​Hi, Friends!

In the spirit of Tuesday's election, I have a short video for you today.

No matter whether you are over or under 18-years-old, what you do with your time and attention matters... it counts. 

​We all have the same 24-hour days, and what you choose to do with yours reflects your priorities. 

The process of going after a goal may not be straightforward. You can't always see ten steps ahead, and because of this, you can't necessarily tell if you are making progress, if you've taken a detour... or if you've landed in a ditch.
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Evaluating your progress is particularly tricky when you see signs that seem to communicate that things aren't working out. In today's video, I give two examples of counter-intuitive signs that progress is happening—one example from my life, and one that relates to test prep. 

After you've watched, meet me down below the video where I expand on the video's ideas.

When I was a senior in high school, I had a blue notebook with Martin de Maat's quote "You are Pure Potential" printed on the cover. 

The cool thing about feeling like "pure potential" is that you don't reach your potential; you reach for​ your potential. It's in your awareness of potential that you can always strive to be better, and in the process become better. 

Being "pure potential" also means that no matter how far you've gotten, there's still further to go. And no matter how dire things seem, there's always the hope for better. 

"I am" is a powerful phrase. Just as powerful is the word that follows it.

What follows the "I am" is a belief that you have about yourself.

"I am smart."  /  "I am stupid."

"I am capable."  /  "I am lost."

"I am confident."  /   "I am worried."

"I am strong."  /  "I am anxious."

​With the new school year comes an opportunity to play around with organization systems.

Personally, that was always something I looked forward to when I was a student. One year I would have one big binder. Another year I would give each class its own binder. Another year I would give each class a composition notebook and a folder.

Coming up with a system of organizing my materials felt like breathing fresh air into the new school year. It was sort of like how it feels when you rearrange the furniture in a room. The room still serves the same basic function, but it feels different.

With this short video in celebration of Labor Day, I hope to help make your other days feel less laborious. Having a day off is great, but experiencing more ease every day is better!

​I hope you are feeling good as we launch into another school year!

​Feel free to reach out with questions or feedback!

​--Erika

In my book, Acing It! A Mindful Guide to Maximum Results on Your College Admissions Test, I say that I want you to "trust your gut and do the work to have a gut worth trusting."

Acing It! gives you a step-by-step framework for developing a gut worth trusting, but in today's video I decided to put a twist on the idea of what it means to trust your gut because the idea of trusting your gut works on a few different levels. 

In the video, I also teach you a quick (1 minute!) technique to settle nerves and release stress.

​When I first began my formal meditation practice, my teacher informed us that, in time, we would clear our bodies of all the stress we had stored over the course of our lives. Not a bad proposition, eh? I mean, what anxiety-ridden person wouldn’t be enchanted by the idea of a stress-free life?

I began to see positive changes immediately. But I still felt anxious. 

And a voice in my head would taunt me, "If only you'd started sooner, you'd be further along right now. You'd feel so much less anxious."

Having goals is an important part of any process. Goals tell you where you want to go and give you the fuel to get there. 

But sometimes, the goal-setting and goal-getting processes feel like struggles. We feel overwhelmed, we find ourselves coming up short, or we aren't sure where to focus our time and attention.

Part of the reason why this happens is that we think of goals in a really general sense so that they encompass everything that we want to experience and have happen. ​

We all have excuses for why we aren't making more progress on our goals. It's easy to accept those excuses as valid. But often, rather than being based in facts, excuses are based in stories we've told ourselves about why something can't or won't work.

Today's video is all about how to change your thinking about excuses so that you can keep moving forward in spite of whatever circumstances have been holding you back.