Echo IV

We recently spoke on the difference in movement and progress. With that in mind, how do we find progress?

You need to wake up with a sensation that you are better today than yesterday. Is this going to be a daily occurrence, waking up with a feeling that the prior day was monumental enough to make your present better? No, and thinking it will be is an unhealthy coping mechanism. Everyone has bad days, we just need to learn how to recuperate and turn a bad day into a good week, a bad week, into a good year, a bad year into a worthwhile life.

Your strongest ally is you. It isn’t your mom, your best friend, your therapist – its you. No matter how much these people build you up, you determine which walls stand and which fall. We have all had beautiful things said to us, things we almost felt bad hearing because they were so positive. Yet, many of us (myself included) put more stock into telling ourselves they’re “just saying that” than truly believing it.

So, we need to ask ourselves – “How would the person I’d like to be do the things I’m about to do?”

As humans, we have no issue basing our life off of someone else. We steal recipes from Facebook, we buy clothes we see on celebrities, we hate on Nickelback because everyone else does. What if we took this energy, this relatively pure form of admiration, and cast it onto ourselves. What if instead of waking up and wanting to look like Brad Pitt, have money like Bill Gates, or have a lifestyle like the Rock, we simply woke up and aspired to be ourselves in the future once we’ve gotten through the mud and dirt and came out on the other side. Why not put that energy and desire into simply wanting to be our best self?

So, I challenge you. Spend sometime today admiring your future self. Admire the successes and failures, admire how you’ve still become better and found growth. Find something specific that you’d like to achieve and admire it as if it is undoubtedly going to come to fruition in your future. Admire your beautiful house, admire your children, admire your time spent volunteering. Then, once you’re done deriving motivation from your own potential actions, act on them. Develop a plan to turn these motivational thoughts into worthwhile actions.

Lets start hanging up posters of ourselves in our psyche rather than people we deem to be successful and true. Maybe put up a Nickelback poster, too.