You’re Not Too Busy! Crush Your Health Goals With These 3-Steps

Stephen Box: [00:00:00] A lack of time, a lack of willpower, and a lack of money. What do these three things have in common? They are the three biggest reasons why most men tell me they are yet to achieve their health and wellness goals. But here's the thing. Overwhelmingly, the lack of time is the number one answer that I get.

And it's also completely untrue. Now, I get it. You might be thinking, what do you mean it's completely untrue, Stephen? That is ridiculous. I have work. And a lot of times I'm maybe having to go into the office early. I'm having to stay late. I'm trying to make time to be a better husband or a better boyfriend.

I'm, dealing with the kids and they have extracurricular activities. How can you sit there and tell me that a lack of time is not my biggest issue? [00:01:00] And listen, I totally get where you're coming from. I'm not suggesting that those things don't take up a lot of time. I'm not suggesting that you just have this overabundance of time available to you.

What I'm telling you is that time is not your biggest obstacle. Because the reality is even when you're super busy, It is possible to carve out time, and that's what we're going to actually break down in today's episode.

Intro/Outro: Are you ready to break free from your old habits and create a better life for yourself and those around you? If so, welcome to Unshakable Habits, the podcast dedicated to helping men be better husbands, fathers, and leaders by prioritizing their physical [00:02:00] and mental well being. Each 360 degree perspective.

perspective with inspiring stories and practical strategies for building unshakable habits that'll transform your life. Join Stephen Box, a board certified health and wellness coach, and let's change the world together, one habit at a time.

Stephen Box: welcome to Unshakable Habits, the podcast dedicated to helping men prioritize their physical and mental well being. I am your host, board certified health and wellness coach, Stephen Box. And guys, today, as I say, we're going to break down this idea that time is the biggest obstacle to achieving your health and wellness goals, and I'm going to show you why it's not, and I'm going to show you what might actually [00:03:00] be the issues that are holding you back from achieving those goals.

I'm going to give you a framework to get around them, and then, at the end of this episode, I'm going to give you one of my very favorite tools that you can use. to figure out where to find more time in your day. So make sure you stay tuned to the very end for that. Now, before we jump into that, I want to ask a very small favor from you guys.

If you could go to unshakablehabits.com, click on the podcast link in the menu, and then on the podcast page, click on the rate show link, and that's going to take you to a page where you can either go to Apple, Spotify, or Podchaser.com and leave a review for us. And if you could do that, guys, that would be super helpful because one of the first things that most people are doing when they find a podcast they think might be interesting is they look at what other people are saying about [00:04:00] it.

So it's a great way to help support the show and help us get more listeners. And also, guys, if you are someone right now who. is really struggling to achieve your health and wellness goals, and you feel like you could use a little extra help, I want to encourage you just go to unshakablehabits.com, book a free roadmap call, and we will sit down and we will talk about what it is that you need to do to get to the next level.

with that, let's jump into this conversation.

Let's start with a couple of examples here of really busy people who've still managed to find time for their health and wellness. So let's start with Sir Richard Branson, obviously has a lot of responsibilities. And this guy is 72 years old, by the way, so if age was one of your big things that you feel is an obstacle for you, you can go ahead [00:05:00] and throw that out the window too, because this guy is 72 years old.

And. Despite all his responsibilities he has, he still carves out time every single day for exercise. He does strength training. He also likes to go out and do some activities that he considers a little bit more fun stuff. And he says that Doing these things on a daily basis helps him to feel better. He has more energy.

He's more focused. In other words, he understands that by taking time to take care of himself physically, and then doing something that allows him to go out and mentally kind of decompress, he actually makes himself a better leader. And He makes himself more effective. He makes himself more productive.

Another good example, whether you agree with the politics of this person or not is irrelevant here, but Barack Obama, when he was the president [00:06:00] of the United States of America, he took out time every day for exercise or like he would play basketball, things like that, because he understood that, yes, I have a very important role, but if I don't have something, that is going to keep my energy levels up.

If I don't have something that's going to keep me in peak physical condition, if I don't have something that allows me to get away, take care of myself, mentally clear my head out, I am going to be less effective in my role. So, Both of those guys have that in common. They understood that exercise and mental health, that physical and mental well being that we talked so much about on this podcast, that they were not just things that were nice to have.

They were absolute necessities. If they're going to perform at a high level, and here's the thing, guys, you don't need to be the CEO of a company or the president of the United States in order to benefit from this [00:07:00] mindset. This is a mindset that every single one of us as men should have. So when we look at this, you have to ask yourself, what is it that makes it where these guys who are just as busy, if not busier than all of us, what is it that makes them able to take out this time?

And I think one of the things that separates people like that from a lot of guys is They don't make the other excuses, right? So I told you there's three top reasons. There's time, there's willpower, and then there's money. And so I think a lot of people, they look at the examples I just gave and they go, Oh, you know, Richard Branson or Barack Obama.

I mean, you know, those guys have money. You know, they can hire a trainer, they can hire personal chefs, they can do all these things, you know, or in the case of [00:08:00] if you're the president, you just have all those things built in to your environment. And look, I'm not going to sit here and say that those things aren't valuable, but you know what, guys?

A lot of us have a woman at home who will happily cook for us and will cook healthy meals for us if we ask her to. Because the reality is so often we're using this excuse of, well, I can't hire this professional for this and I can't do this or whatever, but we have resources available to us. Most of us have friends that are willing to help us with things.

Most of us have people that we can delegate things out to that we choose to not delegate out. So, it's not a lack of resource. We have resources that are available to us. Even if you don't have someone at home to cook for you, meal delivery services don't really cost that much more these days than eating out or having to go to the store and buy food.

And... The little bit extra you're going to pay [00:09:00] to have the food already made for you is pretty, you know, much worth the extra time that you would normally have to spend fixing the food. So let's take that off the table. Let's just forget about for a second, the resources that we don't have. And let's focus on the ones we do have.

Okay. And then we talk about willpower and, you know, guys, if you watched episode 42, which is The top three reasons most men feel overwhelmed. You remember I talk in there about how one of the things that I think overwhelms most men is feeling like we need to do everything. We have to do it all at once and we have to do it all perfectly.

It's this all or nothing mentality and it is absolutely destroying your ability to consistently show up because you think you have to show up. Absolutely perfectly every single day is opposed to thinking you have to show up every day and be as perfect as you can that day, right? There's a difference.

Let me [00:10:00] repeat that because you may not have caught that because I said it a little bit fast So, let me repeat what I just said to you you May be thinking that in order to get results You need to show up perfectly every single day that you have to show up and do all the things the reality is You need to show up every single day as perfectly as you are capable of that day.

And that's going to vary. So when we start talking about, Oh, I don't have time. I don't have time. Okay, we'll get to that here in just a second. But I just wanted to go ahead and acknowledge the fact that there's people out there very busy who they've managed to make the time. We've talked about why it's beneficial.

because it's going to give you more energy. It's going to help you make better [00:11:00] decisions. Cause you're going to have a clear head, right? You're going to have that decompression time. You're going to be better when you make the time for these things. We talked about. Lack of resources and how we can shift that view to look at the resources we do have and figure out how we can better utilize those resources, right?

We've talked about overwhelm. We've talked about this idea of, you know, I, I don't have willpower. Well, you don't need willpower. If the only time you need willpower is when you're trying to make yourself do really hard things. If you. Learn how to scale back so that you can consistently show up and you just do what you can do that day.

Willpower doesn't come into the equation, right? Or you very, you need very little willpower. It takes so much less willpower to show up for five minutes than it does to say, I'm going to go work out for an hour when I don't have an hour. [00:12:00] And with that, that gets into the meat of, of what I really came to talk about, which was time and why it's not the biggest obstacle.

Because the reality is. It is a matter of how you manage your time. It's not the time itself. Richard Branson, Barack Obama had the same 24 hours that you do. They didn't, they don't get to buy a 25th hour. Doesn't matter how much money they had. Doesn't matter what their position is. Doesn't matter their titles.

They don't get a 25th hour in the day. They can't buy that. They get the exact same 24 hours that you do. Their hours still have 60 minutes in them. Their minutes still have 60 seconds. That's universal. We all have that same amount of time. The difference is how we utilize it. And I'm going to tell you what a lot of guys are doing.

They're going out and they're buying books about time management. And they're looking at scheduling and they're looking at time blocking and they're looking at all these different things. [00:13:00] And here's the reality. Those things are cool. Those things can absolutely be beneficial. They can help. There's going to be somebody listening to this right now that's going to say, yes, I started doing that and now I have time in my schedule to work out.

And that's awesome. I'm not sitting here telling you that those things aren't going to be helpful. What I'm going to tell you is. That those things are a little bit more advanced. That there's some fundamental things we need to take care of before we get there. And guys, you've heard me talk before about the Unshakable Hero blueprint.

And what this is, this is three parts. Vision, Discipline, Mastery. And we can apply this universally. So if we look at the idea of time, here's what we can start to see. If I am telling you, well, you know, I want to exercise. I want to spend more time [00:14:00] working on my physical health. I want to take time out to sit in silence and work on my mental well being.

I want to give myself that break that I need. But I just don't have the time. Well, here's the thing. What you don't have is a vision. You, if you're telling me that you lack time, because you have all these other priorities, all these other things going on, what you're telling me is, you have not sat down and came up with a clear specific vision for what you want life to look like.

You are in reactive mode. You are reacting to what other people are asking of you. And sometimes those people are very important, and it feels super important to give them what they're asking for. I totally get that. But here is the reality. At some point, you've got to say no to something. And maybe that is saying no [00:15:00] to watching your TV show.

Maybe that is missing a football game. Maybe it is refusing to work overtime at work, right? It doesn't really matter what it is. Because that is going to vary so much for every last one of us. For some of you, when I said skip overtime at work or refuse to work overtime at work, some of your hearts dropped, okay?

Because for you, work is so important that you could never see yourself doing that. Other people, if I had said maybe skip your kid's soccer practice, your heart would have dropped because for you, that's a super important thing. So I'm not going to tell you that there's a specific activity you need to drop.

Maybe that 30 minutes of television that you get is the most important part of your day and it's really helping you with your mental well being. I'm not trying to take that away from you guys. All I'm pointing out to you is something Has to go. [00:16:00] You have to say no to something if you're going to start saying yes to other things.

So, this isn't about a lack of time, it's about how we are managing our time, it's about how we're prioritizing our time. And if you don't have a clear vision, which is the first part of the blueprint, how do you know what to eliminate? How do you know what to prioritize? Without that clear vision of what you want life to look like, you don't.

And that's why that's the first step of the blueprint. Okay. The next step of the blueprint is discipline. Now, a lot of people, when they hear me say discipline, they immediately think willpower. And you're like, Stephen, you just told me that I shouldn't be relying on willpower or I should need very little willpower just to kind of get started.

And here's the reality. Discipline is not about willpower. I like to use this example. There's [00:17:00] easy hard and then there's hard hard. Easy hard is things that feel a little bit hard, but they're actually quite easy. And generally, they're not important. And then there's hard hard. These are things that are really hard for us to do, and they're really important.

And we, a lot of times we'll avoid the hard, hard, and we will spend a lot of time on the easy, hard stuff. So give you a quick example here. It's a, as a solopreneur, when I started my business, hard, hard would have been. Teaching myself sales skills, even though I came from a sales background, there was still things I need to learn.

Right? So teaching myself sales skills, developing those kind of skills, going out and applying them. Right? So not just learning them, but [00:18:00] actually going out and applying them. The going out, getting in front of people, talking to people, engaging those conversations, and practicing those skills. That was the hard, hard.

Right? The easy hard was just constantly saying, I need to learn another skill. I need to learn another skill. I need to learn another skill, right? Easy hard is when you spend five hours working on your website and your logo, right? Because It's something that feels important, feels a little bit challenging, but Hey, I'm going to make time to do it because it needs to get done, but we're not focused on what's the most important.

So when we talk about discipline, discipline is not about willpower. Discipline is about recognizing the needle movers. It's about recognizing the changes that we need to make that are going to get us the results. Think about it [00:19:00] this way. If there was a river and. You had a bunch of logs that built up and formed a dam.

Well, what makes more sense to you? To go into the river and start just taking the logs off one at a time and, and just kind of hoping that eventually the water will get through? Or, What if you took a second to step back, look at it and figure out the one log that you could take out that's going to just break the entire thing open, right?

Easy, hard is going out there and taking the time to take logs off one at a time, and hoping that eventually one of them is the right one to break everything open. Hard, hard is taking a step back and figuring out which one is actually going to work the best. Right. That's what it looks like when we put things into action.

So discipline is about showing up and it's about not just [00:20:00] doing busy work. It's about doing the right things that are actually going to help get us where we need to go. And by the way, going backwards here for a second, if you don't have a vision, how can you possibly know what the right actions are?

That's why it's so important to start with that vision. All right. So we had the vision. We're clear on what we want. We know how we want our life to look. If being healthy is a part of that, of having more energy is a part of that. If being less cranky and getting easily irritated and screaming and yelling at your wife, your kids, your girlfriend, whoever, if those are things that you want to have as part of your vision.

Well, guess what? You need to prioritize your physical and mental well being. And part of that is making time for exercise. It's making time to eat better. It's making time for sleep. It's making time for [00:21:00] stress management. These are all the things I help people with, right? And the reality is, you need all those things as part of your vision.

So what activities, what actions do you need to show up for every single day? Discipline. That are going to be the biggest needle movers in those areas. Now, this comes to the third part, because a lot of people are going to do this number. When I start talking about what are the needle movers, what we start doing is we start looking for hacks and shortcuts and tricks.

Right? What is the thing I can do right now that's going to like, be like super easy to do and then change everything, because we all want easy. But remember what I said, there's easy hard and then there's hard hard. And the reality is, easy hard doesn't move needles. Doesn't matter how cool it sounds, doesn't matter if it makes a difference right now or not, long term, easy hard does not move needles.

[00:22:00] There's a good example of this is diets. A lot of people where they're going, Oh, I'm going to do keto. I'm going to do intermittent fasting. And look, if you want to do keto, you want to do intermittent fasting. Cool. Knock yourself out. Not saying that you can't. What I'm telling you is that those things may produce a short term result for you, but unless that's how you want to eat for the rest of your life.

Unless that's what you always want to be doing, then what you're going to find is that those things are not going to long term move the needle. There is a reason why within 5 years that over 90 percent of people will regain any weight that they lose. When I talk to people about my 80 pound weight loss, losing 80 pounds is not the impressive part.

Keeping the weight off for over a decade is the impressive part, okay? I'm always very clear about that. People were like, oh man, how'd you lose 80 [00:23:00] pounds? Wrong question. How did I keep 80 pounds off? Lots of people lose 80 pounds. Lots of people lose 50 pounds or 100 pounds and they regain it. Losing weight is not the end goal.

So if you're just doing things that can help you lose weight, then all you're really doing is you're moving the needle maybe a little bit in the beginning, but if the needle is going to go back down to zero because you put the weight back on, you didn't move the needle. We want to move things lifetime.

And the way we do that is not shortcuts, it's not hacks, it's not secrets. It's mastery. It's building up the skills that you need. Right? When I go and I start exercising, if I don't really know what I'm doing in the gym, in the beginning, I'm going to get those beginner gains, right? Maybe I start losing a lot of weight in the beginning.

Maybe I, you know, would start easily putting on muscle, depending on, you know, how old I am in my experience in the past with exercise, [00:24:00] but maybe. Early on, I see those quick gains and they give me hope. But where most guys fall off is when those things plateau. 'cause they will, they will plateau if you, if even if you get the beginner gains, they're going to plateau.

And when they do, most of us kind of give up because we got there. With the hacks we got there with the shortcuts and the reality is the shortcut didn't get you results You were gonna get the results anyways, just by doing something because they were beginner games But when we focus on mastering right now, we start to develop skills now we start to get better So now it's not just a matter of oh, I'm just gonna go to the gym and do something I'm focused on building my skills in the gym so that I can always progress my workouts, and I can progress them appropriately.

Now, am I going to get results at the same speed that I did in the beginning? [00:25:00] No. There's a reason we call them beginner gains. But, with consistency, With that discipline of showing up every day, learning those skills, putting them into action, developing that mastery of movement, getting that mind body connection, doing all those things, I'm going to get better at being in the gym.

And when I'm getting better at the gym, I'm going to start to see better results from it. So, That's the blueprint for this guys. When we start talking about time and a lack of time, it really comes down to, first of all, you need to have a clear vision on what exactly you want to do with your time. What do you want your days to look like?

Stop being reactive to everyone else's needs. Start being proactive to what you want your freaking life to look like. Okay. Once you have a clear vision of what you want life to look like. Figure out the things that you need to do. What do you need to do [00:26:00] every single day? And maybe you can't do everything at once.

Maybe you start with one thing, and then once you get really good at that, you add in another, and when you get good at that, you add in another, and when you get good at that, you add in another. Okay. This isn't about getting six pack abs in six weeks. This is about building a healthy body and mind for the rest of your life.

So if you're going to sit there and look for shortcuts and look for things that you can look good in the mirror next week, then just stop listening to this podcast right now, stop wasting your own time. Because the reality is, you need to show up every single day, and you need to do things that are going to move the needle forward.

It doesn't always have to be big leaps forward. As a matter of fact, big leaps forward rarely stick. Move the needle. That's all that matters. Did the needle move today? End of discussion. That's what discipline is. And that's why most of us feel like we don't have time. Because we're [00:27:00] trying to get the big needle jumps.

We want to see the instant change. And the reality is. You don't have time for that. That's why you feel like you don't have time, because you don't have time for what you think you need. And it's not your fault that you think that. That's what society has told us. That's what society has told us that we're supposed to have.

Look at an airplane taking off, guys. Most airplanes, I mean, there's a few fighter jets out there that can just, like, lift straight up, but a commercial airliner does not just go from sitting there And just lift straight up into the air. It gets on a runway and it builds up speed slowly. And then once it gets to a certain speed, it takes off and guys, that's what we have to do.

That's what discipline is. It is showing up, getting on the runway, building up our speed. And then when we get where we need to be. we take off. And once we take off, [00:28:00] now mastery kicks in. Now we start looking at next level things. Now we start building the skills. Now maybe once we've developed the fundamentals, once we've shown up consistently, once we're doing those things, now maybe we can add some of those shortcuts and those hacks and stuff in, some of those next level things that are going to take us up to the next level.

That's how we make time, guys. That's how we get more time in our schedule, is by implementing that blueprint. Hey guys, if you're not sure how you can find time here, if you're not sure where this time comes from, I'm going to give you a tool. And listen, I use a lot of different tools in my coaching. And again, if you want to see if coaching is right for you, Unshakablehabits.

com. You can click on the link. Up in the menu to book a road map call, and that's completely free. It's no obligation. [00:29:00] I'm going to tell you about my services. I'm going to tell you if I can help you. I'm going to tell you what your options are. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you and say that I'm not going to tell you those things, but it's not going to be a glorified sales pitch.

I'm going to legitimately give you a road map for what you need to do to see the changes you want to see. And then you can decide if I'm the right person to help you implement those changes. But what I want to do right now is I want to give you one of my very favorite tools. Like I said, there's a lot of tools I use in my coaching programs, but this is one of my absolute favorites because it is so easy to do.

And it is so enlightening. And it's called a time log. And what you're going to do is you're going to write down on a sheet of paper. The time that you wake up and you're going to write 15 minute blocks, you can do 20. If you want the exact number really doesn't matter. The idea here is that we at least want to have an, have an idea, right?

If you want to do 30 minute blocks, do that. I don't care. Right? [00:30:00] But at the end of the day, what I want you to do is I want you to start writing down everything you're doing and whatever the increment is. So if it's 15 minutes, it's 20 minutes, it's 30 minutes. What I want you to do is every single time you're doing those and I'm going to just say, don't go over 30 minutes.

Okay. Okay, that's actually like the absolute bare minimum number of times you check in here, because otherwise you're not getting a good enough idea of what your time really looks like. I really like 15, but if you need to go 30, that's cool. But what you're going to do is every time that that time period comes up, you're going to check in.

It might be like, okay, you know, 6 a. m. I woke up, 6. 15, you know, I brushed my teeth, you know, like, what'd you do between 15, right? I brushed my teeth, I, you know, did this, I did that, right? So, you're writing down what you've done in that last 15 minutes there, or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and at the end of the day, you're going to be able to look back, and you're going to be able to see, The things that you were doing that maybe [00:31:00] weren't as productive, maybe you find that you had some pockets of time you didn't realize you had, or you're going to find there's a lot of things that you did that you're like, hey, you know what?

That's not really the best use of my time. I need to change that. And that's why I love this tool so much. It's not necessarily going to help you know what to do with those things. But it is going to help give you that enlightening event. It's going to help give you that awareness around the things that you might want to actually change.

And it's going to help you start to form that vision for what you want your life to look like, how you want to spend your time, because I want you guys to hear this. It's your time. It's not your wife's time. It's not your kid's time. It's not your boss's time. It's. your time, you get to choose how you spend it.

Now maybe you choose to spend that at work. Maybe you choose to spend that with your wife, or your girlfriend [00:32:00] or your boyfriend. Maybe you choose to spend that with your kids. Maybe you choose to spend it by yourself. Maybe you choose to spend it exercising. Maybe you choose to spend it in prayer. Maybe it's some combination of those things.

All that matters is you spend it doing what's important for you. Guys, if you've been telling yourself that time is your biggest obstacle, I want you to stop. And I want you to say that how I manage my time is my biggest obstacle. Because that is the reality. Guys, with that, we're going to wrap up today's episode, but I want to remind you, as always, that while none of us are born unshakable, We can all become unshakable.

Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening to the [00:33:00] Unshakable Habits podcast with Coach Stephen Bucks. Be sure to hit the subscribe button and help us spread the word by sharing the podcast with other men. If you're ready to create Unshakable Habits, you can learn more and connect with us at unshakablehabits. com.