The Winning Formula

Hi, guys. My name is Donnie Rouse, and you are listening to the One Life podcast. So today I wanted to talk to you about the formula of success. So what is the formula of success? Because we've all experienced success in some area of our life and yet not in others. So what I want to do with this talk was using the framework that I used when I was competing in my first physique contest, where I had to literally transform my entire body. I wanted to use that same framework to show you that you guys have this same formula, this accessibility to the same formula for success that you've already used and done over and over in your own life. You just kind of have to pull upon that experience and apply it to the new endeavor or the new goal that you have. So the success formula, again, we all know it. The only thing we have to do is call upon it if you think about any aspect of your life that you are successful and think of a goal that you're proud of. So likely in that goal, there is a series of steps. There's a process that you followed that enabled you to achieve those results that you did, a process that you felt proud about and made you maybe appreciate that journey. It was a journey of growth. So what we're going to do is we're going to dive a little bit deeper. I'm going to share you through my experience of the physique contest I did and how I was able to kind of use that experience and bring that forward. But also I'm going to tell you about, like, the trials that I had when doing it, because fitness is one of my big passions. I love being fit. I love training. It's part of my identity. And I don't think. I mean, I work out five days a week, usually for about a couple hours a day. So it's a big part of my life. It takes a big chunk of my time. So that success formula, for me, if I'm going to break it down into three steps, it really comes down to commitment, modeling and accountability. Measuring and accountability, really. So in order for us to take on any endeavor to achieve any goal, we have to commit. You have to make a commitment. So when I was doing the physique contest, one of my friends, my friends Hubert, I had seen him, we were at the gym. He was swimming in the pool, and I had just kind of changed in my swimming trunks, and I was going down there, and I hadn't seen him in, like, six months. And when I saw him in the pool, his entire physique had changed. So I asked him, I was like, hubert, what have you done differently? I mean, you look completely different. And he's like, yeah, you know, I started working out a little bit harder. He didn't tell me that he had a trainer until like a little bit later. He also then mentioned that he was going to do physique show. When I told him I was, you know what, give me six months, I'm going to be the same way. And he gave me this kind of this look. He's like, yeah, right, yeah, we'll see. I remember saying in my mind, you mother effer in the way that friends talk to one another. But pissed off in my mind, I was like, you wait and see. So the next day, I went out to sign up for this physique contest, which I thought we ended up being different contests. I thought it was when he was in. So I ended up going over and signing up for this physique contest. I said, you know what? If that's what he thinks, I'm going to be competing with him on stage. So the commitment started. I went to the. I went to this trainer who was putting on the show, and I said, hey, I'd like to sign up for the show. He's like, well, you know, the show is not for this many amount of months. We could start doing the training and I could write your plan now and then you could sign up later. I was like, no, no, you don't understand. I want to sign up now because I need to know that I've committed to this, that I'm going to be on stage and that I'm literally locked in, cutting off all other possibilities, burning all the bridges around that I'm going to be competing there. And then I could have that determination, that drive, that commitment to it. So I signed the contract, and from that point on, it was on. So what was next? The next thing I needed to do was I needed to model the behaviors of someone who's been there before. So this gentleman had done different physique contests, and I was kind of hesitant to go with him because I'm like, well, you know what? He's not competing in the same class or the same category that I am in. Is he going to be the right one for me? Because when you think about coaching, right, you think about anything, anyone, you. I could choose any coach who's competed and who's had some success in there, and likely they're going to give me better results than what I'm currently getting because they've been there. I'VE never competed. I have a great physique, and I, you know, I've worked out for nearly, I think, 20 years now. And I think I conditioned my body to be a certain way, but I didn't know how to build muscle, how to burn fat, how to build a diet, and how to build, like, workouts in order to achieve this result that is going to look good and perform on stage. So knowing that you, I could go with any coach. It's gonna be better than what I currently know. I signed up, and so I committed with him. He did my workout, and he gave me my meal plan. And I remember going into that, starting the meal plan. For example, there were six meals a day. I was getting something like 300 grams of protein, like 20, 300 calories. I was eating very, very clean, but it was a lot of food. And I remember feeling like the food was literally layering in my body. And it's like almost to the point where if I ate anymore, it was gonna come out of my mouth. That's how I felt going to sleep and feeling like every time I turned over, the food was shifting and it being very uncomfortable. But then slowly what happened maybe after, like a couple weeks is I started getting used to eating that amount of food and my body got used to metabolizing it. So as I was eating that food, I literally, after every few hours, my body was like, hungry. It's like, give me more, give me more, give me more. And I literally was burning everything that I consumed. So I went back in for a measurement, actually. Well, I'm kind of going to the last part, but we won't go there yet. And my body, My weight was going up, but my body fat was going down. So I was increasing the amount of muscle that I was. That I had, while also decreasing the fat, which is kind of like an anomaly. Usually when people build, they build the muscle and then they shred and they kind of burn the fat. But I was doing. I was doing. I was building muscle and burning fat at the same time, which is like, who does that? I do. And then there was an adjustment. So we going back into the last thing. And it's kind of like, it's kind of the third point. Maybe I'll add one more point. The measuring and accountability. Maybe accountability. I'll make accountability its own point. So measuring. So what? Exactly. So, all right, so I had this model modeling behavior, diet workout plan, and then the measuring aspect. So every single month, I would have to go in and have to measure my results. I'd have to get my body fat. I have to measure all the different parts of my body to see which muscles were growing, which weren't. So this way, I could adjust the process. I could adjust my workouts in order to accommodate and build those parts of me that weren't seeing the growth that they should. So that's so true of life, though, right? So think about the results. If you want to see successes in any area of your life, you need to measure it. And if you can't measure it, then you're not going to see the progress. And when I look back on my own life, I look at areas of my business, I look at even my personal relationships. I haven't had this unit of measure to say, how am I performing here? And the premise, Tony Robbins says he's like, you know what? Sometimes you could be winning and not even know it. Sometimes you could be doing well, but you won't know because you're not measuring. So you need a unit of measure in order to see how am I doing here? Am I doing well? And then once you see where the areas you're not, you make these adjustments and you. You move forward, implementing this new. This new strategy or this new program. So with me, I. Three months into my workout, I'm like, you know, I. I'm not. I mean, I was lean as anything, but I couldn't. I wasn't putting on the mass, considering all the food, considering all the energy that I was expending in these workouts. I. I wasn't seeing this building of mass. And while I was doing those meal plans, every single day was the same meal every single day. So I would start off breakfast. I had like six eggs with oatmeal and some greens. A few hours after that, couple apples, almond butter. A few hours after that, half pound of a protein, usually fish with greens and sweet potato. Few hours after that, the same thing. Few hours after that, I had a double protein shake followed by a single protein shake. And then after that, I had another half pound of protein with. I don't think I ate carbs after that, but I probably should have because it would have pumped my muscles up with glucose. But I. It was just a protein with the salad, and it was a lot of. It's a lot of food. And so we. We did this, and three months in, he's like, okay, we'll make a change. So the change we made was we just switched out the carbohydrates. So where I was eating a carbohydrate or carb, like, the sweet potatoes that didn't have that many carbohydrates to something like rice. Now all of a sudden, two weeks later, two weeks after this, making this small shift, all of a sudden, I exploded. And the result, I mean, people at the gym were coming up to me and were like, what the heck are you doing? You look amazing. You look night dying. And I was starting to get all this attention from people. And the reason why I was able to see those results was one, because I was measuring. And with that measurement came changes. So when you're measuring, it's about measuring. Say, okay, am I getting the results that I want to get? And if not, then you make changes to see, to try to get those results, like to increase, in my case, increase that muscle mass. And if I didn't receive it, if I didn't get it that time, then I would have changed my workout or my diet plan again. I would have probably consumed even more. Kind of goes on the whole basis. I know in order to build a house, you need to have the raw material. So the raw material being the food. If I wasn't getting the food that I needed, the nutrients I needed to build that muscle, then there was no way I was going to build that house. And I actually have two points now. So accountability. So accountability. There were times in my workout where I wanted to give up. I felt spent. There are days where I just felt everything always ached. I felt my body breaking down. I think in the entire time I was working out for six months for this program, I missed a total of two workouts. And I think I might have cheated on like, maybe two meals maybe. And there were times where I was like, you know what? I just feel burnt out. I don't have the steam, the energy to go through this. And then I would see friends at the gym and they'd comment on, like, oh, my God, you look amazing. And they would comment on the results and remember that them commenting on that, because everybody at the gym knew that I was participating in this program. That was kind of my accountability. And I was proud to say, but that was the accountability. And when they commented on the results they were seeing, it gave me this, like, burst of energy, this burst of like, I can do this, I can carry on. And it was almost happened on a weekly basis. So every week around Friday, I would start to kind of burn out. And then someone make a comment about the results I was seeing, and that would give me just enough spike to follow through the next week and for the results. And then ultimately I ended up at the show, and I competed. Well, that's. Something else happened at the show. I'll go into that later. And then the last thing I want to do, and it's kind of like, actually, I won't even touch about that. The last thing. So I'm at the show. There's three participants in the show. I was one of three, and I ended up getting third place. But what was. You know, at first, I was kind of bummed. Like, wow, I finished last. But then when I reviewed the tape, I realized something. I realized that out of the other people that were competing, when we were doing our posing, right, so you have poses where you're pointing at the judges and you're doing your front, you're doing your sides, you're doing your back. And when I was doing this pose, I realized that everyone was posing differently than I was. I'm like, what the hell's going on? And I realized that my coach had given me the wrong. Like, how he was advising me to pose was incorrect in the sense that it wasn't showing off the body the way the other people were. So I'm like, all right, why were they posing differently than I was? And at first, I was kind of upset with it. I was like, you know what? It's his fault I didn't finish first. I was blaming him. But then I said, you know what? It's not his fault. You know, this is just a result that I got. When we. When I mentioned earlier that you get a coach, that each coach will give you a different result, I chose to go with this coach as a result. That is the result that I've gotten because I chose to go with this coach. If I would have chosen a different coach, I would have had a different result. So now it's more of, like, less building on that experience. So now I have this experience. I know what I did right. I know what I did wrong. And now I can take that experience and build on it for the next competition. And I got this encouragement. I was working out at the Edge Club in Greenwich, and one of the guys there that works out was a competitor as well. And he was actually at my show, I was. And I mentioned him. I was like, yeah, you know, this is. I showed him my pictures. He's like, yeah, you were. You had a great year. One of the best bodies in your. In your. In your category. But you're. You weren't posing correctly. And the reason why I said that was because I was positioned in the middle, and the judges will usually position the person in the middle that, one, they. They think is ahead of the others, and two, they want to see more of. And I was in the middle position, and they want to see me. But when I looked back and I was doing the different poses, I wasn't showing my body. And a bad pose is like, you're done. If you're not posing correctly, you're not showing your body in the way that best represents it. You're done. So that encouraged me now to now try it over again. And then lastly, this is not really related, but I'll go into anyway. So, for me, one of the things that's kind of been reoccurring in my life and was this feeling that, you know, if I get results, people may feel bad if I outshine them. It's something I had spoken to one of my coaches about, and then I was speaking with a friend, and she's like, well, what are the things you're most proud of? And I brought up the weightlifting competition. I said, this is one of the things that I'm most proud of because I had to push myself. And when I spoke to other people, you know, I said, they're like, well, wow, how did you get these results? How did you achieve this? I was like, well, you know, it's not. It's not. It's not magic here. I gave him my paper. This is the meal plan I followed. This is the workout I did. This is the amount of time that I spent at the gym. And here, everything's right here in front of you. And people looked at it and they're like, oh, wow, I got. I have to do all that. Oh, man, I just don't know if I can do that. And at that point, I went from, like, kind of feeling like I have to dumb myself down because I'm getting results that I might outshine others to really being proud of the result I've gotten because I realized that I did the work. I did the work that other people weren't committed or other people, like, didn't want to commit to. And that was a big aha moment for me because. All right, well, how about the other areas of my life where I've achieved success and I've achieved things? You know, what's the difference between me and someone else? A lot of the time I felt bad. Like, I was like, I was wronged or I was going to be in solitude because I didn't, you know, I would outshine other people when it really came down to just that, you know, like, some people you have to be willing to commit to the work. So it's not a matter of who's right, who's wrong or shining or being better than someone. It's what are you willing to commit to. So in closing, I'd like to leave you just kind of with that. Realize that everything you do, it really comes down to having the success formula that you've done over and over in your life. So the homework I'll give you is to kind of think back in your own life. Think of an area where you were successful, something you've achieved, and what were those. Those things that were in place that you did in order to get that end result? And I promise you, if you were to take what you did there, if you really break it down, take it and apply it to any area of your life, you will get the same results. And if you're interested in doing physique contests, I am starting to do some training and training people. You could contact me. I'd be happy to be your coach and help you get there. But model somebody. It helps to model somebody rather than try to figure it out for yourself. That is it, guys. Again, this is Donny Rouse, the One Life Podcast. If you haven't already, please check out my Instagram page. The handle is Donny D O N N Y Rouse R A U S one word and rousecoffee R A U S C O F F E E And if you haven't already, please join the One Life Podcast Facebook group. One Life Podcast with Donny Rouse. That is it. Look forward to seeing you guys soon. Thanks for tuning in.