Starting Over Without Beating Yourself Up (EP 132)

[0:16] Well, hello, everyone. Uncle Marv here back with another episode of my unhealthy podcast, where we talk about the messy real life side of getting healthier.

[0:28] Around here, we're looking for honest conversations about what works, what doesn't work, and what happens when life gets in the way. Today, my guest is coach Willie Blake. He is not just a coach. He is also a podcast host. But today we're going to be starting with the person behind those titles, his health journey, his experience with dyslexia, and the challenge of starting over again when a plan doesn't stick. Coach, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me. All right. I probably should have asked this before we got started. Do you want people to call you Coach or Willie? Oh, Willie's fine. Yeah, Coach Willie, Willie, all are fine. Willie's good for this. Okay. All right. So I want to start with a premise that dyslexia is one of those things where when people look at you, you're normal and they don't quite understand, you know, what's going on there. You look healthy. You don't look disabled or anything like that. So take me back and let's talk about when did you kind of realize where you were at and how did that affect your health?

[1:44] Yeah, back around fifth grade or sixth grade when the impact part happened. Okay. I was diagnosed six and seven. I was about first grade. And is that time where my school, we did a little special project. They brought us in, had us read a paper. The school called up my parents and said, hey, while we were doing this, your son had a hard time reading, so we think that he's dyslexic. Or have some learning disability. They didn't say dyslexic. So you should, we just recommend that you might go take them to get tested out. My parents said, okay. So they got me to whatever third party it was that did it and found out I was dyslexic, amongst other things. And when my parents told me, I said, cool.

[2:32] Can I go play soccer with my friends now? Like, I didn't care about it.

[2:36] It's just a word that went out there. But around that fifth or sixth grade, so four or five years later, where now I'm behind on the reading of the traditional school system, now I'm starting to have a physical reaction to a teacher calling on me in class, saying, Willie, can you read this paragraph for us? And me standing up, heart starts pumping, adrenaline starts going, and I start reading, and I'm not thinking about what's on the page. I'm thinking about if I mess up on a word, all the rest of the class is going to laugh at me. And I went to one of my vices, which was eating. Eating is very comfortable. Eating food, I have control over that.

[3:18] And it doesn't argue back with you. It doesn't make fun of you. It doesn't. It's just right there, just like willing to whatever I want to do with that, whether it's eat the whole thing or save some of it later. It's like I'm ready. So the fridge, the kitchen, the cabinets that became my sanctuary. I'd come home, open the fridge. If nothing was there, open the cabinets. If nothing was there, go back to the fridge and lessen my standard of what to eat. Check it back to the cabinet. Okay, go back to the fridge, less than standard until I found something that I wanted to eat. So that's what it was. Were you like an active kid? Were you, you know, social? Were you doing all the stuff, you know, where, you know, as long as you weren't reading, everything was okay?

[4:05] Yeah, I was out there doing it as a kid. I grew up in soccer, so very much loved just going out there and playing it. Also played basketball. Whenever we had baseball or sports going on, we'd go to the park and play and have fun. So very active on the weekends and in that manner on the snap, snap, snap. But with that was also the part of as I was eating and in that comfort zone, and went out and was active, I also saw myself lesser than. So because of the reading and because of everything, that also dropped my confidence out in sports. So then I became the strategic person of now I'm just, I can't run as fast. So now I'm observing. I'm becoming a strategist, which is great in of itself. But I also didn't want to be the shy kid. So now during soccer practice, I wasn't the one that was going after the ball and getting it. It was very much, I was on the back end saying, pass it to me with nobody else around. Interesting. So it started to affect you. So was that middle school or high school when it really started to have that impact on you?

[5:20] Early, late elementary, early middle school was when that, and it was around, I could see pictures from, it was around 20, 20, 2007, which was around age math, whatever that year was, around 2007, um, around middle school age to where I could see in pictures me going from this skinny, lengthy kid, active, nothing to go to then the next year having a belly and started fluffing my face. And then you could see an image of me scrunched over, getting, you know, shy kids as they are, just whatever label you throw on them. So very much around that time of now it's starting to get the unhealthy overweight. Right. But I'm sure at the time that wasn't a correlation. I'm sure that it was just kind of, that was you. Were you doing anything to, I don't know, you can't fix dyslexia, but were you doing anything to work on that? Or was that just, it just was something you accepted, your parents accepted, and everybody else had to live with it?

[6:33] Parents were great support of it. We also had through the school system, the 504 plan. So in simple terms, we got, I was able to get the presentations, PowerPoint, the notes from the teachers, sit in front of the class if I need to, being able to get audio or headphones to help out with that. So very much so a plan that would help me, but also a plan that also wasn't too helpful because I would have to ask for it in class. And if you can imagine a kid, especially a teenage kid, who's trying to be likable to girls and trying to be cool with the guys, go up in class and tell the teacher, I'd like some extra time on the assignment. Very nerve-wracking. Because now I got my peers behind me judging me and saying, why the heck does Willie get it? Why does he get this specialness? He must be a special kid or something else is going on. Or it could be mostly what I did was then I just, I just, I hit it very much was quiet about it. I said, I don't want people around me to know I have it.

[7:39] I don't, I just don't want to deal with that shame or guilt or problem. So I'm going to keep quiet. So the plan was there, but, uh, didn't use it too often. So there were like, there are resources there in place, good support, but then also the, the use of it, I do think has an effect on how I was weight wise and physically, um, but on that mental side too of affecting me. Well, that's what I was kind of gearing towards. I see this as a mental battle more than a health battle, but we know that mental health is, you know, finally being recognized as something we need to address in these days and age. But back, you know, in our day, yeah, it wasn't addressed. And I came from the mindset time of stuck it up, rub some dirt on it, get out there and figure it out. You know, we didn't have, you know, we didn't even have special kid considerations, you know, unless, unless you couldn't walk without, you know, a walker or something like that. We didn't have any of that. So I, I find that interesting.

[8:48] So elementary school, you start going through that junior high, high school. When did you actually realize that you were at a point where you're like, I can't keep living this way and something needs to change?

[9:03] Halfway through college is when that happened. So it was around that time I went into college for an accounting degree. And then halfway through realized I didn't want to sit behind a desk. I did enjoy talking to people. And it was that same time that I was learning more about this realm of self-development, books, psychology, and finances. I came across a statistic that said 95% of CEOs read 50 or more books a year. And I thought, okay, I'm switching from accounting and I'm going into business, business management. Being a CEO would be cool. I think that would be great. So my brain correlated, if I'm going to be a CEO, I have to read 50 or more books. Ain't no right way I'm reading 50 books. Way too far out there. Ain't no way I'm doing it. But if it's something I got to do, then I'll start. So I started with 12 books. One book a month didn't seem too bad. Grabbed the smallest purple book I could. It was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And I started to read. And that's what led to this whole reframing of, well, now it's not dyslexia is bad. Entrepreneurship is good.

[10:20] There are pros and cons everywhere. Everything is just grayscale. So at the end of the day, I got to choose whether I stuck with how I used to think about it, or all these advantages and new information that I have, maybe there's something to it too. And instead of holding myself back with it, I can lead with it. Interesting change. So was there a drastic shift that other people noticed, or did you have to kind of go through a process and was it a slow burn type of change?

[10:53] Very much the only thing that changed was I got an Instagram account, and I always had a book with me. Okay. That was it. That's all people could see. Instagram account, when I started it, I was posting motivational quotes. That was it. I thought it was cool. I was learning these whole new things as, I went into Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey. Yeah, Stephen Covey. How to Win Friends and Influence People with Dale Carnegie. And like all these different books, I started to really like the messages. So I started an Instagram account and grabbed whatever image I could online and posted it to my Instagram account. And then I always had a book with me as I was reading those 12 books in a year. Just always carried it with me. Didn't have to read it. But when I had free time, I didn't go to my phone. It was, let's open the book and start reading it. So people probably thought you were studious, smart, and then you were posting online, so you must be cool. What were you like? Yeah, somewhat like that.

[12:07] Listen, I suck at Instagram still, so I, I don't even pretend to be cool in that way. Um, but physically in, in, in all of that, where were you at that time? And when, was it, you know, was it the physical thing that said I needed to change? Was it the mental thing that said I had needed to change?

[12:27] It was the mental side that I needed to change. So at that from high school till between that and six years later, all that frame, I ranged between weighing 230 and 245, that 15 pound range, back and forth. And it wasn't until I got married and after all this that then the weight shot up. But that can be after. But it was very much a mental thing of I thought this way it was just this one way and now there's different types of ways and, I wanted to experiment wanted to try these things out try new things so now it was very much I'm in planning everything has to be planned perfect and now, we don't really got a plan it's just let's try out what all these gurus and influencers are saying and see what sticks and holds, interesting so 230 to 245 I ll be honest um that sounds like a football player kind of weight so it doesn't really seem like it's that far-fetched that you know it would be, a weight issue so were you having any other symptoms any other issues.

[13:43] The back to the mental side, I thought I was fat. Okay. Overweight. When I shot up in between ninth and 10th grade, I grew like I grew a foot. The fat dispersed through my body a lot better. So I looked way better than I did. But in middle school, very much so. I looked like the fat kid. And I told myself many a times every day that I was the fat kid. And so then when it dispersed and I had more of the broad shoulders, athletic body type, didn't do anything. I still thought it, still thought I was the fat kid. And you're right, like that, that weight range with how I look back at it and look at my pictures, I say, no, I'm not fat. Like I look good, but that one looked good. But very much back then I thought I was the fat kid. Wow. Very interesting. So you, you made the mental shift and I, I assume that the end of college turned out pretty good. You went and did you get that CEO job?

[14:52] Uh, yeah, because now I have my own business that I'm working with. The, not what I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to be working in a corporation for a while and end of college was good, but it was April of 2020 when I graduated. Okay. So right smack in the middle of the start of the pandemic. The year of our COVID. Yes. The year of our COVID. But graduated with the bachelors in business and we moved up to Idaho at the time to get closer to my wife's family and kept working toward getting that job getting more experience and becoming that CEO and it wasn't until later that, due to after working in retail and then.

[15:40] Them basically quiet firing me and letting me go that then made the coaching business happen that's made more of a trajectory on becoming a CEO and running my business. But very much so got graduated and life happened the way that it was happening.

[15:57] Yeah, it does. Now, when we first met and talked, you told me about this program called 75 Hard. And you actually just kind of skipped over what it was. So before we tell people the relevance to what we're going to talk about, tell us what 75 Heart is, and I'm going to say the statement you told me. Yeah. So 75 hard. I still can't remember the dude's last name. His name's Andy. But he created a mental, more of a mental toughness program than a physical diet and exercise, even though those are definitely part of it. It goes over six things. Two 45-minute workouts each day. One has to be outside. Drinking a gallon of water. Read 10 pages of a physical nonfiction book.

[16:53] Follow a diet, and you choose the diet. And no alcohol or cheat meals. And you do that. And I feel like I might've missed one. If it comes back, I'll remember it, but you do that every single day for, Oh, there we go. Last one. And take a progress pick of yourself as well. So all those together. Yeah. Picture all those together, 75 days straight. If you miss one day, you have to restart back to day one. Interesting. Okay. So when you introduced that to me, basically you said, yeah, I tried that thing and it took me 11 times to finish. It did. Interesting. So that process, first of all, what was it that actually, made you decide, hey, I'm going to try this. Let's start with that. It was me being in the hospital with my third kid being delivered.

[17:53] While I was in there, we got a... Being there, looking back at the picture of me in there, and then we hired a doula, which is somebody to help my wife with, just through the labor process, talking with the nurses.

[18:10] We didn't say it out loud between my wife and I, but very much so, I wasn't confident enough to say if the nurses were making noise outside and my wife was trying to sleep, for me just to walk out there and ask them to quiet down. I didn't have the confidence for that and that reflected in us getting a doula but then also I looked back at the photo of being in the hospital.

[18:35] And I did not look I did not like the guy I was looking at, I was like I don't know if you could have a triple chin but I felt like I had a triple chin with that my stomach was really wide out to where my clothes weren't fitting me anymore you could see the underside of my stomach in the shirt and jacket that I was wearing, and that was a reflection moment of, man where did what have i done to myself and i started looking at other pictures of all three of us with a brand new baby we're all sitting in the bed my wife big smile two other girls big smile the baby not smiling because she was a brand new baby and just lying there i looked at myself, and there wasn't a smooth cut it was very much like, double chin, being there, normal, not hunched over anything. And I thought, I just don't like that. And that individual is not somebody, I think, who is able to carry three girls and a wife in his family. And now we got four girls. That individual can't do it. So I was trying out different things between intermittent fasting and.

[19:50] The keto diet and everything else and then i came across the 75 hard program and i said okay I m going to try it because again i just wanted i wanted something to work and all the other stuff didn't right, well when i looked it up you know, at first I m kind of like well this looks like it could kind of work for anybody if, you know if you just structure it because i mean even though it's a strict mental discipline program. It's not set in stone. You don't have to eat these certain foods. You don't have to buy these protein bars or anything like that. At least from what I can tell, it's basically a 75-day mental discipline challenge that incorporates diet, exercise, um, and all of that so when you first of all congratulations for doing it 11 times.

[20:52] I didn't fully do it 11 times i failed 10 times and then was able to do it on the 11th attempt i know but just i mean after the third try i would have been like okay three strikes you're i probably would have done that fair enough yeah um, but that i mean that listen that takes Guts isn't the right word, but that takes, you know, um, sick cojones to set them, say, say, I'm just going to keep trying until I get it done.

[21:20] I appreciate that. I appreciate you saying that.

[21:23] I look back at those 10 attempts and it's like the first one, I got up to day 52. And then day 53, due to planning, I messed up on one of the exercises. So then I went back. And the second time was day, I think, 26, and then failed. And then day 17, and then failed, and then some others. So it was very much. I mean, it seems hard just in the fact that you're talking 17 consecutive days. I mean, it's one thing if you do 75 days, if you're doing just the five days a week and you get the weekends off. But, you know, knowing that you've got to get up on Saturday and Sunday, you're treating all of those days the same. If you're talking about, you know, exercise, first of all, I mean, obviously I, I, I doubt you went to the gym every day, right? No, no, I didn't. So you got to bury that up. So some days it was walking, some days it was doing some other stuff, right? Yeah. Very, like at the beginning, because at the beginning, just walking briskly was getting me in a sweat. So on that first attempt, it was very much so one of those workouts is me out there walking briskly with my dog for 45 minutes. That was my outdoor ones. Then the other one was the pushup crunches, the weights, the things I have inside my house that I could easily do.

[22:51] So it wasn't, it wasn't a huge, that's what I love about the program. Like you said, it's not eat this food. It's not go to the gym and do this certain type of workout or this certain type of way. It's very adjustable depending on how big or overweight the person is to how fit they are to how it really comes down to what is going to push them, past what was comfortable before. And for me on that day one, it was going outside during the winter time, early springtime, when it was cold, going out there with a very light jacket because that was my added mental toughness, to then walk for 45 minutes. So it's very adjustable. And I think that's why a lot of people get hung up because they think they have this preconceived notion that, my workout has to be at a gym and I have to be sweating, got to wear this certain type of clothes and it has to be outside my house, to where Andy's like, no, it's not. It's you, you dictate what it is, but it definitely needs to be you not making an excuse, but something that is out of your comfort zone that you can stay disciplined in.

[24:08] That is fantastic because one of the things that I've been trying to figure out for me personally is how to do something without it being one of these strict program type things. Whereas you've got to do, you know, this program, this day, this program, the next day, you know, arms and chest and legs and that sort of thing. I'm done with all that. I'm, I'm over 50. I said, no more gyms and all of that. Uh, what year did you, uh, finish the 75 hard? It was the, that's a good question. And it was, no, it was the beginning of this year. I thought it was the end of last year. Beginning of this year. Springtime. All right.

[24:49] What habits have you kept from the 75 hard? Are you still doing any of it?

[24:54] Yeah. A few things. First thing is the exercise part. I still go out and walk. Sometimes it's walking the dog. I take care of my in-laws' horses as well. So sometimes it's out there walking laps around the barn. So I kept the walking part aspect. I also kept the not a gallon of water each day, but at least having a water bottle next to me. I finished this one already. But staying hydrated. Because when I have water inside of me, I tend to eat less. And when I eat less, I tend to not gain weight. Crazy how that works, right? And then the last one is the intermittent fasting. That was one of the diets that I stuck with. And so from 8 p.m. To noon is my closed window. So from noon to 8 is when I usually eat. That's a big window. Yeah, it's the 16-8 window with it. And it works well.

[25:55] I'm usually here on calls or working anyways and don't eat till noon anyways. So it's cutting it off at eight o'clock after dinner, after the kids, after the girls go to sleep and just drinking water. All right. I'm still trying to get it to where when the sun goes down, that's my last meal and I don't eat again until the next morning. I don't know if I could stretch it to noon, but that might be a goal that I do. Yeah, that's going to be hard during the winter time when it gets dark around five o'clock.

[26:25] I'm in Florida so oh it doesn't really matter.

[26:31] Different over there yeah okay so when did the coaching come into your life let's uh, because obviously if you just finished 75 hard earlier this year it sounds to me like you were doing coaching before then so when did all that come in and how did 75 hard play into how you coach? Yeah, it started back around 2023, maybe even a little bit. No, it was earlier, 2021 in the COVID time when we were trying to just figure, I was trying to figure out what job to do. We moved back to Utah and was figuring it out and I wanted to start a coaching business, but I knew that wasn't going to do the income. So I also did through produce at Walmart while I was doing it. And so on the side, after the job, I would be out there posting more videos to Instagram, recording myself, saying inspirational things. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was doing something. And so the first year I had zero clients. Second year, though, I got one. And it was my cousin.

[27:41] Really? he said hey i like what you do and I d love to, i want to talk with you because the motivation stuff you talk about uh i got some things that are going on I d like help i said yeah let's get on a call let's talk about it, and he was my first client I m like cool and so it was during that time where that then led to it, once it hit 20, the summer of 2023 is when I got called back to the HR office, and they said, Hey, Willie, we're changing schedules around. We need you to work a weekend instead of just Monday to Friday. And they were doing this for everybody, or at least that's what they said. They said that we have a lot of people on Saturday, so we need you to work Sundays. Sundays for me and my family are very much faith and family time. So that was very much a contradictory to it. I asked them, can I get back to you on it? They said, yeah. Went home. My wife and I had a conversation back and forth about, do I work Sundays? Or do we say this is the end of our business relationship, job relationship at this point and go do something else? And that's when we decided.

[28:59] That we don't want to give up our Sundays just for a paycheck to come in. So I turned in my two weeks and then it was like what to do, which then led to the new conversation with my wife. saying, I've been doing coaching. What if I did it full time? She said, Willie, that's not bringing bread on the table. I said, I understand. We have a little bit of savings. So here is for these three months, if I don't make a certain amount of money, we'll revisit the conversation about getting a job.

[29:39] She said, okay, I can do that. And then from there, we've been able to build since then. And that's how 75 Heart also got integrated because as I've been out coaching clients, it's not me feeling like I have to stand on a pedestal. And I don't want anybody to ever feel that way, especially when I work with dyslexic professionals. They already have too many things that put other people to make them feel that they're lesser than. I want them to feel like I am in the trenches with you building a business because I am. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm right here with you. I'll be transparent. And so 75 hard, it was very motivational, not just for my clients, but for other people to see that everybody is going through a challenge. Everybody's doing something. And then just the small, simple things, not the huge transformation that everyone posts about. I'm the most average guy or the most underwhelming guy if everybody else is able to do these big things and it takes me forever to do them.

[30:40] But i do them and i do them consistently and i eventually get there and from what I ve seen that's been pretty inspiring for a lot of people yeah it works for a lot of us, just get started and just keep going um so your website coach willy blake.com uh, is where people can go I will have the link for that in the show notes, as well as the link for your podcast, which is called Light Beyond Limits.

[31:10] And let's see, your latest episode, I think I just saw was, was it, was the last one, the one about dyslexia? One of the recent ones, yeah. Okay. All right. It was interesting. I'm like, well, wouldn't he have said the truth about dyslexia in one of the earlier episodes? But I didn't go back that far, so I'll have to go back and find that. I've talked about dyslexia probably so many times on the podcast. Always good to have a refresher. Yeah.

[31:43] So one thing, Willie, obviously your confidence is better now Because to be able to say no to a paying job and to bring up the suggestion to your wife about, how about we try this? Because it sounds like in years past, you probably wouldn't have done that.

[32:04] Yeah, that's fair to say. Okay. All right. So you got four kids. All four daughters? Did I hear that correctly? All four girls. Oh, my. That's a fun household. So daughters and horses. Yeah. Not my horses, but definitely horses involved. And then we also have a golden retriever, and then we're also taking care. I don't know what that dude is. it's a it's a it's not a black lab but it's some type of, that size of dog oh it's probably a good thing to know but also taking care of those two are in the house okay yeah big softy, well willie uh i want to go ahead and put a pause here and come back and do another episode where we can talk about your coaching um.

[32:56] And uh you have this thing called the gps method that i want to asked you about. So thank you very much for sharing this time with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, folks, we are going to be back with a second episode where we'll talk more with Coach Willie Blake. And of course, I always talk about things you can do, what's the next step. So the question I'm going to leave with you is, when you start over, are you learning something or just judging yourself. So you can learn more from Willie, uh, by going to his website and looking at the podcast and listening to some of those episodes. Uh, but we will be back to talk about his coaching, his GPS method, and, uh, we'll try to figure out, uh, one more thing to test. So follow the show and, uh, check out everything over at unhealthypodcast.com. Sign up for your favorite pod catcher so you don't miss our next conversation. Uh, this is Uncle Marv saying, And so long for now, and until next time, live healthy and be happy.