The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Fight To Hold The Standard | Nick Bare

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Do you have a standard that you live your life by? If so, are you fighting each and every day to uphold that standard? In this episode, Nick breaks down the importance of setting a standard for yourself in life, fitness, business, family, and more; and even more importantly, how we must choose to fight each and every day and ensure that we are holding ourselves accountable to meeting that standard. Through his personal experience, Nick breaks down what this process looks like in his own life, and how you can apply this mindset to your life as well to achieve peak performance, in all aspects of your life. More Resources: BPN website: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition Follow Us On Social Media! Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast Twitter: @BarePerformPod

Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. that embody the go one more mindset. All right, what's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode of the podcast.

Today's episode is all about holding the standard, fighting to hold the standard. And that has been the topic that has been circulating my brain, my mind the last couple days, my morning runs. As many of you know, my morning runs are filled with silence, solitude, and a lot of deep thinking. that's why I love running. And what typically pops in my head during these morning runs is facilitated.

It is, it is born, is triggered by things I'm experiencing in my life or that I'm seeing in person, observing online, on social media, like in the world as a whole. And this concept has been circulating my brain the last couple days. if I'm being honest, it's been circulating my mind the last 10 plus years, to be honest. This is one of my true foundational values that I hold near and dear. It is one of my strengths. It is one of my strengths that I try to teach my team. I try to implement into my family and my circle, my peers.

It is holding a standard. And the question you have to ask yourself is, in life, are you, thriving or are you just surviving? There's a big difference. Going through life and just surviving, just getting by, just doing the bare minimum, just living. I mean, just to live and survive, you need to make a little bit of money. You probably have to have some sort of human interaction in your life.

You have to put food in your mouth. You have to move your body a little bit, a little bit. That is surviving at its fundamental core. thriving is it's optimization. It's harnessing your full potential. It is going above and beyond. It's seeing where you can take your mind, your body, your team, the people around you.

How much can you milk out of this life? If life was a lemon, how much lemon juice could you squeeze out of that lemon before you die? That's what I'm trying to figure out. I think that's if you listen to this podcast, that's what you're probably trying to figure out. How do I achieve success or greatness, however you define that.

That is surviving. And I think, or that is thriving, excuse me. And that's the big difference. I mean, there's such a huge gap in between just surviving and thriving.

And if we look at, how do we get there? How do we thrive in life? What comes down to setting a standard for yourself, for the people around you, for the things you accomplish, the goals you go after, the family you build,

everything. Set a standard. You see, a standard is a level of accepted quality. And the best part about it, it's unique. It's just like our gut microbiome. Our gut microbiome,

like my gut microbiome looks different from all of yours. And your guy's gut microbiome looks completely different from mine. It is a unique fingerprint. It is just like if you take your index finger and you look at the tip of your finger, it is unique to you. That's why when you get in trouble with a law and they take your fingerprint, they have something that can uniquely identify you. Same with your gut microbiome.

Same with the standards you set for yourself. The standards I set for me, my team, my organization, my family, they are unique to me. it is a fingerprint. Same thing goes for all of you guys. Like when you set standards for yourself, if you're a business owner, for your business, if you're a coach of a team for your team, if you're a captain on team for that team,

you set those standards for yourself. It is self-regulation. You self-regulate your standards. And a standard is a disciplined expectation. I think part of this has been, you know, why it's been on my mind so much recently. Today, as I'm recording this, it is July 8th, 2022. Today's our due date for our baby.

Baby's not here yet. You know, me and Steph, our first baby girl, our first baby in general is going to be born in the next couple days, probably beginning of next week at the latest. And today is today is the due day, July 8th. crazy to think about. And that next chapter of life that we're about to experience,

you know, we've been sharing this online with our community. I've been sharing my life in general for the last 10 years. You know, I've been sharing these different chapters of life. And this chapter of life is interesting

because the feedback is a lot of pushback. And that pushback is facilitated by the standards, people set for themselves in their family, and they want to know that those standards they set from themselves is okay, that they are an accepted quality. Example right here.

Talking about fitness, training, business, diet, nutrition. I get the response recently a lot of, well, just wait. just wait once that baby's born what's going to happen to your physique your training your diet nutrition just wait i'm telling you now when that baby's born your diet's going to go out the window you're going to be eating macdonalds and taco bell and all this junk food and you're not going to care about what you're eating and how you feel and how you're training bullshit It's straight up bullshit Because the standard I set for myself

The standard I set for my family Fitness, diet, nutrition, health There's a standard we set for ourselves in this family Now how we navigate that once that baby is born We're going to figure it out And we're going to have to pivot and adjust And make some plans to To uphold that standard

It's not going to be easy by any means But fitness, health, nutrition, diet, I have a standard for myself. I'm going to maintain a healthy diet and proper nutrition because it allows me to be the husband, soon to be father, business owner, I need to be. I'm going to train to a standard because it allows me to be a business owner, father, soon to be husband, leader that I need to show up and be. That is my standard.

I do not lower my standards for anything or anyone. That is just the way I operate my life and my body. So I'm sure people are saying, oh, just wait and see. Just wait and see once it happens. Yeah, we'll see. But I'll tell you one thing. I have a standard for my diet, my nutrition, and my fitness, my health, because it allows me to operate off a,

foundational core, a fundamental core, so I can show up for my family and execute. That's my standard. Now, my standard, like I said, is unique to me. It might not look like your standard, but I want to thrive in life. I don't just want to survive. And that's part of the process. Now, where standards first introduced to me was, you know, the military, I would say, growing up there were observational standards right like my parents my grandparents um family

people in my life coaches they they introduced standards to me and it was more it was observed right um the the standard operating procedure if you will was really introduced to me when i was when i joined the army you know i graduated college in 2013, commissioned in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer. And within a few months, I was shipped down to Fort Benning, Georgia for a year of training where I spent time in the infantry officer basic course, ranger school, airborne school, Bradley Leader course before being sent to Fort Hood, Texas in 2014. In the military, they are very specific with standards. They have SOPs, standard operating procedures.

You have SOPs in business, I'm sure in your workplace right now, or even in your family, you have standard operating procedures. Like when I go to bed at night, for example, I brush my teeth, I let the dogs out, I lock the doors, I set the alarm, I turn the lights off, and I lay in bed. That is just like my standard operating procedure before I go to bed. We all have SOPs in life. But the military puts it into this system. So when you get assigned a mission or a task, it comes with these four things. You get a task. You get a condition.

You get a standard. And then you get a timeline. So for example, if I'm tasked with planning a mission, for example, and I'll tell a story here a little bit, but the task is this is the mission. This is what you are doing. Condition. These are the people you have to operate with. This is the equipment you have. This is the route. Standard. At the end of this mission, you need to conduct an ambush at this grid point on this objective. Timeline. You must complete all of this in the next 24 hours. at 10 a.m. the next day.

Looking at my watch right now. Okay, I now know what I need to do. I know what I have, do I have. I know what needs to be completed and by when. Task, condition, standard timeline. Now, the timeline does not mean that once that time hits, I'm done, like 10 a.m., 24 hours from now hits. It's not, okay, time's up.

I'm done whether I completed it or not. That timeline just tells me how much time I have to successfully accomplish the standard. The standard. And then you backwards plan based on that timeline so you make sure you get it done. Here's a story to paint a picture. In Ranger School, the last phase is the Florida phase. So you start at Fort Benning, Georgia, where you have a technique week and then you go into patrols. and then you go to the mountains of Delanooga, Georgia,

where you do technique week, you use some testing, evaluations, and you do patrols. And then if you successfully pass those two phases, you move into the last phase, which is that Eglin Air Force Base in Florida through the swamps. And if you successfully complete this week, which again is techniques and patrols, well, you graduate Ranger School,

and you get that tab on your shoulder and you're going home. Now, I had an extended stay in Ranger School. It's a 61-day course if you go straight through. I was there for 145 plus days because I recycled two phases, and one of those phases was the best Ranger competition, BRC week. So I was there for a six-week holdover in the beautiful Fort Benning, Georgia. But that last phase, that last phase is the Florida. phase. And by the time you get to the Florida phase, you're pretty beat down and exhausted.

By the time I got to Florida, I was tired. I was hungry, very hungry. I was exhausted and I was probably 35 pounds lighter than when I started because of food and sleep deprivation as well as you're just, you know, in mountains, you're humping up mountains all day. You're covering miles and miles and miles every day, just walk in, running, completing missions. And the way like a typical day works in patrols is leadership changes out every day.

And when leadership changes out, that new leadership that's put in is being evaluated on their ability to complete a task, condition, standard, and timeline. So if you successfully accomplish those things, you get a go, and as long as you don't mess up anything else throughout the course and you don't get, you know, your peers don't kind of rate you out or you don't have any other issues in the course.

You get to move on the next phase or graduate. So Florida phase, keep in mind everyone is very tired, very hungry, malnourished, and wants to graduate. Now, trying to motivate and inspire and lead people who are very tired, hungry, grumpy, and ready to be done, that's difficult. And that's what the Florida phase tests you with. So it's my time to be evaluated. and I remember this day like it was yesterday. The days were really hot. I graduated in July.

So imagine being in the panhandle of Florida, you know, back half of June, early July, 100 plus days. We had heat casualties every single day. People were dropping because of heat cat. And I ended up getting put into leadership the evening. So we already had a full day of a mission. and everyone was really tired. We got changed out in leadership.

I was the PL, the platoon leader, and I was given my mission. And my mission was to move my platoon and conduct an ambush on this road that was a certain distance away. So I get my mission, me and the other guys in leadership go back, we start planning this mission.

And we kind of assess our team, our platoon, and we realize our platoon is pretty, freaking tired at this point. Everyone's dragging ass because we just finished a mission from earlier that day. And we had a certain amount of distance to cover in order

to accomplish this ambush on this road. Now, simultaneously, what's happening is the sun is beginning to set. And as the sun starts to set and it gets dark, everyone kind of turns into a zombie. You know, you're so tired, you're so hungry.

During a day when the lights out, you kind of feel some energy that vitamin D is just soaking into your skin. You feel okay. But as soon as it gets dark, you put your night vision devices on, you turn into a zombie. And people, like, you would see people just walking out in the middle of woods. They'd be hallucinating, seeing things. They'd fall asleep. As soon as we took a knee, it was like trying to herd sheep.

It'd be easier to tie people together. and I'm given this mission and I'm planning it and I'm thinking we have to cover this much distance with this many people that are this tired this is how fast we could move in the in the wood line in a wedge in a movement formation all spread out and I realize we're never going to make it there or one we're not going with the task and the conditions given and the timeline we will not be able to successfully accomplish this mission. We won't meet the standard. So I had to do some backwards planning and we weren't supposed to use the roads.

We were supposed to stay off the roads. And I had to take close consideration. I thought, you know what, let's move through the woodline. We'll try to get there as fast as possible. So the platoon takes off towards this objective to accomplish this, ambush on this road where enemy was supposed to be moving through the this convoy on this road and we were going to ambush them. We start moving through the wood line and when I realized these guys are so tired,

they're hungry, they were beat down, they were ready to be done, exhausted from the previous day's mission. We were moving slow, super slow through this woodline. So what I decided to do is I pulled my leadership together. You know, everyone took a knee. We stopped. We halted. Pulled on our maps.

We thought the best decision possible was to move the entire platoon on the road and run. Now I knew we weren't supposed to use the road, but I realized that if we didn't use the road, we weren't going to meet the timeline, we were going to miss the convoy, we wouldn't be able to accomplish a mission, and we were going to fail for that ambush. So we moved everyone to the road, and we started having everyone shuffle and run. And what we had leadership deal is we had, you know, me, the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant, squad leaders and team leaders, we ran up and down that whole formation. motivating people to get them to that objective as fast as possible. And as we're rolling up on this objective, on this grid location, I can see the convoy from like half a mile away moving down the road. And I'm just screaming out, having everyone dropped their rucks where they were,

hop on the objective site, set up security, set up our ambush, and we successfully accomplished it. It was honestly a shit show. But what we did is we accomplished. the mission, we achieved the standard within the timeline, given the task and conditions. We made it happen. You know, and that's one of those things that the military taught me is that when you're given a task, condition, standard, and timeline, you make it happen.

You don't train the time. You always train the standard. And that's the thing about a standard is we have to fight to uphold it. It can be and is difficult to uphold if you set your standard high enough. Now, society norms, and I'm sure a lot of people around you, they are just trying to survive. So they set their standard bare minimum. For those of you that are high achievers, high performers, and you set your standard high well above what is required to survive.

You want to thrive. You have to fight. You have to fight to uphold that. You are self-regulating this high standard that you set. And why that's so hard for a lot of people, one, many people have never set a standard for themselves or their family or the business to the people around them. Never have set a standard.

That's the first issue. The second issue is there's too many people that have never fought for something in their life. Now, why have they not had to fight for anything in their life? Maybe it's just the way they were born, the way they were raised, what they were raised into. But I think for most, it's because they're not setting their standard high enough. If you don't set your standard high enough, you don't self-regulate, you don't have to

fight for anything. Because the thing is, we don't have to fight to survive. We have to fight to thrive. And I want to thrive. And I'm sure a lot of you guys listen into this, too, want to thrive. with that comes a fight. Now through this process, you're probably going to experience

your circle gets smaller. And I found this over the last couple years. I would say even if I look back, like when I first started my business, when I started BPN in August of 2012, and I said, this is now the new standard I'm going to hold myself to.

I'm going to build a business from scratch. And a lot of the, people around me didn't align with that, didn't resonate with that, didn't want that. Like, dude, you're in your last year of college. Just chill. Just have fun. Just go out and drink and have a good time and, you know, pass these classes and just enjoy this last year.

Just survive it, man. It's one more year than you're going to the Army. And I was like, no, no, I have this opportunity out. I want to thrive. And from that moment on, what happened was my circle started becoming smaller and smaller and smaller in terms of the people that I could align with or resonate with because as you move through life, you know, say you get a new job or you move or you join a new team or you find a new hobby and you start surrounding yourself with other groups of people, new people,

what you'll realize is that not everyone sets their standards to the height or quality that you do for yourself because then going back to standards are a fingerprint that are unique to you. And the trick is this is where I think you can really miss step and you can really fail is if you move into this new group and you adopt a lower set of standards based off the people around you, you now are lowering your quality of expectations to thrive. The goal is to never lower your expectations to appease the people around you. Always be raising your standards, your expectations. That's what I've done here at BPN.

That's how I've grown BPN. Consistently holding a standard over and over again and raising that standard as often and as frequently as I need to and I can. My standards today are a lot higher than they were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, and especially 10 years ago. Every couple months, my standards move up a tier. It forces growth.

It forces new expectations. It forces a new level of quality. It puts new expectations and standards on the product, the brand, and the people in the hardest part that I found, you know, as your circle is getting smaller and your standards are raising, the hardest part of scaling an organization or a business is that as you, as the founder, the leader, the manager, the director, the CEO, the leader of that business, as you are trying to force growth and set new standards and raise the bar, raise that standard, raise the expectation, the product, the brand, and the people have to scale at the same appropriate rate.

And if the people's expectation, the team, the individuals that are part of that, if they are not raising their personal standards to scale with the organization, the team, the business, well, then it all crumbles. That's one of the hardest qualities. traits, characteristics, skills of a leader in an organization is that just because you're raising your standards and you're raising the organization standards or you're trying to raise the organization standards,

the other people that are part of it need to raise their standards too. And it is your job as the leader to develop those rules, develop those individuals to realize and understand why it's important to raise the level of standard for their individual well-being. it only does wonders. It'll never hurt you to raise your standard. Now, with raising your standard, you may fail.

You probably will fail. You'll probably miss that standard time and time again. But it makes you, it creates reasons for you, it develops you, it forces you to grow to achieve that level of standard that you've now set. The thing is, it all comes back to, society standards are low because most people are trying to survive.

That's it. The challenge for you through this episode is don't accept society standards. Don't lower your standards for the people around you. Because what's going to happen is you are going to be defeated. You are going to be disappointed with the outcome, which is it's an ownership quality. You have to own the outcome. And if you lower your standards to appease people around you,

you, you will just be surviving. You will not be thriving. Ask yourself right now, are you surviving or are you thriving? And if you're not thriving, it's probably because you've set your standards too low for yourself or you've lowered them to appease the people around you. That's my challenge for you. Hold the standard. Fight to hold the standard.

So we'll see you guys in that next episode. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Please leave a rating and review on the platform you are listening to if you enjoyed it. It helps us to grow and reach more people with the intent of changing lives through the Go One More mindset. If you are ready to take your health and performance to the next level, head over to bPN subs.com to take the first step.