So here I am out on a five-day exhibition with my family. We decided to get out of dodge and to explore the wilderness of eastern Oregon and we’re having a great time. What I’ve asked the team to do is to put together a mash up of some of the best listener requests that we’ve had for Author of Your Own Story with the over 100 daily growth hacks we have. I hope you enjoy over these next couple days. We’re going to revisit these older daily growth hacks so you can go ahead and go back.
If you haven’t heard them, go back and do the work and get a chance to actually listen to them. If you remember to go back and listen to the whole library while it’s still available. Now if you have heard these before, don’t worry, doing the work again, you’ve changed so you’re going to have a different outlook on each of these daily growth acts. That’s it for, I’m out living my Author of Your Own Story lifestyle and I hope you’re doing the same.
Hi, I’m Doug Holt with Author of Your Own Story and this is your daily growth hack. Now, about two years ago I came up with the Author of Your Own Story concept and the reason I came up with this as I really wanted to make a bigger impact. I had people asking me how I was living the lifestyle that I was living and how I was able to develop the businesses that I had and do all those things that I was doing. It seemed impossible to them and I knew it wasn’t, we can all do that. It’s my mission to affect, positively, 1 million people across the world and I knew that the best methodology for doing this two years ago, was simply video.
Video and audio formats as well as a website that could produce the content and share it with the masses. You know what, I spent so much time trying to get it perfect, that it took me two years to get here today just to shoot the videos. The lighting wasn’t right, I wasn’t fit enough at the time or I thought maybe next year will be better or next month will be better or I need a better microphone. Do you know what? Imperfect action is going to beat perfect inaction every time and this is the time to change. Go ahead and write down in your journal or a piece of paper your key five areas or what I call your five to thrive.
Each of those areas I want you to write down two to three things right now that you’re holding off until it’s the right time until it’s the right moment, maybe it’s the economy needs to get better or maybe you need to get fitter. Whatever it is for you, we all make up these excuses. I still do it, too. Once you’ve got that, what I want you to do is a list at least three action steps that you can take right now in those areas. What am I talking about when I say feed your mind? One thing I noticed was actually on Facebook and that’s where I keep up with old friends as well as family and all kinds of information and I noticed there were several posts on there asking questions about books and books that people had read recently.
One said, “What is your most favorite book you’ve read recently?” And the second said, “What’s the most influential book you’ve read recently?” What took me wasn’t the questions, but it was actually some of the responses of people saying, “Well, I don’t read or I don’t have time to read books or digest content.” Something of that nature, it was always excuses about why you couldn’t. What caught me by surprise was I was thinking about last night. We’ve got a newborn baby, my wife was frustrated, the baby just would not go to sleep, was crying. I threw on a backpack and I went for a walk.
Most people would think, “Wow, what a waste of time.” Obviously spending time with your child is not a waste of time, but also during that time, I had digested two chapters of an audio book while my baby was sleeping. My little son, he was sleeping soundly, he was safe and during the time I was actually going through two different chapters of a book I was reading. I say reading it was obviously an audio book so uses that term loosely. The audio book I was digesting was actually contrarian to my viewpoints so meaning I knew that the subject matter and the person who wrote this book had opposing opinions of my own. I listened to it deliberately because I wanted another voice, I wanted somebody to give me in my mind another point of view, a contrarian point of view so I could see how the other side was presenting their information so I could see if, perhaps, they’d change my mind.
Maybe there was a point of view I hadn’t seen yet. What I’m going to ask you is, where in your life do you have this dead time, down time? Commuting? Is it walking around the block with your baby? Is it sitting in the auto shop? Where do you have down time that you can audio book into your life? Often times we jump to what’s called shiny new objects syndrome. When you have one project and you’re working on it and then all of a sudden you have that light bulb go off and you have another idea and you jump to that project. Soon you feel like you’re juggling plates and you have all kinds of things going on.
You have maybe 10 projects going on at once but none of them seem to get done. You may even schedule an hour a day each project, but still, you’re not making headway. What I’m going to encourage you to do today is something that I’ve worked with clients for that has had a lot of success. Pick one project, one task and focus on that for the entire day. Pick one large chunk of time that you can barrel down, focus on that project or task and really work on it. Taking breaks, of course, really making sure, maybe 20 minutes, 45 minutes of focus time, take a break and then come back but having that whole chunk of time to work on that project is you’re going to start to see yourself pushing through barriers. You’re going to see yourself pushing past where you currently were, obviously and then actually seeing progress.
I can set aside a few hours of dedicated focused time to know exactly where I left off and not have to go back and recheck those items and to make sure that I’m progressing fast enough. If you have the ability dedicate that focused time, those large chunks of time to a project, you’re going to find that you’re going to progress much quicker than the other people that are around you. I just got off a call with a friend of mine who coaches men to be their absolute best. He asked me a question about one of my goals. One of my goals is to be able to speak conversational Spanish within 90 days. I just want to be able to have a basic conversation in Spanish and I’m far from that goal.
I asked him what other languages he speaks. His response was, “You know what, Doug? My girlfriend and I we tried to learn Italian, but it didn’t work out.” Of course, I asked more, “Well, what happened?” “Well, we hired a coach,” he went on to tell me, “and it just wasn’t structured the right way and the coach was kind of new at and yeah, he spoke Italian but we just didn’t learn anything so I just gave up on it.” I found that to be very interesting because often time how often do all of us start a goal, hit one roadblock and then just give up on it rather than using our resources or our resourcefulness?
I found this with Spanish. I recently relocated to Bend, Oregon, that’s where I’m filming this right now. Here in Bend, it’s beautiful, but there are not nearly as many Spanish speakers as for where I’m from natively in southern California. It’s very easy for me to make an excuse. So what I did was something very different, I went online and hired a Spanish coach and more than that, I came up with a structure for the program. Now as I related this story to my friend you could just see visually his face open up at the possibilities and perhaps the opportunities that he had missed out on. What I did was just something, I took a little shift and became resourceful. I also found that listening to audio books in Spanish, listening to Spanish music, I went out and I actively seek out Spanish speakers. I call up my friends and annoy them to the ends until I get them to speak Spanish to me and try to let me speak my Spanish to them.
It always results in comedy. You see, my friend who is an amazing coach, he didn’t take it to that next level which got me to thinking, where do all of us in our five to thrive in our mind, in our body, and in our soul, in our relationships, in our business do we have a goal and hit one road block and make an excuse? Maybe it’s I’m not going to get as fit as I want to because the gym’s too expensive or it’s too far away or I need new running shoes or I’m not quite there yet, rather than being resourceful and coming up with ways to get to our goals. Where across your five to thrive are you experiencing this making an excuse rather than being resourceful and pushing yourself across that next line?
Where are you falling just short because you’re coming up with a barrier that makes it easy for you not to follow through? Write that down. Then what I want you to do is look at your journal in your five to thrive and look at these areas that you’ve made these excuses. I know I have mine and I’m sure you have yours. Where are you in these areas and what can you do right now, at this very moment to take action? To take the next step?
When we talk about knowing your why, the reason that this came up for me was I was talking to a client of mine and what they wanted was location independence. By most accounts, this person was extremely successful in all areas of their life. Why couldn’t they hit this goal of location independence? When I asked him, “Well, geez, why do you want location independence?” They couldn’t give me an answer. Location independence works for me and it’s something that I wanted, but I also knew why I wanted it. It was something that I strived for and really worked to get and achieved it. For this person, they didn’t really know why they wanted it. They were successful in all other areas of their life, but they didn’t know why.
Each time they got closer to location independence, any time a road block or an obstacle would get in their way, they simply couldn’t push past it. They simply just couldn’t get over those hurdles and that’s because they didn’t have a solid why. I believe that if you have a solid why, there are no roadblocks. You figure out a way to go over, under, around, through, whatever you have to do, that roadblock just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just an opportunity to pivot and go a different direction. Knowing your why is critical. Whatever your goals may be, small or large, knowing your why will help you get there and will help you when you face adversity.
The larger the goal and I dream big and I have my clients dream even … Just as big if not bigger than I do and one of the things that we really focus on each time they set a goal, is knowing the reason why. What will achieving that goal get you? What will achieving that goal get you in your five to thrive? Really going down and going deep into each goal that you have and identifying the reason why will help you achieve it. Your action step today is to go through your goals list.
Now, if you do have goals, what I want you to do it take each of those goals and start with the biggest ones and really write down why you want it. What is achieving that goal going to get you in all five areas of your five to thrive? What effects is that going to have positively for you? What I want you to do is write down the list or journal about it like it’s a story. Remember, you are the Author of Your Own Story, knowing your why is just one step on a path of success.
Have a great day and remember, share this with at least three people that you know. Build your tribe, start the conversation. I’d love to talk to you about it more in the Author of Your Own Story group and that’s it for today. Have a great day and remember to go and be the Author of Your Own Story.
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