What if the key to feeling more grounded, more aligned, and more inspired in both life and business… was to think ten years ahead?

It might sound like a lifetime away, especially when you’re juggling guests, chasing algorithms, and trying to stay afloat in a world that never slows down. But in this powerful episode, I’m joined by corporate strategist and creative soul Tricia Duffy, the voice behind In 10 Years Time, to explore how a simple mindset shift can change everything.

This isn’t about productivity hacks or rigid goal-setting. It’s about legacy. About designing a business… and a life… that fits who you’re becoming.

Tricia shares her deceptively simple exercise that’s profoundly moving and refreshingly practical. It will help you pause, zoom out, and start creating from a place of calm, not chaos.

If you’ve been feeling stuck, caught in short-term thinking, or just need a reminder that you are in charge of your direction… this episode is for you.

Grab a pen, and let’s map your future together.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Sarah Riley, a UK-based expert helps people start and grow profitable glamping and unique holiday rental businesses.designed to help you understanding the shift that can change your business and life.

Listen to this and previous episodes here:

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• Tools and resources in the Inspired Courses VIP Lounge
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TRANSCRIPT

 Thank you so much for joining me today. It is wonderful to have you here because when we went through the exercise that you shared, I was really quite intrigued about how it made me think differently. And I wanted to share that with others because it’s actually a really rewarding experience, but it also helps you think more positively and give you inspiration about the future.

So in a way, what you do is you help people rethink time and how that looks, and maybe the time bound level of their lives, their business, and so. As a corporate strategist, I thought, let’s get you on. Let’s talk about business and also let’s talk about how people can use your technique to really deeply and practically rethink their life and their business and and where they’re going.

So let’s start there. Tell us a little bit about what you do and how you help people.

Thank you so much for having me, first of all. I really appreciate it. So I’m Trisha, Trisha Duffy, and I am a lot of things as we all are and all of your listeners will be many things. And so I guess this is a conversation with all the parts of ourselves.

So I’m a strategy consultant as you mentioned. I am also a songwriter. I’m a singer, I’m a runner. I’m a friend, I’m a mom. There’s so many different parts to our lives, and I’m also a podcaster and I run a business called in 10 years time how to live a creative life. And that’s how we met because I was very fortunate to be invited to do the closing keynote speech at a conference in ecotourism conference in SPEs in Greece.

And I did a little mini version of creating the 10 year plan with all of the delegates. And the process really is about thinking about. What life might be like if we put ourselves in our own shoes in 10 years time and kind of look back over the decade that we’re about to walk into and how that helps us think about what our legacy might be, what might be important to us, what’s really making us take what we might want more of, what we might want less of.

And that acts as a sort of mega pre-deciding tool and, and a North Star, which allows us to make. Decisions that are more aligned with ourselves and our values and, and what we, what’s true to us day to day. So each day you can do one tiny thing, might be only be for five minutes towards that future, but you can only do that if you spent a little bit of time thinking about it.

Absolutely. So what are the benefits for someone if they go through this process to think about 10 years? ’cause 10 years is such a long time, especially because we are going through a epic time of change. This is probably, we are living history beyond history. I mean, this is just history books in the future, actually no history, computers and summaries from AI in the future.

So what’s the benefits for people if they go through this 10 year thinking plan?

Well, I think a lot of people kind of stumble through day-to-day life, and I know I’ve been guilty of this before, kind of with a lot of aughts and shoulds and tensions that we kind of feel like we must do and we don’t take the time to really examine what those things are that really make us tick and what we want out of life and how we.

We’d like things to be, and also we are in an economic system and a political system, which is relatively short term. It’s, you know, the term of politicians tends to be, what, three to four years. The term of board members tends to be two to four years. People are only incentivized to make decisions. For a relatively short time, for kind of five years and under, essentially by taking ourselves out of that and thinking, right, what do I want life to be in 10 years time?

Not withstanding the fact that we can’t predict some short term things as, and as you allude to the pace of change in technology is extraordinary right now, it’s going very, very quickly. But what we can do is say, well, what we would like to be true. What we would like to be learning, expert in how we would like to be living our lives day to day.

We can have some ideas about that. We can write that down. And the act of kind of committing it to paper gives us an ability to kind of reflect and sort of scratch our heads and say That feel like the direction of travel for me. Okay? Yes it does. And then as I say, each day you can do one small thing that aligns with that.

So I’ll bring it to life with an example that I’m sure everyone can relate to. Really has nothing to do with business. It’s really about our family. So how, how do we want the relationships that are important to us to be in 10 years time? My parent parents are in their eighties, whether they will still be here in 10 years time, I can’t predict, but I can know that in 10 years time, I would look back.

I would like to look back on this decade and know that I was a good daughter, that I was showing up, that I was picking up the phone. By thinking about that and spending a little bit of time on it, it makes me. Better able to make a decision this weekend to pick up the phone or pop down or whatever than perhaps it would do when you’re in the kind of day-to-day cycle of everyday life and in the hamster wheel of decisions and pressures and immediate kind of short is short-term thinking.

So I think it’s just a really, really powerful way for us to step outside ourselves and allow ourselves to think beyond the. The, the terms that are generally informing our businesses because of economic and political pressure, that we’re all part of a system that we didn’t make and we can’t control.

I suppose it’s like life is a journey, isn’t it?

And journeys take steps and we always know our destination, mostly for the short term, and we know how to take steps towards that place, but we don’t really think about the journey for the really long. You know, the long term and, and what’s at the end there and what’s that going to look like and how are we gonna get there?

But it seems so overwhelming. Yeah. A lot of people would say, I can’t think of 10 years. It’s just too far

away. That’s the resistance that I encounter quite a lot. I mean, there’s a couple of other things about in 10 years time, which is that it also gives permission for greater imagination. We can be quite kind of self-limiting if we only think about our one year goals.

Well, there’s no point dreaming about, you know, for me as a songwriter, a million streams, for example, because I could never achieve that in a year. It’s pointless. What’s the point? But in 10 years, I might allow myself to believe that because it’s far enough away to permit imagination. I still think that even doing my own 10 year plan, I’m cautious actually.

I, I probably could go further and allow myself more permission. Some of the things I, I’ve been doing this exercise now for about four or so years, and I’ve only been sharing it for the last 18 months when I’ve. Really thought there was something in it because it has genuinely enabled me to change my life completely.

But the sort of ironic thing is that by having this 10 year plan, I’m actually more nimble, more able to pivot day to day because I have taken that time to think about what kind of makes me tick when things go wrong or when things happen that are unexpected, I can kind of more quickly align towards them.

And this is. How the whole thing was created initially, because I saw this in business as well, the businesses and the NGOs and the charities I worked with in the creative sector mainly that had the longer term visions were more able to pivot and react because everyone was moving the same direction because they had thought about that direction of travel.

And to your point about it feeling overwhelming. I mean, I’m, I’m 54 now, and some people tell me, well, I don’t wanna think about being 64, or if they’re 64, they don’t wanna think about being 74. I mean, I will be 64 whether I think about it or not. God willing. So thinking about it is not the issue here. The.

Passage of time is happening to us. We are moving through time all the time by permitting ourselves to think about challenging things. It is challenging and, and confronting to think about being 64. Of course it is, but I’d rather think about it and say, and be able to design what I’d like to be true in 60 when I’m 64, than let it sort of unfold and happen to me without me having kind of any feeling of agency related to that.

So I have to ask this question. How does your method and your technique relate to the technique in the secret, which is, you know, manifesting, thinking about the future, setting a plan, and then making that happen through energies colliding and, and all that kind of stuff. It, do you think that it.

Correlates. It’s similar, it’s got the same kind of brain process and thinking process.

I think it does. I mean, I’m not a massive fan of the sort of, some of the manifesting work because I think that it can give the impression, it, it, it talks to toxic positivity. You know, if you dream that you are gonna be a slim model living in a house and then you.

Do one thing towards that tomorrow that’s just gonna come true. And it just feels for me a little bit like you’re selling some sheet, a story that’s kind of unreasonable and unfair. I just, I, I’m not sure that that’s all that helpful. I mean, for me, my life has changed significantly in that I am more content, more.

But I’m not happy all the time because nobody is. And if we kind of go through that kind of manifesting exercise saying, you know, describing this utopia, I think that that is unachievable. What I think is more powerful and potentially healthier for us all is. To embrace the cocktail of emotions that we feel every day.

Sometimes it’s really difficult, sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s overjoyed. We’re overjoyed and it’s happy and it’s incredible. And most of the time for me now, it’s just generally lovely and contented and calm and satisfied. And, you know, I feel sort of at the, in a, in a sort of, I guess a narrow band of, of, of happiness, if you want to call it that.

I use the inverted commas. Than a kind of, you know, if you do these things, if you manifest, you’ll be, you know, endlessly happy. I just don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think that’s true of anybody. So I think that that can be a little bit unhelpful. The 10 year plan embraces all of it. The hard, the good, the difficult, as well as.

The overwhelming joy that I get living a creative life, the balance I get, the joy that I get from helping people with their 10 year plans and helping them to understand how their creative balance is gonna help them, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I guess that’s the difference really. There’s a little bit more realism associated.

10 years is kind of far enough away to be imaginative, but also close enough to imagine you can make some predictions about what might be true in 10 years time. I could predict kind of when my mortgage might be paid off, when, you know, just some practical things I can, I know what age I will be. I know how old my kids are gonna be and that I’d like the, the lines of communication to stay open with them.

I know how old my business will be. You know, there’s lots of things that we can be sure about as well as things that we can imagine that are, you know, perhaps more, more joyful. So it’s about the combination of both those things.

So for listeners, we are gonna go through a little exercise at the end, so keep listening, but I just wanted to, I suppose, think about.

I agree with what you say, the manifesting can be toxic. There’s a bit of toxic thinking around it. And as my dad might have said, it’s a bit like selling snake oil, isn’t it? But I do think there are some elements which are really great. So how the brain thinks, obviously we know there’s something like. 85% of what the brain does is subconscious.

We don’t even know we’re doing it. And so if we have this plan 10 year plan, and we maybe even put it in a vision board that we glance at every day or every other day, or every week or every month, and then we maybe revisit it every now and again to just check is our plan, are we still in, you know, in the right direction?

Are we still doing the right things for us? Then it can maybe make your brain subconsciously start building towards that even when we’re not thinking about it. I think that’s what I may a hundred percent.

Yeah. So for sure, those elements of manifesting are really, really useful and they’re absolutely aligned with a 10 year plan.

I mean, on my podcast I talk about a number of different exercises that you can do, and I in. Even dedicated an entire episode to this practice of giving yourself an A, which is something that came from academia, and the way that I interpreted it was to write a letter to somebody that was a sort of big, hairy, audacious goal.

My letter was written to Chris Evans, the host of the Virgin Radio Breakfast Show. Thanking him for having me on the show to talk about my podcast. Now, that’s never happened, but the very act of doing that allowed me to feel how exciting that would be. What an amazing step that would be. And it’s a bit like talking to you now, you know, to be a guest on a podcast is something that I only dreamed of when I first started to do my podcast, and now I’m guessing on a number of different podcasts, and it’s really, really exciting, and that does give me joy, and it does give me the buzz and et cetera.

There are a number of practices that we can do that help us to feel those, as the manifesters would say, or the spiritual things would say those vibrations. And I do definitely feel that kind of. The investment of time, thinking about how if those things were true, it might make you feel is a really good thing to do.

And I, I agree with you that your brain plasticity is, is growing all the times. You experience that and also it opens your eyes to those connections to the people that you resonate with. I mean, you and I had just. Strong connection from the moment that we met. And you find those like-minded individuals and they are the people that then help you amplify through the communion of your kind of creative practice and your creative being, which is just being human one could argue.

So, yeah. So I think it’s a different practice because it has this sort of realistic element to it, but a lot of the things you are describing that are the benefits of a manifesting kind of practice are, are, are true of it too. For sure.

And I like what you were saying there about, you know, raising your vibration and getting that energy up because I think that is key actually to achieving what you want in any timeframe.

Mm-hmm.

It’s definitely getting, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter how successful or not things are. Obviously we have their up, are up and down days, but if we can keep our energy up, if we can keep that buzz somehow. Then I think that attracts amazing things into your life. I am a big believer in the fact that, well, in fact, science tells us, doesn’t it?

That if you took a very, very strong microscope and you looked at your skin and down into the cells, down to the quantum level, it would just be energy. And energy is what we connect to. Nature is what we connect to each other. We are all connected by energy and we are light beings. And so I think that if we can continue to.

Increase that energy through whatever means we can. Whether that’s setting a plan that lights us up and gets us inspired and motivated and excited, then that’s going to bring our energy up and that’s gonna bring better things into our life, like attracts like. I’ve often seen, so people in business who.

They tell me that they’re really struggling, that they can’t seem to do anything. And no matter what they do, they keep coming to a brick wall. And, and often actually, if you just see how they are, they are creating their own brick wall, they just don’t even realize it. They don’t even see it. Yeah. And it’s sometimes.

Getting them to think differently. That’s exactly, yeah. Changes everything.

That’s exactly what the 10 year plan does. So my particular area of self-work worth work, I’ll share with you is related to whether I deserve to earn. Whether I deserve to have money. I’ve got a lot of hangups about that. And as you probably know, there was a big study done by Cambridge University in, I think 2017, I wanna say, that suggested that we form our relationships with money and our, you know, perception of financial wealth, et cetera, around the age of.

6, 7, 8 years old. So those views are very, very ingrained in us and it’s very easy to kind of keep perpetuating this sort of myth that we perhaps don’t deserve or we shouldn’t be charging, or while value is not there, et cetera, et cetera, because they’re so ingrained. And when I’m lived with these attitudes for 40 plus years, it’s very, very difficult to unpick by doing a 10 year plan.

And part of the 10 year plan is around finance. And career particularly, I can start to examine, right, what’s enough for me? What does a success look like for me? What is an ingrained view? That’s really come from the generations of my parents because they were post-war babies and lived through a lot of risk, and their seven years moment was informed by huge amounts of survival, practical kind of information, which is perfectly reasonable.

They then pass on to me and I pass on to my children. But by changing my attitude to that, then actually, you know, the ability to live to my meanings from my creativity comes it. It actually ha, it actually works because I’m able to open myself to the possibility of earning from this practice, earning from in 10 years time from this thing that I believe in so powerfully whilst also staying true to my values, which is true.

Make things accessible for people and not exclude people and not have it something that’s only for the rich, for example. So, you know, just taking the time to examine that and say, what do I think? And what is an informed kind of ingrained view? What’s a new view that I might be able to take on board? It helps you.

It’s about sort of stepping outside yourself and giving yourself the opportunity for a little external perspective, almost.

Mm, absolutely. And I think we can’t really talk about this without also mentioning, you know, the whole scarcity element. So if your energy is down, if you’re not thinking positively and up, and if you’re not thinking abundantly, then you’re in scarcity.

You’re stuck in scarcity. And I do see that a lot as well. And often that manifests that someone says, oh, but the, you know, the industry’s becoming so competitive, it’s so difficult to do anything now. I’m not getting the bookings that I want. I haven’t got, et cetera, et cetera. And. In some ways that can create this feeling in them to close down, to shut down.

They’re worried, they’re scared, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re not thinking about those partnerships that they could explore or working together with other people that might open new opportunities. ’cause they’re thinking, well I can’t do that because they’ll steal my customers. Or, you know, they’re still my guests.

And so they shut down and they’re very closed and. That is another way that I see people shoot themselves in the foot. Yeah, a hundred percent operating. But I

think that that’s where the beauty of like a 10 year plan really can help you because if you can articulate and permit yourself just, I mean, it takes 90 minutes really to do your 10 year plan a bit less probably once every few months, and it does it.

It does update. It’s not something that stays completely static all the time. I recommend, I mean, I update my own 10 year plan about three times a year because as you start to take those steps towards that goal that you set, the first time you have your head turned by something else that’s exciting, or you meet an amazing, interesting person and, and that then brings another piece of information.

This is data, another piece of information in in front of you that you think, well, maybe I could try that. There’s also these things compound, don’t they? The tiny activity. Once you’ve sort of decided your direction of travel and where you’d like to be, whether that be from a financial perspective, a career perspective, a business perspective, or something that you want to learn a new skill, for instance, these things have the ability to compound.

So by saying. In 10 years time, I would like to, I don’t know, be a potter, for example, that that’s not one of my particular ones, but I suppose that’s something that somebody wanted to do, be a ceramicist alongside their offer, alongside their glamping business. Then the one thing you can do today is start to.

Buy a ball of clay and see how that goes, and that compounds. So you might be terrible at it that first day. Second day you might be marginally better. Third day you might be worse again, but you only get the benefit of that 10th day when things start to go well because you did 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And likewise, once you’ve done your hundred days, you only get the benefit of that hundredth day because you’d 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

And to 99. So all of these things kind of compound and they grow, but it was only because you dared to write down, do you know what? I’ve always loved the idea of doing pottery and it’s something I’d like to really try. That you were able to give yourself permission to take that step each day and see the benefit of that and see it growing and then maybe invest in your wheel or whatever it might be as time goes on.

There’s a sort of tipping point for all of these things, isn’t there? So yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, it’s the daring to imagine and then taking one tiny. Step to support that, which could include from a business perspective, exploring where the next site might be, or understanding what the regulations are in that territory you always thought about moving to, or it’s just a small bit of data, which I can collect today.

And then that’s one tiny step, which I can compound a bit like compound interest tomorrow by taking another small step. But you can only get tomorrow’s benefit because you did today’s, if you see what I mean?

Mm-hmm. And just as well, to me, clear to everyone that this isn’t just a 10 year plan for creative things like you were saying there with, you know.

You want to become a potter. Brilliant. That’s lovely. But it’s also, you can apply it to business, you can apply it to, to friend, friendships, relationships, everything. It’s anything that affects your life. Yeah. You apply it to, so tell us a little bit about the

process. So the 10 year plan process, I, when I do this with people live I, I run workshops, but I also have a podcast episode on this, which you could just use and stop and start, and stop and start, which is available.

On all the podcast streaming platforms, so it should be accessible to anyone if you can get access to a device. So if you’re listening to this podcast, it’s definitely available to you. It goes through kind of four key categories, which are creativity and learning. And I think that it is important for everybody to think about that even if they.

Not necessarily looking as, I have to live a creative life, although I highly recommend that because of all the cognitive benefits and the neuroplasticity and brain health benefits you would get from any form of creativity in your life. And I think it helps your innovation in your business as well, but also to have a learner’s mindset and.

The 10 year period is very important from that perspective because of this notion of 10,000 hours. If there is something you have always wanted to do in your life, you could start today and be a master at it in 10 years time. That’s absolutely possible. It’s. Statistically likely, and you know, you, you, you could pick up something brand new that you’d never even tried before.

Whether that be a language, whether that be a, a craft, whether that be a, some sheet metal design. I mean, I dunno, it could be absolutely anything and you could be a master at it in 10 years time. Likewise with your business, you start today, you’ll be a master at it in 10 years time. But obviously it will go quicker than that.

You’ll be pretty good after your, after your apprenticeship of say, three years. The next category is career and finance. And so this is where we really get into, as I was just describing, this kind of sense of what’s enough, what does success really mean to us, and try and sort of disentangle ourselves from the economic system and those short term kind of thinking periods that really inform the way that we make decisions and how our kind of career path is pre-designed for us by.

System. Essentially the next area that we look at is relationships and home. So where do we want to be living? How do we want to be living? And what do we want to say about those important relationships? And I do encourage people to spend most of their time thinking about the very old and the very young, because those are the biggest shifts that we’re gonna see.

Either people are going see. Growing from their teenage years to their twenties perhaps, or from their twenties to the thirties. And how might those relationships change and what other lines of communication we want to keep open and as I’ve referred to already with the people in our lives who are older, how do we want to have, remember the legacy?

How do we want to consider this last 10 years that we spent perhaps with those people? And then the final area is health and fitness. So, you know, more bad news, and this is where the kind of the thinking and the realism really comes into it. Is that in terms of our muscle density, so we’ve talked a little bit about brain health, but muscle density, we lose between three and 8% of our muscle.

Every decade from the age of 30, so up till 30, it’s all good news, and after that, it’s all downhill. It’s a downhill slope, and obviously that gets higher as we get older. Once we get into our sixties and seventies, it’s nearer to the 8%, and when we’re in our thirties, it’s nearer to the three. Obviously people are different, so it, it’s not a, a binary number.

But if we want to stay as fit and healthy as we are today, if I want to be as fit and healthy as I am today at 64, then I’m gonna have to start working out. And that again is a pre-deciding tool. When I get up in the morning and think, oh, I just really can’t be bothered to go running today because it’s pouring with rain and I don’t feel like it.

I sort of say to myself, future me. I really appreciate it. If I go for a run. And that sometimes just enough. It’s sometimes just enough. And as you say, kind of feeling the vibrations of how that feels. I, because I update my 10 year plan relatively regularly, I remind myself of this. So those sort of check-in moments, I literally just did mine on on Sunday evening actually.

So that check in moment of going, right, okay, what do I write down that I would like to be true in 10 years? Time maintaining my current fitness, maintaining my weight, et cetera. Well then that makes a good decision that I will make that broccoli salad and I’ll go for a run and I will walk home from the thing that I was at.

It just helps you, again, just enact a tiny decision that day because you. Took a moment to think about it. That’s all it really is. So along with that, we look back as well, we look forward. It’s really about kind of looking back, looking forward, thinking about kind of a 20 year span, really what’s happened in the last 10 years.

It kind of gives us permission and ability to understand the realms of what’s possible and then looking forward, and as I say, this is not a binding contract. You know, I mean, I, I do mine on a big sheet of a three graph paper actually, but I have a template on my website that’s completely free for anyone who wants to use that.

And. The, the updating of it and the coming back to it. I often find that I’m more interested in things that stay the same in my 10 year plan, because that gives me surety. I was really onto something. It wasn’t just a kind of, you know, head turning magpie moment. Ooh, shiny. I do want to be a potter. No, I really don’t.

I am still a songwriter. You know, it’s, it is kind of a check and balance, so updating it really helps you. And once you’ve got one, you can sort of do that compare and contrast and say, what did I say last time? Oh, interesting. Still saying the same thing. Still saying, I’d like to live with these conditions.

I still saying that I want to keep music in my life, or whatever though. I want to learn language or whatever the thing might be. That is your, your driver. Probably something in that. Maybe I’ll invest a little bit of time in it today, just five minutes. In amongst our busy lives.

So of those elements. Do you actually, so you look back at how it, how it was for the last 10 years.

Do you then give yourself small, incremental moments within the next 10 years, or do you just look for the 10 years? Where will I be in 10 years on this? On this particular one?

Well, I do personally as I look 10 years and then I make a daily decision. I don’t do any in between goals. I just don’t think that they have personally served me very, very well to do kind of one year goals because I find it’s.

It’s. So either I self limit and then that doesn’t help me the opposite of the vibrations because I sort of go, well, I can never do that in a year, so I’ll just halve it, halve the dream. And so that sort of self limits, whereas 10 years, yes, I totally believe that that can be possible and I’ll make a step towards it today.

So for example, when I first started doing this process, I wrote down on my 10 year plan. In 10 years time I will have done a master’s. In songwriting, and I’ve only been doing that for four years since I did that first 10 year plan, and I have done a master’s in songwriting, and I’m starting a PhD in October.

If I’d have done a one year plan, I would’ve write fat, maybe find a master’s. Oh, I could never do it. I’ve never passed the audition. Okay. That would go on the three, I dunno it would, I just couldn’t have put that down because I couldn’t have believed that that would be true. So actually what I find is my, even my 10 year plan is guilty of self-limiting because I couldn’t even have comprehended the fact that I would.

To have a PhD that I would have a doctorate, but now I can, this the tenure plan I just did on Sunday. I wrote down, you know, I’m, I’m Dr. Duffy, I’m, I’m, you know, my PhD is completed and I have my doctorate. I can dream that now, but that’s taken me a few years of this little apprenticeship that I’m doing in my own learning to be able to see that.

So personally, I think the 10 and then a step each, each day, each week towards it is really, really powerful.

Let’s put it into context of somebody who is maybe in a corporate job. They’re a bit tired, they want something different. They’re looking for more of a lifestyle business, and they are thinking hospitality.

They’ve always loved the idea of it and thinking of going into it, but they don’t have the land. They don’t have the knowledge. They just like the idea of maybe stayed at a few places and thought, this is great. I’d really like to do this. Looking back, the 10 years looking back will be assessing how did I feel in that 10 years?

It obviously was getting worse and worse and worse, which is why they’re started to look for a change. They’re looking for something different, but then they are starting to think maybe in 10 years I will have my own small lifestyle business That’s manageable that I can. Fund that is bringing in a, you know, lower probably than the corporate job income, but they’re getting payments in different ways, which is a better life, a better lifestyle in nature.

Able to pick their hours, come and go as they please. You know, all of those kind of good things. And then the smaller bite-sized chunks would be okay. This week, I’m gonna think about finding out information about how I can make that happen. Is it even possible to own a business like that without owning land?

Are there any examples out there? Maybe I need to listen to a few podcasts and think about this. Maybe I need to talk to some experts and pick their brains and see if it’s. Actually possible, that kind of thing. So that’s how you are thinking that it works? Yes, a hundred percent.

Exactly. So your, your business owner, I mean, in the career and finance section of the, of the 10 year plan, they would describe what that balance looks like, how much time, how they’re spending their time, what that ownership looks like.

They can dream that because in 10 years, anything’s possible. We’ve already agreed, haven’t we, that we can master something. They could become an expert in this business in 10 years time, but. The way that they can then use that day-to-day is exactly as you’ve articulated. Well, today is Thursday and I am going to, at my lunch break, instead of going out to the pub with the guys because it’s Thursday, and we always did that on Thursday.

I’m just gonna spend 15 minutes at my desk and I’m gonna research a podcast so I could listen to on the way home. That’s a tiny, tiny investment. Now that podcast on the way home triggers an idea. Tomorrow they could spend 15 minutes, ’cause they’re probably working at home on a Friday. I’m making lots of assumptions here.

They can spend 15 minutes in their lunch break researching. Okay. It was interesting to see how that works in France or Austria or whatever territory maybe. I always. I, I spoke German at school. Maybe Austria is the way for me. I dunno, I’m just sort of thinking out loud. That might, that might be the way in, in, in which it goes.

So let’s research whether or not that’s possible. What, what are the weather conditions like? Do I have an idea of it being near Alps or do I have it, an idea of it being in the sunny place near a beach, et cetera. I can start to narrow down and then the next day. They might take a day off from it, but back on Monday, 15 minutes in the lunch break.

Why? I’m just going to have a look at the financial planning. How many tents would I need to do before I was able to make a living from that? And how do you build from that? They might look into their own personal finance and say, right, okay, what savings have I got? How much risk could I possibly take?

You know, all of this is good data, isn’t it? Good information. All we are doing is we’re not making any decisions. We’re not jumping before or running before we can walk. All we’re doing is gathering information and that could take a form of a number of different things, including, you know, depending on what stage of life they’re at, when they might have a tax free pension draw down, or when they might be able to relinquish a lump sum from an is so they’ve been investing in for however long or what they might need to save and therefore what they might do differently today in order to make that possible in 1, 2, 3 years time.

So maybe. They’ll make a decision rather than investigating research. Maybe they’ll make a decision not to buy the bottle of wine or not to go out with those friends. Difficult because they can save 50 pounds and put that away towards the, the, the, the plan. So I think that rather than trying to make it too big and like, well, I can never do that because I dunno where, and just one tiny thing, 15 minutes, five minutes, one minute, literally sketch it.

What does it look like? Draw it on a piece of paper. Yeah, that might be all you need to do today, and then tomorrow do another thing and compound from that. Grow again. Think about that compound interest. You get more from your activity because of what you did today. You get more tomorrow and more the next day and more the day after that.

So with the creative element, I think we need to focus in on that a little bit because I know. Lifestyle business owners might say, I don’t have time for that. I’ve got too many other things I need to do. I don’t have time to be creative. I can’t take on a new hobby. I can’t do a new thing. Now we know about how good creative things are for the brain.

What would you say to somebody who is considering their 10 year plan and they’re thinking about the creative element, but they’re thinking, you know, I don’t have time for that particular part of the of the plan. What would you say? Well,

the, the, the bad news is that in the uk, which is where you and I are both based, the last two years, the single biggest killer in the UK has been dementia or dementia related illness.

And the Alzheimer’s Society tells us that one in three of us born today are likely to be a DI diagnosed with dementia at some point in our lives. And the medical community also tells us, while we are slow to find medical interventions and drugs that work, that the single most. Impactful thing you can do for your brain health and to prevent or delay the onset of dementia is any creative act and it does not matter.

One, jot what the quality. Of that creativity or craft or hobby is at all is the participation in it that is most important. Furthermore, there are other benefits which are, I mean, you talked a little bit about kind of the different parts of your brain and how things are happening and how these vibrations are happening.

When you engage in any kind of creativity or you learn something new, you create. You create brain. Basically you grow brain, so your brain a bit like a bicep. When you work it out, it grows. It’s a muscle that grows. It regenerates cells, and when you don’t use those cells, they atrophy. So by engaging in creativity, you deploy different parts of the brain, which have different functions, and you improve your memory, you improve your reaction times, you improve your ability to comprehend information and make decisions.

You improve. All sorts of elements of your ability to think and, and make decisions and strategize and innovate. If you are trying to launch a small business, you need to be able to innovate, to be able to problem solve. And the way that innovation is bred is through creativity because not just necessarily the creative act itself, but actually what’s happening in your brain when you engage in creative.

Is you reduce the stress of hormones, you reduce your cortisol, you reduce adrenaline, and you allow some of the more beneficial hor hormones, the serotonin and the dopamine and the oxytocin to to level up. And those are the things that help us to connect the neurons in our brains and help us make our decisions, which enables us to problem solve and come up with great solutions.

It’s a bit like meditating as well. If anyone’s ever had an. Experience of meditating. You sort of go into that kind of black hole, and if you become very practiced at it, you can really get into your sort of inner, inner place. And then you come out the other side and you go, oh, I know how to solve that thing now.

You didn’t even think about it, but your brain’s doing the work for you while you are. Kind of in, in that altered kind of consciousness. It’s, it’s the same reason why you wake up with the solution sometimes in the morning is because when you’re in REM sleep, your adrenaline drops to zero and that’s when your imagination network is allowed, is permitted to solve things and come up with hair brainin schemes that your executive network that has all of these sort.

You know, useful stress hormones and adrenaline and everything. They are useful for decision making. But it says those are the hormones that say there’s no point doing that because we’ve been there before and this is what happened. So by eradicating some of that stuff, we actually free ourselves. To be able to make different decisions and we look after our long-term health as well.

So I believe that if you can dedicate again, five minutes, I mean, I mentioned a book to you before this book called The Brain on Art in that book, which cites 4 244 different studies. That also the same thing if you engage in any kind of creative act is good for your brain. They say that 45 minutes a month is enough.

I mean, I would suggest more than that. ’cause I think, you know, it should be possible to find. Five minutes a day. If you scroll on your phone for 30 minutes or two and a half hours or four hours, as some of us do, and even I’m guilty of that sometimes, then I absolutely believe you can find five minutes to do a sketch in the back of your notebook.

Or create a Mandela template and color that in. It doesn’t have to be good. This is not about creating art because you’re gonna be exhibiting in a gallery. This is about creating something because it’s good for you and it will help you to problem solve and be a better business person and a better. All around human being probably as well.

Mm. I think you’re absolutely right and so many of us are dealing with health issues and, and many people dealing with family members and even themselves with brain issues and you know, let’s not. Forget women going through menopause and they have those issues because the whole process kind of slows things down and helps us become forgetful.

Yeah. Which is not helpful at all, but in terms of. How you do your plan, how does that work? So if you said that you share some resources on your website, where can people go to find those resources? What’s the website? My

website is in 10 years time.com. And it’s TEN, the the, the word rather than the number.

And in there you will find access to all of the podcast episodes. And the podcast is a research based podcast and each series has a theme. So. It’s worth going back to the beginning. Think of it a bit like reading a book or listening to an audio book. Each series has six episodes, which are five research based episodes, and one interview, which brings the whole kind of theme together with somebody who’s an expert in the thing that I’ve researched.

And then the resources includes everything from the 10 year plan template. Obviously a creativity finder, so a little tool to, if you’re not sure what your creativity is and you can’t think of the thing to to start with, and I’ve got a little tool to help you navigate what that might be and how you might.

Take that first step, that first tiny step into it or join it later on. So it’s, it is designed to work for people at all levels of their creativity, creative practice. There’s also trackers, things like a rejection template. This might be useful for business people as well. I mean, I, I, I steal a lot from business to, for in 10 years time because my own kind of experience of working in business, this is how the whole thing came about.

Was doing 10 year plans with clients, and I thought, I wonder what would happen if I did it for myself and that this is how the whole thing was born. So I do steal quite a lot of business tools and I adapt them for, for our personal use, essentially, and, and they would be viable for small business as well.

So there’s all sorts of things. There’s reading lists on there, all sorts of things, and it’s all completely free. So yeah, all you need to do is just go onto the website and help yourself. They’re all in gray scale, so everything’s printable. You don’t need a fancy printer and you won’t use all your. Pink ink because my logo is bright pink.

You can, you can access them, access them for free, and, and the podcast is obviously also available to everybody and I run workshops as well. So the next workshop is in September, and that’s actually with me in real time, doing your 10 year plan. It takes 90 minutes. It’s online, it’s on Zoom. The next one’s on a Thursday evening at 7:30 PM UK time, BST, and.

Yeah, it’s a very, very powerful process. I have a very, very high rebook rate. People tend to come back. They sometimes miss one and then come back to the next one, and the text messages and the dms and the emails I get after people have participated are really, really profound. I mean, people have written to me saying, I was really resistant to thinking about being in my seventies, but now I can see that 73-year-old me is going to have an amazing life someone else takes.

The messaged me, dmd me saying, interesting byproduct of doing my 10 year plan. That found out that I can draw down a tax free pension sum in five years. So just all these sort of little byproducts come back and people write to tell me about them, which is just completely joyful, obviously. So yes, it’s all available and it’s designed to be really accessible because I don’t want.

Anyone to feel they can’t afford it or can’t get access to it. So, and, and also huge offer to everybody. If there’s something that somebody wants me to research, I’m always happy to add things onto the list and, and research more things for people as well. So I take, I take ideas and I’ll go ahead and do the, do the scurrying through the PhD, thesises and the, and the medical journals to find the answer if I possibly can.

Would you say you are a researcher at heart? Well, I didn’t think I was, but again, thanks to doing this 10 year plan and me sort of jotting down somewhere I won. I wonder if I could do a, a master’s. I got a massive yeah, bug for research, which I really, really surprised me. And as I mentioned, I’m now gonna be starting my PhD in, in October of this year.

Which is obviously gonna take my research level, upper, upper level. I mean, back to the stories we tell ourselves. A lot of people tell themselves they’re not a creative person, but that’s just fundamentally untrue because to be creative, to be human is to be creative. I also told myself I wasn’t an academic person because I left school at 16 with no qualifications and no prospects, and here I am now a master’s student about to do a PhD.

So again, you know, we have a lot of ingrained ideas that we’ve told ourselves. Through our social circumstances perhaps, or you know, the things that have affected us through our lives and also the big sort of social narratives that inform the roles of men and women, et cetera. And a lot of that’s untrue.

And if we allow ourselves the time of to dream a little bit about what might be possible in 10 years time. We can break some of those narratives and, and, and try something brand new and prove, and prove ourselves entirely wrong. Like me being a researcher.

Absolutely. Well, you know what? I can’t wait to call you Dr.

Duffy. I know. Won’t that’d be exciting. So that’s something really exciting to look forward to. So what is your web address?

It’s www.intenyearstime.com.

Wonderful. So I, I really appreciate you being here today and to share all of this with us and I can absolutely urge everyone to do the 10 year plan, go to your website, download the template, or just do it based on what you’ve shared today and it’ll be really enlightening and very inspirational and it will just prove that everything you dream of can be achieved in 10 years.

So I think you should dare to dream. Thank you so much. Thank you, and I very much hope that you’ll come back to the podcast in the future and share a little bit more about whether you become Dr. Duffy.

Oh, I would love, wouldn’t that be amazing.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Trisha. Thank look for having to speaking to you again soon.

No doubt.

Thank you.