Code of Character: From Poker to Peak Performance

Justin Bailey and Chris Sparks talk about retiring at twenty-three, the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and changing our environment to support our intentions.

Audio recording below (49m13s). Full transcript following.

Podcast Transcript

Note: Transcript slightly edited for clarity.

Justin: My actions honor my vision. My vision reflects my values. My brotherhood shares my vision. Welcome to the Code of Character.

Welcome to the Code of Character podcast. My name is Justin Bailey. I am your host and founder of Code of Character. Thank you so much for listening tonight, or today, or whatever time of day it is where you’re at. I appreciate it. Whether it’s your first time listening to us or you’ve been with us for a while, I never take any of the listeners for granted. I know you could be listening to lots of excellent content out there. So thanks for checking this thing out. Really appreciate it, and I’m excited about today’s episode. We have another great guest, Mister Chris Sparks. He is a professional poker player, kind of retired, but I guess a poker player never retires, he tells me at one point during the interview. So he’s back and forth in there. So he’s a professional poker player, but he is now an executive performance training coach who founded The Forcing Function.

So he teaches people basically peak performance. Getting better. That one percent every day he talks about. He talks about a lot of the methodologies of how to get better at everything, and he used those skills to become a poker champion, I think a top twenty poker player in the world, and really just dominate that game to the point where he realized he wasn’t gonna have to ever work if he didn’t want to, he could just live the rest of his life at a very young age off of what he had done financially, but he had decided to . . . That that wasn’t enough for him. He had a little bit of the come to Jesus situation, I think, and he’s gonna describe that in the show. Very interesting man. I’m excited for you to hear about him. Hear from him, not about him. Well, about him also.

But before we get on to his interview, I wanna let you guys know about something we got cooking up that I’m really excited about. We have a premium group that’s coming, and you’re gonna be able to sign up for this starting in August. And what is a premium group? What is this thing? Well, we’re actually mixing up what our mastermind The Code was, and we’re changing the format a little bit. Or a lot. So what we’re gonna do, we’re actually gonna have eight different coaches available for group coaching every single month. You’re gonna have eight sessions that you can attend. If you have ever thought about hiring a coach, whether it is for a discipline, whether it’s for self-limiting behaviors, whether it’s you’re just kind of needing a bit of guidance, or whether you just maybe . . . Trying to stay sharp and get a little bit sharper every single day, whether it’s health and fitness, whether it’s relationships, whether you’re coming at it from a Christian angle, whether you’re not coming at it from that angle, it’s . . . I’m telling you, we have somebody for everybody. Somebody that you’re really gonna resonate with.

And I’m very excited about this group that we are launching. It’s got . . . A bunch of these guys are my buddies. I’m not going to go through all of them right now, because that would take like the whole podcast, an hour podcast, talking about all these guys, but these are guys I’ve connected with over the last few years. They are all men of super high caliber, and high integrity, high character. I’m very excited to launch this endeavor with them. And so it’s gonna be a premium group, and we are gonna launch this thing at a very, very low price. The cost is gonna be ten bucks a month. And I just said, you’re gonna have eight sessions of group coaching for ten dollars a month. I don’t think you’re gonna find that anywhere in the world, anywhere on the internet, specifically with the caliber of guys that we’re gonna have in this group.

So the flip side of that is I’ve been told that maybe the pricing isn’t right. And you know what? The reality is maybe it’s not, but we are going to try this, because what I want to do is to be part of something. That’s why I brought . . . I asked these guys to join me on this journey, is to be part of bringing a community of men that really can have some serious breakthroughs from high-level coaching, and money is not the barrier. I wanna eliminate that as an excuse, whether real or perceived. Doesn’t matter. I wanna eliminate that. So for a, you know, two cups of coffee, one trip to Starbucks (’cause I know you’re not just drinking the two dollar Starbucks out there, you’re getting the expensive one, you’re getting a muffin, and you’re probably getting your kid a chocolate milk for like five bucks or whatever) . . . So probably half the price of one trip to Starbucks, you’re gonna be able to join this group, this premium group, and be part of a group of excellent high-caliber men. And there’s going to be, I’m telling you, somebody as a coach that you’re gonna resonate with, and you’re gonna get a small taste of what they can do in your life, and you’re gonna see the fruits of what they could help you with, what they can provide.

You know, a lot of this stuff gets branded as cheesy self-help, or self-improvement . . . I mean, it’s just growth. It’s just growing every single day. That’s what we should be doing. We shouldn’t graduate high school, or we shouldn’t leave . . . You know, hit a certain age, whether it’s fourteen, fifteen, we stop listening to our parents and we decide “We’re not gonna grow any more. I’m never gonna read a book, because I have a good job.” That’s crazy. Nobody . . . People do it, but you shouldn’t be doing that. Right? And so this is what we’re gonna do. We’re going to provide a platform for men to get better every single day, every single week, every single month, at a very low cost. And that’s just the . . . That’s how it’s gonna be. And so I’ll be very transparent with you guys, there is an aspect, there is a part of me that is not sure how this whole thing can work out, but I really am just focused on making this a team effort and bringing on . . . Exposing to some men who have never had this level of excellence in coaching, excellence in surrounding each other with a brotherhood that is excited to develop themselves and to get better and to transform their lives in every aspect.

So that’s what we’re doing with this group. I’m excited about it. I hope you’re excited about it. And if I gave a horrible sales pitch then ignore that, because I got eight awesome coaches. Jump in the Facebook group if you’re not part of the Facebook group. That’s Code of Character on Facebook. You can jump in there and you’ll see the coaches listed on one of the posts. I’ll be making some posts this week, next week. All the way leading up to the launch. And in August, we’re gonna have a link for you to sign up for that thing. Join the group. And it’s gonna be fantastic.

So let’s get back to today’s episode. Chris Sparks, professional poker player turned performance coach and founder of The Forcing Function. I hope you enjoy this interview with Chris Sparks.

Mister Chris Sparks, welcome to the Code of Character podcast. Thanks for joining us today. How are you doing?

Chris: Fantastic. I’m honored to be here.

Justin: Yeah. From Brooklyn, New York. I think that you are the first person I’ve interviewed from Brooklyn. So, how is it there?

Chris: First of many. I love it here. I think it’s a melting pot of culture. I’ve always been big on putting myself in the place of action, and definitely I would describe Brooklyn that way.

Justin: Yeah. So you are . . . Chris, you’re a performance coach, and we’re gonna get into what that means, and the things that you have to offer, the things that you’re doing to make an impact in this world, but first we’re gonna hit on your . . . I wanna say . . . You’re done now? You’re retired now? Or you’re still in the game?

Chris: I don’t think . . . I’ve retired a couple of different times. It’s always a good icebreaker, when I was telling people that I was retired at the age of twenty-three. I don’t think any poker player ever truly walks away. It’s like there’s always . . . Always keeping our eyes open for a good game. Right now I’m on a bit of a hiatus. So my heyday in poker, where I had the most success, was probably 2008–2011, pre the event we call “Black Friday.” I had a really nice run on 2017 until earlier this year, and now I’m more in business-building mode during the summer. These things tend to be pretty cyclical, but yeah. I obviously still play at a very high level.

Justin: Okay. So how do you get into full-time poker playing? You were doing mostly online, is that correct?

Chris: That’s right, yeah.

Justin: And so, tell me the genesis of that, and then I want to hear the exit of it as well. At least for the timing.

Chris: Yeah, I think so many things come down to timing, which is taking advantage of luck. Knowing when the conditions are right to strike. And I happened to be starting college during what is called “the moneymaker boom”, where some of your audience might remember, poker was on every channel. And this was what we did in the dorms and in the frat basements for fun, was play poker. And I’ve always been a huge games player. I’ve played a lot of online strategy games, card games beforehand. But this was the first time . . . Not only could I get social status, but I also could get a lot of beer money by doing the game. And so I really dove in, was able to pay my way through college. And then the major events that kind of catalyzed me becoming a professional was I had a managerial job with Ford coming out of college that fell through in the aftermath of the collapse of 2008, which hit the auto industry particularly hard.

My dream had always been to create television commercials. I wanted to be on the cover of Forbes, and all my life had been structured in that direction. And poker was more or less just a well-paying hobby and sometimes distraction, and at this point where, you know, my dream had been sort of curtailed, I was sitting in Detroit with nothing really to do other than “Well, this thing I was . . . You know, I had a really fun time, made some money in college, what if I gave it a real try? What if I actually treated it like a job?” And I ended up being quite successful very quick. I was making whatever my annual salary was at Ford every month, got some friends together, we had like a poker house out in LA, started traveling around the world to play in cash games. Got to the point where I was ranked top twenty in the world. That happened pretty quick. That was a matter of three years there.

And then the major thing, I think for me, ensuring progress was treating it seriously. Where . . . I spent you know, forty hours playing, but then I spent forty hours studying, researching, meeting other players, like connecting with people who could advance. I created a couple side businesses coaching and investing other players on the side. So it was like I really aligned my life around this concept of, you know, “How can I be the best? What are the-” (I call these ‘instrumental skills’) “What are all the things that I need to acquire on my way to this goal of being one of the best?” And so you know, when I moved up to Detroit, I was like, you know, fat. I had never seen the inside of a gym. And so I had to learn “All right, what does nutrition look like? What does fitness look like? What does meditation look like? How can I improve my mental ability?” Had to get basic statistical competence, learning databases so I could analyze players. All of these different skills that end up being in service of this goal of, you know, “How can I be one of the best poker players in the world?”

And just through, you know, these small incremental steps, daily improvement, was able to get from being like a decent player in the college games to, you know, one of the toughest players in the world.

Justin: So I graduated high school, and then I went to college for a year, and then I went off to the army, and then when I got back from the army in the mid-2000s, all of my friends who had gone to college, they were . . . Whenever we’d get around poker, they were in that whole thing of like . . . Everybody was obsessed with it, right? And everybody was very nonchalantly like “Oh, I could . . . I could be on the World Series of Poker,” and “I could do that.” You know. What’s the difference? What took you to being a top twenty player, rather than just another college guy who thought he could . . . Who could compete? I mean was there a talent there, or was it a lot of research? What separates somebody like you from just a guy who thinks he’s good ’cause he watches it on TV and he won a few hands at the frat house?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean just for starters, the fact that makes poker so good is that so many people are blissfully unaware of how bad they are. There’s a lot of ego involved, and there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, as far as you can win a decent amount in the short term but still not be a winning player, right? It’s not very apparent who the good players are until you’ve played for a long time. I would say the biggest character trait that separates the good players from the great players is just simple discipline. It’s very difficult for the majority of people to continue to make good decisions when things are going against them. I mean, everyone sees like the highlights of the big hands, but what they don’t realize is that there’s been ten hours of folding that has set up that big moment, and the ability not to compromise on one’s values just because things have been taking shape.

You know, people get bored. It’s hard to stay patient. There’s a couple different approaches to the game. Two schools of thought, if you will. One is very statistically driven. So there’s . . . You know, the odds. There’s a mathematically correct way to play every hand. I tend to be on the more psychological side, where even when I’m playing online, there’s a person on the other side of the screen, and the computer is just the translator of the language that is happening through the bits on the way. And so I’m trying to interpret the person’s mental state, even though I can’t see them. And there’s a lot of “How do you anticipate what someone is going to do before they know they’re going to do it?” And that kind of understanding that internalized experience really only can come through pattern recognition, which is kind of a ten thousand hours type of thing, putting in lots and lots of hands and lots of study so that you know, when a situation arises, you’ve already done the hard work ahead of time. You could recognize you had a game plan in place.

Yeah. So that’s where discipline comes in too, is you know, everyone loves to play, but very few people love to study. Right? It’s that gym time that no one talks about. It doesn’t make it into the montage. But it’s really what separates the best from the nearly good.

Justin: Now I’m a mindset guy, Chris, so I’m wondering was there a . . . What took your mindset from like, “Just having some fun, winning some beer money” to saying, “Okay, I’m actually gonna discipline myself, and I’m gonna learn this as a craft and really get into it.” Like what was your mindset? Was it just you realizing you could make some money off of it? Was it just wanting to get better every single day? What took you kind of from one to the other?

Chris: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. It is . . . I mean, winning is just a lot more fun than losing. I’m an incredibly competitive guy. I think that is one of my edges that allowed me to stick with poker. ’Cause I mean, I wasn’t a winning player for the first couple years that I played. I wasn’t taking it as seriously, but I needed to stick with it long enough in order to get good, and I think that could be said the same for any pursuit, is that you’re gonna suck for a long time before you can actually start harvesting the returns from a pursuit. And so, you know, I really hated losing, and that was a really big motivator to be more on the winning side. And once I started winning, it’s . . . There was always another level to reach. So once I reached a certain state, “Okay, I’m playing for this amount of money”, well I loved to play against these guys who were a little bit better, see if I could hang with them. It was just . . .

It was kind of this continual moving of the goalposts, in that I was never satisfied with the current place that I was at, and with each desire to rise a level, going from, you know, A Ball to AA to AAA, there was a necessary set of skills that I needed to improve or acquire to reach that level. So it kind of just happened naturally in that way.

Justin: Now, tell me about Black Friday and that. That is when you exited full time for the first time. Tell me about that, Chris.

Chris: Yeah. I was completely blindsided. In the finance world they call it a black swan. More or less we were just happily doing really well and one day our entire profession was taken out from under us. And you know, not to elicit sympathy, right, it was like . . . In hindsight we could have seen it coming, right? That this was not something that was sustainable, but still very taken off-guard. And I was in the position of “Do I want to be a lifetime poker player? Do I aspire to other things? Is poker just a jump-off point for me?” Because I had seen a lot of people, they lacked skills that transferred to the real world, and poker is kind of inherently zero-sum, where if you’re stuck in those circles for too long, you become (for lack of a better word) selfish. Right?

And my values were not in line with that. I wanted to do things that, you know, pushed the human race forward a few inches, and I thought that my experience from poker could potentially very valuable to people. I’m skipping over a lot here, because, you know, that was 2011 and I’m only starting to figure this out here in 2019. In the interim there was a lot of wandering and experimentation, trying things. And that’s the part of any biography that tends to get glossed over, but it’s true, is you need to try a lot of things to figure out what the thing is that you’d like to, you know, stake your flag in as far as finding some meaning in life. You know, my immediate takeaway was “This is an opportunity. I could do whatever I want, I have no outside obligations, I’m single, I can afford it. I want to travel around the world. I want to do all of the things I will never regret having done.”

It had always been a dream for me to do kind of an around-the-world trip, so I said “Why not now? Why not do it?” So I spent a couple years just traveling, trying to get a first-person ground-level experience of different cultures. And that trip more or less ended . . . Man, there’s just so much here. A lot of my net worth that actually had been seized in Black Friday, over fifty percent of it (and I just assumed I would never see that money again), but luckily one day it just magically appeared in my bank account three years later, and that was the day I decided “Oh, this thing I’m doing, traveling around the world, being a little bit of a hedonist, I could literally do this every day for the rest of my life if I wanted to with this money I got today.” And it got me thinking like “Is this what I want with my life?” And I realized that it wasn’t. Trying to identify the commonalities . . . “Well, what do I want?” And a really big one that stood out for me is “I want to be helping people who are looking to shape the world. I want to accelerate their growth.”

And that was kind of the first step towards getting on The Forcing Function, which . . . My current company, executive coaching, where the people who I think are tackling really hard problems can use the help in overcoming those bottlenecks. And it really started with just my values, where a couple times things that I thought were my values were really just candy mountains. Right? First I really went after the prestige as you know, I wanna be someone they write a business biography about. I wanna be on the cover of Forbes. Realizing “Oh, that’s not really what it’s all cracked up to be.” Second is like “Oh, I wanna be rich. I wanna be able to do anything.” Well, I have that. Nothing really feels different. Like, it’s easier, but I don’t feel better. “Oh, well okay, I’ll just like you know, be a hedonist. I’ll travel around the world. I’ll have all these crazy adventures.” Okay. Did that, but it’s not what I’m looking for.

There’s really like . . . What drives us is this search for meaning, and realizing that, realizing that my value was in accelerating the efforts of others, it led me to what I’m doing now. And it’s hard to say whether I could have got here directly without, you know, all the meandering around.

Justin: We don’t need to get into the details of Black Friday. People can go look that up and see exactly what happened. But you know, from . . . Just from piecing some of this stuff together, some legality question was involved, right? And my . . . I’m wondering, were there times . . . I feel like, especially the online gambling, you know, over the years is . . . Kind of been a grey area. It’s like, does it matter where you’re sitting? Does it matter where the server’s at? Does it matter . . . You know, it’s all these kind of weird grey legal areas. Did you ever have any moral conflict with that while you were doing that, just with that whole kind of piece of it at all? Or even . . . I’m even kind of curious with the . . . I know you had a group of friends that were the poker players, but then you know, friends and family outside of that. Was there ever any . . . You know, any of those conversations had, or how did that kind of get handled, if at all?

Chris: Well there’s a few I’ll try to unpack there. So first, legally always has been a hundred percent legal to play. What was the legal grey area was, “Can banks process gambling transactions?”

Justin: Okay.

Chris: And so banks being public entities, they need to reduce risk, decided that the risk was not worth it, and stopped processing those transactions. And so it became much harder for players to get money on and off sites, and that’s what led the sites to more or less convict . . . You know, to buy out banks, which was considered fraud. And so that’s what brought on Black Friday. It wasn’t anything that the players had done. It’s still very legal to play. Morally I have no issues with it. I mean, my stance is if you sit down at a poker table, you like . . . You know what you’re getting into. Like, the rules of the game apply. Like, I’m going to go after your money and you sure as hell better be going after mine. Right?

And you know, there’s actually within the poker community a very, very strong moral code around this, that you know, there’s a one-strike rule, where if you . . . If you have a bad debt one time, if you cheat someone one time, you are more or less ostracized from the community, and no one will ever do business with you again. And so everyone is more or less playing the long con in that the best thing to do is to be honest because you make the most financially by people doing business with you in the long run. These short-term incentives really you know, weed out the bad actors. Now how I feel about it personally, I wish poker was less zero-sum, but that’s how it is. Right? One person wins, one person loses. And I have really made an effort to take, you know, what I have learned from my experience in poker and try to use that to help people, so that you know, my existence on this earth is a net win and that people can learn from my own experiences.

As far as like friends and family, things have come a long way as far as people understanding this. I think you’re nodding your head, I think you understand this too. It’s like this was kind of a hard thing for my parents and for some of my mentors, and for a while, my parents didn’t tell anyone that I was a poker player. They preferred to tell people that I was in a very unsuccessful job hunt. And that started to shift as they . . . I mean as I became successful, but also as they saw how poker influences so many other things in life, and how it is very transferable in terms of skills.

Yeah, it’s very interesting, because so many of these moral boundaries are culturally given, right? Where one person’s compulsion or addiction is another person’s passion. Right? So it’s like we look at things like investing in the stock market differently than playing poker, when really we’re all just making bets on incomplete information. When you look at someone who, you know, spends eighty hours a week working on their business, it’s like “Oh, wow, what a hero.” Right? A lot of that definition is cultural. And that’s why I think it’s very important that people start with themselves, right? Like what is . . . “What are your own personal values?” We’re all kind of playing single-player games here, and we have to decide for ourselves like where we draw those lines.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. And I appreciate you being candid about that. And you know, I think that’s . . . That’s what we talk about in Code of Character as well. I mean for the most part, it’s figuring out what is your value system, you know, what do you actually value? Right? Maybe it aligns with your upbringing, maybe it doesn’t, but we all gotta look at that at some point and say “Okay, is this what I feel, or is this, you know, what’s been put upon me by family, culture?” All these things you’re saying.

And I find it, for me personally, I’ve always understood, even before I understood that I understood it, people and entities that live by a code, you know, whether they’re quote/unquote “good or bad”, that is what makes sense to me. You know? So kind of when you talked about even the poker community, you know, I can get a sense of appreciation for that because it’s a group of people who . . . There are . . . There is a code, there are certain things that they all kind of . . . You know what to expect out of each other, and I think that people can appreciate that consistency, in that you know the kind of people that you’re dealing with, and you know the world that you’re in.

And so I definitely resonate with that, so thanks for . . . Just for going there with me. Yeah. So let’s move on to . . . I mean I hear the performance coach in you coming out as you talk through all of these things, but how did you kind of get the system that you use? Is this something that you kind of looked back at your own life and said “Oh, this is what I’ve been doing”, or did you intentionally craft this system of performance? We talked earlier, you were talking about the . . . You know, just getting better every single day, which I know is gonna resonate with the audience. But I’m just interested in how you kind of came about this. Whether it was natural or whether it was very intentional.

Chris: I think both. I think both. So I’ll tackle each in turn. So naturally what I was alluding to as far as my success in poker is that so much of this happens naturally when you have an ambitious desire of your own goal. Where if you’re going after something that you really want that requires quite a bit of growth, you will identify a lot of opportunities to grow that will happen naturally along the way. And what really started this off, I was you know, telling you about my time on the beach of Thailand where I had this moment of “You know, okay, maybe traveling is not what I want to do with my life.” I looked at my trajectory as far as if the person I am, if I continue down this path, what will my obituary say? Like what will my legacy be? And seeing that my trajectory did not line up with my ambitions.

And so by raising my standards for myself, I naturally started to level up in all of these different areas, because what was acceptable for me had changed quite a bit, where I needed to become a different person in order to accomplish what I wanted to. And that leads me to part two, is that has been my journey on how does one create a system to ensure a personal transformation. Right? Once we’ve done the hard work of deciding what we want to accomplish, how do we systematically become who we need to be in order to accomplish that goal? And I really deconstruct this into a couple aspects. One is habits. Right? What are the behaviors we need to be doing regularly that will lead us towards our goal. And these could be actual actions. If you think in terms of a business, right? Writing, creating a product, et cetera. Things that are work-related that we need to be doing regularly. But it also can be just growth as a person. Daily habits. You know, exercise, meditation, what have you. Things that put us in the state of being our best selves, right? Where we’re able to do our best work, where we’re able to be present with people, et cetera.

And that’s really what I see my job is, is to be kind of a living experiment for what works and what doesn’t, and I’m constantly trying things and talking to people and working with people to discover what works across people. What generalizes . . . What are the component pieces of a system for growth? And that’s why the systematic thing for me is every day I wake up and say “How can I be a little bit better?” Like what is one dimension that I can improve upon? And if that’s true every day, man. Like the length of time that I need to go back and say “What was I doing?” Like, what the F was I thinking? That time period continues to shift, where now it’s like I look back a matter of months and be like “Oh my god, what was I thinking?”

And that’s a very good signal of growth, is that period continues to shrink, and that we are continually evolving, and this idea of a feedback loop. The length of time between measurement, we find out where we are, and we update our approach, that that continues to tighten. The feedback loop tightens. That we improve faster. That speed of improvement is the critical variable, where the faster we can improve the faster we can course-correct. And that’s all life is, is just a series of course corrections. Because … I mean I’m thirty-two at this point. I’m still very much a student of life, but what I’m gonna try to leave anyone here listening with is “How can you create a system to make sure that you go to bed, you know, one percent better than you woke up?”

Justin: Yeah. Sounds very different journey, but similar kind of to how I . . . When I started Code of Character here, it was that I realized when the people . . . When either myself or the people that I had been leading, you know, when there was a failure, whether it was moral, legal, or something else, it was never a knowledge problem. It was never a head problem. It was never like “Oh, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to drink and drive” or “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to . . . ” Whatever. You know, steal from, you know, whatever. That was never the issue. So the issue always comes down to . . . And it’s specifically in the Army. They give us, you know, seven core values. They’re all the good ones. They’re all the key ones. Right? You know, you gotta memorize ’em week one basic training, you wear ’em on your dog tags, you know.

And so but for some reason, people still have you know, more failures. Not only do they have . . . That they don’t improve every day. They regress, right? And so you know, for me going through some of this, this kind of stuff . . . You know, I came back as character being that delta there. “How do we help people get down the path they want to go without that regression?” You know, so my question to you, in that long blurb I just gave you, my question to you is “How do you . . . To you what is the key differentiator—” I know you mentioned habits. I know that’s probably a big one there. But between the people who . . . You know, I see . . . One thing I see on social media a lot, tell me if you see this, I call it kind of like, you know, shotgun self-improvement. Twitter will just be like “Go to bed earlier. Wake up earlier. Exercise every day. Stop eating crap.” You know, it’s like all this stuff, and I’m like “Yeah, those are great. I mean hopefully somebody reads that and it changes their lives, but everybody already knows that stuff.” There’s a reason we’re not doing it, right?

And so how do you coach people that come to you and say . . . You know, maybe they’re like “Yeah, I know all the things, I get the list of twenty things I’m supposed to be doing, but I just can’t seem to do ’em, and I can’t stay on track.” How do you help those people, Chris?

Chris: Oh, man. I just . . . That’s such a great point. I mean, if knowledge was the problem we’d all have already accomplished things and we’d already just be hanging out saying “Isn’t it great we’ve already done everything we wanted to accomplish with our life? All we need to do is know how to do it?” Right? And so we—

Justin: We’d all be at Thailand, right? On the beach.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom, right? It’s one thing to have memorized something or to have read it in a book a few times. It’s another to truly internalize and live it. And that’s what a habit is. Most people think of habits in terms of “Oh, okay, when I wake up and I’m in my bed and I have time and there’s no one around me and I have . . . It’s quiet and I have this perfect place, et cetera, all these conditions need to be . . . Then I write in my journal.” Or “Then . . . ” You know, it’s like “Oh, well, when I have lots of energy and I’m on my way back from work and I pass the gym, then I go in and I work out.” All of these extra conditions. And a true habit is when it becomes part of your identity, that it’s internalized. It’s not a choice, but just something that you do.

And we were talking about morality. I believe there aren’t really any good or bad people. There are people who have made good and bad choices. And that’s all we can do every day, is aspire to wake up and make slightly better choices. And I mean one really good principle that is core to what I do, and I would say, you know, think about this when people are looking for opportunities in their own life, is “How do we make the things we want to do easier, and how do we make the things we don’t want to do harder?” Right? All habits reduce down to that. Is if we want to be a better person, what are the behaviors, what are the thought patterns that align with being a better person? How do we reduce friction towards doing those.

The same thing, right, if we wanted to start eating healthier, how do we add friction to eating unhealthy foods. Right? Throw out all the unhealthy foods. Make it harder to do. We want to spend less time on our phones, don’t have our phones around all the time. Right? It’s a very simple but powerful concept. The understanding that all of our behavior is contextual. All of our beliefs are contextual. Contextual in the sense of we are liquid conforming to the container of our environment, and that if we put ourselves in an environment that’s more supportive of our goals, we will expect our actions to be more in line with our goals.

The common one that’s cited is “You are the five people you surround yourself with.” Right? Very trite and obvious advice, but how many people actually put that into practice, right? We still surround ourselves with people who don’t really want us to achieve our goals, or aren’t really supportive of what we’re doing. And no wonder we find it so hard to change. So it’s something that I really try to embody, is I know that it’s going to be hard for me to make good choices if I put myself in a context that is not supportive of making good choices, and how I exercise free will, my character is made by the choices that I have made in the past to put myself in a good position in the present to make good choices. Right? That my environment currently is supportive of the things that I want to do, and if I know where I want to be in the future I can start to create that environment on the way that ensures progress in that direction.

So, yeah. That’s a few different ways of thinking about it, but it really comes down to “What are the things we want to do? How can we make them easier to do?”

Justin: So I’m interested in . . . You mentioned that your environment is supportive of the things that you’re trying to do. What’s your advice to the guy who is just kind of . . . Just becoming aware to a lot of the things that you and I are sitting here talking about? You know, they’ve just been kind of doing the same old thing for years, they’re surrounded by people who . . . You know, none of this is at the forefront of their mind, and they know that if they try to become better, that it’s going to . . . They’re not gonna get that support, right? So you’re looking at a radical change of community or environment to get to where you’re talking about for these people. What’s your advice there?

Chris: I would start by having . . . Creating some momentum forward. So I think that creating a change of context, be really powerful. So on a micro level, thinking about going to a place with intentionality. I’m really against working at home because it’s a very mixed context. So I recommend these, you know, planning exercises. I’m happy to share links on my blog after the show, in show notes. Go to a coffee shop. Go to a park in nature. Go somewhere that is, you know, unfamiliar and fresh to you, and just write at the top of a page like “What do I want?” And start to think about ways that you can achieve that. And thinking big. Thinking about, you know, “If I could do anything what would I want to do?” And we’ll automatically start to complete those patterns.

Another, you know, good micro-level intervention is examining the environments that we spend the most time in. Right? Our bedrooms. Our office areas. Our kitchens. Et cetera. Looking at them in turn and saying “Are these supportive of my goals?” And if not, you know, what simple changes can I make so that they are more supportive of my goals? And a lot of this is just a hack of redirecting awareness, where once we have that frame of … It’s like a verb change. Instead of saying “Oh, I would like to get in shape”, instead “I am in the process of getting in shape.” And then we automatically become aware, because we are looking for opportunities to improve our health. And so all I say is just make sure that you take that first step, whatever it is. And then it’s very easy for that momentum to build, because you automatically notice opportunities to continue to improve. Right? It’s easiest to redirect a moving ship.

Justin: I noticed you talk about changing your language, and some of the verbiage, which I really like. Are you into mantras or kind of speaking things about yourself or empower statements, any of that kind of stuff?

Chris: Yeah, I don’t do the mantras. I’m very big on you know, the growth mindset type stuff. Not thinking about ourselves as fixed but in progress, so we can improve in anything. Obviously we all need to be kinder when we talk to ourselves, right? We talk to ourselves in such a way that we would never tolerate from others. You know, sometimes we need to quiet that inner critic, and reframe … I’m really big on reframing, in terms of you know, what are the things that we didn’t think we could do in the past that now are very easy to us? Right? And what are the things that we thought were a huge deal in the past that really weren’t all that big of a deal? Kind of keeping these in mind. I think everything is really a matter of perspective, and it is funny how often … You’ve heard a lot in this conversation, we frame things in terms of metaphor. And if we change the metaphors of what we view the world, we’ll generally change the way we act in it as well. ’Cause our beliefs affect our perception, and if we change our beliefs we’ll start to see things in a different way.

I am always looking for ways to change my perception from “This isn’t going the way I want it to” to “How can this be going better?” Right? “These aren’t things that I suck at, these are opportunities for improvement.” And yeah, I think just that subtle shift makes it much easier to take action rather than being avoidant towards it.

Justin: Do you have an example of the reframing metaphors that you just kind of mentioned? Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but that really piqued my interest, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure kind of where you were going with it.

Chris: Oh. Okay. This is right off the top of my head. So a recent story for me, I said like I am new to the gym, and I still have this skinny-guy, you know, mindset.

Justin: Yeah.

Chris: Right? There’s still that like tiny twelve-year-old picked last in gym class that’s inside of me that pops up every now and then. And so I don’t think of myself as in shape or strong, and I’m sure it shows up in a lot of different areas in my life. The story that sticks out to me is I was in the gym the other day and you know, I just finished a spot set, and some guy comes up behind me and it’s like “Oh, well, are you using those next? Do you need me to take these off?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I’m not nearly as strong as you, I can’t lift that much.” And it was the first time in my entire life I was like, “Oh my god, I’m strong.”

Justin: Yeah.

Chris: “I’m strong.” And that was such a powerful reframe for me, because I had always been thinking about “Oh, I need to improve here. I need to improve here.” And this became, “I am just fine the way that I am.” Like if I kept this as I was, that would be amazing, and everything else is a bonus. And I think that was a really good change in approach for me, is every time I go into the gym now it’s, “I’m already strong. If I get stronger, that’s great, but you know, no pressure.” It’s like . . . We put all of this pressure on ourselves thinking that we aren’t enough, and I think realizing “Hey, we’re great just the way we are. We have opportunities to improve, but you know, they’re opportunities. Right? And we’ll try. We’ll give it our best, and we’ll see what happens.” So yeah. Hopefully that’s a good example.

Justin: Yeah, for sure. And I think that also is an example of the environment piece you talked about. Because even a guy like yourself, you know, who is an intentional growth mindset oriented person, you know, we still have our insecurities, right? That when a person in the gym says that, that reinforced something that . . . You know, that we knew, but we hadn’t really been filling ourself with. And so it, just, when you said that I thought “Oh, man, that’s also the power of . . .” you know, I know you didn’t know that guy in that instance, but even just in general being around people who support you and care about you and are gonna, you know, give you compliments and strengthen you with their words, instead of the opposite. You know.

Chris: Exactly. And realizing that any time we have an outsized reaction, right, when someone gives us a piece of feedback, which we should be welcoming feedback, ’cause these are opportunities to improve, right, the idea of constructive . . . That any time that we have an outsized reaction to it, realizing that it’s scratching on an old wound, right? That it’s bringing up an old insecurity from the past that’s trying to protect us from pain but is really preventing us from growing. Right? We’ve been talking a little bit about the gym today. How are muscles formed? They’re muscles formed from tearing. Right? We need to break in order to grow.

Justin: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, I always like to try to wrap these up by summarizing what I thought were, you know, some of the main points today, some of the things that I think anyone listening to this could benefit and take away. And just think about ways that they could potentially apply these in their own lives. So we talked a little bit about the continuous improvement idea, right? Always just looking for a way to take a small step forward today. In any way. And if we find a way to continuously move forward, you know, we will blow ourselves away with what we accomplish. We talked a lot about habits and ways to improve our behavior at the five-second level, right? When we are faced with the choice, those choices are habitual. How can we put ourselves in contexts where we make better choices, whether it’s, you know, our emotions, our thoughts, our behavior, where you know, character is created through a series of good choices.

And the way we choose is created in advance by the environments that we put ourselves in. Right? Finding people around us who are supportive, and et cetera. And yeah. I would just end this by thinking about, you know, what is your personal system for success? Like when you’ve been at your best, what were those conditions? And just make a list. Think of today what are five things that when you were at your best you were doing that you aren’t doing now? And that’s the low hanging fruit. Put those into place. And if you’re performing at your best you will automatically recognize opportunities to perform even better. So just recreate those conditions.

Yeah, I’m always happy to talk about these things more. I would point anyone who is listening to this to my new workbook, which is called “Experiment Without Limits.” It’s something that I’m super proud of. It’s been my main focus for the last six months, is . . . You know, the dozens of high-performing entrepreneurs that I’ve been working with, you know, studying top performers . . . You know, chefs, athletes, military, et cetera. What are the commonalities behind high performance? I’ve condensed all these into a hundred-page workbook that anyone can step by step implement the techniques that I teach my one on one clients. And the other thing I would say is for anyone who is listening to this who says like, “I have no idea what to start, I don’t know where my opportunities are,” I have a little quiz on my website which I call “The Performance Assessment.”

So the workbook is theforcingfunction.com/workbook. The assessment, theforcingfunction.com/assessment. I think we’ll probably link to those in the show notes. But it’s a short quiz, and the idea there is to uncover what your biggest opportunities for growth are, and if you complete that . . . Anyone who does, I’m happy to give personalized feedback to on how you can improve.

Justin: Oh, very cool. Yeah. So theforcingfunction.com. Go check out Chris’ website. I’ll tell you, your website’s really easy to navigate. You have everything laid out there very nicely. You can see a bunch of podcasts Chris has been on, some videos, and Chris also goes . . . I think I mentioned earlier, but outside of performance he really tackles, you know, some of the deep issues. So if you’re a person who likes to think deeply on things or just consider, you know, different things about life, like I do, you’ll appreciate some of those videos. And I think those are right off the website as well. And then I got the workbook, too. So yeah, go get that stuff and take up Chris’ offer there, and once you go through that he’ll give you some feedback, and reach out to him.

Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time. You’re a fascinating guy. Any time you wanna come back and talk about anything else, if you’ve got some new products out or if you have a new epiphany or new experience, man, I’d love to talk to you again, my brother.

Chris: Oh, it’s an honor and a pleasure. I mean, thank you so much for your time, Justin. Thanks, guys, for listening. Yeah. And let’s continue growing, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Justin: Sounds great, Chris. Cheers.

Chris: All right. Talk soon.

Justin: Thank you for listening to the Code of Character podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and share with your friends on social media. Actions, honor, vision.

---