1.Welcome to this week's episode of the A1 show

Welcome to this week's episode of the A1 show. Before I crack into this in place of where everyone else would typically have a sponsor, I'm going to ask you to give me your attention for one minute, probably less. I've started a Patreon channel. If anyone doesn't know what Patreon is, Patreon is a way for you, the listener, to support me, creator. My idea with this is if you would be willing to buy me a point of beer once a month to say thank you for the hard work in the podcast. This is your chance to do that. It helps to keep this show coming to you every single week and your donations and contributions are much welcomed and appreciated. I'm going to put a link to the Patreon channel down below in the description and I would much appreciate it if you check it out. Okay, let's get on with the episode. Thanks for joining me again. It's been a busy, busy week. Anyone who's following us on YouTube, you will know what I'm talking about. As far as that's the best place to begin is a round up of what I've been doing on YouTube because what I've been doing on YouTube is largely what I've been up to for the week. So the daily vlog is still progressing, we're still shooting on. I put out one series this week on YouTube which I think is quite meaningful and the balance on YouTube I think it's trying to find that mixture of its entertaining come with me check out my day vlog style reviews which they find people find informative but largely like a review last week like of Bond shoes isn't that good unless you're considering buying Bond shoes so I want to get something which I think is a value to everyone. So I've started putting together a new training series. If anyone hasn't checked that out, I will link it up down below. The idea with the training series is to try and give you the tools to definitely to critically analyze your own training if you're going to self coach and if you are going to go with a coach to evaluate that coach's performance because there's a lot of charlatans out there and there's a lot of people, you know, coaching that, you know, it's just the nature of an industry where there's no barriers to entry where anybody thinks they can be a coach and largely anybody can be a coach and considering where the man will determine whether they stay there for the long run or whether they disappear. But the series will definitely give you tools to objectively evaluate your coach's performance and see if he is doing the right sort of stuff or if you're self-coached, it's going to help point you in the right direction. So the first one I told talked about the other day, it's how I determine if somebody's goals are realistic. So what we do is we look at somebody's background, we assess somebody's background and then we look at their commitment level and it's the kind of equation is its commitment level plus background equals scope of potential goal. Then we need the user experience and put sort of a realistic filter on it. So if you're telling me if five hours a week and you're not coming from an athletic background, but you want to win a stage in the Tour de France this year something doesn't add up. That was one of the vlogs that's worth checking out. I also had another one on the one of the keys to cycling longevity in staying in the sport for a long time which I thought was an interesting vlog and the idea there's been flexible with your cycling. Like if you're building your whole week and your whole day around your cycling, honestly you're not going to be in the sport that long. There needs to be a degree of flexibility and when you're doing your sessions. Yeah, we all want to get our sessions in, but we need to live our life as well. We're not pro athletes. So it isn't the most important thing in our life. If you wake up in the morning and you feel like having a lazy Sunday morning with your girlfriend, with your husband's wife, partner, whatever, do it, you can do your session later in the day. You know, if the weather forecast is to be good that morning bad that evening, look, go on the indoor trainer, but figure it out, you can move stuff around your life. Don't think you can't go to that priority party, you don't think you can't go away for that weekend because your soil econ is going to suffer and your stress score is going to drop when you're training. So I've been that guy, I've chased those figures and it's not worked down, it's definitely not worked down, it doesn't lead to long-term happiness. The last little bit of roundup before I crack into today's substantive topic which is really interesting topic today. I'm actually excited to answer it because normally of a degree of preparation done for these podcasts and I largely know what I'm going to say.

2.In this one, I know what the questions are, but I don't know the…

In this one, I know what the questions are, but I don't know the answers and I'm going to have to think it on the floor. It's interesting to stick with it. Zwift was the other one with our podcast that I have known this week. I've made the dive into Zwift. I've never been a fan of virtual racing. I haven't actually competed in a virtual race yet, but I've done a couple of found the sessions largely poor that were pre-programmed so I brought across some of my own workouts and I've done a video around that. That was a bit of crack. Enjoyed the week of vlogging and yeah don't see any reason why I won't be bouncing on for another week. Will I get the full year? Look, only time will tell, only time will tell. Okay so recently I was reading a book by an author I quite enjoy. I, you know, I'm a sucker if you're a regular watcher of this listener to this podcast. You know, I'm a sucker for self help help. That's what I was a tongue twister. You know, I'm a sucker for a self help book. And Tim Ferris is an author I found many years ago. I think my first introduction to him was the four hour work week. A book I've had on the coffee table for a while now. It's not one you'll read cover to cover. So I just pick it up and I read a chapter and put put it back down, but it's quotes from and stuff are constantly on my mind because I'm reading it in a piecemeal fashion. It's called Troy Bementors and the concept is Tim Ferriss talks to, I don't know, maybe 200 of the most influential people that he can get access to. He's a pretty good network so he hits some pretty big hitters in this book, but he asked them all nearly the same questions and there's probably six questions and he asks four of the six questions to every single person he interviews. And it's interesting to read true commonalities that someone of them have. And there's one large, large commonalities that we want to talk to you about on this podcast. But I thought it'd be interesting to go through and answer the questions that he has asked myself. And yeah, I've done no preparation for this. So I just got the questions, because I literally wrote questions down and passed them to me just before I went on air and I'm gonna honestly answer them and I felt that was the best way to give you an honest answer. So the first question I'm going to answer is what books have you given most as a gift and a boy? Oh I actually know the answer for this because I gave it the last two Christmases I've given this book to two people in each of the last two Christmases and I think that makes it my most gifted book. The book is called Man's Search for Meaning and the author is Victor Frankel. It's a book about, if anyone hasn't read it, it's only a short book but it's a fascinating read. The book is about concentration camp prisoner in in World War and in Second World War and he's looking for meaning he's looking for a reason to continue a reason to get up in the morning but there's some firstly I go okay so there's some chilling scenes in a pure entertainment as a reader but and really transports you back to the concentration camp and just how grim it is so it's a brilliantly written in fourth half of the book and he, there's one scene I remember that's actually, it's shocking. He, they were basically sleeping, I think like five, six guys to a bed, no mattresses on the bed, no pillows, no quilts, anything like that. A wooden palette, basically, six lads sleeping on a, there wasn't enough room even to lie on their back. So it was soid by soid and the guy beside him was having a horrific dream. And he said his instinct was to wake him up. And then he said he just paused for a second and he taught and he said no matter how bad the nightmare that this lad is having in his dream, that it has to be more pleasant than the reality he was going to wake him up to so he let him sleep through that nightmare. That was a crazy one for me and it's littered with examples like that of just how grim and stark it was from the hunger they experienced to the torture to the humiliation. The second half of the book focuses on why go on, why not take a run at the bar of war and let the guards shoot you like a lot of people opted to do. And he essentially came to the conclusion that no matter how bad, no matter how grave the circumstances that we're facing are daily, we still have a choice, we still have freedom of choice of how to react to these circumstances.

3.They can't make us be sad

So they can't make us be sad. They can't make us depressed. They can inflict grave humiliation and torture on us, but they don't control our reaction to that grave humiliation and torture. And I think given the circumstances that he was in, you can't both take an unbelievably powerful lesson from that, where some of us are getting real down because the monotony of our work or relationship mightn't be where it's meant to be or you might think you've You just hit a brick wall with a solar plane progression or a life progression and you get a little bit down. But to just think that you do get to control how you react to those circumstances and even in the face of massive adversity, Viktor Frankl decided that he wasn't going to let this ruin his life, decided that he wasn't going to let him bring him misery every day and he found joy in every day in small things like a butterfly going past. great book, it's a great read. Boom, that was number one. Yeah, the second one is something I've spoke about before and it's actually poignant timing because it's something I wanted to talk to you about today as well. It's, do you have a morning routine? And this was one of the big commonalities across the book, morning routine. Top performers in every industry from sports to entertainment, to fashion, to authors, actors, every single top performer, nearly without exception in the book, had a morning routine. Now someone else morning routines could have been like Tony Robbins where he does a gratitude journal where he says it's impossible to be angry and grateful at the same time. So each morning he lists three things he's grateful for. To Jocko Wilick who's the retired Navy sailor and Jocko Wilick has a routine of laying out his clothes the night before which means he just gets up in the morning he's an early roiser for torty crazy stuff he actually pokes his picture of his watch every morning on instagram at the time he gets up boss yeah I do have a morning routine my morning routine I've spoke about it before I try meditate in the morning whether I get in five minutes or whether I get in fifteen minutes I always try and get it in meditate and doesn't have to be something where you're going to a special room or a special place. It can be just lying in your bed and going through checking in with your body, checking in with each part of your body, counting your breaths, focusing on your breath and just mindful. It helps me be less reactive to stuff that comes up during the day. So it helps me be more leveled. There's also a great app, Headspace, which will bring you through a guided meditation, which is worth checking out. I meditate, I walk the dog, I have a cold shower, I have a coffee, and I try journal as often as I can. So that's kind of my morning routine. The idea of having your morning routine is you're fully in control. There's so many things that pop up during the day that we're not in control of. We're not in control of so many of the from traffic to work circumstances to the weather. We're not in control of a lot of that. So taking back control of what we are in control of and we're able to control or morning routine and when we can control our morning routine, we start a positive momentum which snowballs into the rest of the day. It can be things like getting your session done, be more productive at work, better quality relationships. But here's a study we carried out. Now, look, it's not the biggest study in the world, but it's it's meaningful for me because I know all the clients personally, but also it's just the numbers are so stark. So we have a program which I'm going to I talked to you about in a second, and it's called Wind the Morning, Wind the Day. And I talk to you about how to execute the perfect morning routine in this program. And I give you recommendations that you should carry out each morning and you follow these recommendations for 30 days. And I call it Wind the Morning, Wind the Day. So coming into the new year, I had 20 clients and I asked the 20 clients to all make a new year resolution. I made my new year resolution which a lot of you know it's around photography and videography and I committed to bringing a vlog daily. I didn't use myself as part of the sample group but if you do that bumps up to 21 clients. So the 20 clients all made new year resolutions. There were non-cycline resolutions, there were small things, well they were actually weren't small things, someone were like taking Spanish lessons, taking up art, running a poem once a week, things like this. The 20 clients committed to this resolution, now 10 of the clients, I put them on to the wind the morning, wind the day routine.

4.Every morning, they had to firstly complete this video course

So every morning, they had to firstly complete this video course. And secondly, they had to execute on it. It's maybe 10, 15 minutes of work in the morning. So I say work in inverted commas, because it's not actually 10, 15 minutes of work. It's 10 to 15 minutes of executing a routine in the mornings. And I checked back in last week to see who was still keeping up on their New Year resolutions and the results are absolutely unbelievable. So 9 out of 10 of the people who'd done the win the morning, win the day are still continuing with their New Year resolution. Now, if you throw me into that mix because I'm a morning routine person Also, you're looking at 10 out of 11 people have stayed with their new year resolution. And if you contrast this, this is almost unbelievable. If you contrast this to the people who picked the new year resolution but didn't complete the morning, win the day routine, only one out of 10 is still doing their new year resolution. It's not unbelievable. It's incredible. It's astonishing to me. So this is why we're launching at the moment, as well as this is the official announcement of the launch. We've an eight-week challenge coming up. We run these eight-week challenges periodically. I think it's a great time to run an eight-week challenge because, firstly, we've got that kind of Christmas slumber out of the system, the January, we're all broke and we're all have weird motivations. I've got to go to GM three times a day, all that. I've kind of got back to normal life now in February. We're also edging close to spring when we all want to be in shape, get out on the bikes, start racing, start sport thieves. So it's an eight week challenge that we've launched and part of the eight week challenge I made sure to include is the Wind the Morning Wind the Day video course. The other parts of it are, I'm going to link it down below, but you can check it out yourself. But the other parts of it are, it's an eight week, I'm, you know, I don't coach a lot of people, haven't for a number of years, but I'm going to be personally building training plans for everyone on the eight week challenge. Dias I think is a thing that everybody starts to slip on again in February after the good intentions of January. So I've added a dietary course into this. There's a bunch of stuff into this and I'll link it down below as well. We're checking out. It's the eight week challenge. But yeah, can you believe those stats on the wind the morning, wind the day and compliance with the new year resolution? It was shocking to me. But there you go. So that was a long way. As anyone who's a regular listener of the podcast will know, I am great for these tangents. So that was a long way of answering that, do I have a morning routine question from Tim Ferriss? Yes, I do have a morning routine. Thanks for asking. Well, next, sorry, next question, in case you thought it was waffling more on that previous point and laboring this further. What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life? Well, this one's a no-brainer for me. It's a dog. We recently got a second dog. Dogs are brilliant. If you don't have a dog, they're great. There are a lot of responsibility, but dogs are great. They're great for getting out of the funk. They're great for getting out of the house and walking them in the morning. They're always in a good mood. They get our responsibility, but they bring so much laughter and joy and they're good crack. I wouldn't be without a dog with two now. So yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't be without a dog but I also wouldn't be with a toward dog. So that was an easy one to answer. And the final question for this week's podcast is, oh, this is a deep one. How has failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? Do you have a favorite failure? Oh, this is actually something that I've been meaning to record a full podcast on and I am going to get to it because it's something and that it's a period of my life that it was a hard period of my life. I've definitely had period, people say they kind of go down a road and veers without them ever really known and then they look back and they're in a different place. I haven't had that experience. I've had hard crossroads and I do make a lot of choices. I make decisions and it was definitely a decision I made probably 12 months ago at this stage where I would have gone down to sort of entrepreneurial roots for one to a better word, where I was running a one coaching but it also on the soil set up a social media marketing agency called soapbox and I bought a local cafe called fuel and I was finding myself just wasn't as happy as I used to be you know on the scale of happy to depressed like I'm not claiming I was depressed but I just hadn't got the same level of happiness.

5.Hadn't got the same level of energy that I always had

I hadn't got the same level of energy that I always had. And I had a good buddy who just advises me on a lot of stuff. And he said, look, just press pause on everything and reflect and see if this is a route you want to go. And that period of reflection meant that I didn't see a future in the media company or the cafe that I just, I couldn't see, oh I don't even articulate this one, I couldn't see it, it wasn't bringing me happy. When I just, when I talked about how many minutes, how many hours, how many days I had left to live. Not like I'm about to die anytime soon since, but we're all on a limited clock here. And I just thought like why am I wasting time doing stuff that I don't absolutely love? Like I love cycling, I love talking about cycling, I love talking about self-help, productivity development. I love learning. A constant lifelong learner and I think a great way to deepen your understanding of a topic is to share it. And that's what I wanted to do, not make flat whites for people, not post pictures of avocados and figure out how to tweak people's Facebook ad spend. And I'd just gone down a road that I didn't want to be down and I suppose there's a part of me as well. There's almost a validation that I never came from cash. We're a normal middle to working class family and there's a little bit of an external validation that like, oh, he's made us. He has a cafe and you're looking for that kind of social kudos but I quickly realized that that's not me and that's not what I want and that's not what I seek and I actually came to dislike that that I'd prefer not to have it. There was an element of that as well. So yeah, I would have to say that I'm gonna get my thoughts fully down on this one because I think that was a life pivoting moment for me and I know we all have those ones, whether it's to start a relationship, end a relationship, start a job, move of house. There's some tough decisions to be made but I think you need to make decisions. Decisions are hard to make but decisions will bring you to a place you want to go. Like omission and not making a decision is as bad as making a decision so I would definitely encourage hard decisions to be made. But I would have to say soapbox and fuel would be the more you stand out for how has failure or apparent failure set you up for later success. That would be my favorite failure. If I hadn't of got out of those two businesses, I definitely would not be as happy as I am now. If that makes sense. It doesn't even make brilliant sense because I don't want to claim that the root of taking now is a massive success. But I think success is without sounding too do corny successes within and success is how you view the path you've taken yourself and for me it's where I get to constantly learn and I get to constantly grow that's what I'm looking for and that's success to me so yeah that's a tough question I'm one I'm definitely gonna think on maybe for tomorrow's morning routine I might even journal on it who knows guys it's been a different challenging and at times a little bit emotional of an episode really thank you for your attention. I love the podcast. I am grown to love YouTube, but the podcast, it's I love that little passive whisper in your ear as you're out running around the bike. So I do thank you for your attention. I will chat to you all next week. Thanks for listening. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Just a brief note to mention once again, our Patreon account. The Patreon account is what helps keep this podcast going. It's what helps fund this. It's what helped bring it to you guys every single week. If you will be willing to buy me a point of beer once a month to say, you know what, thanks for your hard work on the podcast this month. This is your chance to do it on the Patreon account. I'm going to link it up in the description below and I'm going to chat to you next week.