New York Without Sight

If you closed your eyes and when you opened them, you couldn’t see – would your dreams still be the same?

Would you still want to move to New York?
Would you still want that designer wardrobe?
Would you still want a million followers on Instagram?

This test always brings me back to my true desires.

Yes, I’d still move to New York. I’d move there for the people, the dancing, the music, the excitement, the food, the possibilities.

No, I wouldn’t that designer wardrobe. I’d want to wear things that made me feel comfortable and presentable, but you can say goodbye Gucci.

No, wouldn’t want a million followers on Instagram. In fact, I don’t even think I want that now, with my sight.

Why do we set the dreams we set? What’s it all for? What really matters? When you can’t see, it all comes into focus.

This scenario happened to a friend of mine, Tiffany. On the day of her thirty-second birthday, she woke up totally blind for absolutely no reason. Her priorities suddenly shifted massively, and her true dreams came into full focus. She wanted to be an entrepreneur (by the way, she sold $1.7 million in her first year in an e-commerce business, while totally blind).

Food tastes better with your eyes shut because it blocks our sense of sight, which takes up so much of our brain processing power. When we block out sight, we allow our other senses like taste to come to the surface.

When I close my eyes, New York is still delicious. Gucci is not.

The things your heart truly desires will be just as good without sight.

(Ditch the rest of your desires, they aren’t real).

February Goals

I can’t believe we’re about to hit February already, it’s wild. Where did the month go?

However, I’m keen to share my February Goals with you guys because in January I only shared my 2020 goals, and not my January goals, which I think was a mistake. I know this by now: accountability is king.

So with that in mind, here are my goals for February:

1. I will easily reach 60 push ups in a row by February 29, 2020.

   This feels way out of my comfort zone because I haven’t been able to train as much as I’d like this month as I injured my shoulder. Of course, that’s exactly why I’m setting it, because comfort zones kill dreams.

2. I will easily begin my habit of sending a weekly email out to my subscriber list by February 29, 2020.

   I’m excited to add value in your inbox every week! This is my ‘learning’ goal, as I am trying to use my goals to acquire new skills each month.

3. I will easily go to bed by 12am every night.
   I have been a night owl for so long, I no longer want to stay up past midnight doing work – I’m ready to wake up feeling refreshed!

I’m looking forward to letting you know how my goals go at the end of February. Let me know what your goals are for in the comments below!

Set Your Goals in the Heat of the Moment

When you do something in the heat of the moment, you do it without thinking.

Usually, this is described as a bad thing. Yet when you’re setting goals, you don’t want to be thinking, you want to be feeling. Our brains try to rationalize things. They convince us there is no way that we are good enough/smart enough/good looking enough/talented enough to pursue that goal. But when you get into the heat of the moment, and you’re high on life, that is the best possible time to set a goal.

That feeling of being fully alive, passionate, and knowing your truth. That feeling when your full potential is so close you can taste it. That’s the best time to set goals. Not when you’re feeling a 4/10 happy, with a “realistic” view of the world.

Set your goals from your heart, in the heat of the moment when you’re feeling invincible and life feels full of possibility. Then later, your 4/10 self gets to rise to the challenge.

How to Know When to Give Up

Yesterday I watched my brain disguise an excuse as a true reason to give up on one of my goals.

I heard it say to me “It’s so hard to post videos every week. Your videos are so cringe anyway. Plus, you don’t have time for this. You don’t really want to do videos, you just set the goal in the heat of the moment. You can always post one next week instead when you have something better to say.”

Ha!

I know my brain extremely well. I know BS when I hear it. Yet this one almost had me, but I caught myself at the last second. I was lucky this time – I’ve seen plenty of my own dreams go down the toilet because my brain disguised an excuse as a valid reason to give up.

Not this time. Here’s the thing: occasionally, there are valid reasons to give up. They are so few and far between, you can almost always assume that little voice inside your head telling you that “this time doesn’t count” or “have a rest day” is just an excuse. But how do you tell the difference?

Here’s the test:

Ask yourself, “Would I want this goal if I didn’t have to work for it?”

In my case, I imagined having 52 videos (one for every week of the year) posted to my YouTube channel. I imagined how much better my videos would be by the time I’d made 52. I thought about how I could say I had properly, whole-heartedly had a go at my dream of creating video content.

If someone handed me on a silver platter my own YouTube channel with 52 videos on it, I would very happily take it.

There’s my answer. NO. It is not time to give up. I only felt like giving up because in the moment it felt hard to create a video. But I didn’t, and I’m so grateful I didn’t, because come December, I can’t wait to see 52 videos from this year on my channel. I had a similar experience when I first committed to writing on my blog every single day for two years. Day 48 of 730 was the day I almost gave up (I’m on day 198 today).

Asking yourself, “Do I still want this?” is hard to gauge when you’re faced with putting down the ice cream or putting on your workout gear or facing the blinking cursor on your Word document.

However, asking yourself “Would I still want this if I didn’t have to work for it?” has a gut reaction. Yes or no. You know straight away if it’s fear, procrastination making an excuse, or if it’s truly no longer what you want.

You know the answer. Follow through. The pain is only temporary, the reward is forever.

Tear Up Your Bucket List

In theory, a Bucket List sounds like a great idea: before you die, you complete a list of all the things you’ve ever dreamed of experiencing.

Except it has one major flaw: time.

In this video, I share why I don’t have a bucket list and why you should tear yours up!

Let me know what you think in the comments & subscribe ❤️️

Deciding on Impossible

Impossible

1. Adjective: something that cannot be done.

Can’t be done? Challenge accepted.

Because nobody ever changed the world with a realistic idea.

We didn’t go to the moon or climb Mount Everest or run a 4-minute mile because it was realistic. We did it because it was impossible.

The world’s highest performers are setting – and achieving – impossible goals, because they know the only way to live into your full potential is to push your limits far beyond what you think you’re capable of.

Impossible is a mindset. Whether you choose to believe something is impossible for you or you choose to accept the challenge, it’s the decision itself that sets your destiny.

What decision are you making about your impossible dreams?

Your Mind is a Superbaby

If Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Brooke Castillo, Gary Vee, Oprah Winfrey, Derek Sivers, and The Minimalists had baby, it would be me.

Not because I’m spectacular in any way, but because my mind is a product of their ways of thinking. When I create content, I think I’m sharing my ideas – or am I? Is my content even my own original content, or is it just a Tony/Brendon/Oprah superbaby that my brain believes is my own? Just because I had the thought doesn’t mean I grew the thought, it may have been planted there. (Inception vibes, anyone?)

No idea is new. Everyone is influenced by other people and their thinking. Even though I believe I came up with this blog post idea myself, it stems from a web of influence I’ve had from all of those people’s thinking (and many others).

Our mindsets, beliefs, and content are actually a compilation of other people’s influence. This is a beautiful thing because that means that Tony Robbins had his own web of people who influenced his thinking, and his mentors had their own web and so on. We are a product of the people we spend our time with (or in my case, watching on YouTube!).

Your mindset is a web of other people’s influence, then your mindset is a superbaby. A baby that has the ability to evolve and take on new information and beliefs. Who’s mindset are you choosing to let shape your reality?

Strive to be Authentic – Not Unique

When I was 13 years old, there were two girls in my class that I thought were so incredibly cool. I would secretly try to come up with ways to impress them and get them to like me. One day, I ran into them on the weekend, and they were both wearing beautiful new strappy sandals. When I asked where they got them from, they told me it was from a shop that was “their” shop, and they wouldn’t tell me. They didn’t want me to have them too, because then the shoes wouldn’t be special.

Trying to be unique twists us in strange ways. It makes us waste time trying to be special or different and try do things differently that were perfectly good enough the way they were in the first place.

Being unique is totally overrated.

You don’t need to come up with the next big idea, you just need to do the same old ideas – but as you.

Most songs on the top of the charts right now are the same. There’s nothing unique about 4 chords. But the artists bring their own authenticity to the songs, and thats what makes us love them.

The world doesn’t need a new invention from you. It needs a blog written – by you. It needs a house built – by you. It needs the same old pair of jeans sewn – by you.

All the world really needs from us is our authentic selves.

Isn’t that a relief? To free ourselves from the need to do or be something special and different? I’m not doing anything unique and my content isn’t revolutionary: other people have written blogs and created membership sites before. Other people are High Performance Coaches. Other people talk about achieving impossible goals. 

Tony Robbins is credited with inventing life coaching. If you’re reading this, you could just be on Tony’s website instead. I’m not saying anything unique or different from him. It’s the same stuff. But you’re still reading this, because I’m just doing it as me, because you resonate with the same old concepts coming out of my mouth.

Don’t be different, just be you.

How I Became A Coach

In 2018 before I left New Zealand to travel the world for six months, I felt totally lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do in my career (or more accurately, I had too many things to choose from – can’t I be a writer who hosts a TV show, scuba dives, has a therapy/interior design/breakdancing company AND is Miley Cyrus’s backup breakdancer? The answer is yes. But it’s tricky to be pulled in so many directions). For the last two years after I finished travelling, I’ve been living in England, and I can say without a doubt that I’ve found my calling: the Personal Development Industry.

It didn’t hit like lightning and there was no big epiphany. Just day by day, the quiet voice inside me got louder and louder until it was all I could hear. My mum suggested the book “High Performance Habits” by Brendon Burchard, and while I was travelling, I listened to it on audiobook – over and over. I was hooked. I chose to take a giant leap of faith and put my savings into a High Performance Coaching Certification in Arizona.

I had the wildest ride making it to the training. The world tested me again and again:

• I was denied boarding on the plane because I didn’t know I needed an ESTA visa waiver.

• I missed the flight and had to wait for my ESTA to come through. They said it would happen instantly – but it took eight hours. I was running out of time – I was going to miss the training.

• The ESTA finally came through and I booked a new flight for $2000, on the spot ($2000 I didn’t have – I borrowed from my boyfriend Daniel, and he only had $15 left on his card to get the bus home).

• That flight was immediately cancelled.

• I needed to get from London to New Jersey, New Jersey to Arizona. The flight attendant said they could only get me to New York.

• So I took it. And I planned to get a taxi across states.

• I arrived at JFK, and got in the taxi.

• We got on the motorway and the taxi driver was pulled over by the Police for speeding.

• We’re sitting on the side of the road for 10 minutes, and the meter is still running, racking up the fee.

• An hour-long taxi journey later, we arrived at New Jersey airport at 1am – the airport was completely closed. I asked for the fee to be dropped (putting my life in danger + charging me for sitting on the side of the road, I want a discount on my $150 taxi!).

• The driver locked me in the car.

• I wasn’t in a space to argue, so I paid the full amount and left, grateful to be safe.

• I got my final flight and arrived to my certification two hours late with almost no sleep.

At every single roadblock, I thought, is this a sign that I’m not supposed to do this work?

No way. I wasn’t going to believe that. I knew it was really a test of my own character – to see how badly I wanted it, and what I was truly willing to do to get it.

The training turned out to be phenomenal, it was absolutely the right decision. I’ve never felt so fired up for life! I learned how to coach powerfully, how to transform people’s lives, and bonus, I completely got rid of my imposter syndrome.

If you’re thinking of becoming a coach feel free to send me a message I’m happy to answer any questions you have (it’s one of my favourite topics!).

Things I Haven’t Figured Out Yet

A while ago I saw one of my mentors post about the things she hasn’t figured out yet, and I absolutely loved reading them. It made me feel incredibly grateful to see that she is still learning. Even the world’s greatest teachers haven’t got it all figured out.

(Ooh, it makes me wonder what Oprah or Tony Robbins haven’t figured out!)

So here’s my list. Of course, this list is not exhaustive, and in real life my “Things I haven’t figured out” is infinite. I will be forever a student. But here are the most relevant ones at this point in time – Tuesday, 21st of January at 9:53pm.

Things I have figured out:

How to be myself
How to push my limits
How to motivate others
How to follow my heart
How to have fun without alcohol
How to enjoy flying
How to have great relationships
How to make money doing something I love
How to change my mood/state quickly
How to travel on a budget
How to coach people
How to forgive – both myself and others

Things I haven’t figured out yet:

How to know when to stop pushing my limits
How to manage embarrassment
How to scale a business
How to fuel my body to it’s optimum
How to meditate for longer than 30 minutes
How to be completely present
How to balance masculine and feminine energy
How to influence people for social movements
How to sing or paint
How to coach people on anything
How to breakdance
How to do 100 push ups

What have you figured out and not figured out yet? Let me know in the comments!