3 top tips from Gary Walker
1. The ability to stop adding to your drama
Good example would be a weight process. I’ve got to lose (weight). Why now?
Well, I’m going away in five weeks time, and I need to look like this. Okay, well, that’s why now. We have a moment of stress of something that comes into us. So my first process is very simple. Stop, breathe. Sit back and just go okay, cool. The stress isn’t helping me in any way. Just recognize the drama, recognize the story, you’re telling yourself in this? There’s willpower to change it, just recognize it. We then measure it.
2. Values alignment (your alignment to the organisation)
One of my clients fairly recently… great job, good three to four figure income really, really strong, but very upset with the process, not happy with the job. And that’s very uncommon to go, yeah, sitting there going through a lot the process realized that you’re not actually living to the purpose to the why.
So, the values of the organization weren’t matching their own personal values. And I think to me, a very big thing is values alignment. And when ‘your why’ matches what the company why’s, and the company is demonstrating what really means to you that when you give it your all,
3. Be present and enjoy the journey
We need to make that present moment as happy as we can.
Sure there’s going to be financial stress. I moved out of a corporate role. I decided I didn’t want to work 40 hours a week. I decided where I wanted to go, don’t I have to change things, that I have to change some of my expenses? Yep. But, I decided to put destress and no stress in my life as forefront of when I wake up in the morning. If something is stressing me, I’ll move away from it or try and change the circumstances around that. Rather than fighting the fight and being unhappy, our journey is more important than anything else.
Being in the moment of breathing for that moment, smelling the words, you know, being outside in nature, just being in the present moment, that is meditation, you can even sit at your desk and actually notice the fabric of the chair, of the table. You can just for a second, let your mind stop being busy, the power of our mind has over our body will stress our body. So likewise, we need to change things in our mind. We need to just set them to stop them. That’s why I said the first session is stop.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, stress, business, sustainability, change, mind, thinking, recognize, nlp, life, hypnosis, stop, brain, meditation, willpower, put, sit, relationships, bit, coach
SPEAKERS
Gary Walker, Debra Chantry-Taylor
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:12
Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor. I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs and their leadership teams get what they want at a business and life. On the show, I invite successful business owners and expert speakers to share their successes. They are open and honest about the highs and lows of business and also life as a business owner. We want to share those learnings with you to inspire you, but also to help you avoid some of the common mistakes. My hope is that you take something from each of these short episodes that you can put into action to help you get what you want, not only out of your business, but also your life. Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. Today, I’m joined by Gary Walker, who is a Behavioral Change Specialist and is also very much focused on sustainability. And we’re going to talk about the power of our mind. So welcome, Gary.
Gary Walker 01:03
Thank you, Deborah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:05
Now, Gary and I… You may not know what we actually share an office together. So we often have very interesting talks about various things and because of Gary’s specialty, particularly around change behavior, and what that looks like. So why don’t you tell a little bit about about what change behavior means?
Gary Walker 01:22
Well, at heart, I’m a neuroscience nerd, I love anything to do with the brain and thinking, I’ve got a background in psychology in hypnosis, and a bit of counseling. I think of my masters in NLP, which stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. And I realized with my love of everything, technology and computers, that we change a program, we can change its output. Likewise, our brains are wired the way and if we change the way we think about things and change, where we actually tell ourselves stories, we can change our outcomes. Now that change works across a number of areas in our life, whether it be health, whether that be wealth with me relationships, but also applies to business. So maybe we can change the way we think about our business, maybe we can change the way we think about sustainability. So I’ve kind of blended them all together.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 02:10
Yeah, it was interesting. So we first spoke, and we talked about sustainability is but, how does that fit in with what you do? But you’re absolutely right, in order to create sustainability, we actually have to change the way that we behave. So it actually has a very a logical kind of connection. Okay, so before we get started and finding out you know, how powerful our mind can be, and what we can do to actually use that to create a better business, better life, would you like to share with us a couple of things that the listeners can get to know you. So perhaps a professional best, a personal best.
Gary Walker 02:39
Okay, yeah. Well, let’s start with a professional best. And I think it’s just something that just happened fairly recently, because I’m trying to get a little bit more into the sustainability consulting space. I’ve just had a very large New Zealand top 10 organization approached me to go manage a plenary session on sustainability for them. Now, that’s something new, not for them, but not necessarily new for me, but it was about them, recognizing that I can help facilitate changing thinking in people. So there’s a whole group of 30 or so sustainability professional coming into a room for the day. And their goal is to go and sort through all the myriad of workstreams and come up with some good 8 – 10 plans that they can then take forward. What happens generally, is we always get what we’ve always focused on. And if we do what we’ve always done, we get what we’ve always done. So the whole goal is for me to go in there and challenge their thinking. So I’m going to go and get them to think of how many red things in our room while you’re thinking of the red things, how many green things were in the room. So just change your thinking just lift their brain from a standard sort of Alpha Beta wave through to more thinking Delta wave, Gamma waves and really, that sounds really weird, but it’s all about them thinking outside the square. For example, a nice thing that we’re going to be doing which is why it’s my personal best is that one of the things that they’re doing, they’re in construction and so I’m going to put a couple of pieces of paper on the table and say right, off you go and build a house, they don’t know that there’s a whole Lego set in the corner. I never said to them only use the pieces of paper so once they’ve constructed their houses they won’t have used the Lego set
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:13
Ah, hope not we’re not giving away too many secrets here.
Gary Walker 04:15
We’ll find out!
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:15
Okay, good. And personally, what’s been your personal best in your life? Oh, well,
Gary Walker 04:20
this is something different for me is because I believe in the power of the mind also believe in the power of our mind over our bodies. So as a sideline and a really interesting sideline, I teach hothead Pilates, and…
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:33
Which is actually how we met.
Gary Walker 04:36
And what that means is that I have a whole group of.. I don’t know 30 odd people in a 39 plus degree room really hot and working it out. And last night I had one of Auckland’s top wealth management advisor is one of the people that stay at the top of the PWC tower and he was in the room, finished the class and he came up to me said Gary, he said, I don’t think I’ve ever been pushed like that before. He said, You made me believe I can do all these crazy exercises that are done. He says I’m back. I’m hooked. He says, I’ve been just so focused on 14, 15 hour days, never given myself time. He said, You just got me out of my mind. I wasn’t thinking of anything. Thank you for the last hour. That was my personal best. That’s all I asked was want people to get out of their minds and just focus on one thing for that time. If there’s just surviving the heat, well, it’s just surviving
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:24
I think that was my first attempt was just getting through it. Yeah,
Gary Walker 05:27
It’s tough. It’s hard!
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:28
It is, it is so um, in terms of the the pilates and things that you do, do you actually use any NLP in that?
Gary Walker 05:36
Crazy if I didn’t
Debra Chantry-Taylor 05:37
I know So tell us a little bit about that. Tell me how that’s what we want it fought for for absolute novices? What does NLP really mean? Because I think it’s, it’s been given a bit of a bad rap at times, as it can be used to manipulate. But that’s not really its kind of purpose. So would you mind explaining how you see NLP and and yeah, how it can be used in a positive way?
Gary Walker 05:57
Well, I guess manipulate is almost the issue that sits within and I think it’s the same as the word stress. Stress can be good stress, and it can be bad stress. If we are ’bout to be run over by a car, we get a bit of stress in our body, our body, endorphins kick in and we jump out of the way. That’s good stress, we actually have a good part of our body that changes things, and helps us lift our game and helps us do things better, and helps us motivate. So there’s good stress, and there’s bad stress. Likewise, NLP can be used for good and bad. And I guess I don’t know if it’s been used too much for the bad part of it. However, NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. So neuro, being the power of our brain and how we think and what we we tell ourselves, our own stories. Linguistic is the language we use. And that language is often heard… And some people, I’ll never get to this, I’m so busy, I’ll never lose weight, that’s too tough. All this language that we use all the time. And what happens is our brain stores it, it actually has the neurons that fire together, they wire together, and we’ve got like this pathway that we develop inside the brain that says, we’ve said this enough times, and actually wires it that way. And as much as we set ourselves habits, and we set ourselves, this is what I’m going to do we have all the willpower in the world, when our neurons are firing together, tough as anything to break it. So Neuro Linguistic Program is a little bit of manipulation. It’s about looking at those neurons, who rewiring them and manipulating a different kind of outcome. Could you manipulate for people to do? Buy things? market things? Yep, probably. Yeah. And I think that we do that anyway, I’m seeing it all through the place, whether they call it NLP or not, it’s about positive marking, buy this and your life will be better. We used to do that in the 70s and 80s, we used to have cigarette smoking. You know, this! You do this, and doctors will tell you look, great. That’s what’s gonna happen.So yeah, I think we realized that it can happen and the power of our mind is really strong.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 07:57
So how did you get into it? Like what? What drove you towards learning more about the brain and the mind,
Gary Walker 08:03
The mind… To be fair, I did a little bit of hypnosis at school, I’m going back 1000s of years when I was at school. And I realized how just by doing a small course and getting a person to think differently, you could change them. And they really did some crazy things under hypnosis. When I was at university, we did a little test. And this was the subject of my thesis. I wanted to understand stress, wired a few people up using some form of heart monitor, doing skin galvanic response. And it’s a right make…
Debra Chantry-Taylor 08:34
sweat. You’re talking about sweating right, yeah?
Gary Walker 08:36
Sweating, yes. Ha ha – a big, loop here – back to the sweating!. And so I said, well, let’s try and increase the heart rate, increase our galvanic response, this creates stress in the body. And I have 50 or 60 odd people do this. And the average increase was 5% – 6%. Just by thinking of stressful stuff, we then put people into hypnotic state and under that hypnotic state, first of all, through a discussion discover what made them stressed. Seriously, it was weird things. Sometimes it was very, burglary sometimes it was traffic. And if I ever ask people what their biggest peeve is, mostly it’s traffic, mostly is waiting in a queue. It’s a silly little things, but it’s stuff that stresses people. And so under hypnosis, or put them into their circumstances, allowed to put them in the dark alley with the scary people, or put them in a horrific traffic jam and they’re few hours late for the next appointment. And every single one of them, the galvanic skin responses flared. Their heart rate went up, and they completely developed a huge bodily response to something that was entirely in their mind. Highly in the mind. And so I realized the power of the mind over our body is so crazy. More recently, and I’d like to talk this story they did a study with coffee drinkers. I know you like coffee.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 09:50
I do like coffee.
Gary Walker 09:51
Do you have the best coffee here in this office? And they took Group A and Group B and they put them all in the same room and Group A they show them the coffee urn on that side. And Group B they showed on the other side, they said guys we’re going to test the effects of caffeine. Group A, you’re getting caffeinated coffee, Group B, you’re getting decaffeinated. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to do some reaction time testing where they drop like a ruler between your hand and you have to catch it, if you other sort of tests. And whilst this was going in the background at the TV showing the effects of caffeine being heightened reaction times faster thinking, etc, etc. Anyway, as it turns out, Group A 40 to 50% increase in all those reaction times really good stuff. Said right, there we go. We’ve proved the power of caffeine. No, no, no. Just as a as a part of the experiment. both A and B were both subject to decaffeinated coffee.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 10:46
I thought that’d be the case. Yeah. Okay.
Gary Walker 10:48
That’s the power of the mind of Group A. That’s it, right? I’ve got caffeine. And I can do this faster.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 10:53
And that’s the placebo effect in medicine as well isn’t it to many people actually can can think themselves better.
Gary Walker 10:59
Yeah. Correct. And so that’s effectively what part of the mind is it’s about saying, Okay, how can we change our thinking neuro linguistically how can we change what we say what we think, reprogram ourselves to do better, so better life, better business.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:13
So talk me through the process, he would go through with somebody. Let’s just say that I came to you. And I said, hey, look, you know, I want to get fitter and healthier. What would you say to me? in a nice way, please.
Gary Walker 11:26
I think that generally people wouldn’t come to me in that state. Right? what generally happens, people get to a space where they are highly stressed, or this something that has caused them to now make a decision to change. Okay. So it’s very important, okay, if it’s direct, why now? Why not yesterday? Why have you left it for so long? What is the case? What is it that has really cause this? And often there’ll be some moment or something that has happened in somebody’s life that has caused them to reach this moment. Good example would be a weight process. I’ve got to lose. Why now? Yeah. Well, I’m going away in five weeks time, and I need to look like this. Okay, well, that’s why now. We have a moment of stress of something that comes into us. So my first process is very simple. Stop, breathe. Sit back and just go okay, cool. There’s the stress isn’t helping me in any way. Just recognize the drama, recognize the story, you’re telling yourself in this? There’s willpower to change it, just recognize it. We then measure it. So the step second step is just saying, okay, well, where are we? Well, where weight change, we want to lose five kilos, if we want to get more money in where are we financially? What sort of rocker we hit? If we have an alcohol problem? How many are we drinking? If we are eating wrong, if we… so generally…
Debra Chantry-Taylor 12:43
sleep. sleeps are my biggest challenges
Gary Walker 12:45
yeah, sleeps a big one, we tend to look at things in three buckets, health, wealth, relationships, sleep would fall under a health thing. How many hours of sleep Are you getting? Are you stressed? Are you thinking…? So what is the cause you to do this right now? Well, I saw your name, and it came up and I decided to phone you. Well, why haven’t you find somebody before? Well, I got to work on I fell asleep in my desk. Okay. So now we have the reason.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:09
There’s a real trigger point there
Gary Walker 13:10
A real trigger point. So then let’s just use sleep as a great example. So first of all, you stop recognize where you own it, often people buried it. oh it’s because we just had the relationship. We just had the merger, we’ve done this, it’s a new business.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:24
We got a lot on at the moment. Yeah. All those things.
Gary Walker 13:28
You justify the crap out of things to be quite fair. And I think that’s always the first step is recognize the drama, recognize the story that we tell ourselves. And, recognize that moment, an easy way to do this, and I’m going to explain this in the easiest way possible is in the traffic. And this is… you understand this, we’re driving along, get to the traffic light, and somebody cuts us and goes into the next lane. And straightaway our blood starts to boil. We are angry. We are so so angry. And we are the ones that are owning the stress. that other person who happens to have had a sick child in hospital and wants to get there fast enough. He’s own none of that, now that he’s cut you off. He’s going to go look after his child. He doesn’t own any of the stress. You’re the one that owns it. Because that bastard that cut me off. So, where’s the problem lies. So again, it comes down to recognizing and acknowledging that the problem lies with you and not with the other person because often we externalize problems externally to ourselves. So recognizing it sits with us is saying, I’ve got a problem with sleep. But if we do that, we then start measuring how many hours are you getting, how many would you like, what is going on for it? So we really sit and we actually get very clear on what the problem is really / clarity on what we want to have instead. So I said, What do you want to see? I don’t want to not sleep. Well, that’s not where you want to go.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:54
And in a business sense, we’d say it’s not measurable either, right. So how do you know when you actually got there? What was the facts looks like now.
Gary Walker 15:01
Yeah, in fact, I’ve had that before I had somebody come to me and I said, Well, I’d like to lose weight. Alright, let’s stop eating for the next 24 hours, and my job is done. It’s gonna happen. Company, I want to be wealthier, here we go, he is $5. You’ve succeeded your goal. So not only does it need to be measurable, it needs to be applicable in those circumstances. So what does that sleep look like for you? What is it that you want, what the outcome, what is the direction we need to go? From there we get clarity and where we need to go. So we stopped, we’ve acknowledged what we have, we’ve decided that we need to change, we now know where we need to go. The next step is putting into place some form of habit, or some form of system. Now I know you do the EOS systems, it’s about putting in good systems in place to track what we need to do. And often I see this in NLP, so many times we put in 100 things. Whereas really, we should be focusing on two to three things at one time, we don’t multitask, we’d love to believe in multitask, but we don’t.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 16:05
And less is more right
Gary Walker 16:06
Yeah, less is more. And even if we decide this 20 things that we need to do, we’ll just focus on three for the first week. It’s small wins constantly is the goal. Small wins constantly. And so we put into place a system that helps you recognize when you’re doing those dramas, to sit back from the drama. So if you’re in the traffic, and you just start to sweat this person, you go look at me owning this, and you change it you straightaway, you start learning to change. And you might take it off, hey, I had one circumstance today that I changed my mind. Another drama happens, we tend to use what’s called the reticular activating system, which is where most of the problems come from in the first place. It’s a part of the brain, which is designed to help us filter and focus on things very quickly. And what that does, and some people might have seen this, you buy yourself a white Toyota Corolla. So what do we see on the street, white Toyota Corolla. So the rest works the same way. It actually filters everything else that you see all the time unless you only see what is in your mind. If you focused on the fact “I’m never getting a job, I’m always gaining weight. I’m never eating the right stuff, poor relationships, I can’t seem to hold a relationship”, then guess what you see in your life… you see exactly that. So we shoudl change our habits at a couple of places and aim ourselvesbetter. Then always bring ourselves back with a laugh and a giggle, make it fun. And change your way that we see things. Yeah, small habits constantly. And to make sure that that sticks. And I think very similar to what you do we put in accountability, that accountability could be for yourself. It could be a morning gratitude journal, it could be spreadsheets, I love spreadsheets, and we share spreadsheets with people, like hey tick the box when you did this, give suffered coach, get up there in kindness or making yourself accountable and set yourself small goals with little celebratory wins. And now cheat days, just be kind to yourself. So that’s the kind of the processes that I go along. As a coach, when people come in, I sit down, go through that whole process, maybe throw in, say hypnosis if they really want to have hypnosis and some people say hypnosis doesn’t work. Guess what, they’re right, it won’t work? And and I basically you have to deliver what people think in their own mind will work because that’s why they will recall. Remember what we’ve always done. We’ve always got.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 18:23
Yeah, it’s really interesting. reading an article the other day I’d cover those in HBO or something about being able to program your brain to delete things, because your brain actually naturally has to delete things that cannot possibly hold all the information that we actually gather every day. And so it’s the things that we focus on other things that will go well, I must need to store this because you keep thinking about it. So how do you actually kind of press that delete button on things that are unimportant as opposed to things that are important?
Gary Walker 18:49
So we actually don’t delete it, they’ll always be there. But what we do is we rewire. So instead of our neural path going there and saying and a great example, here’s a great example for weight loss actually, my most recent client’s biggest issue… What’s your biggest issue are sweetened ice cream. Okay. That’s understandable. So how does that happen? Do you go out for ice cream or I know just like the lollies in the in the fridge and in the cupboard okay. So when you buy those lollies are in they supermarket? Okay, so here we go. Let’s go backward a little bit. So now we’ve got a neural part that says go to shops, walk down aisles 4, all those sweets on special, let’s buy those. They sit in the cupboard we go home, our willpower is no longer strong anymore and we grab into how about we stop it right at the source. And we’re walking down the aisle and we see those exact sweets we turn around we go…. Hmm.. we recognize ourselves we stop. We laugh. I would have bought those and we walk on. Now when willpower is at its worst we tie it because often that’s what happens we set up ideas and plans in willpower. Willpower is great. When we tie it when we a little bit stressed when others things that happen willpower falls outside and we go to easy we go to easy comfort in some form. If those sweets were there, we would grab them. If they’re not we say oh I’ll jump from the car and before, look at me jumping into the car. Put the keys down even if you wait for five more minutes, give yourself that pause that space between action. That’s all we’re looking for small habits conflict.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:23
Fantastic. So can you give me an example how you might use it in a business sense. So we talked about stress? And I should imagine… Because you know, more of my clients are business owners, they they can certainly be affected by stress, how would you use what you do to change that.
Gary Walker 20:39
So I think it comes down to the way that people are interacting with others in the office. And so first of all getting ability where you actually stop and stop doing the stress, stop doing the drama. So getting very clear on where you need to go here, focusing very clearly where you go, and on your processes to get there. So making sure you can measure where you’re going, making sure that you can actually take time out to actually put together systems and processes that help you get to where you need to go. But without diving into the stress, the minute you see yourself stressful, take yourself out for a walk, take those breathings, look for what’s positive, where you can change things. I always think any one stage if you feel that in business, refocus on where you’ve got to go. Often we get so buried on just trying to be busy for busy sake, that we forget to stop, get outside, stop looking at your phone, just focus, we don’t need to go. Okay.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 21:35
So reconnecting with your ‘your why’, ‘your vision’ is that what you’re saying is having that chance, we talk about clarity breaks, and that’s about getting away from everything for a couple of hours, blank piece of paper, and just allow your mind to not be distracte.
Gary Walker 21:47
Spot on. I think the issue nowadays with business with what I see in for example, the the session that I’m facilitating, is that everybody’s so busy, being busy, that they don’t stop, they don’t take that moment, aside from it. They don’t think outside this way of not using their piece of paper, but using the Lego blocks in the corner. And that comes through phones. And that comes through our natural ability to always go ‘oh I’ve got five minutes. Now let me get on to my phone.’ We always on and I’m not banging on phones, I’m not being a technology, I’m the biggest tech nerd in the world. But we don’t give ourselves space. And I think sometimes it spaces what’s important, even in business, is to actually recognize where we’ve got to have some space. Probably the two biggest clients are head around, and businesses often being as much as we can blame the company we can blame, we always have to look to ourselves for the responsibility here. One of my clients fairly recently, great job, good three to four figure income really, really strong, but very upset with the process, not happy with the job. And that’s very uncommon to go, yeah, sitting there going through a lot the process realized that you’re not actually living to the purpose to the why. So the values of the organization weren’t matching their own personal values. And I think that that, to me is a very big thing is values alignment. And when ‘your why’ matches what the company why’s, and the company is demonstrating what really means to you that when you give it your all,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 23:19
It’s interesting Is it because often I talk to business owners, and we talk about that exact thing, but almost in reverse. So getting the right people into the business to do the right the right roles. I suppose it must be but scary or in finding out that you’re in an organization that doesn’t align with your personal values. And it’s easy for a business owner to say we need to get rid of people because they don’t fit our values. But the other way around, waking up one day and suddenly realizing that actually your values don’t fit in with the values of the organization. Where do you go with that?
Gary Walker 23:47
Well, I’m going to change the word that you just said (and here is NLP at its best!) You said, “thats very “scary”. So I think thats the point of it, is right here to say “Okay, well, this organization – a. uses a million pieces of plastic and it purely has sustainability greenwash, I have heart to be doing the right thing. So that what it is it’s a realization, hang on, can I change this organization from within? Can we go and modify the values? If we cannot? Then are we being happy by staying here and actually using that as a learning experience? Now, does it mean that maybe we need to go out there and dive into a different role? lose some money? Well, that’s the point. Aren’t we going to be happy in our lives? We always say to ourselves, when I do this, I’ll be happy. Our goal is actually to wake up every day and be happy. It’s not about later. It’s not ‘when we’ it’s now.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 24:37
Being Present
Gary Walker 24:38
We need to make that present moment as happy as we can. sure there’s going to be financial stress really is going to be changes. I moved out of a corporate role. I decided I didn’t want to work 40 hours a week. I decided where I wanted to go, don’t I have to change things, that I have to change some of my expenses? Yep. But, I decided to put destress and no stress in my life as forefront of when I wake up in the morning. If something is stressing me, I’ll move away from it or try and change the circumstances around that. Rather than fighting the fight and being unhappy, our journey is more important than anything else.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 25:13
Yeah. And I think also people might worry that, yes, they’re going to take a salary cut or not have that same level of income. And maybe for a period of time, they may not. But I always believe if you’re doing what you love, then everything else around you kind of falls into place, and you get what you what you need, what you want.
Gary Walker 25:28
Especially if you focus on what you’d like to have in your life. Yeah. And I think if you do focus on that, and sure there will be some changes, but that’s part of our learning. Otherwise, what are we doing? We going to work every single day for 20 years and complaining every single day for 20 years? Well, yeah, who’s the one in traffic getting upset?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 25:46
And life is too short, right? Because who knows what might happen? So what tools do you use yourself personally, because we talked about you know, being in the present moment having gratitude keeping focused on ‘your why’ what are the sort of tools that you use yourself?
Gary Walker 26:00
It’s interesting, and I think that of all wonderful systems. So for example, I’ve got my panda planner that I use to plan out my day. I might do some reflection on that. I use an online diary called Agenda that asked and I just map out my days and track all my clients and things like that. And that’s all technology to help me. But, to be fair, the biggest thing that I use is that I recognized my moments when I’m getting in any way stressed, happy, whatever the case may be. And I go ‘oh, okay’, I smile. And and I’m trying to be of service constantly. So those are the tools I do as if how can I be a service at this moment? And I find that it’s a minute and stop thinking about me and start thinking about those around me. That’s my tool. To be fair, that’s really all it comes down to would I lose a couple of things? Yep. Is that okay? It’s actually okay, in the big scheme of things, lots of people are living a very terrible life right now with COVID. And with money and with health. I think we can only affect what we can affect around us. And who are we to think anything different? So yeah, I do use a bit of technology. A little bit of spreadsheets, I do use a little bit of accountability tools. I keep a diary, but I’m not consistent on it. I do it when it feels right. I try and plan my week. I always think it’s important to know where we’re going. And trying to live it to all I can on those things. And I think our journey is to go back to that space, meditate occasionally, I’m not the best meditator in the world.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 27:29
Okay. It’s funny isn’t it? Meditation is around those things that’s always eluded me in terms of I tried so hard. And then, oh look at my language,! “I tried so hard to meditate. And I actually realized that it’s not one size fits all, meditation is not the way that we often see it, which is people sitting there with cross legs and umm-ing and ahh-ing or ohh-ing, or whatever they do. And I realized that my meditation is actually about getting out into nature, and without technology. And so therefore, I’m just present in that current moment without thinking about anything else. And that’s, that’s a form of meditation, isn’t it?
Gary Walker 27:59
Absolutely. Yeah, just stopping and just… I don’t want to say hug a tree but stopping next to the trees and just breathing. But being in the moment of breathing for that moment, smelling the words, you know, being outside in nature, just being in the present moment, that is meditation, you can even sit at your desk and actually notice the fabric of the chair, of the table. You can just for a second, let your mind stop being busy, the power of our mind has over our body will stress our body. So likewise, we need to change things in our mind. We need to just set them to stop them. That’s why I said the first session is stop.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 28:33
Yeah. So let’s recap those steps. And the first one is Stop, stop.
Gary Walker 28:37
Yep. Then we measure where we are. Are we okay? Are we happy? Where are we? Are we? Are we good? With where we? Are we looking at health, wealth and relationships? Are we happy with all those areas? We measure that. If any of them are no, there’s something that we need to change. Where do we need to go with this? Is it a relationship, we need to change ,is that a job we need to change his health that I need to change, do something different? Once we do that, we put in systems in place to change those know, where we can go with dieting, where we can go with relationship advice, where we can go with things, I think we innately know what we need to do. Focus on very few things that we can change every single day, set yourself many challenges, one or two day, one or two week challenges to focus in there. Hold yourself accountable either directly or through somebody else. Most importantly, the most important, enjoy your stuff…… not getting stressed.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 29:32
It’s interesting, because you and I spoke a little while ago about how similar it is to what I do in a business sense. And I really think it is, you know, because we think about the EOS journey that I take people on. It is about first of all stopping because it means something’s not working. So you need to stop and go what’s going on. It’s about really clear on that vision or that clarity of where you want to be looking at what’s working, what’s not working, breaking thing down, things down to bright bite sized chunks, we call them rocks, but there’s things that you can… less is more and then measuring accountability to make sure that you’re actually getting those things done. So, yeah, it’s really interesting.
Gary Walker 30:02
Yeah, so very similar. Personal life business life. And I think that’s the whole point with better, better life, better business. And I think that those two are completely interchangeable. And that’s about us recognizing our part to play.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 30:15
And I think we talked about we know work life balance. And I’ve always actually said that I’m not sure it’s about balance, because balance to me makes it feel like the scales have to be absolutely equal. But again, it comes down to the individual, what’s really important for you, and where does that balance sits with you, it may not be 50/50. But it’s about getting that right, and making sure that they work together as opposed to work against each other. That’s my vision of balance.
Gary Walker 30:36
I think that spot on, in fact, a great example, as from your most recent client, they were launching a new project and needed to put in 50/60 hours a week. And the concept was needed to get this done in order to meet the longer goal. So for a while, work life balance was I’m going to put in 60 hours a week, but enjoy the journey because I have a mission, I know when this is going to finish. And in between, I’m going to take my hours. So this is what this wealth guy was doing. He took us out for his own self, and took the time out to make sure that his health, wealth and relationships. if you wake up and focus on getting your health, wealth and relationships all sorted, you will be fine. So make sure you feed your spirit, mind and body all the time feeding it the right way. And then occasionally, we will say ‘actually, I’m only going to work 24 hours this week’. And get off our phones, get off the stuff that makes us busy. When we lie in bed, learn a new process to before we go to sleep of actually showing some gratitude for what we’ve had amazing through the day. Just sit in your mind and kind of do what you started today off. What’s the best thing that happened today? Bring it to mind, have some smiles, close your eyes, and your brain says Ah, what about.. shush!
Debra Chantry-Taylor 31:45
No, I’m quite happy where I am. Thank you very much. Yeah.
Gary Walker 31:48
And I actually think using the word ‘shush’ is actually a fabulous thing. You say you want to learn to meditate? Sit down Debra, I want to do 20 seconds of meditation. Okay, let’s go… shush.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 31:59
Yep. Perfect. That’s fantastic. So the ideals for a person that you like to work with, obviously, you’ve got individuals, you’ve also got businesses as well just describe a little bit about the ideal client for you that you enjoy, because you know, you’re all about helping, what does that look like?
Gary Walker 32:15
Well, I think I call myself a change behavior coach. And the whole goal being the fact that some people need to change personally, some people need to change at a business level. Yeah. And so the ideal kind of somebody who’s recognized that that they’d like to make that change. I always think that there’s a role between a therapist and a coach or therapist or somebody help somebody off the ground where they are just stuck in one simple area. And the coach helps the person who’s really standing, looking around not sure where to go, and helps them start moving. Performance coach helps people run. Yeah, so those are the three, I tend to prefer working under performance, where people are really wanting to elevate the business to leverage what they’re really doing, suddenly sitting with something that they want to try and to get off the ground. That’s where I like to work. I want to work with businesses, they want to change their thinking. So it goes through a process of creative thinking. So that’s ideal. It’s a small business, something that where people are looking to try and change their thinking, and a little bit of a neuroscience nerdy kind of space, which I really love. And I’m also looking for individuals who want to make a change. And I’ve actually got the desire to do that. I don’t like people who don’t take any responsibility. And that sounds really silly. First part is taking responsibility that I don’t want to change, if you don’t want to change your anger.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 33:33
That’s exactly right.
Gary Walker 33:35
Smokers arrive with me or drinkers that say, Well, my wife wants me to do this. Well, awesome. I’ll take your money, but I’m not guaranteeing any results. Yeah. you’ve got to want to do it yourself. I completely agree. Okay, how do people get in contact with you, Gary, if they’d like to chat to you? Alright, well, the easiest one just gonna be through my central website, which is garywalker.cloud Yeah, yeah. So that kind of, yeah, that’s right. So kind of, it’s me in the cloud. Yeah. And it sends people through to sustainability work that I do. It sends people with some of the coaching that I do in some of the speaking that I do. But it’s all about service. I’m, I’m just looking to try and get up there and help others. That’s really my goal in life.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 33:54
Dot cloud? That’s wonderful. I look Thank you so much. Really appreciate you spending the time with us. That mind is an amazing thing isn’t?
Gary Walker 34:19
Just wonderful. It’s really good power of the mind is so strong in both ways, unfortunately. Yeah.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 34:24
Yeah. Thank you very much, Gary. Thanks again for joining us some better business better life with me Your host Debra Chantry-Taylor. If you enjoy what you heard, then please subscribe to this podcast. And let us help you to get what you want out of business in life. Each week we release a new short episode which will give us success story and three takeouts to put into action immediately. These will help you take your business from good to great. The podcast is also supported by free resources, templates and useful tools, which you can find at DebraChantry-Taylor.com. I am a trained entrepreneur leadership and business coach a professional ers implement Enter and an established business owner myself, I work with established businesses to help them get what they want. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to have a chat about how I might be to help you, or if you’d like to join me as a guest on this podcast. Thanks again to NZ audio editors for producing this podcast. See you on the next episode.
Debra Chantry-Taylor
Professional EOS Implementer | Entrepreneurial Leadership & Business Coach | Business Owner
#betterbusinessbetterlife #entrepreneur #leadership #eosimplementer #professionaleosimplementer #entrepreneurialbusinesscoach
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