If You Don't Want The Life You Have, Envision The Life You Want

I guess you could say in some ways it was the final straw. But all I knew was that I just didn't want to do this anymore. And that went on for quite a while. What I didn't know was what I did want to do. I had no direction, I had no vision. And without that, I didn't know what steps to take to change my situation. Welcome to the Yoga Den. Are you a stressed out cog in the corporate wheel? Do you find yourself asking, what am I doing and why am I doing it? Then the Yoga Den is the place for you. I'm your host, Ryan Spence, AKA the big law dropout, writer, yoga teacher, and your guide on the path to well being through yoga. Yoga helped me find my purpose, changed my mindset and my life. And in this podcast I'll share how to live a life of intention reaction. Each week I'll be talking to a variety of guests, recovering pearls of wisdom to help you figure out where you're heading to, where you really want to go. I won't find your purpose for you, but I'll help you plan the route. So sit back and grab a drink. I've been expecting you. Welcome to episode 10 of the Yoga Den podcast. It's widely accepted in the podcast world that the probability of a new podcast continuing increases after the launch of episode seven, so I'm grateful to have surpassed the seven episode mark and reached double figures with today's episode. This has only been possible due to you guys out there listening to the show each week, leaving reviews, sending messages of support, and letting me know when a particular topic or episode resonates with you. So I just want to thank you guys for joining me on this journey. And to let you all know, we're only just getting started this week's show. It's the first solo episode since the launch of the podcast. The plan was always to record some solo episodes. Some of them will be exclusive content for my Patreon community, which I'll talk about later. And that idea has manifested itself into ideas for a series of bonus episodes, which this is the first, well, kind of the second. There's actually one already in the Patreon community, kind of setting out what's going on there and what you can expect. But anyway, I digress. In these bonus episodes, I'll focus on some of the mindset shifts that are necessary to figure out if where you are is where you want to be and where you're heading is where you want to go. I'd also delve deeper with some of my guests into particular issues, topics, or stories that just couldn't be included in the main episode in the main show. Whether that's for time constraints or anything else, you can check out the Patreon page over@patreon.com theergerdempodcast and if you're minded to join the community, any of the three tiers available, it'd be great to have your support for the show. I'll be eternally grateful. And whichever tier you join, just know that that will go towards me creating new content and be able to do more for you guys to help you along your way. And if you're not minded or you just can't do it right now, hey, that's cool too. The main show is still here for you and it's free. And speaking of free, I have a free ebook and video, flow in 15 available for you all on my website, ryanspenceyoga.com if you're finding it difficult to get back into a yoga practice or you've never practiced yoga Before, Flow in 15 is a great way to kick off your day. The right way, connecting the mind, the body, and the breath in a short 15 minute sequence. And yeah, I know you're busy. We're all busy. There's just so much going on in our lives these days. I get it. I've been there. But you can spare 15 minutes for your own well being, right? I'm sure you can. So go ahead, check it out. If you practice the sequence, let me know how it works for you. Tag me on social media or drop me a line via the website Ryan Spenceyoga.com okay, onto today's show. We're going to talk a little bit about vision today, but I want to kick off by asking you a couple of questions. First, how often do you think about what you want? And by that I mean how often do you take time out to envision the life that you want, how you want it to be, how you want to feel, what you want to do, who you want to hang out with, whatever it might be. Is it daily? Monthly? Weekly? Never? It doesn't really matter the answer. It's just. Just have a think and note it down. Okay, good. Now, in contrast, think about how often you think about what you don't want. You don't want your job, you don't like your job, you don't like your colleagues, you don't. You don't like the weather, you hate your commute. Whatever it is, whether it's big or small, how often do you think about it. Okay? Write that down. Now, I'd like you to consider the frequency of each of those. Look down at the numbers that you've written or the timings that you've written, and see, do you think more about what you do want to do and how you want your life to be, or about what you don't want to do and how you don't want your life to be? A simpler way of putting this might be to say, do you feel that you're running towards something or that you're running away from something? And I asked this because for a long time I was running away from something. I was always thinking about what I didn't like and what I didn't want to do. And what I now know is that thinking just wasn't serving me. It wasn't going to move me forwards. It was just going to keep me stuck in the same place, complaining about the same things. It wasn't until I started to really picture and envision what I did want to do and how I wanted my life to be that I began to develop the tools and the vision to make the changes necessary to get to where I wanted to be. So look at this. If you're. Imagine you're being chased. You know, let's. Let's paint a picture. Let's take. Let's take a movie analogy. Who likes horror films? I don't particularly, but I've seen a few. So let's start there. Let's look at a horror film depicting a zombie apocalypse. Right? Picture that in your mind. Now, let's say you're being chased by a zombie. Yeah, I know zombies aren't that fast, but stick with me here. The zombies are coming. Zombies are running down the road after you. You're running away, but you don't know where you're going. You're trying to get to some point of safety, but you don't know where that safety is or what that safety looks like. So you just keep running aimlessly. Maybe you run into an abandoned building and you think you'll be safe there. Then there are more zombies. Then maybe you get to a river and you dive in, trying to swim away. Then you find out zombies can swim. I didn't know if zombies can swim, but, you know, for the sake of the story, we're going to stick with it. Okay, let's roll with this. So you're constantly on the move, without a plan, without a strategy, aimlessly trying to find a safe place, someplace where your life will be better than it is at that present moment. How do you think you'd feel in that scenario if you said exhausted and deflated? You'd be absolutely right. Now, back to some more comparisons. Compare that to a race. You're entering a race. It could be a marathon, an ultramarathon triathlon, whatever it might be. Your goal is to finish the race. You have a starting point signing up for the race and an end point finishing the race. And by having an endpoint, you can work out the steps that are necessary to get you there. You're running to something, which means you can plan your destination, build momentum, save time, and conserve energy. The end point also gives you something to focus on during the grueling points of the race where you just might want to quit. The months of preparation, training, strategy, nutrition, they're all building you up to be someone that makes it to an endpoint. Okay, you might say all this zombie and marathon chat is fine, but what the hell has that got to do with me not wanting to be where I am and not wanting to go where I'm probably heading? Glad you asked that, because I'm going to tell you, I'm going to share with you a couple of examples from my own life, my experience, to illustrate what I mean and how I reframe my thinking. So as you might know from the intro to the podcast, I'm an ex big law lawyer. Hashtag the biglore dropout. Go check out the hashtag. I find that you can search it on Google and great things come up. It's amazing. Anyway, sorry, off topic there. I was a big law lawyer for 11 years, splitting my time between London and Singapore. And for the first few years I liked what I did. Well, I didn't really give much thought to it, just after years in the music business. Something I'll talk about more another time. It was just good to be in a career that had structure, that paid well, had prospects. And if I'm honest, I kind of like the status that came with it too. See, I wasn't as enlightened then as I am now. And from the outside, everybody viewed what I was doing as being a great thing to do. As I'm sure many of you can attest. Being a lawyer in a top international law firm, it has a a certain cachet to it. And so I just rolled with it. You know, I didn't really think too much about what I wanted out of it all. I just assumed that I just followed the well trodden path that everybody else had done. You know, rise through the ranks, get promoted Each year, maybe hit partner one day with no real idea of what that entailed, but it's what everyone did, so it must be the way to do things right, I think. I think it's about the time my first son was born that I started to look at it all through a different lens. And that's probably the first time that that inner voice inside of me started to ask if what I was doing was really what I wanted to do and if the life I was living and heading towards was really the life that I wanted. But like a school bully, I kept shutting that inner voice down, slapping him down, pushing it into the lockers. And although it may have been true that I didn't love what I was doing, I did love the lifestyle it afforded me. Fantastic holidays, great dinners, big nights out, all of that stuff. Yes, I was a little bit more shallow then. As I said, I just wasn't that enlightened. But we all changed. That's what we're here for, right? And anyway, besides, I had a family to support, so why consider going anywhere when the prospects were good? So I kept on doing what I was doing, complaining from time to time, but accepting I was lucky to be where I was. I just had to suck it up. I mean, that's what you did, right? You just put your head down and you carried on. I don't know really when the trigger point was, but I know that over time I found myself getting progressively unhappier and progressively disillusioned with the way that things were. A turning point for me, which I started to think about a bit more recently, was December 2018. We were off on a family holiday to Barley for Christmas to hang with friends at this amazing villa. It was going to be a great holiday and it's one that we've been looking forward to for quite some time. It also cost a fair bit. And we got off the plane, got in the car to the villa and I turned on my work phone and there it flashed up. An email from a client informing me a deal. They'd been silent for months, had come back to life and of course, it had an urgent end of year closing deadline. I'm sure a lot of you out there can relate. So what does that mean? You guessed it. I was now going to be working not only every Christmas, but over my Christmas holiday in Bali. Man, was I pissed. And this wasn't the first time it had happened. I think I'd worked on pretty much every holiday I'd taken during my time in Singapore in some capacity. But this was beyond annoying. Now, built upon the progressive unhappiness and disillusionment, I just was really, really angry. I wanted to have a great holiday, being fully present with my wife, my kids and our friends. But instead, I spent almost every day of that holiday in this beautiful, amazing villa. The beautiful spare room of this amazing villa, hunched over a laptop or on the phone. I mean, thankfully it wasn't full work days. I wasn't locked in there for eight hours, nine hours a day. But as the science tells us, switching off is vital to our well being. That's why we have holiday days. And sure, I was away physically in an amazing location, but when you know in the back of your mind that work is waiting for you, you can never fully switch off and relax. You know, there's an email you might have to send or that you're waiting for or a call you might have to get on or document you have to draft. It's all there whirling around in your mind when you should be relaxing and having fun. So instead of resting and recuperating, I spent a large amount of time on that holiday in various states of stress and anxiety. I left the holiday nowhere near fully rested. And I knew that I had to make a change. I guess you could say in some ways it was the final straw. But all I knew was that I just didn't want to do this anymore. And that went on for quite a while. What I didn't know was what I did want to do. I had no direction, I had no vision. And without that, I didn't know what steps to take to change my situation. But I did do something. Got back to work. January 2019. I knew I needed to get myself into a challenge, something to kind of really kick start me and get me moving again. So I signed up for my first boxing match, as you do, a charity white collar boxing tournament that's held every year in Singapore. Now, I don't know how many of you out there box, but let me tell you, it ain't easy. Spending three months training for a fight is one of the hardest things I've done, both physically and mentally, but it's also one of the most rewarding. If you're training for a fight, there's a process. You don't just wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to get in the ring and fight today, because that's not going to work out great for you. So you have to go through the process. But to go through the process, you have to know what the process is, and also where you're trying to get to, you're trying to get to the end of the fight in the best shape possible. Or should that be the least worst shape possible? I don't know. Anyway, you might want to win the fight and yeah, you might want to win by knockout. But the goal, the goal to keep your eye on is that the end point is to get through the fight. That's the goal. So once you know the goal, you can plan the steps necessary to achieve that goal. So there's a structure. You know, you have to train a certain amount of times a week, you have to do a certain type of training, you have to have a certain type of diet, you might even have to make certain adjustments to your lifestyle. I gave up alcohol for three months, which actually wasn't as difficult as it might sound. But you're not going to do all of that in a vacuum or in a haphazard manner. You're doing it with the end goal in mind. So that makes it easier. I mean, the process is hard, but it makes it easier to do because you know where you're going and you know that each of these steps is taking you to where you're heading. And also from yoga, because in yoga it's a similar thing. You have to follow and trust the process. You also have to know what's your end goal. For most people, the initial end goal is to do a certain pose, is the physical effects, the benefits that attract them to the practice. For me, I want to be able to touch my toes and sit on the floor cross legged without any drama. Man, I was stiff. But when you get beyond the physical asana, the postures, you start to look inside yourself and do the inner work. And then you start to find out who you are, what matters to you, what your values are, what makes you tick. And that's kind of the purpose of yoga. That's self inquiry, that finding out about yourself. And by finding these things out about yourself, you can then start to strategize and plot a life or plot the steps to take you onto a path that aligns with who you are and aligns with those values you've discovered. But without knowing what those values are, knowing who you really are, you can't take these steps. All you'll do is just keep bumbling along the same way you've always done, doing the same thing, staying in the same place. Or you'll start to run away from what you have without knowing where you're going, which is equally as bad. As you may have said, if you've listened to earlier episodes of the podcast, if you are burnt out exec in the corporate world and you think that jumping and becoming a yoga teacher is going to solve all your problems, all that will happen is you'll be a burnt out yoga teacher because you haven't done the work. You haven't looked inside yourself and figured out who you are, what your values are and what you really want. So wherever you are, whatever you're thinking, take a step back, pause, reflect and envision. Applying vision to my life was a huge shift for me. I didn't have this huge aha moment where I instantly knew that's the path I want to go down and that's my end destination. But I did start to map out what was important to me in life and what I wanted or what I felt was going to make me happy. And once I started to figure those things out, I could then start to figure out how best to get there. And again, initially I didn't know how to get there. I didn't know shit. But I had a vision of where I wanted to go. I wanted to do something meaningful to me, something that had purpose, where I felt I was making a difference, that I was making some sort of positive impact on people. That's all. And that was all still kind of woolly and unspecific. I mean, what does that all mean? But at least it was a start, and it was more than I'd had before. But what was holding me back was the Leamington belief that I'd been a lawyer for so, so long, a big law lawyer, that all I could envisage was life as a lawyer in big law. I knew I didn't necessarily have to do what I was doing at that moment in time, but even alternative careers I was seriously looking at was still in law. It was law in a different practice area. It was working as a lawyer in a different organization. I just couldn't see past those limitations. If you've read anything that I've written or you followed me on Instagram, you may have heard me use the analogy of being locked in this mental cell of self limitation. You know, imagine a cell. You've got four walls, you've got a ceiling, you've got a door that's locked. You've got a window to the outside world with some bars on it, and through that window you can see little glimpses of the outside. But what you can see is limited due to the restricted view from the window. And it's Unattainable due to the locked cell door. Nothing outside is attainable to you because you can't get out of the cell, right? But like any cell, it can be unlocked. And if you can unlock that cell, take a step outside and look up at the sky, you realize that actually the ceiling that was there when you were in the cell was just an artificial limit. Because actually above you there is no limit. That's when you start to see all of these opportunities that were available to you that you either never thought about or you closed off as not the sort of thing somebody like you did. For me, it was yoga that unlocked that cell and the opportunities that appeared reignited my creativity. I started off before Law, as I said before working in the music business. My creativity flowed freely. I wrote songs, I rapped, I sang. I was a journalist for music magazines. I came up with marketing ideas. I went out searching for new acts to sign. Creativity was. It was just in me. It was just what I did. It ran through me. Although I didn't realise it at the time, once I stepped into Big Law, bit by bit that creativity disappeared. And I almost forgot that it was a part of me that might not be the same for everybody. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you can't be creative and be in Big Law, but for me, that's how it manifested itself. And it wasn't until I stepped out of Big Law, stepped out of my mental cell of self limitation, that suddenly that part of me started to return. So wherever you are at the moment, if you're in a role and you're questioning what am I doing, why am I doing it? If you're not sure or you don't think the way you are now is where you want to be and where you're heading is where you want to go, I invite you. In fact, I want you to take some time over the next few days to sit down and think about the question, what does my future life look like? I don't want you to sit there and play around with it in your head and kick out vague ideas. I want you to sit down with a piece of paper and a pen. That's right, we're going old school in your favourite coffee shop or somewhere away from where you'd normally work. Start to list out the things that are important to you. So, for example, is it important to you that you have location, independence? That's one of mine. I want to be able to live and work anywhere. Pick up my laptop, head off and just keep it Moving. Is it important to you that you have a huge house with six bedrooms? Is it important to you that you live somewhere where the sun shines? I love sunshine. Is it important that you, your children, if you have children, go to a certain school, it's important that you have children. Is it important that you drive a certain car? Whatever it is, there are no right or wrong answers because this is about you. It's not about me. It's not about what anybody else thinks. It's about what makes you tick, what's important to you. What is the vision of your life that is going to make you happy, make you fulfilled? And look, if it's doing what it is that you're doing now, you're in an amazing position. Embrace that, celebrate that. Keep it moving. Just try and do it with a little bit more intention. Try to make it work for you. Try and get to a position where you're not at the whim of anybody else, as much as that is possible, particularly if you're an employee. I found that autonomy goes a long way to making you happy. And there are degrees of control and degrees of autonomy. And not everyone wants to be fully in control, as in, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and steer their own ship. But just because you're working for somebody else or for an organization, it doesn't mean that you can't manifest an element of control for yourself and set yourself some boundaries. So think about that and carry that intention with you. Okay, cool. Now, for the rest of you, if, like so many, unlike some other guests I've had on the podcast who've been through this, you feel like what you're doing now isn't serving you, then this exercise is really going to blow things wide open. It's going to make you confront some serious truths as to the lifestyle that maybe you're living now. I know for me, I conversated myself with the lifestyle that my job gave me. My identity was so wrapped up in that. And as you would have heard last week's guest, Lindsay Athanisiu, say, when your identity is wrapped up in the status and in the money and in the external factors of success, it's very hard to divorce yourself from that. It's very difficult to imagine yourself doing something other than what it is that you're doing now of living a different kind of life. And that was difficult for me. I liked the money, I liked the status. I liked being able to go on amazing holidays and stay in fantastic hotels. But once I had mapped out my vision and figured out what was meaningful and what was important to me. These things became less important. I mean, don't get me wrong, I still love them. I love a glass of champagne, I love a beautiful hotel. But they're not the most important things in my life. They're not the things. When I sat down to map out my vision, that came out top of the list that were a priority. The priority for me was location, independence, spending more time with the family, doing really cool things with my kids whenever I wanted to, having control over my time and my day, doing what I want to do, when I want to do it. And importantly, it was also impacting people in a positive manner, guiding them towards living a life of intention, not reaction, helping them to find their own path of meaning, of purpose, of fulfillment, of value alignment. And so it became easy then to just let the other things go. And if through following my vision, those things come back, amazing. But if they don't, that's okay. Because the vision, the path, the impact, the meaning, the purpose, they are the things that fulfill me and that make me happy. So I hope this episode has given you some things to think about in terms of where you are now, where you want to be, and I'd love for you to drop me a line and let me know if you did this exercise and what came out of it for you. Do you now have a vision? If you had a vision, has your vision now changed? Have you realised that what you're doing, where you are, is actually where you want to be? Or have you realised you really do want and need change? And what does that change look like for you? Drop me a line. DM me on Instagram, ynespenceyoga or heogadenpodcast. And if you're not on Instagram, you can find me on Facebook or Twitter with the same handles. Or you can go to the website ryanspenceyoga.com and send me a message there. If you got some value from this or any other episode of the Yoga Den podcast, I'd love it if you could leave me a review on Apple Podcasts and let me know what resonated with you. It really helps to get the show out to others and helps me know that I'm on the right track and giving you guys what it is that you want. And in exchange you will have eternal gratitude. Who knows, maybe I'll rejoin you out on the show, but as we come to the end of this week's bonus episode, that's all for now. Next week I'll be back to the usual programming with an amazing guest joining me in the Yoga Day, sharing their awesome story. But until then, as always, eat plants, give thanks, do yoga, peace.