MX Podcast with Dan Roberts

Welcome to the podcast + dealing with information overload

July 29, 2020 dan roberts Season 1 Episode 1
MX Podcast with Dan Roberts
Welcome to the podcast + dealing with information overload
Show Notes Transcript
  1. Welcome
  2. What is MX and why we have a podcast
  3. The world we live in
  4. Information overload 
  5. Echo chambers
  6. Finding experts
Dan Roberts, CSCS:

Let's go. Okay. Everybody so, hello. My name is Dan and I'm the host of the MX podcast. And this, my friends is episode number one. So in this episode, I'm going to share a little bit information about this new podcast, who I am and why set it up and what to expect from future episodes. Then also, I'm going to talk about today's topic because every single episode is going to have one topic. Today's topic is going to be about information and opinion overload and how we can navigate through that to really get the right information to serve and help us live a fit and athletic and healthy life. So I'm a coach and I'm also the CEO of a wellness company called the dan roberts group. Now we do lots of different things under our banner. We have a couple of workout grounds. One of them is called methodology X or MX for short. So you can probably guess where I'm going the best. So Amex is a workout for women who want to get lean fit and athletic. There's an online members club. There are group classes in numerous countries, and also we have this growing international family of certified MX instructors. Now it's going really well and it's growing all the time. So I figured I'd set up a podcast, a weekly podcast. It's going to come out every Wednesday from now on I to support these amazing women, this community of MX and also really to support anyone else who wants to get some good information about how to li ve a fit and active and happy life. And maybe you want to learn from me as well because I'm a coach and I've done it for a long time. So I've got a lot of opinions and a lot of insights to share you guys. So every episode will focus on one key topic of either personal fitness or personal wellbeing, some episodes like today's, we've very short. I'm guessing it'll be about 15 minutes max, others won't be, and I've got all kinds of guests lined up some really cool people. Um, I'm not going to be interviewing them. I'm going to be having conversations with them, focused on one topic. And that's kind of stuff I like listening to when I listen to podcasts, I love having two people debate and discuss rather than just finding out about someone's history and then plugging the book. So there's going to be none of that. It's going to be kind of, uh, people I respect and are peers in my industry. I'm just going to be chatting and hopefully you'll be entertained and also draw a lot of practical lessons from these discussions. Aside from that, I've mapped out the next couple of months, but it is still pretty unstructured. So I'm I'm not going to do multiple takes and i'm gonna record it live as it were, do one take at a time I'm I've to, to you as a client, as a friend and give you as much love and attention and information as I can. Now I'm not a presenter, which is pretty clear. I'm not trying to be a p odcaster. I'm just a coach, but this is a new way for, to sort of share my information and also to help more people. So I do hope you enjoy it. And please do give me feedback as I go a long with this. So let's start with topic o ne information and opinion o verload. And again, it is overwhelming. Jus think about YouTube. There's literally like hours and hours of content produced every second, right? And there's a new book out every day and there's opinions everywhere. It's kind of overwhelming. It really is!... How much information in terms of fitness and wellbeing, and how much information there is. So it's kind of no wonder that we kind of shut ourselvess off from it a little bit. Sometimes it's nice to be informed. And I think our brains are designed to want new information, but it's a it's too much, you know, and, and to be honest, if information was the, all we needed, we'd already be walking around with million dollar businesses and in the relationship of our dreams and would all have perfect bodies and perfect amounts asleep. And we don't, and I know that that information is out there. We can all get it. So it's not really about information. It's about applying the right information and kind of shutting out everything else, you know? So I've got three kind of key things I want to talk about today regarding navigating through this, this, information overloaded world. And one of them is like to be really mindful of the information you let seep into you. I mean, the information, the people, the stories, the content producers around you, you have to be careful because it seeps into you, If you like it or not. Let's take beauty's example. Let's say all I read was Vogue. Now, if all I ever read was Vogue, I would probably have, wow. Start thinking that female beauty is defined by how skinny, how white and how young you are, because that's how the fashion industry defines it. I know things are changing a little bit, but it's still predominantly that way. Now I know about small, true, you know, that's not true. So intellectually we can have a truth person fee, but if we're giving this narrative again and again, and again, it can kind of chip away at what we believe is true and I'll start infurtate us and we'll start changing our beliefs without realizing, you know, where most of our lives are lived on a subconscious level. And we have to be careful about the subconscious ques going on I just want talk about society a little bit, because t he way we see the world w here s ociety i s society, isn't really society isn't really t o see the world. It's just what o r sorry, let me put it differently. The way society is, isn't really t he way we see it. What we see is just a version of it b ecause life is life and world and society is beautiful, but it's v ery, very complex. And it's full of full of bubbles. Instagram, for example, that's a bubble. If you lived your life on Instagram, then you probably see the world and culture and society as predominantly full of young narcissists, you know, or, and also very left w ing as well. You know, not that that's bad, but that's how you see it. If all you did was h ang o ut on Twitter, you'd probably see the world is quite angry and opinionated, you know, and inarticulate! if you, all you did was hang out with your reading group of 18th century political philosophers, then you've probably have a different view of the world, you know. point is it's very, we have to really take this into account, even though what I'm saying is obvious. We have to realize that the world we live in is not really the world. It's the world we're looking at. Look, look at Amazon and Netflix. They recommend products to you and services and films based on what you've previously liked. Very clever machine learning going on, but that doesn't really make you grow. Does it, if you really want to grow, we have to do things which go outside of a conversation. Not, you know, if you want to go to new places and think new thoughts, we have to be willing to take risks. And this modern kind of world is tribal, postmodern tribal culture we live in doesn't really teach us that it's like one big echo chamber and we have to be conscious of that. Yeah. Now let me just reiterate that point. If you really want to grow, if you don't have an amazing body and learn the best information and optimize your living, let's say. You have to be willing to seek new views and new beliefs about your body, about fitness, about exercise. You have to get rid of the ego. You have to step out of the echo chamber. You have to not be tribal and see yourself as one particular group. You have to see yourself as an individual, a perfectly beautiful, flawed individual, and take a philosophical perspective. And that, to me, that's, that's the only way to really, really grow, to really learn and to really kind of live your best life. Now, where do we get this information from i f we want to learn how to live our best lives, w here s hould we take information from? So we've got books, we've got courses about seminars. We can do qualifications, uh, individual kind of like scientific papers. What do we choose? I mean, you can't just say pick everything because it's, again, it's too overwhelming. There's too many choices. So how do we go about this? Well, first of all, I think we have to look where you're at in terms of your own knowledge. If you are a scholar, if you are an athlete, let's say if you're an athlete and reading women's health, probably won't do it for you. I would go straight to the periodical, straight to the journals. If you're going to be in ournals, don't just read one study because the so many bias is going on. Make sure for start that If you're going to read a study, that it;s a double blind study and also probably don't read one, read loads. To save you time, read some meta analysis studies. Metanalysis studies are ones where they collate all recent papers and have a look at a general liquid, all the stats from different studies. And then they'd give you like an overview. That's kind of more useful. You don't need to be an exercise scientist, but having a slightly putting a hat on as an exercise scientist or nutritionist, just kind of make sense every so often. If you want to get that, get that kind of knowledge and make decisions like a nutritionist or make decisions like a strength conditioning coach. And this is kind of the point of this podcast. I want you to think like a trainer. I want you to think like a wellbeing Guru rather than listening to me or other people. I want you to be your own boss, and I really want this to empower you. So this podcast is going to be full of ways of you to learn how to take control of your life and take control of your f itness and your body. Now, in terms of books and courses and seminars, and even individual coaches, you have to look at the actual individual coach, look at t heir career history. So I would do anyway. A nd I would look at their philosophy. I mean, I go o n courses and I hire coaches all the time for my own development. I always look at what they've achieved, who they've worked with and what they stand for. And I don't care about, I don't look at how many followers they've got. U h, if a nything, if they've got m illions of followers, I started getting really, u m, because people, and this is a huge generalization, but I find that people who are really, really focused on their personal brand and g ot to that t end to put a lot of time into their personal branding, their PR, and they haven't always valued the o ther stuff, the knowledge. On the flip side, I've found the people. I mean, I mentor a lot of trainers and strength, coaches and stuff. And I find that some people are incredibly knowledgeable and know so much about fitness and exercise science and kinesiology, and they've helped some incredible athletes. And the just really like impressive people are so focused on the academic side and the studying and like the coach and any individual clients that they completely neglect their personal brand. And they'be got like 214 followers on Instagram or some 17 year olds or 4,000 talking about fitness. And it's fair enough because I haven't focused on it, but you as a customer has, you have to kind of appreciate that and actually think, wait a second. I need to, I need to get to the experts here, not to the most of the influences. And this is my second point. Please be careful of influences. Now they are now what they are. I see them more as entertainers and want to be celebrities see them as that. Don't see them as experts. And it's a bit of a gray area because you do get personal trainers and nutritionists who kind of market themselves as personal trainers, but really they're just looking to get their next brand deal. And you can kind of tell that by, you know, scroll through their last 20 posts. If they're all pictures of them, they cloths off holding up a product that should tell you something, you know, I'm not criticizing them, but please be aware being famous is different from being knowledgeable and being famous and different from being successful as well. But that's another story, you know, so, uh, you know, just employ a bit of critical reasoning. And also one of the things I have to say, be careful, it's more about fitness people, be careful about people, coaches, or wanabee coaches who just tell you how they train, who kind of use that platform just to inspire or, you know, they try to inspire by saying exactly how and what they do because everyone's different physiologically. We are different also mentally, we're all different just seeing someone, a good body and let's see what they do. Doesn't mean that's the right thing for you. And I know this is a coach because I am in a very fortunate position. So my private clients include very famous YouTube people. They include very famous Hollywood actors and actresses and supermodels. So I'm in that kind of entertainment world. I have been for quite a lot of years now and people who come to me tend to have quite the bodies in the first place and maybe to get amazing bodies for a particular project. So I meet these people before I start working with them with really, really good bodies. And often they really good bodies are because of genetics and because, and I should say, despite how they train and how they eat, not because of it and just by getting some basics, right. And by train them properly. I can get them from very good to amazing. And it's not because I'm a brilliant coach. It's more because they were training so badly in the first place. And some of these people a re giving advice, but Hey, I eat this diet or I t rain this way and it's just really bad, but theri genetics k ind o f saved t hem. So please be wary about just copying what other people do directly and be wary about, experts or influencers or trainers, whatever you want to call them people out there who only advertise knowledge on what works for them, because trust me, we're all different. A nd this kind of links m e t o my final point of today's little episode, which i s to apply critical reasoning. Now If i was going to define critical reasoning. I will Google Wikipedia, w hich I just did. Let me read it out. Let me just l og on i t. The Ability to actively and skillfully conceptualize analyze question and evaluate ideas and beliefs. Critical reasoning is the opposite of dogma. And remember that critical reasoning is the opposite of dogma. Now, unfortunately, the wellbeing industry, nutrition, a lot of nutrition and also exercise is full of dogma. I'm not being negative. It's just a fact the way to navigate through that is to employ critical reasoning at every single point. When you hire someone, when you read something, when you read a paper, when anyone gives you advice, think to yourself, okay, why are they giving me advice first? Okay, it's an ulterior motive. Or sometimes it might not be negative, but might not be conscious. But sometimes people say things just to make them feel good as opposed to being egoless rather than helping other people. So please do employ critical reasoning at all times. Now I've got one thing I want to sort of finish on. I finished coach for a long time. I've done 25,000 hours a on coaching. So I think I'm talking from some of would say, when I say they're getting fit, active, athletic, healthy, and all kinds of positive change is possible. I see on a daily basis, and it's all possible down to the decisions we make. It's not about our bodies. It's about our brains, you know, and I think as you guys are going with this podcast, you'll see it's about the decisions you make, which really makes a difference to your body, your beliefs, which we're going to talk about on our next episode next Wednesday is a big part of that. Uh, and then obviously applying the right kind of knowledge so we train smart and train hard, and we eat well. And we, we start living a life which really, really makes sense and is full of kind of joy and playfulness and, is built from certain key principles. This is all the things I'm going to be talking about in future episodes. So I do hope you join me, obviously, as you can probably guess I'm very new to podcasting. I've never done this before. I just pressed record 15 minutes ago and I don't know how long we're in. I think we're around about 15 minutes in, I'm going to be doing this. I'm going to be recording one every Wednesday morning and I'm going to put it out every Wednesday night to keep it fresh. If you have any feedback or you want me to, uh, any guests you particularly want me to have on, there's a form on my website, just look at at podcasts. And if you go to www.danrobertsgroup. com, you can find the show notes of every episode. You can find a form to get feedback. And, um, I think you need to also find about Methodology X(MX) workout. If you want to find out about that by that, you can do that. And, um, yeah. So trying to say, thank you for listening to me. I appreciate it. And hopefully you enjoy this journey and you get to learn a lot from this podcast. So goodbye, and have a lovely day.