200 - 6 Things to Stop Doing If You Want to Get Selected for Special Forces

(00:00):

What's up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Terminator Training Show. I'm Kevin Smith. Today is going to be an episode about things that you should stop doing if you want to get selected, and they're not really training related. They have a roundabout effect on your training, and I'll get into the reasons why, but these are seemingly minor things that a lot of people kind of brush off like not a big deal that I do these things or don't do these things. How's it going to affect me? I'm totally fine. Everyone does this stuff, [00:00:30] which by the way, if you're doing stuff that everyone does, probably not a great thing unless you want to be like everyone else, which the average person is obese and broke and can't talk to someone without alcohol and so on and so forth. But either way, these are things that a lot of people do on a regular basis without really thinking of the consequences.

(00:50):

The second and third order consequences, which by the way, if you're going into a soft unit, basically your entire job is thinking of second and third order consequences. So definitely something [00:01:00] to get used to at as soon as possible, but these are things that I've had some clients gain a handle over as they have maybe struggled with performance, struggled with self-doubt, struggled with just worry, and not being sure if they're going to be good enough to go get selected, which is totally normal to feel these things, but you can mitigate it and a lot of it has to do with what you do throughout the day. Before we hop into the episode, this is a pretty big milestone episode. This is episode [00:01:30] 200, so just want to thank everyone who has been here since the beginning or if you've joined more recently or some people hit me up and they say, I started listening recently and I went back and started at the beginning and listened to your first episodes and all the way through kind of caught up and whichever boat you fall into, I greatly appreciate you.

(01:49):

If you've taken the time to leave a review, you're awesome and I will do my best to continue making really good content. I have some good interviews lined up in the next couple of months, [00:02:00] so that's a nice little change. It's been a while since I've had a guest on the show and I'm going to get more into that from episode 200. On aside from that, not a huge change. I'm going to do a little bit less frequent q and a's and a little bit more frequent topics, kind of like today's topic. Still definitely do some Q and ass, but I have answered pretty much every single question ever about SVS. Not that it's a bad thing to hear things more than once, but you kind of get the picture. I'll do those a little bit less and these episodes [00:02:30] are actually more of a challenge to me, believe it or not, even though I have an outline right here that I'm going off of, I find it more challenging to do that than to just off the cuff answer questions because some of these things are a little bit, not necessarily outside my area of expertise, but stuff that I just don't talk about as often.

(02:48):

So it's a good challenge for me and I think it's stuff that a lot of people can learn about and sometimes it may have some overlap with some of the questions that I get, but I can go a little deeper with a single topic [00:03:00] episode or in this episode it's going to be like six topics, but they're all kind of related to the same outcome, which the outcome is a less likely to get selected. B, more anxiety, C, more depression D, you're not going to be in as good a shape. You're going to be more likely to make bad food choices. You're going to have less energy throughout the day, less vigor, and really just put yourself on a path to less success. Put yourself on a path to the average American's path, and that's not, I hope if you're [00:03:30] listening to this, I don't think what you want.

(03:33):

So anyway, before we hop into the specific topics, TTM is having a sale. It's the only sale on all of the programs throughout the month of February. They're all 25% off and there's no code. So if you're listening to this within about a week of it coming out, it ends the 19th, the end of the day, the 19th of February, so you got some time and you can hop on any of those programs. They're all 25% off no matter what. It'll just be automatically applied at checkout, no code necessary, and again, that's the only sale on [00:04:00] all the programs this month. However, good news is the advanced running program is looking like it's definitely going to be ready before the end of the month. I am coming up on the finishing touches of that, and it's definitely been a challenge, which all programs are a challenge, which is why I enjoy doing it.

(04:16):

But yeah, it's got a lot of more advanced running techniques. It's definitely higher running volume. It's a great program to follow after two and five mile or if you are a little bit more advanced and two and five mile is a little bit too vanilla for [00:04:30] you. By the way, two and five miles, not vanilla for most people listening to this, but for some people it is. If you're already running 30, 40 miles a week, then it is probably just a better idea to get on a more advanced program. It can also be followed after really any of my hybrid programs or before my hybrid programs. It's got lifting in it just like two and five mile. You're not going to get crazy jacked and crazy strong. It's not technically a hybrid program. It's got lower lifting volume than two and five mile lower lifting frequency at least.

(04:56):

The split is kind of unique. It's an asynchronous split, so each week [00:05:00] the lifting is going to look a little bit different and also the running is going to look a little bit different week to week, which is part of the challenge. If I was just doing the same thing each week, a lot of programs are, it's more appropriate to do similar things each week, at least phase by phase and then kind of change it up in the next phase. But with running, it's a little bit more unique, especially for more advanced runners. You don't necessarily have to do the exact same thing every week, and it can still be very beneficial of course, if it's programmed properly and you adhere to the program and you run easy when [00:05:30] you're supposed to run easy, hard, when you're supposed to run hard and so on and so forth.

(05:33):

So keep a lookout for that. I am going to be doing updates in my newsletter, so if you haven't subscribed to my newsletter, you can do that down below in the description. And also, I've been doing a lot more frequent newsletters recently, not just a sale announcements, but actual informative, legit content that I don't do anywhere else usually. Usually sometimes there's some overlap, but usually it's a unique thing just to newsletter subscribers. So hop on that if you haven't yet. [00:06:00] And without further ado, let's hop into today's episode. The first thing that you should stop doing yesterday, if you want to greatly improve your chances of getting selected and just feeling good and being a more effective human being and feeling less anxiety and just increasing your chances of success in whatever path of life that you choose, hopefully that describes it well is stop unrestricted scrolling if you haven't noticed yet, if you haven't looked around, which you may not have if you're one of [00:06:30] these people, but if you aren't one of these people or maybe you're sometimes one of these people that scrolls all the time, if you look around, most people are always, always on their phone and they're just buried in it and they have no idea what's going on outside the little six by three inch box that they're looking at, and it is getting worse and worse and worse.

(06:50):

These phones have things on them, the apps that are on them, social media apps, et cetera, are literally designed to make you get sucked into them [00:07:00] and distract you and result in these little cheap dopamine hits that happen again and again and again. And the thing about dopamine is it is finite. So if you spend it on things that involve no effort, they involve just little instant pleasure things. Scrolling is a huge one, but it's not the only thing. Binge drinking, binge eating, binge watching 25 TV shows in a row, playing video games for eight hours, watching porn, et cetera, et cetera. All these low effort things that's still release [00:07:30] dopamine. You aren't going to have any more dopamine to use on the other thing that you can use dopamine for, which is the more beneficial thing, which is actually chasing a goal and putting work into something and being driven to go determined to go actually accomplish something.

(07:46):

In this case, along the lines of selection, you have your training, you have your nutrition, you have all the things you have to do on a daily basis for your job, for your family if you have one. And when you just expend all your dopamine on cheap things, [00:08:00] it's really anyone who has probably spent a couple hours just mindlessly scrolling or mindlessly watching YouTube or whatever mindless thing you do that results in these dopamine hits. You've probably noticed that afterwards you don't really feel all that good because you kind of drained your dopamine and it takes a while for it to get back up to baseline, which is by the way, why a lot of people will do this one dopamine, cheap dopamine behavior and they'll follow it up with another one to try and feel good again. For example, some of you have [00:08:30] probably been in this boat I certainly have.

(08:31):

You go out one night and get absolutely hammered. Your drinking that night really, really releases lots and lots of dopamine, but then afterwards as part of the hangover, your dopamine super low. So what do you do? You wake up and you binge eat all day and maybe you just watch TV show after TV show or you scroll endlessly mindlessly, and although you might feel very temporarily better when you do these things, you're just going to feel worse and worse and worse because you're draining that dopamine even more [00:09:00] and it's going to take even longer to actually get back up to baseline where you can use that dopamine for something beneficial. So of course, if you haven't been able to figure it out, that's not ideal for your mental health, your wellbeing, your level of worry, you're going to feel envious of other people. You're going to see all these other people's curated lives.

(09:20):

Everyone makes their lives look perfect like they have it all. They just do a bunch of fun stuff. Their relationships are perfect on social media. In reality, it's not like that, but also [00:09:30] it is going to negatively affect your stress levels and your stress levels have a massive effect on your ability to go and put good solid training sessions in, be consistent with it. If you look around at the gym, most people between sets scrolling away and there have actually been studies in case you need science. There have actually been a couple of studies that are more well known on intra set scrolling and its negative effect on performance, which by the way, it definitely has one and [00:10:00] pre-workout scrolling. So say you get to your gym and you don't really want to train, so what do you do? You pull your phone open, you scroll.

(10:08):

A lot of people are just delaying the inevitable like, I'm going to eventually get to my workout, but for now I just am going to get all these dopamine hits and you get in there, you're not going to have a great workout. In most cases, I call it the park and scroll where people just get to their location and instead of just going in and doing the thing, they delay it. Eventually you're going to have to go in there. So why not just get up and go in [00:10:30] there and train and do it? Undistracted having your phone in there to listen to music change songs, totally fine, but having your phone in there so you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and distract yourself, you're just significantly reducing the potential effects of that training session. You're not going to be as focused. You're not going to be as driven to do it, and it's not a good habit.

(10:51):

So what can you do instead? Lots and lots of different things that are a lot more beneficial. One, you can work on something that is actually going to move you closer to [00:11:00] your goal, whether it's going to train or whether it's meal prepping, which I'll get into meal prep here pretty soon, whether it's reading a book, even going to read a novel, even though people think novels are kind of a distraction and they're not really that productive, they can be. They actually help you formulate ideas and think and picture things and be more creative. You can honestly just be bored. It's okay to be bored. Being bored is a skill. And by the way, if you're going to dsof a lot of [00:11:30] your life, whether you're on a training mission or a real mission in the Q course, whatever it may be, you're going to have to be bored.

(11:37):

That's just a requirement. And if you just never actually allow yourself to get bored, you're going to really struggle when you actually have to be bored, you're going to have all these crazy thoughts, you're going to be anxious and you're going to be very, very, very uncomfortable. But if you practice being bored, believe it or not, you get better at it and you get more comfortable with it and you can kind of just be calm and work on. Another thing you can do is work on your breathing. You can meditate, [00:12:00] you can go do yoga nidra or something that's going to actually calm your nervous system down and be beneficial for you in the longterm rather than just drain your dopamine, stress you out, make you feel envious of all these people who you think have all these curated lives, which they really don't. And by doing this, you're actually developing these really good habits that are not going to help you just with your fitness and just with your selection preparedness, but in other aspects of life because like I said, the default is everyone scrolls and look where that gets [00:12:30] everyone.

(12:31):

Probably not where you want to go. So if you're just doing what everyone else does, you're going to go where everyone else goes, and I don't think that's where most people want to go. The other night before we get into the next one, the other night I went to dinner and we were waiting for our table in the waiting area and I sat down with my wife and there was a table pretty close to the entrance and it was a table of four people, two parents, two kids. The kids were probably eight and 12 ish, give or take. I don't know. I'm not really good at determining kids' [00:13:00] age by just looking at 'em, but that's what I'm going to guess. All four of them were, they were sitting at a table together, family dinner, all four of them were just on their phone. Three of them had one earbud in.

(13:12):

One of them had both earbuds in at a family dinner, not a single one of them was paying attention to anyone. I was bewildered. Honestly, I don't understand how a parent could let their kids do that. I'm not a parent, but still the parents were doing it too. The kids are just learning from the parents. [00:13:30] So this is just going to continue getting worse and worse and worse. And unless you do something about it, then you're just going to continue to get worse and worse and worse and feel worse and worse and worse and see the same worse outcomes as everyone else. So really something to curate. Which brings us to the next one, which is staying up late and sleeping in on weekends. This one is what most people do. Again, they work throughout the week, so they have their wake up times, they have their bedtimes.

(13:55):

Usually they stick to them, maybe they don't, I dunno. But then on weekends they [00:14:00] will stay up later and then they'll also sleep in the next day because they still want to get enough sleep. Got it. But say you want to have just a killer ass week, you want to feel really good, you want to perform really well. You want to make the best food choices possible. You want to sleep really well. You want to just be an effective human being in general fitness and otherwise, and I were to give you two options for this weekend. You can either fly from New York to LA [00:14:30] on Friday night, spend the weekend there, and then fly back on Sunday night, and then you get up Monday and go about your week, or you can stay home and go to bed at the same time. You normally do wake up at the same time you normally do, do your thing throughout the weekend.

(14:48):

What one do you think would result in better performance next week? I would hope you would say stay home and not give yourself jet lag. However, by staying up an extra few hours every single weekend and [00:15:00] sleeping in an extra few hours, you are literally giving yourself jet lag like symptoms. And a lot of people do this every single week. So they have jet lag from Monday to Wednesday. Generally they say for every hour you change time zones. If you're flying different time zones for every hour, it takes you about a day to get back to being recalibrated, back to homeostasis. So if you're staying up three hours later on weekends and you're sleeping in three hours later, that's three days that's going to take you to get back to where you're at full capacity, able to [00:15:30] perform at high levels and crush your goals and actually go and train and feel good and get the best out of your training sessions.

(15:36):

So you're literally giving yourself jet lag every single week. It's actually called social jet lag, and of course it's going to throw off your sleep, like trying to go to sleep on a Sunday night after you've been awake. Believe me, I used to do this all the time without knowing any better, trying to sleep on Sunday night. Most people probably have experience where they can't fall asleep on Sunday night. Usually it's because you stayed up super late the previous nights. And oftentimes it's [00:16:00] also because you were drinking those nights too, which is a whole different can of worms. It's just going to make this entire thing even worse for the dopamine thing as well as just the general fact that drinking's not healthy for you, not great for your training performance and so on and so forth. But even by staying up, whether you're drinking or not, you are most likely doing things that are also like dopa, quick dopamine seeking behaviors.

(16:22):

You're probably not moving yourself forward in life. You might be just binge watching tv. You might be binge eating, you might be just fucking off. And by [00:16:30] the way, it's okay sometimes to go out and have a good time and socialize once in a while, but if you're doing it every single night of every single weekend, you're going to really throw yourself off. So of course the bad sleep that it's going to result in going into the next week is going to also have effects on your ability to make good food choices. When you haven't slept well, you have a little bit of an imbalance in your hunger hormones, your insulin sensitivity is not as good. Your ghrelin, which is a hormone that makes you hungry, [00:17:00] is higher in your leptin, which is a hormone that makes you full is lower. So you have more hunger hormones, less feeling full hormones, and also the food that you eat.

(17:10):

Your insulin doesn't do the same thing it normally does and actually stabilize your blood sugar. So you're going to feel terrible. You're going to make most likely bad food choices because you're going to have cravings and it's not a good environment to be in, not to mention your performance in the gym, your desire to train, your determination to actually go and do what needs to be done [00:17:30] in a selection prep sense, which by the way, the workouts are not easy. They're not chill. And also you're stressed about the fact that you're training for selection and you're not sure if you're going to make it. All these things compound and if you just intentionally or you're probably doing it unintentionally. But now, if now that intentionally reducing your sleep quality every weekend by staying out late and sleeping in, then you're just knowingly giving yourself a handicap.

(17:58):

And even if [00:18:00] you are not training for something, I don't know many people who would rather be ineffective for half the week every single week than be effective every fucking day. And I get that it's hard. You're going to miss out on some things. But if you think about it, when is the last time you did something really, really useful at nine 10:11 PM on a Friday night or a Saturday night? Probably not anytime recently. Most people who say they're night owls aren't actual night owls. They fuck off at night and they just say, oh, I'm a night owl. So they're like, I stay up late, [00:18:30] whatever. You're not actually doing something needle moving at nighttime then you're not a night owl. Night owls are people who get most of their high quality work done and they're thinking done and things that drive them forward in life, done at night.

(18:44):

They're not people who stay up late and party and eat shitty food and just fuck off, play video games for nine hours. So what should you do? I would strongly recommend developing some sort of night routine. Basically what goes into it is determining what time you have to wake up every day. [00:19:00] If you work throughout the week, whatever time you have to get up for that work, that is your new wake up time, including weekends, then subtract about nine hours from that eight hours or so to sleep. Everyone's a little different in how much sleep they need. Some people are fine with seven and a half hours, some people seven, some people nine, whatever it is, but subtract the amount of time that you need to sleep plus an hour from that. So let's just say it's eight hours plus nine is one hour. That is when your nighttime alarm [00:19:30] is going to go off.

(19:30):

Your nighttime alarm is your queue to a plug your phone in and forget about it. Ideally, plug your phone in somewhere else besides your bedroom. You don't need your phone in your bedroom. It's just way more tempting than anything else. And if you need an alarm clock, which by the way, you won't need an alarm clock pretty soon, once you start doing this consistently, you won't need a morning alarm if you do need one for now, they make alarm clocks. It's not like they don't exist anymore, even though everyone uses their phone for [00:20:00] the alarm. Alarm clocks still do exist. So get one and keep your phone elsewhere. What I do is plug my phone in the kitchen and I don't touch it for the last hour of the day and I don't touch it for the first two hours the next day. You don't necessarily have to do that.

(20:12):

Of course, if you're going to work or if you need to be on your phone in the morning, which I would debate whether you actually do, but you don't have to do that part. But last hour, no phone, and that's kind of your cue to start preparing for bed so you get your house environment all nice and sleep ready. That includes turning [00:20:30] the thermostat down ideally below 68. If you can't handle 68 below 70 is a fine compromise, but your body temperature needs to drop for you to fall into a deep sleep. So if it's 75 in your house, do the math, get your stuff ready for tomorrow, do some planning for tomorrow. I'll talk on a later one, a little bit about planning, maybe prepare your food, maybe prepare your clothes, whatever you have to do to get yourself ready for tomorrow and not be thinking about what you have to do in the morning.

(20:58):

Just cover all [00:21:00] you possibly can at nighttime. That way you get up in the morning and you can go crush, then do something relaxing. You can do something like take a nice little walk. You can do something like read a book. You can pet your dogs, you can chat with your spouse, you can stretch, you can do mobility, you can take a shower, any number of different things that don't involve blue light and don't involve screens and don't involve this dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit. Those are all going to help you prepare for sleep. You can also meditate. You can journal, you can [00:21:30] do some breath work, things to calm you down. Here's the deal. Your body can't just in the snap of a finger, go straight to sleep unless you actually prepare your body and your mind for it. That's just not how it works.

(21:43):

And our world today is very antis sleep. Bright ass lights. That's another thing you want to dim all the lights in your house, turn lights that you're not using off. It blows my mind. I'll go down, this is a little tangent, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'll walk at nighttime with my wife. Usually we eat dinner and [00:22:00] then we go for a walk afterwards. And this time of year it's still dark out at 6:30 PM when we usually go and we will walk by these houses and they have these fluorescent lights on in every room in their house, these super bright lights. I just don't understand how people think that that's a good thing to do at nighttime. Yes, you can have some light. You can see, turn a lamp on, dim it, dim your lights, maybe have some candles, maybe have some just really low key lights, some dull lights, but [00:22:30] your body needs to get the idea that it's nighttime.

(22:34):

And being in these bright lights or staring at these bright lights gives your body the opposite idea. So prepare yourself for bed that last hour of the day, use that wisely and you're going to sleep significantly better and you're therefore going to recover better and you're therefore going to feel better throughout the day and you're going to think more clearly and you're going to perform better and you're just going to see better results. So those who are really dialed in with [00:23:00] sleep, at least in my experience as a coach, my clients who are most dialed in with sleep always, always, always see the best results. And also they have the most consistent training. They have less random, really terrible workouts. They get sick less, they get injured less. It makes a massive difference. And forever sleep will always be underrated because everyone knows that it's important, but still everyone does all these things that result in terrible sleep and it's [00:23:30] a massive problem.

(23:30):

So this one is huge. Highly recommend it. Yes, it's going to be uncomfortable at first. You're going to feel fomo, you're going to have to make some sacrifices, but it is all worth it. And it comes down to asking yourself, do I care enough about selection to actually get my shit together and go to bed on time and wake up in the morning and go crush or not? So let's get into the next one. No meal prep, not meal prepping. And there's two ways to go about meal prepping. I'll get into 'em in a second, but a lot of people don't understand how [00:24:00] many food related decisions that they have to make or they are subject to making on a given day per meal, honestly, where to eat, who to eat with, what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat, and so on and so forth, and a bunch of different other decisions that you probably don't know you're making, but you probably are making per meal.

(24:21):

So what this does is it leads to really bad food choices because if you wait until you're hungry to make a food choice, or if you just see where your crew's [00:24:30] going, say you work in an office building with a bunch of average people who don't really care about their fitness, who don't really care about their performance, and you're super hungry and they're all going somewhere and it's probably not somewhere where the food aligns with your goals, it's probably where most people eat. And by the way, most people are fat or obese and not fit. Then you're way more likely to at least sometimes make that decision because you don't have anything readily prepared. You haven't made that decision beforehand and actually prepared [00:25:00] for that mealtime. But additionally, even if you do make the right decision, you're still making all these decisions that don't necessarily need to be made had you made that decision earlier by prepping your food and therefore you're not going to be able to make the same quality of decisions or you're just going to be very indecisive, which is just a sign of feeble-minded people, a sign of lack of confidence, a sign of just not really being able to trust yourself and you're not going to be able to make these really [00:25:30] good decisions throughout the rest of the day because you have decision fatigue and decision fatigue is a real thing.

(25:36):

A lot of people make really bad decisions when they've made a ton of other decisions, even if they were really important decisions that they've had to make legit decisions, not like where and when to eat and how much to eat, but real decisions later in the day when you have to make more decisions, you're going to be smoked from it and you're not going to make the best decisions. Of course, not eating the right food and making poor food decisions is going to then affect your [00:26:00] training performance and your recovery and your body composition and your overall health in general wellbeing. So again, it's a bunch of second, third order effects that a lot of people don't think of like, oh, no, I'll just figure it out at mealtime. That's not a very good strategy at all. Every single person who has been successful with any nutrition intervention, whether they are training or eating for weight loss, whether they're eating for gains, whether they're eating for performance, whether they're eating for health and wellbeing, [00:26:30] what those people have in common is that they have some sort of plan in place.

(26:34):

Maybe they don't prep every single meal. I'll get into some strategies here in a second, but they at least have given it some forethought and they have something that they can fall back to if they absolutely need to or they have just a perfect plan in place and they go execute that plan. Everyone, nobody just wings it. And I'll get into winging it in general here in a bit, but to fix yourself, it's actually pretty simple. Maybe not easy, but simple. There's two options. One is the higher [00:27:00] time and bandwidth, but lower price option. The other one is the higher price as far as money is concerned, but lower bandwidth and time option. So option A, the low price option is to actually prep your own food. What I like to do is a strategy called two decision meal prep. You decide twice throughout the entire week what you're going to eat for every meal, basically every meal of course, if you're going out on weekends and having a meal off plan or whatever, not a big deal, but these are meals that are meals that you need to eat [00:27:30] in order to fuel your performance and feel good and get the right macros and right calories throughout the week when oh by the way, you have other things going on.

(27:38):

So basically you make one decision one night a week and you make another decision another night, a week, a few nights later, for example, Sunday and Wednesday. On Sunday night you make enough food for you to eat that night at dinner and then the next day and then probably the next day, and then if you're going Sunday to Wednesday the next day, so you're making lunch [00:28:00] for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, or maybe you're making breakfast as well. Usually people are a little more busy for lunchtime than any other meal, but some people it's breakfast too. Some people it's dinner, it could be whatever meals, I call them problem meals, whichever meals you either decide last minute or make bad decisions for or you eat on the run, whatever those meals are for you, those are the meals you're going to make extra food for the next couple of days.

(28:25):

You're going to carry that out throughout the week and then you're going to do it again on Wednesday. The exact same thing. You [00:28:30] make a big ass dinner on Wednesday and that's your food for the rest of the week until the weekend, and if you have more time on the weekend and a little more bandwidth, then you can do whatever you want on weekends still ideally eating for your goals because guess what? You're training for something really important that oh, by the way, includes a very dialed in nutrition protocol and most people are all over the map with their nutrition. The other option is to outsource it. This is the higher price option, but it is also way lower bandwidth and it takes almost no time. Honestly, [00:29:00] it takes me three minutes per week to go update my cart and make sure I'm getting the foods that I want delivered to me, and that is to order meal prep online.

(29:09):

You can do it in person some places depending on where you live, they have in-person stores where you could actually go and pick your meal prep up or you can order it online. I really like Mega fitt. There's tons of different options, but Mega FITT has a really good pre-made meals like with excellent macros, especially for performance. They're definitely more of a performance-based meal prep company than like [00:29:30] a health and lifestyle one you won't find unless you make your own, which you can. That's the other option is to make your own custom meal, but you're not going to find a lot of keto super high fat meals with no carbs in it or just really low calorie overall. You can make custom meals that have super high calories, high carbs, low fat, really whatever you want. So usually I get eight. I get these every two weeks, so it covers me for 12 days of lunches.

(29:55):

That's my main problem meal. I make breakfast, I make dinner every day, but it covers me [00:30:00] For lunches, I get 12 every two weeks and I'll get eight customs and then I'll get four. I'll try out a new meal that I haven't tried before and I'm covered. Yes, it's a cost, but it's also an investment. There are things where you spend money on something and you're not really investing anything. You're not going to get returns on it, but this, you're getting massive returns. You're freeing up time, you're freeing up bandwidth. You don't have to go to the grocery stores often. You don't have to spend however long making that massive dinner with a bunch of different days worth of food. So that's [00:30:30] another great option too. Whichever one you choose though, you got to choose something. You can't just go fly by the seat pants and hope for the best and hope that you're always going to make a great food decision because it just does not work that way.

(30:41):

So take it seriously. Which brings us to the next one, which is no personal accountability. This one is massive and it's a struggle for everyone. A lot of people don't think it's a struggle for them, but it absolutely is including me. This is a personal struggle for me and I'm better at it now, but I'm not perfect. A lot of people will say, no, [00:31:00] I am really accountable. I never lie to myself. I always do what I say I'm going to do. But if you think about when is the last time you pressed snooze? When is the last time you used more than one alarm? When it's like most people almost every day, then you are starting. Not only are you not accountable, you're literally starting your day with lack of accountability. You're starting your day by lying to yourself. You committed to waking up at a certain time, and oh, by the way, you didn't wake up at that time because you press S news or you use seven different alarms.

(31:28):

Not only is that terrible for [00:31:30] your sleep, like getting interrupted every seven minutes in the morning when you could just sleep all the way until the last time you press S news. But also it is not good for your psyche. It's going to drain your confidence in your self-esteem. You can't even trust yourself to wake up on time. That is a problem, and a lot of people don't even understand this is a problem. If you've been listening to the show for a bit, you've definitely heard me talk about why it's not a good idea to press news and that you should stop doing that yesterday. But if you're new and you haven't heard this thing, yes, you are literally [00:32:00] starting your day with a lie, and every time you don't hold yourself accountable to something, it chips away at your self-esteem. You trust yourself a little bit less.

(32:08):

You have a little bit less confident that you are who you say you are. You'll do what you say you're going to do. And most people are very lopsided. They lie to themselves a lot more than they actually follow through. Other examples. You say you're going to work out at a certain time and you skip your workout or you say you're going to work on something really important. You got an important project or you're going to study [00:32:30] for something or whatever it is, and you procrastinate. You go fuck off and watch YouTube or you find something else in the house to do other than that thing because that thing's going to going to be hard. It's going to take a lot of your energy, it's going to take a lot of your focus. You might struggle with it, so you take the easy way out.

(32:46):

You say you're going to show up at a certain time to something whether someone else knows about it, or you just say, I'm going to go do this at 11:00 AM tomorrow and you show up late. Showing up late in general is a lack of accountability. Skipping things, [00:33:00] skipping commitments. Like if you made a commitment a long time ago and you don't show up to it or you try to blow it off or you make up an excuse for it, there you go. There's another one. So whether anyone else knows about these commitments or not, for example, like pressing snooze, usually you're the only one who knows about that and you got to live with that on your conscience or you make a commitment to go to a friend's event, whatever that may be. Maybe you made it a month ago and you're like, yeah, I could probably do that.

(33:25):

And then it's the day before you're like, fuck, I don't want to go to this thing. Believe me, I've been there. [00:33:30] You still show up. That is how you continue to build confidence and build self-esteem and build trust. How are you supposed to lead people when you can't lead yourself? This is all self-leadership is really what it comes down to. People are like, oh, I just feel like I'm not a very good leader. Well, how do you lead yourself? If you just don't hold yourself accountable to anything, then how are you supposed to lead other people? How can you actually, without feeling like a phony, tell people to do things even if you all the time, don't do them yourself. [00:34:00] That is like imposter syndrome in a nutshell. And everyone complains about having imposter syndrome and it's kind of okay to feel a little bit of imposter syndrome, especially when you're first starting out, you're first pursuing something big, you first start training to become a green Beret, yeah, you're going to feel some imposter syndrome.

(34:16):

But if you're always doing these things throughout the day, not holding yourself accountable, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And the only way to dig yourself out of it is to start holding yourself accountable and committing to things. One of the big things that I [00:34:30] like to do, if I'm committing to something down the road and it sounds like, okay, yeah, sure, I'll go to that. What I ask myself is, if this was tomorrow, would I go to it? And if it's not something I would go to tomorrow, guess what? When it actually is tomorrow way down the line, I'm not going to want to go to it either. And when it's that day, I'm not going to want to go to it either. So saying no is a big part of this. If you say no to something and you're not committing to it, not going to it is totally fine.

(34:59):

But if [00:35:00] you say yes to something and you commit to it, you have to do it. It is now time to go and do the thing, execute the thing, whatever that thing may be, even if that thing's really hard, even if that thing's going to be painful, even if you're going to suck at it, you still go do it. And this is how you start to rebuild your confidence, rebuild your self-esteem, worry and doubtless, feel less imposter syndrome. Actually prove to yourself that you are who you say you are or who you say you want to be. And by the way, if [00:35:30] you want to become a fucking special operator, that's pretty important. So definitely don't sleep on this one. Do a little bit of an audit of the things you hold yourself accountable. For some people, you're probably going to immediately notice that you hold yourself accountable for nothing, and the more you get yourself going in the positive direction and actually doing things that you commit to, the better you're going to start feeling.

(35:53):

And it's be a little bit of, it almost gets addicting. You start feeling really good about yourself and you don't want [00:36:00] to blow things off anymore, and you want to just get up and go crush. So don't sleep on this one. Alright, the next one is huge. It is poor relationships. And a lot of people don't understand this one either. They think that they can just kind of hang out with whoever they want, as long as they're doing the right thing, then it doesn't really matter all that much. And by the way, if you're hanging out with a bunch of people that usually seek dopamine or skip workouts or eat shitty food or bitch moan gossip, complain, chances are you're not always doing the right thing. That is the type of thing that rubs [00:36:30] off on you. So if you're around all this negativity or all of these people who have no ambition and no goals and no work ethic, the chances of you somehow being the only one in that group to do exactly the opposite of what they're all doing are very low.

(36:46):

Here's the deal. Most people in America are undriven, unmotivated, totally complacent. They're fine with where they're at. They don't do anything to change their situation. They're just really comfortable and they stay in their comfort zone all [00:37:00] the time. By the way, you're about to go and pursue something that's going to involve tons and tons of discomfort. You're going to be outside your comfort zone in a big way. So if you're always hanging out with these friends who are always doing things in their comfort zone, playing video games, ordering pizza, watching football for eight hours and drinking beer every Sunday, things like that, when you actually have to get out of your comfort zone, it's going to be a massive shock to your system. So hanging out with these people and being around this type of behavior is going to make [00:37:30] things way harder on you when you actually have to get outside your comfort zone and go crush something that you're not very confident at or you're not very good at, or that's really hard and pushes you way past what you thought was possible.

(37:42):

Additionally, having a group of friends or a crew that you hang out with that have no ambition and that don't really want to go anywhere in life when you're at selection or when you're doing something really hard that's involved in chasing a green beret or chasing a Trident [00:38:00] or become an arranger or whatever it is, you're going to have that fallback plan, that low ambition, low drive, low agency fallback plan to be like, oh, you know what? My buddies will accept me back into their crew. If I go home with my tail between my legs and I didn't make it, you're just more likely to quit or you're more likely to quiet quit, which is what a lot of people do. They don't actually say I quit, but they just stop trying and they get dropped due to lack of performance, which is just as bad if not worse than actually quitting.

(38:30):

[00:38:30] At least people who quit are man enough to say, I quit. And having that as a fallback plan is always going to make it a little bit more lucrative to not go that extra mile and do the extra whatever is involved in getting through team week or getting through land nav, finding your last point, buckling down and going and crushing selection. It's just how it is. Also, there have been some longitudinal studies on the health effects of poor relationships, and they [00:39:00] compared a one pack a day smoking habit to poor relationships and poor relationships is just as physically unhealthy as smoking a pack a day. So let that sink in for a second. So instead, you need to curate your friend group. And this is really hard at first, especially because probably when you stop hanging out with these people or you cut ties with them, they're probably going to give you some shit like, oh, you're too good for us, whatever.

(39:27):

And oftentimes guys will go back to their [00:39:30] old friend group when they get shit on. Generally speaking, you don't want to take advice or you don't want to take recommendations or persuasion from people who are going in the opposite direction to you in life. And these people usually are, they're usually not going anywhere. So why would you take what they say seriously? So you want to curate your friend group, bye. Stop hanging out with people, cut ties with people, even if it's like a slow whatever, I'm just going to slowly edge [00:40:00] away. You don't have to say, fuck off, I'm never going to talk to you again. You can kind of do whatever you want, but if your friend group bitches, moans complaints, gossips gets offended all the time, has no agency. Agency is basically they think everything happens to them. They don't make things happen.

(40:16):

And having agency is a massive, massively important trait for crushing in soft or really any area of life, but definitely soft. If you're hanging out with people like that, probably best to cut ties with them [00:40:30] if they let other people determine their mood or if they let the president or the politics, whatever's going on in the world, determine their mood, not the person you want to be around. If they're less successful and productive than you, you should be hanging out with people who are more successful and more productive or at least on the path to be more successful and more productive in really whatever area of life. You may not find someone who's on the same path as you, but finding someone who's at least on a growth path to go and chase a big goal, that's the type of person you want to hang around, not the people who are just completely [00:41:00] fine being average or below average in fat and lazy and out of shape and unemployed if they undermine your goals.

(41:09):

That is another huge one. And this could be covertly or overly overtly is pretty obvious. Like, oh, look at this guy. He thinks he's too cool for us. Or yeah, whatever dude, you think you're going to succeed, you're not actually going to succeed. But covertly is things like maybe they tell you that they support your goals and they want you to go crush, but at the same time they invite you out to [00:41:30] bars or they invite you to go grab a large pizza and wings, or they invite you to go play video games for eight hours and skip your workout. That's covertly undermining your goals, and that's a lot harder to identify and actually get around. So be aware that some people might be pretty upfront with it, some people might not be, and the ones who aren't are a little bit. You got to definitely put a little bit more thought into the people who are really, really there to support you and the people who are not, and of course people who are cheap dopamine fis, people who just spend most of their time [00:42:00] either eating shitty food, drinking, using drugs, playing video games, watching football for seven hours every single Sunday without getting up off the couch.

(42:10):

Nothing wrong with doing those things on a periodic basis inherently, but a lot of people just continue to do that no matter what. That's like their life. That's all they do in life. They don't have any sort of ambition or anything. They're trying to work towards those type of people you really want to cut ties with and start hanging out with people who are driven, [00:42:30] determined on a path to success. People who actually support you and want you to do well, truly want you to do well, not undermine your goals like, oh, I want you to do well, but you know what? We're going out to the bars tonight. No, I want you to do well, I totally understand that you don't want to go out to the bars tonight. That makes total sense. I know you have a big workout tomorrow. Go crush. People like that are the people you want to hang out with.

(42:52):

And it might be hard at first. It's probably going to be hard at first because there's not a lot of people like this in the world until you start moving on your path to [00:43:00] success. For example, if you haven't left yet, if you're an 18 x-ray and you haven't left for OSA yet, you might not meet a single person that fits this mold before you go, but guess what? You're about to go and be in basic training with a bunch of other 18 x-rays, who most of them are going to be super motivated and the type of people you want to be around. And then after that, you're going to be in airborne school and then you're going to be in selection or pre-selection with a bunch of hard chargers people. You want to be around people that make you rise to the occasion and step it up and go crush.

(43:30):

[00:43:30] Those are the type of people you want to be around, and it's massively important. And it also can be hard too if some of these people are like family members. It might be your brother, it might be your sister. It might be if your parents that are trying to undermine your goals, and I'm not saying to ignore your parents and just completely disown yourself, but just be very mindful of it. And if you have to start stepping away and putting some space in between them, it might be a really good thing to consider because it's going to pay off in a big, big way. And if you don't do it, you're going to really, [00:44:00] really struggle. And the last one is just winging it and having no rules or rituals or routines that you've lived by. No standards really. You got really low standards and you don't have any sort of vision as to where you need to go.

(44:17):

You don't have any sort of plan in place as to how you're going to get there. You just go through life flying by the seat of your pants and hoping for the best. Most people who do big things, whether it's [00:44:30] put a green beret on or put a trident on, or run a successful business or graduate at the top of their class in school or get a really, really good job, most people got there because they had a vision and they had a plan to get there, and they executed that plan day by day. They break things down into little chunks. If you're just winging it, you're going to have clutter, lots of clutter maybe in your space, in your workspace or your living space. If your truck is just full of random shit, your room is all over the place. Your desk, your office, [00:45:00] whatever you do on a day-to-day basis, wherever you spend time, if it's just an absolute mess, that's one example, but clutter between the ears, you're not going to have clarity on what you're actually chasing and what needs to be done.

(45:11):

You're going to be very indecisive. I already talked earlier about making bad decisions or not being able to make decisions. Being able to make decisions is going to be one of the main things that you're going to have to do as a soft operator or a highly successful individual in some way, shape or form. And most people can't fucking make [00:45:30] decisions or they just make really bad decisions. Honestly, I would rather someone make a quick but slightly incorrect decision. As an SF guy, if you make a fast decision, you're not indecisive and it's slightly wrong. Most decisions that you make you can bounce back from. Of course, if it's a serious thing like life limb or eyesight, then yeah, you want to put some thought into that, make sure you're making the right decision. But most people just can't decide things. They're just not confident enough to decide.

(45:56):

And when you are just winging it in life, you're not going to be very good at making decisions [00:46:00] and you're going to be indecisive a lot. You're going to have really poor fitness because this usually coincides with not having a fitness plan or a training plan program as well as program hopping. A lot of people like this are program hoppers. They won't see this massive amazing result in a few weeks on one program and they think it's the program. They don't think it's them, even though they're the type of person who wings things, they don't understand it. They don't have the awareness of it. So what do they do? They get on another program and probably [00:46:30] don't see results because guess what? Fitness results take time and you're not doing it long enough to actually see those results. So what do you do? Quit that program.

(46:37):

It's that program's fault. I'm going to hop on another program or hire another coach. There's coach Hoppers too. That's a real thing. You're going to be super inconsistent in general as a person. You're going to be very inconsistent. Sometimes you're going to be on your game, sometimes you're going to be off your game, but you don't really have an actual plan in place or some sort of standard in place that you follow high standards. And so you're sometimes going [00:47:00] to be a superstar. Other times you're not. Whether it's with training, nutrition, showing up for your family, showing up for your friends, your work, whatever it may be, when you're just winging it, you're going to be massively inconsistent. And then low agency. I talked a little bit about agency on the last one. People who just wing it have very low agency. They don't understand that they have the capacity and the ability to make things happen.

(47:23):

They just think everyone else is at fault or everything else is at fault and things just happen to them. Whether they're good things or bad things, [00:47:30] they just think life happens to them. And that is absolutely to have high agency if you want to go and be successful in soft. So what do you do? You get yourself together, develop some sort of plan and vision. I like to go five years down the road, one year down the road, and then quarterly kind of start macro and break it down into more micro and then further break it down into more micro goals and tasks. And rules and things you do throughout the day that are going to get [00:48:00] you to where you need to go in the next quarter. And then beyond that in the next year. And beyond that, the next five years break things down into I have to do this every morning.

(48:09):

I have to wake up at this time. I have to go and execute my training session. I have to do my meal prep. I have to hold myself accountable to all the commitments I make. I have to do productive things with my free time and not just scroll away. This is the all encompassing thing that relates to all the other ones I've talked about. And you can break it down into different categories like fitness, personal [00:48:30] development, health, relationships, family, school, professional, whatever applies to you most. Those down into small, attainable, sustainable chunks of what do I need to do today to execute in every area of life that I need to execute? Then you actually make a plan. So now that you have what you need to do every day, you actually plan. So what I like to do is the beginning of every week I sit down on Sunday and [00:49:00] I plan out my week.

(49:01):

I write down everything I'm going to do that week. I don't always perfectly stick to it, but I at least have some sort of plan in place. Then I make a daily plan and ensure that I have three to five key things that I have to do that day that are going to move me forward in life, whether it's in my fitness, in my relationship with my wife, whether it's for my job, TTM, whatever it may be. Usually something in each category. But you also don't want to give yourself 25 different things to do every [00:49:30] single day. That's another form of dopamine addiction where people will have 25 things on their checklist and none of 'em are all that needle moving, but they just check things off and they feel good a little bit about each one, but really they're not going anywhere. So three to five big things every day that are going to move you forward, move you closer to your quarterly goal, move you closer to your one year goal, move you closer to your five year goal, and breaking things down like that also reduces [00:50:00] your anxiety, reduces your worry, because it helps you think about the near future and not all the potential possible things that could happen.

(50:08):

So for example, if you're three months out from selection and all you're thinking about is like, oh, what if I do this during Land N three months from now, which I have no control over? Instead, focus on how can I get myself to be as good and competent and confident at Land Nav as possible this weekend? What can I do? Can I go and practice? Can I read about it? Can I sign up for TF [00:50:30] Voodoo's Mustard in three weeks, whatever it may be. Or maybe it has nothing to do with land Nev. And you're thinking, what if I don't make it through gate week? What if I'm not fit enough? What if I can't ruck fast enough? What can you do? You can fucking train your ass off rucking. And then you can also eat to fuel it. You can sleep to fuel it.

(50:46):

You can develop these habits, you can fix your relationships. All these little things that add up in the second and third order effects are either going to be you're going to be a complete mess and you have basically no fucking chance of making it, [00:51:00] or you're going to be set up for success and you're going to know that you did all the things behind the scenes that are needed in order to give yourself the best possible chance. So that is the main difference. And lastly, you want to have some sort of rating system. So every single day that you execute or don't execute, at the end of the day, write down three things you did really well. Ideally, start with that. So you kind of start on a positive note. It's kind of hard for some people to think of the good things they did throughout every day, but usually you can find three wins, even [00:51:30] if they're minor.

(51:30):

Things that aren't huge wins still works. And then write two or three things that you didn't do well that you want to do better tomorrow. And then actually write out how you're going to do those things better tomorrow. Like put a plan in place to actually execute instead of just knowing, oh, I fucked that up. Oh, I fucked that up. All right, whatever. How am I going to fix myself and do it right tomorrow? And the more you do this, the more clarity you gain on your path forward. And you're not just going through life [00:52:00] winging it. Super important stuff. Whether you have a business you running, whether you're working somewhere else, whether you're just taking time off and prepping to be a Green Beret and you have really no responsibilities. Some sort of plan in place is going to keep you on the straight and narrow, and it's going to declutter the space between your ears and you're going to feel so much more clear and so much more confident in yourself that you can show up and execute.

(52:24):

So that is it, guys. That's the sixth thing. Hope that episode helped you get a little bit [00:52:30] more aware of some of the things you may be doing that are not really moving you in the right direction and gave you some things to consider implementing into your life so that you can not just handle the training part of selection prep or not just handle the little things that go into whatever achieving your goal is, but just become a more effective and well-rounded and confident and potentially successful human being as you move forward in life. So thanks for listening. I'll be back soon with another episode. [00:53:00] Thank you again for being here for so long. I am pumped for episode 2 0 1 and beyond. Going to continue to put my best effort in and give you guys some good content. So chat soon, guys. Till then, Terminator route.