Creating Holistic Success with Brian Covey
Are you operating at your full potential where you are in alignment and filling up all the buckets of your life? In this episode of Built For The Game, Rob Cressy is joined by Brian Covey, as they talk about how you can create holistic success in your life. From self awareness & lifestyle design, to the power of visualization & creating a larger vision. This episode is a masterclass in high performance.
Here’s the podcast version:
Connect with us:
- Rob Cressy – Instagram: @rob_cressy – LinkedIn: /cressy/ – ChatGPT Coaching: http://www.gptleaders.com
- Brian Covey: Instagram: @thebriancovey – Website: https://www.briancovey.com/
Transcription of the podcast:
(note: what follows is an AI-generated transcript from this video. Please be mindful that the transcript may not be 100% accurate)
Welcome to Build for the Game, where we talk about the systems for winning in business and in life for the long haul so that you can thrive in any situation in your growth. Coach Rob Cressy. And joining me today and oh, baby, I am so excited is Brian Covey EVP at Revolution Mortgage. He’s an investor.
He’s an author. He’s a speaker. He’s a coach. And he is a family man. Brian Covey, great to have you on the show. Rob Thanks for having me. I love the intro and I always tell our buddy I would probably invert those. And I’m a family man. Been married 21 years this August, three kids. So I always start with that every day.
And that’s that’s the biggest blessing. All the other stuff just comes along with it
100%. And I think that’s actually a great launching pad to our first topic around holistic success. And this is something that’s been foundational for me, filling up all of the buckets of my life. But more recently, I’ve got an 18 month old son. And a lot changes when you have your first child.
And so often when you’re in the come up in business, you learn about the hustle, and the grind is like more work, more work, more work. But I learned in my old life when I did not have a holistic approach where I filled up the money bucket, I filled up the work bucket. But the other buckets in my life, they were not getting filled up.
So I’m curious to hear from you how you think about holistic success as a high performer, as someone who’s a coach and who does a lot of things, you live a full life, yet, you know, I’m glad you bring this up because this is the game. And I think about for a lot of people that they’re lacking fulfillment today.
They’re feeling frustrated because certain areas of their life, they are winning, but they know there’s other areas and they were called to do more and to win in those areas as well. And they’re struggling with that. And let me be the first to tell you, like that was me too. And if you haven’t been through that tunnel, especially as a man and you’re married, you’ve got kids and all of that, the reality is you’re all going to go through it at some point and going through it teaches the experience.
And so
I go back to Stephen Covey, always talked about the whole person theory when you’re sharing that in Rob I thought about that is that’s the game. And
in your faith, in your family and your fitness and in your finances, they are all absolutely connected in any time that we think we can win and one or two of those areas and not in all four, we’re actually not operating at our full potential.
And I would encourage you to think about this is when all those are in alignment, you will find this beautiful flow. It’s this rhythm. When you’re watching a great athlete and you see them performing and they’re just in their zone. That’s what we should think about in our own lives, is can I be in that zone? Can I be where my feet are?
And can I be focused to when the moments through the day?
And so, Rob, I love that you bring that up for me.
About seven years ago, I had a massive breakthrough, realizing just what you shared. Business was going well. Could be going better. Faith going well, could be better. Family. I was traveling all the time. Definitely could be better.
And in my finances I looked and go, Man, things are going well. But again, I knew it could be better. And I took the initiative. And that’s where my journey really took a very different path seven years ago to go on the journey to find like, What am I capable of? What is my potential? Who did God create me to be?
And that’s the pursuit I’ve been on. It is a journey. There is no perfection. There’s no end. But one of my mentors always shares this. We’re looking for incremental wins, not monumental wins.
Oh, I love that. Because the way that I like to talk about that is we’re fighting for inches. That as you get better in the name of self-mastery, that it’s a rarity where all of a sudden, oh my God, this seismic thing happens, even though
the inches that we create oftentimes can be these epiphanies or these lightbulb moments that can change our life, but you become so intentional in this can be one phrase or assent hints or a perspective.
And I think back and I’ve I’ve shared this numerous times last year, one of the greatest things that happened to me is I learned how to create peace in my life. And it took me 42 years in 5 minutes to understand that peace is just a choice. And you can either choose to be a victim or you can choose to be at peace.
And to me, that is just an each and every single day I show up my antennas of love and flow and creation are all open looking for those inches in my life because so many people think you have to go from 0 to 100. But I am, among other things, a motto and product of consistency.
I’ve been doing the same things every single day for the last 13 years in the name of personal growth and high performance and being the best version of myself.
And it doesn’t mean that I was always this person is the opposite of that, but it is the
like building a house. So when I think about built for the game, this is this long term mindset business in life. And at my left has a great quote. The bigger the dreams, the deeper the foundation. So we just keep building that foundation brick after brick after brick and they stack and the next thing you know, you’re like, Wow, there’s a lot of growth that I’ve added in my life.
And I’m curious about something in your journey, because the circles that we run in, there’s a lot of high performers, There’s a lot of people who make a lot of money. There’s a lot of people who do a lot of great things in business. And I’m curious about what are you and you mentioned some of it, but was there a specific moment that made you want to live the holistic life?
Because I can see from the outside as a coach where everybody talks about everything being great, but I know through my own self excavation that it’s a one of one job and you are the one who gets to decide, you know what, I’ve a lot more potential inside of me, but I noticed that that sort of conversation doesn’t come up a lot because we’re all so focused on one bucket in a lot of these groups that I don’t almost see people on that frequency of holistic success.
It’s what most people will not be vulnerable enough to talk about and actually to engage in those conversations because they know I mean, imagine if we actually even in those circles that we run, what have you actually had to open up the evidence to say, okay, here are my bank accounts, here’s my actual investments versus talking about how you’re playing the game and you’re hustling and you’re doing all these things.
What if you actually had to show what your relationship was with your kids or your spouse and the things like you actually had a scoreboard that you knew the truth. And that’s what many people are not vulnerable about it. It’s why fitness and it’s one of the few areas that you can’t fake being fit, like when you go do a workout with someone.
Rob You know, that’s like I can show up. We did. Murph On Monday. You can show up and do Murph And either you’ve done the work and you’re going to have the performance, the output, you want it or you’re not. You’re going to show up and you’re going to be able to operate only within what you’re capable of.
And so in our own lives, what I would submit to you is that for me, it really required some breakdowns in my life to create breakthroughs. And one of those was as a leader, one of my key roles was recruiting and attracting the right people, hiring teams. And I’d experience tremendous success in sports, right? So most of y’all know my story.
Check out there. But D1 college athlete who started all four years was captain my last two years played professionally a tremendous success. I had confidence in one area of my life on the sports field, so I knew in my business when I wasn’t having the results, my confidence was low. I was having people that would leave my team and quit.
It would blame me as the leader, and they were right in that. And so it requires you to take a look in the mirror. Around that same time you’ll probably know this book, Extreme Ownership. Right? So Jocko and Leif come out with this book. One of my mentors gives that to me. I start to read it. I’m like, Well, if we were rating this on one out of ten, I’m probably I know I’m below five.
Let’s be real. I’m probably a two or three on this. I’ve massive upside for growth. And that was a catalyst for me because the first time really in my career, I wasn’t performing at the level I wanted. Everything was just average and I knew it. Nobody could look at me from the outside though, and probably say, Yeah, you know, I mean, I would I would trade places in certain areas.
And that’s where we get caught is that’s not what’s best. Just because you’re getting along and you’re at this average state, that is not who you were designed to be. And until you can learn the skill of self-awareness and you have people in your life that will speak and even say, Brian, Rob, you can do more, you can be better in this area.
Do you have role models in your life? This is why I believe this proximity is powerful and proximity will actually fuel your purpose If you’re hanging around eight or nine broke, people, you’re going to be the ninth or 10th one. If you’re around eight or nine people in your life that aren’t good, spouses don’t spend time with their kids, don’t take care of their health.
Welcome to the club. That’s what your life will start to mirror. So I had to change my circles. I had to change people that I was hanging around and I had to set a new vision for what is success in the coffee house? Who is Brian Covey been called to be? And for many of you listening, if you’ve been a former successful athlete, college, high school, whatever it was, at some level, you know what it’s like to win.
You also want to know what it’s like not to win and not perform at your best that eat away at me and Rob, that was really what ignited a flame that I said, You know what? I’m not the best husband I can be. I’m not the best that I can be. I can I can get in a little like sorrow mode and be sorry for myself.
I’m offering to take action, and that’s what I decide to do. I’m a competitor by nature. I love to compete. And so I started to gamify certain things start to figure out, and again, it’s back to incremental things. How do I plan out my week, one of those very intentional, actionable items? I want to give you something we talked a lot of theory, a lot of mindset, a lot of stuff.
Start to plan out our weeks on Sunday night with my wife. And what are the kids doing? What’s date night look like? If we’ve got date night that we we don’t need to be for business. We start to plan things out as a family. Family started out prioritization over business, which had been in the front seat of that and I believe this this is a foundational belief.
You can be ridiculously successful in all of those areas. If you have a plan, a routine, and you start to build out what you believe and you desire success to be in your own house and for your life until you’ve designed enough clarity around that plan and what success is, you’re chasing somebody else’s dream, some other deluded version, and you’re not living the life that you were created to live.
Brian Covey, I love this so much and you just opened up Pandora’s box and there is legitimately a master class just in the last 5 minutes that I hope that we’re able to touch on and you said something that no one else ever says that I have to talk about learning this skill of self awareness. Why? Because it took me 32 years of my life before I became self-aware.
How is that possible? At no point in kindergarten through 12th grade, four years of college, in ten years of being in corporate America, did a single person ever tell me the phrase self-awareness? I was making good money at times. I was very successful at what I did, but no one anywhere ever taught me self-awareness, which, looking back on this now, is a massive failure of the entire system.
And it wasn’t until I quit my corporate job and went all in on my dreams of being a full time creator and entrepreneur. When I went to zero $0 zero client zero website zero relationships in the very first morning, I sat there and I was like, Wow, everything is on me. Every single decision in my life. No one is telling me when to wake up, when to go to bed, what to eat, go to the gym, any of these things.
And for a lot of people that’s a heavy feeling. It’s like the Rob, how did you know what to do is like that’s such a big decision. And they’re like, Oh my God, I’ve got to make all of the decisions. For me, it was like freedom. I was like, Holy smokes, can you believe I get to design every single aspect of my life, which is the other thing that you talked about, who you are designed to be.
And one of the pillars of built for the game is lifestyle design in my life changed later on, a few years later when I hired my first coach and he shared with me a quote that changed my life. Live by design, not by default. It once you understand this, this is literally the secret of all high performance. Because when you can wake up every single day and you design things that you love to do that are all aligned to growth in who you want to be and show up as every single day, it is effortless to read books, go to the gym, do gratitude, meditate, be with your family, all of these things, because this is the lifestyle that you design in. So much of the world operates on the hamster wheel of life, or as I call it, default. They show up and do the same things every single day and they don’t actively participate in designing what that looks like in every single aspect of their life. MM Yeah, as you were talking about that, I think back to one of the best lessons that I learned through that process was my day was running me, meaning that I was saying yes to too much.
People would put things on my calendar and my day did not reflect my priorities, nor did they reflect what I needed to have to create success. So the question I would ask each of you listening is, is your day running you where you feel like things are just coming at you in your reaction mode all day, or are you running your day?
And let me just paint a picture for you of what running your day looks like. This morning I was fortunate enough to wake up to take my son to football with his buddies. I go get my workout in after that, I come back. My son, my youngest is at swim, my wife’s there. It’s 8:00, right? Like we’ve got all these things done by then.
At 8:00, I’m still checking emails. I’m watching him swim. I come back and shower, get changed, start my day with meetings that I designed, I set up. When they start, I say when they start that day and I only allow things on my calendar that I’ve selected and chosen because they’re in alignment with where I’m going. And you see, for many of us today, you need to start hanging out with your future self.
You need to hang out with your future self of what they would be doing, what would Rob, what would Brian be doing in five years from now? Would they be saying yes to these things? Would they be over here very disciplined about. I can’t say yes to that right now. In this season, I need to stay focused on what I do.
So either your day runs you or you run your day. Here’s how I’d encourage you to look at where you are and where we all have room to grow. You rob you hit on something is the conversations you’re having today. Over the next few days, I would invite you to start paying significant attention. What are your conversations? Are they about your dreams or about where you want to go about things that you’ve done that day?
Are they about what you’ve actually accomplished? It’s in alignment. There. Are you spending the quality time and with your kids? If you have kids, are you spending time in those areas or manner? Are you just where where complaining about how hard things are? Are you around people that are naysayers or like, Oh man, you can’t do that? Is your self-talk such that you have such limiting beliefs that you’re not even giving yourself a chance to get in the game and you put yourself on the sideline, start paying attention to your conversations that you’re having with yourself and other people.
And guess what? If you don’t like them, change them, starting with yourself. Start surrounding yourself with the right people and watch how your life will change within 30 days. I’ll guarantee you this. You change the conversations with yourself. You change the conversations you’re having with other people. Watch how your life improves. It’s no secret how works. Absolutely. Love that.
And Brian, that is to me, as Tim Grover says, in Relentless, everything is labeled number one because it’s all the most important thing. And once again, the levels to this game and the intention that we show up with. So we’re talking about lifestyle design in and I say this often success leaves breadcrumbs. So our Brian Covey is sharing about being in charge of his day and his morning is the exact same way that I operate my morning in my neck of the woods right here.
So if you’re sitting here and you’re waking up and you’re jumping on your phone and you’re later, you’re not doing something, you don’t have a morning routine, huh? Is this an opportunity where I say, well, wait a second, success leaves breadcrumbs. And there’s a really good book that I recommend called Be Your Future Self Now by Benjamin Hardy are really good on being who you are now based on the future.
Because, Brian Covey, the other thing that I want to talk about, which you’ve mentioned twice now, is setting a new vision. And once again, this is high performance, one on one clarity of vision. And I believe that clarity of vision is different than goal setting, because oftentimes goal setting can feel heavy, it can feel formulaic, like we have to do it because that’s what business people don’t do.
But when you talk about vision, I’m talking about dreams. We’re talking about unlimited possibilities. And right now, coming off of just completing 75 hard for the second time, that the energy that I’m bringing to the table is new beginnings. And I’m seeing this as an opportunity where the best is yet to come for me. All right. What’s that best is yet to come look like for myself.
So I’ve been reading more books about vision. And this is something that oftentimes in life, wherever you are at a certain period of life, maybe you’re going to hear something differently or or something’s going to resonate. So there’s a really good book by Cameron Herold called Vivid Vision, which I really enjoyed. And I’m curious your perspective or your practice on setting a new vision, because like you, I do planning for the week ahead on Sundays and I do it on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, on a yearly basis.
And it’s all anchored in my vision, both from business and in life, but on who I want to be in all areas of my life. So my vision is not just a financial number. It is even emotional things attached to the story that I’m telling myself. Because the story you tell yourself becomes your identity, which becomes your actions.
Your actions become your results. So I’m curious if you can unpack a little bit more on the vision side of things because it lights me up, which is exactly why we should be living more in vision because it’s so fun and exciting to be that person now, dude, I love it. So the greatest gift one of them that my dad gave me, he’s a psychologist and it was the power of visualization.
I’ll never forget the around we were in high school is the first time that I was introduced to this concept, right? I’m thinking, I know this is like we’re going to close our eyes and we’re thinking about the game and we’re going to make these plays in our head. And all of this, I mean, really understand what we were doing.
But I followed the process. I trusted what was happening and over time I started to build this muscle of visualizing success. And what we did for sports was we could actually visualize an entire game moments that would happen. We’d anticipate things that could happen in the game, both us making successful plays, successful passes, shooting and scoring a goal, blocking a shot, all of these things.
We’d also envision what happens when things go wrong. We turn over the ball, someone’s gotten past us, how do we recover and react? And what I love about this is the power of your subconscious mind and how you can reprogram your brain. Today we did that at such a level that we won three out of four state championships, which was unheard of.
And I look at how dialed in we are. That’s what I learned. The power of your mindset, the power of visualization. I share that story with you because I still today use that and you can too, in your room. What you’re talking about is creating a visual and dreaming and thinking about this bigger, better future. And for many of us, we just got to slow down.
I like 90 day increments. There’s sprints for me, right? So you got 75 hard. I love that you brought that up. You know, for somebody that’s going through that as well. 75 days, there’s something sweet about that where we can sprint, we can go all out for that period of time. Our brain can stay focused. We can create new habits, new routines, All of this, I like 90 day sprints throughout mine.
And then I’m looking at that at the end of 90 days, reflecting back on what went well, what could I improved on? And I’m checking my vision. Is anything change right in my family life, in my businesses if we bought or sold a company, what’s happening in the market? What’s happening in my faith, What’s happening in my finances, my fitness, a new goal that I want to set.
And I love how you said this as goals are very different underneath this vision of my bigger self, that 30,000 foot view of who am I becoming, who do I want to be in five years is what my target is. Every 90 days I’ve got to be doing the work and there are metrics because look, there is a scoreboard guys.
Whether you realize it or not, there is a scoreboard evaluating you. Just like if you were to measure your body fat and your weight and your muscle mass and all these things and fitness, there is a goal and a metric to measure your finances. There is a goal in metric to measure where your faith is. There’s a goal and measure to measure where your family is and that relationship.
And we need to be measuring these things constantly. And so what I would encourage you to do if you don’t have a vision, absolute clarity of who you are, becoming that best version of yourself. Many times what I have done is I’ve looked at people in my life. They’re excelling in those areas. I think what if I’m able to take the best of Rob over here, the best of ADD over here, the best Orion over here.
What if I were to put those guys together? What would that elite human look like? That’s who I am chasing and that’s who I’m striving to be in all areas. And we can create that. What I wrote out for myself and my vision and definition for success at a 30,000 foot view is I want to be doing the thing that I want to do with the people.
I want to do them with when I want to do that control, that’s freedom. That is living life on purpose for me, that success. And once I define what success look like and have a vision, look around. That’s where we need to attack the day. That’s where it starts to matter. The work we put in every day, are we moving forward towards that?
Are we staying in place or moving backwards? We’ve got to measure those things. Oh, Brian, I love that so much. A few things. As you said, score board a few times. One of the resources I can share you can go to Rob Cressy.com/habit/. I created a habit tracker that allows me to choose five, ten, 12 things that I want to track in my life every single day in a gamified system.
Because so many people here, oh, Rob and Brian, they they have a scoreboard for their life. But what is it that they’re actually doing in this isn’t a half to do. This is a get to do so for example, some of the simple things on mine are play basketball, are read to my son for 5 minutes, not be on my phone for an hour.
They can be literally and visualization is one of them. And these are things if you don’t do them, it’s not a negative. But if you do do it at the end of the bond, you can then see, wow, I visualize 25 out of 31 days this month. Now we can quantify the positive habits of growth. And remember, there is no what does this have to be?
You can literally put whatever you want on there. And then regarding the 90 day sprints, one of the things that Ed Mylett likes to talk about is whatever you did 90 days ago, now we’re going to start to see the results of that 90 days later. So for me, the reason the new beginnings with 75 hardest so ever present for me is because I am going to start seeing the fruits now for the work that I put in 75 or 90 days later, because so often we say, I want change right now without realizing actually the real change can come three months from now.
And Brian, I know I want to be respectful of your time right now. I thank you so very much for coming on the show. This was a master class of high performance and love and growth in intentional living. And I wanted to recognize that in you that I love this conversation. There’s so much more depth that can come from this work and everybody connect with you.
Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on, because these conversations fire me up, surrounding myself with people like yourself and others that I know. We run in some circles that when you get around people like that, your conversations change, your life will change. And so if you want to learn more, follow me. I’m pretty active over on Instagram.
It’s the Brian Covey, or you can go to my website and that’s Brian Covey. A ton of resources, some things there and let us know. I always say this if anything spoken your day impacted you. You’ve got a question or follow up. Let us know. People that have helped me along my journey have created breakthroughs, have been inspirations in my life, and I know that’s what Rob and I show up.
We don’t do this just to show up. We’re doing this to make an impact and actually change somebody’s life. And so let us know if we were able to reach you and connect to that. And I want to reiterate that because it’s something that has actually been very successful in my life that when there’s a call to action from a host, an author or a speaker that says, Hey, if you hit me up on social media, I will respond back.
You can hit me up on all platforms at Rob Cressy, Tag myself. Tag Brian Covey, I promise you, if you listen and watch this entire thing, you’ve got a question, you’ve got a thought, something inspired you. We would love to hear it and create that because that creates seed is in this universe of love and creation and amazing things will happen.
Sending tons of good vibes your way.