Brian Keane
speaker
176 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Brian Keane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I knew Sunday evening I was going back to work on Monday. And that didn't happen when I went into working in fitness. And it was such an interesting thing because at every stage, I always think of it, and the analogy I use is it's like legs on a table for confidence.
If you're setting up and doing a new journey, you know this, Alana, that at the beginning, you don't really have any legs to your confidence table. So it's very easy to knock it over.
But every time you set a small goal and you hit it, you add another leg to your table, or you set a big goal, a big, massive financial target or a marketing target, and you hit it and you're like, oh, big leg to the table. So if people
people question you then you're like well it's fine my confidence table is pretty sturdy I'm fine I can take these knocks from the outside but in the beginning you should be very careful of that and I think when people are trying to make that leap you have to be so mindful that in the early stages you don't have a lot of confidence or competence probably in the craft that you're choosing to do or the career you're choosing to go into you have to be really careful about who you spend time with my mother used to always tell me that if you lie down with dogs you get fleas
And you should be very careful that if there's people around you who are constantly chucking negativity at you, that's going to feed into you. That can't bounce off in the beginning. And that's something I know now that I definitely wish I had known 15 years ago.
What's so interesting about what you just said too, Ilana, is that everybody will feel the fear, but after a certain point, you just get conditioned to feel the fear and do it anyways. It's a cliche, but it's true. But what I did in the early stages was a thought experiment, which is just basic risk assessment 101. What's the upside of the decision I'm making?
What's the downside of the decisions I'm making? And can I handle the downside? It's risk management 101. The upside for me for leaving teaching and doing this job that didn't feel like a job to me was I'm doing something that I'm getting paid for that I would do for free, that I feel a massive calling to, a massive passion to. I'm like, that's a big upside.
The downside for me was I can go back teaching. I have a qualification. I have four years of experience. I will be in the exact same position that I'm in now And then I ask, can I handle that downside? I'm like, of course I can handle that downside. It's a disproportionate benefit on the upside.
That's perceived fear though. I think what's interesting is separating fear into its two categories, just categories. One is real fear, identified about threat of something bad happening and the others are perceived fear. Humiliation, what would people say? What would people think? That's a perceived fear.
And when you think about your perceived fears, and I went through all of those things, I had them said to me, there was probably way more people that didn't say it to me. But what's really interesting, I swear to you, Alana, I put this into the last book, Rewriting Your Story,
That auntie, who obviously didn't remember this conversation at the wedding, when I released my first book, The Fitness Mindset, which spent 16 weeks on the Amazon bestseller list and hit all the bestsellers in the bookshops it was in in Ireland, messaged me and said, I always knew you'd be a success in fitness. And that... is the important thing to think about here.
When you give new information to people and there's more data, people change their opinion. Yet we carry their opinions and attach to them like our first born child. When in reality, people will say things and regularly forget that they've even said them. And when you give new information, people's opinions change. When you're working through perceived fear, what will people say?
What will people think? People are going to say and they're going to think what they're going to think and say at that moment in time. That's not in rock. That's not solid. That is very malleable and very likely to change. And it's not about dealing with the fear.
It's about having the courage and the strength to persevere with the thing you want to do, knowing that other people's opinions will change. And that fear, perceived fear that you had once upon a time is a little bit of fuel. It's a little bit of, I need to actually go and get this done. And I think understanding the nuance of that is really important in the early stages, especially.
When I decided to go all in, it was ironically my ex-girlfriend at the time. I was living with my partner in London and she was a wonderful, still is a wonderful human being, not was, still is a wonderful human being. And I remember when we were having the conversation about potentially breaking up because we weren't going on the same path. We knew we weren't going to be together forever.
And she gave me a line that I've quoted regularly since. And she meant it about our relationships, but I actually took it to mean about my work. And she said that when we stop chasing the wrong things, we give the right things an opportunity to catch up. She meant that in context with the relationship. And it was true in that context as well. But I thought about it with my work.
I was like, I'm still half pregnant with teaching. I'm half my foot is in this door when I'm actually making more money as a personal trainer part-time. So there was evidence there that this was working. And I said, I need to go all in on this. So I gave myself a six month contract. safety net. I said, I'm going to move back to Ireland in the West of Ireland.
I moved back in at my mom and dad, which was very humbling at 26 years of age to move back in with your parents after having gone and worked and lived in London. And I was like, do you know what? I need to do this and give this a go. And my mom and dad let me stay with them. My sister gave me her old little Toyota Yaris.
One of those cars that when you close the door too hard, all four windows fall down. But It worked perfectly 98% of the time. It would get me to the gym. And nobody knew who I was. I came back in 2014 to the West of Ireland. I had no social media. I had no books. I had no podcast. I had no name or recognition. But what I did have was I was two years working as a personal trainer.
So I had got good at my craft. because every master is once a disaster. Everyone's terrible when they start. So when I started in London, I wasn't very good. It took me a while to get better at my craft. Same as everything. You put the reps in, you get better. So I was already established as a decent personal trainer in terms of my craft.
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