It’s the end of August. Half the year is already gone, and if you’re honest with yourself, you already know whether you spent it deciding or whether you spent it “getting ready to get ready.”
I want to talk to you today about something I’ve been circling for almost thirty years, ever since I first got my hands on a book by Ken Keys and didn’t fully understand what I was reading. The word was consciousness. Back then I called it mindset. Later I understood it as something deeper, present moment consciousness. And here’s the truth about it: it’s not something you acquire. It’s not a destination. It’s a decision you make right now, in this second, and then you make it again in the next one.
You have two brains working against each other. Your left brain is intelligent. It’s where your IQ lives, where you memorize, where you process. It’s also where you justify, explain, overthink, and get comfortable holding on to the same feelings and the same circumstances year after year. Most people don’t use that brain to build, they use it to procrastinate, to rationalize why now isn’t the right time. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a program running in the background, and it was installed a long time before you knew how to question it.
Most of what runs you isn’t even yours. I break it down into a few forms of inherited trauma, generational, sexual, physical, emotional. The generational one is the sneakiest, because it doesn’t look like trauma. It looks like tradition. It’s “we’ve never had money” passed down like a family recipe, repeated so many times nobody remembers why they’re still doing it. You didn’t ask for the family you were born into, the beliefs you were handed, or the ceiling you were taught not to exceed. But you are the only one who can decide, today, whether you keep carrying it.
Healing doesn’t happen on a schedule, it happens now. People love to ask me how long it takes to break a habit. Seven days? Seven weeks? There’s no magic number. You change the moment you commit to changing, not the moment the conditions feel perfect. A skilled tactician decides first and creates second. Most people wait for perfect and then wonder why they never created anything at all.
Non-attachment is not indifference. This trips people up constantly. Being non-attached doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you care about yourself enough, in higher consciousness, not to let outside noise, drama, chaos, other people’s crises, pull you out of your own focus. It’s the difference between being present for your life and being hijacked by everyone else’s.
And this is where codependency and business collide more than people realize. When you overtrain, overtalk, over-give, and rescue people who never asked to be rescued, you don’t build strength in them, you build dependency. I’ve done it in coaching, in family, in leadership. It comes from guilt and resentment, and it keeps everyone, including you, stuck in the payoff instead of the result.
Here’s my routine, not as a brag but as proof of what commitment actually looks like when you strip the excuses away: I’m up before dawn, in the gym, in the steam room, and in business by 5 a.m., and I stay in business until the day is actually done, not until the clock says it’s acceptable to stop. People call that a workaholic. I call it a person who understands that the seconds in a day don’t wait for you to feel ready.
So before you close out today, I want you to do one thing. Don’t go to bed without having had the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Don’t go to bed without closing something out. Don’t relapse into the version of yourself you’re trying to leave behind, whatever that relapse looks like for you: a vice, a delay, a story you tell yourself to stay comfortable.
You don’t commit tomorrow. You commit right here, right now.
Breathe. Release. Let go.
— Jeffery Combs, President & Founder, Golden Mastermind Seminars Inc.