It was just yesterday that we jotted down those New Year’s Resolutions onto paper and got started on the new version of ourselves for 2024, right?

Check your calendar this morning - welcome to July 1st. We are officially into the second half of the year. Another great opportunity is presenting itself for us to reassess our goals for the year, see where we have slipped up, and applaud ourselves for what we have done well. Most importantly, it’s time to recommit to these next 6 months like we did on January 1.

A protocol for you this week is this:

• 1 - Revisit the goals from the New Year

• 2 - Grade yourself on each goal - both outcome and process

• 3 - Grade your satisfactory level with your big life pillars: Health - Family - Friends - Career - Self Development

• 4 - Put together 3 - 5 goals to focus on that encompass your areas of weakness or strength, post them on your wall, and get to work

It’s hard to beat a walk for a session like this. Don’t bring any headphones. Just have a place to jot your notes, get some steps in, and have an honest conversation with yourself. It’s all up from there -

Brain - The Research-Backed Benefits of Daily Rituals

I picked up the new Harvard Business Review magazine on a work flight the other day to pass the time to Atlanta. Every time I find myself buying one of these, I question why I don’t just have a regular subscription, because the pieces are always **fire emoji **

With the rise in technology and the increasing percentage of jobs occupied by people in their 20s - mid-40s, we are watching an active shifting paradigm in management and fulfillment of the workforces they manage. HBR does a consistent job of exposing new ideas and thought processes to help managers and employees lead more productive, goal-based lives in their careers.

This edition had a few excellent reads, but one in particular on daily rituals I found was worth sharing.

Here is the link to the online copy of the article for you to peruse, but what I really enjoyed was the approach of dividing up these “rituals” into different categories that are used for different purposes. The focus areas for the article were morning rituals, rituals to start the workday, team rituals, and rituals to stop the workday.

Life moves so fast sometimes that we can quickly get buried and have an extremely myopic view of what needs to get done in each present moment. Having rituals can act as guard rails that ensure what we prioritize in our heads gets prioritized in our schedules. A few key points:

• “Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have posited that these types (pre stressful event) of pre-performance rituals help to alleviate our stress in part by simply forcing us to focus on something else, giving us less time and space to spiral out of control.”

• Post-Work Ritual: “I take the dog for a 30-minute walk at the end of my workday, and listen to a non-work-related podcast. It’s my marker between closing my computer and transitioning into home life. As a working mum in an executive role, this is the 30 minutes I have to myself where I can let my mind go blank or wander. I don’t talk to anyone (except my dog), and if I do have emotions to process, I use that time to solve for it so that I enter family time in a more present state.”

• Interestingly, readers who reported having a ritual to start their workday were no more likely to have a ritual to end their workday. This suggests that it’s not the case that some people do many rituals and others do none. Instead, the same person uses rituals in some situations but not in others. In other words, we decide where rituals are most needed and use them only then.

We all know we would benefit from a consistent morning routine focused around exercise, but what about our work routines? Does it make sense to put some structure around how you close out your day so you can be present in the evenings? Can your morning work ritual consistently help you identify where your priorities are? For some yes, for others maybe not. It’s a worthy conversation to have with yourself this week.

Body - How & Why To Strengthen Your Heart & Cardiovascular System

If you have been on the sidelines, tempted to finally give running a shot, then this podcast might be enough reason to get you over the edge.

Dr. Andy Galpin, a frequenter on the Huberman Lab Podcast, has launched his own series, kicking off with an episode focused on why cardiovascular health is so important, and how to actively improve it.

We all know a healthy heart is something to work for and preserve, but over the past few years, more and more research has gone into VO2 Max (a metric that quantifies the maximum amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use during exercise) and it’s affect on longevity and all-cause mortality.

In this episode, Dr. Galpin puts VO2 max into layman’s terms and helps lay out a case for how and why to train your body to strengthen your cardiovascular system.

Take a listen to the episode here. Here are a few notes that stuck out on my first pass-through:

• The difference in health outcomes between someone in the top 2.5% in the age group for VO2 max versus someone who’s in the bottom 25% equates to a 5-fold difference in all-cause mortality.

• The heart does not get sore like other muscles because it’s not going through an additional range of motion like skeletal muscle attached to bone

• Cardio Routine for Improvement:

  • Spend 70% of the time at low intensity (around 60-80% of max HR)

    Spend 20-25% of the time at moderate intensity (around 82-90% of max HR)

    Spend 3-6% at high heart rate (around 90% of max HR)

For more on VO2 Max in particular, check out these resources:

• Peter Attia on VO2 Max: Link

• What Is A VO2 Max Test?: Link

Book - Top 10 Books for “Get Off Your Ass” Motivation

If you’ve read one hardcore motivational book, you’ve read them all, some might say. While I see the sentiment in the statement (and have had waves where back-to-back books have felt monotonous), in general I like to reframe the way we look at the utility of the books.

Motivational books might have similar core purposes, but the reason we read them isn’t to gain revolutionary insight, it’s to pull points and thought processes to deploy for our own personal reasons.

Life is full of seasons. Sometimes you have no trouble getting up to go to the gym. Other times it feels like the hardest challenge in the world. I’ve read and used passages from all of these books below to overcome all of the “down” periods of my life.

Look to this list of books for those times when you need some external kick in the ass.

1. Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins

2. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink

3. Do Hard Things by Steve Magness

4. Redefine Impossible by James Lawrence

5. Endure by Cameron Hanes

6. Relentless by Tim Grover

7. Never Finished by David Goggins

8. Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

9. Mindset by Carol Dweck

10. Make Your Bed by William Mcraven