Aligning Your Mind and Body | Sean Vigue | Better Man Podcast Ep. 022

Dean Pohlman: Hey, guys, it’s Dean. Welcome to the Better Man Podcast. Today, I am joined by an old friend of mine, Sean Vigue. Sean?

Sean Vigue: Hello, Dean. Great to be here on your brand new podcast.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Thanks very much. So, Sean is known as YouTube’s most watched Pilates and fitness guy, lightweight Pilates, and yoga guy. Right? What’s the quote?

Sean Vigue: They used to say Pilates and yoga guy.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Which, of course…

Sean Vigue: A guy who teaches both disciplines.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. So, of course, there’s no conflict there because I can be YouTube’s most watched yoga guy but you’re the Pilates and yoga guy, so.

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Pilates is always the curveball in there.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Anyways, so let’s start this off just saying how do I know the guest. So, Sean and I, I think first connected back in I want to say it was 2014 or 2015 and we made a video together. And in that video, this was back when I just yelled at the camera and I didn’t have good sound at all. So, I’m yelling at a camera and I found this really weird open lot that had a bunch of garbage in it but I was like, “It looks nice here,” and you can hear the crackles, which is this lovely Central Texas bird that just chirps very annoyingly, constantly, and loudly. So, I’m screaming at the camera and these birds are crackling in the background and there’s broken glass on the ground. Anyways, that was one of Sean and I’s first videos together.

Sean Vigue: You were under an overpass. Under an overpass I believe and, yeah, there was glass. And I appreciate that because I always film outside and I thought, “Well, he’s really taking it up a notch. He’s going to a really dangerous location with broken glass and cars going right by him.” So, I appreciated that.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That’s extreme yoga for you. But anyway, so that’s how Sean and I first met and I just kind of got the sense from you that you were just overall a very happy, kind of carefree person. Would you say that’s true for the most part or have you always been like that? I’d love for you to talk about that a little bit.

Sean Vigue: I’m a pretty happy guy when I’m doing things I really enjoy doing, filming. So, whenever somebody sees me in a video, usually I’m very, very excited because it’s something I really enjoy doing. I have my moments like anybody off camera or sometimes when things don’t go right when I’m filming, there can be bloopers that I would never broadcast because I might say things that would be inappropriate for my channel. I mean, that’s what’s great about filming and doing what I do or post because whenever I do that, I really enjoy it. So, that’s what you get to see.

Dean Pohlman: And you also perform in other areas. So, you were an opera singer? What was your background?

Sean Vigue: I did professional theater, yes, for a long time in my twenties and about half of my thirties. I’m almost 48 now so I’m pushing fifties but I did professional theater for quite a few years, a lot of music theater. And I trained as an opera singer when I was in college and even professionally, I did some opera. When I was in college, that’s what I started with because I had kind of a voice for that. So, my voice teacher put me on a lot more of an opera menu. I sing a lot of the old Italian art songs and I really like opera, plus he dig operas so I would always bring him certain arias that were probably they were for much older singers but I really enjoyed doing that. I come from a big theater background and I did it as a child. I did it in high school, and then I majored in it also in college. So, sometimes I’ll pop into some singing in a video if the spirit gets to me.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That’s something about your videos that you’ll notice. You’ll go off. You’ll go off in your own little world sometimes. You’ll point out things and have a discussion about them for which I like doing. Because my idea is that I’m distracting someone while they’re doing a pose for, look, it seems shorter while I’m talking about something else. So, it’s Mr. Miyaging somebody into holding a pose for a longer time. So, my question from there is how did you transition from a theater performer to being a YouTube performer, so to speak, or into fitness? Yeah.

Sean Vigue: Well, the theater is very strenuous. It’s very physical, usually doing about 8 to 9 shows a week. And a lot of times you’re rehearsing another show while you’re performing a show in the evening. So, you would get up early and go down to the theater. You’d be rehearsing all day and then you’d have a break for dinner. Then you would go perform the current show that you’re doing, especially in summer theater where you’ll do four shows and wrap sometimes four or five. So, I’ve always been a very physical person. I started working out when I was in high school doing weights but it was in the theater that I discovered more Pilates, core-centered fitness, and also yoga and power yoga and flow yoga and flexibility and mobility training. Because once I hit, I think it was around 24 years old, my body wasn’t happy with the constant weight training all the time with nothing else to balance it. And when I started taking dance classes, I was never much of a dancer. I was more of a park and bark guy. I would stand and sing. I would stand and act. And I was very heavy on my feet. I had an ex-girlfriend that would always make fun of me for that but that drove me into taking dance classes.

And it was in those dance classes that I started learning more about – the teacher would introduce us to certain yoga flows before we would get moving or warm-up exercises. Sometimes we would actually do some classic Pilates work as well because Joseph Pilates, the founder of Pilates, he had a huge dance population that would come to his classes. So, it was at Bromley Dance Center in New York where I started learning more about bodyweight disciplines, calisthenics, and how they carried over into enhancing movement. And I was still doing theater when I got my ace personal training certification down. I was living in Hollywood, Florida, and I was doing theater and I was studying for the certification at the same time. And I went down to Miami and I took the test and I started doing personal training at the time. I’d never really taken any full yoga or Pilates classes at that point but I started blending it in. I was doing theater. I was personal training. They seemed to work very well together, the two disciplines. And that’s really where it started back in the early 2000 down in Hollywood, Florida, when I started combining the two.

Dean Pohlman: Got it. And then what made you start the YouTube?

Sean Vigue: Well, I started teaching first. I taught spin class, and I got fired after a few classes. But I’m working on a memoir right now. I’m being a freestyle fitness instructor, and I’m working on that chapter, How I Got Fired. So, maybe I’ll have to wait for the book on that but I taught a few and I got fired and it stung and I hated it. And then I started taking Pilates and yoga flow classes and I got certified and I started teaching. And then my best friend, Stefon, who I still talk to just about every day, and we’re planning some new things over the summer for my brand but he suggested, he goes, “Why don’t you get a flip camera and a MacBook Pro?” This is back in 2009, which is now like ancient history as far as technology goes, but this little flip camera with a big red button. They don’t even exist anymore. I think they were bought out by another company and they just went extinct. So, I went to Best Buy, bought that, and bought a MacBook Pro. And I have a long history of doing home videos as a child. I had a camcorder and I filmed all the time by myself or with my friends or in events or school events, things like that.

And I just took to it and I went out to the Amphitheater here in town, and I set the camera up on the tripod and just started filming and I never had an issue with that. I learned a lot along the way but it was a very natural transition for me and you just start blasting them, you start blasting them up onto YouTube, into the podcast. 2009, the landscape was very different. A lot of software and websites have come and gone but that’s where I started and it was a very good fit for me.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, something I was just thinking about is I have a friend who or my good friend’s wife, and she is a dancer, and something that I realized when I was attending one of her shows is dancers have to be very in touch with themselves, in touch with their feelings, their emotions in order to express their bodies. They have to kind of work through emotions. They have to work through things in order to be able to express themselves to the extent that they do when they’re performing. So, I’m just curious, do you notice that? What do you notice that performing in that theater has done for you in terms of your own kind of emotional and mental well-being? Does that question kind of make sense? Does that lead into something?

Sean Vigue: That’s a great question. The theater taught me so many invaluable lessons because when you’re traveling around doing theater, you’re constantly working with people. You’re always interacting with people on a very creative level. You’re always in new environments. You’re using your body to its full extent, especially if you’re doing music theater, something that requires you to move, to speak, to enunciate, to breathe, to pace yourself, to sing, and not only to do it once but to do it many, many, many, many times. Yoga applies the disciplines that we work on, Dean, to have staying power. I mean, it’s something you can do as a baby. You can do it at 99 years old, 100 years old. Theater, yeah, it just taught me so much. I’m working on this also in the book, writing about the lessons learned in theater and how they translated over to fitness. When I was in theater, I started training under actors because I would see people that would blow themselves out after a few performances. They didn’t know how to breathe properly. They didn’t move properly. They didn’t hold their bodies very well on stage.

You don’t know what kind of scene or position you’re going to be singing a song into a crowd of 400 or 600 or 2,000. So, you worry about things like alignment, about balance in your body, about good breath control, and being able to get on that stage night after night and the occasional matinees and be as close to 100% as you can be. It really, for me, pushed me to a point of excellence where I wanted to give, you know, if you did 400 or 500 performances of one show, I wanted every performance to be the best I could. And that means taking care of your instrument, taking care of your body, eating right, exercising. I mean, I went out a lot too. Theater years were pretty wild but I always retained whatever show I was doing. I knew what I could do and I knew what I couldn’t do to get up on that stage and do a very good production. And that really carries over into fitness. I mean, I always want to be aligned. I want to move well. I want to roll out of bed feeling well. I want that to show to the people that are watching me in a video or a class or whatnot that I practice what I preach. So, they’re very similar too in movement and breath and presence and physical and mental excellence because you talked about the emotional quality too.

Even in theater, you have to be careful because I’ve seen people, and I would do it too, you would get so emotional but that’s not practical over time in a show. You can’t kill yourself every time on stage. So, you learn of a way to not fake it but not beat yourself up all the time because in a number of hours you’re going to have to get up there and do it again. So, in fitness also, I don’t want to teach things that beat the hell out of me all the time. I can’t get up the next morning and do it again. So, I want something that you can do every single day and keep getting better and better. That might have been a long answer

Dean Pohlman: No, that was great. So, it’s very much on figuring out how to do things sustainably and…

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Very practical.

Dean Pohlman: And I like this idea of this balance between performing and being vulnerable there because you have to be vulnerable in order to perform but also not giving it all away. So, you’re kind of finding this balance of how do I convey what I need to do but also not like de-road myself completely in the process.

Sean Vigue: You know, David Mamet, one of the great playwrights, I’ve read some books that he’s written and he talked about actors that overindulge. And he said, “Look, your main focus,” and I think this for fitness too, “Your main focus is to the audience. Your job is to convey what the author of the show or the musical wants to convey to the audience. It’s all about the audience.” So, when I teach and when I feel, anything, write books, it’s all about who I’m teaching to. You know, it’s not so much about me but it’s about them getting the best experience possible. As you said earlier, you put somebody in kind of a challenging pose and you want to talk them through it in a lighthearted way. You don’t want them to get a bad connotation of everything. You want to keep it light and exciting and inspiring so they keep coming back for more, whether it’s theater or whether it’s our fitness classes.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. No, that’s true. That makes a lot of sense to me. So, I’m still thinking about this idea of giving part of yourself, not giving all of it. So, I’m just curious, do you learn to fake emotions in a way? Is it something that kind of does it carry over into real life? I guess I’m coming into this with the assumption that in order to perform, you have to be open. You have to be emotional. You have to be able to access that. And now I’m kind of thinking, “Well, you’re only able to put out part of that or you’ll burn out.” Does that teach you to also perform, so to speak, in real life?

Sean Vigue: Perform in real life in which way?

Dean Pohlman: Perform in a sense that do you kind of restrict yourself? Do you take what you do on stage and do you sometimes do that in real life, too, just because you’re performing that way on stage?

Sean Vigue: Yeah. You know, a lot of times when the camera comes on to do a video, I am performing in a way. You know, I’m presenting, I’m performing. I want to create something that is a standalone and I film thousands and thousands of videos. So, I still want everything that I film to stand on its own to last, to have the stuff of revelation in it, that will keep going long after I’m gone. I want that to keep going. You know, you mentioned what you had said earlier in the question, the thing is, in theater, I always think of West Side Story. Do you know West Side Story pretty well, the show? I know the movie just came out.

Dean Pohlman: I’m familiar with it.

Sean Vigue: Yeah. And I did a lot of productions of that. It’s a very emotional show. It really is. It’s Romeo and Juliet, set the music in 1950s Hell’s Kitchen with the Jets and the Sharks going at it. Of course, they dance a lot so they’re not as intimidating, but it’s a very emotional show when you tie in the movement and the dialog and of course, the music. Leonard Bernstein music is so powerful. And remember, the first time I did the show during rehearsals, we were all like wiped out at the end. We’re all crying at the end because Tony gets shot in the back and it’s just terrible. Like all the leads die. But then you realize the lesson that you also get a little callus to it. It’s like a really sad song. You listen to it a few times, you get really emotional but then there’s that one time you listen to it, you don’t quite feel it as much. You get callus to it and you get used to it. So, it’s good to go through that. You go through the emotions of a show and then you think, “Okay. I’ve gone through that. It’s still very emotional but I can’t get all worked up every time because then I’ll get frustrated when I want to get worked up and it’s just not there anymore.” So, you learn to do a steady, you know, I know people who have done shows on Broadway. They’ve done shows like 2,000 performances. So, that’s something.

I guess everyone has their own story for it but I’m always fascinated by it. I’m glad you asked that question, how people maintain that kind of consistency, because as I said, it’s all about the audience. It’s always about the audience. It’s always about who’s watching. You want to give them the best experience possible in the end. But, yeah, I mean, every time I hit record on the camera, I think I want to give something really meaningful here. And if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing this. The way my mind operates gets me in trouble like finding balance because I get very caught up in things. I get very excited about things and I have to learn to balance that more. But I really like filming I think because I’m an actor at heart and I want to perform.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. You know, actually, my sister is very into theater and she had a daughter, I think, about four years ago now and she turned four recently. I should know that. Yes, she turned four recently in case she listens to this and says, “You don’t know how old your niece is?” I’ll say, okay, she’s definitely…

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Uncle Dean, you have to know that.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. She wanted to call me Dunkel to which I promptly shot down.

Sean Vigue: That means dark in German. Dunkel.

Dean Pohlman: Dunkel. Yes, I’ve had a few dunkels. It was a fun time. So, my sister was in theater and she did shows, up until the time that she had her daughter. So, she was used to the whole theater lifestyle, going to work during the day but then from 5:00 until 10:00, rehearsing shows or performing and doing it all again the next day. The irony there is I did theater in high school for one year and I was like, “I don’t want to do this,” even though I did choir. I was in three different choirs or, sorry, two different. No. I was in three different choirs. I did the basic mixed acapella group, the group which is like 60 or 70 people and then I did a performance like a show choir, like a Glee-like group. It wasn’t as cool as Glee but there were still some fun pieces that we did. And then I was also in a men’s ensemble like, “Tu-du wop, du wop-wop, pu-du,” so that kind of thing. And then I wanted to go into government and I wanted to work in intelligence and I was in Army ROTC for a year. And then eventually that didn’t work out. And then I ended up in theater in a way with my YouTube channel. And with performing there, it was kind of like a reluctant, not reluctant in the sense, but it took me a while to think of myself as a performer.

You know, the first couple of years, I was kind of like on camera but I felt kind of shy or silly about it. I was like, “Hey, I’m Dean, and I’m here doing a yoga workout,” because I think I was still getting over this idea that yoga wasn’t super masculine. And I wanted to come across as like a really strong, masculine guy and here I am wearing shorts in a field doing yoga. And why did I bring all that up? I’m bringing that up because I can understand the toil of the theater performer. It seems like it’s a very demanding job physically. And it’s cool that you were able to go through that experience and then learn how to take care of your body with physical fitness. So, I don’t know if that led to a question but my other question that I did have from here, you’ve just always enjoyed being on film and recording. Do you remember what is so enjoyable about it for you? Was there something in particular when you were, you know, you said you do it. You did it a lot when you were a kid. So, I’m just wondering, was there something that made it super enjoyable? Was there something else that you got away from when you were able to do that? Or what really drove the joy of performing?

Sean Vigue: Man, the thing is, is the way I am on camera is pretty much exactly how I am in real life just a little more elevated like theater is elevated life. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the famous composer, said you can say I love you in real life but you can say I love you 50 times in a song and it’s perfectly normal. So, when I was a kid and I get the camcorder, my dad bought one and I just learned how to use it and went nuts with it but we would have sleepovers a lot. Friends of mine would stay over and if you stayed over at my house, we would do home videos and we would always do interview shows, which would always devolve in a shooting each other with cap guns and hitting each other and stuff because we’re guys and we’d be running around jumping off. We had a really steep decline in the yard. We would jump off that. This is in the country in Wisconsin. In Wis-cansin.

Dean Pohlman: Wis-cansin, yes.

Sean Vigue: The home videos were so much fun I even put up – my dad helped me put up lights and put a little backdrop down and it was very fluid. We’d say, “Okay. Let’s just go with this.” And we do an interview show. We’d always interview and have different guests. Then we went through a phase where we found a bunch of M-80 firecrackers and we blow things up in our driveway and we tie it into a story like, “Here’s the Hulk,” and I have this little Hulk thing and we blew him up and we’d light the fuse and run like a hundred yards away so you could hear that on the camera also in our voices like, “Ahh,” then boom. And sometimes the fuses wouldn’t work and we walk over, then they’d explode, or sometimes they never would. Well, it’s the 80s. It didn’t matter. We could do whatever we wanted. You know, I don’t have any fingers but this makes my down dogs difficult. No, I do have fingers. But I love filming. I film by myself a lot. I have videos of me just tooling around in my room as I’m filming, and then you hear my dad knock on the door. I’m like, “Okay. Sean, start wrapping up. We have to go somewhere. We have to leave to go somewhere.”

Someone, my buddies would, one or two, where they’d stay overnight and they would flourish on the camera because there weren’t many cameras around back then. And you put them on camera and they were really fun, a lot of them. I have these VHS tapes and it’ll be 30 years next month that I graduated high school. I don’t know if we’re doing a reunion but it’d be something to bring out 30 years later.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. You know, the novelty of the camera, that is something that people who were born after the year 1999 will not be able to appreciate because everyone has access to a camera.

Sean Vigue: They’re everywhere now.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Like, before, I was young enough to remember the age of when a camera was like, “You’re on camera,” like, “Oh, my God, I’m on camera.” And now it’s like secret…

Sean Vigue: Come on, everyone performs and everyone acts different.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, for you, it was very much this play. This was your ability. Like, this was time for you to play. It was unrestricted.

Sean Vigue: It’s an extension of playing and thank God I did it because there’s these time capsules now that I have. I’m so happy I have all these. I’m so happy I have all these videos now, of course. I mean, I have my iPhone. I filmed my son all the time, my family, but I’m so happy I have videos of me doing Pilates from 2009 because now that’s ancient history. Everything just turns into shadows. So, yeah, exactly. I love to play and the best things in life you don’t even think about it. You just do it. Like, when I hit record to do a workout video, I just go. I don’t overthink it. It’s playtime. It’s therapy. You don’t know at the time with a kid but it’s very therapeutic. It’s creative, inspiring. A lot of times you’re outside on a summer day in Wisconsin wearing clothes that don’t match because I didn’t even care back then. I had my skateboarding ramps in the driveway because I was a thrasher for a while. You know, I can’t even explain it. I have no words for it. It’s play as you said. It’s total playtime. And I think fitness is play too. I love cinema, I love film, I love film history, cinematography.

I grew up with the original Star Wars films, and I even had an eight-millimeter camera from my family before I had the camcorder. And I would do stop animation with those because I was always so intrigued by the art of film production. So, somebody once said, “Walk by a magazine rack and whichever magazines you choose, those are fields you should really consider going into because these are the things you’re very interested in.” And I always liked anything with entertainment or theater or film, and I like fitness stuff too. So, if you can combine the two and I like to talk about movies in my videos because movies to me are such great expressions of art and creativity, and I find movies to be very inspiring. Before I go film some time, I’ll put on a skateboard movie or I’ll put on the movie, 300, something like that to get me charged up then I’ll go out and film, more so than music sometimes because I like the visual of it too. And movies are put together in such a beautiful way. They’re very fluid, enhanced light, enhanced life.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, first off, I’ve learned about so many random older movies that I would never know about just based on following you. And you put up like an old movie and you’re like, “What movie is this?” I’m like, “I have no idea.”

Sean Vigue: I think everyone should know this movie.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Those are the kind of movies that you randomly see on Samsung Galaxy TV. You’re like, “What is this thing? Where do they even find this?” And then I do want to come back to – I do want to eventually talk about how do you work on your interests outside of fitness? And what are those? But first, I want to go back to this quote that you had at the beginning of your answer here, which is theaters elevated life. And I want to know, what can people who do not do theater, what could they learn from people who came up in theater, who practice theater? What can they learn from being in that environment and performing?

Sean Vigue: Well, if I was teaching a class on that, I would talk about, well, I love enunciation. I love good breath support. I like all when you can’t understand somebody. I’ve taken fitness classes where I’m like I don’t know what they’re saying or they turn up, I call it upstage. You know, they don’t look downstage. They turn upstage. You know, in theater, your body is always to the audience. I mean, you could turn once in a while but you have to be light but you’re always projecting out this way. So, it’s very vulnerable. You’re using everything you have to project to the audience. So, that is a big one, breath support and enunciation. Speaking from the diaphragm is very good. Another thing we can talk about…

Dean Pohlman: Really quick interjection here. Do you notice that you have imbalances in your body because you tend to look to one side when you’re…?

Sean Vigue: Absolutely.

Dean Pohlman: So, for me, I have like this weird shoulder imbalance. My dumbbell looks all different from my left and my right shoulder because I’m looking to my left and my right shoulder is all different. So, anyway.

Sean Vigue: I always film my right. Yeah, that’s true. I always film on my right side.

Dean Pohlman: We got to switch.

Sean Vigue: Sometimes I switch but…

Dean Pohlman: We got to switch to keep it balanced. We’re going to mess ourselves up.

Sean Vigue: Like, you know, I even put my coffee over here because I want this side to show. No one wants to see this side. They’ll run away screaming, “Look at this. Look at that profile.” But awareness, those old G.I. Joe ads, the more you know, that’s something from the 80s also. But I always talk about, “The more you know, the better you can do in life.” Just being aware, being aware of imbalances. How old is your son now, Dean?

Dean Pohlman: He’s about 20 months. He’s just over 20 months.

Sean Vigue: I have a hard time doing months, so I always talk – so he’s one year and eight months?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Sean Vigue: Okay. So, you’re holding him. Are you aware of holding him on both sides?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. One arm gets tired. He’s heavy. He’s like 25 pounds. So, pretty quickly, my arm gets tired and I have to shift.

Sean Vigue: You shift. My son got used to me because I favor this side. So, now I do like I switch him to the other side saying, “No, daddy. Other side.” I’m like, “No, I have to balance it out.” So, then sometimes if he really pushes the issue, I’m like, “Okay.” Then I make a mental note. Later on, I’ll grab a dumbbell or something. I would just hold it like this for a little bit because those imbalances over time, they create massive problems. So, this is weird, I like to drink out of the faucet. God bless my dad, he always did that. And I’m so aware like, “Wait a minute, I need to switch sides when I do this.” So, now I switch. I’m going back and forth. My son does it now too. I hold him up to wash his hands. He goes, “Daddy, I want to…” He puts his mouth under the faucet and drinks and I think, “Okay. We got to turn him to the other side.” These are the imbalances that over time become doctor visits and chiropractic visits, things like that. Like, “Ooh man, I didn’t realize it. One time is fine, but 2,000 times,” and it becomes a big problem.

So, I don’t know where we got off on that but that is very true. You know, the instructor also has to give a balance class and a balance video if you plan to do it a lot but we do have our, yeah, the right side all the time.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That was me. That was me interrupting you and asking you if you also had those imbalances. But you’re talking about…

Sean Vigue: You can say whatever you want.

Dean Pohlman: Oh no, I just want to get you back on to the answer that you were having. So, I had to ask you, “What can we learn from people who do theater?” and you were going to give the second part of that response when I interjected.

Sean Vigue: I was. Well, I alluded to it before. That’s a good word, alluded. Addy, come here. Addy, come here. Did you want to see Addy? She ignores me all the time. Addy’s famous. She gets recognized more than I do when we go out. She’s run over there. She never listens to me except when I hit record. She’ll come over and jump on me.

Dean Pohlman: She knows.

Sean Vigue: That’s the thing. She’s living an elevated life when I hit record. I’m going to go get him. Wait, what are we talking? Oh, theater. Well, the ability to adapt in theater is very good. You take on a lot of different roles. Every role has different requirements, especially if you’re doing a music theater which is a combination of singing and movement or dance and acting and, shoot, I’ve worked at summer theaters where you also go into the shops also. You’re painting sets, you’re building flats, you’re building things. So, that’s a whole nother thing when I did some theater up in Montana at the big Four Star Playhouse. You’re doing a bit of everything. So, you’re learning so much about how your body moves, how your mind reacts, how you interact with other people on stage, spatial awareness. Sometimes you have a big group of people. West Side Story, again, the Jets, there’s usually a bunch of them and the Sharks and you’re all jumping around on stage together, doing stage combat, doing kicks, doing dancing. So, you’re learning. I’ve gotten nailed a few times in shows before and it’s not fun when your spatial awareness was off or a buddy of yours’s spatial awareness was off.

So, oh man, I’ve been writing about this in my book because some of these things, you just do it out of instinct. You never really intellectualize them. You just do them and that’s very powerful. But then when someone comes on and asks you, it’s very exciting because you learn in real time why you’re really doing something, something you always just did naturally. I don’t do calculus naturally but I can do workouts. I can do theater. Things like that come to me very naturally.

Dean Pohlman: So, I’m kind of curious what comes easier to you. I mean, you kind of answered that but I’m wondering if you can specify what comes easier to you because of your theater background compared to other people that what they would find difficulty with.

Sean Vigue: Well, teaching fitness classes, definitely. Next week I’m traveling to Omaha, Nebraska. I’m teaching a class, a yoga class for the NFCA conference there, and I’ve done classes for the last four years. I went to Iowa. The last couple of years, they were Zoom conferences but I really enjoyed that, going into like a space with hundreds of people and just teaching. You know, put the mat down and let’s go because it’s so accessible. You don’t need anything. You just put a mat back down and you can, “Let’s start with child’s pose. Let’s do some lunges. Let’s practice this. Let’s practice that.” And I’m very comfortable with reading the room and moving appropriately with that. I have thousands of these little note cards on there somewhere, but with notes on them. Yes. Those. I write down words or little mantras or I write down sequences and I do, I always write things down but a lot of times I just go off, as you said. Now, I like this flow we’re in right here. Let’s keep it going. I may have not expected to spend so much time on this, but they really seem to need this right now.

And that’s the really fun part is those things that really happen in the moment that differentiates the classes, whether it’s a life class or a video. In a video, I fill them outside all the time. So, there’s, of course, environmental factors that can pop up, the obvious ones like weather things or wind or I live in Florida now so there’s gators around me. There’s all sorts of wildlife. I was in Colorado.

Dean Pohlman: Have you had a gator run in while you’re filming?

Sean Vigue: They’re around me a lot. I haven’t had one come out of the water since I lived here back in 2011 but I’ve had to relocate a few times. Like, “Yeah, I just don’t trust that guy. He just go back and forth.” There’s a pond right across the street like a smaller lake, and there’s a gator in there but he’s kind of small but still he’s getting a little friendly, it looks like. Also, he’s on our shore. I’m like, “No, no, you got to go over there. You’re frightening the people.” But people are so stupid. They walk up to him and take photos. I’m like, “Get the hell away from him. Leave them alone,” because that’s how they get friendly and then they have to remove him because they get too friendly with people. But you know, there’s a place I film out here. It’s called Artisan Park in this big lake. And sometimes there’s a crapload of alligators in there and sometimes there’s none. But that’s the first thing I do is I just look everywhere and sometimes you won’t even see it. There’ll be two eyes just right on the shoreline watching me and I’m like, “Okay.” I never bring my dog near there but then I’ll relocate far away.

But I’m like I was filming and this woman was, I think, babysitting a couple of kids. She showed up and she was just screaming at one of the boys. I’m like I’m filming right here. You know, I have the camera. I don’t have a crew or anything. It’s me and my imaginary friend but I have the mat and my tripod and the camera and she’s yelling. The boy ran right by me and ran around the lake. I’m like, “You can’t go over there. There’s gators over there.” So, I had to stop everything and she’s just screaming at him. It’s on video, some of it. And then he came back and he’s like, “There’s a gator over there.” I’m like, “Yeah, no kidding.” I was about ready to run over there and grab him. You don’t do that. You don’t go back there. That lady is really, she’s popped up a few times and she just yells while I’m filming like I’m right here.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think.

Sean Vigue: Those spatial awareness, right?

Dean Pohlman: I think there’s a different attitude toward filming now compared to when we were actually using real cameras 12 years ago instead of everyone being able to do it on their iPhone because now people are just like, “Oh, you’re filming. So was half the world like I don’t care. I’m going to interrupt you.”

Sean Vigue: Yeah. You pull back and there’s 30 other people filming TikTok videos right there or something. And a boy comes up, he goes, “Are you filming for…” and he said YouTube and then he listed off like three sites. I’m like, “You might as well be speaking Latin. I don’t know what those are.” And I want to say I’ve been doing this for a while but then okay. “Oh, TikTok. Okay.” I know. It’s like this is a hot shed here. Don’t you understand? I do kind of like it because it keeps it interesting and I say, “Look, you’re going to have all sorts of factors coming in that are going to keep you from doing your flow. We’re just going to keep going.” Even though this lady’s over here screaming. It gives me a chance to kind of talk about it a little bit. Like, you never know what’s going to pop up. It’s okay. Just keep going. If it became too distracting, I would shut the camera off and just stand there for a while and wait and stare at her and she would never even notice. But, yeah, she’s interesting. She just yells or she talks on the phone really loud. And I always worry, “Is she doing this on purpose?” I don’t know.

I mean, I’m doing these big warriors and everything here and she does that. But then again, that’s her privilege. I’m outside in a public space. There’s nothing I can say about it. It’s not like she’s in my house doing that.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. But your ability to read the room and ability to adapt to things, that comes from theater and that’s something that we can really benefit from.

Sean Vigue: Well, yeah. And it’s very easy and I’ve done this too, to get in way too much inside yourself. When you’ve done something a lot, you’re just thinking for yourself and you always have to turn it back to the people you’re trying to bring in to work with, to help. Because you are an instructor, you’re a teacher, and you have to say, “Really, it’s not about me. It’s about trying to get as many people to access this as possible so they can improve their lives and they can share it on,” and it keeps going that way. But I’ve done that before too and I beat myself up where I teach and I realize I’m not even paying attention sometimes to the room. I’m inside my own head. I’m talking but I’m thinking about something else. That would happen in theater sometimes too. If you do a show enough, sometimes that’s the challenge. Like, I feel like I just did this. I just did this. I just did this. I just did this scene a minute ago. It was a day ago but I’ve done it so many times and I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat afterwards. I’m going to go to Steak n Shake with everyone. I’m going to watch this and I want to see this later. And then you realize, “No, I don’t want that. It’s not honest. It’s not good.” So, you bring yourself back to it. It’s that tender balance of things.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So, I want to shift gears a little bit and ask you about your son. It’s Dane, right? Is it Dane or Dwayne? It is Dane.

Sean Vigue: Dane. D-A-N-E. My mom was, God bless her, 100% Danish. It’s a very strong name, I think of Hamlet too. Hamlet, the melancholy Dane.

Dean Pohlman: I’ve been called Dane a few times. Dane! Get over here, Dane.

Sean Vigue: Sorry. I called Dane, Dean. When he was a baby, I was still getting – did you have this? Because your son’s name is Declan, right?

Dean Pohlman: Declan. Yeah.

Sean Vigue: Declan. When he was a baby, I was still not used to saying his name and sometimes I would say, “Dean,” because I knew you and my Head of Theater in college was named Dean. I didn’t know any Danes. So, I would call him Dean but it sounds like Dane with an accent, Da-ine.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. See, I call Declan Tron and Kaya sometimes.

Sean Vigue: How come?

Dean Pohlman: I don’t know. They’re all children. I’m just trying to take care of all of them and I don’t know which child I’m trying to take care of. “Hey, Tron, go look what Declan is doing.”

Sean Vigue: As long as you get on by the third name.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Sean Vigue: And then sometimes I’ll call Dane something but he’s three now. So, he talks constantly but he’s like, “Dad, don’t call me that. I’m Dane Sorensen Vigue.” He’ll say his full name. I’m Dane Sorensen Vigue.”

Dean Pohlman: Wow. So, I’m curious about that because you said you’re almost 48 years old. Did you kind of consciously decide that you wanted to have kids later in life? Did you just meet the right person or like what? What happened?

Sean Vigue: Well, it’s the attitude. We’ll see what happens. You know, I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure about the whole thing. So, as you would, I hit 40. I’m like, I don’t know. My dad was an older father. He was 41 when I was born but I was 44 when Dane was born. Of course, that’s another reason to stay fit and healthy when you’re crawling around doing everything with him. I want to be able to do everything with him, wrestle, and everything. So, we have a bounce house that we put up and I was in it with him for an hour-and-a-half and I’m like, “This is a workout,” jumping around the bounce house and diving and stuff. And so, that’s such a gift to be able to do that. But he was a little bit of a surprise, I guess, one day. What was it? My wife, actually, we were in Colorado and I was teaching a class that morning. And then after that, we were leaving to go to Illinois to see my wife’s family. And my wife came to the class because she came to the class and then we were going to go to the airport afterwards. And after the class, she goes, “Hey, let’s stop by Walgreens and get you some sunglasses,” because I had left my sunglasses on some mountain filming the day before. I did that a lot, actually. Like, why is it so bright? But I climb up somewhere to film and I leave my glasses up there. So, in Colorado, that’s my gift. I left sunglasses on all the peaks.

Dean Pohlman: That’s very nice of you.

Sean Vigue: So, we went to Walgreens. I was very generous and went to Walgreens and she went right to the pregnancy test aisle. I’m like, “What are we doing here?” She was, “I think I’m pregnant.” She has a little bit of a Southern accent. She went to LSU. I was shocked. I didn’t expect it. And so, we did another test the next day and she was. It was the father pangs and everything. I went through nine months of excitement and anxiety and angst and excitement and confusion. My dad had passed away a couple of years. Well, he passed away in 2017. So, that was tough. You know, I wanted to have my dad around for all this but my dad was amazing, amazing dad and father and husband. So, that really inspired me. You know, I always talk. I talk to my dad and my mom, God bless her, all the time about these things. It was a little bit of a surprise. But, Dane, they’re actually out of town for until Tuesday. It’s Friday right now. I’ve never had this much time to myself at the house.

Dean Pohlman: Wow.

Sean Vigue: I was excited but I do miss them. I really miss Dane also because I spend a lot of time with him. But I’m getting things done and I have my other baby here, Addy, the first baby.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. I was going to say my wife lost her mom about in I think 2018. Yes, 2018. And we had Declan in 2020. So, she’s also gone through that struggle of being a motherless mom. I mean, you being the fatherless dad. It’s really tough.

Sean Vigue: I can’t think about it. I think about my parents constantly. I talk to them a lot. I get up in the morning, I talk to them but I can’t think about it because it’s just too darn depressing a lot because my mom met Dane a few times but she wasn’t doing well at all, mentally and physically. So, she may not have been aware of it but I’m very thankful that they did meet. Dane was a little baby. Because I moved my mom out to Colorado to be near us because my sister’s out there also. But, yeah, Dane is like a mini version of my dad. My dad’s name is Mr. Bob, so we always call him Mini Mr. Bob a lot, smile on everything. It’s just how it is and it doesn’t take anything away from the blessing that Dane is and everything but, oh, it stings sometimes. It’s something that I guess you kind of join a club when you lose a parent or both parents. You join this unique…

Dean Pohlman: Is your mom living?

Sean Vigue: No. She passed away Christmas Day, two Christmases ago.

Dean Pohlman: Oh wow. I’m sorry.

Sean Vigue: She went about two-and-a-half years, I think, after my dad died but, yeah, Christmas morning 2019. But I said I moved her out from Wisconsin to Colorado. And I drove around. That was interesting. Huh?

Dean Pohlman: Well, I’m just doing the math here. He was in his mid-eighties.

Sean Vigue: My dad?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Or how old is he?

Sean Vigue: My dad was 83 and my mom was 80 when they passed. I don’t think my mom was that long from the world after dad had passed. I mean, she had about two-and-a-half years, and she was a very introverted Dane, you know? So, it was tough. We couldn’t really get her out to go around to visit. My dad was a gregarious one. I don’t want to belabor the point but it’s difficult a lot without my parents. My wife’s family is wonderful so that’s great. They’re actually with them right now in Illinois, the whole family. So, that’s such a blessing with that. Yeah. Little Mr. Bob. You know, I knew that. I knew when Dane was born, he would take on a lot of traits of my dad, and he had, so that’s really neat.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That’s really cool to hear that, that he’s so similar to your dad. And I just want to say it’s okay for you to belabor the point. It’s a struggle that every, not everyone, but it’s a struggle that a lot of people are going through. And part of the idea behind the show is to, hey, let’s talk about things that suck. You know, it’s not all going to be.

Sean Vigue: It’s true. And I always think I’m very blessed that I had such a great relationship with my parents because I have very good friends that don’t. One of my best friends hasn’t talked to his parents in years. Maybe never again. You know, it just didn’t happen. They didn’t get along. They had a lot of issues. I would have issues with my parents but we were true blue with everything. They instilled the love of old movies and old TV shows. And the best times are very subtle. Just sitting at the bakery in Wisconsin for a couple of hours talking, just chatting about life, and chatting with people who would come in and whatnot. That’s my idea of heaven on earth a lot is just having great conversations. Not living in a social media reality, things like that. But being with my parents and planning the day and watching Columbo with them and having dinner and going for drives. I love stuff like that. I’m a very simple guy that way and that translates great to the fitness that we do because it’s very bare bones, right? You got your body, you got your body weight, you got your 24/7 gym right here. You can go anywhere and go at any time is really no limits to that.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, would you say that one of the reasons why. I would just be curious for you. If I asked you to rate your overall happiness level just in general, let’s like, say, like the last six months, what’s your score on a one through ten, one being the worst, ten being happier?

Sean Vigue: Well, it can fluctuate but I’d say probably an eight. I mean, I’m not a Pollyanna. I have moments. But I find if I don’t get good sleep, I’m miserable. That’s a big one. And Dane has been in our bed a lot lately, which I don’t mind. I love having him in there but he likes to kick his dad a lot. So, I have to sleep. I’m almost hovering off the bed. I mean, he’ll cuddle with his mom. He doesn’t do that with me but he’ll sink his feet and his hands for me. I always have my arms up when I sleep in a defensive posture because he could nail me in the groin or the stomach.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Declan likes headbutting me. He’ll just headbutt me. He’ll just throw his whole head weight at my head and just like, “You just headbutted me.”

Sean Vigue: And they’re like, “So?”

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. He’s like he has no idea. He’s like, “Yeah. That was fun. Let’s do it again.”

Sean Vigue: Yeah. “Come on, we’re playing. Come on, dad.” You know, the leg drops, the Hulk Hogan, like the leg will lift and like, “Oh, here it comes,” and you put your – I’ve developed this sixth sense like Neo in the matrix where I can actually wake up and catch him like get his arm or his leg before he’s going to get me. And somebody’s getting out of bed and groan like, “Son of a b*tch,” get out of bed and go to the bathroom or something. And then I push him over and then my wife later will say, “You pushed him right on me.” I’m like, “I didn’t realize.” You know, I just, “Go over there, Dane.” But I love him to pieces and I come to bed and if he’s in there, I’ll just hold his hand for a long time and look at him. You know, I’m like, “Sh*t, he’s three,” and it’s going to change real fast. That’s what everyone tells me.

People much younger than me who have teenagers or children in their twenties, and it’s like, “It’s going to change real fast. He’s not going to be that little boy anymore.” We were at Disney last week and he has his Woody shirt on and shorts and his cowboy boots and he’s just such a delight to be with in life. So, his life, you’re trying to, “How do I compute all this stuff?” It’s moving so quickly. So, I remember my wife and I talk about I don’t remember him being a baby. I see photos. I’m like, “Okay.” But it moves so quickly. It’s hard to remember.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Fortunately, our biology has learned to black out the first six months of the baby experience because, generally, I don’t know. At least for me, it was really tough. And not sleeping and just having a child screaming at you for most of the day is not a pleasant experience.

Sean Vigue: It’s so strange. You go from total silence and control over your dominion to dropping a bomb right in the middle…

Dean Pohlman: Right, exactly. That’s how I think of parenting. I’m like, wouldn’t it be nice if they started out easy, and then they got more difficult instead of, like, the wave?

Sean Vigue: Yeah, but I know people and I want to push them down a well, like, oh, my babies slept 12 hours every night. And some people I know, like, oh, we had to wake him up to feed him. Yeah, thanks a lot.

Dean Pohlman: They can shut up.

Sean Vigue: It’s so funny because Dane was up every hour, and my wife would feed him, but I was up too. We’re always up. I see, it’s so weird all of a sudden. What’s that noise? You used to have no noise in the house, and all of a sudden…

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. It’s a big transition. So, I wanted to ask you and then I wanted to move on to my part 2 of this. Do you have difficulty being in the present? Do you find that you are thinking about your business? Are you thinking about, oh, what do I need to post on social media? Do you worry about…

Sean Vigue: Well, sometimes, my wife, who is a numbers person, she has her master’s in statistics and she’s great with revenue. She’s my accountant. She’s our accountant. She’s great. And she says, “Sean, you just have to budget your time.” I was like, “Well, yeah, of course.” But then you realize, oh, I’m not, actually plan out what you’re going to do because that’s the danger I get in, Dean, is that the actor in me and the spontaneous guy just kind of goes and goes and goes without a lot of balance sometimes, so.

My best days are when I just put the phone, okay, I’ll do a post, and the phone’s down for about four hours, and I’m not looking at anything. I’m going to focus on what I’m doing now. I do some studying, I do some writing. I’m going to do this. So, my mind just isn’t out of control. It’s not restless because my mind is restless, it just drives you into the ground sometimes. It’s balance. It’s what we preach all the time. Doesn’t mean we follow it. Doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have some cheesecake every now and then, which I actually don’t. I don’t eat cheesecake anymore, but something else. But finding that balance, how do you deal with that? Because posting, you plan your post, you have people that help you with them.

Dean Pohlman: It’s a combination. So, I have someone who helps me with that. We kind of have a template for a week by week, and then I’ll give him ideas or he’ll give me ideas and I’ll refine it, or I’ll come up with an idea and then I’ll say, “Hey, this is great. Let’s post it sometime this week.” But before for a very long time, I would just do it day by day. I would just do it day by day. I would think about what am I going to post today? And it would be like super stressful.

And now, I have the issue, or sometimes, I do feel that, but honestly, one of the biggest stresses for me is what am I going to make for dinner tonight? If I don’t plan it out in advance, it hits two o’clock, and I’m like, oh, my God, do I need to dethaw the meat? What am I going to make? How is Declan going to eat it? But anyways, that’s to answer your question, it’s…

Sean Vigue: It’s the unlimited possibilities of what we do is amazing. And it can also drive you insane. We’ve talked about that before. Fitness, what we do is unending. There’s really no limit to it, in what you can post, what you can do. And you and I stick our fingers in a lot of things – videos, blogs, books. I mean, I was just at Books-A-Million yesterday, and there are my books. There are Dean’s books. I mean, we’re everywhere and we don’t have put limits on that.

And I think to a lot of other people, it’s like, wow, that’s very impressive, but it comes with a price also of not be able to shut it down, not be able to balance it out. And I’m always looking for my next thrill. It’s like my next big score. I’m a drug addict sometimes for fitness, like there are so many places I could go and film. There are so many challenges I could do. There are so many people I could work with.

But if you think like that too much, you won’t get anything done. You’re just always thinking about it. You have to just sit down and do this, times I’ll sit like going to take an hour, a minute to sit on my laptop and just answer comments on my video. That’s always something good to do. But there are thousands and thousands of them, which I love, like managing comments on this video. I have no idea, but sometimes I do that because it’s great to interact with people that kind of comment and that helps focus my brain. But sometimes, I’ll go crazy with the options.

Dean Pohlman: Is that something that is really significant for you, preventing you from being the president, just thinking about all the different things that you could do?

Sean Vigue: Yeah, sometimes, it is. And I’ve been doing this for a while now. It’s kind of like dog years. Every year in fitness is like seven years because I film so much and I post so much and I teach so much and write so much. And it’s very compact and very intense. And that’s the way I like it, but it does prevent me, oh, I should post something and should have the terrible word, like no.

And I’ve done much better lately, like, oh, I’ll do it later. Oh, I want to post about this. No, dummy, you just posted an hour ago. Don’t post it. I see on Facebook there that the algorithms suck for you right now. They want you to pay money to boost posts. So, I don’t know, I just got a TikTok account, but I don’t know how I feel about that. But I think I can just post what I do on Instagram and put it on TikTok because I don’t want anything that’s going to take more of my time and energy away from my family, away from myself, and away from my work and my study. I’m very peculiar about that also. I just want to do what I know. And I’m almost 50, I don’t care about the new things that much. That doesn’t really interest me much.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. TikTok is a different beast and a different conversation. And I was actually talking to my wife yesterday about– I was scrolling through Instagram. I’m like, content is totally different than it was two years ago. I’m like, it has evolved significantly. And yeah, thinking about that is just– and then seeing other content and then seeing like, oh, I could do that, it just creates all this shame. It just, it’s not. And then you finish it, and you’re like, oh, I feel so much worse than I started. Why am I scrolling on this?

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Scrolling it, well, what it does to your brain too, social media. And I don’t want to say too much because I post on there and I think that’s what’s great about fitness is it’s definitely something that demands total focus and that you have to get all of your other distractions away and you just do this. Other things you can watch, I’m sure a lot of people just watch our videos, and that’s fine, but we demand using, hey, get up and do it.

So, leave everything else behind. Get in the moment here with me because being in the moment in these days inside, what a blessing that is to actually be focused in the moment. Like I was just at the gym, love going to the gym, had some– I was listening to Queen or something, having a great time, but I look around and everybody is on their phones doing this, scrolling. Of course, you and I, the posture to the head is down, I’m like…

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. You just want to walk over and push them back into proper posture.

Sean Vigue: I know and I do it out of love, like I want to help you here. Do some shoulder stretches. Do some side bends. Because in between sets, I’ll do twists, I’ll do all sorts of movements, and I’ll air guitar. And I think it’s…

Dean Pohlman: That’s important, yeah.

Sean Vigue: I know, like all we got, Queen on here or Motley Crue and I, but I like to be in that rhythm, in that movement, in that flow. And what were we talking about, Dean, there was the initial…

Dean Pohlman: I was asking you about overall happiness. And then we were talking about being in the moment and what prevents you from being in the present. And then we were talking about social media and that.

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Oh, I would say social media of that it– like everything is good and moderate. Like cars are good if you’re using them to drive a distance. It’s bad if you use a car to try to run people over. So, like social media…

Dean Pohlman: I’ve never heard that analogy, but yes.

Sean Vigue: Well, everything, a hammer is good if you use it to hammer nails. It’s bad if you go and try to hit people, so it’s…

Dean Pohlman: Dexter Season 4.

Sean Vigue: It’s like anything, social media is there, but it’s very easy to fall into that trap. And I am too of the scrolling, and you just have to be very aware. Awareness is half the battle. But fitness videos demand that you get up and move, I think that’s why sometimes, the algorithms don’t, like I’ll post a new video somewhere, you’ll get a little bit of traction. But if I post a funny meme, now, I’ll get hundreds of likes and comments.

Dean Pohlman: Right.

Sean Vigue: And I understand. I understand people aren’t going online, hey, I want to find someone that’s made me do some really challenging exercise. I want to go online to be entertained. My wife does it at night. She likes to scroll on Facebook because she works all day and she needs kind of an outlet. She likes to watch cooking shows. And that works great for her.

But yeah, being in the moment, I mean, thousands of books have been written about a habit, haven’t they, and what it means to be in the moment. But I mean, when I’m with Dane and we’re having fun, those are the times that I seek out. Dad, come play with me. And I always think, well, if I ignore him, I’m going to regret that later. I want to go play with him. Not that I have to, but I want to, and doing power yoga, the flows and stuff, that certainly is in the moment, that’s like a different world is flowing on this map by a lake. It is an extraordinary experience. And then you get to film and share it with people. I mean, do you feel that when you film?

Dean Pohlman: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Very rarely do I film, and I think, oh, I’m still filming. What am I doing right now? What am I going to do later? Yeah, usually, I am completely in it. And then by the time I’m finished, I’m like, wow, I feel great that I did that. I feel great that I created something. Yeah, I find that the more that I can do something that demands my entire focus, the happier that I am.

If I can work in a notebook instead of working on my computer, I’m happier. If I can work within a single window on my computer instead of 18 different competing tabs and going back and forth between four tasks, I’m a lot happier. So, something that I constantly try to do is how can I do what I need to do today in flow? How can I take my entire focus devoted to that? How can I take deliberate breaks between those tasks so that I’m recharging and can enjoy what I’m doing and not feel burnt out? But yeah, it’s a constant struggle. It’s not like I do it every day.

Sean Vigue: That’s a state of flow. It’s a state of flow. I was trying to explain to my wife months ago, it hit me. I’m like, I’m not in flow right now, Jillian. I need to be in flow. There are too many things breaking up my flow, and my wife and I, we’re very compatible because we’re very different.

Dean Pohlman: Right. I got that just based on a tiny bit of what you said. I understood that you were the total opposite.

Sean Vigue: Opera and statistics. It’s very, very different, but we complement each other very well. If you have two people that are too similar, you’ll battle for supremacy all the time. But if you can bring different ideas to each other and mash them together, like the other day, my wife was telling me something about work and taxes, and I was offering some questions. She kept saying, no. She was, that’s not what I’m saying. I said, but Jillian, my mind works very different than yours. Take advantage of it.

The questions I’m asking could very well come up because I see things from a different perspective. She was, okay, and then she’ll say, challenge me on things. Sometimes, you’re like, oh, well, what do you know? And then you go away, like, oh, she’s totally correct about that, and I was being stubborn about it, and I’ll stay, I’m like, you were right about that. Use me, Jillian. And she’ll say, use me, Sean. For Dane, use me. And he’ll go, dad, I’m pooping. Okay, don’t you, so. He’s potty trained now, but yeah, it’s great. Do you and your wife do that as well, complementing each other?

Dean Pohlman: Yes, I was going to answer that with a– we had a podcast with Kelly Starrett from the Ready State, formerly known as Mobility WOD.

Sean Vigue: You have the Supple…

Dean Pohlman: The Supple Leopard.

Sean Vigue: Leopard. I have this book, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: It’s an awesome book.

Sean Vigue: It’s one of the classics in fitness.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And I asked him, like, what’s your number one habit that helps you with your overall happiness? And he said, “Basically, I decide how I do what I do in my life through the lens of does this get me to spend more time with my wife?” And one of the components of that answer was not that he needs to remind himself because he knows this coming into it, but he and his wife have similar goals. They want the same outcomes, but they have different visions. They have different goals about how to achieving that.

So, instead of coming into the conversation and hearing her describe her method a different way, he comes into it intrigued, thinking, what is your vision because it differs from mine? Let me learn from this instead of looking at it as let me compete with this. And if I was to answer your question, in all honesty, I think me and my wife, we still struggle coming together and saying, let me show you my vision. Oh, let me show you my vision.

And I think we do a good job of eventually coming to the realization that we both have visions that will help in the end. But I think, initially, when we present our visions, that there’s friction and it doesn’t happen smoothly. But I think in the end, we do come together with our visions and we’re able to have a productive conversation, but it just takes us a little longer to get there than I think most people. At least, we get there.

Sean Vigue: And it’s good also to not water it down. You want to be something I prey on all the time is when to be bold and when to be patient, when to be bold and when to be patient because you could spend your whole life trying to pound your fist on everything and not get anywhere or spend your whole life just waiting all the time. So, you always stop and go, stop and go a lot. Okay, maybe I should just ease off, maybe I shouldn’t post right now. Maybe I shouldn’t film today. I’m not in the best of moods, or it’s kind of raining outside.

But I like what Kelly had said because you want that harmony in your personal life, too, because that projects to your professional life as well. I’m not going to be good on camera if I’m miserable or if I’m angry. I’ve tried that a few times if I was really upset about something. Like after my dad passed, I didn’t film for about five weeks. That’s unheard of for me because I love to film.

Like, oh, I have to film today. I need to do something. It’s like drinking water for me a lot. It’s great for therapy, an expression for me to do with creativity. So, to not film for about five weeks, it was very therapeutic for me, but it did feel really good to come back and film. I felt more of myself, like myself and what my purpose was. So, very good.

My wife, my one of my latest books, the Pilates for Athletes book, she’s the other model in that. But you talk about different brain types because I put her in the book, she does the warmth and cooldowns. She looks fantastic. She was great. But she doesn’t promote the book. You and I are of the mind. We’re always promoting ourselves. We’re always promoting our brand. We’re very used to it.

But to someone who doesn’t do that, like well, what do you mean promote it? Well, post about it. And I’m like, are you all right with what you should say? I’ll tell you, I’ll write everything for you, just put it on your page or for your family or something. And other books I’ve done, like there are different models in there. I’m like, why aren’t you promoting the book? It just doesn’t make any sense to me why you’re not promoting it. I mean, you’re in a book, it’s in stores. It’s fun. You’re in the fitness industry.

But we only see things through our own lenses, what the lenses we want to see. And then to the other person, it’s seen as absurd, where other people see you where I am filming somewhere. That’s absurd. What are they doing out there? That’s weird. But thank God we do it. It definitely serves a need in society and we have no shame doing it. I don’t care. I’ll film anywhere.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Well, that was all great. I want to move on to Part 2 now. And I have a few kind of rapid-fire questions for you, which never is rapid, but I have a few questions that I ask…

Sean Vigue: I’ll work to keep them. It’s like Inside the Actors Studio. You would ask questions at the end. Did you ever see that show? James Lipton, he passed away, but he would ask these questions at the end.

Dean Pohlman: I have not.

Sean Vigue: Look, Inside the Actors Studio, Will Ferrell parodied him on Saturday Night Live. It was very funny.

Dean Pohlman: Okay. I can definitely see that.

Sean Vigue: Will Ferrell’s kind of hip, right? I can mention.

Dean Pohlman: He’s still hip.

Sean Vigue: He’s Elf, right?

Dean Pohlman: Yes.

Sean Vigue: Ron Burgundy.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. I hope they’d still know that.

Sean Vigue: One of the greatest cop seasons. Look at that. I love that.

Dean Pohlman: Charlie and Snoopy.

Sean Vigue: Charlie Brown and Snoopy, but there’s Addie and I.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, very nice.

Sean Vigue: I should have brought treats and put them in my pocket, that would have got Addie over here.

Dean Pohlman: That would have worked.

Sean Vigue: If you want, I can go get some treats.

Dean Pohlman: I think we’re okay. So, what is one habit, belief, or mindset that has helped you significantly, not the most, but maybe one of the most in terms of your overall happiness?

Sean Vigue: Shut the phone off early at nine and don’t turn it on until the afternoon.

Dean Pohlman: Wow. The whole morning without it. That sounds awesome.

Sean Vigue: Oh, yeah, I’ve been doing that, or I’ll turn it off, like 10 or 11. And by then, I read in the morning. I like to read and be very focused, say my prayers, taking Addie outside, and just look at the trees and think. I talk to myself a lot, but…

Dean Pohlman: I love that.

Sean Vigue: And since Dane and my wife weren’t here, I got up, I read for a while, and then I read last night in bed for a while, which is great. I like reading historical nonfiction. I read a lot of that. And I get up and I read and I drink a lot of water. I make a smoothie. I take Addie out and then I put on something inspiring on the TV. I’ll sit down and take notes. I love doing that.

Dean Pohlman: That sounds awesome.

Sean Vigue: I was getting ready for your podcast. Everything I did this morning was to get ready for this podcast. I want to get my mind in the right frame of mind. I went to the gym real quick. I want to get a little pump, get things flowing because a body at rest is very different intellectually than a body that’s moving with the blood flowing in the mind going and driving through, encountering some bad drivers on the way and all sorts of things. But it was all to get ready to chat with you, Dean, because I wanted to be in a good frame of mind for that. And I get a little nervous because I haven’t done a podcast in a few weeks. It’s a performer in me. I want to be 100% for your podcast.

Dean Pohlman: Well, I am honored. Thank you very much. And thank you for sharing your morning habits.

Sean Vigue: My pleasure. And I didn’t keep it to a short answer, did I?

Dean Pohlman: No, you did. That was great. I loved all of that. So, my next question is, what’s one thing that you do for your health that you think is overlooked or undervalued by others?

Sean Vigue: I go for long walks every night. I love walking. Moving back to Florida, one of the main positives of it was, I go for night walks again. I like nighttime. I’m most productive at night. I’ll go out for like an hour and a half or two hours. And where I live, it’s a nice town. I could just walk. I do loops, listen to piano music, I listen to sermons, I listen to podcasts, maybe this one. And walking for me is, well, it’s the movement, it’s being outside, it’s the focus. I dream so much on my walk. That’s where all my dreams come from a lot. And I’ve always enjoyed walking. My mom instilled that in me. She always went for walks, and I was not silly as a kid who goes for walks.

Dean Pohlman: I know, yeah. Then you become an adult and walks are fun, and nature and hiking is fun, and you’re a kid and you’re like, this is dumb. You’re like, now, you want to do these boring things.

Sean Vigue: Oh, why do you want to walk? I want to go running. I want to do this. And then I started doing it in my late 20s, who was always doing theater and in between shows, I would come home and stay with my parents in Wisconsin, which I loved. And those walks became very special because no matter what I did, where I traveled, what I did, I would always come home. And things were pretty much the same.

And I knew they never would be. I was always very aware that this doesn’t last forever, nothing does. So, those night walks in that little town of West Salem, Wisconsin, were always so special to me, clear skies, the smells, and the sounds. And again, you go and you dream.

Dean Pohlman: All of that dream during long walks at night.

Sean Vigue: Dream. Your mind will do what you tell it to do, it really will. The battlefield of your mind, it will do what you tell it to do.

Dean Pohlman: All right. So, I was going to ask, do you have a set time for a regular stress relief activity? Is there anything that you haven’t mentioned that you do regularly for stress relief?

Sean Vigue: Well, I’m sitting on the floor right now. When everyone goes to bed, I come down here and I sit on this floor and I do all sorts of stretches and I write and I take notes and I usually put something fun on the TV, and that’s what I like to do, or if I’m going to film the next day, I try out things that I’m going to do the next day. I do something new or something that I discovered. I’m going to work out a little bit that night. Sometimes I don’t. I just do it with the cameras on and I’ve been pretty good because, again, I don’t overthink it. So, like, oh, I really shouldn’t be able to do this balance post right now, but I didn’t overthink it all. I just went into it. So, it’s okay.

I haven’t done Bird of Paradise in two months. How the hell am I doing this right now? But I didn’t think about it, I just did it. Okay, so let’s fake that there’s an animal coming at me, so I have to get out of it. But at night, I do all sorts of things on the floor. I do stretches, I do core workouts while I’m watching some classic old 80s film or a movie from the 50s. But the nighttime is very special to me. I wish I only needed two hours of sleep because I would stay until 4 a.m. every night, writing and doing things.

Dean Pohlman: Wow. That sounds like a great night routine. I love that.

Sean Vigue: I love it. And I say a lot of guys would go out, just go out and go to bars. And I don’t do that anymore. I used to do that in my 20s, but I love just doing healthy things at night. It prepares you for the next day.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Well, that’s something that I think you start doing when you have a long-term partner because you’re like, I don’t need to go out. She’s right here.

Sean Vigue: Oh, yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Or he’s right here.

Sean Vigue: Yeah. Who has time for that? We were joking about that. Who has time for Addie? Like a mistress. We’re laughing about it, of course, but like, oh, it’s so annoying. And I’m very happy with everything. I don’t want to do anything else right now. Everyone else is so damn annoying. I don’t want to spend time with other people. So, we went out for dinner the other night, my wife and I and Dane, and we had a great time. It was fantastic.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, as long as we hand Declan the phone with some Cocomelon on it, then we’re good for dinners, but he’s…

Sean Vigue: Yeah, that stuff is crack.

Dean Pohlman: It is crack for children. It absolutely is, yeah.

Sean Vigue: Kind of pulled Dane away from some of those. He likes to watch unboxing things with toys, but those and themselves are designed as crack because the rewards keep coming all the way through the video. The dopamine hit never stops. So, a lot of time, actually, we watch The Simpsons sometimes, and I watch them carefully. I’m like, no, there’s no violence, there’s no swearing, there’s nothing like that. He asked me what that means. I’m like, it’s The Simpsons, Dane, it’s very nuanced. I can’t really explain it sometimes, but I’ll try. But I’ve become very hawkish about what he watches too because something, like put him into a coma on the chair because they just keep hitting them with dopamine constantly, like us, like adults too.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. That’s very careful of you. That’s the word I’m looking for.

Sean Vigue: And I’m not always because sometimes, my relatives let them. I go to work on something. I’m like, no, if he puts his hand down on the chair and I talk to him and he doesn’t even hear me, then I know it’s I’m a cable guy, shut the TV off. It’s too much. So, brain is kind of spinning out of control a little bit.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Do you regularly reflect or analyze yourself, i.e., do you sit down once a quarter or once a week and just go over things that you did? How can you improve? Or what’s going well? What could be better?

Sean Vigue: Yeah, a lot. I know the things that I’m supposed to be doing more of and I know the things I’m supposed to be doing less of. And you definitely do more of the essential things, reading and studying and family time and eating better and things like that. Then the things that are distracting things, social media, watching things that aren’t really inspiring, sitting too long, things like that. And I’ve always been very aware of that stuff. Do I do it? Not all the time. I keep a journal. I kept a journal every night since 1998, pretty much every night. So, I always write out things in that. That keeps me disciplined.

Dean Pohlman: That’s huge.

Sean Vigue: That’s what I do, but sometimes, I get lazy. I just write out what I’m doing instead of put some thoughts down there because having a pen and putting it to parchment is very therapeutic, you said that earlier, more so than typing, but actually just writing. Plus, writing is a lost art. I can still do cursive, but most people don’t know what cursive is. I have a combination of cursive and regular writing that I use, but it’s a good skill if you write it out longhand and you’re more apt to stay consistent with it.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I have very terrible handwriting that only I can read, but it’s a secret script. It’s not meant to be read. I mean, it’s part of my process for getting it down on paper and it feels better than typing it out. It goes a little bit slower. So, I’m able to focus on the thought and the word a little bit more. And then, maybe someday, 20 years later, I’ll go back and try to decipher what I read and realize that I can’t read them all.

Sean Vigue: It’s fascinating. It’s neat because you realize like, wow, you’ve done a lot of things. And mine have to be burned and destroyed when I die because in some journals, sometimes, you want to write things in there that are personal, but you don’t want anyone else to read them. But I have memes full of them.

Dean Pohlman: That’s a good journal. A good journal is one that’s not written for anybody else. It’s one that you just have for yourself. It’s not meant to be turned into a blog post or turned into an emotional social media post. It’s just for you. It’s not meant to be…

Sean Vigue: Yeah, that has kind of a fine line because a lot of time in social media now, people just want to share everything. And I don’t want to do that. I’m not like that. There’s always a line with me. I don’t want to get into this. I’d rather teach fitness. I want to teach movement stuff and be myself while I’m doing it, but I don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts of a lot of things in my life. That’s just for my wife and my family and close friends.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Sean Vigue: Like you asked if I’m very happy, I am, I have a very good outlook, but I have moments, I have angst, I get upset about things, and I work through it. But I wouldn’t want to put that on people who follow me. I might mention it sometimes, but I don’t want to dwell on it because there becomes a point where it’s more like, come on, give me some attention for this. I don’t want that. I don’t like how I am if I’m angry. I know that it’s essential, of course, but I don’t want to dwell on it. I want to get moving and work my way out of it because then the other side of that is very, very exciting and rewarding when you can get out of it.

I’d have to say, with my parents gone, that’s what hits me a lot, subconsciously. I don’t even realize it sometimes. But it’s not yearning to want to reach out to them and share with them, just a phone call away or a visit. And it’s not there. And a lot of times, it’s not even in the front of my brain, it’s down deeper, but it springs up in different ways. So, as long as I’m aware of that and I can work myself through that, and I know that it’s how it has to be. It would be sad if I just never thought about it.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think you bring up the– I don’t know, I mean, social media, yes, I think there’s a benefit to everyone, both you and the audience, the consumer, the viewer, whatever you want to call it, whatever you want to call them, to being vulnerable to a certain extent, to sharing things. But you have to kind of pick and choose what you want to share because if you share certain things, then that’s what you become known for. And you’d like to present like, hey, this is like a– it might make sense or you might want to present a more comprehensive view of your life or somehow do it in a way that is helpful to everybody. But at the same time, you do get known for what you share and you don’t want to put out something that becomes your perceived identity. So, I don’t know.

Sean Vigue: Well, we all do it. We cultivate our own image that we want to reflect onto whoever is watching, whoever is looking at it. And yeah, there is an urge to do that sometimes. But for me, it’s like I want to share. Like I hear a song that I just love. I want to share it by the way. Something like that. I want to share things that excite me.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And I get that sense from your social media.

Sean Vigue: That could make me a better husband, a better teacher, a better father, a better neighbor, I guess, things like that. I’ve always gravitated towards that. I like to be in that flow, that state of flow like that.

I did do a video where I did talk about my dad. It was not long after he passed, and I did say, look, if you want to go– I was sitting on a golf course in Evergreen, Colorado, where I lived. And it wasn’t open, but I found this great spot. I was with Addie. And really, I walked out there. I’m like, I didn’t even know if I was going to talk about it or not because it had to be in the moment if it really struck me to talk. And I talked about my dad for about 10 minutes. I talked about a lot of things about what was going on.

And a lot of people were shocked because I had never talked about it before. I said, why? I don’t want to bring up my personal stuff, especially about my dad. He was going through enough. I didn’t want to make any of that public. I just want to stay away from that because people– anyway, I like to keep that kind of stuff private. It was tough enough, with six months of going through all that stuff anyway.

But I felt good to talk about it in the video. And anyone can listen to that and everyone goes through these things. So, you realize that also that everybody goes through these things. None of us are alone in this, and it can be very therapeutic that way.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing it here, honestly. And if you wouldn’t mind, I’m going to ask you for that link to that video in case anyone else wants to see it in the show notes.

Sean Vigue: Yeah, it’s a really cool spot. I mean, Evergreen, Colorado, where I live, is beautiful in the hills. So, filming outside there was always very lethargic, poor things out sometimes. And then Addie would come and jump on me.

Dean Pohlman: Right.

Sean Vigue: Yes.

Dean Pohlman: All right. So, just a couple more questions, and then I will set you free on your bachelor weekend. So, what is…

Sean Vigue: I was going to get wild in my weekend salad later. Whew. Big salad and watch Columbo. I’m inviting everyone over. I’m sitting in a straddle position right now. There we go.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I’m sitting on a shag rug, but I have my butts propped up for you.

Sean Vigue: So, you’re not in a chair. Are you, Dean?

Dean Pohlman: I’m not in the chair. I have a little pouf, I have a little cushion I’m sitting on. Its about six inches.

Sean Vigue: Okay. Look at us. So, we should be sitting, like, in the squat, the Garland position, actually, the squatty potty position.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I got a little bit of work to do before I get there for 60 minutes, but…

Sean Vigue: Oh, no, never, we won’t be able to move.

Dean Pohlman: You’re right. So, what is the most stressful part of your day-to-day life?

Sean Vigue: Stressful part? Trying to get the flow, and it doesn’t always happen. My wife and I, she works from home now. She telecommutes. So, we trying to find that balance, especially with Dane. Dane starts pre-K in August here in town. So, he’ll have a couple of days a week where he’ll be gone for half a day, but trying to– sometimes it gets to me. I want to be able to be very present for Dane and also be able to work on what I need to work on.

I don’t like having to rush things. If I’m editing a video, rushing that, I realize it, it caused me anxiety. I don’t like to do that. I like to have some time to just sit down, like right now, to sit down and have this chat with you. It’s so nice and so relaxing. You don’t have to work, jumping up to do something. And not that I don’t want it, the reason is I want to spend the best time I can with my son to get my stuff done so I can be totally there. And sometimes, you’re with him, and I’m, oh, I guess…

Dean Pohlman: Yes, it’s hard to get.

Sean Vigue: Or other business, other things besides the fitness stuff that I work on. Oh, I have to call about that or do this. I’d like to be 100% present with the boy because he knows when I’m not. He’s so perceptive. Dad, you’re not– if I answer him and he knows I haven’t listened to him, I don’t understand what he’s talking about, no, Dad, he knows right away. He’s brilliant. They have no distractions. So, he knows exactly that if I’m humoring him about something. I’m sure you– is Declan talking a lot?

Dean Pohlman: He babbles a lot, but he hasn’t gotten to the point where– he’s babbling a lot, but I don’t understand what he’s saying. No one understands what he’s saying. He understands what he says.

Sean Vigue: He says dada?

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah, he says dada. He says mom a lot. He says more, which also sounds exactly like mom. He says lots of words that start with B, so butterfly, bird, baba, which is his grandpa, but he says bah for all of them. So, it’s very confusing. Well, yeah.

Sean Vigue: But you know what they are?

Dean Pohlman: Yes. Deep down, I know what they are, but if I try to analyze them and consciously think about what he’s saying, I won’t know what he’s saying. But if I just react, I’m like, oh, yeah, sure, then yeah.

Sean Vigue: But he knows you react, he knows you’re listening. It’s the hard consonants. Jillian was always a little upset because Dane, he said daddy or dada before mommy. I said, well, to be fair, D’s, they’re nice, hard consonants to say. So, more than ma, M and D, D has more punch to it, maybe that’s why, but…

Dean Pohlman: Well, hey, you’re one of the few parents who dad was the first, so congrats on that.

Sean Vigue: I know. I think he said dada, but he didn’t know what it meant. He just said. So, maybe it was that, but we all think that he just, and also Addie and daddy are very similar. Dog’s name is Addie. You put them together, daddy and Addie, daddy. So, that might have helped also. And I would take them for walks and I would just say daddy a lot to him. Every time I’d just say it and he would say it. I said, no, it’s daddy, daddy, so.

Dean Pohlman: Well done. This is the big one from my last one. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing men and their well-being right now?

Sean Vigue: Well, there’s a lot. Oh, Dean, that’s like an essay, isn’t it?

Dean Pohlman: Yes. I need a five-paragraph essay with a general theory and three things that you…

Sean Vigue: Yes, that’s right. Intro, then I have to sit up, there’s my knee. I have to sit up for that. Men in their well-being, well, what we talked about earlier, a big one, I think would be the cell phone addiction. I think that’s a big one. It may not seem like much, but how much are you spending on your cell phone, being distracted? Even at the gym, which is a place of “health and fitness.” I walk in there, 90% of people, they’re not like this. I mean, they are hunched over looking at a phone and they’ll do it for five, ten minutes at a time or more. So, that is a big one. If you’re doing it at the gym, how much are you doing it everywhere else? I would say that’s a big one.

Dean Pohlman: I think that we need to start printing out our workouts on index card instead of– because that’s my excuse for being on my phone at the gym is my workout is on my phone, so I have to check it. But anyways…

Sean Vigue: You put it in notes. I used to put it in notes.

Dean Pohlman: Mine is in my– it’s through an app called TrueCoach, which is what my trainer uses. But anyways, I should just write it out.

Sean Vigue: You’re so hip, Dean.

Dean Pohlman: I’m so hip, yes.

Sean Vigue: I bring my Commodore 64 computer with me to the gym. I have it written down on there and my Texas Instruments. But I would say the distractions are a big one. I would never preach something that I myself don’t have a challenge with. Like I say, even the phone will get me, I bring the phone and I’m going to use the music. And I keep it in my pocket except to switch songs. I’m very aware of that.

But sometimes, I whip it out like, oh, I’m going to film this. Yeah, I’m always filming, like, oh, this is me one on the ball. Let me put the camera over here, and I can make a little reel about it, then I put it away. But I think distractions are a big one for health and fitness in guys. But just be aware of what you are consuming here, here, here, everywhere. What are you consuming? What are you putting into your mind, your body, and your spirit? Is it something positive that elevates? Or is it something that destroys? And what kind of thoughts are you having? The battleground that is the mind, you control what you think about. Are you thinking…

Sometimes, I come home and like there’ll be some bad drivers and I get home kind of in a pissy mood. I’m like, stop that. Just take some deep breaths and say a little prayer. It’s like, what’s the big deal? It’s no big deal. Why are you upset about that? But control what you’re thinking about, you have that ability to do that. But I would say, keep in that state of flow, no distractions. What are you consuming? And also read, read an hour or two a day, read.

Like you and I write books, and I go, I like to write. Some days, I’m like, I can’t write. I haven’t been reading the last couple of days. Like my mind shuts down, and I’ll sit down and read for an hour, then I want to write again. It’s weird. It primes your mind to want to write about things.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think those are all great tips. Yeah. I mean the…

Sean Vigue: What do you do? What would your advice be?

Dean Pohlman: My challenge, I’ve heard so many great answers to this question. I think we had Nate Checketts, the CEO of Rhone, a big men’s apparel company that I work with. His answer was shame. And at first, I was like, oh, I don’t have shame. And then I thought about it more and I thought about how much shame I have behind, oh, I’m not doing enough right now or I’m not where I want to be with my business or I’m not where I want to be with being a father or being a husband.

And the amount of time I think about that and how much energy and how much guilt and shame goes into you, you need to be better, you should be doing this, you should be doing this, that’s huge. I think being on the phone is something as well, I think not being present. But my big answer, honestly, if you’re asking me this and if this is me interviewing myself, would be not taking time to think about things, not taking time to reflect.

So, for you, it’s going on those long walks and being able to think about things and dream. And for me, my kind of answer is just taking time to be with your thoughts and maybe you journal about them. Maybe you’re just going for a walk and you leave your phone at home and you just process things. But yeah, I think that, in today’s world, with all of the distractions and all of the different things competing for your attention, just being with yourself and your thoughts and processing those and coming to your own conclusion about things and recognizing what are your own core beliefs and what are your values if you really just ask yourself and don’t take into account. You think you should be doing what you should be feeling or what are these other high-performing entrepreneurs doing? And I need to be doing what they’re doing. If you just ask yourself, I think that’s…

Sean Vigue: Delirium of expectations that we put on ourselves. You become delirious and you realize they’re all just thoughts. They’re like farts in the wind. It just dissolves. They don’t mean anything. But my son asked why about everything. And it’s great. Sometimes, it’s a little frustrating, but you always ask why. And I always said, “That’s a good question, Dane.” Adults don’t ask why very much at all. They just go, whether they’re trying to imitate what they saw or do what they think they’re supposed to be doing, they don’t ask why. And it’s a great answer. That’s what gets me into trouble or what should I be doing, like where you should be right here right now. That’s it. That’s all you have. In 50 years, you’re not going to look back. You’re going to look back at the subtle things you wish you would have done more, not these big expectations you put on yourself.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, well, I think it’s really cool that’s what you think right now, that even…

Sean Vigue: But these are things that we all struggle with them. That’s why I say you don’t cut out. Less social media you can do is better, be very focused with it, be very focused on what you do because the whole scrolling thing turns your mind. In terms, your mind will mush. It really does. It just pulls you in all these different ways. And as you said, you lose your own voice, who you really are, what your purpose is.

And to really compose long thoughts, like as a society, we don’t read poetry much anymore. A lot of us, we don’t read the great works anymore. We don’t read Shakespeare. We don’t read these things that give us great mental exercise. Remember in the movie Dodgeball, he comes down the stairs, White Goodman, Ben Stiller, with the encyclopedia. This is great because…

Dean Pohlman: It’s the dictionary.

Sean Vigue: He sometimes likes to bring, yeah, he goes…

Dean Pohlman: He’s reading the dictionary.

Sean Vigue: And I think of like he was making it up, but it made sense. I like to just really get the mind going, and the greatest things, innovations happen through a lot of thoughts, a lot of deep thought, composing long thoughts and in that, you find out more of your true self and your true being. But all the distractions, you’ll never find it. You’ll just latch on to what you think you’re supposed to do, and it drives you away from your purpose. And anyway, you just get go off a cliff somewhere, and then, later on, you’re older and you’re bitter and you wish you could go back and do it a different way.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think those are all great points. Well, Sean, I want to thank you for your time, your thoughts, your energy, your sharing, your bachelor weekend with me and…

Sean Vigue: My bachelor weekend.

Dean Pohlman: Yes.

Sean Vigue: My Easter weekend. It’s going to get wild.

Dean Pohlman: That’s what I’m calling it, at least. So, how do people follow you, get in touch with you to see what you’re doing?

Sean Vigue: Well, the easiest way is go to my YouTube channel at Sean Vigue Fitness. Just click play or search for– if you want Pilates, anything you want, put in the search and find it. And you can also go to SeanVigueFitness.com. I just had my website redone a few months ago. It looks very good. I would say start there. Go to the bookstores, pick up our books.

Dean Pohlman: Cool.

Sean Vigue: How is your new book doing?

Dean Pohlman: Good. It is going as expected. That is what the publishers tell me. So, we’re good. Yeah. It’s doing well. It’s good to see the responses. So, thanks for asking.

Sean Vigue: Do you ever do signing?

Dean Pohlman: I think I have once. Once I have gone into a bookstore and they had my book and I said, “Oh, here’s my book.” They’re like, “Oh, do you want to sign them?” I’m like, “Sure.” So, I’ve done that once. I know you do that. I’ve seen you…

Sean Vigue: Yeah, I never did it before. And they said, “Do you want to sign them?” Yeah, because I have a couple of books that are in bookstores and sure, yeah, I never thought about it before. My publishers never really pushed that, but okay, I know a lot of authors that are very shy about doing that, but I’ve gotten very, like, hey, I’ll just take them to the front, like, hey, you have some of my books here, hold them up. They don’t even ask if they’re really mine. I can just grab anything. Okay, Mr. King or Mr. Coontz. Sure. Oh, you are Lord of the Rings. Great, sign them all.

But I like to go to bookstores to write, like I go to Barnes & Noble Books, wherever, and I sit in the café, take out my old HP laptop, and write. I’m working on three books right now, kind of about Dane, different things. But I get very inspired, like, hey, they got my books here. And I’ll go back and see those. It’s kind of like you’re in a brotherhood of authors, of all the authors that are there, sisterhood and brotherhood. I enjoy that. It gives me energy.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Sean Vigue: I do guest classes a lot, I will bring books with, and if I do a guest class somewhere, they will buy any book that I bring because they actually just did the class with me and they feel good, so they’re like, oh I want to buy his book. Everyone knows before.

Dean Pohlman: Yes, that makes sense. Use their endorphins to sell books. I love it.

Sean Vigue: Exactly. It’s the feeling afterwards, and then they get to know you and like, oh, well, that’s cool because I just love books. I don’t do digital things. I have bookcases full of books. I like things that you can hold on to, like DVDs and CDs, that aren’t just streaming that you can look at and put on a bookshelf somewhere.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, there’s definitely something to having a physical because it’s more than just like consuming the content. It’s having it there, being able to see it, and reinforcing your idea of who you want to be. I am someone who reads books, and here is a physical representation of that to show that.

Sean Vigue: And I smell books. I always smell the books, first thing I do. And my son does that now too. Let’s smell it, daddy. Like okay, oh, they all have different smells, like a textbook. My Pilates for Athletes book has a great smell. It smells like an old textbook that I had. And I really enjoy– like I went into Books-A-Millions around here and I saw your book there, the new Yoga for Athletes. And I’m like, let me take a look at that. Let me know if you want me to– I posted about it once when it first came out. I did a post with it.

Dean Pohlman: Oh, yeah. Thank you.

Sean Vigue: And I’m like, that’s cool. It’s so funny because some of the people in bookstores can give two craps that you write books, like you work in a bookstore. Like, these are my books, and like, I’ll ask my buddy Dean and I’ll ask Cassandra. And there are all these people that I’ve collaborated with have books right there, like, yeah, okay, whatever. Just sign it. Would you want me to put it back? Okay. And then they walked off. Hey, these are my books here. Oh, good for you. They just keep walking. So, I was like, that was kind of…

Dean Pohlman: Yeah.

Sean Vigue: But I think some people get scared, like he’s going to make me do Pilates. I don’t want to do Pilates.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, cool. Well, Sean, thanks again for joining me, for sharing all this stuff with me. It was an awesome conversation. I’m sure we’ll talk again soon. I don’t know what else to say. Anything else you want to add?

Sean Vigue: I knew it would be, you and I have– well, we’ve done a couple of collaboration videos together. We did another one when I was in Colorado. Remember, we did? That was a long one. That was awesome. And we’ve had long conversations. But as I say, there’s only a handful of us out there that are kind of crazy enough to do this fitness job that we do where we put our names behind it and have videos and go out to a lot of different kinds of media. I so enjoy talking with you and the others.

I have a podcast too. And I had you on my podcast. I love to find out where people start. It’s always kind of we’re always just constantly stumbling into things. Like we know what we love, what we like to do, and we’re trying to share it across many different platforms and that evolves over time. So, I’ve enjoyed– I got to talk to, you know Lesley Fightmaster?

Dean Pohlman: Yes.

Sean Vigue: You know Lesley, right? She had passed away a few months ago, and her and I did some stuff together, just a real sweetheart. And she was on my podcast, and I so enjoyed having that conversation with her. I need to share that because I know people really miss her a lot. She was such a lovely lady. And I’m so thankful to have conversations like that with her and with you and other people about how we do this, how we go about day-to-day operations of being some kind of online fitness person.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack with it. So, well, thanks for the closing notes. Guys, I encourage you to go learn more about Sean. If you are looking for more yoga workouts, you’re looking for Pilates workouts, he’s got an amazing YouTube channel. He has a very fun teaching style. You’ll see it when you go check it out.

But I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Better Man Podcast. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a review, click the review button, that’s all. It’s just like you don’t even have to write anything. You just click it, and then it’s done. Make sure you follow, subscribe, and I’ll look forward to seeing you or hearing from you or speaking with you, whatever that is, on the next episode.

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