Becoming the Best Version of Yourself in 2025

Ready to make 2025 your best year yet? 

Lachlan Stuart shares his framework for becoming the best version of yourself. From setting actionable goals to defining personal success, this episode is packed with practical tips to help you reflect, plan, and take meaningful steps toward a brighter future. 

Whether you’ve had a great year or a challenging one, growth is always possible. 

Tune in to learn how to turn feedback into fuel and step into 2025 with confidence.

Chapters

• 0:00 Becoming the Best Version of Yourself
• 5:59 Mapping Out Your Best Self
• 10:11 Creating Your Best Self for 2025

Transcript

Lachlan Stuart: 0:00

What could your life look like if you truly had no limitations? It's a very interesting question to think about and one that I want you to dive into in this episode. Today, we're going to explore how you can become the best version of yourself in 2025. December is the best time, in my opinion, for starting a year fresh, to review the year that's been and get clear on what you want the year to look like and set those standards so you can have the most actionable, or intentionally actionable, positive year ahead. My name is Lachlan Steart. Let's dive into the episode. Welcome back to man that Can With Lachy Stewart. Today, we're going to dive into how to become the best version of yourself as we get to the end of 2024,.

Lachlan Stuart: 0:44

It's the month of December where I personally spend a lot of time thinking about how successful the year was, and I have my idea or, I guess, my standards around what a successful year is, and I use the benchmarks of whether I hit certain goals or I achieved certain outcomes to help me look back and go okay, was this a great year or could it be improved upon? It's really important to think about, or I believe every year can be improved upon because we gain so much experience and so much feedback from one year. We should aim to build upon that and we should use the feedback. So if you really wanted to say is next year going to be the better year, of course it is. I ask myself every year how can I be a better husband, how can I earn more money? How can I become healthier? How can I have more adventures? How can I have more fun? You may have certain areas of your life or certain questions that you want to ask yourself. That will allow you to get clear and identify what's truly important to you. Now, there is no right or wrong in what that looks like, because your life is completely unique. So, when you think about the question of how to become the best version of yourself, there are so many frameworks and I'm going to give you a framework today, a very simple framework that if you implement it, you'll be able to start working towards it. Because there are so many frameworks, though, it can be overwhelming. So we do want to look for simplicity. We also want to keep it unique to you.

Lachlan Stuart: 2:08

Far too many people are trying to fit into a mold that society's created for us around one specific definition of success. If you were like me, that definition meant that you needed a lot of money to be successful and you needed to have a great career title. What I've since learned is that there are so many other things to me that make or define success for me. Is that there are so many other things to me that make or define success for me. I want to, and even now working towards running 58 marathons in 58 days across all 50 states of America and all eight states and territories of Australia. That, to me, is success. Putting that together, raising funds, having the adventure, bringing friends along with me that is a really big part of what a successful 2025 will look like for me, because I want that experience For you. It may be having your first child. It may be launching your business. It may be ticking off a health goal. Whatever it is, it's completely okay because it must motivate you, not only externally, meaning you achieve something, but internally. It must help you grow, and a thing that will happen when you work towards a better version of yourself who you are right now, as you're listening to this podcast episode, won't be the same version of yourself that will be achieving those goals, and that is okay, because you have to grow, you have to face your fears, you have to try new things, you have to fail. You have to laugh about it all, because so much of it isn't serious.

Lachlan Stuart: 3:19

I was on a run this morning with my nephew my nephew's 11. When we finished the run I was throwing the football with him and I. People walking past and they're actually a mate of mine's parents that I hadn't seen for about a decade. Funnily enough, their dad, glenn. When I was talking to him he's like mate. I haven't seen you since I was pulling that car. You crashed out of a ditch Because I rolled the car almost 15 years ago into a ditch and hit a tree and he owned a tow truck company or he had a tow truck at the time. So he was able to pull me out of that and we were just talking about how fast life goes and what the important moments are.

Lachlan Stuart: 3:51

As they were talking sorry, after they were talking, I was walking away thinking it's interesting the seasons of life that we go through. Obviously, when we're young, we have no responsibilities. Everything's play and adventure. As we move into our teen and adolescent years, we want to make a name for ourself. It's about building our character. It's about creating, I guess, security and a home base for ourself, which is probably the age that I'm in now, and then after that it's the family, and then after that it's all about community and all about connection. That's what I want to talk about, not next week, but the following week around why it is so challenging to maintain friendships throughout life, and I'm going to share tips that I personally am implementing, and it's working well to keep great friendships within my life.

Lachlan Stuart: 4:32

But back on track, so, when we're looking at how to become the best version of yourself, it starts with you, right, listening to this, the best version is you, so here's the three pillars that I would look at. Firstly is you need to define what the best version of yourself looks like. Now, it's very easy to be overwhelmed by that question, and it's very easy to jump the gun and think, 10 years down the track, to think about the end goal, which is cool. Think about that. The key, though, is to think about what you want and who you want to become, and strip it back a bit to go over the next 12 months or 12 weeks I personally do 12 weeks, which is what we do in our Strongman of Value Academy in the game plan, but over the next 12 weeks, becoming the best version of myself looks like. Whatever that answer looks like for you, it could mean, once again, depending on the season, it could mean you're increasing your income and your business by $1,000 a week. It could mean you're dropping five kilos. It could mean you're going on more date nights. But what does that look like for you? Because once you achieve that goal, the next quarter or the next year, you build on top of that, and that's all we do in the academy. We help people achieve such incredible results, but we break it down, so they're constantly building, brick by brick, around what has to happen next in order to become the best version of yourself, because who you are in this moment is the current best version of yourself, but it can always get better.

Lachlan Stuart: 5:59

As I said at the start of this, you've got feedback, years of feedback. You can use that feedback to learn how you want to grow or which areas you want to grow, what you need to do, which takes me to key point two. You want to grow, or which areas you want to grow, what you need to do, which takes me to key point two identify key actions. What are the key actions that are going to help you achieve the defined best version of yourself? What are those things that you need to do? Not all of them, but the key ones, the ones that if you were to do them and only them, they would have the largest improvement on you achieving that outcome. So we've got define number one define the best version of yourself and, whether that's over, give yourself a timeframe. I think goal setting is perfect for this. It gives you that timeframe to work towards, so 12 weeks, 12 months.

Lachlan Stuart: 6:42

I personally and you've definitely heard me talk about this I used to talk about 10 year vision, five year vision, and I think that's important, because it does shape direction. What I've learned over the last decade, though, is things change so much, and who I am has changed so much, that what I was working towards isn't as important to me as it once was. I don't hold those outcomes as tightly or, as I guess, strongly in my hand as I would a 12-week goal, because a 12-week goal is something that is far enough away that you can achieve it, but it's also close enough that it still has that urgency, and you can change it if you realize that you don't like it okay, which is a very important thing, because a lot of men that I've worked with really don't like making decisions, because they are fearful of making the wrong ones, and the only way you're going to really figure out if it's right or wrong is by doing it. I want you to understand this and this is something that I guess I really understood and it sunk in in 2015 is that every action has an opposite reaction. So what do I mean by that?

Lachlan Stuart: 7:45

Let's say, for 2025, you define the best version of yourself and let's say, quarter one, the definition is that you want to improve your communication. Actually, I'm going to use myself. So quarter one of 2025, I am wanting to do something that no one has ever done before. I want to challenge myself mentally, my mental resilience. I want to explore in a way that no one's ever explored and I want to spend quality time with friends. Now that decision for quarter one has opposite reactions. So, while I'm working towards one, the adventure and experiences. Two, I'm challenging my mental resilience. Three, I'm hanging out with friends. Some of the opposite reactions are is I'm spending 70 days away from my wife. That's challenging. I'm not working as okay and I'm not having that home base that gives me peace and security and safety.

Lachlan Stuart: 8:42

Essentially so, the understanding that every decision has an opposite reaction, or every action has a reaction, means you can prepare for what's to come. Now you can't be fully prepared because there's always going to be things that pop up that are out of your control. If you're mindful of things, you can prepare for them. So things that I've had to get clear on is I've had to work out how and have conversations with my wife around how she feels about me going away Not only my safety, but time apart. How are we going to communicate? What kind of communication would she like? Facetimes daily, certain things? We have to put rules around that and standards, because I don't want any of us getting upset or frustrated and putting tension or stress or, sorry, more tension or more stress on the relationship than it probably already will.

Lachlan Stuart: 9:27

The next thing will obviously be from a work perspective. I've finished up with nearly all my one-to-one clients. I am keeping a few that I know I'll be able to manage the time with, and then we've got our academy. I know that there are going to be days and moments where I'm tired and I'm fatigued, but I have systemized what it takes to achieve outcomes for people that I will be able to do that, so work. While it won't be growing fingers crossed, it won't be declining Best version of yourself. I want you to think about that now. What does that look like? What does that feel like? What does that feel like? How does it sound? What do the people around you sound like If you were to look ahead and look back at the end of 2025, what have you achieved?

Lachlan Stuart: 10:11

Who have you met? There are so many questions that you can ask yourself, and the more time you spend thinking about this now, especially the older you get, the more potential answers you can have, the better it's going to be for planning for 2025. I want to give you a couple more questions, so here's what I'll leave you with and this is a very short. This is a very sharp episode this week. One what do I truly want to achieve in 2025 and why?

Lachlan Stuart: 10:38

Number two what daily habits or routines will support this vision? What's one thing that I can stop doing that's holding me back? It's not spoken about enough, but it's very important to actually stop doing things If your calendar and your time is so poor, or you just are always busy, but you don't feel like you're making the progress. Stop doing things, don't look for solutions. Remove things that will bring you the solution. So definitely start there with that. And finally, how do I want to feel on December 31st 2025? There's some things to think about. Gentlemen. I've got a huge year ahead and I've got the next two weeks to really dive into these questions and think about that, but I really would hope that this is going to be a great moment and time of reflection to think about for you what that best 2025 can look like.

Lachlan Stuart: 11:31

Who you need to become, who you want to become. If you had a great year, you can still build on that. If you had a shocking year, you can definitely build on that. It doesn't matter what position you're in, how you're feeling about life. You can always grow and growth is going to provide you so much opportunity. You're going to meet so many new people and, looking back, you don't know what position you're going to be in. I think about the support that we've had for the 58 marathons and I pinch myself to think that we have so many incredible brands with so much credibility that are standing behind us. And it's not because this is my first challenge. I have been building my relationships. I've been building myself, I've been building my credibility over the last decade, for this moment, and so, while some people may go, how'd you do that in 12 or seven months, since we've been planning this, it's more so. What did the previous 10 years look like? My name is Lachlan Stewart. As always, do something today to be better for tomorrow.