Ted Talk 130: What To Do When You Don’t Get The Support You Need?

Podcast Transcription: What To Do When You Don't Get The Support You Need?  

Ted Ryce: What do you do when you’re trying to make a major change in your life - for example, you’re trying to transform your body, you’re trying to get into the best shape of your life, or perhaps, recapture your health because of some year or decades of neglect -but people around you don’t support you, and it’s frustrating, and it kind of drags you down, it kind of puts up obstacles to achieving this goal that you really don’t need.

It’s hard enough to get in shape, let alone to have the people around you, the people who are supposed to love you and support you, kind of getting in the way. We’re going to talk about that today.

What’s up, my friend? Welcome back to the show, I’m your host, Ted Ryce, coach to entrepreneurs, executives, and other high performers, helping them create breakthroughs with their body, which in turn helps them create breakthroughs in their lives.

And what I want to talk about today is my own journey with this, because I’m kind of an unlikely success story.

So, those of you who don’t know me, I was, I partied a lot in high school, I was a total pothead, in addition to doing other things. And I remember, my friend’s mom who sold us weed—yeah, that’s the type of people I used to hang out with.

I remember coming back a few years later when I had achieved my—well, achieved? It wasn’t really a goal I set out to. But when I became a personal trainer in Miami Beach, and I came back to the neighborhood I grew up in, in the Redlands. Sure, it’s a nice neighborhood, but it had some sketchy folks in it.

And I remember talking to my friend’s mom again, I think I was probably still smoking weed then, but she had said, ‘I voted you the least likely to do anything with your life.” Can you believe that? This was like an old hippie, not particularly accomplished, lived in, not that nice of a house and sold weed to kids, and she thought, “man, that guy…” I mean, I might have it rough, but that guy, he’s not going to do much of anything. This is a true story.

And I remember even before that, when I was trying to start my personal training business, and my step-mom, who I’ve had a very complicated relationship with before—up until her death, is the way I should put it.

I remember when I told her, because, and just to set the stage a little bit here, my step mother basically told me every nice dinner we had when we were teenagers, she said, “This is nice, isn’t it? Well, if you don’t get good grades, you’re never going to be able to go out to a restaurant like this. So, you need to achieve good grades in school, and go to a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can eat at restaurants just like this.”  She actually didn’t say it quite that sternly, she was more of a - had a different vibe, but you know, anyway.

And when I started to succeed with personal training, or before I even got into it, she’s like, “How are you going to make money doing personal training?” And I was like, “I don’t know, I met people who were making 70 bucks an hour, and that’s better than any other opportunity I’ve seen so far. So, I’m just going to go with what I know, and I’m going to go for it.” And it ended up being a great career. I was charging 150 bucks an hour before I left the business.

I ended up training a restaurant tour who had a very famous restaurant in Miami Beach, called The Forge. Sharif let me take my parents there one night, and I just kind of silently rubbed it in their face.

Anyway, my point is this: We’re all going to face obstacles in achieving our goals, and it would be amazing to have the people in our life, our parents, our partners, our boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, whatever, to support us, but the reality is, sometimes we’re not going to get that support, and we’re going to have to go and do it anyway.

And I won’t even tell you how I came up with this idea to talk about this subject with you today, because today’s been a tough day for me. And one of the reasons it’s been a tough day, I don’t want to go into too much detail, just working through some stuff with relationships, and I’m traveling a lot.

Everybody thinks I have this dream life, where I’m traveling to all these exotic locations around the world. It is dreamlike in some ways, but it’s also very isolating, right? Meaning, how do you create deep connections with people if you’re constantly on the move?

And I had a talk with a psychologist today, who I’m testing out, a new psychologist. And also, as I’ve mentioned before, I committed to a year of business coaching, and I showed up to their Mindset Monday session today, and this was one of the things that we ended up talking about.

And I wanted to bring it up to you, because it’s such a powerful, there’s a couple of lessons here, and one is, we’re not going to get support from the people who we feel like we need support from. And I want to say this too: like, in the case of my stepmother—in the case of some people, they don’t want you to succeed. They kind of maybe secretly want you to fail, but I don’t think that’s the majority of cases, even with my stepmother.

I mean, she might’ve wanted me to fail a little bit, but she was more kind of saying, “Hey, listen, what have you done with your life at all? You dropped out of college, you haven’t really created much of anything, and you’re going to go, and people are going to pay you money to go hang out with them in the gym, and to count their reps?”

And that’s exactly what people ended up doing. Of course, not that people are paying me for that, people were paying me for the results they got on something I actually had a lot of passion for, and quite a bit of knowledge about, even at that time.

But the point is, we can’t expect people to support us, and it’s not even always from a bad place, not even from a place of like, wanting to see you fail, sometimes it’s just, they don’t have any context for what you want to do, or they may not understand it. Like starting a personal training business, nobody ever told me, when I was busting my butt in my college course, nobody said, “Hey, listen, you can get your degree, and work really hard, and maybe you’ll get a decent salary when you get out, or you could go get a personal training certification, get in shape, throw on a tank top, show up at a gym in Miami beach, and charge 70, 80, 90, 100, 120, $150, $200 an hour.: I even knew one guy who was charging $400 an hour, as a personal trainer.

So that’s one thing, we can’t expect the people in our lives to support us, especially when they don’t understand it, or when they don’t have context, right? Now, if someone were to tell me that now, it’s like, well, I’ve been doing this for a long time, I could go start a personal training business in person very easily, maybe not super easily, but I could go and do it, and people wouldn’t be like, whoa, yeah, what have you ever done? It’s like, I was a personal trainer for 23 years—actually 20. I got out of it finally.

And the other side of this, besides not expecting to get support from people, we have to seek out the right support, we have to seek out the right support. And for me, man, I needed that call today, I needed both the call with the psychologist—I talked about my life a little bit, talked about my family, my father, my sister, my sister’s suicide, tear it up a bit, unfortunately I didn’t cry as much as I wanted to, because it’s such a release when that happens, but…And then I got a little bit of the more tactical and practical approach in the mindset Monday episodes.

So, we can’t expect people to support us, and so, then what do we do then? Because we all need support, as we got to go seek it out somewhere else, that’s one of the biggest things I do for my clients, I know it’s so funny, because when people talk to me about signing up to my coaching program, they think, oh, well, you’re just going to give me the strategies, and I’m just going to go do the strategies, and I’m going to get the results. And that happens, maybe 40, 50% of the time, that happens.

Shout out to Trevor, man’s crushing it. Shout out to John, oh my gosh, wait until you see John’s transformation, it’ll make you feel like what are you doing? He lost so much fat so quickly, completely dramatically, went from dad bod, to like almost shredded.

I started looking at John’s photos, and I was like, “Man, I got to get in better shape.” Love it when I get inspired by my clients like that. So, we have to seek that out, and that’s a big part of what I do for my clients.

And some people who don’t feel like they’re going to need that psychological support, and ended up needing it a lot during the fat loss journey. It’s fascinating. In fact, I need to start telling those people, “Listen, you came into this thinking it was all about strategies, but then you started really struggling with negative emotions, and I had to help you through that, which is all good, that’s what I do here, or half of what I do here, or half of what I do here, but you didn’t see it coming, so that means this is a blind spot.”

And I would impart that to you now as well. If you were trying to achieve certain goals in your life, we’ll keep it with body transformation or health, however you want to characterize it, how you want to think about achieving goals with your health. And maybe you’re not getting, you’re not seeking out the right support, and I would even ask you, is that why you keep coming back to these Real Talk Fridays?

Fascinating fact about the Real Talk Fridays, Gisele, my business partner, wanted me to start doing them. I said, “I don’t think people are going to want to listen to me.”

Fast forward, I’ve had so many people tell me, “I don’t even listen to your interviews anymore. I’ve heard all those people that you’ve interviewed, I’ve heard them on other shows, I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re a great interviewer, Ted, but it’s your real talk Fridays that sets your podcast apart for me, and I come to listen to your show every Friday because of it.”

And so, I would say to you, if you’re one of those people who come to the real talk Friday episodes, because you know you’re going to get that psychological, or mental, emotional support, again, however you want to characterize it, however you want to think about it. Maybe investing in a bit more help can give you a better ROI. It doesn’t necessarily have to be me either, but think about it, because we all need that support.

So funny, I was talking to a friend of mine, a friend of mine who is going to be on the podcast, he’s a rock star public speaker, he’s going to be speaking to Mitsubishi soon. Man, and he’s done a ton of personal growth over the past year, in 2021. And I was asking him, hey, from all these things that you…I mean, he went out to the jungle for like 14 days, and did this retreat out there, and he did other things too.

And I wanted to ask him, like hey, what did you get from those experiences? And his answer was, it was fascinating, but also predictable, what he said was, every time I went and did those experiences, I came back and it set a new level for me, it set a new normal for me. It brought me up to a higher level of performance, a higher level of clarity, understanding, connection, just on another level. But I still have the ups and downs.

There’s no getting away from the ups and downs, and some of us have them more strong than others, they’re a bit stronger, the feelings, especially the down feelings.  I guess some of us experienced the up feelings—get a little bit manic. But some of us experienced that. We don’t have to worry about the manic feelings—at least, most of us don’t, that’s were manic depressive, or cyclothymic...

But for those of us who experienced the lows a bit low—and I feel like I’m one of these people, I have to work very hard to keep my negative emotions in check. It’s a tough ride, and they never go away apparently, or at least nobody’s ever told me, they go away, you just get better at managing them.

And these can come from different places. So, we know that our genes play a part in how neurotic we might be, or how triggerable, how sensitive our nervous system is to certain things might be, to threats, let’s say, to negative emotions.

We know that our nervous system is created in part by our genes. And some of us were just more sensitive, I think I’m one of those people. I have a friend of mine, friendly acquaintance, Ed Latimore, very popular on the Twitter, been on the show once, he is not so…he doesn’t feel that as much, he doesn’t feel so much anxiety, doesn’t feel the lows so low. And so, there’s a genetic component to this.

There’s also, if you grew up in poverty, if you experienced abuse, or especially early, if you have been through a traumatic experience, the death of a loved one. One of my friends was telling me, one of the things he’s had to work from, or work through, sorry, was the death of his grandmother.

Now, for me, my grandmother, I wasn’t that close with her, I was pretty young when she was mentally there, and then she started developing dementia, so when she died, it wasn’t super sad for me. I mean, I wish I had a better relationship with her, but that’s the way it was. And it wasn’t so traumatic. But for my friend, he had such a strong relationship with his grandmother, and it’s been bothering him for a long time, and he was unconscious about it.

And so, there are a lot of things in the background that make us more susceptible to these ups and downs, and I think one of the reasons that I’m…I mean, you know my story, it’s not that hard to figure out, I’ve got a lot of loss, suicide, murder, this is regular old, death.

But in particular, the death of my father, triggered a lot of things for me, and I’ve been on this journey through that, and I don’t feel like I’m completely completed the cycle, let’s say.

The Hero’s Journey, if you go Google that image, and I don’t want to go into what it is too deeply. But it’s something that the late mythologist, Joseph Campbell figured out, there were these recurring themes in myths, and myths from various cultures from around the world at different time periods, I mean, talking about the Homer’s Iliad, to the Bhagavad Gita, to Lord of the Rings, to whatever it is.

And there are these themes in these myths, that recur so frequently, that they create a pattern.

And why I bring this up is, whenever we’re trying to achieve something, or maybe even like me, get through something, we go through this, we go through these stages of that journey. And I don’t feel the point of me bringing that up, is, I don’t feel like I’m out the other side, because at the end of the journey, you come back as a different person, you come back after you’ve created a new normal, and I don’t feel like I’ve created that for myself yet, I feel like I’m almost there.

But it’s been challenging, and today was challenging, triggered by something completely different, you would think at least superficially, but so much of our lives and our patterns of behavior, and there’s so much interconnectedness.

And so to return to the idea of this podcast is this, we can’t rely on the people who we feel like should have our backs, we can’t rely on them to always have our backs, to be supportive. And if you do have that, well, congratulations, you’re doing exceptionally well. But if you don’t, that’s not unusual, especially if there’s a bit of history, like you and your parents, your parents aren’t supporting you, for example, or your partner, if it’s been awhile in the relationship, right?

And we need to seek out those people to support us. I feel like…It’s so weird, I’ve rode an emotional rollercoaster today, it was really tough in the morning, did some work, fell off, got back on track, ended up having the psychologist appointment, super-helpful, then did the Mindset Monday. And then I feel like I’m good again.

And I think that’s the third lesson that I would impart to you today for this episode, is that, when you find the right people to support you, when you invest in the right people, in my case at least, I had to pay for the psychologist, she’s not helping me out as a friend, I got to pay for it. I paid to be part of this business coaching group for 12 months, and if you’re in that situation where you don’t have those people, and you are like me and you have to invest, you got to find the right people.

And the way you know is this: you’ll have that emotional state shift, and you’ll feel better when you do the right, when you’re with the right people, and they’re helping you through what you’re going through.

A little secret for me: certainly, I come and help my clients with a lot of strategies, right? I’m full of strategies, I’ve been in this business 23 years, helping people with their health, and health challenges, and injuries. I’ve worked with people. I’ve worked with a kid who had a stroke in vitro.

I’ve worked with someone who is bound to a wheelchair, and I helped him. That was actually my dad after surgery, helped him regain the ability to walk with a cane. And the thing is, I come with a lot of strategies, but I’ll tell you, one of the strategies that I’ve implemented over the years, and it’s stuck with me. So, my strategies in training, people have changed a lot, not so, so much, but something that hasn’t changed is, I always want my clients leaving a session, and in this case, the coaching calls, whether that’s a group call, or the one-on-one call. I want them to feel better.

And I always ask my clients who are having a bad day, I always like to say, “Okay, so it’s a tough day today, rate it, on a scale of 1 to 10, where are you?” And I always ask them before they leave, I remember one of my clients came, and he said, “I’m like at a 7 right now. Before I hopped on the call, about an hour ago, I was an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, and now I’m at a 7.”

And then by the end of the call, I asked him again, “Where are you now?” He said, “I’m like at a 2” That, my friend, that’s progress, that’s results, let’s say. So, those are the results that you should expect, when you’re with the right person, or even listening to the right podcast, or listening to the right book. You’ll know it, because you’ll get that shift, and it’ll be tangible enough for you to rate yourself, even subjectively, and notice, oh.

Because today I felt like I was about an eight, on the, let’s say the depression scale. I’m not a person that gets so depressed, I get more anxious, but I haven’t felt that anxious these days, it’s been, it was certainly sadness, or so, let’s call it that. Eight on the sadness scale today, maybe it’s seven and a half. But I’m probably about at three right now.

And so, think about that: whenever you’re trying to figure out, okay, well, what should I spend time on? It’s got to give you a result, a measurable result, even if it’s a subjective standard. And this is something I’ve used in my life. Also, part of this is trusting your intuition, which I think is something, it’s difficult to develop, I think a lot of Americans, perhaps, a lot of Western folks, Western English-speaking folks, especially, are disconnected from…You’ve really got to learn to trust your intuition, really trust inside yourself.

We’re too guru- focused, even the people who hate the government, they believe in these bullshit, like gurus, it’s crazy, it’s so funny sometimes. It’s like, you just replaced the government for someone else, but you’re still idolizing someone who should…You really shouldn’t. Because everybody’s on the same journey, everybody’s struggling with something. So again, a little bit of a tangent there, but make sure you’re getting the results and you should be able to quantify it, even subjectively.

So, that’s what I want to leave you with today, hope you have an amazing weekend. Think about what I said today, and again, what can you take action on from today? What was the big takeaway from today? And how can you turn it into something actionable? Because action is the key. More learning and learning and learning and learning is not learning, that’s entertaining. It’s learning, applying, learning, applying.

So, how do you take what you’ve done today, learn today, and go apply it, so it turns into actual knowledge? That’s what I want to leave you with, love you lots.

Have an amazing weekend, and I’ll speak to you on Monday.