Pete:
We are all here because of. He’s the guy that set up the event. Could we all please make some noise for Mr Lee Jackson? Come on, Lee.
Lee:
Well, Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Hey, everyone. So, first of all, I’d love to know how many people are here because of the podcast.
I just want to do a little bit of data cleaning. So we’ve got a few podcast listeners. You guys are legends. We launched the podcast back in 2015 and as a result of that, over the years, we’ve gotten to meet some incredible people like yourselves. It just goes to show the immense power of networking.
So from that, you’re going to see a picture in a minute of me actually doing a podcast back in 2015. So from starting something really small, we were able to slowly connect with all of these different people. Do you remember in the old days, we used to do the 3D or five degrees of how I am somehow connected to Arnold Schwarzenegger? Do you remember those sorts of things? So I would love to work out how we are all connected, how we’ve all connected over the years.
Vito over there. We met back in 2019. He made friends with Andrew. They do great work together. He’s going to be sharing more of that later.
We’ve met Travis here. Travis has come all the way over from Washington State specifically to this event, which kind of puts pressure on me, mate. Thanks very much. But again, a listener who’s made friends with other listeners or met other people within the community, it’s been incredible. So thank you, everybody for coming.
It’s great to see that we have any couple of spare chairs. That’s great. We do have apologies from some people who couldn’t come because of positive COVID tests, so we appreciate that they didn’t come, but we obviously missed them. So today we are going to have a conversation. It’s going to be a little bit raw and we’re talking along the lines of small achievable actions and I am aware that some people may not know who I am, so let’s do a little bit of a history.
This is me many years ago. I was born in Canada. That’s my dad and he was back then training to be a minister. That’s my lovely mum. And that’s my big sister missing from this is my little baby brother, who was born 15 years later.
If we go over here. About seven years later, my dad was finally ordained as a minister and I worked out that I could pull my trousers up as high as possible. That’s me. I also had a lot of hair back then. This is me before I started the podcast.
And I thought that I needed to create this incredible image of a man who was professional. He wore a tie. It was actually from Madeleine. I was wearing a Matalan shirt and I got an old secondhand mac that looked good. And I went to my mate’s mum’s house because she’s got a big house and I got another friend to take pictures to make me look like I was a really successful guy.
It didn’t really work, by the way, but that’s where I was going. And then eventually I realised there’s a point to this. Eventually I realised that I just needed to be the idiot that I actually am, and I got a clothes horse, put a blanket over it and started the podcast 15 years ago. 15 years ago.
In 2015, seven years ago. And that’s led to wonderful friendships and relationships. A hat and a beard.
So let’s go through, let’s set the scene. For most agency owners. I’m going to stereotype. You don’t have to agree here, but I think most of us probably feel a little bit stressed most weeks, if not overwhelmed, if not worried. And the reason for that is that we are the central point.
Everything’s coming to us. We’re responsible for our team, we’re responsible for the projects, we’re responsible for the leads, we’re responsible for the marketing, we’re responsible for talking to upset clients, we’re responsible for talking to happy clients. We’re also responsible for looking after our families and spending time with them. We have an awful lot of things, an awful lot of demands and pressures and it’s frankly overwhelming. It’s stressful.
It’s hard not to bring the stress of the office back home and it’s hard not to take the stress of home back to the office. If you don’t have any of that, please talk to me later, because I’d love advice, but I imagine most agency owners go through at least one or two weeks where everything’s stressed out. And the thing is, we all have goals and aspirations, we’ve all got wonderful dreams. We want to be somewhere, we want to do something different. And how do we do that?
At a personal level or at a business level? How do we grow without burning out? And for me, this talk is very personal. So I’m not saying you’re necessarily the problem, although it does say it is you. The problem might actually be you.
And I know, in my experience, that the problem, over time, was me. So where do we start? I want to tell you a story. So many years ago, that is me back then. I was 22 stone.
I was breathing in for the picture. I was quite proud of that. I thought I looked pretty slim. And that is my wonderful wife. That is when I dropped to one knee, asked her to mirror me and struggled to get back up.
She did say yes, but it was at that moment I realised that I wasn’t feeling great. I was feeling unhealthy. We’d been running around London. I felt absolutely exhausted. I’d had a recent conversation with my doctor, hereditary, whatever, but I was certainly going to start to have problems with my heart, etc.
If I didn’t get myself sorted out. And when I saw this picture, I saw this beautiful woman I’m absolutely crazy about and she looks amazing. And I thought, this is going to be beauty and the beast on the wedding pictures, because she wants the wedding, like, now. So I got to work, and just a year later, I think I’m looking pretty good. Yeah, yeah, we got a few nods.
Thank you. Yeah, I think I’m looking pretty good. I’ve got myself down to about 15 stone for the wedding, and then I did eventually take it a little bit too far and got totally addicted to marathon running. So this is me in the Cardiff marathon. There I am.
I finally lost all my hair. That’s nothing to do with marriage, and I was far too skinny. But you get the idea. I had managed to actually achieve something. And let’s look at the ingredients of success.
I was bought in. I knew I needed to lose the weight, and I was bought in because I wanted to be healthy. I wanted along life, I wanted along marriage. I didn’t want to look like the beast on the pictures. I wanted to be healthy.
I was completely bought in. What I did to train, I decided to set myself some micro goals. So I set myself first to just run for a minute. So at 22 stone, I run for a minute, walked for a minute, run for a minute, and I did that for ten minutes. And that was my first workout.
And over time, I kept building it up. Then I set myself a goal of going for a 5k, then a 10k, then a half marathon, and so on and so forth. So I had small achievable goals that I could aim for that weren’t too taxing, but I could build myself towards. What I was also doing was tracking my progress. If we go back here, that site fetch everyone, which doesn’t exist anymore, they got bought out.
But that allowed me to track all of my progress, what I was eating, and also my calories, my miles, run, et cetera. So I was tracking everything, and because I was tracking everything, I was able to celebrate success regularly. I was celebrating that with my family, with my friends. And finally, the most important part to me was I had an accountability partner that was my friend Martin, and we were both running together. So with these, these were the ingredients to my success.
The result for me, and this is kind of weird, this first one is obvious, was a confidence boost. I would never be stood up on stage. Back in 2004, I was a very mild mannered. I was very nervous. I didn’t like to talk to people completely different.
I had a confidence boost. I had massive self belief. My health, obviously was significantly increased. I had way more energy and weirdly, it helped my career. And I’m not saying that just because I lost weight.
I got the career. The reason I got the career boost was that I was energised, I was focused, I was healthy, I was confident, I was able to build my way through the business. So through the company that I was working at, the problem is that was the exception rather than the rule. I tapped into one thing that I wanted to do, hyper focused on it for two years, which was great. It had a really good positive impact on my life and I never learnt from it, which is a shame.
So let’s just have a conversation about those dreams that we have. We have many dreams, again, at a personal level or at a business level. And the reason we tend to fail is that we jump into our ideas too quickly. My business partner is here, Tim Davis. Just over there.
Extremely handsome guy. Hi, Tim. Good to see you. Thanks for coming. Tim and I are great at this.
We’ll have an idea and within five minutes we’ll be buying the domain, we’ll be building a web page for it, we’ll be having conversations and we’ll be planning for how are we going to cope when we sell 1 million of these and when will we need to staff up and having all of these conversations.
And we’re doing that within the first few minutes, which is great, but we will jump all in. This is something that we’ll do and then we’ll jump all in and we’ll exhaust ourselves. We’ll be overworked. We might be putting hours into this brand new idea that we only had ten minutes ago and within a few days we’ve just been doing nothing but this new idea. We’ve set ourselves in reasonable targets.
You know, I might have set myself a target and this isn’t necessarily mean you Tim, don’t we? But I might have set myself a target of selling 100 in six months or something like that, but that’s just an unreasonable target because I certainly don’t have the resources to sell 100 or even support 100, et cetera. So I set myself these impossible targets really out of the general excitement of the germ of that idea. I also don’t really know why I’m doing it. I’m excited by the idea.
This is a really clever product idea, but to be honest, there’s no real vision, there’s no end point, there’s no necessary benefit to someone at the end of it. It’s just something that sounds really cool, that might make money. And that’s not necessarily a great thing or a great reason to be doing something. Something that sounds cool, that might make money is not really the best motivator, except for when the first gem of the idea comes and you get a little bit excited about it. And finally, we’re the worst for this.
Within a few days of exhausting ourselves, some other idea pops in and now we’re getting really excited about us. It’s amazing we could do that instead. So now we’re buying another domain name. We’ve got many domain names, aren’t we? Tim, Bloxado, Rondayvoo, you named it.
We’ve got lots of cool names. The name Storm, name Brainstorming is usually a day’s worth of work, minimum. So it’s another new idea and we’re on it like a car bonnett we’re just all over that new idea. The old idea kind of just gets moved, or we give it off to one of the team members to do a few bits here or there, and eventually that just goes to the cemetery of great ideas that we had that are now discarded and we’re moving on to something else. We don’t do that nowadays, thankfully, but it’s certainly been the norm for me personally.
I’m definitely massively responsible for that. Both in our business Event Engine and in Trailblazer. Just getting excited by new ideas and they’re not sticking with any one thing. The result, though, is you’ll hit overwhelm. If you’ve got four or five ideas going on at the same time and you’re doing a bit of each, you’ve actually created all of this extra work for yourself that you needn’t do because you’ve still got the clients. You’ve still got your staff to pay, you’ve still got the marketing to do.
You’ve got all of these other responsibilities. And you’ve created for yourself all of this extra work because of the exciting idea and the wonderful dream that you now have. So you hit overwhelm, you very quickly lose the motivation. Again, that’s usually because it was an exciting idea that might make some money at the time, but actually that’s not really the great reason, and you eventually give up, but the worst thing is you might do this, you might give up and never try anything else again. And that’s where I got to quite a while back, and that’s at a personal level and at a business level, I was thinking, it’s pointless.
Everything I try, it’s not going to succeed, it’s pointless now. I eventually got myself out of that and went the opposite direction and a familiar pattern started to emerge. I started taking on too much. I started, you know, taking responsibility. I’ll show you a list in a minute of all the sorts of things I was getting up to.
I was prioritising my work over my health, even though the business was okay. I was just doing more and more. Again, I was going after these ideas. I’d give myself the pep talk, I’m like, Come on, I can do this, and started throwing more and more on my plate. I was taking on things with, say, church, I was taking on responsibilities as a family as well as running multiple businesses.
And again, I was back to setting those unreasonable targets. I don’t know why, but I think we need to we seem to just naturally punish ourselves don’t we have this because of the excitement? We just have this incredibly huge target that sounds achievable in our brain when we first write it down on paper, but then in reality, it is actually a little bit unreasonable. So let me tell you another story. The science for me was first of all, twitching, which sounds really weird, and it was actually in.
My good friend Mr. Martin Huntbach down here did a talk in 2019 where he shared a bit about this, but he also shared a lot about this before the event as well. I don’t even remember the conversation we had, but I started twitching randomly and I couldn’t understand why I was doing it. It was like real proper big twitches. Sometimes my arm would fly up in the air and Tim will remember business conversations where he might suggest I do something. Could you send an email to a client?
And lo and behold, I’d be twitching or I’d be upset about something. And it was really obvious to Tim or to my wife or to anyone, because I just could not control this twitching. So I started twitching. I was not sleeping at night and I was starting to get only mild, but I was starting to get these feelings of panic, you’re not feeling of dread that you don’t know why. It’s just there.
I was getting it, like, all the time and then sometimes I’d start to just feel a bit tingly and quick breathing, a bit scared for no reason, wouldn’t know why. I’d snap then at whoever was with me and I’d need to go and walk out of the situation. Kate just thought I was becoming a grumpy old man before my time, but, yeah, that started happening. And then the worst thing that exacerbated everything was I was starting to get pains in my left arm and I was very worried.
My dad had passed away a few years ago of a major heart attack. And Mums, God love them, my mum said to me after he died, you know it’s hereditary, don’t? Yeah, really? Thanks, Mum. So she doesn’t know that, but she’s created this terrible thing in my mind.
So what was now happening was not only was I twitching, sleepless nights, anxiety, I was getting this pain in the left arm. I had my mum’s voice floating around my head in a Northern Lancashire accent. That was a terrible impression, you know, of telling me it’s hereditary. I was putting on weight again, you know, I wasn’t looking after myself at all and I was just starting to get worried. I had all of these responsibilities and I felt like I was kind of starting to fall apart.
So I did what any sane person would do and I got even busier and did more work, which is about right, isn’t it? That’s what you would do, isn’t it? So I’m throwing myself here into things like leading worship at church. That’s the actual Christmas event. We did hours and hours of work to do this massive Christmas event for people.
I was at the front of stage, we were singing songs, learning things, committing hours to things. I was doing public speaking. That’s me down at “ItsNomad” doing a talk for them. So, for me, my solution was to throw myself into more things, to basically ignore the problem, but that didn’t really work. Does anyone recognise this statement?
I look after myself once everything’s done. That’s something that I kept saying to myself, I’ll be all right. We’re just going to get this new product over the line and then I’ll take some time off and I’ll look after myself. I’ll be all right. We’ve just got this one last performance at church and I’ll get that done.
I’ll be all right. I’ve just onboarded another new client, so I will go and see the doctor, but it’ll be after that project in six months and I’m all right, I feel okay. And you can see here, very lightly, all the different things I had going on. This idiot on stage decided he was also going to write a book and launch another podcast. Because I love podcasting, I launched a YouTube channel.
I became a brand ambassador. You’d imagine I’m adding all of these things to the list. And I kind of thought I was being successful because I was doing all of these wonderful things. I even had the 2019 event coming up, so I’m basically working myself into the ground before you legends all turned up in, Wellingborough, in 2019. So, thankfully we turned around.
We’ll learn a bit more about that. But let me tell you another story, and that is Tim, my wonderful business partner. Thanks, mate. This was the worst day of my life. We went down to a client in London and I’d been having these panic attacks and the twitches and that, but I thought I was going to be okay.
Tim drove us down in the Dented Mini. He’s got this cool little car, he’s got a massive dent in it, so we all call it the Dented Mini. His kids are great. And down we went. And about 45 minutes in, I’m starting to feel that dread here, and a few light tingles, and it’s making me feel a bit nauseous, so I’m like, Tim, do you mind if we just pull over at the next services?
Just need to take a walk and go the loo and that. So I got out and I’m trying to shake this dread, I’m trying to shake these tingles and eventually I can’t really I’ve not told him what’s up, I’m just like, trying to play it cool and eventually I’m like, yeah, I’m ready, let’s go. And we get back in the car and he only drives around the corner. We’re not even out of the service station, is it Tilbrook? I can’t remember the one on the way down to London wasn’t it and we left.
Not even got to the garage. And I just felt this incredible electric charge going all the way through my body. My arms were shivering, everything, and I was starting to shake uncontrollably. I felt extremely nauseous. I felt really dizzy.
The twitching was going in like crazy and I was like, Tim, please can we pull over? I don’t know what’s wrong. I think I’m having a panic attack. But not like a panic attack panic attack that I thought I was having in the past, which was just a bit this was a full on it lasted about 45 minutes in the car park of Tim being a legend, rubbing my leg, telling me, like, breathing exercises, just talking me through it, which was incredible. And then eventually, when I kind of calmed down a bit, we carried on driving down to London because I insisted, no, we still need to go.
So off we went down to London and I did spend at least another 30 minutes. I think I eventually passed out, didn’t I, Tim? I spent another 30 minutes with this electrical charge going on. Eventually kind of fell asleep, which was good, because it meant we got there quicker and then felt all right. So that evening, Tim really looked after me and took me to was it Vietnamese?
I can’t remember. A really nice restaurant. And he just loved on me. First of all, we went for a beer and then we went out for food and he just asked me lots of questions and tried to get to the bottom of it and was just a really good mate. That’s a great thing about business partners when they’re all so you mate.
And we had a really good conversation, got me through that, had a good sleep. We went and nailed the meeting. The meeting was to get a product spec for a brand another new idea that we had, which thankfully, we didn’t go after Domain, but we were scoping out this client to say, right, well, what would you need if we were to build the side deal system? So we spent the day with them and we got that brief and I felt, all right, I managed to get through it, et cetera, and we nailed it. We got the meeting and on the way home I felt a lot better.
But I needed to work out what the root causes were that I couldn’t understand what had happened to me. The root causes were obviously that I had too much going on and I was on my way to a meeting to get a brief for another new idea that we were going to create. You remember that list? Don’t you have all those other things? I had also, though, I’m in the car and I’m not driving.
And I know that sounds weird, but it meant I’m not in control, Tim’s in control of the car. I’m not in control anymore. I was a complete control freak over everything. Controlling the code, controlling my team, controlling everything that was happening with the event planning, controlling the podcast. I was publishing all the social media because I’m the best person to write the social media.
Surely I was doing everything I possibly could at home because I wanted to be the best husband ever. So I was cooking and doing all sorts of childcare and just trying to be an absolute legend so my wife would think I’m a legend. For some reason she does. Anyway, I continued to set myself on realistic goals, one of them being I’ll go down to London and take a new product brief for a new idea that we’ve got. And of course I was just heavily ignoring my own well being.
So after a lot of self reflection, I did have a major ‘AHA’ moment. I thought back to that story I told at the beginning where I put on all of that weight. I was feeling unhealthy. And that and I was able to lose all of that weight through those small achievable actions by breaking down, setting that target of 5K and starting with a couple of minutes of running, a couple of minutes of walking, and slowly building that up over time. And I realised that that whole process took two years to get from 22 stone down to a stupid weight of 11 1/2 stone of which eventually someone took me to the side and say, you’ve actually now gotten the opposite way, you need to put some weight on.
It was like little body, big head sort of scenario. It was really weird. But thinking back to it, I recognised that I had been able to achieve something by taking my time, small achievable actions, and the results had been amazing. I felt a hell of a lot better. I’d had that career boost, I had that energy boost, that health boost, et cetera.
So within days I’d been to the doctor. That’s great. I had cancelled almost everything. I cancelled two podcasts that I just started, I just knocked all sorts of projects on the head. I had a great conversation with Tim and we decided all these ideas are going to go into the, will pop a pin on them board and we’ll just focus on these things over here.
And I was just able to essentially clear my slope because I had ATL2019 coming up in three months, this is actually March the 12th was the big horrible day that this all happened on. Was it? Yeah, March the 12th or the 11th, around that time, and on May the 8th was going to be ATL2019. So I knew I needed to do something in three months if I was going to be able to stand on stage, not freak out. So I went to the doctor.
We took everything off the list apart from the Trailblazer podcast and the event and me working on one product at Event Engine. So I’m always grateful for that as well. Just to really clear my mind and help me essentially to reset and look after myself. And the only way I could think of doing it was something called Streaks. Has anyone heard of Snapchat?
I’m one of the cool kids. I use Snapchat still to this day. And one of my colleagues had introduced me to something called Streaks. And what you do is you send each other a goofy picture once a day. On Snapchat and the number keeps going up and it gets kind of addictive when you get to 100.
You’re like, well, I can’t not text you now, because if I don’t, I’m not going to see, it up to 101. And we were on something like 700. So we’d already been doing streaks for two years, sending stupid pictures.
You know what mature adults do. But we were at like 700. So I thought to myself, well, I wonder if I can adopt that sort of mentality my slides were the wrong way around adopt that sort of mentality with streaks so that’s exactly what I decided to go ahead and do and I adopted streaks just here for two things only. I thought, if I can go for a walk every day, that’s just something small and achievable that I can start off with. And also, I probably need to start meditation.
I’ve never done it in my life. But people are always saying how great meditation is. All the successful people do it, but also for someone whose mind is just trying to think of everything and it won’t shut up. Actually, meditation sounded like a good thing to do. So I started off a ten minute walk every single day using streaks.
And I started off doing some meditation, which was really helpful. And over the period of a month, it took me a little while. I missed the odd day here or there, but over the period of months, started to become habit. And over the period of three months by three months, I was meditating. Every day I was walking every day.
I lost a little bit of weight. I was starting to feel a bit healthier. My mind was a lot emptier because I actually was able to practise clearing my mind. In fact, on the 8th of May 2019, I was meditating outside. And doing all sorts of little practises just to calm myself down before I introduced the stage.
And here I am in all of my glory. Don’t you remember? Look at that on that great day well it was a great two days wasn’t it? So let’s unpack this a little bit and see how we can apply this to ourselves but I just want to drive one point across I’ve talked a lot about me at a personal level I am using Streaks to improve my own health that’s physical and mental health and the thing is we can’t keep. Saying that thing to ourselves.
I will look after myself once I’ve sorted that thing out in the business, or once that project is done. If we don’t sort ourselves out first, if we don’t deal with those problems, if we don’t get our mental health in check, if we don’t give ourselves a break, if we don’t cancel some of the things that are just overwhelming, et cetera, then we’re actually going to do a poor job anyway in whatever else we’re doing. So Tim extremely patient with me, but I’ve stretched myself through all sorts of stuff, which meant I was doing an abysmal job at the things that he was relying on me for because I stretched myself too thin and I was exhausted as a person. So let’s look at these. I would encourage you if there’s anything you want to achieve in life, be that break a habit, start a new habit, or do whatever.
Streaks are incredibly effective. And these are actually real streaks that I’m tracking. But here a streak is a consecutive series of days where you complete your goal. That could be you’re doing something once a week, tracking it all year. It could be that you’re doing it every single day.
Most of my streaks are every single day. It could be that you’re doing it on workdays. If you want to make sure you have a lunch break, for example, I ain’t going to have an hour’s lunch break five days a week. You can track those streaks. That’s really good because you can hold yourself accountable to those lunch breaks.
By the way, if someone can wave at me when I’ve talked too much because I have no idea how far I am. And you can see over here recently, 100 and something days ago I started walking 10K steps a day. I’ve read the Bible now for 130 something consecutive days and I still find it tough going. I’ve done my prayer, I’ve got my meditation now for 1100 and something days and I’ve even started learning Dutch recently because I like I like learning new things. So we’ve got Paul, we’ve got our Dutch contingent, we’ve got the Dutch table here.
I’ve been slowly learning Dutch for the last few days, just a little bit at three minutes, in fact, three minutes of Dutch every single day. And I’ve already had a very broken conversation with you guys and a pat on the back, which is great. But these are the ideas. There are all sorts of things that you can do for streaks, but with streaks, it’s something that you can do regularly that you can essentially track your progress. Let’s walk you through it.
Step one what are your dreams? A dream is a wish. What are your dreams? How would you feel if you achieved your dreams? Because a lot of those ideas I mentioned earlier were great ideas that might make money, but they wouldn’t necessarily make a difference to my life or to the life of the people who purchased the product or the great idea that I had.
It’s not really a dream. So what are your dreams? Are your dreams to work four days a week? Are your dreams to go and live in another country or to travel the world and work and be a digital nomad? Are your dreams to get out of debt?
Whatever? There are all sorts of dreams. So what are your dreams and importantly, how would they affect your life? And then from those dreams, I would say brainstorm some actions that you could do. Would that be, like I said, four days a week?
Would that be breaking a bad habit? For me, one of them was to break a bad habit. Or would that be losing weight? Or would it be getting the book out of you that you’ve had inside of you for years that you’ve never, ever started or started multiple times and never finished, and think, you know what, I could achieve 250 words a day for the next year and I’ll have a book by the end of it. Maybe that could be something as well, just for fun.
But that’s how powerful streaks are. You can pick one of your dreams and just set a small one for now. Not a book that’s huge, but maybe it is going for a walk every single day. Maybe it is not working on Fridays by hook or, by crook and somehow doing it four days a week. I don’t know, whatever it be within reason.
Choose the goal that you feel most strongly about and I would say go for it. One small achievable action at a time. You can break that goal down if that’s going to be losing weight for me. I’ve lost weight recently. I’ve lost the size of my son in the last six months.
So six months ago thanks, mate. Six months ago I was 222 pounds and I’m now down to 196 pounds and my son is 28 pounds in weight and I’ve lost like 36 pounds, which is insane. So or something like that. I lost a lot of weight and I’ve owned. I’ve done that really really slowly using streaks where I am walking 10K steps a day and I’m having 2000 calories a day and I’m now at the point where I need to change that and increase the calories and just hold the weight at where I am otherwise I’ll get too thin.
But what I was able to do is just break that one goal down into something really simple. 10K steps, 2K calories, dead easy, I can track that, job done. So whatever your first goal is, just break it down and you can break it down into segments as well. I want to achieve this micro goal over the next three months. Give yourself a long time to do it.
I would highly recommend a long time as opposed to trying to give yourself two or three weeks, because that’s just going right back to what we did in the first place. Wasn’t it an unreasonable goal? Here’s my example of a book or tracking how many days you abstain from something, maybe trying to give up smoking or whatever. Maybe you’re going for your walks in every single day and that I’d encourage you to track your progress because there is nothing cooler than looking at this and knowing that I’ve actually now done 40 days worth of learning Dutch every single day. I feel like a freaking legend.
And I can see that on a daily basis. It’s on my phone. It’s an app called streaks. Dead easy to remember. So go ahead and check that out.
The final and most important stage, I would say, is to be accountable. My best buddy is just over there on the AV team and we’ve known each other for many years. This was us seven years ago. We’re still as bad as darts. That was us two weeks ago.
We still missed the board regularly and we still tried to throw the double at the end. And we eventually give in and see who can get as close to the bullseye as possible because we can’t throw the double, one that we’re both aiming for. But the important thing is, I’ve told all of my streaks, all of my dreams to him and he regularly asks me, he regularly wants to see the screenshots, to see how far I’ve got. The great thing is with Streaks is I can’t lie to me because I know if I’ve missed a day, I can’t lie to me. And I don’t want to have to tell Ian one day that thing.
I really wanted to do that walking every single day. I don’t particularly want to tell him that I’ve not abstained or that I’ve not gone for that walk, et cetera. So that’s been a really powerful influence. And in fact, me and Tim do this in business as well. We make sure we’re accountable to each other for certain things, maybe for keeping on top of emails or for just talking to each other if we’re struggling with anything.
Finally, celebrate and reward yourself regularly. That is a month of 10K steps. A couple of was that August? Yes. So at the end of August we had a Chinese takeaway.
It was great. Absolutely fantastic. But if you’re tracking, make sure you reward yourself regularly and then rinse and repeat until it’s complete. I’ve rushed through the last bit, sorry, because I realised I was talking for an awfully long time. I would just say the major takeaway the major takeaways from this are number one.
Please look after yourself. If you are feeling anxious or stressed or you’re worried about anything, please, A, talk to a doctor, obviously, and B, then see what you can do to just cut a few things out and just start to reset yourself. Remember, as a business owner, you’re going to be here, learning loads of amazing things on stage. New ideas, et cetera. New ways to run your business.
They’re all great. Make good notes of them, but also make sure that you make the most of looking after your own health as well. And if you do want to have a conversation about this privately, come and find me. Let’s have a talk. I’m more than happy to share my own experiences as well, but I would just say don’t do what I kept doing, which was I’ll look after myself until I sorted this out.
Okay? Promise. We’ve got nods and thumbs up. Awesome.
