Unleashing Your Potential with Justin Roethlingshoefer (Part 1)

This podcast is a sanctuary for the curious , the ambitious and the introspective . It's for those of you who , like me , are captivated by the champion mindset and driven by an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge .

Whether you're just beginning your journey or you're well along your path , you're going to find stories here that resonate with your experiences and aspirations . Over the last two years , we've shared countless stories of triumph and challenge , of resilience and transformation . We've laughed , we've reflected and we've grown together .

And as we've evolved , so too has this podcast . Remember , no matter what chapter you're on in your own story , you belong here . This community we've built together is a place of support , inspiration and shared growth . Where intention goes , energy flows , and the energy you bring to this space elevates us all .

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As we embark on year three , I invite you to lean in , to listen deeply and to let these stories resonate with your soul . I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to evoke greatness . Welcome back to another episode of Evoke Greatness .

Today we have an exceptional guest who's been at the forefront of personal and professional optimization for years . Justin Rothling-Schoffer is a renowned performance coach , best-selling author and founder of Own it Coaching , an eight-figure coaching company built to redeem the health of the world .

With a background in professional sports and executive coaching , justin has helped elite athletes , fortune 500 executives and everyday strivers unlock their full potential and achieve remarkable results . His unique approach combines physiological insights , data-driven strategies and a deep understanding of human psychology to create personalized roadmaps for success .

Today , we're going to dive into Justin's philosophy on evoking greatness . We're going to explore the intersection of physical and mental performance and uncover practical strategies that our listeners can apply to their own lives and careers .

So get ready for an inspiring and informative conversation that will challenge you to rethink your limits and embrace your own potential . So , justin , welcome to the show .

I do have to give a huge shout out to Scott McGregor , because he is like the connector of the world and that was how I first got to hear you and a lot of your story on the Outlier Project call . So welcome to the podcast . Great to have you on .

So I love being at the outlier project . I love everything he's doing there , so it's it's great to be with you .

So I'm grateful to be able to share your story and your insights with the audience today .

Everybody wants to be able to have the capacity to sustain whatever they're going through . But when we think about what's required to gain the endurance to do what it is that you are desiring , a lot of hands start to go down , a lot of people start to drop off , a lot of people start to close the door or turn the other cheek .

And I think the biggest thing for me , where I've had to really kind of go through some things in order to get to where I am today and this has been a reshaping of just my identity and who I saw myself as and the component of being okay , going for the journey , being okay with one step at a time , being okay with being slow , and I think for a lot of

times that would hold me back . And I take a look back at my NHL journey as a performance coach and then my transition out between 2020 and 2022 .

Those were just really trying years for me , where I was trying to figure out who I was , trying to figure out where my value sat , trying to figure out where my value was I didn't have , I wasn't on fire for who God had created me to be , but rather who Justin wanted to be .

And it wasn't until I really got aligned with that , humbled myself , that I was able to step into the man that I am today and continue to I always say I continue to try to become nothing so God can make it something .

And that's just really where I think I've grown to and what obstacles I've overcome most recently in order to realize , kind of where I am right now .

And because I was doing things so differently , you all of a sudden get vaulted into this thought leader position in a league that's very small , in a world that's very small . You're writing books . You've got four , four books out in three years . All of a sudden , you've got your fifth book out , puts you on the USA Today bestsellers list , like all the things .

Everyone's like wow . You're like crushing it , and little does people know behind the scenes . I'm miserable , I hate my life , I'm frustrated , I'm insecure . I embellish a lot of things in the sense just to make me feel protected and at the end of the day , it was . I just felt really empty .

My wife , on the same hand , was the youngest executive in luxury fashion . She was the executive vice president of Christian Louboutin , doing all the things that she could have ever imagined as a 10 year old child , visiting New York city for the first time .

And so she was all of a sudden like we were at the same pinnacle , the same unique spots , but yet we both felt like , is this it ? Is it like ? What else is what else is there ? What else can we do ?

We don't feel like we're actually serving , we don't feel like we're in authentic alignment to where it is that God's called us and what we've been created for .

And it created what I call like this spiritual frustration , where , every single day , I would wake up and I knew there was something else , I knew there was something more , but you couldn't put your finger on it . And , in fact , the thing that was holding you back was not any one thing , was not any situation or circumstance , but it was lo and behold .

The man and woman looked at you back in the mirror , and it's once you were able to really just harness that and humble yourself and be willing to again be nothing . That's when , all of a sudden , the lights turned on .

You see it in Hollywood , you see it in professional sports , olympians it's always looking for the next thing Okay , great , I got this medal , I got this award , I got this , you know whatever title boom immediately .

And and there are a lot of people who talk about the fact like Superbowl , and Superbowl is great for about an hour , two hours a day , two days , and then boom , it's like that emptiness starts to rise up if you truly don't have an anchor .

So I love that you share the battle that you had through that , because I think it's hitting those bottoms and feeling empty when there's really so much around you until you find that anchor for yourself . And so that shoots us greatly into my next question , which is what does evoking greatness mean to you ? And what I mean by ?

That is the reason I named the podcast . Evoke Greatness was , I thought you know there's so much . People strive to be something , but when do we start calling it up from within ourselves ? You know , when can we look inside versus looking at everything outside ?

And so what does evoking greatness mean to you , and how has this concept shaped your personal and professional journey ?

And if you're committed to being shaped , that's when you can actually realize the calling being shaped to be . And when we continually compromise it over and over and over again , that's when we kill our calling . Compromise has killed more callings than any lack of talent ever has .

And the more that we can be committed to being patient , the better this is going to be , I'll tell you . I'll give you two stories here that I think really kind of shaped this really really well . I just left the NHL , a bold step in .

As I was getting ready to leave , I just heard the Lord say to me just overwhelmingly for probably three or four years , but finally got the courage . I need you to stop serving the audience you want to and serve the audience that I called you to . The audience I wanted to was the professional athletes , the NHL guys . Why ? Because it was all about me .

It was about hey look , justin's in the NHL it's the look that it gave to everybody else , whereas , in actuality , what was being formed was to be able to serve the business owner , the business leader , the entrepreneur , the people that didn't have access to the information , the knowledge , the wisdom that I had gained and , ultimately , had been blessed and anointed

with . To be able to go and serve people with and , at the same time , not willing to step into that realm because I would have had to humble myself and go into a different space . And so that was number one . And so , as I left , I'm now sitting here going . Okay , I've been obedient , I've stepped in .

Floodgates should just open and it should be easy and everything should be great and everything should be amazing .

And , in fact , I struggled Like I struggled hard for those two years , and I still remember I was in Anaheim , that was where I finished my last job in the NHL and I flew out to New York City , moved my entire self , cross country because that's where my wife was , and so we were doing long distance for three years .

So , crazy , cross continent and , as we were going through this , moved out to New York City and about three months in , I had no idea how to get clients or work with people or serve people or do anything .

And so I found myself standing outside of luxury apartment buildings with flyers and kind of lying to the bell boys as to like how I could get in to be able to say , oh yeah , I've got a client here and just let me walk in and chat and talk .

And when I didn't have any of those things and in fact it was so anyways , I had to sit outside and be able to have this very humbling moment . The second one was I'm sitting . I'll never forget this .

It was my fourth book release and I had gone to Lululemon headquarters in downtown New York City and I had said , hey , I've got this book coming out , it's launching on this date . Could we do a book launch opening on the Saturday afternoon evening , whatever time works for you guys ? Would you have an open ? They're like , yeah , we'd love to . It sounds great .

We've got an email list . We'll blast at the email list , send it to your email list . I didn't have an email list at that time . Like I'm , I'm coming out of not even having a business but just having a little bit of an audience because of the niche in which I was in , and so I don't have an email list .

I don't have an audience that would come and flock to this , and so they send their email list . I put it out on social media . We get like 60 confirmed registrants that were going to come . And so Saturday , seven o'clock , everything's set up .

I got sponsors to come in , I got camera crew , I got a video crew , I got a photographer , I got food all in the back , I've got the chairs all set up . I get somebody even to come and like have a fire chat discussion with me . And 6.15 rolls around , 6.30 , 6.45 . There's nobody in there . Seven o'clock , nobody in there . 7.15 , nobody in there .

Well , all of a sudden I'm like man , nobody's coming . And at 720 something , a homeless man walked in and was like is there any food here ? And I was like bro , here's a book , here's some food from the back , take it , take anything , take everything actually . And in that moment we're 35 , 40 minutes after we were supposed to start there's nobody here .

Zero , zero people , zero people showed up and at that moment I had to make a decision and in my mind there really was only one decision . It was I have to go and put this on and I have to go and deliver a message as if the room is full , and so went , delivered it . At the end , the camera guy looks at me and goes hey , can we go home now ?

I said , yes , you can go home , but mark my words . There will be a day when the room is full , when the book is around the world and it's impacting people and changing lives , and he goes Okay , kid , whatever you think .

And that was , I think , a pivotal point for me in really changing my mindset of who I was and what I knew was the truth for me , because I was an author , I was a influential performance coach , I was somebody who that that's that's what I had been called to be . I knew it inside , just nobody else knew it yet .

And in claiming that , in stepping into that , in believing that , in doing what that future person would do , that was the first step in terms of opening up the doors to what was actually possible today . And so that was that . That's what I talk about like .

Evoking greatness is being willing to be humble , being willing to be nothing , being willing to put a show on with the room empty , just as though the room was full , having confidence that one day it will be .

However , I'm not totally bought in and so I'm like , maybe , maybe I don't really hear this , maybe I'm not really feeling this . So it's like there's that first stage of disobedience .

Then I'm like , okay , god's clearly pulling me towards something , and I start to get like begrudgingly obedient , like , okay , yes , I'm going to do this for the sake of you know , not because my whole heart is in it or not because I I have faith in something that I don't need to see , but I can believe in it .

And then it gets me to that third stage , which is , which is like joyful obedience , where you can truly lean in , but like I think that there's so much of that , that process , because again , we're human and we are , we have this pull of kind of a greater , something greater , and then this pull of our ego and man we can really get in a fight with that ,

but I love . I also love what you said about the suffering piece Someone recently posted on LinkedIn . I think it was the CEO of NVIDIA I think that's the company name . I could be butchering it , but what he said was profound .

He said as he's sitting in a room with people and they're coming up with ideas and trying to do all this people focused on getting better . He said I wish you all suffering , because it is not until you go through that suffering that you really are opened up to learn and I thought , wow , that really framed .

It wasn't a negative , but if we could all go through something hard , something where there is a sense of suffering or suffrage to it , it really does , as you said it it forms us and it shapes us into something greater .

We talk about intentions all the time . I have the intention to be more positive , I have the intention to be more present , I have the intention to be just a more joyful person . Well , it's great to have an intention , but I think we've lost again the meaning To have intention . It requires you to be in tension .

It should be difficult , it should have this component of friction . An intention shouldn't be like , oh , I have the intention to be more positive and like , oh , I'm just a positive , happy person all the time anyways , and it's really easy for me , but I'm just going to make it an intention . That's not an intention .

Intention puts you in the direct intersection point between who you are and who you're called to be . And when you're in that intersection point , it requires you to change , and change requires some tension . And that fire that you're in it's a refiner's fire . That's what's refining you . It's like when you see a gold ring . It's 18 karat gold , 24 karat gold .

Whatever it is . To the naked eye . It looks beautiful , it's gold , it's shiny , it looks great , it's hard , it's metal , it's man . This thing must be really valuable . But you throw it in some fire , melts down . All of a sudden you see all the different alloys come to the top .

You see the aluminum , you see the nickel , you see the copper , you see everything . And until you can skim it off the top , it's only at that point that it can be made more pure , so that now it's more valuable when it comes out the other side . Well , so many of us are not willing to endure the refiner's fire .

We're not willing to sit in the tension , and thus we abort any type of shifting , any type of change , any type of shaping , any type of refining that we're going through . So we ultimately aren't then prepared to handle what it is that was sitting on the other side of it for us . And then we sit over here and we complain . We sit over here and we mourn .

We sit over here and we're comparing . We're sitting over here and we're wondering why we weren't able to get where we wanted to go when in actuality it was sitting there for you all the time . You just weren't willing to sit in the tension no-transcript .

That's like goosebumps with being in tension that's like goosebumps .

Because what my intention is and for a lot of us and here's another thing that's going to be unpopular with a lot of people is oftentimes the thing that we have to be in tension with is not the hard thing that the world tells you , it's not the David Goggins go run 95 miles and be hard and grind it out .

For a lot of people , the intention is becoming less . The intention is not doing the thing , the intention is not being that thing .

Another story of like why I come around to this is , for me , for a long time , my ego and my identity was placed in my fitness level , was placed in how I looked , was placed in how I was operating and something that I say now like an unblessed person either performs or rebels .

And so , until you find where your identity is , it's only at that point that you can lean into what you're truly called to do . And so , for me , I was always performing , always . That's what I , that's what I saw myself , that's where I saw my value . And so I had to look a certain way . I had to have a certain level of fitness .

Every time I went to the start line of a race . I had to win . And so I put a lot of pressure on myself .

And so , as I had just finished up training within the CrossFit Games , had come out , had just started , then into triathlons , because I was like , if I can do this , then I can do that , I then into triathlons because I was like , if I can do this , then I can do that . I can do everything .

I could just be like this big guy that competes in everything and just takes it all home and wins it all . And as I started to finish races and just like you talked about with the Super Bowl , just like you talked about with other championships , I'd win , and I would feel so empty and angry and just like depressed after and not knowing why .

And so I was like you know what ? Fine , maybe it's just because I'm not doing enough races . I'm not . I don't have race season for another three months . So I'm you know what ? I'm just going to go run a hundred miles . And so I went to a track , I set up my own little nutrition station , I set my own little recovery station up and I just ran .

So , for everybody out there , a hundred miles is 400 laps of a track and I just started running . I just started running and I just started running and I just started running and as I got through lap 398 , as I got around lap 399 , I started to have the same feeling in my stomach You're not enough , you're not good enough . Why are you doing this ?

You're just performing . This is what you have to do . And as I finished about halfway through that last lap , I just had this voice in my head and this download of your win is not finishing . And I was like no , that can't be right . Three quarters of the way through the last lap , your win is not finishing . And I felt my legs stop .

Win is not finishing . And I felt my legs stop . You just have one last corner , one last thing to go literally a hundred feet .

And I turned left , I walked across the track , I jumped the fence and I went home , because if I went to the recovery station , I would have to finish and cross the finish line , and so I went home , and it was at that moment I cried the whole way home . It was at that moment that I realized like that was , like that was the big thing , was saying .

So somebody asked have you run a hundred miles ? No , I have not . I've run 99.9% of it , but I haven't , I haven't run a hundred miles . And so that's this thing that comes back to me of what I was stating , where you have to be willing to be nothing .

You have to be willing to be nothing , you have to be willing to drop that ego , you have to be willing to sit into that , and your concept of being intention is actually probably doing less than what it is that you actually think it's doing more .

Make sure to join us next week for part two , where he goes into the details around data-driven health decisions and how they can lead to inevitable success , the cost to leadership that we have to proactively address , as well as humility and becoming less , and how that can paradoxically lead to greater influence . You are not going to want to miss it .

It will not disappoint . I hope that you enjoyed today's episode and I hope that you will join us again for part two next week . Thank you so much for listening and for being here on this journey with me . I hope you'll stick around . If you liked this episode .

It would mean the world for me if you would rate and review the podcast or share it with someone you know may need to hear this message . I love to hear from you all and want you to know that you can leave me a voicemail directly .

If you go to my website , evokegreatnesscom , and go to the contact me tab , you'll just hit the big old orange button and record your message . I love the feedback and comments that I've been getting , so please keep them coming . I'll leave you with the wise words of author Robin Sharma Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day .

It comes from taking little steps consistently . It comes from making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary , so that a day eventually arrives when all that's left is the extraordinary .