080: Consistency is key

Hi everyone, hope that you're all well. Thank you so much for joining me on another episode of Canny Crystals, the podcast. As you all know by now, my name's Mart Tweedyedy, I'm your host, and And this week, this recording might sound a little differently because I'm actually doing this from my living room, so it might be a little echoier than normal, but we'll work with it anyway. But anyway, yes, I'm your host, and this week I have been totally blown away by all of your love and support as usual. But you lot always come through with the good stuff, don't you? Like, a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in my podcast with Jude, um, that I felt a bit down basically because of some messages that I was receiving, and Listening back to it, it sounded like I was being dead dramatic because it was like— it sounded like it was just like the one message off this woman that was complaining about a £4.50 bloody hand-carved skull. Um, but it was, it was a lot more than that. And I did share one of the messages on my Instagram. If you follow me on Instagram at Canny Crystals, you'll have seen that. Um, a woman— I think it was like Sunday morning, I woke up like half six Sunday morning, I think it was, and some woman had messaged me saying 'Your white teeth give me the ick,' or something along the lines of that. And when I looked at her, she was a bloody crystal seller as well. And I just thought, you know what, like, why would you do that? Why would you go out of your way to send someone such— I know, I mean, don't get us wrong, I mean, like, it's pathetic, isn't it? Like, me teeth, like, come on. Like, I had braces for years to get them like this, get them this straight, you know what I mean? And yeah, of course I whiten them because I drink bloody green tea. And when I do drink, I drink red wine, you know what I mean? It can stain them. I drink coffee all the time. It's absolutely ridiculous. Like like, yeah, brush my teeth, yeah, get them whitened. Like, big deal. Like, well, we really bringing dental hygiene into this now? Anyway, I, I just had loads and loads of messages, and it was just people complaining about the silliest of things. And a couple of days after that, I woke up and I started my own little routine again. And this is the routine that I spoke about the last time I was on Jude's podcast, funnily enough, on the Unbreakable Mindset podcast. So I basically have all of these things that I do basically as like non-negotiables every single day, so I do them no matter what. And because I'd been inundated, you know, with dealing with all these silly Instagram messages and these stupid emails, and with Canny Crystals like growing and expanding, getting busier by the moment, all of my non-negotiables had just kind of gone out the window. They just kind of fell by the wayside, and I just wasn't looking after myself. So what's funny is that as soon as I kind of declared to myself that, you know, I'm going to do them daily and I'm going to track the progress of them on my phone, as soon as I did that, I started to feel so much better before I'd even done them. So I even incorporated them into last week's challenge on the Manifest with Mart app. Go check it out if you haven't already, cannycrystalsacademy.co.uk. So last week, for example, we did a self-care challenge in the app because it wasn't just me that needed this self-care and this self-love. And I shared me top things with the group, you know, what I do daily, and everyone else was sharing theirs, and everyone was like, ah, and most of them started incorporating new things that they wanted into their own daily routine as well. So for some people, it might have even just been, you know, getting up half an hour just to meditate. For one person, it was like having a bath. For another person, it was just going for a walk daily. So My top things that I do every single day to ensure that I feel good about life in general are— well, let's go through them anyway. The first thing I do, and there's a whole episode about this, is that I set my alarm for 6 AM. And the reason that I do this is to get ahead of the game. So I'm usually down in the office by, you know, 7:30, 8 o'clock at the latest. So if I wake up at 7 o'clock, I'm going to be rushing around. I'm not going to have time to, you know, get my morning routine down. So by getting up at 6 AM, that's a non-negotiable for me. I will do that no matter what. Then I'll come downstairs and at the minute I'm doing Positively Wealthy by Emma Mumford. Shout out to Emma. I was on a podcast last week. Go listen to that if you haven't already heard it. It was such a fun episode. So yeah, I like to do some kind of like gratitude challenge. And like I say, at the minute I'm doing Positively Wealthy. So I'd either do that or the magic, you know, something like that. Something that's going to get my brain working and get me to write down my gratitude before I do anything else. I'll then have me breakfast and I'll go in the shower. And while I'm in the shower, I'll do another one of me non-negotiables, which is my positive affirmations. And I'll just think about what I want to achieve for the remainder of that day and I'll set an affirmation around it. So for example, if I've got a meeting coming up or let's say a podcast interview that I'm really nervous about, because I do get nervous, I'll say something like, everything in my life goes my way. I'm a positivity magnet. And I'll repeat that over and over and over again. But I won't just say it. Like, I'll literally feel those words as they're coming out my mouth. I will really feel the words in my emotions and my body until it hits differently. Okay? And then as I'm getting meself dressed, I'll pop on one of me subliminals that aligns with me daily intentions. And you can grab these from me website. They're £3, but they require no extra time. These subliminal affirmation downloads, they require no extra time, and that's what I love about them. So I can be getting dressed while these subliminals are playing in the background. They're getting me prepared for the day ahead. And the ones that I've been listening to most frequently at the moment are the Boost Your Luck ones and the Finding Joy and Purpose one, because they align with what I'm setting my intentions for, for the rest of the day. And then once I've got in my office, I'll go and boil the kettle, and while it's boiling, again, I've got like a couple of minutes there, I'll go and sit at my desk desk and I'll do a tapping routine, again in line with my intentions, and I'll be tapping away all of the negativity from my brain just so that I'm arming myself with positivity, basically, and the best, the best kind of armor so that that can get me through the rest of the day. And I'll then light an incense stick just to like move the energy around the room, and I'll make myself a cup of green tea. And later on in the day, two of my other non-negotiables that I do are two forms of exercise for at least 45 minutes at a time. And I know exercise isn't for everyone, but just hear me out. So the first is me dog walk. So I'll usually take JJ out for his afternoon walk at around 4 PM, and then I can either pop on the bike or the treadmill and do me second workout depending on how I feel. Sometimes I just do some weights, sometimes I'll do yoga, you know, it's whatever I feel on the day. And what I've even started doing, because another of me non-negotiables is that I read 20 pages of self-development every single day, that takes around 30 minutes. I've even started pairing it with cycling. So while I'm on the Peloton huffing and puffing away, I'm also reading me book, and sometimes I even put me subliminals on at the same time. And I find that a bit of a game changer because I'm not then having to eat into me time later in the night to read. Does that kind of make sense? And then my last non-negotiable for the day is to meditate or visualise what I want in life for at least 5 minutes, and I tend to do that in bed just before I go to sleep. And do you know what's funny? One of my members in the Manifest with Mart Tweedy community, she mentioned, uh, the other day about subliminals, and I was talking to her about like wearing headphones at night and how they hurt my ears. She mentioned that there is a face mask that you can buy that has speakers in the side, and I was like, what? So I literally went straight onto Amazon, found one. It was £12, right? And I thought, oh, that's a load of crap. But anyway, I bought it and I thought, it's Amazon, I can always send it back, do you know what I mean? They'll always give you a refund on Amazon. So anyway, I charged it up, obviously connected it, and I just heard this voice booming out across me as a Bluetooth device that connect. And I was like, oh my God, what is this? Anyway, I put my subliminals on, I slept like an absolute baby. Honest to God, I couldn't believe it. I was like, What is this? So anyway, Johnny came back from Northern Ireland because he's been back home over the weekend, and he literally looked at us as I was putting this face mask on, and I was like, you won't believe what this face mask does. And I was like, it's got speakers built into it. And he was like, so I'm going to be kept up awake all night by ocean waves crashing and stuff? And I was like, no, no, no. I was like, you won't be able to hear anything. And I put it on, he couldn't hear a thing. And I was like, this is amazing, it's blocking out the light. I don't have to like, um, open my eyes in the middle of the night and see this figure stood in this corner of my room because I've hung my towel over the door and scream the house down or anything like that, you know what I mean? This is amazing. I can listen to me subliminals, it's not hurting me ears, and I can just go to sleep. I mean, what a game changer that is. So anyway, just to recap, because I am getting like sidetracked here, just to recap my non-negotiables daily, right? There's 8 of them, okay? I get up an hour earlier than normal. I do me daily gratitude challenge. I do me positive affirmations. Me 1 hour of subliminals, me EFT and tapping, me 2 forms of exercise, me 20 pages of a self-development book, and 5 minutes of a meditation or a visualization. So like I said, there's 8 things in total, and I have them on the Notes app in me phone with, you know, them little tick boxes by them. And the only way I'll allow myself to go to bed is if I can tick me boxes to say, you know, yep, all done for the day. But you might be sat there listening to this all wide-eyed like, Mart, WTF, that is so regimental and I'll never stick to that. I'm not saying that you have to. I just noticed that a combination of these for me personally helps my brain to grow and learn, which helps me to develop mentally, which in turn keeps me healthy and it keeps me de-stressed and it calms me out. But I guess it's all about finding the right combination for you. Like, What can you do? Or more importantly, what would be on your list to do daily to make yourself feel better and lift your mood as one of your non-negotiables?

Yeah?

Have a think about that because it might be worthwhile you just writing a list because all of what I've mentioned really helped to raise my vibes and my spirit. And I started doing them the Friday that that podcast episode came out. So not the one last week, the one the weekend before with Jude. And after just one day, I looked back at the episode I'd recorded and I relistened to it and I was like, why the fuck was I letting stupid messages like that get us down? And it really helped us to see things from another perspective. So maybe give that a shot yourself. You know, set yourself some non-negotiables that you won't allow yourself to sleep until you've reached them. Start small though. It might be just that, you know, you want to hit 10,000 steps in a day. And then after that, you might think, okay, I've hit 10,000 steps every single day for the last week and now wanna learn something. So you might add in, you know, 10 pages of self-development a day, like as you're going to sleep. So you might take a book to bed with you. And then once you've got a grips with that, another week after, you could add in maybe a 5-minute meditation or tapping or subliminals while you're in the shower or subliminals while you're getting changed. Start small, okay? Consistency is key. The more we do something small, the better for us to incorporate this as routine. So if we said, you know, tomorrow morning I'm going to get up at 5 AM, I'm going to meditate for 2 hours, our bodies and our brains would just go, nah, you're all right, I'm staying in bed. Whereas if we start making, you know, just maybe getting up 5 minutes earlier every single week, eventually you'll hit your target of getting up at a specific time, but it won't feel like it's a shock to the system because you've got there gradually. So if you start setting your alarm for 5 minutes before, or going to sleep 5 minutes before your normal bedtime, you know what I'm saying, it's all going to mount up. So I was reading a book a few weeks ago, I can't remember which book it was now, um, if I find out I'll edit it in, but if you're listening to this and I've just gone straight on, I haven't found it. Anyway, it was talking about how when Instagram launched back in 2010, and its founders already knew that, you know, people were motivated to post photos of themselves online, But no one else had focused on the second variable of behaviour, which was ability. And that's what set Instagram apart. Taking, uploading, and posting a photo took just 3 clicks. Want to take it, want to upload it, want to post it. It was so, so easy.

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Easy, and people love the platform for it. And within just 18 months, Instagram has been sold for $1 billion. Today, it's worth $100 billion. Yeah, simplicity pays off. So just start simple. That's the key message here. The easier a habit is, the more consistent you are with it, and the higher the chances that you'll then kind of adopt it as a permanent habit. So simplifying these desirable behaviors is a great approach to designing these tiny habits. And the best way to do this is by looking at what makes the behavior in question hard to do. So this will eventually come down to, you know, one of several factors. It'll be time, money, physical capacity, mental energy, or even just the fit with your current schedule. So imagine that you decide to work on your fitness and you say, I'm going to, you know, daily I'm going to set myself a target of 20 push-ups. Well, let's look at your factors, right? Because time can't possibly be an issue because 20 push-ups, you could do that in a minute or two, yeah? Doing push-ups doesn't take that long. You don't need any money. You can do push-ups in your own home for free. So money is out of it as well. So then let's look at your physical capacity. Right, there's the first problem. So you might, you might not have even done like a single push-up in years. So you don't have the upper body strength needed. And then you've got your mental energy. So that's another variable. So push-ups aren't exactly fun. Yeah, working out just isn't fun unless you're a masochist. And especially when there's also like this physical struggle. So motivation might be an issue as well. So with all those factors in mind, do you really think that your daily how many push-ups are likely to become a habit? Not really, because when your ability to do something is low, you will only do it on days, you know, when you're riding the motivation wave. And as we know, like, big motivation spikes are good for completing difficult one-off tasks but less effective for kind of repeating behaviors again and again. And that means that you need to focus on ability when designing your little tiny habits and just make them as simple as possible. So say, for example, your daily target is completing 2 push-ups instead. That's easy because you're going to build body strength over time. Obviously, you're not going to do it like straight away, but doing them doesn't require much motivation, but they'll still make you feel good. And that lowers the bar for you to take action every day, and that makes it more likely that this will stick as a habit. So really have a look and think about what you can do on a daily basis to kind of improve your mental state and improve your well-being. Because bearing in mind we can all do something no matter how small it is. And trust us, like, just like that book, you know, The Compound Effect, doing something small over and over again eventually results in big changes. Everything snowballs eventually. And I'll say this all the time because it's just like, if you put this in the context of manifesting, yeah, you can put all your money in one pot of just, you know, visualizing once Or you can visualize daily, and you can use crystals, and you can feel grateful for what you've already got. You can do EFT, decluttering, feng shui, and all that jazz. Because the more you do, the more likely you are to hit your goals. So if you put the lottery on, you stand something like 1 in 14 million of a chance, I think it is. I'm just totally making that up, it might be wrong, but it's something like 1 in 14 million. But if you had 100 tickets your odds are going to come down. You stand more of a chance. If you had 1,000 tickets, you'd stand even more of a chance. Do you get what I'm saying? The more you do, the more consistent you are at something, the likelier that you are to have some form of impact on your life. So can you imagine going to the gym once, coming home and eating a salad, and then, you know, lifting your top up in front of the mirror and you're suddenly skinny, toned, athletic? It's wishful thinking, yeah. And it would be lush, don't get us wrong. But like anything, it takes time, and we just need to be consistent and patient, and we'll eventually get there. If we sit and do nothing, a year could pass and we'd still be in the exact same place, just sat stagnant. Small, consistent actions over time win every single time. They win all the way. Is it Colonel Sanders, you know, the founder of KFC? He basically had his recipe sent to 700 different places or something ridiculous like that. And only because of his consistency and his sheer determination and willpower and strength, someone took a chance on him. And now his recipe is like, you know, one of the most famous recipes in the world for Kentucky Fried Chicken. There isn't a single person on this planet that hasn't heard of KFC. And if you work with crystals, for example, Tiger's Eye would be the perfect crystal to help with that because it enhances the energy within you of willpower and strength and focus and determination. And all of these can help you be consistent with whatever it is that you're trying to achieve in life. So hard work and consistency does pay off. So even when you have those shitty off days like I was having, just take a step back, get yourself back on your non-negotiables of what you want to do daily to kind of, you know, work towards the best possible version of you. And I promise you, you'll get over those crap patches. You'll overcome them. When people give up at the first hurdle, that's like why so many businesses go under within the first year.. You've just got to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep on going. And you know, like, what's that saying that they say, life is a climb but the view's all worth it at the top? God, I sound like bloody Hannah Montana, don't I? So anyway, yeah, I hope that helped you. If you're feeling stuck or struggling to get by daily, just remember there are things that you can do to get better. Start internally with you, okay? Work from there. Do your non-negotiables. Write yourself a list after you've listened to this podcast episode. What am I going to do daily? Spread it over 8 weeks if you really want to and think, can I stick to this for 8 weeks? And start with one action. Just start with one action for the first week. That's all it needs to be. And then build from there. You can literally add in and like any action for the second week, and then you've got two actions to do. Just whatever it is, just stick with it, roll with it. Be determined, stay consistent. Consistency is key. Okay, and yes, it's a little bit of a shorter episode today. I'm basically trying to fit 5 days of work this week into 3 days because Thursday and Friday this week I'm at adoption training. Yes, that's right, you have to go through training to have a baby when you adopt. Meanwhile, the crackheads that live at the bottom of our street could knock out a baby tomorrow without any training. Can you tell I'm a bit sour about my lack of vagina in a womb? Anyway, what will be will be, isn't it? Like, we have to go to about 7 training days, I think it is, across the whole adoption process. This, as well as having home visits, police checks, 15 years' worth of job references from past employers. And believe me, they wouldn't just accept the NHS as a whole from me, they wanted all 9 of my line managers, some of which have since died, which was fun for me to find out whilst digging up their email addresses. But I'm staying consistent because a baby is the absolute dream. Oh, and speaking of the absolute dream, actually, I found my dream house. The only problem is someone lives in it. And if anyone lives in Newcastle and are listening to this, it's in Ponteland up by the airport. And OMG, I feel like I found it for a reason. Like, obviously I haven't made it like any secret that we don't like it where we live and that we're looking to move, but because of the adoption thing, we probably can't move for the first year of being placed with a baby. Adoption rules again. But yeah, so after finding it, I found that the development that it's like built on is actually full of listed houses that have been fully refurbed by a housing developer. And honest to God, it is just beautiful. So naturally, I got Johnny and JJ in the car, and a couple of Saturdays ago we went, we parked up nearby and went for a dog walk around it. Because again, just like I did when I manifested my car and I took it out on a test drive, I wanted to kind of test drive the neighborhood And oh my God, so where we live at the moment, we're so close to the city centre, you know, that you can normally always hear sirens and cars and just general city noise. But this estate is so far out from the city centre that when we were walking, the only thing you could hear when neither of us spoke was birds. And we walked into the village centre, we went by the bars and the restaurants, we found the gym and things that we'd be going to, and we both kind of just looked at each other and just went like, Yeah, this is where we want to live. I would quite happily die there. Um, and then just to solidify it, on the way back from dropping Johnny at the airport last week, I took a detour to the estate as if I was driving home from the airport, kind of imagining myself, you know, coming home from a holiday or coming home from a trip to his dad's at Northern Ireland, and kind of as though like that was our home that we were driving back to. I've also updated my vision board. I've taken off the pictures of my Range Rover because I've got it now and I've replaced them with this beautiful house. So watch this space. I'm putting it out there. That house is going to be mine. And apologies in advance if it's your house that I was stood outside of taking photos of myself, like holding the gate and things like that, that are now plastered all over my dream board. It's a bit weird, isn't it? Oh well, shy Ben's getting out, as my grandma always used to say. Right, anyway, enough of me gabbing. That's it for today's episode. I need to really wrap this up. Don't forget, if you've enjoyed this episode or any past episodes, please leave a quick 10-second review where wherever you're listening to this from, I would really appreciate it. You don't even have to write anything, just click one of the bloody stars. Not one star, please. Um, click any stars that you would give this, click submit. That's all you need to do, really. I would really, really appreciate it. It helps me fly up the charts. Last week's episode with Mike, Mike Hoff, the, um, the spirit medium, got to number 8 of all self-improvement episodes. It got to number 8. I cannot believe that. It's just absolutely amazing. I love it. It's so many good reviews, so thank you so much if you left a review based on that episode alone. And I will see you all next Friday for another episode of Candy Crystals, the podcast. Have a lush week ahead, guys.

Bye!