Ep. 85: Owning It: Change Your Habits, Change Your Life – Justin Roethlingshoefer

Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. You can get a free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com just click on the book link. Also, if you'd like to learn more about our investments, click on the Invest link to learn more about how you can get access to our institutional quality opportunities. On today's show we have Justin Rothlingshofer. You can get a free copy of of his Master your wearable in six minutes by checking out the show notes. Also, Justin's going to talk about how you can achieve 1% performance not only in your financial life, but also in your everyday life. Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. Now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link at Next Level Income. On today's show we have Justin Roefling, chauffeur. Born in Canada, Justin found himself competing with older kids at the age of 13 years old. He became obsessed with performance and the rest of his life became focused on the quest to optimize consistency. Justin is a performance coach for three different NHL teams. A five year NCAA performance coach, NCAA champion, has a Ms. In human biology and performance science and and a postgraduate in functional medicine and HRV recovery studies. Justin Rohingschofer. Did I say that right?

You got it.

Welcome to the show. I was repeating it to myself like it was a tongue twister for five minutes before we started talking here. So I still have to look at how to double, double, double, look at how to spell it. But man, I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on. We talk about a lot of financial stuff on this podcast, but people that know me, they know that I'm all about human performance and that's kind of where my life started and when I learned about your background. I'm just going to tell the audience straight out, we got a little bit of conflict of interest. You are my health coach. I hired you on the spot and maybe we can tell a little bit about that story, but I scheduled this call with Justin, and lo and behold, I get diagnosed with COVID the day before our phone call. So we can talk a little bit more about that. But before we do it, Justin, I'd love for you to share more with the audience a little bit about your background and how you came to be in this. In this role that you are with the founder of Own it.

Yeah. So it's. I appreciate you having me on, and it's so awesome to just be a part of, like a community like this. Chris. It's people that are continually trying to level themselves up. I mean, in the Bible it talks about iron sharpens iron. And that's really, to be honest, like, the only way that we get better is by building those deep relationships. So I get you in and your platform.

Yeah.

When I started Own it, it's funny, it's really a culmination of 20 years in the making. It's like anything that's done with a purpose, it took time to get there. Nothing happens overnight. And when I was 13 years old, I'll never forget it, my father came to me. I was a hawk, born and raised in Canada. I was playing with 16 year olds and I was 13 and I was frustrated. I wasn't standing like I used to. And he said to me, son, talent will get you noticed, but consistency will get you paid. And it was forever me trying to figure out how to become the most consistent version of myself. What does it take to become consistent? We hear it all time. Like it's anecdotal. Now is your habits create your destiny or consistency will get you what you want, or it's all about consistency or whatever it is like it. But it's all anecdotal in nature. Like, what does that mean? What does that truly mean? And so that was at the. My dad kind of just lit a spark that ignited into an absolute flame and ultimately ended up creating something that really led to my overall career. And that, I think was the really exciting part is that as I continue to go through my schooling, through my master's degree, my doctorate, the experience through the ncaa, the NHL, and then ultimately to create Own It. It's always been a continual learning path is I continue to become more awoken to different scientific practices. It's the understanding of the spirit side of things. It's the understanding of the neurological science that goes into it, the behavioral science that goes into it, the physiological science that goes into it, and then culminating them all together to leave people with actionable insights, actionable steps that they can take and do and implement today to ultimately get a different result tomorrow. And that's what I think quite often is let or is left out from the way in which we bring things into popular science or popular culture today is. Is we leave out that stuff. And the only thing that goes in there is the sexy stuff. And that's not quite often what brings. Brings the sustainable results, if you will.

No, there's so much in there. And that was one of the things I wrote down, was your dad's quote. And again, that was, talent will get you noticed. Consistency will get you paid. And it reminded me of, I think it was the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. And she talks about how it's not talent, it's habits that ultimately allow you to achieve success. But the challenge, I think, that we find, Justin, is a lot of people hear this. They know it. They're like, okay, I get it, I get it. I got to work hard. I got to build up these habits, but they're floating around, especially when it comes to diet and exercise, you know, even mental health. Like, people don't know where to turn or how to measure these things. And, you know, you're talking about the data guy. You're talking about when. When you were a teenager. This is what also drew me to you. You're wearing a heart rate monitor, brainwave sensors, HRV monitors. I had a heart rate. I thought it was the coolest thing when I had a heart rate monitor. You know, then I got a power meter on my bike. I thought that was, you know, I thought that was amazing because I didn't have the most talent. I had to work really, really hard. And one of my sons has a ton of talent. My older son, my younger son, not quite as physically gifted, but man, he is. He has the habits and the discipline. So I guess, you know, you were, again, you were performance director in the ncaa, also worked with multiple NHL teams, multiple athletes. What have you seen that has basically created that bridge from talent to results through habits. But with the implementation of data like what. What is really the key to bringing all that together in your mind?

So there, There are two things. Number one is that you're measuring something that you are actually what's measured matters, Right?

What's. What's measured matters?

Yeah, completely. What gets measured gets noticed. What gets noticed gets paid attention to. What gets paid attention to can ultimately change. And if we're not measuring something, there's no way to go back and know if the Decisions you made actually had an impact or not. So number one is actually that you're measuring something. And then number two is that you have somebody or somebody or a process that. That you know and trust that you can start to implement. And a lot of that usually comes from having a coach. Having a coach that can be outside eyes looking in and going, hey, your process is broken. This is not working. And making something applicable and actionable. Because, again, data is great, but in our entire society, we're inundated with data. We're drowning in it. It's not that we have a data problem or an information problem. It's that we have an application problem. And by knowing that and by. And by admittingly living in that, we can now address the true problem that exists. And I'm sure all your listeners know, like, whether they're dealing with business or they're trying to learn state or something financial or something in relationships or raising kids or their health, there's this. There's this. There's three phases. I call it. You've got your information phase. So everything that's down here at the bottom, where it's just a gathering, like, what books can I read, what presentations can I go to, what podcasts can I listen to, what studies can I read? And then there's the third phase, which is transformation. Like, once the transformative process is happening to get somewhere, there's going to be a result in between. Stage two is your maturation process. And that is hard. That takes time. That's not very sexy. It takes work. And what people think is that the fact paid their dues. They've read a book, they've read a study, they've gone to a talk, they've listened to a presentation, that now they've earned the right to have that transformation process happen. And that maturation time in between doesn't exist anymore, which is, again, not true. So that is trying to. And again, can you time collapse the maturation process by who you involved with and who you get around 150%, like, totally. But every single person has to go through the maturation process. It's impossible not to.

Yeah, No, I love that. And on my bookshelf, I have the Secret. I don't know if you ever read the Secret or saw it. Eric's like, oh, you have this vision. You visualize. I think that's amazing. But right next to that book is my Tony Robbins course that I went through. And Tony says you have to take massive action. And I think that's the key. A lot of people, they're like, oh, I learned about this technique, this investment strategy, whatever it might be. They see where they want to go, but they either don't. They either aren't told how much action it takes, or even worse, they take a bunch of action and they're moving in the wrong direction. And that's the. That's the other thing that really, you know, really stood out to me when. When I first heard you present, is that your whole practice. Maybe you could share a little bit more about kind of how you work with patients here, Justin, so the audience understands. But your pat, your practice is based upon genetics. And, you know, I'll give an example that, you know, that you and I talked about on my. On my last coaching call. You said, hey, Chris, you need to eat more carbohydrates. And, you know, a lot of people are listening like, no, no, no, you don't eat carbs. That's how you get fat. But, you know, I added carbohydrates to my diet, and I gained 12 pounds of muscle. Again, I gained maybe a pound of fat. I gained 12 pounds of muscle eating carbs. So talk about how really this transformation in health is occurring right now and how you're applying the knowledge of genetics and how we're all different to the plans that you create. So people are taking massive action or taking action, doing the right things, and they know it.

Yeah, you literally had an amazing segue there for me, where part of our tagline is own your different. Get used to different, because it's one.

Of us is different.

You have to own your different. And for so long, we've been going with generic. The generic diet, the genetic sleep routine, the generic morning routine, the generic night routine. Reading the books, well, that's putting us in the ballpark of average. And who wants to be average? I don't.

Nobody.

That's not why I wake up every single morning. So knowing that we have to. That each and every one of us is different, that we have different cellular makeups, we have different genetic makeups, we have different cellular dysfunction, we have different cellular mutation, we have different things going, we've been through different traumas. Everybody is different. And we have to thus apply everything very different. We go back to that application process. You can have all the information in the world, but how you apply something in your life is going to get different result than how somebody else applies it because of what you've been through. And if we don't take into account you're different, then we're going to wind up in a circle. That brings down motivation, brings down your willingness to try again. And when we get into the habit and talk about how, I actually start to discuss how do you build a habit and how do you break a bad habit, how do you adhere to a new habit, how do you make a habit stronger? Like, there's a habit strength component we can talk about, but it all comes down to what's happening internally. And when we know what's happening internally.

We can now make some cellular level. Yeah, like even.

Totally. And the reason we go to the cellular level, that's where everything's occurring, where cellular mutation happens. That's where chronic disease starts. That's where nutrient dysfunction starts. It's not anywhere else but at cell. And a big word that a lot of people are like, really hot on right now. It's sexy. And go back to that sexiness in pop culture. But it's biological versus chronological age. Biological age is the one we can change. And everyone's like, oh, what's my biological age? Do we even know what you're looking at there? It's actually looking at cellular level stuff.

David Sinclair is big on that, right?

Completely. And so if you start looking at what's going on at the cellular level, like, what. What is your body taking in and utilizing from a micronutrient standpoint? At cellular level, are you absorbing potassium, sodium, magnesium, vitamin A, vitamin D, iron, folate, zinc? Are you doing that or are you faked? Or are you continuing to get. Is your immune function dropping? Because even though you take a blood serum test, you have your, your, your lipids look great, your cholesterol levels look great, your vitamin levels all look great. But at the cellular level, you've got high levels of lpp, which is basically what carries cholesterol through your blood. So you're at higher risk for heart disease or cardiovascular disease. You're not absorbing B12 and folate. So thus, that's why your immune system's dropping and that's why you're fatigued all the time. And because of all those things. Remember, our is one big machine. One thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. So if there's a process that's not working, our body just doesn't go, oh, we're going to shut that process down and just make you continue. No, it's going to start pulling from other things. And when it pulls from other things now, your liver starts working harder, your pancreas starts working harder, your heart works harder, your lungs work harder, your brain has to work harder. In different ways. Certain toxins don't get cleared out, other areas build up with toxins. And that's where we come into biological age. That's where we start to see you aging faster. You start to get predisposed to diseases. That's supposed to happen at 80, 90, 100 years old, are happening at 40, 50, 60 years old. And these are the things that we're able to now tap into and to completely change, let alone how it affects your performance, how it affects your sleep, how it affects your mood, how it affects everything else in which you're operating in everything.

Yeah, and that's, that's the thing, like, you know, that being in medical device sales for years, you're on call, you're working long hours, and it's a hundred hour weeks, you know. So if you're listening, you probably are nodding your head like, yeah, I work a lot. And I used to tell the reps I trained, I said, look, you got to live like a professional athlete, you know, you got to take care of yourself. I was like, you can't. Your brain is not going to function at your peak mental state if your body's not there. So I think all this stuff that you've learned, you know, from working with athletes, you know, if you're a high performer, whatever level, this makes so much sense. And the other thing that maybe you can add on to, Justin, is that a lot of people I remember reading, I don't know, about maybe eight years ago, there's the Paleo diet, there's the Atkins diet, there's the low fat, low carb diet. And the article was talking about how these diets work for about 25% of people. And the reason is you have people that fall into these different genetic buckets. So if you're struggling and you're like, I can't find anything that works again, you know, I took my example. You know, it was like I was shocked when my doctor told me, you got to eat more carbs. Like, it was, it blew my mind, but it made sense. Like in my head, I'm like, yeah, I feel better when I, when I do that. Um, so I don't know if you have anything else to add on top of that. You kind of reset.

Comes back to knowing that again. We've tried to just paint this generic brush across the board. We adopt certain things and of course there's going to be stories where some people, there's, they lost 100 pounds, they lost 50 pounds, they lost 30 pounds. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, like, it's kind of a catch 22. And I'm going to talk out of both sides of my mouth here. 1. Is any of those diets you're talking about work? Any of them work? They all work. But they might not just work for you, they may not work for you.

Right? Right.

And this is what we want to get an understanding of, is what works for you. And we are at the. We're in the business of shaving things away. I tell this story all the time where you go back to Michelangelo when Michelangelo looked at this big marble slab, okay, and he had created David. And it was amazing. And he said to him, how did you create David? And he goes, david was always in this marble slab. I just needed to take away everything that wasn't David. It's no different than you is. We just need to figure out and eliminate everything in your life that isn't creating the best version of Chris. What are you doing right now that you're thinking is helping you, but it's actually not. And that's where we come back to our a, controllables. The hydration place is it in exercise, nutrition, sleep, immune function, environment, mindset, self care. Those eight areas that impact HRV tell us how much stress we're under and how we're adapting to that stress. What do we have to start to strip away? And once we strip those things away, you're left with what's most powerful for Chris. And when we know what's most powerful for you, you can lean in double, triple, quadruple down on what's going to get you the results that truly matter. And when we know what those things are at the umpteenth degree. And we can really love in those areas. That's why we start to see massive change. And when we see massive change, what does it do? It increases adherence. It increases all these things neurologically. And we get back to that neuroscience component that is amazing because our brains are the most powerful thing bodies now.

It makes it easier. The results come faster, they come easier, and it's more natural. It's like doing what your natural talents are. So whether you're a hockey player, a cyclist, or, um, how that works, um, I'm. I'm wearing this ring. Or actually, I just took it off here. It's an ordering. Justin, I know the first time I heard you talk, you were talking about how to interpret some of the information in that. And that's how I picked up that I had Covid two days before I had symptoms. Your Your, your post graduate work is in hrv, right? HRV was a recovery studies, I believe. Yes, is what it was. I think, you know, almost everybody now knows what, what heart rate is like. Oh, you can take your heart rate, you know, it's one of these metrics, hrv. And I believe you've worked with the Whoop Whoop company. Whoop Strap company.

Yep.

So I'd love for you to talk.

About both those guys.

I love it. I'm still waiting on my Whoop 4 coming in. Man.

I have wearable on top of wearables on top of, on top of monitors, on top of gadgets and gas mos and I think it's gas mos and gadgets or whatever. I, it's my dyslexia and.

Well, we'll stick to the ones that we can, we'll see. We'll stick to the ones that we can see on your, your hands and wrists Right now, the gadgets we're going to talk about today. But yeah, so talk about like what is hrv? How can you interpret. So if people have heard of an Oura ring or a whoop strap or even the Apple watch, right. What are some of the metrics that we have now that have, that have come up? You know, how do you use those in your practice and you know, how can people interpret some of these to help get the results they're looking for?

Yeah, I mean that's a great question. And what we often we go back to what I talked about at the beginning where information often is what's overloading us. And wearables now have become so powerful. Like I remember back in 2008 when I was really kind of leaning in on this stuff and studying it in the labs and the only times that you could really get access to this was like in a, in a university lab or that type of setting where you're bringing people in. It was like an ordeal to get this data. Now you've got a device on your wrist that's available to people who don't know the difference between an apple and an avocado. And it's like, why can't we figure this out? It's like, it's no wonder. What's happened here is we've got these amazingly powerful tools. Aura, Whoop Apple, Polar, Garmin, Fitbit, you name it. There's a bunch of them out there, Koros. But when you start to utilize these things like, okay, I've got respiration rate, I've got body temperature, I've got resting heart rate. I've got peak heart rate, I've got average heart rate. I've got heart rate variability. I've got REM sleep stages. I've got slow wave sleep. Just. I've got total sleep stages. I'm just like, oh, my God. Like, I've got algorithmic recovery scores. I've got.

Just give me. Just give me green, yellow, red.

And then the problem with that is when you simplify it, is it that we go back to what we talked about is it's not that simple to paint it with a generic brush because every one of us is different. Why you're yellow is different than why I'm yellow. And we need to understand that. Because the habit that you're going to have to take or the action step that you're going to have to take is different than what I'm going to have to do. Because we might be both. We might both be yellow. Let's just call it that. We might both be yellow. You go, you know what? I just have to have a great night's sleep tonight. You have half a bottle of wine before you go to bed. And I go, you know what? I have work to do. I just need to focus on this. And I go to bed three hours after you. I get less total sleep. But before I go to bed, I do my meditation, I do some foam rolling, I do some soft tissue work, and I ultimately wake up in the morning and have a green recovery. You have a yellow, and you're like, well, what the heck? I got more sleep than you. And you work late. And it's all of these things. None of us are the same. And we're all respond differently. And so that's why when you ask me about a metric that matters, I always come back to heart rate variability. And what heart rate variability means is it's literally a language. It's the way in which your body communicates. And what it's communicating is how it's adapting to the stress or strain that you're placing on your body. Now, here's the crazy thing is that your body doesn't know the difference between mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional stress. So I want you to think about this for a second, and this comment is overarching. Everything in our world is stressful. Everything is stress. This podcast, you and me, right here, this is a stressor on both of us. My butt, sand feet in the water, sipping on a margarita is stress. Me chasing down a taxi in the rain, late for a meeting with my briefcase opening and the wind blowing in my Face in New York City with the noise or howling is a stress. They all fall differently on the spectrum of 0 to 100 of what my body considers stress. But everything is stress. We have to understand that. And so by knowing that when we come into accumulation, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional. Your dog died, you're moving, you're getting on a plane, you've got a business meeting, you're working out, you're putting inflammatory foods in your body, you're dehydrated, you're in a fight with your spouse, your kids are going off the wall, you're having to take your kids to and from sporting events. Keep naming different ones, you've got your.

I'm just shaking my head up and.

Down, you've got renovations going on at your home. Like all of these things, they're all stressors that our body has to process and ultimately are going to determine our performance at the end of the day, which the only thing people are often thinking about is, oh, I just have to eat well, I have to sleep and I have to get my exercise in. Those are the three things that they're like, yeah, I'll do these things and. And away we go. That's why through all the studies and everything I've looked at, it all comes down to eight controllables. Eight controllables that impact HRV and stress adaptation, or stress optimization is what we like to call it, and it's what I mentioned before, it is your exercise or slash movement. It's hydration, it's nutrition, it's sleep, it's immune function, it's self care, it's environment and its mindset. Those eight controllables help to create what we call. Again, if you're listening to this, I want you to try and picture this. Create the four levels. So the outer level, the outer circle is physical. This or the circle inside is emotional. The circle inside is mental. The circle inside is spiritual. If we do not have a big physical, if we don't have a big capacity, the ability to handle more, do more, be more. I don't care how much you work on the mental game, the emotional game or the spiritual, you will never be able to do or handle more. To build capacity, it starts by opening up that outer circle. Now, sustainability, that spiritual circle has to be so connected to that purpose. And that's what creates sustainability. That's what maintains staying power. And that's where we're able to start really being this massive triple threat, if you will, because you've got an engine and you've got a Purpose that goes. And Those are your 1 percenters. Those are the people that you want to be. Those are the people that have owned your different. And once you've owned your different, you get used to that. And that's the people that change the world.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And what I love is I work with my wife. Your wife had a great call with her, you know, talking about that spiritual component and really blending all these things together. So I guess before we wrap up here, Justin, I got a couple more things, but tell us how you, how you work together with the two of you and how Elise really focuses on kind of that spiritual side and really rounding out the triple threat package.

Yeah, so we look at, basically added into two areas. It's called inner, outer, inner energy and outer energy. So your inner energy piece is more that mindset component that, that, that spiritual energy that really gets connected to something, really allows you to move forward and allows any habit, anything that you're doing, to really be rooted within you to create sustainability. The outer energy component, that's everything that we just spoke about from the cellular levels, the genetic portions, the data component that allows these habits to become real. And by doing these two, we end up rooting what we call your habit strength index, like truly being able to own these habits. Are they rooted deeply or are they rooted at a high level? And there's a couple ways that we start to dive into each of these habits within each controllable. Each controllable can have 50 different habits that we can operate in, but which ones mean something to you? And we really start to look at what they mean to each person, how we need to start personalizing them, how we need to start creating these changes, and we operationalize it in a really deep way. Now the two things that I want to come back to here is with anybody, when we're trying to break a habit or we're trying to start a new one, it needs to be rooted in two things. Two things will determine success. One is context dependent or is it context independent? So context dependent would be I work out at 7:30 every morning in my home gym. Well, what happens when you go on the road to a hotel and you have meeting at 7:30? And is it that, oh, your body doesn't know that it needs to work out anymore because you're not at home. And it's that habit is context dependent drops your level of success and adherence. But now if you're context independent, you work out somewhere between 6 and 8am you have a really good understanding of what you need to do for your body. And no matter what, you wake up, you're on the road, now you're going to go run instead because you're not contextually bound to your gym at your home. The second thing is understanding limbic friction. So you have this frontal cortex that determines behaviors and there's going to be friction or the need for a conscious override of any behavior or state in order to change that behavior. So we talk about stress, mental and emotional stress comes in. And so if there's a lot of mental stress or limbic friction over completing something that's people say do your hardest things first thing in the morning because that's where you have the most likely ability. It's rooted in neuroscience. It's the greatest likelihood that you're going to overcome that limbic friction. And so by doing this, we're able to start again. Creating habits. There's four stages of creating a habit that are going to move us forward. It's one, create a plan. Two, generate a routine. From there, routine is the hardest place, hardest place we're ever in. We have to create literally militant structure. And the reason we create militant structure is we overcome limbic friction and ultimately create the plan set around context independence. Because if we compare the two, where limbic friction is minimized and they're content dependent, it maximizes our ability to have long term success. And so by doing this, think about this. By doing this, it goes from plan to routine to rhythm to instinct. And all of a sudden it becomes instinctual that we just start doing things. We do things out of instinct. And all of a sudden this thing that was so hard getting up and working out first thing in the morning, or meditating at noon, or meditating at some point throughout the. Not responding out of frustration, but responding in curiosity all of a sudden becomes instinctual to us that here it wasn't. And Elise says something that is just so brilliant is it takes us from living in a subconscious world to live in a conscious world. And so many of us live subconsciously where we just. We live by our reactions. We live by what comes to us naturally rather than being conscious about it and. And truly owning, go back to pardon the pun, but are different. And owning our choices and owning who we are. And the moment we do that again, you become the 1%.

I love it. And man, Justin, I feel like I only got through like half of the things that I wanted to talk about. We might have to have you back on. But before we wrap up, you know, tell the audience how can they learn more about Own It. How they, how can they get in touch with you if they want to learn more about what you all do?

Yes, the best place to go to learn more about Own it specifically is@oneitcoaching.com and then several ways to reach out to us through there. But post a ton of free content on my YouTube and Instagram channels, which is ustinroth r o e T H so those are the, those are the best ways. And again, very interactive with our audience and those out there. So anybody that reaches out, we're always getting back to you really quick.

Awesome. And I mentioned at the top of the show how the audience can get your master your wearable. In six minutes we're going to have all the links that you just mentioned as well as how to get that in the show notes. But Justin, thank you again for bringing all the value to the audience. And like I said, we might have to have you back on to dive even deeper into some of these things that you are helping people to achieve that 1% lifestyle. Thank you.

I love it Chris. I appreciate it.

Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.