How to Be Great | Alex Toussaint
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2023
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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This ain't daycare... Tough love and actionable insights on validation, gratitude, and self-alignment from the Peloton star. Plus, he shares the most important words he's ever heard.
Alex Toussaint, Peloton Instructor and Puma Athlete, is a titan of the fitness community sitting at the intersection of fitness, tech, music, sports, and entertainment. A hybrid of high-performance athlete and motivational coach, Alex is widely respected for his authenticity and positivity. His new book is called Activate Your Greatness.
In this episode we talk about:
- Alex's remarkable life story
- His thoughts on internal versus external validation
- What he means by "activate your greatness"
- The habits and practices he employs in service of his own greatness, including gratitude, self-alignment, and his "starting five"
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/alex-toussaint
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is The 10% Happier Podcast, I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:19.8 | Hello everybody, how we doing? |
| 0:22.0 | Today we've got an incredible story of somebody who figured out how to be great the hard |
| 0:27.0 | way. |
| 0:28.0 | Alex Tussant is the child of Haitian immigrants who grew up in a wealthy enclave in New York |
| 0:33.9 | state in the town of East Hampton, one of the wealthiest towns I've ever personally |
| 0:38.1 | been to growing up there. |
| 0:40.6 | His neighbor used to call the cops on Alex just because of the color of his skin. |
| 0:45.3 | He's black. |
| 0:46.3 | Alex went on to struggle academically and in other ways throughout his childhood. |
| 0:50.9 | He was sent away to military school, then he dropped out of college and went to work |
| 0:54.6 | as a janitor. |
| 0:56.6 | That, and I will let him tell this story, that is when something pretty incredible happened |
| 1:02.7 | and Alex then turned into one of the very few genuine superstars in the fitness world. |
| 1:09.3 | I take Alex's classes all the time on Peloton where he's a senior instructor, especially |
| 1:14.2 | his club banger's class. |
| 1:15.6 | Really like that one. |
| 1:16.6 | Heads up. |
| 1:17.6 | Peloton does sometimes advertise on this show, but this is not an advertisement. |
| 1:20.6 | I wanted to have Alex on because one of the things I'd like about him, aside from his |
| 1:25.9 | incandescent charm and charisma, is that like my meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, |
| 1:30.8 | with whom many of you will be familiar, Alex also teaches in pithy catchphrases, which |
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