The Wellness Scoop - How to Become a Truly Positive Person

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Vex King, the #1 best-selling author of Good Vibes, Good Life talks about how to shift your mindset, how he overcame huge obstacles to create the life he wanted and in doing so learnt to truly internalise positivity and gratitude. We talk about the importance of stopping seeing yourself as a victim in order to move forwards, the balance between positive well-being practices and a chasing of perfectionism, why the idea of self-love is misunderstood and how we can allow change in our lives. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with your host today, me, Ella Mills. So as with last week's episode, I am recording this in advance because I may or may not have a teeny little one at this point, which is a very exciting thought right now. I'm feeling very pregnant and very, very ready to meet her as I record this. But I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest today. Vex King is the number one bestselling author of Good Vibes, Good Life, a book you've probably seen everywhere as well. The cover has definitely populated my

social media feed a lot over the last few months. And I think I'm right in saying he's now sold over a quarter of a million copies since it was published not long ago, which is an unbelievable feat. And I really have always believed in the idea that people inspire people and knowing that other people have made huge shifts and changes in their lives to get to where they want to be gives us such hope that we can do the same I know that's what inspired me at the beginning of my journey with Delicious Yellow and transforming my health and Bex really is the ultimate example of that he has completely transformed his life and in in doing so, he's brought genuine positivity and gratitude into everything he does. And he's done that from a really difficult start. And by his

own admission, the change wasn't easy. He's been through a number of massive challenges and some serious rock bottoms along the way, but he's managed to now learn to see each setback as a moment to evolve. I really was privileged and it felt such an honor to talk to him about it with his openness and kind of willingness to share. And I especially loved his view on self-love and the idea that it's a balance between accepting yourself as who you are today, but equally acknowledging that you deserve better and always working towards that. And his honesty in the fact that life will only change if you consistently put in the work and also the way that he talked about stopping seeing ourselves as victims in life and

that's the only way to kind of move forward to find true ease and true happiness so I think he's basically just got an unbelievable amount of personal anecdotes and wisdom to share with us and I hope you find him as uplifting as I did I feel like this is the perfect episode to listen to where you're sort of making dinner you're chopping you're cooking you're maybe going out for a walk or heading home after a long day and you're trying to unwind and bring a little bit of joy into your life so got to say a massive welcome to Vex thank you so much for joining us on the Delicious Yellow podcast today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure. I'd love to, if it's okay, really just start at the beginning because we were talking about this actually a few weeks ago about kind of creating a really positive

relationship with your career and your work life and the myth of the overnight success. And I'm sure people, you know, have seen what you're doing now and think oh you know I could never get there or you know wonder if something came easily to you but actually it's at the polar opposite and your story is absolutely unbelievable I mean it's phenomenally inspiring you know it seems that you had a really challenging start in your life and understandably made you feel quite uncomfortable with who you were and quite hurt by the world and I wondered if you could set the scene a little bit for us so we could kind of understand where it is that you came from and where it is that you started this journey to where you are today. Yeah sure I completely understand when people think that there's a set of lucky people

people that are blessed in some way in life that actually go on to then succeed. And I used to always question this in my own life because, you know, I grew up in very difficult circumstances. So six months after I was born, my dad died from tuberculosis. My mom was fairly new to the country and she was still kind of learning her way. And after my dad passed away, a series of mishaps kind of happened in our lives. You know, one of my mom's businesses with a abusive family member actually went bankrupt. And we were actually homeless for around three years of our life. And then when we eventually moved to our council estate, we weren't really welcomed there. We suffered a lot of racist abuse. I observed a lot of violence

around me. And we weren't welcomed in that particular area. And I really wanted to seek a way out. I really wanted to change my life. But every time I'd speak to someone around me, they'd tell me to accept the reality because all they knew was struggle and hardship. So they didn't almost know any better. You know, you can't really blame them because when you're used to that, that's all you think that's going for you in life. I decided then to turn to self-development books in my teenage years. And that was after me just browsing the internet and reading a forum. And then I remember someone saying Bruce Lee's success was down to a book called Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And I really disliked reading. But I decided that I would start reading self-development books. And this is one of the

books that I started with. And as I started doing more research, I realized that there were people in conditions that were much worse than mine that had gone on to do something great with their lives. So I thought, well, if they can do something with their lives, surely I can too. And slowly I started applying the wisdom, the tools, the techniques to my life and things started to change. And, you know, I did hit a few roadblocks along the way. And, you know, even till this day, you will face challenges and you will face obstacles. But I can fortunately say that, you know, my life's in a much better place than it was. And I'm very thankful. And what I do now is I try and teach people the same kind of lessons that I've learned along

the way so they don't have to go through maybe what I had gone through, also so they can transform their lives for the better. I love what you said there about, you know, changing your mindset and going against the grain of not accepting the situation as it is and really pushing yourself through that personal development I can only imagine wasn't easy especially to begin with and I'm assuming you've kind of had your ups and your downs and your good periods and your bad periods and I wondered a if that was true and b what it was that kind of allowed you to keep going through when you felt like maybe you were putting in a lot of time and energy into creating change and yet you didn't feel the

change was kind of necessarily happening yet in the way that you would like it to? I think like I started reading self-development books when I was around 15 years old and then like since then I've read over a books easily. And I'm constantly reading. And this is coming from someone that never used to like reading. But it wasn't until I was like 24 or 25, where I really started to see big changes in my life. And just before I started seeing big changes, I had hit an ultimate low. And this is kind of a key message I want to put across to anyone listening is that I'd read a lot of self-development books around positive thinking. And I thought to myself that I had to think positive. And don't get me wrong, positive thinking is essential for living a

positive life. But there's a transformation process that occurs. And I think sometimes people have a positive thought or positive feeling and suddenly they try and get rid of it or they try and repress it. And then what that does, it kind of gives it an opportunity to brew internally and eventually it comes out in some form or manner. And that's what happened to me. I'd hit an ultimate low after thinking I was one of the most positive people in the world. And after that moment where I tried to take my own life, I decided that I could never return to that state. And I thought, well, you know, my mom's worked so hard. All I'd witnessed my whole life was seeing her struggle and putting her kids first. And I didn't want to let her down, but I didn't want her efforts to be for nothing. So I said to myself, I don't want to let her down, but I don't want her efforts to be for nothing. So I said to myself, I'd never get to that place, but I was doing

something wrong here. So I started reading a little bit more and I really started a journey of self-love. And this is where kind of the book comes in. I started establishing new practices and I realized that you can't just be positive for a day or two. And you also can't ignore your like negative emotions that you feel. But a positive life is very dependent on the habits that you have and creating boundaries with people that might not be too great for your mental well being. And there's a lot of things that go into leading a positive life and actually becoming a positive person. And I think I'd been ignorant in some sense to those things and just tried to create some kind of utopia in

my mind that everything was okay when it wasn't. So that's how I've really changed my life since then. And practices such as meditation have helped me so much. Yeah, it's so interesting what you said. And I was actually when I was researching this, I was listening to a couple of other interviews with you. And I think it was on Happy Place with Fern Cotton that you were talking about that difference, for example, in saying you're grateful, just like you're saying you're thinking positively and actually kind of fully being grateful and internalizing that. And I really, I really like that because I think it's very easy to say, okay, I have positive thoughts but it's not it's not as simple as that you've got to kind of actually

action that into your life and you've got to face up to the reality of where you are as well and not push that under the rug yeah I think you have to embrace everything and I think a lot of the time what we tend to do is we tend to say that we're positive people or I feel good. But actually, does the emotion match the thought? But it's the emotion that's kind of sending the energy out there into into the universe. And I feel that a lot of the time people just say that they feel good or yeah, that doesn't bother me, but actually it might. So you need to start to address those things and actually confront those parts. I think we kind of have a habit of trying to put stuff under the rug and try to ignore actually anything that makes us feel uncomfortable. But actually growth happens when we start facing those things

that create discomfort. And I think that's a very key message. And just going back to the gratitude, I think it's so easy to say, yeah, I'm grateful that I woke up today. But are you truly grateful? And I mentioned this in Fern's podcast, as you said, the key way to actually evoke a feeling of gratitude is to think of your life without the thing that you want to be thankful for. Because when you think about absence, I think you feel grateful for its presence. So you could think about, for example, your spouse, like how much value do they add to your life, how much they contribute to your happiness, how much they actually do for you. Without having that person in your life, how different would your life look? And then suddenly you think,

actually, I'm so grateful that they're here. And you can do that with anything in your life. That's basically how you actually create that feeling of thankfulness in your life. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I wondered is kind of how important you felt it was. Obviously, you had a really challenging beginning. But how did you stop thinking, oh, life is really unfair, and instead kind of change that? And I guess in that take agency and responsibility for where you were, even if you didn't like it, because I think that's one of the things that people struggle with a lot, which is that when difficult things happen. And obviously, for so many different reasons, this has been a challenging year for people. You know, obviously, from an economic perspective things you know are

really really difficult for many people right now and there is an unfairness of course in that because coronavirus is the most kind of random no one saw a pandemic coming it doesn't necessarily help you create the change in your life that you want to create the life that you want by thinking in that way and how did you know how did you shift that mindset? Was that this kind of same rationale? Yeah, I think it all goes down to the, what I like to call the victim and victor kind of mindset. And with everything happening in my life, I would always blame God or blame something else for the way my life was and how poor it was. But I think when you're so busy complaining about the way your life is, and don't get me wrong, you have every right to it because some things are a struggle. We have to accept that some things do feel unfair. But by saying you can't do nothing about it,

you almost give away your power because everyone has a choice. You can either react emotionally and complain about how bad life is and how everything's going wrong, or you can make an empowering choice and start to respond to the events and experiences and the conditions that you experience in a way that will help you move forward with your life. And I said to myself, there's all these people out there that have basically come from nothing, you know, people that have been born into worse conditions than my own, yet they've gone on to create something absolutely amazing in their lives. And yeah, they might have complained for a bit, but then they made choices, choices that led them to that particular place. And I think with coronavirus and everything going on, we do have to obviously be cautious. We do have to look after ourselves. The conditions that

we're in aren't the most pleasant or desirable, but we have to focus on what we can control rather than what we can't control. And I think a lot of the time, I suppose it's human nature, that we focus on the things we can't control. And then we pay so much attention to it. And basically, all our focus goes on that particular thing. And then we're actually not doing anything that's progressive in our lives. We're not doing anything to change those particular things. We tend to focus so much on the problem that we don't work towards solutions. And that's what I looked at in myself and in my life. And I thought, all I'm doing is talking about how unfair life is, but I'm not actually doing be a victor I'm going to start changing things yes you know the conditions I might not be able to do anything about but what I can do is change my response because I think in your response lies your destiny yeah I couldn't agree more and I absolutely love that I mean delicious yellow started for me obviously not from such a big

challenge but from a from a big challenge. And I spent the first year thinking I was the victim and how unfair and, you know, so young and I couldn't do anything anymore. And all my friends could and it didn't help me at all. And it wasn't until I kind of owned up to the reality and took responsibility for where I was and then started to make changes accordingly. And then my whole life changed. And it's better than I could have ever imagined it would be 10 years later it's a really hard mindset to change but the power of it when you can I think it can be kind of limitless and I one thing I wondered is I certainly find that kind of can do positive attitude comes more naturally I guess it's like anything you know practice yeah we start to change you know, practice. We start to change the way

that you think and start to change the way that you wake up in the morning and that you look at the world. And it becomes much more natural to start to think and act in that way. But that does take time. Yeah, you're completely right. I think a lot of the time, sometimes you might go on the internet and someone a guru might say you know I can change your life in 24 hours and what they might actually do is make you feel good and motivated in 24 hours and then you might resort back to the old habits or lifestyle or the mindset that you had I know on the internet a lot of people said it takes I I think, 21 days to build a habit. But I know new scientific research has said, actually, it takes 66 days to build a habit. And what happens when you start to think positive more regularly, for example, on a daily basis, it becomes your

natural way. It becomes habitual. And that's what I realized with myself is that I started reframing events that I deemed negative into something more positive. And the more you do it, the more you start reconditioning your mind. And then suddenly, like you just said, it becomes your natural way. So don't expect massive shifts. Don't expect to become the most positive person in the world overnight, because these things do take time. And I think you'll realise that the more you start practising something regularly. Absolutely. And I know that's something you talk about a lot in the book is that every negative experience is genuinely a chance to grow. And obviously,

while the experience is perhaps happening, it doesn't feel it in the same way. But really, there's always something to learn and there's always an ability to take something from and take a silver lining from even the most difficult circumstances I think you have to remain a learner if you want to grow I think every experience is evolutionary if you choose to see it that way when When something happens in your life, you have to ask yourself, well, what can I learn from this? What can I do better? What have I learned about myself?

What have I learned about other people? And I think when you hold that attitude in your life and that mindset, you start to suddenly feel like things are happening more naturally, things are happening for you rather than against you. And when you feel like that or when you're in that state of mind, you feel more inspired and motivated to carry on moving forward with your life. If you think life's against you, then you're not going to be productive.

You're going to feel sad. You're going to feel like the universe has got some kind of personal vendetta against you. And you're just going to start thinking that nothing ever is going to go right in your life. And I think that's why it's really important that every time something happens, an opportunity, you ask yourself, is there something I can take away from this? And what can I change in my life? Or what can I do better? And one question I have, because I think it's such an interesting one in the self-development space and the general wellbeing space. And we actually did an episode a couple of months ago on perfectionism is that there's always stuff to learn. There's always an ability to grow. Just accepting ourselves for where we are is, you know,

there's more that we can do on that. And that there's always the next level to get to. But it's an interesting one to figure out where the boundary lies between trying to create, I guess, to some extent, a kind of unhealthy level of perfectionism where your life is quite regimented, I've got to do this, I've got to do that, I've got to do 700 practices, you know, and become so reliant on them. And, and you're kind of working towards it, yeah, almost like a sense of perfectionism, which is probably impossible, versus getting to the point where you just feel so much happier in yourself. And there's a kind of ease and a naturalness to it. And you take on those few practices that feel plausible with your life, but that you really enjoy. And I wondered if that's something you've come across in your life and in your work and where you feel that boundary lies.

I want to actually direct this conversation towards self-love because for me, self-love is a very misunderstood term. And my definition of self-love is that it's a balance between accepting yourself as you are and then knowing you deserve better and working towards it and achieving that balance I find is difficult. The example I always give is if you had a partner for example that had a really unhealthy habit you'd accept them for who they are because you love them. However, you would know that that habit is maybe causing them pain or it's not necessarily the healthiest habit for them to have and you'd want them to be better for themselves. You wouldn't love them any less because of the habit, but you would still want the best for themselves. And I think you have to try

and apply that mindset to yourself. Now, in my book, I talk about working towards a greater life, but the word greater is subjective. I think what we need to do throughout life is accept our life for what it is and where we are and the things we've achieved, but also aspire to do better. Because like you said, we always can. And I think it's just moving through life constantly with that balance and not being too hard on yourself about the future and about future goals. Yes, you can do better. Yes, you can achieve greater things. Yes, you can become a better person. But then never stop showing gratitude for the progress you've already made. And for me, it is a bit of a fine line. But trying to achieve that balance, I think, is critical. For me personally, what I try to do is every now and again, for example, I want to achieve the next milestone in my life.

But I try not to put too much pressure on myself to achieve that particular milestone. I try to remind myself how great my life is right now. And sometimes I even revisit the past to compare what my life is now to what it was before and remind myself that actually, a lot of the goals that I wanted to manifest in the past are in front of me right now. And that kind of gives me faith in what will happen next. And just having that faith then makes me less, I suppose, obsessed with what might happen next. When we become obsessed and when we start clinging to a particular goal, we actually start creating our own suffering because we want life to go a certain way and I think achieving that balance is kind of almost like a skill that you you develop throughout life is you know accepting

where your life is but also still realizing that yes I can do better and working towards it without being too hard on yourself and without putting too much pressure on yourself. I think you're completely right there's such a big difference when you're approaching this with a genuine sense of kind of ease and feeling comfortable within your own skin and genuinely have that compassion and that love for yourself. Because if you're approaching growth from that perspective, it's going to be from a slow kind gentle perspective whereas if you're approaching it from a sense of negative view of yourself you're much more likely to think probably in a more kind of perfectionist way where nothing you can do is good enough and you've always got to be doing more

yeah not approaching it with that sense of kind of love and compassion and I think yeah I really agree with you on that one. I actually feel like perfection stems from a feeling of doubt that you will never actually be perfect and that's why you try so hard sometimes to be perfect and when you breed that emotion of doubt what you actually do is create resistance you stop energy from flowing in your life you create dis-ease rather than the ease. And I think once you've let go of that doubt and just trust what might happen next, suddenly things start happening for you. And that's certainly happened in my life. I don't know if you've got a feeling that you might be able to relate to that when you just kind of let

things flow almost and just do your best. 100%. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think another thing you talked about, which I really like as well as allowing that change and growth and not defining yourself, but most importantly, also not defining other people by their past. And we've got to give each other permission to change and to grow. And we may have had characteristics or qualities that we didn't particularly like in ourselves, and perhaps others didn't warm to as much in the past, and that you should have permission to be able to go past that. And we shouldn't continue to kind of see people for who they used to be if they're a different person now. And I know you said like, people

actually saw you as a really angry child and you know I was actually really not a happy teenager and I was definitely a lot more complicated and prickly and and I've I think it's really interesting that that importance of allowing yourself to change and allowing yourself to see yourself but also as I said other people people who, and I know there's people really close to me in my life who were such different people and, you know, have changed so much for the positive and actually, you know, allowing yourself to see them for who they are now and forgiving the past in that sense. Yeah, I think we tend to forget that if we can change, then so can other people. Change is the only constant in life. And we have to move with that flow of life. Back in the day, you know, I was a very angry child. And when I talk about my

past, and people meet me now, they're like, I just can't imagine you being angry, or I can't imagine that side of you. And it's always nice to hear, of course, but that was a reality at a particular point. But that's the past. And that past now no longer exists. It only exists as a mental construct within our minds. And I think, you know, I've made mistakes in the past, and I've forgiven myself for those mistakes. And I think, as human beings, we need to forgive other people as well for mistakes that they've made in the past. And, you know, sometimes people hear the word forgiveness and they think, well, I can't forgive somebody for what they've done because they've hurt me so badly. And, you know, forgiveness

isn't always about condoning what they did to you, the actions that they had towards you, but it's just letting go of the hurt that they might have created. I think it's allowing yourself to move forward with your life. And it also doesn't mean keeping them active in your life. Like I've forgiven a lot of people in my life that might have hurt me in the past, but it doesn't mean that I have an active relationship with them. It just means that I no longer allow them to take control of my mind. And, you know, I don't pay attention or too much attention to what they did and allow it to evoke emotional reaction within myself. So forgiveness really is the key, I think.

And just knowing that, you know, everyone's human, everyone changes, we've changed and so can other people yeah I love I mean if anyone doesn't follow vex on on instagram then really recommend it um it's literally just because you share such nice quotes and there was it's definitely you know I've got someone very close to my family where that's that's the case and definitely something I've worked really hard on and yeah it was a quote the other day it said don't keep bringing up the past when someone is trying to change hold them accountable by all, but let them become better without interrupting their growth. And I just think it's, you know, yeah, you're so right. And I love that way of looking at it.

And, you know, look, I'm sure people are listening to you today and thinking, I love the sound of this. I love this idea of this kind of ease in my life and this positive approach both to the world but also to ourselves because ultimately you know I'm a big believer in the fact that that's where it all starts if you don't have a positive relationship with yourself you know I don't think we've got much chance of having a positive relationship with others or the world around us to the extent that we'd probably like and I wondered if if, you know, a handful of practices or anything that you do on a day to day basis that anchors you in it? Because I think it's, you know, it's always easy to say it, but how do you do it? For me, routine is so important. And

your routine should consist of things that feed your mind, body and spirit. And I think when those things are in alignment, you'll feel that sense of fulfillment in your life. And one of the key things for me is actually my morning routine. So briefly, my kind of morning routine consists of key things that really ground me and set the tone for the day. So upon awakening, what I actually do before I actually step out of bed is I just take a moment to visualize the day ahead. So I kind of focus on the third eye area, which is supposed to be like your spiritual passageway, but it's just between the brows. And with my eyes closed, I just try and picture how I want my day to go. So for example, you know, I'm on the Deliciously Ella podcast. So this morning, what I would have done is just create a scene in my mind of us having a

conversation and it going really well. To make it more real kind of in my mind, I would have evoked my five senses. And then what I do is I step out of bed, go and brush my teeth, have a shower. And then I start my next part of my morning, which is breathing exercises that I do. So a bit of deep breathing, a bit of yoga and stretching. And then I sit in meditation for around 45 minutes to an hour usually. So I wake up quite early just so I can fit this morning routine in because this morning routine takes me roughly two hours. However, I know that's not practical for every single person out there,

especially if you have kids. And I know I've just got a puppy, but when he first came into our household, like my routine did have to shift a little just because you know my whole lifestyle changed but when I do these particular things they really ground me and they really kind of set the tone for the day and then what I do straight after and it's a very small hack but I just listen to uplifting music I listen to songs that I associate to good memories because when I listen to those particular songs, I automatically feel good because I know they're related to a memory which made me feel good. And, you know, one of the songs and I always say this in every interview I've had, one of the songs is just Michael Jackson's Don't Blame It on the Boogie.

Like I can't listen to that and feel bad or sad in any way. I always listen to that and it just lifts me up. So those particular things really set the tone for the day. But throughout the day, you know, it's important that you're eating, the majority of your meals are healthy and nutritious, you're drinking loads of water. You know, they say you should drink at least two to three litres of water daily. Reading a self-help book for me, maybe doing 20 minutes of reading. It might not just be a self-help book. It might be any type of book, actually. It might be a journal, a blog, an article. Alternatively, just listening to a

podcast, something that uplifts you. I think whatever you do in your life or however your routine is, and definitely set the routine around what makes you feel good. But make sure you're meeting your needs, and you're uplifting yourself, make sure there are things that empower you. So exercise, you know, some people like doing the exercise first thing in the morning, some people like doing it in the afternoon, or some people like doing it late in the evening. But all these things will make you feel good. And then as I head to bed, I always journal. And there's loads of different set ways of journaling. But for me, I literally write what comes to my mind, how my day

went, how things made me feel. And it's just made me learn so much about myself. And then as soon as I've journaled how my day went or how I felt, what I do on the other side of the page is I write affirmations or goals as if they've already happened. So for example, if there's one particular thing, when I wrote my, when I started journaling and say, for example, I discovered something that didn't go too well, I would then make a goal out of it. So for example, if I didn't feel too great, my goal would be to feel better tomorrow. And I would write it in the present tense. I would say, I feel great today. Everything in my life is happening just as it should, for example.

And I'd repeatedly write it down, maybe like 10 to 15 times. So if there's one particular goal or two or three, then I'd repeat those goals. And I'd write them down until I actually truly believed them. And I'd also spend a minute or two just visualizing that goal coming to life. But if there was a number of goals, for example, there's 10 things on my mind that I really wanted to see in my life, then I'd write those 10 things down without writing them repeatedly. And that's basically the majority of my kind of routine. But there's a lot of other little things that I do like skincare, things important, just having a bit of time to yourself. My wife loves doing puzzles. So you know, I might do a puzzle with her. I like playing FIFA online. So sometimes I might spend some time

just to play, you know, a bit of PlayStation. I like finding new recipes to cook. I know you've got amazing recipes to try out. So you know, I like trying new things out and just feeding my creativity. And I think what you have to do is just create a routine that works to you according to your lifestyle and your responsibilities. What I love about everything you've shared is that, you know, I'm a massive believer in the idea that people are inspired by people. I think, you know, you've said it several times today, which is that you read about other people who changed their lives and thought, well, if they can do it, I can do it. And I know that was a massive driver for me in changing my life and my lifestyle. I thought, well, if they can do it, there's no reason why I can't. And, you know, I think people take so much

from you there. But what I also love is that you're saying it's completely possible you can change your life but you have to work to change your life it doesn't happen and it's not as simple as waking up one day and be like I'm gonna have a great life I'm gonna be really positive I'm gonna think positively as you said you've actually got to take little steps every single day and be really consistent in that and it's something I've seen it in my own life, but every person I speak to, especially on the podcast, just cements it that little bit more for me is that happiness completely exists for all of us, but it's not simple actually for most of us happiness and the life that we want takes work and it takes dedication and it takes putting

in the time to do the things that create the results. And I really like how straightforward you are about that. It certainly does. You've kind of hit the nail on the head there. I think sometimes it starts with small steps. As long as you take small steps forward, you're still going forward. You're still going to a greater place. And sometimes I totally understand when you're in a really bad place, like I've been in, you know, one of the darkest places that I could ever imagine in my life. And I literally

felt like doing nothing. But you just have to find that glimpse of hope, that little bit of faith, and just do something small, such as literally making your bed or putting the trash away or making a call to a friend just one small positive thing will help you build momentum and then once you've built that momentum and you've got your reward system going that dopamine flowing because you've actually achieved something you set out to do you'll find confidence or motivation to do more and then you just keep building that momentum. And that's what I think a routine helps you do. Like I do quite a lot in my routine right now. And I've developed that routine as I've gone through my life. And I think if anyone's listening

to this, don't feel like your routine has to involve a million things all at once. Just take small steps and then develop it and adjust it according to what really works for you yeah and so it's not about changing your whole life as you said already today and thinking okay if I start thinking positively today everything will change tomorrow it's just about one foot in front of the other and baby steps and yeah over time things will be so different they will and you know don't be put off if you take a step back. It's completely normal. You know, if we lose someone close to us, you know, you can't say, okay, you'll have to see it as a positive experience straight away. Like my nan passed away like a month or two ago. And, you know, that was a hard time for me and my family.

And I wasn't trying to hide how I felt. You know, I did did I probably felt stronger than I ever have with death because I've lost a lot of people in my life you know especially throughout my childhood it did hurt and it's okay to feel hurt you know we're only human at the end of the day and you know sometimes we might take a detour but you know don't be too hard on yourself all you can do is try your best yeah well I'm so incredibly sorry for your loss and I think yeah you're you're so you're so right that like life will hit you with unexpected challenges and and losses and that's unfortunately a part of reality but as you said you've just got to bring that compassion and that those small steps and not see a knock as a kind of end to the journey it's just yeah it's like a wiggle on the

road ahead yeah and sometimes it just makes you re-evaluate yourself maybe what you're doing you know they say this about failure in business that you know failure is really just feedback it's a chance for you to re-evaluate your practices, adapt how you're conducting your business. And sometimes it makes you realise that maybe you're actually not following the right path, or maybe you can do something different. And that's how you should see every kind of setback in your life that this isn't a no, but this is maybe a not this way, or maybe not right now. Yeah, I'd agree with that 100% I think every challenge I certainly think about in the last like 10 years or so starting with my health and then the ups and downs of getting a

business going and and then when my husband lost his mother two years ago I think it's yeah you really learn that there's always things to learn and always paths for growth and even the the darkest moments have the they have an upside in the end you just can't always see it on the day yeah thank you love what you shared and just so appreciate your time today I think as I said I'm the biggest believer in the fact that people are inspired by people and obviously that's why your book's done so well and that's why your work's resonating so much with people because you're just very honest and very genuine and I think I just really appreciate you sharing that and and being open to that

vulnerability today because I'm sure it it will mean a lot to a lot of people oh thank you so much thank you for having me and um thank you for your kindness throughout this podcast yeah it's been a pleasure so this book good vibes good, Good Vibes, Good Life, you've probably seen it 101 times because it's everywhere. But I will just pop the title on things in the show notes below for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

Really, really recommend it, especially this year, where I think that bit of positivity and that nudge towards it can be especially helpful right now. Otherwise, yeah, thanks so much, Vex. And have a lovely day, everyone, taking those small steps towards getting to where we want to be. And we'll be back again next Tuesday. Have a lovely, lovely week. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads.

Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.