Raising Your Baseline: The Secret to Unshakeable Performance

Brent Dowlen: [00:00:00] So you think you’re improving, hitting the gym, grinding at work, scrolling through the self-help tips. You’re not alone. Most men think they are, but here’s the kicker. No matter how hard you try, stress, chaos and life itself always exposes your lowest level of training. It’s like building a skyscraper on sand.

The foundation is all that matters, and most men never actually strengthen it. Here’s the part that most people don’t realize. Your default floor determines everything from how you handle conflict to how you show up for your kids. But you, and most of us men focus on peaks, not the floors. Think of it in terms of weightlifting.

When a man asks how much you binge, I don’t care about your routine, they don’t care about your program or any given day in the gym, the question is, what’s your one rep max? We just don’t say it that way. Your peak, which is a totally useless number that can change radically based on any number of factors any day of the week.

I mean, pros [00:01:00] spend six weeks peaking before a competition to raise the number for that one day. So staying with that metaphor, what we need to worry about is on your worst day, no sleep, no food dehydrated. You’ve been sick, you’re still feeling like crap that got ran over by a freight train, just a flesh wound on that day.

What can you put up for five solid reps? That’s your floor or baseline, whatever word you want to use for it. Racing. That number is where strength is found. Likewise, raising your floor in other areas of your life is the key. In this episode, I’m gonna show you how raising your baseline is the real shortcut to consistently performing at a higher level no matter what life throws at you.

We’re gonna share five tools like the Fear Diet, the No Excuse experiment on a Tied Poverty challenge to help you raise the bar. On your floor and more, but in every area of your life, improve sleep. [00:02:00] Sleep quality is the underappreciated, underutilized for multiplier that we all need. So we’re gonna check in with our sponsors over MyPillow for about 60 seconds, and we’re gonna get into five tips that raise the floor in your life.

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Welcome to The Driven 2 Thrive broadcast purpose, growth, and lasting impact for men. I’m your host, Brent Dowlen, and we help men go from living. To thriving purpose-filled intentional lives. Now, you’ve likely heard we don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. What you may not know or may not care about is that comes all the way back from a guy named Archilochus, roughly back in six 80 [00:04:00] BC Yeah, that’s pre pre-time guys, and it’s been around a long time.

Obviously it’s not a new insight, but the longevity of it gives it credence and its mantra is followed deeply among the US military. It simply means in our lives we can’t dismiss it, but we frequently do and it’s deceptively simple, so it’s easy to tune out and pretend it isn’t real. Your default is your floor.

No matter how many, no matter how many rogue feets you may bench press. A metric ton. You may be able to leak tall buildings in a single bound, but no matter how many feets of strength you do are pal talents or power, whatever you wanna give yourself. I know we can’t jump buildings. Oh, well, Superman, under stress, chaos and fatigue, you automatically revert to what you train to consistently.

But we don’t apply that in our lives. [00:05:00] For example, I pulled a 635 pound sweeping deadlift, and it was by far my heaviest pull ever. However, that was a couple years ago. That was a couple years ago when I was training regularly, and I haven’t been doing that. That was post break before I broke my neck. That was post COVID.

We’ll see if I get demonetized for that one, but. I likely could not have hit that on any given day and certainly not an imperfect day. Even when I was doing that, it was just a peak lift for me. I was at the top of a hard focused planning training cycle with optimum nutrients, optimum rest, and those numbers are completely pointless right now.

Okay? They’re useless. They don’t matter. I did it once several years ago. Yay. Who cares? It’s completely useless to me because it’s not my baseline or floor, whichever term you want to use. Life hits [00:06:00] us when we’re beat up. Stress doesn’t ask permission. It exposes the lowest common denominator, the weakest link in your physical, mental, emotional, or moral training.

The higher your baseline, the better you perform automatically under pressure. The lower the baseline, the more likely you are to crumble. If your floor is low, lazy habits avoidance, soft courage, uh, timidity, it’s, you’re gonna fail. It’s that simple. If your floor is high, you’ve built up resilience, toughness skills, moral courage, then you handle chaos with grace and control.

So, if we’re all on the same page, we understand why this principle works. Let me give you some tools to help you raise your floor, because if you raise your baseline relentlessly. You’ll raise the bar on your whole life. So number one is what we call micro composure drills. Life doesn’t wait till you’re ready.

Emergencies, confrontation, [00:07:00] chaos, they hit without warning, and your first response is usually reactive. So here’s the drill. Take one to three minutes a day and put yourself in controlled stress. That could be taking a cold shower, which, ugh, or that could be doing two minutes of all out pushups as fast as you can.

Hon. Honestly, just pump them out until you drop for two minutes. Just go fast and hard. That could be improv speech in front of perfectly perfect strangers. I had a guest on several years ago, his coach, and one of the things he’d have his people do is randomly walk up to five strangers throughout the day and say, I’m bat.

In the Batman voice, just like that, right? It was to push them into that controlled stress. You can even do it in your mirror, but I would do that with improv speech. The I’m Batman really needs having a purpose in person. But when you do it, track your heart weight. Rate your breathing the chatter in your [00:08:00] mind.

Do it every day. Slowly. Raise your floor. When real chaos hits you don’t panic, then you respond calm, strategic, and deliberately because you’ve been upgrading your baseline and that’s the result. Powerful, right? But if you don’t pair it with this other tool that forces middle discipline under real discomfort and the magic’s lost, and that is the no excuse experiment.

Discipline isn’t burst of willpower, it’s raising your baseline self-control. So pick one comfort you rely on. That could be social media, that could be caffeine. If you listen to the show, you know, that one would hit me real hard. That could sugar, that could be video games, and cut it out entirely Cold Turkey baby for 30 [00:09:00] days.

Parrot with something uncomfortable every day, like a cold shower, a fasted workout, whatever pushes you at first, it’s gonna be brutal. You’ll want to quit. You may even fail. You’re gonna hate it if you fail, start again. But each day you persist. Your floor rises. Your lowest common denominator is going up.

Stress life curve balls. You don’t crumble anymore. You act intentionally. That’s the psychological lever that moves you from reactive to proactive. Impressive, possibly, definitely difficult, but the middle discipline alone won’t stop your fear from hijacking your baseline. We gotta do [00:10:00] something for that as well.

What brings us to number three, the fear diet. Fear is sneaky. It keeps you stuck. Avoidance feels safe, but it lowers your floor, which is really what we’re trying to avoid, right? So here’s how it works. Pick a fear that you avoid. All the time. That might be heights, that might be confrontation. That might be the fear of failure or the fear of rejection.

Good lord, that might be spiders schedule in weekly micro confrontations with these fears. Okay? You’re going to intentionally expose yourself to this discomfort,

high ropes courses. Yeah, maybe, maybe not, right? My dad never would’ve been able to do that. Give feedback to someone that they’re gonna hate. [00:11:00] Not spitefully, just respectfully, but actually tell your friend that thing you Try not to tell them that you know is actually a big thing for them. Try a small public speaking challenge.

Reflect, learn, repeat, expose yourself in low levels to things that scare you. Your autopilot changes. Panic becomes strategy, and fear no longer dictates actions. And now the body. Because mental strength without physical resilience is only about half the bottle. The bottle, the battle. Can I say that right?

We’ll see, which takes us to point number four, which is pain with a purpose. Your body is a baseline amplifier. When your nervous system isn’t tested, stress overwhelms you. It’s that easy. So take on full body challenges. That may be ice baths, that [00:12:00] might be waiter, ruck marches. That might be long swims, that might be ultra marathons.

If you’re David Goggins. That might be going and doing a Tough Mudder or a Spartan. That might be any number of things that challenge you physically with mental stress. At the same time, commit to it. No distractions, no music. That takes it to a whole nother level. Just you and the pain in your body and in your mind.

As you just deal with you, reflect on personal growth, reflect on your life goals, and let the pain actually teach you. Now, when I say pain, guys, I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Don’t misconstrue that. I want you to cause yourself physical discomfort. Take yourself out of the physically comfortable and challenge your body with something that also challenges your mind.

And here’s the [00:13:00] lesson. Pain isn’t actually the enemy. Enemy. It recalibrates your nervous system. It raises your floor, it raises it higher, it makes you tougher, and it makes you unshakeable. Now, body is trained, but what about the impact? What about legacy? That brings us to the point number five, guys, legacy micro wins.

Now, why do we care about that? Because that is a deep seated fear and concern for almost every man. I can’t say all men. I hate throwing out broad generalizations more than I have to. But the majority of men have a deep, deep, heartfelt need for legacy. So true. Leveling up isn’t just about personal improvement, it’s also about legacy.

It’s raising your moral and social baseline. Mentor someone else, teach somebody else, step up in leadership, small daily actions, track [00:14:00] them and reflect. You may be a parent. And so this seems like an easy win for you guys. Or you may not be a parent, and that’s okay too. You can still mentor other people.

There are lots of volunteer programs. There are lots of community programs where people need somebody else to help them study, to help them grow, to help them learn new things. There are opportunities to mentor other people that will help you take it to the next level. Your floor now includes responsibility.

It includes integrity, it includes impact. You don’t just survive, you lead, you influence. You elevate the people around you, which raises the standards you have for you and the standards you have for the way you live your life. You’re having to step up, you’re raising that floor. And finally, the secret weapon for handling chaos with efficiency is number six, is the time [00:15:00] poverty challenge.

Your default productivity is your stress armor. I know exactly how long it takes me to produce a show. I know how long it takes me to produce somebody else’s show. I know how long it takes me to write a new blog post for one of my clients. That productivity I count on, I bank on to protect me from the stress of everything going to shit.

Well, give yourself less time than you actually think you need. In fact, try 90% of your estimated time to start with. If you know it’s gonna take you an hour, do it 90% of that time instead of a hundred percent of that time, and only give yourself that 90% of the time. Now, if you’ve been on the show before, we’ve talked about the fact that a task will grow to take up the time you give it anyways.

And so hopefully you’re already pushing this [00:16:00] boundary a little bit and you. Experimented with this because this is a hard, fast rule. A task will always expand and take the time allotted. So hopefully you’ve already cut back some of this anyways. But I want you to take a deep breath and skill it back a little bit more.

Give yourself less time. Push hard, focus, ramp up complexity, monthly overwhelm, uh, it doesn’t break you anymore once you start to do this. Deadlines. They exist, whatever. No big deal. You’re gonna get it done ahead of time anyway. Your floor now auction oriented, efficient, unstoppable. You’re mastering your life.

You’re not reacting to it. The floor’s gone up, guys, you’re pushing it farther. So here’s the truth. Your life is only as strong as your lowest floor between micro composure deals. No excuse experiments. Fear, diet Penguin purpose, legacy micro wins, and the time [00:17:00] poverty challenge, you can raise that floor.

They’re not hero moments, they’re baseline upgrades to raise the floor. Chaos is gonna test you. Life will challenge you and what it does, your default self will handle it. Calm, focused, and resilient because you’re raising that floor. I wanna take it farther. Download our free 12 week Raise your floor Challenge for men.

No email, no costs, just actionable steps to permanently raise that baseline. You’ll find it embedded in the show page for this episode on my website over@purposedrivenmen.com, our driven to thrive.com. You’ll find the episode page and it will just be embedded there. Guys. You can download it for free as a PDF.

Stop falling back. Raise that floor and be better tomorrow because of what you do today. The Driven to Thrive broadcast purpose, growth, and lasting impact [00:18:00] for men, helping men go from living to thriving. Purpose-filled intentional lives. Disclaimer, my like any other source cycles, promos because of the extended life cycle of a podcast.

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