Mastering Routine for more Productivity and Inner Peace, with Greg Layton

My guest today is Greg Layton. Greg is the founder of Chief Maker. For over a decade, Greg has been a trusted advisor to CEOs and executive teams of multi-billion-dollar companies around the globe. He's the author of a the bestselling book, Chief Maker: How to Rise Above the Pack and Get a Seat on the Executive Team. He's also the host of a popular podcast called “The Inner Chief.” In addition, Greg has spent 15 years traveling the world to learn and master the world's foremost performance techniques. From living with Shaolin monks in China, all the way to racing in desert ultra-marathons, Greg has spent a lifetime studying the limits of personal endurance, as well as finding the best paths to mental strength and peak performance. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Chief Maker Book: http://bit.ly/2uusEOW Website: chiefmaker.com.au Save an Hour Video Series: chiefmaker.com.au/saveanhour INTERVIEW: Let's get to it, Greg. Welcome to DREAM THINK DO, buddy Mitch, thanks, mate. Great to be here. I love it, man. All right, so I want to talk about your book. I want to talk about the power of routine, all the stuff you do for managers and leaders. But it's my show, so I get to go wherever I want. And I want to go to the Shaolin monks you hung out within China. How the heck did that happen and what was that like? Well, it started out as a bit of a journey. One question I’ve had since the early days is, “Who out there is an outlier in performance?” I've seen the Shaolin guys on the telly and even at a circus kind of show once. I always thought they were out of this world. They were sticking swords in their bellies and all sorts of stuff, but it wasn't hurting them. So, who are these guys and how the hell do they do that? About six months later, I started doing Kung fu feverishly where I was living at the time. Six months after that, I found myself up to my knees in snow in the mountains in a remote part of China at a very small Shaolin Monastery and academy. I was welcomed into this little Shaolin school, and I can tell you now, it was like going back in time, it really was. The training was 1000 years old, and just nothing seemed to have changed. We trained 12 hours a day, every single day, dawn till dusk. We didn't just do Kung fu, which I found very interesting. They started off the day with Tai Chi and meditation. Even though Tai Chi is actually a form of martial art, the training is that it was a calming process and balancing the body and the mind and the spirit to begin the day. Throughout the day, we did everything from Qigong to power stretching and conditioning to Sanda, which is China's kickboxing, and also Kung fu. It was dedication to your art form all day, every day. You were there for three months? Three months. Yeah, three months. Interesting - I was never injured, and we did some crazy stuff. An example of one of the things I do is we did this thing called power stretching. I love to tell this story. Instead of a brief, gentle stretch, you get nice and limber and warmed up. And then you'd get into a splits position, with your feet out wide. You might. I don't. Yeah. I truly do. My first day there, I couldn't do splits. I don't know. I was reasonably flexible, but no, I couldn't do the splits. So, I'm in this vulnerable position with my feet out wide, and my hands on the ground. So, my back is parallel to the ground. And a guy comes in, and he starts sitting on my back because he thinks I'm not deep enough into this stretch. And then another guy, because now I'm finding that like a really difficult stretch, he starts kicking my feet up. Wow. It gets to be such a brutal stretch that I can't breathe. I'm in that much pain with the level of stretch; I can't breathe at all. I'm gasping. And then you actually at a certain point, you stop breathing. And then my shifu, my master who they've got a few key things there. One,