The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Paul Edwards

I’m glad you are joining me today for episode #5 of The Morning Upgrade Podcast. Today, I’m talking with Paul Edwards. He’s passionate about fitness and nutrition, his faith journey, and working as a ghostwriter for faith-based authors. 

Top Points Covered in This Episode

• Change your mindset from being a consumer to a producer and become version 2.0 of yourself. 
• Serve others without expectation and they will eventually pay you for your service. 
• Focus on the purpose you carry as an entrepreneur and do things in line with your purpose every day.

Links & Resources

Connect With Paul Edwards at The Paul Edwards

Share link for this episode

Find The Books Mentioned on Kindle or Audible: 

The Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham

How to Subscribe To The Morning Upgrade Podcast

I hope you will join me each week as I interview entrepreneurs that have a growth mindset. We have casual conversations about the things they do each morning as part of their routine. Also, we discuss business tips and their perfect day. All you need to do is click the button below and subscribe. If you love what you hear, leave a review on iTunes so others can find the show. 

Transcription

Announcer:

Welcome to the morning upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote, where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan Cote:

Hey everyone. This is Ryan Cote with the Morning Upgrade Podcast, and today I’m excited to have with me, Paul Edwards. Hey Paul, how’s it going?

Paul Edwards:

Ryan, I’m doing really well. Thanks so much for having me.

Ryan Cote:

Why don’t you start by telling us who you are, what you do, and what you enjoy doing?

Paul Edwards:

Well, I’m a husband and father. I live in Olympia, Washington. I’ve got boys of nine and 11, about to be 10 and 12 in a couple of months. For my professional life, I’m an executive ghostwriter. I curate and write content for faith-based influencers, executives, thought leaders, and experts. And then in my spare time, absolutely love hitting the gym and bodybuilding. I’ve competed in a couple of amateur shows and love to build muscle and stay fit. So hopefully that gives you a brief picture of who I am and what I get up to.

Ryan Cote:

Yes, that’s great. It gave me a lot of questions I want to ask on that too. The Morning Upgrade Podcast, it’s about personal development growth, speak to a lot of entrepreneurs like yourself, about these topics. And so you give two directions to go in. But first, why don’t we talk about morning routines, I’ve got my own set list of things that I do in the morning. Do you have a morning routine? If you do, what does it look like?

Paul Edwards:

For me, I figured out a few years ago that I really need to be able to ease into my day instead of just wake up and start doing it from the moment I get up. And so I started getting up at four 30 in the morning and I got so used to it now that my body clock actually goes off right around then. Like this morning, it went off at 4:37, I’ve stopped using an alarm clock and I just let my body wake up when it’s used to waking up. And for the first, probably 90 minutes, sometimes it bleeds over to two hours. I’m just sitting there reading devotions, scriptures, praying, meditating, thinking, journaling. I just need that time to empty my head of any residual stuff that’s still floating around in there and I haven’t figured out what to do about it or what to think about it. And then that kind of segways into doing some early morning preparatory stuff for work. Very often, I get an interruption there, of having to take my kids, in the summertime here we’ve had to take them up 20 minutes up the road to a Bible camp. And of course school’s starting now so we’ll see how that changes it. And then it’s pretty much because it’s writing, you know, writing is a very focused, intense sort of thing you’ve got to spend a lot of time doing. So I’m usually writing from then on until about 12 noon.

Ryan Cote:

You mentioned health and fitness being a big part of your life. So your morning routine doesn’t include any working out, I’m guessing you do that more towards later in the day.

Paul Edwards:

Yeah. You know, usually, it depends on how heavy of a workload I have for writing. And then also what my afternoon schedule looks like. Cause my afternoon, I regard that as time on the phone, networking, talking to people, talking to clients, talking to being on other people’s shows, and then interviewing people on mine. So if I have a very heavy schedule, I’ll usually regard that as a rest day and then the following day I’ll work out. But sometimes yeah, you know, you gotta be flexible because life happens. And so like today, for example, I went and worked out at 11, a couple of days earlier than that, I went and worked out at 7:00 PM. It just depends.

Ryan Cote:

And you mentioned journaling as part of your routine. You said you’re journaling on things that maybe are not resolved in your mind, or do you follow a specific, like do you answer set questions? I read a book where he recommended, I’m blank on the author’s name. The book is called the road less stupid (Inaudible 04:02) him and he talks about having alone time and every day or a week, I can’t remember, but he has set questions that he asks himself, and he journals on it. Are you doing something similar or are you just kind of letting your mind flow?

Paul Edwards:

There’s some of that, I picked up from Rabbi Daniel Lapin to make sure that you write down three new things you’re thankful for every day. So it can’t be the same old, same old, it’s gotta be a new thing. Now, many times a good night’s sleep, the night before, maybe I didn’t sleep so well. So if this time I did sleep really well, that’s a new thing. And so I take that, but you know, it can be any number of things. The other thing that I do is I believe strongly that learning foreign languages is a great thing and I’ve become quite interested in learning biblical Hebrew. And so I make a point of writing certain prayers that I’ve learned from the Bible, I’ve self-taught on writing them out and then reading them aloud.

Ryan Cote:

Very interesting. As part of my routine, I have an app on my phone called elevate and it’s a brain training app. It’s speaking, writing, math quizzes, and those types of things. And so I’m big into like brain train, kind of look at learning a language as brain training. As you’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, you have to learn something new, especially as an adult, it’s easier to learn languages as a kid. So that’s really cool. This isn’t like a health and fitness show, but it’s personal development. So I categorize health fitness as personal development. Any workout or nutrition tips that come to mind that you swear by? I’m just curious, more of my own interests.

Paul Edwards:

Well, each person is different. I can tell you what has not worked for me in the past. And this has a lot to do with my physiology. So I’m a tall, mainly skinny type of person. I have very long arms. I have a six-foot arm span, which is as I am, I’m six foot two. And so I struggled to build muscle the way you see it depicted in the magazines, the videos with all these guys who have massive chest muscles and much shorter arms and much more muscle and bone density than I do. So there’s a way that that’s done when you don’t have the natural body type. But I don’t know whether that’s the most helpful. I would say if you have a goal of being in shape, not having your gut, you know, not having extra flab, all that… I’m going to say that as usual, it’s 90% what you put in your mouth and how much sleep you get. And if either of those two is off, you can do all the exercise you want to, you’re not going to get the results that you could get if you had your nutrition really dialed in and you’re sleeping properly. And there are all kinds of things we do to disrupt our sleep, including using our phones at night, leaving our phones near the bedside at night. I just had to eliminate a whole lot of things from my diet and from how I sleep so that I’ve been able to go through a very powerful transformation between age 37 and now at age 40,

Ryan Cote:

I love that you mentioned sleep. I don’t think my wife listens to this so she’ll kill me if she hears this, but she’s a thin person, she’s a nurse and she started picking up a lot more… This is a little while ago so this is in the past, but she started picking up night shifts so she was sleeping a lot less. And she started gaining a little bit of weight, nothing else changed except for that, she was just sleeping less because she was working the night shift. And then when she fixed that she lost the weight. So I loved that you mentioned that sleep it’s so important, not just for the weight loss that you said but it’s for your mindset and productivity. I know when I don’t get a lot of sleep I’m pretty much worthless the next day

Paul Edwards:

We are ebb and flow type of creatures we’re not meant to live and constantly on like we’re encouraged to these days. You know, we got our phones and we got 24 seven access to everything and all this information. And we’re just not designed that way.

Ryan Cote:

A hundred percent agree. I’m trying to myself, turn off the electronics at a certain point at night and just read and relax. It’s hard cause you get addicted to checking your emails and you get addicted to business and whatever the case is, but I’m really making a conscious effort to do that. So let’s talk about, you mentioned your business is ghostwriting and you said you have a podcast too, you have the perfect voice for a podcast, I’m sure you’ve been told that. Have you been told that before?

Paul Edwards:

I would love to take the credit, unfortunately, I didn’t make myself. And so I have to give God the glory on that one, but it’s a wonderful asset to have for interviewing on a show. And if you match it with the right kind of tonality and the way you say things and how you connect with people through the camera and stuff like that, it can be very helpful so thank you for saying that.

Ryan Cote:

You’re welcome. So let’s talk about your business, you mentioned ghostwriting. What’s the hardest thing about your business or maybe something you’ve gone through with your business and either how are you handling it or how did you handle it?

Ryan Cote:

Well, it was a 17-month journey for me of leaving behind a job, I was in the property-casualty insurance space as a salesman. And I got fired from my last job because all of a sudden what used to work for me with networking and personal relationships was no longer turning out results. So they fired me and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, but it took 17 months of me learning to get out of my own way for that to become a reality. And so when I say that, I think the hardest part for entrepreneurs is number one, you’re not just on a journey of changing job titles. 

And this is not just about the fact that you don’t work well with others or you don’t do well when people are giving you orders. It’s becoming a version 2.0 of yourself because you make this transition from asking the question that the average consumer asks, which is what’s in it for me, to a far more profound question of the producer, which is when people buy something, why do they buy it? And when you go through a transition like that, inevitably, you’re going to come up against your own blindness as much as anything else. And you’re going to find, I really haven’t stopped to ask that question. And so I have been a little bit, sometimes like in my case, massively arrogant in thinking that I know what my marketplace wants from me. And in fact, I haven’t bothered to find out.

Ryan Cote:

How’d you find out what they want?

Paul Edwards:

Well, what happened was I went through several iterations of stuff that went nowhere. At first, it was kind of like, maybe I’ll do a coaching type of thing, then it was, I’ll be a best-selling author and sell millions of books and that didn’t work. And then I was trying to do a mastermind group on my own, and that didn’t work either. What happened was our mutual friend, the big A, Aaron Walker came on my podcast twice in 2019. And then the second time after I had gone out of my way to connect him with a bunch of people I knew and never asked for anything in return, he came onto the show, we did the interview and in the post-interview chat, he said to me, look, you need to let me do something for you. And after some discussion back and forth, we figured out a way that I would join his mastermind, iron sharpens iron, and I would also write content for his team on a trial basis. Well, that quickly snowballed all of a sudden, about six weeks after I joined, hands started to raise among other people he knew who knew that he was far too busy to be cranking out the amount of content that he suddenly was. And I started to get paying clients, people saying, look, I need the same thing as, or the similar thing as what you’re doing for Aaron and I’m willing to pay you for it. Let’s have a conversation. So it turned out that all that time, the market had been saying, we want a professional ghostwriter who can capture our voice and become us on paper. But here I was saying, you actually want me to come and be an expert or a coach when I’m not one, that’s the short answer.

Ryan Cote:

I love the lesson there too, you giving without expecting anything in return. I think that’s advice that’s been mentioned on podcasts because it’s so true, you know, it’s timeless advice. I’ve got one more question for you and then I’d like you to tell everyone how they can learn more about you, how they can connect with you and maybe the best website from the visit. Your habits, I know you’ve got habits in terms of bodybuilding, you mentioned getting the right sleep, writing, obviously. Are there any other personal development habits that you swear by, or maybe one or two you swear by?

Paul Edwards:

Part of it has been expressed through what you and I have both been learning with this whole vision casting for the next three years in Iron sharpens iron. But even before we were doing that, I discovered that meditation actually has a rich and wonderful history, even for people in the Judeo-Christian faith. The way it’s sort of caricature today is like it’s a far Eastern type of sit on the floor cross-legged and sing kumbaya, and then repeat Lamborghini, Lamborghini, Lamborghini, or something like that. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we are talking about is focusing on the purpose that we carry as entrepreneurs, and then figuring out how does that begin to have a significant impact on the world around us and visualizing what would that look like? You know, just for a moment, what if, what if I actually was what I dream of becoming, what would I do? Where would I go? How would I leave a lasting mark on this world for the better?

Because once you have that picture, you can work your way backward from it. You can start to sketch out what the details are, different things that you would do, different ways that you would benefit others, different ways that you would make decisions that would have an impact on your great-grandchildren. And all of that, I hope I don’t make it sound simple, it does take some effort. It’s not something that you can just flick a light switch and all of a sudden you can do, but there’s a lot of resources out there that can help guide you on that, on a sincere, genuine meditation that’s not Hocus Pocus and not woo woo, and just really focuses all of that power that’s bound up in the human mind on something that really is genuinely important to you. And then your brain will start to overflow with ideas on how you can make it happen.

Ryan Cote:

Excellent. I love that, I’m a big fan of meditation. You take it to a whole nother level. I love it. Excellent. Excellent advice. Paul, thanks for being on the show. What’s the best way that people can learn more about you or connect with you?

Paul Edwards:

I have a website which is thepauls, as in Simon, edwards.com, thepaulsedwards.com. You’re quite welcome to go there. I am giving away a free copy of my new book, which comes out in September of 2020, which is called influencer networking secrets, which is also the name of my podcast. You can find that on iTunes, Spotify, and anywhere else fine podcasts are sold.

Ryan Cote:

Excellent. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, everyone for listening.

Paul Edwards:

Thanks, Ryan.

Announcer:

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