Welcome And Guest Background

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Leadership Insights Podcast with Co-Fanancial Groups. I'm your host, Chad Coe, and success in leadership isn't just about the decisions we make today, it's about the legacy we build for tomorrow. And on this show, we talk to the leaders from around the country, but not just the country, we're talking the world. Today, Jason Dunn is from Australia. And what these leaders do is they're going to be open to sharing their wisdom and insights to help us become better. Jason started by carrying a secret fear for over 20 years. For Jason, it was a fear of drowning that started in childhood. That fear didn't just keep him out of the pool, it created a massive gap between his reality and his true potential. As an elite Australian, ultra-endurance athlete, author, and mindset coach who underwent a profound transformation, one sedentary smoker until the age of 34, he was able to shift his trajectory to conquer his limits, completing over 14 Iron Man triathlons, including the Hawaii World Championships. Transitioning to ultra marathons, he earned two silver medals at the Athletics Australia 100K National Championships and a silver buckle at the grueling Western States 100. Alongside his athletic success, Jason's built a prominent corporate career in finance as an executive co-founder and CEO. But we're excited to really hit on today his speaking and best-selling author of unlimited and greatness doesn't care. He uses his framework for resilience, discipline, to help others overcome adversity and dismantle limiting beliefs so their professional and personal goals can all be achieved. Jason, so welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Thanks, Chad. Thanks for having me on. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Absolutely.

Childhood Fear And Soccer Regret

SPEAKER_00 2:05

So I just I want to go back to the time where you get started, where you're afraid of swimming as a child or even a young adult.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

And look, I'm sure we'll get to fears because most people's lives are uh limited by fears of some uh sort or an event or another. And at the I had a whole bunch of them. And at the very top of the list was was drowning because I couldn't swim. I grew up in the UK, and it's probably not a priority for kids in the UK to uh to become a swimmer, learn to swim. Not the best climber to do that. Uh lack of access to pools. So yeah, I I I grew up um when I say not swimming, I could swim the width of a pool. I have a certificate. I think I still have that certificate, which was basically, and that was pretty much just to uh to save my life. So yeah, I had in fact uh the fear I had of the fear I had of drowning was so profound. And often you can have you know nightmares that are consistent nightmares about something that's you know you know a really, really deep fear. I would often have that uh that nightmare. So so yeah, I couldn't swim. But I think if can I just back it up a little bit? Because I think the context of my life to that point really uh brings to life and brings colour to to the change and the pathway that I went down and how this brought that over.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Absolutely, a hundred percent. We have nothing but time. I want to hear every story.

SPEAKER_03 3:44

Don't tell me that because we will be here for a couple of hours. So I grew up as most uh many or probably even most young young lads do in the UK, where you know your your dream is to play football. And of course, you know, you guys are appreciating appreciating that at the moment. You have the the world's greatest game in your backyard. So that was my dream, and I worked pretty tirelessly at that. I think I've always worked pretty hard at everything I do. And I would play maybe, you know, in my early teens, I was already playing four games of football or soccer every single week, and that was my world. So at the age of 15, I eventually had an opportunity to sign an apprenticeship with a first division, uh, sorry, second division club, professional club in the UK. And I was ecstatic. I you know, I was I was excited. And the challenge was I was going through my school studies at the time, and the club that had offered me the contract, I would have had to get in a as a 15-year-old get on a train after school, travel two hours, go to training, travel two hours back, which logistically and practically was you know almost impossible. And I made this heartbreaking dis I had to make this heartbreaking decision to because it was such a risk back in those days being an apprentice. So I had to I had to make a decision with my head instead of my heart. And it was devastating. And I but I lived with and so I lived with that regret for the next 20 years. And I would tell people, which was fed mainly by ego, and I'll talk about how you know ego is a killer of greatness, and I've lived with ego, my upbringing for you know for most of my life. I would tell people that I could have been a professional soccer player, especially once I'd had quite a few drinks, and that was a fairly regular occurrence, or no, not if um, and I started to feel this very deep, deep regret and shame because I could convince anybody else of the truth that I was trying to tell them, but it wasn't the truth to me because I didn't and I wasn't, and I could have and I should have and I would have,

Agreeing To A Triathlon By Mistake

SPEAKER_03 6:14

but I didn't. So I lived back and I lived well within my limitations the next couple of decades until one day a friend of mine said to me, I was 34, said, Hey Jay, a triathlon. I was working in banking and finance. I didn't even know what a triathlon was. I didn't provide, I said, Yeah, I'll I'll do that. And then I went away and looked up what it actually was. And he said, There's three of us in the team. I went, okay, that's great. So I looked it up, so it's a swim, so I've awakened it's a run. It was only a 300-meter swim. 12k ride and a 3k run. I went, that's that's great. I can do the 3K run. I mean, I know I'm full packaday cigarette smoker, but yeah, I can do that. So I went, yeah, that's cool, I'll do that. And we got together a couple of weeks later, he said, Hey Jason, how are you going with uh I said, Yeah, it's really good. I reckon I'll power through the 3K team. And he said, Yeah, but what about the bike and what about the swim? I said, What what do you mean? And I I I could he said, You're going very pale, and I felt really sick. He said, You you said I'm just doing the run. He said, No, no, no, you're doing all three. And I uh just I felt sick. But I I sucked it up and I said, Yeah, okay, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. And but I was terrified, and for a couple of days I I couldn't stop thinking about what this meant and what the risk was and how fearful I was. I went and bought some swimming gear because you know I hadn't swam since a child swimming across the pool. And I I arrived at the swimming pool, sat in the car park for 20 minutes, six o'clock in the evening in Brisbane, it's dark, indoor pool, and I sat there and I fought with myself that you know this sort of war was raging in my head about yes, just gonna be easier to leave. And as I thought about it, I thought about the times that I'd taken the easier path in my life, and that this felt just I didn't absolutely know why, but this felt really important that I didn't take this easier path because this was my greatest fear. So after 20 minutes, I eventually and the car engine was running. I was like getaway. So I turned the car engine off, and and I just and I went inside and with my nose clip on my nose, and I managed to get through 25 meters, I got the other end, and I was at the wall gasping for air. I was, you know, I was I was dying. And I waited a couple of minutes and then I swam the other, you know, got through the other 25 meters, and I could my arms were so bad I could barely get out of the pool. Heart was racing, palpitating, and and and that's how it started. I knew though, in that moment that I had made this one small choice, and in life, we we make you know, we we have thousands of decisions to make a day. It might even be a lot of instinctive ones, which is across the road looking each way, you know, it's that hard. And we think they're tiny decisions, tiny decisions add up and they change the pathway of your life. The caveat I'll put with that is you need to keep making those tiny decisions, but they can lead you to places that and and for me I feel so less, you know, 62, 27 years later, that has led my life down this pathway that has revealed, you know, reveal things that I never could have dreamed of. And it doesn't stop. I'll come to this shortly. It doesn't actually stop because in the last few years, you know, I've reached 60 and life just has just keeps opening up. You know, there are things that I've been doing that I five years ago I could never have believed that I would do. And so that was that was a pivotal point. And and I kept training for the next 13 to 40 weeks. I put in place a, you know, I'm I'm used to you to using plans, strategic plans and tactical plans, put in place a rolling 90-minute performance plan, which essentially made gave me clarity around what I need to do, get up every day and do.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

Not not what the event was in 13 or 14 weeks' time, but just what I needed to do each day, and then it would provide the discipline to it. But that completely changed the case of my life. I completed the race. I came out last out of uh 150 people in the way to swim. You know, I nearly died. I was on my back like a turtle at the 50-meter buoy. It was a pretty fast-flowing kind of tidal ocean river. But I survived, and I this incredible euphoria inhalation when I got out of the water, and obviously I was in one piece, and then I powered away, and then I think I caught up most of the I think I caught up 140 out of 150 people. And the feeling was so powerful and so immense, and I felt proud of myself, and I hadn't felt proud of myself in a little while because I'd been living with this to a lens, and so as that kind of the next couple of days went on, I I I just had this overwhelming sense of how do I find this again? What can I do next? Where's the next challenge? And what's going to inspire me? And and I was sitting on the couch a couple of weeks later, and I was watching the Wide World of Sports, which had a lot of mainstream but also quirky sports back in those days.

The Hawaii Dream And A Bigger Purpose

SPEAKER_03 12:21

And the YIM World Championships came on. And it was a very special year because there was a I won't go into it in detail, but there was a couple of extreme things that happen as they always do in their race. And I finished watching it, cigarette in hand, and a cup of coffee. Back to those days, you smoked inside your house. Hard to believe. And I said to myself, I'm gonna qualify for the championship. And I made the decision that day that I know exactly what I'm going to do. So the challenge with that is the distances in Hawaii are like 14 to 9 minutes 14 times, the thing I just done. And so that was overwhelming as it is for many people when they set huge goals. Right. So I decided that's what I was going to do. I had no idea how I was going to do it, and I'll share with you how I actually worked that out. But that was my goal. I set a five-year goal. And of course, to qualify for why you have to go fast enough in an iron man around the world and be right up there in your age group to be able to be able to go fast enough and qualify. The challenge then was how could I wrap my mind around I've just done this, so I'm going to do this huge thing. And so that's what I said about that. But the thing that quickly evolved for me was that not the goal. I actually need to put the goal aside. And I actually had to have find my purpose. And the goal, by the way, is not what it's a big mistake that many people make in business and life, in getting fit, you know, and running or whatever. Because goals come and go. If you achieve a goal, it's gone. Then what are you going to do next? I thought a great deal about this, and I I define my purpose as I need to go and find out what I'm capable of doing. I need to go and find where my limits are. I need to find out what Jason can do. I need to prove this to myself. So my purpose became to go and find what I was capable of doing, to go and test myself, you know, to see where my boundaries were, and to see how far I could push my boundaries. And that that had 27 years later, that is as large now as ever then, even though I don't obviously I don't race as much. And so I had I went off on that journey. That was where my life headed, and it was consumed by that, but also you know, running businesses at the same time for business.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

I I would agree with you strongly about the pivotal moments. I have some in my life that either made my life better or gave me challenges that I need to overcome to get where I am or where I was going. And I think that we need to take time to reflect on kind of like the four-second rules for me able to change your life. We need to take the time to meditate to see where we're going. I think you have to visualize also at some point what's your life going to be like when you're running and you're doing and you're cycling, you're trying to compete. Do you spend time visualizing what that's going to look like when you're in these races?

SPEAKER_03 15:57

Yeah, so that's a great question. And I'll go back to the four-second rule because I also want to plug in discipline in there because you know that's one of the absolutely essential 14 steps to finding your own greatness, um, what whatever that might be. I I I came up with at around the same time as this was happening, just actually just after I completed that.

The Armchair Test For Regret

SPEAKER_03 16:18

I also, because I'd been living with this regret, I developed a simple technique that I call the armchair test, and which was because I'd been in financial planning so long and I've seen so many people at 65 and 70 and 80, and or people at retirement that had just got it all wrong. And they had had all the time in the world, but they hadn't prepared enough to have enough financial means to be able to do the things that they always wanted to do. And you also have all the time in the world to look back and think about your life, and many people have, you know, obviously we all have sadness and regret, but you know, for lots of people it consumes them because it's like, what did I do with my life? Why didn't I do that? Why didn't I take that chance? Why wasn't I brave enough? Why wasn't I brave enough to do that? So the armchair test is where you sit down with a piece of paper and you just literally go, if I was sitting down at age 65, and I had all the time in the world to think about my life, what would I be proud of? What would what would fill me with joy and meaning? What would I be proud of? Where am I now? And how how would I feel if that continued until age 65? Would I go, you know what, quietly, I I just I lived a half-life, or I wasted my life, or my life didn't bring meaning. And what you do is you you you create that emotion, that feeling, and you bring it 30 years forward, or 25 years, or 40 years, or 10 years, and you say to yourself, how do you want to feel? Because you know, you need to go and create, you need to go and create a legacy you can be proud of. And so that for me was uh an excellent technique that I use, and I've you know lots of other people, lots of other people use that. But so just to go back to the four second rule, yeah. I and another mantra that I which is actually similar to a David Gogwin's word, you know, I know David's brother pretty well, another very similar one is you know, to be truly successful in life, you must first do what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it until you do. In other words, there are many, many days where you you know on your journey toward aligning with your purpose where you know what you you have to do, but you know, you might not have the motivation that day. You're tired until tomorrow. You know, you're one day, any day, next day, you know, and and you validate that you go, I'm tired, I'm super busy, are the kids, whatever it is. Absolutely always a reason, and a hundred excuses. So and I I link that back to that decision that I made that I regretted for so long, where I followed my head and not my heart.

The Four-Second Rule For Action

SPEAKER_00 19:11

And so I decided that I would make decisions within four seconds before I allowed my my mind allowed itself to talk me out of just so that could be genius because we all have that mind that says this is going to be hard. Why are we doing it? What are we doing? We tried it the first time. I talked to you earlier that everybody quits. And quitting, quitting is just like, you know, you're running and you're tired until you're done. You know, you ask somebody how far you're running, they don't have a goal or a plan to run a certain amount. They just run until they decide to walk.

SPEAKER_03 19:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

I mean, this is the majority of people.

SPEAKER_03 19:52

When we all we are all capable of, you know, twice as many, uh, when our brain, when our minds tell us that we're done, we can't go any further, we're capable of going a lot further.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Jason, do you have an example of something other than this running, biking, and swimming world where you like to not complete something? Or have you brain hacked and mantraed your way to completing everything that you set your mind to do?

SPEAKER_03 20:18

I I have mantured or mind hacked myself to go after anything and everything that I believe is truly purposeful and meaningful to me. So do I always succeed? Look, success and greatness is how you is how you feel about yourself. Success and greatness is actually giving something your best shot, giving something everything you have. Ultimately, if you don't achieve that goal or aspiration, it's it's the knowing that you've actually given it everything you've got. And so that's what that regret is when you don't try. Regret is when you don't take a risk. Regret is when you don't take the opportunity. I can tell you now, I guarantee anybody listening, you will fail at every single thing you don't try.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

That's right, 100%. And that's why we have this up here. It's one of your quotes that you like to talk about. And then we have to close the gap to be able to get stuff done. Because if we try, you could train the brain to be able to complete anything that you want, as long as you said this, as long as you have purpose and aligns with your values.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Absolutely. And then obviously there's the whole thing, you know, that that's you know, purpose, purpose is the antidote to everything. Purpose is the antidote to fear, purpose is the antidote to exhaustion, purpose is the antidote to anything you can name. There are, you know, the annals of history are just chocked full of people that have achieved the most mind blowing, extraordinary things against all odds because they live with purpose in their hearts. And they also they also exemplified the other 13 steps to greatness. And there are many of them, you know, like you know, courage. After purpose, courage is courage is the next thing. And courage, courage is you know basically overcoming fear or your perception of fear and rationalizing the fear. And look, we just got

Putting Fear Into Perspective

SPEAKER_03 22:21

to talk about fear. Can we can we talk about fear? Yeah. Because we all live with fear. And even the most confident, articulate, successful people, everyone has fear. And many fears, you know, when it's public humiliation, whatever it is, failure, yeah, they're they're just you know, fears are infinite, they and they don't go away. And you know, when but when you face them, you actually take them on your terms, and you can rationalize and put into perspective any fear, you you almost any fear, unless, of course, I I actually have you know developed like a fear chart or a fear perspective. And I saw this one you know long, long, long time ago. You know, it was in a you know somebody running a seminar, and this very wise person talked about because we become paralyzed by fear, paralyzed in you know, in the extreme sense, in the instant where you're just literally paralyzed, and the other is you know, paralyzed into not taking action and moving forward because you're scared. But everything in life is relative and there is perspective. Uh I learned early on that again, thinking about the armchair test, you know, there are things we become fearful of, we'll never remember at 65. They were insignificant. And there are fears that actually are real fears. But here's an example. You know, you can write, I use there's a scale in Unlimited. I have a scale that starts with imagine you're in one of these scenarios in a in you know in the white in you know, to do with wildlife. You know, the first scenario is you know, you've fallen off a boat, no one knows you're gone, and you're a hundred miles out in the ocean, no one's coming, you know, there are the fins circling around you, you know, you're toast. You're gonna you toast it. You've got every right to be fearful. There's probably absolutely no way out of that one. You're you know, you're gone. And then you go down the next one, the next one, the next one, you get down to the bottom, and the last one is I'm I'm at a barbecue, and there's a mosquito, there's a couple of mosquitoes buzzing around me. You know, what are they gonna do? Maybe they're gonna just give you a little and you know, you're gonna scratch that bump and you know, whatever, but it's insignificant. You never remember it. It could happen to you a hundred times, it wouldn't make any difference to your life. Somewhere on that scale is the moment or the event or the thing that you're thinking about doing or is in front of you or your challenge. And to effectively you know, dull you know that your response, or perhaps even to you know, to jolt you into finding the courage to take it on, is putting it into perspective. And so once someone's when someone says to me, Oh Jason, I'm really I'm really worried about this, or I'm anxious about this, the first thing I do, Chad, is go, Are you going to die? And they look at me and they go, No. Okay, that's great. That's got that's got the really bad one out here, or is somebody else in your family or really close, you know, gonna die? You know, they're really seriously ill or seriously sick. Let's get that one off the table. So it's not it's not paralyzing, and then you basically work your way down, you go, oh yeah, well, actually, you're going past someone's uh house and there's a dog, you know, medium-sized dog trying to get out, and perhaps it's barking and it wants to bite you. That's what this is, and so you immediately frame it and you go, Yeah, you know what? It's actually not so bad. Or and so the importance there is you quickly realize the significance so that you don't have all these chemical reactions going on within you, and you move quickly to solution mode. So I I don't really, unless it's my family and unless it's health, I don't really worry about anything because it's not gonna it's not gonna define my life and it is not gonna stop me. And I go, you know what? That's a dog trying to, yeah, trying to get out of someone's garden and bite me. That's cool. I can do it without.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

So I always talk about there's another level, right? So I know people bench press two, three hundred, four hundred pounds. I was in an executive group with a chiropractor who bench pressed 600 and some pounds. And you know, I never knew about ultrarunning, but I do have a friend that runs these ultraruns, which are hundred-mile runs that last like what, 24 hours? It's like your world of endurance is a level that I don't think many people comprehend even. And so if we could just talk about the idea of start with what a triathlon is and how long it takes, and then talk about this next level of life, which is the endurance, the ultra races. Share with us, if you will, the setup of that. And then I want you to be able to talk about some of your examples or stories as you train and as life kind of throws adversity at you.

SPEAKER_03 27:25

Yeah. Okay, great.

Ironman And Ultra Endurance Explained

SPEAKER_03 27:27

So the one I started with that most people do when they find the courage and they say, you know what, I want to make something of my, I want to feel proud about myself, I want to challenge myself, I want to, yeah, I'm sick of taking the easier route, uh, the easier road or the easier pathway. I'm gonna do a small triathlon. It might be like a 400-meter swim and a 15 or 20k bike and a you know, 5 or 8k run, or maybe even shorter than that. And you know what? The distance doesn't matter. The fact that you are becoming better than you were yesterday, and you know, your heart is full and and you're getting fit and you're challenging yourself, brilliant. You know, everyone has to that's where I started. And then the I mean you you you get Ultramans, but generally Iron Man is kind of the mainstream. And Iron Man is a 3.8 kilometer swim, 180 kilometer bike ride, and a you know, 42k marathon, and they're in different, very different conditions. So, you know, I've raced Iron Man races where you know the water temperature is 32 degrees Celsius when you start in the dark, and you have jellyfish all around you, and it's dark, and you're following a light in a boat, and you're going out in Asia somewhere across a major shipping lane and into the darkness, and then you're gonna swim back. And those sharks and baddies and everything else below you. So for a bloke that grew up in the UK, petrified as swimming, you know, that prospect is pretty damn scary. So that's uh that's uh that's an I plan. And then ultras basically an ultra is beyond the marathon. So typically it begins at 50 50 Ks. It can be a road race, it could be a trail race. If it's a trail race, then it has a much higher degree of difficulty. And sorry, that that other race I was talking about before was 32 degrees in the water. The the temperature during the day was 38 degrees Celsius, and the humidity was plus 90 percent, so it's pretty extreme. There's a 17-hour cutoff for an Iron Man. Fortunately, I was blessed, you know, I was racing Iron Man and the high nine hours, you know, to low 10s. And then there are ultras, so ultras 50k, and there is no limit to an ultra. It just you know, the longest, probably the toughest ultra that I attempted to race was a 333k non-stop ultra. You've got three days to finish it, I sleep over the Himalayas, over the three highest drivable, drivable mountain passes in the world. So, you know, the first, the first, which is the highest drivable road in the world, you know, it's 18 and a half thousand feet. Yeah, there's probably 45% oxygen in the air. And for an athlete like me, uh, if I go for a brisk walk at 18 and a half thousand feet, it feels like I've sprinting 200 meters. So, yeah, there are and they're they're there you can invent, and people do invent the craziest things like the Berkeley marathons or whatever you know. Like they're all they're all tough.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

They're just now that you're training, and there's also stuff in the western states, right? Because you're flying in from Australia. Tell us a couple of stories around your biking, you're in the western states. Give us some extreme stories about how you overcame some serious adversity that most of us can't comprehend.

SPEAKER_03 30:56

And look, I'm gonna caveat this by saying there are people in this world that overcome way more than I do. I don't I don't put myself up there with that's fair. But for me, and can I just say this is probably the most relevant point about today? And is the greatness is is is a very individual thing. Greatness is never a comparison and should never be. Comparison is the death of greatness, comparison kills joy. Do not compare yourself with other people because all that matters is you moving forward and being better than you were yesterday. That's all that matters.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

100%. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 31:38

So I don't see, so I realize that you know I I got up to a pretty high level. But for me, where I was and what I faced, all that matters to me is I feel good about what I did. And it doesn't make me better than anybody else, it just makes me feel good about me.

Near-Death Stories And Gratitude

SPEAKER_03 31:54

So I have had to just as a big block, I've had 35 hospitalizations. I have had four near-death accidents, I've broken more than 40 bones, I've had you know illnesses that almost you know almost killed me as well. I've been, you know, I've been three times on my bike, I've been hit by a truck. And and and and look, well, the first major one, I was 17 years old, and I just got to Australia, been here a couple of months, driving a car on a Friday afternoon. Some guy drove out straight into the road, didn't have time to stop. He was he'd been drinking. I hit the side of his car, I broke my jaw in 16 places, I lost 40% of my teeth. I had my teeth coming through here, my jawbone coming through here, I had a fractured skull, I had multiple fractures of my cheek. And, you know, I was I was out of house, I was in intensive care for, you know, eight days, nine days, out of hospital in two weeks. I was 17 years of age, I started my own business, and I was catching three trains a day to get to work on crutches with my face completely wired together. And I I one of the great one of the 14 steps to greatness is gratitude. Gratitude is the foundation of life, foundation of a happy life. And I learned in that moment, I woke up after eight hours of surgery, and I was feeling very sorry for myself. My head was completely bandaged, I was feeling really miserable and sorry for myself, and I saw a young child going being pushed along on a you know on a trolley in the hospital, no hair, obviously had cancer, undergoing chemo. And I just thought, you're so lucky. You are so lucky. Here I am completely smashed up. I've got no idea how what how deformable whether my face is gonna be, you know, in a in a total mess. You know, I I couldn't, I just couldn't feel my face. And but I just realized that was my first true moment of gratitude. And so every time something's happened to me, I still feel grateful. I feel grateful that I survived and I go, I was given this opportunity to survive, to go and actually do something meaningful and then do something meaningful for other people. That's my purpose now, my life now is I do it for people all over the world all the time, is help people find their own greatness. So anyway, I've I've gone off track there a bit. Um I had another time I was hit by a truck, a whole bunch of scaffolding on a truck, and I foolishly, it was one early on, I was on my way to doing my first Iron Man, so I was training for that, and I was in Queensland, it was 35 degrees Celsius, and it was out. I went out of my bike for a train ride stupidly without a shirt on, and I got hit, I got collected by a huge bunch of scaffolding on the back of a truck as it went past me. And the driver behind said that I disappeared out of view, they couldn't see me. I went up in the air and I came back down and I just you know 40 kilometers an hour, I went along the road, I I tore two through two layers of skin off, both butt cheeks, and all the way down my back. And I it was it was at a time, it was a long time ago, and I I had plastic skin, it was when they were trialing synthetic skin. So I put the synthetic skin all over my back. And eight days later I was out running with my plastic skin because I knew what I needed to get up and do every day to make this first Iron Man, and so I I don't allow myself to have excuses. I did I did exactly the same in distance. You you find a way if it burns bright, you find a way.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

So you stay optimistic and you really do have a bright light. You also have a high tolerance for pain, I'm gonna guess. I don't even know what that means because the pain is the pain is just it shivers through my body as you tell stories.

Training The Brain And Banning “Hard”

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Well, I think you learn it. You actually, and again, this is you you you can you you can train your brain to do pretty much anything. You you can. And you you can do it in very deliberate stages. And I was saying to you before that, you know, I removed a bunch of words from my vocabulary 27 years ago. I just binned them from my head and from my vocabulary. And sometimes you can hear them emerging, you know, they're trying to get up and I'm trying to push them down. You know, they were words like can't, hard, I removed hard. And so here's an example of what I do when that emerges. So I don't say any, I don't I just don't say oh that I never say that's hard because if I say it's hard, it will be hard. So I just don't say it. You know, when I I for decades, you know, once a week I would do a training run and I would run up and down a hill close to me that's consistent, pretty consistent, reasonable rise, one and a half kilometers up, one and a half kilometers down, and I would do I would run that up and down that 20 times straight, you know. Today you'd be in the mid-30s, and I've been doing it. And so I would run 30 kilometers up, 30 kilometers down. That was kind of my six-hour training run. Some days I would do that back to back. When I trained for the Western States, I was doing that every other day. And on the day in between, there's a set of steps up to the opera house, so up to Sydney Harbor Bridge, you guys all know that, and was about 70, 70 steps, and I would run up and down, two steps at a time, and I would do that non-stop for three hours. Just up down, up down, up down, up down, because I needed to try and emulate, you know, the western states has nearly 40,000 foot of vertical elevation change. So I needed I needed to try and emulate that, and I would just do it till I could just I my legs would just jelly, they were just rubber, I would just fall over. And so I would do that the next day.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

It's awesome.

SPEAKER_03 38:14

And then I would do the inspiration.

The 14 Steps Framework And The Books

SPEAKER_00 38:17

It is, and the idea that your purpose is now to be able to help other people, it takes us to the books that you wrote, in which I absolutely couldn't get enough of the unlimited, the art of being limitless. And I can't wait to read The Greatness Doesn't Care. Your your words are just inspiring, but your stories are phenomenal. You have like 10 people's lifetime of stories. They're they're so abundant, and they're they're like everything you do is just overcoming.

SPEAKER_03 38:47

Yeah, look, I think that is, and I now might you know the way I described that now. Thank you. That's very, very kind of you, Chad. It's about becoming better than who you were yesterday. It's about going in search of the greatest version of you. And is uh the thing about a goal, and goals is they end, and then you've got to go find something else. But the thing about purpose and the thing about that, you know, passion to become to become better, better doesn't just mean achievement. And and so, you know, that's why I went back to write greatness doesn't care because it's less of a memoir. And what I wanted to do was to create a framework of all the things that I've learned that I become wiser at that have helped me become better, a better person, as well as achieving more. And so, you know, greatness doesn't care is is the 14 steps. And what I wanted to be able to do, that I tried to do with Unlimited, and I didn't do, was which you know, Unlimited is more storytelling, is I wanted to be able to give somebody something or somebody go get something or listen to her that they could identify wherever it is in life that they're stuck or trying to start, like the first step to getting going to their new life, the first step to getting going to the greatest version of themselves. Now, you might have purpose, you know, that's the first step, you might have got purpose, but you don't have the courage. Or you have the next step is mindset, and the next step is planning, and the next step is discipline, and so on and so on and so on. And if you think that you're ever done, if you think that you cannot get better, then I gotta tell you, there is no human that cannot get better. And I just I want to sort of go to some of the more profound and softer stuff I can just before we finish, because otherwise we're just gonna go on forever.

Stillness, Presence, Nutrition, Vulnerability

SPEAKER_03 40:53

I've added things in there that have made me a better person or made me a more catering person. You know, like some of the softer stuff, like um stillness. Stillness for you to be able to process things, you know, to be able to, you know, whether it's business or family or whatever it is, you need you need stillness. You need presence. You need to eat well. Okay, so I've got one is you know, one is nutrition. And my most profound learning in the last three years, you know, pretty much hitting 60 and beyond, is vulnerability. Because I've had some shit happen in my life that has tested me, pushed me to the edge. There are things in my book that I actually haven't put in there because you know, some things that were that humiliating things that are my fault. But I've had to be tough, you know, running a business, you know, being a leader, the exec leader or CEO, doing the things I've done, the things that happened to me, you just get used to being tough. But what that means is as a person, sometimes you don't improve because you're always, you know, you're trying trying to be tough. You don't accept when you're wrong, you're not vulnerable. And what that does is that impedes how you connect with another human being. And what I love is I think vulnerability has grown my life as much as anything. You know, I go up the road into my local town, uh, you know, it's a pretty big area. I will walk down the main street and I would have a conversation with seven people. You know, just everywhere. People just I love that connection. I love the vulnerability. You know, you've got to learn to laugh at yourself, you've got to accept when you've stuffed up and you're wrong. You know, and you just you know, you just in the instant you have to recognize you go, I'm sorry, you know, I can do better than that, or whatever, and you and you grow as a person. So greatness is not a destination, greatness is how you live, and you can, and don't ever think you're done. Age is no limit. And if you're 55 or 60 and you haven't lived healthily, you can change because you still have the rest of your life ahead of you. Yeah, I I agree with that so much.

One More Step And Real-Life Greatness

SPEAKER_03 43:25

Help people find meaning in your life. All of this, you know, greatness, I I believe is about happiness.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Yeah. And I think happiness is activities, happiness is activities, and being able to look forward to things, and and you don't just have to do one thing, you do many things. You do the again, you the biking, the swimming, and you do things that are hard, but you've practiced and trained the brain so that you could overcome it, and then you feel good about it, and then you build your self esteem and your confidence.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Absolutely. And there are many other benefits I mean, there are lots of other, you know, chemical benefits. And you know, there are you know, and I I write a lot about what different things do to your brain. And but you, you know, my one of my favorite quotes is, you know, is uh Elliot Kipchogan, you know, probably the greatest marathon runner of all time, one of the greatest athletes of all time, you know, no man is limited. And I when I say no man, you know, no person is limited. Your only limit is your brain, is your mind.

SPEAKER_00 44:35

And you have to be able to talk to yourself. I think you said in the book too, like you reached call it a limit, but then you said one more foot, one more step, one more mile, one more mile, and then you get a second wind, a third wind, a tenth wind in your case.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:51

But really, you just have to put that one more foot in front of the other. You have to take that one more breath.

SPEAKER_03 44:56

Yeah. Metaphorically, in life, in anything, and you know, whether that's your family, your children, whatever it is, it applies the same. And so doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it until you do is secret essence. So it's a secret source and of life. And that applies to, you know, you come home to you come home from work, you know, you're exhausted, you know, the kids want to play, and all your heads doing, oh, I just want to sit down and watch TV or just want some space, you know, whatever. My advice, create some space before you get there. If you can exercise before and after, if you can get to and from work on your feet or on a bike, do that stuff. But it's in those moments because if your kids in five and seven, they don't know what you've been through in the day. They don't know you're exhausted, they don't know how much you need space. All they care about is whether dad goes out into the street and plays with them. That is doing sometimes doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it until you do, because that's what they remember, and that is greatness in a relationship as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

So I think you I think you've

Where To Find Jason And Closing

SPEAKER_00 46:02

mastered it. Where do we find your books? Amazon or your website?

SPEAKER_03 46:06

Okay, so Unlimited is self-published. That's on most platforms uh around the world. It's on you know Audible as well and Spotify. Um, so I self-published that. And can I just say one thing I love, one thing that really, really makes my life is there's not a week that goes by. Someone in the world doesn't reach out and go, I went off and did this, I read your story, and I've done this, and I feel amazing, and I whatever, and I found courage. And that I love. That's that's my purpose. Greatness doesn't care is released online on the 28th of July. It's in stores in Australia and New Zealand on the 28th of July, North America in bookstores, uh, North America in the UK is the 3rd of November. But it will be it, you can you can buy it online from the 28th of July.

SPEAKER_00 46:56

So you and I have one thing in common that I know of. Uh I'm gonna let you guess what it is.

SPEAKER_03 47:03

We've uh both had a life in financial services. You have I had. Is that it?

SPEAKER_00 47:08

I guess we have two things in common. The second one is we both read our own parable. You read your story, I read mine, and that's a challenge in itself to be able to sit there and read for two and a half hours flawlessly, so that the audience could listen and be inspired to our books. So I love listening to you. You did a really great job reading it. And my book, uh The Auctioneer's Apprentice, is out in Audible as well. It's a nice little parable because I'm a charity auctioneer helping raise money for nonprofits in the United States.

SPEAKER_03 47:42

I didn't know that, Chad. I will go check that out, man.

SPEAKER_00 47:45

Very cool. And in the in the space we're in, as we wrap up, Jason, what's the best way for people to reach you?

SPEAKER_03 47:53

I think you are going to add probably my website.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

I'm going to add the website and the in the show notes that that the links you sent me.

SPEAKER_03 48:01

Yeah. The other is you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me. I'm re uh as I said to you, I'm old, so I'm 62. So I use Facebook a lot, and I have lots of friends and followers on Facebook. So reach out to me on Facebook, but all my other details are on my website. And I the thing I love is helping people. So if if you want to have a call, you know, you want to sort of run something by me or whatever, you know, look, I do it for free. I just love helping people.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Jason, you're you're definitely a blessing. And a co-financial group, like your financial service firm, right? I have what they call the abundant life roadmap. It takes people down a path, it aligns their values and goals to help them reach retirement and stay comfortably retired. And I do that, and I love to talk to people and help people. One of my niches was unemployed executives, because if we don't talk to them, very few people do. I used to make the connections, I still do, I make the connections. I do whatever somebody needs or wants because I had so many people in my life help me, coach me, and mentor me that I, like you, I think, just want to be able to give back and help other people have the best life they could have, the greatest life that they could have. And many people don't even know how great it could be. So it's for you and I to help inspire people to do that.

SPEAKER_01 49:24

Absolutely, Mike. Absolutely. Good for you.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed today's conversation. Reach out to Jason. He's on Facebook, LinkedIn, and all over the other social media platforms. Thank you again so much for being here from Australia.

SPEAKER_03 49:40

My absolute pleasure. Go to the Aussies tomorrow.