Oliver Wood got started in the business world after 7 years as an independent personal trainer. As he started online, he rapidly built a company to over 15 staff in his mid-20s, helping thousands of clients upgrade their body, energy, and productivity through a 4- step system he has agreed to share with us.
His unique perspective of both running a multi 7 figure company and understanding the behavioral nuances of what truly makes health habits stick after working with thousands of clients, has allowed him to create his own category in the health market of working with busy professionals that I want to share with you today.
His ability to take complicated topics and simplify them down into actionable steps you can integrate into your busy lifestyle is what makes him a world class coach.
Olly has committed the last decade of his life to the development of his Body Reset program alongside world-class coaches that has now impacted 1000s of clients from around the world.
Olly is a health expert with a deep background in business and health coaching with a deep background in gut health, biomechanics, leadership, mindfulness, and nutrition.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Oliver Wood about how it’s not about what you eat but what you absorb.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How being on a diet doesn’t allow your body to perform at its optimum level.
– Why only looking at your intake of food and your output of exercise isn’t enough.
– How stress is not level it’s a threshold and why that’s important.
– Why you should look at how stress impacts you both mentally and physically.
– How it’s important to pay attention to how your feels and what changes you’ve made.
Connect with Oliver:
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@ollywoodnz
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Connect with Steven:
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@XeroShoes
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@xeroshoes
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facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
Paleo, carnivore, high carb, low carb, high fat, low fat. Does it really matter what you eat? Well, maybe it’s not what you’re eating, but what you’re absorbing, and I don’t mean by osmosis, because that’s a whole different thing and not even what you’re absorbing on this podcast, The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body.
We typically start talking about the feet, because they’re your foundation, but now we’re going to talk about some things a little higher up that’s also a foundational thing. You kind of got the hint. Anyway, hi, I’m Steven Sashen, CEO, co-founder of xeroshoes.com. This is the podcast where we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, CrossFit, and skydive, play Dance Dance Revolution, whatever it is you do and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.
Did I say enjoyably? It’s a trick question. Of course, I did. Because if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are because you’re not going to keep it up if you don’t enjoy it. We call this The MOVEMENT Movement, because we’re creating a movement. I’m going to talk about that in a moment. It involves you, no big deal, no pressure. About natural movement, letting your body do what bodies are made to do without getting in the way in the name of “technological advancement.” I put air quotes around that.
So the way you participate is easy. If you want go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Even though join is in the URL, that doesn’t mean you’re joining anything. There’s no secret handshake, there’s no money exchanged. There’s no anything, other than all the previous episodes. All the places you can find us on social media and interact with us there. And simply, if you want to help spread the word, then like and share and give us a thumbs up, and a five-star rating and all those things you know how to do. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So let us jump in. Oliver Wood, please tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Oliver Wood:
Steve, what an intro. I love that. My name’s Olly.
Steven Sashen:
Well, thank you.
Oliver Wood:
I’ve been in the health and fitness space for a better part of a decade now, and I absolutely love your background. I’m a huge fan of the Xero lift shoes, and the whole foundation starting from the ground up. and that was very much my background as well. For me, I grew up in a very small town over here in New Zealand. I’m still based here and very much grew up on whole foods, real foods, connected with the ground, connected with what I was eating, all of these things. And going into all of the sports, from rowing to rugby, to even the body booming shows down the line, just understanding all of the different nuances, skillsets, how I would eat, how I would move for all of these different categories, allowed me to just be a sponge of I really don’t know what I don’t know and that everything, as soon as you start learning, you realize how much more you have to learn.
So this last decade and will continue to be, just a complete exploration of how do I make sure I feel better? How do I function better and can I do more stuff in a way that my body is working with me on the way? And I think that’s a huge part of your message as well, is just looking at it through the lens of how do we tune in? How do we make sure that this body is working as well as it can? And that’s really been how we’ve structured our entire approach, is it’s not just a case of forcing the body to exercise more, it’s not forcing you to drop your calories through the floor, it’s not throwing in an arch support when your feet don’t work, right. It’s taking the time to look at all of this stuff and make sure that you’re actually in tune with what’s actually happening underneath you.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, I guess we’re done. No, agreed. Now I got to back up. For people who are watching this, we’re going to have to address some elephants that are in the room. So elephant number one, you have this wonderful little… what I want… clothing accessory that you’re wearing. Would you like to just say a word so people can stop paying attention to that?
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I’m in a sling. I’ve got a broken wing and this is my third time I’ve had a broken wing in the last, what, three years. I had a pretty big motorbike crash back in end of 2020, and it was kind of a near death experience for me. I was going about 140 miles an hour, 200ks over here on a track, so I wasn’t on the road and had complete brake failure. So coming into a corner, doing that sort of speed and the brakes do not work. So I hit the wall at that sort of speed, managed to drop the couple gears and get some speed off the bike, and luckily I managed to jump at the very last second rather than going splat into the wall and I went 30 odd meters, I can’t do the math into feet, right over the top and landed inches from the road.
So I missed the fence, missed the gutter, missed the road, and somehow landed somewhere in the middle. So in all things considering I have a spine, I have a pelvis, I’m able to stand up, but I’ve got a couple of reattached tendons in my shoulder that have taken a while to be reattached.
Steven Sashen:
Holy smoke. So I want to dive into that for a second, just for the fun of it. While this whole crash was happening, I love that you said dropped a couple of gears to try to get some speed down. While this was happening, what was happening in your mind and body and I’ll tell you why I asked but I’m going to let you start.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, well the whole experience of going to a track day is adrenaline anyway, right? You’re just going round around circles really quickly in order to somehow have some fun and spend a lot of money on petrol. So in the moment you’re very much already in a very heightened sense state anyway, I’m really, really glad that I didn’t freeze because I’m assuming for most you would in that space. My goal became very narrowed in on, “Well I’m going towards a wall and I have two options here. I either jump off now and roll and probably break everything or I hit the wall or I find maybe a third option and try jump.” Somehow I managed to jump at the right second in order to get over the wall, but there wasn’t really much more going on than that. It was just like, well I didn’t go through a whole recollection of everything like, “I’m about to die.” It was very much like, “This could be really, really bad and there’s a couple of very, very small options that I have at play.”
Steven Sashen:
Well brilliant. Thank you. I asked because I have a friend, a guy I spoke to this morning actually, who he developed, it was a neoprene vest that did real time monitoring of all your physiological data. This is, I don’t know, 10, 15 years ago when this was not really possible. So they had one of these vests on a race car driver who they’re just looking at the screen and looking at the guy’s vitals and seeing his heart rate, seeing his respiration rate, a bunch of other things and suddenly everything just got really slow and really low on the chart and they’re like tapping the computer to make sure it’s okay, then they look up and the car is just rolling.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, they.
Steven Sashen:
And while it’s rolling the guy in the car could not have been more relaxed and when asked about that afterwards he said, “Nothing for me to do other than wait and see where I land.”
Oliver Wood:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
It’s just a wild thing that people… I can’t even imagine what that situation is like and I’m sure what I just said makes it even more unimaginable, but you added something that’s in that same vein.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, if I got excited I would’ve freezed, right?
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Oliver Wood:
So I think from a survival standpoint, you have to stay at some level will calm. I don’t think I was that calm, but it was very much assess situation, what do we do? This isn’t going to be good either way, but let’s see what I can do with it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, those situations are fascinating. You gave me a flashback back. Back when I was in gymnast mode, I remember vaulting and at one point things did not go well and I’m 12 feet in the air rolling slowly and I’m realizing, “I’m about to land on my head and in about a second I may be dead,” and I pulled it out of wherever and made it slightly past my head, but those moments, and I’m sure many people have had them, but they don’t get talked about a whole lot.
I was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when that was all a mess and got caught in a shooting spree and had six guns, pointing machine guns at my head and trying to decide which one was going to have the pleasure of pulling the trigger and I say this very casually now, it was 1989, but B, when I really think about it, it was the most lucid I’ve ever been in my life. Everything was very crystal clear and same thing, it’s like I’m just looking for an exit, I’m looking for to see when I’m going to jump and not hit the wall. I say it definitely changed my life. It was a very profound technique. I just don’t recommend it.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So one other thing as in terms of elephants in the room. So I’m assuming the helmet behind you is the helmet you were wearing when you were riding?
Oliver Wood:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
And the whatever you want to call it, the image of the car behind your head is…. that one. What is it?
Oliver Wood:
There’s a Jag on top.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, nice.
Oliver Wood:
It’s the one sitting in the garage, so I figured I’d get a photo for the office.
Steven Sashen:
I was going to ask if you had one. That’s brilliant. My dad had a Jaguar, an Xkss and he let me drive it once and I’m taking a turn at some very fast speed. He got very uptight and I said, “Dad, that’s what they made this car for,” and he was still a little grumpy and then we pull onto the road that was heading to the house that I grew up in, which is pretty much just a straight road for about a quarter of a mile, and he says, “All right, pull over.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Pull over.” I said, “What?” He goes, “Pull the damn car over.” So I pull over and I stopped the car. I said, “What?” He goes, “Okay, floor it.”
Oliver Wood:
Perfect.
Steven Sashen:
He’s a good man.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, if it’s an X J you should know what that shape is because it was very much filled or that sort of same concept.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it looked very familiar, but there’s a lot of cars that have that shape now. I hate to say it’s a little Tesla esque in that shape. It’s a little-
Oliver Wood:
Ooh, I don’t know know.
Steven Sashen:
Look, there’s only so many ways you can make things aerodynamic. Look, I’m going to be a total geek. Have you looked at the Aptera? Do you know what it is?
Oliver Wood:
No.
Steven Sashen:
The Aptera is a three wheel solar powered EV. It’s the most aerodynamically efficient car ever made, A-P-T-E-R-A or even better go to Xeroshoes.com/aptera because I think a deposit is like $100, but if you go to that link, you get $30 off. Anyway, they’re hoping to start producing them in mass within the next six to seven months or so. It’s crazy, and they’re inexpensive. You can get a solar powered electric car for under $30,000.
Oliver Wood:
Crazy.
Steven Sashen:
It’s totally amazing and very fun. All right, but back to where we started. So my opening inspired by something you and I said before I hit the record button was it’s not about what you eat but about what you absorb, and that’s a really interesting message for a number of reasons. It was funny or or coincidental. Lenanwa and I watched the show 60 Minutes last night and I think what we watched was actually a recording from a week or so ago, but they were talking about this drug Semaglutide, which has been very effective at helping people, especially obese people, lose weight. It reduces your appetite in a number of ways. It also has a bunch of side effects, but the interesting thing was they had a number of people who were very overweight claiming that they were eating very low calorie and there was a hint that maybe these people were just absorbing calories differently or better, more efficiently I guess would be the appropriate way of saying it, or that their metabolism was freakishly slow despite the fact that they were very, very overweight.
So this whole question of absorption is one that really doesn’t come up very often and then throws a monkey wrench in the whole question about which diet you happen to be on and what seems to work for you. So given that long, ridiculous intro, say more about what you’re thinking about, what we’re talking about, with this whole question of absorption versus ingestion.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, well the issue, as you just mentioned, is that if we’re in the category of trying to drop body fat, we start to notice that if there’s initial deficit that is every man and their dog knows will start something becomes a way to elicit some level of fat loss. Now the problem is if they’re just focused on the intake of food in order to create that deficit, then they get to the point where they’re lowering and lowering the amount of food they’re eating to the point that they’re eating a couple lettuce leaves and an almond, right? They’re no longer at a point where their body’s operating at a particularly high level.
So looking at the other variables here that actually play a role in how we can improve how our body absorbs foods, how it’s going to burn foods overall, some version of contractional movement is going to have a role, but if we’re just looking at this sort of binary lens of intake of food and output of exercise, then we tend to be playing quite a narrow game. We’re looking at it through the lens of being a machine.
Steven Sashen:
So let’s start there. One of the biggest arguments in the body recomposition world, let’s label it that for the fun of it, is it just calories and calories out or is it something else? And spoiler alert, every bit of research ever done says calories in, calories out, but what you’re just saying is that we may have a difficult time actually measuring what the calories in is at the very least because of what your body does with those calories. Did I get that wrong?
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I think the best quote or best summary of this is if you say it’s just calories, you’re 90% right and you’re 100% wrong because you’re looking at it through the lens of, again, nutrition training, but you’re not looking at how the body’s adopting to the outside world.
Now the best focus that we’ve been focused on recently and our audience, if you were, is very much focused on business owners and contractors and people that are very much in a production sort of output type space, that there’s a huge aspect here where stress obviously plays a role, but it’s not simply the reduction of stress, it’s a resilience of stress itself because stress is not a level but a threshold and when we look at it through the lens of what’s happening with our sleep, what’s looking at our recovery, our movement, just all of these things that come back to a happy whole human, it’s going to make a huge difference on how our body is reacting to the outside world.
And if we take them into account, this whole equation, although it’s still an equation, we consider other factors or other variables that are actually going to play a role. So without trying to make the whole thing complicated, we are looking at tuning in, and that’s really where we started today, is looking at it through the lens of movement, are just going for a run from a mental health standpoint, which is amazing, or are we going into another spin class to block out the outside world and just stress our body out? And sometimes that can be beneficial, sometimes that’s really the last thing you need to do right now, and we tend to see this pool of A-type personality getting pulled into another spin class rather than just sitting down and maybe breathing for five seconds. So there’s just a bigger conversation.
Steven Sashen:
That’s a very interesting point that people who are stressed to begin with because of whatever they’re doing for their life or how their mind works, I think maybe have a natural tendency to lean towards some other high intensity activity, whether it’s high intensity intervals or a spin class, et cetera, which it’s interesting, I don’t think I’ve thought of it that way, as it’s just adding on to the stress load that you currently have, and if you’ve got all that cortisol running through your body that’s going to affect what you do and don’t do with food and what kind of foods you even are interested in, et cetera. So that’s a fascinating thing. I keep thinking when you talk about sleep, it’s one of my all-time favorite things is checking my weight before I go to bed and then checking my weight when I wake up.
Actually my favorite is checking my height before I go to bed and then checking my height when I wake up. The first time I did that. It was like, “Holy crap, I am five six for about an hour in the morning,” and those days are long gone, but I love the losing weight while you sleep part. I find that utterly brilliant/hysterical, and I think someone should write a diet book that’s called Lose Weight While You Sleep, and the idea is that they just put you in a coma for a month and then you end up at the perfect weight.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, interesting strategy.
Steven Sashen:
So if type-A people tend to lean towards these high stress activities as well and that could get in the way, say more about what might be happening and what would be a more appropriate intervention and how that relates to this whole thing of what happens when you’re taking in food when you’re in the high stressed and more stressed situation versus whatever the opposite of that might turn into.
Oliver Wood:
So the biggest thing, when we started to look through the lens, we saw this specifically with the thyroid clients and we started to see that there was a nutrition element here, there was a nutrient deficiency, this and a stress this, something else going on, and then it’s like, well let’s have a conversation about stress because there’s stress through the lens of psychological and what we’re doing to adapt to the outside world, but then there’s also physically what we’re going through. Now there’s a very different type of stress through stimulating the nervous system verse more of a metabolic type demand. Now, there’s going to be a significant difference on how the body adapts to that stress based on whether that is metabolic or whether it’s more central nervous system based. So when we look at it through the lens of whether it’s thyroid functional, what we look at through historically being quite a chronic level stress situation, i.e, someone’s work at a high level, no human or even animal has ever been designed to be stressed for long periods of chronic time.
There’s supposed to be short bouts and obviously we went through that whole period of cortisol is bad and they realized when they blocked that entirely, nobody had any energy to start with. So there’s absolutely some benefit of having cortisol to wake up and a natural spike of cortisol when exercising, but if it’s now chronic for 6, 8, 10, 11 hours throughout the day, now we’re running to some really big issues. We’re breaking down muscle tissue, we’re storing more body fat, we are pulling a lot of the blood away from our digestive tract and more towards our muscles because our body naturally thinks we’re going to go fight or flee instead of sitting in the chair and just getting pissed off at our neighbor or someone driving past us.
So there’s all of these negative responses to cortisol being high for long periods of time, which we need to regulate at some degree, yet what we’re doing is by to de-stress, we see all of these people putting themselves in a position of either blocking stress entirely, which is the alcohol, the caffeine, the TV, whatever, which we know is not particularly helpful, and then two, there is the, “I’m going to be fit. I’m going to force myself into spin class and I’m just going to stress the body out further.”
So we have two polar opposites. We have one where we are under nourishing the body yet over consuming and we really run into quite a sluggish state or two, we have a space where we’re really trying our hardest but our body’s not even changing, it’s not responding, we feel worse and we’re dragging ourself through this process because we need more discipline rather than actually working with our body.
So it just becomes a more wholesome conversation around how we talk to ourself and often what is a result of the activities we put in our day that are truly effective rather than just forcing change, and as you know, as we start to get older through age and stage of life, there’s going to be a significant adjustment in how we operate, how we exercise, and what we get the benefits out of. When we were 21, we probably found that we just stopped having the pizza on the Friday night and we go for a couple more runs and it tend to work. A little bit different now.
So it’s not just an accuracy of information, but I think truly the conversation comes around relevancy. At what age and stage are you at currently? Are you someone that’s been fit for a long period of time, you feel your body’s operating with you or are you trying to now make some changes and you feel sluggish, you feel rundown and things aren’t responding the same way? So there’s a big part there as well.
Steven Sashen:
There are a couple thoughts that you just gave me. One is, so how old are you now?
Oliver Wood:
I’m actually only 27.
Steven Sashen:
Oh you’re a child.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. I don’t think I’ve said this to anyone before. I’ll say it now. I’m over twice your age, I turned 60 recently. So there’s two thoughts. One, I imagine that even just trying to go on a calorie restricted diet… well I don’t imagine, I know for a fact, that adds a layer of stress as well since your body is trying to keep metabolically sound. There’s another word that I was looking for. Homeostasis, there we go. Your body’s trying to maintain homeostasis, you’re putting it through this caloric deficit, this little stress, which ironically can just add to the problem. That was thought one.
Thought two. At 60, the annoying thing, yeah, it used to be that I don’t have pizza on Friday and I weigh five pounds less on Monday, and now getting that last five pounds of body fat down, which I would love… it’s not the last, but getting five pounds of fat down would make me a better sprinter, I’d have a better strength to weight ratio, man, it is a bitch, it just doesn’t want to go because I’m not very responsive to dietary interventions, but I am responsive to activity. But the problem there is at 60, I can’t recover fast enough to do the amount of activity and the type of activity where my body would respond accordingly. So I’m in this interesting catch 22 where part of me is like, “Ah, whatever,” and the other part is still trying to optimize what my body can do because I like competing as a sprinter. Any thoughts about either of those, because I don’t remember where the hell I started that whole thread?
Oliver Wood:
There’s must to go down there, and the big thing for me is clearly at 27 my focus here is not on what works for me, it’s after working… we’ve specialized with clients in their forties and fifties, so there’s a huge amount of understanding of, “Okay, they’re not responding the same as me. This isn’t working the same way. What’s different? How do I start?” and just asking better questions and going further down that route.
So certainly through the clients I work with, and I’m assuming you’re in the same category, but it’s entirely an observation, is we tend to go from being maximizers in our twenties and then we start to actually have to kind of forced towards being optimizers at some degree because if… I’ve been having this conversation with someone just earlier today who’s getting ready to do an ultra marathon cross-country type run and he is like, “Okay, well I know how you did this run 20 years ago. You would’ve started running five to 10K every single day and you would have built that up until we got to the event.” Now I suggest that’s probably not the best strategy. We’re going to look at how we increase your fitness and reduce joint impact as much as possible so we can actually get you to the event and build up that in other ways.
So the focus really becomes not how can you get more done in your day, but how can you get more of an impact from the things you’re doing. So I think that becomes a really nice shift and it allows you to have, you’ve still got some very measurable goals, but how you’re getting there might be different.
Steven Sashen:
Well you reminded me, there’s one of my all-time favorite exercises and it’s apparently very good for sprinters is the Nordic hamstring curl. For people who don’t know what year you’re sitting on your knees, you have your feet held down-
Oliver Wood:
It sucks.
Steven Sashen:
You’re kneeling with your feet held down and then you try to keep your body as straight as possible and lean forward by hinging at your knees until you fall on your face and then ideally you can come back to, and that’s a whole thing. Anyway, I was trying this, doing a couple sets of eight three times a week and I was just never making any progress and then I went to doing five sets of five with a good two, three minutes rest in between once a week and suddenly made huge progress and now I can do this exercise, I can go down, I can go back up, I can do that repeatedly.
I was both pleasantly and annoyingly stunned that that was the protocol that worked for me because it wasn’t psychologically satisfying to just do this thing once a week and get the results. That was what was so funny, getting the results wasn’t as satisfying because I wasn’t putting myself through the paces. I wasn’t working hard, but that’s what worked. I don’t know if that’ll continue to work for other exercises because just getting basically my feet, ankles and hamstrings and butt strong are the only things I cared about at the moment, other than, for the sake of vanity, I’ll do some bench press, I’ll do some chin-ups, but I don’t need that. That’s just to make my wife happy. Go ahead.
Oliver Wood:
I was just going to say the biggest observation for me initially was I started in the triathlon space before I ever went into rowing, which is a really horrible mix between endurance and sprint anyway, and then moving into bodybuilding, which is very just explosive power and no endurance. So I really forced myself into three different categories and how my body adapted to each one of those is extremely different in how my body felt. One of the things I noticed in the triathlon space and the endurance space in general was when I get older, I must be able to be better at doing triathlons in an Ironman type scenario or in a more endurance type scenario, and as I understood more about the physiology and what was actually going on, it’s like, well actually you don’t get better in endurance, you just tend to get worse at sprint.
So people tend to do things for longer and you’re in a beautiful category here where you’re holding onto the level of power, explosive power to keep yourself young, strong, and functioning at a higher degree, whereas most people when you see this in any gym is you’ll see 30 treadmills and you’ll see one or two rows or one person doing sprinting because it is much easier to walk for an hour rather than get up and go for five minutes. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Oliver Wood:
I’m not saying it’s better, but it’s just easier and I think when you shift that to really as we get older, focusing more on that explosive power and that strength, the impacts are obviously drastically, they’re very helpful, but two, they also take a very small fraction of time. People are just not willing to hit them.
Steven Sashen:
It’s hard. This is the thing. When I go to a master’s track meet, it’s sort of having a secret handshake with the other athletes because we’re working really hard, not for very long, but it’s just very difficult, there’s no prize money involved, there’s no bonus points involved, no one really cares. At 60, here’s the thing that’s so funny, you go to an open track meet for people of all ages and everyone’s going crazy over the kids that are up to 25 or up to 30 maybe, they’re the fastest people there and that’s very exciting. And then the people that are over 80, they get a lot of attention and everyone in between where I’m now, no one gives a crap. So it’s very upsetting, but it is interesting, it’s a silly… And also, we’re really, really competitive, which makes no sense because there’s no reason to be that competitive, but the fun part is we’re all old enough to know that what we’re doing is difficult, pointless and ridiculous and we love it and therefore again, there’s handshake of like, “Hey, we’re both morons,” and I’ve literally never met an on the track that I don’t adore because we all have that weird thing in common.
But yeah, sprinting is way, way harder, pushing yourself to the limit is way, way harder, and interestingly, and I would argue, this is going to sound funny, this is a weird version of ingestion versus absorption as well, is finding that balance between how much effort you want to put out because you enjoy it or you think it’s going to be beneficial and what it does do to stress your nervous system where the next two days you’re going, “I never want to do that again,” and finding that balance, finding the right dose where you can absorb it in a way that it’s nutritious versus something that is more catabolic and psychologically difficult where you think, “Yeah, I can’t keep doing that.”
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, and I think just simply asking yourself what is the goal is something that will change over time and through the simple lens of health, wealth relationships and which one is more of a focus right now and we tend to see a very natural like, okay, January we’re going to focus on building a health back into a space where we’re happy with or there’s a September-October period where we’ve got to double down and work and get these projects sorted.
So there’s always a natural tendency to make those adjustments around what is the focus, but where you are going there is there’s kind of a separation of there’s health as a category, but now we’ve got performance span, lifespan and health span. Now, if something’s focused on performance and I’m getting ready for an Ironman, well it’s not really helping particularly well with my lifespan, but there’s a balance of all three of those.
So I think it just becomes very clear on what is the goal and making sure it’s your goal, not my goal. I think that’s a big issue in the personal training space and then really being able to optimize a little bit closer to what that looks like as actual steps to your goal.
Steven Sashen:
I think that that little Venn diagram you just painted a performance lifespan and health span is a very interesting one and it’s an interesting introspective exercise because I wrestle with this one. I know that having more muscle mass is better as you get older, so if I really paid attention to that, I’d be spending more time working on hypertrophy and building more muscle mass, but that gets in the way of what I’m trying to do on the performance side, which we know power athletes tend to die a little sooner, but that’s the thing that I enjoy doing. Then the lifespan part, that’s the easy part because there’s the fun component, but I think it’s an interesting exercise for someone to go through, to think about how to prioritize your time and effort based on how those three circles do intersect or whether they intersect at all.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I spent a whole afternoon on this about halfway through last year, just trying to understand this whole concept, but it was really just came from a conversation with our coaches around are we truly optimizing towards their goal? Because once they hit the first 10 kilos weight loss or whatever it might be, it’s like, “Cool, I’ve ticked the health bucket.” I’m like, “Well what does health look like for you?” Because health is not a, you tick it and then you never have to worry about it. It’s a, how do we make sure this is something you want to do every day and what do those steps look like towards something that you’re pursuing?
I really love the… I’m probably going to have to use that story at some point, around everyone’s focusing on the people building up to their mid twenties or 30 where they’re absolutely at their peak, and then everyone’s congratulating the people over 30 because they’re still going, but then there’s this whole space in the middle of rediscovering or recreating yourself and finding a driver or a pool that is motivating to you, even if it isn’t to anyone else, and I think that’s a really, really important part.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely. Well I’ve given up the idea of winning certain races because I’m a genetic freak. Any sprinter is a genetic freak, but there’s some guys who make me seem like I don’t even know what I’m doing. A friend of mine, he’s 62 or 63, and he’s running times that any high school kid would kill for. I mean the guy’s just a machine. I’ll never come close to beating him. So my goal is just hitting an all American time every four years or every five years when I enter a new age group and they get incredibly slower. So the way Masters Track & Field works or Master’s Track is every five years there’s a new age group, and in that age group there’s certain times that you have to hit to make an All American. If you look like at the 100 meters, it goes down by a tenth, and then two tenths, then three tenths and then a second and then it goes off a cliff pretty quickly.
The first senior games I was at, I was 50 so I qualified and there’s a bunch of 60 year olds telling me, “Just wait, when you turn 60 it falls off a cliff,” and there were some 80 year olds standing behind them going, “Dude, you have no idea.” But having that goal, like the only thing I care about, I don’t need to be faster than I was last year, but if I can just keep hitting All American times, every time I enter a new age group, that would make me extraordinarily happy. It’s an identity that I enjoy having.
Oliver Wood:
This is a interesting question, I just want to ask you question, but based on the decline in overall performance, but your consistent motivation towards hitting a time, how do you detach the actual outcome being declining versus your motivation to keep going?
Steven Sashen:
My motivation hasn’t changed, it’s still the same. I enjoy competing, I enjoy training. Sprinting is going to Las Vegas because it’s all intermittent reinforcement. You go to Las Vegas, you pull the lever, you cross your fingers, you pull the lever, you cross your fingers, you win, you go, “Ah,” and then you can pull in the lever. Sprinting is the same way. You can’t do it perfectly. It’s a very simple thing. You come out of the blocks, you drive, you stand up, you go as hard as you can, you hold on, but there’s always something that goes wrong. So the joke is, at the end of a race someone says, “How’d you do?” And I go, “Do you just want a number or can I give you the excuses first?” and that’s what we all do. It’s like, “Oh, I tripped out of the blocks. Oh, my transition phase is bad,” whatever.
So there’s literally addictive quality to that, and I also enjoy the competition because you can’t fake that. You can’t fake what happens when there’s a guy right on your shoulder, either in front of you or right behind you that you want to beat or that you’re afraid is going to beat you, and I like the psychological component of that because it took me years to learn to metaphorically stay in my lane, where I’m just focused on what I’m doing, not what the people around me are doing.
So I just find it all really, really enjoyable and then having that, hitting that All American time goal adds to it. It gives me just enough to get me off the couch, but not so much that I’m really all tied up in knots about it. In fact, I’ve got my first indoor track meet this coming Sunday, and frankly, if I had an All American time, which, if I don’t I’ll be stunned because from the 55 to 59 age group, I think it was 8.5 and I was running 8 2, 8 3 and now it’s 8.9, and if I’ve dropped half a second between two years ago when I ran an 8 2, 8 3 to now… or geez, almost a second, then something is very wrong and I’ll be depressed and want to figure out how to fix that, but if I hit it, then I can just relax for the rest of the indoor season.
Oliver Wood:
So ultimately in summary, there’s a competitive nature which allows a comradery aspect, but there is also a measurement against the performance span that you have at certain areas. That’s kind of cool.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s what’s so really enjoyable about Masters Track is there’s both the opportunity to do this silly thing called competing with people for no reason, and there’s an objective measure as well that you can use if you want. I know some guys who come to the track who will always be last, but they just like that there’s, A, that camaraderie and B, it just gives them a reason for getting out there. They’re not trying to win, they’re just trying to get from the start to the finish, and I applaud that. I know that if I was a little faster, the urge to compete and try to beat my friend who I’ll never beat would be obnoxiously high and I wouldn’t enjoy that and if I was slower and I wasn’t showing some form of competence, I wouldn’t enjoy that either.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah. Well, the bloke that joined our community yesterday, his entire thing, he summed it up beautifully. He was 74 and he said, “My entire thing is making sure when my mind says go, my body doesn’t say no,” and I really liked that link.
Steven Sashen:
That’s great.
Oliver Wood:
It was just that awareness of my mind is always wanting to find a new thing to do, but my body’s always talking my way out of it. So it’s just trying to get a connection between those two that feel like I’m on the same path and this whole tuning in as part of it, but I think that explosive power, focus, drive at some level, if you can just keep that going rather than just leaning into the comforts of the world that’ll just make you feel slower, more rundown and less able to do it once you stand back up, I think that’s a really cool conversation as well.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, there’s little things that I notice on a daily basis where getting up from the floor without using my hands as quickly as I can running up the stairs three at a time or whatever it is. I also if there’s anything that I can do, any physical thing that I can do where people half my age can’t do it, that makes me extraordinarily happy, and I got a couple of those.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, brilliant.
Steven Sashen:
Like Nordic hamstring is one. There’s like three things that I can do where people are like, “How do you do that?” and some of it is because I’ve been doing it for 40 years, but some of it is that I’ve been working on it.
So I’m not suggesting that anybody else should have whatever competitive nature that leads to some of these things that I do. I guess the reason that I even bring it up is really to invite people to figure out what it is that makes them tick and what’s enjoyable. Like I said at the top, if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up. And to be clear and candid about it, I’m still working on having fun phase for some of what I do this. Like I made this great home gym, I’ve got every piece of equipment that I would want and sometimes every time I walk by I do something and other times I walk by and go, “Oh god, I don’t want to look at that crap anymore.” So finding that right balance is challenging and it’s gotten more challenging as I’ve gotten older where I just don’t have the resilience that I had where I could just push through it or the motivation that I had where I would just push through it because again, in my twenties I was still competing at a reasonable level, so that was motivating. I don’t need to do any of this now.
So it’s a whole different game, and I guess where I’m going with this, the reason that I’m hacking it out with you in real time, is another Venn diagram of just what it is that’s enjoyable, why it’s enjoyable, and then the how to do it in a way that works with what your body and mind can do.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I was going a different way. I was thinking more down the lines of motivation and where that stems from because you have it but it’s undulating and I think that’s normal, and I think there’s a huge part here where people that are the most resilient are usually the ones that are self-compassionate, right? Because you’ve been beating yourself up inside your own head, you’re not in the particularly good spot in order to move forward. So I think that’s really, really helpful and I think if anything that’s a… Go ahead.
Steven Sashen:
Well let me ask you a question about motivation because this happens both as an athlete at whatever level somebody might be, but also happens in business, where people ask me often, “Well what motivates you to do what you’re doing in business?” and I go, “What are you talking about? I got shit to do.” So it’s like what motivates me is we have 72 employees, I’m primarily responsible for making sure they get paid. I don’t need to do something to get psyched up. That doesn’t mean I enjoy it, it’s just what you do.
So what’s your experience with, let’s call it intrinsic motivation, versus extrinsic motivation and just what you’ve seen with people as they have… Do they try to psych themselves up for doing something or are they just trying to find the thing that naturally gets them out of bed and off to do what they do? How do you put it?
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, this blew up my face, so I love this conversation because I was in a whirl of it for at least 20 years, everything was about some sort of external goal. It was the triathlon, it was the rowing championship, it was the body building medals there, all of the stuff, and then it was business and hitting certain accolades and business goals and all this stuff. Then you hit all them and you’re like, “Well what do I do now?” and if your focus was entirely on the goal, there was just a bit of a… the motivator was never the money or it was never the medal. There was one photo that I took on the body building stage and these things here are not there because of the award, it’s more the reminder of the photo that I had when I got on stage and my face was blank like, “Job done, onto the next.”
Steven Sashen:
You know what? Hold on. Wait, I got to pause. When I became an All-American gymnast, which I had worked three years to make that happen, I literally was confused when people were congratulating me because we set out a plan, we did the plan, this is the result of doing the plan. So what’s the-
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, it was like, “I expected it.”
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Oliver Wood:
And I’ve been in that space so many times where you expect the goal, you tick it off and you move on and I think there’s a celebration component that I completely missed that I’ve started to realize is helpful now, but as you’ve just said, is you move from those initial accolades and a narrow focus to nearly a responsibility type thing or of me just coming back to how I conduct my day and a level of standard that I hold myself to.
I think that’s an important shift. You bring in this beautiful sort of competition space where you’re able to do it regardless of who else is involved, there’s a driver for me that I’m going to, in anything, it kind of highlights like a healthy version in comparison, but for me, I went through that whole space while also breaking everything in my shoulder and going from the fittest best shape I’d ever been to feeling like that entire identity be removed. Kind of like you’re in a space where you’ve been the NFL staff for all your life and now you’ve got to rediscover who you are.
So I went through that in the same time that we hit certain business targets and I was like, “Well what’s next? Nothing’s driving me, nothing’s pulling me.” So it shifted to that space of, as you mentioned, responsibility. For me personally, it’s a level of standard I hold to myself and I think there’s a really nice phrase that a guy said to me the other day is “Ordinary people come extraordinary when they raise the minimum standard.”
So my goal is never hitting the perfect day every day, but there’s a minimum standard that I hold to myself that is typically a lot higher than most, and that’s simply just, I don’t know why, but that’s just literally the nudge that I have for myself. Does that make sense?
Steven Sashen:
It does. It made me think of another barometer or another yard stick. There’s been something going on for me lately that, to make a very long story very short, I’ve become hyper aware of my mortality in a way that has been so unbearably pleasant I don’t know what to do with myself. Little things that are mildly enjoyable are now extremely enjoyable. Random things that are just literally random.
Like the other day I’m walking our dog and I’d wasn’t paying attention to where we were and then I look up and I realize, “Oh, we’re really close to home,” and for some reason just seeing the corner that was the last corner we turn made me unbelievably happy and everything just feels very precious and it’s added a different flavor to the way I’m perceiving all of this stuff that I don’t even know what to do with it yet because it’s still very new for me and I just hope it never goes away because it’s just so delightful in recognizing that even if I have these goals, what’s happening now is enough or maybe even more than enough frankly. And I don’t mean in a material sense, I mean just breathing in and out and having people that you care about and vice versa, food that tastes good, just a dog that is utterly delightful, these little things and it’s just occurring to me that as we’ve been having this conversation, that aspect of stuff has been on the sideline of what we’ve been talking about up until now.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I think the beautiful part of this is, I don’t think either of us have the answers, it’s just we’re literally communicating what we’re discovering as we walk through it all. But I think there’s a really nice space where you’ve clearly gone through a space of growth in company to a level of maturity of all these things and then you’ve found a happy medium, and I think that’s a really interesting space where a lot of people are stuck in waiting until the next paycheck or just trying to stay up water, and then there’s people that are born into wealth and then they have no direction at all. But when there’s a growth from nothing to something and then a recalibration from in the middle, I think it allows you to get some… it gains a different perspective on, what you get out of life and what you focus on because at the end of the day, something that initially was upsetting to me but is becoming more of a relief than anything is that nothing matters until I create meaning of it.
Steven Sashen:
Isn’t it wonderful? Yeah.
Oliver Wood:
And I think it’s an important part that you’ve done with your sprinting, but it’s like, “I understand that nothing matters unless I create meaning behind it,” and I think that’s been a continual loop for me at least, that maybe I haven’t closed yet, but it allows you to look at that level of what I see or deem valuable.
I think when you have a whole team of 70 odd people behind you, or in my case, 20 odd people, there’s just a deep sense of, “Well these guys are all here with me and we’ve created this incredible team,” and there’s just a growth path where we feel we’re on the same line and that becomes deeply meaningful. What more is there to life than what I’ve created meaning behind?
Steven Sashen:
Well that me thing brings me back to sprinting. My favorite thing is at the beginning of a race, this happens repeatedly where someone who… and typically someone who’s looking very intense, looks at me and says, “Hey, good luck,” or “You have a good race,” whatever, and I go, “Hey look, again, there’s no prize money at the end of this. Just I hope you stay healthy, don’t get injured, have a good time,” and, “Oh, right, by the way, I totally want to kick your ass.”
So I just like saying it, and I do something funny… God, you just made me think of this. I do something funny at the beginning of a race. I look at the finish line and I remind myself that the only reason it looks far away is because we have binocular vision. If you close one eye, you can’t really tell how far away something is, and if you think about it, if you really want to get fun about it, you think that the only reason you’re perceiving it at all is because there’s some weird thing happening in your brain after information hits your retina and then goes back to your brain and it’s all sort of internal in a way. It’s like a dream. And when I do this, I’m not describing it as well as I could, but it’s sort of like the distance between start and the finish collapses. It’s just there’s this visual image, distance is a concept, so it feels like I’m not having to run anywhere. There’s nowhere for me to go.
Oliver Wood:
Do you know what a really fun way of having this experiment played out is?
Steven Sashen:
No
Oliver Wood:
Try rowing where you’re facing the other direction.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God, that’s really interesting. Say more.
Oliver Wood:
Well one race will feel 5K long and some will feel 1,000 meters. You’re like, “Really? Was that there yet?” because the only thing that you’re really playing off is you have 500 meter distance barriers, like, “Cool, that’s 500 down, that’s 1,000 down, that’s 1,500 down. Last 500. Go,” and races where you’ve got people behind you that you’re chasing, you’re like, “Where are they? Where are they?” always feels like a longer race rather than when you’re out in front and you’re seeing everyone behind you. So that whole concept of distance and time and stuff really is quite different.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really fascinating. So what’s it like? So look, I’m talking about staying in your lane when I’m running, but when I’m running there’s either some amount of in front of me or I hear them behind me, but on the rowing side, what’s that when you are not the one leading and you can’t see everybody? How do you deal with that?
Oliver Wood:
Ultimately it’s summed up as if they’re behind you. Life’s great if they’re in front of you, i.e. behind your back, life’s horrible because you’re constantly chasing, you don’t know where they are. It’s horrible.
The balance really for me me was how can I get out of the gates as quickly as possible without using all the energy for the rest of the race, but I know that there is massive value in getting out quickly so I know where the whole field is in order for me to stay there. So yeah, there’s a massive drive in that first crucial 250 meters in order to be out in front in order to make sure I know where the whole field is and go from there.
Steven Sashen:
Are there other people who had a different relationship with where their place was and could handle that not being in the lead well enough and internally enough that they pulled it off at the end?
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, the only way that it plays out any differently is if the boat isn’t at least a full boat length in front of you. So if you’re an eight or four, something bigger than just a single where you can focus on, “Okay, I’m up to number eight. Now I’m up to number seven and I’m pulling them in,” and it becomes a whole reeling in process of what I can see in my periphery, as opposed to if you have to turn around and they’re way out there, it’s game over.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, God, I never thought about it. I love rowing. I hate getting up early enough to row. Literally it’s like if I have to wake up before 6:00 AM to do something, it’s just not going to happen, and around here, that’s the only way to do it. Do you miss rowing?
Oliver Wood:
I do. Only from the same conversation you are having around the sprinting is there’s a level of when the whole boat works together, it’s just the simplicity of that click happening at the same time, water going, all of that stuff just is brilliant, but there’s probably a fantasizing over the good parts as opposed to all of the days, but the structure and the whole space of just having an aligned crew and there being a sound to that aligned crew I think was pretty cool.
Steven Sashen:
No, I’m going to go back to the intermittent reinforcement thing. When I first was learning a row, I’m in an eight and it’s mostly middle-aged women who are in the boat with me, and the woman in front of me yelled at me, “Why do you keep hitting me with your oar?” I said, “Because you’re not getting out of the damn way,” but we had three strokes where everybody was in sync and it’s just magic and I could only imagine. It’s sort of like, somebody said to me, and I will confess, I’ve never had the experience I’m about to describe. He said, “There’s that time when you’re sprinting where your form is right on point and it just doesn’t even feel like you’re running and you’re going faster than you ever have,” and I went, “Yeah, I haven’t had that yet,” but I had that in that boat for a minute and I can only imagine if you’ve got seven other people in that boat with you and they’re that good, that that feeling must be even better that-
Oliver Wood:
Oh, you go past every lake and you’re like, “Oh, I want to row on that.” It stays with you for a fair bit of time, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. It’s really dreamy. That raised a whole other thing for figuring out, and by the way, we got to come back to where we started this conversation about absorption and ingestion versus diet, but before we get back to that, finding something to do, where there is that possibility of that sort of transcendence within the action itself, I think that’s highly underrated or not necessarily understood and the interview-
Oliver Wood:
I think it’s massively rated where it needs to be for the people that have achieved it, but like you said, very few people put in the time, the effort or the focus in order to ever achieve it, so it’s probably not talked about that much because very few people have got to that point.
Steven Sashen:
Well there’s also certain activities that engender differently than others, like rowing, but when it’s really smooth, it’s just really smooth and there’s just something about the act of rowing where that’s a possibility. There’s that possibility. It’s a little different actually, but there’s some activities where it’s just not built in and where you don’t have that kind of… how do I want to describe it? That relationship between what you are doing and how it’s working where it’s that immediate and the outside part of it is as important as the inside part of it because what’s happening around you on the water, if the water’s choppy, if the water’s smooth, if you crab an oar. There’s all these little things that are external to you, some of which you have control over, some of which you don’t, but every now and then it all lines up. And I’m just thinking about the number of things that are like that and there aren’t a lot.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I think the only lens that I would look at through or my thought process with what you’re saying was flow usually is on the other side of you doing something for a really long time, doing the boring work for a really long time in order to get good at something and most people are not willing to put in the time to get really good at something because it requires a lot of years of delayed gratification.
That’s kind of what you were describing is taking time to get through the choppy water or do the boring work or do it when nobody’s watching or just take the time to refine a skill to a level of focus and flow because flow really comes from everything aligning together, but there’s so many stimulus that need to come together in order to be one sort of fluid movement that regardless of what skill, and I’m only saying that because I’ve been able to be part of so many sports and I’ve experienced flow on the track and I’ve experienced flow even in a bodybuilding space on a stage, which is the last thing I’d ever think I’d find flow in, the rowing, that sort of thing, just being able to spend that… I probably think it’s 10,000 hours in all of those things, but to a substantial amount of time in each one of those sports to feel like, “Ah, that’s what this whole thing feels like,” and now I watch.
It’s the same as reading a book. Ten years ago when you knew nothing about business like, “Oh, there’s a couple things that were kind of interesting now,” and then I went back to a book five years later, I’m like, “This makes sense. This makes sense. A hundred percent this,” right, it could all just make sense.
And then I went and watched a motor GP thing on the TV the other day and I was finding myself leaning into the corner, seeing where he was changing gears. He was holding his rev at a certain level, all of those things that felt like flow because I understood what that skillset required and knowing that there was a whole, it wasn’t just getting on a… I did polo as well for an amount of time. So it’s not even just jumping on a bike and twisting an accelerator, it’s like now you’ve got this whole animal underneath you having to run as well. So there was all of these areas of a whole bunch of things having to align in one space in order for that thing to actually work. So I think it takes quite a bit of time.
Steven Sashen:
Well thanks. You just highlighted something though, that I think is the biggest difference between you and me and I don’t know if we’ll be able to resolve it and that is my fantasy is to have enough money to go to bookstores and buy all the business books and take them out into the parking lot and burn them because I find them all so completely useless. It’s all survivorship bias and hindsight bias and people trying to make a living by coming up with some story that makes people give them money and the story is always, “Here’s how to make money,” and that’s how they make money. I just find it all reprehensible.
My wife early on said something like, “I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” I said, “No one knows what we are doing. No one’s ever done what we’re doing before. Our job isn’t to know in advance, our job is to figure out every day what we need to learn and then hopefully learn it as quickly as humanly possible,” and that’s a boring business book. If I had to give a lecture on business success, it would be try to prove that there’s a market for what you’re doing before you waste a lot of time, effort, and money and then just cross your fingers. Work hard, cross your fingers because that’s part of-
Oliver Wood:
The biggest part or the best guidance I think I’ve had on reading books is don’t read something that someone’s trying to sell you something and how do you do that? I’m like, “Well let’s start with people that are no longer alive,” and focus on things that have actually been learned over-
Steven Sashen:
No, no, you can’t do that because a lot of those people who are no longer alive, they wrote those books because they were trying to sell you something and then they just died. So people don’t know-
Oliver Wood:
Right, maybe that’s not a good filter. Yeah, or at least if you know that there’s been something sold at the end of the day, I think things like-
Steven Sashen:
Even still, I’ll tell you why. This is a variation on reading a book. Somebody said to me, “Hey, we have an opportunity to pay some amount of money to go to Necker Island,” which is Richard Branson’s Island, “and hang out with Richard Branson,” and I said, “Why would I want to do that?” and they said, “Well, you’re a business person and a marketer.” I go, “Yeah,” They go “Well imagine what you could learn from him.” I said, “I can tell you right now what I had learned from him.” They go, “What?” I go, “I’m not Richard Branson. That’s it.”
Oliver Wood:
Have you ever had your own mentor?
Steven Sashen:
No.
Oliver Wood:
Really?
Steven Sashen:
No.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah. So obviously I’m much, much younger and I think that one of the big things that I think I’ve taken, the only thing that’s worked well is that I’ve taken the time to be, “I know very little about this thing and I will look to… I’ve got one of two things. I can spend time or money in order to learn it,” and I’ve definitely had measurable adjustments in learning the skill quicker and that got me to a level of getting my head above water and seeing what the difference was between applicable skills moving forward and then just building this big, “I’m going to talk about what without the how.” So I got very good at putting a book down after two pages because I was like, “This is just building a story to talk about what without the how and now I’ve got to click a button afterwards.”
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Oliver Wood:
But I think that space, and I just had a conversation with a guy that’s joined us in our community today, was talking about it through the lens of, “Well, at the end of the day you’ve got to do the work. I’m absolutely not doing that for you. I’m just going to make sure that we can have a discussion of are you running in the right direction?” And that click for him to be like, “Well now it’s just a guidance of those subtle little tweaks now,” because there’s been very few periods in the last six years at least where I haven’t had some sort of coach-mentor on the side. So I’m maybe biased or that’s one thing that’s different here, but I’m certainly getting to a space now where I’ve done some things and I’m starting to realize there is a lot of people just talking about what they’re hoping to achieve around what they’ve actually done. and that space is not very fun.
Steven Sashen:
No. Anyone who’s made their career by teaching people how to make money, I couldn’t care less about. Anyone who’s never sold a physical product, I don’t care anything about. Anyone who hasn’t tried to upset an industry, I don’t care anything about. Then you’re left with kind of nobody, or then you’re left with this rare group of people who are, by definition, they’re inimitable. They are weird in whatever way that allowed them to do whatever they did, and often the people around them are putting them on a pedestal inappropriately. Look, I’ll just name names. Everyone talks about Steve Jobs. The number of people who allowed Steve Jobs to be Steve Jobs is huge and if everyone thinks that it was Steve Jobs, they’re missing the point. There was a whole bunch of other people and they go, “Well, but Steve Jobs who hired them.”
We have this fondness for idolizing individuals and it never works well, it always ends badly. I mean, my God, look what’s happening with Elon right now. I don’t know what he’s going to do coming out of this if he’ll pull it off or not. People forget that Elon bought Tesla, he didn’t start Tesla, and there’s just… Anyway, it’s a peculiar thing, but I think a lot of the things that you could learn from a whatever, from a coach, a book or whatever, you get forced to learn most of those or you crash and burn.
That seems to be the way of it, is like you start doing everything on your own, then you realize you can’t do everything on your own and then you do one of two things, you keep beating your head against the wall trying to do everything on your own and you crash or you go, “Ah, geez, I got to find some other people who know how to do this better than I do,” and then you have to manage them because they never have the same motivation that you do.
Oliver Wood:
And I’m assuming that’s probably where you’re at in your company now is if you’ve got that many people come through, I’m sure you’ve gone through at four or five levels by now, of managers or levels of control that needed to be given in order for Steve not to run the whole thing.
Steven Sashen:
Well my wife has done a better job than I because we have a COO and CFO, who took over what she was doing. I’m still doing it on my end on the marketing and product side and I’m not saying this to pat myself in the back, quite the opposite. My biggest problem is that I’m really good at both of those things and I see things that other people don’t see. So I’m always going to have a role until someone tells me they just don’t need me anymore and they hand me a big wad of money, but until then I’m always going to have a role. I’m never going to be able to turn it over just because I do it better than the average bear. So my goal is to make it so that the things that I do well is all I’m doing and not all the extraneous stuff.
So it’s like if somebody writes a… I had it happen today. Someone gave me a press release and said, “What do you think?” and I rewrote the whole thing, but it was easier for me to rewrite the whole thing based on what she had already done than for me to start from scratch. So fine use of my time.
Anyway, speaking of use of our time, we’ve used a bunch of time, but I do want to back up since we started with this. Is there anything else that we want to talk about just to give people something to pay attention to, something they can walk away with from where we started this conversation that took any number of turns, which is my favorite kind of conversation, about this whole thing of absorption versus ingestion and how they can pay attention to that in a way that would be useful?
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I think two themes that I’ve taken from all of our tangents today is, the first one is you don’t have to, you get to. So whatever you choose to have meaning then do that thing and do it well and whatever that takes to find your flow, find the enjoyment in what you’re doing, I think is huge.
The second part there is just starting to understand more than simply the more obvious tangibles like calories in, calories out. Start to tune in with your body and understand what’s actually going on. So to give you one actual step from this, I think a really, really great place to start for so many people is take three to five deep breaths before a meal and just get to that space where you’re tuning into your actual state before eating. Now it comes from a very real, like where am I at? Am I in a sympathetic response where I’m in that fight or fight or am I in a parasympathetic where I’m calm, rest and digest?
And most people, when they realize that they’re mildly hyperventilating all day, it just allows them to have a slight check-in of, “Okay, let’s just slow down a little bit before I have this meal,” because there’s so many people focusing on, here’s the fancy new smoothie, but they’re eating it while they’re running out the door or they’re still on a work meeting or whatever else. So that’s really where this conversation of it’s what you absorb, not what you eat that matters, is it’s just paying attention to how that body actually operates. And if we can do that, then what you’re eating actually gets used and all the fancy herbs you’re putting in the thing are actually going to do something because you’re allowing the body to operate as it should. The body is a very smart little thing, but we’re not allowing it to function how it should.
So I think that whole conversation of just tuning in, creating meaning behind the things that really matter in your life, and then creating those tangible results based on what you care about, what you’re driving, and then having that clarification of what health looks like. Is it performance? Is it lifespan or health span? And the answer is never binary, it’s always going to be a percentage of each one of those, but what are you truly wanting out of life and how can you make sure your body is along for the ride?
Steven Sashen:
Well, I can’t thank you enough for finding a way to synopsize what we’ve talked about in the last hour and a few minutes because I couldn’t have done that and that was brilliant. I’m going to have bring you in for everything that I do, because that was just splendid. I hope people appreciate that.
So speaking of people appreciating that, if they want to find out more about what you’re up to and how they can interact with you, be helped by you, et cetera, tell people how they can do that.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed today as well. I think if you want to find out a little bit more on us, I think the easy place to start would just be OllyWoodNZ on Instagram or Facebook, kind of any social platform you’ll find us there.
Steven Sashen:
You’re going to have to spell it out just because of your New York, New Jersey accent.
Oliver Wood:
New Zealand accent.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Oliver Wood:
The So just go the Hollywood without the H, right? So Hollywood, O-L-L-Y, Wood, Nzid or Z, whatever you… Yeah, NZ, would be the main one.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’ll do it for Americans. So, Hollywood without the H, N-Z.
Oliver Wood:
There we go, N-Z.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Oliver Wood:
That’d be best place. Yeah, Body Reset is our main company. There’s a whole lot of stuff on there, but I think social would probably be a good place to start.
Steven Sashen:
Perfect. Well, Olly, this has been a total, total pleasure and we could do this for hours and maybe we’ll do a part two at some point, one a different topic that we won’t talk about for an hour and have more fun. Most importantly, of course, heal well, feel better, looking forward to what happens when your wing is all working again and you’re out having more fun and seeing which new thing you tackle next.
Oliver Wood:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for your time. As soon as I saw the Barefoot Focus, I was all in. So I appreciate your time and thanks so much for asking great questions and having a great conversation.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no, my pleasure. So for everyone else, thank you also, and just a reminder, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Nothing to pay to join, there’s no secret handshake, just all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us on social media and everywhere else, and again, give us a like and a thumbs up and share and five star wherever you can, you know the drill. Again, if you know what to do, you’ll do it to help spread the word.
Most importantly or at least equally importantly, if you have any questions or comments or feedback, anyone you want to recommend to be on the show, if you want to tell me that you think I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, whatever it is, you can drop me an email at move@jointhe movementmovement.com. And until then, just go out and have fun and live life feet first.