Chad Dunn | Mind Over Everything

0:00 If it ever happens to you, but if you ever wake up and for some reason you're just not motivated to do what you you're not motivated to win that day, how do you turn that around? You got to move. You got to move. I went into the first class. I'm sitting there with a bunch of people that were just, you're overcoming drug addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction. You know, there's a class of all these people that had to be there.

0:25 So Chad Dunn, I'm really looking forward to this. You have a fascinating story to tell. And yeah, so it's an absolute pleasure to have you here. You've had a distinguished career as a BMX writer and actually spent a couple of years in prison, which may surprise some people. So you have a great overview of life from many different sides, and I think that's going to really benefit the listeners to hear this fascinating story. You now have a very successful business specializing in rehabilitation, physiotherapy and obviously so helping a lot of people physically, but I'm sure mentally as well.

1:02 So without further ado, can you let the listeners know a little bit more about you? Sure can Dave, thanks for having me on here again. My name is Chad Dunn, owner of Move Human Performance Center. Well, the biggest thing I always ask people is, you know, tell me a little something about yourself, you know, and I think that's one question that people can't answer anymore #1 because they don't know their self identity or two. They just don't know who they are, you know. So for myself here, I'm AI grew up as an athlete, I grew up in an active household.

1:29 I wrestled, I played football, I did BMX. So I like life on the edge. You know, I played sports because I like to chase adrenaline and that was kind of my biggest thing is I used my sports to chase adrenaline through my high school years. You know, I played the football and was doing all that, you know, normal high school kids. But then I got into partying in my college years, I got into this field from wrestling, hurt my shoulder, had to go to physical therapy and I knew that's what I wanted to do.

1:51 That's why I was one of those people that knew at an early age what I wanted to do and that's what I went to college for. Well, and like I said, is I was doing some partying in college and the studying kind of started taking a back seat. I started, you know, messing around with different sales opportunities of selling drugs. And then I became a drug user. At that time, never was I eliminated from my work. I was always growing up. I was taught to be a hard worker. My dad was a cowboy guy. So hard work was always in my blood.

2:19 You know, the party never interfered with my work until it got to be real bad when I became a user. Yeah, I still tried to do my work. I was still helping. I was still preaching health. But at the same time, other identity was I was destroying my own health. And it's, it's one of those things is that I really wasn't the true person at that time. I was trying to find fun. I was trying to fit in with my friends or trying to fit in with friends. And I really wasn't focused on myself. And so that led me to boom two years in a federal prison out here in the United States.

2:45 And so I sat in prison for, you know, 20 years. I got 31 sentence. I had a survey, 88 percent, 85% of that, and I got out in 2008, went back to work doing physical therapy, working with a clinic, had some really, really, really major cases that were transformation. As I was transforming myself, I got to work with a bunch of clients and help them transform their self. And I knew, again, like I said earlier, I was in the field to help somebody, you know, 2017 I end up leaving my company I was working for, I opened up Move Human Performance Center and here we are.

3:16 Brilliant. So I've got a few questions for you. And my first question is, you know, you kind of intermarry already, but the defining transitions in your career and life and how you navigated them. Yeah. Well, you know, when you have to balance life for the young kids, you know, and you really don't know who you are. And I think that's the problem nowadays is that we're looking for that identity, you know, having to balance that with going to school and doing whatever that you want to do in your future.

3:40 It was hard. I got lost. I got sucked into this vortex, you know, and it's kind of the same thing with the injuries is that when these people have an injury or, you know, even with weight loss, fitness, anything, that's that we get sucked to this vortex and we don't know how to get out of it. We look for help everywhere else. You know, we go to your Weight Watchers, you know, we go to Narcotics Anonymous, Alcohol Anonymous, we go to these classes and we're looking for help. But really what I think we forget to do is we look to forget inside and look at her help for yourself.

4:04 You know, it all starts with you. It all starts with you. That's that's very true. I think, you know, as a coach, I've been very aware that it doesn't matter what you tell anybody. Nobody's going to take that on board unless they're ready for it. And often, you know, you can help people in the right way, but if they're not ready to hear it yet, then it's it's not going to land at all. And, you know, maturity obviously helps that. How do you feel about, you know, is it better actually to go through a period of not knowing yourself and experimenting before you find yourself?

4:41 Or do you think you want to start trying to define who you are at a younger age? Because you miss out a lot on a lot of fun if you if you know exactly what you want and have your identity so and. You're absolutely right, you know, and that's kind of the devil's advocate, you know, And we as parents, we don't want our kids to stress. And so we preach everything. Go be a doctor, go be an attorney, go be a teacher, you know, go get a good education so that way you can have your future. Well, if you look at a lot of these people, a lot of those people that are in that field, they're not happy.

5:10 They're not happy. You know, it's a student loan, It's the payback, it's the long residency, the fellowships that have to do. But it became a job and a career for them. That's one way. But again, we try to get the best out of our kids in our offspring, so we want them to be in a good situation. Well, on the other side of it all, and I try to tell this all the time, parents, the kids will make their own decisions. They will, you know, it's their own choices. I had the great parents. They're growing up, you know, me, my wife Jackie, we're great parents and even my kids, you know, they're all grown now, but they even they get in a little bit of trouble.

5:41 But I want them to do that. I want them to get in a stressful situation and I want to see how they get out of it, you know, because I think right now in this world, we as coaches, we do a lot of thinking for the kids, you know, they are, they want to be told what to do. Kids want to be told what to do. Coach, what time do you want me to show up? Coach, how many balls do you want me to hit? How many serves, how many 4 ends, how many back heads? They want to be told on what they have to do. But then when we release them and they become their own person, they don't know how to think because we do the thinking for them.

6:05 So I want them to learn how to think. You know, the critical thinking is a huge thing. And for me, the trouble I put myself in, I never played the victim mentality. I was always the one that did it. You know, it was entertainment purposes. I put myself into these positions and I knew I was going to be fine because I knew how to get out of them and I knew there's a way to get out of them. And that's True Grit. You know, it's just like anything else. Yeah, when you get down, you have to figure out how to do it all.

6:26 I wasn't looking for help anywhere else. You know, my parents tried to help me. The system tried to help me, but at that time I didn't, like you said, I didn't want the help. I was still having fun, you know? Yeah, Unfortunately, when I got incarcerated, I had to sit there. I said, OK, the fun is over. You know, now it's time to take a big look at yourself. Take a good look in the mirror. Self reflection is key. And then let's create this new person. But also, I can't say this is. It's not that the fun is over, it's a different kind of fun that you find.

6:51 Sure, I channeled my energy differently. You know, I went from hustling and peddling drugs to peddling health and peddling athletes. You know, we still hustle. I work harder than I've ever worked. You know, actually, I take it back when you're working on the streets and you're a user and you're a drug dealer and you're trying to find things, you know, those are the hardest working people out there. You know, they're available. I was available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I never stopped because again, it was an opportunity, you know, so now it's the same thing.

7:14 I work I'm six days a week here at Move and I do everything because that's getting it's about giving back, but giving back the right product. Brilliant. So do you have any mental models or principles or tools that you use in making decisions, especially under pressure, that that you could share? Yes you know the biggest thing and I've got a lot of them obviously move his mind over virtual everything. First of all, you have to have faith in yourself. So it's a system that I use is that the first thing when you walk in the door, whether it be an athlete, whether it's a patient coming back after a catastrophic injury, I have to talk to them mentally and I have to do my evaluation.

7:48 Are you sure you're in for this long ride? And that's really it, you know, and now if you say that you are willing to go through the 12 month of an ACL, or if you're going to go through the life changing of the paralysis or the victims, you know, I'm going to have to ask you, Are you ready for this battle? You know, because it's not going to be one in one big war. It's going to be a series of small victories over and over and over again. But that's the that's the resilience. That's the way to stay, to keep coming back, you know, to keep fighting.

8:13 It's not how many times you get knocked out, it's how many times you get back up. But those are the key components of all. So for me, it's a mind over virtually everything method is that you got to believe that you can do it. If you don't believe, there's an old saying that the doubters will doubt and the believers will believe. But everybody's human. And how do you deal with the down moments? Because you know, it's even if you believe and you get up and you go and you, you have that resilience, there will be little periods where you do doubt and you do, you know, struggle to have the motivation and how, how do you deal with that?

8:45 Well, you know, the biggest thing, and even in just life in general, is silence. We have to have a period of silence. You have to listen to yourself and you have to ignore the noise. We always hear this noise. So I've got that the I've got the outside noise, I got the inside noise. But sometimes the inside noise of what we hear ourselves say to ourselves is the worst, you know. So instead of me being the inner critic, I try to be the inner coach. And I learned that when I was locked up, you know, there's lonely nights out there when my family would come and see me and they would leave, you know, at the time when my wife would come up and bring the kids and we get to have this nice little two hours, three hour, 4 hour meeting.

9:17 But then I got to see him walk out the gates and I'm still stuck in prison. Like I have to say goodbye, but I get to see them leave, you know? So that's the time when you have to be able to coach yourself is that there's going to be another day, there's going to be another point, there'll be another game, another set, another match. But you have to focus on what is important right now in front of you, you know? And I think that's really it's about what you see is the 50m target instead of the 300m target.

9:40 You have to keep your eyes on the sites. Very good. What is most important to you in balancing family business, financial success To keep the right feeling, Because of course we all want a great family and we want success. One Financial. You know, you can't have it all all of the time. You have to find a way to manage how you feel about all of these things yourself. I don't know if I'm explaining that very well. No, you are, you know, so when you're in prison, right? Or just living, I had a whole bunch of stuff before, right?

10:10 I get in prison, everything's taken away from. So you have to start with one. And one other philosophy I have is one in a row, OK, I have to start with me and it has to be one in a row, One serve, one breakup point, you know, I am over here and I have to get the next. That's really I'm trying to do or for me, it's get the next day. So when I found myself, I got out, I found my family. I have my family with me. But again, my family's only going to succeed if I succeed, you know, and by able to do that, you have to have a job.

10:36 The biggest thing is you have to have a job. You have to have means of financial gains. You have to. And so working with the company, I knew my hands were tied. I was a convicted felon. I couldn't go get a job somewhere, you know, because now I have a record, you know, And so now I'm limited. Thankfully, like I said, my buddies, they were there, they helped me out and I got a job there. But it came to a point where I wanted to do more for my family, you know, and I had to do more for myself. So I went to a bigger stage, you know, and I decided that I was going to open up move.

11:00 I sacrificed my wife and I, we had to sell our house to be able to keep this alone. You know, we, we hit covet in 2023 years into business, we hit covet. You know, we, we managed to stay ahead. We changed our model a bunch so that we could accommodate anybody. But again, with strategic planning, with strategic planning, you can make anything happen. So we had to start fighting. And the biggest thing that we've developed was a team. You know, my wife and I, my family, you know, we always eat dinner together when the kids were home.

11:25 We have a nice team, you know, at move right now. I have a nice team, you know, and I think what happens is that financial success, family success, work success, it all is much easier to accommodate and to make when you have a great team around you. I mean, I, this is just wonderful to hear because in, in my coaching, I've found with, you know, elite athletes, elite performers in anything that what happens outside of their job, outside of their work is just as important and, and often is, is something that is the thing that's missing until they put that right.

12:00 And, and I've talked to them a lot about making your family or your partner part of your team. They need to understand what you're trying to accomplish and their role in helping you to do it. Now, the role might even be as much as just saying, you know, when I'm away, you know, at work and, and, and traveling or whatever it is, I don't want to feel guilty. I want to feel like I'm doing this for us And I want feel like you understand that and that you're part of this team and the support that you give me is as much as my coach gives me or my physical trainer gives me or, you know, you are very much part of this team.

12:36 But in return, we will set up aside times where it's just our time and we have that to look forward to. And once they start to incorporate people close to them as part of their team, that's often when things change for the better and the real success can kick in. That's true. You know, I always look at the target or a bullseye. You know, that outside ring is pretty big, so you can fit a lot of friends in there, a lot of family, a lot of supporters, you know, you can put all that in there. But when you get to that inner circle in the middle of the bullseye, it's pretty small.

13:08 Not every, but not everybody can fit into that. So I'm going to have to kick some people out or I'm gonna have to dump some people along the line, you know. But in the inner circle of what you have, those are the people that are there to support you. You know, I got lucky, you know, when we started open up move, you know, my wife, she ended up having to stay with me. She was a bartender now she's now a medical biller and HR and she runs all the operations of it all. But I got lucky because I got my wife right in the next to me as much as possible.

13:32 Sundays, that's our date night, you know, Saturdays, date night, Sundays, it's our family time, you know, So you have to learn to separate work, you know, you have to learn to separate the family stuff. But at the same time, is that my wife's there to push me, right? She knows that she knows what I have, you know, she knows my, my, my ability to help people. I understand what it is because I've helped myself and I've helped many along the way. But I know that there's a bigger, bigger, bigger out there for me.

13:55 And she's been pushing me. That's how I got this book started for my 50th birthday. She says, I want you to write this book and tell your story. So it is so much. It's just amazing when you have somebody on your side that can help give it that extra push, whether it be a wife, a spouse, a husband or a coach. And today some somebody's leading you in the direction you want to be. And when you have a good leader pushing you, as we all know as coaches, you know, it's much easier to get to that final destination.

14:17 Absolutely. So I've got a couple of quick questions for you, and the first one is what's a common myth or piece of bad advice that you hear in your field? I say this one all the time, and I'm sure you know the hard work. If you want to be better at something, you got to work hard. And I hear that all the time. You know, living in Arizona, hard work is the people that are outside in the summertime digging ditches and it's 120°. If you work hard, you're going to get tired, right? But if you work smart, you're going to get better.

14:43 So I don't really like to use the hurt word hard work. I like to use smart work, right? You work hard, you get tired, you work smart, you get better. That's one of my biggest advice. Well, I like that. I'm gonna steal it. No, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I look like I said, I see these guys digging ditches. It's 120°. I said. That's, you know, I tell all my athletes, if you want to work hard, that's hard work. They're outside. I'm smart. I got 77° that indoor every day in the summer in Arizona. I never feel the 120°.

15:06 Yes. So who or what has influenced the way you think about leadership the most? You know, I've got a lot of them. I've got a lot of them. I look up to a lot of people. You know, I've got a lot of mentors that I've been around, you know, especially since I, I came back in 2008. And I've got a really, really clear head. You know, I grew up in the Arcadia neighborhood, which is very affluent. I had Robert Kiyosaki and Kim Kiyosaki, which is the rich dad, poor dad riders, you know. So I've been around the, I used to train Kim, the wife, I trained her.

15:33 So I've been around a lot of positive people, you know, and I just sit back and watch, you know, I had a gentleman that had an insurance company, he'd have sold it for 660 million. So I see what hard work can do for you. I see what hard work can do for you. And then as I've opened up move, you know, I've continued to look more on the business side. I've got a lot of CEO's of, you know, in my book, I talk about some CEO's that I look after, you know, media people, car sales and car lot people. There's a lot of them that look and I see their business model.

15:59 And really what I see from a mall is they all give back, you know, and that's where I'm at right now is that all of my mentors, they're philanthropists, you know, they're giving back to the community, they're giving back to the people. And you know, I admire anybody that does that. Yeah. And I think the, the one thing that is underestimated, the more successful you are, the more you can give back. Yes, you know, and you know, if you're giving, I don't know, 10% and of a million, that's 100,000 as an example towards something.

16:25 And if, you know, spared 10,000, you know, that's only 1000 that you, I mean, you have to start somewhere. And I think it's important to, to give back all along the journey. But the influence that you can have, the more successful you are is significant. Yeah. But you know, when my patients come in, when I first came out, little did they know when I was rehabilitating them, they were rehabilitating me. So some of my my people that really inspire me are not these top dogs, You know, they're the guys that have been on fire for, you know, 2 1/2 minutes.

16:52 It's got 67% of their body. You know, his name's Anthony. You know, I can tell you one for sure. His name's Anthony Ramos. He's inspired me more than anything just to see what he's gone through as a young 24 year old male. He's got 2 little beautiful babies. He's got a wife. And here he is, four months in a coma after survivor after sustaining severe, severe burns. You know, I'd never seen him get up, give up, you know? So how can I? It's amazing. You know, I seen him get his life back and that was when I was working with him.

17:17 I got I got my life back. So he always says, hey, you inspired me to keep moving. And I said, well, little did you know, you inspired me to. Lovely, lovely story. So if you look back now, you know, and maybe to that 2008 moment, what's the biggest piece of advice or the one piece of advice maybe that you would have liked to have imparted to that person in 2008 that could have helped you or spent along your journey or that you heard later on or experienced later on that just wish I'd known that a little earlier.

17:49 Well, we all have heard it, but we haven't really absorbed and taken it in, right? So through my course of my life of selling drugs in the streets and training people and then becoming a user and whatnot, everybody at that time, there was always some type of punishment that you had to go through when you get in trouble. So you have to go to classes. You have to go to these alcohol classes or you have to go to these drug classes or these anger management classes. And so when you went in there, they put a label on you.

18:13 You know, they said that hey, you know, you are an alcoholic or hey, you are a drug drug addict or hey, you're a violent person or some stuff. And I'm sitting there thinking that's not really true because that's not me. You know, I just like to have fun. I go out and have entertainment. You know, I got a couple DUI's. You know, I'm out here in the streets and I'm doing whatever, but it was always having for fun, right? So they always put a label on me. So at that time I thought, well, shit, if I got this label, then I might as well just be that person.

18:37 But that's not true. I was listening to somebody tell me who I really was, you know, and then when I I got out, I had to go to one more class and I mentioned this guy all the time. You know, his name is Scott, a little short counselor. I went into the first class. I'm sitting there with a bunch of people that were just you're overcoming drug addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction. You know, there's a class of all these people that had to be there. And when he opened up his class, he said, now for some of you guys, it's the first time in here.

19:01 Some of you guys, you've been in here before. One thing you're not going to hear from me is the word addiction, he says. But what you're going to hear from me is we all make bad choices. We all make bad choices, he says. Is that simple? If you don't want to go, if you don't want to gamble, don't go to the casino. But you end up at the casino and now you end up gambling. That's the wrong place to be. You know, if you don't like to do drugs, don't go to the drug dealer and go to the area to go look for it.

19:22 Stay away from there, right? And I'm like, man, is life that easy? It's all about choices. And so I have a chapter 2 in my book. It's called yes or no, right? That's it. It's either yes or no. That's it. There's no Grays, there's no maybes. But in this world that we're in today, we have all of these options that we get to make right now. We can take 31 flavors, you know, I can do any background or I can pick filters I could put. That's not true. That's not true. It's about choices. It's either yes or no, you know, And when you do those, everything's been good.

19:49 Ever since the day that I left, I've made the decision to make the right choice every day. Now with those conscious day, they're those choices. They have to be conscious choices. Don't let those subconscious choices get you, because subconscious is what you know. That's what you do, right? You? If it feels right, it's probably wrong. Don't do it. That if it feels right, it's probably wrong. Yeah, and that's why I had to do. I had to suffer for a little bit. Yeah, making choices. I mean, it's interesting you say that because when athletes feel sorry for themselves and, you know, they've had a bad loss, you know, didn't achieve a goal that they set out for whatever.

20:22 And, you know, they'll even sometimes say, you know, I just feel like giving up and and I'll always say something. This is very easy. You either stop or you carry on. But you need to carry on with the right attitude. Don't carry on saying I should be stopping. Yes, you either carry on positively or you stop. Let me know now, do you want to carry on or do you want to stop? Because if you want to carry on, then you come for a ride with a great attitude because that's the only way that you're going to ever succeed.

20:51 And and I know a lot of people carry on and they say they're resilient, but there's a basic negativity around them that is saying, yeah, but I'm not going to get through. I'm not going to get through. And and that, you know, and, and maybe, you know, maybe I should be stopping. And if they're in that place, it never happens for them. And again, that goes back to being that inner critic, right? We go back into being the inner critic. Well, I don't want to be the inner critic. I got to be the inner coach.

21:16 I've got to tell myself that I can do this, you know, but we listen to those voices, you know, So now you have all these external factors or queuings and you have the internal queuings, you know, maybe they're better than me, you know, or they've they've got, I wonder who's in my DMS or I wonder who's texting me or, you know, our mind gets filtered by all this outside talk out this outside noise. You know, it's got to go back inside your own self and you have to have that inner talk inside you. You have to know that, hey, I've got to win this next point or I've got to win this next day.

21:42 You know, for me it was days, you know, I had to win the next day. And by doing that you hear stacking days all day long right now. You know, stacking days, stacking days. That's the the term I always use one in a row, right, because again in 2nd and I've used this my old, you know, he's a AAU godfather coach. I think he's 79 years old right now. His name's Art dies coach. A lot of the MBA guys out of it, the US and he said in order to become a great basketball shooter, you got to start with one in a row.

22:06 And so I've taken that into my life. I can take that to my athletes. If you want to be a good quarterback, you got to complete one in a row. You know, if you want to be a good tennis player, you got to get one survey and go one in a row. Yeah, that's how you're going to be able to do it, you know, But people look ahead and they, yeah, I've got to get the six of them I got. It starts with one in a row and that's the one in the row really is the choice that you make or with the voice that you hear inside your head.

22:25 It starts easy. It's all easy. Yeah, one, one last question. If it ever happens to you, but if you ever wake up and for some reason you're just not motivated to do what you you're not motivated to win that day, how do you turn that? Around you got to move. You got to move from physical medicine. Physical medicine is the best, right? I've got a, he's one of my other mentors. He's 91 years old. He was a Honeywell guy back in the day, you know, CEO, very, very polished businessman. This day, I think he probably still walks 12,000 steps a day, you know, at 91, movement is medicine, you know, movement is medicine.

22:58 So even through the addiction stuff, you know, I know a lot of it, they talk about exercising because it releases the serotonin that don't put me, the norepinephrine, all the good chemicals that we chase and that helps us feel better. That's what exercise does to you, you know. So if it is those days and you don't have to go out and kill yourself and crush yourself, but you just have to get out and move, breathe, you know, takes a big deep breaths. I think that's one of the biggest thing that people don't do now.

23:21 They don't breathe. Breathing is important because it gives us that sense of just relaxation or we can exhale any of the bad things that are in our body. And then my last thing, I think the biggest thing is, as I said, you have to have silence. If we're driving in the car, we got the music on, people are running, they've got the air pods in their ear. There's always music, there's always some type of noise. So you have to sit in silence. And again, that's what I learned in prison. You're real thinking.

23:43 And when you gather yourself to be able to know what you want to do, you got to sit in silence. And so it might be, you know, sitting on the couch for about, you know, 2 minutes and just like, you know what, now it's not the day to sit here. You know, you better get your butt up and start moving. And when you do that 5 minutes later, you're going to be fine. Brilliant. Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure, Chad, great to see you again. It's it's been fascinating chat that we had. I think your story is amazing and it just love your your energy.

24:11 It just comes through the screen. You know that you're not just a positive person, but the vibe I get is a very good. Person thanks for watching Locker Room Power with David Samuel. If you enjoyed the episode, hit subscribe and leave a comment on your favorite platform. See you in the next one.