Get Mentally TOUGH, Achieve Your Goals and Do The IMPOSSIBLE By Doing This TRICK | James Lawrence

[Music] that's why people fail is because they rush straight to that big goal and they they miss out on everything in between which is the most important part you can't skip those stepping stones and go right to it because that's where you're going to learn you fail in your preparation so that when you get to the big goal dream as big as you can so big that it scares you and you hear that all of the time but what people don't do is they don't shelf it forget about it reverse engineer it to the point where they build that success and that momentum so they can eventually get to it and that's the part about doing if you just read watch you don't adapt and evolve you gain knowledge but it's not applied knowledge once you do you get closer and closer to that big goal james lawrence the iron cowboy welcome back to the show man super pumped tom thank you i'm thrilled to be here dude i'm excited to have you you are the epitome to me of hard things doing hard things building your identity around that why do hard things why do they matter why in fact we should tell people what you did so you sent me an instagram dm and you said tom i'm going to do 100 iron man length triathlons in 100 days which is crazy and then you ended up doing 101 in 101 days which is absolute pandemonium why why hard things uh whiteheart things great question i believe that without doing hard things we will go backwards in life we'll go backwards in the way we feel we'll go backwards in the way our mind develops and let's just take the pandemic for example when that happened you could take a look around to your peers or colleagues or associates and say they've experienced hard things based on what i'm observing how they're handling this right now and then the flip side of that is i could look over here and say okay these people have never experienced something difficult in their lives and really really struggling with this and we all struggle with different things at different times but it was it was pretty obvious to me who had experienced things before and who could handle something like that and so for me doing hard things with intent is preparation for the unknown because life's life's not easy life is not easy and we all struggle with our own ways and i truly believe that we all have to go through this life and we all have to learn the same lessons in order to navigate it it's like a it's like a board game and you got it you hit all the check marks and you got to hit all the squares and you're going to keep falling down the the the slide in snakes and ladders if you fail that test and when you pass the test you get to go up the ladder you think there are universal lessons that we all have to learn absolutely yes let's hear them i've never thought of them before what an actual lesson or b but i mean i think we all have to learn things like humility uh kindness perseverance toughness grit just off the top of my head those are things that i think we all have to learn and the the more and quicker we learn those the quicker we can advance through life and gain those experiences number one question again i've traveled around the world been a lot of stages it's been a blast i never thought that this would be my life but the number one thing is how do i become more mentally tough how do i become more manageable how do i overcome the barriers how do i climb that mountain you you cannot read about it you cannot hear someone tell their experience from it you have to have an experience you have to climb the ladder you have what is it about doing it yourself i agree by the way but i want to know have you thought about why it is that we have to actually be in the mud doing the hard thing ourselves because motion creates emotion and you have to experience something and feel it in order to have an experience or knowledge with it and so if you are backed into a corner you're beat you're broken and somebody says when that happens you can take the next step well do you truly believe you can take that next step if you haven't done it because i'm sure in your life with what you've built you know momentum is a huge thing right success breeds success and confidence breeds confidence and so by actually doing you're creating those small wins in your path and then you can draw back on those experiences and apply them to now you can't do that you can't gain momentum by reading something it's always by application all right let's push on that i'm going to add a third type of person so you said you're looking at covid and you're seeing people that are handling it well and you're like alright that's somebody who's seen some they've been through something they've built that sort of mental awareness of what what they're like what they need to do that they can survive you say a lot the next step isn't going to kill me and once you know that next step's not going to kill you all of a sudden you're willing to take that next step then you look around you see people who are floundering they're really struggling and you know that they haven't been pressed in hard times i think though there's a third category that might be indistinguishable or maybe you can tell but they've been through hard things and they've been damaged by it and they haven't learned the lesson they took the hard knock like you went through in 2008 they lost everything and what they decided to learn from that was that they're a failure and now when something hard comes along they've got ptsd about it and they really don't want to face it or engage with it so how do you make sure that as you either go through the hard thing or put yourself through the hard thing that you learn the right lesson yeah great example and that category is real and it exists what happens is a lot of people they want to go from zero to 100 and they fail when they try to do that and that person that has been knocked down hard what they do is they try to go from zero to a hundred again and they're not ready for it and it's about everything in between zero to a hundred and i couldn't even have conceptualized a hundred without doing the 50 prior two and i couldn't have considered the actual 100 iron man was precipitated by the 50 which before that was the 30 and before that yeah the fun run and the training went back down to a four mile fun run right because that's kind of where my endurance history started and someone tries to miss the skip the formal fun run skip the the first half iron man world record skip the full skip the 50 and they try to go all the way to 100. well you're not creating momentum you're not learning the lessons along the way to learn the key lessons that we all have to learn and so that category needs to reassess where they are and be patient with their journey and start to learn the smaller lessons that are meaningful that get you to the bigger ones right the real test fail and preparation and they're not they're not willing to do the prep phase they're just going right to the test they fail and that just kills their confidence all right i want to get into the lessons and i want to get into like there there's a mental analog to what has to happen but there's also at least in terms of what you did there's a physical analog so one thing that i think is important like for people to really understand i want i'm obsessed with this idea if you're having a biological experience and what i mean by that is one that your brain and your body act in certain ways and there's no way to transcend that there are ways to deal with it there's ways to leverage it but there's no way to transcend it it is going to happen you are going to be in the grips of having a squishy wet brain you know that evolution is shaped in a certain way part of what has allowed you to do what you're doing is that okay you start as a wrestler when you're quite young that strengthens your tendons and your ligaments and your joints and so you're laying a physical foundation and it's important for people to understand that a that just takes time and b you have to understand where your body is to know if you're going to be able to get to that point because somebody that starts lifting for instance when they're very young they build groundwork in the connective tissue in their body that somebody if they're picking up weights for the first time in their 40s they're not going to have that same ability to layer on the same kind of strength so just being thoughtful about that and then now getting into this idea of the mental lessons that you're going to learn so i want to know what those are so the small lessons that we begin to learn along the way what is it that you begin to understand where your own cowardice lies that you understand the nature of the negative voice in your head or is it something else entirely i think the negative voice and learning how to deal with that is literally the most important piece because i've been i've been through it i've been doing this for 15 years and each time we push that envelope a little further and further and you would think at this point at the time like i've completely silenced the bully dude he's loud he's still the internal bullet the internal yeah he's still out i mean the outside the outside bully is another totally different topic and conversation but that internal bully that internal dialogue it's always going to be there and i i believe i said this the first time we met like as humans we are most tough on ourselves like we are our toughest critic and for some reason we don't see ourselves the way that others maybe see us and it's it's typically in a more negative light and so i think i think mastering that continual conversation and beat down that we have with ourselves is one of the most important pieces to that puzzle and why if you go from zero to a hundred that voice is so loud it's so dominant you don't have a chance and you have to be able to learn how to talk to it uh early early and during simple things so that you can overcome it and build that momentum like i mentioned before you you can't you can't take on the biggest thing like you don't go from off the couch to climbing everest like there's a there's a process and base camps you got to go through and and that biggest component is that that self-talk that conversation that you have because people always ask you know what is it is this a mental fee or is this a physical feat and i say it is a hundred percent both as you can probably see i am obsessed with the future of crypto and nfts and i want to make sure you are prepared to understand and enjoy this new digital revolution [Music] to help with that i've launched a new impact theory discord where you can get not only all my information on crypto and nfts but also stay up to date on everything impact theory you'll be joining a community of amazing impactivists and have direct access to me early offers and so much more to join click the link in the description and i hope to see you in there i bet you thought i was going to say mental i wasn't sure which way you're going to be honest it's 100 both because the physicality the groundwork that you that you just talked about it has to be there let's just say i'm i'm a 300 pound man and i try to do the physical feats that i do it doesn't matter how mentally tough i am that becomes my limiter and let's say i'm the most physically fit individual on the planet but i have a really weak mental game the mental side of me can't drag that incredibly physically fit person along the way and so it truly is an equal bounce and i've heard a lot of people say hey these these things are 70 mental and 30 physical or whatever the ratio is dude it's it's a hundred percent of both you got to go all in on both sides of it in order to do 14 000 miles for you know 140 miles over a quarter of a year and then you you've got to understand it wasn't just just 140 miles it was 24 hours a day because you've got the recovery the side of the the side of a project like that that people don't understand is like even when i was sleeping or trying to sleep it was complete trauma i mean i was having intense night terrors i was having full body tremors and every night i'd i'd sweat through my clothes and two sets of sheets that's just that's the the recovery part of the journey that people don't see and i'm still dealing with the mental side of this post conquer 100 the massive drop off and so if you're if you if you don't have an intently solid mental game i don't care how physically you are and if you have an incredibly strong physical game i don't care if you don't have the mental side it's 100 of both yeah now that makes a lot of sense to me i want to talk about what you have to do as you're building up to this so there's a really interesting study that shows that if you set a small goal for yourself you're actually less likely to accomplish it than if you set this really crazy big goal because the big goal is exciting like somebody can get excited about saying i'm gonna go set world records which you've done in spades multiple times over and over it's really incredible and obviously that's really inspiring and you can imagine like because i remember part of the early discussion was if i'm gonna go into coaching or teaching i need to differentiate myself and so there was even an element of like this is a marketing vehicle which i think is very smart and on top of that i know that if i'm gonna stand up in front of people i need to have done it so in the beginning like you can get excited about okay i'm going to totally change my life i'm going to set records i'm going to do all this crazy i'm going to be up on stage i'm going to get paid a lot of money to do this i'm a clever businessman like all of it plays into how you get excited enough to do this but because you can't go from zero to 100 people get totally up because they don't have the why to sustain in these small little increments that are absolutely critical so how do you help people have like hey here's this big crazy thing that you're gonna do but you have to set that aside for a minute and now we have to build the tendon strength and get your joints there and you know your ability to deal with the mental side and that's the part that people aren't willing to do because they get so excited they see they see the headline they see the headline of what it is and they want that feeling of what it takes and to be honest with you i i i don't enjoy the business out of stuff like i i and and i didn't i set out to do it on the coaching side of stuff just for triathletes i trust me last thing i wanted to be was on stage last thing i wanted to be was in front of people last thing i wanted to be was the center of attention um and like you said it's so important to have that big goal because that's a super exciting thing but people miss out on the journey and it's so cliche and i hated the words came out of my mouth enjoy the journey but it's so true and it's not about enjoying the journey it's about part taking in the journey and participating in it and being very present in every step of the journey and that's why people fail is because they rush straight to that big goal and they they miss out on everything in between which is the most important part you can't you can't skip those stepping stones and go right to it because that's where you're going to learn i said earlier in this in this conversation you fail in your preparation so that when you get to the big goal i tell my clients all the time dream as big as you can so big that it scares you and you hear that all of the time but what people don't do is they don't shelf it forget about it reverse engineer it to the point where they build that success and that momentum so they can eventually get to it on a small level we coach the full distance triathlon all the time and all the time someone will do their first workout and they say i can't do and i you know i can't do an iron man i can't do a full distance try and i say forget about it that's not that's not where we're at like that's the finish line and i ask do you trust me do you trust the process are you willing to show up every single day yeah absolutely great that's not the goal let's just do today because by doing this you're going to adapt and evolve and that's the part about doing if you just read watch you don't adapt and evolve you gain knowledge but it's not applied knowledge once you do you get closer and closer to that big goal when i started that four through in that four month fun run that we've talked about i could no way my brain could have conceptualized like i couldn't even come up with the goal it was so astronomically out there right i couldn't even have come up with 50. i could come up with a marathon that was my goal that was my heart and as you evolve and learn and continually show up more becomes possible when you know this is what i as i do one we wouldn't do it if we knew how hard it was and and and two when you're in the middle of it it absolutely seems impossible and everybody that's in the middle of their impossible hit is so hard and it is ruthless and it's brutal but then when you accomplish you you hit that goal whether it's intermediate or big then you go ah i've learned i've grown i've adapted now more becomes possible and then you can continue to push that envelope that's the thing you never want to do is sit down and go okay i've made it i'm there i would have i would have been content with the 30 34 iron man's through 11 countries that would have been it but i i just knew deep down in myself like there's more i'm capable of more and i've learned i'm different than when i was when it when i was in the middle of it and it was the hardest thing i've ever done and then as things evolve and progress more becomes possible and it's man i have learned at the highest level that perception and perspective is an amazing thing what do you mean my perception and perspective of a hundred is very different than say yours uh you've never done an ironman right no right and so to you that would be holy cow from where i am today that would take a lot of effort a lot of energy and a lot of training i could probably walk off set and somebody said hey go it's time do an iron man i'm like okay fine let's go do one right my perception and perspective of what that is is very different but over time now my like my new normal and the way i look at things is very different my previous world records that were the hardest they could have possibly been when i was in the middle of it are laughable to me but to the newest member of the community their heart is my four-mile fun run from 14 years ago and you need to meet yourself where you're at on your journey and over time your perception perspective will change about what's possible for you and that's the biggest thing is people want to get intimidated and overwhelmed by oh heated that that's impossible i can't do it i can't even relate to that but you have to understand that everybody's journey starts at the beginning you're never an expert when you start like when you exited quest your knowledge was so different than when you were like oh i'm gonna start making bars and do these you know this get into this nutritional space how how big of a paradigm shift and your perspective probably changed a lot from conception to exit strategy even where you are with this business now i mean where you were and what you've learned has completely changed but you didn't watch a youtube video you did it and experienced it experimented with it this worked this didn't work you learned you had failures you had successes and now your goal is probably bigger now than it was when you started and when you started that goal was astronomical and almost unimaginable but it's because your perception and perspective has changed dude i really hope people listen to that that's so important it's what i call frame of reference so your frame of reference will determine it's a much easier way to put everything in that your behaviors follow your beliefs and your behaviors are all that matters which means ultimately your beliefs are all that matters so then it becomes a question of well how do you shape your belief and one thing that i love in your story about okay you have to go out there and do it because i i did watch youtube videos i did read books but my thing is i do that and then that day i'm deploying that knowledge so that the knowledge is an abstract it's concrete it's allowing me to go do something now the reason i think you need to do something for the reasons that you talked about is illustrated so perfectly in your story where at one point i think this was back in the the 50 uh where you just laid down on the side of the road curled up into a ball and were like i i don't want to keep going now in that moment it's really it's a battle with your own self-talk it's reorganizing your why why am i doing this like you talked about sort of gathering all those things up that to me is the juice that to me is why you do hard things that that's why i um do cold exposure right so i'm not going to do 100 uh 101 excuse me triathlon length ironman things but i need to be exposed to my weaknesses i need to trigger my insecurities i need to get into fight or flight i need that part of my brain screaming at me to get out that i'm in danger that this is bad somehow that you know that that you you have that real sense that fight or flight right i've got to get the out of the water so like trying to force yourself to stay in ice cold water i was in 52 degree water i think until i was legitimately worried that i was going to hypothermia how long was that i looked it up after and i was so far off i could have stayed like another three and a half hours but i actually having to worry about it but i was utterly convinced so i was in there for over a half an hour and so you know you're in there look at like your teeth i was worried i was gonna bite my tongue or chip my teeth it was that kind of thing and in those moments two things happen one you're confronted by your weaknesses which i think are really important to stare at so when people say you learn something or you learn about yourself i it isn't a pretty thing that you learn it's an ugly thing it's a thing i'll speak for myself it's a thing that makes me less impressed with myself but then i push through that and i find defense mechanisms and i find my why or i strengthen my why and i find things that allow me to overcome that and then i'm like whoa that's a really useful tool but the the thing that nobody ever says is you are confronting the weakest ugliest least attractive version of yourself humanly possible and in slaying that dragon you move forward yeah yeah and that's that's why people don't do it is because nobody likes the endless version of who they are and we and i mean who doesn't enjoy comfort and uh i'll tell you a cold story i hate being cold and i've had two terrible experiences being cold um i did a full distance extreme triathlon in alaska oh god and it was uh june but it's in the ocean yeah was the swim and a normal a normal full distance is 2.4 miles and they they were going point to point so they're like no big deal we'll do 2.7 and there was a glacier dump about halfway through the swim now my normal full distance swim is about 105 2.4 miles this water was so cold it was about 51 degrees and when we swam past that glacier dump it dropped to 48. oh the swim took me an hour 53. i could not feel my body and it took me the entire bike ride to warm up before we did the the marathon on the mountain but that was that was literally the coldest i've been and then we did a race called the world's toughest race in fiji um it's on amazon prime 10 episodes hosted by bear grylls mark brunette production totally crazy thing way outside of my expertise levels you're talking uh repelling uh ascending a thousand foot waterfall uh just jungle trekking things i've never done before and we had to get up this river system and at the top was these frozen pools and uh i have never been so cold in my life and it felt like two days we were in that for close to 12 hours in freezing cold cold waters and i've just i hate being cold in general and so those two experiences um it's the reason i don't do cold showers and cold therapy because i'm like i gotta check i don't need to do that how did you push through like what what is your secret sauce is it just you have a killer why like how do you get yourself dude the idea a hundred and one iron man length triathlons in 101 night terrors every night like it's so crazy i think i'm mentally tough but dude that's gnarly i think that the concept or idea of a challenge like that is so exciting and again you have no idea why so exciting it's not exciting to me sounds ludicrous um i think doing something that nobody else has done before and trying to do it at a level that's so high nobody can deny it so are we good to talk about why i did the hundred please okay so so i was on your show after i did the 50 and that was 50 full ironmans 50 consecutive days through all 50 states young young family uh i we've got five kids an unbelievable wife and um we had this crazy idea to push the envelope we'd broken a couple world records and we said this is what we're going to do and doctors said it was impossible they said we were going to die or i was going to die and the kids were going to have a great time i was going to die and and when you're doing something that nobody's done before there's no road map and so you're ultimately going to make some mistakes and we did we never hid them we never ran away from them we faced them head-on but as you know the internet space is unkind and we were attacked and mocked and ridiculed and they deemed not everybody there's a small camp out there that deemed what we did a complete failure we failed we did not accomplish it and i'm so glad we because there were a couple days where you had to train indoors because of crazy weather yes we were chased by a hurricane we had to go indoors on day 18 it was a 106 degrees outside in chattanooga tennessee and i was so exhausted i'd never done 18 consecutive before nobody had and i lost concentration for two seconds and i fell asleep on my bike when you do that you eat crash you crash and that's no fun and my hip swelled up i had road rash and i made a decision to get back on my bike and finish that day and there's a whole sub story to that where it was my daughter my wife she was waiting for me she was doing a 5k every single day and i was like i have i have to meet my daughter so she can accomplish her goal i don't show up she doesn't run she falls short that's on me and i felt that responsibility so i was so glad that she was on that journey same time i was on my journey and anyways long story short we were the following day we were in mississippi massive storms again inside i'm i'm physically broken i'm mentally broken i'm completely exhausted we had done most of the day we were wrapping it up and i was like i'm in a lot of pain and we had done a lot of our training to minimize the damage on the body on an elliptical machine it simulates running really well we could match my heart rate intensity we were still covering the distance i called up my coach i said hey wrapping today up gonna jump on the the elliptical we're gonna do a couple miles on there we're gonna take the finished picture and get to the next day i want to get out of mississippi and he was like great let's do that thinking nothing of it we took the finisher picture like we did every single day and we posted online got in the car drove all night and started the next day day 20 in alabama i think and i woke up to an angry mob and for years years after that back up we decided to continue we finished it changed my family's lives it has given people around the world hope and inspiration i have gone on to speak in 48 different countries we have changed the way people think and show up in their own lives and we i almost pulled the plug day 1920 because of that incident and because how ruthless people were to us and then that whole time space of me being on stage every time i got get off stage i felt like a complete hypocrite because i was telling people to be mentally tough and to show up in their lives and just that smallest little again that voice that never goes away that beats on us we give it so much power and i finally said that's enough i sat down pulled out my calculator did all the math we covered 7030 miles i was like okay how many miles did i spend on the elliptical 0.24 percent of the miles point two four percent so then i thought man if i was in the nba and i knocked down 99.76 percent of my shots i'd i'd be the number one player in the entire league i'd have 100 million of all time ever if i was in the nfl and i and i qb and i nailed 99.76 of my throws i'd be the best player i've ever why am i being so hard on myself nobody had done what we'd done we'd move the bar so much and i don't know if it was i wanted to prove to myself who i know i am or if part of me was like i want to show that less than one percent of the people that have this opinion that i am who i said i was and who i am and then the pandemic hit and i had gotten out of shape i have been traveling nine months out of the year i'd been on stages and coaching and presenting and helping people have hope and get out of their own way and achieve their dreams because i'd achieved mine i i got my dream at home i've got my family i've got stability i've got whatever i want now and i built it all in the pandemic hit and overnight literally overnight speaking goes away coaching goes away racing goes away and i had i didn't know it at the time but i had an entire year plus zero work no income i get to focus on me i get to be with my family and everybody experienced the the kovid shut down in different ways it blessed my life it was it was an opportunity for me to go there's one more i i cause i the whole time six years post 50 i always said and i'd always wanted i can do do that better i got asked all the time all the time if you could do it again would you and i said i wouldn't do it again would i do it the first time and they said would you change anything and i always said no because i'm the person i am today because of what i learned on that journey i love the mistakes we made like i said we've never had it we put it in the book it's in redefine apostle it's in the documentary we highlight it all of these struggles and mistakes that we made because it was part of our journey there was no road map for this and so i started thinking i said okay i'm not perfect i'm a human being i'm not perfect but i can try and strive for excellence in anything i do and i looked back on the 50 and i said what what was the 50 the 50 represented to me chaos logistics fatigue and i said okay if the 50 was what we did was dubbed redefining impossible if i remove chaos if i remove confusion if i put systems and team in place if i control my surroundings can i double what people thought was impossible because what i what i initially set out to do on the 50 was how many consecutive full distance tries can the mind and the body do i didn't find that out because logistics and chaos got in the way we had no money we bootstrapped it and we were relying on the general public to be there when they said they would be there in each state as a volunteer we're at the mercy of everybody and we had you know the wingman you've seen them and they're crazy and the mistakes they made and they i mean he hit a deer in the middle of the night no fault of his own he was exhausted but that took out our generator we couldn't carry food all these things so the 50 was it was was chaos and confusion and logistics and i said if i can remove those control those put team and systems in place financially we're in a different spot if we did this all in a remote location can i achieve my goal of finding out what the mind and body can do as far as consecutives is concerned and that's where we landed on 100 in utah because the pandemic wiped my calendar out and i said i've got possibly a year to get ready physically and mentally to draw from my past experience and to see if that's possible and on march 1st 2021 we set out on a journey to see if that was possible and do 100 consecutive now that there's different ways to fray to frame that goal because you can say the word 100 consecutive or 100 consecutive days and it's hard to conceptualize that or figure out what that is it's a quarter of a year so now take the iron distance it's 140.6 miles well if you just say 146 miles a day it's hard to conceptualize too so it's 14 000 and 60 miles over 14 weeks and which is 140 miles a day and we set out on a journey and again you wouldn't do something if you knew how damn hard it was going to be and you wouldn't do something if you if you had all the answers and you don't start as as the expert and so we did we set it on journey on march 1st and the the rest is history and i am so proud of myself i'm so proud of our team and we left no doubt we left no doubt to who we said we were and the criticism we silenced everybody and i challenge anybody to find a flaw or an asterisk to what we did hey guys i hope you've joined the impact theory discord which if you were unfamiliar with discord it is basically a more fun slash but if you need another reason to join here is the ultimate one on october 13th we are going to be dropping our most valuable product yet maybe the most valuable product that we will ever offer in the form of an nft this yet to be revealed nft token will give you unparalleled access to everything i am working on special discounts free access exclusive access and much much more if all of that was exciting to you and you want to learn more click the link below to join our discord community and follow the steps to read my article the beginner's guide to crypto and nfts reading that and joining the discord community will make sure you are ready for october 13th it's so funny that that point two four would just it would with me as well so i completely get it but on the outside looking at you i'm like really like you let that with you it's so crazy like the story alone of like the first or second night where you have to fly coach with five kids after waking up and not even sleeping running a triathlon then flying to the next state with five kids in coach and do the next one i was like come on meow like at what point did we say like this is so absurd in fact if you want to complain about that you go do the 50 50 50. and then you can complain but it would with me too that's the weird thing like and i can imagine that's what makes you special though does it or are we just wired like that like what what i think makes me special is i'd find a way to the other side of that whether it was doing what you did and finding some even more just absurd thing and like going okay this time there's not going to be an asterisk as you called it because i think that i think the human mind is just a certain way and one of those things is we are a social creature and it absolutely matters what other people think and it matters what we think and it's this weird confluence of all the things so it didn't bother you until you got the echo back from people that oh this is an asterisk but once it got in your head then it's all over because now it's like you can't escape it well because if you remember in our first interview i said at some point in time i didn't care what people thought and i wasn't trying to prove them wrong i was trying to prove myself right and i said that's a very different energy and i don't know when that shifted because i still i still believe that i believe i'm successful in what i do because i don't care what people think i'm not comparing myself against somebody else's standard of excellence if i did i would have been satisfied with 10 in a row right and so why push that envelope but i think it's because i know that there's more i know that that wasn't that wasn't acceptable and deep down i believe i'm a person of integrity and my my word is my bond and for some reason i'll be honest 100 was for me a thousand percent it was for me uh because that question was posed to me it did bring up the conversation that internal dialogue was well did that point two for four percent matter if you said you were going to do that did you do it and i said i yes and then you just have that whole conversation while you're rationalizing it did you actually do it are they are you right do you give them any power and so it's that entire conversation with that tiniest bully that we give so much power to and i i wouldn't have said this before but i'm i am so glad i gave that little voice a little bit of power because it brought out the best in me it brought out a different beast that came out and literally doubled what everybody thought was impossible i call it we defied logic it was so i don't know what the word is unlogical for what we set out to accomplish and again full circle my perception perspective was different based on the experience that i had learned and how i evolved through that process when i woke up and i presented the story the thing to sonny and said i want i want to tackle a hunter consecutive her hesitation wasn't it's possible or not possible it's how is this going to disrupt my life in our kids lives and how do i balance and framework that even even her perception has changed like no question in her mind the literally the question wasn't is it possible can we do it it was like okay how are we going to fit this into our kid's life because we're six years removed from the 50 our kids were 6 to 12. now they're 12 to 18. now they're very busy they have their own lives they're looking at colleges they're looking at your high school friends jobs you can't displace your family and so you have to framework houses going to work with seven of you and that's a different conversation and it's crazy because her perception was the same as mine yeah that's totally possible based on what we've done now our preparation needs to match that goal and get it done [Music] let's talk about criticism and people that throw shade how did you so it it brought out the best in you ultimately but how did that conversation go how did you begin to switch it and then as you were doing this was there ever a time because i'm a big believer in what i'll call the the dark side and i mean that in a star wars way where it's like nature only gave you pleasure and pain and so why people don't leverage the anger the rage the that side of the equation to me is a mystery i don't understand it so i think they're both useful i think you have to be very careful how much time you spend in the dark energy because it's very corrosive and over time it ends up destroying you and not you know the other person but it gives you some pretty powerful impetus for sure was there any of that like you're going through the 100 you're tired i mean you were running on a stress fracture through some massive percentage of this so are you saying to yourself there's going to be no asterisks on this like i'm going all the way z yeah absolutely what i learned from the 50 was what you say you're going to do is the expectation and if you deviate from that it gives them permission to then attack you so on our website we said these are the rules of the hundred if we deviate from these come at me full force i deserve it and that's one of the biggest lessons that i learned is you have to set up the standard and the expectation and then once i set up those parameters there was zero deviating from it and i learned if i do they will come at me and i and i was so driven to not give anybody an ounce of power or ammunition to come at me with anything and so it was every situation i was in was go back to you this is a great lesson for anybody in life and before you go on any journey whatever you're doing figure out your ethos what you truly stand for then every decision after that becomes easy should i do this does it align with my core values black and white yes or no decision made once you set out the parameters for the 100 what that looks like that's your ethos for this project then you go back you're in a decision should we do this or that go back to the ethos black or white easy question easy answer and so once we wrote out the parameters made it public that's what it was and it was everything outside day number one 18 degrees outside whoa 18 degrees try riding your bike in 18 degrees when that happens it's very very cold i made a colossal mistake in planning the hundred i looked at the average temperature for march in utah i'm like oh 50s and 60s i can do that that's the high never on one day of the hundred was i on my bike during the high of the day it was on there at seven in the morning day number one 18 degrees and so we were immediately up against it as far as like your ethos because that would push anybody inside we would bike through snow we bike through sleep we like through hail like you there was a moment and it was so amazing the way the cycling community came out but there was one day it was so cold we called the snow day and we we stopped several times to either refuel and we went into a gas station and one of the guys went to take his gloves off bite it to get the glove off and nearly bit through his finger because it was so cold and he could he didn't he didn't realize he was actually biting into his finger whoa that's how cold it was we were all that cold but it was just a quick stop and he was trying to take his glove off so he could you know refill his water bottle to get back out on the road but those are those are the conditions that we started at and it's a it's an immediate gut check the first week of the journey realizing hey i'm on day 10 i've got 90 more of these uh where am i at and you know you mentioned that stress fracture that i had in my shin it started with a an undisclosed ankle injury that i went into it with that i didn't want to tell anybody about and it quickly exploded up my leg you know because when you're in training for something like this you have to minimize the damage um you don't want to over train and you don't want to hurt yourself before you even start and so there's there's an obvious immediate ramp of volume that's unavoidable and your body has to go through the adaptation phase of doing that well my body didn't handle it i turned 45 in the middle of this journey i'm older and i developed a stress fracture and it got to the point where i felt like i knew i knew my leg was going to break and i had to manage the pain and every step i was taking on the marathon i was like this is that this next stop my leg's going to break this next step my leg's going to break and i'd manage the pain manage the pain and i'd black out i'd pass out and casey was there one of the wingmen he did all the runs with me he'd catch me and within five seconds i'd come back too and we'd do a little countdown and we made a shirt that says here we go because that's what we would say we'd audibly say it out loud here we go and we'd get moving again and i'd manage it manage it manage it black out catch me and he said you know you're blocking out those entire last six miles and i said i know but it's what we had to do because the question i had to ask myself was is the next step going to kill me that's one of my major ethos one of my major mantras is is the next step going to kill me and um it was about day 15. i was at the peak of the shin problem literally thought like my leg was going to break didn't know what to do i was at the completion of the day and i looked at sunny and we were back at my house and i said i don't i don't think i can manage that level of pain for 85 more days and she gave me some of the best advice that i've ever had my entire career and she said the work is done today the work is done allow the team to do their job at a great pt massage therapist team there allow the team to do their job go to bed wake up tomorrow because we have no idea what tomorrow's going to look like and then let's face tomorrow as it comes because mentally i could not conceptualize that level of pain management for 85 more days we were so early in the journey and i my my my 45 year old body was broken broken if the 50 was chaos exhaustion and logistics the hundred was injury pain and longevity those would be the two the two parallels between the two contrasts and and that to me became the the the campaign model was take every day as it is today because we have no idea what tomorrow's going to look like because what we've learned on my journey is my body is in our bodies the human body is an amazing tool if you give it the resort resources it needs to recover perform whatever it takes same with the mind and my body could go from great to bad in a 24 hour period and they can go from bad to great in a 24-hour period we had no idea you deal with what you have when it's given to you so on day 8 15 when she gave me that advice that kind of became the theme for for the rest of the journey was like we don't know what tomorrow's going to bring and if you quit now you're never going to find out and that would be the most tragic thing you do on your journey to not know what tomorrow brings and so every single day we would fight till we got to the point where i was like you've done the work today now trust your team to take care of you because tomorrow could be completely different what are your tactics for pain management that's that's extraordinary to be able to manage the pain to the point where you pass out tucks so what do you do i saw footage um that i don't understand uh because i'm completely blank i've saw footage where i i develop a rhythmic pattern with my hands that i'd move them in a certain way to either distract myself or and i didn't know i was doing it and i would take myself somewhere else and somewhere else and i think over time with dealing with pain you develop techniques and everybody's going to be different i didn't have that technique in 2012 when i broke the world record for official events around the world i didn't have that technique i didn't experience that level of pain i experienced exhaustion and difficulty but not that level of pain and as i progressed through my career with crashes and and continuing to push the mind and the body i developed personal techniques that have helped me and i i don't know how to flip the switch like i i i would literally be a multi-millionaire if i could write the manuscript on how to flip a switch on the actual act of doing it i don't think it's a tangible thing that you can teach anybody because it's so unique to an individual and how they do it in their space and for me i've watched some videos and i am just like or someone would tell me where the way i was acting and this was crazy for me looking back on the experience now at some point in time you slip into this trauma protective state and again it's not a flip it's not hey day 35 to day 36 that happened you're going on a journey that's a quarter of a year and you slowly step into the state until your mind is completely protecting you from the chaos and trauma that you're experiencing protecting you how um from the actual experience like you're going somewhere else you're doing going somewhere yeah absolutely going somewhere else had somebody asked me on day 98 of the journey could you do 200 consecutive no question the answer would have been emphatically yes day 102 when i was done in my mind i couldn't figure out how we did 101. it was oh shocking to me and i'm we're two and a half months removed from the accomplishment now i'm still struggling physically and mentally i can't wrap my mind around what we did and it's just proof that you slowly slip into the state and how powerful the mind is to drag a physically fit body through something that everybody deemed was double what impossible was before why do 101 you only promised a hundred i did that was a challenge already absurd enough yep and and 101 didn't come about until the very last week of the campaign because again when i'm on 65 and i still have 45 to go and that seems so insurmountable somebody joked early on i think it was casey and he said hey let's do 101 just me you and aaron the wingman and will shock everybody and i said f off like we're not even having this conversation i can't conceptualize it not even on the table bring it up again and you're fired like that i was so mad that he would even bring it up it couldn't conceptualize it and then you know for me about day 85 i just got into such a flow state after 85 like you're you're there but you're not there that's all it took you're 85. yeah yeah so easy it's easy you're unconsciously conscious at that point just executing i knew where every pothole was i knew the course i knew the environment i've had so much confidence having fought through the worst of the worst through 85 days i'm like 15 is so manageable to me again perception perspective somebody said i'll do 15 consecutive you're an idiot but now we have 15 to go there like you're so close it's done you might as well like it's easy right it's a wrap and um and so once i was beyond 85 i you know my world now is going around and coaching and meant mindset um strength and and that's the imp you know that's the important part of going on any journey and i hate speakers that one are just talking heads that don't have any experience have never been on the battlefield and one of my things is the next step's not going to kill you and the other big question i got after the 50 was could have you done one more and i hated that question of course i could have done one more i chose not to right and so during the last week of the 100 i just got the biggest impression i'm big on intuition doing what you your gut tells you to do and my gut said you have to do one more and i said i don't want it and it said i don't care you have to do one more if you're going to get up on stage and tell people you can do one more step you have to do it and and here's what i learned about people you're going to get to a point on your journey where you're broke physically mentally not not financially but financially too you're beaten you can't imagine dragging yourself out of your dark corner you can imagine pulling yourself off the ground you have no support system you you you're you're a corpse walking around you're depressed you have anxiety everything freaks you out in order to overcome that you have to show up on your journey and i don't know your journey uh i don't know how many times you're gonna have to show up one more time sometimes it's gonna have to be on your own and so we didn't tell anybody that 101 was gonna happen we didn't even know it was going to happen until literally three days before the hundred and hundred was finished on a tuesday i made the final decision on the sunday night to do it and we were just gonna go live on that wednesday morning and i got in the pool nobody was there because they thought we were sleeping celebrating and i woke up and i got in the pool and i was by myself and i did the 2.4 mile swim and i was fully anticipating doing 112 miles by myself and the chat boards went crazy and the the the supporters locally said no way is he doing that bike ride by himself and they showed up and we had an amazing 112 miles and we did it on our terms and i just felt like as a person who gets on up on stage and tells people you can show up on your journey no matter what i had i was broken i was beat i was defeated and on the flip side of that i'd achieved the goal i'd done what i said i was going to do but i just felt at the highest level i needed to lead from the front i needed to go do one more whether it's by myself or with my team the importance of that i think day 101 was more important than the previous 14 000 miles that's crazy yeah because you didn't have to do that one i didn't have to do it i didn't have to do it and i was so broken like i didn't have to i didn't have to do any of them that was just my word and my bond i know what you mean though so there's something about and i say this to myself all the time it's when i do the one that i didn't owe myself so you owed yourself the 100 because you said you were going to do it but you didn't owe yourself the 101 and you still did it i i did it day 100 was so chaotic it was so so much media i mean we started this conversation with i don't want to be the center of attention that's not who i am and so to to do 101 it was on my terms it was with my small team it was um intimate it was stress-free to me it was the ultimate victory lap one mike mike drop galore you know to do to do that and then go you know what this one is truly for me don't ever ask me if i could have done one more don't ask that question um the answer is always yes i choose not to this is my journey i'll do what i want when i want as long as i'm within the parameters i set and um it was it was truly for me yeah incredible that's right how do you deal with the come down of doing something so unprecedented and then what it's like do you have a sense of like i need a new purpose or what what's that been like not a new purpose the who coming off the 100 has been very hard for me um we were i was heavily cautioned coming off the 50 there would be this big letdown um and then down of what that like you don't have the adrenaline [Music] i think i think it's achieving the goal it's your sole purpose and once you achieve it there's the next day is nothing and i i saw and i'm going to post it on my social media this week it was a letter um written to from the olympic athlete standpoint had i known it would be like this and and the whole thing is like you you train for four years or your entire career for this one moment that one moment happens and next thing you know you're mowing your lawn and nobody knows who you are and and that's what it feels like and i was cautioned after the 50 because it was so big at the time and then i didn't i didn't experience it because i got whisked away into the speaking into podcasts into meeting tom and all these crazy things and so i was just on this incredible high that never ended and that became my new normal and so when we did the 100 what changed was the duration of it there's a big difference between going all in being on i mean on on mentally for 24 hours a day for seven weeks and then doing that same ask on on for 14 weeks and this is the first time in my life i am a very positive person i'm a very happy person i'm a go lucky person i am in the face of adversity i've got a smile on my face you cannot tell i'm suffering this was so dramatic and so drastic and i got into such a protective state that when i came out of it i've experienced sadness and depression and hormonal imbalance like i have never experienced before and it's been really hard on me because i have never been on that journey before and now i'm on a very new journey if any your if every journey has i would say three phases it's preparation execution and post or recovery well i am in that post recovery portion and it's like nothing i've ever experienced before like literally when i get home from this trip i'm going to get brain mris done wow because i'm suffering from such brain fog and confusion this is one of my favorite stories i was it was like a week after the 100 and i was driving somewhere with my wife and we were on the interstate in utah and my wife looks over and so lovingly and so patient she says hey you're driving 45 miles an hour whoa and i was like oh yep i am i didn't realize it i was in this fog of a space and i said i think you should drive i've never experienced that before and i can go through a day where i've either done a virtual presentation or creating content or doing some filming and the day ends and a switch goes off and i go from i am okay to i am not okay and there's confusion and i don't know what to do i'll be walking around my house i've never ever experienced this before and i'm not worried about it because i know it's a hormonal imbalance and we joked prior to turning the cameras on don't ask me the question what's next and this is a perfect lead into what's next and i've kind of been going down this cool journey of biohacking my my brain my body my health and um i'm still gonna do fun races like i'm doing a cool race in costa rica in a couple months it's the hardest mountain bike race i'm going to abu dhabi dubai to do the world championships for spartan i'm doing some really cool stuff um what's next for me it's i want to live a sustainable healthy lifestyle beyond 105 years and to me that is super intriguing and fascinating and i think is possible um and i wouldn't be the first but for me i want to go on that journey of like total health and wellness and controlling my mind and giving my body what it needs because i've learned at the highest level like we are so powerful mind and body but you can't abuse what you have and you have to if you've learned anything about the pandemic like you have to take care of yourself to combat and battle our surroundings we're in a constant war with the elements around us and i'm fascinated especially having experienced what i've experienced coming off of the hundred and the trauma that i went through intentionally mind you i did it to myself i'm not comparing myself to anybody else that's been through different types of trauma but for me it's kind of like opened up this box of like how powerful the mind body is how protective our minds can be to our bodies and now i want to take it on the journey of like how powerful of a human can i be and how long can i live maintaining a really high standard of living and that fascinates me and i know it does you too um you want to live to your 500. want to live until forever forever that would certainly be the idea i push that button yeah yeah so i'm i'm kind of going down that journey right now um just of of self-discovery and um just with the emotions that i've had and i mean i i have an unbelievable life i i have so much to be grateful for and to be in the middle of a workout and just start bawling like for no reason is shocking to me and to have that experience and i i have empathy and compassion now for people that are like no like something's wrong like it's an imbalance and i i don't know why i'm sad i don't know why i'm depressed and for me the biggest thing that's helped me is like i have to get out and do something i i can't sit at home and focus on you talk about focusing on that dark that dark space or whatever it is and that dark space can come in many different ways and depression and anxiety is a big one and for me um getting on my bike and getting up into the utah mountains has been so therapeutic for me and healthy just to get out and just separate and disconnect and breathe air and and and and just do something that i love and that's been super helpful for me because i joke that i joke that i did a i did a quick video on instagram and i said that tree right there is not yelling at me it's not judging me it's just it's just a tree and it's letting me be who i am and i think that was super important for me um to realize how important like cycling is in my life and how important it is not to sit in a corner and focus on everything that hurts or everything that is sad to get outside and to shift that energy i said it before emotion creates emotion and for me it's a super important piece to my puzzle i love it dude what you have done is so inspiring and if the next step is to inspire people to live to 105 you can count me in though that's pretty young but at least it's more than what most people hope for where can people follow on your insane journey yeah we post most everything on instagram so iron cowboy james and then everything can be kind of plotted and navigated through our website just ironcowboy.com i love it dude guys if you haven't already man what this guy has shown to be possible is extraordinary you can't look at it and think that something in your own life is impossible it's merely a question of how badly you want it what price you're willing to pay to get it and speaking of things that you can get if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 268,782

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, James Lawrence, Iron Cowboy, Redefining Impossible, how to be great, how to be successful, James Lawrence documentary, James Lawrence triathlon, James Lawrence Ironman, triathlon, most ironman in a row, 100 ironmans, how to set goals, goals, how to achieve goals, how to do hard things, how to be mentally tough

Id: kgewSQnWtIo

Length: 65min 5sec (3905 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021