177 Self Improvement On Purpose

One question kicks off a bigger challenge: what part of you is so valuable you should protect it at all costs? We land on a surprising answer that is not about your past, your image, or being “the best” in the room. It is the drive to get better, even when nobody is clapping, watching, or giving you credit. That inner push is the difference between growth that lasts and growth that fades the moment life gets busy. 

We talk through how self improvement becomes real only when it is intentional, repeatable, and built into a daily routine. I share why I block off quiet time early in the morning, what I practice in that space, and how routines should evolve as you get sharper. We also get honest about accountability: nobody is coming to hold your hand, but the reward of doing it yourself is believing you can create change through your own effort. That mindset connects to my work as an assistant principal and the message I push to students: effort changes results, and avoiding fundamentals like reading and math can shrink your future options fast. 

From there we lay out practical pillars of self mastery and personal growth: communication skills that reduce conflict, activity goals like 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, hydration targets, stretching and mobility for aging well, diet habits that influence self esteem and health, and emotional intelligence that helps you respond instead of overreacting. We also touch on how better choices, especially by men, can reduce harm and build healthier relationships over time. If you want a grounded motivation boost with real habits you can start today, press play, then subscribe, share this with someone who needs a reset, and leave a review with the one routine you are committing to this week.

Transcript

From Attention To Growth

Build A Daily Routine

Self Mastery And Personal Accountability

Communication As A Daily Practice

Steps Water Stretching And Diet

Emotional Intelligence And Better Reactions

Parenting Messages Men And Relationships

Less Complaining Final Challenge

SPEAKER_00 0:11

What up, though, and welcome back to I'm Growing Man, Jimad J in the building. Today I'm going to answer a question. Uh, the question was, what is something that you would never want to change about yourself? And the most recent answer I heard from this is that they didn't want to change their past. And I was like, what's more instrumental than your past? I think you should always learn from your past, right? But what I wouldn't change, and now mind you, I don't, I don't like to use the word never because I do believe the word never has a way of finding its way back into whatever you said you weren't gonna do. So I try not to use that word uh because there's always a reason on why it could happen. But what I wouldn't want to ever change about myself is the idea that I want to get better. And like I just thinking about when I was younger, I wanted to be better in things because I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be like whatever it was happening, I wanted to be better than everybody. And people say you got this competitive nature. And then I realized like a lot of males are taught this competitive nature of wanting to be best or better. But what separates people from those things are the effort, you know, and who's in your corner, who's your parents, you know, uh, I just believe I wanted the attention because I didn't like the way that I was living. And the reason why I've come to that conclusion now is because I'm older and I still want to be better, but I I don't want to be better because I want to be seen. I want to be better because I feel like if there's an area that can improve, why not work on it on a constant basis? And I feel like this is this is one of the reasons why I've I've enjoyed the person that I'm becoming because I try to maximize my time to get the best out of any opportunity. And in this case, just me. Just me working on myself. I feel like there's no, there's no like dead time. It's always something that I'm working on to improve the environment around me. Whether it's in my day-to-day job, those of you that know, I'm an assistant principal. And I try to push these messages on to my students also. And the the messages that I'm pushing that I feel like that any parent will want, you know, the assistant principal to push is that your effort is going to change the results in your life. You don't put any effort, nothing's supposed to change, and it possibly can get worse if you don't learn the essential parts of just reading and doing math. If you can't do that, you kind of put yourself in a box that limits a lot of opportunities later. And I try to convince them that they have to be accountable for their current learning. You know, a lot of them don't live in an environment where education is promoted versus practice versus the do as I say and not as I do. So I try to come up with words so that maybe they can mature, you know, where they could be like, okay, if I don't, it's gonna look ridiculous later. So the least I can do is put in this work. Me wanting to improve my life, I wouldn't want to ever change that because I want to become the example that working on yourself is like the greatest pastime. But just imagine in your spare time, in times where you're bored or don't have anything to do, you decided to work on yourself. Like you you become a different person. And the person you become is you don't get worse. You I don't know, it's like a clip. You you start to get things, you're like, oh, I didn't look at it that way. And I'm gonna tell you the benefits of it at the end, but I want to talk about how to get to this point where you're constantly improving. You have to create a routine. And when I say a routine, this routine needs to be in the times where you're not at work and you're not being occupied where you're being distracted. It's just really dedicated to you. And you need to do it every single day. I want to say it at the same time because if you do it at the same time, there's is it's a different expectation, you know. And if you don't, you could very well forget to complete that task or task that you're supposed to do that works on yourself because your day got really busy. So there's a part of your life where you have to block off where it's just where nobody can bobby you. This point in my life, I've decided to, in the last, since I was 41, I've been waking up uh four o'clock in the morning. Uh I can't say it's really been four because I get up a lot earlier a lot of days. Um, but I'm doing a routine where I'm working on my languages, I'm working on chess, I'm meditating, I'm journaling. I am getting my mind prepared for the day. Now, mind you, being that I wake up that early, nobody's going to stop you other than you. So I enjoy getting up in the morning. I'm not a late person anymore because they say that your body is easier to focus in the mornings because of scientific reasons. And I've just started doing it where it works for me. If you can do something that works for you, I highly suggest you do it. Because if you don't, the longer you take to create this routine that is gonna make you a better person, the more you're not probably gonna believe in how important you are. Now, when you do create this routine, I want you to know that routine is going to change. Because once you start doing it and you get used to it, you're gonna look for ways to improve it. When I say you're gonna look for ways to improve it, you're going to use this block of time to make sure that you're not wasting your time. Because if you're supposed to wake up at four and you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, you might as well just stay asleep. Because if you're waking up and you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, you're interrupting the time that you could be replenishing the energy that you probably want to do for the other day. So make sure that you hold yourself accountable to whatever you decide, because nobody's gonna come hold your hand and say, hey, you didn't wake up before, like you said you were gonna do. Like, and if you do, you you're lucky. But the reward in doing it yourself is believing that you figured it out. And when I say figure it out, I'm saying like you understood how to get what you wanted through none other than your own effort. Now, I do want you to know, along your journey, you're gonna get help, you're gonna get opportunities to help elevate who you are, but it's it can't happen without you actually putting in that work for you. So depending on your why, it could come sooner than later. My why now is just that I know that if I work on myself on purpose, that I'm only gonna get better. And if I get better, that means that the environment around me has a better resource out of me. So me not worrying about anything I can't control is one of the one of my things that I say every single day. But I can't control myself. That's why I believe self-mastery is the key to increasing your quality of life. Like, I think there's so many distractions outside that if you don't put the time in and realizing how important you are, you would never learn how to find self-mastery of your body. And mind you, we only have one. And depending on who your parents are, they could have given you some bad practices because that's where most of our practices come from, from our parents' exposure. So if your parents were aware, you learn a lot of things on how to prevent a lot of the bad things that happen to the human body later in life. And if your parents weren't aware, weren't aware, it's gonna be left on you and possibly your exposure of who's in your environment that's going to lead you onto a path that benefits you. But that's very difficult. And everybody don't get that opportunity. But one thing that we do get with free will is the opportunity to improve through our own effort. Now, if you don't put in that work, you'll probably use excuses that, you know, my fans didn't know things, that we were poor growing up, I didn't get to do this. You're right. But there's somebody who had it worse than you that found a way. And I realized in order to be a better example, you have to believe that you're important and you have to create a routine where you follow it, and that is really your holy grail because it's working on you, it's not hurting anybody, and you benefit from it. If you practice this on a daily basis, and I don't know what what you plan on practicing, but I do want you to know at some point my routine will incorporate playing an instrument. Right now I've learned to do these new exercises I haven't been faithful on, but I want it to be a part of my everyday life. You know, I don't really want to do the weights thing, being that I'm so much older, I want to make sure that I just have my body strength. So it's these isometric uh workouts that I've been trying to study and incorporate into my routine because I truly believe, you know, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. So keeping my body in the best shape possible through intentional uh exercises that helps me increase the quality of my life. And I'll say this at my age, there are a lot of people, my friends, that are aching and complaining about everything. And as I get older, I just I know that my body is going to break down at some point. But until then, my job is to find ways to get the most out of it. So I guess the point of this podcast episode is you don't have to be seen, right? But you should want to get better. You don't have to like do anything for anybody. Just do it for yourself. Like work on yourself, work on the things that uh will make you happy. And when I say happy, I mean like make you feel like I can do this again tomorrow. Like if you work on yourself, you don't know what you could develop into because you haven't worked on yourself deliberately. And that that means every single thing: body language, facial expressions, silence, the way you pause after your thoughts, the way you process uh the things you could possibly say, the things you do say, the way people receive it. Work on all of this. Get your thoughts together where it becomes easier for you to be able to articulate your views. And when I say that, when you do that, you reduce the conflicts that you have with people that have known you for a long time, people that you just meet, or people that may have uh a completely different view from you, and you'll be able to de-escalate any type of conflict because you already understand how possible people can respond to you. When you become prepared for those things, you're a different person. And I believe uh as we continue to improve, communication will be something that people will work on like it's like brushing your teeth, like work on your communication. We just have to be more attentional with what we practice, and especially when I say with communication, because people could take things the wrong way, but if you can work on those things, those things are less likely to happen. Your activity, everybody knows how many steps you get in a day, every single day, even when you're not feeling well. We I'm I'm promoting eight to ten thousand steps a day. Uh drinking half your body weight in ounces of water, doing yoga, uh, stretching, because as you get older, uh you don't want to just uh move so quickly. You want to make sure your body's warmed up uh because you don't want to tear or break anything. Uh like I said, we only have one body, and if we're not taking care of it, it's it could be it could be broken, and we we don't heal like we used to. So we just got into getting a better practice of on how to maintain the only vessel we have. Uh your diet, your diet is instrumental in self-esteem, uh the way you look at yourself, the way the things you think about, the things that make you happy. Like if you have aware parents, you can, you know, possibly not have that problem. But depending on who your parents are, you could have an addiction to delicious foods that causes obesity, that is later led to so many different health problems at younger ages because we don't realize how important our diet is. And with the information that we have now, we have to have better practices on changing the message. It's too much information out there for us to continue to fall to poor health practices. Last but not least is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is just being able to describe how you feel, um, being able to respond to others, knowing how they could possibly feel so that you don't overreact. Because a lot of times we overreact because we don't have enough information. If we knew, if we knew we had the information, we would less likely overreact because we can't control our emotions. We haven't gotten to that point. But I do believe that communication, activity, diet, and emotional intelligence, if you work on these things like on a daily basis, this will improve your outcomes in so many different parts of your life. If you don't work on it, it is more than likely you're going to have some health complications, some conflicts, or Yeah, I guess we can just say that. Health complications or conflict. If you if you can't work on these things on purpose, it's almost like the inevitable. And the inevitable is disputes that could lead to you being uh an introvert where you don't like uh to interact with people. I think that human interaction is probably the number one thing that I see that is like what we need to live in this world, and then we still find people who don't want to do that. And I think that has a lot to do with the way we're treated as when we're younger. You know, uh, depending on who your parents are, it could create some versions of you that we don't know what's necessary. And when I say what's necessary, I mean the things that parents should teach all of their kids. Like going forward, like these are the key elements to improve the evolution of parenting. Because right now, you know, we have parenting books, and I'm not saying they're not working, but there are a lot of people that can't read, and I think that we need to change a message on how to reduce these stories. I know we can't really promote so much, you can only promote so much stuff in schools, but if we don't change the message about what men, I mean, specifically I'm saying men because, you know, there are a lot of people that say that I don't put it on the woman. I don't put it on the woman because I'm a man and I feel like if we made better decisions, women wouldn't ever get compromised. Because I don't know women that, you know, started out in a non-compromised situation that was out to get anybody. Anybody's like living that type of life, that means something was taken from them and they hurt, and this is how they believe their life is supposed to be. And as a man, we're supposed to protect our women from feeling that way. And if you're not mature enough, you will create trauma in this young lady that's gonna create stories for other men to talk about because they didn't grow up in the best environment. But if we change that mission or that message about men making better decisions, I think that the relationship could prosper because of intentional practice of unimprovement. I don't know. I've never met a woman who did not want to enjoy her life. And now they have to do it by themselves. And like I told you before, uh the most common message I've heard about humans is that we have to have interaction. And now, you know, a woman rather have peace. And now we find men is rather have peace also because they're not good in relationships. So if we worked on ourselves, like I said, work on ourselves, it will create a different version of you where you will attract the energy you're supposed to have. And I'm gonna keep pushing that message because I really do believe that a lot of us don't know the amount of work, you know, therapy, counseling, that early journaling, exercise is very important. Your activity, uh, if you're not, if you're not doing these things, getting enough water, you're probably complaining about something. But if you're working on yourself, you don't have time to complain because you have to put the work in. And once you get into the habit of the routine of improving, the complaining goes down drastically. And you just use your time to find ways to feel that way even more throughout your day. Y'all make today better than yesterday. Don't worry about anything you can't control. G A T A. Get after that action, or that action will get after you. Be great on purpose.