Podcast Transcription: How To Make 2022 Your Best Year Ever with Ted Ryce Part 2 

Ted Ryce: What is up, my friend? Welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host Ted Ryce, coach to executives and entrepreneurs. And today we’re going to go into our part two of “Your Best Year Ever,” we’re going to be following up on part one. So, if you haven’t gone to part one, if you haven’t listened to part one, you want to go there first.

The reason why: it’s the intro and the self-analysis. We set up the stage about what this series is about exactly, what is the philosophy of achieving your best year ever. We also talk about the reason why we don’t achieve our goals, why we’re not in the habit of living up to our potential, how when the stress gets on, we don’t rise to our expectations.

But we fall down to the level of our training and what we need to do as the foundational training to set ourselves up for success in an area where we don’t have the level of success that we want yet.

And there’s even a downloadable PDF that you can go to legendarylifepodcast.com/2022. And I want to tell you, or rather ask you, did you do the exercises, because if you haven’t, now’s the perfect time, you don’t even need to listen to Episode One again.

Although if you haven’t, make sure you listen to the episode and do the exercises at the same time. But if you’re that person who you listened to Episode One, but you didn’t do the exercises, well, now’s your time to do it.

And I would even suggest part of the problem here— and I run into this in my coaching group—is we give people some exercises to help them get emotional leverage on themselves and they don’t do them.

But the people who do them, get better results in the program. Is it specifically because they get more emotional leverage from doing the exercises? Or is it because they’re all in already and they’ll just do whatever it takes, whatever I tell them? That’s a great question. And I can’t answer it, to be honest. But I will tell you this, the correlation is there. And I’ve been through this enough times to tell you that the people who do the exercises are the people who get better results.

So, if you want better results in this area, in the area that we’re going to train up, the area that is your weakness, whether that’s health, wealth, or relationships, go back, do the exercises, especially if you’re a high performer and even more, especially if that’s even a term, I don’t know if that’s even really something we say, but it’s even more important if you’re not a high performer, but you found yourself listening to this podcast, even more crucially important for you.

But even if you’re a high performer, this is important. Even if you’ve got your wealth handled. In other words, you’re making enough money to where you’re very comfortable, you’ve got relationships that are very fulfilling, awesome, but make sure you do this, especially if health is the one or doesn’t need to be health, obviously, I’m a bit biased, because that’s what this shows about, it’s presumably why you even listen to this show.

And certainly, my wheelhouse, where wealth, career/relationships, not really—you want to do the exercises, is what I’m getting at here.

So, when we have the exercises done—again, you can get that at legendarylifepodcast.com/2022, the downloadable PDF—now we need to ask ourselves about strategies.

And I want to tell you, I’m going to be sharing with you, my strategy, my way, my approach here. But how I came up with this approach is kind of interesting. So, I started… I’m 44 now, about to turn 45 In February, and I started my health and fitness professional journey when I was 22. So, I guess 1998, something like that. And I didn’t have money when I first started. I was a personal trainer, no clients yet.

And so what was I doing? I was reading all the free content I could. I was reading a magazine called—oh, gosh—Muscle Media 2000. It was the first magazine that was for people who weren’t on steroids. It was the first kind of fitness bodybuilding magazine for people who weren’t on steroids. And they started telling the truth. I really loved it. Because they were like, “Hey, listen…” and they even told you how to use steroid.

There was one section with a guy who would talk about steroid use. I would always skip it because I was like, just not taking… I didn’t even have the money to afford it. I don’t even know where to get it. But they would at least break things down like hey, if you want to take steroids, this is what you’ve got to do. They had some steroid expert there.

But the training is where I was introduced to people like Charles Poliquin. Charles was on Tim Ferris’s podcast a few years back. I’ve been learning from Charles for like 20 years, or more. Paul Chek, I don’t know if he’s been on Tim Ferris’s podcast, but he’s been on Ben Greenfield’s. I was learning from Paul 20 years ago—found out about him through Muscle Media 2000 Magazine, and who’s the other guy Pavel Tsatsouline, who’s been on Tim’s podcast—again, found out about him, too.

And those are all the guys I’ve been learning from for over 20 years. Charles Staley is another one. He’s been on my show a few times; he’s not been on Tim’s. And the free content was great, changed the game for me. But then I hit a wall, I realized, hey, listen, the free content is great. But it’s just an article that you can read in a few minutes and you can get a workout, but what are the principles? What are the first principles of exercise? How do we get in more depth so that my clients get better results, and of course, I was interested in better results for myself, too.

And then I found books. And I’ve got to say, my dad, who—one of the things that my parents did for me… I know I’m probably very critical. I come across as very critical of them at times. And we’ll talk about that another podcast, because it’s not quite maybe what you think. Or perhaps maybe I don’t explain it well enough. But one thing they did that literally changed my life for the better and set me up for success, was they taught me the power of books.

I remembered, wow, when I was 14, and I – the internet wasn’t even around yet—I had my dad’s Arnold Schwarzenegger’s…My dad bought Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding book, I don’t even remember the name of it. It’s not the one that’s very popular on Amazon. It’s like a super old one. And I remembered, oh, yeah, I learned a lot from that time. And now what are the books that I need to read now?

So, I was coming off a really hard time. As many of you know, my brother was murdered when I was 19, and here I am just a few years later at 22, trying to figure out my life, how to move on. And I returned to that idea that my parents instilled in me that you can learn how to solve problems with books. In fact, you can get a lifetime of a person’s knowledge in just an investment of a few hours from reading a book. Incredible!

And then I got even better results with my clients. More people wanted to work with me. And so, I started wondering what the next step was. And the next step was to do courses and seminars. And that’s what I did. I started with, correspondence courses, is what Paul called them, but Paul Chek’s Correspondence Courses.

He had a scientific back training and scientific core training, and he had a bunch of other scientific program design. Paul, he’s a very different person now, in case you’ve heard him on Ben Greenfield podcasts or other podcasts, maybe my friend, Josh Trent’s Wellness Force radio podcast. But Paul was very scientific back in the day, at least, he…

That’s a story for another podcast, too, because some of the things that he shared turned out to be kind of wrong. But at the time, it was really good knowledge, it was better than other things that you could find. It was hard to find information because it just wasn’t as like, where now it’s like, there’s too much good information.

But anyway, correspondence courses, I took all these courses because they were like books, but really specific. For example, you can read a book about anatomy, but in Paul’s scientific back training course, he would break down the functional anatomy of the back. He talked about how the latissimus was attached to our humerus or shoulder joint and goes down and attaches on our pelvis, talked about the different muscles of the core, like the internal oblique, the external oblique, the rectus abdominus, the transversus abdominus.

He talked about the deep back muscles like the multifidus, and the rectus femoris, or hip flexor muscle, and he talked about how they all work together, so functional anatomy, the biomechanics behind it, and then how to assess a person’s body in this way, how to assess their back function.

And then, based on the assessment, you would learn exercises for those particular issues that you found during the assessment. It was incredible. And whoa, did it level me up even further?

And then the next level from that was doing a mentorship or a coaching. You might call it coaching or mentorship. They call it a certification.

I went to do my level one with Paul Chek’s team in Toronto, Canada, stayed there, spent a couple thousand dollars to do the mentorship, spent 300 or 500 bucks to fly to Toronto, spent another few hundred bucks to stay in a hotel. And we went through this process of taking the information that we got from the courses and apply it to case studies and to doing things in person and to refining what we did.

And let me tell you, it put me so far ahead of all the other personal trainers in Miami Beach—not all of them because there were some really good ones. And also, some Paul Chek-trained guys as well. But it put me at the top that I made a name for myself. And I was training celebrities. And that time, it was like…I hadn’t met Richard Branson yet or worked with…

Now I ended up working with Robert Downey Jr. because of all this stuff that I did. It’s not because I was born with any special talents, or that I was even that personable. People just thought because I just…I reflected my training. As we talked before, we don’t rise to our expectations, we fall back to the level of our training, and I had put in the work, I had been through the boot camps.

And it changed me as a person, it changed the way I showed up with people. It changed my confidence. It changed the interaction when a client would ask me, “Hey, why are we doing this and this, and this?”

I would be able to tell them “hey, this why we’re doing it, I found a problem with your back stability, so we need to work on this exercise, because when we start getting you to deadlift heavier, you’re not going to have that back problem. But if we don’t deal with it, it could be an issue. If not now, it could be an issue in a few years. So, we’re going to deal with these things.“

And fast forward to now—same thing with growing my business. The reason I was able to leave personal training and create a business online and travel around the world is not because I got into a lot of free content, although that did start the process, it’s because I ended up in a course by John Lee Dumas to start a podcast. And then I got coaching along the way.

I’m in two business coaching groups right now. There’s a story behind why two that I’m not going to get into today, I had problems in the first one, but the guy made it right, and the second one is just amazing. And it’s for building a Facebook group and some strategies on that. And it costs thousands of dollars.

In fact, that business coaching group, that was $26,000 for a year. And then the Facebook group strategy, one was—it’s more than Facebook group strategies, by the way, but it was $7,800. But here’s the thing, if you want the fastest results, I’ve got bills to pay, I’ve got a lifestyle to live, I’ve got people to help, I don’t want to wait for 10 years, I want results, sustainable results, for sure, but I want results now. And that’s why we took this method. This is how you get there quickly.

And if you’re running a business, you probably have hired business coaches, you’re probably in EO, you might be part of YPO, and it helps. I’ll tell you, you can even get with someone who’s not even that great of a coach, and it will help. Or if it’s relationships, you can get with someone who’s just good, maybe not even the best, and you can get great results.

And so. I want to tell you this: is in your weakest area, you have to really ask yourself, what can you put forward? What should you put forward, how fast you want results to happen? I had a conversation with someone just the other day, they said, “Ted, I’ve been listening to your podcast for three and a half years, and I’m talking to you right now because I want to join your coaching program, because even after three and a half years of listening to your podcast and implementing the strategies that you’ve shared with us, I don’t have the results that I want.”

Can you imagine? And she didn’t join my coaching group, which is totally cool. That’s fine. But you’ve got to ask yourself this... And I didn’t get a chance to ask her this, but I’m telling this to you. How much time do you want to wait? Because there’s no right answer for this. If you’re comfortable at your pace right now, then fine. But if you want to fast forward results, you have to ask, who do I need to hire to get me there fast? Who do I need to hire?

Because the free content, to be honest, it takes us a couple hours to put a piece of free content together. It takes me longer to write an article, if I’m honest, bunch of hours, because I’m not a fast writer, but it takes several hours of preparation to put say, this podcast together. So, it may take me only 20, 30, 40 minutes whatever to do the actual podcast but it takes hours of preparation.

But here’s the thing books, it takes a year to write a book. Now I don’t have a book, so I can’t sell you one. So, it’s not even out of self-interest here. Or a course, that’s the next level, because a course can give you details and context that a book won’t be able to. And also give you an experience that a book can’t. Book is just written information. It’s awesome. I’m listening to a book right now called The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Incredible!

But guess what, they don’t actually even have a course, they just have a coaching offering. I want to join that coaching. And then they have a certification. The coaching, by the way, with Steven Kotler, it’s $5,000, to be part of the coaching group, I don’t know how long it is. And then to do the certification, it’s $9,000. You better believe I’m doing both of those things. I’m going to spend $14,000 doing it.

So, I’ll make my money back, and I’ll be able to do it faster, getting the great information. So, you have to ask yourself, if you’re having therapy, if you’re having a marriage therapist or going through marriage counseling, and you have a business coach, but you don’t have someone with your health, it doesn’t make sense, you know?

And I know it can be hard out there, who should you even hire? I mean, you might like me, but maybe you don’t trust me 100%. That’s cool, I get it. Maybe you’re not a trusting person. But I tell you, find the people to hire if you want the best results. But what I’m really trying to tell you here, stop using free content to try to get ahead. Figure out the books, courses or even coaching that you need to achieve faster success, especially in your weakness.

Because coaching in particular, or mentorship or therapy, or group coaching, that’s the best way to get ahead. And as you can hear from my personal experience, I’m a true believer here, I sell this, but it’s also what’s gotten me to the level of success that I achieve.

I’ll go back to that person that told me she’s been listening for three and a half years.

Do you think she’s going to be able to figure it out by listening to three and a half more years? Hopefully, I’m able to improve my content that much that she does get better results, but it’s not likely, because it just information, it’s just not specific enough. It’s doesn’t isolate, okay, what is this person’s problem? Books can take you deeper, courses can take you a level further than that, and then coaching is how you identify your specific problem.

So, a book might tell you, hey, you need to eat less—for nutrition, for example, for fat loss, it might say, you need to eat less calories than you burn to lose fat and here’s how you calculate how many calories you eat. A course might tell you, okay, here’s how many calories you eat. Here’s how to do that. But let’s go through some exercises where, let’s say you’re eating the right amount of calories, but you’re not getting results. Let’s go through some troubleshooting here. Let’s talk about some contacts on how to eat the right amount of calories and what the common challenges are.

And then a coach might tell you, “Hey, listen, what are you struggling with right now?” Okay, so you’re in a new city because you’re at a business event, and you’re going to a restaurant, and your gym is completely different than the one that you have back home, so you don’t know what exercises to do. The food’s very different. You don’t know the supermarkets to go shopping, or what you should order. It can be very specific.

So, as I’m saying this, what is your current level of investment in solving your weakness? And what can you step it up to? If you’re only listening to podcasts, articles, and blogs, or listening to podcasts, and reading articles and blogs and watching YouTube videos, time to step it up to a book, if you don’t have the results that you want in whatever area of life you’re trying to achieve?

And if you’ve been reading books, but you still don’t have the results you want, step it up to a course. And of course, you know what’s coming next, if the course doesn’t give you the results you want, or if you just want to fast for the process, who do you need to hire?

And look, I’m not even talking about me with your health. This could be in business. In fact, I have a client who hired me recently—should have hired a business coach because her business became a problem during the coaching. It took too much time away from her.

She was making money, but her business was such a mess, that it kept taking time away from her doing what she needed to do to get in better shape, and it ended up ending our coaching because she did three months with me, she wanted to do more but she couldn’t because she built her business, it was making money, but the foundation was weak. And so a problem came because of COVID and it affected her business.

A business coach could have helped her. I couldn’t, I’m not a business coach. I know some things about business, but probably the best business advice that I could give her, it’s like, hire a business coach, you should never have hired me, to be honest. And that’s not true. I really believe we all go through the process that we need to go through. And I told her that.

That’s how honest I am with people. I’m like, “You need to hire a business coach, your business is a mess. We never talk about nutrition. We talk about your schedule and how your schedule is a mess and how you need to upgrade your knowledge when it comes to technology. That’s what I was helping her with—hardly talked about nutrition.”

And I try to make sure that when people join my coaching, I really try to make sure that they’re in the right place for this. And she sold me on it. And I thought, you know, she’s successful, she’s making money. But then she had some business problems. And again, she wanted to coach for longer than three months, and she wasn’t able to, but I think she’ll come back next year.

But again, I would even have to have a talk with her before she does it because I don’t want to deal with the same thing. It was damage control from her business instead of working on the nutrition and exercise strategies that would give her results. And it’s so easy. A lot of people, by the way, if you can’t extrapolate this from the story I just shared, a lot of people, their problems aren’t really health problems, weight loss, fat loss, it’s not really the strategies, it’s that you have too much stress from your work, or too much stress from your relationships.

So, I’m not trying to get you to hire me here. I’m trying to get you to do the best thing for you. So, if you’re an entrepreneur and your business is a mess, get a business coach, not me. And certainly, don’t, you know, the only reason you listen to podcasts or even read books sometimes is to know who to hire, perhaps a course. So funny, there was somebody who I wanted to hire to coach me, they only offer courses.

Some people get tired of coaching, and don’t want to do it anymore. Luckily, I’m not at that point. I really love coaching. But yeah, we want to develop a book—a course, rather. And we will have a book eventually.

But ask yourself, what do you need to do? You may even want to go back to that first episode and perhaps really ask yourself, is health number one thing or is relationships or wealth the number one thing. You’ve got to be clear on what you need to do.

And I always ask people that on the breakthrough call. I’m like, why are we here? You said you have some problems in other areas of your life, why do you feel like this is the right approach for you right now? And again, I’ll return to the idea, even if it isn’t the right approach for people at the time, I still believe that’s all part of the process. That’s how some people need to learn the hard way. And I was certainly like that.

But now I want to ask you, what are the strategies that you’re using? And how can you upgrade your strategies? What books, what courses, what coaches? Who can you hire? And again, be clear on what area you need the most work on? For me, I’ll tell you, my business is number one. I already have my health to high level. My business is number one. If I got that going smoothly, it frees up the time so that I can focus even more on my health.

Because there’s people who I want to work with to work on my health and get it better. Dr. Ruscio—Ruscio, I always mess up his name, Dr. Ruscio, that’s someone I want to personally work with. Actually, I said I was going to work with him, but I kind of fell off because I’ve been so slammed, but he’s someone I want to work with. He’s someone I would invest money into.

And I’ve read his book, and he doesn’t have a course, Next step is to work with him—actually, his team. So, I’m basically just kind of ranting at you right now because I want you to get better results. And I want you to see so many people have trouble with this, but I think the answer is very clear. And I think it’s clear for you. We just don’t want to do what we know we need to do. We just want to find a way around it.

And for high-performers, what they say is I should really be able to figure this out on my own. But it’s not what you say about your taxes or your business’s taxes. If you’re saying about your relationship, oh, I feel sorry for your partner. I’m only half joking, but it’s half true.

I’ll tell you another quick story. When I get into a serious, serious relationship before I get married, I’m going to do marriage counseling before I get married with that person, not after a few years when the problems start to arise because we didn’t get it handled beforehand.

And by the way, I got that tip from John Berardi, someone who is a mentor of mine, someone who I’ve done a certification with— a course with, in other words, and got coaching from him too, it was a great course. Yeah, that’s what he shared. He got a, I don’t know what you would call it, but parental advice. He worked with some psychologists who specialize with parents in parenting before he had kids.

Why? Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I had to think about that quote for a second so I didn’t mess it up.

But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Do you really want to go through…? I mean, how much time do you have? Do you really want to go through the trial and error? Whew. So easy, folks, so easy to live a much better life, we’ve just got to be willing to do what we need to do. So, I don’t have any specific downloadable PDF for you today, because I think it’s quite clear, you just write down in the health, wealth…

Or we can do this as a PDF. I’ll ask Gisele to put this together as a PDF for you. Write down health…Let’s do it this way, write down your weakest area first, and write down what books, what courses, what coaching, mentorship or therapy can you get, you know, write one book down, write one course down, write one coach down, or one mentor or therapist, and then for the next two areas do the same thing. I can put that together for you. We’ll put that on the downloadable PDF.

But it’s so simple to get better results and to get faster results. There’s a lie in our society that says that it takes a long time to change. No, it doesn’t. Let me tell you, when one of your family members dies, or if this has already happened to you, you change immediately. Or on the positive side, when something amazing happens, it changes you immediately.

When I first had this epiphany that, whoa, I have this business thing handled in a way where I’m never going to worry about paying my bills month to month, or even if it all burns down, I know how to get back and build it up again, I was a different person. When I had my transformation when I worked with my coach, Eric, when I was traveling in Southeast Asia, I don’t care where I am or what happens to me, I know how to get back to where I want to get to.

In fact, I’m almost there. 186 pounds, but it’s the day after Christmas, it’s the day I’m recording this and I’m up a couple pounds, but I know it’s just water. It’ll come right back down after today, baby, but it was a long journey to get to this point, because you could gain those couple pounds on that scale and be like, “Oh, gosh,” get a case of the fuck-its and just give up. But not me. I didn’t even have react emotionally to it. I just smiled. I enjoyed yesterday, Christmas buffet, and just back on track, no problems, no stress. And it’s because of the training that I’ve done that I’ve been able to get to these areas.

So again, write down the books, the courses, and the coaches that you want to work with. Even if you are a person and you’re not really a high-performer. And you’re kind of like, “Ah, coaches,” but write someone down anyway, for every single area. I’ll tell you, I have so in for every single area, even for my health, I have people who I want to work with, just like I told you. I call myself a health expert, because it’s just to kind of like, make it short and understandable, or fat loss expert, right?

But really, what I’m great at doing is helping people lose fat in a sustainable way without giving up their lifestyle or their favorite foods. That’s what I’m, you know, working through injuries. For example, if you’re over 40 and working and you’re feeling beat up by your…you’re feeling like you have to… you’re feeling fit, but you have to kind of beat up your body with workouts and you’re not sure how much longer you’ll be able to keep up that strategy and you’re wondering, oh, in 10 years, am I still going to be able to keep this up and I feel like I’m starting to get fatter anyway. Well, that’s my wheelhouse.

But when it comes to like gut health and all the things that Dr. Ruscio works with, it’s something I know about, I’ve read a lot of articles and listen to podcasts about it. And I guarantee you, when I go through working with him, I’ll be a different person as a result will have leveled up my knowledge and be a better coach, an even better coach.

So that’s enough of that. I’m done. I’m just fired up about it. I just believe this is the way. I’m a true believer, okay? Sorry, I’ll step down from the pulpit now. I’ll stop preaching, but I’ve just seen that work so many times. And I feel like you know if I can convince at least one person to start investing at a deeper level with themselves, it’s worth it. It’s worth all the people I annoy, all right?

Hey, look, coming with a lot of love today. I hope you had an amazing Christmas or if you celebrate a different holiday, you know, Hanukkah, Diwali, Ramadan, whatever. I hope it was amazing. Can’t wait for Episode Three, can’t wait for this year. It’s going to be the best year ever. Let’s all make it the best year ever. Not because COVID is on our side and going to help us out because I don’t think it is.

But let’s find a way in spite of what’s going on, in spite of the losses, the setbacks, the struggles that we have and will experience this coming year, let’s find a way to— let’s set a higher standard and say you know what, we’re going to make it our best year ever, even in spite of the challenges. That’s all I’ve got. Love you lots, hope this help, see on the next episode.