2020 The Most Fucked Up Year of my Life
What I’m about to share with you is deeply personal, in fact just thinking about it gives me two strong feelings. I feel sick in the pit of my stomach, and I feel grateful through my entire being, both at the same time. It is the most bizarre experience I’ve ever felt before and I know exactly why it is there.
👉🏼 My body is trying to tell me something and I am listening.
2020 has stretched me like never before, but as with anything in life there is always an equal and opposite energy. So I’ve been stretched to my absolute limits one way which has been painful as f*ck, but I’ve also learned more in one year than most people would learn in ten years.
You see everything on Earth is kept in a perfect balance, there are ALWAYS two sides to every coin. You can not grow without growing pains. You can not have deep love without deep pain. They CANNOT exist without the other, and any attempts to have a life just full of positives is a fools game.
Knowing this has allowed me to look back at 2020 with gratitude because of the growth, however, the growing pains were real. This year I cried more than any year prior, but I also had accelerated success more than any year prior.
🗣 Let me tell you about how this all unfolded…
Three years ago I decided to change careers from personal training and fitness coaching to mindset coaching, by coaching online and running in person events. I decided to make the shift based on a few things.
A strong desire to understand why people behaved the way they did, what made them tick, what made them succeed or fail. I knew it was in their minds but wanted to know more.
A strong desire to help people succeed the same way I had with my sports, Guinness World Record and also investing.
A strong desire to build a seven figure business.
A strong desire to live my best life possible.
I became certified in Hypnotherapy at the end of 2017 and then went on to do my Neuro Linguistic Programming certification in 2018 and since then have completed a ton more certifications, programs and courses which have given me a powerful skill set for transformational work with people that work with me, are part of my membership or attend my events.
I’m not one to do things by halves, so I decided to sell all of my real estate and put that money into my own personal development. Considering I was mortgage free which is most peoples dream, this was a ballsy decision to choose to rent and heavily educate myself and invest in my business.
I am going to skip out a lot of the details but over 2018 I ran events throughout Australia and New Zealand which was a foreign practice to me. I had to pay for staff, organise travel, learn about event management, learn about sales, all while still being very new to mindset and guiding people through transformation work.
This is really where the stretching began, and when I think back, the amount of suffering I have put myself through over the last few years is a little crazy.
Some events cost around $30,000 or more to run which did not guarantee any financial returns, some months I had 3 back to back events, that’s almost $100,000 out of my own pocket before I even turned up to run an event. Can you appreciate the stress that might put you under to make sales???? Holy fuck!!! It was AWFUL!!!!
Especially because my primary driver was to help people, not to make sales! I remember running an event in Gold Coast and I completely forgot to even mention my next program. I had 50 people in the event and all I wanted was to help them, I completely forgot to present my other programs and I would have lost about $20,000 just because of my stupidity.
I ran an event in Newcastle which cost about $20,000 to run including my flights and accommodation and TWO people showed up!!! Two fucking people!! The auditorium was set up for 100 people! Do you know how painful that is to lose $20,000 and spend a weekend travelling and have two people show up.
I had contractors that were invoicing me for 40 hours work a week and only producing about 5 hours worth of results. This problem lasted for almost a year before I finally put 2 and 2 together. I was paying someone to build systems for the business and I spent more time fixing the issues that they were creating and after 12 months I was down $70,000 and still didn’t have any systems. Massive lesson in hiring staff.
I even had a video editor that was charging me to fix his own mistakes and charging me for the time it took his slow internet to upload and download the files. My lord, the last few years have been HUGE.
But honestly, this is only the tip of the iceberg and I won’t tell you about all of the carnage, let’s just say I got destroyed. 💥 🔥 🌪
I want to fast forward now to 2019 when I decided that I needed a coach to help me, because I was WAYYY out of my depth and the stress was crushing me. Imagine throwing a goldfish in a shark tank, well that’s how I felt, living in a constant state of anxiety.
Having a business coach changed everything, he had run and spoken at events all over the world so he was a great person to be guiding me. We started to make changes and build out a new program, I had relief, faith and direction, but what I also did was give my own thoughts and feelings away and instead gave my coach 100% responsibility to guide me.
👉🏼 I did everything he said to the letter, but this is also where the next downfall started...
I had stopped listening to my own inner guidance system, I had stopped thinking for myself, I simply followed orders like a robot. I was fast and efficient (like a robot) but somewhere through the year of 2019 I had lost track of what I had wanted or what felt right or wrong for me.
👉🏼 I was starting to live by someone else's values and the symptoms started to show.
At the start of 2020 I knew something didn’t feel right, again my body was starting to show signs and symptoms of not being in alignment. I was actually in Bali in March preparing for a retreat when the V1rU5 hit the world.
I flew back to Australia, had to postpone the retreat and then under the guidance of my coach rapidly changed my business model to match the new rules and economic climate. I dove into the wealth coaching space, an area of life I’d done pretty well in to help others get started and get educated on how to make their money work for them.
During this time I got to run my wealth training and speak at some incredible events alongside some of my heroes like Dr John Demartini, Les Brown, Peter Sage, Joel Brown, Brian Tracy, events that I am eternally grateful for, and in fact, there is no way on Earth I would have been ready to speak at summits with thousands of people if I hadn’t been through the CARNAGE of the last two years.
Once again this is the universe bringing everything into equilibrium, all of the pain of the last few years was also the exact thing that prepared me for the success that came. Both are two sides of the same coin, and to have one without the other is not possible.
I also had the highest year earning I have ever had in my life, I got to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, I got to move into a house that I LOVE that is on the water. Sometimes people only see the good side, not knowing the struggle that goes on behind the scenes, but the cool thing is, once you accept the struggle is part of the success, you begin to become comfortable when things are uncomfortable, you begin to become peaceful when the walls are falling down around you.
The same way a trained soldier is cool under fire, you also become cool under the stressful conditions. Once you embody the lessons you have just created a new normal, you have just evolved.
You’ll notice in the title I used the words Fucked Up and not ‘the worst year of my life’, because worst would suggest it’s been bad. It hasn’t been bad, it’s be hard, tough, challenging and testing, more than ever before in my life, it has been F*cked Up, but it has taught me so so much and given me opportunities that I once only dreamed about.
Just remember that life is always looking for balance and equilibrium, and whatever you are going through that you perceive to be ‘bad’ will ALWAYS come with its equal and opposite ‘good’. When you find the good you find peace, and when you find peace, you live an inspired life.
Much love as always 💕
John