228. From Vision to Reality: Making 2025 Your Most Fulfilling Year with Mick Spiers

What if you could turn 2025 into your most fulfilling year yet? 

Join us as we uncover the secrets to joy, purpose, and gratitude with insights from renowned experts like Michael Bungay-Stanier, Zach Mercurio, and Dr. Martin Seligman. 

Discover how to align your actions with your core values and attract opportunities that truly resonate. We'll guide you through transformative strategies to identify what energizes you and how to live a life of meaningful purpose. With practical advice on incorporating daily gratitude and distinguishing fleeting pleasures from lasting fulfillment, you'll be inspired to take control of your path and vision for success.

But that's not all—get ready to manifest your best year with insights from Dr. John Demartini, Timothy Gallwey, Brendon Burchard, and James Clear. 

We'll clarify manifestation misconceptions, focusing on the power of action and reducing interferences like doubts and distractions. Learn how small, consistent actions can lead to significant results using James Clear's "Atomic Habits." From setting daily intentions to time-blocking and being present, we introduce the VISION framework to help you achieve your goals. 

Plus, we'll explore leadership and personal growth, spotlighting an upcoming conversation with Dr. Carol Parker-Walsh, promising insights into inclusive leadership and building high-performance teams. 

Let's embark on this journey together to make 2025 a remarkable year of learning and leading.

Chapters

• 0:01 Creating Your Best Year Ever
• 6:46 Manifestation, Focus, and Action in 2025
• 16:34 Leadership and Personal Growth Exploration

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

What would it look like if you made 2025 your best year ever. What steps could you take right now to make that happen? And what's the one thing that if you achieved it, by the end of this year, you would be so very proud of the year that you've had. In today's episode, I'm going to unpack some lessons to you about what you can do to create your best year, and stay tuned to the end, because I'm going to provide you with an easy to remember framework that can help you to make that happen. Welcome back to season five of The Leadership Project podcast. We're very proud of how far we've come with the first four seasons, and we've got lots of exciting guests coming up for you in season five. Today is going to be a solo cast where I'm going to be sharing with you some tips that I've picked up from experts in self improvement and personal development about what it takes to create your best year ever, some very practical tips of things that you can start doing little steps, that you can start doing little mindset shifts, that you can start doing to create your best year ever. And as mentioned, stay tuned to the end. Can I share with you an easy to remember framework that gives you those practical steps on what you can do to create 2025 as your best year ever. So let's start with Michael, and one of the videos that he shared recently on LinkedIn really caught my attention about starting with joy, focusing on what brings you fulfillment. Think about the importance of what truly brings you joy. It's so easy for us to get lost in tasks and responsibilities and distractions that don't serve us. But what if we took a moment to truly assess where your time is going. Are you investing your time in things that energize you and fulfill you, or are you letting it slip away on things that drain you, take a stock tike of your life? What can you do to let go of some things. What can you say no to so that when you are doing the things that truly light you up, you've got more time by clearing space for joy, we make room for the things that matter. So have a think about the things that bring you joy. Have a things about the things that drain you. And look at where you're spending your time? Are you Doom scrolling on Tiktok, or are you using your time in a very fulfilling way that leads nicely into some messages from Zach Mercuria, our previous guest on the show, around making sure that we're living our purpose and our values. So at the start of the year, this is a time for you to clarify your vision, clarify your vision and your purpose for who you are and the person you want to be. Zach Mercurio teaches us that the key to fulfillment is finding our purpose without clarity on why we're doing what we're doing, it's easy to get lost in the hustle. So as you look ahead to 2025 ask yourself, what is your purpose? If you're struggling to find your purpose, have a look back at our previous interview with Zach Mercuria, where it really helps you break that down, an exercise that you go through. You can go through it for seven days or even a month, asking yourself questions about, what did I love doing today? What brought me joy? What brought me fulfillment? How did I serve others? Was there a way that I showed up that was in service to other people? Because purpose is quite often at the base of that, what would happen if I did more of that thing? These are all things that can help you. Make it clear if you're still struggling with finding your purpose, ask yourself what, what would happen if I stopped doing that thing? And that might be an important key as well. So think about your purpose. Think about your values. And for 2025 think about what success would look like, what would good look like, what would great look like. Getting that clarity around your purpose and values can help you build a solid foundation for everything that you do in 2025 I'd like to bring that to a head with work from Dr Martin Seligman and one of his famous TED talks, really highlights some key points here about the difference between the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. And it's the meaningful life that's most fulfilling of all of these where. We align our strengths with our purpose, and a purpose that's greater than just ourselves. The pleasant life is about instant gratification. It's about that. It can be social media. It can be something that gives you a buzz for a moment, but really is not fulfilling, and it's a fleeting moment. And the problem with pleasure, it's actually quite addictive. It releases dopamine in the brain, but what happens is it has an increasingly shorter half life. So what we need to do is whatever that thing is that we're addicted to, we need to go back and do more of it and to do it more often and with more intensity to get the same level of pleasure that we got from the original hip. This is why things like social media and alcohol are so addictive. You keep going back, because you need a bigger hit of dopamine for it to have the same effect. Whereas the studies that Seligman has done into the good life, which is where you find yourself getting yourself into a flow state, or a meaningful life, which is where you're in service to others and you're finding true fulfillment that has a longer life, and it sticks with us, and one of the keys in this process is gratitude. By cultivating a daily gratitude practice, we can then unlock the power of fulfillment, where we take the moments to truly appreciate the things that we're grateful for. So ask yourself, what are you grateful for today? Start with something small, and watch how gratitude begins to shift your perspective. The next expert I want to go to is Dr. John Demartini, also a previous guest on the show, and this is about manifestation and focus and about aligning everything that we do with our core values. Dr. John Demartini helped us to demystify or debunk the many myths about manifestation. People talk about your dream of a million dollar check and it just lands in your mailbox. That doesn't happen, and that's not what manifestation is. Manifestation happens when we focus intensely on the things that matter to us most, our core values. When we align our actions with these values, you begin to attract the right opportunities into your life. So take a moment and ask yourself, what are the most important values I want to focus on in 2025 what actions can I take every day to live in alignment with those values? Manifestation isn't just about wishing things. It's about taking consistent action on what matters most, prolific action and getting away and getting rid of the things that are cluttering our focus. If you're struggling to find these things, think about things that light you up, topics where you could talk about it with a friend for hours and hours and time would just seem to pass without even noticing that's a sign there that there's something there that aligns to your core values and what matters to you most. So if you want to manifest something important in your life, it's prolific focus, prolific intentional actions on that thing is what makes manifestation work. Which leads me nicely onto the work of Timothy Galway and the inner game, and you've heard me on the show talk about his performance equation before performance is equal to potential minus interference. This equation reminds us that we have boundless potential. We We can do anything we put our mind to. But it's the interference, our doubts, our fears, our distractions, that's what holds us back. So what's interfering your success? What limiting beliefs or habits are holding you back from reaching your full potential? This year, take intentional action to reduce that interference, whether it's overcoming self doubt or addressing distractions, things that aren't focused on your goal, focus on eliminating what's in your way, and then you can unlock your true potential. So you've got two levers here. You can work on your potential, work on your skills all of these things, and that's part of mastery as well, but you'll get an even bigger return by removing the elements of interference. The next expert I want to lean on is Brendan Burchard, and what I've learned from Brendan over the years, a big one is around. Of intentionality and action. Taking action, get moving, stop avoiding the things that you've been avoiding. Brandon emphasizes the importance of taking actions on the things that we've been avoiding. We all have tasks or goals that we've been putting off, but the longer we wait, the heavier they become so what's one thing that you've been avoiding that you can take action on today? Just start with the first step. Don't wait for the perfect moment. Once you start moving, momentum will carry you forward. Each small step is a victory. And the final expert I want to lean on is James clear and his amazing book, atomic habits. If you haven't read atomic habits yet, you may be one of the only ones in the world that hasn't please pick it up. It's amazing. This is all about making good habits easier to stick to and making bad habits harder to stick to. So James in atomic habits shows us that small, consistent actions lead to huge results over time. So what's one habit you want to build in? 2025 maybe it's exercising more reading daily, or improving your focus, learning the piano, whatever it is, make that habit easy to start and hard to break. For example, lay out your workout clothes the night before, or set a reminder to read every morning. Likewise make bad habits harder to maintain. For example, if you're trying to cut down on screen time, put your phone in another room, or set time limits on those apps that allow you to do that small changes like this compound over time, leading to big results. So what can you do to make the habits that you want to stick to easier to stick to make it easier to do the habit than to not do the habit and for the bad habits. What interference can you purposely put in place so it's harder to continue to do those things all right now, as promised at the start of the show, here's a simple framework that you can make this your best here year ever, and it's around the word vision, V, I, S, I, O, N, and it breaks down like this. Number one, visualize your future. Have a clear vision of what you want to achieve in 2025 how it aligns with your purpose and what it will take to make that vision a reality. What small steps do you need to take today to get started, I stands for intention. Set an intention every day. Set an intention every morning. On how you want to show up. Ask yourself, what's my focus today? How can I make today count? S stands for set boundaries with time. Use time blocking to protect your most valuable resource, your time. Make sure you're investing your time in activities that align with your vision. If you want to show me what you really care about, show me your calendar, show me your schedule and show me that you're scheduled in the time to work on the things that you want to work on. And when I say time blocking, that's it, that time is just for that, nothing else I is for. Immerse. Immerse yourself. Be present. Be present in everything you do. Multi multi tasking just simply doesn't work. Focus on one task at a time, whether it's your work, your family, your personal growth, whatever it is you're doing at that time, be fully present, and you'll see a huge change in your life when you do this, if you're not getting distracted in a meeting by other emails or other messages and you just focused on the person in front of you. They will great, really appreciate it. They'll you'll be showing them that they matter to you. You'll be making them feel seen, they'll feel heard, they'll feel like they matter. And you will focus, and you'll pick up so much more from that conversation. Same with your family. When you're with your family, be with your family. Get off your phone. Be with your family and be present when you're working on yourself, be with yourself and focus on the things that you're supposed to be working on. So immerse yourself and be present. O stands for ongoing reflection at the end of each day, ask yourself these five questions, what went well today? What didn't go well? What would I do differently next time? What did I learn about myself and what did I learn about others? If you ask yourself these same five questions every single day, you will be. Progressively fine tuning yourself so that you can make minor course reactions and stay on track to the things that matter most to you. I've been doing this same practice for the last 12 years now, and I can tell you it absolutely works. And N stands for navigate. Navigate with action. Take consistent, intentional action every day towards your goals, whether it's big or small. Take those steps. Make sure you're always moving forward. Get the law of inertia to work with you instead of against you. The Law of Inertia tells us that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, whereas a body at my emotions tends to stay in motion. So get in motion. Break the dark, get yourself moving, and you'll build momentum. So there you go. Vision, V, I, S, I O N, visualize your future. Intention every day. Set boundaries with your time, immerse yourself and be present, ongoing reflection and navigate with action. If you do those things, you can achieve what you're trying to set out in 2025 and you can truly make this your best year ever. I hope this has inspired you to start 2025 with clarity, with purpose and a solid plan to make this your best year yet. And don't forget, small, consistent actions every day lead to huge results over time. In the next episode, we're going to be diving deep into leadership and personal growth around inclusive leadership and high performance teams with the amazing Dr.Carol Parker Walsh, trust me, you do not want to miss that conversation. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP, Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.