can you just touch on? You already spoke about the four principles or the main principles of Swiss Eight? Can you go through the eight principles for us? For the listeners? Yeah, so the top four, I mean we call the top four, bottom four. So the top four is fitness, nutrition, mindfulness and sleep. Uh and that we we call those the top four because they are the holistic health lifestyle principles um that we we asked we try and get people to start with first build a routine around those four principles and then once you're happy and you're comfortable that all that has become habit and it is a routine. Then we've got minimalism, discipline, time management and personal growth and they basically life hack kind of principles. Uh huh. Mhm. You know what is up guys Welcome to today's episode of the live train performed podcast. I'm your host, Sean Cooper. We are currently running through the Swiss Eight miniseries. Adrian introduced the eight pillars of health and wellness for the Swiss A model. Swiss eight is a proactive mental health model designed to provide the tools required To deliver high quality content around the eight pillars of health and wellness to allow you to be better at life.

These principles are delivered straight to your phone via the Swiss eight app where you can build out your daily routine via the inbuilt calendar. This covers sleep, nutrition discipline, fitness, time management, personal growth, mindfulness and minimalism. In today's episode we are going through personal growth. Let's get started. First up, we need to define what personal growth is? So personal growth is also known as personal development or self development and it involves the growth and enhancement of all aspects of you as a person. This includes the feelings that you have about yourself and your effectiveness in living the life that you want to live. It includes the development of positive life skills and the development of a realistic and healthy self esteem. Personal development involves mental, physical, social, emotional and spiritual growth. That allows a person to live a productive and satisfying life within the customs and regulations of their society.

This is achieved through the development of life skills. These life skills which are necessary for successfully living in a productive and satisfying life generally fall into one of several categories. Self relationships, family, friends, community Korea, leisure, spirituality and education. They also include being able to recognize and describe one's feelings, giving and receiving feedback, recognizing assumptions, setting realistic and attainable goals and employing problem solving strategies to each area of their lives. Now ask yourself this question, are you the same person that you were 10 years ago five years ago, even one year ago. For the most part, people are going to be different. Okay, people change, People grow people develop and this is the point of this podcast. Now we can look back to 10 years ago and there's probably certain traits and habits and things that we do that we were doing 10 years ago.

All right. So maybe we're lacking a little bit of self development in that particular area, but maybe we've developed um personal growth in other areas or other aspects of our lives. And if you can break your life down into certain categories, which I mentioned before and look at each one of those categories and say have I grown, have I developed have I improved my ability to deal with that situation um from where I was 10 years ago? Okay. You might have gone through a self development process, but if you're still doing the same shit that you were doing 10 years ago and potentially sabotaging yourself in certain areas of your life, then that might mean that you're in a fixed mindset and I'll dive into the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset in a moment. But if you're in a fixed mindset then that means that you're potentially doing things that are not serving you. All right. So this is where it takes a little bit of introspection to look back and reflect on the things that um have changed for you.

And also look at the things that haven't changed for you that might potentially need changing too better your life moving forward. We all view the world through a lens. Okay. And that lens is tinted and shaped by our life, our experiences our environment, both internal and external. When we're growing up, it's shaped by our parents, our teachers, our friend circles, um You know our ability to deal with adversity, how we perform in tests, how we um interact with others. Um Our lenses literally shaped by everything that we've experienced through our life to get us up to this point right now. And there's a great meme that one of my friends sent me which I use on post, which I use on social media all the time and it reads off like so when a photographer can't change a scene, he changes his angle and lens to capture the best of that scene. Similarly, you can't change a situation in your life, you change your perspective to get the best out of that situation.

And for me that weighs up your lens. Okay, now you choose how you view the world. We can all read the same book and we'll all take different lessons from it and we can all be in the same situation which we are with this, you know, covid pandemic and we can all take a different reading from that. It was interesting last I think it was last week I went out for dinner with some friends and Um someone was complaining about, you know how short of a year it had been 2020 and I kind of pause for a moment and reflected and I was like actually 2020 has been a really good year for me personally, it's been a great year for me personally because I've gone through a lot of self growth and self development and I've done a lot of study and I've started this podcast and I've started my Youtube channel and I've had all this time to do all of this stuff work on my own projects that I've been meaning to work on for quite some time, but haven't had a chance to, haven't had time to. So you know, it all comes down to perspective and how we view the world and if you've been following along and listening to the podcast in order, you would have heard me say a story uh in my last episode with rob morgan and this is how we perceive the world directly impacts our emotions, decisions, mental, spiritual and physical health and well being.

There are two types of people in the world, all viewing the world through a window or by the reflection in the mirror. The first person looks in the mirror when things are going well and give themselves a pat on the back for their success. These same people look out the window when things are not going so well and point the finger at those around them for not showing the necessary support, all looking out for the bad luck that has come their way. The second person, however, looks in the mirror when things are not going to plan, they ask what they have done to put themselves in their current situation and what they can do to progress in a positive manner. These people look out the window and things are going well and attribute their progress to those around them and fortunate circumstances that have aided in their success. How do you view the window in the mirror? This is the classic growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Let's dive into the difference between those, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset occur on a continuum. They are at either ends of the spectrum, but there's a lot of gray area in the middle and you can be anywhere on that spectrum in certain areas of your life.

So understanding and reflecting on where you are in certain areas of your life again, going back if you're the same, doing the same things that you were in your relationship that you're doing 10 years ago and you haven't changed anything there and you're not growing, you're not developing, you might have a fixed mindset in that particular area. However, if you've been financially successful and you've implemented um you know, courses and knowledge and wisdom that you've learned over the years to build a profitable business, then you might be in a growth mindset there. So understanding where you are in different areas of your life is the first part in making changes, okay? If you want to make changes, you need to make changes Now, the fixed mindset is when you think that your talents and your abilities are set and you can't change anything about it, You can't change your personality, you can't change the way that you do things, you can't change your mind set, you can't change the way that you think about things, so you continue doing the same thing that you've always done.

That is a fixed mindset and the growth mindset on the other hand is understanding that we have neuro plasticity, which means that we can impact how we think about things and how we reflect on things and how we perceive things. Um and we can make changes in our lives slowly, progressively over time too. Start pushing us towards being the person that we want to be. Now don't confuse the growth mindset with those self help books that are like you can do anything, believe and you can achieve. Okay, that's not what it is, what a growth mindset is, is understanding what you're good at and what you're not good at and maybe going right well I'm not very good at this, so how can I get better at that? Maybe my talents and abilities low in that area, however I want to get better at that, so I need to put in some work, maybe I need to study hard and maybe I need to find a different way to learn these processes. Maybe I need to implement different strategies to push me in the right direction, Okay and understanding that you're going to need to put some effort in if you're not naturally gifted at something and you want to get better at that, then you can get better at that, but you might need to invest a lot more time and a lot more effort into that thing.

So, you know, a growth mindset is not necessarily the best thing to have all the time, because if you're bashing away, trying to do something that you're not good at and you don't enjoy doing that, but you're trying to get better at it, then you're just not going to invest that time, energy and effort. So um it can be a double edged sword as well, but likewise, so can the fixed mindset, Okay, just because um you can change something, it doesn't mean that you should change something. There's probably areas in your life where you do have a fixed mindset, but the way that you thought about things has allowed you to progress and excel in that particular area, so if you don't need to make any changes in that area then you don't need to, okay, but if you want to keep improving, if you want to add that next 1% that next 1% that adds up over time, then you might need to adopt a growth mindset and you don't need to swing too hard in one direction, you might just shift that um that scale a little bit in one direction so that you can start moving in the direction you want to become the person you want and there's a great book called mindset by Carol Dweck, which I'm currently reading through for the second time and this is a great book that explains the difference between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset.

This is one of the books that I typically recommend to people whenever people reach out and ask me for any book recommendations, I recommend three books and the first book is called The Subtle Art of Not giving a fuck by Mark Manson, I believe. Um and the concept of this book is essentially how I live my life, we live in this day and age where people care too much about way too many things and you know, they're impacted and influenced by all of these things, what people think about them and how they talk about them and um all these types of things and um it's the book is not about, you know, not giving a fuck about anything, it is simply choosing what you care about. So that's the first book that I typically recommend to people and then that's followed up by mindset by Carol Dweck. Um and this is pretty much what this episode is about. The growth mindset versus a fixed mindset and going through personal growth and personal development. Now, the third book that I typically recommend people is called Extreme ownership by jocko willing and Leif Babin.

Um and this is essentially taking ownership of your life and being accountable for every fucking decision that you make in your life. That has brought you up to this point and is going to influence and impact how you move forward and you know what the rest of your life is going to look like. So those are my top three book recommendations and I highly recommend that the majority of people listening to this podcast get onto those books if you haven't done so already. So what I'll do now is just read off a couple of paragraphs from the book mindset that really resonated with me and are thought provoking whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are carved in stone is an age old issue. What these beliefs mean for you is a new one. What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep seated trait. Let's first look in on the age old fiercely wage debate about human nature and then return to the question of what these beliefs mean for you since the dawn of Time, people have thought differently, acted differently and fare differently from each other.

It was guaranteed that someone would ask the question of why people differed, why some people are smarter or more moral and whether there was something that made them permanently different experts lined up on both sides. Some claim that there was a strong physical basis for these differences, making them unavoidable and unalterable through the ages. These alleged physical differences have included bumps on the skull, which is called phrenology and the size and shape of the skull, which is Cranie ology. And today jeans. Others pointed to the strong differences in people's backgrounds, experiences training or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Bernie, who was the inventor of the IQ test, wasn't the IQ test meant to summarize Children's unchangeable intelligence. In fact, no Bernie, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early 20th century design this test to identify Children who are not profiting from the Paris public schools so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track without denying individual differences in Children's intellects.

He believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence. Here is a quote from one of his major books, modern ideas about Children, in which he summarizes his work with hundreds of Children with learning difficulties. A few modern philosophers assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism with practice training and above all method, we managed to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before. So who's right today? Most experts agree that it's not either or it's not nature or nurture genes or environment from conception on there's a constant give and take between the two. In fact as Gilbert Gottlieb and eminent neuroscientist put it not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop but jeans require input from the environment to work properly. Now I've spoken briefly about genetics versus epi genetics in a previous episode and I will cover that in a lot more detail in an upcoming episode.

But essentially genes are what you're born with. This is your DNA ePI genetics on the other hand is how your genes are expressed and this can be influenced by your life soul, how much you're sleeping, what your stress management, like what your nutrition looks like. Do you have any nutrient deficiencies? What's your gut health? Like all of these factors play a massive part in how your genes are expressed. So yes they are going to be some hereditary illnesses and diseases that potentially passed on from generation to generation. However how your genes are expressed ultimately comes down to the environment that you live in. So even if say cancer runs in your family for example that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get it okay you have those genes in your D. N. A. That could potentially be expressed and develop into cancer. However your lifestyle can play a massive part in how those genes are expressed and whether or not those genes are turned on or off and again this is epi genetics and tying this back into the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

Someone with a fixed mindset who has cancer that runs in the family just thinks, well I'm just going to get cancer at some stage in my life. So I'm just going to live as best I can and do whatever I want because I'm probably gonna die from it at some stage in my life. However, someone with a growth mindset goes well, I know that cancer runs in my family. However, I understand that my lifestyle and how I interact with my environment and the people around me is going to determine how those genes are expressed. So yes, there's a higher possibility that something may develop. But what's in my control is how I live my life. And that's going to determine how my genes are expressed. So then I'm going to set myself up for living the best life and doing the right thing the majority of the time, so that my genes are expressed correctly and those genes that have the cancer properties stay switched off and this is simply focusing on what is within our control. I want to talk about physiology right now for a moment, because physiology is how our organism operates.

Anatomy is the makeup of our organism, and physiology is how the organism operates. Now. All of the systems are connected. We've got 11 systems of the body and they are all interconnected. So if one system is up regulated, then that's going to have an impact on the other systems. Something I want to talk about here is stress a case stress has been related to nine of the top 10 causes of all cause mortality. And balancing our stress is absolutely essential for living your best life. Because if your body is under stress and your autonomic nervous system pushes too far into the sympathetic state as opposed to the parasympathetic state. Okay, then we have a flow on effect down the chain. Okay, creates an inflammation response, which then means that you're not going to be able to digest, absorb assimilate your nutrients very well. You're not breaking down your food, you're not breaking down those foods into their raw materials to be able to fuel the rest of the organism, which again, has a flow on effect to all of your other systems.

Now, balancing the autonomic nervous system is super important to maintain homeostasis. And homeostasis is the baseline in which our body operates. Our body is constantly trying to get back to homeostasis. Now, I want to go back to what I said before about too much sympathetic drive. Okay, sympathetic drive. And uh an inflammatory response is absolutely essential for adaptation. Okay, so the problem is when you push to fire into a sympathetic state and you're creating all of these low level stress is over long periods of time. That creates this low level inflammatory response that then again affects your gut health, which then affects your mental health and also your physical health. Now, recent research in the last 5 to 10 years has shown that the gut and the brain are directly linked. So if there's a problem with the gut, then that's going to cause issues with your neurotransmitters, which are chemical substances which your nervous system uses to essentially communicate with the rest of the cells in the body.

And this can also create a hormonal dis regulation. And your hormones are a substance that it's a regulatory substance that circulates in the blood. And again, the hormones communicate with all of the other systems and cells in the body as well. So too much sympathetic drive which is a fight or flight state leaves you hyper alert and it leaves you tired but wired. Uh and it leaves you unable to get back to homeostasis because there's potentially not enough parasympathetic drive, which is our rest and digest state. Ah And both of these are required to get back to homeostasis. Think about the fight or flight state. The sympathetic state as being your accelerator. This is what you used to get shit done and then your parasympathetic state, which is your rest and digest state is your rest, recover, relax. This is your break. All right now, I'm not going to go too deep into this topic right now because the next episode on mindfulness is going to cover this in a lot more detail.

But what I will do is link a short five minute video from my Youtube channel covering the autonomic nervous system and that will be in the show notes now to round out this segment and segue into the next segment. I want to finish with this quote, manage your psychology to optimize your physiology. There are many ways to look at personal growth and self development. Uh I am recording this on the 13th of august thursday and today I dropped an episode with rob morgan who are interviewed from Kiss Fitness. Keep it Simple Fitness. And if you haven't listened to that episode, I recommend going back and listening to that. Because in that episode there's a lot of points that we talked about where he takes a growth mindset and you know, he had a failed relationship, had a failed business project, um didn't really know where he was going in life and what he was doing and where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. However, it was how he looked at things that kind of gave him a little bit of an insight into where he was that right now and he went into some reflections on, you know, what had gotten him to that point and then decided where he wanted to go from there and that kind of set um you know, it's at the point it set the stage for how he got to that point, what lessons he could take away from those failed relationships and failed business project and how we could learn from that and move forward.

And this is the whole idea of personal growth. It's about looking at your life as a whole and it's about um introspection, where you're looking at everything that's happened in your life, that's gotten gotten you to this point and then how you're going to take those lessons or look at those lessons and change your mindset from I'm a victim and this is what's happened to me, like. All right, well, I've made some decisions that have put me in this position. Um how can I learn from this? How can I implement these changes and how can I move forward and put these processes in place on a day to day basis that's going to move me in the right direction. So again, if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly recommend going back and listening to that. Um and he dropped some really good knowledge on how he kind of got out a little bit of a funk and put those processes in place to allow him to, you know, become a successful businessman, um happy father, husband, um partner, and just an all around good human.

And if you listen to this episode first and then go back and listen to that episode, then you'll see exactly what I'm talking about about the growth mindset because there's a number of times where I asked him how he felt when, you know, he had these failures and you know what he did to kind of fix them. And there was a number of times where he actually said, well I don't look at them as failures, you know, and this is an important thing, Okay. How you view the world and how you view, um, adversity and things that happened to you really determines your ability to deal with these adversities and be able to put them behind you and learn from them and move forward. And something that we spoke about and something that I said that happened quite often in the tech industry is fail early and fail forward. Okay. And you know, I work with professional fighters and um, sometimes things don't go their way and you might have an amazing training camp, but you know, they step into the cage, they step into the ring or whatever and they don't put on their best performance. And you know, to me that's not a failure. That's just feedback. All right. There was something that we didn't quite do as well as we could have, that we can fix next time.

So let's look at the big picture and let's try and optimize that one thing or those two things that we didn't quite get right so that we can dial everything in next time and put on a better performance. Having this growth mindset is not something that I was born with and it's not something that came easily for me over the years I've had to develop this growth mindset and this pretty much started when I was in the army, um I spent six years in the army full time deployed to Iraq East Timor Afghanistan. And when we go through our training, we do these training exercises. Um we'd go field for like two months and do these mission rehearsal exercises or mission specific training before we went on these deployments. And for the most part we would do these big operations and afterwards we'd have an after action review and this is where everyone would literally sit down and we'd walk through the entire operation and we'd go through um some things that we needed to fix, some things that we needed to improve and some things that we needed to sustain.

And the reason we did this was not to point the finger at anybody, it was simply to make sure that we were constantly improving our standard operating procedures and tactics techniques and procedures because at the end of the day, if our TTP S and S O PS weren't up to standard and weren't up to scratch and you know, the standards of every single soldier was not where they needed to be, that could have dire consequences overseas. So, you know, this was always to ensure that everyone was operating on the same page and our standards were at a level that was going to contribute to the overall mission and not put anyone's life in jeopardy because at the end of the day, like training is training. But when you get on the ground, when you run deployment, when you're a foot soldier, if you fucking make a mistake, you could be paying for that with your life or even worse the life of the bloke beside you. So this was always something that we did and you know, you needed to develop thick skin. It wasn't like if people were criticizing you, it was always constructive, it was not you did this wrong, you did that wrong.

It was like, all right, here's the problem, This is how we fix it and this is how I live my life. Now, you know, I'm constantly looking at what the problems are, but I'm not just talking about the problems and focusing on the problems. I look at the problems, it's important to look at what the problems are. But then you need to develop a solution that's going to help you get out of that problem will get away from that problem, will fix that problem. And this is important, being able to take constructive criticism and for a long time I wasn't able to do that. And I was like, fuck these guys, they're talking shared about me blah blah blah blah. Now it took me many, many years to develop this ability to take in this constructive criticism because at the end of the day, I knew that or I realized that these people, my commanders, my mates, my colleagues, etcetera, were giving me this constructive criticism because they wanted me to be a better soldier. They wanted me to be a better person and the environment that we were in, we all trusted each other. So any time we had some constructive criticism, everyone took it on board and we had to, otherwise you essentially wouldn't deploy.

So we quickly learned to respect the opinion and the input of the soldiers either side of us as well as our commanders because we're all working towards achieving the same mission. And this is something that I've continued on with my life. And now I actually go out searching for constructive criticism. Now, here's the other thing. I started this podcast not knowing anything about podcasting and my first few episodes, I fucking sucked and I'm probably still suck, I'm probably going to look back on this in a year's time and be like, oh man, those episodes were rubbish, but that's part of my own personal growth. I enjoy putting these episodes out because it teaches me. And when I first put those first couple of episodes together, I sent out a heap of episodes to a number of mates that I trust and respect and you know, I told them I'm like, be assholes, tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong, tell me what I need to fix, tell me what shit, tell me what's good because there's only one way that I'm going to get better and that's by knowing what I suck at.

And again, I still suck, but I'm working on getting better and it's a work in progress and that's the whole point. It's constant improvement. That is what personal growth is. It's looking at where you're at right now, It's looking at where you want to be and it's about putting in those 1%ers day after day after day, the add up over time to improve yourself to get better. And I'm lucky enough to have those types of people in my life, my friendship circle is quite close, but very deep and the reason they're my friends is because I know I can trust them and I know that when push comes to shove, if I'm asking them to be honest with me, they are going to be fucking brutally honest, and I appreciate that and I love that about them, and to me that shows me that they care about me, okay, I don't want to have yes men around, I don't want people around that are, you know, sucking up my ass. I don't need people like that in my life, okay, I need people in my life that are going to tell me the honest truth without being assholes, but again, looking at constructive criticism, if you're going to make something, if you're going to give someone criticism, don't be a fuckhead about it.

You know, make it constructive, all right, this is what you're doing wrong, this is how you fix it, or this is what you need to do a little bit better. And this is something that I'm doing with my coaches at Tiger muay thai at the moment. The gym has been reopened for roughly 7 to 8 weeks now, after the covid pandemic, um we're operating on a restricted schedule, um and we've obviously got all the health measures to, you know, track people coming in and out of the camp and all that type of stuff, but um We're only running three classes in the fitness department at Tiger at the moment, so I'm not needed to coach. So what I'm actually doing is running some one on one development sessions with my coaches and I'll spend an hour, hour and a half with each coach every day, monday to friday for a week and you know, I'm getting some good responses and I'm getting some really good feedback from that and people are loving it, people are enjoying it. But the reason I'm running this coaches development sessions is because I care about my coaches, I'm the head strength and conditioning coach and the fitness department is my department.

So all of these coaches are a reflection of me, they are a reflection of my ability to lead my ability to manage my ability to coach. So, you know, it's in my best interest to make sure that all of these coaches up to standard and the reason I'm doing that is because I fucking care about my coaches, I want to have the best coaching team on the street. I spoke about this in the last episode when I was talking with rob for those of you that haven't been to soy tied in Phuket Thailand, it's a street that's about a kilometre and a half long, and there's like 12 to 15 gyms on the street or something like that, um Now there's three gyms that cater to the fitness side of things and the rest are predominantly multi gyms, um but that was a goal of mine when I was employed as the head strength and conditioning coach 2.5 years ago, my goal was, my vision was to have the best coaching team on the street, and when I initially arrived and was trying to establish myself as a coach, I was an intern, I was working for free at a two month contract and you know, something that I brought up with the fitness department was the coaches development, because the best gyms that I've worked in the past had a coach's development program and you know, this was one session a week and you know, some people didn't like that because they were in a fixed mindset, they were just like, no, we like things how how it is right now, we don't want any change um and you know, it took a long time for me to implement this coaches development program, obviously I became head strength and conditioning coach and that happened probably about six months after I arrived, so I had a two month contract as an intern, and then within a month I got offered a full time job because the staff or the management obviously saw what I brought to the table, um so they offered me a full time job and then the head strength and conditioning coach at the time ended up getting offered another gig back home in the UK, so he ended up vacating and I applied for the position and got it and as I tried to implement this coaches development program, I was getting a lot of pushback and this was because people were afraid of change and you know, I realized very quickly that I needed to change the culture and I needed to change the way that things were done, so, you know, I let that slide for a little bit and I um you know, didn't push the coaches development program, but what I did do was start enforcing more rules and better standards and things like that, and that was my practice for the first six months and you know, I talked to some of my coaches now and they, they thought I was a little bit of an asshole at the time because they thought I was ruling with an iron fist, but there was a reason that I was implementing those rules and regulations and standards and that was because you know there was a pretty shitty culture and there was a lot of divisiveness between the coaches and there was some cliques within the coaches group and you know I didn't really like that and you know fuck I'll be honest here some coaches were not showing up to class is that they were scheduled on for and the way that the place was being run was not up to standard in my opinion and I didn't like that, I thought this world renowned facility would be much better run and managed and I was surprised to see how poorly certain aspects of the gym were being run and that was my goal was to start implementing these rules and regulations and again S.

O. P standard operating procedures, these fucking standards to get everyone up to scratch, to make sure that you know you could rely on the person next to you and it took quite a while to implement those standards and get everyone up to speed and get everyone on the same page and some people didn't like me for that and I was okay with that because I wasn't here to make friends, I was there to um make sure that my department was operating in a fucking level that was acceptable and expected at such a world class facility. Now I just want to follow that up with the fact that the head coach at the time was actually not in Thailand and for about four months, 4 to 5 months whilst I went through the intern process and then got offered a full time job. The actual head coach at the time was not there, he was back in the UK getting surgery. So there was a standing head coach and this guy was mates with a head coach and um to be honest, was not a fucking, not a good manager, not a good leader.

Um you know, it was good at his job being a coach, but not good at managing people. And my first introduction to him was rolling into the gym and I was probably in Tiger for about a week and there was another coach that was coaching at the time and him and one of the assistants who wasn't even a trained coach, we're paying this fucking coach out in front of all of the clients and I was just looking at this dude going, what the fuck man, You're supposed to be the leader, you're supposed to be the role model, you're supposed to be the person in charge of that is leading the group and you're acting like a fucking idiot. So I lost a lot of respect for him then um and we had some issues moving forward, but that's a story for another time, but you know, at the end of the day, I became one of the full time coaches and it was my um goal to I have my own standards, have my own practices and make sure that I was professional and I was reliable and I could be counted on because that was important to me, you know, honesty, integrity, professionalism, these are all traits that are very important to me, so I was going to do whatever was necessary, it didn't really matter too much what other people were doing because that was on them, and if they could look at themselves in the mirror and say that they were doing the best job that they could then whatever that's on them, that's not, that's not for me to comment on, but my mindset is, you know, if I'm not giving my best, if I'm not being relied upon, if I'm not being consistent, professional and contributing to the team, then you know what, I'm being a fucking asshole and I'm not contributing and I'm not being at my best, so obviously once I became the head strength and conditioning coach, um you know, again, my department was a reflection of me and my manager managerial skills and my leadership skills, so I had to get everyone up to standard and you know, I got a lot of pushback for that, but it is what it is and um you know, I went through a massive personal growth period there myself because here I was coming from a military background where I was operating in a four man sniper team for you know, the best part of 3, 3.5 years out of my six year military career and these are some of the best soldiers in the battalion, like once someone said that something needed to be done, we all contributed and we all came up with a plan and we all made sure that everything that we were doing was squared away okay and we were doing everything at the best of our ability.

Once I go to the army in 2012, then I went into personal training, I started my own business. So you know when you're your own boss and you're running your own business, if you're not fucking operating at a high level and and maintaining your own high standards, then that's going to come about, People aren't going to fucking pay for your services, words going to get around that you're not a good coach, you're not not good at what you're going, what you do, so you're not gonna be able to put food on the table. Um So that was always a process for me, was to continue growing, continue developing, continue progressing. I think it was in one of the last episodes, I spoke about um my progress and my journey and you know, I'm again the head strength conditioning coach at Tiger muay thai, a world renowned um facility, but I've also been coaching Peter Yang, who is now the UFC bantamweight champion and I've been coaching him for 2.5 years, I've coached him for six of his seven fights in the UFC and we started working together before he made his UFC debut.

Now I put myself in that position because of all the personal growth and development that I've gone through over the years when I was running my own business, I was constantly studying, I was constantly trying to up skill, I was constantly learning the next piece of the jigsaw puzzles so that I could apply that to my clients and um you know, that continued on when I came to Tiger Muay thai and again going from being military to running my own business to now working for an employer, it was completely different. I had to change my mindset and I had to go through a growth period because you know how I done things up to that point had served me very fucking well in the army and running my own business. But then when I was intermingled with other people and I had to get them up to standard, you know, I had to change my tactics, I had to change my style because there was a lot of pushback and people, you know, here's the thing like going from military to civilian, there's a massive difference in um professionalism and reliability and all that type of stuff and it kind of shocked me to me to be honest, um thinking that, you know, there was people that I couldn't rely on and there's people that I didn't trust and if I asked them to do something and shit didn't get done, I was like what the fuck is wrong with these people, you know?

So it took me a lot of personal growth and development for me to change my leadership style and um you know, figure out what I was willing to allowed to happen and what I was willing to um sacrifice on and I had to figure out different ways of being able to portray this information and get these standards up to scratch and it took a long time, but once we got to a certain point of, you know, 6 to 8 months, nine months down the track where everyone kind of understood what was expected and what was required and they were finally hitting the the basic minimal standards, then we started implementing the coaches development and and again this was personal growth for them, but it was also personal growth for me because I love to learn, um I'm constantly trying to learn new skills, I'm constantly studying, I'm constantly trying to again, you know, figure out the next piece of the jigsaw puzzle that's going to make me a better coach and putting these practices in place over time is what allows me to be a better coach and I like teaching other people, I like coaching other people and that's a big part of how I learn.

If anyone's been to my classes in Tiger muay thai or being coached by me over the years, you know that I'm an educational coach. So yes, I'm going to tell you what we're doing, but I'm also going to tell you why we're doing it. And the reason being is because I want to understand that I want to know what I'm doing, I want to I want everything to be justified, Okay. There's a purpose, there's a reason for everything that I'm doing and I want that to be explained so that people have buy in and this is something that, you know, has come up for me over and over again over the years, is that um some people don't really care about why they're doing something, they just want to rock up to a coach and be told what to do um and then crack on and do it okay. But those are the people that spin their wheels, those are the people that, you know, never really get the results that they're looking for, They come in, they say they want to do something, but when they don't have buy in, they just spin their wheels and yes, they're doing something and something is better than nothing and they're giving themselves a pat on the back for getting in and getting the training done.

But at the end of the day, they don't fucking hit the results that they want to hit because they don't have that by and they don't have that, why they don't have that, that big reason that's pushing them along and they don't understand why they're doing something. So they just go through the motions. Um, So for me coaching other people is the way that I learned. If I'm learning about right now, I'm going through anatomy and physiology course. Right? So um funnily enough, I had a question come up probably about a month and a half ago on one of my Q. And A sessions, um about the potential of weight stunting growth in Children. And I've just been gone. I've just gone through my module about the development of bone in the human body. Um and they talked about growth plates and how bone was formed and developed, etcetera, etcetera. So you know, I use that information that I just learned and put that into that podcast episode. Um and this is something I do all the time in my classes when I'm coaching.

I'll pull everyone together and I'll give a five minute spiel on something that I've learned recently or I'm learning at the moment and I'm applying it to and I'm making it relative to the session that I've just put people through and the reason I do that is because I want to see How well I can portray that information. So I might have 30 people in the class and I'll start talking about energy system conditioning. Hey guys, today we went through the power power development session, we finished with some power endurance, we're working through the anaerobic energy system primarily. You know, we went through a electric system went through malolactic system here, blah blah blah. These are our systems, you know, and I'll explain the energy systems that we've used in that training session and why training them is important. How they relate to different sports and different people and um how they are used in your life. And sometimes I'll look around and I'll get these blank stares and you know, people's eyes have glazed over and I'm like, all right, well I didn't explain that very well.

I need to go back and I need to learn that better so that I can portray that information a lot better. Then there's gonna be other times where, you know, I'll see people like talking to themselves nodding their head kind of see this light bulb moment in people's eyes. And for me that means that I've betrayed that information. Well, that means I know that information well enough to then be able to build upon it. And that's a that's an extremely important part of the puzzle for me is not only learning how to do something and gaining that knowledge, but then being able to apply that knowledge. Okay. And this is the difference between data information, knowledge and wisdom data is collecting numbers. Okay, think about a Fitbit. If you were a Fitbit you might be looking at your steps, you might be looking at your waking heart rate. You might be looking at your sleep quality, et cetera. Okay. That is just data right now. If you don't know what that data means, then you have no information. But if you do understand what that data means now you have information.

All right. What does this information mean? What do I do with this information? This is where knowledge comes into play. All right. What is knowledge? Knowledge is well, if I took you know, only 3000 steps today, um I probably don't need to eat as much food. All right. So um then wisdom comes into play. All right. Well uh my waking heart rates normally around about 50 beats per minute. It's friday. I've trained really hard this week. My waking heart rates now up at 55 beats per minute. I'm not going to go and hammer myself at training today. Okay, now I'm gonna go and get a massage. I might go to a sauna, an ice bath. I might do some recovery based movement. Um Very light work just to get some blood flowing and and focus on the recovery session. All right. And this is really important. Understanding why you're doing something Now. Like I said before, I'm currently going through my anatomy and physiology course um to get my diploma and I covered some anatomy and physiology in my PT course in what year was that?

2012 and that was enough information. That was enough content to allow me to get out and start coaching people, Start training people and understand, you know, at a baseline level what I was doing, you know, I knew more than the average person. Let's put it that way. All right. But when I was going through that stuff back then I was literally just doing enough to get by and passed the course so that I could actually get out and start working with people. Um So recently I've been posting on my instagram stories about my results from my anatomy and physiology course and I'm up to module six right now, and I think my lowest score has been 96% and I've got a couple of 100% and 1 98%. So my average is roughly 98%, and I've had people commenting on it and give me some me some encouraging messages and things like that. But I've also actually had a couple of people message and say, hey, like good scores. Are you cheating? Like what's going on here?

And I'm like, no, I'm not cheating. I'm actually I'm making sure that I'm learning this content because I want to fucking know this content. I don't just want to get the tick in the box and get the diploma. I want to understand this content. So I'm taking my time going through the course and you know, I could definitely go through the course of a lot quicker and google all the answers and all that type of stuff. But for me that's, it's got nothing to do with personal growth. That's not helping me achieve anything. You know, that's I'm cheating. I'm not putting the time, energy and effort in to understand why I'm doing it. There's no for me there's no point doing a course and getting a tick in the box, getting a diploma, getting a qualification. If I can't then apply that information. Okay, again, going back to that data information, knowledge and wisdom. I want this to become wisdom. I want to understand exactly why I'm doing something and what it means. Okay, again, talking about anatomy and physiology.

Anatomy is the structure of the organism and the physiology is the or how the organism operates. And I want to understand that stuff. I need to understand that stuff so that I can up skill and make myself a better coach. Now, here's the thing. Personal growth and development is a mindset and your mindset is a choice. I've spoken recently on. I think it was my last reflections episode on 22nd of no, it was five August about leaders in my life and I spoke about the last dance, which is a documentary series on netflix about Michael Jordan and the Chicago bulls and the dynasty. They went through in the mid nineties. And one of the quotes that really resonates with me um is from Michael Jordan and He says I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games 26 times.

I've been trusted to take the winning game shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed and this is the point. We are constantly looking for growth. We should not be looking at failure as a setback. Okay, failure is feedback. If failure is not an option then neither is success. They don't want, it's not one or the other. Okay, they go hand in hand. The people who succeed the most are those that fail thomas. Edison has been quoted as saying, I did not fail 10,000 times. I found 10,000 ways that didn't work. And this is the growth mindset in action. It's about taking these lessons, figuring out what doesn't work and then going in different directions so that you can start implementing these small 1%ers day after day after day that are moving you in the right direction. This is the growth mindset. The growth mindset is all about constantly striving to improve, its about constantly striving to become better.

And I look back at some of my relationships that I've had in the past and my last relationship was with the girl for five years. Amazing girl and she helped me go through that transition transition period from military to civilian. And I look at that relationship and I take a lot of lessons out of that and I appreciate that relationship and I'm grateful for that relationship because she helped me through a period that was difficult for a lot of veterans, um a lot of military personnel that do transition because it is a difficult transition period. And uh again, I look back at that relationship and I'm super grateful for the lessons that I learned when I was going through that process with her. And we're still friends to this day. The relationship prior to that, I was with a girl for 2.5 years and this was whilst I was deployed to Afghanistan and we had a lot of issues in the relationship and you know, I look back at that relationship and I was pointing the finger and I was saying that she was doing a lot of things wrong and you know, there are some things that she was doing that was pissing me off, and I was in a fixed mindset at that stage, and you know, I took those, well, I didn't take those lessons from that relationship at the time, but it wasn't until I met Laura and the girl that I was, my ex girlfriend that I was with for five years um and I started implementing those lessons that I learned and I was like, all right, well, you know, yes, uh Laura, the girl before that was doing something's wrong, but I was also contributing to those issues and I was doing shit that she didn't like, that was then she was retaliating and doing shit that I didn't like.

So when I went through the relationship with Lauren, I took those lessons and I was constantly striving to be a better person and of course I still fucked up and I still did some shit that, you know, I'm not proud of and I look back on and I'm like, oh man if I had had my time again I would have done things differently. But you know that whole relationship was about implementing the lessons learned from the previous relationship and trying to strive to become a better person, become a better partner, become a better overall human being and contribute more to that relationship. Now we can apply the same skills and same principles to everything in our life. If you look at all the different areas of your life, we've got our relationships with ourselves with our significant other, with our family, with our friends, we've got Korea, we've got finances, we've got education, um all of these different aspects, health and wellness, all of these different aspects that contribute to being a healthy person okay and being healthy is about balancing everything out.

If you spend too much time in one area, then other areas are going to drop off and again I spoke about this with rob morgan on the last episode in his interview about juggling those balls, juggling the balls of life and ensuring that we're not spending too much time in one area and you know, having that negatively impact the other areas of our life, so again, all about balance and we don't have to do everything at once, what I'd recommend doing is look at one area of your life where you're not happy and you're not successful and you're, you know, you might not even not be successful, you might just be looking to achieve a little bit more and then it's just about implementing one thing at a time, if you're having troubles with your relationship, for example, think about this, even if you have a shitty day at work, don't fucking go home and dump that on your partner, okay, they might have had a good day and if you walk into the house and you greet them and you're in a bad mood and you're grumpy and you know, everything is about you, then that's going to add some, possibly some resentment.

So, you know, think about walking into the house and greeting your partner where the kiss and asking them about their day and and contributing to the relationship and you know, trying to be a positive, um putting yourself in a positive mindset because that person might have had a bad day as well and you know, you're a team, you need to be working together to achieve happiness and achieve contentment, fulfillment and you should be bouncing off each other and you should be feeding off each other and if one person is in a bad mood then that's going to the other person is going to feed off that, and if one person is in a good mood, then the other person should be feeding off that as well. So taking small things, small aspects of our lives and looking to improve just one area, it might simply be um finances, okay, I'm having some financial troubles. Um I'm not saving enough money to buy a house, which is putting a strain on the relationship with my partner, so what's something that I can do that's going to contribute to that, and that might be adding something in where you go, I'm going to add an extra $50 a week into the joint savings account or it might be, you know, I'm Buying three coffees a day and that's adding up over a week and what something else that I can do, maybe I can, you know, buy some cheap coffee from home and make my coffee before I go into work and um you know all these little things add up over time.

So it's just looking at these different areas of your life and thinking about what you can do to change that situation, this is the growth mindset, right? You don't need to do everything at once. Just choose one thing that's going to have a decent impact that you can do consistently over a long period of time, that's going to contribute to creating a more positive person, creating better balance and moving you in the right direction. Some of the best lessons that I've learned have come from playing sport. I grew up playing rugby league when I was younger and then transition to playing rugby union. Uh, and I actually got a scholarship to go to Sydney when I was 17, I moved from Darwin down to Sydney for a couple of years and you know, I was good player in Darwin and I, you know, thought I was going to be able to make it as a professional rugby player. When I got down to Sydney though, it was a completely different, I was in a different position, you know, I was back at the bottom of the Totem pole and I was rocking up the training with 80 dudes, they're 80 to 100 dudes there.

And for the first year I was playing fourth grade colts and you know, it kind of hit my ego and I wasn't working as hard as I should have because I expected to be playing in a higher grade. But once I changed my mindset and went, all right, well there's nothing I can do about this um, playing fourth grade, but what I can do is train harder. I can rock up on time, I can put in more effort. I can um you know, build these relationships and I can be a better team player, I can be bigger, stronger, faster. Um I can be better conditioned and once I started focusing on those things then I started bouncing up through the grades and and ended up playing the next two years in predominantly first grade. So you know, there's a lot of lessons in that and I've taken those lessons from my sporting background of you know, there's things that aren't going to go your way, but there are things within your control that you can strive towards, that is going to make you a better person, a better player etcetera, and it's understanding that, you know, I wasn't the most naturally talented player, but what I did well and what put me into those first grade teams was that I fucking worked hard, I got into the gym, I got after I put on some muscle, I put on some strength, I put on some um I added some speed and some power and built my conditioning and you know, that made me a better team player and that made me a better person and that um reinforce the fact that yes, I wasn't talented or I didn't think I was that talented, but with practice with effort with method with um consistency, I could improve those skills and I could bounce up through the ranks and that's exactly what happened, I've taken those life lessons with me throughout the rest of my life um and there has been times where I have been in a fixed mindset, but I soon realized that the fixed mindset wasn't getting me anywhere pointing the finger at other people and doing things that were sabotaging me was not helping me improve.

And awareness is the first thing. Once you have awareness you can change something now to round out the episode, I want to relate this day and age we live in to what I'm talking about because we live in this fucking age of entitlement, people come out of a four year university degree and they walk into a job expecting to be at the top of the totem pole and it's like, man, don't you understand that the people ahead of you, the people above you that are getting paid a higher salary that are managing you, they went through the same fucking process and once they got out and they started in the workforce, they had to start from the bottom and build their way up, they had to earn their right, they had to earn their way, they had to prove themselves over and over and over again and you know, we live in this age of participation trophies, where if you participate in something at school or in a sports carnival or um you know sporting events or competitions or something like that, everyone gets a fucking trophy for showing up.

Okay, I disagree with that. I think that's absolute bullshit because that doesn't teach anything about real life. That just says, hey, if you show up we'll give you something right that sets you up for failure later on in life. Okay, If you put the work in and you contribute and you focus on your weaknesses and you build your strength, you put the time, energy and effort into improving yourself. That's when the results show and even if you don't get the results that you want, maybe that's not the right area. If you maybe you need to, maybe you need to focus your time, energy and effort on other areas of your life that is going to contribute to you being a better person and contributing in a positive manner to society as a whole. The final point that I want to make to round out this episode is that this society that we live in has transformed failure from an action which is, I failed into an identity which is, I am a failure.

Okay, so changing your mindset is going to change your actions and your actions are going to change your results. That's it for me today guys, if you like my content, please follow me on my instagram handle at coach underscore codes K O B E S. I am on facebook at performance functional training and I also have a Youtube channel at performance functional training. If this message resonates with you and you enjoy this content, please pass this off to your friends and family and leave me a five star rating and review and come back next week for the mindfulness episode. See you're there much love guys. The Western world is in the middle of a mental health crisis and our veterans have taken action. Swiss. Its team of combat veterans have built a proactive mental health program that is delivered through a mobile app. The app offers users programs in eight categories of health and lifestyle, all proven to reduce anxiety and depression. This holistic model forms your daily routine, aiding you to build structure, improve discipline and take ownership of your life.

Once these habits are formed, the app will teach you new skills, skills that can form identity purpose and encourage physical interaction to rebuild your tribe and reduce isolation.