Nine surprising secrets to unlock your full potential in everyday life

Untethered Mind, Friday Edition (by the sea), 5.5-min read.

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I love sitting with a cup of hot fruit tea to brainstorm unconventional ideas.

In the rush of life, we can often miss the simple and surprising ways people amplify their full potential.

Here are some things that have helped me notably multiply my effectiveness:

See the woods for the trees.

When we’re anxious, our performance drops.

We see less, and we miss more.

Most of our anxiety comes from being too detail-focused. We are focused on the ‘how.’

‘I can’t do this!’ We fume, staring at a blinking cursor on a screen.

But we find instant relief when we return to the ‘why.’ We see a good reason to continue when we switch to the broader strategy.

When we have a strong enough ‘want to,’ we will find a way through.

Time and attention spent on the thing.

It’s funny how simple things are when you get realistic and rational.

If you want to get great at something, you need to spend more time and attention on the thing.

People ask me how I’ve come to grow such a large readership, and I tell them I just published over 800 articles.

Seeming geniuses simply poured more time and energy into fewer things than most.

Don’t confuse personal inadequacy with a lack of experience.

Comfort with awkwardness.

Life is awkward, particularly when interacting with other humans.

Humans are clumsy and hilarious in their awkwardness. Wishing for awkward-free situations is like wishing for the moon to fall out of the sky into the sea.

Learn to embrace tension, awkwardness and discomfort, and you will have an advantage that towers over the common man.

It only matters what success means to you.

How we view success determines how we experience success.

Who cares what others believe is ‘success?’ You don’t.

If we view something as a failure, which person A views as a win, we are disappointed. However, person A has a significant advantage simply because they were content with reaching an earlier milestone.

Turn from self to other.

Few good things happen when we’re self-conscious.

You know this from lots of personal experience and anxiety.

If you’re depressed, one of the best medicines is to take small steps towards improving someone else’s life. The power of focus is real.

Where you place it will determine the impact you can make.

Focus less on yourself.

Move from ‘have to’ to ‘get to.’

I speak to people all the time who are stressed, unmotivated and verging on total burnout.

When we look closer at the language they use to describe their day-to-day, we find it filled with ‘ought tos,’ ‘shoulds’, and ‘have tos.’

Living life under a sense of obligation will suck the nectar out of your soul.

Instead, start by shifting your language.

What if nothing needed to be an obligation? What if you ‘got to’ take the kids to school? What if you ‘got to’ write every morning for thirty minutes?

Can you either cancel or outsource, or could you turn ‘have tos’ into ‘get tos?’

Be relentlessly consistent in at least two things.

Success looks like an event to most, but, really, success is born in consistent habits.

What are two things you could do every day, or at least regularly, that would profoundly impact your skill set and life if you stuck with them for two months? We’re not talking about obvious and ingrained habits like brushing your teeth. Those are givens.

What are your two game-changing habits? Work on those, and you’ll climb higher than most.

Be the most compassionate person to yourself that you know.

Many of us are scarily cruel to ourselves.

We berate ourselves with good intentions. We want more for ourselves.

But what if heavy self-criticism actually held us back even more?

Can you imagine what life would be like if you were your greatest, most compassionate supporter?

You don’t need to wait for someone to give you permission to do what you want to do and to do it with your full, supportive backing. Find your self-compassion by dropping the need to beat yourself up.

Let go and give yourself space.

Prioritise the important over the urgent.

Urgent often takes precedence over important.

But when this happens, you undermine yourself and your future.

Important things are writing a chapter for your book, learning Spanish or spending more time with your mother (hi mum!).

The irony is that your most important tasks are also the most urgent.

Seemingly urgent things, like responding to Derek from accounts, often mean we ditch the important.

Turn that around.

This starts by figuring out what’s important for you in the first place.

A year can go by and you will have been busy, but did you do what really mattered?

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Thanks for reading!

P.S. If you’d like a more in-depth guide that takes through everything you need to know to manage your thoughts so you are free of continual self-judgement and boost your productivity, you’ll love my course: Untethered Mind.

In it, I share how I managed to overcome years of self-doubt to experience less anxiety and more daily joy.

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