Before You Chase Success, Face Your Reality | #649

What’s your reality?

In this episode, Lachlan Stuart shares why most men fail at reaching their goals, not because they lack motivation, but because they skip the step of facing their current reality.

You’ll discover:

• The truth about setting “big hairy audacious goals.”
• How the 7 Domains of Life reveal what’s holding you back.
• Why success requires an honest baseline before you build.
• A powerful exercise called the reverse bucket list that shifts your perspective instantly.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or like you’re not living up to your potential, this conversation will give you the clarity and framework to start rebuilding from the inside out.

Stay tuned for Lachlan’s free Inner Track Scorecard™  coming soon.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Your Current Reality
• 1:51 The Seven Domains of Life
• 4:50 Creating Your Baseline Assessment
• 6:37 From Pain to Positive Change
• 9:35 The Reverse Bucket List Technique

Transcript

Lachlan Stuart: 0:00

What's your reality, or it's what I want to talk to you about today. Whenever a man steps into my office, the first thing that we really want to dive into if he is looking to improve his quality of life is what is the reality? A lot of times, when people decide they want something different and this may be you we set this goal, we get excited by the goal, but we don't really ever get clear on what our baseline is or what our current launch pad is. And it's very hard to build a solid foundation meaning something that you can stick to if you aren't aware of what foundation you're building it on. And I became very aware of this probably a decade ago, when I was wanting to improve my life. I realized and I'd set a goal similar to what I was mentioning watched a guy on stage. I was super inspired and I walked away from that event going I want to do that and I want to earn a million bucks, right. It was the motivation that encouraged me to set the goal, which is what we talk about a lot. But what I didn't realize was that the timeline that I'd set for that or the timeframe that I'd set for that was just ridiculous. I wanted to do this in 12 months. I'd never earned over 60 grand a year, let alone over 10x-ing that, to make that happen. So I don't want to ever discredit the decision that you make to set a big, hairy, audacious goal, as I call it. But I think it's just important to make sure that when you're setting a goal much like when I set that goal it's on the horizon, meaning you're looking up and you need to challenge yourself, but it's not over the mountain, meaning there is a lot of stuff that has to happen in the meantime. So I walked out of that and I just remember thinking all right, motivation, it's going to happen and you cannot fault the enthusiasm.

Lachlan Stuart: 1:38

But I just didn't have a lot of things working for me and I was setting myself up to fail. I don't want you to fail, and I'm sure you're maybe sick of failing in certain things. Fail is an important part, but if we can get a few runs on the board, you're going to be able to change your life. I truly believe that. So the main thing that I want you to walk away with today is knowing how you can create your reality, and some of it's going to be confronting. I remember having to look at myself in the mirror and just be like look, this is who you are, this is how you've been acting. This is the current reality of the results you've got, and it's not as good as you would have liked, or maybe you aren't as good as you think you are. That's tough to deal with and I had to own up to a lot of things.

Lachlan Stuart: 2:24

But what made it, I guess, easier for me to start breaking things down and making progress in my life was looking at different domains of life. I was introduced to this concept literally a decade ago and I ended up creating I guess it's a keynote or a podcast. You can go back and find it. If you've been listening to the podcast long enough, you'll see it the eight areas all men must master, which has now gone into the seven domains of life, or the inner track, which is something that I'll have free for you guys to go through, and you'll be able to actually get your own score within the next week. So make sure you come back to that one.

Lachlan Stuart: 2:56

But when we're looking at the domains of life, it's important to get clear on what the reality is across those areas, because you need to know that they're all connected right. The quality of your health impacts your mindset, it can impact your lifestyle, it can impact your relationships, just like the quality of your relationships can impact your lifestyle, can impact your mindset, can impact your health. And so we need to start looking at what's the reality of that and what's holding me back, because we're only as strong as our weakest link. So, when we're looking at the seven domains, think about it like this We've got personal growth, we've got health, we've got mindset, we've got relationships, we've got lifestyle and we've got finances Some super simple categories that everyone can rate themselves on, and if you were to have to rate yourself out of 10 being it couldn't get any better.

Lachlan Stuart: 3:42

You've already achieved the optimal in that area. What would you rate yourself? And one being like it is the worst. Then you can give yourself a collective score, and that, to me, is what I would call your inner track score, your overall life satisfaction score, and then you can look at them and go finances is 10, relationships are nine, lifestyles are nine, but my mindset and my health are threes, and this is common for a lot of high-performing men. They have the runs on the board, but they have that internal chaos which is leading to everything else falling down around them. And look to be honest, it keeps me in business, but you probably do not want to live a life like that and I know for a fact I do not want to live my life like that. So when you get clear on those domains, we can then go. Where am I honestly at there? And then this is what we do when we're looking at your reality and essentially identifying your baseline. And the B in baseline is the very first step in the become method, which is, I guess, my process in helping men rebuild or grow from the inside out so that they can lead in their life, in their love and in their finances. So we want to get that dialed down. So the first thing, get clear on those seven domains, score yourself. Make sure you follow here, because within the next seven days I will have something available for you for free that you can rate and actually get some steps on how to improve those areas. I'm very excited to share that with you guys.

Lachlan Stuart: 5:07

After sort of getting clear on those areas within my own life, I started setting goals around wanting to get healthier, I wanted to get wealthier, I wanted to improve my relationship with myself and my relationship with my wife or girlfriend back then, and it gave me purpose. Every day I wasn't working on one area, I was working on another, and it just became. The healthier I got, the more confident I became, which allowed me to show up more confidently in my relationships. And as my relationships became better, my network grew and more opportunities became available to me and life just really started running or moving in that right direction. But I could not have got there had I not been honest, and I still remember going back to 2017 when, three years into trying to achieve this million dollar a year business, I didn't have the runs on the board. I'd actually gone from running a network marketing business back to Ubering and I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Lachlan Stuart: 6:00

I was stuck and I had to have a good hard look at myself. I had done a lot of work and I had made some massive improvements in my life, but the same things that were driving me to chase my potential which were the things that I was running away from had started to come back up, and that was that I'm not good enough. It was that I was weak and that I was a failure, and when they were ruminating around in my mind. My mood started to drop, my enthusiasm dropped and my appetite for risk meaning doing the things that I needed to do that were challenging me that would have put me in a position to be better and have a better life were holding me back, and I didn't really have that pain to want to change anymore, because my life wasn't crap anymore. It was much better. But I was losing that drive to want to continue excelling, and that's one thing that I've seen so many times is that when people aren't honest with themselves, they're like that's pretty good.

Lachlan Stuart: 7:01

I'm probably an atheist. What does that even mean? And what are you comparing that to? And I had to go back to those areas that I mentioned. What would a 10 look like if I was thinking bigger? Because at any one point you're going to be moving from pain back to homeostasis or whatever you feel like a good baseline would be within your life. That's cool, and once you get there which was where I didn't have immense amounts of pain in my life life was pretty cool. It was better than it was, but I didn't really have a compelling future to build towards, and that's what we need to go to and the benefit of having a baseline, and you've always got a baseline. It doesn't matter whether you're in the pits on the rock bottom or you're currently where you are while you're listening to this, there is a baseline for where you're at. Which is your reality right? Where are you at financially? What are your relationships like? How's your health? What's your energy? If you're using a whoop, like I do, what is the scores there? How many date nights do you get to have? Looking at your calendar, do you feel inspired by the week ahead or are you just like another week? How much longer can I do this? For, be honest, think about it, check in with it.

Lachlan Stuart: 8:09

But I had to create that pain to want to change and I still wanted to continue building an incredible lifestyle. And when I started looking at it, it's like I've got more flexibility in my life. I'm in control of what I'm doing, and that was Uber driving but I'm a little bit limited on finances. I am still not the main provider in my family, so therefore, that was, I guess, ruining the image that I had of myself. I didn't feel like a man, I didn't feel like I was truly contributing, and that was supporting that limiting belief I had that I'm not good enough. So I had to challenge that and I was like, if I want to feel like I'm good enough, I have to think bigger, I have to push myself harder and I have to start raising the bar on what I'm capable of earning more so that I can provide. And that's going to, I guess, create this positive feedback loop. And that's where I want you to think about what pain can you create?

Lachlan Stuart: 8:57

And this may sound sadistic, but for me it just motivated me. I was sitting back and when you're not moving, you are. Tony Robbins always says, when you're not growing, you're dying. And that's essentially what I was doing Watching the time tick by, hoping that I would hit a lucky streak. And if you want to create a good life, you've got to get very clear on that baseline, and it can be tough and challenging, which there was a lot of reality checks along the way, and I got introduced to this concept called the reverse bucket list and I wanted to share this with you as well while we're looking at your baseline, because a baseline, when you start acknowledging some of the honest truths, can leave you feeling a little bit fucking flat. I'm going to be honest Because if you're not where you want to be or you haven't been living up to your potential, why would you feel amazing about that? But the cool thing is is when you start acknowledging where you're at, you now put yourself in the most powerful position to change. And one thing to leave you with is that reverse bucket list. And the reverse bucket list is this Look back on your life, think about the experiences that you've had, the memories that you've created with people, the achievements that you've done, and write them down.

Lachlan Stuart: 10:05

They're things that you can be grateful for, things that you can be proud of and things that can show you the good parts about yourself that quite often we overlook, because when we're looking so far in the future, we often forget to look back and appreciate. We definitely look back and go fuck, I'm not good enough or I did this. I need to punish myself for the rest of my life for that, as opposed to going. I represented Australia, I won a GPS title, I got to live out my childhood dream, I've got some lifelong friends, I turned my life around Things like that that we can actually be proud of, because then, when we go, our reality may not be where I want to be, but up until this point, I've done some pretty cool stuff. So what are those cool things that you have done? Because while you're diving deep in the baseline right your current reality that also means while you're looking at what you don't want the shit you also got to look back at the things that you've done well and you've got to give yourself a pat on the back for that.

Lachlan Stuart: 11:05

So I want you to think about this. If you were to be honest and observe all of the domains of your life, where are you currently, where would you like to be and how far have you already come? My name is loachlan Stewart. Make sure you stay on the lookout for this new school card I've got coming out. I look forward to sharing more of these little short snippets. These have been getting great feedback from you all and I look forward to so many more. I think this came off the back of me looking at where my baseline is right now, and I've been playing small. I've not been talking to the point, giving you guys as much. I guess not even advice, like just honest frameworks that I use or throwing the questions out there, the things that I'm thinking about, that not only help me and my clients, but could help you just by listening to this. So, wherever you're listening to it, I hope there's been a few things that you can take away, few things that you can.