Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are. If ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here today. I wanna talk to you about how you can change your entire life in five years. And I picked that specific amount of time because I think that there is a lot of content about how you can change your life. And it's true. You can change your health, you can change your relationship status, you can change your career, you can change your habits. There's a lot that you can do.
I think the problem that happens for people is that they want to change everything right now. And if they can't change it right now, then they never get started. And I think a big part of really choosing or deciding, making an intentional decision to change your life is to have a realistic timeline for how long that's gonna take. And when you set yourself up with a realistic timeline, you actually set yourself up for success. And so that's what I wanna talk to you about. The three things that I want you to really think about and focus on as you think about changing your life. Before we get started, I wanna tell you about my own experience with this. Now it's been 10 years, but I know when I started this podcast, before I started it, I was in a place where I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I felt really lost. I felt like there was no way I was gonna replace my income as a lawyer. I was still really caught up in the perfectionism and the all or nothing thinking and a lot of the fears that I had. And after five years of doing this podcast, my entire life is different. I not only have this podcast and platform, I've created a business that makes multiple six figures where I work about 20 to 30 hours a week. I get to work on my own schedule. I get to do something that I'm so passionate about and so in love with and fulfills me very deeply. And I never would've thought that I would have had that when I started this podcast. And I want you to understand that it didn't happen in year one. And a lot of the changes happened really slowly.
They happened over time. Like it was like I did it for a year just doing interviews. I started kind of flirting with the idea like, could I coach? Could I start a business from this? I allowed myself the time to kind of build that. Instead of thinking like, I need to make six figures in six months and all these other kind of BS marketing tactics that you see online, I allowed it to take the amount of time it was gonna take. And slowly over that time, not only did I reach the goals that I wanted, I found a career that was really fulfilling to me. I found a way to make more money than I did as a lawyer. I found a job that allowed me the freedom and the flexibility that I wanted, but I fundamentally changed as a person through that time. In order to do this, I allowed myself to work on that fear of failure and the fear of being judged.
I took up space, I put my face out there, I allowed myself to be criticized and have the trolling comments and be okay with it. And that slowly changed who I was. It helped me eliminate my perfectionism, it helped me deal a lot with my people pleasing. That one's not eliminated just yet. It helps me deal with my imposter syndrome. And it allowed me to do that slowly. Like my nervous system would not have been able to deal with all of that and work through everything I needed, you know, to work through. Which by the way, I'm still working through a lot. If I had to do everything in six months, if I had to change my whole life in a year and think that, you know, if that didn't happen, then it wasn't worth it or I failed somehow like giving my body and my brain and my nervous system the time to acclimate, to learn something new, to integrate things to, you know, practice what I was preaching, to try new things to fail, is what allowed me to succeed, is what allowed me to build this business and to continue growing.
And I think about that as I think about my next goals. I never set goals for like it has to be done this year because I know it's likely not realistic. And it likely comes from this place of like, I think when I get there I'm gonna be happier. And so I wanna get there faster as opposed to like how is this just the next way that I'm gonna grow and how can I give myself the time and energy and capacity that I need in order to grow into that version of myself? And so I just say this because I've now not only seen it with myself, but with all of the people that I coach. One of the things that I coach on in my program are these five-year plans. And so I wanna walk you through it as well and how you can change your life in five years.
So there is the famous quote, I think it's by Bill Gates, where it's we overestimate what we can do in a year and we underestimate what we can do in a decade. No truer statement has ever been said, right? I think for a lot of us, you can even shorten that down, right? We overestimate what we can do in a month. We underestimate what we can do in a year. If you think about let's say a weight loss journey or a health journey, a lot of us like wanna have results within a month. We wanna go hard, we wanna go five days a week and we're gonna go on the strict diet and then we burn out and we don't get anywhere. But like if you made your health journey a year, if you started saying like, Hey, by the end of the year I wanna like see some change, you would stick with it more.
You wouldn't be discouraged when nothing happens after a month because you wouldn't be expecting something to happen after a month. You would give your body the time it needed to actually start showing you the change, right? It's the same thing when you increase kind of that timeline, when you give yourself a decade, let's say for a lot of you, let's say you wanna change your career, if you really looked at it as like, what am I gonna work on over the next 10 years? We don't even have to go that long. We say like five years. You give yourself ample time to then actually have the space to be able to work on it. And you give yourself the time to build up to the thing that you want. And so for so many people, I see that sort of give up on change because they think it's not gonna happen.
The only issue is that they've just gave themselves a shortened timeline and it was arbitrary, right? Nobody's saying you have to have things changed within a year or within a month. We just decide like, well if it's not gonna happen by that time, then it's not gonna happen. And that's like the first thing that I want you to really be aware of is that we all have this all or nothing thinking. It's the way that our brains are sort of wired. But you have to catch yourself. You have to see when you're doing it so that you can use your more rational brain to override it. For a lot of us, we really have like, well, if I'm not gonna be able to have the body I want in a month, then it's not worth it. We don't think that maybe consciously, but we just decide if I'm not gonna see huge changes right now or if I can't commit a hundred percent to this, then it's not worth doing.
And I think that is the biggest killer of your dreams over anything else because it's not true. It's not true that if I can't do it all then it's not worth doing. Doing a little bit is actually the only way to hit your goals is staying consistent over time. And that requires you to do a manageable amount. It requires you to figure out how much capacity you have and allow yourself to just do that and be okay with that and know that like it doesn't have to be all. I don't have to be this fitness influencer who's working out four hours a day, right? I don't have to quit my job and have a new job and become successful at it within six months. Nobody says that it has to happen in that timeline. So why am I setting that arbitrary deadline? And I think for a lot of us, it's because we're so terrified that what we're picking is the wrong thing or it's not gonna work or we're gonna fail.
And so we're almost this like one foot in one foot out. Like, okay, I'm gonna try it for a month and if it doesn't work, I'm gonna be like, see, it wasn't gonna work and I'm gonna give up because I don't wanna have to like actually give it my all and see if it fails. And I'm here to encourage you, like give it your all and see if it fails. Like if you're gonna do it, do it full out. Commit to it. Commit that like it might take a year, two years, five years. But if that's how I ultimately wanna change my life, if I wanna change an aspect of my life, I'm willing to put in the time that it's gonna take in order to get there. And so I want you to be really aware of like when you wanna make a change, when your brain is telling you like, if this doesn't happen within this certain amount of time, it's not worth doing.
If I can't give it a hundred percent of my attention, then it's not worth doing If I can't go full out, which I see even like when people wanna start businesses or people want to, you know, maybe do art or focus on a passion project, they constantly think that they can't do it because they don't have enough time. And the belief is that you need kind of these perfect conditions and you need all this extra time and you need to spend hours and hours building this thing and you don't. The reality is is that in this day and age, there's lots of ways to do things on the side in short spurts like spending two hours a week, let's say on your business, right? For a lot of people they think, oh well that's not worth it. But if you look over time, two hours a week, let's say over a year of 52 weeks, that's over a hundred hours that you're spending on a project that you're spending on this business.
And so yes, it may not take off the way that somebody that's gonna spend eight hours a day on it would, but who cares? You are just gonna take a little bit longer. That's your path. And that is okay. It doesn't have to look like everybody else's, it doesn't have to be someone else's path. It can be like someone else might get a business up in a year and you are gonna take three years. It's still worth it for you. In three years time, you're gonna look back and be like, I'm so proud of myself for starting three years ago. 'cause now I have a full fledged business. Now I have a business that's making money. Now I've learned how to do this stuff while keeping my job right? When I didn't have to take on really the financial burden of jumping into entrepreneurship. There are so many ways to do these things when you don't have this mindset of like all or nothing, it has to be all right now or it's not worth it.
So I want you to like really be on the lookout for that. And look what I'm talking about leads to the second thing, which is really understanding the power of the compound effect. If you haven't read Darren Hardy's book about that, I highly recommend reading it because I think it does such a great job of really showing a lot of instances where the really small things add up to make huge changes. And I think we overlook that. We think we have to make big sweeping changes. We have to, you know, quit our job and go full-time in our business. And you know, that's the only way to do it. And not only is that not the only way, it's usually not the best way because it's gonna put an unreasonable amount of stress on you. It's gonna stress you out to the point where you likely can't focus on doing the things you need to do.
And so learning how to do things in small increments over time is what will not only allow you to stick with it, but actually start kind of creating this snowball effect, right? So when we're talking about like if you commit two to three hours a week to work on a project, to work on your business and then you do that week after week after week after week, it starts snowballing like maybe in the beginning those actions don't seem like they're returning that much of a result for you 'cause you're just kind of starting with the foundation. But over time, when you have your system set up, when you have, let's say kind of the foundation set up when you don't need to be setting up like social media and websites and stuff, those three hours start accumulating and like you start, let's say putting out content and you start doing sales and you start reaching out to people, you start getting a much bigger return on your investment for those two or three hours.
It starts, like I said, snowballing into something that has a lot of momentum in his book. Darren Hardy gives a lot of different examples. One is like when you look at, you know, maybe an unhealthy habit when we start with something really small, let's say we just wanna, you know, add one thing to our day, we're gonna have an extra latte. Or let's say instead of going for a walk at night, we decide we're gonna just watch an extra show on Netflix. In the short term, even in a month, two months, six months, there's really not that big of a change. And so you think like, ugh, it's not a big deal. But over two years, three years, four years, it's a huge change. It's a huge ripple effect. Maybe you become more sedentary, you start having more like let's say back pain. You start gaining some weight, you start losing muscle walks that you would take would probably help your mental health.
Maybe you'd go on walks with your spouse and it would help your relationship. It would be the time to have conversations. Maybe it starts making you feel less lonely. 'cause that's when you call your friends and you have these conversations. There's so many things that are wrapped up in maybe taking a 30 minute walk, like the choice to make a walk instead of sitting and watching another Netflix show. Now I have nothing against watching Netflix and doing things to numb your brain. I think we all need it. You don't need to be productive all the time. I just want you to think about the concept of the compound effect over time. What are these little actions that I'm doing and how are they going to create the results that I have in my life? One of the other examples he gives in that book is I think he was talking about like the English cycling team.
I can't remember if it was English or one of the national cycling team. And he was talking about how the coaches came in and this team had never won and they came and they didn't really change big things, but they started changing really small things like the pillows that the athletes slept on and the environment in which the private plane that they would fly on was, and the amount of oxygen they were getting and all of these like minor kind of tweaks and they ended up winning like the Tour de France like five years in a row or something. But it wasn't that like they were training 40 hours more a week and they had to push their bodies more. It was like looking at where are small ways that I can make a change that can overall increase, you know, the sleep that we get and the energy that we have and you know, they would like change the seats of their bikes like a little bit to be more ergonomically correct.
And like those little things are what added up in order to make them this championship team. And so I say that to say say like when you think about it in your own life, it actually is one of the most important concepts to really understand because it takes off the pressure of having to change everything all at once. It takes off the pressure of like I have to be a completely different person if I'm gonna change my life because I hate to be the bear or bad news. But you're not gonna be a different person. Your brain's not gonna change all of a sudden and you're not all of a sudden gonna be the most motivated person that's disciplined that sticks to things all the time. You're the same person with the same brain and you don't need to be that different if you start taking small changes.
Like if you think about, let's say if you wanna pay off debt so that you can quit your job. If you start by only saving a hundred dollars, let's say from each paycheck, if you stop making it this big deal of like I need to save a hundred thousand dollars in order to do something, but you make it a bite-sized thing of like, can I save $10 a day? I don't know, that's a random kind of example. But if I could, could I do something where maybe it isn't as big of a lift for me, I'm more likely to stick to it, I'm more likely to continue this. I'm more likely to then see the wins and then stick to it more. I'm more likely to change my own self-concept to become a person of like, huh, I can save, I can manage my money.
I do understand this, I do stick to this, which gets me excited to save more, to do bigger things, to maybe make some investments. Like when you start kind of stacking these little wins on top of each other, they grow into becoming really massive wins. What happens unfortunately for so many of us is we go into this, I'm gonna go hard, I'm gonna go hard for two weeks. I'm gonna cut out everything. I'm gonna save all of my money, I'm never going to eat out. And then that's a miserable way to live. And so then we give up. And so I want you to really think about the compound effect and how you can implement that in your life when you wanna change it. Especially if you wanna change your career. Maybe you can't quit this year or next year even, right? Can you quit in five years?
Can you quit in three years, right? Can you quit in, I don't know, seven years if you can. We need to start now with small things. We don't need to change everything, but we need to start thinking about are there people I wanna network with? Are there new skills I wanna gain like slowly here and there is a class that I wanna take to brush up on my coding skills. Are there people that I wanna get into contact with? Do I wanna explore some other interests that I have? Do I wanna give myself a couple of hours on Saturdays to work on the passions that I have? Allow yourself the time to kind of explore and grow and work on things actually like set yourself up to be able to make big changes later. And so that leads me to the last thing, which is these five year plans, when you really look at these concepts of like getting rid of all or nothing thinking and really thinking about the compound effect of like little actions over a long period of time, right?
How can I be relatively consistent? When I say consistent, I don't mean every day I have to do the same exact thing or every week, even if it's a a small commitment. Even if I say I'm only gonna work on my business for two hours a day, that doesn't mean I'm gonna do it every week. Some weeks I'm gonna fall off, some weeks I'm gonna get sick, I'm gonna have life stuff happen. Fine. It's the culmination, right? It's like the cumulative effect. Can I keep coming back to it? Can I keep bringing myself back and grow this over time? So both of those things I want you to think about when you think about these five year plans that I teach a lot of my clients. I want you to just take whatever it is that you want to do. Even if it's just a crazy dream, you can do this exercise just for fun.
It doesn't have to be like a real five-year plan, but I want you to just see the power in it. So I want you to take whatever dream you might have and I want you to try to break it down within five years instead of a year. I want you to really think about what would the steps be. Let's say as an example, I wanna write a book, okay? I've always wanted to be an author and I wanna have a book published by kind of the traditional publishing houses. Okay? That's my goal. A lot of people take a goal like that and it's like I wanna be an author. And then they immediately get overwhelmed by all the steps that they have to go through in order to be a published author and they start thinking about all the things they don't know how to do.
And so they get completely overwhelmed and then they give up on it, right? What I want you to do is like if you take that goal and you break it down into five years, right? You look at it as like, okay, the vision is to be an author. Now if I work backwards, you could do this anyway. What I would recommend is like at first brainstorm, what are the steps that it would take to become an author, right? Like if I was gonna be an author, I would have to have an agent, I would have to have a deal from a publishing house. I would need to know how to write, whether that's fiction or nonfiction. I would need to like brush up on my writing skills, maybe need like an editor. I don't know. I don't really, I don't know why I picked that analogy 'cause I don't know how to become a published author, but just bear with me.
When you start looking at, okay, if I was gonna do that in five years, if I didn't have to get it published today, you know, either work backwards or work forwards, whatever works with your dream. What if in the first year all I had to do was work on my writing, that's all I had to do. I had to take a creative writing course online. Maybe I had to spend two hours a week writing short stories. Maybe I wanna get involved in some writing groups online. I wanna join some, you know, writers Facebook groups or Reddit groups. And I'm gonna spend some time exploring like what does it take to become a published author? That's all I have to do in an entire year. That's manageable. That's a manageable amount of things to do, right? I can like find some groups, I can learn more about what's needed.
It's kind of like the information gathering stage. I can start working on my craft to learn how to write better. So this is what I'm gonna do. And then maybe in year two is when I want to go to writing retreats or sign up for a writing coach or I don't know what people do, but get more serious. Maybe I wanna start submitting short stories. Maybe I wanna look for places where I can get my writing critiqued and I can get edited by other writers and I can do it for other writers so I can get a better understanding. Maybe I can take more courses. Maybe at the time I can start outlining an idea or outlining all of my ideas and picking an idea for a novel. Or you know, if I'm gonna do, let's say my memoir, I can start outlining that. If I only have to do that in year two, right?
It's like a year one, maybe I'm saving money to go to a writing retreat. In year two, again, it becomes so much more doable. Then in year three, I'm gonna work on really like the bare bones of my first draft. By that point, I will have been in these groups. I will have gone to these writing retreats. I likely will have networked a lot more to get an understanding of like how you find a agent. You know how you start pitching publishing houses. Maybe that's the year I start looking at the actual process of getting my book in front of different agencies in order to get signed by someone. Maybe that's when I start looking at creating more of a pitch. Okay? Like I don't have to worry about that right now. That's not something I have to do. I have to do that in two years and I will learn so much more in this process as I put myself out there towards this dream of becoming an author, right?
Year four is maybe when I get an agent and when we start pitching and when we start, you know, maybe I have a draft and I get an editor and I work on that draft to make it a better version where I'm gonna pitch it to different publishing houses. All of it becomes a lot more manageable when the dream isn't something that has to get done in year one, when it's not like I have to figure out all of publishing and I have to get an agent and I have to become a really good writer and I have to network with everybody. I have to know the idea and I have to have everything outlined. And like that's insanely overwhelming. And so it's not to say that you can't be a published author, you absolutely can, but if you have no history in writing and you have no background or network in that world, it likely will take you more than a year.
And that's okay. 'cause guess what? You got a lot of life to live. So why not just stretch it out? Why not give yourself the time to actually be successful and to give yourself the time to learn and to grow? I'm telling you, when you start looking at your dreams in five year kind of increments, when you start thinking like, okay, if my next goal is like I wanna have a business up in five years, it becomes so much more doable instead of these kind of pipe dreams that people sell on like Instagram where it's like you can have a business up and running and make six figures in the first year. I hate seeing those. Like I, I love people being encouraged to go into entrepreneurship because I do think it's much more viable for a lot of people that don't see it as an option.
I think so many more people could have their own businesses, but they're too scared to kind of think about it. And so I love encouraging people to think about it as an option, but I hate that that culture is like this get rich quick scheme because it takes time and that time is gonna pass and you don't have to dedicate your whole life to it. So like what if we just look at it realistically like anything else, right? Like if you're gonna become a lawyer or a doctor, it's gonna take years. You don't just like do something for six months, take a course and then become a doctor. Like it's going to take a lot of training. And when you think about other things in your life as well, what if you gave yourself that same space to allow yourself to grow into that dream?
When I quit the law, I remember I gave myself a year to figure out quote unquote what I wanted to do with my life. And I had told myself like, okay, we'd figured out the finances with my husband and I thought I'm gonna give myself a year. If I don't figure it out, I have to go back to the law. Now at the time, that seemed reasonable, obviously it was completely arbitrary. And I think one of the best things that happened to me is that I didn't figure it out in the first year and I got towards the end of the year and you know, I spent most of that year with a baby. And so not shocking that you don't have a lot of extra time to kind of figure out a career when you're taking care of a newborn and an infant and you know, going into the toddler phase.
But I think the best thing happened because I was forced to grapple with, now what you gave yourself this arbitrary timeline, the timeline is up and you don't wanna go back. So now what? And I really had to question like why did I just choose a year? It wasn't financially that we needed me to go back at that time, even though I kind of wanted to believe that it was, it was simply because I was scared of like, well, if it's been a whole year and I can't figure it out, then that means it's never gonna happen. Or I have no idea what I want or I can't be trusted with this type of a decision or whatever other my brain wanted to give me is like I thought I was kind of whipping myself into shape. Like, okay, you get a year, that's what you get and if you don't have something by then you gotta like grow up.
You know? I don't know what I was thinking and then I didn't. And I was like, well now we're at a year. Now what? And I think that the best thing that I did was be like, okay, maybe a year wasn't realistic. Maybe I needed more time to take care of my son to really stave off the burnout that I was feeling to explore what I actually like to figure out who I really am. Maybe it takes more time. And I think that when I realized that and I realized like there's no reason to give yourself this arbitrary deadline. Nobody was looking to see like whether you're quote unquote successful or not in that time it's just you. It's just your own pressure. It forced me to kind of slow down and be like, what if it just takes as long as it takes? What if you're gonna do this as long as it takes for you to find the thing that you wanna do?
And I'm so glad I did because that did allow me the time and space to be like, I don't need to force this. I could get another job if I needed to financially I'll get another job while I still continue this exploration of who am I and what is it that I want and what do I wanna work on? And we come kind of full circle back to like when I started this podcast, it really was with no intention of like I didn't know what it was gonna come of. I didn't have the idea of like a full fledged business. I didn't know like have a business plan and know exactly where it was gonna go. I just gave myself the time to work on it slowly and allow it to build and see what I liked about it and see what I didn't and grow it organically and then add different parts and let my nervous system catch up and do things that were really scary and allow myself to grow.
And over time my entire life changed. I'm a completely different person than I was just in how I approach life and how I think about life and the things I go after and what I let myself explore and experiment with. And so I'm just grateful for my past self that allowed me the time and space to change in that way. And I want you to give yourself that too. There's no rush. I know we live in a culture where everything is rushed and where you're basically programmed to believe that you have to be a success by 25 or it's too late, but it's all a lie. You have time, you have so much time to change and grow and learn more about yourself and explore and become a different person and try different things. And the more you give yourself the time to grow into that, the more opportunity you allow yourself. 'Cause there's so much that you can do, you just might not be able to do it in six months and that's okay. So expand that timeline, figure out what you wanna do in the next five years. Get rid of the all or nothing thinking. Start doing things in small baby steps that compound effect and watch your life change.
All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful and I will be back next week with another episode. If you want help with these five-year plans. And if you want help kind of learning how to do the compound effect in your own life, you can join me in my membership, the Quitter Club. You can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub where you can learn more and that's where we do all this work in depth together. All right, my friends, I hope to see you in there. And if not, I'll see you next week for another episode.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.