Research has shown that you are what you believe. You are what you think and what you think drives everything you do and experience in life.
Research has also shown that what you perceive is what you believe….anyone else reading this in the voice of Napoleon Hill from Think and Grow Rich?
Your personal perception of reality is determined by the beliefs you hold. This does not necessarily make them real, except for the fact that you believe they are.
Your beliefs create and dictate what your attitudes are. Your attitudes create and dictate how you respond — in other words, they dictate your feelings.
And your feelings largely determine how you behave.
But what does this really mean for your life?
Basically you have the opportunity to change the way you think, and what you believe, and therefore change your life.
Have shitty negative thoughts, experience more of that in your life.
Focus on gratitude and abundance (even when you don’t feel like you have either) and it starts showing up in your life.
Get really clear on the ideal client you want to close in your business this week, guess who turns up on Monday?
Train smart and do a daily visualization of you completing your upcoming triathlon in your personal best time…and you likely will.
The thing is, that isn’t easy to do if you have no idea what you want to think, how you want to change and what you want your ideal life to look like.
So it starts with getting clear on what matters to you, what your priorities are and what would feel like you’re living with purpose.
Enter Life Pilot.
Every Sunday, for the last year, my partner Josh and I have taken ourselves off to a lovely cafe or on a nature walk to do our our weekly Life Pilot Reflections.
Basically over breakfast or a ‘walk and talk’ we reflect on the week that’s gone.
We ask each other some of our prompt questions to dive deeper into what really went on.
Like what went well this week, what could have been better and what was holding us back or moving us forward?
One of our favourite prompts is to do Roses, Thorns and Bananas.
What the heck is that?
It’s a great way to look at what is going well in your life and the week (roses), what wasn’t so hot (thorns) and what surprised you (bananas!).
It’s an extremely illuminating and effective exercise. We usually start with roses, for example:
“I finally finished that report and it felt like such a big project to wrap up and I’m really proud of it” — rose.
“I noticed I procrastinated like crazy on starting that new project” — thorn.
“I was amazed at how much extra energy I got from our boxfit sessions this week” — banana.
Paying attention to your life and how you’re living it, allows you to focus in on fine-tuning it to be the best possible life you can live.
Everytime we do this we uncover truths like what activities hold us back, where we are limiting ourselves, what things put us in flow.
Using our spreadsheet we can see patterns over days, weeks and months of what’s working for us and where we procrastinating or getting stuck.
Being more intentional about how we spend our time and tracking that every day using our spreadsheet and toggl.com has made us far more productive, effective and present in our every day lives.
As a rather famous man once said:
You underestimate what you can do in 3 years but overestimate what you can do in one year. ~Bill Gates
And it’s true!
Which means we think we’ve cracked the issue of goal setting which comes down to knowing what the heck you’re actually capable of achieving.
That’s because we’ve gone from dreaming and scheming about our 3 year plans, and then reverse engineering those lofty dreams into 1 year goals, then quarterly, monthly, weekly and right down to daily.
It’s been transformative. It’s a simple methodology for winning life one step at a time.
After years of personal development and testing tools, templates, strategies and methods of others, I feel like we’ve combined all of that and simplified the heck out of it, to make it doable and effective.
One small step per day, one seemingly insignificant action, can lead to a ripple effect in a short amount of time — weeks or even days.
That can lead to all sorts of amazing changes in a matter of weeks and months that shift your life direction into what you wish it to be.
Like Ruby, who joined our Life Pilot Challenge in July:
“I joined Life pilot hoping to gain a bit of control and calm over what was shaping up to be a ‘busy’, exciting but at times overwhelming year. The life pilot system has allowed me to dream big in ALL facets of my life, not just my business. Incorporating regular check-ins to prioritise, reflect, learn and grow helps me remain focused and on track to turn the vision I have for my business, family, health and relationships into reality. A month seemed like the perfect amount of time to begin embedding life pilot and I really valued the three zoom calls and weekly emails. I never felt overwhelmed by the level of content and in fact found that they were perfectly timed, just as I felt my attention slipping they’d arrive and keep me on track.”
What exactly is Life Pilot?
It started out as a geeky, colour coded spreadsheet Josh and I put together last June to help give us more direction in our life. We had big dreams but were well aware that we needed a better system of making them happen.
Simplicity and essentialism was our focus. We didn’t want to end up with tonnes more on our plate and feeling overloaded.
The 3 x 3 theme of Life Pilot is what makes it so user-friendly and why it gets results.
By that I mean we have a 3 year vision template, and to make it a reality you’re can’t set any more than 3 goals a day, week, month, quarter or year — which has proved massively challenging for all the overachievers in the world and those who have way too much going on.
But boy does it work!
It’s more than a spreadsheet, it’s a way of living and staying focused on your dreams, and as far as I can see, from researching a multitude of others tools and journals, it’s the only one that shows you how to look at a 3 year vision and translate that into an action you have to do tomorrow!
In a matter of months, it allowed us to achieve more than we thought possible, and not just in our work lives, but across all areas including health, relationships, personal growth, wealth, lifestyle and impact.
It gave us daily focus and momentum, and at the same time allowed us to focus on our individual dreams, as well shape our joint ones together in a way that was exciting, fun and doable.
Life Pilot is unique in that you can do it yourself, but it’s even more powerful if you buddy up with a friend or partner and do it together.
Even better the time you’re investing in doing it, is time spent making your life better, because you put it to work immediately and can start to see the results.
The truth is Life Pilot works because it keeps things simple and adds in accountability. Two of the most important things you need to succeed.
If you know it’s time to overhaul your goals and turn your long-held desires for your health, wealth, personal growth, business, relationships and impact you want to make into reality, then