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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Welcome back. So straight into it. Yesterday, I spoke about, you know, the mind storming and, also about the winters and the seasons of your life, different parts of life, different seasons you're going through, whether it's economically, physically, mentally, relationship wise, you know the score. And, really, the question I wanna ask you is, what are you made out of?
Speaker 1:What's your character made out of? Because you only know really when you go through the tough times. And there's a guy called Jack O'Willenhick who is this, like, ex Navy Seal guy, and he's got a really good video where some guy kept coming up to him saying, I've mentioned this before, so sorry if it's repeating, but it's a good one, so listen up. One of the guys used to work for him all, like, was working alongside and that came to him with problems all time. Got this problem, this problem.
Speaker 1:And every time he said he had his problem, Jack would say, good. Good. And the guy be like, okay. Kept going, going. And then one day, the guy said another problem to him and then he said, but don't say because I know what you're going say.
Speaker 1:And Jack was like, why? He says, you're going to say good? I said, yeah, good because from all of these problems, something good will come from it he says. And this is true for most problems we deal with day to day. Now, obviously, there's some problems that are beyond that, that there is no real good coming from it.
Speaker 1:I mean, if it's a death, for example, I personally can't see a good coming from a death. I mean, you can deal with it better and stuff like that. We're talking here about, like, your day to day stressors, your stressors, even financial ones and stuff. Like, they might make you look at things differently and not looking at things differently. You see this, this, and this.
Speaker 1:You There's a lot of those stuff in it and I just want to say to you now if you're going through a tough time or now or the challenge is tough, you've got a lot of social events coming up or you're away or you've gone through this and that, good. Because if you can genuinely handle these social scenarios, handle of work stress, handle all of this stress, this stress and still work on yourself, still give yourself that hour or two a day or whatever time it is, right, that's brilliant. You know, that's what type of character you're showing yourself to be. If you can go through real turbulent times and not throw the towel in and go, well, everything's going to shit over there, so let me make everything else turn to shit. You know, this is a silly way to look at things.
Speaker 1:It's like, why would you make everything else worse just because one part's going worse? And this is called essentially compartmentalization. Very good. Come on, I said, alright. I'm on the pod here.
Speaker 1:Compartmentalization. One of the things that, Napoleon actually said that he had nailed down to a tee. And a lot of people are very good at this. You can have a stress in your relationship, but then you've got different stress with another family member, and you can kind of separate them out as opposed to letting them leak into each other because then everybody is going through the essentially all the stress you're dealing with will ruin or tarnish everything else. So that's just a bit of advice.
Speaker 1:Some of you are absolutely smashing it right now. Some of you might be feeling it's tough out there. Every single way, good, good, good. There's always a way to look at things that makes it better or something to learn from. Now the task today is is to, at the end of your day, to to write the journal entry.
Speaker 1:And this isn't just a story of the day like a diary, it's a it's a journal. So what I want you to do is I want you to write key events down from a day, how they made you feel, okay, what your thought process was at the time. Right, you write those down and this is kind of like how Marcus Aurelius wrote his diary or his meditations or his to himself they called it. He wrote down kind of stuff like maybe something happened but then a piece of advice you're given, or he would give himself advice from that, and the reflections. So that's what I want you to do.
Speaker 1:You do the key things, how they made you feel, and then I want you to give yourself advice on what could have been done differently, what could have been done better, how would you look at it now when you're maybe calmer about it, and how did you look at it when you're maybe emotionally stirred, what's the difference? And you start realising your behaviour or outlook is vastly different in the moment versus if you can pull yourself out of the moment, you know, and then you reflect on the day and how could the day be better, maybe write down three things you create for as well if you want to, or three things you want to improve on, and then you go to sleep that night and you kind of close the book. So everyone needs to do this. It's like self analysis. And it's not to be too analytical about stuff.
Speaker 1:It's just like giving yourself good advice is an essential part of living. Donald Roberson, who is a stoicism expert, is a psych psychotherapist, he trains psychotherapist, one of the best in the business. He was saying, if everyone could give themselves the advice they give to their best friends and actually take it, therapists would be out of business. And, he obviously is a tongue in cheek. There'll be some forms that are obviously needed, but in general, there's a lot of people, if they did take their best friend's advice, they probably would be in better position.
Speaker 1:You know? But what happens is we get blinded by these emotional stints. The emotions come in, and emotion means to disturb, the root meaning of emotion is to disturb. And of course that's exactly what it does, it disturbs the calm in you and it can disturb them in a good and bad way, like you know being super happy and pumped out about something and you become super maybe optimistic and you see things like that, it's disturbed you that way. Or you can see or you get angry and that's a really bad disturbance because then you really are shortsighted.
Speaker 1:So it's to handle emotions. If we were to look at how do we master our health and we speak about nutrition, we think if we could master our emotions or understand our emotions and respond and not react to them all day every day, if we can take a step back sometimes, if we can write down what's happening to us and look at it from a third person, you know, we can take ourselves out of it and look at it through that lens. And there's even research on this that shows that when we give our best friend advice, we're something like 30 more open. We're like 19% less judgmental, stuff like that, like all those key things. Like, give way better, more open, more neutral advice.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to all styles, you can't do it. So an example of this is you might be thinking, well, the advice of someone said, if they track honestly, and they hit their macros, and they get their steps and they lose weight. And you tell people, if you do that, you lose weight, right? And when it comes to yourself, Someone tells that to you, you say, well, no, I'm not losing weight because I admit my steps, admit my macros, I'm just losing weight, it might be some of my hormones, might be this, the macros might be wrong. But really what we're doing is being very defensive.
Speaker 1:More really, we need to take a step back and go, am I actually tracking, like most days? Do I know how much I'm eating? Do I think I'm eating 1,005 when I'm eating 2,009 on a weekend? You know? Take a step out of the picture, and the most likely scenario is the most obvious.
Speaker 1:If you're not losing weight over three, four, five, six weeks on average, you are not in a calorie deficit, right? That's just the fact, okay? What do we do with that information? If we were very judge, non judgmental, and we were looking at as a third person or best friend, we'd say, okay, if you're not in the calorie deficit, and you've been claiming you're eating 1,007, right, but your maintenance is 2,007, what's up on your weight is stable? What's actually happening this year?
Speaker 1:There's a thousand calories a day in average you're eating that you're unaware of or you're not an accounting for. So let's try and see if we can find thousand. Let's have fun with this. Where do you think this 1,000 can come from? Well, Monday the first, I'm genuinely good.
Speaker 1:But then on Yeah, you know, Saturday and Sunday, I have guests every Saturday, Sunday for the last four weeks. Okay. Average calorie intake on a weekend could be 4,005 calories. So you found your solution. Let's see if this weekend, if I just know and be very, open, honest, and and moderate this weekend, let's see if that starts making a difference.
Speaker 1:And shock, it does. You know? So that's kind of how we look at things. It's a very difficult thing to do, I think, because it means that you have to get out of your own head, get out of your own way, in a sense. But today's all about that.
Speaker 1:It's about, okay, you've had a first few days now, some of you are feeling good, some are feeling behind, whatever. Okay? Doesn't matter really what others are doing and what you're doing. Tonight we got discussion club about the video. So hopefully some of you watched it on about Monday.
Speaker 1:I'm really thinking of personal development as an important matter because we don't get these lessons in school, we don't get these lessons outside of when we start working. It's all about like, just thought, yeah, these are just lessons you don't get given or in a sense when you're ready for them. You know, you might get these snippets of advice from your parents or whatever when you're growing up, but you never have a proper sit down or think about it. Sometimes that's always needed. There's a really good quote on this.
Speaker 1:Think I think maybe. You know, if you give, he if you give me eight hours to cut down a tree, I'll spend seven hours sharpening my axe. You know? And some people go straight in and start hammering on that tree with a blunt blade, and it will take forever. I'm asking what personal development is.
Speaker 1:It's like, are you sharpening the axe? Because we need to know. We need to get our sharp, we need to be sharp, we need to understand where we're going, we need to spend some time on ourselves, sitting down sharpening, sharpening, sharpening, what am I going, what am I doing, where am I go I can't even say, where are you going, what am I doing? And that's what we're gonna be doing tonight, sharpening the axe to make sure it's good to go. It's good to go.
Speaker 1:And once you know where you're going, guess what? You can go there like lightning. Because there's nothing worse than going really, really fast the wrong way. Or we're going, you know, you you what's the quote by saying? Like, wind is favorable if you've got no one you haven't got the target destination to sail.
Speaker 1:So, you know, wherever wind doesn't matter. When you have got a target destination, you know what wind is gonna favor you because you know where you're going. So that's all about today. Enjoy the day. Take things one day at a time.
Speaker 1:Okay? Today is today. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow doesn't exist yet. So do those habits and behaviors that have made those days good, and you're gonna be today they're gonna make today good as well.
Speaker 1:Walk to sharpen the mind. Work out if you want to get the endorphins going to get stronger, get the blood flow going. Hit a good number of calories and protein. Calories, energy, enough energy, but not too little where you're in a real big deficit if you lose weight, but protein to maintain muscle, to feel fuller from meals, to feel better about stuff, you know, drink water to make you feel better. So you're gonna feel really good about these things.
Speaker 1:So do them for those for that sake anyway, not just for the weight loss element. Do it for the day's benefit itself, and that's how we look at things. So enjoy your day. See you later. Watch the video, and I'll see you in a bit to sharpen your axe.