Warren Mainard: Hello and welcome to the IMPACT Players Podcast. My name is Warren Mainard and I am the Executive Director of IMPACT Players an organization focused on inspiring men to be great husbands, fathers, and leaders. And one of my favorite men, who is also a husband, a father, and a fantastic leader is with me today on the Podcast, Gary Chupik. Gary, thank you for being on this show with us today.
Gary Chupik: Yeah, thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Warren Mainard: So, a little bit of an introduction to Gary. Gary is a close friend of mine. He's spoken at IMPACT Players in the past and he's taken a unique approach to the way that he's trying to help men, and all leaders, grow into really being elite in what they do. And Gary has transitioned from being a ministry leader and a pastor to now working in the realms of secular and Christian vocational leadership. And Gary's got a, just a long list of experience and accreditation as a certified strategic planning facilitator, a life plan facilitator with the Paterson Center. He's a member of the International Coaching Federation. He's an executive leadership coach, a professional leadership coach, mindset coach, sports nut, strategist, writer, and speaker. Gary, you've done some really unique things, like served as the chaplain for the Seattle Thunderbirds, worked in a pilot program with the Seattle Seahawks in performance psychology, and now in addition to your own private endeavors, working alongside of Russell Wilson and his organization that's focused on helping people grow into an elite mindset. So there's a lot that you have to offer in this conversation, but maybe just give us a summary of who you are and what it is that you do.
Gary Chupik: Yeah, I'm not sure where to begin. So yeah, thanks for that. You know, it's interesting when you think about your own life, it doesn't sound very exciting. You always want to hear about somebody else's life. So I don't see my life as really that thrilling, but I grew up a prairie boy in Saskatchewan, Canada and I got married to a girl from Bothell, Washington and we moved here and worked in a lumberyard and worked, did some security work and put myself through seminary. And it was... never really interested in ministry. It wasn't on my radar. And just felt like that was, at one point, that was the right next thing for me was to be involved in ministry. And so I did some youth ministry in North Seattle for five years and then I did some chaplaincy, professional chaplaincy at Veterans Hospital in Seattle. And, thought, "Lord, what am I gonna do with my life? And where am I going to go?" And I ended up going to seminary and then planting a church on the east side of Seattle in Woodinville, Washington. And I did that for 11 or 12 years and experienced some burnout and had some tough times and it was challenging. And I thought to myself, I need a hard reset in my life and how would I go about doing that? And so I felt like the best thing for me to do was just sort of to sit in the coffin, let some stuff die in me so that other stuff could be resurrected. And so that was a pretty pivotal time to let death do its work in me. And out of that came some pretty incredible things. And so I started a leadership company called 'Gary Chupik Leadership,' and I also started another sports psychology business called 'Elite Mindset.' And so leadership and sports psych and high performance psychology and mindset stuff is really what I do. And so I have the privilege of traveling all around North America and teaching that stuff. And so anybody who's willing to listen, I'm willing to talk cause I think it's pretty fun stuff. And, so yeah, it's just been a pretty wild ride the last three years.
Warren Mainard: Yeah. No, and I can attest, I've been able to be a part of watching that and walking alongside of you through that, and the way that you have been able to really learn from some of the defeats, fail forward in some ways, and then rebound with just incredible vigor and energy and enthusiasm is so inspiring in and of itself. And so today the theme for our little conversation is around the subject of the habits of the highly successful. And I really love that because, I think sometimes in our world today, we put an incredible amount of emphasis on natural talent, natural gifting, and yet we know that there are just an infinite amount of stories of guys who had ultra top shelf talent that somehow didn't pan out. And then there are endless stories of guys who were two star type guys, or didn't seem to have a lot of the talent of their peers, and yet somehow ascended to a really high level of success in whatever it was that they pursued. And I wonder if the nexus of those two things is what their habits were like. And so I'd love for you to maybe kind of just, based on the experience that you've had and what you've studied and seen, maybe just give us a baseline understanding of why is it that habits are so important, developing the right habits, and maintaining the right habits. Why is that so important to really establishing and maintaining success?
Gary Chupik: Yeah. Those are good questions. Yeah. And there's a lot to that; it's multi-layered. So at the core of performance is always self-leadership, it's always self-leadership and it's self-identification. So, who am I? Why am I here? What am I created to do? What am I created to be? And unless you dial into that piece, the habits don't last. So actually, in my view, habits are an identity issue. It's an identity issue. So what kind of person am I? Am I the kind of person who gets up at 4:00 AM and goes to the gym? Am I the kind of person who participates in this habit or that habit. And I think if you can answer the question of what kind of a person do I want to be and how do I want to like self-identify, then then you have a real shot at making habits work for you because you have that inner centered circle or starting place. So I think a lot of it starts with self-identity and then out from identity, comes self-leadership. So how committed are you and I to living out who God has created us to be? And so if we're dedicated to that, no matter where it takes us, cause there's a lot of faith that's involved, because we oftentimes don't know where God is gonna take us. But if we can tap into that, okay, I know who I am now I have to lead myself. Once you determine that, then you can figure out what the habits that are gonna be necessary for you to maintain that, the way that you wanna live your life and who you want to be. So it's actually, in my eyes, it's kinda like the third question. But it's an important one because, it's interesting motivation. I think a lot of people really struggle with motivation and I think unless the motivation comes from identity, I think motivation will just kind of come and go. So I think for the most part, the average person out there living their life and culture, motivation's probably a big thing. Do I feel motivated to take care of myself? Do I feel motivated to go for a run? Or go to the gym? Or read my Bible? Or whatever it is. I just don't know if motivation's that important. I know that sounds sacrilegious, but I actually don't. I actually think really high performers, I think motivation is less important. I think for the average person on the streets, I think motivation's a big deal. But the problem with motivation is that it's pretty uncertain. And I have to remember to be motivated and I have to find ways to be motivated. So if we can kind of short circuit that one, if we can kind of just kind of find a way around the motivation issue. So I'm not saying that you don't need to have a motivation, but to use it as the ongoing fuel is pretty tough. So the maintenance of habits is... that's a different issue. It's a different question other than identity and self-leadership.
Warren Mainard: Yeah, that's, I mean, man, we could just go deep, deep, deep into that, that theme of it's really more about you coming to terms with who am I, as opposed to what gets me kind of going in the morning. What's the difference between the guy that pushes the snooze and sleeps through his early morning priorities versus the guy that that says, no, I'm getting up. And it's like you hear people say something like, I really need to get motivated to do so and so. Whether that's to get up and go to the gym, to wake up and spend time reading their Bible or to like, get their garage cleaned out. I mean, it could be so many things. And I think what I hear you saying then is like, it really comes down to someone looking themselves in the mirror and saying, what kind of a man am I exactly? Am I a man who does what he says he will do? Am I a man that believes that his personal health or his spiritual health or the health of his family is worth grinding for? Is worth doing this? And once you come to terms with the man or the woman that you are, then the motivation is already, it's intrinsically included in that.
Gary Chupik: Yeah, it is. In other words, if you have a really, if you're really dedicated to your own self-leadership, then the leadership that does flow out from you is just the overflow. And so taking care of yourself, I call it the SFO principle: self for others. So if you take care of yourself really well, you'll be able to... out of the overflow, love other people really well. So it's the equivalent of me getting two hours sleep in one night and honestly, I'm not a very pleasant person the next day. I'll be cranky and selfish, and I won't have multi-layered thinking, I'll lack emotional regulation. I'm a mess and I'm not very helpful and I'm not very loving and I'm not very patient and I'm not very kind. However, if I take care of myself and I make that a huge priority, then when I love myself and take care of myself as an act of worship before God, then I'm really able to dive deep with my kids or my wife or the people around me and be very, very helpful to them and available to them. But if I'm not taking care of me, then I'm simply reacting to what a situation might need. So that idea of taking care of yourself is very, very true. We grew up with JOY right? Jesus others, you.
Warren Mainard: Yes.
Gary Chupik: But really, it's SFO. It's care for yourself so well as an act of worship to God that you'll be really, really effective in loving and caring for others.
Warren Mainard: So, Gary, I'm kind of a sequential thinker and how does one thing result to the next, result to the next. So walk me through, give me maybe an example if you can of... okay, this is an identity statement, this is the motivation that comes out of that identity, and then this is the behavior that, or the habit that results, as an extension of the identity statement.
Gary Chupik: Yeah. So, here's a good example. So when Covid hit, and I was, I'm at the gym between two and three hours a morning. And I'm the kind of guy that gets up at 3:45 or 4:00 AM. And so I thought to myself, well, the gym is closed now. It's February, it's raining, it's cold, and there's nobody outside. And there's an atmosphere of fear in the, in our area or region. And so I thought to myself, well, what kind of person do I want to be? So do I want to be the kind of guy who has to have a warm gym to go to? Do I have to be the kind of guy who has all the pins set up perfectly for me to set that, to knock down? And do I want be the kind of guy who if it's below a certain temperature, well, I'm just not gonna do it? And so I decided at that point that I didn't want to be that kind of guy and that I wanted to be the kind of leader, but it just didn't matter that I just was set on, I was intrinsically motivated, so I had an internal locus of control. The external environment wasn't going to affect me. And so I had decided and made an internal decision that I was just not going to skip a beat. So I'm up at 3:45 in the morning, it's raining, it's cold. I'd go to a football field and I'm working out for a couple hours and running up and down my hill and doing pushups. And that to me, was so healthy for me because the moments that I just didn't feel like doing it or didn't think I could, I would be like, wait, I've proved a lot to myself by doing this consistently six days a week for the last, and I, I've done that before. So I've been working out and really taking care of myself the last, for years. But it was just another opportunity to prove something to myself. And I think that's what habits are all about. I think it's proving to yourself. Because at the end of the night, you're the person who's got to lay their head down their pillow and decide whether you're a fraud or not, and decide whether who you say you are is what, how you live your life. And so if I got to lay my head down on my pillow at night, and I say, well, I'm this or I'm bad or I'm thinking positive, or I'm not being honest with myself, but if I can look back at my life or throughout the day and say, you know what I'm proving stuff to myself and those habits help prove to myself that I can do something. So it's not a matter of being positive, it's a matter of being optimistic. And optimism always requires a reason for us to be optimistic. So I've given myself, by 8:00 AM, I've given myself a lot of reasons to be optimistic about my day. Why? Because I've proven it to myself. So there's a lot going on when we prove things to ourself. There's a lot going on with habits, there's a lot going on with progress. And what's interesting, there was a recent article that came out that talked about what kind of hormones are being released in our body when we're pursuing a goal or when we're making progress or when we feel like we're on the right path. And so this research article talked about the, all the hormones that are released as we are on our way to a goal. And so, you achieve a goal every four weeks, or six weeks, or few months, or maybe a year, and then you get to that point and you have this adrenaline rush, and you did it. But there was a lot of really great things that happened along the way. And that's why a lot of people, when they reach a goal, there's a big letdown because you spent all this time and all these hormones were being released in your body, and all of a sudden they're not being released anymore because you achieved your goal. So in this research paper said, that about 75% of all the hormones that we experience in achievement are also experienced on the path there. So that idea of, what I call 'progress theory,' that idea of making progress in our habits is crucial. It's absolutely crucial. Because if we can find ways to participate in those habits on a regular basis, and we're proving things to ourselves and we feel like we're on the right path, it does something to your mind biochemically. It does something to your mindset, does something to you spiritually that you just feel like you're on the right path.
Warren Mainard: Wow. That it's so fascinating how we're as holistic beings, we're all so interrelated, our physiology, our spiritual self, our emotional, mental, physical self, the more that we keep one in tune, it helps to keep the others in tune as well. So, Gary, you, you've mentioned a couple times already, you're a guy that gets up early, you mentioned getting up at 3:45 AM, you mentioned doing a two or two and a half hour workout. Is that, indicative of what every highly successful leader does? I mean, in other words, do you have to get up at 3:45 if you wanna be a highly successful leader? And what are some of the other habits of those that have really figured out how to master and lead themselves?
Gary Chupik: Yeah. I mean, I know that I'm odd in lots of different ways. But everybody is a lock and everybody needs to find the code to unlock themselves. So you're your number one opponent, and you're different than everybody else. And so you got to figure out you, like you're your number one opponent. So it's like, well, how do I beat my, how do I beat me? How do I overcome me? And that's why a lot of the cookie cutter approach to sports, psych, and mindset and positivity, and that stuff kind of doesn't work in a lot of ways. It would be akin to trying to bake a cake and taking all the right ingredients. So you crack a couple of eggs and you put some cocoa on top, and you put it in the oven at 425 for an hour, then you take it out and you put some flour on top and some milk, it might resemble chocolate cake, but it ain't really going to taste like chocolate cake. I, and I think it's the same thing. A lot of people hear a lot of the right ingredients, but they don't know how to put it together. And so, there's real value in working hard to unlock you. So for example, if you're not the type of person who's going get up at 3:45 and go to gym for a couple hours, well, what kind of day and, and you get to define it, you get to be the one who figures that out. What kind of day would... or what would you be doing in a day that would give you an outstanding day? In other words, if we could do this thing by design instead of default, then what would be placed in our day? So I was talking to, there was a gal who was on a football staff, and she said to me, "Gary, how are you?" And I said, "Great." And I said, "How are you?" And she said, "Well, I've had a pretty miserable week." Then she stopped for a second and she said, "Well, do you know why I had a miserable week?" And I'm like, "No, I have no clue." She goes, "No, I'm asking you. Why am I having a miserable week? And I said to her, "Well, it's because you chose to be vulnerable." So she chose at the very beginning of her week and every day she reinforced it, that she was going to just constantly react to everything that was going to be happening around her. And so volatility of uncertainty, I think is, it happens to all of us every day, but she had just decided that she was going to be affected by her circumstances. And so for you and I, if we can internally figure out who we want to be and what we want to do and what makes us have a great day, and it's different for all of us. Than our responsibility and what we can do is that we can figure out how to win that particular day. So I created something called 'Win the Day', and it's a way to unlock yourself. So it's not an even number of things. I like to teach people. It's an odd number of things. It could be either five or seven is is ideal. And so what are those things that are unique to you and your listeners that just stack the deck at the beginning of the day? I call it front loading. What could you do to front load your day before 8:00 AM that would give you an awesome day? Like, and these things are uniquely you. So for me, going to the gym at 3:45 is just one of those things that just puts me in a totally different place. So I personally have seven things that I do that just stack the deck for me every day. And it's like, I measure the success of my day, not by the circumstances, but whether I did those seven things every day.
Warren Mainard: Can you elaborate on maybe what some of those seven things are? I mean, I think that probably everybody listening to this would be like, okay, I want to know, at least as a template or an example, what are some things that I should be thinking about or considering when it comes to establishing a day that feels like a win and front loading. And are they all kind of active, action based, or are they more about creating and reminding ourselves of certain truths and ideas? Yeah. What does that look like?
Gary Chupik: Well, the beautiful thing is we all get to choose our own thing. And so for you, it might be quoting something or making a declaration or reading your Bible or some activity. For me it's a combination of things. So the very first thing I do is I got to make sure that I'm sleeping seven hours. So the science behind sleeping seven hours is overwhelmingly, it's overwhelmingly obvious that seven hours is the magic number. And most, I think lack of sleep is probably one of the leading causes of disease and death that our culture ever experiences. We just don't ever hear that. But it really is. So sleep is crucial. It's crucial for emotional regulation. It's crucial for performance. It's crucial for cognitive ability. It's crucial for, especially for athletes who are going to, who are, you know, most sports are a game of inches. It's just, there's just so much to sleep. In fact, I was talking with a coach recently a year ago, and they were about to go into a playoff game the next day, and the head coach said to me in this area, he said to me, "Hey, how do I win this game?" And I just said, "Sleep better than youir opponent and you'll win." And so, the endurance strength, cognitive ability, agility, balance, speed, all of those things are all highly regulated by sleep. So number one is get seven hours sleep. So every day, seven hours sleep, bare minimum. And then number two is go to the gym and exercise. Number three is eat well. Number four is make my daily declaration. So I have three declarations that I make every day. And again, this is just one of those things, it's just, it's Gary Chupik, and it might not be anybody else, but I always say to myself, every day at the gym in front of the elliptical, "This is the day the Lord has made, I will be glad and rejoice in it. Jesus, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God. And in You, I live and I move and I have my being." Then I'll quote my personal philosophy every day, number six. And then I have what I call 'blue sky time.' So whether I'm spending time in prayer and reading my Bible or thinking and praying or meditating, that's just really important to me. So yeah, I'm pretty religious about that. In fact, some would say that I'm very mechanical about it, but it's interesting how I don't need to be motivated to do those things. I can be very mechanical about it and achieve the same benefit as if I were motivated. So motivation isn't really an issue for me. So if I do those seven things, I feel pretty accomplished at a certain time in the morning. And the way I look at it is the brain is kind of like a hard drive that boots up every morning. And so the programs that you get to load into your brain are completely up to you. They're completely up to you and I. So if you want to load programs that are really healthy and positive and that produce good things in you, then you get to choose those things and you can choose to load them up. You don't have to choose to load viruses. You don't have to choose to load other things. Your brain defrags every night, and when you wake up in the morning, it's a clean slate, and you get to boot up that computer. And so what are the programs that we're booting up our computer with?
Warren Mainard: Yeah, that's a great illustration for those of us who live on the east side in a tech savvy environment. And I think you're spot on that there are a lot of viruses that we allow to enter into our minds. And circling back to the illustration that you gave about the female football coach and her asking you, why am I so miserable? Or why am I having a miserable week? And you kind of said, well, you've allowed yourself to be vulnerable to that type of attack. I wonder, we've spent most of our time kind of focused on the ideas of time, action-based habits. But one of the things that I've really been thinking about a lot over the last year, in particular during this Covid season, is seeing and recognizing in my own life, spiritual habits or mental health and emotional and relational habits. And the way that I've kind of described it to people is that I'm starting to learn how to read the road signs of where something is going. So it could be my own thought life. And I know if I keep going down this path of thought life, it's going to leave me in this negative or dark or unhealthy place. And so recognizing as I see myself going down that road and seeing those road signs and saying: okay, now I need to learn how to take my mind in a new direction than where it always goes. It's like when you get into a rutt, right? The rutt just takes you to the same place. And the more often you go down that rutt, the easier it is to to to end up where you've always ended up. And so to create a new path takes more difficult work at the beginning, but eventually that healthy path becomes, for better lack of a better term, a good rutt to be in or a habit. And I've seen that with my own thoughts. I've really been interested to see how that works out within my own home, within my own family, of conflict; where we have the same conflicts over and over and over again. Whether it's between husband and wife, mom and daughter, father, son, and beginning to identify what are the road signs that are coming up that could either take me down the same rutt or begin to carve a new healthy path. And I think I kind of heard you saying that a little bit as it related to that example of the coach where if you think what you've always thought, you'll end up in the same place every time. But if you go into it and you say, okay... take for instance, you have a boss and every time you have a one-on-one with this boss, you always leave feeling defeated, worthless, and just angry or frustrated with the relationship. Developing a new habit of how am I going to think differently? What am I going to say differently? What am I going to do to prepare myself for this differently to begin to create a different outcome. So maybe just as I've kind of been sharing that, what are some thoughts that come to your mind about that? Is there some truth to that? And how is that a habit in a way that is similar to some of these other more concrete ideas?
Gary Chupik: Yeah, very interesting. Yeah. And that certainly brings it home, doesn't it? Yeah, it's interesting. So there's a couple different thoughts that I have. Number one is, there's a great book right now, it's been out for a few years. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow. And it talks about your brain having two systems, system one and system two. Your system one thinking is very fast, it's very intuitive, but even with intuition, your brain is drawing upon hundreds of data points that allow you to have that intuition. Whether it was a memory or something looked a certain way or you felt a certain way or a combination of all those things. The problem is, is it's not very trustworthy because it's lacking feedback. And so we'll just have an intuition about something, but we could be really wrong about it. So it serves us well in many situations, but system two thinking makes us slow down and think to ourselves, like you said, I kind of got to see the road signs. I got to think about what I'm thinking about. And to slow down our thinking is really powerful. And here's a good example. If, let's say we're tempted, let's say we tend... we're tempted to overeat. And so there's the big bowl of ice cream or the chocolate cake. Well, if we're going to do fast thinking, we'll think, well, maybe I'll just go on a diet tomorrow and I'll eat that today. So we do this fast thinking, but what if we could slow down our thinking and say to ourselves, okay, so I want the cake, but I want to be healthy too. Or I want the cake, but I want to be consistent in my values and how I live my life. I want to live healthy and if I eat the chocolate cake, I'm not going to feel well for an hour or two, or three or four or longer. But making a good decision makes me feel good all the time. And so to slow down our thinking as we, in your, the way that you put it, it's like we got to, we have to create a new neuro pathway for us to think about these things. I had a client who, he had, he smoked 30 cigarettes a day, and he said, "Can you help me kick this addiction habit?" And I said, "Well, I'm not really in the addiction counseling game, but, maybe this could work." And so, he, I just want him to quit one cigarette, just get one cigarette a week, so it would take him 30 weeks to get down to zero. And so by 29, 28, he's seeing progress. And he goes, this is so easy. I could do one cigarette a week, one less cigarette, no big deal. We get down to 20. And he says, well, I think I'm ready to go zero now. I think I can do this. And I said, don't do that. And he said, no, I'm really ready to go down to zero. I want to make this big jump. I think I can do it. And I said, okay, give it a shot. So he did great for three days, and then he was back up to 30 and I said, so let's go back and let's start at 30 and come back down. And what was going on was, if you make a change too quickly, you actually don't change the way that you think about it. So you might make a decision and then change your behaviors, but you're actually not creating a new neural pathway for your brain to reason out why you don't want to do something. And so that slow progress in our habits is really powerful because we retrain our brain who we want to be, and what does that look like. And we can talk ourselves into or out of things and practice that slow thinking. Now that's real change. That's long term change. And so this idea of slow progressive change is powerful. In the same article that I mentioned earlier, you know what, the brain doesn't know the difference between going an extra inch and going an extra mile. It doesn't know the difference. So if you're, let's say on the treadmill, and you're going to go one more inch, and you feel like you're making progress cause you went one more inch, that's fantastic. But if you would've went another mile, the brain wouldn't be able to tell the difference. All that you would know is that you are making progress. And so giving your brain a chance to catch up and syncopating with the way that you're, the way that you live your life and your behaviors is really, really powerful and profound. That's the kind of change that we want to see.
Warren Mainard: Yeah, I love that. And that idea of thinking fast and thinking slow, it reminds me of a scripture that a lot of our men who are involved in one of our IMPACT cohorts have spent time dwelling on and thinking about, it seems like it comes up in every one of our studies that we do. But it's in, it's found in, in James chapter one, and it says, "Brothers, be quick to listen, be slow to speak, and slow to anger. For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." And really what that in, its essence is all about, is don't react quickly, but respond thoughtfully. And I wonder if we could take that biblical principle and extrapolate it into every area of our lives, that even in our own internal narratives, that we're quick to listen, we're quick to ask ourselves questions about why we're thinking this way. Why am I feeling this way? What is the motivation behind me wanting to react in this way? And then to be slow to speak or react, slow to just do that kind of sudden jolt reaction, but and not to get angry with ourselves or to have that emotional response, because the immediate reaction or the anger does not produce the righteousness of God. It doesn't produce God outcomes in our lives: the fruit of the spirit and the characteristics of a Christ follower. So it's, I always love it when I see these parallels between modern psychology and best practices and timeless biblical truths. And you go, okay, God created this. He created us. He, his truth is timeless. And every once in a while, we kind of figure this out in other realms of life. And, and we go, okay, yeah, God knew what he was doing. He had this figured out way before the latest top bestseller puts it out there. In fact, this is a little bit of an aside, but maybe you saw this, Gary, a while back and I think it relates a little bit to your field. But, I saw a book on the bookshelves a year or two ago, and the title of the book was 24/6, and I can't remember who the author was, but it was basically a book from a non-believer talking about the importance of taking one day off a week.
Gary Chupik: That's hilarious.
Warren Mainard: Which as believers, fellow pastors understanding that God created the earth in six days, on the seventh day he took a rest. He created the Sabbath as a day of rest for man. And man, that Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath. That idea that, that God knew what he was doing by modeling the importance of taking a day of rest as a life habit in the way that we approach things. Oh, yeah.
Gary Chupik: So good.
Warren Mainard: So, as we wrap things up, as these things tend to go, we get so ingrained and excited about the topic, it can go quite long. But as we wrap this up, maybe kind of just walk me through, Gary, or I'll give you the option. This is a choose your own adventure.
Gary Chupik: Okay.
Warren Mainard: Maybe wrap this up with a story of how someone really benefited from adopting some healthy habits or walk me through what are some different areas of our lives that we should really take some time to reflect on our habits. So maybe, we've talked about the health, but what are some other areas of our lives that we can really begin to reflect on developing healthy habits? And I guess finally, what are some resources that either you have or that you would encourage us to check out that might help us to really focus on developing healthy habits?
Gary Chupik: Yeah. There's a lot there. I think I'll choose door number two, and then finish us number three. So I would say that making yourself a priority is crucial. So the word priority didn't come into existence in the English language until 1400. We didn't, we don't have a semantic record of it. After 1400, it's for the next 500 years. It's only found in the singular, it's never found in the plural, never. And so during the American Revolution, Industrial Revolution, we began to use the word priorities. And so I think in your work life and your professional life, it's hard only to have one priority. But in your personal life, if you really think about having one priority, then I think it's a great way to go. And I think you should be a priority. And it sounds selfish, it sounds self-serving, but I would highly bet that our spouses would say, man, I wish my husband would make himself a priority. I, or I wish that my wife would make her herself a priority. And when she does that or when we do that, everyone around us benefits. And so that idea of just kind of selling out to us being really healthy, and then us living out of the overflow of our lives and the other people around us get to benefit from that, that sounds like a really fun way to live. And so I would highly recommend a deep dive for your listeners, a real deep dive into themselves and trying to figure out themselves. So now you can take personality exams, you can talk to people, you can get feedback from people. I think all that stuff is really helpful. But I think the most important thing you can do is really figure you out and make yourself a priority. A good short story about that is I've always had, I've always been overweight and I've always really struggled with my weight ever since I was like in 10th grade, I just always, always really struggled. And then it dawned on me that I hadn't made my health and my weight loss a priority. And I thought, well, yeah, I have, I've made it. But the problem is that it was one of many priorities. That was the issue. And so I thought to myself, if I was just going to make myself the priority and make my weight loss the priority, then what would I do? And I would, I had that come to Jesus moment where I said, you know, I guess I just haven't been very successful, have I? Maybe I need to get a coach. And so I hired a nutritional coach and it was the best thing I ever did. And so I would say for your listeners, pick something, I mean, other than yourself... making yourself a priority, but pick some aspect of your life to make a priority, and then just be honest with yourself and go down the rabbit trail. And if I was to make this a massive priority, but this is the only thing I was going to focus on for the next month or two or few months, whatever it is, I wonder what kind of growth and progress that I can make. So yeah, make yourself a priority - that's a big part of it. And then in terms of resources, there's some stuff that's on my website, but I mean, there's a million good things out there. Again, it's like baking a cake and you can get all the right ingredients, but if you're not sequencing it properly, then you're probably not going to have a lot of success. So, your listeners are always... feel free to contact me, and I can walk them through that process a little bit more. It's the same process I use with professional athletes and sports teams and that kind of thing. But the sequencing is really important. So there's lots of good stuff. There's lots of great stuff on leadership. It is just deep diving. I, I've adopted something since I was in my early twenties, which was always read where I am. Always read where I am. So if I'm experiencing depression, read about depression. If I'm experiencing unforgiveness, read about unforgiveness. If I'm at a place where I'm having marital struggles, and then I always read about marriage. I'm constantly trying to give myself both language and neural pathways to think about what I'm going through. And then it makes so much easier to talk to people about these things. And I learned so much, and then I can share that knowledge with other people.
Warren Mainard: That's great. I love that, I mean, that last little bit is a nugget right there. Always read where I am, really become a student of your own struggles. I think that's, that is really cool. So, yeah, thank you for sharing that. Gary, thank you so much. This is fantastic content and I feel like we just scratched the tip of the iceberg. So what is the best way, if somebody said, Hey, I'd really like to go deeper on this with Gary. How do they get in touch with you? What's your social media? Your website? What's the best way for people to follow along with what you're doing and what you're putting out there?
Gary Chupik: Yeah, there's a couple different ways. Thank you for that. so I have two websites garychupik.com, or they can reach me at elitemindsetnation.com. On Instagram, it's Elite Mindset. And on Facebook, it's just Gary Chupik Leadership and it's Elite Mindset. So, yeah I'm all over. They can find me anywhere.
Warren Mainard: That's fantastic. Well, Gary, I hope this won't be the only time that we have you on this show. And looking forward to getting you back in person as well as we continue to have our monthly IMPACT breakfast gatherings. But for everybody that has joined us for this YouTube and podcast, I want to just say thank you. And, if you like what we're doing here, please subscribe. Please rate this podcast, share it with other men or friends and family, and let them know about the work of IMPACT Players. And if you're interested in finding out more about Impact players, please visit us at impactplayers.org. For Gary Chupik and myself, thank you. Have a blessed and wonderful day.
