Part 4: Season 6 Wrap Up

In anticipation of season seven of 'The Business of Endurance' podcast, the Charlie Reading and Claire Fudge explore recurring themes from past episodes. They delve into the concept of marginal gains in both nutrition and business, referencing specific examples like athletes' performance and business strategies. The importance of goal setting is discussed, highlighting its impact across different life areas. Additionally, they touch on mental resilience and behaviour change, relating it to both nutrition and business practices. The episode closes with information on available resources, workshops, and downloadables to help listeners enhance their endurance in various aspects of life.

Highlights:

• Exploring Marginal Gains
• Marginal Gains in Business
• The Power of Goal Setting
• Mental Resilience in Nutrition
• Building Resilience in Business

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Chapters

• 0:04 Marginal Gains and Goal Setting
• 11:44 Behavior Change and Resilience Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:04

I'm Charlie Redding and I'm Claire Fudge.

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome to the Business of Endurance. We have come to the end of season six of the podcast and I think it's been a brilliant, brilliant season of episodes. We've had some incredible guests on there and what I'd love to do is spend a bit of time just going through and looking at the soundbites and the key takeaways from each of those episodes. Welcome back to the Business of Endurance. Really excited that season seven of the Business of Endurance podcast will be live from next week. But while we wait we wanted to just dissect some of the common themes that come up.

Speaker 1: 0:57

We've done over 100 podcasts so far with amazing guests and there seems to be common recurring themes that come up that we thought we'd just spend a little bit of time looking back at the last season, looking forward to the next season, but thinking how are these common themes playing out in the world of nutrition and how are they playing out in the world of business? So one of the most common topics we end up talking about claire is marginal gains, looking for those little gains and little performance boosters. And I know when we were chatting to indie Lee she was doing that through doing her own bike mechanics and really looking at how she could improve everything that she did. How do you see marginal gains playing out in the world of nutrition? How do you help your clients through marginal gains?

Speaker 2: 1:38

I think it's really interesting in the world of sport, isn't it? When you see athletes putting that into play? One of the biggest mistakes that I, when you see athletes putting that into place, one of the biggest mistakes I see people make, actually is that they do want these marginal gains, but they almost want that before they've laid the foundation of really good basic nutrition. So really starting to get their basic nutrition right first of all, but then really getting the cream and the icing and the cherry on top of the cake, is how I describe these marginal gains. That could be anything from helping an athlete be able to see that actually changing small things but on a really regular basis and boring as it sounds, actually makes a huge difference. That could be as much as talking about actually do certain supplements benefit them, whether we're talking about part cherry before they go to bed, so trialing something and saying, actually, what's the risk versus the benefit?

Speaker 2: 2:27

Does it work for you? They are the tiny marginal gains that they're talking about. Does collagen actually work for you if you take creatine? Does it work for you as an individual? So they're some of the marginal gains that I would certainly work through with with an athlete, but what about you from a business coaching perspective? Where do you see marginal gains happening with business people? What do you teach?

Speaker 1: 2:48

I think it's really fascinating and it applies so much to business, as it does to nutrition, as it does to sport sir clive woodward talked about it, in both sport and business, as the one percenters. And we think we see success and we see other people thriving and succeeding and we think, oh, they had this one great idea. And then you realize actually it was lots of small ideas. So, james, I just read james dyson's book invention or inventor I can't remember the exact name of it, but classic example if you see it and you think, oh, wow, he just came up with this great invention, the cyclone vacuum cleaner. What you don't realize is he created 5,000 versions of that vacuum cleaner before it actually worked. So every one of those 5,000 versions was marginally better than the previous one. He worked out 5,000 ways. It didn't work.

Speaker 1: 3:37

So I encourage all my clients to literally ask a yearly event to sit down and go okay, how can we find like literally a hundred different things, that all of it, none of which will change the world, but each little thing will make a big difference, because when you compound them all together it makes a massive difference. And, yeah, we actually take them through a process called the game of games that allows them to sit down and look at each stage of the business and I know, with a team, lots and lots of different ways that they can boost their business and it's brilliant. Ultimately, I think that approach just doing that one meeting once a year had a significant role in us increasing our business by 50% year on year, because it gave us so many little ideas and we then go off and implement them over a course of months, and again it of a few months, and again it made a massive difference. And I think in season seven of the podcast we've got we've got an incredible Ironman winning professional triathlete that's now done multiple sports. I'm going to keep it secret as to who it is, but I can see that she has benefited from looking for marginal gains through her career, whether it was before her Ironman days, during her Ironman days or now in her new sports. I think she's absolutely brilliant. So I think it's really important.

Speaker 1: 4:51

One of the other topics that comes up time and again is goal setting and the importance of goals, and I think back to last season. I think how Sebastian Bellin, after nearly being killed in that bombing in Brussels airport, how he was so determined he was like I'm going to set the goal of doing the Ironman in Kona. That had a huge impact on his recovery and everything else that has come since. How does goal setting work in the world of nutrition? Do you help clients set goals with regards to their nutrition? How do you use goal setting?

Speaker 2: 5:22

This is where I see people often making quite big mistakes, whether they're a business person and they're sporty, or whether they're a business person whether they're an athlete, they used to. Often people are very used to setting goals within business and benchmarking things and coming back and looking whether the goal that they've set out to achieve is working or not. And yet with themselves, I often see that people don't make those goals themselves, certainly when it comes to performance, nutrition and what I often see is that people either have these amazing big goals which is brilliant and that's what we're talking about doing but what they fail to do is set out small, tiny steps, like almost a little flat in a big wooden bridge across the ravine, but they haven't got those little tiny sets to get them to those big goals. So I really help people to think about a really big, exciting goal that's big enough, but then making sure that they've got very specific, realistic goals, small goals to get them to that big ultimate goal, and also coming back to then look at those small steps and that big goal and actually tweaking and changing things.

Speaker 2: 6:26

Because what I often see again is sometimes, as we move on through life and as business changes, as your training might change. But actually sometimes your goal needs to change a little bit, or sometimes your little steps need to change because they don't quite fit in with now maybe home life or business life and it's really important that they change those things along the way. And we've actually got two pathways within our framework. We've got the setting goals part, which is the beatbox smart performance pathway, and then also how do you evolve those goals, and that's through the continuous improvement implementer. So we use both of those systems to be able to help athletes and clients get to where they need to be. But, charlie, you're the person who probably taught me a lot about goal setting as well, so I know you're a big fan of it and you use a lot within your business, with your own life, to get you to some, and you've achieved some amazing goals more recently as well.

Speaker 1: 7:20

Tell us how you use it with your clients and also with yourself you've hit the nail on the head there, in that you've got to continually go back and revisit these goals. Setting goals and then just forgetting about them is no good. They say that losers have goals and winners have systems. Now, losers people that have goals doesn't. It doesn't mean that they're loser. But if you only write down the goal and then you forget about it and you have no system to actually achieve the goal, then it doesn't really count for much. But I think goal setting is so important because the top 3% of people, in pretty much any area of success, seem to write down goals. If you want to be in that top 3%, you've got to do what the top three percent do, haven't you? And I'm a big believer that you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of systems. But it's the goal gives you the motivation to go out and do the stuff, and then the system is what helps make sure that you keep coming back to it, and that's what you've just described a great system in terms of look, we're going to set this goal. These are the little things we've got to do to get to that goal, but equally regularly we've got to review that, to see whether we still have the right goal and the right steps. So that's really brilliant. And all of that applies whether it's in life, whether it's in business, whether it's in health, whether it's in relationships. And I think that's the piece that I would pull out is that when I first started goal setting, it was very much right, I'm going to set these business goals. And then I started thinking I'm going to set these goals that it's going to include some business stuff and some personal stuff, and it was only really when I worked out that actually I needed goals in what I now call the six spheres of success. So that's health, wealth, happiness, what I do, what I do in the business, what I do on the business and the relationships that I have. And now I'm very diligent about setting those goals for each of those different areas, because those are the six areas that I need to thrive on. It's very easy with goal setting to go I'm going to set this business goal and I'm going to do everything to achieve that. Oh, by the way, my marriage is broken down, or my kids, and so I'm very diligent about setting goals in down, or my kids don't, and so I'm very diligent about setting goals in in each of those different areas, and I think goal setting is really powerful in business when it gives you a really clear focus.

Speaker 1: 9:27

And one of the things that I've loved with episode one in season seven, which everyone's gonna get next week it's a father and daughter business charity movement. It's amazing and I love how really clearly defined they have set goals in the past and succeeded and now set a big, massive, scary future goal. So I think that's really brilliant because everyone in their organization knows exactly what the goal is. They have laser light focus on achieving that. That creates so much power in a business.

Speaker 1: 9:59

It's something that actually we coach under. What we call the moonshot mindset is just having that one single focus that everyone in the business knows. That is the goal. That's a great episode to start season seven with and if you remember, if we go back to the first episode of season six, we had an incredible episode with Joe De de sena and we were talking a lot about resilience and I think resilience is a word that has come up so often since that conversation with him, both on the podcast and away from it. How do you see mental resilience being a factor in the world of nutrition and how you help your clients.

Speaker 2: 10:36

That's an interesting question. I guess how I see it is because I work with sports people and athletes, who are often business professionals. They're quite good, often from a mental resilience perspective, like they learn that during training. How I see it in the world of nutrition is more through behavior change, so actually looking at people's behavior with regards to how they then are working out and putting into practice their performance nutrition. So to give you an example of what I'm talking about here, sometimes people will often say I fell back into old habits. So actually we spend a lot of time working on okay, so why is it why you're doing what you're doing? Because if you don't look at that and actually look at what sits underneath that, you're only really putting a plaster on top of what's really going on. So yes, they might have all of the knowledge, but until you look at behavior and how you might change that behavior and those habits that surround it, then often you're not going to make long-term changes because you're always going to have that habit or that behavior coming back.

Speaker 2: 11:42

So that's how I see it in the world of from a dietary perspective, from a performance nutrition perspective. It's really through looking and finding those behaviors and, let's face it, we all have those behaviors in some sense or form. But really, looking at the number one, what is that habit or what that behavior that's causing a certain effect? So whether that's that you always buy I don't know a chocolate muffin when you go into coffee shop because it looks great, okay, so why do you do that?

Speaker 2: 12:04

What's driving that apart from the fact that it's amazing, but you know all the sensors involved that we work, or I've worked very much with people on really finding out why they do what they do and usually that's actually a really exciting experience because people often don't realize why they're doing what they do but also, then, really helping people to be able to make a lifelong strategy for change from that and what I mean by that is, I guess, think of it as almost like a relapse strategy. We're all going to go back into our old habits at some point. We've been doing it for many years. So it's really two parts in my answer to resilience. It's more around for me and nutritionists around behavior change and lifelong strategy. In terms of mental resilience in business, how do you work with clients around mental resilience?

Speaker 1: 12:53

I think it's an interesting one and actually initially okay, how do you do that? But there's a lot of research at the moment that shows, and it often comes under the guise of willpower rather than resilience. But, for example, if you are given a a challenge to do, like a math challenge, let's say, those people that just go straight into the math challenge continue to try harder but longer than people that before that challenge had to sit there and stare at a biscuit, and the reason is they've used up some of that will, their willpower has drained by stopping eating that biscuit and then when it even when it applies to something completely different they are less willing to persevere with the mass challenge. There's quite a lot.

Speaker 1: 13:35

I've read a lot of books around sport performance and business performance that talk about this time and again, and I think it's just really interesting, and so for me, one of the keys to business is delegating everything except the thing that you love and the thing you're really good at, because the problem with most businesses the bigger the business gets, the more the business owner gets bogged down with the stuff that they don't like and the stuff that they're not that great at, and they spend less time doing the stuff that they're passionate about and they are genuinely brilliant at and the reason they got into that business, and that drains their willpower. So the one of the most successful strategies in business is to delegate absolutely everything except the probably the three things that you really love and you're really good at, because that way you haven't got these other, these other things, draining your resilience and and it means that you're spectacular, delivering that stuff, which ultimately usually is the profitable part of business anyway.

Speaker 1: 14:32

That's what generates the revenue. All the other stuff, all of the management and the HR and the admin that drags you down. For me, that's a great way of building resilience into your system, because you're delegating all of that stuff that really drains your resilience. And I think actually this topic is really relates to an episode that we've got in season seven. That is one of my favorite authors Like he wrote one of the best endurance books ever written in my eyes, if not the best, just brilliant and we talk a whole lot about mental resilience within that and the central governor theory and all of that kind of stuff. So that is an episode that to look out for.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Just to finish off, I've mentioned a couple of different systems within this and I know you have two. One was the game of games that we do for our clients and how we can continue to create that improvement through the business. But the other is a system actually which I didn't give the name of, but it's called the Delegate Compound. It's about getting rid of more and more of that stuff that reduces your resilience and focusing on stuff that you love. We actually have an online workshop, so it's about a three-hour workshop called Three Steps to Entrepreneurial Happiness, and we actually lead people through that. It's completely free of charge. If you go to the show notes or look at our website, then you can go through that whole workshop three steps to entrepreneurial happiness and it'll talk you through how you can use the game of gains and the delegate compound to make your business and life better. You've mentioned a couple of things within this section as well. Is there anything that you can provide the listeners that can give them access to some or any of these types of bits?

Speaker 2: 16:11

in the show notes. I will put in that link to our goal setter and also something around being able to identify your own behaviors and also some small steps to be able to think about marginal gains as well. So there'll be three things in the show notes that you'll be able to download.

Speaker 1: 16:28

So for all the listeners out there. Go to the show notes, go to download those three things from Claire, go visit the trusted team and go through the three steps to entrepreneurial happiness and next week come back to this same place to listen to the first episode of season seven of the Business of endurance. Is going to be a brilliant journey. We've got some amazing interviews lined up for you and, yeah, so if you don't already do it, it really helps us get amazing guests on if you follow the podcast or subscribe to it, whatever you want to call it, under, whatever platform it is that you listen. So please do follow, subscribe podcast. It really helps us get amazing guests on. Look out for the first one next week and, in the meantime, keep on training If you want us to keep getting amazing guests onto the Business of Endurance podcast.

Speaker 1: 17:21

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