The Secret to Achieving your Goals with Tobi Pearce

Welcome to Chat With Us, the show that talks about all things health, wellness, life, and business. I'm Rachel Gillin, and I'm Emma Dylan, and this is Chat With Us. Welcome back to Chat With Us. We are kicking off Season 2 with an app to set you up for the year ahead. We're welcoming back Toby, my fiance, to chat all things goal-setting both personally and professionally. How to structure them, what you need to achieve them, managing expectations of your goals, and we even give you examples along the way. So welcome Toby. Welcome to Bias Rubberbillion Beers. Good morning baby. It's great to have you on the podcast again. First one. Yeah, and good to be back. Of 2024, how weird does that feel saying 2024? Well, we're already almost in February as well. Yikes. So I thought today we would cover all things goals. And the team is kind of floating ideas as to what guests we would like to have on board. And I couldn't think of anyone better. Yes, I'm hyping you up. I couldn't think of anyone better when it comes to, you know, setting goals, strategizing how to achieve them, and kind of following through. So the execution behind goals, I think is something that's super important. So yeah, I put you forward. And actually when I was talking online about setting goals with you this new year, I had so many questions. Are you excited to be here? I am really excited to be here. Wow, you seem really excited. This is my enthusiastic face. We talk about this all the time though, that my capacity to express emotions visually is maybe not what you wish it was. Yeah, we both aren't the most enthusiastic expressionists. Most of the time in the household, we walk around like this and I like the best day today. We really do. So something that made me laugh when I was going through the questions for this podcast was a memory I have of us when we first started dating. I think we were honestly only three days in. It was so early on. We moved quick, but it was very early on. And I remember in the car, we were driving and you kind of turned to me so casually. I was just like, so what's your 60 year plan? What do you plan for children, finances and you know something else? And I was like, wow, we're going there. We're going there. Third date in my mind, I'm thinking, oh my god, I didn't even know what I'm doing tomorrow, let alone in 60 years. But that was one of the things that has always stuck with me with you is that you're such a planner. You are so structured. And I feel like, as I said, I think you're the perfect guest to talk all things goals. So let's get into it. Why is it important to set goals and is there a right time to obviously coming into the new year? There are a lot of different opinions on whether or not you should set new year's goals. I personally think there's never a wrong time, but talk us through. Is it important to set them and is there a right time? Yeah, I think I think when you set them is probably less important, you know, than actually setting them. In my experience, yeah, whether it was, you know, as an individual, as a personal trainer earlier in my career. Yeah, as a business owner and now, you know, advising and mentoring other founders. Honestly, I think most people, like from an observer's view, most people kind of autonomously experienced life. And what I mean by that is that they kind of just float through. They have, you know, aspirations and dreams and I think sometimes they think they have goals, but they don't really commit to them, you know, in my opinion, in an appropriate way. And then as a result of that, a lot of people kind of end up feeling like they're losing time constantly. They're not kind of getting what they want out of life or out of relationships, right of work or the health or whatever it may be. And I think a lot of that comes down to either outright the absence of actually having a legitimate goal set or even if you have a goal set actually setting that goal in the manner that is going to allow you to succeed. And to actually enjoy the success. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because a lot of times, yeah, and just to use some examples, you know, people would walk into the gym and like, oh, yeah, I want to lose 25 kilos. And or a business owner might come and like, oh, yeah, next year, my business did, yeah, last year, my business did $5 million, I wanted to do $10 million this year. And the issue with both of those things is that they're missing an important criteria that I think is necessary, which is this idea of like believe ability, right. Okay, come to gym, going to lose 25 kilos, it's like, well, do you have any experience losing weight? Do you currently have a lifestyle that's going to facilitate that, et cetera, et cetera, very often the answer is no. And it's like, well, they would say that as a goal, that's more border of bordering on a dream, or an aspiration, you know, then necessarily actually a goal that I've committed to. And that's like this key or chord difference between the language that people use, you know, the actions that they take, which is where a lot of kind of goals, kind of go to die. So have you, this was a good one. And I actually, I was asking you in before, because I'm like, did you like, obviously you've had a long career in business, you've come so far personally and professionally. Did you always set goals early on? Or is it something you kind of developed them on the way? Yeah, I have this belief that, you know, 10 years in the future, people kind of answer what's happening today based on what they know then. Rather than say, oh, yeah, of course, I was super structured and whatever I don't think that's necessarily like accurate. I think early on, I always had, I always had a really well-defined idea of what I wanted to achieve. But those were an example. Yeah. So like, you're in my business, you know, when I first started personal training as a guy, I want to, you know, design my business to look and work and generate this, you know, income in this particular way. But I would almost say that at that particular point in time, a lot of the goals or, you know, kind of dreams, you know, that I had in mind will probably almost a little bit too far in the future. And what I mean by that is that it's all well and good to have like a longer term, you know, mission or vision that you're kind of working towards personally or professionally. But part of the issue that that presents is, or what do you do now? Like what do I do today to, you know, get me in that direction. And so whilst I did have goals, I would say they're probably not as, they were not as useful 10 years ago, you know, as the ones that I believe I said now. So for those out there who are looking to set goals, what is the best way to set a goal and how to set yourself up for success, whether it be personal business, what do you currently do coming into the new year to set yourself up? Yeah. So I think firstly, um, overall, actually, I think you have to write this stuff down. Right. I think without writing it down, there's no objective way to be accountable. Right. So like a lot of people, you know, I'm going to go to the gym. This is my goal and my mind. They go and do it. They kind of fall off track or they do or don't achieve it. They don't know whatever it's like, how do you actually get the positive feeling and the positive reinforcement from success if you don't actually have something to refer back to. And also, how do you keep yourself accountable to things? Because you know, the in our minds, we're really good at avoiding discomfort. So as a species, you know, as human beings, we are, we are experts, we are born experts, you know, at avoiding discomfort. And a lot of the time we will, you know, design perceptions or beliefs in our mind about why we haven't achieved something to rationalize that it's okay. You know, whereas I think like, you know, having something written down to kind of refer back to it's like, well, on this date, I set this goal. I did or didn't achieve it regardless of the reasons why. You know, so I think writing down is very important. I think the second thing is that when you do go to write it down, you need to articulate this stuff in a, in a manner that actually facilitates success. And so what I mean by that is I think that people need to be considerate of reality in some regard. So let's, let's kind of work through this right. So if I set a goal, my goal is to achieve XYZ, whatever it may be. Okay, that's, we can understand that. That's not going to happen without a commitment of effort. So that has to be some degree of effort that you all work that you put into achieving that goal goals that magically occur. So we need to define what the work is with that particular work. And this is something I recently started doing a few years ago. Well, if that's the worker, I have to do what habits do I have to have in place. Yeah, it's actually achieved this. So for example, it's like, well, if you want to lose this weight, well, one habit I have to build is exercising. So how do I go about you're actually creating the habit of exercise in my day to day or week to week life. You are two other important characteristics. I like what's going to be the emotional impact of this journey and then what is going to be the moral boundaries that I'll put in place for this journey. So from an emotional standpoint, and this is the reason why I think it's very important to separately consider this is that the goal that you want to achieve, whatever that may be. And the level of work you have to put into that and the level of discomfort, you have to, you know, tolerate. None of that has any care for how it makes you feel. Right. And so a lot of people fall into this trap of, I'm going to set this goal to achieve this to do this work and they get a little way into it and they're like, oh, buddy, oh, God, Jim's really hard or, you know, show up to work like this is really hard. Like, I really don't like this. This is really uncomfortable. I really don't want to do this. And it's like, okay, well, but if you had have acknowledged when setting the goal, am I going to commit to this goal of these the emotions I'm likely to experience throughout the process. IE, this is going to, you know, so for example, like when you first start working out, you're the most deconditioned you'll ever be. So it's going to feel the shittest. It's going to be the hardest. You're going to feel the worst about yourself, probably then you ever will in that journey. And part of the issue is people set these goals and sometimes they even get to like building these habits and doing the work and then they knock themselves off the bandwagon because they haven't been honest with themselves about the fact that it's actually not going to feel good emotionally mentally. The reason why I have this kind of like moral consideration outside of that is and I think business is a really easy way to think about this. It's like, oh, well, I want to make this amount of money and I'll do this work. And I'll get there at all costs. And I think that's without having some moral boundary about things we will and won't engage and then we don't kind of have limitations to prevent us from doing the wrong thing. So I think like, you know, this kind of planning or goal setting process has to be around in in summary form is like, what is it that want to what I want to achieve? What work do I have to do to get there and what habits are actually going to facilitate me to regularly do that work? What emotions am I kind of willing to tolerate, you know, throughout that process and what that moral boundaries will I say in order to kind of help me achieve that goal? And I think like that, that kind of collective framework is really useful in the sense that because for some people will actually mean that as they're writing this down, as I said before, they might actually decide what shit, maybe I really don't want that. You know, because a lot of people and this is the other thing I said earlier about kind of dreams and aspirations like everyone wants to be better look better, feel better, make more money achieve this, whatever it is, everyone has different values, but everyone has things they want to do. Right. The biggest disconnect that exists with almost 100% of people, and this is even with myself included when I'm sometimes thinking about my goals, I'm like, that they don't appropriately consider the, you know, this notion of reality, it's like, this is probably going to suck. Yeah, and I think sometimes the example, a really great example here is, you know, people will look at incredibly successful athletes, and you know, normally it's like the Kobe Bryant, the Michael Jordan's or whatever of the world. And they're like, oh, yeah, I would love to be like that. It's like, no, you wouldn't. If you had to eat the same food every day, train three or four times a day every single day, be sore all the time, sacrifice friendships and this and the other, it's like they're the emotional and in some cases, your moral considerations, you need to have it. If you're not willing to trade those in exchange for whatever this goal gives you otherwise, well, then it's not an appropriate goal for you. You're not ready or don't truly want to commit to it. And so the overarching thesis there is a lot of people's goals fail because they don't actually consider what's necessary in advance of it. So they actually end up designing a really, really great environment to feel crap about themselves. And then to motivate them to not set goals because their whole history of setting goals makes them feel like shit. I've never thought of it that way. Wow, that's the moral part. I definitely have not considered. What's a good example that you set for yourself this new year that you can share that you've done that has been uncomfortable, but you considered that uncompability in your, yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, look, we all know he's going to say, well, no, I think this is a great opportunity to talk about a very valuable topic that I think all people should engage in. And that is, of course, the plunge rule or no, yeah, we'll do the plunge call. We're first a studio to, I mean, that's always the top of the list. So, yeah, really interesting one, a lot of people who do sports or in this case, do martial arts and trained to get to those belts belts grade you in theory based on your capability of competence. That's not always right, but that's the general idea. And a lot of people get tired of this idea of like, oh, how do I get to blue belt or how do I get to purple belt or whatever it may be. So, yeah, one of the things for me has been this idea of like, well, I've started to phase away from that and I've more started to lean to this goal of like, I just want to be really good. Yeah. And so I want to be deserving of, you know, whatever that next level is for me. And then when I look at that, if that's kind of the goal, or then, you know, the work that I have to do is obviously train a lot of habits that I have to put in place. I like, well, what do I have to do to get myself to training all the time? What do I have to do to make sure that I'm not missing out on training because of injury or, you know, whatever it might be. And then so like from an emotional standpoint, you know, for me at the moment, we've obviously just moved, you know, here to Queensland, I don't know anyone. So in Adelaide, it was really easy for me to go to do two because I had friends there and this and that and the other and now I'm here and like, well, every time I go, I'm the new guy. I don't know the people, that's uncomfortable, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so I need to make sure that I am, you know, setting myself up for success by making sure that I have habits in place to do that. So part of that for me is like one, my overarching kind of like thesis for this year is whatever the uncomfortable thing is do it immediately. That's my, that's my overarching thing for this year with a goal setting. So for me, that's like an overarching principle I'm trying to align to. And then that helps me, you know, rationalize, you know, the desire to not train because every time I think about training or going somewhere, I'm like, oh, it's a different club or a different place of different people. It's uncomfortable. It's really, it's really uncomfortable, but then I come back to this idea that what the goal is to be deserving of this skill, get really good. You know, the work I have to do is pretty simply train and study and make sure I'm not injured so I can keep getting to that, you know, that training. And every single time I go, I feel overcome this battle of, you know, discomfort and awkwardness, which for me is a introvert is a is actually quite a big, you know, he'll decline. I love that. I definitely thought you were going to talk about the plunge pool. If you want to talk about the plunge pool, I mean, Toby's one of his thing was to go to do the plunge pool every day because again, his goal being he wants to do the uncomfortable immediately. That's not even just the plan. No, we need to go into debt. So Toby has like a fear of water. Yeah, I have a fear of being submerged in water. Yeah. And then even more specifically like being in above waste water, waste type water in the ocean. You can imagine like he's dating me. I'm like obsessed with the beach swimming pool. And I remember like I would always say, let's get to beach and he just you never wanted to. I was incredibly, I was an expert at avoiding that discomfort. He thinks that he saw a shark once and he was younger than his. I was nine years old. I was in Portland, and I was wearing a snorkel and a sore shark. Here again, the shark was right at his face and then he can never go in the water again. But anyway, you've come so far, you planned every day and you went for a swim at the beach and went away. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Which was honestly, I don't know if it was my cardio that was struggling or the anxiety that was like tightening my chest while we were walking through the water. But yeah. What's your thoughts on there being rewards or incentives for achieving goals? Yeah, I think it depends on the context a little bit firstly. And then I think secondly as well, I think it's maybe generally speaking to society's ideas of rewards. I would say perhaps a little, you know, skewed. Yeah. Right. So maybe two, two examples. Someone goes, oh, you know, I want to get really lean for beach season and look good, feel good, whatever it may be. Yeah, I kind of get to a certain point or whatever that may be and they're like, oh, yeah, I've earned myself a cheat meal. Yeah, and the whole idea is like, cause it's you've earned yourself the right to take yourself further away from your goal. Rather than it might be like, I'm going to buy myself a new bikini. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm going to buy myself some new act of where like, or we could, yeah, and this is a slightly more blunt view. It's like, or congrats. You did what you set out to do. And this, this is probably the good segue to a, this is a professional view that I have you from, from your micro experience surrounding the idea of people management, you know, an employment. And that is that in the most, like the most simple direct language possible, the word employee means to make use of the word employment, therefore, means to make use of an individual skills and capabilities for commercial gain. So when we employ someone, we employ them, I will pay you this salary in exchange for that salary you will use this skills and capabilities to deliver this work, right. And then normally once a year in most organizations, people get a performance score. And in simple terms, it's normally you're either not meeting expectations, you're meeting expectations or you're exceeding expectations. And most people will take their salary and then they will deliver the work in exchange for their salary. But then they expect to get an exceeding expectations on their score card. And because that they believe that's their reward and then they want to link that to, you know, pay rise or whatever it may be and that's fair enough, I can understand how people get there. But it's like, you were given X in exchange for why if you gave why and you received X, then you met the expectation of that agreement. So the reward should be the continuation of that agreement. The reward shouldn't be some huge celebration or a bonus or a pay rise or whatever. It's like, well, you made a commitment in exchange for something you got everything, IE the salary. So you should feel really positive about the fact that you upheld your end of the contract. And I think all the people said goals and they expect to kind of get to this destination, but I feel great. I'm so awesome and they're looking for some emotional climax. And it's like, well, the emotional reward should be, you know, confidence. Yeah. Right. Like I committed to doing something and look at me. Hell yeah. I did it. Yeah. And I think the more you set goals, the less you tie it to that end celebration, like I look at competing early on to to the end of my competing career. And it was no longer about, you know, stepping on stage. It was about the journey, what I was achieving, that feeling of getting up each day, showing up for myself and doing what I said I was going to do. And it's the same in business at the beginning, but once the business gets here, I won't have any more stress and, you know, you're good and everything's going to be great. And then you realize, like, that's not how life works. Yeah. So how do you start to celebrate the small, the small little things and yeah, less tie it less to that end goal. And the goals getting, like to your point, the goals get much, much more nuanced over time, you know, like early on, like people, especially in business like, I want to make this money. Yeah. Yeah. And then obviously over the years, it becomes more sophisticated. Sometimes it becomes a less about money, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, anything an example from my own experience, you know, when building your businesses earlier, my career was all about like win, win, win, win as fast as possible, you know, this and the other. And the more I've had experienced more, I realized like, well, yes, you can kind of increase or decrease the rate at which things happen. In a business environment, but a lot of things are really out of control, you know, the people, the market, the customers, you can't control all those things. And so over time for me, it really became less about winning and winning quickly. And I was like, well, how do I do this really efficiently with low stress. Yeah, how can I manage an organization or manage a team of people, which are, you know, we talk about this quite a lot at home, you know, how can I do this where these employees are really engaged. And it just works. And like that sounds like such a boring, simple, you know, agreement, but for anyone listening to either runs a business or kind of owns a business or in some similar capacity to understand just getting the thing to work is really hard. You know, so like having this goal of like, I just want to work smoothly and then like trying to achieve that is actually an awesome goal as opposed to like, I just want to make a squillion dollars or whatever the more conventional goals may be. This is a great one for you because you're literally the most organized person I've ever met to the point where I feel like you have, you've robbed off on me. I was probably, I'm organized in a weird way. I can't explain it, but. Organized chaos. Yeah. I'm an organized chaos and I feel like since meeting Toby, you know, we just spent away for the weekend and I did our itinerary. You might notice throughout the organization that I deliberately didn't engage or like doing anything at all. I just sat back and watched and I was so pleased. There was the Google doc with an itinerary. It was segmented by day and time and activity who was organizing what thing in the family or it was a pleasure to experience. It's really rubbed off a man. Honestly, like now I like to have a plan because I'm like, we know that going on a holiday without a plan is never as good as going on one with one. I think that role that role holds holds true for most things. A lot of people don't like the idea of being too structured and too planned and without. You know, I'm not saying that you shouldn't. Yeah, and I'm not saying you shouldn't allow for like, yeah, creativity and serendipity in life. But I think a lot of people who would push hard against like having structure and a plan really are doing so because of the emotional discomfort that's associated with accountability. You know, like people really don't like that. So like, you know, like, I have this spreadsheet. It's my 365 day habit tracker. And I literally says the three or five things I want to do a day with a box. Check. Yes, I know if I did it on a certain day and I look at it throughout the year. And there is like. Like in my mind, I'm like, I've been doing this so much. You know, whatever. And then you open it and I was like, oh. And we'll work out for four days. Oh, that's right. Oh, yeah, because I flew here and I went there and I did this and. Oh, shit. You're in that degree of accountability. Like a lot of people don't like for me. I'm like, awesome. Great. You know, now I can go, okay, well, I haven't got that results. I didn't do this thing. Yeah, but a lot of people really don't like having a plan and a structure because it actually drives them further towards discomfort. It moves you closer to discomfort, which is what you need in order to achieve outsized results and achieve your goals. You need to be able to move towards and tolerate discomfort. But a lot of people just don't like that, which is why even though I've been training for 10 plus years, I'll tell you the other day. And then I happened with my app and I was, I wanted to do a workout and I couldn't get into my app and I was like, like really frustrated. I didn't realize how much I relied on having this little like app that kind of told me what to do when I could tick it off and, you know, it kept me accountable because I don't really have a personal trainer or anything like that. So I feel it's funny how even if we've been doing something for so long and really is a habit to a certain degree, even still those days where you need to be held accountable. Well, yeah. And I think even with this idea of habits too, I think the more I have explored this on a personal basis, the more I realize that habits are super sneaky. Yeah, so a lot of people think unhealthy habits. Yeah, 100%. Well, I'm not even just that. Like I think a lot of people think about a habit as I, you know, I wake up in the morning and go downstairs and have a coffee. I was like, that's my daily routine. That's my daily habits. Yeah, yeah, absolutely is. But if we kind of pull away some more layers, there's also a lot of things that's like, oh, well, if I feel this emotion, this habit will run. Yeah. So like, and for a lot of people, it's like, oh, if I feel discomfort, or, you know, okay, well, move away from that. And that's like a habitual response to discomfort. And I would say that's, you know, a habit that is not positively contributing to where people want to go in life. But a lot of people don't recognize that as a habit. Right, they don't even recognize it at all. They're not even consciously aware of that. Yeah, I even found like, obviously, the end of last year, well, the last six months of the year, I was showing up and working out nowhere near as consistent as I would have liked. But I also was noticing an habit of kind of, oh, I went to the gym, but I didn't really go to the gym. So like, when I was at the gym, did I push myself to, like, was I pushing myself in my sessions, or was I sort of ticking a box? And even that habit of just kind of not keeping myself accountable as to whether or not I'm actually training with intensity is a great example of, I'm still doing a task. But am I actually doing the task? Or am I just doing the task? So yeah, well, this is a really, I think this is a really interesting idea as well, though, right? In a sense that a lot of people, you know, set goals and sometimes they define habits and work that they're going to do for. And they, when they do it, they have no celebration. It's just a box ticks. When they don't do it, it's massive internal punishment. Right. And so like, you know, in, in business, you know, we have like a budget or a P&L or whatever that says we did or didn't hit these goals and didn't meet these points, right. And everyone who's been in business and done that knows you hit some, you don't hit others, you hit more this month, you hit less next month, you know, there's a, there's a degree of acceptable variance in reality. And I think a lot of people also fall off the bandwagon with the goals is how I'm going to do these things. And they do six out of seven days or whatever. They're like, oh, I'm shit. I'm angry. I'm just out there. That's just a great excuse to not do the next day. Now, if you were to follow like the really extreme school of thought, you know, you might say, well, yeah, six out of seven is not good enough. If that's the level that you want to operate your life out, which brings me right back to the initial framework, well, emotionally, what am I willing to tolerate? Because I'm not willing to tolerate the amount of discomfort that comes with like inverted commas perfection, you know, with my work effort and habits. Like, well, then don't set perfection as a goal. It's like a lot of people like, I want to exercise seven days a week. Therefore, anything less than seven is a failure. It's like, well, if you really can't commit to that, don't commit to five or four or whatever it may be. I agree. So the initial question, how do you stay organized and manage your time effectively? Well, I can really answer that for you. Katie. Yes, the Katie. Honestly, how long's Katie? We work together for six, six and a half years, I think we can't all come up seven. I think Katie is one of the most efficient women I've ever met. Yeah, so for those of you who are listening, we actually called Katie once the podcast about the puzzle. Yeah, but yeah, so Katie's been my EA or executive assistant for, yeah, well, over half a decade now. Yeah, and she's awesome at her job. But yeah, Katie is definitely a massive support for that. I think for people that don't that don't have a Katie, you know, I think, you know, I think the idea of, you know, managing your time, like as a proxy for effort. But then also using the design of your management for time to achieve management of your energy is a really important idea. And so what I mean by that is, you know, let's just say everyone has eight work hours in a day, whatever that might mean. And you have a series of tasks to get done. If you have a whole bunch of tasks that you like really know that you'll avoid. Right. And you really know that you don't like or whatever they may be try to find a way of arranging the order of the work that you do that's going to like best utilize your energy. So like, for example, for me, you know, I very often like to do like my deep work or deep thinking at nighttime. You know, so you know, like you've gone to bed like night, sweetie. Yeah. And then I store down the hallway to the office and you know, I might work for two, three, four hours or whatever. And that for me is the best time of the day where I'm like strangely, I feel quite awake. I feel quite energized. I don't have any disturbance as a distraction. So if I really need to think about stuff, I'll do it then see where I'm firsting the morning. Yeah. Correct. So this is the whole idea of like managing your energy. So you want to get up and have a coffee and then you want to think. You want to take notes of write stuff down plan, whatever it is versus for me, I'm the opposite. Right. And so I think you have things that you need to do tasks. They require effort. You have to slot that effort into time. But the only way to have an effective arrangement of your time is to figure out like what energy do you have when for what things. And you need to you need to manage to that. And again, I say this in the context that if you want extreme results, whatever it may be in your life, you go to do extreme shit. Right. You know, so if you're not willing to do that, then you have to accept, well, I can't work 14 hours a day every day. Maybe I can only work seven effective hours a day. Okay. Well, you get really good at figuring out when you're high and low energy times are an attributing or associating work effort during that time that is going to be the best kind of return on effort and return an investment from a time perspective. And you're also like Google calendars like your Bible. Yeah. So I literally my Google calendars from when I open my eyes until one point of like drop on or off it school or I can't for everything. Absolutely. Everything is accounted for. For me, I love Google calendar for mostly like work and meetings, but then I love to write down everything, like even my day, even though I kind of know what what I have, I like to write it down again to just make sure I refresh my mind. I'm big on like, I'm big on lists and efficiency and preplanings. I need to know what my week consists of, which is why I get really upset when people like cancel or move meetings and like. I think this is a good point to write. It's like not not every system is going to work for every person. Yeah. And so like, I mean, in saying that I do think the idea of writing things down works for everybody, which isn't not everyone likes outfields because it can be a little bit confronting. But I think outside of like, you know, how you articulate it or document it or whatever outside of that, like what you do with your time, when how you do it, a list, not a list, post notes, not post notes, whatever they are, it really doesn't matter. It's ultimately about figuring out what what do I need to do to make sure I get this thing done in this time. I also think like reflecting each, whether it be week, fortnight month on your goals, like something I noticed with the last six months of the year is as Toby and I were rewriting our goals for 2024. I went back on my 2023 goals and I was like, oh, like I achieved that. And then there was some things I was like, oh, like, yeah, that really, I really didn't pull through on that one. So I think going back to that list, every however long and actually making sure sometimes goals will change, whether you're altering goals or just keeping yourself accountable. Well, I do think this is an important thing too, right? Like yeah, goals will change because reality changes around us, our life changes, we move relationships work, whatever it may be, you know, regardless of the reason why things just change. So we should always have like this openness and optionality for change. But again, like coming back to the whole writing things down thing. When you are doing the change and or making a change of goals or work or whatever it is that you might be doing, don't lie, don't lie to yourself. And this is a really really interesting thing. Well, you and I was talking about this before the idea of human beings, like self governing, right? So it's like, oh, I manage myself and as human beings, we all manage yourself where we manage, yeah, what we do in our life, right? And I always use this example, it's like, you know, if human beings or an individual's were really good at self governing, then if you went to a, yeah, a supermarket, yeah, if you went to a shopping center, then all the trolleys would be in the trolley base. And there would be no need for a person to reorganize the trolleys because people would know, well, I've got a trolley, it's got stuff on it, I'm going to take it out and put it in my car. And when I don't do that, I go back in the trolleys. Everyone on this, everyone listening to this podcast, there's been a moment in time where you have not put your trolley away. Or you put it away in the wrong spot. Yeah, and so if humans could self govern, then things like a simple as that wouldn't be needed. And so when we think about the idea of setting goals, we have to be honest with ourselves is like, we, most of us are not that good at self governing, which is why writing things down is a really, really good way, not only to have coherent. And, and, and articulate thoughts, but to actually have like a documented written record, because that will drive emotion to, you know, there's no negative emotion with failing goals if they're not real. You guys run away from it for them, if they're written down on real and to your point, you go back and look at them at whatever time later and you go, oh, yeah, they're really good at that. I actually feel good about that because I did this stuff. Oh, I didn't really achieve that. Yeah, okay. And that's probably fair, because I didn't do these things. So you can actually have honest, your reflective conversations. Yeah. So I thought, why not pick your brain a little bit when it comes to business. I'll, I get a lot of questions around that. So let's tie the two together, shall we? When it comes to business, is it a whole nother ball game when it comes to goals? Do you set similar to your personal goals, like what's the process like or should the two be quite similar? And then how you set personal goals, is that how you set business goals, especially when you were running a business? Sure. When did you like, obviously when you started your business journey, did you know that the business had to have a strategy or plan early on or. Yeah, not a chance. And then again, this is a came back to what I said before about answering questions, you know, like looking back, I try very hard to be as like honest as my memory will allow me to. Yeah, well, there was a point in time where not a single person in any business that, you know, I was a part of no one knew the metrics, no one knew the financial results, no one knew the plan. With this, I was like, yep, cool, go on here, run, yeah, and and for those you plan on that doesn't work. So I think like, you know, to go back to kind of the initial outside of the, you know, questions, I think. Yeah, some of the obvious and interesting differences between goals, setting individually and goal setting for businesses is really obviously the divergence in controls. So what I mean by that is like, you know, order the control myself, I need a few things to control myself, I have to have these habits, I have a spreadsheet, I have a schedule, you know, whatever it is, and that that's enough to kind of control or govern. Yeah, the outcomes in my life. When operating a business, you have to be cognizant of the idea that. Let's say out of every hundred decisions that are made, however big or smaller decisions are, even if you own the company, even if you're the CEO, you're probably making less than two or three percent of those decisions. Purely by virtue of the fact that as a leader, you do less work than everyone else, you might work longer hours, but you do less actual raw work, which means you're making less incremental decisions day today, your decisions might be bigger and have more impact, maybe. But there's, if there's a team of 50 people, you're one of 40, I want to 50, so that's for this 49 others, they're actually making a lot more decisions in you. And therefore, by virtue of that, the ability to govern or control that those decisions are in alignment with the goals of the business and alignment with how you would make those decisions, et cetera, et cetera, is incredibly complicated. So to simplify that, the idea of goal setting and business obviously comes under this notion of strategic planning, strategic planning or a strategy really comes under this idea or this phrase that you are creating a believable plan to deploy your resources today to create a future outcome. And so to look about this, like the future outcome is effectively the goal, right, but a strategy kind of consists of the goal in combination with the resources, humans and money, you know, that you might use to deliver work as a part of a plan, right, and that all has to be believable. And what I mean, but that is that, you know, if it doesn't make sense, it's like, oh, last year we went from one million to one and a half million dollars and revenue, but this year we're going to do 100. It's like, well, you know, it convinced me that's going to be believable, right, you know, and so I think from a planning perspective, you know, business versus personal, it's just there's more layers of information, there's more fidelity required, there's more, you know, kind of structure on whatever purely because you're trying to influence and align more people. Okay. And obviously early on when you started to implement things like strategic planning and, you know, objectives, KPIs, et cetera, what was the like a moment where you're like, oh, this actually works. There are a moment for you, are you kind of, because it's all good for people to tell you what to do, right, but then to implement it and for it to work. Yeah. Obviously he's going to, you know, yeah. So I think in an interesting kind of turn of events, you know, early on in my career, I thought the idea of like if you had a plan or a strategy, that will kind of get you where you wanted to go. That's not an ultra, right, you know, you, because then well, if you have a plan and it's kind of you, let's assume in the extreme case, got a plan call, set and forget it will magically happen. We arrived straight back in self governance lane with a shopping trolleys. You're effectively expecting in, you know, our test case, 49 of the people to just do the right thing every day and make the right judgment calls every day and align with those goals, assuming that they understand and that's a big assumption, assuming that they understand what the goals mean and all that. So having the plan is great, but it's only really a small part of an overarching system, which I think needs to exist. So you need to have the plan. I think you need to have a way of measuring that, which is normally the budget. And I think you need to have a, a almost metronome like system. So metronome is a thing that keeps musicians in time. They play music that that becomes the heart beat of the organization. So we schedule meetings around that. Yeah, we're going to review the strategy. We're going to review progress. We're going to review performance. We're going to review the budget, whether that might be. I think you need to have the intersection of those three things to actually really bring its life. And that's that those three things are kind of the answer to how do we control government influence 50 people as opposed to one when setting personal goals. And when those three things were implemented and kind of working, did you find most of the time you would hit the goal? Well, so this is an interesting thing. So I would say the journey started from hitting less of the goals to progressively over time hitting more of the goals. And what I mean by that is that you're setting more realistic goals. Well, if maybe I substitute the word realistic for like more informed, right, because early on and so you're talking to founders and management teams about budgeting. You know, I will very often say like the first budget that you do will be the least accurate. And then your goal every quarter or two quarters, however often you can update and reforecast every quarter or two your job is actually to find a way to get closer to predicting what's going to happen in the future. And so over time, as you set goals, you get better at setting them, you know, what data to look at, you make better judgment calls. And this is in simple terms, this is why people who are very highly paid corporate executives or very severely successful entrepreneurs do better than everyone else, because they've spent time building the capability to make better judgment calls. That goals that are achievable, create plans that can be delivered, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Did you struggle to manage both business and personal goals when you were in, you know, the grant of it all, or did you find you were kind of always on top. I always talk about things like I feel like life has seasons. Sometimes, you know, business might be more of your priority than it might be like your personal relationship. You can't always be prioritized, but did you feel like you could always stay on top of all of your goals when you were setting them all. So I think in an interesting way, I think part of the part of the model that people have here is a little broken. And so like an example on almost the same vein is this idea of like, how do you balance your kind of like personal professional life. And in that life, I include things that I want to do, and I try to balance those things together. So I'm not weighing my career against everything else. You know, I'm saying, well, I have, you know, our relationship, you know, we have a family. I have personal hobbies like, you know, exercise and jiu jitsu. I like to try and play chess at the moment. I like to read, you know, these are all things that I want to get into my life right as well as my work. So it's not work versus every single other one of those things. It's about well, what are the things that are important to me and what do I want to do when. And so I think in terms of like from a goal setting perspective, I'm a really useful way of thinking about this is to separate. For the context of the business and I'll tie this back on a sec, but you know, to separate the goals of the business from what you have to do to get there. And I emphasize you. So like, for example, you know, if you're a founder who owns a company and you want to the business is an individual organism or entity of its own, it will live and breathe fine without you doing everything. Now, if you're worried that you're not doing everything it will break, well, that's just a problem for you to solve. It doesn't change that you can have that goal professionally for that business because that business isn't you. And a lot of people they, you know, merge their identity with their business, which is totally understandable. But the business can do things without it needing to have 100% of everyone's kind of time and effort all the time. That's part of managing resources and whatever, which is a school that takes some years to build, right. So like from a personal and professional goals and perspective, it's like, well, you don't like as an individual, your professional goals are not the businesses goals. The businesses goals are the businesses goals. You might have like a thing you want to achieve with that, but it's still the businesses goal. It's not yours, right. From a personal perspective, I would say that a better way of looking at this for people is well, that the business represents a vessel for them to achieve a personal financial goal. Right, which is a more nuanced way of looking at it. So like your personal goals might be your health family finance. For most people finance is going to be either like their job or their business that they run or and maybe they have a few investments or whatever might be. So that business really just represents one of your assets and you might have a goal. I want to make sure that asset is successful. Now that company might have it's own complete independent strategy, but they're not necessarily meant to be the same thing for someone who loves reading as much as you can you give us some personal recommendations when it comes to business and personal success. Are there any standouts that you think we should all read. Yeah, look, I. I think I think with this stuff and also like in the vein of, you know, goal setting and all these sorts of things. There is a longer version and an abridged version of this, but my favorite business author is a guy who is no longer with us his name is Peter Drucker. There's a series of different books, but there's like one in particular, which is called the executive in action, which is actually three books together. Anyway, one of those books is called the effective executive now what are not everyone's going to become executive or whatever is redundant right because that book is really a list of models and frameworks like making decisions, managing your time. Yeah, being efficient, you know, this and the other which are all requirements of executives, but also in my opinion, just humans in general, we need to make good use of our time. And so I think whether that's like a personal or professional endeavor, I think that's a great book. The only caveat to that is that it's a little. It was written many, many, many years ago, so the language is a little not so modern. And I think alongside that, you know, you can have like all of the understanding of what to do, you know, and how to do it, but if you can't manage yourself internally, you know, your emotions and you can't tolerate being like uncomfortable and disliked, you know, then I think that's complicated. And so I would probably look at, you know, when it relates to, you know, like interpersonal skills, so from one person to another, I have said this many times, or yes, the courage to be just liked. And I think if you read that book and don't get a lot from it, then read it again, because you weren't paying attention, right. And so that's a really powerful book. But then I think, you know, alongside that I think sometimes a good dose of like brutal reality can be good for people. And so, you know, there's a few people, you know, Michael Jordan's coach, like, you know, person fitness coach, you has written a few books and forgotten his name has gotten passed me, I think it's Tim something. And then another guy, David Goggins, who's, you know, a really extreme panel, like, you know, Ultramar, run and now, do I think that either those mental models are applicable to everyday human beings, well, probably not because they're not going to put in the level of frankly, pretty intense effort or insane effort to do that. But the ideas remain the same in that, like, if you can't set goals, be accountable, be disciplined to whatever that level means to you, well, just don't expect anything. And I think those books that are written by those guys, I mean, they're all, they borderline a little bit on entertainment versus education. And I always use this with books. It's like you're either kind of reading education or entertainment could be careful of which one. But I think there's some interesting ideas in there. So if you would have blend how to manage yourself with some business stuff, you had to understand yourself and how you feel with the curves to be to slide, and then a little bit of a dose of reality with a goal setting stuff from those guys, I think that would be a nice, you know, a nice collection. Yeah. Okay, last question. One piece of advice for everyone to achieve their goals this year. These open questions, you get me every time. I didn't see that one on the list before one piece of advice on the bottom last question. You can think about it. Well, yeah, and this is like super generic, but I had a conversation with a guy I've been working with for a little while now yesterday. Awesome guy. So lovely. I've actually known him for a very long time personally. He's now running a couple of businesses and we have this kind of interesting loop conversation loop that we have which he's making some great strides on from a development standpoint. And then so initially we start working together and he's like, oh, yeah, I've got these two businesses. I think this one's going to fail. And he's like, oh, yeah, it's hard to get customers and all these elaborate kind of frankly excuses and beliefs that it's impossible. And I was like, okay, well, have you got a database of people who are not customers and they've never been. Is it yeah, you got a database and my company's on there. You see a couple hundred of might call well between now and next week, I want you to call a hundred of them. I want you to sign them up. And he's like, oh, it's not going to work. You know, anyway, it says belief system. There's not going to work. He goes away, calls him up like doubles is revenue. Yeah, in seven days. And so like the whole thing here is coming back to us earlier, we as human beings will create like incredibly good, articulate, hyper detailed stories now mind about why there are reasons why we shouldn't do this, why it won't work, why it's not the right option. You know why there's some other more comfortable thing over here and he would constantly say like, oh, I've got this new idea for another business though. You know, I have all these skills. I could just go and do this in my but just do the thing here. Like just do this thing for me. I love to talk about the reasons I feel like it's anxiety. Why I can't why something going to work or how it could break or why it fail. Yeah, rather than just accepting that what will be will be. Yes, and just hopping up each day and chip away, which I still do anyway. But I like to distress myself out all the other emotions, but here is it. So then here is the advice. Right. So to answer the question in a business sense on a work with people who in a commercial sense will say me like, well, this will never ever work. And I'll go, okay, convince me. Right. And that requires them to use examples and data and whatever on a personal sense, right, working people and personal goals to say that like, oh, you know, this isn't going to work. I can't do this. I'm not capable of doing this ago. Cool. Prove it. Because if you are so confident that you're right that this won't work, that that's wrong. This is impossible. I said, well, the worst thing that could happen is that you do it and you were wrong. Because if you do it and you were right, it's like, well, okay, well, you prove that you are right now. You don't know to do that thing. If you do it in spite of your avoidance and you were wrong, well, not only have you proved that you were wrong and you shouldn't be silly and listen to those invoices for this particular things, you've also just unlocked more opportunity. You've had more success. So if you believe that you shouldn't be doing something for all these reasons, prove it. Do it. So do you think I say these things to myself because I'm scared to be accountable? Sometimes true. I think we all do. Interesting. I feel like I like just to like punish myself. But yeah, but okay, let's just as an idea, like just as a little idea, let's explore that right. If someone has a particular thing that they need to do and in anticipation of that, they feel substantial anxiety anxiety being defined as concern or worry or fear about something happening in the future. That's a perfect environment that you've created mentally to not do the thing that you need to do. Right. And so the more intense emotions that you have and the more thoughts and beliefs that you create in anticipation of something that maybe you perceive as being uncomfortable, the more intense that gets, then the more likely you are not to do it. Right. And so I often use this as a, as a good, you know, calibrator for myself and telling my core. Like if I have all these like defensive thoughts and avoidance thoughts and whatever, I'm like, well, I know I probably, I probably should either a just do it or be figure out why that's happening. You know, what am I not like consciously aware of because like I said before, as humans, we are so incredibly good. We're experts at avoidance, but we are absolute experts at avoidance, you know, our whole, you know, the human condition is effectively set up largely for self preservation. I don't die. And that's not really tremendously useful in a, you know, business sense or a personal sense, but the proxy for that we're looking at these things if we perceive them as uncomfortable or dangerous or emotionally conflicting, will we create these stories to avoid them. So if that's true, if you were having a conversation with someone else about I really don't want to do this thing, if that is true, I said, we'll prove it. It's happens to me so much with like social events. I'm like, oh, like I work myself up. Oh my god, I don't want to go. I don't want to go. And then I go and I have a great time. Yeah, but that's an example of proof it because if you were like, oh, I really don't want to go. I was like, well, prove it. Worst case, you get there and you don't like it. You know what you do? You live, right? You lost five minutes or 20 minutes or half an hour. Cool, great. And you collect good more data to inform a future decision, right? But alternatively, if you just go in your case, you have a good time. It's like, well, okay. So I've just proved to myself that all the anticipatory anxiety was actually just my brain inaccurately, you know, assessing a future situation. Yeah. Well, that's a whole nother conversation, isn't it? Well, that was that was so good. I feel like people are going to get so much value out of that. So thank you, honey, for coming on. We love to have you on the potty. Love you, honey. We'll have to do another one once there. We've got another round of fingers. Yes, after the wedding, which is scary. It's like 13 weeks on Monday. 13 weeks on Wednesday. How are you feeling if I'm so stressed now? I was going really well, but now we still haven't even booked our flights or anything. We haven't booked our flights. The wedding is booked, but we haven't booked our flights. Like, sorry, what? We have the list of flights. We have the list anyway. It's going to be great. Everything's going to be fine. Well, thank you, honey, and thank you guys for tuning in. We'll see you on our next podcast. Thanks so much for joining us, and we hope you loved today's episode. Make sure you follow our socials chat with us.podcast on Instagram and TikTok to stay up to date with all of our show info. See you soon.