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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Living Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.
I really enjoy personal development. And, you know, I really enjoy working with people who are engaged in moving their lives forward. And to see the progress of people, it's awesome.
It's inspiring, it's motivating, it's powerful. Just to see people improve their lives and experience, I don't know, just to have a better life experience. It doesn't turn into, you know, it doesn’t turn into simplicity, and it doesn't turn into easy, and it doesn't turn into constant happiness, but it changes your total life experience in a way that I think really improves it.
Anyway, so with that said, comment, check in, engage. Otherwise it's a totally one-sided comment, and you're, I'm the only one on this end speaking. So speak back when you are.
This week we got to, as you may know, I'm going through some of the chapters in my book, The One Horse Race. It's going to be released here soon.
Today we're going to talk about a concept in chapter seven. It is skill number two in belief development, and that is make a promise, keep it, is what I call it. Make a promise, keep it.
And what it is, it's becoming somebody that you can trust and depend on. And my quote, my quote about this is that it's been said that men are, that they might have joy, and I agree with that. But what we miss is that" joy is the reward of doing things that don't feel good.
So if we want to experience more joy in our lives, our goal must be to seek and embrace actions that causes discomfort rather than seeking to feel good all the time." Okay. That's what I think about it.
So keeping promises to yourself and self-discipline are two of the strongest builders and the fastest way to build a perceived self-value.
Now, I say perceived because here's the thing, you're already 100%, you know what saying? You don't have to run around and prove it to anybody, but what we want to do is we want to prove it to our own brains.
We want to develop the belief in ourself according to me, and I believe according to God and the law of the universe.
You're 100%, whether you know it or think it or any of that. I think that just by virtue of being able to come to this planet and participate in this experience, you're 100% deserving of everything, regardless of what you've done, haven't done, or what's been done or said to you and all that. Period.
But our challenge is to believe that ourselves.
So one of the fastest ways and one of the skills reinforce that in our brain so that we can internalize it, feel it, and solidify that belief so that our results start changing.
That's why I call it perceived, because the value is already there, but we need our brain to perceive the same thing that's true about our value, and that is that we're a hundred percent.
Nothing has to do with morality or willpower when I talk about self-discipline. Okay?
It's basically just how your own brain learns how you are, what it believes to be true about you.
When you make a promise to yourself, your brain treats it as a prediction about the future. And when you keep the promise that you made to yourself, the brain records messages like, I am reliable. The things that I wanna do matter, my intention matters, I can be trusted, my word matters, my word has weight.
And then that evidence adds. Every time we make a promise and keep it, that evidence, we provide evidence for our brain, and it accumulates and helps us build and solidify this belief of worth and credibility to ourselves.
So when we do the opposite, we all do this, right? We all completely break promises to ourselves.
It's right now at this time of year, right here and now it is February, the beginning of February, and we're right at the season of our New Year's resolutions are all shot to hell by now. Usually. Not everybody, I know not you, but a lot of people.
And so, you know, we all make promises that we don't keep to ourselves, and it doesn't feel good. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
Let me tell you some of the things that are happening when we make a promise and keep it.
For example, if I say, I'm going to be on time for this, or I'm going to wake up at a certain time, or whatever the thing is, okay, I'm going to whatever.
You make a promise to yourself and you don't keep it. The opposite happens of what I've been discussing, and that is your brain records messages and takes in meaning that things like, you know, what's your intention doesn't matter. You're not dependable. You can't count on yourself. “You can't rely on you, Shane.”
You know what you say, it isn't really real. You know, you're not, you're not, you don't have any authority, and it just starts to erode your self-trust.
And by the way, with it, your perceived value that your brain's thinking, your value's going like, you're not that kind of a person that can be trusted and counted on, depend upon, you're not trustworthy.
Discipline, that's what happens when we don't do that. Discipline is, it just sounds so damn hard. When I hear it, it's just like a twinge with pain almost.
I just think of a, that's what I think. Maybe you don't, but I, I think that the word to me just by saying it sounds hard. Sounds like work.
And it's often misunderstood as, you know, being forceful or being rigid or being regimented. But in, but in reality, discipline is it's just being in alignment with your own values and your own intentions is what it is.
Operating outside of what you want to do is when you're being undisciplined.
So each act of discipline that we do tells our brain those positive messages that reinforce a positive self-belief.
Your brain hears, if I say I'm going to do 10 push-ups every night before I go to bed this week and I do it, or even if I do it one night, first night, you know, I started, my brain starts taking in messages.
“Hey, you did that. I follow through. Shane, you're the kind of person that tells yourself something, does it. You follow through. If you say you're going to do it, you just do it. That's who you are.
I say it. It's done, man. It happens. It's gold. It's solid.” It's, you know, you know, I don't abandon myself just because it's uncomfortable. OK.
My long-term well-being that I can see, that I can visualize, that I can hope for, it outranks this short-term discomfort that I'm going to be going through.
And that message is interpreted by our brain as value. Now it's perceived value because, like I said, no matter what you do, just know that you already, you already have the value. You've just got to convince your brain, your subconscious and your conscious.
Your brain doesn't assign worth based on intention. It assigns it based on consistent evidence. Okay, so we're providing evidence to our brain of our perfect value.
Okay. The brain prioritizes predictability, excuse me, which means the brain likes it when we look into the future and say we're going to do something and do it.
And it predicts, it prioritizes reliability. The brain feels safe when, when we feel like we can predict what's going to happen, we follow through with it.
When we're reliable to ourselves, it just like provides this stable environment, and our brain is happy. It like equals safety.
For some, there's some sense of safety that we get from following through, and that safety translated, that translates as value. And you'll notice this, like, when you are disciplined, you will notice, okay, that you have less anxiety. Of course, you have increased confidence, and that is, you know, those are the feelings they get from following through with yourself because your, your brain is giving yourself messages.
You're having thoughts that you're that kind of a person that doesn't says what that we say that we're gonna do. Okay?
When we break a promise, the internal noise is different. Like I said, when somebody, we frequently break promises to ourselves, the brain, it gets like, it butts heads with itself. It has contradiction. It's like, you'd want to do this, but hey, you're not doing it. What's going on here? Okay.
That's a conflict inside of your brain. We have this intention. I intended, I wanted to do this, but my behavior didn't do it. That's a conflict, right?
My values are, I've stated my values. I'm telling you, this is what's important to me, but my habits don't show, they're not consistent with my values. Okay.
This internal inconsistency creates self-doubt, creates hesitation, it creates self-attack, and it creates our brain giving ourselves messages that are not the kind of messages that we want to be believing about ourselves. Okay.
And so, and it's not because we're weak, okay? We're not gonna keep all the promises that we make to ourselves. That's just not gonna be the way it's gonna be.
We don't do it because we're weak. We do it, our brain just needs to learn how to trust ourselves, to trust us, okay? And we need to learn how to trust ourselves.
People think that discipline produces results, and of course it does. But more importantly, more importantly than getting the results of doing the thing, which feels great, one of the reasons it feels great is because of the thoughts that we're thinking that's reinforcing these beliefs.
And that is the most important, I think. A lot of times it's even a higher, it's even more important than getting the result that we got from doing the thing, whatever the thing was, from waking up on time or doing the push-ups or whatever we were going to do, getting our goal.
So the beliefs that we want to have are beliefs or thoughts that our brain gives us when we follow through, when we keep our promises to ourselves, and when we show it, we, what's the word I'm looking for? When we do discipline, when we are disciplined, okay?
I'm somebody who shows up, okay? I'm somebody who finishes what I start. I'm somebody who keeps my word to myself. I make a promise, I keep it. That's who I am, okay?
Now, we don't, we're not going to have time to go into this in extreme detail that we do in the book and the courses that I teach on this, but I can give you the two main things that are going to make the difference for you here. Okay.
And I'm going to tell you how to be in the top 5% in the world right here, right now.
There's two things about making promises and keeping them that are the most important according to me. And that is the promises that you make yourself about time and about money.
Okay. So let's just take a little bit of, cause that those are resources really, time and money. So what do I mean by that?
So here's what I mean. What I recommend, and we break this down into minute details and walk with people piece by piece through this, but what we, we have a system where we schedule time. Okay.
We schedule our lives, and we live it on purpose by the hour at the beginning of the week.
So at the beginning of the week, we look all the way to the end of the week, and I'm talking about everything that we're going to do. Not work, not just appointments, not just, just anything.
Every waking moment by whatever, at least by the half hour. Okay. Some people do by 15 minutes. I don't like to do that. Do it by the half hour, and we schedule our seven days.
We do it every week, and a lot, almost nobody does that. Okay.
But what I have found is that if you make promises with your time by putting what you want to do on purpose in a calendar at the beginning of the week, before the week happens, there are so many positive results.
The first thing that happens when you do that, and again, we go through a process of breaking this down into a very detailed system of how to go about it and make it really simple. So this is just the basics, but you can begin this anytime you want to.
Now, you probably already have some sort of system for scheduling and quote unquote managing your time, right? You probably have some sort of system that you're doing.
And that's good.
I suggest a complete and comprehensive plan that covers every half hour, every waking half hour by the week. Okay. And I highly recommend it, and I'm going to give you some of the reasons.
The first thing that we do at the beginning of the week is we shut, get quiet time. Okay. And then we write down everything that we can think of possibly, every little thing that we need to do for the whole week.
Then we put it into a slot in the calendar. We take in time for recreation, for meals, for everything. Errands we need to run, work time, appointments, the dentist, as it's a dentist day, everything that we need to do, put it into our calendar. Okay.
And when you emptied your mind and you found all your little notes and reminders, and I actually have one place where I store my notes and reminders, so it's not, I don't have to look all over the place.
When you've, when you've got all those out of your mind and out of all the places that you've stored all the to-dos, okay, and you put them in the calendar for the week, okay, and the ones that won't fit into this week, they're out of the way.
Okay.
What happens at that point is you feel, it feels amazing. Okay. It feels good.
Because first of all, I don't have to wonder if I'm going to forget something because I don't forget that many things unless I forget and look at my calendar because it's already in the calendar.
So that's a sense of relief just to start with right there.
The next thing that I know that I've done when I look at it, I know that what I am doing is what I'm doing on purpose.
Okay. Here's the thing. I used to go around, and every damn day I'd just be, it'd feel awful at the end of the day. And I'd be running my ass off from the time I woke up until who knows what time I went to sleep, every day.
And I, at the end of every day, I'm like, oh my gosh, I just didn't get enough done. I just put, and then I'm like, “What's the problem? You've been going all day, Shane.”
Well, you're trying to fit, you know, too much stuff into this. And then I've tried to do too many things, and there's too much stuff, and I never have enough time. It feels awful. Okay.
Then you get overwhelmed because there's so much stuff piling up and piling up, and you can't keep up, and there's no way out. It feels awful. Okay.
And this is the cure. I'm telling you, this is the cure. This is the cure.
Overwhelm doesn't exist when you plan your time this way. Telling you straight up, you're going to have to believe me on it. Trust me on this one until you come with me and do it for a few weeks, and you'll see what I'm saying.
So once you get that done, feels great.
Okay. And then the week starts. Here we go. All right, we're off and going.
And then the first thing that happens is the first appointment or the first block of time, whether it's a two-hour block or a half-hour block or whatever it is. If it's something I'm not real high on doing, or let's just say I was high on doing it, I wouldn't have put it in there because guess what? I could have put anything in the world that I want to do.
It's my life. I can choose what I'm going to put into this calendar. I could choose to, you know, anything. There's no limit unless I'm limiting myself. So what I put in there, I put in there, and I did it on purpose.
And then I get there, and doing this thing, most of the things really in my calendar is going to cause me a little bit of discomfort.
And you know what we do, I do and everybody does, we're like, well, you know, I'll come back to that. I could do it later. And I've got these emails I've got to check out, and I've got nine text messages that I haven't opened yet and a couple of voicemails, and my phone keeps dinging. Somebody's hit me up on Messenger, and blah, blah, blah.
And we want to, and there's this other thing, and there are little things that we can do, and we get a little reward, and we feel better, and it's not very, a lot of discomfort. Okay.
And so we use it to justify not doing the thing, and that feels terrible. That's make a promise. Don't keep it. Okay.
And it's really, really easy to do. And we all do that. We do goals. We do it all the time.
And so the first step is to, first of all, we decide in advance, we put it in the calendar, and then we know it's gonna be difficult when those times come, and we have a plan to do it, okay?
We know it's gonna come, and we do it.
I'm gonna give you a couple of, a key here in a minute of how to make the choice that you intended to rather than to change it and do something different.
We also make up excuses like, I can't plan my life that way. Too many things come up, and I never know how long certain things are going to take and all this.
We have all those solutions already baked into our life planning tools. Yes, you can. You can do all that.
If you get to the moment and you don't do it, then you're back in the same boat. The overwhelm can start to creep in. It doesn't feel good.
Even though you accomplished another thing, the one that you put in your calendar is not done, and it's still sitting there, you know, gnawing on you. Still in the back of your mind now, and it's still undone. It doesn't feel good.
Okay. Let's just say that the moment comes, you're in the right frame of mind, you're following our system, and you do the thing, whatever it is.
Let's just say that you're going to, uh, you're gonna write. You're gonna write, I don't know, a blog post, or you're gonna write a chapter in a book, or you're going to write somebody a letter, or you're gonna write a talk that you're gonna give in church, or I don't know what.
Everything you're gonna write, you're gonna do it for two hours straight.
And you get to the time, you're like, “I don't really, this isn't, this doesn't say it's homework or something, or we're gonna talk, you know, I got plenty of time to do this. I was kind of, you know, getting ahead of myself. And I, and I should do those other things, and I could do, you know, I'm just going to go do that right now.”
But you go, hold on. You go through the discomfort and say, you know what? I put it in here. I'm going to do it.
So you do it. You spend the two hours, and you get the task done. You get the writing done. You got it all done inside the two hours.
And guess what that feels like? You know what it feels like. It feels, it feels great. Right?
You're proud of yourself. Look at what I, so far ahead of the game. I already got my homework done, my talk done, whatever it was.
Okay. I'm efficient. I'm productive.
And you know what? It feels great.
And guess what you just did? Even probably according to me, more important, you just reinforced your brain that you, all those things I just said, you're efficient, you're productive. You keep your own promises.
You're the kind of person that says what you're going to, and you're ahead of the game. You're all that, man. You did everything. You're dependable.
Okay. It reinforces to your brain. You're dependable. You can be trusted. You can count on you.
And that equals that your belief that you want to have that you're a hundred percent is true. Okay. That's what it reinforces.
So that's how it works.
You can literally eliminate overwhelm, feel better, improve yourself, your personal beliefs just by putting down what you're going to do and following it. Okay.
And it takes a habit, and it's an ongoing thing. It's not, uh, not too many weeks are perfect with me, but it's something I work at, and I'm getting pretty good at it.
Okay. Way better than it was in the beginning.
Um, so that is time. I want to talk a little bit about the money thing. Okay. Cause it's pretty much the same thing.
It's the same steps. You decide in advance. Okay.
So what I'm talking about is, is writing on paper. I say on paper, but that means documenting somewhere on some file and some computer or phone somewhere.
You're going to, or on some app or whatever it is, you're going to decide on a 30-day period. You're going to decide in advance. You're going to do your, spend your money on paper in advance.
Okay.
So, and then you're going to go through the same steps. Okay.
You're going to decide what it is. You're going to record it.
Okay. And then when the time comes, follow through with it, and we'll give you some tools to help you follow through.
The same thing happens. Okay.
You automatically, boom. “Hey, I'm, I keep my promises.” And you're reinforcing to yourself the kind of human being you are.
And it feels great. Okay. Plus you got some money in the bank, and that doesn't hurt either.
So these two things, I'm not going to go too far into the money thing. And remember this. Okay.
The money is basically the same set of decisions, okay, as the time.
If you were intentional with your time and your money, your life's gonna be different. It changes everything about your world.
Remember, regardless of whether you follow through with the discipline or don't, whether you schedule by the half hour, hour, or don't, whether you plan your money or you just live in total reaction, you react to everything with time and money, you're still 100%. Okay.
It's just gonna be so much easier.
Plus you get to be productive and efficient and reach your goals and all that. That's fun. Have some money in the bank, so there's that.
But on top of all that, it reinforces to you so you can really believe and know.
That's what I want you to do, man. I want you to know that you're 100%. 100%.
You don't have to do this to prove it to the world. Just prove it to your brain so that you can more fully internalize it.
It makes it so much easier if you do these skills. Okay?
Um, yeah. I just want you to know that you already are 100%. Okay.
There's three keys that I'm going to give you. The first one is just to do it. Okay. Cause most people don't. Most people do not.
Most people put, there's kind of three categories. People that just put in appointments or this or that. They schedule this somewhere on a calendar somewhere so they don't forget that they have a certain thing.
And then the whole rest of their life is just like, whatever happens, I react to it.
And then there's the next step up, which is people that put, um, you know, they put a few things in every day, like a big six, or they have a system where they put a few more things in the calendar.
But they're not intentionally, they're still doing a lot of reactive living. Okay.
Which means that, like, you're just bouncing from here to here based on whatever happens, and you're reacting to the world instead of acting upon it.
There's only a small percentage of people. Okay.
You're going to be among the elite if you practice these skills. You're going to, you're gonna be in the less than 5% of people in this country that live this way.
The next thing is, first of all, just so you just do it, okay? Commit to do it. That's the first step. Commit that, hey, I'm gonna start living my time on a calendar.
And some people go, you know what? That's ridiculous. I'm not gonna spend it. I'm not gonna schedule every half hour. I wanna be spontaneous and do whatever I want and react to the world. You can react to the world, but here's the thing. Stephen Covey said this, “If you want spontaneity, put it in your calendar.”
You're gonna have more time, more recreational time, the freedom that you get from knowing.
And you know, in the beginning I said, hey, at the end of the day, I would say to myself, I feel so bad because I didn't get anything done, and stacking up, and I always had too much to do, and this and that.
I don't get everything done on the planet that I would like to get done if I could. But you know what I do do? Here's the difference.
Everything I do, I do on purpose because it's planned in advance, it's on my calendar, and when I put it on the calendar, it's done. I do it. I do it.
I'm getting pretty good at not putting it off. I mean, I say it's going to be done, I put it in the calendar, that means I'm doing it.
And all the rest of the stuff that wouldn't fit into the calendar, I'm automatically okay with it. You know why? Because I know that I have prioritized and I have done what I want with the time that I had on purpose with my intention.
What else is there? Nothing.
So all that stuff, I'm like, you know, that stuff's going to have to wait. And it gives so much peace of mind. That's where the overwhelm takes. I still don't get, you know, a million things done. I get a half a million things done every day, but not a million.
But I know that that other half a million is going to have to wait until it fits into my calendar on purpose.
And so the, the that I'm just living on purpose makes all the things that I didn't get done irrelevant.
Like, I'm not doing that and that's okay. Because, you know, I can't be in two places at one time. I can't do everything that I've ever thought about. Okay?
We can only do what I can do, and I do a lot. Let me just tell you that.
But the things that I don't do, if I didn't do them, they're not that important for this moment in my life. It gives a tremendous amount of peace.
Step two is, number one is just to damn do it, commit to do it, commit to begin the process and try.
Second one is to consider what you promise.
And this is, sometimes I like to shoot in the name later. And so what I'm saying is consider what you promise. If you're gonna put it in the calendar, or if you're gonna tell yourself you're gonna wake up at 5 a.m. tomorrow, damn do it. And don't say you're gonna unless you're not, unless you're gonna be committed to do it.
And that's what I mean by consider what you promise, okay? You become more intentional. That's what I mean by that. Consider what you promise. That's what I mean.
All the 500,000 things that I didn't do, I didn't do them on purpose because I'm focused on this bunch over here that I'm gonna do, okay?
The last thing is, is Tony Robbins talks a lot about this, and my good friend, love him to death, Ben Care, really hit home with me with a message he had about what a state changer, okay, a state changer.
So what that is, you change your state of mind.
And Ben Care uses music, and I think music is a great tool to change your state.
So what that means is, for example, when you come to the decision point and you find yourself drifting away and not doing the thing when it's time to encounter and go through the discomfort and exercise your discipline, and you're kind of starting to drift. The moment that you catch yourself not going for the thing and doing the discipline, boom.
He touches a button on his phone and it plays a certain song, and it helps.
And I've done this myself, and you can experiment with this. Some of you've done it too, but just do it as a regular course of habit. Okay?
Find the right motivating inspir... something that will inspire you, that will refocus you on the long term, not what your brain's trying to guide you away from the discomfort.
Go do this easy thing, it'll be okay. Don't do it right now, you know? Go do this little pleasurable thing over here. Don't go through that discomfort.
That'll change your mind and say, “Yeah, go for it, man. Bring it on. I can handle this little discomfort for this much of joy in the end.”
So use a state changer. That's number three, okay?
Here's the thing. If you get good at making promises and keeping them, it's so easy. It makes it so much easier to believe that you're amazing because you trust yourself. You're a person that you can count on.
When you say it, it happens. That's who you are.
And that doesn't mean that it happens every single damn time. Sometimes it doesn't.
And guess what? That's okay because I fix it to the best that I can. If I need to make any amends because somebody else was involved, do that.
And then I go right back, and I recommit, and I do it better next time. Okay, and that's just fine.
But the more that, the more that you tell your brain, the more that you make a promise and keep it, the more messages that you're sending to your brain about your value. Okay.
And then your brain accepts it. You fully believe it.
And as that happens, that's when everything else in your life really improves.
If you consistently schedule your time hourly on a calendar, and if you consistently document your budget each month to intentionally plan your life, you're in the less than 7% of people that do.
Now, if you, if you put it on paper, your time and your money, if you schedule it on purpose and you make a consistent effort to follow through, to follow through on your plans, if you do it and then you make a consistent effort and stay with it, you're in the top 5%. Okay.
And you should consider yourself a high performer. Okay. You're in the elite.
You're in probably in less than, you're probably closer to the top 3% because not a lot of people go this way. Okay.
You're living on purpose, and that feels good.
And it tells your brain what the truth of reality is. And that is that you are 100%.
Remember that, my friends, your value is non-negotiable.
Stay with me.
