Trav Bell, "The Bucket List Guy" and the world's top bucket list expert, discusses how creating a bucket list can unlock more opportunities to experience ikigai in episode 76 of the Ikigai Podcast.
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The Bucket List Guy
Trav recounts the journey that led to his moniker as 'The Bucket List Guy.’
Creating a list of goals
Nick: I wanted to have you on the show for a number of reasons: to talk about creating meaningful goals or a meaningful life, coaching, and also public speaking. But before we dive into those subjects, let's touch on how you became known as ‘The Bucket List Guy.’ And as The Bucket List Guy, what do you do?
Trav: That's a good point. I'm still trying to figure it out. Someone actually called me the bucket list guy, about 12, I think it's now 13 years ago. So prior to that, I'm obviously getting a little bit grayer.
So I’m in Ocean Grove now about an hour and a half out of Melbourne, grew up surfing, still surf, surfing, lifesaving, swimming competitively. So I was always kind of a jock, and that led me to do a physical education degree in University.
So I moved to Footscray from Ocean Grove, that was a bit of a culture shock. And I started my physical education degree there, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I thought I was going to be a high school PE teacher or something like that.
And then this guy came in, Tony Hewitt, doing this thing early in the 90s, mid 90s, it’s called personal training. And he was getting paid a whole $200 an hour like in the mid 90s. And here I was basically as a kid, swimming teacher for beer money, getting whatever per hour.
And I was just fascinated, he trained some celebrities, he trained some wealthy people, and he was getting results, more importantly. He'd really coached them to get results—way more results than the average gym. I was just fascinated.
So he said this before the internet, before Facebook, and all the rest of it. I subscribed his magazine, went to his conference, get his book. etc., I just did everything he said. I was fascinated. So I followed him around, and I did everything he said and got my first personal training client in the mid 90s.
You know, as a coach, you get one client just look after them really really well. It's not hard to grow a coaching practice, let alone a personal training business. So Heather was my first client, and got some great results, she’s a whole other story. She referred everyone in the English speaking language and then grew my business, I think my record was 63 one hour personal training sessions in a week and I did that for like three years.
I was running around doing everything with them. Didn't investment my money very well. But then started to bring on other trainers. I know that's a real long answer. Got one of the first personal training studios in Melbourne, and had 13 personal trainers working in our Richmond studio. One of the trainers said ‘I wouldn't mind doing one of these studios.’
And I investigated what franchising look like, and that was the first franchise of personal training studios in Australia. Jai started a Canterbury personal training studio, and as a result, we built up a chain of, I think, 21, 22 personal training studios around Australia and three states.
Had a truckload of personal trainers working under that umbrella. Then we're just having a conversation earlier, letting some toxic people into the system who thought they could do it better than me. Quickly became a tail-wagging the dog kind of situation. They rallied everyone against me. Some other stuff going on in my life. It was like a perfect storm for me slipping into depression albeit mild.
The doctors wanted to put me on heavy antidepressants. And I trained too many clients that were on antidepressants that were just kind of sleepwalking through their life. I said, no I don't want to put a band aid over the top of it, I wanted to get to the root cause of what I was going through.
And I went through every course I did, I went to Burning Man, I did Ayahuasca, I did Tony Robbins walk on fire. It was actually fun enough, Nick, to work out my values and did all the live coaching courses.
And it was around that time that I actually came across ikigai as well, you know, around that time, and that combined with Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychologist who worked under Martin Seligman, the grandfather, if you like, of positive psychology.
And he's got this book Happier, that was gifted to me by a friend of mine, who basically said, ‘Here's a book on happiness, Trav, you miserable, prick, work yourself out.’ So I did that. And it's got a Venn diagram in that and it's NPS processor. It's what gives you meaning, what gives you pleasure, and what are your strengths, and in the middle is your calling.
I'm doing all this, working out my stuff. And I did got to the root cause of what I was kind of going through, did this NPs process, and I got motivational speaker. I'm an educator by trade like you, I can't help it, I love helping people.
And around that same time, a friend of mine, actually in one of these seminars said, ‘Trav, you're in a lot of these seminars, you're investing a lot of money. Why don't you teach this stuff?’ And I was like, all the world's came, the planets aligned. And I went, ‘Yeah, that's why I'm here.’
So working on some of my stuff, but I really want to pay it forward. So I'll put on a talk, and I was absolutely crapping myself, put on a talk about a month later, I learned NLP, learned all the life coaching stuff, all my entrepreneurial history, I've really only owned my own businesses, I've never had a corporate job in my life. So I've put all that into a three-hour seminar.
Halfway through the seminar, I only had about 40 people that came to the seminar, I nearly had to pay them to be there. This is again about 13 years ago. But halfway through the seminar, I showed the group that I had since I was 18, I'm 50 now, so since I was 18, I've had a list to do before I die, I've actually written down.
And I picked it up in a book somewhere, I've always had that compass, that North Star, that reason for getting out of bed in the morning, that reason to get off the fence and make decisions. There was always like my reason—it wasn't to be a millionaire, it wasn't about the time or the money, what I would do with that time or money, because time and money are just resources.
So we build businesses, we have careers, we have jobs. And if you do that, well if they're optimized, they should spit out time flow and cash flow to allow you the owner of that job career business to go and do the things that you really want to do in life, because it’s not about the time and the money, it is what you do with those resources.
So I've always had this philosophy and build something that you're really proud of, a legacy if you like. And I started telling the group some of the things that I've done in my life and some of the stuff I've written down since I was 18. And I asked the group who else has got one of these lists actually written down out of their head separated from their to do list?
And no one does. No one. What the hell do you get up in the morning? How do you make this stuff? Most people still today, Nick, ask most people, ‘What are your goals in life?’ and they'll give me three answers normally, and that is, especially here in Australia, pay off the house, put the kids through school, do a bit of travel when I'm older.
It's like dude, is that your goal? That's it? People don't get to do the trouble of it because you know, what the movie was all about, The Bucket List movie was all about. So at the end of the seminar, Joe, one of the personal training clients at the time, said, ‘You have this list to do before you die stuff. It's like a bucket list. You're like the bucket list guy.’
I’m like, lightbulb moment, and I went home and registered thebucketlistguy.com, and then reverse engineering and ever since in that moment, I decided to go online before it was COVID. And here I was with all these bricks and mortar, commercial leases of gyms all around Australia.
And you know, one of the books that I read at that time was Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour Workweek. So he's with me with all this burden, all of these gyms and overhead, running a big business. And here's Tim Ferriss running everything from a frickin’ hammock in Thailand. I like that business model. Freedom is one of my top values. But like I said, I've been doing that ever since.
Speaking and Coaching as a Source of Ikigai
Trav reveals the pivotal role public speaking plays in his life, identifying it as one of his significant sources of ikigai. This journey has not only shaped his path but also paved the way for an incredible opportunity to be among the speakers at TED Talk Australia.
Influencing a wide range of people
Nick: I actually found you via search on Google. I was looking for Melbourne TEDx talks, because I thought, for me, personally, public speaking was the next step in my entrepreneurial journey, and I've done the book. And I was ready to step up.
And, yeah, I saw your TED talk. I thought, this guy is interesting, he's got a mohawk, and he's talking about having a bucket list. And then I searched you online, and discovered you have your own bucket list certification program. You’ve also written a book, you're a professional speaker.
And I thought, after watching that TED Talk and looking you up, this is the guy for me, this is the guy I need to reach out to and say, ‘Hey, I think you can help me.’ So that's what I did. And you've been helping me overcome some limitations and mindsets that I needed working on.
It's been a great process, and I've made some lots of progress. And I really do look forward to our weekly calls. And I've learned so much from you. So it's been a real joy to kind of work with someone who is inspiring and also kind of related to the version of your future self.
So I find coaching, both, you know, receiving it and offering it to others, very life affirming, it can be very life changing. We'll get back into the bucket list formula soon. But I think speaking and coaching are sources of ikigai for you. They give you a sense of purpose. They've obviously helped you grow. You've said to me, you feel you're in your element.
Trav: That's why I did it man. There are a number of different ways that an expert, a thought leader, a specialist in a certain area can get their message out there in the world. There are six kind of ways. There's speaking, authoring, mentoring, coaching, training, and also facilitation. But in my experience, there are six different income streams. And a lot of people say, like you and me, I just want to write the book. Cool.
That's a big bucket list tip for a lot of people: is it going to help you retire your old job and go into full time. Are you going to be Stephen King? That’s going to take a few books to get up to that level.
The three that really come together are the speaking, coaching, and authoring. Now you'll have a preference for one of those. For me, coming out of the blocks, I've been around a lot of speakers. And since I've scratched that itch with that first, you know, public speaking gig and I've done some speaking during my health days, my PT days.
But speaking about something different was full on scary. I've seen some speakers, there's one speaker by the name of Alan Weiss, who's a Brash New York Jew. I saw him speak down here in Melbourne, he's one of the top keynote speakers in the world. He had no tech, no whiteboard action, no nothing.
He had us laughing and crying all in the same minute over and over again—amazing storyteller. And for me who grew up shy, except if I got some alcohol in me, I grew up not shy in sport or anything like that. But certainly in school and public speaking, I shit myself. So for me doing speaking was actually my biggest fear.
But I thought, I saw him, and I if I could do that, I could do anything. Because that was my number one fear, I know it is for a lot of other people. And for me, that was the first domino that gave me the push to bust through that initial inertia, conquer that fear. And obviously, the momentum and motivation that follows is a crazy ripple effect.
And that gave me all the confidence in the world to do more and more. To start off with some of the stuff that we've done together, start off with small gigs, and get those runs on the board. And that just leads you to more and more confidence, bigger and bigger crowds.
The peak of that was actually doing that TED talk. That was about three minutes doing this one, I was super nervous. And that was in front of 2000 people here in Melbourne, the biggest Ted stage, I believe in Australia. That was a big thing on my bucket list.
Why be a speaker? Sure, there's a little bit of ego, but mostly, you can collapse timeframes in terms of how many people you can help, because speaking is basically coaching one to many, in a short amount of time. And it's extremely leveraged business model as well.
You know I've spoken on six, seven continents around the world. And it's pretty cool to show up, the rooms full, you didn't have to fill it, you get your speaker fee. And as a result, you're there for an hour, you probably get paid what most people get paid in a month, and you leave.
And for me, I've heard this speaking, public speaking, keynote speaking is the hardest way to make easy money. So it's a 10-year build up kind of thing, you don't get that coming out of the blocks, but it's a great way to see the world, it's a great way to influence a wide range of people in a small amount of time. Rather than going one on one.
But you're only there for an hour, maybe two, maybe you're running your own retreats, or whatever. It's pretty arrogant to think that you can change people's lives after an hour's talk. That's pretty presumptuous, it's all ego. But that's where the coaching thing comes in.
It's like, there'll be a portion that our audience, that whatever you've disrupted them with, whatever your thought leadership is, it's really resonated with them, they go, Nick’s the guy for me, or Travis’ the guy for me, I want him as a coach, I want his attention, I'm willing to pay for it.
And hence why you've got to have coaching programs or group coaching programs, the book that comes in and seals the deal as well, that is an expensive business card. It is a bit of a promo tool. But it's a great add on to both programs. So those three go hand in glove.
Nick: So do I. I guess I'm going through this stage of growth, and I forgot to share this with you. But I was on LinkedIn the other day, and I saw another keynote of someone presenting ikigai, again the Venn diagram, but this time was to several 1000 people.
And I thought another person's misappropriating the concept and as aspiring as that Venn diagram is it's factually wrong. I just thought, wow, here is someone speaking on mental health, and they're presenting factually incorrect information. And so it is an ambition of mine, or a bucket list of mine to to have that first paid speaking gig with a large audience.
Bucket List Mastery: Designing a Life of Adventure and Fulfillment
Trav delves into his bucket list blueprint, inspiring individuals to forge their own procedures, guidelines, and structured plans in pursuit of their objectives.
Exploring ‘My Bucket List Blueprint’
Nick: Let's move on to your bucket list philosophy or how you've put together your bucket list. And I think it's relevant because at this time of the year, many people start thinking about New Year's resolutions or goals for the new year. And I think after the initial excitement of setting the goal, many people then struggle to stay on course.
So I think you offer a far more effective philosophy and strategy with a bucket list approach. So do you want to talk about specifically what it is?
Trav: Yeah, I'll give you the what and the why. The what is, it's very important as coaches, speakers, authors, thought leaders in any space, you pick a highway, pick a lane, then own the lane, obviously, bucket list is for me, and ikigai is for you.
So we could have been experts in a number of different areas, but they're the ones that our most values align, it's really congruent with who we are and what we believe. So it's really cool. I think it's the Holy Grail, when you can speak from your heart, speak from truth, speak from stuff that you practice on our day-to-day basis, and get handsomely paid for it. That is the holy grail. It's really cool.
There's a lot of people out there that can't claim that, they're doing jobs or careers, even businesses that they've created that they hate. That incongruent life is very ‘un-ikigai’, right? So, we're speaking from the hearts and wrapping this business model around it, I think is a double bonus.
So our job is to distill all of the stuff that's come before us and distill all the stuff that we've been exposed to, and pay it forward somehow. Not rip it off, not plagiarize, or anything like that, but put our own flavor, our own spin on it, and then pay that forward in a really tangible way.
We've got to make the intangible ideas tangible. How do we do that? Well, we create our own processes, rules, blueprints, etc., you know, diagrams that we can teach—that becomes the filter, the lens, that we can teach that intangible through, and it becomes tangible that way.
And so I created the book, which is My Bucket List Blueprint. You've created your ikigai process, and I did the TED talk on the My Bucket List Blueprint. And really, it's a simple acronym, there it is on the back of the book. It's a simple acronym, if you're watching this, and if you're listening to this, it's as simple my bucket list blueprint. My bucket list is the acronym.
Now prior to me becoming the bucket list guy, being named as the bucket list guy, registering that domain, there'd be a movie the bucket list. Everyone was talking about bucket lists already. I wasn't the pioneer of the concept, it's an old term, even though an urban term.
And so my way, I looked a lot of it, in the movie, to a certain extent it was all about travel. I love the narrative, I love talking about it. And to be honest, my 18 year old life list wasn't called a bucket list, it was just a to-do before you die. And it provided me a bunch of reasons, not just travel. A bunch of reasons for getting out of the bed in the morning.
I wanted to create something that wasn't all about travel. The ‘T’ in the my bucket list blueprint, the T at the end stands for travel adventures. But now we know we've got 11 other categories. I designed the whole 12 categories to allow people to go north, south, east, and west in their own brain, to help them extract in an articulately personal meaningful and holistic bucket list, and stuff that didn't cost a lot of money.
See travel costs a lot of money a lot of time. So people wait till someday, the perfect time, to get those resources banked up so they can go and do it. But sometimes that day never comes. And we live in a delayed gratification society, ‘I'll be happy when syndrome.’
So I'm going to do all my travel when I retire, in my two to four weeks break I've got every year from my job. That's cool, but something's broken. Because if you look at mental health, the perfect storm that is mental health of which we've both been exposed to a lot, when you look at anxiety, going through depression, going through the roof, the over prescription of antidepressants, going through the roof, suicides, youth suicides.
And then we got this thing called the loneliness epidemic, it's a real thing. Google the loneliness epidemic, and you go through the pandemic on top of that, and you've got a complete mental health perfect storm. So something's broken, even though we've got all this information out there.
So basically, what I teach is positive psychology. Positive Psychology is identifying a person's strengths: what gives them meaning, purpose, fulfillment, gratitude, and getting them to basically bleed more of that into their work and into their life, they'll have a happier life, more fulfilled life.
What I've done is put this bucket list brand over the top of it. So they go through this blueprint and identify all the travel things that they want to do, but also all the little things that they wanted to do, that they can do right now that doesn't cost any time and money, and you cross off or tick off a lot of that low hanging fruit.
And that gives them a sense of motivation and momentum to smash through the bigger ones. So it helps people get moving, you could call it short-term goals, medium-term goals, and long-term goals, of course. But bucket list has been a real user friendly way to get people to pay attention, rather than just goal setting, traditional goal setting.
And so I say a bucket list is a tangible life plan, where your career planning, your business plan, should fit into your life plan and not be the other way around. It really brings down that work to live principle. And it's not just about ticking a whole bunch of cool stuff off. It's really about how a person reverse engineers every aspect of their life in order to make this stuff come to fruition.
So it's a growth of them on this journey towards his self imposed destinations. But more importantly, it's about a person that exists on the other side. And that's the person that they don't know yet. That's a bigger version of us.
Nick: Yeah, it really resonated with me when I got your book. I thought, this is a really cool blueprint, because there are things like for C, conquer a fear or E, express yourself, T, take lessons. And even I, idiotic stuff.
And then yeah, I thought, this is gonna be fun, I was sort of rubbing my hands thinking, ‘Well, I want to take lessons from The Bucket List Guy.’ So that sort of immediately became, I want to be coached by this guy. So I sort of put that down on my list, and sure enough, I managed to make it happen, we connected.
So having a list of meaningful things to do, where there as you say, it's just not travel, and it's not materialistic, and it's not superficial. It's meaningful, it's tied to your values, it pushes you to grow. It is life-changing.
And there is actually a lot of overlap with ikigai as well. That's why I think we get on so well, we have a good time, but we also share a lot on our cause. It's amazing that we don't have more conversations on these themes of what makes life worth living, or what helps us to grow, or what's worth fighting for. What's the challenge worth fighting for?
Rather than accepting, okay, I'll just accept that, I'll do the nine to five, I'll have the weekends, I'll have the occasional holiday and then eventually, I'll be free from all that.
Why Writing Down Your Goals Matters
Trav expounds on the crucial role of documenting one's bucket list as an integral step towards realizing and achieving personal goals.
Only worry about the ‘what’ and ‘why’
Trav: I want to add just quickly, something to that, Nick, too. People watching and listening to this right now, you might think, ‘I've already got a bucket list’, but it's actually in your head, what you've got to do is to actually write it down, separate it from your daily to-do lists, because your daily to-do list is the one that gets done first priority. That's the one we're all worried about. So I want you to separate the two and actually write it down, put pen to paper, it's a conscious process.
So what happens when you put pen to paper writing goals down the bucket list items. What you're basically doing is typing them into Google. Google is your reticular activating system, what that does is sought and distill the search engine to give you the answers for those search terms.
Now, if you put Everest base camp, I can guarantee and you write that down as part of your bucket list, if you want to do that, guaranteed that the universe, the search engine of the world, your reticular activating system, or sought generalize, you'll start noticing different conversations, you start following different people online, you'll be starting to search more yourself, obviously, you start paying attention.
And before you know it, the universe will provide the how. So when you're writing, a lot of people don't write goals down in the first place, because of fear of failure, fear of disappointment. If I write this down, I don't want to disappoint myself and make a promise that I can't keep, so I'm not going to write it down.
So my advice around that, and a lot of people literally said to me, I don't write goals down because of that. Wow. So someone in their ecosystem has imprinted into them why they cannot cannot do something—their own psychology is getting the better off them.
But hear me when I say this: when you're writing goals down, it's so important to only worry about the what and the why not about how. What and the why: What is it? Why you want to do it? What's your personal reason for wanting to do it? And not worrying about the how—the how over complicates, it just complicates the goal.
So if I want to climb Mount Everest, for instance, using that analogy, if I start thinking about the how, I'm going to be thinking about every little step, every little, you know, rope pull, or where the crampons are gonna get every little micro step in that process. And it's just going to overcomplicate it, I'm just gonna go not too hard, I know you're gonna write it down.
Or running a marathon, you want to run a marathon, or write a book—that’s a big task, but if you actually think about every little process, in the writing, every little bit of the how, in the writing of the book, it will overwhelm you and you won't even write it down in the first place.
So just write what the item is, why you personally want to do it, because you'll have a personal reason for doing it. And I always say give it a rating out of 10. So 10 is like super inspired, super motivated to, you know, this will be a big regret if I don't do this.
One to five, you couldn't really care—take it or leave it, whatever. So the key is to identify your sevens, eights, nines and tens in terms of inspiration level, and then definitely write, you know, because you'll have a big personal why for that. And then just let it go. Write it down and just let it go. See what the universe provides, before we know it.
And by the way, you get to tell enough people, too. Because those people could be the resources for you to collapse the timeframe between where you are and where you want to be. So it's good to tell people you got one of the best ways to lose weight, is to actually to publicly announce it on Facebook because people want to support you, they don't want to pull you down. So I genuinely feel the world's pretty good, and they want to support each other.
For the full podcast conversation, go to: Creating and Feeling More Ikigai with a Bucket List