003: Planning a New Future After Losing my Wife
In this deeply personal episode, I reflect on the emotional weight of losing not just my wife, Lani, but the future we were building together. I talk through what it looked like to start over and begin consciously designing a new life. I share the tools, mindsets, and inspirations that have helped me begin navigating this journey, with the hope it gives you something you can use in your own season of change.
What You'll Hear in This Episode:
Losing a Future, Not Just a Person: How grief impacts the vision of your life, not just your present.
The Power of Conscious Choice: Choosing to create a future with intent, even amidst grief.
Using ChatGPT to Map Out Options: From visas to climate, and identifying new cities to live.
Dr. Joe Dispenza's Teachings: The science behind meditation, visualisation, and the quantum model of change.
Our 5-Day Retreat in Orlando: First-hand experience of Dr Joe's retreat and how it helped shift my thinking.
Daily Practices That Are Helping:
Meditation and emotional embodiment
Visualising and feeling a future reality
Journaling in the present tense
Reframing this moment as an opportunity to focus on me
Tools & Resources Mentioned:
Book: Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza
→ Highly recommended as an audiobook on AudiblePractice: Dr Joe’s guided meditation (included at the end of the audiobook)
Prompt-Based Planning: Using ChatGPT to help map out potential cities and life options
Journaling Tools: Inspired by Think and Grow Rich and advice from Jay Samit
Quote from the Episode: "While I would give anything to have Lani back in my life and to be planning that future with her, the reality is that I now have an opportunity to build something new. Something strong. And something she would be proud of."
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share with someone who might need it, and head over to www.therebuildlab.com to join the newsletter and explore more tools and articles for men rebuilding after loss.
Transcript – 003: Transcript – 003: Planning a New Future After Losing my Wife
What do you do when the future you planned is gone? When Lani passed away, I didn't just lose a wife, I lost our future. I lost everything that we spoke about, our next chapters and the future we were planning to build together. And we had spoken about moving to the US, getting my US passport, uh, visa.
Lani was an American, so I was eligible for a spouse visa and moving to Florida, moving to somewhere warm. We met in Bali where we both lived and we enjoyed the heat, we enjoyed the walks on the beach. And then after, you know, two years in the UK we decided we wanted to get back to that kind of weather and climate and lifestyle.
So we were planning to move to Florida. And, you know, a couple of months ago when Lani passed, that changed for me and the future we spoke about was no longer a future that I was going to live. And it's hard to take. It's one of the hardest things to do actually, is kind of think about what my life will now look like without Lani in it.
And it's painful to think about that, but at the same time it was, it's an opportunity. It's now an opportunity that I've been given to really focus on myself and plan the life that I want to live. And, you know, you've got an option of just letting life pass you by and wake up every day and just let life happen.
Or I can use this opportunity to be like, okay, I am going to create something amazing for myself. Make no mistake about it. The life that I want to live would be with Lani, a hundred percent. If I could do anything, it would be to live with Lani every day. But that isn't the life I now have and it's now making the best out of a bad situation, and me wanting to do that in a way that's going to honour her.
So I mentioned in episode two, you know, the 10 things I did that helped me deal with the grief and one of them was start planning my future and start rethinking about it and coming up with a solid plan as to what I want to do and, and utilise some tools and it's going to help me get me there. So in this episode, I just want to kind of go through what that looks like and what I've been doing and how it's been helping me, you know, managing the grief and navigating that pain.
So. After a few days after Lani passed, and, you know, I was sitting there and dealing with those thoughts, I wanted to think about my future. I wanted to, like I said, not just let my life pass me by. I wanted to honour Lani and start planning my future. And, you know, as a spouse of, or as a widow of an American citizen, I'm eligible for a US passport.
Or US Visa, sorry. So I started to look into that and, you know, just doing some research online and using ChatGPT to see what I had to do to get that. So that kind of was my first idea. It was like, okay, me and Lani aren't going to move to the US, but it's something that's still possible for myself. So I started to look into that and started to use ChatGPT.
Just to see what kind of areas in the US I can be looking at. You know, I gave it some prompts that I want to be in a hot climate. I want to be near an airport where I can fly home nonstop, easy enough so I can get home or my parents can go out to see me. I want to be in an area where there's job opportunities and it allows me to earn good money, near a beach would be great, if not, somewhere outdoorsy, somewhere I can take the dogs for walks every day. And they came back with, you know, various cities in Florida and in Texas. And a couple of the options were Miami, which is where me and Lani were looking at, and Tampa, and then in Texas looking at Austin and Houston and those kind of areas.
So that was cool, just to kind of get my mind busy, I guess, and thinking about, okay, these are some possibilities of what my future could look like. And that was kind of exciting, just being able to think about that and start putting that plan into action. Just to keep my mind, to give myself something to focus on rather than focusing on the sadness that I was going through.
And then, you know, starting to make that happen is, you know, through the years me and Lani did a lot of personal development work, invested in coaches, going to events, courses, podcasts, audio books, you name it. And a lot of them will all say the same thing. You know, there's a pattern of success that they'll talk about.
And it involves, you know, visualisation is one of the tools that a lot of them mention, and I've tried that before in the past, you know, I tried to get on board with it, and Lani was always someone that did these tools and always spoke about this, this spiritual work and this kind of what I call 'woo woo' work.
And it was something I really couldn't get into back when I first started doing it, when I first met Lani. And then in 2020 I got introduced to Dr Joe Dispenza and his work, and I started listening to his audiobook, 'Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself'. Dr Joe Dispenza is fantastic. If you're a man and you don't believe in that spiritual kind of 'woo woo' stuff, I really recommend listening to that book and kind of getting into his work because he breaks that stuff down in a scientific way. He talks about the quantum realm and quantum physics and all this kind of stuff, and he breaks it down in a man's way, with logic and understanding. And he backs it up with studies and science.
As I was listening to his book, I'm like, oh, this makes sense to me now. All this stuff that Lani was saying that she's been doing, I understand it now, like it makes sense to me a little bit. Not as deep as Dr Joe understands it with his quantum physics background and everything, but the way he's explaining it is like, okay, I get it. And he's got this proof in his studies.
Me and Lani had the opportunity to go and see Dr Joe Dispenza on a five-day retreat at the end of last year. In the room, he's doing these studies on people and he does them every time he has an event. He's collected thousands and thousands worth of data – people's blood, people's brainwaves as they're going through these meditations and using the tools that he teaches. And he has proof and he spends as much time on stage going through the proof that he's collected and he brings out other scientists to talk about it and really show you what's going on in the human body when you're doing these things.
Just understanding it the way he was explaining it really helped me kind of get on board with these tools. So, like I said, one of them is visualisation, which I do in a meditation. So every morning as part of my morning routine, I do a Dr Joe Dispenza meditation. If you listen to that book, 'Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself', he takes you through how to do the meditation and he actually gives you a meditation at the end of that book. So it's really worth listening to, how and why of everything as you've listened to the book and then he teaches you exactly how to do it.
I've been doing that every morning and kind of the concept is obviously not just visualising what you want and seeing pictures and, you know, seeing what your day may look like, but also feeling the emotion as if it's already happened. And that's the whole point of it – if you are doing X, Y, and Z in your visualisation and you're seeing the life that you want to live, how is that making you feel? What are the emotions that you would be feeling then? And start feeling them now and then when you start feeling them now, he says that you essentially draw that future event towards yourself in the present. And it's been really powerful to see it happen, to hear testimonials from people at these events that have done it.
I saw Lani do it last year. She had a goal. She had a feeling and a visualisation that she was working on and it came true. And it really got me believing that this can work. So it's something that I implement every day. And then the second part of that is journalling as well.
Again, every mentor and, you know, they talk about journalling, how important it is and planning that future and writing it down as if it's already happened. And I do this straight after I meditate. So when I come out of my meditation and I'm feeling those emotions as if it's already happened, I feel that's a great opportunity then to start writing that stuff down.
And I write it down as if I'm living that day in the present. So sometimes I just do an 'I am' mantra, like I am, I'm happy, I'm strong, I'm living in Texas, or you know, I am walking my dogs and feeling the sun on my body. And then sometimes I just write out a plan as how my day would look or how my day looks.
So I wake up and drink my coffee in the garden and feel the sun. I take the girls for a walk over at the park and see them running around, and just journalling one page a day straight off from meditation takes a couple of minutes, really gets me putting those thoughts on the paper. Even Grant Cardone – love him or hate him – but he mentions that he does it. He wakes up every morning and scribbles on a notepad the things that he wants to achieve as if it's already happened. He said he did it when he first was looking into buying a private jet, and then, you know, he had the idea that he wanted a private jet and he was writing it down every morning and then that transpired.
So, you know, these guys that are successful in various areas and businesses are all doing these same tools. So, you know, why not do them? Why not give it a shot? So that's what I thought. And we'll see how it goes. So we're on episode three of the podcast. What's going to happen in a year, two years' time? We'll find out. I'll keep journalling and hopefully it comes true.
You know, I plan to apply for my visa to the US next month when I get back from California, after picking up Lani's ashes and having a celebration of life for her, and then start putting that plan into process. And, yeah, watch this space and I'll continue to meditate. I'll continue to see that future so I come out those meditations feeling good and that's how I want to feel.
Dr Joe says, when you come out of those meditations feeling the way that you feel, why would you not want to feel that every day or multiple times a day? And it's like, yeah. So meditating to me now makes a lot of sense when I get to experience those emotions. And even though those things haven't happened yet, I get to feel like they have, and that's a positive in my body.
So I'm choosing to create a future for myself that I really want to live and one that Lani would be proud of me for living and, you know, using this situation that I hoped I would never find myself in, but I am, and I'm not going to let my life just kind of pass me by. Now it's about, okay, I've got an opportunity to really create something special for myself and I'm going to do it. And I've now got a guardian angel that's looking out for me every step of the way. So there's no reason why I can't make it happen. And I have a couple of tools that apparently work. So I believe in them and I continue to do them every day and we'll see where it takes me.
So, you know, if you're someone that's kind of experiencing something like this, you've lost somebody or you're in a part of your life where you don't know what to do with your future, you don't know what it's going to look like, I encourage you to chat to ChatGPT, get some ideas and start planning that out.
And, you know, be honest with what you want for your future, what you want it to look like. Write it down. Write a goal down. You know, you don't know where you're going if you don't have a map in front of you. And then start putting some practices in place. You know, for me it's the journalling and the meditation.
If you aren't familiar with meditating or anything, and you don't really believe in that, I highly encourage you to read Dr Joe Dispenza's work or listen to some podcasts that he's on – he features on quite a lot of people's podcasts, and you'll probably listen to him and think, oh, this actually makes sense now. Like, I understand where he's coming from and, you know, he's got the proof that backs it up and it's really amazing to listen to. So that book, again, is 'Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself'. I recommend the audio book. It's very easy to listen to. He tells the stories really well, and then at the end he breaks down that meditation, how to do it and what meditation is.
So thank you for listening. This is episode three. If you enjoyed it, then please like and subscribe. If you want to head over to the website and subscribe to the newsletter, it's www.therebuildlab.com. And the goal of that really is for me to kind of put together a community of men that are going through similar things so I can share with you my tools and thoughts and put something together for us guys and really bring us together.
So thanks for listening.
