All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mike Newhead. This is a 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 Inside Mike Newhead. Listen, thanks for joining us again this week, and thanks for everybody who's been dropping by the website, www.tripplewinsidemikenewhead.ca.
Traffic's been up, I really appreciate it. We got some newsletters coming out this weekend that are going to be really interesting for everybody. Now, this week, we thought it would be really great to sit down and talk about preparedness goals. Everybody's trying to achieve something in your personal life, and you're finding everything around you, you're striving for something.
Some of us are just trying to consume oxygen and get through the day, but there is different ways, or there are different ways for you to achieve a goal, and in preparedness, it's no different. So, how do you take the gnaws and the chaos and all this disinformation that you hear out there about the collapse of the world and the coming global war, and everything else under the sun, and carve out of it a reasonable, actionable way to improve your own personal preparedness, right? So, you've accepted the fact that you're responsible for your outcomes. You've accepted the fact that you've got to do something about your state of preparedness.
You're willing to become more self-reliant to learn skills, gain knowledge. You want to become more self-sufficient in your ability to provide for your basic needs, but it's always the how that seems to trump a whole bunch of people. So, today, we're going to go through what it's like in preparedness to set up your goals, and then my simple goal-setting system and execution that, to me, makes a world of sense, and is based upon my 40 years of life experience, making goals, failing a whole bunch, but that's part of the lesson, and it's an integration of 20-odd years of planning in a military environment. So, sit back, grab yourself a beverage, let's get at it.
So, I've late, you've noticed a lot in the podcast episodes we're putting out here at Inside Mike. We're talking a lot lately about your blanket of preparedness. So, it's the visualization of what preparedness is for you. So, it's you out in the world rocking your incredible life, chasing your dreams, doing your thing, but you have this blanket wrapped around you, and it's almost like your superhuman, you know, your superhero cape that you used to wear as a kid when you were running around, whomever your favorite superhero was, the cape or the shield just seemed to protect them from everything around.
And the blanket of preparedness does the very same thing. It's just a cloak that you wear around you as you rock into your world, and it keeps you insulated from life's disruptions. Now, that quote protects you from the world, and when we visualize it, you lay it down on the floor. It's like grandma or great grandma who used to knit these things.
It has four quadrants, right? So, top left, top, right, top, bottom, left, bottom, right type of thing, right? So, imagine four quadrants of this. We know that the four quadrants are your physical health, your mental health, your financial health, your financial independence, and your animalistic requirements.
So, goals are best expressed when you write them down. It's a set of commitments, right? We talk a lot about things, and I talk out loud, and you listen to me, and you listen to other people, and I'll talk about goal settings, et cetera. But until you commit it to writing, the physical human act of writing in your language has been shown an empty number of studies to make things matter, to make things more serious to you, and to make you more committed is to write it down.
Now, you can write it down in a journal. I journal most days. I'm a huge fan, if you've been listening to notice of Apple Notes, just because I'm an Apple guy, so I follow Apple Notes and use those apps for everything. You can use a whiteboard.
However you decide to do it, you need to write down your goals, right? There needs to be some physical writing expressing what you're after. And then an affirmation periodically, go back and check. We like to check our health of our goals, just like anything else we're working on periodically.
I schedule it for once a month. So, one Sunday a month, I sit because just Sunday is my day off, not related to religion, it's related to the standard work calendar that we have in Judeo-Christian society. So, on Sunday, I sit back one Sunday a month, and I just pull out my journal or my goalbook, and I reflect on it, right? I don't check it every day because it gets monotonous and crazy.
And then you just like, oh my Lord, I'm not losing enough weight or oh my finance is my emergency funds, not big enough. I just look at it once a month and assess, does this still make sense? Considering what has happened and considering what may happen in the short run, does this make sense? Am I on a track that still is logically fits with the way my life looks?
Because you can make a great plan and then get punched upside the head. As Mike Tyson famously says, so you do periodically have to check it. But the idea being about goal setting is realistic. Now, there are smart goals, you know, set after the smart acronym, and there's a whole bunch of acronyms out there.
I'm not going to run into all of them. The end result is, you know, if you have 25 goals, you're pursuing, you're not pursuing any goals because it's almost an impossibility for you to manage that level. So, in preparedness, I like to take it from you have a blanket of preparedness that you are stitching consistently throughout your life, and it has four quadrants. So, I express one goal per quadrant.
Very, very simple. What am I working on? What is my goal? What am I doing?
And so, I map those out through the following process. Very simple, but this is how I do it. First of all, you have to determine your end state. In the army, that means an old saying of, what does the world look like when I've reached this goal?
So, if goals don't have an end state, they're not goals, right? They're not goals at all. I want to be fit. It means absolutely nothing to absolutely everybody, right?
You may have a visualization of what you might look like, but you need to codify that into an exact measurable end state. And I'll give you mine. My goal for my physical health is to weigh 180 pounds, to be able to do 50 pushups consecutively, 10 pullups consecutively, and hold a plank for five minutes. Very simple, very measurable, right?
Now, I have the same simple goal for each of the four quadrants. For my mental health, it's to be able to get eight hours of solid sleep every night. If you have low anxiety, if you have low stress levels, you're able to sleep. Sleep is one of the first thing that gets disrupted when your mental health is not calm.
So if you're not sleeping well, it's largely how to do poor eating and in digestion. But more than likely, it's due to unmanaged mental health issues. So if I'm getting eight hours of sleep every day, then I have managed my mental health. The one for financial independence is to have five lines of income generating $10,000 of salary per month.
That's my financial goal, my financial independence goal that I'm working towards. The fourth one with animalistic requirements is very simple. I want to be to the degree to the extent possible 90 days self-sufficient, which means you can shut off all the utilities in my house and I can perfectly survive without any external intervention for 90 days. So you see, there's four very clear goals.
I have expressed them. You can see what it looks like. You can measure it for animalistic requirement. That means 90 days of food, 90 days of medical supplies, 90 days of security precautions, 90 days of water, right?
It's very, very measurable. It's clear. You can see it. You could write it out.
You could visualize it, right? My physical goals in my physical health are very clear. It's got to power. It's push-ups.
It's pull-ups. So with my four clear end state, right? I can very, very, very clearly see what they mean. That's a huge point, right?
So if financial independence, some people say debt-free, right? I don't want to owe any consumer debt. Now, you always, unless you own your house free and clear and congratulations, you're going to have a mortgage or you're going to have rent. But other than those two things, some people say my financial goal is to be debt-free, which means I am encumbered to no one, absolutely no one for my finances.
That's huge. It's measurable. It's clear. You can see that point.
Number one, the second thing that you have to do in goal setting is determine exactly where you are, right? So you know exactly where you want to go in your preparedness goal, right? You have it labeled right there. You just did it.
It's crystal clear. Now you have to say a crystal clear and honest, and this is looking at an incredibly good looking person in the mirror and being honest with you. Where are you right now, exactly? So physical fitness, right?
I've got a goal of being 180 pounds. I get on the scale. It says I weigh 220. Okay?
I know exactly where I am now. It doesn't matter whether I like it. It doesn't matter whether I'm angry about it. It doesn't matter whether it's disappointing.
I'm crystal clear that right now, I weigh 220 pounds, and my goal is to weigh 180 pounds, right? I know the start point and I know the end point. It has to be a crystal clear start and finish. And you do the same thing for all four of your goals.
One goal per quadrant, don't get any more detailed than that. And then you start your end state, you know what that is, and you know your start point. The next thing you have to do is this is where your theoretical brain starts to work. There are ways to get there.
There are a multitude of ways for me to get from 220 pounds to 180 pounds. There are many ways for me to get from five hours sleep to eight hours sleep. There are many ways for me to get from the lines of income and the level of I do now, which is personal, I'm not going to tell you that, to five lines of income and $10,000 a month. You start to map out the different ways and map them all out, right?
This is brainstorming. We're all familiar with it in some way, shape or form, but it's your way of stepping out and saying, hey, listen, I could, there are 15 different ways. So let's write down every diet that I could go on, right? Let's write down on every diet I could go on, every exercise regime that I could do to get from 220 to 180.
Let's write them all out. You're probably going to have 15 or 20 to be frank, right? The only caveat is, is they have to be reasonable possibilities. Can you actually do this?
Now, there's a guy on TikTok right now who lives out of a van and I forget his handle, but he's doing a 14 day water fast. Now, that's a good way, a great way to regulate your body and to do, let your body do a whole bunch of really neat internal systems to get things set. And be honest with yourself, if you don't think you can go 14 days without food and just drinking water and maybe the odd cup of black coffee, then that's not reasonable. Get it off your list.
It's not done. Hiring a personal trainer, a good one is probably $600 to $800 a month. I almost did that one year when I was at MoVody Fitness. $800 a month.
If you don't have $800 a month in your finance and your free balance without, you know, free and not due to something else, then hiring a personal trainer is not a reasonable option. See what I mean? So each one actually has to be doable and achievable, right? That you within your current resources, you can't say, I need a personal trainer.
I'm going to go get a second job to pay for the personal trainer, right? Because now your sleep is going to suck and it's not going to work out, right? So that's what you have to do. Could I do each one of these, right?
So let's say you've got 10 different ways to get from 180, sorry, to 20 to 180 pounds. There's 40 pounds off your earth that's got to go, right? You've got so many different ways to do that. Now you do something we call wargaming, right?
Wargaming is really easy where you play one off of each other and you take a few simple things. And I look at three elements that make, help me decide the timeline, right? The timeline it will take me to get from 220 to 180 if I use this strategy is how long estimate, you do your best. Okay.
So you do that for each one. The second one is achievability, right? Is this really achievable? How much will I have to change what I currently do?
So how much of an impact is this going to have on my normal daily life for me to achieve the goal of getting those 40 pounds off meers through this goal, through this system, right? The last one is what is the sacrifice necessary? Don't underestimate this and I'm dead serious. Do not underestimate the sacrifice that you are asking yourself to do, that you are committing yourself to do.
Truly understand it, right? Truly look at it. If you need to build out your finances, like me, I'm trying to build the fourth and the fifth line of income. I have the first three done.
It's far, far below $10,000. I have two more lines of income to build. I know what they are. I'm in the process of building them.
They're not there, right? I know the sacrifice necessary to get that. That's time, that's effort, that's learning new skills, gaining new knowledge, right? Be very, very clear with yourself about the sacrifice that's going to be required.
Not just it's different from the impact on your normal daily life. This is sacrifice. This is what you're going to have to give up. So if you have all three of those and you measure them out and then you look at the options that are presented to you, all of them are achievable, otherwise they wouldn't be there, right?
Each one of them has a timeline that tells you and your brain how long you're going to have to go through this to get where you want to be, what has a level of impact on your daily operations and the last one is the level of sacrifice. So you have to war game these in your head. There's no one who's going to come in and do it for you. You've got to score them, do whatever, you know, there's two ways to do it.
You can use a Likert scale, which is a one to five in difficulty or you could use stop light. So is this red, yellow or green? Now whatever way you mark these things, you go through the war game and you have to choose. This is the hard part, my friends.
And a hard part for a lot of people is you have to sit down and make that choice. Which one of these ways, these strategies, am I going to pick to meet that clear goal of getting from the start point that I am to the end point I want, right? Then you got to write out the plan. This is where you get out that journal, you get out your apple notes, you get out your whiteboard.
Exactly what steps do I need to take now that I've chosen the strategy. Now I know the how I'm going to get from where I am now to exactly where I'm going to go. I know the how, what are the steps? You got to write out the steps, you got to write them in order and then this is what really works for me.
I translate that to an actionable calendar. Now I'm a guy who lives by a calendar because you know, I just fill up everything in my calendar and when it's filled up, I can't do anything more that day and everything else gets punted. But every day at the start of the day, starting at 7 a.m. I have that day's goal, right?
That day's achievability. Now you don't have to do it by day, some people do it by week, but make sure you have a set of steps that you're going to go. So basically you've designed the roadmap to get where you're going. It's like you just created a Google Maps, right?
The Google Map direction is right there. It tells you where you are. It tells you where you're going. It gives you the timeline because you're going to drive, walk, bus, whatever and it gives you each step of the way you're going to have to take.
That is you're going to create your own Google Maps guide for your preparedness goal. You're going to have four goals, right? One for each quadrant. So you do this for each one.
It sounds like a lot, but listen, you're worth it, right? If you actually want to achieve your preparedness goals, this is what you need to do. Now, one more step. This is a concept directly from military.
You can only have one main effort. I have talked about it before. The word priority cannot be pluralized. That is one thing you must never do in life.
You can only have one priority. And priority in military parlance means the main effort. That means it gets all the excess resources and whenever it's failing, it gets access to all resources, including sacrificing the measure you're taking for the other three goals. You have one priority.
You have one main effort. You have to decide. Like for me, I'm trying to get eight hours of sleep a night. I'm trying to get to 180 pounds.
I'm trying to bring my animalistic requirements out to 90 days. And I'm trying to get five lines of income that equal $10,000. I have four clear preparedness goals, one for each quadrant. The main effort for me is my physical health right now.
Absolutely unquestionably, it is the priority. So I do everything I can to meet my other goals, but the physical health stomps all over the other three when necessary, right? Absolutely. If I have to sacrifice an hour or two of sleep to get up earlier, to do the exercises to fit in my busy day, to follow my plan, then that's what I do.
I will sacrifice eight hours of sleep. Listen, I'll try to go to bed earlier, but if necessary, I will cut that sleep down to seven because my physical health, the goal of my physical health of being to a healthy weight. With the other things that I talked about, the pushups, the pull-ups, the plank, etc. Is my priority?
It is my main effort. And I have all those written down in Apple notes. And then I also periodically, like I said, one Sunday a month, I sit back with a great cup of coffee because I love coffee. You can drop over to buy me a coffee.
com, the link is on insidemycanoohead.ca to buy me a coffee if you appreciate the products that we're producing here. But I love my coffee. I pour a great cup of coffee and I sit down and I go over my goals every month. So I've just expressed the four goals that I have, right?
Do they still make sense? In today's world, is it still reasonable for me to be moving my animalistic requirements to 90 days? I think so. Yes.
Okay. Good to go. Keep getting Jeff. You're doing a great job.
Sleep. My physical health. My finances. Is it realistic for me to be going after $10,000?
Right? That's a lot of money. That is a massive amount of free cash flow every month. I'm far from that now.
But the question is, is it still achievable? You know, I've got a plan to get there. But if all of my efforts are not coming to fruition, then maybe the $10,000 goal is unrealistic and I should shave that back to $8,000. And then reassess the goal when I get to $8,000.
Because it's no good to have a goal that no matter what you do, you're not reaching, right? That's why you have to reassess them. Not you have to give it reasonable time, but you have to reassess the goal. So hopefully today's ideas that I gave you about the blanket of preparedness, how you should have one goal per each quadrant of preparedness, you need to write it down.
You need to label the way of getting to that goal by first, you know, very clearly picturing and writing down what is your desired end state, what does the world look like when you've reached this goal? Be honest and frank with yourself where you are now. How about all the different ways that you could get from where you are to where you want to be, measure them against some criteria. I told you I use timeline, the impact, the achievable of the impact that's going to have on my daily normal operations, and then what level of sacrifice is truly necessary.
And that's an honest gobsmack thing sometimes to get there. I balance them off, I score them, and then I choose one. Then I write out my plan. It has to be, it's like a Google Maps event, right?
Start point endpoint and all the left turns, right turns, go straits, everything, every step of the way you're going to have to do to get there, right? I translate that to the calendar for me because that works. Then I sit down with my four goals, one for each quadrant and I ask myself which one is the priority, what is the main effort because priority must never be pluralized. Then it's there and I start going after it.
I start chasing those four goals. I chase my main priority first and foremost. And once a month I sit back with a great beverage and I reassess whether these remain realistic. So hopefully today helped you out a little bit.
I've got some great episodes coming up. I'm still working on getting the bugs out of an interview that I did last week. It should be out this week. It's great.
It's all about how you consume preparedness, information and what people are looking for. I've got a couple coming up on political issues because the world is getting a little spicy so we say. And for those out there, God save the queen, the queen is dead. Long live the king.
Take care of yourself and stay safe.