The 5 RITUALS That Predict Success - DO THIS EVERYDAY!

If you winning for the rest of your life, so to speak.

Right.

Winning. If you're just experiencing that the rest of your life, you're gonna have a very empty life. You actually have the greatest joy, the greatest fulfillment, the greatest meaning in the dancing between the two.

So we've done a lot of talking about rituals before in other videos. I figured we could put an interesting spin on that today. Do you have like a top five or a top three or something like that? We'll say top five, yeah. If you had to pick the top five daily rituals that you do, since you've kind of figured out your routine, as we've shown in other videos before, what would be the top five rituals that you do daily to create success?

Well, so for me, the word ritual is another word for routine. Alright. And what is a routine? It's nothing more than being consistent with action. Okay. So most people have to put an established routine in place to actually eliminate distractions. That's what the routine kind of does to kind of set you up. So when you look at routines, rituals, whatever you want to call it, right, Whatever terminology you want to call it, they're both the same thing. I think the ultimate thing is how you start your day matters. And what you do in the beginning of your day is probably just as important as what you do throughout your day. And what I mean by that is I have found that even if I'm going through some stressful situations, and I had some earlier this week because obviously I still own businesses, I'm not just a quote thought leader, I'm a practitioner. Like I am actively running businesses on a consistent basis.

Yeah. And it's not this business. There's more businesses.

Well, yeah, there's a handful of other ones. Right. So including a very large company that, you know, my decisions could impact lives. If I make a bad decision, you know, a bad decision, you know, several hundred people might lose their job or something. That's just not something I'm okay with. Right.

I think when I'm in that zone or when I'm in a really good place and I'm trying to get started, started in my day, I think I start off my day every single day with a sense of expectation and gratitude. What I mean by that is I expect that good things are going to happen and then I actually verbalize those good things. Now, as a person of faith, I might say something along the lines of, God, I know you're awesome. I know you love me. I know how powerful you are. I know you're going to open up wonderful doors for me today. Great relationships. You, you're going to give me all the strategies, all the techniques, all the wisdom I need to battle the day and come through. I know you've got my back. You see what I'm saying? That's my expectation side. My gratitude side is going to be very similar. As a person of faith, it's God. Thank you so much. Thank you for my breath in my lungs. Thank you for the ability to be able to use my ears and hear sounds that are beautiful. Thank you for the visibility within my eyes and allowing me to see. Thank you for the ability to use all of my limbs and touch and feel and run and jog and walk. Because I've shared this before. My wife herself struggles to get around now. It's difficult for her to walk for long periods of time without a cane or a mobility scooter. Things that some people would take for granted. If you would just spend time verbalizing those things just to get started, then you could work your way up to the other things. Because that expectation now becomes things. Those expectations soon become things of fruition. They start to kind of manifest themselves where. Which then gives you something else to be gratitude on. But at any point in time when I was literally in my darkest moments, if I had just gone through the motions or the process of just being thankful in the moment, setting the expectations, I know you're opening doors. I know my relationships are going to be bold and beautiful. I'm so thankful for my hands and my heart, my eyes, my brain. It's simple stuff.

Even when everything in your life seems to be going wrong, how do you wake up and still be like, I'm find things to be thankful for?

Well, it's very simple. I just gave you the really super easy ones. Here's the deal. The reality is, when it comes to expectations and gratitude, you are only going to experience that which you expect, and you can only be thankful for that which you understand or focus on. Okay, so if you're not focusing on things that you can be grateful for, it's going to be increasingly more difficult. The reality is the time that you need gratitude and expectation the most is actually going to be the very same time that you probably feel the worst. That's when you need it the most.

And that's when nobody wants to use it.

And that's when nobody wants to use it, which is why it's so important to make it part of your daily. Your daily routine, your daily ritual, if you will. Like, I mean, I've shared this before 5:30 alarm goes off every morning. Every single morning from 5:30 to 5:45 to 6 o'. Clock. I'm in that gratitude and expectation phase the entire time.

So you just, you roll out of bed, you go to your closet or whatever I think of, sometimes it's my.

Closet, sometimes I'll just be there in the bed. Sometimes I'll actually roll over and I' lay my hand on my wife and be thankful and say things over her that she doesn't. Of course she's probably going to figure it out now, but you know, these are things that I do, right? And when you get into a situation where that becomes a force of habit, it's not hard for you to find the things to be grateful for because you've already articulated and things articulated those things. When things are good and sometimes as much as it sounds that you're. It's repetitive, right? You want it to be, you want to have a certain level of emotional intensity behind it, like a connection to it. But because it's already there, it's become so ritualized and routine wise, right? You are already setting yourself up to kind of bring into your life that what you're hoping for. Essentially when you have a gratitude and expectation journey as part of your daily routine, when things are not going really well, it's easier for you to find your center and find your place. When you find your center and find your place, cognitive behaviors are actually simpler, right?

I think it's easier to think.

It is easier to think because you're not getting wrapped up in the emotions of all the things that you're battling. Instead you're able to just. It's a dopamine here, it's a serotonin boost and it's a perspective shift.

Is it because you went ahead and from the moment that you woke up, you went ahead and handled those emotions with the gratitude. Like I'm just curious how that works.

I guess what I mean by that is I'm not handling those emotions when I wake up. I'm setting the tone for those emotions when I wake up. Okay. So rather than my emotional state controlling how I'm going to think, how I'm going to act and what outlook I'm going to use. I'm going to let my mind tell my emotions how they should be thinking and feeling throughout the day, you're deliberately.

Framing it in a specific way.

Exactly. And that's the power of gratitude and expectation. Because most people say what I start off with gratitude, it makes me feel good, right? It's a meditative practice. All of that's true and all that's good. But when you dig under the surface, what you are doing is you are setting, you are telling your life and your day and everything behind it what to do. You're not letting it tell you what to do. And look, I'm not a perfect, it's not a perfect science. I have bad days every now and again myself, but I don't stay there as long as I used to. I would have one bad event and that might wreck me for six months. Now, if I have one bad event, something that I'm not super crazy about, or something that just seems like it's gonna be a negative impact, it might take me a day, maybe two.

So it sounds like it's like as you practice doing this, more and more you become conditioned to do it and it gets a lot easier. But in the beginning, if you're noticing, you're trying to build this first habit of waking up every day and feeling that gratitude, it's going to feel uncomfortable because you're not used to it, right?

Absolutely. And look, so much of your emotional well being and your mental well being a direct copy of your physical well being. Here's what I mean by that. If you want your physical nature to change, what do you have to do?

Change your thoughts, Right.

If you want your physical change to happen, what do you have to do?

I mean, you can work out, right?

Okay, go to the gym, workout, do some running, do some walking, do some kind of activity. Keep that in mind. Okay, now just set that for a second. If you want your emotional well being to change, what do you have to do?

Change your thoughts.

That's part of it, I guess.

You have to work out your mind.

You're working out the very same thing that you're trying to influence. You can't influence anything in a positive direction without putting it to work.

I see.

Okay. So, you know, when I was dealing in some of the darkest areas of, you know, even the suicidal thoughts and stuff, I was happening, you know, you know, several years ago, it became very necessary for me to take complete ownership and accountability of those thoughts and then reframe them immediately in the moment and continue doing that over and over again. So when I would have. You've heard me say this before on my bridge moment where I have this, on the left side, I got this, this entity yelling how much, how unworthy I am, how unlovable I am, how insecure I am, how I don't matter, all that kind of Stuff on my left side and on the right side I've got this other angel, if you will, that's like, no, you're wrong. You're amazing. You got possibilities. Just keep going. Like, don't give up, right? We all have that battle, right? And it's at different volume levels. When we're going through a really tough time in life, it's obvious somebody turns up the volume on this one. When things are really good, you turn up the volume on this one. Your happy space is in the middle, right? You almost have to have a source that's going to push you past your limitations. And sometimes it's an external force and sometimes it's an internal force. And then you also have to have on the other side where you're having a season of just winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winging. If you winning for the rest of your life, so to speak, right? Winning. If you're just experiencing that the rest of your life, you're going to have a very empty life. You actually have the greatest joy, the greatest fulfillment, the greatest meaning in the dancing between the two. It's literally like they're doing a two step tango or something, right? So if you're going to change your emotional well being, maybe you're suffering on the emotional level. Okay, if you're doing that, then essentially you need to be working on emotional content to develop the emotional level. Because you can't solve an emotional problem with logic because it's based on feeling. Conversely, you can't solve a logical problem with emotion because it's feeling. You see what I'm saying? These things are interconnected. And when you set the tone out with expectations and gratitude from step one, you are starting the anchor or the result or the footing or the root system that you need. For as it grows, you're able to feed it a little more sunlight, feed it a little more water, and before long it goes from acorn to oak tree. Wow.

Makes a lot of sense. So what's the second habit?

So the next thing is going to actually spend time, more time in the prayer and meditation phase. Here's what I mean by that. We already set the precedent for gratitude and expectation, which in some cases can be a form of prayer and meditation. This is specifically more along the lines of trying to bring things into your life. So it's the presence of asking. It's understanding, wisdom, knowledge, understanding relationships, things that you can bring in to add value to your daily life and actually opening that window. But only if you have the expectation of Actually hearing those things and, and seeing those things actually come to fruition in your life. A lot of people will pray and meditate and ask for things that they don't believe will actually happen. And as a result, they block themselves.

I was going to say, like, does that block you off from the result?

It does. And it took me a number of years, almost a solid decade to fully understand that because the mind is so powerful and we give off so much energy as people. Like, we have more energy within us than anything else. Like, we have water and energy. That's essentially what kind of makes up the human body. There's an electrical signal that sends a signal to move your finger, move your toe, move your elbow, move your knee. Right. All of that stuff all the way to your digestive system that you think is automatic, but your brain is telling your digestive system to work every day. So when you put these things into practice on a consistent level, you are training your brain to actually bring into your life the things that you're talking about, the things that you want. The third thing that I think is so powerful in maybe the top five, is for me, I do something every single day that grows my mind, my body, or my spirit. While I'm at my cognitive high. When I'm most alert, most awake, is when I typically do all of my learning. I intentionally don't do my learning late in the afternoons, maybe around the 2 or 3 o', clock, because for me, from the 2 to 4 o' clock range, that's my toughest time of the day.

Me too. But I get a second wind after.

That and I do too. But what I'm saying is we all have these windows, but some people, the biggest mistake they're making is they're learning in the window when they're not on a cognitive high because they just kind of align their day differently.

That's number three. I think the fourth one is probably pretty important as well, which is understanding the power of priorities. We've done some other videos before on how to position priorities and how to set them. But a priority is nothing more than the thing that you're going to take action on that's going to give you the greatest lift or the greatest advancement.

So the daily ritual associated with that would be constantly revising your to do list and your priority list so that you're up to date.

Yeah. And even getting the dopamine hit when you're able to check stuff off.

That's one of the biggest things we've talked about before. And the biggest things That I think you've probably seen me learn over the last year that's provided a lot of my growth. Has been trying to get myself into the habit of managing those to do lists and stuff because I used to keep everything in my head.

How did that work out for you?

I was stressed and overwhelmed all the time and got like nothing done.

Yeah. And you know, for me, it's funny, I have notes. So I'm at the gym and I'm doing my personal development stuff along with my body and whatnot. I'm making notes on my iPhone, but I have just as many notes on pieces of paper that I do on the iPhone. Because if something I've learned to. This is something unique that I think I do that maybe people can benefit from. I learned to keep something of a note taking device near me at all the times and be okay with stopping what I'm doing to jot down something. Some of my most impactful quotes, you'd like to say I talk in fortune cookie, meaning I quote stuff all the time. I don't even know I'm quoting stuff. Like I'm.

Well, you can be very philosophical in.

Nature, you know, so you got that. But I also create a lot of quotes. Right. Some of my most impactful quotes have actually come just because I'm being open to source on a regular basis. Open to what? Sources mean God for me, right? I'm being open in that moment to receive.

But then when you receive it. Because I think a lot of people have ideas. Exactly. I think a lot of people have ideas. Like it's like the person that, you know, sees, sees a product that they thought of five years ago. They're like, I could have been rich. You know, that was hard, but somebody.

Else took action on it.

Exactly. But people have ideas, but then they don't do anything with them.

Well, look, I think it was Stephen R. Covey that said in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And it's been a decade or more since I've read the book, but one of the things that he mentioned was having the importance of having an idea folder, an idea file, right. Having a device, a place you go to just jot down ideas. And then when you have reflection times, when you have a few moments, you just go back to your ideas folder and look at your ideas folder and say, okay, well what idea do I want to dabble in or take advantage on or experiment with or whatever? Maybe you'll be the next person to invent the toothpick. I mean, who knows, right? That's kind of a key factor there.

Makes sense. So, yeah, making sure that you're always taking time every day to keep that to do list, keep that priority list up to date. And when you have these ideas about things that you should do differently, things that you should do in any way, make sure that you write them down.

Yeah, absolutely. After that, it comes down to diligence over distraction. Super successful people, myself, all of us are diligent minded. Like when we're. When we're at work or we're in our profession or career or even our hobbies, we're there to play.

Is that number five?

Yeah, number five. I mean, that would have been my fifth one anyway. I think that that's what separates people who truly end up getting breakthrough and transformation and consistency. It's like they tie emotional meaning to actually doing the diligent hard work. It's almost like they almost get, like a reward for doing the hard work first. There's nothing more powerful than the power of diligence. If you literally, if you go at life in general and you're consistently hitting it on a consistent basis, you are going to make progress. You might stumble along the way, but if you don't give up, you're going to make progress. What happens is people get distracted by life.

If you get distracted by life, you're going to have a hard time being diligent. When it comes down to it, when you go to attack your day, attack your day, be consistent.

We talked in the last episode about productivity, about having a to do list, but then also the importance of having your not to do list, or the writing down the things that are actually distracting you on a frequent basis and making a note that, you know, maybe you can just say, hey, in five years, I can watch tv. In five years, I can watch the.

I myself, I like a good video game. From time to time, I find that you can decompress from it, Right? But if I'm in what I refer to as a push season, meaning we've got a live event we're planning for, I've got to come in and do content like this. I got to go and do podcasts, I have to go do Clubhouse now on a consistent basis to make sure I'm feeding people there, make sure that I'm making the right relationships. If I'm in a push season specifically, I eliminate as many distractions as possible, which means we may have the newest Hitman or the newest Assassin's Creed or newest video game that I love. I want to sit there and just don't out and be done with for a while. But if I'm in a push season, I don't touch it because I know that I'm trading. I'm trading valuable hours.

Right. For valuable lack of progress.

Well, the thing is, one of the things that I first learned from you, I think five years ago when we first met was you kept talking about this concept of seasons and how life, in life, there are seasons. And I had never heard of life being put that way. I thought it was just, you're working towards success and then you get there. But you kind of illustrated for me that, you know, no, there's literally, there's seasons where you're focused on. I forget what the word. Like sowing and reaping. Right. There's seasons of sowing and there's seasons of reaping.

It's funny. And so that comes directly from the Bible and this theology of seasons there, in fact. So the main currency back in the golden days, okay. Was livestock. And then essentially what become agriculture, some kind of farming. Okay. So in the Bible specifically, it talks a lot about terminology that would be equated to gardening or building or livestock.

Which is why seasons make sense.

So, and it doesn't matter if it's livestock, if it's building or if it's agriculture, it doesn't matter which one of those three. All of them follow the same set of seasons. So the Bible talks about something called seed sow at harvest. So, so you're going to seed, you're going to sow, you're going to harvest. Seed is cultivating the land, getting the land ready, tearing some stuff up, throwing the seed down. Sowing is kind of like putting the dirt back on top of it, maybe sprinkling some water on it, let the sun shine on it, let some rain come, and then you wait patiently for the harvest to come, for all the hard work that you put in firsthand. Farming by nature does not equate success immediately upon applying the seed. Yeah. Okay.

Well, you wouldn't expect to plant a seed and then have a tree the next day.

Well, not exactly. And you can't plant an oak tree in the winter. Right. It's not going to get the nutrients, the sun, the water. It might get water through snow melting, but it's not going to get what it needs to become successful.

And likewise, you can't become successful if you're in a season dominated by distractions.

Right, exactly. But however, if it's snowing, you can build a good snowman. Right. Each season has something Beneficial about it. Most people don't understand that there 1. There are a set of seasons, and you can just use the set of seasons that we normally experience as people.

Well, also, you can control what season you're in, too. You can decide. I'm in a sacrifice season now, right?

Yes and no. You can decide what you do within a season. You can't necessarily dictate the season itself.

Got it.

All right, so, for example, we'll take the COVID experience. Okay? Covid experience. If we're looking at it at a global scale as a sense of season, it would have been what's known as winter, a very long winter, but it would have been winter. It's when not a lot can be planned, not a lot can be grown, and you're simply waiting for the thaw. Okay. Well, after winter comes spring. Spring, typically is when you actually put new seed on the ground. You start preparing the fields. You start getting ready for heart, like getting ready for stuff. Okay? And after spring comes summer. And summer is a lot of sowing, sowing, meaning the hard work, Right? As you go through the hard work, then you get ready for the harvest. Right? And it doesn't matter what career you're in, what profession you're in, what relationship you're in, all of those things are going to go through a very similar cycle of season. You're going to have moments, even now with your young child on the way and everything like that, that you guys are deeply in love and everything's awesome. And, you know, as soon as your child's born, I guarantee you'll be weeping like a baby. You'll finally understand the sense of a father and why you see me push my kids as hard as I push them and try to protect them as hard as I. You'll get it like that. Like, it'll just be boom, no explanation needed. Right. Well, from that, you're going to go into what we like a honeymoon phase. You know, you and my daughter are going to be like.

Baby, it's us. It's our family. It's us. You know? And then somewhere down the line, you're going to hear out of nowhere, and you'll be like, you. No, you get them. You get her. Like, this is a season. This is a cycle, right? And before you know it, they'll go from baby to teenager, and everything in between matters. Who that person becomes, who that young one becomes comes on the moments, whether or not you're just spanking them for no reason, sending them to bed without an explanation, or you sit them down and say, all right, here's the deal. You're getting the spanking because of why and you force them to have some cognitive functionality themselves. You see what I'm saying? Like, yeah, there's so much that goes involved in life and business and career and relationships that comes down to this essence of seasons, comes down to this essence of creating a modality, if you will, to actually create improvement. Now, if you do the wrong thing in the right season, you get no result. If you do the right thing in the wrong season, you get no result. You have to do the right thing in the right season to get the right result. And as you're doing that, you're, well, go ahead.

How do you know what season you're in?

I think it comes down to experience.

But if you don't have the experience.

Yet, you got to follow the principles that I mentioned at the very beginning of the video, which is going to be like, you know, expectation and gratitude. Right. Asking for during the prayer and meditation, asking for wisdom to know the difference. I can tell you that the journey principles brand that we have, the Steven Scoggins brand that we have got. Okay, we are still very much in a sow season.

Yeah, we're still working on building.

Exactly. However, a year and a half ago, we were very much in the seed season. Yeah, we were trying to figure out, okay, how can we serve people in what way matters to them? How can we get free content them in a very quick fashion? How do we help people who are like I was, that had no money. Right. I'm not, I'm not building an entity on making like, I'm only going to work with people that have money. Screw that.

So I guess I could say this. If you don't have a plan for your life, you're in the seed season. Right. Because you have to. The first thing you have to do.

Is you're either in the seed season or you're in the winter.

Got it?

Okay, so here's some emotional ties to winter despair, frustration, overwhelm, anxiety, self esteem issues, insecurity issues, self sabotage. Those are winter, like, symptoms.

And what do you do in the winter?

In the winter is a process of planning. You're planning for your field, you're planning for your crop. I'm going to plant an apple tree out there. What I would refer to in the real world is growth. You're reading, you're studying, you're watching. You're not getting lost in what you don't have. You're getting lost in what you can.

Build and you're learning in the process of building for the.

Exactly. You move into spring season when self confidence starts to rise, knowledge starts to increase, action starts to be taken, routines are set in place and you keep going. You move into summer when all of a sudden all the hard work that you've put together for the first two seasons is now starting to kind of show itself a little bit. And while you're still pushing yourself, you're pushing yourself from a place of immaturity to maturity. And then after that season comes obviously the harvest season. That's when everything that you've worked for, all the work that you put in, all the managing your money wisely, all getting rid of toxic relationships and getting new relationships in. When all of that stuff begins to take shape and you've put in the reps and you've done the work, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, now you get to harvest the benefit. You're surrounded by great people, you have a mission, you have a call, you're taking action, you're making progress. And now there's something called hope.

One thing about that season, about the harvest season, is hope.

And then you're going to start the cycle all over again. So whatever limiting belief, you maybe had to get to this level. Well, that's great. You've done the growth process, you got to this level. Well, now there's probably something else you've got to work on.

Yeah. The way you described it to me was more in a business capacity, but it works for life as well. If you start out at the bottom, your first step is to go from step zero to step one and then step one to step two. But at every step, you're going to have to evolve. And as you evolve, you're going through those seasons over and over again.

Well, I would say I don't necessarily like the word evolve and I don't like the word evolve for one reason. If you look at the evolve, it's a process of osmosis. It's a process of something's becoming something else or something's transitioning to something else without any internal or external factors. Okay. I would like to say that you're exchanging the word evolve with becoming because becoming takes work, becoming takes consistency. Right. Becoming takes thought. Becoming takes an action plan. Becoming takes being careful which relationships you're in.

So evolve kind of puts the pretense that it doesn't require work.

Well, it doesn't require works and it doesn't require focus. And that's the furthest thing from the truth, if you're going to build a career you love, a life, you love a relationship you love, and you want to, like, just feel like your life is full of passion and meaning and beauty, then it's going to take intentional focus, intentional work, and before long, you'll actually be there before you know it. It surprises me how many people come back after we've worked with them for a little while. Whether it's been in a live event, the online school, or just one on one, or even some of the Instagram stuff we've done, it doesn't matter.

In every single circumstance, when somebody says, hey, I went and did the work, I went and put in the reps, they always say this. I don't know why I waited so long. I don't know why I waited so long. Oh, my gosh, if I could. If I had just known this, I would have taken a step. I don't know how many more videos we can do where it's like, take the damn step, right? Like, stop waiting. Stop messing around. Get after it.

Hey, some people have to watch. I'm a good example. Some people have to watch thousands and thousands of videos. Like, I watched thousands of hours of videos with no, no action taken on my part. And I had to sit for years and watch myself not grow, but still feed myself information before it finally clicked that if I don't start stepping up, if I don't do something and take action on the stuff that I'm learning, never going to get anywhere. It was a very hard lesson to learn, and it left me at rock bottom, and I've been kind of scrapping from there ever since.

Yeah, I mean, I think if people go back and watch and just take the five takeaways and just do those things consistently, they'll be able to very quickly realize what season they're in, which means they'll know what to do inside of that season, which means they can actually start to build some momentum. I think if you do those things, you'll be winning the day and finally, well on your way to actually making a successful life and loving what you're doing.

Sounds good, man.

Perfect. Rock on. As you can see, your questions are important. Do me a favor and drop your questions in the comments section below to make sure we can answer your specific questions. In the meantime, you're probably going to check out this video right here. Check it out. People that are very successful with money are constantly learning about money, See it as a tool.