My wife and I started to help with running school holiday children’s camps. This has been full of challenges and opportunities for our family to grow, not to mention a very busy season I find myself in with business and travel. Because I was focussed everyday of last week just on the camp I found little time to write. But I also found that when I did have the time I couldn’t think of anything to share.

Towards the end of the week I went for a walk in the bush, hoping to find some inspiration. In the past I have found it good to stop and gather my thoughts and pray. But on this occasion I just couldn’t think of one suitable topic to talk about.

However, over the next few days I did come up with some topics for discussion. In fact, several re-entered my mind which I’ll outline below and hope to write about in more detail very soon!

Poverty and debt

This particular topic is a painful topic because something I have experienced first hand since I was 19 and right into my adulthood. It has been something that has cost me severely and created a lot of chaos in my own life and those around me. Every time I revisit this topic and some of the situations I’ve been in because of poverty brings a few tears to my eyes.

My thinking over the last few days is that if I share about poverty and debt I am going to have to be vulnerable. I’ve come to realise that unless I’m vulnerable and able to tell the truth about the circumstances I’ve been in I won’t be able to help anyone. On the outside, to most of the world I spent 1/2 my adult life trying to project an image of success. Including financial success, career success, family success and having success in other areas of my life. But deep down knowing that this is just a facade trying to “keep up appearances”.

Distractions

Another area or topic I have been wanting to talk about for a while is distractions. How many times have I been distracted by something which has sent me off course for hours, days, weeks or even months? Well plenty of times and if I look back on my life and decisions I can see the number of times I have been significantly distracted. Distractions are sometimes easy to spot and other times it’s not until I’m knee deep in one that I realise I have been led astray. Usually from lack of wisdom and accountability.

Shame

This is painful, but shame is something I’ve had to deal with as a result of how I think others see me and the relationships that have been fragmented as a result. The problem with letting shame influence my decision making is that it has limited me from moving forward several times in my life.

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All of these topics are going to resonate with others. Behind our “keeping up appearances” are human beings with raw experiences, some good and some painful. I hope that being able to share my own journey and struggles I can encourage others to move beyond their circumstances and live a Raw Life: One that is filled with purpose and vision.

I look forward to writing about these in the coming days and also if you have any topics or things you are struggling with please don’t hesitate to join the growing community of people looking to live a Raw Life.

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I knew I had a gift somewhere in there to write. In fact, I used to enjoy writing more than reading at school. I think my teachers and maybe my Mum wondered why I wasn't as interested in reading as others. Well, probably because I'm not a "sit still" kind of guy if you know what I mean? And also because writing helps me to focus and concentrate on my thoughts and approach for life.

One of the key ingredients to this writing was starting a journal. I started writing in a journal around 2004 and sporadically put down my thoughts, prayers, hopes and other things going on in my brain. With the level of intensity I have experienced in my life the last 10 years the amount of journalling has increased.

This staple of writing in my "life diet" has helped me with a number of challenges I have had to face and overcome in marriage, parenting, faith, work, business, travel, relationships, diet and every other facet of my life.

Now that I have experienced this I came to realise that no gift is ever given to be held in a box and kept secret. Every gift that we have been given is for first our benefit, then second to help others.

Once we give out the gift we start to live a more purposeful life and it is definitely more satisfying!

So thanks Substack for providing this platform to make it easier for people like me on a writing journey.

These 3 sections called “Technology, Faith, Business” were created in haste and I just don’t think they’ll be useful at the moment. There are plenty of other blogs out there that focus on becoming better at business or how to walk in faith or what approach to technology we should take.

I’ve now got rid of those sections because I want to focus on the one thing: Helping people get back to the basics of a raw life.

I’ll explain a bit more why I’m doing this, apart from my passion to help others.

First, most of the issues I’ve faced in life inside and outside of work, have always been related to a couple of areas: My identity and purpose. I won’t explain yet, but if you read my blog you’ll understand what I mean by that.

Second, my current view as I am going down this long and windy road called life is that to become truly effective and get the most out of life we need to work on our personal character. That requires stripping away everything that hinders us, with false pretence and the desire for validation as a couple of examples.

Third, the other area I have found is that people want to talk plain language without the jargon. Our world is filled with jargon and acronyms for every topic under the sun. Jargon can be useful when we go and see a doctor, want to upgrade our car or buy a new laptop. But our everyday raw life doesn’t need jargon, it needs simple language that helps us with the basics. More complex concepts and ideas can be discussed using story telling, because it is more relatable.

In summary I want to help you, the reader with easy to read content that can provide helpful tips and open up ideas for discussion. I look forward to sharing this journey of “Raw Life” with you and hearing how it’s helping you. At the moment I’ll stick to this, but in the future there will always be opportunities for setting weekly challenges at the end of each article, podcasts or anything else that you the reader finds useful. Please provide me feedback on the feedback button at the bottom of this newsletter and also please share this article on your social channels.

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While I was sitting at the table with my wife today I asked her what she thought would be a good topic for my next article. “Expectations”, she replied. That opened up a can of worms that I was not ready for. “Ouch” I thought for a moment and also a few laughs from both of us as we talked about some of the times we’ve let each other down (unmet expectations).

From my own experiences as an adult some of my biggest expectations have been met with disappointment and heartache. And there have been other times when I have got really excited about an expectation that was met as well! Others have often described me as an optimistic person, but as I have got older (and hopefully wiser) I have had to overcome some battles in my life, either with other people or myself.

When we want to see a massive shift from living “day by day” to purposeful living, we will change our expectations. We will start to look outside what is the current situation and start to dream. But you will be met with opposition from others and yourself, as you change your mindset from a fixed one to a growth mindset. You’ll have days you dream big and others where you might even doubt your reason for being in the first place.

Something I have been working on through the trials and experiences of the last 20 years is the expectations I had of my life and others. I had massive dreams to start and own a successful global business, have a family and own a piece of land in the country. I wanted financial freedom and in my early 20s I wanted to retire at 40 years old. But as I went on this journey with big dreams and goals for my life I had to have almost every aspect of those dreams stripped away. When you hit the same brick wall again and again and again it becomes weary after a while.

One of the hardest things in having big dreams or “Great Expectations” is that you will need to be patient, extremely patient. This is not something that comes to us automatically, especially in a culture that has food, travel and video on demand. We are conditioned to be consumers (see my previous article Why Raw Life? where I discuss consumer vs producer mindset). Part of breaking free from a consumer mindset is to remove your immediate expectations.

I can list a lot of expectations I have had at times in my life and some might resonate with you too:

• A desire to be accepted by others.

• Excitement about wedding day.

• The thrill of going on an adventure.

• That my wife would love me unconditionally.

• My kids would listen and be respectful to us and others.

• That my family (parents, siblings) would accept me for who I am.

• That my car would always work.

There’s a massive list of things we “hope” will turn out from everyday things like the car working perfectly to more long term things like finances, relationships and career for example.

How do we live a life free from expectations?

Well, the truthful answer is we can’t be free from expectations, it’s a part of being human. However we can have reasonable expectations in their right place.

For example if we have a regular job we need to place an expectation on ourselves that we will get to work on time. Or it is OK to expect our spouse to greet us when we get home or when they get home from being out. And if you’re in a team you want to know your team has your back and vice versa. There is nothing wrong with these types of expectations. Sometimes we or others will let us down in these expectations, but the key is not to let those disappoint you.

Acceptance is probably a word I will throw around a lot. It is an important thing I’ve had to work on, especially accepting that quite often your expectations aren’t going to be met. I think part of this is to see the best in people and yourself, have high expectations, but don’t pin your hopes on anything that isn’t going to matter in the long run.

What about life “shocks”?

In terms of larger expectations, such as life long dreams to own a house or have a family. Well, we don’t fully control the outcome of how these will play out, no-one does. You can only have self control over your area of influence, but once you have lived long enough you’ll soon realise that some things are just out of your control.

There are plenty of life “shocks” that come along our way that can feel very raw at the time and may take time to heal from. In fact a lot of people suffer trauma from unmet expectations caused by such as a divorce, loss of a family member, bankruptcy, serious injury or illness.

From my perspective you can’t walk through this stuff alone and you need to have the right tools to experience raw life and see that every thing that happens in your life can be used as a turnaround and bring you into a place of overcoming. One famous quote I saw recently was a sign that said “Your Attitude + Your Choices = Your Life”. I thought about this while walking this morning and realised this sounds like a true statement, but it is not the whole picture. It might look like that for a number of people who have been successful, but the reality is different.

“Circumstances + Your Response + Your Choices = Your Life” would be closer to the truth. How you handle a difficult life event is going to determine your course and direction for your life.

I’ve explored some ideas, but will leave you with some questions below which may help you understand how you currently manage expectations?

How do you respond to your circumstances?

What expectations did you have when something went tragic or unexpected?

What are you basing your expectations on?

How could you create expectations that are significant?

What different responses would you have in the future?

I would like to think that more often than not, procrastination is linked to a lie based on our identity and purpose. I feel like when I’m writing about this topic, I am only really addressing a symptom and not getting to the real underlying issues. But lets look at this logically for a moment and try and address this procrastination.

From first hand experience to overcome procrastination I have tried to follow all sorts of ways to reduce it in my life, but for the sake of keeping it simple I am suggesting you try these 3 things first:

1. Identify it!

2. Recognise it for what it is based on!

3. Take action!

The first thing is identifying it, the second thing is recognising that it based on a lie, third take action because you know it will stop you living a raw life.

I wish I had applied this several years ago and have only recently discovered how to overcome it.

Identifying Procrastination.

From Britannica the meaning of procrastinate: “…to be slow or late about doing something that should be done : to delay doing something until a later time because you do not want to do it, because you are lazy, etc.”

Put in simple terms we can easily identify procrastination as you putting off something for any number of reasons including laziness, excuses or lack of interest. There could be an underlying hesitancy to get something done, because you’re unsure or because you don’t feel like you have the resources at hand. Or any number of other reasons.

An example I can share from my own life is delaying meeting with my wife every week to discuss our business, finances and household. Every time I put this off and I don’t make it the #1 priority for that day it comes back to bite me. Or another example is my hesitation to tackle a project for my business or launch a product. I have plenty of other examples.

One of the other examples was related to writing content and articles. I was so focused on getting the right information to people and making my articles sound as professional as possible that quite often I gave up. I have a stack of unfinished, half written articles and ideas. The best advice someone gave me is that you can just write like you speak and readers will understand you better and find it easier and probably more enjoyable to read. Once I grasped this concept I changed my approach to writing content that was straight from the heart and only had a slight filter through my head.

Recognising the lie

Before I mentioned that most procrastination is caused by a lie and now I’m going to unpack this a little bit.

When approaching any task in life there are several statements we live with everyday including:

• “I’m not good enough”

• “I’m not capable”

• “No one values my work”

• “This will be too hard”

• “I don’t where to start”

• “I can’t be bothered”

• …

The list goes on and are personal to you and your journey. We are always going to be faced with these, but if you are able to recognise that all of these types of statements are connected to our identity and how we see ourselves, our purpose and abilities you will overcome most procrastination issues.

When we say or think any of the above statements we see it as lying to ourselves mostly. We are not being true to who we are and our identity and purpose. That is a whole topic in itself , trying to get to the root of your who you are and why you were put here on this planet at this particular time.

Another category that I’ll call “over commitment” are where we have actually said Yes to something that we deep down know we should have said "NO” to. Someone recently reminded me of this and it made me reflect on areas I had said Yes to, but couldn’t commit.

Start replacing the lies with truth. You are good enough for this task, you are capable and you can achieve! It takes a long time to break old habits, but once you have started to change your mindset from failure into a growth mindset you will start to see a massive change.

Take action

Nothing overcomes procrastination better than action. Even if you do something and it doesn’t turn out 100% this is better than achieving nothing. Also take responsibility for your area and if you can’t do something due to a skill limitation then either learn that skill or ask someone else to help and/or do it for you.

If you enlist another person to help you and let them know you are struggling with procrastination, I have found this works wonders. Quite often sharing your struggles with the right people who are more than willing to help solves half the problem.

There are plenty of resources I have used to take action. One of them is focus on one thing at a time and block out all distractions. Another tool is setting an appointment to do something in a calendar. And yet another is setting smaller achievable goals, that may or may not be linked to a larger goal. Bit sized chunks are way more satisfying as you get the feeling of having achieved something.

For now these are my thoughts on procrastination and look forward to feedback and hearing stories from others how they manage it.

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Footnotes:

1. Procrastinate definition: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/procrastinate

One day I was driving into town (which was a 40+ min drive away) and I had been speaking to a friend of mine about how frustrated I was and I think either him or I mentioned about going with the flow “bro”. I was needing to hear this because I was just frustrated at a lot of things that seemed to be out of my control. As I drove past the town’s hospital deep in my own thoughts I saw this particular van drive in the opposite direction and it was as if everything else in my vision was blurred and the sign on the van came into focus.

The words on the van were “GO WITH THE FLOW”. It was a plumbing van and since then I have never seen that van again. However I was now getting the message plain and clear, that I needed to go with the flow. How did this impact my life? Well for someone who doesn’t like to sit still and wants to control things and make things happen this was the exact thing I needed. Not that it was welcomed at first.

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However soon after this happened I realised every time I get frustrated with anything including my parenting, business, work, marriage, anything else that I can respond in a different way to the situation. The way I can respond is to realise that I am not in control of other people, I can not ultimately control how my children or other people behave and so the one thing I can control is me. And that is one of the first lessons I was able to learn through this process of “Going with the flow”. - Acceptance.

This made me realise that there are better ways to parent, communicate with my spouse, communicate with others and also try and understand people better. I mean just about everything we want to achieve in life usually involves other people so we better get used to becoming better at communicating and accepting them for who they are.

I’ve also recently had to use “Go with the flow” in other areas of my life. For example: business, going on an overseas trip, moving house, new job, children’s schooling. Through this ongoing, life long process it has made me realise that going with the flow is not necessarily removing responsibility or loss of control, but it is having better self management and control of myself. I look forward to sharing more on this in the future as it seems to be one of the ways to get into a more raw life. I have had opportunities come up that I would have never otherwise had happen if I wasn’t going with the flow.

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I did less than 5 minutes research online to see what information was out there about living a raw life. I sort of chuckled when I stumbled upon a whole lot of websites about raw food and eating. No surprises there!

We live in a world and a time where we segment every area of our life into these nice little boxes that we try and control and compartmentalise, to the detriment of ourselves and those around us. I am not saying this is wrong, I mean even my Substack here has 3 new sections called “Business”, “Faith” and “Technology”. But when we segment things into these “nice little boxes” and do this at the expense of the reality around us we miss out on real life, we miss out on the rawness of life. We also wonder why we don’t get ahead in life and can be left wondering “Why am I not succeeding?”

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Part of the answer in this is getting back to who we are as a human being. I’m speaking not from some theoretical mumble jumble in my head as if I hadn’t experienced this before. I’m sharing this because I have experienced Raw Life.

There are so many facets to experiencing a raw life, that a few of us will not understand what it means. But I’ll give an example of one facet that I experienced a few years ago. One day I was walking through the super market aisles and as I looked around I had this thought “You need to be a producer, not a consumer”. The idea I had was not a new one and it didn’t just pop out of thin air, it was a thought built on a progression of other things I had thought and experienced before. And I believe it was inspired by my relationship with God among other things.

So I went on a journey (parallel to other things happening in my life at the time) of discovering what it meant to be a “producer”. I didn’t need to look far as we were living in the country and I could see producers/ farming all around me as I drove home. Also we were connected with different groups of people that were trying to become more “self sufficient”. But it wasn’t just about growing and consuming food.

Going from being a consumer to a producer was going to take a shift in my mindset. It was going to require a paradigm shift. I was already aware of consumerism and also the way food is produced for mass market and the fact that nutrition is often lost from the time it has been produced and then manufactured and placed on a supermarket shelf. As I started to meditate and think about this producer mindset and way of life further, I realised this wasn’t just about food. I started to have my eyes opened to how we as a society are so used to consuming (not just food, but products) that we often don’t step back and out of our consumption to understand the bigger picture.

For example we may be health and environmentally conscious, so we think buying a certain product that is marketed as healthy and environmentally friendly will help. But we don’t often step back and think “Do I need this product?” or is there something else I can do or produce in my own backyard or household that fulfils the same purpose? Also why am I purchasing this product? Is it because it gives me an excuse to “enjoy” something without being “unhealthy” or damaging the environment? We also might choose an electronic device because it appeals to our “needs”, but in reality most of these needs are wants and desires and actually destroy the value of other things. For example we all know how useful smartphones are, especially when it comes to wasting time.

We trade more temporary things that take our time away from the important things like family, relationships, friendships and our eternal purpose. This producer mindset is something that is a starting point for understanding raw life, but is not the only way to start to understand raw life. These are some of the other important facets of living and experiencing a raw life: Identity, Belief, Self Worth, Nature, Time vs Money, Producer, Purpose, Relationships.

My hope is that Raw Life is going to help you experience a life worth living that does not deny who you are as a human being and helps you understand your true value. Raw Life can seem messy at times and often when starting on this journey of Raw Life there are several areas that you will be questioning “What’s the point?”, but from my own and other’s experiences I can definitely say that it is worth it! I really look forward to sharing more on this journey.

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The season I have been in has been fraught with a lot of pain and suffering as a consequence of poor choices and bad influences and also timing. Through these trials and the amazing things I have also experienced in spite of the circumstances I believe I can help other people from all walks of life.

Ever since I was a young lad I wanted to help people and most of my motivation in life and business has been to help people. With this immense desire to help others, comes a real deep sense of purpose and meaning. And on the flip side come a lot of areas where I have had to learn (and am still learning) to adjust my approach so that I am not being taken advantage of or sacrificing my time with family for the sake of helping others.

So on this note, I am going to intertwine all my business, software, technology, faith and other bits and pieces into one place. I hope you as a reader will enjoy it and it helps you on whatever journey you are on that this present time.