[00:00] If you’re looking for a system to implement into your life to live a life of peak performance in business and in life, if you’re looking for a framework that you can install almost like a software to upgrade your life and how you live personally and professionally, this episode is for you.

[00:23] 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 and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today I’m talking about. This framework that you can use in your life to live a life of peak performance.

[00:44] Now, this doesn’t mean you will be perfect every day. This doesn’t mean that you will be infallible. What this means is that you have a path to run on a track, to run on a plan, a framework, a system for living your life in such a way that you maintain balance and you execute at the maximum. Possible capacity of yourself.

[01:07] Now, if you think about the title of this new podcast, success for the athletic minded man, you think back to your life as an athlete, maybe you were an athlete in high school, maybe you were an athlete in college, or maybe you’re a weekend warrior. Now you like to run five Ks or do Spartan races or, or iron mans or whatever it might be, there’s a framework in.

[01:28] Type of life that allows you to maximize your performance. And that’s really the underpinning of how I live my life, how my clients live their lives. And that’s what I’m going to share with you today is this framework and where this framework came from. Now, today is part one of a five part series because there’s four parts to the framework.

[01:47] What I’m giving you today is the overview. So you understand the entire framework. And then in my next four solo episodes, which are usually. Alternated with interview episodes. I’m going to keep that framework or keep that, that sort of cadence from success through failure, which we ended at the end of 2023.

[02:05] And we’re starting now in this new podcast success for the athletic minded man in 2024. That cadence of sort of alternating solo podcasts, where it’s just me with the interview podcast, we’re going to keep that going. So over the next couple of months, you’re going to hear these. Episodes where I’m going to be going deep into each of the four main components of this framework.

[02:26] And we call this framework reveal your path. And this is sort of a reference to the idea of when you’re an athlete in competing, the path is very clear to you. There’s a schedule, uh, you know exactly where you have to be when you have to be there, what you have to do to get from where you’re at, to where you want to go.

[02:45] Success is very clear to you. It’s, you know, it’s winning the championship, standing at the top step on the podium, earning the starting spot, winning the competition this weekend, whatever it is, it’s always very clear while out here in the real world. It’s not. Always so clear. So I’m going to reveal where this framework came from and how you can implement it into your life.

[03:06] And then, like I said, in the upcoming solo episodes, I’m going to go deeper on each of these four steps so you can really understand how you can implement this into your life. So the way I want to do this is by giving you a little bit about my backstory as an athlete, my failures, primarily. And then how I carried that into the real world and, and how I found some success in the real world.

[03:26] And then I ended up really at the bottom of the barrel one point, really, you know, down and out and sort of looking, standing at the bottom of the mountain, looking up, figuring out, trying to figure out, you know, where am I going in life? And how do I maximize my potential? How do I take my knowledge and wisdom experiences and actually apply that to my life?

[03:44] So I can find success professionally and, and, you know, make a big impact and make a lot of money and grow my career. But also in my personal life and how to keep those things that are most important in my life in front of me. Quick interruption. If you like what you’re hearing here and you want to learn how you can implement this into your life, just go to Jim Herschel, jr.

[04:03] com slash apply to see how you can get a free one on one coaching session with me. That’s Jim Herschel, jr. com. Slash apply now back to the show. So let’s go back away. So in high school, I was arrested as a high school wrestler. My goal is to be a Pennsylvania state champion. I never even got onto the podium at the high school state championship.

[04:24] So not only did I fail to achieve the goal of state champion, I didn’t even come close. I qualified for the state championships a couple of times, but didn’t win enough matches to get onto the podium. But luckily I was recruited by several universities, the university of Virginia ended up being the place that I selected to go, I was recruited by a couple of Ivy league schools.

[04:43] I had, I had good grades, not great grades. I couldn’t have gotten it, gotten in on my own. I did need the help of the coaches to get into any of those schools academically. Like I said, good grades, but not sort of. Great grades that are required to get into schools like Cornell and Penn and Brown and university of Virginia, but ended up at the university of Virginia as a recruited walk on non scholarship athlete, uh, I was part of a top 10 recruiting class.

[05:08] Probably would have been ranked higher. If it wasn’t for me, I had guys on my team, like Matt Roth. He was a Pennsylvania state champion. Uh, he was actually my roommate, my freshman year, and this guy had, had achieved the pinnacle. I mean, when you’re a Pennsylvania state champion, you’re among the best in the country.

[05:22] That’s just. Pennsylvania is so good in wrestling that if you win the state championship, especially in the big division, uh, even in the small division of Pennsylvania, you’re just simply among the best in the country. Well, that was that guy in here. I am essentially a nobody. And I saw how Matt lived his life and how he went about competing.

[05:39] And I registered that year. So if you’re not familiar with the college athletics, if you, you read, sure you get five years. To do four years of competition. Uh, that’s changed a little bit with the cove extra COVID year recently. And it’s a little bit easier to get a, uh, an extra year. Essentially you have four, five years to complete four years of competition.

[05:58] So I redshirted and showing up at UVA. I. Thought to myself, man, I don’t know if I can cut it here. Academically. I certainly don’t know if I can cut it here wrestling wise, because everybody here is way better than me. They’re all state champions or three times state place winners. I was none of those. So there was a lot of uncertainty, but there was also this knowledge that I know I have potential, but I just don’t know how to unlock it.

[06:20] And you may be feeling the same way in your life. You’re like, you’re feel like you’re driving with the parking break on, you know, you’re leaving too much on the table, you know, you have more potential. And I felt the same way too. And you fast forward five years and. I had unlocked that potential. I became a three time ACC champion.

[06:35] I was an NCAA division one, all American. I went from average at best, as far as high school wrestlers go around the country to one of the best in the country at what I did. I was invited to live and train at the Olympic training centers and Olympic hopeful, I was ranked. Eighth on the Olympic ladder and in Greco Roman wrestling.

[06:54] And I had this opportunity to train at the Olympic training center as Olympic hopeful. And so complete transformation. I graduated with two degrees from the number one ranked public university in the country. I mean, complete transformation happened there. And then I went off into the real world and took about a year and I sowed my oats and I went traveling and I went on some epic adventures where, I mean, I was in, I spent three months.

[07:17] Backpacking through central America, down through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Baileys, and went on some absurd adventures, including scuba diving in the dark, doing a couple of night dives, scuba diving off the coast of Honduras. An experience with a shaman medicine, man. I mean, just all kinds of bizarre stuff.

[07:35] And it was just an epic, epic adventure. Epic adventure is actually one of my core values. And this was just an epic adventure. Went to Europe for a month. Backpacked around Europe, led adventure camping tours for about four months in the United States, which is actually where I met my wife. So anyway, I took this year off away from wrestling and then ended up coming back to wrestling as the assistant coach at Virginia, ended up coaching for about a decade, collegiately ended up as the youngest division one head wrestling coach in the country at one point.

[08:03] And after coaching, I got out of coaching because I was starting to build a family and just realized that the balance wasn’t there as a coach, you’re pretty much on 24, seven, seven days a week. And stepped out of coaching and got into business, started my first business, and that was successful. I sold that it was a local home services company and raised angel capital, built another company, a technology company, built a software, and that failed.

[08:27] Finally kind of raised my head, looked up after putting my head down and working on this thing diligently, fanatically, almost for two years. I left it on my head and finally looked around. I figured, realized that everything that I was trying to build was actually crumbling around me. I had a failed business.

[08:44] We had debt up to our eyeballs. I was not focused on my marriage. Like I should have been. I mean, I was so single minded focused on the business, sort of like I was in wrestling, single minded focus on wrestling. Well, I was single minded focused on my business. I wasn’t spending enough time with my wife or my kids.

[09:00] I’d stopped working out. I was in the worst physical shape of my life. Pretty. Pretty low point for me. I was essentially broken, broken at that point. And I remember laying in bed one night, staring at the ceiling, thinking what was in place in my life when I went from under performer to peak performer, what was in place in my life when I unlocked my potential as a wrestler, as a collegiate athlete.

[09:26] And can I learn anything from that and apply that to my life now? Well, I started thinking back on this and I had this real epiphany one night, laying in bed, just sort of staring at the ceiling. My wife’s You know, asleep in bed laying next to me, I’m just ruminating, sort of stressed out about money and my business and, and, and sort of where I was going with my life.

[09:45] I thought I’d be further along at that point in my life. And I was in my younger thirties at this point. And I realized there were four things in place in my life when I was competing, when I was maximizing my potential that were not in place in my life. Now, and those four things are there. So I’m going to share these four things with you.

[10:04] Number one, when I was competing as an athlete, and this is relevant to you, the athletic minded, man, this is very important to you. You’ll see the parallels to this in your own life. So when I was competing, success was very clear. I knew exactly what the vision for success looked like. It was standing on the top of the podium.

[10:25] It was winning the competition that coming weekend. It was showing up at practice. Can be. It was very clear, like out in the real world, it’s very, it can be a very ambiguous, especially if you’re thumbing through social media or paying attention with the mass media tells you that you should want the vision for success.

[10:42] When you’re competing as an athlete, whether you’re Tom Brady or Kobe Bryant or some high school athlete. It’s very clear what success looks like, and as based upon the values that you have in your life. Now, when I was competing, I probably couldn’t have stated my core values like I can today, but I knew I wanted to be tough.

[11:00] I wanted to be disciplined. I wanted to be respected. I wanted to go on to success after wrestling like so many of my heroes and my mentors did. And I didn’t have those core values in my life in the real world. And I didn’t have that clear, crystal clear vision for success. And so that’s the first piece.

[11:19] And so I ask you, what is that vision for success for you? What does it look like to stand on the top of the podium? What is that gold medal moment for you in your life? So there’s that crystal clear vision in the values that underlie that. And number two, that’s the first part of four. The second part. Is you have to have goals that align with those values, not goals that align with again, what you see on social media or the, what the mass media tells you that you should want, or what your parents want for you, or what a lot of people do.

[11:48] People based our goals based upon what, you know, what they see parked in their neighbor’s driveway. Like, what about setting goals that actually align with you and who you are and who you want as a human being? That’s what we do is we create goals that align with those values. They’re tethered with those values.

[12:05] They’re tethered to that vision because you think about your life as an athlete. You can do really hard things. I remember one time when I was wrestling, I was 22 pounds over two and a half days before competition. 22 pounds in two and a half days. And I lost all the weight. I made weight. I was a skeleton.

[12:22] I probably should have been hospitalized, but I stepped on the scale, made weight. Uh, it was a horrible, horrible experience in my, in my life, something I would never wish upon anybody, but I did it. It was, it was extremely hard as it sounds like a silly word to even use to, to do something like that. But it was to the edge of my limits, probably a little bit too close to the edge of my limits.

[12:42] But why could I do that? Because I had goals that aligned with my vision for success and my values. I had to make weight. That was who I was. That was what I did. That was part of the vision for my life. And so I stepped on the scale two and a half days later, I made weight. The rest of that story is a little deeper, but the quick short version of it is, uh, I wrestled terribly the next day.

[13:04] And about a week later, I bumped up a weight class. So it was a terrible experience, but I was. I could do the hard thing. I could be resilient. I could do the hard thing because I had a very clear vision for my success and my goals were aligned with that. Now in the wrestling, when I was competing, when you were competing, you know, there, there’s this sort of single minded focus that doesn’t work in the real world.

[13:26] There’s more pulling at us. There are more stakeholders in our lives now, which is why we set goals in four areas. Number one, relationships. Number two, how self self goals is sort of growth, personal growth, impact, impact you want to make in the world, like philanthropy or volunteering, or just fun, fun goals, things that are fun for you that maybe you’ve kind of forsaken for sort of the busyness that can come with life, you know, after athletics and kind of once you get into family and job and professional life, so that self, the third category is health.

[13:56] Pretty self explanatory. And the fourth category is wealth, wealth, professional goals, career goals, financial goals. So relationships, self health, and wealth that sort of prevents us from going single minded focus and getting off balance or living out of harmony with how we want to live our life. Cause that vision.

[14:13] And athletics, it’s standing on top of the podium. It’s very different in the real world. When you have a family, when you have a job, when you have a philanthropic interests, when you have community interests in different things, pulling at you, so the second area is aligned goals. Now the third area of four.

[14:28] So the first is the vision and values. The second is aligned goals. The third is very, very important. And so many people overlook this. This is called the environment of excellence. Now, the environment of excellence is when you think back about your life as an athlete. I think back about my life when I, when I was maximizing my potential, I had coaches who kicked me in the ass if I needed a kick or they helped me up and, you know, help me course correct.

[14:53] They picked me up and dusted me off. If I needed that too, they could see my blind spots. I couldn’t see my own blind spots. They could. You have to have somebody outside of you. We’re on the inside of the jar trying to read the label. You have to have somebody on the outside of the jar reading the label, helping you understand you, your blind spots, see, helping you see your mistakes, helping you recognize your, your wins, and when you’re doing things right so you can keep doing those things.

[15:19] That’s part of the environment of excellence. Another part of the environment of excellence is being around. High performing people. I had that in my life. I was around all Americans. I was around, I was coached by all Americans. I had teammates who had become all Americans. I was around other athletes at the university of Virginia who are among the best in the country, some of them best in the world at what they did.

[15:39] Those were the people in my environment. Who are you hanging around? That’s why our program, we only bring in people who are performing at a certain level or above. So you can be around other like minded people, high performing people who set the bar high, set the standard high, so that we can all raise each other’s standards, challenge each other, push each other, hold each other accountable, that is what is required to maximize your performance.

[16:06] To perform at your peak, this environment of excellence. Now I’m going to go deeper. There’s a lot more to that. I’m not going to get too granular in this episode, but the environment of excellence is really important. There’s also an internal game here, a mindset piece to this. What are the words that you’re using to yourself that a champion uses?

[16:22] A champion athlete uses that you need to use in your life now in the real world as well. Now, those are the first three. Now, the fourth and final piece is this. It’s all well and good to create a vision and identify your core values. It’s nice to have these goals that align with those values and have a tracking process, which we do.

[16:42] We have a tracking system and framework. It’s nice to have all that in the environment of excellence and surrounding yourself with the right people and doing the mindset work like elite athletes do. But if you do all that and you stop there. It’ll work for about a month, maybe six weeks, and then you’ll fall off track.

[16:59] You’ll fall off the path as we call it. This is why you have to have the fourth and final piece in place. You have to have a plan for following through. If you don’t have a plan for follow through, you will be consistent for a while. You will have fits and starts of progress towards your goals. You will make some progress.

[17:17] And then before you know it, you’ll be off track. You’ll be drifting and you’ll kind of. Stumble upon your document where you have your goals or you get some downtime and catch your breath and go, wait a second. Like I forgot about my goals. Like I haven’t even done anything for a week, a month, six months on my goals.

[17:33] You have to have a plan to follow through a systematic framework for following through. Now, when I was competing as a wrestler and in a division one university, a high caliber division one university, this was simply around you. If you think about the lives of professional athletes of Olympic athletes.

[17:52] You know, if I did go, I actually went to the Olympic training center several times and did train out there, but if I had done it even full time, you, you live full time around this, like this is always around you. So it’s there by default. I mean, the goal is in front of you every day by default. It’s not in the real world.

[18:09] You have to be plan a systematic plan and framework for following through. Let me give you a couple of quick examples. One very simple thing that you can implement in your life is this. Take your goals, write them out and create what we call micro goals. Every month we do this, we create new micro goals in, in, for our clients every month, and then you can print them out.

[18:27] I have them right next to me. Actually, I’m within arm’s reach. Literally. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see it. I’m holding them up right in front of you right now. These are my micro goals for the month. I keep them. In my journal, right next to me at arm’s reach. I look at them every morning.

[18:40] You can write them down every morning if you want and sort of shorthand. So that’s one way to keep your goals in front of you. And one way to make sure you’re going to follow through. Here’s another one, have an accountability partner, right? Find somebody who you’re accountable to them. They’re accountable to you.

[18:55] Just like when you had teammates, let me give you a last one here. This was really simple, easy to do. Easy not to do set an event on your calendar for the first Monday of every month to remind you. To reset your goals or review your goals, set your new micro goals, adjust as needed and set the path for the next 30 days.

[19:13] These are simple ways you can set a plan to follow through. Now, like I said, we’re going to go deeper on this. If consistency and focus is a challenge for you, all of these pieces of the framework are going to be going to be helpful, but I’m gonna share some really specific tactical ways. In the episode in the coming months here, where I, or I do these deeper dives to these four categories, but this is the plan for peak performance.

[19:35] You want to maximize your performance. You want to be resilient. You want to be consistent. You want to be focused. You want to live with balance. You want to keep the things that are the most important in front of you. You don’t want to go all in on your career. And forsake your family or your health and wellness.

[19:49] This is the plan. This is the framework. And you might be thinking, well, Jim, I’ve heard this stuff before. And yeah, you may have heard some of this stuff before. I didn’t invent this framework. I discovered it. I rediscovered it. This was in place in my life. When I maximize my potential, when I went from average to becoming one of the best in the country at what I did and invited the Olympic training center to become one of the best in the world.

[20:13] And what I did, this is what was in place then, but I didn’t do it by myself. I had other people around me helping me. And if you don’t have that in the real world, you’re not going to maximize your performance. I have clients who are division one athletes who pay a personal trainer to make them do their workouts.

[20:35] But could they do them on their own? Absolutely. Are they getting the results without the personal trainer? No. So is it worth paying the personal trainer? I’ll let you answer that. If it gets you the results, is it worth paying the money? Is it worth investing? Is it worth getting that person outside of you?

[20:53] To help you implement this framework so that you can finally get the results. You’ve been trying for years, trying different things, reading the books, listening to the podcast, watching the YouTube videos. You have to have the framework in your life, the infrastructure that includes the people in your life.

[21:12] If you want to have that conversation, we can certainly have, have that conversation, go to Jim Harsha, jr. com slash call C A L L. You can have a call with me, but if it’s not with me. You have to implement this into your life. Otherwise you’re going to keep getting the results you’re getting right now, which may be, listen, they may be good, right?

[21:30] People from the outside world might be looking, you might have a nice car, nice home, whatever it might be. I don’t know, but if you know, there’s more in the tank, if you know, you’re leaving too much on the table, do something about it. This framework we call reveal your path. It’s about revealing that path and staying on the path long term.

[21:48] It works for my clients. And it will work for you. I look forward to talking to you. Take action.

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