Bonus Episode: Brief Words Of Wisdom, Introspection & Insight From Ben Greenfield.

Hey, folks, the audio you're about to hear is a bonus, very atypical show, but I wanted to pour my heart out to you for about 15 minutes. So take it for what it's worth. No commercials, no interruptions. Here we go.

Lately, I've been thinking quite a bit about life. I've been engaged in some deep introspection and self inspection, which I think is healthy for everyone to do on a regular basis. In my case, I was forced into it and into a state of extreme humbleness and ego disillusion when I failed to complete one of my recent competitions, the Train to Hunt national championships in Colorado. I came down with an extremely high heart rate, dizziness, extreme fatigue, and an inability to simply put one foot in front of the other during that event. Likely a combination of just pushing myself too hard lately and jet lag and altitude, and a cluster of factors that basically left me lying in my bed for about 12 hours, barely able to sleep, staring at the ceiling and thinking about life.

Now.

One thing that you need to understand is that I'm a fan of personality tests. It's something that we, of course, are very big on at Kion. Everyone takes an Enneagram. And my Enneagram.

Puts me in a very, very high category of what's called a one and a three. A perfectionist and also an achiever. That is a pretty dang dangerous combination because as you can imagine, this causes me to expect a lot of myself in every task that that I attempt to perform, while simultaneously taking on a lot of tasks all at once. That's an exhausting combination that in many people can lead to burnout, into spinning too many plates at once, into trying to do everything that you're doing, which is often too many things perfectly, which means that you do them perfectly but have zero time left over for relaxation, for hobbies, for family, or for self care. Or B. Projects begin to decline in quality and those plates crash to the ground. And eventually you crash to the ground as well.

In addition to that, the achiever personality type on the Enneagram dictates that one tends to.

Try to be who others expect them to be, or at least who they think that others expect them to be. As a matter of fact, the direct quote from the Enneagram is that in the headlong rush to achieve whatever they believe will make them more valuable, achievers can become so alienated from themselves that they no longer know what they truly want or what their real feelings or interests are. Thus, the deeper problem is that their search for a way to Be of value increasingly takes them further away from their own essential self with its core of real value. Step by step, their own inner core, their heart's desire, is left behind until they no longer recognize it.

Now that, combined with the perfectionist mentality, creates a person who tries very, very hard to seek the approval of others.

To be perfect, to try to be someone they're not, and to neglect what makes them truly happy. And I feel like I have begun to slip into that myself. That's not to say it's wrong to want to achieve excellence in things. It's not to say it's wrong to want to achieve great things in life. When steered in the right direction, in a state of true authenticity and also a state that enables one to accept the fact that they cannot be perfect, one can go on to achieve great things as an achiever and as a perfectionist.

But in my case, what I've done to myself is I've built constant 247 pressure to do many things. For example, to be fit as a fiddle for the next event.

I have told others I think an error, that in order to drive you to be motivated to be fit, you must always be signed up for something that slightly scares you, something that challenges you. And while this can be healthy, in some cases it can backfire. Meaning that I'm finding myself no longer able to travel, to spend time with my family, to sit in a movie, to enjoy life without simply thinking about whether or not I'll be ready to represent and be that perfect person who inspires others to greatness or whatever excuse I want to give myself at the next event that I'm signed up for, whether it's a triathlon or a obstacle course race or any other form of physical competition. I've always been in competitions since I was a teenager. There's never been a time in the past nearly two and a half decades that I haven't had some type of event, that I haven't worn the mask of an athlete and a competitor.

In addition to constantly feeling the pressure to be fit for the next event, I often feel that I need to project the perfect person to the world. The perfect skin, no crow's eyes, the perfect six pack, rippling muscles, extreme fitness. Everything that I've grown to define myself as because I'm under the impression that that's who the world expects me to be and to dig myself even deeper into that hole. All my bios and all the information about me you can find on the Internet and when I'm getting up on stage to speak, my differentiating characteristic is not necessarily that I'm smart or intelligent or witty or studious or any of those things that I try to maintain and pride myself on. But no, instead he's the ironman triathlete, the masochistic globe trotter, the man who's able to handle anything. The extreme edge of fitness. And I feel like that has dug me into this hole of needing to be that person. And that's exhausting, to constantly be that person.

And then finally, I often feel like I'm a failure if I'm not achieving. I feel like I'm a failure if I'm just laying around reading a work of fiction or watching a movie with my children. I'm somehow shorting myself and not being that person who I'm called to be. And sure, there's some wisdom to that. There's some wisdom to the idea that you don't want to laze around and spend your time unwisely. But at the same time that can be taken to the extreme. And it can very much affect those around you because they sense that what you'd rather be doing is figuring out a way to make yourself even more perfect and go out and achieve even more.

The fact is, I wrote an entire lifebook last year that dictated what I hold dear in life. And frankly, being an extreme athlete wasn't really a big part of that book. Sure, I did include the fact that I think it's important that I occasionally go out and engage in adventures like climbing a mountain or swimming in an icy cold river or doing something that makes you a little bit physically uncomfortable. And I think that's fine. But I think that my life has become skewed much too far in that direction. And the other elements of my lifebook that I dictated that I hold dear, such as building a community and forming close friends and building more relationships and spending more time with my children and spending more time in nature and building my spiritual self. Just as much as I've in the past many years buffeted my physical self. I'm not doing many of those things. I'm still in this vicious cycle of race. Achieve, project, the perfect person, rinse, wash, repeat.

But what do I really want? What do I really want? Well, at this stage in my life, after a deep amount of introspection, the past couple days especially.

I want the following.

I want to be more present in my local community. I want to know my neighbors names. I want to attend events in my local community. I don't want to feel like I have to hop on a plane or go to a conference or go to a mastermind or go to a meetup in order to be with my friends.

I want to build ties and roots in my local community.

Furthermore, I want to be able to help people without feeling rushed. I want to be able to find out about an opportunity to go play my guitar at a nursing home, or go volunteer or go help out at church, attend a Saturday morning prayer session, do things that involve helping others and not look at my calendar and think, well, crap, I can't do that because I've stretched myself too thin. I'm busy and I'm in some other state, some other country, some other nation.

And I'm not saying that I don't want to still travel the world and help people and use the platform that God has given me to affect global change in people's lives when it comes to their health and fitness and longevity and spirituality and happiness. But again, there's an imbalance. I have almost no ties in my local community.

I want to spend more time in nature, but not time in nature as a workout or time in nature being crushed in a race. I just want to be able to go out and learn more of plants, of plant medicine, of hunting, of tracking, of trekking, of building with my hands, of starting fires and building weapons.

Traveling through nature. It makes me happy. I know it. But it's so often that I'm there because I'm there to get ready for a workout or to do an Instagram story about how good I am at harvesting plant X, Y and Z. And I instead just want to enjoy nature for the sake of nature.

I want to participate in sports very similarly, without the feeling that it has to be a workout. I want to play tennis like I did when I was a kid, for hours where you're just hitting balls and having fun with your friends. I want to be able to swim and hike and even lift weights and go to the gym, which I love to do, but without the pressure of it needing to be an absolute suffer fest because I have some event I'm supposed to be in peak physical fitness for.

I want to care for my spirit. I want to wake up in the morning and know that I have the time to pray and to meditate. Heck, even to fast. I've said this before, there's many times when I want to fast and I want to.

Take care of my body in that way, almost as a religious practice, but can't because yet again must dump calories down the hatch to be ready for the next workout to get me ready for the next hardcore masochistic event.

And finally, I want to do what I know truly makes me happy and has made me happy since I was a child.

I want to write and play more music and I want to write and read more fiction. Both of those things are elements that I draw a great deal of happiness out of. And that might sound selfish, but I want to create music that makes people happy. I want to write books that tell the hero's story.

And I don't want every piece of content I create to be about the next injectable anti aging molecule or pill you can pop or biohacked workout. Again. It's balanced. So when I close my eyes and I see myself five years from now, there's that balance. I have friends and relationships in local community, I'm volunteering, I'm with my family, I know every plant in my backyard and in the acreage around my house. I'm still enjoying physically fit events and I'm still a healthy specimen, but not in the way it has been, not in the way that I'm doing it to show that I can beat others. That fire is waning from my belly. I'm transitioning from being that hardcore athlete and I instead have a deep desire to transition to being more of a mentor, more of a teacher, more of a person who enjoys other aspects of life.

And so I'm telling you all this so that you can simply know my position, that you can know where I'm coming from as you see me evolve over the next several months and years. I still have a deep desire to explore the depths of performance and fitness and health and longevity and biohacking and beyond.

But in a balanced manner that doesn't turn me into a person who's simply sitting on a plane, lonely, banging out yet another article on biceps and abs.

Traveling to a conference to speak to a group of people and hang out with the relationships that I've built because I don't have any back home.

I can't take the pressure of being that perfect person any longer. And I realize that's the pressure that I've placed upon myself. I can't take the pressure of feeling as though I need to climb Mount Everest every day. And yes, that's the pressure I've placed upon myself.

I don't want to be that hard charging, high achieving CEO with the set jawline, but the tired eyes and the sadness on the deathbed because.

They really just made a lot of money and did some hard things.

But never actually changed people's souls and spirits or.

Made their family happy or took time to smell the roses.

So I'm in a transitional phase. There are certain commitments that I have committed to this year at the time that you're listening to this, such as competing in some obstacle course races and.

Doing some physically fit events. But.

After that, I really, truly want to focus more.

On building a platform as I have built of health and longevity and adventure and joy and fulfillment and beyond, but with more balance. And I also want to feel as though I can be there for my team at Kian without it being rushed, without it being nearly an afterthought because I'm stretched so thin with so many other plates. But I instead want to build a great company that will also change the world.

And so that's where I'm at in life. And that's why I've created this audio for you, so that you can understand where I'm coming from and perhaps so that you can learn a few things about yourself in the process.

So I thank you for listening to this. I hope it's given you a little bit of perspective on who I am and where I'm coming from and where I plan to go.

So for now, that's all. Oh, one more thing. If you have any comments or feedback for me, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Life Thoughts that's BenGreenfieldFitness. Com Life Thoughts Thanks.