Two-Brain Radio: Meet the Dalai Lama, Open a CrossFit Gym—With Brandon Evans

20191017-TBR-Evans-Web

Greg: 00:02 – Hey, it’s Greg Strauch with Two-Brain Media, and on this week’s episode we talked to Brandon Evans. Brandon Evans is a gym owner. He owns Heart and Hustle Fitness. He’s done an amazing job with his business, but really we break down his journey to CrossFit or finding even his gym and the long track that he took to get there, to include traveling all around the world, meeting the Dalai Lama and spending three days with him. Make sure to listen to this episode. You guys are going to love every second of it. It is such a different type of journey than you’re used to. If somebody has invited you to CrossFit and that was how you started it, you’re going to love this episode. Make sure to subscribe to Two-Brain Radio to hear the very best ideas, tips, and topics to move you and your business closer to wealth. Two-Brain Radio is brought to you by Two-Brain Business. We make gyms profitable. We’re going to bring you the very best tips, tactics, interviews in the business world each week. To find out how we can help you create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.

Greg: 01:06 – We’d like to thank one of our amazing partners, Driven Nutrition. Have you ever been asked by your members or your staff what supplements to take, when to take them and where you should get them? How about the time it takes to put in the orders and making sure you have the right amount of supplements on hand? What about your profit margins on your supplements? Do you know what they are? Are they good, even? Your time is worth something, and ordering supplements isn’t worth your time. Driven Nutrition has solved this for you. They allow you to step aside and use preorders to send to your members for all supplement orders. That way you don’t have to have extra inventory on hand and it allows your members to order the supplements when needed. They’ve created an amazing on-boarding process for new businesses to allow for quick and easy understanding of what they have to offer and true profit margins that most other supplement companies promise but never deliver. This is why I personally use Driven Nutrition within my gym. Go to drivennutrition.net to become a Driven affiliate today.

Greg: 02:05 – All right, I’m on another amazing episode of Two-Brain Radio with Brandon Evans. How are you Brandon?

Brandon: 02:10 – I’m doing good, man. Yes, things are good. Things are well.

Greg: 02:13 – Excellent. So, you are the owner of Heart and Hustle Fitness, which is—it’s the gym that you own and the business that you own. But we’re not here to completely talk about the business. I mean, we can get into that as we go throughout this journey, but that’s really what I want to jump into, is the journey of you and finding CrossFit. but really you have a very colorful past of how you got there. It wasn’t like, hey, I walked into a gym and they were doing CrossFit and I decided to jump into it. It was more of you started on a path of being able to travel. So what kind of ignited you to want to travel and when was that?

Brandon: 02:50 – Yeah, man, it was about 10 years ago. Longer than that. 12 years ago. I was 23. My wife currently, she was going, she finished at University and went to Taiwan. She wanted to go to Taiwan to teach English for a year. That led into her going to Australia for teacher’s college and being away for a bit. We were together since we were like 16 years old and for about a three-year stint there, we took some time off apart, away from each other to go and do our own thing to discover ourselves. Had no idea what we were getting into. She was traveling, had another friend who was in Thailand traveling. So I figured, cool, I’ll go do that. So I don’t know why I picked New Zealand. I thought it’d be a cool spot.

Brandon: 03:32 – And I got a work visa in New Zealand. And off I went, I found myself after a month there, it wasn’t the cheapest country to travel in. I needed a job. So I found a job working on a dairy farm. I spent three months milking cows up at 3:00 a.m., stacking all my cash away, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Like the Southern Alps were off on one side of the farm, beautiful river flowing through it. So you’re surrounded by all this beauty, but like if anyone’s ever done dairy farming, it’s a grind of a job. It’s laborous, you work all day long. The cows need you 24/7. So anyways, stuck with that for three months, stacked away a whole bunch of cash, which, compared to, you know, my wife and I, our salary now it’s peanuts compared to, but it sent me on a journey for the next 14 months traveling around the world.

Brandon: 04:25 – So I figured I’d had enough of New Zealand and a friend of mine was in Thailand. So let’s go to Thailand, see what Asia’s like, never traveled anywhere really in my life outside of like flying to Florida when I was a kid. So off to Asia we went and Bangkok kind of like took my breath away as soon as we landed. Went saw a bunch of sites, traveled the city, just the hustle and bustle, the busy-ness, the craziness, just being immersed in a culture that I’d never ever experienced before. Barely even seen any of it on television, let alone walking around. Just the senses, the smells, all this stuff. So then I got to do something really, really fascinating. I went to Northern Thailand. I met up a friend with a friend of mine.

Brandon: 05:12 – She was working, in a military base, a Shan State military base in Burma. And she asked if I wanted to go. I said, sure, why not, right? You’re kind of in the flow of things not thinking about—you somewhat think about risk and responsibility. I called my brother, I let him know where I was and told them not to tell my mom cause she’d probably lose her mind cause we had to cross the border illegally through the jungle to get into Burma. That’s where the military base was. So most people aren’t too familiar, but there at the time in 2008, there was a genocide happening in Burma. So the Shan State military was fighting back against the government. The kids that I met at this camp, there was about 600 orphans at the camp and she was teaching English.

Brandon: 05:58 – So I went there and hung out in the classrooms during the day for two weeks. Got to know the families, got to know some of the children. It was a fascinating experience, of one of the crazy things we—all I had was flip flops. I didn’t have my shoes. We had to leave all of our baggage at the safe house before we hopped on mopeds for two hours riding through the jungle, up the mountains. And then we got off and we started hiking on foot. Lindsey had just came out to meet me like three days prior and she was like, you know what, you’ll be good in your sandals. It’s not too wet in there. Perfect. Halfway through a three hour or sorry, halfway through like a six-hour trek, my sandals broke, and I’m now barefoot. The sun’s going down.

Brandon: 06:38 – It’s dark, we’re in the jungle illegally. The guides that we have have guns just in case. And we’re like, we’re hiking through a mountain, I’m slipping and sliding in bare feet trying to get to where we were. It was an experience and I’ll say that, right? So we eventually get to the camp, thank God. My feet are a disaster, all cut up, covered in mud. But then you get there and you see all these kids running around and we start talking to people who live there and that’s like, it means nothing, right? Like, that’s one little incident that I had to go through and we start hearing stories of these kids who have had to like flee their homes because they’ve been raided and bombed. They’ve watched parents be murdered, killed, set on fire, raped. Like gruesome shit, like the whole nine yards.

Brandon: 07:30 – It was horrible listening to all the stories, these kids, I say kids, like the ones we were talking with were like 17, 18 years old. And this stuff happened like not long ago to them. So it was a pretty crazy experience just being there, being witness to that and then knowing that like, hey, we can at least try to shine a little bit of light on these people. And it was kind of a first glimpse into like, you know, sharing gratitude, be grateful for what we have and me really starting to understand like, what luck is and how lucky I am to simply just be born in the country that I’m born in, let alone, you know, having a cottage and a summer home and having cars and vehicles and access to food and grocery stores around the corner.

Brandon: 08:24 – So yeah, it was kind of an eye-opener for me. So anyways, that led me, I traveled, came back from there. All was good two weeks later, we came out, my stay there was over. I had to continue on with my journeys. Went through Laos, the whole bunch of the rest of Southeast Asia. And when I was in India, or sorry, when I was in Laos or when I was in Bur—I’ve been to a lot of countries, you’ll have to excuse me.

Brandon: 08:58 – When I was in India, when I was in Burma, Lindsey, convinced me that I should go to India. So the second I got back to Thailand, I booked a flight two weeks later, and not that Southeast Asia didn’t change my life, but for me these three months that I spent in India was like a defining moment that completely changed my life forever. Fly into India, get to Delhi and like I thought Bangkok was crazy. It’s like the calmness before the storm. Delhi was crazy, man. Like I live just outside of Toronto, in the greater Toronto area. The 401 is a crazy busy highway, at some stretches it’s like over 20 lanes wide, and we get to Delhi and it’s like the same thing, but it’s not just vehicles and transport trucks.

Brandon: 09:52 – There’s cars, there’s fucking people walking on the street. There’s cows in the middle of the highway as we’re leaving the airport trying to get into the city, this overwhelming sense of like urgency, people, animals. It was explained to me at one point, it is heaven and hell in the same place on Earth. It’s a beautiful thing, but it was crazy hectic. The pollution was crazy. There’s just like dirt, garbage everywhere, and you’re trying to like make sense of all of it. Get out of the cab and walk into my hostel that I found literally, dude, a brick comes flying by my face. I’m like, what the fuck? I stand back. This lady, she’s cooking food on the side of the road. I guess some dog was at her. She starts throwing rocks and bricks at the dog. I’m just like, where am I right now?

Greg: 10:41 – A complete Twilight Zone from, I mean probably where you grew up and stuff like that, I’m guessing.

Brandon: 10:48 – Totally, man. I live in the suburbs in Canada, just outside of Toronto and like in comparison, like Leave it to Beaver, man. Like, you know, I have three brothers. We all played rep hockey growing up. We spent our entire summers at a cottage, like, you know, first-world problems, right? Like, I have come from an awesome family, didn’t have too many struggles. Especially now with this experience I have traveling the world, like I don’t have any problems compared to most people, for the most part. My issues are my issues, and I have to deal with them and they’re real and they’re there. But when I look back to that experience that I have of actually walking a day in somebody else’s shoes, it gives me a real quick reality check to like, right, take a breath, everything’s gonna be OK and keep moving forward.

Brandon: 11:44 – So I talk about how India was like a defining moment and changed my life. When I traveled into the Himalayas, I loved the mountains. You know, I’d spent a summer forest firefighting at West in British Columbia a year before I left traveling. So as soon as I got to India, that was it. I was going up North to see the Himalayas. Get to the mountains and all is good, do a few treks. And I knew the Dalai Lama was living in exile in India, so I figured, oh, I might as well, like I know I have a Lonely Planet travel guide. I’m going to go to this town where he’s lived in exile. Who knows, he’s probably not even there. He’s probably traveling the world giving talks and speeches and all this stuff. So I’m going to go there and just check it out, see what it’s like.

Brandon: 12:29 – You know, it was a bunch of tourists go there, a bunch of backpackers, so probably be a good place to hang out. So I get there for about a week, hanging out, trekking around. There’s this little restaurant. So everyone in this town is from Tibet. A lot of Tibetans have fled Tibet into India to live in exile. And we go into this restaurant with this lady, you just sit down and she brings you food. You don’t know what you’re getting. Sometimes you don’t know what it is. But it’s rammed full of people, locals, tourists, whoever. And she feeds you and she sits you wherever there’s a spot, you don’t sit down with—you don’t pick what you want to sit, she just throws you in a chair and throws a bowl of soup or some momo with some dumplings, whatever it is in front of you.

Brandon: 13:16 – So we get there, I’m eating there every day because the food’s delicious. And I just love that experience of like, just give it to me. I’ll eat it if it’s good, if it’s not, who knows? And just trying to get uncomfortable. Right? So I’m sitting down and talking to a woman in front of me who happened to be from New York and she’s like, oh, are you going to the teachings next week? I looked at her kind of like, what are you talking about? She’s like, oh, the Dalai Lama’s putting on free teachings next week. You just got to go down this little path, find this little shop and register and you’re good to go. So I said, OK. So I went and I did that. Took a, that was like, a week from that date when that was happening. So I was kind of excited for that, I called my parents, told them what I was doing.

Brandon: 13:53 – That that’d be kind of cool. And then I found myself traveling North to Kashmir. And that was crazy all on itself. It was like we took a private car up there and Kashmir, there’s been a forever battle between Pakistan and India as to who owns this piece of land. Every other bus that passed us was full of military personnel. I’d never been anywhere in the world where there was more military presence than in this place. It was kind of crazy. And it was during Ramadan, so there was like very few tourists there. There was me and another gentleman that I’d met, an Italian guy. And we’re living in this village during Ramadan, so we’re only eating before the sun rises and we’re only eating after the sun goes down.

Brandon: 14:43 – In this Muslim community, and like you’re talking like time warp, dude, like there’s a mill where they mill flour and it’s two massive stones, where the water comes through is a turbine to turn the stone. And that’s how they ground their wheat into flour. Like completely old school. Like it was a pretty cool experience to be there. So anyways, come back from there, gets back to, McLeod Ganj in Dharamshala, that’s the place where the Dalai Lama lives, and it was crazy, man. The first day you’re just like in awe. I’ve never been in the presence of another human being where their energy and their aura is so strong. You can feel it. Like it was a small room of a couple hundred people. I was at most, I don’t know, 15 feet away from away from him. We spent eight hours a day for three days just listening to his teachings, him telling his story, from childhood to adulthood.

Brandon: 15:45 – He’s in his eighties now. The struggles and trials he had to go through dealing with China taking over Tibet, war happening with Tibet and China, him having to flee and leave his people. But like the compassion that he speaks with, the gratitude that he has, and how every single negative encounter that he spoke about was immediately turned into a positive. I just found it like, it was very touching to me. It was an eye-opener to me and I just figured like, why can’t we do this? Right? Like, we live in a world that at times can present itself, especially if you watch the news, that’s very negative. So listening to him for those three days, it changed my life cause it set me on a path to do a few things.

Brandon: 16:41 – One, to consciously think about spreading love and compassion with every person that I meet. Practicing gratitude on a daily basis. And there was something he said that stuck out to me. And I tell it to people all the time and I try and live by it. It was that you are all you have, right? You’re an individual. We all have our own beliefs, but like Buddhists believe you have a spirit that possesses your body. When you die, that spirit’s going to go and possess another body, whether it’s a human, another type of being, whatever it might be. And so at the end of the day, when everyone else is gone, when your family dies, your loved ones, your kids, whoever it might be, you’re left with you and you have to deal with you. So it’s like, become the best version of yourself that you can so that you can better serve those around you.

Brandon: 17:32 – And that when shit does hit the fan, you can still be OK. But if you’re not working on you, then you’re not going to progress. You’re not going to succeed. And you’re not going to be able to be of best service to the entire world, let alone to your community that you can be. So from that point on, I kind of just, it opened my eyes and I spent those next months when I traveled really soaking up every experience that I had that I could, and trying to think about those things. On a daily basis, I probably think back to that time that I spent in those teachings with the Dalai Lama, which led me to meditation, to practices, to breathing techniques later on down the road, that are just striving every single day to think, like, am I a better person today than I was yesterday? What did I improve on today and what can I do tomorrow to make myself that much better? Cause if I’m not the best me then I can’t be the best father, I can’t be the best husband. I can’t be the best friend. I can’t be the best boss. I won’t be the best to my members at my gym and my facility. So why wouldn’t I want to do that? Why wouldn’t I want to be the best me so that I can be of best service to everyone else around me.

Greg: 18:44 – Yeah, it sounds, I mean I can only imagine looking, if there could have been a camera following you from the very beginning of this and going through this journey, but then even sitting down with the Dalai Lama and kind of having that surreal experience and having that ability to really think of life from a completely different perspective than probably when you walked in. And we’re going to be right back with Brandon right after this.

Chris: 19:14 – Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. If you’ve ever run out of money, you know that it affects every single corner of your life, all of your relationships, your business, even your self-worth. And so when I found a mentor in 2009, I said, I want to share this gift with everyone. Since then, I’ve been building and refining and improving a mentorship practice that we now call Two-Brain Business. We break our mentorship into several stages. The first stage is the Incubator, which is a 12-week sprint to get your foundation built, to get you started on retention and employee programs and finding the best staff, putting them in the best roles, training them up to be successful, and then recruiting more clients. It’s an amazing program. It is the culmination of over a decade of work. It’s also the sum of best practices from over 800 gyms around the world. These aren’t just my ideas anymore. What we do is track with data what’s working for whom and when, and we test new ideas against that data to say, is this actually better? Then when ideas have proven themselves conclusively, then we put it in our Incubator or Growth or Tinker programs. I just wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” to define who should be doing what in what stage of entrepreneurship. But no matter where you are, the Incubator is your first 12-week sprint to get as far as possible in your business. We’re a mentorship practice for one reason: Mentorship is what works. We work with gym owners for one reason: Because you have the potential to change the world with us, and I hope you do.

Greg: 20:43 – All right, Brandon, we’re back. Now, let’s keep going here, and I love this. You were still traveling around the world after meeting the Dalai Lama and spending time with him. What happens after you leave his presence and you’re traveling again? I mean, from that point to now, I mean, owning a gym and being successful and moving forward and doing all these amazing things for yourself, your community, your family. How do we bridge that gap? What kind of happened in between the travels and then getting to that point?

Brandon: 21:15 – Yeah, man. The beautiful thing about traveling is it presents itself with experiences that you can never anticipate. So, leave the Dalai Lama, travel through India, experience like true poverty, like people who literally are living in a massive garbage heap. And there’s like crazy community of people. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who live in these slums and garbage heaps. And you meet them and they’re like, welcoming you into their home to give them like literally the last morsel of food that they have because they’re just trying to be a good host. So like another massive eye-opener is to like, wow, like there is good in the world and like you have to rely on strangers, the kindness of strangers. So that kinda sets me through, I go back to Southeast Asia, travel through Vietnam, which was kinda cool.

Brandon: 22:11 – My parents came over to me, so I was able to share that experience with them traveling through Vietnam. And then, I don’t know if this is crazier than the Dalai Lama or not. I don’t know. I was like, I’ve been on boats, I’ve been on trains. I have been on planes, or sorry, I’ve been on trains, planes and automobiles. I’m gonna try and travel on a boat. So I got a list of all these yacht clubs, make my way down to Singapore. And I ended up hitchhiking on a sailboat and I spent three months crossing the Indian Ocean on a sailboat, on a private yacht. Met a gentleman and his girlfriend at the time, they’re now married, who were circumnavigating the world. They’re from California and they spent three years traveling the world on their boat, and I was lucky enough to meet them and be invited on this journey.

Brandon: 23:02 – So we’re on the boat for three months, learned a lot from this gentleman in terms of like taking risks, right? This guy took a massive risk to do this thing. He’s an estate lawyer from Newport Beach. So just having lots of heart to hearts, lots of talks with him, some more perspective and experience, that, you know, changed my life to help set me on this path. We thought we got pirated at one time. Pirating was huge at this point in the world, especially Somali pirates, so as we were approaching Oman, Yemen, we’d gone like all the coast of Thailand, through Malaysia, to Singapore, to the Maldives, which is like paradise on Earth. And we’re now going towards the Middle East and there’s massive waves. When you’re at the bottom of the wave, you can’t see anything but water.

Brandon: 23:49 – And when you come up to the top you can kind of see, and I’m on the boat up top by myself and I hear a bunch of voices. So first you think like, am I just going delusional because I’ve been on the boat for so long, or what’s going on? And next thing you know there’s a fishing boat and it’s right beside us. I’m screaming down below cause the only thing we’ve been talking about is what are we going to do if we get pirated, cause that’s not gonna be good. So I’ll give you a bit of a perspective on like where we are, like middle of the ocean, legit middle of the ocean, two days prior, we’re like 500 miles from anything. There’s nothing else around us. Most eeriest thing in the world. The water is crystal clear, not a ripple in the water for two entire days.

Brandon: 24:34 – Nothing on the depth finder. The radar’s off and on because we’re like, we’re literally in the middle of nowhere. Like if someone comes up to us, there’s nothing we can do. There’s nowhere to run, there’s nowhere to hide, we’re screwed. And then fast forward to the weather coming back, we meet these guys and now they’re getting super close to our boat. We’re sailing, our sails are up in full mast. They’ve got all these antennas sticking out of the top of their boat and they’re rocking back and forth and we’re trying to get them to get away from us and they just keep coming closer. So we put our motor on trying to sail out. Next thing you know, they’re throwing coconuts and they’re hanging fish up. They are just fishermen and they’re looking for a little something. So we ended up bartering with them.

Brandon: 25:16 – We’d give them a couple of beers and a couple packs of smokes and they throw over some coconuts and we have some pina coladas on the boat and we’re off to the races and all was good. But it was quite terrifying for a moment in time not knowing what the hell was going to happen to us. So from there I get to Yemen, travel through Yemen, fly to Egypt, get to Egypt, meet some tourists. They’re like, oh, like where’d you come from? So I tell them I was on a boat and I was in Yemen. They’re like, you were in Yemen? I’m like, yeah, completely naive to the fact that this is like the home of Al-Qaida. This is where the terrorists or some terrorists live in the world. And like four days before I arrived in Egypt, there was a group of Japanese tourists, they’d been kidnapped, were missing for a month, and they were just killed in the crossfire between the military and the Taliban.

Brandon: 26:04 – So I kind of snuck through the country using public transportation, which was crazy enough in itself. And we got out of there. So that’s like a bit short of a story of my trip around the world. Fast forward, I fly home, my wife and I got back together, we get married. I pursue my dream of becoming a firefighter, get a job, start working the job, I’m about three, four years in, and I’ve got this like yearning to do something else. I work shift work, we’re on 24-hour shifts, so I have a lot of time off. And my dad owns a business. My best friend runs a business. I’m like, maybe I can take a stab at running a business. Friend of mine starts doing CrossFit, go to the gym, get immersed in doing CrossFit.

Brandon: 26:54 – And it just brings back all these memories from travel. It brings back all these experiences and that’s all about the community, the community feel, the love that was there, the compassion, the sense of welcoming when I walked into the gym for the first time from everyone there, it reminded me of walking into a hostel, it reminded me of teachings that I had with the Dalai Lama, Michael and Barbara welcoming me on the boat. People welcoming me who don’t know who I am, who have no idea who I am, with open arms and they’re spreading love and they’re spreading compassion and there’s just like such a positive energy. You know, Chris talks a lot about, Chris Cooper talks a lot about wealth and what that actually means. Like to me, that’s wealth. To have this abundance of love around you, surrounded by your friends and your family and your loved ones.

Brandon: 27:49 – And it wasn’t long after I started doing CrossFit, I said to my wife, I’m like, and nothing against the facility where we were, but I’m like, we can do this and we can do this better. And like, this could be awesome because what I want for my family and my kids is to be able to give them experiences in life that I once had and to get back out into the world myself and to continuously have those experiences whenever I want, however I want, and to bring whoever I want with me. That’s my goal: to get back out in the world, to do those things, to help better myself, better the lives of my family and my children and those who surround me. And then that led us to Heart and Hustle. You know, Michael was a huge influence on me about taking risk and a good friend of mine who’s an entrepreneur, he didn’t stop pushing me, right? I started surrounding myself with people that I aspired to be or at least aspects of their life. Like I want to be more like this person. I want to be more like that. And I surrounded myself with those people to keep pushing me so that I could achieve my goals. And had a daughter, still a firefighter today. We opened the gym and yeah, the gym’s been awesome, man. Full of experience. We have a wonderful community filled with beautiful like-minded people and you know, we’re lucky. We hear a lot of wonderful comments from our members about how we’ve changed their lives. You know, I’m sure most gym owners have, right? But it’s really touching to hear those things. We have this vision that each of our members, t’s our goal for each of our members to become a better version of themselves.

Brandon: 29:35 – And when you hear that happen, when you hear members living their Perfect Day, it’s pretty cool, man. But for me, it all started over a decade ago, traveling around the world, just gaining all this experience that I could. And there was no intent. There was no plan to gain that experience. It was just like, I’m going to go travel, and just sounds kind of cool to see some new countries that I’ve never been to before. And as I get older and as I reflect back on those experiences and continue to have those experiences, I can like create those synapses between what we do in the gym and what that experience of travel has taught me.

Greg: 30:18 – Wow. I love every part of all of that story of your life. And I love really, honestly, the outlook that you constantly have, even when faced with hard decisions and difficult things that you’ve gone through in your life, I’m sure. And then of course, being a business owner, because we all have difficult times no matter what, it is not success over success always. But you’re always having a positive outlook on it.

Brandon: 30:45 – Yeah, I try, man. I really try. It’s challenging, right? I think it’s hard to be positive all the time. I think it’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to defer to the negative. And you know, it comes from a lot of practice, it comes from, you know, the last 12 years of trying to—it’s just like CrossFit, right? Mechanics, consistency, intensity of trying to consistently improve my methods of my mental health, my mental well-being and how do I deal with that. Like I know when I’m not meditating, I’m stressed. When I’m not exercising, it stresses me out. I need those two things in my life. They have to be consistent. If they’re not consistent, that’s when I fall off. That’s when the stress levels get high. That’s when the fights happen at home.

Brandon: 31:31 – That’s when I’m not the best dad that I can be to my children. And I hate that. I hate being in that space. So, those things are constantly on my mind. I’m constantly listening when I have conversations with people as to like, are they starting off negative right off the bat? Do they go to a negative? And if they do, how can I put a positiv, spin on the conversation to like, to change it, to change that outlook, right? And try and have these conversations with our members in goal-setting sessions to like, it’s just negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. We all have good, we all do good. We’re all really good at something. So it’s trying to highlight that and then just to carry that over into other areas of our life where we can try to excel or believe that we are doing good.

Greg: 32:22 – Agreed. Agreed. If you could, I mean, there’s thousands of people that are listening to this episode when we release it. What’s one thing that you’d want to tell any of them, what’s one piece of advice that you’ve learned throughout this entire process in your journey, which has been super amazing and colorful and I loved every second of it, but if somebody is out there listening and you want to give them one piece of advice from everything that you’ve collected throughout this time, what would that be?

Brandon: 32:51 – I dunno, man. I think it might sound weird for some, but I think you need to—I find extreme value in sitting in silence, through my meditation. I sit in silence. Your thoughts go crazy in your head and you get to a point where you can start to collect those thoughts. And it’s really helped me stay on a path in my life. And the more people I talk to who practice meditation, they all tell me the same thing, right? It helps you give clarity to your life. It helps you give direction if you feel lost as to where you wanna go. Sit in silence. It helps you be present in the moment. We dwell on the past and we stress and develop anxiety about the future. Both of those things do not exist. Right? The past is gone. It will never happen again. And the present hasn’t exist—or the future hasn’t existed yet. All you have is the moment. So for me, finding time to sit in silence has really helped me be present in the moment in every aspect of my life. And it starts small, right? You start small with five, 10 minutes a day and you build from there. Consistency with that practice has completely changed my life. So yeah, that’d be my advice, man. Start sitting in silence. We live hectic lives where like, I mean, just our phones right? It’s crazy. Anything you want information to is at your fingertips in a second and everything is just so hectic. Even trying to sit in silence in your house is difficult because your air conditioner’s, on your furnace is on, like there’s always this background noise, right? But wake up early in the morning when no one else is up in your home, spend five, 10 minutes sitting in silence and start tracking it and see how it changes your life.

Greg: 35:04 – I love it. I need to do a better job of it. Just like I’m sure anyone does. Having ADHD it’s much harder to sit in silence and not think and move, but I definitely know with meditation it’s definitely helped me with focus and everything. But sitting in silence definitely is difficult. So Brandon, thank you so much for being able to jump on and share that with us, share your CrossFit journey and the lessons that you’ve learned throughout this process. And it’s truly amazing to see, I mean, from that beginning travels and through all of these stories of where you’ve been able to come from and what you’ve been able to do. And I just love every second of it. So I really thank you for being able to jump on Two-Brain Radio and share your experience and your story with us.

Brandon: 35:49 – Thanks, man. Yeah, I know. It was a great pleasure. I really enjoyed doing it. Thanks for having me.

Greg: 35:56 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.

Thanks for listening!

Thanks for listening! Run a Profitable Gym airs twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Be sure to subscribe for tips, tactics and insight from Chris Coooper, as well as interviews with the world’s top gym owners.

To share your thoughts:

To help out the show:

  • Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help, and we read each one.
  • Subscribe on iTunes.
Like
Tweet

Leave a Reply

One more thing!

Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing you exactly how.