Week by week we are inching closer to this newsletter going out every Monday for a year. Periodically, I think it’s important to remind everyone, including myself, why it got started.

I am and have long been an avid consumer of development content online. I follow the bodybuilders, the marathoners, the diet coaches, the David Goggins, the Tony Robbins, the readers, the leaders, and the rest. While I love the content each of these entities produces individually, I couldn’t help but feel that there was never enough overlap between the subjects. My personal opinion is that all things personal development go hand-in-hand.

The bodybuilders aren’t talking about reading. Most runners aren’t talking about lifting. The readers aren’t talking about what they're listening to. The fitness moguls aren’t talking about their professional pursuits, etc. Yet all of these things go hand-in-hand - becoming the best version of yourself requires some investment in all of the buckets. And with that in mind, came the structure for the newsletter:

Brain + Body + Books = Breakthroughs

With that as the foundation, I have tried to speak on things that I find not only relevant but things I have experience with personally.

I’ve been overweight with no motivation or discipline. I know what that feels like. Never looking at a mirror too closely as you walk by. Buying bigger clothes. Feeling like shit after yet another crap meal.

I went 26 years of my life without ever running more than a couple of miles. I was a self-prescribed “non-runner” until I started (Funny how that works)

I’ve felt stuck in the mud at a job and in my career where I desperately needed guidance on what to do next and where I needed to improve. I found those in the books and podcasts that I wasn’t listening to at the time.

I went years after college without picking up a book, even though I knew zero very successful people who didn’t read themselves.

This isn’t a “look at what I’ve done” intro here. I just want to routinely peel back the onion to why this thing means what it does to me. This newsletter isn’t a revenue generator right now, but I have gotten more from the discipline of research and writing it than I could ever weight in a dollar amount. And it very possibly may never be - but I want everyone to find just one thing in one of these letters that can get their personal development snowball rolling down the hill. Hearing those stories years down the line…well, that is priceless.

Now let’s have a week

Brain - Performance Anxiety and Preparation

I want you to think back to the last thing you did that you got anxious about leading up to the main event. It could be a big work presentation, a best man speech at a wedding, an endurance race, a call with a client, etc. The principle below encompasses all of these.

Now to yourself, I want you to have a short moment of honesty as you answer these questions:

• What were you most anxious about? Anxious about failing? About how you could look? About meeting other people’s expectations?

• When did you start preparing for this event? Did you give yourself enough time?

• Now be DEEPLY honest with yourself - as you prepared for this event, did you check every box you could to make sure you were as prepared as you could be? How many times did you rehearse the speech? Did you put in the miles for the marathon you needed to? Did you cram for the presentation just a few days before?"

So much of what we are anxious about when thinking about an event that stands out in magnitude in our lives is the fear of not living up to our potential. Of falling on our face. And in that practice, we put a major emphasis on feelings and emotions that are out of our control.

To combat this, the most effective strategy I have found is to 180 your focus onto what you DO control, which in most instances, is the way you prepare.

You might still get the butterflies before you give that speech, but if you have written and re-written it dozens of times, recorded yourself giving it, listening back through it, and repeated that process dozens of times, then when you show up to give it, you won’t have to put much thought into what you are saying, just how you are saying it.

You might still have a sky-high heart rate on the start line of your next marathon, but if you committed to a training plan from someone who has been there done that, and stuck to the plan for months on end, you will settle into the race once the whistle blows.

You might still be intimidated on that first call with a prospective client, but if you have recited your slides / pitch dozens of times, practiced your transitions, and have a list of questions to steer the conversation ready, you can fall back on that as the call progresses.

Simply put - not always, but a good chunk of the time - general feelings of anxiety are often similar responses to a deeper feeling of knowing you are underprepared. Being overly prepared gives your mind the bandwidth to stop worrying about WHAT you have to say and do, freeing up space for you to think about performing in the moment.

So do this for me - pick something big you have coming up, and try DRASTICALLY overpreparing. Get so annoyed by how many times you’ve reviewed your speech that you simply can’t wait to just finally give it. Re-read that PowerPoint until you see the slides in your sleep. Commit to not missing a single DAY on your next training block. And let me know how the results compare.

Body - Your Body Is Like A Car - How Do You Fuel It?

I love the analogy of comparing our body to a car, and drawing similar conclusions to the type of fuel we put in it to make it go.

How silly is it that many of us at some point in time have pulled into the gas station in a new car and thought “I should probably put the more expensive gas in this thing so it lasts longer and takes better care of the engine and the performance.”

Yet many days we are presented with the same scenario for our bodies, and not only do we not choose to put in the best fuel, but we choose to do even worse, putting things in our body that we KNOW will negatively impact its performance, energy, and longevity.

You would never think about putting oil or soda in your gas tank, would you? A little won’t crush it (much like a little cheat meal here and there), and your body (and car) can still perform with improper fuel in it - but the top-end performance is immediately hindered.

There are not many scientific anecdotes that need to be sprinkled into this section this week, just a simple challenge to hopefully reframe the way you think about your body:

“Do you treat your car’s engine better than you treat your own body’s?”

Start thinking about food as fuel, and you can quickly combat some of those pitfalls you tend to fall victim to. When presented with the chance to roll through McDonalds or make it home to cook up a whole foods meal, think about how you would like to feel and perform tomorrow, and in the future, and match your fuel choice that way.

Book - Good Energy by Casey Means, MD (Cont)

3/4ths of the way through this book this week, and man…to say that I am seriously reconsidering some of the ways I approach my diet and lifestyle would be a drastic understatement.

We often kind of just float through life, myself included, feeling like we are invincible. For so long, I have only truly considered some of the larger picture buckets of diet and lifestyle - make sure my calories are X, make sure I am eating enough protein, make sure I am working out X amount, etc.

But then you read a book like this that directly calls out the plethora of poor ingredients in our American food system and flaws of the American lifestyle, and it seriously makes you dissect if the life you are living is really as healthy as you think. I’ll have a deeper dive into the book when I finish, but I leave a couple more passages today that struck me as I made my way through this week:

• “We can’t have a healthy society without well-functioning humans. We can’t have well-functioning humans without well-functioning cells. And we can’t have well-functioning cells with mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and cellular and hormone disruption from toxic chemicals in our food. We combat those things through nutrient-dense, unprocessed foods grown in living, thriving soil.”

• “Eating spices like turmeric (which directly minimize chronic inflammation) or cruciferous vegetables (which directly minimize oxidative stress) are two examples of ways that food can functionally signal for Good Energy.”

• “The pounds of molecular information we put into our bodies daily impact our health. Every thought you have and feeling you feel comes from food. Inside your mother’s body, you were 3D printed out of food, and every item you ingest continues to print the next iteration of yourself. Bodies, neurotransmitters, hormones, nerves, and mitochondria are all made, exclusively and necessarily, from what you (or your mom) put in your (or their) mouth; we don’t arise from thin air, we arise from food.”

• “If you sit all day but get 10,000 steps over the course of one hour by going for a run, that’s less health-promoting than if you space out those steps over every hour of the day”

• “Refined added sugar causes astronomically more deaths and disability per year than COVID-19 and fentanyl overdoses combined. We need to see refined added sugar for what it is: an addictive, dangerous drug that has been included in 74 percent of foods in the U.S. food system and for which the body needs zero grams in a lifetime.”