9-Year Life Cycle: How to Plan Your Life Around Where You Are

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Stay tuned. How are you? Come on in here. Good to have you here today. Man, it's that time of year. We're hitting those patterns, aren't we? Hey, Christmas is coming.

Thanksgiving is coming. Not necessarily in that order. And that's just a pattern in life. Well, life is a repeatable series of patterns. In fact, your brain works that way.

I'm going to point your attention to a pattern that's been happening your entire life. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. And you're going to be able to play into it, okay? It'll be a fun show today.

I do this once or twice a year. You may not have heard of the nine-year life cycle. It's coming up. It is a daily boost from MotivationToMove.com broadcasting live between the race cars and the rocket ships just south of Daytona Beach here in beautiful Port Orange, Florida.

It's me, Scott Smith. Hey, Scott Smith on Instagram. Glad to have you here today. You know, it's all about making your life better. It's all about figuring stuff out all along the way.

It's not about pure motivation. It used to be. We kind of moved away from that these days because you can get that anywhere. There's all kinds of people on TikTok doing that.

I've just kind of moved to the point that it's, I have always found the most The most motivation you can ever get is a plan, is a blueprint, is somebody who's been there, done that, says do this.

I've always found you're never more motivated than when you know exactly what to do. And so I, over time, I haven't tried to do this, but over time I moved this show in the direction of saying, well, let's just tell you how to do stuff.

Let's help you figure it out and just assume the motivation will be there. And then sometimes I come around and go, oh, let's talk Unicorn and Rainbows, which we'll do a little bit of today.

By the way, if you happen to be a business owner, you're in business currently. Most likely you have a staff. It doesn't really matter what you do. It makes no difference.

Most businesses are about the same. But you've got your business going on. You've got your life going on. You've got everything. And you're like, what am I going to do?

And maybe AI is driving you crazy. And you need somebody in between who not only can help you sort out what's going on in your brain, but can sort out what's going on in your business and help you drive the ROI of that business.

That's what I do. That's what I do. It's what I do off the podcast. So if that's you, if you could use some help, if you're looking into 2027, you want to make it better.

I have one, maybe two openings, depending on what you do, depending on the workload that we have to go through to help you get there. But we should talk about it. Just send an email, scott at motivationtomove.com. Personal email to me.

I will get back to you. We'll talk about it, see if it's a good fit. Listen, at your level, there's no sales pitch here. Either it can help you or not.

So reach out, make the connection. Let's go from there. All right, let's get into something fun today, huh? Why not? Or we could do something really not fun.

Let me ask you, which one would you like? Fun stuff or not fun stuff? Let's do fun stuff. So my buddy, my friend, a spiritual advisor, Lewis Gates, met Lewis many years ago.

My wife was a Reiki healer in this little town called Casadega, Florida. It's a spiritualist town. I'm not a spiritualist, never have been. I'm a Christian.

That's who I am. But I also explore all kinds of other things. And at the time, we were exploring that. She was a Reiki healer, the whole thing. But I met Lewis.

He was her teacher, and he's the senior pastor there. He did her funeral, actually, many, many years ago. So I have a lot of experience in that little crazy place called Casadeca.

But Lewis has some really neat ideas. We used to get together because I used to call him the motivator and the medium. That's what we called it for a long time. So I had some really neat stuff.

I've seen him over the years, learned a lot from him. But he dropped this on me probably 20 years ago. And I have seen it in play. Now, when I learn something and I look at it, I'm like, yeah, right.

That's not going to work. Nine-year life cycle, what? Did you make that stuff up? Probably. Everybody makes stuff up, right? But then you go live some life and you start seeing it happening.

In my case, not only did I live life, but I've taught this to a lot of people. A lot of my clients bring it back to me all the time. They scout them in year five, I can tell.

And so I've just seen it happen. So I'm going to go through this with you. Take it for what it's worth. But it's just based on patterns of life, some numerology at play here.

So depending on how you think about this stuff, and I know I don't talk about this often, but you don't know what I don't talk about. So there, nine-year life cycle.

Great for a year in planning, for sure. So here's what happens. You have cycles in your life that last nine years. They begin the very second you're born.

And every nine years, they restart. So, you know, zero you're born, one starts. Then at 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72. I'm not going any further. I'm not going any further.

I mean, you get that old, who cares, right? But every nine years, one resets. Now, again, these are just patterns. And just like talking about the 80-20 rule yesterday, you know, if you're a stickler to Scott, it was 79%.

It wasn't 80%. Okay. Don't worry about this. If I say it happens at year number nine, it doesn't mean on your ninth birthday it happens. But somewhere around there, you're going to see a trend.

So take it with that, okay? Okay. Remember, I'm a pretty practical guy. I look at this very, very differently than a lot of people do. So here's what happens.

In the very first year you're born, not the very first at zero, but let's say you're 36. You're 36 years old. That's year one. And year one, you start kind of asking for what you want in life.

I'm not saying you're going to sit down and say, well, what do I want? No, but you're going to notice yourself. Start asking for a change. We see this a lot in 36 and 45.

That's kind of the Prime personal growth years? I'll say it as it is, Scott. That's the prime midlife crisis years. You know that. 54, 63, we get the same thing.

A little bit less, though. People just start looking around saying, okay, is this all there is? Have I met for more? What's going on? I don't know. Would you start asking for something different in your life in year one?

Now, as anything would happen, as you begin to start asking, you start recognizing. Reticular activation system kicks in. It's like, hey, I want to buy. We're buying a Tesla, right?

I want to buy a Tesla. Now I'm seeing them everywhere. It kicks in. You start to notice it. Same thing. First year, maybe I want to make a change. Second year, it's like, wow, you start to kind of focus in on a couple of things maybe you have some interest in.

Psychologically, that's actually how life works. I talk about facing your passion all the time. What I mean by that is your passion is just kind of something you notice. You don't find your passion.

You're right. You don't. You really, truly get out there and just kind of trip all over and go, that's kind of cool. Maybe I'll keep doing it. I've just recorded the first episode of our new season talking about the state of play for the IMO's net zero framework in the wake of the just concluded latest MEPC meeting.

The big question I hear again and again is, what happens next and how quickly? In this episode, I unpack what's moving, what's stalling, and what that means for future decisions and timelines.

Search for Maritime Impact on your favorite podcast platform. Stay tuned. If you've ever taken up pickleball, you probably one day, and if it's your most passionate thing you're doing right now,

if you're like me, you were probably joking about pickleball a year ago and suddenly you got into it, right? And now you have the shoes too. So number one, you start asking. Number two, you start focusing in on something.

Number three, it starts to come together. This is when you get the pickleball shoes. About number three, year three, you start kind of getting the goodies that come with it. In other words, you're starting to kind of get into whatever you're doing.

You're starting to maybe buy the resources, the tools, the skillset, things like that. And you're starting to kind of bring it into your life in year three. Now,

If you do that long enough, everything in life takes a couple of years to get going. Year four, you will find yourself moving toward a purpose in life. So as I've said this many times before, I just kind of said at the beginning, your passion is really something that you kind of stumble upon.

It's nothing that's sitting on a corner waiting for you. You just kind of stumble into it. And as you lean more into it, your passion will become your purpose.

It just makes sense. If you do something every single day, eventually you're going to purposely get out of bed and go do it, right? So year four is when you start doing that. You purposely get up and say, I got it.

Let's go. I'm on a roll. Year five is about reevaluation. Year five is a time when you've been at this for a while, right? You've been at this five years.

And now you're like, okay, well, let me look at what I got here. Let me see what's really going on. Let me see. I mean, where am I here? It's like the infatuation goes away.

Year six is when you say, okay, the infatuation's gone. I've rerouted a thing. I've got some resources. If you're starting a business, maybe you've got a little bit of a role going.

Maybe you have a podcast that's starting to pick up. Maybe you're writing your book and get some distribution. I don't know what it is. But you start looking at the things that you have and you begin to say, okay, well, let's make the best of it.

We're going to work with them and we're going to really leverage that. This is year six. So it just makes sense. I know you want it faster than that and you certainly can get a lot of it faster than that.

But the truth is everything takes some time to really get the depth of it. Year seven. This is kind of a place that I'm year seven right now. I'm year seven.

You take stock of things that no longer serve you. So if you've paid attention to me for the last year, you would have heard me beginning to kind of work with what I've got, really paying attention to the resources that I have. But right now, I have said to you multiple occasions, this podcast changes at the end of the year. This podcast still serves me.

It doesn't serve me the way I'm doing it right now. Love doing it. Don't get me wrong. But it needs to have some modification to it to make me happy, which will make you happier.

So I'm just kind of doing that. I'm saying I'm taking stock. I'm looking for what no longer serves me. Let's get rid of it and let's bring in the things to do.

Year eight, you begin to clear the clutter of your life that you don't need anymore. So we've taken stock. We know what doesn't work. Now we're going to start to get rid of it.

Let's start moving out. We're going to start to make space. And year nine, we decide that we need to go for a next cycle. We need to begin to make a change.

We haven't begun to look up and say, I'm going to go do it. What is it going to be? We haven't done that yet. But we're starting to think, you know, something's got to change, man.

And you start looking around for it. Or maybe it's a positive thing. Maybe things are really, really good, but you just want to do something different, which is kind of where I am. It's like it's really good, but I think we can make it better and have a little more fun with this.

So I'm just kind of deciding what it's going to be. I'm not there yet, and I don't think it's going to be there right away for me. I think I'm just beginning.

So notice something, if I can draw your attention to this. I just gave you nine steps, right, of a nine-year life cycle. If you'll notice something, everything I talked about could have been done in a month, but not on a big scale.

If you want to change your job, the same thing applies. Just ask for something new. You focus on the new gig. You start to get opportunities someplace.

You find yourself actually doing, getting the job. You get into it, you're really out of it. You think, what was I thinking? Wow. Let me see what I want to keep.

Do I want to keep this job or get a new job? What do I want to do? Take stock of what you no longer need. Get rid of what you don't. Maybe possibly, I don't know, clear the clutter from your life you don't need and maybe think about getting another job.

You could do that in six months. So this is a pattern that duplicates all the time. But again, some things happen fast. Some things are much smaller, but I'm talking your life.

It has been said that if you want to change your life, it takes about 10% of the time you've been alive to actually change it. Now, I agree with that to some extent. I agree on two things.

Number one, everything changes instantly. If you want to change something today, you can. If a tragedy happened to you this afternoon in your family, if something happened bad, your life would change instantaneously. Nothing else would matter.

Agreed? You can get fired today. You're not even thinking about getting fired, but you get fired and your life changes instantly. It's how it works. So we have that going on at play.

That happens all the time. But we also have the larger change, which is what I'm talking about today, a life cycle, which means that you begin to move a certain direction. So before we get out of here, let me just push you back in time and just think at a time when you found yourself beginning to contemplate that something had to change.

And you wanted it right away, didn't you? And yet... We all know it doesn't matter how fast we want it. We all know it's going to take some time. That's the way it works, right?

I know you want it now. I also know you're willing to take a year or two to get it as long as you get it. So keep that in mind, the nine-year life cycle, as you get out and do some stuff today. You want more of this kind of thinking?

You want to work with me directly 90 minutes once a week? FaceYourPassion.com. That's my school group. Jump in. Money-back guarantee. If it's not your thing, no worries.

Give it a try. I think you might be surprised what it does for you.