In this coaching session, Jim Kwik introduces an original acronym, KNOW SELF, to guide participants through a practical, self‑discovery process. He walks through each letter, pairing it with a concrete exercise or mindset shift: - K – Know: Identify five personal strengths or qualities and write them down, emphasizing the power of self‑recognition as a foundation for confidence. - N – Navigate: Become aware of emotional triggers and habitual thought patterns, using journaling prompts and a "to‑feel" list to deliberately cultivate desired emotions. - O – Own: Re‑author one’s personal story by reframing past challenges as stepping‑stones, asking reflective questions that turn setbacks into growth narratives. - W – Welcome: Embrace change by adopting a work‑in‑progress mindset, recognizing adaptability as the true driver of learning and success. - S – Silencing: Quiet the inner critic through awareness, curiosity, and self‑compassion, drawing on techniques like tapping and kindness practices. - E – Embrace: Accept imperfection, treating failure as feedback and shifting focus from perfection to progress. - L – Learning: Develop self‑soothing strategies (breathing, nature exposure, gratitude, meditation, etc.) to regulate the nervous system and maintain emotional balance. - F – Forgive: Conduct forgiveness visualizations to release resentment, which Kwik reports dramatically alters brainwave patterns. Throughout, Kwik intersperses personal anecdotes, audience interaction, and brief brain‑care tips, encouraging participants to apply the exercises immediately for tangible improvement in wellbeing and performance.
Chapters
Have an acronym here for you. So, I make this post where I say one of the keys is you have to know yourself, trust yourself, love yourself, and and and be yourself, right? But in order to do all those things, you have to start by knowing yourself. So let's turn this into an acronym: Know Self. So K N O W S E L F. I'm gonna go through this, and let's come up with some exercises together on. How we can put this into play. And then I'll teach a few things that I'm doing this month to take care of my brain. And I'll answer some of the questions that were submitted, and then we'll open it up for everybody. And again, the goal with Kwik Success is I want you to use— get practical, pragmatic things that you could do to immediately make your life a little bit easier, better, or brighter. So this one would be no exception. All right. So the N in know is actually know. I think it's important for us to identify— I talk a lot about superheroes, right? And a superhero doesn't just have a power, but they have purpose behind the power. But it— I do believe we all have some inherent natural gifts or strengths or talents or traits or something we've developed over our lifetime. So the K in KNOW is know your strengths. So How do you identify and leverage? Because remember, when I talk about limitless, certain things are limited, right? We have a limited amount of time, 24 hours in a day. There might be a limited amount of, of right now money in the bank or connections that you have. It's a finite amount. What becomes more limitless is leverage, right? And how do you get more output from the same amount of resources that you already have using your creativity, your imagination, your learning? And so why don't we start by knowing what makes us strong? You know, what makes us unique? On a piece of paper, let's— you don't have to share this if you don't want to in the chat or in the comments if you're watching this live. If you're watching this recorded, which most people do, I'm very grateful that you join us live, those who are, but I know time zones and work schedules. Let's list 5 strengths. Or qualities or traits that you appreciate about yourself. Okay, so why don't you start there? So the K is know, and just take a moment and think about or write down— I prefer if you could write it down. I know a lot of you have a journal for quick success. You know, you just have something, you know, the same notebook that you use each time. List 5 strengths or qualities or traits that you can appreciate about yourself. You know, it's so funny because I remember doing this exercise years ago and the curator, the facilitator was saying, you know, write 5 things that are, you know, you like about yourself or appreciate about yourself and 5 things you don't. And everyone was so much, so much easier to write the things that were, you know, weaknesses or things that we were not so happy about. It's kind of interesting how our mind goes. I don't know if you can resonate with that, but 5 strengths, qualities, traits, and that's the K. You've heard me say this before, but if you've seen one of my favorite movies, The Matrix, where Neo goes to see the all-knowing and wise Oracle in the kitchen, there's a sign above the door that says, know thyself. Having the curiosity to know yourself. So we'll start with your strengths. Okay, is giving, driven, resilience, creative, curious. Oh, I like those. Those are good. Okay, so you're thinking about 5 strengths or qualities or traits that you could appreciate about yourself. Rebecca, communicative, great sense of humor, a greater building relationship, wonderful brain, and of course creative visionary. I love it. Learning, inquisitive. I mean, these are great. All right. So, okay. So we start there. You want to love yourself, you get to know yourself. And you don't have to stop at 5, but this, this is wonderful. And taking a moment to like, to own it, right? I take my son, he's 2 years old. We go to this gym once a week and they— it's funny, it's funny. They do these exercises and then they do this breathing where they pretend they're smelling a flower. And then blowing out candles, like, as a 2-year-old, right? So they have to calm their nervous system, and then they exercise again, and then they do that again. But it starts the same way. This starts with— they make— they make— they flex their biceps like, I am strong. And then they go, they go, I am brave. And then they say, I could do this. But I really do believe that, you know, our self-talk is something for real, and it does make a difference. Sorry. So the N in no-self. Navigate. Once you get to know yourself, you want to be able to navigate. And this is the acronym I'm looking at here that I'm creating in real time with you. Navigate. Here's, here's something that we can navigate— our emotions. There are these— it came up in the community also— emotional triggers. So I challenge you this week To build the self-awareness to recognize the patterns that are holding you back. They say about 40% of our day is habitual. You know, some people say 95% of our thoughts are the same thoughts we had yesterday and day before that. Regardless, it's a big amount. So what are the patterns, either the patterns of feelings, the patterns of thoughts that are keeping us stuck? And a strategy around this. How many of you, uh, how many of you journal? So this would be a strategy that, that I use and have used journaling, uh, the prompts maybe to track your, uh, even your triggers, your emotional reactions to things. And that's why I feel like journaling is a wonderful time for reflection, whether you do do it in the morning or you do it during the day, or is it different times or nighttime? So the K is know your strengths and is navigate your emotions. And the strategy is recognize the patterns of emotions that we are in. You've heard me say that I have a to-feel list, just like a to-do list. And there's like, I pick 3 emotions I'm going to cultivate for that day because I don't think we have emotions as much as we do them. There's a strategy that we're doing, our physiology, our thinking, and that awareness is very important. The O in no is own, and what I want you to own is your story, right? What keeps us in a certain stuck state is well, number one, our state, right? But also the story that keeps us there, the scripts that we that keeps us there. And I I really do believe that we can be the hero in our own story. We've heard it's you hear it all the time that you can't. Compare your chapter, you know, 5 to someone else's chapter 23. But we're all going through a hero's journey of our own villains, our own obstacles. We find mentors, we overcome challenges, we taste defeat, and there's some kind of reflection. So the O is, and you can do this with your journaling, is own your story. So how can you look at your story? Maybe do 2 things. You could reframe your past experiences. Like the big thing to a growth mindset, right, is when you look at the past or mistakes, when you start reframing those mistakes as stepping stones, not as setbacks, not as setbacks, but, you know, your opportunity for a comeback, then things change. A question you could ask for your story is things like, How has a past challenge shaped me for the better? And I could think of immediately 3 or 4 examples in my life where at the time, like sometimes we don't know why certain things happen until we have hindsight. And my prayer for everyone would be that they could go back, you know, in the future, look back at today and realize why things happened. The way they happened, that it took you to a beautiful place, but maybe we didn't know it in the moment. But we're not going to get the answer unless we ask the question. So how has this past challenge or problem shaped me for the better? To be able to, to shape our own story moving forward, right? The W in KNOW— and I'll go to your questions— is welcome. And for me, February Really is about welcoming new change. Growth requires flexibility. It requires adaptability. Ultimately, it's not the highest IQ or the most— like, it's not the most important trait, I think, is our ability to adapt. That's why learning is all adaptation, right? Our ability to rapidly adapt in a changing world. So welcoming change. Because you've heard me say that growth could be hard, change could be scary, but nothing is as hard and scary as being stuck somewhere you don't belong. So how can you welcome that change? 'Cause it's inevitable. You know, a mantra you could say is, I am a work in progress. You know, I'm a work in progress, not a finished product. Right? And you could just come up with something that just is useful for you. I'm a work in progress, not a finished product. The S in SELF, so no self, This is a process of silencing and reducing the doubter inside of us. So silencing the inner critic. And again, that's easier said than done. There we've done multiple podcasts on this subject. We've had experts come in even on book club doing tapping and other ways of changing our inner self-talk. Sometimes the enemy is not the enemy. Like it's not, it's not your boss or it's not that incliner. It's not the thing that you're facing. Often it's the person in the mirror. And specifically inside of us. I was, I was doing some— I was watching this thing on Bruce Lee and, you know, he was saying there's this inside of us. We have these challenges. We have the perfectionist that we have to deal with. We have the doubter that we have to deal with. We have the ego that we have to be able to deal with. And all those things are keeping us from like our real, real self. Um, But how do you silence that doubter? And an exercise in this is starting just to— awareness is a starting point for all change. I want to remind everyone of that, including myself. Notice self-judgment. And when you find yourself criticizing yourself, instead get a little bit curious and reframe it, because that self-compassion goes a lot further than we think. We've done podcasts on the power of kindness specifically to ourselves for positive change in our life. But S is silencing those critics. Great. That's the S. The E is embrace. And I mentioned perfection, that perfectionist keeps us from taking action, doing the things, self-criticism, embracing imperfection, right? Growth comes from learning and the goal is progress, not perfection. So embracing that, you know, and the mindset shift you can make is asking yourself, what if failure was feedback, that there's no such thing as failure, it's only failure to learn something, that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of it. And I'm sure you all know and have examples in your life where, you know, you learn from a mistake and it helped you to grow and make a difference in a certain way. So that's the E, is embrace imperfection. And finally, the L and the F. The L has to be learning. Specifically though, in the case of knowing yourself, learning— here's something to learn. How are you self-soothing? Like when you're under stress and you're faced with overwhelm or conflict, how do you self-soothe? How do you regulate your own immune, like your own nervous system? Do you have habits to regulate your emotions? How do you self-soothe? Because you stay in that fight or flight or freeze, that's probably not the most healthy, certainly not from a performance or wellness standpoint. How do you soothe yourself? I'm noticing this with our kids in terms of even at that early age, how they pick up ideas on how to be able to calm themselves down. So some people And I'm curious in the chat what that would be. How do you self-soothe? How do you regulate your emotions? How do you calm your nervous system? How do you get out of that fight or flight? Is it tapping? Do you do gratitude? Do you do deep breathing work? Do you do affirmations? Do you exercise? Do you do some kind of meditation? For me, nature does it. You know, I'm in the Northeast, so it's been a little bit spending less time outside. But that's kind of my go-to. It's like You know, in other countries they prescribe like forest bathing and going out in the woods and being out in the sun. So learning how to self-soothe and having a technique around that. And then the F in no-self, you know, I went to this 40 Years of Zen with Dave Asprey, who's been on our podcast a number of times. And the claim there is that you could— your brain, because they do all this neurofeedback, could look like monks after, you know, them doing 40 years of meditation. You could get that in 5 days, right? And I'll tell you, like, when I did it, the thing that moved the needle the most to get me into those deep states was forgiveness, doing a forgiveness exercise and visualizing the person in front of me that I felt wronged me, and then actively going through a series of imagination forgiving that person. And then your brainwaves— my brainwaves changed dramatically, you know. And then I did this thing, it was a little bit intimate and raw, but where I put, you know, I went through all the people that I was consciously aware of that I was holding some kind of angst with, and then I put myself in that chair, like in my imagination, and that forgiveness just put it off the charts. But, um, The F in no self, I'm gonna say, is forgive. Releasing the pressure of yourself, of unrealistic expectations, you know, and then even just reflecting, like, what would I say to a friend who made the same mistake? You know, what would you say to somebody who did what you're being hard on yourself for? And that's often something I do, right? I also often, when I want to change my state, I'll ask, or even facing a challenge, I would ask, you know, what if somebody— well, how would somebody 10 times more loving than I would act or think or say right now? Or how would somebody 10 times smarter than me, you know, make the decision around this? Um, it just kind of puts me in a new place.
