Marc Chernoff's Blog, page 66

7 Assumptions We Need to Stop Making About Other People

Never underestimate a person’s challenges. Everyone is struggling. Some are just better at hiding it than others.

Too often we judge people too quickly, or too subjectively. We tell ourselves stories about them without thinking it through—our perceptions and biases get the best of us. I was reminded of this today when I received the following in an email from a Think Better, Live Better 2020 ticket-holder (I’m sharing this with permission):

“…I learned the hard way that a smile can hide so much—that when you look at a person you never know what their story is or what’s truly going on in their life. This harsh reality became evident to me this morning when I found out one of my top students—always straight A’s, a positive attitude, and a smile on her face—died by suicide last night. Why? Nobody seems to know. And it’s killing me inside.”

Talk about a reality check, right?

What we tell ourselves about others—what we think we know—is often far from the truth.

And with that in mind, I’m sitting here reflecting on all the little things we have to stop assuming about other people, for their sake and ours… (more…)

3 Great Ways to Force Yourself to Be More Grateful (and a Little Happier)

At the end of the day, before you close your eyes, breathe deeply, appreciate where you are, and be grateful for what you have. Life is good.

Most of us have amazing family members, friends, and other loved ones who love us back. Learn to appreciate what a gift that is. Most of us have good health, which is another gift. Most of us have eyes, with which to enjoy the amazing gifts of sunsets and nature and beauty all around us. Most of us have ears, with which to enjoy music–one of the greatest gifts of them all.

We may not have all these things, because we can’t have everything, but we certainly have plenty to be grateful for. To an extent, we know this already, and yet we forget. It happens to the best of us.

Sometimes Marc and I get so caught up pursuing the next big thing that we forget to pause and appreciate the things we have, and the things we’ve experienced, learned and achieved along the way. And the most tragic part of this is that our happiness takes a major hit.

The Science of Gratitude and Happiness

As human beings, when we aren’t grateful for what we have, we aren’t capable of being happy.

This is not just some self-improvement cliché either. It’s been scientifically proven. For example, (more…)

The Life-Changing Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

Be the type of person whose values, priorities, and actions always agree with one another.

Why is it that over 50% of our new course students tell us they feel completely overwhelmed and exhausted in their personal and professional lives?

The answer may surprise you: It’s not the number of minutes they spend awake and working hard each day that’s the issue—it’s that they often spend 99% of those minutes juggling too many things at once.

Be honest…

Do you check social media apps on your phone when you’re sitting in meetings, or when you’re spending time with family and friends?
Do you eat lunch at your desk, or while you’re on the run?
Is the TV often on in your home, even when you’re busy doing other things?
Do you send the occasional text message while driving?

The biggest cost of doing multiple things at once like this (assuming you don’t crash from the texting and driving) is (more…)

5 Signs You’ve Been Doing Too Much for Too Long

When things aren’t adding up in your life, begin subtracting.

Busyness is an illness.

Think about your own life and the lives of those close to you. Most of us have a tendency to do as much as we possibly can—cramming every waking minute with events, extravagances, tasks and obligations.

We think doing more will get us more satisfaction, success, etc. When oftentimes the exact opposite is true.

Less can be far more rewarding in the long run. But we’re so set in our ways that we can’t see this.

And so…

When we work, we shift from one task to the next quickly and continuously, or we multi-task—juggling five things at once until the end of the day… and yet we still feel like we haven’t done enough of the right stuff.
When we finally break away for some healthy exercise, we tend to push ourselves as hard as we possibly can… until we’re exhausted and sore, and less likely to want to exercise tomorrow.
When we go to a nice restaurant, we want to try all the appetizers, drinks and entrees, indulging in as much deliciousness as we possibly can… and we leave feeling bloated, sometimes uncomfortably so, and then our waistlines stretch.
When we travel to a new city, we want to see it all—every landmark and every photo op—so we do as much as physically possible… and we return home from our trip utterly exhausted.

How can we tame our urge to do too much? (more…)

A 2-Minute Morning Routine that Guarantees a Great Start to the Day

by Neil Pasrisha, author of You Are Awesome

“Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.”

― Meister Eckhart

Do you know that clichéd Catholic confession chamber scene from the movies?

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the mobster says, on bended knee, behind the metal lattice. “I put Two-Faced Tony in a vice at the deli and chopped him out of the family.”

I didn’t grow up Catholic, yet it always seemed interesting to me that confession was a religious practice.

I looked into this as part of my research for my new book on resilience You Are Awesome: How To Navigate Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an Intentional Life. I found it’s not just Catholicism! The act of confessing is an integral part of many world religions from Catholicism to Islam to Judaism to Mormonism to Buddhism.

Over the ages of our species coming into its own, across different geographies, different times, different backgrounds, we were somehow all wise enough to include a little emotional geyser of confession as part of how we lived and worshipped together.

Why?

Well, it seems (more…)

7 Powerful Reminders to Focus on What Matters

What you focus on grows.

Stop managing your time.

Start managing your focus.

“Am I making meaningful use of this scarce and precious day?”

That’s a simple question Angel and I challenge our course students to ask themselves anytime they feel busyness overwhelming them.

Because excessive busyness is rarely meaningful.

And make no mistake about it—excessive busyness is a widespread, modern-day illness!

We fill our calendars and our social media feeds with various kinds of busyness, oftentimes just to avoid being bored… to avoid being exactly who we are, exactly where we are. The instant we feel a bit idle, we run off in the direction of the nearest shiny object that catches our attention. And in the process, we not only miss out on the serenity and beauty that exists within ourselves, but we also miss out on (more…)

4 Steps to Loving Your Ordinary Life

Let’s start with the bitter truth:

You will never be as good as you think you should be.

And life will never be as easy as you expected.

All of us are faced with the same reality. There will inevitably be times when we slip up and fail to meet our (unreasonable) expectations of ourselves. It’ll likely happen quite often too. And if we don’t embrace these slip-ups and failures as necessary lessons learned, we will gradually and unknowingly become self-conscious about everything we’re not doing and achieving according to planned.

Honestly, it happens every day to the best of us—we hopelessly catch ourselves thinking about how we’re falling short.

We worry that we (more…)

5 Hard Questions that Can Save a Life (and Spare Some Pain)

We waste our lives waiting for ideal paths to appear in front of us. But they never do. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.

There’s nothing more disheartening than a perfectly healthy, reasonably affluent human being with the whole world in her hands who’s chronically unhappy and unproductive. There’s really no excuse for it either, yet Marc and I see this phenomenon unfolding every single day—people who choose to be stuck in misery and refuse to admit it. This mindset often results from an extremely unbalanced life—one with too much expectation and not enough discipline and appreciation.

The bottom line is that when you have very little discipline for accomplishing new things, and very little gratitude for what you already have, you’ll never know the true joy of making progress in life, because nothing will ever change, and even when it does, it will never be good enough in your mind.

So, how do you cultivate balance in life when everything is already so far out of whack?

For a decade now, Marc and I have (more…)

7 Hard Things You Should Start Doing for Others

Don’t just rant online for a better world. Love your family. Be a good neighbor. Practice kindness. Build bridges. Embody what you preach. Today. And always.

About a decade ago, at one o’clock in the morning, my grandpa who was suffering from Alzheimer’s got up, got into my car and drove off. Angel and I contacted the police, but before they could find him, two college kids pulled into our driveway with my grandpa. One was driving him in my car and the other was following in their car. They said they overheard him crying about being lost at an empty gas station 10 miles away. My grandpa couldn’t remember our address, but gave the kids his first and last name. They looked him up online, found our address, and drove him home.

I was randomly reflecting on that incident today while sitting near the edge of a beautiful ocean-side cliff in San Diego. As I stared off into the distance, the sudden awareness of footsteps behind me startled me. I turned around to see a young lady who was almost in tears slowly walking to where I was sitting. I jumped up, walked up to her and asked, “What’s wrong?” She told me she was deathly (more…)

10 Excuses the Mind Will Tell You Before You Take the Next Step

STARTING NOW: NO shortcuts. NO quick fixes. NO blaming others. NO “I’ll do it tomorrows.” NO MORE EXCUSES!

The mind is a wonderful thing. It’s also an excuse-making machine that frequently tries to convince us not to take actions we know are good for us. And this prevents many positive changes from taking place in our lives.

I’ve had to learn to watch these excuses very carefully in order to make the positive changes I’ve made in my life: a healthier diet, regular exercise, meditation, more sleep, daily writing, better planning, less procrastination, more focus, etc.

If I hadn’t learned about these excuses, and how to suppress them, I would never have succeeded in making these positive changes. In fact, until I knew better, I had failed countless times when I was young because my mind’s deceptive tendencies used to get the best of me.

So why does the mind mess with us and make irrational excuses?

Because the mind wants comfort, that’s why. It’s afraid of discomfort, pressure and change. The mind is absorbed in its comfort zone, and anytime we try to stretch that zone too far, for too long, the mind tries desperately to get back to ground zero at any cost—including sacrificing our long-term health, happiness and success.

So let’s expose 10 of the cowardly mind’s most damaging excuses once and for all… (more…)