#2100 Bridging The 'You' Gap - Harps

listening to this and where you want to be. So, where am I, say, physically or mentally, or financially or professionally, or personally or sociologically, like, where am I in my life in that part of my life? How am I going, what's going great? What's not going great? What are my results telling me? All that? Where am I? And where do I want to be? Let's just round it up

or down and let's just go a year. It could be three weeks, it could be three months, six months, could be ten years, right, but just a future version of you, and I think it's good to try to identify what is the gap between where I am and where I want to be, or who I am behaviorally or practically or financially, and who I want to be. We all have a gap so well. I don't think

I've met anyone who doesn't. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has zero aspiration or ambition or intention or hope to be a slightly better version of themselves in some way at some point in the future. So I think we all have that gap. But it's trying to identify what that gap is, what that means to us, how important it is to us, and what's at the

what's the underlying cause of the gap. What are we doing too much of or not enough of, or what are we not thinking about or not addressing, and what do we need to do? And like the tough thing about one of the many tough things about being a human is that we're emotional, and when it comes to us, we're often very unreasonable. We're often very hard on ourselves, or at other times the other end of the scale.

We just want instant gratification and fun and easy and quick and painless, so we just hit up on all the fun stuff, the comfortable stuff. But there's always some kind of underlying reason or cause or mechanism that's keeping us behaviorally or psychologically or physiologically or financially trapped in a spot that we don't want to be, which is not say life is currently shit. It's not say that

at all. It's just to say that many of us have wanted to be in inverted commas b in another place for a very long time, but we're not there for whatever reason, you know, Like there was a time when I was working on the gym floor and then I realized I wanted to own a business. I want to work for me. So there's the oh, well, here I am working in this place for this much though, for this bloke, in these circumstances, in this culture, it's okay, but I don't love it. You know, it's a five

out of ten. I don't love it. It's not My life is not horrible, but this is not where I want to be. So then I would and I did. In that moment, I'd go, well, this is my current status, situation, income, environment, circumstance, level of responsibility, level of power. I wasn't running the show. I couldn't run the show because it wasn't my business. And this is where I would like to be at

some stage in the future. I don't necessarily think I timelined it to win it within a day or a month even, but just to recognize that this ain't it for me. This is okay, but this ain't it in inverted commas for me. And then what does it look like?

You know? And you're always redefining and kind of realigning and thinking about what that means over time, and that you know that what it will look like, what will be the ideal situation, circumstance, scenario, income, culture, environment, task, role, job that will be different for you at different times, just as it has been for me. But right now I'm listening to this. You know, where are you at and where would you like to be? And what is that gap? And let's see if we can talk about

bridging it. So what I've done, Groovers, is I have broken it down into kind of like the macro and the micro. There's the big rocks and the pebbles, and the big rocks of which I speak grasshoppers are ah for today anyway. They are these physical health, mental health, lifestyle habits, career financial stuff, relationships stuff, brain function and

mental health stuff. And putting our current operating system under the spotlight as well, so we can take a look at all of these kind of individual kind of components of the US experience, and then maybe the the micro that sits underneath the macro of each of those headings. So I'm not going to make this too long. It's just kind of, I guess, an introduction to this concept between bridging the gap, and obviously there are a lot of gaps for many of us. Some of them are

really important. Some of them are like, yeah, I wouldn't like I wouldn't mind being a bit better at that, that would be nice. But if I don't get any better at playing my guitar, that's okay. Or if I don't lose three more kilos, that's okay. Or if my income stays at you know, whatever it is or whatever it is plus ten percent, I'm probably going to be okay.

So it's not a big thing, but there will be big things like I cannot currently or I can't continue on my current workload, so the hours I work, the stress that it puts me under the level of sleep that I'm getting, like, it's just not working. So that's something that really needs to be addressed and immediately. So top of the list is physical health, and in that like no surprises here, I think When I think about my physical health, I think about the impact of food

and everyone's physical health. Is how I frame it food? How much am I eating? Am I overeating? Am I under eating? And am I eating high quality food? Where do I get it from? Do I prepare it? Is it ultra processed? Is it somewhat wholesome and closer towards the organic end of the spectrum? How do I eat in terms of my relationship with food? What about social eating? What about compulsive eating? What about reactive eating? What about numbing out with food? What about all of those things?

So I think it's just to be. And as most of you know, my biggest challenge for a lot of my life has been food in terms of me keeping my shit together, managing me, making good choices, and giving myself the best chance to live a long, healthy life. Food has been my number one priority because that was my biggest issue. That was my biggest kind of emotional, psychological, behavioral tipping point. So think about the things. If food is an issue for you, don't beat yourself out, don't

jump up and down. As emotional as we all are, recognize the emotion around it, feel it. That's all cool. But then try to turn that volume down a little bit and start to be a bit strategic, just practically, what am I doing that doesn't work? What am I bullshitting myself about? What am I telling people that isn't true? What am I currently doing pretty regularly that is dumb as fuck? You know that this is You don't need

to be super educated or highly intelligent. I know most of you are, But you don't need to be a genius to figure this stuff out. You don't need to be a genius to know that you are doing things which don't align with who and how you want to be. So food is a biggie under the banner of physical health exercise, of course, I don't really need to explain it to you. But more than how much do you exercise, or do you have the perfect program, or how hard or how easy, my kind of number one priority for

people is that they exercise consistently. Most people that I have met over the years I'm talking about the totality of the people I meet in life are not consistent. And that's very reflective of the stats around exercise consistency generally speaking in the research. So we know that a

lot of people start a lot of people stop. A lot of people do a whole thing for a while, they get results, then they stop, then they lose results, and then a whole bunch of stuff happens, and then we're getting to October November, it's getting warm in Australia anyway, and then people go, right, that's it, I'm back baby,

And there's another cycle. It's hard to be consistent. And it doesn't mean it's hard for everyone all the time, but it means it's hard for a period of time until that exercise that works for you, until that exercise that produces the outcomes that you want becomes ingrained into who you are, Like, this is part of your operating system. Now, this is part of your hardwiring. This is you on default. This is normal mode you, NM you why sorry, n

M why normal mode you? Because then once that exercise gets integrated into our subconscious and our day to day patterns and rules and rituals, and now this is just us doing us. This is not us trying to be

spectacular or become an Olympian or being credible. This is us just trying to build an operating system around As I said, initially, food and exercise, which is going to work for us, And by work for us, I don't mean get us in the Olympic team or some kind of physiological specimen that's superhuman, but rather just a version of you that is consistently as healthy as you can be, optimizing your physical potential. Of course, under the banner of

physical health is sleep and stress and relationships. Sleep and stress. You kind of get it. If we're under sleep, we're not recharging the batteries. And I actually just read an interesting paper talking about or abstract of a paper, I'll be more accurate about how you know, there's a thing that happens with sleep, and that is that over time. You know, people say I'm really good with five hours.

What happens is when you under sleep. Now, virtually nobody, very very few people can be consistently physiologically healthy on five hours sleep. There may be a few unicorns out there. But what's happened with many people who go, oh, I'm great with five or six hours is that their body has adapted so that they feel good, so they have the perception of I'm okay, while below the surface physiologically

things are not okay. So we don't even know sometimes because we can't pick up on the data on the biodata that our body is sending us so sleep, even if you think you're going okay sometimes with four or five six hours sleep, the research seems to suggest, and my observation and work with people seems to suggest that there are very few people who can consistently live on somewhere in the five to six hour range and be

genuinely healthy optimal immune function, cellular energy, cellular health, cognitive function on very little sleep. And then the last one on the list here on the physical health as relationships and just because you know what's happening in your relationships more specifically you'll or close relationships, it impacts you. And this is an interesting thing because it's not something I used to think about a whole lot. I didn't really

think about it, you know what. I didn't actually understand it as being such an important factor in physical health in mental health, because if your mental health is not great, your physical health it's not going to be great, and vice versa, like they're intertwined to think that, as I've said many times, to think that you know, psychological, emotional and physiological kind of states or outcomes are not intertwined with each other. Is ignorant. It's not science, And the

only place that those three things exist in isolation. You know, emotional stuff, psychological stuff, cognitive stuff, physiological stuff. More broadly, the only place they operate in isolation is in research, as in science. But as a human being just fucking navigating life on the big spinning rock, navigating the blue. No,

all that shit's intertwined. That if something bad happens, I worry, that affects my body, That affects my cognitive function, That affects my nervous system, my emotional state, my ability to think clearly, to communicate rationally. Everything is intertwined with everything

with us humans. So having relationship problems and ranging from not great through to horribly horribly destructive and toxic, that has a big physical health, probably bigger than everything else in the short term, in the short term sleep maybe the exception. All right, mental health. So where am I with my mental health? If I could, you know, crag a fight and just go well, ken is I feel fucking great? Most of the time? I don't. I feel

very stressed, very anxious. I don't feel saddy, make sad stuff. I don't feel depressed. I kind of process life pretty good and you know, overall, like not perfect, but overall actually genuinely pretty good. Well, that's amazing, and I think that's obviously possible. And I think for me, most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time,

I'm near that end of the scale. I think if we averaged it out for me ten being at the end of the scale, I would think most of the time I'm a seven to nine, And there are times when I'm a one like you, or a three like you, or a five like you, and maybe now and then

a ten like you for a minute. But just trying to understand, remember I metacognition, thinking about how I think and how I feel and who I am the way I am trying to understand your mental health from an anxiety point of view, from an overthinking point of view, from the decisions that you're making every day, from the reactions that you manifest to certain stimuli, like the way that you respond to stuff good and bad, or people

good and bad, or situations and circumstances. Your ability that equanimity thing that we speak about, your ability to be the calm and the chaos. Can I be in the middle of a shit fest and not be in a shit state? How do I do that? And maybe that's something you want to or need to develop over time.

How does the firefighter who's in the middle of complete chaos and turmoil and smoke and fire and panic and screaming people and uncertainty and danger, how does he or she run into that environment and be exactly the person that we need in that moment to be our best chance of saving lives. That's fucking amazing. I love that. So how do I become more of that? Do I process experiences? What is do I process things? Something happens. My go to is negative, this is bad, this is

going to end badly. There's not good, blah blah blah blah blah, I'm an idiot, I fucked up. Whatever. So there's the thing that happens, and there's our response, and our response is based on our story that we tell ourselves about the thing. An event happens and ten people are there, so it happens to all ten. Nine people respond absolutely fine, no major drama, trauma, stress, anxiety, and one person in the middle of that interprets it differently,

has a very negative reaction. This is not weakness or badness or you know, this is a human response. This is that person's response. So thinking about how do I change that? We can't. We can't fix that in this podcast. But I've I've thought about these things forever. When someone says something, why do I want to impress them? Or when someone's around me that I think is impressive, Why then do I try to boill? That's ego, that's insecurity,

that's self doubt, that's fear, that's all my bullshit. Now, this is not me beating me up. This is me understanding me. This is me recognizing how I am and what I do and trying to park that in the logical space, turned down on the emotion, on all my bullshit, of which there is much, and then try and create some kind of approach to or method or system to do something about that. But to do something about that, I need to understand that. I need to understand me.

I need to understand why I make the decisions I do, Why I process things the way I do, Why I react and respond the way I do, Why I over or underreact, Why I blame instead of thinking, well, maybe I'm part of the problem. Why I do that? Why we do that. Next on my list is lifestyle, which is more practical, so it's kind of almost a big picture of how do I manage me in the middle of my life? I reckon one of the most important questions.

It's very broad and it covers everything. But you know, often even when I could be talking to one hundred lawyers or one hundred blokes who work on a construction site,

or one hundred nurses or a thousand doesn't matter. But even though I work in different professional environments with different kinds of people who do different kinds of jobs and different incomes under different circumstances, really I rarely go in there and talk about their job or work or productivity or you know, outcomes on a business level about how do you manage you? Like how do you manage you at work? And we can extrapolate this to at life.

How do you manage you? How do you manage your mind and body and emotions and choices and actions and reactions and energy? How do you manage that stuff? Do you have a plan? Do you have a plan or you just get up today and kind of do what you did yesterday, even though yesterday was shit and the day before was pretty shit in the last hundred days have been somewhere between not awesome and kind of average. Maybe for some people. Again, that's not a criticism, that's

just for some people their reality. Now, there's no magic fairy. No one's going to come in and magic up your life. Nobody's going to come and fix it for you. Nobody's going to come and solve it for you. Nobody's going to come and sprinkle happiness dust all over your s Gone. It ain't going to happen. So we acknowledge it, we realize it, we see it for what it is, and we try to practically address it. And I might say, okay, so how often do you drink booze? Someone says every night?

I go cool, Well, that's something we can change, perhaps not easily. But do you think drinking alcohol every day is good for your mental and emotional and physical health? And they know the answer is no. Great, Well, now we're starting to understand maybe one part of what the problem might be. If we're talking on this macro level of your life, then we talk about maybe caffeine, and caffeine's fine but not for some people. Coffee or two

a day's great, but not seven or eight for most people. Drugs, well, the odd voltaire and for your saren probably okay, the odd aspro or panandole or paracetamol probably fine, depending on the individual, of course, not recommending anything, but consistently using drugs that are mind altering or physiologically altering in not a good way. Well, that's problematic. And what about rest and what about relaxing, and what about recovering? How's what's your plan around that? How do you reset? How do

you push the reset button? How do you come back to work all the kids or the whatever it is. What's your little kind of metaphoric retreat from the manic? What's your metaphoric retreat from the chaos and the busyness and the responsibilities and the demands. And I know some of you are going you don't understand my life, blah blah. I get it. I get it. I understand you are very busy. I understand. And it isn't a contest. But for the last six years I've been working a lot.

I've been recording mostly seven podcasts a week. I've been doing a PhD. I've been navigating old age with my parents. I've been you know, I get it, it's and we can either say, yeah, I'm fucking busy, Shut up, you don't understand my life. Fuck off. We can go yeah, I'm fucking I'm busy. But is there something I can do out of the fourteen hundred and forty minutes a day? Is there ten minutes a day that I could do something?

Is there something little? Maybe it's five minutes that might move the needle If I do that five minutes every day and build it in six or seven or eight or ten or who knows, maybe one day thirty minutes. So we're doing this thing for thirty minutes a day, that's so fucking great for us. But we're not doing it for fourteen one hundred and ten minutes. That's great,

that's not a massive request. When we'd be brutally honest and we go, well, like if I said, even though I just told you how busy I am, do I waste time on the phone? Fucking yes? Is it good for me? No? Am I a dumbass? Yes? Will I do it today later? Yes? Right? But do I do it less than I used to? Yes? Am I working on it? Yes? Can I find thirty minutes? Twenty minutes, ten minutes a day if I had to, well, if I had to, I could, well, let's just pretend that

you have to. So lifestyle is a big one. Now these ones are a little well, the next one's a little closer to the macro, but it's still massively important in terms of the quality of the results that we're producing now and will in the future, and in terms of bridging the gap, the U gap of which we

speak grasshoppers. And that's just your current habits. Like you've got lots of habits around the way you communicate, the way you do your job, the way you drive to work, the way your little rules and rituals that you do every morning. You get up, you do this, then you do that, then you do that, then you check that, then you check that, then you do this, and then eventually you walk out the door and jump in the car, or you go to the office upstairs at home, or

you whatever it is that you do. You have rules and rituals and habits and behaviors that are programmed into your hard drive. And that's not good or bad, that's just thing. So what is great for us to do is to put our habits, good and bad, under the spotlight what am I doing all the time that's for the most part good for me. I can recognize that I can go well. I walk ten thousand steps plus a day. I lift some weights every day. I try to be kind every day, and if I have the opportunity,

I'm kind every day. I try to eat good food. I try to be productive, I try to be creative. I do all of these things, which are pretty hard whirled into who I am and how I am. I don't always produce good results, but I try very hard to do all of that, and truthfully, it's mostly just autopilots. So that's a habit. There's some shit that I do that's good. There's some shit that I do that's not good.

So have a look at the way that you do things typically typically, and then think to yourself about whether or not the way that you do that typically or daily or routinely or habitually, whether or not that is working for you, whether or not that is working for you, whether or not that's a good thing. And we don't need to turn our life upside down in terms of habits and behaviors by the end of the week. But what we can do is recognize things and work on

things one at a time. I think you'll know the story of a year and a half ago or so. I kind of realized how few steps I was taking because I do so much work where I am right now, which is in my office, which is in my studio, and I'd like, I live in this fucking chair. And sure I would pride myself that I would go to the gym and list shit every day, and that's good. But there was one thing that I wasn't doing enough, and that was just general movement. That was just incidental activity,

occupation activity. Some jobs require you to move a lot, like I've got friends who are trades, lots of friends who are tradees, and they would probably do ten to twenty thousand steps a day without actually in inverted commas going for a walk, so to speak, whereas my occupational and incidental kind of step count is somewhere in there three to four. It's like very low. I actually have to consciously go for walk to get so I recognize that one little thing, Hey, Craig, walk more. I didn't

change anything else. I I didn't change my food, didn't change my last oh my kind of my operating system. Other than that didn't change food. Everything stayed the same except that one thing, and that made a massive impact. We can move the needle. If you are currently you know, doing three thousand steps a day, just go all right, well, I'm going to do one thousand more. I'm going to do four thousand, and then we'll see how long that takes.

And I'm guessing that's going to take I don't know, somewhere in the ballpark of ten minutes, ten minutes, give or take. And then next week you might go, you know what, I'm going to go from three to three to four to five. I'm going to do five great And these are just little things that are not hard, do not require money, do not require skills, do not require a PhD. Are they sexy? No? Is it quick? Well?

Kind of, but in the context sometimes people would go no, right, And so much of the things that we need to do to bridge the U gap are that, you know, they're kind of Oh, you just got to batten down the hatches and do the thing when no one's looking, when it's not fun, quick, easy or painless. Got a few to go. I'm dragging my feet our career. What is my relationship with work? This is something I think

about a lot. I think about like me. Right now, I'm going to give you a little bit of an insight into the Craig experience right now, so you all know that you don't all know. Some of you have been informed that I have this thing called U station shoe dysfunction, and I often have blocked the ears. So right now my right ear is really blocked. And I started and stopped this little extravaganza about three times before

I just went fuck it. I'm just going to record, and if my ear blocks, it blocks, and so I don't need any sympathy. But it's actually hard for me to do this right now because my voices echoing in my head, which makes focus and concentration hard. But anyway, that's just what's going on for me right now. Let's go back to career and the consequences of staying in

a career. Perhaps that doesn't rock our boat or work for us emotionally or mentally or I'm not even talking about practically or financially, that's a big part of it. But here I'm talking about more what are the health consequences of my work. I talk to people very often whose biggest issue is not money. It is not the job itself. It's not the work itself. It's that their situation or environments or relationships or culture or experience at

work is shit, or their experience personally of it. Not say everyone in the same place is feeling or experiencing the same thing, but these people, which is very normal, and you probably are that person at some stage. Like going to work is not a great thing, Like you don't get excited, you don't look forward to it, you don't love it. It's a thing you do because you

feel you have to do it. And the truth is, for some of you, you do have to do it because you're financially have your hands tied, so you need to do it. And I totally understand that. So I'm always thinking about for myself and the people like coach, what are the health consequences of what you do of your job and how can I change that? And even though some people might be in a high paying, high flying, high respect, high social status job, fuck, how important is

that social status job anyway? All that, all those boxes are ticked from the outside looking in, tickety boo, fucking well done, But from the inside out the experience is terrible. Emotionally, psychologically, physiologically, experientially it's shit. So yeah, I think career and financial staff in general. You know, financial security, your relationship with money, stress about money. All of these things can have absolute consequences, good or bad depending on your situation and what's going

on right now for you. And then let's quickly go through the three in the bridging the gap saga, it's

become a saga. Relationships are so our life is built largely around relationships, friendships, work people, family people, friends, peers, incidental people that we kind of nudge up alongside somewhat regularly that are just in our life, perhaps circumstantially that we didn't choose all okay, but we know that the quality of our relationships, as I think I mentioned before, like especially on a personal level, has a real impact and what's going on in those relationships, and especially that

when there is emotional and psychological turmoil, even if everything else is going great in our life, if we're in the middle of psychological and emotional turmoil with someone that we love or care about very much, be that intimate relationship, a best friend or a family member, it's going to fuck you up, and it's going to fuck you up for a while, and so trying to for me, trying to build relationships as much as I can control, not the person, but control as much as I can or

as much as I can contribute, is better way to say it. To a healthy relationship, Then that's what I'm going to do. Understanding that what I think often doesn't matter, Understanding how they think is extremely important. Understanding that their reality is not my reality. Understanding that the window through which they view, experience, digest, and understand the world is

not the same as mine. So of course there'll be differences, and of course I need to navigate and negotiate those, and of course I need to I don't always do, but I try very much to operate primarily through love, through kindness, through compassion, through empathy, empathy, through awareness. Yeah, relationships, big, big, think about one relationship that you have that matters to you,

that you would like to do better at. Doesn't mean you're all the problem, doesn't mean that at all, doesn't mean they're none of the problem, doesn't mean that at all. My experience is that most of the time, not all. Most of the time it's a bit of a combination of both. People Sometimes it's one hundred zero, but not often. All right, let's do one more. So I've got to here brain function and brain health. And I probably wouldn't have put this in twenty or thirty years ago because

I didn't really get it. I got it theoretically, but I didn't get at it experientially, like I get it experientially even right now as I'm talking, because I have low level frustration right now. That's not me being weakal terrible, but I just like telling you. So you go, oh, he gets frustrated. Oh he has bad days. Oh he can't fucking hear out of his right ear. Oh that must be so imagine just put imagine cover your covering your ear with soundproof headphones and then taping it up

with two feet of tape, and you can't hear anything. Well, that's my experience and some right now, and sometimes that's both. So my voice is an eleven out of ten in my head, and your voice talking to me is a one out of ten standing two feet from me. And so you know in the middle of that, that affects my brain function, affects cognition, affects my emotions, it affects mental acuity in my ability to execute things to do

my job. So brain function, how well your brain works, Like I said, memory, creativity, focus, mental acuity, your ability to problem solve and talk to people and overcome conflict and problems and navigate life on an interpersonal level, linguistically, sociologically, practically with other humans. It's so important that your brain works well. If you're a leader, it's important that your brain works well, if you're a mom or a dad. Obviously, if you're in anyone right, there's no one for whom

this is not important. And just think about those things which might impact your brain function or your brain health. You know what you put in your body, sleep boost, all the things we've spoken about, and how you might how you might improve your cognitive function or performance. So for me, choosing to do a PhD at fifty six, very atypical. I would say, I don't know how many first year PhDs in psychology start at fifty six, but I would think less than point one of one percent,

which doesn't make me good or bad. It just makes me very atypical. And that makes me a little bit sad because I wish people would intentionally learn as they get older. I wish they would consciously study. If not, I don't necessarily mean in an academic environment, but do a project, write a book, do your own research, take up a language. Write with your opposite hand for a week, Like I know that sounds random, but I did it a few weeks ago, and I still do it periodically now.

Because I have two whiteboards in my office, I will often get up. I'm left handed, I'll get up and I'll write the alphabet in my right hand. And the way that I could do it a month ago, which looked like dogshit, now it almost looks like, oh, that's just my writing my good hand and my bad hand. For one of better terms, the gap is, you know, speaking of the U gap, the gap has drastically reduced. Like if one of my goals, for example, was how do I write with my left hand? And also what

are the benefits? But how do I write with my right hand? We'll crag. You just write with your right hand. It would look fucking terrible, And then you do it again and again and the next day then it will look less terrible. Instead of being ten out of ten fucking horrible, it'll be a seven. Then eventually it'd be like neat

writing so people won't people won't know. People wouldn't know because I've done the work to create the neurological gains between what I want to do and then what my body is capable of doing, down to the fine motor skills of holding the pen between my thumb and index finger and then producing that completely different look of writing the same guy at sixty two practicing something and literally creating new and different neural pathways in my brain to

be able to operationalize this thing of writing with my wrong hand. Well, there are so many fucking things that you and I can do that are going to upgrade your brain, things that people do not think about. I might do a whole episode on that right team. I may abhored you, I apologize for my stumbles mumbles here and there, but I want you to listen to the whole podcast with your index finger shoved in your idea and you can empathize with me. See Team