- We all have this fantasy where 'if I had time,
I'd clean my house from top to bottom,
I'd write a book, I'd create something,
I'd write a blog, I'd read all these books,
I'd be so productive' and suddenly,
guess what we all have?
Most of us have time, a lot of time.
Even if you're still working from home,
you're not commuting, you're not socialising,
we suddenly have a lot more time than we had before.
Most of us are thinking, 'you know what
I've realised, I have no interest in cleaning my house,
I'm not reading books, I'm not learning anything new.
Why am I not using this time
and how can I become disciplined during this time?'
(stirring orchestral music)
Well the thing that stops us is always fear.
You see, we're not very motivated.
Now some of us are, most of us are not.
A lot of us need structure and we need the structure
of I get up, I go to work, I come home.
On the way home, I go to the gym,
then I make some phone calls and then I see
my friends and now I've got all this time
and nothing's happening.
There's a proverb I love and it says,
"If you want something done, give it to a very busy person."
and I notice myself, in the first two days of being at home,
I found I wandered around, didn't really know
what to do with myself, I read and I kept falling asleep
and then I got myself together
and realized that we all need structure,
we like structure, we like a timetable.
After all, normally you wake up and your day
has a structure, I get up, I make breakfast,
I juice, I go to work, I do this, I do that,
I have lunch, I come home, I pick up the dry cleaning,
I go to the gym, I pick up the kids
and we have a structure
and what you must do now to have discipline
is to give yourself a structure, even write a timetable.
You need to get out of bed.
The worst thing you can do is lie in bed,
put on the TV, stay in there,
look through Facebook, play on your computer,
suddenly hours have gone by and you've done nothing
and doing nothing is actually incredibly tiring
because you're not motivated or focused,
so create a timetable and stick to it.
I will get up at X and the first thing
I'm going to do is meditate or work out.
You might go, I can't work out, I've got a tiny apartment.
Yes, you can, just doing the plank,
doing crunches, doing sit-ups and doing push ups will work.
You need a space the size of a bath towel.
Doing some deep breathing, using big bottles of water
or even cans as weights will help you.
You must exercise, first of all, it makes you feel good.
It gets your lymph going, your immune system
is your lymphatic system, your lymph doesn't have a pump
if you exercise, you boost your immunity.
If you boost your immunity, you are less susceptible
to any virus and it gives you something very good to do.
Skipping for five minutes a day
is great for boosting your lymph.
Trampolining, if you have a little rebounder.
Press-ups, sit-ups, skipping, these are enough.
You can do press-ups against a wall but do something.
And when you've done those two things,
I've meditated, I've exercised and by the way,
here's a way to get great discipline,
have a friend and say every morning at 10,
we exercise together on Zoom, on FaceTime, on Skype.
There are many, many generous people
giving away yoga classes, exercise classes, Pilates classes.
Sign up, sign up with a friend
because when you commit to doing something
with another person, your chance of sticking to it
goes up by a massive 80%, so if you think,
'you know I keep planning to do those workouts
and I miss them', do it with a friend.
Go for a walk, go for a cycle ride.
At the very least, do this online and do it with a friend,
so that you can't let them down and they can't let you down.
Now you've got two things out of your way,
meditating, exercising and now give yourself a timetable.
If you're not doing your job from home
and you're not homeschooling, give yourself a timetable.
What am I going to learn today?
You see Harvard and Yale and so many colleges
are giving away free online programs,
libraries are streaming books,
YouTube is the best university in the world.
Decide I will learn something new
and watch something new, every day
and then have a lunch and make a better lunch
and then decide who you're going to talk to.
I'm going to Skype an old person who's alone,
talk to a friend, talk to my family
and in the afternoon, well, I'm going to do some work.
Maybe I'm going to do housework, cleaning out drawers,
emptying cupboards, giving stuff away.
Maybe I'm going to do more learning.
Then the evening, that's my time to reward myself.
I'm going to watch a movie, read a book.
You see, human beings react very well to reward
and we all know as parents who say to our kids,
do your homework, then you can go out to play,
clean you room and then you can have an ice cream.
Eat your lunch and then you can have a little bit
of dessert as a reward.
We function much better with a reward.
With goals, we have purpose and direction.
Without goals, we kind of flounder around.
If you go 'yeah, I'm floundering,
I'm definitely floundering.
I'm going from the couch to the bedroom,
half watching TV, I'm on the computer all the time,
I'm not doing anything with my life
and I go to bed feeling I've wasted my time'.
You need to have goals, goals give you purpose,
direction, clarity and focus, so write out a timetable.
Remember when your kids go to school, they have a timetable.
When you go to work, you have a mental timetable.
Give yourself a timetable, what are you doing today?
And then give yourself a reward.
When I have done these things, meditated, exercised,
learnt something new, done something,
you connected to someone else,
then I take a reward, I reward myself
with my favorite movie.
You see, if you don't take it as a reward
and you just watch the movie the minute you get up,
you feel bad all day because you feel
like I didn't earn this.
When I was writing my first book,
the way I motivated myself was to say,
every day, if I write three chapters,
then I get to watch my favorite show,
I get to make something yummy to eat.
I'd even say to myself, my first coffee of the day
or my first tea, I have that as I'm working
on a chapter or a spell-check,
because we need to have the reward.
If you have the reward without the action,
you always feel kind of guilty.
You can't enjoy that time because your mind's going
into 'I could a, would a, I should be doing something else'
when you've done the something else,
'Ah, I deserve this', we all know we go to the gym
and come home, we feel so good.
I did a workout, I did something.
So you can give yourself structure and discipline
and motivation with a timetable.
With something exciting to do and with a reward.
There's a great proverb that says,
"To be happy, you need someone to love,
somewhere to go and something to do."
The someone to love right now may be you.
Working out is a way of loving yourself,
meditating is a way of loving yourself,
giving yourself structure.
Eating better foods is a way of loving yourself.
The second part of that is something to do
and there is so much to do, we're so lucky
we live in a world of WiFi where we can learn
so many things, read great books,
study great content, talk to other people.
Somewhere to go, I can hear you saying,
where am I going, I'm in the house?
Go inside we all want time for ourselves.
And the other way to give yourself structure
and discipline and focus is don't use these words.
I'm in lockdown, I'm in quarantine,
I'm stuck in the house, I feel like
I'm in prison, I'm cooped up.
None of us are actually in quarantine,
you are not locked in at all, you are allowed
to go out for a walk to the store.
You may feel cooped up but you're not cooped up,
you're not a chicken in a coop.
Your freedom is still there, you're free
to eat what you want, do what you want, wear what you want.
When you use these words, 'I'm trapped, I'm cooped up,
I'm stuck, my freedom's being taken away,
I feel like this is an apocalypse.
I feel like I'm in a war zone'.
The way you feel is linked to the words you use.
You notice I'm saying a lot of the time,
"I'm at home, I'm indoors", I don't say,
'I'm in lockdown', because I'm not locked down
and I don't say 'I'm in prison in my house' because I'm not.
I don't say 'I'm going crazy with the stress'.
I'm at home, I'm indoors, I'm lucky to have a home,
to be indoors, I have food, I have heating,
I have love, I have people to connect with
and you do too and you might think 'no I don't'.
But you do, there's always someone
that you can connect to, there's always something
you can do, somewhere you can go and someone you can love
and there's another proverb I love, that says,
"To have real balance, you need to have
a relationship that's good, a career that's good
and something just for you."
and many people say, 'I've got a relationship
and I got a career but I haven't got anything just for me'.
What could you have just for you, an interest?
It could be yoga, it could be breathing,
it could be keeping bees, it could be potting plants,
growing orchids, it doesn't matter what it is,
it's what I call the triangle.
A relationship that's good and if you don't have
a relationship yet, as you build
a relationship with yourself,
focus on all the great things about you,
be more ready to grow a relationship with another person
when this passes and it will pass.
Work on your career while you're at home.
What could you learn?
Could you learn communication skills,
marketing, search engine optimization?
Could you learn IT skills, could you learn another language?
Could you read some more books?
So you can work on your relationship,
work on your career and work
on the thing that is just for you.
It doesn't matter what it is, it's not important.
You could work on learning to eat better food,
you could batch cook, you could study.
So you need structure, discipline and focus
and fear makes you run away
from all of that and just meander around.
When you have goals, you'll feel better.
And please don't live in fear.
You're probably immensely safe.
You're at home, you're safe, you have an immune system,
you live in a country where they will take care of you.
Yes, we have to be very careful with distance
and washing our hands, we're all in this together.
One day, you'll look back and think gosh, you know what?
I really could have used that time better.
I had a client, a very rich woman,
who went to jail for VAT fraud, tax fraud
and she was what you call one of the ladies who lunch.
She was very wealthy and her life was really about
going out to lunch and she lived in a beautiful, gated home
and when she went to jail, that was a shock to her system
but she trained to be a yoga instructor,
a Pilates teacher an aerobic instructor.
When she got out, she went back to that prison every month
and gave free yoga classes to the other prisoners.
She said "you know, I lived in a gilded cage all on my own
with staff and actually, I loved those women in jail.
We became great friends", there are people
who have been to jail, Martha Stewart, Jeffrey Archer,
Jonathan Aitken, if you know who they are
and they've used that time well.
They learned something new, they did something new.
They were all saying, "you know
it wasn't the end of the world."
Something good came of it and one day you'll look back
and think wow, I had eight weeks off,
I didn't even do anything, I ate potato chips
and binge-watched Netflix and felt terrible.
Don't be that girl, that boy, that man, that woman.
Use your time well and if you're at home
with children and partners, help them too.
Say 'let's work out together, let's cook together,
let's study something together'.
Also be aware that if they don't want to,
that's fine, you study your stuff.
Help other people too and if you're alone
and your friends are alone,
say 'let's study this course together,
it's like being in a book club
and let's communicate every day
about what we learnt, what we're doing',
you have no idea how brilliant
your potential is, you know why?
Because your potential expands as you move towards it
and it expands again and then it expands again
and when your mind moves to a new potential,
it never, ever, ever goes back again.
Watch some great YouTube content,
use my motivation videos and my meditation videos
and remember please, like, please share,
please subscribe, please think of someone else
who could benefit from this too.
We're in this together, we'll get through this together
and if you're smart, you'll look back
and think, I used that time well.
See you very soon.