Like a flash of light, January is well behind us, and perhaps those well-intentioned New Year's Resolutions are long forgotten too? One of mine was to go to yoga - I found a yoga class that ticked all my boxes, put it in my diary for every Monday evening and, guess what? I haven’t been once! Work, life and other reasons got in the way, and that’s fine, but I intend to go this month and you can hold me to that!
Perhaps your Resolutions are a bit like my yoga classes, and remain living in ‘ideas land' despite your best intentions?
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Well, the great news is that February is here now, which means you get to set new intentions and new goals.
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Here in the Southern Hemishere, January and February means hot weather, time-off, beaches, outdoor living, family time and watching spectacular fireworks - the Australia Day Fireworks were particularly amazing.
Time off for me also meant doing my annual review and reflection of the year, a practice I realise I’ve been doing annually since 1997!
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Given that 2017 was such a big year of change and transition for us (new country, new job, new business, new home), I decided to not only review the last year, but to review the last 10 years together! It was a fascinating exercise which threw up some valuable insights, including the fact that most of the big goals I set myself back in 2008 have been achieved! Yay! I became CMO of RBI, trained and qualified as a health and business coach, created and built a wellness brand aligned to my values, took my personal health and fitness to a whole new level, made more time for the important people in my life, travelled the world, including an amazing spiritual trip to India which was a big gap in my travel log, built a significant passive income stream which has enabled us to achieve the biggest goal of moving to Sydney and meeting and connecting with some truly amazing people on this side of the world.
Timings were completely out, years in some cases, but they all happened. Key insight: when you look back at your life, it doesn’t matter how quickly you do things. What matters is that you:
- keep working on yourself
- keep focusing on serving others
- keep moving forward
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A Summer January - I only worked for half of January, but it was an intense process getting my brain back into gear and preparing for some very big potential partnerships. It’s exciting to say the least and this excitement was channelled into some pretty intense work to prepare for conversations and big presentations. You can learn about some of the key insights from this experience in the latest episode of the Raw Energy Show.
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If you’re struggling to move your resolutions from ‘Ideas Land’ to ‘Results Land’, here are some top tips to help you make a positive change. Remember, change and transformation are all about creating and integrating new Healthy Habits into your lifestyle and your business. Whilst it takes a while to form a habit, they define who you are over time, so doing more Healthy Habits will lead to a healthier and better you:
- Study success. Find someone you admire, list their habits and then decide which of their habits you wish to adopt. Just like in business, where books like ‘Delivering Happiness’, and ‘Good to Great’ are recipes for business success, the same is true in other aspects of life. So seek out the successful examples in your life, study what they do, then create a checklist to help you implement the key elements into your own life and teach others to do the same. If you implement two new Healthy Habits every year, that’ll be 20 new habits over a 10 year period! Best get started.
- Beware of those who want to hold you back. When you try to change, other, very well-intentioned people will try to hold you back. Nowhere is this more obvious than when you try to change what you eat. When I decided not to eat meat in 2006, this naturally caused issues for other people. At first, I didn’t have the answers to the questions I now get asked regularly, especially 'Where do you get your protein from?' If you’re trying to change and eat healthier, check out the top tips on what to say in response to the inevitable questions. This piece by Lindsay Oberst is an excellent starting point for people wanting to make a positive change.
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- Persevere. I just love running along a path and not knowing where it will lead.
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Sometimes it comes to an abrupt stop and I'm forced to go back. But, other times, what seems like a dead-end, opens up into a new path, a new opportunity and a new adventure. If you're feeling stuck, often a new perspective can help you find the way through and allow you to keep on track so that you don’t have to go back to the beginning.
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Just like running along an unfamiliar path, if you’re stuck in a job, a business, or a relationship, don’t give up. Seek out the advice from someone who has been there before so that they can guide you through. There’s always a way.
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- Practise - it’s easy to spend time talking, but it’s action that gets results. Just like my yoga that hasn’t (quite) started, when things are unfamiliar, it’s hard to get up-and-running and 'into the groove'. But once you’ve begun, it's much easier to keep going and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you will improve and grow. Make time to practise and become a master in the things that are important to you so that you can have a better life.
- Passion - when you’re passionate about what you do, you don’t need extrinsic motivation, you have motivation from the inside. What do you love to do? If you manage a team, find out what they are passionate about too and try to align their roles with their passions. There’s nothing more wellbeing-enhancing than doing a job you love. I recently ran a team session and one of the first exercises was to find out what people are passionate about and I discovered that we have team consisting of people passionate about: cooking, running, nutrition, baseball, refereeing and singing! We're now playing with ways to bring these multiple talents into the workplace to share the passion. Win-win!
- Take care of the bookends of your day (as Darren Hardy reminds us):
- Morning habits. Start the day off right to set the tone for the whole day. I begin my day with a consistent set of morning habits: a meditation, a note in my journal, the priorities for the day and a run. All of that helps put me in a very good frame of mind and ready to tackle whatever the day throws at me!
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- Evening Habits. At the other end of the day, my evening habits are a bit like the end of a retail day. As every store owner knows, the day will end with cashing up and preparing for the next day before heading home. Applying that logic to your life, at the end of the day, your cash-up could include activities such as writing a gratitude journal to focus the
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mind on the more positive aspects of the day, writing down the priorities for the next day, reading something relaxing, saying goodnight to your phone and putting it to bed in another room!
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- Focus on the present (emphasised by Eckart Tolle in The Power of Now). Work should be energising, but the sad fact is that 66% of Australians are dissatisfied with their work and 1 in 3 quitting their jobs because of stress. Given the amount of change in business and society, it’s no surprise that stress is on the rise.
So what you can you do about it? Bring yourself back to the present moment by allowing yourself to focus on the present using 'mindfulness techniques' such as focusing on the beating of your pulse, taking three deep breaths, going outside to look at the sky and imagining the universes that lies beyond the blue. These very quick tasks will help your brain and body calm down, and importantly give you the energy to cope with the next challenge of your day.
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- Set goals for yourself - one great way to set big goals is to write yourself a ‘letter from the future’, visualising the way you would like your life to be, say a year from now. I wrote a 'Letter from the Future' in January 2017. It helped provide valuable structure and when it arrived in my inbox on December 28th 2017, about 50% of things had become a reality and the other 50% were things that I couldn’t have imagined would happen. That's what makes life exciting! Why don’t you write your own ‘Letter from the Future’ and share it with me at lawrence@getrawenergy.co. I'd love to hear from you.
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Your chance to work one-to-one with me
Lifestyle & Business Fusion Coaching - if you need help to visualise your future and create a road map from the present, then I'd love to help you. The Raw Energy coaching approach is a unique method of lifestyle and business coaching, blended together to enhance your overall life, business and wellbeing.
The process starts with a half day intensive, where we’ll unravel your whole life and set a compelling vision for you to work towards. We’ll then have three follow-up accountability calls.
If you’re in Sydney, we can meet in person in our Lavender Bay studio, but don't worry if you're not. I work with many people based in the UK and the US via the Zoom video conference platform. It's amazing what can be achieved today working collaboratively across countries and time-zones.
I have the capacity to take on two coaching clients in March, so please Contact me for a one-to-one no-obligation discussion to see if I can help. If you're a leader in your business, family or community, get in touch.
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Links to latest blog articles:
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Let me leave you with a very inspirational thought from Guru Singh:
'Our prayer is that you ride these storms until they disappear (they will); ride them with confidence, skill and creativity. Untangle the excessive strands of fear that have woven themselves into your days; separate the noise from the music and sing a song that calms the storm . . . become an example for those less courageous to hold on to and follow. Turn this world into the sanctuary it deserves to be, with the life you deserve to live.’
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Enjoy FlexFeb and see you in March!
To your health,
Lawrence
Founder & CEO of Raw Energy, CCO of SumoSalad, Life Coach, Author
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