How To Change Your Life In 6 Months

So today I want to take you back to 2020 when I first started to change my life. And over the course of six months, my life completely changed. I had completely new goals, new direction. I went from not having a direction, doing teaching, finally having the realization that I didn't like teaching to that, Oh crap, feeling, well, what do I do now? To deciding, well, okay, I'm going to just charge forward in this vague direction. And I don't know how I'm going to do it, but this is what I'm going to do. So I experimented with a lot of different stuff and I just compiled the other night, Garrett and I were on a date and I just compiled in a notes app. Like of all the stuff I did during that time period, what has stuck? That's what I want to talk to you about today. Basically like how to change your life in six months, how to do a reset. So the first thing that I did was I created several very specific routines. And the first of those routines was a morning routine. And I feel like now at this point, people think of morning routines, they're thinking like yoga and matcha and all this stuff. But I had what I would consider kind of like a visionary morning routine at this point where every single thing, every single part of that morning routine was focused on whatever the bigger vision was. And I just kind of like locked on that thing. So basically that whole year, that whole like six months when I was still teaching anything that wasn't related to the vision, I kind of just like stopped prioritizing it and I didn't give it a priority in the morning. This morning routine had four very specific parts and they were all like funneling toward this vision. So basically I would get ready as quickly as possible. Like I would get up at five 30, we'd probably leave the house at five 50 drive to the coffee shop. The coffee shop opened at six and then from six to seven, this is when I was kind of like doing this morning routine. So I am just not a morning person. So I would just be so groggy from like five 30 to six, that whole time's like waking up just a zombie, really not awake. So the first step in this morning routine is as soon as I would get to that coffee shop, I would write down my 10 big dreams every single day. And I will put the picture up here because I cannot find it. It's in this house somewhere, but I cannot find it. So every day I would just write down my 10 big dreams. It would just be something like, I'm a bestselling author. I'm like a full time YouTuber. And I would just write down these like 10 big dreams so that every day I would be refocusing toward the bigger vision because when you're showing up at the coffee shop at 6am every day, it's kind of like, I don't feel motivated to do this. So there has to be like, there has to be like a motivational inspiration routine. And that's what I found when I was looking at this list. So much of that is related to this, this inspirational motivational routine. So then I would get out my planner and I would look at what I had assigned for myself that day. Later on in one of the next routines, I'll talk about that, but I would look at what do I have assigned for the day? And then I would kind of like itemize them in order. What hour do I want to do them? Like I'd planned what I wanted to do that day. But then that morning I would sit down and I would plan, okay, hour by hour, what do I want to do? So that was really impactful. And one of the things in the planner that I was using at the time was it had a blank for you to fill in song of the week. So this is the third part of this morning routine. And I would pick a song for the week. I don't know if you guys just saw that video a little, um, two videos ago, one video ago about changing your life. And I had songs in there that just kept me motivated. So every morning I would just be listening to these songs that motivated me or touched me in some way. A lot of them were Disney songs, motivational songs, or they're kind of cheesy, but it really just motivated me to pick a song of the week. And then I would get into what I would call like the deep work, like whatever the priority is for you, which for me, it was starting the YouTube channel, but I was still teaching. So this morning routine, I would say that I probably did that from six to six 15 and then from six 15 to seven is then when I would work on whatever I had assigned for myself with YouTube channel, whether that was like rough editing a video or final editing a video or like outlining or drafting or whatever it was, then I would work on it in that spot. And that was all the time that I gave myself to work on it. And I found that just an hour a day, every weekday really started changing my life. I feel like people really underestimate just how much an hour a day can give you. So then once it was seven, seven to seven 15, you know, I would drive into school and then I would work from seven 15 to three. And then when I, when I got done from my work day, then I would just be done for the day because I had initially tried doing all this in the evening working on YouTube. Cause I'm like, Oh, I'm like a night. I'll do that. But just because of all the decision fatigue and like the reason I wanted to get out of teaching was because it was so draining. And so the last thing, like after that whole draining day of this job, I didn't really like the classroom management issues. The last thing that I wanted to do was like come home and just keep working. So before all the decision fatigue kicked in, that's when I wanted to work on YouTube. So that's why I chose to work on it in the morning. So the second type of routine was these commitments that I would make to myself and I would have these graduated commitments. So when I first started, I had heard Sean Cannell say, he's like, you know, I just make 35 YouTube videos, commit to making 35 videos. And then once you get to 35 videos, then you can reevaluate. So that's what I did. So my first promise to myself was I'm going to get to 35 videos. I'm not going to negotiate with myself. I'm not going to get into that conversation with myself. I'm getting to 35 videos. And once I get to 35 videos, then we'll see where it goes from there. So that probably it took a few months for me to get to 35 videos. Once I got to 35 videos, then it was like, okay, I need to reevaluate. I've learned a lot more since this point. What, like where do we want to go from here? And at that point I made the commitment to myself that I was going to give it two years. I felt like I had consumed enough content of people saying that things really took off at about the two year mark of them doing it like really full time. I was like, you know what, two years, I'm going to give myself two years. And in addition to that, I had heard about the 10,000 hour rule, which is just kind of like an average approximation of how long it takes to get to mastery. So then at this point, like my commitment to myself is like, I'm just going to get to 10,000 hours because even though I've been doing this for several years, I'm not close to 10,000 hours because most of the time I've been doing this very leanly, like an hour per day, for example. So it would take 10,000 days to get to 10,000 hours if I'm just doing an hour a day. So this is the first time, um, this last six months has been the first time that I've really been putting a lot more time into it and really making gains on those hours. These graduated commitments really were like me hanging on. So the next thing I started implementing around this point was having like a weekly reset routine or a Sunday reset routine. And there were probably like three parts to this, I would say for three main parts. So aside from like, just kind of like tidying, I guess, and getting ready for the work week, the first thing that I would do is I would sit down and start weekly planning. And I was specifically trying to plan in futuristic things, like not just appointments, but fun things. Like basically anything that would be on like a vision board or things that I wanted to achieve that seemed like dream life things. I was putting those in first. So every Sunday night I'll be planning my week and I would also be planning my YouTube week very specifically. So I had, I'll see if I can find a picture of it. I'll put it here if I can find a picture of it. But it was this little like weekly spread that I had that I laminated for it with a dry erase marker. I would fill in what I was doing for YouTube that week, because at the beginning I was having a really hard time figuring out a flow of what worked for me and what I could get done. So I would try one routine for a week and then it wouldn't work. So I'd erase it and I would kind of, and I just kept kind of like plugging and playing. I think I had sticky notes on it. At one time I was trying to shuffle the things and seeing like what orders would work. And so basically I just experimented and experimented and experimented. So it was also on Sunday that I would kind of determine what routine worked for me for YouTube. And then finally I would start doing like meal planning. So I've done a lot of different things over the years. Sometimes I was doing meal prepping, like we were prepping for the entire week. Snack prepping, like snack prepping for the week. And at this point, what I'm doing, I have a meal plan video. If you want to check that out, what I do at this point. But now I just kind of like plan the meals, keep it really simple and no recipes and do that. So that was something that I really started doing. I want to reinvent the wheel with creative things, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel with this boring stuff. Like it just uses too much energy if you're constantly like behind on the boring stuff. So I just get the stable routine for the boring stuff so I can actually, you know, provide that creative energy for the stuff that matters. And finally, right around this time, I had read the book, Getting Things Done, which that is pretty much the productivity Bible. I also read, I want to show you some of the books I was reading at the beginning. Don't Keep Your Day Job. That one really resonated with me. This one you can have it all. For some reason, this one just like really resonated with me at the time. I have so many highlights in here and I'm kind of surprised at the things that I highlighted because they seem kind of like basic to me now. But this one at the beginning really helped. This one, Claim Your Power is really good. This is like a 40 day activity like rediscovering yourself, your hidden potential. And then The War of Art, which I obviously recommend all the time. That book is so good. And also what do you do with an idea? This children's book, it's so good. I think I read this actually on a YouTube video a few years ago, but that book is really good. Um, but I've read Getting Things Done. And so from a productivity perspective, that book's just like the productivity Bible. So one, basically the big tenet of that book is that you should use your mind to think about things, not of things, meaning use your mind for creativity, fun stuff, whatever you want to think about, not tasks and stuff like that. So that's something that I really took to heart. And so I think for a lot of people, they have what's called like a silent to-do list. Like it's just the stuff in your head and you're like, Oh, don't forget to do that. Don't forget to do that. And it's all in your head. So one step above that is to get rid of the silent to-do list and actually get that on paper and write the to-do list. But then a step above that is that instead of having a to-do list, you write it on your calendar. So anything you would have on a to-do list, you know, you spread that over the appropriate time in the calendar. So then you just have one spot for things. You don't have all these like different floating to-do lists. You just pick one calendar, one place. Um, and then you keep everything there. So that was like really a game changer when I started seeing like a planner as kind of like my sidekick for visionary type things, like not just appointments, but like, you know, actually moving the needle and stuff that takes some proactivity to put on the calendar. Then the other thing is that instead of putting the results on a calendar, like test on Friday or paper due Friday, that's kind of the result. Instead of putting the result on the calendar, putting action items on the calendar, like what's the, what's it going to take? Okay. If I have this paper to write, maybe I'll chunk it over five days. So rough draft, brain dump, your final edit, you know, whatever the steps are putting the steps on the calendar. And then, yeah, just setting up that daily date with the planner as part of the morning routine. I think that that was really impactful. If you liked the quick habits that I listed in this video, I have another video about habits that I'll link here. And if you liked kind of the YouTube side of stuff and like the side hustle ideas, I do have a side hustle video that walks through like my YouTube process. So if you're interested in either of those topics, I will have those linked here. Thanks so much for watching. Bye.