what does it mean to live life to the fullest train to your potential and perform at your best. Leave nothing on the table. That's a non negotiable is that I, I strive to be better every day because if I'm not on top of my game, how is anybody else gonna follow me down the road? Keep demanding more of yourself to live up to that potential and to stay hungry. Training is progress. You know, when I look at the word training, I think of steps, baby steps to get somewhere that you want to be and that is basically your life journey. That's a mindset in itself, man, it's like, it's not just about I know that for you, a lot of that's about the physical, but we're constantly in training, whether it's growing our skill sets, whether it's growing up physical bodies, whether it's growing our relationships, whatever and all of that is a training ground and that kind of goes back to the mindset that we just talked about, You underestimate yourself and you don't even start, but then once you start, you often surpass what you thought you could do perform at your best mate. That's that's sort of what life is all about. You don't have the knowledge and have the fitness to healthy ambition and drive that no matter what comes along.

When that next phone call comes, I can just say yes, I don't have to worry, just go and do it. Your what is up guys, Welcome to 2021 this is my first episode for this year, One episode has already been released, but I did record that before christmas last year, which was a four part installment with john Latoc of Storm Force Fitness In this episode, I'm going to be reflecting on the year, that was 2020 So that I can then project into 2021 now. I think this is an important thing to do is to reflect on um what you've achieved in your life and the things, the decisions, the actions, the behaviors that have served you and what has sabotaged you. So then you can look forward to the future And learn from those lessons of the past. So that's what this episode is all about now. It is very easy to look at 2020 and you know, get caught up in things that you couldn't do and get caught up in all the negative bullshit.

Um, but that's the easy option. The hard option is to take the lessons from 2020 and learn from them And move forward and apply those lessons that you've learned into 2021. Because here's the deal, let's be honest, if you just took the negatives out of 2020 and you don't have any positives, what makes you think that 2021 is going to be any different? Just because the clock ticked over to midnight and we're now entering or we have now entered a new year. It doesn't mean that everything is going to magically change. You can't just click your fingers and everything goes back to the way that you wanted to be at the end of the day. This comes down to our mindset, okay, and this is us focusing on what we can control and not worrying about the things that we can't control. One of my favorite books is the subtle art of not giving a fuck, and the book is not about not caring about anything, it's just choosing what you care about.

Because so many people care about so many different fucking things that anything that's outside of their control or anything, they don't agree with anything they don't like gets them down. The whole point of the book is choose what you care about because if I don't give a fuck about all of these minor small things that really don't affect me, then you know, that's good for my mental health. However, if I can control the things that are within my control and I focus on them and I manage them to the best of my ability. I know that regardless of what happens, I can control those things that are going on within my direct life. And here's the paradox if I manage the controllable is to the best of my ability, it also allows me to deal with the uncontrollables in a lot better manner in a lot better state. If those things do come up. Now one of my favorite quotes is this don't judge each day by the harvest that you reap, But by the seeds that you plant. Now, this quote is going to be pertinent when I go through my reflections for 2020 because all of these amazing things that did happen to me throughout 2020 didn't just happen.

Okay, I put myself in those positions, I made decisions, I took actions, I created behaviors too. Um you know, tie in line with what my core values were to them, Put me in those situations to take advantage of. And of course, there was certainly some good luck that came up throughout the year, which I'll dive into as I go through my reflections. But ultimately it was my core values that were driving everything that I was doing throughout the year. And when you work in line with your core values, what you'll find is that life just becomes fucking easier. My whole goal in life is to live a really fucking good existence where I'm doing the things that bring me contentment and fulfillment every single day and I get up every day knowing that today is going to be a good day because I'm doing the fucking things that I enjoy, I'm doing, the things that I love and you know, something else that I always talk about in a post on social media is, you know, you shouldn't be looking for the next vacation, you should be looking for the next holiday or your next getaway.

You know, set up a fucking life that you don't need an escape from. And when you do this, life just becomes really fulfilling and really simple. Okay, my goal in life is to keep my life as simple as possible. I don't like drama, I don't like bullshit and I'm going to minimize all of the external factors that bring that stuff into my life because I don't want it to be a part of my life Now, in saying that I have reflected on 2020 and one of the things that was missing in my life was my social circle, I've got, you know, a small group of friends in Thailand, most of my really good mates back in Australia. So I don't have many close friends in Thailand, but I'm totally okay with that because I'm focused on building my career, building my journey, building my brand, building my authority in the fitness industry and building my growth and personal development. So, um that's the opportunity cost, that comes along with um the decisions that I've made, and that's the big point is like every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to many other things.

So, understanding what you call values are and acting in line with those and making decisions, understanding that everything has a cost benefit ratio, everything has positives and everything has negatives. But when you start weighing up the pros and the cons uh and understanding what you're willing to um sacrifice and what you're not willing to sacrifice again, it makes life so much easier, I'll get to this later on in this episode, but that is one of the goals for me this year, is to build my relationships with the people around me now before I go any further in this episode, I just want to say that if you're looking to set goals and you're looking to change things in your life and you're looking to implement positive habits and cut out negative habits and all that type of stuff to um kick off 2021 on the front foot, then I highly recommend going back and listening to some of my first episodes. So the first two weeks that I launched this podcast was all about building those habits to allow people to um take a look at their life and take action and implementation of all of these things that are going to push them in the right direction or stop them from moving backwards.

So those episodes that I recommend is episode number two, which is goal setting, episode number six, which is the power of habit, Episode seven, creating consistency, episode nine, restrict temptation and meal preparation, episode 10 accountability 11 is hierarchy of value, one of my favorite episodes, Uh episode 12, motivation direction and episode 13 The effect of your environment. So um if you're fairly new to this podcast, I do highly recommend going back and listening to those episodes because that will literally set you up for every other episode that you listen to. Those are the foundational episodes that I put out right at the start for a reason, in that particular order. For a specific reason Now, for 2020, is one of those years that you could literally look at and say that was the worst year of my life. Ah and that really depends on what your reference point is and the lens that you're viewing the world through, because here's the deal we all perceive what we wish to perceive.

We're all looking at the world through lens and that lens is shaped by our mindset, it's shaped by our upbringing, our values, um our experiences etcetera. Um A lot of people went through very similar things throughout the year, but what you'll notice is that a lot of people have very different mindsets and outlooks on how that year was and if you're looking for shit in your life, that's what you're going to find. And here's the thing. We can condition ourselves to find a positive in everything that comes up in our life or we can condition ourselves to find a negative in everything that comes up in our lives and this is literally our fucking choice. We get to choose how we perceive the environment that we live in now before I go any further, I want to say that I was not dramatically impacted by the pandemic last year, I didn't have anyone close to me lose their life for um you know, lose their business, their livelihood or anything like that.

Um so I'm super grateful for that. Um However, in saying that, like, I actually had a really fucking good 2020 considering the circumstances and the reason I had a good 2020 was because I actually achieved a lot of things throughout the year. I achieved many, many things that, to be honest, I probably wouldn't have achieved if the pandemic hadn't hit. And the reason I say that is because I started this podcast when we went into lockdown and I've been thinking about doing a podcast for about eight or nine months at that stage, and knowing that we're likely going to go into a lockdown period, I was like, right, I'm going to buy all this equipment and I'm going to start putting these processes in place because that was one of my values. That was one of my goals, was to start this podcast. You know, and I probably wouldn't have had that time to put that together If we hadn't have gone through the lockdown. Now, I was also fortunate enough to be in a relatively stable financial position to be able to continue living my life without having to make money the gym clothes for a couple of months, all of the staff were put on 50% salary and many, many years ago I actually started up my online coaching business and that was because I looked into the future and thought one day I'd like to be able to travel around the world and still make an income.

So I've been putting my processes together for many, many years building out my online coaching business. So that was uh that revenue stream, that was kind of keeping me afloat. Now, I'm going to circle back to this later on because those two things played a significant role in my 2020 and it'll all make sense uh in a moment. So I'm going to rattle off a couple of things that I was really proud of that I achieved last year and then I'll talk about a few things that didn't go quite so well. Uh and then I'll kind of um give some examples about, you know, the different mindsets that you can take and being grateful for um and taking positives out of negatives. All right, so I got my training program up on the Swiss Eight app, and Swiss Eight is a proactive mental health program designed to allow people to schedule in the most important things of their lives. Now. The beautiful thing about this is I am a veteran and this app was created by veterans after one of our veteran brothers took his own life and the reason um this is a big problem in the veteran community um you know, guys dealing with pTSd anxiety, depression, et cetera is because when people get out of the military and I went through this myself, I kind of lost my way for a bit And this is what a lot of people were feeling throughout 2020 when they lost their um you know, sense of purpose and they kind of lost their self identity with losing their jobs and being stuck at home, not being able to associate with certain people and things like that.

So, You know, a lot of the veterans were able to help out their friends um by, you know, teaching them tools and techniques that we had actually used ourselves. And you know, that was a big part of um the Swiss eight app. Anyone who's followed this podcast for awhile knows that I'm an ambassador for Swiss eight. Um and I I speak about all of their eight pillars of health and wellness in their own individual episodes. Um so if you don't know what suicide it is, go and download the app and start structuring in the important things in your life in the eight pillars of health and wellness, All of the programs on the Swiss eight app are developed by veterans, and a lot of the things that we teach. My program's up on there as well. A lot of things that we teach is from our own lived experience, Some of the other things that I'm really grateful for in 2020 was the opportunity to take six weeks holidays right at the start of the year, February March right before lockdown happened.

Um so I went to Japan for a couple of weeks and caught up with some of my best mates who I haven't seen for like six years, it's been since we've all been together, we went snowboarding there, then I went dived and trained in bali with a good cruel people. I went home to Australia, spend time with my family, completed my yoga course with a bunch of veterans um through a program that was funded by or partially funded by the Australian government um to teach us yoga to allow the veterans to take that style of yoga back to our communities to start using that as an alternate therapy for PTSD and anxiety and depression. Um I also became an ambassador for B spunky, which is a male hormone optimization company, um a supplement company and I've actually interviewed Sean Sergeant who is the founder uh in one of the live transform episodes. I also played my part in pd on his journey to becoming the UFC bantamweight champion, which has been a fucking incredible journey over the last 2.5 years um that I've been training him four cents before he made his UFC debut.

So that was fucking amazing to watch that unfold and I literally started crying when he got his hands raised, so that was pretty incredible moment. Um I also got to play in a couple of rugby tournaments in Thailand and was actually awarded the most valuable player for my team, Puckett vagabonds in the southern Thailand rugby tens championship um and we took out that competition and got invited to the national championships up in Bangkok, unfortunately tore my hamstring in that tournament within the first five minutes of the first game, so pretty shitty, but also amazing to get the opportunity to play. I started a period of strength in addition program for professional fighters at Tiger Muay thai where I've been working for the last couple of years. Uh it was awesome to get that off the ground, it's something I've been working towards for the last couple of years. Um then I spent three weeks driving around Thailand and exploring this amazing country that I get to call home um which was pretty incredible to think that, you know, I couldn't travel overseas but I could travel within Thailand and uh man, there were days like three or four days where I could literally count on one hand how many foreigners I saw in some of the places like off the beaten path.

It was really cool, I completed numerous courses, read a couple of dozen books, listen to heap of podcasts and you know, really focus on my own journey of personal and professional development, which was amazing and has added to, you know, my skills um and my coaching profession, my ability to be able to communicate to people and um you know, be a fucking good coach to people who are paying me money. Um Which brings me to my next point. I got to coach multiple athletes and people from all over the world through PTS Um at Tiger Muay Thai through group classes at Tiger, and also through my online coaching platform, which I'm going to circle back to in a moment. So all in all when I look at 2020, you know, it was a pretty successful year for me uh in saying that I don't want people to think that, you know, I just had a fucking incredible year and nothing went wrong. That is not the case at all. That is just what I choose to share. Okay, I did have some shit go wrong. Um I had made of mine uh former colleague that I worked with, that committed suicide, um a father figure and a very influential man in my life who kind of took me under his wing when I was uh you know, going through the later teenage years, uh He ended up dying this all sorry, last year as well, which kind of hit me pretty hard.

Um My pop's health declined fairly rapidly um last year, so, you know, I can't get over to new Zealand to see him unfortunately. Uh I also missed the most important day on my calendar year, which is ANZAC Day and that's like the one day of the year that all of my mates, all the boys that I served with in the army um You know, put aside our own lives and um families and you know, other commitments, life commitments and shit like that. So we can actually get together catch up reminisce um have a couple of beers, throw some banter and just fucking be around each other and have a good time. Um And you know, my career, my work, my finances took a bit of a hit. You know, I had to dig into a lot of my savings throughout the year as well. But um all in all, you know, I can take the positives out of all of those things that happened. Um And you know, that's that's that's the big point is like, bad shit happens to fucking everyone. If I dwell on the negatives, then that doesn't allow me to move forward.

Okay. Of course, you need to grieve and be with the emotions and you know, experience all of the emotional ups and downs that come with. You know, people dying and um you know, really fucking bad things happening, but you don't let those things define you. Um So some of the lessons that I talk from those things that happen, those negatives, again, I'm going to talk about taking the positives out of the negatives. You know, obviously it's really fucking shitty that one of my mates committed suicide. Um But the positives that came out of that was that it actually drew attention to uh the other, like, 20 guys that he'd been helping behind the scenes, who were really struggling with ptsd anxiety and depression and, you know, he basically um talked guys off the fucking edge of the cliff, some literally and some figuratively. Um so what I talk from that is that more needs to be done and, you know, as much as we're doing our best to spread the message of, you know, managing mental health through the Swiss Eight app, you know, it's not reaching some of the people that we need to be reaching, Some of the people that are at the highest risk.

So some of those 20 guys that, you know, a lot of people didn't know were struggling and had these issues have now been able to get help and once we identify these guys, we can start pushing these tools towards them so then they can start sharing with their mates as well. Uh Snog er was one of my rugby coaches that took me under his wing when I was 16, 17, 18, uh for most of you that have been listening for a while, you'll know that I left home when I was 14 came from an abusive family, so he was one of those guys that kind of took me under his wing, and um you know, it was a really fucking positive influence on me as a young man going through that transition period as I was growing into becoming a man, um and he unfortunately died last year of a heart attack, but the positive that I took away from that is that, you know, he was one of those guys that just fucking lived his life, He really loved his life and he loved his family and he fucking did the things that, you know, brought brought in fulfillment.

He was traveling around the world every fucking year, basing himself in bali basing himself on beaches all over the world and surfing. It was unfortunate that he fucking died of a heart attack, but at the end of the day, what I take from that is that life is fucking short, you don't know when your time is up and you know, if you can live a life that brings you contentment and fulfillment, like you're fucking good to go, I'm sure that man died with a smile on his face. The next thing is, you know, my pop's health declined rapidly um which has been really shitty to watch um speak to my mom and my my nana about, but um you know, this kind of circles back to what I was talking about earlier and that is, you know, purposes essential and everything that I've read over the years, um studies books. Um you know, all that type of stuff is purpose is so fucking important in your life, you know, it's been so much research where uh you know, an older person dies and then within a year their partner, husband, um wife dies as well.

You know, they say from a broken heart, but uh in reality it's because, you know, a piece of them died and they no longer have that purpose, they no longer have that reason to live. Um, and this brings me to Viktor Frankl's book, Man's search for meaning, which is a fucking incredible book. If you haven't read that, uh it's about his time in the Nazi death camps, uh, and he, it's an expose on his life and what he went through there. And, you know, the mind said that he had to adopt to give his life meaning every single day so that he could live day to day and just make it to the end of the day, and it was literally like living one fucking day at a time. And as I said earlier, I went through a phase where I got out of the army, I didn't really know what I was doing, I lost my purpose, I lost my direction, I lost my meaning. So, um you know, that was a big thing for me is I was giving myself that meaning, giving myself that purpose. I wrote down all my values, um which you'll find in the hierarchy of value episode I spoke about earlier.

Missing ANZAC Day was a big one that is like one of the days of the year, or pretty much the day of the year that I know all of the boys look forward to. Um and I've spoken about this in a previous podcast. One of my mates a couple of years ago said that he wasn't going to go to ANZAC Day because he has such a fucking good time there, being surrounded by the boys and that camaraderie and you know, those bonds that are fucking build through war, he's like, I have such a good time there, that I'm depressed for weeks after and I've experienced this numerous times as well, and I'm like, well I'm willing to go through that feeling for a couple of weeks after just to experience that time and that camaraderie and that bond with the boys for that 12 or three days, so that's a big day for us. But the positives that I took away from it is that, you know, the communication for the rest of the year is just as if not more important than that one day. Um you know, so that forced me to stay in contact with all of my friends on a much more consistent basis and something I actually did when we went into lockdown, I wrote down my values and, you know, building those relationships or maintaining those relationships was a big one for me and I made it a point.

I structured it into my schedule to, you know, call three people every single week, okay, I put aside an hour to make those calls, and you know, this is something that I reflect on now, once the Gm opened up, and, you know, lockdown stopped and, you know, we were allowed to get out and about and move around with restrictions, obviously, um you know, I didn't stick to that routine anywhere near as much as I did throughout the quarantine period, so um that's something I'm definitely gonna be working on this year, is building those relationships, maintaining those relationships with people around me, but also with people back home, you know, there's probably guys are listening to this, that we're all guilty of this, like, we can go fucking months and years without talking to our friends and catch up, have a fucking awesome time, you know, not a day has gone by, but in saying that, like, we need to be fucking better communicators as well, so that's a goal for me this year, is to, again, schedule in that time too.

Um talk to my friends, talk to my family and make it a much more consistent thing, much more consistent theme throughout the year. The last negative that I'm going to take a positive out of is my financial situation. I'm sure everyone's gone through the same thing, you know, I've dug into my savings, I've spent a lot more money than I intended on spending without much coming in at all. Um but in saying that the positive that I take away from that is that, you know, I still got a fucking job and I was still making a little bit of money due to my online coaching again, I'll circle back to this in a moment, but you know, it also gave me the time to reflect on my life what I wanted to do, the direction that I was moving in And also the time to work on my business rather than in my business because as I said earlier, I was planning on starting this podcast, um had thoughts about it, what I was going to do etc etc for about nine months, 10 months or so.

Um and then once I realized that we're probably going to go into a little bit of a quarantine period was like, all right now is the time to start this podcast. Now is the time to hit my anatomy and physiology course. Now is the time to read those fucking books that I've had on my list for the last couple of years now is the time to build out my business, work on my online coaching. Um do some projections, do some goal setting for the next couple of years, et cetera. Um so it kind of forced me to stop and take a little bit of a step back and take a little bit more of an objective view, you know, take a bird's eye view of what I was doing in the direction that I was moving in. So a few things that I'm really fucking proud of is I built my numbers, former online coaching business, this is not something that I advertise or market or anything like that, It is all organic people reach out to me um and you know, I'll ask them some questions or make sure that we're right for each other before I take them on board and I've had some fucking incredible messages this year from people that have worked with um I won't go into all of the details, but a lot of them made me very emotional ah and I've literally had people say thank you so much, you have fucking saved my life, I don't know where I'd be if I hadn't met you or I hadn't found your content or you know, hadn't started following you or whatever.

Um and there's been so many messages that are along that same vein, that's just fucking left me speechless. So um thank you to everyone who has been a part of my journey this year and who I have coached and if I have touched you in some way through this podcast or my social media platforms are online coaching or anything like that, you know, I don't need a fucking thank you, I don't do it for the thank you, but I do appreciate the support. Uh and the next one is, you know, this fucking podcast, I've had so many people reach out and like, man, this is the fucking stuff that I needed. I wish I hadn't found you sooner. And again, I don't put this podcast together to, you know, get thanks from anyone or you know, I'm not monetizing this, I do this because I want to fucking help people and I want to create myself as an authority in the space, someone that people can trust, someone, that people can rely upon, someone that people can go to and expect real fucking advice, that's going to help them move them in the right direction or stop them from fucking sabotaging themselves without trying to sell them something.

So, Um for those of you guys that have been listening for a long time, anyone who has left me a rating and review, I fucking really appreciated, I thank you so much. Um I've got roughly 17,000 downloads at this stage. And you know, I'm going to continue doing this podcast because I love it. I love helping people. Um if I have touched you in some way, if um one of the messages has really resonated with you, please reach out, let me know um doesn't need to be, you know, a fucking massive message or anything like that, just to thank you or something, just so I know that, you know, it's getting through to people and if only get two people reach out to me, it's worth it. So um to round out this episode uh that's it from my reflections. Uh for 2020 you guys will need to do your own uh everyone has their own lives. Everyone has their own perceptions. Everyone has their own lens that they perceive the world through. So uh it is up to us, It is our choice, how we choose to perceive the world and how we choose to interpret all of that information that comes in through our sensors and then what our output is to the rest of the world.

And I want to finish with this. Your relationship with the world is a reflection of your relationship with yourself. Or put in other words, your perception of the external environment is a reflection of your internal environment. Much love guys piece