Remember, the beliefs and ideas in your head are just a narrative that came as a result of your neuronetwork processing your experiences and emotions to form a set of rules. These rules ultimately formed the belief structure that filters the way you see and think about the world, so the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not that belief structure is working for you. Are you getting the results you want in all aspects of your health? What about your relationships? Recreation? Wealth?

When I was a kid, I had developed a habit of coming home from school and plopping down on the couch to eat a bag of potato chips and drink an entire liter of soda. I’m well aware now that feeding my system garbage food with zero nutritional value was a horrible habit, but mom and dad were so busy working that no one was really around to tell me otherwise. In my mind, this became an acceptable passtime, so it’s no wonder I was a fat kid with an explosive personality type!

Fast forward several years and not much had changed… Instead of potato chips and soda after school, the habit became a Costco poppyseed muffin and a 4-shot venti white chocolate mocha on the way to work – about 1,300 hollow calories packed full of sugar. Hmm… I wonder how I gained over 100 pounds and experienced crazy volatile mood swings throughout the day?!

I was still allowing the destructive relationship I had developed with food as a kid to slowly destroy my human system… Every trigger, every pain point, and every unresolved childhood trauma led me straight to food and alcohol. My health was deteriorating, my businesses were failing, my relationships with my family and friends were falling apart… This was not the lifestyle I had imagined for myself, and the guy in the mirror was definitely not the role model I wanted for my kids.

The human body is only so resilient. When you constantly feed your mind with destructive thoughts and beliefs, and your body with processed foods packed full of sugar and chemicals, you force your system to work overtime eliminating toxins just to stay alive. At more than 100 pounds overweight, I had to face the hard reality that if I didn’t start making some significant changes in my life, I wouldn’t be around much longer to watch my kids grow up… And the thought of that terrified me.

At the end of the day, we only know what our communities taught us growing up. They did the best they knew how with the information and experiences they had to offer, but at some point, you have to take it upon yourself to accept responsibility for what you do and do not know, and then do something about it.

I won’t lie… My personal self-discovery journey was full of ups and downs. I had to face some hard realities, accept that we can’t see our own blindspots, and finally work through significant unresolved childhood trauma. I had to get brutally honest with myself in every aspect of my life – health, relationships, recreation, and wealth – to identify what was working and what wasn’t. I had to commit, all-in, to reprogramming my belief structure and making the changes necessary to grow. I had to cut ties with people who were holding me back, and seek out a new circle that would push me to become the best version of myself. As it turns out, you can save yourself years of pain and struggle by finding great mentors and absorbing all the wisdom and guidance they have to offer.

While this was far from an overnight transformation, in the process of discovering how my unique system operates and how to work within those confines for optimal performance, I…

If you take nothing else away from this, invest in discovering and understanding how every aspect of YOUR unique system operates – your dietary needs, sleep requirements, emotional health, when you’re most primed for deep work and creativity, your natural strengths and tendencies, etc.

If you want to win in manufacturing and supply chain, you first need to understand the conditions your body requires to do so.