In this episode of The Tactical Empire, Jeff Smith and Shawn Rider dive into the power of auditing habits and maintaining consistency for long-term success. From personal injuries to daily setbacks, they share how small, consistent actions across fitness, family, freedom, and finances create lasting impact. Learn how to adapt habits to fit your lifestyle, build momentum, and stay aligned with your goals. They also introduce their Accelerator Program, offering valuable resources for entrepreneurs and investors ready to elevate performance and well-being. Tune in to discover how auditing habits can unlock your next level.
In this episode of The Tactical Empire, hosts Jeff Smith and Shawn Rider dive into practical strategies to overcome life’s challenges and achieve high levels of discipline and success. They discuss their personal experiences with injuries and setbacks, the importance of maintaining consistent habits, and how to audit personal and professional goals as an entrepreneur. They emphasize the significance of the 'four Fs'—fitness, family, freedom, and finances—and how maintaining discipline in these areas leads to long-term success. Tune in for insights on sustaining motivation and managing stress to ensure resilient growth in your business and personal life.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:29 Casual Conversation and Injury Stories
04:43 Transition to Main Topic
05:03 Q1 Reflection and Q2 Motivation
06:09 Consistency and Habits for Success
09:49 Real-Life Examples and Personal Insights
20:35 Final Thoughts and Program Promotion
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[00:00:00] How do you find the will to fight back against the world that wants to keep you sedated? S stuck plates? Join us for the tools and strategies you need to create a life of abundance, discipline, and high achievement. This, this is the tactical implied with Jeff Smith.
Jeff Smith: Welcome to another episode of The Tactical Empire. I'm joined by Sean Rider. How are you, man?
Shawn Rider: Oh, living, living the life. Sun's out. Guns out. Soccer practice last night. Gymnastics for the daughter tonight, baseball for the Sunday night soccer. Tomorrow night games, football starting. I mean, we got, we got the whole shebang, man.
So, uh, we are good. How are you?
Jeff Smith: Good. Good. I. I'm, uh, healing up from a little injury. I about broke my fucking leg earlier this week and [00:01:00] uh, so that's been interesting 'cause I've had multiple people tell me it's broken. I don't think it's broken, but you know how when people get in your head you're like, huh, maybe it is broken.
I don't know. And so, um, I'm walking it off.
Shawn Rider: I'd rather it be broken than torn ligaments. You had quite the golf ball size lump in your ankle.
Jeff Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm, I'm recovering from that. Um, yeah, yeah, it's fine. It, it'll be fine. Um, I, I fasted yesterday like we talked about, and, uh, that made it feel better.
Uh, so no, no surprise there. Lower my inflammation and I feel better. Um, so we'll see. I'm, I'm ready to get back at it though. Like, I was running, I was doing everything and, and feeling pretty good, but I, I was neglecting my mobility and it's still the same old. Hip issue. I, I've got a glute medias tear that I never rehabbed properly.
So like, this one scared the shit out of me though, because like, I legit [00:02:00] almost did, like you played football for long enough, you know what I'm talking about. But I almost blew out my ankle and my knee in one fucking shot, and like, it scared me. So I, I, I was, I was happy that it all seems structurally sound, uh, after all this, but man.
It had me scared. I was like, okay, I think I need to do my mobility.
Shawn Rider: I've had plenty of ankle and knee issues from my football days. And, uh, when the ankle gives man, uh, it gives, I've also had a dislocated kneecap and that felt like my leg bent in half, like so respect to the people that actually had their legs broken in half.
But when I, my dislocated kneecap was the. Mo my, the least serious football injury that I had, and it was so painful.
Jeff Smith: Yeah, the most painful for sure. I've heard that.
Shawn Rider: It was, it was fixed right there on the spot. I was fortunate [00:03:00] enough, um, this was when I was at App State. I dislocated my kneecap and the, the, the kneecap like slid to the side and it didn't rotate.
So it was still facing forward. It was just on the side of my knee and there was an orthopedic surgeon there for another player and he heard me screaming on the ground. 'cause I legit, I legit didn't see it, but I, I felt it, it was in attacking drill. Yeah. And my knee. Bent in half and touched the ground.
So I thought my leg snapped. Um, so I was screaming. He came over and like he popped it right back into place like two seconds later. But, uh, that dude, that was so painful. But I've torn ligaments in my ankles. I've break, I've broken my, my tib fib, which is a lot worse. It required plates and screws and surgery and, but, uh, that kneecap.
So what were you, you guys were playing? At the RV park?
Jeff Smith: No, it was, it was, it was adults playing and having a Nerf gun.
And I, I legit thought I broke [00:04:00] my fibula, so I'm like, okay, like I need to test this thing, see if it works, but I'm, I'm, I'm back at it.
Shawn Rider: Other people, they're like, you walked it off so well, bro, and I'm trying to imagine like serious Jeff, like in serious pain. Trying not to show it.
Jeff Smith: I, I don't have a pain face.
It is what it is. No,
Shawn Rider: for.
Jeff Smith: I just drag it home. I got a dead leg. Now. It is what it is. You, you get back to back to your base. Take care of it.
Shawn Rider: If you, if you need to pay doctor's bills, post more pictures of your feet, you'll be able to cover them in no time.
Jeff Smith: Oh, man. All right. Now that we've sufficiently lost this whole audience, where are we going?
Shawn Rider: It's only four, four and a half minutes. So at at one and a half speed, that was only two and a half minutes time. So, alright, so if that wasn't motivation enough for you guys to not play games with adults so you don't have to use your [00:05:00] insurance, uh, or go see a doctor, especially if you're traveling. What I wanna say, this episode's gonna be dropping right at the tail end of Q2 or right at the end of Q1 going into Q2 right before our meetup in Jacksonville, Florida.
You know, uh. Maybe you are an entrepreneur, investor, came into the year with high hopes. Hopefully you did annual planning. Hopefully you did couples planning. Hopefully you did a, a, a vision. Hopefully you reset a few things. You started taking action back in January. But as we know, like on the tail end of 90 day plans, a lot of people start slipping and, and fading out, and life happens, especially during Q1, during six season, if you have kids.
So going into Q2, maybe you're well on your way to reaching your goals. I know we, that I am in a lot of the areas of my life. Um, I've tried to audit myself on some of the areas that I've been slipping. Maybe you didn't take, maybe you took action, but you didn't get the results you were thinking. So Jeff, let's just take some time here.
Take it wherever you want, but let's [00:06:00] give the small business owners, the entrepreneurs, the investors, a little bit of end of Q1, beginning of Q2, motivation.
Jeff Smith: Oh no, I, I don't think it's about motivation. I think it's time to audit your habits and, and your consistency. I mean, like, that's, that's all that it comes down to for me, is like, boring.
I know, but that's what, that's what produces results. That's all that produces results. You can say I'm as boring as anything, but like your habits and your consistency are all that matters.
Shawn Rider: I'm being facetious. It is the answer though. Um, and, and so just pontificate on that though, right? Like you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times, but you need to hear it over and over again because there is no shiny new object.
There's no silver bullet outside of. Audit the shit that you know you should be doing to get the results that you're trying to get. So, go ahead Jeff. Sorry for [00:07:00] interrupting with my boring, but it's the answer.
Jeff Smith: Well, I mean at, at this time of year, it's a great time to do it because everyone comes out of the new year with, with motivation.
Right. Especially this year. We were in a weird year getting past a certain. Political administration coming into a new political administration, everyone was highly energized thinking about what was gonna be happen. Right. And you've had enough time at this point as a business owner to have gotten kicked in the fucking balls over this three month period with something right.
So, and you know, it's not all shiny rainbows and fucking whatever, unicorns, and, uh, like a three month gauge is a good time to kind of knock you off your momentum game, if you will. 'cause like, you can, you can build as much enthusiasm and momentum out of, uh, having, having motivation to carry you [00:08:00] for a little while.
But ultimately, at the end of the day, what produces long-term lasting results is just consistency with the understanding that those things are gonna happen, those setbacks are gonna happen. I just told you I like broke my fucking leg. Almost like that was, that was one week's time of dealing with that. I was sick as hell for another week and my whole household was sick, all six of us.
And so that set me back another week. I had to travel and drive to Houston. I. In a, a flurry of four days. So like, that was three weeks, almost of my three months. So, I mean, those things all came up unexpectedly and threw off progress that I had intended on making. And so what, what you have to revert to in those times is like, what are you gonna lean on?
What, what stability points are you gonna return to? How, how are you gonna control what you can [00:09:00] control in those situations? Because you can only do what you can do. You're gonna get sick, you're gonna get hurt, you're gonna have setbacks, financially, businesswise, relationship wise, whatever. You're going to talk to your wife in a way you don't want to talk to her.
That then set you back. Three days having to fix that shit, right? Like that happens. Like those things happen. You're like, man, we have been on such a good run and then I screwed it up, whatever. And, uh, things like that are gonna happen in every aspect of your life. Or I have a really good relationship with my 12-year-old daughter right now, and I wanna keep that going.
But I said the wrong thing when she was upset about this, right? 'cause I'm not a 12-year-old girl and I don't understand that. And I'm just a fixer, not a. Listener, and so you're
Shawn Rider: really good at, you're really good at, uh, providing examples for us.
Jeff Smith: I know, I know because I, I, my, my examples are learning opportunities for everybody else, and so like I.
Shawn Rider: These [00:10:00] aren't made up examples.
Jeff Smith: I am, I am rehashing my first quarter and I'm telling you guys where I'm at and that that's reality. That's how life works and I'm still kicking ass in certain areas and I'm still controlling what I can control and doing what I can do to keep on a path where I know that over time I can keep the momentum up and the compounding interest of the results.
I'm. In spite of these temporary setbacks, in spite of like having things not go the way I intended them to go, right? Because if you build this perfect plan and it takes you 90 days of execution at a hundred percent, you're never going to be successful in that particular plan. But if you set your long term goals somewhere where you.
Or manageable to hitting them, and, and you're willing to ride it out and say that, that, like, that's just the inevitable result of where we're gonna get. I, I'm willing to spend as much time as it takes [00:11:00] doing this to get there, then you, you cannot fail. Yeah. And I think I, I, go ahead. I love ti, I love time related goals, but on the other hand, you have to go in.
With a indifference on when it occurs. And so you may set a goal for April one. By April one, I'm going to do this. This is why we reflect every quarter, like where have you come? 'cause if you're still moving, you're still getting closer to the target. So April one, you have to take with a grain of salt if you're not there.
If you are great, it's time to remeasure and extend. But like you, you have to go in time. Targets are great for creating urgency, but, but like I said, you have to approach them with a level of indifference on whether they're completed during that time, which is a weird [00:12:00] conundrum 'cause you want that fire under your ass, but you also have to accept the reality that like it's gonna come into your universe at the point that you bring it in.
Shawn Rider: Well, that's why I have a love hate relationship with, uh, specific goal setting as it is, regardless if it's, uh, time set or number set. It's like, 'cause I was thinking about this the other day. It's like, hey, if you're trying to get the $30,000 a month in a business and you, you end that quarter and you're trying to get it by the end of the quarter and by the end of the quarter you're at 29,992, uh, you didn't hit your goal.
Like, are you like, so I play that in my head, like if my goal 30,000, how am I gonna feel if I come in at 28, 5? Depending on where I'm starting, but probably still pretty good if it's, if it's, if it's higher than what it was, it means we're on the right trajectory. Try and figure out why we didn't hit the goal.
Did we slack in an area or did we just not pour as much [00:13:00] gasoline on the fire as we could have? Right. Could we have added more to the ad budget? 'cause the ads were working and we just. Kept, kept the budget the same and we had capacity to increase it and bring in more people or whatever. But it's interesting now, like, um, you know, opening up a new business a couple months back, we, we set out, uh, an annual plan for it from a financial perspective and, and we beat it where're above where we expected.
And like you play this game where it's like, oh, that's awesome. Now the next level's here because we can reach the next layer of goals faster. And so you can't let the fact that you have another layer to get to deter you from the excitement that you did beat the goal. Because a lot of people just beat themselves up.
Oh, that was great, but we could have done X, Y, Z to get here even faster. So, um, I think that's living the gap versus the game men game mentality. Dan Sullivan. So I always come back to that as a foundational book. Um, but same thing, man. I'm looking back at Q1. On [00:14:00] like any given day. I am, I am really, really happy with how everything's going.
Um, if you, like I told the guys in the group, I think on the stoicism call, uh, I, I'd rate myself really high as a father and as a husband, but if you just, if you had a camera in my house and you tuned into it on a random Tuesday, you'd probably see me doing shit that I said you shouldn't, I shouldn't be doing as a dad, like on my phone when my kids are playing next to me.
Like, we all do that shit every now and again. But I, I think the, the quarter's gone really well. But, you know, wife left her job. We had to dial in some of the personal finances. Uh, you know, I'm not the greatest, uh, trainer, so to speak on like training a new employee. And it happened to be the new employee was my wife, and it was like, Hey, you have more experience in this, this sales management realm.
So I want you to take what the franchise has and talk to the new franchise coordinator and look at the content and create, create the job that, that, that you want. The role responsibilities is like. I'm not that [00:15:00] person. So there was a little bit of tension there early on. It's like, I don't know what to do.
I'm like, well, I don't know what you should do too. 'cause I'm not, I'm not good at that role. So just go, you know? But fast forward 90 days, she's crushing it. She's found her way of doing it. And the results are yielding itself, right? We've dialed in the finances. We're getting into consistent rhythm there.
We've been able to take a trip. We we're gonna go to North Carolina next month. We're taking some time off like there. I wanna come back to you. You went to habits. And this kind of plays into that is like your habits need to be the, the positive physical health, mental health production, yielding habits that we know work.
And for me, I. I want to keep the main thing, the main thing, no matter what's going on in my life, right? I just made a Facebook post today about, uh, the injuries I had in high school and how it laid the foundation to my expectations on things can get taken from me, basically, that are outta my control at any point.
And I listed some of the things that I went through [00:16:00] over the past, uh, few years, you know, by few years, I mean 15, 20 years. Um, and, and, and the one thing there is like during that whole time, I kept the main things, the main things. And what I mean by that is. I never stopped working out. I never started eating like shit.
I did not become an alcoholic. I don't smoke cigarettes or recreational products. Um, I took vacations. I've show up to all of my kids' stuff. Um, I, I, I hire and fire as needed. Like, those are the things that over the long time are going. To get you where you want to go without suffering through life. And I think that's why I yelled at you at the beginning, boring, because it's literally the boring stuff is the exciting.
Parts of life and the, the things that actually get you what you want. When we look at going back to the last episode, when we [00:17:00] look at what we define as a winning entrepreneur and investor, okay, and so that's like, that's like maybe that's motivating people. Maybe it's not. But if you show me what you've been doing, I don't need to know your name.
I don't need to know what you look like. I don't need to know your job. If you just showed me your calendar and what you have on it. What you do for yourself, what you do for your work, what you do for your family. If I saw that, the chances of me being pretty close on, like how you feel and what you look like about life, I could probably get fairly close to that.
And I, I truly believe that. So that's why Jeff said d in your habits, that's why I'm saying keep the main shit, the main shit. And, and, and you'll be fine in Q2 and you may not reach what you want in Q2. It may be Q3, but you're gonna get there. 'cause the clock doesn't stop ticking. That's what you have to understand.
The clock always keeps going.
Jeff Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, what you're referring to is, I, I like refer [00:18:00] to is like guardrail activities. So like we talk about the four Fs, fitness, family, freedom, and finances. Like you build micro level habits to those and, and, and when everything seems like nothing's going right, and, and you lean on those like guardrails and, and you evaluate how much you have been doing those things and you go back to like the basics of that.
And if you control those things, things will start to improve. And, and I, I know that because I've been doing it for 15 years and I've seen the opposite occur, I've seen the ebbs and flows of like peaks and valleys of success. Like going hard for a while, doing really well, and then it all fucking crumbles.
And you're like, why can't I create consistency with this? And it all goes back to like those guardrail activities and, and, and you, for me, I track it, but I mean like you can see [00:19:00] linearly over time, the more consistent you are with those activities that are meaningful. The, the better relationships you have, the more money you make, the more energy you have to produce and pour into other people like it.
It's just it all, and, and that takes years to figure out like what works for you. I mean, I, I can tell you what's worked for me, but like that may not be what exactly works for you. Right. And so, um, it, it's, it's a lot of tests. Retest and figure out what impact it's having. Is it creating stress on your life?
That's something we talk about in the inner circle all the time. Like, you're, you've tried this for 30 days, is it creating more stress than benefit? And if, if the answer's yes, then fucking get rid of it. Mm-hmm. Like if you're scared as fuck to get a cold plunge and it raises your goddamn blood pressure every morning at five in the morning.
Stop cold plunging. I don't give a fuck what they say. Like that's not worth it. To raise your cortisol levels to go cold plunge. If it creates a level of tension in your life that you'd then have to manage, [00:20:00] 'cause subconsciously that is creating some other neural pathways happening for you and, uh. And, and which changes your mu mood, it changes your attitude throughout the day.
It changes like a lot about you. And so like people take that for granted trying to be hard or whatever. And uh, the reality of it is you have to find your flow of your activities that work.
Shawn Rider: I, uh, don't deny that and adjusted some of my habits accordingly. Um, I've said that on plenty of other episodes. So ladies and gentlemen, if you're an entrepreneur, investor, and this episode helped you.
We're happy about that. Uh, we just dropped another episode on our accelerator program. So if you're ready to work with Jeff and I two on one, we'd love to have you after we, uh, send you through the Freedom Audit, do a little vetting call, see if we're right for each other. And you're right for our group.
Uh, Jeff, anything else for the people? If not, send 'em out [00:21:00] and we'll see 'em next time.
Jeff Smith: Yeah. If this is your first time here, don't get it twisted. We're not saying go be fucking soft. Like, and, and I'll, I'll give you the tough love on that if you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. It's not, it's not a, it's not a free pass to make an excuse for yourself to getting out of doing the work, just so you know.
So we're clarifying here. Um, yeah. Hit us up on the tactical empire on all the platforms. You can follow us on the Facebook community. We have a free tactical Empire Facebook community there. You can DM Sean and I at Instagram anytime. We're happy to answer questions. Um, if you have questions about infinite banking.
The four Fs, our, our inner circle group or our accelerator program. Hit us up and let us know. We'd love to talk more about it and see how we can help you. Have the best year ever. Take care kick ass. We'll talk to you [00:22:00] soon.