Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Summary
On episode 397 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan opens his mindset series by tackling the excuse he hears most often from clients: “I’m just too busy.” He argues that being busy is rarely the real problem; the real problem is where people choose to put their priorities.
He walks through his own experience as a full time student, husband, and manager who still made it to the gym every weekday, and explains that the difference was treating that gym time as fixed, non-negotiable time on his calendar, the same as any other appointment.
From there he introduces the Identity Grid, a tool built around four channels (career, relationships, health, and fitness) that turns priorities into a daily action, a goal, and a strategy for working around the obstacles that inevitably show up.
Links
- https://40plusfitness.com
Key Takeaways
- “Too busy” is usually a priorities problem, not a time problem. Allan points out that people do not skip the gym because they do not know it is important; they skip it because something else keeps getting prioritized ahead of it.
- Block fixed time for health and fitness the same way you would block a meeting. Allan wrote “lunch” on his calendar during his corporate years so his two to three time slot for the gym was protected the same as any business commitment.
- Saying yes to everything means saying no to what matters most. Allan references the book Essentialism to make the point that an unfiltered yes to every request quietly crowds out the things you actually care about.
- There is rarely just “one thing”; most lives run on multiple competing priorities at once. Allan pushes back on the popular idea of a single core focus, noting that a sick kid and a demanding job can both be “the one thing” on the same day.
- The Identity Grid organizes your life into four channels: career, relationships, health, and fitness. Each morning you set one intended action in each channel so you know you are moving in the right direction across your whole identity, not just one part of it.
- Actions become goals, and goals run into obstacles that require strategies. Allan’s poker night example shows the pattern directly: the obstacle is a standing poker game at his best gym time, and the strategy is delaying poker by an hour so the workout still happens.
- The framework aligns with a be, do, have mindset. You start by believing you are the kind of person who trains consistently, then you do the work that person would do, and the results follow from that identity shift.
- Allan considers health and fitness success to be 90 percent mindset. He argues the physical actions themselves are not complicated; what is hard is getting your mindset and identity aligned with the person you actually want to become.
“Health and fitness is 90% mindset. It’s nothing hard, but it’s the hardest thing in the world if you don’t have the right mindset.”
Coach Allan Misner
