Podcast Transcription: How To Make 2022 Your Best Year Ever with Ted Ryce Part 1 

Ted Ryce: What is up, my friend? And welcome to the first part in this series, “How to Make 2022 Your Best Year Ever” Now, here’s the thing, I want you to understand what you’re getting yourself into: this isn’t me talking, this is me talking you through a series of exercises, because if you really want 2022 to be your best year ever, it’s not going to be passively listening. It’s going to require some effort on your part, some action from you.

So, what we’ve done here, is we’ve created a PDF to go along with each part of this series. And you can download that at legendarylifepodcast.com/2022. That’s legendarylifepodcast.com/2022.

So, you want to go there and download the PDF, and print it out if you’re you want to take it old school and use pen and paper. Or bring it up on your computer, or mobile device—if you want to just type.

So, let’s jump right in here. We all have goals, but not that many of us achieve what we set out to do, what we write down as our goals. And I want to explain a little bit upfront about why I believe that happens. And it’s very simple here. We all have stories, “Oh, I had a rough childhood, oh, it’s really hard, I have kids and a family. Oh, I’m very busy at work.”

Whatever your story is, we all have a story, but let’s push our story to the side. The reason we don’t achieve our goals is simply, we’re just not in the habit of taking action in that particular area of our life. I’m going to say that again: We’re not in the habit of taking action in that particular area of our life. The one that we want to work on. Now, if you’re here, its probably your health, that’s why you show up to a podcast named Legendary… Oh, actually legendary life, it could be a lot of things, but you know we focus on health here.

I mean, there’s a picture of me without my shirt on, on the thumbnail of the podcast. Hopefully, I’m not teaching business skills like that, right? Anyway, so it’s really simple, we’re just not in the habit of it. I want to paint the picture of why I think that happens to us, because we come up with reasons, so many reasons, so many stories, so many excuses.

One thing that’s quite common with the clients that I deal with—I deal with high-performing professionals, these are people who are running $20 million businesses, or $65 million businesses, or they work at a multimillion-dollar business, an eight figure or nine figure business. And they’re an accountant for them, or an auditor, or I’ve worked with engineers, I’ve worked with financial advisors.

And these people that I’ve worked with, it’s so funny because people will tell me sometimes, “Oh, I’m just lazy.” I’m like, “You’re making a few hundred grand a year, you’re not fucking lazy. Where does that come from? You’re not lazy. You’re imbalanced, you’re not good at taking care of yourself, but lazy is not the reason.”

People who are just generally lazy don’t achieve much in life. It’s like, “Do you make money?” “No.” “Okay. Are you out of shape?” “Yes.” “Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend? Wife or a husband?” “No, dating is too hard.”

That’s lazy, I mean, that’s what I think about. I don’t know anybody like that, actually, I’m sure they exist, I’m not saying they don’t, I just don’t know anybody like that. And I think it’s probably hard to find. Everyone I know is working really hard, but what they lack is—what would you call it? The drive, they’re working hard, taking care of their family, taking care of their work, showing up at work every day, running their business.

It’s just the health gets put aside. Now, why does that happen? I think this is so simple, folks, it’s so simple. First of all, look at your childhood, where your parents fit? Did your parents take you on walks and make you play sports? And perhaps they did, but did they get to a point where they gave up on their health and started putting on a lot of weight, not exercising as much? It’s really common.

And then you may have started in the same, you may have been an athlete, or a cheerleader, or, yeah—an athlete or cheerleader or whatever, something very active, but then you got busy. So, all the energy that you put into athletics got put into your career and your family. And so, you took the same level of drive and energy, put it in a different direction, it’s as simple as that.

So, our childhood, we don’t grow up—and I’m not blaming your parents here, they didn’t even know it was going to be an issue. Obesity is a new problem, it’s not an old problem, it’s not an old problem, it’s an old problem in the sense it’s been around for a long time, but it’s new. The epidemic of obesity, especially in the United States—people are not this fat in other countries, I’ve been to a lot of different countries, I’ve lived in a lot of different kinds. We’re number one.

Actually, I think Mexico has been competing with us. That’s a story for another podcast though. It’s out of control here. And part of it, it’s just not our culture to be focused on fitness, and I want to be very specific about what I mean here. I mean, it’s not our culture to actually take action on these things consistently, because otherwise we wouldn’t have this problem. But we go on a ton of diets, there’s more gyms, and more gym memberships than ever.

But people don’t have a sustainable approach, they don’t make room for it in they’re like. And once things get stressful, what’s the first thing to go? Exercise and then stress eating to manage your emotions. That’s what’s happening. And guess what?

You know, everyone wants to blame “big food”. Big food isn’t the problem, they’re just capitalizing off of the problem. The problem is you, the problem is our environment, the problem is that, it’s simple as that. The problem is we eat our emotions, the problem is, our environment is set up to stress us out and to feed us. That’s why Karen brings in the donuts on Friday, and Bob brings in pizza on Pizza Tuesdays or whatever. It’s a cultural, not only is it a training thing, but it’s a cultural thing.

Now that’s with health. We’re going to be talking about more than just health, we’re going to be talking about health, wealth, and relationships. But I want you to understand, it’s the same thing here. Making money is simply a matter of doing certain actions, and anyone can do that. Same thing with health, anyone can have good health, provided that you’re not already so far down the road with your health, that to come back from it, it’s…right? If you’re on your death bed with stage four esophageal cancer, that’s a tricky one. But if you don’t have any health issues, but you’re overweight, or maybe have pre-diabetic blood sugar levels, like I used to have, or problems with your cholesterol, whatever it is, you can improve that. And with your wealth, you can improve that.

Whether it’s an issue of I’m working hard and making a lot of money, but I don’t love what I do anymore, I’m not passionate about my business anymore, I want to go do something different. You can sell your business, or you can find a way to replace you. I met an entrepreneur recently, he got COVID, he was laid up in bed for, I think it was 9 days in the hospital on oxygen. Just met this guy, when I was in Mexico, just a few weeks ago, and he stopped everything, he left his business, it’s still running, he got someone else to run it.

And now he’s just making money and not doing anything, just focusing on his health. And I don’t mean not doing anything, he’s taken action in other areas of his life, because he put his business into someone else’s hands, it’s being run, and he’s just collecting the paycheck. Or maybe you’re like how I used to be, struggling month to month. If that’s your case, there’s a way to improve that. Everyone can do it, okay? Everyone can do this.

Now, you may not be the healthiest person, or the best athlete in the world, you may not become the richest, you may not be up there with Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, but come on, with whatever you’re great at right now, you’re probably not there either, that’s the truth, right? So, we can all improve here. The same thing with relationships, we can all improve. So again, we’re going to get into a self-analysis in a bit here, but make sure you download that PDF.

I just want to say a couple more things, because another problem is that people get started on the path of improving a certain area of their life, and their health, their wealth, their relationship, and then things get busy, and then they drop it. Why does that happen? Why does that happen?

And there’s a Navy seal saying, I think this is—what do you call it? Paraphrase, but, “You don’t rise to your expectations, you fall to the level of your training.” So, when the stress is on, you don’t rise to your expectations, you fall to the level of your training, and if you keep falling off the wagon, you’re training sucks, it’s that simple, it’s that simple folks, your training isn’t good enough.

Now, some of us have a more talent, or more, we catch on quicker in certain areas of our life, and we catch on slower in certain areas. So, you might have to train harder than someone else.

Or you may not have to train as hard as someone else, and when I say training here, I mean going through the experiences that you need to improve. For example, here’s a great example, right? None of us were born knowing how to ride a bike, but most of our parents, they put us on the bike, we fell off, we started crying, they put us back on, and they wouldn’t let us give up.

And as a result, you know how to ride a bike now. In fact, there’s a saying, “It’s like riding a bike.: Meaning, your muscles remember, actually, it’s your nervous system, but whatever. You get back on a bike and you can keep riding. Not because you did anything amazing, but your parents didn’t let you fail. Because if most of us now had to go and learn how to ride a bike, we’d fall off the first time, say, “Oh, riding bikes isn’t for me.” Why? Because your parents aren’t there to get your ass back on the bike, and make you do it, because everybody goes through that same process of falling off falling off.

Well, guess what? Everybody goes through the same process in their health, wealth, and relationships too. We all make mistakes, you don’t give up on being healthy, because the shitty diet that you followed didn’t work out. You find something better, you don’t stop trying to have a business simply because the first one didn’t work out, you try it again, you try something different.

You don’t give up on relationships because you had a bad one, we wouldn’t let our children do that, but here we are, right? We don’t have anybody holding us accountable. And so, the training that your parents gave you to ride the bike was good, because now you can go ride one.

Even if you…I got on a bike, hadn’t been on one in years, and it was a little sketchy at first, let me tell you. I’m a pretty good athlete, not amazing, but pretty good. My balance is pretty solid, but it came back to me, even though I haven’t been on a bike in literally years. You don’t rise to your expectations; you fall to the level of your training.

I didn’t need to talk myself up, like, “Come on, you can do this, you can get on that bike, you can ride the bike, you can do this, Ted.” No, I got on it, and because of all the training that I went through, all the bike riding that I did in the past, and because my parents helped me get to that point, I didn’t need to talk myself into it. I just got on and it was shaky for a couple minutes, and then I felt like, oh yeah, I got better and better as the ride got longer and longer.

So, this is about the proper training, in any area of your life. Is it no wonder that athlete parents have kids that are athletic? Is it no? I work with a lot of wealthy people in Miami beach, and instill now, but I was actually in people’s homes in Miami beach with them. Is it any surprise to you that their children do well in business or in their careers? They grew up with Ferrari collection out front, the Aston Martin D9 or whatever, DB9 or I forget.

Anyway, you know what I’m talking about, all the expensive cars, the multi-million dollar houses, the kids make money. One of the kids that I was training, who is 16 and he was making, I don’t know, probably more than me being a personal trainer, selling shoes. And is it any wonder that those of us who are…and this is the, I mean, there’s a lot of fit people and a lot of wealthy people in the world.

The real rarity here is people who are great in relationships. Is it any wonder that people who grew up with their parents modeling great relationships end up in great relationships?

But if you’re missing something here, then there’s going to need to be some work. And I’m setting the stage here, because I want you to understand what it requires from you, and why it’s hard for you, whatever that area is, because this is going to take work. In the past, I’ve talked about cold cognition and hot cognition.

Hot cognition is what we do automatically. It’s the level of training that you have, it’s the, “Oh, I’m stressed from work, let me go drink wine and eat steak, because I work so hard,” and that’s my way of dealing with it.

It’s the, “Uh, I’m afraid of something in my relationship, so I’m going to aggressively act out at my partner,” that’s your training, right? So, you’re going to have to work hard to do something different.

And when we’re talking about change, we’re talking about rewiring your brain, we’re talking about these stages of change, something that I’ve talked about a lot, the stages of change, or the trans theoretical model. And there’s six parts to it. There’s not thinking about it at all, there’s starting to think about it. “Oh, I should probably be getting better shape. My joints hurt, my doctor said I’m going to end up with a diabetes diagnosis, I think I should probably change here.” Determination, you’re determined to do something about it, then action.

But again, relapse, relapse happens, and then maintenance. So, the important one here is relapse, because this is what throws us off. When it doesn’t work, we don’t say, oh, I need to get back on track, I fell off track, let me get back on track. No, we take it personal, we think it says something about who we are as people, instead of our level of training. Oh, my training sucks on this, and I need to train myself up, need to put yourself in boot camp, it’s as simple as that, folks; it’s so easy, this stuff. What’s hard is the emotional ups and downs, and also the stories that we start to tell ourselves, you got to just push those out of your head, if you want something, you got to train yourself to the point where you get it.

So, with that said, let’s dive into the self-analysis. So, hopefully by this point in the conversation, you have that PDF in front of you. The first thing I want you to do, is I want you to rate your—so, we have health, wealth, and relationships.

And I want you to rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 with health, I want you to rate yourself on a scale 1 to 10 with wealth, 1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest. Like, where are you with your health, wealth, and relationships? And then do the same thing with relationships. Now, you can pause it, if you need a couple minutes to think about that, and then start it back up when you have the numbers for all three areas.

Now, the next thing we’re going to do is choose the lowest, what was the lowest score for you? Then you’re going to answer the question, you’re going to pause this and answer the question, why are you at this score? And what’s in your way of raising it? So, pause this right now and answer that question, and give yourself 5 minutes.

Start a timer and give yourself 5 minutes, don’t just put time. No. That’s bullshit, that’s the shitty training that we’ve been doing in these areas of our life. Time to break that habit. Write for 5 minutes, set the timer for 5 minutes and write, just keep writing, whatever comes to you, you’re not writing a novel here, you’re not writing an essay, nobody’s going to grade it, just let stream of consciousness happen.

And then when 5 minutes is up, you can come back. And then choose your second choice and ask, why are you at this score? And what’s in your way of raising it? Just to get an idea of why are you at this score? And what’s in your way of raising it? Because we all want to improve things, not go backwards. Saying again, set a timer for 5 minutes, pause this, and just write, stream of consciousness, 5 minutes, let it flow. What are we doing right now? We’re training ourselves. We’re trying to understand, we’re trying to get some awareness here. So, when you’re done, come back.

Now choose your score that you had the highest, and the highest score and say, why are you at this score? And what would it take to raise it? So again, set your timer for 5 minutes, then come back when you’re done. Okay. Now we’re going to move on to—we’re going to train your weakness, we’re going to take the one that you scored the lowest with, and we’re going to work on that. Why? It’s the lowest hanging fruit, and easy to see progress.

Of course, you’ve got to use the right strategies, because here’s the thing: let’s say health is why you showed up to this show, and why you’re doing this exercise right now, but let’s say you rated really low with relationships. Maybe you’re not even in a relationship, maybe you’re out of a divorce, and you’re single, and you’re not even dating. And that’s why you’re overweight, is because you eat, because you’re lonely.

But you don’t want to go out and date, because you feel bad because you’re overweight. Then exercise and nutrition might be a part of that, but really, the lowest hanging fruit there is to improve your situation with relationships. It’s to get back out there and get some positive emotions going in that area of your life, i.e. relationships, and then maybe you might feel less resistance to going to the gym and less temptation to eat your emotions.

Do you understand how that works? And it’s one of the things I talk to with people who want to join my coaching program. If they have a problem with their wealth, or a problem with their relationship... And when I say wealth, I mean, it could be they don’t have enough money, or maybe they have a lot of money, but they’re not willing to make the time, because they’re so addicted to their job, or running their business, they’re not willing to take time out, it’s a waste of time for both of us to sign them up to coaching.

I do coaching for the money, folks, is how I pay the bills, for sure. But it’s not just about the money for me, okay? My wealth, my career, I need to feel good doing it, I need to feel like I’m-- when my clients don’t get results, I feel bad, I’m all about problem solving, getting results, getting that win-win going, that win-win energy, like we’re on the same team. Like we’re team Navy Seal team six, you know, like, crushing problems together.

I can’t tell you in the past just really quick, how many guys, mostly men, maybe some women too, but a lot of these wealthy business guys I train, they would pay a bunch of sessions up front for personal training, and then they would just disappear.

First time it happened, it’s nice, it’s like, “Oh, I just got paid for free,” but in reality, what I eventually realized is number one, I got paid, but this guy’s gone, he’s not going to come back and train, he’s lost, right? So, now I’ll have to find another client, because I got paid by the session. I do things differently now, where it holds people more accountable.

And also, aside from that, I didn’t feel good because I wasn’t really helping someone, I really get high from helping people, that’s why I’m in this business in part. I get high, it’s part of what my wealth goals are, I don’t want to just make money, I want to feel great making money, I want to help, and the way I feel my best is to help other people win in their life. I say that to give you an example, because if you’re struggling with your—maybe you’re not struggling with how much money you’re making, but in the way that you’re making it.

So again, we’re going to train our weakness here. So, what was your lowest hanging fruit? Because that’s the thing that’s going to give us the most leverage, you got to train your weakness. So, are you ready to dive in?

First question: What do you really want? Because as the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland said, “If you don’t know where you want to go, then any road will get you there.” You’ve got to be specific about what you want here, so again, pause, take 5 minutes, write down what you really want. And when you’re done, come back. What do you really want here? And be specific.

And then the next thing we need to ask, is what’s your life going to be like in 5 to 10 years, if this part of your life doesn’t change? Again, set the timer for 5 minutes, write stream of consciousness, and come back when you’re done.

The other side of this is, what would your life be like in 5 to 10 years if you achieve what you really want in this area of your life? So, set the timer for 5 minutes, write, and then come back.

And then the next question is, why is this important to you now? Why right now? Why is this a must do right now? So again, pause this, set the timer for 5 minutes, and come back when you’re done.

The next question is, what’s the biggest challenge here for you to achieve your goal? What is in the way of you achieving this goal? What’s in the way? What needs to happen? Is it that you don’t know the strategies? Is it that you do know what to do, but you keep getting thrown off by other people in your life, because you don’t set boundaries, what is your biggest challenge? Set the timer for 5 minutes, write stream of consciousness, just let it flow, and when the timer is done, that’s when you stop writing, and that’s when you come back.

And the last question here is, if you say yes to your goal, what do you have to say no to? If you say yes to this, what do you have to say no to? Set the timer for 5 minutes, don’t stop writing until it goes off, and come back when you’re done.

All right, so now we have an idea here, we know where you stand with your health, wealth, and relationships. We have them ranked in order, from the thing that’s the lowest score, to your middle score area, and your score that you rated the highest on.

And we got some perspective about why you’re at that score, and what’s in your way of raising it. And we are going to decide to train or weakness first, and why again, it’s the lowest hanging fruit. If you’re struggling with your wealth and your health, but it’s relationships that it’s the lowest, that’s what’s going to give you the biggest leverage. Because what we’re looking for here is emotional wins, this is an emotional journey. Success in any area, it’s an emotional journey.

And if you’ve got one other area that’s just making you feel so negative. Getting some positive experiences to balance that out, by getting some wins in that area, that’s going to make everything easier for you. And now we have, what do you really want? We have, if you don’t get this handled in 5 or 10 years, what’s your life going to be like? And the next is, what would your life be like in 5 or 10 years if you do achieve this goal?

We have the answer to why it’s important for you now. We have the biggest challenge for you, and also, if you say yes to this, what do you have to say no to? Because the truth about achieving goals is that you have to say no, you have to be a little imbalanced, you have to change what you’re doing, you have to say no to some of the things that you’re doing to allow space for this new goal.

And so that is the end of part one. I hope you enjoyed it. Now, I want you to stay tuned for part two, where we’re going to dive into strategies, we’re going to get tactical and practical, we’re going to put together a game plan, we’re going to get very specific on the things that you need to do to handle this area of your life. And we’re going to talk about health, wealth, and relationships. We’re going to talk about some ideas, I’m going to give some examples, and we’re going to go from there. So, I hope you enjoyed today. Let’s make 2022 your best year ever, all you’ve got to do is show up and put in the work.