Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Dr Gordon Spence on helping you to Get Moving & Keep Moving!

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Want to live long and well, but feel like you're not fulfilling your health and ageing potential? Psychologist, exercise scientist and educator Dr Gordon Spence explains how to get on the right path.�� If you're listening to this podcast, you're more than likely to be committed to personal growth and desire a long and prosperous life.  But when it comes to health and ageing well, many of us feel stuck. No matter how successful you are financially, it doesn't mean much if your body is failing you and you lose years off your life.  So how do you set yourself up for quality of life as you age, and get over the barriers you're facing today? That's where our guest, Dr Gordon Spence, comes in. He's the author of ‘Get Moving. Keep Moving.’ He is a highly sought-after speaker, coach and educator who helps you to live well and perform well long term. A psychologist and exercise scientist, Gordon’s areas of expertise include sustainable performance and healthy ageing, with a particular interest in helping you to return to exercise in mid-life.  Enjoy this powerful discussion and invest in yourself! Turn your life around with a copy of ‘Get Moving, Keep Moving’ If you’re serious about maintaining the quality of your life and enjoying sustainable active living you need to start today, so grab yourself a copy of Dr Gordon Spence’s great book ‘Get Moving, Keep Moving’ at https://healthyageingproject.com/book - your future self with thank you for it! Dr Gordon Spence's book recommendation: Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl Connect with Dr Gordon Spence: Email: [e-mail] Website: www.healthyageingproject.com Deep Dive Blockbuster Meeting with Bushy If you’d like an hour of power to talk with me personally on any questions, queries or issues you’d like to discuss about your investment strategy, finance or property portfolio delivery, whether you’re a potential investor who doesn’t know where to start or an experienced multiple property investor who is stuck and looking for ways to improve or grow your property investment journey, just jump on knowhowproperty.com.au, hit the purple ‘Book Appointment’ button in the top right hand corner, then click on the 'Property Pathway' option to book in your preferred time and for the princely sum of just $295 you can ask me anything you want for a full 60 minutes.  For more free investment insights, join the Get Invested community: If you want to continue investing in your knowledge, join me and many other like minded investors in our Get Invested community right now. I send a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. It’s full of investment and lifestyle tips, my personal book recommendations, apps I use to enhance life and so much more. Just visit bushymartin.com.au and sign up at the bottom of the page … because this is just the beginning! Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

And I think, you know, one of the messages that I'd want to get out there for people to just to think about is that healthy aging isn't something that happens in your 60s and 70s. It's a lifelong process. And our 30s, 40s and 50s is a particularly critical period. And it's a period where people often sort of fall off the horse, as it were, and as we've already been discussing, can sometimes really find themselves in a hole and then starting to be troubled by sort of lifestyle diseases that nobody really ever wants to have to deal with, but can be a function of us not keeping our bodies in the sort of working condition that they really need to be in to function well. I define success in life as really a balance of accomplishments, all right? And so for me, that's absolutely about career success, about financial success, it's about relationship success, but it's also about things like health success as well, right? And so, for me, success has got to be about balance because I think if we get it out of balance, then, you know, we don't have a life that can be as fulfilling and satisfying as we might otherwise like it. And so, I think that's a problem is that people start to define success too narrowly and then channel all their time and energy into either career or financial goals or whatever it is to the detriment of other things.

right so that's the first thing that I would say and so if we're defining success that that that way then sustainable success is then about being able to put in place routines and rituals and practices that allow that balance to be maintained over you know over long periods of time and so you know that's really then about again about having good motivation and so if we're talking about the financial, sorry, health success as we just did, then a big part of the motivational equation is going to be that interest and enjoyment, right, because we're not going to be able to sustain it

if we don't have that. So that, for me, is a particularly critical one. So you've got to have a good basis of motivation. You need to kind of know where you want to take it. And so in Get Moving, Keep Moving, one of the stages within the model that is in that book is about casting forward and thinking about, well, where do you want to take this? You know, when you're 70, what do you want life to be looking like? What do you want a healthy, ageing future to look like? And I think when it comes to that, people don't often get clear enough about why they're looking

to do anything about their health. And it becomes problematic because it sets up an unstable motivation that doesn't allow people to be able to succeed in the way that they'd like. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills and their money and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you to

start living by design, not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less, and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey, and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested. Hi, Friday Fighters. How long and how well do you want to live? And how well are you aging? And how often do you work up a sweat doing something that you

really enjoy physically? Now, your mind might be boggling, but is it every day, a few times a week, very occasionally or never. And have you ever really thought about any of this? And if you do, is it just a fleeting passing thought before you get on with the rest of your busy life? Now, I'm sure there's been times that you've thought about the prospect of dying and how long you live, but how much time have you spent thinking about the ongoing quality of your life as you get older? Because it's easy for time to slip through your fingers and the hustle and muscle of everyday life and before we know it, like frogs in a slowly heating pot, we cooked without realising it. So are you ageing well? What's your current quality of life like and

where's it heading? Are you starting to groan when you bend down or stand up? Do you start gasping for breath every time you walk up a flight of stairs? Do you find that you're not quite as flexible as you used to be? That you're always feeling tired and grumpy and dragging yourself around. You can't quite do what you used to do. And you just shrug and put it down to the fact that you must be getting older. And when and what is the time that is stopping you from regular physical activity? What choices have you made or unconsciously making that mean that physical activity and regular movement has or is being relegated from a must-do regular part of your life to a nice to do or have to do if I've got time. Because for the most part, it's the little

incremental decisions that we make along the way that end up forming habits that can either keep us on track or leave us far off track without us even realising it. Now for me, I've been very lucky. I had my midlife crisis early in my 30s when I lost everything in pursuit of my career. I put my heart and soul into architecture and running a busy practice at the expense of absolutely everything else. I even gave up my beloved hockey after badly tearing my hamstring. But when I lost everything, I was forced to stop and prop and reflect on how I was going to do things differently from that point on. And while I didn't realize it at the time, the seeds of my belief in that sustainable success in anything lies at the intersection of what I call the three

elves, self, health, and wealth, where self is your mindset, expectations, attitudes, and outlook. Health revolves around your daily disciplines and happy habits in relation to how you breathe, sleep, eat, move, and meditate. And these two combine to determine your wealth in however you choose to define that. And it's like a three-legged stool. Knock out one of these legs and everything collapses. So after my massive wake-up call, I shook myself off and was determined not to make the same mistakes again.

And now, thankfully, I'm set to play and celebrate my 800th game of hockey in a couple of weeks time. And while I have periods where I struggle to keep motivated and keep moving physically, I feel blessed that I now enjoy sustainable active living. So what about you? Now be honest with yourself because no one else apart from me is listening. What are your pursuits outside of work? Do you still make time for them? Do you hear yourself saying, yeah, I'm going to get back to this. I should do more physical activity if only I had the time. And how many times you had a burst of enthusiasm to improve your health? Your New Year's resolutions come around and you bought your new shoes, joined a gym and enrolled in an online

program. After getting off to a good start, you're feeling great. Then, as it often does, life starts to conspire against you. Work pressures, illness, family issues and or an injury. Soon after that, your interests start to wane and you get a sense that you're failing yourself and that it might just all be too hard? If you're answering yes to any of these questions, you're not alone. It's a common challenge, so how do you overcome it? Well, that's where today's special guest comes in. Dr. Gordon Spence has written a fantastic book about it called Get Moving, Keep Moving, Healthy Aging and How Physical Activity Loves You Back. It's a book that addresses the experience of becoming disconnected from physical activity and exercise and the stuckness that can come with

and he's joining us today to dig into this extremely important but often overlooked subject. So welcome and let's get invested Gordon. Hi Bushy. Gordon I've been looking forward to catching up with you for a while and but before we sort of get into the guts of it can I get you to give us a bit of a rundown on who you are, what you do, what you do differently and most importantly why you do what you do mate. Okay so I guess probably the easiest way to describe me is to say that over the past 20-odd years, I've had something of a portfolio career. So I started out working in retail banking

and then sort of moved into international trade, did that for about a dozen years, until I realised that it just wasn't quite for me, that there was something else that I needed to be getting from my working life. So I took myself off to back to school at the age of 31 to do a psychology degree. um and to cut a long story short i did a bachelor's degree master's and a phd and and ended up 2006

coming out as a registered psychologist but also an academic so i i had about um 20 years all told in academia and i've worked in academia but also in private practice because i've maintained that for for the entire time and that's really important to me because i like working with people and I like helping people to lock down the sort of change that they desire for themselves and then most recently I guess what I've been doing is exploring other interests and so in particular exercise science and at the moment I've been exploring fusions of psychology and exercise science with a real focus on healthy aging as you've sort of already described in your intro so that's kind of where i'm at at the moment um and it's been a it's been an art of joy

and um really really enjoying being able to you know send a send an important message out to the world about the importance of keeping ourselves active as a way of supporting healthy aging yeah i love it mate well we're going to really dig into that shortly but i'd like to sort of circle back and if you look back through that portfolio uh career that you you've talked about lovefully to share some of the highs and lows the challenges that you've had what made you make those decisions to jump from one thing to the next and what have you learned from that and how has that led you to what you're doing today yeah well i i guess um some of those some of those those leaps and changes that i've made have been born essentially from

dissatisfactions so um one of those dissatisfactions that took me back to study psychology was just I just wasn't enjoying my career um was just something that I was finding you know difficult to get out of bed every morning and and really sort of uh show up in a way that was good for me and good for the you know the organizations I was working for because I just wasn't quite engaged enough but more recently um the the the movement towards exercise science was really born out of, again, another source of frustration that I was experiencing through my late 30s, early 40s. Like a lot of people, I was, you know, I was working hard

and, you know, working on my career, doing this and that. And I found over the course of about 10 to 12 years that, yeah, I was busy and I was getting lots done and having a family and buying houses and you know doing all of that sort of stuff um but there was a lot that was getting left behind um and by my mid-40s i was about 10 kilos uh heavier than i you know would describe as my fighting weight if you like um i was um pretty stressed a lot of the time i wasn't getting as much sleep as i as i as i really should have and i was getting three or four colds a year And it was just this sort of general feeling of, you know,

not being as kind of having as much well-being in places as I could have done. And as my 50th birthday was starting to approach, I started to, you know, like a lot of people do, started to sort of think a little bit about where I was at and where life was heading, and I just got sick of having the same conversations with myself about why I wasn't being able to get out and do things that I knew I would enjoy. And principally that's running.

I've always been, you know, right back to my late teens and early 20s was a really keen runner. I really liked the feeling of being able to run and run strongly over a long period of, you know, over a considerable distance and just loved that but lost connection from it. and so when i was 48 i um i basically uh gave myself an uppercut and uh decided it was time to slap the shoes on and get out and run again so i set myself a goal which was to run a second marathon before i turned 50 so i'd given myself about 18 months or so to get get uh ready for

that uh managed to accomplish that uh six months before my birthday and then set some other goals which really kind of set me on course to continue running and to establish it as a sustainable practice for me, and I haven't missed a beat ever since, and that was seven years ago. Yeah, that's awesome. I'd love for you to sort of dig a bit into, you mentioned there that things just sort of fell away, that running was a passion from early but it fell away.

Can you talk us through how that occurred? Because I think it's something that's pretty common and it sort of happens without us realising it. So I'd love for you to unpack your thinking and what you did and why that sort of fell away. Yeah, well, in some ways there won't be too many surprises here. I mean, you know, through my 30s and 40s I got married in my early 30s and then I was finishing my PhD, you know, of course,

the next four years and then we had kids. So, you know, life just got really busy. And it was really easy to start to preference those other things, you know, work and earning money and, you know, sort of setting life up, as it were, and start to relegate things like regular physical activity and running to the back burner, in a sense, to turn it from essential effort to discretionary effort. And that just happened far too easily. um and you know putting excuses in place about why why i wasn't able to do it i often i often reflect back on on um you know the example that some world leaders people like john howard have kind of i guess uh have established and said over the years um were they able to maintain um regular physical activity uh practices and routines um despite you know doing things like running

running a country um you know i think that thinking about those kinds of role models if you like have been quite useful because it leads you to start to think well if they're able to do what the hell's wrong you know why is it not something that i can manage myself what was really interesting was when i essentially got to a point where i was tired of of all the excuses that I was putting in place for myself and when I got myself running and when I had set myself some goals, some things to achieve, how quickly and easily many of those excuses and reasons for not being active dropped away and actually really didn't trouble me

as much as I thought that they might. So, you know, there were many of the things I'm sure your listeners perhaps recognise around just general busyness and, you know, when you're immersing yourself in a career or immersing yourself in trying to, you know, create financial independence for yourself or whatever it is, it's really easy to get tunnel visioned and start to forget about some of these other things and deprioritise them in such a way

that we start to think, oh, yeah, it's something I'll get to later and we deprioritise it and before we know it, we're, you know, we're sort of getting ourselves into a real hole. Yeah, it's certainly a pretty common theme amongst a lot of hard-working Aussies these days, there's no doubt. Gordon, I'd love for you, just as a slight aside here, share with us something unique or interesting that you haven't ever shared publicly before.

um yeah i um i suppose i've already started to talk a little bit about it i think one of the things that's perhaps a little bit unique about me and i've certainly had people sort of reflect on this with me um is that i've become a mature age student twice in my life um so i did at the age of 31 i've already talked about that when i went i went off and uh started my psych degree I also did it again at the age of 51 when I went 12 years after saying I would never study again. I found myself sitting in a functional anatomy class, not 101, but it was an undergraduate class, sitting there in a lecture about

to learn about the anatomy of the heart. Now, that's quite a challenging thing to do. You know, I already had three degrees. I didn't particularly need another one. um but i decided to go and get it because you know i've already told you a little bit about my reconnection with running three years into that journey so you know i started at 48 i'm talking about when i was 51 now three years into that journey i had become so curious so kind of fascinated about what was happening in my return to running and what was happening for me physically

as I started to not only regain fitness but then also started to challenge myself and start to do you know other marathons and even attempt ultra marathons it was just a fascinating experience and I you know I made a few mistakes I had to go off and see a podiatrist and a physio and a sports nutritionist at different times to try and support what I was doing and every time I walked away from those consultations my head was like popcorn it was like just I was going in you know there's this journey into my physical self, which as a psychologist, of course, you know, I'm kind of going, wow, this is amazing. And I just wanted to know more. And I thought, well, let's see what I can do. I checked out to see whether it was possible to do a graduate certificate of some

sort, but no, I couldn't do that. Didn't have enough base knowledge in exercise and sports science. And it just came down to the kind of a question of, well, you know, if you need this knowledge then why don't you go off and get it um and i just thought well i will so i went and enrolled in a um bachelor of exercise and sports science been doing it part-time got a few course credits but i'll be finished at the end of the year so um mate it's just been the most extraordinary experience and and has really fueled my interest in wanting to fuse psychology and exercise science together particularly with this health this this focus on healthy aging particularly with a focus on people wanting to return to exercise in their 30s, 40s and 50s, because it's such a critical

period of time in regards to healthy aging. And I think, you know, one of the messages I'd want to get out there for people to just to think about is that healthy aging isn't something that happens in your 60s and 70s. It's a lifelong process. And our 30s, 40s and 50s is a particularly critical period. And it's a period where people often sort of fall off the horse, as it were, and as we've already been discussing can sometimes really find themselves in a hole and then starting to be troubled by sort of lifestyle diseases that nobody really ever wants to have to deal with but can be a function of us not keeping our bodies in the sort of working condition that they really need to be in to function well. Yeah I think you make a really good point there because

it's this sort of almost subconscious assumption that oh well I don't need to worry about that healthy aging stuff until i retire exactly but it's the the habits that we're we're developing or not developing uh way earlier than that and i'd love for you to share you know any thoughts you have around you know for those who who aren't starting to or maintaining regular exercise particularly in their 30s and 40s sorry the equation what what that leads to what are the downsides of that and and what sort of uh things start to evidence themselves uh if they do become pretty sentient during that time oh well you know all sorts of things really start to um start to uh become problematic um you know i think our bodies are a design that we've evolved in a

certain way right we our bodies have evolved um on the basis of undertaking a certain amount of physical activity right you know we we we we process fuel sources and we metabolize in in particular ways based on almost an assumption that we will be moving to a certain degree um and this is where we this is where the whole lifestyle um um disease issue really starts to become front and center because um as evolutionary biologists um sort of describe it you know a lot of these lifestyle diseases are mismatches they're mismatches because we live in these high convenience societies um that don't require us or don't impel us to get active and to to move our bodies in ways that support good physical functioning um and so as soon as we start to

stop kind of if you like um uh using our bodies in a way that they revolve to be used we start running into into strife um and and you know there's all the kind of the um the accompanying difficulties of that so we we lose we start to lose muscle strength if we're not using our muscles and we're not uh we're not engaging in in um forms of exercise that provide some sort of stimulus to our skeletal system then we start to lose bone density as soon as we start to lose bone density then we you know other things start to happen that we're you know we go out and we we start to do a little bit of exercise and we find we can't cope with it right and we start to feel injured and and you know there's there's all sorts of things that can come with that your question about um

the downside what was that question can you just throw that yeah i guess what i'd also like to dig into around that piece of the exercise, Gordon, is, you know, it's the old, I guess the old story, if you don't use it, you lose it. Yes. Does there become a point beyond which it's pretty difficult to climb back out of? It can become difficult but not impossible, right? And this is where I think we need to take a little bit of a pause

and think about the way in which we perceive ageing and particularly around our age. And I think people engage in a lot of self-directed ageism where essentially what they do is they throw up all of these limitations on the basis of the number that they have beside their age. And so, you know, you have people starting to decide that, oh, I can't do that because I'm 48 or I can't do

that because I'm 55. um but i think i think what we need to recognize is that we are sitting on a whole lot of untapped physical capacity that we don't really realize is there so just as a as a little example if you were to have a look at some of the world records world record times in swimming and running and you have a look at those times across the different decades what you see over time is that you know swimming times and running times they of course they they you know people get get slower right but at sort of the top of the tree what we see is that those those world record times don't really head south they don't really start to dramatically decrease till the age of 70

right right so there's a steady decline right i'm not saying that there's not there's a steady decline but they don't dramatically decline till the age of 70 and one of the things that i think is really interesting about that is that there's we retain this this this physical capacity in a way that I don't think we we always realize and so some of the the downsides or the difficulty can really be around that behavior change piece and you know first of all I think one of the things we have to do is to have a good chat to ourselves about what might be possible and what we might be capable of and start to and start to think about potentially what we could do and what might be enjoyable for us because i think if people want to get back on the physical activity

horse as it were then for me the starting point has got to be interest and enjoyment right got to be interested enjoyment over and above anything else because if you want to sustain it over time then you're more likely to do that if you're doing something that you're interested in i mean it's just sort of common sense really in many ways but i don't think that's often the person's starting point person's starting point is often well you know they've had a health scare or they've gone to the doctor or maybe their partner is sort of nagging them to lose a bit of weight and so they get back on the horse as it were by deciding to do the first thing that sort of comes to mind or the last thing that they did so it might be going off to the gym or it might

be running or it might be swimming or it might be whatever um but potentially without spending a lot the time thinking about well yeah how much do i actually really enjoy this um uh because if we don't enjoy it then it's more likely to be an unstable source of motivation uh and and just won't last yeah totally agree you mentioned something there that sort of uh pricked my attention i mean you said until the age of 70 what what happens at 70 or thereabouts that that changes the equation substantially i'm i'm interested because i'm not too far away from it So from a personal perspective, I'd love to know what changes in our physicality or physiology or wherever it is that means

that when we hit that sort of 70 target, things start to change. Yeah, well, there's a natural ageing process that takes place that affects, you know, muscle and bone and various other things and cell health. Sarcopenia and osteopenia are natural processes where we experience you know a physical decline right um and and it's it's certainly the case that that that is that is will continue but what we do know is that the to the extent that we um we use it to use your your phrase before um to the extent that we do that we are able to slow

that process right we're able to slow it down um and not have it sort of kick off and accelerate on us because we're not doing anything the old use it and lose it scenario so i like to say use it and keep it right um and and really you know give yourself the opportunity to be able to get into you know 60s 70s 80s and still be able to do things to be able to get out and be physically independent i know a lot of you your listeners are probably um you know give a lot of time and attention to thinking about their their financial independence i think it's also important to invest in physical independence as well right doing things to maintain physical health across the decades that can maintain muscular strength maintain bone density maintain cardiovascular

fitness in ways that you know keep those lifestyle diseases um as a non-negotiable for us and allow us to be able to really be able to enjoy life for as much of life as we can, you know, be able to get into our 70s and 80s and do remarkable things. And there are people doing remarkable things out there, running marathons and ocean swimming and doing all sorts of other stuff. And the really interesting thing to me is that often we look

on, you know, those examples of people in the community doing you know what seemed to be quite remarkable things and we almost sort of see them as being oddities because i i don't i sort of look at them and i sort of think well you know you kind of in some ways just um you're tapping into what's there you know a physical capacity that is there and is available to you um if you're prepared to um you know shape your life and create some some routines um that can uh that can allow it all to happen yeah beautifully said i and i totally agree with what you said earlier around you know that there's this sort of uh measuring stick that we've we've put on ourselves where well we've we we're 40 now then we can't do this and

we're 50 now we can't do this and now we're 60 we can't do this yeah uh the the ones and i guess you've had first-hand experience with this but both yourself and the others that you've uh interviewed in the book where they don't apply those limitations to themselves what's different about their thinking to a lot of other people's thinking do you think um the the interviews that i did in the book yeah yeah well um so i think from in the in get moving keep moving i one of the things i wanted to do as you said is is interview some some people about their experience and I particularly interviewed them about their process of returning to physical activity and they were all late 30s,

early 40s and get them to share their experiences with me and their reasons for wanting to return to exercise were in many ways quite similar. They all wanted in one way or another to engage in a healthy way sorry to live in a sorry to age in a healthy way um and they just they just had different ways of expressing it but one one of the people that i interviewed her um her mother was struggling with dementia and she knew she knew that um you know physical activity cardiovascular health uh is a known uh factor to um i said buffer against the the risk of

of dementia and so she wanted to be doing that because she didn't want her mum's experience to be her experience right and so um she decided to to to get back into some things that she she hadn't done in a while which included um swimming and running and uh and away she went um more recently um uh bushy i've i've i've been doing some other interviews um talking to people about other physical pursuits and things that they really enjoy doing so these don't change stories these are stories about you know what do you love to do what's your passion and getting people to talk about their different physical pursuits and so um uh one of the things that's really interesting is that when you sit down and you talk to people who ocean water swim or they

fence or they like fencing sword sword play um or they um crossfitters or um they what else could they do you know just any any physical pursuits that they might might engage in when you talk to them about that experience what you hear from them is something where they almost they don't consider what they do is to be exercise it's just part of their life it's something that they can't imagine um not having in their life um and so this is why i'm sort of saying to to you um that interest in enjoyment for me is got to be the starting point because um as soon as you as soon as you start picking things up like your hockey for instance all right for you i'm imagining that Most of the time, it's no great effort for you to, you know,

get the hockey stick out and want to go and run around the field and hit a ball around, right? I do it every day, mate. I go for a run three or four times a week. I take my hockey stick with me. It's part of the act for me. And I just love it. I focus on it.

It gets me, you know, gets my head out of work. I come back feeling refreshed. And then on the day, playing with the boys, there's a camaraderie. there's there's there's a whole bunch of stuff there that uh really lights the fire for me mate and i i just i just can't imagine my life without it quite frankly exactly that's right and when you talk to when you talk to someone who's a mad king kayaker or a mountain biker or an ultimate frisbee person or a sailor or any of those people they'll tell you very similar things i'm going to circle back to some of that stuff because i'm going to deep dive into the book shortly but before we do

so? Because we've sort of been circling around this. I'd love for you to give me your rundown on what you believe to be your definition of sustainable success. So, look, sustainable success for me. So, let me first of all just define the way, talk a little bit about how I define success, right? So, I define success in life as really a balance of accomplishments, all right um and so for me that's that's absolutely about career success about financial success it's about relationship success but it's also about things like health success as well right and so for me success has got to be about it's got to be about balance because i think if we get it out of balance then then you know we don't have a life that um can be as fulfilling

and satisfying as we might otherwise like it um and so i think that's a problem is that people start to define success too narrowly and then channel all their time and energy into either career or financial goals or whatever it is to the detriment of other things right so that's the first thing that i would say and so if we're defining success that that that way then um sustainable success is then about being able to put in place routines and rituals and practices that allow that balance to be maintained um over you know over long periods of time um and so you know that's really then about again um about having good motivation um and so if we're talking about financial um sorry um health success as we just did then a big part of the motivational equation

is going to be that interest and enjoyment, right, because we're not going to be able to sustain it if we don't have that. So that, for me, is a particularly critical one. So you've got to have a good basis of motivation. You need to kind of know where you want to take it. And so in Get Moving, Keep Moving, one of the stages within the model that is in that book is about casting forward

and thinking about, well, where do you want to take this? You know, when you're 70, what do you want life to be looking like? What do you want a healthy, ageing future to look like? And I think when it comes to that, people don't often get clear enough about why they're looking to do anything about their health, and it becomes problematic because it sets up an unstable motivation that doesn't allow people to be able to succeed in the way that they'd like.

Yeah, I love that. Well, I'm going to bridge that into getting you to talk about what your ideal lifestyle looks like. Paint us your life vision long-term. What are you doing? How, when? Because I'd love for you to sort of paint a vivid picture of that and then talk to us about what you're investing in today

that's going to attain and maintain that long-term. um well i've got to say it i know i've already spoken a bit about interest and enjoyment that for me if i was to define anything um as being almost like a central uh rallying point for me in anything that i'm doing at the moment it's about following my interests uh it's about you know really trying to give expression to the things that that i find interesting and i find important that's where the this is where the the writing has become really important it's why the book was so important for me it took three years to to write the book for for a variety of reasons both my parents passed away during the writing of the book and we had a pandemic so you know it was

a in in some ways a bit of a difficult process um but i'm happy to say that having done that um i you know got the book published and had a couple of launches and that was really great and really really satisfying and then i just had this this sort of this inclination that uh i'd missed an opportunity um the opportunity that i've missed in the first book was i hadn't said enough about different forms of physical pursuit and physical activity that people could potentially commit to uh and i thought no all right we need to do something about that um and so long story short first book took three years second book's taken three months so my son and i have been writing the the second book and we've just uh it's 98 done we're going to put it into proofreading in

a couple of weeks and you know by the end of the year we'll we'll have that one out um what i'm saying to you bushy is that for me it's it's part of success across the remaining um period of my life is going to be about continuing to push out those what i think are really important messages and try to create, you know, a meaningful contribution and a bit of a legacy around helping people to kind of create the sorts of lives that they want to be creating for themselves so that they can get the most out of it. Life is for the living.

And I think that we need to keep things in balance as much as we can. I mean, Aristotle was right, you know. um the golden mean it's it it's about creating a balance of things um that can allow our time on this earth to be as enjoyable and satisfying as possible yeah i love it and uh we're right on the same page without your your vision in that regard is is perfectly in alignment with with my own in that capacity gordon so we're we're we're in the right place to to have this chat Tell me, if you sort of look back on what you've invested your time

and energy and your money in so far, and I'm not talking in physical investment here, I'm talking in exercise and, you know, all aspects of life, what's been your best and worst investment, you believe, and what have you learnt from both of them? um so the the worst investment best investment they're kind of going to be the flip side um for me education has been just such an enabler um and i didn't i didn't pursue it on leaving school

um and i'm not one to necessarily regret um decisions that i've made um i sort of you know if you make a bad decision well you know okay try and make that bad decision a little better but by learning what you can um so you don't make it again yeah exactly and in a way i think if i if i had gone off and um and studied straight out of school that you know the next sort of 15 20 years might have been might have been a bit different but i had a different set of experiences and And, yeah, end of the day, I sort of steered the ship back in another direction. So to get around to answering your question about the best investment,

well, I think the best investments that I've had from a career point of view and from a self-development point of view are the decisions that I took to go and be a middle-aged, sorry, middle-aged, a mature-aged student at 31 and then at 51. I just can't underestimate the importance of that. I've found both experiences to be completely enlivening for me, particularly in terms of helping me to understand what sort of contribution I can potentially make and learn along the way.

And, you know, for me, life is exciting and interesting and and satisfying when you're learning um and i can remember at one stage um in a previous role when i just got a sense that i had stopped learning um in the role that i was in and it was a horrible place to be goodness me it was a horrible place to be um so i think we need it's really important to keep our minds active to continue to connect with things that um you know feel meaningful important uh and keep going yeah 100 agree mate the day i stopped learning is the day i die yeah for that very reason that i think unfortunately our society belts the curious curiosity out of us because there's a big conforming element um that make makes things

easier if we can sort of break through that and just keep questioning and keep curious and keep interested then i imagine i imagine in running your podcast you must be you must be on a continual learning journey with that it's my the best personal development exercise i've ever done gordon the the every episode expands my mind in areas that uh i would never have taken the time to even contemplate so uh you know it's it's the reason why i'm like a kid in a lolly shop in the podcast gordon because it's just uh every week i'm i'm talking to fantastic people like yourself and and learning new things and and and just thinking about stuff that i otherwise wouldn't so we're really enjoyable in that regard but i now want to sort of really uh we've sort of

touched on a fair bit of already but i want to really deep dive now into the whole healthy aging sustained active living uh area uh given uh your you know focus and expertise in that area and we sort of touched on uh your book uh already but i'd love for it to really uh hit us uh squarely between the eyes with you know why did you write it what are the key messages as you see it and and who's best suited to pick it up and have a read yeah fantastic okay so um so i'll give you a little bit about about the backstory in regards to um um me re re-engaging with running at the age of 48 yeah and and i also told you a little bit about how um over the course of three odd years of returning to running um i got you know pretty interested in what was happening to me

as i was attempting to do it and that led to me you know going back and studying again um one of the things that occurred to me and i remember it occurred to me when i was you know i was in the middle of a run um which is often where i think i do some of my best thinking quite frankly um was thinking about the experience that i've been through and relating it and sort of layering it across other people's experience that I, you know, was aware of and thinking to myself, you know, I think there's a book in this, right, because I was reflecting on, you know, sort of 20, 30 years of my life and thinking

about the patterns and the decisions and, you know, where life had been and gone and thinking, well, how many other people are out there? Also, you know, in a similar situation to the one that I was in when i was 48 you know you change the numbers it could be 35 could be 39 could be 43 um could be 52 you know how many other people are out there and lost a connection right to their physical selves in ways that um are starting to become a little bit problematic um and so i thought yeah i think there's a book in this and so i i i sat down one day and i thought right i want to do this and i

started writing a bit of my own story because that seemed like a pretty sensible place to start wasn't quite sure what the book was going to be about at that point other than I wanted it to be about a reconnection to physical activity and exercise and my first impulse was to to talk to some others and I knew I had about half a dozen people who I knew via Facebook and just conversations and and so forth who had in one way or another um got themselves moving again and so i just i just reached out to them and said hey look you know i can write this book and we'd love to have a chat and i interviewed them and then um transcribed the interviews went through themed them wrote them up as stories yeah um narratives physical activity narratives if you like and and that was

that was where the the book started and it was as i was doing that as i was writing up my own story and then there's that i started to notice some patterns um and i'll you know sort of long story short i won't bore you with the details but basically a model emerged out of the writing process uh a four-stage model that seemed to me to be um a good way to approach um preparation if you like for for getting for getting moving again love it i'd love for you to uh sort of whet our appetite and give us a a taste tester if you like on the the four stages having read the book now and it is a really enjoyable easy read and i'd love for you to sort of break down those four stages and sort of health activation process framework if you don't mind yeah that's

right that's what then that's what i called it health activation um process and i'll tell you I very specifically named it health activation. One of the reasons was I wanted to get away from health promotion language, not because I don't think health promotion is important because it really is, right? People need to know, you know, what's required for us to be able to function well in regards to sleep and physical activity and exercise and hydration,

sorry, eating and hydration, et cetera. We need to know about that. But one of the things that I was becoming aware of was a real sense that when it came to a lot of the health promotion messages that people seemed to be, you know, sort of tuning out in a way that I think health agencies over the course of, you know, you stretch right back to the 70s when the Life Be In It campaign was launched, right?

It's still, yeah, absolutely, still one of the most successful, if not the most successful public health campaign that's ever been because of the way that that was done. And since then, health agencies have become very, very good at putting those messages out there to the extent that if you stopped anybody in the street and you said, well, what do you need to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle? They'd probably have something to say about, you know, five serves of veg, two serves of fruit you know eight glasses of water eight hours of sleep you know people can can you know recite this stuff they know it yeah um and i think that people have almost become overexposed to it so

much so that when people you know come into contact with those messages they kind of go yeah yeah yeah i know all that so those are almost like a tuning out yes we almost become numb to it yeah that's exactly right um and the other thing about it is that health promotion tends to be innately prescriptive so in other words it's health experts telling the general population what to do right and fundamentally most people don't like being told what to do yeah you know what i mean totally and so part of the book is is i really didn't want to go at it in that way i didn't want to go out and start to prescribe, I wanted to give people a way of thinking about their health so that they could activate themselves

and have it sort of come from within, so generating that self-motivation for change rather than doing it because the doctor and the health experts and everybody else in society is telling me that I should. That sets up an unstable motivation, right? Yeah. So the whole idea behind the health activation process is really that. And so how have I approached it?

So I've said in the first stage, the first stage is reflect. And reflect is about thinking back to times in your life, earlier times in your life, potentially when you're a kid or an adolescent, and thinking about things that you used to do that you really enjoyed. And so the starting point really in the book is this idea that as human beings, we are naturally active creatures, right? When we come into the world and when we're kids, we love to run

and jump and twist and turn and push and pull and all those things. We just do it because we love to move our bodies in space, right? And so I think we have this innate enjoyment of physical activity, which we really engage with as children and adolescents and then into early adulthood and then lose. We start to lose it in our 20s and then really starts to accelerate it in our 30s and 40s, as you and I have already discussed earlier in the chat.

Yeah. Right. And so that's making sense, I hope, of this first stage, reflect, which is about, well, think back. Think back to, you know, what I was doing when I was 12 or 15 or whatever. What did I really enjoy? What would I do for no other reason than the sheer enjoyment of it all?

It might be cycling. It might be swimming. It might be hockey, right? Let's do that. Let's tap into that and reminisce about it. Let's take it one step further. Let's really, you know, enliven it by pulling out the trophies or the old photos or ringing up an old teammate, whatever it might be. spend a little bit of time reliving it reminiscing about it because that can be a powerful source of

energy yeah that's reflect yep second stage is um project so in the first phase we've looked backwards in the second stage we're looking forwards we're projecting forwards and thinking about well what sort of healthy aging future do i want to have let's go forward to you know when I'm 65, 70, 75, and think about, well, what do I want life to be like? What do I want to be doing? How do I want to be feeling? That kind of thing. And start to sketch out like almost a personal vision of what that looks like,

to make sense of anything we might be doing now, right? So that's project. Now, by this stage, and the book, you know, takes people through some exercises to help them start generating some options about things they might do and they might at this point have come up with a few things that they might think that they'd like to do so let's take your hockey example so it might be somebody goes yeah i used to love playing hockey i want to play hockey again fantastic that might be the option the third stage is inspect and the third stage is really about assessing physical and psychological

readiness and so that physical readiness might be about recognizing bushy that oh you know i haven't played hockey in 10 years and last time i did i snapped my hammy right um i might need to just check in and see how physically ready for this i am maybe i need to go off and you know maybe see my gp or maybe go and you know go and get a a little physical assessment done um by you know the local gym or where it might be let's assess where we're at physically because you know what we want to make sure we do is get back into it with a hope of enjoying it right and we want to make sure that we perspire rather than expire but we don't want to go off and go crazy and then you know blow a gasket um because you know it's it it's very hard to enjoy our life if we're not

living right so we want to make sure that we're making a sensible decision so that's the physical readiness but then also really important is your psychological readiness and sometimes what that that really means is you know to what extent am i really on board with this am i really owning it am i ambivalent about what i'm about to do yeah i want to do some hockey but you know actually i'm really really busy and you know i'm on the seesaw right yep if we if we go at things and we and we've got a high level of ambivalence it often means that we're not going to sustain things for very long we're not change ready and so a little process in the book about helping people think that through and start to have a look at whatever ambivalence might be there so that's the third

stage physical psychological readiness the fourth stage is connect this is about looking outwards right it's about looking out into the world and thinking about our social networks and our social supports i think this is almost the most important part of of the whole of the whole model right because you know we we can draw a lot of support and a lot of encouragement a lot of motivation from people in our network now i'm not just talking about you know the people that i might play hockey with or the people i might run or swim with not just talking about that we can be starting to think about an exercise physical activity and exercise ecosystem that sits around us that might include the people that we exercise and do physical activity with but it might also

include other people as well. Anybody in your family who's interested in what you're doing and just takes an interest and likes your Facebook posts or asks you questions about the tournaments that you're in and the goals that you have. It could be the club. The club can be part of your ecosystem. It could be your GP, your physio. Yeah, it could be neighbours. You know, we can develop an ecosystem that we can shape that in some way scaffolds our effort and helps to keep us going right and so I think that's a really important part of this and in the second book when when we talk to you know these different people that um you know really love what they do and the passion that they have for their different uh physical pursuits and sports

all of them bar none talk about the importance of people that they come into contact with um with their physical pursuits and how important they are and how they keep them going and so I think from a motivation point of view and a continuous effort point of view this becomes really really important because you're right you said it sort of um quite a while ago there are some challenges here one of the challenges is behavior change and so why not why do we have to struggle um through this on our own why not connect up with others to the extent that we can so that they can help us and we can help them yeah beautifully said i am 100% agree i in recent times because we're moving around a fair bit i i'm sort of been moving from club to club a little

bit just to keep it in and and that because i'm the johnny come lately a little bit that social element isn't quite there yet you know you particularly at uh my vintage you coming into a club where with guys that have been playing with each other for a long time and you're you're coming in then then i'm finding that social uh piece uh more challenging at the moment for that for that very reason and i'd love to love to sort of dig into that motivation piece a little bit more because uh you know i think the hardest thing in terms of the persistence and the endurance of the exercise is to keep going and to maintain that enthusiasm have you got any thoughts on on how listeners can sort of tap into that so that you know once once they've they've got back

into something they really love uh sustaining that exercise is is often the hard piece what what are your thoughts around that gordon uh look i think one of the things for me is i i don't i don't see that there's any any necessary problem with people just deciding to yeah i want to start going to the gym i want to start you know um doing some body work or or i'm going to start doing some running or some swimming or some cycling or whatever just for the sake of But that's fine. I think people can do that and sustain it for long periods of time. What I tend to recommend to my clients is to try and attach that effort to something.

I think when we can start to do a little goal setting around our physical pursuits, I think it's a really useful way of going. um so for instance yesterday um yesterday we had uh the city of surf um here in sydney yeah 80 000 60 000 80 000 people i'm not sure how many it was um for a lot of people that is absolutely the focus of their um of their activity um the regular physical activity that they engage in is to train for something and to prepare to prepare themselves for something for many people I mean, I know a couple of people who did it yesterday for the first time and it was like it was major. It was like a big, big thing for them and really can help to keep people focused and energized and bring a whole lot of other stuff into play. And so what I mean by that is, you know, if you if you're training for the city to surf or a half marathon or a cold classic, if you're a swimmer or some bike rider, Sydney to Gong, for instance, Sydney to Gong bike ride coming up.

up i think in in november yep all these things have um have have sort of ripple effects in terms of behavior in a way in which we organize our life so for instance you know if i'm going to commit to one of these things then i need to you know do a certain amount of physical activity each each each day or each week but i'll also um potentially then start to yeah look at the way the way I'm sort of eating and the sorts of things that I'm drinking and start to make some nutritional changes that are going to support that goal. And then I might start to change my rest and recovery patterns and actually get myself off to bed a little bit earlier. Do you know what I'm saying? When you put something like that in place, it can start to

then bring other things in line as well in ways that can become really helpful. And then you've got the excitement that sits around those those events you know things like coast walk and you know a whole there's just our communities are jam-packed full of physical activity options of one sort or another that are quite broad and diverse um and in many ways offer something for for most people i think and and this is why i thought yeah it's fine if you want to just go to the gym and and just work out three times a week and that's fine um but it's also the case that you know if i'm going to do another event it could actually also transform any time that i spend in the gym because i'm doing some gym work for the purpose of making a swim or a bike rider or

whatever a little bit easier and and conditioning myself for it so i'm a big believer in if we're wanting to lock down a sustainable change in terms of physical activity, ramp up that excitement factor and really get focused on it by using events and setting some goals that can stretch us a little bit and really give life that kind of extra dimension. Yeah, beautifully said. Without thinking about it, that's exactly what hockey does for me, mate.

Because I need to maintain a certain level to be out on the pitch That means I am in the gym, I do eat the right things, I get the amount of sleep. All those things, those secondary flow-on ripple effects, as you mentioned, wouldn't happen if I didn't have the goal and the enjoyment that I get out of getting out on the pitch on the weekend and running around and smacking the ball in the net. Exactly.

And to the extent that you can do that and spend time on it, you're more likely to enjoy the time that you have out on the pitch, right? you're going to be less susceptible to injury and the whole thing is just going to be a whole lot more enjoyable and exciting so you know it's that sounds great. Yeah and I think the other flow on effect because it in a roundabout sort of way it also helps your work because you're thinking more clearly you're a bit sharper it does that ripple effect is really important and And that's probably the thing that I think a lot of people miss out on. I know if there's a period where I miss out on exercise for a day,

I'm a grumpy, grouchy, you know, I sort of build up a bit of tension. And as soon as I get to that point, I go, right, I need to get out and do something because I just burn off the aggression and then I'm back to calm and I can be more meaningful in what I'm doing at work as well. So it's not just what you're doing, the physical activity, it's its flow and effect to everything beyond that. So even with your relationships with your partner and everything,

you're better because you're out there huffing and puffing. Look, yeah, well, you've just opened up the topic of benefits of physical activity. We won't have time, but, boy, we could say a lot about that. You know, engagement in physical activity, we know from a cognitive perspective in terms of, you know, mental abilities, has all sorts of positive effects, effects like improving processing speed memory recall executive functions the ability to you

know exercise self-control to think flexibly all that stuff you know a lot of your listeners have been knowledge workers and people that you know think for a living um well physical activity just does a whole bunch of good stuff uh for helping us to think well right and we we also know that there are sorts of post-exercise benefits that exist for people as well and there's been studies done looking at um how people get cognitive benefits from one bout of physical activity right going out and and doing something walking running swimming whatever it might be for anything up to 20 minutes can can lead to some of those improvements that i was already talking about you know memory recall executive function improvements those sorts of things is just huge

there's huge benefits to be had and the other thing that always amazes me it doesn't amaze me but one thing I like because I like to go out and run and I'll often go out and run for an hour or more um is is some of the insights and some of the creative thinking that can occur for me when I go off and do that that I might go off um go for a run not with the explicit intention of trying to solve a particular problem but don't you know when I let my mind relax and when I sort of tune into my surrounds and start to, you know, just sort of let my mind drift a little bit, sometimes you get these blinding insights about things, problems that potentially start

to get solved because of this different mode of physical operation that I've gone into and that brings a real benefit in terms of, you know, the way in which I'm thinking about stuff or the perspective that I now have about a problem that I might have been holding on to. So there's, you know, there's all sorts of different things that we can gain from a commitment to physical activity. And what I love about it, Gordon,

is that you get an immediate benefit from it right off the bat, as you just perfectly described, but then the long-term benefits that build on themselves over time to be able to improve and extend the quality of life, because there's no point living to a ripe old age if the quality of life is rubbish, in the meantime, if you're sitting in a wheelchair dribbling out of the side of your mouth with a nurse poking a food down your throat,

then that's no way to live. But if getting active today means that we can extend that quality until the day we pass our last breath, we're at least being able to get up and about and enjoy what we're doing, well, it doesn't get much simpler than that, does it really? can i bushy can i just quote from from you know one um part of one of the interviews out of the book right yeah and it's from leanne and she talks about she was the one i mentioned earlier who you know really got going but on the bait on the back of you know the the difficulty she was

experiencing with seeing her mom sort of um you know struggle with dementia and she says this and And I quote it in the book, right? Yeah. She's talking about how, you know, as a woman, she was able to have babies and how amazing the human body is and all of that sort of stuff. And she says, it's amazing. Now I'm at this age.

And she was, I think she was about 451 at the time. I'm thinking that if I don't look after my body and do things with it, I'm going to lose the physical nature of it. It won't matter how amazing my mind might be if I'm trapped in a chair. That's the thing. there's no point feeling like this sorry there's no point feeling like you're this curious vibrant person on the inside if the outside doesn't let you do anything with it beautifully said beautifully said it's one of my favorite quotes out of the book yeah that that that sums it up

doesn't it i'd i'd also love the story in the book about the dad's army rowing crew can you share a bit of that with us oh that's probably my favorite bit uh look um the dad's army rowing crew okay so um just to make sense of that for your listeners um my i just gotta refer to my dad my dad was a real motivation for me writing this book he inspired in many ways and he was in it and he was a always an active man he was always doing something uh ran for many many years when he couldn't run anymore at about the age of 78 he decided that he wanted to do some rowing had done some rowing when he was a young kid uh always been interested in it but because he couldn't run he thought he would start to row so he did he used to go down to the rowing crew sorry the rowing

club and sort of jump on their rowers and and do a few things anyway um the they had masters rowing crews and stuff and he was approached by um three guys who were putting together a crew for a master's um rowing event and they asked him if he wanted to row with him and he said he he did um at this stage dad was 85 wow um and what then ended up happening was uh he had his competitive rowing debut at the age of 85 at the Penrith International Regatta Centre where they rowed at the Olympics and dad had his first experience of competitive rowing on that day one of the most inspiring days I've ever been able to recall anyway I tell you this because the three guys that rowed with dad that day Dick, Bevan and John they at the time were 71

71 76 and 77 right so dad was the you know dad was the older member of the group um but away they went the reason that i wrote them up in the book is that when i interviewed the five people who um whose stories i i captured every one of them was talking about how they wanted to age in a healthy way every one of them was in one way saying something about how they wanted to be when they were 70 and I thought to myself as I was putting this together I thought you know what I know three guys that are living the sort of life that they are talking about yeah how about I go and interview them awesome so I went and I interviewed them I sat them down I had a lovely hour and a half chatting to these guys about their sport what they love about it and what it delivers

to them in terms of healthy ageing, in terms of physical functioning, and they were just fantastic. And so, you know, one of the things that they talked about, all of them to some extent, was how being active rowers and continuing to compete into their 70s put them into a physical status that their peers, their friends, the people that they knew in Taree, which is where they all live, um just didn't seem to have um and you know going to hospitals and and seeing gps and stuff and

being being told that they're in a remarkable physical shape and you know they got a sort of a sense of pride and it's a satisfaction from from hearing some of those things but they also talked a lot too about the sense of community that's sat around the um the rowing club and how that was a really really important thing for them that there's a whole lot of interaction and friendships that were you know in many ways the the club was like an extension of their family um and they really really um got a lot out of that um they they they still had competitive instincts they still wanted to win when they went to regatta um they still had other goals um it was just a marvelous experience to sit down with these guys and go you know what this is what life could

look like in the 70s they didn't have perfect health they don't have perfect health but they have better health than most people the same age and they're still able to live in a physically independent way and i think that's really important when we get into those later stages of life is that we feel the sense of continuing to be able to make a contribution be able to look after ourselves a sense of self-mastery and confidence etc etc so that was that was why i wanted to interview those blokes and they were just awesome yeah it's just very motivational mate i it's something i sort of allied to this a little bit but i i guess i i get a bit frustrated and i'd love your thoughts on this that we in this sort of the instant uh short-termism that we we're

currently uh surrounded by how do we uh motivate people to embrace delayed gratification so that they're investing themselves now for for long-term benefit it's something i just not seeing it anywhere whether it be physical whether it be uh you know financial uh i've just not seen that commitment to that delayed gratification process and the persistence and dedication that needs to to achieve long-term results in whatever it might be what are your thoughts around that so when you say delayed gratification you're meaning what specifically yeah well let's take it in in the sense of what we're talking about here that the dad's arm is a perfect example really where they they have chipped away uh and just continuing to do things so that they they the benefit is they

can they can do it for longer uh in the in the in the uh investment arena for example Gordon we're talking about you know if you invest a few dollars a day and you keep doing it regularly for long enough you end up very very comfortable down the track but convincing people to even take the action and see the benefit of doing those little things on a very regular consistent basis over a long period of time I don't see a lot of what any insights on on that sort of approach from your your end yeah well if we're talking about um if you're talking about making those investments in physical activity for the purposes of healthy aging um i look i think this is this is where um you know we need to get our head up a little bit um and start to look around

um and start to tune in to um you know stories of the experiences of people like the dad's army rowing crew um to create almost like an impetus in a and a and a and a reason to start to to build a compelling reason um to want to delay gratification and and to to make a few decisions and exercise a bit of well here comes the discipline word a little bit of self uh discipline in the service of something that will pay dividends later on um and i just think that perhaps that's something that people just don't think about right which again is one of the reasons i wanted to included in the book is like what's life look like in some ways the dad's army rowing crew are really speaking back to us from the future yeah if you know what i mean yeah totally about

how it could about how it could be and and how much do we actually think about that do we actually stop and think about that we're so locked up in our own kind of current concerns um and short and as you say, short-termism, thinking about, you know, just the, you know, what's happening in the next 12 months or two years without taking a longer time horizon and thinking more holistically about life. So I think a lot of it's about sort of trying to get our head up and start to think about, well, what do we want to actually create?

And then there's that other question about how are we defining success for ourselves so right at the beginning i said i was saying to you that i sort of define success as a balance of accomplishments right career financial uh relationship health these sorts of things and that um you know if we want to be successful then um you know are we going at it too narrowly or do we need to start to to think a little bit more expansively about how we define that for ourselves yeah beautifully said that's uh really really good way to to bring that to a close i want to sort of jump now into what i call the the ambush fastball or the bushfire lightning round as i affectionately refer to it as gordon so on that score what's your favorite

quote and why my favorite quote so i look there's a few i could probably turn to apart from the one I just gave you from Leanne, I do really like that one. I think it's a beauty. It is a great one. But there is one that I particularly like from American novelist, I think he was a novelist at the end of the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who said, let me make sure I get this right, that happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always

beyond our grasp but but which something like if you sit down quietly may alight upon you yeah i really like that i really like that i think that um you know as a psych um i have heard a lot of people talk about the quest for happiness and sort of doing things to try and pursue happiness and sort of charging at it and trying to really sort of grab it um by doing things intentionally and and i just think that actually when we start to do that it becomes a bit like a slippery piece of soap um and that it when i think we we're in a much better position to be able to experience happiness in life when we when we get busy and go at other things um And, again, it comes back to what I was saying earlier about, you know,

where I'm at at the moment with, you know, really committing to things that I find interesting and enjoyable. If I pursue those things and I engage in them in a really wholehearted way, I find that I have a good experience. I often say to my wife, I'm never as happy as when I'm running. And it's true because I had an injury six months ago, and I've got to tell you, I was a bit of a grumpy bum for about six weeks when I was on crutches.

But a lot of my physical identity, sorry, a lot of my self-identity is locked up in my ability to move. Yeah. Right? So true. So true. Yeah, I love that, mate. Sort of shifting into the literary area,

above and beyond your book and your upcoming book, what's the top book that you'd recommend we have a read of and why? Can I give you two? Yeah, definitely. Okay. So one that I've recommended many times to any of my leadership and executive coaching clients over the years is Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl.

This is a fairly renowned book, very short book, only about 100 pages or so. Viktor Frankl was interned in Auschwitz concentration camp. He was also a psychotherapist. and psychiatrist and it was a story of essentially about him being making it through his experience in Auschwitz and then going on to form a a type of of therapy based on the creation of meaning and I just found it's a it's an incredibly inspirational book about how really in this life the greatest freedom that we have is to choose what things mean to us which is almost sort of

a paraphrase of his essential message and i've just found it to be an enormously helpful um story for people to read uh particularly when they're in in moments of crisis or a great difficulty and challenge and aren't quite sure how to how to get through so man's search for meaning i just think is a great book i often describe it as a three cup of coffee coffee book because it's only about 100 pages you probably get it through it in about three cups of coffee um so that's one um great book by the way i've uh read it a number of times over the years and every time i read it i get something different out of it it's a classic it is an absolute belter um the other one um that i would would recommend this one this one's going to be a slightly

slightly more um uh committed read i would say it is a book called exercised uh the science of physical activity rest and health by a evolutionary biologist uh daniel lieberman i think he's at harvard anyway he talks about um he talks about essentially physical activity he talks about uh human evolution from a physical standpoint and how um we have just got the whole thing around exercise just all screwed up um and how people tend to suffer you know as a result of the paradox of exercise, which is this idea that we know that exercise and physical activity is good for us, but most people don't act in their own self-interest.

They don't do enough about it. And so he sort of goes through and makes a case for engagement in physical activity in ways that I think are enormously practical but also gives a scientific basis for making sense of some of the things that um uh we struggled to do uh and would do um much better with if we could just develop some some positive habits so i just think it's a fantastic book um very very uh well researched and and and articulated and from a really interesting uh really interesting guy great well i'm gonna download um that on the kindle as soon as we get off

the show today gordon i haven't read that one yet and uh it sounds like a really good read so awesome love that next one what's both the worst and the best piece of advice that you've ever received um so the best advice i think i received i know i've already spoken about this at least twice in this i'm sorry if i'm repeating myself no repetition's good no i think i think the um best piece of advice i probably had was from my mum um where my mum went and did a social work degree uh after she had you know i'm the youngest in my family but when i was about 12 i think it was she decided she was going to go off and go to university and do a social work degree um that was back in the late 70s at a time when that wasn't something that um you know your mother tended to

do or mothers and and i remember when i was struggling a bit myself with my direction and I remember her talking to me about her experience and encouraging me to take the step that she had taken and I'll always be grateful for it because I think it was just a fantastic piece of advice and was one of the things that really helped me to get across the line. Yeah, I love it.

What about the flip side? What about the worst piece of advice that you've received? The worst piece of advice? Oh, goodness. I'm struggling with that one. I think I might have repressed it. Or expunged it from your memory banks. Yeah, yeah.

I think I have. I'm not quite sure. That's good. Well, if there hasn't been, then let's leave it at that. What about switching subjects again? And this fits beautifully into what we've been talking about today. What's a personal happy habit, a rewarding ritual or a daily discipline that you think has contributed most to your success today?

I'm going to be really boring. and say that it's it's around it's around my my running habits um i just it's really it's just such an important part of my life it's a it's a sort of a foundation stone and um and i particularly like getting up into we don't live very far from um state forest um so i like to to get up into the into the state forest and run on the trails up there um and you know you're surrounded by bell birds and whip birds and various other things it's just uh beautiful it's an absolute it's an absolute joy um and so you know i i i you know there's other things i could i could mention but that would be the one that's probably the most significant most important for me

yeah and i love that there's a whole lot packed into that which you you've taken us through well today um uh sort of bringing it all uh to a conclusion then if we reflect back on our great conversation today gordon what are the key takeaways and the immediate actions that we need to take okay so um i guess i would summarize it by encouraging um your listeners to have a little bit of a think about how um how they're defining success for themselves um uh and whether they are thinking about it in in in broad terms or whether that perhaps it it might be a little are narrower than than might be helpful um and and as they do that to think about where does health sit within that where does where does physical activity sit within that is it is it sitting on

the margins is it something that we sort of see as a discretionary form of effort rather than essential effort um i think they're useful self-reflective questions to ask ourselves because um you know if that's the case then we may be setting ourselves up for some difficulty down down the track um and the other thing that i would i would say is that if people start to think about that level of physical activity i'm going to come back to it again enjoyment and interest um what are some of the things that are likely to be appealing to people um from physical activity standpoint i just can't emphasize the importance of it enough because um if we do things we love we're more likely to continue doing them it's just going to make the whole behavior change

challenge a little less acute yeah extremely well said mate that that is awesome but uh you have touched on the the new book already yeah and let's perhaps just sort of finish on that in terms of what's new and next for you yeah well that that's that's looming large um so the the follow-up book um is 26 ways to keep moving um and it's an a to z of different um different physical uh physical pursuits i think i've uh i've already uh mentioned a few of them uh in this call already um but it's it's really just designed to um you know to take a peek behind the curtain of people's experience people who love different forms of physical uh pursuit different sports so as i said we start with alpine skiing bog snorkeling crossfit dragon boating

extreme ironing fencing goalball hiking ice skating judo should i go through the lot mountain biking netball open water swimming paddle which is a combination of tennis and squash uh quad ball which is the old quidditch and that's a very serious sport i'm here to tell you yeah surfing table tennis which is a really interesting one uh ultimate ultimate frisbee vigoro which is a combination of cricket and baseball uh wheelchair rugby cross-country running yachting and zakani which is a form of um persian yoga and calisthenics um that uh used to be a training protocol for persian army many years ago so it's an a to z it's an a to z of physical pursuits and we've written it up in such a way as to give people um an opportunity to think

expansively about what they could do because all these things exist in our community right exactly and what a what a great way to get inspired about things that you probably haven't even thought of and and as a means to get moving i i love that mate uh where where can listeners grab copies of your current book and the the one that's coming out okay so um with get moving keep moving um that's on all the um all the usual online sellers at the moment or you can buy it directly from myself by going to www.healthyagingproject.com and there's a link there to to a book page where you could buy the book and we'll be starting to do some pre-release promotion of 26 ways to keep moving in in the coming in the coming weeks love it and and for

those that have listening and really resonated with your message and and want to reach out to you to to perhaps say get you to do some work with them how how can they find out more and and get involved with you again go to the website um and you can send me a message through the website and uh you know i could talk about this stuff for hours so i'd be more than happy to chat to anybody uh about anything that we've we've covered off on today mate uh been very inspirational inspiring and energizing gordon that's been a great chat i really appreciate you joining us today and looking forward to staying in touch and and can't wait wait to read your next book thanks mate thanks bushy thanks gordon

to get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au that's h-e-l-l-o at khgroup.com.au or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash get invested i look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.