Hey everybody, it's Andy.
Always helping you build a career you love, but today we're also going to talk about your
life, and I am going to share some personal stuff of my own, and techniques that I've
used throughout my entire life that have helped me be successful.
I wanted to share them with you, because I get asked ... Or I have been asked so many
times throughout my life, "How is it that you are so productive?
How is it that you are so passionate about everything that you do and undertake, and
where does all the energy come from?"
And where does all the energy come from?
I've really been looking forward to sharing this with you, and I'm going to show you exactly
what's inside my journal.
There are 11 things that I want to share with you about that, and hope you can apply them
to your work and to your life.
I think they will do wonders to benefit you.
Now, it is about my journal, but it isn't about how I plan my day.
That's a video for another day.
Today is really about how do I think through everything that I do each day, and how does
it make sense to me.
Why does it matter?
How should I approach it, how should I think about it?
So let's get started.
Let's talk about the journal itself first.
I use just a Leuchtturm1917 journal.
I have a few of them here with me.
Nothing special, they're just lined paper.
They're easy to carry around in my brief bag or my computer bag, or whatever I choose to
do with them.
But just very sturdy, very neat, great for notetaking.
I like bulleting things, so they just ... They're absolutely, absolutely wonderful.
Each day when I get into the journal, or just even the things that I'm going to do that
are inside the journal, I have this "to be at my best" list, and it's just a ... It's
a reminder to me, there's seven things that I like to do each day, it's kind of my daily
checklist of habits.
It's not all my habits, but it's seven that I try to do every day.
It's rising early, exercising, asking futuristic questions � which I'll share with you here
shortly � meditating, I do some excellence planning � which I will also share with
you � I do a little journaling, some gratitude, and I affirm my "why."
If I do each of these items every day, I know I will be at my best to be energetic, passionate,
enthusiastic, and embrace all the projects that I have, with the people that I meet with,
and all of that great stuff.
It really centers me.
Then what I like to do is I have some questions that I like to run through.
Maybe I'm doing these in the shower at the health club, or in my house, or maybe with
my coffee, but I always ask myself these key questions.
There's seven or so of these.
Who do I want to be today?
How do I want to interact with others?
How can I make a difference?
Who needs me on my A game?
These are just a few of them that I ask myself every day, but they really get me thinking
about how I'm going to approach the day.
So, where my "to be at my best daily" are the things that I want to do to make sure
that I know that if I do these, I'm going to be in great shape, well, if I ask myself
these questions and I think in advance of what I'm going to do in the encounters that
I'm going to have, I know I will do them all well.
So that's the second thing.
The third thing is I have these daily reminders.
I don't know about your life; my life is very, very packed.
I don't even like to use the word "hectic," it's just ... It's packed.
I run a business � actually, I run multiple businesses � I have a lot going on, I do
an awful lot of things, I have lots of hobbies, interests, I have a lovely wife and family,
I have my dogs, which you probably have seen, who are actually in the corner there now while
I'm shooting, which I absolutely love.
So I have these daily reminders that basically just make sure that I'm in order each day.
They're things like being responsible for my energy, making sure that I'm not holding
on to any tension, trading expectations for appreciation.
We're going to talk about that in a little bit here, but we all have expectations of
how our lives should turn out; I don't know how right many of us are about them, but usually,
expectations are false or faulty, and appreciation can never be faulty.
But just adopting a learning mindset so that I know when I struggle that it's not a failure,
and sometimes I struggle for days on end, or weeks on end, or even months on end, depending
on how big the project is.
These are just reminders not to complain, anticipating issues that could occur throughout
the day.
These just center me, so I just ... I love those daily reminders.
It only takes me a few seconds to go through them, but if you do that each morning, you
know that when you encounter these kind of things, you're going to be ready for them.
I also have these daily improvement questions that I ask.
I love this part of my day.
I wrote these questions out.
There are five questions that I ask myself every single day that help me better my business,
better myself, and make me work in a more optimum form, and this is where a lot of the
ideas come from, and the material, and the training programs, and the gifts, and all
the things that I do with the milewalk Academy.
This is where a lot of them come from, and I actually shared these five questions that
I ask myself in a live office hours video that I did about the fastest way to improve
your career.
I gave you my five questions, and then I made analogous questions for you if you work for
a corporation, how you might adjust those questions.
But my questions are: What can I improve for my paying students or my existing customers?
What can I improve to give more value to my community?
Anybody who's watching this, I think about what can I do to give you more value.
How can I better market my services?
So, from a brand awareness and a marketing perspective, how could I better market my
services?
How can I improve my internal systems, because I want to become more efficient, and what
should I stop doing?
So I ask myself those five questions every day.
It's an idea-generating exercise.
I absolutely love it.
It's what gets me charged up, because that's where all the ideas come from, and then I
get excited about doing those things for you.
But it's really what gets my attitude in order, and plus, it gives me great projects to work
on and things that are of real value.
I'll never be able to do all of them, but I spend a few minutes on each of those questions
every day, and I brainstorm.
It's a wonderful way to get yourself charged up.
Then I affirm my "why."
I never want to forget why I do what I do.
It's something that I wrote and have tinkered with for about 15 years.
I repackaged it at the end of last year.
It's four little paragraphs, I have it memorized, I say it three to ten times every day.
It starts with "I was created to positively change more than 100 million lives through
my teaching."
It's what I want to do.
I'm not very numbers-oriented � we're going to talk about this in a minute � but I wanted
in my "why" to make sure that I had some order of magnitude, so that I had something big
to reach for.
And it goes on to talk about why I'm going to do that, how I'm going to do that, and
all that good stuff, and it is with me all the time.
I say it every morning, either at my desk, in my sunroom, on my way to the health club,
or wherever, but I know it, every day it's going to come out a number of times, and it's
what keeps me centered, and I never lose sight of why I do what I do.
It's a big deal for me, and it really helps me stay focused.
Stay focused, that's one of the biggest challenges that we all have.
I also have ... I call this ... I have this "meaningful" checklist.
It's not a meaningful checklist, it's ... When I'm going to do something, what does it mean
to me?
So this is the checklist that I go through before I say yes to anything.
I get, and probably like you, we all get a lot of requests, whether they're in our personal
life or whether they're for our business.
And so, before we just say yes, because I know we regret a lot of things that we say
yes to ... It sounded good at the time that three weeks from now, we're going to babysit
so-and-so, it sounded great, it sounded fun, but when the time comes, we've got to make
sure that we actually can do it and follow through on what we commit to.
But there's a lot of things that I get requests on.
People want me to speak, people want me to work on their podcasts with them, those kinds
of things, I get lots and lots of requests.
Would I write an article with somebody, things of that nature.
So what I do is I go through these four questions that have to do with my level of enthusiasm,
my connection to it, whether I will be satisfied, and just the coherence of how it fits into
my life.
So I ask myself, "Will it excite me?
Is this something that I will be passionate about, and it will be fun for me, and I'll
be enthusiastic about it?"
Second thing I ask, "Will it deepen the relationship that I have with the other people, or individual,
or people that I am going to interact with?"
I also ask myself, "Will it satisfy me?
Will it actually satiate something that I'm trying to do, a skill I'm trying to build,
a project I'm trying to work on, or is it just something I want to volunteer to do?"
You know, that's very important, that it be satisfying with whatever it is that we do.
And then the last thing is coherence: "Is this something that fits into my overall work
life, or my life-life, and is it going to be ... Do I want this to be a big part of
my story?"
And I just run through it very, very quickly, and I think about if ... Will it make a difference?
Will it actually make a difference if I do that?
Who am I going to be helping?
Will it make a difference for me, will it make a difference for them?
So, before I say yes to anything, I kind of go through that process, and I assess it.
Very helpful, saves me from doing a lot of things that I would otherwise regret, and
I'm sure it will help you save you from a lot of things that you would otherwise regret.
I also have these little reminders.
These are kind of silly, but I really like them.
I call them "engagement questions."
These are questions that I literally ask myself and my team, and my teammates or my clients,
or whoever, or people I'm coaching, or whoever it might be, so that it'll stimulate and kind
of pause me, and help remind me, "Hey, think about it.
Think of it this way.
What would happen if we tried this?"
I want to think about the consequences, the upsides, the downsides, those kind of things.
"What's the best way to approach this?
Is this something we could do better?"
And these questions will help you step back, get away from the issue or the project or
whatever, and then just remind yourself, pause, get centered, and genuinely think about it.
Because, as silly as it sounds, you might think your mind's working and thinking all
the time; actually, you're on autopilot a ton, and you're just going through the motions,
and you're trying to knock out the papers, knock out the widgets, knock out the work,
knock out the project, when the fact of the matter is, you should really take a sobering
look at what it is you're doing.
And sometimes, I need to remind myself that, so I have these questions here, so whenever
I'm not sure what to do, I look at them, and they remind me, "Think, think."
This is one of my favorites.
I call it the "move the needle questions."
I always think about everything that I do, everything that you do, not everything is
created equal in terms of magnitude and moving this world forward.
So I, as a business owner, am continually looking for ways to invest myself and my material
into the market so that it can impact people, whether that's a free giveaway, a webinar,
a video series, or a training program, or my coaching program, its methodology, and
so on.
I always want to look at three areas related to: Is it going to move the needle, is it
going to make an impact?
I think about its relevance.
Is it actually relevant in what's going on in that person's life, in my life, in the
world, and so on?
Is it different, is it unique, is it me?
I don't want to be a copycat.
There's plenty of other people out there who can copy; the world doesn't need another one
of them, so is what I'm putting out genuinely different?
Does it have my personality in it, does it have my energy and my enthusiasm?
Does it have my experience, my unique value?
My unique value.
I can tell you there's a lot of other coaches that are out there that do what I do, or talk
about what I talk about, but am I bringing my 30 years to the table, and with everything
that I have to share with you, or whoever is encountering what I'm giving?
So, is it different, and am I making a major contribution?
I always weigh this one whenever I get tempted to do something for a buck, which is rare.
I know we all need to earn money because we need to feed our families, and I need to stay
in business, and all that good stuff, but I look at the contribution first, because
I always feel like if it makes a major contribution, the money part will take care of itself.
So, is it relevant, is it different, and am I making a major contribution?
Every time I'm about to start a big project, or I'm looking to tinker with it to improve
it, or I'm looking to upgrade something I've already done, I ask myself, "How can I make
it more relevant, how can I make it different, and how can I contribute more?"
Love those needle-mover questions.
Then I have my goals.
I have a handful of goals that I work on.
These are process goals; I rarely have metrics goals.
I look at analytics for my business, I look at things in my life that I would like to
improve, but I genuinely focus on progress, and the journey, and the process that I go
through every day.
So, as an example, I would like to make sure that I go through my checklist every day,
I affirm my "why" every day.
If I can go through all of these, I call that a victory, because the process that I'm going
through, I know in turn will turn into positive outcomes and an enjoyable day, which ultimately,
I think, should be everybody's goal, probably the number one goal, to be truly happy in
what you do and what you contribute to this world.
But when you start putting metrics on things, and you become so numbers-focused, I think
it can become a little disheartening, especially because those numbers are usually expectations,
and we're not focused on the appreciation and the journey.
So, I have a handful of goals that I reflect on, I look at.
Those are next in the journal, and I always look at them, usually on a daily basis, but
at least weekly.
Then I get into the daily journaling.
Every day, in the morning, or at lunchtime if I do not have a meeting, I will take a
few moments, and what's nice is I'd kind of recap what's happened, or what's happened
in the morning.
I exercise in the morning and do a number of other things in the morning, and then I
like to quickly journal, and I like to go through my gratitude.
Everything in my life ... You know, I used to do three things a day, now I probably do
25 things a day.
Everything from my home, my family, my health, my dogs, you, my community, members of the
milewalk Academy, whoever it is, I'm always offering appreciation, and I never lose sight
of it, even the silly things, my iPhones and my cameras and my lights and whatever.
Anything that makes my life tick, I want to be appreciative of it and know that I have
been very blessed, and it is very easy to forget this in the world we live in, and it's
also very easy to forget it when we're hanging out on social media too much, and we're watching
highlight reels from all of our friends.
That is one way not to be happy, and to lose sight, and start having expectations.
Just stay grounded in appreciation; you will be happier.
And writing it down stimulates different parts of the brain, it engages you more, you are
physically engaged in the appreciation.
I love it, it's one of my favorite parts of the day.
It doesn't have to take very long, but the benefits of it last all day, until you go
to the next day, and it's over and over again.
So, that's a big part of what the journal is mostly filled with, and then I have one
other thing.
There are a number of keepsakes that I have, and cards, and things that I absolutely love.
They're with me all the time.
It's really wonderful reminders; I use little flip calendars and cards, and other things
that I ... Something if, that I love so much I might even type it out, make a quote card,
laminate it, just so that I have it with me and it doesn't wear out, because I love it
so much.
I've got a few of those as well.
These are all things that are in my journal, and I absolutely live with it, it's with me
all the time, but I live with it and I live by it.
I hope sharing this with you has given you some different ways to look at how to think
about your day.
Now, you don't need to do every single one of these things all at once.
These are things that I look at throughout the day, some things I look at once a week,
but it's always with me, and I always have it at the flip of a fingertip, and I can get
myself centered again.
And this is what helps me generate ideas, this is what helps me think about how I'm
going to approach my day, how I'm going to approach my project, how I'm going to approach
the people that I interact with.
This is where a big part of the energy and the passion comes from, and I hope it energetically
and passionately helped you.
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I release new videos every week, and I have my live office hours every Thursday.
I'd love for you to stop by so I can get to know you a little better and help you on a
deeper level.
Until next week, have a great one.