Change is about becoming different in various parts of our lives triggered by our internal desires or external events. Through change, it helps us see new things and grow as a human being spiritually, mentally, and physically, which are all interconnected. How do these aspects of change come together to shape our life?
Join us in this episode with Brian de Castro, founder of The Domestic Athlete. Our conversation focused on how we can maintain work-life balance, prioritize well-being, and explore creative projects. We also talked about how to align our passions to achieve fulfillment and avoid burnout through intentional management. Brian shared the benefits of exercise, mindfulness, creativity, and self-awareness. Listen to this episode and start transforming your life today!
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Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all reach that point in life where we want to make some kind of a change and there’s so many different catalysts for change. Probably, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard several episodes with people who have had events such as health scares or even just getting laid off from a job perpetuating a new way of thinking, a new line of, “Okay, what change do I wanna make? What do I think through what do I really want?” However, there are so many components to it. There’s obviously the mental stuff, some of the spiritual stuff that’s been on in the last few episodes, but I’ve also covered on some episodes the physical aspect of it and it all kind of, in a way, goes together. And here to discuss how that goes together, I have the founder of The Domestic Athlete, Brian DeCastro.
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Brian, welcome to the program.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.
Definitely. I want to start by orienting our audience here. So what is The Domestic Athlete all about?
Yeah, good question. Back in 2016, I was actually working, I was on my probably 15th, 16th year working in the same organization. For the last, say, nine years, I was actually employed managing the entire fitness department that consisted of 40 trainers, 20 staff, multimillion-dollar department, there’s a lot of moving parts. It was a very exciting position. We went through a $50 million expansion at the time and we cut the ribbon and then, after that, it was kind of like, “Now what?”
Yeah.
Ironically, the universe responded and they were actually phasing out people in sort of that middle management position as well. My position got phased out. I drove off the lot with a big smile on my face. I can move on to the next thing but also not with the risk of, you know, I had a family and everything so responsibility and all that stuff. When I started The Domestic Athlete within a month of leaving the club, my passion was in working with regular folks in the grind, day to day, parents, professionals perhaps with families that are trying to keep all the balls up in the air that also need the life force, the inspiration, the excitement. They still want that. You don’t want to wait ’til you’re retired to actually start living your life so how do we keep it all together and keep our life force but also manage all those moving parts, the dance class, the hockey practice, all that stuff, and then paying your bills and then you also have a marriage or relationship or something, right? So there’s so many different things going on.
So Domestic Athlete is basically people like you and I operating in the sport of life, like I like to call it, so what do you need to operate at your best? Share on XOh, wow. A lot to unpack there. Maybe let’s start with a little bit about your story because you said that you spent 16 years working with the same company, overseeing personal trainers and stuff like that. How much did that experience, what you observed in that experience, inform how you wanted to create The Domestic Athlete, inform form your vision, who you wanted to serve and how you wanted to serve them?
Yeah, I was blessed with this opportunity at this organization. I was blessed to be working with the top 3 to 5 percent in the GTA. I was personal training at the time before I became the manager, clients were personal training with me for over 10 years that didn’t even really know my rates. Financially, there was no object, it was just constantly scheduling, regularly reoccurring clients and stuff like that. CEOs, builders of big companies, doctors, lawyers, high-performing individuals, but also even the elderly population. That’s the first gym I was ever at where you’d see a 90-year-old come in at 6 a.m. and walk the treadmill and be standing upright. Health and wellness and mental health was always a part of this culture in this one facility. Lucky to also work with children of the adult clients that I have from like 14 all the way through to university and beyond, so I was able to see the evolution of the client through their ups and downs and difficult times, went through the 2008 market crash and how does everyone respond to that or react to that, right? We actually had one of our best years in personal training that year because people were valuing their health and their family life and all those other things so they cut other things out so they could keep those things in. So I’ve seen people through a lot of different things and be able to document, over time, what works, what doesn’t work, what to pick up on, and as I was there too, I also had professional development opportunities to continue learning while I was on the job, traveling to California to do courses and all these different things I was able to do to add to what I was doing with my stuff on the gym floor and in the leadership space as well. So, there was a lot kind of being built and stacked, one layer on top of the other, let me go from a strength coach, former powerlifting competitor to almost like a holistic coach and almost coaching people in the spiritual space as well. So it’s an evolution over time, both personally and professionally. Those were some critical times.
You mentioned some things about determining or finding out, seeing what works and what doesn’t work. In all these lessons of what works, what doesn’t work, is that kind of what dragged you into the direction of being a little bit more holistic. So rather than fitness only, obviously, your physical fitness is a very important aspect of your life, but how it kind of is connected with all the other parts of your life.
A perfect, very practical example of that is 55-year-old dad that has a company, he’s not a competitive power lifter or anything but he did like his strength training so worked on his deadlift and his squat and his bench and stuff, just for fun as part of the fitness protocol. He has no business bench pressing 350. He has he has no business squatting 500. So it’s how strong do you actually need to be? So, based on the standards that I was trying to build with Domestic Athlete, you can actually get fit enough. So when you get fit or strong enough or you can run fast enough, what’s next? There’s maintenance in your fitness side of your programming but how does all of this apply? How does it be integrated into the lifestyle that you want to have and the hobbies, the family life, all that stuff? And in this one particular circumstance, I did have a 55-year-old man that does play hockey, liked strength training but also the thing was he had a teenage son that plays hockey that he wanted to continue to play with so if I made him too big and slow, he could move a house once but he can’t skate around the rink. Now he’s losing out some quality of life, because we’ve swayed his training too far over on one side of the spectrum. So what is the sweet spot with any individual as far as what they want to experience, what they want to do in their lives, and putting the amount of risk, like limiting the amount of risk way, way down?
Because, also, when you’re a parent, getting hurt is non-optional. Share on XIf you can prevent it, like I remember when my son was really small, there were so many things I physically did with him that if I’d gotten hurt, it would just suck because you’re just removing yourself now from a part of his life that you want to be a part of. So those are some of the things I considered with working with people that I worked with is how strong do you actually need to be? How fast do you need to be? How far do you need to run? And just kind of meeting them in that space, then going, “Okay, now what? What happens next?”
So given your acknowledgement that there’s a way to take things too far, I need to ask you what your general feelings are about apps and Apple watches and all these things that are tracking fitness and making it really all about numbers, in a way. “I need to burn this many calories today,” “I need to do this many minutes of workout,” “I need to do that.”
There’s two answers to that question. I think, for me, one is the technology with the things that you can access now and the data you can accumulate now with something that’s just literally around your wrist, it can serve as such an amazing tool because some people say, “I sleep well,” but if you’re actually tracking your sleep, you realize you woke up like 12 times last night so then we start looking at sleep because sleep is also a huge part around managing your stress levels and your ability to recover. So, these things we didn’t have access to decades ago so we were just assuming we were doing things accurately. Where it kind of goes the other way is when I was powerlifting, I was obsessed with the numbers. Sometimes, the only way the numbers are accurate is when you record what already happened. It’s hard to predict numbers or target numbers. I remember a member came up to the gym one time and got on the bike, set it up a certain way, and then asked me, “So this is the calories, right?” I go. “Yeah.” “Okay, great. I’m going for 1000,” and then he just starts hammering away at the bike. So he’s looking for a number. It doesn’t necessarily mean though that if he burns 1000 on the bike three times a week that he’s going to hit that target 3500-calorie deficit if he’s drinking three nights a week as well and there’s no accuracy on how he’s choosing his meals. There’s so many variables. We’re already consuming enough data as it is. Social media, computers, you’re at work in front of a screen all the time. I do teach, what I do teach along with some of these other tools is self-awareness and intuition. If you’re given this meal, this meal, and this meal, intuitively, what meal would you choose if you actually want to feel great after? We have enough history of eating that we know sometimes there’s certain foods that just make us go right to sleep, right?
Yeah.
And the apple versus the apple pie sort of thing, right? There’s certain things where keeping it simple and teaching and reminding people of their intuition, that it’s actually a reliable source of data as well with all the other technical stuff that could also come into play and be part of it.
That makes sense, so kind of just being intentional and knowing the context of these numbers because it’s not numbers for the sake of numbers but it’s numbers or tracking to inform, “Hey, here’s something you might not have realized,” because most people I think historically have not really paid too terribly much attention to sleep from New York, which prides itself as the city that never sleeps. So you talk about working with a lot of busy people, The Domestic Athlete is a lot of people that have just a lot on their plate. What are some typical challenges that your clients are encountering when they come to see you?
The first thing would be time and a life force energy to do the thing that they need to do and sometimes logistics, like I’ve told clients before if there’s no way you’re going to get to the gym three times a week, let’s not explore that as an option for exercise. Let’s look at the spaces you have in your home and let’s start with an empty room and just build out from there. With regards to time, we all have the same seven days a week, 24 hours a day, but this is from one of my mentors, he’s like what are the five most critical tasks that have to happen this week that are the highest yielding, that’s going to move you and align you with your goals? Because it’s so easy to over program ourselves. So that’s where the “I don’t have time” thing comes from, or the life force thing comes from maybe you don’t love your job, or maybe what your job requires, you leave the office, but for whatever reason, the nature of your work still has you on your cell phone when you’re at home, dinner, whatever
So the challenge I welcome and love is to sit down with them and go through a typical day-to-day situation and look for the opportunities. One thing I do is a 10-day reboot. What is the one thing that we can touch or change or adjust for the next 10 days that would shift what your days start to look like, that would yield the greatest outcome, that’s very accessible, easy to do, and you can do within 24 to 48 hours? And that’s how they get started because a lot of people can be sometimes overwhelmed with where do I start first.
For sure. Reminds me of New Year’s resolutions and how the average New Year’s resolution is abandoned, I think the median date is January 19th.
Yeah.
And the most recent studies I’ve read on that has been because people often say, “I’m gonna change these 20 things all at once,” which is overwhelming as opposed to changing one thing, so is your 10-day reboot usually just like a small change, something just as simple as one of my personal favorites to advice to people is I’m not going to put my phone in my bedroom anymore so we don’t lose sleep by spending two hours on YouTube or TikTok before going to bed.
Yeah, it’s definitely something like that, and what I do is I have on my website, I have the Life Force Check-In Questionnaire. So it’s very quick, you fill out these questions based on four different categories, your movement, your fueling, your lifestyle, and your fulfillment, things that make you happy and how do you enjoy life, so you generate a score and from that score, we can target which of those four things shows the greatest amount of potential. And then in that one section or theme we will talk about in the discovery call or something, we’ll hash out the day and go, “In your lifestyle design piece, we noticed you’re not getting to bed earlier than midnight. Perhaps we can leverage sleep as the first opportunity and see how that plays out. In the 10 days.” I’ve had this happen with people before and it started to change how they selected their foods, it started to change their mood, it started to change how they’re recovering from workouts, in just 10 days. Body composition changes happen in just the 10 days because they’re not snacking anymore because imagine when you’re tired, when you’re really tired and sluggish and kind of moody, you’re not going, “Wow, I could just use a salad right now.”
Yeah, yeah.
You want to smash a bag of chips or a bag of cookies or something like that, get some ice cream out.
And they’re in contact with me every single day as it progresses along and I usually get feedback within the first four or five days. “I’m in a new world right now.”
Oh my god. And it’s so great to see something like pretty quickly because I think a lot of people can get discouraged with some of these kind of longer slogs, even though – just so everyone’s kind of on the same page here, define the term “life force.” What does that phrase mean to you in this context?
That’s a really good question because it can be thrown around a lot in different ways. As a as a Reiki master, I would describe life force as your chi or your spirit, your energy. A friend of mine, when I first started training back in the early days, he was a veteran at this club that I was at and he said the best way you could prepare for your client is show up well rested, well fed, perhaps get your workout in so you could be present with them. So you’re basically raising your frequency, your level of energy to be able to output it. It’s when your cup is full, your cup is full and it could spill over and then you have excess energy, because when a coach or a personal trainer or a Reiki master or something are showing up to do their work, there’s an energy exchange that happens so you need to have some excess play or some surplus to deliver your best work. So if eating the wrong foods will lower your frequency or not getting to bed on time will lower your frequency – Have you ever been late for work?
Yeah.
And then you arrive in the office and then your coworkers start to ask you something and you’re just like, “I haven’t even like sat down yet. I haven’t put my bag down yet. I haven’t opened my inbox yet,” because you rushed out, you didn’t have maybe your coffee or glass of water or breakfast so you’re losing life force just by being stressed out. When your life force or your frequencies is aligned to be present, you’ll find that even in this situation right now where we’re talking, we’re both on right now because we’re in your podcast and recording and stuff, but we’re in this nice hum, this nice flow, this nice hum of performance, not super hyperactive and not kind of like struggling to keep the conversation so this is kind of what it feels like when your life force is on point, when it’s aligned.
In my personal situation, like right now at this moment, lucky in the fact that I’m doing something that I chose to do, that’s really in alignment. I chose to start this podcast, I chose to have these types of conversations and stuff like that, and I know a lot of people, especially we talk about employee satisfaction, I know, in the US, the number has been kind of steady in the low to mid 30 percent range for over a decade. I think, globally, the number is actually even lower, but probably in like Canada, Britain, Australia, probably pretty similar to the US in that range and so what that tells me is that two-thirds of all people are currently, depending on what time of day it is, not doing something that they chose to do, not doing something that they’re passionate about, not doing something that they’re really kind of fully involved in. And so that’s a situation where it can become a lot easier to feel in one of those like kind of manic or drained states of mind.
You can often see this both in the career space, especially if, depending on whatever reason we went to school, whatever we chose, could have been influenced by family, legacy, or whatever, or you just didn’t know so you felt that you had to pick something, there’s that so now you’re in a career that you’re kind of like meh about but maybe you’re getting paid pretty well so like I’d be crazy to leave this but you’re not super – you’re like at a 60 percent in fulfillment.
Yeah, yeah.
Or there’s relationships too where there’s an automatic assumption that when two people are together long enough that they’re probably going to move in together or they’re going to get engaged or they’re going to get married, and then once they’re married, they’re like, at the right age, they’re probably going to have a family. There’s always that expectation. I call it the marriage matrix. You get sucked into like – before you know it, you’re at the furniture store and you’re picking out, you know, it’s like, “What happened to me? I used to be really cool, now I’m just like going from one score to the next.” And that’s also up to be partners in the relationship too to be self-aware of are we still nurturing the third entity. And career wise too, I think with people – I’ve had conversations with coaches on my team when I was at the club that are like, “I love what I do. I know I wanna still be in the industry, but something I’m doing now is not nailing it for me but I have so many clients, I have bills to pay, I have rent, I have this and that,” I go, well, no one’s telling you to quit now, but even if you put aside an hour, two hours, three hours a week, start with dreaming about what it could look like, then what is like one or two or three small action, steps to move towards it. Even if you don’t leave your current job, just the fact that you’re working on something on the sideline can excite you enough that more is possible, that you do have options, there are possibilities out there, you’re not stuck. And, eventually, maybe it does come together.
Yeah, that’s important, that feeling of being stuck, because I think there are a lot of people out there, I know how it feels from my past, I know there’s a lot of people out there who definitely do feel stuck and so if someone listening is in that position where they feel stuck, you call it the marriage matrix, I call the whole thing living by the script, which is just exactly what you said, it’s been set out, good grades, “Oh, you’re 29, you should get married. You’re 33, you should have a family now,” whatever. What’s the easiest thing – you said like setting aside a few hours a week to just dream even. What’s the easiest way for someone who’s just really busy, really at capacity? Let’s say someone does have a full-time job as well as some sort of other family and community responsibility and just really, really doesn’t have time for stuff like, what’s the easiest thing someone can start doing? Is there something people can commonly look into as a way to kind of free up that time?
Yeah, I’m thinking about back when I was employed, when I was working for another organization with somewhat fixed hours. I was lucky enough to create my own hours but it’s still expected. I was still accountable to 40-plus hours a week, right? So what I did was there was a couple times a week, and I don’t know if everyone has ability to do this or not, but on Mondays and Wednesdays, I went in later. I didn’t have to go until like 11 or 12 or whatever, but I stayed later because in the gym space, they open late, but instead of just sitting at home watching TV or whatever and just thinking about going to work, I actually would go to a park nearby with my journal and just have a moment to kind of just write down my thoughts, clear my head, almost like I have a meeting with myself. And, eventually, that led to me dreaming about the future, dreaming about where I wanted to go next, what I wanted to do next, and creating plans. And I also had this thing, because my job was so good at the time, I thought what if this just vaporized? What would be plan B? What would be the move I would make next? So you got to think about that too. What if your job just – the company folded or you got laid off or whatever, what would you do next? So I’d be putting myself in these scenarios but in a dream, almost like a dream state, like just allowing possibilities, allowing positive things to happen. What would it look like if it unfolded? The other thing too I would say, if you do allow yourself this kind of time, which I highly, strongly recommend you do on a regular basis, even if it’s once a week, ask yourself what is working? What am I grateful for that’s happening right now in my current situation? For one, bills are probably getting paid. You got a car, you got healthy family, whatever. Just start rhyming off all the things you’re grateful for and what’s working, but also what’s not working or what’s missing? And start making a little bit of a list and go, well, what if I change, what could it look like? But also a huge question that someone asked me before that kind of might put us into action is what is the cost of delaying? What’s the cost of waiting? Five years, ten years, fifteen years from now, what is the cost? What would be missing if you didn’t make a move? Even if it was still on the side.
Well, I think there’s two important points you just made that I want to kind of reiterate for my audience, for anyone listening. First of all, as you just said, that cost of delaying, because one thing that I commonly hear and also commonly say is staying in the same spot is also a decision. Even though it comes across as the default decision, it’s also kind of a decision. And I think the other important point that I want to embellish a little bit more on is the whole idea of not having everything be known and so when you are going out and making appointments with yourself and I think people often see that when it comes to something along the lines of meditating or even personal project around cutting down on screen time, cutting down on unnecessary noise, social media and stuff, is oftentimes we don’t know what that next step is. You put the pen on the paper and you decided, “I’m gonna write down,” and then eventually your ideas started coming, eventually your what-if’s going to come. Because I think a lot of people get into that mindset of, “I need to know what’s next,” even if someone’s really, really – let’s say, you have a job that’s just draining your life force, a job that’s just really, really draining. It’s not of those, “Okay,” it’s like they have really rigid hours and they’re constantly just making you feel pretty shitty about yourself every single day, people are still thinking, “Well, I can’t quit my job. I can’t leave this until I know exactly step one, step two, step three will lead to results X, Y, and Z.” And so element of it that you’re alluding to where, at some point, you have to not know every single specific, maybe not be not be so much of a perfectionist and still kind of just say, “I need to take care of my life force and I need to have that time with myself.”
One of the things I’ll ask is how is your holistic health? Because I work in the health space and our bodies don’t lie. Our bodies will tell us, like have you put on a few pounds every couple of years over the last decade, how does your body feel when you get up in the morning? There’s all these different signs. You’re not healing fast enough. You’re not regenerating and uninspired and the whole thing, and I feel like once we get moving, I will say health is one of the most accessible first steps you can make because just moving on its own, there’s a thing that people don’t realize about exercise, exercise moves emotions, it clears emotions. So if you might have felt depressed or angry or whatever and you went through an appropriately prescribed routine, within 30 minutes, you actually feel a lot better, which makes your mind clear and you’re grounded in your body again, you start thinking rationally, you’re actually starting to problem solve. So say 10 to 40 days of that, when someone didn’t even know what their 90-day goal was, now they all of a sudden know they want to do a triathlon.
Wow.
Because things start to feel possible. We found the house that I’m in right now, we started with what would we even be approved for? What will we even afford? Well, the first move you got to make is find an agent and just look at houses. We might decide after looking at the first five houses, “This is impossible,” or, “Wow, we can afford a lot more.” This is actually the 12th house we looked at. The first one is like, “Nah, this is nice, but not us,” then this one, then this one, this one, I would so put something down on this one but there’s that room, that scary room that I think there’s ghosts in that, or you got to knock that wall down, and you’re eliminating, it’s process of elimination, you’re just eliminating to find the thing you really want and then you step into it and you’re like, “Wow, this is totally – I can build a future here.” So taking those first easy steps. And as a coach, often what coaches do is help lead people to the well and then the process begins. I say, “Your journey has just begun,” sort of thing, after the first conversation.
Yeah, it takes a while. And when you start journeys with your clients, one of the things I wonder is how often it is that you often tell them that they need to start getting away from certain influences? Because we think about this feedback where you have something that stressed you out and you talk about movement. For me, it’s cycling is my big thing that really kind of clears my head out a bit, but getting out and getting moving is kind of a proactive thing that you can do, you can control. Often, do they have an influence, whether it be a job, whether it be certain communal responsibilities, certain people, even certain things they do in their lives, such as going on to YouTube and getting sucked down rabbit holes where you advised them and said, “Hey, if you really wanna feel better about yourself, if you really want your life force to come back, you might need to cut down or cut out of this situation.”
Yeah. I think of something I call the fishbowl effect, right? Or the fish tank. We have a fish tank with – it’s like a 20-gallon tank and if I were to go to the store right now and not test the water and go to the store and buy like a dozen of these little guppies or whatever and then drop them in the tank, if I didn’t test the water and they didn’t give me the thumbs up that the water was good, it would take days before the fish were just floating to the top. Because it’s toxic. So, when you think about whether it be a relationship, a job situation, your lifestyle itself as a fishbowl, how often are you changing the water? How often are you managing the environment, the life force, because if you’re waking up every morning and you’re running at 40 percent, that’s what you have, say it’s out of 100, you have 40 to start with and it takes 10 just to get to work, so you’re just like doling out these life force credits and you’re not recovering because when you come home, your fishbowl, the water’s toxic. You’re just on borrowed time, you’re like in debt all the time. So that’s why when I talked about me taking the – on my later days, I left the house and went to the park. The energy is clear and different there. I’m around nature, I have different like aroma of the trees and stuff and there’s people there. That’s what I tell people too in this situation, find a way to relocate, even it’s for an hour to a place that you love, that you feel connected, because then you start to be able to create the space for yourself to dream and your frequency will rise up. And, unfortunately, sometimes, our homes are these toxic fishbowls and it’s not necessarily the people in the house, it could be just old habits and old programs that are running us in the background. You mentioned default behaviors and stuff. That’s a program just running, like an app. Until you uninstall the app, and that’s also called self-awareness. When you become self-aware – I became self-aware of this cookie habit I had, when I got home when my son was small, I think he was in preschool and I had to pick him up when I got home from driving from Toronto to Newmarket is about an hour to get home so once I get home, I have about an hour or so before I go get him and I would just start snacking like crazy because it wasn’t dinner yet, I was kind of hungry, kind of feeling like emotional pressure to go from this manager to dad, there was a transition period. That transition period was usually filled with whatever crap was on the counter was what I was defaulting to. When I became self-aware, I permitted myself you can have that snack but before you have that snack, you’re going to get a glass of water, you’re going to go in the backyard and do some breaths, you can maybe do some jumping jacks, and then you’re permitted to have that if you want. Within two or three days, I don’t even notice the cookies were there anymore. I just completely uninstalled the program and realized that, at this time of the day, with mental fatigue, we just can’t make great decisions around diet so once you know that, maybe you’re going to pack an apple on the on the commute home, you’re going to try different things, you’re going to have a routine when you get home that’s incompatible with eating to transition into being a parent or a partner or whatever it is. You got to become self-aware of that first before you can make changes.
Yeah, what makes me sad to think about how many people have habits like that and they don’t become self-aware and something like that will persist for a decade or more and then say that life force, if the environment is toxic and it’s going from 100, the next day, it’s 80, the next day, it’s 79, the next day, it’s 78, eventually, it really starts to take its toll.
Yeah, yeah. I ask people to sometimes, if you had a day to yourself, where would you go or what would you do to fuel your fire? What would you do to build your power back or take your power back and they usually are able to describe that to me. “Well, I really liked being in the country so it’s just literally 30 minutes out in that direction and it’s just cows and farms and I just love being around animals and nature in the forest.” I’m like, okay, well, imagine you go there every so often to just plug in and recharge. And what happens is we’re actually realigning with our natural frequency. Just the last week I was able to – I was lucky enough to go with a friend of mine for a site visit three and a half hours away from where we live. He’s doing a site visit for a retreat that he’s doing. And when I first arrived, I was in this mind scramble, like my ego was looking around going, “Oh, my God, you have to use an outhouse. What kind of bugs are here? There’s just tall grass, I’m gonna get attacked by ticks.” I was in this total like city slicker mode where I was just – like I was so scared of like nature. And then he took us on this walk for about maybe not even an hour, he took us for a walk and there was a creek there, and once we came out of the forest, I suddenly felt like, “Wow, I’ve just been recalibrated.”
Yeah.
And I was totally chill. I was in this aligned frequency with the nature around us because we are actually part of nature. We forget that. We separate ourselves from nature. We’re actually part of nature so realigning is that’s your more natural state to be in. And if we’re in these artificial environments pummeled by technology – if you open your phone and you’re not really paying attention, if you’re not intentional about it, if you open your phone and open up, say, Instagram, you’re immediately on the feed, you’re immediately on somebody else’s agenda. You’re likely to flip your thumb and scroll every 30 seconds. So, every 30 seconds, you’re on a new agenda, new agenda, new agenda, right? Because it’s recording, it’s documenting what you like and what you click on, it’s going to start firing out more things. This is not new information to us, we know now this is what’s happening, but we all do it and that’s sucking life force. If it goes on for too long, it’s sucking life force. You could have just sat for 15 minutes doing breath work and not scrolling on Instagram.
Oh, no, I mean, there’s so much because I remember reading somewhere like a decade ago that your email inbox is like a house for everyone else’s agenda for you and, obviously, I have my business around helping people cut down and be more intentional about their screen use but never thought that, as you scroll through Instagram, you see person one’s post, you’re in their agenda, and then person two’s post, you’re in their agenda, and that agenda could be something subtle, like, “Oh, I want you to notice I did this really cool trip today,” or, “I want to show you this,” or, “I wanna talk about that particular topic,” and you’d be like, well, I wasn’t meaning to think about this topic today. This wasn’t the topic I’ve been meaning to have on my mind but –
Because I also teach gym to school-aged kids three days a week and I’m learning kids will reflect back to us things that we’re not aware of about, I find.
But one of the things with kids these days, and maybe adults as well, is we’ve forgotten how to be bored. Share on XPeople who’ve created things and created these amazing inventions and things, they had to sit in the stillness long enough to lock into something and download it and intuitively pick up on stuff and go, “I gotta seek out that person. I gotta research that thing.” You can’t do that if you’re consumed by something that’s recycling itself every 10 to 30 seconds. There’s
Yeah. I kind of wondered if that had something to do with like kind of some of the creativity trends, because if I look at recent history, and I tend to think of things in the lens of music a lot, and I think 1900, 1910, you got jazz, and then 30 years later, you got blues and a little bit later you got rock and roll, and then 30 more years later you get hip hop and somewhere in there, you also get disco and the dance music craze. And then since the late 1970s, I’ve looked at like, okay, first cable TV and then the internet, social media, I’m like, how much new stuff have we really created? You know the movie Back to the Future?
Yeah.
So I think about this a lot. The movie is set near 1985, and in the movie, he goes back to the year 1955 and he’s playing music on stage and he all of a sudden lurks into the new music of 1980s and everyone’s just shocked, all the people in the crowd, and I was listening to some of the music today in 2024 and I thought to myself, if someone were to go back to the year 1994, the same 30 years ago, and plays this new music, no one in that year would be that shocked. They may think we may have overused that auto tuner for a little bit. But other than that, there wouldn’t be this like, “Holy, like, oh, my God, this is totally different stuff that I have no preparation for.”
There’s an interesting conversation, because if you were to sort of rise even higher out of our day-to-day conversation or day-to-day routine into this much higher sort of collective view of what we’re experiencing as humans now as opposed to decades ago, it’s very hard to find a movie that’s a new concept, right? Quite often, they’re using genres that just sell well, right? Like horror movies, serial killer things, or really goofy comedies and stuff. It’s really hard to find something that’s really inspirational that really – at least for me. So there’s these formulas you start to pick up on if you’re paying attention that they must just sell really well so they just keep running them through. Music as well. Even just like YouTube, there’s people becoming multimillionaires providing something, this is going to sound judgy and I’m just irritated that I didn’t do it, but providing content that’s really not serving humanity in any profound way other than to entertain people.
Yeah.
Because people are viewing it, they’re making millions of dollars. So it’s interesting because there are some channels too that are actually providing some really profound stuff that aren’t monetized.
Oh, 100 percent, for sure. And I don’t want to discredit the people who actually are doing some really interesting stuff. I remember thinking in the movie sphere, at least, the movie Spirited, the Christmas movie from 2022 about kind of a newer version of like the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future. I remember thinking that was a really neat concept and a couple others, but then like noting I think Spider-Man’s been done about 85 times by now.
Yeah.
Definitely. Well, Brian, I like to thank you so much for hopping on, joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, talking a little bit about this kind of holistic manner in which we serve our own life force, being in the right environments, getting rid of toxicity, but also with ways to recover and way to keep our bodies in shape and how we can kind of find a balance around going too far in some directions as well.
Yeah, it’s been great and I think there’s more to unpack along the way but I think if I were to share anything to anyone listening is ask yourself too, what’s not working or what’s missing? And how’s your health? There’s enough evidence there to make you curious. And be curious about it. Don’t beat yourself up over it but just be curious about what else, ask the universe, what else is possible?
What else is possible, and I’m guessing this check-in needs to be done on some sort of regular cadence too, like I say weekly, some people do quarterly, but, in some way, check in, say, “How am I doing?”
Yeah, 100 percent. Find your people.
Find your people that will have those conversations with you as well and allow you to have whatever answers you might have and as you would them too. Hold the space for each other. Share on XDefinitely. Find your people and find the right content. Hopefully, some of that right content is the Action’s Antidotes podcast. I’d like to thank also everybody out there who was listening today and hope that you tune in or tune back in for more inspiring stories with people who are living according to their truth and are living doing something that they really feel passionate about.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- Brian on LinkedIn
- The Domestic Athlete
- Empowered Human
- Awakened Body Podcast
- Awakened Body Facebook Community
- Upcoming Virtual Event: Coffee + Clearings – “Keeping the ball rolling”
- Email address: brian@thedomesticathlete.com
About Brian DeCastro
Brian has been a fitness and lifestyle coach for over 20 years and has assumed several roles ranging from the fitness frontlines, to management, leadership, teaching and business ownership. His current mission is to help others actualize their dreams and experience spiritual connection by optimizing their health and lifestyle habits, so that their inner true-self can awaken and emerge. By blending the fundamentals of health and lifestyle design, with Reiki healing, he delivers an intuitive yet practical approach that supports each client in navigating their unique wellness journey.