#275 Gratitude, wins and lessons of the previous year, and looking ahead to 2023.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

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Please note that while an effort is made to provide an accurate transcription, errors and omissions may be present. No part of this transcription can be referenced or reproduced without permission.

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Welcome to Personal Development mastery podcast episode 275 - Happy New Year 2023! 

It's been two weeks since the previous episode and I realise that, similarly to what I did last year, that I have the tendency to need to take time off during the end of the year and do my annual self reflection process. I take time to look at my wins of the year, The lessons that I've learned or the things that didn't go in the way that I wanted them to 

and of course, it's also a period of looking ahead setting goals for the next year the intentions for the person that I want to be, what I want to achieve and so on

So in this episode today I will share with you my reflection, and also my wins and gratitude.

In terms of the podcast, in the previous episode I discussed some of the wins - some of the biggest ones being climbing from the global 2% to the global 1.5 top percent and also compared to the listenership, the downloads if you want from last year, the numbers in 2022 compared to 2021 were roughly twice as many - I am very grateful for this growth of the podcast.

The other big win for my year was the experience of the 10 day silent meditation Vipassana retreat that I've discussed previously and because of its uniqueness and its importance and of how challenging it was, I consider it to be one of my biggest wins of 2022.

The other important win and gratitude for me that the previous year I started working with people who want to create and launch their own podcast but they are not sure of what to talk about or how to do it. So I started working with them as a mentor and coach to help them in the creation and accelerate the launch of their podcast, making it a smooth process. And I actually also did a free four day challenge about it last year which I'm planning to repeat next week as well. So if you are interested in having your podcast but you’re not sure of what to talk about or what form exactly the podcast will take, or maybe if you're not that tech- savvy and you don't really want to learn all the specifics and technical aspects of a podcast, then the challenge is for you - you will find the link in the shownotes.

One more win and gratitude of 2022, and this I haven't shared before - so you will be the first one to hear it in this podcast.

And You will hear more much more about it in the coming weeks and months. But for now, all I will share is that back in July I had a inspired thought of creating a book, my first book. A few days ago, the final draft of the book was finished. So right now the book is in the final stages of editing, so it's not going to be long before it is ready. The topic is of course, personal development but what I have done is taken the concept that Tim Ferriss in particular and others as well but Tim Ferriss in particular has used in his book Tools of Titans where he collected the knowledge the wisdom from his podcast guests, and created a book as a knowledge broker of this wisdom of his guests - so I have done something similar with my book. I'm very proud of it and very happy about it.

I consider it a great win because as I said it came to me as an idea, so in a way I felt like it was assigned to me by my higher self if you want - like I had a duty to write it - I became very inspired and I wrote it relatively quickly -  the vast majority of it, the core of the book, I finished over the first two months.

So these are some remarkable wings and gratitude for the year that just ended.

And I will share with you some of the biggest lessons also that I had and realisations. The first one has to do with alcohol. So I will give a very brief background here: the previous year, 2021 and up to some point in 2022, I was on an alcohol free adventure, as I called it - I didn’t have a drink for 15 months.

In 2022, I started again having alcohol on a few occasions, maybe a couple of times a month on, however this lead to December, the previous month, which is usually a period that people drink more - and I also did.

The lesson here actually, is about the effects of alcohol, which is not something new. But what made this realisation about it more clear to me is because I've been using the whoop band, which is a fitness/wellness tracker. I will put the link to that in the show notes to check it out - it's very accurate tracking. So it measures the heart rate. skin temperature, even the oxygen saturation of the blood and gives you some incredible insights about how effective was your sleep, for example, or what is your resting heart rate, the heart rate variability, some incredible information and it's certainly worth checking it out if you're looking for a fitness and wellness tracker to use.

So the big realisation was when I would look at my own readings the day after having drunk alcohol and the shocking realisation that after an evening of drinking my resting heart rate would increase a lot. I saw it increase by 20 in one occasion - so in other words, my heart was beating 20 times a minute, faster at rest, - and thinking about it now it's scary how much more strain that puts on the heart. So yeah, big realisation - and coming back to currently, I am doing the dry January, starting again a period of cleansing. I have done the dry January every January since 2018, and it always leads to some amazing insights and usually to prolong the abstinence period for much longer.

One other big lesson this year was about creating my reality creating how things are in my life. There is that phrase that your world follows your idea about yourself - what you think you create. And I was very much familiar with this phrase. I have read it in different iterations many times

but this year with realisations that I had. It became very evident that the inner world that I create with my internal dialogue expresses itself in the outside reality.

There is a phrase one of my guests Victoria Rader shared in her interview with me and It made a big impression on me. And she said notice what you notice because what you notice is what you create. So that's my biggest realisation for this year actually realising how this works, because I said I knew about it. I had read about it. But it's when you actually see it happening and making the connection that the outside reality is reflecting what's happening inside of you, and when you actually experience it, see it happening, It's a very different way of understanding how what we think we create

As I look back, the last thing I will mention is my gratitude to you- So thank you very much from my heart for listening- and I also will express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to the about 50 exceptional people that I was privileged to interview on the podcast last year and have conversations with - they all had been my inspiration and catalysts of my personal development journey.

And before I conclude this first episode of 2023, the last thing to share is about the next episode 276, that will follow next Monday, the ninth of January and we will go back to the usual format of two episodes a week. Monday with an interview and Thursday with a solo episode and I'm very much looking forward to another year of growth, of inspiration, of taking action towards improving our lives. 

So again, I wish you a Happy New Year 2023 with personal growth, success and fulfilment. And until next time, stand out don't fit in!

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