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![S2:EP 2 [VIDEO] - Tom Foxley: Mental Fitness Coach - "We grow by pushing our boundaries, take risks, and then coming back to a state of safety" image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=54,quality=85/image-files/63de7bc76bdba1bc512995ab/611e3951-187c-4d9e-bef1-1079ac0ea610.png)
S2:EP 2 [VIDEO] - Tom Foxley: Mental Fitness Coach - "We grow by pushing our boundaries, take risks, and then coming back to a state of safety"
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Tom Foxley a mental fitness coach and former Royal Marine Commando, helping individuals understand the type of person they need to become in order to achieve their deep rooted desires and goals.
Life is hard, and it is made harder when you feel like you lack clarity of the direction you want to go in life, be it your career, relationships, or health. You can feel aimless, and like someone else is in control of your life. In this episode, Tom breaks down the foundations behind building mental fitness, the clues to know if you are on the right track or not , understanding your emotions and learning to recognise them, and more.
You can find more about Tom here:
Instagram: @TomFoxley
Web: tomfoxley.me
Podcast: TheFreedomProject
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Transcript
Introduction to Tom Foxley
00:00:00
Speaker
Cool. Mr. Tom Foxley. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking looking forward to this conversation to happen for the few weeks that we've had it booked in. Yeah, we've been ah we've had it in the pipeline, but we're fine here. um Really, really good to have you on. So normally I like to start with an introduction, but I like to get my guests to introduce themselves. So for anyone who's not familiar with Mr. Tom Foxley, who are you and and what do you do? Yeah, so I am a mental performance coach for freedom-seeking business owners. And basically what I help people do is create mental
What is Mental Fitness?
00:00:33
Speaker
fitness. And mental fitness is a bit different to mental health, and we can get into that a bit later or at some point.
00:00:40
Speaker
I was formerly a Royal Marines commando, so elite-ish aspect of the British military. I coached some very, very high-level athletes, including literally the world's best in a few different sports, including CrossFit. And I am ah obsessed with why do we do what we do and how do we optimize ourselves and perform at that higher percentage of our potential.
00:01:06
Speaker
Awesome. So it sounds, I've listened to you on a few other podcasts and the the term mindset came up quite a lot. And when people think of like mental performance there, I think it can either scare people away or, you know, it's one of those terms that gets thrown around quite a, you know, quite a lot in in social media. There's mental, this, you know, mindset aspect being having a positive mindset, having a negative mindset.
00:01:28
Speaker
So, you know, it's a term everyone will be familiar with in terms of mindset, but I've seen you break it down into kind of three distinct areas in terms of what you do. So you've got the sort of philosophy, physiology, and then the psychological side as well. So can you just talk us through a little bit more about mindset and how you've broken it down into those areas?
Evolution of Mental Fitness Concept
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, so the way I now say it, I think I used the term mindset originally because it was an easy phrase that people intuitively understood a percentage of and kind of got it to begin with. But as I've evolved, I've realized it's a bit more than the mindset that we take to a um to an experience and we show up with. So I speak in terms of mental fitness now.
00:02:13
Speaker
And our fitness is our ability to execute a task or to achieve a certain goal. And that's pretty different from mental health, which if you Google health, it's usually a an absence of illness or disease. And that's a bit different. I used to view that as getting from like minus 10 to zero, and then mental fitness is going from zero to 100, and it's getting it's accelerating. And there's similar principles in there, and there's similar practices, and some tools even work the same way, and on both sides of that ah zero.
00:02:44
Speaker
But for me, it's about how do we get you to do the thing that you need to do? How do we get you action focused? How do you get you achieving and attaining? And to do that, how do we get you improving? How do we get you actualizing? So there's three things that essentially create our mental
Components of Mental Fitness
00:03:02
Speaker
fitness. And we can think about these as the components or the zones of mental fitness.
00:03:07
Speaker
One of them is our resilience. Resilience is our ability to positively respond or adapt to stress. So if I have very low resilience, I encounter a stressful situation and I can either play dead, and we can talk about exactly what this means eventually, but I can either play dead or I can go into that fight or flight hustling grind stress out mode. That's the first one. We can train our resilience to maintain this point of equilibrium when we approach challenge. Feel free to jump in if you want to as well.
00:03:37
Speaker
The second one is clarity. Clarity is being able to see the situation, our path, and most importantly, our self with clarity, clearly without a lens in the way. So this looks like typical goal-setting stuff, but also looks at knowing yourself and freeing yourself from your stories. So that's the psychological aspect. The first one was physiological. And then finally, we look at the character that we're developing.
00:04:01
Speaker
And this looks like if you had your superhero version of yourself with a 10 out of 10 focus, and a 10 out of 10 discipline, and a 10 out of 10 compassion or awareness, basically what does this version of you look like? And that's applying the the philosophical side of things so to develop our character, to become the person that we know in the back of our mind we have the potential to become. The Germans had this phrase, the Hinterkadat, I think I'm saying that right.
00:04:29
Speaker
basically a thought in the back of our head that we know it. It's not quite clear, but it lives in the back of our mind. And that character is our hint of Godang. It's who we think we can become. It's the version of ourselves that we compare ourselves to and go, mad, I knew I could be that guy or girl. like There's that version of me that's dying to come out, and it's the way that we surprise ourselves or disappoint ourselves when we act below our potential. So Mental fitness is basically training. Training the resilience, training our clarity and training our character. That's interesting to say about resilience because I feel there's certain aspects of, if I speak personally, there's certain parts of me I wouldn't say I'm a particularly resilient person. or i've I've done your mental your mental fitness is assessment and I'll talk about that in a minute, but the the question I really initially had was when you talk about resilience, do you think you can be
00:05:22
Speaker
Do you think there's two sides to it? So in certain aspects of my life, I would say um I'm fairly resilient. So we've been traveling before, I've been, ah you know, broad of my other half and we basically got stuck. we We, the flight got canceled, all the trains were canceled and we were yeah pretty screwed really. have But I don't te tend to panic in situations like that. I'd say my my resilience for situations when I'm put into those ah ah situations, I'm pretty good.
00:05:52
Speaker
Whereas if I was to talk about resilience in terms of, you know, setbacks or, you know, personal goals and development, I would say I'm not very resilient. I would say I struggle quite a lot with this kind of self-deprecating, you know, I'm not good enough, all that sort of stuff. So do you think that resilience can be multifaceted and and yeah when you talk about that one?
00:06:16
Speaker
Great question and and thanks for sharing as well. I think it's so important to you ah to to frame this in terms of stories in personal ways.
Understanding Resilience
00:06:23
Speaker
So you doing this is is fantastic and and it's not always the most comfortable thing to do, say entirely. Resilience is situational and this is partly where these and these zones of mental fitness, they merge and they become wrapped up. Just like your strength can help your cardiovascular fitness. Because if I'm stronger, I don't have to work so hard to put one foot in front of the other and run. So in this case, it could be that we have a story about certain areas of life where the lack of clarity can influence the resilience.
00:06:57
Speaker
or there's a physiological kind of trigger or a physical trigger. So this resilience piece is all based on this idea called polyvagal theory. The idea of that is the vagus nerve, the 10th cranial nerve, it means the wandering nerve. ah You've had a few guys on the podcast who have probably talked about the vagus nerve. It has a few functions.
00:07:17
Speaker
And in polyvagal theory, the way I looked at it and interpret it for the people that I work with, and there's a few different ways to look at it in terms of trauma, but there's three different states that it can be in. It can be in fight or flight. Like, I need to get out of here. I need to change something. I need to make a difference. So you fight or you fight to get out of there. You can be in what's called your dorsal vagal shutdown. And what that means is There's a situation out there and I am so terrified by it and I'm so threatened by it. I'm going to shut down. I'm going to literally play dead. If your cat brings in a mouse and the mouse lies on the floor and plays dead, this is nervous system kicking in. It's not a conscious move. It's not going.
00:08:00
Speaker
Huh, I know I'll get this mount this cat. It's ah a kicking. You literally get so stressed, so fearful, so scared that your body will shut down. And for people, this looks like baring your head in the sand. It looks like avoiding the situation. It looks like not wanting to confront it. It's the complete shutdown.
00:08:21
Speaker
and then you have if the ventral vagal so the vagus nerve again is optimally toned the ventral vagal like ventral means going forward it means at the front okay so that means we're socially engaged with the problem we're moving forwards now I bring all that up because our body is constantly scanning for threat it's always saying, am I safe? It's a phrase called neurocepting, and it's it's different from perceiving the situation because we're not consciously doing it, we're neurocepting it. And that means we're looking out, or part of us is looking out and constantly scanning the threat. So link to this, and I told you to get back here eventually.
00:09:01
Speaker
sun When we're looking at your, am I, can I be situationally resilient? It might be that your body is neurocepting a threat in a certain environment. So I struggled in my business for a long time. I went completely broke in my first ever business was in about three months. I tried to work in gym. I was not qualified to do it. I had no leader, no training. I had nothing. And apart from being a pretty good coach at the time.
00:09:30
Speaker
From then on, it took me a long time to disconnect the the feeling of looking at my finances from the utter terror that I experienced and the shutdown that I'd get into. So it could be a situational thing. But if you put me in a physiological, like if you put me in raw Marines training, I could handle it.
00:09:51
Speaker
I could go through that stress. If you put me in an argument, I can handle it. So it's a different kind of perception. And that can come back to childhood. It can be a lot of different things that links to it. It's kind of a trauma response, um but without necessarily the intensity of trauma.
00:10:07
Speaker
Okay, that's interesting.
Mental Fitness Assessment Tool
00:10:08
Speaker
And I talked about like the little mental health fitness assessment that you have on your on your website. So we'll we'll we'll put some links in at the end of the podcast. So I'll get some sort of inputs where you direct people to go. but it ah but To put it bluntly, my scores weren't great. I feel like it told me stuff that I knew to be true. And I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there listening who feel this way as well. But I think for me, it's more of a case of I feel I'm capable of a lot more than I'm currently doing. And I think this is kind of what your business is centered around, is you know extracting that performance out of people. and
00:10:50
Speaker
and getting them to build into the character they want to be. The the thing I struggle with personally is ah know I know I'm capable of more but it's where I can channel my efforts to do that and how do you know if you're you know moving in the right direction. There's things in my life I've achieved which I should be more proud of and know I was proud at the time although it's quite a fleeting sensation and I've spoken to, I spoke to Andrew Daysh who was a previous guest hat on.
00:11:20
Speaker
And he was really jotting down to this idea of you know enjoying the reward of your efforts even if you you you you might go into a gym session for example and not quite achieve what you wanted to do but you you should be proud of what you did anyway because you worked and and just taking that extra time and and he did it at the time when I was kind of graduating from university and I was had this idea in my head of like enjoying the rewards. Anytime I did anything and achieved something I'd always take a little bit longer than I thought I should just actually really reflect and go actually you know I'm proud of what I've done.
00:11:54
Speaker
um So I just wanted to ask, when you start looking at things like not fulfilling your capability or those sorts of feelings, where would where would one start with you know trying to unpack that and it's so initial of getting to the point where you want to be?
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's the first thing I would do is actually put someone through that mental fitness assessment, or when I work with someone there's a slightly more in-depth version of that. Well, it's a 10-day assessment phase. So we're basically looking at, do you need to work on resilience, clarity, or character?
00:12:26
Speaker
the 90% of people, it's an even split between resilience and clarity. ah Some people need that character development, but honestly, most people have stories that get in their way. in In terms of clarity, the hierarchy is so people haven't identified a clear objective that they can get behind. and There's this idea called nested goals that we can go through, and I think that would be pretty useful at some point, but all that means is and there's this misalignment between what they're doing and how they're trying to get there and what they want. So it looks like if they're lacking clarity, they are they don't know where they want to go. They don't know the path to get there, obviously, because how can you know the path to get there if you don't know where you're going, and you can't see yourself clearly. So that's the clarity component.
00:13:12
Speaker
And then the resilience thing is if you are finding yourself confronting the same challenge time after time after time and not getting any further, it's usually a resilience challenge. and And the reason that is is because that ventral vagal that is called the social engagement system, that circuit is switched on and we become created and open and willing to risk and fail.
00:13:39
Speaker
So, if it's like, I can't tap into that potential, well, firstly, there's a story there. Who says so? How do we know that's true? Because there are times you 100% have. So, what's the story that's getting in the way? And then we just basically drill down into, okay, what's the root cause? Because someone might say, hey, I want to get physically fitter.
00:13:58
Speaker
But what does that mean? Well, firstly, we need to figure out where you want to get to. What does physically fit to look like? Does it mean and deadlifting a car? Or does it mean running a sub-3 hour marathon? like What does it mean to you because of very different training protocols? So that's the first step we we start with.
00:14:16
Speaker
And then if we look at fizzy, you know like we're talking about physical stuff there. So if you're looking at like a strength goal, I'd say that the metrics to know if you're on the right track may be quite a clear cut. You may have a ah you know a nice route of progression mapped out. When we're talking about the mind,
00:14:33
Speaker
how How would you know if you're you're on the right
Pathways to Mental Fitness
00:14:36
Speaker
direction? Would it be a similar sort of process? Yeah, a beautiful question. It's something that I seem to obsess over a lot, and but not many people have thought to ask themselves. So it's a really, really insightful question, not just because I agree with it, because I think it helps people.
00:14:53
Speaker
So we're always walking two paths, the path of attainment and the path of actualization. And you can imagine you've got one foot on both paths. So the path of attainment, let's say that's your right foot, is what are you getting from the world? This is really important. So is it the house? Is it the partner? Is it the job? Is it the dog? is it like What is it? like What are your steps that you're trying to accrue? Is it the wages, the salaries, the revenue for your business? like How are you moving forward on that?
00:15:22
Speaker
And then, let's say your left foot is in the path of actualization. Who are you becoming? Are you moving forwards? Now, what I've found is people start moving that right foot forwards, the path of attainment, over and over and over and over again. and Eventually, you get stuck because they're basically doing the splits. They've got their left foot dragging behind them, and that is anchored in. it can't They can't move any further forwards because they're snapping back with that path of actualization holding them back. Firstly, I look at Well, are you moving forward in the things that you want to move forward in? Because remember, fitness is your ability to achieve a task, is to do something, is get is to perform how you need to in the world. So we can look at that and then we can ask, is it a skill deficit? So is there a skill that you're lacking? Do you not know how to market your business? Or
00:16:10
Speaker
do you not know how to deadlift a barbell properly and if that's the case we can just work on that but more likely from people who work with me it's the actual sorry yes the actualization piece so then we look at sorry let me back up first metrics what the key metrics of success in your chosen discipline so that could be revenue that could be 5k time you tell me and you'll know that for you and then we can look at in the personal growth side of things That looks like physiologically. I track things like heart rate variability with my clients. Where are you at? Are you improving your heart rate variability? Are you finding a natural ah natural bound to operate in? There's some complexity around now. You can go into that if you want to. um So physiologically, I look at things like that. I look at sleep quality. I look at mood.
00:17:00
Speaker
Then I look at, I've actually got a checklist. Do you have your goals clearly written? Do you have those nested goals that I talk about clearly lined up? and Have you been through your stories work that I do with people? Do you know your stories inside out?
00:17:15
Speaker
And at the end of it, you should be able to go through that mental fitness assessment, which is intentionally harsh, by the way, because I think people need to kind of realize um where we're at and how much potential we have to give. and It's not like everyone scores fairly low. Like, I don't score 100% on it. I'm like, definitely not. I'm about 70% on it. There's more I can give.
00:17:37
Speaker
um So then I start to look at like, have you basically filled in these boxes? Do you know the type of person you're meant to become? Are you always matching up? And then it's a more subjective measure and it's a conversation. I see I was in the 30s for most, ah was I think 30, 30, 40 and I think it's not too far removed from what I was expecting to be honest. i did I went with an open mind but the things I struggle with currently are probably those areas in which we touched on. Things like the goals. you know ah
00:18:10
Speaker
I've had goals in the past, but I don't know if they were more on the superficial side or if it's actually something I really, really wanted to do. And I think that's probably quite a nice little topic to move on to, to be honest, is is the goal element. Because everyone, again, it's one of those things where people say, you you should have some goals. It's financial goals, physical goals, whatever it may be.
00:18:28
Speaker
but when we're talking about again like mind you know i'm currently working with a coach just started working with a coach to you know i said i'm i'm kind of struggling at the moment and i want to build i know for me the physical aspect is a nice way to bridge the gap between you know my body and my mind i know if i'm feeling good physically then the mind tends to follow and i tend to sort of improve on that sense but when we're talking about You know, the the goals for our mind as well, similar question to before really, is what what would that look like in terms of a mental goal? is it Is it that we just want to become more resilient, for example, or we want to, um you know, when someone shouts at you and puts you in a stressful situation, you are a better person at responding to that. what What's the kind of, what are we talking about here when we're talking about those sorts of goals?
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll give you an example and it's pretty linked that one of my clients, actually but about five of my clients I'm working with right now, have basically realized that their character goal is assertiveness. They want to be more assertive. They're all guys and they've all got to the situation where when things are demanded of them or when they are confronted with a situation that they don't want to happen, they kind of roll over and they don't assert themselves over it. So they're speaking to and a client who wants a certain thing and they know they shouldn't do that, but they have to they kind of feel ah obliged to people please in that way. And so,
00:19:58
Speaker
it may look like, okay, assertiveness, let's train that. And what you're really talking about here is the bottom rung of this thing called nested goals or this concept called nested goals that happened. I want you to imagine at the bottom you've got this thing called character skills.
Developing Character Skills
00:20:14
Speaker
This is the character of who you're becoming and if you've ever played FIFA or Madden or any of those other games,
00:20:22
Speaker
you'll know that each character, or each player, or whatever, has a score for shooting 70 out of 100, passing 50 out of 100, endurance 90 out of 100, and have these ratings. What we can do when we have clarity over your goals is go, what type of person do I need to become to achieve this goal?
00:20:47
Speaker
So, it may be that discipline was in there and, oh, okay, I need to become this type of person and I need to become more disciplined, I need to execute my task. It may be that I need to become more present, it may be that I need to become more compassionate, but it may be that I need to become more um aggressive and I need to go after my goals and the regression. But you can only do that really once you've ascertained what's driving you authentically because there's so many ways you could develop, just like there's so many types of physical fitness you could develop.
00:21:15
Speaker
that we need to figure out what you want from the world first. Say, at the bottom of the list, imagine this kind of like river, there's kind of energies flowing from the top to the bottom. At the bottom is character skills. From there, we need to know the process. So the process is basically what you need to do to move you forwards. What's the process? This is when people say obsess over the process. Really, really important stuff.
00:21:39
Speaker
um So your character skills is who you need to be to ah to execute the process to the best of your ability. Above your process is your short term goals. These might look like 7 day goals, 1 day goals, 30 days, 90 days. but Basically up to 90 days. so This is when smart goal setting comes in. So we want challenging and specific goals at this point. Be aggressive with it, force yourself. From that you can derive the process and from there you can see what character you need. Above that is your long-term goals.
00:22:10
Speaker
like kind of three years, one year from now, what do you like what is the thing that you want to have in your life? Is it you want your business revenue to be up? Is it you want to have a team in place? Is it that you want to only be working three hours a day? What is it? You want two kids. like What's the ah vision ah sorry what's the um the exact goal? What's the quantifiable metrics?
00:22:30
Speaker
Now, that's kind of where most people stop. It's probably just the smart goal setting. Maybe they think about the process. Very rarely, they think about who I need to become. But above that, there's two more tiers. And above the long-term goal setting, and sorry, three more tiers. Above the long-term goal setting, we get our vision. Now, our vision is the emotional aspect, a standard gist of what I want to achieve. It's the the um the emotional tone, you could paint a picture of it. It's that kind of got that feeling associated with it. And the reason we have that is because logically you can set smart goals, but if they don't align with your vision, then they're meaningless to you. Above that, you have your values. Your values are the things that you want more of in your life. So for me, freedom is a big one.
00:23:19
Speaker
that's a huge one in my in my life adventure is another one okay um and then above that we have a unifying purpose now goal this things those components of nested goals if we are If we're doing everything right and if we've completed that exercise, so basically all of those exercises I can give people to slot into those, we find alignment and there's a clear line. The river runs without any curves or maybe a slight few curves in it, but like it's a straight line and you've got to imagine that's the most efficient way to get energy from the source of the river to the mouth of the river. It flows easily.
00:23:56
Speaker
Most people have bits missing, so NG Paul's there, he doesn't reach below that, but more common is they're misaligned. You've got this vague vision. It's someone else's vision of success you picked up from childhood. It's not really authentic to you. You've got these goals that are misaligned with your long-term goals. You've got no idea of the character um and the process. Well, it's so confused because there's 12 different things that you're working towards.
00:24:21
Speaker
So what we need to try and do is create alignment in that. And it's not like things become effortless. You still need to work hard. You still need to push hard. You still need to like encourage yourself to use the most of your potential. But really, when we're talking about How do I aim at who I need to become?
Pursuing Authentic Goals
00:24:39
Speaker
Well, we need ah values pa that the whole of that complete. And as we populate it, it's almost like a pointless painting. You get more data points and then you can step back for it and go, oh, this is what my life's about. This is what I'm here to do. And then the rest just clarifies.
00:24:58
Speaker
Okay, that's interesting. So you talked there about one of the points I picked up when I was looking at the sort of prescribed life that you have is ah as a child. And I think that's an important one really because you We've got this kind of societal norm of, you know, you go to school, you then go to college, then you go and get your A levels, then you go to uni, and then you go into your career, and then that's you good for 40 years. I do think it's very difficult then if you are in a in a career to then go, actually, is this really well what I enjoy? what is Is this what my purpose is?
00:25:35
Speaker
And i think unless I think some of the most successful people I know have actually never been to university, never been to college. And I've really recently changed my mind on this whole idea of university and you know there's some people that used to go, you should you know shouldn't go, shouldn't bother other people that would darn the hill going, yeah you need to get the education. And I was one of these people that would be like, yeah, the yeah the education is really important. It teaches you not just the you know and the academia side, but looking at your social skills and things like that as well.
00:26:04
Speaker
And then as I've gotten a bit older, I've realised actually there's a lot of people doing very well because they they've had this idea from the beginning that they didn't want to go to union, it was very clear cut and they didn't want to follow that kind of prescribed path. They wanted to kind of do their own thing and they've you know they've built some very successful businesses or they're in really good you know corporate positions now.
00:26:27
Speaker
but they just did it the sort of unconventional way and I think it's reassuring to know that you don't actually have to go down that prescribed route and the fact that you've acknowledged that there is a prescribed route for people, I think people kind of get scared of the fact that I don't really want to deviate from what people have said I need to do and um what parents have said I need to do.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, here's the um here's the the clue about what whether you're pointing down the right path or not, whether you're moving in the direction you should be moving, because there's no right or wrong answer to university or not to university or to running a business or a career or a marriage. That's why it's so contentious. Anything contentious is because there is no truth to it. and There's different perspectives to different people and that entirely depends on you and what you are set up to be doing. You should be applying your strength in the best way you can.
00:27:23
Speaker
I should not be a plumber because I'm terrible at it. I tried to sort out our underfloor heating and it took me forever just to switch my um my and my grand source i sorry air heat pump off and on again and then it worked after like two months, that kind of thing. like I shouldn't be doing that, but I'm very good at understanding people and I'm very good at like and teaching and coaching and guiding.
00:27:46
Speaker
So we have our authentic version of us. We know in our back of our mind that we want to be in. How do we know whether that's just fantasy or whether it is a true genuine urge? Well, your emotions. So the conscious mind, the rational bit you call you, processes around 50 to 60 individual bits of information per second.
00:28:07
Speaker
The subconscious, the emotional, the physiological, so basically the ah more primal parts of our brain and nervous system processes 14 million bits of information per second. And I can't do the maths. Another job I shouldn't do, mathematician. I can't do the maths to figure out what the difference is there, but it's gigantic.
00:28:27
Speaker
And if we can tune into the informational density of that intuition of the felt sense, then we can gain some ah some extra perspective. So really, we need to just understand, learn to feel, learn to appreciate our emotions in order to give us a different perspective on the situation.
00:28:53
Speaker
So our emotions are kind of giving us those cues almost to say you're kind of on the right track or maybe you look at something slightly different. Yeah, exactly right. So there are five core emotions that I think of them as primary emotions, and I can't remember the book that I learned this from originally, but we can put it in the show notes if I remember.
00:29:15
Speaker
um But like it's not my concept is all I'm saying. It's someone else who's done this work. And they basically say there's five primary emotions, and this is what I teach my clients too, and it's the easiest way to do it. And there are tons more than five, but these are the primary ones, and it's the easiest way to learn to get the outcomes that you're looking for.
00:29:34
Speaker
the anger, joy, sadness, fear, and this kind of sexual creativity. And that's not lust, it's more I want to create, I want to make. And our first step is called emotional literacy. ah sorry yeah Sorry, yeah, emotional literacy. And that's just knowing, before we get to emotional intelligence, we need to learn what are the words that we're trying to use. so And it's simply being able to say, oh, I'm feeling fear, or I'm feeling anger, or I'm feeling joy. And the reason why is because each of those has a gift that it's trying to give you. It's trying to teach you something.
00:30:10
Speaker
it's kind of obvious but if I'm feeling anger it's telling me there's a boundary that needs to be set or I need to be defensive I need to stand up for myself or I need to attack something I think about why we evolved anger if I'm feeling fear it means hey you idiot pay attention you need to look at something you're not doing that right now so this is where our emotions come in and rather than resisting our emotions we need to learn to ultimately appreciate them to go, hey, it's telling me I feel joy, or maybe I should do a bit more of this thing. I feel sadness, well, I need to let go of this. I need to allow it to drift. And to having that um
00:30:51
Speaker
Having that appreciation and that sensitivity to our emotional state gives us more data points. And again, back to that point of this painting, it's more dots that form ultimately a higher resolution image. like we did of the old If were speaking to each other 10 years ago, your camera would be rubbish and we'd be able to see. But now you've got high resolution because there's more dots in there. And it's the same thing with our emotions. If we can colour that and add detail with the higher resolution image, that's what we can do. Stop filming on the potato, essentially. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Emotional Awareness and Growth
00:31:29
Speaker
So with that in in mind then, would it be a useful exercise to, you know, i've so so I've recently started taking up a bit more on the journaling side and I know this gets, you know, peddled ah as well like, you know, you must journal, but doing it the right ways is really, I've found pretty beneficial to me.
00:31:46
Speaker
ah acknowledging as you're going through your day to day where those emotions come in and just make a note of it, would you say that's a good thing to do? Yeah, absolutely. there It's basically, can you generate some awareness over what's happening? and can you Can you catch them in the flow? and um The first thing I try and get, or the first exercise that I ah do as my clients, once I've taught them kind of those fine five primary emotions, and by the way, every other emotion is like a combination of those or a different intensity, so it rages 100% of anger, that kind of thing. um The first thing I do with them, the first exercise I get them to do is simply stop five times a day and just go, which of those five am I feeling right now?
00:32:30
Speaker
it has to be one of those five and it makes you sit there, get to know the physiological symptoms of it and go, huh, okay, I didn't realize it, but I'm feeling sadness right now. That's interesting. And that's it. There's no attaching to it. There's no attaching a story to it, but it's kind of like, a hey, that's interesting.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, just acknowledging the feeling. I can't remember who I... Oh, it was them Andrew Shaw, had on the podcast. And I don't feel familiar with his his work at all. You may have seen his videos. of He's like normally typing at a computer and then he kind of turns to face you and he's... Yeah, he's an emotional, talented coach essentially. and And we were talking about this this idea of dysregulation. So he used that term quite a lot. So being dysregulated, you know, I was going to ask you what what that means to you really, but he was talking more about
00:33:22
Speaker
not just you're not turning the dial off you're not trying to push those feelings away and for a lot of listeners this is going to be this is the point where you either lose a lot of listeners or you don't and the people who are kind of a bit more open-minded they kind of stay the course those who I think tend to I want to say shy away because everyone has their own reasons for doing it but I feel like this sort of stuff is where you get a big divide in people and go and ask, you know, feelings, opinions that i I don't like, I don't want to know and some that go actually, you know, kind of could lean into this a bit more.
00:33:55
Speaker
But he's talking about not just feeling your emotions, but he said, you know, really do feel them. So you're not, again, not attaching a story to it. You're just acknowledging how you feel in a specific moment, whether it's yeah joy, anger or whatever you said it was. um But just having that awareness and going, this is how I feel. And just that's it. Write it down or move on. Not going, oh, I shouldn't feel like this or I should feel in a particular way, which I think is is quite an easy trap to fall into.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this story. I can't remember which of his books it was in, but he um he spoke about this firefighter who burst into a burning room with his team as a veteran firefighter into, I don't know, 1,000, 10,000, 100. I don't know how many fires.
00:34:41
Speaker
but he got in there he was very experienced he's with his team there was a raging inferno he came to his kitchen and something felt off and he ran through his checklist in his mind about like okay well i can see this i can see that i've run through this and everything like by that checklist is safe but there's something that's different and he felt this kind of dread in his stomach fear right he felt that fear And he got his team, he got out, as the last guy crossed the threshold, the entire floor collapsed. And if they'd stayed within it, they would have been buried alive and burnt alive. What he did is pay attention to his emotions. And there's a study through and the Singapore army that basically assessed how effective leaders were and compared that to their emotional intelligence. It's kind of obvious when you think about it,
00:35:34
Speaker
but the more effective leaders have better emotional intelligence. Now, and that's because you can see what's happening in other people and you can see what's happening in yourself. You've got more data points to draw from. I was just coaching this guy before this call, who is, I think he's a software engineer. And so he's very analytical. He's very mechanically minded. He's got an amazing gift for many, many things, but this emotional stuff was new to him.
00:35:58
Speaker
And he was just saying, oh, I get it now. It's the resolution. I've got a better and resolution image to aim with. I can see more clearly. It's almost like you've got another dimension when you can see your emotions clearly. So it's not just you've got your x-axis, you've got your y-axis, and you can plot your points in the graph more clearly. So it really can be a superpower. and The theories, and I was like this, like As in in the military, I had to push through, it I had to shut down my emotions for a long time. The fear is that when we learn emotional awareness, that we give in to them, and it's completely the opposite. When we learn emotional awareness, we stop being pushed around by emotions.
00:36:43
Speaker
we can see them clearly because no longer am I consumed by anger because I'm not trying to suppress or repress it. I'm allowing it to be there, it burns intensely, the half-life of it is very short and then it fades away and I become balanced again. There's fMRI studies that show an emotion will last 60 to 90 seconds, any intensity, if you just pay attention to it and allow it to be there. And Freud said this but over a hundred years ago, that as soon as you turn away from your emotions, it becomes very ugly and becomes something else entirely. Our job is to simply see it for what it is. It's nothing more than the physical sensation. Now you can attach all the stories you want to it, but it's nothing more than the physical sensation.
00:37:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's very similar to what but we were talking about with Andrew and and in that sense. And um yeah, I agree. I think it's think it's important to, the more you push stuff away, the more it just kind of bubbles up. And at least in my experience, I found the same, you know, I'm not an angry person, I've never been a particularly angry person. But I do notice when if I try and repress stuff too much, I do end up getting a bit very frustrated and it's little things that, you know, just really piss me off.
00:37:58
Speaker
It's like little irritations and they just, they stack up and stack up. So um trying to avoid to get to that point is always more beneficial, I think. Yeah. I wanted to talk about- Let me jump in quickly because you mentioned dysregulation earlier and there's like a heart age, your question. The way I think of dysregulation is you um you have this window tolerance, which is how much stress you- Did you talk about window tolerance with anyone else before?
00:38:22
Speaker
Not window tolerance. We talked about allostatic load. I don't know if that's a similar principle. Yeah, there's definitely carryovers between it. So window tolerance is basically how much stress or how much challenge can I handle. And either side of that, you get kind of hyper arousal and hyper arousal. So you get overstimulated, you'll just fight or flight, or you hyperarous, you down regulate, you're very low. And it can trickle over into that shutdown I talked about before.
00:38:49
Speaker
now what we want to do when we talk about dysregulation, that you're either side of that window of tolerance, you grow by expanding your window of tolerance, by going into those moments. So you have to be dysregulated. Life would be so boring and mundane if you never dysregulated your nervous system. Like, why do you watch scary movies? Why do I go backcountry skiing or climbing? Because I enjoy being dysregulated. There's a thrill to it.
00:39:18
Speaker
and the way we grow as human beings is we experience things that dysregulate ourselves and then we learn to regulate our nervous systems and mothers do this initially for us ideally and then we learn to regulate our own nervous systems. So we grow by pushing that boundary and coming back and then pushing that boundary and coming back and that's what's so essential to not only do things that scare us and take risks, but also come back to safety and learn how to regulate yourself and your emotional self.
Commitment and Willpower
00:39:50
Speaker
okay or let's talk about goals and you we talked about goals and nested goals before but there's there's a point I didn't quite go on to which was goals as commitment. So if you are committing to a goal and this is something I've been guilty of before, I think the point at which most people stop is just the point of action. So actually they could have the plan, they can you know map out their goals and their ready to hit go and they just don't get there because they just don't start and i've heard it said many many a time with a lot of different things is if you want to do it just start like you learn along the way you don't have to have everything mapped out but i wanted to go take that one step further and and just say for these but if we consider goals as commitments let's say you wanted to get up earlier in the morning or you want to hit the gym multiple times a week
00:40:42
Speaker
what if you keep breaking those commitments to yourself let's say you want to get up at let's coin it let's say 6am you want to get up at 6am because you want to do a bit more stuff in the morning I want to get up at 6 a.m. and then day one, oh shit, I missed it. I got up at 7.30 a.m. Day two, we did the same thing. I've heard James Clear say, you should never miss two days in a row of a habit. I think it was James Clear, maybe Chris Williamson, one or two. But I wanted to just understand what the dangers are if we keep breaking these commitments to ourselves.
00:41:17
Speaker
where you form a story and your stories dictate who you become. So if I believe in the type of person who always wakes up late, I become the type of person that always wakes up late. So we can approach that from a behavioral lens and just say, well, I'm going to set 12 alarms and one of them is going to be and a bloke playing the drums in my bedroom so I cannot wake up. There's the behavioral way and it's going to say I'm going to get to bed at a certain time. i'm That's my first discipline.
00:41:42
Speaker
and I'm going to enjoy my nice bedtime routine, so I'm excited to do it." And And then we can think about, okay, well, what's really creating that behavior to begin with? And what I'd be looking at there is what story have you created along with it? What do you actually believe about this? The point that I was originally thinking about, and the reason why I lost my train of thought there, is because there's something I wanted to come back to. And have you heard of the change formula?
00:42:11
Speaker
I haven't. and Okay. So it's basically C equals brackets D times V, close brackets, plus FS. And what that means is change. So your ability to change equals your pain or discomfort times your vision plus your first step. So let's look at that waking up early.
00:42:36
Speaker
you know the first step, you set your alarm clock. You've probably got a semblance of a vision and sometimes a nice vision is enough to carry you forwards there. um You go, oh, okay, I want to be doing this kind of thing. But what's missing there is the discomfort.
00:42:52
Speaker
How can you attach paint that and make yourself not do it? So you can have this as the social pressure. You can guilt yourself into it. You can sign up to a coach who will force you to do it. You could pay the bloke playing the drums to get you up so you don't have to wait. but We're not just motivated by the carrot, we're motivated by the stick. And you have to have there multiple multiatory no There's No, there's some word there. You have to have two factors to multiply together. So you have to have a good vision, some ends of vision, but most often it's not a pain. So how can we force that pain? and and Tim Ferriss has this great idea in his, I think it's for our work week,
00:43:35
Speaker
where he talks about if you don't meet the goal that you set for yourself, you have to give some sort of and financial um deposit to a political cause that you really don't agree with. And that's enough of a motivational fact because you're not only losing money, but there's a social thing and just there's guilt in there as well. So you need to find something that really creates pain if you don't do it.
00:43:59
Speaker
It's interesting you say pain and discomfort because this is actually where we're going into next. We've heard of this idea of leaning into discomfort and it comes up, crops up time and time again. You know, Jay Oldston says, you know, get comfortable being, if you do hard hard things, you'll have an easier life. And if you do easy things, you'll have a hard life.
00:44:20
Speaker
And, you know, Ross Edgley, you know, he's said the same sort of thing, you know, you get comfortable being uncomfortable and that's a that's a good thing to do. Other people have, you know, Andrew Shaw as well as one as well, that little bit of discomfort is is good for you. He said if there's this things that are, tend to be painful, they they tend to have a, you know, obviously I'll caveat by saying you don't just go and do the most painful thing you can without any any benefit. but I learned about this idea of the anterior cingulate cortex. I think it was through, I think it was Huberman actually. Huberman probably. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely a Huberman kind of thing, isn't it? So part of the brain where you can almost train your willpower. So by doing things that you don't want to do, let's take the very classic example of like a cold shower or something like that.
00:45:10
Speaker
doing something you really don't want to do and doing it anyways, you can build that willpower muscle. You can almost train your brain and grow that sort of um ACC or MCC, wherever it was. And I ah like this idea of discomfort, linear discomfort.
00:45:28
Speaker
But it's, again, it's one of those things where there's like a fear barrier, I think, between getting to the point of discomfort and actually thinking about doing it. So when I talked before about that, breaking that commitment, it's like, OK, I will do it. I want to get into this kind of I'm going to do this cold shower in the morning.
00:45:45
Speaker
And then you get to it and it's like, oh, it's a bit cold outside. I really don't want to do that. And I, when I look at other people in the world, there are people that have had the deck massively stacked against them and they've gone on to achieve these amazing things. You know, yourself, I know you've got a personal story, which, you know, you've had some, some, some hard times as well. And then you've, you've leaned into the the discomfort of the commando training, for example.
00:46:13
Speaker
I guess it's every time I don't do something like that, I feel a bit guilty and then I think that guilt just adds the pressure on that story. We're going back to that story. I feel like I've let myself down when I go. I'm breaking this commitment. I'm not leaning into that discomfort and I feel like I'm missing out on stuff. where So this idea of discomfort, I just want to get to get to my point.
00:46:38
Speaker
How do we better lean into this idea of discomfort, doing uncomfortable things? Yeah, beautiful question. And once again, there'll be how many of your listeners going, yeah, that's me. I've been rewriting the story and I just can't change it because it's too much. so Number one, let's go back to that change formula. Can we increase the improve the vision? so Basically, the nested goal side of things, can we get clear on why this is important to you? ah so Attaching y's to things is is really important. Making one single powerful y or multiple individual y's, we can have that. um
00:47:11
Speaker
And then we can increase the pain too. Now, the mistake most people make is that it's too big a leap instantly. They've got too much ego to appreciate where they actually are now. And I say this understanding myself. When you say you hold up one of these patches of Wolverine's commando and you've got the green berry or wherever it is around my house,
00:47:34
Speaker
you've got these things that is reminders and you see these people who are doing like incredible things and you not myself but like you look out and you see Ross Edgley or you see Goggins trying to freak so I should be doing that every single day and realistically I don't think anyone would want to be in Goggins head so that's something to consider and but also let's have the humility to admit where you are now and Now, some people will sabotage themselves consistently by, um let's say, I'm going to increase my business's revenue by 10 times over the next month. Well, why don't we just focus on adding 10% first?
00:48:13
Speaker
Let's aim small. Let's be humble in this. And through doing that, you build an undeniable stack of proof that you can grow. It's about doing things simply. It's about consistently growing.
00:48:29
Speaker
There's a glamour, and there's an intensity to it, and there's ultimately a self-dooming that we perform when we set these huge goals. Let's get simple. Let's focus on the most essential thing. What's the one thing that you can change that's going to have the greatest impact to the quality of of your life and that's really key that word quality is not about improving every metric it's about getting clear on the one thing that will improve your life most so the biggest thing that i do when i start working with to clients is kill about 90% of their goals let me say which one thing if improved will make all your other goals easier or irrelevant
00:49:13
Speaker
So that could look for most people, it's genuinely improving their business output or their career or earning a bit more money because it gives them the freedom to do certain things and that helps them massively. For other people, it's working a bit less. there's There's variations in this. But what one thing can we do that improves things and then if we link back to how do we approach discomfort then your discomfort has got a goal to it and you're not just doing cold ice baths because everyone else is doing it or you feel like you should be.
00:49:44
Speaker
not doing it to conform to someone else's norm, you're doing it because each of those steps is a tiny vote towards the type of person you want to become. And that's where it becomes down to that character skill training I talked about before. so we can identify the type of person you want to become. Maybe a few that's more disciplined or maybe a few that's more committed to your goals or something like that. There's a character skill that you're trying to become. And now you can say when you're facing that shower and you go, this is a vote for the type of person that I want to become.
00:50:21
Speaker
this action now is me becoming this person. I know that by doing this, I get one step closer. and And then you see the tiny impact that that has on your on your ultimate outcome. You see maybe the business revenue doesn't go by 10%, but it does by 2%. Like, oh, that had an impact, so I can do more of that. And when we simplify our life rather than try and do all the things at once, we set ourselves up for success.
00:50:47
Speaker
proving it with the small wins. I think ah think there's this glorification of the discomfort as well. that you know when We talk about Goggins, he's a classic example and you hit the nail on the head where you wouldn't want to be in his head because he is just so reliant on and obviously not knowing him and not just from what i've what I've read about him, he's reliant on that kind of just going to those dark places and just powering through.
00:51:12
Speaker
I think Ross on the other hand is kind of, you know, I was listening to him the other day on The Without Limits with Marshall, actually, and he was talking about Gratitude being his main kind of thing. So it's a complete juxtaposition to what Gorgons is.
00:51:29
Speaker
But again it's one of these people, I think that's the, it's one of the best things and worst things about these kind of characters we see. He's so inspirational, both of them are in their own right. But you see him all the time so you think that is the bar and I like have to get there. But it is, the bar is so much love for yourself you need to kind of bring it back down and I think that's a great that's a great way of phrasing it. You need just look at those kind of very small incremental wins and then building it that stack of proof you said you know that I was at hall mosey said that stack of undeniable yeah i'm sure a lot of people have said if i think i've heard it come out of his mouth so it's a building that stack of undeniable proof of you know you are who you say you are i think is what he was saying so you know just and i think that's something i've tried to look back on as well and go actually even if i'm not quite where i want to be yet
00:52:20
Speaker
Sometimes it just takes a moment to reflect on actually what yeah what you have achieved. And you know when i when I look at imposter syndrome, and I default to that quote a lot by going, well, here's all the stack of evidence for me that says, you you think I can't do this, but actually, here's every time documented where I've shown in the past that I can do it. And I think it's just building that layer by layer, layers of paint, as I say, just building that individually.
Balancing Reflection and Action
00:52:49
Speaker
When you meditate enough, you realise that the past is nothing but a story you're telling yourself, and the future is nothing but the story you're telling yourself. This moment right now, not five minutes from now, but this moment right here, right now,
00:53:05
Speaker
you have almost total control over how you behave and if you can default to being conscious rather than unconscious you can create the outcomes that you want by simply being who you need to be in that moment so it's really like can you keep yourself on the edge of the rut and not falling into the rut of unconsciousness can you climb out over and over and over again into that conscious reality Is there something to be said for being overly conscious? I think Chris Williamson coined it, the curse of the deep thinker, where you have, you know, you you and I are very much um on the same sort of level and now we we've clearly watched the same sort of thing, absorbed the same sort of content. So I can imagine we've got similarities in and what we do.
00:53:56
Speaker
But there's also things for me where I'm like, well, I know what I should be doing. I know exactly how I need to get there. And if I'm not doing it, that's almost like another, that would go back to that guilt again, that kind of reassurance that I actually, it's just adding to that story where I'm not doing that, I'm not being that person that I want to be, even though I know exactly how to get from point A to point B. Do you think there is such things like that the curse of the deep thinker?
00:54:20
Speaker
Yeah, i I love Chris, but he's not the first person to think this. There's so many studies that show self-reflection is a gift and a curse. Now, there's a golden ratio, which is a one-to-one action to self-reflection, and that's what we want. and a few years ago. I actually posted about it this morning, weirdly. But a few years ago, I worked with a therapist. I was like taking my next edge, and honestly, there are a few things I was struggling with. And I was like, okay, can this person help me? And honestly, she was brilliant. I came away from all of these sessions thinking, I've got this thing that I understand about myself. Oh, that makes sense. And it was all these blocks like tumbling into position. And like it was
00:54:59
Speaker
Intellectually stimulating, it was emotionally very difficult and I was loving the process. And I looked at all the metrics that mattered to me in my life about four months into it and thought nothing has changed. It was just navel gazing and mental masturbation. It wasn't action.
00:55:15
Speaker
So when i'm this is the difference between a coach and a therapist, and the therapists are very important for a lot of people, but they're not coaches, because coaches work with a narrow band of people to get a specific outcome. So a sprinting coach gets that job, like gets the job done, and I coach people. to improve the quality of their lives through mastering themselves and their business. like It's very specific. A coach is there to get a specific outcome. um And that's because it's changing the actions and the behaviors associated with it. A therapist is there so you understand, so you can find your own solutions. A coach says, here are the answers. This is how you grow. Awesome.
00:55:54
Speaker
Tom Foxley. Thank you very much, man. That's yeah really insightful. There's definitely things that I've picked up on throughout the conversation, which I'm going to have a look at. And ah yeah, just kind of peeling back the layers of it and not aiming so high. I think the sort of one percent.
Conclusion and Resources
00:56:12
Speaker
I think it was one who is it said one percent better every day. I love a good quote.
00:56:15
Speaker
But it is very true. You don't have to change the world overnight. It's just building those layers and kind of starting to change that narrative. So yeah, thank you man. Really appreciate the conversation. My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. ummi um um So if anyone wants to find out more about what you do, your coaching side of things, social media, um let us know where where they where can they go.
00:56:36
Speaker
Yeah, three places ready. It depends what works best for you. First one, my podcast, I just released a, it's a daily three-ish minute podcast. The podcast itself is called The Freedom Project, but there are sub-series within that. It's called The Mental Edge, and you'll see Mental Edge in one, two, three, three to five minutes every single day with something actionable at the end so you can master that day. It's like a shot of espresso for your soul. That's the idea behind it. So you subscribe to that, hit my website up.
00:57:06
Speaker
tomfoxley.me f o x l y dot m e and and then the easiest way, and I love it when people do this because it makes it way more human when I do a podcast, is to head to my Instagram, which is just tomfoxley, shoot me a message, let me know if you enjoyed the show, let me know what your biggest takeaway was.
00:57:24
Speaker
um and I like to have conversations with people because otherwise it can be like we're in a vacuum and do you listen to podcasts like this and you think oh well that's someone who's um doing your own life and they're not having kind of real conversations with people like me, I like to have conversations with people like you. So um reach out to me there.
00:57:42
Speaker
i sort um appreciate it man thank you