Awareness Is A Superpower

How are you? is the daily boost from motivation.com. Happy to have you here today. My name is Scott Smith. Thank you for stopping by. Feeling better. My COVID is fading.

Just a little tickle these days. Still a little raspy, but kind of like the rasps. My wife said, honey, you can go back to the gym. And I said, maybe not tomorrow.

Not probably tomorrow. I'm actually doing pretty good. Okay, today, something that you need, desperately need, something I haven't talked about for a long time, something that a lot of you will hate just by name alone. You won't want to do it.

But if you do, life changes. And I'm kind of in this business where a lot of guys like me, I can change your life, right? I don't know that I actually have that power, but I do know a few things. If I can point your awareness in the direction it needs to be and then give you a way to get out of it to make adjustments, we can.

So hang with me a little bit because this is something you're not going to want to do because it's called the Daily Awareness Diary. Whenever I say daily, you're like, I don't want to do it daily.

Awareness, that's okay. Diary? Oh my gosh, Scott, I don't want to do a diary. Hang tight. It's easier than you think. It's only 10 questions. I'll talk about nine of them today.

But it's 10 questions. That's about it. And once you do this, you're going to get some awareness. So let me tell you why I did this. I noticed a long time ago that most people are not really consciously aware of what's going on.

So they would set goals. They would come up with all these things they want to do in their life. And then they would kind of drift along through their life and not really know what was happening. I said, well, I had to find a way to do this.

So most people will go to a seminar or get in a coaching call or something like that. And they would try to figure out their belief system, their actions are taken, their values and things like that. And frankly, they'd make it up. They couldn't remember.

They didn't know what to write down and they just didn't know. So the more and more I coach people, the more I said, gosh, I need to find out what's really going on. I need to read between the lines and just see if we can figure out what's happening in your life. Because I just kind of reasoned in my own little brain.

I said, if I could track you for a week, maybe like, I don't know, you want to track your diet for a week and see why you're gaining weight. A lot of personal trainers do that, right? They say, hey, track your diet for a week, then we'll set a plan for you.

So I reasoned that if I did the same thing, that I could probably read between the lines and we could just kind of deduce exactly what needed to change.

So I did it with my Face Your Passion group about three years ago when I started it and came up with these nine or 10 questions. And I'm going to tell you about those today and I'll tell you why it works and why you should be doing this and exactly how to do it. It's going to expose parts that you're going to really probably not like, but you're going to go, okay, I see what I got to do now. It's very cool.

So the daily awareness diary, basically it's this. If you can do it for probably the minimum like 15 days, if you can do it for 20 days, 21 days, 30 days, something like that, even better. It takes you about 10 minutes or less to do it every single day. It's only got nine questions we'll talk about today.

And it's not a diary where you said a dear diary. It's not like that. It's just kind of tracking what you did. So let me go through these questions for you.

And if you use these tomorrow morning and then use them every single day, life will change. Now, here's why. I ask the same question every day. Every single day.

The only thing that changes around it is your life. how you live it, all the things that happen, right? So I ask you the same question. That's our control.

But everything around you does change. So eventually, I got to tell you, you can't hide from it anymore. It's like looking in a mirror. You can only write down things every single day and lie or make something up for a limited amount of time until finally you go, oh, my goodness, that's what's actually happening here.

So what is the first question? Well, how was yesterday through the lens of retrospection? How just did it go through the lens of retrospection? Not what did I do?

Not what affirmation? Not what did I check off? But retrospectively, how do I feel about what I created yesterday? Because think about it this way. If you set goals, if you wanted to accomplish something, say, this week, you set a goal on Monday, and then by Wednesday, you said, well, what did I do yesterday?

And you realize you didn't do a darn thing toward that goal? Life's going to change. So retrospectively, I want you to look over your shoulder and see what you did the day before and how did it work out for you? How'd your life go?

The next question is, today, prospectively, what will we do? So the question is actually, how is today through the lens of prospection? The reason I do, and I talk about this often, is that humans are wired for prospection. In other words, you have the unique ability to create something.

You could literally make your day. So I don't want you to say, well, what am I going to do today? What's on my list today? I don't want you to do that.

I want you to say, hey, I've got some ideas, some things I want to create. What will I create today? So you get what we're doing. We're looking over our shoulder.

We're saying, what did I create yesterday? Did I get the life I wanted? And did I get the business I wanted? Did I get the relationship I wanted? Whatever.

And if not, what do I do today to fix that? It's a very simple way to start, but it really tracks into what your actual goals are, assuming you have them.

It's incredibly powerful. The third question is, how do I want to feel? I won't explain exactly what it is. A very technical question, but how many times do you ask yourself, how do I want to feel?

How do I want to do that? If you ask yourself that question, how do I want to feel? And you're willing to answer it honestly, you're probably going to say, I want to feel good.

I want to feel excited. I want to feel great. Whatever it is. But if you don't take the time to ask yourself, who else is going to ask you that question?

How do you want to feel? Next, I ask, what am I praying for? You can say what am I meditating for if you'd like to. It puts me in a different mode because when I start thinking, what am I praying for?

What am I meditating for? I'm going to think differently. I will promise you this. Something will pop into your mind. Something you may have forgotten to think about because you got too busy.

We're just going to remind you every single day to say, hey, remember, what are you praying for? What are you meditating for? Next question. Who do I want to pray for or meditate for?

This is really interesting to me because when you ask that question, who do I want to pray or meditate for? You end up going, wow, I haven't thought about this person for a while. They've got some troubles in their life. I'm going to put some good energy out there.

Next question, who do I want to connect with? I love this one because when I started, it was like, you know, I need to connect with my daughter or connect with some friends I haven't talked to for a while. It evolved beyond that to friends I really haven't talked to for a long time and even evolved to places where I didn't even know somebody, but I thought they were cool. I thought, well, I want to connect with them somehow.

And as you get into this more and more, you'll find that list expands. And it's really fun because now you reach out and connect with people and your life changes too. You get busy in a good way.

Probably the most powerful question I have in this whole nine is what are the pre-planned responses I need for today? I can't teach totally to you today what it is, but it is a core fundamental concept of what I roll with every single day myself and what I teach. And that is that in every single thing that's going to happen today, every interaction you have, phone call, email, whatever it happens to be, somebody you run into in the hallway,

What will your response be to what they say, to what they do, to what they expect? Even to the extent of, well, I don't know what it is, so what will I do if I don't know what to do? It's a crazy simple way of thinking about things, but just imagine this. The pre-planned response in a boss meeting, in a sales meeting, in a meeting with your kids, if you kind of have thought through exactly what may happen, what you may say about it, you have no more stress.

And if you go the extra step and say, well, what if I miss something? Well, I've told you, just think about, well, what happens if I miss something? What happens if I'm surprised? Think about your reaction before you get there.

I will tell you of all the questions I have on this, the pre-plan response is the one most people give me big, big response on. They say, man, it just works. And usually it comes in relation to a meeting with a boss or a supervisor or something like that.

Something we ask as well is what's my conclusion as I finish today's diary? And the reason I ask conclusion is because it just dawned on me when I did this and then in actual fact working with people that we couldn't ask all these questions and not have some conclusion percolating in the back of our mind about how the day went, how we feel right now. And even my coaching calls, my group coaching calls, if you're on one of my calls, I started with retrospective and prospection and I end it with what's your conclusion for the call? And I feel kind of weird doing at the end what's the conclusion, but they always have something that blows my mind.

Again, it just made sense to me that if you spent nine or 10 minutes answering a couple of questions, that you would probably have something in your mind that would, your opinion of the time you just spent.

It's very powerful. And finally, the last one I put on here is what personal affirmation can you create today from this diary? This is one of the coolest things I've done. I have people have done this now two and a half years, three years almost.

And at the end of this, I simply say, hey, write yourself an affirmation. I'm a strong, powerful character, whatever it is. I don't care what it is. Write your own.

We have people now with two, three hundred affirmations they've written by them for them. They don't need me to do it for them. It's crazy. We just leverage this.

I will tell you right now that you may not believe me and it's okay if you don't. You don't have to. I'm not here to twist your arm. I am here to tell you this silly idea called a daily awareness diary changes everything and it puts you in control of

of everything. And that's not an understatement. That's not an overstatement. That's just the truth. I think I, I think I need to get out of here. Try it.

Okay. Do your daily awareness diary tomorrow. Answer those questions. Go back. Maybe they'll show up in the show notes. They probably will try it for a little bit.

Give it four or five days. I promise you. You'll think differently in four or five days. I'll see you tomorrow.