Speaker 1: 0:00

Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I am your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you, and today is episode 202. It does have a bit of a ring to it still getting used to the 200s but today I want to talk about something that's pretty real and I think it's pretty real for all of us, and it is a it's probably a cliche topic that we've spoken about here numerous times, probably even in the twenties, and it's also a very common topic that I've been talking about across my other content over the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 1: 0:32

Now, by the time this video comes out it is going to probably be about four weeks later, but it's super relevant to me right now while I'm recording this and the topic is about having a plan or I guess we could reframe it of furthering your lifestyle with intention, and it's basically having a plan or having a strategy brings together the two worlds, in which we're not just hoping for things to occur, we're not just dreaming big, but we're actually having a strategy and having an action plan to make this happen and knowing how you're going to actually level up and create the life that you want. Now, this is a very common topic that I love to talk about. I love hearing other people's perspectives and their dreams and goals and ambitions and aspirations, but too often yes, too often we wait for things to happen. We wait for things to just land in our laps and majority of the time they don't. They don't land in our laps when we want them. We want all these things, but you're not out there actually trying to make them happen. Where's the intention? Yeah, sure, your intention is to do something, but if you're not doing anything, then the intention is irrelevant. We assume that we're going to stumble into all these opportunities, all these relationships or whatever this success may be that you're wanting or planning or hoping will come to life. But the truth is this, and this is the reality of it without a plan, we are simply just drifting. So that's the topic.

Speaker 1: 1:52

Today. We're going to go through four or five points that I want to bring to your attention, maybe give you some perspective about reframing this and maybe how you can look at it from a different perspective. I'll bring in some of my own examples as well, but if that sounds like something you're interested in you better buckle up. And, of course, while we're doing this episode, while we're having this conversation, if you do enjoy it, hit the like button, subscribe. Make sure you do follow the podcast, whether it's on YouTube, whether it's here on Spotify or Apple Podcasts all the great places that you're listening to this podcast. But, most of all, if it does resonate with you and you think someone else can benefit from this, please share it to someone else and help them further their lifestyles.

Speaker 1: 2:29

We're going to roll the intro and let's get into it. So number one and this is the most common thing that I love to talk about, and that is do you actually know what you're working towards? If you do not know what you're actually working towards, then how can we even start talking about execution? Right, you need to ask yourself three main questions, and these three main questions are what do you actually want in life? What would leveling up look like for you to get to this actual place that you want to be? And the other question, the third question, is if you could create your ideal life or your ideal future, what would it include?

Speaker 1: 3:14

Now, these questions can become very overwhelming. I know they're very overwhelming for someone that's maybe just come out of high school, maybe just starting university, maybe even finishing university, because you don't really have life experience, you don't really know what you want. And as I've progressed through business, through life, in working for someone else for almost 10 years and then having my own business for five years, going through university and all these different things, there's been an acquirement of life experience, work experience, just everyday experience, and that experience gives you the understanding, the knowledge and the appreciation of these questions. But when you don't have that, it can be very overwhelming to think, wow, this is very overwhelming, so we need to just break it down a little bit more. But the cliche of all this, when you haven't really figured out what you want, is a lot of people just say they want more freedom, they want better health or maybe a deeper relationship, more success, but they never really take the time to actually define what does that actually mean? And this will change over time. Whether you're 18 or whether you're 20, 25, 30, 36, 45, 50, 60, it does not matter. What matters is you actually define what it is relevant to you, because someone else's idea of success or ambition and what you want in life isn't your definition and that's their definition. That's between them and that you need to define what yours is and keep it to you, and it's going to be your North Star. It's going to be the thing that you get up and pursue.

Speaker 1: 4:45

Is it financial independence? But what does that even mean? What does financial independence mean to you? Does it mean you have the money, the ability to just fly anywhere in the world at any time? Or is it simply that you don't have to be stressing about, a month to month, paying off a mortgage or living off paycheck to paycheck? What is it? Is it becoming the healthiest version of yourself? Now, these are all very cliche points, but most of the time, it's one of these top three right Financial independence, whether it's being the healthiest version of yourself. And what does that look like? Does that mean that you don't have to worry about being injured? Does that mean you have the flexibility to go do a 10K run? Does that mean you can go out and do a two-hour ride? Does it mean you can go do multiple laps in the pool? What does that mean? Define it for yourself. Are you lifting 180 kilos? What is it? Or maybe it's just about upskilling yourself, learning a new skill, or maybe it's traveling more.

Speaker 1: 5:34

There's so many different ways to look at this and without a clear vision, you'll always be chasing the distractions because they're there to distract you, and there's plenty of them instead of actually moving towards something meaningful. And we get stuck in this little doom scroll of looking at other people's ideas, other people's visions, other people's dreams, and then they start selling their dream to you. I know it, I'm a YouTuber myself. Right, I talk about the dream I'm building and I get people attached to my journey, thinking that they can do the same thing. And if you want to do the same thing, please do the same thing. But remember, my journey is not your journey. You need to build your journey, the way that is going to work for you your different experience, your different expectations, your different responsibilities, your different accountabilities, what you've achieved in life, what you want to achieve in life, what you want to achieve in business. Do you need a lot of money? Do you need a little bit of money? Maybe it's a side hustle, maybe it's part-time, maybe it's full-time. There is so many parameters of what that looks like in terms of working towards something, but I think what we can break it down to is what are you moving towards. That is something meaningful and that meaningful is for you to define.

Speaker 1: 6:41

So number two is then the trap of actually winging it versus having a strategy. Now, if you go play chess, typically most people jumping into chess have no idea of strategy within chess. They think I'm going to jump in, I'm going to wing it and I'm going to show you how it's done. They have no idea, not knowing that the other guy is just a silent strategic player, right, and they can come in and just whoop you because they've got a plan of attack, they know the different sequences, they know the different play strategies, but that's not something that is physically tangible scene until it actually occurs.

Speaker 1: 7:15

So some people live life hoping things will fall into place, as we've said before. Right, but putting things into motion is another whole question and it's a lot of hard work. And look, at the end of the day, we can live life hoping things fall into motion. We can live life hoping things fall into place and that works until it doesn't, because sometimes we get a good run, Sometimes we get served a whole bunch of opportunities from the people around us. But as you progress, unless you're out there whether it's talking, connecting, sharing, asking, putting in the reps, then things will just slow down and you will become irrelevant to the bigger things happening in terms of. When I say bigger, I'm not talking about society in a whole sense, but I'm talking about in your area of expertise, in your niche, in your space, in your ecosystem, in your world. And here's why One.

Speaker 1: 8:08

When we don't have a plan, we tend to spend years stuck in the same place, just spinning wheels, trying to figure it out, trying to get traction, without direction. We also let life just happen instead of you actually letting life happen as you shape it, and a very common thing that I love to say is a year's going to pass regardless. So what are you doing to shape the next year? Is it doing one small thing every day? Is it doing lots of things every day? Or are you just going to think I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow, and you never actually put any intentional action in place, and then, without a strategy, every setback feels like a roadblock instead of just a detour. And that's the power of a strategy it makes you work in different ways. It makes you work towards where you want to be by implementing certain things at certain times and leveraging certain elements at certain times.

Speaker 1: 9:01

It's not a plan right, a plan. You might plan to have a strategy. A plan is I have a plan to get to where I want to be. The strategy is how you're executing, how you're playing your cards at different times in that journey and sometimes when you hit roadblocks, you need to be able to take that detour and spin around or shuffle to the left, or shuffle to the right or take a U-turn and then make your way back around the scenic route or detour. So this is why you see some people constantly growing, while others feel like they're just running in circles and they're moving around or they're not really making progress.

Speaker 1: 9:34

And it's not about comparing about he's doing this, she's doing that, she hasn't done that, she has done that, whatever. The difference isn't talent or luck. It really just comes down to intention and action. Just a little side note there Remember, the only person you should be comparing to is yourself, your previous version of yourself and your future self and where you are now. So if you want to get to a better version of yourself, you can't keep being the previous person you were, because that person clearly hasn't got to where you want to be. So what are you doing daily to get to that next level? And if you're improving yourself by 1% every day, that's a huge compound over 365 days.

Speaker 1: 10:10

So the next part, or the next way that we can look at this, is how to reverse engineer your future. Now, if you want to turn your dreams, if you want to turn your ambitions and goals and aspirations into a reality, as cliche as it sounds, we can actually reverse engineer your success. What does it even look like? So we need to pick what it is that you want to you be doing right and again, we'll just use cliche examples because they're relevant to majority people, but you've got to define what that is.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Say you want to earn $100,000 doing what you love, or maybe you want to be in the best shape of your life, maybe you just want to travel more and work less, instead of saying I hope that happens, you've got to break it down. You've got to break it down. You've got to spend some time. Yeah, do some work and actually understand what's what right and what skills, what habits, what actions are going to get you there. When we have a plan of where we want to be, it helps give us a North Star and a route to actually work towards.

Speaker 1: 11:06

So when things aren't working out, you can fall back and, okay, you can ask your simple question is this going to get me closer to where I want to be? And if it's yes, it's a good thing to do. If it's a no, then it's like probably not something to be doing. But even though you know where you want to be, it can't be just done off hope. You need to start thinking okay. So what are the things now that I need to actually start doing about this? What skills do I need? What habits do I need to put in place? What actions am I going to have to take? What small steps each day can I take to move in that direction? And what obstacles may I foresee, with a little bit of foresight, that I might actually have to challenge up against? What obstacles may arise and how will you handle them? Obviously, you can't plan for every situation, but if you're willing to adapt, if you're willing to jump in and actually give those things a go, figure out how to scale a wall, how to get around it, how to solve that problem, then you're going to be more confident in actually making this happen. Clarity will create the momentum that you need in order to get things done. And when you know what needs to be done, you will stop procrastinating and you will start making progress.

Speaker 1: 12:12

One thing I love to do in my business is take massive action. When I know what I want to do, when I see exactly the next step that I need to do in a week progress to get me to where I want to be I just push really hard onto that, I prioritize. And then there's some days where you don't really know what's the next step and you need to just take a couple of days to just do the grind, get into the motions and then eventually you click and now you know what to do. And then what I love to do is just do not hesitate on that action. You've got to take it. Obviously. You've got to make sure that. Is this action sensible? Is it viable? Is there a risk versus reward, and are you comfortable with that risk? How are we mitigating that risk? How are we managing that risk? This applies to anything in life whether you're trying to earn money, whether you're trying to exercise more or whether you just want to travel more and work less. All these different things have consequences, pros and cons, and positives and negatives, but when you know that information, it helps you be able to do things swiftly and with speed and with, I guess, confidence as well.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Which brings me to point number four, which is around excuses versus execution. A lot of people talk about what they wish they could do, but then we give a million reasons why we can't and a lot of the time it's excuses. We blame things of why we can't get stuff done, when really it really comes back onto our own ability to prioritize and get our head in the right position, and some of the cliches are I don't have time, or it's too expensive, or what if I fail? These are not real barriers. They're purely fear disguised as logic and excuses, and we tend to then use that thinking because of that, I won't do it when really the real question we want to be asking is do you want this enough to do what it takes? Do you want this? I'll ask you again do you want this? Therefore, are you willing to do what it's going to take? Because if you want it, you're going to make it work and if you don't want it, you're going to find an excuse.

Speaker 1: 14:05

And this is a really relevant conversation around the people I'm going to get pretty real here the naysayers, the doubters, and I'll call them the haters of people that are following my journey. They talk about all the things of this doesn't make sense, or why are you doing this? Or they compare themselves to me in how they operate their own business and one. It's just absolutely pathetic because we are not doing the same thing. I don't care if you want to run your business the way you want to run your business. Actually, I do care. I love that you want to run your business the way you want to run your business, because it's your business. How I run mine and the decisions that I make is I'm doing what I want to do to find and make it work.

Speaker 1: 14:46

It's the amount of people and I talk about this all the time the amount of people that have told me that me selling clothing at the level of capacity that I am, and with the cost of goods and washing and outsourcing and having staff, it is not feasible, it's not viable. You cannot do it. We're still here. We're doing it. We're growing every single 90 days. I've grown 20% on average every 90 days for the last. This is my fifth year doing business. And no, not all of that was clothing, but we've done clothing for two years and we've done more in the last year than we did for the first two years, actually almost the first three years. Please tell me. Yeah, clearly it's not working, is it? But at the end of the day, the things I'm doing other people don't want to do because it might be hard for them or it might be uncomfortable for them, or it's just they just don't like it and that's okay, like there's seriously nothing wrong with that. I don't know why it gets into a bit of a comparing pissing game, because it's just ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 15:42

You need to ask yourself is what do you want right, and are you willing to do it? Are you willing to find a way through it? At the end of the day, anything that you want, whether it's through business, whether it's through life, whether it's through relationships, all these different things it simply comes down to problem solving. If you want something and there's a hurdle in the way, how do we solve for X? How do we get past the hurdle? Maybe a lot of the time, it is just fear. We're scared to talk to someone, we're scared to take action, we're scared to try. We're scared to put our name out there, we're scared to put the camera on and record for the first time. I guarantee you, 80% of the problems are probably fear-based, and if you can conquer that, then you will achieve so much more in so much little time. So I guess then to wrap it up in a nice little way to look at this is it really comes down to a long-term mindset shift.

Speaker 1: 16:32

For me, I've always been about planning and having an idea of where I want to be. Sometimes I didn't have the details behind that, but I was always working towards that idea of where I wanted to be, and success isn't about luck or talent, though those things do have really big weight in how people achieve what they want. It still comes down to actually having a vision and working toward it consistently. Because if you have a vision and you know what you're working towards, then if you're in a place at the right time and you do get lucky, you can apply it to your vision and your plan. If you don't know what you want and someone says, hey, you want to do this, how can you execute with it? Because you don't think it's relevant? You don't know what you want If you have talents and skills. Again, that's going to help you get to where you want to be. If you're good at painting, but you just want to collect Pokemon cards, that skill doesn't help you collect Pokemon cards. Of course, if you put the two together and maybe you can paint Pokemon cards, that's a different conversation. But what I'm saying is yes, sometimes it's not always going to be transferable, but sometimes it is going to be. Give you that unfair advantage and I digress there, but I wanted to make sure that's very clear.

Speaker 1: 17:41

But if you want to make real progress, whether it's in one week, one month, one year, this year, whenever it may be, you do need to shift your mindset. You need to stop waiting for the right time and just literally start now, because the time is going to pass anyway. You need to make decisions that are based on your future self, not your current fears, because your future self isn't going to be worried about the things that are scaring you now. There's going to be bigger things that are scarier at that point in time and you worry about that then. But for now, if you want to get to that next level, what do you have to do? If you walk into a situation and you know the feeling because you've been uncomfortable. If you walk into a situation and the only thing that is stopping you because there's no reason to say no other than you're scared, it's probably the right thing to do, unless there's something telling us no, this is illegal or this is dangerous or this is not appropriate in terms of ethics and legality and all those different things.

Speaker 1: 18:37

But I recently I recently moved into a warehouse and I remember looking through that and I walked in there and I had no intention of actually wanting it, I just wanted to go suss out the vibes and get some inspiration. I walked in there and I had no intention of actually wanting it. I just wanted to go suss out the vibes and get some inspiration. I walked in there. The agent was there and I literally said out loud I said, oh crap. She said, oh, what's wrong? It's not what you want. I said, no, that's the problem. There's actually no reason for me to say no other than I'm scared and it's going to cost me more money.

Speaker 1: 19:03

But we got it anyway, we made it work, and when you realize that self-awareness of what is stopping you from actually progressing and you can overcome that, of course I got to do a lot of work. It's going to be a whole, much more amount of work, but it's getting me closer to where I want to be. It's probably going to shave off a bit of time. It's going to be a lot of hard work, a bit more money now, but in the long run it should have a huge return on investment. And but in the long run it should have a huge return on investment and I'm comfortable to take that Like. I'm happy and comfortable to do that. So we need to make decisions based on our future self. We need to make decisions based on, not our current fears. And when you stop worrying about how long will it take and actually start thinking about how far can you go, that's when the game changes.

Speaker 1: 19:45

Because at the moment, I've been doing business for five years. I knew that I wanted to really give a good go of this for seven years, knowing that I'm going for 10 years plus. So really, I haven't even started to get to my point where I start to really question everything. All I'm saying is like, with the progress that I've made, the ability to grow, learn, understand and become a better version of myself, whether it's through the podcast, whether it's through YouTube, whether it's through my business, whether it's through my relationships, whether it's through my personal progress in other areas of life, you start to think, well, if I was able to achieve this year, I was able to achieve this in a couple of years what can I do in 10, right, and you start to really see the potential, your potential, and that's why it's so important that you go through this process to further your lifestyle. So my final thoughts is this your plan equals your success. If you have a plan, you can be successful. Right, so you can drift through life or you can take control of it. You can hope for change or you can make it happen. You can keep waiting or you can start now.

Speaker 1: 20:46

My question to you is write down in the comments down below if you're here on the YouTube, stop write it down of what's your plan, what are you taking control of, what are you going to do? And every so often when I ask these questions, I only get one or two people respond, and that's great. I really appreciate it, and those people are probably going to be very successful. So right now, you're probably feeling a little scared to put something down in writing. You're probably a bit scared to think, oh, what if other people steals my idea or nah, am I actually going to be able to do that? What is it that you want? What is your plan? What are you aiming for? What are you working towards? And then you can ask yourself of how are you going to take control of it? How can you make it happen? And how can you make it happen and how can you start on it? Now you do those three things and you ask yourself that every day, is this going to get me closer to where I want to be? Am I taking the right actions? Because is it going to get me closer to where I want to be? You will make wild progress and you will literally further your lifestyle. Appreciate you being here.

Speaker 1: 21:43

If you did have any questions or you wanted to continue the conversation, whether it was the question I asked you or maybe just in general about this whole conversation, drop down there below into the comment section, or you can send me a message on Instagram. We can connect, we can chat and I would love to help you right, even if it's just bouncing some ideas, maybe giving you a little bit of a confidence boost, or maybe you just want a perspective. I'd love to help people. I do this podcast because I want to see other people thrive. I want to see other people pursue their passions and with purpose and further their lifestyles. And you can do that. You don't need me to do that, but I know sometimes it can be rough and tough to get to that point of being confident, being comfortable and being willing to actually step out and make it happen. So if you want to have a conversation more than happy to do so I would love to be able to see if I can give you some more tips and tricks to make that happen.

Speaker 1: 22:34

But I think literally everything we've just discussed today you've got everything you need. You just got to go do it, hey. So stop mucking around. What's your plan? What are you going to do? Let me know down in the comments. Appreciate you being here and please, if you enjoyed this, subscribe, comment. We've got episodes every single week. And, of course, if you really enjoyed it and you think someone else needs to hear this and get a big kick up the butt, share it with someone else. It would mean the absolute world to me. Plus, we can help other people further their lifestyles. Appreciate you, you have, and cheers Ciao.