My guest today is Dean Coulson, Founder of The Lean Warrior. Dean’s gone from IT consultant to gym owner and now performance lifestyle coach. He helps successful businessmen, entrepreneurs and CEO’s who are stressed, anxious and feel burnt out, optimise their health and performance so that they can relax, feel happy and fulfilled and spend more time with their family.
Dean also shows men how to remove fears and express who they really are and give them the tools and resources to thrive in all areas of their life.
When you run a business, there can come a point where your work takes over your life. You feel obliged to be attached to your business 24/7. More often than not, this can lead to stress, burn out and a lack of work-life balance. Dean Coulson is a former IT consultant and gym owner turned successful performance lifestyle coach. He helps businessmen, entrepreneurs and CEOs who are stressed, anxious and feeling burnt out to optimise their health and performance, so that they can relax, feel happy, and spend more time with their family. He joins Robin to discuss men’s mental health, emotional triggers in life, as well as how to remove fears and express who you really are in order to thrive in all areas of life.
After spending 12 years working as an IT consultant, Dean recognised the need for change. With a new family at home, he realised that the uncertainty of his week and the amount of travel involved was no longer the right fit for his life. He’d seen other people setting up online programmes and working from home, realising that he could do this too. A great fitness and nutrition enthusiast. Dean started working at his local gym and despite his background in IT, his nutrition and performance trainings were the ones high in demand. After also working on his own nutrition, which helped him and his wife conceive naturally after years of fertility struggles, this further inspired Dean to venture into a new career as performance lifestyle coach.
Since setting up his own business, Dean has started to see patterns when people work with him. The initial challenge is diet-based, with people concerned with body image and that they aren’t eating well. The external world and the pressures around physical looks has a big impact. Most of the time though, there is deeper-rooted unhappiness, and diet and fitness is used as a barrier to cover the issue at heart. Sometimes this is not apparent to the client as there can be many complex layers between the surface problem and the inner challenge.
As humans, our values and belief systems are developed as a child and it’s when we are most susceptible to thinking a certain way based on the influences around us. Whether it’s helping to shift thoughts on money like Robin does, or food and happiness like Dean, working with a coach involve unearthing the deeper-rooted beliefs and changing mindsets.
Dean also does a lot of work helping people overcome emotional triggers which can transform into negative behaviours.
There’s a misconception that you think something and then get triggered, when really it doesn’t work that way. There are three parts to the brain. The second part is switched off during any stressful or threatening situation including emotional triggers. It is the emotion that comes first, but the brain associates it with being painful and pushes it away. Your brain will then distract you with something else and willpower will kick in. This can lead you down a path of doing something you don’t want to do though.
This is comparable to dealing with fear. You have the fight, flight or freeze system. Your gut instinct may be to fly, but the outcome could be different when we take time to process our feelings. Depending on how traumatic an experience is, there can be a greater sense of push towards or pull away from something.
Being healthy and being able to thrive is a combination of physical health, mental health, emotional health and spiritual wellbeing. Often people focus on one area, which causes the rest to suffer. It takes practice to look after all these elements, but it is worth it.
Dean feels that men tend to focus on the physical element more. Historically, men talking about their mental health was seen as a weakness. Being vulnerable wasn’t considered ‘manly’. However, by putting yourself first and all aspects of your health first, you are giving yourself space to fully recharge and focus on your happiness, which means you can then give more energy to other people too.
It’s a fine balancing act, but something that is often overlooked, yet makes a huge difference.
If you want to learn more about what it means to be truly healthy and overcome your emotional triggers, listen to the full podcast episode to hear Dean’s inspiring words.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/deanncoulson/detail/recent-activity/shares/
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/DeanNCoulson
Twitter: www.twitter.com/DeanCoulson
Instagram: www.instagram.com/dean_n_coulson/
Website Address(es): www.theleanwarrior.com and www.deancoulson.co.uk
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