Podcast Transcription: How To Win The Year In 2023

Ted Ryce: Oh, wow! As I'm recording this, we're already done with the first month of 2023. Where does the time go? And I want to ask you, did you start strong in 2023 and you're just riding that momentum? Proud of yourself or how well that you're doing in the first month of the year?  

Or, are you like me and you're kind of struggling a little bit? You kind of struggled at the beginning of the year? Maybe you travel too much, maybe ate too much, and you're just now wondering, how am I going to finish this year? I'm already off to kind of a struggle start.  

And so what we're going to do in this podcast is we're going to talk about how to win the year. Because even if you had a strong start, it doesn't mean you're going to finish strong. And conversely, if you had a weak start, it doesn't mean you can't win in 2023. You can absolutely win in 2023.  

And that's what I'm going to go into in this episode. So, if that resonates with you, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Legendary Life podcast. I'm your host, Ted Ryce, coach to entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, high-performing professionals, folks. And the reason I do this show is twofold. Number one, I want to give you the best information on health on the internet, especially for fat loss.  

I've been in this business 23 years, and I know how confusing and frustrating it is to try to figure out who is who, who to listen to. And I'll tell you it's even worse, because the people who do the best, have the biggest social media following are usually the worst people to follow.  

But what I do here is I want to give you that information free so you can go and use it and benefit from it and get great results. So, what I ask you to do is don't listen to me. I'm not trying to convince you. I want to convince you enough to try what I recommend so that you can use it and benefit from it. I believe in learning through experience.  

And the second reason I do this show is because once you get some results and see how powerful the things that I share with you are, for some of you who are high-performers, the CEOs, the founders, the entrepreneurs, the business owners, you may want someone to take you to that next level because you're doing well in your career or business.  

You're doing well with your relationships. It's your health that you want to focus on, and you want to win back your health. You want to reclaim aim your youth, feel ten years, maybe even 15 or 20 years younger. And I can help you do that. So, I want you to think about me when it comes time to decide who to go with.  

All right, well, I feel like we're already off to a strong start for this episode. But I want to tell you this. I did not have a strong start to the year. I had some travel, was in Europe, bounced around all last year, was up and down emotionally because of the jet lag, the long flights, the re-establishing routines, the packing, the unpacking.  

And I arrived… I probably should have stayed a week longer. I was at my cousins for Christmas. I should have stayed there two weeks. But I came to Sao Paulo, Brazil, on December 26. Well, I arrived on 27th, my flight was on the 26th.  

And I've never been here before, so I had to go through all the challenges when you get to a new city. And if you've ever moved to a new city, imagine doing that several times a year. That's what I do.  

The only difference is I live out a couple of suitcases. We can talk about that type of lifestyle, the nomadic lifestyle, some other time. But I've chosen to live this way for right now, and I don't regret it.  

But I did find myself last year—If you’ve heard my episode, my biggest lesson of the year, my business coach Mike Chu, who I signed up for another year with and super excited about that, just had a call with him. So if I sound like I'm on top of the world, it's partly Brazilian coffee, which is quite strong and good. And it's also I just came from the call with him. 

And what he told me last year that changed the game for me, he’s like, “Listen, every time you travel, you're on this emotional roller coaster, Ted, you sound like a victim. You whine, you complain, you don't get your work done.  

And here's what I want to tell you. None of that matters. You've got to establish your habits and routines, no matter what. Feeling sad? Habits and routines, no matter what. Feeling good? Habits and routines, no matter what.  

And I want to tell you: I put that into action, and my year finished strong. And I was implementing that when I first got here. But because the overnight flight to Sao Paulo, all these flights to Brazil or the red eye, “Oh, I can't sleep on the plane.” So I didn't sleep at all. Okay.  

My Oura Ring registered 0 hour of sleep. And the other thing that happened was, I got here, I had to re-establish new routines. And there was a slight—I want to be honest with you. I lived in Floripa in Brazil and Brazilia. I know my way around those cities, but I don't know anybody in Sao Paulo.  

And I got here and people warned me, “Hey, Sao Paulo is kind of dangerous. It's like New York.” And I was like, “Oh, man.” So, I got here, I was, like, struggling a bit. My Portuguese is a bit rusty, and I was on edge. Like, I was having sleep issues. Now, I was pushing through, sitting down and doing my work, but the quality of my work wasn't so great. And I really had to go through a process of figuring out, okay, well, how do I get back on track here?  

And now I've started to do that, and it started with my sleep. And what I want to talk to you today is this: The thing is how strong you start the year, it does not matter. It's easy to have a strong start if, for whatever reason, your environment, your life, your lifestyle. All the stars were aligned for you.  

You had the time, business was slow, and you're able to get a strong start. Or maybe it was opposite. You got your butt kicked a little bit, like I did at the end of the year: a lot of travel, a lot of eating, whatever the case may be, and neither one matters.  

What matters here are your habits and routines. And I want to talk to you about something because maybe you have goals for the year, like I have goals for this year. I want to 10X my business, not just financially, but my reach on social media.  

I want to become a better content creator. I want to create content that really helps people and I want more people—and I feel like I do that, by the way, but I want more people to be helped. I feel like I come from such a good place, but I don't play the influencer game.  

I don't say things for shock value because I know they're going to go viral because it goes against my ethical code. So, I've chosen to do that and I have no problems with it. But it does present an issue, in that, I've got to become a much better writer.  

I've got to be way better. I can't just say whatever people say. Stop washing your body parts, especially your genitalia, with chemical laden soaps, because that area absorbs the chemicals and it's lowering your testosterone and making you fat.  

And you'll never get healthy. There may be a little tiny, tiny incy weensy minuscule bit of truth to that, not even for fat loss, but to just health. But that's the type of stuff that does really well. But it's completely, like, all of a sudden you're like, “Oh, well, I'm using that glycerin soap from…”  

I forget the name of the brand in the US. But I'm using that glycerin soap, but I still weigh the same and my belly is still big and my pants are still tight. But I'm using that soap, you know, I don't know what's happening here. I must be super toxic. So I’ve got to compete with that. And that's fine. And what I want to tell you is this to compete with that, we all have to have not just our goals, but our standards.  

So goals are about the ceiling. What are you reaching to stretch for? What are you going for this year? But standards are different. Standards are something that you won't sink below. Do you get where I'm going with this?  

It's the concept of raising the floor instead of raising the ceiling. Because raising the ceiling, having those big goals, they're nice, but it's really about how you do on your worst days than it is the few days a year or a few weeks a year, if you're lucky, where it's like, this is an amazing week.  

Everything's just in line. There are no problems. Or even if there are problems, I don't see problems. I just go and I crush it and everything, you know, just on fire. And I get there too, actually. And then a lot of curveballs come.  

And the key to navigating the curveballs is to maintain your standards. If you can't go after your goals. Are you with me on that? For example, a goal is, “I want to get to 10% body fat.” A standard is—like what I'm going to get into.  

“I work out every day. I do some form of exercise every day.” I shouldn't say work out because there's this connotation like, I'm really am pushing hard in the gym. I'm not, but I do daily exercise and I eat 2200 calories per day. I track seven times a day. Those are standards. Those are things I don't dip below. So that's the difference between goals and standards.  

And I want to say something else. I've also attached my emotions to my inputs instead of my outputs. In other words, I'm emotionally attached to my habits. Am I doing my habits, yes or no? Am I achieving my personal standard, yes or no? Regardless of what the end result is, am I hitting that personal standard?  

I want to share some of my personal standards with you. Number one, I've already shared daily exercise. Every single day, my normal, what I like to do is this: I alternate between one day of weights, one day of cardio.  

Now the weights, it could be a 20 minutes workout or it could be a two-hour workout. I did like a 90 minutes workout today. I felt great, had a great night of sleep, did a 90 minutes workout. I had the time. I went for it. I feel amazing as a result. But sometimes I can't do that. But I do something every day. That's the standard. Are you with me?  

Next standard, seven hours of sleep. If I wake up and it's six hours, which actually happened to me last night, I go back to bed. Because my energy, if I spend one more hour of energy to get seven hours of sleep provided, I feel like I can go back to bed. Sometimes I can't. It's way better. The rest of the hours after I wake up are way better.  

Another standard is one weekly massage or float tank. Now I've been getting a weekly shiatsu massage from this Japanese-Brazilian woman who her family is Japanese-Brazilian, like I said, but she has family in Japan, went back to Japan, studied massage there. She is incredible.  

I can move my neck much further than I've been able to, I want to say in like a year, maybe more, I don't know. So, I'm feeling good. That's a personal standard, a weekly massage.  

I track my calories seven days a week. Now that’s sometimes—I want to be honest, I actually screwed up today a little bit. I'm going to do my best to try to recap and figure out how many calories I ate. But I screw up sometimes. But I still track. Even if I don't track accurately, I don't care. I still am in the zone. I'm still tracking. I track every day. 

Another standard. I track my workouts, my resistance workouts. I don't track my cardio or things like that, but I track my resistance workouts. So those are some of my personal standards. So it's not about gaining 10 pounds of muscle this year, which I wouldn't want to do actually. Or it's not about getting down to 10% body fat, which I am on my way to.  

But it's about those standards, because I know if I stick to those standards, those routines, those habits, my results will come. And more importantly, I'm going to feel good because these things…Maybe I just shared my personal standards with you, and you're like, “Oh my God, that sounds horrible.”  

But these are for me, they're not for you. And so the question right now I would ask you is this: your year is going to be dependent on how well your personal energy is. Even if you're an extremely successful entrepreneur, let's say you're making 100K a month or a million a month, or whatever it is. You're running an eight figure, maybe even a nine-figure business, maybe you sold your business.  

But it comes down to your personal energy. And more specifically, the standards, habits, routines, in other words, that create that level of energy. And what I see people do is they don't put enough into this, and then they wonder why they struggle in their business.  

They've got a million-dollar business or $10 million business, and they're stressed out. They're starting to get weird ailments that the doctors aren't sure what's going on. And it's obvious that you're overweight or obese and your stress is out of control.  

And doctors, they don't measure stress. I hate to tell you. They don't measure stress. They don't do a cortisol panel, unless they feel like you have some sort of disease, like Cushing's disease. And then you have the Naturopaths who are like, “You're experiencing adrenal fatigue,” which, you know, what is that?  

What's really happening is you're not managing your stress. And even if you're feeling good in life, and let's say you're running a stressful business, let's say that your relationships are pretty good, but as your body starts to get unhealthy, it starts to raise what's called your sympathetic tone.  

In other words, if you have high blood pressure, if you have a high resting heart rate, if you measure heart rate variability, and that's getting low, if you have high cholesterol, if you have high blood sugar, you're under physiological stress.  

If you're in a lot of chronic pain because you're beating yourself up in the gym, blowing out your rotator cuffs or your meniscus in your knees or your back, and you're in chronic pain because of it, it's another form of stress.  

Even if you white knuckle it and try to talk to yourself, “Hey, listen, it isn't that bad.” Your body doesn't lie. Do you know what I mean? You can drive your car around and the check engine light is on and you can positive self-talk about it, but you can't get around the fact that eventually your engine is going to blow up.  

The positive affirmations, the white knuckling, the tough talk. If you're having symptoms, it is what it is. One of my clients, Jeff—shout out to you if you're still listening. Jeff’s my client from years ago. Fantastic transformation. Jeff told me, he said, “One of the best things I learned from you, probably the most important thing I learned from you, Ted, was be results-oriented.” 

And so often I find, in particular Americans, our culture is really good at dissociating. In other words, disconnecting from our bodies, disconnecting from how we feel, and focusing on what we want to accomplish. Even if we're in survival mode, even if our knuckles are white and our teeth are grinding at night, because we're just pushing through and we're ignoring all the symptoms, it doesn't mean it's not taking a toll on your body.  

So, my point here is this. Start with your personal energy, because if you don't, it will get to a point where you’ve got to take time off from work because your physical health is poor. At the very least, you're going to be still working, provided that you're young enough, maybe in your 40s, maybe in your 50s or 30s, and your body still can take more of a beating.  

But once you get into your 60s, it's going to get harder and harder every decade. So, your personal energy is huge. And it's so funny sometimes because I talked to a couple of entrepreneurs recently, and they didn't want to join my program.  

Of course, they haven't been listening to the podcast like you have. They came from social media, which is a very different, you know, you and I, we have more of an emotional connection here. But they told me, “Oh, you know, that's a bit expensive what you do.” 

It's like I'm cheaper than a Hublot or a Rolex. How many of those do you have? How many $5,000 suits do you have? What neighborhood do you live in? How much money do they pay for that apartment or that house and a few thousand dollars, it's not worth feeling your best?  

It's a lie, right? Because of this. I get clients who actually join and go through the program, they tell me this is the best money they've ever spent in their life. Not everyone says that, but Dan said it. He lost 50 pounds with me, and he's crushing it right now.  

So the people who don't join—and, you know, I feel bad because I feel like they're like, “Ooh, you know, I did the cost benefit analysis, and it's just yeah, it's just, you know, I'd pay for college.” Like, what do you think I am? I'm your executive MBA, but for your health. I've the best goal around because I'm going to tell you what's really going on. This is about neurochemistry. This is about your brain.  

This is about psychology. This isn't about… I mean, the very surface level of health is the exercise and nutrition, but it's about the other things. That's where the power is. I remember everybody thought it was living the best life ever when I was in my late 20s and early 30 because of how I looked.  

But I was actually sleeping poorly. My sex drive was low. It wasn't until I started learning what the hell was going on. I had a lot of unprocessed trauma that I have for my childhood, I didn't deal with it.  

I wasn't sleeping well. Didn't even realize it because I was one of the people I'm talking about right now, just white knuckling it. Wake up every day, get yourself to Starbucks, slam a cappuccino, at least that's my drink of choice.  

Coffee always comes with milk for me. I know that's heresy to some people. No sugar, just milk. Milk has sugar in it. So maybe that's where I get it from. And then just power through. But it wasn't until I started understanding stress, understanding psychology.  

Let me tell you something. I did something…People don't realize I've been in this business for 23 years. Do you know all the crazy shit I've done? I was the guy; I was using all the non-chemical toiletries. I did all that stuff and I still had all these symptoms because they were stress related.  

That's the big conversation in alternative health. They'll talk to you about don't touch the receipts because the Xenoestrogens from the chemicals on the receipts and they'll say, oh…What else do they say? Sun your b-hole, sun your butthole. All this crazy stuff. Shine infrared light on your genitals. I actually like the cold plunges so I won't talk bad about them. And the saunas. I like those, too. But some of the other stuff is just—I've done all that.  

Not the genitals and the sunning of the butthole thing, okay? I haven't done that. I had my head screwed on straight by the time that got popular. By the time Dave Asprey was posting up on Instagram, sunning his bum, you know, I had my head screwed on straight.  

But I've done so many crazy— I went down so many rabbit holes. And so what I want to tell you is this be results-oriented in your approach to your health. Ask yourself, when I do this, how do I feel afterward? I just did a workout, how do I feel afterward? Do I feel destroyed or I feel energized?  

Because I told you I did, like, a 90 or 2 minute hour workout today. I felt on top of the world afterward because I didn't kill myself. I know what I'm doing these days. But if you're doing things that make you feel worse, then you're making yourself feel worse. Makes sense, right?  

Or if you're doing things that have zero impact whatsoever, but they sound kind of cool, like the Liver King guy. You're eating raw organs. Oh, my gosh. I had a guy one time, he wanted to join my coaching program because people think that I don't turn people down. It's like, I'll take whoever. That's not true.  

I said, “Man, I think you’ve got it handled. You're eating raw organs, lifting weights. I don't think you need my help. That's exactly what I told him. He was a nice guy, too. I hope he doesn't listen to the show. Sorry, man, if you do, but I was just like, “I can't help you, man. You're eating raw organs. That's way outside of what I'm dealing with.” 

Because for me, that's like psychological extremism when it comes to diet. Go talk to the Liver King guy who got busted for steroids. If you don't know who I'm talking about, great, because you don't need to. But he's a dude in the fitness industry who lied to everybody. And said it was his primal lifestyle of walking down Manhattan, doing lunges and dragging sleds and eating raw liver, when in reality, he did all those things and took, like $100,000 worth of steroids every month.  

So anyway, ask yourself, am I doing what really makes me feel my best? And it goes beyond exercise. It goes beyond diet. Certainly, sleep is important, but it has to do with not just stress and sleep, but also your social interactions. Are you hanging out with people who lift you up, like me?  

I had the call with Mike today. I'm on top of the world. I'm on fire right now. Can you feel it? And so I want to talk to you about my professional standards. I'm doing two coaching calls with him a week now. They're group coaching calls. And it's great here because I'm like one of the least…I’m not the least successful, financially speaking, right?  

I feel like in some ways, I'm the most successful in some ways, but one of the least successful, financially speaking, in that group. And it's great because that means I'm learning a lot. And they're all in the same business. They're all health coaches. I can't think of... There's two other people, one in real estate, one in investing, I think.  

But I do two coaching calls per week, and I have a content creation standard because I'm really struggling with content creation, even with podcasting, but not as much with podcasting, but I'm struggling with content creation, with writing, specifically.  

Sometimes I hit it out of the park and people are like, “Whoa, that was amazing. You changed my life reading that tweet.” And most of the time, I'm kind of hitting in the middle. I don't get a lot of, like, “Ew, you suck!” I don't get any of that. Which is almost worse, because when you get in the middle, it's like, “Meh, look at that cat video.” 

So what I wanted to tell you is this. Your personal energy is everything. It's the source of your happiness. And when I talk about personal energy, I'm really talking about what are the things that make your brain feel healthy? Not just the practices that help you physiologically, but also psychologically and also socially.  

Those are the three areas of health. The biopsychosocial model that really encompasses how we should be approaching our health if we really want... What do we really want? That great experience of life.  

So, what are you doing to make that happen? What are your personal standards? Not your goals, but what standards can you set for yourself that you won't go below? Is it a step count? Is it a certain number of resistance training workouts per week?  

Is it cardio workouts? Are you like me and you’ve got to focus on your sleep because you don't sleep that well? Is it a stress reduction? Because you say you're not stressed, but, you know, you're kind of grinding your teeth at night and your heart rate and blood pressure is up a little bit.  

Yeah, your stress is a little high. Is it something with stress? Once you set those and stick to them, that's when the magic happens. And no matter what happens during the week, whether you…Because you're going to get curveballs thrown at you. That's the good and the bad news.  

So, relying on those routines and habits and the personal standards you set, saying, you know what, I won't go below this, that's what's going to get you through. That's what's going to help you win in a big way, because at the end of the day, it's about one thing.  

How consistent are you? What I’ll say is this: it’s number one, having the awareness to know what helps you feel your best. And then two, being consistent with doing those no matter what. And if you do that, you will win this year, regardless of how you're starting right now. 

Regardless of the curveballs that you'll get thrown in the middle of the year, or maybe the, you know, whatever Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, you will get curveballs this year. It doesn't matter how on top of the world you are, you will get them. And these personal standards are what will get you through to the other side.  

So that is it for today. I hope you got pumped up and started to think about this idea of personal standards versus your goals. And I would even challenge you to write them down. Like I did have my personal standards right in front of me. I have my professional standards right in front of me as well.  

And so I’m asking you this: what is the one thing that you can take action on after listening to this? Because the other mistake is listening, watching, reading and doing nothing. What action do you need to take after doing this? Go do it. That's what I want to leave you with. Have an incredible weekend, and I'll speak to you on Monday.