Seeking clarity is about finding out who you are but more importantly who you want to be and how you want to feel in the future. You have to have a vision for yourself in the future and find meaning in what you do today because that propels you forward. When you have clarity about your future, you can be intentional about your behaviors and shape your future self.

You generate clarity by asking yourself questions, researching, trying new things, sorting through life’s opportunities, and finding out what’s right for you. Continually keep doing these things because clarity  does not come all at once. It takes time to find things out, to think about them and continually refine. Start with finding the answers to these questions: Who am I? (What do I value? What are my strengths and weaknesses?) What are my goals? What’s my plan? Below are three practices to help you find more clarity.

Activity: Envision and Clarify Your Future

Your future self: Describe your future best self positively in 3 words and continuously remind yourself of them by putting a reminder in your phone (3x/day). Start acting like that person today. Think about your feelings & behaviors in different situations in the past and think how you would do it in the future.

Your future social interactions: For each person close to you, imagine how you want that person to describe the relationship with you in just 3 words. With every interaction, demonstrate those qualities. You can also ask yourself 3 questions before any interaction: 1. How can you be a good person or leader? 2. What will the other person need? 3. What kind of mood and tone do you want to set?

Your future skills: Look into your primary field of interest and identify 3 skills that would make you successful in the future in that field. Next, set up a plan to develop those skills obsessively: How will you learn and when. Approach skill learning as a specialist with the goal of mastery. Finally, imagine the future and create a list of 3 skills that you would need to succeed within 5 to 10 years from now. Keep them on the radar to also start developing them sooner rather than later. Make skill building a priority!

Your future service to others: Ask yourself how you can add value, inspire, and make a difference to those you serve (customers, colleagues,..). What does matter to them? How to serve in unique ways? How can you exceed expectations and serve with excellence? Make your contribution to the world! 

Activity: Determine the Feeling You’re After

Events that happen in your environment trigger a sudden, mostly unconscious, emotional response like anger, fear, amusement, sadness, relief or love. You can consciously choose how you want to feel regardless of those emotions that come up by changing the interpretation of that emotion. For example, when you’re afraid tell yourself that you’re sensing a feeling of readiness and excitement.

Ask yourself frequently: What is the primary feeling you want to bring to this situation, and what is the primary feeling you want to get from this situation? What do you want to feel today? What emotions come up and how can you define the feeling yourself? In sports, “feeling” makes you a winning athlete.

Activity: Define What’s Meaningful

Our striving for a meaningful life is one of the main factors of psychological well-being and happiness. High performers define meaning as: enthusiasm (choose projects you are most enthusiastic about), connection (have social relationships that challenge you), satisfaction (effort linked to your passions, leads to personal growth, and makes a contribution to others), and coherence (having the feeling that things you do make sense, create a legacy, feeding a higher purpose). You can create your own definition of meaning by just starting to know the difference between busywork and your life’s work. Choose to have more meaningful activities in your life. Questions to ask: What activities bring me the most meaning? What activities are not meaningful to me? What new activities can bring me more meaning?

When you’re abundant with energy, you can do anything and you are more likely to climb to the top of your primary field of interest. Your level of energy influences your overall happiness, your enthusiasm for taking on challenges, your confidence in facing adversity, and your influence with others. Energy is something daily that has to be sustained over the long term. Crush it and still be happy!

You have to take responsibility for your energy and GENERATE it. People don’t “have” energy or happiness they have to generate it themselves just like a power plant generates energy. As a person, you can generate energy by transforming the way you think and feel about any given situation (from negative to positive). Don’t wait for joy, motivation, love, but choose to generate it!

Any power plant that generates energy has a certain capacity and if it’s running above capacity it will blow itself up. For this plant to keep running at its full potential it will have to schedule PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE. As a person, you can do this by scheduling several pitstops during the day. You can do this by leaving your seat and drinking some water. Come back and ask: “What’s most important for me to focus on this next hour? What’s my intention here?”. Every time you do this you have a new opportunity to restart awesome! Remember when you take your pitstop don’t check your phone, emails, social media,… because the goal is to recharge.

Activity: Release Tension, Set Intention

(Manage Transitions During the Day)

Reflect on activities you have during the day. Do you ever carry over negative emotions from one activity to another or from one place to another (work to home, meeting to meeting,…)? Consider using the transition time to release tension and set intention for the next activity.

1. When you transition from one situation to the next, take a deep breath, close your eyes and tell yourself repeatedly “release” to release the tension in your face, neck, and shoulders.
2. Then set an intention for your next activity on how you want to feel by asking yourself: “What is the primary feeling I want to bring into this situation?”. Examples of feelings to bring: curiosity, patience, enjoyment, relaxation, gratefulness, warmth, appreciation, intensity,…

Decide to dictate your feelings yourself and generate more of the feelings you want more often.

Activity: Bring the Joy

You can choose how you want to feel at every moment throughout the day. To bring joy, you can master your thoughts and guide them toward positive states of mind. You can do this by creating triggers in your environment that remind you of bringing joy. For example, when you see this mug with “Bring the joy” it will remind you to take charge of your own happiness and joy.

Another good practice to “bring the joy” is to start your day with these simple questions: 1. What can I be excited about today? 2. What great challenges can I set for today? 3. What or who might cause me stress, and how can I respond in a positive way? 4. How can I prepare for moments during the day when things can go wrong? 5. Who can I surprise today with a thank you or appreciation? Create an awesome environment around you by bringing positivity into social interactions!

Activity: Optimize Health

Start taking care of yourself! Everybody knows what to do: Exercise, eat healthier food, and sleep 7 – 8 hours per night. Despite this common sense, many people give excuses why they are not able to do this. For example, they say they don’t have time for this. STOP making excuses and start putting yourself as a first priority and implement habits to live a healthy lifestyle. Your life will become so much better and you will feel a lot more energetic!

Necessity means that you feel a deep emotional drive and commitment to succeeding, and it consistently forces you to work hard, stay disciplined, and push yourself. When you have high necessity, you feel success or high performance as a must and not just a preference.

Activity: Set Your Identity

Take some time to set your identity, which means you define for yourself who you will aspire to be and how you’ll show up. Hereafter, remind yourself of who you want to be and align your actions with it.

Your task should be to set new standards, self-monitor yourself more frequently, and learn to become comfortable with taking a hard look at your own performance. Self-monitoring is crucial to stay on track and keep performance high. Areas in which to raise your standards: Commitment to excellence, Health, Focus, Courage, Joy, Kindness, Growth,… If something is tied to “who you are,” you just do it!

Activity: Set Real Deadlines

Having a deadline motivates you to give full focus to finish a project on time so you can let it go and focus afterward on a new challenge. A real deadline is a date that matters because if it isn’t met, real negative consequences happen. If it is met, real benefits come to fruition (e.g., excitement of seeing your work out there). Setting deadlines can more than double the likelihood of achieving a goal.

Know the dates when things are due, and the real consequences and payoffs associated with those dates. You can increase the importance of a deadline by making it public to the world, which gives it some type of social pressure. Finally, don’t fall into the trap of false deadlines which are due dates that are someone’s preference, not a true need with real consequences if it’s not met.

Activity: Know Who Needs Your “A” Game

Ask yourself the question: “Who needs me on my “A” game the most right now?” Being on your “A” game means that you are giving your best effort with full focus on the singular task at hand. This question forces you to do an internal review: What is my A game? Have I been bringing it today? What would my A game look like in the next hour or so? Who is worth fighting for?

Activity: Affirm the Why

High performers talk to themselves and remind themselves why they do what they do. The WHY is the reason you work so hard, it’s your purpose. Why MUST you do this? “To affirm” means saying with confidence to yourself and to others that something is true. By telling others what you do and why, you create a social consequence and obligation because you said it will happen. Keep your Promise!

Questions: What do I want to excel at? Why is this so important to me? To whom I’ll tell? What can I tell out loud to myself to affirm these whys? How can I remind myself about my goals and why’s?

Activity: Level Up Your Squad

You can win without an ideal peer group but social support just makes growth and success easier, faster, and more enjoyable. If you can spend time with a group of people who challenge and inspire you, it will change your life. An easy win is to just spend more time with the best and most positive people in your group. Next, add new people to the squad with greater experience than you.

Remove the following personal belief: “I don’t have access to successful people”. Go find them! What you can do: Add one more awesome friend, Volunteer, Play sports, Seek mentorship.

People often are very busy, work late nights, have no time but at the same time feel that they’re not making progress and are not productive. This often compromises their health, well-being, and overall happiness feeling. High performers have found a way to produce more without these compromises.

Below are three productivity fundamentals, and in the next sections, three advanced practices to increase your productivity.

1. Set clear (explicit) and challenging goals: This increases engagement, enjoyment, and inspiration to maintain focus. It increases your effort & you work more quickly. Motivation leads to productivity.
2. Maintain Energy: See energy habit. Your brain needs downtime to process information and recover. Going away from your desk every hour for a break increases productivity by 45%.
3. Maintain Focus: Avoid information overload at the start of the day (email, data,…), avoid distractions and interruptions, avoid multitasking, find your peak-concentration state.

The overall feeling of having a balanced life has a positive impact on productivity. You should focus on balancing happiness or progress in your major life arenas, instead of hours. Every week rate your happiness on a scale of 1 through 10 and also write your goals for each of these 10 life categories: health, family, friends, intimate relationships (partner or marriage), mission/work, finances, adventure, hobby, spirituality, and emotion. A Simple weekly review helps to rebalance and avoid that one arena of life becomes more intense, important, and time-consuming than others.

Activity: Increase the Outputs That Matter

Figure out which outputs will advance your career, will make an important contribution to others, and will make you remembered. Those outputs are the few things that you have to produce exceptionally. Focus consistent effort on those outputs and produce many of them over the long term. Example: Instead of learning every marketing technique, focus all your effort on creating and marketing as many qualitative online courses. After deciding your outputs, try to spend as much undistracted time as possible on them (60% is the sweet spot). The other 40% ends up in everyday tasks of work or running a business (strategy, management, emails,…) that can never be eliminated completely.

Activity: Chart Your Five Moves

If you want to make big meaningful things happen then you have to think before you act, create a plan and work through it step by step. First of all decide what you want to achieve (align with your outputs). Then, ask yourself: “If there were only 5 major moves to make that goal happen, what would they be?”. Think of each major move as a project that can be broken down into deliverables, deadlines, and activities. It’s very important to figure out the 5 moves by analyzing successful people that have already achieved your goal. If you don’t know the moves, you lose. Finally, fill the project activities into your calendar taking up to 60% of your time, cutting out less important activities off your calendar.

Activity: Get Insanely Good at Key Skills

To become more productive, become more competent. Determine the 3 major skills you need to develop over the next 3 years to win and start mastering them with the “progressive mastery” method. The steps in the progressive mastery method are: 1. Set specific stretch goals to developing that skill, 2. Attach high levels of emotion and meaning to your journey and results, 3. Identify the critical success factors, and develop your strengths in those areas (fix your weaknesses), 4. Develop visualizations that clearly imagine what success and failure look like, 5. Schedule challenging practices developed by experts or through careful thought, 6. Measure your progress and get outside feedback (Find a coach or mentor), 7. Socialize your learning efforts by practicing or competing with others, 8. Continue setting higher-level goals so that you keep improving, 9. Teach others what you are learning.

Examples

"Outputs that matter"

• Blogger: more frequent and better content
• Cupcake store owner: discern 2 best-selling flavors and expand distribution in just those two
• Parent: increase frequency of free time and great experiences with the kids
• Sales rep: more meetings with high-quality prospects
• Graphic designer: pump out more great images
• Academic: quality of the curriculum and classes, or number of published papers or books
• Apple: dump many products and focus on massively scaling fewer products
• Walt Disney: building up production of movies

"Chart your 5 Moves"

The 5 secret moves to publish a best-selling book:

1. Finishing writing a good book. Until that’s done, nothing else matters.
2. If you want a major publishing deal, get an agent, or just self-publish.
3. Start blogging and posting on social media, and use these to get an email list of subscribers. Email is everything.
4. Create a book promotion web page and offer some awesome bonuses to get people to buy this book. Bonuses are crucial.
5. Get 5 to 10 people who have big email lists to promote your book. You’ll owe them a reciprocal email – meaning you agree to promote for them later, too – and a portion of any sales they might make for you on other products you may be offering during your book promotion.

Progressive Mastery

You’ve determined that specifically wanted to develop your skill as a freestyle swimmer:

1. Set goals for how fast and efficiently you entered the water, swam a lap, executed a turn, finished your last 10 meters.
2. Before every practice, remind yourself why it was so important for you to get better at this, and you talked about your goals with someone who cared about your performance. Maybe your why is to get fitter, win a swim meet, or lap your best friend a few times.
3. You determined that a critical factor to success was your ability to work your hips efficiently in the water and that your major weakness was a lack of finishing stamina.
4. Every night, you visualized the perfect race, imagining in detail how you would move through the water, kick off the turn, power through fatigue, go for it in the last few strokes.
5. You worked with an expert swim coach who could give you regular feedback and who helped you design harder and harder practices to reach higher and higher goals.
6. You measured your progress in a journal every time you swam, and reviewed the journal, looking for insights on your performance.
7. You constantly swam with people you really enjoyed swimming with, and you entered competitions so that you could face better swimmers than you.
8. After every swim session, you set higher goals for the next session.
9. Once per week, you formally mentored another swimmer on your team or taught a swim class at the local community center.

Influence is the ability to shape people’s beliefs and behaviors as you desire. It means you can get them to believe in you or your ideas, buy from you, follow you, or take actions that you request of them.

Ultimate Influence Model

Don’t blame or try to control people, but choose to collaborate. The only way to influence another person is to first relate with them by asking questions or giving praise for their qualities, and secondly by challenging them to think better, do better, or give more of themselves. 3 basics to start with:

• Ask: If you want to have influence in life you have to ask for what you want, and not just once but multiple times. People like you more if you ask them to do a favor, and if you repeatedly ask and share your ideas, they start to become more familiar with your requests and start to like your ideas more. Not only ask what people want but also formulate questions that elicit what they think, feel, want, need, and aspire to, how they’d like to work together, and what outcomes they care about.
• Give and you Shall Receive: You can double your ability to influence others by giving before you ask. Great things to give: trust, autonomy, praise and decision-making authority. You should constantly look for ways to help (= giving) others and be proactive in it. You can do this by carefully considering problems people face, and offer suggestions, resources, and connections.
• Be a champion of people: Find out what your people are passionate about, and cheer on their good ideas. Be excited for people when they do a good job, and praise them. The ultimate measure of whether you really support someone is to trust them, give them the autonomy to make important decisions, and praise them in public when they do well.

Activity: Teach People How to Think

When you try to guide someone’s thinking, make it a habit to use one of these phrases: “Think of it this way…”; “What do you think about…”;” What would happen if we tried…”; “How should we approach…” ; “What should we pay attention to…”. Think of someone you want to influence. How do you want them to think about themselves, other people, and the greater world (how it works, what it needs, where it’s headed, and how to change it). As a leader, incorporate in every communication (email, meetings,…) how people should think about themselves, competitors, the marketplace,… and why.

Activity: Challenge People to Grow

Influence happens by, unconfrontationally, issuing positive challenges to motivate people to excel and grow. In order to inspire action make clear that your intentions are to help someone grow and become better. Speak to them with respect and honor. Challenge each person individually to:

• Develop character: Give feedback, direction, and high expectations to people for living up to values such as honesty, integrity, responsibility, self-control, patience, hard work, and persistence. Direct: “you could do better”, or “you’re better than that”, or “I expected more form you”. Indirect: “how would you best approach this situation?”, “looking back, do you feel you give it your all?”
• Treat others better: You set expectations, ask questions, give examples, or directly ask to improve how to treat or connect with other people. “Listen to, or support each other more”, “Show more respect”, “Spend more time together”, “Give more feedback”. Also, respond to bad behavior.
• Contribute: Not only give feedback on the quality of current performance but push people to add more value in the future. Challenge to reinvent products, business models,… If needed, be direct: “You can do better”. Think about someone’s great contributions and the ones to be improved.

Activity: Role Model The Way

Start thinking daily about how you can be a good role model for your family, team, and greater community. It’s not just about being a good person, but about intentionally demonstrating a specific behavior so that others will emulate that exact behavior and improve, which will help move toward a specific result. Think about your role models: what made them amazing? How can you be one too?

You can define courage as taking determined & persistent action to serve a life-enhancing goal, in the face of risk, fear, adversity, or opposition. You already demonstrate courage when you take just a first step towards real change. Taking this first step gives you the confidence and fearlessness to take bigger steps to ultimately reach your goal. Remember, the more you do something successfully, the more comfortable you’ll become with it. That’s why you should start living a courageous life now.

Firstly, you must decide what living courageously means to you and if your level of courage is sufficient enough at this stage of your life. To help think through this you can ask yourself the following: “If your future best self showed up and looked at your current circumstances, what courageous actions would that future self advise you to take right away to change your life? How would you advise to live?” Most probable answers: Don’t play small,  go for it in life! Secondly, you should plan for courage. If you know what you are afraid of, you can prepare yourself, study, get a mentor and face your fear to grow.

Questions to ready and condition your mind for more courage: “Which courageous actions might improve my family’s life forever? What could I do to truly change things for the better? How can I bring myself more to face a situation that usually makes me nervous or anxious? What have I wanted to say to those close to me and how can I declare that truth? Who needs me and who will I fight for?”

Activity: Honor The Struggle

Only when you see struggle as a necessary, important, and positive part of your journey to grow, then you can find true peace and personal power (=”no progress without struggle”). Honoring the journey means that you adopt a mindset that loves to master new challenges, welcomes or anticipates them, faces hardships, and sees learning as an essential way to overcome challenges. Ask: “What are your struggles and how can you change your view of these struggles (e.g., by thinking about their great outcomes)?” “How will you welcome and embrace new hardships (=”embrace the suck”)?”.

Even when you feel overwhelmed, go for a walk, or breathe, and consider the problem rather than avoiding it. Ask: “What is the next right action for me to take right now?” If you aren’t yet ready to take action, make a plan. Trust that things turn out and have faith in the future. You will make it through!

Activity: Share Your Truth and Ambitions

Don’t be fearful of expressing your true ambitions, joy, and powers, because the people around you could feel bad about themselves. Also, don’t hold back on yourself, your dreams or your ambitions because others could judge you or give criticism. Be your true self in any aspect and pursue your dreams without restrictions. You can only connect authentically with others if you share your true desires with them. Don’t keep your ambitions, dreams, or actions for yourself but speak up and share them with others. The people who are in your life for the right reasons will listen to your truth and help guide you in the right direction e.g., advise about skills, equipment, coaches,…. Speak up for what’s right for you and you’ll find freedom but also courage. Every day, share something with someone about what you really think and want in life. E.g., “I was thinking about doing X because of reason Y”. Think about what you want to share, and share it. Then take bold action each day to bring it to reality.

Activity: Find Someone to Fight For

People tend to do more for others than for themselves. Usually, it’s just in doing something for one person that we find our reason for courage, and our cause for focus and excellence. It’s important, therefore, to begin seeking things and people you care about and start to care deeply about something now. E.g., a better life for your family. In this way, you will be more likely to find courage when it matters. Ask yourself who or what needs you to be courageous!