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Change is always awkward at first, but it gets easier with practice.

I’ve been asked on a number of occasions the “secret” to harnessing mental toughness to overcome adversity. The “secret,” I tell them, isn’t a secret but a fact that they don’t want to hear because it’s simple. But simple isn’t easy. That secret is this: make a decision and go with it.

That’s it.

I remember waiting for Hell Week to begin in BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training) and students asking the instructors—in a somewhat uncommon cordial setting—what the secret was to making it through five and a half days of constant, nonstop activity. Here’s what the instructors said, “The secret to making it through BUD/S, is knowing you’re going to make it through BUD/S.”

It’s belief.

You need to believe that you’re the type of person who has the skill and will to make that goal happen, and then make it happen. Don’t worry about what’s right and don’t wait for the perfect opportunity because “perfect” doesn’t exist—it’s an excuse to procrastinate.

Your habits create happiness more than anything else in life. These 10 habits will make you happier today.

Make yourself proud. Give everything 110%. It’s the extra 10% that everyone remembers. Here are 12 things that you can do, today, to make yourself proud.

First of all, I want to be clear I'm not talking here about coaching, say, in the NFL or the NBA, which is a whole different ballgame, so to speak, but in the business world.

Though there are similarities, athletic coaches have a different inspirational skillset. Operating in a more controlled business environment, management coaches have to, understandably, turn down the volume a bit.

But whether they're working from inside an organization (in direct management or as a mentor) or from the outside (as an executive coach), there's one fundamental quality good business coaches share.

They're good listeners.

And not just people who listen casually, without paying attention and impatiently waiting to speak, but who listen hard. Carefully. Thoughtfully.

Writing a to-do list seems like a tidy little way to keep track of what you need to accomplish, but it can fall short or even derail your success. To-do lists don’t provide context about the tasks, they don’t give you a timeline, and they’re easy to ignore. What’s more, to-do list prioritizing systems can be complicated and hard to navigate.

So should you ditch your to-do list completely? Absolutely not, says Paula Rizzo, author of Listful Thinking: Using Lists to be More Productive, Highly Successful and Less Stressed.

"Lists can change your life if you use them correctly," says Rizzo, founder of ListProducer.com, a website that offers tips and courses for making lists. "It seems so simple to write a list but there's actually a right way and wrong way to do it if you want to be successful. Oftentimes our bad list-making habits are holding us back."

Of all our available resources, everyone has the same number of hours in a day. Some, however, happen to get more done. Are they faster or smarter? Do they have more help? Perhaps. But they’ve also learned tricks that can help them stretch time and eliminate the unimportant.

Here are six things super-productive people do every day to maximize their results and success.

Cultivating smart habits is the key to unlocking your potential.

The internet is chock full of daily habits that will help your routine, but what about bad habits? Because habits are so ingrained into our daily routines, we often don't notice how harmful ones sneak in and ruin our success.

Try eliminating the following habits from your life and see how your success in business and in life improve:

Feeling stressed lately? Chances are you're not alone. We carry varying degrees of stress around with us all the time—sometimes more, sometimes less. Does that pressure make us more productive or less? As with so many aspects of human psychology, the answer is: It depends. But what it depends on is something called the Yerkes-Dodson curve, a theory that dates back to 1908. Here's how understanding it can help you channel the stress you may be feeling into energy to get things done.

The Yerkes-Dodson curve relates the amount of motivational energy, called "arousal," a person may possess to how well they'll perform at a given task. The basic idea is that at low levels of arousal, people don't perform particularly well. In this state, people aren't all that motivated to get much done. That helps explain why being totally stress-free can breed laziness or complacency, and also why some of your most productive days are those when the clock is ticking for you to wrap up a big projec

In a society roided-out on bling, cash, ego, nakedness, and status, we have lost our authenticity.

We have lost morals and what it means to be ourselves. So many are caught up in following the crowd they have gotten lost in it. How can any type of true success come from being a follower?

Followers are lost to their authenticity and are chasers of "status" and "wealth." Followers are competitive, insecure, and consistently positioning and provoking to one-up each other. The stand-out successes we all admire are not in the crowd, they aren’t chasing cash, or being cool.

It doesn’t mean they don’t love nice things or indulge in them; it means they approach success from a different mindset.

Don't try to be perfect, just try to be better than you were yesterday.

Get your brain in shape with a little mental strength training.

An author runs down the impressive benefits of lifelong learning.

How you spend your night can have a huge impact on the day that follows. Do you spend your time ruminating over issues? Or maybe you stress over something that didn't quite go right during the day. There's no doubt, how you think affects how you feel. This is particularly important at night as you try to unwind and prepare for rest. This sets you up for sleep which serves many vital purposes. When I look at my clients who achieve the most during their days and are happiest, they are the ones who have a healthy routine at night. They set themselves up for success the following day by thinking and acting in a particular way.

Resolutions are often an exercise in wishful thinking. People rarely keep them, mostly because they’re vague about their goals and don’t have a plan for following through. But that isn't the only thing that may weaken resolve or slow progress toward a goal. Failing to understand some practical brain science can just as quickly do you in.

Neuroscience has shown us this year that we may actually have everything we need to stay focused, be more creative, remember more, and make better decisions—just as long as we can work a bit more with our brains, not against them. Here are a few things we learned that can take you closer toward being your best self in 2017.

What is your honor worth to you? People with honor share 12 characteristics. They should be treated as guideposts in your journey through life.

The 12 life skills I strongly feel are most important some of which schools touch on but don’t emphasize nor go into enough detail about. Too much graphing parabolas, memorizing the quadratic formula, and learning to diagram sentences and not enough real world material to use and apply. With that being said, here are the top 12 life skills I wish I learned more about in school:

The future of work is all about innovation and agility. We have to be prepared for ever-changing circumstances, and that means being open to learning new things.

Learning is no longer something we just do in schools. We can't rely on just the skillset we knew when we entered the workforce--that will guarantee career stagnation.

So I decided to sit down with Dr. Josh Davis, the Director of Research and Lead Professor for the NeuroLeadership Institute, an organization devoted to using science to advance leadership potential.

NLI has recently been exploring how to make ideas stick. Through their research, they created a model outlining four key conditions for effective learning: Attention, Generation, Emotion and Spacing (AGES).