Remi Adeleke is an actor and author who served as a US Navy Seal for 13 years. He is also one of the most inspiring people I've ever met.
Born in Nigeria to a well to do family, Remi's father died when he was only 5 years old. Upon his death, the Nigerian government froze his family's assets, and Remi's American mother was forced to move him back to the US.
Remi grew up in a rough neighborhood in the Bronx. By his teenage years, he was dealing drugs and running scams. After a drug deal gone bad, Remi decided that this life wasn't for him and decided to fulfill his dream to become a US Navy Seal.
This dream was instilled in him after watching Michael Bay's move The Rock. Remi went to the recruiter, but learned that there were two warrants out for his arrest.
Through a twist of fate, Remi was able to get those warrants expunged and he went on to join the Navy. After two attempts to get through BUD/s Remi made it through and became a Seal. He went on to serve for 13 years until leaving in 2016.
At the end of his Seal career, Remi was looking for his next mission. That's when another twist of fate got him onto one of Michael Bay's movie sets where he landed a role in Transformers: The Last Knight.
This is a story about transformation, determination, and sheer faith in God. Remi's upcoming book Transformed chronicles his life and everything that led to his current success.
To pre order Remi's Book: http://www.transformedstory.com
To subscribe to Remi's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd7m4t3XMEfSn2hgLvxKowQ
To follow Remi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/remiadeleke/
Like any addiction, a grudge will wear a hole into you. Unlike many addictions, a grudge doesn't involve putting a substance into your body.
Instead it survives by getting you to focus only on the dark corners of your mind. Holding a grudge means that you are focused, not on those things that will make your life better, but on the person you're holding your grudge against.
The thing is that holding a grudge doesn't really affect the other person. Your hate and your focus on that other person's life really just affects you.
It puts you into a hole and into a life you never wanted to be in in the first place. All you're doing by holding a grudge is allowing the other person to grow faster than you.
How do you get over a grudge? It's not necessarily forgiveness, but rather just letting it go. The key is in taking your attention off of the other person and onto making your life better. Work on your fitness, your career, your business, and your positive relationships.
I've lost three people this year to opiate related deaths and I've lost 8 over the last five years. Each loss has been heartbreaking because, in each case, the deceased left behind families who were destroyed from the grief and loss.
Here's the thing: no one grows up wanting to become a drug addict. People do not go down this road willingly. In each case, it began with an injury and a prescription.
When the prescription ran out, the pain didn't stop and an addiction was already developed.
We tend to think of opiates as being an "evil" drug, but I don't think that's the case either. The problem isn't with the drug itself, but rather with the way we manage pain.
The truth is that pain and injury can be made less severe with better life practices. In this episode I discuss ways of managing pain without opiates.
As I mention in the podcast, I am not a doctor, and everything I discuss here should be done only with the approval of your physician. I also implore you to advocate for yourself in your interactions with your doctor in determining treatments that will work for you.
To learn more about other resources to manage pain, check out the following episodes:
https://warriorsoulagoge.com/podcast-show-notes/chris-bell-2
As a podcast host, I get to hear a lot of peoples' stories. Within each story there's someone who faced adversity, overcame it, and came out the other end a better, stronger, and more capable person.
Craig Grossi's story is no different. As a US Marine serving in one of the most dangerous districts in Afghanistan, Craig faced both horror and loss.
But amidst the danger and the terror, Craig also found joy. Last year, we brought him on to discuss his book Craig and Fred. Fred is a little white dog that Craig found in that combat zone. His book is the story of how Craig saved Fred and brought him back to the US, and how Fred eventually saved Craig from the darkness he experienced after his service.
Since we first spoke to Craig, he and Fred have been all over the place, traveling across the country to spread their message of stubborn positivity. They've also been working to help veterans and other dogs by raising money for charities.
This is, in my opinion, one of the great stories of our time, and I wanted to revisit Craig and Fred so that they could spread their message of stubborn positivity to our audience for the holidays.
When you're young, having friendships is almost a right of passage in life. There's lots of opportunities to meet people through school, sports, and clubs.
When you serve in the military, you're constantly surrounded by friends and acquaintances. You have people you can confide in.
But as you get older, it gets harder and harder to maintain those relationships. So many people find themselves in a position where their wife, husband, or girlfriend is the only person they really communicate with regularly.
But what happens if you go through a divorce or a breakup? That's when you can find yourself socially stranded without anyone to toss you a lifeline.
In this episode, I take you through three easy techniques for re-establishing your social network.
Fitness is a lifelong pursuit, but it can mean different things at different times in your life. When I was younger, I was a competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder. Training meant that I was going to physically push my body to it's limits almost every time I walked into the gym.
Today, training is very different. I don't train for competition and I'm not looking to lift obscene amounts of weight. Instead, I train to feel better, prevent injury, and to be healthier. The aesthetic benefits of looking strong and muscular are side benefits.
That means that, while I keep my training challenging, it's not the knock down drag out fight that it once was. In this way, training supports the rest of my life goals of being a good business man, a good partner, and a good leader.
Additionally, training keeps me mentally clear and allows me to feel my best no matter what's going on in my life.
Paul Tokgozoglu is a digital marketer and podcast host who is also the CEO of Excelsior Industries: A company working to revolutionize the education industry using Artificial Intelligence.
Paul and his team are creating an automated platform that will allow a person to learn anything online by accessing available content in a curated and automated fashion.
Paul also hosts the Beyond Homo Sapien Podcast about how emerging technology and ideas are driving forward human expansion and staging the species for the next leap forward in evolution.
Beyond this, Paul has led an extremely interesting life. He is currently serving as an officer in the United States Army. After going through a very rough personal period, Paul had some tests done and found out that he's on the autistic spectrum.
Outside of his business ventures, Paul is also an avid Jiu Jitsu practitioner with nearly a decade of training under his belt.
Learn more about Paul and his projects at the links below:
https://www.facebook.com/paul.
https://www.instagram.com/
https://twitter.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/
http://shoutengine.com/
https://www.youtube.com/
Take Paul's Free Course on how to identify and overcome the limiting beliefs that are sabotaging your mind in 3 easy steps that leave you feeling energized and ready to conquer your goals!
The past can be one of two things for you: it can be a ghost that constantly haunts you or it can be a source of strength.
It becomes a ghost when we find ourselves constantly going back and dissecting events. You wish that some way, some how, you could just go back and take advantage of that chance or not make the mistakes you did.
Its thoughts like this that probably keep you awake at night. Turning your mind into a machine that you can't turn off. During the day, it steals your focus, taking you away from the present. And it keeps you from fully living because living happens in the now.
On the other hand, the past can also be a source of strength. This can happen when you find a way to become grateful for your past. Both the good and the bad offer up opportunities for gratitude.
Those opportunities lie in the lessons you learned and the opportunity to apply them to the present.
This episode takes you through exactly how to use gratitude to overcome one of the greatest obstacles you'll ever know: the ghosts of the past.
Each week, Chris Albert delivers a fitness Q and A from members of the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy Private Facebook Group. If you'd like to join, it's free of charge and you don't need to buy anything. Just hit this link and request to join.
Nicole from the group asked about accessory work. These are exercises that don't include one of the main lifts like the squat, the deadlift, the overhead press, or the bench press. She asked which accessory exercises she should be doing and with what frequency?
The answer here is that it highly depends on what your goals are and on what your body needs. An athlete will need certain accessory exercises depending on her sport and where she needs to become stronger. Chris gets into the details on this and reveals how he programs accessory work into his routines.
Next, Chris brings up the popularity of SOF training for non special operations people. He brought it up because there are so many programs on the market centered on training like a SOF operator. The problem with these programs is that most people are not SOF operators and that their goals are very different. He discusses why athletes and fitness enthusiasts simply should not train this way.
Finally, Chris discusses the difference between curcumin and turmeric. Many people are getting confused about the differences between these two and the benefits they offer.
This podcast is brought to you by FBOMB Nutrition. To get 20% off of your first order of FBOMBs, head over to http://www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code WARRIORSOUL at checkout.
One would think that an industry that centers around biology would base it's products and ideas around scientific fact. Unfortunately, that's often not the case. That's why Sal Di Stefano and Mind Pump Media exist, to bring the truth about fitness to the masses.
Sal and the other guys at Mind Pump are, in my opinion, some of the most intelligent people in the fitness world today. Sal got his start as a personal trainer and eventually went on to own his own gym.
After 17 years in the fitness industry, he partnered up with Adam Schafer, Justin Andrews, and Doug Egge to produce Mind Pump. Their show is described as "Howard Stern meets fitness." It's raw, sometimes shocking, but always entertaining and informative.
In this episode we discuss fitness, finding truth in the information age, and rising above the victim mentality to find your purpose in life.
Pain is a fact of life. It's also something that keeps us from being who we truly should be.
That's because whenever we go through intense pain the human tendency is to try to put our minds somewhere else. When it comes to physical pain, this tendency allows humans to accomplish many things. Extreme athletes, for example, are able to put their bodies through immense amounts of punishment.
When it comes to mental pain, however, this tendency to mentally run away from pain can push us further from reality. It can also keep us from overcoming the challenges that we need to face in order to move forward in our lives.
The fact is that if we truly want to live our lives the way we should be, we can't run away from pain. We have to live with it.
Our tendency to avoid it drives us toward drug abuse, alcoholism, and other addictions while also strangling our mental growth.
In this week's Warrior Fitness episode I discuss questions from members of the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy.
First, I talk about whether or not you should focus on doing different deadlift variations: conventional deadlifts, rack deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, and sumo deadlifts.
While I do believe that each deadlift variation is useful, and that strength trainees should try to incorporate all of them, beginners should focus on perfecting the conventional deadlift first before moving onto variations.
Once a lifter is advanced enough, switching variations every three weeks can be helpful for strengthening weaknesses.
Next, I discuss whether or not I think lifters should use weight lifting belts during their workouts. While I see the value in using them if they are part of training for your sport (i.e. powerlifting or olympic weightlifting), I do not see much value in incorporating them otherwise.
Then I cover whether or not fasted workouts are effective. The answer here depends on a number of factors that I cover in the discussion.
Finally, I discuss weight loss for those with slow metabolisms. For those with slow metabolisms it's not as simple as reducing calories and doing more exercise. Instead, calories may need to be varied on a day to day basis to get the metabolism fired up enough to actually get you to lose weight.
The Warrior Soul Podcast is sponsored by the good people at FBOMB Nutrition. Get your first order of FBombs for 20% off at http://www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code WARRIORSOUL at checkout.
Sue Bhatia is the Founder and Chairwoman of Rose International, one of the largest staffing companies in the world. She came onto the podcast today to talk about Rose's Deployment to Employment initiative.
Many people do not know this, but there is actually a surplus of jobs on the market right now, and companies are having difficulty filling these jobs with qualified candidates. Military veterans make perfect candidates for these jobs because they have the leadership and soft skills suited for these environments.
In this conversation we discuss how Rose International works with veterans to find well paying tech jobs. They have a coaching process that aids veterans through the interview process and building their resumes.
To apply get into this program, simply send your resume to vet@roseit.com.
The holidays are a joyous time for many people. Thanksgiving and Christmas bring about family gatherings, parties, and get togethers. But those who are depressed can often feel more alone than ever around the holidays.
I'm not an expert on depression by any means, but I have been very depressed before. I can tell you that dealing with it means that you have to realize something: you're the only one who can get yourself out of it.
Depression involves retreating inward. The consequence of this is feeling like you're the only one in your world. Getting out of it entails pushing outward, even when you don't want to.
This can involve helping others in some small way, or it can involve becoming part of a group.
As I said, I don't have all of the answers, but I do hope that this episode helps you to get through this holiday season and to find some joy for yourself.
When it comes to fitness, a lot of people freak out about the holidays. That's because Thanksgiving and Christmas bring turkey, pumpkin pie, candied yams, and lots of other temptations.
And the fact of the matter is that eating it is almost mandatory. If you don't participate you miss out on time with family and memories that can be made.
But it isn't impossible to enjoy the holidays without slapping on 10-15 pounds. In fact, the holidays are a great time to get in shape.
In this fitness notes episode, I cover a strategy to help get you through the next six weeks and come out on top of your fitness.
The point is this: don't wait until New Years to get in shape. You can start right now and still enjoy all of the holiday meals coming to you.
Two art forms that go back to the dawn of human history are music and storytelling. Both had roles in developing communication and culture.
Dave Bray is a storyteller and a musician. A US Navy veteran who served as an FMF Corpsman, Dave is a man of both patriotism and faith.
This is very apparent in his music. His album, Music on a Mission delivers soothing vocals along with heartfelt storytelling in which he describes each song's importance to him.
In this interview, we talk about Dave's music, his love of country, and his views on how the country can heal it's divisiveness.
The pursuit of knowledge is one of the most important ventures you could ever take up in this life. The problem is that many believe that knowledge is difficult to come by.
In this Warrior Notes edition, we cover three different methods of pursuing knowledge: reading, experience, and failure.
Reading is, by far, the most accessible way to gain knowledge. While you may not be able to secure a mentor in your geographic area, you can still learn from the masters by reading what they have to say.
The other is via experience. The problem with experience is that many people wait for the "perfect" time to try to get actual experience. This is a mistake because it keeps you from the opportunity to fail.
Failure is, by far, one of the best ways to secure knowledge. Within failure, there is the opportunity to learn lessons.
This week on the fitness notes edition, Chris covers topics brought up from the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy private Facebook group.
The first question asks whether or not workouts with a single exercise could be effective. It was asked by someone who needs to do their workouts after a long day of work, and who wants to focus on the important stuff.
The second question asks whether one should do squats or deadlifts. Chris highlights the differences between the two exercises and why you should do both.
Finally, Chris answers questions on different intermittent fasting protocols and whether or not a 72 hour fast is a viable choise for those seeking to improve their fitness.
In the aftermath of the Borderline shooting many of us scrambled to find the motive. This is something we commonly do when a tragedy like this happens.
But this time it ran more deep as the shooter, Ian Long, was a United States Marine. In the aftermath, General Robert Neller did his best to distance the Marine Corps from Long by stating that Long was an "ex-Marine." Many, however, believe that Neller missed a "teachable moment" where he could have reached out to those Marines who are suffering from silent wounds.
Amidst the shock, many were also lost on the fact that another Marine died that night. Dan Manrique served in the Marine Corps and then went on to become a volunteer with Team RWB who made it his mission to help other veterans.
This episode discusses these two Marines and their diverging paths. One died a lonely villain, while the other died a hero. It covers four things we can learn from the life of Dan Manrique and from the mistakes of Ian Long.
Michael Reagan is a political commentator, Republican strategist, and the son of President Ronald Reagan.
Michael has made it his mission to get America to remember its history through the Reagan Legacy Foundation. His latest project is the Walkway to Victory, a memorial brick walkway at the Airborne Museum at Saint Marie Eglise in Normandy, France.
The walkway is lasting and fitting tribute to those who liberated France and Europe during World War II.
In this interview we discuss the Battle of Normandy and why it's so important for Americans to remember their history and the sacrifices that those young made on those beaches.
We also discuss some current political events. Michael has been an honest and objective Republican critic of the Trump Administration. We discuss what's going right, what's going wrong, and what our current leaders could learn from President Reagan's Legacy.
To learn more about the Walkway to Victory and the Reagan Legacy Foundation: https://www.reaganlegacyfoundation.org
For Michael's book Lessons my Father Taught Me: Click Here
In today's world, it's easier than ever to start a business. The internet and technology have lowered the barrier to entry and they've created the opportunity for anyone to become an entrepreneur.
The problem is that many people get wrapped up in the details without focusing on what's important. Focusing on things like creating a logo or building an expensive website are useless for people who are just starting out.
What you should focus on is doing the one thing that will make or break your business: solving a specific problem and finding a specific audience to help with that problem.
This Warrior Notes episode discusses the major things that you need to do if you are considering opening up your own online business. I pull back the curtain on both Warrior Soul and my online training business to give you some insight as to how you can start your own journey.
For those of you looking for an amazing FREE resource on starting your own online business, check out AmericanDreamU.org. It's an educational platform for Veterans that covers everything from building your LinkedIn page to understanding financials
Transformation challenges are becoming more and more popular, and I think that's a good thing.
These challenges have helped many people learn how to get fit, lose weight, and master their bodies.
But if you are looking to transform your body, also make sure that you are transform your mind. Don't make this a temporary foray into fitness: make sure that the habits you pick up and the practices you instill become permanent parts of your life.
Real transformation occurs when you're able to do all of the things you need to do to better yourself regardless of what happens and despite the obstacles you encounter in your day to day life.
This Fitness Notes takes you through what you need to do to instill real transformation in your life.
http://www.warriorsoulagoge.com/podcast-show-notes/transformation
Napoleon Hill once wrote "If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self."
These words ring very true. Everyone wants to be successful, but so many people fail because of self doubt and self sabotage.
Our guest this week is a man who helps people master themselves so that they can achieve success. Sergeant Major Max Garcia honed his skills in the greatest leadership proving ground of all, the United States Marine Corps.
Enlisting in 1994 at the age of 17, Sergeant Major Garcia has led several generations of Marines at home and in combat. During this time he began exploring the power of the mind.
Now, as Life Coach 8, he is leading in a different way by helping others to achieve abundance.
http://www.warriorsoulagoge.com/podcast-show-notes/max-garcia
When I look back at pictures of myself serving as a US Marine, I remember those days as being mostly good. I was young, doing something that had meaning, and surrounded by friends.
But the truth is that, if I remember hard enough, those weren't my thoughts at the time. In my mind, I was always complaining, "why am I here" or "this is dumb." And normally, I was wishing I was somewhere else.
Most of us live our lives by trying to put our minds somewhere else when we go through difficulty, and that's a huge mistake. It's a mistake because there is so much opportunity to be had just by living in the present.
Stop wishing you were somewhere else, bring your mind to the present, and you'll be amazed at what you can learn.
As a trainer, some of the common things I hear from people is that they "can't find the time to train" because they have "other priorities."
On the surface, this sounds legitimate. People naturally think that family, job, and the daily rigors of life should come first.
In reality, that's a lie. It's a lie because, without fitness, you're not going to be able to meet those "more important" obligations for very long.
The only two real assets you have in this life are your mind and your body. Without either of those two you're not going to be able to be the best spouse, parent, or provider that you can be.
In this episode, we discuss some simple strategies that you can use to make fitness the priority in your life.
https://warriorsoulagoge.com/podcast-show-notes/make-time-fitness