Why Corporate High-Achievers Can't Execute on Their Health

You execute billion-dollar strategies but can't stick to a meal plan. Why?

Your work environment has rewired your brain for constant dopamine hits - jumping between emergencies, new projects, firefighting. You love the chaos. But your body doesn't work that way.

Sustainable health transformation requires repetition, not novelty. Same meals. Same workouts. Week after week.

But that feels boring because there's no dopamine spike.

This is the identity split killing your progress: you're addicted to the chaos at work and looking for escape through your body.

I break down the three levels of transformation - and why most people never reach Level 3.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Identity Architect Podcast with your host, Greg Ferron. And today is a solo episode that I really wanted to talk about. And I think basically we're addicted to one hormone. And this is the magic of why you don't have the million-dollar body that you want. When it comes to your life, health and fitness, your work environment has already sculpted your brain to behave in a certain way. What do you mean by that, Greg? Well, simply this. At work, you jump from task to task, you go from answering emails to the phone calls to the next emergency to something else, the new project, and you spend time firefighting. Now, if you're a C-suite woman who's managing teams or running a business, this will all be, you know, your daily life, right? This will be what comes up every day. You get to a desk, you have an agenda of what you need to do, and then all of the things come in. The CEO wants this, the board of investors wants this. Um, if you have a business, you and then it's like the oh a client needs this urgently. And here's the thing: you love it. You absolutely love the thrill of jumping from one task to another. It's exciting. The dopamine hit from it is phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. The challenge is that your body doesn't work the same way as your career does. Here's what I mean. Whenever I work with a client, the first thing we do is we start on one particular thing. I get them to master maybe portion sizes or master exercise or master one thing. And having a background in martial arts has taught me that the way to excellence in anything is to actually focus on the one thing that you can that will make you make you that 10-15% better every time and do more of that. The world of the corporate craziness is that it spikes dopamine every time. So you go into work and you're excited for the new challenges of the day, etc. But it leaves you frustrated in another aspect because you never get to finish the project that you had the day before, right? So now you're just flitting between incomplete but all new, exciting stuff because that's the challenge, that's the thrill of the job. But then you wonder why there are so many mistakes that happen in around your teams, right? You wonder why person X hasn't finished this, or why person B hasn't responded to your email, or why person A hasn't come back to you about the numbers you need for the next project plan or whatever that is, right? And it's really interesting because those people are all in the same bubble as you are, in that they're working on multiple things at multiple times and never finishing anything. And we thrive on that. We thrive on the dopamine hit that it delivers to us. It it's we thrive on that. Oh, something new. So we complain about it, but we actually love it. We complain, oh, I haven't finished this, I haven't had time to do this, but we're actually secretly excited about the next project that's coming in or the next emergency that you have to fix. Whereas changing your body is the total opposite, but changing your body is doing certain things for a long time, consistently, not perfect, but over a normal time. So the identity that you've built is that when it comes to your body, you must be doing something different every week. Okay, and this is why, or one of the reasons, why you quit on yourself, because what you're doing is not delivering the new dopamine hit every week or every day that you get in your daily career. Okay, so what happens is you have the let's say you get a meal plan, you get the meal plan, and it says eat these foods maybe four or five meals across a week every week. And after about a week, you go, Oh, this is boring. However, in your career, you've been working on the same things for 10-15 years, but when it comes to your body, you're like, Oh no, this is boring. I need to change something. And because you have all of this chaos in your working life when it comes to your body, your body is the first place you can say no to certain things, it's the first place you can retreat and be like, Oh, I don't want to do this, and I don't want to do that, I want some, I want to escape the madness. So the way that we escape is through food. All of these little ironies. And this is the observation I've had with working with women for 20 odd years now, that you're looking for escapism through your body. The same way that you get that kind of almost escapism in your work, even though you you might not always enjoy it. Because it brings something new and novel every time, the thought of doing the same repetitive task for your body feels alien. That's the fact. I'd argue this that if I came and looked at your job description, you're probably doing 90% of the things on your in your day job that aren't actually in your job description. Then you wonder how or why you're not able to deliver on all the projects you've got, right? But because you've got to a point where you're like, right, I'm always going to accept the new um projects, I'm always gonna be on hand for every little piece of work that's going. Again, because the environment has shaped you into you have to be seen to be doing something all the time, and your face has to be seen by the right people, or else you don't get the promotion, you don't get the reward, you don't get the validation of how hard you work and how much quality you can deliver. But when you're trying to change your body to match the level of career you want, it's gonna require repetition. It's gonna require that you probably center your food around the same five to ten meals on a two-week pattern. It's gonna require you exercise regularly, doing the same exercises over and over again. And that feels hard because you don't get the dopamine hit, especially when you first start. And I call this the little um the little child with a toy syndrome. We are very good at going, oh, okay, um, I've got a new toy. You see it with kids all the time. Got a new toy. They play with it for a short while, and then eventually the excitement of it drops. And this is something I talk about, I work with my clients on that the human brain needs variety and stability. It's a crazy paradox. But that's what happens is you drop the toy. So when your workouts are new, your diet's new, everything is new, it feels exciting because it feels like you're working, it feels like you're doing something, and that's the that's the trap that everyone falls into. After four, six weeks, maybe even less, it you don't get the same buzz from it. So then, because it doesn't feel like you're doing something, your brain, your identity says, Well, now I need to look for something more, I need to look for something different. And you're trying to escape the repetition that is needed to create the million-dollar body that you want. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. And when we do the work together in the million dollar body method, this is why my program is between six and twelve months, depending on where you are and where you went to get to, because I've realized over time that 90 days is not enough for change because we're working over time to get you to keep acting in a certain way, which we call a superhero identity, in a certain way towards your body, and then we're gonna have to keep coming back to it. So we're gonna kind of have to expose you um to that, and over time, you know, the first week or so, you'll do it a lot, you'll do very well. Then there is the valley of kind of despair where you feel like nothing is working, you feel like nothing's changing, it's not changing fast enough. I need to do this, I need to do that, I should be doing something more. You get distracted, okay. And one of two things happens: you either go look to do something different, or B, you drop the level of importance because it doesn't feel hard enough anymore, because you're addicted to the the hard, the dopamine. Okay, so why people change their training programs every four or five weeks, which is not needed. This is why people change their diet plans every couple of weeks, because it feels like there is no dopamine attached to it, and one of the parts of the million-dollar body method is to lock in the identity of the being the person who shows up and does stuff even when the dopamine reward is not there, and this is what happens when we lock in that I'm not a dopamine hit person and that I don't need to do it. I then find my clients start to see their work life improve. They stop working on the things that don't serve them, they stop working on the things that aren't advancing their career, they stop working on the things that don't actually bring home the bacon. They start going, okay, I'm gonna outsource this because this is busy work. I'm gonna delegate this because this is not within my scope of genius, and this is why you can't separate your work, your personal life from your body. You can't do it. This is where we get where we get it wrong. So this is a bit of a ramble as a podcast, but I think it's an important message that everyone needs to hear. Repetition is the magic, you can't escape it as much as you want to. But I'd urge you to look at how you work, how much you jump from one thing to the other, how many times you switch because someone shouts louder. Observe that, and then ignore it. Ignore the demand that you have to be jumping onto something else, because I guarantee there's someone else in your team that can pick it up, or for those of you who are solopreneurs, etc. The client doesn't need it at this moment in time, and you've got other priorities. This is one of the ways that I help my clients to find and create the time to be able to do the things that they need to do for their bodies because you already know what to do. The issue is not jumping for the dopamine hit to then find other things to do that prevent you from doing the things you want to do. That's the difference. So if this has piqued your interest, I'd love to hear more. You can follow me on Facebook, Greg Theron, LinkedIn, Greg Theron, uh, Instagram, Greg Theron, and listen back to some of the episodes of these pod this podcast in its evolution. But this is the new evolution of of the podcast, and what I'm going to be talking about more and more going forward, the patterns I see with clients, the things that happen that stop you from having your million-dollar body and having the life you want. Because you all know already how much protein you need to eat, you all know already how many times you need to exercise, you all know how many steps you need to get. That was never the issue. The issue is, is and I'm gonna let me jump onto this one actually. There's three levels. I think this is important. There's level one, which is nutrition, diet, exercise, hormone therapy. I would argue, is also in that level one category. So GLPs, hormone uh replacement therapy, those are all important things, massively important. Medication, or what I would say level one. Level two is what I call somatic work, because this is the working in, this is breath work, meditation, uh, yoga, tai chi, all those things that bring energy in, calm the brain, etc. Level three is the work we do on the million dollar body method, as well as the other two levels. But this is the important work, and this is why people get it wrong all the time, and why people bounce from diet to diet. Because they never looked in level three. Level three is identity, beliefs, and the stories and narratives you tell yourself. Everyone focuses on level two, level one, and we wonder why people jump from one thing to the other. And if you don't do the level three work, which is part of what we do in the million dollar body, then nothing will change. You'll be scrabbling around looking for another diet again and again and again, and it will mean a slower journey. But you're the sort of person who wants to master things in their life. That's okay. I'm not promising you're gonna get abs in six weeks, I'm not promising you're gonna get abs in 90 days and and shaver for your body fat. No. This is about you treating your body as important as the other areas of your life because you know deep down that you haven't been doing that. Because if I ask you if your body is as important as your business or your career, you'll say yes, but your actions show me differently, and that's okay. This is not to shame you. This is this podcast is for the woman who knows what to do, but for some reason they can't quite manage that area of their life, their body, health, practice, the same way you show up brilliantly in your career. You can sell two million dollar contracts, you can change companies, you can run projects that change the world. However, when it comes to your body, it doesn't get the same priority. And this is what I do as the identity architect. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Share it with someone who needs to hear it, and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye for now.