I'm 51 years old, and for much of my life, I treated my thoughts as reality. I would begin something with energy, then my mind would race ahead and create a complete story about what might happen. Those thoughts shaped my emotions, and those emotions shaped my decisions. Many times, I walked away before life had the chance to show me what was actually possible.
The lesson I remembered more than I lived
When I was 32, I was going through a difficult period and began working with a coach. He gave me The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That book helped me understand the difference between the past, the future, and the present moment. I carried that lesson with me for years, but I had no daily practice that helped me keep returning to it. Over time, life moved on and the lesson became something I remembered more than something I lived.
At 50, I joined a mindset course and began paying much closer attention to the way my mind worked. I read books, listened to podcasts, watched interviews, and took notes. Somewhere during that period, I came across a simple suggestion: write down ten things you are grateful for every morning. I started with the basics. I wrote that I was grateful to be alive, grateful for my health, grateful for my wife and daughters, grateful for our home, grateful for food on the table, and grateful for the ability to exercise.
Bookends for what was actually happening
The practice only took a few minutes, but it changed the beginning of my day. It gave me a sense of completion before the day had really started. It brought a smile to my face and made me feel as though I had begun on the right foot. Most importantly, I had acted. I had done something for myself before my thoughts had the opportunity to take over. Months later, I learned about another simple exercise: write down three good things that happened during the day before going to sleep. I started immediately because I already understood the value of the morning practice. The ten gratitudes became the beginning of my day, and the three good things became the end. Together, they became bookends that helped me stay connected to what was actually happening in my life.
Capturing the moments before they faded
Then I began noticing something important. At night, I could usually remember the larger good things, such as a client sending an email saying yes, a project moving forward, or an important conversation. The smaller moments were easier to lose. I might run into my mother at the supermarket and receive one of her big smiles. My dog might greet me at the door. I might share a laugh with one of my daughters, enjoy a good coffee, or have a warm conversation with someone I care about. Those moments felt good while they were happening, yet many of them had faded by the end of the day.
I began capturing those moments while they were still fresh. That small action gave them a longer life. A five-second experience became something I could remember, revisit, and keep as evidence. The more I practiced, the more my thoughts began to come from experiences I had actually lived. Those thoughts shaped my emotions, and those emotions became grounded in my own life.
Why it works — and how it grew into a method
Over time, I became more comfortable spending time with myself. I became more selective about where I placed my attention and energy. I became clearer about when to speak, when to listen, and when to let something pass. The more present I became, the more clarity I developed. Clarity improved my accuracy, and clarity and accuracy together strengthened my self-confidence. Clarity, accuracy, and self-confidence cannot be bought. They are built through short, conscious effort practiced consistently over time. This is one of the reasons Novak Djokovic's comments about mindset stayed with me. He explained that mental strength comes from work and that he trains his mindset with the same seriousness that he gives his serve and his backhand. His strength comes from respecting the process, returning to it, and treating it as part of his daily development.
I began to see personal growth in the same way. A book can create awareness. A podcast can introduce an idea. A course, coach, or therapist can provide direction. The lasting value comes from what a person continues to practice between those moments. Personal growth becomes meaningful when it becomes part of how someone lives and how they show up for themselves every day.
What the record actually does to your thinking
After about thirty days of keeping the record consistently, something shifts — and it's not what you'd expect. It isn't that you feel happier. It's that your thinking becomes more accurate. The internal monologue that runs in the background of most people's minds draws from whatever evidence is most recent and most emotionally available. The brain has a structural negativity bias: threats and failures get encoded more deeply than successes, because for most of human history, a missed threat was more costly than a missed reward. Your brain was not designed to give equal weight to the good conversation and the argument, the work you did well and the mistake you made. It gives more weight to the second item in each of those pairs. Not because you're pessimistic. Because the brain is managing risk, and risk management prioritizes negative data.
What a written record does is override that default. Not by canceling out the negative — the negative is still there, still available, and still gets processed. But for the first time, the positive evidence becomes equally accessible and equally persistent. The good thing you noticed on a Thursday three weeks ago is still in the record on a difficult Monday six weeks later. Without the record, it would have faded — encoded weakly, replaced by more recent data, unavailable when you most need it. With the record, it's there. A specific, dated entry: what happened, why it mattered. The brain can draw from it. This is not positive thinking. Positive thinking asks you to assert things you don't have evidence for. This is evidence replacement — swapping out a biased sample of your experience for a more complete one.
The difference in how this feels between day one and day thirty is worth describing concretely. On day one, the practice feels slightly forced. You're writing things down that don't feel significant enough to write down. The good coffee. The small conversation. You're not sure it counts. On day thirty, the record has weight. You've accumulated a visible account of your own life — not curated, not edited for an audience, just what actually happened. When your mind goes to the familiar stories about your progress, your capability, your reasons for confidence, it no longer draws from a thin, negatively-weighted sample. It draws from thirty days of specific evidence. The internal monologue changes quality. It becomes less speculative, less comparative, less dominated by the worst-case pattern the brain defaults to under pressure. It becomes more grounded in what is demonstrably true about how you actually move through your days.
This is what the clarity and accuracy I mentioned earlier are built from — not insight, not motivation, not a better attitude, but an evidence base that more honestly reflects the life you are actually living. And that evidence base is not built in a single good day or a single inspired practice session. It is built by returning to the practice, day after day, until the record has enough weight to shift what the mind thinks from.
The Japanese idea of kaizen describes continuous improvement through small, ongoing effort. the MyHGY™ Method (formerly called the Have a Great Yesterday Method) applies that same principle to the inner life. The improvement appears as greater clarity, greater accuracy, and greater self-confidence. The practice begins by becoming aware of the small good things that are actually happening, giving them your attention, writing them down, and allowing them to accumulate into a visible record of your life.
At some point, while I was already practicing this and beginning to imagine how it could help other people, I heard a story that used the phrase "Have a Great Yesterday." The phrase immediately connected with what I had been experiencing. It also gave me confidence that the value I was finding in my own practice could matter to other people. The practice already existed in my life. The phrase helped me give it a name.
The MyHGY™ Method is a daily practice of showing up for yourself. It helps you notice what is real, preserve it, and allow it to become part of the way you think and feel. Over time, the practice creates a counterweight to negativity bias. Your mind carries pressure, uncertainty, and unfinished work, while also carrying a growing record of what is good, true, and working in your life.
Your dog was happy to see you. Your mother smiled when she saw you. Your daughter called because she wanted to talk. You completed something difficult. You enjoyed the coffee. You kept your word. These moments happened, and they belong to your life. When they are preserved consistently, they begin to shape the way you see yourself and the reality you are living.
This is the principle at the center of the Method: Success starts with awareness and focus, requires commitment and is visible when it becomes consistent.
For me, the MyHGY™ Method has become a way of developing from the inside. I return to the practice, pay attention to what is happening, and preserve the moments that deserve to remain. Each day adds to the record, the record creates visibility, and the visibility helps me become clearer, more accurate, and more confident in the life I am actually living.