The Circuit of Success Podcast with Brett Gilliland

Dr. Carla Fowler is an MD, PhD, and elite executive coach.  For the last decade, she has been a secret weapon for scores of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other senior leaders.  Carla’s unique approach combines the latest research from performance science with timeless best practices to help top performers level up and achieve their goals. https://www.thaxa.com/p/circuit-of-success The best way to get in touch with me is through my website or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-fowler/ Twitter @DrCarlaFowler Carla Fowler, MD PhD THAXA, Inc. 206-395-5948 EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION Brett Gilliland  00:02 Welcome to The Circuit of Success. I’m your host, Brett Gilliland, and today I’ve got Carla Fowler with me, Carla, how you doing? Carla Fowler  00:09 I’m doing very well, Brett, thanks for having me on. Brett Gilliland  00:12 Absolutely. It’s great to be with you. I don’t I don’t get to talk to too many people that are an MD and a PhD very often. So we’ll, we’re gonna have some fun talking about that and get to hear your story. So, but again, where are you coming from again? I forgot to ask you what part of the country you are in right now. Carla Fowler  00:27 That’s okay! I am calling in from Bend, Oregon currently. Yeah, part of life. I actually my coaching practice is totally virtual. So we move around a fair amount. But currently we are in the mountains of Oregon. And it’s beautiful. Brett Gilliland  00:46 Awesome. Well, I have to introduce you to my buddy Greg Salciccioli out there. Do you know Greg by chance? Carla Fowler  00:51 I don’t.  Brett Gilliland  00:52 Okay. He does some coaching out there. He’s an awesome guy. I’ve worked with him for years and I’ll have to introduce you two so anyway, let’s dive into Carla Fowler. And what’s made you the woman you are today? I know, you know, looking at the research I’ve done here you like I said MD PhD, and now an elite executive coach, for the last basically 10 years, you’ve been what they call the secret weapon, right? To CEOs, entrepreneurs and other senior leaders. And so let’s dive into that. But before we do, kind of you could Carla what’s made you the woman you are today? Carla Fowler  01:26 I love that question. And the story always comes out a little bit different. But I think that’s one of the fun things is that in our lives, so we get to like, constantly think about what our story is. And clearly, like there was one point in my life where the story was, I was going to be like an academic physician. And you know, the story today is, you know, I’m a coach thinking about and studying about and helping people use performance science. So where did it start? You know, I think early life grew up in the Pacific Northwest. And really, I just have to say, my parents are amazing. They took us backpacking. And when I’m talking about backpacking, I mean, like, you know, out in the wilderness for like 10 days, and there were three of us, and they would take us out. And there were three of us at one point, all but like younger than the age of seven. So like one kid’s in a pack, the other two kids have to be walking, because there’s only room for one kid in the pack. But I’m telling this story, because I think that very early in life, there were just some situations you encounter where you realize that you cannot bully reality. So turns out, if you’re five, and you don’t want to be hiking anymore, but you are three days into the wilderness, you know, your parents can’t save you, they will tell you to keep walking, they might also like slowly start to walk down the trail without you to make sure you come along. And but I bring it up because I think I just had some experiences early on where it kind of has you realize that like, you are your own best lifeboat. And so like, yeah, things happen. Sometimes you don’t like the way they turn out. But really, when you realize that with your own two feet, you can make progress. You can work work through it. I think that’s a really empowering sort of starting place. I’m not saying that’s what I was thinking when I was five. But I have come to see it that way.  Brett Gilliland  03:37 Come to realize that.  Carla Fowler  03:39 Yeah, right. Um, but I think, you know, growing up, I was always pretty interested in like, some of the physical activities. I had this amazing teacher who, she was a physical outdoor teacher, but she thought we were kind of, I think, getting soft. And so her whole premise and curriculum was around making us do really challenging stuff. So I’ll give an example. She had us walk around Lake Washington, large lake in the Seattle area. And it’s 55 miles. And we did it in 24 hours. And this was a bunch of like 10 and 11 year olds. Like we just kept walking, and we walked from like 4am to like 4am the next morning, and, and you had to do it, like everyone had to finish you had to encourage each other, you had to just like find a way to like, get that grit and and really build it. So these were kind of some of the experiences that I had when I was young that I think definitely influenced kind of the whole path along the way. And there are certainly moments when you know, at hour 23 of being awake in like a surgical residency where there was and you’ve been on your feet the whole time where you start to think well, yeah, this is kind of like that time, we walked for 24 hours straight. And so, so this was kind of like early life, in my family and my growing up. And, you know, I ended up in medicine, the path kind of headed that way. Because I always liked math and science. I really liked the idea that you could solve things. And I think for me, like, that was a manifestation of that, like, okay, there is a solution, and you can ask questions, you can figure it out. And so I headed off to college, and I thought I would do engineering. And, you know, it’s, it’s interesting that I picked that I think I saw it as like, well, there aren’t a lot of women, engineers, or there are less. And so maybe that will be helpful in getting into college, you know, and getting into the program, I suspect it was. But I rapidly realized that, you know, I was more interested in people and what was going on with people, everyone around me then I was in like circuits, or building a bridge or doing some of that more kind of engineering work. And so I switched majors to focus on medicine. And it was really funny. And this, I think, was when I, I sort of put my finger on something else that often had been happening in my life, which was, so I wanted to switch majors–– walked in to the dean of like, pre med, folks. And I said, “Okay, you know, no one in my family is a doctor, I would like to go into medicine. How do I do that?” Yeah, exactly. And he sort of looks at my transcript. And he’s like, this is after one year of college and he’s like, “Okay, so you’ve taken two semesters of physics, two semesters of inorganic chemistry and two semesters of math. And, you know, two semesters of whatever were the only other classes because you took four each semester. And he’s like, You did that all in one year?” And I was like, “yeah, that’s like a normal, you know, engineer schedule.” He was like, “well, you’re, you’re halfway done with the requirements, for medicine.” But I bring that up because I think often, I didn’t always have total clarity about where I was going. But something that I sort of, I think an instinct I was following was this idea that if you can learn how to do things that are difficult, like if you see something difficult, and it kind of scares you, and you like, lean into that and just say, “Okay, well, I’m just, I’m just gonna go learn how to do that. So I’m not afraid of it anymore.” Even if you don’t end up going in that direction, that kind of like know-how being a person who knows how to take something that’s challenging and somehow muddle your way through it get through it can be a really useful sort of life skill. And it often means even when you transition, even if there’s some change costs to that, that you can make some of those leaps. And so I think that was the case for me and making that transition. But so fast forward, you know, I’m starting to near the end of college, I’m thinking about applying to medical school. I’ve also like taken an interest in immunology, because I took a class and I thought, wow, this is really going to be the future. So I don’t know, like, how familiar you are with like, all the biotech stuff that’s going on around like cancer immunotherapy.  Brett Gilliland  08:36 Oh yeah. Carla Fowler  08:36 Yes, yes. Okay.  Brett Gilliland  08:37 Yeah. Well here in St. Louis there’s a huge, there’s a huge landscape of people in that in that space. So yeah, so I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m familiar with it. Carla Fowler  08:46 Well, so think back in like 1996. Or sorry, let’s see, I guess it would have been no, it was like, probably ’99. Like, so I’m taking this immunology class, and I’m just thinking to myself, Oh, my goodness, like, I don’t know how this is going to shape up, but like the number of like, diagnostics, therapeutics, and like, things that are going to come out of this particular like, biology is going to be big. And I think I should probably be involved with that somehow. And so, so fast forward, I was kind of interested in research, interested in medicine, someone, a friend walks up and says, “Carla, do you know there are these programs where they pay you and you can get an MD and a PhD. So it’ll take you 10 years, but like, you’ll have no debt. And you can do this,” and of course, I heard that and I was like, you have to be kidding. That sounds like the best deal. Like guaranteed job you have a job and and you get to like work on these challenging things that to me, I was like, oh, that sounds awesome. Of course. This friend was like, I think it sounds terrible. So they did not end up doing that deal. They went to med school, med school and and I’m sure our very successful now. Brett Gilliland  10:02 So you did that. And so obviously, you graduated then. So 10 years later. So I know you went to Brown University and you got your PhD at the University of Washington, and then get your general study of general surgery at Stanford. So you’ve been to some amazing universities. So you spent that much time, energy, money. Right? I would assume, you know, for me, it was a head scratcher. And we talked about being on the podcast. So here’s an MD and PhD, but now is the managing director and a founder of a company that’s doing elite executive coaching, how do you change from that “I’m all in” right, I got these unbelievable degrees to now I’m an executive coach helping people all over the world. Carla Fowler  10:42 That and that transition is really one of the big pivots, I would say, of my life. You know, in terms of like, headed, as you said, headed through medical school and PhD, I credit those activities to really teaching me how to think and I think particularly how to think about unstructured problems, how to think outside of system. So academics, like some people had a terrible experience with them, I had a very good experience with them, but they do. And so for me, they provided sort of some train tracks, right, like you kind of know what’s expected, you do the test and that. And I think most of us know that actually, a lot of life is really different from being outside of school. And so I think doing a PhD in science, one of the real parallels between that I think, and moving out kind of into the business world where I’m working with executives, was this idea of, “how do you think about an unstructured problem where there is a ton of uncertainty? You’re gonna have to figure it all out. No one’s, there isn’t a playbook to do your PhD, you have to pick a scientific problem that no one has really sort of sorted out. Not only that, but you sort of have to think about not just pick a problem, but you need to pick an interesting and important problem. Ideally, yeah, and I think the same is very true. Like, there are so many parallels between, for example, entrepreneurship, and science. And so even though I know these things sound really different. For me, there actually have been a ton of parallels in the kind of thinking that’s necessary, that kind of mindsets and actions that are necessary, the kinds of things that even help you be successful. There’s actually a ton of parallels. I obviously didn’t know that at the time when I was doing my PhD. But I did know that, you know, I had an advisor who I walked in, and I was like, Well, I think I could run this experiment, and I can run this experiment. And he was like, “Carla, why are you, why? Why are you going to do that?” You know, and also, you should try to not just take someone else’s work and say, well, I could kind of clean up this part of it. Or I could do a little bit of this over here. He’s like, “what’s the thing that you want to do? It’s going to be your own big contribution.” And I think you can see parallels of this everywhere. Like, everyone’s seen the business out there, or the thing where they’re like, well, I could do that just a little better. And so I’m going to start a company to do that thing just a little better. Generally speaking, that’s not that’s not a great strategy, in the sense of, if there’s a huge vacuum, you could be successful. But I find that it’s often a better way to think of it to say, “what is it that I want to start? What is it about?” You know, “what’s going to be most important?” And “how can I generate those results?” This like, this comes up, actually, you know, as you’re thinking, and as I’m working with executives, also, sometimes we all just get inundated, inundated with like, all the all the things we could improve both maybe in the results we’re producing, but also, maybe even in ourselves, our own development. And I think it can actually be a huge source of distraction. Like, because it feels like so much. And our attention is pulled in, like all these different directions. And so, I think one of the big things, again, that I learned over the course of my PhD, but that also plays very heavily into the coaching that I do today with executives is can you figure out what results really matter that are going to be most important, and it’s gonna feel brutal. I actually call it brutal focus, because it’s going to feel so stark, right? And it’s a very different way of thinking than, “okay, I’ve got all my long laundry list of things here. And I’m trying to keep up and kind of do it all.” So it’s, it’s a different kind of thinking. But it is something that can really unlock results in a way for a person who’s already performing at a very high level. It can be something that really kind of unlocks and clarifies some things to bring them to the next level. So, I totally haven’t answered your question about the jump. But that’s all right, we’re hoppin in. Brett Gilliland  15:08 Go ahead and continue with that. That’s what I was gonna ask. So then the jump was, there was this defining moment you were actually practicing right as a, as a physician, is that correct? Carla Fowler  15:18 So I was in residency, which you are, you are officially an MD, you have a license. I was in my intern year. So if everyone remembers Grey’s Anatomy, that show when everyone shows up, they were interns as general surgery, interns. It’s nothing like that in reality, that’s my disclaimer. Except for like being up all night. Brett Gilliland  15:45 Exactly. Carla Fowler  15:46 Yeah. So um, so I show up. And, you know, part of the reason I chose surgery was again, this thought of, like, what is it I’m gonna learn there, what, who are the people I want to learn from, and one of the things I really liked about surgeons were that, when I looked at them as a group and the way that type of medicine was practice, you really have to see your choices. Because the choice is very binary, it’s often like we’re going to operate, or we’re not going to operate–– Brett Gilliland  16:16 Right. Carla Fowler  16:16 ––and to not operate is as much a choice as to operate. And so what I saw in that group of people was that they really had to see that choice, they had to own whatever choice they made. And they often had to make that choice with not a complete set of data, which again, is very parallel, I think, to the situation that many executives aren’t in where they’re leading, they have to make a decision, you don’t have perfect data. And there’s probably even beyond the data you have, there’s a ton of uncertainty, right. So like, so the surgeons were one of these places where the stakes are high, you have to make a choice. And, and then you got to own that choice. And then what there is to do is improve that choice over time. But I kind of, I looked at that and I was like, I think that’s really interesting. I also liked that there was a physical art to it. Because again, I was a person who really liked the, just the play between the mental and the physical, in terms of performance, and so went off to surgery. And I will say this during that year, I learned a lot about I learned a lot of surgery. And I also learned very much that I think the biggest passion area for me more than actually operating like actually being a surgeon really came back to thinking about performance and people. Because I’m surrounded by these really smart, high performing people, it was the same when I was, you know, doing my PhD. It’s been the same on some of the sports teams that I’ve participated in, for college, and also post-college. And it’s this moment where I was like, I think I’ve reached the point where to be good at this is going to take everything, it will be my one thing. And I think I’ve always been a person who wanted more than one thing. And so, and with that, when I thought, well, if you weren’t this, what would you do? And I thought, oh, you know, the connecting thread through this entire story is that I have been interested in you could even say sort of obsessed with thinking about how people do their best work, how do they reach their potential? How do they do it in a way that they thrive? You know, I think there’s a lot of high performance in surgery. I’m not sure that in medicine, in general, people are thriving yet. And that is kind of a whole system of things. You know, I just feel thankful every day that they’re there, you know, if you show up in the middle of the night, and you need to have your appendix out, there’s someone there to do that for you. And so, major, major, thanks for that. So, I think I’ve realized that I needed to make a big pivot, and that what I really loved even more than, like, surgery specifically, or medicine specifically was thinking about behaviorally about performance. And so this is one of those moments where you jump jump off, it’s not necessarily a popular decision. Everyone is like what are you doing? Brett Gilliland  19:30 I bet. Carla Fowler  19:32 And um, but you kind of can see something, you have a vision for something. And so it was kind of my first independent, besides the PhD, it was like “okay, well this is now my independent like, project and challenge that I need to structure for myself.” I wanted to design my practice. So I wanted to not just not just attend a coaching academy or certificate program and open a shop like put up a shingle. I actually wanted to use kind of my science background to say, how do we want to build this? What would really help high level people who are, and executives who are dealing with a lot of the same things I actually encountered through my kind of academic and medical pathway, but really helped them level up and be able to reach ambitious goals that they were setting for themselves, without like wringing themselves out in the process. So that’s how that pivot happened. And we talked a little bit about the parallels along the way. But it was still, it was still a big, pretty big jump. Brett Gilliland  20:38 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Any time you invest that much time and energy into something and then just totally change it. And to your point to like, people probably thought you were crazy, like, “What in the hell are you doing, you can make good money, be a doctor make a big impact.” But yeah, you got to follow your dreams and go do the things that we want to do, which is what I love to talk about, which is what we’re gonna dive into now. And so what so I’ve had a business coach for years. And I truly believe in them. I think it’s, it’s, it’s a massive investment that people need to make in themselves, because you need a sounding board, right? I mean, I have my black journal everywhere I go with me, all my coaching meetings are in these over the years. And I just think it’s time for us as leaders and people, whether you’re leading companies or leading just your household or leading yourself, we got to make that investment. So I just want to make that disclaimer that I fully believe in that. But what do you see are the biggest tools like you know, there are there are three or four or five tools that you use to help people achieve what’s you’ll see in the back of our microphone here, and we’ll talk about as a future grade than your past that you can do with that? Carla Fowler  21:43 You know, there are and I think there’s different ways to think about tools, like sometimes tools are a hack, and I do have some of those. But I think some of the biggest benefits that come from coaching, and this is how I coach, is really working on some of those fundamentals or first principles that then sometimes eliminate the need for a hack, eliminate the problem altogether. And so I think that’s the first thing is sort of how I how I view things is, can you set up a foundation with someone for their goal that they want to achieve? And what’s going to be most important for that, that really then helps us say, “Okay, well, if we can see that very clearly, then we’re in a position to say, what’s really a problem and what’s not a problem,” right? What’s a fire, you can let burn, what’s mess you can tolerate? And I bring up, you probably hear me using a lot of language about time. And a big piece of that is because I think many well, many executives, and many people of all sorts, I think, feel like life is busy. Maybe they want something, there’s not enough time to get it. And I think this is just a common refrain. And then I think we also have a culture that’s continually giving us inputs to say, “well, oh, I should do more, I should be doing that I should be doing that.” And this is true at the executive level, as well as just kind of for everybody out there. So I would say there are three lenses that I really use to kind of look through. And they’re sort of topics of conversation that I use with my clients. And again, they can scale like, up and down the stack in terms of for a situation, what’s happening in this moment, this situation, but all the way to how does this impact your whole strategy, how you’re thinking about things? So the first one, so the three things are brutal focus, learning to cultivate power. And the third one is relishing uncertainty. And so how, how I think about these are number one, we already started to talk a little bit about this idea of brutal focus, which is, I think, helps ward off to mistakes that often happen for people when they’re trying to improve their performance, or they have a goal that’s really important to them, but they’re feeling like it’s been elusive, or it’s just really challenging. So, the two mistakes are that often people haven’t really explicitly defined their goal. And this creates a couple different challenges. One is sometimes that means that the goalpost keeps moving, and so they’re always burned out, and maybe they’re doing a bunch of great stuff and making a lot of progress, but they’re not really recognizing it. They’re like that’s yesterday, I’m thinking about today. I call that like performance discounting. You discount your part of your past performance, even if you totally practice. Yeah. But I think the other thing is that often So they haven’t explicitly defined what their goal is would meet, which makes it really difficult to also then ask the question, okay, given that goal and like when it is and why I want it and what’s important about it, it’s really hard to figure out if you haven’t done that what’s most important? Like, where could you invest time and energy that would be most impactful to get you moving towards that. So the other thing is a mistake that people can sometimes make, which is related to this, is they don’t have, they’ve defined the goal, but they don’t have clear focus on what’s most important for getting there. And so there’s a couple different flavors. One is like, they try and do it all. And I think I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this in your life, I think you’ve, you’ve been busy. So like, sometimes you burn out, you’re like, I am just trying to do everything. And it’s kind of spreading out my efforts, and I don’t feel very effective at any of it. And I’m kind of burnt out. Yeah. Brett Gilliland  26:01 Can I can interrupt you on that. So I mean, I think that’s a that’s a good point. I mean, I think that the burnout is real, right? I mean, especially for people that are trying to do so much in their lives, personally, professionally, just emotionally, intellectually, whatever it may be. But I think what I have found personally is breaking things down into almost four years, right into one year. If that makes sense. And what I mean by that is 90 day calendar is so I focus on 90 day goals. So I’m in my, you know, July one through September goal right now, that’s the quote, unquote, year that I’m looking at those 90 days, and then I get energy. At the end of that I walked through different exercises where I look at my phone, I go through every picture, I’ve taken those last 90 days, and kind of go through that with gratitude, right, and I write it down where we’re at what we did, and then more stuff that I can dive into it a whole nother podcast, I’m sure. And I’ve got this, you know, journal that I’ve created. But for me, it’s that right? And then getting the excitement around that. So would you feel for you that you’ve seen people break it down like that, or someplace differently to where it’s not so much burnout for people? Carla Fowler  27:11 Oh, I think that’s absolutely a great strategy for it. And different people do it in different ways. The solution you’ve come to for yourself is one wonderful way of doing this. You know, I’m reminded just personally, my husband and I, at the holiday time, our sort of gift to ourselves is we go out to dinner, and we relive our year. So we both go back to our calendars we like and this is professional and personal, but we just go back and then sort of month by month. Remember everything that was accomplished, you know, that was special, even that was hard, right? Because I think, you know, people, we we have to kind of balance this idea of being in the moment. Like in the moment right now, like our life is actually happening right now. And the future is it’s kind of imaginary. Actually, we have lots of ideas about what is going to happen tomorrow. I mean, I’ve got a schedule for tomorrow, I assume that stuff, right? And then there’s the past, right, and the past is actually we can use the past to really help ourselves flourish and create perspective in the moment, like what meanings we take from the past are obviously really powerful. I like these types of rituals, like what you’re talking about, because I think they help us. Number one, view the past somewhat factually as much as possible. So that it’s not just our idea about what happened. But to actually like, if you’ve ever gone back and looked at your calendar for a year, it tells you like how you spend time, what did you invest in? What grade stuff happened? What challenges did you make it through? So I find that ritual to be really wonderful. And these are great ways to sort of say, How do I take myself out of something my brain is sort of trained to tell me about how I think or feel about that thing and say, “No, well, what were the facts of that?” And certainly, part of coaching, I think is being able to be that reflection for someone else. So I do this for my clients a lot, if there’s some performance discounting happening, to say, “Hey, I just want you to remember like, for example, when we first started working together, maybe skill or issue X was at this point, and this is sort of how you were feeling about it. How do you feel about it today?” Or like, “let’s contrast that with where you’ve come at this moment, and all you’ve accomplished,” and so I think that actually is one of the important roles that I play as well. Is to be that foil? Yeah. Brett Gilliland  29:52 I think asking great questions too, is important, right? I mean, that’s sometimes you mentioned earlier is I don’t really know why or how and, and I always talk about when you know you’re “Why” any “Hows” possible? So I mean, for me, I think it’s starting there. Right? Starting with Why are you choosing to do this? Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do that? Right? And I think, yeah, the more clarity that there is there, then the how I’m gonna go do this is easier, right? It’s easier to happen. I can set up rituals and habits and stuff like that for that. So for you, either you personally, or the most successful people you work with, what are you finding that morning routine or morning habits looks like for people to have the most productive day possible? Carla Fowler  30:29 Ah, I love this question. My answer is I it’s not a contrarian. But here’s what I’ll say. I think that there, there’s just a lot articles out there about like, morning routines, and a morning routine can be very powerful. I think the challenge is, when we see these things, we start to equate them with, oh, well, if I’m not like meditating, and like doing a hit workout, and you know, journaling, and this and that and that all before like 7am, then I’m not going to be successful.  Brett Gilliland  31:07 I love that. Yep.  Carla Fowler  31:08 Yeah, so that’s the downside. So I love the morning routine question and what I always recommend, so what I practice myself, and what I recommend to other people is that morning is a special time, it’s the time our brains have just reset. And you could argue that that we are amazing in the fact that we can sleep and then like, then we enter a new today. And so we definitely have some time some more clarity of thinking some more freshness, in that morning time. So I recommend that people use it well, but what is going to be for each person can can depend. So I’ll tell you what, what I do and the kinds of things that people consider. I think, for example, getting some daylight, like literally going outside in the morning, physiologically is very good for circadian rhythm. So that’s the thing. Sometimes that’s combined with exercise, I like to even for just 20 minutes, make sure that I’ve gotten outside, sometimes it’s just a walk. Maybe with silence, maybe with music kind of depends, kind of what I’m looking for. But that’s one of the things that that I like to do. I also think some kind of contemplative practice can be useful. It can be long or short. But for me, sometimes that’s doing like a mind map. But I often find that I am trying to organize what’s most important for the day is one piece that commonly comes up. And then another piece is setting my perspective. So I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I don’t know if you roll out of bed and have a feeling or a thought about a day, like you know what’s on your calendar. And sometimes you wake up and you might feel like I’m so excited about today. And sometimes you might think I feel some sense, I don’t know if it’s worry, but I sort of maybe it’s dread, you know, we get the full range. But, um, you know, I just find it can be really helpful to set perspective. And I think some people do this, like doing a little gratitude journaling, like sometimes people find that a useful practice. But I think the last piece that I do is I spend, I spend a little bit of time with my husband, like we just kind of check in with each other, maybe we have an intellectual conversation about what the other person was thinking about. Or we just kind of talk about what needs to happen. But we just have, again, think 20 minutes, just like a little bit of connection time for what is the most important relationship in my life. And so those are some things that I do in that morning time. And I try for me, I’ve really said I often start coaching like at 8am. So I, I’m not a person who necessarily wants to get up at like, five to do a ton of stuff. So I’ve found that those things work well for me. And so for clients, what I always say is when they’re trying to figure out, okay, well what should be my morning routine? I definitely first say okay, whatever that CEO is doing, you don’t have to do the same thing. Yeah, what what’s gonna make you successful is picking that thing for you. That’s going to be helpful. But then I give some thoughts around often things that are helpful is how do we take care of our brain? How do we take care of our body? How do we take care of our relationships like and and then maybe the last thing is I love to eat the frog. Yeah, okay, we get away so this idea of like the, if you had to eat a frog today, like the best thing to do is just eat the frog in the morning because that frog is not going to look more appetizing at 4pm. Brett Gilliland  35:07 That’s a, it’s a great book it talks about eating the frog just get thing over right you can call it the shit sandwich, whatever it may be. I’ve heard it called different things. It’s like, yeah, if you if you stew on this deal till you know what time is it right now it’s 3:39. So let’s say like your, to your point, it’s four o’clock almost our time here. If I was waiting all day long to do that thing and putting it off. It’s terrible, right? It takes energy sucks the energy for my day. And so just get it over with. So I agree 100% what you’re saying. So I call it focus 90. So you heard me say earlier the 90 day goals, right? The 90 day year. But also I’ve taken it to where it’s the focus 90 is my first 90 minutes of my day. So I’ve spent years, I’ve spent years, beating myself beating myself up for not being the guy that wants to get up at 5am and go on like your 100 mile run and workout.  Carla Fowler  35:56 I know, right? Brett Gilliland  35:57 Right. And I can’t do that. And I would try it. And then I’d find after about a week we can have I’m pissed off, I don’t like it, I’m tired, it makes me cranky. And I wasn’t that person. And so now I’ve had to learn to love mornings, by creating things that I want to go do that moves the needle in my life, right? So I talked about F to the fifth power, your faith, your family, your fitness, your firm, which is my work and my fun. And so I create all of my stuff around those five things. If it moves the needle, and one of those five F’s, we’re doing it, right. And so I’ve learned that in the first 90 minutes of my day, I get to create my ideal morning. And if I don’t want to do it, I’m not going to do it. And I found for me, so for our listeners, it’s been very, very helpful. And now, you know, I do reading I actually do the meditation reading. So because I love it, right. But working out for it was tough for me. And so now I’ve recruited them, we have a very active neighborhood. And so I’ve got, I don’t know, 15-18 guys on this text message. And you know, so now it’s my responsibility on Sundays, I do my Sunday planning, I get the workout scheduled. And so Tuesdays and Thursday morning, 6am, we have guys at my house, we come together, there’s three goals, right, and I write this down in my journal, because again, when I know my why any how is possible. The three goals are to live well into my 90s, and to play golf on my 100th birthday. It’s accountability. So that’s the second one, accountability. And then the third one is just brotherhood and fun, right? I love being around these guys. And for me, it allows me when the alarm goes off this I mean, like “ugh” to now like “dude I get to go hang out with a bunch of my buddie!” So taking all that time, but I think it’s important to know create your morning routine around what you want to do and make it fun. Carla Fowler  37:40 I think, I love that you brought up fun, because again, I think I think performance can be fun. I don’t know that everyone use it that way. But the other thing I wanted to point out that is very brutal focus of you is when I hear what you’ve created around just this piece of working out, right in the morning, you are like you’re finding ways to get a double. So often when we are setting goals, like you’ve got the five F’s, like that’s a lot of stuff in there, you know, many people might pick one of the ones you have, and be like, that would be a whole, you know, whole life right there. So it becomes important to see where you can get a double. And so you’re getting some fun and some fellowship out of that workout. And like you’re staying fit, you know, getting what you need to take care of your body. And I find this is where when we can focus and figure out, for example, if you figure out the “why” you it also helps you figure out like, what the “What” is like, “Okay, this is sort of the value I have, but like, what would that look like in action? If I can really explore what that value means to me, like, what might that look like?” And then also, “are there multiple ways I can get that?” You know, or “are there certain activities that actually literally might get me multiple of my values, or might be an expression of multiple values?” And I think this is one of the things that again, when you start to look through a brutal focus lens and say what is most important, we can start to be creative and find ways to help people do things like, like what you are doing. Or another great example that people often will bring up is like, you know, the university in my car, car university, right? You’re listening to audiobooks, and you have a long commute, like, you could get two hours of learning in every day. That’s over 700 hours of learning every year. Yeah, I mean, if that was your commute, and you turn something that was kind of a negative into a positive, like a negative one to a one. And that’s a huge shift.  Brett Gilliland  39:54 Yeah, and I think it’s, I agree 100% what you’re saying and we keep going back to this why but for me, it’s really clicking is when I talked about living well into my 90s and playing golf on my 100th birthday. So when the alarm goes off tomorrow morning at 5:45, and I know there’s gonna be a bunch of guys in my backyard waiting on me. One, the accountability is huge. Because last week, I there was, it was raining. I didn’t want to go outside, right, but I knew there was gonna be four or five guys waiting on me. And I don’t want them in my own backyard. Right “where the hell’s Brett?” right? And so yeah, that accountability is huge. But again, visualizing and picturing myself at 100, it made that choice that day easier, because I do want to have that focus. And it’s more than playing golf at 100, right? It’s being involved with my grandkids. It’s, it’s just feeling okay, and it’s doing all those stuff. So I think that’s really, really important. So for you, when you hear the word future greater than your past, again, that’s our firm’s mission statement is helping people achieve a future greater than your past, how does that sit with you? And how does that make you feel? Carla Fowler  41:04 Oh, it resonates deeply with me. I mean, I have this joke that it’s always like, “Hey, how are you going up into the rage?” And I think for me, I mean, one really simple answer is, I don’t know that I will ever retire. I think, I think that I’ve always been interested in like, hey, what’s the next? What’s the next thing that will show me something about myself that I can grow into. And that’s not to say that I want that all the time, I think accurately, it probably looks a little more like, you know, you have like a steep a stream trajectory, and then you kind of get sort of comfortable at that new level, right? You pull some G’s, and then like, you’re like, Whoa, okay, I am looping really fast, I’m iterating really fast, learning a new thing, going from not very good at it to, you know, being really skilled at it. So you get to that plateau. But the thing is, and I see this, this happens, for other people, also, I think it’s a little bit universal, you can kind of get stagnant if you stay on that plateau for too long. It’s okay to like, regroup and recap and and enjoy some of the new skills you’ve learned or the new position you’ve obtained. But I also noticed that one of the things that most commonly I think comes into play, maybe about this midlife period, there’s a lot of things going on. Like for example, there’s often kids, there’s family, there’s work, but by about like mid 40s, many people have kind of gotten to a place where they have been kind of successful, they’ve established themselves, they’ve established a household, they’ve established their work. And that is a lot of work, like going through the growing up of your 20s into the 30s, like putting your head down doing the hard work, and you kind of arrive in a more comfortable spot than you’ve been in for a while. And I think there comes a moment when some people call it like midlife crisis, or there’s lots of names for it, but you just have this sense of like, what like what now that I’m no longer scared to death or really worried about like, doing, like being an adult. And I think, you know, sometimes we put a word like, what’s my purpose? And I think that is when we’ll look at it. But I often have felt like, one of the challenges with that word is it’s so ambiguous, and it feels like going on this journey that, that it’s, there’s not a right answer to and it often doesn’t instruct us in how to go about that. And sometimes I find that it’s really helpful to ask people, and to help people start growing again, like to get out of this stagnation, and then more things become clearer, right. But I think we sometimes get a little stuck. And it’s a time when we need to grow again. And that, that helps us reminds us things about ourselves, but it also helps us build new things about ourselves. Brett Gilliland  44:26 I think that mission and purpose is tough because it does it’s feels like a lot of stress and pressure. I didn’t like I gotta go out and find my actual mission and purpose and attain date. Carla Fowler  44:36 Where is it? Is it behind the fridge? Brett Gilliland  44:39 Yeah, there’s no rulebook for it. You can Google it you can google how to find your purpose and go through 900 different exercises, which I’ve done a lot of those and it it for me, I shouldn’t say for everybody, but for me that future greater than your past hit me like a ton of bricks and I knew exactly what I was put on earth to do. Right but did it just came to me it wasn’t from doing exercises, but I think it is from doing exercises, reading books, surrounding myself with good people, interviewing good people, right? Focused on those things, and doing the right things to move the needle in my life. That’s how it can come over and hit you like a ton of bricks. Carla Fowler  45:18 Yes, I think you’re describing something really great, which is sort of how I think about like, a mastery loop. So this idea of, how do we like, how do we learn anything? How do we get good at anything? And there’s a couple different ways to look at it. And I love using if it’s okay to just use you as an example. Absolutely. You know, as you’re talking about, how did I figure out this thing? Right? And we could probably put anything into that place. But for, for you, it was like mission and purpose, like, how do you how do you go out and find that, but you know, you did a couple different things. Number one, you spent some time, like just getting inputs, right? Learning, you did some you did some reading, you talked to people. And so you tried to sort of build, I call this building knowledge of the craft, whatever it is, you’re trying to learn, like, try and get some knowledge, build some knowledge of the craft. But you did a second thing that’s really important. And we sometimes forget this part, which is where we give all that knowledge, our own thinking and spin. Like where we really integrate that knowledge and own it ourselves. And that’s kind of the thinking time, even some of the exercises you were doing. You know, it was some practicing. So deliberate practice, but it was also I call it synthesizing, you’re trying to take all this, these inputs that are coming in, you’re trying to sort of help your brain, build something with them. Something that’s your own creation, right? Not someone else’s. I briefly brought up deliberate practice, you were doing the things so you were doing things that you knew were in the right direction that matter to you. And so really, a step of the mastery loop is then doing some deliberate practice, where you’re really intentionally trying to say, “What am I doing?” And “do I need to make a change to it?” If so, I make that change. And then I try it again. And I think I think the last stage of the mastery loop is really this idea of testing yourself. And this is perhaps where the analogy may break down a little bit in your case, but I think that you, you really invested in different ways that align very well with how we learn anything. And so I’m, I am not surprised that you got to some clarity on it. Now, of course, it’s not a direct line, it looks a lot more like  Brett Gilliland  47:41 Yeah, exactly.  Carla Fowler  47:42 you loop through it again, you slowly are kind of moving forward. But this is actually a lot of the path that I recommend to my clients, and I help them design. Like, what is that learning pathway look like for them for, for whatever it is, it could be looking for their purpose, but it also could be, “hey, I need to be thinking about whatever we’re, we’re looking ahead to our whatever FDA trials and bringing a product to market and that’s something I don’t know a lot about, I haven’t done that before.” Okay. Like, talk about, let’s talk about but how you what’s a process you can design and then run so that you don’t let that uncertainty of not knowing it just make you paralyzed? Brett Gilliland  48:33 Yeah, that’s makes me think earlier, too, you see these things on Instagram and like reels and different stuff of like these life hacks. And, and while I get it, I understand life hacks as a way to make you be more efficient and in a manner that you didn’t know before. Right? But at the same time, it frustrates me when I hear hacks because it’s like somebody’s looking for that, you know, five minute ABS or whatever you call it, but in the day, through my experience, I’m 21 years in this business this month of running wealth management, practice and a firm and, and there has been nothing I shouldn’t say, maybe there, is I have not really found too many things that I can say as a life hack, other than just showing up every day and doing the work. Alright, that’s the hack. Carla Fowler  49:16 You should name that, you should just call that like the Brent life hack. Brett Gilliland  49:21 Yeah. I’m gonna make, I’m gonna make an Instagram post about that. That’s my life hack is show up to work every day. It’s not fun. It’s just it’s like, you got to do the grueling work. And I’m an only child. I don’t I didn’t understand delayed gratification. And I’ve had to learn that right. And it’s one of those things that you can’t, the delayed gratification you have to learn to love overtime, because it’s absolutely 100% for anything that’s worthwhile is going to take time, right? Raising a child––it takes time, right, and it’s time in the relationship, it’s time out of the relationship. And so, so anyway, last question for you here, Carla is, do you have like principles like, you know, these principles that you would say that from science that help you or help me or help anyone else achieve better or perform better? What would those be? Carla Fowler  50:21 Well, we talked about three of them, I guess we went in depth on brutal focus. The other two are cultivate power, and relish uncertainty. Cultivate power, in short, is this idea that the results we produce matter. But in areas where it is more difficult to like measure absolute performance, which is most of much of business, frankly, in sports, it’s generally easier to know who won and lost. But pretty much everything else is a little more tricky. So in areas where it is more difficult to measure, we need to make sure that the network, the people around us are seeing our results, and that our results matter from their perspective. So there’s a couple of ways this manifests, I really do think about and help clients think about, like, who knows about what you’re doing? Do we need to help you raise your visibility? You know, do we need to think about network as an asset, right? Who knows what you’re doing? Who knows you, those things matter. So, and I bring that up, because there are a lot of people who are very high performing, and very good at what they do, and who think that that will be enough, but actually in the world, sometimes like that, that can be missed, and you wonder why you didn’t get the promotion, or you didn’t land the investor or, you know, whatever it is. So that’s one, the part about relishing uncertainty, I think we’ve talked a little bit about this, but it’s this idea of that, you know, to do great things, as you pointed out takes time, right. But if you put in time and you are consistent, then your results will compound over time, and can be really incredible. If you have that time. That being said, that is a that is a faith play, right there. I mean, when you have to be patient and keep doing the work. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved in that. And so, but I think that is actually a lot of success stories, when you hear about them, we don’t usually hear about that long tail, before the success part, the hockey stick. But there was a long tail. And I think during that period, you really have to know how to manage that uncertainty. And I always like to say, why manage it, why not relish it, if there’s some uncertainty, then you’re probably doing something interesting and exciting. Like there’s an opportunity there. And I can tell you that not a lot of other people are going to do it and lean in as much as you are and to be patient and to really invest as much as you are. Because as human beings, we hate uncertainty. And so I talk to people continually about what are the mindsets that will help them as an individual manage that uncertainty, you know, how to thrive in the face of it, maybe how to even have some fun with it. Because if there’s uncertainty, then there is the potential that we can be surprised and delighted. It’s also possible that we can create a future that’s even bigger than what we could imagine. So I guess as a, you know, a final thought on this, I think often we have to go or get started moving on something long before we have certainty about it. And also, we have to like, do it. And it’s going to be messy at the beginning. We’re going to be learning we’re going to be in the early stages of that. But to not judge yourself or how it’s going based on the fact that you don’t have certainty and it doesn’t look perfect. Because I think that most great things happened because someone was willing to do that and kept going. And so that’s kind of my my final thought on that relish uncertainty. Brett Gilliland  54:14 Yeah, and I 100% agree. I mean, I’ve you know, what we do is we bring advisors into our firm, and they’ve been in the business for 20, 30, 40 years, right? And that they don’t, they don’t like the uncertainty like, “Are my clients gonna come?” Right? “Are they gonna come over? Are they gonna do this? Are they gonna do that?” And then every single time, you know, 36-37 times, whatever it’s been, they do. And everybody says, “gosh, I wish I’d done this earlier.” And I’m like, so I lead with all my conversations with with potential advisors that this is the thing and I don’t use the word releasing, relishing uncertainty, but that’s exactly what it is. Right? We’re not gonna have this clear pie. It’s just gonna say this is exactly what’s going to happen here. Right? And it’s just it is and so, so anyway, well I appreciate the time today, Carla. This has been awesome having you On The Circuit of Success and if you are ever in the St Louis area you give us a buzz. Carla Fowler  55:05 Awesome, thank you so much Brett. The post Carla Fowler Says 55-Mile Walk at 10-Years-Old Trained Her Feet for Surgical Residency in Adulthood appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Today’s podcast features Brett’s guest appearance on Lisa Nichol’s “Something Extra” podcast. Brett discusses how he has learned to take initiative and work hard to impact others. Starting with the decision to leave the firm where he was a successful advisor, Brett began his own fiduciary practice to “help people achieve a future greater than their past.” Learn how you can make the most of each day and align your time with your passions! The post “Success Only Precedes Work in the Dictionary” appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.  

Colonel Jason J. Glynn is the commander of the 375th Mission Support Group, Scott Air Force Base, Ill., leading five squadrons totaling over 1,500 personnel. He entered the Air Force in 1999 as a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. He has commanded two civil engineer squadrons as well as served on a combatant command and major command staff. Additionally, he was assigned as a Defense Legislative Fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski and served as civil engineer for a Contingency Response Group. He has deployed in support of combat and humanitarian operations worldwide, including operations Inherent Resolve, Iraqi Freedom, and Unified Assistance. In 2019, he led a cross-functional team to develop the Air Force’s first strategy for the cybersecurity of control systems. The post Jason Glynn’s Definition of Success Comes From His Military Experience “Success is Accomplishing the Goal” appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Lauren Johnson used to serve as the Mental Conditioning Coordinator for the New York Yankees, now she has her own consulting practice. Bulldozing obstacles in the industry and her personal life, Johnson sits down to tell her journey of eventually reaching success, the trials of getting here, and her mission to help people improve their lives through the choices they make. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION: Brett Gilliland  00:01 Welcome to The Circuit of Success. I’m your host, Brett Gilliland, and today I’ve got Lauren Johnson with me, Lauren, how you doing?  Lauren Johnson  00:08 I’m great. I’m great. Thanks for having me today.  Brett Gilliland  00:10 Absolutely, you are a mental performance coach and a speaker, you own your own consulting company now, and done some work with professional athletes, specifically, even the Yankees and a lot of business leaders and fortune 500 CEOs. And so a lot of stuff we’re going to talk about today. So I’m really, really excited about diving into it, but you’re up in Northern California, I just came from old Tahoe. So that’s a beautiful part of the country. Lauren Johnson  00:32 One of my favorites.  Brett Gilliland  00:34 Amazing. Does it get old being out there and the beauty of these mountains and these trees? Lauren Johnson  00:38 Never, absolutely never. Now, I’m still a little bit of it takes a drive for me to get to Tahoe, but man, I try and get up there as much as possible.  Brett Gilliland  00:48 It’s beautiful. It’s amazing out there. Well, if you can Lauren, why don’t you give us a little lay of the land? What’s kind of made you the woman you are today? Some of that background and kind of set us off on the right foot on who Lauren Johnson is? Lauren Johnson  00:59 Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of a heavy question. Let’s see, what we’ll start with the easy stuff. I grew up an athlete and an athlete household my whole life, fell in love with soccer at a really young age. It was like it was a mixture of both fun and really challenging for me. So I completely fell in love with it. And the second I started doing it I was like, “this is what I want to do.” So originally, I wanted to be a professional soccer player. That was my goal. You know, back in first grade, when they asked you who you want to like what you want to become. Brett Gilliland  01:32 Yes.  Lauren Johnson  01:33 And while school was fine, and I was decent at it, it was really like sports that always, I was always drawn to sports in some way. And so as I went into, you know, my college years, not only do I play at the collegiate level, but I knew that past college, I wanted to work in some sort of sports. And so originally, I actually wanted to be a physical therapist, because I’m like, “Okay, this is, I can get the closest to working with athletes. You know, besides being a coach, and this is really exciting to me.” Well, then my senior year of college, I found sports psychology, actually, after I became injured as an athlete, and completely fell in love with it. Because the one thing I didn’t love about physical therapy is, I was a kid, I love the connection with my clients. But I’m not very good at the medical side, like and it didn’t excite me, like, not my thing. Like, I felt like it was a requirement to have this other piece of it. So when I learned oh, there is an actual job that is all about your connection with the client and helping them to overcome these mental obstacles they are facing holy cow! That’s for me. So I actually my senior year I decided to, I finished off my degree in kinesiology, minored in psychology, and then went full force ahead for Master’s in performance psychology. And it’s, you know, kind of led me down the path I’m on now. Brett Gilliland  03:03 Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. So how did you, how have you built your quote unquote, resume, if you will, right? Because I mean, Yankees one of the most, well, the winningest organization in major league baseball history. I know you spent some time with them. It’s like how does that happen? Like, so talk to our listeners, and not necessarily “Yes, it’s the Yankees.” But how do we go do something that may be bigger than what we think we could do? And then believe it and go get it done? Lauren Johnson  03:27 Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, if you would have told me out of grad school that in a couple of years time, you’re gonna work for the Yankees, I would have thought you were crazy, not because they didn’t think I could do it. But because up until then, I didn’t believe it was possible. And I had a lot of people in grad school and otherwise, and I know a lot of grad students have this, have had a similar experience where they’re told, like, sports jobs are the hardest to get, like don’t even you know, they kind of like steer you away from it. And I, part of me believed that part of me was like, “Oh, screw that, like, I can get it.” So I graduated from my master’s program and I had two job offers. And one, I ended up taking one and turning down the other, but the only thing about the one that I ended up taking was that it required like six months before I was going to be placed in an actual role or position. And it was very common for this role, I was–– that I had gotten, and so six months goes by and I don’t hear anything. And at this time, mind you, I’m preparing for this so I’ve moved out of my apartment I think I was living with my grandma at the time like and like it was living with which who, by the way is like one of my best friends, one of the most incredible times of my life, which we can go back to that later, but she’s amazing. However, I’m like living with my grandma. I am I have a master’s degree and I, I’m like, just kind of like in limbo waiting to see where I’m going to be moving to. All my stuff’s in storage. And I remember I was I was visiting my boyfriend at the time, but now husband, and we were driving up to Tahoe, believe it or not. And that’s when I get this call. And it was in response to an email I had sent in the email was, “hey, just checking in six months has gone by I haven’t heard anything. Like, when should I be expecting my job placement?” And I got a response that said, “We’re sorry, the job is no longer available.” All the way up to Tahoe to have like, a fun weekend with my boyfriend, you know, soon to be husband. And I was like, in tears.  Brett Gilliland  05:47 Yeah, just got kicked right in the teeth. Lauren Johnson  05:50 Just devastated. Yeah, my whole, like, all my plans were just uprooted. And now we’re supposed to go celebrate. Like, I just cried, wanted to like crawl in a hole. And I just remember how upset like, devastated, I wasn’t thinking, I can’t even go back to the other job. Because it’s six months has passed, they’ve already refilled, they’ve already filled the position. So I’m kind of screwed. So I after, you know, having my own little pity party, and you know, being upset, I was like, “What am I gonna do about this?” So I ended up calling, you know, a lot of people that we actually talked about before this calling a lot of people that I knew in the field. And people that, you know, were mentors to me, or were already working in pro sports. And I, you know, call them for advice, and was there any jobs available, and there was just nothing. And even when there were things, I kept hearing the same thing, when you just need experience, and which is a very frustrating thing to hear out of grad school. So I’m now like, my deadlines for my for my student loans are approaching. So I’m like, well, I need to make money. I can’t like sit around waiting for like these jobs to happen, or to get experience before I can start applying. So I end up getting a job at Starbucks. And it was really humbling. But I will never forget, my mom used to tell me. She said, “You are never too good for any position.”  Brett Gilliland  07:16 Great advice.  Lauren Johnson  07:18 You are never too good to work in a position, you think you are never better than any other position out there. She said there are times where you have to roll up your sleeves and do the difficult thing. And yeah, part of my ego was like, “I don’t deserve to work at Starbucks.”  Brett Gilliland  07:33 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  07:35 I, you know, and Starbucks was exactly what I needed. So I’m working there humbled by the whole thing. And one day this guy drives up in the drive thru. And we’re chatting, like, we’re chatting it up. And he goes, “so are you in school?” And it was a common question. Most people were. But I said, “no, actually, I just graduated.” And he’s like, “great. What did you get your degree in?” And I like was so proud to tell him I was like, “Oh, I got in performance psychology.” And this guy just starts laughing in my face. Like, fun belly laughing and I’m like, “Oh, this is great.” Yeah, I’m like, do I have something on my face, like, what’s, what’s so funny? So finally, you know, I have no problem with confrontation. So finally, I just asked him, I was like, “What’s so funny?” He goes, “oh, you got one of those degrees, you’ll never use.”  Brett Gilliland  08:27 Oh.  Lauren Johnson  08:30 And it was like a gut punch. Here, I am already feeling like, I am not in the position I should be and now somebody’s telling me like, there’s a chance you’ll never leave here. Because you’re not going to do anything with that. And I was so pissed, like, I walked away, somebody else had to hand him his drink. But it got worse as the day went on, because I started ruminating on this. And have you ever had that where somebody says––  Brett Gilliland  08:55 Yeah. That’s what happens. A lot of times, the hardest feedback is, and the feedback, even if a spouse right gives you feedback, you may be mad, but you’re mad because it’s true. Oh, yeah.  Lauren Johnson  08:55 It sticks with you. And you just keep replaying it like a broken record. And every time you replay it, you experience all the emotions all over again. So that’s happening. And then I get mad, because I’m mad, because I’m like, Lauren, they just got, you don’t event know this guy. Like, why do you care? Like, why are you giving him all this power over you? And that’s when I had this like, A-ha moment. And I realized I wasn’t upset because he was rude. I was upset because he was right.  Yeah, because there’s a part of it. That was 100% true.  Brett Gilliland  09:42 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  09:43 And I’m not sure if it came from anybody close to me, I would have paid attention to it the same. And it, what it forced me to do is it forces me to look in the mirror and go “Alright, so if that’s true, what is your response going to be?” Because I realized, like, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna make much progress if I just turn around when I’m faced with adversity. And that’s essentially what I was doing. And so that day, I Googled how to start your own consulting company, started my own consulting company, worked the earliest shift at Starbucks, it was, I had to get up at 2:30am, my shift started at 3:30. worked until 12. And then from about 12 to four, I would go on LinkedIn and send out messages, cold calls, pick up phones, like, and I, my goal was just to get in front of anybody that would allow me to work with them, because they knew that if I could get in front of them, and I can show them the value of what I had to offer that, more, more than likely, I’m gonna get a client after that. And if not, at least, maybe I’ll get a referral.  Brett Gilliland  10:49 Right.  Lauren Johnson  10:50 And that’s what I ended up doing. And little by little, I started getting some traction. And people would see my work and they would refer me to somebody else. And then that person would refer me to somebody else. So suddenly, I built a, you know, very humble company, but a company enough to pay my bills where I didn’t also have to work at Starbucks, right? And after a year’s time, I actually had some friends that worked in baseball that, that sent me the job opportunity from the Yankees when it came out. And I interviewed and I got the job. Brett Gilliland  11:27 Boom, podcast’s over. Dedication, perseverance, courage, right? I mean, I think a lot of similarities. I was 22-23, 23 years old, when I started the financial wealth management business, right. And still to this day now, 20 plus years later, I’ll have I’ll talk to young folks and they’re like, “Yeah, but who’s gonna give their money to a 23 year old?” I’m like, Yeah, you’re right, who is going to do it, but I think just sometimes ignorance can be bliss, too, right to where here I was in this new town, St. Louis, I wasn’t from here. Now, here you are building a consulting company, you’re cold calling people you don’t even have any clients that you’re consulting with or that you’re helping performance mindset, right? But yeah, you had a belief, you had a vision, you had action, which is one of the circuits of success, hence the name of the podcast. And so I could go on and on about that stuff. But I think sometimes not sometimes, most of the time, in my opinion, you’ve got to take action, without the answer. Do you agree with that? Lauren Johnson  12:26 Yeah, it’s actually, the core of what I’ve built my company on is this idea that you become a lead by choice, not by chance, I could have made a totally different choice.  Brett Gilliland  12:37 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  12:38 I could have chose to stay exactly where I was, and, and allowed fear to take the wheel and allowed other things and outside circumstances to, to make decisions for me. But that’s the thing about being a victim and you’re in your situation, whatever situation you’re in, when you’re a victim, you’re pointing outside of you. And when we point outside of you, we give our power away, because now we’re requiring things externally to change in order for our situation to change. And where, sure, you could argue it was not my fault that suddenly the job wasn’t available. You can argue all of that. But what good is that going to do for the situation I’m in? Like, it’s not going to do any good. It’s the question is like, “Okay, well, now, what are you going to do about it?” Because mental performance is oftentimes about accepting your reality and choosing your response. And the reality is, your reality isn’t always great.  Brett Gilliland  13:32 Right.  Lauren Johnson  13:33 Sometimes it sucks. And you have to like it. That’s the thing. A lot of people like, “well, isn’t accepting it like accepting defeat?” No, it doesn’t mean you have to like what situation you’re in. But what you’re doing is you’re accepting the fact that this is the reality you’re being faced with. And now you have a choice to make on how you’re gonna respond to it. Brett Gilliland  13:53 Yeah, I talked about that with attitude just, just simple with that, like this morning I don’t know about you, I have to have an alarm go off, right to get me up. But I am a good sleeper. But I have a choice, right? We all have a choice every single day and to your point choice on to be successful or not. Right? Is, is a the the word “choice” for me is a big powerful word. Like I love that word. Because it is nobody else’s choice. But Lawrence or Brett’s to choose how today is gonna go does that mean everything’s gonna go great? Does that mean every voicemails gonna be perfect? Every email is gonna be here, you know, here’s millions dollars, or here’s this big consulting job. No, it doesn’t mean that. But it’s how we choose to live that reality. Right? And how you do something with it. And so I call it the bounce back theory. And you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but the most successful people in my experience, they bounce back from defeat quicker than others. Right? You had your pity party you call it it’s exactly what I call you had your pity party. Some people’s pity parties last five minutes, some people’s last couple of hours, some last a couple of days, some last month, some last a year. But the most successful people people bounce back quicker from defeat thoughts on that. Lauren Johnson  15:04 Oh, man, I love this. Because a lot of times, it’s actually it’s funny, I actually have this sticky note. So for anybody that’s actually watching, I will explain it for those that aren’t. But this is how I describe, I was talking describing this to somebody the difference between like an amateur athlete and a professional athlete. And when it comes to their mentality, that the top squiggly line has very high highs and very low lows. And the bottom one, there are still highs and lows, but it’s the in between that shifts. And that mental performance doesn’t make you invincible. It makes you adaptable. And this is a good example of what that looks like, is that professional athletes, they still go through highs and lows of performance. But they’re more adaptable when those things occur. And so therefore, the highs aren’t so high and the lows aren’t so low. And so they’re able to establish more consistency over time. And more consistency within their results. And so I could not agree more with you. I think that’s an really important point. Brett Gilliland  16:01 I’m looking for a book. What’s the name of it here? It Takes What It Takes. Have you have you heard? Have you read that book? Lauren Johnson  16:07 Yeah. By Trevor Moawad? Yeah, we actually––  Brett Gilliland  16:10 God rest his soul, by the way. Lauren Johnson  16:12 ––my director at the Yankees and him are best friends or were best friends. He frequented into the Yankees quite a bit. Brett Gilliland  16:20 Okay. It made me think of that. When you, when you showed your lines, right, he talks about basically I’m paraphrasing here, but taking the emotion out of it right. Don’t let your highs be too high. Don’t let your lows and be what’s he call it, neutral thinking? I think if I remember correctly, but it but it’s true. But I can also be guilty of that. From a raging optimist standpoint, I like to live in that moment. Because it can propel me on to something else. Even though that thing didn’t happen. I like to think it’s gonna happen for a while. And something else may happen. I don’t know if that makes any sense or not. It’s probably a little confusing, but I think I don’t like to go into the into the depths. But you certainly do it on a journey of entrepreneurship, for sure. Or sports? Lauren Johnson  17:02 Oh, entirely. And really what that really what we’re talking about here is our relationship with our emotions, our relationship with our responses, because emotions you’re right, they’re not they’re not bad, feeling positive, feeling optimistic, or even feeling angry or upset. There could be benefits to both of those things. But the question is, where does the benefit lie? And for a lot of people, when they ride those highs, or when they ride those lows, that, it really becomes a something that gets in the way of their ability to perform consistently. And so one you know, one great tool, again, that Trevor Moawad talks about is neutral thinking is being able to detach from that, that’s a great skill to have. Now, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have emotion. Because pain is a catalyst it’s a catalyst for change. It can be a catalyst for growth. And then you know, optimism and positivity can be a great motivator. It when we are building momentum oh man, there’s a lot of science behind momentum and motivation. But what we do know is that there’s a balance between the two, when we look at actually our neurology and our chemistry, is that too much of either can become a really bad thing. And we have to be able to have the balance in order to sustain it long term. Brett Gilliland  18:18 Yeah, I think. So when I hear that heard you say that motivation or use that word. Let’s talk about purpose. I mean, motivation, in my opinion, you talked about like, I know you’re a speaker, but I think you’re a speaker for change is the way I would say it right? Is actually let me get this meat and potato thing. Let me take one nugget and implement it in my life, then there are motivational speakers, right, you’re ready to run through the brick wall when they get done speaking at the conference, but then you leave the conference, you go to the airport, or you drive home wherever you’re at, and that motivation is gone by tomorrow. Right? So go ahead. Lauren Johnson  18:53 I was just saying I love you for saying this because I the amount of times when people like oh, you’re a motivational speaker I’m like no, not exactly. Brett Gilliland  19:00 There’s a difference, there is a massive difference and I want to make sure I say that out of respect for what you’re doing. It is for me, there’s motivation motivation is great, right we need it we got to have it. But there has to be purpose right and you can probably see this on this on the camera, I don’t know if you can or not on the microphone “F greater than P” people listening this probably get tired of hearing me say it but future greater than your past. That’s my personal mission statement. That’s our firm’s mission statement is helping people achieve a future greater than their past. And for me what I had to find, now I’m 44 years old, when I started when I was 23. I started on motivation, right? The conferences, the books, the things I needed, but now it’s purpose. Right? So when you hear that what comes to mind for you? Lauren Johnson  19:42 Oh many things, many things. I can go down so many, so many paths with this one I’ll start with this is that I agree with you motivation is, I always think of it kind of like a power plant. Power Plants don’t have energy they generate it. And so motivation is often we treat it as something we either have or we don’t. But really, it becomes generated with action. And a lot of times, it comes after the fact. And the thing I hate about motivation is that a lot of people use it as a prerequisite. Like, oh, I have to feel this way.  Brett Gilliland  20:17 Yeah. Lauren Johnson  20:17 In order to act this way. And there was actually an example, I was working with a golfer. And this day, in particular, I was just out observing one of his tournaments, and we’re out there and he, he’s having a bad day. Like, you can kind of see, you can see the frustration building and building. And, you know, I watched him, you know, three putt and he’s pissed. And so he throws down, he literally throws his putter to the ground, goes over, like, pulls out his driver, and his caddies like picking up this stuff. Like, as he’s as he’s doing this, and like, literally almost runs to the next hole. And then I’m having to like, jog to keep up. He, he goes through every like, literally abandons his routine entirely. Putts some balls, swings, and we watch as it goes directly into an, into a hazard.  Brett Gilliland  21:07 Yeah, yeah.  Lauren Johnson  21:09 We I mean, hello–- Brett Gilliland  21:11 I’ve done it. Lauren Johnson  21:11 Right. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And so he was so pissed, he, he walked off and quit.  Brett Gilliland  21:22 Oh, wow.  Lauren Johnson  21:24 I gave him his space for a little bit, till he calmed down. And then we sat down to talk about it. And I was like, “Hey, what happened back there?” And he goes, “I don’t think you understand.” He goes, “I hate losing. That’s just how I am.” Brett Gilliland  21:41 I love that, I actually hate that statement. It’s just how I am. But go ahead. Lauren Johnson  21:46 Me too. So you and I are the same with this. And I said, “bullshit.” And he’s like, he kind of like, looks like stops for a second. I like shocked him. And I said, “That’s not who you are. That’s who you’re choosing to be.” I said, “you can be angry. And still your cool. You can be upset, and still maintain composure.” I said “you can be fearful and still act in a way where fear is not in the driver’s seat.” I said, “your feelings and actions do not have to match to coexist.” And I think it was the first time he had heard that.  Brett Gilliland  22:31 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  22:31 And up until that point, he believed, like a lot of us do is, we fall it––somehow like along the, along the path of performance, we believe we have to feel some way to act some way, it’s complete crap. You can feel one way and act entirely different. It’s hard to do. Sure. But it’s not about like faking it till you make it. It’s learning to behave it even when you don’t feel that way.  Brett Gilliland  22:56 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  22:56 That is discipline. And that is high performance. Brett Gilliland  23:01 I’m writing that one down, behave it even when you don’t feel like it. Because you’re right. I mean, I grew up in an environment that was the old fake it till you make it type thing, right? And it’s like, I never connected with that. But you hear it, and then you somehow in your 20s, you start to believe that you know, somebody’s driving on the road. Listen, this, Don’t fake it till you make it. Like he just said, behave it. Right? behave the way even if you don’t want to. And I talked about again, attitude, your belief system, and your actions ultimately get you results. That’s the circuit of success, right? That’s what this show is all about is your attitude, beliefs, actions, get your results. There’s a lot of things in between there. But when you have those things, that again, back to that motivation, and that purpose, I think you got to dig deep and find out why in the hell are you doing what you’re doing? And if you don’t know the answer to that, I don’t know what to tell you. Lauren Johnson  23:52 And, you know, most people don’t have that answer. When I meet with a lot of people, like, I’ll give you a good example. I was working with a CEO up in Canada recently. And there’s a lot of things we’re working on in general. And one of the things is he wants to exit his company within three to five years. And it was funny because he didn’t say that originally, originally he said, “Oh, I want confidence.” I want this, I wanna be able to walk into a board meeting and this is, this is fill in the blank and it’s just anybody that knows their why can spot when somebody thinks they know it, but they really don’t.  Brett Gilliland  24:30 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  24:32 And it’s because what a lot of times we have, like the surface why and there’s nothing wrong with that by the way, having a why that’s temporary or that can carry you through today or tomorrow and it be more surface level. There’s a place for that. But when we’re looking for our true why our true purpose it what it really does is it is a couple of layers deeper and it, oftentimes takes somebody else to reflect back to you and help us get there. So I asked him, I was like, “that’s not it.” And he was like, “What do you mean? How can you tell me that? That’s not it?” I was like, “because it’s deeper than that.” And so I kept asking, like, “what do you want?” And he would tell me, “I don’t know, what do you want?” And then the process and I actually learned this from my good friend, Nick Kabuto, that in the process of just asking, “What do you want?”, time and time again, after a minute, you’ll start to see us diving deeper into layers. And what we learned is that he didn’t want, he didn’t want what he wanted, just so that he could feel good about himself walking into a meeting. He wanted what he wanted, because in two, three years time, he wants to exit his company, so that he can spend more time with his children. So that he can be the dad that picks them up after school. And there’s a legacy he wanted to be able to leave. And so when we really dove deep and understood that his whole energy shifted, and the reason why this is important, is because when you’re speaking to your Y, you’re speaking to the part of the brain that is responsible for decision making. And so that’s why when you don’t feel like doing something, and you go, “well, I should, because I just need that confidence.” You’re not like jumping off the couch to do it. But when you connect to something greater than you, like your family, your legacy, the example that you’re leaving, suddenly you go, “I gotta get up.” Brett Gilliland  26:32 Yeah. But I think the reason people don’t do that, though, in my opinion, is it’s scary, right? Because once you admit it, and I always say peel the onion layer back, like you’re talking about these layers, right? So once I peel that back, and now I’ve kind of, always say Pandora’s Box, everybody’s got the box, and I got a key, and I got to unlock that key to let this thing out. Right? And so we do that with clients. “What’s important about money?” “Well, I just want to be secure.” Now, “what’s important about being secure,” right? What’s and you just keep going and asking them questions back about what they just said. And then it’s, it’s not every time but you’d be shocked at how many times actually, you know, we’re grabbing Kleenex because somebody’s crying, right? And that’s the jobs, to tie it back. But it’s very scary because once you admit it, now the fear comes in. And then the mind in my opinion is made to protect ourselves, right? Our parents tried to protect us as kids. We tried to protect our own kids. And so the fear comes in there and says, “Man, I just admitted this thing. Now I gotta go do it. What happens if it doesn’t happen?” Lauren Johnson  27:35 Right, yeah. I mean, I, have you experienced that before where maybe like, even your why or even some of the goals that you’ve set have have scared you like fear, which I’m sure you had. Brett Gilliland  27:47 Well, I’ve even had the thought of like, Who the hell do you think you are? Right? Like, why? Why like the future greater than your past? What the hell thinks you made, what makes you think Brett, you can make somebody’s future greater than their past? Right? And you have to fight through that demon earlier. And I do think it comes with experience, because I’ve had different mission statements over my life for different purpose statements. But I can honestly say, this is the first one that was the real, real, real, real one. Like it’s what I get up to do every single day. And I think I’ve eliminated a lot of other negative emotions in my life, knowing that future greater than your past purpose, right. But there are lots of things that scare you. Lauren Johnson  28:24 Oh, yeah. And I, I resonate with that, because so I remember one time I was explained, I was talking to, you know, something, something along this very similar lines that we’re talking about with a player from the Yankees. He goes, “Well, you’re not allowed to think that way. Like you’re a mental coach.” And I was like, that’s precisely the reason why I think that way, right? I was like, because how can I teach you the things that I do if I haven’t gone through it myself?  Brett Gilliland  28:55 Yep.  Lauren Johnson  28:56 It’s when people ask me, “Lauren, like, why do you why do you love this field so much?” The answer is because I was the athlete that needed it.  Brett Gilliland  29:04 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  29:05 I was the person that constantly got in my own way that I thought if I wasn’t perfect, then I wasn’t worth shit. Like, I had all of these things that actually led me to this field because I needed it. And I think we continue, of course, it evolved from being a soccer player to now, you know, about to be a first time mom, and I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. And I’m terrified. And there’s a lot of fear associated with it. There’s changes that are happening that I’m like, rejecting. And so the different chapters in your life will require different mental skills or iterations of them. And I need it the most. And so I don’t teach anything that I’m not willing to do myself.  Brett Gilliland  29:46 Yeah. But with that, I think two, is just pick the mom obviously, I’m not a mom, but I am a dad. I’m a dad of four. And I think that so many times, whether it’s business, parenthood, whatever it is, we just think we got to know, right? I remember driving home the first time you guys will probably experience as you drive home, we had to drive home on an interstate with our first baby. I’m 10 and 2, I’m going like 45, you know, I’m a fast driver, right? And I’m going like, these people were freaking crazy, you know? And it’s like, it doesn’t come with a rulebook, right? Dealing with a pandemic running a company didn’t come with a rulebook. Right? Striking out 37 times in a row doesn’t come with a rulebook. But that’s where my opinion faith in a higher power, but faith in yourself, your belief system, your process, that’s what has to come in that we as a human being, like, like advice to you, right, as you have in I know, you know, this, I’m speaking to the coach here. But the point is, you have to have faith that it will show up, the rulebook will show up in how to be a mom, right? And you will figure it out, and how to be a mom times two, or in my case, the dad times four, and it just shows up, but you got to believe it. And you gotta have faith in that. Lauren Johnson  30:55 I love that you said that. And I have, and it’s a reminder that I constantly need. So thank you for sharing that. Because I will never forget when I first, you know, found out that I was pregnant, and we were you know, body changes are happening and I’m like rejecting them because I’ve been like a super fit athlete my whole life. And I’m like, what’s happening? What is that?  Brett Gilliland  31:16 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  31:17 It’s like, my body’s so foreign to me, I had a friend and I texted her, I said, “Hey,” and she’s a good friend of mine. Since college she’s had, she’s now on her second kid. And I, I text her I said, “the first time you got pregnant, did it feel like somebody just dropped you in the middle of the ocean? And you had no idea what direction tp swim in?” And she’s like, “Absolutely, absolutely.” And so I think that that analogy doesn’t, isn’t just for pregnancy, but it’s for a lot of other things in life, like you had mentioned is that sometimes the best lessons in life are the ones where you feel like you are lost in the middle of the ocean, and you do not have a clue what direction to go in.  Brett Gilliland  31:53 Yeah, absolutely.  Lauren Johnson  31:55 It’s the exploration, right? The only way that you start to learn what direction is the right one or not, is by exploring it. And by choosing one and going, and then it may require a course correction, it may require turning around, you might get lucky the first time we go, nailed it. But how are you to know? And so I do think that some of the best lessons do come from that degree of discomfort and, and honestly, like complete and utter vulnerability. Brett Gilliland  32:23 Well, I think it’s learning to write and it’s, it’s okay to make a mistake, whether again, in business or and being me, hell and apparently, I make mistakes every damn day, you know, and it’s like, but you got to learn from them. And we all learn from those mistakes, and then do something about it to not do it again. But again, I will do it again. I still make the same mistakes. Lauren Johnson  32:44 Yeah, if you’re, if you’re constantly making the same mistake, you’re not learning.  Brett Gilliland  32:48 Yeah. Lauren Johnson  32:49 If you never make any mistakes, you’re not growing.  Brett Gilliland  32:51 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  32:51 And so one of those, it’s one of those, you know, paradigms that, you know, we want to pay attention to, because, man we can get in a cycle, just not making any updates.  Brett Gilliland  33:01 Yeah.  Lauren Johnson  33:01 But then, if you’re so, but at the same time understanding that mistakes are a part of the process, as you’re, as you’re growing. And as you’re developing. Brett Gilliland  33:10 Yeah. So what would it be if I followed you around, you know, for a week, a month, whatever, pick your timeframe, I followed you around, and I said, Okay, I’m going to find these 1, 2, 3, 4 points I know, Lauren Johnson will never miss, what are those things? Lauren Johnson  33:27 That’s a great question. I don’t know, I’ll have to think about that. What points 1, 2, 3 points, I don’t know, one of the things I kind of live and breathe by is, I think that there’s so much power in any moment, by understanding where your control doesn’t, doesn’t lie. It’s a very foundational principle, you know, in the sports psychology field. And the reason is, because I think that, you know, especially as a young athlete, I gave my power away a lot. And when you attempt to control things that you can’t, it ends up controlling you. And that’s what happened is I was being controlled by all these outside circumstances, I was being controlled by, you know, other people’s opinions of me or things like, you know, jobs falling through, you know, alot of things that were totally outside of my control. I would lend so much of my mental currency there. And so one of the things that is so foundational in my every single day, and in terms of dealing with any adversities, or struggles, or even decisions I’m making, is I go back to kind of this idea of understanding where my control does and doesn’t lie. Because I think a lot of times, it became such a default setting, to just if I didn’t like it, that was the thing I focused on and it’d be it’s, you know, that negativity bias that our mind it’s like so attracted to, and so for me, one of the things without fail is, is I will always know where my power lies. And if I get upset at something about something which, trust me, it happens, you can ask my husband. But that’s yeah. Oh, let me tell you about that, however, but what always happens is that there’s a little I give myself a little bit of time to be upset. But my bounce back is pretty quick. And it always starts the catalyst for the bounce back always begins with that question is where does your control lie? And where doesn’t it? And what does that mean for your next step? Brett Gilliland  35:31 Well and we talked about that earlier right? The bounce back theory, as I call it, I just was speaking to a group of people, young, young professionals a couple of weeks ago, maybe and, and that’s, that’s the advice like, how do you get over disappointment, and for me it’s, be disappointed, have my pity party be pissed off. I mean, I mean, be absolutely pissed, because you’re golfer guy, I don’t want to lose, I don’t want to lose, my wife and I will race around the yard just to not lose, right? I mean, it’s, we’re competitive, our kids are competitive. And, but I guess my point is, is again, faster, but put the game plan together. So if I didn’t like that thing that just happened, then for me, I go to my black journal with an ink pen and my mind, and I put together the game plan. That’s gonna get me out of that shit that I don’t want to deal with right now. Lauren Johnson  36:17 Oh, yeah, it’s so true. There’s, you know, my husband, I, he, his head’s gotten a little big because of this. So I, nobody send this to him, please–– He already, given him enough credit for this. However, it’s important for people to hear this because it honestly impacted me a lot. And it happened not long ago. And he asked me a question. And what it did is it took me out of the moment that I was in it, it gave me a third party perspective. And it’s a powerful question that stuck with me that I asked constantly. And when I’m upset, or I’m in, you know, in frustrated or something happens, the question I often like to ask, besides Where does my power line where it doesn’t it is? “What typically helps in moments like these?” He posed that question to me once, when I was upset. And what it did is it suddenly made me zoom out. Because right when we’re in our emotions, we are so in them, and sometimes we identify closely with them. And this gave me a moment to almost have that third party perspective where I could zoom out and look at my situation. And then I could actually reflect on past experiences, in what helped. And then what my brain naturally did is what might help now. And what I realized in that moment, the answer at that moment, was giving myself like a 24 hour period to just be upset, but not address this yet. And then come back after I was, you know, I created space from the emotion I’d created space from the initial shock. And then I could respond appropriately. And so that’s not, that’s a question I offered to you and to the right question. Because it really, it really makes you, again, like you said, creating a future better greater than your past. It makes you think on your past in order to create a better decision for the future. Brett Gilliland  36:28 Send. Yeah. And I think coaching is a big part of all this too, right? I mean, I had a coach for years. And you look at pick your favorite athlete, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady. I mean, Tom Brady’s got an entourage around it, right. And it’s, it’s people around you that and to your coach that your to your golfer that you ask him questions, you need to hear that stuff. And you’d be smacked in the face sometimes and wake up and ask questions that are hard to ask to ourselves. So for our listeners, I would tell you find a coach, it doesn’t have to be a lot of money, find somebody, right? Maybe it can be a lot of money, depending on their budget, but find somebody you can go to, to get help to ask you these questions and go through that. Would you agree with that? I would assume so based on your, what you do. Lauren Johnson  38:51 I just called my coach earlier today, I have coaches that I use right now, you know, for different reasons. But I invest a lot of money in coaching, because I see the value in it. And every coach themselves, by the way needs a coach. So if you are a coach saying like, Oh, I don’t need it, because I am a coaching, BS! Yes. Oh, we all do you know why? We all have blind spots. And there are there are these three areas that I actually created a video about this last week that elite performers, you know, do differently than than average performers. And it’s, it’s this idea that number one, they don’t play victim, okay? They’re not sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. Number two, they under–– they’re lifelong students, and so they’re constantly trying to learn and develop. So one of the things and you’re like if we followed you, what’s something you wouldn’t miss, is I’m constantly learning. So whether that’s reading books, whether that’s taking a course, whether that’s being coached, or applying something new, like you know, homework that my coach gives me, which by the way, I’m in a very uncomfortable position right now with learning a new skill. And so I felt like I was taken back to like a beginner again, so thank you to one of my coaches for that. And so that being a student is huge. And then the third thing is they understand the value of who you surround yourself with. And so they surround themselves with not people that don’t necessarily are “yes people” or just will agree with them, but other like people that also want to improve themselves. And so I, I, this is so important for me, it’s been so important, like for the last five years, I’ve noticed, is just who I surround myself with, and who I choose to spend time with my proximity to certain people, it matters. And it’s, it’s become more important, the older I’ve gotten. Brett Gilliland  40:38 Which I just talked about this, I don’t know if it was on a podcast or somebody else, maybe somebody an advisor in our office, but you can feel somebody’s presence, positive or negative, right. I think John Gordon, who we talked about, before we started recording, he talks about in the energy bus, you know, as a 15 feet radius, you can feel somebody’s presence, positive or negative, get rid of the negative vampire, right? Stick around the positive people. And it’s, I’m lucky that my friend, I shouldn’t say lucky, has probably been done this way because of who we are, and our values connection. But my friends lift each other up. One is not jealous of somebody else’s success. And if somebody does something, or you get a high five, let’s go, like, that’s awesome. Lauren Johnson  41:19 And that’s how it should be. And I understand that that’s not how the world entirely operates. I realized that’s not everybody’s reality. But rou’re 100%, right. Like, if your response to somebody winning is like, I have to pull them down, like we you need to look in the mirror. Yeah, and I think we’ve all had that experience before, if we’re all honest with ourselves, for other reasons, whether it’s jealousy, or, you know, fill in the blank, however, the best like, you will never find somebody who is doing well for themselves and working hard, pulling somebody else down. It’s just that is not allowed in my circle. If you do that, that’s fine. That’s the but that is a reflection of you, not me, and my proximity to you is going to change as a result of it. Because I need to be surrounded by other people that want to see me win. Now, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be honest with me or give me feedback. Thorough feedback. That’s not what I’m saying. But we all know those people that are, that are negative, just to be negative. And I think Justin Su’a does a really good job of explaining this. And he says, it’s the difference between fountains and drains, there are fountains in our lives, those are the people that you call, you know, when something good happens, who do you want to call and share it with?  Brett Gilliland  42:31 Oh, yeah.  Lauren Johnson  42:32 Yeah, they’re gonna fill you up! And then there are drains. And those are people that they’re calling you and you’re like, I don’t want to answer that. Yeah. And so it’s like, it’s I think it’s important to understand who are the fountains and drains in your life, and sometimes you can eliminate the drains entirely. But for those people that you can’t eliminate, then the question is, how can you change your proximity? Because proximity is power, the closer somebody is, the more that again, you can feel that energy, and it can actually impact you versus maybe you just need to create some distance, maybe you’re just not available this Friday. Or this weekend, like you usually are. Brett Gilliland  43:10 On the power of “No’s” used too, I’ve learned. Lauren Johnson  43:13 That’s been a tough one for me, but one I’ve gotten better at an exercise a little bit more. Brett Gilliland  43:17 But I also think that you collectively, when you’re building it, and especially in the early days, you got to say yes to a lot of things like I did this is four years ago, but I just remember what I did 40 things I learned in my first 40 years, right, and one of them was I said, take the coffee meeting. Just take it, like I don’t know, maybe something good comes out of it. Maybe it’s a complete waste of time, maybe a connection of a connection of a connection that I won’t know about till five or seven or 10 years from now happens. I don’t know. So I struggle with it as well. I mean, I I’m pretty darn good at saying “no” now. But I think in the early days, when you’re on the grind, and I’m still on a grind. Don’t get me wrong. But my point is, is that you got to take the coffee meeting sometimes, but then also be very protected, right? So I call them F to the fifth power, my faith, my family, my fitness, my firm and my fun. Those five F’s, if I can decide based on this thing coming at me look at it through a lens of one of those five things. If the answer is “Hell, yes,” let’s go. If it’s “no,” then let’s we’re saying no. Right? But it’s got to move the needle on one of those five areas. So do you have a decision making process like that, or anything similar to that? Lauren Johnson  44:28 You know, I do I have, I have a decision making process in my business. And then when it comes to my friends, it’s a very different decision making process. But I would say that in terms of my business, I have, I have an incredible business strategist that I work with. Because turns out in grad school, they teach you psychology, not business. So that’s an area that I was like I need help in. And so what we’ve done is actually I think, I think creating a system or a filter, first starts with clarity. Because once you’ve gained clarity, then you can apply the filter that is in alignment with that.  Brett Gilliland  45:06 Yeah. Lauren Johnson  45:07 I love it. I love it. All right, now we’re gonna have a little fun, I’m gonna steal your cell phone from you, okay, now besides email and calendar, because that’s boring, and you got to have them for work. What’s the one thing that I cannot delete on your cell phone that you got to have? Just in your life, it’s a thing you just want, you’d have some stress.  I think where I struggled to say no before, is I wasn’t always clear, but I could feel the alignment shift. But I didn’t anticipate it. And so I would say no, say yes to things I should have been saying no to. And so now, the filter actually comes from the things that I have actually set for my goals, I’ve created a 10 year plan, a three year plan, a one year plan, a six month plan. And when those things don’t align with those, that’s where I have to say, okay, it’s kind of like that, that story about the British rowing team, you know, will it make the boat go faster? And it filters your decision making because if going to the bar does not make the boat go faster then they’re not going to go. And so for me, it kind of like asking that same question to myself, like, will it make the boat go faster? And if the answer is no, I don’t do it. Audible.  Brett Gilliland  45:54 Ah, I like it.  Lauren Johnson  45:59 Audible. I–– Brett Gilliland  46:02 I so wish I could listen to Audible. I’ve got I think 15 books in backlog because if I just never, I like start to fall asleep. I like I gotta read the real book. Like, I’m trying to drive down the road for 30 minutes and do it I’m like, next thing I know, I’m like, I don’t know what the hell just happened. Lauren Johnson  46:36 I’m like half and half, because I’ve read into that before. And I still like having a physical copy. But there are some books that I want specific things from. And so audible is like the way that I go with that. And then if I want a hard copy, I’ll go get it. But I I’m gonna say I like both, but audible, I probably couldn’t live without and Uber Eats. Brett Gilliland  46:57 Uber Eats–– Big deal from Amazon yesterday, I had to send a text message to my family because my, especially my two older boys, they’re in high school, and, you know, you look at their little, they got their own little cards, I gotta go make some money, we’ll put some money in there. But it’s this damn GrubHub you know, whatever the fee is to do GrubHub and Amazon Prime members, they just took a little stake in GrubHub. So you get some free deliveries from GrubHub as an Amazon Prime member. Lauren Johnson  47:22 Well, maybe I’ll need to download some grub because I also have Amazon Prime. Brett Gilliland  47:26 There you go, you get some free food delivered to you. That was the worth right there the price of being on The Circuit of Success, which is nothing other than your time, and now you’re thinking “Why the hell did I do that?” Anyway where do our listeners find more of Lauren Johnson. Lauren Johnson  47:39 So you can actually, the best way is to go to my website, which is LaurenJohnsonandco.com. And that’s spelled out “andco.com.” All my social media handles on there, you can check out my latest events on there and–– Brett Gilliland  47:53 You have one coming up in November, right?  Lauren Johnson  47:55 Yes, we have one coming up in November. This is for mental performance coaches. So people in the field of sport and performance psychology or those interested in the field, working in the field, and we bring together some of the most incredible people that are currently in the field and fields that should, that support it. Meaning like, again, grad school does not teach you business. So, we bring in some really great business experts and things that actually help you to do the work in the field. Brett Gilliland  48:20 That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, we will put all that in the show notes. I’m sure there’ll be a link that you can share and we’ll put that in the show notes as well and people connect with you. But Lauren, you’re a rock star. Thanks so much for being with us on The Circuit of Success. I’ve enjoyed our time together. Lauren Johnson  48:33 Hey, thanks so much for having me. This was a blast. The post Lauren Johnson’s Aha Moment Was Being Told “You Got One of Those Degrees You’ll Never Use” appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Elizabeth Connelly made the Forbes list of America’s Top Women Wealth Advisors Best-In-State and St. Louis Small Business Monthly’s Top 100 St. Louisans You Should Know. Connelly and Brett discuss her early start in education, how she practices moving on from the past, and why she identifies as a “big picture person.”  Elizabeth Connelly, J.D., CTFA, CISP joined Visionary Wealth Advisors as a Partner and Sr. Wealth Management Advisor in November of 2021 with an impressive 35+ years of experience in the financial services industry.  Throughout her career she has developed enduring client relationships that have spanned decades.  Elizabeth has an extensive record of community service; most notably she serves as Board President of the Signature Healthcare Foundation Board of Directors.  She is also a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame Financial Advisory Committee. Brett Gilliland  00:02 Welcome to the search of success. I’m your host, Brett Gilliland, and today I’ve got the privilege to interview ELIZABETH CONNOLLY. Elizabeth, how you doing? Elizabeth Connelly  00:08 Doing well, thank you. Brett Gilliland  00:10 Well, it’s it’s great to have you you, you know, you had to come all the way from Brentwood. I always joke with people in Missouri that have to come over to Illinois. It’s like we had to go through, go through the border, you know, to get your passport out and everything. Elizabeth Connelly  00:21 Very easy. Very easy drive. Brett Gilliland  00:25 Well you are a partner and Senior Wealth Management Advisor here at Visionary Wealth Advisors, you are a Top 100 Person to Know in St. Louis, that’s a big deal. And you are a Forbes list of America’s Top Advisors. So congratulations on all those things. It’s amazing. You’ve been with us for almost a year now, I guess about seven, eight months. And it’s just been really, really neat to get to watch your career, and learn from your career. So I was excited to have you today. But you don’t just wake up and become that person in St. Louis or this advisor. So could you tell us a little bit of the backstory, what’s made Elizabeth Connelly the woman you are today? Elizabeth Connelly  01:01 Oh, yes. Thank you. So I grew up in a family of eight children. Brett Gilliland  01:06 Oh, wow. Elizabeth Connelly  01:06 So academics was very important to my parents. They actually are from a little town in Illinois, Sullivan, Illinois. Brett Gilliland  01:16 Oh my gosh! Elizabeth Connelly  01:16 Yeah, so their parents raised them to be educated. Because my dad’s 89 now, my mom passed away about 18 months ago, and education was just very important in the family. Because when you look at a farming community, and what my grandparents and my great grandparents went through, they did not have the privilege of going on to further education. So when I was growing up, I had no idea that you had a choice about going to college, I only knew that you had a choice about what you, what school you went to after college. So that’s the environment that I grew up in. Brett Gilliland  02:02 And did all eight do that? I mean, all eight kids went to college? Elizabeth Connelly  02:05 Yes. Brett Gilliland  02:05 And that’s, that’s amazing. Elizabeth Connelly  02:07 Yes. And all eight of them have another degree beyond college. And literally, it’s because that’s–we didn’t know any different, right? We just didn’t know any different. When we were younger, so I call myself the middle child, because there was always the three older kids and the four little girls and I was right in the middle, I was never old enough to be with the three older kids. And I was too old to be with the four little girls. So as the middle child, if you would, I hung out mostly with– I have two brothers that are right above me. So my oldest is a sister, then two brothers, myself and four little girls, if you would. My brother Dave, when we were little, we always played together. He had a stethoscope and a black bag from my uncle who was an orthopedic surgeon in Decatur, Illinois. Brett Gilliland  03:05 Yeah. Elizabeth Connelly  03:06 And Dave used to carry those around. My dad had an old briefcase and I used to carry his old briefcase around, we would sit at a table like this. And my brother had a little pad of paper and he’d have the stethoscope around his you know, nine year old neck, and he would practice writing prescription pads. So you couldn’t read his handwriting? Brett Gilliland  03:29 Yeah, sloppy, right? Elizabeth Connelly  03:31 I would argue with him because I was going to be a lawyer and I was going to be a litigation lawyer. So we did that. That’s what I did when I was younger. On my path, if you would to school, I ended up when I was a senior in high school, I won a scholarship from Monsanto, where my dad worked to be a foreign exchange student in Belgium. And I was 17 years old. My dad was away on a business trip. My mom was cooking Mosca choli, in a big pot. She always was dressed, had a little apron on, had her lipstick on. She was at the stove. And I was sitting under the phone that was on the wall. And it rang. And I answered it. And I remember my mother freezing, because she heard my answers when I said thank you for the scholarship. She froze. And I always wondered, well, why did she freeze? Well, this is their 17 year old daughter who’s gonna go off by their own part of the country. Brett Gilliland  04:33 Getting ready to go to their own part of the country. Elizabeth Connelly  04:34 Yes. So my path was quite different than my brothers and sisters. I went my senior year of high school. I picked a college that happened to be close to my brother that I had done things with my whole life. So I went to Rockhurst University. They accepted me before, in my senior year of high school. I never visited there. I didn’t know anything about it. But I will always credit the Jesuit education with how you think about the world and how you approach the world. When I came home from that, and I started college, I had a wonderful person who you meet with, and they help you with your curriculum, etc., your advisor. I remember telling– her name was Ursula, Ursula fall–and I remember telling her that I had wanted to be a lawyer, but I tried everything else. I tried computer science, I tried mathematics. I tried. I loved philosophy. I loved English. I tried all those things. When I got to my third year of college, she said to me, “do you know you could graduate this year? And you could have a double major in English and Philosophy?” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t.” She said, “Well, here’s what you’re going to take. And you’re going to graduate.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” And I didn’t know what to do. And at that time, businesses came on campus and interviewed you. Brett Gilliland  06:08 Yep. Elizabeth Connelly  06:09 So I interviewed at all those. I took a job. When I was a junior. Well, my last year, which was your my third year of college, I took a job in the management training program of what was then Famous Bar. Brett Gilliland  06:24 All right, yeah. Elizabeth Connelly  06:25 So as I got closer to graduating, she said, Ursula falls said to me, “you’re going to take the LSAT,” and I said, “Okay,” so I took the LSAT, my scores came back, they were okay. And she said, “you’re going to apply to law school.” I applied to one law school. I got in, and I said to her, “what am I going to do?” She said, “you’re going to go to law school.” And I said, “But I already accepted a job.” She said, “you’re going to tell them that you’re not going to take that job.” Brett Gilliland  06:58 Oh, wow. Elizabeth Connelly  06:59 And there started my career. So it’s fascinating when you look back, or I look at my children’s lives, the iterations that you go through as you explore what you may or may not want to do. I loved business, I loved mathematics, I love designing the big picture, if you would. I went to law school, when I was in law school, I had the good fortune of working in a firm for quite a while through graduation, etc. And I was allowed to try a case with one of the partners, they’re under what’s called rRule 13, you’re you’re not licensed, but you’re with a licensed person, before I had graduated, and it was a wrongful death case of a teenager. And I knew then I was 21 years old. I knew then, that the life of a litigator, which is up and down and up. In my mind, I wanted to have a family also, I wanted to be married someday, etc. And so I thought, I better do something different in my young, 21 year old mind. So I went and I interviewed at what was Center Bank, which is now Bank of America, after a number of iterations. And there I started my career. The day that I interviewed, I was hired. I was so lucky, but did not know it then, because I walked into an environment where someone was retiring. So there was a desk that had both institutional and personal money on that desk. I then grew up in a world where I did both. And so I was trained in both institutional money and personal money, which is very unusual, as you know, in our business, they’re very different. My clients were the people who started Anheuser Busch Ralston, Purina, Southwestern Bell. Those were my clients. And so I helped them both with their company dollars, and they didn’t have much personal dollars in the beginning. But then as they did, then you craft a plan for their personal wealth as well. Brett Gilliland  09:23 Which that’s where that designer thing comes back in, right? You talked about you like the big picture, and those are the things that you get passionate in the things that you do today. Elizabeth Connelly  09:29 Yes, yes. I love. I love what I do. W When I look backward, I feel incredibly fortunate for the experiences that I had. I was there for quite, quite a while I was recruited to Commerce Bank, so I ended up in the banking field, the longest part of my career. I was 12 years there, and I ran the personal trust division. So I had a lot of experience on both sides, as well as with people, and I love people and our business. We are so fortunate because everybody who we run across is different, right? Brett Gilliland  09:33 Yeah. Yep. Elizabeth Connelly  10:10 Everyone’s different. They have different dreams, goals, concerns. It’s all different. And we are trusted with that. Brett Gilliland  10:20 Right. Elizabeth Connelly  10:21 As you know, we often know more about a family than other family members may know. Yep. And just over the course of my career, I have developed relationships that span over 30 years, and I just looking backward, I just feel incredibly fortunate. Brett Gilliland  10:42 That’s great. That’s so great. And what a great career and a great, it’s still going, you’re still doing a great job and building the business that you’re building. So couple things come up for me in that story. So it’s funny, I when I was a child, so I’m an only child. So you’ve got, you know, seven siblings, and so we had different houses, right, mine was very quiet, yours was probably very, very noisy. And God bless your mom and your dad for doing that. And so but it was funny. So I played at my grandpa’s house, my grandpa was a banker, my dad was a banker, had an uncle that were bankers and some business owners and farmers. And so, but I just for some reason, knew early on, I want to be in business and the game, I would play as a kid, we would set my grandpa’s basement, and he had this little place that we would kind of make a makeshift office and Lindsay and Christina and Jennifer, my cousins, they would come in and they were all, they would all work for me. And they would come in and literally, the only thing I would do in this game is kind of sit at this desk, and they would come in and hand me a piece of paper. And I’d have to sign off on something. And so we joke about that to this day when I see him, which isn’t often enough, but how you as a child, the things that you start to do. I think if I was looking back, I would give those kids that are doing things now pay attention to that, right? Because that really matters of what maybe you can do. So to think about what you did, and your brother and so on, I thought was really cool. So as you can, let’s talk a little bit about– I don’t need to make this a male/female thing, but I think you know, having four kids, you know, it’s like they need their mom, right? They want to be with Mom, mom is important. They always joke that mom’s their favorite, right? And that’s okay. But as a professional woman, if you could give advice to that, that woman right now driving down the road, listen to this, that’s that’s wanting to raise a family but yet be a professional and build a career that you’ve built? What advice would you have for her? Elizabeth Connelly  12:27 I would first say to her, you can do it. It is overwhelming to think about being a wife, a mother and a business person. There are some days where you’re beyond exhausted. But I always thought to myself, we’re only privileged to do that right? For a short period of time. In my career, it was a different world. I can remember for years and years, being the only female in the room. I can remember being at board meetings, I was the only female even today in my role, if you would, there are not that many females, right? If it is something that a young woman wants to do. I say do it, you can do it. Fear, I sometimes think that people overthink things, right? And I think that’s from fear. Yeah, we all have that fear. The mind is an incredibly powerful thing. And every time that I feel fear, if you would, because we all do, right? We all especially if we’re tired, you feel fear, I would say to that young woman, you push that out of your mind, and you continue to tell yourself, you can do it. Brett Gilliland  13:50 So how do you, how do you do that? How do you just push it out of your mind? And before we even go there, you know, I thanked you on a text message but I want to publicly thank you for that. The St. Christopher rosary you sent me, right? So for those of you that listen, you probably hear me talk about my fear of flying eight years, it gives me chills thinking about it, actually. And so I just got back right and had this amazing trip, but you talked about the fear. And I always say the fears we put in our mind never blow up to the magnitude you put them in your mind to be. And that’s the case, but they are real like so there was no logic behind not wanting to get on the airplane. I knew the stats I knew it’s better likelihood I would get in a wreck drive into the airport than I would flying but again, there’s no logic behind it. And so for me, it was you sent me this rosary is a three step process. I had to pray and for me that thing was in my front right pocket the whole trip, right and whether I was hiking on a plane, wherever it’s at it was there. And so I thought a lot about that and how to push that. So is that something you would suggest? Whether it’s the prayer or whatever it may be? Is that like how do you just push it through your mind and let go of it? Elizabeth Connelly  14:54 It takes a lot of practice. Even today with different moments, I have to do that. I was very lucky when I was in college, there was a priest, who said to me, and I wrote it down on this envelope and kept it next to my bed stand in my dorm room. There is nothing you can’t do for just one day. And in my life, I’ve had to break that down into 15 minute increments sometimes. Brett Gilliland  15:26 And I broke. sorry to interupt, I broke it down, there’s nothing you can’t do for three hours and 10 minutes, because that was my first flight. Elizabeth Connelly  15:31 Okay, very good. You know, it’s interesting, because that has been in my mind, and every time there’s a fearful thought, an ugly thought, you know, the voices in your mind of things you want to say to people who’ve bothered you, if you would– I just, I say that, I say that to myself, and I push it out. If you are a person who is a person of faith, I have certain prayers, the routine prayers, for example, the Hail Mary, that the length it takes to say a Hail Mary pushes whatever that thought is out of your mind and it redirects it. And so you can do that you can quietly do that, wherever it is, you’re sitting. And I always felt like it was my job when I left my home in the morning, to put a smile on my face and leave it there regardless of whatever else was going on in my life. And I have also followed that. And so back to the to the young women, I say that to them. I say you keep a mirror on your desk, when you’re on the phone when someone’s challenging you when things are not going your way. Look in the mirror for a moment and see what your face looks like. Put a smile back on it. It’s amazing about putting a smile on your face. How that redirects you. Brett Gilliland  17:02 You can feel that energy, right? I mean, you talk about people you can feel it when somebody walks in a room, you can almost feel their energy. And I think it’s John Gordon’s book, The Energy Bus he talks about you can feel it almost radiate. I think it’s 10 or 15 feet. He talks about that you can feel somebody’s presence. And I think that’s, that’s part of that. Elizabeth Connelly  17:19 I agree with you. Brett Gilliland  17:20 Yeah, yeah. So what what would you say if I, if I was able to follow you with a camera back then right, go 10, 20, 30 years ago, whatever you want to do. Like what are the no-miss items that Elizabeth Connelly, that I would see that was in your daily lives, your daily habits back then, and even that probably still go on today. Elizabeth Connelly  17:42 What I would say to you is whatever I decided to do, I gave it my all. Whenever I was tired, I told myself, take a breath and keep doing it. I would say that my number one focus, in my mind, always was my family. So I will be married 38 years on December 21. This year, we have two children and they were hard to comeby. So Anna and Vinny and I, I will say that I made sure that as a female full-time working person, that I knew that somehow I could do it all. I made sure that with my children, most women in where I lived did not work. A W-2 job if you would, they were very involved in school and so forth. I made the choices at that time and I devoted my time with my children where I felt they would see me. So I made my choices to go on a field trip that they would be on to be present in the classroom, that sort of a thing. I actually had moms say they saw more of me than they did other people. But it was because the things I chose were in front of my children. So I didn’t run the wrapping paper I didn’t do some of the very important things because that was not in front of my children. So I always made sure that that was first and foremost. And I always did my job. I, in that day and age it was very different than now, and so a lot of it I don’t think people can really relate to today. You know, when you were going to have a baby for example, there was no leave there was no paid leave there was nothing like that. And so your fears were “is someone else, am I going to have a job when I come back?” You know, those were your fears. Brett Gilliland  19:56 Think about how far that’s come in 30 years? Elizabeth Connelly  19:58 Yes. As I went through my career, my biggest goal was that Anna, my daughter, who’s now 34, would not have to go through what I did. And I think for the most part, though, the women, the professional women have accomplished a lot in that regard, there’s still a long way to go. Brett Gilliland  20:22 Right. Elizabeth Connelly  20:22 There is, but it’s a lot better than it was in my day and age. So the routine things that I did that I do, I pay attention to my family, I pay attention to my job. I don’t, for me, personally, I never believed in work life balance, I believe in work life integration. Brett Gilliland  20:44 Love that. Elizabeth Connelly  20:45 So seven days a week, I tend to my family, and I tend to my clients, and I don’t discern the times, I don’t stop at any given time. And when a client, one of my biggest work behaviors is, when a client has a question, that’s when they need an answer. And that could be whatever time of day it is. And I’ve always made that a point, I don’t shut my life, either part of my life down. Brett Gilliland  21:17 I love that. Okay, so I think when I hear there from your conversation is one of my favorite quotes is “the abundance of and versus the tyranny of the or,” and so I heard in your remarks where I can be a mom and a wife and a professional woman, right? I could be a mom and and still go to the field trip and still work and do those things. Right. So when you hear that “the abundance of the and versus the tyranny of the or” what are your thoughts on that? Elizabeth Connelly  21:47 I absolutely agree with what you’re saying and on, I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s a very difficult thing. And I think women, women give 100% or 150% of themselves to whatever it is they decide to undertake. And so it is very hard, but it’s very gratifying. And I will say being on the other side of it, I having done it for as long as I have, you can do it. I don’t know how, how to stress to women, the the world in which we live now, the 20 year olds, the 30 year olds, the world they face is, is difficult. Yeah, it’s very, very hard. And I feel like to my children, I say, “just believe you can do it, every action you have, believe you can do it.” And I think that that gets you through some of what’s going on in our world, and gives you some hope, if you would, that it can be done. So always do the “and.” Brett Gilliland  22:54 I love that. I love that. And so you see on the microphones here, you know, the “f greater than p” the future greater than your past. And as you know, our firm’s mission statement is helping people achieve a future greater than their past. And so when you hear that, and you being you know, what 7, 8, 9 months into, into Visionary, how does that connect with you? And what does that mean to you and your role that what you do every day? I loved that about the firm. I just love that saying, if you would. My belief with my clients always was that I had a responsibility for their tomorrow’s that not just today, right? You have what you have today. But what we’re concerned about is tomorrow, and how do we get to tomorrow? And how do we get to tomorrow with all the gyrations that happen and the things that go on in people’s lives? So because that’s been my belief, my whole career, or responsibility for my clients, tomorrow’s, I felt it fit exactly in line with what visionary does. Brett Gilliland  23:55 That’s great, too. And you’re right, because your tomorrow’s, it’s our job, I think, to think about their tomorrow’s right? Because you’re so focused those people out and out in the world, you know, run around doing their lives. They’re, they’re busy, right? They’re chasing kids, they’re working, they’re doing whatever in their own business. It’s our job to think about that tomorrow. So what advice would you have whether you’re in wealth management, or you’re an attorney, whatever it may be, and again, male, female, doesn’t matter. But what advice would you have for them to always say kicking down doors, right? You got to go out and make things happen. You got to take action. That’s one of the circuits of the Circuit of Success is Action. What was that action like for you? And how did you have the confidence to go out and do that? So I forced myself to take a public speaking class when I was in college. It was the hardest thing I ever did. But I knew that you have to do that. Right? I would tell any young person if you haven’t done that, do that. Toastmasters is something that’s out there. If you’re already in the professional world, do that. You have to be able to speak. Brett Gilliland  24:57 Yeah, that’s number one. Elizabeth Connelly  25:00 Once you can speak with regard to how do you get a network? How do you get clients? That sort of thing? I joined every group that I could, I was very active in the Bar Association, very active in groups. So I would try to align myself with other professional women. So who were in different fields, right? Brett Gilliland  25:24 Yep. Elizabeth Connelly  25:25 So that I broadly could get to know people. And women will support women. So that meant a lot to me. And I still, I believe that to be true today. So whatever groups that someone can align themselves with, that’s how you get to know people. That’s how you tell your story. Even in your everyday life, I would go to exercise with four other women every morning at 5:30. So we would go to exercise, and these women were from different, you just roll out of your bed, brush your teeth, and that’s what you look like. But we all talked about business, it was fun. I can talk about business in the grocery store line when someone’s talking to me, because it’s a part of my life, right? I listen to people, I catch what they say. As far as getting clients in your early career, what I think people fail to realize is, it doesn’t happen in one year or two years. It maybe starts in 10 years. And so you have to know that you’re going to get some but your phone’s not going to ring, right? Brett Gilliland  26:40 Right, absolutely. Couldn’t afford it, right? Elizabeth Connelly  26:41 You are going to be out there doing the work. And even at the 10 year mark, you’ve built a group of people who know you. It’s still not a shoe in that your phone’s going to ring. And I told myself, early in my career, we had nothing. We had student loan debt, we had no money, we had nothing. I couldn’t be the person who took doughnuts to a meeting or took everybody out to lunch.  I didn’t have the money. And so I told myself that what I would do is I would do three things. Confidentiality means everything to me. And I tell anybody that I’m with who shares anything with me that they want me to know it, that’s where it will stay. They want someone else to know it. They have to tell them because I won’t. I also communicate. And I communicate more, I believe, than a lot of people. I answer every single question, and I don’t wait to answer it. I will even respond to an email and say, I need to think about that. And I’ll get back with you on Friday. Brett Gilliland  27:53 Yeah. Elizabeth Connelly  27:53 I answer every question. Brett Gilliland  27:55 That’s powerful. Elizabeth Connelly  27:57 The other thing that I do is I stay true to my word. If I tell somebody, I’m going to do it, life happens, right? Sometimes you can’t things change. I tell them, I tell them in the right amount of time. And then I make it up. Brett Gilliland  28:12 Yeah. Elizabeth Connelly  28:13 I never, ever forget where something came from. So if someone way back in my career was the first person who introduced me to someone who today has become a source of clients, if you would. I always give that credit. And I never forget that. And I believe that if you are that kind of a person, the right things follow. In my career now, honestly, my phone rings and its reputation if you would, but I worked on that. I worked on that for years. And I think that that’s what people can set you apart if you would. Brett Gilliland  28:56 I would say that number one is a young person watching my parents  their gentleness with us. But always those seeds that were planted that I didn’t know, right? Until I was an adult. And to your point that doesn’t happen overnight. You know, things happen. I’ve been doing this for now 20, almost 21 years next month. And so it things that happen now I’m like, oh, oh, that’s right. That’s how that happened. Because it’s been 21 years of going out and building relationships. And I’ve ran an executive forum for 10 plus years of six or seven guys that we get together that we all run businesses in different industries to your point. And that’s been a game changer for me to spend time with people and hear a different perspective than just what my perspective is. And the people around me. Right? I think that’s important. It’s, my dad always said, it’s who you surround yourself with and the books you read. I just thought he didn’t like my friends. Right? But, but, but it’s true, right? And so I tell that to my kids now it’s all about who you surround yourself with. And so for you and you look about look like that, who was that mentor for you or who was that source of education, if you will, to how to get to the next level and stay at the next level? And may not have liked. Elizabeth Connelly  30:09 That’s right. Yeah, I would say it starts there, then I would absolutely credit when I was in college, my academic advisor, why she was given to me, I don’t know. And also another individual, I was on a work study program and financial aid. And he was the head of the admissions office. To this day, I am in communication with, with him with his wife. And he has referred a number of people to me, who have referred a number of people to me, and on down the line. Those, watching those individuals who were incredibly humble, and just true to who they were, made a huge difference to me. And I would say that they are the ones who gave me the foundation for how I wanted to behave in my life. Brett Gilliland  31:07 So when you when you look about how you behave in your life, I think it’s important to think about the future, we talked about future greater than your past, right? Think about the future, be thankful for the past, also learn from the past, but also live in the moment. So you get those three paradigms, right? You get the future, you get the past, you get the present, what have you done, personally, and professionally to try to live in all three of those, if you will, if that makes any sense? Elizabeth Connelly  31:33 It does make sense. And what I would say is, I reflect periodically on the past, because we all learn from the past. Everyone has a story to tell. And life is not an easy thing. I take the learning from that. I don’t ever want to hold on to any fear or bitterness or whatever it was on that scenario. So that’s the past, now I really focus on enjoying the moment enjoying what’s here right now, enjoying my family, enjoying my clients. But you have to intentionally do that. Because your mind wanders, right? You have to tell yourself to settle down and enjoy just sitting and being with people. That’s hard because we’re driven, right? We’re on to the next thing. So I work hard at settling down into the moment. The future. I’m a big planner, I’m the big picture person, I do that for everybody in my life, right, every one of my clients, etc. So I can’t help but be that person, the big picture person. But I devote, I devote time to that. But then I tell myself, okay, it’s an order, I document my cat, you should see my calendar. I live off my calendar, right? And I documented and I give myself time to think about different things so that it relieves my mind to be present in the moment. So I’ll actually dock at my calendar for whatever that big picture thing is that I’m going to think about that on Saturday at two o’clock in the afternoon. Brett Gilliland  33:16 So you book it? Elizabeth Connelly  33:17 Yes, I do. Brett Gilliland  33:18 And so people are getting, probably get tired of hearing me say this, but I talked about strategic think time all the time. So for years, I mean, you can see these black journals over here, you can see the black arrow here. It’s been the same one since July of 2005. And for me, that that time to just sit and think is is crucial. It’s probably some of the most important time and and people say I don’t understand, I’m busy, I think personally that you talked about Saturday at two o’clock whenever you put on your calendar. That’s some of the most important time of the week in my opinion. Elizabeth Connelly  33:48 I agree. Brett Gilliland  33:49 Yeah, so what, what would you tell the 40 year old Elizabeth, what advice would you give her looking back now? Elizabeth Connelly  33:59 Take the chance. What I mean by that is in when I was in my 40s, so you’re you’re into your career a bit, you have your family and you’re raising your family. And again I, not focused on fear but but it’s very real to people right? Brett Gilliland  34:19 Absolutely. Elizabeth Connelly  34:20 And people don’t talk about it, they hide that they hide and what I would say to myself is that looking backward, if you believe it will work out somehow or some pattern of it will work out and so lean into it, do it. That’s what I would tell my 40 year old self. Brett Gilliland  34:42 Yeah that’s, that’s great advice. To lean in, just do it, take the risk, feel the fear. Do it. Anyway where they say fear is false evidence as appearing real right so it’s mostly false right? But it appears real, but you do you have to jump through it and I call it the comfort zone callus right? You get this circle, the more we go up against our comfort zone, we start to build a callus and we just won’t bust through it. So you got to learn to go a different route to then get around the callus and go make it happen, then your comfort zone starts to expand, right? And now the things that 20 years ago scared the daylights out of me now it’s like, “Well, that’s easy,” right? And now the fear of flying, well, I can’t wait for my next trip, right? And to go, but you got to get through the comfort zone, which isn’t always easy. So you got to take that first step. So what would you say your dreams are now? Right? You’ve had a successful career, you’re here, you’re still successful? What are the dreams now? Elizabeth Connelly  35:38 My biggest dream is really for my family, right? We all just want our children to be happy and healthy. And whatever they’re exploring in their work life. That becomes your dream, right? It becomes your dream, you live that. So my husband and I feel very much that way about the kids. That’s number one. For myself, I get asked all the time when I’m going to retire like people are afraid I’m going to retire. I’m never going to retire. Brett Gilliland  36:05 Yeah. Elizabeth Connelly  36:06 I love to use my brain. And I, I feel so fortunate that in our job, it’s it is a brain job, right? It’s not a physical job. That could be prohibitive, if you would. So I, when I look at our future, I am hoping that the kids are situated and good that Pat and I do get a little bit more time to do things right time to be together. Yet, I would still, just like I do now, I just do my– he drives me around everywhere. So that I can do my work. Like my family’s used to that. And so I’m always getting driven around. And I just I want to the people in my life is what I where I want to focus if you would. Brett Gilliland  36:56 That’s beautiful. Beautiful. So last couple things. Any books you’d recommend that people read? I know we talked briefly about reading, do you have one that sticks out? If not, it’s not a big deal. But if you have any books that stick out. Elizabeth Connelly  37:03 The only one that sticks out in my mind is there is a lean in book. Brett Gilliland  37:13 Yeah. Sheryl Sandberg? Elizabeth Connelly  37:15 Yes. Yeah. And I think women in particular should read that book. Yep. I gave it to my daughter when it first came out. And it’s just, it’s an easy read. And, and it’s just valuable. Brett Gilliland  37:28 Yeah, she had a, an amazing post. She just announced her retirement from Facebook. And so she’s stepping away from that. But she had an amazing post for people that are on social media go look her up and go read her retirement post. It was, it was awesome. I read the whole thing. And it was a really cool thing about being a mom and being a professional, you know, at the same time and all that she’s accomplished. And she lost her husband. And so just, just an amazing story. So again, if you if you could leave, I always call it the kind of your closing argument, if you will, your closing speech or halftime talk, whatever you want to call it. What’s that one more piece of advice, maybe if you’ve already said it, but if you, if you just said that’s that’s the Elizabeth Connelly battlecry. Like, I know, if you do this, you will be successful long term, because that’s what matters. Decide your convictions, practice them every single day and believe you can do it. Brett Gilliland  38:26 I love that. So practice your convictions, believe in them. Do them every day. So not like I was– this is a much different thing. But we don’t say brush your teeth. You know, if it’s two times a day, that doesn’t mean do it 14 times on Sunday. Right? Elizabeth Connelly  38:41 Correct. Brett Gilliland  38:41 It’s two times a day. And you build that daily habit. So to your point, right there is whatever your convictions are do them every single day, and you’ll be successful fair? Elizabeth Connelly  38:50 Yes. Brett Gilliland  38:51 Awesome. Well, Elizabeth, thanks so much for being on The Circuit of Success. This has been an absolute blast. I was looking forward to interviewing you and again, thanks so much. Just your kind note the kindness of your heart just to send that, that deal to me and give me peace because when that door shut on the on the airplane in my mind, that was gonna be the worst moment of my life and this calmness, literally, it gives me chills again, this calmness came over the airplane, and good to fly the bird, and then you realize it’s not a big deal. Yes, a few little bumps here and there, but that’s not a big deal. So thank you again, and thanks for your time today and your wisdom and everything you’re gonna share with our listeners. So thank you. Elizabeth Connelly  39:26 Thank you.

Brian Bradley is the Vice President of Brand Development and Strategic Programs at Egoscue, Inc.  The Egoscue Method provides safe, effective and permanent relief from chronic pain without prescription painkillers or invasive surgery. Brian has been on a deep, soul-based mission to help millions of people learn how to live healthier, pain-free lives.  As a Posture-Pain-Performance coach, his clients include Tony Robbins, the NFL, the PGA, MLB and NBA among others.  Though these clients are amazing, it’s the normal, in-the-trenches person who really excites Brian.  He loves helping them dig deep into their structure to realize “you’re not broken…you’re just bent, a bit”… and get them to their next level. URL for podcast listeners to get the eCises:    www.egoscue.com/Podcast  Instagram @egoscuemethod  @thebrianbradley  Facebook @The Egoscue Method  @TheBrian Bradley  EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION: Brett Gilliland   Welcome to The Circuit of Success. I’m your host, Brett Gilliland, and I am with the Brian Bradley. Brian Bradley. What’s up, buddy?  Brian Bradley  Buddy? How are you? I love that “the” Brian Bradley, you know, there’s two ways that I want to spell my name and some people misspell it, they put the A before the “I”. And I send it back. I just send back a thank you there like for what? And I’m like, I’ve always wanted my name spelled that way. But you’ll learn by the end of this podcast that it really doesn’t pertain to who I am. But “the” Brian Bradley is, yeah, that’s my Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff. Because I’m not that narcissistic. I’m not that narcissistic. I am on social media, which means I am partially narcissistic. But it’s because the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey player he owned Brian Bradley, he wouldn’t sell it to me. So I had to go with the “the”.  Brett Gilliland “The.” So you see Ohio State? I think they just put a little deal on that word. “The” Ohio State University.  Brian Bradley  Yeah, they trademarked it to the Ohio State University. The question is, can “The” University of Miami use it? Can you know–– Brett Gilliland   “The” Eastern Illinois University where I went? Brian Bradley   Or mine You know, I won’t even mention where mine was.  Brett Gilliland   That’s funny. Well, hey, man, it was I was on a trip recently. And in Tahoe and my buddy Chad Coates started talking about this, the Egoscue method. And I was like, man, I’ve never heard of this. And he literally, we talked about it for like the next 10 or 15 minutes on a way to go hiking in Tahoe in the mountains. And it was amazing. I went to your website, he was talking about it. He also hired a therapist that works in your Del Mar office, which is in San Diego, for those not in the area. Taylor O’Rourke worked with her. And here’s a guy man that is just raving about this. And I sent you a message last week. And now here we are, and you’re fired up to talk about the Egoscue method. So before we dive into all that, maybe just give us a little bit of lay of the land, and what’s made you the man you are today and what’s gotten you to where you’re at. Brian Bradley   Well, behind me on my TV, you’ll see these little white cards, one right there. And one over there. Yep, those are the funeral cards from my parents. So they both died the year before COVID. Thank God, because they didn’t have to deal with COVID. My dad had dementia–– remind me to tell you the story about him in physical therapy in the leg, you know, progressive leg pressure pads, and I’ll tell you about that. But you know, to be honest, it’s it’s, uh, your past can a lot of times dictate who you are. Now, that can either work for you or that can work, you know, against you. So, you know, the great Tony Robbins would always use that. And I’m sure he pulled it from somebody like Jim Rohn or somebody where he says, Is your life working for you, or is your life working against you. And you know, my life works absolutely for me. You’re looking at the most selfish human on the planet, I do not invite drama and drama tries to get in. And that even goes for people in chronic pain, the drama of having an injury.  I was blessed enough 30 years ago, 30 plus this year, to run into a gentleman named Pete Egoscue, who fixed himself coming out of the Vietnam War. He realized that the human body had the capability, you know, your god or your universe provides things for you. And his was in the jungles of Vietnam. You know, we had a command in front of them and they were walking by him and somebody puts their fists up. He dropped to the ground, they dropped to the ground, he walks in front and goes “What do you see?” And ahead of them was a young lady who was unrattling herself from all the stuff she had on, put down her basket of whatever, let’s call it rice, vegetables, whatever. Standing there, squatted down and gave birth. She wrapped the baby up umbilical cord still intact, picked up the product and walked back to her village. And at that point, he said he didn’t realize it at the time, but he remembered it. That’s how resilient the human body really is. It can basically do anything at once. You’ll see all the people like following a Wim Hof or looking at my Instagram doing the cold water immersion.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah. Brian Bradley   It’s not easy, but it’s all psychological. So you can overcome, so when we used to John Lynch, Demetrius DuBose, Tony best Sally Trent Dilfer, anybody in the NFL back in the day we’d have the summer camps and I’d always hear Pete, of course, the Navy Seal and the in the Marine Corps running through his head. “Your mind will quit far before your body ever will.” And when you keep hearing that mantra, “your mind will quit far before your body ever will.” So don’t give into the mind. “Don’t give into the monkey mind.” You’ve heard people say that kind of stuff. Get out of your head and into your heart. Trust your instinct. Your instinct isn’t to… on that pue, that we have behind our clinic isn’t to ring the bell. Your your instinct is to “man I really wish I could go on another one.” And instead of saying “but I can’t.” We might want to ask a better question. “What would your life be like if you did?” So I have chronic pain people all the time, who we try to talk to, we don’t try because Yoda doesn’t like try. So we talk to them. Just do it and get them to understand that their body is enough. The injury is there for them, it’s not to them. So for example, my son plays Division One soccer, his whole life, he’s been training for this his whole life, he wants to go pro. Okay, great. I’ll support it any way I can. How I supported it, when he was younger, I took him to the playground three to five days a week, two hours at a time and made him made him stay for two to three hours at a time while I worked on the bench, you know, doing this or doing talking or phone calls or whatever. Getting him to realize that 360 degree movement, at that age developed into a six foot two left foot in 4.4 seconds zero to, you know, 40 yard dash, I’m gonna set zero to 60, 40 yard dash athlete, that if I had him on a US football team, he’d be very strong in the middle going across the middle catching balls. But I cared for his brain too much. So I put him into soccer, which he loved. And I love the you know, diversity of the sport, from every race known to man or woman to coaches who have no freaking clue how to talk to a teenage boy. So they have to come over that emotional adversity. I’m coaching them through it, I’m actually writing a book called “Moron” and it’s gonna have coach underneath it. It’s not true. But I think it’s a great name of a book if you want to write one with me. Because these guys, a lot of times, they don’t take into account what for example, that that soccer player at Stanford who took her own life, the stress that she was under at the D1 level, not blaming the coach only. I am partially because people don’t listen real well. They don’t see the signs they’re not trained in doing this, they want the best out of that commodity that they’re paying for, which is the college athlete. So for us, the college athlete, the high school athlete, the, the adolescent athlete, the grandfather, all of them could be in a sport like CrossFit working out together. Pickleball is every age and it’s the number one growing sport in the US right now. Number one in injury, surpassing CrossFit now, because everybody loves it, they love the community of it. I love both of them because of the community. But when you take a body that’s misaligned, like this, this picture over my left shoulder, when you miss when you misaligned that body, that’s the perfect blueprint. And you take it to the sport, I don’t care what it is picking up your baby off the couch, getting up off the toilet, walking upstairs, soccer, rugby, I don’t care what it is, your body has a blueprint for how it should move. And the bad part is that the body finds another way to move to still get you from point A to point B because it’s very, very smartly designed. But it’s so inefficient or noxious that it leads into chronic symptoms, or something more devastating. And people out there with sciatic pain, femoral nerve pain, thoracic outlet, TMJ symptoms, chronic migraines, they know what we’re talking about.  Brett Gilliland  Yeah, absolutely. And so let’s let’s dive right into this stuff. And we’ll talk more about the Egoscue method and exactly what it is. But you see me grab my shoulder here, my left shoulder, so I’ve been in pain for a week with it, right? And so what is it that you do and I know it’s around exercising and different kinds of––not like going out and lifting weights and all that stuff, but kind of walk us through, you know, and I can be your guinea pig or pick any kind of story you want. Walk us through what you’re doing, how you’re serving the people and how you’re making a difference in their life.  Brian Bradley   Okay, so all of this ties back to a gospel because I do a bazillion things from a biohacking standpoint. But it’s only because I speak at so many different biohackings from you know, the podcast idea with Dave Asprey to all the way to biohacking Congress, whatever. But at the center of all that is Egoscue. So I can reach out to this thing over my shoulder here, the bio charger PEMF pulsed electromagnetic field, my cold plunge in the garage, which I’ll show you a little bit on here. The, not the infrared sauna, but the regular 180 degree sauna that I put in. But those are all bio hacks. But without the Egoscue portion at the middle as the basis of the foundation, it’s like building a house with nothing drilled into the ground. Eventually the wind and rain are gonna blow that thing down. So look at this guy. 56 year old guy. What are you tell me what you see there? He’s an Ironman triathlete out of Kona, what do you see? Brett Gilliland   I see some shapes on his shoulder like they’re going straight down and his head is bending forward and it looks like maybe his back is arched a little bit, basically. Brian Bradley   Well, I actually I want you to look really close there. He looks like he overdosed on a drug called no Asset Hall. Yep, get it because he has No Ass. At All. Sorry, I just slowed that joke down. But here he is. 12 minutes later. Brett Gilliland  Wow. Brian Bradley   How did that happen? Because he did the work. His sideview picture you’re saying 12 minutes, not 12 months, 12 minutes, which is why I don’t mark it that picture because it’s it’s it’s unsellable. People are like, but thank God he had a tattoo. Because I can at least say that’s the same guy.  Brett Gilliland  Yeah.  Brian Bradley   Or for your female customer coming in and talking about this. Where are you… Here? She came in with chronic symptoms. Check out the one in the gray pants versus the one in the black. Tell me what the difference is. Brett Gilliland  Postures huge, the leaning over the midsection, I mean, there’s all sorts of stuff in that picture. Brian Bradley  Spoken like a true male who did not go to look how much thinner and in shape she looks?  Brett Gilliland Well, I was trying to come up with a word for that. But yeah, you’re absolutely right.  Brian Bradley   You don’t want to get a hashtag. So leave it to me. She couldn’t believe it. But all it really was was opening up the floodgates, meaning if somebody was sitting in front of me, and she’d say, “I’m fat,” and I’d go like this, “I agree.” And her eyes open up like this, like “What? I didn’t ask you to agree.” I said, “Oh, no, there’s a difference. You and I spell fat differently. You spell it FAT I spell it PHA T because PHAT is part of the lymphatic word. You are lymph system blocked.” And when her body moved back to the right skeletal performance level. Posture is everything without having to think about it getting the body to change on it and create its resilience in its own way. Organically versus you going, “Oh, stand up straight.” That’s not what I’m asking for. I’m asking you to do the exercise. That’ll do it for you. The lymph system will respond and that was her going. “Uh my back feels amazing. But look at how much better I look.” Which is really what people have to look at in the mirror every day. I’m in my mid 50s. What are you in your late 30s?  Brett Gilliland  I love you, 44.  Brian Bradley  Okay, I’m not stupid. But you look in the mirror, we all looked in the mirror this morning and said, “well, parts aren’t where they used to be,” you know, that kind of stuff? Yeah. Well kill that self judgment and say what could I do on a daily basis, a small two millimeter shift, a minimal dose of Egoscue that moves me back just like that 58 year old Ironman triathlete who was looking for his, he wanted to get another PR before he quit doing Iron Man’s. There’s no way he was going to get it with kyphosis and rounding of his upper back and head forward. Not a chance because he was running, biking, swimming. Let’s call it biking, swimming, swimming, biking, running, with a shoulder that was driving everything. So you mentioned your left shoulder. What did I just tell you? What did the story about? What did I tell you about your left shoulder? Brett Gilliland   I’m leading with that?  Brian Bradley   Correct? We didn’t mention anything about your shoulder. But we just taught you that maybe your left shoulder is trying to make up for something at your pelvis. They may not be balanced. So do me a favor, stand up and take your shoes off.  Brett Gilliland  Okay. Brian Bradley   You do have pants on right? Like, folks, he has pants on? We’re good. We’re in the Zoom world. Okay, but close your eyes and just stand there for a second and anybody listening to this as long as you’re not driving, actually, even if you’re driving: Are you sitting balanced? Left cheek versus right cheek? Where are you sitting? So with your eyes closed? Right? Where are you located? Left to right front to back? Are you evenly standing? Or is one foot carrying more weight than the other? And is in it? Is the weight in one foot in a different place than the other?  Brett Gilliland  Yeah, I feel like, I feel like I’m leaning more left. But I feel like there’s more weight on my right.  Brian Bradley  Okay, so maybe your torso is slightly rotated or leaning one direction but your hips– Brett Gilliland   I feel like my left side is out more than my right side.  Brian Bradley   Correct. So this this is why you know more about your body than anybody else because you live in it every day asking that question that question right there is a subjective waiting for the subjects response. But it’s given me so much information, because maybe your left shoulder is reacting to the overload of the right foot. Where is it in each foot more weight in the heel is one in the heel the others in the ball of the foot? Where’s that? Brett Gilliland It feels the right one is in the back of the foot and the left one feels like it’s in the front of the foot.  Brian Bradley  1 So imagine you lining up for a putt and you’re loaded right heel left ball of the foot. You may be pushing all your putts to the right and I don’t even know how I don’t even know if you play golf.  Brett Gilliland   You’re damn right. I do and I’ve got a big golf match on Saturday and I pushed all my putts right.  Brian Bradley   So what could you do without I’m gonna give you some exercises of course for everybody but what can you change right now in golf, if you know your weights in the heel of your right foot and the ball of your left foot, I would say to you put your big toe into the ground on the right foot.  Brett Gilliland Okay. Brian Bradley   That instantly changes the weight from the heel to the ball the foot.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah.  Brian Bradley And now you can close over the ball a little further instead of pushing it to the right. Brett Gilliland That’s a big help.  Brian Bradley   I only asked for 10% of the gross.  Brett Gilliland  Okay, well, as an amateur, it will be a lot.  Brian Bradley  Exactly. I don’t want the tax implications anyway.  Brett Gilliland  Okay, okay we’ll get through that.  Brian Bradley  So whether you play golf or whether you play rugby, or whether you’re doing CrossFit or whether you’re doing Jazzercise, pickleball, ping pong, I don’t care what it is, we give you the most efficient way to function by you understanding through the education that we offer, so that somebody can say, “Wait a second, Brian just said my chronic shoulder pain is here serving me versus working against me. God, I need a massage.” No, when I get a massage it’s because I want a massage. Not need a massage. There’s a massive difference between the two.  Absolutely right.So how do we fix that? Right so I mean, everything you just did in the one and a half minutes it took you to diagnose why missing my putts? Right? Because this just comes out of nowhere. So being in Tahoe last week, I Goffs I was I was hiking. I don’t know why. But all of a sudden, I just started having this pretty, you know, immense pain from here into my lower upper back into my bicep. You know, obviously, maybe I pulled a muscle I have no idea but––  or it’s nerve pain coming from your neck. Yeah. So maybe it doesn’t bother me which one it is I not asleep. For the listeners. I’m gonna say a bad word hear. I really don’t give a poop. Yeah, yeah. Right. Because I learned from Pete Egoscue 30 some years ago that the symptom is an opportunity, my son with a broken foot. He’s four months out now we’re doing all kinds of crazy stuff. He’s getting back into training twice this weekend. You’ve never seen a human male cry as hard as he did during the game when he broke it because he was having the game of his life. D1 starting position, blah, blah, blah, blah, I’m finally there. Boom, he takes a step pushes off and he hears crack. And he goes, “Wow, I just broke my spike.” And he took one more step. And he goes, “that’s not my soul plate that I broke.” In his mind. It was his soul that he broke, because he worked so hard to get where he was. So he’s looking at me. And he’s like, why are you smiling? This was later of course, when I knew it was okay to do it without getting punched by your 20 year old. I said, “I’m so happy you broke your foot.” He’s like “what do you mean?” Brian Bradley  I said, “There are points in life where you need to learn the hard way. And this is that moment right now, this will set you up for the next seven to 10 years when you’re playing D1 at at a further level, and then eventually playing at a pro level. So if that’s what you decide to do, I couldn’t care if he was a clarinet player. He’s gonna be the most functional clarinet player on the market. So that’s the unfortunate thing about having me as a father. But the reason I was happy about it is that I went to: what an opportunity to get functional. So I found a physical therapist who I knew worked from a whole body functional level, because he’s not going to listen to me because I’m a moron, I’m his dad, right?. Even though we have the top, top, top, top top players around the world coming to see us. I think he may only start listening to me when I actually get Ronaldo to work with us which which is coming soon. It’s coming soon. Brett Gilliland   Dang. Brian Bradley   But from the standpoint of changing your mind, now it’s–– I took him to another guy, a chiropractor in Arizona named Sean Drake, over at Athlete Chiropractic, unbelievable stuff that he uses with pulse with the shockwave treatments with DC current with manipulation with dry needling. It’s all different than what I do remember that circle in the middle is Egoscue. And then outside of that is dry needling, this, this, this, this, this, this this. So what I do is you do this in the center, and then I’ll give you the best treatment somewhere outside PMF, cold water therapy, sauna, all that stuff. But it’s what you can do at home. So that’s what I wanted these guys to really reinforce. And they helped switch his psychology to “oh, I’ll be ready.” Here was here were his words. “I’m feeling dangerous.” And I’m like, Oh my God, thank you. Because that’s where we needed to go from. I’m broken.  Brett Gilliland   Bottom to the top.  Brian Bradley  Let’s go and sometimes you need some mentors around you different than the people you live with. You know, so I may bring him to you Brett to go okay, look, here’s what Brett does. Let’s say my son’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to have a very successful podcast.” You know what, I’m gonna have you intern with Brett for a week just to see what he does or listen to it or go see what he does. Give him some people who are the experts at this kind of stuff. And I just happen to be the second best in the world at what we do. Because Peter Egoscue is the best. So when you look at this kind of stuff, I don’t say that to be braggadocious. I don’t even know if that’s a word. My dad taught English, I’m in trouble. I look at it and say, It’s with such certainty that when I looked at you and said, his left shoulder is serving him, He looks like he played golf. I had no idea. If you do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you’re going, now I understand why I push my putts to the right and to your listeners, we had no discussion prior to. Brett Gilliland  Zero. Brian Bradley It was a guesstimate on my end, based on what I know golfers act like and look like here’s the tough part. You actually hiked that entire week or weekend in Tahoe, and your left shoulder and neck drove the hike. Yes. Rather than your ankle dorsi and plantar flexion, inversion eversion. These are just terms for what your ankle does and your foot does. Well, then your knee has to bend and extend, okay, then your hip has to flex and extend. But your hips not flexing and extending so your shoulder takes over and does that. Brett Gilliland   That’s exactly, what you just did there like leaning, like that’s what it feels like. Like when I lean forward like that and put some stress on it. And it actually feels better than when I’m just sitting here calmly with good posture. It actually hurts down my arm right here.  Brian Bradley Well, because you’re sitting on, you’re not rooted at the chair, your hips are so far out of position. So do me a favor, just relax and feel that shoulder again while you’re sitting there. Feel it? Brett Gilliland  Yep.” Brian Bradley Don’t move your shoulders. But roll your pelvis. So you get taller, you’re an anterior tilt. So you’re off your tailbone and you’re onto those sit bones underneath your hips. Now instantly what changed about your shoulder?  Brett Gilliland  Less pressure.  Brian Bradley   This isn’t rocket science.  Brett Gilliland  Right.  Brian Bradley   I mean, I was just dumb enough. Now I’ll take it a step further. Peter Egoscue was just dumb enough with a political science degree Marine Corps major combat veteran to go. You know what, it’s not up to the doctors to do this. It’s up to me to help them and figure it out. And I luckily ran into him coming out of university, heading back to school for another degree because I wasn’t enough. Until I found out what the true secret was. Here’s McGregor, that’s in the Khabib fight in the blue and the black shorts. How’s he supposed to breathe when he’s stuck like that?  Brett Gilliland   You can’t.  Brian Bradley   So I got him 12 days before the green fight, which is cowboy. That’s the posture change. And he won in 44 seconds. Very smart athlete. Very smart. He basically said, “I totally understand what you’re saying. My hip drives my foot, my foot drives back up and boom, here comes the punch.” Whereas before that I said, “Where’s the power come from?” And he’s like, “it comes from my arm mate, you don’t want to get hit,” you know I’m doing a horrible Irish accent. But I’m like,” No, this is the delivery of the tip of the whip. What’s snapping the whip at the base?” And nothing was snapping the whip at the base. But Khabib snapped the whip at the base. Because it was like the Rocky 4 movie. He trained in the snow and the trees and Russell bears. Connor trained on a bike.  Brett Gilliland   My silence of just just trying to understand it all. Let it all process so so what do you do? Like how do you help Conor McGregor in that deal? I mean, the picture was dramatic for those that can’t see it. Go to YouTube, check it out. So what are you working on? Or what can we be working on? What can I be working on for the shoulder? Pick your pick your deal? What are we doing at home?  Brian Bradley   So why don’t we get you up and run you through a couple of exercises.  Brett Gilliland   Let’s do it.  Brian Bradley   And you can be the model like you’d be the Vanna White. I’ll be the other guy, Jack, Jack, whatever it is. Okay, and shout out to Vanna White. It’s amazing. Okay, so back up a little bit. Find what you call a comfortable stance. Let’s take everybody get home, get on YouTube, go to his page. Check this out. Trust me when I tell you it’s well worth it to run through these couple exercises. It’s an absolute game changer. So shoes are off. If you want you can stand in front of a mirror and look in the mirror and see if your shoulders are level. See if your feet are straight. Look at this picture over my left shoulder. That’s how it should look. So Brett, with your eyes closed, we knew your weight was in your heel heavier on the right ball of the foot on the left but it feels like your torsos twisted or cricket or something.  Brett Gilliland Yes.  Brian Bradley  Okay. So turn your feet perfectly straight. And then take them five degrees. Pigeon toe like literally five degrees in and get them that’s probably too much. I can already tell by your knees. You may have gone too much. Put your fist between your big toes. That’s how wide your feet should be apart. So I brought you closer because we’re going to strengthen you with your feet this wide. So when you get into the golf stance, bro, you’re going to kill the ball because you if you’re strong here, you’re massively strong out here. So now, take your hands and put them in this position. So here’s a fist, open it up so your fingernails and palms could touch your thumbs are like in a hitchhike position. Put that against your temples like this. Shoulders down away from your ears, and close your elbows together. Now your dress shirt might be tough on this. You’re almost like Tommy Boy, “fat guy in a little coat.” Okay, here we go. Close them together. Come on, touch those elbows and open them all the way back. Yeah, there’s a good one, give me about 15 of those keep going. For those of you that are just watching or you want to hear why. Or you’re looking at the screen, there’s a muscle right here, called the psoas muscle, this long red piece, I’ll show you another one. This long black piece right here. That muscle attaches to the inside of the leg into the spine. And we call it the circuit breaker. We’re now turning on the circuit breaker but the work is at the shoulders. That’s why we have your feet five degrees turned in. So this is exactly what Taylor would have done with your buddy to watch him do some therapy at his house, which is cool, because you don’t have to have a clinic there. How many is that?  Brett Gilliland  I have no idea.  Brian Bradley  Yeah, that’s probably 15. That’s all right. We can start over if you lose count again. Just from now put your hands in that same position. Shoulders down, hands are stiff. Now pull your shoulder blades together. But watch me first. You’re going to slide your shoulder blades back and down. You’re not going to lift your ribcage and lean back. So just hold it there tension between your shoulder blades. Bring your arms straight out like this. Check your foot position if you moved. Brett Gilliland   So like you got a cramp right there, that’s alright. Brian Bradley   Hey, welcome to almost 50 brother. Okay, so now shoulders down and back. And now circle your arms forward, up and forward 40 times. Don’t let them come into your periphery. Like look at me. Don’t let your eyes see your hands. So get those hands back.  Brett Gilliland   Okay, yeah, big difference. Brian Bradley   Do not lose count, you’re on about 10. Just these two exercises can be done on hole number six, hole number 12, and hole number 17. And your golf game I promise you is different on Saturday. Okay, now, shoulders down. Same position, bring your arms up, those hands are in that stiff position. Shoulders pinned together, down and back. And now go palms up. Thumbs back, keep that hand locked out. And now circle up and back 40 times. And you can see on the video that he’s circling around, like a dessert plate. Maybe like a beautiful, perfectly done strawberry shortcake or peach cobbler. Oh, God. He’s so good. It is summer, it is summer. All the while your feet are straight Brett you notice we haven’t changed your foot position. Because the perturbance upstairs is now going to change the route you’re sitting on. So now turn your feet back to where you want them. Close your eyes. What’s changed about your body weight left to right front to back.  Brett Gilliland   My body weight is more on the right front of my foot and my left foot feels very balanced.  Brian Bradley   So have a seat in the chair that’s built by the lowest bidder. Come over to the microphone. Now just sit there for a second. Get comfortable. Don’t try to sit up straight just relax. And what’s the difference to your shoulder? Brett Gilliland   Crazy different like I can feel I don’t feel the pain that I felt earlier. It’s been there for a week.  Brian Bradley   Correct. Go after the cause versus the symptom. So do I give a poop about your pain? Yes, because it’s part of your history. It’s part of your story. But it’s time to write a new chapter Brett. Brett Gilliland  I mean I feel stronger too, like the upper body feels stronger after doing that.  Brian Bradley   You’re actually better looking. I know your listeners can’t believe it. They didn’t think it was possible, but it actually happened. So think about it from the standpoint of that’s why I have stupid humor because all it is is an opportunity for me to talk if you hurt. You hurt. Let’s have a talk.  Brett Gilliland  So what did we do there that like, to make that? This almost sounds like it’s bullshit just to be quite frankly, right that I’ve had this pain for a week. And now I’ve been complaining, my wife’s probably tired of hearing about it. I literally said to a guy Jason down the hall a little bit ago, man, I need to find a massage like by tomorrow, so I can be ready. Our Club Championship is Saturday, you said those words, it feels like, you know, like this is almost made up that we’re doing this and we’re not. And it’s just crazy to me that I literally have no pain in my shoulder. So what did we just do right there that made that go away? That quickly?  Brian Bradley   Well, how long do you think it’s gonna last? Brett Gilliland  It’s a great question. I actually thought about that, probably an hour to two hours.  Brian Bradley   So did it work or didn’t it, it worked. Which means then you might have to do them again, right? Until your body gets strong enough to reposition you back to this blueprint as close as possible. So then, so this is the pain free book. This is the second version, the first versions back here, sold about 4 million copies, number one on Amazon, all that stuff. This pain free book is an absolute game changer as it relates to understanding what’s wrong and what the philosophy is. Your body is so perfectly designed that yes, we’re going to have injuries. I just drove to Arizona to get my son some treatment over there by my friend. Six hours in the car and I drive a nice car. Brett Gilliland    Yeah. Brian Bradley   But my ass hurt. I got about an hour from home, I got a shooter into my right hamstring and my right glute and I’m like, “You have got to be kidding me.” I’m gonna make this oh my god, my son’s like, “what are you doing?”  Brett Gilliland   “I do this for a living and I gotta deal with this crap?” Brian Bradley    Correct. Like, so I laugh about it. I’m like, Okay, it’s almost like you’re, it’s time to listen to your body at that point, because I went a couple days without doing much. Played some pickleball did some other stupid things. Got home, did my stuff. Got in my exercises, did my other stuff that I biohack with. Come on. I’m 110% the next day.  Brett Gilliland  So what about if I told you it was my right knee or my right arm and not my left shoulder? Would we have done the same stuff? Brian Bradley  If your right knee was hurting, we may have done some sitting stuff. Like if it was really bad, like OA and you were heading in for surgery in two months, I would say my goal is to cancel your surgery. But my other goal is to prep you for surgery train you for the sport of surgery. So you can let your doctor do his or her job without doing them without dealing with all the BS of your body being so mucked up. Let’s get it to as close as possible. And then let those great practitioners do their jobs. Brett Gilliland   Yeah, it’s literally it’s mind blowing. I mean, I did three basic exercises right the this deal the forward and the backward and it’s it’s literally gone. My mind is blown. Podcast over, mic drop, whatever you want to call it. Brian Bradley Well, now we got to relate this to remember you have listeners out there that are saying the same thing you are. Yeah, I know. It worked for Brett. But I’m special.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah, yeah. That’s what they’ll say.  Brian Bradley   I’m not judging that that’s everybody has their own identity to their pain. My answer is this. Bring it on. Let’s just see if it’s something simple. Listen, I had a good friend of mine whose dad died of asbestos caused lung cancer.  Brett Gilliland   Yep.  Brian Bradley  He’s a Philly Alma, or whatever that is. Yep. I know, just enough to be dangerous about that. But we were golfing. And He’s coughing. And I’m like “Sidney, listen. That doesn’t sound right. You either have pneumonia or something else.” And they went in and they found a tumor tumor tumor tumor tumor. I get it. Make sure it’s not something super serious.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah, right.  Brian Bradley   But in Arnold Schwarzenegger talk, if it’s not a tumor, then let’s just think it might be something simple. Maybe it’s the misalignment maybe it’s the broken fibula that I had on my left leg when somebody slipped into me in ninth grade baseball, which led me to squatting and getting a hernia on my left inguinal canal, which led me to my mountain biking downhill, which is my ACL reconstruction, which led me to my labral tear, which led me to my dislocated shoulder. Like all of the shit that I did.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah. Brian Bradley   But I’m not kidding. I’m 10 years older than you. And I promise you I’m 10 times the athlete.  Brett Gilliland  Yeah.  Brian Bradley  But not because I’m bigger, faster, stronger. I promise you I’m the fatter out of the two of us. Right? I love Italian food. Unbelievable. Like Stromboli is amazing. But I will tell you, I actually put okay so here’s here’s a link that I put on my Instagram. I put this post up so that I saw that you Okay, so it’s pointing to the deltoid at the bottom. The pec minor, not the pec minor, but the pec clavicle head at the middle. And then the big trap muscle. Why did I post that? Because I’m lifting a 40 pound. I’m lifting a 40 pound iceberg that my cold plunge made. And my bicep is doing the lifting. But if your shoulder is in the right place, here comes his friends to help them out. So that’s why I said, you’ll never work alone. And then I said, You’ll never walk alone, because that’s Liverpool, soccer, so you can see why I tag them on there. So I didn’t want them to think I was trying to steal their trademark. So the shoulder never works alone, unless the shoulder is allowed to sit forward, then the big deltoid goes, I’m going to sleep, the traps gonna take over. And then the supraspinatus does all the lifting, and boom, there goes your rotator cuff. Meanwhile, it was the it was the macro growth position of your shoulder. Brett Gilliland   So when we’re sitting here, now whether I’m sitting in a chair, I’m sitting in the car, I need to probably have my shoulders rolled back more? Is that I mean, cuz I can’t tell exactly how you’re setting or do you worry about that when we’re sitting there?  Brian Bradley   Literally, I’m sitting like this.  Brett Gilliland  Okay. You’re kind of hunched forward a little bit.  Brian Bradley  Yeah, look at the video guys. I’m sitting like the way my mom would come up and smack me in the back of the head.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah, posture up.  Brian Bradley  She’s not a violent person. She was Italian. It’s just how they speak to you. Okay, but thinking about it. No, I don’t want to go see, I went and watched Top Gun Maverick for the second time, which by the way, if you didn’t watch it for a second time. Brett Gilliland   I haven’t seen it. I want to see it badly.  Brian Bradley It’s so better. It’s better the second time. We sat in the movie theater, and I reclined my leg, put the other one up there. You can’t sit in the movie and watch something like Braveheart 4 hours long, and think “Brian said shoulder blades together?”  Brett Gilliland Yeah.  Brian Bradley Let’s train for the sport of movie watching. Let’s train for the sport of sitting, let’s train for the sport of sleeping. Imagine how many people can’t sleep because their body never lets go. I can’t stress this enough. And I know that if you don’t have a migraine, listening to my voice by now, it will happen if you rewind it long enough. But it’s I can’t, I can’t talk enough about this. And it’s been 30 years with this message. And I’m not tired. Like this is so much fun. When you said to me, “Hey, my friend sent me over. Do you wanna do my podcast?” “I’m like, “yep,” didn’t even read the rest. Right? Then I read it afterward, because respectfully, after you took the time to write it out. But I’m going Yeah, because during COVID, I said yes to everything.  Brett Gilliland  Yep.  Brian Bradley I’m like, let’s do it. Let’s get this. This is a perfect time for people to sit around doing nothing. And we’re gonna give them some content to think about. Brett Gilliland  So how many times a day do I do that, I mean? So as soon as you feel the pain, and so basically, as I strengthen whatever I’m strengthening, and then the pain starts to go away, I’m assuming like anything, when it works, you kind of die off a little bit, but try to get that habit of doing those three exercises.  Brian Bradley   Are you in your office or your house? My office? Do you have anybody around? Who wouldn’t mind coming in and doing something not exercise wise, but I need an assistant to come in and smack you around a little bit?  Brett Gilliland   Sure. Hang on. Let me see.  Brian Bradley All right, folks, you’re gonna want to stay around and see this. This is gonna be awesome. Let’s hopefully, hopefully he finds a petite female to walk in because I’m going to have him she’ll be like, “I don’t want to hit him too hard.” But watch what happens. Because once we can get him down to a hip driven athlete right now, so shoulder driven. It’ll be a massive difference depending on who gets to smack him around.  I prefer female. Yes, female! Come on. Brett Gilliland  I’ve had shoulder pain for a week and escaped. Fix it in about five minutes. Three minutes.  Brian Bradley   What’s your name? Ma’am?  Robin   Robin.  Brian Bradley  Robin. Do you mind switching to the other side of him?  Robin  Okay, over here?  Brian Bradley   Yeah. So Brett, what I want you to do so you’re gonna turn and face his shoulder–– Robin  This way?  Brian Bradley   Yep. Right. What you’re gonna do is kind of just sit like I was sit relaxed. Okay. And don’t fight this because she’s not going to smack you. I was kidding. But Robin, what you’re going to do as Rhonda Robin, Robin. Robin, you’re going to take your hand on his shoulder and just push him. And notice how easy it is for you to push him that way. Don’t be afraid he doesn’t feel pain. Brett Gilliland Hey we’ve worked together for a long time Brian. So this this could turn bad.  Brian Bradley  Yes. She’s like this, “remember last Christmas?” Okay, so now get your feet pointed straight ahead. Okay, roll your pelvis forward to put the arch in your back. And I mean, really crank up, so Robin, you know, look at me, look at me. Look at me. I didn’t say pull your shoulders and do this. Remember, let your shoulders relax. Roll your pelvis off the tailbone and hold that. Bring your knees in a little bit so they’re not flaring out. And now take your shoulders and drop them and pull them back hard. Hold. Hold that and hold your pelvis where it is. That’s all you’re gonna do. You’re not going to brace in any other way. You ready Robin? I want you to like 5x the hit, you’re not going to hurt him. Brett Gilliland Chairs on wheels, chairs on wheels, Brian Bradley  That’s fine, what is the difference right away Robin that you felt?  Robin   There’s resistance. I mean, that resistance but I can’t–– Brian Bradley   He’s heavier, you can’t push him over.  Robin Yeah.  Brian Bradley   So imagine being the NFL athlete who can train their body this way so that when they get smacked, their head doesn’t do this whiplash and create CTE long term. This, I need everybody to hear me out. I promise you, we can stop CTE tomorrow. That’s a huge statement. Because the people think that the brain is swelling. When I truly believe that the fluid that’s being pumped around the brain is not able to drain because the spine is so compromised, that that cerebral spinal fluid goes up. It’s like having hair in a clogged bathtub, and you keep filling it up with water and expecting no drainage to happen. It’s going to overflow and ruin the house. So what they’re doing is, they’re, it’s pumping up and it can’t leave so it’s pressurizing the brain downward. So what you just did is you just anecdotally proved that she smacked you perturbed you in the upstairs, while the downstairs was stable and routed to the chair. That stopped you from whipping the head like this. Because there was so stable at the base, your whole spine went together. This is why someone like John Lynch doesn’t have CTE symptoms. Number 10 hitter in the NFL of all time.  Brett Gilliland Because he practices this same method? Brian Bradley   Oh, since high school, we’ve been working with him. Yeah. Yeah. And what he’s doing at the 49ers he’s going to change the NFL, I promise you that.  Brett Gilliland   That’s amazing. So if you got a buddy, that’s an NFL former NFL player right now that maybe has some problems, what exercise you’re doing for that guy? Brian Bradley    You’re getting him over to see me.  Brett Gilliland Okay. Brian Bradley Yeah I got to see him I can’t say well, you’re gonna do this, like we got to see where their postural dysfunction is. And if they need someone to talk to you like, look, they if they know Justin talk, talk to him if they know John Lynch or you know, Tony Boselli, Dilfer, Steve Stenstrom. I mean, there’s a bazillion of them, Gilbert, all these guys who don’t have these major problems, because they spent so much time doing things like this. So check this out. Brett Gilliland  Is Robin done? Brian Bradley   Robin, thank you so much.  Brett Gilliland   Thanks, Robin. Brian Bradley  20 million 30 million 100 million dollar athletes doing this. Come to Daddy, where are you? Okay. I won’t tell you where this is. But I’ll let you. So that’s outside of the stadium. So look what they’re doing. They’re playing like they’re playing like kids. See those two guys walking up there?  Brett Gilliland   Yep. Doing bear crawls.  Brian Bradley  This is the gross playground stuff that I did with my kid growing up. And now we have the adult version called the patch. And we’re getting ready, I can feel the tipping point coming. This should be in 32 franchises around the NFL. Brett Gilliland   Because you’re just working on again, posture core, I mean, all that stuff to make that thing be right. Brian Bradley  This does not translate to the field. If the body is out of this position, this translates directly to the field when John Allred John Lynch and those guys got themselves back in this position, and then benchpress and then went to the field, the weight training worked for them.  Brett Gilliland When you look at John Lynch now he’s still a stud, right? I mean, the guy looks like he could still sit up and play today.  Brian Bradley I’m not kidding when I tell you you should see the workouts he does. It’s it’s stupid. And the reason being is because he looks at Peter Egoscue and goes “that guy’s 76? You got to be kidding me. Look what he’s doing. Brian Bradley’s 54, I want to be like that.” Now, he doesn’t want to be like my personality, because there’s only one of those. But as it relates to physiologically the stuff that you’re able to do, you should be able to get bigger, faster, stronger. With minimal effort.  Brett Gilliland  Yeah. Yeah. So again, I’m gonna keep asking this question for those watching listening myself, well, I mean, those three exercises, and maybe that’s just tailored toward me, but this isn’t you’re not asking people to go out and do an hour’s workout to get this thing, right?  Brian Bradley I’m asking them for uh, okay Tony Robbins and we’re working with him for 28/29 years. I’m going to be with him next week. We’re going to do an event speaking at his event, blah, blah, blah. But every morning he gets up, does three Egoscue exercises goes out and jumps in the cold plunge. Yeah, but he starts his day with the foundational movement of alignment. I couldn’t care if it’s 3. Brett Gilliland  He does this and this and this? Brian Bradley Well he does some other ones. You know, whatever I give them personally they’re made for him. But in general, I’m going to take 50,000 people next week through elbow curls, arm circles. And then I’m going to show you one here called the greatest abdominal exercise ever, just because I think your fans are gonna want to see you go through hell, so I think it’s good. Brett Gilliland Let’s do it, man.  Brian Bradley  Okay, so stand up for me again. And those of you, I’m telling you, you’re gonna want to try to do this. Tony Horton did the p90x stuff. And he and I were working on some stuff for his stuff. And we were talking one day and I’m like, Look, bro, I gotta steal this sprint thing that you’re doing. Because in my mind, I’m going, what a way to turn on the hip flexor. Now, meanwhile, you’re not gonna be doing anything for the hip. But in general, you’re doing everything for the hip and the abdominal wall. So get yourself in a sprint position, with one foot behind you one foot in front of you, the back foots up on the tall like this, like you’re gonna use that foot to push off, not too high. Like, literally you’re at a you’re at the start gate to get ready to go. Put your hands like this real stiff, and your elbow at 90 degrees. And the other one at 90 degrees. Notice how that hand wants to open up behind you like this at the elbow. Keep it bent at 90. Now very slowly just changed positions like this. Yep, keep going. So this, folks, that’s what you’re going to want to do. And when I say go, you ready Brett?  Brett Gilliland   Yeah. Brian Bradley I turned off my series. So hold on. Here we go. Timer. Ready?  Brett Gilliland   Yeah.  Brian Bradley  Go slow. Faster, faster. And then full speed. Now go. I said full speed. Brett. Full speed. There we go faster. Brett. You’re racing that little nephew that you just can’t stand. Everybody has one. Come on. Let’s go. That’s 12 seconds. Brett. Keep going Brett. Brett Gilliland   Holy crap. I’m out of shape. Brian Bradley  Nine seconds left. You know what the best part about this is? We have to do the other side yet. Okay, take a break. Switch legs. You ready? You’re not out of shape. This is high intensity. But we’ve put your shoulders in a position of not being so rounded. So you’re out of shape in the new position but once you strengthen it it gets better, you ready? Backwards, set. Go. As fast as you can go. I’ll start the timer when you’re going full speed. Here we go. 17, 15, 10 Come on faster. Brett. 10. 3, 2, 1. Take a break. Now have a seat. Now just sit there for a second. Remember, you had a shoulder injury that was bothering you? How is it right now?  Brett Gilliland   No pain.  Brian Bradley   But yeah, we just killed it. But it’s because your spinal erectors down to your hip flexor, your glute all that’s now anchoring a better shoulder position. Which is why when we had Robin in the room, she could push you and you were like this. But when you sat up at the hip and locked it in with the erector and shoulder blade, you were like hitting a tree that’s well rooted during a hurricane. You’re not going anywhere. So the goal with everybody on here would be to create a hip driven athlete once again. And what I mean by athlete is everybody here has an athlete inside of them.  Brett Gilliland   Yep.  Brian Bradley  75 you’re an athlete. You’re just at your level. So I can’t stress enough go get the pain free book at painfree.com Let me show you my Instagram and the other Instagram got by the way. Here’s the Egoscue up here at the top. That’s how you spell it E G O S C U E. I’ll show you this backpack one that I posted. This is about like wearing a backpack in the wrong place. So it’s under @theBrianBradley on Instagram and Facebook. There’s also @Egoscuemethod on Instagram and Facebook. I answer all my DMs personally so I expect to hear from everybody. Brett Gilliland   I love it. Brian Bradley But look at that. That’s a girl that I caught at a Biohacking Conference talking about chronic pain, and her backpack is so low that it’s creating the forward hang of her head. So could we correct her backpack? Yes. But could we correct her frame that carries the backpack? That’s even more important. Brett Gilliland   Crazy. So real quick, how do we? What do you like about the sauna versus the infrared sauna? Brian Bradley   I liked, well, all studies are mainly for the Finnish saunas, you know, out of Finland and stuff like that the they’ve been doing it for so long, it’s the high heat has been studied to have different effects than the than the infrared, infrared goes to about 140. This, the one normally is 165 to 180.  Brett Gilliland   And you like that even more than just the infrared? I mean, I sat in an infrared one time my wife and I went to a spa in St. Louis. I mean, I felt like a different person when I came out of there.  Brian Bradley   Yeah, there listen there. I don’t think the studies are out high. I don’t think enough studies came out yet about the infrared saunas yet. I think that’s why like I’m going with the high heat, which will still add a more intense level give you the same effect. But the infrared might give you a better effect for a shorter amount of time or whatever. But I can tell you that that Marasco that I’m sitting in the Marasco Forge, cold plunge, and the bio charger here for PEMF and the NormaTec for my legs and all that stuff. I’m doing everything I can to keep a Ferrari on the racetrack and the Ferrari should have been retired a long time ago. Brett Gilliland   So you do those I see that golfers do those all time after a long day, right? They put them in the bag, they do whatever those things do.  Brian Bradley  They’re amazing. That’s an amazing you know what it’s like, I get a massage every day that I need it. It massages from the from the toes up to the hip. And you know, look I again to your listeners, if anybody’s interested and they say “I’d like to do some therapy with you”, get a hold of me. If you’re talking about “I want more questions about Coldwater immersion, which tubs should I get?” I know. “Which PMF device?” I know. “Should I get the NormaTec?” I know and I know the salespeople for all of them.  Brett Gilliland   Yeah, I need all those links. I have to holler at you on Instagram for that. I guess that thing to your right, what is that thing you keep talking about?  Brian Bradley   This is a pulse electromagnetic field creator. Sorry, I have another meeting coming up here at 2 o’clock. I have a post Instagram. It’s on there. It’s a, I posted this last night. If I can find it. Brett Gilliland   Okay, I saw that post. I’ll just look at that.  Brian Bradley   So you see that light bulb that I’m holding? Yep, that’s a free standing light bulb. It’s not plugged in. But the PMF field is creating energy through me hyper accelerating micelles that I’m lighting up the light bulb. And when you start worrying about when you start reading about PMF it’s it’s like plugging your iPhone into a supercharger.  Brett Gilliland  And you do that to your human body, human body.  Brian Bradley  So what I tell I told this to an NFL guy this morning, cuz he’s like, tell me about the cold plunge. Tell me about this that says I said, “you need to set aside $50,000 or you can die and leave that 50 grand to your kids.” And he starts laughing he’s like, “no, they’re getting enough.” I said “then become a little selfish. Put this in, put this in, put this in, put this in, put this in.” And I gave him five things to do. And he’s like, “I’m seriously thinking about turning a whole garage into that.” I said, “it’s better than you putting a squat rack in because what the hell do you need that for anymore? You’re not even playing anymore.” Brett Gilliland   So I buy one of those. What’s that bad boy cost me over there? Brian Bradley   $10 a day financed. Brett Gilliland   Okay, so not much.  Brian Bradley   I didn’t tell you how long financed. Yeah, that’s about $300 a month and you know, that’s about $16,000. The cold punches about $9000. The spa, the infrared or the regular Saunas are anywhere good ones, five to $9000 maybe $12,000. So I looked at all this stuff and I was like, I already have the Vanguard’s fund for my kid he can have the money from the house, okay, I get all that. But I want to spend some money on myself and I already want to be there with him when he’s enjoying it. Brett Gilliland   Yeah, cool. Listen, man, I know you’ve got another meeting. We could go on and on and on. This has been phenomenal. This is, I’ve never had to work so hard. You know, it’s felt great. You’ve cured my shoulder and I’m going to be contacting you after this to connect more by the book “Pain Free” at painfree.com We’ll send people your way in the show notes man. Really appreciate your time. Brian it has been phenomenal having you.  Brian Bradley  When will you post this?  Brett Gilliland   Oh, it’ll be not this Monday coming up. But next Monday. Brian Bradley So the 19th Yeah. What if I created a URL with okay Egoscue.com/ What’s your podcast called again?  Brett Gilliland  The Circuit of Success. Brian Bradley  You Egoscue.com/circuit or slash success? What do you want?  Brett Gilliland  Success. Brian Bradley   Okay, so we’ll go slash success. And then I’ll put some things in there to give people some links to go look at some stuff and more information they can opt in so we’re not bothering them. We’ll just do that.  Brett Gilliland  Beautiful. You’re the man. Appreciate you. And again, we’ll put all this in the show notes. We’ll get that link from you. And you have an awesome day, man.  Brian Bradley  All right, brother. Enjoy. I’ll catch up to you later.  Brett Gilliland  All right. See ya.  Brian Bradley   See ya.   The post Brian Bradley Calls Himself “The Most Selfish Human on the Planet” (And It’s a Good Thing) appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Markman, Art 2022 Art Markman, PhD is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology, HDO, and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the IC2 Institute. He has written over 150 research papers on topics including reasoning, decision making, and motivation. Art brings insights from cognitive science to a broader audience through his blogs at Psychology Today and Fast Company as well as his radio show/podcast Two Guys on Your Head. He is the author of several books including Smart Thinking, Smart Change, Brain Briefs, and Bring Your Brain to Work. The post Art Markman on the Circuit of Success appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Dan Bruder is an author, CEO and Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  He co-founded Blendification to harmonize work and life. With today’s remarkable volatility in labor and consumer markets, many businesses aren’t adapting at the pace necessary to stay ahead of external changes.  He discusses how it is time to stop searching for a perfect work-life balance and instead pursue a synergistic work-life blend.  He is committed to blending work and life to enhance the lives of employees, customers and communities. The post Dan Bruder on Emotional Intelligence appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

Brian Miles is the Major League Mental Performance Coach for the Cleveland Guardians going into his 8th season with Cleveland. In his role with the Guardians, Brian assists players and staff of the organization in the continued development to enhance performance and mental and emotional development.   Prior to joining the Guardians, Brian worked for the United States Army as part of the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program both at Fort Bliss (TX) and Fort Drum (NY). In his role he taught mental performance skills and techniques to develop the mental and emotional strength necessary to thrive in adverse and stressful conditions.    Brian is constantly wondering about the human potential; his goal is to help high performers be incredibly deliberate with their intent, habits, decision making, and belief that they can train their mind to be the best version of themselves.   The post Brian Miles on the Circuit of Success appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.

This is Dr. John Delony’s second appearance on the Circuit of Success Podcast. He is a bestselling author, mental health expert, and host of The Dr. John Delony Show, a caller-driven show that gives you real talk on relationships and mental health challenges.  He has two PhDs and over two decades of experience in counseling, crisis response and higher education.  He offers counsel on how to reclaim your life, get back in the driver’s seat, and learn to connect with the people you love.  The post Dr. John Delony on the Circuit of Success appeared first on The Circuit of Success with Brett Gilliland.