Reading, note-taking, planning, and discussion are all great things. They come with a catch though. The catch is if you don’t do anything with all the information you are gathering then nothing will happen. You have to apply all of the amazing ideas to your everyday life or the consequence is- they mean nothing. If you feel like you aren’t applying, let’s get started, right now!

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
 — Tony Robbins

First, let’s talk about some best practices for note-taking!

There are 5 main takeaways we recommend you look out for when taking notes.

Key Concepts, all the practical information in any book. Key Concepts are made up of 3 elements. Main Ideas, Supporting Ideas, and Lists and Lingo. If you are a practiced note taker you know these elements already.
Anchoring Moments and Triggering Quotes, add to your arsenal of priming for a resourceful state. If you’re in a resourceful state while implementing new ideas you have a much higher chance of achieving success.
Deep Diving Resources, provide the references and extra documents needed to examine subjects more fully.
Take Action Directives, are hidden self-coaching tools that help push you over plateaus.

Need some guidance on taking notes?

If you need some help with structure and what to look for, look no further!

If you want to take a deeper dive on these topics join us for an E-Mastermind where we go step-by-step through each of these items to help you upgrade your note-taking: Turning Ideas Into Action: The “What Now?” Method

Turning Ideas Into Action

That’s up to you! Don’t let yourself have limits, it’s time to flex that creativity muscle! Still, here’s a few ideas to help move you along!

Main Ideas and Supporting Ideas are lessons you learn or can give you wins as you validate ideas or change your perspective. Write them into the pages where you track daily work. The Main and Supporting Ideas of a book can change the way you see things. To really make them stick add a quick descriptor of the new ideas or how they changed your view of things.

These lessons learned and wins can later be condensed into your weekly review, this allows you to quickly reference the most important lessons and wins. Do this and now you’ll have a reference for where you can find deeper detail on your daily pages, your daily pages will let you know which notes to reference, and the notes will tell you exactly where to find in-depth information in the book! All with minimal searching and frustration!

Lists & Lingo can help you plan your actions & tasks when you’re planning out your goal or even setting your targets for the day. Lists, especially checklists or those that outline processes, often share the exact steps you need to implement your goal. For example, the main list in The Miracle Morning is S.A.V.E.R.S which gives you the step-by-step process to jump-start your morning, even if you aren’t a morning person. When you’re referring back to your notes, find lists that you can integrate into your daily workflow — whether that’s your morning routine, a decision-making process or even a creative project!

Anchoring Moments & Triggering Quotes are powerful primers that help you get going when you are feeling stuck. Motivation is a tough game, but in the end, there is any number of things you can do to get yourself moving. Anchoring Moments and Triggering Quotes are big players here. Call on these inspiring elements before you start any task to light the spark you need.

If you have a general quote that inspires you or an anchor that applies to many things in your life. You can use them to decorate a page draw them in the margins and use fun colors to accent them. If you have quotes and moments that are more specific to a task, plan in an extra 10–30 minutes before you start to ramp up. Visualize an Anchoring Moment that makes you feel positive about yourself, or helps you remember what it felt like to be inspired. Recite the Triggering Quotes you logged that inspired you most when reading so you capture some of that again and see that vision of the future your reading inspired!

Deep Dive Resources should fill in the notes section of any monthly pages, especially if you aren’t already utilizing this space. It’s great for keeping around anything you think might be useful in the future but is much easier to reference than searching through your daily pages.

If there are any resources you want to dive into, plan a time for them into your daily pages! When will you start? How long will it take you? What do you intend to gain from the reading?

If it seems useful but you just aren’t sure or it doesn’t seem a good fit for your focus right now. Put it down. No harm in keeping the reference around, just in case.

It’s important to note here, that you should try to implement what you’ve read in one book before moving onto another. Even if you think you don’t understand something as fully as you’d like. There is no substitute for doing and reading every book on the subject will ultimately mean nothing if you don’t take action.

So leave some space in between reading all of the incredible books out there to DO!

Take Action Directives are the over-sized elements of some of those super creative journal pages you see online. Use Take Action Directives to fill in blank spaces of your page with large bold and colored text. When you have a Take Action Directive it’s easy to start flexing your creative muscle!

If you can find stickers with your Take Action Directive, buy them, and place them right on top of the task section it’s needed for. If you can’t write in big letters so that when you go to do that task you remember it. When you feel yourself slumping. Be your own coach and repeat the directive to yourself. Do it out loud!

If Anchoring Moments and Triggering Quotes are to get you amped up before you start a task, then Take Action Directives are for during! They are invaluable for pushing yourself once you’ve hit a plateau. If you’ve ever had a coach you know what these are, as an example

A coach might yell at you to “Run Faster!”

The intent of this isn’t to tell you what to do, you know how to run, and that you need to run faster. The intent is to create focus through repetition of a simple directive. The constant pounding of the directive forces you to clear your mind of any clutter as it drives your mind towards one purpose to, RUN FASTER! The clutter fades until suddenly, you do!

These are just a few examples of how note-taking and journaling combined can become incredibly powerful tools for getting things done!

Take a look at your own notes and journal, how do you take action on these ideas so they don’t stay just words on a page? Share with us in the comments below!

This article was originally published in BestSelf.co blog

After reading hundreds of books and listening to thousands of podcasts, the entrepreneurs ended up with a start-up, BestSelf Co, and a productivity journal called the SELF Journal.

Lavery and Brouwer raised more than $300,000 on Kickstarter in 2015 and then sold the SELF journal and other products to more than 100,000 customers in their first year of business. They also were one of eight winners of Shopify’s Build a BIGGER Business competition, which highlights some of the fastest growing businesses selling on Shopify.

The win came with a sweet prize: One-on-one time with entrepreneur Tony Robbins, who has been nicknamed the “CEO whisperer” for his ability to help leaders grow their businesses. Lavery and Brouwer, along with the other winners, spent five days at Robbin’s Fiji resort for personal and group mentoring.

Their main takeaway from Robbins? Think long-term and think bigger.

“Without question, our biggest takeaway was the importance of staying focused on the long-term vision rather than the day-to-day — to stop you getting left behind,” the co-founders tell CNBC Make It.

“Tony talked about big, successful businesses that seemed untouchable. But they got caught playing catch-up because they hadn’t given enough thought to the future. They didn’t anticipate the changing market, which created space for a competitor to knock them off the top spot.”

Robbins encouraged them to answer three questions:

1. What business are you in now?
2. In the long term, what business do you need to be in?
3. What are the steps you need to take to close the gap?

For Lavery and Brouwer, who sell paper journals, the experience encouraged them to think about how to diversify their products in order to offer something for those who prefer digital products. They started by launching a free Chrome extension that blocks distracting websites and helps you get more done.

As for how to maintain a long-term view and continue to adapt to a changing market, the key is to not fall in love with your product, the co-founders learned: “If you stay focused on your product, you can lose sight of the changing market.”

On the flip side, “if you fall in love with your customers, you’ll have access to the information you need to keep serving them in innovative and interesting ways. That’s how you survive long-term.”

Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on Facebook!

Don’t miss: Self-made millionaire Tony Robbins shares the advice he would give his 21-year-old self

Have you started a New Year’s resolution? Are you already staring down the barrel of another year failed? You’re not alone. We all get inspired by the grand ideas in our resolutions.

They take the mediocre and mold it into something incredible. Inspiration leads us to a desire to take action, but grand ideas are not executable. That’s why despite best intentions you’ve already hit a wall.

To effectively use inspiration you have to channel it right, or you’ll ultimately end up in the loop of inaction. Unsure what to do next, and questioning every decision you make. Where should you channel your inspiration?

Into Setting 13 Week Goals

It’s no gimmick. 13 week goals is a how everyday people are turning the inspiration of hopes and dreams into sane and sensible steps for real life change.

If you’ve already gone through the exercise of visualization with us, assessed your goals to be S.M.A.R.T. and built a calendar that gets you excited for the year. You’ve got some inspiration built up and created a desire for change! Turning that into clear 13 week milestones is the last thing you need to achieve lasting change.

Use that energy you’ve riled up and let’s build a plan of commitment to make your success inevitable!

Take a breath, relax your shoulders, and let’s ask ourselves some questions.

In a few easy steps we’re going to show you a big vision broken down into a 13 week goal. The result will amaze you!

No Goal Too Big

To get started with 13 week goals let’s do a basic exercise. First you need a vision for your future. Think about the perfect ending to a goal you are working on right now.

Remember, the idea behind visualization is to go big! Don’t hold back and don’t “be realistic”! Target something that sends chills of excitement down your back and frightens you!

Now, take a moment and connect with that big thing, what it means to accomplish it, and what it will feel like when you do.

Got it? Do you feel excited and scared?

Good!

Now that your heart rate is up let’s get a few questions answered to flesh out these goals.

13 Week Goals Questionnaire:

1. How much time do you have available to do pursue your goal?
2. What is the one important thing you must do to make progress?
3. What are 4 milestones you can celebrate on the way to achieving your vision?
4. What can you accomplish if you do this one thing everyday for 13 weeks?
5. How close does that get you to your goal?

Let’s look at an example answering these questions.

Big Vision:

My goal is to write a 100,000 word novel!

Sounds pretty exciting and scary to me!

Questionnaire answered:

1. I have only 1 hour of free time to write.
2. The one thing I must do to make progress is write.
3. I can celebrate reaching each 25,000 word section.
4. 25,000 words divided by 13 weeks or 91 days = roughly 275 words a day.
5. With just 275 words written everyday for 13 weeks, I can write 100,000 words.

Bump up 275 to 300 just for kicks. Does that sound like something you could do?

Connecting 13 Week Goals with the Calendar

The year calendar is great for your vision, but it’s too big for 13 weeks. Just like thinking about 100,000 words is too big!

Thinking about 25,000 words? Less scary…

Thinking about 300 words? Not scary at all!

So right now take a calendar you reference everyday and block out 13 weeks of time.

Add these two elements to your calendar:

1. Write the one thing you need to accomplish at the bottom of each day for the 13 weeks.
2. Cross off the day when you complete the one thing needed to achieve your goal.

Commit yourself to not break the chain of cross offs! Do that and you’ll be just like Jerry Seinfeld!

This article was originally published in BestSelf.com blog

Calendar planning is just a long term to-do list that’s probably going to change anyway, why bother. Sure there’s a few things that have to be on there, but planning a whole year is crazy! Nobody can predict what’s going to happen, what a waste of time.

Sound familiar? If so, beware! This is the moment indifference steps out of the shadows and into your life. A looming presence that stretches out into the entire span of your year: waiting and watching to moderate your excitement for living.

If you’ve ever felt numb during joyous times for no reason you could discern, then you’ve experienced the influence of indifference. But don’t worry, it’s not hopeless.

When what’s on your calendar is more than a glorified to-do list of externally enforced responsibilities indifference is forced to slink back to the shadows. How can you use calendar planning to push indifference back?

A Steady Drip Eventually Floods

Every year starts of the same. A boost of excitement and idealism for the future. A few months in we stand strong, there might have been a few set backs but overall we are still excited.

Halfway through the year all the excitement we felt at the start of the year has vanished. It’s easy for us to point towards different events in life that have assaulted our optimism for what we could accomplish.

Most are things far outside of our sphere of control. We resort to doing what we did the year before and the year before that. Looking forward to the holidays, vacations, and weekends.

All the general escapes from our daily lives. As we near the end a growing despair turns to hope once more, and the cycle continues. But here’s the question.

What traps us in this perception prison of ultimate mediocrity?

The answer is the slow and steady drip of indifference. When the year starts we have a singular event that drives decisive action, we are encouraged by society to become engaged in our lives like at no other time in the year.

In the months leading up to the 1st, January becomes filled with new and exciting initiatives for your life. Perhaps these initiatives even go so far as to expand into February and March.

That’s where things usually end. By this time your days have taken on a sameness, especially if you’ve been consistent. As far as you can see into the next nine months it’s more of the same. The drip begins.

As the year progresses, so the drip steadily falls and surrounds you like a flood until you become hindered by it. Even if great things start happening around you.

There is a disconnect from the events, life seems to move by you faster than you keep up until the drip is so high you are up to your neck, and it’s all you can do to just float. Indifference has now overwhelmed every facet of your life.

As the new year returns the goodwill overwhelms indifference, the drip disappears, along with it the flood is drained, and once again you dare to hope.

Intentional Calendar Planning for a Year of Your Life

To stop the drip and cut off indifference at the pass you need to imbue your calendar throughout the year with the same kind of push that you receive at the start of it.

More than that, these pushes need to be things that you are excited by, things that you can look forward to. Most importantly, they need to be related to supporting your overall goal and intent for the year.

The big one! The one thing that when you accomplish it, your life will change drastically.

The Basic Calendar:

1. Shared Social Holidays
2. Birthday Celebrations
3. Meetings and Appointments

The Intentional Calendar Planning Additions:

1. Two “Big One” Related Events
2. One Monthly “Big One” Related Meetups
3. One Weekly Check In with a “Big One” Related Group or Individual

With these new types of events filling up your calendar it won’t be just tasks to get done, it will be experiences to look forward to! A feeling that alone could change your whole year!

Connected Through Experiences

When we surround ourselves in activity with people of like mind and purpose it amplifies everything we’re striving for. Our capacity expands because when we are together the sum total of all our experience can be utilized by everyone.

So, we have to ask. When was your last big event, meetup, or group/individual check in? What was it about? How has it expanded you?

Comment below and inspire others to be intentional with their calendar planning! Who knows, maybe even make some connections here!

This article was originally published in BestSelf.com blog

It’s one of the most daunting questions we can be asked. “Why are you doing that?” It always seems to catch us off guard and the immediate response that pops into our head, “Because it’s what I’m supposed to do.” annoys us more than helps us.

The answer is one that immediately instills doubt in our actions and once that emotion is unleashed there’s no telling where our thoughts will take us.

It takes some effort to engage with finding your why, and the answer can be ever changing but when we can answer the question “Why are you doing that?” It becomes the ultimate power boost to our resilience. So, how do we go about finding our why?

Up Life’s River Without a Why

Let’s be honest, achieving in life is hard, it is really HARD. The longer we engage with it the harder it becomes. If we aren’t prepared it will slam into us and leave us reeling. When that happens it’s so easy to feel out of control like we’ve lost our footing.

With our foothold lost life becomes a wild river rapid, dragging us along it’s tributaries until we reach a final destination we never wanted to go towards, and are left to wonder how we got there. To avoid this we have to keep our bearings and maintain our direction.

Some specific tools in life help us do that. Aspiration is our canoe, confidence is our life vest, knowledge is our skill on the water, and a why? Well, that’s our oar.

We can survive the rapids without it, our boat will keep us moving, our vest will keep us afloat when we fall, and our skill will help us survive in whatever way is necessary.

The one thing we cannot do without an oar is steer. We can’t direct ourselves down the paths and parts of the river we want to be on.

Without an oar we are at the mercy of where the river flows the hardest. The odds of being on the path we truly desire is not in our favor if we don’t have a why. Navigating the rapids of life this way all but leaves the final destination to chance.

The Winding River of Finding your Why

One thing is at the core of finding your why, this is your decision making. When you make a decision it is the manifestation of why.

Refuse to decide and it’s the same as not having a why, decide in haste and the river will be just as unpredictable as if you have no why at all.

To navigate properly, you must pay attention, you must engage with the flow of the river. Only through watching for the streams and pathways that will lead you in the direction you want to go will you achieve the results you want.

To find your why, the reason that in this moment, you do what you do. You have to look, you have to engage, and you have to decide.

That decision, to engage with your journey down the river will reward you, or it will punish you. You will feel the violent push or embracing pull of your why as a result of the decision you made.

To Find Your Why:

1. Make a decision in your life.
2. Reflect on how the decision made you feel.
3. Ask yourself, did you feel pushed away, or pulled towards it.

The more decisions you make, the more you come to understand your why. The better you can travel the river.

Your Why Matters

It’s powerful to put your why into words. To find those words are an entirely different matter. Few things are as the reason why we do things. Our motivations and decisions are wide and varied, but even with all this variation we will always find someone next to us on the river.

When we meet this person we can help them or we can hurt them. They can heed our help, or they can ignore us.

We encourage you, to help and to heed. Leave a comment below if in this moment you know your why, or leave a comment if you feel yourself being swept away so someone can help you in finding your why.

This article was originally published in BestSelf.com blog

When what we want to achieve exists so far outside of our common day-to-day habits the path to change is covered in an impenetrable fog. It’s a haze that makes it hard for us to see much further than a few missteps into the future.

What’s worse is it blocks us from seeing the very real danger of inevitable failures that are easily avoidable if we knew they were coming. How can we possibly see the dangers and failures in our path?

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Not Assessing Goals

While a visualization is necessary to get a feel for where you want to go. Stopping there means we are way more likely to lose steam. Three or four months in resolutions will start to fail, if they haven’t already.

This is because at some point we are going to stumble in our progress. When that fall happens it creates an immediate and visceral drop in our self-confidence.

We begin to question the ultimate direction we’ve chosen to take. Even if we recover from this first fall, several more are likely awaiting us. The trick is to prepare for them.

If we don’t, when they hit us, we are more and more likely to quit each time. The goal we were so sure of suddenly appears much further away than we thought. Our motivation and all progress dies.

This is the inevitable downfall of a goal if we haven’t validated where we want to go is even possible. We ultimately can’t achieve, not because we’re incapable, or unskilled, but because any number of other elements that were always going to keep our achievement out of reach.

Then we hit the wall that was always going to stop us, we become frustrated, discouraged, and often give up when all we really needed to do was realize the wall was there in the first place so there isn’t a haze surrounding it and we see that it can just be walked around.

A Quick Start S.M.A.R.T. Goal Assessment

To handle these easily avoidable speed bumps we are going to implement the S.M.A.R.T. goals assessment to any goal we want to achieve. Before the assessment break your resolutions down into the categories 5 year, 3 year, 1 year, and 13 weeks.

Start this process in a very specific mindset:
“My goal in it’s current form is not S.M.A.R.T. goals assessed. No matter how much time or effort I’ve already put into it.”

We want to think this way because doing so will help us practice thinking critically around this idea! A practice that will increase your ability to do so in every situation where you want to make sure what you are doing is S.M.A.R.T.

Through the entire process of thinking about a goal we are going to ask ourselves one question over and over again.

“Is this goal S.M.A.R.T; or Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based?”

Note: Each letter of S.M.A.R.T goals have variations on what they stand for, syntactically people have created their own preferences for terms to used. At some point you’ll develop a favorite variation too. We encourage you to make it your own and allow this skill to develop with the definitions that make the most sense to you!

Definitions of S.M.A.R.T Goals

To assess a goal examine it through each of the parameters of S.M.A.R.T goals individually. Start with the first letter and work through to the last.

1. Specific- To be specific the goal must have parameters defined related to a singular aspect of the overall goal. This parameter should be the most impacting and motivating parameter for you personally.
2. Measurable- To be measurable the goal must have a finite aspect to it. Such that you can look at the compiled data and once you get to a certain point definitively say “I did it”!
3. Attainable- To be attainable the goal must not be hindered by anything in your current environment. You should have all the resources, items, and support surrounding you to tackle the goal. If there are hindrances that exist in your environment you need to address these first, or have a plan on how to deal with them when they inevitably arise.
4. Realistic- To be realistic the goal must not be so far outside of your circle of experience or skill sets to be considered unreasonable. This isn’t the time to be prideful or overly judgmental of yourself. This is the time to allow yourself to be honest of what you are capable of and, in doing so, find where you can expand yourself just a little more past your perceived limits.
5. Time-Based- To be time-based the goal should have an end date that allows you a reasonable amount of time to accomplish the goal.

Thinking about your goals in this context will help you clear a path ahead to them even when sidetracked so you can remain on the path to where you set out for.

Smarter Together

One of the most incredible things about all of us is for all the differences in our journey, the more we consider the path of those who surround us the more success we find.

The greatest among us will freely admit that they stand on the shoulders of giants. That their innovation is not the exclusion of ideas, but the inclusion and re-imagining of them. When we connect the dots of ideas to preexisting concepts in ways others have not seen we create amazing things.

So, we ask that as you complete your assessment of a goal, drop it into the comments below show us what dots you’ve connected– because together we can go far!

This was originally published on BestSelf.co blog

It can be, without actions a vision can fade but without a vision actions eventually become muddled. Without a vision it’s far too easy to get lost on the way to our goal. Worse, if we feel lost it eventually leads to us becoming indecisive.

Once indecision tears into our lives it leads us down a dark path of all our progress being halted. If indecision effects us deeply we tend to look for a guide, someone with experience to help us along our path. This usually comes in the form of an external force, a friend, a coach, or the like.

It helps in the short term but can become a crutch in the long run if we aren’t careful. This is because an external force will not always be there to point the way for us. So, utilizing a third party to manifest decisiveness in ourselves doesn’t develop the skill set for manifesting decisiveness in ourselves.

How can we become the masters of our own decisiveness?

Visualization is an Exercise to Plot the Path

There’s little more we face in life as sinister as the motivation destroying tornado of indecision. It’s a subtle force that sneaks slowly into our minds. At first we don’t realize it’s influence but in time it builds into a mass of power until it becomes a cyclone that crashes through our lives.

In the wake of indecision’s chaos confusion reigns that diminishes of any sense of self-confidence we have. Everything around us feels like a mess, we don’t recognize our surroundings and it makes us think we’re lost.

It turns us around when suddenly we find that we’re wandering aimlessly through life despite our best intentions or goals.

What’s worse is that we know how to beat indecision, we make a choice! Get up and do something, anything! Yet, when indecision has us in it’s hold, knowing what we must do does not equal taking action.

Indecision stops us because it veils any action we might take as just another step down a road you’re already unsure of.

To find our way we have to stop and take a moment to check our compass, find our true north, and verify we’re headed in the direction we desire. When we do this indecision loses it’s grip! Our steps gain back their purpose and a growing haze is lifted.

Give visualization a try with this exercise!

Special Gift: A Visualization Exercise from the Inner Circle

Once you’ve reflected on your year, the next step is to start looking forward.

Our mission is to help you live a life you’re proud of. So it’s time to think about what you’d create in a life that makes you proud.

A proud life is a balanced life that’s fulfilling in all areas. So if you could wave a magic wand, what would you love to create in the year ahead — to build a life that makes you proud?

STEP 2 OUTCOME

By the end of this step you’ll have a comprehensive list — categorized into areas that matter to you — of what you want to create for your life.

This list provides a clear vision for your future. It’s a reminder of what you really want to strive for.

It’s a reference point where you can sense check any decisions — to ensure your choices, actions, and hustle take you closer to where you want to go.

What’s Visualization?

To get to this stage you have to have reflected on the year that’s passed to give yourself a baseline to spring from.

The next step is to visualize what you’d create for your life if anything was possible.

Here’s why…

By visualizing, you can use your imagination to create a new future. And because you’re using your imagination you don’t have to think in the way that you usually do.

Instead, you can let go of any limiting beliefs and give yourself space to dream.

This is hugely powerful.

When you think without limits and let go of any preconceptions of what you can or should do, you start to explore the things you really desire.

You become a shade braver and bolder with your goals.

And when you then articulate them on paper, you set the wheels in motion to make them a reality.

In this way, visualization can provides a road map — a vision that can direct your brain’s focus.

As a result, your future actions, decisions, and observations all work together to help you discover the insights and opportunities you need to make things happen.

Have you ever wanted something so much that it consumed you? Then, as if by magic, you met the right person, read the perfect book, discovered the missing insight, or solved an ‘impossible’ problem.

That’s the power of visualization.

It kick-starts a chain of action

It unleashes your subconscious mind

It provides the inner compass that takes you closer to the things you desire.

It’s why Step 2 of your Best Year Yet uses visualization to tease out the goals you long to achieve.

How To Visualize

When it comes to visualization, here are some tips to help you get the most value from this step.

Firstly, aim to banish all your preconceived notions about who you are and what you’re capable of.

We get it! This probably won’t be easy!

You live everyday under the pressure of perceived limitations that have come to define you.

You tell yourself there are:

• Things that you’re just not good at
• Successes you could never achieve
• Ways of existing and socializing that’s just who you are
• When you start to dream outside these confinements, things can get scary!
• But awesome things can happen when you shrug off those old preconceptions and start from a place of openness about what’s really possible for you.

It’s a little like starting a whole new life in a whole new place — where you get to define exactly who you are (and what you do). And because the people you meet don’t know any different, they accept your story outright.

This is what visualization looks like. It’s the ultimate view of a life you love.

A life that’s lived on your terms — where you’re not squeezing yourself into someone else’s framework and where you go after those meaningful goals that will bring you joy.

So how do you visualise a life that would make you proud?

Let’s move onto the activity instructions and start visualizing yours…

Action Items:

Step 1 already got this process rolling.

Thanks to your reflection, you’ve identified things you enjoyed in 2017 (along with the things that didn’t go so well). As a result, you’ve already begun to think about what you want to create more of in your life (and what things you wish to let go.)

So building on your Step 1 foundation, we’re now going to visualize what your life would look like if you could wave a magic wand and have everything and anything you desired.

There are two ways you can approach this activity.

Method 1: Use the Life Focus worksheet

You’ll notice the Life Focus worksheet comes in three formats:

There are two versions already complete with eight categories

And another one that’s blank — so you can focus on the categories that are important to you

When it comes to your areas of focus there’s no wrong or right answer — there are only the areas that matter to you.

So the first part of this exercise is to determine your categories. Either use the categories provided, create your own, or use a combination of both.

Once you’re happy with your categories, now comes the fun part.

It’s time to dream 🙂

Taking each category in turn, if you could wave a magic wand (and have absolutely anything you desire), what would fill each section?

To complete this task:
1. Set yourself a limit of three minutes per category
2. Grab a pen
3. Write down whatever comes to mind

Don’t censor yourself.

The benefit of working to such a short time-span is there’s not enough time for your logical, analytical mind to trip you up and keep your thinking small.There key here is to dismiss what you currently believe is possible for you and instead dream as big as you dare!

As Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.”

Here’s the thing about your brain…

It will look for answers to whatever questions you ask. Ask different questions, get different results. Just allowing a possibility the space to breathe can open up all kinds of opportunities that you previously didn’t imagine were possible.

And remember you don’t have to achieve everything tomorrow!

In fact, it may take you a number of years before you create everything you desire. But that’s part of the fun. Life is about the journey — not just the destination.

And anyway you never really ‘arrive’ because every time you achieve a goal you simply open the door to an entirely new target.

Method 2: Sticky Note Method

Here’s an alternative take on the visualization task. This is the same goal setting process that we use on our team retreats and it’s hugely effective.

The principles remain the same.
This is about thinking big and reaching out into the world of desire and possibility.

To complete this exercise:

1. Grab a pack of sticky notes and a pen
2. Think about what you want for your life
3. For every idea that you have, write it on a different sticky note
4. Give yourself 20–30 minutes to do this
5. Once finished, categorize your sticky notes into different life areas
6. Then add them to the relevant sections of your Life Focus worksheet

The key difference with this approach is you get to think about your life as a whole instead of category by category.

Two Eyes are Better Than One

When we reflect on our lives having someone we trust to work through the details can give incredible insight we might otherwise be blind to. This is because those around us aren’t caught up in the habits and cycles our mind engages in.

When we share our visualization with others it helps clear paths and reveal truths we might otherwise miss with our singular viewpoint.

So comment below and share one big thing you visualize for your life! What’s the thing you’ll do achieve it?

This article was originally published on BestSelf.co blog

In our lives we’re constantly shifting through various courses of action, sometimes by choice, other times because we must.

No matter the reasons for a course of action everything leads to a result. It’s these results if ignored that are doomed to repeat. This is where vicious cycles are born, the ones that keep us in self-defeating patterns.

If we are to break free of repeating outcomes we need a reflection practice to help trigger the change in actions that lead to undesired results. The question is, how do we recognize our actions and their outcomes to break the cycle?

Vicious Cycles VS. Reflection Practice

We all have our own vicious cycles. Those particular triggers that instigate specific destructive actions. They build into one another, killing our productivity, straining our relationships, and beating down our self-esteem.

It’s frustrating because we know they’re there. We experience their pain again and again, yet we can’t break the cycle. In fact, if a cycle is around long enough our minds become predisposed to react automatically when a trigger appears.

Our actions in response will be the ones most commonly taken, even if they’ve always lead to an undesired result.

Don’t worry, our brains aren’t trying to sabotage us. It has our best interests at heart. It’s utilizing a system of creating an automatic responses to make sure we have the resources available to react to events in the immediate vicinity we aren’t familiar with. A process that’s essential for survival.

But it comes with a catch, it makes no distinction between a good or bad results. So, If the response we’ve built into an situation creates an undesirable outcome, or if we’re in a situation where we’re forced to take actions.

Each time we action with this automatic response, a pattern is established, solidified, and the vicious cycle continues!

To stop and reprogram these automatic reactions we must catch ourselves in the moment of a vicious cycle. This is extremely difficult and in order to achieve it a reflection practice is vital because it allows us to setup a plan to stop the automatic response when it’s triggered.

We can reflect on many different levels, but the best place to start is in reflecting on the past year. This higher level view will help us see the bigger patterns we have, the good and the bad. Once we see them we can action on them!

What do you think? Want to give it a try?

Special Gift: A Guided Reflection Practice from the Inner Circle

Start by looking back on the past year to figure out what went well, what didn’t, what you enjoyed, and what you learned.

With these insights, you can create your benchmark and lay the foundations for the plans that will help you design your best year yet.

STEP 1 OUTCOME

Complete this step to consolidate your learning’s from the previous 12 months and create your baseline from which to plan your year ahead.

With your reflection complete, you know exactly where you are starting from and it’s this clarity that will help you setup the year ahead for success.

Why Reflect?

The 10 Step framework to your Best Year Yet kicks off with reflection.

This is one of the most important stages of the entire process — because you can’t move forward until you’ve first looked back.

Reflection is about the best way to consolidate everything you’ve done and learned in the past 12 months.
If you put your foot on the gas without reflecting, you’ll miss out on all the insights and knowledge the past 12 months have gifted you.

In turn, you’re more likely to make needless mistakes, move forward slower, and even make the wrong decisions.

That’s why reflection is a skill promoted and practiced by some of the world’s top performers and athletes.

They know it can help you learn from your mistakes and make better choices and decisions in the future.

It’s the reason football players (for example) spend WEEKS pouring over every minute and analyzing every play of every game. By understanding who played well and why, they can make informed adjustments going forward — and keep improving their performance.

And you can do the same.

It’s why reflection is an essential component of your best year yet 🙂

So let’s put this theory into practice with an Action Step that you’re going to like a lot.

Action Items

This reflection exercise is one of our FAVORITES.

It’s something we always do at the end of a year — and if a 13-week road map has been particularly significant, we’ll do it again.

It’s a quick and easy way to sense check where you are and give yourself a springboard from which you can move forward powerfully.

To help you reflect, we’ve prepared a worksheet for you to download. It’s called the End Of Year Reflection worksheet and you can download a copy below.

You’ll see from the worksheet that we’ve broken your reflection down into four simple categories.

For this step, you’re going to reflect on FOUR things:

• What brought you JOY
• What brought you SUCCESS
• What made you DISSATISFIED
• And what FLOPPED!

To make your reflection easy, grab:

– Last year’s calendar
– Any SELF Journals you used over the past 12 months

Then go through them — week-by-week — and pull out any events you want to list on your End of Year Reflection.
Your goal is to create your best year yet so think about all categories — not just your work achievements.

This might include:

– Your relationships
– Your health & well being
– Your personal growth
– Your financial situation
When you’re finished, look for your patterns. For example, is there a correlation between what brought you joy AND success?

Finally, analyze your results by answering the final two questions on your worksheet:

1. How far have you come over the past 12 months?
When we’re hustling after goals, we can spend too much time thinking about where we still have to go. As a result, we overlook and undervalue the distance we’ve already traveled.
So take a few minutes to appreciate the progress you’ve made.

2. Secondly, get a sense for how you feel about your current trajectory.
If you were to change nothing, would you be happy with where you’d end up in 12 months time?
For example: How would your health be? What about your business or your career? Or your relationships.

Here’s why.

To create your Best Year Yet, you have to fill it with things that bring you joy.

Living a life you love (and a life that makes you proud) happens when you craft your day-to-day around the things you enjoy (and the things you’re good at).

Why fill your day with stuff that drags you down if you don’t have to!

Remember, you’ll always do your best work, have the most fun, and enjoy the most success when you’re motivated and energized.

The opposite applies too…

Tasks that leave you dissatisfied absorb a disproportionately large amount of energy — because you will need to dig a lot deeper to get things done.

What’s more, you’re more likely to procrastinate and squander your time. You probably won’t do your best work. And you’ll feel more drained at the end of the day too.

So for a better performing year, you’ll need to proactively double-down on the things that bring you joy and success. And swap out things that flopped and left you dissatisfied.

It’s a super simple formula that lays the foundations for your best year yet.

Inspire Others

Big or small we aspire to accomplish things in our lives that matter. We want to do more of what makes us happy, and feel fulfilled with our lives.

We all struggle, find success, and change as we grow. Make no mistake, those lessons can help others as much as you!

So share with us in the comments below your most impacting takeaways from your reflection practice. Let what you’ve gone through help others on their own journey. The smallest insight can change a life!

This was originally published on BestSelf.co blog

Subversion of ideas is a powerful tool we can use to turn a negative into a positive in almost every situation. When it comes to self-worth and confidence this can be a monumentally beneficial and imperative practice. The social landscape we live in is littered with confidence destroying landmines from social media sites to youtube, and everything in between.

The ability for anyone to tear us down with various degrees of anonymity is higher than ever. To combat this some of the worst social faux pas have evolved in a way that allows them to be more healthy and even absolute necessities for maintaining balance in the world today.

Ego is the Enemy but Achievements are Best Friends

Achievements are now more important than experience in many circles. Whether it’s in the workforce, with friends, or in relationships- responsibilities are no longer so clearly defined. Instead, as the popular expression goes we all wear “many hats”.

Meaning anything goes and all that really matters is results. We live in a time when we can find anything we need to get something done, for free online or for cheap. Specialty skills are still valued but more and more the ability to quickly learn a new skill and apply it, trumps all. This has lead to the trend we see, where the most relationship building information you can share is your achievements.

This turns the aversion of ego on its head as our ability to tout our achievements can be the difference between getting the job, making the friend, or helping someone in need. Achievements are what give us an air of authority in someone else’s mind.

Today’s environment values titles less and less, moving the perception of what provides value towards those who don’t just problem-solve, but problem-find.

We shouldn’t let this get us down though! Removing titles is such an empowering transition for society! It shows we can recognize that knowledge or at least the acquisition of knowledge is becoming a universal commodity.

The bottom line is that now more than ever, we can be whatever we want to be. The phrase “If you can think it, you can do it.” is not just something we tell to our kids to bolster their confidence. It a pure and powerful truth. That can make all the difference in your life if you sit down to pursue what you really want.

Vanity doesn’t Satisfy but Personal Truth Boosts

Self-affirmations have become a necessity for anyone making their way through social structures. Personal branding continues to grow as one of the most powerful forms of advertising, no matter the type of business, a non-profit organization, or government agency. We are drawn to the pure influence of seeing everyday people we can connect with or aspire to be.

To tap into these incredibly powerful forms of growth for ourselves, our businesses, and our dreams we embrace vanity. From selfies, to live streams we open ourselves and our lives up to millions of people with a few snaps and clicks.

We can with a single interaction encourage, and inspire someone all the way around the planet in an instant! Even for ourselves, taking just a little bit of time to build ourselves up is proven to create a higher resilience to difficult and stressful situations.

The truth is, this has opened up so many doors for people to live the kind of lives they never could before. From artists to clothing designers, crafters, and everything in between personal brands have empowered uncountable people to do what they love every day without adhering to any rules but their own.

Affirmations for their part have been studied and proven to change the way we perceive ourselves. They build up our confidence and in doing so help us deal with the difficult things life can throw at us.

Selfishness breeds Loneliness but without Self-Care, we’re Lost

Self-care is a critical activity we should engage in during the day. Our time is split between two forms of contribution. One that is in service to others- these are our communications, our efforts at work, or taking care of the kids. The other is in service to ourselves- those are eating, exercising, intentionally breathing, and just taking a quiet moment to appreciate what we have. We need both to truly thrive!

As with all things, a balance must be met. We cannot be completely selfless. If we are, we will find ourselves used up. Sometimes even abused for our giving nature. Yet, we can’t be completely selfish either, if we are then we push away those we care about most.

We have to fill ourselves up before we can make a contribution to others. We have to take care of ourselves because if we don’t then our contributions come from a place of emptiness. This will make them subpar and in some cases even detrimental to our ability to serve at a level that will make a real difference.

It’s an incredible time to be alive! A time when we are seeing so many social constructs be deconstructed. Allowing for exciting new structures to rise in their place. Individuals are empowered to learn complex skills, make connections with communities, and chase their dreams like never before.

There’s a new societal renaissance happening around us every day and it includes everything from- music, art, business, communication, health, education, self-enlightenment, even reality itself with growing virtual reality advances! With so much possible to contribute to we have to selfishly take some time for ourselves or the result is total burnout.

The question- Who are you?

It’s never been more important or life-impacting as it is today to know who you are. It is the key to finding your passions, connecting with a community that will support you, that will give you a real and lasting sense of fulfillment and contribution. To truly find the answer to this question. You have to be a little selfish and engage in some real, honest, and revitalizing self-care. You have to be a little vain and believe in yourself.

To lift yourself up and be a little egotistical so people know what you’re capable of. You do this so you can find yourself. Because when you do that! This crazy world we live in starts to make a lot more sense. Take it from Jessica, she can do anything better than anyone.

This was originally published on BestSelf.co blog

Feeling overwhelmed is a common problem that can strike at any moment. As demands roll in from all directions this productivity killing monster often rears it’s ugly head.

At first it’s not so bad. We feel busy, challenged, maybe even a little excited that we have so much to do. There’s a catch though. If busy goes on for too long or if tasks pile up too high the excitement quickly turns into despair, action into inaction. But what can we do?

The answer is simple in theory, but nuanced in practice. What we can do is ask ourselves questions. It’s important to ask questions because the right question and the right answer can change our entire perception of something challenging in an instant.

It’s likely you already engage in this practice. We all tend to ask ourselves questions about challenges we face, even if we don’t realize it. It’s the caliber of these questions and what they focus on that means the difference between getting unstuck or falling deeper into the trap that overwhelm sets for us.

Surely, at this point you’re asking yourself, “Well then, what’s the right question?”

Good question, but the bad news is there’s no single ultimate question we can ask ourselves to get the answer every time. Rather it’s the practice of exploring multiple questions and answers that is key in the fight against overwhelm.

The good news is we can use other people’s trigger questions, ones that help them defeat overwhelm, to jump start our own practice!

An Examination of Tim Ferriss’ Tactics shared in Tribe of Mentors

In his most recent book Tribe of Mentors, Tim focuses on the idea of asking questions. In the book he shares that it was manifested out of a need to fight the monster of overwhelm in his own life. It was during a period of self-reflection that he started to journal about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to grow as a person from 40 onward.

The list grew and grew until it became completely overwhelming! How was he going to accomplish all this? Particularly the things he’d struggled with his whole life… overwhelm began to tighten it’s grip. In the book he shares that he then asked himself the single question he uses to trigger a perspective shift.

According to the book, the ultimate answer for him was: I would have a whole tribe of mentors to call upon when facing the biggest challenges on my new journey. With this the looming cloud of overwhelm began to dissolve, and he set himself to breaking down tasks using this new perspective.

When we’re overwhelmed there’s an inescapable feeling of everything being so hard! We create a narrative in our minds that the only way we can get through is to struggle. The cycle of this narrative reinforces a perception that individual tasks are a singular insurmountable thing.

His question is powerful because it automatically leads us to challenge this core aspect of feeling overwhelmed. What the question shows us is the size of the task isn’t what’s overwhelming. Rather it’s our approach to solving it that creates this perception.

So the next time you feel overwhelmed try and ask yourself: What would this look like if it were easy?

See where it leads you!

Community Contribution

Whether your questions cycle you deeper into overwhelm, or they’re triggering questions that help you climb out of the hole– they are valuable! Examining our questions and seeing what others ask themselves gives us insight on improving our own questioning practices.

So, we have to ask…

What are the questions you ask yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed?

Share with everyone in the comments below!

This was originally published on BestSelf.co blog