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Hello everybody and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through
the podcast.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, wherever you
are in the world, you know the deal, it's good, great.
To have you here back for another episode as we dive into the psychology of our 20s.
Today we're going to talk about something a little bit different.
I think normally on this show we love to take a specific topic and dive into all of the
studies, dive into all of the of course science behind it.
But we're going to step back for today's episode and just look at the lives that we are creating
from a holistic point of view and the ways in which we can actually design a life that
we truly love.
Just on of course like some of those core propositions and core theories to do with what makes
us happy, what makes us satisfied, what it actually means to enjoy life from a psychological
perspective.
I think a big worry for a lot of us in our 20s and me included is this kind of lingering
question of how do I get the most out of my life?
How do I ensure that when the time comes and I'm on my deathbed, there's nothing left
to do, there's nothing left to say that I can look back and be like well, you know,
well I had a really great life.
Not just that, I had a life that I really loved.
I think that very existential questioning of feeling like we have to make a lot of decisions
right now to set ourselves up for future happiness can keep us up at night.
You know, we want to feel in control.
We want to feel like we have some say in choosing what we want from these, you know, 70 to 80
odd years that we get if we're lucky.
And I think more than that general just sense of purpose and general sense of satisfaction,
we also want that daily enjoyment.
We want to wake up and be excited by the lives that we are creating, but also the lives
that we are currently living.
I think it's one of the best feelings in the world when you go to sleep at night and
just feel grateful.
You feel grateful for your friends.
You feel grateful for where you're at in your career.
You feel grateful for all the joy and the happiness that you're experiencing and bringing.
So how do we make that a reality?
I think it's, you know, one of those big conundrums where at some stage you're going to reach
a turning point and realize that what you've been doing so far might not actually create
a future that you're really excited about, especially during the decade when we feel
like we are on the cusp of a lot of huge life decisions, but also kind of at a crossroads
where we're trying to make the best choice for us that's going to set us up for long-term
happiness.
I want to take some of the pressure off.
I want to take some of the pressure off from feeling like there is a singular decision
that is going to make you happy in the future, a singular decision that is going to allow
you to build a life that you love and focus on those core principles and five kind of
practical things that you can do that regardless, regardless of what's going on around you,
regardless of what the world throws at you, regardless of your choices, you can still
be happy.
You can still feel contentment.
And I don't think it's going to be necessarily easy.
I'm not going to sit here and be like, oh, you know, just follow these five simple steps.
You'll be done in 30 minutes, like obviously not anything worth having, I think comes with
hard work.
It comes with self reflection.
It comes with dedication.
But the person that you are investing in is yourself.
That's what I really want to remind you.
Like, this is your best investment.
Best investment ever is to set yourself up for a beautiful life, to set yourself up for
a life that you love.
So let's talk through it today.
I'm super excited for this episode, and I think if you're listening, hopefully you're
excited as well.
When we begin this process of essentially designing our lives and designing our futures,
we cannot go into this transformation from a place of blindness.
You know, we actually need to identify those crucial points where we are dissatisfied,
where we are perhaps getting ourselves into a rut.
What is actually the problem here that is causing us to want to take action?
I think we tend to get stuck in the life that is easiest for us, the life that is convenient
and comfortable, even though it's maybe not what we truly want.
I think this is because as humans, we naturally crave our creature comforts and what seems
familiar.
We are innately scared of situations, events, choices that are going to disrupt the norm.
It also might be that we don't necessarily feel like we have the tools that are necessary
to redesign our life because we have become so stagnant and stuck in our patterns and stuck
in our daily routine.
We've kind of reached this point where we've stopped believing in our agency and in our
self-efficacy, which is essentially our sense of feeling in control of our decisions and
our future.
That is a really hard pattern to break out of.
Before we can build a life we love, I think we actually have to deconstruct the one that
we have.
Even if you are at like a 7 or an 8 or even a 9 out of 10 on life satisfaction, it's still
possible to really raise that ceiling for what you want and what you expect.
This first tip, this entire approach of deconstructing the life you have really relies on choosing
courage over comfort and challenging what you have come to expect from life by identifying
where maybe certain events and experiences are not contributing to your expectations and
shaping your life around that potential, that potential for improvement.
What we need to look at in general is kind of the four biggest areas of life where we
feel the most dissatisfaction.
We have money in career, of course, we have our relationships, we have our health which
includes mental health and then this final one which I think we don't often discuss,
which is values and spirituality.
I'm including that last one because I think it is a facet of our mental and psychological
well-being that we often neglect.
It's very hard though to feel like you are building this life that you love when you don't
actually believe in anything, when you have nothing to put your faith in and that doesn't
necessarily have to do with religion, I think values are equally as important.
But more than that, a sense that you have a mission and a purpose in life.
That could be a mission to improve the lives of others, a mission to create something beautiful
to solve some problem that we see.
I think we all need something that we're passionate about and something that drives us.
It is very hard to even feel like you want to change your life if there's no direction
for that.
The other areas are pretty self-explanatory.
I think we all know what it means to be dissatisfied in a job or in a relationship or dissatisfied
with our health, who doesn't worry about those things at least once a week or even daily,
because they are truly a foundation for a happy life.
The easiest way to identify what your main source of dissatisfaction is is to actually
follow the stress, to notice where you carry the most stress.
What do you think about the most when your thoughts are wondering or when you're falling
asleep and all the busyness of the day has kind of ceased?
What are you left thinking about in those moments?
Is it, you know, I wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow.
I wish that I was doing something I was genuinely excited to do.
I wish I had more friends.
I wish I felt more like myself in my own skin.
Our anxiety and worries might seem really scary and really frustrating and we might choose
to avoid them because of the discomfort that they bring.
However, I think that is the biggest mistake we make.
And that the reason why is because these worries, these fears.
Firstly, when we ignore them, we know that suppression inevitably will lead to these fears
just gaining more power over us because we are avoiding them.
But when it comes to building a life we love, those worries are your best friend because
they are shining a bright neon flashing light exactly where you should be starting, where
there is the most room for improvement.
So maybe you're at this point where I'm going to use that example of like you're super
dissatisfied with your career.
That's a really big one for a lot of us.
It's not fulfilling your board, your annoyed at your coworkers.
Sometimes the reason why we continue to stay in those situations in a life we don't
love is because we don't know what it means to pursue a different kind of future.
And we are scared of what that future might look like that it might be worse.
If the life you have found yourself in is not the life that you love, you really have
a duty to question not only what needs to change and in what area, but what the potential
outcome of a change might be.
So I'm going to explain this a little bit further.
There is an incredible book actually on this topic and it is literally called Designing
Your Life.
It's written by Two Stanford Professors.
There's also a TED talk about it that I really recommend.
And they talk about this exercise called the Odyssey Plan.
So the time between like our 20s and our 30s is what they call our Odyssey years, like
our years of exploration where we are in this strange vacuum between childhood and what
we see as a real adulthood.
And during this time, it is absolutely necessary to test in your mind different life paths or
ideas about your future.
A lot of the time though, the way we are told to approach this is super limiting.
You know, we're always told to think about our five year plan or what do you want to be
when you grow up or what are you going to do next?
What are you going to do after graduation after high school after this job contract ends?
That way of approaching the future doesn't actually allow us to be creative because it suggests
that there is one answer.
But the idea behind this Odyssey Plan exercise is to think a bit broader and to come up with
three different plans or versions of your future life by asking yourself three questions.
If your life was to continue the way it was, what would a day in five years time look
like?
Go into as much detail as possible.
We've talked about this before, but what are you waiting for breakfast?
Who are you living with?
Where are you living?
What does your day look like?
What do you do for fun?
Imagine that situation five years from now, nothing changes.
Now think about what happens if this plan that you're currently living out doesn't work?
What would you want from your life instead and what would a day in your life in five years
time look like then if this plan A of this current routine doesn't work out?
What would you choose instead?
Would it be any different?
Are you maybe picturing yourself happier or more fulfilled?
And finally, what would a day in your life look like in five years time if money, time,
and social expectations did not matter?
If you could do exactly what you wanted.
How do you feel then?
So I think the last question always gets people in a bit of a tizzy because they're like,
well, you know, money and time and social expectations do matter.
Of course they do.
Of course they matter.
They are so limiting, very limiting.
And it's not to say that you need to picture this ideal life and live it out.
It's more so being like, if you take away all of these external factors that control our
happiness, what is the core of your idea of a happy life when none of these things matter?
And it's really interesting to see how this exercise changes the older you get.
So for example, when I first did this exercise a few years back, I was 20 and I was, oh my
gosh, I think I was still working in hospitality.
I must have been.
I was still working in hospitality.
And you know what, if I was still working in hospitality now, I think I would be miserable.
My year, you know, day in a life five years from back then would not be a life that I
necessarily want now.
My backup plan was I'm going to go in through consulting, which I did actually end up doing.
And you know what, that life was really amazing for some time.
But when I really thought about it and I started concentrating that final idea of a life
where you are not constrained by money, time, social expectations, I got a better idea
of what I really wanted to do.
And that was to do something where I was creative, where I was my own boss and where I lived
according to that mission that we were talking about before.
So this multiverse exercise, I think the real power and significance in it is that it
allows you to recognize what life has to offer.
And it allows you to not be scared when things don't go according to plan and embrace the
courage of change and practical change, things that you are going to change.
So after deconstructing your life and identifying where you aren't to satisfy it and how that
might need to change in the next five years, what it could look like, you need to start prototyping
and testing those different versions of the future.
To start with, choose one area that you can improve where you will see the most growth.
So for example, we've talked about the career one quite a bit, but health is another really
big element of this.
And often it is a huge source of dissatisfaction for us.
We don't like how we feel in our bodies.
We don't like how we're treating ourselves.
We don't like X, Y and Z.
That is holding you back from a happy life and is your duty to change it.
So instead of going in and being like all or nothing, I'm going to become like the fittest
version of myself.
I'm going to be so healthy.
I'm never going to have a depressed or anxious thought ever.
Instead, what you want to do is spend just 15 minutes a day working on that area of your
life in a positive direction, whether it is exercising for 15 minutes, building your
resume for 15 minutes or finding a passion project that you do every day, 15 minutes
that contributes to future career opportunities, 15 minutes of texting back all your friends
or giving them a call, building that community, that little change is going to go a long way.
I think the reason why is twofold.
Firstly, when we think about like creating our dream life, often we do think about this
big future, right?
That's like 20 years down the line.
And that is so daunting. And when we just think about the outcome, it is so big in our
minds and we want to get there so fast with such impatient creatures that we forget that
we actually have to be acting on our dreams and goals.
Your dream life might involve a really nice terrace and a big city.
Sadly, that's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen if you take 15 minutes
a day to educate yourself on investing or to go over your spending.
If you want a one day, write a book that you get a hold in your hands and say, you know,
I wrote this book, I wrote every word that doesn't happen from wishful thinking.
It happens from writing for just 15 minutes every day.
And the 15 minute rule really helps us overcome our all or nothing thinking that keeps us
in a place where we are scared of even starting.
I think this fear of starting comes from a few things.
The biggest one to me is perfectionism.
I talk about this quite a bit, this idea of perfectionism procrastination.
If we aren't completely sure that our plan is going to work, that our future is going
to be perfect, why start?
Why even begin?
Because we are so held back by the sense that if it's not exactly what I want, why should
I put in the effort?
Why should I face the possibility of failing, the possibility of setting my sights really
high and not being able to reach them and being disappointed?
So that's one of the first reasons is when we want to create our dream life, when we want
to change something really significant, it's very daunting because there is a lot of room
for failure.
And the other thing is to do with analysis paralysis.
Something that I really like to talk about is choice overload.
This idea that there is a lot of different choices for people like you and I in our 20s.
And often we think that having a lot of choice brings about a lot of freedom, brings about
a lot of options.
It actually does the opposite.
It creates this thing called analysis paralysis where because there are so many paths that
we can take into our future lives, because there are so many different things that we want
to do, we want to travel, we want the career, we want to settle down, we want to go and pursue
acting or whatever it is because there are so many different dreams that we hold at one
time, it is so hard to choose one so we don't choose any of them at all.
That means that not only do we not create, we just don't end up creating any life that
we love because it's so much easier like I said to just stay in the place where we're
comfortable, we don't have to challenge ourselves, we don't have to potentially go through
mentally and emotionally uncomfortable experiences such as failure.
But I think the 15 minute rule allows us to get comfortable with the risk and get comfortable
with some of the discipline that we need and slowly see improvements such that when the
time comes we might have to make a big change, we already feel prepared.
And my mum used to always have this saying, shout out to my mum, she's amazing, very wise
woman.
And you know what, it probably isn't even her saying, but I'm going to give her credit
for it.
But she used to say the easiest things aren't always worth having because if everyone could
have it they would.
And when you think about 15 minutes, 15 minutes to devote to just something that you really
want in your life that's really going to improve your life, the majority of people don't
take that time at all.
You also discovered that with each of these days that you continue to do something that
you love and do something that's good for you, what you're actually going to find is
what you really want in life.
So I'm going to explain that a little bit.
When we said our sites, we say, okay, I want to do this thing for 15 minutes.
Say for example, that's writing.
When we begin to notice that that 15 minutes starts turning into an hour or even more,
you realize that you're doing it because it's something that you love and it's become
part of your lifestyle.
Creating the life you love is not about huge, massive decisions that are going to completely
like move you to a whole new spectrum of life and then I'm going to completely change
your path in the moment.
It's also about building up good habits towards the practices and the future that you want
to build over time.
So we've spoken a lot about the planning phase and what we can contribute to our lives
through those small moments.
And you know, that is really amazing to have vision, but we equally need to identify the
things that don't make us happy.
I think improving your life isn't always about addition.
Sometimes it's about subtraction as well.
And I think that's something that the self-help space sometimes misses.
You know, it's always a new lifestyle plan or a new training exercise or a book or a
product or more relationships or more healthy foods or more whatever.
But sometimes we actually need to be in the space and the mindset of removal.
And we kind of need to, you know, murray condo our lives and the habits that are holding
us back.
It's hard to fully love the life that you are creating when you are beholden to a nasty
friendship or you are eating food that makes you feel unwell all the time or you have
a routine that leaves you bored and miserable and unable to wake up in the morning or a job
that is completely draining you.
There is nothing that you can continue to add to your life that is ever going to replace
the things that continue to drain your energy.
And there's a quote I saw the other day that I think really puts this quite well, which
is your new life is going to cost you your old one.
And that includes those habits that hold us back.
That we might, you know, might make us happy in the moment or which are too difficult
to address.
But in the long term, end up acting as almost a form of self-sabotage.
I have an example of this for you.
It's around drinking and if you listen to an episode I did a while back around, should
you quit drinking in your 20s, you'll know a bit about this story.
But for the longest time, I had a really bad relationship with alcohol.
I think that I grew up really wanting to be cool and really wanting to fit in and also
being kind of socially anxious and alcohol when I entered uni and even like post-grad
life, alcohol is like the most amazing social lubricant and it makes everything feel more
fun and more free.
And it's just such an easy way to socialize with people.
I began to realize though that actually alcohol was one of the biggest things that was
almost acting to undermine the life that I wanted.
Every time I would drink, I would always, I didn't really know when to stop if that makes
sense.
I didn't really know what it was like to not drink every day and I would always kind
of find a way to kind of do that.
And what ended up happening was I was always completely, you know, physically drained.
I didn't feel healthy.
I didn't know it's either hangover but when I did it really like, wasn't great, I couldn't
be productive.
And I think that that's a great example of almost like addition by subtraction.
Your life improving by removing things that you might feel completely reliant on but
which are actually causing you a lot of long term suffering.
And it's about identifying what's are driving you to keep those things in your life even
when they're at the expense of your future self.
Is it peer pressure?
Is it loneliness?
Is it dependence?
Those things all take away our ability to control our lives and kind of be the director.
You know, like we want to be the writer that produces the director of our lives.
We want to be in control.
Not our impulses, not our cravings, not our fixations, not our bad relationships.
So I think cutting things out obviously takes a lot of focus.
The thing that a lot of us make, I think the biggest mistake a lot of us make is that
we just want to try and transform every domain of our life at once.
And we want to just do a whole big cleanse.
Instead I want you to think about the one thing that is holding you back right now, only
one and focus on that.
Put your energy into removing that from your life.
I always like to imagine the kind of final hero story, if that makes sense.
What it will feel like to tell someone in six months in a year and five years what that
journey was like for me.
Like, wow, that was a really hard decision, but I'm glad that I did it.
I can tell you that I did this from the point of high insight, being in a space where
that thing is no longer in my life.
You know, I'm so glad that I quit vaping when I was 25 and not at 40.
I'm so glad I decided to stop drinking every night.
I'm so glad that I realized at 23 that that person was not good for me and not at 30 when
I had seven years to act.
And all along these things were actually keeping me from being truly fulfilled by a life that
is my own.
So we're going to take a quick break now, but when we return, I want to talk about a few
more kind of joyous habits and practices that I think we all need to apply when designing
a life that we don't just love, but we absolutely and truly adore.
So we'll be back after this short break.
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