Earlier today I was actually rolling on the ground with my newborn. He’s six months old. As I was actually hanging out with him for a little bit, my phone went off. Normally I have my phone turned off, but I wanted to check the message. As I was checking the message, in that moment, I realized that I wasn’t being present, so I just set my phone down. Now, it wasn’t more than about 10 seconds that my little boy – Bodie – he actually saw the cell phone on the ground and went for it, and that was the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.
So, what if everybody was watching you? You know, this morning I got up early, and while I was actually foam rolling getting ready for my workout, which I’m about to go do now. And while I was doing that, I was watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk to the Dutch Brothers Company. Now it’s two and a half hours, so I just got into the beginning, but one thing that Gary said that I thought was really interesting as he talked about the times that we live in. The times that we live in today versus our grandparents. So Gary was relating with saying, “Hey look, when your grandparents were around, your grandparents could have been jerks and they just had to move, right? So your grandparents could have lived in Portland and something could have happened, they could have done something bad, or something could just have happened in their lives and they wanted to move away from it. Now they could have moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and nobody would have known, and they would have started afresh. But nowadays, everything we do is carrying with us, right? With the advent of social media and the internet. You really can’t hide from things. Whether you’re doing bad things or good things, they do carry with you.”
Today, I was doing employee interviews where I actually talked to my employees about how they’re doing in the business. What I have them do is fill out kind of a long form where they’re doing checkboxes. Am I doing very good, good, or needs improvement, or not necessary in this particular category for many lists that are on there, and then I have a lot of questions. Of course, if you listen to any of these daily growth hacks, you could probably imagine I go way beyond just business to really know what’s going on in my staff and my team’s lives.
Now, this is a quick tip, but something that’s really easy to do. We all know the power of inspiration, the power of inspirational thoughts, inspirational movies, inspirational images, yet how often do we lose these inspirations right after we see it? Maybe you see an inspirational image in a magazine or an inspirational movie, and then after leaving, a day, two, three, four days later you lose that inspiration. Well, inspiration comes and goes, but one quick thing that you can do, right here, right now, today, to increase your odds of getting inspired, is by adding inspirational images to your desktop as well as to your phone backdrop.
So what the heck do I mean by ANTS? Well ANTS is simply an acronym for Automatic Negative Thoughts.
Now these are the thoughts that go on in our heads subconsciously when we’re driving, you know, taking a shower, or having a conversation with somebody and then all of a sudden you start remembering things from the past or you start thinking things, “Well jeez does this person think I’m not smart enough? I’m not good enough. I’m not rich enough.” Whatever it may be. They happen automatically.
