The Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage

The Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage

In this podcast, you’re going to discover three powerful questions that will set you up to have the most extraordinary year of your life. We urge you in something we have all grown to despise and distracts you and interrupts you and somehow finds a way to take priority over the most things that matter in your life. It doesn’t care about your intention for meaningful progress. It doesn’t care what you want. It’s selfish. It wants what it wants when it wants it and it always comes across to you and those around you. It means that book you’ve always wanted to write doesn’t get written. It means that friend you have been meaning to call doesn’t get called. Then one day you wake up asking yourself, “Why am I finding it difficult to love my spouse? Where does this extra ten or twenty kilos come from? Why am I living here or in this job? Why do I feel like something is missing? If you can relate to all of this or any of it, I have good news. You’re normal, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I mentioned what happened when my mother died when I was fourteen. Stay with me because I want you to walk you through three questions when a potential to change the course of your life. These three questions are the core foundation of a bigger system I developed called the Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage in Nine Steps, which has been designed to help you finally conquer the urgent and make meaningful progress to what’s important things you’re holding near and dear to your heart. I developed this process because as you’ll see, when I started using this process year-after-year, my life in all areas completely took a turn for the better.

My career, my relationships and my health, I was more alive mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I was having a far greater impact than I ever was before. People around me saw the change and asked what I was doing. In the beginning, I shared it with just a few people and what I found is that they are looking for the same thing, too, clarity. Clarity on what they needed to do to get themselves in the right direction and most importantly how to stay on track. That is why I created this podcast to ensure more people would benefit after I saw the amazing results people were getting in my program. Coming up, three powerful questions that you need if you want to have an amazing year.

The first question is this, “What would your ideal life five years in the future look like?” Most people live their lives as if they are going to live forever. There’s this belief that that will be all the time to change. Life will carry on pretty much the way it always has. There will be lots of times to adjust to the changes that will occur in the course of your lives. In the right time, pieces will just fall magically in place and will all be as right as rain. They may not say it, but this is pretty much how they’re living. They often give no thought to how the future will change and if they will be ready for it.

I met this gentleman and became one of my business partners. He was incredibly a focused and driven person about his future while being very careful to maintain all these relationships with people. When he first graduated as an engineer, he had worked for an engineering company and he decided he wanted to focus on being a management consultant. After he completed his MBA, he tries to get a job. He figures he would have no problem with this double degrees and years of working experience. To his horror, he went through 26 interviews before he got a job. This gave him a foul taste on the probable future.

When he finally got a job, he made a resolution. Never be at the mercy of another interviewer. Eventually, he left to set up his own company investing in other businesses. Fast forward five years later, he has invested in 30 companies in six countries in multiple industries. He got married to a very special lady who was starting to become a doctor and has a beautiful son. His major concern is how could he give his son a great life in the future? What would your ideal future look like? What gets you excited and motivated about it?

The second question is this, “If you continue what you’re doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future?” One of the illusions of our culture is that you can do it all and I just don’t buy it. I believe you can do anything you want. You just can’t do everything you want at the same time. If you are going to live a designed life it has to be based on priorities and intentionally choosing the priorities that will guide your life. You probably know what’s important to your husband or your wife or your partner and you certainly know what is important to your boss. You may know what’s important to your parents or your kids, but who is setting the priorities of your life? What’s important to you? Are you being honest with yourself?

I had a close friend and client. We had gone to school together. He’s also done my personal development programs. He consistently put other people in his life first. His ex-wife, his children, and his brother, he puts himself last. I finally told my friend that he needed to do a significant emotional work about his relationships with people, then it would take one year. If he chose not to do this, it would have serious repercussions in his future. He told me that it sounded too painful to do that type of emotional work. Fast forward five years later, his brother defaulted on his bank loan. The bank forecloses on the loan. Since my friend was the guarantor of the loan, they went after him.

In one year’s time, he would have achieved financial freedom for life. Instead, one year from that, he was declared bankrupt. He then came in to do some emotional healing, too little too late. He got very stressed and then later a heart problem activated and became life-threatening. He needed surgery to carry on. Fortunately, he survived the surgery. If you continue to like what you are doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future or do you need a rapid reality check on where you’re going in your life?

Here’s the third question, “What commitment will you now make for your ideal future?” We had you identify the core priority in the previous podcast. If you did the exercise in the previous podcast, you know the trajectory or what you need to do. The question right now is, “What will you commit to this future? Are you going to be lukewarm and say, ‘Let me think about it,’ or are you going to come into it all in?” Let me give you an example of my own priorities. My first priority is me now. It didn’t use to be. Even though I exercise appropriate self-care, you’re not going to be of any use to anybody else. For example, if you’re going to lead with your emotional baggage, then you’re going to drag that into any relationship you may have. If you don’t take care of yourself physically, which was me at one point, it can lead to something serious like a heart attack or some other health crisis.

Somehow issues can’t be avoided, I get that. You’re going to get increasingly less productive at work or in your business as you age. Years ago, when I was living the compulsive life, my priorities weren’t in this order and you could tell by my daily actions. Going through this process, starting with these questions, I made an important discovery. It contradicts a lot of people who are saying, “You can win at business and you can win at life, but you can’t win at both.” Here’s my experience, you can’t win at one without winning at the other. Success takes both.

Don’t let the urgent take precedence over the important. Don’t convince yourself that the situation you’re now in is temporary. Why? Those temporary things have a way of becoming prominent and then becoming a lifestyle. Don’t just drift or drive along. Ask the third question. Ask yourself what commitment will you make now for your ideal future? A few years ago before I formalized the Freedom Formula, I was working on my schedule for the forthcoming year. I thought I had a good plan. I remember than one year earlier in the same thought, but I grossly over-committed. I looked at my plan again and broke it down into the number of hours and realized that I underestimated how much time and resources I needed. I needed another 500 hours that year. That was a major wake up call.

I felt desperate because there were so many things riding on me: the current businesses, the future projects and my staff. I felt exhausted. I thought there has to be a better way. It took me three months to reconfigure everything. It took another six months to implement and change all the ways of thinking about managing time, energy, and resources that I had been doing for the last fourteen years. Once I did and I got everyone in my company on board, everything changed. Suddenly, I had time to exercise, go on movie dates with my wife once a month instead of twice a year. I could exercise nearly every day. That’s how our company became more profitable. So often we build up things in our mind and it comes down to making that one single commitment.

Let me ask you this, as we have been talking about this, you probably thought of a commitment you needed to make. Maybe it’s a tough conversation you need to have. Maybe it’s an action you need to take. What is it for you? What’s the thing that’s going to move the needle? It may push you outside your comfort zone, but all the important stuff happens outside your comfort zone. If you feel uncomfortable just thinking about what I said, fantastic. Embrace it. You are where you should be. Nothing good happens inside the comfort zone.

What is the next single commitment that you need to make? If you want to live a life by design, if you want to be courageous and not live by default and not be in overdrive, these are the three questions you need to answer. Number one, what would your ideal life five years into the future look like? Number two, if you continue what you are doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future? Number three, what commitment will you make for your ideal future? Now you are clear about the questions you need to answer to live a life by design. The next obvious step in the practicality of implementing this on a daily basis.

For example, how will your everyday life change from what you are currently doing? How are the daily decisions being different based on the answers to the questions we discussed? How will you manage your time so you are giving attention to the things that matter most? It’s all just dreams and wishes unless we take our 30,000-foot view of our ideal life and bring it down to the practical daily actions. This is practical because I’m sure you want to make a big decision or change in some area of your life before now, but for whatever reason, you didn’t. We’ve all been there, so what is it going to be different for you this time? For most people, nothing unless the reason most people will never get what you truly want in life. To succeed, we’ve got to break this old habit. I had to be ultra-driven about my businesses. I need a serious wake-up call to realize I have to do something dramatically different from the way I approached my day. If I didn’t, I get sucked in the same old, same old me. Your habits determine your character and that determines your future or your destiny.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering their soul’s purposes. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast, I’m going to help you design the life that works so you’re able to say yes in the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the bigger your true potential can ascend to and you can accomplish all the things you set out to do and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me as we get close to designing the life of your dreams.