Stop Living A Life Of Complacency - Ben Bergeron - #426

What I'm saying is don't settle, don't live lives of complacency because there is so much out there for us. We all have the right to live incredibly fulfilled, incredibly passionate, incredibly joyful lives where you are psyched its Monday morning. Benjamin, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Chris.

Good to be here. Appreciate it. I want to start with a quote from your Instagram. It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well have not lived at all.

In which case, you fail by default. That's a JK Rowling quote. What's that mean to you? So if you can play it safe, right?

You can play it so safe in life that there are no risks. You know, it's basically it's, think of the parallel to exercise. You can live such a life that you will not get hurt exercising. What that looks like is sitting on the couch all day long.

So there is an inherent risk that you will get hurt the moment you do any form of exercise or trying to shape in any way, shape, or form. And that's the parallel to life. If you are going to try to do anything meaningful in your life, there is an inherent risk that you will not succeed. That should not stop you because if you don't try, you're failing by default.

You're not going to live a life of any sort of meaningfulness, fulfillment, or impact on anybody else. And that's kind of my measure of success is your life meaningful, fulfilled, and to have impact on other people. So get out there and go do it. It seems to me that you make quite prudent decisions.

Do you have to push yourself to take risks sometimes? Yeah, I think that's so I'm an entrepreneur. So I think I'm not quite as risk averse as many other people. But it's probably built into being an entrepreneur.

I think it's probably built into my DNA a little bit that I want. So driven to live a life that I'm proud of. So driven to live a life of meaning and joy and happiness. And I don't want to put that off for anything.

So because of that, I think I'm willing to take more risks along the way. Case in point, when after I'm graduating from college, university, I got a really secure job doing finance and I wasn't feeling fulfilled. So I took the big massive risk in left the corporate ladder, the security of the paycheck, and this really nice career path. And I didn't know what I was going to do, but I just moved out to become a ski bomb for a year to try to figure it out.

Because to me, the risk of not living a life to its fullest meaning is essentially a nightmare. It's hell on earth. Like living not on your terms, not taking control and not doing something that you want to do is not the way I want to go about things. So because that I think that's, I don't even, when I'm making those decisions, I don't necessarily saying like, whoa, this can be really risky.

It just is the alternative complacency. And if the alternative is complacency, I'm out and I want the other path. What do you say to people that need that bit more of a push, that maybe feel a little bit unsatisfied with whether or not, but struggling to take action? Well, I don't.

I don't say it to them because it's their choice to make. And I'm not here to say that the risk is worth the effort because everyone has a different risk aversion and risk willingness scale. And what I say is like, there's are plenty of things that I don't want to do. I don't want to go free solo up El Capitan.

Like that's not, that's too risky for me. But for somebody else, that might be totally within their wheelhouse. So for me to put my value system on what is risky and what is not, I'm not here to do that. So somebody's like, should I make the leap?

Should I make the jump? That's something you got to listen to. And when I say listen to, it's not a matter of weighing out the pros and cons on a piece of paper. Listen, one side, here's all the things that would go right.

Here's all the things that could go wrong. To me, it's listen to your gut because your gut has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology built into that DNA that's helping guide that decision. And if it feels not right in your guts, it probably isn't right. So that's something that people I think can come a little bit more in tune with is what is their gut.

I think we're so in today's world, influenced to be logical beings. That's what we say changes us from the apes. It's like we have a prefrontal cortex. We can think, we're the only almost like, think about our thoughts.

Where's everyone else has the lizard brain, the amygdala, and we operate on instinct. I think we've lost a little bit of instinct. And we try to rationalize everything. And I think that's the gut is the thing that can, that should guide more decision making along the way of what we're truly looking for is to live meaningful and packed lives.

Dude, I've been thinking about this so much recently. The fact that we pray at the altar of cognitive horsepower so much, right? We just believe that we can wrangle the world around us through just sheer cerebral weight. Right?

Here's a story. So halfway through last year, I got put on really, really boring normal medication. And I didn't realize, but when the doctor said you need to up the dose, I didn't know that it was an anti-colonergic. Do you know what that is?

No. Okay. So Colleen is one of the neurotransmitters that makes your brain work, basically. When you take new tropics, many of them have Colleen in them.

And over a little bit of time, my thoughts ended up being super muddy. I pride myself on having agile thoughts, right? I'm a podcast. That's my money.

I need to be able to think quickly what's in my head needs to come out of my mouth. One day I was out for a walk and it took me 90 seconds to remember a town that I've been to 10 times, like to remember the name of it. I'm thinking, okay, there's some sort of a problem here. And it makes you start to doubt and feel very conscious of the fact that you don't have the ability to fix the problems the same way.

And then I realized what it was, dropped a dose, everything was fine, totally reversible. But what I felt for a small amount of time was basically like kind of like a dementia type situation, just a restriction in my processing ability. And I spoke to a friend whose dad had dementia and he said, this illness has taken everything from me. It's even taken myself.

What he means by that is when we are people that rely on our brains to get us out of problems, but I know that no matter what the situation is that I get myself into, I can probably think my way to a solution that will get myself out of it. And there's something that's so brutal about degenerating your ability to think because it's killing your ability to fix the problems, not just giving you problems as well. Yeah, I think so that is, I mean, so the cognitive thinking, the thinking brain, the problem solving, that is what I don't want to mention that at all. Because that's what gave us the lightbulb.

So I were able to talk across an ocean. It gave us everything that we have as human beings. So it's the most powerful thing that we have. I just believe that we've we've become too reliant on it.

And we're not. And because that we can rationalize everything away for logical reasons. I can't quit my job because XYZ and A, B, and C, it makes no sense to quit my job. Meanwhile, we live unfulfilled eyes because we're not willing to take them step forward and do something that your gut is screaming at you going, let's go be happy.

Let's find joy. Let's go for a walk in nature. I know you have those 19 emails you need to respond to. But this is, you know, it's, you know, I've been reading a lot about marketing recently.

And it's it's, we run our businesses this way. We run our businesses based off because you can find any data and we dive into the data. Yet we can't logically explain why advertisements with animals in them do better than an advertisement that don't. And we don't need to respond.

We don't need to rationalize. We don't need to figure out what they know logically. Some things are just magic, right? Some things are just built so far into our biology as human beings that we're not going to be able to figure it out and put it on a spreadsheet.

Not everything is, you know, able to fit into an Excel document. Some things are literally just feel and emotions. And as much as we go back to like the Simon Cinec thing is people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it.

And that goes right down to the root of everything. Well, forget about all of this. You know, we started this with this risk thing. Don't try to weigh and measure it.

Just listen to your gut. And this is right down to like people that are trying to figure out like, should I stay with my partner or not? You know, I've not fulfilled in my relationships. Should I stay with my end?

You go like, well, I should because that's how I create, you know, some sort of steadiness in my life, whether it's financial or routine or it's what what my friends and family think or what will my religious group think or what would the alternative be? Is it being alone and all these things? And this is the reason people settle and become complacent and they end up living with a non supportive what, you know, wife or husband. It is either, in my opinion, it is either you live in an incredibly passionate, supportive, trusting relationship, or you don't have a relationship.

There is no middle. It's it's me. It is binary. And people go like, well, it's okay because, you know, if I move out, it's gonna be really tough to support myself and my kids.

And I won't see my kids as much. And we'll stay together for the kids. And this is why people live are afraid to take the leap to leave their job, to leave their, I'm not, I'm not here, you know, promoting like, go quit your jobs, go to get divorced. What I'm saying is don't settle.

Don't live lives of complacency because there is so much out there for us. We are all, we all have the right to live incredibly fulfilled, incredibly passionate, incredibly joyful lives where you are psyched it's Monday morning where you are psyched that you're in quarantine with your family, where you are psyched that you get to do what you do every single day. And if something doesn't line up that way, don't put it off. This is your life.

No one is going to come and change it for you. I think that we all kind of wait for because what we grew up with our entire lives, mom and dad will do this, then teachers will do this, then society tells us to do this. And then it's all pre-programmed for us. And by the time we have control over our lives as functioning adults in society, we're programmed.

We're programmed to follow the script. And we go, well, the script is gonna change eventually. And then the next thing that people look forward to is retirement. And by the time you're in retirement, you think that that's where you're going to kick it.

That's where you're going to be in a hammock with the drink with the umbrella and be able to have fun. And by that time, you've given up your passions, you've given up your hobbies, you haven't lived a life that you want to, and you hope that you're going to finally get there. And it's not there for you. Don't wait, like take the risks to make it happen today.

No one's going to do it for you. Absolutely not. You rely a lot on being procedural with your efforts. You've got this awareness intention action framework that you follow.

And a lot of people that are listening are going to be intentional actors as well, personal development, self development, thinking about their work throughout the day. How do you balance being intentional with trying to have that intuitive sense coming as well? Do you feel intentional all that? No, I think it's all it's one of the same and it's self awareness.

So everything to me starts with awareness, whether you're trying to make changes in your life, or you're trying to figure out your strengths and weaknesses, you're trying to figure out what you how to become happy, it literally all so let's take that one. We're trying to become happy because I think that truly is the shared purpose across humanity. We call it what we want interchange that word for happy for enlightened to call it finding God, call it pure consciousness, call it whatever you want to. That's what we all have is a shared purpose called evolution, right?

The evolution of our of ourselves mind, body and spirit. That's what we all have as a shared common purpose. Now, everyone has their own unique purposes as well, which is their talents and changes based off of opportunities where you are in your life, but that shared purpose of happiness. That's that level of awareness, just of that, like knowing that that's what we should all be chasing.

That's what we all are looking for. Now, if that's the case, what are the things that make me happy? And it's a simple exercise is like get out a piece of paper. And I do it on my notes on my phone.

I do this every so often is make a running list that you can cross off and add to of the things that make you happy. And what you'll find is I'm not talking like in the moment, I'm not talking about like getting high. I'm not talking like, you know, watching funny movies, although that might make the list. But what you'll find is things that make you happy might not make you happy in the moments, but they do eventually.

And my list involves things like you would expect. You know, I like exercising. It makes me feel good. I like being in nature.

I like, but I also like building things. I like working with teams. I like leading people. I like being creative.

I like thinking about the future. I like breaking things down into frameworks. I like doing yard work, like, and you create these lists. And then what you do is you become where you're saying for, then you create intentionality around creating those moments.

No one's coming to do those things for you. If you find fulfillment and joy and happiness being going for nature walks, then schedule those in and schedule it in the way you would schedule in a dense deployment where when it comes, you don't push it off for something else. It's the thing that's so now we have the awareness of truly aware of what's going to make me happy. The intentionality of this is going to happen if I don't do this.

It's not going to happen. And then the action, like if you we can talk about all we want and talking about it does make me feel good. Just like everyone talking about it. But that's the trap because you talking about your goals actually elicits the same dopamine as actually doing goals.

So it's a trick and you have to recognize that it's the actual doing that moves us forward. It is truly not until we take the steps that we go anywhere. So that's why the that three-step process of awareness intentionality and action is kind of that's, you know, that the three pillars that I think move people towards that, you know, you fill in the blank, finding God, pure consciousness, enlightenment or just joy, like joy in their lives. And I if we don't operate in that circular fashion of constant flywheel of awareness, intention, action, awareness, because we take action, you get greater levels of awareness.

Do this truly help me move me towards my goals or not? And then you move and you iterate. It's the lean startup model. It's a build, measure, learn, right?

Let's take action. Let's just build it. We have to wait for perfect. Let's jump, grow wings on the way down, learn, iterate and make adjustments along the way.

And if you keep on that flywheel, eventually you'll get to and it's not going to happen immediately, but eventually you get closer and closer to that end state and you enjoy the process along the way because you're making adjustments with intentionality, not just getting pushed by anybody else or society. I don't know what the next book plan is, but I think that that should be one of the ones before you hang up the writing pen. I think that that framework is worthy of a book. Noted.

Good. Talking about big risks. News recently when Dave Castro was let go by CrossFit HQ, although he might not be technically a leader. He's definitely a big figurehead in the sport in a lot of people's eyes.

What we thought's on that. So the first one was surprise. I actually was coaching the 530 AM class at the gym and I came in and started coaching and the members actually told me because I hadn't checked social or anything like that. So my first reaction was surprise and I remember it.

And I was surprised mostly because I thought if it was going to happen, it would have happened. As new leadership comes in, the easiest thing to do is to rip off bandings. Clean house all at once. Yeah, just clean house.

And they did that. They made a lot of shifts and a lot of changes, but Dave was there. So that's my initial reaction, but then with a little bit of hindsight and a little bit more perspective and a lot of thought, the timing of the change actually does make sense. So if we remember back when Rosa took over for Glassman, that was late spring or early summer, somewhere in there.

And the games were looming. The games were around the corner. And it was in the midst of a pandemic. So this is where they had to scrape together a completely new format where they did an online qualifier and then invited five guys and five girls to a Rome's California.

So to do that, with complete new leadership on the game side, would have been probably too risky. I think it's a smart move for Eric to Rosa not to make that move. So then it puts us into that next season. And I think that, you know, from there's a little bit of stability now.

So it actually makes sense from a timing perspective, in my view, it was not that the ship has kind of like settled a little bit. So a little bit of rocking can be withstood. And the timing does seem to make sense now. So while it was initial shock, because I thought it would have happened, it's that dissipated fairly quickly, because here's my personal opinion on it.

I think Dave did a really good job running the games. I think from an organizational standpoint and from a programming standpoint, the games are a phenomenal test and a terrific showcase. They would not, I don't think they would be what they are without Dave Castro. But I can see why Eric might think that a change is necessary to get the sport to where he wants it to go.

Why is that? Dave is polarizing. I mean, Dave wore shirts that said unapologetic. That was his tagline.

It's like, so unapologetic means don't take ownership in my mind. That's polarizing. Now, Dave would swear on TV. So it gets to the next level, right?

To get to the the next place, I think it could, I'm not saying, I'm not, I don't have enough inner workings knowledge of the of how it shakes up, but I can understand the reasons for it. You know, strangely enough, you know, I've known Dave for a fairly long time. And I think that the last two games, the one in a romance with five people, five guys, five girls, and the last one, Dave did as good a job as he's ever done from a athlete relations standpoint. So I actually didn't see this coming because again, if it was going to happen, I thought it was going to happen.

And Dave did a really good job of being a better leader. I would say I saw the growth of him as a leader over the last two years. So I was surprised because I saw it moving in the right direction. I've definitely seen Dave be more cantankerous in the past than he has been recently.

Yeah, it's um, it's so interesting. There's a lot of been conversations in our gym about this. And I think the polarizing nature of Dave has trickled down to people as well. There seems to be sort of broadly two camps of people, people that can't believe that he's gone and it's an absolute travesty.

And people, it was overdue. Dave, you know, it doesn't fit the new vision that we have to cross fit. Now, one of the things that's interesting is it depends on what Eric's vision, I think, for the sport is long term, whether or not you want to be on ESPN, whether or not you want to be able to commercialize more, whether or not you want to have that increasingly professional sort of stance. But there is still a huge, huge group of people in CrossFit that like the anti marketing movement, the underground fitness mentality.

And I think that, you know, when Greg went, that was, that was a little bit of a peer into a culture that maybe hadn't caught up with the modern era quite so much. And you see, you know, some of the media team went as well. They were some of the more outspoken guys as well. Okay, then they've gone and Castro kind of was a little bit like, well, what the fuck's that guy doing there?

Like, how's he how's he still there? But then you think, well, he's a programming genius. Some of the workout, think about, was it 20.1? The wall was that wall walks?

Yep. That workout is one of the smartest workouts. Like he destroyed top level athletes with a wall, absolutely destroyed them. And I think that his programming is beautiful.

He was the third ever podcast that I did on the show three, four years ago, the 18.0 announcement. And he's a polarizing figure, but he gave the sport character. There's an element of that edge to him. And I think that you're probably right.

It's okay. So of where does CrossFit, where does Eric want CrossFit to be? Long term. So I can, I can give my two cents into that because I've had conversations with Eric and he's told me that.

Now, this might be, this might have changed because I had the conversation was Eric first came in. So I had a couple conversations with him in this first weeks on the job. And his view. So here's Glassman was not a fan of the CrossFit games.

He actually think it clouded the vision of what CrossFit was supposed to be. Eric is a huge fan of the CrossFit games, like a fan boy, like, he loves it. He competes in it himself. He's very, he loves it.

Eric, whereas Greg saw it as a sideshow and at best, and more realistically, probably a massive distraction. Eric sees it as an avenue for a huge part of the growth of CrossFit as a whole. These athletes represent the pinnacle of what we can all aspire to be. And he's looking to have a viewership of 100 million people.

That's a massive number. Do you know what it is currently? I would guess it's in the neighborhood of single digit millions. So, but even if it's 10 million, that's a 10 X growth that puts it on par with like, so I think the Super Bowl gets like 300 million or something like that.

So that puts it on par with normal NFL playoff type things. It puts it above UFC. It's a huge, huge number. And he's used UFC as a parallel for the sport.

So, in order for that to happen, and then you start to realize what his responsibilities are. Whereas Glassman's responsibilities were to the legacy of CrossFit. The methodology. The methodology.

That's what his responsibilities were. And to forge elite fitness and to get people off the cards and off the couch. That's basically what he was his missions. And then he took that to like this revolutionary and let's go fight big soda and those type of things and let's try to change the world.

Eric's. So Eric didn't buy CrossFit. I think that's a misnomer. Eric headed up a group that he got a bunch of people to invest in CrossFit.

So, he's responsible for their investments. Like anybody would. Once you get backed by private equity, you have to be responsible for it. So, he has to grow this thing.

And I think that that probably is at the heart of the Dave thing as much as anything. Dave might have been part of the old guard. I don't know this now speculating, but Dave might have been part of the old guard and like this way we're going to do it. Or the polarizing aspect of it didn't allow for enough upside swing of growth potential.

So, they might need to get somebody that is willing to completely sit in the background against speculation, completely not have and let somebody else be the face of this thing. Whether it's the athlete, you know, Roger Goodell is not the face of the NFL. You know, even Dana White is stepping back as the face of UFC and letting the athletes be them. Or you have a true personality coming in and be the face of it.

You know, like a Rory McCurnan or a patcher word or something like that, something like that. You know, again, this is me speculating in my opinions. I'd have said that Dave could have filled that Dana role quite nicely. I think he's got a little bit of edge.

He's got the reputability from having been there from the very, very beginning. You see somebody like Dana that is a very, he's a fight maker, right? That's one of his main roles. And he's a common thread that ties together very, very early days with current days and he's been there through the Reebok buyout, then Venom buyout and fighters coming and going and acquisitions and stuff like that.

And it is nice, I think, to have that, you know, it's Eric's decision or whatever, it'll be interesting to see what happens. As someone who doesn't have their money based on the, what Dave decided to say on a microphone or the t-shirts that he wears that I had to do that he turns up with, I would have much preferred to see Dave Castro continue to be the guy that programs the games and is there announcing and doing all of that stuff. However, from a business perspective, I can see why that wouldn't work. And it'll be interesting to see whether or not going business first leads to a better experience down the road or whether sticking to the old school core principles would have been a more effective strategy.

But I guess time will tell. Time will tell. You said recently talking about leadership and stuff like that, you said that you weren't a born leader. How so?

Oh, so I actually, when I was younger, I would take personality tests. It would come up that I was a phenomenal follower. Give me directions, tell me what to do, and I go off marching and do it and do a pretty good job at that's transformed as I've gotten older. So that's the first piece.

The second piece is I'm extremely introverted, still am. I'd much rather be a wallflower at a party than the center of tension, even talking to people at all. Honestly, I'd rather just listen. In terms of if you define extroverts and introverts, if being around other people gives you energy or takes energy away from you, being around other people takes energy away from me.

I'd rather be creating stuff on my own. So it's effort. It's a lot of effort for me to try to have conversations and try to communicate with people and hold people to certain levels of standards and expectations and share the vision and create common threads throughout an organization or teams. But I've learned to, honestly, being a coach has helped transform that a little bit, because when you're a coach, that's the job.

The coach's job is to be the leader of an individual or a team. So it's allowed me to grow my wings a little bit as I've gone through this process. But my natural inclination is probably not leader first. It's something that I've struggled with.

And frankly, when I started putting myself in a leadership position as an entrepreneur, it was something I was pretty poor at. And I think that even today, 15 to 20 years into the journey, I'm mediocre at. It's something that I'm continuing to try to learn. But as we talked about before, that self-awareness is the big thing we need to start with.

And then we create some intention to take actions beyond that. But if when there is a crisis, I'm not the guy that's like, let's go do it, charge into the fray, let's go take it. It's like, dang, oh man, this can require a lot. That's my gut.

That's who I am as a person. I avoid conflicts massively. I'd much rather have people like me then jump into it. It's a lot of work for me to have taxable conflict resolution.

It's a lot of work for me to pick up the phone and have a phone call. It's so much easier for me to sit on the sidelines and just hope it all works out. I've learned that's not the best methodology. Have you just tumbled into this position then?

Because all of these things are reasons why you should absolutely suck at doing your job. You shouldn't be the leader of a team. You shouldn't be the leader of a business. You shouldn't have an online platform that thousands and thousands of people follow and trying to make the best crossfit or fitness gym in the world and stuff.

How the fuck did you get here? I stumbled into it. Yeah. I opened up a gym because I was super passionate about fitness as a means to get people to become the best versions of themselves.

If we are that same shared purpose we all have. So here's I believe that our training methodology, training really hard, is as worthy a means to enlightenment as anything that's ever existed. Meaning people can choose any one of these tools, whether it's meditating, journaling, going to church, AA. It's dance music.

Like art. All of those things are ways for people to find pure consciousness, to find themselves, to find joy, to find awareness about self-awareness where they are. I believe that's hard training, not jazz or size. But what we do, because what we do, the greatest adaptation, and yeah, we get ripped and you get lean and you lower triglycerides and you increase your longevity and functionality, the biggest adaptation is between the ears.

You like you're a different human being in your brain from having experienced this path. And that's what I believe from day one. That's why I wanted to open up a gym was because I believed I could help change people from the inside out to leave more purpose driven lives. And when I opened up a gym, I was even before that I was a personal trainer and doing a personal training standpoint, that's kind of my sweet spot.

One on one, build a relationship and we can do that. And then from there, things kind of went really well. And I got a little following and it made sense to open up a gym. So I opened up a gym and then it becomes this thing where okay, now this is going well and we had higher coaches.

And that's where the thing starts. Once you have to lead other employees, the thing changes. And then we created a team that competed at the CrossFit Games. And okay, now you have to lead that team and we win the CrossFit Games.

Oh my gosh, now people want to follow you to create an online platform. And that starts a snowball. And then it creates, turns into a revenue stream. And now you have a business underneath you.

So yeah, it was, I want to say reluctantly, because I've enjoyed all the steps, but it was organically, it just kind of, I didn't seek out a leadership position. And it doesn't, it's not part of who I am on a molecular level. It seems like a career, a series of stumbling down the set of stairs. And at each step that you've arrived at, it's just been another challenge that you've needed to do.

And it's like, well, I'm the guy, it looks like I'm the guy. I much preferred that sort of a story when it comes to entrepreneurialism, athleticism, building a team, creating an organization or a movement or a culture or a podcast or whatever it is. I much prefer that sort of story because I think that on average, far more people end up in positions like that by following their passion, not really being able to predict the future that much, maybe just kind of knowing one or two steps in front of them. And then before they know it, they look back after five or 10 years and go, holy shit, look at all of this stuff that we've built.

And it creates anxiety, this sort of ambient anxiety amongst people that don't have a plan, when they don't have a plan. And they think, oh, well, look, what Ben got to the stage with the online and the gym and the team and the CrossFit games and the stuff he must have laid all out. And you can get through this by just doing your best as challenges arise and taking opportunities as they arise. And then in retrospect, anybody can piece together some bullshit, sorry about how I knew it was going to be this.

And I originally started off with a personal training. And I knew at that moment, I was going to take a team to the CrossFit. No, bullshit. The vast, vast majority of people stumble into their success, like falling down the set of stairs.

There's a dichotomy with that though, because on a personal level, yes and sort of. And then once you have a team, no. So here's what I mean by that is from a personal level, I think it really helps to have a vision of what it is you're chasing. But it doesn't need the, you don't have to have the steps built out.

You can just have the North Star, right? And the North Star, there's a reason it's a North Star because you can purposely go off track. When a plane leaves New York City headed for San Francisco, it's off track 99% of the time. It can be tens and dozens and dozens of miles off track.

But as you get closer and closer, it gets more narrow and narrow and narrow. And certainly when you go to landing time, you want to be right on the button. And that's much like starting a business. When I started a business, I didn't know what I was trying to create.

I couldn't have told you, we're going to have comp train and we're going to have six different gyms around. But I knew what I wanted this gets back to what we originally started the conversation with. I knew what I wanted from a feel. I knew what the feeling I wanted was.

And that is when we get done running a class at our gym, I don't want people to leave. That was the feeling. And if we create this place where people feel like once they leave, they're going to have this FOMO, this fear of missing out, this is truly the best hour of their day and they don't want to end. So when the workout ends, they're hanging out, then we've created a transformational experience for them.

Now transformational is the opposite of transactional. Transactional is, I pay you, you pay me, I provide a service and then you we shake hands and it's over. Most businesses are transactional. You hire someone to paint your house, they paint your house, you pay them, it's gone.

What I wanted to do was not be a transactional coach. And a transactional coach, if we're coaching basketball, they teach you how to do a triangle offense, run a full court press, how to swear up your shoulders when you shoot a basketball and how to defend a pick and roll. And when you're done playing basketball, they haven't done much for you. Whereas a transactional coach makes you a better person.

They teach you discipline. They teach you how to work through adversities. They teach you how to be more humble and a better teammate. And what I wanted to do was to create a business that was not transactional but transformative.

That changed people. So when they were no longer a part of our business, whether that was when they went home and they spent the other 23 hours of their day, they were different people. Or after they moved out of the state and they were no longer able to come to our gym, they were different people for having experienced our services. I knew from day one that I wanted that.

And the ability to, as then a leader to share that vision is a necessity. You have to be able to share that with your team. If you don't have that aspect of what we're trying to create, you're at a loss. Because we are going to default to making sure that the things on the scoreboard are happening.

Because the only thing you can do is say that the measurables are in place. And that's what everyone's running their business now. Because there's more data than there's ever been. So what people are doing is they're going, okay, do we make X number of calls?

Do that lead to X number conversions? Do those conversions lead to this many sale onboarding sessions? Do those onboarding sessions lead to this much of a churn rate? Do that lead to this much of an average client lifetime value?

Okay, let's spin that back up to what is our customer acquisition cost, average lifetime value versus customer acquisition cost. Here we go. We're in the positive, let's pour more fuel in the fire. And they think that's how to run a business.

When it is, except that's not the totality of it. It has to start with me, which what is the vision for the feel, what we're trying to create? Because as we said in the beginning, people do things based off of feel, not off of logic. We have we are still emotional beings.

The example of that is the parable of the elephant and the rider. The elephant represents the amygdala brain, the feelings and the emotions. Whereas the rider is the calculator. The rider is the human being on top that actually knows how to get from point A to point B in the most efficient way.

Do that. The rider is in control for part of the time, except for once the amygdala kicks in, which happens in every single buying purchase, that's the reason people are staying with your business or leaving it. It's not because of your price. It's not because of the it's because it's gut feeling that they have.

And as a leaders, we have to understand that that gut feeling thing is the most important thing that we have. And that's why our driving mantra for our team is to build a tribe, build a tribe by making dope shit that creates a feeling. That's what we're trying to do. Now, what that what that and from there is we find the opportunities that come and present themselves to us and we figure out if this is in line with what we're trying to do, is this dope is going to help us build a tribe is going to create a feeling.

It's not going to do those things, not create a feeling. It's it's transactional, push it to the side. That's things like making better bells and whistles and all this other stuff. It's that things that are really going to tug at heartstrings.

That to me is the way you lead, you lead from the front from the beginning is create an understanding of what is that we're trying to create, not from a 5,000 users, 10% churn, 23% profitability and 10% growth. Like, cool, cool. But let's target the real things that move the needle, which is the emotion. Are you familiar with good heart's law?

You know what that is? I'm not. Okay, sure. That is exactly what you're describing.

Good heart's law is an adage often stated as when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It's named after a British economist Charles Goodhart who advanced the idea in 1975. So an example of that might be a target I want to achieve is a measure I want to achieve to base a target on is the number of email subscribers that I get. So I'm going to maximize the number of email subscribers.

The way I'm going to do that is I'm going to say put your email in here and I will send you a million pounds. Thousands of people submit their email address, but you don't give them a million pounds. You have achieved the target that you wanted. But what you've actually what you genuinely meant was I want people to willingly give me that email address so that they are glad to receive emails from me on a weekly basis.

That was the feel that you wanted when you're relying on good heart's law, when you're looking at a measure becoming a target, it ceases to be a good measure for sure. So like a great example of that is your churn rate, right? How many members are leaving every month versus how many did you start with at the beginning of the month? If you have a thousand members hundred leaves during the month, your turn rate is 10%.

Well, obviously that's lower the churn rate. Well, if that becomes, you can actually hack it, right? If you cut your price down to 10%, you're more people are going to say because there's just it's but to your point that wasn't the intention. The intention of churn is to get people to want to stay.

It's what Einstein said is that not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. And that's why we can't get caught up in this data-driven world that we have. And I'm not saying data is not important. Use every bit of it that you can.

Just don't put blinders on because it's not the thing that only thing matters. There are things that happen that we can not rationalize. This is one of the problems with dashboards for online businesses, for podcasts, for YouTube channels, stuff like that. Again, with YouTube, you could clickbait your way to maximizing views, retention, but really what are you trying to achieve.

Do you want to sell your soul to get to 500,000 subs? Well, probably not. But you're going to arrive at the subscriber number that you said was the target and realize that actually it wasn't the outcome that your intention meant. So yeah, I think this applies to a lot of things, right?

You know, you could get yourself to. I want to look good in the mirror. Okay, I'm going to run at 500 calories for the next six months and dial myself down to some ridiculous body fat level. Again, like, yes, I've achieved the thing that I wanted.

But what did I really mean? I probably meant I want to look and feel great and confident in my body. I want to feel powerful and mobile and fit and strong and attractive and all that stuff. Okay, is the solution that I've got oversimplified?

And if it's oversimplified, I haven't actually got the outcome that I meant. Right. Yeah, this is, it kind of speaks to brand building, right? So in business, brand buildings are really popular thing right now.

And people are chasing white rabbits. And they think that the brand building is brand awareness. And brand awareness is not the key measure. It's brand relevance and resonance.

It's like, what does it mean? And how relevant are you in that person's life? And when you start to pull back that way a little bit, it's not just about how many people can become aware, you know, the top of the funnel awareness, how many, how can we make that bigger? It becomes, you get, you start to understand, which to your point is like, let's put more banner ads, let's do more digital, let's put more, you know, I start to recognize that that's not the means to the end.

What we're actually trying to do is get people to feel better about our brand. And that happens through the sum of everything that we do, every single thing that you do for your podcast, everything matters, even the entangibles, the way that your the things you can't measure, right, which is the tonality of which you speak, the beautiful accent that you have, like those can't be measured. But those are the things that drive the needle more than anything else that can be measured. I'm not saying that I'm not pooping going because we have a scoreboard, we have a dashboard.

I'm not saying being ignorant to that, but don't use that as the sole way to make decisions. Are there any unique advantages that you think you have as an introvert and as someone who was a, not an unwilling leader, but an unlikely leader, maybe, are there any advantages that you think that you have from that position that might be introverts that are listening who have to lead a team or be part of a team or take over decision making at some point? Is there a way that you look at that and see it as an advantage at all? Yeah, I think that maybe I don't have to backtrack on my words as much as some of my outspoken friends do because they'll just like, without any filter system, whatsoever, it just comes out, right?

So that may be one. And I think it's, I'm, I try to be very intentional, but this isn't an introvert thing. This is something I've learned along the way, is early days in my being a leader in the business, they used to call it my team used to call them Ben bombs, right, where they'd be chugging away doing their thing, working hard, and I would come in with this new idea, this new great thing. I'd be like, so excited and pumped up to talk to about it and be like, guys, this is listening to this.

And like, and not realizing the ramifications that me kind of leaving that grenade there would have, because as a leader of the business, when I say, Hey, guys, this is so exciting, they go, okay, this is where we're going. And as a person that has lots of those thoughts, I've realized I've had to curtail that a bit. So it's kind of the opposite of like the intro, but being an introvert to me, I'm in my head quite a bit. And I create the space purposefully, because it gives me energy.

And when I create the space, I have lots of thoughts on how to improve the business on how to move the needle on how people are reacting to the business of what I feel like the gut thing is that's going to drive people forward. That kind of like, as an introvert growing up and not being the center of attention, I would sit on the fringe of the circles and look and listen, dude, that's that's exactly what I had to admit, listen to the way that words and body language and topics would resonate with people in the group. And I think it gave me a little bit of insight into a sensitivity to sort of like a, you know, an EQ type thing, emotional, intelligent sort of thing. I think also maybe even more so than the lack of willingness to be loud in front of people was the way I went through school and being dyslexic.

And being dyslexic, I had to find work arounds. They like, like solutions weren't necessarily school and learning wasn't easy for me. And because of that, when I would read, I had to read so slowly to comprehend. I couldn't do what everyone else did, which is just, you know, read a chapter or night.

Like it wasn't even a possibility. So I had to figure out how to read a lot slower for comprehension. And now that I'm reading things that I'm passionate about, I think that there's a comprehension. That to me is the goal of reading is to comprehend and then be able to either apply or teach others.

There's nothing else, there's no other reason for it. So every time that I'm reading something and I read a lot now, I'm constantly trying to figure out like, do I own this? Can I talk to somebody else about this or can I own this in the business? As opposed to, I've found books that I don't feel like that with.

And I realize that I find that the goal is to finish the book. And there's a dopamine thing of like, fishing book, I accomplish things, I get things done. And that can't be the goal. So I think that that learning aspect of the only reason to do this, and probably because I never finished a book when I was in high school.

So that wasn't even a goal. Anyways, it was like, you got to get some comprehension out of this and try to, I think that's kind of given me a little bit more, you know, I think that that dyslexic is giving me an advantage, whereas in school, man, it was really, really challenging. You know, it's such a big thing. And when you're school, at least the way that I was, is like you're one of three things, like you're either good looking and popular, you're an athlete and a jock and a stud or you're smart and you get yourself worth out of that thing.

And I wasn't super popular, I wasn't the star athlete and I wasn't, and man, I was the opposite of what smart was, the way smart was defined in academia, which is, hey, Ben, could you read the next page to the class out loud and holy crap, that's my nightmare, because the word was just go fuzzy blank stumbling on words. And I would label myself as not smart. But what I realized as I started getting to business was I had a huge advantage. My dad was also challenged, but incredibly good leader in business, CEO of multiple different companies, and then helped take companies public.

And I learned a lot watching him navigate the workplace, both from a worthy ethics standpoint, and how much common sense business is. And I think business is more common sense than is academic. If you had such a critical inner voice when you were a kid, how have you got yourself to the stage now where you're talking about turning that critic into a coach? What have you done to move yourself, talk from what sounds like a pretty shitty place to a much positive place?

So it's, it's not binary, meaning that it's not like I was terrible then. And I'm great now. Right. So I'm certainly had negative self talk in terms of academics and other things.

Then, and I certainly don't have it all figured out right now. I still have the inner voice and continue to work on it. But the words that you use there is exactly the way that I try to reframe it is coach versus critic. And the critic sits on the sidelines, doesn't get their hands dirty, and just points out all the faults.

I think we all have, I should say, a lot of us have that built into us for any number one of different reasons, right? Parents, teachers, coaches, upbringing, whatever it might have been. And I certainly do as well. And I think that's the goal for most of us is first and foremost, become aware of the voice.

50% of people don't even believe that there's a voice in their head. Like that's a, that's staggering to me because that's introvert. That's all I listen to. That shit blows my mind.

Exactly. My voice is in my head saying fucking barbershop together. Yeah. Exactly.

So the first thing is becoming aware of the voice. And then the next one is just an understanding that you don't need to try to control it. The awareness on just by itself, just the awareness of that voice is massive. And that awareness, the more you become aware of it, when you just from the, because you try to change it, you just get frustrated and you get depressed and you beat yourself up and the critic comes on top of the critic where you go like, they don't like what I'm saying right now.

And you come aware of that, you go, Oh my God, look at you, you're complaining. I'm the sort of person that says they don't like what I'm saying right now. You spin on you spin on that. And this is where you see people melt down in public speaking, right?

They're giving a talk and all the time they fumble on their words and they go, Oh my God, you fumble on your words. Oh my God, you fumble on your words. Oh my. And it's so late on guilt, late on shame, late on guilt.

That's actually to me that is the path. Awareness. And then the next step is awareness without judgment. And when you create awareness without judgments, all of a sudden, now you start to realize the root causes, you figure out the triggers that set those things off.

And now what you do is the next time that happens, you start to realize how your pre programs, we all are running our scripts that is pre-programmed into us from our childhood. And it is guiding our every action decision behavior, unnecessarily. It's a faulty script that doesn't actually exist. But your reality is different than my reality, based off the script that we've experienced in the programming, meaning you are walking down the street and you hear a dog bark.

And you grew up with a dog, a golden retriever that was super fuzzy and used to play with it in the park and imp to you dog barking is a sign of affection. That was your dog used to do before you want to hear you come home and fumble with the keys. They used to bark and go, I know when I open this door, my lovable four-legged friend is going to give me so much of this feelings of oxytocin, all this stuff. So dog barking to you is warm and fuzzies.

I was bit by a dog as a kid. So I hear dog barking and the opposite happens, anxiety, stress. The reality is a dog barking. Neither one of those two belief systems are actual reality.

But we believe certain realities only because of our past. When you start to sit quietly and have awareness of your thoughts, not judging, you start to recognize these triggers. And you start to question them. You go, that's just a, so you hear dog bark.

I feel a gut thing in my stomach start to turn and flip upside down. Instead of judging it, I just go, that's weird. Why did that happen? Ah, the dog bark, that happened.

The dog's not going to attack me. He's behind a closed door. Like, why the heck did that? And all of a sudden, you start to melt these paradigms and you start to be able to navigate life without these triggers sending you into these fear loops, anxiety loops or otherwise.

Now let's bring that to another example. Your wife after dinner asks if you can do the dishes. You grew up with a very, very, very controlling mother. And when you wife asked you to do that, it sets off a trigger.

They go freaking wife trying to control me, telling me to do the dishes. Like, what? No, she just asked you the dishes. But you have this program built into you that when somebody asks, it's a trigger.

Instead, when wife asks you the dishes and you feel that thing, without you, you go, whoa, awareness. Whoa, that was weird. I felt resentment towards my wife right when she said that. What's the reality of this situation right now?

She's just asking if I can do the dishes. She's not trying to control me. That is actually built into me from my upbringing. It's the programming that I have.

It's the software I'm running on. I have the opportunity to rewrite that software. This is that level of awareness that we can all navigate life through. We don't need to be the pre-programmed past.

We have control over the way we navigate the future if we bring a level of awareness and non-judgment to that present moment. Going back to the team thing, how do you get team members to respect the leader? One thing that I've realized throughout running businesses is that the leader often needs to show degrees of outstanding competence in order to get respect from the team. We run nightclubs and we have junior managers, normal managers, senior managers, city managers.

All of the guys that are effective at being any of the senior levels, they have to be performing well week in, week out. That performance is so transparent because everyone can see how many entries they've got into all of our different events. The guys that had the most respect weren't the ones that were the sternest leaders. They weren't the ones that were even necessarily the best team leaders.

They got buy-in from the people below them because they knew that they had talent and competence. But when you get to more complicated organizations, more specialized decision-making situations like CEO of a big online business or coaching a team, it's not your job to be fitter than your athletes. It's your job to be the guy that knows exactly what to tell them. So how do you get team members to respect the leader and then talk about this competence dynamic that plays into that?

Yeah, absolutely. So competence is absolutely one of the pieces, but it's not the only piece. And the reason competence helps a leader lead is because when someone shows competence, the people that they're leading will trust that person more. Because if you show that you're making the right decisions and then things turn out well, or you give some career advice, people take it and then they run with it, that just brings some level of trust.

But trust is a three faceted piece, confidence being one of them. It's not the first one. The first thing you have to show, it's a three C's of trust. The first one is showing that you care.

Because even the competent leader will not get everything they can out of them, like the Bobby Knights, the guy that yells and screams at his players, but doesn't show any sort of level of care for them whatsoever, but he's very competent. He knows the X's knows of his sport as well as anybody else. Will not get every ounce of potential out of his athletes or employees or family or whatever it might be. The first thing we have to show is that we care about people at an individual basis.

And this is why, you know, the saying is it takes 40 hours just to get past a Quatence level. It takes time. It takes a lot of time to actually get to the level where somebody goes like, I can trust that person because they care about me. And this is built into our evolutionary biology.

If you were a, you know, you were a tribe of 150 that lives around a certain huge cave and you had campfires, you had certain hunters, you had certain warriors, you had certain people that cook the food and certain people that's hand to the hides and certain people that took care of the kids, you needed to know that the person next to you cared about you. If they didn't care about you, no matter how good of a warrior they were, no matter how good, now competent they were in their skill set, it didn't create the total package because you go like, listen, that person's really good when they talk to me about warrior stuff. Oh, listen, but I'm not gonna turn my back on that person. It's not total trust because they might have bigger, higher goals and they might knock me off.

So it has to start with care. Then the next one is exactly what you said, competence. You have to know your stuff. You have to be good at what you do.

And the next one is consistency. You have to show up every day. You have to be, you have to have a through line just as what you were saying, it was kind of nice having Dana White there, that consistency level. That just in self brings some trust to the organization because you know that some of the past is going to be present in the future is probably going to be fairly stable because of what they've shown you.

It's been consistent. If there was a different leader in place every single year of UFC, your trust in the UFC would not be what it is today. So that three headed monster of care, consistency and trust is how you start leading groups. Then when you're introduced to the group, that's kind of like the macro overarching thing.

Then there's a step by step process to when you are inserted as the leader. And some people come in and flip over the poker table and they go, this is the way we're doing it my way, their highway and they totally throw everything in like that doesn't bring as much trust because people don't know if you care. They don't know if you're competent and there's no consistency. So what do you do instead?

When you come in step one is you listen. This is what helps introverts and leadership positions is you don't come in. Don't let your ego take over. Literally come in, even if you are the most senior position, you're the CEO of the business, come in and spend your first two weeks just listening.

Listening to people, understanding them what makes them tick, understanding their roles and responsibilities, understanding everything that you possibly can. So that you can step two, learn, listen and learn. If you were in my position, what changes would you make? How would you do your job differently?

What are you seeing as inefficiencies? What are you seeing as things that we should be doing going forward? Step three is help and help in any which small way. Right?

So an example of this is Ted Lasso. Is it really Ted Lasso? No, who's that? Oh my gosh, it's a it's a show on Apple TV.

He's a coach that comes in to run a English premiere of Soccer League. He has no idea what he's doing. But right away, he just comes in and the first what he does is he listens to people, learns what there has people write down suggestions. And one of the things that people said is like on this professional soccer team is the shower pressure sucks in the locker room.

So the next day, there's better shower pressure. You help. You make changes. No matter how small, listen, learn and then help.

After you help, then you lead. What too many leaders do is they come in with an ego and go, I have to establish myself as the leader. I have to tell people what to do. I have to show people what they're doing wrong in the new direction we're going.

And because of that, they haven't taken the necessary steps to work through this the way our evolutionary biology does is it's constantly going, friend or foe, friend or foe, friend or foe. Because if it's foe, I need to fight or flight. Only two options. I need to either resist this guy because he might be trying to take my job, hurt me in ace room, fix shape, or whatever, or get the hell out of here, find a new job.

Until I feel like he is friend, which is the person that's going to help me at the campfire, support me and care about me, then I can't lead. You can't lead. And by the way, I didn't create this. George Washington's is the listen, learn, help, then and only then lead.

It's kind of like the same thing with like mechanics, consistency, then and only then intensity. Same thing, listen, learn, help, then and only then lead. Because if you don't, you're going to have people following you reluctantly. And that's not a leader.

That's a positional leader. I had Eddie Jones head coach of England rugby on the show a little while ago. And it turned out that he was up in Newcastle. I went for breakfast with him.

I got his email address and unsolicited just asked him to go for breakfast the next time he did. He told me the story about first off, he told me a story about Sir Alex Ferguson, who was Manchester United's manager for a very long time, maybe 20 years, something like that. And when he first came into the club, there was a lot of turmoil and he needed to get the players on side with him quickly. So what he did was one of the players tells this story separately about how every game for the entire rest of the season after Alex had joined Alex had gone up to this player and said to him, you are the most important player on the pitch.

It is all about you today. You are the most important player. And it only turned out toward the end of the season, he's like trying to a couple of the other guys. It turned out that Alex had been saying that to every single one of them.

Love that. Because he needed all of them to feel like they had that bond, but he needed to expedite it. He didn't have time to wait to actually be able to work through stuff. And he's become one of the most successful soccer coaches of all time.

Another story that Eddie told me. So this guy is in charge of our rugby World Cup hopes, right? 2023 rugby World Cup's coming around. And this is the man who has coached, played for Australia, coached Australia, Japan and England, all at separate times.

He was a school supply replacement teacher as well for sport, but also taught everything. So he's literally from the lowest 13 year old boys picking up a rugby ball for the first time to the best teams on the planet, right? He's done the entire thing. And I was asking him to go watch this game So what are you looking for?