 Hello everybody from Barbados. The sun is just about to set here on my last night and I wanted to share with you what I've been doing here and why I chose to be here. So first of all last September a client told us that a global meeting was going to be had here in Barbados in January. Of course I was delighted never been here Caribbean January what's not to like but after that I decided that I would stay on. My husband and business partner came out with me to the client meeting and then went home on Wednesday and I have been here since so I've been here this is as I say my last night so I've been here for an extra five nights on my own. I took an Airbnb and I decided to solely settle into deep work. Now deep work is a concept from a book called Deep Work by Cal New Port and the whole idea is really settling into the things that you know when you say if only I could get an hour to myself to focus on this well I decided to take five days to solely focus on all of those things and I decided to do so here and as I say I took an Airbnb on my own and the beach has been here right behind me now it sounds idyllic doesn't it and it has been but there's a couple of do's and don'ts that I will say and that is that you know when you're on your own solely focusing on the hard hard stuff the stuff that's really going to make a difference to the months and the years ahead of your business it's the type of thing when you're at home you tend to say I'll do it now when I have time but now you have time you've no excuses you've nowhere to go you've nowhere to run well sorry just the waves have just come in my feet there as I'm talking to you so the thing is is that you have to put a huge amount of mental energy in and if you don't have the discipline to do that then the time and the money that you spend here is completely wasted now I know some of you will say well it's alright for you you can head off to Barbados and I did this before in the Cliffs of Moher I've done this before in different parts of the world I tried to do it once a year and it doesn't have to be very far it certainly doesn't have to be expensive at all but the key thing is is that I just rule out everything except deep work for a period of time the other thing I want to tell you though is that your normal system of you know motivators or the things that can reboot reboot you aren't here so maybe it's talking to your partner at night or maybe it is you know catching up with a friend for glass of wine in the first evening or maybe it is settling into your TV show I've had none of that there's none of that I take you take I well press it the way I did it I took away all of that all of my natural boosts and they're not here because I'm here on my own I don't know anybody and I've nobody talked at night except myself and that kind of gets scary when you start responding as well but the point is is that you then you have to replace that with other things but you have to do it in such a way where you're not on holiday so I haven't been off snorkelling and I haven't been off you know lying down at the beach looking up the sun the only time I've been doing that is in the morning I came I would come out every morning and I don't know if you've come across blaze Brosnan's book you are the limiting factor it's a great book when you're trying to really think and really focus and really answer questions it's almost like a workshop within itself so I've been using that to journal in the morning and then secondly what I would do then is then I would have any calls that I needed to have and some you know yourself some calls you absolutely need to have but again with the focus on deep work I did the very same thing I made them extra long so that we could do all of those things that we would we might have said before oh I'll get around to that at another stage or whatever there's no getting around to it this is the stage so I did that and then you see the other thing that I want to tell you is that the quick wins aren't happening here I'm not focusing on quick wins I'm focusing on the wins that are going to make a difference but in months and years to come so you know that feeling of oh I'll just do that now and I'll spend a half an hour and then it feels like I've achieved something for the day I haven't been focusing on that these things that I've been working on I won't see the result of them for months and years but that's the point was that I had to keep that discipline so instead your quick wins become your wins that take a longer time so I'll tell you what I have been doing I've been working on a consultancy project since last June that I am literally going to finish tonight and that I've really it just needed a good hard sprint to the end that has taken I spent a couple of hours in it every day so that I've been working on and there's another project I can't tell you about it yet but when I can I certainly will and a really big project that I that I just now obliterated into a million smaller tangible much easier practical easy to get done pieces and that's what I'm going to be focusing on now for the next couple of months and I also I also wanted to read now I didn't I didn't actually get around to doing that and that's another thing that I'd say is that you know you can also say okay I'll do that during my week of deep work or I'll do this during my week of deep work or whatever it doesn't happen like that because if you if you give yourself too much to do well then it just won't happen so instead what I did was that I really really focused on the priority items and another thing I did was that I took the solitary time to really unravel some of my own limiting beliefs and so I'm just going to try stepping somewhere here where there's extra bit of light sun is going down faster behind me and so for example what I did there was that I wrote down my objectives for January now they've been percolating around on my head a lot anyway but I wrote them down and then I wrote down and this was an exercise that I got out of Blaise Brosnan's book is that I wrote on why I hadn't achieved them before right so they're some of them are new you know some of them aren't but so of the new ones and and when I really looked into why I hadn't done them before then I realized why what was holding me back and then what I did was I went one step further than the exercise suggested I then wrote down why I was going to achieve them now so actually what I did was that I unraveled a couple of things that was holding back my mindset and you know we all need to do this that was holding back my mindset and I now think that I'm in a much stronger position mentally to go ahead and to do all of these things along the way what I will say that that really helps is setting yourself up so that you can succeed I didn't put anything on I wasn't going on tour buses or I wasn't doing anything in the evenings or anything I had a couple of things to do every day one was my calls and I mostly did those in the morning because Barbados time is four hours behind Ireland and then I had a couple of calls in Europe and in the States so I just worked them around that and I swam every day or almost every day so I went to a pool for that it's a bit I wouldn't swim in the sea as you can see there it's a it's well it's you know it has a personality and and the other thing I did was that I made sure to eat out one meal a day and that was to get the literally to have the interaction with other people and what I absolutely didn't do was go out for breakfast in the morning because it's so easy to say okay I go out for breakfast now and then I come back in and I'll settle in didn't do that either I made sure that that was something that I did later on in the day and I have also kept my eyes very wide open to the personality of Barbados and enjoyed it like I've been here the first five days were a client meeting the second five days were for this I'm flying back tomorrow couple of things about the island that you might want to know so it's got a population of under 300,000 it's surprisingly expensive I don't just mean you know the tourist side of things you know that's often gonna be the case but it's actually when you're living like I've been doing for the past couple of days when you're actually living here price of food and the price and they're in the grocery shop I mean I got my nails from yesterday just to have a chat actually with the person who was doing them god lover she had to be a mini economist because I was asking so many questions and the price of well of transport is pretty reasonable but I did ask her and and I've asked a number of people and the cost of living here is pretty high and the weather is amazing it's absolutely amazing it's of course you'd expect that being the Caribbean it's actually started to rain now I can't I don't know if you can actually notice it or not but anyway I'll be dry again two seconds afterwards and it's also a place where people are so friendly like super super friendly people stop not stopping on the street but saying hello to you as you go about your day and and music is in their bones I was at mass this morning and just you know just to watch the way in which the congregation were swaying with the music like it's just it's everywhere and it's and it's lovely the food pink fish pink pineapples and pink cocktails they have a lot of their own take on cocktails and they have a great saying here which is that they put everything from wine to iodine in them obviously the latter one is a you know tongue-in-cheek reference and so really really lovely I would say first impressions I can say were amazing but like a lot of people that I've spoken to here it the place grows on you it really really does and they do a lot of water sports that a huge amount of tourism they had a record breaking year last year in terms of cruising where their the cruise numbers were up 3% there also that and that was into the port here in Bridgetown which is back that way and they're also looking to have another port in the north the north east of the island as well in time to come so it's an interesting place so therefore as you can see literally that's the see that what that white light over my head there now that is actually the flight that I will be taking home tomorrow night and right back across it's only eight hours really well served from London I have to say not as well serve from the US but really well start from London and then then back home again so it's been a super useful week it hasn't always been easy but I've made sure to have the discipline to make sure that I could do what I had wanted to do and so delighted that I had the opportunity both to meet the client here and enjoy what Barbados has to offer which is a huge amount so happy new year everybody happy new decade and I hope this has been useful bye