Barbell Shrugged - The Bledsoe Show — Anders Varner: Guiding Coaches to Their Greatness — 101

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Anders Varner is the host of Barbell Shrugged, and co-creator of The Low Back Fix, The Knee Fix, and The Shoulder Fix. Anders found the weight room at age 13 and decided he would call it home for the rest of his life. A four-time CrossFit regional competitor and member of John Cena’s “One Ton Club”, Anders has trained with and coached high level athletes from the worlds of the NFL, WWE, and CrossFit. In this episode, Anders gives a talk about two important skills: Greatness and coaching. He goes into how these skills can be learned and developed, and how we can build programs and systems to help coaches develop greatness. During the talk, Anders covers 3 main areas: The pillars, vision casting, and mentorship, and he closes the talk with 3 actionable steps that you can apply immediately. To learn more about greatness and coaching, go to the The Strong Coach. Enjoy! - Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: https://shruggedcollective.com/tbs_varner ------------------------------------------------------------------------  Please support our partners! @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/bledsoe  to save 15% on your first purchase @vuori- www.vuoriclothing.com - Use coupon code BLEDSOE25 @neurohacker - www.neurohacker.com - Use coupon code BLEDSOE @elementalwizdom - www.elementalwizdom.com - Use coupon code BLEDSOE   ► Travel thru Europe with us on the  Shrugged Voyage, more info here: https://www.theshruggedvoyage.com/ ► What is the Shrugged Collective?  Click below for more info: https://youtu.be/iUELlwmn57o ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged  

He lives up here, Rob Hammer. All right, we'll make sure that happens. How are we introing this? Anders, what... We're just going into it. Yeah, what's the reality of the fitness industry right now? What's the reality in the... Not the fitness industry.

More specifically, what's the reality for the coaching industry? We've been in it. We've both been in it for a couple decades a piece and we've both noticed a trend and you and I got talking yesterday and what you laid out and what you've been noticing is really detailed and I'm really excited for the audience to learn about what it is that you found to be true and where a lot of coaches can put their attention. So what is the reality in the coaching industry right now? Yeah. So there's a couple different sides to this thing.

If you're in a CrossFit space or if you're a personal trainer in, say, like a big box globo gym um you're struggling and and the problem really in our industry is that more so than ever we have all the technical knowledge that we could ever imagine right but we don't have the tools to allow people to turn this into a full-time career or to make a living out of it that is substantial. And we find that there's a ton of fall-off or people that are just lost and they're doing what everybody is telling them to do, but nobody is really laying out a path to get there. Yeah. And I find a lot of coaches, you know, that we all have, like you were saying, more access to movement, program design, the technical aspects of coaching. We have more access to that now than ever.

And, you know, I remember when I got into CrossFit, I had this weightlifting background. And I told myself, I was like, oh, shit, I'm really going to be able to do something cool here because I'm one of the few guys that knows how to snatch and clean and jerk. And what I'm finding now, though, is we may have access to the technical details, but coaches aren't really able to synthesize that into their coaching practice because they're in a place where they don't know where to get their next client. Like the things that coaches are worried about, if they had 100 clients and they were working all day every day, they'd be really happy. But there's an aspect of what's happening in the coaching industry.

There's a lot of coaches. There's more coaches than there are people wanting to be coached right now. Would you agree with that? It's very close, yeah. There's the boom of entrepreneurism. Is that the right? Entrepreneurship is, I don't know which one that is. We'll create that word. Yeah, I think people are realizing that becoming an entrepreneur is relatively easy. You can just go get a client, and now you're an entrepreneur. How do you make that work?

Yeah. It's an entrepreneurial boom right now. Technology has allowed this to happen. And yeah. And the information is there. You really just need to learn how to become a trainer, teach a squat, teach a deadlift. And I really, I mean, it's a very easy way to kind of pose a question to somebody that's getting into being a trainer. It's like, why are you doing this? Well, I love fitness. Okay. Well, I think you have the most important job in the world, right? You have the ability to kind of structure relationships. You are able to empower people, build trust, and usher people on this journey of living a stronger, healthier, longer life. It's something that nobody thinks about the magnitude

of your power or your investment into people. It's very important. It's a job that really provides a lot of value to people's lives. And unfortunately, the easiest route is, okay, now I'm a personal trainer at 24-Hour Fitness, Equinox, wherever it is, and I'm making 20 bucks a client or 20 bucks a class. And it's like, okay, I've got this. Now where do I go? And they don't understand the full path of how do we get there? Or what separates somebody that's making 20, 30 bucks a client or a class from somebody that's making $150,000 a year. Yeah, what bums me out is, and I've done this myself, which is, oh yeah, I'll get the certification,

I'll get the job at the gym, and then everything else will, how I get to that $150,000 a year position, that'll reveal itself. The trouble is, is we're practicing, or we're copying what people are doing down the street. Or we're just doing whatever, like you were saying, if you're a trainer at a 24-hour fitness, Equinox, or a CrossFit box or something like that, you're really putting faith in somebody else to take care of you. But what I find is, you know, 12 to 18 months into

the gig and you're still getting paid 20 bucks an hour and you're not getting enough hours and you're going, oh, wow. Well, what now? Yeah. And that really leads into the question of, well, why have we had success in this realm versus all of the, I mean, there's over 300 plus thousand trainers in this world. How many of them are doing well? Well, the average salary of a personal trainer or a coach is $34,000 in our country. That's not a lot of money, no matter where you live. So if you even scale that to California rates, or if you live in a big city, big metropolitan area where there's a lot of additional income floating around,

like maybe you're at $55,000 a year. Okay, cool. Well, the top 10% of those people are making 74 grand a year. If you scale that to the big city, you might be making 90, maybe at the very high top 2% of the people around you, you're making $100,000. Well,

in that metropolitan area, you probably aren't going to be able to raise a family, comfortably live, and put your kid through school. What does that mean? People are struggling. They don't have a path to getting to the life that they want to live. I think this hurts the coaching industry overall, not only the individuals, but how can we advance this as a, as a, the culture of coaching? How do we advance the technical aspects of coaching when people don't stay in it long enough to master it? Because if you, if you can never get into that income bracket, what will end up happening is people, you know what people, they either treat personal

training as a part-time gig or it's something they do until they grow up. And that's, it does not have to be that way. And we've noticed that it hasn't been that way for us. And however, for the most people, it, it, it has been. And so what we do is we have coaches. They get into personal training. They're really passionate for a year or two. And then they go, wow, I got to go get a real job now because, you know what, I just had a kid. And that got expensive. So the whole industry suffers because of that.

Well, I think that it's, and this is what we connect on so much, is we have to change the way we talk about the conversation. We have to reshape the conversation from, like, how many clients do you have? Okay, now you're successful. How many classes do you coach a week? Okay, now you're successful. You're not. And what we need to start talking about

is this idea of greatness. And that is kind of our purpose going forward is this idea of guiding coaches to their greatness. Like, how do we shape the conversation so that people aren't focused on what I have and where am I going and how am I growing and what are the pieces that I need? So I like to talk to the coaches like, who's the best basketball player? Who's the best entrepreneur in the world? It's like, oh, Jordan. Okay, well, why is Jordan the best? He's got six titles. Does he have six titles just

because someone handed it to him? Or did Jordan decide at a very young age, I want to be the greatest basketball player that's ever lived. And he has shaped his entire life around the idea of greatness. And six titles is what happened. Is Steve Jobs, was he born knowing what the iPhone was? Or did he shape his entire life around greatness? And the iPhone is what manifested out of that greatness. He found a way because he had positioned everything he had done in his life and used all the experiences in his life to create this product that is used by, who knows, a jillion people in the world. Everyone's got one in their pocket. What do you think is keeping people from doing that? Because I think every coach starts coaching with the intent to be great. And then a few months go by and the wind gets sucked out of the sails.

What's happening there? Well, I think that the number one thing is people don't look at greatness as a skill. People think that they're born with it right like everyone thinks that these people you know they may have some genetic inclination towards something like you may be six six and you're going to be better at basketball yeah that's that's something you can't but greatness to be your best self everyone can develop that skill and if you start to believe that greatness is a skill we can start to compare it to other things like coaching is a skill you And if you start to believe that greatness is a skill, we can start to compare it to other things. Like coaching is a skill.

You have to learn how to get a message to get somebody to push their knees out and squat. Awesome. You can learn that skill. You can learn how to do clean and jerks. You can learn how to be a better coach at coaching those things. But nobody ever thinks of greatness as a skill. Well, you got to practice it.

Yeah. So what does practicing greatness look like? So there's, I kind of like to draw this pyramid shape. And pyramids are, obviously, everybody knows they're great, strong, structured. As Louis Simmons would say. Yeah. How tall is a pyramid? There's a handful of people laughing right now.

So in order to, I kind of like to think of, like a pyramid is an incredibly strong shape and structure. But if we can add some foundations to it that go down instead of just the pyramid going up, and we can add these pillars. I like to talk about the pillars of attention, intention, and manifestation, right? Attention. Where are your thoughts, the energy, and time? All of those things are intangible, so they're hard to think about. And that's where people instantly... They don't teach that shit in school either.

No, and that's instantly where people start to fall off because they just, they go on autopilot as soon as they don't have to be in front of their clients. And no one's thinking about how they're spending that extra time. So when you're not on the floor coaching what what are your actions when you're home at night what are you doing are you scrolling through instagram are you watching shitty reality tv like what what is what does that look like what how do you spend your time i think instagram stories has become the new uh reality tv it's so good sometimes. I've caught myself before. I'm washing dishes. I've set my phone up on the counter.

And I just hit the play button. And I go, I wonder what so-and-so is up to. Interesting. 30 minutes later. And a pint of ice cream. No. Just stoned out of your mind on dopamine.

I can't take it anymore. Does anyone like my shit? No. Why do I only have 10%? People like my stuff. So that's like the base pillar, right? Where is our attention? What are we doing in our free time when we're not performing in front of clients or in class

or when we're not getting paid, where's our attention? And the next piece is the intention. So the thoughts and the feelings that go into what we are experiencing when we're not on. So if you're spending your time on social media, you're probably spending a lot of time being angry that you're not on a beach in fucking paradise where all of your friends just happen to have pictures or PRing your whatever it is, right? Like everyone's life is so great. So you go on social media and you look at it and you're like, oh man, everyone's doing it better than me. So now you have a whole bunch of bad feelings going on in your life, right? You don't feel it to them. Yeah. You get

addicted to that bad feeling and that is your intention. All of a sudden everything is a neg that washes over you as this negative intention, right? So do you feel like you're being productive in your free time? That's a feeling, not tangible. It's something we have to feel. Your actions make you happy. If you're on social media, probably not. Are they bringing fulfillment to your life?

That's a big question because no one really. How do we know if your actions are fulfilling? Well, you have to go find that because that's a feeling that you have of man i'm really doing something great for myself right now and manifestation is the third pillar that that is the action piece because your attention and your intention are going to result in your actions and the way that you experience your life and the actions that you take. So whatever you're thinking, however you feel about it, will be how you experience everything in your life. So if you spend your attention in positive ways, learning, researching, spending time around people that are going to make you better,

your intention is that you're going to feel significantly more in control of your own life. You're going to be happier. You're going to feel more productive. Your life will be more fulfilling. And that's going to manifest in better work, better clients. These three pieces are the foundation for everything we do. And nobody ever thinks about them because they're intangible. It's not my time spent here, money comes in. It's the base. It's how we experience life and what we're expecting out of life that matters. Yeah, this is, I love what you're saying about this attention, intention, manifestation.

Because, and one thing I've been thinking about and been in conversations with people around recently is a lot of modern psychology is a lot of psychologists that are cutting edge right now are agreeing on the idea that about what is alignment. And people talk about, oh, my life is in alignment. When your life is in alignment, that's when you experience fulfillment, right? And that's what people are really looking for. And I think that people get confused about purpose. Like, what is my purpose? What is my purpose? I was like, guess what?

You likely have more than one purpose. Yeah. Sometimes my purpose is to go take a dump. And sometimes my purpose is very fulfilling. Yeah, very fulfilling purpose there. And sometimes it's to hop on a mic. And, you know, purpose is a, I think people think about it as a static thing. But it's a moving target and it's a process.

And you're a process. And to think that you're going to find the purpose is kind of silly. And so instead of trying to identify a purpose which is outside of yourself, I really like the idea of finding alignment. And what people are really – they're not seeking purpose. They're seeking fulfillment. And what the psychologists are saying now is you experience alignment when your feelings match your thoughts, match your actions. And if any one of those things is out of place, conflict is what exists inside the human body. And I think that a lot of times people are having feelings that are creating thoughts and then they're stuffing it down

and they're not taking action. And action can be the hardest thing to do. And it's when those three things are lined up, like you're talking about your attention, your intention and manifestation. If you want that manifestation to occur, I think things like the secret and this whole manifestation conversation got a little out of control where people go,

well, I can just think about it. It's like, good luck with that because you got to feel it and you got to take some action too. Well, the manifestation piece kind of leads into the base of the pyramid of when you actually start to take action, right? And this is where things actually get really hairy

because you got to make decisions on your own life. And we call this base of the pyramid kind of cleaning out your own house. And I like to tell this fun story of actually just getting married. Like from the age of whatever to 30 years old, 28, 29, 30 years old, there was a lot of girls.

And they all lasted in this like three to eight week long period. And what would happen after eight weeks? I just, oh, these girls are terrible. All of them. How could they all be terrible, right? But you have this great experience. It's short lived. It's hot. It's heavy. And then eight weeks later, you look at them and you're like, we have no future. You're terrible. There's zero depth to you. Why would I spend my time? I can't spend another day with you. And it's not just girls, right? Every girl in the world, how many times, I keep dating douchey guys. Where are the good guys? Everyone wants to know where the good guys are. Well,

guess what? You suck. You aren't doing the work to attract a good guy. I'm going to send this to a bunch of ladies I know. Why can't I find that guy? I was the girl. Why was I only dating terrible guys? Because I was a

douchey dude that was only putting out the vibe that I was here for three to eight weeks and that's all they were interested in as well. You attract everything that you're putting out, and everybody would look at me and go, oh, that guy's only here for about three to eight weeks. Cool, let's go. And by the end of it, we didn't like each other. So what happens? I don't want that anymore. I got so tired of that that I need to clean out my own house. I got to clean this thing up. I need to become somebody that's long-term dateable, marriable. Well, what does that mean? Now I have to go back and objectively look at all the decisions I make. Am I somebody that's stable enough to have a household? Am I responsible enough to potentially raise a family?

Am I going to be able to buy a house, a mortgage? All these things that go into is an actual female that has her shit together, willing to date somebody like me. I got to grow into that. I can't be dating douchey or terrible girls and douchey dudes. I have to grow so that somebody that is willing to marry me will actually appear in my life. So I took six months off dating. And six months later... Were you celibate? I was. What? Yeah.

I broke the whole thing. I was talking to... I had dinner with a friend last night. She went celibate for two years. Oh, wow. Best thing that ever happened to her. Or that she happened to. The very first girl that I dated is now my wife.

And we have a child together. And I understand that there's a process to growing, to becoming the person that you want to be. And in that process, you might have to go celibate for six months. Because you have to be around people and learn what a marriable thing is. I had no idea. I was only conditioned to date people for three to eight weeks and then think they're terrible as if it was their fault. It was my fault.

I needed to grow into something that was marriable. I used to like to date girls three to six months. But after two, three weeks, I would do the bare minimum. I was like, I'll keep her around, but I'm going to coast. I'm going to coast. And then after six months when it was ending, I'm like, I'll keep her around but I'm going to coast. Yeah. I'm going to coast. And then after six months when it was ending, I'm like,

oh, what happened? Why did this fail? I don't understand what happened. They must be a terrible person. It's got to be them. It's not. It's not.

It's 100%. You. You're putting that vibe out. That's what's coming back and those girls are signing up for three to eight weeks. They're dating douchey dudes and I'm dating terrible girls. It's just's coming back. And those girls are signing up for three to eight weeks. They're dating douchey dudes, and I'm dating terrible girls.

It's just what it is. And if you want to be successful, and you want to have something that's long-term, and you want to chase greatness, there's going to be a gap in which you have to clean out your own house. It's not just girls, right? It's all relationships. An uncomfortable gap. Yeah, a very uncomfortable gap. And it may be relationships.

Like if most of your friends go to the bar on Friday night, well, guess what? You're going to have to break up with them if you want to be good at what you do. Because Friday night is going to lead into Saturday, which is probably going to lead into Sunday. And now your first client at 5.30, 6 o'clock a.m. on Monday morning,

you're not really putting out your best effort. All these things are a system that lead to you understanding this idea of greatness and all of your choices matter. All these things are a system that lead to you understanding this idea of greatness and all of your choices matter. Your relationships. Do you spend time with people that bring you down that are negative about their life? Dating someone that brings more problems and drama. Like, are the people around you inspiring? Are they like, are they chasing greatness? That's a real thing. Like health and fitness, your your fitness coach you're supposed to be an expert in this field are you overweight like are you actually fit should someone actually be taking

fitness advice from you right how about like finances making ends meet are you worried about paying your rent next month that shows up in everything you do that scarcity mindset of like oh how do i how do i get to next month like i need to there's nothing that bothers me more than going on like facebook and you see that like i've got room for two clients this month and you're trying to create scarcity so somebody's going to act well guess what i've got room for millions of coaches right now if you would like to be better at what you do i have a plan for you i know how we can do this there's a really easy system that you can buy into and all you have to do is make a little bit of a commitment that you would like to be great at what you do

and do this for the rest of your life and all you have to do get the basic stuff in order right and all you have to do break up with your old life. It doesn't have to be all at once, but the bigger the piece that you break up with, the more uncomfortable it's going to be. But on the other side of that is, you're going to have more time. So when you break up with that terrible girl or that douchey guy, you've got a whole lot of time and you've got a whole lot of money that are now resources that you can use to do something very valuable in your life. And that is when we start to move from this survival mode of, am I going to have a job in a couple months? Like, I hope I can get two more clients and I'll be able to pay my rent a lot

better. If I could just make sure that I'm surviving. Well, once you have all of these basic essentials and you've broken up with all this stuff, you find you've got time, energy, money, all these pieces. And now you can enter into this creative mode where it's not, I hope I can survive or I hope I can pay my rent. I've only got room for two more clients. Now I have room for literally millions of people. I can help coaches. We're going to shape the way coaching is done in this world. Like, I want you to chase greatness. That's a creative thing. Like, what is greatness? So how do we do that? We have to change the way we talk.

And now I am the center of wellness. I am coaching 10,000 youth athletes. I am running coaching programs for millions of fitness coaches. That is the embodiment of what a professional is. And if somebody is the greatest, like, is Elon Musk like, I hope we can go to the moon. No, no. Elon Musk's like, I'm going to build a society on Mars. No one questions him because he embodies all of that. And I don't know why

coaches don't walk into the fitness space and embody exactly who they are and where they're going and know that getting out of survival mode, I hope I can make enough money next month, should be, I'm the center of youth athletics in all of San Diego. I have so many clients right now that I need to hire people underneath me or I need to create better systems. And now we have a creative problem because you're able to create a business model or create a structure to handle abundance. And that is at the base level of all this is getting out of survival mode

and entering into creative mode. Yeah, as I'm hearing this, I look back at my own life and go, yeah, there was a moment. I was about 30 or not about. My 30th birthday was the last time I got drunk. And I woke up the next day. It was my 30th birthday. It was a party.

Half the room was my clients at the gym. And man, I had this goblet. And I had my birthday goblet. And people were just pouring liquor in there. And I was just drinking it. I was blacked out way too early in the night. Gave a couple speeches I don't remember. Passed out.

Woke up. Was relieved to find that the woman that was in bed with me was, in fact, my wife for the next day. And I woke up with this really deep dread. I go, shit, man, I don't even know what I said last night. Clients were in the room and I ended up having the worst hangover. It took me days to recover. This is my 30th birthday. I was already starting. I was like, man, I am aging. Yeah. Like going into a new decade, especially after your prefrontal cortex has developed is a big deal. And I go, no more, no more of that. And if you look at my life and then you look at when I turned 30, there wasn't anything magic about that number. It was that experience. And it was a choice I made in that moment where I said, this has got to be

different. And if, when you look at my career, that's when the gym started doing really well. Barbell shrug started very shortly after that. There are things, more things started happening when I chose to cut out the drinking. And I had a lot of people, I had a lot of people, you know, ask me why, or even if I go to like, I had to re up my CrossFit level one and they, they crack open beers at the end of it. And I used to think that was so cool. And now I think it's so terrible. And, uh, you know what, that's where people are at and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it really. But if for me, I think it's, uh, you know, it's a personal decision. It sounds like it's a personal decision for you as well as that, that bar life, which I used to indulge in

myself and it's really, really toxic. And, um, and you, you're right. There's, when you cut something out, it creates space for something new and we get to move into that creative space. Um, and I think a lot of times in our society, people want to, they think that getting better at something is about adding, what can I add? And 99% of the time I find it's about what can I remove? And when I remove it, it creates space for something new to come in. And going back to what you were saying about attention and intention, is when I create space,

I am on high alert in regard to my attention and intention because that's what's going to get attracted into my life. Because if I am not being aware in that case, then what's going to come back in is a lot, it's going to look a lot like what I was doing. Yeah. I have a very similar moment in the gym. Oh yeah. Where you think that when you're in the gym, you are, especially when you're CEO of the gym, I need to be the life of everything, especially if we have a party. Everyone needs to know that I can do this partying thing the best, just as well as I can do the

coaching thing the best. I won 26 games of beer pong in one week and did not lose a single game. And I woke up the next week and went, do I really want everyone that is paying me money to help them have a better, fitter life to know that I am incredibly good at throwing a ping pong ball into four ounces of water at any point in time or a beer? Like I'm so good at drinking. I've played so much beer pong in my life that I can win 26 games in a row. No, that's not the vibe I want people to know about. That's not who I am. I don't want them to be like,

Anders, really good trainer. Nah, see, I actually know him as the really good beer pong player guy. No, you gotta let that stuff go and become the new person that you want to be because you're gonna wake up drunk one day or you're going to wake up with a big hangover and wonder what the hell did i do last night why did i play that many

games of beer pong what did i say in front of all the clients that's a that's a scary one but yeah that once once people find that space instead of kind of you know it, it's kind of like that loop, right? Maybe you break up with that douchey dude or that terrible girl. And what's the next thing that they do? People always go back into the loop and they find something to fill that space with negativity. And what we're learning and what we're trying to, what we are getting coaches to do is this idea of vision casting. And I think that this is the next layer of the pyramid. And I learned a lot of this stuff just in my own working with our coaches and really just self-experimenting, right?

Like you write your first business plan. You don't really know that you're doing this vision casting idea. Like what is the mission of your gym? Like, oh, stronger, healthier people. Cool. Like, well, what's the vision? What does it look like? Well, in one year, I want 300 members. In year two, I want, and it's like, what do those mean? Like what is, there's no feeling behind 300 members, right? And I've been in a couple places where I really didn't know what the future of my life looked like. Kind of breaking up with CrossFit, selling my gym, moving into this role at the Shrug Collective. There's a lot of things that happen well before any of this stuff manifests into its real life.

And one of the moments that I have, so the exercise that I always have people, anyone that I work with is before we even like start working together, I need you to just sit down and do some free writing and I need you to just roll. I want you to just tell me everything that you want in your life and not just like the little things. I want to know what your dreams are. I want to know when people, there's a lot of places. So I've been very lucky

and I've been in rooms and experienced and had a lot of friendships with, we can call it like famous people that have been very successful. One of those people is Dierks Bentley. And he used to come into the gym and train and he would invite me to places. And I've been backstage like four times with him

and it's very cool. So the majority of the people, we'll call it 15,000 people, they go and buy their tickets and they're standing among 15,000 people to watch a concert. Well, when you go backstage, you get to hang out and see what's going on back there. Pretty cool.

Open bar, you get to have a drink. It's fun. But what's super cool and what the learning experience comes in is that when you walk out on stage and you're on the stage watching the concert, when you look up at 15,000 people, your life changes a little bit. You understand a little bit of what it's like to be Dierks Bentley talking to 15,000 people. And in those 15,000 people,

every single person knows the words to the song. Every single person there is there to experience Dierks Bentley. They're there, they're paying 50 bucks a ticket not because they want to learn something they're they're seeing something new for the first time there's nothing novel about the song what they're there to do is share in the experience that that song has created so they scream at the top of their lungs and they're all singing and loving and dancing in the whole environment is this flowing thing along with the music.

And they're not doing that because they're learning something new or there's something special that they don't know about about to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. And I just thought, man, one day, why can't we just change this song out for talking about movement and nutrition and living your best life? And what if my goal is not to be a personal trainer or a coach, but what if one day my goal is to inspire so many people that I could walk out onto a stage and there'd be 15,000 people and everyone in the stage is just excited to be there, to share in the experience of movement.

And I wrote this, my vision casting, the idea of where I wanted to go with my life, I just called it Sky Full of Lighters. I want to walk out on that stage and I want to know what it's like to feel 15,000 people that have been moved by your ideas and the way that you present and the way that you can make people feel and that empowerment that they feel through your message. And, you know, it's not just, oh, go write what you think is the right answer. Like, you have to really find out what's important to you. Like, what does it feel like? What are the emotions that go into that moment when you walk out on that stage and there's 15,000 lighters up? That's an insane feeling. I think about it a lot. I still think about it a lot. I think about the emotion that goes into, holy shit, it happened. I've been dreaming about

this for years. I've thought about becoming a better speaker. I've thought about how can I reach more people? How can I create a message that creates action in other people's lives? How do I make other people better at what they do? And then one day you just walk out and it's like, oh, wow, we did the work. How hard do I have to work to get that many people to move in the right direction and make themselves better? It's not about the song. It's not about squats.

It's not about deadlifts. It's about this shared experience that everybody wants to have. Like we can bring these people together. And that's why that moment is so important. And if you sit down and you write and you dream on paper. It becomes a reality. So you've had the dream. You've had the ability to write it out. And now we've got two very tangible things.

Like we've got the dream. We've got the piece of paper. And now that becomes really the blueprint that really sets the stage for where we want to go with our career. It's written. You can go look at it every single day. And you can make it and and you can shape that idea into action and we start that at the very base like okay well if i want to stand on that stage and look up and there's 15 000 lighters and people want to be inspired to be

better people what does that look like what does it feel like well i need to find out my purpose because that's what they're going to be that's the shared experience i need to find out my purpose because that's what they're going to be. That's the shared experience. I need to find out how they can take that message and be better people. Well, now we have to worry about, or not worry about, but we have to give them actionable items. We have to give them something tangible that they can take with them to really dig into how to live a better life. And all that stuff starts with, what is the vision that I have of my life? Like what's special to me? I think one of the things that trips people out here and trips them up, and I've been tripped up by this myself, and some people are much more susceptible to this

block if we want to call it a block than others which is if people don't know how it's going to happen then they don't think it can happen and I think there's a level of trust and faith in a process of saying this is what I want

and I'm going to be moving towards it and having faith that I will get there. To me, in writing has been a huge part of my own process. So that's one thing that you and I have in common. And people who I know that get caught up in how are we going to do it, I actually find that they don't write. People who write tend to trust the process more because, well, once you start writing it down and things start happening, you go, oh, this fucking works. Do you find the same thing to be true? What do you see that blocks people from writing down their vision and pursuing it? I think that people don't understand how long it takes if you dream large enough, right?

So most people, when they're living in this survival mode, it's like, I really want to have 15 clients. Well, you can go get 15 clients in a month. You really grind it out. We could stop everything we're doing right now and I could go put all my attention and intention into getting 15 personal training clients. I could live.

It would be so simple. It's not really that difficult. We started the Shrug Collective in April. April 1st, 2018. It took us four months to hit a million downloads a month. We did 1.3 or something like that the first time that we hit a million. I want to know what it feels like to hit a billion. That's insane. A billion people. We have created a structure in which a billion people by 2028 will have at a minimum been affected by the way

that we think and view the world of fitness and health a billion people will have downloaded our thoughts and information and let us into their brain with the hopes that they're going to learn something they're going to take that education and live a better, stronger life. And then hopefully they pass that on to other people. That's how we make a massive ripple effect and change. Tell our story to somebody else and hopefully they come in as well. I really believe that we're going to hit a billion by 2028. I don't see any problems with that we're already doing a million a month it's 12 million a year 10 years if we didn't grow one ounce we're at 120 million downloads okay so we got what we got to 8x ourselves in 10 years to get to a billion if i was

to walk up to somebody be like yo we have this cool network. We talk about strength and conditioning, health and fitness, and a billion people. They'd be like, a billion? A billion? That's such a large number. Well, no, it's not because I gave myself a 10-year ramp. And I know that if I really set my intention on finding the most creative people

that have the biggest reach, that are really, really living the life and are designing their lives around a similar concept of the sky full of lighters, that they want to affect the way this world views health and fitness. Seems really simple to me, actually. Maybe I'm not dreaming big enough by saying a billion. Maybe 10 billion is actually the answer. But a billion, think about that number. If you want to impact the world, why aren't you dreaming about a billion? Why aren't you thinking about a billion? It doesn't make sense to me.

I hope I get 15 clients this month. Why? Here's the thing. When I opened the gym in 2007, CrossFit Memphis. And I didn't have a vision of reaching X amount of people. However, I had a vision of doing something. The thing that was in my mind was, we're going big.

How are you going to do it? No fucking idea. But it wasn't only a thought. It was a feeling. I had this feeling from, you know, and this feelings can be learned. You can train a feeling. I promise. Cause I've been training feelings intentionally for a while and it's really cool. And I had this sense, this feeling going big, want to make a big impact in the world. And what I did was because I had this sense, this feeling going big. I want to make a big impact in the world. And what I did was because I had that feeling, I spotted, I was constantly looking at the horizon for opportunities to go to the next level. That's a common conversation in my mind is what's the next level, right?

And I didn't know how I would do it. And in fact, I remember people asking me like, you know, what are you doing? I was like, oh, I want to reach, I want to go big. And they go, what does that mean? I go, I don't know. And as I got older, I got to put that into real words. And I started a few different businesses, had a few different ideas while I was running CrossFit Memphis before Barbell Shrug came into being. When Barbell Shrug came into being, I still didn't know if that was what was going to be the thing that really started to launch things. And it ended up being that. Here's the thing. In in 2007 if you would have said well the way that you're going to make a big impact in the fitness industry is uh with this thing called a podcast 2007 that's

when youtube came around no one was podcasting the oldest pot like the oldest podcast i know of is ben greenfield and he started in 08 and he's like oldish like yeah as far as podcasts go that's like like nobody was listening to them then we got started in 2011 2012 and people thought it was funny that they're like oh what's that even i was i recognized that it was very new yeah and so um however i wasn't attached to the how i wasn't attached to how it was going to happen. And what I was attached to was the vision. And I kept moving through and I go, this could be it. So we're going to go with it.

We're also going to do some YouTube videos. And we're going to build a Facebook. And whatever is available is what we're doing. And I look back on it and I go, wow, barbell shrug is what allowed years with barbell shrug, constantly asking myself, how can we have a bigger impact? And, I mean, if you've been following what we've been doing for years, you've seen it go up and down and sideways and left and right and all these things. And as I get older and as we do this thing longer, and then that launches the Shrug Collective, which amplifies everything that's happening by, you know, another 10X. And then we're, by bringing other people, we're leveraging other people's voices in order to cast a bigger net. And then, you know, this past year, I'm having the vision for the strong coach

and I go 100,000 coaches. 100,000 coaches in the program within the next decade. And that sounds like a lot. Most people couldn't imagine impacting 100,000 clients. I want 100,000 coaches who are going to then turn around and impact thousands of people themselves. That's the next level. And so what I'm saying here is don't get caught up in the how. Really follow the why.

Follow your vision. And things, trust this process and things will unfold for you if you do that. If things do not feel like they are unfolding for you, you're doing it wrong. And that's okay too. But know that life is going to be really hard. And part of that unfolding

is something that I think has been like the most important part of my life. When I go through this process and I focus on my attention, how am I feeling about my attention? What feelings come up? How is that manifesting into real life? How am I eliminating excess baggage so I can simplify and really focus, cleaning out my own house and making sure all my

stuff is in order. And then, you know, the next piece of vision casting, like, okay, like now that I have everything in my own life in order, where am I going? Okay, well, I don't know if I have a big enough vision or I don't know if I have it totally locked in on the how. And the thing that has been the most important piece in the how to me is not my own ideas. It's mentors that have come in. I've talked about it on your show before, but going in like the first couple of years of the gym, I was making more money, making a bigger impact than I had ever made. I knew that I was doing the right thing, but I had no idea what my business was. I thought I was in the gym business. I was never in the gym business. The gym was just where I ran my coaching business. And coaching is at the heart of what we were doing. And I never knew that

until still a good friend and mentor, Jesse Abanez came into my life. He ran, he still runs a real estate business in San Diego. And man, he came up and was like, hey, like, we got to, let's talk about what's going on here. Like, you have all this stuff going on, like, what's the future of it look like? And what are like the core principles that you're running all of this through? Like, what are the people getting out of this? And what are like the core principles that you're running all of this through? Like, what are the people getting out of this? And I had no clue what he was talking about, because I never understood business. I never understood that my job was coaching, and I needed to become the best coach that I could possibly be. And that way, I was not operating out of this

survival mode. It was in this creative mode of how do I get into a mode where I can expand this coaching business as far as possible and impact as many people as possible. And that really shaped me understanding what business was and the core concepts of the gym and why it was successful. You've attracted some interesting people. And I've attracted some interesting people. Yeah. And I've attracted some interesting people. I attracted you. Yeah. And that's been a good thing. You were, yeah.

And you know what? What I find is when you're living inside your vision, the right people show up. And usually when the people show up, they have ideas for how. You had ideas for how. And really, they have ideas for how yeah you had ideas for how and really at you the idea that you have to have like a mentor like that is my mentor like no i actually live a life where everyone around me

inspires me in a separate way i'm learning something specific from them all the time and you know the the next piece of like people that show up in your life when you get your stuff in order like john cena showed up in my life, and I talk about it all the time, but it's never really like a, oh, I got to lift weights with that guy, and he's so strong, and he's so cool. No, what I learned about was discipline.

What I learned about was dreaming. What I learned about was you can be a personal trainer and then go become the biggest movie star, and you can sacrifice everything else in your life and clean out your life with so much of the extra BS that your singular focus becomes being the best person that you can be so that your message is spread everywhere. And that is very, I got to watch that firsthand for four years and I learned like, oh, that's what discipline looks like. I thought I was disciplined. I thought I worked hard.

Then I actually got to see the best in the world work hard and be disciplined. And I realized, oh, I'm giving discipline like a D plus right now. Like that guy's actually disciplined. I thought I was working really hard. Turns out that guy's actually working really hard. And I need to follow his lead and understand how hard I need to work and how much I need to dial my own purpose in so that I have the ability to grow at the same rate that he does or the same way that he has grown and reaches many people. And in order to do that, it led me to the idea of like, in order for me to reach people, I need to kind of reshape the idea of coaching and I need to build a media company. And if I'm going to build a media company, I might as well go seek out the people that are the best in the world at growing media companies. Oh, wow. 30 minutes north of me right now,

Mike Bledsoe and Doug Larson are running an entrepreneur's breakfast. I should probably go learn from those guys. I should sit down and have a cup of coffee and just see what it's like. Now we're here. Now we all get to do this together. Now we all get to grow the Shrug Collective. But it was never part of my intent to be in this business with you guys. It was always like, I just want to go learn. Those guys are doing it bigger and better than everyone else. So I could go learn from the guy down the street that's got a cool little Instagram story every day and playing at a B-level or a C-level. Or I could go find the guys that are doing it better than everyone else, and I'll go learn from them. That way, even if I fall a little short, I'm still playing at an A-. I still know how to grow this company, or I still know how to build a media channel

to get my message out. And I can learn along the way. But it's seeking out the people that are the best at what they do. And those become your mentors. They become the relationships that you're doing. And I think it's the most important thing to understand what a mentor or somebody like that is.

Like the fact that like, you think about opportunity costs. For you to sit down and have a couple, this conversation right now, you're investing your time your energy all of those resources into me right now if cena wants to go lift weights with me yeah he's lifting weights but he's also telling he's investing his time and energy and resources into me what he could be doing is never being in my gym he could have never shown up and gone and done his own thing, but he chose to be around me to do this stuff. So I get to learn. And that opportunity cost

is something that I value more than anything else. All of the people that are in my life could be anywhere else, but I have developed the trust with them that they want to invest their time and energy and resources into me. And if I don't take that seriously, I'm going to lose those people. So every single person that I'm around all day long is somebody that is very, very important to me that I'm learning from

and I better be working my ass off or I'm going to lose that person. And if you have no idea what a mentor is or somebody that you can learn from, and you're a personal trainer or a coach, all you need to be doing is looking out at your 8, 10, 12, 15 clients or the 25 people that are in your CrossFit class, and they're all there. Somebody in that class is paying, if you're a CrossFit gym member, they're paying $150 to $200 a month. They can afford that. As a CrossFit coach, you do not have enough money to afford $200 a month gym membership. That's just not part of your monthly

budget. It's probably why you got into coaching in the first place. So anybody that is in that class is in a better financial position that you are, and you should be picking all of their brains to find out how they got to the ability to pay for a $200 gym membership. Plain and simple, you're at the bottom of the rung if you're the coach. The only way that you're going to get to the top of the list is by learning from everyone in that class, finding out everything that has made them successful enough to get to that point. And every time they talk to you, you better be listening. You better not waste their time because they could be having a conversation with anyone else,

but they're investing their time and their money and their interest into you. And take it seriously. They're your mentors. They're all right in front of you. And as you build and as you get better and as you get better at this process of eliminating the extra, really dialing who you want to be, writing this vision statement, you can tailor that conversation and weave through that crowd

to find out where you're really going to be going and how you can start to create the system of your life to getting there, which really gets to the last piece, the top of the rung, which is this integration. You're the hero of your own journey. You could go and watch all of the scary movies. Everyone loves the scary movie because the lead character is always going to run up the stairs away from the bad guy, and everyone knows the bad guy's upstairs. Why don't they run

out the front door? It doesn't make for the good movie, right? Everybody wants to have this thing, and everyone in the audience is like,'t go upstairs the bad guy's upstairs well why aren't we objectively viewing our own lives in the same way as the character that's running upstairs directly towards the bad guy like don't go on that another shitty date don't bring that person into your life is fantasy football really serving your greater purpose every sunday when you're around your friends and you have six to 12 beers, you're making all the jokes?

It's comfortable, it's fun, you enjoy it. You've done it your whole life. You have to keep going. No, you don't. Because if you were the hero of your own story, the very first thing you would do is say, we're done watching football on Sundays. That's a gigantic 12-hour block of your life

that provides zero value. And what you should be doing is going on a hike that morning, writing your programs, getting rid of all the BS work that you need to be doing on Sunday. So that on Monday through Friday, you have the ability to be around all the people that are actually going to provide the value to getting you to where you want to be. So Sunday is no longer football day. That's programming day. That's setting up your week. That's preparing for your 6 a.m. That's finding out how am I going to actually get through this week and become a better coach? And how am I going to get to whatever this dreamland that I've created in my life? I have to create a system. And that system doesn't involve six to 12 beers

and a fantasy football on Sunday. It involves work. It involves getting up early in the morning. It involves going out and getting some sunlight so you feel good about the day. Your attention on Sundays is now about preparing for your week to become this idea of greatness. Work gets really easy when you take care of yourself and prep for the week on Sunday.

Yeah, if you're doing the fantasy football thing and drinking beers until you go to bed, you wake up on Monday, it's a fucking shock. Yeah. You wake up and you're like, oh, I got to work now. Oh, it feels like Monday. Yeah. Yeah, if you complain about Monday, that's a fucking sign. Feels like Monday.

I love Mondays. Yeah. Yeah, and we got into this conversation. We were hanging out yesterday. We were about to go walk into Equinox. Yeah. And you're going to give a presentation about what we just talked about. Yeah.

And as you were showing it to me yesterday, I go, we got a podcast about this. We have to talk about it. We got a podcast about this. And then I realized, oh, it's perfect that we're podcasting about this because on Monday, the next round of The Strong Coach launches and you're going to be in The Strong Coach.

I am going to be in The Strong Coach. You're as a student. Yes. If anybody wonders what goes into being really good at what you do, you always just go back to the baseline. Where's my intention?

We're going to reach all the coaches. We have 100,000 coaches to reach. How are we going to reach all of them? Well, we're going to do a billion downloads over the next 10 years. How is that going to manifest into the next stage?. How is that going to manifest into the next stage? Well, our goal is to make everybody in this world stronger, healthier,

longer. We want to change the shape of health and longevity and impact as much as many people as possible. And the intention of the program, I did the beta group over the summer, six. I just finished the first group after beta with 12.

We're now opening it up to 24. Previously, when I did things, I would open it up to everybody and see how many people I could sign up. Not happening this time. This is being done slow on purpose because I want it to be right. And the thing is, is if I let it 100 in, there's going to be a lot more holes. With 24, we have so many people. Anders is going to be in as a student. I have Danny Rios, our head coach.

He's going to be with every single person. I'm overlooking everything. With as many eyeballs and ears on every single student, even if our curriculum could, could use some improvements because we're tweaking it every time we're there individually to bridge that gap. And so we're doing, we're intentionally opening up 24. And then at the first year, we're going to open it up to 48. And we're going to slowly grow this thing. And we're doing it slowly because it's going to be the best program. And you know why it's so easy to be the best right now?

Nobody's doing it. Nobody's talking about what actually is going to make you a good coach. I traveled around. I took the first half of the year off. It was fun. If you followed my social media, you saw me. And you're probably like, that guy is screwing off. I did a little bit. And I bounced around from gym to gym, met with a lot of coaches, went through some masterminds where there was a lot of coaches. And not only in the fitness industry, I was hanging out with life coaches and business coaches and I saw some patterns and I go,

I actually know what they need. This is exciting. And so, yeah, if you're listening to this and you're inspired by this, go to thestrongcoach.com

and get signed up. Come hang out. It's going to be sweet. I'm excited about it. We have man, the idea My wife is also taking the course because Ashley is a relationship coach and everything she knows

about business is simply by being in my presence. So she's seen a lot of the back, but she's never been gone through a structure. Uh, how, how do I, how do I impact people as a coach more effectively? So, uh, she's going to be in there as well. So we're going to have a really interesting crowd, um, in there. So, and I've, and I know a couple other people who I know a couple people personally who are going to be in the group.

It's going to be a really exciting three months because I also transformed it. It was originally eight weeks. I've turned it into 12 weeks. Got some feedback, came up with new ideas. I saw where there were some gaps. I'm going to teach more about leadership. I'm going to teach more about leadership. I'm going to do more leadership modules.

Or I'm going to add a leadership module. So we'll spend a whole week in that realm. And every single module we have over the 12 weeks could be its own 12 weeks. But this is where we're starting right now. And I'm super excited to, to, you know what we're going to have, uh, at the end of this year, we will have had a total of 42 people go through the program and, uh, we're well on our way to a hundred thousand. I love it. I, you know, what's great is when you say we have 42 people, we're well on our way to a hundred thousand.

It's happening exactly like it's supposed to. Yeah. Because you set your intention, your attention. It all goes back to just, this is our purpose. This is why we do this thing. and I,

um, one thing just from being in the group and talking to a lot of the people that have kind of been in the group as well already, um, that you've already put through, uh. This last piece that I was talking about, like in the mentorship side of things, if you struggle finding people or you struggle asking in person or don't really know like a clear path to finding somebody to learn from, begin the program. There's 24 people that are in the exact same spot that have their own stories, their own way to help you. And you've got coaches in there already

that you can ask any questions to. It's like a built-in mentorship program plus all the action items that you need to be a part of it. Yeah. And we have weekly Zoom calls. Yeah. So you get... I pop part of it. Yeah, and we have weekly Zoom calls. I pop in this last round.

I was in 80% of the calls. Danny Rios leads them. So good. And Anders will be in there. I'm going to try to get Doug in there. And yeah, the mentors are floating around in the Facebook group and will be on Zoom calls. It's going to be really, really good.

So looking forward to having you in there. Go to thestrongcoach.com. Got anything else, Anders? Good to go? Good to go. All right, brother. Thanks for joining me today and dropping all this knowledge. Yeah, buddy.

All right, man.