Speaker 1: Gooday, gang, I hope you're bloody great. There's going to
Speaker 1: be blunt and direct, and if you're feeling a bit precious,
Speaker 1: today might not be the day for you. Having said that,
Speaker 1: it might be exactly the day that you need. Now
Speaker 1: here's what I think some, not all, some not all
Speaker 1: of you need to hear a message from me. And
Speaker 1: the message goes as follows, stop fucking waiting. Stop waiting
Speaker 1: for the magic, stop waiting for the opportunity, stop waiting
Speaker 1: for the right time, stop waiting for an invitation, stop
Speaker 1: waiting to feel confident, stop waiting to feel good enough.
Speaker 1: Just stop waiting. Stop waiting. At two conversations with people
Speaker 1: today who need to change stuff, one in person the conversation,
Speaker 1: one on the phone the conversation, both of those people
Speaker 1: know that there are things that they really need to
Speaker 1: be doing, not want necessarily, but need to be doing,
Speaker 1: Like there are a shit going on in their life
Speaker 1: that can't be more specific than that. But let me
Speaker 1: tell you that they are fucking waiting and to their
Speaker 1: own detriment on some level, like many other people, waiting
Speaker 1: for some kind of better time than today, Like so
Speaker 1: many people that I talk to, it feels like whatever
Speaker 1: day that I talk to them on. No, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter which day, any day of the week, any week
Speaker 1: of the year, any fucking year of the decade. But
Speaker 1: no matter what day I talk to them, it's never
Speaker 1: the day. It's always soon. It's tomorrow, it's next week,
Speaker 1: it's next month, it's when the kids are not on holidays,
Speaker 1: it's when the ankle's better. It's when. But it's not now.
Speaker 1: It's never now. I don't think that we should be reckless,
Speaker 1: but I think that for many people this whole fucking
Speaker 1: it's not the right time. It's not the right moment.
Speaker 1: I need to get my metaphoric ducks in a row.
Speaker 1: I think it's bullshit. I honestly think it's bullshit. I
Speaker 1: think we need to be strategic, and I think timing is,
Speaker 1: at times, no pun intended, an issue. But I think
Speaker 1: for more people, timing is an excuse. Now, I'm not instructing.
Speaker 1: I'm not instructing on any level. I'm not suggesting that
Speaker 1: you be reckless, that you don't think, but I am
Speaker 1: suggesting that if you have been in the waiting for
Speaker 1: the right time, brigade or group, for let's say a
Speaker 1: year or more, then I might suggest to you that,
Speaker 1: depending on what the thing is that we're talking, it
Speaker 1: might not be a timing thing. It might be a
Speaker 1: you thing. Sometimes on this journey of personal development and
Speaker 1: growth and improvement, we need to own things. We need
Speaker 1: to be self aware. I said to one of the
Speaker 1: two people today who happen to be a dude, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I told you that they're both dudes,
Speaker 1: but I just said to him, honestly, this is coming
Speaker 1: from a good place. I feel like you're fucking kidding yourself.
Speaker 1: I feel like you are calling your excuses reasons, and
Speaker 1: I don't think they're reasons. I think they're self created,
Speaker 1: perhaps unconsciously, but they are self created avoidance strategies. And
Speaker 1: I fear that if you don't make a decision, and
Speaker 1: you don't start today, or you don't start soon, that
Speaker 1: there will be a dire fucking consequence that you can't undo,
Speaker 1: or it will be much much, much harder to address
Speaker 1: than it currently is. Here's the thing about change, especially
Speaker 1: when we're talking about personal change, we're talking about habits
Speaker 1: and behaviors and outcomes on planet US. Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: It's uncomfortable nearly always at the start at the very least,
Speaker 1: it's inconvenient. It's often not practical, it's often disruptive. It
Speaker 1: often disrupts our plans, or our patterns, or our current comfortable, familiar,
Speaker 1: easy operating system. We don't need to wait, but we
Speaker 1: want to wait, and we find a way to justify
Speaker 1: the waiting, and we get really defensive when people go,
Speaker 1: are you sure you need to wait? Because when things
Speaker 1: happen in our life, when dramas happen, when catastrophes happen,
Speaker 1: when bad things happen, that we just need to deal with.
Speaker 1: Timing is never an issue because we don't have the
Speaker 1: luxury of time. You have the heart attack, you just
Speaker 1: have to deal with it today. You break your leg,
Speaker 1: you just have to deal with it. Today, your partner
Speaker 1: walks out on you. You just have to deal with
Speaker 1: it today. And there's no chance of not dealing with
Speaker 1: it on that day because it's out of our control.
Speaker 1: We can put our head in the sand, of course,
Speaker 1: but that only makes it worse. Imagine if that thing
Speaker 1: that you've been putting off, you said today is today
Speaker 1: the day that you are listening to these words this podcast.
Speaker 1: Even though even though some of you right now are
Speaker 1: quickly creating a list of reasons as to why today
Speaker 1: is not the day. What if you fucking did it anyway?
Speaker 1: What if you just what if you saw this as
Speaker 1: an opportunity, not a problem. What if you went this
Speaker 1: interruption from Harps, this fucking poking and prodding, this challenging
Speaker 1: of me. What if you said, this is not something
Speaker 1: to avoid again, this is not something to put on
Speaker 1: a shelf again. What if you went, not fuck it.
Speaker 1: This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity. Yes it's hard,
Speaker 1: but it's an opportunity. I don't know if I've mentioned
Speaker 1: this on the show, but last week I was demonstrating
Speaker 1: something in the gym. I did something. Anyway, The problem,
Speaker 1: the bottom line was I injured myself reasonably badly. I
Speaker 1: fucked my shoulder. I ended up in hospital. I don't
Speaker 1: think I've told this story, but anyway, X rays the
Speaker 1: whole shooting match didn't break anything but some significant sholder
Speaker 1: soft tissue injury. Blah blah blah, doesn't matter. It's okay,
Speaker 1: I'll get better. Told not to do any strength training
Speaker 1: for six weeks upper body strength training. As you can imagine,
Speaker 1: that went down well on Planet me, the somewhat obsessive
Speaker 1: weight trainer. My immediate response was, fuck him, I'm training.
Speaker 1: My other immediate response was, woe is me? Life's not fair?
Speaker 1: Why does this happen to me? I've da da da
Speaker 1: da all the self pity and the bullshit. But when
Speaker 1: I got over the emotional stuff, the anger and the
Speaker 1: self pity and the bullshit, kind of after I'd gotten
Speaker 1: home from hospital, which was a six hour visit, and
Speaker 1: it was eleven o'clock at night, and I could have
Speaker 1: eaten a dead rat. I was so fucking hungry. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I started to think about, Okay, I have this thing.
Speaker 1: I can't wake up tomorrow and this injury is gone.
Speaker 1: And so this happened. What is tonight? What is today?
Speaker 1: Today is Sunday. So this happened about nine days ago.
Speaker 1: I think it was a Thursday. So I started to
Speaker 1: think about how I could make this problem an opportunity.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I don't do enough of,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that I've avoided is stretching.
Speaker 1: And so I said to myself, self, why don't you
Speaker 1: use this time to improve your shit flexibility in your
Speaker 1: sixty year old raggedy ass fucking high tensile body, your
Speaker 1: violin string fucking body, your ceramic tile body that is
Speaker 1: quite strong but also quite brittle. Why don't you make
Speaker 1: that body more flexible? Why don't you use this time
Speaker 1: where you're not using your shoulder and your upper body
Speaker 1: so much. By the way I talked to him, down
Speaker 1: to four weeks, You're welcome. What don't use is to
Speaker 1: improve your flexibility. So from the next day until today,
Speaker 1: I've done it. Today, every day I've done thirty minutes
Speaker 1: of stretching, which and me doing it every day for
Speaker 1: nine days, and me doing thirty minutes a day. And yep,
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit frustrated, if I'm being honest, because
Speaker 1: of my shoulder, but not nearly as frustrated as I
Speaker 1: could be or would have been in the past. And
Speaker 1: also I'm using this time out still training my lower body,
Speaker 1: still training core a little bit, not training my upper body.
Speaker 1: That's okay, I'll recover, I'll get back there. But what
Speaker 1: I'm doing is I'm using this time away from strength
Speaker 1: training my upper body to increase my overall flexibility. In fact,
Speaker 1: today I did forty five minutes. I looked up at
Speaker 1: my phone and I was at thirty eight minutes and
Speaker 1: I went, fuck, I'm going to do it to forty
Speaker 1: five minutes, and I stretched forty five minutes. So we
Speaker 1: turn the problem if we want, even if in the
Speaker 1: middle of the problem, even in the middle of the adversity,
Speaker 1: we can find some kind of light in the darkness
Speaker 1: if we look for it. So this problem of not
Speaker 1: being able to do one thing has opened a door
Speaker 1: for me to do another thing, which I'm now doing
Speaker 1: and I feel better. I feel looser, I feel more flexible, obviously,
Speaker 1: and the stretching for me is something that I'm going
Speaker 1: to maintain moving forward. The challenge for us is to
Speaker 1: get out of this inner dialogue of circular conversation for years,
Speaker 1: if not decades, of rationalizing why now is not the time.
Speaker 1: It's not a good situation for me, it's not a
Speaker 1: good time for mehaps you don't understand. And of course
Speaker 1: there will be times where literally it isn't and I
Speaker 1: get that, But let's differentiate between when there is a real, genuine,
Speaker 1: authentic problem or reason. Right, Let's put that to one
Speaker 1: side as five percent of the time, and that's cool. Now,
Speaker 1: let's focus on the ninety five percent of the time.
Speaker 1: Where you and I know that we're just not starting
Speaker 1: because we just don't want to. We don't want to.
Speaker 1: We're going to start soon. And then we look up,
Speaker 1: and as I've said many times before, we look up
Speaker 1: and it's now December twenty twenty four, it's now July
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. At six months later, it's twelve months later,
Speaker 1: and we're still having the same inn and dialogue. We're
Speaker 1: still not doing the things that we should do. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting is when we lean into this where we go, fuck,
Speaker 1: don't procrastinate. I was listening to Andrew Schuberman, neuro scientist extraordinari.
Speaker 1: I was talking to him. I'll talk to him. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get him on the podcast, but fucking a
Speaker 1: long shot. But anyway, but I was listening to him
Speaker 1: talk about what happens in our brain when we actually
Speaker 1: just do things that we don't want to do, when
Speaker 1: we we go fuck it. And this is an example
Speaker 1: where we go, yeah, I know I could do it today,
Speaker 1: but I don't have to do it today. I can
Speaker 1: start tomorrow. And the I don't have to do it today,
Speaker 1: I can start tomorrow becomes a default setting sometimes forever.
Speaker 1: But when we go, fuck it, I could do it today,
Speaker 1: I don't want to necessarily. I don't feel like it's
Speaker 1: not going to be comfortable, quick, easy, painless. It might
Speaker 1: be hard, it might not be sexy, it might not
Speaker 1: be super enjoyable in the moment, but nonetheless, I'm starting.
Speaker 1: When we do that, there's a thing in our brain
Speaker 1: called the anterior mid singulate cortext say that ten times
Speaker 1: fast the anterior mid singulate cortex, and that changes. That
Speaker 1: builds stronger neural pathways and neural connections, and according to
Speaker 1: some research, some late, some recent research, that part of
Speaker 1: the brain actually grows. It hypertrophies, it gets bigger like
Speaker 1: a bicep does when we do bicep curls. It's fucking incredible.
Speaker 1: And so when we decide that, look, today is the day,
Speaker 1: or or when we decide that we're going to do
Speaker 1: the thing that we could put off. We could put
Speaker 1: it off, we could rationalize it, and people would go,
Speaker 1: well that makes sense, I totally understand. But nonetheless we
Speaker 1: decide to not put it off. We decide that today
Speaker 1: is the day. We create some momentum, and every day
Speaker 1: we just get up and we just keep doing despite
Speaker 1: the fact that it might not be fun, quick, easy,
Speaker 1: or painless today, or convenient today. We might not be
Speaker 1: motivated today, we might not have a cheer squad today,
Speaker 1: we might not be getting great results at the moment.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless, we're going to keep stepping up and not
Speaker 1: giving up. We're going to step up when most would
Speaker 1: give up. We're going to look for solutions not problems. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're going to be practical and realistic, and yes we're
Speaker 1: going to have good and bad days because we're human,
Speaker 1: but we're not going to keep giving up. We're going
Speaker 1: to stop fucking waiting. So many people that listen to
Speaker 1: this show, that listen to pod, that come to my
Speaker 1: workshops that and I mean this in a loving way.
Speaker 1: If I was all about popularity, I would just tell
Speaker 1: you that you're all fucking amazing all the time. But
Speaker 1: you know that you're not all amazing. You know that
Speaker 1: you're not doing great stuff every day most of you,
Speaker 1: and you know that there are things that you need
Speaker 1: to hear but don't want to hear. And if I
Speaker 1: was one of many of the coaches, mentors, personal development
Speaker 1: people on Instagram, I would be saying all this fucking
Speaker 1: hyperbolic bullshit self help fluff, this fairy floss kind of motivation,
Speaker 1: but it's just not valuable for you, and it's just
Speaker 1: not real for me. Some of you don't need to
Speaker 1: hear this because you're on the path, you're on the journey,
Speaker 1: and you're doing great and truly for me to you,
Speaker 1: fucking well done, you, super proud of you. But there
Speaker 1: are some of you that are your own problem and
Speaker 1: you know it. And if me saying this bothers you,
Speaker 1: that's okay. But of all the problems you've ever had
Speaker 1: in your life, you were there for all of them.
Speaker 1: You were there for all of them. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you were always the cause, but there's a fair chance
Speaker 1: that you're a common denominator with some of the fucking
Speaker 1: shit that's going on in your life. I'm not interested
Speaker 1: in making you feel good for three minutes with rubbing
Speaker 1: your back and pumping up your emotional tires. I'm genuinely
Speaker 1: interested in helping people to help themselves. And I'm interested
Speaker 1: in what you're capable of changing in the next three, six,
Speaker 1: twelve months, the things that are on your to do list.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in your plan, I'm interested in your resilience.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in the work that you can do. I'm
Speaker 1: interested in what you will do today because you've listened
Speaker 1: to this. See you next time.