Become someone you can trust
90 days. 90 promises. 90 pieces of evidence that you’re someone who shows up.
You didn't stop moving because you lack clarity or willpower – you stopped moving because you've broken so many promises to yourself that you've started to expect failure before you even begin.
The life you long for exists on the other side of the unknown, but you'll never get the courage to jump if all your past evidence predicts you won't make it.
To become good at life is to become tolerant of uncertainty – and becoming tolerant of uncertainty is to trust that tomorrow-you will do what today-you planned. The more evidence you have that what you say you'll do, you actually do, the more self-trust you have, and the more you can tolerate the fear of what might happen if you take that jump.
The life you want rests on one thing: keeping the promises you make to yourself.
The life you don't want rests on the opposite – breaking the promises you make to yourself.
Fortunately, keeping your promises is a skill you can build – and there are two parts to it.
- You need to change your identity into someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not.
- You need to get better at making promises you can keep.
This is what The Show Up Challenge is created to help you achieve.
The life you want rests on one skill: showing up whether you feel like it or not.
The life you don't want rests on the opposite – showing up only when you feel like it.
Fortunately, showing up is a skill you can build – and as you build it, it starts to become a habit, and when it's a habit, it stops taking effort and becomes simply what someone like you does.
How do you build it?
First you need to understand the mechanisms behind what creates a person who seems to be controlled by their feelings – it looks like a discipline problem from the outside, but it's really a self-trust problem. When you understand what that actually looks like, you have the solution to the problem that has had you stuck in a slump for all these years.
When your words and actions are not aligned, you're internally fragmented – your intentions are pulling you in one direction, but your actions are pulling you in the opposite direction. The result is you going nowhere.
You say you're going to quit eating junk food, but you end up getting it every friday anyway.
You say you'll start working on that thing, but you end up binging YouTube all night.
This incoherence between what you say and what you do becomes less noticable over time – self-betrayal becomes the norm, but your inablity to trust yourself makes it almost impossible to move.
If the evidence is that you don't stick to what you say, how could you possibly take the leap into the unknown and trust that you'll have your own back when things get hard?
The result is a stalled life – trapped in old patterns, constantly starting and stopping, getting nowhere.
The pain of standing still eventually leads to a forced attempt to change your situation – so you create a long list of things to do and avoid, and promise yourself that it's different this time.
This moment looks like the start of your new life, but it's actually the exact problem that has gotten you into this state in the first place.
See, the "plan" you made is not really made for the version of you that has to keep it, it's made for the idealized version of yourself that could wake up tomorrow and be a completely new person.
So a couple of days after making it, you fail – which fits the script perfectly.
Every time you say you're going to do something, and you don't, it's recorded and stored as evidence that you're someone who doesn't follow through and that you can't trust your own word.
This creates a negative reinforcing feedback loop, where you start to predict that you'll fail before you even start, and the eventual failure feeds back into the loop strengthening the next prediction.
This is the source of low self-trust, self-respect, self-confidence, self-discipline, self-integrity and courage.
And it is here the solution is hidden as well.
Forcing yourself to show up when you don't feel like it doesn't work.
Someone who acts despite discomfort doesn't have more willpower than everyone else – they've just kept enough promises to themselves to stop questioning whether or not they'll show up.
When resistance comes up in the form of fear, self-doubt or low energy, it doesn't have the power to decide their next action – what decides is what they said they where going to do.
When we're in a slump there's usually more than one thing going wrong – our first impulse is to tackle everything all at once.
But this is exactly what leads us to
The life you want rests on one habit: showing up whether you feel like it or not.
The Show Up Challenge helps you build that habit.
The Show Up System
The free Challenge builds the habit. The System keeps it. Your program's one tap away, the deciding's done before you wake up, and everything's still there long after day 90.