Operate at Peak Performance: Health Secrets for Entrepreneurs by Dan Go

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Wayfair Every Style, Every Home so the biggest misconception that entrepreneurs have is the fact that they need to trade their health in order to make make more wealth in order to make more money. And from my perspective and from my experience, I found that if you neglect your health, you're actually leaving some major monetary gains on the table.

On today's show, we'll discuss how maintaining your health and wellness can become a competitive advantage for your business. This is the Launch your business podcast because we know starting a business is challenging, but it doesn't have to be confusing. Each week, we'll give you the tactical advice and the necessary tools to scale your business without feeling burnt out. I'm Terry Rice, business development consultant and staff writer here at Entrepreneur Magazine. Let's dive in. Hey, before we officially start today's show, I want to let you know how I can personally help you land more high paying clients by building an irresistible offer. It's called the Revenue Accelerator, a live workshop where I'll teach you how to multiply your revenue potential and spend less time working with premium price services. And as a listener, you'll save $50 by using the promo code. Launch space is limited and you can learn more by visiting Terryrice Co Convert. That's Terryrice Co Convert and now let's hop into the show. If you've ever been curious about my daily schedule, here it is. I usually wake up around 5am so I can get some reading or writing done before my 4 kids get up from there. It's pretty much what you might imagine. And remember, all my kids are under 8 years old. A mad scramble to get everyone dressed and fed before they're off to school or daycare. But after that I don't immediately start working. Instead I head to the gym. I usually get back around 10:30 or so, down a protein shake, then get to work around 11am and you might think that seems a bit off. People sometimes ask how can you start work at 11am? What about your clients? Don't they want to talk to you? Yes they do. But I normally don't take any client calls until around 2pm and let me explain. Sure, I could go to the gym later, let's say during lunchtime, but I tried that in the past and far too often something would come up that caused me to miss my workout. So I'd feel guilty about missing my workout and annoyed that I had to skip it for something that was not on my schedule for the day. So I prioritize my mental and physical health by scheduling work around my workouts and of course my family obligations. And I make sure I complete any work that requires creative or critical thinking by not taking any meetings before 2pm this allows me to get a solid three hours of deep work before hopping on zoom calls. And I even have time to meditate as a recess. As today's guest will share, prioritizing your health and wellness can become a competitive advantage for your business. Dan Go is a high Performance coach for entrepreneurs and the CEO of High Performance Founder. After the early death of his mother, Dan left a cushy corporate job to become a personal trainer and eventually brought his message of taking health seriously to entrepreneurs. Dan's theory is that taking care of your health is a way to transform your life and your business. Today we'll discuss how he's making time to work out even with a newborn child. And how you can eliminate excuses as well, why water is your greatest ally when working towards your health goals. And a surprising reason why doing less can actually help you achieve your goals faster. Let's hop into it right now. Dan, first of all, thanks so much for being here today. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it, too.

So I've been stalking you on LinkedIn for about a year now, so I know who you are, but do you mind introducing yourself to everyone listening as well?

Yeah. So my name is Dan Go, and I do a number of things. The very first thing that I am as a father, father of two kids, you were just mentioning the fact that you have two kids as well. And yeah, we actually just have a newborn right now, too. She's about like seven weeks old. So we're in the thick of sleep deprivation at this very moment. And I'm a husband, I'm a father. That's like the first and foremost things. I coach entrepreneurs to help them get into their best shape possible. And I've been doing that since 2018. And in the meantime, I post on places like Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. And, and I do my best to help people not necessarily see the tactical side of getting in shape, but I want people to understand the philosophical and mental side of getting in shape and what it actually means to them and what it actually means to their lives.

Yeah, we're going to get into that. But let me. First of all, quick, quick clarification. I have four kids, so I'm not trying to beat you or anything, but I got four kids, and after the first one, I was working out at the time, but I was like, look, there's no way I can exercise. I'm sleep deprived. I'm up with this, this newborn baby and. And I fell off as a result of that. So you having a newborn right now, how are you sleeping and exercising?

So the sleep is. If I can't focus on the quantity of sleep that I need to get, then I really just focus in on the quality. And I'm so thankful for the fact that I focused on improving my sleep before my second kid came, because if I didn't, I would probably be much worse than I am right now in terms of the workouts. I have had to adapt. So before I would be able to go off and go to the gym for an hour a day every single day if I really wanted to. But now it's a lot different. And also from as a parent, especially with multiple kids, you Kind of feel that guilt a little bit because you're like, I don't want to leave my wife with, like, you know, in your case was like, four kids. In my case, it was like, two. It's. It's a handful. So what I have done is I've really consolidated my workouts down. Something about having kids makes you focus on the things that actually take priority the most. It hacks. It makes you reprioritize and just focus on the things that matter. So I'm going into the gym. I'm only doing about 30 minutes inside there. I'm doing it about two times a week. I'm doing the minimum effective dose at this very moment. Again, I'm appreciative of the fact that I put the work in before that, because there is something called maintenance, and I'm not trying to gain a bunch of muscle or anything like that. I'm just trying to maintain my sanity and my body all at the same time. So. So I've had to adapt. I've had to cut out, cut down my workouts, really work on the things most important. And that's actually been working for me. It. It provides me less stress in the end of the day, thinking I have to, like, work out every single day in order to, like, maintain a certain physique or a certain type of energy. And. And I'm glad it did. I'm glad I was able to go through this and adapt to it.

One thing I did before we hopped on is I looked at some of your most recent Instagram posts as well as LinkedIn posts. And if you don't mind, I'd like to share those with the audience and then get your reaction to it. What made you want to post this? Is that cool?

Sure, yeah, for sure.

You sound a little apprehensive.

A little apprehensive right now, but, yeah, let's go for it.

All right. All right. Let's see what happens here. So the first one is this. If only entrepreneurs knew how much better their business and family lives would be if they took their health seriously. So what. What secret is there about having, you know, taking their health seriously that would help their business as well as their family life?

So the biggest misconception that entrepreneurs have is the fact that they need to trade their health in order to make more wealth in order to make more money? And from my perspective, and from my experience, I found that if you neglect your health, you're actually leaving some major monetary gains on the table. And the reason being is because when you take Care of your health. So many things happen. It's the lead domino. I mean, exercise, it helps you make better decisions, it helps you manage your mood, it helps you manage your emotions, it helps you get more energy. When you eat a nutrient dense diet, it again helps you maintain a good level of mental health. It is a good, is a good way to battle anxiety, depression, by having more nutrients in your body, by gaining the amount of sleep that you need, it turns you into a sharper human being. So when people think about getting in shape, they think about all these things that they gotta do. They think about the time that they have to use to trade to get in shape. But the reality is it doesn't really take that long. You can automate a bunch of processes to make it easier for yourself. And once you start focusing on your health, you can actually in turn become healthy or actually wealthier as a result. And the best part about it is, is regardless of like the monetary gain that you get out of it, the people who matter most are watching. So your kids are gonna see you get healthy, your wife or your husband is gonna see you get healthy. And then this has a trickle down effect. If you are the leader inside of your household, what happens as a result is everyone just follows the leader. Everyone follows the example of the person at the top. So your habits trickle down to the people that are, that you're leading. We always kind of conform to the standards of the people that we hang around most. So that's probably the best part of it. It's that your family starts to get in on the act when you start getting in shape.

Yeah, yeah, I, I love that. Have you heard of the Murph before? That worked out. The Murph, Yeah.

Zuck. Zuck did the Murph in some ridiculous time. I don't. Have you seen that before where he did it? He basically did it in a time where it would be at one of the podiums in like 2015 CrossFit games or something like that. But, but yeah, I have heard of the Murph. It's, it's ridiculous. It's amazing.

Yeah, it's, it's a tough one. I'll explain it for everybody listening to. So you run a mile, then you do 100 pull ups, then you do 200 push ups, then 300 air squats, then you run another mile and you do that all wearing a 20 pound vest. So I did that myself on Memorial Day this year and to your point, my kids were there cheering me on. I don't like, I don't know if I beat Zuck. My time was 48 minutes. But after doing that, you can't go back to feeling frustrated or challenged by things at work sometimes. Right. Feel like, oh, I have to do this presentation. It's like you just ran a mile with a 20 pound vest on. Like, you're okay. So I think it gives us all a chance to get a win for the day, like to challenge yourself and get a win and then that extends on to the rest of your life as well, your day as well. Because you know, you've challenged yourself, you've met that and you're ready for more challenges as well. So that's one of the benefits for, for me too.

Yeah, 100%. It's, it's taking care of the most important client of the day, which is yourself. And a lot of people are, they put so much into other people, they put so much into their families, they put so much into other clients when the reality is is that they're really pouring from a cup that isn't necessarily full. If you take care of yourself first, what happens as a result is you actually have more to give to others. And I love this quote from one of my mentors, this guy, Dan Martell. And his, his main thing is like, you have to exhaust the body in order to tame the mind. So when you, when you are just going through an intense workout, something like the Murph, you really have no, you really have no thought towards anything else other than finishing the workout. And then once you do that, you're going to realize you have all of these neurotransmitters and all these hormones going through your body and it's making you feel freaking awesome as a result of doing it. And guess what's going to happen when you take that in the rest of your day? You are going to crush the rest of your day as a result.

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Well, one of the main things is just energy. The, the quickest way to know that you are low energy is, is if you are actually hydrated. If you're not drinking enough water, that's the very first thing. And whenever I talk to entrepreneurs, whenever I talk to high performers, whether they're working at Facebook, Google or whatever they're doing that they actually have a passion for. One of the things is that energy is currency and a lot of people would be surprised at how much energy they can gain by being more hydrated. And I'm not saying being more hydrated by drinking soda pop or drinking, I'm drinking a decaf coffee, I can't drink more than one coffee a day. But you know, they would be flabbergasted at the amount of energy that they're leaving on the table by not drinking enough water and not being hydrated on a regular basis. The other thing I love about water, especially in the time that we're in right now where over 50% of the people are in the United States by 2024 or 2025. I could be kiboshing this, that, but basically like they're going to be obese. One of the things with water or that water does is it, it gives you an option, it gives you a Substitution. Instead of drinking, say, soda pop, something that comes with 30 grams of sugar and a lot of caffeine and a lot of calories, you can actually just substitute that with water. The other thing that water does is it suppresses your appetite. It actually makes you more full. One of the things I love to do or one of the things I did when I was out of shape was I just traded water for drinking soda pop and actually traded water for, for snacking as well. Or actually traded snacking for water and soda for water as well. This, this alone helped me probably drop about like 10 pounds off of my body by just getting rid of those things. And the biggest thing that I think about when it comes to getting in shape, it's like, it's not necessarily about restriction, it's about substitution. So if we can substitute a lot of the things that we do mindlessly, like snacking or, you know, eating refined sugars or drinking refined sugars, and replace that with something like water, I think it's like one of the easiest ways to transform your health.

I'm going to make a confession here, Dan. Yeah, I wasn't going to talk about this, but here we go. Yeah, I, I've been doing CrossFit for like five years and do well enough. Right. You know, I've done the Murph several times, never with a vest on. So this year I was like, okay, if I'm going to run the MRF with a 20 pound vest, I'm going to lose 20 pounds and that way it'll kind of even out. That was my thinking. Here's how I lost £20. I got in a really bad habit of eating ice cream pretty much every night when my son Trevor was born. Trevor's three, and I did not stop until about three months ago. And I lost £20 just like that. So sometimes it is your habits. It's not substitution. It actually is elimination because you should not be eating that much ice cream.

Yeah. And then also like, you know, this goes into something a little bit deeper. It's like, okay, so like, why are we eating the ice cream in the first place? And one of the things that I think about is like, we do these things especially with like food as a way for, for particularly I found with guys like us, it's like a lot has to do with like stress at the end of the day and just like just trying to like not think about it and just enjoy like one part of the day, so to speak. So one of the things I love to do with even like my Clients is just like, okay, so why. Why are we doing this? What is the thing that we're trying to kind of the emotion that we're trying to numb? Or where is this coming from? Where is this deriving from? And what can we do to substitute it while we heal the part that is. That needs the ice cream in the first place?

When you first became a trainer, did you anticipate the mental side of coaching? Because you're gonna think, okay, I'm gonna teach them how to do a power clean. But every time I hear you talk, you're going deeper than just physical. Like, what was that? Like, just that realization? And how'd you make that transition?

So I have. I have the perfect analogy for this. So let's just say that, you know, let's think of someone that we know that's, like, completely out of shape. And then, like, imagine that we wave a magic wand around this person and magically we give them a fit body, a six pack, like, whatever it is right now, how long do you think that person is going to keep that body? And would they be able to keep it? Would they lose it? Right. I would go on to say that they would lose it within a matter of weeks because it had nothing to do with genetics. It had nothing to do with anything else other than the mental side and the habits that they have, the mindset that they have around their bodies. I'll throw it out there. I think that we have an overabundance of information. I think that we know the basics of how to get in shape. And sure, we may be missing some tactics here and there, but I do believe that most of it has to do with how people approach fitness and health and getting in shape from a mental aspect more than the tactical aspect. And the reason I say this is because. Is because, like, everyone knows what to do. Eat real foods, lift, sleep well and drink water and repeat. And these things are quite simple. Some people take action on them. But why? Why are most people failing? Most people are failing because they have. They think about the tactical side. They don't think about the person that they have to become in order to have the result that they want. They always think about losing weight and never think about, like, okay, what habits do I need in order to make this irrelevant, in order to make weight loss relevant, in order to get there without even thinking about it. That's why I put the emphasis on this side. Because when you can actually change someone at the core, then all these tactics, they start working and they don't even have to think about it, they just do it automatically because that is who they are. And I'll leave you with one more thing right now. So let's just say that I'm working with a client, or let's just say you're helping someone get in shape and then they're about to go to vacation, they're about to go to like Mexico and they're gonna go to an all inclusive resort. What do you, what do you think happens with the average person when they go on that vacation with the way that they're eating and also the way in which they exercise their bodies? Like, what do you think happens?

I know what happened to me. I fell off.

Yeah.

So that's gonna be my guess.

They take a vacation, right? They basically take a vacation from their bodies. Now, did that very same person brush their teeth during that vacation? So yes, I would hope so. Unless they have like completely horrible teeth. Right. So, so the, what we want to do is we want to get to this fitness thing, to our workouts, to the way that we eat as a form of personal hygiene where you don't do a workout and you feel kind of disgusting for not doing it. It's like you have a film over like your mouth, like if you don't brush your teeth. We want to get it up to that level where they feel like they have to do this. It's like a need in their life. And you don't get there by like prodding, pushing.

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I, I love the, the reduction of outcomes and goals to the thing that you can actually do. So the thing that I say to my clients all the time is like, you don't even have to work out. Just cross the door into the gym if you feel like you want to leave, get out of there, or cross the door to their basement where the gym is or whatever it is, right? Or cross the door to go outside for taking a walk. Like, like I reduce it down to the minimum effective thing that they have to do to just show up. Because once you show up, then especially for like high achievers like us, once you show up, then you're gonna be like, okay, well I might as well do like a couple push ups. Or I might as well do like you know, a couple, like, you know, a couple minutes. And, and, and I always say like something is always better than nothing and something always creates momentum. And also like when you give someone say this thing is like, okay, you gotta work out every day. Well, guess what's gonna happen? They're gonna feel bad when they don't work out that one day and then it's gonna snowball because they're gonna have this all or nothing mentality towards what they're doing. Right? I, I like to just like minimize the amount of actions that they have to take. And if they wanna add more to it, then great, but if they don't, then great too. It's, it's totally fine. You don't have to feel bad about it. So that's what I would say. It's like the main thing is just like show up to the minimum effective dose of what you are committing to, what you're going to find as a result of doing that, you're going to want to do a little bit more. And I'll use one more example of mine, which is not necessarily about working out, but it was about me creating on social media. So when I started to create on social media. I started with Twitter. And the very first thing that I did was, like, I told myself, like, if I just create, like, once a day, that is, like, enough. I mean, that is enough for me if I just show up every single day. And then my Twitter account started to grow, went to 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 100,000. And every single time that I hit these milestones and did whatever, I just told myself, like, you know, just show up, do the work. That's the only thing that. That I require of you. That's the minimum. So. So I say that to whoever it is that's listening to this, who has a problem, you know, going to the gym or even just, like, working out, it's like, hey, just put yourself in that position. Give yourself the minimum effective dose, and just commit to showing up. You don't even have to do anything when you show up, but just commit to showing up. Guess what? You're probably going to do something, most likely.

Love it. Yeah. In that situation, I at least stretch because I'm there. But. But yeah, I love the focus on, like, just getting started. But what if people want to learn more from you and how you can help them get started? Do you mind sharing information about the programs or courses that you have?

Yeah, for sure. So I have. I do coaching with entrepreneurs in regards to getting them in shape. And one of the things that we do is we help them create plans, strategies, and also, like, tie that up with accountability to make sure that it actually fits their lifestyle. So that's the first thing that we do. I also have a program. It's called the Lean Body 90. It's predicated upon the coaching practice that I have, which is making sure that you're going to the gym two to three times per week, 30 minutes a week. We give you the workouts that those entail, and also we give you our nutrition program, and we do those two things. I think the best thing is for anyone is to go on my newsletter. If you go to danfounder.com and you click on the newsletter button, just sign up for the newsletter. And I send out the newsletter every Tuesday and Friday. Send it out to right now. It's 110,000 people. And. And yeah, like, I've had so many people on that newsletter, just, like, email me back, like, saying, this is like, the best thing ever. I'm just basically just trying to give as much value as possible. So. So, yeah, I would say do those things, most likely.

Awesome. Dan, thanks so much for this. You're going to have 100,010. What's the number again? 100,000.

110,000 subscribers? Yeah.

All right, you're going to have 110,001. You'll sign up right now. But thank you so much for this. Again, I've admired your work for for a long time and I appreciate you coming on and sharing everything with our audience as well. So thank you for that.

Thanks, Terry. I appreciate being here.

Awesome. And that's our show for today. Again, you can learn more about Dan and his programs by visiting danfounder.com and also I originally discovered Dan the was LinkedIn content where he shares practical tips on how to improve your overall wellness. So give him a follow there as well. Thanks for listening and I'll catch up with you next time. Apply what you've learned on today's show. You'll find the show notes and more resources at TerryRice co. Podcast. Again, that's TerryRice co podcast and the best way to support this podcast is by subscribing, telling a friend, and leaving a review. Also, you can get more tips by following me on Instagram terryrice or follow me on LinkedIn. This episode was produced by Josh Wilcox of Brooklyn Podcasting Studio and edited by Dan Lardy. Special thanks to my wife, Dominique, for keeping our kids relatively quiet as I recorded. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time.