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iAlign #78 - You Get To Decide This Is Rock Bottom · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the I Align podcast with Flint Mitchell, where I provide stories, resources, and tools for ambitious builders who are ready to gain control over procrastination, overthinking, and distraction.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I got fat when I was 23 years old, and I found myself questioning my life while I was huffing and puffing on the side of a volcano in Northern California.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not like fat, fat, but fat enough that everything in my life that I liked doing was significantly more difficult.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually vividly remember a moment when I was walking with a colleague down the hall in my big biotech campus in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about running because he was training for the big sur marathon later that year.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we walked past this body fat scanner that HR had put in the hallway, I guess, as some part of some health campaign.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So he jumped on it and he checked his scan.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was somewhere around the low 20%, 22%, 23% body fat.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't, not because I was concerned about my weight, but because I was confident that mine wasn't that high.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I said something like, Yeah, I'm good.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm probably somewhere around 15% right now.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: To which my colleague visibly laughed at me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he was a really intelligent physicist from Eastern Europe.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So his laugh was a strange mixture of a deep jovial belly laugh mixed with that classic Eastern European, almost sinister honesty.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, what the fuck?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: This actually broke through the wall of perception that I had created in my life in that moment, which was substantially more positive in my mind than it actually was in reality.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: For a long time, at that point, I was an athlete.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I played high-level soccer in high school.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had a body fat scan entering college, they read about 6%.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I completed two half Iron Man's, I maintained a pretty serious level of performance with my health.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So what did this chubby shithead know about my health that I didn't, right?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in the moment, if I had to guess, like realistically, I was probably around 23 to 24% body fat in that story.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So like 10% higher than I thought in my head that I was.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was in complete disillusionment about the current status of my health.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was lying to myself about one of my most central core values of health, but not intentionally.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: If I had seriously looked and collected the data, I probably could have deduced it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: My surfing, it was shit.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: My focus, it was shit.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: My relationship?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, not shit.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: That was a really fun relationship, but I was insecure about my physique for sure during it.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: That leads me to why I'm talking about this, which is my capacity to climb mountains?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Shit.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I had woken up for easily half a decade at that point thinking I could wake up on any given day and do just about anything my body wanted to.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You want me to run a marathon?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let me get my shoes.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: You want me to climb a mountain?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let me go find my cramplands, etc.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so this aforementioned colleague and I, and one other in my engineering research group, decided to go climb Mount Shasta later that month.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was May.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you who don't know, Mount Shasta is a potentially active volcano.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was dormant the last 3,000 years in Northern California.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: In May, it's better because you have snow and not rock.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the snow allows you to like actually get grip while you walk, whereas the scree that you step on, if there's no snow, every step you take comes back a foot.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little over 14,000 feet with active glaciers on the north side.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And generally speaking, real risk.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: People don't die often, but they do occasionally, like once a year or once every other year.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So as far as mountaineering is concerned, it's a pretty small feat.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's not impressive, I'd say, by any means.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a steep, beautiful, and iconic mountain.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the three of us set off on Friday at 3 p.m.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: from work in the Bay Area to this little town of Dunsmuir, which is just outside of the town and mountain of Shasta.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I had at this point not climbed Shasta.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was just a bit delusional about my body's capacity in that moment.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, yeah, whatever.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a mountain.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because even though I wasn't in the best shape of my life, I was still younger, and the two of them certainly still believed I was going to smoke them up the mountain the next two days, probably also because I talked big game.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: They decided to make sure that I had my fair share of some cheap beer in this shitty dive bar.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I, at 23, did not have strong boundaries around alcohol.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't a partier or a big drinker, but I certainly allowed myself to have enough on a regular basis that it contributed to the layer of blubber line around my stomach at the time, right?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just another symptom of my misaligned life in this moment.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was still in the stage of my life where I didn't believe that I was capable of having negative consequences.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: A bit better with the glare at least.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was still in the stage of my life where I didn't believe that I was capable of having negative consequences from doing quite literally the exact same things that led to the negative consequences that other people have later in life, right?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Eat burgers a bit too often?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course, but I'm still healthy.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm young.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine, right?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of beers with colleagues after work, completely normal.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm healthy.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have a good job.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Starting to wake up and get to work a little bit later and later, even if it's on time, I'm still smart.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have potential.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine, et cetera, et cetera.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and to be fair to myself, I was actually quote unquote fine.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a good job.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was doing fine at it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: My health was by medical standards fine.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: My routines and punctuality were fine.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: You get the point.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like life was, in fact, fine.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if my goal in life was to just have an okay, fine life, then by all means, I was fucking crushing it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: But fortunately, my goal in life was never to have an okay, fine life.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was to have a fucking incredible one.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And by that standard, I wasn't even shooting at the right goal.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like when you hook a drive while playing golf onto the wrong fairway and think, oh yeah, that's fine.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I can still get it there.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously you don't, because it wasn't fine.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was pretty shit, and you're coping and you triple bogey.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's what that was like.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: I digress.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we're drinking some shitty beers, playing this silly hoop game on the back wall where you swing a hoop under this little hook on the wall.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's dim, probably 12:30 a.m.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm supposed to be climbing a mountain the next day, but instead I'm buzzed, I'm bloated, I'm blubbery, and not by any means ready for that challenge.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And in reflection, this was literally a case study for the exact type of person that gets hurt climbing mountains.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: You quite literally could not write a better description of the most endangered person on a mountain, which is young, male, overweight, hung over, bloated, overconfident, and unprepared.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like that description that's warning, flashing, and bright red.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I will hand it to myself.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I've got quite a bit of resilience and I have quite a bit of experience in the wilderness.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Slogging along up the bottom of the mountain to our campsite, I managed to keep up for the most part.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I was struggling and I was absolutely not thriving.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was in pain, I was out of breath, and I was recognizing that I was lying to myself, not just about this mountain, but about a lot of things in life.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: There was no chance I was making it up that mountain the next day.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: We parked ourselves on this epic little ridgeline, dug into the snow, placed our tents at around 10,000 feet, maybe 9,500 feet.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: We hunkered down what was supposed to be a storm that was going to blow through that night, and then we were going to climb the mountain the next day.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even though I knew I wasn't living up to my potential in that moment, it was epic.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like this storm, constant 30 mile per hour winds, much, much stronger gusts ripping at the top of our tents, back and forth.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: My colleague basically got covered in snow.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: I slept like a baby.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was fantastic.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: The colleague next to me, he was in the tent with me, who unintentionally called me out on my way weeks before.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was sleeping next to me, and I think he was terrified.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because when I woke up in the morning, he said, Wow, you slept well.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I responded, And you?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, No, I haven't slept yet.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, I'm making espresso.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I warm up my freezing hiking boots, and I start planning not to hike up the mountain, but how I would make sure we would not continue.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And instead, thoughts what I could say to create doubt that we should do it.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh yeah, that storm really hasn't fully gone yet.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: It might not be safe.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a good one.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Instilling doubt in the safety of returning from an adventure is a shortcut to ending it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was also partially true, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like we need to stop now, weather, but it was, you know, oh, this is concerning weather.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: We should keep an eye on it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And who knows?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they felt the same way.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: But regardless, I influenced the trip to stop.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we did.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: We hiked uh a bit further, you know, another thousand vertical feet, and then we started our descent, right?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: We drove to a restaurant and had, you guess it, a burger and a beer, and I was embarrassed.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was happy that I was on this adventure because I was born to adventure and still am.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: But I was sad that I had allowed myself to slip comfortably and unknowingly into a body that wasn't prepared to adventure.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was not on the right track in life.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was in danger.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, looking back, I was in much more danger than I realized.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not from that mountain, but in life.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was comfortable and my life looked good from the outside.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was saving good money.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was dating, contributing to real science patents, I was pursuing medical school, blah, blah, fucking blah, right.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: So not only was I on the wrong path, I was deluded by comfort that I was on the right one.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it required some outright failures, like this little expedition on Mount Shasta to show me that.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: In an aside, I had a conversation with a gentleman who I believe was five years sober at that point, a couple years later after this story, from drugs and alcohol, and he was talking about addictions, and he said something that has always stuck with me, which is that rock bottom is where you stop digging.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And fortunately for me, even not having heard this insight yet, this was years to come, I decided that this moment would be my rock bottom.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I decided around that time on Mount Shasta that would be my rock bottom right there.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to gain another 20 pounds from shitty work lunches and happy hour drinking.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to become unhappy, deeply unhappy, and pursue a dependent relationship like so many people do to fill the sad void they've opened in their life from a lack of pursuing their goals.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to let my life completely slip away in order to determine that I was at my rock bottom.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that was one of the greatest gifts I ever gave myself was to allow myself to say, you know, my life is fine and comfortable right now.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've made some mistakes, but they aren't yet the type that will affect me for the rest of my life.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: They're small mistakes.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: My life isn't what I want it to be.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to make mistakes that will, in fact, change my life for the worst.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not going where I want it to go.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that is enough to ask for help and to do things differently.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to go about my entire life story here, but I do want to fast forward several years.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we're fast-forwarding through a hell of a lot of personal work, a lot of adventure, travel, publishing my first book, new work, new business, homes, etc.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like quite a bit of progress.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I came back to Shasta.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I climbed it slowly and methodically and with a smile on my face as the stars slowly faded into the light of a pink, purple, orange sunset on the horizon.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I took each step, and even if some of them slowly slid back in the scree, I took another one.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: I actually took a picture of my friend smiling, sipping his uh can of Foster's beer that he brought up the night before in his sleeping bag.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have a drink.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I don't drink it all anymore, but because I have boundaries and standards that I abide by.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I stood on the top of Mount Shasta in my father's hiking boots with my grandfather's iSacks.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as I've said before, this mountain isn't the tallest in the world.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even that dangerous.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: It can be, but it was symbolic to me.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I decided that not being able to climb it due to my own lifestyle and life choices was my rock bottom.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I changed my life such that my sole goal on this planet was to align my actions and my life with my values.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it forced me to be honest with myself on a daily basis, not just every couple years.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: I changed the standards that I hold myself to.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: I changed the boundaries I must enforce in order to hold myself to these standards.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I changed my behaviors.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It required me to change the way I reach out for support, to ask for help, both from others but also from myself.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: It built the foundation of what I have now, which is a life of adventure.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And adventure doesn't mean large expeditions and worldwide travels, by the way.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It means choosing to live your life in the way you want to and to take risks that are aligned with your values, even if they contrast with what the people in the world around you deem safe.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: For example, even to speak about this story feels like an adventure for me because it's a bit of a risk.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's vulnerable, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: To build my business is an adventure for me.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: To rewrite my life in the direction I want, regardless of the thoughts or the comments of others, is an adventure for me.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: My life is an adventure.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I want your life to feel like an adventure too.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to know, right, that you have permission to decide when things are incorrect in your life.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need a large, atrocious error in your life or to fall off track for a decade in order to determine that your life is worth living.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'll let you in on a secret, even if you have gotten to that point, and it's okay if you have, that still won't be the moment you change unless you decide it is.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because the decision to change your life for the better can never come from external circumstances.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: It can only come from your own personal decision.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are anywhere on that spectrum, maybe you are way off track, maybe you are not sure if you are or not.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're actually doing quite well, but you know you've gotten too comfortable and distracted and that it's preventing you from really reaching your potential.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're even doing excellent, but something still feels a bit off.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you can be doing what appears to be fantastic, but still feel misaligned.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I know and work with individuals who quite literally have more money than they could ever need, who wake up unhappy because they have no space to pursue their real dreams.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you allow for it, your Mount Shasta moment can be right now.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And if you decide for it to be, then weeks or months or years from now, after you have done the work to change, you will stand on the top of whatever summit it is that you wanted to climb to.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll look down at the horizon and think, this is just the fucking beginning.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've been told your entire life that you're smart and you have potential, but you continue to see yourself not do what you said you would do again and again, and it's made you stop trusting in yourself or that you will ever achieve that potential, I want to help you.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: If that's of interest to you, click the first link in the show notes, fill out the 30 second application, and grab a time on my calendar.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Spots are obviously limited because of my time and availability, but if they fill up and you're a good fit, I'll make sure you get on the wait list.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.