Greg: 00:00 – It’s Greg Strauch of Two-Brain Media and on this week’s episode we’re hearing from Jeff Jucha. Now, this was originally recorded in the Two-Brain Summit of 2019 and he talks about the topic of your duty to succeed. He touches on things of how to affect the world that you want around you and the option of failure. As always, subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas, tips, and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
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Jeff: 01:47 – My name is Jeff Jucha. Like Oscar said, I own two gyms in Little Rock, Arkansas, which I promise is a real place. And I am basically going to be looking at my notes a little bit today because I’m a little bit nervous up here, so bear with me some. But, before I go any further forward, I have had some experience speaking to the military before and they’re a very vocal crowd and it’s a very different environment. So I’m not used to people raising hands when I ask a question, I like to do something else. You may have seen it before or even been to a place where we do it. But say like a yes or no question instead of raise your hand, I’m gonna have you say “aye.” So there’s a couple motivational speakers that actually do that as well. So you guys have been hearing from amazing presenters so far. Chris Cooper came and talked to you, Oscars’s come and talk to you. Jay Rhodes, one of my favorite people, has come and talk to you. If you guys have gotten something beneficial for you to take back home today, go ahead and give me an aye.
Audience: 02:47 – Aye!
Jeff: 02:47 – All right, so not too bad there. Now say like you’re going to go home and actually use that to improve your life or someone else’s life and go change some more lives, give me an aye.
Audience: 02:56 – Aye!
Jeff: 02:56 – That’s how I like it. Awesome. I feel better now. OK. So this is also my first time speaking at this summit and just like he told you I’m a new mentor as well and following some amazing acts. So I have to close the entire day down. So not like there’s any, you know, pressure there or anything. So that’s where a lot of my nervousness comes from. But you know, being nervous is really just a state of attention that we get when we get into a position or a place where we’re uncertain of an outcome or we don’t have control of an outcome and it can almost be viewed as the same thing, which is just kind of like a state of fear. So what I actually ended up doing when I was booked for this talk was Googling and researching some things to do to relieve tension. And we know what this is like, there’s tension in a classroom with a new person that comes to our class and we tell like a silly joke or something at 5:15 in the morning just to ease some of that. Like we’ve all been there, we’ve all done it for somebody at someplace, some point and we just want them to relax. Like, and you’ve probably told some like bomber jokes that are just terrible. Like one of the one I used before I came out here was what do you call a fish with no eye? Yeah, some of us even know, you are CrossFit coaches cause you Google this stuff, right? This is our life. I’ve also been at coach for a long time as well. I am still a coach. I don’t ever see me ever stopping being a coach. I love it. I love it so much.
Jeff: 04:30 – Something I do want you to actually do for me though, go ahead and take a look behind you. Check out the door in this room, the actual door right here behind us. That door when you walk out it today, what you do, some of us are already—we very much believe this. Some of us do not. Some of us haven’t thought about it much. Some are kind of skeptical. What you do is gonna change the world. What you do changes a lot of people’s lives. It’s not a question of are you going to, it’s a question of how are you going to do that? It’s a question of are we going to actually be able to change the world in a way that we would like to see? So whether you go out and you do something extremely beneficial to humanity or you go and do something that has negative consequences you never saw coming or never intended to have, or you get into a routine and a rut because we get like that in life. We’re creatures, we’re biological, we don’t work off ones and zeroes. Things happen and we get demotivated and depressed and we rob the world of our gift and we dull ourselves. We could have been a much bigger version of ourselves and giving something back bigger, or we just give up on things that matter to us all. We’re going to change the world. It’s just a matter of how is it going to happen. So you could say we have a duty when we walk out that door today. So originally I didn’t want to write about duty. Funny how that works. When I was booked, I was booked as the motivational speaker. And again, it’s my first time talking. They’re like, “Hey, you gotta come close it down, deliver the motivational, send everyone out. No pressure, Jeff.” And I thought about it and of course I accepted. I would love nothing more to be more involved with Two-Brain and be up here and be able to share something beneficial.
Jeff: 06:18 – But, I said, yeah, I’ll do the motivational talk, but I’m not talking to you guys about motivation today cause I don’t buy into it very much. And here’s the reason why: I feel like motivation is a shower. We take a shower every day. You should probably do that. It’s a good idea. You lose friends if you don’t. But you’re going to get dirty again. Life happens. Relationships break up. Children grow up and move off to college. We lose jobs, we get a new job we don’t like. We take risks and they don’t pay out for us. We’re gonna keep getting dirty. So you don’t need something like a shower. You don’t need motivation from an external source very much; that’s always available to you. What we need is something that’s deeper and connects to us at a deeper inner sense of purpose that’s going to make us want to keep taking showers. It’s going to make us want to go get dirty again, to be OK with the process of going out, putting in work, failing, getting dirty over and over and over and over again. Cause that’s what it takes to be successful at things, right? So we want to have a tool that is something deep at our core that will help us do that. And I hope today to share that with you and to give you that tool so that when you walk out the door today, you’re able to affect the world in a way that you want to see it affected, not just in a way that you can watch walk by or watch other people do, and we don’t have to always succumb to those bouts of those heights and those valleys that we go through in life. We can remember something inner inside of us and use that as a tool that we can call upon at any time.
So that’s most of what my talk is for you today.
Jeff: 08:00 – In getting to that inner sense of purpose, that’s always been something I was a little bit obsessed about even when I was much younger, and I was always wanting to know—I was the guy who wanted to know more of why, not how, right? Why are we here? Why are we doing these things? What’s it all even mean anyway as opposed to how can I do this next thing? And yes, if anyone has not heard it yet, I am like the sky, you know, high, head up in the cloud is hippy dippy mentor. That’s me. So I want to know like the why’s behind things and I want to know why I was making decisions, why I was making patterns that I didn’t see back then that I do now. And after 33.33, three, three, three repeating percent of my life on this planet, hopefully, I’ve gone back through a lot of those memories, lots of them, lots of scenarios that I’ve been in and I’ve connected some dots I couldn’t see back then. And I’ve connected a large overarching why to the patterns in the decisions that I making that I can see now that I could not see then. And I’m going to share with you a process on how to use that and also parts of my life as well I also I have not spoken about much to not only give you an example and to give you context, but to give you proof. If we all have stories, and I reflect mostly on my own story because it’s the one I know the best, and with all things considered, I shouldn’t be up here talking, I shouldn’t be up here. I shouldn’t be talking. Like not talking to you, but like literally can’t talk because I’m not around. We all have stories that have meant a lot to us and I decided to go back, see what I could pull out of this thing and build a tool so that you can take what you’ve learned this weekend, walk out the door and affect the world in a way you want.
Jeff: 09:47 – After all that, you know, I always understood the idea of duty when it came to—I asked all these questions about my own life and my own patterns. I was making my own stories and the answers all pointed me to what the definition of duty looks the most like. So duty was always the answer and that’s why I’m talking about it today. And knowing that we have a sense of duty given to us as a definition from society, duty to our parents, duty to our school, duty to our job, duty to the military if you’re in the military. I wanted to know more about a sense of duty to yourself and a sense of duty to the world around us. So after waiting for those memories, connecting the dots and bringing in the why across all of them and beyond a refutable doubt, it was even an answer I didn’t want, but I still got anyway and that’s how I knew it probably was a legit answer. I think I have a great definition of duty that everyone can take here and go do something with and how you can tap into it like an energy source, just to move your life in the direction you want, to affect the people around you, to create the dreams being realized in your life that you want. Just like carbohydrates and the ATPs and Krebs cycle use our tissues for to move seemingly immovable objects. And that’s where I have my last time I talk about the Krebs cycle joke. There’s at least like two, like bio majors here or at least a couple of Phys Ed majors here. Yeah, one back there. Thanks. Yeah, we’re very rare.
Jeff: 11:27 – So before you start listening to me about, you know, why you should talk to me about duty any further, let’s get to a couple of things. What is not duty? Duty is not dreams. Dreams are visualizations in your head that create a response from your hormone system, that create feel-good emotions, that are going to make that visualization feel good. So you’re going want to go back and think about that dream. You’re going to want to ruminate on it. You’re going to want to visualize it more and just stay within it and just like, hmm, how nice would it be if that came true? We got dreams. But the flip side of that is we don’t have to do anything about it to make that dream come true. We can just go back to the visualization. We can daydream. So I can be like, hmm, how nice would it be to like move this chair? Well, I could just sit here and be like, that would be nice. Or I could do like the real thing and be like, well that was lackluster. So we don’t have to do anything. We can stay within our dreams. We don’t need to prompt any action happening. Right. You can always get feel-good emotions from something.
Jeff: 12:39 – Drive. Duty is not drive. I have a drive right now to go back to State Street downtown Chicago and get Lou Malnati’s pizza, because I had it on the way up here and it’s delicious and I’m going back. But I’m not going to be able to hang out with anybody after the Summit so I’m not going to do that. I had to rule out something and I prioritized. And when you think about it, all of us, somewhere between the ages of like late teens to early twenties did some questionable things because of drives. Yeah. A few of us have. I have never felt a duty to shotgun a natty light and then go find every pretty girl with all of my friends from college and try every cheesy pick-up line that we could come up with and convince me to go try on them. At least not in my thirties. And I’ve been 30 for like two months now, so far so good. Follow me on Instagram. I’ll keep you updated.
Jeff: 13:42 – Dreams are not callings. All of us at some point more than likely found ourselves in a big social situation, like a theme park or a festival or a parade. And we were with our parents, and at some point we got separated from our parents. It was that dreaded moment. A lot of us can even remember the first time it happened. For me it was Busch Gardens. I don’t even know if that’s still around, but that’s where we were. And I got separated from my family and we hit this point where we’re looking around and we just go, well, shit. And we’re lost. And if you’re anything like me, panic is a bit of an understatement. And we’re looking around and there are hundreds, if not thousands of people all calling out to someone else. Children calling out to their parents, parents calling out to their children, people calling out to their friends, their drunk friends calling out to nobody in particular, but they’re having a blast. God bless them. Right? But then you hear it and your rescued, and you hear one call and it’s your mom or your dad. It’s unmistakable. It’s unignorable. No matter how much softer and quieter it is than all the rest. You shouldn’t have been able to have heard it. Decimal volume, there’s no way you should have been able to. Thousands of people. But you did and you were attuned to it. You knew which call to respond to. Duty is like that. Duty is not a dream. It’s not a visualization. It’s something we feel. It’s not something we can see like a dream or visualize like a dream. It’s not something that we hear like a calling. It’s not a drive, it’s a direction. It’s something that lets us know which of these things to respond to. Which of these things to actually pursue. That is where a lot of our inner sense of duty comes into play in our lives. And if you can get into touch with what it is and where it comes from, you can leverage it like a tool. Like jet fuel on top of the regular fuel you use to get through daily tasks.
Jeff: 16:02 – So we know what duty isn’t. Let’s talk about something that duty feels like. So you’re coaching your class and you’ve got 10, 15 athletes in your gym at that time and a bunch of them are very fit. They’re throwing barbells down, they’re PRing their torpedo bell, like clean and snatch by a bazillion pounds and it’s really impressive and the music’s raging. It’s an awesome atmosphere. Like I love that atmosphere. I love a big group, but there’s a 105-pound girl in the back of the class way back there and she’s on the ground on her back and she smiling ear to ear and she’s laughing, but it’s not quite a laugh. It’s kind of more like a seagull squawking. AW! That’s my seagull. I didn’t practice that for this. But that’s only because she doesn’t know what a laugh sounds like because she’s always been u
nable to go to a place where she’d feel uncomfortable, because she’s deaf, and she’s been deaf her whole life. And it’s a little different for her. She’s been afraid to leave her house to go do things socially outside of her work where she works with other deaf people and where she teaches and learns with other deaf people in a school for deaf. But here she is, making friends outside of her home and actually establishing more of a social circle and having fun and laughing because you’re there. Duty feels something like that. Duty isn’t telling what’s a fish without an eye sound like joke to your five 15 class. It can be actually, but it’s not protecting your ego by not telling that joke. But duty is when someone comes up to you or another coach because you are that gym. And they say, “Hey, I know like this might not mean a lot to other people or just in general, but your gym saved my life.” And then being able to go and actually have a long really heartfelt conversation with them where they feel comfortable talking about it and you learn a world you had no clue about, duty feels like that.
Jeff: 18:25 – Duty is the voice inside of our head, but it doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in the language of enthusiasm. It speaks in emotion and even biology. It lets us know this is worthy. Yes, this is worth my time. Yes, this is worth the struggles, yes, it’s worth the failures and mistakes I’ve made. Yes, it’s worth going to the seminars and learning these things and sitting through some like real things I don’t really quite get and like being overwhelmed and then actually getting that one good thing. Yes, this is worth all of the hours I spent in college studying the damn Krebs cycle. It’s finally happened. I hope that my kinesiology professor sees this one day. Try to flunk me now.
Jeff: 19:25 – So, we know what it’s not. We know what it feels like. So let’s use a definition on it. And this is just my definition. Duty is a responsibility that we feel at the core to actualize on our potential to affect the world around us. It’s something we feel deep with inside of us to actually affect what’s going on outside of us. It’s not visualized like a dream. It’s not heard like a calling. It’s the direction. So when you think about how could I foolproof test this, if you think about somebody, two people with the same dreams, I’m going to do XYZ, one could wake up and have a healthy breakfast, get up early, go work out, go help a whole bunch of people that day. The other person can wake up, sleep in a little bit. Stay on snaptstagram all day. See what the Kardashians are up to, whatever it is. Yeah. Now you’ve got the same dream going on, but people are just expressing that potential that’s within them a different way. So you’re going to do things, you’re going to express energy, your genes are going to express further down the line on your genetic path that you go. But it’s just how you’re going to do it. And duty lets ups know it was worthwhile and how we want to do it. Or you can just Google laughter exercises before you go talk to people.
Jeff: 21:00 – So where our duty comes from, where does our inner sense of duty come from? This is part experience-induced. So based on your past successes and failures, you’ve determined what’s important to you. You know how great a kid can turn out if they have a great role model, so you want to be that. You know how sad a life can turn out or how unhappy a life can turn out without a good role model and you want to stop that so you want to go become that. You don’t want to work a job that you hate because you watch someone do it for 18 years. You’ve experienced something in the past or something that wasn’t there for you and you want to have that there for other people. You went through an experience you want other people to never have to go through. This is things that we’ve prioritized. These are contracts we’ve written with ourselves based on how we’ve lived in our experiences and what we did to get through them.
Jeff: 22:03 – Your sense of duty is part chemical induced. This is just as important, if not more important, in my opinion, than actually the experience-induced one. This is—let’s think of it this way. Who here has been in love before? It could be like a high-school—it could be your high-school sweetheart. It could be your partner, it could be your wife, your husband, a spouse, a lover, a best friend. For those of you that got friend-zoned. But it can be someone, anyone you’ve been in love before. Think of that feeling. Give me aye if you’ve been in love before. OK, so like everyone who’s been just like kind of in love, don’t say it this time. I mean like laying up at night. Your cheeks are sore cause you’re grinning ear to ear. You’re thinking of things to say tomorrow that will make them smile and you’re thinking of doing really dumb things you would never do in order to make them laugh.
Jeff: 23:07 – And you are just smitten and you cannot believe it can feel this good to be alive. You’ve had that kind of love before. Give me an aye. Yeah. Yeah. That guy’s been in love before. All right, cool. Vulnerable things to talk about. So you’re on a grassy field. Close your eyes with me for a minute and just envision, visualize this. You’re in a grassy field and it’s a sunny day and you’re having a picnic and there’s a hole in the ground about a foot away from you, and your partner’s walking by and they’re getting close to it and they’re on that stride, it’s not the stride where they go step in that hole but it’s the one where they’re about to. Surely they’re gonna at least twist their ankle if they step in it. What do you do? What do you do? Go ahead. Open your eyes. What do you do?
Jeff: 23:54 – Anybody, just say it loud. Tackle him? What? All right everyone who’s not from Power Athlete, who’s got a kid here? Who’s a parent? You can raise your hand for this, that’s cool, you don’t gotta yell aya at me. All right, you’ve got a kid. What do you do? You protect them, right? Is it even a question that you protect them? Right? So it’s not like, and you know, like some people really laissez faire about parenting and they’re like, well, he’s got to learn to watch where he’s walking one day. Thanks, Dad. All right, so we got the right mentality here. It’s not a question. It’s your what? To protect them? Your duty, right? Is there anything else we could really fill in there? It’s not a dream. It wouldn’t be nice to protect my child. It’s something that we feel with inside of us to affect the world outside of us. And there’s a purpose and there’s a reason for that. So it’s part chemical induced. We know duty’s not just a dream that we want to come true, but a tool that we can use to make dreams come true. This is something that’s obviously part experience induced from our history. It is written from the past into the grain of our bones. It’s also part chemical induced in a way that we don’t have a lot of control over at times. Who here’s ever heard the term “you can’t choose who you love.” You can say aye on this one. Say aye. OK, cool. So it’s a really amazing thing and also a really annoying thing sometimes, right? Can’t choose who you love. Whoa. Wish I hadn’t made that mistake back a while ago. So we know what that’s like. Your body’s gonna tell you things that you don’t know you prioritize yet, things that are very important to you.
Chris: 25:46 – Hello my friends. It is Chris Cooper here. Since 2009 I have been writing daily blog posts, producing podcasts, videos, all kinds of stuff on social media with one mission in mind: to make gyms profitable. I came to that mission because I was an unprofitable gym owner. It almost ruined my finances and almost ruined my career, my marriage, everything. And since that day, since I made my recovery, I have wanted to help other gym owners become profitable, too. It’s part of my mission to the world because if you’re profitable, you’ll be here changing lives of thousands of your clients for the next 30 years. I think together we can have a tremendous impact. When we started mentorship, I did every single call myself. I
was doing up to a thousand free calls a year and I was doing 10 calls with people who signed up for our early mentorship program, but the Incubator has been updated and improved a dozen times since then. Now the Incubator is really the sum of all of our experiences with over 800 gyms worldwide. In the Two-Brain mentorship program, we can now learn from everybody. We can collate data, we can see what’s working where and when and what the new gold standards are as they emerge. When somebody has a great idea, we can test it objectively and say, “Will this work for everyone or will it work for people on the West Coast or on the East Coast?” We can do that with little things like Facebook ads. We can also do that with operations and opening times and playbooks. All the questions that you have about the gym, we can answer them with data and with proof now. That’s the Incubator. It’s more than what I wrote about. It’s more than my experience. It is the best standard in the fitness industry, period. And I hope to see you in there.
Jeff: 27:28 – It’s my favorite slide. So we can’t cover everything with science. We can’t cover everything with psychology. We don’t as a race, we don’t know what’s at the bottom of our own oceans. I don’t even know what’s at the bottom of my pool, right? It only takes us so far, but we do know that someone, something, some force, saw a massive amount of value in us and decided that we were necessary and we’re here. This is where the spiritual origin and where our sense of duty comes from. So no matter what your belief structure is, God, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, whatever it is, the universe, if you just want to say that, it decided that you are necessary and that you are worthy of something called a compass or something called duty, which acts like a compass. That compass, by the way, is—another likening I thought of right before I walked up here is it’s not our voyage. Our duty is our compass that guides us and points our way through it. So I’m not here to give you dreams. You got plenty of them. They’re all over the place. I’m not here to give you motivation. There’s plenty of that, but you can have a compass to point your way through and only you can get in touch with it and define it and know it. Then you can walk out of here and put it to use. So I want to give you a couple short stories from my life. All of these were happening from the time I was 15 turning 16.
Jeff: 29:01 – Can you hear me? How about that? Better. OK. Mic’s happy now. So these happened when I was much younger, but this is a place where my duty was put to a test. I was faced with a decision and I had to utilize it. It is now my favorite part because I don’t have any more notes to go over. I can just freely talk the rest of the speech. I have big ears, guys, this is like hard to do. Better? All right. So we talked about like that person that you’re love with say aye if you’ve ever been in it and then it was like, OK everyone who’d been in it say eye. I’m 15 years old. It is a beautiful sunny day in Arkansas, which there’s only about 14 of those every year, which you won’t burst into flames and it is wonderful. It’s 70-something degrees. There’s a light breeze blowing. There’s light cloud cover once in a while. Stuff is green. It’s towards the end of the summer where it’s about to be fall and the leaves are about to change, but not quite yet. I can remember it so vividly and I had my first girlfriend, her name was Ricky, and I was smitten. I could not stop smiling. I was so happy and I was just, you know, at 15 years old I’m like, I don’t want this to be like all the relationships that came before it: imaginary.
Jeff: 30:27 – So I was really excited. I was like doing all the things I could do, you know, to make her love me. And we went swimming. It was that kind of day where your mom or someone else’s mom was like, well, let’s take the kids out and we’ll drive 40 miles into the middle of nowhere where we can swim in an above ground pool. And that’s what we did. We were out in Velonia and we were driving back. It was a great day. I remember we stopped at Sonic. I had a cherry limeade made because, I don’t know, I thought it was like a fancy thing to order and I just got that, and we start driving back from Jacksonville and we go onto the highway and it’s this thing called the bean field and the sun starts setting over the bean field and my friend Tiffany’s up in front of me and I’m in the middle row of this minivan. My friend Tiffany’s up in front of me right here in the passenger seat. Her mom’s driving and my friends Pinder and Eric are behind us and Ricky’s right here. That was great. I was so happy, and I even know the song that was playing. I would be amazed if someone here knew it was called slow, it was like move it slow motion for me. It was like the most radio hip-hop song ever heard. I’m not going to repeat it. But I remember the song that was playing. And in that moment, I hear some vibration noise, like a humming. And I start feeling some of the humming, I can feel it my foot first. I can feel it in my hip a little bit too. And it’s nothing to worry about, which is weird. Maybe she was like hitting those things on the side of the road that you know like wake you up if you, you know, started drifting off to sleep cause you’re listening to another like nonfiction audio book. And I turn and I look up the front, no major sense of concern going on. But Tiffany’s mom is obviously noticing something too. And in the course of about three seconds, the time that it took for me to look back just to make sure of something, that vibration has now grown to a rumble, and it is almost deafening and it is vibrating the entire car.
Jeff: 32:39 – And by the time I start feeling that, I look to the front one more time, see Tiffany’s mom and it’s no longer a sense of concern. It is a face of imminent doom and there is struggle to even hold onto the wheel and keep it from turning. It’s amazing how fast time moves and how slow it can move at the same time. And at that point it hits me. We’re not getting out of something, so I might as well do my best, whatever happens. And I’ll look over to see Ricky’s seatbelt and it’s not buckled. My seatbelt’s not buckled. And I think. I don’t act. I think first. I’ve got a decision to make. I can reach over and I can get that buckle on her. I can do my best and help. There’s no chance, there’s no guarantee, but I can reach across and I can do my best and then get mine on. Or I’m closer to mine. I can get mine on really quick and then try to help her. But guys, if I put it right here, it’s going to be real tough to reach across and help someone else out. So what do I do? And I remember the thought in my head. Dear ,anyone up there listening or watching if you are, I hope you can hear me. I need you now. It was worth it. You bet I got that belt on Ricky first.
Jeff: 34:21 – After a bit of recovery, I was at home. I was still on crutches. I still had lots of things put into my leg here, in my arm here. I was like, you know, my sense of humor I had crutches and I had external fixators and casts and stuff. And my way of getting through stressful situations is humor. So of course I was like, look mom, like the bionic man, I’m an android. I was into “Terminator.” And as well as I was trying to keep my hopes up and get to a nice recovery, my mom had gone through a divorce with my dad. And I didn’t have a relationship with my dad at that point because of it, kind of adopted my mom’s view of it via my dad. And she’s a wonderful woman and I love her to death and I love her today. But at the time she was vulnerable and a manipulator had worked his way into our home. And with a guy who’s just even a little bit self-aware and has just had a huge life-changing event that reminded him of how ephemeral things really can be, we don’t really mesh well. Because I sensed it.
Jeff: 35:39 – So that ended up with a good bit of fighting and not like arguing, but knock down, drag out. The fight ends pretty much when the other one can’t fight any further. And I knew that if I survived that wreck,
I wanted to do something with my life. I would not waste it. I would not squander my blessing. But I should probably survive to graduate high school before I did that. And I would probably have to do that. I’d probably need to survive and graduate, and move on to better things. But I need to actually make it to that point. And I decided that’s it. I’ve got to go. And he drove home one night after I had my report cards mailed to my mom, who would imagine they’re not wonderful, and I knew what was coming that night. And so I got everything ready. I had my room cleaned up as best as I can, I guess cause I thought maybe it was some cordial way of doing it. And I had a laundry hamper with some clothes in it and a few bare necessities. And I had layered up clothing because I couldn’t fit everything in there. I was going to look like the kid from a “Christmas Story’ everyone seen that? Except I was on crutches. So it’d been like—I legit looked like that. And had everything ready to go. And I sat by my window and I had my 79 tan and turd-brown El Camino in the drive or in the street ready to go. It had no mufflers on it, so it was the loudest thing in the United States at the time. And I heard him pull into the driveway, half onto the grass and slam the door, slammed the door for his car and it hit me at the worst time possible. I don’t have anywhere to go. I literally have nowhere to go. What do I do?
Jeff: 37:36 – And the door from his car slammed and then the door of my house opened. And I never really would consider me ever saying the statement that duty looked like a kid on crutches, hobbling through some grass, towing a hamper to a beat-up El Camino with a white tailgate with no mufflers to try to sneak away and then also not be spotted by local authorities for the next long while in that thing. But that’s what it was. I wouldn’t have a home again for a long time and I thought I was doing pretty well to not have house, to not live at home with people, but I did miss my sense of home. I remember a lot of places I’d stay and I’m forever grateful for the families and the friends that let me crash their couch. I spent a long time and not having a home. And I got to where I missed the sense of it so badly that I knew it was something I needed. I needed to have some safe structure. I missed being able to actually go somewhere after school. I missed actually going home to a smile and not just an empty car. I missed having family who are proud of me. I missed actually talking to family. And I really missed not having to freak the hell out whenever I’d heard a noise or a twig snap outside of my El Camino that I was sleeping in, I really missed not having to worry about that.
Jeff: 39:08 – I didn’t have this relationship with my dad, though. It was the only place I had to go. That I could go, and that was if he would even listen to me if I called him. It had been a long time since I talked to my dad. And I felt like if I did, I’d have to admit I was wrong all this time. I’d have to put it behind me and just be wrong. This is actually Burns Park, about 500 yards down from here right down that way. I would park my car and the cops would never see me there cause it was just small enough as you saw an El Camino to hide behind a hill near the boat ramp. And it was the best place to go cause the druggies wouldn’t go there. They’d always go to the playgrounds. Nobody would bother me. But this was my view and it was kind of a cool view sometimes, but I was tired of that view and I was tired of my, you know, three jobs that I worked, one of which was North Rock Athletic Club, where I actually got that job so I could use their showers, but turned out to change my life a good bit. I’m glad I did. I had to do something because if I made it to graduate, if I made it into being an adult, I was going to be a pretty messed up adult if I lived as a hobo most of my life, I felt. So I called my dad, not the next day, maybe a little bit later, maybe it was some time in December. But this is him at our Christmas party last year. He’s our chef. He’s actually a chef. He runs the whole kitchen for a university. And he’s just someone who’s loved by my gym just as much as I love him.
Jeff: 40:43 – So ABC’s of duty. When I went through these times of my life and I was asking questions, there are a lot of hard questions, but the two that meant the most, the two that you could apply to a lot of situations in your life is what do I want? That’s pretty simple. You don’t need to ask, what do I need to do? Cause most of us will figure out what we need to do in order to make something happen. But it’s do I really want that thing? What do I really want? What am I missing here? And not what do I need to—you’ll know what you need to do to get it, but not what do you need to take on? You don’t need more stuff to do, but what do you need to leave behind that’s preventing you from actually having it now? So if you could have that thing now, what’s preventing you? It’s so much faster for us to drop off loads of weight to feel lighter than it is to actually go work out a whole bunch for like six, seven months and lose a few pounds a week of body fat. Like if, but if we’re carrying kettlebells and I just want to be lighter, I’ll just put them down and now I can actually have my hands free to go do things, so I had to put things down and leave them behind. More on being a gazelle later. I had to get rid of my sense of certainty and my control in order to get that belt on Ricky. By the way, I did actually get mine on too, which is interesting because my seatbelt failed in that accident so I’m really, really fucking glad I put that seatbelt on her and I didn’t put mine on first. It wouldn’t have mattered. I had to give that up. I had to get rid of my sense of fear and my sense of balance. I had to go do something I never thought of before, I didn’t know how I was going to make it out of in order to leave that situation that was crippling me. I didn’t leave a home. I left a house for my fear, and I went out and I became unbalanced, but that’s what it was going to take for me to actually make it. And finally to actually get back to home. I had to get rid of my ego, had to get rid of this “I don’t want to damage the little inner me from being wrong this whole time about someone” and believing, you know another story that was written by a court and two people who were fighting with each other and they’re just humans. I had to let go of those.
Jeff: 42:54 – Does anyone else ever think of any times where a sense of certainty or control we may lose or fear of losing our sense of balance or our ego got in the way of a decision, right? Aye, yeah, we are awake. Yeah. A lot of things. Could almost say if you’re a human being, no matter how enlightened you get, I’m very big into Zen, I’m very big into Buddhism, I don’t care how enlightened you get or if you’re the Buddha yourself, you’re still going to have to experience what it’s like to be a human, and we have these. Eight slides later—that’s why my presentation was so long. It was like 10 slides of the same thing. Gazelles. One of my favorite things to talk about. If you’re like me, you watch the Discovery Channel. Who has watched the Discovery Channel and could probably guesstimate how this is about to end? Give me an aye. All right. How confident do we really feel for that gazelle right now, now give me an aye. Right. OK, so the aye for the cheetah was a lot bigger than I for the gazelle. But let’s think about something for a minute. What’s really going on here is it is a struggle of focus. It’s a struggle of want. This guy needs to want to live more than he wants to eat. And that is all that needs to happen for him to win. You cannot determine the terrain. It’s already predetermined. You can’t take control of the weather, it’s already predetermined. You can’t control how much food is in your belly when a cheetah starts to chase you, it’s already predetermined. All you have left to do is to want it bad enough and to focus on what’s in front of you when that cheetah starts to chase you.
Jeff: 44:44 – Fun facts. Le
t’s look at a cheetah. It’s got razor-sharp claws. It’s got razor-sharp teeth. It has this tail nearly as long as its body that actually is a weighted and bobbed at the end to help it like weave and make the same types of turns as best as it can to actually mimic the gazelle. It is a supreme predator. It is built to hunt. It is built to kill so it can eat. If it does not, it’s gonna die. Kill or die. Woo. What an animal. Let’s look at the actual attributes of the gazelle. It’s a gazelle. It has feet, it eats grass. Fun fact, over 90% of the time, cheetahs are outmaneuvered, outwitted, outrun, outlasted, and made to look like idiots from gazelles. Data is there. Gazelles win nine out of 10 times. National Geographic Discovery Channel, of course we’re going to dramatize things we’re humans, we love that stuff. We want to show what’s going to happen with the cheetah when he catches him. And like, alright, kids go back in your room. This is the fun part, right? But that’s not truth. The truth is nine times out of 10 that gazelle wins. So why is this important? Hyper focus on one thing in front of you. One thing produces progression and that produces momentum, which leads to more progression and more momentum. And that’s how things get done. The great saying, how do you eat a whale? One bite at a time, you focus on what’s in front of you. You focus on what’s important at that time. So if you have the focus of that gazelle, whatever it is that you are wanting, you really think about that type of focus and you adopt it, you’re gonna win. I don’t gamble, but if I wagered money, I wouldn’t wager, I wager in my head sometimes that my friends who actually bet money on games in the night just like, here’s what I would do. I wouldn’t gamble on the one who’s the most well equipped for the mission. I would gamble on the one who can use what they have equipped already like a badass, and my money’s going on that gazelle every time. If you have that focus, you’re going to win. At least nine times out of 10, which is a nice ratio.
Jeff: 47:12 – Two things you can leave behind, and this is from me being a coach to other coaches. That is the option of failure. This is going to expand further out than your careers, but you’re going to take what you learned here today and use those things. When you do, you can’t accept the option of failure. It doesn’t end well for the gazelle. Looks about like that. The reason I want you to think about getting rid of the option of failure is not even so much for yourself. It doesn’t end well for the gazelle, but it doesn’t end well for the people around us because when you—it’s OK to feel like a failure once in a while. It’s OK to lose battles, you’re going to, it’s the nature of it, but when you resign yourself and you actually accept failure or you accept that you’re going to walk away from something, like I have seen sadly happen many times talking to people, when you do that, you don’t just fail yourself. You fail that 105-pound girl in the back of your class, you fail those people who could have their life changed in a positive way or even saved by you by just doing what you cared about and what mattered to you. You fail in that sense, so you can’t ever resign to that.
Jeff: 48:29 – One more thing to leave behind, and this is limiting beliefs. And this was originally actually my entire speech; the next 30, 40 seconds of this with my whole speech, but I had to fill an hour. Josh made me. With that type of knowledge and vision and focus, if you have that type of focus, the only thing that’s going to stop you is yourself through limiting beliefs. I love how so many gurus will talk about the only thing in front of you is yourself. You’ve got to get out of your own way. I’m like well how? It’s limiting beliefs. These are things that we do regardless of how successful we become, we’re going to do it because we’re humans. This is just an experience we’ll forget about it, and we’ll go back and we’ll tell ourselves things that are not true. One that’s real and is actually a real example is I feel like a fraud as a coach because after losing 80 pounds, I can’t lose the last 20. I don’t even look like a coach. I don’t even have abs, right? That’s a real one. Who knows somebody who’s suffering from limiting beliefs or has or has suffered from a limiting belief in their own? Give me an aye. Every one of us. We’re all human beings. So if you’re going to do that from time to time, the thing is what do you do when that happens? Now go back to our coach who is having imposter syndrome. I feel like a fraud because I don’t look like it. No, you blazed a trail and you know what struggle is and you know what strength also is to overcome that struggle and you can empathize with our clients and my clients in a way that the always-had-abs crowd can never do. I’m unfortunately in that crowd. There are things that someone can come up who has lived that life and walked in those shoes can do that I can never do. I can never empathize like that. So give me an aye if you believe this statement: Getting abs is harder than losing 80 to a hundred pounds.
Audience: 50:30 – (silence)
Jeff: 50:31 – Right. OK. Now, if you think that coach or that person who’s lost 80, 100, 125 pounds, whatever that is, and they’ve upheaved their life and they have upheaved their diet and their sense of balance and their family and their time and failing and relearning again how to do it right and failing at that and doing it again over months and years and years. Do you think that person’s had a harder struggle and can actually do a whole lot of good? Is that harder than getting abs? Give me an aye. Right. Strength’s in the mind, but so is weakness, and limiting beliefs is a start of much of that weakness and that fear that we have. I don’t believe we are here to suffer from limiting beliefs that we put in front of ourselves. I believe we’re a lot more than that. I believe you are a lot more than that. I believe you are what the entire universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are and what you do is everything that the entire universe is doing at the place we call here and now. Just like I believe that a single wave is something the entire ocean is doing.
Jeff: 51:42 – You’re a lot bigger than something that just wakes up and suffers from limiting beliefs. Because when you do limiting beliefs, you are a villain looking into a mirror at a victim. And that is not what you’re here for. But we do it and we’re gonna do it. So we have to be able to recalibrate our value and recalibrate what’s important to us so that we can tap into that as an energy source. When we’re felling trees and we send them downstream, which is how lumberjacks will do, we’ll get all the trees into a river and send them down the river and they get jammed up and stopped. You can walk out and you can push some of those logs and get ’em out of the way, can kick them out of the way. But when there’s a huge stop-up of them what will happen is the lumberjack will take a stick of dynamite and throw it into the center and blast the logs free and let the river rage. That’s how you do that. So you’ve got to have a tool or something you can use to remind yourself of those things. And I’ll give you mine.
Jeff: 52:38 – So for the rest of this presentation, for the very brief amount of his presentation left, take two fingers and find your pulse for me. Keep it there for rest of it and take a minute. Really find it, close your eyes. Find that pulse and feel it. When I was living in my car and I was sleeping in Burns Park, which is very much wilderness, it was loud from all of the animals that were there. But on cold nights, one by one, those species would start to be quiet and they would calm down and go to sleep and they’d stop. And it’d start with the birds and then the frogs would go next and then cicadas, and then it was crickets and then there was nothing, and it would be so quiet. I could hear my heartbeat and didn’t need two fingers. I could hear it, I could feel it in the steel walls of that car and that was the only thing that would calm me enough so that I
could get to sleep.
Jeff: 53:44 – Since then I’ve learned a few things about the heart. I can share some fun facts about it. That heart that you’re feeling right now, that was put there when you were developing in your mother before you had a brain. The heart develops first. The brain comes next after it. And that heart beats, when you’re standing it beats faster. When you do CrossFit. It beats when you sleep. It beats even if you don’t tell it to. Something found immense value in you and decided that you are necessary and that it was time for this world to have you. And it did all of that and it put it inside of you and it did all of it before you were even born and took a breath or even had your first thought. That heart’s an amazing thing. Hearts, we believe, almost have their own intelligence and we’re testing for it now. Just like we tested and found out that gut has its own intelligence, it’s own brain. It produces a peptide, A and P, that’s used to shrink down tumors so that they can be extracted from body when there is no other way to save that patient.
Jeff: 54:58 – It can be used to actually help destroy cancers. The heart produces hormones that won’t allow it to be destroyed and you got one. Something found massive amounts of value in you, and decided you are worth duty and you are worth a compass and it was time for you to be here. Your duty is not to believe limiting things about yourself. Your duty is to succeed in what you do when you walk out that door. Your duty is to take everything you learned from here this weekend, everything you learn tomorrow and the next day and all of your struggles so that you can not just be successful to be successful, but so that all the things that can come from you being successful actually get to happen. It’s your duty to succeed. No go out and do it. Thank you.
Greg: 55:54 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
