Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #267 BITESIZE | The Power of Positivity | Joe Wicks

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 149 of the podcast with the inspirational Joe Wicks. Joe has been inspiring people to get healthy for nearly a decade. And in this clip, he explains how he followed his passion against the odds and why optimism, compassion and healthy living are choices within everyone's reach. reach. I've heard that you try to do bootcamp classes and there was some times when no one would rock up. You love helping people. If no one turns up, you're going to keep rocking up

Starting point is 00:01:57 day after day. And it's certainly not an overnight success, is it? Yeah. I do think that every person that's mastered their craft or their art or what they're good at, there's always been a struggle. There's always been a time where no one turned up, where no one was booking tickets to your concert or coming to your bootcamp. But I never for one second thought, I'm going to give up now and go and work at Holmes Place or David Lloyd. I just wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to have my own business. When I posted my first Lean in 15 video, all my mates laughed at me, thought I was a plonker. Everyone was telling me to go back to my bootcamps. YouTube, when I started that, no one subscribes, no one's doing your videos. What makes you keep

Starting point is 00:02:33 filming them on your terrace, on your own with your camera and uploading them? And now today, 6 million people a month do those workouts. That would never have happened unless I put in the work in the early days and I believed in myself. And for me, honestly, my greatest achievement is Pee With Joe lockdown and the growth of my YouTube channel, because that's content that anyone anywhere in the world, whether you're living in the Philippines, India, South America, Australia, you can go onto that channel and do a workout completely for free and 6 million people a month for doing that. And that's just because I've been so consistent and never gave up. Yeah. I mean, what a message for anyone listening to this who is confused in their life and is

Starting point is 00:03:17 trying to find where to go next. And sort of even hearing you say that, that, you know, your mates were laughing at you when you posted your first video. Mate, who the hell do you think you are? No one's going to like that sort of stuff, but it's about having that belief, isn't it? You say you don't know where that comes from. I mean, is there anything in your childhoods, if you think back, is there anything do you feel that has given you that extra belief? Because not everyone will go the extra mile like you have. My mum left home at 15. You know, she wasn't educated. She didn't get any GCSEs or A-levels. My dad's a roofer. So I'm not from an ambitious family of entrepreneurs. My mum had my brother Nick at 17. She had me when she was 19. And my dad throughout my whole life has battled

Starting point is 00:03:58 through heroin addiction. He's clean today, which is amazing. And I suppose now as an adult and as a parent, I'm really focused on having a strong family unit and being present and being stable and being really kind of committed to my wife and my kids and being there for them. And I suppose I apply that to my business and my work. I just care about people. I think I've realized as I've grown up, I think maybe when I was younger, I was probably more selfish and not very optimistic and a little bit pessimistic. But now I've just trained myself to be positive and be optimistic in every situation. And that's something you can really learn to do. And it feels so good when you realize you can be positive. You can live your life not moaning about things and actually taking control. Because when you do that, when you realize you can react differently and you can see things positively, life is better and you can be so much happier. So I don't know where it came from, but it's definitely something that's inside of me. And I love spreading that message. I love trying

Starting point is 00:04:53 to encourage other people to live that way, whether it's through meditation or exercise, whatever it may be, you can choose to live a healthier, happier life if you start making the right decisions, I think. You said that, Joe, that when you realize you can react differently, that is really powerful, mate, because that's been one of the biggest learnings for me in my journey into adulthood and as a parent is just that, it's when you know there's that space between the stressor and our response. There is a space, and in that space, we can choose what we do. You know, it may be hard sometimes, but we can choose. And it's like a revelation when you sort of get that and go, oh, I could react like that. I used to react like that, but now I'm going to choose to react differently. Joe, about a year and a

Starting point is 00:05:42 half ago, I think I heard you say somewhere that you don't think meditation is for you. It's not your thing or something like that. But then I know and I've heard your chat with Russell and it was brilliant. It was such a good lesson. And he mentioned on that chat, as you didn't hear that, he thought meditation was going to help you. Was that the trigger for you to try hear that he thought meditation was going to help you. Was that the trigger for you to try again? And what's happened since then? So I tried like the Headspace app and the Calm app a couple of years back, you know, and it's like the seven day challenge or whatever. And I did about 10 minutes of it. And I rang up my friend and said, look, I'm mindful that I cannot be mindful. And I'm fine with it. I want to be busy. I like being busy. I'm good. And then I did the Russell Brand Under the

Starting point is 00:06:25 Skin podcast. And he says, Joe, you sound like a man. Your brain sounds like a brain that needs meditation. And he was like, look, I'm going to send you a link. Go and give it a go. It's a 20 minute guided meditation on YouTube, completely free. I sat there and I did it. And I just felt so good. Like I've never connected with my breath. I've done yoga before, but I've always struggled with the breathing and that kind of stuff. And it opened something up in my mind, it opened up this moment of space and like gratitude. And I said, I did an amazing, this is a true story. I did an amazing meditation on gratitude. And it said, think of something you're really grateful for. And all I could think about was my dad being alive. And I was thinking, why am I thinking that? Where's that thought come from? And I burst into tears because I realized how grateful I was that he didn't die. He didn't inject himself with heroin

Starting point is 00:07:14 one day and he's flat and die. And that was really powerful. And I had this really wonderful feeling. I've never had that thought. I've always just thought he was a victim, but I kept thinking, you you're a survivor I'm proud of you like I'm so grateful you've survived this I got off the got off the meditation like got out of the 20 minute meditation I rang him up and I told him that and I told him how proud I was of him and like what a weird thing to happen I've never that's never crossed my mind but meditation brought me that calmness and that little bit of space in my head to think you know you can say this to your dad right now and you can mean it and it could be wonderful and it was just the most lovely conversation and he was so happy that I reached out and he's been

Starting point is 00:07:53 trying to get me to meditate for years my old man because he's very much into yoga meditation I've done some really deep meditations on gratitude and and that's powerful like when you when you start to actually think positively about things, you realize that life's just all these experiences and you've got to be grateful for everything, you know, and you can learn from it. And one thing I'll say about my childhood is that my mum and dad always said, and my mum used to say all the time, Joe, I love you, whatever you want to be, whether you're a dustman or a doctor, I'll love you just the same. And that's such an important message when you're a kid, because I didn't have any pressure to be anything or anyone. I just was going to be who I wanted to

Starting point is 00:08:27 be. And that was a lovely message. And I keep, I say it's Indian. I was like, whatever you want to be darling, when you're older, I'm going to be so proud of you as long as you're happy. And that's really what my mom and dad have said to me from a very young age, even when I was like a seven, eight year old boy. Yeah. Powerful. Is it true that in your PE lessons, you were the first out and you were trying to motivate and sort of gear and get everyone going? It's 100% true. And the more I talk about that experience to journalists, the more it becomes clear that because when I was in school, I was very disruptive. I had a very short attention span. So in maths, English and science, I would have annoyed you. I would have distracted you.

Starting point is 00:09:03 I would have been leaning back on my chair, you know, being a clown. But when it came to PE, I loved it. I ran down there. I wanted to be straight on there, getting dressed. And, you know, when I was a kid and you're playing PE, you can't play football on your own, so you need a team. So I would be rounding up the kids saying, come on, get your kit on. And then there'd be people dragging their feet going, that's not for me.

Starting point is 00:09:21 You know, they'd be more into their tech or their kind of creative stuff. But I still tried to get everyone to do their best and really encourage them to have a go at it and so I do I do think even then I was a little kind of personal trainer if you like um and rounding the kids up saying come on it's tennis time grab the kit let's go and I'd be running to the shed and picking things up because the quicker I got that lesson going the happier I was so if it dragged out and I only got a half an hour session, I'd be upset. So I would really be trying to get everyone on the same page. And that is quite ironic when you think that now I do that as a living.

Starting point is 00:09:53 But the whole PE with Joe thing, the lockdown workouts, I was supposed to be a PE teacher. I just didn't have the patience. I went to work as a teaching assistant for a year. So I have come full circle. I was a personal trainer, running boot camps, doing one-to-ones. Then I went on this UK tour. Then I'd done PE with Joe and I've come full circle. I'm doing what I always knew I was going to do, which was inspire kids to move and exercise. Yeah. Joe, I tell you, that gives me tingles hearing that because it's like you were

Starting point is 00:10:20 doing that probably at 10, 11, 12, whatever it was. You were being the body coach at school. You strike me as someone who is living your life. You're not living the life that society expects of you or what other people may want you to do. You found your passion. It just so happens you're doing it on a global scale, but you could just as easily have not been doing it on a global scale. And I get the impression from you that if you were a PE teacher in a school helping 30 kids in PE class, of course, we'll never know, but I get the impression from you that you'd be happy and content doing that. Do you know what I mean? I think so too. I really do. I love being a personal trainer. I love doing bootcamps. I just kind of outgrew it in the sense that I wanted to reach more people. And just by chance, I got on Instagram and I started sharing videos and started sharing recipes. And I never

Starting point is 00:11:15 had... You have to understand, when I started sharing my videos on Instagram, I did not think I was going to get approached by a book publisher to create books. I did not start my YouTube channel to do PE with Joe and have 80 million views. And I didn't do PE with Joe to get an MBE. But when you're so driven and so passionate, you just do it. You don't know why it's like an energy behind me just pushing me forward. And I've always had that. And I do, like you said, if I wasn't successful as the personal trainer and the body coach, I probably would have gone into coach, I probably would have gone into teaching. I probably would have been a school teacher and I would have been very happy doing it. Yeah. It's so lovely that because I think many of us in life, we're struggling. We're trying

Starting point is 00:11:54 to live someone else's life. We're trying to do what we think we should do rather than actually what we're meant to do. And it's a very, very inspiring story. When I think of that energy, Joe, I'm sort of thinking, where does that come from? Because there must have been setbacks along the way. I've got this energy inside me and I know I can inspire and motivate and I love it. I'm so driven by that. I'm so purpose-driven.

Starting point is 00:12:17 And a lot of people will look at me from a distance and think it's like this big marketing machine and it's all about YouTube views and book sales. But that all came completely organically. it was never intentional. Even this year with the fundraising, I didn't plan on being a fundraiser. I just love doing stuff with schools. I love getting kids moving and I needed to do those P with Joe workouts to help people. I just love working with school kids. I love knowing that young kids are like going into their living room and choosing a YouTube workout and doing it on their own. That's for me is the ultimate win because it's like they're doing it off their

Starting point is 00:12:47 own back. And I get a lot of messages from parents that say that my kid went upstairs with my laptop and I could hear bang and I thought they were rowing and they were doing one of your hip work as they were doing mountain climbers or running on the spot. And that's such a lovely message because it's really what I'm trying to achieve. It's like independent desire to want to exercise for their own mental health. So I just very much, I focus on that. I focus on what I'm good at. And that is inspiring, you know, young children and adults to move and feel good

Starting point is 00:13:15 and smile and laugh. And I'm going to try and do it as long as I possibly can. Really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #267 BITESIZE | The Power of Positivity | Joe Wicks

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