The Roaring Heads Podcast

What is talent? Talent is a measure of what you can learn to tolerate.  In this one I talk about your window of tolerance. What that means. How and why. When and where you need to develop it. Tolerance trumps talent, because talent doesn't leave the station without it. All the forms of pain and suffering that we experience; physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual are teased out here....

In sport, it comes and it goes. When we hang onto pain it comes and stays, instead of coming and going... We choose suffering in our mental resistance when we can't let go of what we don't want to feel. The sticky tentacles of our mind is constantly in judgment, analysing and assessing if this moment is too much. But that disconnect with your body is an energetic block. Energy can't...

This podcast is devoted to our companion pain. There is an exhaustive list of the ways we have been taught to disassociate from pain. We are experts at resisting what we don't want to feel. Problem with that is, because we are resisting pain, we resist allowing our experience when we are involved in something that is creating pain.  If you are resisting pain in your training, you are resistin...

Ive been punching away at blogs for many years. In many ways that writing has become my own teacher.  Raw curiosity has dragged me headlong into a personal investigation of my own state, and the writing it spawned has held a mirror up to the world of performance.  The curiosity brings the questions, how do we live our best life? How do we bring ourselves to the zenith of performance?  The answer i...

We  are full of patterns.  Habitual, unconscious ways of being in the world built mostly around safety.  Programmed patterns are running all the time in our training, many of them separating us from our own internal power. The past drags us around by our bootlaces unless we are very consci to it All the metal, subconscious scripts that we run under pressure play at the forefront of our minds eye d...

Sport and indeed life, demand our attention, our presence and our focus.  That focus is about retaining our personal integrity. It is to not speak against ourselves, or descend into self blame, self judgment or the self defeatist talk which can often lead to a fracture in an athletes focus.  It's about remaining self possessed and free from the internal agitation that deregulates our nervous...

Don’t define yourself as an athlete, embody it! What does that mean? It means bringing it home.  The measurement of the process is useless without the awareness it takes to integrate it.  The integration is about the intelligence and the self awareness that you apply to the suck and the embodiment of the physical unfolding that is taking place right here and now.  This is how physical consistency,...

This week we had a chat with Mark Jansen about the challenges an athlete faces being an elite level age group triathlete and cyclist while working full-time in the corporate world.  Mark is a super strong willed athlete, racing successfully in 70.3 and Ironman. A twice top 5 finisher in Hawaii and a multiple sub-9 hour Ironman, he is well positioned to speak about the balance of work, life and spo...

Want the best of yourself? It's not about how you react; it's about how you respond.  Critically, it's about your state of mind as you respond that governs the quality of the action you take in that response.  You're programming around what you think you can and can't do radically affects your capacity to respond from a place of power rather than from a place of defense. I...

I suspect that a warrior hides in the DNA of all athletes. Many of us are disempowered in these times though. We are so busy trying to be an athlete on an outer level and not quite coming to terms with what that means. So, in this podcast Im covering a few specific questions: When does the warrior become the worrier?  Where do we leak power in our sessions?  What are the implications of that for o...

In life we have times where we meet a crossroads where we have to make a choice.  Profound life change can be a portal to a deeper existential shift in our perception of ourselves as human beings.  This week we had a chat with professional triathlete Laura Dennis who is being faced with that challenge right now.  Laura sustained a serious head injury after being hit by a car in training, and today...

People have ideas about mental strength which are not entirely true, often thinking they need to be ruthless with themselves. They tend to think they need to have an Ironclad will that shows no vulnerability, no mercy, no leniency. But that which does not bend, often breaks. The problem is, it is weak as it is projected outwards towards the world, and strong as it’s projected inwards towards ourse...

In this podcast I am discussing the three pillars of progress through process.  Namely - Thrive  Automaticity  Discomfort  I discuss the subsets of each pillar. The idea here is to provide you a short cut in your own athletic endeavours through the experience of my own and the observation of those I have coached over the last 25 years. Gilesy.  http://www.grantgiles.com.au https://www.inconvenient...

Most of our problems as athletes are bound up not in the way we physically train but in the way we think and react to the stimulus. No point in training like a champion and thinking like you have already lost.  To make any real change we first have to understand what it is we are thinking. Importantly we can change the way we think, feel and react, creating a positive, supporting mindset for perfo...

The chase for the dream, the outcome, or the result is the motivating factor that encourages  many people to get after their aspirations.  In this podcast we explore what is important in terms of the energy that fuels our chase and our relationship to the chase, do your motivations and actions move you towards your goals? Or do they move you away and indeed block the path you have chosen.  In this...

When we get what we want, we want what we don’t have!!  It’s a slippery slope, sometimes getting what we want is the worst thing that can happen to us. If it comes easy, it comes greasy, slips through our fingers and then the more we have the less we feel like we’ve got.  This concept we are sold of fame and fortune is an empty promise, a void with no real substance, people who arrive there quickl...

This week we are speaking with Karl Page, the founder of WOSUP (War On Single Use Plastics). Karl is somewhat of a journey man. We speak about the fantastic inspiration behind WOSUP, the idea behind the experience that sparked a movement of sustainable materials. Established in 2018, WOSUP is a social impact enterprise dedicated to making a difference in our environment by providing sustainable al...

There is nothing like race day pain and suffering to test our mettle. The deals we make with ourselves in the smoky backrooms of our minds, the tenuous connections that we make to our own internal strength, often frayed at the edges by the experiences of the past and the doubts of the future.  That incredible day before a big event where the mental pain at times often feels overwhelming, only an a...

Doubtful, fearful, reactive, defensive, divisive, alienating, isolating, estranging, inharmonious, disingenuous, manipulative, repetitive, cynical, victimising, dishonest, deceitful, underhanded, duplicitous, insincere, calculating, scheming, devious and unscrupulous. A bunch of words to describe the tip of the iceberg that we have all been witness too in Australia and around the world in the last...

The advent of Instagram and the body image sales pitch that has created influencers and so called successful movers and shakers, pushing us to look a certain way by targeting our unconscious need to fit and consume, can at times be a very destructive force which separates us from the deeper truth of our potential if we are not using a high degree of self awareness. The dangers are obvious. Disorde...

  Doubt is the ultimate cynic. Are you sick of manifesting the opposite of what you want? Repeating the same outcomes regardless of the preparation? Feel like a victim, not a victor? Fatigued from trying? Do you know what trying would look like if doubt were not present and you were? If we could only see the athletic process without the filter of judgment, tags, labels, doubts and fears and into t...

What we often don't talk about is our journey as ex-athletes. It is a subject that we need to bring out into the open. Ex-athletes often feel like they have been swept under the carpet or put out to pasture in some way, but this projection lacks a basic truth, in that most of the discomfort in retiring from sport, or anything else for that matter, is in fact self driven in the way that the in...

Fear and doubt rely on two critical aspects of mind that feed them their meals, those two mind based aspects are known as memory and imagination. They wreak havoc on our sense of peace, they take away our presence, limit our awareness and separate us from our true sense of self. You could call these mind based aspects "the separate self" as one great teacher Rupert Spira refers to them a...

Intentional Resilience is power made of many aspects. No athletic goal moves anywhere without desire and intention. The power of dreams is an internal process that drives a physical outcome. That internal drive can look a little like this-  Desire, inception, intention, inspiration, enjoyment, motivation, enthusiasm, heart, guts, will, acceptance, non resistance, and the ultimate outcome of resili...

This week we are talking to waterman Mick Di Betta, the inaugural World Champion Molokai to Oahu prone Paddleboard Winner. Mick has been a top 10 fixture in that event for nearly 21 years, which is an amazing feat in of itself. Mick is also a coach who has coached many champions to the world championships, working both online and physically with his group "Just Paddling". Many of the wor...