Welcome to The Raquel Show! In this episode, I'm going to take you through my personal journey with the challenging "75 Hard" program. I'll share the five crucial lessons I learned while completing this demanding challenge, focusing on commitment, discipline, clarity, strategy, and the vital role of community support.
Key Takeaways:
Commitment: Challenges are designed to test your commitment. It's crucial to overcome excuses and obstacles that arise during your journey.
Discipline: Discipline is the cornerstone of success. Learning to say no to instant gratification and embracing delayed gratification is key.
Clarity: Simplify your goals and create a daily checklist to build positive habits effectively.
Strategy: Find creative ways to incorporate challenging tasks into your daily routine, prioritize essential activities, and leverage your time wisely.
Community Support: Surround yourself with a supportive tribe that encourages personal growth and holds you accountable.
I'm excited to announce that I'll be launching an exciting year-end challenge to help you finish the year strong. If you're eager to level up and play bigger in your life and business, send me a direct message on social media (@itsraquelq) with the word "challenge," and my team will provide you with all the details. Take a moment to ask yourself: How am I challenging myself to play bigger today? Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Raquel Show, and remember, keep pushing your limits to achieve your goals.
Welcome to The Raquel Show! In this episode, I'm going to take you through my personal journey with the challenging "75 Hard" program. I'll share the five crucial lessons I learned while completing this demanding challenge, focusing on commitment, discipline, clarity, strategy, and the vital role of community support.
Key Takeaways:
Commitment: Challenges are designed to test your commitment. It's crucial to overcome excuses and obstacles that arise during your journey.
Discipline: Discipline is the cornerstone of success. Learning to say no to instant gratification and embracing delayed gratification is key.
Clarity: Simplify your goals and create a daily checklist to build positive habits effectively.
Strategy: Find creative ways to incorporate challenging tasks into your daily routine, prioritize essential activities, and leverage your time wisely.
Community Support: Surround yourself with a supportive tribe that encourages personal growth and holds you accountable.
I'm excited to announce that I'll be launching an exciting year-end challenge to help you finish the year strong. If you're eager to level up and play bigger in your life and business, send me a direct message on social media (@itsraquelq) with the word "challenge," and my team will provide you with all the details. Take a moment to ask yourself: How am I challenging myself to play bigger today? Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Raquel Show, and remember, keep pushing your limits to achieve your goals.
There's a reason why this is called a challenge and why most don't always finish. It's meant to be hard. will come up on a daily basis and it will first test your mindset on whether or not you want to keep going and finishing it out. Welcome to the Raquel show. This show is for entrepreneurs who want to play bigger in business and in life. And I just want to say thank you all for hanging out with me today. Thank you for being a part of this community. And I want to ask you guys all, have you ever signed up for something and didn't really know what you signed up for? Oh, I felt that way with this 75 hard challenge. I was out to lunch with clients and made a quick decision to do it, not even considering all the factors. And let me explain. 75 hard is a challenge that goes on for 75 straight days and here are some of the things that you have to do every single day with no rest days. First, you got to do two 45 minute workouts with one being out doors. Talk about Arizona summers and doing a workout outside. I wish I went in my pool more often. You have to follow a diet and I did macros and I counted proteins, carbs, and fats because I wasn't trying to lose weight. I didn't want to also have any processed carbs like pasta, pizza, or bread. You also have to do a progress picture, a gallon of water. Read 10 pages out of a book, physical pages, no alcohol and no cheat meals. Doing things out of your normal routine, especially difficult things mean you're going to have to get out of your comfort zone and it may seem impossible, but doing things means breaking your regular habits or what you feel. comfortable with breaking your brain patterns and building new ones. Everything starts with your mindset and your thoughts become your action and your actions become your reality. And in this episode, I want to break down five. Lessons that I learned from doing 75 hard. Number one is challenges test your commitment. There's a reason why this is called a challenge and why most don't always finish. It's meant to be hard. will come up on a daily basis and it will first test your mindset on whether or not you want to keep going and finishing it out. There were plenty of excuses that I could have gave and it started within the first few days. Like, why am I doing this? It is so hot in Arizona. The people I chose to do it with live, most of them live in California and they don't have to deal with triple digits. And guess what? We also had one of the hottest summers here in Arizona since I've been here for 16 years. It was brutal. And this also happened during a crazy time in my business. And that will be a different episode when I'm ready to talk about character, genuine character and leadership. But I debated about finishing it out for the sake of my energy. It will test your integrity. Because no one's really telling you to go do it. I believe there's so much value when you push yourself through challenges, especially in the things that you don't want to do. This is a hundred percent challenge, not 99%. And I can tell you the group even had a joke to do 75 medium. It's all or nothing, my friends, because if you don't finish one thing out of your checklist, you got to start. all over. Can you imagine? And I heard some of this from you guys in my DMs that they got to like day 60 and then they had to start over. Some got to day 70 and they had to start over because they missed something. It's very easy to give into your excuses and I see this happen in business too. But if you want to go to the next level, you've got to get out of your comfort zone and you're going to have to push through to get to What you are fully capable of and the best version of you. Number two is discipline over everything. Discipline will be the key ingredient to your success. The motivation was there for me for the first three days of this challenge, and I quickly realized that if I was going to finish this, I needed discipline to say no to certain things. For example, when my family was eating out and we were traveling, There were plenty of foods that I wanted to eat, plenty of desserts that I wanted to eat. And I also remember that being in Vegas for a week and a half, it wasn't super convenient because we stayed in an Airbnb. I was in a conference then we stayed in an Airbnb because the boys had a basketball tournament. Both of them did. It wasn't convenient to find a gym or to even go outside and do a workout early in the morning because it was still hot like Arizona and you even thought I don't want to wake anybody else up because we were staying with the team and there were parents there but I had to get it in before the basketball games. There was a time where I went to a conference and I was worried about getting my water in during the conference. There were plenty of times where people asked me to drink, parties, gatherings. And I had to say no, because instant gratification in business and in life is very real. And if we want to succeed, we've got to learn to say no and practice delayed gratification. Number three is clarity is power. The checklist was set and it was predetermined. It's easier to accomplish things in business and in life when your checklist is simple and can be repeated daily. I didn't really have to worry about what I needed to do the next day. Think about your goals. We have this routine and then we got to think about some for some of us. We get, we think about what do we do next? What do we do next? Can you imagine if you just had a simple checklist and you just got through it, you knew exactly what you needed to do from the moment that you woke up to the moment that you went to bed. There were plenty of weeks during this challenge that I prepped my meals and measured my food and I put it in the schedule at the end of my day to finish up the checklist or either post in the group. Or on my social media. And when you're clear about what you want to do in life or in business, and you have a simple checklist or roadmap, your habits. Become easier to build. You can start to stack wins. And when you stack wins, you build momentum. It also helped that I was reading self development books. I was able to finish six books during the challenge. It was your best self, the greatest mindset, unlock the power of your mind. How will you measure your life? The hundred million leads, the effective executive. I actually learned that reading was easy for me because I love to read. So before when I would get up in the morning or during my in between workouts, I would read or late at night I would read. It's a habit that I picked up in my early childhood and my kids are exactly the same because when they were kids, we would go to Barnes and Noble and read in the children's section. So when you have And you start stacking the habits, you feel like you've accomplished something. You have a sense of accomplishment and every progress is a step in the right direction. Number four is strategy matters. We only have 24 hours in a day. Prior to 75 hard, life and business was already difficult. And I know what you guys are thinking. How the heck am I going to put this checklist in? My life is crazy. I've got the kids. The kids are in school. I've got all the things with my team. I've got to hire people. All the excuses, right? And what you quickly realize is there's a way to do it. We all have only 24 hours, and if we want to get something done, we're going to find a way, even... if it feels like a whirlwind and you start letting go of things that are not as important, or you find leverage for some of the things that you normally do. So getting a gallon of water was also something that I needed to strategize about. And some of you guys had asked, I got messages about how do you get a gallon of water in, especially when life is busy and I'll tell you, I learned this from my coach when I was actually prepping for fitness competitions is she told me try to get half a gallon or a little bit more than half a gallon in before noon. And. When you have coaching days or when you have conference days, you actually have to really plan on getting, cause I would have, I have two coaching days where I coach back to back. I would actually have to plan how I'm going to get my water in, especially when I don't always have a pee break. So let me share how I did it. This is no different than when I tell my clients, you gotta front load your year, you gotta front load your months, and you gotta front load your weeks if you want to get your goals hit. You'll feel so much better. The moment I got up, I drank a glass of water. I used another glass of water for my pre workout since I work out in the morning. And during... my workout. I also had a water bottle, an insulated water bottle. It's my Play Bigger water bottle. And I would drink I think it's 32 ounces. I would drink water as I'm working out. So that was easy. And when I got back from the gym, I used more water for my green juice because I take greens every, every morning with vitamins, and I also used water for my after workout protein shake. And I would get through, just that alone, I would get through more than a gallon, half a gallon of water. When I went away for conferences, I drank more water when I got up. I drank a bottle and a half at the gym. And when I would get back from my hotel room, or when I would get back to my hotel room, I would finish the other half before I got into the shower. And when I was getting ready, I was drinking water so I could flush it out before I had to actually leave for the conference. And I would sit in the back of the conference room, and most of these rooms have water stations, so I'd sit next to the water station and in the back so that I could refill my water jug and I could actually also go to the bathroom. Another strategy I had since my body was super sore on certain days is, and there's no rest days, is And I believe that your body needs it is I decided that on those days I would take two walks a day for 45 minutes. And it does help that I have a really cute dog named Rocky that I actually get to walk with, but he probably was wondering why are we walking longer than normal? Because it was like 45 minutes. You get better with strategy as you do more. And it's the same in business. The more you quickly realize what needs to be done, you get better over time. And last but not least, you need a tribe. You need community. You need support. Doing this with a group of people At first, I was committed to them. I didn't want to give up because I was their coach and I didn't want to let them down. And that was really important. So if you're ever going to do this, try not to do this by yourself. Try not to do this with one other person. Try to get a group of people, especially people that you care about, that you all want to get better and you all want to support each other and get through 75 hard. I remember people telling me when things had happened during the middle of the challenge that I wouldn't have done it in the first place. I wouldn't have started the challenge with them. People told me to protect my energy and get away from people that were not good people. And let me tell you, those days I struggled real hard. I didn't agree with certain people in the group. I didn't agree with their character. I saw true colors in their behaviors and lies that were said. When I pieced stories together, it rocked my freaking world and so many like I couldn't understand how people could be cold, could be deceiving and talk behind your back and make assumptions. Trust me, I was going through all this mindset stuff and not have the audacity to communicate with me and I said it before, it was so disrespectful on so many levels. And it wasn't just about business. And what I realized it was a sign of ego. It was a sign of maturity. And Hey, that's going to be another podcast when I'm ready to really dive in and talk about all the things. And on the flip side, I found others to help me push through and find ways to protect my energy. And I had a whole community on social media, even though I felt like I was posting so much about my stories, but it was more of my accountability. I got countless messages, even messages from this podcast. I just appreciated them. Today, I am so much better because of it. And it's one thing when I look back at this year, I can't believe I finished because towards the end I had lost so much weight, and I really didn't want to in the beginning. I had to hire a trainer nutritionist to help me like finish it out. One, I was like, why am I doing this? And so my trainer Ruth actually helped me. And she also helped me with like my macros because my metabolism was very, very high. And so I couldn't fit in a lot of my clothes. I had gone down almost three sizes. And for me, I felt like that was unhealthy for where I actually wanted to be. And what was really interesting is when you hire people or you have a supportive tribe, sometimes they see more for you than you see yourself. Ruth helped me get through what I thought I was actually capable of. She actually pushed me past that point. And getting a great support system is key. So people who are meant to be in your life will be there and things will flush out for the long run. So entrepreneurship isn't meant to be done by yourself. If you think you're going to build a big business by yourself, like you will reach a ceiling. You will need mentors and coaches if you want to accomplish big things. So take a moment to really find those accountability partners, find those coaches, find those mentors. And I really want to thank. those that sent messages because you will never know how much those meant to me, especially during my most difficult days of this challenge. Focus on the process. Focus on what needs to be done. Challenge yourself to get through one activity at a time, one day at a time, and planning ahead does make things a bit easier. It applies to everything in life. Front load those things. Chunk down those big things into smaller pieces to the day. And just focus on what's the one thing you need to get done at the moment. I realize that when you do hard things, you grow. When you do hard things, your capacity grows. What you thought was once hard becomes easier. And this challenge is for those that want to step up. And I truly believe that when you go through challenges, you get substantially better and you also play bigger. Everything starts with you and your mind and my friends. I love sharing and documenting some of my lessons and I will be doing an agent challenge to finish out the year and if you're looking to level up and finish strong this year, send me a DM at itsraquelq with the word challenge and my team will get you all the details. Take a moment to ask yourself, how am I challenging myself to play bigger today? I appreciate you all hanging out with me and until our next episode, don't forget to keep playing bigger.
