EP046 - A Life without regrets - Anthony Astbury

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the whole Man Academy podcast. And today we are talking about regrets. Here's one for you. What do you regret doing in life? What do you regret not doing in life? It's a question we've put to a few people recently with some interesting responses. But what about me? I tell you, I do regret is not buying bitcoin. When I first heard about it, which is probably back when I was working in the city. That's got to be six, seven years ago now. And I remember someone saying, oh, one of the chaps we've dealing with, he's been buying this bitcoin stuff and of course we looked it up and said, no, that's just nonsense. That's never going to catch on. And who knows what the price was back then. But there's one of the big regrets of me not paying attention and not bothering to read up about it. Another one, which is a common theme between some of the guys I spoke about, was not learning actually about investing. Seeing as we're talking about the money side of things at the moment, I think for us all, you maybe were too busy in life spending it instead of trying to save it, and not just save it, but actually increase your savings through investments and assets. So there's another one. I wish I'd have spent a bit more time, I was younger, learning about those kind of things. But what we realized is it's important for all of us to spend some time reflecting on what is important to you and what maybe you need to work on. We always say here at the whole Man Academy that you have the different segments of your life. A man is made up of many parts and not all of them will necessarily be doing great at the same time. But if there's some you would like to work on, maybe we could help you with that a little bit. Examples we've had people request help with sleep. We can do that. Fitness, easy. Weight loss, extremely easy. A guy we're helping has already lost two stone in just over a month. Some people think it's hard. It's not if you know how and how someone can help you. There's plenty of things we can help you with and it's all about doing life better. So what we realized was all of the people that have subscribed to our E letter, our wonderful E letter, which goes out every Friday at 10am and sometimes other days, but those are bonus emails, wasn't getting anything apart from the E letter. And when they actually subscribe, we wanted to give everybody Something a really powerful exercise that they could take away and spend some time working on and maybe work on with other people. So I'm going to do a quick screen share here. Let's see if it actually goes well. And what we developed was the how to Do Life Better Exercise. We described it as a free 30 minute exercise that will save you years of wasted life and future regrets so that you never feel life has passed you by. Nobody wants to feel like life has passed them by. So what about a life of regrets? Let's take you through it. You know, we want to help successful men who are bored and want more adventure. Guys who want to die with zero regrets and are committed to ensuring it doesn't happen. There's a difference between saying I don't want it to happen, actually doing something about it. We wrote that men today are under more pressure than ever before to be successful at work. Yes, to build and support happy and healthy families, to exercise and eat properly, to dress well and to think and say the right things. As I said the other day, the most dangerous thinking you have at the moment is an opinion and then put it on social media which we're going to talk about a bit later. So guys are juggling so much expectation. When your diary is busy, you might not have time to sit down and evaluate what you really want in life. What do you want in life? Who knows, maybe you should sit down and have a think about it. You know, we said it's easy to sleepwalk from one week to the next, living moment to moment. Not really understanding that the actions we're taking today, however small, can add up to lava changes further down the line. Much larger changes. A bit like with fitness, if you go to the gym today, just today, you're not going to get any fitter. But if you keep going two, three, four times a week over the course of the weeks and months, you will become fitter. It's those compound decisions. So we don't want to live our life with regret, I assume. And that can be something you did do, didn't do the job you didn't take, the person you didn't ask out, the email you didn't send, the risk you didn't take. Fill in the blanks you could have, you would have, you should have. So we can avoid those regrets by changing our behavior. Where do we start? Well, guess what? The how to Do Life Better Exercise. Now, if you haven't already subscribed to our e letter via the website, then head over there now. All you got to do is put in holdmanacademy.com movement and you can download this exercise if you have already subscribed. We will be sending out in the E letter so have a look for it and if you can't find it, just email me anthonyholmanacademy.com and I will visit over to you. So let's take action and start moving forward. I'll take you briefly through it. We just want you to grab a paper, pen, something that you can kind of, excuse me, take notes on. But before we get started, you need to make sure you're in the right state to work on this. So it sounds ridiculous. I want you to get up, put some loud music on, just for a minute or as long as you want, jump about. Energy makes a real difference. And I say that through going through years of personal development, when I've been to events and I can't tell you what it's like when 5,000 people get up and start jumping around to loud music. The energy changes, gets your heart pumping and I think you become slightly in a more resourceful state. So, long story short, what we're looking at is the segments of your life that might be important to you. So this list might not have all the ones you want on it, but stick with it. So we're talking about fitness, we're talking health, social life, personal development, achievements, relationship and family, career and money. Show me the money. So what we'd like to do, in short, is go down each of those segments and rate how you're doing right now from 0 to 10. Nought being you're doing crap, 10 being you're knocking out the park. So let's go through them. For me. Health. I'm pretty healthy. I put about five pounds on whilst I was living up on holiday recently. But generally I'm very healthy. I'm very lucky. I have a partner who's a nutritionist, so I've got that one covered. So I'd probably give that about an 8. Achievements. I've achieved some fairly good stuff in my time. I'm not sure what else I particularly want to achieve at the moment. One of them, which is going to be coming up soon, I'm going to give myself a seven for that. Relationships. Well, I have a partner, we get on very well. Sometimes we even talk to each other. So that's going well. Money could always do with more money and the more money you have, the more freedom you have and the more you can help other people. So I would say a five on the money. Show me the monies. Career. I'll give that a 9 because I love what I do and that is one of the most important things in life. I think if you can enjoy what you do, especially if you're spending hours and hours on it, that's absolutely priceless. And it's something. When I worked in the city, you know, I enjoyed it at a time. But like a lot of men who I know work in the city now, the fun went out of it and as soon as it does, it doesn't really matter how much you're getting paid, you're still spending, you know, maybe 200 hours a month working on something that you're not necessarily overly excited about. Personal development. I'm always working on myself, different courses. I'm working on a course at the moment which will be part of the whole man academy soon, so that's all good. I'd probably give myself a seven there. Social life is crap at the moment. Not been going out very much, apart from being on holiday with the crazy things that are going at the moment. My social life is completely pony, which is quite a technical term. And alongside that, fun. I think that social life for me is all about having fun, to state the obvious. So I need to improve on that. So I'm going to give that a pour four at the moment. And in fact, fun is very important to me. It's one of my highest values. So that's one to work on fitness. I used to be super fit, but since we had kids and we moved to the country and I'm busy working, I'm not as fit as I used to be. I once represented my country in the obstacle course racing World Championships, which I'm sure you're excited to know about. But these days it's gone downhill a little bit. Even though I have a home gym, so I've got no real excuse. Perhaps I need to just get up earlier. So there we go. We could look down there and say, well, which ones would you like to work on? Try not to over evaluate. Usually your first answer, your number is the right one. Answer it to the best of your ability and then look at the results and see, are there certain segments that stand out that you'd like to do better in? In the exercise, we'll ask you a series of questions to take you through, you know, what would be happening if everything was right in that segment? What's happened right now? What's it costing you not to work on that segment? That's one of the most powerful questions. Years ago, when I had one of the first life coaches that I had, and I was really struggling to make a decision about something. And she said to me, what is it costing you not to do that? And I realized at that moment I had to make a decision and just stop what I was doing. So sometimes there'd be one question that can just flip things for you and you're ready to take action. What resources might you need? Another huge one. So many of us will often think, oh, I can't do it because I haven't got this, I haven't got that, I haven't got the help. And you'd be surprised how, if you become resourceful and get into a resourceful state, what you can do and who you can find that can help you. So we always love feedback at the whole man academy. We've just shared something online, actually yesterday, which was directed back to us from a guy who wrote in, who said that our latest E letter or the previous one resonated, which is always nice to hear. Someone was, you know, someone was really reading it and understanding. We understand how men feel. So we ask you to go away and create your action plan on paper. Write down the segments, work through as we suggested, and as we wrote in here, you'll be amazed what you can achieve if you just focus and have a plan. And the most important bit, take action. Because knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing, as I heard a great guy say once. So let us know about that. Think big, come back to us. And now we move on to the next part of the podcast, which is about social media. I watched a film the other night which just blew my mind on the. How could we put it? The dangers of social media and the effects it is having on primarily kids. But you could pretty much apply that to everybody. I admit myself, I've probably, you know, sometimes you don't realize it till you get your screen notifications and realize you have been on. I mean, I use my phone a lot for work, but you might been on your phone for like four hours, five hours that day. What are you doing? And I find it really hard not to keep checking my phone. I know you can have a look to see the stats these days, but yet checking my phone, you look and you're like, I checked it three minutes ago, so why am I still checking it? I don't know. Do you have that? Anyway, in our E letter we shared a film which I watched recently on YouTube which just blew my mind, especially having two little children who thankfully aren't on social media yet, but who knows? And it's one of those things. I wonder for yourself, what's it like for you using social media? Do you need it? Could you do without it for a weekend, I wonder? So it'd be interesting if you were able. Let's stop the screen share. It would be interesting if you were able to let us know what's it been like with you? So with social media, have you got TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, just keep going on. It's very easy. They covered it in the film and I know several friends have mentioned the same thing, to literally go imagine round the board. So you'd be like, right, I'll check Instagram and no, and then I'll go to Facebook and then Twitter and then TikTok and then to something else and then back and then start again and just keep going round and round and round. And it really is technical term, but hamster wheel to nowhere. So let us know what it's like for you. And also, if you've got kids, what's it like for them? Are you allowing them to be on social media? TikTok for me is one that I will be deleting very soon for various reasons, but I'm not saying that's necessarily worse than the others. It's just unnecessary. So let us know, keep us in touch and we'll be back next week with another podcast. And we also shared, if you haven't listened to it, last week's podcast with the editorial director of Mr. Porter, Dan Davies. It was a great podcast, great interview, had some good feedback, and it was all based around their Time for Him campaign. So if you haven't already, head over to Mr. Porter and have a look at what they're doing, which basically is encouraging guys to stop scrolling on social media and contact their friends, which is very much similar to something we said a while ago and again, can be simple yet powerful. So look out. For our podcast next week, we're lining up a few guys who are specialists in movement, in fitness, in personal development. So we should have it all for you whenever you're ready to consume it. In the meantime, let us know how you get on with the exercise and say, if you haven't downloaded it, head over to the website, download it now, and we look forward to hearing from you for a bit more excitement on how you've done life better.