Make America Swole Again - Episode #2-16: Overcoming Adversity

 This is Josh Holyfield, and welcome to another episode. Make America Swell Again, a no bullshit, no sugarcoating Snowflake free podcast where I teach you how to step outta your comfort zone. Stop dreaming and start smashing your goals on fitness and in life.

 What I'd like to spend some time talking about tonight is how to overcome setbacks, how to overcome adversity. What do you do when you're on a path in you're life in pursuit of something and you experience a setback that you feel is holding you back from achieving the thing that you want to achieve?

And so I'm eventually going to get to that. And this is gonna come full circle as I talk to you about this for the next 15, 20 minutes. What I want you to do is I want you to really spend some time thinking in the moment about this, and then at the end of this whole spiel of me walking you through this process, you're gonna be like, fuck man.

I never thought about it like that. So, I wanna start with the word discipline. If you're in the comments, I want you guys to do me a favor and leave a comment and tell me what is your definition of discipline and is it something that you can acquire? And while you guys are typing in the comments I'm watching right here on my screen as they pop up, I want you to really consider the concept of two examples that I'm gonna give you.

And then I'll give you a kind of a third explanation. So do you think that it's a coincidence that if you're a Christian or you read the Bible that Jesus had disciples. And have you ever noticed that when you're talking about a subcategory of something, a phenomenal example is martial arts. It's referenced as a discipline.

What discipline of martial arts do you partake in? Interesting. So I've done a podcast, I believe on this in the past, so I'm not gonna go too deep into it, but the word. Discipline is roots from the Latin word diss, and the definition or translation of the Latin word diss is you're not gonna believe this pupil.

Student strange. I'm sure that's the last thing that you were considering. And so the word discipline is actually a lot less synonymous with the knowledge and ability to make the follow through with actions regardless of whether or not you want to. That is the common general definition of discipline.

Basically doing things that you don't want to do because you know you have to, or you're obligated or whatever. So when it comes to religion, when it comes to martial arts, and I'm practicing a discipline, I am a student. So the disciples of Christ, they were students of his gospel, of his teachings and martial artists.

So the discipline of martial arts that I practice is juujitsu. I am a blue belt and the martial arts discipline of jujitsu, I had to earn that I can't acquire. The discipline of Jiujitsu. I practice it. I practice the gospel. That's why in the Bible he talks about basically the way that they look at sin or he looks at sin is as long as you're willing to admit that you did something wrong and stand before man and do it without shame, then you can ask for forgiveness.

You can be forgiven. I feel like that's pretty solid. Hey man, like this is what right and wrong is. But if you learn from your mistake and you ask for forgiveness and you truly learned from that mistake, you can still come to heaven because he understands and understood that you're practicing his gospel.

You're trying to live it. You're in a pursuit of living that is quote unquote the goal. But obviously, you're never gonna be perfect. You're gonna stumble, you're gonna fall, you're gonna trip, you're gonna lose faith, you're gonna, whatever the case may be. And so taking that and separating the biblical and Christianity and religious aspect of it.

Let's talk about the, the martial arts aspect of it. When I practice a discipline that requires that I show up and I be consistent. And the harder I work and the more committed I am, and the longer I do it, and obviously the better I get, the higher my rank or my belt is going to go. It's something that I have to earn.

And it's interesting because one of the things is that they say about martial arts, specifically jujitsu, is they ask, the belts are white, blue, purple, brown, black, and then black belt goes all the way up to Grand Master and so forth and so on. What's the hardest belt to get? Most people would say black belt is hardest to get, but the truth is it's not.

It's actually white belt. And the reason for that is because in order for you to become a white belt, you have to actually start, and most people never do. And the only difference between a white belt and a black belt is a black belt is just a white belt who never quit. That's it. As far as challenging belts and progression, I would make the argument that blue belt is the hardest belt to get past.

White belt weeds out the people who quit or aren't meant for it. But once you've achieved, okay, I'm here. And this is, I'm committed to this discipline. Blue belt's the hardest to get past. I've been a blue belt for 13 years now. Obviously I took a long break, but it's funny. I say it because it's like, holy crap.

But here's the thing. In order for me to progress and practice that discipline, Of whatever martial art that I'm doing, of whatever religion I'm practicing of whatever routine I want to lead of, whatever life I want to live of, being healthy and in shape of losing weight. These are all disciplines that I practice of building a business, of building an audience on social media, of whatever it is that you're trying to, it's a discipline.

You are a pupil. You are a student of that. Discipline is not something that you can have. It is not something that you can attain. Discipline is something that you build over time. And so like a phenomenal example. And before I close the loop on this concept, one of the things that I fucking think is crazy is two sides of this coin.

So the first is, I dabble in business coaching, and most of the clients that I bring in for business coaching are entrepreneurs that want to start or scale their online fitness businesses. I coach a lot of what we call fit pros, fitness professionals, and these dudes are fucking built like me, six pack and years and years worth of training and consistency and hard work in the gym and all that stuff.

And then they come to business and they look for shortcuts. They're not consistent with showing up and posting. They're not consistent with their customer service or their messaging or their, any of the things that are necessary in order to build a strong, predictable, successful online business. And it fucking blows my mind, like, how is it that you are so committed and consistent and just disciplined here, but here?

You're like the fat guy looking for a shortcut to lose weight. And on the other side of that coin, we have guys who struggle with their health, who are overweight, who have trouble maintaining consistency, aren't able to stay on track with their nutrition, can't make time for the gym. But bro, they're the best dads in the world.

They show up for their kids. They're always present, or maybe they're fucking incredibly successful and disciplined in their job or their business, like they've chosen to build their discipline in other disciplines of life. The argument that I make. Is in order for me to be as effective as possible in all of these other things, my business, my relationships, my marriage, the time I spend with my kids, how present I am for them, my hobbies, my cognitive function, my spirituality, my mental health, all that stuff, I have to build a foundation of health.

Your body is a temple, and so if I ignore my health, Now it has a negative effect on everything. Else, which is why I prioritize my health and wellbeing, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual health. Those come first. Then I know that I can show up as the best version of Josh in all these other disciplines of life.

Now, going through that whole scenario and that thought process and that frame of thinking, I'm sure many of you guys haven't even thought about the concept of discipline in the way that I just explained. Now I want to put another layer onto it. Who here has played Super Mario? I'm sure most of you guys have guys watching in here.

If you've played Super Mario, you know that as you progress, it's a level based system. Level one, level two, three, depending upon what version of Super Mario you go with. You have worlds. So world one and then levels, world two, and then levels Mario. As you progress through that game, it becomes more difficult.

They're stakes. The stakes in that game are the number of lives that you have. So it's expected that as you go through these Super Mario levels, you're going to die. That's why you have lives. And so typically, after you run outta lives, the game is over. Those are the stakes. So they start this game that has this natural progression where it gets harder and more and more difficult over time.

With the intent of knowing that you are going to fail. Like you start a video game, you want it to be, have a healthy amount of challenge. And most video games, if you play them, they are almost like progressive overload and how difficult they are. So the first couple levels are easy, super simple, learn the buttons, learn the controls, hand eye coordination.

And as you progress, it's just a little bit harder than what your skill level should have been based upon completion of the previous level. And then every once in a while you come to a point during the game where there's a certain level that kicks your ass and you spend however long on it and die on it numerous times.

And what happens when you beat that level? You get that dopamine high. Fuck yeah. Hope you feel good. You feel fulfilled. Do you stop? Playing the game? No. What happens when you come to a level that you don't feel like you can beat? At what point do you quit? Maybe you'll take a break for a minute. Maybe you'll set the game down and come back tomorrow.

Most men and boys will fucking sit and die on that level for hours and hours until we finally developed the skill to beat it. What would you say if I told you that? The way that I just explained Super Mario is exactly how discipline works, developing discipline, and the challenging levels that I just explained.

Those are your setbacks. Those are the periods of time where you face adversity. Those are the really big challenges. So a phenomenal example is just like Bob Bubba Roaches said level eight was the fucking ass kicker for him. Here's the thing that you guys forget when you're going through difficult and challenging times in your life or you face setbacks, is you had to beat levels one through seven in order to get to level eight.

And I'm sure during your progression through levels one through seven, there were setbacks that took place there. And you had to overcome those obstacles, those challenges, those periods of adversity in order to move to the next level at that stage. And as you become more competent and better and more disciplined, your skill level increases, but the degree of the challenges that you face also increases.

So one of the coolest and most interesting quotes that I've heard is you can measure the value of a man based upon the size of his problems. When I was a teenager, like in high school, my biggest problem was making it to fucking school on time and. Making weight for wrestling and probably whatever fucking nonsensical drama my girlfriend had going on at the time.

You look at your kids' lives and like the problems that they see as life altering, you're like, it's meaningless to you. Then as you get older, but you go to college, your problems get bigger. You gotta start paying rent. Maybe you have to get a job and actually worry about paying your bills, whatever the case may be.

You have kids. Your problems become even more. As you progress in your career, you become more responsible for more things and more people and bigger parts of the company. Your problems grow. 20 years ago when I was 15 years old, I had no problems. But the problems that I had at the time, to me, they seemed like they were big problems.

Today at 35, I own four online businesses. I manage a handful of employees revenue. I spend thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing every month. I manage those budgets. I have six children to manage the health, and four, I manage my home. The list goes on. I have a lot of big problems, like my problem is making payroll.

These things are fucking things that I never would even have fathom when I was 15. A lot of people, they lose sight of the fact that the reason their problems or adversities or setbacks from those adversities are so big is because they've become so big, they have progressed so far. And now if you look at that singular problem as if it's isolated in your life, yeah, it seems like it's this huge mountain to climb.

But you're not at the bottom of the mountain. That's the part that you guys forget. And so a lot of people ask me, they're like, Hey Josh, I have all these things happening in my life, these distractions, these obstacles, these setbacks, these challenges. What do I do to overcome them? I'm here to tell you that these are necessary aspects of building in the discipline that you're pursuing.

So like all of us is practicing the discipline of being a man, being a dad, being a husband, being a business owner, or whatever the case may be. And as we practice those disciplines of life, we're gonna be faced with a series of problems associated to the growth that's necessary in order to become black belts.

Remember, a black belt is just a white belt Who ever quit? Never quit. What if becoming a black belt was fucking easy? Everybody would have a fucking black belt. He didn't quit during the times of hardship, during his setbacks, during his adversity, during those challenges, how do you overcome those challenges mentally, those adversity, those setbacks is stop looking at them as if they're a bad thing.

Instead, start looking at them as. Your opportunity to progress life and mastering any of its disciplines is very simple, and I'm gonna give you the formula. The very first thing is obviously you have to believe that you can get to where you want to go in that discipline. Whatever it is. Your job, your business, your physique, your relationships, your finances, whatever.

Then once you have that basic level of belief that you're actually capable of that, all you have to do is start moving towards acquiring it and what's gonna happen as you. Start taking action as you were going to slip, you were gonna fall, you were gonna fail, you were gonna experience adversity, you're gonna experience setbacks.

That is the journey. Those are the hardening lessons and the experience that you have to overcome and acquire in order to become a master of that discipline. So as long as you make mistakes, you fail, you have setbacks, you face adversity, and after you slip, fall, fail and skin your knee, you get up and you realize you made a mistake.

You would just, maybe I can try it this way and then try again. You'll never completely fail unless you quit. It's impossible to be a failure as long as you iterate on your mistakes and you never give up. That's it. The problem is most people quit when it gets hard because they can't pass level eight.

They put the game down forever. They never play level eight again, and then they're stuck at level eight in that discipline of whatever it is that they did. Think about that in instead of looking at these adversities and these setbacks as a negative thing, instead you should be viewing it as an opportunity because facing struggles in your life, while you're in pursuit of becoming the man that you want to be and creating the life that you want to create, those setbacks and adversities are a indication that you are moving towards the thing that you want.

If you're living in a world where you don't have stresses, you don't have failures, you don't have challenges, you don't make mistakes, you're comfortable and you're happy, and you're just stagnant, you're not getting better in that discipline of whatever life you're practicing. You're stagnant there and you're not.

Elevating. The challenge is the adversity is required. It's a prerequisite for level nine. If you can't beat that boss, you need to go find a way to beat that boss. Then when you can beat that boss, now you get to move to level nine. Guess what? All of the things that you learned that got you to a point where you were able to beat level eight, those are now the minimum standard of performance from level nine and beyond.

Can you imagine if I was playing a game and I'd beat level eight, it took me like three weeks and I finally beat level eight and I got to level nine, and it was like the same skill level as level one. Wouldn't it be a huge fucking disappointment, like this is way too easy. It would bore you, like it has to become progressively more difficult over time, and the only way to do that is to stack the skills that are required in order to get there.

It's just like they do math. In order for me to do math, I have to learn how to count. Once I learn how to count, then I start learning how to add. Once I learn how to add, I have to start learning how to subtract. Once I learn how to do those, then I learn how to multiply. Multiply is just complex edition.

Instead of eight plus eight, I'm doing eight plus eight, which is just eight times four. It's just complex edition. The same way that. Multiplication is complex edition. Division is complex subtraction. How many times does eight go into 24? Subtract eight from 24. How many times were you able to do that before when you, until you hit zero.

Right? And then once you learn those skills and you move on. But at no point in time during my math journey do I ever stop being expected to know how to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, basic arithmetic. We just add to it. Then you get to fucking geometry and algebra, and then calculus and trigonometry and so forth and so on.

Like I can't do trigonometry without first doing geometry. This is coming from somebody who is like one class away from a bachelor's degree in math. That's how it works, even at the highest levels of math. That's how everything in life is. I stack skills over time, and the way that I learn and acquire those new skills is by failing by through adversity.

So people ask me all the time, Josh, how do you overcome setbacks and adversities in your path towards whatever? It's not that I'm trying to handle them, it's that I realize they're necessary. Nobody wants to play a game where they always win. Eventually they're gonna get bored. That's why every single one of you, if you were in a happy, committed, long-term relationship, a marriage, you and your wife challenge each other period.

She's. Probably somebody who challenges certain aspects of your personality or your view of the world. My wife, the way that she challenges me is by holding me accountable to the commitments I make to myself, even when I don't want to. She refuses to allow me to be a lesser version of myself. She challenges me every day to show up better than I did yesterday.

This is actually a new thing and I love it about her. It's really good. So I wanted to take some time to give you guys that perspective tonight. Because I think it's really valuable in the way that we view discipline, overcoming setbacks and adversities and understanding that this isn't something that you get.

It's something you practice, and as you practice, you get better. And so one more thing I wanted to share with you about that. Remember, and I'm sure you guys have heard this before, it's a quote from Kevin Brown that I wanted to share with you. He basically was doing a speech where he said, practice makes perfect, right.

And everybody in the audience is, yeah, practice makes perfect. He says, wrong practice doesn't make perfect. It makes improvement. That's it. Actually, the quote wasn't from, it was from, not Kevin Brown. It was actually originally from Vince Lombardi Jr. If you wanna look that up. It's a phenomenal quote.

Practice makes improvement. We practice. So that we can fail, so that way when we go out into the real world and we don't want to fail and there's a higher stake, the likelihood that we're gonna fail is less. Stop expecting your life to be easy without challenges, because expecting your life to be easy without challenges is the same as.

Being okay inside of your comfort zone and being stagnant, stepping out of your comfort zone is synonymous with pursuing greater challenges in your life. The challenges that you pursue should just align with creating the life that you want to create and whatever discipline of life you're in. Pursuit of mastering.