Identity: The Injury That Cracked Tyler Bramlett Wide Open

Matt Gilhooly (00:00)
What does it take to stop running? Not from a finish line, but from yourself. Tyler spent years building what the world told him success looked like. The body, the car, the company, and the world cheered him on. But underneath, nothing outside of him could fill that hole. It took one moment on a gymnastics floor, a knee that gave out, an identity that fractured, to start the slow unraveling of everything he thought he was.

What followed was multiple surgeries, years of hard questions, and one choiceless choice that changed the direction of his entire life. This is a conversation about the difference between performing success and actually feeling at peace.

Coach Tyler (00:40)
And I'll never forget, my body was like, no, this is not feeling good. And I was like, you shut up, buddy. I'll show this guy the hardest punch he's ever seen. That's literally what I thought in my head.

And I came down and my knee went completely sideways. it was like, you know, like literally just completely sideways toward my ACL, MCL, LCL quad meniscus all in one shot.

Matt Gilhooly (01:05)
You're listening to the LifeShift Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Gilhoolie. This show is built around one simple idea, that sometimes a single moment can change how we see everything. Each week, I talk with someone about the moment that shifted their life and how they learned to live differently after it. These are not stories about having it all figured out. They are stories about what it looks like to keep going once the story changes. Thank you for being here. Here's today's story.

Matt Gilhooly (01:36)
Hello everyone, welcome to the LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Tyler. Hello Tyler.

Coach Tyler (01:41)
Hi Matt, how are you?

Matt Gilhooly (01:43)
Pretty good. Worked a full day, felt like a second Monday of the week, but you know, that's okay. How are you?

Coach Tyler (01:47)
yeah. Sometimes Tuesdays

feel like a second Monday, don't they?

Matt Gilhooly (01:51)
Yes.

Coach Tyler (01:51)
Yeah, I'm having that same feeling now that you mention it. And I didn't sleep the best last night, but that's alright, you know? Life happens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think everybody has at the end of the day, Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (01:56)
Yeah, we carry on, right? Worst things could happen. We've both experienced those. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you wanting

to be a part of the LifeShift podcast and share your story in the LifeShift way, I guess. I'm sure you've shared your story many times in many different ways. So I look forward to this conversation because truly, I never really know where the conversation is going to go. And that's what's exciting about it to me because we're just kind of like two humans here.

talking about life, if you will.

Coach Tyler (02:26)
Yeah, me

too. I'm happy you're doing it this way too, Matt, because I don't know where this conversation is really going to go either. you know, I think it's better. People want to hear people talking and having a real conversation. So yeah, I'm happy

Matt Gilhooly (02:36)
Yeah. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (02:38)
I'm here.

Matt Gilhooly (02:39)
Well, I appreciate it. It I said this before, but it's very interesting to me now in my 40s, realizing how hearing other people's stories can heal parts of me that I didn't know actually needed that healing, like, it validates things or it makes me feel less alone in a certain circumstance. it's

Coach Tyler (02:59)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (03:01)
selfishly it's a it's beautiful for me as well.

Coach Tyler (03:04)
I think you nailed it. You said less alone. I was hosting a live call last night and there were some people sharing. And I always find that when somebody shares their experience, there's someone else who's had a similar experience. And it's that moment where we go, yeah, like I'm not alone in this. And we can feel a little more settled inside of ourselves, you know, cause thinking that we're alone in something, there's like, that's the easiest way to feel tortured. Right?

Matt Gilhooly (03:30)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (03:30)
So that's why I think sharing stories is so important. We got to realize we're not alone.

Matt Gilhooly (03:35)
it's so easy to feel alone in our circumstances, especially, you know, when you're facing something giant, you logically know that other people have experienced this. Like for me, my mom died when I was eight and I knew other people had dead moms, but I really felt like I was the only person that ever had to live without a mother at the time. And, you know, it sounds funny to say it out loud now, but

As soon as I started hearing other people around me, like other kids my age who had similar things happen to them, I was like, we, you know, like that, it wasn't unique to me, which is a comfort in my opinion. So I agree.

Coach Tyler (04:13)
Hmm. Yeah, totally. And that

just breaks my heart, man, just to hear that. Like, I have an eight-year-old, and I can't imagine her losing either of her parents, right? Like, that's just... That's so... Yeah, it must have been devastating, really hard to get through that. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (04:28)
I failed at grief for 20 plus years because it was

1989 and nobody was talking about this stuff, so...

Coach Tyler (04:34)
Yeah,

when you you had to stuff it down as a man in 89, right? You gotta yeah, you're not allowed

to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have a I have a similar upbringing, I think. So

Matt Gilhooly (04:38)
Exactly. Nope. And I carried that to like 30 something. So, you know, it's... Yeah.

Coach Tyler (04:47)
yeah, the boys don't cry. Push it down. Go to your room until you sort yourself out. I don't know if that was your experience. But yeah, it's pretty sad.

Matt Gilhooly (04:52)
Yeah. Yeah. But I look back on it,

I'm like, guys, this eight year old just lost his mom. Like, I think you're supposed to cry. I think like, that's all the required pieces. But I sure

Coach Tyler (04:59)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (05:04)
probably like you just assumed that my role was to do this or to be perfect. So anyway, enough about me. I'm interested.

Coach Tyler (05:09)
Yeah. Isn't

that crazy though, how people don't want you to grieve, right? People are so uncomfortable with grief

Matt Gilhooly (05:16)
it makes them uncomfortable.

Coach Tyler (05:18)
that they just push your grief down because they can't handle the discomfort

Matt Gilhooly (05:22)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (05:22)
of feeling it. But the only way to let stuff go is like to give yourself permission. Yeah, you got to

Matt Gilhooly (05:26)
go through it.

Coach Tyler (05:28)
go through it. That's the only way out is through, right? So sorry. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (05:31)
Yeah, it's no,

I think it's I think people nowadays are a little bit more fortunate in a way because people are a little bit more vocal about their grief journeys. And people are talking about just emotions in general, both, you know, especially for men, a lot of men are talking about it, which is, is, I think, healthy, like we're all human, we're all gonna feel certain things. So let's talk about you. Before we do, though.

Coach Tyler (05:52)
super healthy. Yeah. Okay, let's do it.

Matt Gilhooly (05:59)
2026.

Who is Tyler? How do you show up in the world? How do you identify these days?

Coach Tyler (06:03)
Who is Tyler? You most people think of me as Coach Tyler. You know, I'm all over

Matt Gilhooly (06:06)
Okay.

Coach Tyler (06:07)
the social media threads as Coach Tyler. I'd like to think of myself as a human being, first and foremost. I think way too many of us identify with some bucket that's not a category broad enough for us to have a lot of respect for everybody around us. So I just wanna say I'm a human being, first and foremost. I'm a dad. I'm a...

a husband and partner to my wife. I'm somebody who's trying to do good in the world through his experiences, through my life shifts that have happened along the way. I'm somebody who used to be much different and has changed quite a bit along the way. And I'm really proud of that change. think a lot of people...

carve their beliefs in stone and die on a hill instead of giving themselves permission to change, you know, along the way. I'm somebody who loves to move his body, to take care of his body, to hopefully inspire others to do the same. I'm someone who faces emotions head on now when...

If you asked me 12 or 13 years ago, I wouldn't even be able to name a feeling, you know, so I feel really proud of that too. And I really feel proud of encouraging others to do the same. So that's very much in line with the start of our conversation here.

Yeah, I'm also just a human being just

failing every day and falling flat on my face and getting back up again and dusting myself off and just doing the best I possibly can at the end of the day. And to me, I think that's what's most important is being able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I'm doing the best I can. And some days, it's not that great. And some days, I feel really good about it. So yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (07:45)
Yeah.

Well, I feel like, I mean, just describing yourself as a human being, which, you know, on the surface, very logical, right? Like we, show up as that, but that has all the things that you just described. It's the good stuff, the bad stuff, the learning from things, allowing yourself to change, not getting stuck in your ways. It's, really refreshing to hear that. I think sometimes, at least when I was growing up, it was very, performative. It was very much, well, yes, but I was very performative.

Coach Tyler (08:10)
Yeah, it still is. Especially with social media.

Okay, so you were very performative. got you. I was too. I get it.

Matt Gilhooly (08:16)
Yeah, like I had

to show up perfect. I often talk about how this show taught me how to listen better because I would go into work meetings and I was listening for the next silence so I could say something super smart or ask the question that, wow, Matt's really paying attention. When I wasn't, I was just waiting for the next silence and not really absorbing and.

And it was just all about performance because I needed people to see that I was worth caring about or, whatever it may be at that particular time. And so I, I love that you lead with like, this is me, all of it, good, bad, and different.

Coach Tyler (08:58)
I think we need

more people like that. Instagram world of just like show me the best of the best and then people build this expectation that that's how their life should be and then the delta between their expectations and their reality causes them so much suffering because we think that other people don't suffer but you know I've gotten the privilege of meeting a lot of people who are very successful in myriad of different ways and everybody's struggling. Everybody's got to struggle from time to time right and I think it's so important just to acknowledge that and to be

real. And I think we need more people talking from that place instead of this place like I got it all figured out. It's how about I'm doing my best to figure it out and I'm doing my best to support others along the way. know, so yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (09:41)
Yeah. Acknowledgement is a key. I think that

was when things unlocked for me is like the self-awareness, acknowledgement of the reality of existence and not the performance I was trying to give. So, you know, I'm glad I found it, you know, and some people won't find it because of whatever's keeping them from finding it. But I hope, I hope by listening to us, they can be like, well, maybe I should, I should lean into that fall flat

Coach Tyler (10:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (10:08)
on my face.

Coach Tyler (10:08)
Yeah, yeah, we only learn by being willing to fall flat on our face and be able to stand back up again and take the lessons that we learn. In fact, inside our company, I have this thing that's really important to me. I call it GTMD. It's a little bit nerdy. It's like the scientific method, but it's guess, test, measure, decide. And it sounds like a data thing, right? But at the end of the day, that's how I treat my life. If I'm trying to figure something new out and I need to solve it, let's make a guess. What am I going to try? And then I'm going to test it. I'm going to measure the outcome. I'm going to decide, is this

worth it or

And that's it, you know, and so I think it's such a great way to approach life But why I said that was because by doing this you welcome a lot of failure You

Matt Gilhooly (10:47)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (10:47)
know because if you guessed and you test that's you putting your neck out there and when you

Matt Gilhooly (10:50)
Yep.

Coach Tyler (10:51)
put your neck out there It's going to get hurt sometimes, you know, and so yeah I just think people need to be willing to fail like what is failed. It's it's first attempt in learning That's what I always say, you know

Matt Gilhooly (11:02)
I like it. You keep reaching into

my brain. I was like, you just had to try. You had to try things. So,

Coach Tyler (11:06)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (11:08)
well, let's get into your specific story. And I'd love if you could paint the picture of Tyler, who you were before this main life shift event that we're going to talk about today. you can go back as far as you need to, to give us any kind of context of that quote unquote before version of you, but yeah, tell us who

Coach Tyler (11:28)
Yeah,

Matt Gilhooly (11:28)
you were.

Coach Tyler (11:29)
yeah, I think this is great. We've kind of teed this moment up too because like you, Matt, was raised in a society with a family that wasn't emotionally sensitive and yet later on in life when I was in my 30s I discovered I was an incredibly emotionally sensitive child but I stuffed those feelings down because they weren't welcome. along the way,

I developed this character, I guess you could say. And this character was a kid who was overweight, who was frustrated with his body, who didn't want to feel that way and decided that he's never gonna let anybody make fun of him ever again. He's gonna make sure that he shows them, you know, like probably the most simple phrase that I think of in the first huge portion of my life is like, I'll show you, you know,

Matt Gilhooly (12:18)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (12:18)
like I'll show you.

moment I realized I had agency so I wasn't just had to succumb to my life I could choose what I wanted to do the choice I made was I want to be successful and I want to be fit and I want to have all the stuff in the car and like a lot of I mean this is a thing that I think a lot of guys fall prey to especially like the social media world these days like it's so easy to find some masculine guru out there that tells you if you drive a Ferrari and you know you do some certain things and you make some money that like that's what

is important in life.

And did I buy that. I bought that story, hook, line, and sinker, man. And I went for it. And you what's really weird about a journey like that is world praises you when you chase what your society thinks of as success, right? So as a man, if you end up getting abs and getting a cool car and becoming successful, along the way, basically everybody in your life's gonna be like,

like, yay, keep going, cheer yawn. And even if underneath that

is a pile of insecurity, is a huge amount of selfishness, and I think it's so sad. I think it's so sad now. At the time, I didn't even see it. You can't see what you can't see, right?

Matt Gilhooly (13:38)
Right.

Coach Tyler (13:39)
And so that was me, man. Growing up throughout my life was just trying to figure out how I could prove myself. And like I said,

Matt Gilhooly (13:45)
So wasn't really

agency, necessarily.

Coach Tyler (13:48)
Yeah,

it wasn't. It was the spectrum of the agency I thought I had. You know what I mean? It

Matt Gilhooly (13:54)
All right, yep.

Coach Tyler (13:56)
was like, I've got choice to be able to follow the thing that society told me was the way I need to show up. And again, I think the biggest thing that I have realized now is beliefs are chosen, whether we know it or not. And so all those beliefs that society put on me were things that I just accepted, right? That when you are successful, when you have

good body when you're fit when you have a hot wife when you have a great car like a nice house or whatever like that's your worth that's your worth and happiness yeah

Matt Gilhooly (14:25)
Yeah, and happiness that brings you success and happiness.

Coach Tyler (14:29)
Yeah. And, and, my God, the happiness thing. Can I, my God, this isn't a life shift moment, but

Matt Gilhooly (14:34)
It's a checklist.

Coach Tyler (14:35)
it was, it was one of them, man. I bought my dream car, Matt. I bought my dream car. I wanted this car for so long. I bought

Matt Gilhooly (14:40)
and you were so happy.

Coach Tyler (14:41)
the damn thing. I was so happy. I drove it. was 30 minutes away, the dealership to my house. I pulled up to my nice house. I turned off the engine and I was like, still empty inside.

Matt Gilhooly (14:52)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (14:52)
You know, and it's those moments,

I think, where we realize like this dream that society has painted as happiness is this never ending hedonic treadmill of feeling like we're not whole enough, unless...

unless we get a better body, unless we get a, you know, more success, unless we get more stuff, whatever it may be. And man, I was on that treadmill running as hard as I could from the moment I thought I had a choice until the moment I realized I was on the wrong path.

Matt Gilhooly (15:23)
Yeah, I mean,

I feel like I call it society's checklist. Like I was just doing the things that that I was

Coach Tyler (15:27)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (15:29)
supposed to like, get good grades, you graduate, you go to college, you get a good job, you buy a house, you have a car, you know, like you just do all the things. And every time I got the next thing, I was like, Okay, what's next? Because this part isn't bringing me happiness. This part isn't doing what the world has sold me. So it took a while, but I totally relate to that agency.

piece and I didn't mean to discount the agency that you felt at that age.

Coach Tyler (15:54)
No, no, there's a

really good importance there is to create that distinction between like true agency. Like I have awareness

Matt Gilhooly (16:00)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (16:01)
that I'm making real choices from myself, my own values and beliefs, not I'm making A or B choices based on these inherited values and beliefs that I have, right? Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (16:13)
Yeah, I mean, when I

when I was 12,

I got pretty overweight. And I think probably grief and all that stuff. But as soon as someone that I loved in my family told me that I was fat, basically, it was I'm gonna, whoa, no, I'm in, I'm not perfect. They're gonna leave me because my mom left me in my brain. So everything I started slim fast at 12 years old, I start, you know, like I started exercising to those dumb videos.

Coach Tyler (16:42)
SlimFast,

forgot about, dude, I did SlimFast too. We used to buy that at Costco and I would

Matt Gilhooly (16:44)
Listen. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (16:47)
use that as like a high protein diet food to eat throughout the day. my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (16:51)
I just read that, you know, I believe the commercials, if I was to drink this and do this exercise video

then, but then it just led to like eating disorder, you know, like it just turns into a mess and all the while I'm like, yeah, I'm doing this for me, but I wasn't, I was doing it so other people wouldn't look at me like that person. So I relate kind of to the thinking I had agency, but was really doing it out of fear.

Coach Tyler (17:15)
Yeah, it sounds

like you relate to the slim fast too, because I just, have not thought about slim fast in 30 years, but you just got brought me right back to my early dieting days when I was doing the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (17:23)
Yeah, welcome. Welcome to chalk. Yeah, strawberry chalk. So, so you were building

the the checklist storybook life for yourself you were doing all were you you happy along the way I'm sure there were you felt happy but or maybe not.

Coach Tyler (17:42)
I got to do a lot of things that people think will make them happy.

Matt Gilhooly (17:46)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (17:47)
know? Like buy the supercar, go on the dream trips, you know, have an incredible house, like be able to do a lot of the things that most people don't get to do. I kept waiting to feel happy. But if I'm honest, I just kept feeling like it was a hole that would never be filled, right?

And what's really interesting to me, Matt, and this is another story, but like.

I remember I was around a group of other guys who were in the fitness space and they were doing really well for themselves and hadn't seen them for a little while and I came back and I talked to a guy I knew there and I was like, hey, how's life been? He's like, know, it's been rough, man. I got a divorce and you know, it's been hard on me and the kids and stuff. And I'm like, that's really hard. And then he went, but I got a private jet. And he was like, really, he was really excited about it. And I just was like, and it was this, it was one of those moments, you

I feel like I'm sharing too many life shifts here, but it was one of those moments where I was like, I'm on the wrong path. You know what I mean? Because like, if our value is this perception of success or acquisition of things or flying a jet around, we're using that to stuff down maybe the sadness of our family being, you know, broken apart.

Like what the hell are we doing with our lives? You know, at the end of the day. So I, yeah,

I wish I could say I was happy. I certainly had a lot of fun experiences, you know, that I think are really cool and I wouldn't trade them for anything. But on the same note, I drank every night, drank away my anxiety and sorrows and I damaged my relationship really badly for many, many years. And it's taken me like nearly a decade to do a lot of repair work.

around

that, you know, based on who I was and who I am now.

I didn't show up as well as I wanted to as a father when I had my first daughter. I turned that around pretty quick because that one became pretty obvious how I was failing there. yeah, that's not like the workaholism, alcoholism, addicted to exercise. That's not a picture of someone who's feeling really happy and content in their lives. I was feeling constantly uncontent in my life and looking for something outside of myself that would make me feel

Matt Gilhooly (20:12)
Yeah. As you were saying that I was just thinking like, most people aren't taught, or at least I wasn't taught like what is happy? what truth like

it's all the material things that you just listed, like that's gonna bring you the happiness. But like, we're not actually taught how to experience that. Or at least when we're kids, and we are happy, we're doing something happy, we're not told to like, okay, that's what that is. Keep chasing that as you as you grow up. So I think of like these these growing up versions of us. And we're just like, we don't know what to what it's supposed to feel like, because we haven't

Coach Tyler (20:51)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (20:52)
identified it.

Coach Tyler (20:53)
And that's so off, man. And I know that people have to go through their own experience to get there, but like, I really feel like peace and happiness, it starts with feeling deeply connected and comfortable with yourself and who you are. And the more I was able to get away from...

feeling like things outside of me were the solution to feeling whole and I could accept that I've been whole this whole time and I've just been on the wrong path. The less I wanted this stuff outside of myself, the more I felt content with any circumstance I was in, the more I felt like I should use this superpower of energy and intensity that I have for serving others rather than serving myself.

Yeah, I just felt like it made me a better human being at the end of the day. And to me, like you said, I think it's big. People don't talk about what is happiness. It's like, it's the house, it's the car, it's the girls, it's the body, it's the whatever, right? I'm like, well, what about just being really content with who you are with nothing, right?

Can you imagine that? Like if you just had nothing, no acclaim, no nothing, you know, your average body, whatever, can you still be content? Right? That's happiness, right? That's peace at the end of the day.

It's the opposite. It's like the exact opposite of what

Matt Gilhooly (22:10)
the

Coach Tyler (22:11)
everybody out there in the social media world is trying to teach you is the right way to do things. So we need a reset. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (22:16)
like we need a reset. got to start with hopefully you did this with your kids. Teach them what happy is. So

you you found all this space. So I love here's my assumption it might be false. But did the life shift that you wanted to talk about today? Did that was that a wall for you? Was that a like a pivot a light switch? What was it for you?

Coach Tyler (22:37)
Yeah,

I'd like to call it a lead domino.

Matt Gilhooly (22:39)
Okay.

Coach Tyler (22:40)
You know, sometimes in life that shift that happens is like this event that just tips over that first domino. And then it just has this cascade of dominoes behind it. And if you look back, you go, damn, all that happened because of that, right? And I think one of the most powerful gifts people can give themselves is

really tracing how those life shifts impact us in a positive way and really learning how to accept ourselves and our life in like an open-armed way. I don't want to say positive necessarily because things can really suck. Like your circumstance is really bad. So that's challenging. But like it's made you who you are today. And so if you can deeply reach in and like love and appreciate who you are today, then you got to go through all the stuff you went through to get there. And in some ways, I think that gives people a chance to be grateful

for their life, regardless of how challenging some of the circumstances in it have been. So yes, it was a lead domino for me that really.

Matt Gilhooly (23:39)
bring

tell me what that lead domino was because I agree

Coach Tyler (23:42)
Yeah, let's do it.

Matt Gilhooly (23:43)
with you with the being able to trace back as and I always ask how specific can we get guess you know like was it a sentence was it a word was it you know like a punch in the face whatever you know whatever it happened to be it's like that sliding doors movie like she missed the train and her whole life changed right you know and you think that it has to be we have to be having life shifts all the time so yeah tell us about

Coach Tyler (24:00)
Yeah, yeah. I think that's happening to us all the time, by the way. I really do. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (24:07)
this lead domino for you

Coach Tyler (24:08)
Yeah, you know, so like I said, the lead domino.

Matt Gilhooly (24:10)
I'll change the name of the show for this, just to...

Coach Tyler (24:14)
Yeah, so like I shared with you, know, in my earlier years, was insecure and...

and frustrated and people made fun of me and I said, I'll show you, right? And then I spent the next 10 or 12 or 13 years doing that, trying to get people to see me outside of myself. And that involved a huge part of that was fitness, right? I loved fitness. It was an outlet for me that frankly, it helped me quit drinking because it was something that my addictive personality replaced the substance abuse with, which I guess is, I guess is positive at end of the day.

Matt Gilhooly (24:47)
in its own way.

Coach Tyler (24:47)
the time.

Yeah, but you know, it can be detrimental

in another way. And along the way, I really became attached to this identity that I was building of like, I'm like this entrepreneur, I'm this like athletic character, I'm like this person that can push, push, push, push, push, and like, I'll get anything done, right? And again, the world was cheering me on. That world

Matt Gilhooly (25:08)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (25:08)
was cheering me on along the way.

And part of my pursuits were learning new physical things. I love movement. I love the complexity of the human body. This hasn't faded away from me. I love learning how to move. love feeling into my body as I'm doing different movements. I've been a musician since I was young. I played drums for a long time, so very physical in that way as well. So was doing gymnastics. And I'm a pretty big guy. I'm about six foot, 200 pounds. And I don't think I had any business doing gymnastics on a spring floor.

Matt Gilhooly (25:41)
How old were you?

Coach Tyler (25:39)
Working on back flips and jumping moves and things

like that. This was in this is my late 20s and Yeah, probably not. Probably

Matt Gilhooly (25:45)
Yeah, probably not.

Coach Tyler (25:48)
not, you know despite all of that and I was doing some moves and this coach I was working with told me to punch harder and if you've never been on a gymnastic floor These are like really it's like a hard trampoline kind of right where it's like a board over a trampoline basically So if you keep your body really tight and rigid, it's called a punch

And the more tight and rigid you are, the higher you bounce. It's kind of like if I were to take like a balloon or something or a ball with loose air and I drop it, it wouldn't bounce very hard, right? But if I fill it air till it's super tight, it's going to bounce pretty hard, especially off of a spring surface. So he was saying punch harder. And I'll never forget, my body was like, no, this is not feeling good. And I was like, you shut up, buddy. I'll show this guy the hardest punch he's ever seen. That's literally what I thought in my head.

And I came down and my knee went completely sideways. it was like, you know, like literally just completely sideways toward my ACL, MCL, LCL quad meniscus all in one shot.

and like the egomaniac I was at the time, I scooted to the side and was like, no, it's cool. It's just a flesh wound. You know, like, it's not a big problem. I'll just put a bandaid on it, you know? And they was looking at me like, are you sure about this? This is how bad it was, man. I even like got up and stumbled my way over to the rings and started doing some ring practice because I didn't want to like throw in the towel. And you know, it was messed up as, as I was walking over there, I could feel my lower leg was detached from my upper leg. So it was clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. You could feel it like the bone.

grinding around and stuff. I knew that I had messed something up, but my

Matt Gilhooly (27:19)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (27:19)
ego was just like, no, I'm just gonna play this off. And of course the shock set in, so I wasn't in pain at the time or anything like that. But when I got home from that class, I was like, I think I might have really hurt myself. Maybe I'll be able to sleep this one off. I still had some hope, right? And I opened the front door, and I had two little dogs at the time, and they ran out of my house.

And one of them was just like a chicken trying to catch this thing, right? It was so hard. So there I am start stumbling after them and it was nighttime and my wife was still at work. She was at this like late work meeting. And as I was stumbling, the pain set in. I was just like, and then I started crying and I like, I was not a big crier before this point either. And finally this, they wandered over to my neighbor and I said, please pick them up. And she probably thought I was like insane at the time, right? But she did. And I grabbed him and I brought him inside the house and I sat down.

and I was like, something's really wrong here. And I called my wife and...

She actually called her dad. came and picked me up. went to the hospital. You we got some x-rays and they said, I got to come back for some MRIs. And they came back the next day and yeah, dude, you had really messed yourself up. This is what they would call a career ending injury in professional sports. When somebody runs into your knee sideways and it caves pretty much sideways like that. And, you know, what's interesting about this is I had had a knee injury before that. I got hit by a car 11 years before that and got through that injury and it was still challenging lessons.

And it's part of what got me into performance and learning about the human body and stuff. But I really got through that one. Like that injury I thought was bad at the time. This, after this one, it was like, this is a cake walk, right? Compared to what I've been through with my other knee. so, you know, that started this journey for me because my identity kind of fractured in that moment.

Here I am, I'm this guy who's like taking so much pride in what I can do with my body. I've already had an injury and recovered from it, right? Because I'm tough and you know, all these different things. I've

Matt Gilhooly (29:14)
I'll show them.

Coach Tyler (29:15)
been pushing, I'll show them I've been successful. I've been doing all this stuff. Like look at my life. It's amazing, right? Yeah,

Matt Gilhooly (29:20)
Look how happy I am.

Coach Tyler (29:21)
look at how, look at how, exactly look at, look at me. Look at how happy the car makes me, right? Exactly.

Matt Gilhooly (29:26)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (29:27)
And in like a moment, I was like,

That's not my identity right now. Now I'm vulnerable. I feel like really insecure. That insecurity popped back up. And that really started this journey of...

exploring my emotions, exploring my egocentric nature, exploring my selfishness, changing my approach to how I show up for my own body, changing my approach to how I teach others to show up for their own bodies as well. I'm so grateful that it happened at this point, because like I said, it was that lead domino that unfolded everything behind it. But at the time, man,

You know how it is, when something happens at the time, it's like, woe is me, why is this happening to me? But with a long enough time horizon, and with enough trial and error in your life, I think it's easy to look back and say, wow, had that not happened, I probably would have been just an egocentric, selfish, alcoholic who, you know.

was always thinking about what's in it for me, not thinking about how do I show up differently in this world in a way that that's better. I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe not. But yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (30:35)
I mean,

you could have, you could have gone worse. Like you could have gone deeper into the, the other side. I'm curious.

Coach Tyler (30:38)
Yeah, could have gotten worse. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (30:44)
Were you someone before that asked for help?

Because my thought, my first thing was like, you said like, you're vulnerable now and part of me thinks, okay, well, you really did some damage to your leg. You probably need help. And it's probably, you probably can't do it. You can't show them in this situation or can you?

Coach Tyler (31:02)
You have to, you know, when

Matt Gilhooly (31:04)
You have to ask for help.

Coach Tyler (31:04)
you, yeah, when you get to a place where like,

You can't go to the bathroom without someone helping you. Like you have to, you have to like humble yourself

Matt Gilhooly (31:13)
Pretty humbling.

Coach Tyler (31:14)
a little bit. You got to check your ego. You got to ask for help. You know, somebody stands next to you while you're taking a shit and then they help you get back up off the toilet. You know what I mean? Like,

Matt Gilhooly (31:22)
very nice of them.

Coach Tyler (31:23)
yeah. And it's like, but it's like an experience of, of, it was the opposite of the other experience I was having, just feeling like, like I could conquer the world, you know? And so, yeah, it was challenging. You know, why this life shift was so, was,

was so monumental for me is that even after that, I tried to fix it. I got a surgery. came back from that and it didn't work all the way. And so I struggled for like two years after that, went back, got another surgery, struggled for another year after that, went back, got another surgery, struggled for another like seven, eight years after that, went back, got another surgery. And so like I've had four knee surgeries on this right knee now. I've spent nearly a year of my life in a bed.

recovering from these knee surgeries and injuries. I've had to learn how to stand up and walk and go downstairs over and over again on numerous occasions. every single time this knee lights up and I go through another experience like this, it's just a new lesson that I needed to learn. Right? And like I said, now I feel really grateful for it because when we talked about happy, like I feel really comfortable in my skin with who I am.

I don't need success or fame or anything like that. I just want to show up and like do my best to take care of me and my family and do something positive for other people. And that like feels really good to me, you know? And like all that came from the suffering of just sitting through this and having to watch my identity just dissolve away as I kind of worked through this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Literally. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (32:56)
But were forced to stop, right? Like you were just forced to like literally stop.

Coach Tyler (33:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (33:03)
And so there you

are, you're stuck with all the things that you had been maybe running away from or pushing down or whatever it may have been.

Coach Tyler (33:06)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you know what's hard is like, you know,

when I went to fix it the first time, you know, they did the whole thing and they put some new ligaments in there and they put some new cartilage in there and okay, everything's gonna be good. And it just it just wasn't, you know, my knee got like, arthrofibrosis, which is like a rapid onset of scar tissue, I couldn't bend it all the way or straighten it all the way. And at the time, Matt, like, I was planning on going back to the old Tyler.

You know what I mean? I was

Matt Gilhooly (33:34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (33:35)
like, we'll fix this knee right up. I'll be squatting 400 pounds in no time. like, you know, this will be,

Matt Gilhooly (33:39)
punch harder.

Coach Tyler (33:40)
yeah, that's it. Well, just, yeah, I guess I'll push harder. I'll show you, right? Again and again.

Matt Gilhooly (33:42)
Right.

Coach Tyler (33:44)
something like this, this career ending injury happens, not going to let you get back to that version of yourself. And

had to like check my ego at the door. had to stop trying to show up and be strong and powerful and realize, okay, what's important to me? This is probably one of the first lessons I got from it was like, what's actually important to me? Is it having like the physique and the the the skill to move my body in these ways that I can get like,

you know, attention for? Or is it just not being in pain?

Right. And being able to like walk and like go up and down stairs and like feel reasonably good in my body that I'm not going to like fall apart.

And man, I tried to let the ego run that. And every time I did, I would just end up right back where I started. Cause the thing about injuries that people don't know is the biggest predictor for future injury is previous injury. And that's because when we injure ourselves, the body starts to compensate. It doesn't function quite the same, especially from side to side, unilaterally. And so I ended up with this whole myriad of like downline issues. And the more I tried to go back to the old version of me,

Matt Gilhooly (34:50)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (34:50)
the more I tried to push and I tried to achieve with my fitness and I tried to get back to that version, I would just keep entering myself. And sometimes it would be the knee. Sometimes it'd be my lower back this time, then it would be my shoulder, then it'd be this. What am I doing, right? I'm out there abusing my body because I think it's gonna get me some sort of like attention or validation from people outside of myself. And so...

Matt Gilhooly (35:13)
And even if

does, it's very short-lived.

Coach Tyler (35:15)
Yeah.

And what's the point? Like, I don't want to be 80 years old and like unable to walk. I don't want to be in a wheelchair. I want to feel good. And, know, like, so that was the biggest shift initially was physically, it was like, I had to make the decision that

You know, the way I take care of my body is not through pushing myself and punishing myself, which by the way, so much of that motivation I learned came from that insecurity. I don't know if you ever like, if you could put a like microphone on my inner critic as I was working out, you know, most people would have been appalled at what I was saying to myself

Matt Gilhooly (35:47)
I'm sure.

Coach Tyler (35:47)
to get me to perform like that. And now it's different. Now it's like, that feels off, you know, don't do it, you know.

Matt Gilhooly (35:52)
I would say that, yeah, I would say most

people, I would say a lot of people in the fitness industry. That's what their brain sounds like.

Coach Tyler (35:59)
It's the whole industry.

And Matt, this is like part of my entire thesis of what I do now is that.

I think most people are feeling like they're failing with fitness because it's starting with using self-criticism as fuel for motivation. Right? And

Matt Gilhooly (36:14)
Right.

Coach Tyler (36:16)
if, if all we do is rehearse hating ourselves, then even if the body changes, even if other things change, you think somehow along the way we got really good at liking ourselves? You know what I mean? Like I know I didn't, I know I was never happy. Right? I was constantly. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (36:29)
Right. I don't think anyone that's fitness,

it's always like, it's not good enough. I mean, middle,

Coach Tyler (36:34)
It's not good enough, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (36:36)
mid thirties for me, I got in the best shape of my life. Like I think I could count eight, you know, abs. Like it

Coach Tyler (36:42)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (36:42)
was like, but it was so hard to maintain and, but you're like, I want to. So then it's like the reverse of being a fat kid because now you're shaming yourself. If you give up instead of other people shaming you and you showing them

Coach Tyler (36:53)
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. it's so bad.

Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (36:58)
you've kind of

created this own ecosystem within your, in your head. And it continues because now I'm not in the great greatest shape as I was in my thirties. And there is, there's still that spiral. So it's, very easy to fall into that and the world doesn't teach us any better.

Coach Tyler (37:13)
Well, but underneath that

is something simple, right? It's the belief that how we look, our bodies look is a huge part of what should make us feel happy or proud of ourselves. And like, I just,

Matt Gilhooly (37:21)
Right. Yep. That's deeply ingrained.

Coach Tyler (37:24)
I think how you show up is what should make you feel proud of yourself. And everybody's got a different body shape and type and we grow older and our hormones change and like, let's just show up. Let's show up and let's take care of ourselves the same way we want to show up and take care of someone we love.

Instead, what do we do? We show up and we criticize ourselves and punish ourselves and we use that, right, as fuel. And I want to call this out, like, I told you I was vastly successful early on. That was in the fitness industry. And you know how we did it in the fitness industry? In the marketing world of fitness? We said this, Matt, we said, hey, Matt, you should hate yourself because you're fat and gross. And you should use that hatred to motivate you to buy my product so that way you can finally look the way you want and you can get that validation and feel good again.

whole fitness model is broken when it starts with that. And

Matt Gilhooly (38:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (38:13)
that's why so much of my life now is talking against it. Because I used

Matt Gilhooly (38:16)
Mm.

Coach Tyler (38:16)
to be right there, uplifting that message, doing it on myself, telling others to do it on themselves until I realized this is toxic. This is not healthy. And it's not the way I want people to live. Yeah. It works for

Matt Gilhooly (38:25)
Yeah. And it's sad because it works.

Coach Tyler (38:29)
some. Here's the thing, Matt, that I found interesting. It works for some, right? Especially the most...

seeing people on the internet that influence your stuff, so many of those people were so good at shaming themselves that they could maintain that for long enough to get to that place where society gives you those rewards. For most people, you know what happens? They follow the same path.

and then they stop because it sucks and it doesn't feel good and their self-worth goes through the floor and then they try again and they repeat that cycle. So it doesn't work for everybody. I'd say that 99 % of people end up stuck in a cycle of just feeling shameful instead of actually doing something to take care of themselves.

Matt Gilhooly (39:10)
No, I mean it works for the trainers.

Coach Tyler (39:13)
It works for the fitness industry, that's for sure. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (39:15)
Right. It's a very,

it's, it's easy to sell because, because we're so receptive to that for some reason, as a society, we're so receptive. And so

Coach Tyler (39:23)
Yeah, we love negativity. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (39:25)
we're like, yes, I will buy your $197 package and then not show up, you know, and so they're the fitness person or the coach or whatever gets their money onto the next person. And it's not a big deal. But I was, was wondering if you remember, what

it was

or when it was that you first felt like you were surrendering to uncovering this new version of you because I mean, I don't think it's like a I'm sure it's not a, you know, someone turned on the light and all of a sudden I thought, okay, shed that but do you recall like what made you lean into this newer side?

Coach Tyler (40:02)
Yeah, I'll share two different stories because I feel like there's different parts of myself that really woke up from this.

Matt Gilhooly (40:08)
different dominoes.

Coach Tyler (40:09)
Yeah, so I'll share one when it came to how I spoke to myself and how I treated myself when it came to, guess my inner dialogue around fitness. So I was at this retreat and I was going up this big flight of stairs.

And this was like just after a surgery and then my knee wasn't feeling great. And I was like going up the stairs and things were feeling just really shitty. And inside my head, I just reverted back to what I always did. And I was like, come on, you pussy, like get up the stairs, like quit whining, you like you should be able to do this, you know, all this stuff that I was, I was used to telling myself. And I had this moment.

It was a meditation retreat, so I got a chance to really reflect on some of this stuff, right? And I had this moment where I was like, what if that was my daughter? You know, what if I was going up a flight of stairs and my daughter was behind me and she was injured and she was limping and I turned around and I said, come on, you pussy, you should be able to do this. Like, get up the stairs, let's go. Like, obviously, like that would be horrible. If anybody saw somebody saying that to someone that they loved or a child or something, they'd be like, you're a demon, you know, you're a monster.

Matt Gilhooly (41:17)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (41:18)
And yet, there I was doing it to myself. And I know other people can relate to this story. If we take a moment to listen to what we're saying to ourselves, I think it's really, really critical all the time. And at that moment, I decided I don't wanna do that anymore.

and I started rewriting my inner critic. I call it the inner cheerleader now. So I try to rewrite any of my inner critic phrases into inner cheerleader phrases. And I mean that really, like I write it down. there's a new one. I'm going to write it down. I'm going to flip it around. And then I'm going to start practicing that in my thought patterns. Whenever I notice myself, you're going to fail, you're going to this or whatever, rewrite it and start practicing that. Because at end of the day, one of my favorite phrases in neuroscience is nerves that fire together wire together. And so if all we

do is think negative thoughts. get really good at thinking negative thoughts about ourselves. But if we get good at hearing that, stopping them and rewriting them, at first it feels effortful and clunky and challenging. But we get 100 reps under our belt. Okay, now we're starting to get better at it. We get 1000 reps under our belt. Okay, it's starting to get a little bit more easy. We get 10,000 reps under our belt and the old one starts to seem laughable and that cheerleader becomes, you know, your new experience of life.

And so that was the moment where I really like it was it. was not gonna treat myself like this anymore. I'm not gonna let other people treat themselves like this anymore. I'm gonna bring awareness to this in myself and others. And I'm gonna try to help other people rewrite the way that they're treating themselves because...

I think it's really toxic. I just think it's downright toxic, the way that we do that. And I constantly think about my daughters, Matt, like, I don't want them to grow up in a world where that's the message they learn. Because I was, I fell prey to this as a man, and I think women have this like 10 times harder than men, right? Your worth as a woman lies in how you look and what you do for others for the most part, you know? So like, I just want them to not feel that, you know, that pressure growing up. They will, and I just

Matt Gilhooly (43:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (43:16)
hope I can help.

teach them how to have that inner cheerleader along the way.

Matt Gilhooly (43:20)
Yeah, and it's like,

how do these messages get out? Like, I feel like, like, why did we growing up, take those in and see them as, like, it seems like things have changed so much. But maybe they haven't changed at all.

Coach Tyler (43:38)
think this comes back to the psychology of marketing, like you said. We're so attracted as human beings to negativity and negative news and fear. And I think there's a reason why for that. When you look into evolutionary biology, if something is worthy of being afraid of, it's something worthy of paying attention to. This could mean the difference between life or death, feast or famine. So that's why I think a lot of people talk about us being attracted to negativity rather than positivity. And so the moment marketing

figured that out. Every industry became about, you know, fear if they're able to use it. And when it comes to the body, like, my God, it's so easy to make people feel insecure about themselves just by showing them a picture of someone who we say they should be like, and that they would be happy if they were right.

And it just works so well. I know this clearly. Like, I was a part of the industry. And we would run

Matt Gilhooly (44:30)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (44:30)
advertising about lose belly fat in two weeks and blah, blah, blah. And it worked great. And you know what? I started a new company where we don't do any of that. Way harder to market to people when you said, hey, we're

Matt Gilhooly (44:39)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (44:41)
going to teach you how to take care of your body. And we're going to teach you how to stop criticizing yourself. They're like, I'll go with the guy who tells me I can get a flat belly in two weeks, right? So yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of this is capitalism.

is saying that if we're gonna market to people the most effective way, we're gonna use fear. And then that fear is gonna create inner criticism at the end of the day, because we're not enough, right? That's the whole marketing tactic. You're not enough,

Matt Gilhooly (45:08)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (45:09)
and if you do this, you'll feel like you're enough and you'll finally be happy.

Matt Gilhooly (45:12)
Mm hmm. Yeah, it. How depressing.

Coach Tyler (45:17)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (45:18)
Welcome. Welcome to the world. But I was thinking when you were saying about, know, like your company now and trying to get people to buy into these things, which are very valuable. I think there's just a lot of people that are like, well, I don't know how to do the toxic fitness world. I don't know how to do that. So I'll pay for that.

This other stuff feels easy. I know how to do that any day. Not that we're practicing it, but we're just like, yeah, I can talk. I can practice gratitude and I can all these things. And it just seems so like easy to do when it's probably just as hard or harder. Yeah. Then, then the other

Coach Tyler (45:54)
Yeah, it's not, it's way harder. It's way harder, yeah, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (46:00)
part, but I think we're just so conditioned like, I can take care of that. I can, cause we're all, you

know, a lot of us grew up feeling very self-sufficient in our ways, whether it was toxic or not. I can handle that, but.

Truthfully, we probably need what you're doing now way more than we need mess that you were part of before.

Coach Tyler (46:18)
mean, yeah, teaching people how to love and respect their bodies and how to show up and care for their bodies, like this is my life's work now and it's something I absolutely love. And I told you I was gonna share with you a second part of that experience

Matt Gilhooly (46:30)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (46:30)
that was a shift for And this was a part of, this lead domino caused this in some ways, but it's a little bit divergent from my own personal injury. And that was, my wife and I were in partnership for a long time in the fitness industry. And even after that injury, I still kind of went back to this

marketing mindset and you know trying to make money and what's in it for me kind of thing could I could feel myself changing for sure in those moments like realizing like does this feel fulfilling not really you know like are we really helping people I don't know you know they're losing weight but they still hate themselves so I don't really know what's happening here and it was my wife who's just so she's very tuned in to things that are going on in the world and society and she's empathic and she was like I don't I don't think

I don't think we're doing this right. I think we're hurting people. I think we're damaging their psychology. think we're showing up poorly. And I wish I could say that my response to that was, wow, tell me more. I want to hear more about this. at the time, was still, again, the lead domino took a decade for it to fully tip over, I think.

But at the end of the day, I was like, what are you talking about? Look at all this money we're making and look at all these people who are losing weight and all this stuff, right? And so we got into that kind of friction pattern for a little while there. And then my daughter started showing some early signs of a eating disorder. And I was like,

That one hit me like a ton of bricks. I was just like, my God. And that was when everything that she was trying to describe to me, my wife was trying to describe to me, that was happening to people when we use kind of like pressure, fear, shame based psychology to try and market to people. That's when that all hit me. Because before that, it was like some other person. You know what

Matt Gilhooly (48:14)
Right.

Coach Tyler (48:15)
I mean? It was like somebody else, you know? And after that moment, I was like, no.

I am participating in something that is damaging the psychology of my own child, right? Is making her feel like she has to do a certain thing, a certain way in order to, you know, feel settled in her own body.

one of the proudest moments of my life,

which still I don't know if it was a good decision because it's definitely been financially harder since then was after that moment I decided to turn everything off that we had working we were like, we made the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing companies three years in a row. We were really successful selling supplements and cookbooks and workout programs and all the stuff you see online

And I turned it off when it was still working. I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. But there's a moment, like we talked about the identity piece that changes with life shifts, right? And this identity change when my daughter told me she had an eating disorder, didn't tell me this, but she started showing this, the identity shift in me was like, I'm not going to fucking do this anymore.

Matt Gilhooly (49:18)
Right?

Coach Tyler (49:19)
Right? And it took me a little while to get the balls to do it all, but I did it. afterwards I asked myself the question, like, how do I use the skills that I've learned, the experiences that I've had to do something different?

Right? To instead of get people to hate themselves or develop eating disorders or try to change themselves thinking it's gonna make them happy, just start teaching them how to just move their bodies in a way that feels good. Start developing confidence in their bodies in a new way and start learning how to motivate themselves from a place of self-love rather than self-criticism.

And that's still taking me a while to figure out, you know, and I'm still working on it. It's a work in progress, yeah, No, that's good, yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (50:03)
That's a good thing. You don't ever want to be finished. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (50:09)
I definitely don't think I've got it figured out, but do think that when I look back...

that lead domino of my identity fracturing along with my knee was a huge part of it. And I feel like we're just scratching the surface. can't, the amount

Matt Gilhooly (50:22)
Yeah, of course.

Coach Tyler (50:25)
of different little dominoes that tipped over along the way. And even I think about the last surgery I had.

when I was sitting in my bed again recovering for a few months, I kept asking myself this question,

which was like, if I never got the ability to move back, could I still be happy? Right? Like, I want to feel happy no matter what.

I want to feel, and maybe happy is the wrong word, think content, like peaceful. I want to feel like at peace with what is. And that was this moment where I just really like recognized that like all the suffering in my life is me thinking that my imagination should be reality instead of what actually is.

Right. And the moment I can pause and realize how freaking ridiculous that is to think that I am, you know, all knowing and what should be right.

Matt Gilhooly (51:18)
Ha

Coach Tyler (51:18)
And started accepting things as they are, except that I was an asshole and not listening to my wife and not showing up. And I had a lot of repair work to do, accepting that my identity was just fueled from like ego and insecurity, accepting that I kind of showed up shitty and selfishly in the world of

business and probably didn't really help people along the way. you know, like the moment I could accept those things, that's when I could face them.

And when I could face them, that's when I started to feel like, I was moving through them. Like we said early on, right? If I stuff down the shame of showing up poorly,

and not feeling proud of my actions, it stays in me. And I constantly feel that inside me. But if I take a moment to just go, you didn't know better at the time.

And now you do. when you know better, you do better. And you're living that. Like, you're showing up. You're being a human. You're falling flat on your face. You're getting back up. You're dusting off. You're asking yourself the question, like, what's working here? What's not working here? What feels right? What feels wrong? think the more I've done that, the more content and peaceful I feel like my life is. And the more...

I feel like I'm on the right track because I'm not looking for something outside of myself to make me feel good anymore. I'm

Matt Gilhooly (52:39)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (52:40)
just looking to show up and do my best each day and, you know, help people along the

Matt Gilhooly (52:45)
Sounds like you are.

Coach Tyler (52:45)
way. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (52:47)
You I think of you said that decision like the best decision, the hardest decision all wrapped in one. think it's probably it's very commendable decision because the world was probably applauding for the success of your company and probably not many as many people applauding when you decide to shut it down. Right. And but at the same time,

you did it for the right reason. Like you did it for like what you want, you probably want to teach your kids on to make decisions and like with real, like, you know, some, something inside that there's a proper decision for that. That's guiding that versus reaching for money, reaching, you know, like all the things that we thought we were supposed to do. So, I mean, good for you for listening to yourself enough to make a decision that everyone around you probably was like,

What are you doing? Well, not everyone, but a lot of people, I'm sure.

Coach Tyler (53:45)
Yeah, yeah,

a lot of people and, you know, it's, I want to say it was a decision, but I feel like sometimes life, when it fractures your identity, you get presented with these choiceless choices. I don't know if you've ever had that experience I'm talking about, but like, you know, one of the hardest things to do for me to accept was to look in the mirror and say, ooh, you showed up with low integrity.

Matt Gilhooly (54:07)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (54:08)
you showed up with low integrity and you got rewarded for it. And people looked past that low integrity because you were fulfilling what society says is successful and what

Matt Gilhooly (54:21)
Mm

Coach Tyler (54:22)
everybody wants. And having kids was big for me because

It's like almost impossible for me to look in the mirror and think to myself that the choice I would make is I'll just stay in this low integrity and have a lot of money and then my kids will love me for it. You know, like I'm gonna die one day and all of this shit you can get with money doesn't really matter. What matters is how we chose to show up. And so again, it was a choiceless choices. Do I wanna be the guy who thus far, if you look at the decisions he's made have been low integrity?

and selfish or do I want to be the guy who writes that wrong and says I live from a place of integrity so that way when my kids grow they can see that you can make hard decisions that are against the grain of society in service of

I think a better humanity and just maybe not just as big as humanity. I don't want to blow it up like that. Like I just feel good inside myself. I'd rather be poor and have high integrity than be rich and have low integrity at the end of the day.

Matt Gilhooly (55:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

I still think it's a commendable decision based on your you grew up and kind of face the world because I think people can have that feeling inside, but don't make the decision because it's hard. I mean, it's hard to do all that knowing what you know. So I mean,

Kudos to you for starting something with more integrity that feels aligned and might be harder, but more purposeful, more, you know, like you could go to sleep at night and feel, I mean, I'm sure stressed at times, but also feel good about what you're putting into the world. Is that true?

Coach Tyler (56:07)
Yeah, you know, as you're saying this, what rose up for me was like,

Matt Gilhooly (56:10)
you

Coach Tyler (56:11)
had I known how challenging things would be after I shut all that down, I might have made a different choice. I'll be honest with you.

Matt Gilhooly (56:19)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (56:20)
That guy at that moment, if he had

like a ghost of Christmas future pop up and show me, you know, like some of the financial hardships that would happen.

like a lot of the obstacles I had to overcome to do the thing that I wanted to do and make my real life's purpose, I probably wouldn't have done it, you know? And I'm grateful to say that right now, like, things have been going really well and are starting to go the right direction. you know, part of what we do is we host these challenges. You mentioned earlier, you how do we get people to show up and start thinking differently, right, a little bit? And how do we do that in our community as we have these challenges where we use movement as a trojan

horse into getting people like, my knee hurts. OK, try this. It feels a little better. OK, by the way, why are you here? And they're like, to lose weight. And you're like, does that really matter to you? And we keep going a little deeper. And when people come in and go through those experiences with us, they come out the other side, and they're like, whoa, I've been on the wrong path. And so I feel so proud of everything that we've built. And our most recent challenge was the biggest one we've ever had.

So yeah, the message keeps growing. feel like it's way slower than I could have ever imagined. I was so used to things blowing up so fast, especially when you're using low integrity marketing and high fear marketing. It's really easy to get people to want to buy into things. But when you're being more honest

telling people like people we tell people all the time this is slow this is not gonna change overnight this is not a 30-day fix right we'd love to see

Matt Gilhooly (57:49)
down.

Coach Tyler (57:49)
you do this for a year and after a year you're probably gonna be like wow that's incredible but it's gonna take a while you know like nobody like nobody hears that out there right now it's always you know super quick fixes and easy and you know what's that which part

Matt Gilhooly (57:59)
Yeah. So are you saying that to yourself as well in the mirror about your business? That same thing?

It's going to be slow and it's going to, you're going to have to keep showing up and you're going to, might take a year. I mean,

Coach Tyler (58:12)
Yeah, my patience has grown immensely the last four years, which is so funny because, you know, I used to do these New Year's resolution things and it wasn't like a typical news resolution. I would just like think of one skill I'd want to cultivate and bring to the forefront. And it was I think it was four or five years ago. It was patience and it was right as I was starting this new company.

And my God, did the universe show up with lessons for patients in every way, like in my relationship, in my parenting, in my own physical health, in the financial side of the business, the, in just the business itself and getting traction and like, my God. yeah, I mean, the universe delivered on my ask. That's for sure.

Matt Gilhooly (58:57)
Hey, you know?

Coach Tyler (58:57)
So yeah, now

I'm actually in a place where I feel much more comfortable with things growing as they grow and realizing that people will come to us when they're ready. think one of the most beautiful things about what we're trying to do here and like what I do for myself and how I want to offer that to others is just like, once you kind of see the way the fitness industry is teaching people to talk to themselves like we talked about, you can't unsee it.

You know, all a sudden you're on social media or you're in a store and you see a magazine cover and you're like, wow, this is just like shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame. And once you realize that it becomes a lot easier to not want to participate in it when you realize you have agency over that, you have choice. And so I think people, once they get the message, they're like, yeah, I don't want, I don't want to do this anymore. You know, and I think that's a beautiful thing. And I really hope that more people over time will realize that.

We're bathing in a society and a culture and fitness especially, but there's a lot more areas that are happening like this that just aren't really healthy. They're not serving us. They're not making us feel authentically happy. They're not making us feel like we like ourselves. They're always making us feel like we have to reach outside of ourselves to feel good.

Matt Gilhooly (1:00:10)
What do you think that, what would you say to the Tyler that just punched harder and landed? What would you say to him as he hobbled to the side, to the rings? Is there anything you would?

Let him do it.

Coach Tyler (1:00:26)
Cause

he wouldn't have listened. You know, if I,

Matt Gilhooly (1:00:28)
He'll show you.

Coach Tyler (1:00:29)
yeah, if I thought back on anything, said, this is the thing that's so hard, Matt, is I've done some business mentorship in my life too. And you can't convince somebody who has that hard driving personality that

Matt Gilhooly (1:00:43)
Yeah.

Coach Tyler (1:00:43)
success is not going to make them happy. You can't convince them.

The only thing you can do is walk them up to it. And when they come back and say, still don't feel fulfilled, you go, aha.

And then you can start saying, let's channel that into the only thing that I really think makes people feel fulfilled, which is serving others, doing something that serves others. know, like one of the things that I've learned along the way is when I feel really anxious inside myself, go do something for someone else, right? And when you do that, you feel really damn good. And

Matt Gilhooly (1:01:17)
Mm-hmm.

Coach Tyler (1:01:18)
like, it doesn't even have to be something you get credit for. You can go, you know, to the grocery store and buy a gift card and just say, hey, give this to the next person. Don't tell them I did it.

and you can stand by and watch them and they're just like super happy about it, right? It doesn't have to be something you get credit for, but like at the end of the day, think so much of our society, especially here in the West, like it's about what's in it for me, right? And

Matt Gilhooly (1:01:40)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Coach Tyler (1:01:43)
that is the surest path towards not being happy. I promise you that, you know, no matter what is happening on the outside. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (1:01:48)
Yeah. we see it around us. We see it around us. We it's unfortunate,

but people like you out there in the world showing up in the way that you do, hopefully it's rubbing off on the right people and they're kind of practicing similar things, which I think is a good place to ask you how people can find you. Like what's the people want to know more about you. They want to know about your company. They want to tell

Coach Tyler (1:02:12)
Yeah.

Matt Gilhooly (1:02:13)
you their story, whether you like it or not. Like what's the best way to find you.

Coach Tyler (1:02:15)
Yeah,

yeah, I mean, we shape is the company that I've been talking about. If you're watching, I'm wearing the t shirt right now, which I wear these shirts every day.

If you just go on any social media and type in WeShape, you'll see us all over the place. I'm really grateful. Like I said, it was slow at first. media, I don't know how this happened. But we have like 7 and 1 million followers now across the platforms. And it keeps growing. So I feel really grateful for that. And a lot of people tell you, don't read your comments. And I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for our comments, because so many people are just like, thank you. Thank you for this message. Thank you for teaching me.

this, thank you for helping me move better, feel better, right? So yeah, feel really proud of everything that we do there. And if you find us on social media, you'll see WeShape, if you ever want to come in and try a routine, we build workout routines for people customized to each person. We host challenges, we do

Matt Gilhooly (1:03:10)
sweet.

Coach Tyler (1:03:11)
live calls. Me and Dr. Lisa, who works with us, do some one-on-one coaching with a handful of select people as well. We do retreats now, which has been probably my favorite thing we've added in the last

year or so. We got one coming up here pretty soon which I'm just really excited about because being able to work with people like in proximity to each other that's really the most gratifying thing I get to do. yeah check us out there you can reach out DMS say hi can give WeShape a shot for free we always let people try for free for two weeks that way they can experience a difference for themselves. you come across one of our challenges we let you try the whole challenge out for free for 28 days.

Matt Gilhooly (1:03:48)
Nice.

Coach Tyler (1:03:49)
So

again, I'm always trying to make sure that like we deliver first and foremost. So yeah Yeah

Matt Gilhooly (1:03:52)
Yeah. Well, I'll give the links to everyone in there. I always

encourage people because you know, there's this person, definitely a personal element to your business, but just these conversations of like human to human people are out there. We talked about it feeling alone. So if something in Tyler's story resonated with you or validated something you were thinking 10 years ago, whatever it is, I highly encourage people to just reach out and DM and just say, because

say whatever it is that's on your mind because there's so much power in sharing your story for the first time or are saying it out loud. And some people haven't had the fortune to do that or they haven't been fortunate enough to be able to share that. So I like to encourage it. So that's why I said, whether you like it or not.

Coach Tyler (1:04:37)
Yeah, yeah. And you know what's funny, Matt? The people that are coming to us, early on I thought it would be more like, kind of like, older millennial, like 40s, maybe 50s or something like that. strangely enough, this is kind of funny, but like, I think a lot of people who are younger, the younger you get, the more you have hope that if you transform your body, you will be happy.

And the older you get and the more you kind of tighten up and the more injuries you end up having, the less that that hope is there about transcending the way you look and getting validation. And the more you're just like, I just want that lung to have the same experience. kind of had.

And so I think the people that often resonate with us is the people, they're 50s, they're 60s, they're 70s, sometimes they're 80s or 90s who are just like, I just want to be able to go up and down stairs without hurting. You know what I mean? And I want to be able to learn how to show up and like, take care of my, I'm sick of looking at the mirror every day and criticizing myself. I want to be able to look at the mirror and say, you're doing a great job. You know, you're doing the best you can. So I found that really interesting because I thought it would be maybe a younger generation with more progressive mindset, but they still got that hope.

that if they get successful, if they get the body, then they're gonna be happy. And I think the people who are older, they're like, I've done this and it's never worked for me. So let's try something different, you know? So.

Matt Gilhooly (1:05:54)
Yeah. Well, thank you

for what you do for the world, not to the world. You did that before. Thank you for what you're doing for the world

Coach Tyler (1:05:58)
Yeah, I guess that's true.

Matt Gilhooly (1:06:01)
now. I think it's really admirable and I'm glad you made that difficult decision, even though it was a choiceless choice. I think it's really important. And thank you for just allowing me to ask the questions that I did and be part of this podcast. It really truly is. There's so many things that you said that like validated how I felt in certain parts of my life. So thank you for that.

Coach Tyler (1:06:22)
Yeah, and thank you for the thoughtful questions and for doing this. think stories are how we learn, and I think it's so important to bring people on and not ask them for the stories that helped them become the winner they are and instead say, what's the hard thing that maybe helped you wake up a little bit and learn how to take responsibility for yourself and for your life in a meaningful way? So, yeah, thank you.

Matt Gilhooly (1:06:48)
I thank you for saying that. That was very kind. And I never know how to end these. I've done 280 of them and I still don't know how to end a podcast. So I'm just going to say thank you to you and thank you to the listeners for just being a part of this journey for the last five years. And I will be back in a couple of days with a brand new episode. Thanks again, Tyler.

Coach Tyler (1:07:05)
Yeah, you're welcome.