The Truth About Building Durable and Resilient Humans with Ed Williams

You're listening to the PT Profit podcast, episode number 218. Today I'm sitting down with Ed Williams and we're talking all about the truth about building a durable and resilient human. Are you ready? Let's get started. Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast. What's up, coach? Thank you so much for pushing play on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I have a super, super exciting episode lined up for you today. If this is the first time that you're here, welcome. I'm super excited that you're here. I have been wanting to schedule an episode with Ed for so long. I just really love his methodology. I love the contrarian approach that he has when it comes to how we can show up for ourselves, for our clients. What it means to really be in integrity with your word and push yourself as well as give yourself grace, but remain uncomfortable in a way that is fun, safe, helpful, and really helps people get and be resilient and reach their goals and do it from a very high level, compassionate and driven way. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. What's up? Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. How are you?

I am doing fantastic. I'm excited to be here with you. Excited to have this conversation. Just excited to be with you today.

This is going to be so excited. I'm. Before we hit record, we were just catching up, shooting it because we have been trying to get this on the show for, I think a year now, which I'm so excited about. You who are listening are going to be in for a treat. Ed, would you mind sharing with us a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there?

All right, so my name is Ed Williams. I've been in the fitness industry a little over 21, 22 years now. Serve different people over the years. At this point, I serve, do a lot of education with coaches, personal trainers, and also serve high school athletes who are looking to play in college, especially in the rehab setting with a bouncing back from injuries because personally I went through that myself and didn't have any answers and had to go out myself. And now that I have those answers, I want to make sure they have the tools and the answers they need so that they can believe that they can play at a higher level, bounce back from these things and really be resilient. And that's what a lot of my message is about for me and fitness is being resilient and finding ways to be strong, durable and resilient. I'm a father of four of a wife and family man. Right. So I'm really passionate about all those things that I do with my family, but also passionate about this industry and really helping coaches be educated from people who actually have walked the walk and continue to walk the walk rather than just marketers for the most part now.

Yeah, I love that. And I think that I had shared before I hit record that one of the biggest reasons that I'm compelled to your content is I think that you have a new, unique approach to how you teach coaches to build resiliency. And we, and I had shared personally my opinion that I feel like that there our pendulum has swung and that we continue to live in extremes in the sense of it. It's either or. And we're either super, super dogmatic and going to the gym with the flu, but then. Or we're letting ourselves get off the hook and then we're actually not eliciting behavior change because we're actually not building resilient humans. And so I would just love for you to share a little bit of your perspective and your approach in what it takes to build a resilient human.

That's a great question. And I agree with you on the pendulum swing. Right. And I've been around the industry long enough to see that pendulum and have seen it swing back and forth violently, hoping that it would come somewhere in the middle. And clearly we're still swinging the pendulum back and forth. A lot of it for me has been getting enough negative. So I'm always here like I want to be a positive light, but with that positive light, I want to tell people the truth, right. Because yes, you can be gung ho and I've been that I've been the 20, 21 year old that just going to go in there. I believe everybody needs to go after themselves. But over time, I'm now in my 40s, right. And I got a lot more life experience, work with a lot more people and realize there is some nuance to it. And so I'm with the nuance. And I'm a. I am a person that's always telling people learn, like we need to learn in this industry. And Continue to evolve. With that evolution, we still can't leave the principle behind about what it actually means to get people results, what it means to actually be durable. So I'm less about all these new tactics and more about what are the principles that we can all agree on, even if our strategy may be different moving forward or strategies may be different in how we go about attaining these same goals that people are going after. But what I'm seeing with that pendulum is there are way too many people selling fear and keeping people believing that they're either broken or, or fragile or need to be overly careful about all these other things. And that's really just not the reality. Excuse me. The reality is people are more resilient than they give themselves credit for. And the minute that we get people to believe that we are resilient, that they can do more than they believe they can do, we'll get way more out of A lot of it is a mentality. Once we start to let people off the hook and they start to believe that they're fragile, all of a sudden they have fragile actions. They become fragile beings in terms of the decisions they're making. And the one thing that I've always believed and known about strength training is if you can teach people that they can train harder than they believe they can train, and you start to build results and people get stronger and that attitude starts to carry over into other areas of their life. So I believe that as a tool, strength training is one of the most positive tools for building strong, resilient people if utilized correctly. So this message of being weak and fragile will never resonate with me, especially when it comes to this tool. Because what most people don't know is for me, I've been depressed and I've gone through depression issues in the past, and the one tool that brought me out of it was strength trading. So the foundations of it in terms of building resilient, durable people, that's what got me into the industry. And I've watched it time and time over the years. I don't care if it's an athlete or just a mom of a couple of kids just trying to find her strength again. I've seen it as a tool work in ways that other tools just don't work.

It's so powerful and so good. And also, I think people tend to forget you said train harder than they think that they could. That's what is going to elicit change. If you want more of the same thing, then keep doing the same thing. If you want something to Change. Something has to change.

100, 103. As a coach, if you can't push someone further than they can push themselves, then what is the purpose of you? You should be there to push me outside of my comfort zone and take me to places that I couldn't take myself. But for me, that's the power of a good coach. I don't care if you're coaching, strength training or something else. If I can't push you out of your comfort zone enough to raise your ceiling of where you understand that you are, then there is no purpose if you can just go do that by yourself. So as me, as a coach, I'm not putting you outside of your comfort zone, making you tap into places and realize that you can do things you didn't think you could do. And that doesn't have to be super scary, right? We're not throwing you off the. Off a bridge somewhere. It's no. You think you're tired when you take two more steps. Those two more steps for somebody that really didn't think they could take another step, opens the gate for the next five, six, seven, ten steps. Because you break through that ceiling of, oh, my God, here's my capacity. And that's all we're trying to do. Because if we go too far past that, obviously we get this retraction. You scare people too much. But a good quality coach that can push that feeling up over time will allow people to stretch into the potential in a way that they never believed they could. And to me, that's where the transformation comes from. So what people don't know is with my last gym, it was called 3e, and the first E was excellent. The second E was enlightenment. The third E was empowerment. And those three E's, you know, also the ease of my children, my first three kids, they're all my kids. Names are ease, but those three E's, like excellence. How you go about doing what you do. Enlightenment is okay. Now you realize that you can do more than you thought you could do. Empowerment is who you become on the other side of realizing that you can do more than you thought you could do. And to me, that's the process of building resilience, and that's the process of using strength training as a tool and how you deliver that to people and how you communicate that to people. That allows people to walk across that journey of realizing who they really are versus who they thought they were and.

Who they become and who they become.

100. Because that's what we're going after. Who Are they in the process and along this journey, that's how you build more durable, resilient people. It's not this overnight thing, but it's over time when you realize you've done things you didn't do, you could do, you continue to get stronger. And all of a sudden you have the physics. Especially for women, men, we tell them they're physical, they can handle these things. But especially for women, especially if the message has been, you're weak, you're gentle, you're frail, these kinds of things, all of a sudden when they realize that, no, I am strong, physically strong as well, it just builds something very different in terms of empowerment for most people, especially women. I've watched that transform personalities, attitudes, more with women than almost anything else I've ever seen, and then again with boys and men as well. Because when you see the fruit of your labor, it does something very different. It's not this thing that's weighed. If you train hard and you put together the right habits consistently, you will see the fruit of your labor over time. And there's something very empowering of knowing my hard work is transforming into something that I can physically see and grasp, and it's allowed me to become something different or someone a bit different than I was previously.

I love it. What I heard you say is the 3e process to push the boundary of capacity. That's essentially what we're doing over time, 100%. So I'm curious, earlier you said you were talking a little bit about, you walked us through the process. Can you share with us the principles that you live by, that you think are the founding? Like, these are the principles of building a durable, resilient human.

So that starts in. You know who you are. So to me, you treat people as a foundation of everything else. Like, I know one way to treat people. I'm going to treat people well, no matter how they're treating me, no matter what I'm dealing with when it comes to that. Because the only thing I control is my behavior, my attitude, and how I go about treating people. So for me, that's the foundation. You and I connect, part of it. Because how I deal with people, how I treat people, how I talk to people, Right? So that is the foundation of those. Honesty and integrity is the next principle for me. Right. And that shows up even in training. Honesty, integrity. Did I show up and do what I said I would do?

Yes, that is the number, in my opinion, if that. If you were to take anything away from anything you've ever heard in your Entire life, it is this. Your word is your wand. Do what you say you are going to do. And there are no limits.

That's it. And that is. That's one of those biggest ones. Because only you can answer that, right? When you look in the mirror, you can lie to your coach. You can let everybody else. And I tell people all the time, like, it will always show in your results, right? So if you're telling me you've been doing X, Y and Z and it's not lining up with the results that we're seeing, there's something wrong in the process and we'll go through that, or there's something wrong with what you're doing or not doing or you're not being honest in terms of doing what you said that you were going to do. See this time and time again. And it's the same concept. I talk to people all the time. Did you do the work? Yes. We need some accountability, but did you do the work? And there's times, listen, I failed to do it. So I know I can take on this for that. Did I give 100%? Did I really actually do the work or did I do enough to hope to skate by? Those are vastly different results. So people want the optimal, best results. They want to give the least amount of effort. And that's what we're starting to sell people, is you don't actually have to work that hard to get what you're trying to get. You don't actually have to do that much. You can do. You can get the body you want in 10 minutes a day. No, you can't. But as long as we're selling people that people want to believe that it's like the next big pill. It's like people upset with the Liver king. It's no. Everybody was chasing down the next best thing, next pill, the next supplement that's going to take care of and negate all this hard work that needs to be done. And that's what people are running away from. And I don't care what your goal is in life, you got to do the hard work. So we talked about the integrity portion of it, showing up and doing the work. Right? You have to be willing to show up and do the work. So action is the only thing that drives any forward progress. And that's one I've had to learn over time. Like you don't. Once you understand something a little bit, you have to take action. Because we can adjust what you're already doing, but we can't make any adjustments. And Nothing. Right. So you've got to take some action if you're actually going to drive forward towards any result, no matter what that is. So for me, it's not about. I was having this conversation with somebody recently and it's an ed. You're like a motivational speaker. And I told him, I don't want to be motivational. I want to be inspiring. Because inspiring means you actually take action. Motivation is touchy feeling. You just feel good. I'm not. I'm less interested in you feeling. Getting more interested in you doing something so good.

So it's like that's.

This is.

These are the three pillars of success, essentially for you of to be a durable, resilient human.

Right. You have to be willing to take those steps and do the work.

So good. So now I'm curious. We talked earlier about boundaries and pushing the boundary of capacity. How do you navigate binding. What is that line of like, at all costs down the shame spiral, going to the gym with the flu versus putting yourself on the hook and practicing flexible discipline. How do you find that boundary for you and for your coaches and their clients?

Comes back to that. The one big word, excuse me. Health is the main thing that we're selling and or dealing with. Health is the foundation of everything. We and their principles within that. But health is that foundations, like, we're chasing down health, right? So if you got the flu or something else, we're not in a healthy state. What do you actually need? We need to recover, right? So along that spectrum, there's times where it needs to drive hard and there's times where we need to put the brake on and actually balance out. So we talk about that sympathetic, parasympathetic fight or flight. Rest and digest. If all we do is push the gas pedal, we'll still never get towards what we need to get because we'll actually burn out. So within all of it is this balance that has to take place. And it becomes through a learning process, sometimes you got to step on that thorn or you got to touch that fire on the stove to know, okay, that was a little bit too hot, right? And it's walking people towards that slowly and understanding that, knowing that you have some personalities that are going to overstep that. But when they deal with the consequences of that, you're there to catch them, say, hey, that's okay, you went a little bit too far. But we still need to progress forward, right? It's like, kids. I got four kids. You have children. Tell them all the rules in the world and Sometimes a big part of their growth and development is you got to let them prick that finger. You got to let them stub that toe. Right? You're not letting them hurt themselves too much, but stub that toe and now say, hey, look, here's why these boundaries are in place. If we do X, Y and Z, we'll continue to push those boundaries as you progress and you earn that. But that's why some of those boundaries are there. And with a lot of clients, with coaches and stuff, especially with coaches, that's what it is. You have to let them hit those walls a little bit before they're willing to take heed to what some of these principles and boundaries is set up and why they're actually set up. So yes, you set up boundaries to keep people safe, but you have to allow them to wander within those boundaries, even if that means they're going to bump their head. We still have boundaries here to keep them from going past that, but we have to allow them to play within that. Right. Because to me, that's how learning takes place. And every individual is a little bit different. So with some people, you have to talk to them very differently than with others. It's not about talking harsh to everybody else, but how do you inspire these particular personalities? Looks very different than inspiring or pulling back. Somebody else you need to pull back. So even within athletes, I got athletes where you got to continue to pull in the reins and you got other ones that you got to continue to coax forward to believe in themselves and what they're capable of. I don't think there's any different. I think personalities are within that. But knowing what boundaries you need to put up due to those same personalities become very different. So that personality that it's probably going to go further than you want them to go, you have to put up a lot more boundaries to protect them from themselves. And then the other person is almost, once they get past a certain level, putting that boundary behind them where they can't actually go back right where they have to start. It's like burning the ships, right? You find different ways to burn some of those ships. So they're continuously going forward and not going back. So it's this give and take of understand the personalities that you're dealing with. One, you have to put boundaries almost behind them to keep pushing them forward. The other one, you got to put boundaries in front of them so they don't go too far, but you still give wiggle room to play within those.

Yeah, too far, too fast. Because you wouldn't teach a toddler. You wouldn't tell a toddler who just learned how to run or to walk that they're going to go run a marathon.

100%.

We're just conditioned as human beings. Whether we like it or not, it's just part of how we are designed that we are looking for the fastest, most efficient way to do anything. Even at all costs. Our body is going to make compensations to take the fastest route. That's why people are looking for that 10 minute sh. Do the mind work out?

Yeah, listen, there's something to that, right? As human beings. So I want to build efficient, fast results. The question is, do you want results you can keep?

Yes.

Or do you have results that disappear tomorrow? Right. Because you can have those fast, but you can't have them fast and keep them for most people. Right. So it's like, what are you looking for hand to get ready for this wedding? Great. You can have those fast. But the plan that's going to get you there on that particular day versus the plan that's going to allow you to continue to keep wherever you got is a little bit different. Right. So like everything else, there has to be these ebbs and flows in how you go about doing those things. And again, like I said, that's a learning process. But for me, I always say I'm not the right person for everyone. Right. Because the person that wants to achieve £100 in the next two months are just not going to jive with my process, nor is that going to jive with my brain. That's not how I function or what I believe. Because I know what that would create and cause. I know the pain that would be associated with trying to get there. And I know what the body will do after that once you actually achieve that particular point. So I'm okay with telling people, hey, if you need to get in a race car and go faster than you'd like to go, you can go do that. But if you need help, I'm here. Sometimes that's what it is. You have to let people go do that because that's what we're sold as a media. We're sold fast, efficient, fast. Right now, fast food. And that's one of the differences. It's funny moving from Connecticut now being in Georgia, you realize, I don't care how fast you are, you're from New York City, you're from Connecticut, you get down here to the south, they're going to move at the pace that they move at and you're going to have to adapt to that. And that's why environment matters so much. Like my kids don't get a lot of screen time so they don't understand the commercials. They don't know what's really happening there. Right. We're creating these environments that are conducive to. To driving the kind of results that we're looking for. No matter what area like that is. I know before you'd asked about discipline. To me it's less about discipline and more about creating environments that drive the habits that you'd like to. If I'm an ice cream junkie, then I shouldn't keep ice cream in the house. If I want ice cream instead, I should have to go get it and make it a trip and do that. And then if I do that, enjoy it. But if I have it in the house, I can't say I don't have the discipline not to eat this ice cream. To me that's madness. You're setting up an environment that's not conducive to the results and the habits that you're trying to drive. So for me, environment matters more than just this discipline that we continue to push on people. You're just not a disciplined person. You put most people in the wrong environment. We're going to have some very different outcomes. And I think we need to push the message about environment and the environments we're creating to allow people. So if somebody is in these chaotic environments, those are going to be stressful environments. High prolonged stress and building great results don't go together. They just don't match. So we can try to make the matches like oil and water. We can try to make the matches put them in the same cup. Great. They're going to separate. They just don't blend in that same way. So people need to understand how much the environment is impacting their mood, their personalities, what they're going through, the results they're getting or not getting. All of these things are part of resilient beings that we don't take for granted. It's like checking off the box. I did my training great. What about these other areas? Because the conversation happened over and over is we have 168 hours in the week. Just because you took care of three, you have 166 to yourself. And that 166 has a whole lot more impact than this three or four does that you are spending a week working on this one specific thing. We don't address your environments. If we don't address those other parts of being Resilient. You're going to impact and not get the outcomes from this hard work that you're doing for those three or four hours a week.

I love this. Have you noticed that this is another E word in your process?

Here we go.

Oh yeah. And I just think it's also such a powerful shift too because I think that we. Sometimes people will tend to be hard on themselves and not hard on themselves in terms of action taking. Hard of themselves. Like going down this shame spiral because they think I'm just not motivated, I'm just not disciplined enough. But they're actually haven't. What they actually haven't done is set themselves up for ultimate success.

100. Absolutely. The best way to put it just so I did. They're not setting themselves up for ultimate success. When you understand the habits necessary and then you understand environments conducive to making those habits happen. It's like you read the book a couple of times. If you got all your training gear out and ready and in a bag and everything ready to go out the door and you set the alarm to get up, the odds of you doing that are much higher. Then I got to get up. I got to find my training gear. I gotta hope to. Maybe if I don't set my alarm, maybe if I wake up in time, like those are two vastly different things. One person is determined and they put themselves in the best position to make those actions happen. Right. They set themselves up for more success than this person who. I'm gonna take it by chance, I'll wing it if I get up in time. Maybe. Maybe. Those are very different things, right? So yes, we talk about planning and all those things, but the environment, like environment. If I eat in a chaotic environment, I'm probably going to have digestive issues. Right? The food wasn't the issue. We can. I can give you all the best foods and put you in the worst environments and you're going to have digestive issues. Right? Because good digestion and chaotic environments don't exist. And most people don't necessarily understand that. Right. Even in fitness, we eat on the run, we got a bar, we're stressed out, we're. And then wondering why our health is worse than some of our clients health. Right. It's in the environments and the habits that we're taking on. Not understanding how those things are impacting this one thing. We're just. I like to say as a society we are symptom chasers. Right? Chasing down the source of the problem. We don't chase source, we chase symptoms So I know as an industry we complain about doctors or medicine or all these other things, yet we are just as guilty as chasing down symptoms over sources.

I'm laughing because I know it's so true. It's so true. Everyone's like, oh, I don't want to take those medicine. And I'm like, but you drink alcohol, right?

Yeah, just. I'm like, what are we doing? So it's the same. It's the same kind of thing, man. It's look at source is. And the source for most people are the habits in their environment.

So good. So now you know one of the things that as someone who has worked with so many coaches and help them learn the skills essentially of movement and also coaching, what are some of the biggest mistakes and misconceptions that new and intermediate coaches get into when they are building and working with clients?

I love this question. Understand the foundation of what they do is you have to have people skills, right? People have to like you. You have to build relationship with people and have good people skills if you're going to be impactful. We're in an environment where there are so many. See, when I started there was one or two certifications around, right. In order to get educated. It was one heck of a process. Now there are so many voices in that realm that everybody is trying to chase down. And then you get smarter. I need to learn more. And what I found, even working with supposed advanced coaches have been in the game a long time. They skipped over the foundation. So you have to have people skills. Then you need to have a basic understanding of anatomy so you understand how the body actually works and functions. Right. These are principal type stuff to get the exercise per se. How does the body function? Understand some functional anatomy, Understand how to have some people skills and rapport with people because that's the only way it's going to translate to anything that you're trying to do. And then being really good at your craft, not sure when that went out of style, but being really good at your craft and producing results look a lot simpler and is a lot simpler than people are giving it credit for or think. Because people oftentimes will get some of my programs and go, that's it. Yeah, yeah, that's it. But do that. And I'm here's the big thing. Pay attention to details. If people ask me what I do better than most of the people, especially when it comes to movement and nuances, pay attention to details. Because small details have a massive impact on what is that we're trying to do. Right. Yes. This program might look simple, but if you do it the way it's designed to be done, people will realize how hard it actually is. Because complexity doesn't produce more hard work. Right. Complexity. Actually, if you look at the research, the more complex something is, the less actual effort and hard work is actually put into what is that you're trying to get people to do.

That's so good. I mean, it's so good and so true. And I really like too, that you talk about the foundations, like skill foundations of hue, of movement. Because there are some things out there that teach people to be movement professionals who have no business being a movement professional. But it's interesting because, you know, sometimes I feel like people will be simple at the cost of not understanding complexity. And that's not the same thing. That's not the same thing.

And so I'm glad you said that. Right. Because here's part of my philosophy, especially when it comes to education. There are some courses in school. You wouldn't take somebody who's ready for elementary level education and put them in a PhD program, but in fitness we will, yes, miss people, skip over middle school, preschool, middle school, high school, college, then you might go into a master's or PhD. People who have just jumped in and don't have the foundation of elementary school are now taking PhD level continuing education courses. Now, you can't expect someone to take that kind of a jump and still be able to make sense of all this information in a way that they can apply at a high level. We're shooting and pushing young coaches to go take these complex things long before they've gotten a chance to understand these foundational things and implement those foundational things at a level where they're producing results. Nuance is earned. Complexity should be earned, not given. In our industry, it's given, not earned. And then we wonder what's happening, what's going on? Because it's cool to have all these different levels behind these letters, behind your name, hoping that it actually means something.

This is so powerful. And I'm just going to go ahead and share like, full transparency. I've had to learn this in my industry as a marketer and a messenger as well. Like, I have had direct feedback of people saying, I felt like I was taking a PhD program in communication. And I'm like, you are. And you are, you absolutely are. And so if you are listening to this as a coach and you're thinking, oh my gosh, that's what I do, number one, you're not Alone. Okay. So I'm just going to give you some empathy right here, right now, because you're not alone. And I know that, at least for me, it comes from this place of wanting to help your client get the result faster. Right. You want to almost learn the lesson for them. But honestly, it was my children that showed me that I was doing this for my clients and that I can't do it for them. I cannot rescue. I can keep them safe and alive. But there are lessons and communication things that they have to learn, and I can't learn it for them.

Cannot. You cannot. Because what happens if you take a kid, if you take a child that's trying to learn to walk and you constantly hold their hand, do they learn to walk? Not very effectively. Right. You got to let them fall down. You might hold their hand to pick back up. Maybe you put a wall next to them so they actually have a little bit of something to walk along the way and do. But you're absolutely correct. Like, I have empathy because the industry has changed so much and it's confusing to know what you should do, what you should take, who you need to listen to, what makes the most sense yet. The thing that struck me the most is the first seminar I taught was in 07 or 08. And I remember preparing for this course because I'm preparing for trainers. And I remember I started speaking and I realized that even though people had been in the industry a long time, I had to go from notch 10 and bring it down to notch 3 because I started giving people way more credit than I, than they actually had. Right. And I think it shows up all the time. Teach the Polking group. I teach and do these things and the fundamentals are still the fundamentals. And if you skipped over those steps, the fundamentals are still going to be super powerful to actually driving results. So people think results require complexity and only complex situations require complexity. But how often are we dealing with these super complex situations? Because I wrote a post recently where I said I'm not the professional that I was 20 plus years ago, yet I still helped a lot of people back then. I didn't know what I know now, but it doesn't negate the fact that I helped a lot of people along the way with what I did know at that point. Trainers don't lose sight of the fact that even where you are, even if that is, as a beginner, you can still help people from where you are right now. If people have complexities, you have to be okay saying, maybe you need to Work with someone else. And that was one thing that I was really good at through my career was no, I want a box. I'm not a boxer. So you need to go find this person over here who boxes because that's what they do. Because at best, I'm going to be a counterfeit version of what they're doing. At best. So no, go do, go to the person that does what you need in that way better than I'm ever going to do it and allow me space to go help this other person that I can help better than somebody else is going to be able to help. And being okay with that was a lot of what drove a lot of my growth. You're not going to help everyone and everyone is not for you. And I think that's hard to hear and embrace sometimes as a young professional. You think it's just you? Yes and no. But everybody is not for everyone. Right? So spend your time, focus on the people that are for you and serve them as best that you can serve them. And as you up level your skills, you serve them better.

I just think that's. Yes. I can't. I just can't agree more. I think that, I think too, I love that you bring the analogy of children because if you're listening to this and you've never been around kids, if you've ever watched them learn how to walk, it is the most fascinating thing on the planet because they will fall down a hundred million quadrillion times just over and over. And yet they just keep getting up. And it's like you can see in their little mind that it's like they're, they don't fall down and go, oh, why didn't they fall down? Why did I fall down?

I must not be good.

I must not be designed to walk. I, oh, this means blah, blah, blah. No, they just get back up again because in their mind they're like, oh, yeah, I was walking. And then they just keep falling.

100. Listen, training is the same. People go, I've never squatted before. Great. Oh, I expected my first set of squats to be perfect. Everything else it requires practice, requires a lot of practice. It requires a lot of reps. It doesn't mean you give a bunch of junk reps. But some of those first sets of reps are semi junk reps. Right. Like it needs to be within a certain principle of gauge to keep you safe. But we're not going to perfect anything doing it five times.

Yes.

So the kids falling down and getting back up, they're Determined to walk. And if those of you that have not been around kids, if you help them up too often or you make a big deal out of their fall, you stunt their growth, right? Because it allows them to get back up in the confidence to keep going. Right. They want to know they're safe. But if you over help them, you stunt their growth, you stop their ability to continue to progress. And that's the same thing with a good coach. You got to know when to push and you got to know when to actually stop talking and allow people to go through the actions to figure some things out. We call it now you hear it all the time constraints. Yes. Create some constraints and then allow people to work within those constraints and figure some things out. Everybody thinks they're going to get this perfect roadmap. There is no perfect roadmap because we are dynamic beings. Which is why I always go back to what are the principles that you're standing behind? If it's marketing and say, Beverly, what are the principles behind marketing? If it's one of the principles behind this particular portion of medicine, it's the same thing. Because principles never change what happens in between that is ever evolving. So if we always understand the principles, we can evolve within that without ever walking so far away from what it is that needs to happen. And so it goes back to your first point when you said you feel like people. We've gone with a pendulum that swung so far that people stop training hard. Right? Because we've made people scared of training hard. You're going to hurt yourself, and you're not strong enough, and you're weak and you're soft, and you did be careful. Your big toe's not up. Like, what? Wait, so if I'm a consumer, I'd be confused, too. I wouldn't know where to start at all. And I'd start to think, oh, my God. Right? Same thing with physical therapy. My business was built on people not training hard enough in physical therapy because I have a PT background. I studied that, I did my undergrad in it, and I realized most people fail at physical therapy because they're just not pushed hard enough. At some point, you need to drive. You have to train hard enough to drive a stimulus. The body is not going to change just because you ask it to change. You actually have to coax it to change. And you have to give it a reason to adapt. Right? You have to drive it forward enough outside of its comfort zone that it has a reason to adapt and build resilience and be stronger and add More muscle or whatever that is. It has to be driven past a certain point in order to force it to adapt. That is how it functions and works, right? And that's what great coaches are able to do. When I hit a crush, people can you push that organism outside the comfort zone enough to allow it to recover, to come back more resilient? And it's this process of continuing to try to slowly push that ceiling up higher and higher. People are evolving and becoming different people in that. And one thing I don't want to forget to say with young coaches, track what you are doing, right? This guessing game and come in and throw some things at the wall is part of that process. Because sometimes it's hard to realize the progress you're making because it seems slow. But if you were tracking some things, you go, wow, look at that. On Instagram, I had five followers and now I have a hundred. You can see that same thing with strength training. When people don't actually track some things over time, it's hard for clients to stay consistent enough and continue to drive forward because they're not necessarily seeing the progress in the way that they think they should be seeing it. But if you can show people their progress over time, that's what drives discipline or whatever these other things you're talking about, right? People get inspired by progress. And you have to have multiple ways of showing people progress, which is what keeps them inspired and keeps them driving forward towards what it is they set out to do in the first place. So I know in marketing those metrics might be different, but the principle is the same.

Amen. You have to. You have to. Otherwise, because what happens, and this happens, at least for me, and I just think it's human nature, is I will ask a very powerful question because sometimes people will come to me and say, oh, this isn't working. Well, how do you know that? What are. How are you measuring that? No one likes this. There's no engagement. Compared to what? Like, how do you know that you know, and you're not alone in the sense that for me, because I do this too, and I think that. And I'll just share for transparency for me, is that I'm always fast, right? Covid has taught me to. Like when I got Covid and Covid pneumonia, I had to really get like super slow. And what happened was that I just recognized that I kept tricking myself into believing that I was making data driven decisions when I really wasn't. And then when I actually was forced to look at it, I kept realizing, oh, I'm throwing the baby out with the bath water and making all these decisions and claiming that they were data driven, but not really. It's a little bit of what you were saying earlier too in this sense of like it in the sense of there is. It's one thing to understand something and double tap it and be like, yeah, data driven decisions. I do that. And then another thing to actually live by it and know it.

100, 100. And there's nuance, man. Sure. You don't this as a new, like as a coach. As a new coach. There's some things that you just don't know until you start to go through it. People ask why I'm so impactful, especially with high school athletes bouncing back from some kind of an injury. I've been then I've blown out both knees, I bounced back, I recovered, I've could all the things that the doctors told me I wouldn't be able to do, I did. I went on to play a scholarship level, I went on a championship level. Like Even after my second year I went and competed Olympic weightlifting at 66 when they told me I wouldn't be good at it. And I won medals and I. Because I'm always trying to show people that you're capable of more than you give yourself credit for. And despite what any doctor or somebody else says, you have to actually believe that for it to be true. And I just met a point where I believe that life ended at 22 because I had my second knee surgery. No, maybe for you it has, but let me show you what I'm capable of doing because I'm going to think outside of the box of what it is that needs to be done. So part of my life is I'm always trying to use some of that part of it to inspire people to say, look, you can bounce back and you can bounce back better and you can be resilient and you can achieve all the things you're going after. And this hiccup is going to be what allows you to help somebody else down the road. I wouldn't be as impactful if I didn't walk in their shoes and not have answers and have to go find those same answers. So I know even once you're physically ready to get back to sport, your mind's not quite there. You're still a little scared, he's still a little fearful. And if you've never been through that, it's hard to have that conversation with the nuances that help somebody know what to expect and be willing to drive through that wall because they know what to expect. Right. So when I tell an athlete this is what's going to happen. Guess what? When they get on the field and it happens the first time, they go, oh yeah, wait, coach said that would happen. I'm okay, push past that. And that's when they start to become. But it's really helping people push past that first perceived barrier. That's our biggest challenge as coaches, young or seasoned. Part of that is pushing people past that first perceived barrier to get them believe and get some buy in into what it is that you're actually going after and that people are capable of far more than they think.

Yeah. And you said it doesn't matter whether you're new or seasoned. And I actually we could probably do a whole separate podcast episode on the fact that evidence is a double edged sword. The more seasoned that we get. I always talk about how complacency is where dreams go to die. Right. Because we still have to change. And it's hard to want to change when things are good, why change? Those things are good.

But that's that evolution. Right. Are you. And as long as I've been in the gpeople said, why do you still learn? Learning looks different for me. But why do you still push to do these things? Because we're ever evolving. The principles stay the same, the methods change and they should. That evolution can come with some change, but it doesn't change necessarily the foundation of what is that I believe in. And for me, at the heart of it all, you have to train hard enough to elicit a response. And we can't get so far down the rabbit hole that everybody has become some kind of a therapist where we're trying to treat people instead of actually doing what they came to us to do. Which is to train. Right?

Yeah.

Therapy to therapist. But we can do this realm better than anybody else can do this realm. Let's focus on that and getting the most out of that rather than trying to dive into all these realms. If someone needs physical therapy, send them to physical therapy. If someone needs a therapist, send them to a therapist so that you can function in your capacity on a level that none of those other areas could do. That's where I think we get a lot of confusion where we're trying to be everything to everyone and we end up being ineffective to most of the people that were actually trying to help. Right. And a lot of it is just spread too thin. Try to be everything to everyone. Know who you are, know what you do know who you serve. And you'll be far more impactful than trying to serve everyone and be the problem solver. I can tell you I'm guilty of that because I want to help people. I want to help people. Can you help me do this? Yeah, I can figure help you do that. Can you help me do it? Yeah. But then you realize you end up not being impactful and being known for anything in particular. And anybody that's had any real impact, they're known for something. Even if they do multiple things, they're known for something. And that's really important to be known for something. That means you've actually gone a bit deeper than most people will and you'll be able to actually drive far better results in whatever that is with whatever that demographic that you particularly work with will get.

And that is so true, so amazing. I couldn't have said it better myself, honestly. This has been such an amazing, insightful podcast. Thank you so much for pouring into me, pouring into my community. So I want to be mindful of your time. So for those of you who have been just as moved as me and want to learn more, connect with you, what are some of the best places that I can send them?

Best places you can send them are going to be Instagram at Ed Strength Academy. I do have Facebook, but there are a lot of Edward Williams if you can find me. But there are a lot of Edward Williams out there itself. IG is probably the easiest and anytime you have a question, DM me, man. I'm always willing and up for talking to people and helping some younger coaches out as they come along the press. But this has been amazing. It's been great. I hope that the audience has taken nuggets from this particular conversation and I'm glad we actually made this happen. So yes, it has been probably a year or so trying to make it happen. I'm glad we finally made it happen and grateful for the opportunity was.

It's amazing. Thank you, Ed. You did. This was so good. I really appreciate it.

Got it.

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