Unmasking Greatness
Join Fitness/LifeStyle Expert & Mentor Chris Kakouras talk about maximizing your health, business, mindset, and overall life! Let's get better together as I bring on amazing guest to interview and learn from!
Unmasking Greatness
Your Success Qualities Already Exist—You Just Need to Redirect Them
Chris Kakouras explores the powerful intersection of business and fitness mindsets, revealing how the same traits that drive professional success can transform your physical health when properly applied.
• Five key pillars connect business and fitness success: goal setting, structure/systems, patience, handling stress, and meaningful wins
• SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) create clarity and urgency in both fitness and business pursuits
• Structured systems eliminate decision fatigue and create consistency—the foundation of results in any domain
• Patience and resilience come through embracing challenges rather than avoiding them
• High achievers often excel in business but struggle with fitness because they haven't transferred their success qualities
• The confidence gained through physical transformation cannot be purchased—it must be earned through consistent effort
• Finding community and mentors who "speak your language" accelerates progress and prevents costly mistakes
• With just four months left in the year, now is the time to sprint toward year-end goals rather than postponing to next year
Follow Chris on Instagram for daily updates and message him directly if you're interested in accelerating your health and fitness results with professional guidance.
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Welcome to Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, chris Kikoris, a lifestyle fitness coach and mentor. This podcast is about unmasking your greatest potential, finding your purpose and crafting a life worth living. Health and fitness has been the gateway drug to all of my success. My continuous drive to keep learning and surround myself with other high achievers forces me to level up, which has developed my mind to something I never thought was possible. This podcast is here to share what I've learned and continue to learn with all of you. This is your sign to take back control of your health, mindset and personal environment. Strap in as we are recharged and always find value in the show. Please subscribe and share, as we can all get better together. Let's go. What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, chris Koukouris. I hope everybody's having a blessed day.
Speaker 1:These last couple weeks months have just been insanely busy for me and honestly, I put a little story out on my Instagram talking about how I didn't want to say busy anymore because I just found out that was probably the normality of my life moving forward. So and probably for many of you as well. So I think it's. You know, being busy is also a blessing. At the same time, knowing that I have something going on, something working. If I had nothing going on or no ambitions, no goals, I feel like that would slowly kill me. And so I say that to say I shouldn't be complaining about anything. But I am excited because we do have some really, really cool things we've been working on for a long time. I don't want to say it yet it is. We're going to release it, hopefully the end of this month, and I'm telling you guys, this thing here is something I have thought about for a very long time I've been wanting to do. It is really going to be impactful to many of you and also to the community and to a lot of people, a lot of families. I'll say that. Okay, I'll say that, but just know I'll probably be leaking things out in the next couple weeks. But moving forward from that conversation, because I don't want to, I'm too excited. I might actually spill the beans on this conversation. We got I have a couple things coming up. We got two interviews coming up in the next two weeks. So I'm super pumped for that.
Speaker 1:And you know, if you guys don't know or haven't been, you know keeping up with me, I do have a content studio, podcast studio, at a gym in Greenville called Carolina iron and over there. I have been there now for well. I've had my studio for over six months, but I've been a member for about a year now. I signed up when they opened originally and it originally started with me just wanting to work out at a really cool gym. And keep in mind, this gym, with zero traffic, is 30 minutes with traffic, is a full-blown hour, so I've learned my timing quite well at this point in time. But going there, I did that to help me with my business and build a studio, a place to work. But I did open up a couple in-person slots, so I capped it at five people and that was it max. And I enjoy the in-person aspect, but it's just from a capacity standpoint. I just I don't have the time, so I had to put a limit on it and I didn't even plan on doing it. These people ended up coming in there and really just adamant, like Chris, I really, really want to do in-person with you. I know we could do online, but you're here, I want to come here. And anyways, long story short, we worked it out.
Speaker 1:One of the and this comes to the point of my topic. The people that have been coming to work with me are high level entrepreneurs, business owners, coos. These individuals have a mindset of hard work, very busy lifestyle, a lot of traveling, and you know they come from all different backgrounds, but I can say that I can really see the mindset that they have and I think it's also a little bit easy for me to relate to them because I understand the lifestyle of just like the go, go, go, never shutting it off, and so we definitely have good conversations and I can also help them in their fitness journey, because a lot of the and even many of you that are probably listening if you aren't a business owner or entrepreneur maybe you're just a corporate professional you have a lot of successful traits that you guys are using in your business. That's why you have the position that you have is because you have the qualities that are needed to be successful. Now, when it comes to your health and fitness, you haven't figured out how to tap into those qualities and shift them into health and fitness, because if you can do that, you have hit a major keystone of making successful strides going forward. Right, because it's the same tactics, but we just have to apply it in a different fashion, and so that's what these people have been doing and they have been getting amazing results, and very quickly, because they have, again, very good qualities that can tap into fitness to get them faster results, because they're more strategic, they're more measured, they're more structured.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of parallels that come with fitness and business that people just didn't realize before, and that's really what I want to talk about today, as I've been talking to, obviously, a lot of these types of people and working with them as well, where you can really take that same mindset and apply it to almost anything and it can really help you excel in whatever your goals are. And specifically, you know we're going to be talking about health and fitness, but there's five pillars that really overlap in fitness and business that I want to go over with you, and I think everybody can take some little nuggets away from what I'm about to say. And these things, some of these things may even seem simple, like duh Chris, like why are you telling me this? And, honestly, sometimes you just need to hear it again. You need to hear it from a different voice. I've paid tons of money to get in the right rooms with the right people for them to tell me some duh information, and it was enough for me to turn on the light bulb and get you some amazing results moving forward.
Speaker 1:Because, again, we are literally what? Four months away from the new year, and you guys are in two positions right now. All right, two positions One you're on track to reach your New Year's goal. The other you are behind. You did not do what you said that you were going to do on the new years. And for those people specifically, I'm going to tell you right now what I'm about to talk about. You need to be sprinting to the finish line. You need to buckle down and start going after those goals, because if you think, oh well, I'll do it next year, how many years have you been telling yourself that? Let's be real with ourselves, let's be honest. Okay, so let's hit these five pillars.
Speaker 1:So the first one, here's the duh goal setting. Are you setting goals, and not only just goals? There's an acronym for smart, smart goals. Okay, s being specific, all right, are you specific with your goals? Did you say, well, I'm gonna lose, I'm gonna lose weight this year? Or did you say I want to lose 20 pounds this year and I want to. Maybe you even went even further with specificity and said I want to be sub 12% body fat and I want to increase four or five pounds of muscle tissue this year, are you? That's? That's the kind of specifics that I want to see. You know, let's really dial that in.
Speaker 1:M is measurable. How are you tracking this right? Are you weighing yourself every week? Are you, if you're doing your body fat, are you going to an in-body scale or a facility that's able to read these measurements every three months? Are you keeping track in a log book of your workouts? If you're not measuring things, you cannot manage anything. So you have to find ways to track and measure the results that you're getting or not getting, so you can make the adjustments and pivot when necessary.
Speaker 1:Is it achievable? Is it realistic, right? I do think there's a component that you need to really shoot for the stars, right, because it really makes you work hard towards something. But I think you also need to be real with yourself. Are you saying, hey, I need to lose 20 pounds in the next four weeks and keep in mind you haven't ever done anything like this in the past? I would say that's probably not a good goal, nor is that healthy. All right, I think a realistic goal for someone that's trying to lose 20 pounds is, you know, 90 days, you know even four months. You know, do 16 weeks, and that's a very slow, steady, realistic pace. That's healthy, that you can do.
Speaker 1:All right, is it for R relevant? Is this relevant in your life right now? I always, even with relevant, I would ask why? Why are you doing this? What is going to change in your life that's going to even make a difference, you know, is it that you? You just don't have the energy to play with your kids after work? Are you is is? Are your life so stressed out that every little thing just blows you up that you start yelling and screaming? You know, is it that you just want to be able to take your kid to the park and still be able to play with them and get on the floor with them and play Legos, or you know, whatever it may be, there's got to be a strong reason why, and sometimes, sometimes, it may not be you.
Speaker 1:We have a client right now that just started and it's almost like he just doesn't really care for himself. You know, he hasn't built that awareness to where this is really important for his health, his wellness, I mean. Yes, that is a good component, but some people need something else to fire them, something that makes them tick, and I do know that he has a significant other that he wants to propose to and he feels like that. She is the reason that he needs to do this. And I told him. I was like, look, dude, that's fine, I don't care. If that's the fuel to your fire, use it. If sadness is the fuel to your fire, use it. I don't care, and you shouldn't either.
Speaker 1:Whatever gets you to make that first step and keep going through the hardships, use it. Over time, that will shift. You'll find more motivation. You'll start seeing changes. You'll be like, oh, I like this. You'll lean more into it. But in the beginning, use whatever you got to use. It doesn't matter to me, but we want to find what that is. And then you got to put a time on things. So T for time. If you don't put a time on when you need to accomplish something, there's no urgency, there's no significant reason why you need to hurry up or catch up to reach your goals.
Speaker 1:I use this example because if you ever thought about back, when you were. Let's say you were in high school, you were in a I don't know an English class. Okay, you're in English class and you have a 30-page paper that you're supposed to be writing, right, and they give you let's say they give you a month 30 days. Well, if you were like me, I waited till probably the last day or two and I banged out 30 pages. Was it great? Probably not. Did it get done? Yes, all right, but when you start thinking, I did that in two days.
Speaker 1:Imagine if I were to write 30 pages every two days. Can you imagine the significance of what that would be? I mean to write a whole book, you know. Or maybe, if you use this SMART acronym, you probably would have been a little more specific and measurable of what you were doing to achieve the relevant task in front of you, which means that if you had 30 days to write 30 pages, write a page a day Super easy and digestible and you would have had time to make sure your things are right, your spelling was correct, your grammar and all the good things that come along with writing a paper. Back before they had chat, gpt, all right.
Speaker 1:So make sure that you set some really good goals. You know, this is why this is so specific when it comes to health and fitness, because, again, just like that, you got to set parameters, you got to make sure that you're working towards something in a very specific manner. And the same thing goes along with business, right? These business owners, if they want to hit their you know their Q3, q2 or Q3, you know goals, whether it's acquiring sales or clients or whatever their business may be they have to break things down. You know, you have to reverse engineer things to see what are the metrics that I need to be doing to hit these goals.
Speaker 1:You know one of the things back in the day and this is not as true anymore, but when it came to acquiring cold leads and converting them to clients, let's say, you're doing instead of for us, specifically because we're online, we don't actually door knock, but you could think of this as door knocking on social media. You would send out cold DMs and for every hundred messages that you would send out, maybe 20 would actually respond back, maybe five would actually set up a call with you and you'd close one or two, one or two people out of a hundred DMs. But if that's the metrics that you have to go off. That's what you go off of. So if you want to acquire, you know, four clients a month, well then that's 400 messages you got to send out. Right, and everybody's measurements are different, but I'm just using that as a simple math. So again, you got to be very specific.
Speaker 1:The next one is having structure and systems. All right. Oh, my God, I mean I can't explain how much this will actually make your life easier and get you closer to your goals in health and in business. Because, when it comes to your health and fitness, structure and systems is going to take all the guess work out. It's going to make sure that you're not stressing yourself out as well, and things are just put in place for you to execute and get to where you want to go.
Speaker 1:So, having meal plans set up, knowing what days that you're going to train, what exactly you're going to train, you know when it comes to consistency as well with time management, you know what time that you wake up, you know what time that you go to sleep, and everything's kind of pre built in the middle for you to just just move along and everything just flows right. So you don't have what they call decision fatigue. You don't need to wake up and be like what am I wearing today, you know? Or what am I doing today? What workout am I doing today? What should I eat for lunch? I mean, that's exhausting when you got a lot of other priorities that you need to focus on.
Speaker 1:It's the same thing with your business. You got to have SOPs, you got to have certain things put in place to execute, to reach the goals that you want to reach, and this will beat motivation every single time. It's just the consistency of having these in place, and if you don't take the time to really sit down, have these things put in place, these structures, these systems, you know, having your Google calendar set up, your CRM set up, you know, maybe you're using a fitness app that schedules everything out for you, so you know exactly what you need to do every single day. You are going to be what we call drifting and wherever life throws you, you will land, and I promise you you ain't going to land in anything good, but some mud and maybe some dog shit. Right, you got to pick yourself up and clean up and see where it's going to throw you next. You need to have very clear, structured systems. This will create freedom, ultimately, and much better results.
Speaker 1:The third one you got to have patience. Patience, oh my gosh. You know back when I've learned patience, by a default, in my opinion. I think back about this now because I used to skateboard. You know, back in high school, dude, I would work on one trick for hours a day, never land it, which turned into days to months to learn one trick, and that was just something that we, as skateboarders, we just kept working, kept working to get better. And that's how you did it. You fell more than you actually landed anything, and the patience to actually achieve something like that just meant so much more, and that pretty much translated into my bodybuilding career too. I didn't just build the physique in the next couple months. I know tons of people come to me and like, dude, you gotta get me in shape in the next couple months. Even if I told them a year, they'd be like oh man, a year, dude. I've been doing this stuff for over 15 years now. You know I didn't even consider competing until about four or five years into lifting and because of my passion for it and enjoyment of lifting, the gym was the easy part for me. You know, competing was more tapping into the nutritional aspect. That's when you really start to dial things in. But that foundation is the gym. The gym is really the gateway drug to all of your success, and I correlate that straight into my business too.
Speaker 1:We have been able to be very successful in our online business and a little bit in person as well, and everything that we kind of put our hands on, because I have patience, I know sometimes things work. I know sometimes things don't work and I don't get frustrated, I just keep going. I've been using this term of casting lottery tickets, right, so many people play the lottery. Don't mean that you win, but a lot of you keep playing and you keep spending your money on it, and for me, it's the same thing. But eventually something will hit and I can tell you my rate of success versus your rate of success of hitting the lottery is much higher. Right, because I'm a little bit more in control of what I'm doing, but it's the same concept. You know what I mean. You got to make sure that you have the patience and you're testing and you're trying and you're looking over and auditing what's working, what's not working. Okay, it's all about you know, having the conversation of delaying some gratification. We know we're going in the right direction because, again, if you're tracking those metrics, if you're looking at the stats, you'll know that you're trending in the right direction. It may not be as fast as you want, but I promise in the next six, 12 months, two years, five years, you're going to turn around and you're going to see how far that you've came and you'll be like I'm so glad that I just started.
Speaker 1:Some of you guys are so hesitant to just take that first step and you're just like it's so far or it's so hard. I don't think I can do it. You are your own worst enemy. You are the only person holding yourself back from achieving what you really want. It is not the program, it's not the coach, it's nobody else in your family, it is you. You are in control of your life and when you realize that and recognize that you have control, you have received the power back in your hands. You have not given the power to somebody else anymore and just waiting for them to tell you what to do. You need to take control and you need to own. That is one of our mission statements. Is we, as you know, in our company and as our clients, we need to take ownership. You need to take ownership of your actions, whether it went good or whether it went bad, and that's okay. Not everything goes perfect, but we know what to do.
Speaker 1:Moving forward, the fourth one I would say is handling stress. You know this all comes along with it, right? This, this is training you. Stress is handling stress. You know this all comes along with it, right? This? This is training you. Stress is not bad. Let me tell you something.
Speaker 1:Everybody's like oh, I'm so stressed, I can't handle it. I embrace stress. I have built up a threshold and I've even hit the limit where I I was done. I was like this is not worth it anymore. I can't do this. I don't know what I'm going to do. You know I've hit those moments, but I don't let those moments define me. I know this is just a moment and I've had moments that actually lasted weeks and I'm like maybe this isn't a moment. Your mind will play games with you, but I know that I have gone through many hardships in my life that have made me resilient. I've been in many moments of my life where I realized that I was I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know how I'm going to get out of this. I don't know how I'm going to move to the next stage or chapter in my life, but I just kept going. I did not look for a handout, I did not look for the light at the end of the tunnel. All I did was just keep taking one step at a time and this will teach you and embrace your mind for this discomfort. All right. This is where things start to become more easy for you, because you just know how to handle it and some of the hardships and stressful moments that would affect somebody doesn't even phase you anymore because you've been through it. So if you're going through something hard, just embrace it right now.
Speaker 1:I think you gotta know that this is building up your strength. It's kind of like your body. How do you build muscle? You gotta go through stressful moments. You gotta go through the hardships. You gotta pick up the heavy weight and go through stressful moments. You got to go through the hardships, you got to pick up the heavy weight. And it's not just lifting the weight. It's not that first rep, it's not the fifth, it's not the 10th. It's the two, three reps past fatigue that you got to push through Going to almost failure. That's what builds your strength, that's what builds muscle. It's just. It's not just the moving. You got to go through the hardships. The same thing with business. We say that there's new devils with the different levels. You know what I mean. Every level that you hit in your business, you got new things that you got to fight through, and it's just a learning experience. Now you want to speed some of this up.
Speaker 1:There's a Chinese proverb that says if you want to get somewhere fast, ask the guy that's coming back from where you're trying to go. You understand what I'm saying. That means if you are struggling, you don't know where you want to go or you don't know how to get there. But you really want to get there quick because you know some of us we want things fast, we don't want to wait, and that's okay. But then you got to ask someone that's a professional that knows what they're doing. Right, if you are in the health and fitness, you want to lose the weight, you want to build the muscle, you want to get the physique, the energy, you get your hormones managed. Where do you go? You find somebody. You find a coach, a trainer. You know someone to guide you and put a plan together. Yes, you do pay for that, okay. Same thing for business. You want to learn the systems. You want to learn how to track you know, create leads, run ads. What do you do if you don't know? You hire a mentor.
Speaker 1:All right, I've been through three of them now and, uh, and, and you know, here's the reality. You know I don't want to get off topic with this one. It's an investment in you. These, you're learning skills that you should be able to take and utilize for yourself moving forward. Without them, right, they should be teaching you these skills. It's like going to school. It's literally like going to school to learn a trait that you can do moving forward. And again, every time you hit a different level, you need maybe a higher level service. But the point, what I'm saying, is when, when you're investing in these, you need to do your due diligence. You need to make sure that you ask the right questions, to make sure that you feel like you're a good fit. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Full, full transparency. You know, on both ends of the spectrum coaches and mentors I have invested in mentorships. You know that were 20, $25,000. And some of them were amazing and some of them I just kind of flushed my money down my toilet and you got to swallow it. You know, maybe you took just one or two nuggets. All right, it is what it is. You know you got to be willing to bet on yourself. But I'm willing to bet on myself every single time versus doing nothing. Doing nothing is not an option for me. Bringing the towel to the game is not an option for me, because I will never throw it down. We got to keep going. We got to keep that resilient mindset and we just keep moving forward. Life is short and let's make the most of it. And doing nothing, you're ending it early, all right.
Speaker 1:The last one is you know the parallels of having meaningful wins. You know, when you create a healthy body, a healthy physique, a mindset, the strength, the endurance, these are things you can't buy. This is building confidence. You cannot buy confidence. You cannot buy your health. I mean I guarantee people will be. I mean people think they can when they're buying Ozempic, but you're basically injecting death in you if you don't know what you're doing. But realistically, like these sort of wins, when you create those bodies, that health, that lifestyle, it feels good. You earned it, you worked hard, the compliments that you get. People see you walk around and people look at you and they're like I respect that. You know, I respect what you've been doing.
Speaker 1:I see that all the time, especially with like business owners that we've been talking to that are in shape. I'm like this is why I can see someone that I can look at, a business owner, look at their physique and I can say, okay, I bet your business is doing well, because it takes discipline, it takes consistency, it takes resilience. You got to have the mindset to be able to achieve a healthy physique and that same mindset, like I said, it correlates with your business. I guarantee that you're consistent with your business. You're tracking, you have your goals set in place, you're stressed, but you have the resilience to push through. This is a huge identity shift of the person that you want to be right and you are proud of the progress.
Speaker 1:When I see someone that is successful in their business, automatically dude, I am super like impressed. I am, you know, obviously proud of them for their accomplishments. I look at it and I'm like wow, I uh, how'd you do it? You know I'm asking the Chinese guy. You know like, how'd you do it and you know with that, I think, again, you can learn a lot from that.
Speaker 1:And so, depending on where you're at when you're listening to this, maybe you're you know, corporate professional, you're, you got your own business, you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to figure out your health and fitness. You need to take the same traits that you're using to be successful in your business to your health and vice versa. Maybe you're great in the gym, you got consistency, you eat healthy, you do your cardio, you know you've built a healthy body. You need to take the same traits that got you there to build your business. They overlap so much that I think people overlook it. Sometimes they overcomplicate things. So you know, again, I encourage you guys to take a couple of these things that I said and see you know not all of them, but pick one or two that you can start putting more focus on. Where do you feel like you're lagging behind and apply that. That's going to help you get you to the next level and then from there you can again new levels, new devils.
Speaker 1:You figure out the next part of the game right, this whole fitness life business. It's a game and you got to learn how to play, and you got to learn how to play by the rules. There's no cheat codes to this. You got to learn the skills to be able to be successful, and many of you guys want to keep playing the same level because it's easy. The new boss is too hard. I don't even want to do that, I'll just. I keep playing the same level. That's fine. If you're happy playing the same level over and over again, do that.
Speaker 1:But I can promise you, if anybody's into health and fitness, if anybody's into the business, we don't think like that. We don't settle. Mediocrity is not something that we enjoy or talk about. It's always what's next. We're not living our life in the past. We want to know what's going to be in the next, in the future, what are we working towards? Those are the conversations I like having, and you can learn a lot from the people that you surround yourself with. So again, take one or two of these little nuggets and start working towards one of them. If they feel like that, you've been lagging behind and I can promise you you're going to start seeing some amazing results in the next 60 to 90 days. Lock it in, put a time down, all right.
Speaker 1:So I thought this was an interesting topic, again, just due to the conversations that we've been having, um, and and honestly it's just been I don't know. It's things that I already. I already think you know in general for myself, but then when I get to talk to other people that are kind of similar headspace and mindset, I'm like, ah, this is kind of refreshing because they understand. It's like I'm speaking a foreign language. Sometimes, you know, I'm like, ah, they get it. And that's the same thing with you guys, wherever you're at. You need to find that community. You got to find those people that speak your language and make sure it's a language that's going to help you get better. All right, so I hope you guys have a good rest of the day.
Speaker 1:I will be again, I think, in the next two, the next two weeks, as of right now. We have things booked. I have two really incredible guests that I'm bringing on, super pumped for Remember, every time that I do a guest, uh, we do actually video record that we put it on the YouTube. So these guests will actually be on the YouTube channel as well. I'm really pumped to actually talk to them. Um, it's been something on the books One one actually just popped up, but he has his own podcast as well. So it's it's going to be great. That's all I'm going to say. So hope you guys have a good rest of the day. Follow me on Instagram. That's where I'll really be keeping you guys up to date on a day-to-day basis, and if you guys have any questions or you'd like to get your health, your fitness, on track and really speed things up, shoot me a message and we'll get you set up. All right, hope you guys have a good rest of the day, peace.