Today I want to quickly share how sensational my morning has been, because, if you’ve read my other posts you’ll know I believe that how you start is often how you finish. So if you start your day full of motivation, commitment and gratitude you will achieve so much more than if you have lazy, flat start and don’t move around much.
I woke up very early this morning and did this incredible meditation as the sun was coming up. I live right on Manly Beach and it is so, so beautiful to look out onto the ocean. It’s hard not to be grateful in that situation for everything I have and how far I have come.
Work wise today I was looking at our social media posts and saw that a few questions had come in, so I thought I’d use those questions here today for our disruption blog and podcast.
One of the questions was: Why did I actually call this ‘The Disruption Sessions’?
I love the word disruption because it really suggests doing something new, disrupting the old or the old patterns. It’s a term that I’ve coined with our Troublemakers business, in fact, with the Troublemakers, we say;
I look at it more than just the business side though. I ask how do we disrupt those sabotaging patterns? How do we disrupt those patterns around health, relationships, business and career that in some cases have us feeling powerless? I also look at crises. Crises are disruptions to the norm. If you look at major, major crises in life, all-be-it they’re very, very uncomfortable, what they actually do is shake you up. They have you look at the world in different ways and ask questions that you wouldn’t normally ask.
One major disruption in my life that lead to my understanding of all this and ultimately gave me my success was the passing of my dad. If you have been to Live it Now you will have heard me tell this story of his very sudden death.
That day was Father’s Day and I was 13-years-old and my family went out running along Manly Beach. That was the norm for us. Everything about that day was normal for me, only it turned out to be the biggest disruption to my life, to my family’s life, to everything. That disruption set my life in a completely different direction.
Now, initially it was chaotic. Initially I was all over the place, but eventually that disruption got me conscious. I started to ask different questions and the questions that I was asking was, What is life about?
I saw my dad work hard his entire life, he had amazing discipline but he never went on holidays. He put his whole life on hold for business success and I don’t want to be doing what my dad did. I don’t want to end up like him. We’ve only got a short period of time so I designed for myself a different life. And the key to all this being of benefit to me was two weeks before he passed away, he said to me, ‘Matt, the key to life is to live it now’.
Because of that disruption and that message I started to search for answers. I started to research. I started to learn. I wanted to learn about myself. I wanted to know about life. I wanted to learn about my dad and this ‘Live It Now’ message. It became my mantra. I was able to make decisions based on that instead of getting caught up in other people’s goal plans.
I started to realise that we only have a short amount of time in this life and it’s what we do with the moments that we have that are so important.
All that led me to create Live it Now, and in Live it Now I look at what these unconscious patterns are that we actually need to disrupt. And then for those who are ready for more then we go into the Disruption Tours and The Great Escape to get you out of your comfort zone and shake up your thinking. We do all that in really beneficial ways that enable you to grow and challenge the norm and be incredibly successful without working every single minute of your life and chasing tomorrow.
So I call these Disruption Sessions because really it’s about getting uncomfortable and disrupting your life or disrupting your business. Because if we look at business in terms of how to go to the next level, the answer is always that you need to disrupt what you are doing. If things stay stagnant then your results will stay stagnant too.
If you’re making the same decisions over and over again, you’re going to get the same results. So we’re going to make some different decisions. We’ve got to be troublesome, we’ve got to be disruptive, and we’ve got to be creative. And that’s the troublemakers mindset.
It might be, you’re in a job and you want to do your first 100K or it might be the 100K to a million jump, or the million to 10 million rocket, whatever it is, in order to get to those specific positions in your business, what has to happen is a disruption. A disruption in the business but also a disruption in the leader.
I often say a business will never outperform the psychology or skill level of the leader, and this is why some leaders can be holding the businesses back because they are not willing to look at themselves internally and disrupt their old belief systems or old habits, including their decisions or their viewpoint of what the business is. The vision will really determine how far the business grows.
A lot of entrepreneurs don’t have a clear vision for their business. In fact, they often have in place an unconscious vision of challenge, which is a vision that it’s so hard they’re only able to pay the bills and keep out of the red, and that challenge becomes their reality.
So to get out of that and make real progress we’ve got to disrupt, and it has to come from a disruption that starts inside.
So the point of these disruption sessions is to basically disrupt your every day, to challenge you a little bit so that we can look at things that maybe you haven’t looked at or maybe you’ve been pushing down or avoiding, and instead of avoiding it, let’s disrupt, let’s face those wounds, those fears, those challenges and let’s create a disruption to create an eruption of new opportunities.
Some of you would have experienced this before, if you’re naturally good at disrupting or maybe you’ve been through a crisis that got you thinking differently, and when you get through the entire disruption process what happens next is what I call The Breakout and that’s where you break out to a new level of operation. And that’s what these disruptions sessions are, is we’re going to disrupt you, then we want to help you break out.
And funnily enough, the next question I had today was actually, how do I break out of my job? Because they are really closely related, these two things.
I think that’s what we’ve first got to do is adopt that troublemakers mindset in order to break out of your 9-5 job.
The troublemakers mindset is that you’re willing to challenge rules. In fact, you’re not just willing to challenge those rules, you’re willing to get into a little bit of trouble. And these rules could be your own internal rules that you put on yourself about what’s possible, about what you should be doing or they could be rules about what works and what’s best and what’s normal.
The first thing we want to disrupt are your rules internally and then we can move to disrupt the rules of some other people, maybe Mum’s rules, maybe Dad’s rules, maybe your boss’s rules.
We want to get in a little bit of trouble. We want to get a little bit controversial maybe. And with this type of approach, what we’re really doing is getting creative.
If you think of it, in a business we’re solving problems with our customers, we’re solving problems with our team, we’re solving problems with cash flow, we’re solving our own internal problems, it’s about solving problems as fast as possible.
To do that effectively we need to become creative, we need to think outside of the box, and that’s what a troublemaker does. They think outside of the box, they challenge rules and a lot of time these self-imposed rules make no sense when you actually step back from them and take a look, and you realise, if you follow these rules they’re really going to limit your life.
In my programs I develop groups that are kind of like that schoolyard experience where we hold each other to a higher standard. We have each other’s backs no matter what and yes, we pay each other out and have a lot of fun, but we make sure we’re each performing at our best simply through admiration and mateship and that idea that you are part of something bigger than just you.
So if someone is experiencing fear or a doubt or they are worried about what someone thinks, all of the troublemakers rally around them and go, okay, we’ve got your back, now you’ve got to do it, now you’ve got to create a disruption to create an eruption of opportunity.
I hope you enjoyed learning and maybe getting an idea yourself of some kind of plan to make a disruption in your own life or business. Speaking of that actually, it is important to have a plan in place for how to implement all that change so I’ll go into that next time and break down for you how to plan your disruption, so keep an eye out for that and I’ll get it to you shortly.
In the meantime I hope I gave you a bit of clarity around what the disruption sessions are and their purpose so you can switch on and light up your inner Troublemaker and really get to living.
So go out and create your own eruption of opportunities in your life because, let me tell you, there are so many opportunities out there. Once you get your mindset right and once you start really showing up the way that you know you can you will be stunned at how incredible the rewards are.
See you out there!
Matt Catling