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Today we have an extraordinary lineup featuring special guest Jeff Spencer, 
a name that resonates with the pinnacle of peak performance. Jeff is a renowned Olympic hopeful turned peak performance coach with over 400,000 hours of expertise and a Master’s in Sports Science.
His incredible journey includes helping win 40 gold medals, top awards for entertainers, and legendary success for entrepreneurs. Jeff’s insights can benefit not only elite athletes but anyone aspiring to excel in different facets of life.
The episode delves deep into Jeff’s early inspirations and his transformative experiences with remarkable mentors who shaped his path. Jeff shares how his first mentor, a three-time Olympian cycling coach, taught him that winning is a learned skill, while his second and third mentors nurtured his creativity and resilience, respectively.
A key takeaway from this conversation is Jeff’s emphasis on the Champion’s Blueprint, a framework of five core competencies that translate historical patterns into actionable insights for optimal performance. Jeff and Dave discuss the importance of balance in all aspects of life to achieve true championship, which involves harmonizing different dimensions such as health, relationships, and wealth.
In This Episode
- Jeff Spencer’s incredible journey and mentorship
- The Champion’s Blueprint and its five core competencies
- Balancing various life dimensions for peak performance
- The importance of proactive health and relationship management for long-term success
Dr. Jeff Spencer, welcome to the show.
Well, Dave, I can’t promise I’ll be on my best behavior. So we just got to take our chances and see what happens.
So grateful to have you on the show, Jeff and I promise the audience right now that we’re not going to be talking about watts per kilogram and power output and bikes. But what we are going to talk about is peak performance today, the champion’s mindset, something that you call go -kiss, which is super clever and just really grateful and humbled to have you on the show, Jeff, and share some of the things that you’ve learned over the years from just some amazing people and the accomplishments you’ve had yourself.
So why don’t we begin there and just tell us what was it like growing up and really becoming an Olympian? Did you have a pivotal moment where something struck you and said you really wanted to set that goal of going to the Olympics. How did it all start?
Well, when I grew up, I wasn’t quite sure what parents were for because they didn’t really help me out, but they didn’t get in my way. So I just had this idea that I have to figure it out for myself, which is okay, because I’ve got the self-starting gene. When I was seven, I thought it’d be cool to be an Olympian because I saw it on television. I didn’t know what sport I would actually do, but I thought it’d be awesome just to march into the stadium on the opening day ceremony parade. That would, to me, would be the best ever.
Then when I was 11, I was asked to go on a 25 mile bike ride with some older riders that were part of a formal racing club. At the end of that 25 miles, I wasn’t tired and they were gassed. So we figured that there was a little bit of opportunity here and I then was gifted with my first angel, who was my cycling coach, who took me under his wing at 13 and he was a three time Olympian, five time national champion. He said, “Jeff, I want you to come and train with my group.”
If you understand what we’re talking about, you understand what we’re doing, then you have the ability to become your own champion. You have the ability to become an Olympian. That’s not something that I could put into you. It has to already be there and I understood everything that they were talking about. So I worked together with the coach and his approach was, that winning is a learned skill. It’s not about just trying harder or wanting it bad enough.
He taught me how to win and so when I was 21, I was an Olympic cyclist. So I checked that box off, but simultaneously I was a student at USC studying sports science between my sophomore and my junior year. So there was an academic interest. I also, when I was 18, I was introduced to my second angel who taught me about life and taught me the kind of mind, body, and soul. He was actually the heart of it where he chose me to be his apprentice, helping him create his master glass art pieces.
So I became actually a very prolific artist and I showed in the best galleries in New York City. But most importantly, what I gained from him is that he read to me poetry. He read to me the great works of antiquity, great literary works. He shared with me classical music and he said, I need to fill you up on this stuff. So I had the ability to win and the structure from my cycling coach, Angel number one. Angel number two taught me the creativity side of things.
Then angel number three was a Frenchman who was connected me into the cycling world at a very deep level and he had this amazing dignity that I wanted to have myself. I found out that he was a World War II concentration camp survivor and he had so much dignity. He had no venomous, he had no antagonism. He was a fully reconciled human being.
So those three people as a composite, they were kind of my father’s in a certain sense because my dad was like a non-entity, but I felt that certainly the gift of what they gave me was made a very lasting and very deep imprint on who I became as a result of them waking up in me what was already there.
What would you say in terms of a percentage being really nature nurture, right? With the influence of these angels versus, you know, what you were really born with deep down inside.
Well, to me again, all of us have these untapped potentials within us that are innately hardwired there, but they need to be awakened and I was lucky because they awakened some of the more pivotal ones for myself in a variety of different life areas. I was really lucky. So had that not have happened, then there’s no telling what I would have been and why I say that also is that we adopted our daughter from Columbia at the age of 10.
It was a very unusual adoption. She didn’t have any school whatsoever and when we adopted her, she didn’t speak English. We didn’t speak Spanish. We had no language, she had a parasitic written body. She had been abandoned by her parents. She came from severe poverty, ADHD and PTSD from getting beaten up and worse and when we adopted her, she was like a blank slate.
Aspiration for her was not just to save her life, but to actually manifest her potential and so I dedicated, we dedicated, now it’s been 15 years of our life to raising her and we see the difference that it’s made. I think that having potential is one thing, but having it accessed where it becomes a viable component on how we engage life, which that determines the level of quality of life that we create and the value that we bring to humanity.
I think that it has so much more to do with who you’re around than it does with the natural side of it. If it’s there and it’s not awakened, then you may live a life of desperation and despair because you never connected with it and that’s why, in my opinion, we as people have an obligation to be able to share with other people possibilities. So if they have the same possibility within them that we’re talking about, that energetic transfer will awaken that potential within them that will allow them to live their best life possible.
How do you think other people can find their angels?
That’s a matter of proximity, quite honestly. You know, there are two parts to this that are absolutely essential that we need to be exercising our entire life. Number one is to be in a state of receivership. Receivership is where we open up our mind, hearts, body, souls, and spirits to receive insights and revelations that could pop into our consciousness that we can’t give ourself.
And if we’re too busy chasing everything and looking under every rock, we’re so distracted that maybe one of these inspiration shows up, but we can’t see it because we’re too hyper-focused and so we have to be in receivership. That needs to be kind of a continual state of being and then the second part of this is proximity. We need proximity to certain people, places, and things because they’re all potentials that have been manifest and we’re around them.
You probably had this experience yourself where you’re with someone and somebody says something and you say, “yeah, well, why didn’t I think of that?” Well, you’re thinking the same thing, you actually had it within you, but since they said it, it woke up in you what was already there. You just didn’t know it.
So the idea of having a diversity of exposures to people, places and things so that the latent innate potentials that we do have can be awakened within us and they can be cultivated into usable assets that we can then create a life of value contribution on.
It’s such a great form of consciousness, Jeff, really to be thinking about being in a position of receivership and I think it’s increasingly harder in today’s world that we live in, where we’re getting constantly bombarded between, you know, these little devices that we have in our hands 24/7, people can reach you at any given time.
But I find that when you’re actually, you know, and I love your whole world of peak performance, right, is it’s not only the body, right, but it’s the mind and preparing your mind so you can have deeper level thinking, right, and really move towards this level of consciousness where you can be open for that receivership.
It reminds me of a quote that Dan Sullivan says a lot is that you know, people cannot transform themselves if they’re too overly booked, right? But yeah, so it’s trying to figure out, for me, it’s been trying to figure out really how to create enough space in my life so that I can have those moments of receivership and deeper thoughts.
Yeah, that’s absolutely true.
Yeah, I think that’s a valuable perspective. I mean, it’s almost an imperative if you want to play your biggest game and live your fullest life and I actually have a concept I call GOCUS, G-O-C-U-S. That stands for goal focus. The G is for goal focus and this is where, as you’re going through the activities of daily living, it’s a bit like a chameleon.
A chameleon has two independent eyes. One of the eyes can be looking at what’s in front of it that it needs to get done and what’s approaching it, but the other eye can be looking off into the horizon for things that are yet to be seen and so when we as humans practice GOCUS, we can be deeply buried in the activities of daily living while simultaneously we hold a portion of our consciousness being in receivership for ideas to pop into our radar screen to be able to be able to visualize them or be aware of them in advance.
I found that if we get too hyper-focused on things, then we shut down the peripheral vision and when we shut down the peripheral vision, we lose two things. We’ll lose opportunities that could advance us significantly. But we also don’t see blind sides starting to form, that if we don’t see them, they can either stall us in process or worse yet, take us out of the game.
The idea of existing in two places simultaneously like a chameleon by practicing GOCUS is another aspect of life that I think is really important to incorporate in how we do life day in and day out.
Yeah. What would you say is your current GOCUS, Jeff? Because, you know, it’s fascinating, right? I mean, once people realize such pinnacles of success as you’ve had, you know, achieving a gold medal, working with some amazing people, you know, raising a daughter that’s just absolutely amazing is, I can’t even believe, you know, how much you went through to do that. But what would you say, you know, right now? would be your go-kiss.
Well, right now, because of my age, I’m 73 and I’ve learned a lot and I know how the real game of full potential play happens, and it’s not by accident. When we discussed it, me becoming an Olympian, when I committed at the age of 11 to become an Olympian, the next 10 years I dedicated the one thing and my job was one thing and one thing only. and that was to develop my full potential. That was my entire job to do that.
So I understand what it takes to get it and I know what it takes to maintain it and evolve it and full potential. It’s an evolutionary process over a lifetime that’s never completed. So there’s always going to be another level of revelation that keeps us vitally in the game and making an ongoing contribution. But life remains an adventure for us like because of that and so the reason why I’m in the game at my age is because I know the secret to this.
I want to share that secret because the secret to get there and stay there is not what the experts are telling you. It’s not about harder work. It’s not about pushing yourself, it’s not about huge sacrifice, it’s none of that, it’s other things that when done bring a richness of quality to life that makes life worth living and it allows us to create a lasting impact on humanity because we’re able to create a legacy of value and meaning that people can look at as a case study to follow.
To be able to get to and live a most abundant life and what does that mean? It means living a life of passion, purpose, productivity, and prosperity. And for me, it’s really important that I share with humanity what I know based on the historical evidence of what it takes to become a full potential player. That’s something that we do that will last us and take a lifetime to be able to create.
Now, Jeff, you have a goal achievement roadmap that you call the champions blueprint, which I find really fascinating and I love to think in frameworks as well. That was in my book, I wrote the book called the Holistic Wealth Strategy, and really just providing, I think, guidance for people, right? But also being having something that’s flexible enough, right, to adapt to your own circumstances, whatever those might be.
But why don’t you break down the champions blueprint? How did you do? How did you develop that? And what would you say, you know, is the best place for people to start with that?
That’s a great question. Well, first off, everything that I say has been backed up by historical evidence. I’m not sharing my opinion on anything because you stick around long enough in life and you start to see these patterns evolve. So I just want to say that everything that I’m saying has been observed through consistency basically over time.
The current incarnation of this is it’s more like a champion’s ladder. If you climb a ladder, It’s aspirational because you’re always moving up to a higher level of play and the observation is that there’s five different competencies that we need to master to be able to be a prolific achiever and to create our best legacy. The first thing is that you need to have a champion’s mind and notice I didn’t say mindset, know, humans have mindsets because they’re rigid.
They think just because I think something I can manifest it, it’s almost like a recital of something, but that’s not what a mind does. Champions have a mind where they look thoughtfully at every sets of circumstances and they decide based upon the context and their available resources. They decide what is the best path to take. It’s a very thoughtful consideration and it’s deliberately chosen and it’s executed at a very specific time for a very specific reason.
That’s not what a mindset does. A mindset is a singular, rigid idea that is absolutely fixed. If we apply, that would be like applying a hack to everything. It doesn’t work like that. When we can evaluate the circumstances and know what to do based upon what history tells us to be true, that allows us to move forward to convert the opportunity into a success, well, that’s how this all works. You must have a champion’s mind.
The second thing is that you have to control your day. If you can’t control your day, you can’t control your life. If you can’t control your life, then you can’t be a trusted leader because nobody would ever want to follow someone that doesn’t have a process by which they systematically capitalize on the productivity opportunities of the day. You must be able to control your day. Thirdly, you must be able to convert possibility. What does that mean?
It means that we need to be able to create and see opportunity. We need to be able to seize it and capitalize on it and convert it into a realized when. We have to know the skill of winning and it’s a learned skill. It’s not something that we’re born with. Number four, we have to have a mechanism to peek around the corner and see what’s coming because the greatest risk to everybody in my opinion is making choices on what you think it is when it’s not, or being blindsided by something because you didn’t see it coming.
You must be able to convert possibility. We need to be able to create and see opportunity, we need to be able to seize it and capitalize on it and convert it to a realized win.
When that happens, we can stall or worse yet, we can be derailed, which are not advantages to anybody. So we have to have a mechanism that allows us to peek around the corner to be able to seize the opportunity when it shows up and to avoid the preventable problem that we don’t need to have.
The fourth item on the champion’s ladder is that, actually the fifth item is that we need to maintain momentum. I know, momentum is everything. and every time we start, stop, start. Every time we stop, it takes a lot more energy to get back on the gas again. So we need to learn to conserve our resources. We need to know when to push, we need to know when to pull back. So we’re able to carry that momentum.
What that does that extends the runway of our life productivity, so we’re able to create a greater number and magnitude of personal successes. But obviously, they give us a level of experience that we can share with others to help them to get to their promised land more easily. But it also allows us to create a legacy that can be a case study that other people can emulate as to what to do to live a successful night, not what a don’t do and don’t be like me failure.
And what do you think, right, if people out in the audience are thinking, wow, I mean, this is amazing, but I’m not planning on going into the Olympics anytime soon, right? Do you think that this framework still applies for anyone out there to increase, as you say, their prosperity, their productivity, where they’re headed in life?
This is a universal antidote, in my opinion. It doesn’t matter. We all have our gold medal. We decide what that is. Mine was the Olympics because it showed up for me. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. Every one of us, I mean, just think about this, Dave. It’s like, there’s only one of us in audio creation. There is no other Dave, there is no other Jeff. 350 billion people have been on this planet since moment zero, and there’s only one of us.
Our uniqueness allows us to provide some value to humanity as we honor our gifts that nobody else can give in this creation and every time we come from that place where we’re in perfect alignment, and I didn’t say we’re comparing ourselves against everybody else and trying to adjust our life to keep up with the Joneses. I said, “you know, every time we identify what our unique abilities are and we create a life based around that, then we have momentum to make a significant contribution to humanity.”
The other side of this is that we have no idea who we’re going to impact by what we’re doing. But I think that we can safely say that in today’s world of electronics, that things can travel quickly around the world. Nothing we do is insignificant because everything that we do kind of has an energetic signature that’s broadcast out into space that interfaces with people in our proximity.
And again, as I mentioned earlier, that can wake up untapped potentials on them. They can awaken untapped potentials in others. So all of a sudden, one thing that we did is affecting a billion people, and we didn’t even know it. So I think it’s really important that we don’t decide the value of our impact because we don’t know and what I do know is that humans dramatically discount the value of their competency.
I dare say that generally humanity, because we’re a fear-based organism, but we have a lot more confidence in our ability to fail than we do in our ability to succeed. That’s just a way that we’re innately hardwired. So we kind of break, got to break that mythology and so those are the things that I see that are essential. So to answer your, another aspect of your question here, like where do I get started? In my opinion, and this is what I do with every client, is that I want to know three things. I want to know what their menu or their list of aspirations are.
We’ll call those the goals and there are all sorts of goals. There’s big, hereditary goals. There’s moonshots. There are smart goals. But to me, the only important goal to have is what I call the right goal and there certain criteria that if the goal that we’re considering pursuing meets this criteria, then it’s probably the appropriate goal for us at this point in time. So we need to know what the goal selection menu is.
But then, probably more importantly, we need to know the state of readiness of the individual. Like how ready are you for what? you know, dreaming is different than your readiness. Because your readiness, all the tools that you have, your resources, everything that makes you capable, that’s the time, distance, energy, and resources that every goal that you currently have. And when we know what our reach is, and we have a menu of goals to choose from, then we can make the correct match that makes sense for where we are in our development.
Then at that point, then you can construct the plan with the steps to go from A to B and that’s based upon the evidence that we have by looking at what our assets are and looking at the context that we will be executing the steps to our plan within. And if you know that, because that’s only a mental thing.
There is no investment other than perhaps a fee for service or perhaps just the time to be able to create that kind of three point place of observation to make that determination. To me, that’s the first place to start. And I’ll say also that people are encouraged to go for the biggest goal possible and I’m saying, well, I don’t know if I do that.
I would go for a goal that teaches you how to learn how to win and teaches you how to achieve the goals because as you learn to achieve the goals, because it’s a learned skill, then once that’s mastered, then you can go to higher, higher, higher levels of aspiration. Because if it’s too much too soon, you’re not gonna get there and it doesn’t mean it’s the wrong goal.
It just means perhaps that it’s the wrong time, but then we think something’s wrong with us because we’re told to go for the biggest goal possible and maybe it’s outside our reach. So we actually talk ourselves out of what’s possible by just being a little bit premature on that.
So those are the things that I would look at and it’s much better to be a late bloomer than to be someone like most people that press way too hard, way too long, way too early, and they end up blowing themselves up prematurely that unfortunately sometimes it’s just at that point in their career development or their competency where they could produce the most significant number and size of the goals that they have in front of them.
Yeah, really great insights there, Jeff and, you know, I was thinking through this as I was doing my interval workout this morning, my VO2 intervals and, you know, I think what you said there was just so valuable for people out there to really, you know, just take a moment, right? And really think through this. One of the things is really the fact that you are creating your own game board.
Ha ha ha!
As like Nick Peterson likes to say, right, you’ll never win someone else’s race. Right? So, if you’re going to be a champion, as you said, it doesn’t have to be an Olympic champion. But what is being a champion to you mean? Right? And it means different things to different people. And then one thing I was kind of really thinking about with that, like for me personally, it’s who do you want to be a champion to? Right?
I want to be a champion to my family. I want to be a champion to the clients that I serve and the impact that I can create. So kind of really thinking about those and then really creating my own game board and then like, as you said, creating goals and go-kits really that support that. But it’s very challenging in this day and age, right? Because we’re constantly, you look at social media, right? And there’s you someone doing, you know, cliff diving.
I mean, you name the feats that, you know, people are doing. Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s from one end to the other, billionaires, you know, I mean, all of these types of things, right? So how do you get the focus on what really matters to you?
Blindfolded, yeah.
Well, I think again, it’s gonna be the reach and as I said before, the first thing I do with every client are phase one, and what I do is to get clarity. We need to know what your aspirational menu looks like and then we need to know your state of readiness. Whatever you’re ready for, the goal should be selected based on that and then the path forward is based upon the evidence of the context that the goal will be executed in.
But I don’t see that happening, I see people, they come up with an idea and to run with the front pack, it has to be the biggest goal possible, which I don’t advise initially. In doing so, then it’s very easy to talk yourself out of belief in yourself because it’s just way too much like way too soon, in my opinion.
It’s much better to evolve over time, maybe a fast finisher rather than to blow yourself up and I see people blowing themselves up all the time. You know, like if you get adrenal fatigue, well, plan on taking a year off because you can’t force your way through adrenal fatigue. You know, it just isn’t going to happen. So again, I found the common wisdom often tempts people to make incorrect assessments about what the scorecard like really is.
You know, to me. So I kind of look at this through the eyes of another type of wisdom and that is what does history tell us to be true? And the other thing I want to say about this too, Dave, is that, you know, kind of like the addiction to devices is it’s our fear of being left behind keeps us compulsively engaged in the device because we feel that if we don’t keep up with everything, then we’re going to get left behind, which is the most terrifying place to be for any human.
That’s what they fear the most, but what I’m saying here is that if you’re too busy chasing everything and looking under every rock, you’re exhausting yourself and when you find it, you probably don’t have the energy to pursue it because you’ve used it up chasing it. The other side of this too is that when you remain in receivership and you don’t chase everything trying to keep up, then inspirations and revelations can show up.
In your consciousness, which is like, let me show you what your bigger future is, and you’re letting it show up and that’s an energy-free process to do that, but most people can’t take it because their human biology, their fear-based survival biology tells them, like, if you’re not running this fast or faster than anybody else, you’re going to get left behind.
How do you expect to do this if you don’t do anything? And I’m telling you, the best ideas show up when you’re mowing the lawn or you’re in the bathroom or doing something like that and if you do not give yourself pause to have the best ideas show up, and you don’t have the energy to take action when it shows up, then it’s all for naught and it’s really hard to trust that because it’s going exactly opposite of where the herd’s running like in today’s world.
Yeah, that hits home so well, Jeff and, you know, going back to your early point of, you know, owning your day. You know, I was raised in this society where it’s, you know, you’re the first one in the office, you’re the last one to leave, you know, being in the Marine Corps. I mean, there was just never enough, you know, that you could get done right to be succeeding. So it was always about really, you know, kind of working harder. And I started my career off the same way, but
It took me many years really of cultivation and growth to really understand that those magical moments as you talk about to prepare yourself for receivership can happen and for me, it’s been through having a rigorous morning routine, where I’m able to, you know, exercise properly, right, get in touch with myself, you know, my body and everything.
Do some meditation, hit the cold plunge, you know, do some of those things you don’t want to do and then do some journaling and creating that space for myself is actually when I have the time, you know, to make the biggest, most impactful moves on my chessboard that I actually could do. But it’s very counterintuitive because we’re all just constantly pushed to, you know, I gotta get to this thing. I gotta go do this, right? I gotta get there, but in reality, those are the actually the biggest moments that you could really have.
That’s exactly right and again, it’s very hard to trust that even though we know that it’s true, it’s very hard to believe that and that’s part of why most people are ruled by their survival instincts that are hardwired into us. See, we actually have two mentalities that are hardwired into our biology. And the first kind of human mentality is our fear -based survival instinct.
That’s hardwired into us. can’t shut it off. It’s with us our entire life and it has one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s self-preservation. Self-preservation is not creating a life of value. It’s self -preservation and because that’s our highest biologic and psychological imperative initially, the way that our biology is designed, it gets first dibs at every moment of our entire life, but you can’t make history from that.
The good news is that we do have this other type of hardwired mentality within us, which is our instinct, our highest biologically encoded instinct is to be a seeker, S-E-E-K-E-R and you think, well, wait a minute, I thought procreation precedes seeking. Well, no, it actually doesn’t, according to the experts. It’s actually stronger than like shelter. That’s how primal this is for us, so this other mentality that we have that’s our most important instinct.
It’s geared towards becoming a full potential player, It’s aspirational. So you can see the inherent conflict here. You’ve got human mindset, rigid, reflex, mousetrap, impulsive behavior that usually doesn’t work out because of survivor and then you got the champion’s mind that’s very thoughtful. It looks at things, it considers things, it evaluates things, makes prudent decisions, it does things in a timely manner.
These are not the same thing, that we have these two mentalities that are at war with each other 24 hours a day that are biologically encoded in us. We all experience that, I mean, quite honestly, most of us feel off balance most of our lives. You know, do this, do that, and then maybe you have a tranquil moment once in a while. Well, that’s the conflict because these things are at war over your decision making. They want to control your decision making.
And you know, the only way you can create and come from your full potential is that you can’t come from your survival impulses. It’s not possible. So we have to continuously apply a certain number of behavior choices that represent what has to go right. That’s not natural for us, what’s natural for us to be a sniveling, whining, complaining person that blames their life on everybody else and nobody understands me, blah, blah, blah.
You know the drill, that’s a natural life. That’s free, you don’t need to do anything but if you want to live a life of abundance and contribution and fulfillment, well, that’s where we need to cultivate the seeker within us. What are we seeking? Well, we’re seeking a life of meaning like you could take Maslow’s hierarchy. Yeah. Well, what’s that? Well, that’s the aspiration is to self-realize, meaning that we’re playing at our full potential. And I believe that that’s probably a stronger impulse and the fear based survival impulse but the fear based survival impulse, because it’s a higher priority because if we don’t survive that we can’t do any good stuff.
This always gets first dibs, but this gets the final say, you know and all the good stuff in life has to be applied to be maintained the good stuff in life does not self-perpetuate, because if we don’t apply it on a regular basis, then we always drift back into that whining sniveling, uou know complaining self that I call the human mindset.
So to me, this is fundamental that we understand this because we cannot shut either of these off in a lifetime, but what I do know is that if we identify with our survival impulse, self is the real us, then you’re screwed because people say, well, that’s just the way I am. I have no choice, well, you do have a choice. Yeah, that’s part of you, but that’s not the real you.
You know, the real you is the one that is driven by that hardwired survival, that hardwired instinct, which is to be a seeker and a contributor and a creator of your own greatness that you contribute to humanity. That’s the war that we fight day in and day out. We got to be really clear, the real imposter syndrome isn’t what people say it is. The real imposter syndrome is identifying with the survival self as being the real us because it comes naturally to us. Yeah, I get that. But I don’t know if we want to be natural.
I think we want to be actually, in my opinion ,we want to be supernatural, where we supersede what everybody else does and we develop the capacity to be able to do the actions by applying them consistently that allow us to move forward and create works that are unique to us that contribute to humanity and in that way, we can live a life of value. We have a certain tranquility of being because we know we’ve honored the possibility of making this happen. We’ve contributed to others by giving them a case study that they can emulate.
To me, that’s the primal level of understanding and if we don’t understand that, it’s not psychology. People think, this is a way of thinking. No, it’s not. It’s a biology that’s behind everything that precedes the psychology and if we don’t understand the biology, then we can be trapped into thinking that we could think our way out of stuff. Well, you really can’t.
We have to understand what the battle really is. So I’m on a bit of a rampage here, but I really feel very strongly that so many people discount themselves and give up because they don’t understand this fundamental aspect of themselves and remember, we have this throughout an entire lifetime. Like I’m 73. I still have human mindset stuff pop up in my mind. Like, “hey, dummy, you should be not thinking like that because you’re 73.” Why’d you do that? You should know better than that.
Well, wait a minute. If that’s something that’s a reflex as it relates to survival. Well, I can’t help that, but I don’t need to take that on as the real me, I can make a choice to do what it is that the champion’s mind would do to create an action that takes me towards a personal achievement that honors the process. I’m not doing this to show myself how great I am. I’m doing this to honor the privilege of being able to have that and I think that we need to understand that because I don’t care who you are, you’re gonna live with this battle throughout your entire life and there are no exemptions from it.
100% Jeff, yeah, 100% that that is so impactful ad I’m glad you brought in Maslow’s hierarchy that was really going to be my next question, is right this, this journey towards self actualization, I think is what you know, us as humans, right are really trying to seek and, you know, we spend a lot of time in the financial world, right, because that’s kind of some of the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, we’re trying to provide financial security, you know, for our families, for, you know, having a roof over our heads, and food to eat and things like that and if we can create enough passive income to do that, then we can get closer to, you know, realizing our full potential.
So I think you articulated that really well and just understanding, you know, that biology, right, that’s oftentimes, you know, gets inside your mind.
And I have to tell you, and you must know this of all people, it’s crazy. If anyone out there does sports, when you get into that oxygen starved place, like doing high intensity intervals, that brain, that biology turns on so hard, it is so in your face, it wants you with every, you know, bone in your body to stop doing what you’re doing.
To quit at all costs, it is really amazing. So I find that this is actually really a powerful training, you know, of my mind really to really put that in bay and one of the things that I’ve been, you know, developing personally is really trying to manage basically systems and boundaries around myself, right?
So when I feel that that, you know, that brain is coming on, that biology is coming on, right, with the scarcity type mindset, then there’s other things you can do like breath work, or meditation, you know, or some form of exercise to really kind of push that aside and then let your aspirational side reveal itself. Any thoughts there?
Yeah, well, that’s really well said. It kind of like the discipline doesn’t matter, but a couple of things you said there, I think are imperative. It’s like, we, in my opinion, to honor the privilege of a pass through this dimension, it is important that we become successful and that we do be prudent with our resources to make our resources grow. Because, you know, as our resources grow, they can be used as a force of good that allows us to demonstrate number one to other people that raising our own bar is possible.
When we accrue and as our wealth increases, then we could be more charitable and we can do other things that we couldn’t do if we did not have that side of ourself in a continuous state of ongoing development. So I’m a really big fan of that. And I also do intervals and this is, one of the reasons why I do it, complementary to what you said, is that I always do mine in the afternoon.
The reason why I do that is that in the morning, I know that pain is coming in the afternoon. I know it and I want to train myself away from thinking about the pain later. I want to train myself to be present and get done what has to get done without prophesying how painful it’s going to be later, because that’s a massive distraction that us humans are very vulnerable to, and that’s the reason why I do that.
Then as I do the intervals, again, I know that as the body gets fatigued, then the spirit becomes vulnerable to the persuasion of the human mindset to start talking and lobbying the contrarian views that talk us out of doing anything good onto our radar. So deep appreciation for you sharing that. Thank you.
Yeah, for sure Jeff, I also wanted to ask you about balance, you know, and again, I was reflecting on, you know, moments in my life where I was trying to be a champion, the times from my earlier days when I, you know, really wanted to be an officer in the Marine Corps and serve my country. Right and so for me, that was kind of like my highest calling and to be, you know, a champion at that time.
Also, when I was competing for Iron Man, you know, I wasn’t winning a gold medal or anything, but it took an inordinate amount of time and resources, as you say, to really kind of commit to that, you know, what I would say kind of that champion level goal, but what I find is that it’s really challenging to balance all these other things in your life that we have, such as, you know, our, our wealth, our family, our relationships, right? Our health, right? Can you sometimes, you know, put aside those other dimensions of our lives that are so important because you’re so focused, you know, just on that one goal of being that champion.
Yeah, well, I think there’s a time in life where that single focus is important, but at a certain point it becomes obsolete because it becomes internally disruptive and so if we look at the definition of champion, to me, it’s a full potential player that has developed their assets to their fullest in all areas of life. That’s the key to this. It’s like if you’re lopsided where it’s all in your interest and you’re leaving other areas of life behind, then that disqualifies one from being a champion, in my opinion.
You know, I’m a full potential player sort of guy and let me explain here is that if we look at the areas of life, there are several of which are going to be five, maybe 10. It really depends on whose chart you look at, but the point is, is that there is a number of areas that taken as a totality represent a single life and how it’s being lived.
And in my opinion, it has to be symmetrical and here’s the reason, symmetrical meaning that the right amount of attention needs to be applied to all areas of life and here’s the reason why, because when we talk about full potential play, it’s not a linear process. It’s an exponential process and this is what I mean. Let’s say that there’s six areas of life.
Okay, great. So let’s say the six areas of life, all of them, let’s say out of 10, let’s say that four of them are eights. You got one that’s a nine and you got one that’s a three. Well, it’s impossible for that system to work in harmony because you’ve got a three in there and the three in there disables all the other parts working together as a collective and therefore, you don’t get the dynamic of all the parts in harmony that allows an exponential zone performance to occur. Because like spontaneous healing, a zone performance in athletics, that’s when all the parts of the system are working together in harmony that creates the exponential.
The exponential emerges from that, so if you’re at a whack in maybe one area, then there’s no way that you can be a full potential player. You could say, “well, yeah, I’m a champion in this.” Yeah, well, I get it, but what did you give up to do that? So how can you really say that you’re a champion if you leave a trail of destruction 10 miles long behind you? So to me, it’s really in the definition and the whole secret to this, in my opinion, is to know how much of what in all the areas of life need to be in the cocktail at one point for them to emerge in harmony to allow exponential life to occur.
And my client sets what we’re looking for so that there is no compromise. We’re not looking to get an eight across the board, but we’re looking to make sure that the percentage of all the parts is what it needs to be and that’s gonna always be changing depending upon the environment that we’re performing in. It’s dependent upon our age that has another kind of level of consideration. So again, anything that does not serve as an example to the whole.
I think I don’t and would not label that as a champion activity. You may get the gold medal or something like that, but that doesn’t mean that, you know, in life you demonstrated what a life of harmony. I don’t like the word balance. I think it’s harmony, you know, we want to get harmony because balance can mean, well, we pound down all the high stuff. So everything is at the same level.
You know, I think it’s really harmony because sometimes we need 2% of this, we need 8% of this, we need 50% of this, and we put that cocktail together then kaboom, we then get exponential output. So that’s how I would look at that and that’s how I would answer that. That’s how I do work with my clients and through those definitions and through that level of aspiration and that structure.
Jeff, as you approach really, your next decade, how are you thinking about not only fitness, but your health at this stage?
It’s primary, you I’ve always been very engaged in my health practices, only because that’s how I grew up. Again, I grew up as an Olympian. There’s obviously health practices that are involved in that, that involve fitness, diet, recovery, et cetera, all the components there, but I think there’s something that is really important, and thank you for bringing this up, but everybody thinks that neuroscience is everything.
I’ll say that neuroscience is something, but it’s not everything and let me give you an example. Why? Because your nervous system, one of the nasty tricks that it plays on us is, it gives us a false assessment of what our true status of health is. Let me explain. Is that the way the nervous system works is that it’s a system within the body that’s connected to receptors and those receptors pick up data and it’s additional touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, et cetera.
That relays information into the central nervous system, the spinal cord that goes to the brain. The brain kind of takes a look at it and then it can send out a command somewhere based upon the information that it got. But a couple things here is that for a nerve to fire, like a receptor to fire, there has to be a certain amount of stimulus put on the nerve for the nerve to turn on.
It’s like a light switch, you have to push on the light switch with a certain amount of intensity for the light to turn on. It’s exactly the same thing with the nervous system and the nervous system. It relays information that provides us a conscious awareness of where we are in space and time. That’s not everything and only 25% of what the body is exposed to is strong enough to turn the nerves on that inform us about how we’re experiencing life.
So that means 75% of what’s there isn’t being provided to us because the nerves aren’t being turned on. So we’re making choices based upon 25 % of the information and so what does that mean for us on a health perspective? It means that you can have stuff growing inside you that you don’t even know. It’s called subclinical. It’s like underwater, it’s subclinical, sub meaning under.
You don’t see it yet, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not there. So when that happens, it gives us the false idea that everything’s okay because I feel okay. Well, that’s not exactly true. It could feel okay, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have something of high significance happening within you. You just don’t recognize it. So what does that have to do with the conversation?
Well, what it means is that it’s really important to get ongoing proactive assessments that look at the function of how the body is working to promote and create and maintain health, even when you’re feeling good, because you’re always gonna see changes in function that precede the change in the capacity or the failure of that eventually get to a significant magnitude where we have a conscious awareness of it and so you can see that it’s a deadly trap in that situation.
Again, I just suggest that people take the time to have a look around on the inside, get somebody that’s qualified to do that, to see what’s really there. Because it’s so much easier to get rid of stuff when it’s invisible than it does once it’s showed up, because once it showed up, it’s usually downstream quite a ways. So that’s how I look at it. The other thing I’ll say is that the observation is that if you get to 55, beyond 55, it’s really hard to get health back.
So if you’re not there yet, please spend the time to get there. I can honestly say that one of the things that I did, I always maintain my health practices throughout my entire life. Even when I was doing stuff of incredible intensity, you know, with the hours at work and things like that, that people do. I do know that the two things that people defer to later, and they promise that they’ll get back to it later, is relationship and health practices.
I’m just saying, you know, while we’re in process in our thirties and forties, you know, it’s always a good idea to make sure that we’re kind of cultivating our future by proactively doing things to support that and delaying the possibility of other stuff, and we do that both from a relationship perspective and also from a health perspective, because what happens if we defer these things, Dave, to later, usually I call the zone of doom between 38 and 43.
That’s where the cumulative effects of delayed deferment of relationship and health and other things, they culminate in that age and three things can happen, generally speaking. Number one, catastrophic health failure. People are dying of heart attacks in their early 40s, late 30s. It can be a financial ruin. We’re too leveraged, too long, too early. I know people that are making very good money, but they can’t pay for their bills because everything’s in leverage.
You know, and so something goes wrong and all of a sudden, boom, there’s no leverage. Well, then they got to start over, lost a couple of decades of effort. You know, it’s exactly the same thing with the relationship. You know, people at a certain point, they get tired of hearing it.
I swear I’m going to change. I, this time I mean it, you know, nasty divorce, boom. Half of what you got’s gone. Like overnight, could be again, decades to recover from that. So I think that there, there needs to be a prudent assessment of where a person is and what their future is gonna be based upon their current trajectory.
I mean, that’s what I do with my clients. One of the things that I know that they don’t, I know where they’re gonna land on the current trajectory, they don’t and so if that’s where we want it to land, well, that’s a good thing, but if it’s not, and they think it’s going somewhere else, it’s gonna go where history tells us it’s gonna go. So again, I feel like so many of the things that we’ve talked about today are real, and they are very destructive to a life of value.
If we have a bit of an insight and we reflect on what history shows us to be true about some of these things, then we have a different decision leverage point that we can now decide what it is that we want to do with what we’ve got. I’m glad that I took the time to take care of myself, and I was really lucky because, you know, wanting to be an Olympian since the age of 11, I was really lucky because, you know, I came from a welfare family, so we didn’t have extravagant food, so I just ate very simply.
Being kind of a hunter-gatherer myself, I don’t need a lot of stuff. You know, I just like my agility, and I love to be participant and active in people’s lives. I love riding my bicycles, you know, et cetera. So there’s been a bit of a, I wouldn’t say a monk’s vow of austerity, but you know, I’ve never needed a lot of stuff to live a life of contribution value.
Jeff, really appreciate you sharing that and I can’t emphasize that enough to the audience out there. It’s really identifying, you know, some of those blind spots that could be lurking in your health, in your relationships, in your wealth, you know, various points in your life. And again, I think the biggest challenge that we have is, you know, speaking of healthcare, right, this traditional system that we have, it’s only set up to treat you when something is wrong.
Right? So if you’re to do to be proactive, like you’re talking about, you know, you need to get educated, you need to seek the right providers, right, and really uncover what those, you know, blind spots could be before they, you know, could be potentially, you know, catastrophe for you. So, so really appreciate you sharing that and bringing that to the forefront, right, because you know, we certainly want to avoid that.
It’s been such a pleasure, Jeff, I guess in the final closing, if you could give just, you know, one piece of advice to the audience about how they could really, you know, move the ball forward in their lives, what would be the most meaningful thing they could do?
Yeah, that’s kind of an easy one for me. Thank you for asking though and the reason why it’s easy, because I’ve lived it. I think the most important thing that we can do every day is decide how we’re gonna show up, because as I mentioned earlier, we have two mentalities that are at war for our decision making and as I said earlier, that all the good stuff in life, doesn’t self perpetuate, has to be maintained by applying certain things to keep it viable.
And to me, every day it’s a choice to decide, are we going to come from our human mindset, our survival, impulsive responses to life? Or are we going to choose the champion’s mind that allows us to be able to cultivate the greatest of our assets to live a life of self realization?
By becoming a full potential player and it’s a choice that we have to make every day because if we leave it up to how we feel, it’s going to choose the survivor self every time because that’s our natural state of being. so for me, decide how you’re going to show up. My adopted daughter that was exposed to the most hideous 10 years of her early life, people imposed upon her things that nobody has a right to impose on anybody.
If they had showed up differently for her, she wouldn’t have the scars that she has to deal with that she did not ask for and that’s why I say the most important thing that we could do is decide how we’re going to show up for each other. Because what I do know, Dave, is that no matter how you slice the pie, I don’t care how big your game is, because I’ve been around some of the most prolific achievers of our era. And I could tell you that no one wins alone. You need people to work with you that are compatible. So with that being said, I think that’s about all I have to say. Thank you again for the opportunity, Dave.
Yeah, fantastic. It’s been such a pleasure and an honor to have you on Jeff so many valuable insights. If people would like to learn more about you, connect, dive into your resources, what is the best place for them to look?
Yeah, well, thanks again for saying it would be, just a couple of things here. would be a website, drjeffspencer.com. That’s a place to do it. If you go to my website, I also, I publish a couple of videos a week that are very short and very small about what my discoveries are, about what it takes to get to the top and stay there. and that’s called the weekly spend. So you’re certainly welcome to join that.
Thanks for the opportunity, Dave.
Thanks again, Jeff, really appreciate it.