High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 155: Win the Small Things Daily to Build Consistency with Ian Warner, Olympian and CEO of Kho Labs

Episode Date: February 4, 2018

Ian Warner is a Canadian track athlete specializing in the 100 meters. On June 30, 2012, he finished second behind his brother, Justin, in the 100 meters at the 2012 Nationals Track & Field Championships in Calgary to make his first Olympic team. He is the founder of Kho Labs, which is a mobile technology that connects injured athletes with local health care providers. Ian is also a self-published author, an avid reader (he read 100 books in 2017), and runs a website called athleticcourage.com. In this interview, Ian and Cindra talk about: His keys to success and making it to the Olympics Ian’s disappointment at the Olympic Games How his experiences with injury led him to develop a new APP for athletes Why we should approach everything with a long-term mindset And his recommendations after reading 100 books in 2017 You can contact Ian on Twitter at @Kho_Labs and by email at [e-mail] You can find a full description of the Podcast and contact information for Ian at cindrakamphoff.com/ianwarner  

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, author of Beyond Grit, 10 Powerful Practices to Gain the High Performance Edge. And thank you so much for joining me for episode 155 with Ian Warner. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best athletes, leaders, coaches, and consultants all about the topic of mindset to help us reach our

potential or be high performers in our field or our sport. Before I introduce Ian, I'm going to head over to iTunes and I'm going to read a rating and review. This is from Dolan from Focus the Fire. He said, concise and powerful a five star rating. He said, to reach high performance you have to do what scares you. This show offers great insight into what high performers do to excel. Tune in

if you're hungry for growth. Thank you so much Dallin. I appreciate your rating and review and if you enjoyed today's episode I'd encourage you to head over to iTunes. You can leave a rating and review like Dall enjoyed today's episode I'd encourage you to head over to iTunes you can leave a rating and review like Dallin did and I could read it next week on the podcast or you can share it with a friend either on social media or by sharing a link to the podcast interview. Now today I interview Ian Warner and let me tell you a little bit about Ian. He is a Canadian track and

field athlete specializing in the 100 meters and in 2012 he finished second behind his brother Justin in the 100 meters at the National Track and Field Championship in Calgary to make his first Olympic team. He's also the founder of CoLabs which is a mobile technology that connects injured athletes with local health care providers. And Ian is also a self-published author and avid reader. He read 100 books last year in 2017, and he runs a website called athleticcourage.com. Now, in this interview, we talk about various different things related to mindset. We talk about his keys to success and what it took to make the Olympics, his disappointment at the Olympic Games, why we should approach

everything with a long-term mindset, his recommendations after reading 100 books last year, and how his experiences with injury led him to develop this new app for athletes. Now, two of the quotes that stood out to me during this interview were these. First, he said, winning the small things day to day today is the way you develop consistency in your performance. And then he also said, you know, my motto is I need to take ownership and I'm in control of how I move forward. And if you don't take this mentality, you're a victim, a puppet on a string. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Ian Warner. If you'd like a full description of the podcast, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash

Ian Warner. And you can find Ian on Twitter at ko underscore labs. That's K-H-O underscore labs. And myself at mentally underscore strong. We'd love to hear what stood out to you about today's interview. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Ian. Welcome to the podcast, Ian Warner, Olympian, self-published author and entrepreneur. I'm so excited that you're here today, Ian, to share with us your journey.

I'm pumped to be here and I'm just hoping that I can help some of your audience and fans out. You know you can. Awesome. I'm excited to dive in. So, you know, the first question I want to ask you is kind of tell us about your passion and know you can. Awesome. I'm excited to dive in. So, you know, the first question I want to ask you is kind of tell us about your passion and what you're doing now. Yeah. So right now I'm working on a mobile app called Coe that just connects athletes with injury solutions to help them get back to doing what they love. And this passion really just stem from my own frustration of being injured, not knowing where to turn, not knowing how to get help, not knowing, you know, not knowing how to get help,

not knowing what products I should buy or what's going to be the most helpful thing, the most easiest, simplest route for me to take. And just kind of spending years just on Google, hoping I get the right answers and really just getting more frustrated because I end up going on with a sprained ankle and then leaving Google feeling like I'm going to die the next day. So just from those frustrations I developed over those years, I realized that not only developed a passion for helping athletes with injuries, but also I realized that there was an opportunity out there to help athletes in this specific area. Absolutely. And I think it's a place where athletes don't have always very much psychological support or kind of support in terms of their injuries.

So pretty cool opportunity just to help athletes be better and to cope better with their injuries. So let's kind of dive into a little bit your story, and then we can dive into the app and talk more about that. So I know you're a successful runner, competed in the 2012 Olympics in London, competed at Iowa State, which I'm excited about that because my husband went to Iowa State and I went to University of Northern Iowa and competed in track and field.

So just kind of tell us a little bit about your journey in terms of competing. Yeah, so I started running track and field only actually to get faster for football. I started playing football when I was seven. I wanted to get faster for it. So I'm getting into the sport and realized that right off the bat that I had a decent amount of talent in the sport and just stuck with it, stuck with both sports really as I got older. And going into my last year of high school, I decided to stop playing football to focus on track. And I was always locked in on getting a scholarship throughout high school. At this time,

my brother had already gone on scholarship. He's three years older. He went to TCU. So I already knew the route to take and that it could be done. And once I got that scholarship to Iowa State, and actually I want to add in there, Iowa State was actually the only school to recruit me. Nobody else in the entire country wanted me. Just this one school. And I didn't know where Iowa was. Coming from Toronto, I didn't know anything about Iowa State, but I'll tell you what, I went on my visit there and I love Midwest people. That's what really made me go there. I just love the people there. And once I got to Iowa State, I was injured my first two years there, frustrated. I didn't have a good relationship with my coach at first and pretty much everything

hit rock bottom. I was actually going to transfer. When I tried to transfer, no one wanted me again. So I kind of humbled myself and said, you know what, I got to make this right with my coach. We fixed things and had a great season. And then the next season, I stayed healthy two years in a row and I ended up making the Olympic team. And that was kind of the story of my track career right there. Wow. So some kind of difficulties really early on, when you think about your success in college, well, tell us a little bit about what you competed in and then tell us about your journey to get to the Olympics.

Yeah, so event-wise, first I was a track and field athlete and then I competed in the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, and 4x1 relay. And in terms of the Olympic journey, so that's something I always, for those of you who might know track and field a little bit more, the 96 Olympics in Atlanta, obviously a great Olympics. That 100 meter dash that year was actually won by a Canadian athlete by the name of Donovan Bailey.

In 96, I was six years old. And I remember watching that. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, man, that's something that I want to do one day. That was the first thing that put that vision in my mind. And as I got older, it kind of not necessarily, I didn't ever give up on it as a dream, but I just had other things to focus on. And I'm always a big believer that you got to focus on the stair, the next stair that's right in front of you, but you got to see the whole staircase at the same time. And so I was just focusing on this next stair, the next stair. And once I got to college, I never thought about it as much because I was injured somewhat.

So I was always trying to come back from injury. But one special moment that I'll never forget about my Olympic journey specifically is after I had that first season where I didn't get hurt. So that was my sophomore season, redshirt sophomore season. After that year, my head coach coach not my sprint coach but the head coach of the whole track and field team at iowa state by the name of cory emmels he came to me and he said ian if you stay healthy one more year you're gonna have an amazing season and i was like uh all right whatever i didn't i just took it with a grain of salt whatever i i go back for

the next year and you know saying getting the same, I'm training my butt off and I ended up staying healthy the whole year. And I just absolutely tore through the NCAA. Like it was insane. Every week I was running a new PR. I, my confidence was just through the roof. I just couldn't be stopped. Like it didn't, I can get in a race with anybody. And I just felt like I was going to win. I ended up being an all American that year. And then I went to Olympic trials and they were in Calgary. And my brother ended up winning the race. I came second and we both got named to the Olympic team. And just like that, I accomplished that dream of making the Olympic team. But then on top of that, I got to do it with my brother and we were roommates over in London, which was a super cool experience to be able to say you roomed with your brother at the Olympics.

I love it. I love it. So there's a lot of questions I could ask you just about that kind of story alone. I think one thing that stood out to me is that Corey Emmel said to you, like, if you stay healthy, you're going to have an amazing year. And, you know, I know he's a very successful track and field athlete as well. I don't remember how many times he's been an All-American, but incredibly gifted. What did, you know, him saying that to you, how did that impact you think your journey? Well, what it did was it helped me to understand that successful people, because he was very successful there as a coach as well. He ran really well at Iowa State, but he also had coached a

bunch of just absolute monsters in the 10K and stuff like Lisa Cole and Betsy Sane and all these people were just national champions and stuff. And the one thing that really impacted me with it is that it showed me the power of being consistent because what he understood that a lot of people miss is that it's winning the small things day to day to day that add up and they just keep adding up and they keep adding up. And then it starts to get exponential and that's what happens. But then when you get hurt, it kind of like resets it and you've got to start building again. So when you stay healthy, it's like day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger

and more just keeps getting added to that bank account so that when you need it, you have a huge down payment that you can put down on that success when you need it, you have a huge down payment that you can put down on that success that you want. And he was a hundred percent right. It was like that next year I stayed healthy and all those training gains from all those years just started adding up. Yeah, that's cool. And when you say like the small things, what are the small things, you know, that you think you did to be successful and get to the Olympics or, you know, some of these other people like Betsy Saina and Lisa Cole, who are names I know as well. Yeah. So I have one image that is burned in my memory about success and Betsy Saina. So the one thing I remember with Betsy Saina is she's

from Kenya. So Kenya is a pretty warm country and her coming from Kenya to Iowa state, that's a huge culture shock one. And then also from a weather standpoint, that's pretty brutal. And I remember waking up one morning, I was on the bus riding to the weight room to get in the training session. And it was the earliest bus you can catch. It was just like around 6.30, I believe, around six o'clock, 6.30. And while the bus was driving, I look over to the side and this is like midwinter, it's freezing outside, snow everywhere. And who do I see? Betsy Saina putting in her mileage. And I always remembered that because the biggest thing is that like success, people see what they want to see on the exterior. But a lot of times people miss what someone went through behind the scenes in order to

get to the success they have. So with a business, it could be someone having to remortgage their house so that they can make payroll or take out a bunch of credit cards in order to keep their business going. Or specifically with sports, it's like going to bed when everybody else is up partying. I can't tell you how many times people call me lame or loser or buzzkill because they all want to do something. And I was like, no, I got to go to sleep because I got to get ready for practice in the morning or eating right, not drinking, stretching every day, you know, foam rolling. It's all of those things that end up making the huge impact. Like obviously training hard and doing well in practice is a part of it and a big part as well. But I think most people can do that. Most athletes can show up every day and

train hard and say, I work really hard. But it's those little things that happen behind the scenes that you don't get credit for that your coach isn't going to know whether you do or not, that really make the huge difference. I think that's a really important lesson because I think we can apply it to athletics, but to our business and to every part of our lives. So I appreciate you saying that, Ian. And, you know, for people who don't know Betsy Saina, I think she got fifth at the 10,000 meters at the Olympics, the 2016 Olympics, and was a, you know, several time national champion.

So I think what you're saying, you have evidence, you know, that you can see doing the small things made a big difference. Yeah. And, you know, one thing I want to add about Betsy too, is she also won cross country nationals for the NCAA. And the one thing I want to remind people about cross country is that when you win cross country, you're actually racing everybody at one time. Like, it's not like, you know, like when I, if you go and win, run a hundred meter race in the finals, there'll be eight other people. There'll be seven other people in the race. There's eight lanes. So you're racing, you know, seven other people. And if you're running even like the mile or some of those larger races, there's a

certain amount of people in the race. But when you go to NC's, you're racing, like there's like 300 people that you're going out with at once. And when you win, you beat everybody. So it really is like a testament to how good of an athlete you are when you win cross country. At least I think anyways. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I never really thought about it that way. And I ran cross country. But I like that. So Ian, when you think about, you know, your success making to the Olympics, but also, you know, handling the, the adversity, the first couple of years, not getting along with your coach, but you know, the injuries that you experienced, what do you think it took, you know, in terms of your mindset and the mental skills, what did it take for you to continue to believe in, you know, fight through that? Yeah, the mental toughness and the focus

on what I really wanted out of life had to be there. And to make it to kind of put this in perspective for you, I had a really big freshman class that I came in with. There was 15 of us total and I only graduated with one other person. Everybody else had quit at some point before we got to graduation. And that's tough because, you know, you come in with people and they end up becoming your really good friends. You know, that class of people you come in with, those are your, like two of them I lived with and, you know, they quit. So I had to deal with them going away and, you know, quit so I had to deal with them going away and you know person after person coming in and going and transferring and all these different situations that you're dealing with and I think the the mentality that you need to have is you

just have to remember why you got started and and it took a lot of focus on being like okay where am I trying to go with this all and when you remember where you're trying to go with this all? And when you remember where you're trying to go with it and you're thinking long-term, it makes it so much easier to keep going. And I think a book that has helped me a lot, and I think a lot of people will be able to understand or relate to in some way because most people have used this product at some point is The Everything Store by Jeff Bezos.

Oh, it's not by Jeff Bezos, it's on Jeff Bezos, but it's by somebody else. I can't remember what Jeff Bezos, but it's by somebody else. I can't remember what his name is, but it's a pretty popular book. But the reason I like that is because when you go through Amazon's whole story, you see how Jeff Bezos was so good at thinking long-term. You could see the full staircase. So when everyone else was saying, you're an idiot, you're crazy. Why are you still doing this? Why are you guys buying this company? And why do you think that you can sell all these different products and all that stuff? He just stayed focused on where he wanted to go in the long run. And he didn't let the short-term things trip him up. And that's where a lot of us make our

mistakes in life is we let these little small short-term things make us panic. And we make a decision that when you really look at it in the long-term, it really wasn't that big of a deal. But that's what I think got me through a lot of those moments and those challenges was just being like, hey, I want to graduate and I want to make an Olympic team. This is where I want to be in five years, six years, seven years. So I have to go through this in order to get there.

So you kept that long-term vision that you wanted to get to the Olympics in mind. You know, Ian, tell us a little bit about your injuries your first couple of years, because I think that really shaped, you know, what you're doing now in terms of, you know, starting the APCO and, you know, helping injured athletes. So kind of tell us about your journey there. Yeah, so I came into college actually with an injury. So I l4 l5 problems in my back which are related to the psoas muscle which connects to is a hip flexor but it connects to your hip and then it connects to the l4 l5 and when it's tight from doing things like sitting down which we do way too much of it pulls your l4 l5 forward which basically gives you like a lower back arch when you're sprinting this is a nightmare because the amount of force you're putting into the ground

and it wears on you over the season. So you get to the end of the season and then my back would be absolutely blown up and swollen. And so first year I come in, I end up having to redshirt my indoor season because I just can't even run some practices. I think I got it taken care of. Outdoor season starts.

I go to Big 12, which is at Texas Tech. I'm running in the heats i i'm the only freshman to make the final so i'm super pumped about this only problem is i can't run the final because i fractured my back so i have to i'm in a wheelchair that my team's pushing me around because my back is completely locked up i get back to aims that i have to go i'm in a wheelchair for a couple days there before i'm able to start walking and moving a bit and it was just absolute nightmare and then the next year I I think I'm good I think I've recovered from that and then I I'm ranked third going into big 12s uh indoor for the 60 meter dash and you know I'm feeling great and the next thing you know pull my hamstring just

devastated like I actually bawled on the track. It was just absolutely horrible for me. I had worked so hard. And it was really one of those things where I said to myself, I've done everything right. I've done everything I can possibly do, and I'm still getting hurt. I wanted to just quit right there. Because I started to feel truly like God was trying to tell me, Ian, you are not meant for this. Track and field is not your thing. You need to just find something else to do. That's what I felt like at that time, at least short term, that's how I felt. And then after that, I had a bunch of groin injuries and I had injury with my toe, just some minor things there. But then the other major injuries I had actually were earlier in my career. The first one, when I was 12 years old,

I had a spiral fracture in my tibia playing football. And which a spiral fracture is basically if you go outside and you grab like a stick, a branch of a tree and you twist it, that's basically how the tree will, the branch will break is how my leg broke. Basically, it was very painful. And the other injury I had was an avulsion fracture of my hip. So I was running a hundred meter dash. I was dipping the cross line and stretch that hip too much. And basically the muscle pulled the bone that clear off. So that was another extremely painful. That sounds painful. Yes. That one wasn't fun. Like that one, my leg, my, my hip was actually locked in a flex position

for like a week. I couldn't even, I couldn't bring it down at all. It was pretty much to my chest. It was really awkward. So yeah, I had my fair share of just absolute disasters and weird injuries. And I learned from each of them and I met different doctors, different physiotherapists, chiropractors and massage therapists. And I listened very intently to everything they told me. And I kept all the information that they gave me. So over the years, I ended up just building up this crazy mental injury database that I was able to help other people with and really help myself to get healthy. Okay. And tell us about when you, you know, I'm just kind of picturing you on the track indoors at Iowa State, you know, just crying and questioning, like,

if this is something that you want to continue doing. Tell us about, you know, because I think there's quite a bit of research about how injured athletes, what happens to them psychologically when they experience an injury. And they can go through the same stages as, you know, when we lose a loved one. So, you know, what made you decide to like, okay, I'm going to stick with this? Because I think at those moments of despair, it's really hard to remember that vision that you want to go to the Olympics, right? And when you're really questioning if your body can take it. So how'd you move on from that? I was actually, this was probably the most growth I've ever had in a period of my life as a person, as an athlete and everything. Because after I went through that, what I did next was I just started blaming everybody for everything. So for example,

my mom had come down from Toronto to watch me run and her flight kind of came in late. So I had to wait for her to stay up the night before. So I didn't go, I didn't stay up super late, but I was up later than I wanted to be up. And I kind of got out of my routine a little bit. So I blame my mom for coming in, also putting more pressure on me. I blame my brother for being such a good athlete and putting so much pressure on me to kind of match what he had done. I blame my coach because I thought he was just an idiot because he got me hurt. I blame my training staff. I just threw the entire training staff under the bus because I felt like they couldn't do anything to get me to keep me healthy. Honestly, I was a wrecking train at Iowa State. But what was the best thing that

ever happened to me is when I tried to transfer, I tried to leave. And when I tried to do that, no school wanted me. And when that happened, what that made me do is it made me humble myself. And it made me say, you know what, Ian, you're not as good as you think you are. You have a good opportunity here at Iowa State. You need to humble yourself, but you also need to take 100% ownership for everything you do here from this point on. And that ownership was what got me healthy because I stopped waiting for somebody else to tell me what I needed to do to be healthy. And that was the problem. I was waiting for this magical answer to fall down from the heavens, just in an envelope with the perfect solution to what I needed to do. And I realized that, no, I have to take ownership because you know what? At the end of the day,

no one cares about my body and my career. Like I do. No one's going to put in the effort to get me healthy. Like I'm willing to do. So I had to take it on myself and I had to take it on myself to fix my relationship with my coach and stop blaming other people. And I knew that if I took ownership, that whether my career ended up being successful or not, at least I knew I took ownership for it. And it was on my back from that point. I like that story. I think there's a lot of lessons that we can each take from that. And I think it's really easy to blame somebody when things aren't going perfectly for you. And it was like this difficulty of not getting signed by another school that made you really take responsibility. And I think for, you know,

for us to reach our goals, we have to take responsibility. So I think that was a really important part of your story. Oh, no, the ownership is so important. I think, especially today, it's really tough, because it's really easy to become a victim of anything. And the easiest thing for me to relate to on this is from a racial standpoint. I have so many friends I talk with and they feel like because they're black, they have these injustices and those injustices. I'm not saying that none of these things happen and everyone can point out an injustice in some area of their life or sometime when they feel like they were treated unfairly. And I get that.

But at the end of the day, at some point, you just have to say, you know what? I'm going to take ownership for my life. I'm going to take ownership for these things. And I'm going to move forward. And I'm in control of what happens from here forward. Because the problem is when you blame other people and you live through that every single day, you never feel like you're in control of anything that happens. When you're a victim, you feel like you're just this kind of puppet on a string being controlled by this person who's been oppressing you. And I think for myself and what I've seen in so many other lives of people who've been successful around me is they reach

this day where they say, I'm owning everything from this point forward. I don't care about this or that anymore. I'm owning it and taking control of the situation. Awesome. And when you think about when you said you knew what you had to do to overcome the injuries and to be healthy, what did you know inside of you when you took ownership and what did you end up doing after that? Well, I stopped just relying on Iowa State and my coaches to just give me the answer. So what I did was that summer, I went back to Toronto just to kind of reset my mind, refresh and get ready for another year. I found and started reaching out to a couple of different therapists and people I knew. And this is why kind of coming with the app, it actually was.

And I had seen tons of people about this. I'd seen so many chiropractors, physiotherapists. It was actually an athlete that was the one who gave me the kind of guiding light and led me in the right direction and was like, hey, you got to get your glutes firing. It's a glute issue. And I never had thought of it or approach it that way. But I listened to what he said. I just started from the basics. I started getting my glutes firing again, started getting my hips stretched out because basically when you sit down, it shuts down your glutes. I started doing a lot of glute bridges and heavy glute bridges with a barbell and things like that. And to this day,

never had a back problem ever again. And that's why it's tough for me to completely, like with what we're doing with Cole, I know we'll get into this later, but it's tough for me to completely block out what an athlete's perspective is on injury sometimes, because I know that athletes who are even willing to help, because most athletes tend to be very selfish. I'm just going to throw that out there. So most athletes are very concerned with their own success and moving themselves forward. And that's what it's kind of needed to an extent to really succeed in sports. But the ones who are willing to help out others with things like injuries and that type of stuff usually are knowledgeable because they've been

through a certain amount of pain themselves and they know what it's like. And they don't want to see other people go through that stuff. And they all often have very interesting perspective and things that a lot of people haven't thought about in terms of how to come back from an injury. So that was a very important lesson for me, but it also gave me an interesting perspective for future things in my life. Absolutely. So then let's fast forward to the Olympics and then we can jump into the app and you can tell us a bit more about that. But you know, when I think about you finish one and two at the Olympic trials, you head to London for the Olympics. Tell us about what that was like at London. And what do you think, you know, is really important in terms of mental preparation to do

well at, you know, just such a big sporting event? Oh, yeah. So the good thing about this is that, well, the good and bad thing is that it sounds like it's gonna be a fairy tale story, but the kicks in the face really just didn't stop. So I ended up making this Olympic team, go one and two with my brother, riding high, everything's great. And I had missed the standard to run in the 100 meter dash by 0.02. And just so you know, like in 100, 0.02 is like nothing. So I get named to the Olympic team in the 4x100 meter relay. And the 4x1, obviously there's four people on the team. I came second. So you would assume that I'm definitely going to get on the team, right? So it ends up being that the coach wants to put other people on the team other than me.

So I ended up getting all the way to the Olympics and I ended up finding out about a week and a half. No, no, it wasn't even that. It was probably about a week before we were set to run or the 4-hour one was set to go off that I'm going to be sitting in the stands for this thing. Wow, heartbreaking. What heartbreak is and why it's even more heartbreaking is because the Olympics is already such a high that it's like going from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. So I really struggled after that. Like just going back, like it was a long season. I competed for a very long time. And for those who don't know, like the NCAA season is very long and grueling. So it starts in January and I went from competing January all the way until the end of August. So I flew straight from London, right back to Iowa

state for my senior year. And I was just mentally exhausted from this thing. And again, it's just more lessons though. Like I went into it and I had this big dream and all these things I wanted to accomplish. And I thought I had done what I needed to do. And I still came up a little bit short from what I really wanted. And that hurt a lot, but I'll tell you what, the experience of being there was unreal like there's nothing you can compare to the Olympic Games the dining center was open 24-7 you can go eat anytime there's people from all around the world training in all these different sports you're seeing celebrities like the LeBron Jameses and the you know Venus the Williams sisters and and all that stuff like the whole thing was absolutely surreal and being there.

And especially, so when it comes to the 4x1, my brother still ended up running on the 4x1. So I was still a hundred percent supportive and of team Canada and everything. And they ended up coming third and they got disqualified and got the medal taken away, which was another brutal experience to sit there and watch. But there was just so many lessons taken away. But at the end of the day, it was actually what helped me retire from the sport because I reached a point where I was able to say, you know what? I had a good career. I accomplished enough of what I

wanted to. I'm good. I can walk away from it and be happy. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, in that moment, it's an uncontrollable. it's not your decision to, you know, to be on the four by one, even though you had the second fastest time, it's the coach's decision, right? And sometimes that's political, you know, we don't have an influence on that. So when you think about like the lessons that you learned from that, and what did you take from it now to, you know, be a successful entrepreneur and build this app? Well, what I've just realized now is that life is just full of kicks in the face. It really is. And a lot of times it feels like you're the only one getting kicked in the face, especially in this social media world where people

only show you what's good in their life a lot of times. So you think, oh my gosh, everybody's life is beautiful. Everybody just goes on vacation and just lives a great life and has amazing jobs and amazing kids and amazing wives or husbands or whatever the case is. But all I get is kicks in the face all the time. But what I realized is one, most people are struggling just as much as you are. They're just never really talking about it or showing it. But then secondly, what I realized is that the person who's really gonna come out on top at the end of the day is the person who can just keep taking those kicks and just somehow keep marching forward so now I have a kind of different mentality where I really embrace the suck I embrace the crappy situations because I know on the other side of the crappy is going to be a

great victory because most people just can't do it. They just won't. As soon as it gets tough, they will give up. And you see this all the time with podcasts. People start a podcast. After two weeks, they don't get the type of downloads they thought they were going to get. They quit. They start making an app.

They didn't get the downloads they thought they were going to get. They quit. They start a business. They don't make the money they thought they were going to make really early. They quit. They start a sport. They want to lose weight. They don't lose the amount of weight they thought they were going to lose, they quit. They start a business. They don't make the money they thought they're going to make really early. They quit. They start a sport or they want to lose weight. They don't lose the amount of weight they thought they're going to lose. They quit. And you see these patterns everywhere. And that's why accomplishing great things,

that's why we call them great. It's because most people just won't go through the sucky periods that they need to go through. Absolutely. And when you think about what it took for you to stick with some of these things, you know, like I know the app didn't go perfectly the first time that you got it designed, right? So, you know, there was some difficulties there. Like what have you done from a mental perspective to help you stick with it? You know, if you could pinpoint, you know, what's the strategies that you've used or, you know, how, tell us how you stuck with it. Yeah. I think a big thing for myself is I depend on books a lot to help me. I like, I have one book, especially that I read a lot when things suck. And it's called three feet from goal. It's from the Napoleon Hill

foundation. And it's a great book because the whole book is pretty much about the kicks in the face and it's other entrepreneurs and athletes telling stories of all these things they had to go through to get to where they are. And when I read through these stories while I'm in these situations, I realize I'm like, oh yeah, like, wow, look at this guy went on to, you know, run a billion dollar company,

but look, he started off with like practically nothing and all these things happened to him. And then it just puts in perspective again. It's like, okay, I keep going. So that's the one thing that I think is really important just to kind of feed your mind the realities of success and not what you're being shown on TV and in movies and stuff that are always sped up

and super unrealistic a lot of time. And then the second thing is putting yourself around people who are encouraging and going to help you embrace that suck and get through those difficulties. Because if everyone around you, we become what we're surrounded by. Everybody around you never gives up and you're not going to give up either because you don't want to be the one friend that just keeps giving up all the time. But if everyone around you is the opposite and as soon as anything gets hard, they throw in the towel, well, it's going to be a little bit more difficult for you

to not throw in the towel when things get tough. Absolutely. And I read, Ian, I read your blog about how you read 100 books in 2017. That's phenomenal. Tell us what you learned from that, and maybe a couple of your favorites. So, okay. So the biggest thing I learned from that right off the bat is that you can do anything you put your mind to. Like I always, every year I go into, I try and set like a big challenge like that. So one of the, one of the big ones that I set for myself in 2015 that I still do now is I wake up at 3 10 every single morning and a lot of people hear these things and they're like no one actually does this stuff but you can do a lot more than you think you can if you just put your mind to it and you don't and you get outside of what other

people consider to be normal or unrealistic or real or whatever like there's no time that someone set that everybody has to get up or any time that you have to go to bed. People just do what they see other people doing or what their parents did, and they just continue on those patterns. So that's the first thing. Set those challenges, and you'll absolutely shock yourself. But when it comes to the second big thing I learned, the big picture of everything from all these books that I took away was that you have to approach everything you do with a long-term mindset. So one thing I do now is I don't start anything unless I think I'm going to stick with it for at least 10 years. So I'm not starting a podcast that I think I'm just going to run for two or three years. No,

if I can't see myself doing it in 2028, then I'm not starting it. I'm just not going to do it. And I understand things change and stuff like that. But I realize now more than ever that it took me 16 years to make an Olympic team. No one ever really looks at it like that. But that's how long I was running before I made the team. And when you look at so many businesses out there, before they became mainstream, they were around for a while. It's just maybe you never heard about them. And there's so many situations in life where it's

like there's 10 years of work, 10 years of grind that were put in before they got to that moment. So I really try and stick to that long-term mindset. When I think about some of my favorites, I would say one of the big ones that I really enjoyed was Extreme Ownership. It perfectly touches on what I was talking about earlier about the power of taking ownership in everything that you do. Another one I really liked was Leaders Eat Last. It's by Simon Sinek, which most people have heard his TED Talk about starting with why. Just all his stuff is pretty good. But the reason I liked that book was because from a leadership perspective, it just reminded me that just the benefit of treating people good and treating people like humans. I think that was the main takeaway from that book.

Cause I think a lot of times people get caught up in just making money and other things like that. Another one that was a surprisingly good one was seven highly effective habits of people. Oh sure. Seven habits of highly effectiveits of People. Oh, sure. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Thank you for saving me on that one. Yes. Sometimes they're hard to remember. I was like, wait a minute, this isn't sounding right. But yes, that one by Stephen Covey. The reason I like that one is because I know it's a classic. I kind of avoided reading it. I just didn't think it sounded, it kind of sounded kind of cheesy to me. But when I actually read it, I was like, no, this book is, it's a classic for a reason. And there's

a reason it's been around for a long time. And I think that one had a huge impact on me. And if I was going to choose one more that I think is good for athletes, I think Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think it's a great book. And I think just putting it in perspective, Arnold was a world-class bodybuilding champion. He made millions in real estate before he even got into movies, which a lot of people don't know. Then he became a famous actor. And then on top of that, he became the governor. There's not a lot of people that I think exemplify getting whatever they want out of life like Arnold was able to do.

So I read his book. It's like 400 pages and I just whipped through that book. It was so good to me. Awesome. Awesome. So Extreme Ownership, Leaders Eat Last, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Total Recall, if you'd like to go check out that list. And I will put, for everyone who's listening, I'll put a link to your blog under your show notes. So if you just go to cindracampoff.com slash Ian, you can find that blog. So, you know, kind of as we finish up, Ian, tell us about your app, Co, and you know, what your intention is to do with this app. And obviously now that we know about your journey and about your injuries, we can better understand

kind of your motivation, but tell us a little bit about what your intention is with this app. Yeah. So the whole purpose is to build a community built around keeping people healthy. And that can be mentally, physically, because they really end up fitting into one category because once you kind of get physically, at least for an athlete, you know, once the physical fitness kind of goes, uh, after putting in so much work, the mental is really not too far behind also tanking for, for most people anyway. And I want to create a place where athletes can go and they can get the solutions they're looking for to get back to being strong and doing what they love. And just from the perspective of

a therapist, you know, my wife is actually an athletic trainer and massage therapist. So I understand that it can be tough a lot of times marketing your services to people out there. And a lot of therapists I talked to kind of felt like athletes weren't good clients because there's just not like enough of them. But from my experience being an athlete and coaching and stuff like that, there's tons of athletes. They just don't know what they're looking for, where to go.

And there's not a lot of athletes that are just sitting at home thinking, you know what? I need to reach out to a sports psychologist. Like they're just not thinking that. That's not something that's just running through your head or you're not thinking, oh man, I need to go see that chiropractor.

Like unless you're parents or you have someone knowledgeable in your life who's directing you to do those things, it just doesn't run through your mind. You're just thinking, I need to be healthy. So that's why we start the whole process with the question. You can ask whatever question you have. You can say, hey, I hurt my hamstring three weeks ago. I don't know what to do. I play this sport. And then once you answer that question is we will know your age, your location, sport you play, you know, the information that you put in. And as you put in more questions, some of your injury history as well. And then we can get you connected with the best solutions to get you to where you want to be.

And there's a way as an athlete that you can get medical advice on there, right? And you have connected medical professionals through the app? Yes. So the medical professionals have to actually apply. So there's an application process just to obviously, you know, make sure that it's actually a legitimate person who's licensed and all that stuff. But yes, they can, when the athlete asks a question, the medical professionals that come on, that's what they see is a feed full of different questions that they can reach out to. And we're working on some different things to make it an even better feed where you can filter and break it down by, you know, location. So you can find people who

are only local, if that's what you want, or if you are, you know, you're traveling to another country or you're traveling to another country or you're traveling to another state to do some work for a while you can find people in that location if that's what works for you so we're working on some different things to make it just a lot better and eventually we're going to add scheduling right into it so that when people do find someone they do want to work with they can schedule that appointment and then rate and review them right there so all that information and data on you, therapists and their services is all in one place where athletes can go and find exactly what they need to stay healthy. And Ian, when you think about your why

behind this, right? Like it took a lot of, a lot of work to make this app and, you know, you might have gotten some kicks in your face as you were, as you were moving forward with it. So like, what's really driving you here? So the biggest thing for me is I know the frustration and pain of being hurt. And there's one thing I can a hundred percent guarantee. Like even if therapists don't think this is a great idea, it doesn't matter. I know for a fact that injury questions from athletes are never going to stop coming in. Like I I'm a hundred percent sure of this. They will not. Since the day we put the app out, we have not had one day where there were not at least three questions and it just keeps coming in as it goes. It's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger and there'll be more and more questions. And it's because I know that there are tons of injured athletes every single day that have no

idea what to do in order to get healthy and they go and talk to their parents and their parents have no clue so they just tell them to suck it up yeah and the athlete actually is legitimately hurt and they don't know who else to turn to because their coach told them to suck it up their parents told them to suck it up they're not going to tell their friends about it so where else do they go like what and this is how like mental health problems, as I'm sure you know, this is how they kind of creep in. Because if you go to the people who you think are going to be there for you and give you some good support, and they tell you, you know, kind of suck it up, you're all right, then like where else do you turn? So we want to give, you know, a safe community where people

can go to. And like, that's what really drives me. I know that pain and frustration all too well. And, um, I just, I just want to help people get back to doing what they love. And you know what, if, if I never make a dollar off of it, then I'm good with that. I'll still keep doing it because I just, I know that pain way too well to not do something to help those athletes that are out there. And so if a medical professional is listening or, you know, Ian, you know, we talked about, I'm like, man, you should, I add sports psychology professionals because, you know, I think about so much of the injury that there is a kind of a psychological, you know, just difficulty in general with the injury. So, you know, if you have sports like people who are interested in learning more or medical professionals, how should they contact you to kind of help with the app?

Yeah, you can definitely reach out and email me. My email is ianw at kholabs.com or on any of the social media channels. Just DM us on Twitter, Instagram at kho underscore labs. And I'd be happy to talk with you guys about things. And here's the good thing about getting involved with a company early on. I think a lot of people wait for companies to be really big to get involved.

But the good thing about getting involved early is that we're so small that we can actually listen to your changes and make them immediately and your suggestions on how to improve the app and all that stuff, we can implement those. Whereas like you go to a company like Facebook, they're not going to implement something because you know, syndrome,

if you call, you know, you're not going to call Mark Zuckerberg and be like, Hey, I want you to make this change to Facebook and he's going to make it the next day. You know, like they're a big company kind of set in their way.

So we're all ears. We love listening to ideas people have. And I think mental health and adding that part to it and promoting more because we don't get mental health questions yet, but I know if we started promoting it on like social media and stuff, we would get mental health questions. So that's, that's something that we think is just as important as the physical side. So I would love if anyone on that side of things wanted to reach out to me with ideas of how we can do that better. And you can get the app. I got mine on the app store, right? So it's K-H-O is what you'd look for. If we're an athlete, as we're listening, why should we check out the app?

Yeah. So if you're an athlete listening and you're not hurt right now, you should definitely check it out because you don't want to wait until you are hurt. Like the goal is to start acting on things before it becomes a big problem. And the reality of being an athlete is if you are actually trying to push yourself to be your best, that means you are pushing your body to the limit. And at some point an injury will come your way. So download the app, have it ready,

look through some of the other injury questions, anything that you've been through in the past and just look through and see what you can learn to make sure that you're keeping yourself healthy. If you are hurt, then you want to download it and ask a question. Even if you have someone that you're already seeing, it never hurts to get a second or third opinion just to make sure that you're doing all the right things to be healthy. And you can always get in and help the community out with, you know, anything that you've ever, anything that you've already been through, you know, maybe you can offer a word of advice or you can just keep someone's spirits up by saying a positive word to them. Absolutely.

So if you're interested in contacting Ian, you can go to ianw at kholabs.com or find you on Twitter at K-H-O underscore labs. So Ian, man, I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your insight with us today. I'd like to kind of wrap up and share with you the things that I took from your interview as a, you know, just as a way for me to sort of summarize what I've learned. So you really talked about like winning the small things day to day is what helped you become an Olympian and contributed to success, you know, of other people around you like Betsy Saina or Lisa Cole. And I love what you talked about related to ownership

and how that was really important in your journey. Once you did that, you know, that really allowed you to become a successful runner. And so, you know, you said, you know, you decided to take ownership. You're in control of how you move forward towards your vision. And, you know, you decided to take ownership, you're in control of how you move forward towards your vision. And, you know, if we blame, we just feel like a puppet. And then I like what you said about, you know, feeding your mind with the realities of your success and that, you know, the things that you learned from reading those books was really, you know, that you are in control of your destiny and, you know, that you might be getting kicked in the face, but there's going to be a great victory on the other side. So thank you so much for your time, Ian, and sharing your wisdom and your insight with all of us today.

Hey, thank you so much for having me on. I really do appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you liked today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.