The Two Paths To Reaching Your Next Level

The primary purpose of our personal development is to achieve self-growth - to improve the quality of our lives by becoming healthier, more effective, more present, and more impactful. This idea of constant growth suggests that we’re always seeking to tap into our next level and maximize our potential. And as I’ve found in my life, when it comes to generating improvement and growth, there are only two paths to reaching your next level…

The path you take comes down to asking yourself this simple question: Do you know what you should be doing to improve your life?

If the answer is “Yes”, you do know what you should be doing to improve your life, then the path forward is just a matter of doing it. This becomes a process of understanding the roadblocks, obstacles, challenges, and details getting in the way of you doing it. It becomes more of a behavioral design approach to changing your life so that you can get consistent in doing the things that most serve you.

Some people would call this being more self-disciplined, which I define as “faithfully following through on doing the thing that most serves you, consistently, despite the circumstances around it”. Cultivating self-discipline isn’t just about willing your way into action but exploring all the factors around the action, clearing out the resistance, and structuring your environment to be more supportive in doing it.

If the answer to the question is “no”, you don’t know what you should be doing to improve your life, then the limiting factor is your own awareness. This means that the path forward is to go out and find the ideas, perspectives, examples, lessons, and recommendations that will help you improve in the ways you seek to.?

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time, shared by Maya Angelou - “Do your best until you know better. Then once you know better, do better.” It’s a reminder to not judge or criticize how things have been because it was the best you could do from that level of awareness. And then, once you have acquired that awareness, it becomes a matter of being more self-disciplined to faithfully follow through on what you know you should be doing.

The truth of it is… The majority of the time, if you’re being really honest with yourself, you do know what you should be doing to improve. Or at least you have an idea for something to try. So the real bottleneck to your own self-improvement, and reaching your next level, is to get yourself to follow through and take action. Even if it scares you, even if you don’t feel ready, even if you have reasonable excuses to make about it.

My personal process for that, which includes self-discipline subconscious priming, and honest self-accountability, and clarity on my goals and committed areas for growth, is my Self Improvement Scorecard. It's how I take action to elevate to my next level every single day.