Episode 122. Reflection2022: A Year of Reflection and Growth
Episode 122. Reflection2022: A Year of Reflection and Growth
Join us on the In-situ Health and Fitness podcast as we reflect on the past year and all the challenges and victories we've experienced in our journey towards better health, fitness, life and business. We'll discuss the changes we intend to make to our lifestyle, share the things we have learnt the hard way, and discuss our goals for the coming year. Tune in every week for actionable advice and education to help you live your best, healthiest life.
Questions discussed in this week’s episode:
What is something you have changed your mind on?
What is something in life/business that has improved and something that hasn’t improved?
What was one highlight from the past year?
What are your goals? (relationships, mind, health, business/career)
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Episode 122. Reflection2022: A Year of Reflection and Growth
We normally say. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode. I'm excited about this one. This is our 2022 reflection episode. Episodes, not episodes. I hope we're not doing more than one of these. I like these episodes because it allows us to go back and reflect on the year. But I strongly recommend that every single person does this because. If you're just doing stuff, then you don't know where you're going, you don't know where you've been, you don't know if you've achieved anything and you're just sort of doing stuff for the hell of it. So by reflecting on the year past, you can see how you've improved and areas that you haven't improved on that you need to work on again this year. This is something we do a lot with our new clients. We do it weekly and then monthly and then they can do it on their own. So obviously over some time. But it's just a good way to understand the things you have achieved during the year because a lot of the time we forget. And also what works for you and what doesn't work for you? I think that that is. My biggest, like, the thing that I learned the most from is what hasn't worked. Because sometimes you just keep doing what isn't working and just keep expecting it to eventually happen. And then you're like, well, if I spent 12 months doing this one thing, it isn't right for me. Yeah, 100%. And like I said, you might continue doing that for another 12 months before you even reflect and realize that you're spending all this time and effort on something that doesn't give you value. So we've got a few questions we're going to sort of ask ourselves. We're going to try and give a business answer and a life or health and fitness answer. They're sort of all the same thing for us anyway. You can use these questions as you're going to realize Mac hasn't got some answers to some of these questions, and that's quite all right. You don't have to have an answer to these questions as long as you sort of think about it. You don't have to have an exact answer for the questions, but as long as you reflect on the questions in the past. That's what I'm getting, that you don't have to do a podcast for your reflection. You can sit there and just think about it. You can sit there, you can write these things down, and
then you can journal about them. Or you can just chat with yours. Loved one significant other. Partner, Friend, dog, dog, anybody that will listen, it is good to sort of think and talk out loud about these things because it just does sort of make you think a little bit harder. So if you have got that opportunity to talk to somebody about this sort of stuff, you're probably going to get a little bit more value out of it. All right. I think you should go first because you picked and I think the question we should start with is what have you changed your mind about this year? Because Jack posed this question to me 3 days ago and I could not think of anything, but I think I've got something, but I still want you to go first. So what's the question? What have you changed your mind on this year since the start of this year, I guess?
This is a good one because it just gives you that opportunity. Like, Oh yeah, I did believe this, now I did this and it didn't work like we were just saying. So you, my one isn't that big. You've been hassling me to ask my answer, and I haven't given you my answer, but protein shakes. So this is a bit of a weird one that I thought. So I honestly thought you needed to have it. Protein is very important in muscle growth. It is the most important thing. We've talked about that on plenty of other podcasts or that sort of stuff. And. I thought protein shakes had a bigger impact. Like I thought, they give you better results for muscle growth than they did. So we haven't had a protein shake at least. Two, maybe three months. Yeah. We ran out. And I. It's just one of those things where. Yeah, I'll order it. Yeah, yeah, I'll order it. And you know we haven't. Yeah. And then two months passed. I'm like let's just I thought about this in my head and I'm like let's not order it and let's see what happens because you were like Jack was obsessed as soon as we finished the workout. Protein shake. Hungry protein shake. Yes. I want to give a bit of a back story to that. So my. My Health and fitness goal this year was to put on muscle mass. To do that you need to be in a surplus and a protein shake is a great way to get you in surplus. So a bulk as you hear about it on social media and people talking about it, bodybuilders, they call it bulking and bulking is just a surplus of calories. So a little bit extra calories each day and the best way to do that is with a protein shake. Having one extra protein shake can put you in a surplus for the day, so 200 to 300 calories. That's so can a Mars bar. Yeah, so it's either a Mars bar or something dirty like that, or a protein shake. Now I got up to 103 at my peak, maybe a little bit more depending on if I had been to the toilet that day.
And since they're all come back down a couple of kilos, but. Since I bulked, I put on all the muscle mass I wanted and now my goal is to I guess dial in a couple of points in my body to grow that area. So my delts or shoulders, I'm trying to grow more than the rest of my body and I'm surprised with the results. Everything else is dialled in, so sleep, nutrition, workouts are focusing on the workout to grow the shoulders, all that sort of stuff and I've got. More growth in my shoulders than I thought I would without protein shakes. Well, yeah, so. Yes, and we talk about this a lot in the episode. Protein shakes are important and they are a good thing, but. I've changed my mind about how necessary they are. Yeah, for muscle growth. Now in saying that our diet, everything I eat is still protein-focused, so protein is still the highest. Like the macronutrient is still. Probably the highest out of all of them. So I'm still getting a lot of protein. I'm just not having the protein shake to top it up and I've still got it. But Simon's shoulders are growing more than they have before. So, yeah, that's the one thing I've changed my mind on. Well, I would never have guessed that. Hmm. Interesting. That's why I didn't want to tell you what it was. All right, So what do you got? OK, mine is. Like completely left field but I only discovered it or thought about this or this literally like slapped me in the face yesterday and that is that. Motion is not action, right? So a lot like the past 12 months specifically, I think that I have thought because I'm in the motion of doing things like I'm learning about stuff and I'm planning content. And I'm. All of the things that don't that aren't doing
the behaviour. So I think that yesterday I'm reading atomic habits for like the third time. And yesterday it just, I read that sentence that motion is not action. And I was like, wow, I spend so much time just in motion, but I don't act. Does that clear? Yeah, a lot of planning, and a lot of thinking. So like a real-life example for someone listening would be like, if you are faintly thinking, I'll just read this book about nutrition before I start to eat a healthy diet. I'll just watch all these YouTube videos on how to work out before I start. Exercising just does all of these things, so it's like I'm in motion before I do the action. And the action is the only thing that gets you anywhere. And I don't know what happened to me these last 12 months, maybe even just six months, but. I've spent so much time. And I have a very bad, perfectionist problem that I spend so much time just trying to plan stuff so that I can do the action perfectly. But I spend so much time planning, I never actually do the action. So I think that's what I try to remind myself of, and that's when I'm going to focus on this coming year not just being emotional, doing fluffy things. But acting, yeah, I guess that comes into my like what I've changed my mind on business-wise is how important consistency is because we talk about consistency all the time with health and fitness. You know. One workout a week is great, but you know, three is better and doing that for 12 months is better than doing it for one month. That's why you know I'll talk so much **** about six-week challenges and all that sort of stuff because you're not consistent, so consistency is best, but. Of realized probably too late this year that consistency is the most important thing for business. Just doing those little things that are that you need to grow your business. So small little consistent things every single day that will reach
the business goals. So that's what I've learnt or changed my mind on. I just thought you know, going out and you know. De Before I just thought about like, you know, just content here, the message here, you know, reach out here, e-mail there were consistently doing the things I need to are probably more important than just doing random things for the business now and then. Yeah, so that's the business thing of realized. And again, that ties into health and fitness as well. Like just doing random, having random healthy meals here and it is useless. Having one healthy meal a day is much better. Yeah, definitely for your goals. Next question, what was the next question? What is something that has improved in life and business and what is something that has not improved for you? You go first.
Throw me on the bus. So what has improved? What has improved? Life or business or both? What has improved is clarity, I guess. So like I've said, I've learned a lot over the last 12 months. Clark white has clarity about what we want in the business. Yeah, I had that same thing written down. Yeah. So that's good. So we've changed the business model. Three times a year. So three times we've changed our minds about what we wanted and we just could not get clarity. And every time we change it, I'm like all right, this is it, we've got it and I still couldn't define what it was. So it wasn't we changed the business model, this is how we offer our services, and this is what people get. But I could still explain it very clearly. So there's no clarity in that business plan or that model so. Now I have a lot more clarity, so that's one thing that's gone well. But we had to go through all those **** variations to get to the good part. Yeah, so. Yeah, that's sort of both answers and both are the same thing. Good and bad. Yeah. So the bad things were all those **** business models that we had and all the things we tried that didn't succeed. But out of that, we've now got a lot more clarity about what we offer. Yeah. And I think sometimes being in a country town and not having a very big network, it's really hard to remember that. Starting a business and having a successful business doesn't just happen overnight because everyone around us sort of works for someone or they have a business that is. How would you describe it? I don't know. I like building, they're building. Do you know what I mean? And I think sometimes it's hard, it is very hard for us to remember that it takes 10s if not hundreds of changes to the product. You have to find the right product that's going to work for you and the clients that you want, right? But it's just so hard to remember that when there's no one around you too. Work with. I don't know. Yeah, well, like, given that
the building is a good example, there are heaps of builders there. Like you could be building a house right next to somebody and you could look over, see how they're building it, and learn from them. Yeah, where we can't do that. No. Yeah, we just have to go the long. It's like we have to go the long way around and make a bunch of mistakes before we come back to where we should be. If there was somebody there, there's plenty of people that do this before us and they could have gone, yeah, well, don't do that. That's not going to work. Yeah, we just didn't have that. Well, the thing that I think has improved was the clarity around the business, but also my confidence slash, I hope, my speaking ability in the last 12 months. So think about I was trying to think about the podcast that we would have done this time last year and I think my confidence just in having. Like a podcast. Like I used to be afraid to say, Oh yeah, we have a podcast. After all, I didn't want anyone to listen because I was worried that I wasn't. I didn't know enough stuff or I wasn't a good enough speaker. So I sort of played it down and when people asked me what I did, I would be like, I'm just a nutrition coach, you know, like don't look me up online or anything. I don't want you to see what I'm doing. But now I'm just like. This is what I do. This is what we do. This is our business. It's a real business for everybody, which is also really hard in a small town because. Having an online business, people like what? Yeah, what do you mean? Do you work for the government online? No, we run a business online. We have a podcast. So I think that that's something. It's probably my biggest improvement or my favourite, favourite improvement. And I would say something that hasn't improved for me or us is our network maybe. And I was also going to say my ability to sell. So our service, yeah, I think that just comes down to clarity as well. Yeah, we are supposed only just clarified everything. So now I know what we offer.
Yeah, next question. Ohh, we're smashing through these. OK. The next question was just goals for Before we go into that, let's dive into some others that I just thought of other, what other questions highlight highlights of the I'm not prepared for? We're reflecting right now on the podcast live unedited highlights, highlights of the year. Say the podcast is also not a specific highlight, just a general one. Just general like thinking about good moments that we've had this year. Because again, a lot of the time when people reflect it's always negative because you only really remember the negative stuff because it has more of an impact. So taking the time to think about positive stuff. Sort of gives you a bit more energy and gives you more encouragement to go out and achieve more things. And again, like if you're chasing a health and fitness goal, it's good to sort of look back on the achievements you have had so far because sometimes it's hard to see physically your goals. One highlight was the podcast why we hit 3000 listeners for a week. It does drop. It sort of floats in between and At the moment we can't get like literally just can't get over 3000, which again. That is a massive haul for me. I didn't think would even. Get there. I think at the start of the year we're still hanging around like the 500 where we yeah well maybe 1000, but like to increase that much to have that many people interacting and listening with the podcast. Probably a huge hole. And I do love doing the podcast. That's one thing that has been consistent with our business since we started is the podcast. Definitely. It's got nice **** like better. But, and again, we're going to continue growing it over the next year, we've got some really big exciting things coming up like studio Wise and that sort of thing full of podcasts finally, but that's probably one of my biggest highlights.
Business-wise. Business-wise. I was.
The yeast went so quickly for me. I feel like everything's mushed together, but I was going to say mine. Starting my solo episodes was probably my favourite. Like, that's the thing that's been most exciting. For me, I think this year like Union stuff is great as well and I've done well this year in uni. So like that's a highlight I guess, but. I don't know. I, I just really love one. Like 12 months ago I never would have thought that I would do a podcast by myself because. That's embarrassing and I don't know anything. And two, I just really love learning stuff and teaching people stuff, so I like having that. I don't know, it's like an added. Motivator in the business for me to plan and be organized and learn topics more in-depth, which I think ultimately helps me, helps our clients, and helps the business. So yeah, I think starting that even I've been on two episodes, but I've got lots planned. Health and fitness wise I would say for me is hitting 103 kilos. I know a lot of people like that. That's gaining weight, but. So I'm 35 and I was able to put on muscle. A very healthy way without any. External supplements or injections and that sort of stuff. So I am proud of that. I am. Happy with how I did it, but yeah, putting on. It was about four or five kilos of muscle in my life being 35. I've grown more hair in the process.
When a lot of guys my age might be stressing about hair loss, I've grown too much hair and it's growing all over my face and head in places where. Like, I haven't had hair before. Um, so, you know, that's more like an. Bonus. I feel great. Are moving better. So yeah, I was just. My goal was to put on muscle mass. I hit that goal and. If I had all the other benefits come along with it as well.
Yeah. Honestly, I can't think of a health and fitness highlight. And is that because I didn't set any health and fitness goals? OK, generally just setting and holding fitness goals is so hard for me because I don't want. Specific aesthetic, like I do to some degree, but I don't. I just want to be generally healthy, like, and that's such a broad and hard and unspecific goal. But that's just my goal. I think one thing that makes me very satisfied. Maybe not a highlight, but satisfied is our current sleep schedule, do you think because? This is probably the longest we've stuck to it. This is so boring. Something like these two is so boring. This is like I feel great every day and if. As you could get to how we feel every day, then you realize how **** you were feeling. Do you know what I mean? So I guess, um, what was I saying? My sleep schedule. Because I actually, wake up and I want to get up. I'm excited to go to work. I'm excited to do uni, to just go for a walk, to just hang out with Jack and the dogs. I don't know. Like, I think the sleep schedule is the biggest thing that got me to my goal of putting in more muscle. And then now cutting back body fat and growing certain muscle areas. I think it's like the sleep consistency that we've dialled in has been the most. The biggest thing to move the needle, yeah, it wouldn't have been as successful if it wasn't for the sleep part
of things and not even just health and fitness wise, like how long do you like, probably since we've been in this house, so at least six months we've had our sleep schedule really dialled in and like even my anxiety. That was very bad before we moved house to now it. It's like nonexistent. Like, it's like a little amount of enough anxiety to be motivating for like just general life things, but not like. Crippling. Crippling. What's the point of life? What am I doing with my life? I can't do anything. Everything's falling apart because I think our sleep is just so much better. Our sleep schedule is so much better, and I never thought that it could have gotten better from like 12 months ago. We probably recording a podcast telling everyone how to sleep and our sleep schedule wasn't even dialled in. Consistency. Yeah, all right. Goals. Goals well. I hate setting goals, to be honest. So because I just, I feel like people say like I'm going to lose 5 kilos and I just hate goals like that, like broad. So my goals are in 4 categories.
For somebody that doesn't like setting goals, you got now 4 categories. Well, OK, specific broad goals are very hard for me. So I've got relationships. And I think that my goal for the next 12 months is to have a monthly date night with Jack because we don't have the nonexistent now. We just work pretty much. And then my other relationship goal was to schedule time. To nurture friendships because I'm very very, very, very bad at it. Relationships not really like a relationship like with Jack is easy because. Jack, I don't know, but I'm really bad at actually making time to. Spend time with friends, maybe you know what I mean. So how am I going to do both of those things? Schedule them into my calendar, physically write them down? And then I did the next category mind and I want to continue to read daily. Slash just learning because like I'm learning so much stuff about the brain and how important it is to read and learn so. Reading Daily is going to be my thing and I feel like in the past I've been like reading daily is too hard. I don't have enough time, I'm so busy, but I know that I spend a lot of time scrolling through social media. When I go on that post, I end up scrolling. So I'm going to try and replace that scrolling with reading because it just helps me get better as a person, in business, and life. Mentally. The 4th one is a health goal, and that's going to be changed. Try to change out my exercise schedule a little bit. I feel like I've got very, very, very comfortable with just strength training four days a week and
walking a bunch. So I want to keep strength training four days a week. Add in. My plan is to Monday, and Tuesday strength train mobility. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday strength training maybe. I was going to try and add in two cardio dates. So maybe Wednesday is like cardio like interval style and then one interval style on the weekend. Yeah, nice, which we have talked about before doing something like that. Yeah, that was going to be one of my goals to elevate my heart rate. Yeah, that's my capacity once a week, once a week. And again, as you said, we just get comfortable in certain. Training methodologies, like somebody who's been doing high intervals every single day for 12 months should do some other exercise that doesn't elevate the heart rate. It's just you've got to do a bit mixture of everything. And yeah, we've been pretty slack on the. Heart rate elevation.
We do walk. So you know, you're here to heal. Your heart rate gets up a little bit, but not that high. If not where you can't like talk, you know, you never really go past that. But we might do a superset of legs and if those that know if you do like a heavy super set of legs, two leg exercises back-to-back, your heart rate gets pumped. Pretty pumped, but that's not very consistent. Yeah, done, I guess you could say. So having an actual scheduled workout. The week, in the weeks' program, is one of my goals. Wait, I got one more area. Ohh, business, business guys, there's four. OK. So my business one is to just be more business-minded like I feel like sometimes well my first thing was I'm just in the motion. I'm not doing the action. So my plan or my goal is to plan out content, product launches, podcast, and episodes. YouTube videos when we go back to doing that. All of that kind of stuff well in advance so that we can be as prepared as possible and we can take advantage of like holidays and special times of like seasons and stuff like that because. I don't know. I don't know how to run a business. I'm just making it up as I go. We both are. So just trying to implement daily habits that I guess make me. More professional maybe. Yeah. OK, now you can go. Do you want me to tell you the topics I've done? The health and fitness one? OK. Relationships.
Yes, they, I guess we have a different opinion on that. Like, I'm very particular about who I have around me because yeah. And the people that come along that, yeah, I suppose I could work on those a little bit more and be a little bit more, spend a bit more time trying to create better friendships with those people. So yeah, that'd be a good one. The date night sounds nice. Where are you taking me this month? Starting next year? It's only a couple of days away. Crap. Two days away.
Relationship yet? Next mind? Mind.
I don't know.
Like what do you have from what I had? I like reading daily all like to make sure that I'm always learning something.
I'm not going to commit to reading every day.
My mind thing would be, I guess, not to go on social media as soon as you get up in the morning because you're so bad at that. Yeah, right.
Mine would be mined and business all in the same one like you said. Just trying to be a bit more professional with my business. Our business, our business and just doing the things you need to, to be better at business. Or making the business better. And what was the other one? Business. Health business. Yeah. So business I want to be a better coach this year. I feel like I may have let that slip with all the different variations that we've tried to do during the year, so I want to be the best coach possible. So yes, have the business on point but it is probably better on the coaching side, so. I know the clients we've got now probably listen to this going, yeah, you already do a good job, but I know I can do better. So I want to be the best coach so when somebody works with us, they're getting the best possible coaching they can have for them, like very personalized coaching. So then results are guaranteed. So making just being better at coaching and all that sort of stuff, having better systems in place to be able to coach better as well. They're my goals for the next 12 months. Cool, OK. Come back here in 12 months and reflect again on the podcast. Did we even set goals? I think a big mistake. Last year. Did we set goals? If we did, we certainly didn't track them, no. And again, that's like. Write them down, yeah, doing goals. Just saying you're doing yours, but like we're saying that we're going to do certain things to improve the business so we can have a checklist to make sure we're doing those things every day. I'll tell you my plan everybody for how I'm going to stay on track with my goals that I'm going to use notion. It's very confusing. You don't have to use notions. You could use excel or a piece of notebook of some sort. Write the goal and then I'm going to decide on the habit that will help me get to that goal. And then I'm going to decide on how
to incorporate that habit into my day or my routines. And then I'm also going to try and have a weekly check-in to see if I've done the habit. If I'm progressing towards the goal and the monthly check-in, why are you laughing at me? I want to reach my goals, but these are all the things we do for our clients, we just don't do for ourselves. Exactly, yeah.
This is when you're saying I'm like, **** we do. We do all this with our clients, but we don't do it for ourselves. Yeah, so we're going to do everything that we do for our clients, for ourselves, checklists, things that tick off reflections and make sure we did it and not changing everything at once. This time of the year, everybody's like New Year's resolution. We're going to change all this. Just doing the one thing until it becomes a habit and then adding on top of that. You've got 12 months, so just choose 12 things. Choose three things, yeah, split it up into three different three-times sections and just work on those three things over the year. And if you make those three things a habit, you know you're going to be better next year. And also, when you think about it, choosing just three things and that's not enough. Like I want to do more things for the year. If you do more things, you're likely to do 0 things. So then you've just done another 12 months of doing nothing to progress. Whereas if you just focus on doing a couple of things, at least you've progressed to some degree, you've got some new habits, you've made some improvements, so. Yep, awesome. Let's leave it there now. Again, everybody listening. If you are going to do a reflection, let us know if you want help, or if you wanna chat about certain things. If you're not sure how to achieve certain things, hit us up. We're always happy to help. We're also in the shop on in situcollective.com/collection
have journal prompts if you want to add journaling in like I'm pretty sure there are weekly reflections, monthly reflections, and daily reflections. There's a bunch. I think they're free. Yeah, most of it's free. So anything you're trying to achieve, you can find on that web page. And if it's not free, it's only going to be a couple of bucks. So head over there or reach out and we can send you in the right direction or help give you a bit of guidance on your reflections as well. That's it. Merry Christmas. Happy New year.
I guess next time we'll be talking to everybody. It will be 2023, have a good New Year's everybody and we'll talk to you all next week. Bye.
