Brian Keane is a three-time best-selling author with The Fitness Mindset, Rewire Your Mindset and The Keane Edge: Mastering the Mindset for Real Lasting Fat Loss.
Over the past ten years, Brian has become one of the most recognised faces in the Irish health and fitness industry. He has spoken at major wellness events such as Wellfest Ireland and Mefit Dubai, was a Keynote speaker at Google HQ for their 2018 wellness event and has done corporate wellness talks for Allianz Partners, SAP and Acorn Insurance.
On top of running his own highly successful business, Brian has also completed some of the worlds most gruelling endurance challenges, such as six back to back marathons through the Sahara desert, a 230km through the Arctic and multiple ultra-marathons, including a 100 mile ultra-marathon in the desert in Nevada.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Brian Keane about the mental side of fitness and exercise.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How transitioning to more holistic and mentally challenging fitness pursuits leads to personal growth and fulfillment.
– Why bodybuilding competitions are difficult and can lead to struggles with disordered eating habits.
– How setting incremental targets and following curiosity allows you to continually push boundaries in fitness.
– Why your fitness goals should be aligned with your personal values.
– How people should take a mindful approach to making decisions that nourish their personal growth and wellness.
Connect with Brian:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@brian_keane_fitness
Facebook
facebook.com/briankeanefitness
Links Mentioned:
briankeanefitness.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
When you’re thinking about exercise, maybe the least important thing about exercising is what you actually do for exercise. What the hell does that mean? Well, you’re going to find out on today’s episode of the MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, typically starting feet first, those things at the end of your legs, they are your foundation after all. And we also break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, cross whatever it is you like to do, and to do that effectively and efficiently, and probably most importantly, enjoyably, ’cause if you don’t like it, you’re not going to keep doing it anyway. So find something you like. Hey, I’m Steven Sashen, co-founder and chief barefoot officer here at xeroshoes.com, and we call this the MOVEMENT Movement because we, that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement.
What happens when you let your body do what it’s made to do instead of forcing it to do things that it shouldn’t do, in my case, by shoving it into shoes that don’t fit like the way human feet should fit or work, you get the idea. Anyway, the way that involves you is really simple. Just spread the word. Share, like, give us a thumbs up, give us a great reviews, tell people about what we’re up to. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. And one way you can do that, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, you’ll find previous episodes, all the places you can find us on social media. If you want to get this podcast from somewhere other than where you already found it, we’ll show you the other places you can get it, et cetera, et cetera. So let us have some fun. Brian, welcome and tell people who you are, where you are, and what you’re up to and why you are here. That was four big things, but I trust you can do it.
Brian Keane:
Steven, thank you so much for having me on. I’m really excited. I’m actually vibing and feeding off the energy already, so this is going to be a great conversation. I’m Brian Keane. I’m Brian Keane, Fitness Online. I’m on all the social media channels, host of the Brian Keane podcast, one of the top health podcasts in the world, interviewing guests in health, wellness, fitness, three time bestselling author, and I am a, you could probably say a hybrid athlete. I’ve done basically everything. I played a high level sport, I competed in bodybuilding, I then went into ultramarathons, triathlon, adventure races, and I have a wide spectrum of what I’ve done and I basically spend my living now working with people, helping them get into great shape, looking at the nutrition, looking at their fitness, and documenting my journey online with all the cool stuff that I get to do.
Steven Sashen:
You might want to tell people where you are or where your voice is from.
Brian Keane:
I am in the west of Ireland where I’m born and bred. I lived in California for years, and London, so I was away for quite a while. So I’ve learned to slow it down and speak and enunciate and say all the words the way they’re supposed to be said. But I currently reside not too far from where I grew up in the west of Ireland.
Steven Sashen:
I think we might… I don’t know if you’d know this. So I was just in Dublin a little less than a month ago, hanging out with our lead programmer who we’ve been working together for 12 years, but we’d never met and my wife and I had to come over to Europe to do some business with our European office and I had an absolute blast there and it also cracked me up ’cause there were definitely stereotypical things where it was a handful of guys who at any given time of the day or night were clearly just looking for a fight.
Brian Keane:
It’s true. The cliche of fighting and drinking is so ridiculously true that anyone that comes to Ireland is like, “Why are there people just looking to fight and why are there people drinking at two o’clock in the middle of the day?” I’m like, “Yeah, we just do that sometimes.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, they’re drinking at two o’clock because they couldn’t find anything open at 10 A.M. and I’m going to pat myself on the back when I say this and you can explain what I’m about to say ’cause I… Well, let’s say, I think you’ll be able to explain what I’m about to say, and I did head over to the Forty Foot.
Brian Keane:
And how did you find it?
Steven Sashen:
Well, I loved it. Do you want to tell people what it is?
Brian Keane:
I think it’d be better explained in your words because I would imagine your experience will tell the story.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, well, let me back it up. I’ll start by saying, so I’ve been a polar bear, someone who jumps in the freezing water on plus or minus New Year’s, like chip away the ice, get in the water for a long, long time. When I first moved to Boulder, I think I did it 17 years in a row, and so the Forty Foot is this little outcropping where you can jump in the water outside of Dublin and it’s really cold and quite delightful. And this could sound funny. The water is not overly salty, overly saliney, it’s like the night before I had really good oysters and it felt like I was just having really good oysters. So I mean, it was delightful.
Brian Keane:
It’s a beautiful experience. I’m on the west coast, so the Forty Foot is on the east coast and then Black Rock is on the west coast, so people kind of alternate between the two. It’s something that I do myself more so for recovery and just for grounding. Like, you know yourself when you’re kind of that type A all up in your head, there’s nothing like just getting into the water, getting a little bit of that salt, connecting and grounding and you’re coming out feeling like a million dollars.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, don’t leave out the coldness of the water. In fact, to your point, I had a friend call me one day, he was having some sort of emotional turmoil and he was asking for my help. I said, “Just bring a bathing suit and come on over.” This is at a time when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, right off Boulder Creek. So he comes over and he starts to tell me what’s going on. I said, “Shut up, just come with me.” So we go to Boulder Creek, we jump in and he gets out of the water and starts to try and tell me something. And I went, “Do it one more time.” Jumps in one more time. I said, “Okay, what was your problem?” He goes, “No idea.”
Brian Keane:
Yep, love that. How good is that? If you could bottle that… We won’t get into a tinfoil half western in pharmacy. If you could bottle that feeling, we’d be multi, multi-billionaires and it’s completely free. You just hop into it and you feel amazing.
Steven Sashen:
Well, what’s funny, people think that a cold plunge is a similar thing, but when it’s moving water or an ocean, whole different world entirely. Yeah, you can’t compare the two at all.
Brian Keane:
Oh, definitely not. No. The benefits that you get from being actually in nature, getting a little bit of the magnesium, as you said, the water flowing, the cold plunge, it stays so you’re able to kind of acclimatize to it.
Steven Sashen:
That’s right.
Brian Keane:
It feels it’s night and day in terms of, I would say difficulty, but also in terms of benefit.
Steven Sashen:
And there’s something I find very entertaining when you get out of that water. I mean, you stay in long enough until hey, it feels totally fine, which means you’ve stayed in a little too long and then you get out and the entertaining part is watching your body try to figure out what the temperature is internally and externally. So for a moment you’ll feel hot and then you’re just going to start shivering like crazy and it’s like everything in between. And then you have this insane thought. It’s like, “I got to do that again as soon as possible.”
Brian Keane:
It’s amazing. I remember the first time I ever had that, the after drop is what it’s called. I ran an ultra marathon in the Arctic in 2019, so I was doing a lot of cold water swimming and dives and plunges to try and condition myself for that. But the first time, Steven, I went in, I did 20 minutes and it was October, so it was cold, it was absolutely freezing. I’m not sure what the Fahrenheit equivalent was, but it was about three degrees centigrade.
Steven Sashen:
Yes.
Brian Keane:
Four degrees centigrade.
Steven Sashen:
Basically barely over freezing.
Brian Keane:
I came out feeling like a million dollars. Similar to you. When you get to a 10-minute mark, you’re shaking, shivering, and then your body just becomes acclimatized and you’re like, “Oh, I can do as long as I want.” And then I came out and I got that after drop, I was in my car. I’m not even joking, Steven, a cup of tea. I couldn’t drive the car, I had to turn the heat on full blast. I was like… For half an hour I was like, I’m late for work. I wasn’t able to drive home. And I was like, “Right, we’ll go slow and steady next time. Let’s not jump in and do 20 minutes the second time ever.” So just listen and learn, for anyone who’s listening that wants to do it, maybe start with three, four minutes and build up.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and it was funny, I was noticing I’d start shivering and my jaw doing that shivering thing where my teeth are chattering and I was with my friend Colin and I’m saying, “I can stop it. I can stop all this if I want to for only about 20 seconds, and then it just takes over. It’s uncontrollable.” You just gave me a flashback or this whole thing gave me a flashback. When I was living in New York City, I was doing Aikido with a bunch of very interesting, very crazy people who were trying to break it down and see, does this really work at all, let alone as a fighting art or a martial art or self-defense or whatever it is. And there was this one teacher, his name was Hal Lehrman. Hal was a real estate guy from Brooklyn who was just one of the best Aikido guys I’ve ever met in my life.
And all of us that hung out with in that class with him, we were really just trying to explore this whole thing. Anyway, it’s a February in New York, we finish the class, we all leave, we’re heading to the subway and it’s one of those New York biting, biting, cold days. The wind is blowing, there’s snow on the ground, it’s just a little drizzly. Everyone’s complaining about the cold. And I say something like, I like at times like this to try to just really feel the sensations without attaching a label to the experience. And then it doesn’t really feel as cold and there’s a long pause. And then Hal says, “Yeah, I did that zen shit for 40 years. It’s fucking freezing out here.”
Brian Keane:
Well, there we go. I would’ve said that there’s going to be some Buddhist zen-like response that everyone can take and I’m going to be able to take off the back of the podcast. And I’m like, “No, it’s cold. It’s just freaking cold.”
Steven Sashen:
No, that is the Zen like response. Mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, New York in February is fucking cold. That is the zen response. But this is an interesting segue. I mean, to go from bodybuilding to triathlons, that’s a unusual path to take. Can you say a little… No, actually… Well, I want to frame this. Can you tell people what your… What’s the word? I tease this with the whole idea that when it comes to exercise, the least important thing might be exercise. Do you want to tell people why I said that? And if that fits in with your story of going into bodybuilding, what that experience was like ’cause most people have a very warped idea about that. And then the transition to what you’re doing now. It’s interesting to me, and this is all about me. So if you could do that, that would be really fun.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, that’s a great question, Steven. You said that right before we went on air and it fits perfectly because what I was attracted to when it came to things like bodybuilding and then triathlon and ultra marathons was more the kind of discipline and mental resilience that came with it as opposed to any of the physical fitness. Now, I had different reasons for going into different things, but when I talk about even fitness and the exercise being the least important thing, which is so true in a lot of cases, I always tell people it’s not the exercise program that’s important, it’s how you’re executing the program that’s important. In a lot of cases, of course there’s nuance within that, and we can go through it, but my journey was a little bit, and I have to tell a bit of a backstory because otherwise the transition into bodybuilding makes less sense.
I used to be an elementary school teacher, so I was living and working in California. I was working with UC Berkeley in Northern Cal as a soccer instructor. And when I was out there, I got a couple of health problems. I was hospitalized a few times with stomach problems and didn’t really know how to fix it. I was given a lot of medications and Western medicine of right, your medicine isn’t working up the dose, it isn’t working up the dose, it isn’t working up the dose. And it got to that point when I was 21, 22 where I thought, “This can’t be it. I can’t go and 10x how much medication I’m taking. I need to look at what’s going on here from a holistic standpoint.” So I started to look into nutrition and that’s what got me interested in that area initially. And fast-forward 18 months, I was able to heal all my gut issues, heal all my health problems with my nutrition by changing up my lifestyle.
And it got me into the space where fitness became a huge part of my life. Now, I ended up working as an elementary school teacher because I thought that was the career path. I was born in a family full of teachers. It was a very safe and secure path, and it wasn’t something that I particularly wanted to do, but it was the path that was laid out before me. And my very first teaching job, I was an elementary school teacher in a third grade in London, and I walked into a job because I was a male teacher, there was a shortage of teachers. I was into sports, so I was able to coordinate physical education in the school and again, had a handpick of jobs. And I was 30 minutes into my very first day of teaching and I thought, “This isn’t what I want to do. This isn’t what I want to do. I’ve spent four years getting a degree a year post-grad, this isn’t what I want to do.”
And I came home that Christmas a couple of months after, and the analogy I used in books and on podcasts was it felt like I spent years climbing a ladder only to realize it was up against the wrong wall. And when I got home that Christmas, my mum was having a conversation with me and I was really low and depressed and just feeling very down that, look, this is my career now and I don’t want to be doing this. This is 8, 10, 12 hours of my day Monday to Friday and I hate it. And she asked a question that I still use to this day, which is 15 years later. She asked, “What would you do for free?” And I thought about that and I was like, “Well, I would work in fitness for free.” I was like, “I love going to the gym. I love working out. I was like, “If I was cleaning the floor in a gym, I’d actually be happier than what I’m doing now.”
And fast-forward, I signed up to a fitness instructor course, personal training course, qualified as a nutritionist, certified as a nutritionist, sports nutritionist, and started working in that space with people. And one of the ways that I tried to separate myself as a personal trainer, one-to-one at the time, was competing in these bodybuilding shows because it was something that was different to what other trainers in the gyms were doing. So I ended up going into bodybuilding, doing really well. I got a pro card in November of 2014, which just means that you can compete for money. And I was traveling around the world as a fitness model doing photo shoots with magazines, things along those lines. I was really unhappy during this time. I was very calorie depleted. I had a terrible disordered eating pattern. I was very strict for six weeks, and then I would look like a Michelin man for two, three weeks when I’ve eaten Ben & Jerry’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So whole history and unhealthy patterns there.
Steven Sashen:
Let me make a note. Don’t eat Ben & Jerry’s breakfast, lunch and dinner. That’s going to change my… Okay.
Brian Keane:
Just lunch and dinner. Just lunch and dinner.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Got it.
Brian Keane:
Breakfast is where the problem is.
Steven Sashen:
The intermittent fasting version of eating Ben & Jerry’s. I got it. Okay.
Brian Keane:
100%. Yeah. And you can’t go wrong with that. No, Ben & Jerry’s is amazing, don’t get me wrong. It’s not to knock on Ben & Jerry’s, it’s literally one of my favorite foods. But breakfast, lunch and dinner, not a good idea. And with bodybuilding, I was competing in that world and it’s a very, for anyone that is even slightly familiar with it, it’s exactly as you’d think. It’s oiled up, muscular dudes and girls depending on the categories, and they’re just on stage getting judged with how they look and getting marked on how big they are, how lean they are, et cetera. Basically like a dog poodle competition for people. Just you’re on stage as the person instead of twirling around doing tricks and jumping up and down.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, wait. I just like the idea of the dog competition, but especially thinking of poodles. Because with poodles, the way they get those topiary, like hairdos, that’s the closest thing to bodybuilding I can think of. So they’ve got the little puff in the bottom, there’s their forearms, they’ve got the little bicep puff, they’ve got the… I mean, oh my God, I never thought of bodybuilders and poodles, but now I won’t be able to ever get that thought out of my head.
Brian Keane:
There you go. And I feel like I’ve identified a spirit animal as a poodle maybe in my bodybuilding days, for sure. So there’s obviously a connection and a tie there somewhere. But I did that for a while and in 2015, my daughter was born, and that was kind of my life changing moment for me. I wanted to just be a better dad. I was walking around tired all the time. I felt really unhealthy, like I was calorie depleted and just brain-dead all the time. And I wrote my first book in 2016, released it in 2017, and that changed everything for me. The Fitness Mindset, spent 16 weeks on the Amazon bestseller list, and it opened up all these doors for me professionally that were previously closed for me. And I had a great 2017 with work, but I started to feel a little bit unfulfilled in other areas of my life.
And that’s how I got into ultras and that’s how I got into triathlon. I was looking for a challenge that I could choose that would give me something to train for directionally that wasn’t going to completely ruin my relationship with food and body image, et cetera. So bodybuilding was out for me. I wasn’t going back into that. And the first ever ultra marathon I signed up for… I know you had an episode with David Clark recently talking about bad water and the level 100, et cetera. Mine was Marathon de Sables which is the six back-to-back marathons through the Sahara Desert. So I signed up for that in August 2017 and started training for that and ran it, well, completed it, ran, walked hobbled the six marathons in April 2018. And that was my first ever transition into that world. And then for 2018, I did Marathon de Sables, 2019, I ran through the 230 kilometers to the Arctic.
And then in 2020 I ran my first a hundred-mile ultra marathon in Nevada at the Jackpot 100. And I’ve been kind of transitioning out now. So I’m doing more martial arts, Muay Thai, things along those lines now because I’ve kind of closed that chapter of my life. But yeah, as I mentioned, training ADHD, I literally jump around in all these different disciplines depending on what I’m curious about, something I recommend to people I work with as well as follow your curiosity, similar to what you mentioned earlier about the enjoyment, what gets you excited, what can you find enjoyment in, and then lean into that. But that’s kind of a long-winded way of how I went from bodybuilding to ultras and triathlon and adventure races.
Steven Sashen:
I like it. And I like where you landed ’cause it’s something I’ve been talking about quite a bit lately, and you’ll appreciate this, I think, I don’t know, we’ll find out. The part of find the thing that you enjoy is critical. And I think people, human beings just in general, we like to imagine what we think we need to be happy in some imagined future. And then we look for someone who seemingly has done that, and then we try to figure out what they did and we want to get a paint by number step-by-step, follow the lead, do what I did plan, but that’s not the way it works. In fact, I’m going to take it out of context into business. Someone approached me years ago and said, “Do you want to pay some ridiculous amount of money to go hang out with Richard Branson on his island?”
And I said, “Why would I want to do that?” And they’re like, “What do you mean? Imagine what you could learn from Richard Branson.” I said, “Oh, I know what I would learn. I’d learn, I’m not Richard Branson, so I can’t do what he did ’cause I don’t think and act and move, do anything like what he did.” In a similar vein, especially when I stopped doing gymnastics when I was 32, I spent the next 10, well, 13 years until I got into sprinting at 45, trying things to see what I enjoyed and what made sense ’cause there were some things that I enjoyed, but there was no value for doing them. Like, I was doing a bunch of weird circus art things that were super fun, but I wasn’t going to be in Cirque du Soleil. And so why am I doing this? Lately I’ve been working out with a trainer. We do the most intense, difficult, super short workouts I’ve ever done in my life. They’re literally the most difficult thing I’ve ever done athletically in my life.
And it’s my favorite thing that I do every week because it matches my personality so perfectly that even though it is literally at the end of 10 minutes, I can’t get off the ground, I’m ecstatic. And I am not suggesting this for everyone, ’cause it’s definitely not. But the point is to find the thing that lights you up that makes you just go, “Ooh, I want to do this again tomorrow. Not because I have to, but because I want to.” Even those days when it’s like, “Oh, I’d rather take a nap, and you still do it and after you did it, you feel good that you did it.” That’s good enough. So that mindset thing, which is why I brought you on here. So in terms of movement, moving what your mind is doing is a thing as well. Let’s jump into that. So talk to me about how you really turned that understanding that you were getting into what became that first book and what you’re doing with human beings. I mean, wherever you want to go with that, frankly.
Brian Keane:
You said something really interesting there, Steven that I want to ask first if you don’t mind, because I’m curious based on the gymnastics, the sprinting and the high intensity stuff that you’re doing now. And I’m curious if this is the same for you, because this is something, I’m 36, 37 at the end of this year, and I’ve been kind of playing around with this idea for the last few years that it’s a season of life thing. There was a time when I needed a very tangible goal, i.e., a race or a competition I was working towards. And now at 35, 36 going into 37, it’s very much an enjoyment, hence why I’m doing Muay Thai and things that I’m enjoying. Did you find that it was a season of life-based or was that always a case of it felt wrong and now that you’re doing something you enjoy, it feels right, or how did that look for you?
Steven Sashen:
I don’t think it’s a season of life thing for me because part of what I enjoy about sprinting is the competition. The reason that I didn’t do any sprint training from college till I was 45 was why, it’s hard? And there’s no good reason for doing… Now, the joke that I have about masters track and field, especially the sprints, but pretty much all the masters track and field athletes that I’ve ever met, we’re all typically at an age where we know that being this competitive is stupid. We are also old enough to realize that’s the way it is. And we’re working really hard, frankly, once you get past about 45 depending on the event you’re in. But for sprinting, once you get past about 40, it’s just a question of how slow can you slow down? ’cause you’re going to get slower, but you just want to slow down how you get slower. For me, I’m a masters All-American, all that means is I’ve hit the 60 or the hundred below a certain time, and that time changes every five years.
My goal is just to keep hitting that All-American time. My stretch goal, if you will, is to hit the All-American time for someone 5 to 10 years younger than me. And so that’s motivating for me. That gets me out of bed. And I also enjoy the training. It’s difficult. There’s something about that particular type of burst training that matches the way my brain works. And on the lifting that I’m doing now, there’s all of that, plus some of what I’m doing is explicitly for becoming a better sprinter, and some of it is for building some more muscle mass because that’s connected to longevity. And some of it is undeniably for vanity. I like it when I am changing my clothes and my wife goes, “Oh.” I like it when I’m hanging out with people and I tell them I’m 62. And they go, “Sorry, what?” And so I like it when people say, “Geez, you’re in really good shape.” And I’m thinking, “Not quite, but okay.” I’ll take it. So that’s the combination that… And some of that I would actually… I’m going to change my answer somewhat.
Some of that may be life stage, but some of it might just be the serendipity of finding all these things at this time in my life. And what I mean about the first part of that is I wasn’t working quite as hard to find a workout program beyond sprinting that really fit me that I really liked. I mean, I’ve got a great home gym. I do stuff every time I walk by it most of the time, but I never was able to put out the effort to really turn it into something that I would do. In part because for the last 15 years I’ve been running Xero Shoes and I just didn’t have the brain space to do it. So some of that fits into your cycle of life component, and we can start singing Hakuna Matata, and some of it is just the serendipity of all these things lining up at the right time.
Brian Keane:
That makes so much sense. And it’s interesting because what you mentioned there about Xero Shoes and the capacity, that’s what happened to me after I wrote the first book, was I had more money than I had been making in a very, very long time up until that point, and I had a lot of time. I had a lot of free time because the opportunities that had opened up for me were very highly leveraged. There were speaking appearances, higher ticket offers for programming and I had all this time that I thought I actually need to go and physically challenge myself. And it’s interesting you mentioned there, and it’s slightly opposite to my story when it came to what I enjoyed. I am very vocal on my podcast and channels about how much I hate running, but I do ultra marathons. I’m very vocal. I love having ran, but I hate running. The process of running. I’m not built to run. I’m five foot eight… Go on.
Steven Sashen:
I’m not a runner. I’m a sprinter.
Brian Keane:
And like you, I’m built to sprint. I’m five foot eight, a 175 pounds, about 83 kilos, 175, imagine. Someday. Someday. Fingers crossed some days. I’m built like a little hobbit. I’m not built for these long distance 100-mile ultra marathons. But what I loved about those challenges was they forced me to do things that I wasn’t good at. And it humbled me a lot and I found it made me a better person in other areas of my life. Because when you go into fitness areas where you feel like you’re running downhill for the metaphor, i.e., bodybuilding, for me, I look at a weight I put on muscle. I’m genetically gifted for that. But if I stop running for a week and I try and run a 5K, I’m out of breath. It kills me because I’m not built for that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so here’s the part we have in common. Power athletes in general don’t have good VO2 max.
Brian Keane:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
But the flip side is, I would argue, even though you don’t like running, but having run, the part that you like is the finding and adopting a challenge. And so for you, it was finding a thing that I need to figure out how to get good at, even though I don’t have a propensity for it. And for me, it’s been just finding the thing that I just have the propensity for ’cause I have no interest in trying to buck the tide. And maybe that is a cycle of life thing ’cause I try to buck… I mean, I want to learn new things. I want to learn to do stuff I haven’t done before.
I just had… Wait, what the hell was it? I just had one that just happened where I went, “Ooh, I got to do that.” And now I can’t remember what the hell it was. Anyway, it’ll pop back in my head at some point. So there’s always things that I want to do, but I’m very clear that I don’t want to suffer for the sake of suffering. If I’ve got a good goal in mind, I’ll put myself through it. But if I’m doing it because the goal is this imaginary happiness at the end, not because I want to pursue the goal and see what that’s like, I’m not going to do that.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, I call it in one of the books the I’ll be happy when fallacy. I was probably the king of that I’ll be happy when fallacy. Oh my God, that is a life hack in, I know that’s been a completely bastardized term, but if ever there was a life technique or hack, it’s knowing that that’s not a real thing, that I’ll be happy when.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Do you know the book Stumbling on Happiness?
Brian Keane:
Yeah, great book. Dan Gilbert. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, for people who haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. But the premise of the book in a nutshell is that every thought we have is some version of I’ll be happy when. We’re horrible at predicting, I’ll be happy when, and being correct. We’re even worse at remembering how bad we are at predicting it. And we think we’re special ’cause we think if a million people that we interviewed got what we thought would make us happy and they’re no happier, we’d still go, “Yep. But if I got that…” And his recommendation for getting over it and I want to hear how much this was yours or what you did differently was go meet as many people as you can who’ve gotten it. And once you find out that ain’t it, when that thought arises, it’s not that it’s going to stop, but when it arises, you’re going to have a hard time believing it.
Brian Keane:
One of the stories that I think the universe sent me in my college days that I never appreciated until I was older in life was exactly as you said there. And the language I’ve used in my own dialogue was, when you speak to those people who are in the position you want to be in, you have to understand the cost they paid to be there and are you willing to pay that cost? And I remember in our twenties, and we were on what was a J1 in California at the time, we were in Berkeley University right before I got my job there a couple of years later, and we were on the night out, and I think in the states it’s called slightly different, but we were basically out on the pull, where you’d go out chatting to girls, me and my friend, and that was all we were doing. Irish guys, Irish accent going into night-clubbing-
Steven Sashen:
Oh man, you’re shooting fish in a barrel.
Brian Keane:
It was the best thing ever. Literally all you’d have to do, Steven, sometimes was ask what the time was and the accent would open the door for you. And as long as you had any sort of wit about you at all, you were fine. But his line was, and I remember we’d be chatting and we’d be looking at really attractive girls on the other side of the bar and we’d be talking to them for 5, 10 minutes and he would always ask, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” And that was his line. And it’s basically a representation or are you willing to pay the cost for the people who are in the position of where you want to be? And I never connected with that at 2021 that I now do in my 30s, but I think it’s applicable across timelines.
Steven Sashen:
You want to hear something… This is something, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this publicly. Not that it’s a secret, but I’ve never talked about it publicly ’cause why would I? And you’ll see what I mean in a second. I got that lesson when I was 15, maybe 14. I was at summer camp and I was sick, and so was my best friend. And there was a guy also in the infirmary who was the dishwasher who was a few years older than us. And my friend was super obsessed with sex and said, “So have you had sex?” And the guy says, “Yeah, I have.” And my friend’s like, “Oh my God, was it great?” He goes, “No.” He said, “What? What happened? Was it someone… Was she really hot?” “No.” “Wait, what?” “Well, we were friends, our parents were out of town. We thought, Hey, what the heck?” And then he started to say something and for whatever reason, I felt like my brain just opened up and I knew what he’s going to say next is going to be really, really important.
And he said, “Here’s the thing I can tell you about sex. If you have it with someone you really like, it can make you closer. If you have it with someone that you don’t really like or know, it can make you much more distant. And it’s not enjoyable to be like that.” And I was a stand-up comic for 10 years, where similarly, there was lots of opportunities. And I actually did say to one woman who was hitting on me, and I’m usually oblivious to that happening, I’ve been told that I’m a complete idiot when it comes to women being interested in me. And I said to her, I said, “Yeah, I’m not really interested in doing this thing now when we’re going to wake up tomorrow and have that awkward silence.” And so she said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Don’t worry about it.” And then we just went to sleep. In the morning, we wake up and there’s an awkward silence, and when she meets my eyes, I went, that’s what I was talking about.
Brian Keane:
Wow. I feel there’s so many myself included in past timelines and past versions of myself that needed that message, Steven. I have a weekend plan now, and now I’m going to question everything I do and all the decisions I make ahead of that weekend based on what you just told me.
Steven Sashen:
Didn’t mean to ruin your weekend.
Brian Keane:
You made it better. You probably made it better. I feel like the higher version of myself. Well, thank you.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, good. All right, so this was a big tangent, as I tend to take people on, we talked way back when about not the what, but the how when it comes to exercise, and we’re talking about mindset things and how… Again, if you can, what was it that sort of snapped you out of believing the I’ll be happy when part and let’s feed into the work that you’ve actually been doing. What it means so people can understand what it is that you’ve figured out, if you want to call it that. That’s a hard way of phrasing it, but it’s all I’ve got and how that works when you’re working with humans.
Brian Keane:
Yeah. I remember when it happened. It was 2015, I was backstage at the WBFF World’s Fitness Model Championships, which is basically where they bring all the top fitness models in the world and it’s just a bodybuilding competition, and I was chatting to people, I had been following online for years who I thought had made it. They had millions of followers. I thought they were doing amazing, and I was chatting to them backstage and one in particular, he was miserable. He was miserable. And I’m like, “Jesus, you aren’t at all the person that I follow online. I’m like, you’re actually really unhappy.” And he was giving out about that he wasn’t making enough money. His drug bill was really high, and I didn’t realize that was a whole subsection of that world and in terms of the extremity, and I remember thinking, “I wouldn’t swap positions with you.” And that was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I did that competition. I ended up coming eight, so top 10 in the world, which worked well for marketing outside of it and all that other stuff, but I was done.
I did that show and I was out and that’s what made me question the I’ll be happy when, sometimes switching positions, and something I’ve said regularly is generally don’t take advice from people you wouldn’t switch positions with. Again, that’s 99% of the time, there’s always going to be 1% where somebody can offer really good advice and you wouldn’t switch, but 99% of the time it can be really useful as a filtering process. And that made me look at my ladder against the right wall analogy. And when I was teaching, I used the example area that I felt like I had spent years climbing a ladder, but I was up against the wrong wall. Something that I never questioned was when I’m climbing a ladder, stopping and going, “Am I enjoying this process? Am I enjoying this?” It’s the old Buddha quote, “How do you expect to be happy at a destination if you’re not happy on the journey?” And now when I’m making decisions, I’ll set the end goal and I’m all for big goals. I think people should have big goals, body composition, weight loss, sprinting, gymnastics, business relationships have big goals.
Life is for living and you should live your life, but you also have to ask the question and you enjoying this process and is this something what you really want to do? I.e., os the juice worth the squeeze? Is what you’re giving up and sacrificing worth it? ‘Cause sometimes the answer is yes, and then sometimes the answer is no. In the case of different conversations with your spouse or your loved ones or your kids, I have my daughter and you’ll have difficult conversations because I want her to show up in the world in a certain way and make sure she’s kind and respectful and has worked for herself. So sometimes there’s difficult conversations around that when she’s upset because somebody has said something externally. But checking in with that and checking in with what your values are, your junk values versus true values can be really helpful. But also giving yourself permission to change your mind.
I think confirmation bias is a big thing where people will just confirm their own best luck beliefs and they’ll say, “Well, I need to get this thing and I’ll be happy.” And you just keep going down that path. And sometimes you have to give yourself permission to change your mind. Don’t quit because something’s difficult. Sometimes you have to take a rest and persevere and go through one step back for two steps forward. But also don’t be afraid to quit if you just find your ladders up against the wrong wall.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, you answered the question that brought up was, in terms of, if the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, don’t necessarily do it, but things are not always swimmingly simple. So I was going to say, what percentage, and it’s a silly question, but I’m going to ask it anyway, it’s like what percentage of difficulty would you endure? Not necessarily even because you’re believing this thought about I’ll be happy when, but just because that’s just comes with the territory. It reminds me there was some actor I wish I could remember who, who said, “There’s nothing better than getting paid for what I used to love.” And it’s an interesting thing line ’cause it’s a little glib and it’s not like there aren’t times where he loves what he’s doing. And when you doing it for a living, it’s different than just doing it.
Brian Keane:
It’s really deep question as well. That’s a great quote and a great line actually to search what was after-Yeah, it is. I really like that. In terms of the percentage, it’s interesting ’cause something I’ve changed my mind about going back to give yourself permission to change your mind is sometimes difficult things can be nourishing and sometimes difficult things that can be depleting. And what I mean by that is generally I factor most things in my life through asking the question, will this thing nourish me or will this thing deplete me? The job tasks I choose, the projects I work on, the people I spend time with, the people who are in my inner circle, my friends, my family, et cetera, most of those things, sometimes they can be difficult, but they’re ultimately nourishing. And a workout is a great metaphor for this. Sometimes people go into the gym, you know this from your timid workouts where you’re exhausted beforehand, you’re tired, you’re mentally tired, you’re confusing physical and mental tiredness, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t really feel like this.”
You do your timid workout and then your energy level is skyrocket. So the thing that you were going against actually nourished you and gave you more energy. And sometimes the things in life are a little bit like that. The difficult conversations, the difficult things you do, like writing books. I’m working on my fifth book at the minute, and they are soul-destroying in the editing phase, every single time. I feel like, and again, for women listening, they’re going to hate me, but one of my ex-partners used to always tell me that when I was writing books, she used to think it was like childbirth. She’s like, every time you forget how bad it is, every single time.
Steven Sashen:
It’s just like going to Costco on Sundays.
Brian Keane:
You’re just like, “Oh, it’s fine. Yeah, Sunday’s the day to go. It’s handy.” And then you rock in and you’re like, “Never again. Never again. Why am I here on a Sunday again?”
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. Yeah.
Brian Keane:
Sorry, go on.
Steven Sashen:
No, keep going, please.
Brian Keane:
No, I was just going to say, books are a bit like that, but you know that it’s going to open doors, it’s going to give you royalties, it’s going to give you financial freedom down the line. So sometimes the initial difficulty is worth it in the long term.
Steven Sashen:
Well, let’s be clear. You know that because you now have a history that allows this to be the case. If it’s your first book, who the hell knows? If it’s your second book after the first book didn’t happen, who the hell knows? So this is one of those things where someone asked me the other day, “What’s my best business advice?” I said, “Go to a bookstore, buy every book on the shelf they have about business. If there’s more than one, buy them all. Then take them out in the parking lot and light them on fire because it’s just not going to be like that. That’s all a confirmation bias and hindsight bias.”
So point being… And the reason for that in part is if you open up all those books and read the advice one book’s going to conflict the next which will conflict the first, which will make up a third thing, which would… It’s like just again, all confirmation bias and hindsight bias. Now it’s appropriate that we are still talking philosophically, and we haven’t talked about working with humans in actual fitness things since mindset is the key, does it make sense to bridge that gap at this point?
Brian Keane:
Yeah, 100%. I think given the overarching theme and the idea can be useful as a foundation because when you’re given the practical tips, you have that underlying knowledge, that pyramid of prioritization on, right, this is the overarching idea. When it comes to actually working with humans, and I do, like, one to one with people, coaching, and you see that the problems tend to be the same, just the language is different. People tend to struggle with very similar things. It’s just they use different language first. So sabotage is a big thing. Not being able to set a realistic goal, not focusing on the mini wins, pressing what I call the fuck it button when they go off a little bit off track.
So nutrition is big where someone will go off plan on a Saturday and then they press the fuck it button and go, “Okay, I’m just going to go off plan for the rest of the weekend and I’ll start back again on Monday.” The myth of magic Monday and all these principles, and now I have confirmation bias and availability bias based on the area that I work in where but people tend to have very similar problems when it comes to the mindset, they’re just using different language to describe it.
Steven Sashen:
So do you want to break some of those down? I mean, self-sabotage is one that I find interesting because I don’t agree with that as a concept. In other words, and feel free to tell me if you think I’ve got my head up my butt about this one, but in my mind, if you… Well, it just occurred to me I have to do it in a different way. So back to your point about not setting realistic goals. If you’re not setting a realistic goal, the thing you’re doing can’t be self-sabotage, it’s actually probably smart. It’s probably some semi-conscious recognition that you were a boneheaded about the goal part. But either way, and let’s say you set a realistic goal, what seems to me to be the case is that you have some probably unexamined belief that just conflicts with something either that you’re doing or that’s happening as a result of what you’re doing.
And so you’re actually acting in what you think are your own best interests, even if they may not be. And the reason, I mean, that might sound just semantic, but I like to think it that way because the idea of self-sabotage, it’s almost like you have an evil inner twin who’s just trying to mess with you, versus you have an evil inner someone looking out for your best interest who may just be a little misinformed. Like, look, every bit of advice my father gave me was complete bullshit, but he meant well, he just didn’t know who I was. He just didn’t understand my brain. He was giving me suggestions that for him would’ve made sense and would’ve changed his life. For me, they just had no application whatsoever. And when I finally realized he’s doing the best he can to give me his best advice, then I could listen to it and just say, “No, I appreciate that. Yeah, I’m going to go do this instead.”
And it’s a bit of a shame that he died about eight years ago ’cause he would’ve been just giddy with the fact that I proved him wrong with what’s happening with business. Actually, he’d be jealous, but he’d also be giddy that he got to be jealous. So it looks like you may have to take the self-sabotage and realistic goals combine to talk about that for people to understand what you’re thinking and what the remedy is.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, it’s a great point. Steven. I think they tie really well together, and I agree with you up to a point, and this is where I feel it will slightly verge off in terms of opinion based on my experience and feel free to push back in the different direction, is with the people I work with generally and what I see, and the first book, and again, just to break it down, because the whole way I wrote that, and it’s not a plug for the book, I’m a believer some people should read books similar to what the business, what you said there. Every fitness book is going to have similar ideas, whether it’s mine or somebody else’s. So if you want to read it, read it. If you don’t, it’s fine.
Steven Sashen:
Ah, I’ll read it.
Brian Keane:
I’ll tell you what’s in it here. Like, I broke down that book into two sections. So it’s called the Fitness Mindset. The first section was fitness, so everything you need to know about basic training, movement, nutrition, sleep, alcohol, hydration. The second section was the mindset side, so setting the realistic goals, self-sabotaging, dealing with anxiety, dealing with the worry, dealing with setbacks, failure as feedback. But my clients at the time, and I was a one-to-one personal trainer in a gym. When that book came out, most of my clients knew what to do. They knew they should lift weights, they knew they should move more, knew they should eat more fruit and vegetables, good proteins, complex carrots, healthy fats, but they couldn’t stick to a plan.
They kept falling off track. And when it came to the self-sabotage, what I found there was always an underlying issue. There was either a self-worth issue, a self-confidence issue, a self-respect issue. There was something underneath it that people were struggling with, and there was normally a worthiness where they didn’t think they deserved to get it, or they just genuinely didn’t have the education on how to do it. They were doing what they thought was right, and it actually ended up being wrong, i.e., going in and going across… Go on.
Steven Sashen:
Well, no, I want to, ’cause I think we’re on the same page. I just want to do this and see where you go with this. I think that referring to something as a self-worth thing doesn’t give people any agency. What you said afterwards, like, “Oh, I believe I don’t deserve it.” That’s a thought, you can actually investigate and see why you think that, what that means, what that could do, and see if there’s any truth to it, because deserve, of course, implies there’s some external something letting you know whether it’s okay or not. So that’s an interesting one. When people call it self-worth such an amorphous concept that what do you do with that? But I have the belief that I don’t deserve to be, fill in the blank. It’s like, oh, that’s something I can work with.
Brian Keane:
That is one of the most common things I’ve seen with people is it’s belief systems. Like, fitness and nutrition aren’t overly complicated for the most part, like, eat more real food, eat less processed food, move more, sleep well and hydrate, drink water, good clean water, those four things, you’re going to get 80% of the results you want with most fitness goals, assuming you’re not trying to be a professional bodybuilder, All-American sprinter, et cetera. Unless you have an extreme high level goal, but for most people it’s going to be helpful. What isn’t is that underlying belief system of I don’t feel like I deserve to have this or emotionally eating, comfort eating are big areas that I focus on with people. A lot of people struggle with that, and that tends to come back to internal, and again, it’s woo woo terms and I hate using them sometimes, but self-love, self-worth, self-respect, that umbrella of actually how you feel about yourself. And I don’t want to go too esoteric with that, but-
Steven Sashen:
No, you’re not going esoteric. I think you’re on it, which is that those are the words that people are using, but what you said about the language of it and the beliefs, like, even the thing of emotional eating or comfort eating, it’s like, I’ll describe it this way and tell me if this resonates with you, with anyone for you or anyone you worked with. I was doing some stuff with a friend of mine who was saying he was having some problems with drinking, and I said, “So the last time you went on a little drinking binge, let’s try to play the film really slowly.” And by the way, this is not advice for anybody who’s listening. This is just a specific situation. Take it as a story. If you think I’m full of shit, I totally get it, but I’m just going to tell the story. This is what happened in this situation.
So I said, “Let’s play the film really slowly. Before you grab the bottle, what was going on?” He said, “I had a huge fight with my wife.” I went, “Okay, so between the huge fight and grabbing the bottle, what were you thinking? And play it frame by frame.” He’s like, “I was thinking, ‘I can’t stand this anymore.'” And I said, “Cool. And then you had the idea that getting the drink would do what?” He goes, “It would just calm that all down and make everything okay.” I said, “And let’s not take it too far. After you had the first however many drinks, did it seem to make it okay?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Cool. Let’s back up a half a step. Now, let’s go forward half a step. Was it really okay? The effects of the drink?” He goes, “No.”
I said, “Okay, cool. Now let’s back up a half a step. You can’t take it anymore. Is that even true? I mean that you couldn’t take it.” And thinks about it for a second, he goes, “No, I mean, I’m an adult. I could take it. I just didn’t like it.” I said, “So your drinking was all based on I can’t take it anymore and now can you force yourself to believe that? Now that you’ve just looked at that thought?” He goes, “No, that was completely bullshit.” Didn’t see the guy for six months. I said, “How are you doing?” He goes, “Haven’t had a drink in six months.” I said, “Still having fights with your wife?” He goes, “Yeah, once a week.”
Brian Keane:
Steven, there’s genius in what you’ve just said there, and it’s a thought pattern interrupt and it’s nearly identical. Like what you were saying that I was nodding here for people who aren’t watching the video, because I’ve had that conversation hundreds of times over the years. It’s normally with people with food is, you’re reverse engineering. You reacted and had a reaction to this thing, fight with a loved one, your boss shouted at you, stressful day, et cetera. You had this feeling or story that was playing out as a narrative in your head, i.e., “I can’t take this, I’m fed up. I’m sick of this.” And your reaction was to use a coping mechanism, in this case with alcohol, in some of the cases I’ve used, most of them was food.
And you’re breaking that thought pattern in between, you’re just putting a stop gate in between and bringing a little bit of emotional intelligence and awareness to that feeling in that moment so that you can rewrite that story and tell a new narrative. So you’re not using that coping mechanism every time you have a fight with your loved one or you feel stress or your boss shouts at you. And it sounds like a small thing, but like your friend, it’s everything. It’s literally everything. If you can get to that and you can really get someone to check in with that and they get the… You’ll see it. It’s what I call the oh fuck moment where they go, “Oh fuck”. And when they have that, you know you have it, and then that can compound positively over time.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. And so we started with this, we kind of went back to it. So again, we’re talking about the how rather than the what, ’cause everyone knows the what. Now we can clarify that there are a lot of different what’s we already said. Basically find the what that works for you. But the how is this mindset part. So out of, I think you said there were sort of five of those things you identified, what have we not touched on?
Brian Keane:
In which respect? In which of the five?
Steven Sashen:
So self-sabotage, realistic goals, oh, mini wins. What were the… I can’t remember the other ones.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, mini wins, failure is feedback and they’re kind of the main principles. I think they all tie together. So if you’ve got your setting realistic expectations, and again, have a massive goal, but just adjust a timeline. I don’t think most goals are realistic in particularly with body composition of not everyone’s going to be an Olympic sprinter, but for body composition, building muscle weight loss, et cetera, most goals are just a timeline that needs to be adjusted.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to pause on that one. That is so, so good. ‘Cause I hear that also when people say, “Hey, I want to run a marathon barefoot in three weeks.” Like, “Whoa, no, no, no.” But I also noticed, look at 62, I’m not putting on mass the way I did when I was 22 and I’ve basically, I didn’t have a goal about this to begin with, but lately it’s been coming up. It’s like I’m giving this a good year and a half before I have anything that I want to measure. I mean, things are changing in the interim, but slowly. So that one… I mean, this is going to sound funny.
If you talk to people about starting a business, they go, “Write out your business plan, then double the expenses and half the revenue that you’re projecting.” I think people need to start doing that for fitness. Double the amount of effort, half the results minimum. And in fact, I did a talk for the small business administration. I said, “Don’t even do the double your expenses and half the results ’cause whatever you write down, it’ll just cost twice as much and make you half as much no matter what you write down.” And if people just did that around the fitness because people think, you probably deal with this back to the having realistic expectations, people don’t realize the limitations or opportunities of their genetics. It’s like, “I want to look like that guy.” That guy is a genetic freak who doesn’t produce myostatin. You are, fill in the blank.
Brian Keane:
It’s interesting, and I agree completely because straight away I feel that question is broken when somebody goes and a hard no for me, ’cause people that I work with one-to-one they have to apply to come into a program is when somebody sends me a photo and go, “I want to look like that person.” It’s normally a hard no, but I will send a question back going, “Look, there is absolutely no way. I don’t even know what you look like now. All I can tell you is we’re not going to look, because that’s not you. You’re a different person completely.” But genetics are one of the things I tell people. Now, again, if you want to be LeBron James, NBA basketballer, Olympic sprinter, professional bodybuilder, yes, genetics play a huge role. They’re literally the thing that separate those top 1, 2% of people. But body composition, weight loss, fat loss, building muscle, genetics normally doesn’t determine the results, it determines the speed. That’s an important thing to look into.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. I mean, I would say there’s speed bumps and limiters along the way as well. I mean, look back to you and me, we’re never going to have the VO2 max to be able to just crank out a 10K and not breathe hard.
Brian Keane:
But anyone can complete a marathon-
Steven Sashen:
Correct.
Brian Keane:
… but it might take them five years to train for it.
Steven Sashen:
Right. And you’re not going to be setting a world record.
Brian Keane:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
When I got back into sprinting without knowing anything, I was thinking, “I can’t wait to win races.” My goal changed to, I just want to keep hitting All-American times. And when I show up at the starting line, I’m 5’5 on a tall day, and the guys that I’m racing are big buff dudes. I just want to be the guy who shows up and everyone goes, “What’s he doing here?” And then I beat them and they go, “What just happened?” So that one I can pull off most of the time. But yeah, a whole different game.
Brian Keane:
I love that. And there’s something in there that I want to pull out for people just in case they didn’t pick it up the first time, Steven, that you need to have what your version of winning looks like. Has a great line that, “You play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” and going into try and win a marathon-
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, I love that line. Okay.
Brian Keane:
It’s great. It is. I live my entire life by it. It’s a brain tattoo for me. But if you’ve never ran a marathon, you’re not going to break a world record on your first one in three months, you’re just not. But if your goal is to complete a marathon, because you can run 5K now, 10K now, and you want to run one in six months or eight months or 12 months, and the goal is completing it within four and a half hours because you have a good 5K, 10K time, that’s a really realistic target for you if you work with a structured program to it. And that means you’ve set yourself up to win, even though you technically didn’t win the marathon, but you’ve hit your goal. And I think your version of coming up to the sprint line and beating those guys who are like, “What’s he doing here?” And then wonder what happened. That’s a beautiful version of that.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a fun one. Okay, so back to the other things. Many wins, failures is feedback, what else did I miss? Let’s do those and then whatever else I forgot.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, failures is feedback I think is more of, again, an abstract idea, but I think with fitness it’s so important because as entrepreneurs, as business owners, you know this with Xero Shoes you have to use, because there’s failures. There’s no avoiding failures in business, there’s no avoiding failures in life, but there’s no avoiding failures in business. But what you can do is learn from them and you can make sure, and Charlie Munger has got great lines. I love the late Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, “If I just know where I’m going to die, I just won’t go there.” And that’s a good approach on the front end where he talks about doing pre-mortems on things. People do post-mortems when they’ve made mistakes, sometimes you can do a pre-mortem and a pre-mortem and fitness is really good. What are the things that if I did now and I continually do in terms of my daily habits, will stop me hitting my goal?
Well, okay, I’m having four bars of Snickers every night, or I’m having the half a bag of Oreos in front of the television and four beers, I want lose 20 pounds. That habit straight away isn’t going to help me. And I’m not saying you to cut that out completely, but you scale it back. So you’re identifying what are the things you’re doing now, but you’re also on the flip side going, “Right, what have I done in the past that didn’t support me and how can I learn from that so I don’t make the same mistake going forward?” We learn that as entrepreneurs, we learn that as business owners because if you don’t want to go out of business. It’s a survivorship bias that we mentioned earlier with the business books. The survivorship bias, the people who have written the books have survived. Sometimes there’s luck, sometimes they were genuinely, there’s good messages in them, sometimes there’s a combination of both. Fitness is similar. You are looking for the things that what can you do that are going to help you move to the goal.
When you fall off track, how can you not have that happen again or not have it happen in the same extreme and you’re constantly moving forward. It’s one step back, two steps forward, one step back, three steps forward. That’s what fitness is like. Weight loss is like that, body composition, muscle building is like that. Anything in that space, running a marathon is like that. There’ll be days when you are smashing a 20K and then you twist your ankle or you get a stress fracture and you have to scale it back and you know, right, “I can’t ramp up to 20K that fast again. Next time I do a marathon prep, I actually need to build a gradually.” I get tendinopathy ankles. I tore my Achilles in the Arctic. So that’s something that still flares up for me when I’m doing normal marathon training, if I ramp it up too quickly. So I know I can’t go from 5K to 20K, I have to go 5K to 7K, 7 to 9 over the space of several weeks.
Steven Sashen:
Or don’t run to the Arctic.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, wait, that’s a good lesson for anybody here is, don’t go into the Arctic, don’t tear your achilles up there and then drag your leg behind you for 86 kilometers. But you get good podcasts out of it, you get good stories out of it. So yeah, it wasn’t all bad.
Steven Sashen:
And many wins, which is related to that.
Brian Keane:
Many wins. The analogy I use for building confidence is like legs on a table that when you have a table with one leg in the middle of it’s very easy to knock that table. Confidence is very similar like that for people. When you set small targets for yourself and small mini wins, it’s like adding small legs to that table. And then over time you have this table that’s quite hard to knock. That’s why it’s so important at the start of a new journey to surround yourself with good people because if people are knocking you and your confidence is low, that’s when people fall off track. New business venture, new relationship, new marathon goal, new running program, new body composition goal. When people are like, “Ah, you can’t be doing that. That’s not what you do, it’s what other people do.” That can sink in early on because you have no proof, you have no evidence, you have no confidence to support…
People can say that to me. And it’s funny, I’ve had that. I remember I was sitting in the sauna about six months ago, Steven, and I was chatting, so I’m quite a big guy. I quite bodybuildery by design. I get leaner when I’m training for ultramarathons, but I’m quite big otherwise. And I was in the sauna talking to a guy and he goes, “What are you training for?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m training for an ultramarathon.” He goes, “There’s no way you’ll be able to run an ultramarathon.” He’s like, “There’s no way.” He goes, “You’re too big.” And I was like, “Okay, well, I name off the nine that I’ve done already.” And it was just that kind of… I was sitting there going, “Wow, if that was the beginning of the journey. I would’ve believed him and gone, ‘Yeah, Jesus, maybe you’re right.’ But I have enough evidence now to say that that’s not true.” And everybody is in a version of that. When they’re starting something new, sometimes you have to borrow the confidence from a trainer or from other people and it’s really important.
But you have that legs on a confidence table and you’re setting these small wins, and marathon training is a great representation of this. If you’ve never ran a marathon and you ran your first ever 5K and you nearly died, which is a very common experience for a lot of runners, And then you build up and you run 5K quite comfortably, and before you know what, you’re at 6, 7, 8, then you build up to a 10K and then you get to a half-marathon. You can’t go from 1K to 21K overnight. You can, but you’d be really sore and you’d probably do it really slowly. But if you build up to it gradually and set those little mini milestones of, okay, I want to run 5K and then I want to be able to build up to a 6K, and then 10K is my next target.
When I started training for Marathon de Sables, and I had never ran, Steven, before this. I was an athlete, so I sprinted. I was a sprinter, I sprinted in high school and I played football, Gaelic football, which is our national sport, like a mixture between American football and basketball, you might’ve seen it when you were in Dublin, and I played that sport, but I’d never ran more than 5K. And the first time I ever ran, it was two kilometers at the end of my bodybuilding workout, and I nearly got sick. I nearly spewed everywhere because I just wasn’t conditioned for that, wasn’t built for it. And I thought, “Oh my God, six marathons in the Sahara is 250 kilometers over six days.” I was like, “I’m actually getting sick after two.” I was like, “How am I going to do more than this?” But pyramid of prioritization, I said, “Right. There’s no point worrying about running six marathons if I can’t run one.” So I signed up for the Dubai Marathon in January and from August until January, all my training built up to that single marathon, and then that gave me the confidence.
I completed that and then was able to go on and do the six. Now, I’m not saying for people to do six back-to-back marathons, but it’s relative. Your goal might be a marathon, it might be a half-marathon, might be 20 pounds, 50 pounds, 100 pounds, goal is all relative. But you need to set these small wins along the way so that you’re building up that confidence in yourself so that when you end up hitting the goal, it just basically becomes another step on that journey.
Steven Sashen:
I said this to someone yesterday. It just came out of my mouth, and maybe I heard it from somebody else before. I said, “Confidence comes from competence.” And the only way you could build competence is by doing it, just like you said. In fact, when I became an All-American gymnast, I was perplexed that people were congratulating me because it was basically a plan that my coach and I set in motion two years earlier. And so all we did was we stuck to the plan with the various detours along the way and obstacles, but we hit the plan. So there was nothing to congratulate me for. We just did it, which people didn’t really understand that. But the other one is if you haven’t built up that competence yet and someone says to you, “You’re crazy, you can’t do it.” My response is, “I think that too sometimes. You may be right.”
Brian Keane:
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
‘Cause if you’re a business person, if you’re starting a new venture, it doesn’t matter about business, for anything. If you don’t acknowledge the simple fact that you have doubts, that becomes a bit of a problem as well. And they may be true, they may not. Someone asked me about mindset for business. I said, “The only thought that you need to have is maybe. All the rest is superfluous, but maybe. And then you kind of take it from there.”
Brian Keane:
It’s really interesting as well to add on that, because I think personality type comes into play here too, because you do have, and there was times in my life I was a little bit more fiery in my twenties. I had a little bit of a more fuck you, I’ll show you attitude, which can be really useful. Again, it’s kind of like fire as an analogy. Fire is great and it can light up your house, but it can also burn the fucking thing down. So you have to be very mindful of how you use that negativity and anger and hate as fuel. But some people will gravitate towards that and it can be really helpful. Others, it will completely knock them where they’ll think, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I can’t do that.” And the right way is probably in the middle where you’re just like, “Yeah, maybe you’re right. We’ll see. We’ll keep following the path and we’ll see what happens.”
Steven Sashen:
We’ll see. Yeah, you’re completely crazy. I think that too sometimes. And typically if you respond that way, honestly, that way the other person says, “Yeah, me too.”
Brian Keane:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the people you’re connecting with and vibing with, they’re like, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m like that as well.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, when I started my thing, I thought it was going to be a failure, and then it was and then the next one wasn’t. And then the third one I thought was going to be a success and I was wrong. So yeah, I found it very… The other one I do with people who are seemingly successful is I say, “How much of your success was due to things completely out of your control?” And then they go… They can’t stop talking.
Brian Keane:
Yeah, that list is endless.
Steven Sashen:
That list is endless. And that’s one that people don’t appreciate. I mean, especially if you’ve been successful in the past, the worst thing that can happen is you get a new idea and it feels like the first one, and it’s like, “Ooh, yeah, that’s dangerous.”
Brian Keane:
Yeah. Well, that’s the thing that over confidence is a big thing. A little bit of success is like a drug, and you always have to realize, or well questioning question to myself or bring it back to myself, that you’re always starting from zero with every new venture that a lot of it doesn’t carry forward. And again, bringing humbleness to it and knowing that luck, and yes, there’s an element of the how do you work, the luckier you get for sure. But also there’s such an element of all these moving parts that you can’t control, right timing, right wording, right thing, met the right person. All of these potential doors that opened that mightn’t opened in an alternative universe. I think just bringing that back and knowing it’s the combination of both that makes most people successful in all things business, but probably fitness as well.
Steven Sashen:
Agreed. Well, that seems like a perfect sort of segue to wrapping this up. Is there anything we missed?
Brian Keane:
No, I think we got it. I think we got a lot of the mindset stuff there, so I hope that helps a lot of people.
Steven Sashen:
So you got four books out, a fifth in the works. So after the first one, what evolved or what changed in the next one so that we can basically talk people into buying the entire over?
Brian Keane:
I appreciate that, Steven. And it’s funny because my publishers hate me because I’m the first one to be like, “When I say something and you think it’ll connect, you should 100% buy the book. And if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t.” And they hate that. They’re like, “Tell everyone to buy the fucking book, Brian. What are you doing?” So I get this all the time. The first one was that Fitness Mindset. It’s where I literally wrote a book to my clients that were struggling, and it ended up doing better than I ever thought. The follow-up was Rewire Your Mindset, which is a book purely on mindset that failure is feedback. I break things into four quadrants, your health, love and fulfillment. So for people who kind of felt like they fell out of balance in particular areas of their life who struggle to feel the fear, do it anyways and move past these kinds of self-limiting beliefs, I wrote that book for that audience.
The third one then was more specific to my athletes. And then the last one was a traditionally published book with The Keane Edge: Mastering the Mindset for Real, Lasting Fat-Loss. It was for people who were going on slimming clubs, yo-yo dieting, struggling with weight loss, it was specific to them. The new one I’m working on now is Rewriting Your Story. It’s a book around those belief systems around those stories you tell yourself and learning to rewrite them and take control of that narrative and make it more supportive.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. So if people want to find that or anything else you are up to, how should they do that?
Brian Keane:
Amazing, Steven. Yeah, I’m on everything. I’m on all the channels, the Brian Keane podcast and my podcast and Brian Keane Fitness on all the social media channels and Brian Keen Fitness-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on. You’re going to have to spell things for people
Brian Keane:
Oh, yes. Brian Keane. So B-R-I-A-N, Irish spelling versus the Y. Keane is K-E-A-N-E, and then fitness on all the channels. And briankeanefitness.com is the website as well.
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant. Brian, this has been a total, total pleasure. I can’t thank you enough. I mean, I could, but it would be obsequious and annoying. So more importantly, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much. And people please do track Brian down and let me know what your experience is when you dive into all the mindset things and how that affects all the what’s that you’re doing and instead of… Let me do that differently. Let’s see what happens when you start paying attention to the how’s instead of the what’s. There we go. That’s what I meant to say, but I couldn’t do it.
And just a reminder, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media. How you can find us, if you have any requests, comments, suggestions, advice, people you think, who should be on the show with me, especially if you know someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, I want to talk to them, then you can drop me an email. Simple, send me an email at move M-O-V-E at Join the MOVEMENT Movement. And until next time, whenever that happens to be, go out, have fun and live life feet first.