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This month marks the 3 year anniversary of the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast! Firstly, thanks to all of you listening day in, day out, investing in yourself, getting to the next level in your career and making an impact on the people you serve. Also, thanks for all your reviews and comments, which help people discover the podcast on all our platforms. To mark the milestone, we're re-releasing some of our top downloaded podcasts from the past 3 years - ones you expressed how it changed your refrigeration career and your life. We’re starting off this countdown with Episode 113. “5 Tips on Developing a Growth Mindset” which was recorded during a live session at the NASRC CO2 event in California.
In this episode we discuss:
-Setting goals
-Developing habits
-Making a plan
-Taking action
-Believing in yourself
Helpful links & Resources:
(Original episode) Episode 113. 5 Tips on Developing a Growth Mindset
Episode 214. How to Develop the Right Mindset for Success
North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council (NASRC)
Book: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Book: Limitless by Jim Kwik
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Trevor Matthews, and I am so pumped up this week. This week marks the three year anniversary of the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast, and that is huge. It is mind blowing when the team told me it's three years, and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
(00:01):
What we're gonna do is we're going to do something special. We're gonna re-release. Some of the top listen to podcasts, some of the ones that were, that you shared with me, say, Hey Trevor, this was a game changer for my career. This was a game changer for my life, and it set me on this new journey, this new refrigeration path, and I am so pumped up.
Uplift you. Get you to that next level in your refrigeration career. And I would really wanna, personally thank you and all of you who are bringing yourself to that next level, being better tomorrow than today, like we always do because of your passion, your support, your real, your commitment to investing in refrigeration.
I'm still working on this stuff. This is a lifelong journey. Having the right mindset on what we do day in, day out, because we have tough jobs sometimes, but very rewarding jobs and we need to really believe in ourselves. And the five things that we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna talk about today, and I'm gonna talk about it as a group, so hopefully some of you can share.
'cause I really believe we need more of that in our industry to really grow ourselves. 'cause at the end of the day, we work really hard. We play really hard, but we want to make sure we're continually growing and getting better at anything that we do. We're gonna get into developing habits. What are some good habits you have?
A lot of us, like me, I fell into refrigeration. I'm first generation technician and I fell into refrigeration. Some of you may have had a dad or an uncle or someone that got into refrigeration, but really I fell into it. I didn't know what refrigeration was before 2004. I didn't know things got cold.
And what I mean by that is the, the small simple steps that you take every day to reach your goals, develop those habits, making those plans some, all this stuff's gonna change over time, , and that's okay, but it's getting to the point where you're following some sort of guideline to help you. And then the last thing is believe in yourself.
Maybe friends, family, coworkers that are very negative. Show of hands. Look at that. Everybody's hand goes up. Right? And, and that, that's okay. What do you do about that though? What do you guys do about that? When you're in a situation where there's someone that is negative around or. Bringing up a, a negative conversation.
Having a positive mindset is one of the most important thing and one of the hardest things. It 'cause that even just that one person, I've been in lots of situations where those one person was negative in an office atmosphere and it took everybody down. Even though there's seven positive people that you talked with all the time, and they're excited about the day, even though they have ev, all of us have problems.
And the first step to that, I believe, is setting goals. What type of goals can you set? Anybody know? Go ahead. Short term ons there. Let's write some of those down. So short and long term. What else? Short. I love this long. So personal education, career, financial, whatever goals can you make Emotional? I love that one.
Long term. Short term. Long term, right. Does that make sense? How many of you go through this right now? Show of hands. Okay, so about half of 'em. I love that. That is great because this is what is one of the most important things to get you on the right mindset because when you thi what you think about is what you're gonna make happen.
How now, how do you break that down? Now if I just say something. Is that something that I'm gonna be thinking? Is that something you think about all the time? There you go. So now that's a long-term goal for you, right? That you're focusing too. Have you written it down somewhere? No. Okay. So this is one of the things that I've learned from many bi different people I've read over the years, and follow for self-help is so important to write it down because if you see it all the time, you start to think about it more.
Buying a house in the Midwest would be a lot different. So you need to be very specific. When I made those goals, I knew I wanted a three bedroom house. I knew I wanted two bathrooms because one bathroom is not good enough and a house that I have. I wanted to have a yard where I can run around. So when I had kids that I had a yard.
So the big thing at the end of it that I didn't do for a couple years, 'cause until I found it, I didn't, was I didn't think to myself. I was like, wow, I accomplished that goal. And then really reflect it on the goals that you make and create for yourself. And this is something we do in refrigeration all the time.
When I hear, , I wanna learn CO2 and the knowledge that I have is like, whoa, there's a lot to learn. So you got water heater, CO twos, you got heat pump, CO twos, you got chiller, CO twos, you got supermarket, CO twos, you got air conditioning, CO2 applications, , so there's so much to it. And then from there you can break those down into buckets.
How, why was I even saying that? What I mean? People laughed at me. But that's okay. 'cause I was young and I didn't understand, but I understand now and I'm working backwards on, on my long term goals. So you gotta break your goals up into certain segments. You have to measure 'em. They have to be attainable, relevant, and time bound.
But when you have a specific date, I've had a goal for, I'll give you a good example. Last year I had a goal to launch my podcast in February. That was my goal. February comes around, my podcast is not launched, and then March comes, then April comes, and then may, I got it. I launched it. I could have been hard on myself being like, I can't believe I didn't do this, struggled with that, but do what I did?
Just it was one of the things that, I'll go back right at the beginning of my career is when I wanted to get into FRI commercial refrigeration. I was specific. I took an HVAC program and I talked to the teachers and stuff like that, and they said commercial refrigeration. Where is your the biggest growth?
Okay. But that was a goal that I made. But one of the things that I, I, I don't regret, but I was young and inexperienced and not as much wisdom, is that I wasn't making goals along the way. My, my focus was just to be, get that my ticket and get my four years in. But while you're making these goals, you should be continuing to make new goals.
And this is what you do. That's one step. Professional goals, work with your, your your, your companies. And then work with your family on your family goals. The emotional goals is another big one. This stuff we don't talk about in refrigeration is like, well, what's your spiritual goals? We don't talk about that.
They missed all their holidays, all their family. 'cause they didn't set any goals they had. They had one goal in mind was this right here. You can't just have one goal in mind. You have to work on all these goals. And when I see successful people. That to my, what I believe is successful, it's not only the money, like you can, they print billions of dollars off every day.
Read a little bit about, 'cause we're really here to help you. These live sessions are for you to come and ask questions, to learn a little bit, to grow. We've trained thousands of technicians from technicians from three to four to five years in industry all the way up from 20 to 30 years in industry.
(00:22):
How would that make you feel if everybody was trying like that before we talked about it? When you have one negative person in the room brings everybody down. But if you had another eight or nine people talking like that to even this negative person, they look at it a different approach. And sometimes those people that are negative, they don't.
So set these goals next. Developing habits. How many people here have bad habits? A lot of hands go up. How many people have good habits? Okay, good. Good. I like that. Habits are something that has really hard to change. One of the biggest things that I've learned, and I've read a lot of habit books, I'll tell you a few of them.
So you, your, your habit is to Okay, respond. Don't have the answer, but I'll get back to you soon. Yep. Okay. And I love that because that's the same thing. Like, I'd go to a job and then I, I, I'd fix 20 jobs, but I'd have this one job and I'd just think about the one job that I made an error on. I smashed that compressor.
So take a minute and I'll tell you some of my, my, my ones. Because you can't really stop any habits. You can only change habits really. You're changing one habit for another. How can you take a habit that you, it doesn't have to even be bad. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe it's like, oh, I'm, I don't like eating at 10 o'clock at night because I do not wake up, , I don't sleep well, or I don't like having coffee at 7:00 PM I can't sleep.
The only way to change a habit is to know the habits that you have right now. For example, I used to, after work, I'd work a 12 hour day, 10 hour day, whatever it was. I'd get home from work, I'd have beer right off the bat. This was years and years. I'd have 4, 5, 6 beers. It, it didn't even matter. And then I would watch tv.
It's like I got my little, my little kids now. I got, I got children and I didn't like to be inebriated around them. I started to think, why, why am I doing this to myself? I'm spending four or five hours in the evening and I'm not accomplishing anything. I'm not spending quality time with my family. I'm not, , growing as a person.
I love it. I had one last night, to be honest with you, but I understand what I'm still trying to accomplish, and I understand my habit now. It's not a, it's not a habit like I had before where it was five or six a night. I changed that to different habits. My habits now in the evening are making social media videos, making content, spending time with my kids, quality time as best as I can, scheduling myself.
They're like, reading is one of the top CEOs in the world. They read like 60 books a year, and these are supposed to be the, some of the most busiest people with hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of employees, and they can read 60 books. And I can't read one. Okay, so what I did was I started small.
I went from reading like a hundred words a minute to four or 500 words a minute. Now, like last year I read 20 books. 2019 I, I read zero. This year I'm gonna try to read 30, ' cause I spend my time, I turn my habit from watching Netflix or looking at the social media to reading. Do if you read 20 minutes a day?
I know by the summer I want, I remember I turned 40, maybe it was, it two years ago, I think, two years ago, and eight months before that I said I wanted to have a six pack. But what a lot of people say, oh, well I want this. What do you do? Well, you just wait and the time comes and then all of a sudden you get there.
And read to 10 and then sleep from 10 to whenever I wake up and which was trying to do it at five 30. So I, and I didn't do it fast. So just to let , like these habits that you wanna build, you, you gotta start slow. 'cause if you try to do everything at once, it's too much is overwhelming and you're not gonna do it.
Can't wait till my Friday. So that's what I thought about all the time. Oh, the Sunday comes around, I'm like, oh, it's Monday. Oh, it's Monday. And so Monday was always not a great day. I love every day of the week. You should love, every day you wake up, you should love, because if you miss that day, it's not gonna be very fun.
Every night. Every night. Even here at the hotel. I have a glass of water beside my bed. So when I wake up, I, I hydrate myself. We have to keep healthy. You have to have a lot of different goals. I don't think we put health goals on on that last list, did we? We should have health, health goals. We should be one of the number ones that we should have had on that last list, right?
You need to have non-negotiables and you can't. What I mean by that, if there are weddings, if there are birthdays, if there are things in your life that you don't want to miss, because we're in an industry where you could be on call and you're going, you gotta go on call, you need to start at the start of the year.
And that's stressful because you think in your head it's like, man, I gotta let them know. And you're worried about going to talk to them about this day and you stress about it. But if you already have this plan in place, and it's a non-negotiable, most people understand, most people have their, , families or friends or events like this.
If you don't plan on how to get to there, it's gonna be very tough. I know I said that for years. Oh, I want to get an investment. I wanna do this and this. Until I started planning, none of that was happening. It was just a dream in my head. But when I sat down and I wrote it down, okay, this is the plan. How do I get there?
Nine, 10. 12. 12. Okay. That that's fair. So what, what could we say? So it's say 9, 10, 12. So 10 hours a day. We'd say on average that you could say, I get up at six and I'm done at four or six to six and Oh, like, 'cause a lot of people say, Trevor, I'm on service. I don't know where I'm gonna be. Well, maybe you don't know for that 12 hours, but over before and after.
Okay. We got eight hours. What else do you need to do in a day? Eat. You need to eat. Bathe. Bathe. Okay. Drive. Well, we get the commute. Okay, I like that one. Is commute involved in this one? Overall? Could be overall day. So your work day, does that count your drive right now? Mm. Okay, so that's different. So we'll say eat clean, pick up your kids.
Pick up kids. We'll say, so we'll say two hours now we've got six hours left in our day. Okay. What else do we need to do? Go to the exercise. Okay. How long does everybody go to the gym here or exercise or do something? How long would you say than an average? Half an hour. Hour, two hours, four hours, hour, hour, half hour a day.
You're sitting there with them, they're out playing a sporting event and you're on your phone the whole time while they're doing their sporting event. You gotta think about those hours that you're doing. So what do you guys think for with your kids? Family, kids Hour, quality hour. And , the more, the better.
A day? Some. Some people say five hours a day. Let's call the job the rest of the day. 24. Yeah. Yeah. Left an hour a day. I know. So now I got two hours a day. So your spouse, how much time do you wanna spend? We should have spouse up there, right? I said this, I got this as family. Our kids. But your spouse. This is something that in our industry is, is very bad.
(00:43):
Okay, so one hour spouse. So we got one hour. What are you doing with this one hour? Growing, maybe learning, watching tv. See, I don't even, I don't watch TV anymore. I used to watch a lot of it. I don't, it doesn't interest me anymore. But yes, TV could be, I would put that under hobbies, watching tv. But what are you doing with this one hour?
Avoiding other drivers. I love that. Because this right here, this is your education. Yeah. This could be your education. I used to just listen to the radio. There was no podcast at the time. Listen to the news about all the negative and hate going on out there. Listen to listen to music, hardcore metal music, whatever it was.
If, and this is an older one. If you listen, they were talking about cassette tapes. If you listen to and on your drives and all that amount of time, you can get a two year university education. , when you think about that, it's like in three years of drive, sorry, three years. In three years, you can get a two year university education with those 12,000 miles a drive.
'cause , it takes 10, 12, 15 times to hear the same thing before it really starts to sink in, before you can imitate. Okay, but this is the thing. We got out different times that a lot of us just throw away. I think the most important times. Is, oh, I put work twice. This is sleep. Yeah. This here and work for some of us.
Yeah. So I'm always thinking that, but why I didn't have to, I was just trained that way. Until I realize after years and years and years of doing it that I, why? I'll just go to their birthday party anyway. Go hang out with my friends. If I get a call, then I go talk with my manager about, I'm taking my van to this party.
I. Don't just dwell on that and all of a sudden, two months go by, four months go by, and then you just think, oh, I should have did this. I should, should, should, should, would've, would've. Coulda is you, you take it and stay accountable. So each week they'll talk to you and be like, Hey, did you, did you work on reading every day or three times a day?
We can make this, we think in our head, well, for me anyway, as a technician, I thought in my head, well, I don't know where I'm gonna be. I don't know when I'm gonna be there. I'm all over the place. I'm on call. I got this and that and that. And it just overwhelmed me. And when I started to structure the stuff, this doesn't have to be perfect, like I said, but when you have a little more structure in your life and you can, even if you're a service technician, you can, it makes you feel probably, for me, it made me feel that more structured, more centered, and it kept me motivated.
And by an hour in, then I'll start figuring out what I'm supposed to do in the garage or what I want to do. Right? This call about planning next is taking action. Super important, taking action. We talk about the goals, we talk about the, the developing the habits, getting out. Maybe some of those bad habits stop the procrastination.
I've tried it before. My legs hurt for like a month. So what, what you want to do is really work on taking that action. And it's all about the small simple steps. I'll say this again, you gotta start small because if you try to do everything at once, it's gonna be so overwhelming and you're gonna just stop doing it.
Like, I've been seeing you on there. I'm like, that's awesome. Do I have not done anything different in the last two years. Every day doing the same thing. I'm being persistent and consistent. Maybe the posts have changed or the videos changed a little bit, but I'm just doing the same thing as I've done for the last two years.
But I try right now, I try to do it right then and there because what happens, I think about it at that moment. If I don't do it, it's two days later, I think about it. It's like, shit, I forgot to do that and I needed to do that. I needed to make that phone call. I needed to be there or whatever it is I needed to buy that kid for, for my kids birthday gift or going to the birthday party, whatever it is, right?
So it's okay to adjust. You should be reviewing these plans. This plan here could change. Your kids are now gone to university, so now you wanna spend quality time. So maybe it's not in the plan. It's like I'm gonna go out there and see them every month or every quarter. I'm gonna fly to the other co. A city they're in, a country they're in, and I'm gonna go see them.
I know that Fernando says like, plan for the next day. That's a great idea. I've never did that for years. But imagine if you plan the day before, how easy your next day could be. Or if you plan on Sunday, you work on Sunday. What, what am I, what's Monday? Gonna be like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
If you think you can, or if you think you can't. You're right. 'cause you are. If you think you can't do it well you're right. You think you can do it. You're right. It's something to think about. Okay, the last, the last one. I don't know how much time I have left. Believe in yourself. How much time? Oh, 20 minutes.
Believe you can make a plan. I think the biggest thing that I see, especially in our industry in refrigeration, there's a lot of self-doubt that go up to a service I did. 'cause I know I did it. I go up to a service call, I'm thinking about the service call already, don't even know what the problem is. And I'm already thinking, oh, it's the, it's the, the, the world's coming to an end.
If you're telling yourself you're not gonna be able to fix it before you even start working on it, you're gonna have a lot harder time to solve that problem. And I used to do this all the time on call all the time, doubt myself. Even though I fixed the problem, I fixed the problem, the rack's up and running the customer's happy.
I go to the call, I'm like, and I fixed a hundred of them before I fixed a hundred of them. And then I go out and then I'm, I'm worried that I'm not gonna fix it this time, or someone's gonna go behind me and don't. One of the big things, I, I had callbacks. Everybody has callbacks. What I feared, what I, what I feared that nobody would tell me if I had a callback, 'cause I worked at companies that they didn't tell me.
So really this is something that we all need to work on, and I bet you can see some of the people who have the confidence not, I'm not talking about ego, I'm talking about confidence where someone is confident when they know what they're talking about. They're, they're, they're confident in the things that they do.
, it's, it's things that we need to, don't, don't fall asleep yet, but it's just, just things that we need to work on. We all need to work on some things. So this is, these are the five things that I really believe. If you work on this stuff, it's hard. It's not, this stuff's not easy, but if you work on those goals, start working on changing some habits, getting into making a plan.
'cause I have lots of it. Why do we need four TVs in our house? Seven cell phones? What I mean? So think about, think about that. So you can do all that stuff. This is important. You need to find coaches. You need to find mentors. You need to find accountability partners. This is how you grow. I didn't get into it too much, but I started getting mentors about four years ago.
I wanna thank you so much for hanging out with me and the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment, let me know what were your key highlights, what you took away from myself or my guest, as well as if you have not subscribed yet, head over to Apple Podcast or Spotify and subscribe.
What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Trevor Matthews, and I am so pumped up this week. This week marks the three year anniversary of the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast, and that is huge. It is mind blowing when the team told me it's three years, and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
(00:01):
What we're gonna do is we're going to do something special. We're gonna re-release. Some of the top listen to podcasts, some of the ones that were, that you shared with me, say, Hey Trevor, this was a game changer for my career. This was a game changer for my life, and it set me on this new journey, this new refrigeration path, and I am so pumped up.
Uplift you. Get you to that next level in your refrigeration career. And I would really wanna, personally thank you and all of you who are bringing yourself to that next level, being better tomorrow than today, like we always do because of your passion, your support, your real, your commitment to investing in refrigeration.
I'm still working on this stuff. This is a lifelong journey. Having the right mindset on what we do day in, day out, because we have tough jobs sometimes, but very rewarding jobs and we need to really believe in ourselves. And the five things that we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna talk about today, and I'm gonna talk about it as a group, so hopefully some of you can share.
'cause I really believe we need more of that in our industry to really grow ourselves. 'cause at the end of the day, we work really hard. We play really hard, but we want to make sure we're continually growing and getting better at anything that we do. We're gonna get into developing habits. What are some good habits you have?
A lot of us, like me, I fell into refrigeration. I'm first generation technician and I fell into refrigeration. Some of you may have had a dad or an uncle or someone that got into refrigeration, but really I fell into it. I didn't know what refrigeration was before 2004. I didn't know things got cold.
And what I mean by that is the, the small simple steps that you take every day to reach your goals, develop those habits, making those plans some, all this stuff's gonna change over time, , and that's okay, but it's getting to the point where you're following some sort of guideline to help you. And then the last thing is believe in yourself.
Maybe friends, family, coworkers that are very negative. Show of hands. Look at that. Everybody's hand goes up. Right? And, and that, that's okay. What do you do about that though? What do you guys do about that? When you're in a situation where there's someone that is negative around or. Bringing up a, a negative conversation.
Having a positive mindset is one of the most important thing and one of the hardest things. It 'cause that even just that one person, I've been in lots of situations where those one person was negative in an office atmosphere and it took everybody down. Even though there's seven positive people that you talked with all the time, and they're excited about the day, even though they have ev, all of us have problems.
And the first step to that, I believe, is setting goals. What type of goals can you set? Anybody know? Go ahead. Short term ons there. Let's write some of those down. So short and long term. What else? Short. I love this long. So personal education, career, financial, whatever goals can you make Emotional? I love that one.
Long term. Short term. Long term, right. Does that make sense? How many of you go through this right now? Show of hands. Okay, so about half of 'em. I love that. That is great because this is what is one of the most important things to get you on the right mindset because when you thi what you think about is what you're gonna make happen.
How now, how do you break that down? Now if I just say something. Is that something that I'm gonna be thinking? Is that something you think about all the time? There you go. So now that's a long-term goal for you, right? That you're focusing too. Have you written it down somewhere? No. Okay. So this is one of the things that I've learned from many bi different people I've read over the years, and follow for self-help is so important to write it down because if you see it all the time, you start to think about it more.
Buying a house in the Midwest would be a lot different. So you need to be very specific. When I made those goals, I knew I wanted a three bedroom house. I knew I wanted two bathrooms because one bathroom is not good enough and a house that I have. I wanted to have a yard where I can run around. So when I had kids that I had a yard.
So the big thing at the end of it that I didn't do for a couple years, 'cause until I found it, I didn't, was I didn't think to myself. I was like, wow, I accomplished that goal. And then really reflect it on the goals that you make and create for yourself. And this is something we do in refrigeration all the time.
When I hear, , I wanna learn CO2 and the knowledge that I have is like, whoa, there's a lot to learn. So you got water heater, CO twos, you got heat pump, CO twos, you got chiller, CO twos, you got supermarket, CO twos, you got air conditioning, CO2 applications, , so there's so much to it. And then from there you can break those down into buckets.
How, why was I even saying that? What I mean? People laughed at me. But that's okay. 'cause I was young and I didn't understand, but I understand now and I'm working backwards on, on my long term goals. So you gotta break your goals up into certain segments. You have to measure 'em. They have to be attainable, relevant, and time bound.
But when you have a specific date, I've had a goal for, I'll give you a good example. Last year I had a goal to launch my podcast in February. That was my goal. February comes around, my podcast is not launched, and then March comes, then April comes, and then may, I got it. I launched it. I could have been hard on myself being like, I can't believe I didn't do this, struggled with that, but do what I did?
Just it was one of the things that, I'll go back right at the beginning of my career is when I wanted to get into FRI commercial refrigeration. I was specific. I took an HVAC program and I talked to the teachers and stuff like that, and they said commercial refrigeration. Where is your the biggest growth?
Okay. But that was a goal that I made. But one of the things that I, I, I don't regret, but I was young and inexperienced and not as much wisdom, is that I wasn't making goals along the way. My, my focus was just to be, get that my ticket and get my four years in. But while you're making these goals, you should be continuing to make new goals.
And this is what you do. That's one step. Professional goals, work with your, your your, your companies. And then work with your family on your family goals. The emotional goals is another big one. This stuff we don't talk about in refrigeration is like, well, what's your spiritual goals? We don't talk about that.
They missed all their holidays, all their family. 'cause they didn't set any goals they had. They had one goal in mind was this right here. You can't just have one goal in mind. You have to work on all these goals. And when I see successful people. That to my, what I believe is successful, it's not only the money, like you can, they print billions of dollars off every day.
Read a little bit about, 'cause we're really here to help you. These live sessions are for you to come and ask questions, to learn a little bit, to grow. We've trained thousands of technicians from technicians from three to four to five years in industry all the way up from 20 to 30 years in industry.
(00:22):
How would that make you feel if everybody was trying like that before we talked about it? When you have one negative person in the room brings everybody down. But if you had another eight or nine people talking like that to even this negative person, they look at it a different approach. And sometimes those people that are negative, they don't.
So set these goals next. Developing habits. How many people here have bad habits? A lot of hands go up. How many people have good habits? Okay, good. Good. I like that. Habits are something that has really hard to change. One of the biggest things that I've learned, and I've read a lot of habit books, I'll tell you a few of them.
So you, your, your habit is to Okay, respond. Don't have the answer, but I'll get back to you soon. Yep. Okay. And I love that because that's the same thing. Like, I'd go to a job and then I, I, I'd fix 20 jobs, but I'd have this one job and I'd just think about the one job that I made an error on. I smashed that compressor.
So take a minute and I'll tell you some of my, my, my ones. Because you can't really stop any habits. You can only change habits really. You're changing one habit for another. How can you take a habit that you, it doesn't have to even be bad. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe it's like, oh, I'm, I don't like eating at 10 o'clock at night because I do not wake up, , I don't sleep well, or I don't like having coffee at 7:00 PM I can't sleep.
The only way to change a habit is to know the habits that you have right now. For example, I used to, after work, I'd work a 12 hour day, 10 hour day, whatever it was. I'd get home from work, I'd have beer right off the bat. This was years and years. I'd have 4, 5, 6 beers. It, it didn't even matter. And then I would watch tv.
It's like I got my little, my little kids now. I got, I got children and I didn't like to be inebriated around them. I started to think, why, why am I doing this to myself? I'm spending four or five hours in the evening and I'm not accomplishing anything. I'm not spending quality time with my family. I'm not, , growing as a person.
I love it. I had one last night, to be honest with you, but I understand what I'm still trying to accomplish, and I understand my habit now. It's not a, it's not a habit like I had before where it was five or six a night. I changed that to different habits. My habits now in the evening are making social media videos, making content, spending time with my kids, quality time as best as I can, scheduling myself.
They're like, reading is one of the top CEOs in the world. They read like 60 books a year, and these are supposed to be the, some of the most busiest people with hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of employees, and they can read 60 books. And I can't read one. Okay, so what I did was I started small.
I went from reading like a hundred words a minute to four or 500 words a minute. Now, like last year I read 20 books. 2019 I, I read zero. This year I'm gonna try to read 30, ' cause I spend my time, I turn my habit from watching Netflix or looking at the social media to reading. Do if you read 20 minutes a day?
I know by the summer I want, I remember I turned 40, maybe it was, it two years ago, I think, two years ago, and eight months before that I said I wanted to have a six pack. But what a lot of people say, oh, well I want this. What do you do? Well, you just wait and the time comes and then all of a sudden you get there.
And read to 10 and then sleep from 10 to whenever I wake up and which was trying to do it at five 30. So I, and I didn't do it fast. So just to let , like these habits that you wanna build, you, you gotta start slow. 'cause if you try to do everything at once, it's too much is overwhelming and you're not gonna do it.
Can't wait till my Friday. So that's what I thought about all the time. Oh, the Sunday comes around, I'm like, oh, it's Monday. Oh, it's Monday. And so Monday was always not a great day. I love every day of the week. You should love, every day you wake up, you should love, because if you miss that day, it's not gonna be very fun.
Every night. Every night. Even here at the hotel. I have a glass of water beside my bed. So when I wake up, I, I hydrate myself. We have to keep healthy. You have to have a lot of different goals. I don't think we put health goals on on that last list, did we? We should have health, health goals. We should be one of the number ones that we should have had on that last list, right?
You need to have non-negotiables and you can't. What I mean by that, if there are weddings, if there are birthdays, if there are things in your life that you don't want to miss, because we're in an industry where you could be on call and you're going, you gotta go on call, you need to start at the start of the year.
And that's stressful because you think in your head it's like, man, I gotta let them know. And you're worried about going to talk to them about this day and you stress about it. But if you already have this plan in place, and it's a non-negotiable, most people understand, most people have their, , families or friends or events like this.
If you don't plan on how to get to there, it's gonna be very tough. I know I said that for years. Oh, I want to get an investment. I wanna do this and this. Until I started planning, none of that was happening. It was just a dream in my head. But when I sat down and I wrote it down, okay, this is the plan. How do I get there?
Nine, 10. 12. 12. Okay. That that's fair. So what, what could we say? So it's say 9, 10, 12. So 10 hours a day. We'd say on average that you could say, I get up at six and I'm done at four or six to six and Oh, like, 'cause a lot of people say, Trevor, I'm on service. I don't know where I'm gonna be. Well, maybe you don't know for that 12 hours, but over before and after.
Okay. We got eight hours. What else do you need to do in a day? Eat. You need to eat. Bathe. Bathe. Okay. Drive. Well, we get the commute. Okay, I like that one. Is commute involved in this one? Overall? Could be overall day. So your work day, does that count your drive right now? Mm. Okay, so that's different. So we'll say eat clean, pick up your kids.
Pick up kids. We'll say, so we'll say two hours now we've got six hours left in our day. Okay. What else do we need to do? Go to the exercise. Okay. How long does everybody go to the gym here or exercise or do something? How long would you say than an average? Half an hour. Hour, two hours, four hours, hour, hour, half hour a day.
You're sitting there with them, they're out playing a sporting event and you're on your phone the whole time while they're doing their sporting event. You gotta think about those hours that you're doing. So what do you guys think for with your kids? Family, kids Hour, quality hour. And , the more, the better.
A day? Some. Some people say five hours a day. Let's call the job the rest of the day. 24. Yeah. Yeah. Left an hour a day. I know. So now I got two hours a day. So your spouse, how much time do you wanna spend? We should have spouse up there, right? I said this, I got this as family. Our kids. But your spouse. This is something that in our industry is, is very bad.
(00:43):
Okay, so one hour spouse. So we got one hour. What are you doing with this one hour? Growing, maybe learning, watching tv. See, I don't even, I don't watch TV anymore. I used to watch a lot of it. I don't, it doesn't interest me anymore. But yes, TV could be, I would put that under hobbies, watching tv. But what are you doing with this one hour?
Avoiding other drivers. I love that. Because this right here, this is your education. Yeah. This could be your education. I used to just listen to the radio. There was no podcast at the time. Listen to the news about all the negative and hate going on out there. Listen to listen to music, hardcore metal music, whatever it was.
If, and this is an older one. If you listen, they were talking about cassette tapes. If you listen to and on your drives and all that amount of time, you can get a two year university education. , when you think about that, it's like in three years of drive, sorry, three years. In three years, you can get a two year university education with those 12,000 miles a drive.
'cause , it takes 10, 12, 15 times to hear the same thing before it really starts to sink in, before you can imitate. Okay, but this is the thing. We got out different times that a lot of us just throw away. I think the most important times. Is, oh, I put work twice. This is sleep. Yeah. This here and work for some of us.
Yeah. So I'm always thinking that, but why I didn't have to, I was just trained that way. Until I realize after years and years and years of doing it that I, why? I'll just go to their birthday party anyway. Go hang out with my friends. If I get a call, then I go talk with my manager about, I'm taking my van to this party.
I. Don't just dwell on that and all of a sudden, two months go by, four months go by, and then you just think, oh, I should have did this. I should, should, should, should, would've, would've. Coulda is you, you take it and stay accountable. So each week they'll talk to you and be like, Hey, did you, did you work on reading every day or three times a day?
We can make this, we think in our head, well, for me anyway, as a technician, I thought in my head, well, I don't know where I'm gonna be. I don't know when I'm gonna be there. I'm all over the place. I'm on call. I got this and that and that. And it just overwhelmed me. And when I started to structure the stuff, this doesn't have to be perfect, like I said, but when you have a little more structure in your life and you can, even if you're a service technician, you can, it makes you feel probably, for me, it made me feel that more structured, more centered, and it kept me motivated.
And by an hour in, then I'll start figuring out what I'm supposed to do in the garage or what I want to do. Right? This call about planning next is taking action. Super important, taking action. We talk about the goals, we talk about the, the developing the habits, getting out. Maybe some of those bad habits stop the procrastination.
I've tried it before. My legs hurt for like a month. So what, what you want to do is really work on taking that action. And it's all about the small simple steps. I'll say this again, you gotta start small because if you try to do everything at once, it's gonna be so overwhelming and you're gonna just stop doing it.
Like, I've been seeing you on there. I'm like, that's awesome. Do I have not done anything different in the last two years. Every day doing the same thing. I'm being persistent and consistent. Maybe the posts have changed or the videos changed a little bit, but I'm just doing the same thing as I've done for the last two years.
But I try right now, I try to do it right then and there because what happens, I think about it at that moment. If I don't do it, it's two days later, I think about it. It's like, shit, I forgot to do that and I needed to do that. I needed to make that phone call. I needed to be there or whatever it is I needed to buy that kid for, for my kids birthday gift or going to the birthday party, whatever it is, right?
So it's okay to adjust. You should be reviewing these plans. This plan here could change. Your kids are now gone to university, so now you wanna spend quality time. So maybe it's not in the plan. It's like I'm gonna go out there and see them every month or every quarter. I'm gonna fly to the other co. A city they're in, a country they're in, and I'm gonna go see them.
I know that Fernando says like, plan for the next day. That's a great idea. I've never did that for years. But imagine if you plan the day before, how easy your next day could be. Or if you plan on Sunday, you work on Sunday. What, what am I, what's Monday? Gonna be like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
If you think you can, or if you think you can't. You're right. 'cause you are. If you think you can't do it well you're right. You think you can do it. You're right. It's something to think about. Okay, the last, the last one. I don't know how much time I have left. Believe in yourself. How much time? Oh, 20 minutes.
Believe you can make a plan. I think the biggest thing that I see, especially in our industry in refrigeration, there's a lot of self-doubt that go up to a service I did. 'cause I know I did it. I go up to a service call, I'm thinking about the service call already, don't even know what the problem is. And I'm already thinking, oh, it's the, it's the, the, the world's coming to an end.
If you're telling yourself you're not gonna be able to fix it before you even start working on it, you're gonna have a lot harder time to solve that problem. And I used to do this all the time on call all the time, doubt myself. Even though I fixed the problem, I fixed the problem, the rack's up and running the customer's happy.
I go to the call, I'm like, and I fixed a hundred of them before I fixed a hundred of them. And then I go out and then I'm, I'm worried that I'm not gonna fix it this time, or someone's gonna go behind me and don't. One of the big things, I, I had callbacks. Everybody has callbacks. What I feared, what I, what I feared that nobody would tell me if I had a callback, 'cause I worked at companies that they didn't tell me.
So really this is something that we all need to work on, and I bet you can see some of the people who have the confidence not, I'm not talking about ego, I'm talking about confidence where someone is confident when they know what they're talking about. They're, they're, they're confident in the things that they do.
, it's, it's things that we need to, don't, don't fall asleep yet, but it's just, just things that we need to work on. We all need to work on some things. So this is, these are the five things that I really believe. If you work on this stuff, it's hard. It's not, this stuff's not easy, but if you work on those goals, start working on changing some habits, getting into making a plan.
'cause I have lots of it. Why do we need four TVs in our house? Seven cell phones? What I mean? So think about, think about that. So you can do all that stuff. This is important. You need to find coaches. You need to find mentors. You need to find accountability partners. This is how you grow. I didn't get into it too much, but I started getting mentors about four years ago.
I wanna thank you so much for hanging out with me and the Refrigeration Mentor Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a comment, let me know what were your key highlights, what you took away from myself or my guest, as well as if you have not subscribed yet, head over to Apple Podcast or Spotify and subscribe.
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