Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro

Change is about becoming different in various parts of our lives triggered by our internal desires or external events. Through change, it helps us see new things and grow as a human being spiritually, mentally, and physically, which are all interconnected. How do these aspects of change come together to shape our life? Join us in this episode with Brian de Castro, founder of The Domestic Athlete. Our conversation focused on how we can maintain work-life balance, prioritize well-being, and explore creative projects. We also talked about how to align our passions to achieve fulfillment and avoid burnout through intentional management. Brian shared the benefits of exercise, mindfulness, creativity, and self-awareness. Listen to this episode and start transforming your life today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all reach that point in life where we want to make some kind of a change and there’s so many different catalysts for change. Probably, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard several episodes with people who have had events such as health scares or even just getting laid off from a job perpetuating a new way of thinking, a new line of, “Okay, what change do I wanna make? What do I think through what do I really want?” However, there are so many components to it. There’s obviously the mental stuff, some of the spiritual stuff that’s been on in the last few episodes, but I’ve also covered on some episodes the physical aspect of it and it all kind of, in a way, goes together. And here to discuss how that goes together, I have the founder of The Domestic Athlete, Brian DeCastro. --- Brian, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. Definitely. I want to start by orienting our audience here. So what is The Domestic Athlete all about? Yeah, good question. Back in 2016, I was actually working, I was on my probably 15th, 16th year working in the same organization. For the last, say, nine years, I was actually employed managing the entire fitness department that consisted of 40 trainers, 20 staff, multimillion-dollar department, there’s a lot of moving parts. It was a very exciting position. We went through a $50 million expansion at the time and we cut the ribbon and then, after that, it was kind of like, “Now what?” Yeah. Ironically, the universe responded and they were actually phasing out people in sort of that middle management position as well. My position got phased out. I drove off the lot with a big smile on my face. I can move on to the next thing but also not with the risk of, you know, I had a family and everything so responsibility and all that stuff. When I started The Domestic Athlete within a month of leaving the club, my passion was in working with regular folks in the grind, day to day, parents, professionals perhaps with families that are trying to keep all the balls up in the air that also need the life force, the inspiration, the excitement. They still want that. You don’t want to wait ’til you’re retired to actually start living your life so how do we keep it all together and keep our life force but also manage all those moving parts, the dance class, the hockey practice, all that stuff, and then paying your bills and then you also have a marriage or relationship or something, right? So there’s so many different things going on. So Domestic Athlete is basically people like you and I operating in the sport of life, like I like to call it, so what do you need to operate at your best?Share on X Oh, wow. A lot to unpack there. Maybe let’s start with a little bit about your story because you said that you spent 16 years working with the same company, overseeing personal trainers and stuff like that. How much did that experience, what you observed in that experience, inform how you wanted to create The Domestic Athlete, inform form your vision, who you wanted to serve and how you wanted to serve them? Yeah, I was blessed with this opportunity at this organization. I was blessed to be working with the top 3 to 5 percent in the GTA. I was personal training at the time before I became the manager, clients were personal training with me for over 10 years that didn’t even really know my rates. Financially, there was no object, it was just constantly scheduling, regularly reoccurring clients and stuff like that. CEOs, builders of big companies, doctors, lawyers, high-performing individuals, but also even the elderly population. That’s the first gym I was ever at where you’d see a 90-year-old come in at 6 a.m. and walk the treadmill and be standing upright. Health and wellness and mental health was always a part of this culture in this one facility. Lucky to also work with children of the adult clients that I have from like 14 all the way through to university and beyond, so I was able to see the evolution of the client through their ups and downs and difficult times, went through the 2008 market crash and how does everyone respond to that or react to that, right? We actually had one of our best years in personal training that year because people were valuing their health and their family life and all those other things so they cut other things out so they could keep those things in. So I’ve seen people through a lot of different things and be able to document, over time, what works, what doesn’t work, what to pick up on, and as I was there too, I also had professional development opportunities to continue learning while I was on the job, traveling to California to do courses and all these different things I was able to do to add to what I was doing with my stuff on the gym floor and in the leadership space as well. So, there was a lot kind of being built and stacked, one layer on top of the other, let me go from a strength coach, former powerlifting competitor to almost like a holistic coach and almost coaching people in the spiritual space as well. So it’s an evolution over time, both personally and professionally. Those were some critical times. You mentioned some things about determining or finding out, seeing what works and what doesn’t work. In all these lessons of what works, what doesn’t work, is that kind of what dragged you into the direction of being a little bit more holistic. So rather than fitness only, obviously, your physical fitness is a very important aspect of your life, but how it kind of is connected with all the other parts of your life. A perfect, very practical example of that is 55-year-old dad that has a company, he’s not a competitive power lifter or anything but he did like his strength training so worked on his deadlift and his squat and his bench and stuff, just for fun as part of the fitness protocol. He has no business bench pressing 350. He has he has no business squatting 500. So it’s how strong do you actually need to be? So, based on the standards that I was trying to build with Domestic Athlete, you can actually get fit enough. So when you get fit or strong enough or you can run fast enough, what’s next? There’s maintenance in your fitness side of your programming but how does all of this apply? How does it be integrated into the lifestyle that you want to have and the hobbies, the family life, all that stuff? And in this one particular circumstance, I did have a 55-year-old man that does play hockey, liked strength training but also the thing was he had a teenage son that plays hockey that he wanted to continue to play with so if I made him too big and slow, he could move a house once but he can’t skate around the rink. Now he’s losing out some quality of life, because we’ve swayed his training too far over on one side of the spectrum. So what is the sweet spot with any individual as far as what they want to experience, what they want to do in their lives, and putting the amount of risk, like limiting the amount of risk way, way down? Because, also, when you’re a parent, getting hurt is non-optional.Share on X If you can prevent it, like I remember when my son was really small, there were so many things I physically did with him that if I’d gotten hurt, it would just suck because you’re just removing yourself now from a part of his life that you want to be a part of. So those are some of the things I considered with working with people that I worked with is how strong do you actually need to be? How fast do you need to be? How far do you need to run? And just kind of meeting them in that space, then going, “Okay, now what? What happens next?” So given your acknowledgement that there’s a way to take things too far, I need to ask you what your general feelings are about apps and Apple watches and all these things that are tracking fitness and making it really all about numbers, in a way. “I need to burn this many calories today,” “I need to do this many minutes of workout,” “I need to do that.” There’s two answers to that question. I think, for me, one is the technology with the things that you can access now and the data you can accumulate now with something that’s just literally around your wrist, it can serve as such an amazing tool because some people say, “I sleep well,” but if you’re actually tracking your sleep, you realize you woke up like 12 times last night so then we start looking at sleep because sleep is also a huge part around managing your stress levels and your ability to recover. So, these things we didn’t have access to decades ago so we were just assuming we were doing things accurately. Where it kind of goes the other way is when I was powerlifting, I was obsessed with the numbers. Sometimes, the only way the numbers are accurate is when you record what already happened....