The Daring Well Podcast - Holistic Health & Wellness, Mindset, and Personal Growth
Are you ready to feel empowered and motivated to crush your personal development and wellness goals?
Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here. Your one stop for mindfulness, meditations, holistic wellness, mental health, evidence based strategies, healthy habits, and deep and meaningful conversations to help you transform your mind and relationships.
Well, I’m your host, Rita Mercer. I’m a holistic wellness and mindset coach, licensed counselor, and your new virtual friend on this wild and crazy journey called life.
On the Daring Well podcast, we will explore holistic wellness practices to strengthen your mind, body, and spirit. Each episode we will learn new coping skills and explore holistic wellness tools and tips to shift your mindset and discover your true self.
With nearly a decade of experience as a licensed mental health counselor, specializing in trauma, grief, loss, and integrative mental health, I’m excited to share some nuggets of wisdom, clinical experience and research that I’ve learned along the way.
I invite you to lean in as I share stress management tools, resources, and guest interviews to help you DARE TO BE free, calm, have more joy, create meaningful relationships, be your true and authentic self.
Want more wellness and mindset support, let’s connect at DaringWell.com or on YouTube at Daring Well Coach.
If you’re ready to Dare to be Well, let’s lean in!
The Daring Well Podcast - Holistic Health & Wellness, Mindset, and Personal Growth
The High Achiever's Burnout Recovery Blueprint with Jim Laird
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What happens when success comes at the expense of your health, energy, and peace of mind?
In this powerful episode of The Daring Well Podcast, Rita Mercer sits down with veteran strength and conditioning coach Jim Laird, founder of Vitality Brotherhood and Vitality Sisterhood, to discuss how high achievers can recover from burnout, rebuild their health, and create lasting vitality.
Drawing from nearly 30 years of coaching experience—and his own journey through autoimmune disease, chronic infections, and personal adversity—Jim shares practical strategies to help listeners stop pushing harder and start working smarter.
Together, Rita and Jim explore why so many successful people find themselves exhausted despite doing "all the right things," how chronic stress silently impacts the body, and why recovery, rest, and self-awareness are essential ingredients for long-term success.
You'll learn how simple daily habits like walking outdoors, improving sleep, prioritizing protein, fostering social connection, and embracing silence can dramatically improve your physical and emotional well-being.
Whether you're a busy professional, entrepreneur, caregiver, or anyone feeling overwhelmed by life's demands, this conversation offers actionable wisdom to help you regain balance and thrive from the inside out.
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Chapter 1: Jim Laird's Personal Journey & Why He Helps Others
Jim shares how overcoming ulcerative colitis, recurring infections, and personal struggles transformed his approach to health and coaching. He discusses the evolution of his "why" and how his mission shifted from seeking validation to genuinely helping others create sustainable wellness.
Chapter 2: Why High Achievers Burn Out
Many successful people believe working harder will solve every problem. Jim explains why that mindset often backfires and shares the powerful "stress bathtub" analogy that illustrates how chronic stress accumulates and eventually spills over into burnout, illness, and emotional exhaustion.
Chapter 3: Warning Signs You're Running on Empty
Jim discusses common indicators of chronic stress, including fatigue, anxiety, poor sleep, low motivation, emotional reactivity, binge eating, and feeling "tired but wired." Learn how to recognize these signs before they become major health concerns.
Chapter 4: The Five Fundamental Habits for Better Health
Discover Jim's simple but powerful wellness framework:
- Walk outdoors for 10 minutes, 3 times daily
- Prioritize quality sleep
- Eat adequate protein
- Stay hydrated
- Build meaningful social connections
These foundational habits help regulate stress, improve energy, support metabolism, and create long-term health resilience.
Chapter 5: The Power of Silence, Recovery & Self-Compassion
Jim shares his closing wisdom about starting where you are, embracing silence, healing emotional wounds, practicing forgiveness, and learning to "work in" so you can effectively "work out." This inspiring conclusion offers listeners a new perspective on sustainable success and self-care.
Key Takeaways
- Hard work does not always equal better results.
- Recovery is just as important as productivity.
- Chronic stress often shows up physically before we recognize it emotionally.
- Walking outdoors is one of the most underrated wellness practices.
- Sleep is foundational to energy, hormone balance, and decision-making.
- Strong social connections are vital for long-term health.
- Silence creates space for healing, self-awareness, and personal growth.
- Sustainable habits outperform extreme wellness strategies every time.
Connect with Jim Laird
Jim Laird is the founder of Vitality Brotherhood and Vitality Sisterhood, where he helps high-achieving men and women simplify their health, recover from burnout, and build sustainable wellness habits through coaching and community support.
Learn more about Jim's coaching programs, free resources, and wellness communities through Vitality Brotherhood.
Website: https://www.vitalitybrotherhood.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigjim44
Follow us on YouTube & TikTok:
@DaringWell
For free wellness resources. Click the link to tap into new ways to reset with mindfulness, holistic wellness tips, and coping skills.
https://www.daringwell.com/freebies
00:00 Jim Lairdʼs Motivation
Welcome to The Daring Well Podcast with Rita Mercer.
You're no good to anybody if you can't take care of yourself first.
Hello, my dear. Welcome back to The Daring Well Podcast. Failure, burnout, health challenges and adversity, they can either break us or they can make us.
They can help make us by thinking about the foundation for something greater. So today we're gonna be talking to Jim Laird. He's gonna talk to us about ways to rebuild your life from the inside out.
So I'm excited to welcome our guest today.
Jim Laird is a veteran strength and conditioning coach with nearly 30 years of experience helping everyone, including women and men and youngsters and youth to professional athletes, rebuild strength, energy and resilience.
He's also the founder of Vitality Brotherhood and Vitality Sisterhood. So I love that he didn't leave the women out.
Jim's work centers on helping high-performing men and women simplify their health, recover from burnout, and stay consistent with the habits that actually move the needle. So again, I'm so excited to welcome Jim Laird to share with us.
He's joining us from Nicaragua. And so again, welcome Jim to the podcast. Glad to have you today.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Awesome. So as we jump in today, I'd love for you to share your why. So when you think about your why, I'd love to hear kind of what I love about your story.
You didn't just, you don't just know the knowledge of how to live healthy, but you've lived it yourself through different health challenges and you've learned how to overcome adversity.
So talk about what motivates you to coach people from a health and wellness perspective.
Well, I think my why has changed over the years, but currently my why is I just want to help others get better. So, but my big thing is always wanting to help other people. And originally, in the beginning, my why was more selfish.
I did not have a very good childhood and I was seeking validation. So I was looking to help other people to make myself feel better about myself and to get the gratification and the love that I didn't receive as a child.
And so, in the beginning, I'd be resentful if people didn't acknowledge my health. And later on in my career, I realized not everyone wants my help.
And I just need to offer my help and the people that are willing to listen and accept my health, that's great. And the people that aren't, maybe they're not ready, you know?
So I do a better job now of just speaking my truth, putting it out there, and then letting the people that hear about it. I'm very lucky.
I have a lot of people that I've mentored that are coaches in different places, and I've got several clients of mine that are now coaching and helping other people. So that's a big part of what drives me, is basically just helping other people.
Gotcha.
3:34
Vitality Groups Nicaragua
Gotcha. And what inspired you to, I guess a couple of things. What inspired you to start the Vitality Brotherhood and Sisterhood?
And also what inspired you to move to Nicaragua?
Well, the men's groups, the communities were just kind of, I was coaching in person. And when I moved from Kentucky, around COVID or whatever you want to call it, happened. They closed my gym down in Kentucky for about eight months.
And I decided that I needed to move to Florida. I didn't want to live somewhere where the government could shut my business down for eight months. It didn't make me feel comfortable.
So I moved to Florida and I was working with a medical doctor. I worked in a medical doctor for three years and I brought group coaching into his, into his medical practice with great success.
Having someone to make sure you follow through with the advice and the lifestyle tips and troubleshoot or give people habits that they can actually adhere to, is really the key, whether it's physical training or coaching, or whether it's
psychological help or it's medical practice stuff. It's really the consistency, the simplicity, and the adherence, the compliance to what you're actually trying to do. They get your results in the long run and they have a change.
So I moved to, I moved to Nicaragua originally. I was going to open a gym in the beach and the medical doctor and I were going to bring people down here. That didn't work out and ended up being that the property wasn't really a good fit.
Then the medical doctor kind of his business kind of changed and so, I really liked being here in Nicaragua. I didn't really want to leave because the cost of living is so wonderful and I just like being here.
So I stayed and that's when I started Vitality Brotherhood, Vitality Sisterhood, I went on my own and I wanted to have support groups for high achievers that are working really hard that are not getting results.
That's typically my typical client I've had over the years, are people that are working really hard, they're highly successful, they've either burned the cattle up both ends and finally caught up with them, or they're gaining weight or whatever it
is. The harder they work, the worse it gets. So I'm really good at troubleshooting that and really help me guide people and figure out what the root issue is and help them work through it. If I can't help or further not to somebody else.
Then once I was here, I moved away from the beach and I moved more inland and I ran into a couple of baseball players here that recognized me from the Internet. I started helping them and a couple of the teams here asked me to help.
Before you knew it, I was working for Dusty Baker, working with the national team that went to the World Baseball Classic back in March here. We were one out away from our first victory. That was a really fun experience.
Now, I worked for a professional. Last year, I worked for the Dantos who won the championship. This year, I worked for the Boar, which is a professional baseball lead team.
And so I work with them. And that fulfills my in-person coaching. It's definitely some of the hardest work I've ever done because I don't speak Spanish well.
And I'm exposing them to a lot of things they've never been exposed to before. And so the language barrier combined with just a different style of their approach to training than in the US or Canada is a little bit of a challenge.
And then also the pay, obviously, I'm not getting paid anywhere near what I would get paid in the United States. But the benefit is I get social connection. I get to coach people in person.
So that's a huge plus. And then I work online as well. So the balance between making sure that I'm taking care of myself and working in person here and doing my virtual work is a little bit of a challenge that keeps me on my toes.
So I have to follow my own advice. But that's essentially how I ended up here. And I never would have guessed that I'd be coaching baseball in Nicaragua.
I've worked with professional baseball players, I've worked with college baseball teams, I've worked with high school teams in the US, but I never, never would have expected to be coaching baseball in Nicaragua particularly at the highest level.
That's cool.
7:42
High Achiever Burnout
That's cool. So Jim, tell me, so you talked about high performers, high achievers, why do you think they burn out despite doing all the right things?
Well, a lot of the times they think they're doing the right things because that's what's worked for them in the past.
So they think they're doing the right things, and if they think they're doing the right things, and in their mind, they're doing the right things.
So a lot of it might be looking at their strategy and that strategy might have worked when they were 20, 30 years old. But now that they're 40 or 50, it doesn't work that well.
So what happens is people that are high performers, they don't understand that hard work always doesn't equal results. So if I've got a baseball bat, I'm trying to chop down a tree, that's not going to work very well.
But they think the harder they work, the better results they're going to get. So they don't have the right tool for the job.
So a lot of times in the past, people that are hard workers, particularly business people, they've been rewarded by working super, super hard, and they think more effort. For example, I had a lady named Rachel.
You can check out her for and after, her testimonial. She actually did a podcast with her. She's basically a mother of three.
She was a pharmacist. She was working three jobs, and she was training at five days a week, and she started gaining weight, and her coach was like, we need to do more cardio. So she started going in twice a day, right?
So she was doing two cardio sessions a day, or two sessions a day, plus she was working three jobs and had three kids. She came to me because she was exhausted. So she thought more effort equal better results.
So the first thing we did was cut her back to working out, just strength training three days a week, walking. We got her to sleep more. It's funny.
She'd noticed when she'd go on vacation, and she would get away from training, she felt better. She wasn't holding as much water. She would actually lose weight when she went on vacation and quit working out.
So with her, it was getting it in her head that she had to put more effort into the rest than the training, that she ended up getting some incredible results. But she just had it in her brain.
I did a whole hour podcast with her, talking to her about the mental side of it, how hard it was for her to actually take the time to take care of herself.
I use the analogy all the time of you're on the airplane, the mask drops, what do they tell you to do? Put the mask on yourself first before you put it on something else.
Because if you pass out trying to help the other person, you're gone and the other person, if it's your child, they're gone too. You're no good to anybody if you can't take care of yourself first.
She talked about that how she wasn't a very good partner, she wasn't a very good, her kids called her mean mommy because she was so tired and so exhausted. She's like, what do I do with my free time?
Because we caught her working out back, she's like, how am I going to play with your kids? Have a glass of wine, sit on your back porch and relax. Go for a walk, do something fun that you haven't done in a long time, go out with some of your friends.
She's like, oh, okay.
A lot of times with hard workers, it's just getting them to understand that you have to do maintenance on yourself, and that means slowing down enough to actually do the maintenance and taking the time to maybe go for a walk at lunch, or like holding
all your calls, and having your lunch, and putting your phone down, and actually chewing the food up, and not just like being on the computer and on the phone while shoveling your face full of food at the same time, taking the time to get outside,
taking the time to relax so you can work harder. The goal isn't to become a Buddhist monk, the goal is to recharge and reload so you can continue to focus and work hard. I call it the stress bathtub.
You have this bathtub and basically once it fills the top, it spills over and you could get an autoimmune disease or a heart attack or it could be just depression or whatever.
That bathtub spills over and it turns into all sorts of different health issues depending on your genetics and other factors. But you have a drain in the bathtub. As you get older, the bathtub gets smaller.
But the rest and I call it working in makes the bathtub bigger. That's like walking for leisure, good nutrition, sleep, getting outside, getting sunlight, good relationships. These are all things that make our bathtub bigger and empty the bathtub.
Our modern life with the phones and notifications, the emails is making our bathtub fill up quicker. Sometimes hard workouts can do that too.
We want to make sure that sometimes we work out to get to challenge ourselves to improve strength and get better. Sometimes we want to work out to restore ourselves to put energy back into the system.
That's what I teach people is like, what does your body need? Does your body need to push harder or does it need to rest? Do you need to be like, teaching people how to work with their body?
Because a lot of people in their early 20s and 30s for me too, I drove my body like a stolen car.
When I got sick, I had to learn, when I got colitis, I had to learn, like, okay, I need to learn how to relax, I need to learn how to shut my mind off, I need to learn how to sleep. These are all things that were foreign to me.
It's just like more caffeine, turn the music up, work harder. Then one day I started having blood in my bowel movements, and that was a huge wake-up call for me that some things needed to change.
Yeah, that must have been scary, so learning how to listen to your body.
13:15
Recognizing Stress Signs
How did someone, a high achiever, know when they've been running on stress for too long, emotionally or physically? You gave some examples with that testimonial. Is there other early warning times people can notice?
Well, it can be like low libido, it can be just being emotional, it can be binge eating, it can be all sorts of different things.
Like you're exhausted during the day, like you're literally like your head is falling at work, and then you go home to go to sleep and you wake up tired but wired. That's a really big sign that you're completely exhausted, you can't go to sleep.
You're coming home and you're drinking in order to go to sleep. That's another big warning sign too. Anxiety is, depression is another sign.
Drinking will help you go to sleep but it will destroy your sleep and you won't be able to stay asleep. Alcohol is a depressant but it also affects your deep sleep and it will cause many, many issues over time.
Binge eating at night, also being ravenously hungry and eating lots of junk food at night is another sign that you're in a bad place.
Got you.
14:31
Five Core Habits
Good practical things to think about. I know you already gave a few different ideas when you think about simple ways to take care of yourself. What are some other ideas?
I know you talk about protein, walking, hydrating. What are some highlights of these different things?
I have the five fundamentals, which is basically when I try to start with sustainable simple things, because it comes down to what you actually are going to do. Most people, they don't need fancy, they just need a few simple things.
I think the most important one is the walk outside 10 minutes, three times a day. One, that fixes your circadian rhythm. Most people spend their entire life indoors.
I think 97 percent, most people spend 97 percent of their day inside in front of a screen. So the LED in the screen, it has blue light, and there's nothing wrong with blue light. There's blue light occurs in nature.
The problem is with the screen or the computer, it's only blue. We used to have incandescent bulbs, and that's better because there's red. Red is a more calming part of the spectrum like fire.
So in nature, blue never happens by itself. There's always different colors of the spectrum in sunlight. So it tells your brain what hormones to produce.
Like in the morning, it spikes your cortisol. You want to spike your cortisol with the sun and movement, then their support is all supposed to go up, and then throughout the day, it's supposed to drop.
Then in the evening, your body ramps down based on what frequency and light frequencies are coming from the sun. Of course, you've got vitamin D, and the darker your skin, the more sun you actually need.
That's why many, many dark-skinned people really struggle in the United States with higher rates of heart disease, obesity, because they're designed to be closer to the equator, and they're designed to get more sun.
So people that live at more lower latitudes or darker skins, they really struggle. It's really sad because nobody tells them that. Someone who has dark skin like yourself needs like 10 times the amount of sun I do.
Because my ancestors evolved at higher latitudes, the lighter your skin, the less sun you need, the less sun you need to survive. So that's something that's been forgotten. But the walking outside basically lowers blood sugar.
If you do it as an observational exercise, as opposed to like exercise, like trying hard. If you're flowing and you're relaxed and you're basically observing and breathing through your nose, then it becomes like stress management.
So you're managing blood sugar. It lowers blood sugar at the same rate of a metformin. Getting out in nature, listening to the birds reduces anxiety.
You're getting vitamin D, you're producing hormones, particularly in the morning. You're getting your thyroid, your testosterone, all these things are basically managed by the sun.
Also, you're fixing your circadian rhythm, your immune system is also run by sunlight.
So your sleep is going to improve, you're going to be less stressed, your resting heart rate is going to go down, your fitness level is going to improve, you walk three times a day, you're actually going to burn some body fat when you do that.
So basically, you checked off a million boxes with this one really simple activity. What happens is when you're not sleep deprived, then you have an easier time regulating your appetite.
Sleep deprivation leads to sleep deprivation combined with ultra-processed food, leads to just ravenously being ravenously hungry.
I think that's one of the reasons today why so many people are reaching for GLPs is because our body makes GLPs internally and has a system to regulate appetite. But when you're sleep deprived, that's completely gone.
So I think that's one of the reasons why people just can't stop eating, is because they're up on their phone at 11, 12 o'clock at night watching Netflix and then they're not getting enough sleep.
One or two days of like under seven hours sleep is, you're basically equivalent to you being impaired, like having too many drinks and trying to drive. So it's going to basically make a difference in your ability to make decisions.
I think it's one of the reasons they do it by design. Because if you're sleep deprived and you're addicted to your phone, it's going to make it much easier to sell you things.
If you're present and logical and in a good place and you're not emotional, you're going to be a more less of an impulse buyer. So I think it's, I'll put my tin-full hat on and say, hey, it's like that by design. The Internet is like a giant casino.
It's like the slot machine thing. You just keep pulling the lever. The walking alone, more people just did that.
I think that's one of the reasons why there's so many less obese people in the 70s because in the 1970s, as I'm sure you remember, people walked outside. People did manual labor. They spent a lot more time outside.
People today are not doing that. Yeah, and poor kids.
Kids are on their video games. They don't play outside. I know.
Even here, it's getting bad.
That's I think is a huge part of it. Then protein, eat enough protein at every meal. Most people should eat a fistful of protein at every meal.
Lean protein, preferably, like the steak, chicken, fish. Those things, if you do that, it's going to help regulate blood sugar.
Most people don't understand that most of the hormones and the chemicals, particularly the chemicals in your brain that are required for you to have a good night's sleep, are comes from amino acids.
If you under eat protein, you're not going to have the ability to sleep as well. You're not going to be able to relax at night as easily. Then it just builds muscle mass.
It helps control blood sugar. It fills you up. If you get a nice chunk of protein in every meal, you're not going to be as hungry.
Then of course, the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism and the easier it is to control your insulin resistance and all that good stuff.
Then high-quality water, glacier water, the water that comes to the glacier bottle in the US is the highest quality water you can buy at the store.
If you're going to filter your water, you need to put some minerals back into it, some sea salt or maybe something called concentrates that you can get. But even I've had plenty of people that just increased tap water. I'm not a big fan of tap water.
I think there's a lot of garbage in it, but you're better off drinking more tap water than not enough water at all, because most people are drinking diet coke and lots of juices and sodas and coffee and energy drinks, so they're dehydrated.
If you can't do the bottled water or high-quality spring water, then at least get more water in general. That helps regulate appetite. It's just going to help your whole body detox and just keep you healthy in general.
Then the next one is get the lights off at night. Essentially, there's actually a new goal. If you go to my website, fatalitybrotherhood.com, go to recommended products.
There's a bulb that you can actually... It changes the light cycle. With the day, you can hit the switch.
Flip it on once, it's morning light. Flip it on twice, it's midday. Flip it on three times, it's late evening.
Flip it on four times, it's nighttime. It's the first bulb that I know of that's LED that actually mimics the actual sun spectrum so that you can have it on at night, and it's not going to affect your ability to sleep.
So there are options like that, but candle light's really good, or just making sure it's not a big overhead light, the light's at a little lower level. I turn my phone screen red.
I have some blue blocking glasses, so I try, the sun goes down around 630 here, so I try to get the lights off or dim.
I also have a red light panel that I leave on in the background, so that it's more like having a fireplace on, but you just want to avoid the bright blue lights at night and the screens.
If you have to watch something, you can always wear blue blocking glasses or you can buy some software that turns the screen red. Then the last one I think is probably next to walking is the most important is social connection.
It's great that I can talk to you on the computer, but nothing beats interaction in person. There's a book called The Great Cholesterol Myth that I used to hand out to all my clients.
A lot of my older gentlemen, and this comes into the work harder, smarter, not harder type thing. Most of my clients would come to me that were older 50, 60 years old and would be in pain. My first question is like, are you on a statin drug?
Of course, I'm not a medical doctor, but one of the number one side effects of statin drug is pain. I would give them that book and then they could read it and it would help them make a decision, and they could decide with their doctor.
But the vast majority of the, I'd say 98 percent, 95 percent of the guys that went off the statin, their pain was gone within a week. Same thing with women and birth control. I've got women, they're trying to lose body fat.
How hard do you think it is going to be to lose body fat? If you're on a hormone that's telling your body it's pregnant, you're not going to have an easy time losing body fat.
Antidepressants, women are like, I'm trying to lose body fat, I'm going to lose weight, and they're on antidepressant or they're on birth control. That's like trying to drive with your emergency brake on. That's all part of like, who are you?
What are you doing? What's your goal? What do you got going on?
A lot of times it's about educating people, but to get back to why the social connection is so important, there was a town in Pennsylvania where the people in the town, and you can probably relate to this from the 1970s, they all smoked, they drank,
they didn't eat the greatest food, but their life expectancy wasn't any lower than anywhere else, and it's because they all went to church together, they went out to bars together, they had good community, and that's something we've lost today,
people are being sucked into the phone. I know with me here in Nicaragua, I really struggled with that when I first moved here because I didn't really know that many people, I didn't speak the language, and I was working virtually and I started
getting sucked into the phone, I was watching good stuff, but I was watching history videos and things like that, that's my kryptonite. But when you're doom scrolling and you're looking at that all the time, it just sucks you in. And so people,
before I left Tampa, even here in Nicaragua, there'll be people on their phones having a conversation. I left Tampa two and a half, three years ago, and there was a group of teenagers, and there were like ten of them, and they were all on their phone
having a conversation through the text. They're just sitting there. And that's, you know, if you look at like 1970 versus now, and the obesity rate is like quadruple, probably even gone up times five.
And the subtle differences in pictures and like how many people were overweight. There's very few overweight people back then. But the main difference is a more outdoor lifestyle, less processed food.
And then three channels on the TV, right? And of course, like I remember 10, 30, 11 o'clock came around. The three bars on the TV went up and up.
That was it. So people weren't sitting around at two o'clock in the morning on Netflix and on TikTok. And so we've got broken circadian rhythm combined with just like having a slot machine in your hand, and foods that just you can't stop eating.
So that's a big difference between now. But those are my five fundamental habits. And some people start with one or two, but the goal is to get them people doing all of them eventually.
And if you've got those habits as your foundation, you're going to be in a pretty good place.
And then, you know, is your goal performance, is your goal to be a performance beast or your goal health, you know, look good naked and look good and feel good.
You know, if your goal is just to look good and feel good, you flirt with performance, you don't marry it. Now, if your goal is to be a performance beast and train at the highest levels, you're going to have to marry it.
And there's obviously consequences that come with that. And I compare it to a performance car.
If you're going to buy a fast car, you're going to turbocharge it, supercharge it, you're going to have to have better tires, you're going to have to do more maintenance, you have to change the wheel more often.
The harder you drive the car, the more maintenance you're going to, is going to be required of it. So that's basically, you know, what I, what I talked to guys about and helped them work their way through.
That's good.
27:06
Wisdom for Life
That's good, Jim. As we wrap up today, what are some words of wisdom that you want people to walk away with?
Start where you are. If you're in Tampa Bay, you can't drive to Colorado starting in St. Louis.
So, you know, that's right, you know, people, people will come to me and they don't understand, they've dug themselves a hole that's 20 feet deep.
They don't understand that it's going to take some time to fill that hole back in and you might have to do it one teaspoon at a time. Sometimes it's a shovel full, sometimes it's a teaspoon, but you have to start where you are.
And then be still and know, there's amazing power in silence. And I think one of the things that our world has done is taken silence away from us. And silence is, I was afraid of silence for so many years.
One of the reasons I worked so hard and I trained so hard and I did combat sports and played football is because I couldn't sit quietly because I had things in my soul, in my mind, in my heart that I couldn't deal with.
I didn't have the ability to deal with it. So I basically distracted myself and worked my ass off to just push that stuff in the closet. Silence is going to reveal some things to you about yourself that you don't like.
And instead of pushing it into the closet, just watch it and deal with it and put it behind you. You might need to forgive some people. That's something that I had to do eventually.
That was a huge turnaround for me. And then, you know, once you forgive some people and you don't have hate and resentment to drive you anymore, there's a lot of very successful people, athletes in particular, that are driven by hate and resentment.
Once they put that behind them, they got to kind of rediscover why they want to train. That was really hard for me when I got rid of my hate, my anger, my resentment, and it improved my health dramatically.
But it took me about four or five months to learn how to train because I actually loved myself and not because I was managing hatred and anger so that's kind of a little offside topic. But don't be afraid of silence.
You need silence and then work in so you can work out. The harder you push, the more you have to put energy and gas back into the tank.
Most people today are just going, going, going, going, and they're not doing anything to put gas back in the system. And so if you just, that's where the 10-minute watch is so great because it does that automatically.
And so, you know, that's, that's essentially what I would tell people. Start where you are. Don't be afraid of silence and work in, you know, so you can work out and push hard.
That's good.
Good words of wisdom, Jim.
Thank you.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for joining today. I'd love for you to share like how guests can, how the audience can connect with you, how they can go deeper if they want to build more strength from the inside out.
How do you best serve them and what are ways they can connect with you?
Well, the best way to connect with me is go to Vitality Brotherhood. I have a way you can join the women's and the men's group there. I have a group where you can come into the community, ask questions.
I do educational calls every week. I also do coaching. I do group coaching, individual coaching as well, for people that are really wanting to get serious.
It's mainly accountability. That's the main thing is we come up with a plan and we might discover some things that are underlying root causes, just because I've worked with so many people. Like for example, I had a couple of ladies here recently.
They were working with me and they had pain. One had an autoimmune disease. I started working with them and we're getting some really good improvement, but I didn't really think they were getting as much improvement as they should.
I saw some red flags and some warnings, and I sent them to a pelvic floor specialist, and both of them ended up having severe endometriosis, which was the underlying root driver that was just absolutely putting their body in an immense amount of
stress. They've gotten that taken care of and they've been able to make some changes in their lifestyle and stuff to hopefully keep that from coming back. But that was affecting their breathing, it was affecting their ability to sleep and relax.
It was really bad. It was some of the worst cases they'd ever seen. All the doctors had missed it.
A lot of times I work with people and they're breathing and they can't breathe because their nose is blocked and then we send them to your nose and throat specialist or a dentist.
They're able to do some things with them and their breathing improves and then all of a sudden, they sleep better, all of a sudden, they start losing weight. Many times there's things that are often overlooked.
Or another example is a lot of people don't have gallbladders. They get their gallbladder taken out. Usually it's autoimmune related.
The doctors don't explain to them, gallbladder basically stores bile and that's what helps you break up fat when you eat it. People will be trying to lose weight or they'll be really tired.
They don't take digestive support and then they haven't changed their diet. So when you don't have a gallbladder, you don't digest fat as well. So it's not you want to go on a low-fat diet, you just want to eat less fatty food.
Then you need to take a supplement that has ox bile in it. Now, food superenzyme is a great one. It has ox bile and digestive support.
You need to take that for the rest of your life because what happens is, if you don't have bile in the system, you can't break up the fat and you can't absorb fat soluble vitamins.
So I've helped hundreds of people that basically were really struggling. They're bloated, gassy, trying to lose weight. They felt terrible, they had no energy, and we found out they had no gallbladder.
They're doing tons of cardio, and it's like all of a sudden we give them like two tablets each meal, and all of a sudden they drop 10 pounds just because they're not as inflamed, they start feeling better, they have better energy, they sleep better.
All of a sudden they get better results and it's not because we worked harder, it's just because we found something that was making things more efficient. Same thing with the birth control.
If I got a woman that's on birth control, it's going to be very difficult for her to lose body fat.
So that's a lot of what I do is I'm like a little detective, and we go through the history and figure out and try a few different things and build a foundation so that we can stack habits on top of each other. But that's essentially what I do.
You go to Vitality Brotherhood, there's a place to book a call if you want to just talk to me directly. You can join the communities. There's also a free guide there if you're burned out, I have a simple free guide.
You can get on my email list and I send out valuable information all the time. I'm just trying to sell you something every day. So I'm happy to have you in the community.
Awesome.
And the community is on Facebook?
No, it's on school. There's a women's group and a men's group. So if you go to vitalitybrotherhood.com, you can join either group.
Yeah. That way I interact. I do two calls a week on there for free.
Interact and then you can get in one of my coaching programs. If you want more personalized, individualized service, I do individual work and then I do group work as well.
Awesome. Awesome. Cool.
Well, thank you, Jim, for dropping some words of wisdom and some different ways to just live well mentally and physically. I definitely am appreciative for that information. All right, guys.
Thank you again for joining The Daring Well Podcast. Wishing you guys a beautiful day. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe wherever you hear this episode.
Until next time, keep living, keep loving, and keep daring well. Take care, guys. God bless.
Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of The Daring Well Podcast.
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