Hello, my name is Leslie and I am host of the Why Not Today podcast.
This is a podcast to celebrate people who have been courageous and said, Why Not Today?
I started this podcast to honor my father, Patrick Cain, who often did say, Why Not Today?
I am based in Reston, Virginia, a planned community right outside of Washington, DC.
And thanks for joining us today.
And I'm excited to have my guest today, Travis.
And I'm going to try to pronounce your last name.
I'll let you do that in a minute.
But I met Travis at an event that somebody that was actually one of our guests on the podcast, Marissa Roy.
And she has a company called Permanent Change Coaching.
And she had an event and she was like, I have this amazing speaker.
She blew, you know, like this great event and this amazing speaker.
I'm like, who is this Travis guy?
And I almost didn't go to the event.
And Marissa was like, you have to come.
And I ended up going, it's always, I don't know about you, Travis.
It's always those things I really don't want to do that I have to make a little extra effort.
They was like, Oh my gosh, this is like who I need to meet near.
So I heard Travis's story.
He was sharing and doing a little bit coaching with some people in the group.
And I know at the end you looked at me, you go, are you okay?
And I'm like, yeah, why?
You're like, you look so excited.
I'm like, I was so excited because what you're sharing not only could help me personally, but help me train my team and share it with other people.
Why not today?
I completely thought when I have you on the podcast and you have a really fun story that is another connection to me because you went to her G and I did also.
And so, you know, we find that connection of mutual something in your life.
You automatically connect.
So I'm super excited to have Travis here as our guest.
So why don't you introduce yourself Travis, tell us what you do and a little fun fact about.
Yeah.
So my name is Travis downer.
I'm currently the director of client success for a fitness business mentorship company called impact fitness coaching Academy.
And we help online fitness coaches grow and scale their business to pretty much whatever level that they like.
We help people that are just starting out or people that are making, you know, multiple six figures even scale up to well over a million.
And my main job is to lead the success team that helps people do that. And I really kind of my specialty area is particularly on breaking people's limiting beliefs and really getting them to see the higher version of themselves.
So that's what I do on a day to day basis.
And I've been doing that for a couple of years now.
I think you need to get branch out into other worlds. And we're going to talk about that after this because you've got great skills that I think could use for all different businesses.
Fair enough.
Fun fact, you want to tell your fun story or Virginia Tech story.
Yeah, so I went to Virginia Tech. I think I got there in 2008 might have been 2009 one of those two. It's kind of blurry years after me.
But I joined a fraternity that my brother was in called Pi Kappa Alpha. And each year, another sorority on campus does the philanthropy event where it's just like a big talent show that all these Greek life participates in.
And we were trying to figure out what to do that year. And it was my first semester or two within the fraternity itself.
And we found this black light weird looking dance illusion thing. And we said, Hey, we should we should just do this. So 16 of us got together. We went on stage.
We did this black light thing. And we did really well. We ended up winning the competition, which is super great.
But someone ended up filming that and putting it on YouTube.
And back in the day, like this was the beginning of YouTube and that video got about 500,000 hits over the course of a couple months, which is a really unexpected strange experience.
And it's not like we had, like we were just doing this for fun. Like there was no end game whatsoever. Like we were still in college.
But one of the comments on that video said you guys should submit this to America's Got Talent.
And at two in the morning, somebody probably got home from the bar and said, You know what, this is a great idea. We should send it in.
So they did.
And for some reason, America's Got Talent actually called us and they said, Hey, we want to fly you guys to New York City.
We want you to audition live for the show.
We thought it was a joke. We thought somebody was just messing with us, but we looked into it a little bit and it was legit.
So 13 of us got together. We considered it a free trip to Manhattan.
We put together a 90 second show and we flew all the way up to the city and we performed.
And then life got a little bit crazy after that because they actually liked it. They gave us a standing ovation.
The judges said, You're going through to the next round and we just kept getting through round after round after round and found ourselves in Los Angeles on the actual live like this episode is live tonight.
Those types of shows.
And on 2010 or in 2010, we placed third on America's Got Talent, which was not expected whatsoever.
And we started touring the country and the world doing corporate entertainment events with our act.
And we did that for about a decade until COVID actually ended up shutting us down and they shut down the whole entertainment business.
But yeah, I went from a college student to a business owner fairly quickly.
And then suddenly I was an international traveler and doing all these like huge corporate events. And it was just a very, very eye opening insane experience where you get to see a different side of the world and humanity and people's perspectives and beliefs and almost like a crash crash course style where you just injected right into it.
And it just forces you to really become kind of the next version of yourself.
Was this your freshman year college?
I'm pretty sure when we were on America's Got Talent, I think I was in my junior year of college.
But when we first went on the show, it was at the very end of a spring semester.
So like things were kind of quiet.
But when we kept getting through round after round after round, we actually had to take off of a semester in the fall.
And then right after the show, we won on tour for about three months across the US and did a 25 city tour with a show.
And that required us to take off the next semester as well.
So I was my junior year of college.
It basically wasn't in college, which was an interesting experience.
Yeah.
Can you go back and finish?
So I after a year of doing that, you know, you really you're in these rooms with people that you would never be in a room with when you're 20, 21 years old.
So your entire perspective of life pretty much shifts and every belief you have is shattered very, very quickly.
Yeah.
So we took a year off and when we came back, I took a I think I did another semester and then some of the guys said like, hey, that was a lot of fun.
I love that.
But I want to I want to finish this out.
But my mindset was almost like, this is a way out.
This is a way to another whole entire lifestyle that I've always thought I kind of wanted to do, but I didn't know how to get there.
So I ended up actually dropping out of Virginia Tech during like my unofficial senior year and completely focused on the business and continue to grow and scale it.
And you probably got much better education during all that than you ever would sitting in a class.
Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I remember after we did that for about a year, year and a half, I was sitting in like a business economics class or something like that.
And some of the stuff that they were talking about, I was just thinking none of this applies and I own a business like this is this real world experience has really taught me more than I could ever hope for.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, what a cool story and what and and again, it goes to courage that you had the courage to go forward with it.
Because that could have been pretty scary and I assume your parents probably had an opinion about it.
They definitely had the opinion. I mean, speaking of courage, I remember sitting at my desk at Virginia Tech kind of deciding, you know, do I go back this next semester and that was obviously a mass amount of fear around perceptions of what I was doing from a family perspective, a friend perspective.
And I kept coming back to the same quote from a football coach which was at any point to be able to sacrifice who you are for who you will become.
And I kept thinking to myself, you know, I'm currently a college student but I can't really be a college student and a successful entrepreneur that's traveling all over the planet at the same time and I don't really want to be the former I would rather be the latter anyway.
So I had to explain that to my parents, particularly my mom.
Yeah, and it was met with some resistance.
But ultimately they said, you know, you if you got to do this then, you know, you go do it.
And we'll we'll see how it goes.
And it went very well.
Yeah, that's awesome. I love that story and I love the courage and, you know, the why not today and how one thing one decision in your life once.
One fun thing you're doing could totally like one moment in time can totally change the directory of your life.
Yeah, I mean, somebody else submitted that video to Merck's Got Talent.
I don't even know who did it.
But if they never would have done that just that five second moment in time my entire life would look completely different.
Yeah, somebody said I've heard many times it takes like five seconds of courage to do the thing, you know, just insane courage to just do that one thing and.
You know, just to be in the the talent show took courage because I never went to Virginia Tech one but my nieces and nephews went to University of Kentucky and their Greek life is huge there and they did this.
I don't even remember what it was called but it was major fundraiser event probably very similar.
Yeah.
All right, so let's talk about courage. What does courage mean to you?
Hmm, I think courage means for me personally really leaning into discomfort and disconnecting discomfort from action.
Because what I have experienced in the past is you know you're brought up to something that has resistance or discomfort or that you're feeling hesitant around and you really mull over that for days, weeks, months, years and you look back and you say man.
I should have just done it on that day. Why didn't I just pull the trigger.
Yeah, why not today.
Why not today. So for me, I actively practice disassociating discomfort and action which it which really is like a belief of mine I don't think one is actually related to the other therefore I can just focus on the actions I need to take.
Right.
Love that. Have you, have you felt a male Robin's at all.
I don't.
Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with the five second rule.
And she talks about just do you know count go five four three two one and then just do whatever you don't want to do whether it's getting out of bed and not having to snooze or calling, you know, going to get go to rehab if you need help for whatever starts the business make the call do all but you go five four three two one and then do it you don't go one two three four five because then he goes six seven eight.
But he's just, you know, and that's why I'm so passionate about this podcast and sharing people's stories, because I think it's, I know it's giving people courage to do the things they've been afraid of and just to be able to see people's past and you just never know what that decision is going to take your life and what past and the person you're
going to meet that's going to be that person I had a conversation with somebody one day and we were talking about, you know, where you met that person and you go back like way way way back to meeting that person that connected you to all these different people.
It's a really fun thread to pull because if I would have never done all of the Americans got talent stuff, the show is called fighting gravity by the way for anyone listening if you want to look at it.
But if we would have never done that I would have never ended up moving to right outside of Manhattan if I would have never done that I would have never met my fiance if that never happened I would have never been working with the mentorship that I have now like we would have never met so it's just crazy how those things
kind of like pinball together over time.
And just, you know, acting on those things and doing those things being courageous. So it sounds like you had lots of courageous moments your life and you know the path that you're on now and I love that you're coaching health professionals and their businesses and I can.
So all your training and action with Marissa and how good she is at closing the sale and she is she is and I've said this so many times wise beyond her age is how young she is and what skills she's in what I mean I've been in the personal growth world for almost 30 years, and just to watch what she's done
is pretty advanced. So, but so I'd love for you to talk about, you know, some of the things we talked about the event and some of the belief.
We don't have all day and I knew you took a while to do that but I just it was just the way you said it. I mean I've heard it, what you shared many different ways but you just need to say it dumbed it down.
And relatable so I want I really love this podcast to be able to get people tools to like help navigate their life.
Yeah, so the first thing that we need to kind of start with is just defining what really limiting beliefs are because without that we can't even like attempt to identify them so my, my go to version is something Tony Robin says, which is it's
essentially a story that you're telling yourself that's holding you back from becoming the next version of yourself it's holding you back from becoming who you want to be and nine times out of 10.
This belief that's within you, you don't even know it's there. It's subconscious, and you usually only find out if someone else points it out to you.
So what my, my hope is, is that I can really help people identify beliefs and like give them the tools to do that so they can start to do some of these things on their own without having to rely on someone else to identify those for them.
And why do we like the stories we make up and I'm sure it goes back to way way back or genetics whatever why do we create past stories.
Why don't we ever create the rarely do we create the good somebody calls and you're like, Oh, they're gonna be my next best customer instead you're like oh they're going to say no.
Yeah, man, it really depends who you're talking to right.
I think it has so much to do with your upbringing and how you're raised the kind of beliefs that your parents or your siblings or your friends and family had when you're growing up because I know some people that are just like overly, almost to the detriment overly optimistic in that area and then I know some people that
are really live in fear. I think most people hang out on the fear side, because it's so much easier to visualize. It's like oh yeah everything go wrong. I can visualize that really easily.
But when it comes to things going right so to speak, it's so much more foggy, because they don't really see how it's going to work outside the next five seconds.
So it's hard to get them in the future and like an actual positive environment when looking into the future and seeing something negative. Like it just ends right hey go do this thing. Oh it didn't work. And that's the end of it.
That's all you don't need to look any farther. So honestly I just think it's easier.
Yeah, I think you're right. Alright, so it starts with limiting belief.
And from there, it kind of goes into a little bit of a framework. So limiting beliefs are things that sound like I can't do this, you know I can't lose five pounds it'll work for that person it won't work for me I don't have the time.
I'm overwhelmed like all those things are really common limiting beliefs but figuring out that they are is really really hard fundamentally.
So that's why I try to give people a framework to walk through it, and that framework is literally only four words. It's thought, feeling emotion and action.
So thought feeling emotion action. And each one of those things turns into the next so thought creates a feeling a feeling a physical feeling, a physical feeling creates an emotion and then emotion creates an action, and then an action just turns back into a thought.
So if we know that's like the general framework of how your brain works how you interact with your environment. Then we can kind of have a dialogue around. Okay, what how do we hack the cycle and figure out what our actual beliefs are using those four things.
And the only thing I'm really trying to propose right now as a new belief for everyone listening is that beliefs are optional. Anything you've ever believed is it's yes or no.
What doesn't even matter what it is you can believe whatever you want. And we're really good at that with things that don't matter.
So, you know, Santa Claus, easy, easy, yes, no, not a big deal. But when it comes to, can I do this, can I not, it's very easy default to not.
So in order to really hack this cycle, we need to look at your actions and figure out the emotion that you were experiencing during that action.
And a very simple example of this is if someone is on like a health journey, and they decide not to go to the gym.
Right, we, I feel like most people listening have like some experience in the health world, and they have or they have not gone to the gym at some point. And they've said to themselves, I didn't go to the gym, when they wanted to.
So that's the action or in this case, in action.
And we've got to ask ourselves is okay, you didn't go to the gym. What emotion were you feeling that made you not go.
And it could be, you know, I was feeling depressed, I didn't really think I could do it, you know, I was feeling defeated I was feeling sad like usually some sort of negative emotion stops people from doing the things that they actually want to do.
What's the emotion that we were feeling once we laugh on to that, the next two questions you got to ask yourself are, what would you have to believe to make you feel that way.
So that's part one. So we're action, we're back to the emotion and now we're trying to get to the core belief, which is just a thought that you have in your mind.
And from there, that's where things get fun. So let's pretend, you know, the inaction of going to the gym, what kind of emotion where you're experiencing I was feeling defeated.
What would you have had to feel or what would you have had to believe to feel defeated.
And that could be, I don't think I can actually do this.
I know this is working for other people, but it's not working for me.
And that gets you to that core limiting belief, which probably was a bit more subconscious and you weren't really thinking that like you're not walking around saying that aloud in a mirror.
It's deep down in your brain.
Does that make sense so far.
Yeah, absolutely. And I teach water Rubik.
And I often told people in class, I use this exam all the time, like when you wake up in the morning, and you don't feel like going to that feeling to think about how you'll feel when you put your head on the pillow at night if you did or if you didn't if you did you feel great all day you didn't think about it again if you
didn't all day long you think I should have I should have and it just never goes away.
And it perpetuates the problem.
Yeah, right, you get the thought becomes a belief which is like, I can't I can't I can't I can't I can't.
I can go.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
So once we get back to that core belief, then the beauty is in the simplicity of the question that you can ask yourself, which is simply objectively speaking, is that belief true.
So, taking the gym example again we got back to, I can't do this.
Is that objectively true.
No, no, it's not.
You know that you can do it but you've you've made these decisions that have led to you and you've had this belief that has created everything that you're experiencing now.
So once you know that okay objectively that's not true, you get to ask yourself, what is true.
If that belief is inaccurate, what do I want to believe instead.
And then it's, I can do this, I can push forward, I can lose the weight, I can go to the gym, which is instantly going to give you this different physical
sensation within your body, which is going to create a different emotion and create a different action.
And it's that process that you have to run yourself through over and over and over again by looking at your action.
What was the emotion.
Well what I've had to believe to feel this emotion.
And that is that belief true.
Objectively, yes, no.
When it's no, that's when you can almost rewrite who you are as a person and change your identity if you can consistently say no, what do I want to believe instead and then take an action on that belief.
Yeah, so true and as I said it's just simple, but it makes so much sense.
Yeah.
And doing it over and over and over and catching yourself. I've worked with lots of different coaches and coach a lot of people, and it's that self awareness when you can catch yourself like, oh, why am I thinking this thought.
Yeah, why am I feeling this feeling. Have you ever done and after you talked about this I caught myself the other day, you have that negative thought about whatever I didn't do this or something and you have that feeling.
Like I've had that feeling in my gut of like, something was wrong. And then I forget what that thought was. I'm like, why did I feel that.
And I tried to find it again. I'm like, what am I doing? Go find that thought again.
And that's a really great point because most folks often associate their thoughts with their like identity or their soul really at a core level when really your thoughts are essentially nothing.
Right. It's electricity and chemicals in your brain. But since we're not asking ourselves or since we're identifying as our thoughts, that's where people get into trouble.
What if you don't believe all your thoughts? What if your thoughts aren't you because everyone has weird thoughts sometimes you've had thoughts that are like, I'm going to punch this person in the face, but you don't because that's what you don't actually believe.
You don't have a desire. There's no meaning behind it.
I don't think I've ever had that thought. Oh, yeah. Oh, then you're good.
There's other things. I mean, my sister, but your kids, but yeah.
And it's just really about disassociating yourself from your thoughts. And when you have a thought that's not serving you or you have a thought that you believe you need to question, it's taking that outside your mind and writing it down or projecting it onto a cloud or a wall or saying it allowed and saying like, what does this actually look or sound like?
Now that I'm seeing it or hearing it, do I actually believe this? And that's where that awareness really needs to come through. It's the constant questioning of your own thoughts that will allow you to do this kind of ad hoc and whatever you want.
Yeah. So, you know, thinking about that is catching yourself. And I was listening to something the other day, they were talking about mantras that really kind of help you go and do the things you want to do, which one being why not today, which I live with a lot.
So is there anything you encourage people to ways to catch themselves or ways to shift or mantra to say or something?
Yeah, have that trigger. I know there's trainers that say, you know, when you do this, do that, you know, have that triggering thing or where they call stacking habits.
Yeah. So there's sort of an affirmation style. There's two schools of thought here. The easiest one is to talk aloud, honestly, because if you start talking aloud all of your thoughts and realize how weird and crazy some of them sound, you'll start doing that with your regular thoughts, which brings the awareness up.
So that's like quick hack number one, talk aloud to yourself a little bit more. And it's very helpful to identify your own thoughts because you're just speaking.
And the things that we say to ourselves, we would never in a million years say to anybody else, ever.
Correct. Absolutely. Like if you if you get back to the belief and one of these examples, and the belief in your head is like, I'm a piece of shit.
Saying that out loud is very, very, very different experience than just thinking it. And when you say it aloud, it's like, I don't do I actually believe that like that seems really aggressive.
So that's kind of one style. The other one is a twist on an affirmation. So most affirmations are I am blank. So in this, in this one works really well actually because you could say I am not my thoughts.
But that's not really like a decision that you're making. It's kind of just something you're saying to yourself. So what I like to prescribe to is putting the word choose in there and say I choose not to be my thoughts.
I like that. And if you repeat that to yourself over and over and over again, allowed. What you get to do is that when you have a thought since you've been programming this into your mind, you get to say I get to choose what I want to do a or B, as opposed to I choose not to be anything, or I am not X.
So it gives you two paths to take every time this thing comes up for you. So for affirmations, I really like putting choose in there because it gives you, it literally gives you the power to choose yes or no right.
And that can power to choose. Absolutely. Do the things and make the decisions and be courageous. So I choose to be courageous and say why not today. Yeah, just say yeah.
So we can talk forever and ever and I love your training and I think you need to get into outside of just the health training. How did you get into that niche and into that?
That's a good question. So when COVID hit, I was working out across the gym outside of Manhattan, and the gym kind of shut down, of course, and we moved everything online.
And then over time, I want to say like four or five months later, the owner of the gym made a decision that for me was extremely unethical and violated like my own core values as a person.
So, you know, why not today? I was like, I, I can't work here anymore. I have to quit. So I quit. And of course with that, I had no income. So that's.
Yeah. So my fiancee at the time knew a personal trainer that she worked with like a decade ago that now had a business mentorship for online fitness coaches. And I was already interested in that anyway.
So I just ended up talking to them. I joined their mentorship. I went through it and after I finished, they said, Hey, you could build your own business. And that's a great idea.
And you could also work for us. And I said, that sounds fun too. So they ended up hiring me about four months after I started working with them as a, as a student within the mentorship.
Right. And then it just kind of went from there. So that was like two and a half, three years ago at this point.
That's awesome. And I see somewhere on Instagram, you're writing a book.
Yes, I am writing a book. It's called How to Not Suck as a Leader.
It is the 10 to 15 biggest mistakes that I've made in my entrepreneurial journey and how to avoid them.
And it's specifically for like beginner entrepreneurs that maybe you just started a business.
Maybe you have an employee, maybe you don't or people that are thinking, I want to start my own business. Like, what do I need to know?
It's for those folks. It's not for like, I run a Fortune 500 company. Like that's it's not for them.
Okay. So I do have an established successful business, but it would be a good tool for some of my team members.
Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot of great reminders in there. And I think it's still be a great.
I'm always ready to learn these stuff.
Same. Love it.
And then turn around and teach it.
That's what we get to do. So, all right. So how would you empower somebody else to say, why not today and be courageous?
Hmm, how would a buyer someone else to be courageous?
It's really getting them to think about what's stopping them from being courageous.
Right. What's the actual belief that's holding you back from doing the thing that you want to do.
And for most people, it's a variation of I can't do X, Y, Z.
And it comes back to the same framework. Like, is that objectively true?
Are there other people that have done the thing that you want to do because if they're human and you're human,
and they started with whatever they started with, like, it doesn't matter, you can do it too.
So just focus on the actions you need to take instead of the things you need to think about.
Right. Absolutely. I'll go back to those actions.
And somebody said to me one time, like, why not you? Like, why can't you do it?
Yeah.
Somebody else has done it. You can do it. If nobody else has done it, you can still do it.
Yeah. Because I mean, everyone started from the same place.
So just objectively speaking, you can do whatever you want to do.
Yeah. Love it. All kinds of great stuff.
So I always go back to a connection to my dad and people are like, how did I never knew your dad? How the heck?
Well, I would say probably the connection to my dad that I'm talking is when you're talking about beliefs and positive beliefs
and believing my dad never believed that a problem couldn't be solved.
I think he had that in his quarter and was definitely a think out of the box kind of guy.
And just going, I mean, his life kind of like yours went on a different trajectory because of one thing that happened.
And you never know where it's going to take.
So he grew up in California, was supposed to play football, I think for USC,
and got in a major car accident and maybe the night he graduated my school and almost died, lost the sight in his eye.
That's where the logo comes from. It was an iPad.
She always had an iPad on her Bob and Ruff Dash.
And because he couldn't go there and he was in the hospital for months and months, he went and ended up going to Notre Dame,
which obviously a long time ago he just decided halfway through the semester,
I want to go to Notre Dame and he got on a train and went to Notre Dame, which is kind of crazy to think about.
I met my mom in South Bend and the rest of history, but he was definitely a think out of the box,
believe the good and problem. I saw something the other day and it was a sign that said,
better to ask for forgiveness and permission.
And I was definitely my father and I said that to somebody one day and he's like, what do you mean?
I've never heard that. I'm like, we obviously were not raised by my dad.
The rules were somebody else.
So lots of great stuff. And I think you definitely need to get into other areas because you've got amazing talent
and what you've done and just in the time I've met you,
I can see where you can make a difference in a lot of people's lives.
So how can people find you connect with you, Travis?
Yes, you guys can just follow me on the good old Instagrams if you'd like.
I would suggest linking my name in the show notes because it's impossible to speak.
No, I was going to have, we will share all your contact information and I'm going to, can we share a link to your fighting gravity?
Yeah, absolutely. I'll send you a link. We can do that.
Yeah. So yeah, this has been great. Thank you for joining us.
And I love the Virginia Tech Connection.
Oh, and who was the football coach that you quoted?
I think his name is Eric Thomas.
I think he's, I think he was a high school football coach, but he had some videos on YouTube that I found somehow.
And he's just a fantastic motivational speaker.
I have no idea if he still does it, but that one line that he said to me, I think that really changed my life forever.
And it's amazing too. It's that one thought, it's that one person, it's that one limiting belief.
It's that one moment that can totally change your entire life and just being open to it.
And I think that's really the message I want to share. It's the open to, who knows where your life can go.
And it's just never that.
And that, even that, like that's a belief.
Yep.
If you don't believe that, then that's probably not going to happen.
My firmly believe it, you know, never know where it's going.
So, well, thank you, Travis for sharing.
And I'm excited for everybody to hear this episode and you can find us on YouTube and Spotify, iTunes, all the places.
And if you want to review us and like us and share this, we would greatly appreciate it.
We're almost at, I just looked today, we're almost at 2000 views.
And last time I checked, we're at 26 different countries.
So I'm not sure who thinks of this all over the world.
But thanks again for joining us.
And there is a website which is www.WhyNotTodayPodcast.com.
We have t-shirts and vinyls and stickers and cups.
So to encourage you to say why not today.
So thanks again, Travis.
And I look forward to connecting with you more.
Thanks everybody for listening.
See ya.
Bye.