S1E35 · Matt Church: Truthful and Real

Hey guys, welcome to the Virtus Performance podcast for all of you guys that have stuck with us for the last 35 weeks. Thank you very much. If you've been enjoying the podcast, please share and subscribe. Please hit us with your feedback too. We've had a couple of rad emails and messages over the last week or so and they are very much appreciated, every single one. So to you guys that have sent us some correspondence, thank you very much. For you guys that haven't, come on, get on your bike, sort it out, get it done. Today I sat down with one of my favorite humans.

His name is Matt Church. He is a, I guess a manager of a business coaching firm, a life coaching firm. He's done basically everything there is to have done. He's the wisest person I've met in a long time and he's 22 years old, which for me who's three years older than him, it's kind of fucked up because he's way smarter and way better than me. So yeah, this is, this is a podcast that I am going to listen to four or five times because yeah, it's a game changer. So I hope you guys feel exactly the same way and get exactly the same stuff out of it.

Enjoy. My personal and business goal is to be just a little bit better every day. I believe everyone, especially normal people have a story to tell. The Virtus podcast exists to help us all find small ways of consistent improvement by discussing the journey and experiences of each of our guests. Matt Church. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, sir. Pleasure to be here. It's an honor to, to get you on the first time I met you, I was like, I've got to get this guy on a podcast and it finally happened. We've teed up schedules. We've done it.

Did very, very well. We did. First question for you. Yeah. What gets you out of bed in the morning? It gets me out of bed in the morning. Helping people squeeze life, helping people squeeze life. Everything I do is about like, I love seeing people optimize themselves, like experience themselves more. And I'm like, I'm a massive, I know I'm a massive introvert and like, I don't like spotlight. I hate spotlight. I struggle with being the person who is being looked at, but fuck. I love seeing people. Are we swearing? Is that a thing? Mate, go nuts.

You can say fuck shit, whatever you want. I should have asked that in the free run. I love seeing people look at themselves and be really, really proud of who they are. But so you're obviously an introvert, but why do you hate spotlight? Because you're someone that like you're the wisest 22 year old I've ever met by far. Why do you hate spotlight? Because you would be, I would sit there and listen to you and watch you all day in the spotlight. It's interesting because my whole life has been spotlight. I like my first sort of experiences were in restaurants and bars in terms of work.

I was in theater all the way through being a kid and still still now I do a lot of like stuff on stage. I've been a trainer and speaker, like I've always done things in the spotlight, but I think because I'm like, I've always a big introvert and like I've always played characters, which has been something the last time we chat about, it's been something the last couple of years has been about. It's been breaking out of that. So I've always been a good, like I've been an actor since I was a kid and I have always been good at not being me with people.

And so I think learning when I talk about being in the spotlight, I mean being in the spotlight as me. Yeah, as you, yeah, because that's, I guess a little bit different and probably it's hard to separate those two, but yeah. What parts of you do you feel as though you didn't want to be in the spotlight? I think the parts of me that were a little fucked up, not big things, but like I grew up in an environment where everything had to be seen to be perfect. Okay. It was always like cushions had to

go in the right spot and they had to be clean and if someone was coming over, then everything had to be ready and we all had to be, it all had to be smiley faces, perfect picture portrait. Yeah. And life isn't like that. It really isn't. It conspires to make that not happen. I wasn't okay with that for a long time, for a long time. And so the last couple of years have been really about working out who I am, becoming really proud of that person and also recognizing that there's this massive fucking journey. You know, I always say to people, when people say like, what are you about?

I'm like, well, I'm just a dude working out. Yeah. That's all I am. Well, that's what we all are. That's what we all are. Trying to figure it out. That's why I do this. That's why we, we, we got in touch. Cause we just want to, I wanted to meet people like, like you who are just trying to figure it out. Like I am. And then we can use our stories and our experiences to be the, I guess our hindsight is everyone else's foresight. Yeah. Fuck. That's what I said. Yeah. Put that on a t-shirt. Yeah.

I like that. We've got a couple of t-shirts going at this point. Oh yeah we do. Mitch, who are you, outside just a guy that's trying to figure it out? Yeah. Wow. That's a big question. What I struggle with that one, what I do, like, so I'm a, I see myself as a leader. And with that comes a shit ton of responsibility. Yeah. It does. Oh, I'm a leader and I love, so like side note, what I do is I run a small business consulting firm, not mine, but run it with a good friend of mine and the operations man manager.

We help coaches, so behavioral experts, people who support people with dating, health, fitness, mindset, parenting, career. We help those people build something that they're really proud of that sustains and that can turn into a career. Yeah. And so I lead a team I'm fucking breathtakingly proud of and help, and we do that. We help people be better is the way you describe what we do in this podcast and that's what we do. Um, for me, I see myself as a leader, somebody who's on this earth to help people optimize what they do and who they

are, fall in love with who they are, become proud of who they are, experience more of who they are, and ultimately be able to help people do the same thing. I like the ripple effect. Do you feel as though you as a coach of coaches need to be all of those things yourself before you can teach other people? There are two parts to that answer, yes and need to be okay with all of the parts that me that aren't that. Yep. The more I, the more I accept and become proud of, I was saying this

to my partner last night, I am so proud, the biggest shift this year has been, you know, 2017 has been, I really became proud of what I've gotten and who I am, and that was a scary thing. I'm really proud of this, looking around. Which is a hard thing for a lot of people to say. Yeah. Because it's kind of fucked up and kind of sad that people can't say that they're proud of who they are or what they are. We're in a world where life can be curated, you know, where we can have, you

know, like I purposefully nowadays put out Instagram posts or Facebook posts talking about everything that's not cool about life, you know, like I'm looking when I become, like one of my biggest missions around why I do all of this is because I want to be a really outstanding dad, really outstanding parent, and one of the things I'm looking forward to when I become a parent is putting out all of the, like, hard shit in parenting. Yep. You know, I put up a post a couple of weeks ago, you know, like a good year ago, up to the point where I was overworking myself, not really recovering, and I found myself like putting away two bottles of wine a night.

I like got three months into that and I was like, one, spending a lot on wine, two. And you probably wouldn't drink cheap wine, I imagine. No. No. Who drinks cheap wine? And so I was like, I have a problem. Yeah. And Mike, a couple of weeks ago, I put a post up about it on Facebook, just to share, like, hey, as much as everyone's seeing this, you know, doodoos on stage and training people all so little fuck up, got some shit going on. But I think that's important to be able to, like, check your ego and take a step back and go, you know what, here's how I've struggled.

And I've found that vulnerability so important in, I was talking about it before, allowing you or the people around you to see when you struggle and to not have to put on that brave face and yeah, I'm doing okay. Just talk to people because everyone wants to help. Yeah. And it's going to be the next wave of leadership. So if I look at, say, 2002 through to now, it was a message of building some anything great. And that's not just business. Anything great is going to be hard work, hustle and passion. And that's been a great message.

Yeah. I reckon if I look at the thought leaders of today, the Arianna Huffington's, Brene Brown's, even, you know, people like Elon Musk is starting to get on board talking about how what it is actually about nowadays is like recovering well, taking care of you, becoming somebody to get the most out of themselves, taking care of your health, you know, that particularly in entrepreneurship, that was not a conversation five years ago. It was almost probably the opposite. It was, hey, check it out. I'm treating myself like shit to get my work done. Yeah. Here's my bin of dyke Pepsi.

Look at it. This is how hard I've worked. I haven't slept in three days. I'm doing really well. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. And it's that ability to fill your cup before you try and fill everyone else's is kind of the perfect, it's an analogy I use like weekly, but it's so perfect and so simple. Resourceful selfishness is not something we do well. No. Not like taking care of, you know, I hear, especially given that I coach coaches, he coaches all the time telling me, you know, I just want to serve, I just want to

give, I just want to like, I, and I like, I respect that and there's a direct proportionality between how much we're giving to ourselves and what we give to other people. Yeah. I don't understand. What are the things that you do daily, weekly, monthly to give back to yourself? I look at it in three categories. I learned this from Jack Delosa, good friend of mine, somebody I like deeply respect and anybody listening who wants to see what I just talked about in terms of like somebody who runs something very successful, this is in business and who is a preacher, take care of yourself.

I look at it in three categories, mind, body and soul and so I start with soul because I've made the shift a little while, I'm not a religious person, I'm not really a spiritual person. I'm a bit of a pragmatist, but taking care of my soul has been one of the biggest things that has allowed me to build more, experience more, give more. So like my practices are around, a big part of it has been journaling, I keep a lot in my head, I'm a head person and like anyone who'd be listening, people who'd be listening to this and yourself included, like we don't stop seeing the world and we don't stop thinking about the world.

You know, like I look at where we're sitting on top of the building I live in at the moment looking out at the city and I go, you know, who's in there? That tree looks amazing. I wonder how that got there. You know, what's that over there? Constantly thinking. Yeah. It's all happening. It's like life's happening around us whether we're paying attention to it or not. And there's always lessons to be learned, but I don't think we can learn them in our head. Yeah. And so put it on paper. Yeah. So journaling for me is an opportunity to like really, because we can't write faster than we can make.

It's an opportunity to clarify my thoughts and I don't, and this question I simply ask myself, like what's going on for me right now? My heart, for my soul, for my hand. I stole that question from you when we caught up the other day or a couple of, it was about six weeks ago now, and stole it and put it. So I've kind of tweaked your daily huddle and that I think I've spoken about on this podcast a little bit before, but for every day and if my staff don't want to do it every day, they might do it every second day or third day.

We all put a Facebook live video up and said, what's going on in your world at the moment? What are you struggling with or blocked on? And what's your focus? And I stole those three things from you and now I've seen an incredible, I guess, shift in mindset in terms of my staff actually looking after themselves and starting to talk about, hey, I'm not looking after myself, this is what I'm going to do today. But also when people watch them, they actually see what's going on in everyone else's world. So it's been that awesome team building exercise, but at the same time, it's been that awesome self-realization of maybe I'm not taking care of myself enough.

And I'm someone that all, like all this stuff is exactly what I've been working on for the past six, 12 months, the journaling, the gratitude, the perspective. I'm still not great at training myself. Like I'm someone that I got into what I do because I love training and I played like sublete sport for a long time and now that that's over, I'm like, well, I don't really have any wants or will to train, but I've got to be healthy for the next 100, 150 years because I'm going to live like 170, 180. That would be my estimate, that would be my estimate.

So I've got to figure out what, like, what the hell I'm going to do and I'm going through that struggle at the moment of finding what it is that will, I guess, give light the fire under my bum to actually start moving again and start lifting and running and jumping and doing all those kinds of things. What are the things that do you just kind of brain dump into your journal or do you have some parameters you follow? I have some parameters. I try not to brain dump because I want to, I want it to be focused and channeled from soul.

Yeah. So how it generally starts with today life is, tends to be my first three words, today life is. And it can be, my only parameter is how I'm feeling is how I'm feeling. There's a really great thought leader, his name is Marshall Rosenberg, he wrote a book called Nonviolent Communication. Essentially the principle of it is that we communicate, we learned to communicate through judgments and thinking, you know, like people will say things like, I feel like you don't listen to me. That's not a feeling, it's a judgment. Yeah. And what I don't say is, I feel unheard or I feel sad or I feel whatever, right?

We communicate, we are so detached from our feelings and because of that we judge our feelings. Do you think it's because we don't let ourselves feel how we want to feel and we, there's that stigma around, I don't want to be sad, I don't want to be the angry person, I don't want to be the upset person, I just want to be the happy person. And we've got so many dynamics at play. Part of it is what we were talking about before with, you know, most people have curated lives. I haven't seen people putting up their, today my partner and I had a massive fight when I was sleeping in the same bedpost.

Or I don't see, today my kids shit me. Or even like, you know, I see puppy posts everywhere but what I don't see is like my dog just shatting my bed. We don't put that up. But that's 50% of the equation. Yeah, 100%. And because of that, like, all we see is happy smiley people and that's awesome. And we have a way of, like, our brains are designed, you know, neuro-linguistic programming tells us that we delete, distort and generalize our world based on what we see. And if all we're seeing is happy smiley people, we start to think delusional.

Everything should be happy smiley. Everything should be happy smiley. But that's never going to happen and all pain, all pain, I believe comes from unmet expectation. Oh, that's a big one. All of our pain comes because we're expecting something that isn't being met right now. It's not about lowering standards, it's about expecting what's going to happen, which is expecting sadness, expecting anger, being okay with it when it comes. I think that ability to feel how you want to feel and let yourself just be that way is incredibly powerful because if you want to be sad, be sad, if you want to be upset, be upset.

Don't force yourself to be something else because then it's just going to bank up and bank up and eventually something's going to blow, like whatever it may be. So you mentioned NLP, but what are the areas that you kind of delved into with communication and how have you been able to kind of break it down? Oh, big question. Sorry. Yeah, it's okay. Massive question. I'll talk about a little bit of my experience. So I studied coaching with the Coaching Institute in Melbourne, fantastic group if anybody's interested in that area, no affiliation anymore, so it's not a plug.

Nothing wrong with plugs. Shrink yourself. Don't open that door. And studied foundational life coaching, neuro-linguistic programming, meta-dynamics, neuro-semantics. I love learning why we do what we do because we're patent people. We run our lives in patents. We can understand patents. We try to find patents in everything. Yeah. Yeah, we do. I see faces everywhere. There's a fire hose reel downstairs and today I swear I was smiling because that's how brains have to work. Because the world, if our brains are a computer but they're limited computers, if they processed everything that was going on, we just exploded.

So we have to compress our world and sometimes we don't do a very good job of that, especially because most of us, all of our life is programmed from zero through seven and nine till it's all imprinted. And if it's not a great imprint, which it almost never is, it almost never is a perfect imprint. We're going to compress our world inaccurately and see things that aren't there or create things that aren't there. And so coaching is fundamentally two things. It's the ability to help somebody see the accuracy of their world and then create a new representation of it.

Yeah, I like that. And that's the most amazing thing about being a coach in whatever area of life it is, is you don't do the work for someone. You don't put, like, I don't get my clients and I don't push them through the weights. I don't push them through the prowler and the running and the jumping and the landing and stuff. They have to do it. I just opened the door for them to be able to do it and be able to do it safely and properly and then they can explore it from there. And I'm sure you guys do exactly the same thing.

And that's kind of a really cool realization to come to as a coach, but also as someone who is coached, that you've still got to put in the work, but you've got to look after yourself at the same time. And for me, I see so many people that move poorly, and we'll talk about that at some point. Side note to everyone listening, we've just been at breakfast for the last hour and we did a pre-podcast podcast. Yeah, I really should have recorded the last hour. It was gold. It was probably better than this, to be honest.

I'm sorry to everyone that's listening. You missed the good bit. It's not coming back either. But we talked about recovery and things like that, but that's hard work within itself, I think. It's hard work jumping on a foam roller for five minutes every couple of hours or to force yourself to eat something good and nutritious when you've got no time to do it or you don't think you have time. Everything's in equilibrium. Before I started training really well, or consistently, I thought recovery was super easy because I don't know if you know, but beds are amazing.

Beds are the best. They're the best. And so I thought I was spending a lot of time recovering. And then I started training, and training was hard. Training was really hard. And then training got easier, and recovery got hard, and I was like, "What the fuck?" Recovery's the hard bit. I think everyone can smash themselves in the gym or go for a run or do that thing, but not everyone, and this is something I suck at. I was better when I was an "athlete," but I suck at recovery because it's time and it's mindful time, and it's actually spending that moment taking care of your body in whatever way it is.

It's not the easiest thing to do, but when you do the work, you feel better, you can train more. It fills up your cup in every other aspect of your life. I think communication comes in many different forms, but how has it shaped you as a leader, and how does it help you improve everyone else's leadership ability? That's a great question. Fundamentally, NLP, neurolinguistic programming, teaches us that communication is only the way it is received by another person. So in saying that, what we intend to mean doesn't matter. What somebody heard is what we said. The perception is reality kind of deal.

I often repeat that to people because it takes a moment to realize that that means when we say the words, "That's not what I meant," it doesn't matter, it's what we said. That teaches us accountability in language because it's easy to take responsibility for what we said in the past. It's challenging to be accountable for what we're saying now. To be aware of the fact that just because what we think we're saying makes sense does not mean that the other person is hearing the same thing. It's on us. We need to take that. I wrote this word down because it's one of my favorite words, "ownership."

We need to take that ownership of how someone perceives what we say. If we're able to do that, when I'm talking to mom and asking her to do something at work or talking to my partner and I say something and they don't get it, I'll find myself repeating the same thing. I'll say it exactly the same way, and I'm like, "What am I doing? I'm not changing anything?" And I need to take ownership of that. I might say it's slightly slower. And it's slightly slower, a little bit louder, a little bit more obnoxious. And my diction gets better.

Can you understand? But it's a really simple thing and it's a really easy fuck-up that I do daily, but being aware of it and then taking ownership of it allows, I guess, a change in the communication and a change in how it should happen. If you could coach people in 30 to 60 seconds on how to communicate better, what would you tell them? On the spot. I like it. What do I say? The ultimate empathy is being able to jump into somebody's world and to understand that their whole world is a universe, like it's a fucking galaxy.

There's an asteroid belt going on in their brain and there's comets flying around their heart and shit smashing into each other. It was a big bang at one point, or at least that's what a bunch of people think. Honestly it's not about getting it right. You're just not going to land. I consider myself a pretty strong communicator and I still will say something to a team member and I'll get a nod, a very confident nod, and I go, "Cool, I can tick that off in my head. I've got a confident nod. I'll get them to repeat it back to me."

And I go, "Okay." In my head I'm like, "I'm fairly confident that I'm going to walk away." And the thing that I said is going to be the thing I see in 60 to 90 minutes. And I'll walk back and it will not be that. And it'll even be to the point where I'm like, "I don't understand how you took those words and got there. How did you piece them together in that order?" Chinese whispers. Between two people. Between two people. Between one person in their own head. I'm like, "Oh yeah." How many times did you repeat that to yourself and get here?

It's not about getting it right. It is about extreme ownership, and I know you and I are both a big fan of the Jocko Willing book. Amazing. Amazing. If you haven't read it, stop this. You'll get way more out of the Jocko Willing book. It's brilliant. It's fantastic. It's accepting that what somebody has produced is what you've said. And being aware that that's because they've got this whole universe going on of how they filter things. If we can be aware of that and empathize with them, just accept that people are this whole fucking universe, and so we're not going to get it right.

But it's not about us getting what we want or what we need. It's not about that all the time. What it is about is about making people feel okay with their universe. So in terms of communication, if you can simply accept that they're this whole human just like you are, you're going to do a lot better. Because you're going to be able to truly, from a coaching point of view, accurately analyze the response you're getting. Actually analyze, are they getting it? And whether they're listening, because they're going to be listening, but whether they're actually able to process what you're trying to tell them.

Like if I'm trying to teach an exercise in the gym as a really, really simple example, and they're not moving the right way, I need to have some really quick on my feet problem solving as well, shit, how am I going to get them to do this properly, efficiently without hurting themself? How do you think, and you're a self-proclaimed dating coach, dating coach superstar, sex specialist, and these are the things that you said before. I'm a Jess Ryan proclaimed all of those things. Can talk people up. Yeah, the verse community will understand what that means.

As a former, I guess, relationship coach, dating coach, what did that teach you, one about people and two about why so many relationships, I guess, break down and fail and don't, I guess, succeed as well as they maybe should? Oh, that's a good question, it's going to have a can of fish. We are just going to go for the big like, drop the bomb and then we'll talk about it. We are incredibly bad at teaching people how to love us. And like I've done it, I imagine you've done it, I imagine plenty of people have

listened, have done it, where a partner has, or anyone in our world has done something that has caused friction in us and in our brain we've gone, why didn't they know not to do that? And then we will think about that for three to six weeks and then communicate it to them really well. We are incredibly bad at teaching people how to love us. Now the biggest reason for that is because we don't find out how to love ourselves. We are, like if we, our partners, our partners will magnify what's in us. There are a couple of things that magnify, you know, money magnifies who we are, relationships magnify who we are.

They point out to us the way we're treating ourselves. The way we're communicated to if it causes friction within us is because we're communicating to ourselves the same way we don't like when we do it. We can learn to love us and learn, and that's not philosophically, yeah, I'm in love with me. There are mechanisms that make that happen. How are we showing love to ourselves? Do you think it's an ability for people to actually say, you know what, I should love myself? Or do you think it's an ability for people to go, well, I don't know what I need to do to love myself?

It's both of those things. It's both of those things and people like, now that the self-love revolution is starting to become a thing, there are a whole bunch of people beating themselves up about not loving, like why don't I love myself enough? Like that's a very... It's a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's that negative feedback loops like I don't love myself enough. Damn it, I don't love myself enough, I suck. I don't love myself enough and it's just that vicious cycle of not winning. Yeah. And like, self-love is not tokenism. It's not looking in there and being like, yeah, you're right, you're right.

And it's not, self-love is, and it's also not in big moments. It's not when we nailed it. We're not experiencing self-love when we nailed it. It's too easy. Yeah. We're in the moments where it went well. How do we treat ourselves when it went poorly? How do we treat ourselves when it didn't go our way? How do we treat ourselves when we don't know the answer, when we're uncertain? Those are going to be the biggest learning for us of how we want to be treated. Yeah. Cool. Little things, we call them boundaries in coaching, is what are we okay and not okay with?

If a partner speaks to us a certain way, it's being able to really respectfully go, this is the reason most relationships fail is because people can't go, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I don't like being spoken at, and I felt spoken at in that moment." What we do is go, "Don't speak at me like that." And so we're- Speaking at them whilst telling them not to speak at us. Which is us teaching them how we want to be loved, because that's how we speak to ourselves. Don't do that. Yeah. We do the same with kids.

We will demonstrate immature, childish behavior as adults in order to get them to stop the same behavior back. And they grow up thinking that's the norm. And they grow up thinking that's the norm. Yes. And it repeats itself every generation. Because we have the same thing. I truly believe we have an opportunity to break a major cycle in this generation of parents coming from, say, 10 years ago forwards. We have a wonderful opportunity to break a cycle of children learning to love themselves, because we are starting to learn ... There's a lot of study into family dynamics and family therapies.

Virginia Satir is a wonderful example, Marshall Rosenberg is a wonderful example of that. Learning about how ... The reason most of us grow up with dysfunction is because in some way we had to parent our parents. We had to listen to very adult problems. We had to really handle stuff when we were 12 and 13. I remember my parents really struggling with some stuff around their relationship. They're still together. Sometimes I don't know how, because of what they went through when we were growing up. And I remember chatting with my parents about that at 12. Which is a pretty heavy thing for a 12-year-old.

But then again, you were working in a bar, right? I was working in a bar, yes. So I was chatting with a lot of people about the relationship problems. All things that a 12-year-old can't understand. Yeah. And so we grow up with an uncertainty that we will be taking care of. And that fear carries with us. And so in our relationships, most people aren't looking for a partner in the beginning. When we first start dating, we're looking for someone to replace the hole inside of us that we've got from not feeling like we had really high-quality parents who loved us.

Yeah. Which is a pretty heavy thing to try and put on someone else, especially someone you're only just meeting. Yeah. And it's starting to slow down now, but through the rise of MySpace, Tumblr, all of those image-sharing sites, this whole thing of, "I want my other half," I fucking hate that. I really call it out when I see it, "What other half?" I was in a long-term relationship that finished at the beginning of this year. And I came out of it, and I didn't recognize myself. I didn't know who I was. Which is a pretty

crazy thing to think that you've put so much dependence and so much of you into someone else that you don't know who you are anymore, somewhat. Yeah. It's pretty heavy. Yeah. I couldn't, because my identity revolved around having this partner. And of course, the immediate thing I did was started dating again to fill the hole. Yeah. And I kept wondering why nothing was working. Yeah. Like nothing was sticking. Yeah. What was, what allowed you to, I guess, progress from that mindset where you are, where you were then, to the mindset you're in now? Started dating myself.

Hey. I went out, you know, I'd take myself. And it was very, in the beginning it was tokenistic, and it seemed silly. Yeah. I'd take myself to the movies, and I'd like book two seats, and I'd have my bag on a seat. And I'd like sit there really awkwardly, because I'd never spent time with myself. Really spent time with myself. And I would like go and watch a movie by myself. And I-- I hate that there's a stigma around that. Yeah. Because, and this is me saying, like, I've never actually done it. But I think, isn't a movie the perfect opportunity to spend time by yourself?

Yeah. Like, because you're lost in another world anyway? Yeah. Yeah. We-- it's interesting, though, because we do that so often is we will-- it's a form of escapism. We try-- like, I started realizing that, so I'm like, this is really easy. And then I did something like, I'd go to St. Kilda Beach and sit at a, like, you know, beachcomber or republica, which are just packed with people, and I'd sit by myself. Awesome. And that was uncomfortable. Yeah. Because I can't escape there. No. I can't get into someone else's world. I can't be anywhere else.

Did you just sit and just kind of people watch and enjoy what was going on, or watch what was happening, or just sit on your phone? In the beginning, I sat on my phone. And then when I realized I couldn't bring the phone with me, I got super restless. Yeah. You're like-- What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? It's sort of like when I started doing cold showers, started doing cold, hot immersion. Yeah. Like, I'd be in a cold shower for 10 seconds thinking, it's been three minutes. It's been three minutes.

It's been three minutes. And I started doing the same there. I'd be like, fuck, it's been hours. I'd be like, it's been four minutes. It's been, like, eight minutes. And really slowly, I learned-- and it wasn't so much a strategy, it was just this thing that started happening, was I became really calm. I was able to sit there and be. And I have to think about things and not have to have something to think about. Have something to do. Have someone to meet. Have someone to talk to. Yeah. You're just able to be within yourself. Yeah.

Which is pretty important. So if you were to throw a little bit of advice out there for people who struggle being with themself, what would it be? It would be first to start filling your own cup. And consciously choosing to do things that make you happy, fulfilled, which we don't do enough. We're really bad at investing in ourselves. And it can be something little. You know, I love going-- we were chatting about this before-- I love going watching the sunset with a really good glass of wine on a Sunday night. Good. And sometimes it's either over Christmas or over the break.

I love scuba diving. I'm going to go and be on a boat for five days out in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef. And I spend most of my day sitting on the bottom of the ocean. Perfect. I'm doing that because that is something that I would not give to myself normally. I'd be too busy taking care of other people. Yeah. And you've got to check yourself and actually give yourself time to do those things. Yeah. And so for anyone struggling to be with themselves, firstly, awesome. Because really, if you know that-- Yeah. You're aware of it.

Yeah. Awareness is kind of the-- you're 50% there. The battle is half won. I think one of my favorite, I guess, little activities to do with the people around me who are struggling-- and it's usually a client, but can be friends-- and most recently done it with my better half, KP. We sat down. I'm like, all right. I want you to write 30 things that you love doing. Yeah. And let's do them. Whether it's by myself-- and a bunch of hers were things by herself. And she struggles to be by herself a lot of the time.

And we've had some pretty cool discussions around that lately. And it's go for a run. It's walk on the beach. It's do things that are actually for her. And when you start ticking those off daily, weekly, monthly, you start to build that bank of good memories that, you know what? I love being around myself. I like being that person who can be by myself and not have to rely on other people. And it's something I struggle with. But I think I struggle with it-- I don't necessarily struggle with it, but I love being around people. I'm probably-- if we were to put a scale of introvert to extrovert, I'm probably more towards the extrovert end.

I love my own time, but I get my energy from being around other people who are up and about. And sometimes I need to go, you know what? I just don't want to talk to anyone. I just want to be by myself. But the majority of the time, it's around other people. If I'm going for a coffee with two people, I'll talk to another six and invite four of them along. It's just what I do. But I was able to-- after a podcast maybe 10, 12 weeks ago now-- I was able to sit down and chat to an adventurer, Beau Miles, who's done a heap of, I guess, solo travel.

And we talked about the importance of solitude. I set myself a goal in that podcast to spend a couple of days by myself with no human contact. And the importance of that in, I guess, how my years finished up and how I've rounded up myself as a person over the last 12 months-- heaps has happened. I've had a huge year, as I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast has. Take two minutes to yourself and just go, wow, I've had a pretty big year, even if you have to write down what you've done. And allow yourself to give yourself a pat on the back for what you've done.

And it's allowed me to just get out of my bubble and look at it all and go, I've done pretty well, which is hard for us to do, hard for us to check that ego sometimes. Solitude. Solitude's an amazing thing. Like I said, I love diving, and so I'll often-- my first couple of dives will be looking around at wherever I am. And by about the fourth or fifth dive for the day, I'll simply put on a weight belt, set my buoyancy to be a little deeper so I'm sinking. I'll sink myself to a sandbank, and as I kick my fins to slow down, I'll land and all the sand will be up around me.

And one of my other practices is Vedic meditation, so I'll sit and I'll close my eyes and I'll meditate underwater. It's an amazing thing. And I'll do that for 20, 30 minutes, and when I open my eyes, all of the sand has settled. And solitude has a way of doing that. It has a way of settling all of the different parts of us in terms of their weight or consistency. And that's a great way to find out the parts of us that are not working. I remember when I was in year nine, we had an amazing outdoor education program at the school I went to.

And one of the things they did on the year nine camp was a three-week camp. They'll just take you out of your house, put you in a bush, and you're there. And one of the things they do is they do a solo, essentially a full day. So they take 30 kids, line them down the bank of a river so they can't see each other, and they tell you it'll be three hours and they make you do it for 12. You've got food, everything you need, by the way. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. It's not neglect.

It's a bunch of solitude. Just giving the teachers some time off. Well deserved. And I remember I was on my solo, and I could hear this after about two hours, I could hear "Thwack, thwack, thwack." And I was like, "What the fuck is that?" And after a while, I just became part of the noise. When we got back, we were chatting about experience, and it was one of my really close friends who I always thought was this really calm chick, this real chilled out chick, who never had anything above the surface. She was saying that after about two hours of nothing, she got really angry, really angry.

She had this dead tree and this really heavy stick. She's just cracking it against her. She cracked it. She took a clean half meter off it in about three hours, just thwacking it. And that experience has sat with me for a long time, because as I do more solitude or I spend more time with me, it's an opportunity for me to really explore me, because I don't have the distraction and the noise, or the interference, to not have me listening to myself. I start to notice shit. That's the scary thing. Yeah. It's hard to be

vulnerable like that, and to allow ourselves to, for some people, and I'm sure you've been through times and I've been through times, it's really scary being stuck in your own head, and to have to listen to yourself. And we feel like we're constantly, data's coming in day after day after day, second after second, with phones, computers, everything. To actually allow ourselves to go, you know what, I want to escape from that and put my phone down, put my laptop down, and just go for a hike or go for a walk or do something that's just for you.

It's a hard thing to do, but, and this is, one of the guys, when I was doing that a couple of days away, one of the guys said to me, he goes, "I could never do that." Good story. I hate that. Good story. I hate that. I could never do that. All you've got to do is just do it, and I literally, I was probably a little blunt, so I apologize if I offended, but I basically just went, "All you've got to do is do it." You just go, like, just do it. If you tell yourself you can't do it, you will never do it.

If you tell yourself you can't climb a mountain, you'll never climb a mountain. If you tell yourself you can't have been a long lasting loving relationship, you'll probably never been one. Like it's all of those things and the way we talk to ourselves and to go on a big tangent, like around back to that same stuff we're talking about, the way you talk to yourself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell yourself that you're going to be shitty and miserable and angry and sad, you're going to be shitty, miserable, angry and sad. If you tell

yourself that, you know what, bad shit's going to happen, but I'm going to attack it with a positive mindset, I'm going to look for the little gems of information and I'm going to enjoy all the fuck-ups and all the failures, then you're probably going to be a pretty happy person. Yeah, and it's as easy as the opposite. It's as easy to have a really positive, self-reaffirming conversation with yourself as it is to have because they're just words. My team get really shitty at me because I'll be sitting on my laptop emailing and I'll be sending an email and I'll be like, "Fuck yeah, that was awesome.

Yeah, that's a word. I'm going to go with that." That's not a sentence, but fuck it, out loud and talking to myself as I send emails. If I'm on the phone, they'll see me pumping around, I'll say something fucking awesome. Because I'm training, because I get one day to do that and then the next day and then the next day and I figure I have that moment anyway. It's my intention of living is I've got this moment anyway. It's here. This moment is here. The moment that these people have chosen to listen to this conversation that we're having, the moment is here.

The moment after this conversation is just as here. What do we do with it? Is it a wasted moment? It's not about doing big, fast things all the time. Every moment doesn't have to be you standing on top of the summit looking at the sun coming up and going, "This is pretty amazing." It's every step on the way up the mountain that you need to enjoy. The analogy of fitness and movement is so apt here. I used to think that success in movement was how heavy a thing can I lift. What's the heaviest thing I can lift?

Can you just repeat that for all of the gym girls that are listening to you? I used to think that success in movement and fitness was what's the heaviest thing I can lift. I've been around really fantastic coaches from a strength conditioning movement point of view who've really taught me that the power of movement is in its quality. I've stalked the shit out of your team, and Cam is a wonderful guy who I've stalked if you're listening. I'll make sure he listens. Outstanding. He'll love this. The way that many of your team talk about movement and many of the people I surround myself with who know a thing or two about movement, and full disclosure, I don't.

It's not been an area of my training. The quality of movement is so powerful, and it's the same in every moment. It's not about how the analogy of heavy is this moment, what's the big thing I'm doing. I love whitewater kayaking, but I could not whitewater kayak every day of my life. It would be a weird thing to expect to myself. I'd like to see you try. What are you doing? I'm kayaking. What are you doing next week? Kayaking. Play on. I'd get no meeting stuff, or I'd get plenty of meeting stuff. I've read a great book about high performance, but I cannot remember it for the life of me.

I'll set it to him to get at it somewhere. They talk about it from the states, and they talk about how life is oscillation. I look to nature for a lot of evidence of how we should live. I look at the life and death cycle. I look at waves. I look at the moon and sun. I look at seasons. Everything is in oscillation, in and out, up and down. We need both sides of the equilibrium to create a level of success. So in each moment, like any movement, it's not always what's the heaviest thing I can lift, but sometimes it can be.

Just as much as it can be what's the quality of this body weight movement, or as simple as what's the quality of the way I'm sitting or lying down. Just as important as how big a thing can I, like what can my body do from a performance point of view. They're the same conversation. The really simple language we use around that at Virtus is blast and caress, and this is something that Greg, our physio, has taught us. You can be blasting, where you're working towards improving capacity. So whether it's strength, speed, power, whatever it is, or you caress, where you focus on movement, you focus on rest and regeneration and looking after yourself.

If you're always in blast, you'll eventually break down, whether it's psychologically, whether it's physically, something you'll give, you'll get sick, whatever. If you're always in caress, then you're probably never gonna move forward, never gonna improve. So you're right, you need both sides of the coin, you need the high tide and low tide, you need each end of the spectrum to be touched on to allow yourself to move forward. And it's not necessarily a one day I'm gonna blast, one day I'm gonna caress. Could be in the same session, could be in the same month, could be in the same year.

Like you might have a two, three, four week blasting period where I'm just gonna smash myself because I feel as though that's what I need. And then it might be, all right, I got a six week movement caress that I'm gonna work on. And I love, I think this quote, I assume comes from you and it's something Jess says a lot, it's the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And it's, if you do a set of six pushups or deadlifts or whatever it may be, if you do that set of six really shit, you're probably not gonna get where you want to get to.

And it's like simple as it needs to be. But if you're, or if you're spending 30 seconds on a foam roller, if you just kind of just do it for the sake of doing it, you're not gonna get where you want to get to. And you're gonna end up in exactly the same position in six months as you are now. Like we talked about it before, about watching people move and seeing people move day to day. I can't go to a commercial gym anymore because you just see the movement that's done so badly. And that's probably like, I've got to check my ego and go, well, maybe I could help these people.

But at the same time, I can't go to every commercial gym in the world. And there's, and I'm sure everyone listening will know someone or will have been through this stage before where they've spent six months or they've seen someone spend six months doing the same shit every day and they never get any better. And like you'd be exactly the same, seeing the business world side of things. And this doesn't, this isn't just movement. This is life. Like if you do the same stuff every day, you don't have, for a year, you don't have a year's worth of experience.

You have one day's worth of experience that you've times by 365, is that how many days are on you? Yeah. Yeah. Except for before, I think. Yeah. All the things I would have learned in primary school that I now think. It's not that important. Great segue. Speaking of primary school and high school and things like that, use the term before programmed life. I really liked the way you use that term. Explain to me from, in your mind's mind, what's a programmed life? Yeah. So NLP teaches us that the way we learn to filter our world, cause essentially our brain can only process a certain amount of information.

Your scientists have measured that in bits, it's all very scientific, but essentially we can only process a certain amount. Turns out there's a lot more information coming at us and our brain can't handle it all. It's sort of like if, you know, if anyone wants to do an exercise, simply like close your eyes. And then when you reopen it, look for everything in the room you're sitting in that's green, go green, go green, go green, and look around for everything that's green and then close your eyes and tell me anything that was red, tell me anything that was brown.

And if you've done it without listening to this segment, but do it for anything, you won't be able to do it. Cause our brain can't process that much. It's a wonderful computer, but it's a little stupid too. It can't do a lot. So we have adapted to learn what to focus on. We filter stuff out. Correct. It's not important. Correct. Seemingly not important. Seemingly not important. And we do that through a number of different filters. We filter through our attitude, through our beliefs, through our values, which are a whole kettle of fish, through our memories, through our experiences, through simply time and space.

We filter our world through all of those different things. And as a result of that, we get a representation of what's actually occurring. That representation is inaccurate. I love Tony Robbins. If anyone's into personal development, he's a wonderful beginning for this conversation. He talks about 9/11 in the States and he talks about how some people as a result of September 11th and the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and I think it was in Pennsylvania, how some people took that and still to this day use it as an opportunity to create and send your environment around Islam and around Muslims and have turned it into an opportunity for hate.

And a whole other group of people have used it as an opportunity for us to come together and have a conversation about love and bring people together. And what he says, which when I first heard this, I heard that and I was like, "Yeah, that's accurate. Well said. Yeah." And then what he said really hit me. He said, "Same planes, same towers." And I went, "Fuck." Same planes, same towers. Same towers. It was pretty heavy. It wasn't that some people stood on East Street, saw the plane hit and went, "Love." Yeah. Same planes, same towers. Yeah, that is heavy.

We have the same, all of the, in NLP we call it the event, the event will be the same. Some people have the death of somebody close to them and use it as an opportunity to memorialize that person and live in their honor and some people experience grief forever and there's no right or wrong around that. But it's just experiencing what you experience. Same event. Yeah. Always the same event. And what that teaches us in coaching is that as hard as it can seem and the more we coach, I'm sure there's an equivalent in fitness as well or in movement and performance, you become less preachy over time.

Oh, I understand. And I've found that like I used to be, "This sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks." I was so anti a bunch of different stuff. I'm not anti anything. I don't think and I probably am, so I'm probably still working on that ability to think critically about everything because I'm big on there's good in everything. Let's use CrossFit as an example. I used to be like CrossFit sucks. And I came from a position where I went, "You know what? I think it sucks. I need to experience it for four or five weeks and try it and see what happens."

And I finished that four or five weeks and went, "I love doing CrossFit." The programming, the sustainability of it, all these different things, in my brain, needs a lot of work and the way I coach. But all the good CrossFit coaches are doing that anyway. So it's an incredibly powerful tool because it gets people into an environment where there's community culture and gives them an opportunity to move which, at the end of the day and for all the people in the fitness industry and I'm sure any industry, that we're in such a niche industry anyway.

If we keep dividing CrossFit, bodybuilding, powerlifting, athletic development, all the movement stuff, each different area of our industry, we keep going into smaller and smaller industries, smaller and smaller industries within the industry, you just can be pissed off at everyone. They're not doing the right thing by you. Which, by the way, is insert how many hundreds of years ago, that's the Crusades. It's the same thing. Exactly. Your God, your beliefs are incorrect because mine are correct. Yeah, exactly. But there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. There's hundreds of roads that lead to Rome, like

two plus two equals four, but so there's three plus one and eight minus four and I'm sure we can sit here for hours, sprout numbers out of what it equals. But yeah, just be, I think we all need to be a little bit more mindful of just because they're not doing it the way we would do it, doesn't necessarily make it worse. Yeah. And again, look to nature. You know, I often think about, you know, I look at a tree over there and I go, trees don't like get seeded in the ground, poke up and then stop and go, well, which, which way is the sun?

How do I grow perfectly? How do I go straight? They just, they fucking grow. Yeah, there's so many examples of that in nature. The cleanest, you know, I know you love hiking, I love hiking. The cleanest water is found in moving, moving parts of the street. You know, you want to find clean water, you want to find water that will kill you, go somewhere stagnant. I would much rather any day, you know, look at the example of CrossFit, you know, Jess, Jess Ryan said this to me once about CrossFit and also that, you know, the app, the fitness app movement.

Yeah. And I, I'm, I've always been really anti it, both because I suppose I've got experience in the entrepreneurship space and it's, it's all very, you know, to, to get it, to get out. And then what she said was, but at least it gets people moving. Yeah. I went, fuck, what a great point. Yeah. I'd much rather any day, somebody simply moving and working it out than stagnant waiting to get it right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Step three is go do it somewhere where you're going to be supported long term. It's going to be sustainable and you're going to be able to continually move forward, but you're right.

It's, it gets people off the couch. Yeah. And as hard as that is to swallow sometimes it's okay. Like that, that's that for some people that's enough and that's all we need. And we can't help everyone at once. But if we like, um, I think this is, I think Cam taught me this, um, the pure of heart rule. If you do the right thing for the right reasons, everything will end up okay. Yeah. And it's, it's a simple one, but if you follow what you believe in and continually learn from other people, then you'll be able to use those experiences to help other people.

And it's just a beautiful cycle of help and everyone moves each other up and lifts each other up. Except with buttwinking and deadlift. Yeah. Don't buttwink, no squat. That's probably, you're probably not going to buttwink in a, you should, if you buttwink in a deadlift, there's some stuff going on, but yeah, you're right. Also don't buttwink in a squat. That's that, that squat that's specifically for Cam so he knows how deep I've done in the stalking. Yeah, exactly. No buttwink. So they're the things that when you accept 60% good as good enough, then, then you start to get people that get injured and get, get hurt and things like that.

And you know, Cam's views, I think promote all of what we, what we believe in Virtus. It's just quality over quantity, move well, then move often, but don't, don't move often before you're moving well, because it'll pay you back and it'll pay you back with interest and you'll get hurt. You'll be in pain, whatever it is. And I think the biggest thing, and this is a, this is a me formulated question for you. The biggest thing for that is ego and how we allow ourselves to put it on the hook and not worry about it. Which is rule five at our gym.

How do you put your ego on the hook? Hmm. It's an interesting answer. It's, it's, it's going to sound egotistical to people still on this part of the journey. That's by really loving me really deeply loving me because ego is insecurity, you know? Um, interestingly, like ego state therapy, right? Which is where ego comes from, teaches us that we have up to 15 voices in our head at any one time. And when I first read that, my response was, thank goodness, that is the most validating thing I've ever fucking read. That's a great response to that.

Oh my God. Yeah. Um, I was like, ah, brilliant because it makes sense if anyone ever like, um, invalidates this, I'm done like, um, ego is an insecurity. It's another voice needing to speak in order to like fill a hole, fill a void and everything in our life is what voids that we created for ourselves inside of us. Coming back to the conversation about, um, you know, the, the filters of life, what they teach us is simply that we can choose what the event means. We can always choose what the event means. The last step in experiencing anything is meaning.

What do we make it mean? You know, if somebody challenges us, you know, my partner is very into health, very into health. Um, and she is just an incredible example of eating well, nourishing herself, moving well. Um, and she'll challenge me on a lot to do with my health. Which is awesome. It is now. Do you listen to her? Yeah, I do. Is it because you're able to love yourself and you're able to check that ego? Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Yes. It's because I have, I can check my ego because I love myself and I have really, because I love myself, I have boundaries and I can communicate them well.

You know, I know where we're, you know, why we're jumping all around the place, but I love that the puzzle pieces are starting to come together in terms of teaching people how to love us. That's an incredibly important conversation. And when I think about, you know, think about Elle, she will challenge me on say what I'm choosing to eat and like, you know, really direct by just telling me what that's, what's about to happen in my body and like could have, could have said that was when it was on the plate, decided to do it when I was halfway down my esophagus.

That's okay. These things happen. Did you know that's going to corrode your insides? We live when we learn, right? Yeah. Um, and that was challenging. In the beginning I chose to get really defensive because I was simply making it mean that she was challenging me, the human being, she was just saying, that's not a good thing for your body. She was actually saying, that's not a good thing for the body, choosing to make it mean challenging me as the human being. She's not attacking you. She's attacking the process. That's going to happen. Yeah. Pointing out a fact.

Yeah. That reminds me of like one of my first ever, um, placement things I did at one of the bigger gyms down our way, um, all around rehab and stuff like that. One of the staff members, the boss who, so the guy who was looking after me, he was doing something to it with a client and the boss just walked past, said something little to him about what he was doing. He changed it. And afterwards I remember him saying, he goes, I used to hate when Ryan would do that, but now I know it's just going to make me a better coach.

And that has stuck with me eight, seven, eight years. It's just something that if you allow yourself to not feel attacked when someone suggests this is how you could do this better, you know, the world's going to be a better place. And if we, you know, one of my, I don't know why I just wanted that, but one of my life rules is never argue on the internet and I break my life rules occasionally. All right. Rabbit hole. Exactly. But that like the reason why people argue on this is because they feel as though people are attacking them, not their ideas.

And yeah, and yeah, I don't even know why I thought of that, but I want to, I want to tweak the, the mode of the conversation a little bit and talk a little bit about business and a little bit about what you guys do. What has helped you build your culture that you currently have? So culture is two things. It's dynamics and it's mechanics. So dynamics are, what is the DNA of your organization and that is what is the vision? Where are we going? What's the mission? How are we going to get there together? What are the values?

Like what do we believe and stand for? Mechanics are how do we do it? And that's, it's boring shit. It's systems, processes, it's indicators of performance without both. We don't have culture ever because we can have all talk and not have systems to make that talk possible. And, you know, I was saying to you before, you know, I've been in a position where my entire team left in the space of a very short amount of time. I remember sitting down with my boss, having a glass of wine and being like, well, looking around an empty office where no one was coming back to and going, we fucked up.

And we thought it was dynamics. We thought the culture wasn't there. What it was actually is mechanics. It was that there was, people wanted this big vision. They wanted to live the values. They wanted to be a part of this mission, but they couldn't do it because the processes didn't allow it. So they felt like they were failures. So you can't have culture without both. There's a wonderful quote and I can't remember who said it and I'll misquote it terribly, which is a pattern for me. That's quotes. That's how people deal with quotes, I think. God, I hope so.

It's, if you want people to build a boat, don't bark orders and drum up the wood. And don't bark orders and demand people drum up the wood. Basically teach a yearning for the vast and endless sea. I fucking love that. I need to stop and digest that a little bit. That's pretty amazing. I'll say it again because it's what I live by in leadership. It's if you want people to build a boat, don't bark orders and demand the drumming of the wood. Teach a yearning for the vast and endless sea. That is now my new favorite quote.

Anyone that's listened to more than one episode of this will know that I love quotes. So that's amazing. And that's, yeah, because automatically I think about how that relates back to my team and how that relates back to my leadership styles and management styles and how I fucked up in the past and how my ability to be self-reflective has allowed me to change the way I go about things like that. So that's pretty amazing. If you teach a yearning for the vast and endless sea, they will build a better boat than you could envision. Yeah. And that's been true of my team.

Verne Harnish talks about how as a leader you want to be the dumbest person in the room. Yeah. I crave that. A hundred percent. Because I know that there are people who will build a better boat than me, but there aren't very many people on the planet who can teach the yearning. Great leaders learn. Great managers can bark the orders and drum up the wood in their vision. Great leaders and great cultures are built off everybody yearning for the same sea. And if we know -- and that sounds good. That's a really cool sound bite. Yeah.

It's super -- it's one of those, it's super simple, but it's not -- it's incredibly difficult. Nah. Because -- and any business owner who has a team will expect this. If you teach a yearning for the vast and endless sea, everyone's got a different fucking sea. Yeah. And a different way of navigating it. And some -- you know, if I look at like ships over time, you know, the way the Chinese built ships versus the way the English built ships, totally different ships for totally different seas, for totally different weather conditions. So dynamics in dynamics and mechanics is what sea are we yearning for together?

Yeah. And if you can bring together a group of people -- They're all yearning for the same sea. All yearning for the same sea, without teaching them how to build their boat, you're going to create something amazing. Yeah. Together. Yeah. Like, there's a reason why everyone in business does what they do, because it allows them their sea, their why, whatever, I guess, language you want to use, everything's moving towards that. And then if -- yeah. And I'm starting to see my team all come together to start building the boat, and guess what? I'm having nothing to do with them actually building the boat.

I'm just, you know, giving them the materials and the resources to go ahead and build it, and you know, let's see what we come up with. Oh, God, that's easier said than done. Yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah. As someone that likes to build boats, metaphorically, it's a hard one. Well, it's like they're building a boat within a boat that we've already built. Yeah. So we're like, no, I did a pretty good job of my boat. Boat-ception. Boat-ception. If you were able to build a boat within my boat, my boat must be pretty good. Yeah. Why does your boat look different?

Uh-oh. Show me how your boat works. Oh, wait. It goes faster. Oh, wait. It's going to last longer. Oh, shit. So this is what kills culture, is most leaders, and this is not a, because I do this still, is that when a better boat gets built than mine, rather than looking for the learning from my boat, I'll tear down theirs. Mm. Or mean to. Yep. But it's natural. It's a, you know, Cam comes to me with a new program, and we're like, no, that sucks, mine's better. Before I've even had a chance to look at the program, like, it's a really, really simple one, but it's so hard for us to get out of that mindset.

But when we do, shit, like, life gets easier, because people start building your boats for you. Yes. And because, like, for me, I want my team to want, I want my whole team to feel like co-founders, all building this thing together. You know, I look at Google, for example, great book, Work Rules, by the VP of People Operations at Google, so the person who runs their HR and their culture, and he talks about how many of Google's greatest inventions were accidents, like they have a 20% rule, which is that 20% of your week, month, year can be spent on anything you fucking want, Gmail came of that.

That's awesome. Gmail came because a guy said, I reckon I can use this, the search function, and I can take my email, and attach, like, say, Hotmail, attach a search function to it, and then he went, fuck, this is hard, because I can't just dump a search function into Hotmail. You know what? I'm going to bring my emails to the search function. And then Gmail was born. And hey, I use Gmail every day, and I'm sure most people do. It's the biggest email system on the planet. Google Chrome came because of an accident, because of the 20% rule.

It was, you know what? I reckon, fuck it, we can make search really fast, why don't we just make internet really fast? And now, Chromebook exists, Pixel, the phone exists, they're the fastest phones and computers on the planet. They're not the best selling, Apple still overtakes them, but they're the fastest, because of two things. Because if we look at what Google's initial mission was, it was make information available, quickly available. They have a much sexier vision than that. And if we look at everything that's been created by people who weren't the founders, Chromebook, Chrome, Gmail, it's all built on the vision of make information available, make it available fast.

So they've got these, coming back to mechanics, they've got these products that are making them millions and billions of dollars. Created by people they might pay 100 grand a year to, or less. So the ROI is massive, like from a business point of view, we need to be profitable. The ROI is huge. But you've got something that's built in the vision, in their initial vision, same sea, different boat. Yeah. And now they, and you know, Apple's the same, you know, they were told don't create, don't go into the phone business, you'll fail. Yeah. And now, and it was not the, it wasn't Jobs who came up with the idea of let's do phones.

He just took his one part of his wisdom. He was make the boat sexy, but he had no idea how to build that boat for that sea. Yeah. And he got his, yeah, his crew built the boat and now they've got a whole fleet. And we don't have to be big to do that. We don't have to be the elephants, you know, and Vern Harnish says there's three kinds of businesses. They're mice, which are startups. There's elephants, which are like whales. Then there are gazelles, which are fast moving, structurally integral creatures who are not at the bottom of the food cycle because they nimble and move quickly.

Yeah. And they're efficient because like in a business sense, everyone's small team, but they're everyone's working together. Yeah. And they're able to communicate. If we look at, cause everything's an organism, a business is just an organism. We look at a business, you know, we take the analogy, the body, how much has to happen just to walk. Yeah. And if for that to happen, our body has to be yearning for a vast and endless sea the whole time. Yeah. And when anything doesn't, it, you know, I, when I started, I was, I woke up one day,

well earlier this year in just an immense amount of pain and I went, fuck, I went saw my osteo Jordan Moncrieff, amazing, amazing thought leader on movement. And he, two things he said to me was one, that pain's been there for many, many years. Your body was just really good at hiding. And the second thing is everywhere you're feeling the pain is everywhere the pain was not created. Oh, I love that. Yeah. And that's the simplest, I guess, idea as in terms of movement and pain that people just don't get. And you know, I've, I'll chat to a couple of mates tonight about pain and how medicine and how it's treated.

And if your knee sore, something below or above it that's creating that pain or up top. If your lower back sore, it's something below or above it that's creating pain or up top and you've got to figure out what, and that's what the best medical professionals and movement professionals in the world are able to do. And it's just systems that are able to identify, well, your, if we use a hip for, if you use back, for example, your hips aren't flexing and rotating like they should, or your upper back isn't rotating like it should. If

you guys listening are interested in that side of things, look up the, the joint by joint approach, which is a really, really simple way of explaining how the body works and how joints are meant to work, difference between mobile joints and stable joints. And it like hijacked your answer a little bit. But from a pain point of view, if you understand that you get 50% of the way there, which is so valuable when there's so many different reasons why people are in pain. If you can understand that, then movement stops becoming a hindrance in terms of pain.

It starts to become a factor to fix it because, you know, I'm sure everyone's gone to a doctor or a physio or a chiral or an osteo, someone that isn't great at what they do and, or isn't, doesn't understand this. And they'll say, Oh, you just need a rest for a month or you need a rest for two months or you need to take three weeks off. If you stop moving, you'll, you'll lose your ability to move. If you, and yes, sometimes we're in immense pain and we can't move. That's okay. But find the little things you can do and yeah, and then you'll, then you'll get better and apply all of that to business and team building, right?

If you want to know why your sales team aren't performing, look to your marketing team. Yeah. Are you producing great quality leads? Look to your operations team. Can it be done simpler? Don't look to the sales team first. And if we come back to like any kind of pain, it's simply an inability, like it's a lack of awareness around movement, which is our ability to lead and manage ourselves, which is the business owner. It's always us. Yeah. And it's the same analogy is we will get to a point where the team aren't performing, we're not achieving results.

So we stop managing. We stop leading. Fuck it. You know? Like, um, or we, we just do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Same, same communication. Same communication over and over again to more blame. And then we wonder why it doesn't, and we'd expect like logic would tell us that if we just kept doing the same thing, it would plateau and we'd experienced the same result over and over again. It doesn't. Yeah. Because like in, like in movement, it atrophies, you know, it's not performing and growing and moving. So the team atrophy, well, you hurt your back deadlifting poorly.

You do more dead lifts. That's going to hurt more. And like, it's really a simple thing, but one of the, from a movement point of view, and I love how you brought that back to business because that's, that is perfect. It works exactly the same way. Sometimes you've just got to chill out and breathe. And I use the term breathe because like this morning, one of my clients came in and she was super sore, super tight, and just nothing was working. And we use a test called a Brettzel, which it's a stretch, which basically shows you what's tight in your body and what's not working.

And from there you choose something to fix it and something to make it better. So for her today, usually it might be a foam roller or a certain stretch or a certain movement that we do today. I just said, well, you guys, we're just going to spend 10 minutes breathing. So we did 10 minutes breathing. And from the developmental stages, we went belly, we went back and went hands and knees. And we spent 10 minutes doing that. And I got put her back in that same stretch. And she said, no fucking way. Like it genuinely changed the way her body moved because she spent 10 minutes just focusing on her breath.

In through your nose, fill up your diaphragm, or use your diaphragm, fill up your belly, out through your mouth. And if we're able to, in all areas of what we do, whether it's movement, whether it's business, if we're able to actually go, you know what, sometimes you just need to come back to our breath and then let things take care of themselves to a point, just got to take action still. And that breath in itself is action, but we've got to be able to bring ourselves back to let's go to the basics and let's make sure the simple things are working.

And then the complex will take care of itself. That's a really, I don't know, that's a really simple one for me, but something that I still struggle with and I'm still, I'm only starting to fully or somewhat grasp. It's again, coming back to business, it's the same thing. The solution is almost never, like it's the same in anything, right? If you're noticing the problem, go six, seven steps before, and you'll find the part of the tree diagram that we went in the wrong direction. That's how we got to this dead end. Yeah, that's cool. That's really cool.

If you feel sick, probably not what you ate 20 minutes ago, it might be what you ate a week ago or five or six days ago. All right, I've got a bunch of questions for you and you can be as succinct or as long-winded as you'd like. First one for you. If you were to write down three values that you hold dearly, what would they be and why? Love, I'll say them and then I'll speak to them. Love, passion, patience, to be really clear, I am in business and I'm a peak performer. A lot of my communication nowadays, because it's the lesson I'm on, is around slowing down to speed up and all of that.

At the end of the day, I walk into the office at seven o'clock, my PA hands me a schedule and a book of papers and I'm out of there at 10 o'clock. Just like you are in your business, just like many people who listen to you around their own businesses or in high-performance roles are. Those three grounding points for me, love, passion, patience, love, because for me, everything can be an expression of love if we choose it to be. Everything is awesome. And honestly, if it was always, we'd be in a better place. We can fight from there.

Imagine what it would be like. Imagine what the world would be like if that was the case. It's not tokenistic. We can argue and fight from a place of love. We can disagree, debate, all from a place of love because it can be love of self. I talked about my partner is very, very into health and very, very into challenging me, but she knows that one of the things, she doesn't drink, I'm more than happy with that. She really struggled in the beginning that I really enjoy wine and would often call, she'd make comments because I hadn't taught her how to love me in this area, not her.

Extreme ownership says it's not that she should have known. I had to say to her one day, "Hey, this is like a boundary for me. It's something that I'm not intending to stop doing. When I hear comments like that, I simply feel judged." And funnily enough, she stopped making comments because it wasn't about me. It was about me. And it probably stopped bugging her as much as well. So everything can be from a place of love. Oscillation because I truly believe in every moment of life, enjoying it, enjoying it to its absolute fullest. And that doesn't mean things can't suck.

It just doesn't mean that. It means that on the other side of that oscillation, we'll be asked like finding a way to make that sucky thing an integral part of our life, learning from it. I go through shit times all the time, times I don't know the answer, you know, I was saying to my team, there are more times than not where I don't know what I'm doing, more times than not. But that doesn't mean in all of that not knowing, I'm not passionate about the not knowing. It's all part of this adventure for me. And in the 30s, patience.

If someone was to say to me what's my favorite trait about myself, it's that I'm patient as fuck and I don't learn that. I'm patient with people because I'm patient with me because I stopped because all of that pain is unmet expectation. I just stopped expecting for myself things I could not meet and started expecting for myself rather than things and outcomes, I started expecting not what I would do or what I would have, but who I would be. What can I really, and it's not a rah rah woo, you know, woo woo spiritual thing. It's a hardcore, I expect and demand who I am going to be in that moment.

It is something, it's a performance capacity thing. It's not a just let it happen thing. As a result of that, the do and have takes care of itself, and so does the give. Definitely. All because I can be patient with myself and expect more of myself because I'm not expecting impossible things. That's perfect. I really enjoy. I really, really like that. Have you had a defining moment? Yeah. Yeah. Two that I can really think of. The first was, I don't know if I mentioned it in this podcast whether I mentioned breakfast, but if I mentioned it again, I mentioned it again, they sort of conflated in my mind.

That's okay. I remember waking up, I went through a period earlier in the year where I was, like I found myself drinking a lot, a lot, a lot, and I was easily putting away two bottles of wine a night. It just became this thing, the habit, it was just a habit. In my mind, it wasn't a problem as it often isn't, and then it was. Yeah, it isn't a problem until it is. It isn't a problem until it is, and I distinctly remember waking up one morning, seeing four bottles of wine on my kitchen counter

empty, and seeing a message from somebody who I had booked in, who I really care about, who I booked in to have dinner, and it was just a stream of messages, which was, "Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? Here, you're here, you're here." So they'd waited in this restaurant for two hours, and then left. And it wasn't a problem until I heard someone, as it's so often isn't, and there was a defining moment of seeing these four empty bottles, seeing these messages, and really just being blank. It was not having anything to

go with, and it was the moment when I really decided to commit to my health and vitality, was I can't keep treating my body as something that's going to catch up to the rest of my world. I can't keep making reactive decisions on this sort of stuff, because at the end of the day, it's going to be the thing I'll look back on and regret. Like I see dads at 45 who can't play footy with the kids, not because they don't know how, because I can't kick the ball straight. Can't move because they're in pain. Move because they're in pain.

Yeah, and there's something that breaks my heart, where I see some clients, and from a movement point of view and a health point of view, where it feels as though I care more about their health than they do, because it's not a priority for them. But at the end of the day, whether you want it to be or not, it has to be a priority for you, because that's the vessel that's going to get you to 60, 70, 80, 90. Or you'll drop dead at 50, or 55, or 60 with the quality of life for the last 20 years that isn't what you want it to be.

It's so simple, but it's so hard for people to do it, and yes, you've got obstacles to get through. You might have an office job, you might sit in the car for four hours a day, but they're not obstacles that are insurmountable, and it just takes a little bit of, I guess, passion and motivation to get you to where you want to get to. And I use that word motivation, I don't like the word motivation, so I want to flip that to change it to discipline, but what do you think of the word motivation? I'm

a bigger fan of inspiration, inspire to breathe within, that's where that word comes from, and inspiritus I think is the root of it, and it's to breathe within. Motivation is external, I can motivate, and in the metaphor of coaching, I can coach from a point of reliance. That's what I love, when I first heard about what you do and what Virtus stands for, most conventional GMs, PTs, through no fault of their own, simply through conditioning in the industry, it is all about conditioning and reliance. You need me to go further, versus the mission, the vision, the message, the purpose of what we're doing to remove reliance and build realization and build sustainability in human movement.

Create self-managed humans, that's one of our lines. That is inspiration, to be able to breathe within, to create breath, because motivation, to breathe from external, it's not the root of the word, it's just the contrast, is to breathe from out, to need air from out, versus to have breath and create breath within. I love this idea of alchemy, it's how can we create gold from nothing. That's inspiration. It's how can we create a self-sustaining perpetual breath within. That's awesome, I love that. If you could be remembered in one sentence, what would it be? One question. He taught me my life could have merit.

Put that on a t-shirt. That's perfect, that's all I need, that's spot on. Do you have a morning routine? Yeah, I do. What is it? So I get up in the morning, so I tend to get up at around quarter to six, and the first thing I'll do is I'll drink, I'm a big fan of, I've learned this from my partner, I'm a big fan of alkalinity in my body, so I'll drink lemon water, and I'll spend some time like nourishing my body in that way, I'll drink a smoothie, lots of greens. Then I'll go and move.

So I'll go to a boot camp, or I'll go and train, or I'll go and run, but I get my body moving, mostly to activate my nervous system. So it's not, it's often not performance training, it's often get my nervous system moving. Then I will, as a result of my nervous system moving, I meditate. I usually try and do that around sort of nature, so I like to be, you know, if I run off and run to St Killa Beach, I sit on the beach and I meditate, 20 minutes of edict meditation, which takes this activated nervous system and grounds it deeply, grounds it deeply, and moves me from body and mind being on and then activates soul.

Then, and through all this time, I stay away from technology, and I stay away from any form of input, because at this point I'm simply warming up for all the input. - That's cool. - Yeah. Yeah, I do not, I don't, it's like I don't want to now lift, it's not about lifting any weight at this point, it's simply about activating different parts of my body. It's all warm up. After that meditation, I will eat, do something really healthy or well, or if I'm not eating for that morning, I'll like read or something, I'll spend some time nourishing, and then by that point, I'll shower, get changed, and then I walk to work.

I walk into the office, and once I hit, once I, and the whole time I'll be, I try not to just start my day, so I walk in those doors. - What's your, what's the timeframe around that? What time do you get up? What time do you get to work? - Yeah, so up at about quarter to six, I'll eat and smoothie and all of that stuff until about six. Six is when I like to go and move, if it's a boot camp, that'll be 6.45, and so I might start a little later in the day, I'll wake up later and get myself a bit of a sleep in.

Otherwise, six I'll go and move, hit the gym, and again, it's not about moving fast, it's not about moving heavy, it's about moving out of work, yeah, and that'll last me until about 6.30, 6.45. I'll eat, like I'll eat or read until maybe another 15 minutes, until 7.15, and then my office is four minutes away from where I live, so walk down there, and through that all, I'm setting an intention for the day. All that intention. - I have some morning routine envy right now. That's perfect. - Bill, again, Jack De Loser is currently, he's

launched a fantastic ebook, completely free, again, no catch, and no affiliation, not plug, he's just a phenomenal, he's a phenomenal example of somebody who did the overwork thing, overwork thing, overwork thing, and built something amazing, and then woke up one morning and couldn't get out of bed, physically couldn't bring himself to get out of bed and had to go on this journey, so I've learnt a lot from him on this. And then when I walk into the office, it's game time. So all of this is pre-game prep, and every time I step into that office, it's ball toss, game on.

- So for all the athletes in the room, you get it. For all the business owners or all of the people that are just trying to figure out how they want to run their daily lives, it's a really, really simple analogy to understand. - It's all about I treat every day as grand final day, and it's because I deeply believe that, and I'm not an athlete, and I have not worked with a huge, I've worked with some athletes, sub-elite, and I've worked with one elite athlete, but never really worked with athletes, especially in team sports,

they've all been individual, I deeply believe that on a grand final day, there has to be a point where you let go before you get on that field, where all the training, all the preparation, all of that, at some point, you have to let go and play the fucking game, that's what I do. And then it's simply running the strategy and trusting myself to know what works, and being on, staying present, but trusting deeply that I've prepared for this moment. - My little mantra that I probably use, that I use every grand final, 'cause I've been lucky enough to play in a fair few, is how good, like right at the start, I'll say how good is footy.

'Cause it just makes me enjoy being there, and it stops me from worrying about the performance or anything like that, and I'm someone that, I pride myself on being a finals big game player, but it comes from that relaxation and that acceptance that whatever happens will happen, and I've just gotta ride the wave. - I've walked into, and the nature of business is with any game, is that it's unpredictable, and I've walked into days where I've walked in and there have been big lawsuits sitting there for me to handle, I've walked in and had a

major government body pull accreditation, tell 1,200 clients that they've pulled accreditation, not tell us that they've told 1,200 clients, told those 1,200 clients that they're not gonna get their money back without consulting us. And if you've ever seen the movie where one phone rings, then the next phone rings, then the lights happen. - That's happened. - Yeah, we had 400 people ringing in the space of three hours to complain and bitch, and I had a team of six, and I've had that happen all, and it was a beautiful, shining day, and I walked in, and then ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, and it took us an hour to work out what the fuck was going on.

And the whole time, it's like, bring it on. We've prepared for this moment, this is what we've trained for, how good is what we get to do? And it's the shift from I have to do this to I get to do this. - Yeah, yeah, but it's the last 10% what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it. That mantra, just remember that, and you're kind of rolling, I'm really, really, really interested to hear your answer to this question, what is success to you? - Oh, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. At the moment, that's such a qualifying statement, because I-- - That's a great way to start it, though.

- Yeah, it will change, and it has changed. At the moment, it's being really, really proud of, and it's pride in a very spiritual deep sense of gratitude to self, sort of I imagine there's a copy of me, like a clone of me who I'm deeply proud of. The way you can be proud of a partner or a sibling or that sense of like, you've done something amazing having that with myself for big moments, little moments. You know, I was saying, you know, in my apartment, there's one piece of furniture that it's a shitty couch, I've had it for three years, I'm ready to get rid of it.

And when people come, like I love my apartment, and that's the one thing people go, it's a weird out of place couch. And I say to them, that's my shitty couch. Like I look at it and I go, I created a world where that could exist. That's what it is right now. - Awesome. - Yeah. - My next question was, what are you most proud of? So that's perfect. - Yeah. - What are you most ashamed of? Flip that. - Yeah. - It's interesting, I'm such a follower of Brene Brown who talks about toxic shame. - Yeah.

- That's one of the things I've really worked to let go of. I'm most ashamed of where I took out my anger at myself on other people. And you know, people listening to this, I believe will resonate with this, is that to be listening to this conversation, A, we have to be privileged, but B, we tend to have to be smart. It doesn't mean intellectually smart all the time. - Just aware. - Aware. And with awareness comes power over people and people like me, and generally people who listen to conversations like this tend to be pretty switched on with people.

And so, you know, I was a very, very good manipulator for a very long time. I was able to, nothing that is like crazy controversial, but being able to get what I want because I could speak well or had a level of inner strength, that's something that I will, you know, I'm working to first forgive me and then I'll move on to having conversations with people who I feel are owed apologies. - Yeah. - But that's something that is, until I clear it, and I may never, and I've had to become okay with that. 'Cause you know, I love this idea of dying without regret.

I think it's dangerous. - There's only one time in your life you're gonna be able to actually figure out whether you are gonna die regret or not. And it's a really easy thing for people to say, "I have no regrets yet." Or you're just not honest with yourself enough to actually say, "You know what? I regret that." - Or you don't know it's a regret. Just like the pain, like pain in my back was probably created years ago. My body was just super good at covering it up because it's a good system. - But it is.

That's exactly it. My body is incredibly good at manipulating itself to not be in pain, but eventually it'll stop finding ways to do so. - And so will we when it comes to regret, and it'll come up. So that would be why. It's that I used the privilege I have of being, you know, having grown up in a phenomenon, like having parents who put me through a phenomenal education system, being exposed to great people. I used that privilege to hurt others, yeah. - If you could go back to high school and implement some changes to the curriculum, what few subjects would you chuck into that?

- Hmm. What few subjects? Man, I would change the way that we teach. I changed the way we teach health and fitness, purely as a result of, like I'm in the beginning forays of my journey into it. It was probably only mid this year that I went, "Fuck, this is a thing that I need to do." But I would dramatically change the way we talk about it. You know, I'd implement so much more holistic health. When people say, because my ability to handle more in business, which is just my area, has grown exponentially in the last six months.

It's had to because we've gone through challenges, but it's also happened because mostly I have the energy and mental clarity to take care of it. You know, I've been playing with things like hot and cold immersion, which is another thing straight from Jack D. Great nutrition, hydration, which is the thing that nobody fucking tells me. If anybody's water, like guys, it's probably important that you have optimum hydration so that everything can work well. Yeah. If you drive your car without enough oil or enough water or enough petrol, it's going to stop working eventually. Putting food into my body that is food, objectively, that is food most of the time.

All of those little holistic health, again, not a medical professional, just opinion, personal belief, blah, blah, blah, disclaimer. Not immediately defaulting to what can I take to avoid, what pill can I take to avoid what caused this? It doesn't mean I don't believe in medicine. What it is, though, is I'd rather not react. How many Panadol can I take to get rid of this headache? But it's not a headache. Why do I have a headache? Well, it's because I haven't drunk enough water, I haven't had appropriate nutritionists because I slept four hours last night. It's a really simple one, but people miss that holistic thing.

For anyone that has listened to a few of these, I would have mentioned that our holistic wellness scale a bunch of times, just are you ticking these 10, 12 boxes? If not, fix it. It's a simple one. He immediately goes to write that down. I'll send you our little form. It's a really simple one. I just rate 12, I think I've changed it, it used to be 10 and now it's 12. 12 areas of your life, rate it out of 10. 10 being perfect, one being shit-house, anything below a seven, what do we need to do to fix it?

What's the one action point? If it's sleep, get off your phone before you go to bed. If it's hydration, carry a water bottle with you and have three bottles a day. That's your goal. It's just simple stuff like that. The second thing I'd add ... Fuck, that's cool. The second thing I'd add into school, I don't know if it's a ... I would change the way we teach teachers. There are some wonderful European models where teaching is seen to be the biggest privilege career-wise and I fucking love that. You have to have a master's degree. Again, it's not about the education, it's about the value we place on educators.

I had phenomenal teachers and I know people who didn't and I know what a big difference that made. Huge difference. Not in terms of what they knew, it was in terms of who they were. Yeah, definitely. From what they made okay and what they validated and what they were able to share, how human they were. I would desperately ... I wanted to become a teacher and still to an extent do. But you are effectively, you're just not teaching kids in a classroom. One of the things this year, there are two additions I want to make to my life this year.

One is to work with Lifeline and become a crisis counselor with them and one is to go and work with some youth mentoring programs because I truly believe that we don't need more corrective education. We need more validation of what is. I wish people told me that anger was okay instead of don't talk to me like that or that sadness was okay instead of boys don't cry or back to anger, girls don't get angry. All of these messages that through no fault except more conditioning, conditioning, conditioning, we teach kids still. Simple, who do you look up to and why?

Give me one person because I'm sure you could tell me a bunch. It's interesting, it's interesting to say that I struggle with it. Not because I don't think they're amazing people but because I stopped looking a little while ago. Who do I look up to? I very much look up to some incredible women, Brene Brown, absolutely, takes a lot of guts to have the conversation that she's having about toxic shame, Michelle Obama, a hugely strong woman who's living her values. Those two women are two people I very much look up to. Awesome. Do you have a mantra?

No, I don't. I have a question I ask myself all the time, like a question I come back to as a ground running moment which is like is this nourishing and fulfilling me? Is this adding to me or is this taking away from me? They're two incredible words, nourishment and fulfillment in all areas of your life. I've tried to move away from happiness, let's just say I don't want to be happy, I'm not stoic. It's a level of it doesn't have to be that all the time and it can still be okay. Yeah, it's really cool.

What advice would you give a 15 year old version of yourself? Don't grow up so fast. You really don't have to. It's mind-blowing to think that was only seven years ago. Yeah, if I can tell me that. I forget, I say I'm a 22 year old tracked on the outside of an 80 year old. Grow up less or need to grow up less. The more acceptance I have around the fact that I know very little in the scheme of things, the more happy I am with where the world's going and where I'm going with it. Yeah, I like that.

If you could invite three people to dinner, who would they be and why? Oprah. Good. Why? Because I believe she has one of the most pragmatic, applicable, relevant conversations around living spiritually and connecting with the, and again, I'm not religious, but with the God inside you, and she's a wonderful example of what it can mean to overcome true resilience. Barack Obama, because I believe he went through one of the most challenging leadership trials and tribulations ever, and man, I'd love to pick his brain about leading and what leadership is when people don't agree with you.

Matthew, and it's a balance between Brene Brown and Elon Musk, and I think it goes to Musk just because it wouldn't have been about three days ago, but I read an article interviewing him, because he's been doing a round of interviews recently, about why he does what he does, and his answer was to be useful, and I went, "That's deeper than I care to admit." Three words, to be useful, that just straight down. To be useful. All of that, to be useful, there's so much to unpack there. That's an amazing answer, and he's just next level, he's insane.

All right, last couple, I want a bunch of favorites. First thing that comes in your head. Favorite fun fact? Favorite fun fact? Oh, squirrels forget where they hibernate. When squirrels hibernate, they forget where they place 90% of their nuts. Oh, really? How fucking good is that? They forget. It sucks. But unlike goldfish, they know they've forgotten. Okay. Well, that's probably worse. It's worse. Yeah, ignorance is worse when it comes to things like that. Your favorite resource for new information? It seems cliche, but people who've walked that walk before. Cliches are things for a reason, though. Yes.

Exactly what you said. Also, cliches. Great place. Great resource. Favourite movie? I hate this question. Oh my goodness. I really don't. I'm bad. First thing that comes in your head. Go. No, I'm not having a stroke, I'm having a stroke, um, God help. The ones that came to mind were so silly. Tell us about it. Shawshank Redemption. Oh, great movie. Yeah. Yeah, just, you just jumped on IMDb and checked what was at the top and went, you know what that'll do? What was that or Saw III? Which is just, which is not a philosophical answer. Let's stick to your first answer.

Good. Favourite, this is a two-part question, favourite music to listen to, one when you want to relax and two when you want to pump yourself up? When I want to relax? Jazz. I love jazz. Evening jazz. Um, and when I want to pump myself up, um, Winnie Houston or Celine Dion? Oh, good. You and Cam would get on. Great. Favourite book? Now this would be the hardest one for you to quantify, right? Yeah, it is. Pick one. It is. Um, I'll do fiction and non-fiction. Fiction? The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Um, just a stunning, stunning story.

Just like, it's the, it's the only book I've ever sobbed for, sobbed for, because it is a beautiful articulation of what it means to be a young person going through any kind of challenge. So fiction, The Book Thief, Markus Zusak, great movie as well. Um, and then non-fiction, at the moment, it'd be Braving the Wilderness by Brene Brown. Awesome. Yeah. Lovely work. Last one. Favourite quote? Well, again, there's the answer that will sound very philosophical and the answer that won't. The answer that will sound very philosophical is, um, to know and to not do is to not know.

Good. Uh, and the not so one is, uh, do or do not, there is no try. I like it. Mate, thank you very much for this. This was outstanding. Absolute pleasure. Eric King. Thank you so much. Good for you. I know you guys can't hear that handshake, but we handshake. We shook hands. It was a good one. Thank you.