Sleep, Movement & Video Games ft. Lee Chambers | Ep 99

People seem to forget if you change today, today will change your life. To keep up with the latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to the Self Belief Chief podcast Facebook group. Download your favourite ones and this episode is brought to you by ODD Health. The easy way to speak to a nutritionist Take control of your health and your body. With the support of registered nutritionists online through the Odd Health app, you can even take a free questionnaire so that they can understand more about your goals to help with your first consultation. If you want to know more on the selfbeliefchief.com podcast page underneath the episodes, you'll be able to find more information. Lee, thank you so much for joining me and going through your details beforehand. I mean, you've got so many interesting things going on, but first and foremost, as many of us are experiencing a very small, strange, turbulent time at the moment. How are you finding it?

Yeah, I mean, it's been a challenging time, absolutely no doubt about it. And at the same time, David, it has been a time to really take a step back, reflect and start to look at not only what's going to happen in the future and how we can start to try to action things, to either step into that or protect ourselves against that, but ultimately to look at ways of doing things differently, to look at how we can continue to help people through turbulence, through crisis, and how we can really make a difference and an impact, especially when things are a little bit rocky.

Yeah, absolutely. And you use the word turbulence there. I mean, I really want to get your insight in terms of. Because you've been through turbulence, right? And so you understand that. But actually having the kind of confidence, belief to get through that particular period and that level of resilience is something people really require right now. Would you be happy to share with us a bit of your experience in those tough moments and how you managed to get on the other side of them.

Yeah, certainly. So I'll try and keep it as succinct as possible. But in the middle of my studies at university, I had some serious mental health issues and that was caused in many ways by a number of different elements of having a relatively stable childhood. I'm from a working class background, my parents worked hard and we always had food on the table roof over our heads. And you know, I had that late millennial childhood which was pretty comfortable. But I went out to university, enjoyed the autonomy, enjoyed the freedom. What I actually found though is I tried to make the adolescent to adult transition, didn't have the self awareness and emotional intelligence to dig deep into myself to find out how to express that. So I looked out to society and as a young black male who was pretty technical, scientific, data driven and quite entrepreneurial, I looked out and didn't see anyone who really reflected me. What I saw was sports stars, musicians, film actors. So I didn't really have anyone to model off in that respect. And then I look back to my past and realized that I'm very, very different to my own father. And the males in my family never had more than surface level conversation with any of them in my life. So I didn't have that stage from there. So what I actually found is not being able to access myself, not being able to model from society, not be able to take anything from my own upbringing left me quite stuck. And I then started to isolate myself. I had some struggles with my academics and then it literally ended up with me then avoiding. So I started to avoid contact, connection my studies and felt like I was failing. I went on a bit of a spiral downwards to the point where I isolated myself in my university flat for two weeks and was taken home by my parents. So that was the first time I really hit that adversity. And I simply didn't have the tools, the techniques or the insight to, you know, to fight it, to approach it, to move into it. So I just literally put my head in the sand and I went home and had the space to reflect and then it was able to kind of transmute that and see that wasn't me who was failing, it was the process and not having that understanding I could build that had the ability to refine those areas of myself. So I then took that forward. I managed to go back to university and graduate by building myself back up, building more of that self awareness and emotional intelligence that allowed me to express myself authentically, start to actually chisel my own character and find out who I was. And I graduated in 2007 in International Business psychology and had to think, what would I want to do? You know, I need to actually pick now because I'm about to go out into the world of work. And I decided to go into financial advisory because it knitted together two of the things that I'd entered, identified were really resonated with me, helping people and working with data, statistics and figures. So that, that was really great. Got myself on a national bank graduate scheme, happy, really progressing. And then naturally, 2007, not good time to graduate. Six months later I lost my funding for my training and then I lost my job. So second bump in the road and yet again, I walked away from that thinking it's not fair, seems very harsh. But I very quickly then flipped that focus down to realise I need to take ownership over this. There's not any finance jobs out there, so I'm going to need to forge my own path and that comes from me. In fact, I'm probably going to set up my own business because I can't be made redundant from that and I can't fire myself unless I need to. And also my professional qualifications, I'm going to go and pay and invest in myself because it can't be refunded and I can choose, I'll have skin in the game, I'll be more consistent. So I then did that for five years, building a business, working in different industries and doing a number of qualifications. Everything was settled and you start to get a little bit comfortable and a little bit complacent about things. My son came along, I met my wife and got married. And as things felt that they were expanding in that focus, I was becoming more comfortable and not pushing that boundary more like I should have been and trying to make life more certain and stable, which is great when you've got a family. It's not great for your own personal growth. And then in so many ways, a lightning bolt from above decided to jolt me out of my increasingly comfortable pattern and shift my worldview completely. When in 2014, I just turned 29, was there thinking, what do I want to do before I'm 30, you know, and my wife was six months pregnant at this point, so I was about to become the father of two, a 30 year old man on paper, more sensible and less disruptive. And yet all of a sudden, over the course of a week, I lost the ability to walk through illness. So my immune system attacked my joints, the connective tissues locking both my knees in place, my shoulder and my wrist, and putting me in hospital, unable to do the basic things myself. So I couldn't go to the toilet, I couldn't show myself, I couldn't eat properly on my own. And then all of a sudden I had a team of people around me who actually cared, who actually helped me to do these things. And initially I was in shock. That kind of alchemized to despair and frustration because I didn't know what was going to happen. Suddenly it all gone, it had been taken away and then it kind of moved to grief from physicality, my athletic ability, my ultimately mobility. And I didn't know what was going to happen. But I very quickly again realized that those Negative emotions had to let them come and hopefully express them. If you suppress them, then they were going to come and bite me at some point in the future. I knew as human beings, we have blazing joy all the way across the spectrum to deepest despair for a reason. They're there to be expressed as part of the human experience. And my knowledge over time and starting to accept that adversity does come allowed me to almost say to myself, well, this has not happened to me. It's happened for me. And now how can I start to move into this? Because if I take ownership of my health outcomes, this chronic disease that I've got, got it for life, it's happened. I've suddenly lost the ability to walk, and yet the ability to move forward. I'm not gonna put any limits and boundaries on my recovery. I started to come increasingly grateful, realizing I've never been grateful for walking until I lost it. As humans are incredibly complacent and don't really think about what you have until all of a sudden you don't have it or have access to it. So that really fueled me on. I made a decision quite early on that I could either continue to resist the pain and suffer longer, or I could just accept that it was going to be challenging. It was a challenge that I could step into. And at that point, I really got there. I was in walk, in rehab, and I accepted it. I'm going to attack this disease as much as it's attacking me. I'm going to step into the gap that's been opened up between what's happened and what's going to happen in the future. And I'm going to drive that. I'm going to push that on. So I suddenly became accountable for my own recovery. I wasn't going to sit there in the wheelchair and hope the medicine was going to work. And by doing, that, recovery was difficult. It took me 11 months to get back, walking a mile unaided. And yet in that period, my daughter was born, and I looked at her there with absolutely no boundaries and limits upon her, none of society's dirt. She was just her authentically expressed, most of the time crying. And yet I knew that all of a sudden, in a few months time, she'd be walking and I was gonna be walking with her. All of a sudden, that power of why that connection to I'm gonna be walking my daughter and running around the garden with my children got me through those mornings where I was stiff, I was in agony. I didn't want to. I decided that my identity was going to drive my actions instead of how I felt, because I knew that if I. If I. If my actions were driven for how I felt, then I wasn't going. I wasn't going to be consistent in my recovery. Because you don't feel like doing your stretches and all your rehab exercises in your physio when it hurts, when you're so stiff, and when you're so fatigued and tired. And by doing that and connecting all those dots to. I stepped into that gap. And even when I had a significant setback after six months, when some of my lower lumbar vertebrae started to compact together, I still saw the progress I made, because I've been tracking that progress every single day. And I look back on when I had a bad week and looked back the month previous and saw that I'd actually made progress, even though I'd regressed this particular week. And all that together allowed me to really faced adversity. And because I'd accepted it, because I realized that ultimately this was my winter, and this was probably one of the coldest winters of me stood exposed on a mountain I was possibly going to have in my life. And yet I decided this is how it's going to be. Things are going to happen. I don't have control over that, but I do have control over how I react, how I respond, and then how I move forward into the gap that's been made by anything that ever happens to you. And I had on my wall a picture of an ecg, because ultimately, life is like a heartbeat. You're going to be in the trenches at times, so other times you're going to be on top of that peak on that mountain. And yet if you stand in that trench when it's incredibly difficult, you've got your head down, you can't see the next peak that you're going to go up to. When you can't see that or when you decide that you want life to be comfortable and be a straight line, be flatline that doesn't have variance, then you'll chase comfort. But it's not going to be comfortable for you, because a flatline would mean that you were dead. So you've got to kind of accept that adversity, come and see it as a challenge, not a threat. And it's really a time for you to show not only yourself, but the people around you that you can face adversity and you can come through it, because not. It's not gonna. It's not deadly. It's not gonna kill me. It's just taken something away from me. And we, we almost have that, you know, that mindset nowadays that a bad thing happens. And it's similar to being chased by a tiger ready to be eaten. And yet, very simply, there's very, very little that you should honestly be afraid of in the world we live in today.

I mean, thank you for sharing that. And yeah, you have experienced a lot of turbulence and got a really good attitude towards it. And you gave that example right at the end in terms of it's not like you're being chased by a tiger. But of course, our brain was built 2 million years ago. No doubt. Why use that particular example of it's not like being chased a tiger, but a brain has to find that new thing, doesn't it? Do people like me? Do we have enough followers on social media? Am I good at my job? That's the new thing. That's the new survival focus, really, when people get stuck. You mentioned about being stuck at one point. All my clients, I always say to them, whenever you get stuck, it's the combination of just two things. It's life doesn't match the plan of how you think it should be. And the second part is you don't feel like you've got the control to change it. When you have those parts at exactly the same time you get stuck. It is very difficult. No doubt. I could see on a number of cases where that was the sticking point, but then obviously the solution was, well, either I can leverage some control here, actually maybe I have to create a new plan. And you talked about acceptance a few times, which I think is interesting because sometimes we kind of part of my French bullshit ourselves about where we are in the hope that we don't have to kind of go, actually, maybe I'm not here. Maybe I'm actually a bit lower down. But actually appreciating, accepting that might be the case is the only way to recognize, okay, if I'm actually here, and I'm certain I am here now, I can work out what the next level is and how to get to it. When we're not really trusting where we are, we can't really understand what it takes to get to the next step. The thing I wanted to ask you something you said, amongst that is finding certainty. And I think most especially in the current climate, but especially with lots of people I work with desperate for more certainty, right? Desperate to know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, how it's going to happen, what, why it's going to Happen all of this stuff. So you were. You were looking for certainty. So during that story, during that part of your journey, I mean, how did you find more certainty?

Yeah, what was interesting is I actually realized that you have to accept the uncertainty because the future is, by definition, uncertain. But it's about you being able to dig that bit deeper into yourself, to be able to really authentically express yourself. That's the certainty that you have where you start to be able to control the things that you can and accept the things that you can't. And that actually brings a certain calm confidence and inner trust in yourself. And that is what actually gives you that foundation of certainty in a world that is constantly dynamic, agile and moving. Now, every year that goes by, the quicker the world spins and people are still looking for the certainty of years gone by. In some ways, we almost reference the job for life.

Absolutely.

And lots of constructs that we quite often are told within phrases, within stories. And when we kind of almost look back at history that we. Well, this. You know, there was always a certainty. There was a king and there was. There was numerous political factions, and they were always fighting. You know, lots of things are, to be honest, certain. You don't know when they're going to come, but they are kind of certain because human beings have a tendency to follow certain patterns over and over and over again, which does bring certainty in a strange, convoluted way. And yet it's that as the world has become as it is, and there's this element where people want to be more comfortable. But he almost imagined that they could suddenly step massively outside the comfort zone and be incredibly spontaneous and adventurous and fun. But almost from the movies, this idea of modern bravery and courage where you run into the burning building and make that snap decision to jump out the back of a plan, when in all truth, that actually comes from sticking your toe outside the edge of that comfort zone and gradually expanding it over time. The actual courage is the very small personal actions of something that gives you that little sense of uncertainty, that little sense of fear. Because so often we have to kind of step a little bit into that fear to gradually get closer towards our potential, towards the growth, and towards actually feeling that we can propel forward and make progress. And yet on the other side, we constantly told that this product and these services, this life, will make it more comfortable. And naturally, comfort, in many ways, is the antithesis of growth, because you can't really grow if you're comfortable. The more comfortable you are, the more static you are, the more static you are, the more the world moves around you and away from you and you actually start to feel the uncertainty because it's spinning and moving quicker than you are. And it's this idea of, you know, I want comfort, I want certainty, security and stability that actually comes from moving. But we're led to believe it comes from being very still and moving slowly.

Yeah, and I always use a phrase with. I totally agree. I always use a phrase which is if you do what is comfortable, your life will be more uncomfortable, which is sort of exactly what you're doing, touching upon there. And of course vice versa as well. And you know, it sounds very, when we talk about it sounds very straightforward in terms of, you know, doesn't it make logical sense that the more times we step out of our comfort zone, the more we get comfortable with more and more things, therefore we feel less uncertain? But of course, that's all logic, isn't it? There's the emotional aspect of it as well. I always get people to do two things, which is, I think sometimes I'm not. I want to ask you this as a question because the you do a similar work is I get a lot of people who tell me about management tools, emotional strategies, all of these sorts of things to do with their mindset. And they say I do these things but it doesn't change my life. And I always say to them, those things aren't there to change your life, they're there to break your pattern. They're there to stop you in that moment from the current train of thought so that we can do the bit that does change your life, which is in fact taking action. And what I love about the work that you do is it's very kind of. Well, you talk about it in terms of environmental psychology, but very energy based because I always say the hardest way to change your mind is to try and change your mind. And actually there's a load of other things that are actually a lot more simple. And I quoted this, I don't know how into your basketball you are, but LeBron James and he said, imagine you had a drink that could replenish, you know, replenish your mind, that reduces stress, that makes you want to be more adventurous and take more risks, that allows you to be at your best so other people see you at your best and it's easier to socialize with people, that makes you feel well rested, that eliminates anxiety and just is a cure all to most things. And he said, of course that doesn't exist as a drink. It's called sleep. I would love to get your take on a few of these different things that affect our energy levels, but I would love to talk about sleep first. So I've got a few things that I get people to do, but I'd love to know your approach to sleep and how important, no doubt you think it is, but how can people in fact improve their sleep?

Yeah, so for me, it's really the cornerstone of performance and the cornerstone of longer term health. And it seems simple in practice, but like a lot of things that we automatically do, like breathing, we don't tend to utilise them in the same way because again, we take them for granted because we just kind of do them. And the slight other element of sleep, in terms of when people look at it from a personal development, self improvement type of view, is that almost any other practice, including nutrition and exercise, is something that you can physically go and do and have a significant amount of control over. And sleep is one of the processes that sometimes the more you try and force it, the more problem it becomes.

It's like, don't think of the white elephant and then you think of, you know, don't think of a white elephant. And of course, that's all you can think of.

Exactly. And we like to be able to control things. So naturally, the fact that we can't necessarily control our sleep, we can take significant strategies with our environment, with our routine and with our biological processes to ensure that we get more restful sleep and we increase our chances of getting the duration that we specifically need for our bio rooms, which is a whole other interesting topic.

Another podcast.

Yeah, we can dig into yet. So often, for me, it's about really transmuting that in a simple way. So the darkness of your room, in terms of the fact that our skin is photosensitive, so therefore it senses light. And that then affects your neurotransmitter levels, which ultimately affect your ability to get into sleep. You want your room to be so dark you can't see your hand in front of you. You want your room to be cool, but not so you feel cold. And we can all play with our thermostats in the Western world to get to a point where we actually find that optimal temperature. You don't want to go to bed dressed like an arctic hunter because your body needs to regulate its temperature and actually drops a few degrees when we fall into sleep. And you will not only stifle that process, but as your body tries to regulate its temperature, you will sweat significantly and enough to probably wake you during the night and disrupt your sleep cycles. We look at other things as well because there's so many things in our modern lives that affect our ability to drop those few degrees and have that melatonin stimulation and have those cortisol levels drop slightly so we can fall into that sleep cycle. So some of the simple curfews that are quite often used when we're looking at hygiene, obviously sometimes we have to actually go all the way down into cbt. When people have looked at hygiene and optimized everything, it's still not working for them. But the curfews around caffeine, it's got a half life of about eight hours. It mimics adenosine in our brains, so it goes into those receptors. So it doesn't actually give us performance, it masks our fatigue. And those caffeine receptors mean that the adenosine just runs around trying to.

So can I ask you about caffeine? I'm glad you brought that up. My. So I've got this one part of my mind which is the sort of science based aspect of caffeine and then the other part which is just the logic. And so touch on the logic. I don't. I've never really got my. I'm not a caffeine drinker right. So I've never got my head around the idea that ultimately caffeine is using up insulin and various other energy stores and therefore fatigues the body. And therefore what do we need? We need more caffeine to replace that. So logically, if we never had caffeine in the first place, it would be not too dissimilar because all you're doing when you're drink, using, drinking caffeine or having caffeine products is using up those energy stores but getting a marginal boost here. But you're just going to need to be dependent more and more on the caffeine. So that you say what? Because I've probably butchered and oversimplified that aspect.

Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways we honestly believe that it's a performance enhancing substance because in principle it is. And however, it's almost like paying money on a credit card. So you get that initial purchase quicker by paying it on the credit card, but you have to pay that back at some point with interest. So that's the reality of caffeine use. You can imagine it to either waiting for your wage, buying on the credit card now. So it's that instant performance hit now as that caffeine goes into your receptors and stimulates a number of biological processes which literally speed you up a little bit. What's clever is because it also goes into those adenosine receptors, that is the adenosine receptors that tell your body you're tired. So over the course of a day, over the course of 16 hours, they all go in. At which point the idea of the eight hours sleep comes in. It takes eight hours for all to come back out of the receptors for another day of 16 hours for it. It's basically a brain byproduct and it goes into those receptors, it tells you you're tired. So by caffeine being stuck in those, body's not telling itself it's tired. Of course, like anything that you use that affects a biological process, there's a whole bunch of side effects around that that tend to be mass because we're so deeply interconnected. But for a lot of people, it literally becomes the only way they can function. Yeah, because they lose that functionality because the receptors are not picking up in the same way. And some of the other biological processes that it affects are effectively slowed down. So you feel slower. But you also become accustomed to feeling caffeine as your base level once it's activated all these processes. And when you feel that, suddenly not having that feels slower. So you actually feel sluggish. And it's the same with sleep. If you sleep five and a half hours a night becomes a point where your body adapts, but you're actually walking around thinking, I'm fine, you heavily under slept. But that becomes your new normal, your new baseline. So you won't actually realize what it feels like to have a good night's sleep until all of a sudden you go on holiday. You've not got a socially defined wake up time and you actually sleep for nine hours and you wake up in the morning like, whoa, I feel great on holiday. No, you feel great, you're a good night's sleep.

And no doubt you place a huge importance in terms of blue light filters or obviously reducing that. So a lot of my clients, I make sure that if in fact, for whatever reason they need to use various devices, that they have the appropriate filters with them. But I'd love to know. In fact, I have a bit of kind of research and science around that. But what are your takes on it?

Yeah, so again, it's a significant and is highly impactful. But it's strange because we have that systematically being brought in the glasses. Even the technology companies themselves are realizing that if I geolocate your device, I'm going to Lower the light levels because it's significant. But, you know, when the mobile phone and the technology companies do something about it, just how powerful it is, because they know that you would still buy their products even if we didn't implement it. So that's always a real big flag in the sky for. It's something that needs to be thought about, but it's kind of looking at the whole picture. So in the morning, you want to get those lumens from the sun in your eyes. You want that light exposure. It basically goes into our melanopsin cell in our eye and stops our melatonin production, and then from there stimulates our serotonin production and GABA and a whole other bunch of neurotransmitters to actually get us prepared for the day, ready into the wakefulness, activates our biorhythms and gets us into a place ready to go and attack. You know, we're ready to go naturally. How our rhythms set are quite individual to each of us. Designed from that evolutionary perspective that it wasn't that long ago in the middle of the night, we were all prey. And it's hilarious now to think that people drive around and go out partying in the nighttime. It was only a few thousand years ago that you did that and you were probably going to die. So the world has changed significantly in that period, and we should be incredibly grateful for the ability to do that. But, yeah, in literal terms, fires are very mellow. You know, light length, light form. So that was kind of light we were living with in the dark. And again, very little blue light exposure from a fire. But all of a sudden a light bulb's invented. And it wasn't that long ago that we were sleeping 10 hours a night. That's gone down. That went down to 8 with the invention of the light bulb and then the television. And now in the Western world, it's down to 6.7 hours. Well, like you referenced previously, we have changed so minimally evolutionary, you know, physiologically in that period that it's nuts to think that all of a sudden we've chopped a third of our sleep off just due to the fact that, you know, we've suddenly got lights everywhere, and now smartphones are ubiquitous across the world. It's kind of strange to see what's going to happen. But ultimately, when you kind of look at it, you know, you've got that blue light, you've got caffeine, you've got exercise, got to be very careful exercising too close to bed because you raise your Core body temperature makes it harder to drop it off, and that's what you need to do. And what they find is, with many insomniacs, they struggle to get that core body temperature down, which is really detrimental to them getting off and getting to sleep. Then it's starting to look at other stimulants, such as nicotine. Not a great idea at bedtime, not a great idea, full stop. And alcohol, which obviously a lot of people think relaxes me. Well, it kind of. Kind of does. And yet it affects your sleep cycle significantly, meaning that you're more likely to come out at the top of REM and not get as deep in stage four. You're not going to feel great in the morning. And it's not. We're not even talking like hangover, we're talking like a few glasses. And you really should be trying to do that four hours before you go to bed. And massive meals as well. Again, if you think about how intensive sleep is as we try and recover, or physiologically and psychologically, you don't want any processes that take a lot of energy happening in that time because the digestion is massively energy intensive. But what it also does is stops us being able to clean our brains effectively. So we get a significant flush of spinal fluid through your brain. If you're not digesting any food, it's from the glymphatic system, so it pushes spinal fluid up through your spine, up into your brain, cleaning out the towel and all the byproducts from the neurotransmitters through that day. If you've eaten close to bed, you're still digesting. Your body doesn't have the energy to do that. That is very, you know, on the cutting edge of science at the minute, looking at how that works. And you've only actually noticed it through looking at Fmris when people have been sleeping and suddenly wondering, why is the brain, like, going woof, expanding and then decreasing again? So, yeah, there's so much research into it. And I think the biggest thing to remember is a lot of these advisories are nice and actionable. Curfews, four hours, eight hours, dark. So dark you can't see your hand. You know, have a digital sunset where you've not got that blue light exposure. Or minimize it as much as you can. Consider about the lights in your house, because, again, your typical bulb that's got enough lumens to knock 50% of your serotonin production. And just the massive. The biggest thing we have in our modern society is anxiety and Cortisol will keep you awake. So you've got to try and find that way to disconnect from work, from things that are stressful. Don't have things in your bedroom that are going to stress you out. Don't have that bill on the side, don't have that clutter across the back. It just needs to be peaceful, really. Your bedroom should be for sleep, sex and not much else.

Yeah, the idea of having bills next to your bed is just. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, your phone, your bills, all the sorts of things that people have in there. It should be a, should be a safe haven for people, really. And so this brings me on to the next thing, something that I'm quite passionate about. But you, you no doubt with your experiences will be much more so than I am. I'm very keen that my strength training, flexibility, I do, I go to pandemic aside, yoga, Pilates classes, do my strength training, do other forms of exercise because I know from some of the injuries and problems that I've had that restricted movement and the idea that as I get older over the decades that without this work now, I'm going to experience a lot more stress and strain and irreversible problems that I could be addressing now. So when we talk about movement, how do we get people, how do we encourage people and how do we get more people to think very consciously about integrating various movement patterns or various forms of exercise or. Movement is such a broad topic, but how do we encourage people to think more consciously about that now rather than when it's arguably too late for people?

Yeah, it's a real, a real challenging topic because when we look at the psychology of health behaviors, for people to see how things compound and start to understand how to implement that today people don't have a real power of intention when the delay on things is so high. And obviously with health, it compounds over the years and generally bites you at some point in a significant way in your later life when all of a sudden you don't have the tools or the time to reverse that compounding element. So we kind of understand, like compounding interest in finance, but it's difficult to get people to even understand that on the basis of a pension. Compounding health is a whole other ball game compounding. So with my clients, we quite often start really, really simple. So how can you just get more steps into your day? Can you walk across the office instead of emailing? Can you park a few spots away? Can you use the stairs instead of the lift? And then it's getting People to actually think, you know what, rather than be as comfortable as possible and drive as close as possible and try to have everything as easy, you know what you've got to actually experience and stress yourself a little bit to grow physically, but also to protect yourself physically. And it's about trying to almost start to transmute that into people's busy, everyday lives. Because you get significant subsections. There's the people who literally don't move. And for them, you have to start simple. It has to be easy, it has to be actionable, and they have to see some kind of tangible value fairly early on in the process. And that almost comes from elements of the slightly scarier aspects. So a little bit of a shock of that pattern of comfort. Then you almost need to give them something that seems slightly rewardable, easy and simple enough to execute and help them start to almost look at. If this is something you can measure and evolve a little bit, you will honestly feel better. And so often it's about anchoring that into the fact you actually will feel better in the short term. Because there's no point telling people if you don't move more, you're going to find that you lose your mobility in 20 years and you'll have diabetes, you might lose your leg. It's too far. People's intention for behavior, it's closer. The motivation. If the delay is too far, they won't have the urgency to go and do it and start to implant those habits into their lives. So it's almost about making it actionable, making it digestible, making it simple, knocking that pattern out a little bit and then starting to help them see how they can do it without it taking anything away. Because when you can do that, you can then help them see that actually it becomes an investment, not a sacrifice, to actually walk a little bit further and, you know, to get off the buzzer, stop before. And when people start to, you know, on that process, it becomes a bit of an upward spiral where suddenly they start to look at movement and how they can actually do things. Because in terms of our ability to actually exercise, the reason why so many people struggle is because you have to find what really resonates with you with movement. For people who are more difficult to engage, you have to enjoy it. And if you don't, you're not going to be consistent. It's just not consistent if you don't find some element of joy in it. Because as soon as you face a barrier or an obstacle, you're just going to turn around because you can Excuse yourself. It's so easy for us to excuse ourselves. We all do it. No matter how enlightened and how many enlightened moments we might have. We all excuse ourselves from doing things quite often and we have such poor self talk and generally quite poor communication. But we're amazing at convincing ourselves not to do things. And really then it's like looking at next up group which is an increasingly significant group within younger people. And again, it's the younger people who need to see the compounding issues of what they do today either being fruitful or detrimental in the future. And there's a lot of people like, you know, like our age who they have sedentary jobs, but they go to the gym. So they wake up, they get in the car, they drive to work, they sit down all morning, drive to the gym on dinner, pump some iron, get all sweaty, drive back to work, sit down, go home, sit down, watch Netflix, have tea, go to bed. Barely any movement. But I'm going to the gym, so I look fairly athletic and I'm sure I'm absolutely fine, but actually you sedentary.

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And it's about helping them see. Actually this gym's not really going to do that much for you because it's not just exercise, it's movement. And exercise is a little circle in the middle of the overall movement equation. And then it's about how can you actually start to build more movement into your day. For so many of us, we've got a place where we're probably going to be there for seven hours. And if you do a job at a computer like so many people do, it's about building the opportunities to move. During the day we actually have lots of little opportunities to move, but again the idea of comfort, technology, efficiency, but you move the cognitive processing. Like with my business clients, I'm getting them out doing walk in meetings, doing walk in networking because so often they've got access to green spaces outside not far from the office. You have a walk in meeting, you take people out. Suddenly cognitive flexibility increases, the blood's flowing, they're in natural environments, every single sense is being activated. As the wind hits the face, the feet touch the ground, they hear the birds and the light shines in their eyes and all of a sudden everyone's switched on, people are getting creative, people go back to the office and they're not slumping to the chair, they're actually present actually there. It does, in terms of return on investment, really pay to get outside and get active. But obviously we wouldn't have meeting rooms that smell crusty if we, if we saw the true value of that. But yeah, really it's about those opportunities to move.

I think you made some really good points there and you're right, it shouldn't be trapped under exercise and I think we can all do a better job on that. But another very good point you made is exercise nutrition, if you are punishing yourself, is not sustainable. You're absolutely right, I think in terms of the enjoyment aspect. And you get those real, you know, the hardcore athletes who, that they, that's how they describe that I am punishing myself and. But it might wouldn't be punishing because really, actually they're enjoy, they enjoy that, the challenge of it. But so speaking of athletes, one thing we do have in common is it sounds like a background in sport and so I'd love to know a bit more about what your background looks like. And because I, I loved sport when that was part of my profession for a while and I love working with athletes now. So what's your background?

Yeah, so I kind of took an interesting path. So again, I did international business psychology at university and my own sporting career. I never really excelled in anything to a level where I felt that I could really push on and become that. And my parents really pushed me towards the academic side, naturally, because I was the first person in my whole extended family to go to university. That was very much became like a pinnacle and a beacon thing for me to go and do. But my interest in sport has always been there and the elements around achievement, excellence and pushing beyond limits and boundaries, because that is something that every single person struggles with. We put those lovely false limits on ourselves and set boundaries and then we move up towards them and then that's it, that's as far as we're going. But you can't do that in sport because you can't limit yourself. And that's something that I really catalyze is really beautiful to me. So when I was working in local government and running my video game business, I then started to think, right, I do want to do something within sport at some point. More importantly, I want to optimize my own body to see where do my limits lie. So I went and did a Performance in Human nutrition qualification and that then started and spiralled and I did strength and conditioning coaching and then started doing my football coaching badges. And by going through that process, I ended up working, being called up by a sports performance agency called Momentum. And they were like, you know, we've seen, we've seen the qualification that you've done and your background in psychology. And if you bring these together, there's currently a number of different clubs and organisations looking for people who knit these aspects together. So nutrition, the psychology of environments and the, you know, elements of human performance together. Because a lot of clubs have people who specialise in each of those disciplines. But there's always this kind of understanding that for marginal gains, it's great that everyone is pushing in isolation. If someone comes and knits those together and compounds and, you know, incrementally pushes those forward in an interconnected way, what more can be achieved? What more can be amplified? So that took me to a place where I was then working at Everton, at Manchester City and Wigan Warriors Rugby Club. That was an amazing experience for me in terms of just the cutting edge of science, the just seeing elite performance in action and seeing just how much money, time, experimentation. And while it really opened my eyes and I rubbed shoulders with some really interesting people and all of a sudden these people who in some ways you almost idolize slightly and you're just talking to them, you're the expert.

So who at Man City did you have to say, you're not quite good. You've got to improve this and this and this. I don't know how I would have told Sergio Aguero or whatever. Actually, you're not really doing that well. You could be a bit better right now. So what does it look like? I mean, all seriousness, what does that look like in terms of, you know, to necessarily give specifics, but if you've got stories, it'd be great. Is actually what sort of things can you look at someone go, you know what, actually, this is, this is where we need to make an adjustment and this is therefore the benefit that it has on you.

Okay. So if you imagine in the kind of role I had, I was looking at data. So, for example, players performance and taking all those analytics from a home match and an away match and then looking at how that environment changed those analytics and then taking someone who was in the first team and someone who was in the. In the squad, then someone slightly below that because they would have the training pitches, you would gradually move from the academy and your training pitch would get closer and closer to the first team's training pitch. The closer you got being there, psychology of that, you know, you're getting closer to you and in reality there's a lot of young lads who keep moving, keep moving and then at some point they stall.

How interesting.

And there's lots of little Things because I was, I was there as they were building the new academy. This is a good. It's a good seven years ago now, but it really opened my eyes and I was kind of there, like looking, what's the difference? Helping the Academy lads see this is what David Silver's doing. You, dynamically, are probably going to end up playing in a similar position. You're probably going to have similar statistics both physically and intellectually at that point. This is where the gap is. But don't look at it as a gap, look at it as what you need to gain. Get to that point. So, obviously, if you imagine like young Fordham was there at that time in the academy, surrounded by a bunch of talented lads and it's like the mentality you have to have as like a 12, 13 year old all of a sudden, because they were. They all go. So if you, if you live in the academy and there's 80 rooms there.

Yeah.

A lot of Academy lads, they go to the private school up the road, they're all together all the time. They get the school and they come back, they train. It's elite performance from such a young age, but you start to see them shape the mindsets. It's really something that's. It's amazing to see, but just see how much pressure's on these young lads who've been flown in from the other side of the world and they've got to make that cultural shift, they've got to make that performance shift. And all surrounded by each other, sometimes pushing each other on and sometimes really obviously, like, bonding together while knowing that they might be the reason why you end up being made redundant at some point down the line.

I needed you when I was at Watford when I was younger, I could tell you that now. But I always say to people that clarity brings things closer and exactly what you said in terms of that gap. But you see David Silver, or whatever area of life you often, in a lot of cases can see the example we aspire to be, because otherwise there's nothing. There's not many people, and that's why we love innovation so much, is someone creates something that hasn't yet existed. That idea of something magical in that way. And everything we've got in the room or anyone listening, everything that's in your room right now has once never been existed, had to be created. But we follow an example and then the only thing that really stops us is success. Leaves clues, right? If you do, in most cases, at least in terms of achievement, if you do what that person did you were going to see similar levels of success, maybe not as much, maybe more, whatever, but similar levels. And the gap is not knowing what the gap looks like. So I can absolutely understand that, that appreciation that as a youngster, you probably do see it as criticism at first. But if you can recognize that as now, you know. Right. There's no other reason. There's nothing else you need to look for. This is the gap and that's what's required. Yeah. And so I wanted to talk about sport because I love sport, but I also wanted to talk about your video gaming company, especially because there's a bit of a debate going on, especially in the US around video games. So just a bit of a backdrop before we hear about your video company. So a lot of people who would listen to Joe Rogan's podcast, he was mentioning. So Joe Rogan's in his 50s and he was mentioning that video gaming is a waste of time. And his backstory is actually he was. He was very addicted to video games as well at one point. But he says at this point in his life, you know, video games are a bit of a waste of time. And then I think Influencer called. I think they're called Ninja or something. One of the biggest video game influences in the world. No doubt you. You would be aware of who's saying, well, there's actually so many opportunities in video games. It's a whole new industry that opens up that people to make money from. And what's happened in the last five years alone has just created these opportunities that just did not exist. I'm in that place with video games. I've got friends who are avid video gamers. I'm not a massive one myself. So I want to be educated to a certain extent of what the possibilities are. But I think there is a line to be drawn in terms of, okay, well, if you're going to spend 10 hours or whatever with video games, what's the purpose? It's like anything, isn't it? What's the purpose and what does it facilitate? And so I was hoping that one just tell us a bit about your company, but then educate me in terms of what the landscape and the possibilities now look like and how people maybe can be doing more. You know, if there are opportunities that what can be people be doing to, I guess, get involved, I guess.

Yeah. Okay. This is absolutely massive topic. So it's kind of just give people a reference. I started my video game company in 2008, right in the middle of the economic crash, and it actually started out of my parents back bedroom when I'd had to move home after losing the job at the national bank. So for me it was. I'd always quite enjoyed video games as a youngster. Actually found a picture of myself with a Commodore 64 when I was 7. So my uncle was incredibly into computers before computers were even interesting. And it's been his lifelong work and he introduced me to it at a young age, which in so many ways means that I'm very digitally agile. But at the same time, from a young age, I was very, very much into video games. And because of how I'm wired and my mindset, I like statistics, I like data, I can spend an awful lot of time theory, crafting and crunching numbers and playing video games. So it actually stemmed from me having issues around video game addiction when I was younger and I spent hours playing games happily be. I was very, very good when games first went online and to the point now where I'd probably be able to be an E gamer if I played at this, if I played at a level. Yeah. What that actually means is though, back then there was no E gaming scene. It was very much play games for fun. Games are for fun. There's never gonna be any money in someone playing a game watching you. It was a social thing where you play games with friends, sat round having a chat and it's moved incredibly quickly in that 15 year period. So it's kind of very quickly run through my own.

Please.

Started as me doing E commerce and E tail and I was doing that through a number of different marketplaces and then built my own website and started doing it through there. So for the first five years I was doing that, it made six figures in the first year. Its revenue doubled for the first three years consecutively. And this was all while I was the only employee. So I am very, very capable. I've got Asperger's and what that means is very intense. And I do have like a range of strengths and some significant weaknesses, but I was able to do every single business process myself. So I was able to do the sourcing, the sales, the marketing, the finance and the communications, all that, and feel comfortable doing it. Which meant that I was able to build that on myself and continue doing that. The problem with that is you then start to micromanage things and you struggle to step back out of it a little bit. Because I should, looking back now, have gone in earlier and started to leverage other people's skills because there was clear areas where I brought more value. But I was adamant That I was doing everything because it was mine. And again, it comes from being made redundant. This wasn't being taken away from me. And sometimes that kind of almost like back to the wall motivation, very, very powerful. So what kind of happened is I then saw and you have to be incredibly agile in that business. It moves so quick. Possibly the quickest moving industry in the world, definitely within that kind of realm. So in 2013, I moved down supply chain. I started to look out to the future and see digital downloads were coming, publishers were looking to retain more rights, and wholesalers were trying to effectively stym some of the middle aspects. So I fell down the supply chain to ensure that I was actually batching smaller amounts to keep a certain element of custom and really find my own niche. So I moved into Europe, doing a lot of stuff across Europe to the point where I was operating in 13 countries. When Brexit hit, I actually ditched my UK operations and worked solely from Europe. And last month I sold the company to Danguard in Denmark. So I've now exited to really focus on essentializing.

What was that? I was gonna say congratulations, but so what. What is that feeling for you when you. When you say sold the company? What's. What's the predominant emotion that comes with that?

Oh, it's amazing. Because that company started from a tiny bedroom, grew to work across Europe. I ended up with a network of amazing people who I met along the journey. But that company, for me, it gave me the finance to recover when I lost the ability to walk. It also gave me the finance to spend a lot of time with my children. My daughter started school last year. In that period of recovery and spending time with my children, I'll never, ever get that back. If I'd have been working a traditional job and not been there. So for me, it gave me the resources to have the time to both get myself back to good health and spend a lot of time with my children. So when I think about the overriding emotion, it's almost like tears of joy. Because that one simple company that started from an idea, and again, at the time I'd been to see a business advisor, took the business plan, they said, you know what, Lee? It's a great business plan. But you, you're young, you're black, you've got a bit of an attitude problem. You're going to struggle if you go straight into the wholesale market, because that is controlled by people who are not going to feel like they want to let you into the circle. And, oh, boy, it took me a long Time to penetrate that circle. But I got there in the end. And again, the power of being told no. And sometimes we need to not take advice. In fact, more often than not, don't need to take advice. Way too much advice out there, not enough encouragement. And God damn it, don't conform to what people tell you. Find out who you are and go and do it. Because again, you can't actually think your way to clarity on these things. You need to go out there, take the action, you know, you need to fail because again, success leaves clues. Failure chisels the tools to utilize.

Yeah, yeah. And I often, I often try and get people to think about, you know, what happens if you don't do it. And of course everyone, you know, we're both fairly young, but some people have got to a point in their lives where, you know, it's mortgage, kids in the job, whatever else. I used to work in a corporate environment and I just remembered people complaining about their jobs. But of course when redundancy season came around, oh no, I must, I must keep my job. I must keep. Now of course each their own in terms of, you know, it's a job, it doesn't have to, not everyone, it has to be the be all and end all in terms of their passion and everything else. And of course they've got to finance things in their life. But I knew that wasn't me. And I think lots of people listening know that's not them. And you're right that we don't need knowledge anymore. We really don't. There's. So you can get knowledge anywhere and really understanding how to do it through your own filter, but having a sense of actually what is your niche and actually understanding, you know, your niche, but also your target market. There's a space for pretty much anything now. Okay. And we just live in this generation of, you know, the stuff that you've done and stuff that I've done 20, 30 years ago. I mean less than that. We just none of these things were available. And it just seems such a shame when all these things are available that people think, I'll go back to what you said is no, look, that no longer exists. Which is the job, the 50 year job with the gold Rolex at the end of it, it doesn't exist anymore. And I think personal brand or innovation in that sense is going to be even more important. People just look you up online and it's going to say who, what is your brand? Who are you? What do you do? And even if people don't have Their own business. I think that is going to be the thing now. It will just be your personal brand. It'll be like a stamp. And really, it's for us to cultivate what that looks like before someone else defines it for us. I find it interesting, for example, when Barack Obama does a, you know, is no longer president, but releases a documentary instantaneous, you know, instantaneously, before anyone else can write his story for him, you know, very, very clever. And people need to take, you know, part of the work to schedule in is actually how do we define ourselves and what does that look like? And aligning with that. And the clearer and more solid that foundation is, the less easily we are swayed by everything else and everyone else. I found you very inspiring, Leigh. And I'm curious before we kind of start talking about where people can find out a bit more about you and what you have going on, which I'm sure people want to. Is a similar question, I guess, that I ask a lot of people. When you've started on this particular journey, however long, you feel that this phase of your life, maybe. Maybe it's split into a few phases, but this phase of your life, you would had, of no doubt a picture, an idea of what that looks like, of where you can get to. And in many ways, maybe you have now surpassed that. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. I don't know from the original picture, what is the footprint now that you want to leave for people, for others to follow? What does that footprint look like? And what footprint would you like to leave to the people listening right now?

Yeah. So I think in so many ways, when I hark back to that principle of me looking out as an adolescent at university, looking for someone like me, it's about actually putting the footprint out there to say, you could potentially be the next me, except you're not. I can stand here and say that as a, you know, as a scientist and an entrepreneur, that young black people can do that as well. But I don't want people to take me for that. I'm trying to impact other people. And honestly, like you just said about Barack Obama, you being able to authentically express yourself in this world where education tells you not to, it conditions you not to. The people around you condition you not to express yourself. Your whole life is about writing your own story. Strangely, if you actually look at the root of the word authentic, the root of the word authentic is author. You write it. You don't need to ask for a pen, you don't need to ask for a book. You can start today writing your own story. In fact, just take a pen and paper and do it. It's yours. You don't need permission. You don't need forgiveness. Just go out there and start to dig that bit deeper, write your story and be yourself.

When did you first start writing that for yourself? What age?

So, if anything, it's when I had that first challenge, that mental health, because I found that when I looked at my paper, it was blank. I've not written any story for myself. It was all other people's writing. And when that moment hits you, that your whole identity, what you believe to be you, the control that you believe you have when you suddenly get out that piece of paper from your mind and it's everyone else's writing societies, parents, people around you, holy crap, it's barely legible. Write your own story. And at that point, I said, you know what? I'm gonna have to strip some of this back. In fact, I'm gonna screw this up, chuck it in the bin, gonna start again. This is my story, and I take that. And you have to take ownership over this book. That is you. It's really easy to just be a victim and let other people scribble in it, and it just ends up becoming a yearbook of other people's thoughts of you. But you end up thinking that you're what's written in that book, and that will form every belief that limits you from being yourself. So actually, it's just time to sit and reflect and realize that you write it. It's yours.

Lee, where can people find out more about you? What have you got going on over the next. Well, over the course of this very strange year. But what have you got coming up? What you. What are you doing at the moment? Where. Where can people find you?

Yeah, so the best places to be updated on what I'm doing is on my website. That's essentialized.co.uk and leechambers.org you can find all my socials there. And I've got a number of courses coming up that you can find the details of on those websites and a number of projects and speaking gigs that you'll find out about as well as we gradually move into the next interesting phase going forward.

Pretty good stuff. Well, Lee, as I said, I found you very inspiring, and your story is one that I think many people would listen to. And I am thinking, in terms of shit, I should be doing more here, but. No, but that's exactly what you want. That's why every week, in terms of people having this podcast is you do want to find people with a different perspective and a different certainly a different journey. And it gives you an idea of the possibilities. And, you know, for people listening, I always say to people, you are the sum of the 10 people you spend most of your time with or listening to or whatever. And that's proven from a financial point of view and everything else. And by all means, all the people who have, you know, a decade plus worth of experience in particular area. It's it's worth my time. Hopefully it's worth your time. But it's certainly a pleasure for me to deliver these things. So, Lee, just finally, thank you again very much for joining me. And I wish you all the best for the future as well.

Thank you, David.