Hello and welcome back to Chasing Excellence, a show about chasing what truly matters.
My name is Patrick Cummings.
I'm here by myself for just a quick introduction.
If you tuned in To our last episode, you'll know that this is part two of a conversation we're having about the five factors of health, specifically the changes and evolutions we've made Ben and I have made over the last year across each one of those categories, each one of those buckets.
In our last episode, we talked about training and eating.
And this time around we're going to talk about the Sleep category, the Connect category and the Think category.
Before we do that, If any of these episodes this episode, the previous episode, the one we put out next week, if any of them resonated with you and you really liked them, it would mean the world to us if you were to hit the little share button and send it along to one or two friends or cousins or colleagues.
It's the best way for us to find new people, just like you, just like us, who want to have these conversations, who want to focus our lives around the ideas of excellence that we talk about multiple times every single week.
It's the best way for us to find people like us.
So if you've got a friend, you've got a cousin or you've got a colleague who you feel like is ready and interested in these ideas, please do share them.
We appreciate it.
We thank you for it.
We're going to jump back in talking about the changes we made to our sleep or our recover bucket.
So let's go.
What do you got?
Have you added anything to the old sleep habits?
So bedtime routine.
This is, you know, I had a conversation with Heather.
She's like, this is the easiest category.
This is the easiest one.
It's like, you just have to do nothing.
It's the easiest one.
Yeah.
And I actually think it's the hardest because you have to change so much, to change the amounts you sleep.
And we all know, so there's like quality, quantity, consistency.
We've had plenty of conversations about that.
The biggest one though, is just how much of a sleep opportunity are you providing yourself every night?
And to change that from...
Now I say it's the hardest one depending on where you're starting with, right?
If you spend three hours a night from eight to 11 Netflixing, is that, that's a verb now?
I don't think it's a verb, but it should be.
It is now.
Netflixing and chilling?
No, it's not it.
Yeah.
So if you're doing, then I get it, right?
But in our situation it's like it's dependent on a lot of it's kids.
There's a lot of other variables that come along with it.
I had to change when I was coaching my morning classes.
So I did a lot of intentional changes this past year, from like when I was coaching classes, to our bedtime.
And I now give myself, this is...
I tracked sleep for a long time.
And whenever I would talk to like a performance medicine professional, right?
I'll call it that.
Like not a normal doctor, but somebody that I was going to to try to improve my performance.
Vitality longevity performance, all the stuff that we talked about on this podcast.
We would talk about, obviously, we'd talk about things like the five factors.
And we talked about sleep.
It was the one that I was like, this is the one that I know I'm under the bar on.
And I would struggle to get, you know, seven was good and I never got eight in terms of hours.
The normal for me now is a nine hour sleep opportunity, getting over eight most nights.
So that the big change was I started getting up at six o'clock instead of 515 or 530 and started the lights out before nine o'clock.
So that's nine to six.
So that's that nine hours.
In order to do that with the kids, we start the bedtime routine at 7.45.
So it's yours though, yours and Heather's you mean, or the kids?
The kids, we all do it together.
It's all one big...
It's all one big tidal wave.
You know, it's like, was that a cartoon that like spun around?
Tasmanian Devil.
Tasmanian Devil, yeah.
That's just at the Bergeron 7.5.
Yeah, so it goes from the kitchen, you know, to outside to play some soccer, to get some homework done, to brushing teeth.
And then we all kind of moved together in one like little pack.
But that's what we realized.
One of the big things was how invested Heather is in this.
I don't know how I would do it if it wasn't tech.
I just don't think it would happen.
But she's so invested into it.
She's read all the things, probably more than I have on it, listened to more than I have on it.
And she's very concerned about Alzheimer's because it runs in her family.
And she knows that sleep is the number one thing that we can do to help mitigate that.
So she's very in her mind.
It's like if I miss an hour of sleep, I'm just ticking the percentages up that I'm going to get Alzheimer's.
So she's very aware of it.
So we also know how long it takes for that bedtime routine to happen.
So...
Basically, for us, it's dinner goes into kitchen cleanup, which goes into upstairs and start the process.
So we have dinner usually around 6.30.
It takes, you know, half hour, 45 minutes maybe, done in early seven.
By the time we've cleaned up the kitchen, it's...
7.45.
And the next thing we're doing is going upstairs.
Yep.
And that's where usually we're in bed somewhere around the 8.15 to 8.45.
That's the normal night.
If we see nine o'clock, we've done something wrong.
And that's obviously like the reception is like...
Bodie once or twice a week has a late soccer practice, that type of thing.
We've gotten good to the point where this is happening on the weekends as well, which is pretty dope.
We might see nine o'clock, but we never see 10.
And I will give that this is not as good in the summer months, just because 745 feels like three in the afternoon, because the sun is still out and everyone's outside.
But in terms of the winter months where it gets dark at...
545 and no one's outside.
It just makes it way easier.
You know, there's a lot of negatives to Northeast in the winter.
This is a positive.
We're recording, it's not quite 4 o'clock and I can already feel outside that it's basically nighttime now.
I have a lot of follow-up questions on that.
I think I'm going to hold it.
Maybe we'll have Heather on and we can talk more about all of these different choices, because I feel like I could ask you 30 minutes of questions.
We won't derail us too much, but that's great.
The sleep opportunity is definitely something that we've talked about.
I think it's the first principle of this particular category is to give yourself a sleep opportunity of eight hours.
So kudos to you.
I would say the only thing I would add, two things actually, two things that I've started to do.
Well, one thing that I've done forever, that I will just it's a hill I will die on which is do not bring your phone into the bedroom.
I cannot tell you how distracting that is and how much sleep you potentially will lose, both in the evening and even in the morning, because you'll roll over and, instead of falling back asleep for that 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you'll pick that thing up and then you're half awake for 30 minutes.
That's not particularly new for me, but again, a hill I will die on.
The one thing that is new and I've mentioned it before is I've found that having a good book next to my bed is really a powerful little gravitational force to get me upstairs.
And I think it works in the same sort of whatever our brain wants when we turn on Netflix.
It's sort of like entertainment and sort of zoning out, but it's not entirely falling asleep yet.
And I found that the times when I've got a good book that I'm like oh, I want to figure out what happened.
I want to read what happens in the next chapter or the next part.
I will get upstairs.
20, 30 minutes before I would otherwise if I didn't have that.
Keep your phones out.
I really do advise get a good book, because it will pull you up into your bedroom and you'll get into bed and guess what?
You'll probably fall asleep 20 or 30 minutes before you would otherwise.
Because you're in bed and now you're comfortable and it's warm and you've got your pillow and all the other things.
So if we want to get that sleep opportunity, I think you've got to make the bedroom really, really attractive, for lack of a better way to put it.
We just mentioned, it just triggered it for me, but you said like your bed is warm.
Like the Sleep 8 is dope.
Yeah.
Like the Sleep 8 is super cool.
You combine that with the mattress that we got, which is the Helix.
Shout out to Eight Sleep and Helix because that's a combination.
We love, it's unbelievable.
Like we lie in bed, Heather and I were like, this is amazing.
Yeah.
Like you can tap the side, three taps, tap, tap, tap.
The reason I love that so much is because they design it.
So you don't need the phone, which everybody like tap, tap, tap.
Yeah.
You tap the side of the bed three times and it heats up.
Tap it twice and it cools down.
It can wake you up with this like little vibration thing.
It's really, I mean...
Those two combinations, that Helix and the Sleep 8, because we've done other ones.
We've had really good mattresses.
They gave them to us at the games.
Like we met somebody at the CrossFit games and they're like hey, we're giving these to all the athletes.
We want you to have one as well.
And another sleep temperature regulated one.
And they are not the same as these two.
This is a magic combination.
It's incredible.
I'm a huge fan.
Huge fan.
Okay.
Let's jump into, let's do the connect bucket first.
What do you got for us there?
I think I've only got one thing worth mentioning there.
You tell me.
Okay, so when we say connect, we're saying connect with yourself.
That's like, do you understand what sets you on fire?
Do you feel like you have a reason for living?
Do you understand yourself is actually- Yeah, do you understand yourself?
What are your values?
What do you think is important in life like that?
Trying to live in accordance with that.
And then so it's connected with yourself, connected with others relationship and connected with nature.
I'll put all of these ones into the one that we normally talk about, which is connect with others.
At work, I stopped doing work in my office.
So you've been here.
My office is at the end of the hall.
Yep.
Nobody has a reason to go past my door.
I saw Heather took it over.
Heather took over my office.
Exactly.
So it's way nicer now.
There's lots of plants.
There's like spa music playing in it.
Yeah.
But I don't do work in my office anymore, because I was.
It was like, basically like if I was here, no one even knew I was here.
There's no reason to walk by it.
So I started doing work.
All the way just to look for you.
Yeah.
So, just as I realize this in terms of a leadership principle, I mean a big part of leadership is connecting with other people.
It's kind of like the sleep opportunity is the first principle.
You have to give yourself that opportunity.
Well, if I'm at the end of the hall with the door closed, there's no opportunity.
No, in fact, it actually does the opposite.
It says, please don't come down here.
So what I do now instead is I either do my work in the open space.
We have a common area.
So I just do it there, or I do it in the big conference room which is.
You've seen, it's just a glass pane thing.
So everyone can at least see me and I'm, a lot of times I'll leave the door open to that.
So it's just very easy for inviting now.
Yeah.
Now I'm not, I'm not, I'm not hoping people come in, but it's so different.
Just like it's the difference of like growing up and having mom home and knowing mom's home but she's whatever upstairs doing laundry or she's on the phone, versus like mom's at work.
She's not even here.
Even if you're an 11 year old, just having mom, the presence of mom being in the house is, even if she's not engaging with you.
It's so different than an absentee.
So that's one of the things I've done is stop being a on-site yet absentee leader.
Another one I've done is with Bodie and Harley.
They both do it in different ways, but is I don't know if I didn't have this before.
Maybe I'm just way more cognizant of it.
I think that either you said it or Cole, but I try really hard to say yes.
When they ask will you go play soccer in the backyard Bodie or Harley says, will you jump on the trampoline with me?
I try as hard as I can to say yes to those.
I do that a lot with the kids now.
That sounds like wisdom from Cole.
I'm going to get from Greg for that.
The ability to always say yes.
That's a great point.
And two other quick ones is Sunday run days have actually been a really good connection thing.
Yeah, that's great.
It's so cool because we like we talk about it on Saturday.
We schedule it on Sunday.
What time we're going to go?
What's our run?
What's our route?
Then where are we going to have breakfast?
That right there is a two and a half hour morning between the run and the breakfast.
And then we also know that every Sunday night now we go out and have ice cream together.
It's like that day is really cool.
Other side effect of that is because we say yes to ice cream on Sunday, they never ask for it.
They don't ask about it.
Exactly.
Because they know it's coming.
Yes.
That's when we do it.
That's when we do that thing.
So that's been really cool.
And the next one is just getting back into reliable coaching, a particular class and the connections made there.
So coaching the 930 now have done it for over that class for over a year.
And that's, I find a lot of fulfillment and value in that.
That's really cool.
Your Sunday run day reminded me.
It was totally by accident.
I took the boys out of the house because Michelle was.
I think it was at Thanksgiving.
She was cooking pies or something.
I was like, I'll get the boys out of here.
So we went up the road to a trail.
And it was just maybe a mile loop.
And as we were getting on the trailhead, I was like, you guys want to run?
And my oldest was like, what do you mean run?
I was like, instead of walk the trail, we'll just run it.
And they were like, yeah.
So we did like a mile trail run.
They took breaks when we needed to, but it was so much fun.
My boys are seven and four.
And so it's like.
Just letting them run ahead, and how much fun they have running and jumping off of rocks and avoiding branches.
Like it was just like, oh, this is perfect.
So it's really fun.
I look forward as they get older to maybe incorporate that with a little bit more intention.
That'd be fun.
What are yours for Connect?
I'm going to give one.
And it's in the sort of the self part of that.
So self, others, nature.
The one with self is actually part of it stolen from you, and part of it is just something new.
So overall, it's a practice that I've started doing, that I love, which I just call the evening check-in, which is just two questions that I ask myself before I go upstairs, right.
Because it's on my phone.
I do a little typey typey.
And so I leave the phone downstairs and I go upstairs afterwards.
And it's two questions.
The first one I stole from you, which is what happened today that you want to remember, right simple question like what happened today, that in a year from now, if and when you read this back, you're like oh, i remember that.
I'm really glad i remember that because that little moment or that little thing was meaningful to me and it's the the kinds of things that go by really fast and you won't remember it if you don't take that moment to check in with it.
So that's the first thing.
And then the second question, which I really recommend both of these questions, but the second one especially which is what knocked you off center today.
What happened? where you were like, oh, that got me.
What did Michelle say?
What did the boys do?
What happened at work?
That moment, what happened?
Acknowledge it.
Maybe explore a little bit as to why that knocked you off center.
And what did you do to get yourself back on track?
And to me again, it's both of them are doing the same thing, which is like moments that happen really quickly, that you will let go by really fast and you won't think about them again, unless you have a reason to think about them again.
Asking myself these two questions at the end of the day has been a really nice exercise of checking in with myself.
When you go back and do that, what knocked me off center and you, bring that back up.
Do you feel like it knocks you off center again?
Almost never.
Wow.
Yeah, almost.
I mean, and again, like I'll check back when I have a really hard day.
Right.
Because it might.
But so far, it's little micro moments.
It's little things.
It's all like the little voice in my head got a little too loud.
And so, no, it's actually that's actually really interesting question.
An interesting point is that you know, because one of the questions we talk about all the time that you say is like is this going to matter in five minutes?
It's going to matter in five hours.
It's going to matter in five months.
And really what you're saying is how that feels.
Are you still going to feel that in five minutes or five hours or five weeks or five years?
And I found that four hours later, the thing, like, oh, no, that's...
I know that it made me feel a certain way.
I remember how it made me feel.
But right now, as I'm reflecting on it, the same feelings haven't replicated, at least certainly not to the extent that the first moment did.
Because I think the first moment is always unexpected.
Whereas when you sit down and say, okay, well, what did knock me out?
You're looking for it.
So you're expecting it.
You're prepared for it versus when it happens and you're not prepared for it is actually when you give the real honest reaction to it.
The response to it.
How long have you been doing that?
It's probably been like a month.
Okay.
Not super long.
Yeah.
I think what's going to be really... This is essentially like a reverse clause, which is...
I think people intuitively understand the reason a gratitude practice works, right?
Which is it's the same thing as, like when you're sitting down with your family at dinner and you go hey, and you do it every.
You ask this question every single day what's something good that happened to you today?
Mm-hmm.
Or how did you help someone today?
If it's the same question over and, over and over again, eventually people start navigating their day looking for those things.
What this is essentially doing is well, why would we want to be looking for things that are going to knock us off center?
That's not a good thing.
But the reverse clause of that is.
What we need more than anything is the awareness of when it happens.
Yes.
And what you are going to be able to do is, instead of looking back and going like okay, what did throw me?
If you ask yourself this long enough and a month's not... enough yep you eventually start navigating every day going like where is it yep where is that kind of thing that gets me where's the thing that's going to knock me off center and you're looking for it And then all of a sudden it becomes this thing of like, you're so aware of when you get knocked off center that you can, if this is the biggest, if you can become aware of when you get knocked off center, you have the ability then to recenter.
The biggest mistake that people make with this is that they don't recognize you know, we just talked about this in a recent one that proverbial tap on the shoulder like hey, something's up.
You might want to course correct.
And they just spiral off the road into a ditch, right?
That's a really cool thing to put, that practice is really cool.
All right, quick pause.
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I'm going to ask you a first question, because this is maybe my only excuse to ask you.
When I'm thinking about connect and again in that sort of self-connect bucket and thinking where do you put something like journaling?
Do you feel like that's, if you had to like, obviously it doesn't really matter, but like, if I was like is journaling in the think bucket or the connect bucket, where would you put it?
Yes.
It doesn't matter.
Hmm.
Yeah, right.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter.
Arbitrary, either way.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
It's like saying, would you consider thrusters cardio or strength?
Right.
Does it matter?
They get you fitter.
Yeah.
Just do them.
Right.
So having said that, you wrote down journaling in the Connect.
My think is about journaling.
Yeah, cool.
So if I was to rewind a little over a year ago, I was going through probably the most stressful time of my adult life, honestly.
COVID was really hard as a business owner.
A year ago was the hardest part of my professional life.
The really short version of that is made.
A bad move with CompTrain.
Hired some app developers to try to pivot in a different direction.
Take advantage of some.
The United States has a RD credit.
If you do app development in the United States, you basically get to write it all off.
So we moved our app development team domestic and it basically almost killed the company.
Really stressful times for me.
I ended up having to put a ton of my own money into this thing to keep it alive.
Really, really, really stressful.
And I couldn't figure out how I was going to make this work.
And I didn't feel like I was doing anything that was equating to a win.
So what I realized was I need to really focus on setting my priorities and I need to feel like I'm making some traction.
So I changed my journaling practice from gratitude cause.
It was like honestly, the gratitude felt like platitudes at that point.
It felt like empty.
I wasn't grateful.
I was just doing it for the exercise and I wasn't feeling the effects of this.
So I was like, what are the three most important things I needed to do today?
And then the next morning, I would write down what were the wins from yesterday.
So the first thing I would do is write in the wins from yesterday.
And I would go, okay, now, right away, I'm setting my day off like, damn, I did those three things.
And one of those things might be like, I recorded a podcast with Patrick.
That's a win.
That's a big thing.
We put something out into the world.
That's cool.
Or I was able to move the discussion farther along in terms of our programming methodology with Coalsager.
Or wrote the severance agreement between us and the development company.
That's like, what are the wins?
And I start stacking these wins.
So three wins from the previous day and went okay.
Now, with a gazillion things I need to do, what are the three most important things I need to do today?
And that practice started to like, it started to center me a little bit and I've kept it going.
So that's something that I've done in terms of like, I needed it for the thinking.
I needed it for like the clarity of mind because I was like spinning.
I felt like my mind was more of a kaleidoscope than looking through, like with blinders on the side, but not like laser focused on something.
Right.
And I needed some laser focus.
I need to feel some momentum.
And that really helped.
The other thing I did was talking to one of my very best friends and a mentor of mine as well is he had been recently through something very similar, in a very different way.
So He is an incredibly successful wealth manager and he moved from an incredibly secure, incredibly successful company with Bank of America, which owns Merrill Lynch.
He was a part of Merrill Lynch.
And he made the really bold decision to go with a smaller, more nimble way, more customer-centric bank.
It turned out that bank that he went with was First Republic.
I don't know if you remember First Republic, but... they basically, they went bankrupt.
They went bankrupt about five weeks after he joined.
So he moves over his entire business over and within two months, the company is imploding.
No one, none of his, all of his investors like, should I pull my money out?
Should I leave you?
Really stressful times.
He obviously makes it through it.
I'm talking to him about this and he goes hey, this is something that I did, which was like There's going to be times in your life with imbalance.
This for you is going to be one of those times.
Be imbalanced, but set a near-term goal of still having the summer with your family on the Cape.
Nice.
Right, so this was happening during the holidays about this time.
So I made so like it's basically like around January.
I'm like you know, my hair is getting grayer than it already is.
And I'm talking to him and he's like and that like all of a sudden create this like okay, this can be really hard.
It's gonna be really hard.
It's gonna be long, long hours.
It's going to be like buckling down, but this also isn't forever.
And I'm going to have my summer on the Cape.
Like that's the goal.
Just like the kids, like, I'm going to get my ice cream on Sunday.
So, like, let's not- Yeah, that's exactly right.
Like, it's set some parameters and some near-term quick little wins.
And that really helped in terms of my thinking, turning from this like wait a minute, so am I just going to be running this for the next five hours?
Like you start a marathon?
It's like no, just like you know, what you should do is like why don't you run to the first aid station and, you know, get yourself a little snack.
It's like, okay, I'll do that.
Like I'll just run to the first aid station and get a snack.
It's like, ooh.
I can do that.
And we feel like running again, start running again.
It's like, that's not so bad.
So that helps a lot in terms of my thinking, my approach to. some really stressful, stressful times.
And you know, having been now we're 11 months removed from that.
We are in such a better like, we're in a better place than we've been in the last four years.
So, you know, on the other side of what seems like an apocalyptic moment is growth, is betterment.
As long as you... can keep your wits about you, I think.
Yeah.
As long as you yourself don't turn into that Tasmanian devil inside.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Which I I mean, I know I'm not perfect and I had times that I was at home and I was like this is just so.
This is so hard.
And I would share with Heather and break down into Heather's credit.
She's the best, you know, she's like, dude, we don't need any of this.
She's like, let's go to Montana.
Let's get a shack.
We'll homeschool the kids.
We don't need anything.
It's like, hell yeah.
And I will say, as somebody who was there and who witnessed it, you handled it as well as I can imagine a situation like that being handled.
And so I commend you on that.
But I think it's all the you know, it's all the work that you talk about, that we've talked about all the time.
Like you've put the mental reps in for long enough that when you had a really heavy barbell it still was heavy but didn't make it easier.
But you were equipped to handle it again, as well as I think it could be handled.
So kudos to you for it.
Appreciate that, Patrick.
The only thing I'll add on my end in the think bucket is I have in the last this is really old in the last couple of months maybe three months is, and this may come as a surprise to you, but maybe not because we've talked about a little bit.
I can be and I have been in the past a bit of a news junkie.
And I found myself in the lead up to the election.
Spending way too much time reading things that weren't changing my mind in any way, shape or form wasn't really informing me.
It just made me feel like I knew what was going on.
And that gave me a little bit of comfort.
When I realized that, I started to dial it back.
And then post-election, I turned it off entirely.
And I've never not known to the degree that I don't know now what's going on in the world.
And I'm learning how to be OK with that.
And I'm learning how to be more comfortable with that and the space it creates and the space it's created for me to read more books or watch a documentary or listen to another podcast that I really wanted to listen to but I never quite found the time for, is not shocking, but it's surprising.
So it's been really, really nice to turn that stuff down, because I recognize that 97 of it is not helpful, useful or teaching me anything.
And then, with that, being able to engage a little bit more intentionally with some things that are helpful and do help me and do move me forward in the ways that I want to move forward.
I actually didn't know that, that you were a news junkie.
We poo-poo that so much.
I thought you were on my team.
I was on your team philosophically, but for a long time, not practically.
Wow.
You hypocrite.
I thought I knew you, Patrick.
I'll take that because that's... So that's been the big thing is turning it off.
I'll tell you, it was hard to avoid it.
It's...
Near impossible, right?
And it is so enticing.
It hits all the sensors.
It hits all the things.
Regardless of what side you're on, it doesn't matter.
It's so triggering that it's hard to without complete, total abstinence.
It's hard to just have a little bit and go like oh, and now that's enough.
It sucks you in.
So good for you for being aware of it and not only being aware of it, but going even farther.
Like you didn't return back to baseline.
You went baseline plus better.
Yeah, that's been great.
And a lot less time spent on my phone, which is obvious and not surprising that that's better.
Yeah.
I remember that was great.
That was fun.
And that was actually longer than I thought, but in a good way, like I wasn't sure we were gonna have that much meat on this bone.
But look at that.
See, and I think the interesting thing about this, and I'll wrap it up here.
And part of why I wanted to have this conversation, because I thought, regardless of whether or not, if we had a lot to add, is you and I have been doing these things.
We've certainly been having these conversations for years and years.
But even beyond that, we've been...
Paying attention to what we eat, paying attention to the thoughts in our head, certainly the way we've been training.
We know how important sleep is.
We've known all of these things for a long time.
And if anybody was really set, like I figured it out, I don't need to change anything.
It would be people like us.
And yet we just spent an hour talking about.
Here are the little tweaks I've made, the dials I've turned in this way, the things I stopped doing.
And I think that's really useful, because I don't think that these are ever gonna be fully 100 set in stone.
These are all like 1 changes, 2 changes, all in the direction of how do I do these things a little bit more consistently?
How do I make sure I'm doing the things that I say I want to be doing?
Because these are the things that lead us to the life that we say we want to be leading.
So I think it's important because it can be easy to think like, Oh, we've got it figured out.
And we don't change anything.
But that's clearly not the case.
Yeah.
Chasing what truly matters.
And that is a moving target.
That's right.
That is an active verb, chasing.
I'm a man.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody out there for listening.
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Ben and I'll be back soon for a brand new episode of Chasing Excellence.
