My war paint is sweat. Sweat from the work I put everyday in to keep my pillars in balance. The investments I make to keep my mind, body, finances, and soul in alignment. I know that finances might seem out of place. But that too is part of investing in myself. We’ll get more into that in a future post.
The question becomes, how do you do it? The answer is that you make a choice. In my case, I finally made the choice to invest in myself. I realized that at some point in my life, I started investing in the wrong things. Sure, I’d always put time into getting better at whatever job I was in. Those investments made me good at what I did, but I wasn’t investing in the other parts of my life. I found myself falling into the trap of binge watching too many shows, playing video games, or spending hours watching YouTube reaction videos.
Don’t get me wrong, I love those things, but I was spending too much time doing that and not enough time working on myself. I wasn’t reading any more. I hadn’t exercised since I left the military in 2014. I had never been able to control the noise in my head. Luckily I had squared my finances away a few years ago. Even that, though, needed some tune-up.
Making Excuses
I also always found myself making excuses like, “If I spend time doing these other things, that’s less time I’ll have with my family.” or “I’ve never been very athletic so I’m not good at exercising.” Or, my personal favorite, “I’m not a morning person so I can’t get up early to exercise, read, etc….”
Any of this sound familiar? Do you find yourself saying the same things to yourself? Do you find yourself making up excuses? I have a secret to tell you, Its all bullshit. Its all things your mind tells you to keep you comfortable and safe. You basically lie to yourself so you can justify not being committed and disciplined.
I wasn’t a morning person because I was lazy. I wasn’t athletic because I never took the time to learn how to train properly and make healthy living a part of my life. And yes, investing in yourself might take some time away from your family, but I would challenge you to really look at what you do with your day. I mean take a real, honest, and hard look at your daily schedule. I think you’ll start to realize that you have more time during the day than you think. You just don’t use it wisely enough.
Taking Ownership
You control and have complete ownership of what you do with your time. Own it. Own every minute of your day.”
-Carlos Frevert
So that’s what I did. I owned it by making a choice. I chose to really invest in myself. At first, it was about just about getting my mind and body squared away. Once I wrapped my head around learning the steps that I needed to take to control those things, and managing my time to do those steps, the other stuff started falling into place.
It didn’t happen overnight. There was a bunch of trial and error. I felt super selfish because I was taking time from my family. But learning to control my time helped me mitigate the impact to the other parts of my life.
7 Steps To Invest In Yourself
I didn’t realize it at the time but, looking back now, I took some simple steps to get started. Notice I said simple, not easy. None of it was easy. Here are the 7 simple steps that I took to start really investing in myself:
- I identified the things I wanted to change about my life and wrote them down.
- I visualized what the ideal end state looked like if I fixed each of these things and wrote that down.
- I figured out what steps I needed to take to address each of these things and wrote that down.
- I came up with SMART goals for the highest priority things I wanted to change and wrote those down.
- I looked at how I spent my time, figured out what I should stop doing, and what steps I could incorporate into my daily life. I wrote those down.
- I committed to doing the work. I choose to stop waiting and I took a step forward everyday.
- I looked back on a daily basis at what I wrote down and measured myself against my goals.
Its Simple, Not Easy
And that’s it. Its that simple. But just because its simple doesn’t mean its easy. I have to continue to put the work in everyday to make this happen. I iterated on the process as needed. I was gentle with myself when things didn’t go as planned. Over time, my commitment to bettering myself helped me build the discipline I needed to meet my goals. And slowly, over time, I’m hitting those goals. Its not a fast process. It takes a lot of time and patience. Remember, life is a marathon, not a sprint.
So make a commitment to yourself to follow these steps, come up with a plan, and tackle just 1 thing to work on for two weeks. If its important enough to you, you’ll get it done. If its not, you won’t. It’s that simple. You’ve got complete control and only you can make it work.
Leave a comment below if you found these steps helpful to come up with your own self investment. Or connect with me on Instagram or Twitter to let me know if you are going to try these steps. I’d love to connect with you each week to see how you are doing.
Investing in yourself is the single most important investment you can ever make in your entire life. Make the promise to yourself to set some goals, develop a plan, and unlock your greatness. Do the work everyday, one step at a time. Don’t let the opportunity pass you by to create the best version of you. And show me your war paint.
The lyrics in the pic are from an amazing song called “Nice To Meet Me” by Zach Hemsey. Check it out below.
[…] not going to lie. It is. But you can’t half-ass real change. If you looked at my “7 Steps To Invest In Yourself” post, all this is step 1, “Identify the things you want to change.” If it feels […]