Adam Whiting, now a well-known yoga teacher around the world for his smart sequencing and anatomical focus in class, was at one time just trying to understand what was going wrong in his body. After seeing doctor after doctor in Manhattan, trying to diagnose massive dizzy spells, headaches and seemingly random spouts of numbness throughout his body, he was told by all accounts that his body was "fine."

"I was diagnosed with having anxiety disorder and panic attacks," Whiting told me. "And it didn't fit for me, because it wasn't presenting itself as anxiety. I wasn't stressed. I wasn't depressed. And in my mind, at that point, my knowledge about anxiety disorder was so limited that I was sort of in denial."

At that time, Whiting was working in New York as a musician. But in order to pay the bills, he worked nine-to-five at an insurance agency - a job which, he describes, was a major catalyst for his anxiety disorder and also the catalyst for him finding what he was truly meant to be doing.

"A friend introduced me to asana, to postural yoga. After several months of just doing yoga...I could feel the anxiety start to unwrap itself. It was just the most amazing feeling of actually feeling safe in my own skin again."

After feeling how yoga helped and healed him, he knew it was something he wanted to teach. From that point forward, he launched into his first teacher training. He began teaching right away, supplemented that with playing music, and didn't look back.

And even though it became a greater hustle to make ends meet, it was all building towards a greater purpose, or Dharma, as you'll hear Whiting describe in the episode.

He started teaching more and more classes, then began traveling for workshops, and then started running trainings and retreats, all in addition to playing music on the side and weaving it into his teaching repertoire.

He describes it as all part of a tapestry in "whatever this career is."

Whiting sums it up nicely, but his tapestry is composed of many moving pieces that all move him in the direction where he wants to take his career and his life. From moving to Australia to lead trainings alongside owner of Power Living Duncan Peak, to hosting retreats across the world, to moving back to the U.S. to lead his first 200-hour yoga teacher training on his own, Whiting lets meditation be his guide in setting goals for his future.

And rather than setting traditional, tangible goals, Whiting is focused on following his Dharma. He sees those action items to achieve more as the logistics to align in order to go after something bigger.

"I absolutely do have goals of running more teacher trainings, of having my advanced 300-hour training up and running, of having a tour in Australia and running retreats in Australia and Bali. But in my mind, I sort of think of them as logistical things to align so that I can look out past that and set my sails towards that journey with the knowledge that the winds are going to blow me somewhere completely unexpected, but also with the the trust that wherever I end up is where I'm supposed to be."

Listen to Adam Whiting’s episode of the #WeGotGoals podcast to hear more about how he views Dharma, his purpose and duty in life, and the way he views goals that ladder up to that. Thanks to Cody Hughes for the photo used in this post.

You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts (including Spotify!) and if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to [email protected].)

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Start transcript:

[0:00]

Jeana: Welcome to We Got Goals, a podcast by asweatlife.com, on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen with me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma.

Cindy: Good morning Jeana.

Maggie: Morning Jeana.

Jeana: Good morning. Maggie, this week you spoke to Adam Whiting. And you actually got to do that interview from home.

Maggie: I did. I talked to Adam who is a yoga instructor. Who I think started teaching in Charlotte, North Carolina. Where I am from. And then has since moved to Australia and then back to North Carolina. But he continues to lead trainings and retreats and experiences across the world. In Bali. In Sri Lanka. In throughout Australia. He's taught at Wanderlust. He teaches in a lot of places. I've always just really respected his classes. I have loved them and I wanted to know a little more about his journey to yoga. How he got to the idea of wanting to teach internationally. Because that is a whole other track of teaching that I don't know a lot about. So I was really excited to get to talk to him and then I was home. So I got to do it in person before taking one of his awesome classes.

Cindy: Oh, that's so great and it sounds like not just what he said but how he said it left an impact on you.

Maggie: It did. And I didn't even say this to him after. So if he listens to this episode he'll be like, "Oh, she didn't tell me that." But I was noticing how mindful he was as he was answering any of the questions that I asked. Or response to something he would say. And thinking about that a little bit more. And even like closing his eyes. Taking time to answer mindfully. I don't do that always. And so I think we don't always love silence and we kind of mumble through things until we get to the point. But he was just really thoughtful about what he wanted to say. And then speaking to that versus talking around the point at all. So I thought that was probably a testament to, in general, his journey toward mindfulness as a teacher. He didn't begin teaching yoga with this meditation center. He actually talks about this in the episode of being very anxious and having anxiety attacks and not really sure of what was going on in his body. He was a musician in New York. Doing that grind of working other jobs. Sitting at a desk while he was trying to have gigs at night and make it as a musician in New York. He was getting beat down through that grind. And so meditation actually, when he was introduced to it just had him sitting with his thoughts more. And he didn't really like that. And so the Asana practice, the movement piece of yoga was what keyed him into a different way of life. Or a different kind of thought pattern. And that he could get out of that anxiousness mode. So the meditation piece came later as I learned. But it really is like a stronghold to his practice and how he teaches now.

Jeana: And Maggie, Adam almost didn't do this interview at all, right? And this isn't the first time this has happened to us. Can you talk a little bit about why he sort of has trouble with the concept of goals?

Maggie: Yeah, he asked me like, "Is it okay if I don't really have goals. If we do this interview?" And I always think any input on how people view goals is beneficial. However, you see it. Whether you notice or, you know, want to kind of go down the path that one of these goal-getters goes down. Or you kind of take that at face value and choose something different. That's what's cool about this podcast is there's so many different viewpoints. And he said that he's worked with brands and at companies where setting goals has been a central piece of the puzzle. And so he understands it. And he knows that there's benefits to setting a ten-year vision and going after it. And then really executing on your one-year goals to make that ten-year vision a reality. But for him, what's he's found along the way is that he is much more in tune with the idea of dharma. Dharma he says is widely known as your calling but really it's more like your duty. Like your purpose. Why are you put on this earth? And you've got to find that. You've got to search for that. And then you've got to do it. And so that's really what leads him. And that seems ambiguous. And that can be scary. Like that's scary for me to think about. Just, oh my god, what is the one reason I'm here on this earth. But that doesn't really scare him. That's more of like what lights him up. And I think when he speaks about that you'll hear just how much of a guiding force that is for and all of the teachers he has learned from and how teaches now.

Jeana: Well what a mindful way to think about goals and we're so excited to hear this interview with Maggie and Adam. Keep those earpods in goal-getters. There's more to this episode at the end. We'll hear from people just like you out there achieving big goals or trying new things or maybe just setting big goals.

[4:56]

Maggie: So I'm here with Adam Whiting. Who I have had the pleasure of taking class from many times before he moved to Australia. He's a yoga i...

Triathlete and coach Sharone Aharon faced some obstacles en route to completing his first Ironman.

First of all, he’d never done any type of multisport event. He didn’t own a bike. His longest run was about 20 minutes, done as part of his training for the Israeli Secret Service. The first time he got into the pool, he swam 200 yards—then went to the locker room and threw up.

Still, 10 months later, he finished the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and full 26.2-mile marathon at Ironman KONA.

As Aharon explained to me on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, getting there required a combination of confidence and naïveté.

“I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that I would make it,” he says. “Look at little kids—when they fall down, they don’t think, ‘OK, I will not ever try again.’ I think that’s what happened. I was this little kid who found a toy and dedicated his entire being to that.”

Plenty of challenges—he calls them “mosquitos,” because they sting but aren’t serious—popped up along the way. Still, so many things fell into place. He immediately got a sponsor, a client who supported his goals despite his lack of a track record. Even the fact that he was able to get into Kona in the first place was unusual and remarkable, he notes.

All this validated what seemed like an out-of-the blue decision at the time—but eventually led to to an entirely new career. “It just came up from within, from the core of my being,” he says. “I can’t explain it.”

“But at this point, it’s part of the way I coach my athletes, how to really engage with their emotions and their goals, and how to combine them together to produce great training and great racing.”

Over the 20 years since that first race, Aharon’s helped thousands of athletes achieve similar ambitious goals through Well-Fit, a triathlon training program he launched in 1998. In 2009, he built a bricks-and-mortar facility. There, at 1700 W. Hubbard St., athletes can strength train (alone or in group classes), swim in Endless Pools, ride bike trainers, and run on treadmills as they train for marathons, triathlons, and other endurance events.

“We took an individual sport and we made it a team sport, and we do that at Well-Fit all the time,” he says. “We have a team of people all competing individually, but because they work together, they actually achieve greater success.”

Well-Fit does have an elite team, members of which tend to finish races on the podium. But you don’t have to be an experienced athlete to take advantage of all the facility offers, Aharon says. You just need a dedication and a willingness to invest in yourself.

At first, “the notion was that Well-Fit is only for fast people. So I said, no … we are making people fast. That’s what we can do. What we realized is that people who come here and get the most benefit are people who care about their results,” he says.

How do you go from merely aspiring toward better performances to making them happen? In our chat, Aharon spills a few clues:

In fact, Aharon’s next goal—besides carving out more time for his own training—is to make his style of altitude training more widespread and accessible everywhere. Seeing others’ success on the program only fuels him to reach higher in business and in the sport.

Listen to Sharone Aharon’s episode of the #WeGotGoals podcast for more tidbits on performing your best, and check out the Well-Fit website for more about altitude training options—and all of the group’s other plans and perks.

You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts (including Spotify!). If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to [email protected].)

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[0:00]

Jeana: Welcome to We Got Goals, a podcast by asweatlife.com, on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen with me I have Kristen Geil and Cindy Kuzma.

Kristen: Good morning Jeana.

Cindy: Good morning Jeana.

Jeana: Good morning. Cindy this week you spoke with Sharone Aharon, right?

Cindy: I did, Sharone is a triathlete, a coach and the owner of Well Fit Performance. Which is a pretty sweet triathlon performance here in Chicago. It's been around a long time. He's seen countless athletes achieve their goals and he's achieved some pretty cool goals himself. So it's great to talk with him.

Kristen: And Cindy you talked to him about the first time he completed an Iron Man. And it sounds like he went in with a level of blissful ignorance, maybe not quite knowing what he was getting himself into. How did that work out for him?

Cindy: Well, it actually worked out pretty well. In fact, he thinks that is one of the secrets of his success. He had been in this really secret service which is super fascinating and then he was a personal trainer for a while. He was kind of getting bored and not really sure what direction he was going to go next. So he just decided one day that he was going to train for an Iron Man. He didn't really know how to do it. But he just had this childlike approach to having fun and being excited about the training. Of course then he did some planning and got a little bit more serious about some of the hard work he was going to have to do along the way. But he really thinks that that ability to not even contemplate failure helped him achieve success. He went on to finish that first Iron Man and many more since. And then to build a whole incredible career around the sport today.

Jeana: And today he's helping take athletes to new heights in one way or another, right Cindy?

Cindy: That's also true. He has kind of taken that same approach. We talked a lot about kind of the ways, the secrets to success for all endurance athletes. And he really does think it's a combination of committing to a goal and also maintaining some of that childlike excitement and wonder. And you can see that in the way that he runs his business. He's focused, he's serious, he's intense, he has a goal but he also wants to do new things that are fun and exciting for both him and the athletes he coaches. So one of the exciting and fun things that he's done is put in an altitude room in Well Fit. I got a chance to try it out. It was a pretty cool experience basically you go in there and you work really hard for a really short period of time. And if you swap out a couple of your hard workouts on flat land for a couple workouts in that room when you're training for a triathlon or marathon, Sharone really thinks that you could do some pretty incredible things to achieve your goals. So it's kind of a cool option for athletes here in the Chicago area. And it was interesting to hear him talk about how he not only wants to use it to help athletes here. It's part of his goal to kind of share this with athletes across the country and really kind of get this idea into the sport.

Jeana: It's like moving to Colorado but not actually having to.

Cindy: Right, exactly. Although there are mountains painted on the wall so if you narro...

Some of the best athletes in the world. Founders and CEOs. Authors of bestselling books, internationally known fitness gurus, even reality television stars.

For 62 episodes now, we on the #WeGotGoals team have had the good fortune to interview some pretty impressive individuals. We’ve learned so much about what’s powered them to the top (and we hope you have, too!).

But the more goal-getters we talked with, the more something dawned on us. Nearly every single one of them had a failure story, a way they fell short en route to what they viewed as their biggest high. What’s more, they nearly all volunteered to share it with us in a conversation about what was most essential to their achievements.

So co-hosts Jeana Anderson Cohen, Maggie Umberger, Kristen Geil and I took a moment to do another guest-less but host-ful episode--we’ll be recording one of these every month or so from now on--to discuss what these failure stories taught us about resilience.

Resilience--something Cohen admits she’s “kind of obsessed with” lately--amounts to the ability to recover quickly from difficulties, adapt to shifting circumstances, and thrive despite, or perhaps even because of, setbacks.

What enables some people to emerge triumphant from situations that would crush a normal human? Our guests offer us clues. Some leaned on a support network, others took the opportunity to reflect and refocus, and a few stayed laser-focused on a bigger, long-term goal. All, it seems, had incorporated their failures into the narratives that made them the high achievers they are today.

We talked through some of the failures that stood out for us over the past year-plus of episodes. For me, it was when Dr. Ari Levy failed his medical boards--then retook them, and now owns a successful practice, SHIFT. Or when Kathrine Switzer nearly got pulled off the course at the 1967 Boston Marathon, but chose to finish instead, and make history.

Cohen contrasts these with the story of Lee Kemp. The wrestler made the U.S. Olympic team in 1980; then, the country boycotted the Games. That failure was beyond his control and irreconcilable, and still fuels the way he lives his life today.

The setback that stood out for Geil was Jessica Zweig, who’s now the founder and CEO of the SimplyBe agency. Before that, she co-founded Cheeky Chicago--and from all outward appearances, was hugely successful. But inside, she felt so conflicted she eventually became physically sick.

For Umberger, Stephanie Johnson’s tale of applying for Survivor for17 years straight--and ultimately getting kicked off before the merge--highlighted the way success and failure aren’t always necessarily black and white. And Maaria Mozaffar, who failed the bar exam five times before moving on to succeed as a civil rights attorney, author, and activist, showed just how powerful persistence can truly be.

In the midst of reflecting on what we’d heard from our guests, we shared our own failure stories--career aspirations gone awry, opportunities missed, times we felt like fish out of water. I think we’d all agree those experiences shaped us and led us to where we are today (a spot we all seem pretty pleased with). And, we discussed the ways we’ll continue to build self-care and coping skills into our daily lives so we can nurture our resistance and boost others up along the way.

A few things we brought up:

Have a failure story of your own? We’d love to hear it. Share it with us in the comments, or--better yet--record a voice memo and send it to [email protected]. You could be featured on #WeGotGoals in the future.

Listen to the full episode anywhere you get your podcasts—including, now, on Spotify! If you like what you hear, please help us spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners.

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[0:00]

Jeana: Welcome to We Got Goals, a podcast by ASweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. But this week we are talking about past episodes of Goals and most notably about failure and resilience. I’m Jeana Anderson Cohen, with me I have Cindy Kuzma, Maggie Umberger, and Kristen Gial.

Woman 1: Morning Jeana.

Woman 2: Hello.

Woman 3: Hi.

Jeana: So I know that we all have a lot of episodes that were our favorites. And a lot of guests who were highly motivational and have gone through a lot of things. And we wanted to take this time on this week’s episode to talk through those guests. So Cindy, can you tell me about a guest who failed, got back up, that resonated with you.

Cindy: Oh my gosh, well I mean the first thing that really struck me when talking about this topic was, I kind of thought back through all the episodes, and pulled out some of the notable failures and there's so many and just that pure volume is really encouraging. Because we have some darn impressive people on the show and almost every single one of them has a failure story and some of them are huge failure stories. It’s just a part of success. And that in and of itself was just something that stuck me when as I was thinking about this. One of the individual failure stories that spoke to me a lot was way back to, I think it was maybe episode 5 or 6. Dr. Ari Levy, now he’s a physician, he owns his own medical practice. Sort of a holistic health practice here in Chicago, Shift.  But he failed his medical boards the first time he took them. And what really struck me about that story was that he realized that it wasn’t. You know it’s one thing to kind of fail when you take a step too far or when you’re really ambitious. And you’re aren’t quite ready for the next challenge. But he realized he failed because he didn’t do the work. He didn’t study enough, he didn’t prepare, he didn’t dedicate the time. And so he had an extra layer of shame and guilt on top of his just plain failing the medical boards. And then with that comes all the questions of what’s going to happen to my career, am I going to lose my job, am I ever going to be a successful physician when I can’t even pass this exam. What he did next, that struck me again was despite that shame and guilt, he really leaned on his support network. And we all need to do that when we fail but sometimes it's extra hard when we kind of realize that we contributed to our own failure. We're so still deserving of that support and we need to reach out to people, kind of get past ourselves, get past that shame and guilt. And connect with the people who care about us re...

Sometimes, we’ll have a guest on the #WeGotGoals podcast who doesn’t actually like or set goals (I’m looking at you, Dawn Jackson Blatner and Josh Katt). For whatever reason, they don’t connect to the term, or they’ve employed a different paradigm to accomplish great things.

Which is fantastic—one of the best things about the show, in our humble opinions, is the glimpse at the wide variety of paths high achievers have taken to reach success.

But this week’s guest, Nicole Bernard Dawes, has the opposite perspective. Goals drive nearly everything the founder and CEO does. She aims to set both ambitious aspirations—say, starting an organic snack company, Late July Snacks, that hit $100 million in sales this year—and small mini-targets, including what she wants to get out of each business meeting. And she’s not afraid to lay them all on the line.

“If you don’t even know what you want, you’re definitely not going to get it,” she says. “And I think clearly articulating what you want helps people.

Setting goals helped Dawes recover from an incredibly difficult year in 2009. First there was the recession. Then her father Steve Bernard—her co-founder (and, before that, the founder of Cape Cod Potato Chips)—passed away from pancreatic cancer. When he died, the bank called the loan, leaving Dawes and her husband/business partner Peter scrambling to raise cash.

“Through that, it forced my husband and I to take a hard look at kind of who we were at Late July and what we wanted this company to really become,” Dawes says. What did they decide and how did they pull through? In our interview, Dawes shares seven lessons that kept her moving forward.

One of the most critical changes Late July made the following year was to the hiring process. Being qualified to work at the company, they decided, meant more than just having the right education and experience. Dawes began looking for people who’d make a positive addition to the environment, and spent a significant amount of time having multiple team members interview each candidate. In some cases, that meant positions went unfilled for years, a stressor in a fast-growing company. However, the result was worth it: “I truly believe today that we have the most wonderful team in our industry,” she says. “We have a group of people that wakes up every day ready to support each other and believes in the company and believes in the products.”

Dawes made another big decision in the wake of her father’s passing: to leave cookies behind and enter the tortilla chip market. That was no small shift—cookies made up $2 million of the company’s $9 million in sales at the time. However, Dawes felt strongly she wanted to steer the company in a healthier direction. Of course, she wasn’t satisfied with just any crunchy nibble. She aimed to create the number-one tortilla chip in the natural-food business. “Singular focus on being number one requires all your effort, and all your team’s effort,” she says. “No matter what our team was doing, we always kept that goal in the back of our mind.

It took a year to perfect and introduce the tortilla chips, and they got off to a rocky start. “That was a little bit scary because we had just bet our entire company's future on this launch,” Dawes says. That taught her Late July needed to build brand awareness in this new space. So, they spent the next year concentrating on a few key accounts, securing a foothold there before spreading their wings to the larger marketplace. That focus helped them course correct quickly. “I think we might have become the number three in the first year,” Dawes says.

That rapid rise was built on superior flavor. As the daughter of a potato-chip mogul father and a mother who owned a health food store in Cape Cod, Dawes prioritizes making food that’s both nutritious and delicious. “I’ve always believed that as a natural products brand, we have an obligation for the entire industry to make our products taste great,” she says. “When a consumer has a bad experience with one natural product, they make an assumption about everything.” And to succeed in the highly competitive salty snack realm requires repeat business: “No consumer is ever going to buy a snack twice if they don't like the way it tastes.”

How, exactly, does Late July makes its chips so scrumptious? Besides constant comparison to competitors and making sure the whole team is eating—and loving—them, Dawes says they stay alert for constructive criticism. She applies this philosophy to all areas of her life and business; it’s a key component of her overall positive outlook. “We’re all just kind of learning and growing, and none of us are perfect. The more receptive you are to hearing things that could be done better, the more likely you are to improve faster,” she says.

Looking to the future, Dawes is aiming for Late July to dominate the salsa category too (they’re in the midst of launching that line, and popcorn, right now). However, she also gives her personal life high priority by setting goals there, too. Her big goal is to be available to her two sons, now ages 16 and almost 12. She puts it in practice by working from home more and eating family dinner together four or five nights a week. And, she encourages her employees to take similar steps. “We all have lives, and when you’re a high-achieving person, you have to not hide that,” she says. “It’s OK—it doesn’t make you less of a productive person to prioritize your private life.”

Listen to Nicole Benard Dawes’ full episode anywhere you get your podcasts—including, now, on Spotify! If you like what you hear, please help us spread the word by leaving a rating or a review. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to [email protected].)

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There's something to learn by listening to any individual's success story, but when the story starts with being kicked out of high school at 15, one can get pulled especially quickly into hearing how it panned out.

I found myself at the edge of my seat while sitting across from Pivotal Coaching Co-Founder Scott Hopson for the latest #WeGotGoals podcast episode interview because that was exactly how his story started.

If you're in the training industry, maybe you've attended continuing education sessions through NASM, EXOS, The Gray Institute, or Power Plate International; if so, you've probably studied Hopson's material or done a workshop with him. He also helped launch Midtown Athletic Club, Chicago's first urban sports resort with 575,000 square feet of health and wellness amenities. And, as the co-founder of PTA Global, he's coached countless personal trainers in a unique approach focused on behavioral science.

Essentially, Hopson has worked his entire professional life on becoming the best version of himself as a personal trainer, but he's also dedicated his life to the fitness industry from a practical coaching, educational, and business perspective. And with the prestigious laundry list of titles he possesses, you can imagine why I found it unbelievable that it all started with being kicked out of school.

But, as Hopson told me during the interview, when he decided he wanted to turn his life around, he started at the source where he felt like he was always home, the one place where he felt "in flow" amidst it all - with his coaches when he was playing sports.

He held onto the memory of being coached and let that passion drive him forward. Now, helping others achieve their movement goals makes him feel alive, and he's equally passionate about training other coaches to bring out their fullest potential and thus, inspire clients to become the best version of themselves too.

The most interesting thing about our interview, though, had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the human behind the science of coaching. In order to go after the "what" (whether that's a specific fitness goal or any other transformational goal in your life), "you have to articulate the 'why,'" Hopson said.

Ultimately, understanding that it's not about him as a coach at all when he's in a coaching session has helped him understand how to navigate every other kind of partnership and communication in his life.

"If I'm going to coach you, I've got to create an environment for you to train yourself, because I can't do it," Hopson said. "That'd be quite arrogant and ignorant of me to believe I can. If I create an environment for you to change yourself, that affects how I communicate to you, how I listen, do I have empathy? And I apply that to my business relationships. Am I listening? Am I willing to consider the possibility that they don't only have a point of view, but they might actually change mine?"

Hopson also mentioned that he leans into his intuition to help guide his unique, nonlinear career path and what big goals he goes after.

"I'm at my happiest, and in flow, where nothing else matters than that present moment, when I'm being of service to someone as a coach," he said.

I commented on how lucky he was to know that feeling - a feeling of just being in total flow. He replied that we all have it, in some way, shape or form. We just have to notice and be open to tapping into it.

"It doesn’t happen every day, [but] there are things you can do to connect you back to it if you lose it – whether it’s prayer or meditation, or whatever it is that connects you to that thing," Hopson said.

Listen to Scott Hopson's episode of the #WeGotGoals podcast to hear one success story you likely won't ever forget. You can listen anywhere you get your podcasts (did we mention, we're on Spotify now?) If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or a review! We'd really appreciate it. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to [email protected].)

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Transcript:

Jeana: Welcome to #WeGotGoals a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high-achievers about their goals. I’m Jeana Anderson Cohen. With me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma.

Maggie: Morning Jeana!

Cindy: Good morning Jeana!

Jeana: Morning! Maggie, you talked to Scott Hobson this week, right?

Maggie: I did! I spoke with Scott Hobson and he has a lot of roles which I will try to give you in the upfront here but he will do a better job of talking about the many companies that he has started. And from his career trajectory, he’s been a personal trainer, he has coached coaches. He still loves to coach people on how to help other people achieve their goals. He is the founder, co-founder of PTA Global as well as Pivotal Coaching. But essentially what he does, is he helps people move better.  Whether that is individuals or people within big gyms or at really large conferences and for fitness professionals across the world. He’s been to 40 countries to teach. He’s also an author, a writer, and a speaker. And I was so lucky to get to speak to him about his goals of which he has many.

Jeana: But he also failed big once, right Maggie?

Maggie: I didn’t realize this. I didn’t know this until we were talking for this interview, but he was kicked out of high school. And he kind of tossed it out there and I was honestly shocked because he has done so many things. He is the co-founder of Pivotal coaching which is a world-wide coaching business now. And I was honestly surprised because he is so accomplished. He’s so well spoken, he’s so driven. But I learned that he did get kicked out of high school and it took something for him to realize that in order for him to turn his life around he needed to find the thing that made him feel like he was in flow, is what he calls it. And when he feels like he’s in flow, he knows he’s doing the right thing and the only thing that he felt that kind of sensibility around was when with his rugby team and when he was being coached by his coaches. He felt like he was at home and he wanted to do that more. He wanted to do that in any capacity he could, so he became a personal trainer. He kept going back to school, he kept learning more and his fervor for learning more about human movement and just how people behave around fitness. It’s a much broader topic for him then just like what happens in a coaching session. And he’s really turned that enthusiasm, is what he calls it. This spirit for understanding how people move into his life-long career. Which is huge leaps and bounds away from getting kicked out of high school years ago.

Jeana: And he feels like it’s important to coach the humans who are doing the movement and not actually coach the movement. Which is an interesting semantic issue, it’s an interesting word choice. What does he mean by that and how does that fit into his overall philosophy?

Maggie: So Scott has the wherewithal to know that what happens in the gym is only a tiny part of your day. And he knows that as long as you just throw anatomical cues at people it’s going to go over their head. They have to find their why. And so he’s become really, really passionate about helping other coaches learn how to speak to people to meet them where they are and to really influence and inspire change for people on a greater level than just going through the motions of a program, of going through the workout. We say this all the time at aSweatLife that fitness can be the catalyst to you living your best life and that what happens in the gym can absolutely affect you life outside of the gym if you let it. If you want it to and he has started to focus a lot of the training and the protocols within Pivotal Coaching around human behavior and how can what coaches do in your training sessions influence how that training session goes. It's so much more of an emotional thing than just a physical thing which is interestingly a large part of the conversation that we had was just about how connected to his own emotional well-being he is. Like when he’s not in flow as I was saying, he knows it and he needs to make a change. And that's what happened when he was director of a really large facility that he's still incredibly involved with and he loves it very much. But when he was doing a role that he could do but he felt a little bit more stressed by being in it. It was apparent to him that he needed to make a change and he could be a better asset in a different capacity. So that when he could actually get back to working with people, for people and helping. Really his passion is working ...

Elite runner Jordan Hasay had a goal of winning this year’s Boston Marathon. And she had a good shot—in her first marathon, in Boston last year, Hasay finished third and ran a faster first marathon than any other woman in U.S. history by almost a full three minutes (her 2:23:00 bettered Kara Goucher’s record of 2:25:53, set in 2008).

Last fall at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, she once again finished third, and improved her time to 2:20:57. Magazine profiles were written about her chances.

But this past April 16 was not her day—and not, in her case, because of the epically bad race conditions that knocked out so many other athletes. As Hasay explains on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals, a stress fracture sidelined her the day before the race.

“You put so much into the preparation and then I got so close to being able to race,” she tells me. “When you do set a goal and then you're not able to achieve it or even—I mean, not even being able to toe the start line, that's really tough.”

Hasay took about a week to wallow (which, research shows, is actually good for you, in moderation). Then, she refocused and moved ahead. She set new goals for improving her weaknesses. She worked on strength in the weight room, flexibility on the yoga mat. She called her dad proudly when she did a 30-second handstand.

Eventually, those small goals added up to an emerging comeback. A mile became a mile and a half became 55 per week. That sounds like a lot to us mere mortals, but to someone like Hasay who typically puts in 100-plus when building up for a marathon, it's still far from her normal.

But she’s getting there, and feeling good about her prospects. When Hasay started doing faster workouts again, she and her coach Alberto Salazar noticed improvements. “He goes, it's the yoga! Your stride looks so good!” she says.

Those of us in Chicago will get a chance to see that stride in action gain this fall, when she’ll be back here with her sights set on placing higher than third and beating the American record of 2:19:36 (set in 2006 in London by Deena Kastor).

This injury wasn’t the first time Hasay has overcome obstacles. In fact, her current successes were made possible, in part, by challenges. “You can find the positive in anything,” she says. “I try not to see anything as a negative.”

She’s been running since she was 12. In high school and college, she was a legitimate star on the track—at 16, she ran the 1500 meters in the Olympic Trials. But when she graduated and turned pro, in her words, “I wasn’t having the success that I wanted.”

Like most elite athletes, she revels in the process, enjoying even the tough days. Still, as much as she loved running, she began to realize she needed to refocus to achieve her long-term goals of winning medals on an international level, at the Olympics or a world championship. “You have to see some outcomes in order to keep staying motivated,” she says.

Moving from the track to the roads, and from shorter distances up to the full 26.2-mile marathon, was something she’d always planned on eventually. Actually making the leap was scary. After all, if she hadn’t been any good at it, she would’ve had to refocus entirely.

In October 2016, she ran her first longer road race—the USATF 10 Mile Championships in St. Paul, Minnesota—and won. That gave her a glimmer of renewed hope. Now that she has two successful marathons under her belt, she feels confident she’s on the right path.

“Sometimes when you are setting a goal that helps,” she says. “If you keep trying to go back to the same thing like I was on the track—I have all these memories where I was trying to hit a certain time or pace and I just kind of failed. So maybe just change it up. It’s still running, but it was just totally different kind of vibe for me."

“It’s nice that I found the distance I was really born for,” she says.

All this came in the midst of yet another significant setback. In a sad story I’m grateful she was willing to open up about, Hasay’s mother—her best friend—passed away in 2016, after the 10-mile race but a few months before that first Boston Marathon.

Though she was devastated, Hasay channeled her grief into greatness in her marathon debut. She visualized her mother there with her, drawing strength from her memories and the foundation her family and faith had given her. In an interview afterward, she cried, saying she knew her mom would be proud.

A journal in which she wrote letters to her mother, intertwined with her running log, helped Hasay in the tough weeks and months after. So did spending time with her family—she, her father, and her brother remain extremely tight-knit. “We’re all doing really well, which I’m just thankful for and that kind of propels me forward,” she says.

Listen to her on the full episode of #WeGotGoals on Apple Podcasts here. You’ll hear more about the value she places on rest and recovery, what she cooks for dinner, and how much she can deadlift (hint: WAY more than you’d think for a marathon runner—she’s posted her strength-training routines on Instagram to prove it).

If you like the show as much as we do, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave it a rating and a review — it really does help. And stick around until the end of the episode, where you’ll hear a goal from one of you, our listeners. (Want to be featured on a future episode? Send a voice memo with a goal you’ve crushed, a goal you’re eyeing, or your best goal-getting tip to [email protected].)

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JAC: 00:16 Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen, and with me I have Maggie Umberger and Cindy Kuzma.

CK: 00:16 Good morning Jeana.

MU: 00:21 Hey Jeana. How's it going?

JAC: 00:24 I'm doing great and I'm very excited for this week's episode. Cindy, you talk to an incredible athlete, someone who had the fastest U.S. marathon debut, Jordan Hasay.

CK: 00:36 I did. I spoke to Jordan, who, as you mentioned, had an amazing debut in the Boston Marathon last year. She also ran the Chicago Marathon last year where she came in third with an even better time of two hours, 20 minutes and 57 seconds, which is blistering fast and she's coming back to run Chicago again this fall, so she was in town and I had a chance to sit down with her and it was wonderful.

JAC: 00:58 And Jordan hasn't always had the smoothest sort of training record. There was a moment where she encountered injury, right?

CK: 01:05 Yes. She in fact was supposed to run the Boston Marathon again this year and was injured right...

In December 2017, I called Laura Vanderkam to ask her what I needed to know about time tracking if I was going to attempt to do it. What's time tracking? It's exactly what it sounds like - keeping tabs on how you spend your time all day, every day, for as long as you want - and I was intrigued by the prospect of attempting to do it.

After reading Vanderkam's book I Know How She Does It, I knew I wanted to track my time for at least a week to see what I could learn (hint: so much). One of my biggest takeaways was that by analyzing the data on how you do spend your time, you can make better-informed decisions about how you want to spend your time and how you're going to do that.

When Vanderkam came out with her latest book, Off The Clock, I knew there was no better time to have her as a guest on our podcast, #WeGotGoals.

We've interviewed some pretty hardcore goal-setters and getters in the past, and discussed anything from how someone might attempt to sell every cup of coffee in the entire world, to doing whatever it takes to become the fastest woman in the world.

Vanderkam is a high achiever whose goals take a different spin: she led the goal setting conversation with what she calls "better than nothing goals" - not Big, Hairy, and Audacious, but incredibly powerful nonetheless.

Case in point, Vanderkam has run at least one mile a day for more than 500 consecutive days. She talks about how that wouldn't have been possible if she'd set a goal to run a marathon or even to run 30 miles a week, but that one mile is "like nothing," she says, and she's really content with and proud of that goal and the way it makes her feel.

Clearly, Vankderkam is a process-driven person versus an outcome-based goal setter, as proven by her three year time-tracking streak. Prior to writing I Know How She Does It, she set the big goal to track all of her time for one year. Turns out, she liked the accountability it gave her so much, she just kept going. And the lessons she learned over three years of tracking time - plus input from other case studies and experts - make up the newest addition to her collection as an author Off The Clock.

All of this tracking has helped her as she sets goals and spends her time in two key ways:

1. She remembers how she spent her time more fondly and with gratitude: By looking over her own spreadsheets to reflect back on where the hours went, Vanderkam sees all the things she's done - something our brains don't tend to do without bias. Vanderkam notes that our brains have the tendency to remember the negative over the positive (a phenomenon that's been tested and proven), but she's able to reminisce on her past more fondly and strip some of those negative connotations away.

2. She's able to separate the days from one another: She also took notice of what habits she tends to fall into and asks herself, "How is today going to be different from other days?" Vanderkam does this because it helps her to expand time by making memories more, well, memorable.

"When the brain thinks about time, its sense of memory perception is affected by how many memories you have in that unit of time," Vanderkam says. When we talk about time flying by, she continues, we're experiencing the shortcut our brain takes to group similar memories together. "So that's how life starts to disappear into these memory sinkholes."

Sure, we need routines to help us make decisions quickly and efficiently, but what are we turning into a routine that would be more fun if we did something otherwise? Vanderkam encourages doing things differently, from trying something new to simply walking a different route to work to make your brain remember days differently and apart from each other.

Listen to her on the full episode of #WeGotGoals on Apple Podcasts here. You'll hear the big goals she's outlined for the future and why she's still tracking her time down to the half-hour each and every day.

If you like the show as much as we do, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave it a rating and a review it really does help. And stick around until the end of the episode, goal getters. We have real life goal getting to share from a listener.

Transcript:

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C:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Maggie Umberger and Kristen Geil.

MU:Morning, Jeana.

KG:Hey Jeana.

JAC:Thanks for joining me ladies. Maggie, you did the podcast today and you interviewed Laura Vanderkam.

MU:I did. I interviewed Laura Vanderkam, who is a writer, an author, a speaker. She's written so many books that just the title alone makes you just think, I need to read this book. Recently she just finished off the clock and so it has just been released. She's a time management expert. She tracks her own time. She helps other people become more productive by analyzing how they spend their time and it's a really fascinating job that she has, that she's also turned into a career in multiple different facets. So companies work with her, she works with individuals and she, she tracks her time personally and kind of describes her experience doing that as well.

JAC:Now when you say time tracking, it gives me flashbacks to agency life, but she means it differently, right? Maggie?

MU:Yes and no. She tracks her time down to the 30 minute increment, which does remind me of agency life for having to remember who you're working with and what clients you're working on, all the way down to the quarter hour. But Laura tracks our time by analyzing where she spends her time with work, with her personal life and doing life admin things. She keeps the categories really broad, but it gives her information about really where she's spending her time and what her habits are and if she is aligning what her goals are with where she is spending her days.

JAC:Super interesting and she even gets right down to the sleep time, which you'll hear more about in the episode. I don't want to blow it for you. But Maggie, I know you tracked your time personally right around the New Year, so you have experience with this.

MU:I do, I got to interview her already for just a phone conversation and ask her how to go about starting to do this task because it seems pretty daunting at first, but she, she told me not to get too bogged down or in the weeds with it. I could keep it really general, but just to keep a log and I did it in my google calendar of how I'm spending my time. And it did a lot of things for me as in terms of showed me where I was spending more time than I thought. Sometimes I would say that I was completely bogged down with some assignment or some piece of work and then when I looked at where I was spending that time, sometimes it was just in the transition of getting from place to place and so it wasn't actually with that task or whatever it was.

MU:It's just a nice way to see where you're actually spending time and then the story you create around that. But it also helped me see where I could be a little bit more productive and so if I would put it in my calendar that I was going to do it. I actually did it during and I try to do that more often than not. But when I was doing that exercise, I was super accountable to myself by saying this is realistically going to take me 90 minutes and then I would make sure it took me 90 minutes and if I needed more time I would carve out a separate hour or whatever it was later in my week so that I could be really realistic about how long things were going to take me. I was checking more things off of my to-do list and I felt like I was actually doing the things I was said I was going to be doing.

KG:Maggie, Laura also mentioned something that I had never heard of before that she called better than nothing. Goals. Can you give us an idea of what that is?

MU:Yeah. So, and I also don't want to spoil it in the episode either, but we could have talked forever about just time tracking because it is really fascinating. But, uh, the idea of looking at time tracking and how it can help you set your goals is something that we kind of focus this episode on. She talks a little bit about those better than nothing goals. And one of those, um, goals that she has was just running a mile every day. She talks about it being almost like nothing. Like she could just slough it off and just that could, she could attain that goal no matter what. But if she set even a m...

Julie Smolyanksy is a tough woman to nail down.

Not in terms of her schedule — although she is all over the place, having recently published her first book, The Kefir Cookbook, while running Lifeway Foods full-time as CEO and President.

Instead, over the course of our conversation on the #WeGotGoals podcast, I found myself trying — and repeatedly failing — to put Smolyanksy neatly in a box that I could easily write 500 words on in a blog post.

Smolyanksy is a CEO/President, sure. But she's also been the first female CEO of a publicly held firm (when she took over Lifeway Foods in 2002 after her father's unexpected death). She's a mother and a feminist activist, identities that drive her decisions as a businesswoman who wants to set a strong example for her daughters. She's an immigrant who came to the United States as an infant with her parents, who brought kefir with them as a taste of Eastern Europe and later turned it into a $12 million business (up to $120 million in 2017). She's sharp as a tack and incredibly organized and detail-oriented, but she's a believer in holistic health and says things like "the universe is going to give me what I need" without a hint of irony.

Needless to say, my head was spinning as we sat down to talk, knowing there were so many dimensions to this woman. But interestingly, one of the things we talked about was the benefit of ignoring your brain and listening to your gut, something Smolyansky got a crash course in when she lost her phone in Mexico for a few days.

"It was like sort of the universe doing a wake up call like 'Julie, stop, stop, slow down, stop, listen to yourself, listen to your body, you're spinning out of control,'" Smolyanksy revealed.

Without her phone to distract her outwardly, Smolyanksy spent her days doing yoga, meditating, and journaling, only to find that hip pain she had dealt with since pregnancy had mysteriously disappeared after a particularly cathartic meditation.

"I think that was this moment of following my intuition," mused Smolyanksy, noting how after that realization, she was able to look back in her life at times she had ignored her gut instincts only to regret it later.

Today, Smolyanksy hones her intuition through regular SoulCycle classes, running, enjoying the occasional glass of red wine — and of course, incorporating kefir into her diet regularly.

"What we're learning now about the microbiome, I am blown away by how important it is having that gut, which we call a second brain now, how important it is to have one that's running well. When it's healthy, it's like magic."

Listen to Smolyanksy's episode of #WeGotGoals wherever you get your podcasts to learn more about taking over the family business during a tumultuous, grief-filled time, plus how she feels her identity as a feminist impacts her daughters and what it's like to be the only young, immigrant female CEO in a room full of old, white males. To get more of #WeGotGoals, make sure you subscribe and leave a rating or a review so others can hear these stories, too.

Psst... don't stop listening when the interview portion is over. We saved a few minutes at the end of the podcast to devote to real-life goal-getters like you, and we'll hear from one inspiring goal-getter each week.

Start Transcript:

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JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen and with me I have Maggie Umberger and Kristin Geil.

KG: Good morning, Jeana.

MU: Good morning, Jeana.

JAC: Good morning and today Kristen, you talk to a real boss.

KG: Yes. I talked to Julie Smolansky who is the president and CEO of Lifeway Kefir.

JAC: And Julie was not the first president and CEO of Lifeway Kefir. She sort of stumbled into or was thrust into that role under some not so ideal circumstances, but really thrived there, right?

KG: Yeah, exactly. So Lifeway Kefir is Julie's family business. It was started by her father. Her mom contributed a lot as well, and she and her brother actually both grew up working for her father and learning the ins and outs of running Lifeway Kefir. Then in 2002, her dad passed away very suddenly from a heart attack and at that time Lifeway Kefir was about a $12,000,000 business. Julie took over the next day as CEO and president and began running the company. It made her the youngest female to be the CEO of a publicly held company at that time. She was somewhere around 27, so very young, but since she's been in that role, she has grown Lifeway Kefir to $120,000,000 as of last year, 2017. So we talked a little bit about how tough it must have been to be thrown into the CEO role in such dark circumstances, but she actually had a really unique perspective on it. She thought that having to take over as CEO right away was her father's way of leaving her a project where she could direct her energies and help work through her grief without being totally consumed by it.

MU: And we've gotten to speak to many different CEOs and entrepreneurs on this podcast and one thing that has come up as a theme that I found pretty interesting is how certain people have talked about the importance of their intuition and how they have really, really leaned on it and making decisions. And so it's obviously not something that they take lightly and Julie is one of those CEOs as well. Is that right?

KG: Yeah, so a little bit of backstory. We obviously talked a lot about Lifeway Kefir and how kefir is so good for your gut health with all of the probiotics, so in the biological sense, Julie's always thinking about the gut, right, but we also talked a little bit about how she's learned to hone her intuition and listen to her other gut, so to speak, and how that served her in the business world and she told a story that you'll hear about losing her phone for a few days in Mexico and how she learned to just figure stuff out without technology and she offers some really good advice for anyone who's looking to disconnect a little bit and really hone in to their inner self and driving their own decision making without outside influences.

KG: And I think that's another thing you'll hear come through this podcast a lot is I feel like there's really two sides to Julie. You know, on one hand she's a really sharp business woman. Always thinking about her next move. She just wrote a book that recently came out. So she's very savvy in that sense of the word, but she also speaks really beautifully about listening to the universe and learning how to hone her intuition and she's a little more woo-woo than what you might expect from a CEO, especially someone who is such a young CEO in a tough business world. So I think you'll get a lot out of this interview guys.

JAC: And we can't wait to hear Kristin with Julie. It sounds like it was a really great interview. And stick around listener for the end of the episode where you'll hear from real life goal-getters and what they're achieving out there in the real world today. Here's the show.

KG: Welcome to #WeGotGoals. My name is Kristen Geil and today I am here with Julie Smolansky, the president and CEO of Lifeway Kefir. Julie, how are you today?

JS: I'm doing great. How are you?

KG: I’m great. We're so excited to have you on today. Lifeway Kefir has been a friend of aSweatLife for awhile now and we've gotten used to trying your delicious kefir products at all of our SweatWorking events and we're especially excited to have you on today too because we're going to hear more about the book that you've recently published. So thank you for being here today. First of all, we'll start off with the question that we ask everybody who comes on this podcast and that is, what is a big goal that you've achieved in the past. Why was it important to you and what steps did you take to get there?

JS: Well, one of my goals for quite a while has been to write a book and I finally did. I just published the Kefir Cookbook and it took me quite awhile to write and it was a challenging for a variety of reasons, but we did it. I'm super proud of it. I share a lot of great stories from my life, my family's life. I touch on a lot of various issues from being an immigrant and a refugee to a female entrepreneur to a mom. Um, so, you know, even though it's a cookbook, it's very personal and I, I think it was sort of like the appetizer to my first kind of entry into publishing and writing. But yeah, that I am right now just kind of sitting back and watching the book have its impact and being able to talk to my customers and various people as I kind of tour around the country and hear about how kefir has improved people's lives. It's been very, very touching to me. So I'm, I'm kind of just enjoying this moment right now.

KG: And you mentioned just now that the Kefir Cookbook is more than just an actual cookbook. I've flipped through it a little bit and it seems like there's a lot of stories of your family woven in. How did your family influenced the conception and the actual writing of this book?

JS: Yeah, so I mean, you know, my father passed away, which is how I ended up as the CEO of Lifeway. Uh, he passed away about 16 years ago now. And so he, for me, it was sort of writing some of the stories that were important to me to share that I wanted to sort of document and leave for next generations because those stories become diluted over time or lost....

If there's one thing I've learned from listening to over a year of #WeGotGoals, it's that building a business or achieving a major goal is rarely as easy as these rockstar goal-getters make it seem.

But for Katlin Smith, keeping things simple is the secret ingredient to her success with Simple Mills, an all-natural baking mix and foods company that uses recognizable, natural ingredients in place of things like high-fructose corn syrup and artificial ingredients.

Smith started Simple Mills in 2012, right after she began cleaning up her diet and cutting out processed food and sugar. Almost instantly, a lightbulb went off in her head.

"Growing up, I learned okay, food affects your weight, it affects your digestive system. But never did I think that food could affect your immune system or the other things we're learning about now, like anxiety, depression, or cancer. And it was just stunning to me that food can affect those things."

Armed with these realizations, Smith realized she had to do something to change how people eat — and thus, Simple Mills was born.

And even though the premise of Simple Mills was — and continues to be — clean, nutritious foods for a better life, Smith has never shied away from a great mission that expands beyond the grocery store aisle. In fact, once she realized how much her health was affected by a clean, unprocessed diet, Smith went home and did something I truly identify with: she made a list.

But not just any list. "I brainstormed 10 different ways that I could impact the way that people are eating and what they're eating and how many kinds of whole foods they're eating," Smith shared. "It ranged everything from going and getting my master's in public health to starting a natural food company that would help change what people are eating."

(Spoiler alert: that last one is the idea that won out)

Recently, Smith was able to participate in a life-changing trip made available through her inclusion on the 2017 Forbes' 30 Under 30 list. With about 85 other attendees, Smith traveled all over Israel, including at the Syrian and Jordan border, learning about all the complexities behind the conflict in the Middle East.

Seems heavy for something that looks like a press tour on the surface, right? Yes — but according to Smith, the trip helped open her eyes to the larger complexities facing the world, in addition to sparking ideas for how she and Simple Mills can have an impact in spaces larger than grocery stores.

"There were two key realizations for me on that trip," Smith reflected. "The first was that what we have today we can take for granted really easily, and things can change. The other thing that I really thought coming out of that trip was just how not simple conflict is."

Even more surprising about the trip? It was entirely paid for by Schusterman, the company who invited Smith and the other attendees. So what was the catch?

No catch, revealed Smith — just a firm reminder that with great power comes great responsibility, and all the standout attendees on the trip had the means to truly change the world. Fresh off the trip when we talked, Smith takes that responsibility incredibly seriously and intends to start by using Simple Mills as a platform to change the food industry. From there, the sky's the limit.

"I do plan on doing more things with my life than just Simple Mills. There are a lot of problems in the world, and a lot of problems to solve and I think that if you have like the energy and the resources to impact the world, you absolutely should."

We can't wait to see what Smith does next. Listen to Katlin talk to me about her goals on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals by downloading his episode wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show as much as we do, be sure to subscribe and leave it a rating and a review.

And! Don't take out your earbuds before you listen to the end of this podcast — we've got a real-life goal from a goal-getter like you that you've got to tune in for.

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JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talked to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Kristin Geil and Maggie Umberger.

MU: Good morning, Jeana.

KG: Hey Jeana.

JAC: Good morning

MU: Kristen, this week you got to speak to Katlin Smith, who is the founder and CEO of Simple Mills.

KG: That's right. Maggie. I got to chat with Katlin Smith who has been a friend of aSweatLife for awhile and it's been so exciting watching her company grow from when she first founded it back in 2013 while she was still working as a full time consultant at Deloitte. It was really interesting and inspiring to hear her talk about how she would wake up at 4 in the morning, bake for a few hours and then go right to her full time job and yeah, I think we got a lot of great information out of her from this interview.

JAC: And we've talked to Katlin a few times just through the years and seeing the company grow, but this is really the first time we've heard her talk about how she's really introspective. Can you speak to that?

KG: Yeah, so Katlin is a self described introvert, which I always think is really fascinating for people who are entrepreneurs and CEOs who—she also mentioned she's in meetings, you know, 70 to 80 percent of her day, so I was really interested to hear how she balances that side of her personality with being such a forward facing public persona. So we got to talking about what helps her recharge from being in front of people all the time, always talking, always in conversations and I think the tips that she offered for how to recharge as a business leader who's an introvert will be really helpful for our listeners.

MU: Speaking of being a business leader, she was one of Forbes’ 2017, 30 under 30 business leaders. So she just came back from an incredible trip to Israel and you got to speak to her just off of coming home from that trip.

KG: Yeah. So Katlin was one of Forbes 30 under 30 last year and one of the perks that she was offered is that another company sponsors a full-blown trip to Israel for anyone who's graduated, so to speak, from the 30 under 30 class. And this company covers everything from airfare to hotels to experiences. And Katlin was talking about how amazing it was and how they kept blowing her mind with all the different experiences that she and I think it was roughly 80 other people got to have. But when she and her other travelers, we're asking the trip leaders, you know, what's the catch? Why did you bring us all here? The trip leaders, were simply saying that they wanted these business leaders of the present and of the future to realize how much power they truly have when it comes to changing the world.

KG: And you know, she quoted the old Spiderman line with great power comes great responsibility. And I thought that was really interesting because Katlin started Simple Mills, she said, to change the way people eat, which is not a small feat in and of itself. But now after this trip, it really seems like she's thinking much more globally about how she and her company can impact the world in ways beyond just how we eat and where we grocery shop.

JAC: And it's important to note that what simple mills makes is baked goods and sort of the Betty Crocker-esque products that are gluten-free and made out of whole foods and whole ingredients. And as someone who eats gluten free, it was incredibly impactful for me because I am an added Cheezit in years and Simple Mills has a product, a cracker, that's just like a Cheezit. So can you talk a little bit about why she started down this journey to make this gluten-free whole food option?

As president of the U.S. expansion at F45 Training - the Australian-born fitness franchise - Marc Marano's job is as much sales as it is strategy. He's here to make Americans fall in love with F45 - and to get more franchisees in the process.

And as you'll hear Marano talk through on this week's episode of #WeGotGoals, getting to F45 - the big goal he accomplished - required a giant leap away from his family's legacy business passed down from his grandfather to his father and finally to his cousin and him.

As difficult as it was for him to leave the business in property, for Marano, it was even more difficult to watch friend Rob Deutsche. He opened the first F45 in Australia in 2014. “He was former banker, but again like me, decided to hang the tie up for the last time because he needed something better in his life,” Marano recalled.

After six months of careful deliberation, Marano made his decision.

"That goal was achieved only to walk out of a business that I knew everything about to walk into the fitness world that I had only ever been a consumer," he said.

Now the he's in the fitness world, there's no turning back and no slowing down as he chases his next big goal - total market penetration. The franchise is in 22 states in two years.

"In the last 24 months, we've awarded over 300 F45 studios in the U.S. We have currently, I would say it's just about to topple over 100 studios that have opened," Marano said. "We are awarding anywhere between 20 and 50 studios across the country a month."

How's he doing it? "By traveling wherever I have to go, by speaking to whoever I have to."

Uprooting his life on one beach in Australia to another beach in the US, Marano moved to spread F45 to the US from Los Angeles. But he isn't going it alone - he noted that his fiancé Emma Rose - also Australian and known for her time on the Bachelor Australia - has been a steadying presence in his life. A big goal he stated for the future was building a family of six kids.

But first he'll have to wait for his life to settle down - he spends more time in the air, traveling to new F45 locations than he does on the ground.

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JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Cindy Kuzma and Maggie Umberger.

MU: Morning, Jeana.

CK: Good morning, Jeana.

JAC: Hello.

MU: Jeana, you spoke with Marc Marano, the head of North American Expansion of F45 training this week.

JAC: I did. Marc Morano's whole job is to plant as many F45 franchises across the United States as possible, which is super interesting because it's a fitness franchise that comes from Australia, which Marc, you'll hear say in the interview, is not super common for Australia, it's not a franchise sort of country. It's more of like a one shop family owned kind of country.

MU: Well, funnily enough, he also left his family business to do this job. Right?

JAC: He did, yeah. It was a a real emotional struggle for mark as he sort of looked at an opportunity to work with F45, which was started by his friend and help grow that company beyond the borders beyond the continent and country of Australia.

CK: It's interesting too, right, because he kind of talked about even though he had a love for his family business and it was emotional for him to walk away, he had this sense of freedom in doing something that was a little bit more meaningful to him even though ultimately he was then going to be executing someone else's vision instead of carrying his own family legacy forward. Can you talk about how we kind of sorted through all that?

JAC: It was a difficult decision, but at the end of it all, he said that he followed his heart, which is important at the end of the day because you have to get up everyday and do a job. You're spending most of your time at a job and I think what it came down to is he surrounded himself in business originally with family. It was the company that he was working for, it was a multigenerational. Companies started in Australia in real estate that was handed down to him and his cousin by his father and his uncle. He has a big family and family is a huge priority to him. So as he was looking at the business and walking away from it, he did so really respectfully and after some heartfelt conversations because he wanted at that point to follow a passion project and to do something different. He didn't really talk through sort of the idea of legacy, but I would imagine that he had to think long and hard about legacy and about what he was walking away from because he talks about how his father is his, his greatest inspiration and I can only imagine how difficult that must have been. But now mark is on an airplane a lot of the time traveling from city to city in the United States. He's based in L.A. now, he and his Instagram famous slash the Bachelor, Australia famous fiancee, get to travel a lot together and get to do some of this work side by side because her job is really portable and he talked about how having her by his side made it a whole lot less lonely. Because again, I would imagine that going from being surrounded by a support system of your family to sort of striking out on your own is totally different and it's sort of a unique challenge, but here he is doing it and he's built his own sort of family and support system within that business as well.

CK: So we're really excited about hearing this interview with Marc and Jeana.

JAC: And stick around listener for the end of the episode where you'll hear from real life goal-getters and what they're achieving out there in the real world today.

JAC: I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen and I'm here with Marc Marano on the #WeGotGoals podcast.

MM: Thanks Jeana, thank you for having me on.

JAC: So mark, how do you spend your days?

MM: Now, I'm very fortunate to be in a career path that um, and we'll go into that a little bit later, but in something that I really, truly love. I felt that for a long time, even though I was working in a position with family and in a family business and you know, putting on that suit and tie every day that I was a corporate refugee, I use the term corporate refugee because I was not working for the man so to speak, but I was working in a career path that was financially rewarding, but it wasn't giving me any soulful gratification.

JAC: That sort of tells me what led you to do what you do every single day, but what you do every single day is F45 and you are in charge of ...

MM: I'm the president of the U.S. expansion at F45 training, so I try and bring F45, which is the world's fastest growing fitness franchise, to people around the U.S.

JAC: World's fastest growing fitness franchise. That is a big title and a big responsibility for someone who's in charge of bringing it to the United States. Wouldn't you say?

MM: Very much so. Very much so.

JAC: Is it a, is it a lot of sort of responsibility to continue that growth?

MM: Yeah, I mean we're not in any great rush. This has been a very organically grown business. To give you a little bit of the history of F45. We were born in Australia in 2014. One studio, a very good friend of mine, Rob Deutsch, opened up a group training facility. He was former banker, but again like me, decided to hang the tie up for the last time because he needed something better in his life. He opened up a group training facility and kept asking me to come along and try it and I was happy in the existence that I was currently living in both work life and in my exercise life, but to support a friend. I said, OK, I'll come and try it. and was immediately addicted immediately. So much so that fast forward a couple of years I decided to leave my family business to pursue journey of bringing F45 to everyone's life.

JAC: And before we get into the big questions, obviously F45 is a big part of your life, but it, it sounds like F45. You two were born in Australia and I've had to transport or transplant yourself from your homeland to the US. So what has that process been like?

MM: I think Americans and Australians are, they have a lot of similarities and you know, I'm based predominantly in, and I use that loosely, but I'm based predominantly in Los Angeles where our headquarters is in the U.S. Um, the transformation from Australia, Sydney, Australia, which is a coastal city, beautiful beaches, to Los Angeles, which again is a coastal city, beautiful beaches was not a huge culture shock, you know, and I've had the pleasure now of seeing so many different cities of America, meeting so many great people. Every city almost of America for me is like a different country, you know, you have so many different cultures from east to west, north to south.

JAC: We are a hardy stock in Chicago where we are right now filming this or recording this. So I hope that we've been friendly to you.

MM: Chicago is definitely in my top three cities of America.

JAC: Big thumbs up to that. So let's get into the questions. Marc, can you tell me about a big goal that you've accomplished, why it wa...