 In this episode of Mind Pump, we talk about the most important factor to achieving long-term fitness success. In fact, if you do good with this one factor, your odds of success are extremely high, even if you have no knowledge about exercise and nutrition. We are talking about mindset. Your mindset is literally everything. Now, we learned this as personal trainers. After years and years of training clients, we could clearly see the divide between clients that achieve long-term healthy success and those that were sporadic with their success. We talk about all the different factors that we've observed in our clients with the right kind of mindset. We talk about the driver of self-hate versus the driver of self-care. We talk about the difference between motivation and discipline. We talk about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Then, of course, we talk about how to train your mindset because it just doesn't happen overnight. Of course, it's all going to take time. It takes practice. You will stumble, but if you practice consistently, you'll do very, very well. Now, this episode is sponsored by one of our favorite sponsors, Legion. Legion makes excellent supplements for performance, muscle building, fat loss and health. Right now, as of the dropping of this episode, Legion is doing a massive, massive giveaway. They're giving away two supplement stacks, one to a male and one to a female winner. Here's what's in them, by the way. For the men, you get the pre-workout pulse, you get whey protein, you get recharge post-workout, you get digital copies of both of Mike Matthews' best-selling books, Bigger Leaner Stronger and The Shredded Chef. You get 20 ready-made meal plans for cutting fat and gaining muscle. You get a multivitamin and you get fish oil and a phoenix, what's known as a phoenix fat burner. For women, you get all of that, but you also get digital copies of the books, Thinner Leaner Stronger and The Shredded Chef. Of course, you get the multivitamin designed for women's needs. Here's how you enter into this promotion. It's open until April 12th. Go to the Mind Pump Media Instagram page. So, at Mind Pump Media Instagram page, find the Legion giveaway post, follow the instructions, and you can enter yourself into that contest. By the way, if you want to just go and buy some of their supplements, again, we think his supplements are excellent. His transparency and his labels are incredible. We know what goes into making his products. He doesn't give outlandish claims, very honest, with how his supplements work and what they do and what they don't do. So, if you just want to buy some stuff, go to buylegion.com. That's B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code Mind Pump at checkout. You'll get 20% off if it's your first order. If you're an existing customer, you'll receive double rewards points. Also, this month, two of our most popular programs, Maps Prime and Maps Prime Pro, are both 50% off. Now, they're both correctional, exercise in nature. Maps Prime has a self-assessment tool, helps you design your priming sessions before your workout. So, you have your own movement patterns. You have your own posture deviations. How you prime your body needs to be individualized, and how you prime your body will dictate your range of motion, your muscle connection, and the results you get with whatever workout you're doing. Maps Prime Pro is entirely purely correctional in nature. So, you have areas on your body that may bother you, poor mobility in certain areas. You can find those areas, whether it's your hips or your back or your wrists or your ankles. Find those areas. Do the self-assessment tools. Follow the exercises and movements in the program. By the way, these programs come with exercise demos and instructions. So, there is no guesswork. Here's how you get the 50% off discount on either one of these programs, or both of them. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, that's M-A-P-S-F-I-T-N-E-S-S, products.com, and use the code Prime50. That's P-R-I-M-E-5-0. No space for the discount. By the way, both these programs require no equipment whatsoever. Maybe just a broomstick for one of the assessments. That's it. So, you can do these at home. Again, great programs. So, I was working out this morning, finally, by the way. Oh, yeah. You're hitting it back. They're starting to come back. This is the first week and the first day, actually, where I felt like I could push it a little bit, get a little bit of a pump. I'm staying in the low reps and all that stuff, because my stamina is still low. And when you get in that good workout zone, you just have to have a lot of good ideas. And I was just thinking, the most, what's the most important thing, we've communicated this on the podcast several times, but what's the most important thing that somebody can work on and focus on that will contribute, that has the greatest odds of contributing to success when it comes to fitness, like the greatest odds of contributing to long-term, healthy, fit, build muscle, burn body fat, stay lean, stress-free lifestyle of fitness. And easily, number one, by far, and again, we've mentioned this on the show so many times, is mindset. The mindset that you have around fitness. And this actually took me as a trainer a long time. It took me a long time to really realize this. I think initially, when I first became a trainer, I thought that the most important thing was just do what I say, diet is the most important thing, work out the right way. That's the most important thing. I got to get you all hyped up and motivated. And after training for probably took me, I would say six, seven, maybe even longer years, that I really started to see a divide between my clients. And I started to realize that the most important thing that I could focus on as a trainer and working with my clients, it wasn't teaching them how to exercise properly. It's still important, but it wasn't the most important thing. It wasn't teaching them macros and calories in versus calories out. It was all about working around, and we've mentioned it as psychology, the psychology of it, but really it has to do with mindset. It's interesting because you do think about mechanically what you can do to provide answers for your client coming in. And this is something that I definitely got caught in. I can do this, and we can do these exercises. I can restructure your nutrition plan, so it makes sense for your lifestyle, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And it's like, the further you get in terms of your career, you start making your way up to the mind and really getting into the psychology and the behaviors. And that has just so much more impact on everything else, and it all trickles down from there. And it's like, why don't we start there? It's just a lot of times we don't initially think that it's as powerful as it is. Well, I love this conversation. One of my favorite things to read is psychology. What you see with this is, of all the things that we talk about, how fitness parallels so many other aspects of your life, this is the part that does that the most. Yeah. If you have somebody, and that's why one of my favorite quotes is, how you do anything is how you do everything. And so if you have that client that we've all had, that just has the right mindset and approach, and listens to everything you tell them to really takes heed to the advice that you're giving them, really approaches their fitness goals with the right mindset, it never fails. That same person kills it in business, kills it in relationships, kills it in all other aspects of their life, because they have that, they have the right mindset and approach to their fitness, and it applies to every other aspect of life. And the ones that are kind of a mess that you're constantly having to remind and kind of constantly speaking to their thought process and the way I think those are all the ones too that are all scattered everywhere else in their life. Isn't it funny though that you'd get clients like that, like very sporadically, and you get so excited, like, oh, they get it, like they're doing everything. And you don't realize like you can train that part to the other clients who don't come in with that, you know, type of mentality. That's what took me so long to realize, because I just thought, oh, this client over here is just doing what I say more, and this one doesn't. And then I realized that mindset is the source. It's the root of all the success that you get, long term consistent success that you get in fitness. And what you said, Adam, was that I learned that through training kids. When I would train teenagers, because this happened later on, you know, I'd be training clients and I'd, you know, they'd be parents and eventually they liked that what I was doing a lot and they had kids themselves and say, Hey, would you mind training my son? He's 15 years old or can you train my 17 year old daughter? And I would, and I would, they would always come back to me and rather than commenting and complimenting me on the kid's fitness success, which, you know, that would happen too, but that wasn't the thing that stood out. It wasn't like they came to me and said, wow, my kid is so much stronger. I can see my son's abs now when we go swimming or my daughter's posture. They would say that sometimes, but the thing that blew them away the most was all the other stuff. They would come up to me and say things like my kid's doing better in school now. They're picking different friends. You know, my son doesn't seem to be succumbing to peer pressure anymore. I had one kid that I trained, a 16 year old boy, wasn't doing good in school, had issues with marijuana. In fact, his parents were contemplating sending him to one of those camps where they kidnap you in the middle of the night and take you off in the woods or whatever. You guys hear those? I had a girlfriend and he hit it to their brother. Oh, crazy, right? So they were actually contemplating that. And the step before that was let's get him fit and see what happens to have these conversations with the parent. And he did. He stopped, first he started cutting it back, then he stopped. And I didn't, it's not like I talked to him about it. Like I sat down and talked to him and said, Hey, you shouldn't smoke weed. Hey, you should get your grades. It was communicating mindset through fitness. And what I love about fitness is it's such an easy way to communicate it. Like telling a 16 year old kid to not smoke weed. That's a tough conversation. Good job. I mean, good luck trying to do that. Talking to a 16 year old kid about mindset and why that's going to help them become fit, easier sell. Then when they gain that mindset, then it bleeds over into everything else. I'll make this statement right now. And this is when I want to really hit home for me. Clients who had zero knowledge about fitness, nutrition, and health, but who had the right mindset, consistently outperform my clients that had lots of information, but had the wrong mindset. It was like night and day. I knew, I could tell, I could see clearly this person's going to be successful. This person knows a lot. You know, we would sit there and discuss nutrition and exercise and they've been working out forever and work with trainers forever. This person's not going to succeed. And I would see it, in fact, that's how I started hiring people as a manager later on. I stopped hiring people based off their experience and started hiring people based off the mindset. Somebody has no experience with the right mindset succeeds almost every single. That's why it's so important. And you're right. I saw this with some of my younger clients. One of them being a student that was trying to get back into school and had a really hard time studying and had a really low self-esteem. And this was a mindset that he carried with him through basically everything. Didn't apply that towards relationships with girls and all these types of things. And it's just really interesting to watch everything that transpired after this quest to self-improve. And it just started with the body and just trying to each and every day try to do something to improve the strength, improve the movement and all this. And then led to then being able to start on the rugby team and get back into school, has a girlfriend. It's just like this root that you build off of from there. It's this microcosm for the rest of the life. Just think about all the attributes that made a successful client. And when you look at those attributes and then you unpack it, it always leads back to mindset. 100%. Example, consistency. I think we would all agree that one of the most important things for a client to see incredible results, change physique, hit their goals, is just pure consistency. Now, is that client the one that's super consistent? Are they seeing more results than the other client that's struggling with that? No. They're not seeing anymore. If both have got 12 days of consistency down, is one necessarily seeing more results than the other one? No. It's just that the one that has the right attitude and understands like, hey, this is going to be a process. It might take me a little longer to do this. My coach or my trainer is telling me I got to be consistent with it. I'm going to stick to the plan. I'm going to stay consistent. And that's the mindset that's allowing them to do that. And you can go through every other part of training consistency, the ones that everybody ends up slipping up on a diet. Nobody runs it. No one is perfect. Unless I'm training a competitor that is paying for their food to be monitored for them, average people that are trying to get in shape, everybody has pitfalls or setbacks. But it's the ones that beat themselves up over it and then spiral out of control from that. And then those are the ones that don't have the success. The ones that look at it and go like, oh, it was a hiccup. Tomorrow I'm back on. I'm good. That have that attitude. Again, really unpack that. That's their mindset that they can apply to that. Totally. So one of the biggest, easiest ways to communicate this is through the the initial drive or the impetus for working out. I went through this change myself. What I'm about to talk about. I not only saw in my clients, and this is something that if you've been training people for a very, very long time, you learn this first through your clients, then you apply it to yourself later on. I've said this many times, trainers tend to train their clients and tend to be far more aware of how to get their clients to their goals than they are with themselves. And I experienced this again myself. Now my initial impetus, what really got me to start working out, if I really boil it down to the root was I hated my body. I didn't like it. I was really skinny. I was a skinny kid. Insecurities. Insecure. I heard all the comments, you know, bony and stick legs and whatever. Skeletor, this is back when He-Man was around. Skeletor. That's a good one. And it got to the point where if you just said the word skinny, it was like an ice pick, you know, in my gut. Like I hated it. So that was my initial impetus for working out. Now, self-hate can be a very powerful motivator. Definitely can. But that road leads to failure, because what it leads to and what it led me through were workout methods that were too intense. Workout methods that served more as punishment than they were as things that would help me. It was more about punishing my body, hating my shoulder, killing my shoulders, hating my chest, destroying it, like just not liking my body. It led to feeding myself through motivation of self-discuss. You're so skinny, force feed. You're so skinny, take these supplements. Don't give a shit about which one's healthy, which one's not healthy. I don't care. I just hate myself. It drove me to make a lot of bad decisions. Now, in extreme cases, the way that self-hate looks in some people is anabolic steroids for men, plastic surgery for women. And the problem with self-hate is it never, ever, ever ends. It never ends. It never gets satisfied. No, we all know the guy that takes tons of gear, force feeds himself. He's 240 pounds. He's jacked. He hates it. He hates the way he looks. Still too skinny. I need more. I need more. I'm going to push my, or the other person who, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, after a procedure, and it's never enough, that road is a road to failure. And I saw it with my clients, and I definitely saw it with myself. Well, I want to make it clear, though, that it's not as obvious as it sounds like the way you're presenting it right now, though. It doesn't present itself as like, I know you didn't do this, and I know I didn't do this. I wasn't like, oh, I hate myself. I was a positive person. I was confident, too. It's insidious, isn't it? Exactly. It's such a deep-rooted insecurity that it really motivates the behaviors, but it wasn't like I was having this time. I didn't go in the gym. You were looking in the mirror and like, yeah. No, I was like, I looked in the mirror and said like, I'm going to go train hard. I was positively motivating myself to go do it, but it was rooted in an insecurity. Yes, yes. That's what makes it so hard. Insidious is the right word for it, because that's what it is. It's not something that is so surface level and clear that someone listening right now is like, oh, yeah, no, I don't have that, because I don't talk to myself that way. Or I'm not, no, you have to really unpack your behaviors and go like, why am I doing those things? Now, here's why it's so insidious, because a lot of the behaviors that come out of that can be looked at as positive. Yeah, positive. What do you mean? I'm working out. What do you mean? I'm just eating healthy. What do you mean? I'm just pushing myself. That's a good thing. Well, I know the obvious one is definitely your body and image and visually what you look like, but it can also take the form of being inadequate in terms of my performance isn't as good as my competitors. I'm worthless because I can't perform this specific thing, or my game was shit because I didn't do what I was supposed to do, and that used to drive the hell out of me and didn't realize that that was something that overly consumed my thoughts, even so when I was in off-season or I had a really bad performance would carry with me. And then that mentality, then when I'm not playing sports, that does not serve you. That is not a good mentality to carry around with yet. And sure, it seems like it does, because it does produce. If you're really hard on yourself and you want to hammer things out and improve and get better for that reason, you can get so far, but when you make a mistake, it really sets you back. It does. And think about it this way. And by the way, self-flagellation and self-punishment can actually feel good when it's rooted in hate, because you get this feeling of satisfaction. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. It's like, you know, maybe this happened to you, right? You binged, you ate a burrito, a bunch of tortilla chips and cookies and stuff, and you're like, after you're done, right? After you're done with the mindless eating, you start to feel shame and disgusted and you're like, you know what, tomorrow I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to fuck shit up. I'm going to go on the treadmill and I'm going to, and then you do, you go to the gym and you beat yourself up so hard you almost throw up and you're super, super sore. And I feel satisfied because now you beat down that shame. That leads to destruction. And in using myself as an example, this happened in my, this was in my late 20s, early 30s. This was after I'd already been working out for 15 years and after I'd already been training people for over 10 years. And the way I'd learned this was my body literally rebelled. I was forced. I developed severe gut health issues. I lost 15 pounds, couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with me, go into doctors. Here I was insecure about my body and now I'm losing 15 pounds. I thought I knew everything of diet and exercise and I had to force myself to stop caring about the way I looked. I had to. I had to say to myself, I don't care how I look, I just want to get healthy. I'm over this. And then I focused on health and what that led me to was I need to work out to take care of myself. My body needs to be taken care of. I need to eat in a way that takes care because it's obviously not healthy. After a year of that, I healed my body and I had this huge realization. I'll never forget what one of the strategies I had leading into this was I stopped paying attention to my image, my reflection in the mirror. I just didn't look at myself. And by the way, this is not that uncommon. I've trained many, many people who really obese or whatever, and they tell me I just, I don't, I don't look in the mirror. I don't really pay attention to how I look. I don't take my clothes off and stare at myself. I avoid that. Well, I did that. And in that year, I was at a friend's house. We were, you know, going swimming and I went to the bathroom and I caught a glimpse of my body off of the reflection of another mirror. So it wasn't something I could avoid. I just saw it. And I, for the first time, I looked at myself and I realized something that blew me away. I looked better than I did before when I was just beating the shit out of myself. And that's when I realized, holy cow, motivating myself through self-care not only feels better emotionally, it actually produces better results because you're more likely to make the right decision. You know, somebody who goes to the gym motivated by self-hate and, you know, let's say you go to the gym and your hips are sore, your knees hurt. You may say to yourself, ah, I'm going to blast through that. I don't care. Like I need to, I need to change this body. Somebody who has a self-care mindset will go to the gym and say, my knees are sore. I think I need to work on mobility. I think I need to change my exercise order, which incidentally produces better results. It's an example of how that mindset switch. It's smarter. It's smarter. You work out better. Your nutrition is better more consistently and you suffer from less of those extreme, you know, on one end I'm highly, highly focused and disciplined because that's, here's what happens too at some point. At some point you can't hate yourself anymore. At some point you're sick of hating yourself. And then you say this, how many, how many times have you guys, yeah, how many times have you guys heard this from a client? You know, I don't care. I just want to enjoy myself. I just want to, I just want to have fun. I just want to love, you know, eating cupcakes. I just want to live life. You know why people say that? You know why you may have said that? Because hating yourself after a while sucks. And it feels like it feels like an escape. When you finally go off of it, you're like, fuck it. I just want to live my life. It's because you were hating yourself when in reality, taking care of yourself feels good. It always feels good. You don't have that opposite approach. I love the point that you make that it promotes bad behaviors when it comes from this place. And I love that. Again, this is so parallel to other parts of your life. Like what comes to mind for me personally is I think of like, much of my financial success in my 20s was deeply rooted in my insecurities of what I came from. I didn't want to be poor. I didn't want to be in the situation that my parents were in. And that, and it got me really far. And that's what's so dangerous about this is, and I think examples in fitness, we see this a lot with some of the greatest fitness physiques that we see out there. Most, a lot of those people have some of the deepest rooted insecurities. That's what drove them to that level. They've been so insane about it for so many decades that they've built this incredible shell of a physique that's hiding these deep insecurities. And I think of all the decisions that I made financially because I was projecting my own insecurities. I wanted other people to know that I had made it and I'm wealthy, so I was spending money on my friends. And it started to do all these other things that had cascading effects that ended up backfiring on me years later, all because it was driven from the insecurity of I didn't want to be poor, I didn't want this to happen. And then when that got flipped, it completely changed my whole financial situation because it no longer was that important to me and it wasn't driven from the insecurity. So it's not just what we see with bodies and fitness and image, but other aspects of your life if, and that's why I always tell people that many times your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, not just in the gym world. And when you learn to look at it like that, you learn so much more about yourself. Like, yeah, I'm really successful at celebrating all your success, but you know, how often do we ask ourselves like, well, why am I really good at this? Or why am I so successful at this? Am I happy for real? Right. And because that's what we find a lot too, is we set these goals, whether it be personal, financial, fitness goals, and we drive so hard at them. And a lot of times people, this is where like depression kicks in, they reach that goal, they get there, and they're still not happy. They weren't happy because they were driven by something that didn't make them happy. They were driven by an insecurity. That's one of the worst, by the way, that's one of the most painful realizations. If you look at people who seem to have it all, like celebrities, you know, celebrities are an example. Lots of money, lots of fame, lots of power. The suicide rate. Yeah. Access to everything. Access to sex. I have sex with whoever I want. I'm famous. Drugs, people bring me whatever drugs I want. I could travel anywhere. I got this beautiful house, amazing cars, all this attention. Everybody, you know, tells me they love me. And then the suicide rate is so high. And I think it's because if you're driven by these negative feelings toward yourself, and then you get, like it's like this, look, imagine if you're, you hate your body so much that that's what drives you to work out. You can't stand the way you look. You're disgusted with your body. And you think to yourself, you know what? If I just, I got to look perfect. And then you win a high level bikini competition or bodybuilding competition. Now what? Yeah. Are you, did you solve your issue? No. Where do I go from here? I've already hit the pinnacle. Yeah. And it didn't feed me the way I wanted it. It's not sustainable. No, it feels terrible. What's, what the hell is going on? So mindset is in this part of mindset is extremely important. If you go to the gym or you work out at home and you think to yourself, how can I take care of this body versus what do I hate about myself? And because I hate it, I'm going to change it. If you, if you change that to the other one, to the self care one, your decisions will be better. Your progress will be more consistent. And it would lead to the next big factor. And this is a huge one, which is the difference between the mindset of motivation and the mindset of discipline. This is a very, very, very big one. The, the motivation mindset is this. I got to get hyped. I got to get motivated. And that's going to get me excited. And then I'm going to work out. And this is going to be great. The trouble with the motivation mindset is motivation goes away. It always does fleeting. Nobody's ever always motivated all the time. It goes eventually, it goes away. And then what ends up happening is you stop. So you stop long enough until motivation kicks back in. Oh, now I'm motivated again. Now I'm ready to work out. And the fitness, and by the way, the fitness industry, because we're the consumers drive all industries, right? So this is how people get themselves to work out as they wait for these waves of motivation. The fitness industry capitalizes on it. So the workouts that they design and the way that they, that they talk about diet is all based off of motivation. It's like, Oh, now you're motivated. Excellent. Here's a five, six day a week intense, you know, super awesome urban cowboy, you know, dance program that's going to keep you, you know, working out. Or here's, here's a group exercise class that beats you up and everybody in the class is just like you. They all get this wave of motivation and they're ready to work out. It's that mindset and the same thing with diet. Like, Oh, how many times you guys heard this from people like, you know what, that's it. I'm going to lose 30 pounds. They go home and they change everything all at once. I'm throwing everything away. I'm buying only healthy food. And you know, for sure, they're going to fail. It's literally like fire. Like you created a fire that's burning right now, but you have to keep constantly throwing logs on it. It's going to fucking burn out. It burns out. Motivation burns out. And then what? Well, I think this is, I think we're all guilty of this, especially in our, probably our first five, maybe even 10, for sure the first five years, maybe some, I think somewhere between five and 10 is when this really started to come together for me. And I think for me, it was, I don't think I had the knowledge, the experience that I really needed to truly help people the way I did. And motivation is just an easy default from that. It's like, I didn't have quite enough experience to have said, man, I've trained a hundred clients just like you. I've trained a hundred other clients and to be able to really help this person. So the go-to move is what I can do though is rah-rah, excite them. Razzle dazzle. That's right. Razzle dazzle them with, you know, different types of exercises and hype and motivation and like pump them up. And, you know, I'm a positive guy. I'm loud. You know, I've got personality like that. I could do this. And again, it served me. I was getting clients and I had my book was full and I was doing well, but I really wasn't giving people long lasting results. Sure, if you were, if you locked in with me for six months and you booked out all your appointments for six months, I was going to fire you up and pick you up every day. You're getting a show. Right. And that, it only, it got me so far, but it got, man, I got tiring after a while. I got tired. I got tired of being a, this cheerleader and knowing that like 80% of the people would end up going right back to where they were when they first started with me eventually. Totally. It's, it's a tough one. It really is because if, look, by the way, we're not saying that motivation is bad. And I'm not saying that, that trainers who, who inspire their clients and motivate are doing something wrong. It's the reliance upon it and it's the focus on it. It's the motivation mindset. That is the problem because we all go through periods of different feelings and different drives. And when that motivation does kick in, it's great. That's when things are easy. By the way, I've never, ever had to talk of client and to be consistent when they were really motivated. I've never had to, you know, teach a client how to, you know, like this is what you need to do with your diet. Don't, you know, make sure you don't go up when they're motivated. It's easy. You're motivated. Of course it's when you're not that it becomes a challenge. Now think of all the things in your life that you're most consistent with. Think of all the things that you do every single day, no matter what. Are you motivated to brush your teeth every morning? Are you motivated to take a shower every morning? Are you always motivated to show, you know, if you have a successful marriage, are you always motivated to show your spouse that you love them? I guarantee no. If you've been married for a long time, there's going to be times when the motivation to show your spouse you love them is not there. I don't want to show, but you know what? If you have a successful marriage, you're probably disciplined enough to do it. That's the discipline mindset. So the discipline mindset says this, I am going to take care of my body and exercise regularly, whether I'm motivated to do it or not. My motivation is, it's great when I'm motivated, but when I'm not motivated, it's not going to stop me. And I think, I think the important point to make to that is that sometimes that it, you know, when it's, when it's rooted in self-care and because you love yourself, sometimes you don't have the motivation, but you do it out of the discipline. But sometimes the discipline too, doesn't mean that you have to like kill yourself every time. No. You know, sometimes it means like, oh man, I just, my body aches today. I feel tired. I just got bad news about someone, someone close to me that's got COVID right now. I'm thinking about it. So that, you know what though, if I just go for a walk or I spend an hour of doing yoga or, you know, maybe I'm just going to work on getting better squats today and do, like there's nothing wrong. It's not like if you don't do the program, you don't follow your maps, anabolic, you know, phase two workout, like you failed. It's like, no, it's just, you go and you take, you, you service your body one way. And sometimes the part of that, the minds connect to that. Sometimes it's meditation you need. Maybe you've got this issue where you've got a lot of anxiety that's starting to build up or you're, you're, you're stressed about family and all that. So maybe actually beating yourself up in the gym that day, isn't the best way to serve your body. And, and you know that because you're really not motivated to do that, but don't not take care of yourself. Still feed something else, feed another part of your body or take care of another part of your body that is going to, that's going to help you. So it doesn't always have to be this, you know, my goal to lose 15 pounds or my goal to build 15 pounds of muscle. And so, you know, I got to be disciplined. Like Sal said, every single day, not miss a workout. No, sometimes you're working in, you know, sometimes you're working inside versus working on the, your physical aspect. Yes. And so here's the big, here's the big difference with, with, between motivation and mindset. Okay. The motivated person, all, when they're motivated, loves the workouts. Okay. I love my workout because I'm motivated. I love my diet right now because I'm motivated. The disciplined person loves the discipline. Okay. There's a big difference there. The discipline person doesn't always love the workouts. Sometimes they don't like the workouts, but they love that they'd love being disciplined. This is very different. I, I had a client, probably the client for me that really exemplified this more than any others was a client that I trained. His name was Jim, Doug knows Jim. In fact, Jim helped us film the original maps in a block. This was a client that I had for a very, very long time. And he was in his late sixties. I've talked about him before. I don't think I've ever said his name. Very fit, very healthy. You know, he got his testosterone levels checked at late, you know, late sixties. It was in the high seven hundreds. Yeah. He was, you know, he was lean. He was, you know, strong, you know, great guy, just extremely consistent and had been working out and swimming and exercising since his early thirties and never stopped, right? Just never stopped. And I would ask him this and I'd say, no, Jim, how the hell have you all, have you been so consistent for so long? I said, you must just love swimming because he used to swim. This guy would swim, you know, like I think one or two miles, almost every single day, for example, said, you must just love swimming. And I remember he said, I thought this was, I did not expect. I thought he would say to me like, yes, I love swimming. Swimming is my favorite thing in the world. He said, sometimes I love it. I'm like, what do you mean? Sometimes I don't like it. Sometimes I don't like the way it feels. Sometimes I'm tired. Sometimes I'm swimming and I'm just slow and I got to go, you know, a half a mile, a still a mile. He says, it's not that I love the swimming. He goes, I love the discipline. He goes, it's just the part of my day. What it produces. Yeah. He goes, I just love the fact that I have the structure and I wake up in the morning and I go to the gym and I'm just, I'm disciplined. He goes, sometimes he goes, I, of course, sometimes I really, really enjoy what I'm doing. He goes, but a lot of times I don't, he goes, but I just don't stop. He goes, and I remember hearing that from somebody who exemplified it. So when I thought, gosh, that's, that's the secret right there. Well, I know we all like listen and have read books by Jordan Peterson kind of touches on this a bit, but like order and chaos, like there's things that you can control. And, and something like this that, you know, provides structure discipline is something that, you know, it's always there under your control. And it's something that you can lean on that and that feels good because that provides freedom now. Like the thing about the motivation is it's, it's a roller coaster. It's always up. It's always down. It's always up. It's always down. That's stressful. You know, that makes you anxious. Like there's a lot of anxiety that goes with that. And I just, yeah, there's going to be days where you're not going to want to do it, but having that sort of structure established, it just provides a result that, you know, will always benefit you and you will feed off that. Well, the secret is it's very similar to how we talk to people about nutrition. It's learning to connect those behaviors to other aspects that it feeds in your life. For example, like we talk all the time about like, you know, making good food choices. And is, you know, instead of always connecting it to weight loss, up and down the skill, it's thinking about all the other things, my stool, my energy, my sleep, how does it affect that? Well, having good discipline at taking care of yourself, which could encompass a lot of things, reading, walking, meditating, yoga, stretching, hard training session, all those are taking care of yourself. It's not always connecting it to results. Like what, like physical results, what am I, did I build X a pound a muscle or did I lose the weight I needed to lose? Sometimes it's, it's, did it give me like a break from my day? Sometimes it is, did it open up this creative thought process in my head? Did it make me think about the things that I really value in my life? There's a lot of other aspects of being consistent with taking care of yourself every day, bleeds into other than just physical results. And sometimes a lot of times in the fitness space, that's what we get with clients. They come in and it's like, I want to look a certain way. I want to lose a certain amount of weight. I want to build so much muscle. And they're so focused on that that their success to them of a workout has to be making this huge progress towards that goal in order for it to be worthwhile doing it. And it's like, no, that's not true. That's not why you eat good. It's not just so you can look a certain way. It's also because it feeds all kinds of other aspects of your life. The same thing goes for when you're taking care of yourself, fitness wise. Sometimes it's not about, did you get closer to that strength goal, that weight loss goal? Sometimes it's what your body needed that time for other parts of your life. And so along those lines is sometimes not working out taking care of yourself? Yes. Is sometimes eating a cookie taking care of yourself or having a glass of wine taking care of yourself? Yes. When you have the right mindset, now these tools are used appropriately, which is one of the hallmarks of a fitness person who is motivated and has the wrong mindset is the person who never veers off, who is so stringent with their diet that going off, going to a restaurant, going on vacation stresses them out. Oh my god, I'm going on vacation. How am I to get my perfect meals? How am I to get my macros? How am I going? They're missing out on the big picture. And look, here's another way to talk about this. I've heard this before and I think this makes a lot of sense. And psychologists talk about this. It's the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. So the difference between the two of those is growth mindset says the way I behave, the way I think about things, the way I am is moldable. I believe I can change. I believe I can grow. I believe I can change my mindset. The fixed mindset says this is just how I am. This is how I am. It's never going to change. I can't. It won't. There's nothing I can do to change. This is just the way things are. Now, we have studies on this and they're very, very clear. People with the growth mindset have much higher positive outcomes in everything. Anything, whether it's business, family life, or fitness. Let me put it this way. If I have a client that comes in and they say to me, look, it's just the way I am is the way I am. Nothing's ever going to change. Actually, they probably wouldn't even hire me. But even if they did, I've worked with clients with the fixed mindset. And they say to me, look, I'm not going to be able to change my diet. It's just the way it is or whatever. And I understand the whole acceptance part, but that's very different from the person that says, I know it's going to be hard, but I believe in my ability to make changes. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be a struggle, but I am growth-minded. I know that I can accomplish things through effort, through work. It's possible. You have to believe it's possible for it to even happen. If you believe it's not possible, if you say to yourself, these permanent changes are never going to happen. It's just not going to happen. You're right. You're right. That's a quote from Henry Ford, whether you believe you can or you can't. You're probably right. You're probably right. Belief is so important with this. And so having that mindset of, I can change. It doesn't mean it's easy, by the way. I think you have to acknowledge that change is difficult. That's a very important thing. But you've got to believe that it's possible. Otherwise, you're stuck. I also think that a growth mindset too requires the ability to question everything that you do. I think that, and I think Lewis Howells touched on this in his mini-mass book or whatever. I forget the title of it. But a lot of times, when you're doing well or you're hitting goals, you're following your meal plan, you're not questioning anything because you're doing what you're supposed to do. But sometimes that is rooted in the insecurities that we're talking about. So you first have to have the ability to question everything that you do and why do you do it and ask yourself. It's something that to this day, I am always challenging myself on. Even when things go right and well, that's when it's hardest. It's easy when shit fucked up and you're at the bottom of a barrel and you're sitting there going like, why, where did this go wrong? Some people have that ability. Like, shit fucked up, now let's unpack this, let's figure out why and try and work on that. But man, when you get to the next level, you even question the things that go right and well in your life. Do you have the ability to question yourself, why did that play out that way or why did I respond that way or why did I say that or why am I doing this and really look to your true motivators behind that? To me, that's where the real growth comes is in the areas that we're blinded because we have this false perception of success. And to me, talking about fitness and comparing that, the greatest examples are some of the people that we look up most to in the fitness space, the people that are on covers of magazines that we all, not we all, but many people worship and idolize and look up to and think that, oh, they're killing it in life because it looks all great. But man, when you dive deeper into those people, those are the people that have avoided questioning their true motivators and why they do what they do. You're right, because if you're sitting in a situation where you're shredded, you're muscular, you are consistent with your diet, but so super consistent and your workouts never miss a workout, it's really hard to look at yourself and say, why am I, like, what's driving this, right? Because you're getting the results and from the outside, people think you're doing a good job and it's easy to fool yourself, but you're absolutely right, Adam, because in my early days, that would have been me. I would have never questioned what was driving me to work out so hard and what was driving me to follow a particular diet. I wasn't questioning, what was driving me didn't matter. It was getting great results. I didn't question it until my body rebelled. That's when I had to question it, but had I questioned it when I was doing good, I would have never hit that roadblock. I would have never been run over by that, my body's rebellion, that happened to me. I'm going to keep going, because here's the thing, I was lucky that the way that my body rebelled was in a way that I could fix and reverse. I know people who, the reminder was severe and permanent, where they ignored a lot of signals and it got to the point where things went really, really bad and things they couldn't recover from. That's a great point. Well, it's because it's the ego. The things that feed the ego are the most difficult to look into. That feels good. If I look good, I'm doing good. I'm not challenging what my motivation is behind this. I'm succeeding, I'm winning, and that's all ego shit. Those are the times though, when I think it matters most to really look deeper into what's driving and pushing. Yeah, and I think this speaks into how distractible we are as well. We don't want to self-reflect. 100%. Being calm, quiet, and not having any outside stimulus and things to focus on besides just yourself and your inner thoughts and besides what you look like, how do you think? How do I think about things in life? When hardship comes and what's my mentality through all these things, you need to create the space for that. I know we're going to get into this with the next points, but this is something that I just don't feel like the environment that we have today really promotes this. No, actually, it's funny. Just the other night, I did my Q&As and people were asking me about the positive things that I've seen since COVID. It's funny because the news promotes all the bad shit, but I actually have seen a lot of really cool positive things. And what I think it is, is that we're forced to have this quiet time that we haven't had before, and people are starting to reevaluate things that they value. Dude, I've never seen so many people outside of my life. I've never seen so many people play with their kids. Sunshine feels great. Play with their kids, take walks with their spouses, smile and wave at neighbors when they walk by. It's courteous to each other in the grocery store. Thanking the fucking butcher. I was in line in my butcher line. Five fucking people came up and thanked the butcher. Thank you for doing your job. We appreciate it. It gets me chills because it renewed my faith in humanity is what it is, is we live in such a distracting world today. It makes us shitty. All these, it does. It does because we don't stop, but we are good in our root. I believe we're good. Like I believe that when, when we do cut out all the shit, we're forced to sit in our own shit at home. And, and you start to think that way. And you go, fuck, you know what? I got healthy kids right here. I'm so lucky. I've got, I still got a job. I'm fortunate. Yeah. And so it does really start to shift. And I'm watching this happen right now. I'm seeing entrepreneurs that were stuck doing kind of the same thing forever, reinventing themselves and doing two different things. There's a lot of really good things that are happening. And it's, it's tough when you turn on the goddamn news or you open up social media, because the things that get shared in the most viral are the things that are negative and alarming and scary. But we are seeing because we're all being forced to be very present right now. It's pretty wild. It's, you know, I'll give you, here's a good example. Jessica in some ways is a great example. She grew up, and I hope she doesn't mind me sharing this, but she grew up poor. She grew up without much, moved quite a bit, you know, raised by a single mom for a while, and then, you know, stepped out or whatever. They, you know, hiding from the bill collectors, don't answer the phone, you know, gotta move so we can't pay this, lights get turned off, and that kind of stuff. Now, if you ask her about her childhood, I mean, at one point, she slept, no joke. Her bed was a old recliner because she, they couldn't afford a bed, right? Now, if you ask her about how, how life was growing up, you know what she says? It was fun. Oh man, it was so fun. I got to sleep on a recliner. Oh, you know, moving around was really cool because I got, one time we lived in this big house that, you know, we shared with other people and there were these hidden, and she talks about it like it was a fun time. In fact, not that long ago, the lights went out in my house. I got all pissed off, right? Power went out and I, you know, California sometimes does that because they're idiots. And I was all pissed off and she's like, oh my God, this is so fun. We get to light candles and we get to have a good, and it was, I realized like, because if you talk to people who grew up with her, they have a very negative, you know, opinion about how things were. It's like, it's like two different stories. Like, what the hell? But they all grew up the same. Her attitude is what made her, and her mindset is what made her come out of that. You know, far less, far more unscathed than other people. It was the mindset. It's all about reframing your perspective. There's a silver lining in everything. And the people that have the right mindset have this ability, no matter how dark it is, how bad it is on the outside or what everybody else sees, they have the ability to see the silver lining in all those things. And so this is the thing that her and I are most connected in. That's why Jessica and I get along so well is that I think that we can relate to each other, because we have this in common that, you know, I look at my childhood, and I don't know if she's like this, but a good part of my teenage years and early twenties, I wasn't this way. I was, you know, angry at my parents. I had resentment, animosity, and my life completely changed when I flipped that perspective. And I thought, you know what's crazy though? If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have done this. It wasn't for those things. I wouldn't have been like this. If I wasn't like, if I didn't go through that, I wouldn't be able to have empathy for these people. If I went, and all of a sudden I started to see like all the positive things that happened because I went through that. And then all of a sudden I became grateful. Like, oh my God, I'm so grateful that it was that shitty then because now when as an adult and a man almost 40, when like road bumps happen or things, and I'm like, this ain't shit. Yeah, you're chill. Yeah, really. You have that ability to be that way. So, yeah, that to me is, man, some of the secret sauce of success is, I believe a lot of the most successful people I've ever met have always been able to reframe the situation that they're currently in. Now, here's an important thing that I want to communicate about this. It doesn't happen automatically for most of us. Okay, it's far easier. It's far easier to have the negative fixed, you know, blame everything else mindset. That's a really easy one. It's self-serving. It absolves your responsibility because now actually temporarily makes you feel good. It does because, oh, I don't, it's not my fault. I can't do anything about it. So, and I feel good for a second because now I don't have to change it because change is hard, right? So this is not something that happens overnight. So it's not like you can listen to this podcast and be like, oh, that's it. Boom, switch. Doesn't work that way. You got to train it just like the following. Just like if you listen to a podcast that we put out on how to get a better squat, right? You're not going to hear what we say immediately have an awesome squat. You got to go to the gym or go in your garage and practice, practice, practice. You got to practice frequently. You got to practice often and you got to practice perfect. And you got to do this on a consistent long-term basis. And over time, you develop a far better squat. And then over time, you develop an awesome squat. So this mindset is not going to happen overnight. This mindset requires awareness and conscious training. So I'll give you an example of the conscious training. So, and you got to be aware first, right? So you look in the mirror and you look at yourself. Oh, God, I'm disgusting. What did I just say? What did I just think to myself? Become aware. Okay. I'm aware of what I just said. I got to say something positive about myself now. By the way, don't lie. I don't want you to lie. I've told this to clients before. I'm like, well, I can't say something positive about my belly because I'm like, I don't care. Say something positive about something that's real. So maybe you look in the mirror and you say, oh, I'm disgusting. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. That was negative mindset. That was a fixed mindset. That was self-hate. Let me think of something good to say, you know what? I'm a really good friend. You know what? I'm a really good mom. You know, I'm a kind person or I really, I really do try hard. Offset it. Say something consciously to train that mindset. Your, the learning process doesn't go to, right away to automatic. It doesn't go to, look, before you could walk without thinking about walking, like if you're an adult, you probably stand up walking around. I'm guarantee you're not thinking about taking a left step, taking a right step, got a balance, don't fall. You just walk, right? You walk. You could think about whatever you could eat to sandwich. You could talk to your friends while you're walking. But when you first learned how to walk, when you were a baby, you ever watch a baby learn how to walk? They're paying attention. Every, they have to consciously think about what they're doing. That's, that's the, that's the first phase before it becomes automatic. So you have to train yourself and it all starts with awareness. Now there are practices that can help a lot with this. Stoicism is a great ancient philosophy. It's not rooted in, you know, mysticism. You don't have to believe in spiritual, you know, gods or anything like that. It's just a philosophy, but a big part of stoicism is accepting what you can't change and then focusing on what you can. Oh, that's a really big one. I just respond another question I had. Somebody asked me how I was dealing with the anxiety over everything that's going on. I said, I don't have anxiety. That's wasted energy on things that I, focusing on the controllables. That's something I can't control. I can't control COVID-19 spreading all over the place. I can do what I can control the best, which is shelter in place, wash things, stay healthy, eat good, exercise. I focus all of my energy on the controllables, the things that are uncontrollable in my life. You just accept it. It is what it is. And what happens is many people get stuck on the uncontrollables, pondering them, stressing over them, having anxiety over them, trying to worry about them, talking about them to their friends, gossiping about you. That is all wasted energy that can be put towards doing something to better your own life. 100%. So when they do studies on people who have like terminal diseases or whatever, they've done these studies now with like psychedelics, like mushrooms or MDMA. And they're finding that with therapy and these psychedelic substances, that these, because one of the big, the hallmarks of knowing you're going to die soon is extreme depression and anxiety. I've seen this firsthand. I had somebody close to me who was terminal and you see this process. It's like, that's one of the most painful parts. You know, it's terminal. Now you get anxious for the unknown. Oh my god, I'm going to die before, way before I thought I would. I'm depressed from all this. So it's a very painful time. Lots of antidepressants, lots of anxiety, medicines, lots of pain pills. And so when they do these therapies with these psychedelics and a therapist, these people are coming out and they're, they're, they're at peace. They're all of a sudden, they're not depressed, not anxious. And you asked them, when they asked them, what was it, they'll say to you, I just accepted it. I was just able to accept it. Now I'm not saying go take psychedelics to do this. I'm saying the key is the acceptance part. Another thing that helps with that is a spiritual practice. If you talk to people who are religious, truly, like really religious, like really, you know, they follow their religion. They really live it. They're not the hypocrites or the people we don't like or whatever, you know, the good people, you talk to them and they tend to be, you know, it's not like they don't feel sad or they don't get scared or that kind of stuff. Well, they're very stoic about things. They're, they, they, you know, like I have somebody I knew, I know who lost a child and, you know, and they're, but they're very religious. And of course they were sad and it was terrible. But, you know, they, they, they couldn't control what happened. And for them, what they said was, is they, that's, that wasn't, that's in God's hands. And they just, they let go of something that they couldn't control and that dramatically and greatly reduced a lot of their pain. So spiritual practices is another one. So if you, if you, if you like the mystic, mysticism, if you want to believe in those types of things, then the spiritual practice is one way to train your mindset. It's one way to achieve a more successful mindset. And, and letting go doesn't necessarily mean not doing anything either. Right. You know, like, Yeah, like sitting at home. Right. I mean, I think about like, so something that like that I think about, right, is, you know, there's, there's a very good chance that we are going to see serious economical ramifications from this COVID-19. That's a fact. Now me dwelling just on that and going, Oh my God, what if the housing market goes down 50% and we lose equity in this and what if I lose my job? What if, if, if I spend all my time just worrying about that, then it's wasted energy that I could be putting towards being creative and thinking, okay, that like, okay, there's a good chance it's going to happen. Let's pretend it happened now, right now, and it's this moment. What am I doing to pivot and think of things that I can be creating still revenue for myself or making sure that my family has food? Like you cannot be stressing and worrying about that because it's sucking energy from what you could be possibly doing. Reminds me of the joke where the guy, there's this guy that prays every day to win the lottery. Every day I pray, please, God, let me win the lottery. Let me win the lottery. And finally he dies one day. Never wins a lottery. He dies, goes up to heaven. And he, and God, you know, he sees God and he goes, I got one question for you, God. He goes, every day I pray to win the lottery and I never won it. And God says, you never bought a lottery ticket. Like you never, you never took action. You know how you can't win unless you buy a lottery ticket. I love that. Yeah. Here's another thing you can do that will help train your mindset. Cold and hot therapy is effective at this. Now there's the physiological effects of it, how it strengthens the body and all that stuff. But a big part of this, a big reason why some people can go longer in the cold or the hot is because they don't, they accept the uncomfortable aspect of it. Yeah. This is something that I mean, I've stressed this a few times about cold therapy and ice baths in general about when you're in that situation, you can't rely on your own initiatives of tightening and bracing and like bearing down and getting through it. You have to accept how cold it is and you have to get into a calm state. A calm state benefits you so much more in the admits, like the highest performers, athletics wise, the ones at the top, the superstars know how to find that calm state under pressure. So like your Michael Jordan's, everything is relying around this last second shot. And right, the buzzer beater, right? This is something that not a lot of people have this ability. It's something that you have to train and you have to immerse yourself in. And so, and again, this is something too, like people don't realize that even after training, it's, I'm going through this stress to better myself, but also I have to recover from that stress in order to then propel myself forward. So you could take it down just to the workout level. I worked out hard. Now, how am I going to recover? How do I find this calm state? This calm state is something a lot of people neglect. And this has to be trained. This can be trained through hot cold therapy. This can be trained through meditation and breathing practices. Meditation is a big one because if you're stuck in a loop of the wrong mindset, sometimes it can be really hard to get out of it because you're so frozen by this bad mindset. And so sometimes what you need is a break from it long enough to where you can become aware, examine your mindset and change it. Meditation does that. Meditation is the practice of being present. And essentially what it's doing is it's giving you a break. It's giving you a long enough break from this looping thoughts, this poor mindset state, long enough to where you can look at the new mindset. Now, I've gotten this break. Now, how do I, now that I'm done with meditating, let me move forward with this better mindset. Now, and there's tool, by the way, there's tools out there to help you. Meditating is hard, requires practice. We're talking about how you need to train your mindset. One thing that I found that helps a lot. There's a lot of meditation apps that help. Brain FM, brain.fm is my favorite. There are guided meditations on there and there's unguided ones. And then they play sounds that actually help physically, physiologically put your brain in the meditative state. And for me, it was a tool that, because meditating is so hard. If I sit there quietly, I'm just thinking about everything. It's impossible. That helped me quite a bit. My favorite way to break that loop that you're talking about, because let's be honest, it's not like fear doesn't creep in any of our minds. It's not like no one in here has it. Absolutely. But the way I break that loop when I can't, if I'm trying to meditate and I can't get out of thinking about, oh my God, what is, is accept that worst case scenario right then, right then and there. You know what? It did all happen. I lost my job. I have no money. This I can't pay rent. Okay. The question now is, what do I do? What the fuck can I do right now? Instead of waiting and thinking and pondering, like, okay, if my greatest fear is X, Y and Z could happen, let's pretend it did. It just happened. Now what am I doing about it? And now focus all my energy on that and my thought process on that. Get creative. What can I do? What are the switch right there and accept it? The minute you do that, that's how you break that loop. Totally. So I think the key with that is to train and practice your mindset. It won't change overnight. It takes time. It's daily practice. And like anything that you practice, like the first time you tried to ride a bike or, you know, use roller blades or do anything, you fell, you stumbled. Be okay with that. You're not going to automatically have the right mindset. You're going to go from, oh, I'm getting the right mindset. I'm getting the, oh, terrible mindset now for a few days or a week or whatever. You will stumble. Part of having the right mindset is being okay with the fact that you're going to stumble and that it's a practice. So be kind to yourself. Realize, make peace with the fact that you're not going to be perfect at all with this at first, that it does take practice. But once, as you start to improve in this, your odds of success long-term fitness and health success go through the roof. And with the wrong mindset, the odds of failure, long-term failure are astronomical. So this is a, this is again, the most important thing that you can focus on. And with that, go to mind pump free.com, download all of our guides, resources and books. You can also find Adam, Justin and myself on Instagram. This is where we're the most active. Justin can be found at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam.