Founder’s Health

As a business owner or someone just starting out building your business you’ll be met with a lot of stress and if you don’t know how to handle it it might get the better of you.

TL;DR Summary at the end

In this article we’ll go over some basic fundamentals you should have covered in order to perform on a top tier level.

Physicality  Mentality  Spirituality

 

 

Physicality

Your body and your mind are a machine, the better oiled that machine is, the better it will work, the better results you will yield.

One of the absolute fundamentals is physical exercise.
Why? You might dreadfully say?
Well, aside from the benefits your probably already know,
physical exercise makes you smarter.

I will tell you why in a second.

Another thing that might make your ears perk up is that it actually gives you an advantage in business and actually in your overall life.

 

Our physical appearance is one of the few things we can actually controll, yes it takes effort but this effort comes with huge benefits.

People fall victim to a psychological fallacy called Halo Effect.
The Halo Effect decribes linking certain attributes together that don’t necesserily go together.
In this case meaning other people might assume you have certain attributes based on your physical appearenace.
Well dressed people for example are usually perceived as organized, put together and successful.

Have you ever seen one of these transformational videos on YouTube where kind strangers give homeless people a nice haircut and put them in well tailored clothes to give them a chance at a job interview for example?
This is the halo effect in, well.. full effect.

The person inside of the clothes did not change but the perception of him by other people because of his appearance has.

Now knowing this, can you see how this can give you an advantage in your personal and business relations?
If you look put together and in shape, people will attribute all sorts of positive things with that.

They might assume you have really great discipline, that you go for the things you want, even though they might be hard to achieve, that you take action and walk through life with confidence.

So not using this to your advantage is basically shooting yourself in the foot.
We live in a competative world and any advantage you can get is one you should take.

Back to the becomming smarter thing… How does that work?

Your brain is part of your body, it needs oxygen and nutrients to work properly, working out increases the bloodflow to your brain, more oxygen and more nutrients are being delivered in a shorter ammount of time, thus making your brain more efficient at what it does.
Thinking.

Very logical isn’t it?

By now you you know that being or becomming in shape and working out makes you more attractive to your surroundings, let’s other people assume your have your life in order plus many other positive attributes that are associated with a fit looking person, plus it makes you smarter.

These things should be reason enough for you to put down the snacks you were about to shove on your mouth and start moving your body.

Lastly I have one more benefit that working out gives you.
It exercises your mental muscle, that helps you build, incorporate and maintain discipline into many other areas in your life including business.

It’s an absolute cheatcode for so many reasons and I could go on for hours, it clears your head from overwhelming thoughts, increases your dopamin levels and just overall makes you feel fantastic and enhances pretty much everything else in your life.

 

How much exercise is enough?

 

Well that depends on your fitness goals and where you are starting from.

It doesn’t matter if you have never touched weights or never ran more than from your couch to your fridge, all that matters is consistency.

You can start with walking around the block, increasing that walk every other day, do some pushups, go for a run, start taking on sports that look or feel enjoyable, whatever gets you started on this journey,  but do the first step and I promisse you, one month from now your life will drastically change.

 

Nutrition

 

While exercising makes that machine that is your body more capable and efficient, nutrition is the building block, the fuel that keeps it going.

Would you put plant oil into your Ferrari?

Probably not.

While the car is a marvel of technology and incredibly fun to drive it needs the propper fuel to do what it is build for.

The same goes for your body.
If you put the wrong things in it it becomes slow and stops working propperly.

There are millions of diets out there and honestly you can follow any of those.

The important part is that you start paying attention to what you put inside of you and how it affects you.
Learn what makro and mikro nutrients your body needs and try to have a balanced diet catered to your needs.

Usually what you should be looking for in their rough order of importance is this:

Proteins

Minerals

Vitamins

Healthy fats

Carbohydrates

 

While carbs are a great source of fuel for the body, we tend to overeat them, this in turn can lead to us feeling sluggish, tired, and lazy because our body is constantly putting energy into digesting.

Carbs also make you crave more carbs which can be a vicious cycle, because if you eat more than your body actually needs it get’s stored as fat and even though you are working out to get in shape, you might not see the results you want because of it.

If your body get’s the nutrients it needs, in the quantity that it needs and a timeframe that makes sense to not constantly be digesting, stealing the energy it needs to recover, repair or think properly then your Ferrari that is your body can actually perform on the level it is capable of, the level you wish it would work on, and once it does, it get’s you excited to stay on this track.

 

Mentality

The absolute driver for everything you do is your mentality.
Your programming of how you perceive and react to the world.
This programming is something we most likely got from our parents and our surroundings, the thing is, to stay with the computer analogy, these people (your parents) might be very shitty coders and instill a programm in you that does not utilize the architecture of your system in a very efficient way. Running windows on a Mac just does not work as well as running the right operating system that makes the best use of all the hardware on that Mac.

 

If you have received the wrong programming this can absolutely cripple your life in so many ways.

We’re talking about limiting beliefs, inefficient execution of crucial tasks and a bunch of other malfunctions that wrong programming can cause.

 

There is this experiment where fleas are being put in a jar with it’s lid closed for 12 consecutive days. Before these 12 days the fleas would easily jump out of that jar but after being conditioned to this new “ceiling” they learned that that they only can jump so high until they hit an obstacle.
They accept this as their new reality of capabilities.

 

Applying this to your personal life and your conditioning during your early childhood or even throughout your life, I hope you see how damaging this is to your mentality.

You hold on to certain beliefs and limit yourself in growth and execution because of it.

 

Now luckily you are not a flea and neither are you a rigid computer programm.

 

You have the ability to change these beliefs and therefore your mentality.

 

You are capable of reprogramming your mind and upgrading the software it runs on to perform better than you ever thought was possible before, you’ll learn how to jump out of that jar again.

 

To give you some real life examples where this finds application:

 

Let’s say you earn X ammount of money and feel like that’s your personal ceiling and you are not capable to make more without resorting to illegal activities (please don’t).
That is a limiting belief, a false programming that holds you back from making more money.

or

You think you are not a morning person and therefore keep sleeping in because that’s just “who you are”.

or

You might think that you will never be able to create the same work output like some of these high achievers that you see, and might compare yourself to,
because “you just don’t have it in you”.

 

We could go on and on and on but the underlying message is that as long as you hold on to those beliefs, that is going to be the reality you live and perform in.

Once you understand that you can break these limitations and change the programming you hold, you will see these areas of your life change dramatically, all it takes is the understanding that you hold those beliefs and that they are holding you back.

 

Now how do you actually reprogramm yourself to break through these limiting beliefs?

 

Here are some steps you can follow:

Analyse your behavior and try to find patterns that keep repeating and hold you back, try to pinpoint these “ceilings”.

That’s the first step, shining a light on these flawed thinkings.
Once you are aware of them you hold the power to change them.

You do this by actively exposing yourself to situations that you think are outside of your reach and capabilities and try to provoke a different outcome, once you’ve provoked a different outcome, repeat that over and over again as much as you can and your brain will learn to adjust to this new elevated “ceiling” and understand that your abilities now have grown.

 

In short:

Identify limiting belief, actively provoke a different outcome, and repeat this process until you have effectively rewired your brain.

 

DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED

If right now you think: Wow that sounds easy but how is this ever going to work in practice?
You are holding yourself back once again. Because you might have not tried it yet, and so far you were not able to push through those limits, your brain assumes to be the inevitable reality of things.

 

PROOF YOUR BRAIN WRONG

At this point you just have to have the unshakable belief that this is going to work, even if so far you have no personal proof of it yet.

 

TRUST THE PROCESS

As a baby you didn’t have these limiting beliefs, you wanted to walk and fell on your nose millions of times until eventually you got it right and learned how to walk.
You were not discouraged by all these prior failures and because of it you succeeded in the end.

This brings us to another very effective way of breaking these beliefs.

As humans we are conditioned to learn through observing others.
One of our most primal ways of learning.

As soon as you see someone doing the thing you thought was impossible before it unlocks omething in your brain and you understand that it is in fact achievable.

You realize: If they can do it so can I.

This is so incredibly powerful and immediate it’s insane.

If you were ever coached in sports and given a step by step formula of how to achieve a specific feat that you deemed impossible for yourself and the went ahead and did it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

You’re being showed that it is possible, and if you are lucky also how it is done in tiny little steps until you internalize the movement yourself.

 

 

Now lastly:

repetition and consistency

 

Training your mind, rewiring it, can be one of the hardest things you have ever done in your life, especialy if you are trying to break deep rooted beliefs that have been running as a program automatically in your head for all your life, but the power you unlock from breaking through is absolutely worth it.
So the harder the belief is ingrained in your brain the more you have to provoke a different outcome and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it on a CONSTANT basis.

Behavioral changes require repetition and consitency, so if at first you don’t succeed, again, trust the process, know that it is possible for you to change and apply the necessery effort repeatedly in order to achieve it.

 

I want to end this mentality chapter by shining light on something very important.

 

Your outlook on life

 

It has to be positive.

Your life could be absolutely burning, you could be at a point where you already put all your efforts into improving it but still you are not where you want to be, you could feel miserable, discouraged, tired, unhappy, all of these things but holding onto this negativity, believing it as something you just can’t escap,e absolutely cripples you.

Now imagine for a moment a version of you, that lives the exact same life, has the same abilites as you, has been dealt the exact same cards and difficulties but they just have an unshakable positive outlook on life, they belief that their efforts do pay off and that every day the become a little bit better, their situation becomes a little bit better and over time the compounding effect of that will lead to the changes they want to see in their life.

How would it feel to adopt this kind of mindset?

Would you not already feel happier to get out of bed in the morning because you know that you are working towards bettering yourself, your life and towards achieving the goals you have set for yourself?

This is the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset.
If you want to achieve anything in life you’ll need to adopt a growth mindset, everything else is just shooting yourself in the foot.

 

 

Spirituality

 

Let’s talk about how to keep your spirits up, not in a woo woo magical way but rather following a very logical assessments of your needs.

You are a human, and as such you have certain needs, for the sake of achieving your goals you might ignore some of them and push through a period of hard work to get to where you want to be, but you’ll always have to keep in mind that these needs still exist and that at some point you WILL NEED TO TAKE CARE OF THEM.

If you ignore them for too long you run into the risk of burning out.

You might think:

Well if this world is actually so competative I’ll need to work as much as I can towards reaching my objective right?

YES. BUT.

Working towards your objective also means spiritually recharging yourself.

You need to keep your spirits high, you need to know why you are putting so much effort into the things you do, and they way to do that is to give yourself breaks that allow you to charge up your batteries.

Because if you run out of energy you just simply can’t be productive.

You’ll run into the risk of having to take an extended period of time off because you are seriously spiritually depleted and that sets you back more than taking a break every once in a while.

So instead of being glued to your computer all the time, set dates for yourself where you do things that you enjoy.

Have regular conversations with friends, you are a social creature after all and can’t survive in a bunker by yourself.
Also you need an outside perspective every once in a while, this could lead to the breakthrough for the one thing your were stuck on for the past few weeks.
Repeating thoughts only in your head all the time makes you more prone to false beliefs.

In product creation this is particularly important, this is why you need customer feedback early on to see if you are actually on the right track building things for your customer that brings actual value to them versus working on a “perfect” version that you created based on a bunch of assumptions in your head.

 

 

God damned have fun.

 

Becoming Gollum and hiding away in your cave depriving yourself from everything pleasurable just isn’t sustainable.

Charge up on life!

This could be a hike, a workout, having dinner with friends, checking something off your bucket list, going on a weekend trip, riding your bike, whatever makes you happy and forget the world arround you is something you should do regularly because not only is it fun, and life is there to be enjoyed, but also because it gives your subconscious the break it needs to do it’s thing.

What you’ll find if you stop trying to force solutions all the time and give yourself a break, your brain will start to do the work for you which might lead to an epiphany, to a breakthrough in an area you have been stuck in for a while.

Lastly: Having some things in your life that you deeply care about and nurturing them is a feeling that can’t be topped by anything else.
This could mean caring for or spending time with your family, help out in a soup kitchen, rescuing stray dogs, doing a service to your community, whatever it might be.

It’ll bring your attention to the real important and makes these little daily problems fade to nothing in comparison, which alleviates so much stress that you put on these things you have a laser focus on.

An artist I love once said:

With time problems become more comfortable and after that unimportant.

And I love that, it makes you realize how stress is just a temporary thing that actually only you can cause yourself.

It is all about your perception if it.