Why Men Hit a Midlife Crisis (And How to Avoid It) #680

What do midlife crises and young people going into debt have in common?

They both stem from the same root cause: a lack of new experiences.

In this episode, Lachie Stuart shares the framework he uses with every client — the Experience Bank, to help men at any stage of life start collecting the experiences that build clarity, confidence, and a life worth living.

Lachie covers:

• Why staying in one lane means never really knowing who you are

• The 5 types of experiences to collect in the next 12 months

• The difference between a bucket list, mini bucket list, and reverse bucket list

• How a rugby prank in freezing France became one of his favourite stories

• The free Journal app he uses to track his reverse bucket list

• What he told a grade 12 student this morning — and what he'd tell himself at 18

Free Experience Bank PDF: lachlanstuart.com.au/experience-bank

Work with Lachie: https://www.lachlanstuart.com.au/speaking

Transcript

The Hidden Cause Of Feeling Stuck

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

This one thing causes midlife crises for the older people and for young people, it puts us into debt, it has us living lives that we don't feel like we're being seen, we're being valued and we're being heard. So what is it? The simple thing is we stop having new experiences and learning from the feedback from those things. Now I'm very aware that this is not a flattering camera angle as I am driving, but I've got my camera hooked up to the tripod there just below, and I don't have an extension on it yet, so we're just gonna make do because I have been thinking a lot while I'm driving, so I'm like, this is a great opportunity to deliver content. And you know what? It's me doing what we're about to talk about, having a new experience and learning from the feedback of it. Now, throughout life, when we're young, we don't really know our ass from our elbow, meaning we have no idea who we are. We are told that we need to have it all figured out by the time we leave school. We need to know what career we're wanting to do, how much money we're gonna earn, where we're gonna live, probably who we should be marrying, where we're gonna buy our house. And they're such big bloody life decisions, yet we haven't experienced life. We haven't really done anything else aside from live with our parents, go to the same school, surround ourselves with the same groups of people. And that tends to follow a lot of people when they finish school and into their careers, they stay in the one job, they stay in the same field of work, they surround themselves with the same friends and family, and they do the same things they've always done. Meaning you're never getting new information to find out if there are new things that you might enjoy, if there are new people that you might like surrounding yourself with, or if you can actually do things differently to how you've always done them. And that fascinates me because this morning I was chatting with a young fella that I'm very fortunate to be working with his dad, and he actually asked if I would work with his son who's going through grade 12 at the moment. And it's a privilege, right, to be able to work with people who have been where I've been. You know, I feel like I'm more of a mentor role than a coach at this point. And when we were just chatting, he was talking about some of the things he's experiencing, and I was like, mate, no worries. Like, if I could give myself some advice again when I was your age, when I was in grade 12, the thing that I would say to myself, and I honestly say this to myself now that I'm 35, but go out there and have as many new experiences as you possibly can. When I was in grade 12, I wanted to be an athlete, and so I didn't try new things, I just focused so much on being the best possible athlete I could be, and that's important to do, but there was definitely plenty of opportunities where I could have had new experiences and I didn't, and I robbed myself of I guess the compound effect of that growth. And what I mean by that, as I've gotten older, when I met my wife, she's very artsy and creative, probably polar opposites to me, right? They say opposites attract, and she's brought out the best in me in that she's challenged me to Lekov being so serious. She has put me in an environment where I felt comfortable learning the guitar, which I always wanted to do, but I never did. And they're just some small examples, but then as a result of that, I started using social media, and she helped me get more confident in my ability to post content by I guess proofreading before AI was there, but she would proofread my posts and give me feedback, and then I would just get access to people that I never normally would who thought differently to me, and initially that was challenging, but over the long term it's allowed me to see the world through a different lens, and it's also given me so many different viewpoints that make me me. Whereas I feel if I had just continued down the path that I was on, I wasn't happy, I was angry, I didn't show any emotion, I didn't allow myself to be happy, and I probably would have stayed in a job that I really hated, and I don't think that's the life anyone wants to live. So for the young people out there who maybe are feeling overwhelmed or you're maybe feeling confused during this period where you're about to finish school and you're about to, I guess, start your life where you're in the complete driver's seat, go have some fun, go try new things, collect as many experiences. It's why I create the experience bank and I get my clients to do it regardless of who they are or where they're at in their life, and I'll talk more about that in a moment. But it's something that you can use as a framework to continue ticking off those experiences and learning from the feedback of it, and I promise you, you will improve your quality of life. Because if at the end of 12 months you haven't got any clear on who you are, which I cannot see that happening, but you'll have had some cool experiences, and you know, some of my favorite stories, and maybe you are the same, some of my favorite stories come from the experiences where things didn't go to plan. I remember a story I was playing rugby over in France, and we had our pre-season camp, and it was tough, don't you? Like a training camp is never fun. We went to a French military base and we did all of the military training, which you know I enjoyed, but it was freezing, very different to what I was used to in Queensland here. And one night we were sleeping in these bunks, you know, they were sort of raised in tents, like uh what half a half a metre off the ground or what a swag uh style thing, and then I feel our tent just getting ripped apart, and then where our bunks are getting flipped and we're landing on the gravel. And in that moment, I was so pissed off. It's like what the what the hell's going on? And then I realized it was half the team, it was all the forwards, I was a back. All the forwards had decided to play a prank on us, but I was like, what the fuck are you doing? It's freezing, we've got to get up early for a trail run. You know, now we've got to remake our tents, we've got to remake our beds. Like, why would you do that? And I was so pissed off. But now I look back and I'm like, that was a cool moment. Like, sometimes the experiences that we have in the moment that suck are some of the best stories and the most fond memories we have, or actually the things we do remember. So get out there, have some fun with that. And this works for you, even if you're you know not going through that I'm transitioning in school period. If you're you know you've been in the same career for the last 15 years, or you are feeling like you're pushing towards a midlife crisis, or you are happy with where your life's at, but you're just wondering, you're just asking yourself, is this all there is? Because they're all common things, right? You're not alone with that. But if that's you, I would say the same thing. Take the experience bank. I'm going to put it on the website, but you'll be able to find it at lochlandstewart.com.au forward slash experience bank, and I'll just give you a PDF. It'll be free. But use that, and there's five experiences you want to create: one for yourself, one with your partner if you've got one, one with your friends, something that's hard and physical, and something that is to a new place, like a new location. And so if you give yourself all of those, I promise you in 12 months' time you're gonna have a much deeper understanding around who you are, which definitely isn't a bad thing, and then you'll probably find you want to go do it again. And one thing that I do with my clients again is we do bucket lists, and you've probably heard about that. Bucket lists are these big things that you want to tick off, right? Experiences, travel, all of that, and you could tick off a couple of years, and the five would be in that, but you also have a mini bucket list. Now, the mini bucket list is something that doesn't require as much planning, much money, or much effort, but it's still something different, right? It shakes up the mundane, and I would recommend doing something like that every couple of weeks. I personally do the five across a year, and I have for a couple of years, and I would do the little ones every every two to three weeks, really, just to keep things going, or you can do something hard every week, and then finally, people definitely don't talk about is the reverse bucket list. So looking at what you've already experienced in your life and being grateful. So often we live life at such a fast pace that we don't ever take stock of what we've done and be appreciative for that. There's an app on your iPhone if you're an Apple user, and it's called Journal, it's it's free, right? It's brilliant. And I do probably two to three posts in there a week, and it'll take photos from your phone or whoop data or training data, or you can just it'll prompt you with questions and you can just write things down. The cool thing about that is is over the years it'll start keeping a log of it and bringing it back as a memory, just like social media does, and it's cool once again to be able to then reflect back and go, Wow, I forgot I did that. How cool! That was a challenging you know for me. I did the David Goggins challenge, I think three years ago it popped up on my thing. Then I did 30 rowing marathons in 30 days, and I lived in Nashville, Tennessee. I lived in France, I took mum to Europe last the year before. And I've done and I continue to choose to do these things because I want to live a great life, and I want you to live a great life, and if you're feeling lost or you're feeling stuck, just start banking experiences, and I promise you, I promise you, you will not regret it. You will only improve your life, you will only improve the understanding you have of who you are as an individual. Because if you sit there and you can't answer that question, that's okay. But the only way to be able to answer that is by getting out there and doing things that are going to give you more feedback so that you can answer that question. My name is Lachlan Stewart. If you've enjoyed this, make sure you hit the subscribe button. I'm dropping weekly videos. You can grab that free Experience Bank PDF just by going to lochlandsteart.com.au forward slash experience bank, and you'll be able to download that one there. But that's it. Thank you guys for being here, thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.