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Show Outline
Brian Grasso is an amazing guy.
He’s one of the most passionate and caring human beings I’ve ever met, both in the fitness industry, as well as outside of it.
In this interview, we cover the following:
How Brian got into the fitness industry, and why he started the IYCA
Why Brian created the Mindset Performance Institute, and his professional goals within the organization
Why mindset is important to Brian, and there’s a lot more to it then Eastern philosophy or metaphysics
THE foundational principles you need to have a quality, success-driven mindset
The biggest mistakes you’re making with regards to your mindset (including practical examples and analogies!)
Why mindset may be the missing link in both the personal training and sports performance fields
Links Mentioned
Mindset Performance Institute
Brian Grass on Facebook
Q&A
Questions? Comments?
Leave ‘em below and I’ll do my best to have either myself or Lee answer them!
Full Transcript
Hey, everyone, welcome to “In the Trenches Fitness.” I am your host, Mike Robertson, and I’m joined on the line today by Brian Grasso.
Now, I was going to do the standard, pre-canned bio, but if you guys know anything about Brian, that probably just isn’t going to work for you guys. So BG, I just wanted to say, first off, thanks for coming on the show. Could you just tell everybody a little bit about yourself?
Brian: Yeah, man, thanks for having me first of all, Mike. I suppose if I were to keep it short, I spent 19 years in the trenches. I love that your show is called “In the Trenches.”
I started off working with high-end, Olympic champion, professional, national team athletes from all over the world, and that was a huge awakening for me. You graduate college and you’ve got a lot of knowledge and you’ve got a lot of ambition, and you’re kind of ready to turn it loose until you start working with people at that level, and you realize exactly how much you don’t know.
What I don’t know became a philosophy my entire career. I refuse to ever call myself an expert or anything along those lines. Not because I didn’t like to tag, but because I wanted to keep myself always gunning to find more information.
All of that led me to founding the IYCA in 2002, which went on to become one of the largest certification bodies in the entire industry. I sold that in 2011, took a brief hiatus from the industry, and now I’m back with the Mindset Performance Institute.
Which, by the way, is exactly the quantification of what I don’t know. I had to come to realize how much Mindset was the key to everything in fitness and sport, and that’s why I’ve launched what I’m doing now.
Mike: That’s awesome, man. That’s awesome.
You kind of alluded to this, but you started in the youth training world, but you’ve since moved on to focus on other passions and pursuits. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you’re currently working on, and what led you down that path?
Brian: Yeah, I love that question. Because it’s like when I look at my life and my career, Mike, I realize that nothing is in isolation at all. What are the causative factors? Well, they’re all causative factors, and that’s why the whole journey aspect is important.
I got introduced to the topic of neuroplasticity and neuroscience really early on in my career. As I started working with kids and I started to investigate the chronological changes that happened, the adaptations that happened, it took me along this amazing journey about neuroplasticity, understanding how much the brain changes itself, why it does that, which stimulus’ affect it, and what that means from a performance or fitness, or even a behavioral, standpoint.
That above and beyond anything else, Mike, is what fascinated me about what I was doing with the IYCA. When I sold the company, I left the industry just temporarily. It was not on bad terms. I wanted to see a bit more of the world from different eyes and a different perspective.
I guess I’d always knew I’d come back to the whole reality of the brain and the mind. What exactly the brain needs to understand or does understand, what it does do, what it doesn’t do. How we can influence, how it gets influenced by itself, all from a behavioral standpoint.
When you’re looking at fitness, fitness business or performance success, what you’re isolating are behaviors. That’s it. That’s all. Behaviors, if you go one ladder up or one rung up, is all about the brain. What is the brain asking the body, the mind, and the thoughts to do? Those are the actions we carry out.
I investigated a lot, kept my mouth shut, and listened a lot, and learned a lot. I established the Mindset Performance Institute because, quite frankly, I think that’s exactly where we need to go next.
Mike: Okay. So that kind of leads me right into the next question which is what is the Mindset Performance Institute?
What drove you to say “Hey, this is something I’m this passionate about, and I really want to get to the next level?”
Brian: MPI, Mindset Performance Institute. I guess the bulk of my experience is in creating educational opportunities for fitness and sport training pros. I enjoy the process. I really like the aspect of building a team, people who know more than I do about certain aspects of what we’ll be teaching.
So probably about 18 months ago, I conceived the idea and spent a very relaxed, deliberate amount of I’d say 12 to 14 months bringing it into reality, because I didn’t want to hurry it. But MPI is a certification entity. We have Certified Mindset Specialist Level 1. We have Certified Mindset Practitioner Level 2.
Those are the things we offer right now from an educational basis. Oddly, Mike, about 80% of our current students worldwide are fitness pros and sport-turning pros. But the remaining 20%, if you can believe this, are nurses, chiropractors, law enforcement officers, military personnel.
We’re actually starting to get a huge amount of requests for information in the law enforcement community simply because the more we understand the way the brain works from the unconscious through to the conscious, how it affects behaviors, the better we can equip officers, for example, to make decisions on the spot, in the immediacy, that are safe and more predictable for all.
That’s what MPI is. If I were to answer the second part of the question, because I love your questions by the way, here’s the way I always kind of scheme it out in my brain. We became exercise specialists. We became training and programming specialists. We became nutritional specialists, and somewhere along that continuum, became assessment specialists.
All of those are absolutely required. There’s no part of that that can be missing from a fitness pro or a sport-turning pro being the best they need to be for the clients that they have who are paying them great money for results.
The problem is that all four of those factors hinge on the mindset. It all hinges on your brain. So think about how many clients we’ve had that we knock heads with. Maybe not ostensibly, but we grow frustrated by them because we give them this, and they won’t do it.
There are millions of people like that. But then if you reach outside this industry, Mike, you know in Canada and the US the population of both countries that are active has not increased nor decreased in 25 years. So there’s been no movement on how many people are actually moving. As a matter of fact, since 1980, the worldwide obesity population has doubled.
So aside from all of the things I’ve said, this is one of the things I want to burn into the minds of every fitness pro watching this, no pun intended. We are preaching to the already converted. That’s what we’re doing a great job of. We’re preaching to the people who have already made the step towards fitness. But there are millions upon millions upon millions of people who have not yet made that step.
I would like the MPI program to assist that entire spectrum, including the people who haven’t come to us yet. They haven’t come to us because they’re not ready up here. No amount of marketing or training knowledge or nutritional knowledge is going to get them in the door. But that’s one demographic amongst the rest that I’d love to help us all service better.
Mike: That’s such an awesome answer. I always think about if you’ve been in the fitness industry long enough, right? So you know that there’s always that person at a cocktail party or at a dinner. You meet them, “Oh, you’re in the fitness industry, will you write me a workout?” Or my wife’s a dietitian, “Will you write me a diet?”
We all know those meal plans, the arbitrary training programs, they never work, right?
It’s like you said, there’s the mindset element. There’s the element of somebody who’s truly ready to change and make progress or strides or whatever, and something that my wife does a lot of now with her coaching practice. Diet is not just giving a someone a meal plan anymore. There are much more evolved coaching practices.
You’re trying to figure out “What drives this person? Why do they really want to lose weight or build muscle?”
It’s a much more thought-out and a much more individualized approach, I think.
Brian: You hit all the hot spots there. I couldn’t agree with you more. But I’ll keep my comment there brief because I’m sure you have more questions, we’re going to talk about at all.
But yes, I could not agree with you and your wife more. I mean, that’s brilliant stuff you just said.
Mike: Awesome, thank you.
So let’s talk about the whole concept of the mindset, right? Because you and I we could sit here, and we could have a beer or a cup of coffee and we’d agree pretty much with 98% of what the other person had to say.
Brian: Yes.
Mike: But there are going to people that listen to this and they say, “Well, you know, this mindset, it’s a bunch of hooey or it’s very Eastern-influenced,” or whatever, right?
Why do you feel Mindset is important? You kind of already alluded to it a little bit, but just, why is it important to you?
Brian: Great question. I think that it’s always . . . I’m always conscious of how we define things, for example. What I mean by that is when we talk about Eastern influence often the terminology we come to is spirituality or metaphysical and that sort of thing.
I think we have to be very careful with how it’s all defined on a board. I mean that to say I think parts of spirituality and metaphysics are also absolute hooey. It’s so far to the right. I don’t even know how to spell half the things they’re talking about. It’s not my job to belittle that. I just don’t happen to think it has a place, necessarily.
But the interesting thing is that science also sits in a lot of grey areas sometimes. Dr. Mike T. Nelson co-wrote the level one curriculum with me. He’s a PhD, as scientific as it gets. But even he talks about the reality that science has limits. That the best part of science is not trying to ascertain what’s true, but trying to ascertain what isn’t, so that we eventually can develop a thesis or hypothesis that allows us to see what’s true.
But even then, it’s what we know is true right now versus what could be true in 20 years. So I think that the spiritualists tend to make fun of the scientists, and the scientists make fun of the spiritualists. But really, it’s all important.
God, that sounds like such a sales job, but it’s all involved with MPI, and that’s the reason for it. It’s all necessary.
Dr. Mike T. Nelson wrote half our curriculum. It is the hard science of neuroplasticity, social neuroscience. He shows FMRIs, how memory is fallible, how much of our lives are based on what we think happened. But in fact, as much as 95% of our memory is complete garbage. It’s more of an illusion of our perception now than it is of actualities in the past.
So I mean, yeah, Dr. Mike T. Nelson has done a huge job on the scientific relevance of all that. But then, where does my curriculum fit in? My wife, Carrie Campbell, she co-wrote it as well. She’s a licensed counselor, a 20-year veteran as a licensed counselor.
I worked as a coach with, again, high-end personnel in the Olympic realm, the world championship realm, and as low as kids as young as four. So I’ve seen the entire spectrum.
What I know to be true about myself is I’m a coach. Meaning I’m a communicator. Inside of MPI, we actually define spirituality. We define it as a personal journey to know yourself. That’s the only way we define spirituality.
Now, why is mindset important then, Mike? Well, if you don’t know yourself, you don’t understand what’s driving your behaviors.
Why do you react so harshly when someone says “spirituality?”
Why do you react so harshly when someone says “science?”
Why do you get so cynical about the clients who don’t just put in the work?
Why do you get so aggravated with the clients who don’t eat what you told them to eat?
If you don’t understand what’s driving your behaviors and your reactions, how exactly are you supposed to be an optimal communicator and coach for other people? That, to me, is why mindset is so critical.
Has it been influenced by Eastern philosophy? Sure.
And metaphysics? Yeah.
Is it based on cold hard science? Absolutely. Irrefutable, cold hard science.
Does it have elements of spirituality? Absolutely. Because again, every relationship is spiritual.
Every relationship is you not being delusional or blind about your own causes and actions and behaviors. So you’re not blind to that person’s causes and actions and behaviors as well. It all matters and we tried our best to put it all in in a seamless way that made sense.
Mike: That’s an awesome answer. I love that. Again, you’re absolutely right. You see so many people that it’s just black or white, right? It’s Western. It’s Eastern. It’s hooey or whatever.
But you’re absolutely right. More often than not, it’s that balance of the science and the art of it all, right? When it all comes to together.
Brian: I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I coined a phrase years ago. And in retrospect, I probably didn’t coin it at all. I just thought I did at the time. But I used to write down everywhere “Training is the science, but coaching is the art.”
That’s the key. Dr. Mike T. Nelson and I talked a long time, seven months, before we built even one word of this curriculum. All we kept saying to ourselves is, “Right now, all of the behavioral modification, mindset, brain-based courses available to fit pros are very thick scientific, they’re very brain chemistry.” And that’s lovely. I have no problem with that. That’s beautiful stuff.
On the opposite side, the other courses are very motivational, “Rah, rah, vision boards. Everybody can do it.”
Here’s what we did. We’re in the middle, we’re the coaching model. Because all of that, all of the brain science and stuff, great. How do you translate it on a Tuesday morning to a client so it matters to her? That’s our job as far as we can see at MPI.
All of the “Hoorah” stuff? Excellent. But would it be interesting? Did you know that about 75% or so of the population doesn’t actually respond to that kind of motivation internally?
We all love it when people are on stage and jumping around and we’re all “We feel great” until we go home. Then the physiologic adaptation dies, and we’re left right where we were.
So MPI is in the middle. We show you how to take the science and make it practical and not just reach for the common motivational tools that we all use, how to make it different based on who’s in front of you.
Mike: Awesome answer, and that kind of leads right into my next question. If I were asking you, what are the foundational principles to have a quality, success-driven mindset?
Brian: Great question. I get asked that one a lot. I like that question so much because here’s where I get to take it out of hooey and make it real, okay?
So we’ve identified the two major foundational realities of having a good, quality, success-driven mindset. Number one is fixed versus dynamic. That’s it, that’s all.
These two foundation points, by the way, build on each other. So everything I’m about to say is going to bleed into the second point. I felt that was kind of an important preamble.
People who say, “I can’t do this.” People who say, “It doesn’t matter what Mike Robertson’s training program is, I’m not going to succeed.” People who say, “It doesn’t matter if Mike Robertson himself came to my facility and told me how to run my business, I’m never going to make a million dollars in a year.” People who say, “I’m never going to find true love. I’m never going to be wealthy.”
All those things? That is called a fixed mindset. You have, spiritualistically, you’ve built labels, conclusions and definitions, all of which form a nice, tidy box around you. That box is a containable source. You stay contained within it.
Scientifically, you have built legitimate, physical, neural pathways, all of which are engrained on your brain. They are there in real time and real space that tell a story, neurologically, of what you believe your capacities are. If you have a fixed mindset, a conclusive mindset, “This is all life is, this is all it will ever be,” that’s not success-driven.
A dynamic mindset, spiritualistically, is you release yourself to understanding all things are possible, that success is not a measure of finding ways to be successful so much as it’s a measure of releasing yourself and the reasons you’re not now.
We have natural brakes on in our mindset. We release those, everything changes.
Scientifically, a dynamic mindset says that whatever neural pathways have been ingrained by experience, by influence, all those things I remember, I’m smart enough to know that all of that is at least part perception and therefore illusion, which means I really can start today. As opposed to use my past to predict my future. That’s foundational principle number one.
Dynamic mindsets are success-driven, fixed or not.
Now, let’s move that into the second foundational principle because it builds. I talked about it earlier, Mike, regarding that motivational “hoorah” stuff. On the surface, we can all get behind that. When, I don’t know, Brian Grasso was on stage whipping the audience into a frenzy, there’s a certain energy that goes through that room, and people stand up when they applaud. And they pump their fists, and they laugh, and they smile at each other, and they feel really good. And there’s a massive physiological adaptation that happens at that moment.
We make this mistake. “I believe I can do this. I believe I can. I believe I can do this.”
Here’s the problem. We have two brains. One’s conscious. One’s unconscious, and that’s the second foundational principle. Just because we believe it consciously in a moment, does not mean our unconscious is buying that story.
The more we try to “hoorah” and motivate ourselves into this frenzy of “I can, I can, I can,” the more we create this dissonance, this cognitive emotional dissonance because your unconscious story is saying “No, dude. No, I don’t believe that’s possible.”
We all have experienced that. That void, that feeling inside where like you come home from a conference, you get off the phone with your mentor, something like that. You’re like “I can do this, man. This is a time I can do it.”
But then, it hits. That kind of vacuum inside where it starts to slowly enter this voice of negativity, enter this voice of uncertainty. That’s when the dissonant grows.
So the second foundational principle of developing a good quality mindset is understanding there is a massive gap between conscious and unconscious, and what science has irrefutably shown us is that the vast majority of our actions and habits and behaviors every single day are being driven from our unconscious mind.
Somebody who is having trouble with nutrition, I’m sure your wife can relate to this. I will put an apple in my right hand and a chocolate bar in my left hand. Everybody knows what’s the “right choice,” but they keep reaching for the chocolate bar.
It’s not because they’re dumb. This is my least favorite part, by the way, of the fitness industry. These people are not lazy. They do not lack willpower. That’s what we always . . . it’s not.
They have an in . . . or unsuccessful, inappropriate story neurologically in their unconscious brain. Get into that, change that story, everything else changes.
We spend too much time at the conscious level trying to adapt behaviors. It’s not a sustainable success form. It’s immediate, but it’s not sustainable. Those are the two foundational steps.
Mike: Okay, first off, I hope everybody that’s listening, reading, however you’re gonna get this information, really takes note of all that, because I mean I like to think I’ve been fairly successful over the course of my life.
But even still, we all have that moment or that kind of, like you said, those points where we’re up really high and “I can do this, I can do this,” but then, something brings us back down, right? It doesn’t matter how successful you are, I think every person deals with that at some point in time. So that’s a fantastic answer.
Let’s look at the flip side. What are the biggest mistakes people make when considering what mindset means?
Brian: Great question, man. The first mistake is one we’ve touched on, that we assume it to be conscious, okay? “Set goals,” we’re told. I am the biggest believer and subscriber in the world of setting goals.
I know it’s a really ridiculous analogy, Mike, but it works for me, so hopefully, it works for your listeners right now. Pretend that Mike Robertson himself is showing you how to conduct your business, how to create training programs, how to do optimal mobility programs. How to do everything Mike Robertson is just one of the best in the world at, right? And he’s showing it to me.
Well, what Mike Robertson is giving me is what I’m qualifying as the “perfect seed.” He’s giving me the most perfect, special seed. I want to pet it and call it “George.” It’s the most perfect seed possible, right? Guaranteed to grow because Mike Robertson gave me this. This is the stuff he uses. He uses it, so it’s going to work, a perfect seed.
Where are you planting it? That’s the limiting factor.
If you’re planting it in a mindset that is not nearly the dynamic mindset that Mike Robertson has, then Mike Robertson himself can do the work for you, it’s not going to work. That’s the biggest mistake we make. We think we can out goal-set unsuccessful mindsets, and we can’t.
So I always phrase it this way. It’s, you know, the common Napoleon Hill. He interviewed Carnegie and all the big-time financial moguls. I’ve read that book “Think and Grow Rich” 16 times. I’m the first one to admit the first ten times I read it, not only didn’t it help me, it frustrated me. It made me angry at myself. It made me like, “God, I don’t do any of this stuff.” It hit me in a bad way.
It took the 11th time for me to realize that the first ten times, my mindset was not prepared to receive all that stuff. I was developing this inferiority to these people “I’ll never be as good as them.”
That’s one of the biggest mistakes we make. We stay so conscious, and we try to learn from the world’s greatest, but unless we have the intrinsics that they have, their information is not going to help us. As a matter of fact, it could hurt us.
So we need to reconcile with that. The interesting thing is as much as mindset is huge and it’s a vast topic, the way to change it is actually lickety-split easy. Believe it or not. But that’s the biggest mistake.
We think it’s this conscious thing. Where all we’ve got to do is do vision boards. How many vision boards have you made in your life? I’ve made 2,000, and then ripped them down three days later because they never seem to work.
It’s not vision boards. It’s not goal-setting. There’s a deeper layer. It’s the soil you’re planting all that stuff in. If you don’t get in there, none of it grows.
Mike: Fantastic analogy. Something that you said . . . you didn’t say it, but you kind of implied it, is the first ten times you read “Think and Grow Rich,” you didn’t have a source of context to build from, or you didn’t have a foundation to build from, right?
Brian: Well said, yes.
Mike: The words mean things, but you can’t apply them the way that you would like. Or they don’t mean what they should at that point in time. Fantastic.
Brian: Very well put. Agreed.
Mike: I love it. So let’s take all this and build out a more practical example because I love that you’re talking about neuroplasticity and how the brain is so important with regards to changing your mindset.
Let’s start with something that we all deal with every day, right? Let’s say it’s a basketball player. They have in their mind, “I can’t make free throws.”
Shaquille O’Neal, one of the greatest scorers of all time, couldn’t make free throws. Or something that we would see in the gym, somebody that consistently eats poorly. Or they just think “I’m never going to squat 315 or 405, I’ll never make that weight.”
How do you start changing their mindset?
Brian: That’s a great question. We’ve beta-tested this in many venues. Carrie and myself had a clinic. We opened a brick and mortar clinic here in Montreal two years ago. That was very successful. This is online work with clients around the world.
This all ranges from . . . I mean, in the same clinic we had professional boxers to retirees who had been 35 years on schizophrenic medication that they wanted to no longer have, and young athletes, gymnasts, not world-class, but national-level gymnasts.
So we’ve seen this from a variety of places, and we’ve tested it in a variety of ways. What comes down to the greatest avenue we’ve ever seen to accomplish exactly what you just said there, okay? Is the “I will never . . . ” that you meant. “I’ll never squat 315. I’ll never shoot free throws properly.”
We call that a limiting-reflection statement, okay? So what we ask people to do is build a tabletop, a really simple exercise. If you took a piece of paper . . . I’m going to actually do this visually.
If you took a piece of paper, and you literally wrote your limiting reflection statement up here. “I will never shoot free throws well.” Then you assume because you have to assume that for a tabletop to stay erect, it needs at least three legs.
Now, this is the belief system we know to be true, the limiting reflection statement. We’re conscious of that. But there are at least three belief systems underneath it that are holding it up, that are making it true.
So what we would ask is we’d ask you to make a diagram. “I will never shoot free throws well.” Why do you think that’s true? Why do you believe that to be true?
It might take two minutes. It might take 20. But invariably, every one of our clients and customers will eventually say, “You know, the reason I think that’s true is because of this.”
Boom, there’s one table leg. “And this.” Second. “Or this.” So you can do seven or eight or nine if you want to, but we encourage you to do three because three is minimal to keep a table up and it’s not overwhelming.
Now, after you’ve done that and this, the exercise can take two minutes, 20 minutes, two days. But after you’ve done that, all we ask you to do is break the legs.
We have something in our brains that’s called “absolute truth syndrome.” What we see we think is absolutely true. What we remember, we think is absolutely true. What we think, we feel is absolutely true.
Do you know, as an example of this, in law enforcement around the United States right now, eyewitness testimony is no longer considered valid or admissible in a lot of jurisdictions regarding court cases because they’ve come to realize through social neuroscience, that what we saw probably isn’t even close to true, let alone in the ballpark!
So the reason I say that is that those table legs are not absolute truths. We’ve simply come to accept them or perceive them as absolute truths. So break them. What’s a counter statement that disagrees with that?
Now, if you do that, and you practice it a couple times every day for three, four, five, six days, all of a sudden, that tabletop, “I won’t shoot free throws properly,” starts to fall because your subconscious brain picks up the notion it’s being held up by irrelevance.
I don’t know if that answer was too long, but that’s the major exercise we use to help people get into a positive mindset right away related to a specific limiting reflection they have.
Mike: That’s awesome. Can I take it one step further, though?
Brian: Please.
Mike: Okay. So let’s just take the analogy of “I’ll never shoot free throws well,” right? Let’s say one of this person’s thought processes is “I have bad technique.” How do you go about fixing that in their mindset?
Brian: I’d ask them to demonstrate to me absolutely proof that their technique is bad. That’d be my first. I rule everything into absolute truth. How do you know it’s bad? Why is it bad? What makes it bad? Break the leg. Break the belief system.
Who am I thinking of? Los Angeles Lakers, Michael Cooper. Weirdest shooter of all time, but a brilliant percentage. Is there a bad technique or is there just technique? That’s where I’d go next.
I’d break the absolute truth that I have bad technique. “No, you throw a ball exactly the way you should. Just right now, it’s not going in the net.”
Mike: Right. Okay, that’s fantastic and that really hit home because I grew up playing basketball. I grew up in Indiana. A guy like Reggie Miller, right?
Even if you’re not a basketball fan, I’ll give you the short story. Arguably everything that you know about technique, he did incorrectly, yet was one of the greatest shooters of all time.
Brian: Yep. That’s a more relevant example than Michael Cooper from 4,000 years ago.
Mike: I grew up in the ’80s, so I remember Michael Cooper, but I love it. I love it. Okay, BG, you’ve been great so far, but I want to ask you a couple tough questions because I think people always enjoy this kind of stuff.
Brian: Sure.
Mike: First of all, what is one mistake you made along the way, and how have you learned from it going forward?
Brian: One mistake I made along the way was giving up myself rather than giving of myself. I felt as though customer service, for example, in a very family-friendly, family-oriented business required all hands on deck 24 hours a day and it burnt me out terribly.
I’ve learned, Mike, I hate the term “velvet rope.” It comes off as just too pretentious to me, but my health, my family, in that order, are my priorities in life. Everything else is a distant second.
So I’ve learned the amazing balance of being a father, a husband who wants to be good at both those things, not just be both of those things, but how to really over-service people without giving up yourself.
I think that’s a philosophical way of conducting one’s life. To be in the service of others is a philosophy that doesn’t require systems. Because when it’s your philosophy, you figure it out.
But that is a huge mistake I would ask every entrepreneur to really check and balance themselves on. Because to me, Mike, that might not have been like, “Wow, that’s a big one.” But it’s the most important one.
Mike: Right. I can totally relate because I’m in much the same boat. For me, again, and I think some people may take it as weird that you say your health and your family.
But most people don’t understand, if you don’t take care of yourself first, what kind of example are you going to provide? How are you going to be able to provide for your family? So fantastic answer, I love it.
Here’s another one. If the new and improved Brian Grasso could alter the space-time continuum and give the old Brian Grasso one piece of advice, what would it be?
Brian: Man, I want to say “nothing,” because I believe that journeys happen for a reason. But that’s a kind of flighty answer, isn’t it?
I happen to believe that everything I’ve experienced to date. I don’t believe in the nuance that it was supposed to happen. I’m not that kind of space age cosmic about it. But I believe it did happen to land me where I am now. That allows me to look at am I content with where I am now? If so, I probably wouldn’t bother changing the space-time continuum.
But if I could go back, I might expedite this. This might be flighty, Mike. I have learned to embrace impermanence. You can read that as deaf or dying or mortality as you want to, but I don’t see it that way.
My kids, right now, are 9 and 11, and that is an impermanent state. They will soon be 12 and 10, and then one day 17 and 15. My obligation in this world is to serve at my highest capacity to those who would have me in their lives, be it customers, clients, my family, etc. I take an extra amount of time saying goodnight and saying good morning.
The things that I think a lot of people consider dribble in their day, like making dinner or eating dinner with the family, I take great stock in those things because I’ve embraced impermanence on a very deep level. If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to do that at a much earlier age.
Mike: Awesome answer. Okay, a few quick questions before we wrap up and I just call this our lightning round, right? So just a couple quick answers, and we’ll be off.
When you think of success, because we’ve talked about success and mindset and all this stuff, who immediately comes to mind for you?
Brian: Cuba Gooding Jr. in “Jerry Maguire.” I can’t remember his character’s name right now, but he comes to mind. He had the quan. Look, success is not material. I don’t mean that in that you have flashy cars and big houses. Success is fleeting.
To me, success is the quan. It’s my family. It’s my health. It’s the money. It’s the opportunity to change lives. It’s the experience of living. That is success. Cuba Gooding did it as good as anybody else in that movie.
Mike: Awesome. Love it. What is the best book you’ve read recently?
Brian:. It’s called “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Rules Your World.” It changed my life. That book changed my life in so many ways.
Mike: Awesome. So that’s going to be added to the 50 books I have parked next to my bed waiting to be read. “Subliminal.” All right.
If you could briefly summarize what you want your legacy to be, how would you describe it in one sentence?
Brian: To leave this world in a better state than it was when I found it. That’s it. That’s all. That means my kids and the industry I worked within is that. Did I build something that existed beyond me? If so, beautiful.
Mike: I love it, awesome.
All right, BG. You’ve been awesome, my man. Thanks so much for your time. Where can my listeners find out more about you and the Mindset Performance Institute or any other projects you’re working on?
Brian: Yeah, come to mindsetperformanceinstitute.com or just find me on Facebook. I actually like talking to people on Facebook. I’m not a Facebook snot. So Facebook.com/BrianGrasso. Just look me up.
Mike: Very cool. Brian, again, thanks so much for coming on the show. To everyone listening in, I hope you enjoyed it. I know there’s tons of cool stuff. I would definitely listen to this one more than once because there are some really valuable nuggets in there. Brian, thanks again for your time, man. I really appreciate it.
Brian: Thank you, brother. My honor.
Mike: All right everybody thanks. Take care and we’ll be back in a couple weeks with our next episode.
The post Ep. 42 – In the Trenches with Brian Grasso appeared first on Robertson Training Systems.