 I didn't feel like starting this video. Actually, I don't feel like starting most of my videos. The only time I feel like showing up on video is when I have scheduled with a client or when I'm doing a group program with the teachings and the groups. Sometimes I, and with the clients, sometimes I still have butterflies in my stomach and I still need to keep myself accountable to showing up. But back to the main point, I didn't feel like starting this video and yet I'm here. And I know that as I keep on talking, eventually, maybe it's gonna be two minutes, maybe it's gonna be seven minutes or 10 minutes, I will feel like I'm in the flow and I will actually end up after this video being proud that I did it. And that, my friends, is the formula for personal growth, isn't it? To stretch outside your comfort a little bit. By definition, you don't feel like doing it. It's not comfortable. You stretch outside your comfort just a little bit and then after you do that, you feel proud that you did it. That cycle shows you that you are growing. So the way I like to say it is that I am strict about showing up but lenient about the results and gentle to bring myself back to focus again and again. So I'm strict about showing up and making this video even though if you really would let me do whatever I want to do, whatever I feel like doing, whatever it feels like in the flow for me, I would never make videos. I might again show up for teaching sessions or client calls, those feel more natural because I'm interacting with somebody else. Here, I'm interacting with a video camera and that's not natural for anybody unless they grew up with a video camera in their face, right? Or they have trained and then they become natural. Of course now that I've done many, many videos, this feels much more natural than when I first started but for the first several dozen videos that I made, maybe for the first several hundred and still today, if I don't do it every day looking at the camera and speaking to it, it's not natural, it's not easy. And in fact, I don't do it every day these days, right? I make a live video basically once a week now as my rhythm now that I've made over a thousand videos by this point, I'm now making fewer and I'm repurposing more of my older ones but when I first started, I was making a video every day and that allowed me to increase my skills much faster than now that I'm doing it once a week, I still have to get used to looking at the camera again and talking but imagining you, imagining my ideal viewer, the person who is really open and accepting of me, who is eager to learn from me, I have to imagine that person. So same thing when it comes to my writing, those of you who know a bit of my story know that writing never came easy for me and it still doesn't to this day. I did get an English degree from college but that was part of what traumatized me, having to write many papers for which I stayed up all night long to finish them because they were on deadline and usually on topics that I don't really enjoy. And so for my career, I thought, that'd be great if I didn't have to ever write again. Well, I was wrong about that. And now, of course, some of you know me as a professional writer, I have self-published five books now and writing is part of my normal thing. I still don't enjoy it. Some of you who enjoy writing, you should be so grateful that you enjoy writing. Some of you like being on video, you should be grateful for that. I enjoy neither. If you were to say, I have all the money in the, I have all the money I'll ever need for my life and there's nothing I can do to help people, I would never write, I would never make videos. But I do it because I know it helps people. I've heard from many of you and I'm grateful that it is helpful for you. And it adds to my business. It helps me grow my audience and grow my client base and et cetera, et cetera. It does all that. And after every time after I write something or after I make a video, I feel proud of it. I'm glad I did it. So I know again, that cycle of growth is doing something I don't feel like doing with understanding that it's probably gonna be good for me doing it, being lenient about the results and then being proud that I did it anyway, no matter the results. And this is really how I've been operating in my business for years. I did not grow up with this training. I grew up with being strict about results, being strict about showing up on, well, even my parents weren't great at showing up on time either. So I didn't grow up with showing up on time, but I grew up with being strict about results. And that's a very painful way, as some of you know, a painful way to grow up. But now I've had to retrain myself, repair it myself, as many of you may need to do, to be strict about showing up on time, if at all possible. And it helps when I schedule focus-made sessions. I think you may have heard me talk about focus-made before. I use it three to five sessions every single day. Today, I had a session at 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 11 30 a.m. and I'll have one at 2 p.m. And that's one of my shorter days. Most of my longer days, I have six focus-made sessions. So I really encourage you, if you haven't tried focus-made, you've got to at least try it once. Do me a favor and try it once. Or if you've tried it once and it somehow didn't work out, please try it three times, because sometimes the first or second time doesn't work out for whatever reason. Try it three times. And for those who do, it's life-changing. It's been life-changing for me. So I've had to reparent myself to be strict about showing up for my work, especially when I don't feel like doing it, and then being lenient about the results. That's the opposite of what I grew up being taught. I'm lenient now about the results. I don't beat myself up or I don't judge myself about how this video will turn out. What I most care about is that I showed up and shared honestly and authentically with you as much as I could. And then however the video turns out is how it turns out. And that's also why I love doing these videos live, because then it helps me to not judge myself as much because I have one take. Instead of going, oh, I got to start over. If I record myself, I usually do multiple. Too many takes. The exception in my early years, I did the videos at the dog park. So my dog couldn't be off leash for too long. So that's why I had a set time limit there too, not to do too many takes. But now that I'm doing my videos from my home office, it's so much better for me to do them live without having to therefore not judging myself as much. You can judge me as much as you want. I've learned to let that go as well. But that's a practice. It takes continual mindfulness of what's going on in here, especially is there any judgments going on in here? Are the judgments stopping me from doing things? Or are the judgments wise judgments to say, this might be a better direction than that direction. Those judgments are good, like making good wise judgments about do this rather than that. But any of the judgments that stop me from taking action, I know that's not a helpful judgment. That's just old programming that I have to reparent myself and retrain myself to say, no, no, I'm gonna be lenient about the results. And you might say, well, George, lenient about the results, that doesn't make sense because how do you then create quality stuff? How do you create quality? I create quality through creating quantity. So I know, so the way I look at personal growth and business development is that it is a long-term journey. If you commit yourself to the journey of growing yourself and your business, then you realize that exercise is what builds our muscles and our skills. And exercise means showing up. You can't exercise by not showing up and believing your judgments about yourself and therefore staying unmoving and doing nothing. Now meditating is a good thing. Prayer is a good thing. Contemplation is a good thing, but I'm talking about taking action free of your self-judgment. So you might say, well, George, how do you free yourself from self-judgment? I bet you already have a method for it and you just don't use it consistently enough. Probably, right? Don't you have a method for how, if I were to ask you, hey, how do I free myself from self-judgment? You could probably tell me some method you've learned that has worked for you in the past and maybe you just haven't done it consistently. For me, I free myself by doing my energy reboot practice. And if you're curious about that, you can go to Google and search energy reboot practice and you'll find my article and my video about how I do that. So do whatever method works for you to free yourself of the self-judgments so that you can show up, be strict about showing up and to be lenient about the results, knowing that if you just keep showing up and trying and exercising and practicing, your skills, of course, are going to grow over time. Isn't that true? If you show up consistently and you just practice, you exercise, you try, you get curious about how you can do it a little bit better each time, your skills, of course, are inevitably going to grow over time. And as your skills grow over time, your results are inevitably going to get better over time as well. You see the genius, so-called genius of this method? It's not a genius. It's been known for thousands of years, probably longer than that, that if you just exercise and practice and keep showing up and not judge yourself so much, then you're just going to become better over time. And if you can become better every time, so will your results become higher quality over time, right? So the third part of the formula, so they're strict about showing up, okay? Use Focus Mate to help you do that, strict about showing up, lenient about the results, disregard, notice and disregard self-judgements that are keeping you from taking action. Just know that you are on a journey of inevitable growth, okay, lenient about the results for this session. Whatever hour I'm working, I'm like, I'm not going to judge my results right now, I'm just going to do the work. And over time, as I have more distance, as I have more distance of time from my work, for example, once a week, I will log the stats of my recent content pieces for the past week. And when I log the statistics to say, oh, this one got this many likes versus this many likes versus that one got this many likes, then I can go, oh, isn't it interesting? They like that one more, okay, maybe I'll do more videos about that topic in the future. So you only judge yourself, you only judge your results with enough distance of time, so there's not so much charge. You don't judge yourself in the moment. You judge yourself with enough distance and go, oh, okay, that's what worked better than that one, got it. I will do more of that in the future and do less of that. So lenient about the results in this moment anyway, okay? Because the results you are understanding is a longer term evaluation. So strict about showing up, lenient about the results and then the third part of the formula is to gently bring yourself back to focus again and again. So during any hour of work, right? For example, if I'm writing, like I said, I don't feel like writing, but I make myself show up anyway, breathing, doing my energy reboot, knowing that it's all gonna be okay. And then I show up and go, I don't know what to write. I don't know, it's a blank page. I don't know if I can write anything. I don't know if I've, what I'm saying is going to sound stupid. I don't know if I don't even know what to say more than a sentence or two. I don't know if I can write an article. I don't know, but I'm going to show up and I'm gonna try. I'm gonna be lenient about the results. And then five minutes into it, I've written three sentences or two sentences. I don't know what else I'm gonna say. I really, I don't know if I know enough about this. Ah, self-judgment. Notice that it's keeping me from taking action. Gently go, do my energy reboot again, which only takes 20 seconds. Okay, let's bring myself back to the exercise. Bring myself back to the practice of just continue to write. Just try. Just say what you need to say. Just say what you might be helpful for somebody else. Just write as if I'm writing to a fully accepting human being who is eager to know what my silly thoughts are. I'm just gonna keep writing. Gently to keep it. And again, 10 minutes in or 12 minutes in, again, I have self-judgment. Ah, energy reboot, 20 seconds. Gently bring myself back to writing again. That's how I, that's how I, if you were sitting next to me watching me for the entire day, that's where you're gonna see the whole day. You're gonna see this guy writing. Oh no, okay. Let me just reboot. Okay, okay, I'm gonna write some more. I'm gonna write some more. A few minutes later, 15 minutes later. Oh, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can do this. If you were next to me, I would say, I don't know if I can do this. Okay, energy reboot. Okay, that's right. Okay, bring myself back. You'll see me doing this all day long, all day. That's what I'm doing. Unless I'm doing some administrative tasks that's like easy to do, or if I'm meeting with a client, of course I'm not like pausing every five seconds for every five minutes to do energy reboot. If I'm in a meeting, but when I'm working on my own, especially when I'm writing, or I'm creating an online course, or I'm doing some kind of marketing for my courses, or any kind of thing that might have, I'm doing it in isolation because I have to. I have to produce something to put it out there. Then you're gonna see me like self doubt every five to 15 minutes and then have to do energy reboot and bring myself back. You'll see me all day long doing that. Not all day long, like I said, when I'm doing these kinds of work periods. So what about you? How do you work all day long? Do you just go, ah, I don't know how to do this. And then you just leave and do something else? Do something easy and not come back to this? Or do you stay with the project and go, ooh, let me do whatever exercise I need to do for 20, 30 seconds to remind myself that it's all gonna be okay. And that I'm brilliant. I just need to allow myself to try, to allow yourself to try. So I hope that this is helpful. Be strict about showing up. Be lenient about the results during that hour and be gentle every five minutes, every one minute if you need to, to just gently bring yourself back to focus again and again in that discomfort of not knowing if it's gonna work out. Bring yourself back and go, let me just try. Knowing that this is an experience of life. This is a training moment. I say that to my, that's part of my new energy booth. This is a training moment. You know, I stretch and I bring myself back to gently trying and practicing again. I hope that this is helpful. My name is George Cow. Curious what the caption is gonna spell my name, probably COW as I could see there, rather than KAO. And I hope this was helpful for you. I always look forward to seeing your comments below. How does this help you? Or how will you do something with this? Or if you have any questions, then I will see you in the next video. Be well.