IAM1872 – Fitness Coach Introduces the Anti-Diet Nutritional Program to His Clients

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

• CEO Story: Paul stepped into the fitness industry in 2008 or 2009, and soon after launched his unique fitness venture. When the pandemic disrupted conventional gym activities, Paul adeptly transitioned into running online courses and providing one-on-one coaching.
• Business Service: Under his one-on-one coaching service, Paul offers tailor-made nutrition and exercise programs. Through a solidly chronicled curriculum, he teaches clients how to implement fitness principles specific to their lifestyles.
• Secret Sauce: Paul's innovative fitness program, called “The AntiDiet Nutritional Program,” sets him apart from many fitness influencers. Rather than imposing a strict, restrictive diet, he promotes an approach based on abundance and customization to fit the individual's lifestyle.
• CEO Hack: Paul employs a tool named “reframe,” which aids in shifting perspective from an unresourceful point of view to a helpful one.
• CEO Nugget: Paul believes taking calculated risks is proportional to the level of success one wants to achieve.
• CEO Defined: He sees a CEO's role as one of leadership and vision. It's wrapped up in self-leadership and the ability to envision your own life.

Paul Lyngso Teaser 00:00

And let's look at what actually matters, which is principles. And then let's look at how to apply them for you because there is no should, there is no universal. Everybody needs to be doing the same thing. That's just not true. You need to be able to pull, question yourself and pull it out, and then decide what you want to do with your life.

Rather than just some generic, Oh, I feel like I should do this.

Intro 00:19

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of this is the IAMCEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:48

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast. And I appreciate you listening to this episode. And if you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year.

We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, or what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focused on leadership management and coaching. When we think of leadership management and coach, we often think of doing all of the things, but often it's a person that's able to build up their team. That's able to cultivate a creative and innovative culture so that people can excel and actually be their own leaders.

So that's why this month we're focusing on those three big topics, because they make a huge impact on the organizations that we're part of. Now, you'll hear some of those topics this month, of course, some really great perspectives on how people are even defining leadership, which I think is extremely exciting.

So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the IAMCEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today at Paul Lyngso of Lyngso Fitness Academy. Paul, excited to have you on the show.

Paul Lyngso 02:08

Good to be here.

Gresham Harkless 02:09

Yes, excited to have you on is great to have you be a part of this. And what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Paul. So you can hear about some of the awesome things he's doing before we jump straight in.

And as the founder of Lyngso Fitness Academy, Paul has helped thousands of people across the globe to finally overcome their internal and external blocks to greatness.

Paul is exceptional because of his psychological and philosophical approach to health and fitness. I bet you know, at least one, at least a hundred fitness influencers on social media and have watched a crazy amount of transformational videos through infamous diets and his approach is the exact opposite.

In fact, his signature program is the Anti-Diet Nutrition Program. It works on abundance, not restriction. You can achieve your goals without giving up the things you love. You need to learn how to fine-tune these things. He offers a new way of doing things that actually works and is sustainable in the long run.

And his brand Metaphysique has helped hundreds of people live a healthy life without running away from their comfort food. Paul, excited to have you on the show and everything you stand for. Are you ready to speak to the IAMCEO community?

Paul Lyngso 03:12

I am dude. Let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 03:13

Let's make it happen. And so to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your cEO story.

Paul Lyngso 03:20

Yeah, man, for sure. I started when I got into the fitness industry in 2008 or nine. I just was unemployable, man. I did not want to have a regular job and I really wanted to be in the fitness business. And so I got my certifications. I trained people out of a, corporate type gym for almost like a year, like maybe less than a year.

And I decided to go out and do my own thing and start my own business. So that was in home personal training. I drove all around the Chicago area for a better part of a year before centralizing everything. And getting a sublease situation.

So I rented a little corner of a gym that already existed and ran out of there, ran my business out of there as an independent contractor, grew my clientele my own facility in 2013, ran that. And kept going until the pandemic in 2020 in which case running a brick-and-mortar facility was not an option.

And so we moved, we created our answer diet course at that point, moved everything online and have been doing everything online since creating courses, 1 on 1 coaching, the whole deal.

Gresham Harkless 04:26

Nice. I absolutely love that. Especially when you sounds like you identified that early that you were the unemployable and you decided to go your own route and try to blaze your own trail.

Paul Lyngso 04:35

Yes, which is, early on, if you've ever felt that itch, where it's just like being told what to do, just you would rather go do it the hard way yourself that be told what to do people listening to this probably understand what that's about.

Gresham Harkless 04:48

Yeah. It's so funny you say that, and I think a lot of times once you go on that path and you dip your toe in that water, sometimes jump straight in, you feel like there's no other way to do it. So it's hard to even if you wanted to try to go back.

Paul Lyngso 04:59

Yeah. It's, yeah, I've thought about that so many times over the course of my career Oh, man, I could just go get a job right now. I could take these skills and I could be valuable to a company. And in fact, I was interviewed by a big fitness company at one point, a big box gym and I walked in and just didn't feel right.

The energy was off. I'm like, I can't see myself walking in here as an employee and I walked out and it just reaffirmed what I already knew, which is I meant to do this on my own.

Gresham Harkless 05:23

Yeah, absolutely. So sometimes those experiences are those that are your emphasis here that they catapult you into where you're supposed to be. So, if you didn't have those experiences, you didn't go those feelings when you're going to jobs or whatever that is, then you wouldn't be right where you're supposed to be.

Paul Lyngso 05:39

That's exactly right, man.

Gresham Harkless 05:40

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know you drilled down and talked a little bit upon like how you work with your clients, but I wanted to make sure that, there wasn't anything that you didn't touch on and get a little bit more of an idea of like, how you work with and serve the clients.

Paul Lyngso 05:51

Yeah the bread and butter of what we do is 1 on 1 coaching. So we have curriculums that we follow. So we answer that nutrition course, but really what we do is we do one one-on-one coaching and guide people through that curriculum and teach them how to apply that to their life.

So, along with that, yes, there's nutrition. We offer exercise programs as well that go along with that, that we deliver through an app. So it's very easy for you to execute on your own. But, most specifically we work with the application of the principles. So rather than giving you a diet, I'm not like, Hey man, eat, three stalks of broccoli and this much chicken we teach you the principles about what you need to do in order to attain the physique you want.

And then we really work with you on applying those principles to your specific lifestyle, based on your preferences, based on your experience level, based on your schedule, the whole nine yards. So that's really the way we coach people is not saying Hey, eat this much food or this much, whatever, exactly this way, but Hey, let's figure out how to make this work for your life.

Gresham Harkless 06:48

I absolutely love that. And it seems like you meet people where they are and you meet them where they are and you even sound empower them so that they are able to for one, not just follow it, but like you said, it becomes part of who they are because it is actually connected with everything that they are and what they're trying to achieve.

Paul Lyngso 07:02

Yes. Exactly right. I tell my coaches all the time. Our goal here is for our clients to not need us. We don't want to keep them dependent on us forever. Many of them will choose to stick around. Many of them do choose to stick around for long term because they find value in the mindset training and being part of a community, but it is not about creating dependency and holding back some sort of secret sauce from them.

No, we're going to teach them how to do this on their own and then go from there.

Gresham Harkless 07:27

Yeah, I absolutely love that. Just being part of the community where you see people that are going for their goals. It probably creates that culture, that atmosphere that you want to be a part of.

But, you alluded to, that's probably part of your secret sauce is that it sounds like, and even as I read in your bio, that what are the things that you're supposed to do and fitness and it sounds like you counteract those and realize that there is another and better way.

Do you feel like that's the innovation part? Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce?

Paul Lyngso 07:53

Yes. Yeah. Maybe my secret sauce is just, is how to question conventional wisdom. I don't know. Is saying Hey man, everybody, you arrived a certain point in business or in fitness or whatever. And you come up with all these shoulds, I should be doing that.

I should be doing that. I should be doing this. And it's maybe my secret powers are saying should says who? And let's look at actually matters, which is principles. And then let's look at how to apply them for you because there is no should, there is no universal. Everybody needs to be doing the same thing.

That's just not true. You need to be able to pull, question yourself and pull it out and then decide what you want to do with your life. Rather than just some generic, Oh, I feel like I should do this.

Gresham Harkless 08:32

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you said, question, like what you want to do with your life question, what you want to do with your business or whatever that is.

Paul Lyngso 08:39

Our whole deal here like it's a fitness program for sure, but it's about creating a life that's meaningful for you. And so, in order to create a life that's meaningful for you, you have to question that and decide what's meaningful for you. So, yeah, you can't pull that off. And you can pull inspiration from other people.

You can certainly compare yourself to other people in a similar boat and get an idea of what's possible. But at the end of the day, if it's got to be, what's important to you, and if it's important to you, and you give yourself permission to follow what's important to you following up on the behavior change and the habits.

That's just easy. Execution's easy. The hard part is getting the vision dialed in the 1st place.

Gresham Harkless 09:14

And I almost feel I don't know if you've seen this and fitness, but I feel like it's a lot of times in life that we don't sometimes create space or create time or do that work to try to drill down and figure out what that mission vision that why is for us.

And a lot of times we end up jumping from thing to thing to thing, largely because we haven't done that deep work for lack of a better term to understand why we're going on that mission, why we're doing that thing or this thing, that job, whatever it might be.

Paul Lyngso 09:39

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's true. And I think the other misconception is that people think that the vision crafting is one-and-done. Oh, I have my why now and I just go and pursue it. And it's like core values for a company or a mission statement for a company. They just go up on a plaque. Nobody pays attention to them.

They feel great when you come up with them, but then the company's not actually operating from those things like employees aren't, fired up to be like, I'm, operating from place of integrity and honor or whatever, generic stuff they put on those.

So crafting the vision is not like that. It's got to be consistently over and over again, giving yourself permission to change the vision as you grow, as your environment changes, as you cultivate it. As you change, as you navigate, the environment is totally okay for the vision to change.

So it's an ongoing thing. And I think once you accept that, a regular part of your life can just be daydreaming about what you want to make the best part of your day to make the most out of your day to continually move towards what you want.

And a lot of people you. A lot of people get stuck feeling a little bit of shame or guilt around changing paths. So I don't want that anymore, but I'm already on the past. So I got to just keep going.

Gresham Harkless 10:42

Absolutely appreciate that. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Paul Lyngso 10:54

This is the skeleton key to all life, man, to be an efficient all areas of life. This is what we use with our nutrition clients. This is what we use in our own lives to navigate business and leadership and everything. And it's being able to control your emotional state. And it's because your emotional state is going to drive your behavior.

And ultimately so from a nutrition standpoint, we're in the business of behavior change. If I want you to be fit for the rest of your life, you need to change your behaviors and your habits, right? And your emotional state drives your behavior. Sometimes you don't feel like doing stuff. Sometimes you do.

Sometimes you're motivated. Sometimes you're sad. Sometimes you're stressed. And from a business perspective, it's the same thing, man. It's you don't always feel like doing the boring day-to-day stuff, but if you can control your emotional state to constantly be in a resourceful place, you don't have to be positive and upbeat and cheery, but resourceful and connected.

You're going to do much better than when you fall prey to emotional states that aren't resourceful, like fear or shame and guilt we've already talked about or anger. I'm so pissed that I have to do this thing or that this thing happened.

And so, the tool that we use is called a reframe, which is a broad brush, but it's this thing happens in the world. Whatever happens. A problem with an employee, a problem with a client, the state of Illinois shutting down your gym.

These things happen, right? And you really can't control them and they cause a knee-jerk reaction. They cause an emotional state to pop up. And what we want to be able to do is recognize when we're being unresourceful, shift our perspective in person, change our filters, change the story we tell about this event and put ourselves back into a resourceful place because everything that happens in the world is neutral.

It's not good. Or it's not bad. It's literally just neutral and then our brains decide, to tell a story about it to ourselves and create meaning out of it. So if we can find when we're creating meaning that's not serving us, we can boom, pause and put, and retell the story in a way that is going to help us move on with their lives and being a resourceful state.

Gresham Harkless 13:00

That's extremely powerful. And so what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? You might have already touched on this, but this could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. And often I say, it might be something you would sell a client or potentially, if you have to do a time machine, your younger business self.

Paul Lyngso 13:15

I would certainly say this, from a business perspective, your level of success is capped by your ability to take risks. Okay. So you can't build a billion-dollar business. Let's just say, if you're only willing to invest a hundred dollars, it's very unlikely to happen, right? You have to take big risks and you have to put yourself out there.

And so how are you, how do you become the person who can take those big risks? And it's about seeing other people who are doing it surrounding yourself. It's about being certain. It's about your certainty and your outcome to produce and your ability to produce. And so you surround yourself by people who are currently doing it.

People who are on the same path who believe they can do it. You invest in coaches who have already done it, and you do anything you need to do to build your certainty, because once you believe you can do it, then you can take the risks. Then you can have the reward, but there are too many people who want, who they want the reward, but they're too scared to take the risk.

And that's a limiting fact, though the risk, your ability to risk is the limiting factor, period in business, you can do very well with this, with a low-risk business, but ultimately you could do more if you risk more.

Gresham Harkless 14:26

Awesome, awesome. So what would you consider to be your answer to my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Paul, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Paul Lyngso 14:39

Obviously it's about leadership and vision, right? And that's a platitude and generic, but I think what a lot of people miss out on is we see these CEOs, especially the famous ones, and we see them as powerful and magnetic and all this stuff.

Because they've achieved those things, right? But what happened, that's not actually how it goes down is they had a vision and they had congruency within themselves and they developed themselves in the person who was able to achieve those things. So it's about self-leadership and vision for your own life 1st.

And when you have that, and you have that alignment, then people will be attracted to you as a leader, people will follow you, they will catch your vision and then that's actually what helps you accomplish things. You know what I mean? It's very much about it's very much an internal game, I would say is what I'm trying to get at.

Gresham Harkless 15:30

Paul, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get overview about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Paul Lyngso 15:45

As far as diving into those topics more, I would love it if you listen to my podcast. So if you go to missingpiecepodcast.com it's got most, it's well, most, it's got all my resources up there. You can find my podcast right from there. I have a discord community going on links to my socials all that sort of good stuff. So that's my hub, I guess you would call it is missingpiecepodcast.com.

Gresham Harkless 16:05

To make everything easier, we're gonna have the links and information in the show notes. So that everybody can follow up with you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on. Of course, yeah. Subscribe to the podcast and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Paul Lyngso 16:15

All right, man. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Gresh.

Outro 16:17

Thank you for listening to the IAMCEO podcast, powered by CB Nation in Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. IAMCEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business as ceohacks.co. This has been the IAMCEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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