[00:00] You know, if you have a goal or a habit you wanna do every day, it’s like, well, when do I start? I could start today, or I could start tomorrow. I could actually start next week because I’m on vacation this week. Or, you know, actually, next month’s probably better ’cause my birthday’s this month and I gotta whatever.

[00:14] Like, no, like a commitment, a challenge. There’s a clear start and an end, and you know exactly what’s required. 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.

[00:35] And today we’re talking about the secrets to getting you to do the things that you know you wanna do, right? The things you feel like you should do, you want to do. There’s so many guys who I talk to who they’re like, yeah, I, I know what I have to do, but I can’t get myself to do them. I can’t get myself to, to wake up early to do the workouts, to make the extra sales calls, to, to do the thing that, or things that they know they could do, should do.

[01:01] They’re not outside of their reach, but it’s just hard to get yourself to do those things. So we’re gonna unlock all the secrets to this because they see it all the time with my clients. There’s a real underlying framework here and there’s, I’m gonna break down this sort of anatomy of what it is that makes.

[01:18] This work that makes my program work, that makes this framework work that I’m gonna share. This is gonna be totally free, something I’m gonna give this to you, something you can do totally on your own that will help you actually execute at a higher level to start getting the results that you know you want to get.

[01:33] And if you could just get yourself to do the thing and to do the thing. Consistently. That’s the real key here, is to be able to do it long term. Not just do the thing for a week or a month and then fall off, but actually long term, getting yourself how to do, do something right, uh, something or things and.

[01:51] One thing I’m gonna share is that inside of my coaching community, there’s currently 80 some guys in there. Uh, high performing men, all sort of sharing ideas and holding each other accountable and helping each other figure out life together, right? Whether it’s how to make more time for date nights, how to get the workouts in, how to do better, uh, on sales calls or sharing real estate.

[02:14] Purchase ideas and stuff like that. A lot of great entrepreneurs and, and leaders in the community, and they’re, they’re sharing their advice all the time. And one of the things that happens sort of magically inside of this community, inside of my program is that people start to become more consistent.

[02:29] They start to execute on the. Things that they want to execute on. And interestingly, the one thing phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over is we will have guys will, we’ll sign up for the program, let’s say, you know, we have a conversation. They say, okay, I’m in. I wanna sign up for this program for Reveal Your Path.

[02:46] And it might be, you know, let’s say. Five days or even 10 days before they actually start the program, and I talk to them again once they start the program and they’re like, Hey, I’m already working out more. I’m already doing this. I’m already being more patient with my kids. I’m already making more sales calls.

[03:02] And it’s like, why? Why is that happening? Before they even start the program, are they beginning to see the results they’ve wanted all along? Well, there’s something going on here. There’s something at play that I’m gonna reveal here that you can start to use. Now, and I’m gonna share something at the end of the episode that will enable you to actually move forward.

[03:24] Right now you can go to, there’s a certain page I’m gonna direct it to that will enable you to actually dis. Kickstart this right now for free on your own to, to start doing this and implement this framework. Alright? Here’s something that you’ve heard of before, and this is really the, the what I’m gonna break down for you.

[03:39] You’ve heard of challenges before, right? You might’ve heard of the 75 hard challenge, right? It’s this big thing. It’s kind of this crazy, everybody’s doing the 75 hard challenge and it’s there, there’s a handful of things that you’re supposed to do every day for five, for, for 75 days in a row, and those are pre-prescribed.

[03:54] And it might be, it’s like, drink a gallon of water, read 10 pages of a self-improvement book, two workouts a day, things like that. And that’s great, but what if you don’t need those things? What if there’s other things that you need and well, there’s maybe the whole 30. Challenge, right? So this eat Whole Foods for 30 days.

[04:11] There’s Exodus 90. There’s other challenges out there. Well, what about a challenge that’s designed specifically for you first, before we talk about how do you do that? Let’s talk about why challenges work and how you can start to implement some of these concepts today into your life to actually start to move forward instantly.

[04:29] Immediately and start to get results. Okay, so there’s four real components here that are at play. These are psychological. Things that, that have an effect on you to get you to start moving and start doing things right away that will, I don’t care what level you’re at right now, you will jump to a higher level because of what you’re about to hear and because you, you’ll start to implement some of what I’m about to share with you.

[04:52] So why does a challenge work? Like, so whether it’s 75 hard or Whole 30, or, or this challenge that I actually, I’m gonna talk about later on, that I do with my clients every year that I’m gonna give you free access to right now. So why do they work? Four reasons. Number one, you’re making a commitment. You know, think about if you ever signed up to do a, a Spartan race.

[05:12] I’m, I’m signed up for a Spartan race right now, actually got a bum knee. I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to pull this thing off. I’m, I’m hoping I can. I gotta my knees. Killing me. So, but I signed up for a Spartan race, started training for it, and, and there’s this commitment. Once you make this commitment, you start dialing in on the habits that are, that you’re gonna have to execute on, right?

[05:30] You sign up for a marathon or a 5K, whatever it is for you, you, you sign up for something, you make a commitment, and you instantly start taking action because of that commitment. You know, sign up for a course, an online course you might take, or, or even booking a vacation. Think of it that way, like when you book a vacation, that’s a commitment.

[05:49] And you’re gonna most likely follow through on that commitment because, because you made the commitment, there’s money on the line and there’s, there’s choice that you’ve made a, a line you’ve drawn in the sand. Uh, I think about personally in my life, you know, when I was wrestling wrestlers in general, like, you make a commitment to wrestle a certain weight class, well, you’re gonna make weight.

[06:08] I never miss weight in my entire career. And it doesn’t, it happens rarely with wrestlers, but, but it happens, but almost never because you make a commitment. You make a commitment to make that weight. And I lost, you know, for me, you’ve heard me say it, if you’ve listened to this podcast for any number of years, I lost 22 pounds in two and a half days once, which sounds extreme, but in the wrestling world, that’s all that, not all that extreme.

[06:29] It’s, it is extreme for the, for the general public, of course. But you make a commitment. You do the. Right when I signed up for my first triathlon, I didn’t even know how to swim. It was ridiculous. I actually went to a pool. A friend of mine was the, the, the youth coach at this pool locally here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

[06:47] And I showed up. I’m like, Hey man, can I just start coming to swim laps at the pool and maybe get some pointers? He’s like, yeah, man, come on over. And I get in the pool and so I, I swim. It’s 25 yards, right? 25 meter pool, and I swim 25 meters. I come up choking, gagging. I was like a drown rat. And it was absurd.

[07:07] It was ridiculous. But I had signed up for this triathlon, didn’t know how to swim really. I could stay afloat and I’d done, you know, scuba diving and all kinds of stuff before so I could, I was fine in the water, but I couldn’t really actually swim, actually crawl like freestyle. And there was this kid in the lane next to me, he’s like 12 years old and he’s just flying up and down and I’m like, Hey man, can you gimme some pointers?

[07:27] It felt ridiculous. I was like. My, in my third younger thirties and I’m like asking this 12-year-old kid if he can teach me how to swim. But he did, right? He taught me. And six weeks later I swam three quarters of a mile in an open water swim in a lake. And just because I made the commitment, I was going to do the thing.

[07:45] Um, the seven C challenge is another thing. If you know who Dr. Gilbert is, the success hotline. I’ve had him on the podcast before. Um, if you just Google Success Hotline, you’ll check it out. Actually, we’ll have the link, um, the information about the success hotline. In the action plan. Uh, but Dr. Gilbert leaves a short three minute motivational message every day on his voicemail.

[08:06] Amazing guy. Amazing person. He is done it for, gosh, I think like 12,000 days or something like that in a row now, or approaching 12,000 every, every day since 1991. It’s absurd. But he has this thing called the seven C Challenge from Memorial Day to Labor Day. That’s no cake, cookies, candy, chocolate chips, cola, or complaining.

[08:27] Seven Cs. You don’t do any of them for, uh, 98 days of summer between Labor Day, Memorial Day and Labor Day. But once you make the commitment, you do the thing. I always shied away from day making the commitment. ’cause I had an excuse. I’d always say, gosh, I don’t really need to to worry about that. My diet’s pretty good.

[08:43] I’m pretty good. I don’t need to worry about that. But one year I’m like, you know what? Let’s just do it. Let’s do it for one day. I made the commitment for one day, did the seven Cs, or didn’t do any, any of the seven Cs for that day. I’m like, Hey, I’m gonna do it again tomorrow. And 98 days later I completed it.

[08:57] Now I do it every single summer. I don’t have any dessert, any candy, cookies, all that stuff, all summer long. Try not to complain, but some complaining might sneak in there, but that’s hard to, hard to be objective about. So yeah, I, I could probably step it up on the complaining part, but, um, seven C Challenge.

[09:13] It’s a commitment, right? So that’s one of the reasons why a challenge works. That’s one of four, making a commitment. Number two is clarity. You have clear when you make a commitment, there’s clarity. There’s a start, there’s an end, there’s a timeline. You know what’s required. For example, the seven C challenge, there’s a start and an end.

[09:32] I know exactly what’s required. When I’m a wrestler making weight, I know the deadline, I know what’s required. It’s very clear we’re out here in the, in the, in the world where. You know, you don’t really have clarity on when things start or when, you know, if you have a, a, a goal or something, you want a habit you wanna do every day.

[09:50] It’s like, well, when do I start? I could start today, or I could start tomorrow. I could actually start next week because I’m a vacation this week. Or, you know, actually, next month’s probably better ’cause my birthday’s this month and I gotta whatever.
[10:00] Like, no, like it, a commitment, a challenge. There’s a clear start and an end, and you know exactly what’s required.

[10:08] And when I signed up for my triathlon, I knew when the deadline was and I knew what was required. That’s why a challenge works, right? So when, when I share with you what I’m gonna share at the end about creating your own challenge, there’s gonna be a start. There’s gonna be an end and you’re gonna know exactly what’s required, right?

[10:26] So there’ll be number one, a commitment. Number two, there will be clarity. And number three, I told you there were four things. Number three is there’s accountability, right? You have skin in the game. It might be money, it might be reputation, it might be ego. If it’s the vacation that we talked about signing up for, you know, booking a vacation, there’s skin in the game, right?

[10:47] There’s accountability there. Like you, you said you’re gonna do the thing. You’ve taken the days off of work. You’re, you’re planning to use those days for something and you’ve, you’ve allocated them to those vacation days, that vacation you’re planning on taking. So there’s accountability to actually do the thing.

[11:04] Right. And if you’re doing it with other people, there’s more accountability. You’re gonna go on the vacation. That’s why challenges work. There’s accountability. And the challenge I’m gonna share with you, there’s public accountability. You’re gonna be sharing this publicly, and when you have that, you just.

[11:22] Execute more consistently, you, you find the discipline that you’ve been missing all along that you wish you had. All of a sudden, magically it shows up. For example, you know, whenever I have a, a call with one of my coaches, and yes, I say coaches because I invest in multiple coaches. All of the most successful people I know have invested in, in coaches and programs and, and more than I ever have.

[11:48] It’s fascinating to see the, the, the highest level, especially entrepreneurs who I work with and. No, who are friends of mine or I’m in mastermind groups with, I’m like, they’ve invested the most in coaches, but whenever I have a call with one of my coaches, I have clarity coming out of that. Right? We already talked about clarity and I’ve made a commitment, and then there’s accountability to get the thing done because on the next call, guess what’s gonna happen?

[12:11] I have to report back how I did, did I do the things that I said I was going to do? There is external accountability. Don’t tell me you can hold your, I’m gonna hold myself accountable. It doesn’t happen. Not possible. There’s gotta be external accountability. And I’m gonna reference actually, um, my good friend Ruben Gonzalez, who I’ve had on the podcast multiple times.

[12:30] Most recently in episode 4 38, episode 4, 3 8. Again, we’ll have that in the action plan, but I’ve had Ruben, I, he is a four time Olympian in the luge and first ever. Four-time Olympian in the Winter Olympics in four different decades. He was an Olympian in four different decades, but he wrote a book called The Shortcut, and people say, oh, there’s no shortcut to success.

[12:50] Well, guess what? There is, and an Olympian taught me this. He said, there’s a shortcut to success and it’s getting a coach because what does a coach provide you? Certainly expertise, but also accountability and clarity, and there’s a commitment. You just get the things done. I have plenty of clients. Who are amazing athletes in their own right, but guess what?

[13:13] They hire a personal trainer. To get them to do the workout right? They, they’re more consistent and they get the work done and they get it done better because there’s external accountability. So I told you there’s four reasons why challenges work. Number one, commitment. Number two, clarity. Number three, accountability.

[13:29] Number four is this motivation. You will instantly overcome the resistance that you feel. Now, resistance is something that, that Steven Pressfield talks about. If you’ve not heard of Steven Pressfield, uh, he’s absolutely amazing. Um, had on the, had him on the podcast multiple times. Let’s see, episode most recently, episode, I’m looking this up right now, episode.

[13:50] 3 7 2 3 72. He’s written a bunch of books, fiction and nonfiction, but he’s written some great sort of self-help personal development books around getting yourself to do the work and, and, and mostly for writers and artists and entrepreneurs. And he’s got one called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart wants to be.

[14:08] He’s got another one called Nobody Wants to Read Your Crap on the SHIT word. He’s, uh, I got another one called The War of Art, right, which is a play on the words, the Art of War, but he’s read all these books. He talks about this thing called resistance, and whenever you have clarity and commitment and accountability, all of a sudden the motivation shows up.

[14:30] You do it anyway. You do the thing and you overcome that resistance, right? So you’ve gotta welcome this challenge into your life. You’ve gotta decide on the challenge, and then you will feel the motivation show up. There’s an interesting concept called the Hawthorne Effect. Now, what is the Hawthorne effect?

[14:50] This was a study that was done in the early 19 hundreds. It was done in the 1920s. It really came out of an experience at, uh, Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant. It was in Cicero, Illinois, and they were designing a test to see whether light levels. In, in the plant, in the factory, uh, affected the output of the workers.

[15:12] Okay? So they said, okay, we wanna design an experiment to see, you know, do we need to increase lighting because it was so expensive? And do we, if we increase lighting, is that actually gonna increase the worker output? And so here’s what they did. They, they increased the lighting and what they noticed was productivity went up.

[15:30] Interesting. Okay. You might, might’ve guessed that here’s the surprising result. They decreased lighting. Productivity also went up. What happened there? It’s like, wait, what do you mean increased lighting? Productivity goes up, decreased lighting, productivity goes up. What’s happening here? Well, here is what’s happening.

[15:49] There is external accountability. They’re tracking results. So the motivation shows up. Like I said earlier, you can’t hold yourself accountable when external accountability, motivation shows up whenever you’re tracking the results and not just you tracking, but the results are seen publicly. And this is what was happening in, in, in these experiments is like, oh, somebody’s watching, somebody’s looking over my shoulder.

[16:14] Somebody’s seeing how many widgets I create, uh, in, in this plant. And therefore since, since people are paying attention, I’m paying attention, more productivity goes up when it’s tracked. When you’re tracking results with somebody else looking, motivation shows up, you will be more productive. You will be more motivated.

[16:38] There’s some great examples. If you think about Airbnb. The company, when they got into Y Combinator, the accelerator Business Accelerator, huge, you know, really very well, very well known, big business incubator accelerator, their results went up incredibly fast because, uh, in large part. Yeah, everything was now being recorded and they were being asked the hard questions about their metrics, uh, about what they were doing, and, and they had to record this stuff as opposed to prior to that, you know, it was just holding ourselves accountable inside of the company.

[17:10] Once they got external accountability, the motivation showed up to do the right things. Tesla, when Elon Musk started sleeping at Tesla when times were desperate, he literally slept in his office. Productivity went up. He saved the business. He saved the company whenever times were really, really desperate.

[17:27] They didn’t know if they were gonna be payroll. Michael Phelps, when he changed to, from tracking his workouts from how I feel, which is very subjective versus the data and metrics, how many laps, how many mi meters am I swimming, how many hours in the pool? When his coach started tracking that and he had externally, this was externally tracked.

[17:48] The results came. So this is why challenges work, right? There’s a commitment, there’s four things. Number one, a commitment. Number two, there’s clarity. Number three, there’s accountability. Number four, there’s motivation. Okay? So what does all this mean for you? Alright, if you’re listening to this. Prior to October or during October, 2025, we have a live challenge going on right now.

[18:10] It’s going from October 1st to October 30th. That’s a 30 day challenge. If you’re listening to this anytime afterwards, this is still live and available to you. The link is in the action plan. It’s revealyourpath.com/challenge. This is available year round. You can see how we do this. You can see how this is executed and what’s happening right now with the revealer path, um, on the path.

[18:34] October challenge is we are publicly tracking a challenge. This is a challenge that is designed for you by you, and I’ve got four amazing, uh, partners who have helped. Grow this and promote this, this year. Uh, because they care about, uh, people actually executing on the things they know they should do. So we’ve got, uh, Todd Durkin, who’s been on the podcast multiple times.

[18:56] We’ve got Rorke Denver, retired Navy SEAL Commander. We’ve got. Jim Afremow, Dr. Jim Afremow. He works with the top athletes in the world, uh, as a performance coach. And then Zach Even-esh. He’s one of the top strength coaches, underground strength coaches, his brand and his business, one of the top strength coaches in America.

[19:14] All these guys have created it and designed a challenge that they recommend for you. Now, you can use that, you can modify that, what they’ve created or select one of those and, and use it as is or modify it or create one of your own. Right, and I’m gonna have a bunch of things there that you can choose.

[19:29] Ideas, you know, from 75 hard, from the Whole 30 Diet and from a bunch of other options that, that I have used and recommended for my clients over the years. That is the on the path October challenge. You can do it in any month, whatever month you’re listening to this. You can do this right now. You’re just not gonna have the accountability publicly that we all have going through the On the Path October challenge.

[19:51] We’re gonna do this every year, but right now, what you’re gonna do, if you don’t have that accountability for not getting this in time, you’re gonna find. Three friends to do
[20:00] this with. So share this podcast episode so they know what we’re talking about. And then you’re gonna have this shared accountability with each other.

[20:06] Alright, go to revealyourpath.com/challenge and you’ll have all the information right there. There’s a video explaining more about it and telling you the next steps and how to go about your own challenge and um. That’s it. So take action. Like don’t let this go in one ear, out the other. Build this into your life so you can start getting the results that you are absolutely, absolutely capable of, and you know you’re capable of it.

[20:31] Otherwise, you wouldn’t be listening to my voice right now. You would’ve skipped this and found something easier and, and sort of less accountability to do and listen to. But right now I’m challenging you to accept this challenge, the 30 day on the path challenge. revealyourpath.com/challenge. Go there right now.

[20:49] I’ll see you over there.

[21:54] Take action. Good luck.

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