Templates For Success

Hi, guys. My name is Donny Rouse, and you are listening to the podcast One Life. What are the signs of success? The signs of success. Think about that. I mean, what does that even mean when I'm saying the signs of success? What I really want you to do is I want you to think about anything that you've tried, anything you've succeeded, anything you failed at. And what are the signs of success? I've done my first physique showing you. You've probably heard me reference this at least a half a dozen times, if not maybe two dozen times in my prior podcast. But it serves at a very important point, and I'm punctuating these on purpose. It serves a very important point because the experiences I had in that contest, you could take and you could apply to any area of my life and your life, pick up those keys of success, and you could use those lessons that I learned in them, those points, and you could literally leverage that to any area of your life. So what are some of those lessons that I learned in doing that physique contest? The first commitment, when I was doing the Join the physique. I can't even speak right now. When I joined my physique contest, say that three times fast. It was because a friend of mine doubted me. He said that I would never have the body that he had, and he kind of snarked off the fact that I would even attempt doing such a contest. So that was number one. I had a purpose to want to take on the endeavor. If you look at anything that you've done in the past, it all started with this vision. It all started with this switch that was flipped on. Either you saw something that you wanted and you said, you know what? This is what I want in my life. I am determined to make it happen. Or maybe as often, in my case, someone doubts my ability, in which flips on that switch and says, you know what? I'm gonna prove you wrong. Watch. So you've committed to it now. And when I did this for the contest, I had to commit. I literally would not rest until I had signed the contract to partake in that contest. Because until I did that, it didn't feel real. They call it like burning the boats. Or wait, is it burning the boats or burning the bridge? I'm not really sure, but it's kind of like you. Yeah, you know, it's burning the boats. I remember. And the reason why they call it burning the boats is because you imagine, you know, you're. You're going to war and you're landing on this shore, and you know you have the war, but you also know that the boats are behind you. So if you light those boats on fire, there's no turning back. Then you only have two options, really. I mean, one, you fight and you win. 1. And maybe the second you fight, you die. But really, one option. You're there to fight, you're there to win. So when you cut off all those other options, it forces you to stay laser focused on what that outcome is the second. I had a coach, so I never competed in a contest before. And so I went to sign up for my contest, and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna need a coach. I've never done this. I don't know how many calories I'm supposed to take. I don't know how I'm supposed to structure these workouts. So I got a coach. The coach gave me this workout. It was actually a very, very long workout. I think maybe too long and. But I had the structure there. Someone who'd been there before gave me the formula on how to enter the competition, at least place and perform in that competition. We'll go into some of the lessons later. So I had a coach, and as a result of having that coach, there were big shifts that happened in my body. Two months in, all of a sudden, everyone was coming up to me at the gym. Oh, my God. I've seen the results. What are you doing? I want to do it. Oh, my God. That's too much work. I can't do it. I can't do it. But I had a coach, and had I not had a coach who had navigated those waters before, there's no doubt in my mind that I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have gotten to where I was. My body would not have been in the shape it was in when I was doing that competition. With that thought in mind, this is something to recircle back to later is that when you have a coach, there's different levels of coaches. Wouldn't you agree? It's like if I were getting a coach, if I were going to do, I work in coffee, so let's go there. So if I were doing a coffee, I wanted to know how to build a coffee business, first thing I would have to ask is, what kind of coffee business do I want to open up? So I could look to the local coffee roaster down the street in the next town over and say, hey, teach me how to have a successful business. Or I can go to. I don't Know, with the dead skull coffee, whatever it is that they brag about, having the most caffeinated coffee. I can go there and say, hey, teach me how to do millions, you know, whatever, million dollars, $15 million of sales all online. Or then I can look to a Starbucks and I can say, hey, teach me how to have 20,000 stores worldwide and have world domination joking around me. But depending on what that result is, the coach you get is going to dictate those results. Because you can only go as far as that coach has been. Right? They're only going to give you their results. Some of them. I mean, I'm trying to think. I mean, maybe there are some super bowl coaches that have taken players a Super bowl, but have never actually won a Super bowl themselves. I'm sure that might be an exception to the rule, but you know where I'm going with this. So the coach. Third, the habits. So you need to do habits. You need to make all the things that you're working that are pointing in that direction, that goal. You need to make them habitual. And making them habitual simply means just making them so that they're thoughtless, that you don't have to think, you don't have to put the brain energy into doing them every single time. And that alone will come by forming a habit. By doing it over and over, you'll start to develop new ways. It'll be easier. You won't have to put the thought process into doing whatever the task is, say, meal prep, in my case. But it's also about making things easier and streamlining them so they don't take up time and free up more time. So this week you could focus on other things. When I did my contest, I was doing my meal prep twice a week, sometimes three, if I ran out of food and it was because maybe a package of turkey Instead of like one pound or something like that, maybe it was like 0.75 pounds, whatever, in which case I had to go buy more and prep more. But for the most part, I had it pretty streamlined where I knew exactly what I need to get in. I had the rhythm of working out, coming home, prepping my meal plates for the next day, prepping my breakfast for the next day. And it was just like clockwork. And I was able to go through and do it repetitively over and over and over with ease, without any kind of brain power. Let's see, we're on third. I think we're on fourth. Fourth is setting a deadline. One of the things I had failed to for the longest time was setting a deadline for a goal. Because if you don't set that deadline for a goal, you're like, ah, you know what? Yeah, I'll compete. Yeah, you know what? I'm not gonna compete yet. Might as well just push it out six more months. I'll wait for the competition in the summer. Ah, you know what? Yeah, I didn't really work out as hard as I wanted for that. Let me just. You know what? We'll push an entire year. I'll do it back in December. By not having a definitive endpoint for those goals or deadline for them, you're giving yourself the ability to kind of slack off, to not really go towards it. By having the deadline, even if you don't mean it, you're at least giving yourself a structure. And while you might not meet it on that day, maybe it's a week, maybe it's two days, maybe it's a month, but at least you're on course and you're taking the steps. Because a lot of time we can't plan, we don't know what's going to come up. There are things beyond our control that, you know, that might, you know, like delay us. But nevertheless, having that goal set in stone, having that focus point is what's going to get us there faster. The next point is looking at what works and changing up and this will be done. There's probably a couple other points, at least a couple other points I could make, but I'll stop it here at this one just because this was actually the biggest lesson that I learned in doing my first physique show. So I always say, so doing this contest I was working out towards the end. Well, a couple things happened. First, I was doing chicken. I was eating chicken. Three of the six meals I was eating a day were chicken based. And as a result of three months of eating chicken, I started to notice that the energy levels, I felt this, like acidic, this acidity in my body. And if you don't know what acidity feels like in the body, it's just this draining of energy. You just feel weak. And I felt this overwhelming feeling. But yet I was always pushing through on my workouts to complete the workout. And I did. That was just willpower and powering through it. And one of the things I found, I was like, you know what? My body, I think it's the chicken. And I didn't know this, but chickens don't pee. Apparently they store it in their meat or the muscles as uric acid. And as you're Consuming that, you're literally consuming the acid. I never knew that. That's why three months in I switched over to turkey and all of a sudden I started feeling much, much better. Also, I was doing the competition, I was doing my workouts and comes time for the show and I'm on stage prior, like a month or two prior to getting on the stage, I was doing posing practice. So doing posing practice, you're sitting there, you're looking in front of the mirror, they have these giant heat lamps on you, trying to give you the effect that you're going to feel when you're on stage. Because when you're on stage, you're, you're all oiled up. Picture that one for you. You're all oiled up and they have these giant heat lamps pouring on you. Your fake tan is like dripping off, but nevertheless, they're trying to prep you. So while I was doing these poses, I thought I had everything figured out. I get up on the stage, I do my poses, I come in third place of three. There's only three people there. I came in third place of three. And so at first I felt like I was kind of a failure. I thought, well, not totally true. The experience alone, there was a great sense of satisfaction I felt just from stepping on the stage because I knew how much work, I mean, I felt the satisfaction all the way leading up to the final event. It was the first time I saw really felt that kind of satisfaction, that kind of pleasure, that kind of self fulfillment and aiming towards the goal. How they say, you know, it's not about the end result, it's about the journey there. I really felt it in competing for this competition. But I got on the stage and I came three third of three. And I was a little bummed off, a little bummed at first. And I met someone else at my new gym. I met a guy who was at the show, but in the crowd he's a spectator. He's also a competitor for the, for bodybuilding. He saw me, said, yeah, you were at that show in whatever it was, I think it was November. I was like, yeah, I was there. I was showing him my pictures. Yeah, I remember you. You had the nicest body on the stage. The only thing is your posing sucked. And then I'm looking at my pose, the poses that I did, and I'm looking, I'm like, wait a minute, this is kind of weird. Why am I posing different than every the other two guys on stage? I'm looking at my poses and the poses, the way I Was shifting my body. I was actually shielding my body towards the judges, which is not what you're supposed to do, but it was what I was taught. So I'm like, oh, my God. All. Like, I could have walked away with the championship in this event if I just knew how to pose. But then the lesson came, and I was like, you know what? The lesson is that you only get the results from what you. From the. From your coach. Right? You could. You can't. I can't get greater results than he's gotten. What he taught me was what I did out there on the stage. So if I had a different coach, I would have also gotten a different result on the stage. So I was like, huh? How interesting is that? So I could go. Next time I compete, I could go, you know, to a coach. And, I mean, I know if I do nothing different and just take the same workouts that I did and just change my posing, I know I'll do better. But I know if I get a coach having done that experience, I know a lot more, and the results will be better regardless. And the second thing I learned when I was doing these workouts, I had sometimes 50, like, 50 sets in a workout. I showed it to one of my. Another friend of mine who was a competitor and a personal trainer, and he's looking at. He's like, what the hell are you doing? He's like, what are you doing? He's like, do you know how. How many sets you do? And he's like, no wonder. Why you. I had a tendonitis in my left shoulder or the. My. My pec. He's like, no wonder. He's like, look how many exercises you're doing. He's. Your body. Your body was breaking down. It couldn't handle all these exercises. Again, this is what I was taught, so that is what I did. So I learned. So going forward, I know more how to tune into my body, to know what feels right, what doesn't feel right, and also how to work out differently. Can you draw the parallels between this and anything that you want to do in life? I mean, take, let's say, a trip. Your first trip abroad, we'll go there because it's an area that I'm very familiar with. And you're like, how the hell can you. How can you compare taking a trip to a physique contest? Easy, right? So let's go through the steps. If I remember all the ones that I just walked through first, you made the commitment so that signing up of the competition, that's Booking your plane ticket, saying, you know what, this is when I'm gonna go and I'm buying the ticket. Non refundable, might I add. So once you do that, you know, you're booked in. Secondly, find a coach. So who is a coach in that travel realm? The travel. You could look at a blogger, like Nomadic Matt, or you could message me. I get a bunch of my friends who've traveled and they send me like, you know, well, Donnie, what would you do? I'm going to Nepal. What would you do? I'm going to do a, teach English overseas. And they send me this and I give them my inputs on the experiences that I've had, but also what kind of experience they can expect given the culture of that place. Three, having a plan. So having a plan could be packing A, B, C and D. Knowing what you're going to experience when you're in certain months. Sometimes take Southeast Asia. I was just in Vietnam and I was there in the rainy season. I did not follow my own advice. I kind of have this travel this side of me that says, you know what? Screw it, I'm just going to book the ticket, I'll get there. There's nothing that I can't buy when I'm there. So that's it. All I have to do is book the ticket. I'm sure you have a few of those categories in life where it's like, oh, you want to go to a concert? You're like, yippee, yes, let's go to a concert. Oh, don't you have to find babysitter? No, no, no, no, it's okay. It's all my mom. I'll drop them off. And there are certain aspects of our lives where we don't look at the details. We just kind of clump everything into one bucket because we know how to figure these things out because we've done it so many times. So that would be the third point. And if I have to think it out, then I could actually explain it to someone. For me, I just kind of clump it into one. Oh, excuse me. And I don't remember the other points I was going at, but let's go to the last point that I made about re looking at what you've done and then kind of reformulating your thoughts and saying, okay, how can I do this better for the next trip? So one of those things you may realize, oh, I forgot to check the weather. How can I be more ready, more prepared for the next time I go to a place in Scandinavia? And then you're like, all right, well, you know what? I know now, I didn't check the weather before, but I know that even though it's on the same latitude lines as New York City, oh, God, it's a lot colder there. I know to pack a jacket. I know to check the forecast first. So you learn these techniques that will help you be more successful in this time. And that's life, right? That is life. So if you want to be destined for greatness, start out great. And all you have to do, all you have to do is just kind of learn, learn, learn from people who are more successful in those areas and then keep going. That is it. Guys, thank you so, so much for tuning in. If you want to shoot me any messages, DM me on Instagram onny D o n n y rouse r a u s again D o n n y r a u s thank you so, so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to hearing from you. God bless.