You might not be where you would like to be in life right now. Or where you imagine you would be. And if this is what made you click on this video, I want to let you know that I have been there as well.
It can feel dark when you are in this period of your life. You can feel lost. You can feel anxious about what the future holds.
This happened to me during the financial crisis. I started in an industry that I didn't enjoy, and when the crisis happened, I didn't know what lay ahead in my future. Deep down, I knew I wanted something else.
Deep down, I knew I was meant for more. But I didn't know what that was. And so I would try to escape that reality by bingeing on television shows.
By drinking. By doing anything and everything to escape the fact that I was living in a reality that I just didn't enjoy. I wanted to break free, but I didn't know how.
this is where things can change for you. When the pain of where you are now is greater than the pain of change that is the catalyst for you taking action for you, taking responsibility for where you are and where you want to be. Because only when you start owning where you are and your future can change, really start happening for you.
No more blaming other people, No more blaming things out of your control. To do that is easy. It is always easy to blame things that are not in your control for where you are right now.
But it is harder to take responsibility. It is harder to change your focus from what has been to what can be. “The secret to success”, as Socrates put it, “is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
” And in this video, I want to show you how you can start building the new you. And this begins with clarity. It is far better to be climbing slowly up the right mountain than it is to becoming fast up the wrong mountain.
To know what mountain is the right one for you to climb. You have to be clear about where you want to be. To begin with, the end in mind as the author, Stephen Covey, would put it.
How would you know that by the end of this year, you would have had a successful year? How would you know that by the end of this week it will have been a productive one? How would you know that by the end of today you would have accomplished the things that you wanted?
When you begin with the end in mind, you give context for today's actions and also you are able to understand what your priorities are. This is exactly what people like Bruce Lee did in order to achieve their goals, to change their life into something that they can feel fulfilled by, to live with purpose. Bruce Lee in 1969, at a time where he was going through a very difficult time of breaking into the film industry, took out a piece of paper.
He stamped the word secret at the top and bottom And he wrote the following words. He wrote, I, Bruce Lee will be the highest paid oriented superstar in the United States. In return, I would deliver the most exciting performances in my capacity as an actor from 1970 until the end of 1980.
I will become world famous. I will earn millions of dollars. And I would choose to live how I please.
He wrote deep down so that he could read that out aloud to himself each and every single day. He was imprinting that goal into the subconscious of his mind. He was making the impossible possible.
He was giving direction for his subconscious to want to focus its energy on when he had clarity on what mattered most, on where he wanted to be. He then started to align his actions in the present to make that future possible. This is what I did when I lost my first job after graduation due to the financial crisis and was in a period of limbo.
One of the first things I did was do some internal self-reflection. There is a saying that goes the longest journey we make as humans only inches from our heads to our hearts. And that wisdom begins by knowing yourself.
And that's what I did. I got to work in knowing myself better. And it began with these free, simple questions.
Free, simple questions I would like you to answer. The first is what does success mean to, you know, other people that you want this success mean to you? The second is what sort of impact do you want to have in the world?
And the third is what value can you offer others? What value can you offer others? Here is a reason why these three questions are important.
The first question about success is to help you understand your own definition. Because so many of us are exhausted, not because we are doing too much, but because we are doing too little of the things that bring us joy and we are running someone else's race. As Bonnie West said in her book, The Regrets of the Dying, the top regret is that they wish they lived a life more true to themself than a life lived for others.
So when you are clear on your definition of success, you can start aligning your actions with that definition. The second about impact this is because when we have impact, especially positive impact, on the lives of other people, this is what gives our life meaning. This is what makes us feel alive, knowing that we have impacted somebody's life in a positive way.
That is what contributes to our legacy. The third, about value is to understand your strengths. We're all born with different gifts, skills and talents, but we suppress that in the go of conforming to what society expects us to be like.
And so we neglect the strengths that we were born with. And when you do things that don't allow you to express your true potential, it manifests itself tension inside of your body. You're going against who you are.
You're not doing the sort of work that allows your talent to shine. Now, once you are clear on what success means to you, on the impact you want to have in the world and what value you can offer, you then have to make sure that you are making time for this to happen. This isn't going to happen by itself.
These things don't land and you not out of thin that you have to live with intention. And this is where commitment comes in. You must be committed to a new future.
You must be committed to that new life you desire. Because without commitment, you will never begin. And the first step you must take to be committed is to have the courage to let go of your old life, to let go of what came before.
Because your new life, your better life, is going to cost you your old one. When you have the courage to let go of your old life, you are then able to step into your new one. To be committed to your new life is to take actions that will help you get closer to where you want to be.
one of the fastest ways to do that is to understand the sort of person you must become to have what you want. We focus too much on what we want out of life, the way we can make that process easier is instead of beginning with what we want. Focus on who you must become.
Think forward 30 years about who does. Success for you is like, what is he? Or she doing?
Where are they? Who are they spending time with? What characteristics are embracing and demonstrating when you know what their future self looks like?
You want to start making decisions today as that future self acts like that future version of yourself. And then your choices and your habits will grow from there. Because if you are going for a bit of indecision right now, not sure if you are meant to make this choice or that choice, it's often because you're not clear about the person you want to become when you know who you want to become and you can operate from that person.
You operate from the future, not the past. Then your choices and habits are made. If I want to be someone who can inspire other people, if I want to be someone who is going to leave a positive legacy, if I want to be someone who creates so much value through my content, then guess what?
The choices I must make today to realize that future day are now obvious to me. It's now obvious when you work from the identity of your ideal future self. So once you have clarity about where you want to be, what success means you, once you have courage to let go of your own self.
When you are committed to that new future, you then have to curate the ideal environment to make that happen. Because the fastest way to make progress in any area of your life is to design an environment that makes it impossible not to succeed. When I first started, I would look at those ahead of me and say, How how do you get to spend time with these wonderful mentors and individuals?
How do I get to do that as well? But you can you can do that right now. The first step to curating a better environment is to change what you read, to change who you follow in social media, to change what you listen to and what you watch.
The very first books I picked up on my personal development journey what? Books written by the likes of Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, and the People in Hell even Do I want them spending physical time with them? It felt like I was accessing their knowledge and the wisdom.
It was from spending time reading these books That changed the architecture of my mind. It changed my perspective of what would be possible, of what I could do, of what had to happen to meet my desires of reality. You can do that now.
How can you start optimizing your environment, upgrading your environment So it is working for you and not against you? Once you have curated an environment that is helping you, you then have to be consistent in the actions that are going to help you get clues to who and where you want to be. A question I like to ask my coaching clients is this If you took your average day right now and you were to repeat it every day for the next year, would you be closer to or further away from where you would like to be?
If the answer is further away, then the question really is what must change? What must change in your daily routine? If you want to be closer to who and where you want to be and a great exercise to help understand what habits must change and how you can be more consistent is to sketch out what your ideal week and day would look like if you had a blank canvas right now.
What would your ideal day and week look like? Once you start blocking out time in your diary for your priorities and the actions that are going to help you make progress and momentum towards that destination, the challenge for you then is to be disciplined about guiding time for those activities, to not give in to the distractions and noise around you, which is so easy to do in the world that is just getting busier and busier each week and each day You want to be measuring it against that ideal week and day that you have put down on paper. How close did you get to that ideal week and day.
You won't always hit it, but the closer you are to getting towards that ideal day and week, the easier it becomes to make progress because you are prioritizing that which matters. Those actions that are aligned to where you want to be, the vision that you want to create. You're not always going to be perfect.
Things aren't always going to work out the way you imagine. I know. Because I don't always hit my targets every day as well.
The key thing is, is if you are doing the right habits and you are focused on what matters the majority of the time, That is what is going to move the needle. That is what is going to create the change that you desire. You have to show up and give your best each and every day.
Just one small step a day can have a profound impact on where you would be a year from now, a year from now. That is 365 steps. Just imagine where and who you could be.
So to summarize, if you want to change your life, if you want to be in a completely different place in six months or a year from now, you must first take ownership of where you are and where you want to be. When you take responsibility for where you are and where you want to be. That is when life truly begins.
You must get clear on what success means to you, on the person that you want to become. You must have courage to let go of your old self in order to commit to your new life. You must understand who that successful version of you looks and feels like to have an emotional connection to it.
Because when the vision is compelling and magnetic enough, productivity becomes easy. You must create an environment around you that makes it impossible not to succeed, You must be consistent in the actions that are aligned to the person you want to become because it is easy to begin. It is harder to finish.
And in this personal development journey, you have to take some risks. Not all risk takers are going to be winners, but all winners are risk takers. Things will go wrong along the way.
You're going to have challenges. You're going to have setbacks. I know I have them every single day.
This is part of the journey. But keep in mind, in the long term, these things do matter. What matters most is how you choose to respond to them.
If you respond to them in a healthy way, if you come back stronger from your setbacks, then what is going to happen is you are going to expense magic on the other side. You are going to become somebody that people look up to. you are going to become somebody that you can be proud of.
More importantly, you are going to go through a transformation to live a life that you could never have imagined before Remember, there was a reason why you clicked on this video. You want change. You're not like most people, most people don't want change.
They're comfortable where they are. There was a system to changing things. But you clicked on this video because you want things to be different.
You want a better future. You want a future that you can be proud of. A future where you realize your potential and are in a completely different place to where you are today.
If that is to happen, I encourage you to take action on the back of this video. Knowledge is only potential power. The real power lies in your ability to take action, in your ability to collapse.
The gap between idea and execution. and when you make moves towards what you want, what you want makes moves towards you. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video.
If you enjoyed it, you might also like this one where I share seven life lessons. I wish I knew earlier. It would mean the world to me if you were able to hit that like button.
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I hope you have a beautiful day ahead. And in the meantime, I'll see you in the next video.
