David Zappasodi: Immovable Heart Unstoppable Mind

Wellness Force Radio Feelings are essential, but they can't dictate our actions.

We literally infect each other with our emotions. We came here for a special purpose. Let the purpose unveil itself. Knowing without doing is the same thing as not knowing. They're not just trackers. I'm gonna wear this and it's gonna help me do the right thing.

Wellness force radio episode 72 with best selling author David Zappazzotti always came an emotion.

People don't want to lose weight for the sake of losing weight. And the thought of losing weight doesn't excite anyone. What excites them is the ways that their life will change with the blossoming of that goal. So people don't want to lose weight for the sake of weight loss itself. They want to lose weight because they want to feel more empowered, more fulfilled, more of a sense of joy. And what we realize when we see that, when we can really see it, we realize that it's important to take practices on a daily basis that reinforce what I call those goal emotions.

Welcome back to another episode, my friend. I am your host and wellness coach, Josh Trent. Thank you for spending your time with me here on the podcast. This is where every week I bring you access to global experts in wellness, technology and behavior change. On this podcast, you'll learn from exceptional people who are dedicating their lives to driving real transformations in physical and emotional wellness. My intention with the show is that together we'll discover the connections between your emotions and healthy habits to live your best life and enjoy the process. This episode is brought to you by Perfect Supplements, a company I'm honored to stand with who walks the talk with their values of non GMO pesticide free real food supplements that support us all on the wellness journey. Hop on over to perfectsupplements.com wellnessforce. Enter code wellnessforce to save 10% off your entire order at checkout. Today's guest, David Zapposzotti has a degree in exercise physiology from Westchester University of Pennsylvania. In his 20 years in the health and fitness industry, David has been a personal trainer, metabol sniping practitioner, boot camp instructor, martial arts teacher, and public speaker on healthy living. He also founded a functional fitness and nutrition center in San Diego and in nine years he was extensively featured on Fox News, KUSI tv, local television and radio programs throughout California. But more important than any of his credentials, David has a deep faith in the beauty and greatness of humanity and is very determined to help others to see and embody the greatness within themselves. Through this Faith and determination. The he has inspired and guided many people to transform their lives throughout his career. David is the international bestselling author of Immovable Heart Unstoppable, a personal guide to the six essential practices for living a healthy and fulfilling life. He's also my new friend and recently a new dad. David, welcome to the show.

Hi, Josh. Thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor to be here.

Today's show is so exciting to me because it's powerful. We're talking about the most important cornerstone for any fitness or wellness program, and that is the power of the mind and mindset. But, David, before we jump jump into the show, I'd love for you to share a fun fact. Maybe something that people might not know about you.

Well, I just had a baby girl. My wife and I. She is actually 11 weeks old now, and she's just. She's like, right on the verge of laughing. We have her smiling all the time, and it's just so amazing. My life has been completely transformed in the last 11 weeks in ways that I was expecting and in ways that I was not expecting at all. Just unbelievable.

What's been the most blessing and the most joy you felt? Is there any one thing specifically about having a baby?

You know, I. I used to work at home, and now I just can't do that because I, you know, I'm too tempted to hang out with her and stuff. So I actually go to the library. I go somewhere else quiet where I can do my work. And when I come home and, you know, I hang out with my wife and my daughter. I just lay my daughter on my chest and she's sleeping. She's still a little baby, so she's sleeping a lot. I just lay there with her on my chest, and it's just. Nothing beats that.

That is so cool, man. Well, I have a niece, and there's actually a second niece that was born. So I definitely share in the love for kids have this beautiful ability to remind you, like, what's really important in life. It's so cool. Well, David, we shared this unique common thread, I mean, outside of our love for wellness, and that is being a personal trainer. You know, one of the things that used to burn me out being in gyms for 10 plus years was that I had this intuitive feeling at about year five that even when clients would come see me three times a week sometime for they weren't getting the results they paid for and that they deserved. And I got frustrated, man. I took this on and I went out and got like every certification I could imagine, you know, metabolic typing, functional diagnostic, nutrition, four to five different fitness certifications. But I could see, looking back, that it wasn't about my level of education or even my ability to motivate. It was really about my emotional intelligence and learning how to ask the right questions to the people that I worked with. And I'm curious, man, can you share with us why you became a trainer and eventually opened up your own facility to then close it and become a best selling author? I mean, how has emotional intelligence played a role in your journey?

You know, it's pretty funny because my, it's from what you just described about yourself, I think I went through a very similar type of thing. You know, I. My career has taken a lot of different twists and turns. Like you said earlier, I've been a trainer, nutritionist, martial arts teacher, boot camp instructor, all different kinds of things. Now I'm more of an author and a speaker at this point. But there's one thing that's never changed, and that's that from the very beginning, a little over 20 years ago, when I first stepped foot in this industry, I had a strong desire to really get to the bottom line of what's really going on with our health. Why is it that our country every year spends billions and billions of dollars on health and every year it's still the most unhealthy it's ever been? Obviously something we're doing isn't working. And so from the very beginning, I was challenging the most commonly held practices and the most commonly held beliefs that we hold to be about health and fitness. So when I first started in the industry, when I had no experience, I believed that I was going to be able to help people in a significant way by finding the best nutrition program, the best exercise program, putting everybody on it, and then everyone would be successful and we'd all be dancing around and happy and life would be a joy. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. I tried the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, the Pritikin diet, all different kinds of diets, Same thing with exercise, all different kinds of exercise modalities. And what I found isn't that like one of them. I'm not here to promote or to negate any one type of program. What I'm here to say is that there's no one program that works well for everybody. There's no one food that works well for everyone. There's no form of exercise that works well for everyone. You and I are individuals. And what works well for you might actually be detrimental for me. So after years of experimenting with all these programs, I realized that I wasn't going to find the answers that way. So then I went to my next area of focus, which was individualization, which made sense. I realized there's no one program that works for everyone. So if I could individualize as deeply as possible, then I'd be able to have the same thing I was imagining. I'd have all these people have success. We'd all be happy and joyful. Even though the individualization was very valuable for me. I did the metabolic typing I used to test people's metabolism with blood, urine and saliva. Find out what they should be eating based on their biochemistry. For exercise, I was doing postural assessments, core function assessments, dynamic movement pattern assessments. I'd do an hour and a half of assessments before I'd work with anyone on the floor, with weight training or whatever we were doing for exercise. But still with all of that individualization, what I found was still pretty close to the same. A large majority of people didn't get the results they were wanting, and a few people did, regardless of how individualized I made it. So I realized that even though individualization is important, there was still something I was missing. Now, one thing that I should mention that definitely helped me was that at the same time I got into the fitness industry, I also got very into meditation and spirituality and stuff like that. So when I wasn't working or doing work related research, I was meditating or reading about saints and sages of different religions and just getting my mind expanded to different perspectives or ways of looking at things and looking at the world. I got into a pretty consistent meditation practice. What that did for me is it brought about a centeredness and a clarity that no amount of studying was going to be able to give me. The studying was very valuable, but there was a centering that came with the meditation that helped me to take what I was studying and see creative avenues. I could use it with that I couldn't see before. It's sort of like if you're looking for your keys, you lost them and you're looking all over the place, all over, and you can't find them. And then you just sit there and relax for a second and then it just pops into your head. You know where they are. You absolutely know for sure. Because now you've had that recognition, that clarity from a moment of silence.

What about retracing your steps though? You know when they say you lose your keys, just retrace your steps. Do you Feel like it's more powerful when you're trying to remember something, to just be still.

I feel that in myself, you know, most of the. When I wrote my book Immovable Heart, Unstoppable, I wrote it in six months. It's 226 pages. I didn't join any writing groups or any. Like, I didn't do any of that kind of stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with those things, but I just meditated every day. And if I ever felt like a little bit, I didn't really get stuck too much in the book, but when I was writing it, there might be some areas where I wanted to figure out how to write it a little bit more clearly. I would just go and meditate and just go. Step away from it. Just create some distance, just get into meditating. And the answers would always come. I just have that trust that if I just quiet myself, it'll come. I just see myself as a vessel, and the more I can quiet myself, the more it can come through.

You mentioned in the book that you had this period of your own, physical and kind of relational and emotional and even. It sounds like business things weren't working. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

It's funny, because when you were talking about getting frustrated with having your clients have success, I had the same thing. And what I realized is that the way that I was trying to work with my clients and the way that I was running my business, the source of my frustration was the same as their source of frustration. I wasn't getting to the root of the problem with my clients, which means I wasn't running my business in the way that would be effective. What I came to realize. Let me take a step back before I get into the business and tell you something I realized that led me to write this book. In early 2013, I was in my front yard meditating. And I had gone through years of working with clients and trying to help people that were stuck and frustrated and trying to figure out what it is, what is it really that is the key to helping people. In early 2013, I was meditating in my front yard, and it was like I found the keys. I realized what I had been looking for the whole time after I stepped back and just became quiet. And it was so simple that I just wasn't seeing it. And what I realized, the source. There's one reason why we get frustrated and stuck with our goals. And that one simple reason proliferates out. It grows out and creates all the complexities that we Experience. And that one thing is a fixation on achievement. So what I mean by that is when I say achieve, I mean to try to get something that we don't have now to obtain to grab a hold of something that we want to get that we don't have at this point. And what I realized about that is that that's a problem to look at our goals that way. Because when we look at it that way, it actually creates a separation from us and our go creates a separation between us and our goals and it projects it into the future. And because it's in the future, that doesn't feel good on an emotional level. And so emotions attract more emotions that are like them. So what ends up happening is because we see our goal as separate from where we are, we don't have it, it's in the future, and it keeps staying in the future. That doesn't feel good. So then we bring on practices that also don't feel good. So then that's why when a person follows a nutrition program, the first thing they think of doing is cutting out food. What do I need to eliminate? How do I need to restrict myself? Who do I need to limit? That doesn't feel good? Okay, when we exercise, I see a lot of people at the gym, they're exercising on the treadmill, reading a magazine or watching TV because they're bored and they don't want to do it. That doesn't work. That's not effective for long term success. So what I realized is that the goal actually isn't separate from us. We have to reverse that process and bring it back to within ourselves. So what I used to do with people is I would take them through a process. So let's say a person wanted to lose £40. I'd ask them, okay, why do you want to lose 40 pounds? Why is that important to you? Well, I want to be able to play with my kids outside. Like that's just one. I'll just give you this example. I want to be able to play with my kids outside and feel like I can do things with them in that way. Okay, well, why is that important? Well, if I could do that, I feel like it was more connected with them. And why is that important for you? I keep moving down the layers. And here's what I found is whenever I did this, I've done this for many years with a lot of people. In every case, as we move down the layers, it always came down to an emotion. People don't want to lose weight for the sake of Losing weight and the thought of losing weight doesn't excite anyone. What excites them is the ways that their life will change with the blossoming of that goal. So people don't want to lose weight for the sake of weight loss itself. They want to lose weight because they want to feel more empowered, more fulfilled, more of a sense of joy. And what we realize when we see that, when we can really see it, we realize that it's important to take practices on a daily basis that reinforce what I call those goal emotions. That joy, that fulfillment, that empowerment. And the more that we can take action in those ways that reinforce those goals emotions, the more success we're going to be able to have, long term success with our goals. And I wasn't doing that with my business. My goals with my business were all about achieving something that I didn't have. So I did a lot of things that felt restricting, that felt limiting. It was a grind. And eventually I felt like I got burned out by the time we closed the doors. We closed the doors because we had to, financially, because of the economy. But to be honest with you, I was a little bit relieved. It was a struggle for a lot of years for me.

You'd closed your emotional doors. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I just got burned out on it. It's the same thing as when a person follows a nutrition program and they decide, all right, I'm done, I can't do this anymore, and they shouldn't do it anymore. If it feels restricting and it feels limiting, they should. They need to take a different approach. And what I talk about in my book and what I talk about with people that I work with is that you can still have the same goal of like, weight loss or whatever, and you can still even take the same actions. But because you're seeing it differently, you're able to take those actions in a different way and they're able to have a different effect than they normally would.

This is so powerful too, because when you write, you touch on having a health goal being actually bigger than ourselves. And I think the power in this, David, is that it's such a contrast to this modern thinking where essentially selfishness is sold too. Can you touch on why making our health goal bigger than ourselves is the most important thing and how our health goal isn't necessarily just about us.

Absolutely. What I look like if I go to Barnes and Noble or one of the stores and I look at, like a health magazine, men's health, women's health, all different kinds of, really any magazine of any Kind what we find is stuff that's focused on ourselves. Lose focus. £50 in two months. Take the fast track to a lean, sexy body. It's all things that appeal to us. Having something that we want. We don't see things like find five ways to bring more abundance into the life of your loved ones. That's not a title, that's not a sexy scene. But that's the key. It's funny because this is why I tell people, think of it this way. Our country right now is the most unhealthy it's ever been. That makes sense that we should be doing the exact opposite of what we're typically doing. And what we're typically doing is focusing on ourselves. What I found is that in my 20 years, really 16 years of my 20 was as a personal trainer. And that 16 years, the people that I saw that had success were people that expanded their goal to be of service, to include others in some way. So I'll give you a couple examples I might have worked with. I worked with one person who felt like they were lacking in discipline and motivation for years. They just weren't strong enough to lose the weight. They joined a sports team, they joined like a basketball team or like a, like a mud run group or something and bam, all of a sudden they're losing the weight because they couldn't find the discipline for themselves. But there was no way they were going to be the slow person that held the rest of the team down. Now that's a form of accountability that's based on generosity, on being of service. What that does is it makes our goal of weight loss more than just to be able to wear a two piece bathing suit to the beach, is to be able to really do something to help others in some way. I've had other people who had a hard time losing weight and all of a sudden they'd see their kids start to gain weight and they're like, oh no, we're not having this. I need to be a role model. So then they have the incentive and the motivation because now their goal is bigger than themselves. I worked with a number of people that became trainers themselves. And I tell from the very beginning with these people that I worked with this one girl, Corey, and she wanted to get stronger and stuff. And she was like, I want to do this because I want to be like you. I want to help other people that are dealing with the stuff that I'm dealing with. And she ended up having success. And that's the thing, that's why a lot of health professionals are their own first success story because they started out before they even got into their career. Their goal was based on generosity, on being of service to other people in some way. It wasn't just about looking good naked or something along those lines. It was something more expanded than just themselves.

This is really, really powerful for me. It hit me in the chest actually, because that was my story. I mean, I was 280 and I became a trainer because I felt how amazing it felt to be healthy. And I just wanted to share that. And you had talked about something in your book. You had a client, Maria, and Maria was very overweight and she knew her mother was going to come visit in six months or eight months or whatever it was. And this story really touched my heart, man, because it was essentially Maria's love for her mom that made her lose the weight.

She was a beautiful woman. She was amazing. She was, I think she was like 70 pounds overweight. And she came to me and she was an exchange student from Greece. And she was wanted to lose the weight because her mom was coming to visit her in like eight months and she wanted, she was going to pick her up from the airport. And she wanted her mom to see the transformation in her because her mom always wanted to see her be happy and healthy and enjoying life. So she wanted to do this for her mother. So she'd come in to train with me. And in the beginning it was hard. You know, she had, she got winded really easily. We had to take a lot of breaks and stuff. But she was motivated. She'd talk about her mom. You know, I'd ask her about her every day. It was interesting because after about two months, she didn't lose any weight in the first couple of months at all. None. But what ended up happening is that as she got stronger just from the continual workout, she got to the point where she could take on more workload. She started getting more intense in her workouts just because physically she had the conditioning to do it. Then the weight started to drop off. And that's why I tell people a lot of times, a lot of people are focused on a linear progression, thinking that they need to start here and get to their goal as quickly as possible. In most cases, it doesn't work that way in terms of long term success. Most times when people lose their weight quickly, they gain it back quickly as well.

I know about that.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, yo yo dieting and yo yo exercise and all that kind of stuff, yo yo in general is huge. I mean, so Many people are doing it, and the programs out there are actually reinforcing that, which I think is a big problem in our industry at this point. But anyway, back to Maria. She started to, you know, really start to see results. So working with her on her program, it was more like she was trying to get ready for a surprise party than it was trying to lose weight. Her goal was all about her mother. It wasn't even about, you know, obviously she wanted her for herself, that she felt better, she felt more alive, more vitality. But she was so excited about her mom seeing the changes in her, and it just lit her up, and she became one of the fittest people in that. I mean, that girl could have been a model at the end of the day of that.

So cool.

Amazing. And she didn't care about any of that. It was just about her mother. You know, she just wanted her mother to be excited. And. And when her mother did finally see her, she didn't recognize her at first. And then after she did, she was like. Maria told me she was, like, hysterical, crying for like, 15 minutes. She couldn't stop crying.

Oh, my God, that must have been so cool. How rewarding was that, as a fitness professional, to see that go down?

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the thing is, like, I haven't seen Maria for years, but I have absolutely no doubt she is in absolutely excellent shape at this point.

Man. Well, let's transition here, David, shift gears. You mentioned the six practices of a healthy and fulfilling life. This is a guide that people can get in your book. Let's touch on these really quickly. Generosity is the first one. It helps us let go of the past, release obstructions, and makes our goals more powerful by the greater purpose we had discussed and also bringing greater abundance into our lives. How does being generous bring abundance into our lives when in the moment. Moment we're not feeling like being generous? I mean, how do we transition through that?

You know, this is just a matter of seeing that clearly what's really holding us back. Generosity is actually the practice that counterbalances obesity. So think of it this way. Obesity, you know, and when I say obesity, I don't mean, like the clinical definition, you know, I just mean usually when we think of obesity, we think of being physically overweight. The physical being overweight is just the surface manifestation of a deeper pattern that's going on. Really what the pattern is. It's a pattern of holding on to more than what we need. So in our physical body, that shows as being physically overweight with our relationships, it'll show as like holding on to baggage from the past. Resentments, guilt, anger, like all different kinds of emotions that stop us from feeling connected with other people. Just like holding on to more excess weight on our physical body stops us from feeling connected with our body and then with our livelihood. It's more of a sense of purpose. When we're holding on to all these things that we don't need, we have a hard time seeing our purpose. And when we think about purpose, you know, I talk with a lot of people that are confused on their purpose. What am I here to do? How you know all those kinds of things? When we think about what purpose is purpose is really a question of how can I practice generosity in a big way? How can I be a value of service to the world in a way that's going to have an impact? That's what people are typically thinking of when they're thinking of their purpose. And it works the exact same way as like with weight loss or with relationships. And that people are holding on to the past and it stops them from having the type of present and future that they really want. So with generosity, what we're doing is we're letting go. And this isn't just about gift giving. Getting rid of excess weight is a form of generosity. We're actually giving nutrients back to the environment that are healthy for them. We don't think of it that way. Every time we exhale, we're giving carbon dioxide back to the trees. That's a gift that we're giving to the trees. And then when we inhale, we're receiving a gift from them of oxygen. So I talk about generosity not so much in the typical way of like giving a gift. I talk about it as a force of nature. Generosity is all around us all the time. And it's the practice that when now we talked about how expanding our goal to be of service to others, that's important. That's the main way of practicing generosity to help with goals like weight loss or strength gain or whatever it is. Another way of doing another big thing that I do in terms of helping people with generosity is focusing on empowering questions. Our minds work on questions. And if our listeners listening to this and they're not sure about it, what they're going to do is they're going to, in their mind, it'll be very quickly, but they'll ask themselves, do I agree with that? Do I agree that the mind works on questions? And then you're going to go through your catalog of experiences and determine whether you agree with that or disagree with it. So the mind is always asking questions of the questions it asks determines where we're focused and how we live our life. Now, most people, what happens is when people get frustrated and stuck, they're asking a lot of why questions. Why is this happening to me? Why don't I have enough time to do what I want to do? Why don't I have the discipline? Why can't I do this? Why can't I do that? There's a lot of why questions. And when we ask why, what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sense of the past. So if I ask why don't I have enough discipline? The reason we're asking that is because we haven't had the discipline in the past. We haven't experienced that. So we ask ourselves why we don't have it. We're trying to make sense of it. That keeps our focus in the past and keeps us living the past. We keep having those challenges. Whenever we ask those types of why questions, other than questions like why is this important to me? That's getting focused on the present. When we ask these questions that are keeping us focused on the past, in order to shift that, we need to start asking other questions, like what can I be grateful for? If I were to change my body in a way that would be joyful, what would that look like? If I were to change my relationships in ways that would be joyful, what would that look like now when I start asking those kinds of questions, they're harder to answer because they're not our normal train of thought when we're frustrated. But what they do is that's actually a practice of generosity, because what it does is the more we ask these types of of questions that are empowering, the more it helps us to let go of the past. We're able to generously give it away.

So powerful man, because abundance is really the law of reciprocity. The more you give, the more you receive. And it's a perfect segue to integrity being number two in your practices. Because integrity helps us to not create these new obstructions, to not block ourselves. And the lessons of the intensity that you write about are the vicious cycles, this seesaw effect of aggression and isolation. Can you talk a little bit about the seesaw and maybe unpack that a little bit? It's such a huge and beautiful metaphor that you wrote about in your book.

Absolutely, yeah. Aggression and avoidance. So the second practice, integrity, is the complementary balancing practice of the first one of generosity. So whereas Generosity is about a separation or parting ways, a letting go of what's no longer needed. Integrity is about a unification or a connecting with what is needed and with integrity. The way that I talk about integrity, the way I look at integrity, is the same way that I look at, like, a bridge being constructed. A bridge needs two things. It needs strong, sturdy materials, but it also needs to have those materials configured in a way, like the right types of angles. And when you look at, like, engineering, they get those angles down exactly, precisely the way that they need to be because they know that they could have the strongest materials in the world. But if they're configured in the wrong ways, the bridge can collapse. And in the same sense, if we have weak materials but we have a strong configuration, the bridge can also collapse. So we need to have strong materials and a strong configuration in order for the bridge to be able to weather storms and cars driving over it without it collapsing. So with us, with us on an individual level, I look at that in terms of our thoughts and our feelings. Our thoughts and our feelings are the materials and the configuration of our integrity. What I find is that integrity is important because what that means is that we're being honest and compassionate in all areas of our life. Because honesty is inner fortitude of thought, word and action, and compassion is inner fortitude of feeling. And when we have one or the other, when we're lopsided in one direction or the other, we're going to create imbalance. So if we're more focused on our feelings and neglecting our thoughts, words, and actions, that's what I call aggression. Okay, so if we think about, like, if I were to get angry with you when I start yelling and screaming, what's happening is I'm not even thinking about the thoughts, words, and actions that I'm taking. I'm so wrapped up in my feelings. My feelings are running the show, and it's just spewing out on me.

I've been there, and that's.

We've all been. Every one of us, every human being has been there. And that's a big part of what I talk about. My purpose here is to talk about how we're all connected. We're all dealing with the same exact issues. We all deal with obesity. It doesn't matter if we're physically overweight or not. A person could be physically overweight in their body. They could be emotionally overweight in their relationships, creating a divide in intimacy. In their relationships. They could be holding on to obesity and their livelihood, where they don't Feel a sense of purpose in their home life or in their career or something like that. We don't think of it that way, but they're all forms of obesity, and we all deal with them in some way or another. We just deal with them in our own unique ways. So back to integrity. If I get angry with you and I'm lashing out, then my feelings are running the show, and I'm not as focused on my thoughts, words, and actions. They're just flying out now on the other end of the spectrum. So let's say that I do that, and then later I feel bad because now I come down, I've let this all out. It's like I've done this forceful exhalation. I'm empty now. So now it's like, oh, I realized what I did. I probably really overreacted. I. I went way out of line. Now I feel guilty. And so now what happens is when you do things that irritate me, I feel like I want to say something, but I don't because I felt guilty from the past. So I hold it in, and I hold it in and I hold it in, and I keep doing that until I can't hold it in anymore, and then it spews out again. So the avoidance and aggression are a seesaw. We go back and forth between them all the time. The example I just gave is simple because, you know, it's just an example of me and you. But really, in life, I might become aggressive with you because of a whole bunch of things that have been happening in different areas of my life, and you just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or you might just say the wrong thing at the wrong time, where my aggressiveness is ready to unleash. We can see that with relationships, but what about with our physical health? Let's say we have. This is a very common example. We have a woman named Jane. She wants to lose weight, and she stands in front of the mirror in the morning and she looks at herself and says, oh, I'm so fat. I look so gross. And that doesn't feel good. That's a form of avoidance. She's saying something that doesn't feel good, but she keeps doing it every morning. I know this from my own experience. This is very, very common for people that feel frustrated and stuck to give themselves negative reinforcement. And once again, we've all done it to some extent or another. We keep doing it over and over. Why is that happen? Because we're in a pattern of avoidance. We're not focused on the feelings. We're focused on the thoughts, words and actions because that's our comfort zone. Even though it doesn't feel good, it's still what we're used to. It's what we're familiar with. If that person was moving more toward integrity, they'd say, you know what? These messages I'm giving myself, they don't feel good and they don't do anything good for me. So I'm going to start focusing on being more loving with myself and giving myself more positive messages so I can feel better and maybe start to make a difference in a more inspired way. Now that would be moving toward integrity, but that's a hard thing to do because we're so ingrained in our pattern of negative reinforcement when we're in that place. So what ends up happening with Jane is she says that to herself in the mirror, it doesn't feel good. She starts driving to work, she sees someone on the road that's skinny and says, oh, I could never look like that. That doesn't feel good. She gets to work, she talks with her co worker about how she can't follow a diet because she has no self discipline. That doesn't feel good. She goes to the bathroom, she looks in the mirror and does the same thing she did in the morning. That doesn't feel good. So she keeps doing these things that are patterns of avoidance. And then what ends up happening, she gets home, she opens up her refrigerator, her freezer door, and sees a pint of ice cream. So now here's the interesting thing. What happens now is we swing in the other direction. Now her mind is telling her, oh, I shouldn't do that because I want to lose weight. But now her feelings take control. So now we're see sawing in the other direction and we don't think of it this way. But eating ice cream in that sense is a pattern of aggressiveness. Just like me yelling at you and then feeling guilty later. That's why we'll eat ice cream like that and then feel guilty later. It's the exact same thing. We're just doing it in a different area of our life. So a lot of times what I found is when people have issues with like food cravings and lack of discipline with a nutrition program or an exercise program, in most cases, it's not a lack of discipline or a lack of motivation. It's issues within tech. And it's not that people are meaning to be out of integrity. They just don't realize that those things that we do in relationships also apply to how we do things within our body?

We'll get right back to the conversation with David. I have been traveling a ton lately, and if you're on the go like me, I've been taking perfect supplements hydrolyzed collagen on the road with me. It is so much easier. We've all been there where you're like trying to screw the protein top back on and you get the powder in your lap and then you spill it on your passenger and then you get in a fight. You don't have to do that anymore. You can take these single serving packets on the road with you and get your collagen while you're traveling. It makes sense because putting chicken breast in little Ziploc bags and then putting that inside of a cooler and then having to take it out at the airport and show it to the TSA person, it's kind of exhausting. Make it easier on yourself. Get a single serving of hydrolyzed collagen from Perfect Supplements. It's 100% grass fed. It's from cattle that have not had hormones, synthetics or pesticides. And the reality is that as you eat this product, you're eating part of a system that works. These healthy cows eat grass and the sick cows, they eat corn. Then we eat those cows and that leads to a bunch of health problems beyond just the healing powers of collagen for our digestive system and joint health. This Collagen also has 20 grams of protein in two scoops, which helps to curb appetite when we're on the go. Pick up your 100% grass fed collagen at perfectsupplements.com wellnessforce. Do not forget to enter your audience code wellnessforce at checkout. You can save 10% off your collagen and everything else with some other awesome discounts. Let's jump back to the conversation with David Zapposzotti. I gotta pause you just for a second because I want the audience to really take that in. For so many years, I personally struggled with avoidance and aggression because you're right. When we're not happy about something and we're masking the way we feel with unhealthy foods or ice cream, this is a definite act of aggression. And it's interesting, man. After I read your book, I was talking to a friend about this, this, and we both realized we had this moment of aha from your book where we thought, what if people could just develop more emotional presence? Would that help with this seesaw of avoidance and aggression? What do you think about that?

Absolutely. For sure. There's something to take into account with that. We definitely want to work on the emotional, like getting into our feelings and seeing how we feel with what we're doing. But it's going to take a big shift for a lot of us. For example, a lot of people will go to a health professional, and I've experienced this myself, people coming to me, and I've told people when they come to me, don't ever take what I'm telling you as the authority. Don't ever take what I'm telling you as being the truth. You need to find the truth for yourself, within yourself. What I'm giving you are guidelines or recommendations. And the best way to use them is as a way of, like, self exploratory, like self discovery. Use them and see how they work for you. And then we'll, we'll assess how they, how you feel with them. And then we'll find from there. Don't just take this diet and say, okay, well, I should follow this diet because this professional told me I should do it. That's a lack of integrity. What that is, is I'm in my mind saying, okay, this person knows more than me, so I'm just going to follow it. And if I don't feel good on it, I can't tell you how many people have tried diets that don't feel good to them, that feel restricting and limiting and they just don't feel good. But because they were told by some expert that they should do it, it. They do it out of obligation, out of a sense of that that's the right thing to do, and it's not. I worked with a woman a few years ago who was overweight, and she had gone to the doctors and she had high cholesterol. Her cholesterol was somewhere around 300. And she came to me and I did a metabolic nutrition test on her. So I tested her metabolism and found out based on her biochemistry, she should be eating high fats and proteins and low carbs. And when I told her that, when I showed her the test results, it scared her half to death because she was like, oh, my God, like, I can't do that. So I got a little deeper into it, and when I found out, this is really interesting, when she was younger, when she was a kid, she was very skinny and had a lot of energy and was very active and stuff. And I asked her, like, well, did you eat differently back then? And she said, well, yeah, I actually ate a lot of fats. And stuff like that. I said, well, what happened? And she said, well, I learned eventually that fats aren't good for you, that they cause heart disease and high cholesterol and all that kind of stuff. And so I stopped eating fats. And at that point she started gaining weight. And so now, many years and many pounds later, she's way overweight, doesn't feel good, low energy, high cholesterol now. And she's coming to me and I'm telling her she should go back to eating high fat. So basically what she had done was a lack of integrity. She had listened to what others were saying was accurate, that fats weren't good for her, and she wasn't listening to her own body. So she was more. It was a pattern of avoidance. She was listening to the thoughts, words and actions of others and not listening to the feelings, the messages her body was giving her. And so what ended up happening is I. It took a while, but I was able to get her to start doing it, to like, like start eating high fats and, you know, going lower. And she loved it. She loved how it tasted. She still felt bad, like it was still really scary for her. But the next time she went to the doctors, her cholesterol had dropped by 80 points.

And it's interesting because she was working with you, she was going out on a little bit of a scary limb. A lot of people, when they go onto a new limb of growth or whatever it might be, there's a fear there. And only so many days can be felt in fear before there's some type of growth that happens. But in this process, there's patience. And number three on your practices is the art of patience. And it's helping us to not take current situations and blow them out of proportion, essentially. Having patience, you write, makes our mountains into molehills. It brings more growth, more transformation. Why is this patience portion so important for the fulfillment and the healthy lifestyle?

Patience. I think of it as sort of like damage control for integrity. So what I mean by that is with integrity, we're looking to be honest and compassionate, not just with other people, but with ourselves. Because the more we can be loving in that way and in integrity with ourselves, the more we're going to have success, long term success with our goals, regardless of what kinds of goals we have. However, sometimes we're triggered so intensely, usually by other people. Not always, though. There's other forms where we, like when we weigh ourselves, calorie counting, I'll get into those in a second. But there's ways where we trigger ourselves so intensely that it's hard to reflect and see how we're connected with it, to practice integrity in the ways I talk about in the book. So what we need to do in that point is we need to sort of. A lot of people think of it as taking a time out where we just distance ourselves for a moment and become silent and sort of center ourselves and feel into the physical feelings in the body that come with that trigger and relax into them. Now, this is not easy to do. It takes discipline. Most people think that they need discipline to follow a nutrition program or an exercise program or anything. Really, the discipline that people need is to do practices that are effective, that are simple, but that are contrary, that are different from what they're used to doing. This is a practice that when we do it, it can completely transform our life. The example I give in the book, I dealt with my wife. My wife and I have been together for a little over six years now, but the first year, and we have an amazing relationship. We love each other, we have intimacy, we connect every day. It's almost like we're in a honeymoon now. In certain ways we have our things that we deal with, but we have a great relationship. It wasn't like that in the beginning. We're sort of the reverse of most people. Most people have like a honeymoon period in the beginning, and then they start having resentments, build up and stuff. And then over time there might be less connection and stuff and all that. For us, it was the opposite in the beginning, it was like a battle zone. The whole first year of our relationship. And we did a lot of work on ourselves and realized that we need to focus on ourselves and take responsibility for our own emotional states and see that we're the ones that are causing that within ourselves. And the more we were able to do that, the more we were able to start connecting with each other in a really more sincere and intimate way. But what I dealt with in that first year, a lot of was jealous. And I dealt with that my whole life. Pretty much any girl when I was younger or woman I dated when I was older, I had some form of jealousy where I was concerned about them cheating on me or flirting with someone else. If they'd go out somewhere to a party where I wasn't at, I'd have imagined scenarios going on in my head that would bring a nodding in my stomach, a pressure in my chest, pressure in my head, something along those lines. What ended up happening is by the time I was with Kara, my wife, I Realized that there was something different about her. And I can't keep, you know, doing this, like getting into this state of jealousy because all it was doing, what I realized was, all it was doing was breaking down my relationships. It was creating a gap where there was no intimacy and less connection than what I really wanted. What I really wanted was intimate intimacy and connection with my partner. And jealousy was not going to get me that. It would get me short term comfort when I knew everything was fine. But it didn't, didn't do anything in terms of long term joy and fulfillment in my relationship. So what I ended up doing is what I used to do is like if she wanted to go to a party or something, I'd make sure I was going with her so I wouldn't have any concerns. But I didn't really want to go, you know what I mean? So I was doing things because I felt like I had to do it for the security of the relationship as opposed to because I really wanted to do it. So what I did is when I realized I needed to change the. This. This was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life was I purposely didn't go to certain things, like I didn't go to parties or I didn't do certain things that I would have done before out of security. And I had a lot of feelings come up. And what I did is I just laid down, I remember doing this like it was yesterday. Lay down on my bed and I felt the feelings. I didn't try to analyze them or figure out why they're there. I didn't try to do any mental things with them at all. All I did was I got there and I had these imagined scenarios and I feel into my body and I would just relax and feel that feeling. And what ended up happening is that the feeling would maybe start to become less intense. It would dissipate within maybe a minute and a half to two minutes. But here's the key thing. I did it every time. Every time an imagined scenario popped up in my head and a feeling would come up, I would go and I would do this over and over and over again. And after a few months of doing that, what I realized was that jealousy was no longer this monkey on my back that I had no control over by feeling into my body. It slowed my mind down. It actually made the imagined scenarios less quick and less often. So it wasn't as frequent and it wasn't as quick happening in my head because things can happen very quickly and we get absorbed in it. And wrapped up and off we go into this imagined nightmare that doesn't feel good and it doesn't do anything good for us. So by feeling into the body, it helped me to become centered. And what ended up happening is after months of doing this, I started to get a clarity that I wasn't looking for. But I realized that the reason I was having these jealousy issues wasn't really because of the people I was with. It was because of feelings of being unholy or incomplete within myself. But the only reason I was able to realize it is because I was starting to feel more complete myself. So I was actually doing the practice that helped me to feel more whole. And by doing that, I got clarity on how I wasn't feeling whole before, how I wasn't feeling complete before. And now at this point, I don't remember the last time I had a jealous thought. I don't know that I'm completely free of it. It's probably been a couple years since I've had something like that. But who knows, Maybe some challenge. The goal of this isn't to be perfect. It's not to get rid of something for the rest of my life. My goal is just. Just to be happier and happier, more and more fulfilled over time and to help other people to do the same thing.

It's such a dynamic story because you went from literally being afraid that you're going to be cheated on to being able to feel your emotions and realize that they were all just bs and it was this kind of fear based story, you know, false evidence appearing real. And what comes up for me when I hear you talk about this is this patience angle can be applied to losing weight. It can be applied to growing trust, trust in a relationship. It can be applied to growing muscle. I mean, business patience is like this dynamic building block that brings this growth and transformation. But patience, we can't do it alone. There has to be action. And that's number four, inspired action. And you write that inspired action helps us to cultivate more of what we really want in our lives rather than trying to move away from what we don't want, brings more joy and fulfillment into our lives. So, so what in your life have you done to really take inspired action? And for people that might not feel motivated to do that, how do they begin to generate this momentum in taking inspired action?

What you just said was really important. And I want to clarify something. You know, I just talked about like my issues with jealousy and possessiveness in relationship and how you were saying that they also deal with like, weight loss. One of the big ways that I see that the practice of patience is important in terms of health goals, in terms of the physical body, is with like, weighing ourselves and counting calories and stuff like that when we're doing those things. Basically, the reason that patience is important is because uncertainty in our life is inevitable. We're always going to be experiencing change and uncertainty in some way. And the reason that we try to grasp for control in different ways, like weighing ourselves. We weigh ourselves on a regular basis a lot. When I had my fitness center, if you came in to see me one day, I would have opened the closet and I would have shown you, like, nine scales in the closet. And the reason why is because I had certain clients who couldn't weigh themselves, because what ended up happening is that they trigger themselves and they'd actually sabotage their progress through the very act of measuring it. So it's not that measuring. It's not that weighing themselves was the problem. It's that their emotional attachment to what the scale said was the issue. It's really an issue of integrity. Because I had one client, for example, who she woke up one morning and she felt better than she ever had in her life. She couldn't remember last time she felt that good. And so she figured, oh, I must be making progress. So she ran to the bathroom and she got on the scale and weighed herself, and she had gained a pound. And she immediately. That feeling of joy and excitement immediately went to frustration and anger, and she sabotaged. She gained back all the weight and more that she had lost just because of that feeling. Now, she didn't realize that muscle weighs more than fat. So a lot of times when you're losing weight, you could actually be getting smaller and gaining weight because you're gaining. You know this because you're a health professional. But a lot of the customers that we've worked with don't know that. So she made an assumption, and this was a lack of integrity, because she was giving more value to the numbers that were coming up on the scale than to the feelings that were coming up within her own body. And it was so powerful that it caused her to savage. She basically took a molehill and she made a mountain of it. So what I recommend to people is if they're going to weigh themselves, for example, to make sure that they're noticing the physical trigger that comes up and becoming still with it. And for some people, they're not ready to even practice it to that extent. For some people, I'm actually creating a program Right now, that's based on my book. And in the program, I'm going to have a daily planner that people use. And the way that they're going to measure their progress is through an inspiration scale and a mindfulness scale. So they're actually going to be looking at. At how inspired they're not going to be just taking action. They're going to actually be measuring how inspired they were while taking action. Of course, I give ways of drawing up, bringing about this inspired action you know, we're about to talk about now because it's the fourth practice. By doing that, by focusing on being inspired, then we're getting our goal emotions into our everyday life. So we're reconnecting with our goal, bringing it back into the present as opposed to in the future. We're cultivating it now as opposed to trying to achieve it in the future. And this always leads to greater success, success over time.

I'll make sure to link that to what you're working on at the show notes page. So you guys, if you want to just click the iPhone right now, it'll pop up and it's wellnessforce.com heart and I'll link David's. What did you call it? It was a mindfulness scale.

I'm going to have an inspiration scale and a mindfulness scale in the planner that I'm developing for the program. I'm actually going to be filming the program in the beginning of January, so it's coming off here very soon, and we'll be probably have it available in February or March.

And so with the inspired action, and I'm glad you backtracked, because those were some very, very important points you made up, especially when you open the closet and you realize, hey, there's nine scales in here. That's very true in regarding to cultivating patience. But with inspired action, how do we be inspired? If we don't feel like being inspired to take action, how does that occur?

Well, the way that we do that is through practicing. So in the same way that generosity and integrity are complementary practices to each other, patience and inspired action are also complementary practices. Patience is about movement into stillness and relaxing in the stillness of our uncertainty and becoming centered and relaxed in the midst of that uncertainty. Inspired action is stillness into movement. So a lot of times people are taking action, but they're working and working and working. They're sort of like on a rat race, and they're going and going and going. They're never taking the time to become still and really focus on what are my priorities. Why am I even taking action to begin with? A lot of times people get burned out by doing that. So inspired action is the opposite of patience in the sense that we're becoming still first and really feeling into why we're doing it. And then we move outward and take inspired action from that place of stillness. So one of the things that I used to do on a daily basis is I focus on my death. I know that sounds weird, and it sounds a little bit morbid.

Nope, that's okay. The audience knows about this concept.

Yeah, it's not at all. And here's the thing. We see people that are dying, and some people like the whole resentments and grudges with people for years or even decades. And then when they're, like, on their deathbed, they're calling these people up and wanting to make amends. Now, why does that happen? If we really think about why that happens, if we really, like, sort of put ourselves in that position, we realize there's no longer a future. Okay. There isn't a future anymore. So. So we're in this moment right now. And what happens is that we realize the illusion of the future, that one of my favorite sayings in a movie is when Apollo. I'm from Philadelphia, so I love the Rocky movies, and I think it was Rocky iii. Apollo Creed says to Rocky, there is no tomorrow. And he was right. That is absolutely true. There's nothing that exists tomorrow. When tomorrow's here, it'll be today. It'll be right there. Now, there's only this moment. You can have a concept of tomorrow, but you're going to experience it now when it comes to you. And, you know, I've had, like, sort of death experiences through meditation. Not. Not an actual, obviously, death experience. But you get to that point where you. Where you see the illusion of how the past and the future are plays in your mind. But what's really going on is what's here and now at this moment. And when we see that, it helps us to become more discerning of what's really important to us. And then from that place, I was able to take action on a daily basis. That's one of the reasons I was able to write the book as quickly and in as much of an inspired way as I did was because I focused on, this is the last moment of my life, the last day of my life. What do I want to do today if I'm leaving tonight? What do I want to do? What do I want to leave behind to help others so that I can help this world to be a better place than when I came into it. So I was very motivated by doing that. Now the interesting thing is that's what I did a lot before. Now that I have a daughter, instead of thinking about my own death, I think about her life. It's equally discerning and just as much clarity. To me, death and life are like two sides of a coin. They're the same thing. It's just when one door opens, another one closes, and one door closes, another one opens. So. So what I do every day is I write down, I read my goal, I actually have my goal written down that I'm working on right now. And I read 10 different ways my life will change. And I feel into each of those things. I don't just read them routinely, I read them and really feel into them. And then I go into taking inspired action from that place. And I consistently take time throughout the day to do that. So here's an example. What I mean, a lot of people don't think to become still and become charged again before taking action and doing that various times throughout the day. But one area where we do that, where everyone sees the importance of it, is in sports. If we have like a basketball team, okay, and they're a college team and they're about to go into the championships, what's going to happen a few days before the championship? They're going to have a pep rally where they get everyone excited and emotional and charged up. And then on the day of the game, right before the game starts, they're going to have a. A pre game show where they'll turn off the lights and there'll be lights flashing all over and someone on the microphones yelling out to the crowd. Everyone's cheering, everyone's getting emotionally charged up and then the team goes out and takes action from there. Now, during the game, what happens when they're not inspired anymore, they're not in sync, they're not coordinated, they're not working well together the way they normally were. They're starting to go downhill. That's right. The coach calls a timeout and he does that to get them recharged again and then go back out. Because he realizes that if they keep taking action in that uninspired place, they're going to get destroyed. The other team is going to run up the score and destroy them, beat them, they're going to lose. We see that with sports, but we don't see that with our own life. When we're following a nutrition program and we feel restricted and we feel unfulfilled, and we feel like, oh, this is a disaster. I don't hate doing it, but I have to do it to lose lose weight. That's like playing on a basketball court and not doing well and not calling a timeout. We're not going to get the results that we're looking for. We're not going to win in our own life in the same way that the other team is not going to win by not taking the time out. When we're exercising, we're on the treadmill and we're like, doing anything we can to pass the time because we can't stand doing it. It's the same exact thing. We don't think of it in that way because we don't see it as a concrete law. But months later, it's just because of a lag in time. If we could see how quickly we weren't going to get our goals, we wouldn't take action in that way. But because it's months down the line, we don't make the connection, and so we don't see the importance of it. So a big thing to do is we're actually practicing patience on the. On the other end. So with the practice of patience before, we were talking about, like, with our challenges, like jealousy or with weight loss or whatever, like when a negative feeling comes up, making a molehill out of a mountain, making sure it doesn't blow up and become out of proportion. With inspired action, we're actually practicing patient with the high point. So we're like, if we take a timeout, we're reading our goal or like how the coach calls a timeout to get them inspired again. We're actually practicing patience there because we're becoming still and we're becoming charged in that stillness. So we intentionally insert something like reading our goal, thinking about our death, thinking about a life, thinking about someone that we'd love, love, and that we're gonna, you know, do something for them and help them in some way. When we do something like that, that brings up a charge, and then we move back into action, our actions will be more effective.

And this is powerful because you talk about if you're not inspired, it's very difficult to take inspired action. But mindfulness is so important, and it's number five on the list. Now, mindfulness, outside of your definition, the way that I've heard mindfulness described, and, you know, we'll get to yours as well. But mindfulness means essentially maintaining this kind of moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, how our Body feels and just noticing what we're feeling in the moment, not doing anything, not changing anything, not reacting to it. And I feel like this is where we actually get the fuel to take inspired action. Now, you define your interpretation as mindfulness helps us to free ourselves from attachments that keep us feeling stuck. It's this inner essence, this common thread of all the previous practices, and it allows us to experience true freedom. Why is this mindfulness component? Why did you time it right after the inspired action? I'm curious if those two play off of each other.

Like you were saying, Mindfulness is really. Mindfulness plays off of all of them. It really does. Like, mindfulness isn't any more a part of inspired action than it is of patience, integrity, or generosity. Mindfulness is the practice that helps to. We're only able to use those practices that we just discussed to the extent that we're being mindful with them. So, for example, like with generosity, let's say I give you a gift. Okay? It's your birthday. And I come over and I say, josh, you know, happy birthday. You're such a great guy. I'm so glad to know you. It's an honor. Here's your gift. Right? That's going to feel pretty good, right? Regardless of what the gift is, you feel good about that presentation. However, let's say I come in a different scenario. Come in, same gift. I'm on my phone. I'm talking with someone. Hey, John. Yeah, I'm doing good. Oh, hey, Josh. Here's your gift. Happy birthday. Yeah, yeah, no, no, I can still talk. Here you go. So I'm on the phone the whole time now. I just gave you the exact same gift, but it feels completely different now, right? It's the same thing with, for example, with health. Okay, so let's say we're eating a meal, a nutritious meal. Well, I could eat the meal mindfully where I'm really feeling into it and tasting it and being aware of how my body does with it, because my body is sending me mess messages all the time. And it's up to me to be able to be mindful enough to hear those messages, to receive them, and to be able to do something with it in an inspired way. However, if I'm eating that meal, that same meal, but I'm, like, eating it in a very hurried way, and I'm on the phone or I'm watching a show or I'm texting or checking my email, if I'm doing all these other things that distract me from the moment, My body is going to receive. Receive the gift in a similar way to you receiving my gift while I'm on the phone the whole time. It's no different. So you could eat a nutritious meal and it could be unbeneficial for you if you eat it in an improper. You could eat a healthy meal in such a quick way that it gives you heartburn, even though it's considered to be healthy for you. I'd rather see a person eat something that's what they're eating now as opposed to trying to eat the most unhealthy thing they could do. The first thing I tell people when they're following nutrition in anything is be mindful with it first. That's the first thing is start to build a relationship with your food that increases the integrity. So generosity isn't just about giving a gift. It's about how we give it that gives the impact, the power of it as well. With integrity. Integrity is about being mindful of our thoughts and our feelings. If we're not mindful of our feelings, we're in avoidance. If we're not, we're not mindful of our thoughts, words and actions. We're in aggressiveness. It takes mindfulness in both of those areas in order to be in integrity. Patience is pretty much mindfulness. It's just that patience has to do with being still and feeling into the body and the uncertainty that arises. And mindfulness is about being present regardless of whether there's uncertainty or not.

And that's a muscle. That's definitely a muscle that we build over time in meditation. Mindfulness, this is actually a strengthening of the synaptic endings in our brain.

Brain for sure. Absolutely. Patience is basically mindfulness for the challenging times is the way that I look at it. And then inspired action, same thing. I could wake up in the morning and read my goal and read 10 ways that my life will change from it. But if I'm reading those things and I'm thinking about taking a shower or what I'm going to eat or all that, my mind's on other things. That isn't going to have the same impact in terms of being inspired that. That it otherwise could. The more we can be mindful in our everyday life, the more inspiration we get in the other areas. So, like, for example, my whole message with people, like, for example, weight loss or whatever their health goal is, is about reconnecting with the goal and bringing it from the future back to the present. Well, a lot of what we do in our everyday life doesn't have to do with, like, losing weight. Like, we don't think of cleaning the dishes or taking out the trash as helping us to lose weight. They actually can in a certain way. I'm not going to get into that right now, but the more that we can be present with those kinds of things, the more we get into the pattern of being in this moment, the more when we are taking actions that are directed toward our goals, the more those things will also be able to be in the present moment. Because now we're in a pattern. If I'm in the habit of being present over and over and over again, I'll keep doing that over and over and over again. It'll be easier and easier to do that. So if I'm doing it with dishes, with cleaning, with going to the bathroom, with eating, with all these little mundane things that don't seem like they're important, it'll be easier to take action in a present way with presence. When I'm, like, looking to lose weight, like nutrition or exercise or whatever my goal things, my goal activities have happen to be.

Oh, it's powerful too, because when I look at the last point, we're getting to the end of the show, but the last one, and I feel like the most important is commitment. And this is the last principle. You speak of it as being this outer commitment container that gives shape and direction to the previous practices. But talk about this sticking power, I mean, for commitment, how do we actually integrate commitment into this process?

So commitment, really what I mean by commitment is, whereas mindfulness is about giving attention to this moment, commitment is about setting an intention. So, and just like generosity, integrity, or complementary practices, patience and inspired action are a complementary. Mindfulness and commitment are also complementary. Mindfulness is the inner essence of the practices, and commitment is the outer shape container that directs the flow of those practices. Here's the thing. When we have a goal like let's say we want to lose weight, the reason we don't see its immediate fulfillment is because we have conflicting intentions. I want to lose weight, but I want to eat this. I want to lose weight, but I want to be sedentary. It's not that we want to do those things, but those are our habit patterns. Now, they're conflicting intentions. It takes time to see where we're out of alignment with our intention and to move into alignment. That takes time to do that. And even when we do realize where we're out of alignment, it takes time to form a new habit pattern. It takes at least usually, like 21 days or more to get into a new habit pattern from one that's already been ingrained in us that we're not looking to subscribe to anymore. So commitment is the practice that helps us to use the practices long enough to have a noticeable impact in our life. If we don't have a sense of commitment, then we won't follow those practices long enough for them to have a significant impact in our life.

Commitment is something that I've seen people veer away from because it's scary. I mean, when I was working with clients, one thing they would say is, you know, I want to do this so bad. But then when it would come to, you know, a month later, things would be difficult, different. And I'm curious if there is just a handful of practices that you could give people that they might be able to do to begin that cultivation of commitment.

One of the things that I feel is the most important is to get clarity on what we want. A lot of times when I talk with someone, like, let's say I'm talking with someone that wants to lose weight, and I'm sorry if I keep using weight loss examples. One of the reasons for that is because that's my main audience, is people that are looking to lose weight. As a trainer for 16 years, probably, like, I don't know, 97, 98% of people that came to see me wanted to lose weight. So that's most of my stories, most of my experience.

Sure.

But here's the thing. When I would talk, most people, when they come to me and they're frustrated and stuck and they want to lose weight, if I ask them why they want to lose weight, like, what will that do for them? Most of them are focused on moving away from what they don't want as opposed to moving toward what they do want. So if I ask someone, why do you want to lose weight? They might say, oh, I'm tired of being gross. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to want to be in an airplane and not be able to pull on a seatbelt. Like, they're talking about all the things that they don't want anymore but what they're not talking about. So they're very clear on what they are trying to get away from. But that's not the same as being clear on what they want to have in their life, what they want to cultivate on a regular basis and feel differently in their life. Now it's very different saying, I want to lose fat, I want to lose weight because I don't want to be fat anymore and I want to lose weight because I want to be slender and skinny and full of energy. They seem like they're the same, same thing, but they're the complete opposite focus. One is focused on not being fat, which means we're focused on fat, and the other one is focused on being slender, which means we're focused on slender. And wherever we're focused, it doesn't matter whether you're negating it or not, saying, I don't want to be fat, you're still focused on that. You know, the obesity aspect. And it'll keep us. Because our attention's on, it'll keep us repeating the past and prolonging our obesity regardless of what area of our life we're experiencing it in.

Man, you've said so many different things on the show today that I feel like we could have like a tweet session. There could be like 20 different tweets with your name attached to it. And we're at the end of the show. This is the last part of the show. It's called seven for seven. It's seven power questions for seven top of mind answers. So it's whatever comes up for you. And the first question I want to ask is, what is the best book you've read this year?

Probably. And I've read this book a number of times in my life, but I love the book. So Arthur by Herman Hess.

If there was just one thing you could change about the wellness industry, what would it be and why?

I would focus on there being less competition and more connection. I feel like a lot of times people are focused on developing their unique selling propositions, seeing how they stand apart from everyone else and how their services are so much better. What I'd like to see is people working together and working off of each other's strengths instead of seeing everyone as an adversary. And I understand why it's there. People feel a scarcity with money and finances and stuff like that and they want to get ahead and all that kind of stuff. But I feel like if everyone were to work together more on the areas where they're strong, there would actually be more success. Because if we actually made an impact in helping people to really lose weight and feel better for long term success, that would happen through everyone connecting and joining together and having, having collaborations and connection in that way. There's a poster I've seen before and I love this poster. It's a bunch of different people from all over the world, Third world countries, first world countries, different ethnicities, different religions, different races, and they're all smiling and they're all different in their different ways, but the essence of their smile is all the same. If we can focus on the essence of the smile, we can make this world a better place. Not just in terms of the world, but in terms of our health, but in all areas of life. So that's something I would like to see happening in the industry. I think if we focus more on connecting, there wouldn't be a lot of the issues with trying to get people to their goal as quickly as we possibly can and trying to get people excited. There would be more of a focus on what's really important as opposed to just trying to fit into what people feel like they want and sell them because you know that they'll buy it because it's tailoring to what they want, even if it's not really going to help them.

If you could go to either China or Jamaica, where would you go, why would you go and who would you take?

I would take my wife and my daughter with my family in mind. I would go to Jamaica because it's nice weather and it would be a relaxing experience. I would love to go to China just because I'm very into meditation. I love Chinese medicine and Daoism and Zen and a lot of that kind of stuff. I love to read about that. And I study. I actually meditate at a Zen center regularly. I have a Zen teacher, so there's a lot of that. But if I'm thinking about my family, who I would definitely want to bring with me, I'd probably go to Jamaica.

What is your favorite way to practice self love Meditation? If there was just one day you woke up this week, let's say it was this coming Friday, Friday, and you realize, oh my God, the entire Internet has been deleted and it's been taken over by hackers. All your books, your articles, your website, everything you've ever done as far as contribution is gone. If you were starting from square one all over again, what would you say in the first paragraph to sum up all your previous work to this new era of readership?

You know, to be honest with you, I would have the same exact process that I have right now. I would write out my goal, whatever that was. And now if, if my work was already deleted, then maybe that would shift my prior. I'd go back to writing a book or something like that. But I probably still work on what I'm working on right now because it's what I have a passion for. It's what I'm clear on that I want to bring out. And it's something that I know will be beneficial for a lot of people. I know this sounds like I'm dodging the question or making it easy, but I really would be doing the same thing that I'd still be reading my goal, I'd be feeling into the 10 ways my life will change. And I would get into taking inspired action just like I do every day. Every day.

And if there was just one thing that you could focus on for the listeners as far as what they can actually do right now, today, to cultivate more mindfulness, more commitment, more inspired action, what is one thing that people could do today to move closer to better health and wellness?

This is really hard for me to say because I'm not big on self promotion, but what I recommend to people is to read my book. Because to be honest with you, the way that I look at my book is my book is, in a way, even though I don't use the word, I think I use the word spirituality in the book one time. The book is very much on a spiritual tone. It's more about getting to the deep essence of what really drives us and what really holds us back, getting clarity on what that really is. And it's different from what we typically think it is in terms of, in our industry, what we're told. I feel like if people were to read my book, to me, it's like it's the cross between health and fitness and spirituality. In spirituality, we see a lot of stuff about the deep essence of who we are and what this life is all about and stuff. But a lot of times we see that and we have a hard time knowing what to do with it. And in health and fitness, if you look at books at Barnes and Noble, whatever, in there, you see a lot of programs for nutrition exercise, but there's not a lot as much on the deep essence of what's really going on with us. It's just programs that we're supposed to follow routinely. So I sort of feel like I my book bridges the two. It gets into the deep essence of what's really going on with us, and then it also gives practices that are actually really effective in helping us to make changes in our life.

Last question. The most important, I feel like, and every guest on the show has had a unique answer. And I'm curious for you, what is your definition of wellness? What does wellness mean to you?

Wellness is living in a way that where we're trending toward more and more fulfillment and enjoy regardless of what area of life that's in. And really it includes all areas of life. I think of wellness and health as the same thing in terms of the way that I look at them. Health to me isn't just about the physical body. It's also about our relationships and our livelihood, the way that we're living on a day to day basis. So a lot of times we look at wellness. For example, if you look up the definition of health, it'll say a state that's free of aches and ailments, a balance of mind, body and spirit. Type of a state where things are going well. Whereas to me, wellness is about getting into a pattern. It's more about the process, living a process that's fulfilling as opposed to getting to the state where we're then fulfilled.

You can read more about david@immovableheart.com as well as pick up his book. When you guys are done getting the book, please email me josh, wellnessforce.com let me know your thoughts. Thoughts. I'm curious what comes up for you with generosity, integrity, patience, inspired action, mindfulness and commitment. We're also going to give away three free copies of David's book over at the show notes page wellnessforce.com heart David, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. It's been a pleasure getting to know you, reading your book. We covered so much value on the show today. Is there anything you feel like we missed that you'd like to mention?

No. You know, I'm just so honored to have you on the show. I love your show. I listen to it. I don't listen to many podcasts. I actually talk, try to get off the computer as much as I can when I'm not working. But you're one of the few podcasts that I listen to and I thoroughly enjoy. So thank you again. It truly has been an honor to be on your show with you.

Well, thank you. That means a lot to me, David. And again, Wellness Force Radio pick up a copy of David's book. And I don't care if you don't want to promote it, David. I do because it made an impact for me. It allowed me to have better conversations with my friends and it actually changed the way I coach clients a little bit in the patience portion. So make sure to pick up a copy of David's book at Immovable Heart. David Zapposzotti, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Josh. I appreciate it.

You made it to the end of the episode. Thank you. My friend. If this episode meant something to you or inspired you with action, leave us a review. Wellnessforce.com review. Your energy and voice helps to attract so many people to Wellness Force Radio to share this message Message of Inspired Living through Wellness, Technology and Behavior Change so much of what David and I talked about today involved doing an emotional inventory on what's working and what's not working in our lives. I want to recap those six essential practices for living a healthy and fulfilling life with David. First up was generosity. This is what helps us let go of the past and release obstructions without focusing on them. Second is integrity. It helps us to not create new obstructions that impede our progress. Third is patience. It helps us to not take our current instructions and blow them out of proportion. And fourth being my ultimate favorite, inspired action. This is what helps us to cultivate more of what we really want in our lives. Fifth is mindfulness. It helps to free us from attachments that keep us feeling stuck in our lives. And last is commitment. It's the outer container that gives shape and direction to all the previous practices, and it gives us the ability to stick with the other practices long enough for things to blossom. Now all you get to do is go out there and create an amazing day with all these essential practices and inspiration from David and every other guest that's been on the show. So until I see you again real soon next week, I'm wishing you love and wellness.

Sam.