You can do hard things

The more you don’t believe you can, the more I encourage you to read this and use the 2 habits I shared to acknowledge and celebrate your greatness.

“You can do hard things.” As you read that, what’s your first reaction? What do you tell yourself?

If you’re like 85% of the population that’s struggled with low self-image 🙋🏻‍♂️ you might scoff and think: Not me. I never do hard stuff… I’m a wimp, especially compared to others.

If your child or friend shared that same self-portrayal, how would you react?

I’m guessing you’d challenge them — you’d be quick to acknowledge all of their recent acts of resilience, right?

If we see our family and friends through this confidence-building, uplifting lens, why don’t we apply it to our own feats? I think there are a couple major forces at work here.

One, we mistakenly jumble together confidence and cockiness. We wrongly believe that any form of self-acknowledgment is equivalent to bragging. In reality, there’s a healthy margin between patting yourself on the back and shoving your accomplishments in everyone’s face.

Two, we place way too much emphasis on how the world around us measures our wins (and losses) — fraught with a few major pitfalls:

1. Others lack the context to truly measure our merits — nobody fully knows everything we’ve been through
2. What others view as easy might be Herculian to us, and vice versa
3. Relying on outer recognition of our inner accomplishments teaches us to lose faith in our own opinions — social media has only systematized and accelerated this reliance on other humans or, worse, algorithms, to score our performance.

I don’t know about you, but I’m over it.

How about, instead, we retrain ourselves:

• that we’re worthy and capable
• to keep our own score
• to see the climb we made to reach today’s top
• to celebrate the hard things we’ve done

What follows are two of the core habits I’ve integrated that have helped me slow down, take notice of my accomplishments, and keep climbing.

One: Build in moments of quiet

During the average newborn baby’s day, their brains predominantly operate in the slower delta frequency. Adults hit delta during deep sleep. Then, until the age of four, toddlers’ brainwaves are primarily in theta — a frequency characterized by high-creativity and curiosity.

But as we grow into adults, our brains spend more time in beta and gamma, frequencies most useful for problem-solving and heightened awareness, respectively. That’s helpful for adulting, especially work.

The problem is that we remain in these frequencies, with limited moments of downtime. From trips to the bathroom to entire vacations, we keep consuming, keep solving, and, otherwise, keep our phones glued to our faces. And as the world around provides us fewer opportunities to slow down, reflect, explore, and imagine, we miss out on the quiet moments that lead to connection and breakthrough.

Fortunately, there’s one tool we can access to build in moments of quiet, consciously shifting ourselves from gamma and beta, into alpha and theta.

I know that you know what meditation is. Maybe you’ve tried it. If you’re like me — a recovering overthinker — you’ve decided that sitting quietly with your breath and your thoughts doesn’t work. And when you’re struggling most, you’ll probably opt for ANYTHING other than actively noticing your mind’s incessant chatter. Me, too.

My meditation habit, which I started about ten years ago, looks like single-digit days of consistent practice, followed by long absent patches.

Why do I stop each time? Because my mind convinces me that I have better things to do. In fact, I dodged this morning’s session. Hold, please. I’m gonna sit quietly for a few and breathe. 🧘🏻‍♂️

Man, I needed that.

And that’s the thing!.. In ten years, I’ve tried to talk myself out of quieting down countless times. But never did I ever regret a single sitting — even when grief came forward or I was ceaselessly distracted. When that happens, which happens a lot at first, it’s tempting to convince yourself that meditation is useless. Or that it doesn’t work for you.

A friend of mine told me once:

“Meditation works the moment we decide to sit down and do it.”

What he meant is that meditation is less about how well we do it and how we feel afterward, and more about the conscious commitment to honor ourselves and go inward — of witnessing the myriad external things pulling us away and still choosing to sit with ourselves.

Sure, there are proven physical, mental, and emotional benefits of long-term meditation practice. But, thanks to my friend’s framing, I’ve learned to shift my focus from measuring my progress to celebrating my decision to show up for myself.

So, I get that you don’t want to do it. What I can offer is that, just like working out your body, the more you work out your mind, the more natural it becomes and the better you get at it… not that we’re keeping score. 😉

But if you still need some proof that it’s worth your time, I’ll tell you that since I’ve started I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in my ability to become and remain aware of my thoughts — especially unhelpful ones. Instead of becoming consumed, I’m now better able to spot them and set them aside. I flag them as just that — thoughts; i.e. not reality. I breathe deeply, calming my sympathetic nervous system, and I choose to move on to more productive thoughts.

And since the average human has ~6,200 thoughts per day, training our minds to let go of the crap that doesn’t serve us in place of a mind that’s calm, centered, focused, and loving, we elevate our mood, our work, and the world around us.

Here are a few tools & resources that have helped me build up my practice:

Books

• Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
• Pema Chödron’s Making Friends with Your Mind
• Amishi P. Jha’s Peak Mind: For the overly analytical, time-obsessed Amishi’s research proves the benefits of a daily 12-minute practice

Apps

• HeadSpace: I found their guided meditations helpful when getting started — it helped me know I was doing it right.
• InsightTimer: I used this to explore different modalities & deepen my practice. I also found one of my favorite teachers there, Sarah Blondin.
• FitMind: When my logical mind was hungry for the science behind meditation, I used this to really advance my practice.

Devices

• Apollo Neuro: While this thing has many uses, re: meditation I use it to settle my body and aid its ability to reach alpha and theta brainwaves.
• Whoop: I use this to see and analyze the data behind my meditations — how my body responds and my overall stress levels.
• Eye mask: I’ve found that blocking out light more readily coaxes my brain into slower frequencies.
• Google Nest: For additional help blocking out surrounding distractions, I like the simplicity of asking Google to play white noise.

My practice

In terms of what meditation looks like for me, I’ve experimented a lot. I’ve tried various times of the day. I’ve tried guided and unguided, with music and silence. I’ve tried short bursts and longer durations. In my office, in nature, in my car. So many variations.

Currently, what seems to work best is meditating in the morning, following a short (15-min) core workout, stretch, and cold glass of water. The attention on my physical body allows me to settle in, shake off any stored anxiety (and cortisol), and do a better job of sitting still.

I’ve found that I need to sit for a minimum of 30 minutes in order to give my mind time to shift from gamma and beta, to alpha and theta. During those first 29ish minutes, my mind is busy revisiting memories, worrying about the future, and planning my day. I used to get frustrated. Now I’ve learned to let my mind do what it needs to, while actively bringing my attention back to my breath. Then, somehow, at around minute 30, my mind relaxes, I breathe deeply, and I feel grounded. I then do a scan through my chakras and imagine warm, loving energy surrounding them.

At that point, it’s not uncommon for me to “see” (my eyes are still closed) an array of lights dancing in front of me. Scientifically, that’s said to be the activation of our pineal gland. Spiritually, that’s the opening of our third eye.

I then remain quiet for an additional 10 to 30 minutes. All told I devote 40–60 minutes. It doesn’t happen every day but that’s always my intention.

To wrap up on meditation…

I hope you’ll be patient (and persistent) enough to experience how much meditation can become a readily accessible anchor in your life. The more you build your practice, the more it’ll serve your larger growth — expanding your ability to tackle harder things, more regularly.

Two: Create a personal vision

Funny enough, my job is to help companies plot and prove exciting new visions. During that work, the team pays special attention to create a north star of a shared mission and compelling future. Looking back, I’m not sure how I ever started a new project, venture, or business without this step.

But for as long as I can remember, whenever prompted to similarly capture a vision for the life I wanted to manifest, I deemed it unnecessary. I dismissed it as a waste of time. Until recently.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to journal on my 10-year vision. Instead of bulleting out a bunch of vague, lofty goals, we were encouraged to get really specific with the intentions we were calling forward. We were also asked to write it in the present or past tense as if our intentions had already unfolded.

I initially resisted. I’d open my journal and invent something, anything, to interrupt the assignment. Then, I just started writing and something surprising happened… I fell in love with the activity and my vision.

The more I wrote, the more excited I became about what I was writing, and the more inspired my vision became. It felt like, for the first time ever, I was transcribing my subconscious’ deepest desires. Sure, we all daydream, but something shifted by capturing the sights, sounds, experiences, and opportunities with written words.

I wrote about the wildly successful businesses I had started and sold. I wrote about my new and elevated relationships with family and friends. I wrote about my peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I captured fine details of my home and community, the transformative events I organized, the courses and coaching I offered, the ways in which I served, and how I spent my time — which I cherished daily. I got specific with dollar amounts, names, places, and feelings. It felt real because I believed it to be.

And so I learned that one of the biggest “hacks” to doing hard things is to, first, see yourself doing and completing them. This has always sounded silly to me. I’ve dabbled with Law of Attraction stuff but never recouped any rewards. Now I know it was because I was only thinking about the outcomes. This time around, by taking pen to paper, I had caused an opening — maybe in the universe; definitively within me.

But writing out your vision is just the first glimpse of the medicine you’ll receive.

Reading your writing

The real power of writing down your vision is to go back and read it, over and over again. Each time, it feels more real than the last.

I now start each morning reading my vision and then meditating on it. Remember when I said that meditation becomes an anchor in your life?

Starting my day this way primes me to show up as my future self intends to live and work. It helps me prioritize the tasks that will manifest my vision.

And because I’m an auditory learner, I recorded myself reading it so I could just listen to my vision at the click of a button.

I also read it before bed which programs my subconscious to dream and inhabit this new reality. I’m devoting my thoughts to the life I want. In time, those thoughts become my feelings, which then shape my values and beliefs, which produce a new set of results… a new reality.

Supercharging your vision

There are two additional steps I’ve learned from others (still yet to experience myself) that will help to actualize your vision: (1) annual check-ins and, (2) sharing with trusted partners.

1/ Annual check-ins: Annually, return to your vision and re-read it. What you’re bound to notice is that one, several, or all of the intentions you set have taken shape, in some form or another. Seeing your vision manifest is what shifts your perspective from hoping this woo-woo stuff works, to knowing it does.

2/ Sharing with trusted partners: Finding and working with an accountability partner that you trust and, is equally committed to their vision, can be extremely supportive.

I only encourage you to be very selective with whom you invite. Sharing with the wrong partner(s) can hold you back and disrupt your journey. I’m lucky enough to have a community — my soul family that’s doing this work together and supporting one another.

If you don’t have anyone to share with, I’d be honored to be your partner. Send me a note: jay@newhaircut.com. ❤️

I’m here for you. I’m there with you.

If I can do hard things, you can, too

As we wrap up here, I want to get vulnerable with you…

Initially, I wasn’t sure why I was writing this or who it was for. I faced waves of doubt, shame, and guilt.

The inspiration came from a proud moment I was having with myself — mentally cataloging and celebrating recent hard things I had accomplished. In that moment, I wanted others to feel similar pride, compassion, and joy with themselves.

Since I like to write, I just started typing. But I struggled to keep at it. The ‘shoulds’ did a number on me, as they often do:

• You should be working
• You should focus on making money to support your family
• You should write about something you’re qualified in
• If you’re really going to do this, you should make it quick

If that weren’t enough, I repeatedly chastised myself that no one would read it. And if they did, they wouldn’t find it remotely helpful or interesting.

Throughout all of my self-deprecation, what kept me going was remembering the commitment I made to be a light for others.

And so I hope these words, somehow, helped you. I hope you feel seen. I hope you keep going. I hope you realize how worthy and capable you are.