– Welcome everybody to Building My Legacy Podcast today. Today I have with me Sid Garza-Hillman. He is a writer, a podcaster, a speaker and a health coach. He has a Small Steps philosophy and we’re gonna talk about that because it’s very interesting. He is the author of Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto. Also he’s written Raising Healthy Parents: Small Steps, Less Stress, and a Thriving Family. I think a lot of people wanna know what that’s all about.

– Yeah.

– And then most recently he has a book that is just coming out, has come out called The Six Truths: Live by these truths and be happy. Don’t, and you won’t. So it’s a simple concept.

– That’s right.

– So Sid, share with the audience please, how you got to doing what you’re doing and what it is that makes you passionate.

– Great, well first, thanks for having me on your show. I really appreciate it and I love talking about this stuff and the work you’re doing is fantastic. So it’s a culturally a good match. My nutshell Trek, I was a philosophy major at UCLA, graduated in ’91, and I always joke that it prepared me very well for what I was trying to do, which was to be an Indie Rock musician. And so there I was playing music and fell into some acting, but I read a book in 1992 that suggested a correlation between a certain diet Terry change and asthma. And I had been a lifetime asthmatic. So I made that change and my asthma went away for the first time in 22 years. And that began, even though I was doing, like I said, music and acting and things like that. Completely just passionate Trek into reading book after book on health and stress and nutrition. And cut two years later, my wife and I, and we had our first child at the time, we have twins an addition to that now talk about stress. And I went back to school and became a certified nutritionist. Then the frustration was almost immediate with giving people my recommendations and finding that they weren’t keeping with them longterm. And so I thought, well, that’s a nut to crack here. And so that’s when I began, that was inspiration for my first book, Approaching the Natural and began my really honing and formulating my particular Small Steps Approach to long-term habit change to stress management and to incorporating and earning long-term healthy behaviors. And so that’s where I am today. And I am super passionate because people are using my approach in all areas, including management, leadership, productivity, but also in the health and wellness arena as well. So it’s been quite wide ranging and really, really fun to partake in.

– Okay, so before we go too much further, I’m dying of curiosity. What was the dietary change that you made that eliminated asthma for you?

– I gave up dairy.

– You gave up dairy, interesting.

– Yeah, and my dad at 72 years old said, do you think I could be lifelong asthmatic, right? There you go. And he said, do you think I can make that change? I said, I’ll give it a shot. And so he gave up dairy and after 35 years of medication stopped medication for asthma. And it’s very well-documented and variable research and not forever necessarily everybody, but there is a definite causal effect between dairy and anything in inflammatory in my case, it was expressed an asthma, but it can be any number of things for people. And so that was it. And I wasn’t even a healthy eater per se, but I did give up that one thing that was obviously an allergy that was triggering asthma in me. And it was almost instantaneous within a month I was gone and I know no inhalers, no medication ever since. And that was pretty cool, but it made me think, well, wait a second, that’s kind of amazing. And so then I started reading and reading and reading.

– Okay, so since that time you are now working with the Mendocino, you do a 50K race. You do ultra marathons, you are at the Stanford Inn Resort, helping them look at health and nutrition and exercise. Tell us a little bit about that and what brought you to working with that?

– Well, when my wife and I got out of Los Angeles, which was almost like an escape at the time, I love Los Angeles, but by the time we left, we were done. And we moved up to this old town Mendocino on the Northern California coast. And with not a huge plan in place in retrospect, we probably should have been a little more responsible there but we had to get out of LA. And then we got up, here we go. What do we do now? Anyway, there was an eco resort called the Stanford Inn Resort and I thought, well, that’s kind of interesting and fell in line. It’s a resort, but there’s some healthy elements to it, a wellness center, things like that. So I started working there at about 15 years ago, and I still am the wellness programs director there. But since then, I direct my own ultra marathon, as you said, the Mendocino Coast 50K. But yeah, so I run the wellness center there and teach nutrition and cooking classes at the resort and just coordinate retreats and things like that for people who are interested in taking it. And so that’s been really a great addition, everything else I’m doing with client work. And then I’ve got that base and home as I like to think of it at the Stanford Inn Resort. And so I’m pretty happy guy right now.

– What’s your biggest learning from working at the resort with people and their health?

– I think that it all comes back to my Small Steps Approach, which is that people wanna change if they come to me or they come to a class that it’s because they’re looking for sometimes for pure education, but in theory, or most cases, they wanna live better. They want to feel better. But what happens is, is because of that excitement, they’re oftentimes vulnerable to more quick fix models, more 10 pounds in 21 days, flashy. I’m a good teacher, you know, I teach people nutrition. I simplify things, make it very simple and understandable, but what I try to really do is make sure that they are equipped with something to take home and begin. And that is a mindset issue. That is even though you know more about nutrition than you ever did before, doesn’t mean you have to make a change overnight because usually we take on so much that we get overwhelmed and we burn out and that’s why almost 100% of diets and quick fix models fail because people aren’t equipped with how to actually build this into a habit, which is where you get the real benefit of this. So that’s my takeaway is how to provide information, but also provide context to say, listen, just because you know this, now you gotta have a plan to implement that knowledge in a way that isn’t going to burn you out. And that is the channel. That’s like 95% of my work right now. And it has been for over 10 years of how to get people equipped to actually get this done for real longterm so that they’re not yo-yo diet and going from plan to plan. That’s the thing that stops people. And they feel like a failure for quitting repeatedly, but they just don’t have the tools to do it right. And that’s why I love what I do.

– So you coach-

– That’s right.

– And can come to you directly to be coached in nutrition and weight loss and health, or?

– Yeah, so, I mean, I am a coach. I’m a direct coach. I own small steppers, which is two things. It’s an online program, smallsteppers.com, but I also do private coaching at smallstepintensive.com. And the reason why it’s called Small Steps is because all the things that I coach, which is I’m now an oxygen advantage, breathing, a certified instructor, I’m a running a sort of ad running instructor and a certified nutritionist. But all those things I provide under the umbrella of my Small Steps Approach, because my argument and philosophy is that knowledge makes no difference if you don’t do anything about it. So people come to me to learn, to be a small stepper. Then with under that umbrella, I might say, okay, well now let’s apply the Small Steps Approach to nutrition and here’s learning about nutrition and let’s apply it to how you exercise and let’s apply it to how you work in the workplace. Like, how do you apply people have decluttered their homes using my approach because it’s a stress management approach. And then they can actually use that knowledge effectively. So it’s all, but yes, I coach, but it’s all under that umbrella of Small Steps.

– So was it that process that took you to your six steps towards happiness? It’s fascinating that that’s your current book, right?

– Yeah, Six Truths.

– Six Truths, yeah.

– Yeah, it did. Well, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, I’m a philosopher through and through, you know, my bachelor’s degree was in philosophy and I’ve never left that behind because as I gotten into the particulars of nutrition and diet with people, that’s again, what I realized was sorely missing, which was context, philosophy, ethics, this idea of can diet be not restriction and how to lose weight and kit a scale weight. Can it be about nourishment? Can it be about treating yourself well? What can that be? Can exercise be about treating yourself well? I mean, I know that you work in the leadership realm, it’s sorely missing from the discussion of comp corporate leadership health, personal health. When you have a stress that is maintained and you feel better in your body you can lead people better. You can lead people more effectively. And that’s a missing component. There’s plenty of books on management styles, but how about the manager taking care of her or himself? How about nourishment so that they come to work in a better place? My book raising healthy parents was exactly that argument. Can you parent better if you feel better? And my answer is absolutely yes. So Six Truths was just my way of saying, okay, let’s really be focused on what it is we’re looking for here, happiness. We are looking for a good life, and it’s not that complicated in terms of what we understand to do but it’s hard to get done in a crazy world. And it’s getting crazy with social media and everything else. It’s hard for people to stay grounded. And so I thought there was a need for a philosophy of happiness book, essentially. And that’s what I’m trying to do with that book.

– So I’m fascinated by your Six Truths that you write about. Your first one is, setting the example is almost the whole shebang.

– Shebang, yeah. The whole shebang.

– I love of the shebang.

– Right, yeah. You know, it’s, again, people sort of get the idea conceptually, but really when it comes to brass tacks, getting down to brass tacks, boots on the ground kind of stuff, it’s a tough pill to swallow, which is to expect of other people that you lead. And this could be for parenting too, that you don’t expect of yourself. There’s a lot gets lost in translation. And so why I say it’s almost the whole shebang, because I think that it takes up a large part of a proper leadership style, which is do it yourself first, be that yourself first, as Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That’s really what that is. But there’s a lot of talk in these days. You know, again, I quit all social media in 2018 because I wanted to see what it was like to live without it. And so I just walked away from all of it. But with the social media, there’s a lot of talking and a lot less doing. And again, another Gandhi quote, I don’t know why I’m quoting Gandhi today, but anyway, “Action expresses priorities.” “Action expresses priorities.” So if you’re a manager or a leader and you expect things in your organization that you can’t pull off yourself, it’s not gonna be effective. People are going to look at you and go with, if he or she can’t do it, why am I going to do it on some level, maybe not overt unconscious, but they’re gonna it’s like that thing, you can tell people to do things, but if you’re doing it yourself and you’re embody those values yourself, you can be a much more effective leader.

– Yeah, we see that all the time with the concept of work-life balance, right? That’s an issue that’s re-emerged as a big topic as we have gone home with COVID and now we back in sometimes the more hybrid model. Right?

– Yes.

– Like having that example, being able to create that example of balance is difficult for managers and difficult for employees.

– Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’m a manager and an employee, you know, so I’ve gotten both, I manage staff and I’m also obviously an employee. I don’t own the Stanford Inn Resort. So I’m an employee as well. And it is hard. The balance is hard and recovery is hard. And I mentioned recovery because to me, as a Small Steps coach, I am helping people focus on effective recovery so that when they reenter the workplace, they’re in a better mindset to do so. And therefore if they’re in a leadership position by that virtue they’re gonna be better leaders because they’re coming into work in a more recovered fashion. Our downtime is not used effectively and it’s getting less and less, you know, prevalent. You know, like we work a lot. We’re sort of always hooked in. We’re always sort of LinkedIn connected and our downtime isn’t that effective. So we’re coming to work overstressed and under recovered. And so as a stress management tool, helping people be able to manage that better means their overall life gets better to happiness gets better. Their health gets better. And that’s just all about stress management. So yeah, tools to achieve that are great and essential, and sometimes missing from the conversation. We always want to talk about what you do at work, how you manage at work, but how do you manage your life outside of work? ‘Cause that’s a I think a more profound question that’s being largely unanswered.

– So suggestions, recommendations, thoughts that you have about that before we go on to truth number two.

– My thoughts about that are that people, if they want to manage their stress and need to start thinking in moments. I train people what I call stealing moments because aren’t handed to you. And what that means is that we work 10 hours a day or even an eight hour to 10 hour day, we don’t get eight to 10 hours of recovery. We don’t, I mean, we get sleep, but often that’s not even that good. The research I’ve done in sleep is it’s highly affected by caffeine and alcohol and things like that and lights on at night. And so even though we might sleep seven, eight hours, it’s not a deep quality of sleep. So you don’t wake up feeling as refreshed as we could. To steal moments means you come in from your home and you do some deep breathing. And this isn’t like a hippy woo thing. This is like functional, slowing down, disconnecting in moments. It doesn’t mean you have to stop social media like I did. I’m not advocating for that. I don’t even say it in the book. I’m not saying quit. I’m saying cut into it a little bit. Take five minutes to just take a deep breath on the way home. In my car, I now breathe in my car. I don’t even listen to music most times, it’s silence, quiet, just moments. It makes me a better father. It makes me a better husband. When I walk in the door after having taken some deep breaths in the car on the way home. So training to look for moments of actual quality recovery. It’s not the same time amount, but it is quality. And so cutting into those things, but also on a purely physical level, feeding yourself better eating when you can nutritious food that helps the gut bacteria be robust and that affects your mood. It affects how you sleep. It’s an incredible thing. So eating healthy food, clarity of thought, being healthy in your body that does affect you as a human being in the world in whatever capacity you’re in. So that’s big time.

– So healthy food. You’re a nutritionist. I want to ask you about that because lights are the biggest thing. We have the keto diet. We have the real diet. We have the vegan diet. We have the list goes on. I could, there’s pages and pages of that so-

– Yeah, and people go crazy.

– What’s vegan diet?

– Well, I will say that, first of all, vegan, I don’t consider it a diet because it’s don’t eat animal foods, but you can be, you can drink whiskey and Oreos and be vegan, right? So there’s wildly unhealthy ways to be vegan. There are, if you define healthy food in the way that I do, which I do believe is the correct way to define it, which isn’t about the calories in the food like protein, fat, or carbohydrate. It’s about what comes with those calories. So a 32nd analogy is, think about food as a car. In other words, the gas you put in a car is the calories and the motor oil you put in the car, doesn’t the car doesn’t run in motor oil, but it needs the motor oil to run efficiently and with less wear and tear. So it needs gas to run, but it needs motor oil to run well. So we need gas to run to that’s calories, but we need something like motor oil in our bodies to make our machine run well too. And that comes in the form of vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals and antioxidants and fiber and sometimes water. And so when we focus on what makes that the determining factor of healthy food, not the protein, everyone’s crazy about protein. Protein, fat, carbohydrate, just if you get enough calories, you’re fine. But what comes with those calories? That’s the question. And in large part, whole plants, not refined plants like white sugar, white flour, oil, things like that, but whole plants carry with their calories. The most micronutrients per calorie, plus fiber, which feeds the gut bacteria and does all sorts of good stuff. So to include more whole plants in your body and less of the other stuff, the better it’s literally that simple. I don’t need 100% healthy. I know how to, but I don’t. I had a drink, that whiskey I mentioned, I’m a huge scotch whiskey fan. Single Mom, I love it. I don’t do it a lot. So on the balance, I want to make sure that I have enough healthy food in my diet to achieve the level of health that I want. I like that at 52 years old, I can go run 34 miles. I dig that and be with my kids and have energy and be with my wife and be in a good mood. I dig that. So it’s, you know, nourish yourself to get to that level where you feel good enough in your life. That’s it. It doesn’t mean you have to be militant. In fact, I’m anti militancy around food rigidity around food. People who can’t have a drop of oil because they think it’s gonna kill them. That stress around food is debilitating. So again, that is saying here’s what’s healthy food guys and no context about how to do it. That’s my beef, no pun intended with people who are coaching on nutrition is they give them the information, but not letting them know like, Hey, a little bit of less than healthy food is fine. Lower your stress around food. And that’s going to make you feel better longterm. So you got to provide that context in my opinion.

– Okay, I also want you to clarify whole foods because I’m not sure we know I’m defining everything these days ’cause we confuse terms so much that we no longer know what words mean. So whole plants to you means what?

– Well, I said whole plants, but yeah and that’s okay. But some people say whole foods interchange. I said whole plant. So what that means is I’m gonna make this as simple as possible, plants that have been minimally messed with by human beings. And here’s what I mean, soybean incredibly healthy. But when we take the protein out of it and we make soy protein isolate that we put in a protein powder, junk food, brown rice, very healthy when we take the protein out of it then we put that in a protein powder of junk food, the brown rice has a lot of stuff, olives, very healthy to have a lots of things in them, but we extract just the oil out of it. And it’s almost 100% what’s 100% fat but almost nothing else with it. So plants that have been less messed with. So in general, nuts and seeds, whole grains, not white flour. ‘Cause again, we messed with that. We made whole wheat. Then we took all the good stuff out of it and made white flour, right? So whole grains and beans, fruits and vegetables, that’s simple and a variety of such and literally that’s it. And then minimize all the other stuff it’s like that simple. And you don’t have to be, and you can live incredibly well doing that. It’s a little bit of a learning curve with cooking and things like that. But in terms of nutrition is very, very simple.

– Thank you. Thank you, Sid.

– You’re welcome.

– So, truth number two, have a thick skin, but not too thick. So tell me what you mean by that.

– You know, there’s a lot in Six Truths that is about strength, about strengthening and I really made an effort in that book to define strengthen in how I see it and what I don’t think strength is, is stubbornness. I don’t think strength is yelling in anger. I think strength is calm. I think strength is having a thick skin. So not taking things personally and getting triggered by every little thing that offends you, but not being such a thick skin that nothing affects you. So there’s a balance there of having a strength, a personal strength of thickening of skin enough where you can stand your ground when you need to but you can also change your mind when that happens as well. And I think that’s, you know, it’s look, and I was very clear in the book. I’m not sitting here from a pedestal going, you guys look at me cause this is it. You know, these are things I, and I’m very clear in the book, struggling with myself. But in my practice, I am very, very passionate about getting people to define who they are before they make a move. In other words, have your ideals in place. And that echoes for management that goes for parenting. What is the ideal parenting? What are you as an ideal parent? In your mind, I’m not gonna tell you what to do, but how do you view yourself ideally? Then you have a place to move to. Likewise in the strength realm, what is it? What is strength? I wanted to just define it. And I did define, I have defined it for me. I have a very clear idea of how exactly I want to live. Do I do that most days? No. I mean, I do it a little more than not, and that’s why I’m living pretty happy right now. And when I’m not, I kind of fall on the other side. And then I rebalance and re tighten up to get back onto this, you know, get back in the saddle. But it is important to me to define these things. And so the people have an eye on the ball, which is not stubbornness. You got this digging your heels and thing. I think that’s weak. I think bullying is weak. It’s a weakness. It comes off as strength, but it’s not tough. It’s actually very, very weak. So I think it’s nice if we can kind of define that for ourselves and have people who have compassion and care, be strong enough to bring that out into the world more.

– Truth number three, you’ve spoken about it a little bit. And so it was spent a lot of time on it and that is social media. Social media ain’t social.

– Ain’t social, yeah. And again, I’m not advocating for somebody to quit. Like I did, I am a practitioner and I wanted again, living the example, I wanted to go like, look, can this be done? And so I left it completely deleted it, but I just want people to have their eye on the ball about it. You know, when I wrote the book, which is last year, I cite this article in my book, but one of the leading causes of death for children in this country, 10 to 19 years old is suicide. And part of that model is social media. It is social isolation. So while it looks like we’re connected to other people because we’re on social media all the time, the nature of that and the quality of that is not making us vibrant and happy and positive. It’s making us suffer from comparison. It’s making kids, you know, being vulnerable to all sorts of crazy behavior online. So I think it is, I’ll put it this way, it is best managed. It is not to be seen as something that is super good. The more you get it, it’s something to be managed and brought in in measured ways that can be fun and you can connect with people and that’s amazing. But I’ve had clients with digestive issues because they’re spending five hours a day on Facebook, arguing with people that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy. So I just want to, again, let’s be clear about it and then you can actually manage it in a way that makes you feel better in your life and not worse in your life.

– I think that is so true. For those of us who need to do digital marketing, it really becomes a piece that we have to be so mindful of because it can consume you very quickly.

– That’s right.

– Truth number four, there’s no substitute for hard work and there never will be.

– Yeah, that was a, you know, again, I think that there, I have clients right now who I’ve talked about. I go, listen, the more quickly you can get to the acceptance that this is gonna be hard work, then you can actually get to the hard work. But what we do is we want, there’s hard work to be done by making yourself healthy and happy, but then we get stressed about the fact that there’s hard work. So if we can move the stress about the hard work and just get to the hard work, there’s actually a lower stress all overall. But again, what do quick fixes promise you? 10 pounds in 21 days and they make it sound easy. They make it sound like it’s not gonna be hard work. And oftentimes if you follow a diet, something like that, you will get the promise that they make. They’re not promising longterm health and happiness. If you really pay attention, what they’re promising is 10 pounds in 21 days, which means if you follow that diet, you’ll probably lose 10 pounds in 21 days. But then again, there’s almost 100% chance you’ll gain it back. And that’s because it’s hard work to maintain a healthy and happy life. And I always ask, when I’m giving talks, I always go, who here is married? And you know, people raise their hand. I go easy, right? Once you get married, you just phone it in after that, like you don’t have to do any work, no maintenance, it’s just marriages just play themselves out. Having kids super you have the babies and then they just take care of themselves. It’s hard work. But somehow when we want to make ourselves healthy and happier, we’ll fall for the quick fix self-help model, you know, we’ll fall for the quick fix diet model that promises us a life that is devoid of hard work to maintain and it just is not a reality. And I want to make sure in the book that people can understand it’s hard work to live well, it is hard work and it’s potentially getting harder. I don’t know. I wasn’t alive 100 years ago, but it’s hard work to maintain. It’s hard to work to maintain healthy relationships. It’s hard work to maintain health and happiness when you drive by a McDonald’s that has food that is literally engineered to make you addicted. It’s hard to maintain health in this crazy world where the cheapest food is the worst food for you. It will kill you. And yet we were having that battle every day. And so if we don’t understand that there is work involved in this and thank goodness, ’cause it feels good when you earn your health, it feels good when you’re happy and you’ve earned it. And so that’s that truth in a nutshell.

– Okay. So truth number five. The more aware you are about what you give a crap about the happier you will be.

– Again, you know, mindset issue. We get swept up into office politics. We get swept up into stuff. And I have this thing that I’ve told myself I talked about in the book where I’ll get swept up into something that I just get home. And I go I don’t care about that why? Did I get swept up into something like, you know? And so I had this line in my head, I go get a hobby, right? And when I use it, I use that. If I get swept up to something, I go, you know what? There’s more work that I want to do while outside, because if I’m getting swept up in this mundane, stupid thing that makes no difference one way or the other it’s because I got bigger fish to fry and I’m not attending to those things, right? So that’s the idea of be clear about what you actually care about. And the most clear you can become the less chances you’re gonna get swept up in the stuff that you don’t care about. And by the way, that applies for people too. And sometimes it’s difficult for us to acknowledge that being, we might have relationships that aren’t fueling us well, that aren’t making us feel good. That can be family, it’s tough tough spot, right? When you have a family member or somebody in your life that isn’t helping you live better, that is taking you down, sucking away your energy friends or family. And it means that again, you don’t have to cut people off. I’m not advising anybody to do that, but at the same time, like social media, it’s best managed and to take control of your life in a way that says, look, I want to surround myself most of the time with people who make me feel good and I want to be able to do that for them as well. And I think that’s a good goal to have as well.

– You know and you have to be so intentional about that because it’s easy to let time slip by. And then it becomes what consumes you.

– That’s right. And that’s why, again, it always comes down to manage your own stress, treat your body well, treat yourself well so that you can be intentional in your life.

– So your 6th truth is happiness is the A to Y, but you didn’t include Z. So please explain.

– Yeah. And I have to thank you for reading the truth. This is not a joke. A few weeks ago, I got interviewed and I couldn’t remember one of the truths. I only remembered five out of the six. And I was like, oh my, I wrote the book and I can’t remember one of my own truth. It was horrible. I was like, please read it, ’cause I don’t know what truth is anyways. So thanks, you kind of helped me cheat a little bit. Truth is in the A of Y. And what it means is that, look, we it’s goal setting. I’m all for it. Set a goal, but understand that the day that you reach that goal, you’ll be amazing and happy and you should pat yourself on the back, but then you got to get back to work because true happiness, and I did a video on this, on my YouTube channel recently, which is Excitement versus Happiness. Don’t confuse the two, I’m all for excitement. We get excited for things. We hit a goal and we’re excited about it, it’s amazing. But happiness is in the day-to-day. Happiness is in the A to Y not in the Z. Z have that goal, hit it next day, boom, What’s my next goal? Start working again. Because that’s where we find that we cannot rest on our laurels. It doesn’t make us happy to do that. We have good memories and great times, but the guy who goes in high school, I was a football star. It’s one of the saddest models ever, right? Because it’s like, wait, what have you done since? Get back to work. ‘Cause you never are too old to get stuff done and to achieve things creatively or otherwise. And so it’s, again, happiness is in the A to Y.

– You know, a lot of people get stuck in living in the past for that very reason.

– Yes.

– And so today and tomorrow is lost.

– That’s right. Yeah, and I mean, I get it. I do. And it’s like we have a good memory in life is tough for people. And I understand that, but you can and here’s where my Small Steps comes in. And you can do little things. You can draw for five minutes a day and that feels good. It really does. It’s a weird thing, but it does even the smallest little bits of action in the now creative and writing and journaling and just create I’m working on a screenplay right now. I’m not a good writer. I’ve never written a screenplay. I have no desire to be a screenwriter, but I was like, never done it. So I small step. I opened that file once a day. I might write a few things, but I love the process of it. And I may probably rip it up and toss it when I’m done. But it’s the process of it that I really like. And I think that, that feeds when I coach people, I coach them in creative pursuits as well. Joan Stanford, who cones the Stanford and she’s a art therapist. I’ve learned a ton from her in terms of she does creative play shops, helping people get back to creativity. And what that does for your overall quality of life is insane. But we go like, oh, I used to play guitar. I used to draw, try to bring that back in, in little moments and it has a huge effect.

– You also talk about not letting the simplicity of being happy be a deterrent. And so I would like you to speak a little bit about that because you really break things down in your philosophy and in your block into what is simple, what is easy, what is uncomplicated? So talk a little bit about that, please.

– Yeah, I think that’s an excellent question because I’m trying to figure out a way to help people understand this I’ll put in the happiness realm, but also go into the nutrition realm. Eating healthy is very simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to pull off, but don’t confuse the difficulty in establishing a habit about it, with the simplicity of what it is to do it well. So in the happiness realm, I don’t think it takes a lot for us to get to the point where we know what we would be doing if we were happy to sort of set that ideal. I don’t think that’s the complicated part. I think the complicated part is then how to make that happen in the world. Likewise, with diet, I can teach you in an hour and a half class everything you’ll need to know about nutrition forever. It’s not that simple. That’s why wild animals are like, man, you guys think about food a lot. And they’re just eating leaves. And you know, gorillas are huge and they’re like, you guys are crazy with the billions of dollars spending on pills, you know. And so we often go, I’d eat healthy, but it’s so hard. Okay, be clear. It’s not hard conceptually. It’s easy to do that, but it is hard to get it done in the world. It’s hard to change the way you eat. It’s hard to let go of ritual and nostalgia around food and tradition to sometimes let those things go. I don’t think you have to let them go 100% by the way, but whatever. It’s hard to get it done. If you’re a parent and you’ve got to cook in a different way, and people in your family get mad at you, there’s some actual, that’s why I’m a coach, but there is some difficulty there, but that doesn’t mean that healthy eating is difficult. That just means getting it done is difficult. Got it. And now you can be clear about how to move forward with your life and bring things in, in a measured way that doesn’t freak you out and doesn’t freak everybody else out.

– So we have now gotten to the end of our interview. Our time is almost up, Sid. What have we missed that is important for the audience to hear about?

– I don’t think you missed a thing. I think your questions were excellent. I was like, I’ll write something down if there was something I want to talk about, but it’s really, you kinda nailed it and my Small Steps approaches is what that is. It’s all these things under this umbrella of learning, how to enter your day from an ethical I see it as a right and wrong issue, but I could be wrong about that. But it’s how I see it. An ethical stance of self-care of treating yourself well. When you have a backdrop of that, then you don’t go to diet to punish yourself. You don’t go to the gym to punish yourself. You go to the gym to nourish, you go to food to nourish, and you have a treat now, and then too. But if you have that background of self care, then you walk into the world a more vibrant, positive person. And if you want to talk leadership, that is the name of the game for proper leadership, walking into your office, able to inspire change, to be an example for your employees. That’s huge. And so that is I think, a worthy goal to kind of learn how to treat yourself well, first and foremost.

– So as I listened to you, inspiring people re what it says to me is often with healthy behaviors and habits. We tend to think I got to do what?

– Yeah, I should. I hate the word I should.

– And you’d have shifted that to, I get to, which is night and day difference, isn’t it?

– Oh yeah. I talked about in the book, I call The Shed Cloud. Living under the shed cloud. I should write my screenplay. I should eat better. I should exercise. Why? Why should you? Who’s telling you? You’re an adult. You don’t have to, you know, don’t. But when you realize there’s no should about it, then you can actually make a choice about it. Then it’s like, I want to do it. I want to eat healthy. That’s a powerful position to come from. Not, I should eat better. Why? Who’s setting the rule? Nobody’s forcing you. I should, why? Get rid of that. I want to eat better. I want to treat myself better. I want to exercise. I want to exercise. Then you get to have a conversation about it. Then you get to, can make it happen. Then maybe your exercise is five squats per day. That’s where you start because you don’t want to get burnt out, cool. But you get to have a conversation with yourself about it instead of living in a pressured kind of model, like you said, and I think that’s a lighter way to get stuff done. And I think that’ll actually enable you to make longterm change by taking that kind of pressure off.

– So it has been wonderful to have this time with you and to talk with you. Thank you so much.

– Total pleasure, Lois. Thank you so much for having me. It was really great.

– And for those of you who are listening to us today to Building My Legacy Podcast, thank you. Be sure to remember to visit our website at buildtomorrow.com and our social media as well. We will also have information about Sid in the show notes. So if you would like to get in contact with him, you certainly may do so and we encourage you to do that. Thanks very much everybody.