PNTV - Strength for Life by Shawn Phillips

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More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on my friend Sean Phillips. Great book Strength for Life. So I got this book actually in manuscript form and before it went to the presses of awesome book in the Note 6 page PDF Philosopher's Note that will be our guide. I've got about 15 big ideas. Sean packed this book with big ideas. The Context is a 12 week program to transform your life and to experience more energy, more vitality, more strength than you've ever experienced before. Awesome stuff. If you're looking to transform your body and your mind, this is a great place to start and a great place to go. I am going to share some of my favorite big ideas and I'm excited about it. We will start with the first one which is Defining Strength. So Shana is all about creating strength for life. And this idea, I like to say we're going to have a hard time living at our highest potential if we have a hard time getting out of bed. We've got to optimize our bodies if we want to have a hope of optimizing our emotions, our psychological well being, our creativity, our loving relationships, our abundance, all those things we're passionate about really start with our bodies. Are we strong? Are we fit? Are we capable of giving our fullest selves day in and day out? And Shawn makes a distinction between health and strength. Sean says health is essentially the absence of disease.

Okay, cool.

You don't have disease, you're not sick, you're healthy. But what we want is strength. And Shawn says strength is like true wealth, whereas being healthy is kind of like paying your bills month to month to month. You're not totally insolvent, but you're not strong, you're not truly wealthy, having reserves in the bank that allow you to really flourish. So this idea of moving from an idea of just going for health into strength is what the book is all about. And again, it's packed with ideas on how to get there. Highly recommend it. So that's strength. Another really big idea that Sean comes back to again and again is that we're not after change. There's all kinds of fad diets we can pursue that will help us change quickly. It's insane to me to see all these belly fat ads that have the quickest remedy to deal with that. It's just absurd thinking. Sean is about transformation. So whereas change is something that allows you to change, it's pretty straightforward. Transformation is change that lasts. So most change occurs and we snap back to how we were. Sean says we want transformation and transformation is change that stays around, it endures. That's what we're after. And to create that, we've got to do a lot of different things. One of the most fundamental is we got to reorient our relationship to life and create rituals. We talk about this all the time. Sean differentiates habits. We want to have habits. We are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle tells us excellence then is not an act, but a habit. It's not what we do once in a while for a week or two. It's what we do habitually. But Shawn says, look, whenever you think of the word habit, usually you think of something negative. They smoke. That's kind of a habit. The habit of doing this, insert your this. It's usually not positive. So Sean says, let's look at our habits as rituals. Those things we do consistently that really honor our highest selves, that really allow us to create extraordinary wealth in our physical well being defined as strength. What do those rituals look like? And the book is packed with what we can do to create those rituals. And we'll talk about a few of them here. Actually going to jump to just a really, really simple but really, really big idea. The idea that you can take and you can start doing right now if you're not feeling optimal energy. A couple of really big things you can do. Three big things you can do that Sean talks about in the book. As part of his 12 week program, he has a base camp. Really cool idea before when you get all inspired to change your life and you create a vision of what you want to see. Before you go hard into that. Sean suggests what you go to a base camp, kind of like you're climbing Mount Everest right before you just run up Mount Everest. You do a lot of preparation and you get to base camp and you acclimate. So Sean says before you rush into something like a new fitness program or something, clean house, go to a base camp and really get situated to make sure you're taking care of yourself and then push yourself harder then climb and Everest. And a few of the things he suggests we pay attention to in basecamp are huge and strongly recommend. And these are echoed throughout all the things that I personally studied in health and fitness, etc. They're just simple fundamentals. We want to make rituals in our lives. Number one, gratitude. We talk about this all the time, but having an energy of gratitude is huge for our physical well Being it changes our biochemistry. It's a big thing. And. And I'll say this is one of the few health and fitness and strength training books I've ever read that talks about gratitude, meditation, stuff like that. Really cool, but gratitude. Contemplate every morning what you're most grateful for. We talked about it throughout these notes. Russell Simmons in due year says I called that his breakfast of champions. Starting every day with gratitude. It's hard to have a really bad day when we're living from a place of gratitude. Also, water. It's so easy to get dehydrated, which leads to higher levels of toxicity in our bodies and in our consciousness. So being properly hydrated. Sean says drink at least. What does he say? Ten, eight ounce glasses a day. So if you're not drinking that much and you're feeling lethargic, check in on that. Make that a habit and a ritual for you to drink that much water. It's simple and it's huge. Reminds me of the 8020 principle. 20% of the stuff we can do are going to lead to 80% of our results. This is definitely one of the 20% that will lead to significant results. Another big idea here in the base camp, just formative, fundamental things we want to do is sleep. Apparently you can research people. Those who only get four hours of sleep a night have 37% higher levels of cortisol than those who get full nights of sleep. And we do not want high levels of cortisol. So get regular eight hours of sleep, minimum of seven hours of sleep. Check in on that, see how you're doing. If you're not getting that much sleep, my hunch is you're accounting for or making up for that energy with caffeine and with sugar and all that stuff. Check in, get a deep night of sleep each night. Make it a ritual. So those are a few really cool big ideas we can look at there. Some other stuff that Sean talks about, alarming statistics. Did you know that some crazy percent. What is it? 65% of Americans are either obese or overweight. Something like 30%. 30% of Americans are obese. But what's even more remarkable, and 65% are either overweight or obese. Now, what's remarkable is that 65% of the 30% of people who are clinically obese in the United States, 65% of them don't think they are. They think the other people are the ones with the problem. And Shaun talks about how important it is that we recognize reality, that we're honest with ourselves so that we can affect change and if we aren't, we're going to get in trouble. So that just blows me away, those stats. And Shawn is super passionate about transforming our consciousness so that we take care of ourselves and transforming our institutions. So culturally, we created kids and adults who are more naturally going to be living from a place of strength and more fully giving themselves to the world. Big ideas. Sean's really big on something he calls focused intensity training. And he's all about active meditation and making our workouts an active meditation. Really cool idea. We talk about this again and again and again, how important it is to be able to shape our mind, to shape the contents of our consciousness and focus on what we want, when we want. Well, Sean talks about how important that is in the gym and that most people can't focus in life, in relationship or creative projects or whatever, and they don't when they're working out. And that we can use our workouts as an opportunity to train both our bodies and our minds by bringing a focused level of intense training. He talks about that in detail in the book. Again, awesome stuff. And Sean also teaches as part of the Integral Institute, which is one of the ways that he and I got to know each other better. And integrating meditation into our strength training, it's just a great idea. Strength training has all kinds of positive benefits we talk about in the note he goes off on in the book we talk about often. It's been scientifically proven that exercise, strength training, physical training can have the same positive benefits as Zoloft and other antidepressants. Simply moving our bodies as they were meant to be moved can have ridiculously positive benefits in our lives. We've got a bunch of other cool ideas, habits and rituals we talked about. That's huge. It all comes back to doing what we know we need to do in order to create levels of strength that allow us to most fully give ourselves to the world. So that's a very, very quick look at this awesome book. I'm going to leave it at that. Hope you enjoyed. And here's to creating strength for life. If you dug it, check out the note, check out the book, check out at Sean Phillips at Strength for Life. I think fullstrength.com is where you can find Sean and have fun.

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