How Brain Health Coaching Can Transform Your Clients and Your Business with Ryan Glatt

Transcription

Hey guys, happy Friday. Yuri here with you. Hope your day is going great. Today we’ve got another great guest, his name is Ryan Glatt, and he has a really interesting take on coaching, and it’s all about brain health, pretty cool stuff. So without any further ado, we’ll get into the interview in just a sec. I want to give you a bit of background as to who he is, so a bit of context. Ryan develops curriculum for the health and fitness industry on health neuroscience, and coaches individuals towards optimal brain health

He has completed programs from the Amen Clinics, the Neuro Coaching Institute, the Neuroscience Academy, and many, many others. Really furthering his mastery of the topics of brain health, sleep, and mindfulness. And what we’re going to talk about in this episode are two things.

Number one, why his approach, and I’ll talk about this in the interview, why his approach to what he’s doing. He’s very, very smart from a positioning standpoint in the marketplace, but also for you as a health coach or a health provider, how furthering your skillset, adding things to your toolbox, like what Ryan teaches can be a very, very big value add for your clients.

So without any further ado, let’s welcome Ryan Glatt to the show. Ryan, what’s up? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going?

Ryan Glatt:                          It’s great, man. Thanks for having me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And you are welcome. It’s good to have you here. Always good to connect with some new peeps in our space, doing some awesome stuff. You have a very interesting and unique approach to helping people. You have a great brain health coaching program that you work with a lot of different professionals through.  I’m very interested because from what I saw, I didn’t really get a perspective about how you got into this because I think a lot of people in our space get what they do because of their own challenges or someone close to them that was suffering with something. What was your pivotal moment that made you go down this route of really mastering brain health?

 

His inspirations, journey, and mission

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t think it was a pivotal moment. I think for the sake of stories, there should be this pivotal moment, but for me I feel it was really about this kind of consequentially building event towards moving towards this and more of an avalanche. So, things just built up and I was just seeing more information that convinced me more and more to go this route with brain health, and I didn’t really start out interested in brain health, although I did start studying animal behavior. I was trying to study animal behavior to learn how to train and manage exotic animals before I was a fitness professional.

I don’t want to go too deep into it, but it was basically a training animals for movies and TV was my life dream and then I didn’t get into my dream program.

I had recently lost a bunch of weight, became a personal trainer about 10 years ago. I was figuring out I was not very good at the weight loss and muscle gain crowd, but I was very logical and very investigative and so this whole pain management and helping people figure out why they were in pain type of thing really became my calling. And that kind of transformed it to physical therapy several years later. I got multiple certifications in biomechanics, corrective exercise, soft tissue therapy.

Physical therapy school did not work out for me. I had a visa issue. I am going to school in Scotland. It’s kind of a long story, but I ended up being put in jail for seven days and deported back to LA. It was kind of weird. So, that wasn’t for me, but I figured out a way to get a license to touch in the state of California. I took the Anatomy Trains Bodywork seminars from Tom Myers and became what’s called an anatomy trains instructor, which is a fancy way of saying I am a soft tissue therapist.

I got my license to touch and I was doing what a PT might do. And I was not diagnosing people but working with a lot of people with pain successfully. And there were several instances where neuroscience kind of came across. One of which was starting with the animal behavior type of content, which is all psychology and behavior change. Learning about Skinner’s pigeons and Pavlov’s dogs and learning how the brain relates to behavior change. All that was super fascinating to me. And then how behavior change relates to what we do with our clients every day. Whether you’re trying to show them a drill or a stretch or you want them to do later on or you’re trying to get them to adhere to a whole new diet. All of that has to be with behavior change and that includes the brain.

And then there’s this huge movement in the pain neuroscience crowd now where we’re learning and the neuroscience of pain, knowing that it’s not all physical, which is super important for our profession. And that introduced me to a lot of neuroscience, and then just in my PT internship experiential realm, working with people with concussion and cerebral palsy and these neurological conditions that really got me interested.

I think one of the biggest things that stood out to me is for about two years I was in a dark room from almost 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM just doing soft tissue and corrective exercise sessions with people. And I would just notice that these individuals were stressed out. They really weren’t paying attention to what I was saying, not because they were not interested, not because they didn’t have a problem, they just didn’t seem to have the attentional capacity. But what I really remember, what I would show them. And I started to think these are pretty basic cognitive processes that these people are really struggling with. I wonder why. And if I figured out why, I wonder if I can help them with the tools that a manual therapist, personal trainer and health coach has.

I’m working with sleep nutrition, health behaviors movements and the nervous system. And I wonder what I can do to help that individual. And so, it was kind of these cumulative experiences that really said, okay, I want to know more about the brain because if I know more about the brain, I’m gonna empower myself to change the brain of my client and I’m sure I’m doing that already, but I want to know more.

And so, I started to pursue a bunch of different certifications and really just started with exercise interventions and looking up the research on that and looking at the effects of exercise on the brain because they were so myopic in terms of periodization and how to create this workout for this outcome. Then I was wondering, well, that’s all physically based. I wonder what we could do if we look at different modalities of exercise in different ways we could tweak those variables to actually understand how to make different changes in the brain because different people with depression or anxiety, those have different patterns of the brain. I wonder if we could take things like exercise and different modalities, understanding what they do to the brain or understanding what they do with neurotransmitters and really put two and two together.

That really became a constant research question for me for two years. I pursued different certifications and why I really enjoyed learning what was out there and getting a nice base of knowledge, I’m still not satisfied by my quest for knowledge. And so it’s kind of been self directed. I’m going to be pursuing a master’s degree in neuroscience in October, but really my education and my drive has been kind of self directed with the help of mentors and other people who are also interested in brain health and neuroscience. But really just diving into research and seeing can we solve a problem with science? And if science backs up the tools that I use and the strategies that I use that health professional, who can we help with that?

The type of population I typically work with now are individuals with dementia. People who are afraid of getting dementia, people who have said, oh, I don’t have dementia, but I feel my memory’s slipping. That’s what we call subjective cognitive decline. People with stroke, people with post concussive syndrome or a sustained concussion or a traumatic brain injury. These are all populations that I really feel confident in working with and I have been able to help just with the tools and resources I have as a health professional.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. So, I love this. You’re committed to mastering this universe of the brain, which is arguably bigger than the universe, right?

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah.

 

Ryan’s business model and how its structure evolved

Yuri Elkaim:                         Pretty amazing. And we know so little even though we know so much about it. Give us a sense of what your business model looks like now because you started off working with clients as a more of a trainer and a lot of kind of manual therapy, physical touch. How did you go from there to what you’re doing now? What is now look like for you? Because I want to give our listeners a bit of perspective because we do have know massage therapists, manual therapists, physical therapists listening to this who sometimes feel that they’re limited to clinical work because it’s one on one manual touch. How have you been able to take your expertise and bring that online?

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah, it’s interesting because I didn’t really think I go back to something more of an exercise intervention or a movement intervention. I thought I was really specializing towards the manual, and we see a lot of this when massage therapists are also personal trainers and they’re trying to provide this comprehensive service and they’re also health coaches or any combination thereof. And I think what’s interesting is that we’re at an age where we can do that. And what was inspiring for me is to be able to say, well, you know what? I’m going to get the out of manual therapy and start doing movement again. But also get a certification in behavior change and health coaching, and be able to do that process as well. Because my whole idea was to create a business model in which I had coaches certified under my method, but I was also having a coach who practice for individuals struggling with anxiety, depression, post concussive syndrome.

And these were people that were usually referred by a mental health professional. So I wasn’t overstepping my boundaries, they thought that exercise or health interventions would be good for them. We may have very specific to their, their use case. And so I was getting a good referral network from psychologists, but there was something about the coaching business. Well, I don’t know if it was my personality, I’ve just never been good at sustaining the one on one practice, like really, really, really well.

The first business model was create some sort of an education or certification and then have coaches under me, but first establish a strong coaching practice and I had quite a few clients. I wouldn’t say it was the easiest practice, but it was definitely a productive one, a lucrative one. And I felt like I was making a significant impact. I just wish there was a better curriculum out there that would have prepared me, but I’m either helping them to other people do that or creating that curriculum right now.

And where my business ended up shifting is I started prospecting different clients for consulting. So I found a technology company called Smart Fit or rather they found me through my Instagram, which was very surprising and said, “Hey, we have a technology that can train brain and body at the same time.” Which was my area of research and still is, which is combining cognitive and physical challenges together for an enhanced effect which is more effective for your brain that doing either of them alone. And so basically they, they found me on Instagram putting all these posts out because I was trying to educate people about this concept and flash forward a few months and I’ve been consulting with them.

It’s my first ever consulting contract, a legitimate consulting contract. And so I was making significant income from that for a while. And then I was really hoping to find a way to start a brain health gym, like a way to have a valid fashion of assessing individuals and their brain function, gathering their goals. These are typically people, they’ve been all over the place. Nobody can help them and using exercise, sleep coaching and nutrition coaching specific to their goals to really help them neurologically. And it was a struggle to do this. I was collecting a lot of equipment I would need, but I was very hesitant to open a gym on my own.

Sure enough, one of my mentors who’s a neuroscientist at UC San Diego and studies combined cognitive physical training for individuals with schizophrenia and dementia and mild cognitive impairment ended up being hired as the director in Santa Monica for a place called the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, which had quite a significant amount of money to create what’s called a brain health center, which is exactly the center of that I was describing in my vision.

And so whether it was manifestation or good luck or I have no freaking idea, but now I’m working for them full time while consulting. I went from this very a weird phase where I’m like trying to make this reality in which brain health coaching and using exercise for brain health was a reality in a valid one, not just one that people like, oh, that’s cool. That’s kid, this kid is passionate, but it’s not really valid. It’s kind of a one off concept. I really wanted it to be something that was accepted and valid and progressing. And now I’m at a point where I have this consulting position. I’m starting this position that at this brain health clinic next week and I’m projected to make my first six figures, which is tremendous for being able to … Being in this model, doing what I love. I wasn’t really attached to what it looked like and it’s this kind of process of constantly reiterate, constantly prototyping your career.

And I think people are really attached to the models that other others pitch to them. And I was, I was attached to a coaching model or the way people have launched a course before, but eventually I just had this mentality of, well, let’s see what works. Let’s see what doesn’t. And I just ended up in this position and I’m not stopping there. I’m creating a certification with the Functional Aging Institute to certify personal trainers who are interested or already working with older adults to use exercise and present all the research on what different modalities of exercise do the brain aging and how to really program to prevent or slow cognitive decline or dementia. And so those are kind of my three things is his consulting, working in this brain health center and creating education so other people can do it. It’s just now coming to fruition after a couple of years.

 

The strategies Ryan teaches for brain health

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Good for you man. So when we talk about an exercise program for someone to lose weight versus an exercise program for somebody with cognitive decline, what does that look like? Like what is the actual … Is there, what types of exercises? Can you give a couple examples of exercises or differences between the two and what that might look like? So our listeners have a better sense of visually of what that might represent.

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah, I’m happy to do that. So let’s say we have an individual that’s 60 years old that say, “Oh man, I’m starting to lose my memory. I don’t have dementia, but my parents had dementia and all of a sudden I’m very frightened. They’re already working out, but they feel like they’re still declining. What is going on? How can I help my brain?” And so what you can do, as a fitness professional is understand, and I’m trying to make this easy for people by creating these courses and putting content out there. But understand what the science says about different modalities. So what do we have at our disposal? We have strength training, we have resistance training, we have a robotic training, we have motor and coordinated training, things that require coordination and learning a new skill or new movement. We have stretching and mobility. We even have graphed work. We can facilitate mindfulness for people if you have that education.

These are all the things that we have at our disposal as modalities. And then we can also prescribe or suggest physical activities like swimming, hiking, martial arts, dance, all of these things. You can either get certified in, refer to you or have people go to do somewhere else, and if you take the role of authority as a health coach and really start to identify, which each of those mechanisms, and those modalities do to the brain, which I’ve been studying, and I’m happy to help any of you or any of your listeners figure that out after the show. But basically each of them have a different effect. Whether it’s on the effect of on the neurotransmitter level. Some release more dopamine. Some release more serotonin and some release more acetylcholine in response to novelty, which accelerates Corticol plasticity of the brain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So there’s all these different neurotransmitters that are kind of themed per each modality. Then there’s different parts of the brain that are activated during these modalities. And over time there’s adaptations just like muscle tissue that occurs to the brain tissue from these adaptations and from these modalities. And so there’s also a change in brain function. How fast the neurons fire, which neurons are firing. How many neurons are there? Do we create new neurons? And then there’s a usually a change on a cognition, which is your ability to interact with the day to day, so your abilities to memorize, to plan, to think, to organize. Those are all of your cognitive functions and so exercise has an effect on a variety of these structures and functions of neurotransmitters. And we just want to understand, which each one uniquely does. What effects does it have just like we understand physically.

And so once you understand that, you can kind of organize a program saying, okay, I want you to do resistance training at this intensity, but this specific type of resistance training where you’re learning novel movements not going in the machines, and you’re doing more functional movements three times a week. And then I want you to do 60 to 75 percent of your aerobic capacity by running twice a week. Or I want you to go hiking twice a week. Or I want you to pick one activity like dance that you’ve never done before once or two times a week. We start helping them program, what activities they’re doing throughout the week as well as when they’re in the session. If you are facilitating movement for that individual let’s work on novel movements or let’s do some sport like movements that combine reaction time and hand eye coordination and all those cognify or enhance through cognitive stimulus.

These exercises we’re already doing with them, but giving them also a cognitive benefit, a brain benefit during the personal training session as well. And that ends up being super engaging and let’s start with mobility and breath work and the end with mindfulness. Those are our wide variety of the strategies we employ as brain friendly health professionals and personal trainers to be able to deliver that. And the reason that’s important is because most of these individuals will find, okay, what’s the best modality for brain health? Okay, I’m going to do aerobic exercise and that’s all they do.

But the reality is there’s an individualization requirement for a lot of this because everyone has a different brain. At the same time there’s also this requirement to have variability because there’s an aspect of novelty, that the brain really loves and when we have that same routine for 10 years, the brain has kind of gone to this automatic processing and really what we want is to bring it back to the critical processes that are used to processing new information, novel information, always adapting. And so we hear all the time these mnemonics of, “Oh learning something new. It is great for the brain.”

Well, where does that reflect in our exercise regimens typically. It typically does not. It’s typically something that is focused on a physical outcome, but if people have a brain pain point, which everybody does. We’re not just … We’re not prepared to cater to that yet because of a lack of education. But on a high level, that’s what a brain health program might look like. We’re making all those considerations, and we haven’t even talked about the sleep considerations. We haven’t even talked about the nutritional considerations. There is now an emerging field of nutrition called nutritional psychiatry where there are protocols for individuals with dementia, anxiety, depression.We need to learn those and employ those strategies

In addition, if you don’t know the how to coach sleep, not just knowing that eight hours of sleep is beneficial. It’s like telling someone vegetables are good for you, congratulations. But we need to know how to coach sleep. How do identify an individual circadian rhythm, how to coach their individual circadian rhythm so that they can have optimal brain health.

All of those things are critical, but I don’t mean to be overbearing to the professional. However, these tools are there. They exist. The information is there and what I’m trying to do is make it accessible and comprehensive for individuals, but the information is out there. You just need to be reminded on, okay, I care about this problem. Whatever the problem is, it could be mental health, it could be cognitive decline. It can be a very underserved population like a post rehabilitative stroke or concussion. And serving that population and using the tools you already have, not overstepping your scope or even expanding your scope by seeking out more education to serve those populations, which would be entrepreneurial, solving a problem in huge populations that no one’s really solving a problem for.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s pretty awesome. And it’s exciting that you are teaming up with Dan and Cody from the Functional Aging Institute because one of the most inspiring videos that I’ve seen is one of the videos that they have on their website of 85 year old women throwing kettle bells around, doing the ropes. And I’m like, that is what’s possible. I think when that’s combined with what you’re talking about, it’s amazing of what we can do as humans and not fall into these limiting beliefs of life after 60 or 70 has to go down. So it’s just really cool to be able to expand horizons, and really bring this, these ideas, the information, but also maybe a new mindset about what’s possible as we get older, which is pretty amazing.

Ryan Glatt:                          Absolutely. And part of that mindset is people think that they didn’t think that we could slow physical decline. Dan and Cody are doing an excellent job of bursting those myths and they still have a lot of work to do. But we also used to think that the brain couldn’t change, but fast forward several decades and now we know neuroplasticity is this very proven concept. And so the idea is with these older adults or just individuals in general or with us, how can we maximize neuro-plastic change for brain health while they are with us?

And we can do that through exercise, but while they’re in this physiological state, we have the sensitive window where we can also add cognitive stimulus. Whether you’re getting them to pay attention to a piece of stimuli very intensively or you’re giving them a novel movement or I’m treating these older adults like athletes and giving them an eye exercises and having them react to things. And what if that individual that was swinging a Kettlebell that you saw in the video was also using both their hands to alternatively catch tennis balls while standing on one leg and their hand eye coordination is like a teenager. That is possible, but we’re not … we’re treating people as if they were fragile.

Two, we’re not taking the opportunity to maximize this window that we have with people to not just maximize their bodily health but their cognitive health.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. It’s actually a lot of fun because I do this. I do quite a bit of this stuff with my kids who are four, five and seven because I have a background in soccer and I was a goalie. So, a lot of hand eye coordination type of exercises. A sort of like reaction time. So we do fun things like we’ll have a tennis ball with different numbers on it and I’ll throw it at them. I’m like, “Hey, tell me what number you see as it comes into your hand.” And doing all sorts of cool things. But it’d be fun to do that with someone who’s in their seventies or eighties because-

Ryan Glatt:                          And we can do that in the gym. And the power of that year is I don’t think we’ll assess you on the podcast, but it would be great to assess you and say, “Hey, Yuri the areas of cognition that you’re really struggling with? Is it attention? Is it memory? Is it processing speed and give you soccer like drills that you implement, while your heart rate is up later in the gym that you can replicate on your own or with a partner that can help to maximize or improve those areas of cognition. And if you’re like, Ryan, my issue is a working memory and I can’t memorize the tasks that I was working on or this person I was supposed to reach out to. Or the names and that’s affecting my business. I can say, “Yuri, you’re already working out. Just do these drills while you’re working out. Do it for two to three weeks.”

And if you see a significant difference, that’s fine and that’s not for aging, that’s not for concussion, that’s for Yuri. Maximizing his abilities and his potential and not really though in a scientific way. Through modality, you’re already engaging in what you already love. And as you’re with your kids, this ends up being playful and fun and that’s a mentality and an experience that I think people are missing from the gym nowadays and missing from exercise altogether. So I think we can really bring some light literally to this this industry by making this concept happened.

 

Marketing yourself within your niche, creating good habits, and stress

Yuri Elkaim:                         So I want to shift the focus to a business application for this in two ways. Number one, for everyone listening. What I get excited about when Ryan’s talking about this is number one, the fact that this is so novel to the way that most people coach others with their health becomes very attractive to potential clients, to want to engage in this.

Ryan Glatt:                          Absolutely.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And that’s really important. If you’re selling a product, how is this product different from another one? This type of protocol, when you can introduce this to somebody they have not this before, they have not engaged in this before. That gives them, I think a huge sense of hope and optimism for better results, which I think is a health coach or a practitioner of any form. Having this type of skillsets, in your arsenal becomes a huge value add or value proposition to your potential clients or existing clients.

Second thing I want to ask you, Ryan, is we talked about novelty in neuroplasticity. For instance, me learning to throw with my left hand instead of my right hand doing things that we’re uncomfortable. Doing and developing those new neural pathways. How do we as entrepreneurs, because we’re so indoctrinated in the development of habits. Morning routine or get into specific habits because your life becomes a reflection of your habits, blah, blah, blah. How do we balance the seeming importance of habits with the importance of adding new things that we’re not used to doing, doing things almost completely the opposite of our habits to continually grow those neural pathways and helping us grow mentally.

Ryan Glatt:                          That’s a great question. So I’ll start with the first one, which I don’t know if the first one was a question but just to speak on the marketability of this. I would just say to add to that, to my journey, what I found to be most successful is find other professionals, organizations, people who understand what you’re talking about, are aligned in that mission. Mental health professionals, doctors, other trainers that would help to refer people to you for this type of outcome. And then be able to really market yourself in that niche. And if individuals might come to you and say, “Well, you’re a trainer, what do you know about the brain?” Just start that conversation by adding value, sending them education, Hey, here’s what exercise does the brain, I have tons of resources on my website you can send.

I’ve had a lot of trouble kind of differentiate myself between the physical guy and the  brain guy. And sometimes you do have to pick one, but being able to almost preach to your audience, to your niche about the unique value of this has been, has been really beneficial. And if it’s troublesome, you will find your, your niche. Maybe it’s a group, it’s a community of people in your local area. Parents and kids that struggle with autism or concussion or dementia. I mean, you got to really find your niche, but once you do it is extremely profitable in a very impactful and ratifying way to work with your practice and maybe even change your practice completely.So that’s what I would say for that.

For the second piece there Yuri, I’m talking about habits. I would assume that question is changing habits if that was beneficial for the brain. Is that right?

Yuri Elkaim:                        Yeah, I’m not too sure if it can go both ways, I guess like … we know we want to be developing the right habits, but at the same time do we want to get so stuck on our habits that we no longer allow flexibility for new learning. It’s like new formations to be happening in our brain.

Ryan Glatt:                          Well, it’s almost as if the trend I’m seeing now is not don’t just create good habits, but here’s a book on 100 habits that make you successful. That’s information overload and that’s not really a good way to go about it. I think everyone’s really obsessed with what are the habits, but habits take time. It takes energy, it takes glucose, it takes attentional resources and it’s stressful. I would say the first thing for entrepreneurs, and I think this very much applies to me too, is regulate the autonomic nervous system. Figure out how to manage your stress response and sometimes the stress load, the amount of load that you’re taking on that causes stress is not relative or below your stress capacity. And even if it’s just a little bit, people are doing above their capacity for stress and whether you’re excited or whether you’re saying it’s for money or whether you’re driven, it doesn’t matter.

Your nervous system doesn’t care. What your nervous system cares about is what is your stress capacity and your stress load. And the reason I mentioned that is because if you’re stressed out and your autonomic nervous system is up regulated and you’re going beyond your stress capacity, your cognitive processes. So your learning abilities or abilities to create new habits, take in new information, be flexible, regulate your emotions. All of these things that are critical to entrepreneurs will not be effective. And this is why people who are stressed out usually have explosions of behavior that are not desired or they fail in business or they have anxiety attacks. Like if you listen to it, Craig Valentine Story. And all of these things are our Palette. And if you look at some of the biggest mistakes in business, I can’t remember, I think it’s Exon making an oil deal and it was the worst decision ever.

All of those people were sleep deprived. And so their decision making abilities were impaired or your ability to control your impulses. Or not listen to your gut feeling. All of those cognitive and embody cognitive processes will be limited if you are stressed. And I’m not saying don’t be stressed, eat your vegetables. I’m just saying, take an honest look at what your stressful inputs are, and write them down and rate them on a scale of one to 10. 10 being the most stressful, one being the least stressful. And look at your relaxing or your parasympathetic inputs and rank those on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the most relaxing, one being the least relaxing. And see where your score is.

If your parasympathetic score is not double the sympathetic score, the stress load inputs, you are not succeeding at balancing your stress load. And that is the reality. You either need to cut down your stress load where you need to add more ways of decompressing and giving yourself a way to get out of that entrepreneurial mindset. And as you do that you will be more creative, experience better cognitive processing. All the things that you want to have done by trying to incorporate these habits, you will be getting done.

And so I think when it comes to habit development, we have to ask what position or what benefit does that habit serve? How’s does that habit serve us? And sometimes you’re better off eliminating habits or not having those habits at all. Or just saying what’s the one habit that will allow me to manage my stress loads. If it’s having a morning routine where I’m planning my day so I don’t get stressed out because I have ADHD, like tendencies and then making sure I work out later in the day so that I get all of those associated cognitive, physical benefits.

Let’s just stay at that and why does there need to be more? Why does there need to be more? If you have a structure around your day that allows you to be productive, great. Do I need to throw in the cold shower and throw in the gratitude journal and throw it? Yeah, I know all those things are beneficial, but if it causes me more stress to manage that, manage that, what am I doing? And I feel that’s the position we’re in nowadays. It’s more and more and more and more and more if we’re not in the information overload of her actual job or actual work. We’re looking to information overload ourselves in terms of self development and it’s not always effective and so that’s what I would suggest for individuals.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh, that’s good. It’s the 20 pardon morning routine, right? It’s just too much.

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So let me ask you this one final question then we’ll jump into the rapid five. Social media, smartphones, lack of attention in adults, as well as an adolescence. Is this a real problem and obviously these, these platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or kind of built trip out our dopamine response and so forth. But is this a real issue for entrepreneurs to worry about in terms of their maybe receiving attention because of these types of platforms and the amount of time we’re spending on them. And if so, what’s one simple way we can start to kind of work against that and become more focused in what we do and how we live?

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah. It’s a great question and I think the answer is yes. It’s also a continuity of that stress load versus stress capacity and so every time you switch from task to task. I switched from the computer when I’m working on a business related task to my Instagram and my email. I’m switching back and forth. You are wasting attentional resources which are finite. You don’t have an infinite amount of those and you are increasing the amount of time it takes to refocus back on that past. So you are in effect being more or less productive rather, and it does have a negative effect on brain function and structure and we live in this distracted world.

Adam Gazaley is a neuroscientist who wrote a book called The Distracted Mind all about this concept. And all the general self care tactics like getting nature, exercise, sleep, eat well, all held with remediated that, but it doesn’t get to the core of the problem, which is I have an issue with switching from task to task. And my phone was a big part of that. I noticed these individuals, entrepreneurs that have a high stress load, will be up regulated. And when you’re up regulated, observe your own I-behavior and how you feel. Your heart rate’s up, your eyes are darting back and forth. So it’s almost perpetuating this. Jump on my call, jumped back and this misbehavior that seems like you’re like a squirrel basically.

I think the first thing you have to do is regulate that nervous system response. Recognize that what you’re doing with your task, switching behavior is not serving you. And then do something environmentally with your phone, whether it’s putting it on airplane mode and putting it somewhere else for an hour, scheduling that. The whole thing of putting it in a drawer or something hasn’t really worked for me, but putting it on airplane mode and keeping it face down is effective for me.

And then just single tasking. If I have multiple tabs, open drag on tabs. So it’s a single tab. So I’m focusing on one task, go by checklists. All those things have really helped me because I’m a guy who struggles with that stuff whether I studied the brain or not. And so I would say in addition to that, entrepreneurs seem to attach their value to their image, to the amount of emails that check. And so there is a justification going on psychologically of this is my relationship to my phone, social media and email on a mobile device. And so when I convinced myself as an entrepreneur that my value is there and I’m going to continue to check it rapidly or obsessively. And anytime I tried to convince myself out of it, I say, “Well, I got to do this for work and I got to have value.”

But ask yourself, how much money do you really get from doing that? And usually not very much. And so be a good entrepreneur and invest in the things that bring you income. If Instagram arguably can or does bring you income, then say, all right, well how much time do I need to invest into Instagram to get that? What’s the minimum amount of time? And so now you start to use the part of your brain that is driven by your motivations to out convince obsessive behavior, but we really do need to change our relationship to our phones.

And there’s some good companies out there helping with that one’s called Brick, B-R-I-C-K. They’re creating an app to kind of give you points and reward you for the amount of time you’re not on your phone. And then giving a different strategies to reform your relationship to your phone. All that is crucial even for me because some of these processes have become automatic.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Good stuff. We’re going to shift into the rapid five, in just a second, but what is the best place for our listeners to follow you online?

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah. So you can follow me on Instagram. Follow me obsessively and follow me every second of the day. That’s really good for your brain. You can follow me at glatt.somatiq is G-L-A-T-T.S-O-M-A-T-I-Q. Or you could go to Somatiq S-O-M-A-T-I-Q.C-O. So Somatiq.Co. So Somatiq.Co. Somatiq.co, Somatiq with a Q not a C. IQ was cleverly placed in there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I like that.

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah. So you can go there. I have a free training on how to combine brain health and cognitive health with exercise and what you do as a health coach. There’s a free three part training on there. I do this really popular weekly email called brain bullets where I summarize all the research on health and the brain and I send it. I summarize it to you in three bullet points and send it out every week.

That’s really, really popular. And that we’ll also be announcing to our email list that, that new course that we’re launching with FAI, Dan and Cody when that comes out. So those are my main mediums there. Yeah. So happy to help anyone that wants to reach out directly. Because I get a lot of great messages like, “Hey, I’ve struggled with depression. I’m a personal trainer. I’ve really thought about working with mental health professionals. Thank you for talking about this.” So I know people are out there that have thought about this concept and are looking for mentorship and I’m happy to help anyone.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. I will be sure to link up to all that in the show notes for you guys. So, Ryan, are you ready for the rapid five?

Ryan Glatt:                          It sounds dangerous.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It is. It is very dangerous, but honestly it’s whatever comes top of mind. First answer is probably the best one. Exactly. Alright. So here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Ryan Glatt:                          My biggest weakness would be ego, and the need to always be right. And seem smart.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Ryan Glatt:                          My biggest strength is my ability to connect ideas and back it up with passion and be motivated by passion drive.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to run your business?

Ryan Glatt:                          I create what I have.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I’m sorry. So, those that you have developed.

Ryan Glatt:                          Okay.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Ryan Glatt:                          I would say that’s a great one then. I would say the one skill that I developed to be dangerously good at my business is learning how to rapidly monetize it information.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice. That’s a good one. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Ryan Glatt:                          The first thing I do in my morning is I write down what I have to do for the day and review it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. And finally, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when …

Ryan Glatt:                          I wake up with a big smile on my face. No, I mean, I am making a huge impact in the lives of others.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Love it, Ryan Glatt. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. This has been a lot of fun.

Ryan Glatt:                          Yeah Yuri. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.

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Yuri’s Take

So one of the things that I really want to highlight from this episode is the fact that when you’re entering into a marketplace … I’ve talked about this before. There’s really no competition, you are unique, your messages, you’re the messenger assuring your authentic voice matters. Really providing and focusing your marketing and everything you do and produce results for your clients. That’s really how you separate yourself. But what’s cool about what Ryan’s done is that if, let’s just look at the example of ensuring that our clients resUlts is our number one priority.

If you’re working with clients in a capacity where they might be served by adding in some type of neuro brain training, then really furthering your skillset, adding things to your toolbox that you can then deploy with your clients can really be a smart move in some cases.

Now I have no affiliation with Ryan’s program and I don’t get a commission or anything like that. But when I went to see opportunities like this, I think it’s interesting to be able to look at complimentary skillsets that you can develop in and really helped your clients to a great level. So, there’s no shortage of certifications in the health and fitness space. It seems like health and fitness experts are on drugs and the drugs being certifications. I think that’s a good thing in some cases because it shows that as an industrY, we are very growth oriented, which is great and we want to better serve our clients. We want to better improve ourselves and I think that’s awesome. So whatever you can do that’s going to really help your clients all the power to you. That’s the one thing I really want to kind of leave you with here.

The second thing is how from a positioning standpoint, as we talked about, I said, listen, like Ryan, what he is developing is very unique. There’s no shortage of health coaches, right? There’s no shortage of health coaches coming out of the Institute of Integrative Nutrition or anywhere else and a lot of them are saying the same things. And yes, you’ll be able to resonate with different people, but when … and I had a lady asked me about this on Instagram the other day, and by the way, if not following me on Instagram, what are you doing? [inaudible 00:43:42]. That’s where I’m at. So anyway, she was asking me, she asked, does it make sense to narrow down and focus on one perfect client when you can serve a whole bunch of different demographics?

And I said, well, it depends if you want to succeed or fail in business. So if you want to succeed in business, I would strongly recommend you narrow down and focus on one niche or niche, Harvard said. Because what that means is when people think of you, they’re going to think of, oh, so and so. You’re gonna occupy it a shelf or a drawer in someone’s mental closet and their mental cabinetry. And you want them to think about when they think about brain health, they think about Ryan Glatt for instance. When you think about X, Y, Z. When they think about whoever it is you want to be known for, that’s what you want them to think about.

So for me, for Healthpreneur, when you know a health or fitness expert is, if they’re thinking, how do I build my coaching program? How do I build out a coaching business? Their number one thought is Healthpreneur. That’s the embedding type of marketing we want people to have. We want them to know us for one thing, and I’ve made a very, very clear, distinction the past couple of year to move away from a lot of the stuff we were doing before and now it’s just this. That’s it. If he wants to grow a coaching business, a successful coaching business, we are your best stop assuming you’re health and fitness expert to do so and in a great profitable and predictable manner without one on one coaching.

So for you, what is the one thing you want to be known for in your marketplace?

And if you can build your business around that, you’ll have a lot more success and don’t worry, you’re going to alienate a lot of people. It’s all good, but there’s also a lot of people who are going to resonate more with specificity.

So if you need help with this and you haven’t yet gone through our seven figure health business blueprint training, what are you waiting for? Do it today.

Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

Go through the free training. It’s a 70 minute training. I guarantee that it’ll be some of the best time you spent on your business.

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