You've Already Lived Two-Thirds Of Your Life, It's Time To Level Up

It's been a few weeks since the last episode and Ricky wants to be honest about why instead of pretending it didn't happen.

Part of it was strategy. A season of doubling down on what's actually working and cutting the offers and ideas that were just taking up energy without earning their keep. Part of it was something more personal: a genetic reality that makes Ricky's nervous system less tolerant of being spread thin, and a decision to protect it instead of ignoring it.

The real heart of this episode is a question most practitioners avoid. Do you know what quarter it is right now? Q3 means we're over halfway through the year, and there's a piece of psychology worth understanding here. The theory that time perception compresses as you age, so a huge share of how "long" your whole life is going to feel has already happened by your mid-twenties.

Ricky ties that directly to the practitioner who's been sitting on something. The coaching. The skill. The program idea. Whatever it is, it isn't waiting patiently for a better moment. If you don't build it, somebody else having the same idea right now will.

In this episode:

• The real psychology behind why time feels like it's speeding up as you age
• Why Ricky went quiet and the health reason behind the business decision
• The myth of "feeling ready enough" to finally invest in yourself
• Why speed of execution, not the original idea, is the real edge left in this industry
• A fifteen minute Q3 reset you can run this week

Eventually is a lot closer than it feels.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 1:32

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Fulfilled Practitioner Podcast. I'm your host, Ricky, and I'm super excited to be back with today's episode. We got a really fun one today, and one that I feel would help any practitioner listening to it. So I want to start by asking you a question. And I hope you think this way. This answer should come to you really, really quickly. So the question I have for you is do you know what quarter we're in right now? So I'll take a second here. If your brain didn't immediately jump to it is the third quarter of the year, Q3, it means that you don't necessarily break up the year into small enough segments so you can actually assess where you are and what you've accomplished. If my math is right, and I hope it is, we're over halfway through the year already. So if we reflect back January 1st, that was quite some time ago. And most of the time, New Year's has this sort of theme and vibe around it that you start to write some goals out, you start to write some visions out, and you start to write what you want to happen that year for you. And chances are if you're not reviewing those periodically enough, things aren't going to move. So you might go back, find that dusty journal that you haven't touched since January and see what goals you set for yourself. And if you're honest with yourself, you might be a little bit disappointed. And that's completely okay. So we're gonna dive into some strategies to say, uh, some big takeaways for you today as well. And just to go over a summary of what we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna talk about why quarter three should genuinely alarm you a little bit. And we're gonna talk about a really cool statistic about time and perception that literally has changed the way that I see things and what I focus on in my day-to-day. And I also want to be honest with you guys, I know I've been MIA for a few weeks here, and I'm not gonna pretend it didn't happen. I'll get into exactly why in a minute. I've been practicing what I preach, and we'll definitely dive into that. So, this podcast episode is really going to nudge you into taking action on some of the things that might just be sitting around piling up, collecting dust at the end of the day. So, jumping right into it, I'd love to start with a cool little tidbit on time and the way that we perceive time. So, here's the thing: most of us we walk around and we think time is fixed. It's a steady thing, it's the same 24 hours day to day. A year is a year, quarter is a quarter, 12 weeks is 12 weeks. And whether you're eight years old or 58 years old, doesn't matter, right? But that's actually not how we experience it. And there's actually a real well-documented idea in psychology behind why. So it's sometimes called the proportional theory of time perception. So I know that's a mouthful. Some people trace it back to French philosopher named Paul Janet in the 1800s, but the idea is really simple. So you don't have to go and dive into the research. When you're five years old, one year is approximately 20% of your entire life, depending on how close to five you are, right? That feels like forever. It feels massive. But when you're 50, that same year is only around 2% of your life. So your brain measures time relative to how much time you've already lived. And so it's not in some fixed objective way. And that's the big problem. That's why summer as a kid felt like it lasted six months, and now an entire year can go by and you'll swear that it just started yesterday, right? I heard a very specific number thrown around that by the time you're 25, you've already lived roughly two-thirds of how your life is going to feel time perception-wise, even though you've barely lived a third of it based on life expectancy in actual years. So I want to be straight with you. That exact number isn't something official. I've just heard it thrown around, but it makes a lot of sense, right? Comes from different mathematical models people have built off of this proportional theory we talked about. And depending on which model you use, the number may shift a bit, but the point remains the same. So some put this as the perceived halfway point of your whole life. Uh, and that halfway point might be in your late teens or early 20s. And underneath it all, the general idea is real. So it's not that it's uh something concrete. Time perception genuinely does compare on something close to a logarithmic curve as you age. So, whatever the precise percentage is, uh the takeaway is, it's it's all the same, right? A huge chunk of how long your life is going to feel, it's already happened. And it only speeds up from here. So it sounds like something you can't afford to just be kind of casual about, right? I I didn't think so. Uh, I actually sometimes still feel like I'm living in 2019, late 2019, before the pandemic. I feel like the pandemic really sped things up. And these last six or so years, they've kind of been a drop in the bucket. I can't believe at how fast they've gone. And my son today, he's six and a half years old. Uh, so he'll be seven later this year. And I'm just shocked. I still get memories of him and pictures pop up. And I remember him as a baby just yesterday. It's it's just crazy. So I'll get off my soapbox there. I know all of us kind of feel the same. Let's dive into where I've been. And I'll I promise this ties into what we're going to be talking about today. So I've actually been following my advice, and even though it's cost me some visibility, I think it was for a greater good. And even though it meant less content, less noise, I've been in a season of really practicing what I preach. And if you've been following the podcast for a bit, I recorded uh a few episodes on this, but the big one was taking more shots. Is that we all should be in a season right now, especially with quarter three rolling around here, of doubling down on your winners and cutting your losers. So if you've been listening for a while, I've been talking about this concept for a while. And the idea is that most of us we're usually running too many things. We're all spread out way too thin, right? We probably have way too many offers, we have way too many distractions, we have too many half-built ideas, things that are just in our brain. And sometimes we call it diversification when it's really just diluting our attention. And at the end of the day, we often find ourselves productively procrastinating and not actually connecting with people, not actually launching some of that, something that could actually help people, right? So, what I did over the past month is I've actually been looking at what's working. I've had an interesting, I'd say year and a half to two years where, as you guys know, I work with practitioners. I launched this podcast, I wrote a book, uh, I've been putting myself out there more. I've done some in-person talks as well. And I have a lot of things kind of up in the air right now. And it's one of those things where I started to feel like, okay, what's actually working here? Am I spreading myself too thin? And at the end of the day, the people that I work with, they mean the most to me. And I want to make sure I serve at my highest capacity. So I made the call to really focus on what's actually moving the needle for the practitioners that I serve. And I made the call to go all in on that and let go of some of the other stuff or at least quiet it down, right? And let me be real with you, I know that's uncomfortable. A lot of you are doing a lot of different things, and sometimes it even feels risky to narrow it down instead of expanding further. Every instinct, every marketing course, every person that you work with, they're gonna tell you, no, more offers, more content, more everything equals more safety. But I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like it's the opposite, right? I feel like your ability to focus is what's going to create your real leverage. And if your focus is diffused across a bunch of busy work, sometimes it looks like progress on the outside, but I know internally you feel like you're stuck, right? And I'll be even more honest with you because we go back to our biggest why and why did we actually become health practitioners? Most of us we have a personal health journey. My personal health journey, I've talked about it for over a decade now, really was tied very closely to my nervous system. And I've learned a lot about my nervous system over time. So all of the strategies that I've ever used have been in consideration of my nervous system. And I know my own history, so I've mapped my genetics. Uh, if we want to take a more scientific approach to it, I carry a mutation in a gene called C O M T. Uh, and many of the practitioners listening, I know you guys probably know what this is, is catocholomethyltransferase. It's a gene that breaks down adrenaline and other catecholamines in your body, some of the fight or flight stuff in your body, right? So, this gene, just to give you guys a 30-second background, you could have one of three versions of. I like to use traffic lights as an analogy. So if mom and dad both gave you a clean copy, that's a green light gene. And that gene can break down a lot of adrenaline pretty quickly. So it can clear those things pretty quickly. It could break down dopamine really, really quickly. People who have a yellow light gene, they got a mutated copy from one parent. So that gene can function less uh functionally and less efficiently under certain conditions. And then we have the red light gene, and that's what I have. You got a mutated copy from both mom and dad. So what that means is I have the potential for breaking down adrenaline and stress chemicals very, very, very slowly. In the past, this has manifested as anxiety, panic attacks, things like that. But at the end of the day, I've actually learned to live my life in a way where I try my best to not overload this gene. And a secondary role of this gene is actually to clear out estrogen as well. So there's some things you can do in that department. But I find a lot of practitioners, if you don't know your genetic blueprint, sometimes you might be taken on more than you can chew. And literally, somebody who has a green light gene might be able to handle more than you in certain respects and thrive in that pressure. Whereas for you, we have to be more strategic. So, knowing that about myself, everything I've done is to offload this gene. Now, if I was lucky enough, or I don't know if I could call it lucky, but uh if I was in this made-up example of being born on a tropical island where maybe I was from an affluent family and I never had to work a day in my life, my life was leisurely, I chilled on the beach all day, I would never know I have this gene. My body would never get to that stress point to manifest into anxiety or anything else or any sort of fight or flight in the body. But knowing that, I know that when I spread myself across too many things, when I spread myself too things, uh too far and too thin, it doesn't just show up as like me being unfocused. It kind of shows up in my body, right? And you can kind of viscerally feel this. So if you're listening and you're a practitioner and you kind of go through the same experience, there's an explanation for it, right? I've learned over time it simply means there's a ceiling on my tolerating of stress. So when this happens, I have to make a decision where I need to cut the noise and narrow my focus. And that's actually how I protect my nervous system, right? So this season that I feel I've been in for uh some time now, it's been a season of sharpening. I would say it's really allowing me to see what I need to focus on, what is my mission in this world, and how do I serve more people with my greatest gifts? How do I help them make a big impact in this world? Because at the end of the day, as cliche as it sounds, that's the mission. That's the reason we do what we do. It's to help humanity, but we need to understand who we are. So, this is actually why I find so many practitioners burn out. They don't know that there's a ceiling on their stress and they just keep pushing up against that ceiling every single day. They ignore the warning signs, and they also don't know how far they can push. I only arrived at this point of being able to compare winners and losers because I've been throwing stuff out there. So this is where you still need to be taking action. Having the C O M T gene is not an excuse for me to just lock myself in a room and do nothing, right? So it's not a disability. There, there's actually no such thing as a bad gene in this context. Like there's only bad environments. So once you optimize your environment and you find what's working, you can move forward with energy, with passion. And it doesn't stress you out the same. So here's where it gets interested and interesting. And here's why I opened up with that time perception stat. Most practitioners, they simply don't realize this until it's too late. So the coaching you've been telling yourself you needed, and maybe you'll you'll start that when things settle down a little bit. The skill you know you need, but you keep bookmarking all of the videos on it for later. Uh, the support you know would change the trajectory of your entire career, but you just keep putting it off. Like these are things that are just sitting around, and you're going to get to them one day, right? I'll put that in quotations. But that stuff is not just sitting there waiting patiently for you. Time doesn't pause while you get around to it. So I talk about this in my book. Uh, fulfillment isn't just impact and income, it's impact, income, and lifestyle. And every quarter you spend stuck, spinning, or meaning to get to something, or meaning to get that help you need, you don't actually get that back. So it's just not calendar time. Like that would be one thing. In perceived time, it's the kind of time that based on everything we just talked about is only going to feel like it's moving faster and faster, not slower. So this is why you might have made a decision to launch a program five years ago, but it still hasn't been launched yet. And this is the part that most practitioners skip. They think there's going to be a better moment. They think there's going to be a less busy season. They think there's going to be a point where they feel ready enough to actually get some coaching, to learn that skill, to build the system, to do the launch. And honestly, that moment is a myth. It just never happens. I've learned that the hard way. The practitioners who actually grow, they're the ones who accept this. And they accept that they'll never feel ready, but they move forward. They take a meaningful, small step anyway. I was listening to a podcast not long ago, and they actually use this term where they say you have to take a first meaningful mediocre step. So that first step doesn't have to be perfection, but it has to be in the direction of where you see yourself, right? And here's the other side of that same coin and the part that I like think about constantly. If you have an idea, you have to be the one who executes it or someone else will. So I've heard this famous quote that par I paraphrase that from from Rick Rubin. And when an idea pops in your head, so if this idea is to create that program to help people with IBS, you need to do it because that idea found you for a reason. And if you don't do it, someone else is probably going to do it because it's not up to you. It's that idea. And that idea's time to come to fruition has come. So this is a very powerful passage from Rick Rubin. And uh I feel it holds so much strength, right? So whatever program, whatever content angle, whatever offer you've been sitting on, because you're still thinking about it or you're kind of seeing how things play out. Guess what? Somebody else is gonna have that idea. And it's not to say they're competition, but so many times practitioners, entrepreneurs, they have this story of, oh, I thought of this idea well before this company did, but they came out with it. I thought of Google before Google, I thought of Facebook before Facebook, right? And I fully believe it. Like that's kind of the nature of ideas, is like they're not solely given to just one person and one person only. They're not promised to that person that you are the chosen one. If you get that idea, you need to do it. So let me ask you directly if we're now into quarter three and if we're reviewing your quarter one, quarter two, and you're like, I haven't really chipped away at those goals, ask yourself, write it down in a journal, do this exercise, pause the podcast if you have to. What have you been sitting on, right? Is it a program you know that your clients need? Is it maybe a group program you've talked about for years? Is it uh a program or a training program that you've been telling yourself you need, but you'll reach out next year, next quarter, because you you want to notice something. So you've probably told yourself that before last quarter, maybe the one before that. So let's just be honest right now and let's kind of make a collective decision together. And that's that quarter three doesn't care how ready you feel, it's already here. And with this time perception that's just continuously passing at a faster time, these quarters are only moving quicker and quicker and quicker. So here's what I want you to actually do with this episode and not to just nod along to. I hope you've been nodding along to it. Uh, so take 15 minutes this week. Maybe it's right now. Like it's it's uh the day that I'm recording this podcast is a Friday, but you can do it on any day. Take 15 minutes today, uh, whenever you can, do it. Pull up whatever goals you set back in January if you did them. If you didn't, that's okay. And be honest with yourself and ask yourself one question: Are you meaningfully further along than you were three months ago? Or does it feel like you're standing in the same spot? Or the worst one, but you have to be honest with yourself. Are you actually way back? Are you way behind this goal? Did you actually go in the other direction, right? So if you're further along, good. Keep going. Ask yourself uh what one thing you could do to double down on right now to accelerate that. What have been the winners in the past three months for you? What have been the not so good uh things? Uh I don't necessarily want to call them losers, but we'll just do that for the sports analogy here. Uh so if you're standing in the same spot, that's not a reason to spiral either. It's information, it's feedback for you. It's telling you that whatever you were doing on your own, it's not enough. And it's time to stop trying to figure it out solo. Like put it out there, get the help that you need, build the system that you need. Whatever that next step is for you, you do it this quarter and not eventually, because eventually doesn't perceive time the way you think it does. Eventually is a lot closer than it feels, right? So we want to make sure we stop playing this game with ourselves. And sometimes we unfortunately do it through our whole career. So here's the one thing I want to leave you with today. Time is not gonna slow down. You you already heard that here. And it's not gonna wait for you to feel ready. It only compounds against you the longer you wait. So, compounding, it's called one of the wonders of the world. And guess what? That applies to the negative stuff as well. So it only compounds against you the longer you wait. So, whatever you've been sitting on, whatever idea, whatever skill, whatever support you know you need, this is your sign to stop putting it off. If this episode hit home for you, send it to a practitioner who needs to hear it. Let me know, shoot me a message, let me know what was your biggest takeaway and hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next. Uh, I won't go quiet for a period of time. I was in this season practicing what I preach. Uh so I hope you stay fulfilled, stay inspired, and keep doing work that lights you up because the world needs your light.