down, pandemic happens and you might have this really difficult time and struggle. And it doesn't mean that everything will change over the course of one month, six months, one year, two year, three year. I'm not flipping about it, I'm just saying that results over a period of time, we can really shape those. Your actions of proactivity, of positivity, of productiveness. Those things actually add up as like a compound effect to something extraordinary. That understanding that our thoughts, feelings, actions, reactions, aim, goals, attention, focus and results do compound into something helps us take personal responsibility because it motivates us to realize that all of that, all of that over a period of time tends to lead to pretty extraordinary life. Last idea today is that we're responsible for our momentum and resilience. We're the only ones who gain momentum for ourselves and we tend to be the only ones who can pick ourselves up off the floor. And your resilience, whether it's now, next month, a year or two from now, you get to choose to pick yourself up. You get to choose to rise from this and be a more intentional, more healthy, more courageous, more action centered, more positive, more humble and more servant than you have ever been before. You get to get better. The psychology of post traumatic growth is true that a lot of people can take really difficult situations and over a period of time rise from a more intentional, proactive and positive person. And I believe that is what attracts us all here. I am not here saying any of this is easy. I'm just here saying it's your job. I'm not here saying any of it's easy. I'm here saying you're the only one who can be responsible for the things we talked about. I'm not here saying it's easy and you have to do it by yourself. Sometimes that therapist or that coach can change everything. I'm not here saying it's easy, but I am here saying if you realize the magic of making self improvement a way of life, if you realize the momentum and the compound effect of what we talk about here, then you do realize that making this day and every day a great day to grow, that responsibility and that choice can change everything.