Why Most Fitness Goals Fail | Doug Bopst on Strength & Longevity | 5 Questions

0:00Welcome to the five questions. This is the pre-interview with my guests for you to connect more deeply with the person who is actually sitting in front of me. These episodes come out the day before to my main recording to the paid subscribers over on the Compassionate Cure on Substack. These are released months later to everyone, but if you want to hear them first, head to the show notes where you will find the link to my Substack. They're bite-sized, personal, and they are backed with a ton of helpful advice, and they've slowly become my favorite part of Live Well, Be Well. Enjoy. What is the one thing that makes Doug uniquely Doug?

0:38I would say no matter how hard life gets, I always continue to persevere no matter how big the odds are against me. I love that. Growth and resistance. so this very much falls into my next question um what's been the most persistent area of resistance in your life and how did you overcome it my negative self-talk was bad for a while especially as a kid as a teenager and even into my early 20s and the way that i overcame it was literally through practice and working it just like any other muscle it was like every single day changing the way i saw myself changing the way i looked at myself it was writing down certain things about myself that I need to be true compared to what my mind was saying.

1:23But I think a lot of, and is it okay if I go like a little longer on this? Because I thought, I think, and I think with that said, one of the biggest misconceptions I believe in the personal development space is that you can just tell yourself like you're good and that you're amazing and then things will, and then automatically things will get better. I think that works to a point. But I think what really helped me is I got stuff done. Like I became successful. I stayed disciplined. I stayed motivated. I kept setting and achieving goals, which were in the direction I wanted to go, which in turn boosted my self-confidence in the way I felt about myself.

1:58I love that. You set your goals high. And when you achieve them, you know, you can get to the next level. I think that's like, I'm such a, I mean, we're going to have to talk about this in the main show, but I'm such a big believer in positive mindset to a degree because nobody naturally wakes up with a positive mindset. So it's a training process, you know? Right. Totally. And that's what I completely relate to with you. Okay. So this is quite interesting. What's the smallest change that has brought the most ease into your life? So small changes, but big impact. The smallest change I made was not saying yes to everything.

2:33I think as an entrepreneur getting started and even somebody that when you're in recovery, one of the biggest mantras is being of service, it's so easy to get caught in the trap of just saying yes, yes to helping somebody, yes to a business opportunity, yes to like traveling to LA, you know, and I think that that's great early on, like you have to like hustle and move. But I think once you get to a certain point, it becomes overwhelming. And for me, once I like made that shift and decided that I wasn't going to necessarily say yes to every opportunity, my life, you know, got dramatically better.

3:07I love that more precise on what you say yes to. Yeah. And it's like in anything, right? It's like in relationships, there's plenty of people that just go on dates just to go on dates, right? And that becomes overwhelming and people, they, they take a job just because, you know, they want fast money or they don't know if they're going to get a better opportunity moving forward. And, and, and I think that just ends up putting you into a trap where you get overwhelmed, like super quick because your life is just over consumed with so much you really you can't it's hard for you to get clear on what actually matters to you.

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5:06You're hyper aligned. So the next one, I mean, Doug, I feel like these are very aligned, these questions to you. It's what's one health change that you've made that has significantly impacted your wellbeing? I'm trying to think if I will know what you're going to say. This is something I haven't talked a lot about. I mean, I've talked about it. The one how I focused on being strong and like longevity versus like the way I looked and not to say I don't care about the way I look because I would be lying to you if I don't check myself out on a regular basis. But, you know, in my 20s, all I cared about was, you know, how many abs I had popping out of my out of my stomach or how big my biceps were, whatever.

5:48And it became like a healthy drug and addiction for me where I became addicted to vanity. And I ended up in a way kind of falling out of love with fitness because I had just made it my entire identity. And I had to make a massive shift in my 20s to get kind of realigned on that because it was just beginning to spin out of control. And when I made that shift and I made fitness part of my life and not my entire life, it was a game changer for my mental health. So I was no longer like, you know, so obsessive about what I ate. I mean, I was no longer not going out to certain events or seeing certain people because I was afraid of eating out or whatever.

6:32I wasn't like, you know, traveling on airplanes with chicken and broccoli when I wasn't like really competing for anything. It was more just because I wanted to maintain a certain physique because I felt the only way for me to be liked was to look a certain way. And that's been a change that I made years ago that has compounded over time to where I think people's weights naturally go up and down. Mine can fluctuate 10 to 15 pounds here and there. And I'm like, I'm cool because I know that my goals are not necessarily to be the most lean person in the world, but it's to focus on being stronger and to make sure that I'm doing what I can to optimize longevity.

7:14I love that. I very much sit in parallel that I'm going to bring this up more in the main show about this because I had a very similar connection with fitness when I was modeling. As you can imagine, my self-worth was on what I look like and my financial gain was on what I look like. So that messes with your mind. But it's the comparison part that's so profound, I think, with what you said that actually now you're you've reduced that comparison and you're very much aligning with how you're feeling as opposed to the perception of of what you're looking like yeah and it's i think it's way harder to deal with that now right because you know back when i was yeah when i was when i was going through i mean social media was around but it wasn't as in your face as it is now and so i have a lot of compassion for people that struggle with it now because it's like it's hard to escape.

8:05Like the unhealthy relationship with external validation, it's like that the grip is so tight. And it's so tight because, A, there's no real immediate damage from it. Like you're not going to jail for loving external validation in an excessive way. Your life's not going to fall apart immediately because of it. And you can't really see it. You know, you don't really know. It's hard to know. But I think over time, if you're not careful, like, I mean, for me and many other people that I know, it definitely traps you. And you lose sight of what's important. And you reach a point where you're like, gosh, like, why am I even, like, doing certain things?

8:49And it becomes this crazy, you know, call it aha moment. Call it come to Jesus moment. to call it whatever you want where you have to reevaluate like certain things in your life and if you don't like life just won't get any better because you'll be it'll be this dance between thinking you can manage it in a certain way and then the next day you're like oh crap and it's just this never-ending battle um that I think is so important for and I think everybody has to face this at some point in their life more so now than ever before right um I mean I think it's critical and I think it might lead into my last question actually maybe it's not which is making peace with the past because I feel like there's a lot of like present tense that we're now talking about but a lot of that was what you were dealing with in the past and I'd love to know like what's been the hardest thing for you to make peace with about yourself or your life in general I think if I were to be direct um you know I don't I don't harp on it anymore I don't have any like negative emotion to it but i think the way i behaved as a teenager around my mom like i kind of i mean i do regret because for a few reasons a i know it caused her a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress and b it changed the trajectory of our relationship for forever essentially and where we had a really rocky relationship um from the time i was a teenager until maybe my I guess my early to mid-20s where there was it was it was a tough relationship um and why and I'm very thankful that um she forgave me and that I put in a lot of work in myself to get to a place where I you know forgave her for what I thought you know she did wrong but also for me to work on myself to prove that I wasn't going to behave like I did as a kid anymore and that has made our relationship like way stronger than it's ever been because of that because now you know I was just having this conversation with her last week She's like, you know, I'm really thankful that we have this like rock solid, open ended relationship where we can just talk about anything, which, you know, it doesn't really exist anyway when you're a kid, because when you're a kid, things are typically surface level anyway.

10:58But, you know, my relationship wouldn't be where it is today without that. That said, I still like, I still like, man, I shouldn't have done that when it comes to certain things that I did when I was a teenager. And, you know, it's interesting because like I, a lot of what helped me make peace with my past was I watched this, this Tony Robbins video. I was probably, I was probably, I don't know how old I was, but I just remember him. It was, I forget exactly what he said specifically, but it was something along the lines of, if you're going to blame people for all the bad, you better blame them for the good too.

11:42and he talked about how he grew up and I think his mother was really abusive or something and he talked about how that's made him who he is because now he's a very giving person he's a very caring person very loving person and I look back at my life and not not specifically the relationship with my mom but in general like me going through hardship and going to jail and turning my life around has given me unshakable self-confidence. And I don't mean that in an arrogant way. I just mean that I have this ability, this crazy ability, to have this delusional persistence where no matter what is against me, I just know I'm going to get through it.

12:27That wasn't who I was when I was a kid. And now I consider myself to be a pretty good speaker. I'm charismatic. personable and all of that came from me going through tough times and so a big you talked about making peace with the past a big part of me making peace with my past was accepting the fact that the bad i was the bad times in my life led me to the good that i'm doing now right and that was like a big part of me big part of me being able to close that door and being like you're no longer that person anymore look who you are now you're completely it's like night and day it's like anybody and this is the last thing i'll say anybody who goes through any kind of crazy transformation when you look at pictures of your old of the of your younger self it's almost like you see a stranger you see a ghost it's so weird and that to me is is incredibly meaningful and amazing because you just end up proving to yourself that no matter how hard life gets, you still have this amazing opportunity to become somebody different.

13:41I'm so excited for our full conversation. Thank you. And yeah, you've now given me a lot of food for thought on our main episode. So thank you for being so vulnerable. Thank you for speaking from the heart on this. And are you ready to dive in? I'm ready for round two. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.