Megan Henry | Finding Success Between Savage and Sage

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:00:01]:

Welcome back to the Weird and Strong podcast. I'm so glad that you are all here, especially because this episode was so much fun to record and such a fun conversation to have. We have Megan Henry on the episode today. She is a former skeleton bob athlete, and I loved hearing all of her perspectives of what it was like training for an Olympic sport and how that has affected her life going forward. And I know that you're going to love it, too. So without any further delay, let's get weird, folks. Welcome, Megan Henry to the weird and strong podcast. How are you doing today?

Megan Henry [00:00:38]:

I'm fabulous, thank you.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:00:39]:

I'm so excited to be it's been about a month since we've seen each other, and it's been a wild ride for me. I don't know if it's been a wild ride for you as well. Since the enlisted event, it has been.

Megan Henry [00:00:55]:

That was so cool. To put Faces, 3D faces, to Zoom, call Faces was very cool. The Enlifted community is just unbelievable. The people that are attracted to that, I'm just absolutely blown away with how fabulous these humans are. So it was such a positive, high vibe, really fun weekend.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:01:18]:

Yeah. And since then, listeners might notice we talk a lot about unlifted on this podcast now because we've had a lot of Enlifted coaches. At one point, I even jokingly had a conversation with myself and said, well, should I just rename my podcast Unofficially Enlisted?

Megan Henry [00:01:38]:

We're just so cool, that's why.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:01:39]:

Yeah, exactly. I love talking to all the other coaches, and they all have great, cool stories. You think it would be the same thing over and over again. And it's not.

Megan Henry [00:01:49]:

It's definitely not. That, I think is what's so cool, the just diverse backgrounds of all of us.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:01:57]:

Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit about yours coming up.

Megan Henry [00:02:00]:

Definitely.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:01]:

Before we do that, I have a weird question for you. Are you ready?

Megan Henry [00:02:04]:

Yes.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:05]:

Right. The one I had planned, we're going to stick with it because originally we had a scheduling issue we were going to record on Halloween day. So it's still going to get a bit of a Halloween theme to this question. Do vampires prefer arterial or venial blood?

Megan Henry [00:02:29]:

Oh, my gosh. I don't know. Well, I guess arterial because they usually bite in the neck, so I guess arterial.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:45]:

Okay.

Megan Henry [00:02:47]:

There's some things that's why I do, but yeah, true.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:02:52]:

Any other reasons why you'd pick arterial?

Megan Henry [00:03:00]:

I feel not that I have any basis for this. I just feel like it would have more nutrients. I don't know. That's my impression. I feel like they would prefer that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:03:13]:

All right. Something I saw posed online, and I was like, that would be a great Halloween question. And also but I love it. It's something you don't necessarily think about of something from popular culture, of like, we just think that they just drink blood, but what kind of blood? Where do they get it from.

Megan Henry [00:03:31]:

Oh, my gosh, I love Halloween. I love Halloween. So I competed in the winter sport of skeleton, and it takes place from October to March. And so I, for over a decade, missed Halloween. I was either training on it, I raced on Halloween, and so every now and then I would dress up, like, maybe the day before, or wear a weird outfit. So if you don't know what skeleton is, skeleton is a winter sport. It takes place on the same track as Bob Sled. If you ever saw the movie Cool Runnings, and it's like Louge, but headfirst.

Megan Henry [00:04:08]:

So you're laying on your stomach on essentially a lunch tray looking thing of a sled, and you run as fast as you can jump on it, and you're steering with just your body weight, and you experience up to five G's of force, and you're going 85 plus miles per hour. So in training, I would wear some crazy outfit if I wasn't racing on the day of Halloween, wear a crazy outfit. Or one time I was a Green Lantern, but it is my favorite holiday. And so this year, I got to go trick or treating with my nieces, and I haven't been trick or treating in 15 years, 20 years. So that was also a really fun.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:04:57]:

Experience that's super cool and segues perfectly into talking about you and unconventional ways that you show up in the world. Skeleton is a pretty unique sport. Some could say it's a bit weird. Is that something? You five years old, you're like, I'm going to do that. How did you come to this sport? How did you discover it and get to that space where you were competing internationally with it?

Megan Henry [00:05:31]:

So I played sports my whole life. I was blessed with athleticism from mostly my father. And that was just one of the gifts I was given and one of the desires I was given when I took this human form. And I really enjoyed competition and training for something, which is funny because I actually grew up as being really shy, very shy, not a confident person. I say that I'm an extroverted introvert because I was just very much to myself, very empathic. And as I got older, I'm much more talkative and things like that now. But if I enter a room, I'm not going to be taking over the room when I walk in. I guess my outlet really was competing in sports.

Megan Henry [00:06:22]:

And so I played field hockey in college. I ran truck as well. And then I joined the army after I graduated from college. And during that time, I was recruited to try bobsled. And all of the bobsled girls are to give people perspective. I'm like 125 pounds, five foot two. Bobsled girls are five. Eight ish 170 pounds.

Megan Henry [00:06:48]:

They're way bigger than I am. They're super muscular, really athletic. I am also very athletic, but it's different. It's different. And so I was recruited to do that. And they were like, you're going to have to put on 50 pounds. I was like, I can't even put on ten pounds of good weight sitting around eating donuts all day. Cheryl so they told me to switch over to skeleton.

Megan Henry [00:07:10]:

So that's how I got into it. And it's funny that you say that. It's a weird sport because you would not believe the weird people that are attracted to skeleton. Again, it's such a very eclectic, very unique group of people that get drawn to a sport like that. And some of them again, it's all sorts of backgrounds. Like, some of them are PhD students, some are engineers, some are just like, really nerdy, nerdy people that want to have an athletic outlet. They just are from all sorts of backgrounds. And I think it's necessary.

Megan Henry [00:07:49]:

It's like a prerequisite. You got to be a bit weird to be doing skeleton. And so when I was training for, I went and tried skeleton for the first time. I progressed pretty quickly. I started in 2010 or 2011, and then I was a national champion by 2012, which was very cool. And then I had to sit out for a year because I had blood clots in my lungs caused by a birth control. And I'm very much like how I walk differently. If you're talking about being weird, at the time, my intuition was telling me, don't go on this birth control.

Megan Henry [00:08:35]:

And I felt like that. I felt like birth control. And I'm not condoning it, but for me, I felt like it was a very strange thing to do. It didn't seem like very natural. It was just not really a good idea. I was pressured to do so because of the relationship that I was in. And then within ten days of starting this birth control, I started to have difficulty breathing. We had to take a combine test, which is like an NFL combine.

Megan Henry [00:09:04]:

You're being evaluated on your athleticism, your explosives, how strong you are, and the conversation. It was a very scary experience. And I ultimately was hospitalized for that and out for a whole year. And what that taught me was to listen to my intuition.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:09:28]:

Absolutely.

Megan Henry [00:09:32]:

That's a long answer as to how I got into skeleton and what it's all about, but it was a great chapter of my life that had just ended last year. It just retired from competing last year.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:09:45]:

That's super cool. And also, I suspect that there's something common about Olympic sports, especially ones that have been around for a while with, like, what you said about the eclectic nature of who gets drawn into these things, because the sport that I've competed in, weightlifting also an Olympic sport. Lots of strange folks, especially once you get into the geezer league like I'm in, you see a lot of people where you're like, it's not the people you would expect it to be.

Megan Henry [00:10:18]:

Right?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:10:19]:

It is the nerds the geeks, not the people who were on necessarily the football team growing up.

Megan Henry [00:10:26]:

Right. So the gym that I trained at for I did Olympic weightlifting as well. So in March, I competed in Masters nationals and I dropped a ton of weight. I dropped two weight classes. Wow. Initially, it was not intentional. I was in between weight classes and needed to drop to mine. And then I was below and in between again, and I was like, oh, you know what? I'm just going to drop again and stay here title, because I think that I can win.

Megan Henry [00:10:53]:

And I did. I won. And that was cool. I don't recommend doing what I did, but I learned a lot from that process. But the gym that I train at shout out to New York Weightlifting Academy. There are, again, such a diverse background of people that end up coming to train there. And one of the guys is a priest, and they call him Padre. Everybody just calls him Padre, and his instagram handle.

Megan Henry [00:11:23]:

So if everybody goes and checks him out sorry, is Padre lifts. It's so funny.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:11:30]:

I've seen this. It's it's one of those things that the sport isn't I'm assuming skeleton is the same way. They're fairly niche, and so once you start poking your head outside of your gym walls, and you start to realize, oh, there's actually not that many people in this sport.

Megan Henry [00:11:49]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:11:50]:

You're like, oh, I know this person, and they know this person, and they know this person. And then before you know it, you're hanging out with Olympians and you go, Wait, how did I get here? Yeah.

Megan Henry [00:12:01]:

It'S interesting because Olympic sports have such a reputation for, oh, my gosh, it's so amazing that you did this great thing, and when you're in it, you're kind of like, it's not really a big deal, and there's not a lot of money. And that's, I think, what draws the weird people there, because it requires such a drive and dedication to compete at a high level for very little in return. Like, it's very ego driven. Right. The reward is not financial at all, and I guess it's the fame and the notoriety. But in skeleton. So you only get to do skeleton for six months out of the year. And when you go into a race, you get three training days, two runs each.

Megan Henry [00:12:53]:

Mind you, it takes a minute or less on most tracks to get down. So you have six minutes of training to be an expert before you race. And if you're new and you've never been, your experience compounds the more you go. But you usually go to a track once a year. Right. So it takes a long time to reach that supposed 10,000 hours rule. You'll never get that in skeleton. And so, one, we use a lot of visualization, and at the same time, because you get such few runs and you're chasing this experience of having a really good run or fixing something, it becomes a very addictive thing.

Megan Henry [00:13:38]:

And same thing in weightlifting, right? Like, perfecting technique and having a really good snatch, no pun intended. Having a really good snatch or something that's very technical. When you do it right, it becomes very addictive in a way that you're like, pursuing that same high. And so I think that's what keeps people around. It's like, well, I'm so close to just nailing this.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:14:05]:

Yeah. Even when people are new at it, they know when it feels right.

Megan Henry [00:14:11]:

Right.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:14:12]:

They know what it was like, oh, that's how that's supposed to feel. Oh, okay. Coming back to this idea of visualization, how has the practice of visualization from your skeleton days, how have you carried that into your life?

Megan Henry [00:14:28]:

Oh, this is a solid question. So I loved visualization as an athlete. I used it all of the time. I went back to school for sports psychology, and now most of my clients are athletes, or at least in a high performance space. However, I believe we're all high performers. It's just whether you believe that or not and have unlocked that for yourself. So we all are all high performers. And so no matter what it is that you're doing, you can visualize that outcome.

Megan Henry [00:15:02]:

And what's so cool about visualization is your brain and body. They don't know the difference between something real and imagined. So what's a goal that you have, for example, for the remainder of this.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:15:15]:

Year, let's say, put me on the spot, everything I have is further out than a year.

Megan Henry [00:15:23]:

Okay, well, no, that is fine. Whatever your big well, for me right.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:15:27]:

Now, I guess one is for the end of the year, is to get my first seven coaching clients for my new business.

Megan Henry [00:15:35]:

Yay. So if you were my client, for example, I would have you visualize that. What does that look like? What does that feel like? When you have your seven clients, how does that make you feel? Like tapping into the feeling? Visualizing is awesome. Right. And having that intention. However, the feeling is really what makes it more effective, because you're involving the somatic process, the whole part of your body as well, and emotion. And that's a huge driver. And what's really cool that we used and enlisted is the story work piece.

Megan Henry [00:16:13]:

So I've been helping out with my former field hockey team, which is very rewarding, and they're going into their state championships today. And so the coach was actually a bit nervous going into today. And so I said, if you're ruminating and worrying before you go to bed, I want you to write the story of how the game went and write it in past tense as if it's already happened. Full sentences, the whole shebang and he did. And that sort of thing can be really powerful. Yes, the written part is very effective, and even sometimes I'll have people record themselves telling this story and listening to themselves because your voice is so powerful, like, the hearing the sound of your own voice and the vibration of your own voice is very powerful as well. And so I use it for me in terms of things that I want to accomplish now. And one of the things that I'm drawing into me is abundance and what that feels like when I have that and trying to carry that experience now, because your subconscious mind won't let you experience anything that you don't believe is possible.

Megan Henry [00:17:32]:

So a lot of it is repetition and you're brainwashing yourself in a way. And when I was an athlete, so I went into Olympic Trials because I'm in the Army, I wasn't allowed to compete or travel or go anywhere during COVID And it was very frustrating at the time. And I do believe everything happens for a reason, but it's tough when you only have six months out of the year to do a sport and then you can't even do it. You're losing out on a lot of experience. So I spent a lot of time visualizing and I went into so everybody's training and competing the whole year except for me. And so I had to go into Olympic Trials that we were having at the end of that season, prior to the Olympic season with very few training runs. And so I had visualized myself setting the track records. We compete in Park City, Utah, and Lake Placid, New York.

Megan Henry [00:18:32]:

And so I had visualized over and over, what does that look like? What does it feel like? I visualized exact even times, and I did both of those things.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:18:43]:

Is it something like you're taking specific turns on the track at certain times, you're hitting it at these specific times, knowing exactly where you're going to be, what angle you're going to hit?

Megan Henry [00:18:54]:

Yeah, the thing that I tapped into the most was like, yes, how do I want to feel when I'm doing this, when I'm actually on the sled? And also, what is it like when it's done? What's the end product? Because I think sometimes and I've done this too, I did this during my Olympic year. So I didn't make an Olympic team because I was trying to control every single outcome, like every race result leading up to the Olympics rather than so when I competed in the weightlifting, the Masters Nationals, initially, I visualized a ton for that too, and visualizing myself making all of the attempts and PR and everything else. And then I went into the day and my intuition was like, it doesn't matter if you make all of your attempts. It doesn't matter if you PR. What matters is you want to win the title. That's the goal of today. And so what ended up happening is I actually failed one of my snatch attempts. And had I been so attached to making that because this is what happened to me during my olympic year, I was so attached to these results and getting them or not getting them or attached to old results I had.

Megan Henry [00:20:07]:

And in this weightlifting contest, if I had been so attached to, oh, my gosh, I'm not going to go six for six, then it would have been just off a cliff. The whole performance would have but I was like, that's okay, I can still win. I can still win. And so that, I think, is so important about visualization and visualizing that end product of whatever it is that you want, any goal. It could be you want to be in a happy relationship. It could be that you want a car, it could be a job. What does the end product look like? Because all of the little details aren't up to us, right? That's the universe. That's like the beauty of having that surprise of how that happens.

Megan Henry [00:20:50]:

That's how I incorporate visualization. Now it's just even with other goals that I want visualizing the end result. What does that look like? What does it feel like when I have that thing?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:21:02]:

Yeah, so you talked about the how of this. Why would you suppose that people get really attached to the how when they're talking about goals and wanting to achieve big things?

Megan Henry [00:21:17]:

Because our mind likes predictability for safety, right? So it feels nice if we can predict. And we want to control every aspect because it makes us feel safe. It makes us feel like we're doing something. And in reality, it could be hindering you. So it's like rather than focusing on controlling, I say that with a caveat because I do think and this is something I do say is like, we control what we can control. So, for example, if you're an athlete, let's say you're doing weightlifting, for example, we can control what our diet looks like, what our training looks like, our sleep, our recovery, our attitude, our self talk, our body language. These are all things that are within our control, whereas who wins and the actual outcome is not. We can set an intention that we want to win, but what makes sports so exciting is that that's not always predictable.

Megan Henry [00:22:18]:

And that's why we compete in sports, because it's fun. You could have a total underdog come in and absolutely destroy everybody else. And the person who is the best isn't guaranteed to win. That's what makes sports fun. That's what makes it exciting. So we can have that intention of, like, okay, yes, we want to win. However we can't control if you're in a sport where there's umpires or there's weather conditions or you can't control all these other aspects or, like, the crowd. And so the way that we can best, quote, unquote, control that outcome that we're looking for is by focusing and honing in on the things we can control.

Megan Henry [00:22:59]:

And a lot of that has to do with our preparation, our effort, our attitude, our self talk and the detachment from the outcome and just being fully present and in it when we're actually competing and doing the thing yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:23:17]:

To something you mentioned earlier, of the amount of times that I've seen people completely collapse on a missed first attempt. They miss their snatch opener and they've thrown in the towel already.

Megan Henry [00:23:30]:

Yeah, it happens a lot. And an easy thing that I would recommend in that and that what I used as well, is to be like, So what next that's not like me, or just, So what? Okay. And it takes a lot of awareness and a lot of self discipline to do that. That's certainly not easy if that's your first time ever thinking like, oh, I'm going into this competition, and now I got to tell myself, so what? It takes practice and a lot of self awareness, which is why I think things such as meditation and breath work are really good because it allows you to, one, be the observer of your own thoughts, but have practice being present and just trying to detach from those thoughts, too.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:24:22]:

Yeah, there is on my own journey with that, of learning to have fun bombing out. Yeah, that was one of the most eye opening experiences for me as far as what that looks like. Getting ready to set a Pan Am qualifying total and bombing out and still having everybody's, like, walking around on eggshells around you. You can tell that's a big deal. And you're, like, slapping backs and giving high fives, cracking jokes, and everybody's very confused of what's going on that is so powerful.

Megan Henry [00:25:03]:

Because that is weird, right?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:25:05]:

Yes, exactly.

Megan Henry [00:25:08]:

But that's where your power lies in being able to do something like that or to reframe. I remember training in the off season, and if I was doing something that was absolutely in the suck, right? I don't like this activity, I would audibly say out loud, this is my favorite thing. I love doing this. And people know I hate this thing, right? People around me. So they'd be like, look it out, and be like, what? But I'm telling myself, like, this is good. This is what's making me better. I just saw a video yesterday on social media, of course, of a video that had it was like a ramp with two marbles on it. I posted it on my story.

Megan Henry [00:25:54]:

And so one of the ramps is totally flat, and the other one has little hills on it, up and down, and they let go of both of the marbles. And you would think that the one that's flat is going to win, but it's actually the one that has these ups and downs because it gains the momentum, ends up beating the other one. And the whole metaphor for that is that your failures, the ups and downs, are actually what make you grow. They make you propel you forward and help you. And people are really afraid to push themselves to failure. And that is where all of the growth comes from. And that experience of it's unrealistic to think that you're never going to fail a lift. It's unrealistic.

Megan Henry [00:26:45]:

Go ahead.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:26:46]:

Looking at a competition, it's like, well, okay, you failed the lift. Have you failed the lift before? Have you missed in training? Okay. Did that actually mean anything about you?

Megan Henry [00:26:57]:

Right.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:26:59]:

Somehow, when it's on the competition platform or even in training, we start to assign that this means something about us, and it doesn't. Right? You're in the wrong place, wrong time. Mistimed didn't sleep well enough. There's so many variables there. But then we take it personally.

Megan Henry [00:27:16]:

Definitely. I know. It's like putting it on a pedestal in a way. And that's why people end up also choking, because they end up going and doing something, and they start overthinking and trying too hard. When you start trying hard, you actually create resistance. You create a gap and separation between this thing that you want, and it's like you've done this a million times. It's just that you're in a different.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:27:39]:

Room, we're in a different outfit, in a different bunch of people staring at you. Maybe it's silent. There's a lot of things that can happen totally to your point of this changing perspective of things that you don't want to do. I'm sure you've heard this statement that fun is an opinion.

Megan Henry [00:28:01]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:28:02]:

Difficult and hard are also opinions.

Megan Henry [00:28:04]:

Yeah, this is very true.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:28:07]:

So this is one of the things that something that I've been playing around internally in my brain, contemplating of, like, when people say it takes hard work and it has to be hard. I was like, does it?

Megan Henry [00:28:23]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:28:25]:

What if you change your perspective on it?

Megan Henry [00:28:28]:

Oh, my gosh, I really hope the listeners take that, because how different would you show up if you were able to adopt that belief and be like, well, does it need to be hard? Does making money need to be that's a common belief, right? That money making money. It has to be hard. You got to work hard. Yeah, okay. There's things that certainly have to be done, but does it have to be hard? Do we have to take that perspective that makes it way less fun?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:28:58]:

Well, it creates this expectation that it's not going to be enjoyable, right?

Megan Henry [00:29:05]:

Exactly.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:29:06]:

And so a quote that keeps coming up for me, I actually have it written down on my monitor over here is that the magic you're looking for is in the work that you're avoiding?

Megan Henry [00:29:15]:

Oh, I like that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:29:17]:

And so if something is difficult, something's hard, you view it as like, I don't want to do this because I don't like it. Things like that. Okay, so now you're going to avoid it, right. And you're going to sit and go, oh, if only the magic would just happen and I could just manifest it, the universe would just provide it for me. Well, it's right there. It has provided it to you and you're willfully ignoring it because you say that's too hard.

Megan Henry [00:29:48]:

Wow.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:29:50]:

Is it actually too hard? Or you just don't want it enough?

Megan Henry [00:29:53]:

Yeah. If you change that perspective, though, then you would likely want it more. Right. If you end up enjoying the which is, I think, what athletes are good at. They're good at enjoying the off season. Right. And enjoying the monotonous. There's stuff about offseason preparation that is very redundant.

Megan Henry [00:30:18]:

Especially if you're in weight class sports or something. Even like bodybuilding, like you're eating the same meals over and over. That's very redundant. So that could be seen as boring. Right. Or hard.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:30:33]:

However, in the bodybuilding sorry to interrupt, but in the bodybuilding world of, like, watching, I have no desire to compete in bodybuilding, and yet I'm fascinated by with what some of them can do mentally as well. I know the types of training that they do. All the different opinions on how you achieve hypertrophy. I'm watching somebody like Dr. Mike isratel puke in a garbage can after every leg day that he has and somehow he loves this. And I go, that's a whole different switch to flip where people can say, that's crazy and psychotic. Is it, though? He's found something that he's truly passionate about and wants to do, and yet he's found a way to enjoy all the things that you would normally be uncomfortable with.

Megan Henry [00:31:23]:

Oh, my gosh. Definitely one of my friends that is a Navy Seal. And he was just weird. He was weird and he did he just loved that stuff, the stuff that they go through in steel training is not my ideal day. Right. But he just found how to generate the enjoyment from it because he knew it was contributing to his overall growth as a human and just he was so into it. Can you adopt that mentality? How different? I'm loving this conversation because I'm like, how different would I be if I was adopting? That about doing the dishes, right. Or the laundry.

Megan Henry [00:32:16]:

Just every little thing that you're like, I don't feel like doing that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:32:19]:

Yeah, exactly. Or then it creates a situation where it starts to pile up and then you start to feel even worse about it and it creates that snowball effect of all of these. So it becomes even more negative. And then what?

Megan Henry [00:32:33]:

Yeah, that goes back to I need to do this, I should do this. That type of pressure language. And then it just builds into this thing. Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:32:45]:

And then by that point, it's so overwhelming that you don't know where to start. And it's hard and difficult to take action. It'll be posted before this comes out by a long shot because I was just finishing it up. I was talking about you saw my other wait, no, sorry. It's a different person. But you can't see it right now. So I've got this little timer, this. Is becoming my new best friend, because anytime I have that resistance of something like the dishes, I don't want to do the dishes.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:33:18]:

Well, do you have to complete the dishes right now? No, I don't have to complete the dishes right now. Can you do five minutes of dishes? Okay.

Megan Henry [00:33:26]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:33:27]:

Set five minutes. All right, so five minutes is done. I can either keep going, or I can say, that's enough, and then I have this choice. And I also did five minutes.

Megan Henry [00:33:37]:

That's amazing. I just did an instagram live talking about, like, I don't want to do whatever, and how you can be if you notice yourself saying that, then you can be like, okay, what is it that I want to do? Or do I need to do the dishes? Or do I need to do laundry? Do I have absolutely no clothes? Because then, okay, I can do five minutes. I can do one load of laundry. So you're, like, giving yourself that choice, which I think relieves again that pressure and that guilt, and making it into this big thing in reality, is doing dishes this monstrous task? No. And it's not always something that we're jumping for joy to do. I like that, though. I like giving yourself the timer and the choice of being like, okay, I can do this for five like, I can do anything for five minutes. Right? So that's cool.

Megan Henry [00:34:37]:

I like that a lot.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:34:38]:

There's one thing. So we were talking about this. This is something that just popped into my head. New thought, perhaps, new perspective for myself, at least. We were talking about with goals of getting hung up on the attachment of the steps of how I'm going to do this. It's supposed to be this specific path and these things something that I wonder is, do we get really attached to this idea of, I have this goal, it has to go exactly this way, because that also gives us an out when it doesn't go the way we expect it to. It's like committing to a diet. Well, Monday I failed and I ate the donut.

Megan Henry [00:35:21]:

Well, I'm done.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:35:22]:

Might as well throw it away, start again next week.

Megan Henry [00:35:25]:

Yeah, that's a good question. I think, in a way, it is also when people give themselves an out when they make negative expectations or when they're like, something good happened. Like, let's say, okay, I won. I won the Masters Nationals weightlifting competition. And if I was just that was that was just luck. It was just giving, like, an out so that just in case I compete again, I can be like, well, last time I was lucky, right? And I don't know why we do that, but it's like, yo, give yourself credit. Like, be your own hype man there and be like, I worked really hard for this, and I'm really proud of it. And even if I didn't do that, I am so proud of how I showed up today and being able to give yourself that pat on the back because we've been brainwashed for whatever reason to think that being proud of yourself as a negative, I think just from narcissistic people like, yes, there's narcissistic people that exist.

Megan Henry [00:36:39]:

However, being proud of yourself and being narcissistic are very different things.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:36:45]:

Yes.

Megan Henry [00:36:46]:

So it's a shame that that's the perspective that greater society has. So a lot of people will be like, they don't know how to accept those compliments. Like I know Mark England is like, okay, if somebody compliments you, say thank, right. You don't have to give some explanation like, oh thanks, well I'm just lucky or you're going to get it next know, you push the compliment back onto the other person. Super interesting. Why we do that?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:37:20]:

Add something. I just forgot it.

Megan Henry [00:37:23]:

That's okay.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:37:28]:

1 second.

Megan Henry [00:37:29]:

I'll give it to you. I'll give you a second to think before I start talking and go ahead.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:37:37]:

It'll come back. It'll come back. I flung the boomerang too far and I can't see it anymore. But it'll come back.

Megan Henry [00:37:46]:

It will come back. It will come back. I was just going to say about taking that the perspective shift can be illustrated that we were talking about before. The perspective shift is like if you were sitting in your room watching TV and it's raining outside and you had no intentions of going outside, would you care that it's raining? No. If it was your wedding day and it was raining on your wedding day and you had an outdoor wedding, would you care that it's raining? Most likely, yeah. If you were a farmer and there was a drought and it's finally raining, you'd be ecstatic. So it's just like you have three people experiencing something totally different and just being able to be like, I can take that perspective. No matter what person I am, if I'm the person sitting in my room, if I have the wedding, or if I'm the farmer, I have the ability to shift my perspective to that.

Megan Henry [00:38:43]:

And I think that the quicker we're able to do something like that, especially when something isn't going, quote, unquote, our way that is so powerful to be able to it allows you to come back to neutral quicker and be grateful for everything that we're experiencing. So something I was going to touch on before when you were talking about trying to control every aspect of things and does that give us an out then, if it doesn't go our way? So when I was training for Skeleton, I was an Olympic alternate. I missed the Olympic team by twelve points. And I learned so much from not making an Olympic team, truly. And there's obviously emotion that go with that, right? I dedicated a decade of my life exclusively to one thing. So there was certainly disappointment. I'm not saying that there's no emotion involved. I was very heartbroken, I was very sad.

Megan Henry [00:39:47]:

At the same time I was able to be like, this is good, this is a good thing for me for having to have this experience, to be able to deal with it emotionally, to recognize it's not representative of me or saying something negative of me because I did everything that I could have given the circumstances. And the quicker that we can be our own sort of therapist or coach, really coach in that moment and being like, this sucks right now, I'm allowed to feel this way. It's good though, it's good. And I think people get stuck when they don't allow themselves to feel that emotion of being like I am fucking frustrated, I am pissed off. Right, give yourself permission to feel that way and then be like, okay, what's the quickest way I can come back to neutral?

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:40:44]:

Yeah. And many times it's expressing the actual emotion that is happening versus again, trying to wrestle it, control it, stuff it, do whatever, medicate it, who knows? Yeah, they're going to come back at some point. The boomerang came back, by the way.

Megan Henry [00:41:00]:

Oh good.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:41:02]:

And it comes right into what you're talking about here of ten years in skeleton. Does that mean that because you didn't make an Olympic team, does that mean that you have no skills, nothing that you learned this entire process?

Megan Henry [00:41:18]:

Right? I have a lot of skills from skeleton and I think even more so from not making an Olympic team. I think it makes me such a better coach in terms of being able to learn from the mistakes that I made and impart the lessons that I learned on other people. So I think it makes me a better coach. And then just the whole process of having the ups and downs and being able to be resilient and overcome obstacles. There were so many things that I was able to do and I would not be who I am today without those experiences. I just became such a different person through skeleton.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:42:04]:

Truly, that's really rad. And something that what led to this thought or this point is in talking about performing well on a platform or performing well in a competition and making it easy to explain away a compliment or say it was all luck and things like that of well, maybe perhaps my training wasn't perfect this twelve week cycle. Or something happened. Things were less than ideal. Is it ever just those twelve weeks of preparation or was it everything else that you had in front of that too? So taking a look at that, of even those of us who recreationally lift or recreationally compete, it's an interesting thought because I've fallen into this before too, of like oh, it's a local meet and I need to have it's the biggest local meet and I need to have the world's best training. I need to be so prepared for it. Can I just show up and just be yeah, exactly, that was a major shift for me, and I work to impart that with my lifters that I work with is show up. Let's actually enjoy ourselves again.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:43:25]:

It's that perspective shift and know that there's always going to be another one, or as long as you want. There will always be more. And even if this training wasn't optimal, you're still going to get something out of competing. You're still definitely carrying all the lessons that you learned along the way. And so it's either you can focus on all the ways that you failed, all the ways that you lost, or you can focus on all the things that you already have.

Megan Henry [00:43:57]:

I love that. And it's like, can you just perform to the best of your ability on that day, whatever that is, you could wake up and feel like, sick or whatever, like, well, can I perform to the best of my ability? And I think giving yourself permission again to be like, I feel like I'm at 70%, so I'm going to let myself give 70% rather than putting the pressure on myself to give 110%. If you do that, your performance is likely going to be 50%, whereas if you say, okay, I can give 70%, you're probably going to be 90 plus percent because you just gave yourself the permission to be like, I don't have the expectation to shatter the earth here. Today.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:44:46]:

Reality being is that 70% is 100% for that day, right?

Megan Henry [00:44:50]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:44:50]:

You are giving it 100%.

Megan Henry [00:44:54]:

Of the time. It works every time.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:44:56]:

Exactly. And also, can you do that in your day to day life and not just in performance situations of competition and whatnot, being able to truly be honest with yourself and those around you of where you are? Yeah, that's something that I know I have ignored a lot and some days also ignore because the to do list seems far too important. If I don't achieve this thing today, that means I'll never achieve my goal again. These big, crazy, big picture stories that we tell ourselves. And the reality is, well, if I just took the five minute break, if I just took the 15 minutes walk, would I actually do better? That's only one way to find out.

Megan Henry [00:45:50]:

So in flow science, in sports, okay, if you're in the zone, and that's usually when you're the most present, you're having the most fun, and that's when your truest self is able to appear, your truest self. All of the potential from all of your training, that's where people have really amazing, amazing moments in sport. And what's really interesting about the corporate world, business world, recreational sport world, where you're balancing your one focus isn't just sports, right? I've got a life, I've got a work life. And all that is that people in the workplace are expected to be on all the time and they haven't adopted the recovery process that like an athlete has. And when you do adopt that as a person who's in the workplace, you are able to give so much more because you only have so much bandwidth mentally that you're able to use in a day. And so if you're just constantly going through depleting, depleting, depleting all day without having any of these recovery moments within a flow cycle, for example, like taking that walk, doing some breath work, doing a sauna, whatever it is, then it's difficult. Your battery is a little lower the next day and a little lower, and you eventually get to burnout. And so in order for to take some lessons from the athlete world and bring it over to the corporate side, adopting that recovery process to allow you to use your brain better the next day versus wake up feeling depleted, that's so important.

Megan Henry [00:47:36]:

And so I agree with you. It's so easy to get lost in a list of items, actionable items, that we're supposed to check off if we can just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to recover, especially because we're so screen heavy, right? We're always on zoom calls and on the phone and on this and that, and being able to just step outside and give ourselves a breather is so powerful, even just a few minutes. So I really like that you touched on that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:07]:

Yeah, that endless to do list. One of the things that I remind myself of, has anybody ever gotten to a point where they say, well, I did everything. There's no more work in the world to do. Everything's done, and yet we like, well, I have to finish my to do list. I have to get everything done. It's like there's always more work.

Megan Henry [00:48:30]:

Yeah, there's always to do list doesn't come to zero.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:36]:

So if that's true, then why do I have all this pressure to cross everything off?

Megan Henry [00:48:42]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:43]:

Who could I be without that?

Megan Henry [00:48:46]:

Exactly. Who could I be without that thought? Who would you be without your story.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:48:51]:

Exactly in your path as an athlete and now into a coach? What's the number one lesson that you've taken from your time as an athlete into your time as a coach, either for yourself or the people that you work with?

Megan Henry [00:49:14]:

Oh, this is such a good question. I really like that. I think it's easy as an athlete to compare yourself to other people. And I mean, this is true in life in general, to be comparing, especially with social media and everything, and how we show up and compare ourselves to ourselves. That, I think, is the biggest thing that I learned in skeleton, and one of the things when I was competing in skeleton was that so they announce your times, right? When you're going and training and stuff, you can hear everybody's times in a race, they're announcing times. They put a timesheet up in between heats. There's two heats. Usually in a race, in the first heat, it's just there's a random start order.

Megan Henry [00:50:05]:

It's a random draw. And then the second heat goes from slowest to fastest. And what I used to do is I'd put headphones on or if I didn't have headphones, like I had just finished my run, I would tune out. I wouldn't listen to any times. I had no idea. This is when I was doing my best. I didn't do this Olympic year, which is funny, but when I was performing my best, I had no idea what other people were doing. I wasn't listening, I wasn't paying attention.

Megan Henry [00:50:34]:

I was focusing on me and how I was feeling. And so it's easy to feel like when you get out into the world like, oh, well, I should have all these clients and I should be making this much money and this person's got this house, my friend's married. They have know it's easy to fall into that trap of comparison. And something that I've heard before from Derek Grant is his name. He's another mindset coach. He's like, you are the goat of your reality because you're the only one who's had the same experiences and obstacles and overcoming stuff. Like your situation is so different from someone else's. And how do you know that your day one isn't their day 5000? You don't know.

Megan Henry [00:51:25]:

Truly, it's not a fair comparison to make. I don't really like using the word fair, but it's not it's not a fair comparison to be like, well, this person's doing that, so I should be doing this. The journey that you're on is perfect for you. The highs and the lows for me, for me, not making an Olympic team, that was perfect for me because I was meant to learn something from that. I was meant to grow from that. And so that's the biggest lesson that I've taken from skeleton and into the sports world. And even coaching and imparting on other people is like, what you're doing is awesome no matter what the outcome. Because let's say you don't accomplish this goal that you have, then we could learn from that.

Megan Henry [00:52:16]:

There was a reason why. So we can adjust and make new plans and move forward. There's always something to get out of it. And so I would say that's the biggest thing that I've taken from skeleton over into the real world.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:52:31]:

Very cool. Yeah, that's a very astute and sage like advice for folks.

Megan Henry [00:52:40]:

It's funny you say that because so my instagram handle is the savage Meglet. And I say that there is I'm also a Gemini. I was born in June, so I may or may not have two sides to so but what I say is there's two sides to either being an athlete or being a high performer of any kind again, which we all are. Is there's the savage side, the one that works hard, that's diligent is driven and resilient and all these things? And then there's the sage that has this wisdom. It's the more enlifted side of you and it does. It takes this balance of these two personalities, these two characteristics to have that success. There's certainly work that needs to be done in the gym, for example. However, you also have to recover.

Megan Henry [00:53:33]:

You also have to you get to you get to recover, you get to do mindset work, you get to visualize, you get to work on your self talk and self loving and all of these other things. Because if you were just constantly working out in the gym and let's say you worked out 24 hours a day and you never went to sleep, you wouldn't be getting better. There's only so much that you could take. Same thing, like you've got calluses on your hands. If you keep ripping open a callus over and over and over, your hands are going to be destroyed. You can't even lift after that. Right there comes a point on the bell curve, the tipping point that it requires this balance between those two things of the savage and the sage.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:18]:

That's really rad.

Megan Henry [00:54:20]:

Thank you.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:21]:

Yeah, it's that concept of being whole.

Megan Henry [00:54:28]:

Yeah.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:54:30]:

If you only ever focus on the dark parts of yourself, how often can you actually bring forward the light and vice versa? If you're only ever focused on loving the light versions of yourself and shunning away all of that darkness that you may have or the negativity that you have, it's like learning to love yourself in a much more holistic manner.

Megan Henry [00:54:52]:

I would say that that is what I learned from my athletic career because I was very different when I first started skeleton. I was very negative, very perfectionistic, and had this journey going into meditation and mindfulness and all these things because I recognized that I was being insane. I was expecting different results, I was doing the same thing, expecting different results. And so I was like, I know my mindset and the things I'm telling myself are not helping me accomplish what I want to accomplish. And I luckily was able to recognize that and I was able to go through all of that learning to love these parts of me and examine them. I had to ask myself and do that inner work of being like, why do I do what I do? Or why do I believe these things? And that's not necessarily easy and it can be really scary for people, but it's so powerful to know thyself and to be able to be like, I love me anyway, even though I am a perfectionist person or whatever the case may be. A lot of power comes from that.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:56:17]:

Very cool. As we start to wrap up our conversation today, any final thoughts that you would like to leave the listeners with? Any last nuggets of wisdom? Words of wisdom?

Megan Henry [00:56:28]:

It's hard to pick one. One of the things that I love saying and I love telling people is that, one, we are given our desires for a reason. So again, like mine was to be an athlete. And so if you have a desire, you have everything that you need inside of you to accomplish that thing. And that is the joy and the journey of being able to uncover how you are able to accomplish this thing, whatever that may be. And it could be that you don't accomplish that thing in this lifetime. However, your journey is still learning to like, I want to be an absolute multimillionaire and my intention is to create that in this lifetime. If I don't, I still learned and progressed and did all these cool things to try and get there.

Megan Henry [00:57:20]:

Right? And so I would say that you are given those desires for a reason. And again, you have everything you need inside of you and you're not lacking it, you're blocking it. And so if you can do that inner work and discover why you think the way that you think and what are the stories that I'm telling myself, and maybe get with a coach, get with Jeremy and sort some of that stuff out, you can make so much progress when you invest in yourself and invest in that journey because it's so rewarding. So, again, you have your desires for a reason and you have everything you need inside of you to accomplish those things.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:01]:

Powerful words. Love it. Anything that you would like to let the listeners know? Anything that you have going on that you'd like to promote, how they can get in touch with you? Anything else that you would like to share?

Megan Henry [00:58:15]:

So I am at the Savage Meglet on all social media platforms. I'm most active on Instagram, so you can shoot me a DM or any questions. I'm always open to answering them. I love connecting with people and I'm creating a 90 day journal. It's going to be like a morning journal and to help you establish better routines and habits of excellence. I'm just starting that process, so I don't have a release date at the moment, but my goal is the end of the year.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:48]:

This episode will be as you're listening to it, it'll be somewhere in December.

Megan Henry [00:58:53]:

Perfect.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:53]:

It'll be close. Yes.

Megan Henry [00:58:56]:

Amazing.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:58:56]:

And we will have links to get in contact with Meg in the show notes, so feel free to take a peek at those. Thank you so much for being here. This was a treat of a conversation. I know that my day is going to be a lot better and brighter and more fun because of it. So thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for being you.

Megan Henry [00:59:19]:

Thank you. Thank you for being weird and strong. I feel like that's a description for myself, so this was so fitting. Thanks so much, Jerry.

Jeremy Gruensteiner [00:59:26]:

Yeah, awesome. And thank you all for listening. Until next time, stay strong, folks. And most importantly, stay weird.