PP 302: Your Choice is Your Power with Rob Dionne

Rob Dionne grew up as an athlete and has always maintained fitness. However, as he entered the real world, everything became a struggle and a source of stress. Rob began to carve out his career working as an aspiring actor, waiter, and personal trainer. All the weighty responsibilities made him feel not as good as he did. While he and his wife Devon were in Hawaii for their honeymoon, an eye-opening picture shifted his trajectory towards a healthier lifestyle. Since then, he made incremental steps to get back  in shape. Short story, Rob was able to shed his extra pounds and has become more aware of taking care of his body. Today, Rob shares what he learned along his journey to help others feel better about themselves. 

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Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host Kim Sutton. I’m so happy that you are here to join us today. I’m happy to introduce our guest, Rob Dionne. Rob is owner of Open Sky Fitness. But there is so much more that we’re going to cover today because I have just so much more than that. 

Welcome Rob.

Rob Dionne: Kim, thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m so excited to chat with you today.

Kim Sutton: Oh, I am excited to have you here too, and we’ll be catching up in another month. Listeners, you’ve heard me talk about it before. And actually, Rob, I forgot to mention to you, just one episode before yours, Episode 300 is Steve Olsher. Listeners, Rob and I met at the New Media Summit last year. And we’ll be meeting there again about a month after this episode goes live. But I can’t wait for that. I can’t wait for round 2, let me just put it that way. I want to see what dances are done this time.

Rob Dionne: The New Media Summit was awesome. We had such a great time. And not only did we walk away with a bunch of great interviews under that we can take back to our studio, but also people getting to meet people like you, and actually connecting with some awesome podcasters that are out there that I didn’t even know existed. That’s the coolest part I think for me.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And actually, I’m most excited about this time, because I know that I have to make more time to connect with the other podcasters.

Rob Dionne: I agree with you completely.

Kim Sutton: There was just a shortage there. Yeah, but we’re getting off track. That’s just what happens on the Positive Productivity Podcast.

Rob Dionne: That’s right. Off track all the time. Yeah.

Kim Sutton: And in life too. I mean, really, it happens every single day around here.

Rob Dionne: We can’t stay on rails at all times in our life. That’s impossible.

Kim Sutton: Are you ever on rails?

Rob Dionne: I’m literally off the rails. I think that should be the name of my show, off the rails, but it’s not unfortunately. But that’d be a really good name for a show. Don’t you think? Off the rails?

Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, yes. Yes.

Rob Dionne: I think he’s a great name for a show. I don’t know if it’s a psychology show, or maybe it’s a show about having kids, it’s like you totally derailed. I don’t know. I’m about to have kids so I’m feeling like my life’s about to derail. I don’t know, Kim, you have five kids. So you tell us.

Kim Sutton: Okay. None of my kids were planned.

Rob Dionne: None of them are planned. You didn’t plan any of your five kids? You and your husband need to know how to learn how to plan.

Kim Sutton: Okay. We know how it happened. Okay, let me just put that out there. We know how it happened. My first deal with my ex. But actually Rob, my last three, my four year old, and my three year old twins, we had tried for a year to get pregnant. And we kept on having miscarriages. We had four and a year, and we gave up, and I started my business, and we were done trying. But wouldn’t you know that the week that I gave my notice to my job that I was leaving to do my business full time, we found out we were pregnant with our daughter.

Rob Dionne: Wow.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. And then we decided that we were done because that was enough. We were in our house, if we had just enough room for the people that were here, and we went to make it official, and the doctor said you better sit down, you’re pregnant with twins.

Rob Dionne: Oh, my gosh. That’s amazing.

Kim Sutton: So now there’s not going to be any more accidents unless God has an extremely, extremely, extremely huge sense of humor. Because clearly, he already has one giving us twins at the end of all the rest of the kids that we already have.

Rob Dionne: Yeah. And your twins are the two girls, the youngest?

Kim Sutton: No, their boy, girl.

Rob Dionne: Boy girl. Oh, that’s awesome. Actually, we were kind of hoping for twins on the first go around. They were in the family. But we were like, it’d be kind of awesome to kind of hopscotch because we want to, or leapfrog I should say, we want to have a boy and a girl. Obviously, I think most people do if they’re going to have a couple of kids. And it would have been amazing. So if we had had that, I feel like that would have been the coolest thing ever. But I don’t know, I know it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. One kid, two kids, five kids. Geez. I come from a five kid family. I have four older sisters. I don’t know how my parents did it. And my dad lost all his hair, so that’s I know how he did it.

Kim Sutton: My husband has lost all of his hair since the twins were born. He took that off now because he doesn’t want the bald to show. But yeah, I totally get the boy, girl, Actually, this is the first time I’m admitting this, period. But I started crying at the ultrasound for my second child. My first two were boys. I started crying because they said he was going to be a boy, and my ex husband just thought it was so happy. But I was actually devastated, this was so bad. I can’t believe I’m inventing this other podcast. I love you, Robert, my son, but I wanted him to be a girl.

Rob Dionne: Well, you could have named him Roberta. That’s what my mom used to call me when I used to grow my hair long. So if Robert eventually grows his hair long, then you know you’ll get your wish.

Kim Sutton: Oh, he wants to, but it gets poofy instead of–

Rob Dionne: Instead of like long and silky.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, exactly. But anyway, okay. Rob, I want to get back to you. Let’s circle these rails back around so you can share with us how your life has gone off rails in a good way. Yeah. That was a good segue. How did you get to where you are now?

Rob Dionne: Let’s see. Okay, I’ll start from the beginning. Well, we’re talking about career here, we talking about where I am, because I’ve had so many career changes. It feels like in my life, I don’t know where to start. But my wife and I, we went to conservatory in New York. We were talking about that just before we jumped on. I went to SUNY Purchase Acting Conservatory, she was in the Dance Conservatory, and we moved to New York City for three years to try to make it in the Biz, as they say, and didn’t really work. So I moved to Los Angeles because it’s warmer, and it’s more fun to try to make it in the Biz when it’s warmer. You don’t have to deal with slush, and hail, and sleet, and all that stuff. So we moved out to LA and worked on it for a couple of years, like three years off and on. And at the same time, obviously, what every actor does is they have to become a waiter, or bartender, or a restaurant manager. I did all of those things. I also started becoming a personal trainer at the time because I did a show where I lost a bunch of weight and this guy asked me how I did it. And I told him, and he said, would you train me. And that was my first client ever. So I just kind of fell into being a personal trainer. I was always working out with friends, and always kind of athletic as a kid, but I never really considered it as a career. 

So I started training this guy, and I ended up loving it. And as I trained him, he ended up losing like 100 pounds, which was amazing. And I started going and getting certifications in personal training from an ASM, I got advanced certifications for active exercise, weight loss certifications, CrossFit certifications, massage certifications, and just like trying to really build my platform to build a fitness business on. As I was still trying to become a personal trainer, I mean, an actor and manage these waiting tables and managing a restaurant job. And my goal was to just get out of waiting tables. I had been doing that since I was 17 years old. My mom said to me something that I’ll never forget when I was a kid. She goes, Rob, you can wait tables anywhere. It’s like a great way to pick up extra cash no matter where you are. And unfortunately, I used it too much as a crutch. And I feel like I fell into that as it’s almost like I think waiting tables can become a really, it’s like a trap, because you can make a lot of money at it. But unfortunately, none of it is sustainable. And you just unless you’re squirreling away some cash, which gets really difficult. You just kind of get stuck in that rut of being a waiter in the food service business. And nothing against that, you can start a career in that, that’s totally fine if you really want to dive in. But when you’re trying to utilize that as a source of income while you’re trying to do something else, it can be a trap, and I was falling into that trap very quickly. 

And so I transitioned out of that and became a personal trainer. And then I realized, I’m getting all this anxiety trying to be an actor, and it’s not going anywhere. And I have a little bit of an OCD problem where I feel like I have to be perfect at things, and I know that this show is about not having to be perfect, but it’s a struggle to feel like I have to be able to survive as an actor. And I didn’t want to be. I’m 40 now. I was 30, around 30 at that time. I didn’t want to flash forward 10 years, 20 years still being an actor, and still being a personal trainer with a mediocre business. And that was really scary for me because I saw them. You’re in LA, you see those people. They’re the personal trainers that are still actors, that are 60 years old, they’re out there. I see them everywhere, you see them everywhere you go if you’re in the business. 

Same thing with waiting tables, or bartending, or whatever. You see those guys and girls, women I should say who are juggling those two careers. Now, if they’re happy doing that and it brings them joy, all the power to them. But for me, it scared me. I didn’t want that for my life. I wanted more security. I wanted to start a family. I wanted to feel financially secure. And so I decided to hang up my acting hat, walked into my agents office said, hey, I’m done. So walked into my manager’s office and said sorry. Don’t submit me anymore, and I focused all my attention on my personal training business. And that’s kind of what led me to where I am today, and it’s still evolving. But along the way, which is kind of what we were talking about, we invest, we saved money, we squirreled away. We actually had a meeting with a financial advisor that was one of my wife’s clients who gave us a really good bit of advice that said, any debt you have, which we had student debt, we had just debt from moving, we had probably, maybe like $40,000 in debt all all in. And he’s like, pay off everything first. Don’t worry about saving money. None of that matters unless you don’t have debt. And that’s so true. When you want to buy real estate, if you want to buy real estate and you have debt, it’s going to be unbelievably difficult.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my god. Yeah.

Rob Dionne: I know you and I talked about this, you have to get out. If you are not focusing on getting out of debt right now, if you have debt and you want to build something like a build a portfolio of real estate or something, you can’t do it with that. The banks just won’t give you the money. So that was like the first thing. We didn’t even know that. The guy told us get out of debt, and we did. We spent the next six months, we had some money that we had saved, he’s like, dump it into the debt, get rid of it. And then we spent the next six months or so just paying off the rest of it. And that was it. And then we started building back up again until we were able to afford a house in LA. And then we could talk about that because, my house pays for itself. And I can tell you how we did that. And then also, we were able to buy another apartment building in LA based on the money that we were saving from being personal trainers in LA, because we were basically living for free.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my gosh, yeah. I am so intrigued because, listeners, if this is your first episode, I am not in LA. I am outside of Dayton, Ohio, where the cost of living is nothing like LA. I think probably our monthly house payment would only pay for our closet probably in LA.

Rob Dionne: Give us an idea and I’ll compare it to what it would mean to like, you can either rent in LA or talking about owning a home.

Kim Sutton: I know the difference is. Our monthly house payment, and I’ve never been this transparent before either. Listeners, we’re in a land contract because everything that Rob has just said is completely true. If you have any debt, it’s gonna be hard to get real estate. And as an entrepreneur, it gets even tougher because they want to see your income. So we had to restore our credit, get rid of a whole lot of debt before we can buy the house that we’ve been living in for four years. So we’ve been in a rent to own. Rob when we started, we were paying 850 a month, and had a five bedroom house, garage, nice yards.

Rob Dionne: Oh, my god. Yeah. Do you want to know what that would cost in LA?

Kim Sutton: Probably at least a half a million?

Rob Dionne: To buy? No. That would be at least three times as much. It would be at least 1.5 million.

Kim Sutton: No way.

Rob Dionne: Yes. My house right now is a three bedroom house. But it also has two apartments in the back that Airbnb, we could talk about that in a minute. But the houses in this area, three bedrooms, and we live in a not a great area of La. It’s up and coming in LA. Our house is probably worth over a million now, and we got it for sale. We got 675 four years ago. Everything in LA it goes up very, very fast. You have to kind of see neighborhoods. Now, when you’re growing up, when you live in a small town, real estate doesn’t, it’s not like you guys are jam packed. Los Angeles has so unbelievably populated that, it’s all about where is the next place I can live that’s affordable? That’s going to get have a Trader Joe’s in the next three or four years. Like that’s what people are trying to figure out. Where are people going to be moving to, and what’s going to start changing, and upgrading over the next next four to five years. And so we were really lucky. We could not afford to buy anywhere, like if I wanted to buy a five bedroom, two bathroom with a garage and some land, in LA in like West Hollywood area or even Hollywood, I mean, 2 million to start.

Rob Dionne: Oh, my gosh, I mean we’re getting this house for 115.

Rob Dionne: Yeah. That’s the thing. You won’t find a condo in LA, a one bedroom, or two bedroom, not even a one bedroom, you won’t find a one bedroom condo in LA for that price.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, probably not even the closet then.

Rob Dionne: You might find a studio.

Kim Sutton: I don’t mean a studio, I just mean literally like the two foot by three foot closet.

Rob Dionne: In terms of square footage, what you’d get, it’s crazy the difference. So boy, our goal is to eventually get out of the market in LA. Take everything, take our winnings in a sense, and then just bail and go to a place somewhere else. Maybe like Arizona or something. I don’t know, that’s kind of landlocked. We like being close to the beach, but somewhere else.

Kim Sutton: The only way that we’re not landlocked around here is when the river floods.

Rob Dionne: The only way out, you just jump in the river. Yep. We basically started getting involved in the apartment and stuff, and you were talking about, in terms of of being an entrepreneur, and then getting a loan from the bank, what they’re going to need to see first and foremost is the fact that you do not have any credit, you do not have any outstanding loans, you don’t have any debt. That’s the first thing. Second thing is they’re going to want to see proof of income. And for a lot of people, especially like, we’re personal trainers here in Los Angeles, we gather our checks from individuals, not from companies. We don’t get a salary check, we get individual checks. We bought our house, it was June, I think it might have been May. I think it was May when we opened Escrow. It’s a 30 day Escrow so we had to get all of our checks from, and here’s what we did. This is bananas. 

So we went to a financial guy, a mortgage lender and we said, okay, what do we qualify for? And the guy gave us a number that we qualified for. But he goes, look, last year, you guys wrote off a whole bunch of stuff, like you only show that you made maybe, I’m just going to $50,000 between the two of you. I can’t remember the numbers. So he’s like, you only show that you made $50,000 between the two of you, they’re not going to give you a good loan on that. So we’re not going to be able to get the loan. So you’re going to have to show that you make more money, which means that we couldn’t write anything off that year. That year, we were wanting to buy the house. So when we went to our accountant, instead of writing off, because as a personal trainer, basically, you can write off so many things. Like just my car, I can write off. I can write off a part of my office at home, because I run my own business out of that. And then just like meals and such, there’s a lot because we’re on the go all the time. It’s your day to day, and entertainment, and buying clients things and such, and equipment. And basically every pair of shorts and sneakers, I get a write off because it’s part of my uniform in a sense. So I couldn’t write any of that stuff off in order to qualify. In order to show that we made, I can’t remember how much we had to show we made, it was something like 150 to $200,000 between the two of us. And that’s what we did. 

So that meant that in order to get it alone to buy a house that was at the time $675,000, in order to get a loan to qualify for that, we had to pay Uncle Sam something like 30, either 20 or $30,000 out of pocket. We had to give up money we had in order to qualify for a loan. So when we put it down on the house, we had that $30,000 let’s say for ready to put down on a home, but we had to just give it to our taxes in order to just get this done. So it’s so painful because you literally just throw away tens of thousands of dollars in order to qualify. So yeah, that’s what we had to do. But that was the game you had to play. These banks, it’s not 2005 anymore. These banks are not given away loans, they make you work for it. And yeah, so that’s what we went through. But it ended up working out for us.

Kim Sutton: Here’s another crazy thing that I found. I mean, for my husband, he’s a United States Air Force veteran, so we can get a VA home loan, which is 0% down, no closing costs, which is amazing. His credit score was over 640, which is what they wanted to see is over 620, I don’t remember which right now. But there was one tiny little ding from the last 12 months. Listeners, you can’t have one tiny little thing, which sucks. I mean, because we’re doing the best that we can, one bill late and it’s like a tarnish mark. So then we had to wait another year until that thing went away.

Rob Dionne: And that’s brutal. Because the iron is hot and you’re ready to strike. Also the market and the housing market tends to go up prices, tend to go up. So yeah, a lot of things can change in a year. Yeah, that’s brutal. That is brutal. But that’s the game. Unfortunately, these bankers, they’re holding all the cards, they’re holding all the money.

Kim Sutton: I understand why. I mean, I fell victim to the recession. Well, you’re only a year older than I am, I’m 39, we might have been in New York at the same time. Manhattan from 2001 to 2004.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, we were. Yeah, I was there from, I graduated 02, and then left in 05. So yeah, we were there for a couple years.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, I started working [inaudible] second in June of 2001, so I was a half block from the UN when the towers went down. What an experience. Yeah, that’s where we had our first child. Rob, that’s why we moved to Ohio. Like we realize, nope, this is just not what we’re interested in.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people left New York. I have family that won’t even still in New York, they won’t even fly. They’re just shell shocked from that. They have post traumatic stress, and they just do not get on a plane. At this point, you think, wow. 20 years later, almost 15 years later, you get over that, but some people just can’t. It was traumatizing to be in the city at that point.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. This is so not appropriate, and I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make a joke out of it. But that day was my fastest commute day home ever. I had a co-worker who drove to work every day. Her husband, she lived in the Bronx, I was in Westchester. He wanted her to have the car in case one of their kids got sick. And we just hopped right on the highway, and I was home in 15 minutes because there was nobody on the highway. And that does not happen. I mean, that would be like saying there’s nobody on the highway in LA, it doesn’t happen.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, right. That doesn’t happen. Unless it’s like 3:00 o’clock in the morning. And even then, you’re probably gonna get stuck in traffic because there’s some roads going on. But yeah, I mean, totally off track. And totally is a sad topic to be getting into.

Kim Sutton: In Positive Productivity, what I was gonna say was it’s unfortunate because we’re doing the best that we can. And in all actuality, if we could get the mortgage, then we would save money, because we would be saving money in multiple ways. One, we would be building equity. Number two, often, we are prepared for our monthly payment to go down at least $300 when we’re doing a mortgage instead of paying essentially rent.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, here’s our theory behind it too, because we were paying $2,000 a month for a two bedroom apartment in West Hollywood area, and we bought a house in what’s called West Adams, Jefferson Park area, right near USC, south of the 10 Crenshaw, 20, like 15, 20 years ago, this was part of South Central. Lots of drug deals in this area, lots of gang activity in this area. But it’s slowly changing over the last like 15 years. But now, it’s rapidly changing where I feel like the tail end of it. However, when we move down here to buy houses at 675, which is what we bought, the mortgage is roughly 3500. When you’re talking about taxes, and you’re talking about your insurance, you’re roughly putting in about 30, $500 a month to live in the house. But we had two one bedroom apartments in the back and we thought, okay, if each one of those one bedroom apartments rents for 1,000, that’s 2,000. That puts us at 15, $100 a month, so we’re paying $500 less per month to own our house. And so own a house with, again, just like you’re saying, putting in equity monthly. Monthly, you’re putting in equity towards your home, towards something, not just throwing it at your landlord. So we did that for the first year. 

And after a year, one of the girls moved out. Well, a girl moved out, it was a girl and a guy, and she moved out and went to college in New York. And I said to Devon: “You know what? Dev, Airbnb is just starting to pick up momentum. Why don’t we try it?” What’s the worst that happens? It’ll cost us $1,000 or so to decorate. It’s a small one bedroom studio, one bedroom apartment of a 400 square feet. We just put a couch, nice couch, TV, we decorated really nicely and we posted it up on Airbnb. And I tell you, within a couple of days, it was like booked out for the entire way in a couple of days. Like within a couple of days, it started to book out. Maybe we got some traction after a week or so. It started to book out like [inaudible]. And we price really low because what we wanted to do is build up our five star rating and become super hosts, which is something on Airbnb if you become a super host, which just lets people know that they can really trust you, that you’re legitimate. The other guy moved out in the other apartment. And for a while, the biggest thing is, the sticking points are like cleaning. What do you do when somebody leaves and you have another person coming in that evening, and you work with clients and stuff, and you have to be at a job. So we had both of those going at the same time. We would have transitioned sometimes in a day. So eventually, we had to hire a cleaning service or cleaning person. Somebody recommended a cleaner to us, so we just paid for that cleaner. It takes them 45 minutes to an hour to clean it. And it’s a really fast turnaround. It’s almost completely automated. The only thing that we have to do is wash sheets and towels regularly, which is kind of a pain in the butt. But at the same time, it now makes us our mortgage, like I said, 3500. It makes us 4000 to $5,000 a month.

Kim Sutton: Wow.

Rob Dionne: So to have the Airbnb behind our house, now, if you had this same deal in West Hollywood, you’d be making seven to $10,000 a month. Because the issues you can charge that much more, we don’t charge that much because it’s in the West Adams area. But yeah, it’s pretty amazing. So that was how we were able to just keep dumping money into our savings and get into another apartment building. And then we also took out, because we don’t have a loan, we took out a HELOC. Our house was a home equity line of credit in order to, once you have assets, you can start borrowing against those assets and utilizing that money in order to get into something else. You can snowball stuff. And that’s why they say the rich get richer, that’s how they do because they have so many assets. But when you’re just starting out, it’s so hard to climb out of the hole. And every step of the way, the system makes it more difficult. Every step which is brutal.

Kim Sutton: And it’s funny and not funny way, because that was another sticking point for us getting our mortgage. We didn’t have credit cards, and they wanted to see credit cards on our credit report to show that we spend and pay responsibly. So in earlier episodes, I said we had one credit card with a $300 limit, a $300 limit doesn’t do much to help you folks, let me just tell you about when you’re in credit recovery, that’s what you get. So now, we have two credit cards with a $300 limit, but showing that we are responsible, and that they’re not maxed out. Oh, my gosh, it was like an instant 30 point–

Rob Dionne: I’m curious, how do you pay for things? Do you pay for everything?

Kim Sutton: Well, all my invoices, I actually use Harvest. I use harvest so clients can pay by cheque, or they can pay with PayPal using their credit card. So it all goes into my PayPal, and then I can withdraw to my business checking. But I use PayPal to pay for it, and then I get cash back at the end of the month off my paypal debit card.

Rob Dionne: Yeah. This is something that my mom did to me when I was young, 18 years old. She got me a credit card, she covered the bill. I wasn’t allowed to spend more than a couple $100 a month, it probably was the same probably $300 limit in college. But I eventually over time collected. Now, this is really dangerous when you’re a kid. You’re like starting to collect credit cards because I had a Discover card, Chase card, Visa card, whatever it was, and started to collect them. However, I have a Discover card that has like a $30,000 limit on it. And I’ve had that account open since I was like 18, and I never use it. I never use it. I called my credit card company at one point and I go, I think I said I never use this card, I should close this account. The guy’s like, don’t be stupid, this doesn’t cost you anything. You have a credit line of $30,000, you’re gonna need this. He was really honest. And I was like, oh, really, oh, I’m going to talk to some people about this and make sure you’re not lying to me. And it’s the truth though. Like, the more credit you have, the credit lines you have, that don’t cost you any money. It’s something like ours, when I bought this latest property, I put like $40,000 on credit cards in order to complete the property and such. My credit dropped down to like 630 or 640. 

Now, that might sound like it’s not that bad credit. But for me, I’m usually around 830. My credits are super high because I have so many credit cards, and I only use two. I only have two credit cards, one for business, one for personal. But I have all the other credit lines still open in order to just keep my credit moving. And I put like two $3,000 a month on my credit cards. I pay it all off at the end of the month. Like everything is a credit card debt and transaction. And that’s the kind of the proof, the credit proof that the bank is looking for. I understand that people want to go off the grid, they don’t want to necessarily be indebted to credit cards, they don’t want to, that’s a dangerous place to go. But if you can really utilize the system of it, it works out for you.

Kim Sutton: I was listening to Dave Ramsey for a bit while we were working on our recovery on our credit recovery. I have to tell you, Rob, when I was 18, I opened up a whole bunch of credit cards too. I was really responsible with them until 2005, I started my first business which was an e-commerce shop. I thought the more inventory I had, the more money I would make. I did it all wrong. So in the next five years, I built up 100,000 in credit card debt that I couldn’t pay off because I had opened those credit cards just, like you had said, when I was 18. I had those 25 to $35,000 credit lines, but I did everything wrong. But Dave Ramsey, he talks about how you should close out your credit cards. Listeners. I think Dave Ramsey’s principles of paying off your debt, just like Rob’s already discussed, is amazing. Yes, you should do it, but please don’t close your credit cards because you do need that for your credit score if you’re looking to buy something. I know Dave Ramsey always talks about buying used cars with cash and all that. Yeah, that’s great. But if you’re not there yet, if you’re struggling, or if you’re just not there yet, with 10, 20, 30,000 in the bank, I wish somebody had told me, I mean, I had opened a department store credit card when I was in college. I could buy myself a bed for my first apartment. And as soon as I paid it off, I close the card, but that would have been me now.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there are a bunch of credit cards that cost $100 a year to have. Maybe have one or two of those, because they are usually stronger cards. They do give you more buying power a lot of times.I only have one or two of those that are like cost me $100 a year to be to be a member of it. But yeah, I would just, don’t ever close those out. That’s that’s a big, big mistake.

Kim Sutton: Rob it I’m sorry, I need to click it. No, I’m not putting in an ad folks. But I realized I should probably put it in this disclaimer, considering I’m trying to recover my finances. We are not financial advisors. Always contact your financial advisor for advice on what will be best for your situation. I just realized that I better put that in there, to protect my butt.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, I agree. You were talking about buying a used car. Now, say you don’t have the cash to put down on a used car. However, if you have an insurance, like we have USA as insurance, and I’m not sure if you do as well because your husband was in the military. But Devon’s dad was in the military so we qualify for USA, which is a military based insurance company that they only offer to usually vets and we can apply for loans through them, and they give really good percentage rates. So if you’re going to buy a car from a, let’s say, you’re gonna buy a car from a dealer, the dealer wants to finance you, and the dealer is going to screw you on the financing, that’s how they make the most of their money. They want to finance, they want to set up the loan for you because they make all that money. However, if you go through something like your insurance company, they might give really good loans and they can give you that money. Literally within two days, like you can get $10,000 to buy a car in like two days, and you’re only paying 3% or something like that on that loan. That’s a better way to go about it. Then if you don’t have the cash, but you get to only spend $200 a month on your car, rather than going through the actual dealer. I did that when I bought a car off of Craigslist from some guy. 

I buy used cars. Clark Howard on the radio was one of those guys who I listened to very similarly. I was like, don’t ever buy, not that you don’t ever want to buy a new car. If you can afford it, it’s great. But if you don’t think that having a brand new car is not something that’s really all that important to you, because when you drive it off the lot, it drops in price immediately. You can buy it a year old with only 10,000 miles on it. And it’s basically $20,000, or maybe $5,000 less than you would have paid for it if you had bought it a year earlier. So if you can get the loan through, say an insurance company or an outside lender, that gives you a really good deal. That’s probably the better way to go than just walk into a dealer and buy one off the lot and have them do the financing for you. But again, I’m not a financial advisor. That seems kind of the way that I worked in my life. I was trying to you, we try to finagle things. We feel like we don’t have many choices, but we have so many choices. It’s just a matter of do we answer on your own. Listening to the Positive Productivity Podcast for financial advice. That’s your research.

Kim Sutton: But it’s so important, because there’s so much fluff out there on social media. And something that I learned in the last few years is that I needed to start unfollowing people who were only talking about how much money they were bringing in. But as we’ve already covered here, there’s so much money that’s also going out. I mean, I had to not claim any of my expenses for a year in the business so that I could get my house. Oh, my gosh, that would hurt so bad. I mean, there’s 2 to 4000 a month. I mean, I’ve already disclosed how much I pay for a house payment, 850. 2 to 4000 a month for expenses. Oh, my gosh, that would really hurt. But no, we don’t need to drive the newest cars, we don’t need to drive them off the new car lot to be successful. And I really believe that once we get that financial security, financial security doesn’t mean 10, 20, 30, $100,000 in the bank. It just means that you’re in the black for change instead of being in the red. Rob, I have a 1996 GMC conversion van.

Rob Dionne: Awesome.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. The thing was created before I even graduated high school, but it cost a whole 1300. And since we’ve only had to put, well, gas probably cost us more than the cost of the van. And then I ran into the curb one day and the tire flew off. So we had to pay for that. But besides that, we haven’t had to put anything else in, don’t let me drive your car, that’s all I’m saying.

Rob Dionne: I do the same thing. I drive a 2003 Toyota Matrix. I just don’t even make those anymore. I just drive an old beater, my wife has an O4. I would love to drive a Mercedes, I would love to drive $100,000 Mercedes, but it’s not a big thing for me. It’s an ego thing. There’s a lot of people in Los Angeles that make a lot less money than I do, that they’re driving around Mazda, driving around beautiful BMWs that are like the latest model. They’re dropping $800 a month on their lease payment plus another $200 a month on their insurance, they’re in for a grand just for their car. They’re not necessarily saving any money. And if you want to live the life, there’s a whole philosophy around, hey, I just want to enjoy my life as it is. Great, enjoy your life as it is. I just have this fear in me that I’m going to get old because there’s no guarantees. I don’t work a union job like my dad did. When I’m 60 years old, I haven’t been putting money into a pension, I have a 401k that we put money into, but that’s not where my big payout is going to go. So I have to figure out other alternatives. I’m not going to eat up the money that I have right now to drive around a flashy car so people think that I’m wealthy. I just need to get from here to work from here, to the store, whatever, and then go up to Santa Barbara once in a while for wine tasting. I don’t care about anything else, but that’s just me. Other people have their own, they have priorities around why they want to spend money on clothes, or other things. People also rent apartments way outside of their means, which is bananas to me. I know they want to live in a safe neighborhood, but you’re paying like $3,000 a month for a one bedroom apartment, and you only make like $5,000 a month. I don’t even know where to start.

Kim Sutton: That’s really scary to me.

Rob Dionne: That’s not abnormal, especially in LA because it’s so inflated here. The price is so obnoxious. Yeah, actually kind of pisses people off the price. But anyway, in terms of the housing market and all that stuff, you can go round and round in circles forever, and drive you nuts. But in terms of just talking about your show, and basically not having to be perfect throughout the process realize that this is a process, you’re figuring this stuff out. Whether it be your financial situation, whether it be your health, which is a lot of the stuff that we talk about on our show. I mean, not to say completely segue, but that’s a really big thing people get really overwhelmed with not knowing how to do these things, whether it be how to buy a house, how to lose 20 pounds, how to be healthy without feeling sick or tired all the time. There are answers out there, but there’s no one answer for everyone. We can give you financial advice, but that doesn’t mean that’s going to work for you. I can give you health advice, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. What I can say is that there are options out there. The only thing you have to do as an individual is start trying them. Basically, we’re these little individual experiments where we get to test things out see if they work for us. If they work, great. Keep doing it, double it down. If it doesn’t work, then switch your tactics and change course. You had a Melonie, the girl who was on recently on your show? Melonie DeRose.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. Melonie DeRose.

Rob Dionne: I was listening to that episode yesterday on my way home from work. The only time I listen to podcasts is while I’m driving. So she was saying something like, at some point, she realized in her business that she needed to change, she needed to change course, she had multiple, she had the fitness business and then she had gotten into these nutrition bars, those Empact nutrition bars. And she was like, we need to change tact right now, my husband and I need to change tact, we need to adjust for what’s happening and move, and start moving, which meant that she had to give up some things. And for a lot of us, we get so wrapped up in what’s happening in our lives. We feel like we can’t move, we’re like chained to it. And she made a really good example of, when new opportunities present themselves, when new information presents itself, we can change course, and it’s up to us. Don’t listen to that story that says that I’m stuck being this person, or that I can’t do this because there are no limitations. The only limitation is the one inside of our mind that keeps us there. We are responsible, and I know that’s such a difficult thing because people deal with anxiety, they deal with depression, they deal with all kinds of other stuff. 

What it comes to like relationships and families, and there’s a lot of things sometimes holding us back and keeping us down. But as long as you understand that you do have the opportunity and you have the the willpower, or not the willpower, that’s not even the right word, but you have the choice as to how you deal with every single situation, your choice on how you deal with it is the one true power you have. You’re not necessarily a victim of it, you are only a victim of it if you basically let yourself be right. So you figure out your living situation, and your mortgage, and everything, even though the bank puts you back a year, that just gives you another year to kind of really set yourself up for the next one. 

And the same thing for like, if somebody gets injured and they’re healthy, and they’re losing weight, and they’re really excited about the fact that they’re on course, and then they slip and fall and sprained their ankle, and they’re laid up for the next six weeks, they can’t do hardly any exercise, well, there’s another opportunity that is just presented itself to you in terms of really focusing on your nutrition. Learning about something else, another way is to work out that eliminates you having to be up on your feet the entire time. So there’s all kinds of really, I mean, life just presents opportunities to us. We have to stay positive rather than focusing on the negative issues that are in front of us.

Kim Sutton: Amen to that. Yeah, were you in the room, Rob, when I shared the story at the New Media Summit? I asked everybody, the participants, to raise their hand if they had ever received a disconnect notice, or an eviction notice?

Rob Dionne: A disconnect notice? Oh, no, I don’t think so.

Kim Sutton: There was a small panel, and Steve was asking us what changes had come into our life when we had hired a coach. So I started by asking everybody when I was given my opportunity to talk, I asked people to raise their hand if they had ever in their life as an entrepreneur received a disconnect notice, or an eviction notice? How many people do you think that were there? Like 150 to 200 somewhere?

Rob Dionne: Yeah. 150 participants. I think it was 190 in total with–

Kim Sutton: 3 people raise their hands, maybe.

Rob Dionne: That they had received a disconnect notice?

Kim Sutton: Yep.

Rob Dionne: What’s the disconnect notice, is that an eviction?

Kim Sutton: Electric or gas, pay your bill or else it’s gonna be shut off?

Rob Dionne: I got you.

Kim Sutton: Okay. So we have our financial struggles, and I’m not trying to bring this down, this is actually the laugh at it. When you’re facing those struggles, just like Rob said, you can choose what you’re going to do with it. We had our water shut off. But a year and a half ago, we just didn’t have the money to pay the bill. On the day that the water was shut off, it snowed. So we, my husband, actually told the kids to go get the snow there. Like he told the older boys, you can pee in the backyard, but bring the snow inside so mom can use the toilet. But you better believe, I didn’t climb into bed and cry about it. We’ve found the way where there’s a will, there’s a way. I never really understood that expression until I became an entrepreneur. But when there’s a will, there’s a way. We had the water back on that day, and it was a matter of $40. I’m not going to pretend that it was a $1,000 water bill, I’m talking about $40. We have had those struggles where we didn’t have the $40, but when there’s a will, there’s a way. So don’t let any of these little blips stop you ever.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And even if it’s getting your water turned off, obviously, that’s scary. Especially when you have that many kids to just feel like, when is this going to come back on. There’s the scariness goes up from there. It could be a situation that’s much more dire, or potentially maybe financially, it’s much more bigger. Not just $40, but maybe it is $10,000, something that could really sink you. But there’s always a solution. And then if there isn’t a solution, you have to be able to be the adult, or like the nurturing voice inside your head and just be able to tell yourself, I’m going to be okay, no matter what happens. I know, if we’ve gotten this far in our life, if we’re 40 years old, you have five kids, you’d be able to do whatever you want to do. You’re able to put a podcast on every single day, a week, if you’re able to do certain things, you obviously are capable, very capable. And there hasn’t been a point in your life, we always are afraid of the catastrophe. Usually, it comes down to like, we think we’re either gonna die, be homeless, be alone for the rest of our lives. But if that’s just your fear, that’s not reality. All the evidence is saying that, no, I have been able to handle everything up until now. Maybe the water gets turned off for a few hours. I’m able to bounce back, and I’m able to make the decisions that are going to get me out of that. I just need to be presented with the problem. And how I deal with that problem and solve that problem is going to be up to me. I just have to be okay with not knowing how this is going to be solved. This is the thing that drives people nuts. 

When you talk about anxiety, it’s the not knowing that gives you anxiety. When we live in the past, we live in a state of depression, we’re focusing on that. When we live in the future, we live in a state of anxiety because we don’t know how this is going to end. So we’re always trying to future cast, that we’re always trying to figure out what is going to happen. I’m guilty of this, I make lists, I plan, I try to come up with every possible scenario. So this way, I’m not caught off guard, and I don’t have to be, I basically try to eliminate the idea, the possibility of me having to make a decision in the moment that’s going to scare me. There’s no evidence in my life that says that I can’t handle the situation at the moment. There’s no evidence in my life where I’ve dropped the ball like such a catastrophe, like I’m now homeless, or that I’ve done something where my wife is like, I don’t ever want to talk to you again. It really is about just trusting that in the moment you will be able to solve the problem. And in the moment, you cannot future cast, you cannot figure that stuff out in advance. You could chip away at things, but the only way to be happy is to live in the present. You live in the past, you’re in depression. You live in the future, you’re in anxiety. You live in the present, that’s the only time you truly can be happy.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I had a guest on the show, Linda Lairharth, I hope I’m saying her last name right. She leads the Institute for Mindfulness. Listeners, I wasn’t prepared to talk about this, but it’s all about being in the now. And when I was reading through her bio, and I started thinking about it, even just things like taking a shower. So many days, I’m thinking about what I have to do next, what I have to do next, how to get the kids out of the door. But when I was reading her bio, it made me realize, oh, my gosh, I can just stand in the shower and enjoy it. Let’s just bring the mind back to now because I do have one more question before a couple final questions. Rob, how often do you do your plans to stay on track? Or are you constantly course correcting?

Rob Dionne: Yes. Who has plans? It’s funny. Okay. So I’m listening to your episode about anxiety, and you were talking about how you never had anxiety until after you started having kids and you didn’t really experience anxiety. I don’t know how that’s possible, Kim. Literally, in my car it was just like, she never had anxiety before this. You’re describing anxiety, and has been my entire bias. I went to a therapist, and I talked about this on my show, so that there’s full transparency there. The only way I really think that you can get to the bottom and really solve a lot of the issues that you’re dealing with is by really digging in and finding why you do the things you do. And then therefore, when something comes up for you and you have anxiety, then you’re like, oh, I see, this is attached to that. And that’s not the reality of this situation, and you’re having this in real time in the now having a conversation with yourself going, I have no reason to be anxious,, or I have no reason to be upset right now. This problem or this information that I just took in doesn’t define me. It’s attached to a story that I’ve created for myself from childhood. 

One of the things I discovered really early on was, I think where my anxiety came from. I’m not blaming my parents, but I came from a family with four older sisters. My sisters would drive my mom nuts. I was the youngest, my oldest sister’s 10 years older than me. So when I was five years old, my oldest sister was 15. She was a teenager, and that’s what teenagers do. They drive their parents crazy. I made a decision very early on that I wasn’t going to be the child that drove my parents crazy. I was going to be the child that made my parents happy and made their life easier. I made that decision very early on, like I didn’t want to be, I always wanted to help them in a way, or I just wanted to actually, wasn’t even helped them. I wanted to just do everything on my own so they didn’t have to worry about me. And so my parents, they didn’t really read to me when I was a kid. I had reading comprehension issues. I had to take specific classes for that. There’s a lot of insecurity around that for as a kid, because I knew that I was struggling to basically get through a book and actually grasp all of it. So when I would have homework, it was tough. And my parents didn’t help me with homework. My dad, his first language was French Canadian. He moved here, he didn’t really read quickly. And I felt like if I asked him for help, it would be an uphill kind of conversation. I wouldn’t be able to get too much help from him. But my mom, she was always so busy with the other kids. And my mom is, I think I mentioned earlier, like I’m a little OCD. My mom definitely has that on another level. She’s always cleaning, she can’t sit down really for long periods of time. And she loves that lifestyle for herself, because she always feels like she’s got something going. 

But at the same time as a kid, it felt like I couldn’t really go and ask for that kind of help. It wasn’t really there so I had to do all that stuff on my own. I would come home from school, I would start my homework, I would do it. If I couldn’t get it done, which was quite often, I couldn’t get all of it done in the right amount of time. I would wake up at maybe 5:30, 6:00 o’clock in the morning, I would set an alarm, I would wake up and I would do my homework. Now, I’m talking when I was like 11, like maybe 10 or 11. I would wake up at that time in the morning and finish my homework, whether it was a book report, or whatever I needed to do. I would complete it in the morning before I went to school, because I didn’t want to bother my parents with it. I had all this anxiety that I was going to fail at school. And I knew my parents, it’s like at the time in the 80’s. Nowadays, parents are much more aware of putting pressure on the kids and going, hey, you know, you got a 90, that’s great. My mom, she generally would be like, why didn’t he give you a 95? Or if I got a 99, why couldn’t the teacher just give you one more point to give you 100?

Kim Sutton: Did your mom ever talk to your teachers?

Rob Dionne: No, she’d never talked to the teachers to like complain about things, to make sure that they were doing a better job. No, there was hardly any communication between my parents and my teacher, which actually probably would have helped. They never really did that because I never caused enough problems where my teachers would contact my parents. The teachers had no idea how much work I was doing on my own. They had no idea how hard I was working in order to just turn out what I was turning out. I was waking up in the morning. 

Now, here’s where my anxiety came from. I was applauded for doing that by my parents. I would wake up early in the morning, and then my dad would get up at 5:30 in the morning as well to go to work. He would see me, he’d be like, are you getting your work done? I’m like, yeah, I didn’t complete, I didn’t finish last night. It’s like, okay. And then he would go off to work. My mom would get up, she would see me, and if we were having a dinner party or something like that, and they were friends over, my mom likes bragging about her kids. It’s one of the things she does. I think all moms do. But she would say to her kids, I mean, say to her friends, Rob is such a good student. If he doesn’t get his work done, he wakes up early, he makes it up, he gets it done. So basically, that was ingrained in me that that’s normal. That’s what I’m supposed to do. If I don’t finish my work, I have to wake up early, sacrifice sleep, sacrifice my own personal joy. Sometimes as a kid, in order to get all the work done. And that’s the methodology that I’ve created that I created going through my adulthood. And you realize that you build all of these things. These are tools that you build that get you through your life. In order to get things done, you pile it on, this big thing of anxiety. And anxiety is what drives you. 

Melonie, I think I keep saying her name. Melonie is talking about how she would be fear based. The reason why she works so hard is because it’s fear based, and that’s not a good thing. It’s not good to feel like the reason you’re working so hard is because you don’t want to fail. That’s a really bad habit to fall into. And I struggle with that. The balance between not wanting to fail and wanting to end doing this because I really love doing it. And I have to find that line so much. And as an entrepreneur, that is a really tough road to plow when you don’t have the foundation from childhood to be nice to yourself. Does that make sense?

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Rob Dionne: So we have those habits as a kid that drive us into adulthood. And then we realize there’s some point, whether it’s in our 20’s, or 30’s, or 40’s, sometimes in our 50’s, we realize all these tools that I have don’t work right. They’re tools that I had in my tool belt or in my toolbox that I took with me from childhood. They do not function well in adulthood. There’s like a New Yorker, I don’t know about you, in Rochester, it’s funny when I see New Yorkers, there’s a certain thing that New Yorkers do or they’re very defensive. People say like they’re so aggressive, and New Yorkers are so aggressive, and I think that that’s true in a sense. I’m not like lumping all New Yorkers into this, but I can see it in some of the New Yorkers that I know. I can I just look at them and I call bullcrap. I look at them and just like, no, no, I don’t believe that what you’re saying right now is true. I think what you’re doing right now is completely defensive, has nothing to do with the situation, everything to do with you feel uncomfortable and out of place right now, and you don’t know how to handle this situation. You’re getting angry and defensive, and coming at me really hard. And this is people across the board, not just New Yorkers. But I can see it in New Yorkers because I’m from there, and I don’t buy it. And that’s a really interesting thing to develop over time. And that’s only because of the work that I’ve done on myself. When people come at me and they’re aggressive, and they’re mean, and it’s like, wow, I can really see how insecure you are. You’re just laying it all out there. Everything you’re saying right now is not about me, it’s about you. And it’s just the end. Because if I internalize that and take that for myself, which a lot of people do, and then they go back to the drawing board, and they’re like, why am I like this? Why do I do this? It has nothing to do with you. 

When people are digging into you and putting you down, it has everything to do with them. These are our patterns, these are our lifestyles. The way we deal with stuff, that’s how they deal with it. They don’t want to deal with feeling insecure, feeling stupid, they don’t want to deal with that so they turn it around on other people. And you, me, we all have different ways in which we deal with our lives, and anxiety is one of them. For me, a way to deal with stuff is to try to figure everything out and be perfect. And that is not a positive way, that’s not a healthy way to live our life that’s why I think therapy is a really great thing. I think having a very open communicative relationship with your spouse, your husband, your wife, whoever is a really important part of the puzzle. And then creating the friendships around you that allow you to be open, like the fact that you and I could talk like this and be open I think it also speaks to the level of depth that you’re allowed to go to that you said multiple times in the show today like, I’ve never said this before, which is amazing, Kim. I don’t think you know how amazing that is as a person. When people are so unbelievably you’re doing this in front of thousands of people, you’re doing this for your entire audience, people would not say that I go to see a therapist. Their pride has got them so wrapped up where they wouldn’t admit how they struggled and they couldn’t pay their water bill at one point. It is really liberating to be able to talk about this stuff and not feel ashamed. And that if we could just get people to that point, and that’s where a lot of this comes into, this is why I think one of the reasons why I love talking about health so much and helping people with their health because it’s not about what you need to eat, Kim. 

We all know that like eating Cheetos, and Doritos, and drinking Coca Cola all day is not the smartest choice. And yet, we do that on a regular basis, then we pretend that we just need to know what’s healthy. And now, maybe there is a little bit of learning about what is healthy. But in reality, it just gets down to why are we doing this? Why am I making the choice to eat cheeseburgers three times a week when I know that I want to lose 40 pounds? Why am I doing that? What’s got me doing that? What tape is playing over and over my head that has me doing that? So this is a lot of the stuff that we do we talk about on our show that I think is different when you go and you listen to other podcasts about fitness and nutrition. We’re a husband and wife team that are like no bullcrap. This is what we are dealing with, this is what our clients are dealing with, and this is the reality of being healthy. I think that’s the conversation to be having.

Kim Sutton: Well, I just had to throw something in there. I have seen such a, I don’t think parallel is the right word, but a connection between being healthy physically and being healthy financially. Because when we’re taking the steps to become healthier financially, then we’re not putting in all that often. We don’t have a lot of extra anxiety, and depression, and constant worry, at least this is my own experience with anxiety. And that can free up so much space to start taking care of ourselves physically.

Rob Dionne: Can I make a suggestion here? So I have clients that are worth over a billion dollars, I have clients that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. and money doesn’t make life easier. Because that’s one less stress. We make money the big stress in our lives. It is unbelievable. It’s so debilitating. If you cannot pay a bill, emotionally, physically and financially, it’s just debilitating. You’re just scrambling and trying to find out how you’re gonna pay for that thing, or save up for that thing if you want to change your life. There’s so much pressure we put on ourselves, but I know people that are worth lots and lots of money that do not make health a priority in their life at all.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. Rob, I’m not saying that money is going to make us healthier or happier. But having some sense of mental control over our money situation, I even had to reach the point where, okay, this bill is not going to get paid today, but I can’t keep on worrying about it. I can keep on worrying about it, or I can go work on the things that I know I can control today.

Rob Dionne: And I’ll add to that a little bit, like in terms of the health aspect of this because that’s something that we really focus on in our life. No matter where you are in your life, you’re going to have stress, there’s always going to be stress, there’s always gonna be something like a deadline or something you have to get done. Maybe the kids are sick, or whatever it is, there’s just always stuff that is going to be impeding on your day to day that is going to try to slow you down. It’s very rare that we just like, oh, I got all day long to do stuff, and I can go out to lunch with friends, and do this, and go to the beach, and all that stuff. Those days are very, very few and far between for most people. For most people, it’s a grind, Day in, day out grind. From the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed every day is a grind. And they’re trying to financially pay for everything, squeezing all the friends that they want to see, spending enough time with their kids and their families. So this way, they don’t feel like they’re completely disconnected. All of this is common. Very, very common. The thing is that you have to not use specifically, but you listening have to choose if being healthy is going to be a priority, whether you have a ton of money, or you have zero money. Is health going to be a priority? At some point in your life, this is just a fact, at some point in your life, health is going to become a priority. And it’s going to be a priority because stuffs about to go wrong and you’re going to start realizing how important it was to have either a strong body to, oh my God, if I didn’t spend the last 20 years eating like this, this wouldn’t be an issue for me right now. It’s like you have to make the choice when it’s going to be a priority in your life. And what I mean is like, when is that going to be? The real choice is right now. Then the moment is now for you to make that choice.

 And it’s not a switch, it’s not a turn it on, I’m healthy. And now, 180 degrees turn and out. Now, I like eating bean sprouts. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a slow course change, your big ship in the ocean that needs to turn around, and you need to change course, it’s a slow turn. But that means learning. That means just like paying off your debt. You chip away at it, and you eventually get into the part where not only are you not paying off debt, but you’re actually saving money. We’re not burning money every day, and the same thing for your health. You get to the place where you’re actually continually getting healthier, you’re making progress. And for a lot of people, this is where they struggle because the turning of that ship is, I’ve been on a diet for the last two weeks, a month, and I haven’t really lost all that much weight. Or I’ve been trying to use these new things, and I haven’t really seen the results that I want to see. So therefore, I’m going to stop doing it. Unfortunately, being healthy, there’s no end point, there’s no goal, overall finish line goal. I want to be healthy for the rest of my life, and that’s a choice we have to make, whether you’re rich or poor, have zero time, have tons of time. It’s a priority that you want to add to your life just like spending time with your kids or brushing your teeth. That’s something you do, you have to do it. And we just made some reason, I guess a lot of us we’re brought up not being healthy is just an easy thing to continue on with, like not practicing any of those things is an easy thing to continue on with because we never had to in the past. And then it just keeps getting further, and further, and further away from us, unfortunately.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. Rob, I’m going to put in the show notes. Listeners, listen to Episode 275, stop short cutting your healthcare. Rob, just a month ago, I was actually in the hospital for a couple days because at 38, I just turned 39. At 38, I started experiencing the symptoms of a heart attack.

Rob Dionne: Come on. Really?

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah. I had hypothyroidism since birth, and I had been neglecting my own health care. I wasn’t going to see my endocrinologist, I was taking the shortcuts going to see the local clinic at the grocery store because it was right here and my thyroid levels got all out of whack. So in the hospital, they were like, have you been taking your medicine? Well, yeah, I’ve been taking it. Just stop, stop shortcutting your healthcare, stop shortcutting your finances and start, I don’t want to call it a fast track to success, like financially in health, because there is no reason for either. Just stop shortcutting yourself because the shortcut does not lead anywhere good.

Rob Dionne: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Not even anywhere. Just doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s a dead end. Yeah, you’ll get there. You’ll be racing up and you’ll realize, wow, there’s nowhere else to go. This is it.

Kim Sutton: I just have to put it in there. They’re not going to have to put it on, but then you’re going to be like, oh shit, what did I do? That’s gonna be, and that’s what laying in that bed. That’s what I was thinking, oh shit.

Rob Dionne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s scary. It’s a scary thing when your body starts telling you it doesn’t like what you’re doing. This is the thing that bothers me the most, I work with people over 300 pounds, I work with one on one and it’s a slow transition because you have to unlearn a lot of things. It’s just like what I was talking about with therapy, there’s so much therapy involved in the way we are, losing weight and getting to a place where we really want to be, yes, we are take a pill kind of society, we are a quick fix kind of society to get rich, fast kind of society, everybody’s selling it. And it’s such a cluster F bomb of a place for us to live in when it comes to, how do I do this? And when you google search anything, it’s like the people who are paying the biggest amount of money, you’re going to see first. You’re not going to get the actual people that could help you, unfortunately. You’re just gonna see the people who are advertising really fast, really well to have the best marketing. So that’s the scary thing when it comes to building a business people. They’re going to tell you you could do it fast and furious. And in eight weeks, you could be making $20,000 a month. And then people are going to tell you in terms of your health, you can lose 20 pounds in like two weeks, and you’ll be healthy for the rest of your life. And then that’s it, bandaid on it. Like don’t worry about it, you’re going to be good. You’ll live till 90. That doesn’t exist. 

What’s his name? The Godfather of health and wellness was the old guy that died just recently, he was like 93, I couldn’t remember his name. He said only things that are man made, like that was his rule. I mean, don’t eat things that were man made. Basically, don’t eat anything from a factory, something like a man had to create, or man or person had to create. He said, just eat like, basically eat a whole food diet, and you’re good to go. And that was like his whole entire philosophy, which is like genius back in the 50’s. We were all tuning into microwave dinners, and everybody was figuring out what to do like packaged mashed potatoes, and nobody was focusing on real foods. Everybody was focusing on convenience. And all the companies were focusing on convenience. And this guy, Jack Lalanne is like, don’t fall into that trap. Real food, that’s what we need. It’s not unbelievably complicated. When things start going wrong and you have thyroid issues, if you have autoimmune diseases, which is very, very common these days, then you need to get a little more complicated in your health and your wellness. But if you just want to get healthy, there’s just very simple rules to live by. Do you want me to tell you what they are?

Kim Sutton: Please.

Rob Dionne: So don’t eat processed food. Don’t eat added sugar. So basically, what that leaves is basically whole foods, all kinds of meat, fish, vegetables, nuts and seeds. If you are a person who can digest grains, I don’t necessarily, we don’t subscribe to people having grains, but basically just eat real food, whole foods. If it was alive at one point, whether it be growing on a tree or some kind of vegetation, or breathing at some point, eat it. If not, don’t eat it. If you never saw a Dorito tree, then you guarantee, you wouldn’t be able to get my [inaudible] plant my ass underneath that thing and just be like, this is where I’m gonna go.

Kim Sutton: I know.

Rob Dionne: Under that Dorito tree. Same thing with Coca Cola, as society, we don’t really drink water. It’s kind of like we do now a little bit, like in the bottled sense, but like we are gearing away from that. And sports drinks are just, again, just added sugar. So that’s like the big thing. And then it comes to, if you have a lot of weight to lose, you don’t necessarily need to be hitting the gym and doing some crazy workouts. What you need to do is just create some habits that are like physical habits. And there was this guy Dan John I had on my show is really well known in the fitness world. He was like, one of the habits he has people do is, I want you to get dressed into your workout clothes, shorts, and t shirt, put your sneakers on. And especially, if you have a lot of weight to lose, I want you to walk out to the driveway and back for two weeks. Literally, just walk out to the end of the driveway and back for two weeks. And then after two weeks, for the next two weeks, I want you to walk to the end of the street and back. And then for the next two weeks, I want you to walk around the block fully. So eventually, what you’re doing is you’re blocking out time that is yours for doing something physical, and it starts out really small. Putting your clothes on takes you maybe two minutes to do. Walking into the driveway and back maybe takes a minute. So three minutes out of your day. Now, if you cannot do that, if you cannot make that a priority, then I don’t really know how to help you because you have to help yourself. So that’s where that’s where, you know, just these little things, eating whole foods. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially if you live in a family like mine. 

When I was growing up, spaghetti and meatballs, like every Sunday, bread was on the table, every single day, cereal for breakfast, doughnuts on during the week, sandwiches every day in my lunchbox, like that’s hard to do. There’s a lot of transitions, but you do one thing at a time. You start to slowly turn the course of the ship, and then you head back the other way towards being healthy. But those are the things that you start moving towards eating whole foods, and moving and doing something every day, and then you could start elaborating, then you could start getting a little more crazy and trying new things to really start fine tuning your health and wellness. But just try to change the course. P90X is great, but it’s so fast and furious. I don’t really necessarily subscribe to their nutrition style that they offer there. It’s more like a fat free diet or a low fat diet, that’s not my thing. People do this for two, three months, and they have no support systems after that. Now, what do you do? You’re kind of left high and dry, trying to figure this stuff out on your own in a lifestyle. That has never changed. Those are the big needle movers for most people. And I think that that’ll really help a lot of people if they just start making those smaller choices.

Kim Sutton: I want to ask one last question, what about accountability? What do you think is the best way to hold yourself accountable to make these changes?

Rob Dionne: Yeah, yeah. So here’s an example for me. I have the same struggles as everybody else. In the past, I’ve done multiple things. One was I’ve signed up for races, 5K 10K, half marathons, triathlons, mud runs. I signed up for these things. Two months away, I have to do it. I paid money, I’m going to show up on the day. So I know I have to train for that. So that’s one thing. So if I’m doing an Olympic try, I’m swimming a mile in the ocean, I’m running for six miles, and I’m biking for 24 miles, I gotta be ready for that. I can’t just show up and think I’m gonna be able to do it so I got to train for that. That’s one way. So you basically just sidestepped accountability, you made yourself accountable to that one moment in time. However, when the day comes, if you don’t have another race setup for maybe three, or four, or five months in future from there, well, then you might fall off. There’s a small hole there. For me, I signed up for a Men’s Physique competition where I gave myself nine months to basically gain a whole bunch of muscle mass and then drop it all down. I’d never done that. That was when I was 35. And I said to myself at 36, I want to be in the best shape that I’ve ever been in my life. I did that later in life, after I had gained 30 pounds of muscle mass and then dropped off a whole bunch of body fat, and looked the best I’d ever looked at my life at 36 years old. And I’d never done that before. I’m not gonna say that I don’t have a history of understanding how to work out. Obviously, I’m a personal trainer. I was an athlete as a kid growing up, but I struggled with my weight in my late 20’s, early 30’s because I didn’t know how to eat right. That was something that I’ve slowly changed over the course of over 10 years, it was a lot of learning for me. I used to show up at the track and eat a cheeseburger or like a chili dog right before I would go run with friends. Like I’m doing something active, but I’m just gonna have a chili dog before I do it. So I have some energy. That was my philosophy around that. 

But in terms of other accountability that you can have, you can join groups of people, you need to find a community that are all  minded that want to do the same thing you want to do, and that are going to take action and help you stay accountable. That’s another one. You could hire a trainer. That’s another way to stay because then, that’s what I do, that’s what my clients do. They pay money, a lot of money to hire someone to make sure that they’re doing what they should do, and that nobody’s going to be accountable to somebody that they do not respect. That’s a really important lesson that I learned over time. You have to respect and not want to let down the person that you’re being accountable to. So really being accountable to your husband and your wife saying, hey, they just make sure that I don’t eat cheese or I don’t eat ice cream for the next month. And it’s like, okay, yeah, great, so we won’t keep it in the house. So then you bring home the ice cream and your husband’s like, hey, what are you doing? Why are you eating ice cream? You told me that you don’t want to eat ice cream, why are you doing that? You should throw it away, and you’re like, Mom, I’m just gonna finish this one. There’s no accountability there because there’s no power struggle. There’s no you letting him down and feel about letting him down. So you want to outsource the accountability, that’s usually one of the best things to do. 

And then yeah, just making decisions in your life that are really kind of money down, setting a time limit when you’re going to complete something, announcing it publicly that you’re going to be doing it. So if you signed up for 5k, or 10k, invited friends to do it with you, you got to show up on that day to do that thing that everybody said that they all showed up there to do with you. So that adds some accountability. You have to kind of trick yourself into doing it. And then eventually, over time, you build up the habit of exercising, working out. And only then will it kind of be this perpetual motion that you’re like, what if I didn’t run today and I feel really sluggish? Actually, running makes me feel good. Then you start associating being physically active or eating healthfully to actually feeling a certain way, which I’m telling that’s a whole nother conversation. People are not even paying attention to how they feel compared to what they’re doing. So yeah, those are some ways in which to stay accountable. And we actually, not to like plugging it in, but we have this challenge that we’re hosting right now that I don’t know when this is going to be posted. I think you said like mid April, but we have a challenge like an eight week challenge. That is daily accountability. And the community is very, very small. They all post how their workouts went that day. They post how their nutrition went that day, whether they drank their water that day, whether they ate their vegetables that day. We pick these very, very specific kinds of habits that people want to build, and we do daily accountability. Everybody checks it, and then weekly accountability. So this way, nobody falls through the cracks. And that’s something that we really focus on. I think that’s more important than knowing what you should eat, having someone basically to answer or at least if you can’t do it yourself, does that make sense?

Kim Sutton: That makes absolute sense. And actually, your episode is going to be going live at the end of March 2018. Listeners, if you want the links to anything that we are talking about, go to the kimsutton.com/pp302. I have been sitting here thinking, oh, my gosh, should I do this? Should I not? I do have a quick question before I say what I was thinking though, what about coffee? Coffee Beans, they grow, does that mean they lived? Do I need to give up coffee?

Rob Dionne: Yeah. Actually, I have noticed. Okay, so if you know that coffee, that’s a good question. So if you know that coffee creates anxiety for you, if it literally leaves you jittery and feeling terrible, first of all, maybe coffee is not good for you. Maybe it’s not the best thing for you if you’re a high anxiety person. Now, it’s also the quality of coffee you’re drinking, Kim. A lot of times, people are buying Folgers crystals, they’re buying Maxwell House, they’re buying this really junky, we don’t even know if it’s fully coffee, right? It tastes like a kind of wood and coffee mixed together. There’s some great coffee companies that you can invest in online, but you can also go to your roaster and buy coffee beans. 

From in LA, we have really high end, like pour over coffee places. You can like Intelligentsia or like Andante, there’s just a Blue Bottle, they’re out here, you can buy their coffee. And if you’re only drinking one cup of coffee a day, it’s gonna be cheaper than even going to Starbucks and buying a cup of coffee. Don’t buy your coffee at Starbucks, they burn their beans, they do it so they all taste the same. They want to make sure it’s uniform throughout all of their stores, and they don’t pick the best quality. It’s a franchise, it’s a chain, they’re not going to be hand picking. But if you go to a place like Blue Bottle, when you buy their beans, it might cost you 15 bucks for the week to get through a week of beans. Because that’s maybe a half a pound or a pound of beans right for them. Well, that’ll last you an entire week. If you go into Starbucks three times, that’s 15 bucks. And if you’re drinking it with just, say a little bit of cream, I don’t mind half and half or full cream. But when we start getting into this, again, process, so you squeeze it, it comes out of the cow, that’s milk, that’s raw milk, we have to pasteurize it slightly. So this way, you can buy raw milk, which is fantastic. We highly recommend raw milk. If you can digest milk, that’s totally cool. But if you were going to get it out of the cow straight, the more processing it has, then the further away it gets from mother nature, then the bigger problem I have with it. So if you’re getting 1% milk, if you’re getting skim milk, fat free milk, that’s not how milk was designed. So we want it in its most natural form. 

Again, if you can digest it, if it doesn’t make you gassy, bloated, doesn’t give you like eczema, these are all autoimmune issues that you’re going to run down, run into down the line if you are eating foods that consistently, or drinking things that consistently give you allergic reactions, you are going to come down with an autoimmune disease. Guess what? Arthritis is autoimmune. So you have arthritis and you’re consistently eating or drinking foods that are creating inflammation, and inflammation could be in the form of like, I have my belly swells up after I drink coffee. I have no idea why. Or I get gassy around 10:00 o’clock in the morning. Every morning, I have no idea why. Well, it’s probably because you have milk in your coffee, and you’re not paying attention to the fact that that’s the thing that does it every single day. My sister had the same thing. She’s like, Rob, I’m so gassy right after lunch, like 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. I have no idea why. I think I’m allergic to ham or something at school. Because she was a teacher. I’m like, what else are you eating? She’s like, well, I have a ham sandwich with chips. She’s like, do you think it’s the chips? And I go, I don’t think it’s the chips, she goes. And then I have like, they have chocolate milk and something else. And I was like, Did you try not drinking chocolate milk? So she cut that out and literally the gas stopped immediately.

Kim Sutton: Oh, my goodness.

Rob Dionne: This is the thing that I don’t think people will say to you all the time. Not necessarily you, but me all the time. They’ll say I’m just a gassy person, just the way I am, my whole family’s gassy. And if they say that to you, that just means that they have done zero work on figuring out what makes them gassy. They just accept that. I have eczema. I have a lot of acne, that’s another one. I have arthritis. nothing I could do about it. Doctor says nothing I could do about it getting old. These are what the doctors don’t talk about. They don’t talk about how your food, it’s the only thing we put in our body. Why would it not affect how our body runs? It’s mind boggling to me. It’s like our doctors are, they take one nutrition class, so therefore, they don’t even mention nutrition. They try to give us pills, or they try to cut us open in order to solve these problems. But in reality, if I dumped gasoline with sugar in my car and expected it to run, it’s going to eventually just come to a stop and stop working. That’s what happens with our body. The only things we can put in our body is fuel, either liquids or solid foods. And if they are not optimal for our specific body. If you are Ferrari, you run on one kind of gasoline. If you’re a Hugo, you run on a different kind of gasoline. We put higher grades in there in different people. So certain people are Ferrari’s they need, they need very, very specific types of food, very specific types of liquids that they can consume in order to make sure that that Ferrari runs properly. But we don’t want to do that. 

Most people don’t want to do that because they’re buying into the fact that this is just the way I am. And it’s really unfortunate to me, it drives me bananas. People have to unlearn this. They have to unlearn this thing about themselves that they think is normal. Most people don’t care that they have, I had a woman that I worked with one time, she had celiac. And if you’re not familiar with celiac, it basically means you have a complete gluten intolerance. You cannot consume gluten and it just throws your entire body off. You have diarrhea, you have all kinds of stuff. And there was a woman that she said her sister’s like, she realized this about herself, and her sisters also have the same issue. However, her sister likes the fact that she’s celiac because she poops out all of her poop, like it keeps her thin. She likes her disease keeps her thin. And it’s like, oh, yeah, where do you go with that person because she’s completely created a lifestyle around this that saves her from ever having to gain weight. And because the most important thing is the weight, not necessarily the health. So flash forward 20 years from now, a nice, skinny girl looks whatever is going to have all kinds of problems. And that’s just not okay with me, that just drives me bananas. I don’t know.

Kim Sutton: Rob, when I was in the hospital, even though I have, as I already said, I’ve been taking my thyroid medicine, but my body just isn’t accepting it for this month for March of 2018. I am on the same diet that I’ve been on, I’ll just call it the lazy diet, okay. And at the end of the month, I’m being tested for celiac. So one way or another, like even if the tests come back negative for celiac, for the month of April, I will be going gluten free because I did not realize that celiac or gluten intolerance does actually increase anxiety, or it can, and there are so many other symptoms. I mean, I’ll get hot feet in the evening after eating carbs. Or my ears will start itching, and I am done with that. And actually, eczema on my elbows, especially the commitment that I am going to make right now, talk about being accountable for my 40th birthday, March 2nd 2019, that’s I’m going to be the healthiest I’ve ever been on my 40th birthday. I am going to start working out six days a week.

Rob Dionne: Okay, that’s a big jump. I just want to point that out.

Kim Sutton: If that means to start, I need to go out and start walking around the block that I will do that. But eventually, I would like to be going to the gym at least three days a week, but I’m at least doing something physical besides walking to the kitchen the other three days.

Rob Dionne: Kim, I’ll invite you. So on April 23 is when this next challenge starts for us, for my group in this community that work that we’ve created. I’ll invite you and we’ll talk about the logistics of that. But it’s six days a week of bodyweight workouts, which are only 20 minutes. So the time commitment is not all that much, and it all depends, like when we’re talking about body weight, if we’re talking about pushups, it’s about how many you can do. It’s not about like, you have to crush you with push ups, so that’s very specific. The thing about going off on your own and doing six days of doing physical activity without anybody to answer to is going to be like, I’m not saying you don’t have the fortitude, but there’s going to be a moment where willpower is no longer there.

Kim Sutton: There’s a 24 Hour Fitness two minutes from my house with personal trainers there.

Rob Dionne: So if you want to talk about, if you want to change things around, I’ll invite you into this thing to do this with us. It’s eight weeks long, but it doesn’t necessarily end there. But like each individual challenge every three months, we do another eight weeks. And then we have a transition between where everything kind of, I don’t want to say dumb it down, but we take the notch down like five pegs. And we say, okay, now we’re maintaining between until the next challenge, and we’re going into a transition phase here. So everybody pulls back a little bit, they get to recover, they get their life back maybe a little bit if they feel like they were going fast and furious for eight weeks, and then they gear up for the next one. It’s an ongoing thing, the community stays there the entire time. So you have people to answer you, create friendships, you create circles around people that really do want to achieve the same things you want to achieve, and that’s what pulls you through on something like this. It’s nothing harder than doing it on your own. Especially when you’re trying to learn at the same time as doing. You do your business, how hard is it to do on your own, and at the same time have learned because you have to learn the entire time. It’s such an uphill battle that’s why we hire business coaches. People think that they have to learn, know how to be healthy. You think that you’re supposed to walk into 24 Hour Fitness and know what to do when you get there.

Kim Sutton: And look like an idiot.

Rob Dionne: Okay, let me hand you a computer, now go start an online business. We don’t realize that this is a learned thing. I’ve spent a lifetime learning this. People who are healthy have spent a lifetime learning it, or at least they’ve spent the last X amount of years learning how to get to where they are today. Don’t feel like you have to know this stuff right away. What I was saying, like jumping in six days a week on your own not knowing what you’re going to do, what you’re supposed to do. And then also not having a sounding board or going, should I do this, then you’re going to be learning along the way going, oh, maybe I should try this. Maybe I should try this. And then eventually, we kind of spin out and we get sick of it, and it’s unmanageable. So yeah, I’m saying that there’s the whole nutrition part of it, not just the workout stuff, and then the managing. How do you manage it into your lifestyle? Like it’s gotta exist within the world you already have. You’ve created a world. You got five kids running around, your husband’s out working a job, you are the breadwinner in your family, you are responsible, this is on your shoulders and you want to be healthy at the same time.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah. I have great grandbabies to see someday.

Rob Dionne: What does that look like for you? You have to create that world. It’s not on a dime. You can’t create your own dime, but it does take work. And it does take time so you have to start carving it out. And if you’re going to do it all on your own, it’s going to be really hard.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Rob Dionne: I’m not trying to discourage you.

Kim Sutton: I know. I’m not going at it alone. Well, number one, I have accountability. And number two, I have the support and the coaches. I need to do this for myself. And yes, I do.

Rob Dionne: Yes. 100%. 100%.

Kim Sutton: Yep. Yep. Oh, my gosh. Rob, I have taken so much of your time today, this has been absolutely amazing, though.

Rob Dionne: I have I have a thing, it’s a personal goal that no matter how many people have a podcast, I want to beat every single one of their numbers, but I don’t think I’m going to do it because I think you had, I’m scrolling down, it was an hour and 39 minutes, and I think he got me topped, and Cliff is amazing. I’m happy to be a second runner up to Cliff though. I’m gonna send him an email. I’m gonna say, you have 1:39, I’m gonna settle in at 1:30. I don’t know where we’re going because I have some amazing story that’s got you sitting on your chair, I don’t think we’ll pull that off.

Kim Sutton: We still have the intro and the outro. I actually do, I need to help you just one more quick second or a minute. Okay, listeners, I’ve shared this before on the podcast, and I just want you to keep this in mind. My husband, a year before we got married,he was actually homeless, and I didn’t share this earlier, but he was homeless living in his car in Fargo, North Dakota in the middle of winter. He was born into a blue collar family. He lived in trailer parks, he dropped out of high school, and then he joined the service. He joined the service after he and his first wife, who was his high school sweetheart, got pregnant, but that did not stop him. And while there was that initial mindset of this is how my life is, and this is how it’s always going to be when you, I don’t remember who first said it. But you become the average of the five people that you spend the most of your time with. He has constantly increased that caliber of the people that he’s spending his time with. Yes, he is still working out of the home full time in retail, but he did go back to school. And he got his college degree so he could pursue his dreams, and he’s actively building that. But he’s gone from being homeless living in his car to, I mean, we’re just about to buy a house and all these kids, and college degrees. I mean, who knows he could be the next Minecraft developer with a billion dollar game. But that’s only because he didn’t stop.

Rob Dionne: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. You have to believe in yourself. You really do. I know it sounds really tough for a lot of people because like the hardest person to believe in is you. We look at other people and we’re like, that person’s got it. We look at that person, it’s like, oh, if that person just saw their potential, they would just be so amazing. And whenever you say that, you should just know that the person you’re talking about has so much potential, there’s nothing holding us back. There’s no difference between you and somebody who’s super healthy, or there’s no difference between you and somebody who’s super rich. It’s literally though, maybe they’ve had an easier road. Yes. But you can forge that road, you can blaze that trail. It’s all up to you on how hard you want to work. And really working hard is not really the thing, it’s working smart. Yes, it’s just not trying to make it a grind and enjoying it. And then one of the things that you said you’re going to ask me at the end of the show is basically, what are some like parting words of wisdom or some parting things. And one of the things that I have on my board, and I’ve said this multiple times on my show is, always remember the process is the result. So if we’re chasing, you talk about chasing the money. If you’re chasing the money, you’ll never get there because the joy of it will never be there. Which means, you’ll always have further to go. It doesn’t matter if it’s a million dollars that you already have in the bank. And now, you’re going to need to because it’s always chasing the carrot. But we have to remember that the process is what we are, what we need to focus on. It’s the intention behind our goal. That is the most important piece of the puzzle. 

If we say, I was going to go on a hike, my goal is to get to the top of that hill, but my intention is to enjoy the hike. I know I can get to the top of that hill if I work really hard, I can get there really fast if I run, I can get there slow if I just walk, but I know that I can get there. I know what it’s going to take. But if I just put blinders on, and I just get to the top of the hill, what was the experience? Really, what was the experience for me? So if my intention is to enjoy the hike itself, well, then I stop along the way. I chat with some people, I have a little conversation here and there, maybe I see some flowers, and I pick some flowers, and I smell some flowers. Maybe I stop and I don’t know, I just sit and I stare off into the horizon. I just chill there for a few minutes, and then I walk along. And maybe instead of it taking me 25 minutes to get to the top, it takes me two hours to get to the top. But I’ll tell you right now that two hours to get to the top is going to be a memory. That’s the only thing we ever get in life is really memories. It’s the only currency we truly have is the memories we have at the end of the day. That’s all that’s left is the memories. 

So how do you want to remember that hike? Do you want to remember being fast and furious and forgetting how you got there just knowing that you got there? Or do you want to remember every step of the way and how amazing and gorgeous it was? And that is the difference between being like that is the process, is the result in a nutshell. Focus on the process. Focus on the now, we’re only happy at this moment. This is the only opportunity right now at this moment as you’re listening to this show. It’s the only moment for you to be happy, put a smile on your face, look out the window of your car and just be happy and be like, wow, I’m alive. I have every choice in my life to make changes. It’s all up to me. I could do whatever I want in my life. I can quit my job, or I can take a new job, or I can go to the gym today, I can eat healthy today. Whatever it is, I can. I have the choice right now to do that right now at this moment. Tomorrow. Who knows? If I think about tomorrow, though, right now then I’m just going to like future cast. If I think about the past and how sad it’s been for me, or how hard it’s been for me, I’m going to be depressed about that. So just focus right now in the moment. And right now in the moment is part of the process. We always have goals, we have things we’re working towards, but focus on right now the moment you’re experiencing that, and that is what’s going to make your life enjoyable and really worth living.

Kim Sutton: Wow.

Rob Dionne: You know what I’m saying?

Kim Sutton: Wow, I’m not going to ask you for a closing piece of parting wisdom because that was just Wow. Wow. But with that said, where can listeners find you? Because I know they want to know more and connect?

Rob Dionne: Well, of course, thank you. openskyfitness.com is the website. If they’re interested in joining this challenge, it’s openskyfitness.com/challenges where they can find it. But if you just want to hang out with me and Devon, my wife, she’s the prettier version of me. We hang out at the Open Sky Fitness Podcast Group on Facebook. So that is our community of people that listened to our show that believe in our philosophies. 

I was talking about hiring a business coach, I had a business coach talking to me, not just maybe last week like, hey, Rob, you have this Open Sky Fitness Podcast Group, it only has like 850 people in the community, why don’t you just invite all your friends in there and just like dump all your friends, and your family, and everybody in this room so you can have a bigger community. I go, because I don’t want to water it down. These are people that live and breathe our message. They listened to our show, and they’re like, I totally agree with what you’re talking about. I totally agree that calories aren’t the important thing. I totally agree that being happy in your life is actually more important than actually losing all that weight. I have all these things that I line up with you in terms of your philosophies on life and how to live that. I don’t want to distill it down with, or I don’t want to dilute it down, I should say, with people who just want to drop a whole ton of weight and don’t even really understand the conversation going on. So if they want to hang out in that community of people discussing all of this stuff and talk about really having a strong community, it’s the Open Sky Fitness Podcast group on Facebook. That’s where that’s where we hang out, basically, every day.

Kim Sutton: Quality over quantity. Thank you.

Rob Dionne: Totally. That’s the most important thing. And boom, I just beat Cliff Ravenscraft for an hour and 40 minutes. I’m like celebrating over here. This is the best show ever. It’s the simple thing, it’s the little things.

Kim Sutton: It really is. Thank you so much for being here. Listeners, you can find the show notes and the links, and ways to get in touch with Rob and get everything that we’ve talked about over at thekimsutton.com/pp302. Rob, I have to put it out there because I do it for everybody else. One last piece of parting advice. Your last piece of advice was just incredible, but I don’t want to not give you that opportunity.

Rob Dionne: Yes, I have one more. You either win, or you learn. There is no loss. You either win or you learn. Don’t be afraid to take risks in life. You’ll always learn something from it. The worst thing that you could do is just hold back and not ever take a step in the direction that has you kind of fearful. Take a step towards that fear. Take a leap of faith and you’ll learn something, it probably won’t end up as bad as you thought. Just take that leap of faith.