Charlie The Spaniard Brenneman is a professional mixed martial arts fighter, speaker, mentor, and author. After a successful high school wrestling career, Charlie took his talents to Lockhaven University where he achieved a top 12 finish at Division I Nationals and a first team all academic. In 2011, he was ranked as high as number 7 in the world in the UFC and in 2015, he published his autobiography, Driven: My Unlikely Journey from Classroom to Cage.
00:00:00.060Most of you have watched MMA fights. From the casual observer, however, it simply looks like two guys beating each other mercilessly.
00:00:06.660And while the violence is certainly an element of the fighting these guys participate in, there are so many lessons that can be extracted from fighting in the cage.
00:00:13.400My guest today, MMA fighter Charlie the Spaniard Brenneman, shares with us how to become more disciplined, how to develop a perfect day, and what separates the winners from the losers.
00:00:22.180You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path.
00:00:27.880When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time. Every time. You are not easily deterred or defeated. Rugged. Resilient. Strong.
00:00:37.660This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
00:00:47.180Men, what's going on today? My name is Ryan Michler. I am the host and founder of Order of Man. I'm glad you're tuning in here with us.
00:00:52.780If you haven't heard this podcast yet and you're new here, I want you to know we talk about all things manly when it comes to the relationships you have with your family and your community, your health and your fitness, your wealth and business, but most importantly, how to take care of yourself.
00:01:06.320Now, we've got a great one lined up for you today, and we're going to be talking about manly lessons learned from fighting MMA.
00:01:12.260My guest today is going to give us the lessons he's learned from his career so we don't have to go out there and learn it the hard way.
00:01:17.980But before we get into that, I do want to give you the heads up on the Iron Council, which is our elite mastermind.
00:01:23.080Now, I'm sure you've heard of it by now, but if not, this is where men go to actually apply the stuff, apply the things they learn from this podcast and our blog into their lives.
00:01:31.980This is not for guys who simply want to learn about it or talk about what it means to be a man.
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00:01:42.800They want to increase their wealth. Maybe they want to start a new business.
00:01:45.340All of the things I know you're interested in, I get messages and emails every single day from men like yourself who are not satisfied with where they are in life and are ready to do something about it.
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00:02:20.500Now, my guest today is Charlie the Spaniard Brenneman.
00:02:23.560He is a professional mixed martial arts fighter, speaker, mentor, and author.
00:02:28.000Following a successful high school wrestling career, Charlie took his talents to Lockhaven University,
00:02:32.020where he achieved a top 12 finish at Division I Nationals and a first team all academic.
00:02:36.980Now, here's where it gets interesting.
00:02:39.160After teaching Spanish for three years and winning Spike TV's Pros vs. Joes,
00:02:44.220Charlie decided to leave his job to pursue a master's degree and also begin his professional fighting career.
00:02:50.620In 2011, he was ranked as high as number seven in the world in the UFC.
00:02:54.320And in 2015, he published his autobiography, Driven, My Unlikely Journey from Classroom to Cage.
00:03:18.860That mentality, to be honest, it's funny.
00:03:21.040You know, I really do have that mentality.
00:03:22.600I just push through it and sweat and work out and try to just, you know, beat the sickness out of me.
00:03:27.880But I'm not sure that's a true thing, but I work on that mentality.
00:03:32.280You know, I think it is, and I think there's a lot of people who would probably disagree with me on this.
00:03:36.220And I realize that there's people out there who have serious illnesses and sickness and disease.
00:03:41.680But at the end of the day, I think a lot of us just need to tough it out and do what we can just to get past it because there's things to be done, right?
00:04:56.500I needed something to do with myself and with my life.
00:04:59.260And a friend of mine from college wrestling, Frankie Edgar, who, you know, went on to become the UFC champ and is still doing really well.
00:05:06.680I saw him fighting, and I thought, man, I can do that.
00:05:09.500And so I took the steps to get it done.
00:05:12.080I left my job graciously, and I got a grad assistantship for grad school.
00:05:18.220I moved to eastern Pennsylvania, started training.
00:05:21.060And once grad school was over, I jumped into it full time, moved to New Jersey, and spent much of the last decade driving all over the east coast to get the best training in.
00:05:30.940What do you think about – I really am on board with what you just said about purpose.
00:05:35.420I've thought a lot about what I call the domestication of modern man.
00:06:26.440So if you have a married couple or you have a couple who they, you know, they form a relationship on day one.
00:06:34.080And every day it gets a little more, a little more intense, a little more intense.
00:06:37.540Well, if you let a seed, some sort of seed of negativity start on day one, when you extrapolate that and multiply it by a year, five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years, then it becomes this giant mountain.
00:06:50.600Between you and X, whether it's a goal or whether it's some other pursuit.
00:06:54.560And I think that a lot of times people allow those seeds to really sprout.
00:06:59.220And then when they realize they're there, it's such a monumental problem that it's too intimidating to attack.
00:07:05.780So let's say somebody finds themselves in that rut where they feel like they're stuck or that they don't have purpose like you talked about.
00:07:11.860Barring a complete job transfer and fighting MMA, what do you suggest guys do?
00:07:19.520So it's like, you know, whether you call it trimming the fat or whether you call it getting rid of the excess stuff, you know, just what I like to do is every morning, you know, I get up really early, I bust my butt, I train physically hard, I train mentally hard, I'm reading, I'm learning.
00:07:33.840And it's just always clearing the fat.
00:07:39.560You know, there's exercise you can do, whether it's discovering your why or whether it's, you know, writing out your perfect day, these different things.
00:07:45.920But for me, the motivation and the drive to be different is deeply seated in just my core self.
00:08:03.120Because I think a lot of guys know where they are, that they're not happy with life or where they need to be, but they're directionless.
00:08:09.440They don't have any idea of what I need to be doing or how can this change or how can this improve?
00:08:13.760They don't even really realize that something else is out there.
00:08:16.260They just know what they're in is not quite right.
00:08:18.700I mean, for me, I was fortunate and I write about this in my book and I write about it in blogs, etc.
00:08:23.920But I knew from a very young age, you know, what I wanted to do and what I want to do is I want to live, experience and share with other people.
00:08:33.320And the format, you know, at first it was wrestling and then it was through teaching and then it was through professional fighting and now it's through speaking.
00:08:40.520But the theme of inspiring people has been in my being since I was a kid.
00:08:46.560For someone who's, you know, our age, I don't know exactly how old you are, but, you know, you're guessing.
00:09:12.620Go home from wherever you're doing right now and write out your perfect day.
00:09:15.900What, you know, what time you want to get up, what you want to eat, who you want to be around, what you want to do, where you want to do it, etc.
00:09:21.600And then assess it and think, okay, what's the first little thing I can do right now to create that same snowball effect that I was talking of negativity earlier, to create that same snowball effect of positivity.
00:09:38.260I think a lot of guys will look at that though because I've heard that answer before and it's right on.
00:09:42.620I mean, I've done the same thing in my life and I've seen huge transformations and changes and excitement in my life because I'm willing to invest some time in doing that.
00:09:51.140But there's a lot of guys out there who I think will skim over that and won't implement that advice because it almost sounds like it's too simple, right?
00:09:59.460Those people who are going to jump over it and who are going to skim over it aren't going to accomplish what they want to do because they don't understand that what gets you to the end, what gets you to where you want to be are the little things that you do on a daily basis that the average person doesn't want to do.
00:10:15.540And I was actually talking with some of the youth in our church yesterday and one of the gals that we were talking with, she plays basketball and I asked her how many drills she thinks she runs on a weekly basis during practice and she said anywhere from probably 50 to 100 different drills.
00:10:29.680And I said, well, how many different skills are you learning?
00:10:32.140She said, well, at the end of the day, we're only learning three skills, right?
00:10:35.320Passing, dribbling, and shooting and we're just learning and doing all these drills to get better at those three things.
00:10:41.680So she talked a lot about the small things, just getting consistently better at a select few things will really help them obviously in that context win a basketball game, but as life as well.
00:10:52.900You know, I've had a wrestling career, I've had a teaching career, I've had a fighting career and I'm building a speaking career.
00:11:00.680And, you know, I'm living that right now, you know, trying to narrow and focus on, all right, who really am I talking to and what really am I talking about?
00:11:09.800So it's a real thing that just because someone's successful or perceived successful, it doesn't end there.
00:11:23.400You should watch it and all your other listeners should watch it as well.
00:11:26.260It's called Euro Dreams of Sushi, J-I-R-O.
00:11:29.440But it's about this world-renowned sushi chef who, I mean, he literally said, I've been doing the same thing every day for, I think it's like 70 years.
00:11:46.720Because I know if I look at things that I have to do every single day and I do them because I know that they're an important part or a component of what it is that I want to accomplish.
00:11:54.980How do you personally stay motivated to continue doing those things when it gets mundane and boring?
00:11:59.460Yeah, I mean at the very root of it, it's remembering to focus on your why and your reason for being.
00:12:23.620You know, and there's these different funnels that creates enough of a variance that are all collectively working together to achieve my ultimate goal.
00:12:34.380In the past, I've actually bounced from thing to thing.
00:12:36.740And my wife, as I started Order of Man just about a year ago now, she said to me, I really like the idea.
00:12:42.360I think it's exciting and I'm excited for you to do it.
00:12:44.360But I think it'll only last for, you know, several months because I think you'll get bored.
00:12:48.360And I do, I tend to get bored, but I've done exactly what you're talking about where we've got the blog and we've got the podcast and we've got the mastermind and we've got this and we've got that.
00:12:57.680And it's created enough variance to keep things interesting for me.
00:13:00.320So all of those things, it's, you know, it's like a puzzle or, you know, it's all of those things are differently, independently functioning towards that master goal.
00:13:32.180I will tell you, though, one of the biggest things of living life, living life in the public like that, and I've had some really big fights, you know, some co-main events in the UFC on live television.
00:13:43.700And I've also, like, not had the best nights on live TV in the UFC.
00:13:48.500So it's been a spectacle, I guess a spectacle.
00:13:52.500But the thing that I was not prepared for and still, at this point, feel like I got a pretty good handle on it, though, is just the harshness of the real world.
00:14:03.160You know, social media, you have your following, the Order of Man following, I have my following.
00:14:07.860So, you know, I bet you don't get many Order of Man comments saying, Ryan, you're terrible and you should stop, you know, I'm keeping it clean here.
00:14:37.760But it's like, I'm thinking, like, man, if I ever announce my retirement, I'm going to get more hate than I will support.
00:14:44.800And that's the way, unfortunately, that the MMA community works.
00:14:48.120Yeah, so not to rub salt in the wound here, but I've always had this question as I watch an MMA fight about what is the mindset after a loss?
00:14:58.500Because everybody goes through loss, but not everybody has it as visible as you do.
00:15:04.100That's a great question that I wish I could convey the actuality of the situation.
00:15:11.100You know, I watch fights on a pretty regular basis, and the guy that I had just fought, Johnny Hendricks, just got knocked out on Saturday night.
00:15:18.300You know, I don't – everyone I've fought, I don't have a problem with any of them.
00:15:21.580You know, they're all relative, respectful human beings.
00:15:23.760And, man, I watched him lose, and just – I felt for him.
00:15:27.940And I don't have a relationship with him at all.
00:15:30.240He beat me up before, you know, so I should hate him.
00:15:33.160But I was – it was making me sick to imagine how he's feeling.
00:15:38.120I actually said to my wife that next morning, I can't imagine how Johnny's feeling right now because it's like you put – I put everything into that, everything, money, time, everything.
00:16:01.120And to be able to get up that next morning and that next morning and that next morning and then create that snowball effect of, you know, small but incremental positive change is pretty – you know, it builds some strong character.
00:16:30.420It differs from fight to fight because, you know, physically speaking, you could be not bruised at all or you could still be in a hospital.
00:19:05.920So I walked into that on live TV and one, I kicked his butt.
00:19:10.080And it was like, the way I describe it to answer your question, it's like having everything that you could ever imagine and want in the palm of your hand.
00:19:20.180It's the most fulfilling, satisfying, gratifying feeling that you could ever imagine.
00:19:44.580How does your experience in fighting and MMA compare to everyday life, whether it's being a school teacher or now with you building your blog and your speaking career?
00:19:56.740How do those things compare and then maybe how do they differentiate?
00:20:02.860The principles, and that's why it's hard for me to kind of narrow down exactly who I want to speak to, because the principles that I've learned and that I've kind of developed into my speaking curriculum, they're universal.
00:20:18.180It's the standard cliched things that we hear on a daily basis.
00:20:21.060The reason that, you know, people wouldn't expect that a UFC fighter could relate to them if they're in an office or they're a high school kid going to school is because they think that fighting is just this far off crazy thing.
00:20:35.220And while it is kind of a far off crazy thing, I'm sitting on my couch right now in my house in a normal town.
00:20:42.580You know, we're people, but we've been able to experience these experiences and these successes and these failures times a million.
00:20:52.880So the learning curve that we have to go through is amplify that much more than the average person.
00:21:00.980So in that aspect, we have that much more valuable insight to offer people than the average person.
00:21:08.260I get that just because of the level you're playing at.
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00:22:19.900Now, back to my interview with Charlie.
00:22:24.060So what separates a because the night the name of your book is driven and I'm really curious what separates out of the thousands, tens of thousands of guys who call themselves MMA fighters.
00:22:38.060What separates the men who are extremely successful, top level fighters like yourself and guys who never really get off the ground, although they have this dream and this passion they're chasing?
00:22:49.660Yeah, it's a couple to it's two different sides.
00:22:52.500One, it's the work that I was talking about.
00:22:54.740People aren't the majority of people aren't willing to do the things that that I did.
00:23:01.100You know, I'm from central Pennsylvania and I live in lived in a very rural area.