How can you find your own path to lasting change?

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1:53Hey everyone, welcome along to another episode of the High Performance Podcast. And this is a special episode where Damien and I are going to share with you some clips from previous episodes and talk to you about the five steps of change, basically how to change your life. And actually that is the title of the brand new book from the High Performance Podcast, which will be out very soon. You can actually pre-order it right now. All you have to do is click the link in the description to this podcast or head to thehighperformancepodcast.com and you can pre-order the book including signed copies right there.

2:24But Damien, change is something that many people look for, many people struggle with and the whole point of this book is that by breaking change down to five key easy steps, hopefully we can make it something that is just more accessible to people. Yeah, definitely Jake, I'm really excited about it. I think change often gets a bad rep that people think that it's something to be feared when the reality is we're embracing change all the time think of it for somebody becoming a new parent if somebody told you that you're going to take on a challenge that involves you getting up twice in the night and the person you're helping is going to be sick on your clothes you're going to be working for the next 30 years without a moment of thanks or appreciation or any pay yeah or any pay you'd say well I'd never take on a job like that and yet millions of people do it every day become parents some people take on challenges like taking on a new job moving to a new town you know even if it's taking on a new hobby changes all around us and if we can help people understand that it's actually something to be welcomed as opposed to being feared that means that we can help people on their own journeys to high performance it's interesting that there remains some negative connotations around change.

3:40As we explain in the start of the book, I used to think that change is what happens or what you need to do when things go wrong. And actually, I had a dawning realization, you'll find out why and how, if you get the book, that change is actually something that you need for things to go right. You actively need to search for change. The truth is, as Damien's already said, the world is changing all around us all the time. So if we remain fixed, if we stay where we are. We're not just staying still. The truth is we're going backwards. Right, Damien, very briefly, there are five stages of change. Let's start with the five.

4:12Well, the five stages, Jay Carr. First of all, we go to the dream stage. This is where we imagine what is possible, a world of possibilities and excitement and new opportunities are what we start with. That's the dream stage. Then we stop dreaming and we have to take the leap, which is stage two. This is where we have to do something different tomorrow than what we're doing today. Then we inevitably hit the fight stage, what Brené Brown calls the messy middle. This is a bit where it's darkest and where we often doubt whether we can actually get to the end of our journey. We have to pass through that stage before we eventually get to the climb stage where we start to see success occur, but it's only in small sprouting moments.

4:56And then finally we arrive and that's where we take the time to stop, reflect, to celebrate, and then plan how we do the journey again. And we've seen those five stages of change in all 200 plus of our episodes from some of the world's highest performers have taught us how we can successfully transform. So let's start with dream. And you've picked a clip that perfectly demonstrates the dream stage. Yeah. Susie Ma, one of the most inspirational guests that we've had on, spoke about her own journey from Shanghai to Australia to come into the UK as a young girl and had the dream that she wanted to live a better life for herself and her mother.

5:34It was only when she'd set up a tropic business that she realised that actually that was just a small part of it. It was a bigger dream there and she describes it as the infinite purpose. Let's hear her go into the detail. We have something that I call an infinite purpose and this is actually inspired by Simon Sinek. I had the pleasure of going on a a challenge with him about four years back. And he spoke about having a purpose in life. And a purpose is very different to a passion because you can be passionate about so many things. But a purpose is what guides your passions and is what guides all the decisions that you make.

6:11And he spoke about an infinite one, which is something that isn't achievable because it carries on. And on the back of that conversation with Simon, I came back and I decided to create an infinite purpose for everything that I do in life. And that is to help create a healthier, greener, and more empowered world. So that was Susie Ma then, the only runner-up on The Apprentice who Alan Sugar has actually invested in. She runs Tropic Skincare. And that had a big impact on me, the idea of infinite purpose. You know, I had lived my life up until that point thinking that it was all about specific goals.

6:46It was about moments. It was about achieving targets. And actually Susie explaining that if you do focus on those things, you might get there. Sure. But when you do, you will lose motivation because you've reached your target. If you don't get there, you'll lose motivation because you didn't get there. And either way, by focusing on one specific target, it gets you to one specific place. Whereas if you focus more on the process, if you have an infinite purpose that never has an end, if you're always searching, if you're always exploring, then when you find success, you can actually repeat that success, which I think is is really powerful.

7:21Yeah, and there's three questions that we include in the book to help people get there. And we show some really powerful examples of it from Joe Wicks asking about what do I love doing? Wrong and Chatterjee asking what am I really good at? And then Susie talking about what does the world really need? Asking better questions leads to better answers that allows us to get to stage two of our journey, which is actually to take the leap. And we're going to play a clip for you of Alex Scott. I'm from an area of London where, you know, it was a struggle, but I'm proud that the struggle and the hard work has led me to this place.

8:00And actually, why do people look at the negative? Why can't people see that? You know, for you to achieve and get out of something and all the hard work that you've put in, why don't you celebrate that? You just still constantly want to bring someone down because of an area that they're from. But then actually, you know, it's the UK. It's a representation of society. but we've been stuck in a way that this is what TV is supposed to look like. This is what you're supposed to sound like. And it just proves that things need to change. A lesson that I learned when I went to America, I got drafted to the Boston Breakers and it was the first, if the pro league was set up, I got drafted into the same team as Heather Mitts, who was the best right back in the world at the time, golden girl of women's football around the world.

8:46And straight away, everyone's putting us together. Well, how's this going to work? Who's going to play? This is not possible. And straight away, people were telling me like, Al, you can't go to America to play. You're not going to play. You're going to go from playing for Arsenal in England. You're going to sit on the bench. And I was like, oh, you might have a point. But actually, no, I've just been drafted. I was lucky enough to be drafted into the pro league where all the best players are going to play. Heather ultimately lost her place to me in the team. But Heather would stay behind, make me stay behind with her all the time.

9:18She was like, okay, you're great at this, but your left foot should be better. And so she would have me pinging balls with her after training to make me better. So that's a really great example of how people can take the leap by choosing their environment really carefully. Alex spoke about how she had quite a difficult childhood growing up, but her escape was to go into the football cages where her talent allowed her to have a sense of status and feel better about who she was. And then she spoke about going out to America, where she pitted herself against the best players in the world, and that allowed her to thrive.

9:55They were all leaps that she took to achieve her ultimate ambition. And the truth is that taking a leap requires you to fight, right? It requires you to do difficult things. But even then, we haven't entered the fight stage. You mentioned at the top that Bray Brown calls this the messy middle. Before we talk about a specific guest that discussed fight with us, why does this happen? Why can't life just be a sort of linear success story? It'd be lovely if it was, but it's referred to as Cantor's Law in organizational psychology, Jake, and it's named after a lady called Rossbeth Moss Cantor, a Harvard psychologist that says, in the middle of every project, there is always a moment that will come that looks and feels like a failure because you almost have to get too far in to go back, but you're not far enough to see the end point at that moment.

10:42So that's when the night is darkest, if you like. And the ability to anticipate that and do what Nims Purge said to us about being comfortable in these moments of discomfort are actually what separates the good from the great. And the clip we're going to play people now is someone who managed to find, I mean, I certainly wouldn't call it comfort, but he found a way through the discomfort, didn't he? Yeah, so we're going to listen to Ash Dykes, the lad from North Wales who set world records in his exploration endeavours. And he spoke to us around the trail he did across the Mongolian desert, where he'd broken down every day into stages that meant that he was confident that as long as he hit the stages, rather than worry about getting to the end, just hit the small targets he'd set himself, that gave him the strength to get through this fight stage.

11:37I was pulling a trailer behind me, carrying all provisions needed to survive, and that was 120 kilograms or 18 stone. What happened? And I was weak. I was severely dehydrated. I was suffering with heat stroke, which is usually fatal. I could almost feel my organs drying up. I was hallucinating. I was delirious. And I remember I would have to hide under my trailer because picture the Gobi Desert. it's fast it's 40 degrees celsius plus there's no wind there's no shelter even from the clouds and i my only protection was underneath my trailer on the hard you know rocky floor i had continued and there was an unconfirmed water source that was now dry which was which was fine you know i knew to carry enough water in my container to last me an unconfirmed water source because there was always going to be a confirmed water source coming next we'd never like two unconfirmed water sources in a row however in the Gobi Desert you go through water a lot quicker and I was a lot skinnier I was a lot weaker and I was pulling this trailer that was like pulling a concrete block through hell hiding under my trailer and it was at that point I realized that I think I only have potentially three four days in me left because I was in such a bad agonizing way.

12:48How long had this gone on for? This had got I had slipped into it I think over the past two weeks but I think it was probably longer because when I was in the Altai Mountains and it was colder I probably wasn't taking in as much fluid because it didn't feel like I needed to rookie error and at the point where I was underneath the trailer I did have an agent in the capital in Ulaanbaatar but it would take him at least three to four days to find me if he found me in time and another day or two to get me out of that that area and for me I didn't believe I could survive five to six days and I still had four remaining days left and I'm a big believer of the law of attraction visualization but I couldn't visualize four days I was in agony but I could visualize 100 meters and again that's when the break and the goals that I could see 100 meters so there was no reason why I couldn't get from out of my trailer strap my four-point harness on walk for 100 maybe 200 meters if I was lucky and then rest under the trailer again and then I became really disciplined and routined I would rest sometimes for an hour under my trailer, whereas I nipped that in the bud and rested for no more than five minutes before I got up and continued.

13:56So can you explain to us, from a sort of psychological perspective, why it's so valuable to human beings to break things down into much smaller numbers? I've heard people describe like, instead of looking at a wall or building a wall, just focus on one brick at a time. It's the same analogy that Ash was talking about there, isn't it? Yeah, so your brain just releases dopamine when you hit a target. So if you only focus on getting to the outcome, the end goal, your brain's going to release dopamine when you get there. Whereas if you break it down into processes, so you set yourself small goals, small targets, the brain still releases the same amount of dopamine when you hit those small targets.

14:33That dopamine gives you a degree of momentum, it increases your morale and your belief that it is possible. So having a series of small steps rather than looking to could take great leaps is what we all need to be doing when we're in this fight stage. And then once we get through the fight stage, where do we arrive? We start to climb. So this is where momentum starts to help us. So we take what are one-off behaviors and turn them into systems that keep us on track and keep us moving in that forward direction. So a great way of doing that, Jake, is through giving ourselves feedback along the way to make sure that we're aligned.

15:13And a great example of that is the brilliant Ben Francis, the CEO of Gymshark, one of the UK's few unicorn businesses. Ben started the business in his bedroom with his friend Lewis Morgan, and he's eventually grown it into a multi-billion pound business, and he's the CEO of that. And he described to us how taking that role of leadership required him to receive some feedback. a few years ago when i was sort of just starting on this journey we did something called 360 feedback which i don't know if you guys are aware but for those that aren't what you do is you out you basically list people around you that you work with or you spend a lot of time with they fill in a questionnaire and like confidentially you can't see who answered what and they sort of tick different boxes to describe you and people can add in comments as well i had this 360 feedback it must have been like 20 or 30 pages and about seven or eight people that all contributed to it um i read through the whole thing and it completely broke my heart i thought that's not me that's just doesn't sound like me everyone else is wrong in reality everyone else is right i was the problem um so what sort of feedback did you get ben give us just a quick example abrasive um can be too direct to honor at times not thoughtful right um i mentioned earlier about being sort of too direct in terms of my product feedback um not empathetic enough and even when you read it did you still not believe it no i didn't believe it and this is the thing and this is the thing that really changed it i took it home and i put it on the side and then i went off went to the gym did whatever come home from the gym and robin who's my fiance now was just finishing reading it and i was so annoyed that she'd read it and i was like why are you reading that that's mine don't look at it it's not even right anyway anyway whatever cool down an hour later i said what did you think of that anyway and she said that's the most accurate description of you I've ever seen and I was like oh god and that was a moment where it almost felt like everything around me just stopped time just stopped and it was almost like an ego death and I thought right whatever is in that 360 feedback I am going to list down and I by any means necessary I'm going to improve that and that was a moment when I had to reinvent myself you see I think this is really good for people to hear because I think often we look at Ben Francis, we look at the success, we look at the wealth, we look at the journey and we go, well, that must have been easy for him.

17:39Now, we know that there would have been struggles early on, but we then assume once you get to CEO status at Gymshark and the turnover is incredible, surely then the struggles and the self-doubt and the fears and the worries disappear. Yet he's actively talking about having those doubts, almost almost engineering those issues for himself at a really late stage in the development of the business. And it shows that at no time on a journey like Ben's been on, does it actually become what we consider to be easy. Yeah. So the analogy we use in the book is talk about radar displays. When you're driving a car down a road, the most effective way of getting you to stick to the speed limit to get to your destination is having radar displays that tell you what speed you're driving at and just give you the opportunity to adapt and amend your behavior.

18:25And Ben is a great example of that, that being the leader of a business is different than being the startup entrepreneur where you can break the rules. So having feedback from the people that are closest to him to say to him, you're behaving like a bit of a dick here or that's really good, but do more of that behavior is really important for all of us when we're in this climb stage to make sure that we're remaining true and aligned with the person we want to be. So once you've learned a bit from Susie Ma about Infinite Purpose and you've started to dream and then you've remembered that even someone like Alex Scott gets criticism and negativity when she takes a leap, you might find yourself in the fight stage where you rely on the processes as Ash Dykes has explained to us.

19:07And then you start to climb. And even then there are challenges in front of you. You've just heard that from Ben Francis, the founder and CEO of Gymshark. But then the moment does come when you arrive. and actually for so many of the people who've joined us on High Performance, it's a moment that changes everything. All too often it can give them a clarity that they've never had before. And we were joined by Jax Jones, the artist, musician, DJ on High Performance. And when he arrived, when he got to a place where suddenly he'd wanted to be for so long, he wrote himself a letter. Damien will talk about it in a moment, but first let's hear Timothee Lamb, a.k.a.

19:41Jax Jones, reading part of that letter to us. Dear friends, it's Jax slash Timochin I'm releasing a new song It marks the end of the most transformative time of my life From my debut single I Got You in 2013 To the Snacks album in 2019 I've connected with billions of people Built a beautiful music family around the world The young Timochin could never have imagined That any of this success was possible Because I was born at the bottom of the pile And abandoned multiple times Music was the only way I could see To change my world for the better and now you guys have made my dreams come to life. Thank you.

20:20So why was that letter such a significant moment in the arrive stage? Because we often delay our happiness believing that once we've achieved where we wanted to get to, all our problems are going to be solved. And the reality is that we need to take a moment like Tim's done there to reflect on the achievement, how far the journey's been. But more importantly, what he's learned along the way that allows him to go through the journey again. change never stops so he's going to go back into the dream stage and work out what the new world is going to look like for him and how he's going to take the lessons from his five stages into the next five well I hope that you enjoyed those five clips from five previous guests on high performance if you'd like to know more about having the dream taking that leap and making change in your life then our brand new book how to change your life is available right now for pre-order you can hit the link in the description to this podcast and you can get it on the day that it's released on the 7th of December and the exciting news is if you pre-order the book right now and then email a copy of your pre-order to hpteam at highperformancegroup.co.uk then you will enter the draw to come and join us for a record of the High Performance podcast meet the team, go behind the scenes see how we operate have a drink with myself and Damien we'd love you to pre-order the book right now and you could be in with a chance of joining us behind the scenes at high performance.

21:44Listen, thanks as always for listening. I hope you enjoy the new book and we'll speak to you soon.

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