Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Furnier Lifestyle Podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I'm your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you. Episode 178 today, and we're talking around the theme of unexpected wins or unexpected lessons and, following on from the trend over the last couple of weeks, I've picked up and taken in a whole bunch of anonymous questions that have come through and I'm very grateful for these because they've changed some of my perspectives and forcing me to think outside of my normal way of doing these podcasts. Usually I script these out just to make sure that I feel like I've got the right information for you and things like that, and I'll still continue to do that. But this has been nice to be able to just take a break and really dive into my inner self and see what I can do when talking and being asked off the cuff. Now I got this question also. I haven't dived into it myself, I've literally just written it down and I haven't prepared an answer for anything, and I want to answer it that way because I want these things to be real, I want them to be raw and I want them to be helping you understand my take on it from a further, your lifestyle perspective. So the question that came through was what is the most unexpected lesson you've learned from a seemingly mundane or everyday experience? It's a beautiful question. There's a lot here. I've already got some ideas just reading it now, and when I was putting this together, I thought about it obviously for 30 seconds or so, but we're going to dive into that. We're going to run the intro in a second. If you have questions or if you really enjoyed this, please connect with me or share it with someone. And whether you're here for the first time or the hundredth time, I really do appreciate it and I look forward to continuing to have these conversations with you. Let's get into it. Let's get into it.

So the question what is the most unexpected lesson you've learned from a seemingly mundane or everyday experience? There's two things here that come to mind straight away running and daily progress, which I laugh about because I struggle with creating new daily progress. So I think for me, the one that kind of became an unexpected lesson. I know it now, but when I first started to try and lose weight, so we're going back to like when I was 21, I weighed about 115 kilos, 105 kilos and I needed to lose weight. And after some heavy hitting from my best mate and calling it out, I decided that I had to make some big changes. So I went sugar-free for about nine months, 12 months, and lost a good jeepers. It was a good yeah, 21 kilos. It was crazy, but I was able to make some big changes. And during that process, going cold turkey, I took up running. And when I took up running that was for the weight loss, obviously to complement the food change.

But I found a love in the running and from that the unexpected lesson was learning to become a better version of myself. Going out for these runs became me getting close with myself, having to work through the doubt, the lack of confidence maybe I had for whatever the issues I was dealing with at the time, and the running was like a parallel or a projection of whatever those issues were that I was trying to work through. Because as I ran through the course, the challenge, the event or the trail or whatever, it was like me working through that and giving me that sense no, you can do this because you've just done this and this was hard. So that has been like a game changer for me. It absolutely has changed my life. At the time of filming this, I'm actually with a running injury and I'm only allowed to run five kilometers a week, not at once, split up into multiple runs. That's killing me. But that look, I could go on about that and I've spoken about that a long time and maybe I can. I might come back to it.

But to point two, which is something which is it's a polar opposite of each other in terms of making daily progress. I'm huge about it, like I love it, like it's so important because when you look back and think, oh, imagine if I had just done that every day for the last 10 years, how much further we would be. And that's what it takes is to get to the success, to get to where you want to be. It is a lot of hard work of doing a lot of the same things over a long period of time, which is that daily progress, whether it's building a business, learning to run or creating content, doing this podcast. We're up to episode 178. This is 178th rep that I've done, so really it's not that much. But if you think about, if you're doing this daily, the progress, the growth, the compounding of that ability to be better. It's exponential.

You've cleaned your teeth with your left or right hand your entire life. Now go try and do it with the opposite hand. And it is impossible to do because we haven't done it. But imagine if we were doing it every day since we started cleaning our teeth. It wouldn't be weird for us, it would be easy for us, right? So that's the perspective I'm giving.

Now, what I find very surprising is and this doesn't really go into the question, but just breaking into a little bit is there's things I know that I need to do, but I don't know if I have the power to do it right. And that's a quote from Star Wars, but it's just funny, because I love daily progress. I love making the progress towards the things that I now know that I want. There's other things that I potentially want, but I don't want to do the hard work and the daily progress because I know it's going to be super, super hard. And the lesson here is when we learn how to remove the friction points, when we learn how to make those things easy to start, they become easier to replicate. So, for instance, at the moment I need to be doing cross-training, I need to be doing different exercise. I need to be doing weight management in terms of the food I consume, because I'm not doing my running, I'm not burning calories, so I need to bring in some different elements of play. And they're things that I haven't necessarily had to do because I haven't needed to do them because they were being managed, but now that I do, it's a struggle. I haven't been able to get into a groove.

It's very hard to break down habits or make a huge change. Now, when I did the weight loss journey previously back when I was 21, that became a cold turkey kind of thing and it was an ultimatum when I was exercising and working out with my best mate and we were doing all these great exercises but I still wasn't losing the weight. And he basically just come out and said, mate, you're fat because you keep eating this crap. And he wasn't wrong and it hurt. But then I was like, okay, I'm going to prove you that I can make this happen because I want to show you that I'm better than what you think I am. And that was great. It changed everything. So sometimes that kick up the butt, that ultimatum of you getting a quick little flashback, mirror reflection of realizing crap. You're not as good as you think you are. It's an eye-opener.

But sometimes we become so comfortable with who we are and how we are that we justify things. And there's a great quote from Simon Beard, the owner and founder of Culture Kings I think it's just the founder now, not the owner and he says that when people buy things, they buy with emotion, then justify with logic. But that's the same thing of how we go about anything we do with emotion and then we justify with logic and unfortunately, we do not do the thing we need to do because we justify it with oh no, we make an excuse up or we make a reasoning for it. So how do we break that down? Right and again, going off topic now but when we can realize how we can make things that are going to make our lives better and we can help them contribute to us daily, on a regular basis, through daily progress, and we remove those frictions, we will be able to see that massive growth over time. At the time of me filming this, it's the middle of the year, right? We're already halfway through the year of 2024.

And it was only six months ago six, seven months ago that I remember planning out what this year is going to look like for me to build out the podcast, to grow the podcast, to level up as an individual, to level up my business, and I had basically gone through and planned out podcasts. I knew that I set a whole bunch of different rules of what I wanted to be able to do, what I wanted to be able to achieve, and how do I achieve that by doing what. So I know how to do this, but the thing that I think I struggled with is and maybe this is the unexpected lesson, right, maybe this is the learning from just living life is life throws little punches at us. It gives us want, but we don't want to do the work. So we do the opposite, or we do things which kind of delay that, or we take side hobbies, or we do little side quests which we think is helping us get to where we want to be. Yet we don't actually then get to where we need to be because we're still not doing the one thing that we know we need to be doing. So why do we do that? It's because fear, scared, insecurities, frustration. We're not willing to do it. But let's remove that. Let's remove that If I came to you today and said to you you've only got one year to live.

You're going to change what you do. Either change it for the better or you're going to lose all hope. And I think that's what it is right. We need to really understand what is important to you and how do we sell it to ourselves, because sometimes, when someone tells you you can't do something, you either accept it or you deny it. Right and it's the narrative. But if someone tells you in a different perspective and then you start to realize, oh, I can't do that, then you either accept it because it's a loss of hope, so therefore it's not possible, or someone will say to you if you want to do it, this is what you're going to have to do, and then you can start to really weigh up the importance of it, the priority of it and all those different things. And I'm really just working through this myself as we talk through it.

The learning for me here is I put it off is because I'm comfortable, and this is a very common topic. We've spoken about this over the last couple of weeks. Comfort is the biggest killer it really is. When we're so comfortable, we get lazy, we don't do the things that we should do. But the catch, the ironic thing, is, when we break that comfort and get into a new zone of consistency or progress or routine or habit, that becomes your new comfort. So it's really just about that short period of time of breaking the discomfort to build the comfort, of making it a consistency. How do you solve for that? I don't have the answer for you, I've got to answer it for myself. But when you break down those little things, that's the lesson here.

It's those everyday moments, the things you put off right, the running. I naturally fell into that and then it became just a mundane thing that I would normally always do to escape and just as an everyday experience, and there's been some great lessons from that. But then the daily progress. The time's going to pass anyway. It's literally six months till 2025, right, and five years ago it was 2020. Like, where did the time go? So that time's passed anyway.

So what have you been doing on a regular basis that has got you to where you are now? And if you think there isn't anything consistent, then you need to start something, because I guarantee you it'll be 2030 and you'll be like, oh my gosh, I should have done that thing that Chris said, or that I heard about, or that I thought about back when I was prompted, because you will thank yourself whether it's making an investment, whether it's, when I say investment, making a financial investment. Is it working out how to exercise better, doing stretching, spending more time with loved ones? I don't know. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is for you, lock it in, write it down, take some time, figure it out, because I guarantee it will change your life. I've got some work to do. I need to figure out how to solve that problem for myself, with some of the other things that I'm dealing with as well, and just breaking through that. But that's really the big lesson that I've learned. I realized that I've got nothing else more to say on this. I really just need to go figure this out right now, to hit the nail on the head. And what does that look like? How do I remove the friction point to be able to start to make that progress? When you make the progress, you'll get addicted to it. You will see the results and you'll get that gratification that you want, and then you'll kick butt right. The confidence will soar. Talking to myself All right, really do appreciate being here.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you share it with someone, leave a comment, hit subscribe, like it. All those great things. Let me know what you think. If you have a question about all this or if you want to continue the conversation, please do. Let's connect. But I want to say thank you for the question that has come through, because this is a real deep one and I'm love doing this kind of like off the cuffness because it's making me work through a whole bunch of different things. It's like a therapy session. But yeah, really, at the end of the day, I'm really just trying to further my own lifestyle and I'm then trying to share that back to you to further your own lifestyle. So that's where we're at this point in time in the podcast and I'm loving it. So appreciate you. You have a wonderful day. Cheers.