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Authentic gay conversations on personal development, life coaching, and mental health. Join Keegan Hirst, founder of Gay Man's Coaching and former professional rugby player, for weekly real talk about gay lifestyle, coming out, relationships, business, and authentic living. Deep, honest conversations that help gay men build confidence, find community, and create vibrant, unapologetic lives.
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Gay Man's Coaching Podcast with me, Keegan Hurst. This is the podcast for gay men who want to build a life that they're proud of, who want to look in the mirror and love the person that they see back. Now this episode I want to talk about something that we're all guilty of, rushing, why we do it, what the benefit of it is and I want to talk about impatience and not in a way that I'm going to say you should be more patient, I think we all know we should be more patient and that it's a virtue and all that kind of stuff and that is certainly something that I am very guilty of is trying to rush things and go through things. So I want to talk about that and the impact that it has on our actual enjoyment of life. I want to talk about that.
Speaker 1:But let's get into this, talking about time and rushing. The thing that brought this up for me and made me really think about it and sit and consider it was my daughter Taylor has recently passed the driving test. I took her on the motorway for the first time and I was talking to her about obviously how the motorway works and you don't need to be rushing you just take your time you don't need to be trying to dodge and weave in and out and cutting across lanes just you know just trying to keep it simple for her. And I could see that I was telling her what to do and she was basically looking as if to say, you don't do any of that, dad. And so I kind of clocked it and I said, don't drive like I do.
Speaker 1:I'm always in a rush. And she said, no, you're not, dad. You're not always in a rush, but you're always rushing. And I thought, wow. That feels quite profound and it really made me sit and consider and it took me back to something that a therapist of mine called Philip said years ago.
Speaker 1:He said we're all rushing, we're all rushing because we think that life starts after something happens the promotion, the job, the relationship, the thing but life is the middle bit and if you rush the middle bit, you rush your life. And he said, we're all in a hurry, we want to get things done, but we never stop to ask ourselves what happens when you get to the end? What are you actually rushing towards? Think about that. What happens when we finally get to the end?
Speaker 1:And the answer is we die. So maybe rushing isn't the win that we all think it is. And I get why we rush, you know, it's modern life. All everybody talks about now is optimisation and efficiency. It's what can you squeeze in, how fast can we get results.
Speaker 1:We live in a microwave society, you can order something on Amazon, it can be there in the same day. So it's all about faster, leaner, more efficient, more optimised shortcuts. What's next? What's next? What's next?
Speaker 1:What's next? So life becomes this series of checkpoints instead of living it. There's an Adam Sandler movie called Click which I saw years and years ago and this kind of makes me think of that because basically what he does is he fast forwards through what he thinks are the boring parts of his life. And so he fast forwards to birthdays and weddings and events and holidays and promotions and moving house and all that kind of stuff. And he goes through all that and then he finds himself at these positions and he goes, I don't know what's happened between this relationship with this person and this person, why have things changed so much?
Speaker 1:And before he knows it, he's gotten to the end and he's essentially fast forwarded because he has this magic remote all through his life and he gets to the end and he dies and you know that's the kind of lesson from it is to enjoy the small stuff because that's what we think that life is. We think that life is the weddings, the holidays, the promotions, the end results, the milestones, the house moves, big the trips, everything that's going on. There isn't. Those are punctuation marks in our life and the regular day to day Tuesday afternoons where there's not much going on. That is life.
Speaker 1:Life is Tuesday mornings. It's been sat in traffic, it's routines and training sessions and cooking dinner, you know the limit dinner that we cook on our repertoire, it's walking the dog, it's conversations that don't really go anywhere and don't really mean that much and we forget. Know they're not profound life changing things but we're constantly fed this lie by social media that life is the big moments, life is the highlight reel because that's what we are force fed every day is other people's best bits. The bits that they curate, the bits that they want us to see, the bits that the performative bits. Yeah, when we want to show off.
Speaker 1:Social media is showing off and I say that as someone who you know posts a hell of a lot on social media it's all showing off and even and this is the kind of dichotomy I have when I post things on there is I try to be raw and vulnerable and real and honest and then I go but just by putting this out into the and not keeping it to myself, trying to broadcast it, it is in some aspect performative. But then all life is performative. Everything that we do there's a reason behind it. So you can sit and get into these philosophical debates but you know life is the bits in the middle. Life is the mundane and that's why I think people these are conversations that I often end up having with clients where they'll go on holiday and they'll essentially like just fucking go off the rails and they want to eat and they want to drink and they want to escape their own life.
Speaker 1:And I think if you think about, let's say that you're very lucky. I was actually talking to a friend of mine who gets ten weeks of holiday a year and was like, wow, that's a fifth of the year. So he's very lucky. Even him who gets all those holidays, if you only live on the holidays in those ten weeks and the weekends, how much of the year are you missing out on? How much of life are you missing out on when you add that up?
Speaker 1:For every ten years that you've lived of your life, you've only really lived for two if you're only living for your holidays because it's a fifth of it. Think about it like that. In some ways our life is very short and limited but in other ways life is long. You're to live till you're If you're 40 years old, 50 years old, you've still got forty, thirty years left. There's a hell of a long time, there's a hell of a lot of living, there's a hell of a lot of Tuesdays, Tuesday mornings and traffic jams in there.
Speaker 1:And if we can learn to live and enjoy those moments and that doesn't mean that enjoying them is walking around with a smile on our face all the time. About the other week, know, being diagnosed with depression and working through things. That's what I'm having to find is I need to find a way to enjoy the day to day and everything that's going on. And if you think about how we measure growth, I think it's something that people forget is that good things take time and that is the point. That is what makes them good things.
Speaker 1:If everyone was just handed all the things that they want to achieve in their lives, whether it's a stable relationship, whether it's financial security, whether it's a loving friendship group, a nice house, whatever it is, honestly it doesn't matter. If it was all just handed to you and given to you, you wouldn't appreciate it, you wouldn't acknowledge it. When we transform and we change as human beings, one of the biggest achievements in my life is, you know, I know I'm going through a bit of a tough spot at the minute, but I like my life. I like the person that I am and that's taken a hell of a lot of work and it's taken a lot of time. It's taken, you know, ten, eleven years of work internally, externally, a lot has gone on.
Speaker 1:And I think a really good way to look at this is look at a tree. A tree does not measure its growth day by day because one day of a tree growing is insignificant, minimal, unnoticeable. Even a week nothing, not really noticeable. A year Subtle. Oh maybe, yeah, I can see it's grown a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah? A decade? Undeniable. You can come back to a tree ten years later and go, that has definitely changed. And it's because when we are zoomed into things growth can feel invisible, life can feel just on autopilot mode but when we zoom out and we look at the things that have changed over our lives it's unquestionable.
Speaker 1:You know, I spoke the other week about being depressed and I've had conversations with friends about sometimes feeling a bit unfulfilled or feeling misaligned with certain things. It's incredible how quickly the scope of our success and our expectations of our lives change. Because like he said to me, he said, If you take a look at even six years ago when you first started GMC, look at how much your life has changed and the people that you've helped and something that you've built and the friendships that have come off the back of it, the lives that have been changed off the back of that, the ripple effect of all that, that person would have bit your hand off. Go back to the version of you ten years ago and think about the life that you've got now, would they go yeah I'd take that right at this moment. Because that kind of zooming in and zooming out lens it can be literally tied to anything whether it's learning things, it's our fitness, whether it's confidence, whether it's self trust, relationships, mastery of a skill.
Speaker 1:Day to day you go not much better. Week to week maybe not that much better. Month to month, year to year you cannot deny the growth that's there. The reason that we struggle with time passing and impatience and things like that is we want certainty. We want to know that what we're doing day to day is going to get us a result, is going to get us the desired outcome because we don't know.
Speaker 1:And that's the thing, especially in health and fitness, in personal growth, in performance coaching that we do at GMC, it's, you know am I any different from when I was last week or yesterday? Am I going to be different in a month's time, a year's time? There's no certainty because none of us can predict the future. So we want reassurance, am I doing the right thing, is this the right thing, is it going to work? We want proof but we want proof now.
Speaker 1:I did a thing yesterday, show me that it's working. The most meaningful things in our lives only make sense in hindsight and there's a phrase where I'm paraphrasing here so forgive me but they talk about how we learn from our experiences and someone said that is not true, that is absolutely not true, we don't learn from our experiences. We learn from reflecting on our experience So we go through the experience which may or may not change us because we are in the moment and having to deal with whatever is happening a difficult situation, a challenge, a good thing, a happy thing that's going on, whatever it is, while you're in it, you're just reacting and dealing with it. It's only when you look back on it and go, wow, that made me do this, this and this. It made me think X, Y and Z.
Speaker 1:It made me behave A, B and C. And so we can fall into this trap of impatience to get to the next experience as quickly as possible and we can talk about how that is ambition but it's not ambition. It's anxiety. It's jittery jittery and I need the next thing. Need the next thing.
Speaker 1:So I just I know there's there's loads of old shitty cliched saying about the present is a gift and all that kind of thing but joy in life isn't the big moments and the fireworks, it's presence. And I think about my most precious relationships in my life with my friends, with my kids, with partners in the past and the joy, you know, let's take my daughter Taylor is in July is going to be going to America. She's got a scholarship at a university for soccer. And it's not going to be the days out at theme parks or holidays that I'm going to miss. It's going to be the little chitchats, the little catch ups, the little ad hoc chats in the car driving to football training or school.
Speaker 1:And it's having that presence to notice that. Like I'm even tearing up thinking about that because those are the little that's the meat of life. It's the presence to be aware of. This is life that's happening right now and whatever you're doing, wherever you're listening to this podcast, maybe you're driving in the car, maybe you're on a walk, life is happening. Take a look around, see what's going on, take a look at the people, beings, notice them and allow today to be enough.
Speaker 1:And that doesn't mean that if today was your last day you should go out and do whatever you would do if it was your last day. I don't need to worry about tomorrow or next week because if you can't enjoy the mundane, you will not enjoy the milestones for long either. They will come, they will go and it will be what next? Because highs fade quickly, the next goal appears quickly and the cycle repeats and before you know it you're 80 years old sat there going 'fucking hell, it was just a hamster wheel and I was on it and I didn't appreciate the things that I saw as I was going past. So it's just a bit of a practical reframe.
Speaker 1:Today I to give you something to do, not just tell you to feel a particular way. So do something that you do really regularly, whether it's feeding the dog, whether it's brushing your teeth, whatever, vacuuming the house, I don't know, and do it really slowly and deliberately. I love that word deliberate. One of my words of the year is to try and not do things on autopilot. Try to be deliberate in the words that I use, the actions that take, the consciousness of me doing something.
Speaker 1:Brushing your teeth is a really good example. If you want a really simple way to do this, try brush your teeth with your overhand, if you're right handed left with your right. And you really have to think about it. Something that you do on autopilot every day and you've done twice a day for years, do it with your left hand and suddenly you bring an awareness to it. Try being fully present for an ordinary moment, you know, whether it's feeding kids, cooking dinner, just sat in traffic, look around at the people around you, are they doing, what are they saying, what are they thinking, can you see what's going on and take the time to measure your progress by zooming out.
Speaker 1:Where was I three months ago, six months ago, you know, and whatever your measures success in, know, is it how much you were earning? Is it how you looked? Is it how you felt? Is it the relationships? Is it what you were doing?
Speaker 1:Zoom out to three months ago, six months ago, twelve months ago, five years ago, ten years ago. Because progress is a lived experience. It's not you know, we measure it retrospectively but we should try and appreciate it daily because it's not always motivating, it's not always there, it's not always easy. So try to be more present, try putting your phone down, try to take my advice or my daughter's advice and not to rush, you know, try to just be be where you are. There's a friend of mine who I used to play rug with, a guy called Ben.
Speaker 1:He used to come out with some Ben was very good at just not fretting about the future. If we had a bad game at rugby we would often say things like oh but we're not going to get picked next week or he's going to say this or this is going to happen or we're going have to do this at training and Ben would kind of just be like yeah and I remember someone once saying to and then something happened where his sister basically stole his credit cards and run up a load of debt, like tens of thousands of pounds. And he was like and someone said to him, he was telling us the story and someone said you must you must be so anxious and so head up, a bit like it's affecting your sleep and everything and he said no, no no and everyone was like what? How? He said how do you do that?
Speaker 1:The first thing he said was be where your feet are and I loved that saying be where your feet are just you know wherever your feet are is where you are and just focus on the things that are around you right now because that's all you have power over. So be where your feet are. Someone said how do you sleep at night?' they said 'I just put my head on the pillow and I close my eyes and I don't think about the future, think about going to sleep' it's always stuck with me. Listen, it's a hell of a lot easier said than done but it's one of those things that I think if you constantly remind yourself be where your feet are is something that I say to myself when there's something kind of going on in my life. Like when we do one of our big GMC events, so like Edinburgh coming up, it's easy to get swept up in it and be like, need to help those people, I need to have that conversation, there's that thing to do, there's that thing to do.
Speaker 1:I want to make sure that runs well. It's so easy to go, right, these things are coming up. And I will tell myself, be where your feet are. Be where your feet are. You do not get extra points for rushing through your life.
Speaker 1:Things take time because they're meant to be lived. That's the point. Things take time and that is the point. I hope this has helped. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 1:If you're coming to Edinburgh next week I cannot wait to see you. If you're not please have a look at when our next events are and get yourself there. There is nothing more powerful than being in a room of like minded people and those conversations and those perspective shifts are always invaluable and investment in yourself is never a wasted investment. So until next week guys, look after yourself, stay safe, go eat and drink and behave at the expense of how you want to look and feel and I'll chat to you very soon.