Day 1 – Take the Red Pill

Welcome to my course on high-performance living, written with love to help you live your best life.

If you don’t know me, here’s a little introduction:

I spend my days helping people look, think and perform athletically. I’ve been professionally immersed in the world of fitness, nutrition and high-performance coaching since I began my career in the early 1990s (if you feel nosy – you can read my full career bio here ) Anyway, I love my job; I’m pretty sure it’s the best job ever!  The wonderful people I work with, the weird experiences and all the various accolades are all very lovely, but that’s not why I love it…

Being a teacher/coach/trainer implicitly requires you to acquire new knowledge, distil it, and then share it. I see no better use of time in this short life than constantly flipping my mind between student and teacher… and that’s why I love it and why I’m happy you’re here with me right now, partaking in this little course.

This course will help you love your body, think like a pro athlete, perform at a high level mentally and live your best life! The first half of the course is focused on mastering your body… and then we’ll go a bit deeper, and I will share some ideas to help your mind too! So all there is left to say is welcome… Actually… I can do better than that,… so… here I am with my (virtual) arms wide open, welcoming you with a big old lingering man-hug.

A Challenge

I have a challenge for you. It is to spend 30 minutes thinking about where you are in life. I.e. are you perfectly happy with your body, health and lifestyle right now? …No.. of course, you’re not!.. nor am I.. we are all flawed; we are all works in progress. It’s okay to admit you haven’t got it all figured it out yet. In fact, honest self-reflection is essential to growth.

Yes, sometimes it’s tough to look in the metaphorical mirror, explore our past decisions, admit mistakes, and realise some unpleasant truths about ourselves. This can feel ‘negative’ and temporarily knock our self-esteem. While having high self-esteem is a lovely thing to possess, it must be built on a solid platform of self-awareness and competence; otherwise, it’s not actually self-esteem you have… it’s self-delusion.

When you look at your life, choices, strengths and weaknesses of your mind, body and soul, please take off those rose-tinted glasses, nor be overly critical either; see things for what they truly are without too much judgement. Significant self-development in all its forms requires awareness built on unfiltered honesty.

When I do fitness assessments with athletes, prepare a client’s body for a film or work with model agencies to get their girls ready for fashion week, I always share my honest and specific opinions of what needs to be done. If I just gave nice, generic feedback – telling a professional Tennis Player that they are really fit,  or a supermodel l that they look tall & slim.  How would that help them?! Unfiltered honesty about precisely where they are at, along with a crystal clear analysis of their current strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, is the first step to change. Sometimes honesty doesn’t feel nice at the moment, but so what! Avoiding everything negative is pretty childish and will become increasingly problematic.

On a philosophical level, like Neo in The Matrix, it’s surely ‘better’ to take the red pill and live with our eyes fully open. (there is a philosophical discussion about the search for truth vs happiness that can be had here) Anyway.. before you take philosophical advice from an over-hyped fitness instructor…  I shall ask you some questions now; let’s see how real you can be. I suggest you get a pen and paper and answer these key questions. It will take you around 30 minutes+ to do properly.

• What are you happy about?

• What are you unhappy about?

• What do you want to change?

• What lifestyle do you want?

• What kind of relationship with food do you want?

• What kind of relationship with your body do you want?

• What new physical skills do you want to master this year?

• In 10 years, what kind of health and vitality do you want?

• What kind of person do you want to be and why?

Well done, and thank you for spending the time to answer those properly. It’s not always that easy to look within.