I recently had the pleasure of speaking with peak performance expert Ed Mylett, bestselling author of The Power of One More: The Ultimate Guide to Happiness and Success about powerful strategies that can help anyone shape an extraordinary life.
Host of the hit SiriusXM podcast, Mylett contends our best life can be achieved with just one more action or intentional thought. He shows people how to avoid getting overwhelmed by things they think they need to achieve their goals, by rethinking habits, relationships, and patterns. I started listening to his podcast five years ago when I was facing different challenges and his advice inspired me to create lasting change in my career and relationships, and improve my overall well-being. Having the opportunity to speak with him was a true full-circle moment for me.
Drawing upon his experience as a business leader, and coach to leading executives, athletes, and entertainers, Mylett shares a wide variety of success strategies in this interview:
What does it mean to live a ‘One More’ life and how has it helped you personally?
Most people struggle with self-confidence. I have in my own life and that’s why I wrote the book. The bottom line is if you don’t have self-confidence, you’re not keeping the promises you make to yourself. Essentially, you’ve created a relationship where you don’t trust you.
To get to baseline self-confidence, you have to start keeping the promises you make to yourself. Decide when you’re going to get up in the morning, drink a gallon of water a day, whatever it may be. And when you keep the small promises that allows you to begin to trust yourself to make the bigger ones.
A ‘one more’ person does that plus one more. So if I say I’m going to work out and do 30 minutes of cardio, I do it and I do one more minute. If I say I’m going to make 10 contacts in business, I do it and I make one more. We don’t always get our goals, but we always get our standards long-term. And my standard of one more started about 25 years ago and it’s changed my life.
When it comes to making a change, a lot of people struggle to go from thought to action. They know what they should do but have a hard time closing that gap. Why do you think this is and what advice would you give to help people create real change in their lives?
It’s their identity. They don’t believe they’re worthy of it. In life, our identity is the greatest governor of our results. In the book, I call it a thermostat setting. Our identity and the beliefs we have about ourselves is our thermostat. So if you start to expand your business, get into a great relationship and you’re getting 100 degrees of results, but you still have a thermostat/identity of 65 degrees, over time, you will find a way to cool it back down to get what you believe you’re worth. They may start operating at 100, but they didn’t change their identity so they’ll lose that money, they’ll break up with that person and wonder what happened. It’s not coincidental. You cooled it back down because deep down you didn’t believe you were worthy of that love or success.
In the book, you talk about emotions and how we all have an emotional home that we live in and how we are conditioned to return to our emotional home even when those emotions don’t serve us. Can you talk about that and then explain some ways we can start reframing our emotional mindset?
We move towards what’s most familiar to us, especially when it comes to our emotions. So at some point in your childhood, you started to reinforce emotions, some of which you may have picked up from your parents. If you notice, you probably experience the same five or six emotions every single week no matter what the conditions are. So, if you’re someone who feels anxiety, fear, anger, depression, and angst no matter what happens in a given week, don’t you find a way back to those emotions? Maybe it’s bliss, ecstasy, joy, and peace. Either way, you’ll find a way to get those emotions and what’s interesting is your external world doesn’t actually dictate it.
For me, I realized that I functioned well in chaos. It was something I was used to and since it felt familiar, I moved toward it unconsciously. I created circumstances that gave me that emotion. Human beings are really good at getting what they want once they’re intentional about it. When it comes to goals, most people will say something like, “I want to get a million dollars”, “I want to get a relationship” or “I want to get a promotion.” But you don’t really want those things. You want how you think you’ll feel once you get them. If you say, ‘I want that relationship,’ or ‘I want this amount of money’ you don’t actually want that. You want love and security, the feelings associated with those things.
To change your emotional mindset, you have to be intentional about your emotions because that’s completely within your power. When you start to become more familiar with peace, power, purpose, confidence and strength, you’ll actually get that money, that relationship, etc. and not the other way around.
What advice do you have for people who are stuck in the ‘I’m not good enough’ thought pattern? These are the people who feel like they keep getting rejected and failing whether it’s in a job, a relationship, etc. How can we shift our mindset around failure and rejection?
There are three things that can help change your thinking: faith, intention, and association.
Regardless of what your faith is, it’s important to know you are not alone and trust there’s a higher power that is serving you for your greatest good. For me, I just started to connect my worth to the belief that there’s a loving God who created me in His image and likeness and wants me to be happy.
Next, be clear about your intentions. Start to attach your beliefs to your intentions, not your abilities. Be intentional about what you want to create in your life and let that guide you.
Lastly, you need to be mindful of your associations. It’s true that whoever you associate with you become. They’re the people who can change your thermostat setting. For instance, if you’re a 75-degree person financially and you are around people all the time who are at 150 degrees financially, they’ll heat you up somewhere in between their temperature and yours, and so it changes you. Surround yourself with people who see you as better than you are and hold that standard. They have an expectation that you can do and be better, and have a future-focused mentality, always thinking about how to grow and evolve. Those are the friends you want.
The other important piece is about imagination and vision. 99% of people have an operating system in their brain that is history and memory. And they operate out of history and memory all of the time. 1% of people wrestle that away and they operate out of a sense of imagination and vision and create the life they want.
I loved what you said about energy and how it’s a powerful force that can either attract or repel things in your life. How can we learn to control and harness the energy we put out into the world?
It’s by getting quiet. When I get quiet, meditate or sit alone, I can feel energy. When you’re in the midst of doing life, that noise and busyness prevents you from tapping into that frequency. The best way to feel energy is to do nothing and empty the mind. The stillness enables you to connect.
Mindfulness techniques help me tremendously. Put technology away, contemplate, and put your feet on the ground. I practice earthing because there’s an energy that comes from the ground. From there, I can feel energy and be able to take control and tap into it.
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