Barbell Shrugged - Active Life Radio 10: Why making coaches more professional matters - Dr. Sean

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Show Overview:  There is a great expression that goes like this; “If you want to build something big, you need a vision big enough for other people’s vision to fit inside of it.” And it’s true. On this episode of the show, Dr. Sean sits down with the microphone, and you, to discuss how you can take steps to have a better day every day. He does that by explaining the reason why what Active Life is doing, and plans to do, is so important to him and should be to you. The vision for the impact that Active Life will have on the world is most definitely big enough for you to fit inside of it, and in this episode, Dr. Sean talks to you about how you can take immediate, free, steps to make it a reality. Minute Breakdown: 0-5 - Your vision must be big enough to fit the vision of others inside of it 5-10 - Build a facility big enough to house everyone’s ambition 10-15 - How to intentionally build a better community through fitness, without working out 15-20 - What happens when you let your wall ball drop 20-25 - Success is not about money 25-30 - Let’s do something transformative Please Support our Sponsors Organifi - Save 20% at http://organifi.com/shrugged Ned - Save 15% using the code “SHRUGGED” at http://helloned.com Work with an Active Life Coach: activeliferx.com/shrugged Find Dr. Sean at @DrSeanPastuch

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But I asked the crew at Shrugged to be extremely vigilant about who they bring onto the show with me. They ask difficult questions that, frankly, most companies don't want to answer on my behalf. And Organifi answers them. And for me, that's all that I need to know to know that I'm partnering with a company who's doing a good thing. On top of that, I'm the kind of guy who would love to have a wheatgrass shot every morning, rooibos tea in the middle of the day, and turmeric at night. But I don't exactly have great recipes that include all three of those things or space on my countertop in the kitchen to grow wheatgrass, cut it, and and vice it every single day. So I let Organifi take care of that. Healthy

ingredients, superfoods that taste great. All I got to do is mix them with water. All you need is a cup, a faucet that works, a fork or a spoon or a knife and some Organifi. That's it. Peace of mind. Good nutrition down. All the micro stuff is down there in the belly, digesting, making you healthy. O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com. Use the code shrugged at checkout for 20% off. Go do it. Just do yourself a favor. Go do it. My favorite is the turmeric tea before bed. Outstanding. The other company I want to thank is Ned. Head to helloned.com and use the code shrugged at checkout for 15% off. Shrugged at checkout is pretty dope. You can probably use shrugged at checkout on a lot of sites and get some kind of a discount, but you can definitely get it on ned.com. Excuse me. Hello, ned.com. Ned is a company that's going to provide you with all of your CBD oil

and hemp needs. Essentially, if you're dealing with pain and you want your brain to shut that stuff down through some nice calming CBD, Ned's got you covered. You want to sleep better? Ned's got you covered. You want your lips to be less chapped? Ned's got you covered. Head to helloned.com and stop worrying about the sourcing of materials. This is a company that is based in Colorado.

And if you go to their Instagram page, you will find that these guys are completely transparent about what they're doing. You'll see them searching the country for the best magnesium that they can find. I mean, they're legit. They care about their product

and that's why I'm happy to partner with them. So helloned.com, shrug the checkout for 15% off. Now, stick around because I got important things to say to you today. Enjoy. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Network. I'm Dr. Sean Pastuch. I'm your host. And today, it's just going to be us. It's going to be me and it's going to be you. And the reason why it's going to be the two of us today, or the three of us, if you get a friend in the car or with you at the house, is because what I want to talk to you about

today is something that I'm hoping all of you can get on board with. It doesn't cost you any money. It doesn't even cost you any time. It's a mindset. And I'm hoping that you will join me and my staff at Active Life and our clients in beginning to think this way. So this episode is going to be shorter than the typical Active Life radio podcast on Shrug Collective. Because what I want to share with you is something that I shared with my entire staff at Active Life about the reason why this company is so important to me. And when I did, the response was, you have to share that with everybody. So here I am sharing it with you. And I see it as an opportunity for you. It's an opportunity for everybody who's interested in making a dent in the world to do it without having to sacrifice money, time, a ton of effort to get there. I'm not asking you to support a charity.

I'm not asking you to give us any money. Just asking you to get there. I'm not asking you to support a charity. I'm not asking you to give us any money. Just asking you to get behind the idea. So here's the idea. The reason that we started Active Life was because we wanted to humanize the doctor, professionalize the coach to empower the individual. The idea is if we can make doctors better people, we can make coaches more professional, then we, through the people we've influenced as a proxy, can better the world. I don't mean that in like a small way either. I mean, big shit. So I want to let you in on how we're trying to do this locally and how we hope that the local effort that we're putting down is going to spread worldwide. I actually believe that it will.

I have a plan to facilitate that it does. And part of that plan includes you. One of the things that I've learned and that my staff has learned and our clients have learned is that there are a million ways for you to get fit. There's a million ways for you to become pain free. There are a million ways for you to rid yourself of illness. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong. And there's too much fighting about who's right and who's wrong and nobody, it doesn't matter. If you took a chalk pill and your blood pressure went down, then the chalk pill did the job. If you worked with a personal trainer that every other personal trainer in the world would say, that guy sucks, but you got the body that you want and you know that that guy loves you,

then he's great. So everybody has an opinion. They're kind of like assholes. Everybody has one. Nobody wants to hear yours. So this is a vision that my ambition is everybody can fit inside of. That's why I went that path about the professionals. I live in Long Beach, New York. It's on the East Coast. My town is probably very much like any of yours, except there's an ocean here. And what I mean by that is it's fairly middle class. I believe the average household income is somewhere around $57,000 to $60,000.

So it's a little bit above the average household income in the average town in America. We have 7,000 gyms. That's an exaggeration. I think we have, um, on the top of my head, I can think of eight places in town where you can get fitter than you were yesterday. And it's a town of like 35,000 people. We don't need eight places. Um, there are great restaurants and there's fast food. Everything like a regular town that you've been to, the one you live in. We have our own schools, all that. My daughter is four years old

and she's going to be in kindergarten next year. The elementary school and the high school in my town gives the kids physical education, gym class, once every six school days. They also give them structured recess, which means at lunchtime, when you're supposed to be out doing creative things, playing, learning, you know, having conversations, playing tag, not being regimented, they get structured recess. And that is how they get around the loophole of not having more phys ed classes. Okay. The food that they get is the lowest bidder. It's whatever food vendor can get the city to say, that's the right amount of money that we want to spend on food for the kids. So they get name brand nonsense. We're teaching our kids to be fat,

to listen to the boss, to move from room to room. When those kids become adults, they become upset. They listen to the boss and they complain about the boss they complain about their wife their husband having kids they feel as though the place that they live owes them something rather than them owing the place that they live something uh yeah and it ends up with what i would consider to be a fairly toxic society. We can't talk about religion or politics with each other because if we disagree with each other, then the other person must be an asshole. It's not true. We don't have any tolerance for each other. We don't have any tolerance for differing ideas. And a lot of that

comes from our own personal lack of self-awareness. I had this problem. I still have this problem. It's a constant work to improve what I know about myself. So here's what we want to do to start solving this problem locally so that we can prove it works like we did with active life and then grow it globally. We want to create a facility in our town that is big enough to house everybody's ambition. What I mean by that is a fitness facility that includes classes on mindset, classes on literacy for adults, classes on financial literacy, classes on communication, communication on physical fitness. We teach people how to use physical fitness as a tool to improve self-awareness and make themselves better people. Some of the people in our town won't be able to afford to come to the facility that we're going to build, that we're going to

ask people who can afford it to spend substantially so that we can continue to run it. The people who can't afford it are going to be able to afford it because they're going to be able to come for free. But when I say free, I don't mean you don't have to pay anything. I mean you don't have to pay any money. we're going to let people come and get a week of service in the facility absolutely free in exchange for two hours per week of community service, documented local community service. This way, the facility that we run is going to be able to feed the town in which it lives through labor that the town doesn't need to pay for because the town can't afford to pay for it on projects that are important to the people who live in the town

and not a local government bureaucracy. Through doing this, we're going to be able to have the kids eat better food, have the kids go outside and play, because the reasons why the school districts don't do that is because they can't afford it. They don't want to pay another two teachers for the extra shifts. They're not going to pay more money for organic food that actually has a name. And when I say a name, I mean broccoli, not bologna, not some mixed up concoction made in a lab for consumption. Our plan is that this is never going to be complete, but that when we can do it in one town and prove that it works, it will be taken up by other towns who want to cure the

sickness that is the local society that they have there through the same means with which we do it. We had our first meeting today with the facility that will likely house this. It could fall through, but maybe it doesn't. We've been having conversations with the town about this for four years and they've done nothing. They haven't been able to. So we're going to take it into our own hands. And our plan is that when we do this, when we teach people the value of fitness, what it means to be fit, and I'll get into some really specific details in a minute here, that we will be able to, through fitness and education, transform a local community that in turn will transform potentially your community. That's the vision.

At Active Life, we help people get out of pain without going to the doctor or missing the gym. And we teach health and fitness professionals how to help their clients get out of the doctor, excuse me, get out of pain without going to the doctor or missing the gym. We teach doctors how to do it because they understand that the first two questions that a patient asks in a doctor's office is, how long do I need to be here and what's it going to cost? As if to say, there are a litany of places I'd rather be with my time and a litany of places I'd rather spend my money than with you in this office. Doctors need to be more human. They need to understand that and they need to be able to facilitate that without going out of business. We need doctors. Don't confuse it.

Coaches need to be thought of as the doctors for the people who don't need the doctors. I want to say that again. Coaches need to be thought of as the doctors for people who don't need doctors. Look at personal trainers and coaches today. There are some exceptional ones. But when you group them all together, personal training and fitness coaching isn't taken seriously. If it was, we wouldn't be paying our coaches $20 an hour to do their job.

Nobody would go to medical school and incur hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the privilege to make $20 an hour when they graduate. They just wouldn't. So we need to professionalize the coach. So I want to give you an example that a good friend of mine named Tyler McBride, who owns CrossFit 516 in Mineola, New York, gave me to describe how fitness can be a lesson about life. And it's one that maybe you guys could try tomorrow, today, whenever you have the opportunity. He tells his members at CrossFit 516 that once 3-2-1-go hits, I am no longer your coach. And I might sound counterintuitive. You'd be like, what do you mean? That's when the coaching starts. He coaches his ass off. What he meant was he can no longer teach you how to make decisions in the moment. It's your turn. He's taught you what you need to know. Now you're practicing

and he'll refine it. He'll slow things down for you when necessary. He'll change the weight when necessary. He'll stop you and correct your technique when necessary. But it's your decision time. So he uses wall balls as an example. And he said, three, two, one, go, hit. And let's just say the workout, for example, has 50 wall balls to open it up. Five, zero.

And we want you to choose a weight that's going to allow you to go completely unbroken. A lot of you are like 50. Well, I can't do 50 wall balls. I'm broken with no weight. Yeah, you can. So 50 wall balls, 50 wall balls to start the workout. And then we're going to get into whatever else we do. Everybody line up on that wall, the far wall. We're going to do wall balls at the wall ball targets on the far wall. He tells them, as soon as you drop your wall ball, as soon as the wall ball hits the ground, you have given permission to the person next to you to drop their wall ball. You did it. So they have been thinking about doing it. And now it's understandable that it might be a good idea and they might not be by themselves. So they let their

wall ball drop. When they let their wall ball drop, the person next to them sees that two people have now let the wall ball drop. They let their wall ball drop. And before you know it, we're celebrating the one or two people in a class full of 15 who actually ends up doing the 50 wall balls unbroken. Nobody wants to be the first to break. Somebody does, and then it becomes okay for everybody else to do it. The more people who break, the more acceptable it becomes for you to break. So what he tells them is, think about when you break at home.

Think about when the things that you do at home, you take your foot off the gas on. How do your kids see that? How do your coworkers see that? How do your friends see it? How do your parents see it? Your sisters, your brothers. You see, if you're willing to take a break on something as trivial as throwing a wall ball at the wall when your only task is to continue throwing the wall ball at the wall

everything else in the workout is nominal just keep throwing the wall ball at the wall 50 down everything else it's easy street if you're willing to break on something where the barrier is that low, what else are you willing to break on? And what is the trickle-down effect of that break? Here's some examples for how we can clean up the world together through fitness with this mindset.

You get out of your car and on your way from where you are to where you're going is a garbage pail. And between you and that garbage pail on the floor is a cup that somebody else has dropped. It's garbage. Do you stop and pick it up? Throw it in the trash? Or do you step over it? Because somebody else dropped it. So it's okay.

There's someone in town who comes by and cleans that up eventually. Which is it? Do you go back and grab the door and hold it open for the person who's coming who's 30 feet behind you and has a bunch of stuff in their hands? Do you do that? Because it's a little bit harder than not doing it

and so is throwing the wall ball again. And you see somebody who clearly has done themselves up, cares about the way that they look today. You notice it. Do you tell them? Because you have the opportunity in the gym to tell somebody else that they did a great job on that workout, that you noticed that they really pushed themselves. If we continue to look at fitness as the thing that we do so that we can look good naked, then we deprive ourselves of what fitness

could really do for us. And if we deprive ourselves of what fitness could really do for us, then we deprive society of what fitness could do for it. If you're listening to this podcast, the likelihood is you exercise. You probably do. Most people don't chime into something that has barbell in front of it who don't exercise. And if you're still here, thank you. It means you're interested in this episode. So here's what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you first and foremost to recognize and accept that as one person, I can't do this. As one company, we can't do this. And that there is a problem that needs doing. Then I ask you to accept that you doing a little thing in the gym could become you doing a big thing outside of the gym. And I ask you to accept that you doing a big thing or even a little thing outside of the gym could change somebody else's life for the better. That leads to them doing something that makes somebody else's life better.

Too many of us are viewing success as making enough money to not have to worry about money. As gaining enough status to have other to worry about money, as gaining enough status to have other people looking at us and saying, wow, that person has some status. That's not success. Not to me, at least. Not to Active Life. Not to Shrugged, I imagine. Success includes including other people in your vision such that they're compelled to support it. Part of your vision is going to be your ability to spend the time with your family that you need to have. To have the conversations with people that you need to have. to have the conversations with people that you need to have, to have the time to yourself that you need to have,

to feel good about yourself every single day, to have the freedom to say yes whenever you want and no whenever you think it's appropriate. All of those are key elements of success, and success for me is going to look different than success for you. And too often we're taught that there are leaders and there are followers and you can only be one. The best leaders are the best followers. You can't be one without being the other. That's the reality. So what I'm asking you is to help me and help active life achieve success by fitting your vision inside of ours. Help us make society better. Help us help people become better. Help us help you become better by acknowledging that there's room to do it.

And that every once in a while, each of us is dropping the wall ball in our life. And it's still going to happen. No one's going to be perfect. But if we're conscious, every time we drop the wall ball, we'll drop the wall ball less. If the focus is keep throwing the ball and everything else will fall into place, we'll keep throwing the ball. At Active Life, we're going to keep getting people out of pain without going to the doctor or missing the gym by any means necessary. We're going to have conversations with our clients.

We're going to give them 20 meter runs so that they can see that their Achilles doesn't hurt when they do it. We're going to have them tell us that they believe it's going to work. They're going to do high pulls. They're going to do step ups. They're going to do tempo squatting and they're going to pull heavy weight off the ground and they're going to play with their friends

and they're going to enjoy their lives. If that's all that we end up doing, we will have put a small dent in the big problem. Our ambition is not to put a small dent in the big problem. It's to destroy the problem. And I know how crazy it sounds. I know that the idea that us building a local facility that allows people to come through financial contribution or energy contribution given back to the town sounds like nice woo-woo stuff that might be a decent thing for your town, but isn't going to go anywhere worldwide.

Watch it. Watch us do it. Some of you will adopt early. Some of you will wait. That's okay. I understand it's our burden to prove it. I get that. I'm asking that each of you consider your role.

That's all. If the only thing that we do for the world is make it a better place through step-ups, high pulls, tempo squatting, deadlifting, and communication, we've done a decent job. If we've facilitated the opportunity for each and every one of you to take ownership over your role, your responsibility, and your opportunities, and then created ways for you to take action, well then together we've done something pretty transformative. That's all. Just want to do something transformative. So now you're in on the vision. I would love to hear from you about what you think of this.

Share this podcast if you liked the idea. Tag us at ActiveLifeRx on your social media channels. Send this podcast to your friends who listened to it or need to listen to it. Make sure this message gets out. Be one of the people who early on heard the vision, adopted it, and later on was right. That's all for today. Turn pro. That's going to be a wrap for this episode of Active Life Radio on the Shrugged Collective Network. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please head to wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating as well as a great review. If you really love this episode, make sure you're sharing it with the people who need to hear it. Value unshared is value wasted. And of course, if you're looking to get more from us, whether it's coaching courses, one-on-one coaching from

one of our staff members to help you get out of pain without going to the doctor or missing the gym? Head to ActiveLifeRx.com slash shrugged. We'll see you next time.