Jay Papasan:
Hey gang, I’m super excited. We have Gary Keller in the episode today. He actually gave a huge presentation. It was probably the best attended at our annual convention earlier this year. And it was in two parts. The first part is today. It’s about The Way, which is five concepts for living your best life, five big ideas that you can put into action to improve both your quality of your work and your personal life. The other half is the Ten Bold Truths, and we’ll go into that next week.
So, this week, let me give you a little history. What is all this about? We rewrote one of our signature courses with our team here called BOLD, and it is a multi-week course for real estate entrepreneurs to absolutely level up their business. We’ve tracked it for probably close to 15 years and seen people really, really make a big leap from where they were to where they want to be by making a very focused effort, a very one thing kind of effort for a period of weeks.
And so, to get people in the mood to do something big, something that takes some courage, we wrote these introductions. So, today, we’re covering The Way: Five Concepts for Having the Best Possible Life. Let’s hear them from Gary and I will jump in and give you a little ONE Thing commentary along the way.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Gary Keller:
So, there’s a way to living your best life, and it’s by doing your best to be your best. Did you hear that? It’s called The Way. The Way to leading your best life are these five steps. Here’s the first one, the Misogi challenge. It’s a difficult one-time event that sets your thinking and your fortitude to tackle really tough things in order to have achievement. They call it a Misogi event or a Misogi challenge. So, you wake up in the morning, and you set yourself a challenge that is going to literally challenge you harder than you could even imagine that you could do. And by doing that, it creates the energy and the mindset to keep going hard for other things.
So, let’s dive into this real quick. So the Misogi Challenge, there’s an ancient Japanese ritual called Misogi, and it’s about transformation. It’s about doing something so tough. Now, the original idea is once a year, that it shapes how you live the rest of your life. And by the way, you don’t have to have a Misogi challenge once a year. You can have it multiple times a year. You can have different Masogi challenges for different things you want to achieve.
So, here’s an interesting thought, and that is, why do some people buckle under and others bounce back? It’s called resilience. And the question is, how do you get resilience? By the way, the Masogi Challenge is most likely the number one way that you can build resilience into your life, and that is taking on a really big project, taking on a really big task, saying “I want to learn something,” and then go have an event that forces you to give your greatest effort ever.
Because resilience can be learned. It can be. It’s simply a skill and a capacity to be robust under conditions of stress and challenge. I would assume all of us want that for our lives, correct?
Jay Papasan:
All right, So, the Misogi challenge. I associate this idea being popularized by a guy named Jesse Itzler. You probably know him. He is out there on the internet, he’s written multiple books, and he’s popularized this ancient idea of the Misogi, which is something that you do, often physical, that acts as a kind of purifying thing. And he’s kind of made it about taking a challenge that actually transforms you.
And we’ve embraced kind of the newer modern meeting. Like you’ve seen people that’ll do the 29-0-29, like the Everest thing. Different people taking big challenges that are really daunting, whether it’d be running a marathon or summiting Everest, whatever that is. I know that Jesse Itzler does a rim to rim in the Grand Canyon. You’re taking on a big challenge that will force you to level up.
And so, what are the elements here in terms of The ONE Thing? You’re picking one thing to do. You’re picking a challenge, a singular challenge, one thing that could be transformative for you. It’s gotta be really challenging. It’s gotta be limited in time. It’s not a forever thing. I’m not gonna do an ultra marathon for the rest of my days, but I’m gonna do an ultra marathon. And it’s expected to have a big impact.
A lot of times when we do this, even if it’s for a short duration, a few weeks here or there, the end output of this is one, self-confidence. You know that you can do hard things. You’ve done something that you weren’t quite sure you could do, and your confidence goes up. You also tend to raise your floor about what’s possible in terms of what you believe you can do in the future. And if you do this on a regular basis over time, what you tend to do is level up both mentally and in whatever it is you’re doing by getting better at it, more confident at it.
And that’s gonna be a theme throughout today. So, I’ve heard lots of different people that I love and respect kind of talk about this. The first time I kind of encountered this idea, but outside of our own 66-day challenge for all of our ONE Thing fans, like picking one thing and getting really good at it and making it a habit. I remember it was in Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, one of my favorite all-time books. At the very end, she’s extolling the power of perseverance, that the people who are the grittiest, they could just kind of endure the most, tended to be at the top of a lot of heaps in both the professional workplace and the otherwise. She studied soldiers, all kinds of research around it. At the very end of it, kind of a throwaway at the back, was grit for parenting.
And at that time we had younger kids. Now, remember, I dove into that chapter kind of hungry, how will this help me raise grittier kids? And she had a thing called the hard thing rule. And I associate that with a Misogi challenge. They had a rule in their house, which we adopted in ours, is that basically kind of like every semester, so like fall, spring, summer, you’ve got these three, kind of, segments to the academic year for young people. Everyone had to have a hard thing, and that included the parents. You got to choose, but you couldn’t quit until the end of “the semester.”
And so, we adopted it in our house. My wife and I were working out with a trainer, getting up at 5.30 in the morning, three days a week. And that was our hard thing that we were role-playing for our kids. And we asked them to choose their own. My son went through different things and one of them, Gus, he ended up a rower. And we’ll talk about that in just a few minutes. If you know anything about rowing, incredibly difficult. He had five practices a week and his practices were bigger than all of our workouts combined. So, he had his hard thing. He chose it. The ONE Thing is if they don’t like it in the beginning, they have to kind of stick it out for a period of time.
And our youngest chose art classes and coding classes, you name it. It was a challenge that one forced us to try something that maybe we were uncomfortable with, that felt kind of out of reach, and we had to stick with it. So, that’s another way of maybe thinking about the Misogi challenge. Like, what’s that hard thing that we can challenge ourselves with?
If you listen to my recent interview with my friend Pat Flynn, inside of Lean Learning, he’s got a thing called the Power 10. We’re back to rowing. So, in Power 10, if you’ve maybe watched the boys in the boat, the coxswain, that’s the guy in the very front or the gal in the very front that is kind of setting the tempo for all of the rowers will be calling out the rhythm. And when they’re getting close to the finish line and they need to either take on a lot of speed to catch up or stay ahead, they’ll do what’s called a Power 10. And that is 10 strokes in the boat at maximum possible output.
And those Power 10s are not things that are sustainable. And by the end of a power 10, if you look it up online, you’ll often see all of the rowers basically just collapse on the boat. They are giving their absolute maximum effort for 10 strokes. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever tried to row or done a rowing machine, it will get your heart rate way up there, folks. So a Power 10, again, it’s short in duration, maximum output, testing your abilities, but what it does is it actually creates a great leap forward.
So, the whole idea of a Misogi challenge, one of the things that we’re trying to promote with the way is on a regular basis, at least maybe once a year, are you taking one? Are you picking a hard thing? Maybe with you and your family. We’re gonna take on a challenge. Are you doing a 66-day challenge just for yourself? Are you doing a Power 10, maybe around really quickly taking on something that’s uncomfortable today, but you really, really wanna make it more comfortable for your future.
A Misogi challenge, again, it is a one thing kind of rule. You’re focused on one challenge. You’re gonna do it for a duration that has already been predetermined, and it’s gonna push you to your limits. And the goal of this is that you come out the other side different than when you went in. You will have improved or leveled up. Your confidence will be higher. And it’s that idea that we’ve learned to do hard things.
The Misogi challenge is one of the ones that creates evidence of our own resilience, of our own perseverance, our grit. It is a great way of life, which is why it’s in The Way. So let’s dive into the second one, which is exposure therapy.
Gary Keller:
Second thing you do is you have to have exposure therapy, meaning the things that you fear, you have to get into a safe environment where you can work on that, so that when you go out in the real world, you can do it.
The number one way to overcome fear is to face it, right? Be regularly exposed to it in a safe environment. By the way, you know what exposure therapy is. Allergy shots, that’s exposure therapy, right? You get tested and then you get shot. Now, by the way, they’re shooting you with what? Exactly what’s going to cause an allergic reaction. And in fact, they may even tell you to bring an EpiPen just in case you go into shock or seizure while they’re trying to help you overcome it and not kill you. That’s exposure therapy.
So, here’s the challenge. You go, “Sure, I’ll take exposure therapy,” but just like you’re not going to test yourself for allergies and then give yourself the shot, you are literally gonna have to get someone to help you in some safe environment to overcome your fear.
Jay Papasan:
So, kind of piggybacking on the idea of the Misogi challenge is the exposure therapy. And again, it’s intentional discomfort. Now, I want to pause really quickly because exposure therapy, if you go look it up, is a real thing. And it’s something that licensed therapists actually work with their actual patients on. You’ve probably, if you’ve been in the military and the people who’ve got PTSD symptoms, it’s one of the things they do to work with them.
So, we don’t wanna take that lightly, but it is very descriptive of what we’re talking about. We’re going to deliberately expose ourselves to things that we are uncomfortable with or possibly fear in order to normalize that experience. So, I’m just gonna put kind of in quotes around this, I’m gonna refer to this for the rest of my portion as deliberate discomfort. When we choose deliberate discomfort and do it in small doshes over time, the discomfort will go away.
So, kind of a crazy story. I’m sitting here preparing for this and I’m listening to NPR and there’s a story of Tom Freed. Maybe you heard it. It was kind of a big deal that blew up over the last month or so. There was a guy out there that, for his own reasons, he was a snake handler, decided to intentionally allow himself to be bit by venomous snakes. And at the last count, it’s over 200 venomous snake bites. And I’m not talking about your garden variety water moccasin here. He’s talking about black mambas, he’s talking about cobras, rattlesnakes, you name it. All of them, he’s gone out and intentionally allowed himself to be bit. And this is kind of, let’s call it deliberate discomfort at an extreme, but he was one exposing himself as a snake handler as a way to create resistance.
Now, this, obviously, like a hashtag-do-not-try-this-at-home kind of thing. That’s why it was in the news. He was doing something rather extreme. And I think it’s kind of interesting that not only did he build up resistance to so many of these different snake venoms, he later was approached by the World Health Organization, which estimates that some 3 million people every year get bit by venomous snakes. So, they’re always on the market for great anti-venoms, but a doctor approached Mr. Freed and said, “We would like to study your blood because we believe because of your deliberate discomfort, this regular exposure to this thing that was not good for you, you now have all of these anti-venoms. We might be able to make something that could save a lot of lives.”
So crazy story kind of in the same vein, but what are the things that we do to intentionally step out of our comfort zone? How do we desynthesize ourselves to little things that make us uncomfortable?
I’ll go to a personal example. One of the very first times I walked up on a big stage, it was after our old writing partner Dave Jinks had retired. Dave Jinks and Gary used to give an annual speech called the Vision Speech. It was our biggest event. Usually at that time, about 5,000 to 7,000 people in the audience, which is not big today, but it was really big back then. And I would help them prepare for it for the last two or three years. Dave retired and Gary was like, “You know what? Help me prepare, but I’m gonna do it alone.” So, I helped him prepare, helped him prepare for like the whole week before. We go through the slides, we practice the slides, he is ready to go.
On the Sunday of the Vision Speech, which happens at 8.30 AM, I get a call at 5 AM in my hotel room saying, no questions asked, “Hey, Jay. Gary’s decided that you’re gonna be on stage with him at 8.30 AM.” The gift of that was that I had no time to completely freak out. Just a matter of hours, I had to figure out what I was gonna wear and make sure I got backstage in time to be on stage. And then, I just had to go out there and do it.
And I remember I was very uncomfortable. There were all kinds of sound errors. I couldn’t always hear him. I had to imagine what he was asking me and fake the answers. And I made it through a 90-minute Vision Speech on economics. I had never really done public speaking that much at all. And here I was on a stage in front of like 6,000 people, absolutely freaking out.
We went backstage, like I am coming down from the adrenaline rush of having to go through that. It’s like after a car wreck where you’re shaking. That was me backstage. And Gary walked in and I just said, “Gary, don’t ever do that to me again. I asked you, and asked you, and asked you if you wanted me. And at the last minute, you told me that you did.” And he apologized for the lateness of it. But then he also said, “I can’t promise you that. You say that you wanna be an author. And if you’re gonna be a successful one, you’re gonna have to get used to being on stages like that.”
And I digested it, and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, he’s probably right. If I do aspire to be a best-selling author, those are exactly the stages I need to get used to.” So, I made a commitment, I think this was before I had my first coach, but I made a commitment to teach at least one time every single month. And I would volunteer if we had, like, a leadership meeting. I’ll read the book and I’ll present the book. I would volunteer to do the staff meeting, do a presentation. I look for at least one opportunity every single month. And I did that for a period of years and then started attending classes and eventually worked my way to become a master faculty member.
But it all started with a journey of, I got thrown in the deep end, and I said, “This is freaking me out, I have to get used to it.” I did my own deliberate discomfort. I chose to do something I was not yet comfortable with again and again and again, until the discomfort went away.
So, think of this idea of deliberate discomfort as expanding your comfort zone. Every time we do something that’s a little bit fearful, it’s a little bit uncomfortable, we’re expanding that comfort zone just a little bit. We often can’t perceive it in the moment, but the more we do it, the bigger that bubble becomes until suddenly someday you’ll look up. And for me, like, just as recently as a few months ago, I was on stage in front of about 17,000 people. Did I still have the jitters? Absolutely. It matters to me. It’s not a natural activity, but I wasn’t afraid. It was that good kind of nervous energy. I want to do well. I’ve worked really hard to prepare for this, but it wasn’t the abject terror that I experienced way back when, when I got thrown on the stage.
So, deliberate discomfort is how we get past our fears. It’s how we get past our discomforts and small safe steps. Do not go out there and play with venomous snakes, folks, but you can start playing with and experimenting with the things that you are fearful of, that make you anxious, and just take tiny, tiny steps regularly over time until the discomfort goes away. So that is number two, deliberate discomfort. Let’s hear from Gary on number three Kaizen.
Gary Keller:
Number three. So, now, we’ve had our event, we’re supercharged, we’ve got the energy, we have now… we’ve started this thing called exposure therapy, where we’re working on the thing that we’re afraid of, and now we practice Kaizen. And all it is, is this concept of small, consistent improvements over time that get you ultimately where you want to go. That’s actually all it is.
Jay and I wrote a book about this called The ONE Thing. And that is, think big, but start small. It’s baby steps. And a lot of people, they don’t understand the concept of compound interest. They just don’t. They don’t understand it. And they don’t apply compounding, the science of compounding, the guarantee of compounding, they don’t apply it in their life. And it’s eventually how some people climb the ladder and others are still leaping to get to the first round.
Jay Papasan:
So, it might be that you’ve actually heard of Kaizen. It’s kind of a famous principle. I love it. I’ve studied it before, but let’s just go back in history. After World War II, Japan was rebuilding. And it was funny. They brought in a lot of American quality control and project experts, people like W. Edward Demings. If you’ve read The ONE Thing, we’ve got more than one quote from him in there. And a guy named Joseph Duran, which you might remember from our discussion of the 80/20 principle. He’s the guy who actually popularized Pareto’s Principle.
So, some very big thinkers, they show up, they’re helping Japan rebuild, and they start observing kind of the way that they’re doing it and some of the philosophy. And in one company in particular, I believe it was W. Edward Demings observed in Toyota that the quality control engineers were partnering with all of the workers on the line. They made it okay. They invited the people on the line to point out every little flaw. And the idea was through continuous small improvements, the whole system would get exponentially better.
The moment I throw exponentially out there, you probably know where I’m going. But it kind of revolutionized this idea of how we get things better. On the extreme, we have like what we were talking about earlier, like a Misogi challenge, I’m going to go really, really intensely, I’m going to do a Power 10 in Pat Flynn’s language, and I’m going to make a big leap forward in a small amount of time. That’s great, but it’s not sustainable.
Kaizen is utterly sustainable. And if we’re patient and we’re diligent and we’re consistent, it’ll actually lap everybody else who’s only focused on those short sprints. It’s basically, do you want to bet on the tortoise or the hare? Guess what? Every single time the tortoise is going to win because consistency is intensity, that’s what we like to say around here, consistency is intensity, and this is how you find it.
So, improvement will compound over time if it’s made regularly, even in small doses. Guys, this is the domino effect. We wrote about it in the book. If you are going to grow at a regular rate, even though we’re starting with a two-inch domino, just 57 into it, it would go from the earth to the moon. That compounding blows our mind. We think linearly but continual growth is actually exponential.
So, I love how James Clear put it in his book, Atomic Habits. He wrote that a 1% improvement every day will actually add up to you being 37 times better at the end of the year. A change so small, 1%, nobody’s going to notice it. Unless you are tracking to two decimal points in your workouts, you’re not going to notice it. But over the course of the year, it’ll add up to 37 times improvement.
So never underestimate small improvements over time. That is the idea of Kaizen. It’s a philosophy of looking, no matter how small for tiny improvements we can make on an ongoing basis. I will also say this ties into our commitments, the three commitments in particular to get on the path to mastery. If we’re always willing and looking for this idea that I can be a little bit better today, we’re never getting complacent. We’re not settling down on the okay plateau where good is good enough. We choose to be the best we can possibly be at this thing. And that adds up over time, underestimate it at your own peril.
So, you get better every single day by making this tiny improvement. The repetition allows you to also be more confident. I can do it better. And ultimately, you will get better results. Think big, folks, but you can also go small. That is our mantra. Next up, Gary’s gonna talk to us about the Myelin effect.
Gary Keller:
And then, you enact what you would call the Myelin effect. The Myelin effect is a scientific term where the Myelin is a wrapping that goes around your neurons and creates a smoother path for you to repeat an action you want to repeat. Every time you do something, the same thing, you create Myelin, which wraps around the neuron and smooths the path.
When someone tells you to go practice something and you notice that over time, as you practice it, you get better, yes? You’re actually enacting the myelin effect. When someone says in the real estate space, set aside a time every morning for your lead generation, you are literally living this process, right? The next time you do it, whether you realize it or not, it’s a little easier, and then it’s a little easier, and then it’s a little easier.
If it was a guitar piece, my wife will tell you that she has to leave the room because it’s like a broken record. I just have these four-chord progressions and my hand doesn’t work right to do it. But what I notice is magically, if I just sit there and do the four chords over and over and over, all of a sudden, I begin to realize how my hand needs to move. And then, at some point, the hand moves without me. It just happens.
Jay Papasan:
All right. So, obviously, this is about habits, but we’re kind of looking at it at a biological level. And I love this kind of analogy of the myelin because I think of, like, electrical resistance, right? If you have an electrical wire and it’s got the insulation, it’s got holes in it, not only can that spark a fire, but it’s also bleeding out your power. So, every time we make a repetition of some action, some activity, we’re doing it again and again and again, we often use the metaphor of like a deepening the groove. It gets a little bit more set in that way. In this sense, we’re wrapping it with another little layer of myelin or insulation, and that’s keeping more of our power, more of our charge towards that intention. And I imagine it’s just tiny improvements that add up over time.
And so, that is habit formation at a biological level. And when we wrote The ONE Thing, we did find research that suggests pretty strongly that on average, it takes 66 repetitions on average to form a habit. That doesn’t make it as easy as it will ever be, but that is where we go through 95% of, kind of, the discomfort of forming the habit. It gets about as easy as it’s going to functionally be. But that magic of we work for a habit and then the habit works for us, the point here is we have to be intentional.
We can choose habits that will help us advance towards our goals and the life we want to live. We can also reduce habits or eliminate habits that don’t serve that, but either way, it has to be at a conscious level. We can choose habits and behaviors that serve us and we could also set aside those that no longer do, But habits work the same way. If you do them long enough, it becomes automatic. And things that become automatic, they’re just gonna happen again and again and again. It becomes either a virtuous or a negative cycle, right? This is a snowball effect, but it can go both ways.
So, I’m gonna practice the violin every single day. I’m gonna do deliberate practice. I’m gonna get better and better and better. If I keep doing that, theoretically, I might start performing and I might eventually start recording, you never know. But that is the path to mastery. We’re gonna build the habit and get better and better. Guess what? It works just the other way too. If I have a habit of eating a double bacon cheeseburger every day, it’s not gonna feel like anything is happening for a long time, right? But I am building a habit, that habit has an impact on my health. And eventually, you will get to the curve and instead of going up, it will go down, right? That’s how you say, “Wow, my left arm’s numb,” right? You suddenly can fall ill because small bad habits are working against us.
So, our opportunity every day is to ask the question, if success is sequential, it’s doing these little things again and again, and I can choose to be on a path that leads me to exponential success or one that goes the other way, am I choosing on a daily basis? So, it will add up, the habits can become automatic, and eventually we can have it stack. So, choose the behaviors that you believe that you want to reinforce that will make you the person that you will become that will have the things that you ultimately want. That’s the great formula. And you can break it down into tiny steps that form habits that allow those activities to kind of become automatic.
It’s like the super secret to success. If I can build the habit that makes it most likely for me to get the results that I want, I have really kind of supercharged my ability to get results. I wish we could all go back to the beginning on things that we take for granted today because a lot of people look up and they know they need to build a habit around doing something for their business or their personal life, “Oh, I should read more,” “Oh, I should write more,” “Oh, I should make more calls for my business.” Like we have a lot of shoulds out there. And a lot of times, what’s holding us back is we’re just not very good in the beginning.
My coach, Jordan, is often telling me, reminding me whenever I get in that mindset, like I know I should build a habit around this, I know I should start reinforcing this behavior, but I’m not very good and it’s not very comfortable, he just invites me to kind of say, “I wonder how good I will be when I’ve done 100 reps, I’ve done 150 reps,” right? We all understand this. If we continue to practice it, not only will we form a habit, but we’ll also be more comfortable with it, which reinforces the habit, which reinforces the behavior.
So, the Myelin effect is kind of how we lock all of this in at a neurological level. It’s a big idea and it all comes back to building positive habits that get us where we want to go. Do it by choice, folks. So, the last one is called Kintsugi. It is a Japanese art and let’s let Gary talk about what it means and then I’ll be back to wrap up our commentary.
Gary Keller:
And then the last one is, on this path, you’re not gonna always succeed. You’re gonna have failings, right? Things are gonna break. Well, Kintsugi is the concept of that nothing is ever really broken. It can always be rebuilt to be something of value. So, Kintsugi is the transformation of something broken into something beautiful, right? You’ve seen the art.
And it was the idea… by the way, it was an ancient idea to teach children that when they broke something, it’s never really broken. Nothing is ever really broken. It can’t be put back together in an equally or better beautiful way.
Jay Papasan:
So, I love Gary’s takeaways on this. Being broken isn’t the end of the story. This idea of kintsugi is actually another kind of very old Japanese idea. They would have… if you’ve ever seen Japanese porcelain, it’s very beautiful. They are one of those centers of porcelain around the world. They have an art that if porcelain was broken, they would sometimes repair it using gold veins.
So, if you look up Kintsugi, K-I-N-T-S-U-G-I, you can find it and there’ll be examples of these beautiful porcelain bowls and they don’t look broken. It looks like they have gold veins. And so, it might be blue porcelain with gold veins or white porcelain with gold veins or green porcelain with gold veins. The theme here is what was once broken is now gold. They have made the idea of being broken into its own art form.
And so, anything that is broken is not really broken. It is an opportunity to turn it into something even more beautiful through the transformation of Kintsugi. Failure, folks, can just be feedback. Failure can just be another step along the way. And if we mend ourselves and keep going, what the end result can be, it can be quite beautiful.
One of the core ideas here, especially if we’re pursuing the best possible life, which is what the way is all about, is that setbacks don’t disqualify us. They refine us. And ultimately, they may actually be the things that qualify us to serve others.
My friend Rory Vaden, if you’ve heard him on the podcast, likes to say, ‘We’re best positioned to serve those who we once were.” Dave Ramsey dealt with debt. Guess what? He built an empire helping people get out of debt. I think about Mel Robbins, who’s faced her own demons, that voice in her head. “I don’t wanna get out of bed. I don’t wanna start,” all of those things. And guess what? She helps millions today because that’s the person that she used to be. I could just go down a list of people that are in the self-help and the self-improvement that are helping people based on who they used to be.
So, wherever you are today, you’re on a journey. You can choose that you can repair and improve and move on. And that thing that you will become may be even more beautiful than you are today. I love it, it’s inspirational, it tells us that even the worst kinds of failures may just be a step on the path to something bigger and more beautiful. Now, let’s wrap this up and we can kind of recap it.
So, we have five big ideas from Gary called The Way. It’s five ideas to lead the best possible life. First and foremost, we have a Misogi challenge. It’s this idea of doing something very specific, very focused, but for a limited duration that will level us up. And if we do this, maybe once a year, we will constantly be reinforcing the idea that we can do really difficult things and overcome challenges.
This idea of exposure therapy, or I’m calling it kind of deliberate difficulty, is that we can expand our comfort zone by doing small, uncomfortable things on a regular basis. These tiny doses of discomfort will make the discomfort go away, which makes us functionally free from a lot of our fears if we do it in a very rhythmic way.
Kaizen is number three, is this idea of continuous improvement. Again, another small dose on a regular basis adds up to a lot. If we are continually making tiny improvements, it adds up to far more than we could ever conceive.
Number four, the Myelin effect. Hey, be someone of selected habits. Build habits using this idea that we’re neurologically reinforcing the behaviors that we’re choosing. When we build habits that way, we work for the habit and then the habit works for us.
And finally, we’ve got Kintsugi. No matter how hard you stumble, no matter how far you fall, you can still rebuild and what will ultimately be there, what’s broken can be repaired and what’s repaired can be more beautiful than it once was. I love the way, and this is just by the way, the preamble, the introduction to BOLD.
Next week, we’ll have Gary back and we will talk about the 10 BOLD Laws. But before we go there, before you tune out, let me give you your challenge. My challenge to you this week is to choose something, deliberately choose something that’s a little bit difficult, that is a little bit discomfortable for you and choose it and do it. So, maybe send the food back, maybe get up and leave the thing that you really don’t wanna be at, maybe you need to ask for help. I know a lot of us struggle with that. I’m trying to think of small acts of things that we tend to resist. You probably are thinking of one right now. There’s something that you can take one tiny step out of your comfort zone and see how it turns out for you. But make it tiny. Remember, no venomous snakes.
Okay, until next week when we get Gary Keller with the 10 BOLD Truths. I hope you have a great week. Thank you for tuning in to The ONE Thing.
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This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
