EFR 761: You Can't Screw This Up - Real Reasons Why You Fail Your Diet and Workout Plan, Planning For Failure, and the Mindset to Endure Anything with Adam Bornstein

0:00:23 - Speaker 2 Yeah, we just don't know we go back to today, but we connected from way.

0:00:28 - Speaker 1 Prior to this and to kind of pick up there, I was reading in the book and you have a kind of a staple post on social media how your father passed away. He did yeah, mine as well, and I think another really great connection we have here. Not to get super emotional and D, but you just get a motion I'm giving the emotions I've cried on here before.

We can, we can go there, but I love how you have this devotion to your father and you quote Dad. You were given a death sentence but turned it into a life sentence. That's the power of a different mindset. Long story short ever forward radio the name of this show ever forward was my father's mantra. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2003 right after I left home, joined the military, passed away about like a year and a half later up until literally his dying breath. That man did not complain. There was physical suffering as well, but you never would have known it looking into his eyes. He just embodied that to his core and carried it on his final breath out, and that is why I'm doing what I'm doing here today. So Both dads born soon, pop of tuning, kind of hanging out with us here today. I really, I really feel that with you, man.

0:01:38 - Speaker 2 I love that. My dad, when he was diagnosed, would say all the time, no regrets, keep moving forward, shut up. And that's why we would do. My dad was given a very short term to live and he made it three years and we were able to do several cancer walks for him and that was what was on the shirts. So, no way you. You just spoke to my soul.

0:01:59 - Speaker 1 Yeah, great word was his mantra ever since I was a kid growing up. Yeah, he picked, he was in the military as well. Every unit in the army at least we got a unit in Sydney a creed, a motto, his first was ever forward. So he picked that up, brought it home. I'm like, yeah, it's one of those things like that cool, like I get it be a good person, cool, shut up.

0:02:19 - Speaker 2 But then when I actually saw him embody it in that unique way, it like was imprinted on me and it's funny the way that those when you know we were talking before just came on about kids and I got two boys and the thing that I think about all the time, you know, the thing that I took away from my dad, is there's so many lessons that he bestowed upon me on younger that it's almost late that it happens. You don't realize it because you're not processing, you're not like eight or ten or twelve and being like, ah, but then as you get older, these things Right, it's kind of like planting a seed. You plant a seed and you water them for so long you don't see anything. There's little sprouts, but eventually these things become a tree or a giant plant. And I think humans are the same way. Where my dad gave me a lot of things that I didn't realize when it was gonna come to serve me really well.

Oh yeah, and it is served me so well, and it's the same thing that I think about now with my own kids.

And even you know in writing this book that you have the Love note to my dad was truly a way you know, before he passed, for him to know what he meant to me, but also that the writing of the book was dramatically influenced by watching how he helped himself by dealing with his disease, by understanding that he had to change his mindset in terms of how he was going to approach life. If he thought that he was going to die, he would just give it six to twelve months to live. He made it three years and there are a lot of things that he did, but I think the best thing that he did is that he became an incredibly optimistic and positive person. He did not think that brain cancer was going to take him Facing death every day, facing death every day and he wasn't going to allow that to define him. He traveled, he climbed mountains, he would go to chemo and radiation Every time. Afterwards he'd go to the gym and do a workout Badass.

No matter how tired or how beat down he's like I am not going to let this beat me. And in the end it was incredibly hard, because when he did, the pain wasn't necessarily just because his life was coming to an end. Cancer is a vicious disease. A note of an ALS that just strips so much of your humanity it's that I watched him go through the stages of he truly didn't believe that cancer was going to defeat him. So then, when you and for so long, for two years of that three-year battle you would have never known Truly, about six months before my dad passed, he was still out skiing, climbing mountains, traveling the world, doing everything.

He left his yard and he was just like. He changed his mindset in a way that truly affected his behavior and a lot of people, I think, whether it's their health, their nutrition, their fitness. The mindset leads to different behaviors and if there's a gift I could give to everyone, it's not about telling people a specific diet plan or specific workout. It's what is the mindset that puts you in a position to go ahead and deal with the eventful of life, the difficult moments, so that you can still take care of yourself, you can still be healthy, you can still succeed in spite of those variations which we cannot control at all.

Right, like those things are going to happen, yeah, and I think we all get blown in the wind of change, of difficult times, of stress, and that then affects the way that we're able to take care of ourselves. It's supposed to realize that this is actually part of the journey, this is all fuel. Navigating doesn't mean overcoming it, it just doesn't allow it to define you and to defeat you.

0:05:29 - Speaker 1 See what I tell you, man, we just met, but we go way back, we go way back. You know a lot of what you work now to shift gears a little bit is. You talk about how the biggest roadblock is you, the collective. You Right, help us understand what that means and to really kind of swallow that bitter truth pill.

0:05:45 - Speaker 2 Yeah, there are two parts of it. What is it Like? When people talk about behavioral change, they love to think of two things. Right, like eh, I need to become more motivated to go and take action. Or I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to do the action, and then I'm going to feel better about myself, I'm going to change who I think that I am.

But behavioral change doesn't work that way. Right, you first have to change your self perception. When you change your self perception, what that does is it leads to more action. When you do more action, that's when the motivation comes, and the motivation then spurs a stronger self of sense so that you can keep on doing these things repeatedly. So the you is about like, who are you as a person? And most people walk around thinking that they are not healthy, right, and they try and do the good thing, but in their mind, this isn't going to work out, they're going to fail, they're going to screw up and they have to fight against this. The second part of this you component is that everyone talks about especially nutrition. It's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle, but very few people ask people what do you?

0:06:37 - Speaker 1 want your life to look like One of my biggest takeaways from your work that, if you walk away from this episode with nothing else, that is probably, I think, one of the most important questions we could ever ask ourselves.

0:06:47 - Speaker 2 Right, because at the end of the day, this is you know, being healthy is a game of compliance without adherence. Right? The people who adhere to plans best see the best results, irrespective of the planet itself. So when we go and we almost steal or borrow other people's game plan and you're not considering what does their life look like, what is their day to day, if you don't want your life to look that way, people will look at the outcome Like, oh, this guy's shredded or he's got some muscle or whatever it might be. They look at that outcome without considering the process and while considering that you are miserable, which just means that some way you should perform. Maybe you'll get that outcome.

But if you are miserable, if you are unhappy, if you don't like how you're going about your life, that's not going to stick. And then what's going to happen is you did the thing to get the outcome you desired. You hated the process. You will then stray away from that process and see those results disappear. And then what happens? You convinced yourself that I needed to do the miserable, unhappy, terrible thing to get the outcome Went all along. If you would have started with the you variable, you could have engineered a way to get to that same outcome, but in a way that wasn't so miserable. Because that's where the disconnect happens, because people don't consider themselves. They borrow other people's plans when they get the results they want, but they don't feel better, they're not actually happier. They convinced themselves that the path to better health, the path to happiness, the path to freedom is one Paved in pain, and it does not have to be that way.

0:08:14 - Speaker 1 Is this what you think people are talking about when they say the process over the prize? People just aren't really truly embodying or Creating their realistic, most compliant process and just saying so, fixated on someone else's prize, yeah.

0:08:27 - Speaker 2 I think one. You don't want to live someone else's life right and trying to carve and copy that is the wrong way. The process is important, but the process won't matter if you don't first focus on self identity. You can't change who you think you are and you can't change what you think you are capable of. I can give you the best diet plan in the world, but if you have a negative mindset and you have maladaptive behaviors and you are not able to repeatedly do certain things because you fundamentally think that you can't do them or you beat them yourself up or you stress about this or you catastrophize, that best plan will not work. So the process is important and the outcome is what gets you excited, but the self identity is what gives you a foundation, a stable base for change.

I love to sit, like I learned this years ago from training him, alan Cosgrove. He's like you don't want to shoot a cannon from a canoe, right, and the idea is that? Right, the idea of cannon, a canoe. I can give you a very powerful weapon, but if you don't have a stable base, you're going to topple over. It's not gonna want what is the state and then that's a rebuild.

Just to get back to that base right, what is the stable base? And the stable base is the self identity, it's the lifestyle, it's the you variable. And if you figure that out and that takes more time, that's why people don't like it everyone wants the instant gratification, the quick result. You can build that stable base Right, then you can shoot that cannon from anywhere and you will see the better results. But you have to consider that variable first and foremost. And that's boring, it's not sexy, so it's not fun to talk about.

But the other day, when you repeatedly fail, when you repeatedly Don't achieve the goal that you want or have the life that you want or feel the way that you think that you should, at what point Are you gonna ask yourself what am I gonna do something different? It's not just another diet plan. Right, all diet plans are essentially the same thing. You are eating different foods, but you were making different swaps to your lifestyle. So there is a different variable that creates the foundation to help you figure out which one is most likely to create the adherence that gives you the results.

0:10:17 - Speaker 1 You want to kind of go back to your key where their failure I took this note actually from your recent talk up on stage Build a plan around your known failures. Huge, huge asset to whatever the goal is for anybody in their health and fitness journey. Can you unpack that for us please? How do we build a plan around failure? That seems kind of wild right, it seems a wait.

0:10:40 - Speaker 2 I don't want to talk about failure when I talk about success. Because at any point they're going to be things that come in the way Right. There's going to be barriers in the road. For you to think that this is going to be easy. You're kidding yourself.

0:10:53 - Speaker 1 So there's lying to yourself.

0:10:54 - Speaker 2 Yeah, there is a framework known as inversion, and version is used oftentimes in business and what you do is you would invert the situation. You start at the end, but you start at the end from the negative frame of if this doesn't go the way I want, right, this will work the way you think. If it doesn't go the way you want, why? What are the foods that you're going to miss? What are the lifestyle variables that are going to make it hard? Where you're gonna have the most guilt or stress? What is your day like in a way that you can plan it? If you can start from Understanding all of these landmines, all these mistakes, and if you solve for that.

When you find yourself in that situation that you can perfectly anticipate is going to happen, you know what to do, because most people don't struggle with knowing what's good for them, right? I made a joke when we were up on stage. It's like, it's not, like you put two plates of food in front of people and one's got like vegetables and fruit and lean proteins. I got like donuts and candy. Like which one's the healthy one? No one's going.

0:11:46 - Speaker 1 I'm not really sure. Five hundred calories. Five hundred calories, you know you pick right as people.

0:11:51 - Speaker 2 People know what is good for them, mm-hmm, but they don't know how to do is navigate the how, and the how requires you to create situational awareness, the different things where you are likely to self-sabotage or where life will sabotage you, not because life's out to get you, but just because life ain't always fair. Life is hard and if you anticipate those things, you can avoid them, you can navigate around them and it will also, more importantly, help you pick the correct plan right. If you know that you love carbs, you need them in your life. When you cut them out, you want them back. I love carbs, I love bread.

Don't choose a no-carb plan. Right, right, you might reduce the carp's are making just a bit like it's not necessary. There's so many different ways to accomplish your goal without cutting out carbs. Now, if you hate carbs, you know want it, that's a good plan for you. But, like, having that self-awareness and the self-identification and understanding where you might fail will help you identify plans that are more likely to work, as opposed to just seeing the thing that works for that person, whereas, like, they don't crave pasta or, better, like any of that stuff. Like, why is it so easy? Because it's easy for them.

0:12:56 - Speaker 1 Or, even better yet, be able to then develop your own plan instead of always be looking for somebody else. You might be able to pull some inspiration and, like I, need the same to get started. But I used to be a clinical health coach as well, and I would go back to the clients. That always worked best for me in terms of happiness and adherence and getting their goals. We're the ones I call the inception model. I kind of knew what was going to be the plan, but you know what I had to get them to say it out loud first.

0:13:21 - Speaker 2 Right? No, people have to buy in on their own.

0:13:24 - Speaker 1 Exactly, Exactly. A lot of your work now centers around or at least what I kind of picked up on recently is what I call dislike no shit, but it's for some reason sticking so well now on social media and in health and fitness content. I wonder what's your take? Are we coming back full circle to really not only just understanding but finally agreeing to and applying the foundational principles of get consistently, get up, move your body it's okay if you miss a workout. Hydrate, figure out your nutrition plan. Feeling good about what you're doing, who you're doing it with, is as important, if not more important, than executing exactly this workout plan. How is this not common knowledge of this point for everybody? I hope we are.

0:14:11 - Speaker 2 The hopeful, optimistic part of me says that, like, if we just keep beating this drum, it will work. Part of the reason why I think you're seeing a lot of it, though, is because you do see a lot, especially on social, of the opposite. The sensationalize, the extreme, the don't touch oatmeal is going to fucking kill you. There's so much of that, and that stuff easily grabs attention. That's the type of stuff that gets likes, that gets comments, then gets repeated in an algorithm. So there's almost a need and a requirement to remind people of these basic behaviors, because so often people are over. Indexing on these extremes that are either A complete bullshit or B might make a positive difference for the last 5%, and people are focusing on the last 5% before they build the first 95%. So why aren't people doing this? Because it's boring to say to sleep, it's boring to say to go for a walk, and our minds are wired in a way where we respond to crazy things.

There were studies that were done FMRR studies that look that when you share simple, non-simple, you know, sensical, practical information, the part of our brain that gets us to want to change behavior does not light up Really when you do crazy, sensationalize wild. Too good to be true, the part of our brain that drives behavior and triggers dopamine lights up. So the more wild information we share, the more likely we are believed that will lead to change. The more tame, banal, practical information, the less likely we are. So, as smart as we are, our wiring pushes us towards that stuff.

So we need to do this, because that means it's almost like selling a product, right? If you're selling sleeping to someone, you're going to probably have to tell them like 20 times something you could buy in. If you're selling something like Magic Pill to someone, you'd sell it twice if people were like take my money, I want it because I want the Magic Pill. So I think you know it's easy to assume that it's coming full circle, but I think this battle is more like the sensationalization and the extremes are creating this grounds for awards, like please make sure you do all of these things first. Right, we want to do the thing. That's just like the cherry on top. Where's the sundae man? Give me some scoops of ice cream. Where?

0:16:26 - Speaker 1 are we going? Where's the fitness event? Where's?

0:16:29 - Speaker 2 that.

0:16:29 - Speaker 1 Kenny, kenny, kenny, kenny, kenny, can we have an ice cream bar here? We have an ice cream guy. I also want to kind of throw in there. So I've been in social media health, fitness, wellness content for about 11 years 10, 11 years and I wonder if it's just because I think now we have enough social media proof of all the people that kind of started them and content, pushing content out in these new, unique platforms became standard.

I feel like now we kind of have enough timeline of these people who have done the extreme, done the high altitude, everything go, go, go. And then they've all kind of got to the point of you know what? Yeah, that works. But really what keeps me going now is If I can just move my body a few days a week, if I can just be happy with what I'm doing and who I'm doing it with, if I can get good sleep. Do you think we just have look at it as like a longitudinal study, like we've got finally 10 years of data, of kind of coming full circle to this stuff. Do you think that plays a role in it?

0:17:28 - Speaker 2 Definitely. I mean, age gives you wisdom if you choose to listen, right, and I think a lot of us can, you know. We try and then pay it forward. We learn this stuff of like. If I could go back when I was 30, or I go back to 20, this is what I would tell myself, because someone is like you need to kind of screw up and do these things on your own. Oh, you got to, you got to and you don't have to make it harder for yourself, right, I think, so that you know, you, me, we go through these things and we get to see it with hindsight.

Yeah, yeah, and like people, listen to your elders. I don't think I'm an elder, but like the people who have walked that walk already, they're trying to pay forward what they have learned, what makes them feel better, what actually makes the big difference, what are the boulders instead of the pebbles? Right, you want to move boulders and not pebbles. And a lot of times we spend so much energy doing things that make a small difference for the things that you could put energy into that make a big difference, because that's a big accomplishment, right?

0:18:22 - Speaker 1 Like, look at this massive boulder I just moved. I killed myself doing it. Now I'm not going to do anything for a week, a month, right.

0:18:30 - Speaker 2 So I think like the idea of just like building out these simple behaviors make a big difference and people want to reach that because they sit there on the other side of it right now. They've like lived through that and, yeah, the hope is that people will listen, but sometimes they still got to walk that path from the wrong.

0:18:46 - Speaker 1 Everybody listen, listen here, listen to my man. All right, kind of. Before I get to the last question, I just want to say thank you again for your time. Of course you got a new homie here, a new fan. For sure. You work with LeBron James. You got some Arnold Schwarzenegger tie-ins. You got some big names tied into the work that you're doing and when asked how that happened, you said you have to prove that you're so good that they want to work with you. Bro, how did you arrive to that mindset?

0:19:20 - Speaker 2 It's the one thing that I have been consistent with over time. You got it in everything I said that you get. You know, I think it was Jay-Z who once said you got to have the attitude of an intern and I love that line and it kind of stuck with me that you know people don't owe you shit and no matter how much success or how good you are, you're only as good as your next success. Fair or not, that's just the reality. But I love living in a universe where it's a proven universe.

I love it that there is a competitive edge to it where it's that there's something special. In the night you got to show up and not be perfect, but be good. Be good so good that people can't ignore you. And when you're dealing with an Arnold or LeBron, or anyone that it might be, you have to understand your place. They can work with anyone and if you take an ego into that, they're not gonna work with you because it's not about me. As a coach, as a business, whatever it is, if you realize that your job is to focus on the person that you're supposed to help, and if that is your whole focus, if your whole focus on like, what is the mission? The mission isn't about me. The mission is about the work, about the client, about the customer, and be so good because if you're so good, they will appreciate it, they will do the selling for you, they will tell others about you and that is it. If you become obsessed with being so great that people want to sing your praises for you, that plan is undefeated.

0:20:50 - Speaker 1 Kind of reminds me a little bit of the ego check in there as well of serving the greater good and being of service to your people, even when they're coming to you. I think it was Caesar who had this guy, this one role. I think it was even his step-brother or something Basically, this guy that would come up to him every day and just whisper in his ear you are not a God, as a way to just remind him what you're here to do. Well, my final question, to bring a full circle to what we're talking about with both of our pops ever forward. How do you define that? To live a life ever forward. What does that mean to you?

0:21:29 - Speaker 2 When I hear that it's about the idea that life is always ahead. It is easy for our past, it's easy for what we have done, to define who we are, define who we can be or put limitations on what we've been able to accomplish or experience. But if you are looking ever forward, it means that the potential and the opportunity of what's ahead is limitless and that, I think, is a beautiful analogy for life. I don't care what you've been through, I don't care what you've experienced, I don't care the hardship or circumstance that might have been bestowed upon you or lay ahead. The beauty of life is that you can always make it better. I tell my kids that all the time that they have a superpower. My kids love superheroes and I'm like our superpower. No matter what happens, we can always make it better, and that means whatever forward says we can all make it better.

0:22:23 - Speaker 1 Love it, man. I will work in my audience to go to learn more about you, your work, your content.

0:22:26 - Speaker 2 Yeah, on all the socials it's at born fitness Consulting agency is pen name. The book is called. You Can't Screw this Up the URL is literally can'tscrewthisup.com.

0:22:40 - Speaker 1 I don't know what to tell you because I guess you screwed that up. But Go back and start over. Yeah, that is that's me. My pleasure, man.

0:22:47 - Speaker 2 Appreciate it, man. Thank you.