Your Business Is Stealing Your Life (Here's the Fix) #696

This morning at breakfast, I told my wife I'm locking in my next 45-day fitness challenge. I know how that sounds when you're running a business, married, and raising a young family. But that's exactly why most men never do the things they say they will. They wait for the perfect season. They say "one day." And quietly, that one day fades away.

In this episode, I share the 3-step system I use to stop postponing the life I want, and how you can lock yours in without sacrificing your business, your marriage, or your family.

You'll learn:
- Why busy, successful men are the worst at actually living their life list
- How to build your Life List and choose the one thing to lock in first
- The Calendar Lock — how to make it real before life talks you out of it
- How to have the hard conversation with your partner before you commit
- How to protect your time when work keeps trying to steal it
- Why "one day" is the most dangerous phrase in a man's vocabulary
- The exact process I used before the 58 marathons — and what I'm doing next

This is for the bloke who's built something in business, shows up for his family, but quietly knows he keeps kicking his own life down the road.

Transcript

Ready For A 45-Day Challenge

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

This morning at breakfast, I told my wife I'm ready to take on my next fitness challenge. It's gonna take roughly 45 days. Now I know how that can sound selfish, stupid, unrealistic, especially when you're running a business, married, and raising a young family. But that is the exact reason why most men don't live the life they want to, because they keep putting it on hold. They wait for the perfect season. They say one day. But then that one day it never happens. It quietly fades away. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how to lock in the life that you keep postponing. But in this video, I want to keep it very simple for you and give you some actionable items. So how to lock in the life that most men keep postponing. This morning when I was talking about it with my wife, I noticed that I had been kicking the can down the road for doing something that was important to me. I show up every day for my family. I'm there to walk my son in the morning. I'm at home helping out around the house, making dinner, looking after my son, taking my wife on date nights. But I was kicking the can for the things that were on my bucket list, or as I call it, the life list that I wanted to continue embark on. And if you're tuning in for the first time, recently I ran 58 marathons in 58 days across all 50 US states and eight states and territories of Australia. Not because that mightn't sound fun to you, but for me that was that was pretty cool. It was a wild adventure and experience. And I had that next thing, but I'd been postponing it because business needed me, my family needed me. But I have now started to see that I'm postponing my life. And I don't want to be the guy who talks about what I used to do. I want to be able to say to my son and to people in my life that I did all of those things. And I did I did all of those things, and I did them to the best of my ability while still pursuing and creating a great life. So there's three simple steps that we take, which is a part, you know, this is a small segment of a bigger program that I run for men who are business owners earning roughly half a mil to two mil to help them get

Create Your Life List

Lachlan Stuart 2:05

their week back so they can start taking ownership for their life. Now, the first thing we want to look at in that is you want to have the life list, right? And this is where we make desire real. But if you don't have a life list of things that you want to experience, there's going to be a sheet below that you can download, which is ultimately getting you to write down things that you want to experience. And it could be physical things, it could be, I need to get some water, it could be physical challenges, it could be holidays, adventures, whatever it may be. Think of it like a bucket list. And on that list, we do it very simply. So here's a couple of questions that I would like you to think about. That I do all of this myself. The first one in this process so that you can make sure that you're getting life back and you're really locking in some cool shit for your life, is create the life list. So the first thing, just grab five spaces or five lines of paper on a notebook and write down five things you want to experience. It could be going to the soccer world cup final, it could be going for a morning surf on a Wednesday during the week. It could be, for me, I want to say the 800-meter final at the Brisbane Olympic Olympics in 2032. It could be the next challenge, which I'm locking in. Okay. So that could be, but put it in there once we've got those down, don't overthink it. Now we've got something to aim at. The next thing is we want to go choose one thing. Look at that list of the things on the list, which one pulls you the most or excites you the most? Let's choose that, right? Circle it and you're good to go. Thirdly, we want to define that experience. So, what does that actually look like? So, if we're saying our experience is 58 marathons in 58 days, define the experience. What does it want to be? When I was defining the experience,

Choose One And Define It

Lachlan Stuart 3:50

I thought about what I was not prepared to sacrifice in order to achieve it. So I wanted it to be fun, regardless of how physically challenging it would be. So I put that in there. I defined that I didn't want to lose my marriage in the process of chasing this. I said that we wanted to tell some stories. So I started writing down these experiences so I could start creating and crafting it, which started making me want to do it even more. The next part I went into was check the size of it. Is it a small, medium, or large experience? Because you can have big experiences that take a lot of time, energy, effort, money, and you can have smaller ones which cost little to no money and take little to no time. And I think in life as a bloke, you want to have, you know, one to two big ones a year and a couple of little ones sprinkled in so that every day you've got something that you're building towards that makes life worth it outside of the business and outside of the family. Because when you're fulfilling yourself and you're continuing to have new experiences and you're continuing to grow, you're going to bring back more value to the workplace with a new set of a fresh set on life, right? I think about it with the 58, it taught me so much about resilience, leadership, fundraising that now helps me in my business and my career. And I can talk about it with you guys. So think about that, check the size, then identify the cost, right? What are the potential costs? Not only financially, the 58 took me away from my business for a fair while. Not only was the cost meant I was not partying or attending too many social events for 14 months because I knew that I needed to be all in on achieving this goal. I had to identify what conversations had to be had. This is a really important one, one that's often overlooked. Had to have the conversation with my wife. How do you feel about me not doing X, Y, and Z for 14 months while I trained for this? How do you feel about me being on the road away from you for 58 days? How do you feel about me probably being a little bit busted when I get back? Had to have those convos with the important people. And I had to surface the objections early. What were going to be some of the things that would hold me back? Money, time. Is it even possible? Can I put my business on hold? All the things that I'm sure you experience. And then after you've gone through that little checklist, you just decide whether it's worth locking in or not. Really, that's that's the process. Because if you go through all of that and you're all like, I don't I can't have that convo with my partner, or just I've identified the costs and it's not worth it, then you don't do it. You go back to the list and you cross that off and you go, maybe not

Costs, Conversations, And Objections

Lachlan Stuart 6:20

now. Well, what one can and we go through that same process. Now, once we've decided we want to lock something in, we're gonna go to that calendar lock, right? Which is step two. So this is where we make it real. Basically, very simple process, and I'm just gonna fly through these. I will do these more in detail and give you worksheets in coming videos. So make sure you follow for more. But essentially, with our calendar lock process, we want to pick the date. So I chose the 21st of January 2025 as my start date, and I looked at obviously I was running in winter, had to consider what that would look like and how that would impact me. But I chose that date, I then put it in the calendar. I put it in a shared calendar with my wife because that was important, and I told people, I told my sponsors, I told people that were going to follow the journey that it was there for some accountability. Then obviously, around that, you've got to block the travel, the preparation, and the recovery time. So if your experience, I guess, isn't physical in nature in terms of physical exercise, but maybe you're wanting to go to the soccer world cup, you just think of the travel and the preparation is the lead up to, then you've got the experience of itself. And then recovery is just the debrief. Because, as with anything in life, it's so important to be understanding around what did you get from an experience? Because the more you reflect on did I enjoy that or did I not, what did I enjoy about it, what didn't I, you can get feedback to do more of what you like and less of what you don't like. And that's where it's important, regardless of whether it's physical or not, that you're looking at travel, prep, recovery there. Now, you guys are all married, obviously, as I'm talking to it. So you've got to notify your wife, family, team, and the key people when the dates are locked in, right? It has to be in the uh in the books. Now, as a business owner, I had to move business commitments around that. I was running an online community for men at the time. We would normally run workshops in the lead up. About six months before it, I decided not to run any workshops. I just couldn't or chose not to commit to those because I wanted to give everything to my training. Um so make sure you move your business commitments around that. Create points of contact. You're a business owner, so you're gonna be removing yourself from day-to-day for a bit if you're not already there anyway. So you want to have points of contact that your business can still continue to grow as you're off doing these things because that's often the biggest reason why we don't do these things, right? You think, oh, if I take myself away from the

Calendar Lock And Accountability

Lachlan Stuart 8:45

business, it's not gonna grow and things aren't gonna progress the way that I want. So make sure you have a point of contact with someone who is able to answer a lot of the questions that you're you're wanting to do. Make an unavailable plan. I'll talk about more of this in another video, but essentially you're not gonna be unavailable. So if you're if I'm on the road or I'm mid-running of a marathon and there's an emergency that comes up, what happens during that unavailable plan? So if we tick all of these things off, gents, you're gonna feel a lot more comfortable being able to lock these things in and get it done. So the final thing or second and last thing is put money down or make the actual verbal commitment. So I put it out on social media and I booked flights and all of those sorts of things. So make sure you do that. If it's a small thing, you might have a commitment with taking your son along or your daughter along or meeting a mate if you want to go for a Wednesday morning surf, for example. And then build the timeline. Build the timeline to make it happen. So we've got first one is build that life list, just get five to start, calendar lock. There were some dot points of things that you want to look at. Can be as simple as putting it in the calendar, but if you find you don't do that, there's some other things to consider. So you have accountability and you have thought about it enough. Now, the final part here with making sure that you lock in the things that you want and you don't put your life on hold is you've got to protect it. Super simple. You can say you're gonna do things and then something may take priority over the top of it. And if you keep doing that, you'll notice it might be your health, it might be your marriage, it might be your experiences, that it's been about 12 months since you did an adventure, or 12 months since you did something fun with your mates because work keeps stealing life. So here's a quick little couple of a bit of a checklist that you can go through, and this is essentially making the standards real. So, firstly, is treat it like a real appointment. If you treat your adventures, your health, your time with your family like it's a business appointment where you're sitting down to negotiate another contract or another deal, right? You're not gonna skip it, you're gonna do whatever you can do within your power to make it happen, right? To protect it. Create some rules around the time, define what counts as urgent. There will be things that are urgent that you will always take priority. So for me, it's always gonna be family things. Not too many work things take priority unless I'm about to go belly up or it's a really urgent thing. Touch wood, I haven't gone close to being belly up. Next checkpoint is solve problems or or statement, is solve problems instead of canceling. If things try to get in the way, solve it like a problem because you know the end goal. When you're working on, let's say you're working on a build for a house, for example, you're a tradie working on a build for a house, and you're dealing with different subcontractors and a subby pulls out, right? Or they say, Oh, we can't get to it for another month. You've got other trades and deadlines banking on that. So you can either go, oh, the job's screwed, we can't do anything about it, we need to need to cost money, or you can go, okay, this guy's been a bit unreliable, let's solve the problem and let's fill the trade with someone else as quickly as possible. Then you would go, I need to fill this trade. Where's a list of trades that I can call? Who will come recommended, and then who come later down the list? Let's get calling and fill that gap. So solve problems,

Protect The Time And Energy

Lachlan Stuart 12:05

predecide your response if things try to take your time. In the moment, right? This is where choices become such a powerful thing, and standards are even more important. Standards are your choices made in advance. So if you know, which can happen for all of us, people are going to try and steal your time. You need to have thought about some responses in advance so that you can go, I knew this was gonna happen, or I prepared for this. Here is how I want to respond to that. Third one is protect your energy. You can have this holiday to look forward to, and this is super common, or this adventure and experience, but you can burn yourself up in the process because you go, I'll rest when I get to my holiday in the maldives, or wherever you're going, or you're doing your next challenge like me. But the truth is, then you get on holiday and all you want to do is recover from the intense period that you've had. So make sure that you protect your energy along the way. And once again, we talk about all of this stuff inside the program, which we're about to launch the uh pilot pilot group. If you want to find out more, you can see in the link in the in the notes there. And then finally, stay present during it, right? You want to be present during the time that you've allocated. So, this is something that we talk about in other modules where it's like, how do you be at home and not have your head at work still? It's just like how do you do these other adventures or experiences or holidays and not have your head at work? Talk through that, very simple. And then finally, like I said before, once you've protected the time to do it, review it after it to see how well you did, and you can make this process more of your own. So there's some checklist questions that we can go through. The payoff of all of this, gents, you don't need to choose between being a present husband, a good father, and a man who still does big things. You can do all of that, but you just need to lock it in. And that's what I hope you take away from this today. If you have enjoyed this, there's going to be some worksheets below that you can use that you can implement, but just understand that if you are a bloke, you're doing well in business, but

Review, Takeaway, And Program Invite

Lachlan Stuart 14:05

you understand that your business is stealing your life and your marriage is suffering as a result, your health is suffering and you're not getting the adventures and the experiences that you thought business would create. Click the link in the below just to see whether this pilot program is going to be for you and if it's going to help you get the things that you're looking towards. But if you're a business owner, you're bloke, I probably guarantee that this is going to add some value in your life. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week.