Super Habits

There are habits, and there are super-habits.

A super-habit is a gateway to other good habits. For example, when I quit smoking, I was able to exercise better, live longer, stop smelling like smoke, stop annoying people around me, get more productive, etc. One habit change led to a number of other positive habit changes.

Two other super-habits have been hyper-charging the lives of my favorite entrepreneurs (and by extension, the lives of their employees, families, peers, etc.) – meditation and abundance mindset.

Meditation: no need to say a lot about it, but always worth mentioning. Every entrepreneur I know lives somewhere on the ADD / OCD / just-a-wild-ass-untamed-imagination spectrum. I live in all three worlds, and my meditation and mindfulness practice has been critical to keeping creativity and control in proper balance.

My meditation practice has its seasons. Some seasons are filled with daily, consistent meditations of 5 – 20 minutes each morning. In those seasons, I tend to optimize in the areas of my life I find most impactful for me, my businesses, and the people around me.

I can’t strongly recommend enough a daily meditation practice, even if it’s for a minute a day. If you’re new to the idea, here are some great apps to get you started: Calm, 10% Happier, Insight Timer, Headspace, Waking Up, and Breathwrk.

Developing an Abundance Mindset

A few months ago, in a relatively short period of time, the idea of having an abundance mindset kept coming up in my world, over and over again – first in a book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, then in a podcast Exponential Wisdom, then during a coaching session at Strategic Coach. Randomness notwithstanding, when the universe talks, I listen.

Since then, I’ve started my day setting the intention to live in an abundance mindset. As a practical matter, that means reminding myself, in any given moment that I remember to do so, that I’ve got more than I need. More than enough money. More than enough time. More than enough energy, confidence, security, control, approval, and love. The world opens up with that mindset. Less stress. Less scarcity (the opposite of abundance). In my experience, a scarcity mindset is unhealthy and unhelpful, even though the default wiring comes with a million years of human evolution. An abundance mindset is like a massage: throughout the day, in moments of stress or pressure or anxiety, if I can remember my intention to live an abundant life, to have an abundance mindset, the stress, pressure, and anxiety dissolve. It’s been much easier than I thought it would be.  Here’s what’s helped me:

1.  Journal about it.
2.  Surround yourself with abundance-minded people.
3.  Always make your future greater than your past (that’s a Dan Sullivan-ism).
4.  Focus more time on what you love to do; follow your passions. As much as possible, remove things you don’t love to do from your life.
5.  Focus on expanding your strengths instead of fixing your weaknesses.
6.  Choose to see opportunity in everything, even if it’s just learning one more thing you didn’t know before.
7.  Give stuff away regularly; stuff you don’t really need. It’s invigorating, and it will probably mean a lot more to the recipient (if chosen carefully) than it does to you.  The act of giving and donating is, by nature, an example of abundance. Do it more.
8.  Hold your breath and exhale slowly, then experience the contrast between running out of breath (scarcity) and the release of the exhale (abundance).
9.  Make a gratitude list – 3-10 things. If you pay attention, there’s an endless (i.e., abundant) list.
10.  Compare your life to someone on the front lines in Syria or Ukraine right now – the average person over there would switch places with your absolute worst day, anytime. We’ve got it made here.
11.  When trapped in fear, remember that the things that scare you tend to exceed the things that actually end up hurting you. You tend to fear the worst, but most of the time, you end up with more positive results than you feared.
12.  Remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. While you’re alive, it’s one long infinite game.
13.  Remember your ability to access any emotion, any time — joy, love, gratitude, abundance, and presence in literally every single moment of the day. In Viktor Frankl’s words: “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Here are a number of other resources: Abundance Mindset Resources