56: David Kitchen
Source: Edge Leadership Academy
“Everything’s normal, and then I’m in the gym… it starts to happen again… My chest starts pumping, my hands are shaking, and my business partner looks at me like, ‘Are you okay?’”
About David
David Kitchen is the Founder and President of Edge Leadership Academy. Coach Kitch, as he is known by his athletes, is a former Division 1 Coach and has a decade of experience building leaders, culture, and mindset at the highest levels of sports and business.
Born in Harrisburg, PA and raised in the coal country region of northeastern Pennsylvania, David was raised by a single mom. Although he never met his biological dad and didn’t have a male role model growing up, he became the man of the house at the young age of 11.
As a kid, David was always outside, playing football, baseball, kickball, riding skateboards, and doing anything else active as his escape from reality. But his real solace was the weight set his stepfather got for him. He would do reps of the few exercises he knew until his arms were numb, and he loved it.
When his stepfather left the family, he took what savings David’s mom had left, leaving her in financial ruin. This was when David’s grandmother stepped in, whisking his family from their apartment above a bar in the middle of town to her home in the countryside, with their closest neighbors a mile away.
This was the best thing to ever happen to David. As his mom went back to school, his grandmother introduced structure into their lives, taming the wild children and showing them what true leadership looked like.
David describes his hometown as the kind of place featured in the movie Friday Night Lights, with signs in town touting the trifecta of God, Family, Football. Being a larger kid obsessed with weights, David played high school ball in front of 12,000 people every weekend. He was heavily recruited as a junior but after blowing his knee, had to settle for a small school in PA after the other offers dried up.
He ended up graduating with a business degree, selling IT systems right out of college. He was good at it but he hated it and when a friend offered him a head coaching position at a local high school, David recognized the divine intervention, left his sales job, and went all in on coaching.
This newfound sense of responsibility gave him fuel for his next step, which was writing letters to every D1 college on the east coast, offering to work in the weight room for free, and Robert Morris University gave him a shot. David quit his job, packed his belongings, and drove to Pittsburgh to start the next chapter of his life.
David’s next big shot came at the age of 25, when he got an offer to be the assistant director of football training at UNLV. This was the opportunity of a lifetime but David was ready. He ended up spending three years strength and conditioning with both football and basketball programs at multiple schools.
Fast forward to 2020. As David and his Georgia Southern basketball team were getting ready to board a plane to head to March Madness, the pandemic shut everything down. They returned to campus to find out that the head coach was offered another job. So, it was time for David to make his next move.
Fortunately for the many lives he would come to impact, his next move was founding the Edge Leadership Academy, which works with athletes and companies to build leaders and take performance to the next level.
David is the author of The Pyramid: A System for Building Tomorrow's Leaders Today, and The Scoreboard: A Self-Audit System to Help You Build the Life You Want.
It’s a far cry from his days as a loose cannon kid in Pennsylvania’s coal country. But that’s David answering the question he now asks his students: “what if you went all in?”
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Max Chopovsky: 0:02
This is Moral of the Story Interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, max Tchaikovsky. Today's guest is David Kitchen, the founder and president of Edge Leadership Academy. Coach Kitch, as he is known by his athletes, is a former Division I coach and has a decade of experience building leaders, culture and mindset at the highest levels of sports and business.
Max Chopovsky: 0:28
Born in Harrisburg, pa, and raised in the coal country region of northeastern Pennsylvania, david was raised by a single mom. Although he never met his biological dad and didn't have a male role model growing up, he became the man of the house at the young age of 11. As a kid, david was always outside playing football, baseball, kickball, riding skateboards and doing anything else active as his escape from reality, but his real solace was the weight set that his stepfather got for him. He would do reps of the few exercises he knew until his arms were numb, and he loved it. When his stepfather left the family, he took what savings David's mom had left, leaving her in financial ruin. This was when David's grandmother stepped in, whisking his family from their apartment above a bar in the middle of town to her home in the countryside, with their closest neighbors a mile away. This was the best thing to ever happen to David. As his mom went back to school, his grandmother introduced structure into their lives, taming the wild children and showing them what true leadership looked like. David describes his hometown as the kind of place featured in the movie Friday Night Lights, with signs in town touting the trifecta of God family football.
Max Chopovsky: 1:38
Being a larger kid obsessed with weights, david played high school ball in front of 12,000 people every weekend. He was heavily recruited as a junior but, after blowing his knee, had to settle for a small school in PA. After the other offers dried up, he ended up graduating with a business degree selling IT systems right out of college. He was good at it, but he hated it. And when a friend offered him a head coaching position at a local high school, david recognized the divine intervention, left the sales job and went all in on coaching. This newfound sense of responsibility gave him fuel for his next step, which was writing letters to every D1 college on the East Coast offering to work in the weight room for free, and Robert Morris University gave him a shot. David quit his job, packed his belongings and drove to Pittsburgh to start the next chapter of his life. David's next big shot came at the age of 25, when he got an offer to be the assistant director of football training at UNLV. This was the opportunity of a lifetime, and David was ready. He ended up spending three years strength and conditioning with both football and basketball programs at multiple schools.
Max Chopovsky: 2:51
Fast forward to 2020. As David and his Georgia Southern basketball team were getting ready to board a plane to head to March Madness, the pandemic shut everything down. They returned to campus to find out that the head coach was offered another job, so it was time for David to make his next move. Fortunately for the many lives he would come to impact. His next move was founding the Edge Leadership Academy, which works with athletes and companies to build leaders and take performance to the next level. David is the author of the Pyramid, a system for building tomorrow's leaders today, and the Scoreboard, a self-audit system to help you build the life you want. It's a far cry from his days as a loose cannon kid in Pennsylvania's coal country, but that is David answering the question he now asks his students what if you went all in? And all in he is. So if you can't stand the heat, you got the wrong kitchen. Coach Kitsch, welcome to the show.
David Kitchen: 3:42
That was phenomenal man. I really enjoy that you do it that way. You know the intro is I always hate writing short intros because I'm like there's so much more, but you never want to bore people. So I appreciate that man. That was a phenomenal synopsis of the man I am today.
Max Chopovsky: 3:56
And quite the man. You are brother, so you are here to tell us a story Before we get started set the stage. Is there anything that we should know?
David Kitchen: 4:09
Yeah, so when the story begins, it actually is a perfect segue from your introduction. The story is, it starts right after I had left coaching. So right after I got out I had founded my business, edge Leadership Academy, and we were fortunate to be profitable in about six months. And then from there, I launched a second business, and so I thought I was taking on the entrepreneurial world right, and so I had my business. I had a gym, I was working on my PhD, I had just finished my first book and was working on my second, and my girlfriend had just moved in with me from Georgia. So that's where the story begins, and then we can dive into it from there, brother.
Max Chopovsky: 4:45
I love it. Let's do it. Tell me a story.
David Kitchen: 4:47
Awesome man. So it was Memorial Day weekend and my girlfriend, like I said, had just moved in with me. She had not moved out of her apartment in Georgia yet, and so we had to go down to Georgia to get her, the rest of her furniture, the rest of her belongings out of this house and move them back to Pennsylvania. So we're driving down and we get stuck in shore traffic. It's Memorial Day weekend, we're heading south on 95. And so you can imagine, it's bumper to bumper. What should have been an 11 hour trip turned into a 17 hour drive, and through that time I just remembered feeling off and I didn't know what it was, I couldn't put my finger on it. And the whole ride down I'm just out and she kept saying to me why are you so quiet? Wait, let's go, cause I'm usually a very rambunctious, loud person, especially in a car. I don't do well being cooped up. And so she's asking me you know what's wrong? What's wrong? And almost was like I blacked out and I remember hearing my name and she's like David, david, and all I felt was I was on the rumble strips and I was like man, what is going on with me, right? So we pull over and she says hey, do you want me to drive? And I'm like, yeah, you drive, I don't. I don't know what's going on. No-transcript. I say, hey, we got to pull over. I don't feel good. Something, something's going on here.
David Kitchen: 6:33
And so we pull over, pull into this gas station. And I go into the gas station, I get a Gatorade and a cliff bar and I'm like, maybe my sugar's low, maybe something's going on. So I get this Gatorade, I get this Clif Bar. I'm walking up to the counter and it was like I could hear a million voices but nothing made sense, like everything was like blurred out. And so, as I'm walking to the counter, I dropped the Gatorade and the Clif Bar and I looked down at my hands and my hands are shaking and I'm like what is wrong with me? This is insane. Wrong with me, this is insane. And so I pick it up, I pay for it, I get back in the U-Haul and this process continues over and over and over.
David Kitchen: 7:09
So every 20 minutes we're pulling over and it gets to the point where I'm literally like falling out of the vehicle and I can't breathe and my chest hurts and I'm like, man, there is something seriously wrong with me and I can't figure out what it is. And so this goes on all the way through the trip and we end up her family lived in Virginia beach. We end up pulling over in Virginia beach and staying the night. I go directly to bed and everybody thinks I'm just physically ill. And I thought I was physically ill, I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was literally falling out into a crumpled heap on the side of the road and I'm just wondering, like man, what is going on? Like this is terrible.
David Kitchen: 7:48
And so we get back to Pennsylvania and I start, you know, going about my life again and it's kind of okay, everything's normal. And then I'm in the gym and it was my gym was 22,000 square feet, beautiful facility, and I'm in there with my business partners. We're having a meeting and it starts to happen again and it starts. Things start shaking. My chest starts pumping real hard, my hands are shaking, I'm sweating and my business partner looks at me and he goes are you okay? I said I don't know. So I ran to the bathroom, I'm throwing up, I'm like what is going on?
David Kitchen: 8:19
So eventually, what happened, max, was I was actually having panic attacks and I had no idea, and so that's the story of my depression, my anxiety. That's where it all started. I had no idea that that's what was going on with me, and it took months to figure it out. I had EKGs, I had sleep studies, I had everything, because everyone was telling me it's something physical and I thought it was something physical. It wasn't, it was something mental. It was mental health issues that I had not dealt with from growing up. So that's a big turning point in my life. Man was that drive from Georgia.
Max Chopovsky: 8:53
I cannot believe that you finished the drive. That's insane. Most people, myself included, would have pulled over and been like I've got to lock up this U-Haul and call an ambulance. That's crazy. If you're hitting the rumble strips, I would have thought, well, my girlfriend's not in the car with me. I'm just in the U-Haul by myself. Nobody's there to kind of shake me and say, dude, you're going off the road.
David Kitchen: 9:18
I was calling everybody I knew and just trying to distract myself from what was going on. So I was literally making phone calls on the way home, calling friends I hadn't talked to in a long time. Just hey, how are you doing? They didn't know what was wrong with me. I just needed somebody to talk to, right, and I didn't know. I didn't know because I really didn't know what was wrong with me, I had no idea what was going on.
Max Chopovsky: 9:46
And for somebody whose whole life was predicated on strength to feel that week, in that moment. It rocked me to my core. And so what happened?
David Kitchen: 9:50
after you realized that they were panic attacks. What was the journey from there? It was seven months of the hardest work that I ever had to do. Once I finally acknowledged it and recognized it and admitted it, and it got to a point where I just said I need help, like I can't keep living like this, because they were happening more often. It was every single day and I was like I can't live like this. And so I finally got help and I got started going to therapy, got put on medication, got diagnosed with depression and anxiety and what happened was I literally slipped into this depression.
David Kitchen: 10:20
Where my girlfriend was at the time was also a strength and conditioning coach, and so we kept similar hours. And then so we would get up in the morning about four, 30,. You know, she'd have her coffee, we talk in the morning, and then when she would leave for work, she would think that I was getting ready to go to the gym. I would go back to bed until one or two in the afternoon and just lay in bed, and for somebody that's typically a 4am kind of guy, that's odd, right. And so I did that for probably man four or five months in a row where I just I didn't want to leave my house, I didn't want to do anything. It took everything in me to go downstairs to our home gym and train, and so it was a long ride, man.
Max Chopovsky: 10:55
I had to do a lot of work and I had to have a lot of be really honest with yourself, which for the bulk of your life, as you said, it was all about strength, and so that's what you had to project, not just to your family when you were 11 and 12, but you had to project it as the leader of every sort of team that you helped over all those years, and so those conversations had to be some of the hardest conversations you had with yourself your entire life, I would imagine.
David Kitchen: 11:34
Absolutely, and what it was was realizing that the reason that that had happened the way it did, the reason it was so sudden like that, was because I've been going my whole life right.
David Kitchen: 11:43
I've been chasing achievement, I've been chasing achievement, I've been chasing things and all of a sudden you're in a U-Haul by yourself on a 17-hour drive and it gets quiet right and the only thing left is you and your thoughts, and I didn't want to be involved with that.
David Kitchen: 11:59
There were some things from my past, from my childhood, you know, seeing my stepfather struggle with addiction, seeing some of the abusive behaviors in my household. There were things that I didn't want to deal with, that were put in a box and buried and covered with years of overachieving and chasing external things to fill that internal wound. And all of a sudden I'm face to face with them and I got nowhere to hide, because it's just me in the cab of a U-Haul, and I don't know if you've been in a U-Haul lately, but they didn't update those things. There's no Bluetooth, so there's no music, there's no nothing. I mean, you're just listening to the engine and so it is just you and your thoughts. And that's what that was, man, that was. The boxes finally shook loose and all the ghosts came running out and I was not prepared or capable of handling it.
Max Chopovsky: 12:43
And it's not something you expect, because nobody throughout their life thinks I have some issues I need to deal with, right. And so when we're younger, we just go, go, go, we just chase right. And, like I remember, when I was in school I struggled with my own mental health issues but I never could point the finger at it and say. I could never put my finger on it and say this is what this is, this is where it comes from. Here are the things that I need to sort of work through. So what I remember what I would do is I would jump in my car and I went to Miami, ohio, so it's kind of surrounded by a couple hours of cornfields in every direction, and I would leave campus and I would get into my 1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse with 130 horsepower and five-speed transmission and I would just go race on those country roads and just listen to Paul Oakenfold and I loved it.
Max Chopovsky: 13:43
And I realized many years later why I loved it. I loved it because when you're going a hundred miles an hour and you're going up and down these hills and if you don't hit it right, you lose traction, you'll be dead in a second you have no room for any thoughts other than how do I keep this car on the road? And I just remember it was white knuckles, I was gripping the steering wheel so hard. And it was many years later that I realized that's why I did that, because I couldn't be alone with my thoughts either. And so that was my way of kind of short-circuiting that and saying I don't have to be alone with my thoughts. And it was many years later when I realized that chasing is never going to be the ultimate solution, because it's a bandaid. You're just trying to run, and ultimately, what I'm sure you realize too is you got to stop running, you got to turn around, you got to plant your feet and you got to get in the fucking three-point stance.
David Kitchen: 14:44
Yep, and that is so difficult, man. It is so hard because there's so many layers to it. Right, because you start to, once you start to unpack that stuff, you start to see how much your past and I say that I've seen how much the ghosts of my past had one hand on the steering wheel my whole life. Right, because I realized like, oh, I overachieved because I had these abandonment issues. I overachieved because I thought that people would love me if I was successful, right, and so then success became my drug, and then it became the work kept me so busy so that I didn't have to think about anything else. So, and the byproduct of all that work and all that busyness was the success which people which I equated with love and I equated with people caring about me. And so it just became this, this self-fulfilling prophecy of I'm never going to stop. Right, and and I remember standing, I remember standing on.
David Kitchen: 15:38
I was in Las Vegas, I just took the job at UNLV, and I was the first. So four out of my six roommates from college are college coaches now in one fashion or another, and I was the first one to make it to division one. And so my buddy came out to visit me and we're standing on the second level of the Eiffel Tower Club in Vegas and we're overlooking the strip and we're having a drink, and it should have been this awesome moment, right. And he's been my best friend since I'm 10 years old. And he looks at me and he says what are you going to do if it's not enough? And I said, what do you mean? And he's like what are you going to do if that confetti falls? They give you that national championship ring. You do all this stuff and it's not enough.
David Kitchen: 16:17
And that was a question that at that time I was not even remotely prepared to answer. I didn't even want to think about it, right? But then all those years later, it all came to the surface and it's like, oh, that won't be enough, that it'll never be enough If I continue down this path of just chasing external things to fill these internal wounds, it'll never be enough. And so I look at it now and I say I lead with love, like I used to lead with on some level of fear and a self-hatred of I just want to be the best and I want people to care for me because I am the best. Now I lead with love, because I love everything that I do and I love the people around me while I'm doing it.
Max Chopovsky: 16:55
Dude, I have like goosebumps listening to this right now. There is I had a guy on the show, shea Hillenbrand, who was a starter for the Red Sox and he was an MVP. He was incredibly accomplished and he had that same moment when he was literally flying on a private jet and just realized that he was miserable, like all of the stuff that everybody around him was telling him should be enough to make him hell. Anybody completely happy wasn't even making a dent in the way he felt and he was like it will never be enough. I think that you were fortunate enough to understand this pretty early in your life.
Max Chopovsky: 17:42
A lot of people just keep chasing and keep chasing and then they realize when they turn around and look back on their life that they were chasing the wrong thing. There is I think I've quoted this gosh on multiple episodes in the show, but J Cole has a song called Note to Self on his 2014 album and he says there's one part where he says the good news is, man, you came a long way. The bad news is, you went the wrong way. You came a long way. The bad news is you went the wrong way and the first time I heard that I was like damn, so many people chase the wrong thing, they chase the wrong thing. I do have a question, though it was a superhuman effort Do you think that you would have pushed that hard if you did not have those ghosts with one hand on the steering wheel, if you didn't have those demons kind of all around you?
David Kitchen: 19:03
No, definitely not, Definitely not. I think it was a perfect storm of things, right. I think I watched my mom struggle for so long, but I watched her also show grit, and so I internalized that piece of it. And then I also internalized this piece of not having fear, because I had to stand up. I was 11 years old, 10 years old, standing in front of a struggling addict, keeping him from doing something that could have potentially ruined our family, and so I built this inner belief of like I can do hard things. Now it was not true confidence. It was born of fear. But I think that perfect storm of ingredients created this monster, right, and it also created this I say monster loosely, because it also created this really driven person who is, at his core, a protector, right, because that's who I am At my core. I want other people to be successful, right, and I want other people to feel that stuff. But along the way, I still felt like the more I achieved, the more people would look at me the way I wished I looked at myself.
Max Chopovsky: 20:11
Of course, of course. A few months ago I was thinking about this I have three kids. Is I have three kids? And there is always sort of this thought, that kind of runs through the back of my mind, which is like am I being a good dad? Am I doing the right thing? Will they remember their childhood as a great childhood? And parts of me sort of think oh, we have to do all these like amazing vacations and these sort of wonderful trips and these unforgettable experiences, and at some point I realized that they don't care about any of that. Like all they care about is that I'm just there, like I'm literally just in the living room playing Jenga with them, not on my phone, because that's all that matters to them.
Max Chopovsky: 20:55
Like I set the bar artificially high for my own kids. But if I think about my close friends or my parents, I don't give a shit what kind of car they drive, what clothes they wear, where they live. All I care about is that if I need to pick up the phone and call them, they'll pick it up and they'll talk to me. Right, and they'll do the thing that good friends do, which is take time when it's inconvenient for you to help somebody else to help your friend.
David Kitchen: 21:27
It becomes about character, right, and it becomes about understanding that fulfilled success is not an external metric, it's an internal metric and the only currency like. I picture it like a mountaintop right, like you're climbing, you're, you're, you're trying to scale this mountain, to quote unquote fulfilled success at the top. And when you get there, you go through all these things along the way and when you get there, there's a doorman at the top of that mountain and he checks your resume, and your resume is your character, and he looks back down that mountain and he sees what you did along the way to get here and the only way that he lets you in that door at the very top is if you have the right character. And if you don't, then you sit out on that peak and you have those moments like I had. And you have those moments like a lot of successful quote unquote successful people that were measuring on the wrong scoreboard have. And you're cold and lonely at the top of a mountain peak and you're like how did I get here?
Max Chopovsky: 22:25
Yeah, now, you became the man you are in part by having that adversity when you were younger. So the other side of the coin is you may not be where you are right now without having gone through that, because that molded you and that turned you into the man you are today Right. So, as much as you had to do so much work and you had so much trauma in your life, you might not be in the position you're in right now without having gone through that.
David Kitchen: 23:00
You might not be in the position you're in right now without having gone through that. No, I definitely wouldn't. I definitely wouldn't, a hundred percent.
David Kitchen: 23:07
I have said multiple times being born in the situation that I was born in and going through what I went through was the greatest gift that I was ever given and it goes back to. You know, if you think about superheroes like, there's not much difference between a hero and a villain. They both have a pretty traumatic backstory. The only difference is what they choose to do with it, right? One person says the world hurt me, so I'm going to make sure that the world feels it. The other one says the world hurt me, so I'm going to make sure that I help the rest of the world so that other people don't have to feel it. Right, it's the same path, it's just there's a fork in the road and I think my childhood and the experiences that I had built a skillset in me that could be much like anybody. That can be used for good or could be used for evil.
David Kitchen: 23:49
You know, I look at different sections of my life and I look back and I'm like, oh okay, here's how these things have influenced this, and when I'm at my worst. I can be very cold, I can be very callous, I can be very all these different things selfish, et cetera. But when I'm at my best, I can utilize some of those traits that allow me to be callous and selfish, and this, that and the other, and I can also become very selfless and I can become very driven to make an impact in the world and I can become very open and vulnerable. This feeling of being willing, again at 10, 11, all the way up through you know, every time he popped back into our lives to stand in front of a man that I knew was unstable, to say the least, and protect him, protect my family from him, that's that same feeling of fear, but doing it anyways that I get when I share my story on stage. It's the same mechanism, and so it's just deciding how you put it to work for you.
Max Chopovsky: 24:43
Totally. Yeah, you have to make that conscious choice. It makes me feel like adversity is a requirement, like it has to be a requirement. You have to, on some level, go through adversity to shape you. It's like strength training, right? We're talking about this. You cannot build muscle without going into the gym and just crushing yourself, in some cases to failure, right. And when the muscle fibers rip, they grow back stronger and bigger. And I think that it's a challenge for kids that are growing up without having faced that adversity, because they're not getting some of those calluses right that they kind of need to face some of those challenges when they get older.
David Kitchen: 25:33
Yeah, and even from a physiological standpoint, if you look at it, one of the reasons and don't quote me on this, but in my opinion, you know, one of the reasons that there's so much anxiety and things in the world is because our threshold for triggering our fight or flight reflex has decreased. Right, like the threshold. Like the more you train, the more it takes for you to get sore. You increase your threshold, you increase your resistance and your resilience, and I think the same is so true of adversity and emotional stress and emotional thresholds as well. And so, for when I look at children now, like it's, I had this I'm trying to think of the best way to phrase this. I had a unique opportunity as a coach, because I would have kids come in at 17, 18 years old and I'd see them leave at 22, 23 years old as completely different people, right. And so one of the things that we always talked about with the parents was you have to let them go through things, and there's that old quote like you don't want to prepare the world for your kids, you want to prepare your kids for the world, right. And so I think we have to work to increase that threshold.
David Kitchen: 26:39
I'm not saying that everybody should go through what I went through. That's not you know by any stretch of the imagination what I'm getting at, but I think those things are important. Those experiences are important because it has it's increased my threshold for discomfort, right. So I look at things now because of what I've gone through as a child and what I went through even as a young adult. And I look at things now and I say I can do hard things. I literally have it tattooed on my forearm in Latin Hard things are broken by hard things. You can do hard things. But the only reason that I know that to my core is because I've done hard things and I've been through hard things and I've been through the fire and the flames and I'm still standing, and so that's the whole thing. But if you don't have those experiences, that threshold never gets bumped up and then you have to find out the hard way and that's really difficult, especially as an older adult, because it can shatter belief systems and everything else, and it's really, really hard to bounce back.
Max Chopovsky: 27:35
A hundred percent, yeah, so it makes me think of my grandfather, who was born in 1929, which, all over the world I mean the US was about to experience the and they were starving. And their mom ended up taking some of the last jewelry she had left and taking a train this was the middle of the winter walking to the nearest train station, taking a train to market where she could trade that jewelry for two loaves of bread. And she brought those loaves of bread back on the train and then took and then walked from that train station on foot back to their house, but it was wintertime, she walked through the snow, she didn't have very warm clothes and she came home and she gave her children the bread. But as she was walking through the snow she got sick and she ended up getting pneumonia and dying three days later and he was, I think, 11 at the time. Right, I mean that kind of experience. And then world war II came. They had evacuated, they needed to evacuate, get on a train. They ended up going to Siberia.
Max Chopovsky: 28:55
That kind of childhood, of having that happen, made him into the kind of person that was able to become one of the most prominent journalists and poets in Ukraine while being Jewish. Jews never got those kinds of opportunities. He first started writing under a pseudonym and then he wrote a really critical story and his editor said we got to take your pseudonym, this is going to go live. It's got to go live under your real name, because his pseudonym was a non-Jewish pseudonym, right, and he ended up rising to prominence and in fact, when we were immigrating to America we moved in 92. They moved in 94. Right before they moved he was offered the newspaper, which was one of the biggest newspapers in Kiev at the time. So he was offered to be the editor-in-chief of the newspaper and he turned it down to come to America.
Max Chopovsky: 29:47
But it just makes me think that what a story arc for somebody that had such a traumatic childhood. But he would not have been able to make it that far without having an incredibly and unreasonably high tolerance for stress, because he just came to expect it and so everything else that life threw at him was kind of. It was hard, but it couldn't have been as hard as seeing his mom pass away in front of his eyes because she brought them loaves of bread, and you can imagine the guilt that went through his mind. Like I think you're absolutely right. You have to experience adversity, and again, maybe not as crazy as what you went through or what he went through, but something Otherwise you'll never advance right, and the answer then becomes to seek out discomfort right.
David Kitchen: 30:37
The answer then becomes in your own life, to seek it out, right, Whether it's a physical discomfort, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, those types of things. Like that becomes the answer. If life doesn't supply it, you have to go and find it and I think Completely right For me. I think that's our responsibility as humans. Like it deeply saddens me when all that somebody can say about someone is they had so much potential. Like that saddens me because it's like if they would have sought out discomfort and chased it and figured out like I'm excited to see having this past and having these gifts that I've been given. I'm excited to see what I'm capable of. Like I'm really excited about that. It genuinely it gives me life, it gives me passion, Right, Like. And so I think if you seek it out, you can get that too. You can seek out that discomfort and all of a sudden, you can take bigger swings at things because your tolerance level is much better.
David Kitchen: 31:32
Just simple things like when I started the business during the pandemic, people were like dude, you might be broke. I'm like, I've been broke, I grew up broke. Like I'm not afraid, that doesn't scare me Like that's not. That's not what drive. The money doesn't drive me, you know, and so, and so for me it's that fear is gone, that's not even on my radar of being broke Like, okay, so what that's?
Max Chopovsky: 31:51
amazing dude. We were talking about working out before we started recording and you know, rowing has been my thing ever since I stopped doing CrossFit years back and I got comfortable I could have a decent time on my 5K. And then my buddy in January was like you should do a triathlon. I've never run a marathon, I've never done a tri. And he did a sprint tri and the summer of 23,. This last summer he wanted to do an Olympic tri. I was like all right, let's do it. So I started training, but I was training by myself and I'm not much of a swimmer. I wasn't much of a swimmer, it wasn't much of a runner and that first swim I had to do was so humbling. I remember I have a picture of my goggles with the pool behind them before I got in the pool that first time and it was like day one. I was really excited. But after I got out of the water I was like holy shit, how am I going to swim that entire distance nearly a mile if I can't even do 600 meters?
David Kitchen: 32:53
I can't even do 200 meters without struggling.
Max Chopovsky: 32:57
But what happened was I ended up doing it. I ended up finishing the try under three hours, which blew my mind. But I realized that actually it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, because the training was harder than the fight Right and I was comfortable Like I could have just kept rowing and that would have been my only thing. But now my fitness level is so much better because I was like I have no idea how I'm going, will allow myself to not do it.
David Kitchen: 33:27
And in those moments where it sucks and like you look at it and you're like, wow, that was really really hard. I've started to reframe because I told you before we got on camera, I'm kind of changing my training too. Like I came from a powerlifting background. Now that I'm doing entrepreneurship and I'm not in a weight room on a daily basis anymore, it's like okay, now I want to be a little bit more of a hybrid athlete. I want to change from being an off-road vehicle to kind of more towards an F1 car if I can, and so I suck at these things. I suck at putting the weight vest on and going for a run. I suck at all these things. But I've started to reframe it in those moments and almost like find joy in it and be like this is cool because I'm never going to suck this bad again. Like I get to be new at something right I've been training for, as you said in the introduction, I've been training for 20 years, right, and so I'm familiar in the weight room.
David Kitchen: 34:13
I'm comfortable in the weight room. I'm not comfortable in these other things, and so it's fun because I get to have that beginner's mindset and for you, doing the try right, are you familiar with I believe it's a Japanese tradition misogi. So it's the tradition of doing something hard every year, something that's so difficult one day a year that it impacts the other 364 days of the year. Like it's something each year. They have a challenge that you do something that is so hard and so uncomfortable that it impacts the rest of your year.
Max Chopovsky: 34:44
That's cool. I feel this seed being planted in my mind right now. It's a dangerous thing.
David Kitchen: 34:50
I know I've came across it and immediately in my mind I'm like hmm, what can I do this year? What could be something that could be completely out of the box? So I'm thinking about doing a boxing match. To be honest with you, ooh yeah. It's gonna require a different side of me.
Max Chopovsky: 35:05
I did that a long time ago. It was a fight for charity with a bunch of real estate brokers. It was crazy. I mean we had you know glove, we had headgear on, but there were a lot of people in the audience, a lot of testosterone and dude. It was insane. I'd never experienced anything like it. Like when the bell rings, it's just you and your opponent and man. Those three minutes are an eternity for each round, an eternity Like your heart rate spikes so quickly and it just stays there. There's no respite, because if you're not punching or defending, the adrenaline is still coursing through your system Like it's elevated for a straight three minutes. And then you get a small break and before you know it it's like all right man, time to get back out there. You're like shit, that is a whole new joint man. You should do that totally.
David Kitchen: 35:57
Yeah, I'm thinking about. I had a friend who did a similar. He did KO for cancer down in Philly and they fight in the Fillmore in Philadelphia, which is a pretty, pretty famous venue, and he did it last year and he he talked to me and said you should, he's like you should try this. And I was like, and my brother actually went through a cancer battle this year and so he's you know, he's 26 years old, he's two and O versus cancer, so shout out to that that warrior in my family as well. But so for me I'm like, oh, it's kind of a, you know, an event that would hit close to home for me, coming off of this with him, and you know, so, yeah, it's definitely something on my mind Could be my Misogi for the year.
Max Chopovsky: 36:30
Dude, I hate to tell you, but you don't have a choice. I know, I know you got no choice, brother, you got to do it, I know. So, as you think about that story that you told about your panic attacks, what is, for you, the moral of that story?
David Kitchen: 36:54
is, for you, the moral of that story Learning to get comfortable with the voice that's inside you when everything else is quiet.
David Kitchen: 36:58
In the years that have passed since then, I spend more time in silence now than I ever have in my life, and in fact I look forward to it, and that is so different and so powerful, right, and so I think if you can get to that space, it is the most freeing thing in the world. Like there's the book by James Allen. It's a short essay, as a man thinketh right, and or it might be Paul Allen, I got to think about it, but he talks about, you know, the inner sanctum of your mind and how it should be a place of peace and a place of comfort and a place that you can build beautiful things. But if it's not, it's going to be a place where you have tormentors and a place that you get tortured and destroyed. And so I think that that's the moral of my story has been that shift, and how much it has freed me up to operate at a level that I never even thought I'd be able to operate at, because I'm at peace, I'm not afraid of the quiet anymore.
Max Chopovsky: 37:55
Yeah, that is a really powerful thought. It's a really powerful thought. I will say there's one thing you mentioned earlier that I want to correct you on. You said you know it wasn't a physical issue, it was a mental issue, but I think that you probably know that actually, mental is physical, right, Like when your hands are shaking you're about to pass out. That is your body saying to you that well, you haven't listened to my subtle hands, so let me make the shit real obvious for you. You know I'm going to blur your vision and make you pass out. So it is just as physical, as you know. Breaking your arm, Absolutely yeah.
David Kitchen: 38:35
And one of the things that I've learned you know, obviously I'm working on my PhD now in psychology, so I've dove into some of this stuff too One of the things I've learned is that everybody's presents differently right, Like so, like some people are more on the physical side, like somatic, and then some people have a little bit more of the internal type of symptoms and they present differently. So for anybody out there that's listening to this, listen to your body, man, because, just as you said, at some point it's going to stop being subtle and it's going to tell you all right, watch this, I'm going to jam the e-brake on you and we're going to see what happens.
Max Chopovsky: 39:06
Totally, you're so right on you and we're going to see what happens. Totally, you're so right. And for a lot of people it just takes time to understand how to be sensitive enough, how to have a sensitive enough antenna to be able to listen. While the hints are subtle, like I would get injured all the time when I would do CrossFit and even when I started rowing I didn't have the best form and my body was giving me subtle hints like oh, this is an ache that's getting worse when you row and it kind of stays with you for a little bit and I was being an idiot, thinking I'm just going to power through this right, lock it off, right, it's fine. And then I would be out for weeks doing PT because I didn't listen to my body, right.
Max Chopovsky: 39:46
And it's the same thing with mental health. Fortunately, I think the landscape is different now. It vastly improved, where it's completely normal and encouraged to take care of your mental health as much as your physical health, and that's a really good thing, because that was not always the case. A lot of people struggled their entire lives because for me, growing up in the former Soviet Union, it was like did you have any mental issues growing up. No, because they didn't exist there, right, it was just not a thing, like you'll be fine.
David Kitchen: 40:21
It was the same for me growing up. I mean, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, like, like I said, god, family football. This will put it in perspective I broke my foot week, week four of the season, week five of the season, my senior year. So I was playing on a blown knee and a broken foot and I was getting taped up before practice and my coach looked at me and I said, coach, it's broken man, like this thing is purple, it is busted. And he looked at me and he said how do you want to be remembered? Right, and it's like that. That's where I grew up, right.
David Kitchen: 40:49
So I grew up in this mentality and this culture of football and toughness and you know, all these things where it's like mental health, like no way you know, no way you admit you're depressed, you admit you have anxiety, like it wasn't a thing, and so you know, I'm I'm glad that it's changed and I'm really, really hopeful that it continues to change and it continues to permeate through some of the cultures that are still holding on to the old thought processes and some of the things that hold us back. You know, and and I think that's that's the direction we need to continue to go. You know, because I know the effects that I've seen in my life and I know how much better I am now, how much happier I am, how much better my business is. I'm a better friend, I'm a better. You know, son, I'm a better business owner. I'm a better salesman. I'm better at everything that I do, you know, when I'm taking care of my mental health and building that stack of things to keep me on the track.
Max Chopovsky: 41:41
Of course, of course. Now you have been in sales for a very long time. You also have led high performance teams for a long time, and I would think that storytelling is a big part of that, of both of those, and so I know you've told lots of stories, I know you've heard lots of stories. So, of the stories that you've heard, what do the good ones have in common?
David Kitchen: 42:11
that you've heard. What do the good ones have in common? Authenticity. I think you can really tell when someone has rehearsed a story over and over and over and I think there's something to be said about somebody that can be an authentic storyteller, meaning that that story is not cookie cutter, that story is raw and it is true, and sometimes details come out that were left out in the last time you told it or whatever, like that's what I love, you know, and that I think my best performances for myself as a public speaker and as somebody that stands on stage for a living now my best ones are the ones where I go off script and it just comes from inside out, you know, and so I think great stories share that authenticity, totally.
Max Chopovsky: 42:50
Couldn't agree more. What about a good storyteller? What makes for a good storyteller?
David Kitchen: 42:55
You have to ride it Like you have to invest in the story. You have to ride the wave with them, right, and so I think that that makes for a really good storyteller. Somebody that can put themselves in the shoes of both themselves and the audience at the same time Like you have to be able to ride the wave with you should be up when the audience is up and down when the audience is down, like it's a dance right between you and the people in the crowd.
Max Chopovsky: 43:19
I love that. I love that you ride the wave together. What is one of your favorite books that just nails the art of storytelling?
David Kitchen: 43:30
Gates of Fire, steven Pressfield. It's the 300 story Phenomenal, phenomenal book David and Goliath. Absolutely the way it's constructed and the way he paints it. To me it's perfection. To me that's like what it should look like, that's amazing.
Max Chopovsky: 43:49
That's amazing. Well, last question, brother, you've come a long way since you were 20. You've learned a lot, you've matured a lot, but if you had a moment with your 20-year-old self.
David Kitchen: 44:09
What would you say to that, David? Kill the idea of Mr Perfect. Let it go, man. You don't have to be that version of you that you have in your head that keeps you up at night. You don't have to be him. That would be the message that simple Just lead with love, dude, Because you matter and what you're putting out into the world matters. You don't have to be perfect.
Max Chopovsky: 44:29
I love that In an age where perfection is sold on the cover of every magazine fewer now, actually not every magazine. Now we're seeing some vulnerability, but by and large that's been the approach. That's such such a poignant message and one that I am very happy to end on man. That does it, coach Kitsch. Thank you for being on the show, man.
David Kitchen: 45:00
Thank you, brother. This is phenomenal. You have created an environment and a platform that is much needed. I mean, I'm super humbled to have been on it and been a part of it, man, so thank you.
Max Chopovsky: 45:10
Thank you, man. I'm just here to create the platform. You're the one sharing your story and I am honored that you chose to share it with me in the audience. So for show notes and more, head over to mosspodorg. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Moral of the Story. I'm Max Trapofsky. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.