[00:00] You ever look at people who achieve incredible things and you hear about the work that they put in to get there and you think to yourself, like, yeah, I’m not doing that. Like, maybe it’s an iron man or building a business, a side house or something like that. Well, what if you thought to yourself, like, hell yeah, I’m in, I don’t care what it takes.

[00:20] And now I’m not talking about the iron man or the business, I’m talking about whatever that is for you. the promotion or losing the weight or fixing your marriage or getting to your next level with your business, whatever it is today, I’m going to unlock the key to success that is going to help you adopt the mindset of hell.

[00:40] Yeah, I’m in, I’ll do whatever it takes. And it will give you the consistency, the discipline and resilience to get there. Welcome to another episode of success for the athletic minded man, real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus. In business, in life, this is your host, Jim Harsha, Jr.

[01:02] And today we’re talking about the difference between hard work and inspired action. Now I recorded an episode on this, but I just looked it up. It was almost six years ago. It was in July, 2018. That’s like 250 years in podcast year. That’s like revolutionary war. That’s basically when this happened. It happened like when the revolutionary war took place.

[01:25] This was like forever ago. And so. I’ve updated this concept in terms of my teaching of this with our clients. And I’ve got a lot of new thoughts on this. And I wanted to bring you an updated version of this. So the chances are, you haven’t listened to that episode. If you’re listening now, we’ve gotten a lot of new listeners.

[01:41] Of course, in the last six years, I want to bring this to you. A fresh, revised, updated version of this. Now, before I get into sharing about that, I want to share something really interesting that I’m going to give. 10 listeners access to now. It’s the first 10 people who comment on the YouTube video for this episode are going to get access to something really cool.

[02:05] Now here’s the deal. You’re like, Oh, 10 people. I don’t get a whole lot of YouTube views. We don’t invest a whole lot into YouTube early. I should say we haven’t, but we do. But we have been over the past six months to a year. We’ve been just really dialing in those videos and making them even more watchable and editing them and, and putting some B roll and stuff in.

[02:21] It’s pretty good videos. And I think it’s a great way to consume the podcast. So I’m trying to get more subscribers because when you get more subscribers, YouTube shows videos to more people and it helps create momentum. So you. The listener are the key to that. So my ask for you, my request is that you go over to the YouTube channel, just search my name on YouTube.

[02:42] You’ll find the channel and subscribe, like this video and then comment on it. So if you’re one of the first 10 people to comment on this, I’m going to give you access to the To this. Now, this is something I’ve only reserved up to this point for my clients. And it is an AI version of coach Jim of B and AI version.

[03:03] So I’ve uploaded tons of, we’ve been working on this for months. Pauline and I, Pauline does a lot of work on the podcast and with my business, she and I have been working on this for months and months, and we’ve uploaded tons of content, trained this thing to act as much as possible like me. Now here’s the deal.

[03:17] If you’re like, man, that’s weird. I’m not going to chat with a virtual version of Jim. Think of it like I think of it, I’ve come to think of AI as simply assisted journaling or Google search on steroids. This is not trying to actually replace a human being, right? Maybe other AIs are, maybe that’s kind of where this is AI is going, but that’s not what this is about.

[03:39] This is about getting clarity and peace of mind on whatever it is that you’re working on. But getting it from a targeted source, somebody like me, who has been working on this stuff for years and training people and working with people and coaching people. And I have concepts in there. And my, my AI has been trained on reveal your path, which is my coaching program.

[04:00] It’s been trained on this concept called the productive pause, which I talk a lot about cognitive conversion or overcoming friction, as well as on today’s topic, hard work versus inspired action. And so it’s been trained on this. The first 10 people who comment On this video are going to get access to coach Jim AI.

[04:20] And this is a 24 seven tool. You will get access to virtual coaching. All right. So check that out. Look forward to seeing you subscribe, comment, like on the videos. And even if you’d not the first 10, go ahead and keep commenting, liking, and subscribing. That’s really going to help me boost my numbers. So I appreciate your support on that front in advance.

[04:37] All right. So. You know, back in episode 155, I talked about hard work and inspired action. Now, these are two different things. Let me give you some examples. So you really know what I’m talking about. And then we’re going to talk about how do you get it? How do you unlock yourself so that you can turn your hard work into inspired action?

[04:55] So you can find the discipline and the consistency and the focus that you need. To unlock your maximum potential, right? You’re like, boy, Jim, I know that if I can just be more consistent or if I can determine, like, what’s the right goal for me, if I can determine what that target is, like I I’ve got, I’ve got a work ethic.

[05:13] I just don’t know how to unlock it. I’m just not executing on it right now. Or maybe I’m too busy. And the thing that I really want to work on, you know, I keep kicking the can down the road where we’re going to unlock All of that for you today. So let me, let me give you an example. My wife showed me a graphic.

[05:27] She came, she came across on social media a couple of years ago, and it was this dude on a bicycle and I’m not, I’m not a cyclist, but this was like a road cyclist. He has a helmet on and the colored Jersey. And he’s like. Cranking it out down the road in the caption under it says, imagine meeting your soulmate and then finding out that they like to do stuff like this on the weekends.

[05:50] And my wife showed it to me and she was laughing. And because for me, like, you know, my wife is my soulmate. The last thing she wants to do on a Saturday morning is go out for like a hard workout for me. Like Saturday mornings are that’s the day for hard workouts. I love to do a hard workout on Saturday morning.

[06:07] Like my favorite thing to do on a Saturday morning is to run eight miles with a buddy or two of mine. We run eight miles from my house. Into the city of Charlottesville, we meet up with a bunch of other guys and we do an hour long workout after that. And it’s really hard. It’s like a two, it’s two hours, you know, it’s an hour of running and then an hour of this workout back to back.

[06:26] It is awesome. It is like my favorite thing to do that for me is inspired action for my wife. It would be hard work now. On the flip side of that, my, my wife, she loves to do yoga and different kinds of exercises, but for her, she’s a licensed therapist and she’s a school counselor. And she works with elementary school kids who are going through some crazy challenges.

[06:45] It’s, it’s amazing. The stories that she comes home with, but her work for her is inspired action. I could never do what she does. It would be such a grind. It would be so hard for me, but for her, it’s inspired action, right? Difference between hard work and inspired action. Steve jobs, building Apple.

[07:04] Inspired action, Colby Bryant. You hear about the work ethic, the insane work ethic that Colby Bryant had inspired action. You’re thinking to yourself, man, I could never do that. Uh, here’s another example. My friend, Ryan, close friend of mine, good buddy. He lost his wife recently to cancer. And over the past three years, this guy has been the whole family.

[07:28] Of course, the wife, kids, my buddy, Ryan, they have been through a lot. Such a horrific time. It was inspired action. Like the work that he had to do, taking her to the hospital in the middle of the night and just boy, the stories and story after story after story of years of this, of this, this suffering. And it was inspired action for him, for him to do the things that he did to take care of his wife, to be a caretaker, to take care of his kids and his family and himself.

[07:58] It was inspired action. It wasn’t hard. Yeah, it was hard work. Sure. You might want to call it that, but it was, it was really inspired act. It’s not like he wasn’t going to do it. He was inspired to do it, right? I’ll give you another example. Michael Chandler, I even interviewed Michael Chandler, who is fighting Conor McGregor in UFC this, this summer, Michael Chandler.

[08:18] I’ve had him on the podcast twice UFC fighter, and he had him on the podcast back in episode 99, then again, in episode three 23, but in one of the episodes, he said, Jim, I’ve built my success brick by boring. Brick brick by boring brick. Like that is inspired action. The boring work that nobody sees that it’s behind the scenes.

[08:41] It’s early in the wee hours of the morning. It’s in a gym when nobody else is there. Boring work. He’s built his success brick by boring brick. There’s a quote about a samurai warrior named Musashi. I got this quote from a book I read about Dave Schultz. Dave Schultz was an Olympic gold medalist wrestler.

[09:01] He actually got murdered by John DuPont. You’ve heard of, if you’ve seen the movie Foxcatcher. And there’s Dave Schultz loved this samurai warrior Musashi, but there’s a book, there’s this quote about Musashi. It’s it is this, and he’s one of the greatest samurai warriors ever. And the quote about Musashi is this knowing that he’s ordinary, he’s always trying to improve himself.

[09:24] No one appreciates the agonizing effort he’s had to make now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results. Everybody’s talking about his God given talent. That’s how men who don’t try very hard. Comfort themselves. How about that? Like that speaks to it. Agonizing effort, agonizing effort.

[09:47] It is inspired action. When you figure out what drives you. This hard work, it looks like hard work from the outside looking in, it becomes inspired action. Like I was a college wrestler. I remember wrestling in high school over the summer, we would go to these training camps and I would be away from home for a month, actually two, two weeks segments at a time.

[10:09] Whenever I did, I would train for actually, it was one, two is. Actually the one month, uh, the one summer, it was like six weeks of the summer. I went to a week long training camp, a week plus, and then wrestled two different national championships, Greco Roman style and freestyle for cadets. And then a couple, I come home, went home for a couple of weeks, went back to junior camp, did Greco Greco Roman and freestyle for junior.

[10:30] So it was, it was like five, six weeks of training and competing over the summer. And I remember the soreness. There were times when my entire. Body was so painfully sore. My muscles were so sore from the incredible training, this intense training, they put us through literally my, like my toes, my feet, my calves, my hamstrings, my thighs, my abs, my lats, my pecs, my arms, my shoulders, my bicep, like neck, face, your skin on your face is sore from wrestling so much every day.

[11:00] And I remember they were teaching us how to throw. Actually, there’s a guy named Ray Brinzer for any wrestling fans out there listening. You might know the name Ray Brinzer. Uh, he’s an all American at both Oklahoma state and Iowa, both perennial powerhouses. I think he’s the only one ever to be an all American at both schools, but Ray would put us through these crazy workouts and he was teaching us how to throw when we were cadets, we were younger, high school age, and man, we just threw each other over and over and over how we would get these pounding headaches.

[11:27] But this is just what you did. This was inspired action. I wanted to be the best possible wrestler that I could be. I wanted to win the national championship. I never did. I was an all American in the summer place, as high as third in the country, but never got to the top of the podium. But man, this was inspired action for you.

[11:44] The list that I’m talking directly to you and for you and about you and your life right now, in order for you to do your best work in the world, this is what’s required, discovering what is it that is inspired action for you. Quick interruption. If you like what you’re hearing here and you want to learn how you can implement Into your life.

[12:05] Just go to Jim Harsha, jr. com slash apply to see how you can get a free one on one coaching session with me. That’s Jim Harsha, jr. com slash apply. Now back to the show. No, I’m going to talk now about how do you unlock this inside of you? You might say, yeah, Jim. Well, I had that when I was. Playing high school baseball or college basketball.

[12:26] And of course the name of this podcast is success for the athletic minded man. So I’m assuming you’re an athletic minded man. Maybe you played sports in high school or in college, or you’re a weekend warrior. Now you’re like, yeah, Jim, I’ve, I’ve had that in the past, or I had that in this one area of my life, but I don’t have it in the other areas where I want to find more success, but we’re going to talk about how do you, how do you unlock that?

[12:46] All right. So here’s how you get it first. This is required. A productive pause. This will not happen. You will not unlock your maximum potential by simply waking up and grinding it out and doing the same thing today for no better reason than that’s what you did yesterday and doing the same thing tomorrow for no better reason than that’s what you did today.

[13:07] That’s not how this works. You have to stop. Ask the hard questions, figure out what it is that, where do you want to go with your life? What do you want your life to look like in, in whatever area, or maybe all the areas, maybe it’s in your career or your health, your fitness or relationships, whatever it might be, you first have to get clear.

[13:27] Now, this is, this is all the work that we do in my coaching program called reveal your path. So what I’m coaching you to do is what we coach our clients to do. And this productive pause, here’s the definition. A productive pause is defined as a short period of focus reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind.

[13:46] That is what you are looking for. Clarity of action, peace of mind in sports. We have that. It’s very clear what we have to do. We know exactly what we have to do to get to where we want to go, right? Making the starting lineup, winning the competition, becoming team captain, making the post season, winning the game, the mash, the, the meat competition, whatever it might be.

[14:11] It’s very clear in sport. It’s not out here in the real world. You have to first stop. And ask yourself, what do I want from my life? You can do that through journaling. You can do that through the AI tool, the coach, Jim AI that I can get. I’m going to give 10 people access to first 10 people who comment on this video over on YouTube, just Google my name on YouTube.

[14:33] You’ll find this and Google hard work versus inspired action, my name. And you’ll, you’ll Most likely stumbled right across the, across this video immediately, but we’ll also have it in the action plan. Uh, we’ll have the link on my website. If you go to the website, find this podcast episode, you’ll go directly over there.

[14:47] It’s not going to be hard to be the first 10 people who comment. Cause I just don’t have that many YouTube followers or subscribers right now. So go ahead and get over there. Use that tool to do like I was talking about earlier, just sort of assisted. Brainstorming assisted journaling with that tool. So first you got to stop and do that.

[15:04] Now, how else do you get it? Inspired action comes from aligning your goals with your core values and your vision for what’s, do you want success to look like you have to align your goals? Not based upon what’s parked in your neighbor’s driveway, not based upon what your parents want for you, not based upon what you see on social media.

[15:26] This has to be deeply aligned with what. Drives you internally as a human being, and you’re not going to figure that out by thumbing through social media. You’re not going to figure that out by just crossing off 10 or 20 items off your checklist today. You’re only going to discover that by doing a productive pause.

[15:47] You have to step back. And once you do that, you will unlock your potential. So let me give you an example of one of my clients who’s done this. Mark McLaughlin. I actually interviewed Mark in Episode 223, Dr. Mark McLaughlin. He’s a neurosurgeon and he’s an author. He wrote an incredible book called Cognitive Dominance, a Brain Surgeon’s Quest to Outthink Fear.

[16:11] Mark founded a neurosurgery practice. He’s a partner in this practice, of course. He also started a nonprofit and He was writing a book years ago when we were working on his book together, helping him, him creep, put this book out into the world. It took him years to put this out. It was inspired action.

[16:30] The amount of work that went into this, you might say, Oh gosh, that’s terrible. I would never do like, you know, knowing his schedule already, which is crazy schedule and very, very intense works, literally saving people’s lives on the surgery table and in the operating room. This guy found time to write a book, not just any book, not like a hundred pager.

[16:50] But a deep, profound, impactful book, this is inspired action. I’m not saying you have to go write a book. Your inspired action is going to look different than Mark’s. Achieving inspired action requires doing the work to uncover your values, the vision for your life. Setting goals and then creating what we call is the environment of excellence.

[17:15] And you can go back to the first episodes I recorded at the beginning of 2024. There was a five part series on all of these pieces around vision and values, aligned goals, environment of excellence, following through. We, I go in depth in each of these in those episodes, or you can also just go to my website, go to Jim Harsha, jr.

[17:35] com slash. R Y P, which stands for reveal your path. This will give you all five, actually five episodes in that series. Episodes 447. You don’t have to remember that, but you can just, you can grab those off the action plan. We’ll have all of that there for you, but this walks you through each of those steps.

[17:56] The idea here. Is you have to hit the pause button. You have to identify your vision, your values, create goals, align with those values, identify the environment of excellence. This is essentially, you know, kind of very high level here is who are the people I need to be around. You’re not going to do this by yourself.

[18:13] Right. You can’t achieve your maximum potential alone. You have to be around other people who are inspiring you, driving you to a new level. Whenever I train at the Olympic training center, the standard for what hard work and inspired action look like instantly went up the standard for operations standard for the kind of food you put into your body, what time you go to bed, how you act, how you warm up, how you operate in practice, the types of questions you engage in with coaches.

[18:42] The bar raised whenever I was around the right people, this environment of excellence. This is what’s going to happen at my retreat. I have an upcoming retreat. As a matter of fact, by the time this podcast publishes, I think we’ll be at the retreat or just have wrapped up the retreat a couple of days ago.

[18:57] And This retreat is a bunch of my clients coming together at a ranch outside of Denver, and we’re going to be doing some masterminding in, in the level of discussion, the, in, in the level of people that will be there, everybody’s going to come away knowing what their inspired action is. Right? They’re going to have a plan.

[19:16] We’re going to unlock that inspired action there, but they’re going to have a plan to achieve those things. All of them are, they’re investing in this process. They’re going to show up, they’re going to spend money, invest time, and they’re going to come away being able to make even more money, being able to have even better relationships and being even more healthy.

[19:31] All of that, right? I’m, I’m going to podcast movement. This is a convention essentially for podcasters. I’m going to go there to be around other podcasters. Because this will be part of my environment of excellence. So it will help me unlock even better performance in my inspired action, which is delivered, delivering this podcast to you right now.

[19:54] So here’s the catch you say, okay, Jim, well, I’ve done that work before, but I just can’t quite seem to stay on track. Maybe I’m on track for a month or two months or six months. And then I fall off. I drift back to default. Well. You have to have a system, a system in place for regular inspiration. Back in episode 453, just a few episodes back, I talk about systems, having systems in your life.

[20:20] So you can be consistent, remain focused, be disciplined. You have to have a system. To keep this vision and these values in these goals in front of you, keeping your eyes on the prize, because guess what? Your eyes are going to be on other stuff, right? Your to do lists, your email inbox, your tasks, your busyness, and they’re gonna be focused on the monotony in the grind of daily life.

[20:43] It’s like, no, you have to have your eyes on the prize. You have to have a means of keeping your goals and inspiration. In front of you, so you can actually operate with inspired action and it doesn’t drift back to hard work. Cause you’re not going to do the hard work. You’re going to do the inspired action.

[20:59] You’re not going to do the hard work long term consistently, unless it becomes inspired action. And so how does it feel? How does this feel? Well, it feels like you’re, you finally gotten to your life’s work. It feels like you’re doing the right thing. Now I feel that way when I hit the record button on this podcast, I feel that way when we onboard a new client.

[21:21] Um, I even feel that way. The, when, uh, a few hours before recording this, I was gasping for air during a workout this morning and, uh, working out with a bunch of other guys and it was extremely hard. And I actually was leading the workout today. This was inspired action for me. This is who I am. This is part of my identity.

[21:42] This is part of my vision for my life. And there’s a lot of people would say, I would never wake up at 5. I am run to the workout and then do the workout. I did it this morning and it’s just who I am. And I’m around a bunch of other guys and it’s who they are as well. That’s inspired action for me. It may look totally different.

[22:00] Yours doesn’t have to look like mine. Don’t compare yours to mine. And I won’t compare mine to yours. It has to be for you. All right. So what do you do with this? What’s next for you? First go subscribe on YouTube, subscribe, like, and comment on this video. So you can get access to the coach, Jim AI tool. The next thing is to make sure you get the action plan.

[22:22] If you’re not subscribed to my email list, get subscribed, go to Jim Harsher, jr. com slash action. We send the action plan to these episodes out every Monday morning. So it just lands in your inbox. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to lift a finger. And the third thing is this. Do the productive pause, sit down, start journaling about what do I want my life to look like?

[22:43] If you need help with that, certainly I can help you with that. We can help you get that kind of clarity. You can go to jimharshojr. com slash apply and sign up for a free one time coaching call with us. That’s a great opportunity for you to do a free productive pause with a coach. Don’t let this go in one ear out the other.

[23:02] Don’t let this be just another podcast episode in order for you to do your best work in the world. It requires you to do the productive pause to determine what is the hard work for you that you can make inspired action. Good luck.

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