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

07/24/18 • 50 min

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,

Previous Episode

Painting BIG walls and breaking through BIG fears! with Calina Mishay Johnson

My guest is Calina Mishay Johnson. Calina, or Cal, has been doing some amazing work as an artist in Texas. She's been painting since she was a child, growing up in a small town in West Texas, with a population of 600. That's right, 600 people. After years of life-dealt hardships, Calina Mishay Johnson artistic style started to blossom as she gave herself permission to paint with reckless abandon. Her professional art career began back in 2012, as she started to focus on one-of-a-kind commissions. Then a few years ago, Cal expanded her work and started tackling urban street art, making these huge, amazing, freakishly cool murals all throughout Texas. She's also infusing new life into these small towns where she's doing these murals. Heck, her next big dream, which I can totally get on board with is to complete murals on walls all around the world. So, maybe we DREAM THINK DO-ers can help her out with that. Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Website: streetartbycal.wixsite.com/artist Instagram: instagram.com/Cal_calinamishayart INTERVIEW: Cal, welcome! Hi Mitch, how are you? That was an amazing intro – thank you. Let's talk about how this mural thing got started. Let's go back, and let's talk about when the art started. Were you an artistic kid? I was a weird kid. I loved nature; I loved being outside. Like you mentioned, I grew up in a small town. So, we had a lot of freedom. It's like being the last of the Mohican's before anyone had to worry about their kids playing. We were all over town. We built tree houses; I had animals growing up. It wasn't so much that I knew I was super creative, it was just that I would get sticks and make potions in my room. I was always building something. My dad says, "We'd wake up and then we wouldn't see you until it was time to go to bed." My grandmother saved a painting that I did, like an abstract painting when I was probably four. She had it professionally framed; she still has it professionally framed over her bed, until this day. She had that insight to see that I had that creative mind, it's pretty overwhelming. I love featuring weird people. I love that you said that. I'm so with you. There are so many people that I've talked with that whether it was a grandparent, or a parent, that saw something. And it probably didn't dawn on you fully back then, but to think about the seed that got planted when someone would take something that you did and put a frame on it, to honor that. How cool to think about that seed that got planted right there, and look at where it's gone now, is really cool. Calina Mishay Johnson was the first to say, "Hey, this was worth investing money into." It could have been a $10 frame from Hobby Lobby, I don't know, but at the time, now looking back on it, I think, "Wow! That's really special.” That's cool. I also liked to doodle, and I liked to draw, and I liked to make things, but it wasn't my everything. It wasn't like I was fully immersed. I went to a small school – no art department. It wasn't until a bunch of drama in my later years of high school when I dove into that gift more and more. http://instagram.com/Cal_calinamishayart That's amazing. I'd love to talk about that a little bit too. I saw a little bit of your story. I know that you tried to take some art in college, and you'd been experimenting with all kinds of stuff, your grandma had framed something, but you go to take a class in college and it didn't go so well. Tell us a little bit about that. Oh, man. Okay, first off, I was the first to go to college in my family. So, I went off by myself, I have an older sister, who has a gene disorder, so, used to run and play when we were younger, and then it slowly gets worse, and worse, and worse. Now she's in a wheel chair. Then my family situation fell apart a little bit. I left at a very volatile time to go to college, and I was doing it on my own.

Next Episode

Permission to Dream BIG with Mitch Matthews

Permission to Dream BIG with Mitch Matthews Listen To The Podcast: RESOURCES: Dream Job Redefined BIG Dream Gathering BIG Dream Gathering Facebook Page INTERVIEW: I'm going to share some stories I've never shared before. How about that? I’ll be sharing some stories connected with The BIG Dream Gathering, an event that you may have attended, maybe not. If you haven't, I'm going to get you information so that you can attend one in the future. We're doing them all across the country this fall and would love to see you at an event. But I want to share with you three stories that I've not shared before. Each one is going to have something that I've realized has been so important to me over the last few years. These stories will help you go after your dreams, get more clear on your dreams, stay with it on your dreams. Maybe just as importantly, they’ll help you to help someone else do that. Because if you're a DREAM THINK DO-er, you're all about dreaming bigger, thinking better, and doing more of the stuff you were put on the planet to do. By the way, I'll just put it out there, one of the stories is kind of embarrassing for me to tell you. That's why I've not shared it before. It's something my wife knows about. It's a business story, you can probably put it in the “embarrassing disasters” category, but I learned something that's guided me now and helped me grow my own business. But more importantly, what I learned from it, I've taught others. I'm excited about sharing these stories for a couple of reasons. Recently I've been doing a bunch of podcast interviews. Not for DREAM THINK DO, but on other podcasts around the world. People have found out about Dream Job Redefined my newest book. If you haven't gotten it, go grab it. It's available on Amazon. Because of that, I've been doing a bunch of interviews with some great podcasts; I love it. But in that book, Dream Job Redefined, I share about The BIG Dream Gathering. The event that we do around the country. The event that got started in my living room as a happy accident. I didn't mean for it to happen, but I'm very glad it did, and that's turned into something much bigger than I could've imagined. In doing these interviews for the book, I talk a good bit about The BIG Dream Gathering. I realized, as I was thinking back, here at DREAM THINK DO we're on our 187th episode, and I know I've mentioned The BIG Dream Gathering in passing sometimes. But I don't know that I've ever actually told the origin story of how it got started. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it on the podcast. So with this episode, I want to tell a little of the origin story of The BIG Dream Gathering. What it is, how it got started, all of that, but also three stories, again, that I haven't shared before. Some of the kind of timeless truth that I needed to learn, or at least be reminded of, as a part of those experiences. I want to share those with you now. Because I want to inspire you. I want to encourage you to get clear on your dreams and start to go after those at new levels. I think we all need encouragement to take a second and to permit ourselves to dream, and that's what The BIG Dream Gathering is all about. That's what this podcast is all about. You may be familiar with The BIG Dream Gathering. If you are, fantastic, I hope you've attended an event. If not, here’s what it’s about: The BIG Dream Gathering is an event that we do all across the country, it kicks off with a little keynote from me. I'm a storyteller, so I tell some stories on the front-end to get people thinking and get them a little encouraged. All of those things. Then we cut them loose to think about some of their dreams, write them down on sheets of paper; we call those dream sheets. Then we put them up on the walls, and go around and look at each other's dreams. We write on each other's dream sheets - words of encouragement, ideas, suggestions,