Episode 78: Launching Your Fitness Program, Signing Non-Competes, Toxic Masculinity, and More…

0:00:11.5 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.

0:00:13.1 Jordan Syatt: Hello, Michael. How is your cardio this morning?

0:00:17.1 Mike Vacanti: Angry.

0:00:18.0 Jordan Syatt: Angry cardio.

0:00:19.8 Mike Vacanti: I’m angry.

0:00:19.9 Jordan Syatt: Is it the same reason that we spoke about last night? Is that where the anger’s stemming from?

0:00:24.7 Mike Vacanti: Bro, I have so much… I have so much that I wanna say, first of all, I just did 45 minutes of low-intensity steady state cardio, which was purely inspired by you and your Zone 2 professionalism as of late. And I’ve been a little off my cardio game, I’ve been more of like a bro lifter and one, it felt so good to get that sweat and like the… I don’t know if it’s actually endorphins, but whatever is going on in the brain that feels good, but two, yeah, like we spoke about yesterday, I now truly believe that there is no motivation other than anger, not just for me, in the world. And I still believe, like I thought of this analogy, I had the best ideas I’ve ever had in my life doing this 45-minute cardio session, by the way. Shout-out to Jordan for being such a proponent of cardiovascular health. Remember that Michael Jordan or the Bulls documentary, the Jordan documentary, and remember when he had the…

0:01:29.1 Jordan Syatt: “The Last Dance.”

0:01:30.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. He had the scene where after some game, he said this after a loss, some guy came up to him and he was like, “Good game, Mike,” or like something along those lines, and then he used that as fuel for the next game and then in the next… Or in the documentary, reflecting back on it, he was like he admitted he was laughing, he’s like he didn’t actually say that, he was like I made that up.

0:01:53.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, he just made the whole situation up just to make him angry. [laughter]

0:01:55.8 Mike Vacanti: To motivate himself to come back and dominate the next game, which is exactly what he did. Listening to Gary on the Impaulsive Podcast. I remember, by the way, what I thought was interesting, which was they were talking about Gary’s so good at gratitude and so good at being motivated by the right reasons, and he was talking about that, but then he also said, but in the same breath like, “I wanna beat the shit out of you.” He’s like, “I wanna kill you, I wanna destroy you.” Which, knowing him, it’s is so true, he operates on both sides of the coin. But that, whatever you wanna call it, motivation by anger is so real. And I’ve been fortunate and unfortunate over the last many years to have less anger, therefore less like get after it in business, but yeah, we don’t need to go into details, a or random DM. We’ll just… We’ll leave it at that. But just lights a… The last time I was doing emails after 9 o’clock at night, ’cause I usually do it in the morning, caffeinated, very Epicurean, get your work done in the morning, relax a little more in the afternoon, but just it reminded me of the 2012, 2013, 2014 days, and then reflecting on it all during cardio this morning, it came to me that you can…

0:03:20.1 Mike Vacanti: When I say, or when you say, or when anyone says that the reason why they’re doing what they’re doing is because they genuinely get joy from helping people and they want to help as many people as possible, and we get so much satisfaction from that. That is 100% true, but I think of it like a car going somewhere, like why do we… Why do you get in the car and go somewhere? Because you wanna reach a destination, that destination is helping thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, but what makes the car run? Gasoline, and anger is gasoline for I don’t wanna say for every person in the world, but I’m starting to see more and more data points, myself included, and with other, I don’t even wanna say “achievers,” but people who work hard and have similar temperaments, we’ll call it. It’s just a fact, and I’m done trying to wrestle with that and I’m just gonna lean into it and lean into it. Here’s a funny story, and then I’ll stop rambling so much.

0:04:15.0 Jordan Syatt: No, I love this. This is the best.

0:04:17.1 Mike Vacanti: Here’s a the funny story that I think zero people know except me and Jordan, when Jordan was becoming Gary’s coach and we had that transition period, I think I was making jokes to you and maybe to a couple of other people, but I think it was mostly just to you, and I was saying that I’m retired ’cause I was done coaching Gary, I was like, “I’m retired, I’m retiring, I’m retired,” and then I made an Instagram post.

0:04:44.9 Jordan Syatt: Constantly telling everyone you’re retiring, all your coast friends like, “Yeah, I’m retired now, I’m retired,” you kept saying it all the time.

[laughter]

0:04:53.1 Mike Vacanti: And then I made a post. I don’t remember where, we don’t need to get into details.

0:04:58.4 Jordan Syatt: Instagram.

0:04:58.7 Mike Vacanti: But it was… A lot of people have been saying, I’m retired, I’m back. That kind of thing. And while I was walking on the treadmill and I thought of that Michael Jordan making something up in his head, I’ve seen over the years late night cab rides with Gary. I’ve seen him do similar mindset things and to just… Yeah, I’m very okay with it, so I’m glad that right now I have a little bit of real fuel, but I’m very comfortable in the near future just having fictitious gasoline to put in the tank to go hard.

0:05:32.4 Jordan Syatt: You’re just ready to manufacture scenarios that create synthetic anger for that gasoline, for you to just drive that 18-wheeler as fast as you can. [laughter] Man, you really…

0:05:46.1 Mike Vacanti: That’s exactly right.

0:05:47.1 Jordan Syatt: That was a great analogy, by the way, that was a really good analogy. But I mean, yeah. Wow, I like that a lot. Do you have a strategy to manufacture this anger?

[chuckle]

0:05:56.9 Mike Vacanti: I think just…

0:05:57.4 Jordan Syatt: Take that DM that you got and just put it up on your wall, like you said last night, and…

0:06:01.9 Mike Vacanti: If we wanna go real personal, I was motivated for a number of years in there by betrayal from romantic relationships, and now I’m just in a really good place in my life where I don’t… Even if I try and think back to something, I don’t… There’s no more anger there, it’s like… Which is probably good for me, but it has to be something else, and I think it can come from random, random places. But if Jordan, something as good as, “Good game, Mike,” he was like, “Oh, I’ll show him. I’m gonna get him.” I don’t think it’s gonna be that difficult.

0:06:41.8 Jordan Syatt: Okay, alright, I like that. Yeah, man, that was… Last night talking to you about that, I hadn’t heard you that riled up since like 2017.

[laughter]

0:06:51.0 Mike Vacanti: And it is, and I… The thing is, is it’s fun because… It’s fun to talk to you on this podcast because it’s so raw, it’s so like us just having a conversation that I make pretty raw, authentic content in general, historically, but not necessarily to this level. It’s almost like there’s a little bit of a filter in terms of… I don’t wanna say it’s less truthful, but it’s not as revealing, but I know that it’s fun for this, especially with so many coaches listening, having the mindset on inside of what it may or may not take to push oneself in various endeavors in life, it’s fun to get really raw and honest with it. And I know similarly like, I’m not gonna… I know something that has motivated you historically is when you’ve seen someone plagiarize you, or I should say something that pisses you off historically, is seeing someone plagiarize your stuff directly like word for word kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s very interesting.

0:08:00.7 Jordan Syatt: It’s actually pretty bad now though, because now it doesn’t get me as angry anymore. Now, I’m just like, argh whatever.

0:08:08.2 Mike Vacanti: You’re desensitized?

0:08:08.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I’m like more…

0:08:08.6 Mike Vacanti: ‘Cause so many people do it.

0:08:09.9 Jordan Syatt: That and I think also it’s because if I got mad every time that happened now, I would drive myself insane. I wouldn’t be able to enjoy life at all. So I think at this point… I remember when it first started happening, I would make entire pieces of content about that individual plagiarizing my content, and I would go off on that person and it ruined my entire day. And so now I’m just at a point where I’m like, “Alright, whatever.” And also there was the other aspect of it, where most of the people who I saw plagiarizing my stuff, they would last a couple of months, and then they would put peter off. So I’d be like, “Alright, they’re not gonna make it anyway.” Even if you plagiarize my stuff, it’s still not gonna work for you, but… Yeah. So I sort of think it’s like the betrayal that you had previously, that was a big motivator for you, but now that in your life, you don’t… That person is nothing to you and you’re doing so well, it’s probably even thinking back to the exact scenario, it doesn’t bother you as much. You can’t get mad about it, it’s the same… I think it’s the same type of thing. If you got so mad about that every day for the rest of your life, it would drive you insane, you just can’t do that.

0:09:23.4 Mike Vacanti: Would it though? I mean, I would have never stopped making content, I would just… [laughter] It’s this fine line between insanity and greatness.

0:09:34.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. But if greatness requires you to live a very unhappy life, then… If every day you were just so mad about that betrayal, I don’t think you could do anything.

0:09:47.0 Mike Vacanti: Or anything.

0:09:47.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:09:47.7 Mike Vacanti: Or we can even go before that because I’ll never forget. I can name… I’ve probably done it on this podcast when we’ve had similar deep conversations, I can name everyone who made the Bantam B hockey team in the year 2000, or maybe it was 1999, the year I got cut and had to go play against or play on our cross-town rivals, ’cause we didn’t have a C team, ’cause there weren’t enough guys to fill the C team when I was in eighth grade, like that, years, for years, that was like locker room material, that was like, “Oh okay, this is why I started lifting, this is why I’m gonna leap frog every single one of these guys, I’m gonna make varsity… ” That… And is that healthy? Probably not, no. But…

0:10:33.5 Jordan Syatt: But it worked.

0:10:34.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, it works. Yes. The gasoline makes the car drive. Do you wanna get where you wanna get? Okay, do you wanna walk there, or do you wanna take the car?

0:10:43.9 Jordan Syatt: You wanna get in that 18-wheeler and just ram everybody on the road, you wanna drive on both sides of the road.

0:10:48.4 Mike Vacanti: And just roll.

[laughter]

0:10:50.7 Mike Vacanti: Well no, we don’t wanna hurt anyone Jordan. Come on. Don’t take this analogy too far.

0:10:53.3 Jordan Syatt: Not directly, at least. [laughter] Man. Alright, so you’ve got this synthetic anger. I like it.

0:11:03.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:11:03.9 Jordan Syatt: Well, it’s real anger, you’re just figuring out a way to manufacture it whenever you want.

0:11:05.3 Mike Vacanti: When it dissipates, yes.

[laughter]

0:11:08.9 Jordan Syatt: Cool. I’m excited to see what happens. How was the response to your YouTube video?

0:11:13.0 Mike Vacanti: It was good. It was seemingly good. People seem to like it.

0:11:17.3 Jordan Syatt: Nice. Oh my God, dude, I just had… I woke up not long ago, as you know, I just remembered a dream I had last night in this moment, which made me… ’cause it was talking about your video, where she spoke a lot about our book, I just had the craziest dream that our book was… The published copy of our book was just awful, like the cover was terrible, there were mistakes inside of it, there were pages that were printed in the wrong direction, and our publisher was like, “I don’t see the problem.” And I was like, “Are you out of your fucking mind? You don’t see the problem?” And she was like… I was like, “We have to change all of this.” And she was like, “If you change all of this, then we’re not gonna publish it.” I was like, “Fine. We’ll fucking self-publish. We don’t need you.” [laughter]

0:12:08.3 Mike Vacanti: Jeez!

0:12:08.4 Jordan Syatt: I had this huge dream. And it got lawyers involved like, wow, I literally just reme… And I think it was those, the last dream I had before I woke up, so yeah, that just popped into my head vividly. You know how some dreams you don’t really fully remember, I remember this dream.

0:12:24.6 Mike Vacanti: That makes sense, because yesterday we gave our addresses so that we can get books and because now we actually have physical copies ready to go.

0:12:34.4 Jordan Syatt: Oh, did you do that for me? I didn’t know he did that. Did Cat do that for me?

0:12:37.8 Mike Vacanti: I believe… Yeah.

0:12:40.4 Jordan Syatt: Okay. Alright. [laughter] I was like, I didn’t give them my address.

0:12:46.0 Mike Vacanti: So that’s not why you had the dream. Wow! That’s very interesting. But yeah, we’re one month out, but pre-sale is on, you can order a copy right now.

0:12:55.2 Jordan Syatt: Eat It.

0:12:56.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes. If you wanna support, if you wanna buy a copy of the book, we would love that, but we got a month here.

0:13:03.7 Jordan Syatt: This first book is called Eat It. The next book is gonna be called Don’t Eat It.

[laughter]

0:13:13.3 Jordan Syatt: Not really for everyone listening. The second one is not gonna be called Don’t Eat It, but maybe it will.

0:13:16.5 Mike Vacanti: It could be.

0:13:17.4 Jordan Syatt: It could be.

0:13:18.0 Mike Vacanti: It could be. Although, you know what’s interesting, I’ve had… I’ve been much like you have dialed things in with increased fiber, decreased protein.

0:13:28.3 Jordan Syatt: I thought you were gonna be mad about me decreasing protein, I thought you were gonna really really mad.

0:13:31.7 Mike Vacanti: Oh, I am. I am. I’m just… I’m holding that for some synthetic anger later on.

[laughter]

0:13:39.2 Mike Vacanti: I’m fully… No, I’m just kidding. But really… I have been a diet almost exclusively of unprocessed foods for a number of weeks now, and I think… I mean, I told you I stepped on the scale the other day for the first time in months, and I was kind of shocked and somewhat upset at how low my weight was relative to the amount of strength gains and seemingly amount of muscularity, but I’ve obviously re-comped a decent amount in the last few months. I also just… I don’t know, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is really good. There are a number of foods that are… So in the spirit of Eat It, the last few days I’ve been adding more processed foods and it’s just delicious.

0:14:23.1 Jordan Syatt: It’s so good. It’s so easy to overeat.

0:14:25.5 Mike Vacanti: It is very easy to overeat. I also think I’m a crazy NEAT responder.

0:14:30.3 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah, yeah. You always get… You’re downstairs in your basement, just moving around, doing like boxing and football in at your basement.

[laughter]

0:14:42.9 Mike Vacanti: But even… I think back to when I was in a real real surplus eating 4600 on training day and 4200 on rest days, and I remember I lived by a lake at the time, and I would walk around the lake multiple times a day, and I… Thinking back on it, I thought I just wanted to listen to a podcast and go for a walk, but now it’s very obvious to me, I was probably taking 30,000 steps a day because I was force-feeding 800 grams of carbs.

0:15:12.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. And you’ve always been like that. For example, I could sit down and watch a movie start to finish, no problem. You need to stop the movie like 12 times just to get up and move. You’re not the guy just to sit down. I’m very much like… My genetics are just like, sit. Don’t move. [laughter] Your genes are like, Get up, move. You got that North Viking inside of you, alright, we gotta go, we gotta go on the hills, we gotta get some movement in. [chuckle]

0:15:41.7 Mike Vacanti: It must be. It must be. Yeah. But Eat It is book one.

0:15:50.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Eat It is book one. Oh, that was the other thing, and I think I… I don’t know if I said this on the podcast, I think I was just telling you about it, how ever since my sleep has improved dramatically, sugar cravings have gone down intensely. It’s been crazy how little I’ve craved sugar or any processed food when I sleep super well.

0:16:08.8 Mike Vacanti: We did not talk about it on the podcast, we talked about it just us, and I had it on my list to talk about on the podcast, so perfect that you’re bringing this up.

0:16:15.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh, good segue.

0:16:16.8 Mike Vacanti: I remember I would always, not always. I probably asked you 12 to 17 times if you were hungry, and…

0:16:26.1 Jordan Syatt: 12 to 1700 times, not 12 to 17. [laughter]

0:16:29.3 Mike Vacanti: Alright. Maybe. But… And I’m thinking specifically, when your answer was the same.

0:16:34.4 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah.

0:16:35.4 Mike Vacanti: And you didn’t even address the question of whether or not you were hungry, it was always, I could eat. I could eat. That’s not what I asked, though. Did you just eat an hour ago, are you actually hungry? If you don’t have a meal right now, I don’t wanna make you eat, but I think that getting… Not being in a sleep deficit, meaning you’re getting plenty of sleep quality, high quality, high quantity sleep leads to better recognition of hunger cues.

0:17:03.2 Jordan Syatt: Yet there’s also the… To be fair, if you were here right now and you’re like, “Hey, are you hungry? I would still probably say that… I’d still be like, “Yeah, I could eat.” I think it’s part of the social aspect and the ESTP in me or I’m like, yeah, we’ll just do whatever. I’m cool with it. I could eat. But when I’m by myself, where… For example, when I’m by myself, I wake up in the morning, I used to go Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I have Cinnamon Toast Crunch and I have oatmeal in my pantry.

0:17:31.6 Jordan Syatt: Cinnamon Toast Crunch used to just be like, “Alright, that’s the first thing I’m gonna grab, just because I want that sweetness.” Now, it’s like, “No, I’m actually gonna go for the oatmeal ’cause I don’t want that sweetness.” And it’s literally, I think it’s just because I’m getting more sleep, and there’s something about it where the desire for sweetness has gone down since I’ve fully been loading up on sleep, and I’m interested to see once the kid comes and if my sleep is hurting, if I’m more readily opting for the sweeter, higher calorie options.

0:18:01.8 Mike Vacanti: That will be very interesting. Your neurotransmitters right now are the most dialed they’ve ever been in your entire life. You’re on…

0:18:12.3 Jordan Syatt: ‘Cause of my sleep. [laughter]

0:18:12.3 Mike Vacanti: Well, ’cause of everything.

0:18:13.9 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah.

0:18:14.2 Mike Vacanti: You have basically no caffeine, you do… In Dopamine Nation, she talks about basically pressing into in the pain or doing difficult things as a way to increase our dopamine afterwards, and she talks about reading a hard book or doing intense activity, all of this cardio, you’re doing all this lifting, all this Jujitsu, your sleep is dialed. You’re like I just said, not ingesting caffeine sugars down, like your brain is a wonderful… I mean, your dopamine from social media is probably still there, but other than that, you’re a real specimen.

0:18:52.0 Jordan Syatt: Did you wanna hear something funny? I’ve never even told you this, I’ve never told anyone this. I just had this this random flashback to a memory, it was… When you said doing hard things. Right, so this is so funny, I just had this random memory, I haven’t thought about this in years, so when I was a high school wrestler and I was cutting a lot of weight, and this is by no outside influence, I would just do this, ’cause my family didn’t have the best nutritional habits, we always had junk food in the house, all that stuff, I would come home after wrestling practice and there would be like cookies, and I would literally take a cookie to my room and I would just put it on my desk and I would just look at it, and I wouldn’t let myself eat it. Right? ‘Cause I’m cutting weight for wrestling. But I thought I was gonna get stronger just by like, “I’m gonna have this cookie in my room and just look at it,” and I would do that and then I would throw it out. And I remember being like, “Now I’m stronger,” ’cause like I said “no,” this is disordered eating, whatever, Jordan in high school, but I was like, “Man, that actually was [chuckle] real will power to… “

0:19:55.3 Jordan Syatt: Like, I’m cutting weight, I’m like, “There’s no way I can eat this. Or whatever it is, I just bring it to my room.” It’s like, someone who’s addicted to cigarettes, just buying a pack and leaving it on their bedside table, just like to see how strong they are, it’s a really crazy thing when you think about it.

[laughter]

0:20:11.6 Mike Vacanti: It is, but I also love it. [laughter] If you think about the Marshmallow Test and you think about willpower being a finite resource that hypothesis we’ll call it, and the kids that were most successful at resisting the temptation of the marshmallow so they could get a second one, were the ones that close their eyes or occupied their attention, doing something else, like that whole thesis that we have a tank of will power, and that once it’s depleted, it’s harder for us to make good decisions. I think there may be research on this, I don’t know, but it seems to me intuitively that that tank of will power can also be… We can increase the size of it by training it.

0:20:56.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yup. There is research on this.

0:21:00.1 Mike Vacanti: Is there? Okay.

0:21:00.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:21:00.4 Mike Vacanti: Great.

0:21:01.2 Jordan Syatt: There is a book, I think it’s called Willpower by Baumeister. It’s all about how you can increase willpower.

0:21:08.4 Mike Vacanti: Very cool.

0:21:09.1 Jordan Syatt: Like, doing simple things, for example, one of the things is like… I remember I read this book in college, and let me see what the name of this book is, but one of the things is just doing things that are more difficult when they don’t really have to be. So for example, one of the things that they tested in research was brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Doing something like that, it makes it way more difficult than it has to be, but forcing yourself to do that on a regular basis, it’s gonna take more time, it’s gonna be a little bit more annoying, but doing something like that can over time increase the tank of your willpower.

0:21:43.2 Mike Vacanti: I don’t remember the exact scenario, but I had a client who… Basically his wife or girlfriend… I don’t remember… I actually don’t remember who it was, but I just remember, I was struggling with it too at the time, which was, there was a lot more food and types of food around than he was used to having, and then that was leading to more temptation, more snacking, more going over calories, macros, etcetera, and I helped him re-frame it as an opportunity or a test to increase his willpower by looking at it like, how do you get stronger doing hard sets of something, thinking of it as an opportunity to like, Okay, this is around… I’m actually going to strengthen this muscle, when I see it, I’m gonna think about, Okay, this is an opportunity, this is a test. This is somewhere where I can improve.

0:22:36.7 Jordan Syatt: I love that. Alex Viada said something recently to me that I liked a lot, where I was about to do… It was a couple of months ago, I was about to do a max heart rate test, and I was not excited about it, and I was like, This is gonna suck. And he basically said something to the effect of like, “how lucky are we that we can willingly put ourselves through suffering and know that it’s actually gonna make us better as a result of it?” But I was like, Man, what a great way to frame your suffering. It is suffering, but you’re willingly putting yourself through it knowing that it’s gonna make you better in the long run, as opposed to a suffering where you’re not choosing to go through it and it’s not necessarily gonna make you better, but like, this is something that you get to do. Like, part of your day is you’re giving yourself the opportunity to suffer so that on the other end you’ll come out better. I was like, man, that’s a great way to frame that.

0:23:28.1 Mike Vacanti: See, that’s enlightened. That’s like…

0:23:30.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:23:31.8 Mike Vacanti: That… I would just think about the person who said something to motivate me to do the test, [laughter] that’s like a real… Feel like, Godly, spiritual enlightened perspective.

0:23:47.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and the book is called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Baumeister. B-A-U-M-E-I-S-T-E-R. Great book, great book.

0:23:58.7 Mike Vacanti: Awesome. Cool man. What is that, a high fiber tortillas?

0:24:03.3 Jordan Syatt: Oh, yeah. Mission Carb Balance tortillas, these things have 45 calories a piece and 10 grams of fiber.

0:24:11.8 Mike Vacanti: Oh, baby, getting it. Getting it. We have a new… What do we wanna call this? Segment on the podcast that we’re introducing today.

0:24:25.8 Jordan Syatt: I didn’t know that’s what you’re gonna talk… I was like, I don’t know and…

0:24:27.8 Mike Vacanti: It’s a working title. [chuckle] I didn’t either. [laughter] The business question of the day. So, as you know, if you’ve been listening, there have been episodes where, despite the fact that this is a podcast about how to become a better coach, how to help your clients get better results, how to build your online coaching business, episodes go by where we don’t talk about business and… [chuckle] Which is still fun. However, we’re gonna have a standing segment where there will be at least one business question and answer within every episode. Sometimes more, but at least one. So, today we have the business question of the day. Tony, big time listener of the podcast, Tony said, “my current company will not let me train people online on my own. I’m currently training some people online, I have four clients in my first month.” Which is crazy, good for you, Tony, four clients.

0:25:29.1 Jordan Syatt: They’re online clients?

0:25:30.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. That’s unheard of, actually.

0:25:33.5 Jordan Syatt: Holy shit, that’s really impressive.

0:25:34.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. Took me over a year to have four online coaching clients. “However, I am limited in what I can put on social media, if anything at all, because my contract does not allow me to train people on my own outside of the gym. I’ve started a blog, I currently have an email list, any tips on how to build a client base without social media? Thank you guys, your content has been extremely helpful and taught me a ton.”

0:26:00.5 Jordan Syatt: Well, this place that you’re working for sucks, just right off the bat.

0:26:02.9 Mike Vacanti: Yup.

0:26:03.5 Jordan Syatt: And I’m sorry you’re going through that. What I would do is, I would continue to post, and I would just keep doing it. It was funny ’cause one of the places that I worked with was very similar, they weren’t happy with the stuff that I was posting, but I was a great coach, so they weren’t firing me. And they had a lot of people who depended on me and a lot of the clients loved me, and they were like, Alright, we can’t fire this guy, so I just kept posting. And then I would get called in the boss’ office. I remember one time I got reamed out because my boss loved Bulletproof Coffee, he loved the whole putting butter in your coffee shtick, he was all about it. And so I wrote a huge article on my website about why Bulletproof Coffee is fucking stupid, and I blasted it all over my social media and everyone at the gym saw it, and they were all talking about it. And my boss pulled me in, he’s like, You can’t write articles like that, and I was like, Why not? And he was like, ’cause I promote this here.

0:26:57.9 Jordan Syatt: I was like, Well, this… It’s my website, it’s not at the gym. He’s like, But everyone saw it. I was like, It’s the truth, you’re putting 500 calories of fucking butter in your coffee and telling people who are struggling with their weight to do that. Like, What is wrong with you? And then… And I ended up leaving the gym of my own volition about six months later, just because I was like, I had enough online clients and I didn’t need it anymore. So the reality is, if you’re a really, really good coach, odds are, they’re probably not gonna fire you even if you still post on social media. Now I wouldn’t do stuff like actively talk about the gym, especially by name on social media. I wouldn’t say, Hey, if you’re a client of this X, Y, Z, da-da-da, but I would just post educational content. I would just keep posting educational content and helping people, and worse comes to worse, they do fire you, but you’ve already got four online coaching clients, and I would imagine that more people from the gym would come on with you as an online coaching client if you left.

0:27:57.9 Jordan Syatt: But the reality is, the best gym owners in the world want their coaches to build online presences. They want their coaches to be able to build an online presence to get online coaching clients, they want you to succeed. So for this gym to not want you to do that speaks volumes about them. And I would say leave them as quickly as you possibly can, and that might mean staying on with them for another year, while you continue to post content. But I would do that, I would just… Do not stop, I would go harder, post more content, post more educational material and help people. And if they say, hey, listen, I’m more than happy to help with the gym social media as well, I’ll help you make content for you, but this is important, it’s not interfering with the gym, I’m not taking clients from the gym, I’m just posting because it’s reaching people all over the world, so that’s what I would say.

0:28:47.5 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. That’s easier said than done for many. I think number one, get a new job, go to a different gym, like you said, that can’t happen overnight, but start interviewing at the very least. And you don’t necessarily need to take that job. I mean, you can, if you find a new position that’s a really good fit with better culture, better manager, gym owner, you can jump ship, we’ll call it right away, but you can also just use that opportunity as leverage to continue posting. So, yeah, that’s… The long and the short of it is, what not to do is continue working at this gym, stop posting because your boss is an idiot and said you had to stop posting and think of ways to get online coaching clients without being anywhere on the Internet. That’s not the way to do this. Find another gym and either go work there or use that as leverage for, if you do have a conversation where your boss is like, Okay, either you’re fired or you need to stop posting and then you can go to your other job.

0:29:56.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. And this reminds me of something else to say, especially for all the young coaches out there, or not young coaches, whoever, if you’re gonna work at a gym or anywhere and someone asked you to sign a non-compete, do not sign a non-compete ever. It is not worth that job if they force you to sign a non-compete. Because if they’re gonna make you sign one then… I know people who had non-competes and then they couldn’t do online coaching for six months to a year after they left that gym because of the stipulations of that non-compete.

0:30:26.8 Mike Vacanti: Wow.

0:30:28.0 Jordan Syatt: So, do not sign that. Actually, I’m not gonna say him by name, one of my friends who’s in the coaching world, he still does a lot of in-person coaching, he initially signed a non-compete and he was really mad about it, so during the closed office when the gym was closed he went back and he snuck in, he stole his non-compete and tore it up. [laughter] He was like, that was such a stupid mistake. Like, he didn’t know. And then when they started pressure and like, Hey, you signed a non-compete, then he just went and took it and then they were like, you signed it. He’s like, No, I didn’t. [laughter] And they couldn’t find it.

[laughter]

0:31:01.7 Mike Vacanti: No, I didn’t. [laughter] So gym owner is listening, definitely get a digital copy of that as well [laughter] and start on your…

0:31:09.2 Jordan Syatt: Even then though, if you’re a gym owner, don’t make your coaches sign a non-compete. It’s a really shitty thing to do.

0:31:16.8 Mike Vacanti: If I was a gym owner, I would 100% make my coaches sign a non-compete and not enforce it for them to go… Like, if they wanna go make content or go do coaching on their own, or go work at another gym or work in the area, I would never enforce it in those scenarios, but so that I had at least leverage for legal repercussion if they stole clients from the gym when they left, for that reason I would.

0:31:38.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah.

0:31:38.3 Mike Vacanti: And by the way, I think from a moral perspective, I also would not… Tony, because you asked this question, if you end up leaving the gym, I wouldn’t take the clients from the gym with you. And I know there’s debate about that, it’s just like as a matter of principle. Yeah, it’s not something I would do.

0:31:57.5 Jordan Syatt: What if… Let ask you this, what if the gym has terrible coaching and they’re not doing well by their clients. And you know that you’ll be able to give their clients a better service, would you still not take those clients or would you leave them at the more dangerous gym?

0:32:17.8 Mike Vacanti: I mean, if there’s a trolley headed toward three kids tied to a track, and you could pull a lever and make the trolley go a different direction, but there’s one old man tied to the track, should you pull the lever?

0:32:36.3 Jordan Syatt: Yes.

0:32:36.3 Mike Vacanti: You see, it’s like [laughter] a philosophical moral question that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer, that geniuses have been debating for decades.

0:32:47.8 Jordan Syatt: What would you say to that question? That’s an interesting one.

0:32:50.9 Mike Vacanti: I have no idea. I would say that, I don’t know what the write answer is.

0:32:55.1 Jordan Syatt: No, you can’t say that. You have to choose, yes or no, do you pull it? Old man versus three young kids.

0:33:03.8 Mike Vacanti: I would find a way to [laughter] save everyone.

[laughter]

0:33:09.5 Jordan Syatt: It’s sad, but just straight up, I would pull the lever. And by the way, if I was the old man, I would want them to pull the lever so that I would die to save three young kids. Obviously, easier said when I’m not in that situation.

[laughter]

0:33:20.8 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:33:21.1 Jordan Syatt: I mean, in that situation I’d be like, “let the kids die!”

[laughter]

0:33:26.4 Mike Vacanti: Taking a real moral high ground on this one.

0:33:28.2 Jordan Syatt: “They’re stupid kids anyway!”

0:33:30.0 Mike Vacanti: I’m like, but you’re… [laughter] When we’re in our 60s doing this podcast, I’m gonna remind you of this episode. [laughter] And be like, “Okay, Jordan, you can sacrifice yourself or…” [laughter] There’s something about you taking action… Like, letting nature run its course versus you taking action.

0:33:50.3 Jordan Syatt: Well, no, because I very much believe… Like, you know, when there’s a dangerous situation, what’s the first think to do, save the women and children, right? And I very much think that’s part of the man’s responsibility is like… I think that’s part…

0:34:03.4 Mike Vacanti: That’s toxic masculinity bro.

[laughter]

0:34:07.4 Jordan Syatt: I think that’s part of being a good man is taking responsibility to help save other people. I do.

0:34:15.2 Mike Vacanti: Yup. Yup.

0:34:15.3 Jordan Syatt: And that is toxic masculinity. It is. It’s like, and we should be shamed for that and canceled for it. Right? But like…

0:34:19.1 Mike Vacanti: We should be cancelled so hard for even discussing this.

[laughter]

0:34:22.9 Jordan Syatt: So obviously, it’s… Well, I guess male privilege, right? [laughter] But I think part of the man’s responsibility is to save other people, so that’s where I come from with that.

0:34:38.7 Mike Vacanti: By the way, that isn’t toxic masculinity, that is the good and noble side of masculinity.

0:34:45.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh, if you wanna get… I don’t even think toxic masculinity exists.

0:34:49.1 Mike Vacanti: There’s positive and negative masculinity.

0:34:52.3 Jordan Syatt: Correct.

0:34:52.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:34:53.7 Jordan Syatt: There’s positive and negative to…

0:34:57.4 Mike Vacanti: Everything.

0:34:57.5 Jordan Syatt: To everything. Yeah. I don’t think there’s such a thing as toxic masculinity. I don’t. I think…

0:35:03.6 Mike Vacanti: We can just call it negative.

0:35:05.4 Jordan Syatt: I don’t even think… ‘Cause I don’t think masculinity can be negative. I think the negative things that people associate with it are not masculine, like, someone who is just like… I don’t know. What’s a negative trait of a guy, like what… Controlling. We’ll say, overly controlling, right?

0:35:20.7 Mike Vacanti: Okay.

0:35:21.3 Jordan Syatt: I wouldn’t say that has anything to do with being masculine, I just… I think that’s actually a lack of masculinity. I think that’s more like someone being controlling is actually them showing that they’re not a confident man. Like, I think masculine means you’re courageous, you’re loyal, you’re protective, but you’re not overly controlling, right? So I think anything where someone is like, Oh, that’s toxic masculinity. No, what you’re describing is, it’s not masculine at all. Like, I think masculine is all positive. I think feminine is all positive, but the negative traits are not… Are aspects of those two things. Does that make sense?

0:36:00.8 Mike Vacanti: It makes complete sense, except that what you think the word means isn’t necessarily… And by the way, I’m basing this off of Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson’s work, which is based a lot on Carl Jung’s work and he about the good and bad side of masculinity. And so, if masculinity is like… We can think of it as traits like strength, power, you can use these for good or bad things. And we talked about this on the podcast maybe a year, you can use strength and power and competency either to bully someone or to defend someone from a bully…

0:36:38.1 Jordan Syatt: Hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:36:38.7 Mike Vacanti: And that would be like the good and bad side of masculinity.

0:36:41.4 Jordan Syatt: That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense.

0:36:44.5 Mike Vacanti: But I’m with you the way that we… It’s been… I want to defend masculinity in general too, because it’s been so bastardized by the current Western culture over the last handful of years. But those are the… That’s the working definition that I’m using. And it’s hard, because it’s not rooted in any of the hard sciences, it’s more rooted in mythology and anthropology and culture.

0:37:18.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, so… But all that said, I would take the clients.

[laughter]

0:37:29.4 Mike Vacanti: Even… You make a good point where it’s like, “Okay, are they doing a good job with their clients,” but partly… I feel like we can rationalize that in any…

0:37:42.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, it’s… There are some mental gymnastics.

0:37:43.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah… Or I’m a slightly better coach and we’ll give them a better service, and therefore… There are so many…

0:37:51.6 Jordan Syatt: Well, the gym that I worked at, they were bad. They were… They were doing Bulletproof coffee…

0:37:58.9 Mike Vacanti: You know what? That’s a valid point. And the gym that I worked at, that I left, was doing good by their clients, and the programming was intelligent and safe. And I also felt a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to work there that made me not want to take from… I don’t know.

0:38:20.6 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that makes sense. You’re just morally better than me, I get it… Jon Snow.

[laughter]

0:38:25.1 Mike Vacanti: So good.

0:38:29.9 Mike Vacanti: No, I’m definitely not even close to… What have we got? You got any more questions?

0:38:43.2 Jordan Syatt: Let’s see. “Is it true the magic happens after 20 minutes of cardio?”

0:38:50.2 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know what magic we’re talking about.

0:38:56.3 Jordan Syatt: That’s a fair… That’s a fair question. Yeah. Alright. Well, when did the anger starts to sip in during your cardio.

0:39:04.7 Mike Vacanti: You know what, they might be on to something with the magic… They might be on to something. Right around the 20-minute mark, I believe.

0:39:14.3 Jordan Syatt: “Foam rolling: How often and what are the benefits?”

0:39:18.9 Mike Vacanti: Let ‘er rip, Jord.

0:39:19.3 Jordan Syatt: Honestly, I know there’s a lot of debate around it. There’s a lot of people who are like, “It doesn’t work, it’s just placebo.” And frankly, I would agree that it is probably mostly placebo, especially from a soft tissue perspective, but I don’t really care. It’s sort of like… Let’s say, if you have a client who’s taking a sugar pill and they think that sugar pill is something that’s gonna help them resolve their back pain, and as soon as they start taking that super pill, their back pain is gone… Cool. Take the fucking sugar pill. I don’t care. If you thinking that it’s helping is helping, then great.

0:39:55.2 Jordan Syatt: In the same way that nocebo, something where if you think something is gonna cause pain and it shouldn’t, but then all of a sudden now it starts to cause pain, like… Then we need to stop doing that thing regardless of whether or not it’s physiologically causing pain, it’s psychologically causing that we need to address that. I don’t care if it’s placebo. If it makes you feel better and you have time for it, go for it. Amazing.

0:40:18.6 Mike Vacanti: When you say it probably doesn’t work, do you mean relative… Do you mean soft tissue work in general, or do you mean that it just isn’t relative to using a softball or cross-bar, or some other device where you can get in deeper and go harder, a foam roller doesn’t work?

0:40:33.8 Jordan Syatt: That’s a really good question. What I’m talking about is, a lot of people say that foam rolling or even rolling with a softball or whatever causes structural changes to the tissue, and it appears that it doesn’t do that. But that just because it’s not causing a structural change doesn’t mean that… It’s very clear that if I don’t foam roll versus if I do form roll, I will immediately have a greater range of motion after I foam roll even though there isn’t a structural change.

0:41:05.9 Jordan Syatt: Now that could be placebo… There could be a lot of other effects going on within the tissues that are allowing that… That increased range of motion. So I do think there’s benefit. I think there’s also the question of, well, what if you just did a mobility drill, would you get the same amount of mobility increase without having to go through the pain of foam rolling.

0:41:28.4 Jordan Syatt: So for me, it’s very much up to the individual. If they like it, great. If they don’t like it, then we don’t have to do it. We can find another way. I do think one of the cool things about soft tissue work is sometimes you can increase range of motion at a joint or somewhere without taking the muscle through or even close to an end range of motion.

0:41:47.8 Jordan Syatt: Right. So this is one of the cool things I learned working with baseball players at Cressey Performance, doing some soft tissue work with elite, elite level baseball players, we were able to increase their shoulder range of motion without ever taking their shoulder anywhere near a terminal end range of motion, which was much safer for them. So it improved their ability without actually potentially damaging the joint. And I think that’s very beneficial.

0:42:12.2 Jordan Syatt: But we’re not talking about elite athletes, we’re talking about general population… I’d say… It’s probably about 50/50 in my clients who use it and who don’t use it. Some they just feel better. It’s like a little bit of a self-massage and they like how they feel. And other people are like, “I’ve gotta get in and out of the gym in 27 minutes and I’m not wasting five minutes on that.” So I’m like, “Cool, don’t do it.” So it really is up to personal preference.

0:42:33.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah. That’s a great concise answer. I agree with anecdotally, the benefit of using it during a warm-up to temporarily access a greater range of motion, which is going to lead to a more effective and safer weight training session. And so I have clients who use it for that purpose. I myself use it for that purpose, occasionally. I actually… In the last six months, I’ve foam rolled less than I had in the previous decade… Basically.

0:43:07.8 Jordan Syatt: You were always foam rolling at your apartment when I was over. You always had that foam roller out, always doing t-spine extensions on it and rolling your back.

0:43:15.2 Mike Vacanti: When I was an accountant… This goes back to the Two Plus Two Poker forums. When I was an accountant hunched over my computer in a closet, auditing a public company, working 14-hour days with four other interns with me in the closet, with the worst posture ever… Shortened hips, rounded up her back… And then I was doing all this overhead work and I couldn’t figure out why my overhead press was so weak and why it hurt. I couldn’t figure out why I pull-ups and chin-ups were starting to get pinchy up in my neck, and it was just…

0:43:43.3 Mike Vacanti: I was a hunchback. And I think this was 2010, I found foam rolling for the first time through the Two Plus Two Poker forums, when a guy…

0:43:55.9 Jordan Syatt: Really?

0:43:56.2 Mike Vacanti: Responded to me with an article from… I think it was a T-Nation article by Cressey and Mike Robertson.

0:44:04.7 Jordan Syatt: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it there like their posture one?

0:44:08.4 Mike Vacanti: No… It was about foam rolling.

0:44:10.5 Jordan Syatt: Oh it was about foam rolling. I was thinking is their “Neanderthal No More” series, which was one of the best periods all the time.

0:44:16.2 Mike Vacanti: I think it was “Feel Better for Five Bucks” or something along those lines.

0:44:20.2 Jordan Syatt: Oh wow. I think yeah… Wow, man. Those are long-form articles. You remember the title of the article? That’s so good.

0:44:25.4 Mike Vacanti: And basically, I just started foam rolling my t-spine and then doing extensions over the foam roller with it, and that… It allowed me to access greater ranges of motion temporarily, but then also through conscious adjusting of my posture allowed me to stay in those ranges of motion which made various exercises less dangerous and feel better. And so… Yeah, it’s not the end all be all. If you wanna do it, go for it.

0:44:53.8 Jordan Syatt: “Feel Better For 10 Bucks.”

0:44:55.9 Mike Vacanti: Ah.

0:44:56.9 Jordan Syatt: That’s the name. Man. That’s so good.

0:45:00.7 Mike Vacanti: When was that written?

0:45:02.3 Jordan Syatt: That was written on July 12, 2004. It was published…

0:45:05.7 Mike Vacanti: Animals.

0:45:05.9 Jordan Syatt: Wow, wow, wow, wow. That’s crazy. Man. They’ve been at it for a long time. Alright, Mike, I’ve got a good question.

0:45:19.1 Mike Vacanti: Let’s go. Let’s go.

0:45:20.5 Jordan Syatt: Alright, so this person wanted to know, “do I have to do big launches in order to have a successful business?” And I think what they mean is like we see a lot of people having these big launches once a year where they try and get… Either more clients or sell more products… Do you have to launch… Have these big, big, big launches in order to have a successful online business? What do you think?

0:45:48.8 Mike Vacanti: No, you don’t have to. And my mind goes to… Because there’s a few things going on here. You can have a big launch… And there’s companies that do this who have a big launch either once a year or maybe twice a year, and then are not accepting whether it’s clients or a service, whether it’s a course, whatever it is… But basically then they close registration until the next launch.

0:46:16.1 Mike Vacanti: So that’s one model. One is where you can have continuous enrollment in your coaching program in whatever it is, but then also have a launch once a year, or twice a year or three times, or whatever it is. Or you can essentially never launch and only have continuous enrollment which also works. And there’s pros and cons to all of the above. In my online coaching business, I have never done a launch. I never did a hard sell for my one-on-one online coaching.

0:46:47.0 Jordan Syatt: Even when you just started?

0:46:50.1 Mike Vacanti: Even when I just started.

0:46:51.1 Jordan Syatt: Really… You never were like, “Hey… ” Taking on new clients. Any of that. No.

0:46:58.2 Mike Vacanti: Never.

0:46:58.6 Jordan Syatt: Wow. Everyone just flocked to you. They were like, “Michael, take my money.”

0:47:01.6 Mike Vacanti: That’s absolutely not true, because in my first, basically year of having my business… And that doesn’t count to six months before when I was like getting the website stuff figured out, getting it up… Like the back end… Getting five articles written and ready to go and basically procrastinating and dicking around a little bit… But I had like $40 in revenue in the first year, and no clients. Itwas one program that I sold. So no.

0:47:27.2 Jordan Syatt: And you had money saved from your previous job that allowed you to not be so worried about trying to make more money in that time… Right?

0:47:36.7 Mike Vacanti: Correct. And I also lived in a closet and didn’t eat out for two years and didn’t spend any money whatsoever. And so that was beneficial. I would buy eggs by the gross… Do you know the gross?

0:47:50.5 Jordan Syatt: No. What’s a gross?

0:47:52.4 Mike Vacanti: 144… You could buy…

0:47:54.9 Jordan Syatt: Shut up.

0:47:55.0 Mike Vacanti: A gross of eggs for seven bucks from Costco in 2012.

0:47:57.5 Jordan Syatt: 144 eggs.

0:48:00.1 Mike Vacanti: Mm-hmm.

0:48:00.2 Jordan Syatt: How would you carry all of those.

0:48:01.9 Mike Vacanti: With my muscles… 

[laughter]

0:48:06.5 Jordan Syatt: What kind of box does… I need to look that up on Google.

0:48:10.7 Mike Vacanti: So I’ll explain it to you. It’s a 6 x 6 carton, so you had 36 eggs and then the cartons were stacked on top of one another. So that’s what… Five of them, I believe. And then it was saran wrapped all around.

0:48:24.9 Jordan Syatt: Holy shit.

0:48:31.8 Mike Vacanti: And so, just because you’re not launching doesn’t mean you’re not selling, you’re soft selling. You’re making a useful Facebook video, where in the video, you talk about someone who you helped who saw success. And this is part of the reason we advocate working with clients for free, early on is one experience, two you become a better coach, three it helps you build your systems… But four then you have testimonials which are gonna be beneficial, and things you can talk about.

0:49:00.7 Mike Vacanti: So hard selling is a launch, which you can talk about more here, Jordan. But soft selling is soft mentions that open people’s eyes and ears to the fact that you offer this service without actually right hooking them and telling them or asking them to join it, but just letting them know that it exists and the people who do the service see incredible results. But I’m not necessarily asking you to join it, I’m just making you aware of it in this post, where the point of this post is to help you…

0:49:29.0 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And the vast majority of what I’ve done, and obviously what you’ve done is soft mentions, which is how we built our business. I will say, I think the people who… One group of people who can really benefit from launching are people early on in their coaching career who really need to get clients on so they can start making money, or else they’re not gonna be able to pay the bills.

0:49:57.2 Jordan Syatt: So if you really need to get more people in your coaching program, you will get more people in, more quickly with a launch then compared to a soft mention… Which makes sense… If you are at the mall and I just walk by you and you hear me mention General Tso’s chicken. That might make you think about it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna go get it. Whereas if you pass a stand saying like, “Hey here, take this free bite of General Tso’s chicken.” And you’ll get 30% off your meal, if you get this General Tso’s chicken. You’re way more likely to actually get the General Tso’s chicken, once you’ve tasted it and then you’ve actually… You know you’re gonna get a discount on it versus just hearing someone mention it as you walk by. So the launch…

0:50:41.8 Mike Vacanti: Yes.

0:50:42.9 Jordan Syatt: Will help you get more people, especially early on, and especially if you are in need of getting more clients more quickly. So with that being said though, once you have enough clients to where you don’t need or necessarily want to take on any more… Maybe you’re just starting to make a wait list, it’s probably best to not be launching because now you don’t need more clients. So the point of launching… The point of launching is to get more clients. So if you don’t need any more, don’t do it. It’s still worth soft mentioning it in your posts, in your videos… Like one thing I was talking about with my online coaching clients was X, Y, and Z… Or my online coaching client Stacey, asked me this question, I’ve been wanting to bring it up… Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah… Dah… These are softer mentions that allow people to know that you work with people in an online capacity and that it’s not just in person. And if they wanna work with you then they could probably email you or DM you and find out more about it. That’s what a soft mention is.

0:51:38.8 Jordan Syatt: And it’s always worth doing that just to make people aware of it. But in terms of hard selling like, “Hey, I have five spots available,” or, “Hey, I’m running a 30% off discount,” whatever it is, that’s something that really for a one-on-one perspective, you should only be doing if and when you need more clients.

0:51:58.6 Jordan Syatt: Now there is also a huge caveat to that, where I see some people launching every month. Hey, taking two new people. Or like, “Hey, 30% off.” Like every month. It’s like, that’s too much. It’s way too much. I think at most, it should be like once every three to four months, like maximum, you should do that type of a launch. Because it gets annoying, they get desensitized to it. You want it to be something special when they actually do see it.

0:52:24.8 Jordan Syatt: Even if you do need more clients, I still wouldn’t do it once a month, it’s too much. Once every three to four months is plenty. And this also goes for, if you’re not doing one-on-one coaching, you have more of a membership option, or you’re launching a product… Still the same thing… Like once every three to four months at most, when you do a launch for a discount or whatever it is. And if you want more people to buy that product or service, it’s a really good option, but you don’t need it at all to be successful.

0:52:53.3 Mike Vacanti: Great explanation. There’s also something to be said for not ever needing more clients, and it’s difficult, obviously, but it’s very possible. It’s possible just through… If you’re launching your online coaching business, also getting an in-person coaching job, not only for the experience, but also to pay the bills, because it puts you in a position of abundance. And when you operate from a position of abundance rather than a position of scarcity, your behavior is gonna be different. When you need three new clients in the next two weeks, otherwise you can’t pay your rent coming up, that’s a really bad position to be in, and your business behavior is going to map the position you’re in.

0:53:38.0 Mike Vacanti: You’re not setting yourself up for success. Whereas having a little bit of savings plus doing whatever other kind of work that you need to do, ideally in-person coaching… But whatever you need to do so that you do have cash coming in so that you can build your business the right way. This isn’t to say, don’t launch. I completely agree that launching is extremely beneficial, especially early on, but it is to say it’s better to launch knowing that if you get zero clients, that’s okay, and you can still eat next month. You’re not in that treacherous of a position.

0:54:12.1 Jordan Syatt: Right. And… I completely agree. When you launch, the last thing you wanna do is launch based on a whim, or launch just like you had three clients cancel, so you’re gonna launch… That’s a terrible idea. And you can always tell when people are doing that, when all of a sudden their content just goes straight towards… Sign up, sign up, sign up, sign up. Like, no one is doing that if they’re in a good place. No one is going all of a sudden from nothing to trying to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, out of nowhere, if they’re in a good place financially. And people can smell that. And it’s not a good look.

0:54:50.5 Jordan Syatt: What you want to do is if you’re gonna launch, you wanna prep people for it. You wanna let them know, “Hey, this is coming. I’m really excited about it.” And give them at least two to four weeks advanced notice like, “Hey, I’m gonna be launching this. I’m gonna be releasing this, I’m super excited about it.” This is how we structure it in the mentorship. We have an entire massive launch course. And then every four months or so, we’ll put the mentorship… The people in the mentorship through a launch in which they learn how to do it and they learn how to set it up. They learn how to write sales copy for it and all of that. You don’t just wanna lose a few clients and then try and launch because your behavior has changed, people can tell it doesn’t look good. So it’s something you wanna prepare for ahead of time, not something you wanna do on a whim.

0:55:30.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, it’s a great point. And good to know what you just pointed out, which is, if someone is launching all the time, things aren’t going amazing for that person. Because… Especially when we’re getting started, we compare ourselves to our peers more, and we look to our peers behavior cues as, how should I be acting. And we’ve had coaches, people in the mentorship or other coaches come to us and say, “I feel like I need to be doing more. I feel like I need to be launching more.” I feel like I need more programs… Or courses… Or I see this person and this person, and they have two open spots this month, and then they’re launching a new product the next month and the next month they’re launching something else.

0:56:09.6 Mike Vacanti: And on the surface that looks like success. That looks like they have a lot of things going on, but like you just mentioned, if someone is launching super high frequency or launching a lot of different things that it isn’t a good sign for what’s going on underneath the hood.

0:56:24.6 Jordan Syatt: It’s actually funny because if someone has a successful launch, oftentimes, they don’t wanna work at all for a little while. We just had someone in the mentorship… I’m not gonna say their name… Just had someone in their launch made over 40K in their most recent launch, and they’re gonna take the summer off. They’re gonna relax. They’re gonna obviously work with the clients they took on, but they’re gonna take the summer away from a lot of work, which is like… That’s what happens when you have a really successful launch.

0:56:51.8 Jordan Syatt: Like, “Okay, cool, I can relax a little bit.” As opposed to the people who are launching, and launching, and launching, and launching. And it’s so funny, ’cause usually what they’ll do is they’ll be like… They’ll be like, “Oh, so glad all those people took advantage of my last launch.” I have all the… Making amazing progress with those clients and now we’re gonna do another launch. It’s like, no, that didn’t happen. I know what you’re doing…

0:57:11.6 Mike Vacanti: Or you wouldn’t have the capacity and energy to be doing this.

0:57:13.9 Jordan Syatt: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And be careful with the… I’m only taking on two new clients stuff. Because… If you’re not actually just taking on two new clients and you’re just saying that it gets old really quick. And it might work the first time, it might work the second time, it might even work the third time, but the more you do it, the more obnoxious it gets, and the more people really understand what it is you’re doing. Not a huge fan of just only taking on two more… And you know what else I’m not a fan of… And this is gonna get some people mad… I’ve seen a lot of these big mastermind group saying this… I hate it when I see people in there… And either in a launch or in their Instagram bio, they’re like, “I only work with women between 27 to 32 who make six figures and are high achievers and wanna… “

0:58:07.6 Jordan Syatt: Like why are you saying… Why is it that specific? Are you telling me that if a woman who is 40 came to you and she didn’t make that much money and she didn’t wanna get stage lean, she just wanted to get healthier, you wouldn’t take her on. Like… Come on… Stop it. You just say… Like if you only work with… I help women lose fat, build muscle and feel more confident. That’s way better than being so ultra specific with this stuff. It just looks manufactured and obnoxious, but that’s just my opinion.

0:58:36.4 Mike Vacanti: I’m with you 100%. It looks manufactured, it’s also… I don’t think it’s… Niching down that hard is not good for business. I know people disagree. I just… It doesn’t… Definitely doesn’t make sense in fitness… The taking on two clients we make fun of in the book. I forgot about that until I was doing the audio book.

0:58:56.6 Jordan Syatt: Did we?

0:58:58.1 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, we did. Well, we said… We were like mocking… We were like… And you see someone posting, two new… I’m taking on two new clients… And then in parenthesis, they’re taking on more than two new clients.

[laughter]

0:59:12.6 Jordan Syatt: Oh men.

0:59:14.1 Mike Vacanti: And also… You said it perfectly like people… The first time it’s gonna work, but people can sniff it out over time, and it hurts your reputation. Reputation is the game, because reputation is longevity. Reputation will allow you to take years off and continue to maintain your business… I’m… SEO too obviously. But if you burn all your bridges… You’re killing your brand.

0:59:40.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

0:59:44.4 Mike Vacanti: A great episode.

0:59:46.4 Jordan Syatt: That was sick. Sick episode, bro.

0:59:46.9 Mike Vacanti: I know. We’re gonna look back on… What is this, 78? Something like that.

0:59:50.5 Jordan Syatt: What should we title this episode? Toxic masculinity?

0:59:56.8 Mike Vacanti: Sure. Let’s do it.

0:59:58.7 Jordan Syatt: Awesome. Thank you everyone for listening. If you would like to pre-order our book, you can do that at the link in the show notes. Is it pre-order Mike, or is it just regular order?

1:00:08.0 Mike Vacanti: I believe it’s still pre-order because you’ll actually receive it on June 6th or 7th. However, our publisher really wants us to get some pre-orders, so if you could support Jordan and I by picking up a copy from the link in the description, that would be excellent.

1:00:24.3 Jordan Syatt: Or if you wanna join the mentorship and, or join the mentorship, that’d be great as well. And so people are crushing it in there. We are just beyond stoked with everyone. So everyone in the mentorship, we love you, and that’s it. Have an amazing day. And we will talk to you very soon.

1:00:39.1 Mike Vacanti: Bye everyone.