Ep. 047 - Celebrating a Year of Growth: Reflecting on Lessons and Wins from 'Man in the Arena' in 2023

SHOW NOTES

A heartfelt thank you to each one of you, as we celebrate our first year of the Man in the Arena podcast. 

Reflecting on the journey so far, I've had the privilege of hosting fantastic guests who shared their inspiring stories and valuable advice on health and personal growth. 

Reaching this milestone of 50 episodes with over 20,000 downloads couldn't have been possible without you - our remarkable listeners.

This journey, however, hasn't been without its share of learning. Through it all, we've discovered the power of knowledge, the importance of a well-structured process, and the immeasurable value of coaching. 

Challenging the all-or-nothing mindset has been one of the most significant lessons learned, emphasizing the importance of setting achievable goals and the concept of failing forward.

As we look forward to 2024, I'm excited about the plans we have for the podcast - focusing on promoting good health and longevity. Reflecting on the progress made last year, I'm committed to building on that success. So, whether you're a seasoned Man in the Arena listener or just tuning in, you're in for a treat.

Here's to another year of positive energy, valuable insights, and getting started on our health and wellness journeys together.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena, a go-to podcast for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

 Hello, and welcome to the second to last episode of man in the Arena for 2023. This week will actually be the last episode and then, on January 2nd 2024, I'm relaunching this podcast into year two or season two, or however we want to look at it. But this week I wanted to do a really special episode that celebrates man in the arena by doing a bit of a year in review. In this episode, I'm going to start by acknowledging a few people and some fun facts, and then I'm going to share some really cool wins and finally, we're going to get into the meat of the episode with a little exercise that I call 54321. And with that, it's five things I learned doing this podcast that I think parallels your pursuit of your health and wellness. Four things that I want you to take away from all of the combined episodes.

I've done Three ways I can help you, two ways you can help me, and then, lastly, one challenge that I have for you Sound good? All right, let's jump in. So the first thing I want to do is acknowledge you, the listener. If you're a client of mine, I want you to know that when you reference the latest episode in one of our calls, I have to tell you it just makes my day. It affirms to me that the content I'm creating is reaching you and it's helping you and really it's just kind of solidifying all of the stuff that we talk about in our coaching. And if you're not a client of mine, I want you to know that I see the downloads climb up each week and that not only tells me that you're listening, but that you're probably referring your friends to this podcast and I want to thank you for that and please keep doing that, because referrals are the best way that this podcast is going to grow and I want to be able to offer even better content, even more helpful content. So your referrals mean the world to me and this podcast. With that, I want to acknowledge the 10 amazing guests who so graciously gave their time, their experience, their knowledge to the listeners here. I had 10 guests on this podcast over the course of the year and the first three guests not in any particular order, but I had three guests who were current and former clients of mine Odell Warren, paul Korber and Jordan MacArthur and these guys laid bare their experience of doing all of this work with respect to their health and their weight loss and their mental health and they were just so vulnerable.

They didn't just share their success. Obviously, they talked about that, but they also talked a lot about their lows and that takes a lot of guts. So I want to thank you guys for doing that. I heard so much great feedback from listeners who were inspired and, after listening to your stories, that led them to actually taking action. So your stories, your guest appearances on man in the Area had a huge impact. The next two guests I want to thank are Dr Carol Morley and Dr Mark Mitchell, and thank goodness I know these two people because they're brilliant, they're so smart and not only did they bring such great information and advice, but having them on just brought so much legitimacy to this podcast and I'm just so thankful for them for being on. And next I want to thank my fellow coaches.

So Elizabeth Sherman, tommy Geary, Jay Rush, pete Baskess and Patrick Fox. I have the privilege of being part of an amazing coaching network where other coaches meet and support one another and we kind of hone our craft together. And these five coaches they inspire me to no end, not just as guests being guests on the podcast, but I connect with them outside of the work that I do, and they are just so supportive and so helpful because they're so passionate about helping other people realize their potential, and so when they came on the podcast and they shared their knowledge, I'm just so grateful for them, and to have coaches of their caliber be here on this podcast is so great. Now, one of the questions I ask all of my clients doesn't matter if they're an expert, a coach, a client. I always ask them at the end of the podcast what is one last bit of wisdom you want to share with the listeners that they can then take away for their day? And there are so many great gems, but I want to highlight just a few of them here, and some of them are at a context, so they might not make really good sense, but maybe it'll refresh your memory if you're a listener of this podcast. So, in no particular order, here are some of the gems.

There's no way that we can take positive action from a negative place in terms of how we think and how we feel, so be compassionate to yourself. Another gem was be an active participant in your own health and weight loss and in your own health plan. I love that one, because what that does is just assigns our own agency to making changes to our health and wellness. Another gem pick one area of your life where you want to improve and go after it. Remove the overwhelm by trying to do everything. Another one here let your future self guide you. Ask your future self how would you handle this and what decision would you make? Another great one here happiness is a false bill of goods. Fulfillment is the goal, and fulfillment only comes from diving into discomfort and fear and uncertainty and recognizing those things as opportunities for growth. I love that one. When we put good energy out, whatever that means to you, it's going to make an impact, a big impact, and it's going to ripple across your family, your relationships, whatever it might be. So keep in mind for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week you can have a big impact by putting out positive energy into the world. And lastly, I love this one short and sweet, really simple just put your shoes on and get started.

So definitely some great gems here and some great advice. Lastly, I want to acknowledge my partner, amy, who is my sounding board and my number one podcast consultant. She is the first listener to every episode and by far my biggest supporter and without her this podcast isn't what it is. So thank you, amy, for supporting me all the way through All right. Now some fun facts about the podcast. So the most downloaded episodes are when I had Odell worn on on July 19th, when I had Paul Korber on November 16th and then the intro to fasting episode on April 12th. Just wanted to let you guys know those are the most. Downloads doesn't mean anything, just a fun fact, and if you haven't heard those, go back because they are great episodes. I want to share with you a couple wins as well that I've had doing this podcast. Now I'm really proud that we reached 50 episodes in the first year, and the reason why I was able to reach 50 was I started this in February, but then I added a couple bonus episodes. So I've added a couple bonus visualizations I also included. You know what to expect from this podcast at the very beginning. So, all told, by the end of this year, next week after this one, we'll have reached 50 episodes in the first year. And that's just incredible to me, because most podcasts launches don't actually reach past 10 episodes and then, as you go you know further and further to 50, the numbers just keep dropping. So I'm really proud of the staying power that we have going on here. With that, I didn't miss a week of publishing. So I'm gonna kind of talk to you a little bit about lessons I learned in a minute. But one thing that was really important to me is that once I started, I didn't miss a week. And then the last biggest win is there's over 20,000 downloads of all of these episodes in the first year and that's not crazy, but for me that's just really special.

I really enjoyed seeing all the downloads each week and how many people this is reaching. That's really powerful, in my opinion, and it's something that helps me keep going, because I know people are finding value from this. In terms of my favorite episodes, I picked three. I mean, I love each one and they're kind of special to me in a lot of ways, but I loved how to regulate your emotions on February 24th. I think that is just such a vital tool to all the guys who listen to this podcast. So if you haven't listened to that episode, go back. It's gonna be a game changer for you. Another one that I really loved was Success Leaves Clues on March 29th, and the last one I really liked was Making the Most of Cardio on October 10th. Had a lot of fun doing that, just applying knowledge that I've had for decades now on how important cardio is, and so really being able to provide that for you guys was helpful.

Okay, so, as I mentioned in the intro, I wanna go through this exercise five, four, three, two, one as a way for you guys to kind of learn from what I've learned, and my hope is that this is gonna then going to parallel your own health and wellness pursuits. All right now, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, my main goal with this show when I first started it was to show up every week. So, in other words, once I started it, I didn't wanna miss a week. I didn't wanna find an excuse why I couldn't record a podcast a particular week. So consistency was my number one goal. It was really important to me. And why was that? Well, because I believe in leading by example, and so, whether you're an active listener or you're a client, I want you to see the value of showing up consistently for yourself in taking action, because when you do that, it leads to really big results in your life. Okay, so here's how I was able to do that. These are five lessons that I learned doing this podcast. The first one is I learned how to do this. So, before I even recorded my first episode, I purchased a course from a guy named Zach Spuckler.

He's a marketing coach and he had this whole program that kind of laid out from start to finish how do you launch and start a podcast, the equipment that you use, the sort of, how do you can format it, how you can create episodes. So it was a really helpful resource in getting me launched, and how I see this being parallel to yourself is arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can. Okay, so maybe that means purchasing the course, maybe that means you're already listening to this podcast. So that's a great start. But find a process, find a system, and that's my second thing that I learned is, once I finished that course is I created a system and a process to record this podcast every week. It was very simple, but I just laid it out. Here's my best practices to writing the episodes, to recording them, to getting them edited, to getting them produced, all of the different steps, how I upload them each week to Buzzsprout and how they get kind of published and all along the line. There's lots of different steps and, as we know with our health and wellness, if there's a lot of different steps and there's a lot of friction, the likelihood of success drops off. So what we can do to combat that is really be clear on what the process is that we wanna go through. So systems and processes really served me well in maintaining my consistency. The third thing is that I always scheduled this into my week. This was planned and intentional. There wasn't a week that went by where I didn't have this in my calendar and a lot of times in my planning. I have what's called a super week, so there's a week where I don't do any one-to-one coaching and what I would do is I would sort of batch a bunch of episodes, I would write them, record them and have them all done, and so that was with intention, that was with planning. So that's something I really promote a lot in what I coach is it's important to have a plan. So hopefully you see the value in that in terms of staying consistent. Number four coaching helps. All right now, I'm a coach, I believe in coaching, and so I feel it would kind of be a little bit hypocritical for me to promote coaching and not have a coach myself. So I have coaches, as I mentioned, I hired that coach that helped me, I did his course and that helped me get to this place. Here I have other coaches Dave Moreno, he's one of my business coaches and these guys, these coaches, they're just so great at helping you see your blind spots, at keeping you motivated, and that's something I want you to also consider and encourage you to look into. If you're not working with a coach already, make sure that you consider that it's such a helpful thing in terms of helping you reach your potential and your goals. And lastly, number five this is a mindset of mine that I've had right from day one in terms of starting the spear method and this business, and that is to play the long game right. I'm giving myself a ton of runway to learn, to succeed, to fail, to grow in my business, but also with respect to this podcast. When I launched it, I wanted to be consistent in year one, but this is a. I have a much bigger plan for this podcast long-term, and so you know there's lots of mistakes that I made along the way. There's lots of things I've learned and there's so much room for improvement, and that's my mindset. I'm not looking to make this perfect. I'm looking to reach more people and offer more value, and so I'm giving myself lots of opportunity to do that. So those are five things I've learned. I hope that you can apply those sort of learnings on your own and your own pursuits. And with that I wanna go to the next thing, which is four takeaways from the podcast. Okay, this is diving into a little bit more granular content here. Of course, you know 50 episodes. There's lots of great takeaways, and I just wanna highlight four for you right now. Okay, one of the ones that comes back to me often in my coaching is this idea that the rent is due every day, and I did an episode on, you know, sort of shifting your mindset. And this again goes back to that consistency, sort of fundamental. You know we need to be consistent in order to see success in our health and wellness.

Okay you are going to have slip ups Absolutely, we all do, but having this mindset that you're gonna show up every day and make a small contribution to your health is crucial. So pay the rent every day. The rent is due every day. Number two another great takeaway is to use the tools that I talk about. Right, I've shared so many great tools. Tools like the hunger scale, how to process urges, planning your meals and your protocols, intermittent fasting, how to reduce hunger and your appetite. You know All of these tools. You do not have to use them all, but you have to find the ones that work for you and then make that part of your system. Okay, so use the tools that I talk about. They're really helpful and they allow you to see success ongoing. Number three now I can't remember what episode this was, but one of the things that I really talk a lot about, my coaching and I've shared here is to stop trying to do this all on your own, all right. As I mentioned earlier, I believe in coaching. I have coaches, I'm part of groups and part of networks, and I've created the arena which is my online membership, and the reason why I've created that is I want to give guys like you, an opportunity to be part of something, to be part of a group, a team of other guys who are doing similar work, so that you're not on your own and you're just siloed and isolated, and that just makes it so much more challenging. So I encourage you to stop doing this on your own. Get involved in some way with other groups, other coaching, other people who are also doing this work, and learn from them and share with them all of your challenges and all of your wins as well. And then the last one, short and sweet here all or nothing thinking always leads to nothing. Okay, a lot of guys that I work with have this all or nothing mindset. Right, I'm going to do this work and I'm going to go all in, and all it takes is one quick slip up or one deviation off of their plan and it's all falls apart. It leads to nothing. And so, again, I always go back to this the importance of fail fast, fail forward, we're going to make mistakes. This isn't a perfect process. It's an iterative process. Right, it's an infinite process. So it's not like we reach an end goal and we stop contributing to our health and wellness. Certainly, we reach an ideal weight that we want to get to, but that doesn't mean we stop doing the things that it got us there. So we want to let go of this all or nothing mindset. Okay, with that, three ways I can help you. So the first way is just to keep listening to this podcast. My goal was to bring you helpful, insightful, practical episodes every week, and, of course, this is all free to you. And my goal is to make this content better than what other people might be charging for their content. The second way that I can help you is you can join the arena. It's a very affordable option to start working with me, to start applying the concepts that I talk about, so that you see results. So the arena is a place of accountability, focus and structure. And if you're already seeing the value of this podcast, imagine what you would receive from paying for the arena. And if you want to do that, go to the spear methodcom. Slash the arena, all one word. And that's where you can get started. That's where you can sign up. There's an option for month to month payments. You can cancel anytime, so there's no huge risk to get involved. And the last way that you can get involved with me and how I can help you is you can schedule a consultation with me directly and we can talk about what one to one coaching looks like and how one to one coaching helps you on a deeper level to lose weight, to change your health and just make really big changes in your life that are going to be long lasting and sustainable. The work that I do helps guys think differently, they feel better and we really uncover a lot of their limiting beliefs, and then this in turn, leads to them performing at levels that maybe they've never seen before, or they haven't at least seen in the last few years. So that's three ways that I can help you. Now here's two ways that you can help me, and basically it's leave a review. So if you go into, if you're listening on Apple podcasts or you're listening on Spotify, the reviews really help Other people see the podcast and it motivates them to, of course, listen as well. The second thing you can do is share this with someone you know. Right, this podcast is going to grow organically, with people sharing this and referring it to them. Right, and, as you know, I talk about men's health for guys over 40, but it's even bigger than that. This is about mindset.

This is about just improving your life overall, so please share this with somebody that you know. And finally, one challenge, right? My one challenge for you is to take out a piece of paper and do this 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 exercise on your own life. All right, this is a great way to bring closure to your year, to bring some insights and to help you look forward to 2024. And I'm going to change it a little bit from what I did with this podcast so that it's more applicable to your life. So 5, 5 things or sorry, 5, your 5 biggest wins, your 5 biggest wins in 2023. Or 4 things you learned in 2023. Number three okay, three ways you're going to help yourself in 2023. So maybe that looks like I'm going to help myself get better sleep. I'm gonna stay more hydrated. I'm going to seek out a coach. I'm gonna work with a coach. I'm gonna join the arena. I'm going to start to read more about health and weight loss. I'm gonna read three books this year. So three ways you're going to help yourself in 2023. Two ways you're going to help someone else. So I'm a big believer in paying it forward and giving of ourselves. So how can you help someone else in 2024? Okay, and finally, your number one goal for 2024. And what I want you to do is ask yourself once you've identified that goal, I want you to refine it a little bit by saying how will I know what I've achieved this goal? Okay, next week I'm gonna wrap up 2023 by giving you a preview of 2024, including what you can expect from this podcast, the changes that are in store and finally, I'm gonna come full circle. I'm gonna share with you what I'm focusing on as a health coach to improve my health as we head into the new year. I think you're gonna have some really great insights as to what I'm working on With that. I look forward to seeing you next week. In the meantime, please keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity.

If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to thespearmethod.com and download my free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.