Preparedness & Reassessing Your Priority

All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mike Newhead. This is Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible, awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among a sit back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, welcome back to Ottawa Studios of Inside Mike Newhead. Listen, this week we've taken a bit of a pause.

You might have noticed it's been about, you know, eight, nine days since the last episode. We needed to sit back. I needed to sit back and reassess priority to sit back and determine whether this road is the right road and whether we're on the right track to hit our goals. So today we're going to talk about resetting your priority.

All right, grab a beverage. Let's get at it. And as always, if you love what you hear at Inside Mike, can you head drop over to our website, check out all our socials and everything that you can consume, whatever format you like. All right, thank you very much for listening into this episode.

Today, we want to talk about priority and why is that important? And remember the key to this whole episode, if you forget everything else, or if you decide in the next 30 seconds that I'm not for you today, remember one thing, the word priority is not pluralized. You cannot pluralize the word priority. You cannot have priorities, right?

It's an old concept that we have in the military called main effort, which means you are attempting to achieve quite a number of things at the same time. There are a number of objectives and aims that you have in your life and through your business and portfolio and whatever else you did as you're pursuing. But there is only one priority, which stands above all others. And it gets access to all of your resources before all others.

This is the main effort. And in military planning, they put that out quite clearly in the orders. That means if there's any conflict, if somebody calls for help from the main effort, they will take resources from you and they will give resources to that main effort. Because under the commanders plan, that is the number one thing.

So today in your priorities, as you sit back and you're on this awesome preparedness journey, you're trying to rock an incredible life, you're trying to achieve your goals, or you're just trying to tread water and keep your head above this freaking chaos. That is 2022. However, your perspective is every once in a while, it's healthy to pause, to sit down, to pull out your favorite beverage, to put your feet up. You can find 30 minutes.

I know it may be somewhere between two and four in the morning, but you can find 30 minutes hot beverage, cold beverage, whatever your preference is, to sit back and assess. Am I doing the things that I need to do to achieve my goal? Is my goal the right goal? Has the outside world changed sufficiently that I need to now reassess what that goal is?

And again, in the military parlance, it's part of your mission analysis that you periodically do this that you sit down and you say, okay, life circumstances changes. And every once in a while, the cumulative effect of outside of things or major events in your life might put those plans into a position of at least reconsideration, if not change. And a lot of times when you do a preparedness reassessment, similar to reassessments that you may do in your fitness plan, your financial plan, whatever it may be, when you look at your preparedness plan, reassessment, sometimes I would actually argue the majority of time, you're going to smile at yourself in the mirror and you're going to say right on confirmed, good to go. I'm smart.

This is exactly what I need to be doing in the middle of today's chaos. I'm on track, right? But you might come up with a conclusion that I've been focusing on this part of my blanket of preparedness. And you know, there are four quadrants to the bank blanket of preparedness.

And you've been focusing a lot on your physical health, for example, I've been doing a fitness series, I haven't posted much on TikTok lately because of utter mayhem and chaos in my life. I'll talk about shortly. But since I'm on a fitness journey, I've been putting a lot of effort, time and extra into increasing that fitness capacity. But maybe right now in the middle of chaos, that doesn't need to be my primary effort.

So you know, after a couple of weeks of it, I sat back and took a day and thought about it. No, it wasn't achieved. I didn't go ahead a whole bunch of junk. But basically I sat back and said, okay, you know what, when you have a priority, other things are not at the same level.

So have I been paying appropriate attention to the other four quadrants or other three quadrants of my blanket of preparedness, you know, my mental health, my financial situation, and my basic human animalistic needs. And that's it. That's your blanket of preparedness. And so every once in a while, it's important to sit back and effect at what you also need to consider though, as well, you could have an exogenous shock, a significant exogenous external shock that comes along and knocks everything off its pedestal, right?

When that happens, you need to react fairly quickly to save lives. And I know it sounds a little ridiculous, but in your preparedness plan, never make a dramatic significant shift in what you're doing without significant, without not significant, but without properly reassessing. And the reason I say is that if you've taken the time to develop a personal preparedness plan for you and your family that has you on a track that you think is appropriate to hit a goal that you've set and an exogenous shock hits you from left field. You didn't see it coming, right?

You didn't see it coming at all. And bam, that's not the time to make a significant catastrophic change in your plan without thinking, right? This thing that you're doing was a very well thought out strategy that you developed. Don't change that on a dime.

Do what you need to do immediately to deal with that with that shock, but don't make a crazy, crazy change. When I talk about this, let's take a second to talk about boring definitions in terms. Some of this stuff is important, right? So in the military, I have a 28 year military career.

So you hear a lot of confluence of both military terminology and preparedness terminology. And I do this in my formal blogs and things. If you check my preparedness labs.ca site and read a couple of years of blogs that I have on there on modern political issues, a lot of what I bring in is a lot of the military type strategic planning and thinking. And this is what I talk about a lot when we talk about your main effort.

That's military parlance, right? But we also have end state and you don't do a plan. You don't enact a strategy for anything in your life, your financial strategy, your health strategy, anything you do without knowing what the world looks like when you're done. Like, how do you know your fitness journey is over?

What are you going for? If you're going to just get fit, I wish you the best of luck. That never works, right? You have to define.

For me, it's very, very clearly defined as to what my fitness goal is. My fitness goal is to weigh approximately 180 pounds to be able to do 50 pushups straight consecutively without stopping to be able to do 10 proper non-kipping pull ups and to be able to hold a proper plank for five minutes. Full stop. I have a fitness goal that I'm going exactly after.

And when I reach that goal in all manner and respects, I will reassess and a new goal. But if I'm just getting fit, what does that solve? How do you know you're done? You don't.

So we have something called an end state. Now, when a lot of people out there with business education or somebody that's gone through an MBA or a Stephen Covey process, you'll see this as your goals and your visions, right? So a business, when business strategy, we talk about setting a mission and vision, right? So a vision is your end state.

A vision is what do we look like when we're done? What does the world look like? What are we trying and chasing to achieve? Your goals are the same thing.

I'm going to finish my PhD this year. I'm going to reach my fitness goal. I'm going to get financial independence by June 2023. I'm going to have my animalistic needs met for a period of 60 days without external influences.

Each quadrant of my blanket of preparedness, I have a very, very specific, perfectly defined goal for each one. Just one goal, right? Just one goal for the four quadrants. One of those four goals becomes my main effort with only one goal for each quadrant of the blanket of preparedness.

Then you know specifically what you're working for. Listen, I got a lot of things in my financial side that I'm working on, but there's only one goal for each quadrant, right? I don't have seven goals for each quadrant going at the same time. It becomes too much to manage, right?

So when I'm looking at a set of goals in my planning sheet, and I'm weird, like, you might figure that out, I use the old hillroy scribblers, right? I order them off Amazon, those colored ones we had in elementary school. I just love writing on them. I also love my whiteboard, right?

My whiteboard is how I think because I can erase it and get rid of it. But on my planning sheet, I have my four quadrants, right? I just draw that typical square and divide it into four quadrants, and I put four down, and each one has a goal. So I can look at it at a moment's notice, and it's always right in front of me, my four quadrant goals, right?

There's a circle around one of them, and that is my current main effort, right? So if there's ever a competition between putting time or resources towards something, it will always go to my main effort. So the whole idea of resetting your priority is sitting back with a nice hot cup of coffee or beverage of your choice, and looking at the goals you've set for yourself. Are they still realistic?

Are they still achievable, right? Are they still something that you want to do considering how the world has changed? It's what I explained in some of my blogs on preparednesslabs.ca, and the upcoming blog today on InsideMyCanooHead.ca is about understanding your why. Like, why are you doing this?

Right? Some people leave aimless, unorientated lives, and they're just living. And I tell you, yesterday, I heard probably the best explanation for the reason of life, for the purpose of life. Very, very simple.

It was five words enjoying the passage of time. And that was this individual, and I forget who it was, and I don't want to misquote or etc. But that was it. That's the purpose of life is to enjoy the passage of time.

And so how you do that is completely, some people are just, hey, guess what? I'm just rocking this life. I'm living good. I'll see what comes on.

I'm not too worried about it. The world is what the world is, and they just carry on. Have a great life. But most of us that listen to this podcast are on a preparedness journey, and they're trying to set themselves and their family up for success in the future.

So why is this also important to reassess? Well, the world's in a bit of chaos right now. If you haven't been watching the news slightly, and I don't care what country you're in, it seems like the world is kind of on fire, right? And we've dealt with this before in a couple of previous episodes.

But when we talk about chaos, it is actually growing, right? It's becoming more chaotic in more areas of life. And especially for all of my listeners in Europe, central and even Western Europe, not only, you know, the Brits getting a new prime minister, the French restarting and making sure all of their nuclear reactors work, is that you're starting to see a crisis that's creeping into your very ability to provide the basic animalistic requirements, right? So all of a sudden, when fitness was your priority, you're in your blanket of preparedness and your four goals, fitness was your priority.

And then all of a sudden comes along this guy night, Vladimir, and he decides to invade a neighboring country. And all of a sudden, now you might not be able to heat your house or the government, Lord forbid, thinks it's inappropriate for them to decide what heat level your house should be at. And don't even get me about totalitarian dictatorial governments that try something like that. But that's happening.

Listen, that's an exogenous shock that can most certainly change your priority and take it off of maybe your physical fitness and put it on your animalistic needs all of a sudden, if you can't heat your house or if fresh food is becoming so egregiously expensive that you're challenged to provide nutrition to yourself and your family, it's real food, gas and energy. Listen, in today's monitors aside, there's not much else. You can walk where you need to go if you don't have a car, pretty much, let's be frank, but you if you can't eat and you can't eat yourself, winter sucks, winter really sucks when you've got to go down to nothing but beans and rice and a little bit of human spice and some homemade unleaven bread to get yourself through the winter that you're not going to be worried too much about financial independence. You're not going to be worried too much about maintaining your physical fitness regime.

You're going to be challenged in your mental health. So your priorities are going to change. So you need to sit back and think about that on top of conflict. And I mean, not just the obvious war conflict in Ukraine and other places, I mean conflict in life, right?

We have a lot of political discourse and political disagreements across pretty much every nation that listens. There's 39 nations in this world that that listen to this podcast. And I looked at it the other day and maybe there's two of those 39 that have a stable political and financial situation. So chaos is a reality for everybody.

So it doesn't mean you need just because there's an exogenous shock, a big change in the world. It doesn't mean you need to change your priority. It means you I highly recommend and strongly suggest that you sit back and reassess. And again, we do this a lot in this podcast.

And a great deal of advice that you get for me on this podcast is to reassess and think the biggest weapon and the best weapon you have in preparedness is that incredible human brain and your focus, right? So you need to carve out short periods of time with your scribbler or your whiteboard or just you and your thoughts, your notes app on your Apple phone or the similar on your Android, whatever it may be. And just sit back for 30 minutes and think, am I expending my time and resources on the appropriate priority? Is this meeting the bot only the immediate, but the long term goals of my family and myself?

And these are just important things to do. And arguably more important in today's chaotic world that you take the time to reassess. So think about your preparedness plan, right? You've sat back, you've made the preparedness plan.

If you haven't made the preparedness plan, we're going to put up a blog in a week to talk about exactly that. Now, it's all over a whole bunch of other episodes. And I won't reference them because it's included on like 14 different episodes over the past two years, we're going to do a blog and put it up on inside my canoe head dot CA on how to do a preparedness plan from scratch free of charge. Here you are.

If you want to do it, or if you want to set back and reassess what you're doing, the reassessment will come first and then the plan over reverse them one or the other. The next two weeks, all that information will be out on inside my canoe head dot CA. The point is, is that you need to be doing this, you need to have that plan and that orientation to have your preparedness goals not only known to you and accepted and set by you, but have that roadmap done. And now you have to reassess whether that route that roadmap that you've laid out, that geographical route that's getting you from a to your preparedness plan, whether that's the route that is still most appropriate, considering what's going on in the world around you and your life.

And I'll give you a prime example. I had a very clear financial goal for financial independence at a certain date, right? I was about 90% there of being financially independent. And then I had an exogenous shock.

My PhD got kicked another year because of a whole bunch of circumstances that I'll do when I'm done. I'm going to do an episode on what it's like doing a PhD. But the point here is that that set me back here, the additional cost of the additional year took my financial plan and turned it on its head, right? It turned it on its upper head.

So I had to sit back and redo that plan in its entirety, set a new end state, set a new timeline and set the conditions. And then off I went. And it really only took about a half an hour in the calculator to figure out that my time stamp, my end state, the exact month in which I would be financially independent now got kicked to June 2023, right? Instead of the date that it was fair enough.

That's life. I have a plan. I mean, sure, I'd love to have it done this month. It's not going to be.

Here's the realistic one. Here's the achievable goal. I know how I'm going to do that. Bam, it's done.

It's parked. It's my goal on my quadrant analysis. So really, it's not that much more challenging than that, right? You take responsibility for your outcomes like we do an individual emergency preparedness.

You want to wrap yourself in a blanket of preparedness so that you can continue to rock an incredible life living in a suburban and urban environment. That blanket that you construct and knit for yourself has four quadrants to it. Each quadrant has a plan to achieve one very specific goal that you've set out. You've now looked at those four goals and you've assessed right now which one is the priority and which one gets the plurality, shall we say, of your resources and time.

And it's really not much more difficult than that. So we'll get in those upcoming blogs. We'll get into the very nitty-gritty details of exactly how step by step you are going to do that and achieve your goal, right? How do you set that preparedness plan?

How do you determine the goal? We're going to write it out for you and it's all going to be there. But ladies and gentlemen, everybody, just remember that as the Stoics say it's a dichotomy of control. You cannot control things that are outside your control.

So you think about issues that happen to you. So you're getting zodgent a shock. Inflation is out of control. It blows my mind the cost of groceries nowadays.

It's just infathomable. I choose not to get stressed about it because I can't control the cost of groceries, right? What I can control is how do I create a healthy meal plan for myself and my family based upon the resources I have. I have a fixed amount of resources set aside for food.

That doesn't change because inflation changes. So what do I do? As economists say, I change my preferences, right? I change my preferences.

I become more and more frugal, shall we say, in certain areas. But my food budget hasn't changed. I don't change my food budget just because prices are higher. I change my preferences within a food budget.

It happens all the time. And people say, you know, shoppers go down market in a recession, which means people who used to shop at the shopping mall now shop at Walmart during a recession. You just go down market, right? Well, I shop at Walmart regularly, so I don't know if I'm down market all the time or whatever.

But no, I just switched to maybe more Costco buying more money upfront, same money long term, right? So instead of spending, you know, a hundred bucks a week, which is my current family budget for four for groceries, now I spend 600 for every six weeks at Costco, right? So I may go to Costco and drop 600 bucks, but I'm not again in the grocery store for six more weeks, right? So my fixed budget is the same.

You have to figure out what you can control and then orientate your plan on that and not allow yourself to get pulled down that road of high stress, holy crap, inflation is out of control, all these chaotic things. Everybody's yelling at each other about COVID measures and whether mass mandates and vaccines and the world is just yelling at each other. But carving out of the middle of that is figuring out what I can control, making a plan, reassessing the plan, having my main effort to meet that, getting it done. And then doing your best because mental health is one of your quadrants of your preparedness is not allowing the higher price inflation to cause you mental distress.

What it does cause you is to step back and reassess your financial plan and where you're going. So hopefully today's episode was a little helpful. Talk about reassessing your priority, your main effort goals, understanding the definition of them, how they fit your blanket of preparedness and how to sit back every once in a while or when you get a big exogenous shock to take a look. So thanks again for your support.

Drop over to insidemycanoohead.ca, check out our social links. September is our moving month, but you know what life happens. So we're going to be a little bit slower than intended out of the docket. This what happens when exogenous shocks happen to your life, like the noise you hear in the background is my contractor ripping apart a bathroom that literally exploded and is costing me several thousands of dollars more than I wanted to spend.

Welcome to homeownership. Have yourself a great week and we'll talk to you again shortly. Take care, stay safe and remember you can't fight inflation with stress. So don't make yourself stress.

Take care.