Turn Your Day into a Mental Gym

The key is to control awareness. And every time throughout the whole day, regardless of what's going on in your family, your business, your awareness is perpetually moving in your mind.

And if you can control where it goes, you can control how you react and respond to a situation. For me, the way I practice is I look at my whole day as my gym, my mental gym.

When I'm talking to an employee who's not doing something I told them to do or something's going on with the business, or whatever it is,

Every moment I have the choice to choose where my awareness goes. And if someone does something to take my awareness to a different area of the mind, then I go, okay, my ball of light is going to an area of the mind. I don't want it to go. I'm going to grab it with my willpower and bring it back here.

And I'm going to stay here and choose not to go there. You know, I flew here yesterday and it's a classic example. My flight got delayed and everyone's in the plane was sitting for an hour and you could see people's awareness going to the frustrated area of the mind.

you know, like, what's going on? Why are we still sitting here? And I saw my ball of light wanting to go there, and I had to just bring it back and go, I'm like, I don't need to go there. I can choose to be somewhere else.

One of the other things you talk about that I love is willpower. Yeah. And there's many examples from your work that I like, but can you talk about even the way you define willpower and how important it is?

It's not something that I hear a lot of spiritual people talk about. And so can you talk a little bit about If somebody wants to increase their willpower, what do they do and how do you define it? So I would define willpower as mental muscle. If I could draw biceps around my mind,

that would be my willpower, you know, a very simplified definition of it. So every time my ball of light drifted away, I would use these biceps, grab that ball of light and drag it back and say, don't go there, right? And you can go there. And it's not about avoiding that place, it's choosing when I want to engage with that situation.

So for example, if I had a fight with Joe about something, an argument with Joe, if I didn't control my ball of light, my awareness would perpetually be going to that every two minutes. Like, I can't believe you said that.

I keep typing and I'm like, Oh, he's such an idiot. Keep typing. And that, and those are called mental arguments and people have mental arguments in their head all day long.

But when you develop willpower, every time that ball of light You just grab it and bring it back. And there are three ways to develop willpower. Finish what you begin.

Do a little bit more than you think you can, and do it a little bit better than you think you can. And for me, the easiest way to bring practices into our life, you know, a lot of spiritual people will tell you,

you know, wake up in the morning, do yoga, breathe, you know, do your cold times and this and that. It's hard when you have a family, when you have a business. But the way I look at it is if you look at your day,

and you ask yourself, what are the non-negotiable, It's non-negotiable, reoccurring events in your day. Every day I sleep, it's non-negotiable and it reoccurs. So how can I take the practice and insert it into that event?

So every night before I go to sleep, I floss and brush my teeth, put my pajamas on, I go to bed. When I wake up, I make the bed in the morning. I finish what I begin.

I make the bed a little bit better than I think I can. I do a little bit more than I think I can. Maybe I double-fold a confidence, like do the four seasons, or fluff the pillows.

And that is not about making the bed, it's about developing willpower so that I can control where my ball of light goes in my mind. I loved when you talked about the dishes

because the dishes I hate to do. I hate to do the dishes, I hate them categorically. And I think when I first started listening to you a few years ago, you had told the same story

about if you're going to do the dishes, I want you to start it and finish it. We don't do it halfway. And then how could you do it a little bit better?

Clean the crystal, put it away when you're done. And what's fascinating is in our companies now, it sort of has imbued this idea of how you do anything is how you do everything. Yes.

And that we are the type of people here who start something and finish it well. And we're no better than the janitor. We clean up our own mess. And so now it's a big pet peeve and everybody here knows it. Whenever I see dishes in the sink, it's like, we don't do that here.

We're not that type of person. And that sort of like ripples. And so I loved that that teaching from you, so small, everybody can do it, and yet kind of profound. It is. And you know, like my daughter, we live in Costa Rica,

and we don't wear our shoes in our house, so when we come back, we take our flip-flops off and leave it outside. And my daughter used to just, you know, she's six, and she kicks it aside. And I've taught her, like, okay, let's finish the process of going out.

When we take our flip-flops off, let's just arrange it nicely before we go in. That's going to take an extra three seconds, But now it becomes part of a ritual. And the goal really at the end of the day, Cody, you know, it's like, how do we take the key tools that we have in our life that are aligned with what we want to create and make them integrate them into the rituals that exist in our life?

Because if I told you to wake up tomorrow morning and meditate and do yoga and breathe, you're going to go like, I don't have time for this. But every day you have a cup of coffee. Every day you sit in front of your computer. Every day you talk to somebody.

What if you brought those tools into your daily rituals, those mundane little things. Now your whole day becomes a practice. And by the time you go to bed, you've been practicing for 10 hours, developing willpower, practicing focus and all these other things, managing your energy.

And that's a much better approach than to wake up in the morning, meditate for half an hour and then spend the remaining 15 hours running around like a head cut chicken, and thinking, okay, I did my morning meditation, I had my matcha, whatever you had to drink,

and then the rest of the day, you just go crazy. That doesn't help.