Consistency and Finding Time To Do It All
Welcome to the one day at a time podcast with your host and the future leader of The Republic Of Wales, Sveldfjer. Now this might be the only podcast in the world where you actually have to reduce the speed instead of increasing it. However, what I wanna get over to you is that the past is gone. The future doesn't exist. So if you wanna make the most of your life, you've gotta make the most of these moments every single day.
Speaker 1:And this podcast is gonna help you live a healthier, more fulfilled life, hopefully, giving you some wisdom to take away every single day. So I'm gonna shut up now so you can get on with listening to the next episode. Good morning everyone. I did a poll yesterday in the Facebook group asking what do you need help with the most? And number one, by quite a long shot was consistency.
Speaker 1:Second place was how to fit it all into your lifestyle. So let's tackle these both, and see what we can come up with. First of all, consistency. What does it even mean? What you mean is consistency?
Speaker 1:Consistency of, you know, a sauce, which just means it needs to be exactly the same thickness all the way around. It needs to be the same consistency, perfect, same all the time. And then there's consistency, the actual word we are trying to get ahold of here, which is a older word, and it means, consistency is also about being steady. So steady in our behavior. And I prefer that one, that definition, because I think we all think consistency as consistency has to be exactly the same.
Speaker 1:I think if we think that, it's gonna stress ourselves out because it's impossible to be exactly the same every day. And if it's something that's impossible to achieve, we are gonna beat ourselves up about it. And it's this feedback loop that is terrible for our mental health. And we end up not wanting to bother because we cannot be perfect all the time. And that's the truth of it.
Speaker 1:So we think consistency is perfection, and it's not. So we need to change our opinion and what it means to change our viewpoint on it. And this is what Epictetus, the famous stoic talks about all the time. It's like, it's our opinion about things that makes a difference, not the thing. And it's the backbone of modern day psychotherapy.
Speaker 1:Your opinion on consistency is the problem. Because your opinion on consistency is you have to be perfect every day. And if you're not, you therefore are a failure, and there's no point doing it, and you go into a binge. So let's change it up. Let's look at consistency as being steady.
Speaker 1:So what do I mean by steady? Mean by steady is like, let's try and be steady every day, try and be rational and steady with a cool head. If we can bring that to every day, we can try and be our best that day. And we need to look at what makes us not steady. So for me, going on a big heavy drinking weekend doesn't make me steady on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Speaker 1:My week, therefore, is not steady and won't be consistent because I'll feel, you know, shitty and down and whatever, and that's not coming out to being steady. So we need to look at the things, first of all, instead of trying to look at what we can do to be steady, let's have a look at things that make us not steady and see if we can remove them from our lives or minimize them. That's the first task. So the second task is how can we be steady and what's it gonna mean? So steady as well as being a decatastrophizer essentially.
Speaker 1:It's not taking something that happens to you and then letting it catastrophize into something massive. An example of being steady would be you've had a really tough morning, you woke up a bit late, you're rushing about, you're late to work, you get there, huge presentation you gotta do, you do it, it sucks, you know, you didn't do well, and you saw an office drawer of snacks and you had a Snickers duo and it's 11:30, first thing you've had Snickers duo all day and you go, I'm gonna be on a diet, I'm gonna be losing weight, I was a point, I hate this, I've had a Snickers, now it's all over, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go and eat more of a cake, la la la. So what's happened there is is the fact that you're not being steady with a cool head and you've let that one thing that that day, that kind of accumulation of things in a day lead to you just doing a self sabotage and then happen to us like that and always catastrophize them and black and white thinking and think the day's ruined because you've had one Snickers, then of course you're going to struggle with consistency.
Speaker 1:Because you are going to have those days, you are gonna have those times where you just wanna have some comfort food and you shouldn't punish yourself for it because it can fit into your macros. Now someone with a sturdy cool head would have gone, what a morning. Do you know what? I have a Snickers. I'm gonna have a Snickers duo.
Speaker 1:They're 450 calories. Don't care. I'm gonna have it. I'm gonna love it. Lovely.
Speaker 1:Nice. Have a cup of tea. Morning's gone. You know, hell morning, but let's try and have a better afternoon. And, I'll put this in my macros.
Speaker 1:And, yes, it's not the best calorie density wise. You know? I'm gonna have to take a bit maybe a bit of hit later. I'll have a smaller meal for dinner. That's fine.
Speaker 1:And that's how you do it with a steady head. And, you know, is that a perfect day? No. Did you do the best scenario? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Could you not have had a snickers? Potentially, potentially. But is that really living in the real world? Are we living am I being rational by asking you to behave in the way where you're never gonna have comfort foods yourself over bad days? No.
Speaker 1:But we don't have to let them turn into catastrophes for days. I think we do a lot of us will just let that roll, and, we then think, well, I can't do it. I can't do it. Well, you can do it. You can definitely do it.
Speaker 1:You just need a bit of a cool head in those scenarios. The most of those scenarios you have good. I hope all of you have these scenarios coming soon. I hope you have a stressful morning in work, and I hope someone does offer you sneakers. And I hope you take it and I hope you do not let it impact you mentally and I hope you just put it in the app and forget about it go, yeah, I loved it, nice, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I want you to that's how I want you to be to react, that is someone who is steady, that is someone who is act that's someone who is very wise versus someone who's like, I'm not having any bad things ever. I'm gonna bring in three meals a day of chicken and broccoli. And you look at these people and you might think on the outside they're superior in terms of their commitment and consistency, but they're not because they'll get rocked. They can have a stressful day. What are gonna do when they forget those meals one day?
Speaker 1:Or they have a stressful day and they have a Snickers and they go, do know what? I'm gonna go off here for a week now. I thought I was perfect, but I'm not. Do know I mean? So I think it's a good way to look at it.
Speaker 1:So please don't think you have to be perfect every day. If that is your belief, you've gotta be perfect every day. You're you're you're literally, literally setting yourself up to fail before you start. The second thing I wanna touch on is how to fit it all into your life. The short answer is you can't.
Speaker 1:You just can't. You have to prioritize things. And it's easy for me to say, I don't have kids. Live on my own. So for someone who has got three kids, two part time jobs, you know, running about no time, they've got severely less time than I have.
Speaker 1:100% fact, they've got less time than me. But that doesn't even matter. That comparison is pointless. Do you know why it's pointless? Because they can learn nothing of me and I can learn essentially nothing of them for my life.
Speaker 1:Like there's no point looking at their life and going oh how can I, there's no point? You have to look at your own life and your own schedule and you have to be brutally honest with yourself. There are going to be part of your days where they're not optimised. There's going to be part of your days where you can save time. There's going to be moves you can make in your life that can improve your time balance because you're never going get more time in a day we've all got twenty four hours, some people are filling up more than others, some people are more efficient at their time than others, you know, some people might be busy for eighteen hours a day, but someone else might be super effective for eight hours a day, but actually do more than that person that does 18 spends eighteen hours a day.
Speaker 1:So we can't look at just time spent doing things we have to look at the efficiency of what we're doing and this is where it really comes into play where you have to look at kind of hack in your own life like you know, in businesses that, you know, there's a new there's an there's a fairly new trend in, in Silicon Valley in America where they're bringing in chief automation officers to businesses. How can we automate workflows and make them more efficient? How can we save employees' times? How can we look at it? And you know what Toyota used to do this, Toyota instead of donating money to charities, would donate their time to improve the efficiency of the charities organization and they used to have huge results doing this.
Speaker 1:They used to improve the efficiency of 3040% save them 30% cash, they would improve pros like they would do efficiency work that would just be absolutely life changing to that business giving them more money necessary giving them more money would have resulted in success. Same with you if I did give you two hours more time are you really running an efficient lifestyle that those two hours would be useful or would help you or those two hours just be swallowed up. You know, Parkinson's law states something along the lines of whatever time you set, you'll fill that time to the task. Essentially if I told you to do this task in two hours you do it in two hours. If I told you to do it in four hours you do it in four hours.
Speaker 1:If I told you eight hours you do it in eight hours and that is the truth is that we will fill time to whatever the deadline is essentially. So it's not always the case that we think that if we add extra two hours we would do better with it, but in fact we need to subtract to we need to subtract for addition type of thing so we need to take away to add to our lives. So the first thing is to really do an analysis of your time management I think is important is like are you you know check your phone how much screen time you're doing. And the reality is the screen time is high for a lot of us and we definitely should cut it down. Even if your screen time is only twenty minutes a day, does it have to be twenty minutes a day?
Speaker 1:If you really are that busy with no time, there is no real use to social media for you because it's just a waste of time. What are gonna do? Check what other people are doing. What is the point? We all do it.
Speaker 1:Why do we check what other people are doing? Why are we in a stupid loophole check what other people are doing? But this is why I think you should all look into your lives yourselves, and I don't think it's useful for me to tell you, oh, you could do this and that. I don't know. Like, it's up to you.
Speaker 1:Like, be really honest with yourself. Are you truly being effective in all parts of your life? And if you think you are, maybe ask someone else if you think you are and see what they say because I think a lot of the times we're always kind of lying to ourselves, but we're also, in a weird way, always battling other people about how busy we are. Are you busy? Oh, man.
Speaker 1:I'm so busy in this. Oh my god. May I got no time to this. Why are we in this, like, weird one upping each other how busy we are? How's about being I wouldn't let's do the reverse.
Speaker 1:How much time less time you're doing on work? How much again, I'm being more effective. I mean, I'm working actually less now. I I'm only working five hours, but really efficient. I'm working on the hours I know that I'm efficient.
Speaker 1:Smash it. And other times, I'm doing other tasks. Don't know. You need to you need to just look into yourself. There's no nobody can really help you.
Speaker 1:But what is true is you're never gonna get more time. So you have what you have and you have to, you know, like clay, you have to now start, you're not gonna get more clay but you can mold the clay you do have. And it might take you time to sit down once one weekend or time when you get time and to really write down your general activities, really do an analysis. Because you'll do it for money, you'll do it for your finances, but we don't do it for our time. And time is more valuable than money.
Speaker 1:It doesn't really make sense. I'm actually gonna do it later on today myself. Like, where am I spending my time? Get my screen time up. Get my screen time up on average over the last six months.
Speaker 1:Get my times up, blah, blah, blah. When I wanna do workouts, all this stuff, I'm gonna really try and optimize my days. And I think that would help a lot. But to finish this off, you're not gonna fit everything in. You have to prioritize.
Speaker 1:Like, if you want to lose fat as your main goal, but you also want to run and be strong. And you're a parent, three kids, like you can't do all three probably because you'd have to do three strength workouts a week. You'd have to do three running sessions a week to improve to run a 10 k. So maybe you have to just go accept you can't do everything and pick the one main thing to focus on now. So goal my goal is fat loss therefore.
Speaker 1:I'm just gonna focus on the macros and macros up, and I'm gonna try and meal prep when I can. I'm just gonna focus on that. Don't worry about anything else. Get that. I'll do a workout when I can.
Speaker 1:I'll try and get my steps in, but I'll try my macros. And that's gonna bring you the results of fat loss. Once you've lost the fat and you feel a bit better, you might then start looking, well, can I optimize this and add one workout in? Can I add another workout? Maybe I can do a run-in the mornings.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe I could wake up, go to bed a bit earlier, wake up a bit earlier. Like, maybe that maybe you start looking at these possibilities. Maybe at the work lunch hour. Because you should take, you know, breaks and work %.
Speaker 1:You shouldn't let your boss just make you just work, work, work. Like Jim Rohn says, work harder on yourself than you do on your job. So I think prioritization. I've been doing these sessions on a total membership called back in the Loop and the purpose of them is to really narrow focus. So there is something called a paradox of choice where if you've got too many choices, you make less decisions, you take less action.
Speaker 1:When you've got fewer choices, basically do more you have more action. And this is what I want you all to start doing is to, like, write, pick your goal, pick the eighty twenty thing. What's the 20% of time I spend to bring 80% of my results? So fat loss, 20 of the time macros will bring 80% of those. The actually 5% of your time spent on the macros will give you 95% of your results.
Speaker 1:Boom boom that's an easy one boom optimize my time. When it comes to one getting strong follow a strength plan three strength workouts a week forty five minutes one over twelve weeks strong that's gonna generate you the strength strength results. You don't have to do six works a day, six weeks a week, five workers a week. You can do something. That's why we built the the minimum the the maximum impact, minimum time.
Speaker 1:That's the that's the 20 eighty twenty rule. That workout will be 20% of the time you spend, know, moving will give you 80% of your strength gains. Does that make sense? And you start doing this process and really start looking at prioritization, start re looking at how you define consistency, and just try and bring a cool steady head to your days. Be wise and understand every day doesn't have to be better than the one before, but you try your best regardless.
Speaker 1:And when life does does % slap you in the face hard, is not to let that take you off course and take you away from being steady. And I think you're on track. I think we can do it. We can do it. We can break it down like that.
Speaker 1:We can do it. But you're gonna have to spend some time to look into these things and write things down and get a plan together. Because if you don't, you're gonna be you're gonna just be the day's gonna run you, and you're not gonna run the day. You have to start running your day, guys. You're in control.
Speaker 1:You're in control. Control. So let me know if that's helpful. If not, sorry. But if it was, do let me know.
Speaker 1:And maybe we can do a Zoom session with the total members in the Facebook group about, prioritization and getting plans together. Because if you write down when you're gonna work out, what time, and what you're gonna do, you're, like three times more likely to actually do the workout. So writing things down definitely helps. So start doing that. And that is it for today's episode.
Speaker 1:So hopefully you took something away from it. If you didn't, here's what you need to take away. Stop wasting time on social media. Stop wasting time gossiping. You've only got a day to live.
Speaker 1:Today's the only day you ever have. So if there's anything to take away from this podcast, even if you can't understand the word I say, even if you didn't resonate with the wisdom I try to deliver, this is a reminder of you daily to live one day at a time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've got unlimited amount of days, but if you can make the most of today I'm telling you you'll have a fulfilled life so enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow. Do daily to live one day at a time. Give your moments meaning today and don't be fooled by thinking you've got unlimited amount of days.
Speaker 1:But if you can make the most of today, I'm telling you, you'll have a fulfilled life. So enjoy your day and hopefully we'll see you back tomorrow.
