The poet Rumi described why we focus on passion when he said, Passion makes the old medicine new. Passion lops off the bough of weariness. Passion is the elixir that renews. How can there be weariness when passion is present? Bill Phillips has had a great passion for helping people overcome the weariness of heart, mind and body to create new lives for themselves.
Number-one New York Times bestselling author, magazine publisher, documentary film-maker, entrepreneur, inventor, self-made millionaire and motivator Bill Phillips has helped hundreds of thousands of people change their lives for the better. Now he has his sights set on scaling what he calls the Mount Everest of health and energy goals: to transform America from worst to first, to make it the healthiest nation in the world within 10 years.
Described recently by Outside magazine as the most successful fitness author of all time, Phillips runaway bestseller, Body-for-LIFE, has sold in excess of six-million copies. The 12-week guide to achieving mental and physical strength has topped the charts in 11 different countries, including the US, England, Japan, Australia, Greece and Finland, and was named among the top 15 bestselling books of the past decade by USA Today.
Phillip’s book, Eating for Life helps people improve their health by learning to enrich their daily nutrition. Available this spring will be his newest book, Bill Phillip’s Transformation: A Guide to Physical and Spiritual Fitness. Bill has been asked to share his expert advice and insights for television programs including NBC’s Today show, CBS’s The Early Show, Montel Williams, CNN, Fox News, and for publications such as USA Today, Modern Maturity, Woman’s World, the LA Times, and now Healthy, Wealthy nWise.
Charitable giving has been a major part of Bill’s life, and he has received many honors for his work, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation’s highest award. He was also honored by Paul Newman and the late John F. Kennedy, Jr. as one of America’s most generous business leaders. The United States Junior Chamber of Commerce honored him in January 2000 as one of 10 outstanding young Americans.
Bill was also chosen to help carry the Olympic Torch on its relay across America for the 2002 Olympic Games. Over the years, Bill has served as a transformation coach to a Who’s Who list of Hollywood icons and world-champion athletes, including Jerry Seinfeld, Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore and John Elway.
What he is most proud of is helping hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women transform into extraordinary and inspiring examples for others to look up to and follow. These are people who have made a change in their lives and are now making a difference in the lives of others.
Interviewing Bill Phillips is Alex Mandossian who has sold millions of dollars worth of products on Madison Avenue. He has become one of the leading direct marketers in the world today. His Teleseminar Secrets and Virtual Book Tours have paved new roads of success for both entrepreneurs and bestselling authors. If you want to double your income and learn Alex’s secrets, you can go to www.PromoteWithPassion.com.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: Janet and Chris, thank you. Bill, here we are again. I cannot wait. This is the first public interview we’ve done. This interview is all about passion. We all know you’re passionate about health and fitness, but I want to talk more about transformation. Let’s start at the beginning. What things were you most passionate about, the things that matter to you most, that led you to where you are today?
BILL PHILLIPS: Alex, when you and I have talked before, these ideas always come to the surface. I think that there’s the energy that you connect with when you are engaged in something that you’re passionate about. To me, like it is for you and many of our friends listening, it becomes the priority in your life. I was probably 10 years old when I first started to connect with the passion that I have for physical fitness.
It is something that gives me back an energy that has created a lot of good things in my life, so I stay close to it. I noticed it when I was playing Little League football and we were doing calisthenics. It’s a funny story. In the first month of playing football as a 10-year-old, I was pretty effective on the field, but I was really effective in calisthenics. I was selected to lead the team in calisthenics.
I was just psyched about how it felt to get stronger and faster. It’s a role that stuck with me as a strength coach. Now, it’s the emotional and spiritual strength, as well as the physical strength.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: I’ve sat in your home several times, and we’ve talked about how the beginning of transformation starts with your body and just getting moving. I want to dive into your personal story. You have worked out every single day of your life, as long as you can remember. At least, that’s what you related to me. That takes a level of commitment. You’re almost on autopilot.
Talk about leading calisthenics in the football days all the way to the present. Everyone knows your results, but what led to that? What’s the personal story that led there as it related to fitness and health?
BILL PHILLIPS: I recognized early on this is what I liked to do. Like I said, I was an okay athlete, a pretty good running back in football, and a pretty fast sprinter on the track, but I really just loved working out and the training. The training element of it to me was where I got my start. You can also look at the timing. I got through high school in the mid-80s. This was a time when America was becoming very conscious about exercising.
We had gone past the jogging phase, and were starting to get into the Arnold Schwarzenegger-motivated weightlifting around that time. I came into it at a good time. I didn’t know anything about timing; I didn’t know anything about what type of career was ahead of me or what my calling was. I felt that I loved this field. The passion and energy in engaging in this for me was something I didn’t really choose to do. It chose me. It was something I couldn’t not do.
As I went through university, I was studying and I thought my passion might have meant that I was interested in medicine. I was interested in the mechanics of the body and how by focusing the mind you could change the performance and feeling of the body. I could get an impression that there was an element or an essence to the athlete that could change these things. I thought if I got into medicine, I’d be able to work in this area in a professional capacity.
I was studying pre-med in Colorado and playing some football. I started to realize that the type of healthcare I was really motivated by wasn’t what I was being taught. I was being taught a style of healthcare, which in my profession as an AMA physician, I would not be allowed to treat people until they had entered what was a pretty serious chronic and critical phase of a disease. I could see even at the time that it’s not that complicated.
You go about six months upstream, or even a few years upstream, and you don’t have this disease occurring down here. This is a secondary effect of cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, neurovascular disease and strokes. These were happening way downstream from simple things that could be changed if I was allowed to work with changing the thought patterns, the behavior and the style of living a person was engaging in.
I wanted to work in that area and simply provide people with an opportunity to steer clear of what was an absolute certain dead-end in the way people were living. I started teaching exercise and started writing about it in a newsletter back in 1986. At the time, my intention was to pay for my university studies. I didn’t have any money. School was pretty expensive then. It’s a lot more expensive now.
I started writing and teaching people about how to exercise, to train for various sports, to train for physical re-shaping and making themselves over. It was the beginning of the transformation movement that I got involved in. A really crazy thing happened. Within the first year of writing my first page of my first newsletter, I was making more than I would as a five-year veteran physician. It just took off! I was making money for the first time in my life.
I had never planned on making money through writing. I was a personal trainer/strength coach. How many hours a day can you give instruction and receive, at the time, $25 an hour for being a trainer? I realized early on that I wanted to be able to reach more people than that. Instead of charging them $25 an hour, I’ll charge them $25 a year.
I’ll send them a newsletter with pictures, instructions and truthful information. I’ll send them that every two weeks. The idea was driven on this passion I have for sports, fitness and the energy you get back from what you put into those things.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: One thing you focused on is not just the physical, but the mental, the spiritual and the emotional components of consciousness. I’ve noticed that every time you and I have brainstormed together. It’s not a secret that you’re a multimillionaire and that you’ve enjoyed great financial success. Were you driven to make the money, did the money come to you as a result of following your passions, or was it a combination of both?
BILL PHILLIPS: That’s a good question. I get asked that question sometimes when the topic is health and wealth. It would seem there was a motive there to become a millionaire, or that I had a vision-board with a big mansion or fancy car on it. I didn’t. I grew up in the small town of Golden, Colorado, 15 miles west of Denver. It was a very simple place. There are not a lot of big dreams that are fostered there. I lived intuitively in my teens and twenties. I was excited and turned on by the work itself.
For me then and for me now, the privilege of being able to do this work gives me so much positive energy, satisfaction, and such a quality of life. It’s such an honor to do this even just for cost-of-living expenses. Apparently, there’s a formula between creating valuable services in a meaningful and powerful way. The more I created value for others, the more I was able to help people actually make a positive change in their life, make a healthy change in their life.
It was like an environment of goodwill that kept building and building. Almost anything I wished for, once I had this goodwill reserve, was coming true. Once I had a certain amount of money coming in, I looked at the math and said, I’d like to create 10 times as much value. Instead of helping 100 people make a transformation every three months, how about if I help 1,000 people make this transformation?
The income went right with it. If I created 10 times the results, I get 10 times or more on the return. I ended up building this very successful Metrex business, and then a revolutionary health food company, and brought forth some really powerful ideas. Again, it made a lot of money. The EAS Company started off as a very small entrepreneurial venture. Within five years it was worth millions of dollars. I had managed to own 100% of that, because I was able to fund all of my own operations.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: You gave back with a big ‘G’ to Make-a-Wish, and that just impacted it even more.
BILL PHILLIPS: Yes. That brings up the correlation between creating value and continuing to give from the heart. I guess success and profitability, for me, it was in my 30s that I started to make that transformation that hopefully most people have the opportunity to make. I started to realize there was more going on than meets the eye. It’s not just something you read about in a book or hear about in church, but you actually experience it as part of your life.
I was looking at where my success was coming from and where the results were coming from. I was starting to have the experience that it wasn’t me who was creating these. It was me who was being a willing servant to these things happening. I started to make that transformation. Then I just started living with a lot more reverence and a lot more respect for the gifts that I have. Being involved in the Make-A-Wish Foundation was something that really felt right, going back to 1994.
I think it really adds an element of spiritual health and spiritual fitness when there’s a constant cycle of giving and receiving, especially, like I said, when the intention is really authentic and true. I haven’t really chosen to be generous in giving all that. I’ve just gone with what I think is right. It feels right to constantly give back to the systems that need financial support, and also that need people’s prayers and their intentions. The Make-A-Wish Foundation is something I’ve been able to stay passionate about for 15 years now.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: What are the biggest challenges or levels of resistance?
BILL PHILLIPS: How to deal with the unexpected as a challenge? You have to expect adversity and decide in advance that you’re going to overcome it.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: It is, and isn’t it a decision that you make beforehand?
BILL PHILLIPS: It really is. That is something that I see. People so often give up when they’re so close to achieving what they’ve intended. Alex, I know you and I have talked about it and said it’s like giving up on the goal line in a ballgame.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: Yes, on the one-yard line.
BILL PHILLIPS: Yes, the one-yard line. Adversity is going to happen; unexpected things are going to happen. Alex, as you said, it’s not a smooth road. There are different forms of interference and resistance. Most people just don’t realize that it’s something you need to prepare yourself for and create a mindset that says, I know adversity is going to happen.
I don’t know if it’s going to be a fender-bender or a major collision, metaphorically, but I’ll decide in advance that I’m going to keep going and I’m going to keep pursuing a positive outcome and achievement of the intended objective, no matter what. Those three words might as well be written down on the back of my hand.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: No matter what?
BILL PHILLIPS: Yes. No matter what, I’m going to get in a workout. No matter what, no matter where I am, no matter what is going on. These are things I decide in advance; especially with adversity coming in so many different forms. It can even come as the adversity of a person’s own thoughts about their ability. As soon as they feel that they’re starting to succeed, sometimes they still have to overcome this major hurdle of adversarial thinking that prevents people from becoming healthy and wealthy, to be honest.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: Do you think that some people were born into having a future of success, and others were doomed to failure because of their thought process? Do you think we can live into success and it can be learned over time if we just put some successes together?
BILL PHILLIPS: All I can say is what I’ve learned from experience, my own experience and what I’ve seen people go through in this transformation process. There is absolutely one thing we can know for certain about every human being who has pulse. That is that they have this amazing, stunning ability to create positive change. It’s an inherent ability in every single human being.
We have a stunning ability to create change. That doesn’t go away if a person loses motivation, loses interest, isn’t focused, even if they’re low-energy because their health isn’t vibrant. They still have the ability to create change. That means that every single person can turn their health around. I’ve worked with people who were so far gone, honest to goodness, that not only the people around them gave up on them, but they gave up on themselves.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: How do you re-ignite them?
BILL PHILLIPS: Somebody has to believe in them. I have a unique ability to believe in people when they don’t believe in themselves. I keep believing in them, no matter what. That’s the way I treat myself. Even if I’m up against a struggle or adversity, it’s the ‘no matter what’. I’m going to keep believing in that person who has potential to change no matter what they say, no matter what they do. You could call the ‘no matter what’ the unconditional part.
I do believe everybody can be successful; I do believe everybody can turn a situation around. They have the ability, but-there’s a big ‘but’ here-that ability remains dormant until they accept the responsibility to change; if we have that ability it means we have the responsibility. We’re getting into the spiritual responsibility.
Because we have this opportunity to make a change in our life, it makes a difference in the lives of others. It also means to me that we have the responsibility to do that. These are very basic things. I don’t see a lot of books or a lot of teachings about these ideas. They’re the ones that work for me, though.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: One of the things that you’ve done to re-ignite hope and passion in people, is contests, the spirit of competition with themselves and with others. What inspired you to start the contest model? I know you like to work in 12-week increments. Was it a publicity stunt originally, or was it purely to transform people because of the social pressure it puts on others to compare and to measure results?
BILL PHILLIPS: Alex, the idea of the Body-For-LIFE Challenge and this contest model I started back in the mid-90s, was driven by an in-fight that I had. I don’t tell the story that often, but it really opened my eyes in a way I didn’t want at the time, but it turned out to be really good. I was at an event, a tradeshow, in Atlanta, and I met about 600 people over the course of a weekend who had been reading my magazine, Muscle Media, and had been buying subscriptions and books.
They were fans and followers. I thought I was getting ready to meet a bunch of people who were really in great shape, were positive, and had the conscious spark of life in them. I thought, All right! I met person after person who looked like they never had the opportunity to learn about health, energy or strength before. I thought I was at somebody else’s tradeshow booth. These people kept coming up and introducing themselves saying, I’ve been reading your work for years, Bill.
I think it’s awesome. I love everybody, no matter what, so I had a lot of fun meeting people, but on the way home, I had just had it. I thought, What on earth is going on? Why don’t the people who know this stuff do this stuff? This huge bridge between where people are and where they want to be was shown to me. I had the idea that something has to change. These people who know are the people who should be having success with this.
They should be in great shape and feel good. I thought, I’m missing something. This whole fitness industry is missing something, because we can’t help people cross that abyss between knowing and doing. I thought about what worked for me and what worked for the athletes I was working with. They had a different mindset. They were really focused. They could accomplish more in a week of training than a lot of these people were accomplishing in months.
As they get closer to the performance day or deadline, not only their focus, but their ability rises. There’s something about the way human beings are engineered. We’re given a special ability that comes out under certain pressures. I simply decided to create a competitive environment for people who were involved in just day-to-day fitness and wanted to get into better shape. Some of them needed to get into better shape.
I created a contest model that was meant to be like a competition, that was meant to bring about certain energies that we don’t have access to unless we’re thrown into the middle of something. I knew that incentives were a big part of this. In competition there’s a trophy or prize. I really believe that people can get through a lot if they’re focused on the reward and not the punishment. I got them focused on the reward, and put up amazing prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We’re always making up a new game. There are cars, trips to Hawaii, and the recognition they get from their friends and family if they come through this. We made it into a completely different thing. It was no longer fitness. It was now a competition. It was for everybody. Today, there must be two-and-a-half million people who have gone through that. In all the while I’ve been around the fitness and health industry, I’ve never seen anything work better than this.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: Do you think the competition part motivates and inspires others to push beyond what they would normally have done on their own?
BILL PHILLIPS: Exactly, I really do. Not only do I think that we won’t push ourselves to that extent, I don’t think we can. There’s clearly something else that works, whether it’s a spiritual will or a collective will, that’s so much more powerful than our individual will. Unless we’re part of something that is bigger than ourselves, we just can’t tap into it. Obviously, for the firefighter the motivation and the strength come from helping others, literally saving other people’s lives.
I think the people involved in the Body-For-LIFE Challenges and now the Transformation Challenges are able to tap into something bigger than themselves, because the change they’re making is a change that makes a difference for others. To me, that’s powerful stuff. Helping people find their way into a model and competition like that seems to open up a whole new world for them.
ALEX MANDOSSIAN: Let’s talk about weightlifting because a lot of what you do involves weightlifting. You were known to bench press your weight, more than your brother, I think, in a competition. You beat out Sean in one of those competitions, right?
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