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Humans are competitive by nature. We want to improve on ourselves, and on those who came before us. Competition is what has gotten us to where we are. We often mistake unhealthy with healthy competition.

There are several main facets to unhealthy competition. One example is when people want to get their piece of the pie. By this, they are trying to make sure they get some of the attention because they view success as a limited commodity. They try hard and compare themselves to others. However, in doing so are quick to lose heart because they are never good enough. It turns into a negative to see someone else successful when you view yourself as being just as successful, but you don’t get the same level of attention you perceive them getting.

The next unhealthy display of competitiveness is someone who always competes just to thump their chest. When you see someone constantly talking about how they are the best and no one can compare, they are not doing it to be the best. They are just competing to be viewed as the best. We see this is athletes today. When an athlete blames the team and doesn’t look to where he/she needs to improve, it often breeds negativity within the team. The rest of the team feels negativity and resentment to the person thumping his chest and they lose the will to perform to their best.

The next unhealthy competition habit is found in the “One Upper.” The “One Upper” is the person who always has a better story. They always did something just as amazing or just slightly better. You tell a story, but they come back with a similar situation but did something better. No one likes to involve these people in conversations.

Healthy conversation lifts you up and is focused on improvement; Either improvement of self, or improvement of others. If you are trying to be the best version of ‘you’ that you can be or trying to lift others up to make the team successful, you are on the right track. Competition that drives you to be better without losing who you are in the competition is healthy. In leadership roles, your success is shown in how you drive healthy competition. How can you make the team better. If you end up pitting team members up against each other to where negativity forms, you breed unhealthy competition. Instead of lifting one person up and telling others to be like that person, try pointing out the successes of everyone on the team. This will breed a healthy teamwork environment and keep competition healthy.

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There are several ways in which we can make our lives easier, more productive, and all around better. We call these things life hacks. They can be something simple that affects our health, or could be deep and profound that affects our emotional wellbeing.

The first Life hack is meant to affect your meals and health planning. Take some time on your day off to plan and prep your meals for the entire week. Get some Tupperware-enough for all three meals for every day of your work week. It will be easier to plan healthier meals, you wont have an excuse to go to fast food when your time is limited, and you might even save some money in the long run.

The next life hack is in keeping a food journal. After a meal, take stock of how you feel. This will help you in understanding how food affect your body, and your mood. If you are able to keep that in mind, you will find yourself making healthier food decisions, and will think about the after effects of the stuff you put in your body.

A quick tip to make your day more efficient is the 60 second rule. Think about the tasks in your day-to-day life. If a task will only take 60 seconds, do it now. Don’t put it off. You will get more done, and you will be less likely to get overwhelmed at the end of the day. Sort your mail on your way back from the mail box. Set out your clothes for the next day if you are traveling. If it is a simple task that won’t take long, just get it over with and out of the way.

One great hack is prioritizing your day. Make a list of all your important tasks. Compare each item on the list to the others, ranking them by importance and urgency. It will help you set your priorities where they should be.

If you want to start your day off on a positive note, start your day with positive music and positive messaging. Write yourself some positive uplifting messages that your read first thing. Post them on the door or on the bathroom mirror. Just post them somewhere that you will see them right away. When you get your shower and get your day started, turn on positive uplifting music. Put away angry negative music. It sets your mind in a negative position. Prep your day the night before so you don’t throw your day off with a negative feeling of being rushed.

If you want to find ways to help others feel happier, take notes about what brings them joy. For me it is simple, video games, burgers, and Chicago deep dish pizza. For Rohit, it is anything Mariner’s baseball. For Kyle it is shots on air. Keep notes of what makes your friends and family happy. You can then go back to that list for gift ideas, and things that will help you get them into a better mood if they are feeling down.

If you really want to enjoy something new. Immerse yourself in the ‘thing.’ Rohit loves everything flying. He goes to flight museums, finds free flight lessons where you can sit in and learn about how to fly. Being an open person, he also talks to pilots while waiting to take off so he can talk shop with them. Get passionate about something and then immerse yourself by learning all you can about that thing.

To stay organized with your events, we recommend having a shared calendar with your loved ones. You can put in all sorts of events and plans. If you have parties you want to go to, birthdays to remember, meals to cook, bills to pay….put it in your shared calendar so you and your loved one can also plan their schedules accordingly. You will both then be able to see when you need to make more time for each other and how to avoid having to let someone down because you forgot an event.

There is one great life hack that will help you manage your emotional state. Keep an emotion journal when something causes your emotions to change. Write down the things that affect you in a negative way. This will help you gain perspective on the things affecting you in a negative way. It forces you to look at the emotion and the event causing it and analyze it. Why am I letting this affect me in a negative way? You will find yourself less affected by negative situations.

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It is the hardest thing in the world to forgive someone who has wronged us. We fill ourselves up with the negative feelings left over when someone fails us or hurts us through their words, actions, or inactions. Holding grudges can breed distrust, creates animosity, and prevents us from moving on. While we know it is important to forgive, how do we forgive someone and move forward?

Many religions and philosophical beliefs discuss the importance of forgiveness. Having been raised in a Christian home, we were taught about forgiveness as one of the foundational beliefs of our faith. The problem is, no one tells you how to forgive. What steps do you take to forgive? How will you know that you have succeeded in forgiving?

In this episode we explore the importance of forgiveness, some of the situations we have found ourselves in where forgiveness was needed, and how we moved on. When I was recently wronged, I found myself slipping into anger and animosity towards the person who had wronged me. I felt angry and let the feeling build to the point where my health was affected. My blood pressure was up, I had to struggle to keep my voice level and my words controlled around this person. It took me a few days to realize that this person wasn’t feeling any of the anger that I was holding. Hell. He wasn’t even aware that he had done anything wrong.

It was at this point that I realized that holding onto the anger didn’t really hurt him at this point. It wouldn’t make the situation better and wouldn’t change his attitude. It was a hard pill to swallow. I was keeping the negative feelings alive for me and hurting myself in the process. It was at this point that I realized that in order to forgive, I had to confront the issue I had with this person and let go of the anger that had built up. At this point, I decided to let go of my anger, give voice to my concerns and then walk away from the situation.

Letting go of the anger meant accepting that what had happened could not be undone. It meant that I had to understand where my feelings were coming from. Holding a grudge over something, no matter how big or small only hurts you in the long run. The person you have a beef with may never even know that you are angry with them. To truly let go, write your thoughts down and organize them. Express them and then walk away from the feelings. You have voiced them. You are free from them and it is up to the offending party for how they take your feelings and behave moving forward.

Once you have let go of your feelings, you must be careful not to let them back in. If another situation comes up, you don’t want the negativity affecting how you react with someone else. In terms of relationships, you don’t want to start seeing everyone else as possible offenders to the point where you can never fully trust someone. Don’t forget the past but put it into context. The wrong that was done was done then, by someone else, at a different time is not necessarily going to happen with the next person to come into your life. You are free to grow past grudges and bad times. Then you will truly be able to be free from the negativity of that one negative experience.

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We all have things that we should be doing. We also, know full well, that we need to be doing these things. It may be different for everyone, but everyone has that list of things that they know they “should do.” Whether it is, saving money, losing weight, learning a new skill, etc. we tend to build up an impressive list of “Shoulda, Coulda, Wouldas.”

Our minds are complex. It is a super computer that runs our body, but also programs our actions during different stimuli. Think about one of the earliest lessons we learn. Fire is hot. Most of us learned that lesson the hard way. We stuck our hand over the fire or onto a hot surface and learned that it hurts. This is a learned response from 1^st hand experience. A learned response is based on past experiences that we know to be true for that specific situation. Fire is always hot, so we know that we will always burn ourselves if we touch the flames.

Another type of program our minds create for us is based on emotional responses based on our beliefs. We see that in an example of our relationships. If you have ever been hurt by someone in a relationship, you might also know how hard it is to trust someone else later down the road. That is a response on an experienced emotion. You believe that you might get hurt so you hold onto negative feelings moving forward.

It is important to define our patterns and understand why we are doing the things we do. It will help us break bad habits and change our mindset so we can grow. Start by looking at a specific situation. Ask yourself where you started to believe that about that situation. In the example of the relationship from above, you would say I started not trusting people because someone hurt me in this situation in the past.

Next, analyze if it is a learned response based on experience or if it is a learned emotional response based on a belief. If that one person hurt you, will it happen with the next person you trust? No one can say that trusting someone will always end in disappointment and pain, or in Happiness and mutual respect.

Once it has been analyzed, it is time to redefine how you look at it. Using the same example, you may have been hurt in the past, but a new relationship is a blank slate. The situation and the people are different. Do not forget what happened in the past, however, do not let the past rob you of a new possibility. Try to recognize that your beliefs are influencing your actions and take steps to counter them. If someone betrayed your trust, try to forgive and move on. It is more important for your mental health than you may realize.

Beliefs are powerful and affect our actions al the time. Religious people try to shape parts of their lives around what they learn in their religious community. Kids beliefs are shaped by the words and actions of their parents and role models. Often, it takes years before we realize whether the beliefs we have built up are for better or for worse. It is not an easy path and takes years of active reflection. However, it is necessary for our mental, spiritual, and emotional growth.

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How can you tell if your life is a success or not? Would a 10 year old ‘you’ look at you today and say you were successful? This exercise explores the definition of success, but the definition of success as we see it in ourselves. It forces us to define what success is to us, and then hold ourselves up to account for where we are.

Success as defined in the dictionary is just the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. So I ask myself, have I reached my aim or purpose? This can get broad and vague. How do we measure our lives as success? It is much easier to break things down into different pillars of life. Financial, Relational, Physical, and Spiritual.

How do we know if we have a successful life financially? This is much easier to answer. Is your bank account where you want it to be? Do you have a job/career that is providing you what you envisioned? If not, you do not have a successful life financially according to the very definition of success. Usually we have a very clear idea of what we want to earn and how we want to be set financially, but when we are forced to look at how we are performing, we end up seeing our own failures. Rohit said something that is very true. Our priorities are out of touch. If we have no choice we will find a way to make our financial needs happen.

If our finances are not successful, it is time to look into why. Look through your expenses. Write down every single expense you have for an entire month. Then separate them all into 2 categories; Needs and Wants. Put items that are necessary for your survival into the Needs Category, and everything else into the Wants Category. If you truly want to be a success, you will be able to see what you need to cut out to save more and build your finances up. You can also look at your career and see if you are on the right path or if changes are needed. Is your career helping you reach your goals? If not, how can you more align it with your goals?

Apply the same level of analysis to the other 3 pillars in your life and make the necessary adjustments. From there it will be easier to see where we are holding ourselves back from reaching our goals. We find that our excuses really don’t hold weight when we dig this deep. We are responsible for our outcome and no external force is responsible for our decisions.

It isn’t an easy thing to do when we look this deep at our level of success. However, if we truly want to reach our goals and be a success, we need to be able to look at our goals and our efforts to determine if we are where we want to be. Only then will we be able to make the necessary changes to get us to where we want to be.