All right, welcome to season five of Inside Mike and New Head. This is the 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. Welcome back to the Ottawa series Inside Mike and New Head. We've been gone for a little bit, a little absent from the airways, some pretty major achievements have gone downrange, and we're going to talk about today rocking an incredible life and figuring out why the heck we're swinging our legs at a bed in the morning.
So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage, let's get at her. All right, so we sit here on the 10th of December, it is two days post my PhD defense. And today it's not about patting myself in the back and all that, but you know what? We achieve incredible things in our lives, and we need to celebrate them, because the world is a little bit square-shaped, shall we say, right now.
So yeah, I defended my PhD. I'm now being called Dr. D by my friends and family. It's an incredible time.
So what is your purpose? Like, what, and not a grandiose purpose in this universe, and we're going to get an deep philosophical discussion about why you're here and what you're trying to achieve. But what is your goal? Every day when you get out of bed, is it survival?
Or are you actually pursuing and chasing and trying to achieve something? Are you building an online presence? Are you building a company? Are you trying to advance in your job?
Or are you just a wholehearted person who gets up every day and says, you know what? Today, I'm really trying to make the world a better place. So in the world of preparedness, the blanket of preparedness that we wrap ourselves in is exactly what facilitates your ability to get out there and get after it. You remember when we were kids running around playing our favorite superheroes?
We would put this cape on and we would go and run around and chase the bad guys and do our thing, whatever our role was in our little scenario in our head. But the whole point was we were invincible. We put on this cape, we put on this persona, and we could attack and achieve anything. Then we become adults with all of these responsibilities, and we lose that idea, that imaginary, that beauty of pursuit, that idea that there's incredible things out there that we have the ability as an adult with mortgage and car payments and investments and rising inflation and maybe our mortgages hit the trigger point or whatever it may be, we're still here to rock an incredible life and that blanket of preparedness provides that level, that layer of insulation that allows you to rock that incredible life, to chase your dreams, to go after what makes you tick, and to be that person you want.
You know what? It's all about the opportunity to pursue. There's nothing guaranteed. I certainly don't believe in a world where you have equity of outcome, but everybody has an equity of opportunity or should.
So where you can decide, hey, you know what? I want to try to become a doctor. Maybe you're not going to be successful in med school. Lots of people aren't.
I pursued a PhD. It took me five years and three months. They're normally four to five years long. Out of my cohort, we're all still kicking, but some cohorts, they start eight to 10 people, only two make it to the end.
Look at special forces selection, right? You know, of the top tier one, you're probably looking anywhere from five to six percent of the souls who start actually make it through to the unit. So there's no guaranteed outcome and there's nothing in the world guaranteeing that you'll get the goal you're after, right? But there is a world that says you have the opportunity to go and in you, when you decide to adopt a prepared life, when you decide to wrap yourself in a blanket of preparedness, that facilitates your ability to go after what you want, right?
It gives you the opportunity and facilitates the safety net, for lack of a better terms, that allows you to both physically and mentally believe that you can go after it. And you know what? You fail a lot. And this is something we don't do in life very well.
We don't celebrate failure, right? We never celebrate failure. Apparently failure is a bad thing. No, it's how you learn.
And if you want to achieve success, you're going to fail. You need to fail. Because if you're not failing right now, you're not trying hard enough, right? You should be failing.
How many races do you enter where you don't get the podium? But you go back and race again, your personal best is X time out of 5k. I was never a fast runner, right? Whatever you can throw a million and one reasons in there, but I kept trying.
And I knew my race was not against everybody else around me because I had no control over their speed and their timing. What I had control over is the time that I spent in training, the effort I spent in proper nutrition to try to increase my time. Now, I got a half marathon time of an hour 53. I thought I won the freaking lottery, right?
I chase my goal of getting a sub two minute half marathon. Somebody won that half marathon and not too far over one hour, right? Dead serious, not too far over one hour. I'm 48 minutes behind the winner.
And I just won the freaking big prize, because I did it. I trained and I chased it. And why did I, why was I able to do that? Well, at the time, I wasn't really thinking of a blanket of preparedness, but I was thinking of from the perspective of I've got my mental health in order.
I've got my physical health in order. I'm training physically. I've got my financial house in order. I don't lose sleep at night about money.
From a physical preparation perspective, I'm largely okay if, you know, the shizzy hits the fizzy for a short disruption period of time. I wasn't really thinking it through a preparedness lens, but because those aspects of my life were more than in reasonable control, they didn't keep me up at night. I wasn't losing sleep about them. And that allowed me to go forward and chase my dream.
So I wasn't even realizing that I was wrapping myself in a blanket of preparedness until I realized I was racking myself in a blanket of preparedness. And so when you when you look at yourself in the mirror, that incredible wonderful person that stares back at you every morning in the mirror, and you look at them and you ask yourself a pretty simple question, you know, what are my dreams and hopes? Because if you're just getting out of bed every day and just trying to survive to the end of the day, listen, there's somebody in the mirror there that's got to drag your ass out of that because nobody else is going to do that for you. And I don't want to go David Goggins here because I'm not David Goggins.
I'm not some wild ass motivational speaker who's going to change your life. My point is, is that if you find yourself staring in the mirror and you're barely trying to get through the day, you need to go through a very simple exercise. And it's basically not self-defeating, but it's self-awareness. And it's a simple question.
We ask it, it's the most important question in emergency preparedness. It's who is responsible for your outcomes. Right now, irrespective of everything that happened to this moment in your life, the next decision is yours. You own both the consequences and the benefits of that decision, whether it be positive or negative, right?
You have to decide to change. The world is full and YouTube is full and everything is full of all these ways to do it. The point about emergency preparedness is that you're accepting responsibility for your outcomes. You're saying to yourself, listen, I have to be ready for life disruptions.
I understand the state capacity is so incredibly low that my best bet is to build a community around me, build my social capital, get together and get to know my neighbors, my close friends, my family, my faith group, a community group, some sense of belonging and a greater sense of group of people that I can count on when the chips are down. And you'll find yourself oh, so more of a vote. I say this all the time when I work with communities and businesses on emergency preparedness. I'm like, the first thing you need to do is build a team.
And I mean, from building a team is in the sense of community, have a sense of belonging. I tell municipal emergency managers, if you have very limited amount of money to spend and very little programming, get it into the buildings, get it into your facilities, get community groups, free room access to meet, get groups together, have programming at your community center, basically get the community out of their house and get them physically together and interacting that will build social capital that bonding and bridging between human beings that has been the reason why humanity is successful. We don't wander around the woods like wild animals and come together at mating season and then go off and know we are we are a species of gregarious individuals. So you succeed the more you take care of your social capital.
And that's the bonding of people around you like, you're a great meme on a TikTok and whatever, not a meme, sorry, there's one guy giving a speech and he's like, you don't need ex mofo, you know what I mean, to be successful, you only need like three, you don't need 20 friends, you need three rock and great friends. Now imagine if you had three friends that were totally not only committed to your success, you were totally not only committed to their success. The four of you together, four seats of car, you're inseparable and invincible. Somebody like that in that kind of friend group rarely has mental health struggles that get to significant levels because they have confident, trusted friends they can count on people that will help them work through it and people that they spend joy and happiness and time.
And when you surround yourself with people who are chasing their dreams as well, when you surround yourself by people who are motivated, it doesn't matter what dream they're pursuing. Somebody could be opening a business, somebody could be going after a fitness goal, somebody could be, you know, just trying to pass a course at university. Everybody's grinding at something that matters to them. When you surround yourself with people who have a common interest in what you do, and it is an incredibly motivating place, you will so significantly feel the difference in your mental health and your focus, your happiness and your joy.
And that's why when we talk about the blanket of preparedness here on Inside My New Head and online at our various different mediums, we always talk about mental health being one of the four quadrants of your blanket of preparedness. Your physical health is the other half of your game in preparedness is about taking care of your physical form in your mental health. Nothing to do with food in the basement, nothing to do with money, nothing to do with employment, nothing to do with any physical goal that you have or any physical good you have. 50% of your game in the preparedness space and living a prepared life is being in charge of your physical health and taking the steps necessary to become healthier.
And the second half of that is taking the steps necessary to live a calm, confident, happy, joyful, and stressed, managed mental health life. Imagine that. But as we roll into the holiday season, this is a time where a lot of it depends on your perspective. Some people get incredibly stressed at this time of year, somebody get incredibly relaxed.
I will offer this to you on the 10th of December as we come to the end of 2022, which has been a year of incredible disruption. And we're going to do a preparedness wrap up show in the coming weeks before we launch the new season in January. The point that I'm pointing here is take the holiday season. Now, if you're not of a faith that's Christian orientated, don't look at it as this is baby Jesus's birthday, blah, blah, blah.
This is a time for individuals to slow down, to come together in our social groups, to spend some joyous and happy time with each other, to reflect on the Gregorian calendar year that we just went through and all of the challenges the world has seen, every experience that we've been through. And it's a time to recharge that social capital, to get to know people again, to get together with people again, to have these conversations with people. It's a time to think about optimism, that the coming year, the lessons you have learned and the experiences that you have survived through in 2022 set you up for looking at a successful next year. And one of the things we're going to look at before the end of this year in an episode is your financial health, right?
I mean, some people tend to spend a lot of extra money at, you know, at Christmas in buying gifts for people. Some people try to use shopping as a as a mental health treatment facility, whatever you want to call it, shopaholics, etc. We're going to talk about your financial life because, you know, my life experience and the friends that I have, my social capital informs me that money is probably the biggest stressor out there in life, especially in 2022 with the levels of inflation and the Bank of Canada and other central banks raising interest rates to combat inflation and the likelihood that these higher rates of inflation and the higher rates of interest rates are probably here for a good systemic three to seven years, depending on what forecast you look at. This is the reality you're in.
So you're not in a position to sit around and wait to see if the world gets cheaper or wait to see if some boom cycle is coming down. You're going to need to adjust to the reality that who's ever inflated prices, they're not going back down. And interest rates are normally about this rate. The bank of Canada rate four and a half, five percent is a norm in society.
It's where it should be 24 seven forever. So the rates right now are great. They're exactly where they should be for a healthy economy, right? Those low rates that we had before were not part of a healthy economy and we paid them.
We eventually paid and are paying the big massive price for having such deflated interest rates and the massive printing of money. But remember, this show is about preparedness, right? So remember that pursuing that goal is incredibly important. Set yourself up for success.
If you were, and I had this chat with my better half, my wonderful wife, just a couple of days ago, as I was preparing for my PhD defense, I reflected back on that day in February of 2017, standing in my house in another town that I used to live in with all of these documents on the counter. And I got a call from a professor who was the head of the program at the PhD that I was applying for. And this was for all intents and purposes, my job interview, right? And I sat there with a goal and a dream and a hope and what the future would look like.
And here I am five years and three months later, and the journey is complete. The world in 2017 was such an incredibly different place, right? And everything that we went through in the last five years, especially the last couple of years. And yet I persevered not because I'm some incredible, amazing individual that's got all these or I'm rich or I've got, no, no, not at all.
There's so much about me. You don't know. The point is, is that this was something facilitated quite clearly by my blanket of preparedness that I had wrapped my life in a blanket of preparedness before I even called it that to ensure that all of the things that were within my control in life as Ryan Holliday says in the Daily Stoic, many, many times this is the dichotomy of control. There are things you can control and there are things you cannot control.
So Omar Fati, I just accept the world around me. It is what it is, and there's nothing I can do about it. But the things that I have inside my control, the four quadrants of my blanket of preparedness, I am the master of each one of those. Now sometimes they slip, but I pick them back up again.
And because I chose to become the master of the things that I can control and largely just ignore the things that I can't, here I am. I was able to persevere through over a five year academic program while retiring from the military, while going through some pretty challenging personal situations, while going through a pandemic, and going through a number of other things. Here I am out the other end, as serving as an example that even through what the world has thrown at all of us in the last three to five years, you can be successful. You can chase your dreams.
You can rock an incredible life if you chase a life of preparedness. If you make the decision to adopt a prepared life, there you are. And that's my little alarm there telling me that tomorrow's the anniversary of the Statute of Westminster. What a great day to celebrate.
I think I will. Thank you very much for everybody and your patience through these last couple of weeks as our frequency of posting on all the social media is hit rock bottom, as I was preparing for, I think the largest three hour job interview I've ever had in my life. But now that that is behind us and we are moving forward, we've got some incredibly amazing plans for 2023. We're going to professionalize 50% of this podcast and start bringing in some we've had fabulous guests to this point.
And I think I haven't done I haven't done them the service they deserve by surrounding their interviews with other interviews. So we're going to start bringing in at least one individual a month for a professional perspective on emergency preparedness from the community of practice, either from the side of consultancy, somebody living the world or somebody who works in the municipal or provincial space. So stay tuned. Much more is coming out on our social media feeds.
We're going to be back at posting three to five times a day come the new year once the new season drops. And my book, my editor Sharon showed out to you you have patience that is unchecked and unknown. There you are. It's going to be done.
So the fast and frugal quick simple guide to adopting a life of preparedness and wrapping yourself in a blanket of preparedness will be complete by the end of January 2023. And once my editor shreds it and sends it back to me by the end of February, it will be out and it's going to be a nominal somewhere around five to $10. I have decided what price point but something very, very simple. And then I'm going to offer to help everybody else.
So take care of each other. Thank you for all your support. Let's finish up 2022 in a positive and get ready to rock an incredible year to come. Take care.
Stay safe.