What’d we say? | Podcast Transcript

(00:00):

What’s good with you guys. Thanks for joining me. Johann Francis CSCS right here. This is Ego Killer! Yeah. This is my show where we talk all the moves you should be making inside the gym to help you live, move prosper. Feel better outside in life where everything really, really counts inside the gym is our study out in the real world is our practical. We combine those two things to have a happy, fulfilling life. And I believe that all of us should be spending a little bit of time every week inside the gym, trying to challenge our conventions, our comfort zones, and then smashing, smashing them right, tactfully and smartly physically. Let’s see what your body is capable of doing today, what it was able to do last week. And let’s push a little bit more this time around so that we can better prepare ourselves for the hurdles in life, but also be able to accept the greatness, right?

(01:05):

Being able to accept wins, being able to take W’s. Being able to do a lot with success, tells more about a person’s character. A lot of the times than it is than it does when you’re kind of on the low. So we want to be ready in all facets of life. And I think that by being inside the gym, working out and being super duper physical, you’re teaching yourself how to do those things, how to overcome challenges that we internalize. We don’t even really know that we’re internalizing a lot of the time. It’s the value of a very long hike or a long walk. It’s the challenge and the redemption of excessively painful five by fives inside the gym. It’s the reckoning with the previous self and the new self that has all the possibilities right here in front of you, right by tossing iron around, by pushing yourself to the absolute limit by having that new secondary thought process come in, when things get hard that teaches us so much about ourselves, you know, and, and, and I do think that because of those reasons alone, at very least, that’s the reason that we all need to be staying super du active.

(02:14):

And you know, a, it starts with a little bit today. It grows from there. You know, it’s like when I ever, whenever I have people learning new, like, you know, kickboxing techniques or whatever, it’s always people. And I was this way and everybody’s like this, you expect a master at day one. So you’re learning all these new combinations of your hands and fees. Super confusing, super confusing for everybody. Just like if you were today, start learning how to do jujitsu or Krav Magar or something like that. And your coach comes at you with a rubber weapon, a rubber knife, and you have no idea what to do. You’re all flustered. It feels like yo, I’m not gonna get this for example. Right. But the truth is you’ve just laid down the most important part, which is the foundation. And every single time you, you practice, that was your worst day ever.

(03:03):

Okay? Every day you come, you’ve in essence, you’ve always come back from your worst day. And the challenge then becomes getting your up inside the gym, right? Every day you’ve already done the hardest work you’ve possibly done. It’s in the past because it’s there in the past. It doesn’t matter. So the next time you come in, you’re actually getting better. And I like to remind people of that, that the next time you’re, this is the ground level. Every time you’re better. All right. And that’s why I believe though, we all should be doing super duper active things because every time now we get a chance to get a little bit better, teaches us why we’re not able to enhance ourselves and to accept the kind of intrinsic nature of getting better, right? Someone of us don’t wanna get better. Someone of us, a lot harder for us to get better.

(03:53):

We’re kind of indoctrinated, or it’s deep in our genome to accept things the way that they are. Maybe even to stay a little bit down and on the low, right? For whatever reason, there’s a thousand different reasons. People have often there there’s a a man who’s literally is like a psychologist. And I only bring him up because he studies happiness. And this is a thing. And one of the things that I found most interesting about him is that he literally lays out because he studies like the nature of happiness, right? He literally lays out that happiness is pretty much genetic. Like some people are just genetically more happy. They are able to accept circumstances as they come. But what he, this particular guy found is that even if you’re someone that doesn’t have happiness as homeostasis on the regular, you’re just happy grinning ear to ear seasoning. If that’s not you, if you actually practice moves, make you feel better, right. Have positive messages, good countering in mind, all of these things start to happen where your body and your mind become more happy. So you’re actually able to what he says is fight your jeans. So just because you’re one of these OUS people out here who got the cloud hanging overhead all the time, look be you move like you move. That’s all fine.

(05:13):

Sometimes I know what that feels like. But the truth is if you practice being happy, you can get it. And that’s the fire part about it. I want to talk a little bit today, excuse me, a little bit today about the process. How about just the process? The process of being better every time out, there’s an idiom. And look, if you go on ’em into the right now and you start scrolling through your favorite influencers or whoever they might be, right? Top end influencer got, you know, six digit followers. You’re gonna see quite a few idioms. You’re gonna see quite a few quotes in hashtags. You’re gonna see all these things that coalesce in beautiful quotations and have every saccharin intention behind it. Trying to get you up out your seat and on the grind. Well, one of ’em never sat right with me.

(06:06):

What is necessity? Right? Necessity is the mother of invention that ADM never sat right with me. Now it’s not necessarily a fitness idiom, but I wanna extrapolate a little bit and talk about why this idiom is gonna mean the world. Because invention invention is a creative process. There was nothing. Someone had to create something that’s called an invention. And because there was nothing. And if that person did not create it, it is a creative process. Think about creation. You think about you think about art. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind. When I think about creation. When I think about creative people, I think about art. You think about some of your favorite pieces of art, visual, art, physical art sculptures. You think about that stuff. And the people that created them, they wouldn’t exist. If that specific person didn’t create it, it’s a entirely creative process.

(07:11):

Well, you can have ideas in the same vein that are created, that they didn’t exist until somebody thought of them. And so creativity becomes this thing that is really more lateral thinking, right? It’s really more longitudinal has everything to do with that right side of the brain. The part of you that loves and PA, and is passionate and romantic, right? And ideallic idealistic. And then you have on the other side of this idiom necessity, which is just this feast or famine, you either eat or you don’t eat decision, right? You’re either with it or you’re not. And so the idio always runs counter to the way that I feel like we move a lot of the times because it’s like, here’s this black and white binary decision. You either eat or starve necessity. And then here’s this thing at the other end of it, invention. But I want to talk today about necessity’s bastard child. So necessity is the mother of invention, but nobody told you that necessity is also the mother of reinvention.

(08:18):

Reinvention is entirely the process of somebody that is somebody that is looking to curate a new path inside your fitness journey. Look, if you guys haven’t thought about how you’re gonna reinvent yourself over and over, over the next course of your next nine month macro cycle, then I want you to challenge yourself to do three things. Today. One would be performing adjacent goals, and I have two other tips for you, but this is all geared towards helping you reinvent yourself. Are you doing this? Have you, you done this and how have you reinvented yourself? How have you reinvented yourself? If you’ve been active, super active inside the gym, inside of any activity that you do, maybe you’ve even brought in some friends and family to help get you active, keep you motivated. Maybe you motivated and inspired others to do the same. Chances are you’ve already experienced the freedom that comes with reinventing yourself.

(09:22):

I know some folks that I train with on the regular right now, where we have kind of been at it for a very long time consecutively because we had, you know, colloquial ties and we were able to do this thing through the COVID pandemic, more or less. It’s now gone on multiple, multiple years with maybe a tiny little break in between. But I definitely noticed that reinvention oftentimes too, when I only meet some of guys in this for like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 months, that reinvention at least physically doesn’t really come to bear. Sometimes though, I will admit that if I see you guys for like fi a shorter period of time, and then I don’t see you again, looking back, maybe I’ll see you, I’ll hit you on the IG. You’ll see post, you know, you’ll like one of my things I’ll go over to your page, see what’s up.

(10:07):

And it looks like you have done a little bit of interpersonal reinvention, and I hope that you learning to be kind of super in shape and be strong and challenge yourself has brought you to that place. But if you just cold have not been in this spot reinventing, what are you waiting for? Why not? And you know that you gotta do it. Look, it makes me think a lot about one of the hardest nosed heavyweight MMA fighters ever in a conversation I had with one of my coaches or my homeboys. All right. Let me tell, tell you about it is Astair over. Okay. Astair Reem is a six foot four inch black Dutch MMA fighter. Who’s about 200 and anywhere from 60, probably to like 45 30 pounds, just by the way, ripped up from the hips up, right. And legs to diesel diesel. And this man was an interloper in the world of kickboxing about 15 or more years ago.

(11:15):

Right now, look, the Dutch take their kickboxing extremely, extremely seriously. And the same way we take our football in America. This is a serious endeavor. You don’t come around here playing with that. Kickboxing. If you’re in the, the, the land of the Dutch, listen, this guy, he is Dutch, but he was an MMA guy and always made the claim that he could just transfer his skills over into kickboxing and beat some as, so he did an amazing job of doing that too. He got his butt kicked on occasion, but he kicked a lot of inside of the world of kickboxing. So here’s the six, four dude, you know, comes out to like, like house techno, cuz that’s what they do over there across the pond, I guess, and would start stomping on him, cutting a swath through these champions of kickboxing, even though he is an MMA fighter, much to the dismay of all of these kickboxers who saw this as absolute disrespect, he becomes knocking fools down, trying to get to the top of that thing.

(12:12):

And he did it. He did it, you know, the, the gray bar Hardy had a answer for that. But the man is still competing to this day. Well, if you fast forward, about 15 years later, I’m talking to my coach and I’m like, yo, can you imagine, can you see, do you watch his YouTube channel and on over’s YouTube channel at the time, this is like a year or two ago. He was traveling around the world, right? So it’s like, you know, episode one over HIMS in Bali episode two, he’s in the Philippines and episode three, he’s in Russia, four he’s in Egypt, five he’s in Sri Lanka and just doing that globe Trotter thing.

(12:57):

And along the way he’s training and he’s the gregarious type he’s pointing finger gunning and he’s doing the pictures and he’s flexing and he’s the alpha male alpha male up in the room. And he’s also seems like he’s a dope dude. Like he’s helping people with their technique. He’s stopping his seminar and laughing people in the middle of his seminar rather than being that hard nose coach. You know what I mean? That no one wants to be around. He’s seems like by this third person perspective to be a cool dude got his nearby. I’m wondering after all these years how this man is able to keep this up. Now he’s in his forties. And I talked to my coach and my coach was like, yeah, he needs to do this in order to keep himself very active. He needs to keep continually changing spots because it keeps his mind from being set in stone from being too routine. It fights off the inertia of training, which is very easy to get into. Basically it keeps his training fresh. And if his training is fresh, he can always discover new things about his body.

(14:12):

You guys need to remember to reinvent. You can discover new things about your body. This has everything to do with that times where you feel like you’re injured or you can’t move as well. Maybe at times where you feel like you’re kind of low and you really don’t want to get up out of bed a lot of the times, and you still want to keep grind. You still have to continue to grind through those places. And the reason is you have to learn what your body is fully capable of doing, which is a lot more than you think. And we have to discover what it is that we’re framing around those experiences and allowing him to hold his back. I don’t want anything to hold you guys back ironically enough to finish up that very friend, coach of mine was someone that reinvented himself a lot.

(15:05):

So he’d been on the scene himself as a fighter. And not only that, when I first met him, I was in a low place coming out of that low place and trying to get into a space of activity, trying to compete, trying to do my thing, trying to get back into the training that I had started many years before this time. Now, when I met him, I didn’t know that he was a practitioner of all these different martial arts. And this is the type of guy that if you’re just over here talking about one type of martial arts, maybe one type of fighter that you look forward to seeing, he’s already able to mimic that person’s style perfectly. And I’m not just talking about boxing. I’m talking about many different martial arts.

(15:49):

All of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, you know, a lot more <laugh> than they than at first appearance about all these different type of martial arts. And that was fire to learn that about him. Then over time, not only did I realize that he knew all these martial arts, but that he’s like a high level athlete in all these other places, shout out to him. He was this very high level athlete also in his forties, by the way. So not only did he have inter personal or firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be a high level athlete, a badass going up older in time, having to reinvent in order to stay fresh, active and happy, not even have firsthand experience about what he was talking about with my, with the, the man over him, but he was living in himself and I saw it and he was actually helping me come into my space of reinvention because look, I know along the way that there’s a lot of times where I’ve wanted to quit, there’s been a nexus where you’re like, do I continue to do the thing that I love or do I just leave it alone?

(16:58):

And there actually have been times where I’ve mostly tried to leave it alone, but I want you guys instead to remember the truth, which was, you just have to do the things that you love because you love it. And that’s part of you discovering your reinvention. You gotta do that. Do that for yourself, teach somebody to do it that you care about. Here’s how number one, when you’re looking for the next peak, when you’re looking, figure out the answer to the very short question, what’s next, you gotta start performing adjacent goals to the one you have now, whatever your physical goals might be. I want you to start thinking about performing goals that are only gonna assist the ones you have. Now, if you have cardio goals, you’re gonna work your sprinting. You’re gonna work your stretching in recovery. You’re gonna spend more time doing recovery.

(17:51):

If you’re lifting a lot. I want you to think about competition. I want you to think about keeping your body super active. If you’re lifting really heavy, I want you to also get in there and start doing your high rep high volume stuff, high repetition, do stuff that’s adjacent to the number one, a number one goal for yourself. That’s reinvention because you have this goal, you have this path, but now if you do stuff that assists, you’re branching off into another path. Also both of these places, both of these journeys, these proverbial journeys are going to the same spot. Don’t worry about getting lost. It’s just a different means of getting there, not a shortcut, right? As I speak in kind of semi metaphoric terms, also being very literal. We’re still trying to get to that same destination. We’re just taking a different route. So like I know for a lot of you, something that I can knock you back really easily is that injury status.

(18:51):

Well, I want you to think about injury as not just as a temporary setback, that the story doesn’t end there, but what you’re gonna do to get back after it, cuz there’s a ton of things that we now know, especially in this day and age that you can do to stay active up in this, it was kind of some kind of the modus opera that you just chill, that you’re done. You hurt your back, you hurt your knee. You’re done. This was kind of the process. And a lot of folks that are like, you know, probably millennial or older type age, you were kind of taught that yo, once you, once you get that big injury, right, once you have this type of surgery, you know, you got the meniscus and the labrum and the the cartilage, all of that’s done. And yeah, medical advancements kind of make these things easier to recover from. But the truth is it’s also been medical advancements, but how we apply ’em and how we apply them is taking a lot of time to recover rest and restore our bodies that shift in paradigm has been huge. And that allows athletes that allows athletes to age a lot slower.

(20:11):

All right. So I want you guys to start thinking about writing down, speaking of number two, adjacent goals, number two, write your out. So as of today, I want you to go ahead and get the Mo skin. Go ahead and break out the pen on the side of the phone, right? And bust open that notebook app, type it out. Write your out. I want you to think about a year. I want you to think about a month. I want you to think about a week from today and I want you to get equipped, get the mindset around what your goal is going to be. Now there’s a couple things I want to add for you guys. I want you to think about not just having a five year plan five year plans are great. I think this is like the domain of boomer mentality.

(20:58):

Five year, seven year plans, where everything is laid out for you. And you know, you can get there at the end of the day. I think this harkens back maybe to an istic time where it was easy for us to see that if you just keep marching along and swinging that ax and cracking that cracking that ax on the tree, eventually the tree’s gonna come down, which is to say that if you keep grinding away in the same path, eventually you’ll get to the end goal and you’ll progress. But the thing is times are kind of changed so five year and I’m just the believer that five years is way too far for us to plan out. So I don’t really need you guys to write down five years from now. It’s good to imagine, you know what you wanna do, but just remember anything can happen and yeah, anything can happen in five minutes, let alone five years.

(21:43):

But look, one year for me has always been a good distance from the present to focus on, all right, write your out. One of the dopest things you guys are gonna come across is looking back on that list and being like, oh I did the thing that I said I was gonna do six months ago. And to even take this list, this physical list look at and be like, yo, I accomplished what it was. And it also gives you kind of a nice pathway to getting to that year point, right? It makes everything that’s happening today real and helps you to realistically plot out your goals within a year because there is, has to be a connection between the today and to that year, year and a half point that you set out for yourself. And so what you’re gonna notice is that progression is very, very, very doable, right?

(22:41):

It’s the difference between saying I’m gonna be an astronaut someday, right? When you were young and actually saying, oh wait, I need to get into a good school later on. There’s a very, very different pathways that occur right there. And for a lot of people, it helps us because it helps keep those goals. Not only in what you would call perspective, but it just straight up makes it real. And it’s because there’s a thread between at some point in the future and the now that’s all it is. It is checkers. And that’s all it is. The last thing is this. I want you guys to create professional and personal goals right now. Think about your goals for the next year.

(23:26)

I’m gonna go ahead and guess that if you did this right now, you came up with goals that were either professional or personal. For example, those of you who were like, wait, work, what, what work, what I made my goals already. You mean that thing that I gotta show up for at 9:00 AM on Monday and then leave without going to any of the parties in between, right? That you know, I punch out and just don’t contact me. I have two phones for like, yeah, you guys, you’re the ones that probably made straight up personal goals for you guys. I want you guys to start thinking about how those personal goals tie into your professional ones, thinking about your happiness in your profession is good, but also thinking about the brass tax of what you gotta do every day is important too. Thinking about your profession as a profession, as it might be a pyramid or a web that you have to matriculate up, right?

(24:33):

I’m not talking about a ladder that you have to climb. It’s a web <laugh>, it’s a web that you advance. I want you guys to start thinking about those type of professional goals. Very important, because oftentimes they’re gonna tie into your personal life for your personal life then is gonna be accessed every time you hit up the gym or get on the bike or do whatever it is. And I want you guys to think about that. And then for those of you who can only think about your life in terms of professionalism and have a lot of time putting, shutting down that laptop and you have glasses that automatically block blue light or whatever it is. Listen, I want you guys to think how you’re gonna be a better brother or sister, cousin, friend loved one or relative. I want you guys to think about your life, not just in those means, but also how that helps you.

(25:25):

In fact, maybe even don’t even think about professional goals at all, since they’re already kind of laid out for you. All right? So those are the three moves that you’re going to use in order to reinvent and set new standards for yourself when you’re doing your fit thing. All right. Perform adjacent goals, please. If anything, write your out and think about both professional and personal goals and how they tie into each other. Because look, necessity’s Bastar child is not, is reinvention. Invention is great. Reinvention is what’s gonna keep us super active and keep us in the groove. And I want you guys to work there. I’m gonna stop there. Let me know on ego killer show.com, how that works out for you guys. All right. And go ahead and go to apple podcasts. Spotify, leave a review. If you like this episode, it helps get the word out and until the next one stay up.