SOLO EP 8

The speaker talks about various topics. They mention a baby reindeer interview and how the interviewee was lying. The speaker also talks about changing the name of their podcast to "Recognisably Different." They mention their plans for the podcast and filming schedule. They then discuss their decision to stop drinking alcohol and how it has positively impacted their life. They encourage others to try going without alcohol and discuss the societal pressure around drinking. They also mention a video by someone named Dom about confidence and the importance of taking action to achieve goals. Overall, the speaker shares personal experiences and encourages listeners to make positive changes in their lives. Everybody loves the sunshine, well it's a little bit different to last week, last week sat here in my buddy vest, sweating, today absolutely freezing. I tell you what I still can't get over that baby reindeer interview, he found the real life Martha. It's so obvious she was just lying for her teeth. Piers was like, you sent Richard Gadds 41,000 emails and 300 voicemails and she was like, no I never did any of that. But then later on in the conversation, oh yeah but I have 6 email addresses and 4 mobile phones. Who has 6 email addresses? And she was like, oh yeah but 2 of the phones are broken, like honestly that woman is all types of crazy. This is what I need to come into the episode with some sort of plan. I don't know where to start, I've got no agenda, I've just sat down and I've gone blank, I don't know where, I know all of a sudden I need to do a welcome back to the channel guys. For those of you that saw the last episode, you'll have realised that we've actually changed the name of the podcast now, obviously with the whole rebranding. We have changed the name to Recognisably Different, so I thought it was a good name to, just thought it made sense to call it that because that's kind of the slogan slash tagline that we're going with now. So yeah, thank you for tuning in again, it is another solo one, so it's currently Thursday as I'm filming this, so I'm trying to do one podcast episode a week, whether that be solo or trying to obviously get a couple more guests involved and then Saturday tends to be the filming day for the Beneath the Surface series, so at least that way we're filming two episodes a week at least. So yeah, I've not really come into this episode with an agenda as such, there's a couple of topics that I did want to speak about, I feel like it's important to speak about them and kind of how that relates to not only fitness, but I suppose mindset, sort of your beliefs, psychology, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, without further ado, let's get into it. So the first topic that I wanted to touch on was, so I've been sober now for about six months, so I've not had one drop of alcohol in the last six months. Now, I was never really a big alcohol drinker anyway, I pretty much only used to drink when I was on holiday, so we're talking less than five times a year I probably used to drink. And I just thought for this year, because I drink so little, obviously it's not that big of a deal for me to cut it out completely. So yeah, I've cut it out completely and honestly, I said this to someone the other day, I've gone six months now without it and I don't see me ever touching alcohol again. There's absolutely no need for it in my life, it doesn't bring me anything that I need, if that makes sense. I'm not the sort of person that, I'm not bothered either way about, I'm not bothered about just going out and having a casual one or two drinks, I just don't see the point in it. And then likewise, I'm also not bothered about going out and getting absolutely smashed and drinking until I'm so drunk and just feeling horrible. So yeah, I think these six months have been a real eye-opener in terms of, I feel like it'll be very easy for me going forward to not drink. And it's something that I would encourage every single person watching this to at least attempt. I get everyone's got their reasons for drinking and I think it is so established into society now. It's one of them where, and I can't remember who it was, but someone was talking about this topic the other day, and if alcohol had been discovered this year, it probably would be banned because of the detrimental effects of it. But I think because it's so integrated into society and it's just so common, like I'm going to a school reunion this Saturday, right? So I'm seeing people that I've not seen in a very long time and I can pretty much bet any money that I will probably be one of the only ones there that is not drinking. Now I'm very good at not, what's the word, at not being pushed by peer pressure. So if I go to somewhere and I have a soft drink or whatever, a mocktail, you'll know if you've ever been out and you've not drunk and you're with mates that are drinking, they're like, oh come on mate, don't be boring, come on, just have one, all that sort of stuff. So I'm very good at not just being peer pressured into doing it just for the sake of it. And I know a lot of people do struggle with that. They have all the intentions of, oh yeah, I'm going to go out tonight, but yeah, I'm not going to drink because I've got this on the next day. And then before you know it, you're out till 2, 3 a.m. and you're in the back of a taxi smashing a kebab on your way home. I get it, it happens, but you put yourself in that situation and the temptation is going to be there. Whereas I'm very good at sticking to my guns and just not confiding to that temptation. But I suppose it just comes down to willpower at the end of the day. So yeah, I'm half expecting to get some comments when I go to this school reunion about the fact that I'm not drinking. But again, it's one of them where alcohol is one of the only drugs, because it is a drug at the end of the day, where the person that isn't drinking is the person that is deemed to have something wrong with them. It's like people make such a big deal of it. You don't do that with any other drug, only alcohol. If you take cocaine and you go out and you say, oh yeah, I've stopped taking cocaine, people applaud you and they're like, yeah, well done mate, well done for stopping, good on you. But then it's like, you say to people, oh no, I'm not drinking tonight, and they're like, what, you're not drinking? What's wrong with you? You know what I mean? It's the only thing where you are deemed to be in the wrong or you are deemed to have something wrong with you, and the fact that you're not drinking. So yeah, my personal experience, I honestly do not miss it at all. It doesn't bring anything good or anything positive into my life, and there's not really much good that comes out of it at the end of the day. I know people say, oh, what's the quote? Something about, oh, you never made a good memory sober or something along them lines. But yeah, I just think it's not for me, and I would encourage anyone watching this to attempt it, to try and go three, four, five, six months without drinking. And I can assure you that the knock-on effect that that will have in a positive way will be amazing for your health, for your fitness. You will find that you'll be more consistent with the gym. You'll be sleeping better. We know the effects that alcohol has on sleep, like not necessarily your ability to fall asleep, but the quality of the sleep that you're getting will be atrocious if you're drinking close to bedtime. So yeah, I encourage everyone to attempt it and see how you feel, because I'm pretty confident that it will make you feel 100 times better, and you will 100% be more consistent with your training, with your nutrition, with your sleep. And yeah, it's just a good feeling. And that's not to say that you have to be boring and not go out. You can go out, and you can go out for food, and you can go out and meet up with friends and family, and they can all be drinking, but that doesn't mean you have to. I'm more than happy to go out with people, whether it's for a meal, whether it's for a drink. I'll just sit and have a soft drink, or if I really want to, I'll have a mocktail. It tastes just as nice, in my opinion, and you don't wake up the next day just feeling absolutely battered, and the knock-on effect that that then has for the next two days. You just feel sluggish. You don't want to train. You either don't want to eat, or when you do eat, it's just crap. You wake up, and it's, oh, Mackie's breakfast. So it just throws you off for a couple of days, especially as you start getting older as well. I remember the occasions that I did drink last year. I probably had three or four drinks, and it took me about three days to feel back to 100% again. So yeah, I'm glad I did it, and I would encourage anyone else to give it a go. And then another point that I wanted to cover was, and obviously for those of you that know Dom, who is involved with a lot of the stuff within the brand, he's got his own brand, NPS Vision. He's just started uploading some really good YouTube videos in terms of where he's talking about different topics. So if you haven't already, I would 100% go and check them out. They're really, really useful, and in one of his most recent videos, he was talking about confidence, and how a lot of people don't actually lack confidence. They just lack action. And when he said that, I was like, oh, wow, yeah, that is actually, that's so true. And you can relate that to fitness and improving your overall health as well. So you've got to think the only way that you are going to achieve a goal, whatever it is, whether it's a physique-orientated goal, if you want to improve your physique, if you want to put on muscle, if you want to lose weight, lose body fat, change your physique, if you want, if it's more performance-based, so you're looking at training for an event like marathons, high rocks, anything along those sort of lines, the only way that you're going to get there is by taking action. Day by day, week by week, you have to be putting in the work and putting in the steps needed to get you towards that goal. Um, where am I going with this? And I think that that's where most people are going wrong. It's, it's, it's so easy to say you want to do something, but a lot of people say they want to do something, but they're not willing to put in the work and the action needed to actually get there. And by doing that, that is naturally going to knock your confidence because, like, at the end of the day, you've, and Chris Williamson used a really good analogy for this on a podcast episode where he said that imagine if you, you're, you've got a friend and you are arranging to go out with this friend and let's say you're going to meet up for food, you're going to meet up for a drink and they keep cancelling on you. So they cancel on you, you go to arrange it, they cancel, you rearrange and you're sat there waiting at a restaurant or waiting at a bar and they message you, sorry mate, I can't make it tonight. Like if this kept happening over and over again, there's a very high probability that you're probably not going to carry on trying to be friends with that person or you're going to slowly start to drift away and not speak to that person as much because they keep letting you down. Now, you've, the way you've got to look at it is that you, you are essentially that friend but for yourself. So if you keep making these promises to yourself that, oh yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to wake up early tomorrow and I'm going to go to the gym and you, you keep making, there's all these different promises, oh yeah, I'm going to eat better tonight, I'm not going to, I'm not going to drink tonight, like you keep making these promises but then you keep breaking them and you're waking up and you're snoozing your alarm, oh yeah, I can't be bothered today or it gets to the weekend and all week you've said not going to have a drink and then the weather's amazing so you think, oh stuff it, yeah, crack open a bottle of wine or a couple of cans, like you, you are breaking these promises to yourself so naturally that is going to reduce your confidence because you're not taking action. So it's, it's like, it's a bit of a loophole in terms of the confidence and action go hand in hand and like that I can relay that to my, to my Hyrox events right, now obviously you get there, yes there's a little bit of nerves on the day that is completely, especially on the first one, like it's completely to be expected but I went into that Hyrox with the confidence to know that I can do it but I only had that confidence because I know in myself that I have put in the work over the last six months to a year and I've, each day I've done the intense training needed for me to be able to do it so by me doing them actions for Hyrox I have rocked up to Hyrox on the day feeling more confident you know what I mean like if, if I didn't train for Hyrox at all and you just rock up on the day and think I'm just going to hope for the best chances are you're not going to be very confident so yeah I think you, you don't improve your confidence in whatever you're doing by just saying to yourself oh I'm going to do these things, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, you have to take the action, the action is what gives you that confidence over time um and if it else um talked about drinking talked about taking action I feel like there's something else I want to just talk about as well so um I think that's um yeah so yeah I'm going to wrap that episode up here guys again with it just being a solo one wanted to keep it um a lot more shorter and concise obviously naturally when there's two of you you're going to have a longer conversation so hopefully you took some value from this episode if you did please drop the video a like and don't forget to subscribe if you are new uh websites should be up and running soon we're just waiting on the first couple of products soon as they are in stock the website will be live from a clubbing perspective um it is now five weeks till the 120 mile run so really looking forward to that um get a little bit nervous because I was doing a run the other day and on on that run it really hit me in terms of like wow like I've just ran this distance and on I think I what is a run I think I ran like four or five miles um which I've done before and then afterwards I was just sat there and I was like shit like I like we're actually running 30 in in the one day so um yeah looking forward to that it's going to be tough but we are here for it you only get stronger mentally physically bigger and better by putting yourself through these extreme challenges um and yeah we will and yeah I will catch you in the next episode guys so speak soon um I mean they're taking action actually he's getting a little bit so so yeah it does get a bit like oh yeah fuck you idiot you you so uh so do uh so oh that's a that's a nice little youtube clip yeah let's like say you need you need to do more more of this no I mean like honestly I will for the time being I will try and like Tuesday night trust me oh shit stop this