Best of Season 6!

The Best of Season 6 is here! Top stories, insights, and tips from experts in health, happiness, mindset, mental health, and more!

Sonia Jhas (3:07) - Learn how to deeply define health and wellness for yourself apart from societal and cultural conditioning
Craig Weller - (8:13) Learn how to innoculate yourself from fear and other elite mindset tools used by elite special forces
John Coyle - (13:43) Expert in our perception of time and how to live life richly and fully
Michael Bauman - (17:00) How to define deep success...
Michael Bauman - (21:43) How to overcome Impostor Syndrome and Limiting Beliefs
John Helliwell (25:10) Editor of World Happiness Report, How to be Happy...
Brian Levenson - (29:32) Difference between Preparation and Performance Mindset
Joe Sanok - (32:20) 4-Day Work Week, Optimizing Productivity, and Neural Syncing
Peter Sage - (35:17) 6 Months in the most violent prison in the UK, power of mindset
Krista Scott Dixon - (38:34) Masterclass on mental health...
Lettie Gore - (42:52) Black historian and racial justice educator
Luke Tyburski - (44:51) Ultra-endurance athlete, unseen mental health struggles

Transcript

Michael Bauman: 0:01

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Success Engineering. This is the best of episode for season six, so we will be highlighting the most memorable stories, the tips, the insights from each of our guests in this season. So this is such a great episode to listen to as it provides a teaser for a lot of these guests. And if there's ones that you missed along the way that sound interesting, it makes you easy to go back and revisit them. So some of you longtime listeners may be wondering why I'm finishing the season now as I usually end it in December. So, very perceptive of you. There's a couple reasons why I'm doing this. So first off, I just, I recently had ACL surgery after I, I tore my ACL playing soccer and needless to say, the past couple weeks have been pretty painful. And my rehab is taking up more time than I expected. So I just wanna make sure I'm prioritize prioritizing myself and my recovery during this time. Obviously that's important. Secondly, I have a lot of exciting things that I'm working on right now with my business. I'm upgrading a lot of things for the new year, so this is everything. Wrapping up, multiple, Coaching certifications to continue to learn, provide highest value for my clients to upgrading my social media presence, content creation, all that kind of stuff. So, needless to say, there's a lot going on right now, and I just wanna make sure I am providing the best quality I can with the podcast and the content I create. And then thirdly, and this ties in with the second reason, but this time of year, I do a lot of reflection, as I know a lot of you do, and kind of evaluating, you know, where I'm headed, what I want to do, my goals, what I wanna accomplish. So taking this time to pull back and kind of slow down a little bit along with spending more time with family and refocusing, reprioritizing really helps me put my best foot forward heading into the new year. So that's why I'm ending this season a little early. I hope you enjoyed it and got as much out of it as I did. Every single guest upgrades my life in some way. Through the insights they have, wisdom, different perspectives I gave from them. And I if you haven't gotten your copy of number one Amazon International Best Seller, Peak Performance Mindset Tools for Entrepreneurs, you can go to Amazon. I was a contributing author to a chapter in that, so you can go to Amazon to pick that up. My chapter was all about how we can truly feel enough in every area of our life. Something that, you know, I've worked on and I know a lot of, a lot of the listeners and stuff work on, on a daily basis. So I'll put the link to that in the show notes. So, alright, let's, let's jump back in time. Let's revisit these amazing guests that we had on this past season and get a refresher on how we can keep engineering our success. So we kicked off this season with our month on physical health in July, and our first guest was Sonia Jhas. She's a powerhouse figure in the health and fitness space, who shares her own journey with disordered eating, with body image, how cultural and society norms shape how we, you know, define beauty. Really diving into how we can define what true health and wellness is for ourselves. So excellent episode. Give it a listen.

Sonia Jhas: 3:07

I was nine years old. I was in grade four. Some math class teacher was talking, I was loosely paying attention. And I remember looking down and having this thought for a moment where I was like, oh God, your stomach is totally round! It's not flat. Why is it doing that? And I proceeded to spend the rest of my math class, trying to figure out if there was a way for me to suck in my stomach, do that while still being able to breathe so that I could visually look thinner without actually being thinner. if I can't actually change my body, maybe I can fake it and maybe faking it is the same. And I think these moments, these small little moments of me convincing myself that faking it was the same as I don't even want to say making it, but that it was the same as living authentically. I think that was been a theme that carried over in so many different facets, right? It was about my body. It was about school. It was about hair. It was about aesthetics. It bled into so many different areas, but I think the seed was the same, right. There was this expectation around what I'm supposed to look like, what my body composition is supposed to look like. And I felt rather desperate to achieve it even at such a young age. You look in the mirror every morning and you pick apart every part of your body, you are consistently on the hamster wheel of weight loss. You are either eating enough for a village to get it in so that then you can fix yourself by punishing yourself later and going into extreme deprivation. I think for the first time I was ready to call myself out. I think for the first time I was actually able to be like, you can do whatever else you want, but until you can find some version of alignment and harmony with you and your body, you're going to continue chasing job after job, when the crux of the issue is your self-worth. I think for me, one of the biggest aha moments that I had for myself, which is it is never going to be static. I am never going to arrive at the destination. There is no destination that I'm going to be able to hold on to and then be like, well, yeah, did good. There we go. We just unpack here. Because mentally I'm going to be fluid, physically I'm going to be fluid, and so I think abandoning the idea of the destination being where did the happy people live, both physically and mentally. I think that was the opening of a different journey and has been the journey that has continued since then where you're allowed to ebb and flow. The biggest piece of the equation for everybody, it's what do you want wellness to feel like? Forget about what you want wellness to look like, but what do you want it to feel like? And then the question is, what choices are you going to make to actually make that happen so that you can be living in alignment? Because how often are we overriding how we feel? How often are we telling ourselves stories about who we are, who we were, who we could be that are driving our behaviors and we're in autopilot mode and we are racing. I don't know where, but we're all racing. It's the mindset piece that's either going to make the journey exceptionally painful or it's going to be one that opens up the potential for your life.

Michael Bauman: 6:45

I just love how she defined the fluidity of the destination and really asking ourselves what would wellness and health feel like? Rather than getting caught up on the shame treadmill of our body, never meeting up to some oftentimes unattainable goal. And as you guys know, I'm all about, you know, what success feels like and how we can unpack that and unpack the, the narratives, the stories and stuff that underlie it. And so July my book, the Amazon International Bestseller, Peak Performance Mindset Tools for Entrepreneurs that I contributed chapter to it launched and I had amazing time exploring some of the areas of West China, so the Tibetan areas of West China with my family during that month. So lots of yaks out there, just unbelievable vistas, mountains and stunning stars. It was a, it was an amazing month. A lot going on. but the other guest that we had that month was Craig Weller. So he's a previous special force operator who was actually on an ambassador protection unit in Baghdad among a number of other very dangerous places who now trains people to pass the elite special force selection test with a 90% success rate, which is unheard of because there's typically a 10%. For those selection tests. So the entire episode is cramped with actionable mindset tools taken from the best of the best that you can implement in your life right away. It, it's extraordinary. I'd highly recommend it.

Craig Weller: 8:13

In selection, there's no positive feedback. The goal posts constantly move and it doesn't matter how fast you just were because the next thing is gonna suck anyway. You're basically playing for a tie the whole time. You can't win. You can't perform your way out of being cold, wet, and sandy. You're sleep deprived. You're going to have to suffer no matter how good you are. So if people don't embrace effort and struggle as a necessary part of the process and see that failure as an opportunity to learn and become better they're probably not gonna make it very far at all. An internal locus of control is an extremely important thing. Which means you view yourself as an active participant in the world. You're not a passive bystander. The world doesn't happen to you. You're responsible for your own path and what you're doing, and you don't need external motivation to get you through what you're doing. When no one's telling you how good you are, or trying to motivate you and tell you to try harder and keep going or whatever. When the only voice left that is telling you to keep going is the one in your own head. Some people have not developed that and they need that external encouragement. You won't have that there. The only thing left is your own voice. You'd have to look at mindfulness or self-awareness, the ability to monitor your own internal dialogue, your own emotional state and gain an understanding of how your reacting or responding to the external world. So gain a monitoring sense of self and an experiencing sense of self so that you can see this is happening and this is how I'm responding to it. And this is how I'm thinking about how I respond to it. And once you have that self awareness or you're capable of that, it's called self distance perspective, taking from there, you can start consciously managing your self talk as a feedback loop where you know, that certain things are going to be toxic and certain things are going to be beneficial. So it starts with being aware of your self talk and your emotional states and your ability to regulate them and then controlling your self talk because you can't directly control your emotional states, but you can control your thoughts to some extent. You can at least redirect them. And thoughts make feelings eventually. The feelings that we have aren't the direct result of an event. They're the result of how we interpret that event, the story that we tell ourselves about it. So you can learn to tell yourself a better story in the face of these different events. And then you apply that through increasingly difficult or stressful situations. Like you referenced, the stress inoculation thing. It's basically that where at first you learn or master this skill in a low complexity, like a simple, easy non stress setting. Just the ability to sit there. And sense into your own emotional state, the physical sensations in your body, what your self talk is, and then eventually regulate those things like steer the direction of your self talk, change your internal dialogue, if it drifts in an undesirable direction and to do that, just sitting in your living room or whatever, like in an easy environment. And then as you go through training, you start doing that in progressively more challenging setting. So you're taking the same skill that you mastered in a low stress setting. Like the ability to regulate your self talk and your internal dialogue. And then you're doing that while you're a little bit more miserable and a little bit more miserable, and you do things that make it harder and harder to do that. Something that I've seen with the special ops people I've worked with and people I've coached over 20 years almost is that comfort and happiness rarely exist at the same time. Usually if we look back at the moments in which we felt the most happiness or the most joy in what we were doing it probably was not a time when we were extremely comfortable. And in a lot of cases, we're trading one for the other. And I think it's really common for people to trade happiness in exchange for comfort. They give up some amount of happiness. They give up some amount of fulfillment a sense of engagement with their life in order to remain comfortable. And eventually people can build themselves a nest that becomes a trap where you have a lot of comfort, but you don't have a lot of happiness. And I think it's important to be aware of that trade that often they have to be exchanged and that if you're trying to do more fulfilling things in your life, if you're trying to put more days between the years and have things that you'll look back on and really cherish you might have to give up some comfort to do that.

Michael Bauman: 12:50

I learned so much about how we can handle fear and stress. I love the stress inoculation or fear inoculation framework. I've started to use that with my clients, along with how our comfort and happiness rarely go together and how we can intentionally choose to trade one for the other. So good. Excellent, excellent. Stuff. So in August we shifted our focus to what makes us. And our first guess was John Coyle. He's a former Olympic silver medalist speed skater, currently an expert in chron deception, which is how we perceive time, how we store our memories. He has some excellent tips for how you can actually lengthen out your years and your life by filling them with activities that specifically expand our perception of time. And I've actually started planning my calendar using the advice he gave to live more fully and richly, and I know you'll get a lot from this.

John Coyle: 13:43

Success is leveraging my time on this planet to create the most memorable moments possible, such that I slow stop and reverse the perceived acceleration of time that most adults feel, and experience the endless summers of my youth, again. If you think about the way your life is constructed, the brain constructs time and moments. You can't store more than seven seconds. Normally you're storing about two seconds worth of data. That's what you and I are doing right now in a comfortable setting. But when things get crazy, anxious, risky, the brain fires up and it starts storing memories at 10 to 20 times per second. This is why things seem to slow down in a car crash. When you're about to ask that girl out, this is when your brain is on fire, and these are the moments that change the trajectory of your life. The six ways: risk, emotional intensity associated with risk, physical intensity is not required, but usually is helpful, beauty, beautiful things. Uniqueness is just new. And then the sixth and the the multiplying factor here is the flow state. So if you are in the flow state, which is the peak performance zone, the zone, in your best self, then that multiplies your 30 X amygdala driven memory writing by five X. So now you're got 150 times a normal, boring day writing. And so you're literally, and this is no joke. You're literally living 150 times longer. So if you're gonna live 50 more years, you could live 50 more years or you could live like 10 because time is slowing down. Or if you're like me, you're literally gonna live 2000 more years. I'm 20 years into 2022. It's no joke. Because I'm living all the way up. I'm stacking these six things all the time when I can This is the amazing thing. If you can multiply time by 1500. You only need a couple of moments a year to create the kind of things where there's before and after and where you know, where you were and what you did and that sort of thing. So design three, five, I shoot for 10 moments a year that are. Truly compellingly different. So the three things. Broad deep and highly recallable memories, broad meaning there's a lot of information, deep meaning it's intense and highly recallable meaning that you can find it. Those three things. That's a success in life as far as I'm concerned.

Michael Bauman: 16:13

So what activities can you put in your life that involve emotional intensity, physical intensity effort, beauty. Something that's unique, something that's new and flow state that actually can just change up your routine, change things up, make your life more memorable for yourself and for the people around you. An excellent question to ask yourself. So then after that episode, I shared a kind of sneak peek into the Mastermind that I run with a framework that I use for defining deep success in our lives and actually unpacking the layers of success that most people. Which is what leaves them feeling not enough or empty, even if their life is full of all the external trappings of success. So here, I'm gonna break down a couple of those things and you can go back and listen to the episode if you want to hear the full thing. Fundamentally how we define success is about what we desire. In this episode, I wanna really unpack how we go about defining success. I wanna begin with looking at what deep success is. So what most people don't realize is there are actually layers to our definition of success. This is why people can achieve an extraordinary amount and still be left feeling empty. Because while they may have met the criteria for the upper levels of success, they're still missing, understanding and meeting the deeper levels of what true success is. So let me lay out what these different layers of success are to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. So the first layer is the appearance of success. And this is what we see on everybody's Instagrams, tiktok, any social media. These are also the people that we typically put on pedestals. So the ones who've achieved success. It could be your actors, the millionaire CEOs, the sports stars, the rock stars, whatever it is, we look at their life and we see success, quote unquote. We see people who have made it. And we calibrate our definition of success to their appearance of success. And this distinction becomes very, very important because it is actually an appearance of success. There is no correlation between what appears to be a success and what actually feels like a success on a daily basis. the next layer of success, which is the feeling of success. Underneath all of the appearance of success that people have actually lies the question, how can I feel like a success in every area of my life? I have found that there is a link, especially for entrepreneurs with feeling like a success and feeling enough, so much so that sometimes I use these two interchangeably. Success is an ever changing adjustment to circumstances and the life stages that we find ourself in. So it's important to continue to ask these questions, continue to refine, continue to tweak, make adjustments to our life. So no matter what happens, we can be showing up as the most authentic, integrated version of ourselves. Even if that authenticity and integration shifts over time. So feelings, as we all know, they can be very fickle. We need to dig behind these feelings and emotions into our true values that we hold. The stories that we tell about ourselves, about the world, the people around it and the identities that we've actually built. These stories dictate not only how we feel, but everything from how we fundamentally perceive the world, how we interact with the world. And the stories vary by circumstance by the environment by the people were in relationship to. And so, to unpack this area of success to really start to look at these stories, to look at the identities that we have. And this brings us to the fourth level of success. So underneath all of our stories underneath the identities that we tell ourselves really is being present and being aware with the moment that we have right in front of us What if being successful really had to do with how present are we able to be with every moment that we are given in our days in our lives. I feel this is one of the most valuable gifts that we can give to both to ourselves, but also to every single person that we interact with in our lives. I followed that up with another sneak peak episode about how we can overcome imposter syndrome and deconstruct our limiting beliefs and self-sabotage with the incredible work done by Sure that Jamin and positive intelligence. It's really seminal work done in this field, and again, highly recommend everything, but I would definitely recommend listening to it because you can learn about your own personal saboteurs and what affects you and how it affects you, and then you can learn some things that you can do to actually start overcoming that. What has just been fascinating to me for a very long time is we have the traditional definition of success and we have happiness. And can we get both is the question. Can we achieve the success that we want on one hand? And what does that look like? And how can we intentionally define that? But can we also be happy? Can we develop a life that we live very fulfilled and very happily and full of purpose on the other hand? So we've all been there. We've had a dream, we've had a goal that we wanted to do. And then we all kind of sabotage ourselves differently, but you know, we really wanna achieve it. And then when it gets to that point where we take action or we don't, somehow we talk ourselves out of it or we navigate around it whatever that looks like for us, somehow we sabotage ourselves. So I'm gonna talk about all the research around how we actually overcome these limiting beliefs and how we train to do things differently. So again, this is incredible seminal work developed by Shirzad Chamine and you can read about it in his book, Positive Intelligence why 20% of teams and people succeed, and 80% don't. Phenomenal book, I would again, highly recommend it. there's actually three core mental muscles. And the terminology use is very specific with that because these are things we can develop and train, but there's three things that are responsible for all the rest of the peak performance and happiness. it comes down to our ability to be aware of our saboteurs, the things that sabotage us Then the ability to command ourselves to do a different response. And we have those saboteurs. Then we have our Sage responses, which is the foundation of emotional intelligence, it actually operates in a different part of the brain. That's actually associated with creativity and empathy and curiosity. what positive intelligence is at a very simple level is basically we have different regions of our brain and what percentage of our day, do we spend with our brain actually helping us and supporting us and encouraging us versus detracting versus sabotaging us. Positive intelligence is. What percentage of your day is your brain your friend versus being your enemy? mental fitness is similar, but slightly different. Basically it is your capacity to respond to life's challenges with positive, rather than a negative mindset. Mental fitness is training to be able to operate from a higher level of positive intelligence. At the end of the month, I had the incredible privilege of interviewing John Helliwell. He's the editor of the World Happiness Report. I would highly recommend you check out this report. Not only does it list 153 countries by their happiness levels, it it break you. If you break it down even deeper, you can see that there's actually six categories that the 10 years of data have shown to contribute, that contribute the most to overall happiness and life evaluation levels broken down by these countries. And then it goes into some incredible new research around genetics, how that affects our happiness a whole lot more. We definitely ran out of time before we ran out things to talk about with this interview. It was very eye-opening and again, I, I would definitely recommend you check.

John Helliwell: 25:10

Our rankings of countries are based on the average values of people's answer to a question. And then we average'em over three years to get a sample size of roughly 3000 per country. To that doesn't jump around for sample size reasons too much from year. A question asking people to think about their lives as a whole, with the best possible life as a 10, and the worst is a zero. How would they rate their life today? And of course we found quite quickly on. That these averages differ hugely around the world from averages up close to eight in some countries and down below three in some other countries. And they go up and down according to how life really is in different countries. we have a choice of variables we use and the ones that continue to have broad support year after year that two first are obvious of income per capita and healthy life expectancy. Because they've been the poles for assessing the quality of development efforts for decades or longer. The variables that you mentioned earlier is having a social connection contain a variety of channels. But between them, they cover a lot of the important aspects of life. The first and most important is you have someone to count on in times of trouble. It's not the only way of measuring your personal support networks, but it's a good way. So across country, it's just the frequency of people who have somebody to count on Another one is the extent to which people think corruption is a problem in government and industry, separate questions. We take the average of the two in their country. And then we ask people, to what extent do you have a sense of freedom to make your key life decisions that was discovered in this strand of earlier research and turned out to be very powerful and continues to be very powerful. And then we have benevolence and the measure that's used in the report, or have you given to charity in the last month, the variety of other measures that do roughly as well. And people are happier living in societies where everyone is generous. They're not only happier being generous themselves, but they're happy when they're living in that kind of environment. you could imagine dystopia is the adverse of utopia and utopia would be where everything was for the best dystopia is where everything is for the worst. And why did we even think about that in a World Happiness Report? It's because we wanted a way when we're showing that key chart, which gives the overall score for each country, and then how much is contributed by each of the six variables. In order for each contribution to be positive, it has to be positive to some zero baseline. Well, what we use as the zero baseline for each of those variables is the country in the sample that has the lowest value. So one country's lowest for freedom and other's lowest for GDPper capita,, and other is lowest for health. We define dystopia as the country that has the lowest. It isn't a real country, of course. That would have the world's lowest values of all those six variables.

Michael Bauman: 28:23

So some excellent stuff. Definitely check out the World Happiness Report. I know you'll gain insight and perspective both into your own personal happiness, but also the societal, societal and macro for forces that affect happiness on a global scale as well. So in September we shifted to everything about our mindset, about productivity, how we learn. We began it with a conversation with Brian Levenson he's an elite sports psychologist, an executive coach who wrote incredible book called Shift Your Mind, which highlights the difference in mindset that we actually need to have between preparation and performance. And so many things clicked for me in the conversation because there were kind of seemingly oppos. Posing parts of myself. I'm trying to figure out where do you optimize this? Where does this fit in? And this brought so much clarity to the role of these seemingly opposite traits and how they can help or hinder us, whether we use them in preparation or whether we use them in performance. So very, very useful framework for me, and I know anybody that listens to it will definitely get some takeaways.

Brian Levenson: 29:32

When I would talk to my clients and we'd say,"What do you really need when you're performing?" They would say,"It's actually beyond confidence. I need this unshakeable belief in myself that I'm gonna find a way." And actually great humility requires great confidence. It takes confidence to have someone say,"I need to get better. I need help." And it takes arrogance when the lights are on and things aren't going the right way to have this unshakeable belief that you're gonna find a way. I think a lot of people are afraid to step into arrogance. I think a lot of people are afraid to step into selfishness. I think a lot of people are afraid to step into perfectionism because there's a lot there. And if you overdose on any of those, it absolutely is toxic. And by the way, if you're arrogant in preparation, you're not gonna learn anything and it's gonna hold you back completely. And by the way, if you are trying to be perfect in performance, it's gonna get in the way as well. And by the way, if you're selfish in a performance for a lot of team sports that is death as well. So the reason why those words get bad labels is not unjust. They deserve it because if it's used at the wrong time, it absolutely can get in the way of us getting to where we want to go. I think fear can absolutely be a motivator. I think if it's the only motivator, that's where you can run into some issues and some trouble, if we're led by fear, I think that can run into some trouble. Fearlessness is the other side of the coin, where when we are performing, we do need to let go of the concern. We need to be bold. We need to be brave. We need to be vulnerable, courageous, whatever word you wanna put there and not worry about the outcome. And there comes a time where you have to say F it I'm going for it and let's make it happen. And I think if you've done enough fear in preparation, then you've earned the right to then let go and just say, all right, I've done all the work. I've thought about everything that could go wrong. Do you have this story or does the story have you? Do you have the anxiety or does the anxiety have you? Do you have sadness or does sadness have you? Do you have anger or does anger have you? Do you have a glass of wine or does wine have you? I've learned so much from just putting that framework into my world. Success is I wanna work really hard and I wanna be home for dinner as much as I possibly can.

Michael Bauman: 31:37

And we just scratched the surface in the interview. I definitely recommend checking out his book, Shift Your Mind. If you wanna operate at a high level performance, really in any area of your life, there are so many tools in there that you can use to upgrade your life. After Brian, we had Joe Sanok on, He's the author of the four Day Work Week. 4 on a mission to educate the world on the benefits of a 32 hour work week, and even the increases in productivity wellbeing that can achieve through the shift. So we dive into productivity frameworks that you can implement to boost your own productivity along with how he structures his days and weeks for maximum productivity, while still making a lot of time for the things that are important to us.

Joe Sanok: 32:20

The industrialist said, here's the one model. Here's the prescription. Everyone should follow it. Whereas this post industrialist era we're looking at well, what's the menu? How do I taste that menu? Try it, evaluate it, experiment and see if it works for me, for my job, for my life, and then get the data. And if it doesn't work okay, that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that doesn't resonate with you. And so really having that menu based model, both in work and in your life seems to be the post industrialist way that really helps people find what they're looking for. Most of the research shows that the final 20% that someone works in a 40 hour work week is completely useless. They may not spend it all on a Friday, but they're slower throughout the week because the human body just isn't going to operate above that 32 hours. What we see in case studies and in the research is that really, if we just say work a 32 hour week, but we're gonna pay you the same that you get the same or better outcomes. And so there's two factors to your sprint type. There's what kind of work you're doing when you're sprinting and when you're doing it. First we wanna look at be whether you're a time block sprinter or a task switch sprinter. So time block sprinter is someone that just does one task when they're sprinting, whereas someone that's task switching, they have a variety of tasks. Now they're not multi-tasking. These are still high level tasks. The second part is when we do it. So an automated sprinter is someone that puts it in their calendar and it just repeats every single week. And so an automated sprinter for me when I was writing the book every Thursday, it's just on repeat like Thursday is the day that I'm writing the book. Whereas if we look at an intensive sprinter, they go away for intensive. So they might go to an Airbnb for a couple days. They find a space. natural neuro syncing is a term where we're trying to align what we're doing in our behavior and our activities with our natural patterns of energy, hormones, and brainwaves. And so just starting to observe when do I have the most energy? So for me, My peak energy time is usually like 10:00 AM to probably 1145.

Michael Bauman: 34:18

So what is your sprint type? Are you a time block sprinter, a task switch sprinter? Are you an automated sprinter or an intensive sprinter? And how can you use natural neural syncing to optimize your day and routine? So obviously, just like with anything, it's not the knowledge, but what you actually do with it. So what are you gonna do with this knowledge? How can you use this knowledge to actually improve your product? So the last guests we had in the month of September was Peter Sage. His story is so unbelievable. It easily could be made into a movie. He's a serial entrepreneur who was founded over 27 companies. He was buying Ferrari with cash, when he was 25, but his life was miserable. He went from that to living an unbelievably fulfilled life. And oh, did I forget to mention that he spent six months in the most violent prison in the UK on a trumped of charge and up transforming it from within, so he did that too. It's crazy. You cannot miss this episode.

Peter Sage: 35:17

I bought my first Ferrari for cash at 25. I was flying Concord. I got multiple businesses. I could be the idiot buying overpriced champagne on the private tables in the nightclubs. Cause I thought that's what I had to do. I could be the person with the fancy-schmancy suits and stuff. Absolutely miserable. Didn't have a life. Completely insecure. And not happy. And I thought that this was the way to be happy. I'm building a monster, trapping me. Why am I doing this? Who cares? What good am I to the world if I end up in a ditch, upside down in a car that I worked my ass off to buy a and now it's going to be the one thing that, in tombs me, cause I haven't got the energy or strength to enjoy it. I've got more money. What does that mean? Oh, I can decorate my, the prison of my life with better quality artwork. Well, who wants that? So yeah, that, that was the turning one. When it comes to business, we're blinded by that link of achievements equaling good enough validation. And so when we're ignoring the warning signs and it's not tight pants, it's tight blood pressure, it's relationships not flowing. It's forgetting, the kids sports day because put it in the calendar at the office, or you're now haven't got enough energy to have sex when you get home, because you're too busy, fighting dragons all day. So I realized that I've spent most of my life craving significance as a vehicle to try to get connection and approval. And when I saw that, I'm like, what the hell have I been playing? Well, what's really matters here? What am I here to do? Day 1 on the journey to emotional maturity is the day that you realize life is growth centric, not comfort centric. And the second awareness that goes along with. It's the day you finally become, okay. Not being liked. I get a knock on the door from a hundred million dollar law firm, suing me for$17 million. They froze all my accounts globally. They tried to squeeze me into a settlement. I didn't want to do it. I thought they were unjust. Just cause you got the biggest legal muscles in the playground, do you want to bully the little kids? No, not standing for it. Then hit me with a contempt of court application saying I'd breached the freezing order. Lost my business. I went from 50 staff to three staff in three minutes. I had to pay all the legal costs that they throw at me. I'm in a 200 year old prison. I'm getting one shower every four days. I'm managing to make one phone call every two days and banged up for 23 hours a day. With murderers, terrorists, lifers, drug dealers, violent crime armed robbers Yeah, quite the adventure to be fair.

Michael Bauman: 37:46

Isn't that insane? So if you want to hear the whole story, which I'd highly recommend it, it'll blow your mind. Check out season six, episode 10. Incredible, incredible story. Incredible person. So then the last month in October here, was all about mental health, and I had the first repeat guest on, so The Incredible Krista Scott Dixon, or Ksd, who is my personal coach and friend. She's a truly extraordinary coach, and her episode is a masterclass on mental health. I'd recommend it for everybody she helped me tremendously through a very difficult time in my life, and I know you, you will have to take a lot of notes cuz everything she has to say is so applicable and so real and so honest, which is very refreshing as well.

Krista Scott Dixon: 38:34

Hopefully if you're listening and you're feeling like, oh my God, I'm the only one I assure you that you're not. you are not alone. It is impossible to be alone in something that strikes deeply at the human condition. And that's really what this is right? Is the human condition. The condition of being human. One of the frames I have found quite useful for clients is to understand that all of these parts have a function. They have a job, and a lot of them were developed at times in our life. Usually earlier times in our life, when we did not have the full spectrum of adult mature, grown up coping tools, right? Like our prefrontal cortex, like a lot of these kind of thinky reasoning, parts of our brain are not even fully online until our mid twentie. Well, a lot of bad stuff can happen between zero and 25. Right? And so we develop these parts to cope with whatever we experience and in the moment that coping was the best that we could do given the limited toolbox. So if something hard happens to you when you're three or your five or your 10, you're gonna be solving that problem with a three, five or 10 year old mind. And of course it's not gonna be a really great solution to your 30 year old self. When I explain this to clients and then what we do is sometimes even find a picture of them as a child. And with this picture in mind, talk about this child, almost like a separate person, like, what do you think this little person would've liked? And that's very helpful because most of us have some kind of like intrinsic compassion for small children and small children suffering. And the idea like, oh my God. Yeah. Like that stuff happened to this little kid and they did the best that they could with what they had. Like it starts to soften the edge of that. And so first people start to see the reason why this exists. They start to soften towards it rather than being really harsh about it. And then sometimes with that softening, it's almost like they invite that part to kind of integrate. So there's this multi-stage process of first demonstrating whatever this thing that you don't like it had a job to do. You can see how it got the idea that this was useful. It helped you at the time. It's probably no longer helpful. Let's see if we can soften towards it, bring some compassion and then maybe integrate it into our current self and also use it superpowers. Right? Sometimes these parts of ourselves are actually really excellent at something. Like my anxiety makes damn sure I don't forget my passport. I don't forget my keys. I'm an extremely conscientious person and so I'm never that person that's forgetting all their stuff or like going to the wrong appointment. That doesn't happen. Thanks to my anxiety. So you can kind of also give it a job if it has superpowers, whatever it is. One of the metaphors that is often used is you're driving a bus and you have passengers on the bus, right? Maybe your anxiety is a passenger. And your depression is a passenger. But the goal is to make sure that the you-ness of you, the wise self, the wise mind is driving the bus, right? The wise mind is something that integrates all that information that our emotions give us, and then reason and logic and strategy and thinking, and it brings them together into wisdom and discernment. So you want the wise mind driving the bus, but all of these other parts of yourself can be passengers and you can hear them. You can be like,"Oh, hey anxiety. What's up? What do we need to worry about today?" Okay, cool. Let me write that down. And then you can go back to your seat, your job is done. We're good. We got it from here.

Michael Bauman: 42:09

I love the bus metaphor and how we can allow the parts of ourselves that we may not like to be the passengers on the bus and even leverage their superpowers that they've honed protecting us all these years. So I thought that was excellent. Curious to hear what stood out most to you. Cuz there's so much in there. And so after Ksd, another guest we had in October was Lettie Gore. So she's a black historian that works tirelessly to educate people about the overlooked parts of history that contribute to systemic racism that we see playing out across the world today. She is a wealth of resources and knowledge, and this episode will definitely change how you view history and hopefully even your personal behaviors and how you interact with people that may be different

Lettie Gore: 42:52

There's this issue with history and memory. People create these very comfortable truths to feel good about themselves to hold themselves up. You can't just look at history in a vacuum. History is not linear, right? Everything in history is connected. You can't talk about racism and you can't talk about white supremacy without doing your own internal work. Right. And in order to do your own internal work, you have to understand that's gonna come with being uncomfortable. You gotta do that work. That's on you. That's no one else's responsibility, When we talk about the word freedom, and we talk about the word free. We hear these words, our whole lives. What does that really mean though? Freedom for who? Who gets to decide what freedom is? Freedom for me, is not having to worry about how is racism gonna affect me in this situation? Freedom is being able to feel that joy in a way where you don't have to turn it off. You don't have to tone it down. You don't have to worry about it being taken away by society.

Michael Bauman: 44:02

So finally we had Luke Tyburski on the show. He is an ultra endurance athlete, and when I mean ultra, I mean ultra. So he did a 2000 kilometer ultimate triathlon where he swam from Africa to Spain through the straight of Gibraltar, cycled a random Monaco in 12 days. Unreal. But the true gold in his story is how he pulls back the curtain on his deep struggle with depression, of not knowing who he was, his binge-eating, and even suicidal ideation. He shares how we all have these crutches, these things that we use to hide from the deep pain that we feel. And at some point we have to be willing to face that truly inspirational fellow and truly inspirational.

Luke Tyburski: 44:51

So I had this huge loss of identity that I was battling with in the moment I was depressed, suffering with depression, and I thought this sucks. I dunno what to do. And then on a whim, because I didn't wanna sit in that moment and be present in that moment and feel the feelings I was having and assess the situation because it was too painful for me. I did what I thought was a great idea at the time. And that was to sign up to one of the toughest ultra-marathons in the world. 255 kilometers in seven days through the middle of the Sahara desert, carrying everything in your backpack, six marathons in seven days, self supported I was literally running away from my pain, running away from not knowing who I was. The real deep answer to how I was able to push myself when I was going through all these really difficult physical moments during these ultra-marathons and ultra triathlons was the pain that I was feeling deep down. I was struggling with depression. The only time I felt alive and I felt myself and I felt like I had energy and power was when I was out running or over the years as they progressed swimming and cycling. When I was training, when I was pushing myself, that's when I felt alive. As soon as I stopped, I plummeted into depression because I didn't know who I was. So that deep rooted pain. Was the thing that was really pushing me when things got tough, difficult, because it was a case of I can stop doing this stuff and to make the pain go away, open up, and speak about the pain that I was going through. Or I can use that pain to fuel me and quite literally, and figuratively run away from it. 2015 before I did my 2000 kilometer in 12 day Ultimate Triathlon from Morocco to Monaco where I swam the Gibraltar strait between Spain and Africa, cycled the Southeast coast of Spain and then ran from the Spanish French border to Monaco in 12 days. I was a keynote speaker. I'd traveled around the world speaking about the big adventures I'd been on. I'd had countless magazines articles written about me. I had different brands who were sponsoring me. And my mental health was plummeting outta control I just felt like the world was falling on top of me. And I laid down in the sunshine on the concrete, in the back garden, on the path in the fetal position and cried. I opened up and started to talk about the standing on top of a bridge, the binge eating the insomnia, the depression, and the severity of the depression with friends and family. And then I started to add some of that into my keynote talks. Wouldn't it be really cool to show that no matter what color you are, where you come from or how good it looks on the outside that from a human level, we can all be going through some really nasty stuff.

Michael Bauman: 48:04

So there you have it. Season six of Success Engineering is in the Bag. Thank you for taking this journey with me. I'm so honored to have the privilege to be able to. Talk to such a diverse group of world leaders and experts to really dive into how we can define and create success in our lives. So I'll see everyone back in January where we'll bring on some amazing guests to help you completely change your physical health from the inside out. I already have some lined up. I'm excited for it. Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the holiday season and keep engineering your success.