You're Not Behind: How to Change Your Life in 90 Days

in this video we're going to be discussing a simple three-step method that you can use to totally transform your life in the next 90 days I've personally been using this method for years and since last year I've been hosting free online workshops every few months going through the method I've taken tens of thousands of people through it and people have gotten enormous value from these sorts of exercises and if you actually do the things we're going to talk about in this video then this might be the single most impactful video that you've watched this year

anyway in this video we are discussing the three-step method which is reflect align and plan let's dive into it all right so step one is to reflect on where you are currently at and do a bit of a mini life audit now I have various different ways of doing this but I'm going to give you two of my favorites the first one is an exercise called The Wheel of Life and actually if you want you can do this exercise as you're watching along with this video and the idea is that we are going to draw

ourselves a little wheel and we're going to divide it into three categories for work health and relationships now within those three categories we're going to further subdivide them into another three categories So within the category of work we have Miss money and growth within Health we've got body mind and heart and then within relationships we've got romantic family and friends and now that we've got these nine categories we want to ask ourselves the question that in each of these categories how satisfied do I currently feel with where my life is at and you give yourself

a little rating from 0 to 10 in each of these different categories and it'll give you a bit of a visual representation of which areas of your life by your own estimation are going well that you are very satisfied with and which areas have room for improvement I find this personally to be a very very good exercise to do whenever I'm feeling any kind of vague sense of unease about my life because then it puts actual somewhat objective well subjective numbers on the thing and then there is a 10th category that I like to add

to the list which is joy and I would usually put that outside of the wheel because with all this like personal development stuff if you watch this channel you probably watch other personal Improvement self-development channels it can be very easy to just be so fixated on growth that we forget to actually enjoy the present moment and sometimes when I want to figure out how I'm going to change my life in 90 days it actually becomes about I want to improve personal developmentally in any of these particular areas and it might just be I actually want

to experience more joy and so you know remind us to myself to enjoy the present moment and take a step back and to actually rest things like that so The Wheel of Life is one very quick and easy way to reflect on where your life is at right now there is another one that I like it's a very simple journaling prompt and you you know you can take a page you can do this in a physical Journal if you want I like these particular Harry Potter mkin Journal book thingies and you basically split the page

into four parts in the First Column you have work in the second column you have life and then in the first row you have what's working and in the second row you have what's not working and then you set a timer for 5 minutes you put on some VI background music and you just sort of fill in a few bullet points in each of these different categories without overthinking it now I have a little rule for myself whenever I do stuff like this which is that the what's working category has to have at least twice

as many things as the what's not working category again if you into personal development you're probably very smart you're probably very good-looking but you also probably have a tendency to beat yourself up about things that haven't quite gone to plan or that haven't quite gone perfectly but if the rule for the exercise is that the what's working category must have at least twice as many items in it as the what's not working category it forces type A people like us to actually find gratitude in the things that we do already have cuz let's be honest

you know we all want to change our life in the next 90 days and stuff but you know things are going pretty well you're probably in pretty reasonable physical health your mental health is probably pretty reasonable it could be a lot worse sure your finances maybe aren't quite in the place where you'd want them to be but you probably have a roof over your head you're probably watching this on some sort of fancy device you probably got an internet connection your friends and family are probably for the most part reasonably healthy yes of course we

want to grow but we want to grow from a place of satisfaction with where we currently are at if we grow from a place of dissatisfaction with where we're currently at that actually you know I I guarantee when your lot in life improves uh you will still feel that that that dissatisfaction there's a guy called brenon bashard who's a mentor of mine and he has a phrase strive satisfied I just love that idea strive satisfied it's to strive for more but we really want to be trying to be satisfied and grateful for where we already

are at now another very productive way to spend your time is learning and one of my favorite online learning platforms is skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video if you have been living under a rock and you haven't yet heard skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives with thousands of classes led by industry Pros across film illustration design freelance productivity and more and I have personally been teaching on skillshare since 2019 so I've got over 10 classes on skillshare myself I've got three that are specifically about productivity and a few more about

how to use notion how to learn Final Cut Pro for video editing how to start a YouTube channel and one of my favorite things about skillshare is that they've got these seasonal updates for example in December the theme of the month was reflection and if you've been following me for a while you know how much I love journaling prompts to reflect and so that was like the theme that skillshare had for that month and this month their theme is creativity as a practice skillshare can also help you level up in your career with loads of

classes around marketing social media uiux being a freelancer and some side hustle ideas as well so overall you can learn a bunch of personal and professional skills on skillshare if you interested in checking out any of these classes or anything skillshare has to offer including any of my classes then check out the link in the video description and the first 500 people to use that link will get one month free trial to skillshare so thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it so we've just done step one which

is to reflect on where our life is currently at and now let's move on to step two and step two is to align yourself with a compelling vision for your future it's very difficult to make any kind of changes to our life if we don't have a compelling vision for where we actually want to go go this doesn't have to be exact you don't have to know exactly where you want to go but we do need to have some sort of direction to aim in because if the vision if the future that we're working towards

is not actually better than where we're at now there is there's no like there's no motivation there's no momentum to actually make any kind of changes to our life my personal favorite way to create a compelling vision for the future is what I call the threeyear sketch which is basically you imagine today's date 3 years from now and then you just generally write down I like doing it in a physical journal for various reasons what what does life look like today 3 years from now if things go according to plan or if things go well

3 years from now where will you be living what kind of house are you going to be living in who are the sorts of people that you have around you how's your physical health mental health emotional health how meaningful and fulfilling does what you're doing for work actually feel to you how much spare time do you have to work on passions and hobbies and stuff now this is something that takes a little bit of time uh in my quarterly alignment workshops and annual planning workshops which I do completely free online so if you if you

want to join those you can sign up to my email list and I'll let you know when the next one is but in those workshops we do this as like a almost like half an hour visualization you close your eyes and imagine different Futures and stuff uh that's generally quite a nice way of doing it because you're sitting down to actually do the exercise and other people at least on Zoom or maybe around you are also doing the thing but of course if you're watching this video this is the sort of thing you can also

do solo so if you're sitting at your desk or something I'd suggest if you really want to make the most of this exercise maybe go for a walk maybe listen to some nice music generally instrumental is better than lyrics and really just try and visualize your absolute best Life 3 years from now don't worry about how you're going to get there don't allow limiting beliefs and stuff to hold you back like oh it's not realistic it's not possible it's not practical we don't need to worry about any of that stuff we just literally want to

imagine that visualization Imagine That Dream Life 3 years from now this is what paints that compelling picture of the future that we want to work towards and that description should feel exciting if you look at that description you should be like yeah that would be pretty freaking sick if I could get there in the next 3 years that excitement that feeling of excitement is what's going to generate the motivation to actually do the things it takes to change your life in the next 90 days now I've been doing this for the last several years and

I've always just had a three-year sketch written out in terms of like what I want either on the computer or on notion or in my journal but actually last week my wife Izzy hosted a vision boarding workshop for our productivity annual planning event and for the first time by following along in that Workshop I actually created my own vision board and I have my vision board this is currently what V1 of my vision board looks like and this only took me about 10 15 minutes to put together but actually looking at it now feels just

feels really good I'm like oh yeah I'd love to work towards this sort of thing so I've got this jacked dude who's like very flexible cuz I want to get into martial arts and improve my flexibility and Mobility you know if my office could look like this with a lot of greenery and a lot of books that would be pretty cool it'd be pretty cool to have a really sick house 3 years from now this picture here is a co-working space or some sort of office I'd love to build some sort of office for me

and my team that like has great Vibes and stuff and we can all work in person these are some random app screenshots that I got off of Pinterest and that feels pretty compelling cuz me and my team are working on building productivity software we've released one called voice pal already I'll put a link down below if you want to check it out and there's a couple of others that we're working on Super focus and progress pal and then a couple of others 3 years from now it would be nice to have three kids probably not

going to happen but hey you know it's the directionality of vision why not I want to get better at singing and guitar and songwriting which is why there's a picture of John Mayer this picture is sort of Hosting dinners with friends you know the social Vibes this is two people doing Acro yoga my wife is a super into yoga I absolutely suck at like flexibility and so I'd love to be able to do Acro yoga with her I want to get really good at playing squash this sort of stuff and actually just seeing this vision

board you know thanks to the workshop that my wife hosted I'm like oh this is is so nice this paints a genuinely paints a compelling vision for the future that I want to get to and so when you have one of these compelling Future Vision type things to actually work towards everything becomes a lot easier in terms of the motivation and momentum to actually do the stuff it takes to change your life in 90 days if you want to create your own vision board there are dozens and dozens of YouTube tutorials about how to do

so you can just do that I like I'm into all this productivity stuff and for the first time I've made a vision board and I'm like oh this is actually quite nice so I actually would recommend doing this and that brings us on to step three which is to plan your two main quests so there is a productivity strategy that I think is really really really helpful for changing your life in any capacity and that is the concept of quarterly quests uh this is basically where you set goals that you're going to accomplish in the

next 12 weeks in the next 90 days in the next quarter hence the phrase quarterly quests now why do I call them quests rather than goals or tasks or projects or objectives uh well I call them quests because my whole philosophy which I have spent ages researching in Feelgood productivity is that if we can find a way to make our work feel good to approach our work with more of a sense of play rather than and seriousness then it makes us more productive and it also gives us more energy to give to the other important

areas of our life that's why with all of this stuff all of this like life Improvement stuff we also want to be careful not to take it too damn seriously because if we take it too seriously if there's this heaviness and importance that we apply to the whole thing it sucks the fun out of it it sucks the joy out of it it leads to burnout leads to stress and it actually means we're less likely to actually achieve it whereas there's so much evidence that if you can approach things in the spirit of play in

the spirit of fun finding ways to enjoy it even with something trivial like calling a 9 today goal a quarterly Quest just makes it feel a little bit more fun makes it feel like you're on some sort of Adventure now the key thing here and my personal recommendation is that in the category of work and the category of life you're only allowed to have one main quest each there are two mistakes that people make when it comes to this sort of stuff from what I've seen mistake number one is never setting any goals to begin

with but you're not going to make that mistake because you are here still watching this part of the video so well done actually for sitting through the rest of this video that's very good most people would have clicked off because like Tik Tok or Instagram or some other video or some other distraction so the fact that you're here says a lot about you says that you can sit through a video that's like at least as long as this one is so well done for that but the second mistake people make when they get into the

whole goal setting thing is just simply setting too many goals I suspect you are a multi-passionate type of person if you watch this channel you Pro you probably have lots of interests right maybe you're interested in personal development but you're also probably interested in things a b CDE e FG G you probably want to do well in work you want to do well in life you want to have good friendships you want to do take care of your health the problem with people like us who are multi-passionate who have all these different passions is that

it's very easy for us to set all of these different goals in all of these different categories and then never actually make any progress on any of them because we simply have too many goals and so you can either make a small amount of progress in all of these different directions and not really get anywhere or you can focus on one thing and make enormous amounts of progress in that particular area and generally a life transformation in 90 days happens when you pick one thing and you just single-mindedly focus on just that one thing so

that is your main question Quest so in the category of work what is the single most important goal or project you need to accomplish in the next 3 months that is going to be your work main quest here are some other ways to think about the question what one thing if accomplished would move the needle the absolute most if you fast forward 3 months what is the one accomplishment that would make you most proud alternatively what's the one thing that would make everything else easier or unnecessary alternatively what is the one thing you've been postponing

but no it would be transformative if you tackled it alternatively you might think of if I spent the first 2 hours of my workday purely focused on X it would have an enormous impact on my work in that world what is X again I would recommend please pause the video to actually think about it because if you pause the video to actually think about this I can basically guarantee that this video will be the most productive thing that you will do with your time like this year by actually watching this video and doing the stuff

cuz it's so easy right it's so easy for us to just watch productivity videos on the internet and feel as if we're being productive but like you know if we're not going to do the thing it's like what's the point of watching the content it just becomes sort of mindless entertainment or like productivity pornography at that point you know we don't want that we want to actually do the stuff anyway now once you've got a bit of a sense of what you want your work main quest to be I actually have a an a tweak

that I would do to this so I've got a recommended phrasing for how to phrase your work main quest and this is how I would recommend you phrase it my work main quest is to dot dot dot this is the single most important thing for me to accomplish in the next 9 0 days because dot dot dot to complete the quest I commit that in the next 90 days I will have done a b or c and we want these to be objective verifiable criteria that someone else can verify did we actually do those things

this feels really exciting and compelling for me because dot dot dot and here we want to lean into the emotions of it the emotions are what will actually drive us to do the work it takes to complete the quest and then finally to make sure I complete the quest I am going to dot dot dot please feel free to pause the video at this point if you like to screenshot this or write these down or anything like that and I'm just about to give you an example of one of my own quarterly quests following this

format all right so this is my personal example my work main quest is to make life OS an absolute bangger life OS is my productivity course this is the single most important thing for me to accomplish this quarter because once the course is finished it becomes our main calling card in the productivity Niche other than my book to complete the quest I commit that in the next 90 days I will have launched and delivered cohort number three of the life course number two I will have created the life OS field manual with all Concepts and

tools and number three I will have filmed and released the Evergreen version of the course this feels really exciting and compelling for me because I get to put all my productivity knowledge and experience into one thing package it up nicely and hopefully turn it into future books and apps Etc I'm very excited by the prospect of people using the system to genuinely change their lives this is where the emotional side of the thing comes into it because again like like I said unless you feel excited to work on this one more work main quest it's

just probably not going to happen and then finally to make sure I complete the quest I am going to firstly schedule the first 2 hours of each workday to work on it until it's done number two log my focus time spent working towards it and number three send Daily Progress updates to the team to hold me accountable now there is a huge amount of magic in phrasing your quests in this way like it does take some time to to to think about this but the way I think about it is like changing like tweaking the

destination that you're going towards actually makes a meaningful difference in where you end up and also the journey you take to get there it's worth taking a little bit of time just to make sure we're actually going in the right direction going towards a place we actually want to get to because the least productive and the most heartbreaking thing of all is when you spend so much time being productive being efficient getting to a destination only to realize that it was the wrong destination to begin with and if you just spent a little bit of

time thinking about it upfront then maybe the destination could have been improved and you could have saved all that time and effort naturally we don't want this to be a recipe for never doing anything because obviously you can never be fully certain about the course of action you want to take but it's worth spending I would say half an hour once a quarter to decide you know what's really the main thing I want to work towards this quarter now we're going to put a couple of more examples of work main quests on the screen when

these examples are on screen feel free to pause the video if you want to have a closer look at what the example is this example is for the work main quest of completing a book proposal this is an example I would have used when I was working as a doctor to apply for core surgical training Residency program and here is an example of maybe your work main quest is actually starting a side hustle of a YouTube channel this is what that might look like these are just some random examples that are relevant to my own

personal experience but hopefully you can have a look at these examples and you can see oh okay I see what ol's doing with these examples that are relevant to him great let me figure out how I can apply those sorts of examples to my own situation and again if you actually do this if you actually take the time while watching this video to figure out what is going to be your work main quest for the next 90 days and you phrase it out in that way and you think about it and you leave a comment

down below I can basically guarantee this is going to be the most productive video you've watched all year okay so at this point we have a work main quest we are now going to follow a somewhat similar method to have a life main quest and the questions are a little bit different though in life what is the single most important goal or project for you to accomplish in the next 3 months that is going to be your life main quest some other ways of thinking about this what is the one thing that if accomplished would

bring the most Joy fulfillment or peace to your personal life if you fast forward 3 months what is the one accomplishment that would make you feel the most proud alternatively what is the one change that would positively impact every other area of your life alternatively what's the one one thing you've been avoiding but know it would have a transformative effect on your relationships or happiness or alternatively you might think if I dedicated 1 hour of each day purely focused on X it would have a profound impact on my life what is x in that context

so these are all of these different prompts feel free to pause the video at this point and have a think about it and now once you've got a bit of an idea of what your life main quest could be this is my recommended phrasing for your life main quest my life main quest is to dot dot dot this is the sing single most important thing for me to accomplish this quarter because dot dot dot to complete the quest I commit that by 31st March 2025 I will have done a b andc which again are objective

verifiable criteria just as a bit of a tangent here sometimes I do these workshops and people are like I commit that I will stop procrastinating but like stopping procrastinating is not objective verifiable criteria right like you can fool yourself into thinking you stop procrastinating but you're not actually going to do it and you've probably been trying to stop procrastinating for like 20 years at this point and you failed so like we got to change something some objective father the criteria in that case might be I commit that every day I will log my focused minutes

and I will get my focused minutes to 180 minutes focused every workday uh 80% of the time that would be something that someone else could verify they can be like Hey where's your focus log if you don't know what a focus log is I have done a whole three part series on how to focus better I talk about it way more in there but basically you're just tracking the amount of time you're spending focusing and that is completely needle moving for your ability to focus that's how you turn something intangible like I want to stop

procrastinating into something that's a little bit more ible which makes it more likely that you'll actually achieve it okay that was a bit of a tangent let's keep going this feels really exciting and compelling for me because dot dot dot and finally to make sure I complete the quest I am going to dot dot dot again feel free to pause to take a screenshot and actually we'll put this stuff in the video description down below as well so you don't have to like take notes you can just like look at it in the video description

now here's an example from my own personal life for my quarterly quest for the next 90 days my life main quest is to build a martial arts habit into my life this is the single most important thing for me to accomplish this Quest quarter because I've been putting it off for years and it'll have a transformational effect on my health and hopefully my ability to defend myself and my family if anyone starts on me to complete the quest I commit that in the next 90 days I will have attended at least 12 classes averaging one

per week throughout the quarter this feels really exciting and compelling for me because I've been wanting to do martial arts stuff for ages and by making this Quest happen I'll figure out which one I enjoy where I enjoy doing it and can get started on climbing this new Mountain of Adventure to make sure I complete the quest I am going to spend an hour tomorrow making a notion page with all nearby options ask my wife Izzy to hold me accountable to this thirdly check in with myself each week as part of my weekly review to

make sure I've got a class scheduled for the following week and four mention it in a YouTube video so it would be pretty embarrassing if me as a self-anointed productivity expert doesn't actually manage to do it so that is my life main quest I'm going to give you a couple of other examples as well so this is an example from let's say Fitness and this would be an example from the world of dating at this point if you've actually done the exercise you might be thinking oh but but I have other things I want to

do and the other things that are not the one most important thing I think of those as side quests and I tell myself for work in life I'm allowed to have two or three side quests but the main quest is the one that absolutely has to be done and the side quests are more of a nice to have it's like I'm not going to beat myself up too much if I don't manage to do it like I'm not marshalling all my effort and focus towards of things I am really focusing on my main quest and

then the side quest like you know kind of whatevs now if you actually do these three steps number one reflect CCT number two align and number three plan your main quest for work in life I can pretty much guarantee that you will have set yourself up to actually make a transformational change to your life in the next 90 days of course once you've set the goal you actually have to achieve the goal and if you're interested in that I have a video over here which is five very simple evidence-based things you can do to massively

increase the odds that you're actually going to do the thing that you've just set out to do so check out that video over there thank you so much for watching bye-bye