[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, Martin.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: Hello. How are you on this fine day?
[00:00:04] Speaker A: I'm doing good. Yourself?
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Very well, yeah. Just been to the beach, come back days. They'll get better than just came from the yeah, yeah.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Oh, shoot. How was that?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Cold, wet, gray. It's winter in England after all. Okay, gotcha.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: So you're in England, all right?
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm normally based in York, so I just went over to the East Coast and went to walk the dog, really, more than anything else, and just have a bit of a stretch of the horizons because it can be quite busy during the week and yeah, it was just nice. It was just nice to see the sea. Nice to have some fresh air, but very stormy.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay. That's what I'm talking about.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yes. I was really glad we didn't go kayaking today, put it that way.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: The waves were like this all over.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: The place is very messy. Very messy.
How's your day going?
[00:01:05] Speaker A: My day is good.
You are my third podcast. I have three more as well, so I'm super excited. I get to meet new guests and just hit the ball rolling and I'm just having great conversations, especially like I think the last one was from California, the one before in Ohio. You're from London? I mean, England. Excuse me, I can't say London because you said England. I don't know, I can't just say, oh, well, London, England.
But yeah, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun. And I'm excited to talk to you because a lot of guys that on our podcast are busy professionals and all the excuses being a busy professional. So this is perfect.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been there, I've got all the excuses, I've done that before. So, yeah, getting past the excuses is kind of the main thing. And you're right, because once you start to have somebody who confronts those excuses head on and actually is the embodiment of the opposite of the excuses, then the excuses just dissolve straight away. Then it's quite interesting, especially being in the north of England rather than London in York, I do a lot of traveling to get to different places. So when you're then meeting people in London, who work in London, part of the city, et cetera, as busy professionals, and they're saying about how hard it is, et cetera, to get up in the morning, it's like, okay, well, I got up at 04:00 this morning to get down here for a meeting at Site Nine. What time did you get up?
And then go, oh, yeah, it's not that bad, is it, then? Okay, yeah, great. What did you do before? Well, got out of bed, it was really hard, et cetera. Yeah, I went for a run. Okay.
And straight away, just knocking down all those kind of things and go, oh, yeah, so you can really do that. Yeah, gosh can get up whatever time you like. You don't have to stick to get up at like seven or eight. Oh, really? It's just good fun.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: Does America's culture and kind of like the mentality of fast food, does that seep into that side of the world a lot?
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah, massively. Massively. And it seems to be happening more as well these days. So yeah, we're starting to see Taco Bells now.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there are some differences between the ingredients between, for example, what you'd have in a McDonald's in England and what you'd have in McDonald's if you're, for example, when I've been working in New York or Boston or Florida or anywhere, but the essence is still the same. It's still kind of fast food, it's still convenient, it's still not necessarily the best thing for you. I mean, for example, you can have a Burger King. Like a what's? The big Burger King thing?
That's the one. Yeah, you can do the Whopper with fries and a cook, and you've already had, what, 1700 calories?
Oh my God.
None of those are great calories, are there?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. Actually, before we dive in, I always like to always ask guests like three questions.
So let me ask you three questions before we get started so myself and the listeners can get to know you better.
So I think question number one is if you could speak to your 18 year old self, what advice would you give him and why?
[00:04:33] Speaker B: I could speak to my 18 year old self, what advice would I give myself on why would I give it crumbs? That would be don't take life too seriously. It really is. Don't take life too seriously. I think when I was 18 I was kind of trying to get my stuff together, trying to understand what was life about, what was I supposed to be doing in all this life, and trying my hardest to be the best as I possibly could and working all hours. I was probably more serious than I really needed to be.
And kind of looking back, I think that kind of steered me on. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've had a beautiful life. I've done some quite amazing things.
By the same time, I think it kind of steered me away from some of those opportunities that maybe I should have done. So for example, I didn't bother going to university at that time because I thought, actually I had enough of education. I just need to get working and starting to actually build a life.
Actually, looking back, maybe that was an opportunity I should have taken when I was actually working. Sometimes would work more hours than what probably needed to, rather than spending time going out and having some fun with friends and things and probably should have taken more opportunities of that. So for example, when I was maybe in my early twenty s, I probably didn't go out and do as much canoeing or walking and just enjoying time with my friends and then by the time I got to my late twenty s and I kind of realized actually that's a really important part of your life.
Rebuilding that in your late 20s is good fun.
Probably missed out on probably maybe three, five years of being able to just do that kind of thing anyway. So it's always an interesting well where would you like have gone? Do I have any regrets of what I did? No, not really in that respect. I was a beautiful life, amazing kids and things. It's been difficult in places like everyone has been but would I probably have taken a slightly different path in some places? Of course I would.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
I kind of look back sometimes and I think what you described was me. Probably a few years ago I started working at the Pentagon and my friends at the Pentagon, they used to take trips and vacations and they told me and I used to come home, work my business, just be so focused and saw the motivational speakers that you can sleep when you're dead. If you're not working now then who are you? You know what I mean? Just a loser. Everyone else is going out drinking and partying. What are you doing? And I think honestly I should have went out and partied more. I should have drank more, I should have stepped aside more. Because a life where you're just work, work you're in your house, at your computer, just working all the time yeah, it sounds cool, it sounds good, but that's just you're so empty.
So empty.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: And it's not just that, but it's so bad for your health as well. For example, when people are doing the whole work, work thing, the question you got to ask yourself is actually how productive are you being? How much are you really pushing things forwards when you work, work, work all the time. Because you've got to have that kind of balance in life. It's a bit like for example when you're building your body it's the rest periods where your muscles regrow, where they actually repair themselves, where your immune system kicks in, where your parasympathetic nervous system basically is enacted and that takes time to be able to utilize it. And during those kind of downtime moments are sometimes when you have the best ideas you ever have. And it's like when those moments of inspiration kind of come to you and think oh, that's how I do it's. A bit like for example why so many people have notepads by side of the beds and things. It's so they can instantly be able to note those down when they're in that kind of state.
So yeah, definitely. I think that whole culture and that whole idea that we're driven to work, work all the time, it is I think it's kind of detrimental not only to your health but also to your mental. Well being, your emotional well being, and your personal well being as well.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Such rubbish. Such rubbish.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Man, I'm glad we learned that bite now. Yeah, definitely.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: So my second question, Martin, would be if you had to be an expert, and also you're so accomplished, right? You are a multi award winning international consultant, a coach, a speaker, an author.
At 43, you're working a lifestyle that led you to weigh almost 340 pounds, 54 inch waist, but then at 45, you weighed 200 and 732 inch waist. And now you help transform busy, overweight professionals and consultants into a more fitter and happy and more confident person.
And you've also do this at a corporate level too, as well, right? Corporate wellness as well. So this is amazing, right? And you have a smile that lights up the room. So if you had to be an expert in a totally different space besides all these accomplishments and expertise that you have already, what would you do and what would it be?
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Well, it's an easy question because I do do several other things as well. So alongside the coaching side, I still run my own consulting practice, which deals with large scale business change. So usually when people are doing things like mergers, acquisitions, large scale transformations, et cetera, how to actually enact them and make them actually work, that's what my 40 has been. I've been doing that for, crumbs, nearly three decades now. And that's realistically what led me to become overweight. So, yeah, when you've kind of committed so much into doing some of these projects, because, for example, when you're doing a large scale M and A, which is like maybe multi million, multi billion pounds, dollars, et cetera, it will absorb your time completely for a space of maybe a year, two years while that's being completed. And in that period of time when you're trying to juggle, for example, a young family, running your own business and then doing the work for the organizations you're working with, your kind of well being kind of goes to the bottom of the list, which is, like I said, that's how I ended up at 340 pounds with a 54 inch waist. And that doesn't happen instantly either. It's a bit of a boil the frog kind of scenario. You kind of wake up with money. It's like, oh my God, where the hell did this all come from?
And it is that kind of spice. So that's what I have done for years and I continue to do today and I thoroughly enjoy it because how many other roles can you have in life where you get to unpack an organization, soup to nuts, completely see how it works and then put it back together in a much better way and more efficient and more leaner? You've achieved the things that they needed to do and then everyone's got the end of it. Gains the benefits. You get better in benefits for employees, better benefits for the business. It's just a fabulous, fabulous thing to do. And then it just became a natural kind of evolution really, that not only dealing with business kind of change, but dealing with personal change. Because in many organizations, if you, as the leader, can set the tone for so much, whether that's the leader as being a sea level exec, whether that's being a consultant in their leading power program, whether you're the business owner yourself, et cetera, or the entrepreneur, et cetera, with that great vision and passion behind it, you set the tone for so much of what goes on inside the organization subconsciously. So if you're neglecting your health, neglecting your body, you're kind of not really leading by example on those kind of elements, then don't be surprised when the rest of your organization follows suit and then all that kind of negative stuff kind of happens. But you get more absenteeism as people become iller and they can't work, et cetera. They have to find time to be ill when they can't find time for exercise. And then the worst bit, one of the biggest things in modern organizations now is presenteeism where people actually do come to work, but they just go through the motions because they're burnt out, they're exhausted, they can't cope with it effectively, but rather than telling anybody, they just turn up. So then you have this kind of weird situation where you've got people on the payroll turning up for doing stuff but the results aren't coming and you haven't to then do the analysis of why that's the case and then how do you kind of deal with that in many cases? Whereas actually as the leader, if you're there, you're actually giving yourself time to rest. You're showing people how you can be healthy and happy and live a lifestyle that has balance in it, in that kind of respect, then it makes such a big difference.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Yeah, no, agreed 100%.
I did some writingfontrepreneur.com and we talked about that.
You can actually look at employee productivity and the cost of doing business. Cost doing business actually goes down with happy, productive employees. I believe it was thrive global. They did a whole study on sleep.
If you increase the quality of sleep that your employees get, productivity, profits, everything goes through the roof because people are more alert, they're more awake, they can see things when it's about to happen and we'll definitely talk about that. However, I have one last question for you. Is that what is one value you believe all men should adopt to make it a better place for everyone?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Value that every men should adopt to make it a better place or crumbs, I don't know. For me, I kind of live by five kind of key values and that's flexibility, integrity, responsibility, security and trust. And I think those kind of five key values I try and embody within my businesses. I try to make sure my engagements that work with our clients, et cetera, within the family environment, with friends, et cetera, all kind of mirror those.
Because I think if you can be flexible in every environment as much as you possibly can, then what you are doing is you're trying your hardest to make sure you create environments that people are able to maximize and able to thrive within, rather than merely exist or survive. So I think that's kind of really important. Regardless of where you are in, whether you're doing a community volunteering thing, whether you're doing that work, whether you're doing that at home, et cetera, whether you're doing it with clients and things, it's just having that little bit of flexibility can go a long, long way. And then working with integrity, I think that's 100%, if you're going to say you're going to do something, do something.
And that starts with yourself more than anything else.
If you can lie to yourself, then you can definitely lie to everybody else. So start by stop lying to yourself and do follow through on all the things that you put yourself down for. And that has a massive, massive ripple effect going forward and taking responsibility for your own actions, in the actions of your organizations or the community project that you're dealing, whatever it is that you see your kind of key thing there. Because as soon as you start to take responsibility for these things, you stop finding the problems and you start finding the solutions, which makes that massive, again, massive change, not only for yourself personally, but for everybody that's around there.
And like safety and security, again, safety and security is not necessarily I've only ever had one incident with someone with the handgun, and that was in Boston, but I'll go through that later. But I mean, safety and security in the wider sense of security of jobs, security of peace of mind, security of health, et cetera, and really kind of bringing that whole aspect of making sure you're secure across the board, I think that's a really important thing because again, that comes back to some of those fundamental human needs. And when you start to get the basics in place for everybody, then everybody can start looking further up, they can start to feel that they've got the opportunity then to be able to then do things for other people, to then do things better, because you've created that secure and stable base for them. And trust, I think that's pretty self explanatory. If you're not a trustworthy person, how are you actually going to be able to create those environments that actually allow you to either help other people or offer people to actually help you? In many respects. And I think that probably goes hand in hand with integrity a bit. But probably one for me is an internal measure being the integrity piece, and the other one's more of an external measure being the trust piece. So those are kind of the five that I run by, could I choose one?
I don't think I could. I think actually it's an amalgam of those that kind of would make it makes the biggest impact.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, the way you explained it, too, I don't see one holding more weight than the other. I feel like they all work in synergy together, especially the way you explained it. And I love what you said about trust being an external piece, integrity being an internal piece.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: That integrity with yourself. And then trust is that with other people. And I'm actually going to hold that. I'm going to take that.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Welcome. My gift to you.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Thank you. I took something away already.
This is great. This is great. I love that. And I appreciate you answering those questions, because we got to learn about you a lot more, but, man, even more. So let's talk about this, because at the end of day, there's so many busy professionals. I think at the end of day, everyone's a busy professional now. Teachers. Moms, dads right. Whether you stay at home, whether you even go to work, you're a busy professional.
What kind of brought us here? What brought us here to everyone being busy professionals? Not just a professional, but a busy professional. And what brought us here, and how would you define a busy professional?
[00:18:41] Speaker B: So what brought us here is probably the explosion of the Knowledge Era, basically the Information Era, if we call it. So if you think about it, if you go back to the medieval times, in a lifetime, you would only ever have consumed probably the equivalent of the Times in your entire lifetime. That's your entire lifetimes of knowledge you could get in one issue of the Times, whereas today you probably consume the equivalent of the Times newspaper in an hour, and then you multiply that 24 times a day. So straight away you've got this immediate increase in stress and burden, because it's not just a case of taking the information in, but you're then filing it. You're worrying about it, you become anxious about it. Where does it go? What are you going to use it for?
How's that influencing your life? How's it influencing decision making? And that in itself creates this form of business that kind of impacts everybody, not just professionals. But I think professionals are more so impacted than any other segment of society. With Castbacks, it's not like you go into your career, into your job, into your business, et cetera, and you're doing the same thing day in, day out.
It's not a repetitive piece. You're not an automaton. You have to effectively go into those organizations, and you're creating and cultivating these kind of organizations, and every single engagement is going to be slightly different, which means that you're just compounding the effect of more information being consumed, which makes you feel even more overwhelmed. And then when you start to look at what's happened more recently, COVID has been a blessing and a curse in so many ways.
The blessing is we've kind of accelerated the adoption of digital technology by about ten years, easily.
The curse is we've adopted the digital technology ten years early and we haven't learnt the habits, basically to make those work properly. So some people, they've swapped the equivalent of a nine to five job to a five to nine job.
And if you haven't created the habits in your lifestyle that can maintain and manage that, then all that happens is you just increase the number of hours that you're effectively working and that just leads to a very unhappy.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Oh man, that's huge, what you just said. I think that's amazing what you said about that. But yeah, COVID was a blessing and a curse in a sense of what it did for us. I think also what it did, it allowed us to see that work wasn't as important.
I think in the west here, I'll say even in the east over there too, is that what we put it out to be? That there's a missing component within work? Is that real connections? We can only work remote for so long. And one of the biggest problems I think a lot of corporations face is that how do we connect all these people that are working remotely?
Where a majority of people are like, oh, I'm an introvert, I'm introvert. But no, I think a lot of us are extroverts. We like the idea of coming into the office, martin, I see you. I'm like, hey, Martin, how you doing today? And that's sharing that cup of coffee or just that small talk.
How can we build that same connection with our remote teams all across the world? How do we do that?
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Well, I think in some cases you have to almost create those opportunities. I mean, I've been working remotely for many multinational organizations for best part of the last decade or so.
Probably even longer, actually. And when you're in, for example, as a CIO working for an organization, and many of your reports might not be within the same country that you're in, you can't just jump on a plane anytime and you, for example, fly over to Dubai from the UK or over to Kazakhstan, or even over to the US. It's not the same as just jumping the car and going to the office. It's not an hour's commute, is it? It's like 7 hours, 4 hours, 10 hours or something.
So you have to create those kind of environments to make that work. And for me, one of the way I managed to make it happen is literally just set lots of different meetings with people, not necessarily with big agendas or anything, and especially with your direct reports, just set just a time so that you can have those conversations. And I remember on one project we were doing, there's a couple of really great characters in there there's a lovely lady called Anna, and every time I had a conversation with you, she was absolutely, completely work focused. Everything was about work, about projects, about time, about schedule, about budgets, about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Completely work orientated.
Another guy, Martiani, was a database administrator. And I think in the time we spent together over those programs have changed. I don't think I have a single conversation with him about work. We talked about family, we talked about holidays, we talked about his life ambitions, etc. Talked about what he likes, what he doesn't like. But both those two people, they got out of those times, what they needed.
And I built some great relationships, and I knew straight away I could rely on both of them. And anytime I could bring them up and they would be there, they would be able to get the answers that we needed to be able to move the program forward, move business forwards. So sometimes it's just taking that little bit of a think around and not think about things too directly. So how do you create those kind of incidental moments? I think I love the way when I've worked with Americans, it's the water cooler moments, isn't it, that people talk about over here. You bump into people in the tea room, don't you used to be the smoking shed. But whatever the kind of environment is, it's just creating those kind of incidental moments so that you can still have and build those relationships. Even today, on the programs of works that we're doing at the moment, we'd work with one big organization, turn them from, well, going to be doubling in size, effectively.
Many of the calls that we'll have, we'll certainly spend the first 1015 minutes, it'll be nothing to do with what we're there. We're just literally getting to know each other, making sure everyone's okay, having a talk about what's the aspirations for the day, what's kind of been going on.
It kind of works. And then when you have bad days and everyone has bad days, it's like this week, Wednesday night, my dad got rushed into hospital with Blues and Twos. And it's okay, don't worry. He's just managing lots of chronic conditions. As you get older, it's the wrinklies, crinklies, and crumbly stages. He's at the crumbly stage now, so it's just managing that.
But anyway, it meant that when I came on Thursday to do the bits that we were going to be doing on the program, I was feeling a bit tired, a bit jaded, so I just let everyone know. I said, look, I'm not going to be at my peak performance today, just so you guys are aware. And that's fine. Not a problem whatsoever.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. Peak performance, right? I think that's a great topic to segue, because everybody's trying to find either the supplement, the routine, the morning routine, the shower.
Can you talk about what is peak performance?
And how do we actually access peak performance? You know what I mean?
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
And it's a really interesting topic because peak performance is going to be different for everybody you speak to. And it's going to be down to their lifestyle, their goals, what their experiences are, how they want to live their life going forwards.
That's what's going to determine peak performance for different people. So if you spoken to an elite athlete, something like an elite swimmer or anything, when you talk about peak performance for someone like that, they're going to talk to you about swimming, about how those type of things. You speak to a CEO and you talk about what's his peak performance or her peak performance in that organization. It's going to be about how they're going to lead that organization moving forward. And if you ask about, okay, what's your peak performance in your home life, it's probably going to be to be the best father, husband, partner, spouse, whatever within that relationship. So the peak performance is going to be different for every single person in the way that they need to live their life. And that's probably the number one problem that everyone comes across when they start to think about how can I work at peak performance, is that they go straight away. They look online, they download the various different meal plans. They go and do all these magical guru moments like, what is it, the 04:00? A.m. Club going to have a forum, everyone, you got to do 3000 burpees, read 20 books, say your hallelujahs. And it doesn't work like that for everybody. For a percentage of people, that will work brilliantly for and for the other percentage it won't. But it's finding those magical bits that work for you. For example, for me, it's getting up at 05:00 every morning.
I'm dreadful. I'm not a morning person. So when the alarm wakes up at 05:00 in the morning, the first thing I want to do is throw out the window. But I don't.
I've learned that doesn't work.
I get up, I go brush my teeth. As soon as the minty freshness is in my mouth, it wakes me up. I'm alert enough then to be able to get myself to the gym to do something, usually some form of cardio. And then that kind of brings me around enough to then hold a training class that I'll then hold for my clients just to make sure they're starting to get what they need. That starts at about 06:00 in the morning. Well, depends on where they're dialing in from. If you're in Central Europe, it's usually 07:00. If you're towards Eastern Europe, it's 08:00, but it works.
And then from there I will then probably do my own resistance training routine. And then I'll start getting ready for the consulting day where I'll start working on whatever the consulting work is that I'm going to be doing. I'll do that throughout the day, but. That routine works for me. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily work for everybody, but I do know a number of people it works really well with. One of the other guys that I've been coaching and training specifically on his kind of peak performance side. He loves the idea now of getting up at 06:00 in the morning. He's not too keen on the 05:00 idea, but he gets up at six and same thing, he just starts the day with himself. And by starting at 06:00, what all of a sudden he found wasn't just a case of he was starting to feel physically better, but he started to give him time to be able to study more and to get his life in order and get business in order. So that by time everyone was starting to draw in his time. From like 09:00 onwards, he'd already got 3 hours under his belt or so of the personal time or getting himself organized or learning something new. And that absolutely revolutionized his kind of way of being and his lifestyle. So that's the way he does it. But different people will find different levels, different ways of doing it.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
I think for myself, something that really works well is the minute I get up I drink water.
I like to drink not hot, not cold, but like warm water. Right. That instill wakes me up. Add lemon and add lemon and salt to it. And once I drink that and then sometimes I'll add mud water to it. Are you familiar with mud water?
[00:30:00] Speaker B: No, I'm not familiar with mud water.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Instead of having coffee, you have like these adaptogen herbs, mushrooms.
It's alternative to coffee. It has maybe less caffeine in it, but it's just like lions, main cordyceps rishi.
Yeah, turkey tail. So just different things like that. You put it in there, you drink it, turn it with coffee. It's not bad, tastes like mud.
But the results are good. It was also really good.
Yeah, they're really good. So what about you? Do you have like a supplement routine that you take or things that you think you believe in terms of supplementation, how that looks for us?
[00:30:46] Speaker B: I spent about five years trying all sorts of supplements and all sorts of weird and wonderful concoctions and fad diets and fad this, that and the other.
I even tried things like fat burning coffee. I mean, who on earth believes fat burning coffee is going to work unless you're completely desperate.
So anyway, and there's a bit that I kind of learned at the end of it is the fastest way of being able to get fit and stay fit and be healthy, et cetera, is actually the slow way.
Because if you eat well and you eat whole foods as much as you can, then that will definitely be the best way of being able to maintain it and you feel fuller for longer. Now. It doesn't mean I don't use certain supplements because, for example, I'll take a really good quality MultiVit just to make sure I've got all the micronutrients sorted. And then I'm not worrying about have I've got the right quantity of vitamin A or vitamin B or vitamin C or something in there.
I'll take soy fish oil tablets because while I'm trying to make sure I maintain a good diet with lots of things like mackerel and salmon and things in my diet as well, I do know as a community, we're not very good at eating enough omega three oils. So by supplementing with that, I tend to do that. That works okay. And also because I'm busy, I am a very busy person, I will be spending time effectively juggling three different businesses and also working in the business as well, delivering.
I'll use things like a good quality whey protein as well. So for those moments where absolutely I do not have the time, I cannot find that moment to stop. I will still be able to make sure I'm fueling myself in the right way to be able to manage that. But that's always a kind of a backup as opposed to being the principal way of being able to fuel myself. So if I can do it with eggs or chicken or whatever else, I will prefer to do it that way. But it's always there if I need to. Yeah, vitamin D. Tech extra vitamin D as well, because being in the north of England, this is normal. In fact, if you look underneath, my arms are more of a pale blue color. And it's just because you don't get enough sun up here, do you? It's just literally the latitude that we live at. You do not get enough sun, especially during the winter. So having addictional vitamin D means that I stay more alert, my bones stay stronger, et cetera. Don't get from seasonal depression. So all those type of things make a big difference as well. Just by adding that one tiny additional vitamin there.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I had to start taking vitamin D. I think it's 10,000. IUs yeah, my doctor recommended that because my vitamin D, I did my blood work.
I have it over here somewhere. But I did my blood work and my vitamin D was so low. She was like, yeah, you could actually overdose on vitamin D and you'll be okay.
Because how low it was, especially just being melanated, the sun is just hard to penetrate. Even though I work remotely too, I'm always on the screen. I don't always get a lot of sunlight except when I go to my painting or cleaning companies. But yeah, outside of that, no.
I'd like to talk about productivity, right? Because something that everybody wants is they want to be more productive. Right. Talk to us.
How do you see productivity and how can we be more productive?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So again, being productive is going to be subjective to everybody, depending on what you're looking to do.
And I think that's the first thing is actually understand what it is that you're trying to achieve. Why are you trying to achieve it, and when you need to achieve it by because when people say, I want to be more productive, and then they just generally want to be more productive.
When you generalize things and you're not specific, you can't really pin yourself down to anything. And it's a bit like, I'm going to get the guy's name wrong here, but I think the guy was called Robinson and he did Robinson's Law. And if I've got it might be Robertson, but if I've got the name wrong, don't worry about it. And he said, whatever time you give a task, that's the amount of time it's going to take.
Whatever time you give a task, that's the amount of time it's going to take. So if you say, okay, it's going to take me a week to do something, it will take you a week to do something. Whether it's going to take you a week or not. If you only have two or 3 hours to do something, then it'll take you two or 3 hours to do something. So when, for example, people looking at, how do I become slightly fitter and healthier, and how do I fit this into my busy schedule, how busy are you?
The highlighted thing for me was when I was working, actually over in Boston with an organization, and I literally watched the behavior of everyone in the office. So people would come in really early, literally about 7730, because they wanted to be in the office before the boss got in. And it's like, okay, fair dues. So I'd watch what they do. They'd go into the office, they'd switch the computers on, they'd wait until it boots up, they'd log into their email, et cetera. Then they put it onto log screen. They go out the Mixels of a cup of coffee, chat to a few of the coworkers, et cetera, come back, might enter an email or two, then they'd disappear and they'd go do the dry cleaning or they'd go to the gym or something. And then they come back and they might do maybe 50 minutes worth of work or something. Then they'd be off. They'd go and have another chat with people over the coffee room. This would literally be happening throughout the entire day. And then you get towards the end of the day, and everyone's trying their hardest to be the last person to leave the office. Six 708:00 in the evening, and then you're thinking, okay, so you've spent 1112 hours there.
How really productive have you been, though, during those 12 hours? How have you actually moved forward all of your kind of priorities and the schedule, et cetera? And the thing is, it's perpetuated because many organizations still, even today, even after COVID, even after everything else that's gone on, still measure people by how long they are actually in the office, how long they're being effectively punched in with a time card or logged into teams or something. And I'm pretty sure you've seen some of those ridiculous memes and stuff on social media, people connecting things to mice so it looks like they're still active. It's like that's not productive. It's kind of the absolute opposite of it. But if you kind of set yourself some clear times, you schedule your day correctly, then you'll easily find additional time for it. So throwing in an hour in the gym and then it's like half an hour for getting yourself sorted out and eating and cleaned, et cetera, it's only additional half one and a half hours that you could take out of those 12 hours.
Sorry, were you going to say something?
[00:37:26] Speaker A: No, I was just saying yeah, I agree.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: And then when you kind of work it that way and then you say, okay, well what are you actually going to do? Try and bring it back down to being 8 hours that you're going to be doing your work, which means that you have to become more efficient with your time. You then don't have to check emails every single ten minutes. What was it someone said?
I can't remember the figures now, but it was a ridiculous number of times that people check emails during the day. It's something like two 3400 times a day and it's like you don't need to actually do that, right? So if you set yourself some slight target times when you do these things, set yourself some times when you are going to be productive. Block out the times in the calendar. So one of the things I teach my clients is if it isn't in the diary, it doesn't get done right. So put the times in the diary, block them out and treat them like the big boulders of your life. So if you've got a report to write, you've got a book to write, you've got an article to write, you want to have some creative thinking time, et cetera. Put that time in your diary and treat it like one of those stones of life that you're not going to move. It becomes that bigger movable object. And if you have to move it because you get a diary buster kind of invite come through, then it's a move, it's a postponement, it's not a delete, it's not a cancellation. So you still need to do that block of time and then suddenly by changing kind of the approach of how you seek time and actually being very specific about what you're going to be utilizing that time for, you instantly become more productive. It's a bit like for example when you become a young parent and you suddenly got an additional person to kind of look after in your life, you don't get any more time for that. But all of a sudden you've got to become more efficient because alongside working, cleaning, spending time with your spouse, et cetera, you've now got feeding, nappies and all the rest of the stuff that comes along with that. Let alone the fact that you want to love and enjoy time with this bundle of joy you've got.
You can do it when you want to, but that's the thing. When do you want to do it?
[00:39:28] Speaker A: No, that's true. That's true. That's true. Because productivity, I think one thing is I learned is when I started sectioning off time on my calendar and I started to say no to people, I wasn't everybody's friend anymore, but I was a lot more productive. I felt it and myself, I felt more productive because I was like, okay, from this time to this time I'm working, this time I'm going to do this. That's actually how I wrote my first book. Because just like that. Did you follow the same thing too?
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Yes, my first book wasn't quite that efficient. My second book was I had my second book written in four weeks. I think it then took another two months to go through the publishing cycles. But yeah, for four weeks and exactly the same way. Just section off literally no more about half an hour a day. It doesn't take much effort once you can't put the f in.
And it's also putting in the other things in there that people don't think about. So for example, schedule in some time with friends. Schedule in time for you. So for example, on 09:00 every night I try to down tools. Nothing else gets done. It's just me, my family and for me to wind down ready to go to bed. That's it. I try to not do anything after 09:00. It doesn't always happen. For example, if I'm working away or I'm doing a conference or whatever else is kind of happening, it'll get broken. But as a rule, that's what I try to do every single day. And therefore in the diary it's already in there as kind of one of those big rocks or like today we said, I came back from the beach and it's because I'd arranged to spend some time with some friends. Just went over there. We both walked the dog. We were catching up about things. We raised money for charity, usually the R li, which is the Royal National LifeSports Institute here. So these are the guys that are completely volunteer based that rescue people when they have problems at sea.
So we're saying, OK, what we're going to be doing next year. So we're just chatting, walking by the sea, thinking about what's going to be the next set of opportunities we can do, how can we help them?
Because these lifeboats, they're quite expensive. I think over the years we've probably paid for a wheel or two, but there are several million apiece.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: No, that's nice.
Yeah.
It's funny because I'm not a water person. I joined the army just because I was like, yeah, I can't do the sea. I can't do the sea because of that.
But, yeah, that is definitely funny. But I like what you said, scheduling time with friends even as well, because sometimes I know me, I get so busy that I'm like, oh, my God, I haven't seen my friends in so long. I need to, you know, I need to put time away for that. And something that we implemented this year was we planned out four trips to local in the country and then to out the country just so that we can spend time together. Because now as people get older, people have kids and stuff, it's a lot harder to just say, hey, let's go out this weekend. It's like, Let me get a babysitter. I need to do this, I need to do that.
I totally understand that.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
And I've got some good friends that I can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things with, many of them from doing, again, adventure sports over the years as well.
For example, one of the guys is a great artist. He has been for many years. And back in 2016, he says, I need somebody to help me do some snow sculpting because my partner, he's just let me down, and this was that last minute. He was doing the sculpting competition in January, and this was kind of like the last week of December. And after ringing everybody around and obviously I run my own organization, so I'm able to be flexible with my time. I says, well, I'll come do it. And we had such a whale of a time and really enjoyed building some great sculptures that we've been doing ever since. And, like, coming up, we've got hopefully we're going to Finland to do the Arctic Festival there. And we've also submitted design for Nayara in Japan, so we'll see what happens there. So, for example, there's things like that, just arranging time to be able to make these things happen. And as I said, we've got the charity walk we're doing next year, which is what I was chatting to another friend about today. Going to try and do the coast to coast, 192 miles, probably in about 1516 days ish we'll see how we gone.
We did one this year. We did what was supposed to be 110 miles, but we did it in five days, and that was hard work as well. You've been in the army, so you probably know what that feels like, I guess, yeah.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: Your feet must have been hurting.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: Hurting, yeah, definitely. I've never had problems with my feet, but that was the first time I've literally developed blisters, literally the size of the palm of my hand on the bottom.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: All that heat and then the sock rubbing on you and yeah, it's wild, man. Martin I've thoroughly enjoyed, you know, luckily, I know that you have some space still available for some coaching. Can you tell people what personalized coaching looks like with you and lifestyle coaching, what that looks like with you?
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Yeah, certainly. So what usually starts off is we'll have a conversation, we'll work out what it is that you're trying to do, we'll set up some really clear outcomes for what you're trying to achieve in your life and also start to look at a lot of the things that have kind of stopped you before in the past. We can start to make a plan because it's a bit like when you run a business, right? If you're in a business and you kind of ignore previous experience and previous understandings, you carry a lot of unknown risks. And then when you hit one of those risks, it becomes a bit of a surprise. And it takes time to be able to mobilize the organization, to be able to make that work. And the same happens in your own life. If you actually understand some of the best methods that you've been able to utilize previously that have worked for Fiore in your past, then you're able to link what is the unknown going forwards to some of those known quantities that you've had in the past, which makes it so much easier to continue when you kind of hit some of those roadblocks. From there, we kind of talk through some of the basic mechanics, how you deal with your movement, your exercising, et cetera, how you deal with your meals and things. You can't deal with a healthy body without those things. But then we also bring in a good conversation around moderation so to actually understand what it is that your body needs beyond just the moving and the eating side of things. And this kind of really helps with kind of setting some of that balance element to make sure you've got those spaces in your life that you need. The final two pieces look at, one's going to be around. How will you build a method that works for you so you have your own personal methodology?
Because again, just going out there and downloading a generic diet plan or following something vertical that says on an app, you may get results, you may not get results. It's one of the reasons why some people find some diets work and other diets don't. But starting to actually capture what that is and then working out what works for you, what doesn't work for you, you can then start to make the adjustments because you're starting to measure it. And it's a bit like what Peter Deming said, it isn't measured, isn't managed. So by starting to set out a plan, even though all plans are wrong, some of them are useful, we're able to then start to track against that plan and then seeing how we need to adjust it in your life, how we just the method that works in your life. So if you're not a 05:00, a.m. Kind of guy. You're more of a 06:00 a.m. Kind of guy, whether we just that accordingly and then finally it is around that whole monitoring piece and realizing that it's so much more than just monitoring the scales. It's then starting to look at you as a person and the myriad of various elements that kind of really tell you how your body is working, tell you how you feel and so that you can achieve your goals. It's like one of the guys that I'm working with, he's actually from New York originally, but he lives in Paris, France these days and amazing guy, fantastic photographer. He's got another set of books coming out soon and his work is just really phenomenal. He's got a beautiful eye. But anyway, one of his kind of key goals was just to stay healthy more than anything else. And therefore, how could we try and create a way of working a lifestyle for him that meant that he could still have the very colorful life. He could go out and enjoy all the opportunities that come around as being a photographer that travels the world and be able to enjoy the food and the camaraderie and the people, et cetera, that are there with him and at the same time keep moving towards his goal, his goal of just staying healthy. And in fact, the other day, actually, he was saying to me, he said it would be for his yearly checkup, which he hasn't done for three years because she doesn't like it. And the doctor was an eight. He's under his weight. That was supposed to be his heart and everything's working better than it should have been. His fitness is better than it was before. He was doing things like ultimate frisbee these days and even things like little niggles that he had, like on his hamstrings and stuff, they're still there, but they've started to ease because he's actually built their structure and solid muscle around them. That's basically helping to support him. So now he's feeling fantastic for it. But again, it's because it's a lifestyle that fits him the way that he works and fits his lifestyle and things. It's just lovely when you get those kind of conversations going as well, seeing those kind of results.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: Yeah. No, I agree with you. I totally agree with you. I think that's wild that he saw the results even after three years of not going in for a checkup to have those amazing results.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:56] Speaker A: As a doctor, I'd be amazed too. I'd be like, what are you doing working with Martin now? The best way for people to reach out to you is through your website or what's the best way for people to reach out to you?
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Website, social media, even. Just drop us an email at
[email protected]. It makes it as simple as possible. Right.
And I'll quite happily even just have a conversation or just see how things go, really. It might be that you just need a quick pointer. It might just to say hi and say how things are at that point. So whichever way you find easiest.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll make sure that I put that in the show notes as well, and then I'll make sure I had that hello at.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:49:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll make sure I add that in the show notes as well. So before we go, Martin, any last words you want to give us before we head out of here?
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Any last words I'd like to give you before I get out of here?
I think the big one for me is don't get so busy working that you forget to live your own life.
Because sometimes you can get so busy in the myriad of the busyness of business, right, that actually you can forget who you are and actually that you only get one chance at this life.
You've got one life.
[00:50:13] Speaker A: Live it, man. Yeah, that hits hard. That really does hit hard. Yeah. I appreciate that, martin, thank you for coming on. I know the guests will love it as well. So, Martin, please have great day, and then we'll see you again.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: All right, you're welcome. You too. Have a great one. Bye bye for now.
