Roadman today I want to talk to you about a concept called extreme…
Roadman today I want to talk to you about a concept called extreme ownership. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long-chevities? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman! Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman podcast. Thank you for joining me again. I hope your week is well underway. Today I want to talk to you about a concept called extreme ownership. This is a super important concept and it's like a lot of these concepts. If you take it and you run with it and you let it just infect every area, it's not really a word infect, it's what I'm looking for because it's a negative connotation to affect. If you let this just permeate every area of your life. It's going to have a profound impact. It's something that it actually took me a long time to get my head around. I'm not sure if it's you know it maybe a little bit of an inherent Irishness past the book mentality that I used to have. But I embraced this concept called extreme ownership that I'm going to talk to you about today. It just had a massive effect on my happiness, I had a massive effect on my training, a massive effect on my results, a massive effect my coaching clients and every aspect of my life. That's what I want to talk to you about today, how you can use this concept to improve, not just your sport, but a bunch of other areas of your life. Before I jump in and explain this wonderful concept, let me just give you a prod to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Welsh patreon to how you support this podcast. We don't have a sponsor on the podcast. I'd love to get a sponsor in the future, but at the moment it's entirely funded by you guys, your generosity. So if you're getting some value out this podcast, I would encourage you if you can spare the change to head on over to Patreon, buying me the price of a beer once a month to say thanks. It means the podcast is sustainable and I can put the time and the effort and energy in to bring you these podcasts day in, day out. I'm going to put the link for that in the boil. If it's one of those things that you have long finger to encourage you to please take it off the long finger and make action on it now. Okay, this concept called extreme ownership. It's actually, I heard a lad, he's the ex-U.S. Navy Seal called Jocko Wilick and he was the first guy I heard talking about this and I subsequently got his book, I read the book and like a lot of things, I took the part out of his story that were applicable to my life and more broadly were applicable to Suigland and that's what I want to share with you today. Not his entire concept. It's a short form Roadman Boyz podcast so we would need a longer form on to go through his whole concept. But I wanted to cherry pick the bits that are most helpful as athletes. So just a little bit of background on Jocko Willek. He's a Navy commander and he was in Iraq and this is the background to what's relevant to why you should listen to this concept. So he was in Iraq and He was in a particularly stressful military combat situation over in Iraq and you know, there's so many lessons that war teaches us, you know, the fragility of life and Just somebody's lessons are just There are lessons that are hard learned obviously because of the nature of war But they can be also such profound lessons and I think this is one of these really profound lessons So he's command and battalion of soldiers But Iraq is a messy situation for anyone who follows military history. You have multiple US and allied forces operating in the area. You have local friendlies and you have Iraqis. You basically have this hodgepodge of confusion going on. So in attack breaks out, shots are starting getting forward. And then what we typically hear this on every military movie we've ever watched, the fog of war descends, which roughly means there's confusion. And in that confusion, in this firefight and just chaos, blue and blue forest art, that's friendly for her. So it's one group of alloys, US soldiers attacking another group of alloys, a mix of coalition forces and Iraqi soldiers.
Is the mortal sin of combat
This is the mortal sin of combat. Guys are wounded, guys are killed, all on the same side, boy are brothers and arms. This is the absolute no-no in military. So the order comes true, eventually they figure out that it's blue on blue, friendly for her, and the order comes true from Jocko Willick, who's the commander, from his superiors to shut down all operations in the area and debrief. And from experience, he knows what's going to happen here. Someone needs to be held accountable for this sort of thing, and we notice in our job, in sport, in relationships, whenever there's a problem, someone needs to be accountable. From this situation someone needs to be forward. So what Jack of those is debrief, he goes through it and he starts meticulously picking apart every failure that happened in the lead up to this clusterfuck who fails to pass on messages, who fails in their responsibility and their duty, ultimately who is responsible, what was the failure and who was it, proper fingerpoint and name calling. And then he's ten minutes from the Joint Chiefs and all these guys coming in for the a big debrief and he has this aha moment and he looks around the room with all his commanders there and he asks who's to blame and force one puts up their hand and he says you know I'm the blame why was the signals coordinator I should have relayed X information a bit faster he says no you're not to blame asks the second guy you know who's to blame and he said I'm the blame so you know I should have correctly identified my target I shot and killed a friend lead us is on me you know I shouldn't have I shouldn't have pulled the trigger it's on me. He said, you're not the blame. And he went around the whole room asking who's the blame, who's the blame. And hand after hand came up. And in that moment, he knew the answer himself. He said, there's only one person to blame. That was him. He used a lad to blame. He was the commander. He was the senior member on site. He is responsible for every single thing that happens. Now there's a powerful, powerful message there. And I'm not talking about a message for war. It's a powerful message as us as leaders because when I listened to this story and then I dug in and read the book, I taught you know what we're all leaders. We're leaders in our relationship, we're leaders in work and that doesn't mean you're the boss in work but it means you're the leader. It means there's someone looking to you to get a job done. There's people underneath you relying on you. All of us are leaders. You know, I worked when I had the coffee shop, I worked in the coffee shop, serving coffee. You know, even there you might say, okay, a humble barista, am I a leader? You absolutely are. You're leading coworkers by example, you're leading customers by quality of service. So it's taken ownership for that. And that's that powerful message I got. This taken ownership a never-shirking responsibility, never passing the burden. And this is just becoming more and more important in a society that's broken and sick. And we have that quote that I love being well adjusted to a sick society isn't the measure of health. I always mess up who says these quotes. I'm not sure who said that on, but it's a brilliant quote. And That's what we're in this culture of past a book, past a board and all the time. So it's extra important when we step up and own this. And this starts having just such powerful, transformers effect on every aspect of our lives. Like, are you overweight at the moment? Are you carrying an extra chunk that's holding you back in the hills? Own it. Take ownership. It's not your partner's fault for ordering the shopping. It's not, you know, someone's fault for not doing the cooking. It's not your training partner's fault because you cancel during the week and you're not riding as many miles. It's not your coach's fault. It's your fault. It's your fault you're carrying extra weight. Take responsibility for you. Are you in a work situation at the moment where you're looking to grow the top lion and you're look pointing at the finger at salespeople, you're pointing the finger at costs that are spoiling out of control. It's not their fault. It's your fault. Every single thing that happens is your fault. When we start getting to this, we start unleashing a power to take responsibility but also to come up with solutions.
When everyone takes responsibility for the problem, what actually…
When everyone takes responsibility for the problem, what actually happens is problems get solved because not only you take responsibility for the problem, you're taking responsibility for the solution. So you don't blame another person or you don't blame another team, you take responsibility, you take ownership for the good and the bad. You take responsibility for your mistakes, your problems and the solutions to solve these mistakes. Take ownership back of that vision you have for your life. Aristotle had that amazing quote that, excellence, it's not an act but it's a habit. We are what we repeatedly do. So where this is most powerful for me is, take responsibility for your calendar because that's what Boycroydon is. That's what Seikodon is. It's excellence is a habit, not an act. It's a repetition of doing the right thing every single day. Take responsibility right now for planning your calendar. Open your Google Calendar, plan out, I'm going to try and at this time on this day, make the most important meeting you have this week, the daily meeting you have with yourself to to ride your bike. That's immovable. It's set in stone. Like Moses can descend down and he could say to you, look, I need 10 minutes of your time. It can't happen. You can't break that appointment with yourself. And when you take that extreme ownership of your calendar and you say, no, I own this calendar, I'm going to slot in other obligations, other zoom calls, other commitments around the commitment that I have to myself, because that's the most important commitment. What do they say when an airplane is crashing? Put on your own air mask forest. That's us for training. Put on your own air mask forest because you know if you're not training, you're not as nice a person to be around. It's your therapy. If you're anything like me, it's your therapy, it's your mental health. But also putting that in, it's your progression and make sure you're fitter this week than last week. And we talk on the podcast all the time about what do we need to be happy in life? It's progress. It's progress in every area of our life. and cycling it just permeates so many areas of our life with good vibes, with health, with happiness that when we have this happiness, when we have this momentum and we have training in our diary every single day, it radiates and in effect every other part of our lives and I started by misusing the word in effect but now I'm correctly using it and we do have this infectious happiness, this infectious attitude that roises the toy around us. So take ownership of your calendar. That's what I want you guys to do. Get cycling, stick it in there, make it a priority because making that a priority, you're making yourself a priority and by making yourself a priority you're going to make everyone around you happier and better. Guys, this was a bit of a rant of a podcast but I just feel like we're in such a past-the-book culture where everyone's looking excuses instead of solutions. Everyone's looking for a reason why they can't get out trying and everyone's looking for a quick fix. What's the quick fix? What's the magic session? There is no quick fix. There is no magic session. There's repeated acts day after day and the only way they happen is when we take ownership and we stick it in our calendar. Roadman, thanks for listening to my mad impassioned rant today and you know what, you know what, back again tomorrow. Cheers, roadmen. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join, arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14-day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making it faster and making it leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's Masters, Beginner, Advanced. There's meal plans, shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmansoycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio. That's roadmansoycling.com slash 14 day.