Second Half Comeback with DG Gregory

If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, Geoff Woods can show you how to change those five people to people who are living the life that YOU want to be living.

Geoff is host of The Mentee Podcast and is in the middle of his own second half comeback as he goes from full time medical device salesman to entrepreneur.

He describes his talent as "helping others accelerate their progress by showing them how they can go out and surround themselves with the right mentors and the right ideas.

In our conversation, Geoff shares how his wake call came when a 35 year old coworker had a stroke and the following week his company changed his commission structure which effectively slashed his income by a whopping 40%!

Geoff realized he was at a crossroads and needed to start creating passive income to ensure that his family was financially secure in the event something happened to him or the income from his "day job".

But how?

Geoff goes on to tell the amazing story of how he discovered the "Secret Knock" and met a number of amazing mentors that have changed his live and upgraded his own inner circle!

We go on to discuss strategies and tactics that YOU can use today to start upgrading your inner circle and find life changing mentors.

Some of the quotes and highlights of this conversation include:

You can find out more about Geoff Woods and The Mentee Podcast as well as get a free mini course called "7 steps to a 7 figure network" at Geoffwoods.com

Jeff has even offered to jump on a call with my listeners if you have any questions or want more information on upgrading your inner circle. You can book a call with Geoff at Call Geoff.

Cole Hatter wanted to make a difference in the world so he pursued becoming a firefighter until a terrible accident stole his health and his dreams.

In our conversation Cole tells us about his struggle to overcome this serious injury and the loss of his firefighter dreams by starting a highly lucrative real estate investment business with his dad.

Thanks to perfect timing, a smoking hot California real estate market and a ton of hard work, he was crushing it to the tune of six figures per month as a 22 year old!

But then Cole had to face his second major setback as the global financial crisis of 2008 crushed his real estate business. He was struggling to keep his family business above water and became so stressed out and disenchanted that he had to quit the family business and vanish to Mexico to regroup.

It was while in Mexico that he started working for a non-profit building houses for homeless Mexican families. This gave Cole his first taste of working for a purpose.

Cole soon had a life changing revelation. While sitting in his car playing guitar, he had a moment of clarity and realized he could have a much more significant impact if he could fund charitable causes versus simply volunteering as a laborer.

He soon returned to the U.S. with a renewed sense of purpose that helped him not only turn his real estate business around but also become a award winning professional speaker who has earned several million dollars speaking to organizations all over the world.

Now Cole Hatter wants to teach you how to start a purposeful business and get rich in the process.

Don't wait to get rich to make a difference but rather make an impact as you get rich.

He is now organizing a world class, 3 day event in Las Vegas called Thrive: Make Money Matter. It's happening October 16,17 and 18th at Mandalay Bay. World class speakers including Gary Vaynerchuk, James Altucher, Lewis Howes, Adam Braun, Tucker Max and many more will be teaching us how to make money, protect our money and make our money matter.

Here's the most amazing part...100% of the profits from Thrive: Make Money Matter are going to one of our favorite charitable causes, A Human Project.

You can learn more about A Human Project and it's founder Wes Chapman in Episodes 9 and 10 of Second Half Comeback: Listen Here

Here are a few of the takeaway lessons from this episode:

The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.

If this episode and Cole Hatter's message resonated with you, I highly recommend that you join me in Las Vegas, October 16,17 and 18th for the Thrive: Make Money Matter event.

You can find out more about Cole Hatter, listen to his podcast, or book him as a speaker at Cole Hatter.

Today's episode isn't so much an interview as it is a conversation between two friends, two entrepreneurs, who are busting their ass everyday to build businesses and better lives for themselves, their families and their audiences.

Mike Goncalves and I met online and are in a small group mastermind together. He has become a friend, my go to fitness expert and someone who holds me accountable and puts a boot in my ass when I need it.

I thought you guys would enjoy and benefit from ease dropping on our conversation about the daily challenges of staying healthy and building a business from scratch, little by little, while juggling the challenges of everyday life.

No sugar coating here! Just an inside look at two second half comebacks in progress.

It's not always pretty, It's often just hard fucking work but hopefully this conversation will give you a few ideas how to battle through and keep taking daily action towards your goal of a better life.

Mike has a background running a brick and mortar health and fitness business as a personal trainer. He built and ran this successful business for 10 years in San Diego but had to leave the business behind to return to Boston for personal reasons.

He was forced to start from scratch in Boston. He had to get a "real job" to pay the bills and began trying to figure out how to create an online health and fitness business so he could still help the friends and clients that he was forced to leave behind in San Diego.

The Wellness Bucket was born!

The Wellness Bucket is a "community where people want to feel their best, look their best and ultimately live their best lives."

Check it out here: The Wellness Bucket

A few of the things that you'll learn from this raw, in depth conversation are:

I enjoyed this conversation so much that I'm going to encourage Mike to be a regular guest on the show.

Whether you are hustling to build a side business, leave your day job to start a business or have left your job and are deep in the trenches of building your own full time business, I know you'll relate and find tons of value in this episode.

I think this episode is a great follow up to the James Clear Episode as we talk about some of the same concepts of habit transformation for both health and fitness and business.

You can still get the Free Audio Lesson from that episode here:

Click Here for a free audio gift! "10 Minutes to Transform Your Habits"

Please make sure to check out Mike and his awesome work at The Wellness Bucket.

If you enjoyed this episode please share with your friends and family and drop us a note and let us know that you'd like to hear more of Mike on the show!

As always, I'd love your feedback at DG's Email

This week’s podcast features my interview with James Clear from http://jamesclear.com/. It’s basically a mini course on transforming your habits and self improvement for entrepreneurs, athletes and creatives.

James is one of my favorite online personalities and his blog is one of the few that I read religiously.

He is a entrepreneur, weight lifter, photographer and an expert on transforming your habits.

He writes about psychology and habit formation as it applies to business, entrepreneurship, health and fitness, and creativity.

I was actually pretty nervous about interviewing James. In fact, immediately following the interview, I was pretty disappointed in myself because I wasn’t sure I had crushed the interview.

I beat myself up pretty bad! I felt like I had blown my big chance to interview one of my online idols.

I didn’t even listen back to the interview for weeks. I sat on it because I was embarrassed that I had fucked it up.

But recently I forced myself to sit down and listen to it. Guess what I found?

It’s good...Really, really good!

I’m not saying I was good but James was great and most importantly the information was truly valuable.

It’s jam packed with strategies and tactics that you can start applying today to transform negative behaviors and easily build new, positive habits that will truly transform your life and business.

I was tempted to do a lengthy, detailed breakdown of all the great strategies in this post but there is simply too much to cover without making this “show notes” post insanely long.

Instead I’m going to give you just a quick overview of some of the topics covered here so that you will listen to the interview or it will serve as a quick recap if you’ve already listened.

I've also put together a free 10 minute audio download that is a quick recap of a few of the highly actionable lessons from our conversation

Click Here for a free audio gift! "10 Minutes to Transform Your Habits"

Here’s Some of the Highlights

Keystone Habits

James explains that a Keystone Habit is a behavior that helps pull the rest of your life in line. We discuss that for him that habit is weightlifting and for me it’s getting up early.

Morning Rituals

Morning rituals are key because you can get your important stuff done before the urgencies of the day hit and while your will power is still at it’s peak.

Habits vs. Routines

James makes a distinction between habits (such as biting your nails) and routines (such as going to the gym). We discuss how you can make it easier to do those routines by making the beginning of the behavior more automatic. For example if you want to run 2 miles when you wake up, lay your running shoes out and prep your water bottle the night before...then you can just quickly slip on your shoes, grab your water and head out the door without much thinking or effort. “It’s sort of like an on ramp for your behavior. By making the beginning more mindless and automatic, you make it easier to follow through.” “We often think motivation is something you need to feel before you get started but what we really need is to just make it more automatic to get started.” “Typically we don’t fail after getting started. We fail to get started at all!” “Motivation often comes after you begin not before.”

Behavior vs Results

In the beginning, the most important thing is to build the behavior not get the result. It helps to focus on building the behavior of becoming the type of person who works out and doesn’t miss a workout first then worry about the performance and outcome.

Systems vs. Goals

Most people are 90% goals/results focused and 10% systems focused. James makes a persuasive argument as to why it should be the other way around. “The goals will show up anyway if you commit to the system” He discusses three ways that systems are more powerful than goals.

Short Term Feedback Loops

“The best strategy for long term behavior change is short term feedback” Seth Godin

“Identity Votes”

“Each time you take an action, It is a vote for the type of person you are and the identity you have.”

Environment Change and Designing for Laziness

How can you structure your environment to make the lazy or automatic changes better? “It’s really easy to make better choices when you are surrounded by them.”

We discuss all these topics and much more so please check out the episode and look for my series of actionable mini lessons on the blog soon.

You can have them sent direct to your inbox by signing up for the mailing list and as a free bonus I'll hook you up with a free 10 minute audio recap of the key lessons from this episode.

Sign up here:

Click Here for a free audio gift! "10 Minutes to Transform Your Habits"

James has put together a free guide for you called “Transforming Your Habits”. You can get it here by simply signing up for his email list http://jamesclear.com/habits.

James Clear publishes new posts every Monday and Thursday at http://jamesclear.com/

Let's face it, Change is easy when you are miserable and your back is against the wall. The challenge of the second half comeback is that most of us are fairly comfortable. You've spent the past 15-20+ years of our lives building a decent life for yourself and your family.

Your back isn't against the wall.

It's against a comfortable couch!

As a result, you quickly lose the desire and ability to step out of your comfort zone. you're afraid to risk your comfortable life. Your risk muscle gets weak. You get soft.

You're comfortable. Stuck. Hopes and dreams on the back burner.

I hope that scares the shit out of you! Let's do something about it. It's time to bust out of this life sucking comfort zone!

Here are a few of the key takeaways and lessons from this episode:

Thanks for listening! We'll see you next time!

Today's episode of Second Half Comeback is the very first episode of Team Building Tuesday. It's basically just an introduction to the concept and an explanation as to why you should strive to surround yourself with excellence.

The episode is pretty much self explanatory and doesn't really require show notes so let's just go with a brief overview of the concept.

Every Tuesday, Second Half Comeback will feature a short 10-15 minute episode that is focused entirely on the concept of building yourself an "Inner Circle" or a Comeback Team if you prefer.

The episode will features cutting edge strategies and tactics for finding, connecting and teaming with extraordinary, like minded rockstars using all the amazing modern day tools at our disposal.

Many of the episodes will be solo episodes but I will also feature some interviews with Super Connectors and utilize excerpts from previous interviews.

This is not old school "networking". This is "Connecting for Success" in the online era.

[shadowbox]"If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with...Don't fucking waste your life with average people"[/shadowbox]

Let's meet back here every Tuesday and learn a rock solid game plan for surrounding ourselves with a team that will help us crush our second half comeback!

On This Solo Episode of Second Half Comeback, I talk about the mistakes I made and lessons I learned during my first six months in business. My hope is that you'll learn from my silly mistakes and achieve your Second Half Comeback in record time!

Here are a few of the key takeaway lessons from this episode:

Action Step:  Deliberately start looking for extraordinary people to join your inner circle. Go above and beyond with your efforts to connect. Give freely. Ask for help and take note of who steps up for you. Work on this everyday until you have a rock solid inner circle. This is absolutely life changing!

Announcement

Second Half Comeback will now be a 3 x a week podcast! I'm going all in! So look for episodes on Monday, Tuesday and Friday.

Motivation Monday: A quick 5-10 minute "Half Time Speech" to start your week.

Team Building Tuesday: Also a shorter episode specifically focused on building your inner circle, surrounding yourself with extraordinary people, finding your "five people" that will stand shoulder to shoulder with you as you crush your Second Half Comeback!

Full Episode Friday: More of our in-depth conversations with amazing people as well as some long form solo episodes.

As always thanks so much for listening, reading, joining the email list and just joining us on our journey to execute our own Second Half Comeback.

We'll see ya next week for 3 new episodes.

Ian set a goal to accomplish a 100 item "bucket list" in 100 weeks!

In the following years Ian managed to accomplish 93 Items from his 100 item list. Here's a quick video compilation of some of his adventures:

Ian has written a great book about his journey called A Life Sold.

In 2011 Ian even went on to buy his own island in the Caribbean. He later wrote a book about that experience called Paradise Delayed.

In our conversation, we discuss the background and details of his story and highlight several super valuable takeaway lessons that we can incorporate into our own second half comeback's. Here are a few quotes and key lessons learned:

"Constant stepping out of your comfort zone makes you more comfortable at...stepping out of your comfort zone!"

"You can plan forever and nothing is going to happen if you don't take that first step and actually physically start on whatever it is that you want to do."

We finish our conversation by talking about his most recent travels across the U.S. in an R.V. and his future plans to travel China and teach english.

Take a listen to this inspiring episode and learn how to start crushing your "bucket List"!

In the episode I talk about what a great job Nick and his team did with the conference but instead of rambling on about it here, I'll just let you listen to the episode. I'm going to use these show notes to just dive right into the takeaway lessons and to provide a few of the links mentioned in the episode...so let's get right to it!

Actually , first let me direct you to Nick's website in case you aren't familiar with him and his brand:

Nick Unsworth: Life on fire

Here's the website for the Ignite conference: Ignite Conference

Ok, back to my takeaways from the conference.

The conference itself was a three day event that was basically divided so that Day 1 was about "Mindset", Day 2 was about "Marketing" and Day 3 was about "Relationships/Love". Most of my big breakthroughs came on day 1 which is good because somehow I rambled for 30+ minutes just talking about day 1 so i decided to limit this episode to just day 1 lessons.

If you've listened to any of my recent podcast episodes, you may know that I've been struggling a bit, both in my personal life and with the direction of the podcast. As far as my struggles with the podcast go, I've mostly been struggling with doubts, fears and the dreaded "Imposter Syndrome". So the day 1 mindset content was of great interest to me. By the end of day 1, I had a couple massive breakthroughs.

Here are quick summaries of the two big breakthroughs from day 1 of the Ignite Conference (honestly, It's just easier to listen to me talk about them in the podcast episode and check out the video of Nick talking about getting "in-state".)

Nick talked at length about finding your "moment on fire" and then guided us through an exercise. The idea is to think of a time in your life that you felt truly powerful, unstoppable, on fire! Close your eyes. Visualize this moment of triumph in vivid detail. Remember how you felt. Remember how your body felt. How were you standing? What were you thinking?

When you visualize this moment in vivid detail, how does it make you feel? Can you tap back into that moment...that feeling of power? Practice until you can. Figure out a physical cue that you can use to trigger this memory...to trigger this feeling of power.

Once you have mastered this skill, you will be able to use your trigger to bring yourself back into this powerful state whenever you need. Go listen to the episode. It will make much more sense and I tell you about my moment of fire during a division 1 college lacrosse game...Fuck, that was a great moment!

Anyway, here's the link to Nick Unsworth doing a much better job describing this process: Moment on fire

My most transformational moment of the conference came the evening of day 1. There was supposed to be a fire walk, Tony Robbins style, but apparently the local fire marshall took a shit on that idea so the event transformed to a glass walk. A glass walk is just what it sounds like. You walk across a bed of broken glass in your bare feet.

But there was a twist. After you walked across the glass, you were challenged to break a board with your bare hands.

The idea was that you would write your biggest obstacle, your biggest fear on the board...and then smash it. the idea was to literally break through your fears.

The funny thing was that I wasn't at all nervous about the glass walk but I was super stressed about smashing the board. We were divided into groups and there were maybe 10 people in line before me to do the walk and board break. Sure enough the first 7 or 8 people struggled to break their boards! I was getting more and more stressed that I would fail to break the board on my first attempt.

Finally, it was my turn! To hear my description of what happened, listen to the episode (approx. 17:19 into the episode).

Here's my broken board:

So my big takeaway from this board breaking exercise was that I've been letting my fears and negative self talk become a barrier between me and a better life...a better life for my son, a better life for my wife.

This exercise helped me realize that when I truly and intensely focus and bring the full force of my frustration and passion, I will smash through every fucking barrier that stands between my family and a better life!

That is a powerful and life changing lesson! When I combine this lesson with my new found skill for getting "in state", I've got a recipe for success and serious transformation.

So I hope these lessons resonate with you and you can incorporate them in your own life. Let's get focused, "in state" and smash through our fears together!

Please drop me a comment and let me know what fears have been stopping you and more importantly how you plan to smash those fears! I'd also love to hear about your "Moment on Fire"!

On today’s episode of Second Half Comeback, I interview author, blogger and speaker, Andy Traub from takepermission.com and author of The Early to Rise Experience (learn to rise early in 30 days).

I’ve been a fan of Andy’s work ever since I watched an interview with him from Deacon Bradley’s Life Stoked. I totally relate to Andy’s blunt style and to how he seems to focus on taking care of his family first.

I’m a huge fan of The Early to Rise Experience and have successfully implemented a number of his strategies to help take charge of my life by getting up early.

Here are some of the key points and lessons from the Interview:

Andy finishes up by praising YOU with this final quote…

“I appreciate you for being intentional about your life….If you want to win at life you need to be intentional. Anybody who listened to the last 30 minutes is intentional about their lives...Well done! You care about your life...Bravo! This has been an investment in your life so keep listening to the show.”

Links and Mentions

You can find Andy at http://www.takepermission.com/

Get his book The Early to Rise Experience: learn to rise early in 30 days at http://www.amazon.com/The-Early-To-Rise-Experience-ebook/dp/B00B67PHOU

Deacon Bradley's Life Stoked http://lifestoked.com 

Andy Andrews: The Traveler's Gift: Seven Decisions that Determine Personal Success http://www.amazon.com/Travelers-Gift-Decisions-Determine-Personal-ebook/dp/B00ETK822K/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418327123&sr=1-1&keywords=the+travelers+gift

Jeff Goins, Tribe Writers: http://goinswriter.com/tribewriters/