Special · Christmas Special 2020

"And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite." "Let's do this! Come on!" "Mountain!" "It's too damn hot for a penguin to be just walking around." "Three, two, one, eagle!" "Are these two doctors?" "I'm afraid so." "And here we go." "Mr. Simon Cooper!" "Welcome, Wallace." "We're back!" "For a quick Christmas special for anyone that's travelling on Christmas Day and needs something to listen to that isn't Fox FM because, frankly, it sucks." "Not gonna argue that." "I have a question for you to start off with." "Okay." "Who is gonna make the gravy?" "On Christmas?" "Yes." "This year it'll probably be Bernie Cooper."

"Bernie Cooper. Rob Dog makes some good gravy too." "That's good. I'm not surprised by that." "He's a gravy man. I was a bit of gravy." "So, plan for today, team, is we thought we'd get together, we'd talk about COVID, and the unprecedented year that has been." "No. We're not allowed to say the word 'unprecedented' or 'COVID' again." "Agreed. Or any variations of that." "No. So, what we want to do is we want to have a quick chat about the lessons we've learnt this year, about what we're grateful for in the present, and then talk a little bit about 2021, which is a strange thing to be saying.

It feels like it's come up quick, but we figured we could use this chat as an opportunity for everyone who's listening to do the same, to reflect, to appreciate, and to look forward a little bit. Thoughts?" "Love that." "We'll have a question for you." "Okay." "Who is gonna make the gravy?" "I thought I've already answered this question." "Oh, yeah, we have. We have. Sorry. I'm on a loop. I've had too much coffee." "What lessons has 2020 taught you? What's your biggest takeaway from 2020?" "I think this will tie into the next part as well, which is the grateful part, but it's just been a chance to slow down.

It's crazy to think that we are a day out from Christmas, and this year has just been so different. We've been forced to slow down a little bit. We've been forced to take a step back and evaluate how we do things and reflect on how we spend our time and who we spend it with. I think it's probably shone a light on what's important in our lives and maybe helped us to trim the fat, so to speak, to remove the things that aren't important to us or things that don't serve us and load up on the things that do."

"Has there been any practices or activities or any extra fat that you've noticed straight away and said, 'I don't want to be doing that anymore. I don't want to be wasting my time on that,' or spending my time on that?" "It's been funny because I think during our lockdown and when the gym was closed, we were a little bit more insulated and spending a lot of time at home. We had the opportunity to build these practices or habits and then build upon those. But then now, as we've reopened, we've had to shift back to the way that we were doing things."

"In different ways, yeah. We had to try and fit in eight months of social in a month. And I think everyone's feeling pretty cooked, pretty zapped, pretty mentally fried. So it's been a big year and it's fascinating. I always find it fascinating to get to this time of the year and everyone's like, 'Yeah, it's been a big year. It's been hectic. I'm really excited for next year.' It's just arbitrary days and dates and things like that. But in saying that, there's almost like a collective exhale when Christmas comes around and between that New Year's to

Christmas period where you have no idea what day it is or what's happening and it's just kind of like, 'Okay, this is a reset.' Like a collective reset." "Oh, definitely. I think everyone is looking forward to just being able to say goodbye to this year a little bit." "Get in and train over the next couple of weeks." "Yeah, well, I mean, over the next few weeks as we shut down a little bit over Christmas and contract and spend a lot of time with people that we care about and take some downtime from work and from the regular getting back into things.

It's a chance for us again to focus on what's important and focus on ourselves. I don't like the idea of a reset, I guess, in the New Year because that's too close to the New Year's resolution thing that we're always falling into. And just because we are going into a new year after a really big one doesn't mean we can't start doing the things that we want to do now." "Yeah, it does give you the opportunity to close a chapter and start a new one, I guess." "Definitely." "I guess, like we said, it's an arbitrary date or day, but it does hold a little bit of significance, especially if you've been working through in your flat chat.

We're obviously not closing for the Christmas break because we've been closed for so long this year. We don't feel like we need to or want to. Most people still want to train, so we're going to be leaning in, but it's certainly that collective breath of 2020's over, let's lean into 2021, hopefully it brings new things. Hopefully it's not more of the same, it may just be more of the same, but if the last nine months has taught us anything, and to answer my own question, I think for me it's shown people whether what they're doing is what they want to be doing.

And whether the job they're in, or the relationship they're in, or the way they're spending their life, whether they're living up to their values, and whether they're living up to the things that make them want to jump out of bed in the morning. I certainly, as much as I appreciate the period where the gym was closed for all the extra things I got to do, spend time with Lucy and hang out with KP and Tarko and enjoy talking about how we want our business to be structured with you and Mitch and Greg, and figuring out

what we wanted our life to look like effectively, GFL is happy to get back into the gym and just see people, and just be around people, and we, you and I spoke about let's just focus on day to day what we do for the rest of this year. We spent a lot of time over the last couple of years planning and projecting and looking forward, but this year has given us an opportunity to look at today, and to be where our feet are, and to appreciate the 6am class this morning and then go and have coffee with a bunch of good people, and getting some of Mr.

Vidal's delicious Dutch donuts, which one are they called? Delicious. Something's wrong with O. Yeah, carry on. I can't remember. Sorry, Geordie. Sorry, Mr. Vidal. Yeah, no, totally. I think this, it's allowed us to take a step back and evaluate how we do business at Virtus and what we want to focus our efforts on and our energy on, and who we want to focus that energy on, being specifically the people that are within our walls. Just come back to people. It's definitely just come back to people in our community. You can say we're in the gym business or the coaching business, but ultimately we're in the people business.

Our job is to make people, or to help people feel like they can do a bit more as individuals and as a collective. That's our job. Yeah, it's made us realise that where we need to focus on is just building the community and just getting people in that we want to serve and we want to hang out with, and then focusing on them and making sure that they are getting what they come for and that they're making progress in different areas of their life, whether it's their health and wellbeing, whether it's career, whether it's habits or lifestyle.

I certainly don't regret anything that we've spent our time on over the last few years because it's gotten to this point, but there's been so much. I look back now and there's been so much superfluous talk and superfluous focus just on things that you think are important or you think have a heightened importance compared to other things. But ultimately if we can show up, smile, create a space where people want to be and lean into, then we have the capacity to continually innovate and continually lean into creating not only environment, but a community that almost feeds itself with quality.

Definitely. And we've had, it's been really interesting coming back to the gym being open after being closed for so long. And, you know, we've had a bunch of our family members come back and who have supported us throughout the lockdown period and come back and continue supporting us, which has been amazing. But we're getting so many new people come out and want to become a part of our community for different reasons. But it has been wonderful to see so many people coming in here and leaning into the things that are important to them. It's never

been, I feel as though it's never been easier for us to, for lack of a better term, promote what we do or to talk about what we do because we've had eight months of not being able to do it where we've been able to, it's almost like the conversation gets smaller and more refined because we understand at a deeper level, the why behind it and the what. And there isn't all those extra filler words or conversation because we're really clear on what our values are, on what we stand for, on why we exist. And it's just that balance of community with performance with education and being able to lean into all of those.

But almost, I say it kind of off the cuff sometimes, but I know if the four of us decided to leave tomorrow, for example, everyone will be OK and everyone would be able to continue to level up together. We're not going anywhere, guys. We might have tomorrow afternoon off, but we're not going anywhere, which would be today because we're probably going to release this on Christmas. But it's certainly like in terms of the gratitude pace, it's made me realize how grateful I am to have the circle of influence that we have around the people that come in here.

But then also all those people that come in here are leaders in their own right and they can influence the people around them in their own right. Each of those circles obviously are very closely interrelated, but they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the impact we can make on one person travels further than we could do on our own. Definitely. The people in the gym are, like you said, they're leaders in their own right, whether they're a parent or they're a business owner or a teacher, they're all taking responsibility for their health and well-being by coming in here and training in the gym.

But then that translates to other pursuits in their life. And yeah, I'm super grateful that we have such a community full of passionate, supportive people. It's been wonderful to see and just be a part of it this year. Yeah. And just like the lockdown, I guess, fitness trends lent towards walking a lot and running a lot and body weight training, which for a lot of people was potentially very different to what they've done in the past. And I think people realize, I would like to think people realize how simple fitness actually is. It's getting up

at a good time, it's eating good food, it's hydrating, it's walking, getting your steps in, it's, you know, when things are tough, it's taking time to meditate, it's when things are going well, you're leaning to your training, it's being able to connect with people around you in different ways. Like this, the gratitude is just around being able to rock out to a place and know that people can travel more than 5kms to get there. And that we can have a gym that's full of buzzing energy of people that are here to, one, contribute to their own health and well-being but contribute to the collective, you could call it collective health and well-being as well.

Knowing that the days where we don't want to rock out, there's, you know, 10 people waiting there to help get you up and about, and one came along, who will either be a pain in the arse or will be up and about. Shout out to Banksy. We love Banksy. Yeah, it's the accountability piece as well, which has been so important over, you know, when we've been training at home and we don't feel like going out to the garage and, you know, we were jumping on zoom for a while there, which I never said zoom meeting again, I will die happy.

Please never make me do it again. It's painful. But, you know, we did it for a while and it definitely, I mean, zoom was such an important tool when we were at home because we could still stay connected with one another. So from that perspective, I'm grateful for it, but it doesn't, it by no means replaces the face-to-face. I think the accountability piece, like we saw it in different forms and we almost had, we had eight months of experiments. We got to have a crack with the, like the zoom sessions, which worked really well for a, for a chunk of time, but obviously had a fine art lifespan.

Lucy and KP are just waving to us at the moment. Hello. And like those zoom sessions had a fine art lifespan. I think we, we had a crack at them. They went really well for a period of time, but then we identified when they weren't working anymore. And that was this year. It's identifying what things move the needle and what things don't. And then we shifted to the, like we got to open the gym for 10 days in the middle, which was brilliant because it reminded us how much we love what we do and how much most of our members love being here.

But then there was the period of time where it was train heroic, lean in, we gave everyone the space to do their own sessions or do what they felt they needed. But then there was that motivation or accountability level or whatever word you want to use dropped, dropped off. And we lent him to the games, which was six weeks of everyone just cracking in and looking back now, it was brilliant to see so much of our community leaning into things that were different and things that weren't necessarily because we all get into a habit of training the same way or doing the same things.

Or, you know, we talk about attendance and consistency being the biggest driving factors of performance increases or any kind of improvement, which is true. But if we're not intentional with that consistency, it can end up just being much of the same week after week. So the games challenge everyone to mix that up. And then, you know, the last, what have we been open for six weeks, five weeks, seven, seven. Yeah, the last seven weeks has just been around. Okay, well, let's try and get back to not normal, but an intentional new existence that we can all be proud of, we can all lean into and we can all share together.

Like that, put that on t shirt. Let me just take take some notes on that. Sorry, listen back to it tomorrow on the way down. Yeah, it was just about it's just a system of accountability that we created and then people took ownership over. And a big part of what we were trying to teach our people was to take responsibility and ownership over their own their own energy and where they directed that. It's a it's a self leadership play. And it's fascinating when you have those frameworks in place, how much easier it is to hold yourself accountable.

We talk about the games as an option as an example. But another example was when we first opened back up and for four weeks we had the limit on how many people could come into VGT and that limit was 10. So we had 10 people booked in every morning and then, you know, four or five on a waitlist most mornings, which we hate having waitlist. But it was a fascinating experiment to see what that did to accountability, because if you slept in and missed a session or if you got up at 10 to six when I can't go on the train this morning and cancelled, you'd be letting someone else down.

So we had three or four weeks of full classes, massive attendance, a couple of people on a waitlist, which is bad luck, but they got in later in the day. But as soon as we took that limit away and we took that framework of accountability away, you know, we had classes of seven or eight. And yes, there's other factors in terms of people being busy with work and people being tired because of all the extra social commitments and things like that. But it just shows us what that extra layer of accountability does. And obviously we've

introduced a new level of accountability to all our members with our new accountability system, which, you know, we're working on how to execute it the best. But how do you think it's going so far? Yeah, well, it was installed because when we assessed how we do things at Virtus, we realised there was a gap between us setting goals at the start, which was a very which is a very important part of our onboarding process. And, you know, bringing people into the gym and understanding what they want and what steps they need to take to get there.

There was no formal follow up or process to check in on those results. So installing this accountability and success initiative, I guess, is a way for us to just make sure that people are getting what they come for. And I think having I mean, some people really need that accountability, others don't. And some people want it, some people don't as well. I think that's the goal setting. It's kind of the, what do you call it, it's a slightly caveat of goal setting is if you want to make a difference in your life, the people that want to make a difference in their life and want to level up usually do.

Because they implement the steps or the measures to continually figure out what's working and what's not, improve it and just level up and level up and level up. The loop. And the ones that don't are the ones that tend to, I hate goal setting or I don't like leaning into that stuff. And you don't have to love goal setting. Like I'm someone that's for years and years of my life it was achieve a thing, move on to the next one, achieve a thing, move on to the next one. The last 12, 18 months I've talked about on this podcast a lot, I haven't had that same desire to do more and I'm okay with that.

But there's got to be that level of well I have a responsibility to KP and Lucy and Banksy and Tarko and you guys and our community to go okay well how can we this be better? And it doesn't necessarily mean more but it means refining it to change what we do or what we get out of it. Yeah that's right. And that's potentially the okay well 2021, KP asked me yesterday what do I got for 2021? I don't know. I don't feel like there's only a head space to think about it at the moment. But

I am looking forward to like we're going to get together as a team in the middle of Jam and talk about where we're headed and where we want to go as individuals and where we want to go as a collective. What do you think that process will look like as you and us, we sit down and start looking to next year? Yeah I think it's going to take a couple of weeks of figuring out okay what do we actually want to achieve on that day and what head space do we need to be in? And

I think a lot of my, I want to have an intentional, this is a really broad focus but I want to have a really intentional high quality year of just doing what we do. Which is showing up, smiling, training people, helping them be better, creating a community where people want to lean in or cultivating that for us leading from the front whether it be training or goal setting or leaning into the things that scare us a little bit. But just 12 months of doing verse which sounds a little weird or a little simple but like I said the last couple of years there's been a lot of superfluous stuff.

I feel as though the last 10 months has helped us boil down to what's really important to us. And if we can just lean into the community, the performance and the education for the next 12 months I think we'll level up intentionally but without the added pressures or yeah there's added pressures that maybe I'd put on myself or put on ourselves over the last couple of years. Yeah our focus at Virtus I've felt and we've felt has been sort of diffused over the last couple of years or two. Good word. Thank you. I like your words Simon.

I like words. But yeah the last few months has allowed us to really focus on you know we're a performance gym and we are here to coach people and that's the role that we step into as we you know as we go into next year we'll be coaches. We want to bring people in and coach them toward whatever their goals are or whatever they're in pursuit of. And I think by focusing on that it will allow us to like you said be leaders in what we're trying to do and really help the people who are coming in and the people in our broader community as well and will allow us to have the impact that we want to make.

Yeah and I think that's the impact we talked about like owning what or like personal responsibility and owning your thing and the impact starts with what you do and how you act and how you live and it's doing what you said you would do and it's showing up but then it's making everyone around you better. And I think that's something that we as coaches when we rock out to coach the Wednesday 6 a.m. class every week after week after week it's easy to fall out of the why am I here question. And you know I

think next year for us it's and obviously the rest of this year and our job is just reminding ourselves consistently of how important it is to be at our best to help everyone else along at that 6 a.m. class or the 10 a.m. class or the 8 a.m. class doesn't matter. It's been easier to remind ourselves why we're doing this because we've had so much time off and we've we've missed it. So I didn't say to us we had a call with one of my mentors earlier earlier last month and he said it doesn't get any worse than this for us to say can I please hold you to that.

We're on the up but having closed our business for eight months effectively we obviously were lucky enough to be able to coach people and and move the needle in different ways but to be able to close the business for eight months and come out of it and go I feel as though we're in a stronger position. Maybe not financially that we have been in the past but a stronger position from a intention and from a value and from like bonus means excellence from an excellence perspective is all of our focus has been on OK well this is what we do.

This is how we do it. How can we improve that. That's been this year. That's been this year and next year. Hopefully we get we string some months together. Hopefully everyone in the northern suburbs of Sydney stays in the northern suburbs of Sydney for a little bit. Shout out to anyone in lockdown in the northern suburbs. We're thinking of you because it's rough. Hopefully we can string a normal I don't want to use that word an intentional year together of us doing good things. Yeah that's pseudo catch cry a vertice over the last couple of months has to has gone to good people doing good things.

And that's what we do. That's that's who we are. That's what does that mean. Good people doing good things. It's people who are living a life that is aligned to their values a life that is full of virtue that is full of integrity that is contributing to the person they want to become but also at the same time appreciating the person they are. So it's that that balance of being dissatisfied and wanting more and it doesn't necessarily mean more things but it might mean more depth and more love and more kindness more appreciation whilst also appreciating you know how far you've come.

We can stand half way up the mountain and look up and go so far to go or we can turn around and look at the beautiful panoramic vista below us and appreciate how far we've actually come and I think 2020 has given us an opportunity to sit down and take a breath and look at that journey that we've been on and appreciate. And know that yeah we might still have a long way to go but you know we've got a brilliant group of people around us helping us get up this mountain. It's metaphorical in this case but if you are climbing mountains cheers to you.

And you know every now and again hopefully next year there will be more stops as we climb it to be able to appreciate it. A book that I've been leaning into heavily this year is The Boy, The Fox, The Mole and The Horse by Charlie Mackenzie. So if you haven't read it follow Charlie Mackenzie on Instagram it's brilliant and read the book because it's also brilliant but it's just it's exactly what we need I think at this point in time. And I've gifted it to lots of people and lots of people have loved it so thank you to my sister for putting it in front of me in the first place.

Yeah it's beautiful and it just it almost teaches us that simplicity of being kind to ourselves and to others and you know by and supporting others through tough times and the importance of you know one step after the other and keep moving forward. And that we need to sometimes stop and take a breath and you know reset a little bit and be kind but then you know the thing that is important is the next step. Yeah exactly. I think we can finish on that. I love that. So to everyone listening have a very Merry Christmas have a very safe Happy Healthy New Year.

Eat, drink and be merry and do wonderful things and we will be open for business as usual. Apart from the main days and we look forward to doing good things with good people over the next 12 months and beyond. Cheers to you all. Thank you for sticking with us this year and we appreciate you all immensely and look forward to seeing you in 2021.