Stop Demanding, It Doesn't Deserve You
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 going to shut up now so you can get on with listening to the next episode. Good morning everyone we're back with the voice notes I hope you all had a fantastic weekend and I just finished on the Q and A with Hugh Gilmore on how do we deal with our really emotional moments like what are our beliefs about them and do they serve us? Are those thoughts helpful? And we went through a few examples.
Speaker 1:He went through one with myself, where I spoke about how one or two of my friends have dropped out of this upcoming weekend's festivals and stuff like that, which we planned in March for no real reason. You know, one decided maybe didn't like the music now, he's going to another festival. Someone else says, you know, they need to maybe do another day of work when they probably will just do something else on the weekend. So you know how do you deal with that? Well the belief is someone should never do that if you've planned it and that's obviously ridiculous when you think about it people do cancel stuff they do plan stuff and they do cancel it we can't expect everybody to live up to those perfection standards.
Speaker 1:We can prefer it, of course, we can prefer it, but it's not something we should be forcing. And that's just that goes for everything. Family should your family never piss you off? Of course not. Should your kids never piss you off?
Speaker 1:And should you never shout to your kids? Of course. Like that's a ridiculous belief because we all have moments where we do let things get to us. But the main thing away and if you think about health and fitness is look, we prefer to have every day of our journey being one where we hit our macros, we do our gym sessions, we get our steps in and we feel amazing, That's our preference. But that's just not realistic.
Speaker 1:It's never going to happen. And I remember on our coaching program where we used to do a sixteen week one to one, my definition of success for these people would be like, try your best every day. And I had three types of weeks. We had a green week where they hit the macros, everything went smoothly. We had an amber week where maybe four or five days were good, two days were off, and then a red week where, you know, there was no progress made.
Speaker 1:And in in reality, I was like, look, we'd have preferred of sixteen green weeks, but the reality is we're probably gonna have seven or eight greens, four ambers, and then maybe four reds. And that would still most of the time, equal success. Right? And I did ask him about consistency, and consistency is something we all wanna try and achieve because habits are formed, and when we can do things on habit, they're automatic. So if we can get a lot of healthy habits on automation, that's gonna serve us well.
Speaker 1:But he was said, and like I say in this podcast, it's one day at a time. Every day is its own silo. Right? And he was like, you can't you don't have to connect the days up. So if you have a bad Tuesday, does that mean you have to have a bad Wednesday?
Speaker 1:And if you have a fantastic Wednesday, does that mean you're gonna have an awesome Thursday? It's not it's not true. Right? So the thing is, if we do build momentum, right, if we do build, have a good Wednesday, we've probably got a higher chance of having a good Thursday just because we've got momentum, but it's not a guarantee, right? And Dean Leake, our mindset coach talks about this a lot, it's black and white thinking, it's the chimp mind, Everything is black and white, right?
Speaker 1:And if we work in blacks and whites, this is where we're doomed. People do it all the time in health and fitness. I have to do this diet and if I don't do it perfectly, then the F it comes out okay and people do this on keto and they try and do keto for five days they realize they have to have some carb they have one biscuit and then they go F it and then they eat 10 biscuits That's black and white thinking that doesn't serve, right? How many of you do this? If you're doing it in health and fitness, doing it in work, right?
Speaker 1:You do with your friends and your family and I think if we have it in one place, it will seep through together. Look, standards are good to have. Are ideals but know and you also hear stories from entrepreneurs in these in the stories like they had extremely high standards and if you didn't stick to a result, like for example, Steve Jobs was one of them when he was younger. If you didn't have this insane attention to detail and standard of Steve Jobs. And he used to make everybody make the inside of the computer just as tidy as the outside.
Speaker 1:Right? Something he learned from his father, the craft of it, the art in him had to look amazing in the inside. Some engineers didn't agree. They were like, what's the point? Waste of time.
Speaker 1:No one's gonna see the inside. Right? If people didn't agree with Steve Jobs there, they were out. Okay? Only over his lifetime did he realize after he, like, he got kicked out of Apple and he started another company with his talented people did he realize that actually you hire really intelligent people not to tell them what to do, for them to tell you what to do.
Speaker 1:And actually it's not about being right all the time. It's about coming to a conclusion everybody's happy with. So he, over his years, let go of things. He still had an insane standard, obviously, because Apple became the most valuable company in the world after he came back in 1998, I think he was. He wasn't so crazy and demanding and didn't let things go.
Speaker 1:He did let other people take the helm in different areas. That's probably partially down to why Apple did have a massive resurgence in success because he put the power back into the Apple employees that believed in what Apple was. And obviously, they made mistakes. That happens all the time. That's just a lesson for all of us really, like we're doing this journey.
Speaker 1:Let's not try and be perfect. And there's no good saying, I'm a perfectionist. It doesn't serve you. It's not cool. And people say I'm always busy, busy, busy, go no time.
Speaker 1:That's also not cool when you say to other people, nobody really cares about that. It's not impressive. It's actually silly. So instead of having these vanity metrics as things we have in our trophy cabinet like I'm so busy, I got slow, so many things I want to achieve, what else is there, I've got no time, wish I could have more time, all this stuff, it's really just lip service. I mean, it doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 1:It's not something that we should hold on to as like to show off or whatever or others a belief, like it doesn't make us better people and we shouldn't want to be these people that work work work to death and think that's a badge of honor or we want to achieve every single thing in the world that comes into our head because you know that's ideas are cheap, execution is what matters, execution to the end is what matters, you can start as many things as you want but how many things are you finishing? That's the real question is how many things do you actually finish to the end? Right and get through with it. And like I said in last week's voice notes we do things until we get there, can hit until we do it. So we're doing this health and fitness journey until our good habits are ingrained and our bad habits have been untangled and pulled out.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we keep going until until until. We are finishers. We will do this we will go today we'll have it we'll try our best today and it might not be the perfect day but we're gonna try our best the sun is out it's the August you know we're all tired maybe this year has been for me, it's been exhausting. You know, we've launched the app, is amazing, but such a slog, but you know, mourn about it.
Speaker 1:It's just, you know, you have to realize where things are pulling your energy and stuff like that. But we've all been through it. There's been loads of things. And like I'll finish on this, like, example of how being reminded of this mindset stuff's important and it does start to be ingrained in your mind so stoicism has been something I've been looking into and reading about since I was probably like 19 somewhere I remember the first time I listened to meditations in my car on the way to work and I was like this is really shit like this is sucks, Marcus really does, this doesn't make sense like what is this even saying, Didn't really make sense of it. Then I got into some of Ryan Holiday's books which are easier to read and I got back into meditations and I read them and made sense.
Speaker 1:Then it wasn't until I read Donald Robertson's How to Think Like a Roman Emperor which is about Marcus Realis's life did I realise more about the meditations. But anyway, it's been a really long journey for it to click and be ingrained and I knew it's ingrained and I know now it is something that's going to help me for the rest of my life is on Saturday someone stole my phone in this music event in Cardiff. I know exactly who did it. And I went, you know, we still went outside. Look, we had we sent the find my info message to it for my sister's number.
Speaker 1:We did all we could. Okay, we went out, we still enjoyed, I didn't let it ruin my night. Got on with it. I stayed in the hotel in Cardiff because I wanted to go up early in the morning to the venue. So I stayed there on my own.
Speaker 1:And you know, I went to bed and I like wow I haven't got a phone first time I haven't got a phone committed nothing on me I literally can't do anything and I woke up had a shower it was quite freeing in a sense and it was a nice day I was like I got no one can contact me Literally, I'm just walking around now. Nobody knows where I am. Nobody can contact me. And I was walking around Cardiff. I was walking towards the castle and I was like, look.
Speaker 1:I feel quite good. Something I think someone will hand it in. Got up there. Any phones, guys, whatever. Some guys, oh, there are.
Speaker 1:I've been holding phones handed in. We have to go around. So I went all the way around to the other side and they were like, sorry, all the phones that did found got given back to people at the end of last night. And that kind of in that moment, I thought to myself, I keep thinking, I was walking away going, oh, that sucks. But I was like, was I feeling good earlier because I had hoped that I would be there?
Speaker 1:Was like, no, I just felt like, you know, it's not going to ruin my life. I was decatastrophizing automatically. So my thoughts are coming into my mind like, oh, you've lost all your photos, all those memories for, ten years have gone. But then I was thinking, is that really that bad? Like, yeah, I lose photos.
Speaker 1:That sucks. I should have backed up my phone. I should have backed up things. I wish I backed everything up, but I didn't. I was like is it really that bad losing all these photos anymore it's not like I'm gonna go through my phone look at photos all the time I was like people in Afghanistan now like fleeing in terrible situations like if I had problems like that we're way worse than losing photos, right?
Speaker 1:Then I was like, I've lost my phone. Why am I getting my phone? I got my business stuff on there. I was like, your phone will be replaced. You got insurance on your phone.
Speaker 1:It's fine. You just have to wait a few days. You can go on a computer. It's no problem. You have to redownload everything.
Speaker 1:That's fine. It's like, oh, it's gonna cost loads. Oh, insurance will cost maybe a little deposit of excess $50.70 quid. I was I was like, oh, well, people are gonna contact me. And I was like, if it's really important, they'll contact again.
Speaker 1:And I can always check-in the, you know, everything's in the cloud these days. And I just kept coming back automatically with decatastrophizing thoughts. And in the end, I managed to go I had to go around asking people in Cardiff, can I borrow their phone to phone my sister? And nobody would give me their phone as they are. Thanks, mate.
Speaker 1:So I went to the castle again. They let me lose the landline. And I phoned my sister and she said, oh, actually, they found your phone. Someone handed it in last night at some club, which I didn't go to. So someone stole it from the festival, took it to another club.
Speaker 1:He I think then he lost it then and someone picked it up. And he was like, oh, I, you know, I felt you know, I didn't feel, like, super amazingly elevated because I'd already accepted that it would potentially be gone forever. Well, was gone forever for me. And I think that's come from just going over these things over the years, reading them, deploying them, understanding the purpose because if we can de catastrophize situations and look this is the main thing that didn't happen to me, I didn't get a spike in my stress response, I didn't get adrenaline going through my body okay, I didn't turn on my stress response, which is super, super important. Because if we keep turning on our stress response, because we get we make these situations up in our heads, the worse than they are.
Speaker 1:This can cause and trigger chronic stress over days and weeks. Okay, chronic stress, like I've mentioned before, is really bad for us. It makes us hungrier for sugary and fatty foods. It can cause when adrenaline is around the body and fat is mobilized. So when you get adrenaline, your body basically gets ready to fight or flight.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we get energy into the bloodstream and are circulating and then it'll have to go stored back because you're not going to be using it. But that can happen in the clog up your arteries and stuff like that, because you've got another stress response hormone, which we mainly refer to as cortisol going around. It can make you on edge, it can raise your anxiety, and it can do all sorts of really bad stuff, right. So there's huge amounts of benefits to being able to de catastrophize and I think we need to do it like he was saying as well on the q and a. It's like, is this thought like genuinely accurate?
Speaker 1:Like how accurate it's not 100%, really, is it? Is it useful? Is it useful for you? Right? Is the thought useful for you to have?
Speaker 1:Maybe, maybe not. Let's think about Take an action. What type of thoughts do you think is going be useful? A thought where you think your life is over because you lost your phone, or the thought that, okay, your phone is gone, but it's not the end of the world. Things can improve.
Speaker 1:You can get another phone. Okay. We need to be in this scenario. So use it for health and fitness, right. Make sure that you deploy this for health and fitness.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I think with that in mind, go on and enjoy your day, decatastrophize as much as possible, capture those thoughts, turn them on ahead, and you will get a better day. I think we do that if we can do as best of our ability every day, this journey is going to be a lot easier, a lot lot easier. And the macros app is launched if you want to use it awesome, it makes things a lot easier as well but let's decatastrophize today people that's the mission today to decatastrophize all of our thoughts so we do not turn on our stress response needlessly causing ourselves long term health issues. Now on you go enjoy your day remember to live it one day at a time which is today, tomorrow doesn't exist, yesterday is now gone so let's focus on the present moment. 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 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 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 love a fulfilled life so enjoy your day and hopefully I'll see you back tomorrow. Do daily to live one day at a time.
Speaker 1: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.
