#1605 5 Life-Improving Ideas: No. 1. The Right Path - Harps

my Life podcast episodes. If you remember, back in the day, I did two hundred episodes of Life, which were like these little ten minute installments, like little daily coaching sessions. So for this week it's going to kind of be a version of that. I've got a bunch of really good stuff lined up, some amazing guests coming, lots of great things. I've got a few interview this views this week, which will go live from kind of Sunday Monday onwards.

After this stuff. But I thought we'd do something different, might work, might not, who knows. It's what you do? You ever go, don't you? So I want to share a different idea or construct or strategy or life improving kind of technique that might help you create some kind of internal or external positive shift, some kind of improvement, growth, development, evolution, understanding, insight, awareness,

some form of improvement on planet you. And some of the things that I'm sharing, a lot of what I'm sharing has really been stuff that has just become evident to me through my own trials and tribulations, falling down and getting up for sixty odd years. So you know, in business, in life, with health, in relationships, with money, with you know, lifestyle, with trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be and how I want to be and how I might make that happen.

But also, you know, from my experience working with thousands of people in a personal training capacity thousands of sessions. I've said this a bunch of times, but I did over fifty thousand sessions of personal training. Think about that. Fifty thousand sessions of personal training. That's a lot of conversations,

that's a lot of interaction. That's a lot of different minds and a lot of different beliefs, and a lot of different bodies, a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different expectations and a lot of different needs that I needed to navigate and negotiate and understand and have some kind of insight into in order for me to be able to help people create the outcome slash outcomes

that they wanted to create with their body. And while mostly we know that mostly people go to the gym because they want to change something about their body, a physiological kind of shift, of course, we also know that, you know, even when we just talk about getting in shape physically, we know that it's not just about the body. As I've said many times quite often, it's almost like

the body is the consequence. It's really a behavioral and practical and social and emotional and psychological process with a physical consequence. You know, it's about choice, it's about thinking, habits, behavior, all that stuff. And so, you know what was really interesting for me as a young trainer, as a young gym instructor, as someone who kicked off their health career

fitness career at eighteen with really no fucking idea. But as I was primarily at that stage anyway, an experiential learner, I was quite good at understanding people and reading people, and intuitively, while I didn't have great academic or theoretical knowledge. I was not bad at intuitively and instinctively being able to meet people where they are at. And you know, the common denominator, as I've said many times for people who go to a gym, is that they want to change.

And so in a way, you're not just a gym instructor or a personal trainer, or an exercise physiologist or a gym manager or whatever I was at that stage of my journey, But you are an agent of change.

You are a change management expert of sorts, or you become that over time because you start to realize that helping someone change their body, but also change their understanding and change their knowledge, and change their thinking, and change their habits and behaviors, and change their their day to day operating system, and to change the way that they think about food or relate to food, to change the relationship that they have with food and their body and

with exercise, the way that they socialize, the way that they self regulate or don't self regulate. You realize that this is like a really multi dimensional, complicated, integrated process. It's not about one thing, It's about many things, and often it's about people's willingness to do the thing that they have been unwilling to do up until that point in time. What do I mean by that, Well, how

many of us, how many of you listening? I know I have done this, But how many of us know what we should do, but don't do what we know to do because it's uncomfortable or because it's not convenient, or it's not quick, or it's not painless. And the answer is, obviously, many of us, or perhaps all of us, have done that at some stage. And so there's the thing that we're capable of doing. That's one. And two, there's the thing that we're actually doing with those capabilities

or with that capacity or with that potential. And it's my experience that while a lot of people have most people I would say have a capacity for significant change, shift, growth, evolution, development, resilience, competence, you know, all of those things that there's also a large percentage of people who never really even open the door on that stuff because they're too lazy, they're too inconsistent, they're too fearful, or they're too unwilling to choose the

right path, not the easy path. As pursuant to the title, of this episode, and that is, you know, there are the things that we need to do, and they're the things that we want to do. Are the things that need to be done to create the outcome we want to create with our body, with our brand, with our business, with our lifestyle, with our relationships, with our bank balance, with our academic journey, with our capacity to live our values, to walk our talk, to live that life of spirituality

that's aligned with our values and beliefs. There's the path that we can choose that's somewhat easy and convenient and painless, but my experience and observation is that that doesn't get us where we really want to go or could go.

And so you know, this willingness to be able to say, I'm going to take the right path, and by the right path, I mean the most effective, the most productive, the one which is the most likely to open the door wide on my capacity, on my potential, on my gifts, on my genetic potential, so that I can get close to or closer to the version of me that I

want to be. Now, if you're listening to this and where you're at is already good, and you are with your body, with your health, with your habits, with your life, with your income, career, all the stuff that makes up your life. If for the most part, you are genuinely pretty happy and pretty fulfilled and kind of there in

inverted commas there, then this probably ain't for you. But if, like many people, you have been the one day soon person, or the it's not the right time but it will be the right time soon person, or the I'll start Monday or I'll start January one person, then maybe this is for you. You know, for me, I have spent or I spent a lot of my early years trying to trying to get to the top of the mount without the climb, the metaphoric mountain without the climb, choosing convenience,

choosing the quick fix, choosing instant gratification. And while all of these things are super attractive and sexy, they might be good for marketing. Convenience, instant gratification, quick fix, the hack, the this, the shortcut, the whatever it is. All of those things are better or worse. They're good marketing tools because they seem to sell stuff because people love that idea. But what they're not good for producing is long term

change or long term success or growth within humans. And the irony is that, you know, the thing that we avoid, which is the right path, is the thing that helps us become that more evolved, more developed, more capable, more adaptable, more resilient, more skilled, more aware version of us. As most of you know, I've spent a lot of my life educating myself, and that is, you know, experientially and academically, I've been at the cold face of learning. I'm still there,

you know. I'm still reading, I'm still listening, I'm still watching. I'm still formally studying and informally studying. I see myself as a perpetual student, and I'm well aware that the times where I have really learned and really evolved and really gone to another level in terms of my own development, my own understanding as a human using the limited ability

and knowledge and potential that I have. But when I've really gone to another level, and I'm not saying this insincerely, but is when I've just leant into the starfy that terrified me, which is not to say that everything needs to terrify us, or perhaps lent into the stuff which was for me somewhat somewhere between uncertain, unfamiliar and uncomfortable and at the other end of the scale fucking terrifying.

But somewhere in that mix there where you know. When I set up my first personal training business, which was in nine ninety thirty four years ago, there weren't any in Australia. I didn't know how to lease commercial premises. I didn't know how to buy commercial gym equipment. I was twenty five when I was in the setting up process. I'd never owned a business. I'd never done a leadership course, a management course, a business course. I didn't have a degree.

Nearly every adult, because I still felt like a child at the time, nearly every adult who gave me feedback told me it wasn't a good business model, it wouldn't work. I had a belief that it would work. I don't know that I had the optimal bitin business model at that stage. I probably well, I definitely didn't, But I had an inherent, intuitive, very strong belief that it would work.

But what was required of me in that moment that like the easy path would have been to continue on working for someone else in someone else's gym, but one I fucking hated it. But with it, with that job came predictability, came, familiarity, came consistency of wage, came holiday pay, came sick pay, all of those very easy, convenient things.

But what didn't come for me was growth. What didn't come for me, or not at the level that I wanted it was was that capacity for me to be able to climb some metaphoric ladder so that I could be in charge. That that wasn't really available to me beyond the point. And it's not that that model or that particular environment that I was in was bad. In fact, that business at that time and my boss at that time, they were both good. It was a good business. I

liked the business, I liked my boss. But there was only so far I could go, and I'd gone that far. And what I couldn't do is I couldn't create new things. I couldn't come up with an idea and just act on it. Everything had to be run through my boss. And it didn't want to be anything too big or too different, because that would get quashed. And I understood it because, like a lot of my ideas and a

lot of my thinking was very unconventional. The idea of building a stand alone, for want of a better term, a stand alone, public gym that was only open to the public if they were making appointments. There were no classes, there were no memberships, There was no group exercise, there was no pool, there was no circuit classes there. It was all appointment. It was more like a even though to walk in it looked like a gym, it looked like a private gymnasium, which it was. It operated more

like a clinic. It operated more like a medical practice than a fitness center. And on a daily basis, I had people. By the way, there's no self pity in this. These people weren't trying to undermine me. These most of the people who gave me this kind of negative feedback or this feedbay feedback that was somewhat doubtful of what I was doing and how and its potential for success. I truly believe that most of those people believed that they were coming from a good place, and in essence

they were. Turns out they were wrong, though, turns out they were totally wrong. Turns out I was totally right. Also turns out that I still didn't know a lot of shit. Also turns out that I fucked many things up. But what happened when I walked away from the easy path, which was option A the gym with the other guy,

and I got paid reasonably well. But I chose for me based on my values, based on my personality, based on the kind of relationship I wanted to have with work, like I wanted to just create this thing which was basically a convergence of my passion, my curiosity and the potential for making money around that, and to design my own career and therefore, more broadly, to design my own life and lifestyle, which at that point in time was built around this new model, this new thing, this personal

training center. Of course, they were going to happen anyway. Of course, at Craig Harper didn't invent personal training globally. I was definitely in the ground floor in Australia. But what that you know in setting up a business in learning?

How to manage people in learning, how to be a leader in learning, how to hire and fight in learning, how to have grown up conversations with accountants and real estate people and business people, and to understand all the legalities around all the stuff that I needed to do and know and implement to be able to have, you know, hourly conversations with people who are older than me and in many ways more smarter than me, and definitely more

business savvy than me. To be able to put myself in that situation and to be okay with looking silly, to be okay with getting things wrong, to be okay with apologizing when I needed to apologize. For me, it was this, you know, this opportunity to be able to lean into doing the right thing, not the easy thing, the inconvenient thing that just happened for me, to be the best thing, because sometimes the inconvenient thing is the

best thing for you. Sometimes the thing that people think you shouldn't do is actually the thing that you should. I remember, you know, most of you know, my like swimming sports experience, where I was you know, humiliated and all this stuff, which was all again all my doing though self pity. But what I don't talk about much is subsequent to that. I went home that day after I had this horrible experience, self created experience, and I decided I was going to go for a run. I'd

never been for a run. And even though we had compulsory cross country running at my school, that is, we we once a week on you know, for parts of the anyway, we had to because I went to a boys college and in year seven we did these very regular cross country runs. And because I was morbidly obese, because I was wildly unfit, because I was the furthest thing away from an athlete you could imagine. I walked.

I didn't run because I couldn't run because I was thirty to thirty five kilos overweight, and I was wildly unfit. I had an aerobic conditioning, it would hurt because my body was so heavy to run and so on. So, to be honest, I'd never really been I've never really trained properly either. I've done bits and pieces of sport, but in terms of in terms of getting my body and going right, I'm now going to train this body.

I Am now going to consciously and intelligently manipulate my physiology to create a different outcome so that I can look, feel, function, and be different on a biological and a functional level. I'd never done that. So I got home from the swimming sports and I I went I decided I was going to go for a run because I understood. I understood essentially that if I moved more, if I increased my energy expenditure, I'm sure I wouldn't even have known

that term then. But if I knew that if I moved more and consumed less, that that would probably make me lose weight. I didn't really understand, you know, the science of energy, you know, input and output. I didn't really get that, but I kind of knew. So what I did was I literally said to myself, whatever I

eat normally, I'm going to eat half that. So it's not like I started choosing better foods and different foods and I went to the bloody whole food section of the soupermarket and I started eating salads, salads and fucking almonds and you know, watermelon like a chat. I just had what? So if for breakfast I would have eight week bits, I would all of a sudden, I would have four. If I would eat two rolls for lunch,

I would have one. If I would have, you know whatever, five hundred grams or four hundred grams of something for dinner, I would have two hundred grams. I didn't weigh it, but you know what I mean. I literally harved everything. And some of the food I ate was healthy food because it was the seventies, and some of it wasn't

particularly healthy food. But what I did was, I don't know what my calorie intake was, but let's say my calorie intake was it was probably somewhere around four thousand calories a day, I would estimate, well, I harved it

to two. And I don't know what my energy expenditure was, but it wasn't much other than incidental activity, other than just ambulating my ninety odd kilo body around the planet and getting in and out of a chair and on and off a bus and walking to you know, school, and not that I walked to school because I caught a bus, but you know, walking from the bus to school and moving through the day and you know, all that kind of incidental and what we might even call

as an adult occupational activity, all that stuff. It wasn't a lot. So then on top of my harved calories, I introduced, you know, running. Now, when I started running, I literally remember I remember the first time that I consciously, voluntarily, with nobody looking or coercing, I went for a run. I can't remember how far, but it kind of mean more than two hundred meters before I had to stop. And when I say running, yeah, jogging, And that is

where I started. And honestly, I do remember vividly how painful it was for me to run. I do remember how uncomfortable it was. I do remember gasping for air. I do remember feeling like a whale fucking running around the streets of Latroe Valley, specifically moe at that time. Yes, you can laugh, Moey, And I remember how I just felt like I was in a body that didn't really belong to me, and I, you know, everything, all the emotional and mental and physical kind of discomfort you could feel.

I felt it anyway. So I made my self go for a walk slash run, and I can't even remember how far, but I think it was probably somewhere in the four or five kilometer. You know. I was probably outside for thirty forty minutes, maybe a bit longer, mostly walking, some jogging, and over time, you know, I did less walking and more jogging, then eventually less and less walking, more and more jogging, and then eventually, I don't know, maybe maybe six weeks, four weeks, six weeks in to

the process, maybe eight weeks I was jogging. I was jogging very slowly. And I can tell you because you know, I'd halved my food and I'd probably doubled my energy

expended to the weight started to fall off. And while it hurt and it was uncomfortable, and I was constantly fucking hungry at the start, and I obsessed about food, and I had had a really unhealthy relationship with food until that point in time, there was enough internal leverage, enough emotional and sociological because I didn't want to be fat in front of people, and psychological leverage. There was

enough leverage. There was enough of a reason for me to override those cravings for me to override that obsession, for me to override that desire to sit on the fucking couch and do nothing, and to override that desire slash obsession that I had had with food to eat anything that just made me feel good. I was such a foodie. I was so obsessed with eating for pleasure. And this process was hard, This process was uncomfortable, but it was the right path for me. The easy path

was sitting on my ass and eating junk. That was the easy path. And I'm not trying to sound like some big, noble, high performing, you know, dickhead, but it's everything that I've done in my life that's created a really good outcome or some significant form of growth or improvement or insight or learning. Even down to what I'm doing right now with my PhD, everything has had at times on that particular part of my journey, everything has

had a significant component of disco. And for me that is and we don't need to live in perpetual pain or discomfort, of course, but for me that's where the growth has come. And for me, that uncertainty, that unfamiliarity, that discomfort, that's always for me been the path of growth, the path of understanding myself, the path of understanding how I could optimize and operationalize my potential. How I could stop letting my innate ability and my genetic potential and

my largely unused IQ. How I could start to be more productive, How I could start to get more out of what I had to work with. Of course I couldn't have I couldn't wake up the next day and have a higher IQ or more hours in the day, or different genetics, or wake up with new skills. But what I could do every day is I could go, well, how do I optimize what I have? And the way that I optimized it was constantly doing the work and

the way that you do it is the same. And that doesn't mean that all days have got to be hard days or all ours have got to be hard hours. But it means that at some stage we need to I believe, we need to need to hit the pause button and put our life and put our behavior, and put our health habits, and put our career and put our behaviors around money and all of these things that comprise the totality of planet you, you know, thinking, habits,

behavior's outcome. Put them up on the old metaphoric hoist in the metaphoric garage and walk around and kick the tires. What's work and what's not? What am I doing that's serving me? What am I doing that's a form of self sabotage. Am I taking the right path? Or am I taking the easy path?