When I first started out as a speaker and facilitator I was travelling around North America on a speaking tour called "Take More Action", The focus on the tour was to engage youth on the social and environmental issues we faced as a world and to empower young people to volunteer both locally and globally. 

When was the last time you sat down for 20 minutes and really got to know the most important person you have in your life? I’m not talking about a significant other or even a family member; I’m talking about taking the time to sit down with yourself and take the opportunity to get to know who you truly are.

In a world where we spend the majority of our day connected but not really connecting, it can be easy to overlook and not prioritize taking the time to sit in silence, completely uninterrupted, or to open up your notebook and start to journal the thoughts you have in your head. We become so aware of what’s going on around us and with other people, that we can become completely unaware of what’s going on inside ourselves.

Self awareness can be defined as a conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives and desires. It’s foundational in the development of our emotional intelligence, yet it’s easy to neglect. It’s easy to spend more time trying to get to know others and understand their motives than we do working at understanding our own.

So where do you start? How do you teach yourself to become more self aware?

The beautiful thing about self awareness is that you can begin by just thinking about self awareness.

Maybe you want to begin by sitting in silence for 10 or 20 minutes and simply just pay attention to your body’s sensations or the thoughts that are flowing through your mind. If you’re a writer (and even if you’re not), try journaling for 15 minutes every day for week. Write about the challenges you’re facing, the lessons you’re learning, or the things you’re grateful for right now (like having the courage to take action on your idea).

Spending time with yourself is one of the most empowering and beneficial thing you can do for yourself both personally and professionally. Understanding what drives you is a powerful tool for success. Becoming more aware of your emotions and how they influence your behaviour allows you control them rather than allowing them to control you.

However you choose to practice awareness, the main point is to make sure you practice it! It’s like playing an instrument, sport or learning a new skill; in order to get good at it, you need to do it regularly.

Socrates said it simply and best, “know thyself”.

Originally posted at: 
http://www.thesojo.net/understanding-self-awareness/

It’s not about telling a kid “don’t do drugs” or  a group of them to “Stop bullying each other”. It’s about helping youth recognize that they have choices in their lives. 

It’s not about academics — That’s our agenda, not theirs. We should want teenagers to be happy and healthy and let the other stuff come after that. The other stuff WILL come after that. 

It’s not about telling a kid “things will get better” even when you know they won’t. It’s about helping that kid understand that nothing is permanent and everything is temporary, even pain. 

Here we are trying to mold them into what best suits society and neglecting to pay more attention to what we’ve already done. We think so much about the future and the past that we often neglect the present. 

Do you think you could change the world in 30 seconds? Could you take an idea that is big and bold and sum it up into something that could spark the mind or soul of another human being? 

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with a guy who's part of a team that's trying to help people do just that! The platform is called Ticckle (www.ticckle.com) and the premise is pretty straight forward: 30 seconds to share a thought, idea, opinion or question that could influence, inspire and empower other people around the world to not just start thinking, but to take action. 

Pretty inspiring stuff. 

Check it out: 
http://ticckle.com/opinions/1047060398/what-do-you-need-to

Keep Living Big,
Matt

Check out my recent summary for www.actionablebooks.com on the book Leadership 2.0 by Travis Bradberry!

This book is definitely on my list of top books to read on the topic of leadership development!

http://www.actionablebooks.com/summaries/leadership-2-0

If you like the summary, make sure to check out my FREE RESOURCES section for my chapter notes on the book (posted later today)

In Leadership,
Matt

"Each of us is affected in a negative way by something each day. One of the greatest challenges of life is to have both the wisdom to recognize those sources of negatively, and the courage to cast them aside, if necessary." - Jim Rohn, The Seasons of Life


This past week I read a post titled "30 Things to Stop Doing To Yourself." 

It inspired me. It inspired me because it challenged me, by reading it, to really start to look at myself, my actions and behaviours, and my thoughts and, in all honesty, call myself out on the things I've been doing lately that are harming myself or other people. 

I'm not necessarily talking about things that harm me or others physically (though I'm sure that there are long-term physical effects to things like holding grudges or acting like everything is fine when it actually isn't), but more about the things that hurt me emotionally or spiritually (when I say "spiritually" I'm really talking about being connected to something that is bigger than I am). Things that are holding me back from being the best version of myself. 

It forced me to start to be more aware about my self-talk. It made me realize that sometimes I can play the victim (both at work and at home). It made me realize that sometimes I put my happiness in the hands of other people and, as a result, have been losing myself in the process. It made me understand just how powerful perspective is when it comes to personal growth and happiness. 

It reminded me about the story of the two wolves. 

It challenged me to really look at my behaviours and determine what it is that I need to work on right now. What are the negative things I'm doing, thinking or saying that, if I don't take action, have the potential to make me a very unhappy person? 

So I thought about it. I wrote about it and now...I'm going to share it. 

Here's a short list of some of the actual things that I've been struggling with lately. I'm sharing them because, like the post said, we all need to stop pretending like things are fine when they're not. =)

I'm a better person at work than I am at home most of the time these days - I think this has a lot to do with my ability to manage and control my day at work. I have control over the work I do, the meetings I have, how productive I am, and all of that. At home though, life is chaotic. It's chaotic because we have a two year old son, I feel like I have less control, and I'm still trying to figure out this whole being a good dad AND a good partner thing...

I put a lot of my own self worth in the hands of others - I always have. I've always been concerned with what people think about me, whether or not they like me, and how I can make them happy. In some ways, my happiness is in the hands of others. Sometimes that's not a bad thing though. Sometimes it works. Helping others helps me. But other times, I can become so concerned with why someone might be upset with me that I let it take over my thoughts and my actions.

Sometimes I feel fake - Sometimes I feel fake when I'm giving advice on personal development or about how we, as young people, can change the world. It's not because I don't believe the advice I give or the things I say, rather, it's because sometimes I don't do it. Sometimes I just need a break from trying to present myself as strong and confident. Sometimes I'm not. 

That's me. That's what I'm dealing with right now. I'm putting it out here because I want to be accountable. I want to change these things about myself. 

Actively. 

What about you? What are the things you're doing right now that you need to stop? 

It's been emotional,
Matt

So the first thing I should say is that, for anyone who was following my 7 Day Set Yourself Series, I'm sorry that I didn't finish it. 

It’s Sunday! The end of the weekend and the beginning of a new week! For a lot of people, Sunday can be a time of anxiety and disappointment. It’s a time when you reflect on the awesome weekend you had and hesitate going into the week and facing a nasty case of the Mondays.

But what if you had something to look forward to? What if you spent a little bit of focused time on Sunday preparing yourself for the week in a way that made you excited and motivated to start strong?

Let me introduce you to Set Yourself Sundays!

 I’ve been using this strategy for as long as I can remember. I’m not actually sure I know where I picked it up but it’s definitely evolved over the years to meet my needs and so that I can be much more focused and productive with my time. It’s something that I do habitually. When I don’t, I feel as though I’m not in control of my week and very unfocused on the goals I have and the tasks I need to achieve.

Basically what I’m telling you is that by taking a focused 30 minutes on Sunday to set up your week, prioritize your priorities and write down your goals will not only change how you start your week, it will also improve how much you achieve in that week and how you feel at the end of it. It’s a way to monitor your goals and to reflect at the end of the week on ways to continually grow and develop yourself.

It rocks.

Here’s how it works:


I recommend that you pick yourself up a physical agenda or calendar for this. There’s some great research out there that shows the connection between actually writing things down (using pen and paper) and achievement.  In his book, The ONE Thing, Gary Keller tells us that when you write down your goals you are almost 40% more likely to accomplish them. What’s even more impressive is that if you share those goals with someone else as a way to hold yourself accountable that number jumps up to almost 77%.

Wild.

It’s a great case for not only writing down your priorities and goals each week, but also for sharing them with someone who can hold you to them.

Step 1: Prioritize your priorities.

Take some time to first go through the process of prioritizing your priorities. This is the first and most important step. By ensuring that you have your priorities set right at the beginning, any goals you want to achieve or tasks that need to be accomplished can be properly prioritized and you’ll have a clear understanding of what’s important to you and where you’ll put your time this week.

If you’re not totally sure what I’m talking about, check out yesterday’s post on it and then do that before going on to the next step.

Step 2:

After you’ve listed your priorities in order of prioritization, the next step is to then start to list 3-5 goals or tasks you want to achieve.

For example, if one of your priorities is health & wellness, your goals might be:

·      Be active for at least 20 minutes every day

·      Drink 8 glasses of water each day

·      Be in bed by 9:30pm and up by 5am four days this week.

It’s important that you make these goals things that you can easily measure and check off each day. What that means is that if you were active for at least 20 minutes on Monday, it gets a check mark. If you weren’t, it doesn’t.

Don’t do what I did when I first started out doing this either. When I first started this I would write up to ten (sometimes unrealistic) goals. This was way too much and just ended up disappointing me more than empowering me.

Something I’ve started to do within the last year is limit myself to the three most important things I should be doing for each priority. In his book, Keller actually recommends you narrow it down to the ONE most important thing by asking the following question:

“What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

So that should be first. As you write down your priorities and reflect on what you want or have to accomplish that week asking this question will help you stay focused on what’s most important. Try it.

Step 3: Appointments, Events and Commitments to others

On the calendar side of your agenda (see picture below), write down any appointments, events, or commitments to others you have each day. This should include things like going to the gym, spending time with friends, work obligations, etc.

By doing this, you can visually map out your week and cross-reference that with your priorities and goals. If you’ve got a lot of work-related events that week, chances are you’re not going to be able to hit the gym 4 days (unless you’re getting up early…which I recommend) or spend as much time with friends and family as you’d like. If that’s the case, you may want to consider counter-balancing things like not being able to go to the gym as much with something like really focusing on eating healthy and staying hydrated. Another example would be phoning friends while you’re out walking the dog or texting/emailing them early in the morning with a note of gratitude.

By doing a double check here, you’ll be able to see whether or not the goals you’ve set out for yourself are realistic and achievable.

 

Step 4: Monitor as you go.

As you go through your week, start and end each day by looking at your agenda and checking off the things you achieved that day. For example, if you got 20 minutes of exercise or activity in, then give it a check mark. If not, don’t.

At the end of the week (you can do this Sunday before you start to set yourself up again), reflect on what you achieved, what you didn’t and possible reasons or explanations for this. Did you set too many goals? Were they unrealistic given the amount of time you actually had. If so, use what you’ve learned to set more realistic goals for the next week (for example, reading for 1 hour each day might go down to reading for 30 minutes each day or reading for 1 hour three days out of seven).

Step 5: Reflect on the week and set it up again.

The last step, as mentioned above, is to reflect on your week and what you’ve accomplished, what challenges you faced, what you learned from these challenges and how you’ll use them in the new week to move forward and grow. This can be done in a journal or by sharing this with a performance partner (something we’ll talk about later this week).

This is an awareness and success tool.  By taking focused time to set up your week, you’re ultimately setting yourself up for success. By taking the time to reflect on and adapt your goals, when necessary, you’re continuously learning about yourself and growing toward your fullest potential.

Keep Living Big,

Matt

I’ve been waiting two whole days to get into this topic! This is by far one of the most influential and life-improving strategies I’ve incorporated into my life over the past two years.

Prioritizing your priorities!? What does that even mean!?

This gem of an idea comes from the book, Off Balance by Matthew Kelly.

It’s the kind of book that as you read it you think to yourself “he’s talking directly to me!” It’s also a book that I’ve reference, shared and promoted time and time again to anyone who is struggling with finding that thing that we call “Work-Life Balance”.

One of the big ideas that Kelly puts forward is that “balance” doesn’t actually exist. Noone and nothing is ever completely balanced. We’re continuously making tiny adjustments to keep ourselves stable. Instead, we need to consider that everything comes in what he refers to as “seasons”. That these seasons may last a year, a month, a day, an hour or however long they do, but that all seasons pass. We have seasons of being incredibly busy, seasons for rest and rejuvenation, and seasons where what’s important to us during that time takes priority over everything else.

The other brilliant idea that I took from this book (and this is the piece that I’ve implemented in my life and helped to bring into the lives of others) is that we’re not necessarily taught how to make decisions properly. Because we’re not taught or provided a strategy on how to make effective decisions, we tend to either say yes to everything or we say no and end up feeling guilty about it. Kelly brings forward a process that you can go through in order to make better, more confident decisions and to prioritize what’s most important to you.

Prioritizing Your Priorities

Step 1: The first thing we have to do is to start by really understand what we mean when we say “priority”.

We live in a world where everything seems to be a priority and everything tends to be important to everyone. If we keep living that way, we likely end up burning out or feeling as though we’re not living in alignment with our values.

Here’s what I mean by that. When I first left University and was in my first job, I thought I had landed my dream job. I thought that I was going to head in the direction of having and exciting career in event management and sport administration. I also, on top of that, was trying to do a tremendous amount of activities outside of my regular work: learning to play guitar, going to the gym 5 days a week, hanging out with friends as much as I could, reading a book every two weeks, and making sure that I was taking time to cook healthy meals. The trouble with all of this is that I didn’t know what was most important to me. I just labeled everything as important and really quickly fell into a pretty dark place of disappointment and exhaustion. I was reading a lot of self-help kind of books at the time and started to let myself believe that I could do everything all at the same time. I slowly and sadly started to learn that I couldn’t. As I became more overwhelmed with everything I wanted to do, I started to notice that I began feeling really bad about not achieving everything I had told myself that I wanted to achieve. I was struggling just to manage the challenges of my first job and living in the city. Eventually I burnt out. I became really upset with myself and really hard on myself. I started telling myself that I was a failure.

What I eventually learned is that too much self-help can turn into self-hurt.

Looking back on this, I realize that my biggest challenge was that I didn’t know what my priorities were. I didn’t take the time to sit down and really go through a process of understanding what was truly important to me and why.

Enter prioritizing your priorities.

How to prioritize your priorities:

Step 1: In order to make more confident decisions that are aligned with your values and what’s important to you, you need to actually know what is. The first thing you’re going to do is make a list of all of the things that you would consider to be important to you right now, at this point in time in your life. Don’t filter anything, don’t try to cut things down, just write everything down.

Step 2: Now that you have a long list, take a look at it and see if there’s anything that can be put together into a “bucket”. For example, friends and having a social life might be bucketed into the priority of “Relationships” or Working out and eating healthy could be bucketed into a larger priority of “Health & Wellness”.

Step 3: Now that you’ve trimmed things down a bit by bucketing them. Go ever further and narrow down your priorities to a maximum of 5. If it helps, think about what on the list you’ve created is a priority for you over the next three months. Three months from now revisit your list and see if anything has changed. If it has, great! Make those changes. If not, keep focused on the priorities you’ve already established.

Step 4: Once you established what your 4-5 priorities are for the time period you’ve decided on, you now go through the process of prioritizing these priorities. Where a lot of people tend to go wrong is right here. Most people will establish their priorities but not make decisions based on what is most important between those priorities. As a result, those people end up saying yes to everything or end up putting other people’s priorities before their own.

Warning: This is going to change your game!

Take a new sheet of paper (or a new page on your computer) and write down the 4-5 priorities you’ve just established. Don’t try to put them in order just yet. The task is to simply just write them down.

For example,

·      Friends & Family

·      Personal Development

·      Health & Wellness

·      Work

·      Spirituality

Now that you’ve done that, take the first two (Friends & Family and Personal Development) and ask:

Which is more important to me this week?

If Personal Development (things like reading, journaling, reflection, etc) is more important to you that week it gets a check mark. If spending time with friends & family is more important to you that week, it gets the checkmark. The main point is that only one of these two things gets a checkmark.

 

Next, you go through that same process but with Friends & Family and Health & Wellness. Which ever is more important to you that week gets the checkmark.

Again with Friends & Family and Work.

Again with Friends & Family and Spirituality.

The end result is that Friends & Family will have between 0 and 5 checkmarks.

Step 5: Do it again. This time take Friends & Family out of the process and start with Personal Development.

Again, you’re asking the question “this week, what is more important?” and giving whichever you believe is more important that beautiful little checkmark.

*Note* You can use this on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.

Go through this process until you have nothing left to compare.

 At the end, you’ll have a 0-5 checkmarks around each of your priorities. The priority with the most checkmarks is your most important priority. The one with the second highest would then become your second highest priority and so on.

For example:

·      Friends & Family = 2 checkmarks

·      Personal Development = 1 checkmark

·      Health & Wellness  = 3 checkmarks

·      Work = 0 checkmarks

·      Spirituality = 4 checkmarks

This then becomes:

My Priorities this week:

1.    Spirituality

2.    Health & Wellness

3.    Friends & Family

4.    Personal Development

5.    Work

 
Now that you've established what your priorities are for the week (or month, or year), everything you decide to do, to take on, or get involved in should align with these. Because you know what your priorities are and why they are important to you, it becomes a lot easier to turn away less important requests of your time and energy. It keeps you focused on what's most important and what will bring the most satisfaction into your life. 

Important! You notice that work is at the bottom of the list, right? That doesn’t mean that work isn’t important (it definitely is). What that means is that by making sure that I’m keeping myself healthy, I’ll be better at work. I’ll have more energy and I’ll bring more focus and productivity to the work I do. By making sure that I’m keeping in touch with my spirituality, I’ll also be more connected at work. I’ll pay more attention to what’s going on around and inside me. By making time for friends & family, I can ensure that I’m not feeling burnt out. And by investing in my personal development, I can take what I learn and share it with others in the work that I do.

Nailed it.

This is a fantastic process for breaking down those big hairy audacious goals into smaller, more focused weekly actions.

The great thing about this strategy is that you can also use if your managing projects and your workload at work. I use this each week as a way to keep me focused on my major priorities and the tasks & goals I have connected to them. It works great and I can much more easily say no to something that isn’t aligned with my priorities or at least delay the ask until I have more time (after I’ve focused on what’s most important).

Let’s just end this part of the conversation by saying this. Balance doesn’t exist. Work-life balance was really find and great for my grandparent’s generation but it doesn’t sit well with me and mine. I don’t want to divide my work and the rest of my life. I want them both to have meaning and purpose and I want them to be integrated, not separated.

I really recommend giving this a try.

Sunday we’ll take this and I’ll show you how I use this in my planning for the week. We’ll look at what I call Set Yourself Sunday.

Live Big,

Matt

Want to go through this in a bit more detail? Check out this interview I did with my friend Sahil Dhingra on his show Reconnectfully Yours on the topic of reaching your goals and realizing your fullest potential. 

What is up!? Welcome to 2014! 

I know you're probably super excited to have a kick ass year and have probably started to set some gorilla-sized goals for yourselves. 

Or maybe you're just super anxious because everyone else around you seems to be setting huge goals and you're still trying to figure out what happened on New Year's Eve...

Either way, I'm here to help! 

As a way to support you, I want to take the next 7 days and share with you some of the BEST strategies, tools and resources I’ve come across over the past few years around how to prioritize your priorities, manage your time, set goals, where to put your focus and all great stuff like that.

Much of this I’ve learned from other incredible people, books and mentors and have applied to my life to be my best. All of this I use in my day-to-day life and in the work I do training and coaching others. 

My goal is to help you set yourself up for YOUR best possible year yet.
 
But before I keep going, I’ll just say this: You don’t have to take any of this advice as absolute truth. In fact, I encourage you not to. If there’s something here that resonates with you, inspires you, challenges you, that’s awesome! I’m thankful that you found that. If not, no worries, I won’t cry (in public).

I don’t consider myself to know everything about personal development (if I did, I think that would be a bit ironic) but I am super passionate about learning and I focus on positively developing myself a little bit each and every day.

My personal Why (See Simon Sinek’s TED talk, Start with Why to learn more about this) is that I believe is doing as much Good in the work as possible, becoming a bit better ever single day and helping others be their best when it matters the most). My journey in leadership, personal and community development has allowed me to take my strengths & values (we’ll talk about this at some point in the next few days) and apply them to my every day life. As the Associate Director of Training & Development at Free The Children & Me to We, and the former Executive Director of Youth Programs at the Institute for Health & Human Potential, I’ve been so fortunate to take what I learn, apply it and also share it with young people on a regular basis.

My hope for the next 7 days is this:

I want to take the next 7 days with you and share some of the most powerful and helpful tips, strategies and resources I’ve come across, use personally, and train others on in order to help them improve not just achieve your goals, but their overall quality of life and greatest potential.

If you’re a University or college student, looking at your next semester, starting to think about what you’re going to do once you graduate (or how you’re going to graduate), I think there’s some really valuable stuff coming up around setting priorities and how to focus.

If you’re just starting out in your career, my hope is that this can really help you thrive in your new environment. I spend my days training and working with a lot of people who are coming into their first job out of University/College or transitioing from one career to another.

If you’re a teenager, this stuff is for you too! In fact, I think that you have the most to benefit if you can start to build these strategies into your life now, before things start to get even more intense.

The next 7 days will be about getting to know yourself more. Some of what we talk about will be helpful for you personally, other pieces might be helpful for you if you’re starting out in a new career or are trying to decide what you really want to do with your life.

I hope that you take the tips, strategies and resources I’m sharing with you and find something that works for you. I hope that you’re able to not only get to know yourself a bit better, but to use that self-awareness and knowledge to grow. I hope that you find value in what I share. If you don’t, let me know. I love feedback! 

You may not want to read everything I have to share this week, and again that’s totally cool. To give you an idea of what we’re going to cover this week, here’s a high-level break down of each of the topics we’re going to cover and when:

Day 1: Thursday, Jan 2nd – Welcome to the #SetYourself Series.

Day 2: Friday, Jan 3rd – Self Awareness – Finding Your Why.

I’ll take you through a process of starting to find your Why and how to create a Why statement that can guide you and you journey through 2014 focused on achieving all of your goals.

Day 3: Saturday, Jan 4th – Prioritizing your priorities. It’s hard to make decisions if we don’t know what our priorities are. I’ll take you through a really great process inspired by Matthew Kelly in his book, Off-Balance. You’ll walk away with a great tool that helps you prioritize your priorities in both your personal life and work, and, ultimately, become more confident in how you make decisions. One of my favs!

Day 4: Sunday, Jan 5th – Set Yourself Sunday – Setting yourself up for a productive and successful week. I'll take you through the process I go through every Sunday in order to set myself up for a powerful week. If there is one strategy I use that makes the most difference in my life, this is it! 

Day 5: Monday, Jan 6th – Strengths & Values. Hold on it’s about to get reflective in here! We’ll talk about how we can you use them to achieve your goals, find your perfect career and generally be more awesome. Super helpful for anyone currently trying to figure out what to do with their lives.

Day 6: Tuesday, Jan 7th – Creating a personal advisory board. Simple steps to building your own personal brand & creating genuine connections

Day 7: Wednesday, Jan 8th – Sustain the Change – Some of the most important things you can do in order to make sure this kind of change is sustainable long-term.

Bonus: Live the Questions: some of the most important questions I’ve ever asked myself and how they’ve helped me grow, achieve and find happiness.  

So what do you think? Did I miss anything that would be helpful for you? If so, throw me an email (matttodspeaks@gmail.com) or reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn with your suggestions, questions or comments.

Live the Questions,

Matt