The ONE ingredient you need to start becoming the best version of yourself (and how to get it)

Hey, welcome to the Daniel Clough Podcast. I'm Daniel Clough, and on this podcast I cover the power of building foundational health habits in your life. I also share strategies that can help you build your own foundational health habits so that you can become the best version of yourself. In today's episode, I cover the one ingredient that you need to start becoming the best version of yourself. This ingredient in itself will be the difference between you being able to obviously become a stronger and more capable person every 6 months or so. Intrigued? Well, listen on. All right, welcome to episode 11. Before we start talking about the one ingredient that you need to start becoming the best version of yourself, I want to start with a question. And the question is this: are you a better version of yourself compared to 6 months ago? And I want you to really reflect on this question, properly think about it. Look back 6 months ago. How do you feel about yourself now compared compared to them? Are you stronger? Are you fitter? Are you more confident? Are you wealthier? Are you further in your career, or can you point towards something impressive that you achieved at your job? Have you educated yourself and learned new things? Have you got better at a skill? Are you a better parent or spouse? Have you built a stronger network of friends and people around you? Look, I'm not saying you need to answer yes to all of those questions. But when you ask yourself if you are a better version of yourself compared to 6 months ago, a few things should definitely jump right out at you. And your instinct should be one of conviction that, yes, I'm a better version of myself than 6 months ago because of X and Y. Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say that if most people are really honest with themselves, they can't look themselves in the eye and confidently say, yes, I am a stronger, better, and more capable version of myself versus 6 months ago. If you find yourself in this position, this episode will help get you moving in the right direction. So the big question: what causes us to get stuck and not make big improvements to ourselves? Well, if you want to become a better version of yourself, it requires making a lot of small sacrifices every day. You need to push through friction, experience some type of discomfort, maybe put fear to one side, maybe even endure some pain. It's essentially a game of delayed gratification. In fact, that's the best litmus test. Are you regularly delaying or deferring short-term gratification? Are you regularly resisting the temptation of an immediate pleasure so that you can get a much larger, more valuable, and long-lasting reward in the long term? Now, most people don't want to do that. And I get it. I mean, instinctively, I would rather have pleasure than discomfort, but there's really no way around it. That's what you need to do if you're going to move yourself forward and become a better version of yourself. You have to be able to defer short-term pleasure and embrace some discomfort multiple times a day. So now think about your life. So now think about your own life and days. Can you start to see how many choices there are like this? Take my day yesterday for example. I planned to go for a 6-mile run at lunch. Now every bone in my body wanted to stay inside, keep warm, and avoid the discomfort of getting changed into my running gear, stepping outside in the cold and the wind, and running for 1 hour. But what I did is I observed those feelings and then I did the run anyway. As it got into the afternoon, I really felt like having an espresso. But one of my foundational health habits is to only have 2 espressos and not after midday. And based on my consistency so far this month, the right decision was to stick to the rules today. So I pushed it out of my mind and I just got on with things. I also had to sit down and write out the script for this very podcast that you're listening to. Now, getting the first version of what I want to say on paper is always the hardest bit, and I could literally feel the resistance rise up as I started to think about it. There was so much temptation to just push it to tomorrow, but no, I just forced myself to sit down with a blank page and get started. I also had a few conversations, or tough conversations, ahead of me at work, and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to punt these to tomorrow, or even next week. But really, there was no good reason to do that at all. I was just trying to find a way to avoid the discomfort of having those conversations today. And the right thing for me, others, and the company I work for was to have these conversations today and start moving things forward. So that's exactly what I did. And here's the last example. I am listening to a podcast series at the moment on sleep. Now the first 2 episodes are a combined 6 hours. Honestly, even though it's proving to be super informative, I was tempted to not bother listening to it and just find something easier to do. But I know this is going to educate me further and it's going to be super valuable to help strengthen my conviction for getting better sleep. So I forced myself to sit down with it and just get an hour of listening to it in. By the way, that podcast series was with Andrew Huberman and Matthew Walker. It's really fantastic, and I'll put a link to the series in the show notes. And look, most of my days end up going like that. They're filled with these types of discomfort and decisions. And I can either choose to push through and do these things, or take the comfortable option and not do them. Now you might say, "That doesn't sound like a nice life. Where's the fun in that? Surely it's nice to just relax and be comfortable sometimes?" And I 100% agree. Do I always make the decision to choose discomfort over pleasure? Absolutely not. For a start, I'm only human. I sometimes skip a workout I should do. I sometimes eat the cake I know I shouldn't, and I sometimes skip the conversation I know I should have. Again, I'm only human, and actually sometimes I strategically choose pleasure over discomfort. I'm super hot on 80/20— be on 80% of the time and then let loose 20% of the time. And I found that this is the best way to forget virtually all of the results and still enjoy life and be sane. And it's actually why my consistency goal for all of my habits other than alcohol are 80%. Perfection really isn't the goal. In fact, it's the enemy. But on balance nowadays, I usually do the right thing 80 to 90% of the time. Most of the time I'm choosing to avoid the comfortable option, and instead I'm taking the option that will help me grow and will move me forward. And that's because of this conviction I have that I know it will make me a stronger, more capable, and happier person over the long term. And trust me, becoming a better and stronger version of yourself over the longer time frame is 100 times worth the smaller sacrifices that you have to make every day and every week. Just to be able to genuinely answer that question I asked at the beginning of the episode with a confident yes, it's an incredible feeling. All right, I've waffled on for a few minutes. Leaving you hanging on the big question: How can you make yourself do these things every day? Just knowing you should do them isn't enough. What is the one ingredient? Well, the answer isn't willpower, it's not motivation, and it's not a secret hack. The one ingredient you need is discipline. You have to be able to find a way to do these things no matter how you are feeling. Importantly, you have to do these things when you don't feel like doing them. Remember my example day. The previous version of myself would not have had a day like this. I would have skipped things, I would have procrastinated, and I would have chosen the easiest option on at least half of those things. But back then, I was a shadow of my current self. I was soft and I was weak. If you find yourself in a similar position, you are going to have to build the type of person who will do these things regardless of how you feel. You need to become someone who is disciplined. And you have to build that base level capability or nothing will be sustainable. And you can absolutely do that. You can go from undisciplined to disciplined. And the way I was able to do it was I had to rebuild myself. And surprise, surprise, that's where the 7 foundational health habits came in. I had to become someone who was well slept, because when I was well slept, I put myself in the strongest position to be capable and to make the right choices when it came to the crunch. I had to give up alcohol, and that's because of the undeniable way that alcohol causes havoc to my sleep and so many other parts of my life. Just a few drinks the night before had a big impact on how disciplined I was the next day. I had to limit my caffeine, both in quantity but also never consuming it in the afternoon. Again, because it gets in the way of a good night's sleep. I had to become someone who was well hydrated.— it helped me be sharp, avoid headaches, be in a better mood, and just be more capable throughout the day. I had to eat enough protein, so I could put myself in the best position to build muscle and strength and in turn confidence. I had to eat mostly whole foods, so I could be lean, have the right energy and the sharpness to move through the day in the right way. A bloated and a tired version of myself is not going to make the right things happen. And I had to walk a lot, keep active, burn more calories, give myself space to think, and just get out in the fresh air. It was almost as if I had to reinstall a completely different operating system for myself, and you can do that too. So for the time being, forget about all of the things you know or you think you should do. There'll be time for all of that detail later when you're a strong, capable, and disciplined person. Right now, you're probably not that person. So instead, focus on building that person. Focus on building the 7 foundational health habits I talk so much about. If you can build these foundational health habits in your life, you will build that base of the pyramid that I like to talk about. You will become a disciplined and a confident person, and you will become the sort of person who will make the right choices and will do the right things every day. And you will start to find it relatively easy to delay short-term gratification for a bigger reward in the long term. You'll be able to confidently answer yes to my question at the start of this episode: are you building the best version of yourself? And are you a better version of yourself than 6 months ago? If you want more detail on how to get started, I'd encourage that you go back and listen to episode 9 where I talk about the 5 rules to build rock-solid habits. That will give you a good nudge in the right direction. And if you need any help doing this, you know where I am. Just reach out. Thanks for listening.