I’m going to be blunt. This is important, as it will make you self-aware and change your approach in life. But essentially, how you got here…won’t get you there.
What that means is that everything you have done in the past and decisions made to get to this point in your life….will not help you get to where you want to go.
So if you are not satisfied with your finances, your weight, your relationships, career or any aspect of your life – you have to review the approach you have taken so far. You have to review your daily attitude. You have to review your strategies, tactics and plans – if there are any at all, in order to set about changing things. Here are the key shifts required:
Set goals and know your why
When you set a goal, you are acknowledging to your conscious and sub-conscious that where you are, is not where you want to be. As a result, you feel dissatisfied. That’s when you have real power and motivation to achieve the goals, because pressure and tension drive human behavior.
Set goals explicitly, and also be clear why you want them. How will they make you feel? This is important because the purpose of the goal is much stronger than the outcome. The purpose of goals is what they will make of you as a person. Because at the end of your life, what’s important is who you are as a person.
So enjoy the process, and don’t get too hung up on the outcome…it’s more sustainable that way.
Also ask yourself how would you feel and what would it cost you if you didn’t achieve the goals? Tony Robbins suggests setting goals twice a year, review the goals monthly and review your top goals daily.
Mentors
To get to where you want to be, you need to surround yourself with people who have been through a similar path and have been there and done it. Having a mentor is so important as you need role models and someone to pick you up if you stray. Surround yourself with books, attend courses, and listen to podcasts that are aligned with your goals.
In fact, it has been proven that listening to someone speak through audio, i.e. a recording or podcast, has the same effect as if that person was sitting next to you. You want to immerse yourself into powerful podcasts! Ex-monk Jay Shetty and life-coaches Satori Prime have awesome, inspiring podcasts I highly recommend.
Momentum
Daily tasks and routine leads to consistency, which leads to momentum.
“When you experience positive momentum, you’ll never want it to stop.” — Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach
You will notice that successful people keep progressing and conquering goal after goal. They’ve worked hard to develop their momentum and know what it feels like to not have momentum. Being without momentum is rough. It’s how most people live their lives. And without momentum, results are minimal, even with lots of effort.
This is why consistency is key to developing momentum. By putting intentional effort toward a singular goal or vision, and eventually, the compound effect takes over, and you find that your reward is beyond what you expected.
So the key shift you need to make is setting aside time daily to work towards your goal. This time needs to be pre-scheduled and allows for your full focus and determination. Continuous work and practice at anything will eventually allow you to master whatever it is. Author Malcolm Gladwell’s research based on review of successful people, states that 10,000 hours of repetitive effort is required to become an expert at anything.
Think bigger!
This is an important shift, because we don’t always allow ourselves to dream. Remember there is no boundary to what is possible. Instead of seeking to earn £100k a year, why not aim for £1m a year. There’s no rule out there or judgement of you that says you’re not allowed to achieve that target. The universe can deliver whatever you want. Instead of setting a time horizon of 2 years, why not achieving it in 6 months?
By thinking big, your brain automatically starts to think about the steps and tactics to take so you are positioned to achieve those big goals. And a huge part of this, is to reconfigure your reticular activating system (RAS) using visualization.
In any case, by setting larger goals you will find that you will surpass your initial, smaller goal at a much swifter pace. Consider that….
When I started my online venture, I realized that I had to make some shifts in my daily habit, take action and and changes my mindset. Some examples include;
- Scheduling time in the morning, afternoon and late evening to work and acquire skills
- Visualization and meditation
- Getting a new laptop
- Buying a camera tripod
- Going beyond my comfort zone
- Using downtime to mastermind and research
- Ensure my fitness goals weren’t being sacrificed.
Remember, where you are in your life at this moment is down to the decisions and choices you made. All it takes is a mindset shift and your path can easily change to one of freedom, choice and fulfillment.
Click here to learn about an Entrepreneurial mindset and valuable online marketing skills to start your own profitable digital business.
Best wishes
If you want to achieve your goals, you must become a master at visualization. Only then can you imagine and achieve your goals! This is backed up by science and research. Hear me out…(or read the transcript below 🙂 )
Reticular Activating System
You see, your brain has a network of neurons that connect the spinal chord with the brain and mediates the consciousness and behaviour. It’s called a Reticular Activating System (RAS). It is essentially a filter system. A system that allows certain information into your brain, and blocks out other information. Who programmed it? WE DID! And also our experiences and people from our past.
If you think you are unloveable, then your RAS will go through the day and point out to you – any evidence that you are unloveable. If you think you are bad at speeches, you probably will be. The RAS will look for information and external factors to confirm this belief to you. Your brain is looking out for it.
It is like a confirmation bias. Just like when you read the news – you notice those news items that agree with your beliefs.
The purpose of the RAS is to not let all information in. If your brain took in everything at equal value, your brain would explode. The RAS protects your brain and only lets in things that we agree with, like or need at that moment in time. For example, the RAS is the reason why we can ignore the sound of the train, or a crowd of people – but instantly snap to attention when someone says your name.
Visualization
As the RAS seeks information that confirms our beliefs, including limiting beliefs, we basically need to reprogramme our RAS in order to achieve our goals. Because once you reconfigure you RAS, you brain spots opportunity or a pathway that you probably didn’t notice before. And visualization is the key strategy.
If your goal is to lose weight – visualize what your life would like and visualize how you feel when you imagine the picture of you. If your goal is to be successful in your online business, then visualize how your life would change from achieving this goal. I follow these two small steps:
Step 1
Close your eyes, and spend 30 seconds building a picture of yourself going to the gym, or smiling when looking at your bank statement, or the relief from leaving bad relationships. Pick one aspect of your life and focus on it for 30 seconds. Be sure to concentrate on all the small details.
Step 2
Consciously feel the emotions you have. This may be feeling grateful, full of confidence, full of energy, happy. Imagine you are watching yourself with those emotions etched on your face. Imagine it, and see it.
By visualizing our goals in the above steps, we are training our brain to have a different filter. Especially if you visualize consistently and intensely. Our brain can’t tell the difference between the bad things that actually happened to you, and the imagined thoughts you are creating by visualizing. Your brain encodes a vision/imagination as a real memory, thus changing your RAS.
The more you visualize things, the greater your confidence as you start acting in the mode of having or nearly achieved that goal. And it only takes 30 seconds a day.
Studies suggest that simply visualizing yourself doing things helps to develop the skills and improves the skills – just as you were actually doing it. Visualization develop skills. The more we visualize, the more we believe it is true, and we sub-consciously just do it. We just grasp the opportunity, we speak up.
Every day for the next 30 days, spend 30 seconds to visualize;
- What it looks like when you achieve your monetary goals
- How does it feel? To see your bank statement, putting a down payment for a house, sacking your boss? It feels great! Savour that feeling!
When you visualize, you are reprogramming your RAS and changing the filter so that it is spotting opportunity, helping you see evidence that you are confident and that you can do this.
My own results from visualization
I have personally used visualization and continue to do every day. My aim is to change my RAS so that I am seeing opportunities and pathways to help achieve the goals I set. In the past, I have used visualization because I wanted a particular job, a girl I liked, investment properties and a higher salaried job. All of these wishes became reality.
Daily, I visualize my ideal day as a result of being successful in my online business. This mindset work is extremely beneficial, but in addition I joined an online community that teaches me to earn while I’m learning digital marketing skills. The information has been valuable, and if you’re someone who is also seeking freedom from the corporate life and wants to start an online business, I encourage you to click on this link and take the same path I am currently on.
Best wishes
Working in a corporate desk job, I always looking forward to my lunch time workout! It gets my blood going, perks me up for the afternoon and ticks off that box that says I need to get some exercise in for the day.
If you have a commute like mine (around 2hrs), then a pre-work gym session means waking up earlier and entering a near-packed gym. Conversely, hitting the gym after work means I get home later and have little time to spend with my son. That’s why I prefer the lunch break workout. And my favorite type of workout is the total body workout! For me it the best workout for your lunchtime break. If you have an hour for your lunch break, then with a total body workout you can spend around 30 min working out, and the remainder to get ready/get dressed.
Build muscle, Burn Fat
This type of workout targets the largest muscles in the body (chest, back, legs, shoulders) in one session which means a higher testosterone and growth hormone release and makes your heart work faster compared to just focusing on specific body parts, i.e the bro split. As a result, you achieve faster levels of fat loss, and muscle mass gains!
In a full body workout, you will be utilizing those compound muscle groups therefore working as many muscle fibers as possible – thus releasing the greatest amount of testosterone. For example, a bench press not only utilizes the chest muscles, but also shoulders and arms.
Leg exercises especially are known for this, and in a full body workout you will have at least one leg exercise per workout. Being a major muscle group, you’ll find that incorporating leg exercises as part of your total body workout certainly leaves you breathing hard. Read on below for an example of my total body workout split.
Muscle rest
In case of an injury to a particular muscle group, the total body workout allows you to omit the exercise(s) that aggravate the injury and replace it with others that don’t.
With a split body workout though, if one major muscle group gets injured that could throw off an entire day’s workout, so that will definitely put a large kink in your program plan.
No boredom!
When targeting specific body parts, i.e. leg day, it really can be a chore visiting the gym and performing those same workouts. However with a total body workout, you can go from exercising your shoulders to pumping your legs before finishing with your chest. It just makes it more interesting, and your WHOLE body will feel like it’s been through a workout.
What’s more – with a targeted workout, say arms – as you work your biceps and triceps in a session undergoing different types of exercises you find that your effectiveness drops due to bicep/tricep muscle fiber fatigue. As a result, you may not realize the gains that you were seeking.
With a total body workout, once you’ve fatigued your chest you still have energy to target other parts of your body thus ensuring there is no drop off in effectiveness of the workout.
Gain strength
The total body workout is also great for the the trainee looking to get as strong as possible with a set of compound movements. Many popular power lifting programs involve full-body training. Each primary exercise is rarely trained to failure each session, but usually some version of the compound lifts is trained several times per week with different intensity and load. If your goal is to get as strong as possible in a specific exercise, you should train that movement more than once a week. And that’s what an effective total body workout plan can target. Read on below for an example of my total body workout split.
My total body workout
As mentioned, I prefer a 30-35 minutes total body workout during my lunch break as it allows me to do so much more in the time available. Essentially, I want most of my body to be feeling sore. See below an example of my workout split for a week (training 4 days). As you can see I aim to incorporate all of the major muscle groups, i.e. back, chest, legs and arms/shoulders into the workout.
| Monday | Tuesday | Thursday | Friday |
| Pull ups and dips | Barbell rows | Pull ups and dips | Overhead barbell press |
| Incline chest press | Leg press | Shoulder press | Deadlift |
| Bulgarian single leg squats with dumbells | Barbell bicep curls | Triceps | Incline seated bicep curls |
| Overhead tricep extension | Chest cable fly | Flat bench press | Leg raise for quads |
| Ab workout | Lower back raise | Hamstring curls | Ab workout |
You can use this great guide from BodyBuilding.com for the different workouts listed above, or the CrossFit YouTube channel. Essentially, I normally perform 4 sets of 6-10 of each of the above exercises, and use a weight where I fail on the last rep. You want to aim for progressive overload, i.e. increase the weights to gain muscle mass but not compromising on form!
If you have a passion for fitness but struggle to find time during the week with work commitments, then it is worth considering an online business that frees up your time. I would suggest clicking here to learn about creating a profitable, online business in simple steps from a community of world-class online entrepreneurs – as I am currently doing.
Best
What is the Ego?
Your Ego is a part of you, but at the same time it can be separate to you. It is usually on auto-pilot and ticking away as part of your sub-conscious. The sub-conscious is part of your mind that isn’t in current focal awareness. For example, when you’re driving a car, those gear changes and tiny movements of the steering wheel while you’re thinking about something else….that’s your sub-conscious driving the car.
The ego is never satisfied. It’s always seeking more. It is defined as a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance. More material items, more money, better possessions and experiences. As a result, the ego borders on greed especially with its glass half-full attitude. In fact, any negative experiences you go through in life are a contradiction to the ego’s beliefs. For example, if you hurt yourself that’s your ego saying ‘i shouldn’t be in pain’, if you lose money that’s your ego saying ‘i shouldn’t be suffering losses’. When your business suffers your ego says ‘this was not supposed to happen’ – and it becomes easy to revert to your default setting. This is how your ego holds you back from achieving your best.
Ego driven?
The majority of humans have their ego running their life and are essentially passengers. It may well be that in some areas of our life we are the passenger, and in other areas we are the drivers. The key is to be the driver in all areas of our life – but you have to look within yourself to achieve change . However, once people decide that change is needed, they don’t follow through. Why? Because the ego is lazy, and it knows that we can survive life in a default setting so why bother changing?
If our goal was to lose weight – you may intend to achieve change by exercising regularly. But no transformation is easy, so at any sign of hardship the ego will question the transformation and urge you to give it up. It uses avoidance tactics and makes excuses! Similarly for mediating. You will set aside 10 minutes every morning upon waking to meditate. However, you find yourself hitting the snooze button on day 1, day 2…and so on. Why? Because your ego is seeking the easy option.
Follow through
Your desire needs to be stronger than your ego and this takes discipline. Essentially, you need to ask yourself “am i serious and committed to this change?”. Your word needs to be absolute as you don’t want your ego to hold you back.
When you don’t follow through on a practice, you are telling your ego that you’re not committed and are feeding more power to the ego. This applies to pretty much any aspect of your life that you feel isn’t amazing, i.e. relationships, money, health etc.
The key to committing to real change is to remain disciplined and focused on the task/activity/project at hand. In addition, being vulnerable is so important for growth, as it means you are opening yourself up for new insights, constructive feedback, tools and knowledge that you may have not have previously welcomed into your life.
Click below a really useful guide for ways to overcome your ego and ensuring its not holding you back;
As I go through my own journey creating an online business and honing my digital marketing skills, I am aware of my ego taking control and making me procrastinate and lose focus. Luckily the online community I have joined are amazing in making sure I stay on track and am clear on my goals and vision. In fact, there are accountability mentors that ensure you stay on track – ensuring you’re ego doesn’t take over.
If you are interested in learning the same marketing, technical and mindset skills, click here and start your journey to taking control and freedom.
Best