Daily practice is the foundation Scott Simons uses to transform health, mindset and leadership, and he believes it’s the most overlooked key to resilience. In this candid conversation, the professional speaker, wellness strategist and purpose-driven entrepreneur shares how a mentor helped him turn addiction into a life of service and how starting health instead of only stopping bad habits creates real freedom. He explains how simple, repeatable habits like breathwork, hydration and movement can reset stress, rebuild the nervous system and spark clarity. Scott also opens up about his “Be Human” initiative, which helps people reclaim higher ground and connect through shared humanity, and he offers practical tools for young adults, parents and leaders to stay grounded and thrive in everyday life.
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Breathe, Move, Lead: Daily Practice Strategies With Scott Simons
Welcome to the show, everybody. I hope everybody is having a wonderful day and evening, depending upon where you’re located. I’m here with Scott Simons. Scott, thank you so much for being here. Scott is a professional speaker, wellness strategist, mindset coach, and purpose-driven entrepreneur who helps leaders and teams proactively elevate their clarity, resilience, and capacity to thrive.
Over the past twenty years, he’s delivered 300 conferences and workshops and partnered with over 350 organizations, inspiring thousands of employees to take ownership over their health and performance. His work blends the latest in behavioral science, performance psychology, and human-centered leadership into experiences that are energizing, evidence-based, and action-oriented.
He has co-founded four social impact ventures, all grounded in a single belief. Well-being isn’t a luxury. I love that, by the way. It’s a leadership strategy. The more proactive they are about it, the stronger they lead, connect, and perform. He has navigated addiction, mental health challenges, and the high-stakes pressure of building purpose-driven businesses from the ground up. His daily practice is the foundation that keeps him grounded, clear, and resilient. Every tool he shares is shaped by his journey.
Scott, welcome.
Thank you for that intro.
From Addiction To Purpose: Scott Simons’ Journey
There’s so much here that I want to dive into. We’d love to ask what would be a good place for us to start. Tell us a little bit about Scott.
What ignited my journey into health and wellness was a mentor, Steve Sims. I met him when I was nineteen. I was in a drug rehab for three months in the woods here in Quebec. One encounter got me into a whole different direction in my life in terms of holistic health, that I have always been athletic, but never really the mind, body, spirit, the yoga, the meditation.
Steve was all about service. He taught me about servant leadership, serving health. I call myself a health servant. I serve health, which helps me serve health to other people as well, like my mission to inspire daily practice. I breathe in my daily practice to inspire others to do that. In 2004, Steve and I co-founded a community wellness center. That’s where we did meditation and yoga.
That’s when I got into those practices, more breath-based and personal development, and Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey and all that. We co-founded a school for Black youth, which then expanded into other ventures within the Black community. The story really started with a beautiful encounter with an amazing man whom I followed for about 25 years. He passed away two years ago.
Sorry to hear that.
I was actually holding his hand when he passed away, which was beautiful and sad at the same time. He introduced me to the breath, but he was all about palliative care and death and rebirth. I actually was able to witness that. He taught me right to his last breath, which is very symbolic of Steve.
It’s very powerful. I am so thankful you had someone like that in your world. Honestly, the more I talk to young adults, Scott, the more I think about the mentors I’ve had. I’m a family therapist, and so some kids that I work with heading off to school, they haven’t yet met their mentors. You talk about this gentleman as if he changed your life. I think our good mentors in life do. They really do set us on a course and open our eyes in many ways to certain things. I’m so grateful that you had time with him, and it sounds like he really developed a lot in you over the years.
I don’t know where I’d be, but definitely not here in this conversation without Steve.
The Power Of Positive Addiction: Starting Health
You said so much there, and I guess I wanted to ask because I think so much of my audience are parents or young adults. Nowadays, drug addiction is obviously rampant, and it’s changed a lot over the years. Even treatments have changed a lot over the years. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot. Everybody relies on certain things. You’ve got individuals in the AA community who swear by their values and what they believe in. There are a whole bunch of different ways in which people enter into recovery. I guess I’m curious to ask, what do you rely on?
The drug rehab I went to was based on AA, the twelve steps, which are amazing, and I have nothing against them. I did my best to stop the drugs and the alcohol. That was really difficult. It took me years. Even after coming out of drug rehab, even though I think coming out, I stopped everything for like ten months, and it became an anchor point because health is not a belief, it’s an experience. I experienced something there that to this day is an anchor point for me, 28 years later.
However, there was a point where I was just really struggling with stopping the people around me, the context I was in, my community was consuming daily, and drugs and alcohol are very accepted in our society. It’s hard to get away from, unfortunately. Until I really flipped it around and it said, “Instead of stopping the drugs, start health. Get addicted to health, which can be a positive addiction, which leads to independence and then interdependence.” If you’re dependent on whatever it is, a YouTube, the internet, fat, salt, it doesn’t have to be your phone.
It doesn’t have to be drugs and alcohol. We always think it’s that. Once you’re dependent, you cannot really achieve independence. The health practice, I got very much into it. I knew what to do. It’s theoretical, but awareness without action is just a waste of awareness. I brought action up to the level of awareness that I knew started to meditate daily, move daily, go to the gym, and took it very seriously.
After the practices, I didn’t feel like going back to those negative addictions. They kept me in that dependent comfort zone that I so wanted to get out of. Now, when I coach people, it’s “Don’t talk to me about losing 10 pounds or even the mental health issues or whatever it is, let’s focus on the daily practice. 1,440 minutes in a day. Let’s start with 1% of your day, so 15 minutes.” How can we keep that practice daily so that eventually you create momentum?
You start to create independence, and you taste what an authentic health-driven lifestyle tastes like. At the core of the true pandemic on the planet at the moment, which is uh stress, anxiety, mental health. It’s lifestyles that are built with unhealthy habits. How can we start to create new healthy habits? Once you start to taste that momentum, it’s really hard to turn back.
The true pandemic on the planet at the moment is stress, anxiety, mental health—lifestyles built with unhealthy habits. Share on XIt’s amazing. I made a simple change in my world. At the beginning of this year, I didn’t usually bring this on camera, but I will. I started hydrating and drinking the proper amount of water. Thinking I was drinking the proper amount, but I wasn’t. Now I am. It’s amazing the amount of energy and mental clarity that I get just from water. I’ve begun telling people about it because I think it’s a small shift, but it’s a shift that has a big payoff.
I love how you said that, 1,444 minutes a day. I love that. It’s that concept of we’re just starting one building block and moving into the next, and just creating some of that momentum. That’s a great way of putting it. I have so many young adults who don’t know where to start. They’re dealing with, whether it be addiction of any type, or they’re dealing with other large struggles. They’ll often come into my office, and it’s like they’ve got weights on their shoulders. They just like, “I don’t know where to start.” We find one place to start and build on that.
I think health is how people get healthy. Maybe also why people don’t get healthy, because they just don’t know where to start. You’re 100% right. We certainly live in a world where, if you really look around, you’ve got people that get it and they understand what they can be doing, and then maybe people that aren’t ready to get it. They’re not in a place just yet. Hopefully, they get there sometime soon. I’m curious, you’re shirt. It’s screaming for me to ask. Tell me about that. Be Human, what’s that?
Be Human: Reclaiming Our Humanity
Be Human is a project I started in 2018. I had just done the Al Gore leadership training on climate leadership. Of course, at that point, I had gone through probably 2 or 3 depressions. I was looking at my inner world, and it was dark. To be honest, it was violent. It was paralyzing. The voices in my head. I was looking around. I’ve been going to corporations since 2006. This archaic industrial system simply does not serve the planet or the employees.
I saw the dis-ease. I’d give ten-minute health breaks in companies to get employees to move. Employees would come to just cry because I was there. They’re solar, so I was a safe space for them. I didn’t even know them very well, but just a level of distress. They didn’t know where to go. I said to myself, “I think humanity is failing at the moment.” We can do so much better. It’s not that complex.
I started a club of human beings that wanted to be part of the solution, practice daily, be challenged, and be supported. I have a crazy network of wellness specialists that’s at the service of this club. It’s generally growing every single year. However, it’s human beings who want to reclaim higher ground so we can serve humanity. Hopefully, we’ll wake up and thrive again. I say that again, because I feel we have maybe pre-agricultural revolution or something, but I feel there was a time where humanity was thriving, and maybe it wasn’t that too far ago.
If I look back at the twentieth century, the human-to-human violence was crazy. I just feel that if we were human-driven, what does it mean to be human instead of robots or this or that? I feel the solutions are right there, right in front of us. However, we have to get out of that reactive state and more proactive state, tap back into these human circuits in the brain that aren’t primal and primitive that just want to say, “I’m right, you’re wrong. Blue against the red. This against that.” It’s very primal circuits. We have this executive functioning that we can connect to and lead from there, lead from the heart. It’s a grand vision.
Love and respect are at the core. Human to human conversations are part of the solution. Share on XI love grand vision. That’s why I started the Be Human Club. We have Be Love, Be Joy, all kinds of things just to remind people. Some people would say, “What does it mean to be human?” I’m like, “Exactly.” Instead of having these monologues where people aren’t really, “let’s create a dialogue, create a conversation around what does it mean to be human?” I don’t have the answer necessarily, but I think love is at the core, respect. Conversations like this, for me, are a human-to-human conversation that’s part of the solution.
Unlocking Inner Wisdom: The Simplicity Of Breathwork
I totally agree. I love the fact that there’s dialogue around that. I think that’s amazing. We don’t ask that enough about what it means to be human, and even basic, small things on a day-to-day basis, doing kind things for each other. I feel like some of that’s been lost. I love that concept. That’s great. Tell me about breath work because I have to admit, as a therapist, I have the one-on-one knowledge of it, but it’s not something that you’ve talked about a few times already. I guess I want to ask, can you give us a sense of what you mean by breathwork?
The term breathwork now is very synonymous with the holotropic, that of Wim Hof. I don’t know if you know Wim Hof, breathing through the mouth and going into altered states. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s a technique in itself. What I call is maybe breath training or simply coming back to the wisdom, the intelligence, and the sophistication of the body. How I present it, especially in the corporate world, is that we breathe 20,000 times a day. The breath is what brings us back into the power of now. There’s this beautiful friendship between the diaphragm and your heart.
The heart rests on the diaphragm. We breathe 20,000 breaths that guide the hundred thousand heartbeats. When our breath is incoherent, stress, anxiety, fear, jealousy, envy, shame, guilt, those heavier emotions, that incoherency in the breath sends an incoherency into the heartbeats, which then sends an incoherency into all the systems in the body and automatically will go into fight, flight, or freeze. You know what that means.
The blood goes to the extremities, less blood in the organs, disconnected from the memory, really disconnected from our human potential. This used to happen for 2 to 3 minutes when we were hunting, but now it’s happening when we’re going onto social media. “I didn’t get enough lights. I’m not this, that.” We’re constantly in that state of fight, flight, or freeze. However, if we do come back to breath management, which is brain management, which is nervous system management, we tap into the now, and we tap into the inner pharmacist, and we can actually change the chemistry in our body with one conscious breath.
Yes, there’s breath work and there are all these trainings, but what we really need to do is stop. That’s the first step. Stop is go, sympathetic nervous system, stress, performance-driven, optimizing driven light, stop, give the body the opportunity to breathe. The body knows exactly how to breathe to bring you back into homeostasis equilibrium harmony.
However, we simply need to give it the time and the space to do it. That can be three breaths, can be 5 minutes, 10 minutes, no need for a technique. If you want to close your eyes or if your eyes are really tired in North America at the moment, we have six muscles around each eye. We’re not blinking as much in North America because we’re looking at screens so much. Your eyes are pretty much the brain that was pushed through two holes.
We need to relax the eyes, which sounds weird, but if you can relax the eyes and relax your tongue, your tongue with fascia is connected to your heart. If you relax your tongue, you relax the heart and simply give your body the space to tap into its sophistication and wisdom. Do that once, twice, three times, whatever per day, it’ll totally start to transform your life.
I love that. I’m all about simple, basic techniques that help. I love what you said. We forget sometimes we’re all connected and everything in here is connected. If we are stressing our system, it’s coming from somewhere, first of all, but secondly, exactly what you said to just stop and take a moment. It is rare. We don’t do that enough. I could say I don’t do that enough. I think that people in general don’t. Can I put you on the spot for a second?
Yes, please.
Experience The Shift: A Guided Breathwork Practice
My young adults who are watching might wonder, “Breathwork, what is all this stuff?” Tell us a little bit about it. Can you maybe take them through a simple, basic set of breathing so that they can feel it, they can sense it, they can experience it?
Guiding five breaths or something like that?
Yes. just something really basic. I would love that. Thank you, Scott.
The first step is, hopefully, you’re not driving or anything, you’re in a safe space. If you can root down with the four corners of your four feet, just feel your foundation, your base. Close your eyes. We are relaxing the six muscles around the eye, which will relax the brain and the nervous system. If you’d like to bring one hand to the abdomen, one hand to the chest, we’re so connected to our phones, the technology of the phones, but we forget about the incredible technology in the human body.
The breath is what brings us back into the now. Share on XWe’re just going to feel how the body’s breathing now. Those 20,000 breaths, 20,000 inhalations, 20,000 exhalations that we often take for granted. Just a bit of gratitude for the intelligence that knows exactly how to breathe to bring you back into harmony. For these five breaths, I’d like us to breathe through the nose. Breathing through the mouth is like eating through the nose. It’s weird.
The nose was made to breathe. Start by exhaling through the nose and then take a deep inhale through your nose, and very gently exhale. You’re already changing the chemistry in the body. A gentle hold, relax the facial muscles, relax your inhalation muscles, your shoulders. 3, 2, 1, exhale. Inhale and exhale. Remember that beautiful friendship between your heart and your diaphragm. Inhale. Hold, relax, release, relax your tongue, and exhale.
Let’s do one more together. Inhale. Hold. Inhale just a bit more and bring a smile to your face, your heart, all the cells in the body. Fill your body up with gratitude. Even if you don’t feel like it, if you don’t know, just do it. Just fill your body up with gratitude. 3, 2, 1, and exhale. Keep your eyes closed for a few more breaths and witness how your body’s breathing is now. There is so much intelligence because you’ve given your body the space to tap into that wisdom, that sophistication. Excellent, you can open your eyes.
That is how it’s done, everybody. Thank you, Scott. That was awesome. I love that. I want to point out the simplicity. As you said, other than driving a car, you can pretty much do that wherever you need to do that. It’s amazing how often I have people say, “My phone’s acting funny, and I’ll just turn it off and turn it back on.’ We don’t do that for ourselves enough. Thank you. I really appreciate you bringing that to the table.
Can I just go just a little step further?
Please, yeah.
Tell me your favorite words. Steve was very much into etymology and the roots of the word. There’s inspire and there’s expire. There’s a word we truly destroyed, especially in the past few years, which is conspire like conspiracy theories and stuff like that. Con means with, and spirale means to breathe. Inspire, expire, and conspiracy mean to breathe together. I know the solutions to a lot of, let’s say, the challenges and the problems that exist on the planet at the moment.
One that I do know is truly part of the solution is this, the true conspiracy where 1 or 2 or more people come together to breathe together, to calm down the reactive primal primitive brain that’s very active, connect to the much more evolved human brain to find solutions that will serve humanity and serve the planet and this next seven generations, not that it’s the next four years, but the next quarter, the next four years. I truly feel that this work that we just did there, I don’t know how many people are going to be breathing together, but the ripple effect of that is at the core of the solutions that the planet urgently needs at the moment.
That’s awesome. I take from that breathwork is not just individual. Breathwork can be done with people. I certainly know plenty of my students that I work with who experience panic and panic attacks. If you’re a parent and you’re with your student and they’re experiencing those things, breathwork is grounding. It is amazing.
It is truly a reboot to be able to, as you said, Scott, very eloquently, to be able to give you a higher level of thought. That’s amazing. One of the things I ask a lot about when we talk about wellness is, “What’s in your bag?” Breathwork is, to me, something everybody can do, and you can do it just about anywhere. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Can I ask what else is in your bag, Scott? What else do you do to stay grounded?
Scott’s Toolkit: Meditation, Movement, And Cold Exposure
I’ve been working on my bag, or the toolkit, let’s say, for 25 years now. The next step in terms of breath would be heart coherence. The heart coherence practice is very simple. A thousand scientific studies on it. You’re inhaling for five, exhaling for five for 3 to 5 minutes, which brings all your systems into a coherent state. The benefits will last up to 4 to 6 hours. If possible, you’re doing the 5 minutes 3 times a day.
You can look for heart coherence or heart resonance practice very simply. I definitely look into that. The toolkit I use daily is meditation. I did Vipassana meditation, a ten-day meditation retreat in silence. I’ve done that three times. I practice on the mat. Let’s say we’re on my cushion, which is right here, the meditation cushion, but now I’m bringing much more into real life. I’m meditating with clients.
I’m meditating with other people, who don’t even know, affecting my state, which will influence their state. If you’re in a coherent high frequency state, if you believe in that, and it’s pretty evident that somebody’s in a low frequency state, you can feel how heavy it is. If you’re a high-frequency state, you can impact and influence that person. I’m constantly meditating on the possibility of staying in the now and in my posture and my coherence as much as possible.
One of my midlife crises was sports. One thing I took up was mountain biking again, and I started snowboarding at age 45. The other one is jujitsu. Jujitsu is learning how to stay calm in very stressful situations. I’m not saying that everybody should start jujitsu, but I’m just challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone in terms of sports.
The cold is a ruthless, ruthless teacher—pretty much liquid cortisol. Share on XGood for you.
The ultimate one or another powerful one, and I’m blessed to be in Quebec, is cold showers or the cold. If you can manage your breath in the cold water, the cold is a ruthless teacher. It’s pretty much a liquid cortisol. If you can learn to go into the cold bath, the cold plunge, or cold shower and learn how to exhale throughout the experience, exhaling for 5 to 10 seconds, let’s say, because the exhalation is the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response. You’re practicing in the cold, how to stay calm in stressful situations.
When you get out of the shower, you go into real life, you’re like a ninja, like a Jedi, like a sensei of your nervous system, and you’ll be responding to life instead of reacting to life. That’s when you can truly start to take responsibility for your actions and responsibility over your energies. We all have that ability to respond. I’d say if you can have access to cold showers or cold plunges or lakes or rivers or whatever it is, practice as much as possible because it will rebuild your nervous system in an optimal way.
Fascinating. I love how you said that liquid cortisol. I’ve never heard that before. I think what you’re talking about doing is preparing and helping people understand that the more prep you have, when a situation does arise, you’ll be ready for it. That’s amazing. My broad takeaway, Scott, and I want young people to really hear this message, is that our mental health, our wellness, doesn’t just happen. We have to go out of our way.
We have to chase it. We have to do certain things that make us feel grounded, make us feel whole, stretch our bounds a bit, and put us in a zone where we’re able to be in the moment and assist. To me, like you, I feel like my mission in life is to assist and to help. I feel so good when I do that. I think that for lots of people who don’t have a lot of experience doing that, recognizing the value in just being kind, just small little things like offering someone friendship or an ear or a space or to be connected to.
Those are all ways in which you ultimately help people, but you can help yourself as well. It’s a really good takeaway for young adults to hear. You have a mindset, Scott, that is a little different from people that I normally talk to, and I appreciate that because it helps me grow, helps me understand things that I don’t understand. Honestly, I want to try a cold bath, a cold shower, cold something after this conversation tonight, because it sounds really amazing.
I’ve never done that. I’m guessing a lot of my audience hasn’t either, but certainly it sounds, you give a great description and I think it sounds like something that could really benefit all of us in many ways. I’m curious, you go into businesses, and the businesses, I would imagine, do you travel all over for that, or is it mostly in Quebec?
Mostly in Quebec. I have been across Canada, and the services I’ll bring personally are that I taught yoga for ten years. As I mentioned, those ten-minute health breaks and then conferences are called Proactive Mindset. Just getting from that reactive primal state into a much more proactive state. We have a team of about 50 experts as well, including osteopaths, physio, nutritionists, and anything that can help the employee on site.
Out of those 168 hours a week, if you’re spending 40 to 60 hours sitting and working and not investing in your health, it’ll lead to this, once again, I said this pandemic of burnout and depression in the workplace. It’s eye-opening how disconnected people are from their bodies. I’ve been doing that since 2006. I’m an OG in the corporate wellness game.
Corporate Wellness Evolution: From Then To Now
Good for you. I’m going to ask you a big question than OG, because I’m curious. That’s a long time, and I’m curious how it has been in your observation, health and wellness change within businesses, within people, from then to now?
It’s a huge question. I’ll answer it as quickly, I guess, as I can. It was 2006 when I started. I felt at that point that companies were actually taking the health and wellness of their employees seriously. Still to this day, our best sales were in 2007. Of course, the biggest recession in a hundred years kicks in. The first thing that companies cut out is their health and wellness. It took us a long time to come back up. We were sailing again.
Of course, the pandemic hit, which completely transformed the workplace. However, now not just the HR person, but the CFO is starting to talk about health and wellness because of the costs of disease and medication and burnout and leaving the office for six months, whatever it is. Now that the CFO is starting to talk about it, health and wellness are part of the solution. Seeing that the awareness has gone up a lot, very aware of what we should do.
Companies are pretty much like they’re obese. They’ve got cancer. They’re just not into health and wellness. They know what to do, but they’re not doing it. The action is definitely not as high as they were. It’s so dependent, I’d say, on geopolitics, on the finance, and now the volatility in the world. We don’t need to get into politics and stuff, but it’s so volatile. People don’t know whether we are in a recession or not. That stress, I think, is causing companies to experience analysis paralysis.
They’re not taking the actions that they could take, the simple actions and the investments that would give them a crazy ROI to every dollar invested. Anybody would do that in the stock market, but when it comes to the workplace, because it’s so hard to quantify and even to seek, it’s just still not a reflex.
I think we’re heading in the right direction, but it’s going to take that next generation of young men and women that I feel is in your core card of target because they get it, to be honest. They don’t want to go into that archaic system that their parents were in. It’s just that the human is not in the equation. There’s really no benefit for them, I feel. They want to be part of that new wave.
They’re much more sensitive, and they’re much more awake, and they know that they’re addicted to their phones and stuff, and they want to get out of it. I think that’s where that conspiracy of our generation co-labor, collaborating with that generation to find a system that will serve all of us. That once again, I don’t see that happening as such tomorrow morning, but we’re definitely heading in the right direction
Discipline Equals Freedom: Advice To His 19-Year-Old Self
I guess that’s the silver lining to the next generation being more aware. That’s a great way of saying it. I had a good answer. It was a tough question, so I ended it well. I see that with my patients, even in terms of I’ve been practicing for a while and when I first started, the awareness was different from what it is now. Mental health, in particular, is being talked about a lot more through things like this podcast and other areas. It’s amazing.
I was telling you offline, it’s amazing how many emails I get regularly from young adults that are listening to these conversations, and they’re taking information, and parents probably are fairly unaware that they’re listening to some of these podcasts, but it’s good information. It’s good for them to have. It’s good knowledge for them to be pushing forward. I’m curious. It’s a therapeutic question, but I’ll ask anyway. The 19-year-old self in you, Scott, you go back. What advice would you give your young adult self?
I’ve never been asked that question. That’s definitely around commitment, around discipline. Discipline leads to freedom. There’s a real freedom in discipline. It took me a long time to figure that out. That to me is a daily practice of 1 minute to 3 hours, whatever it is out of those 1,440 minutes. I mean, the next generation is streaming for about three hours a day on average. Ninety percent of people in North America are doing less than 30 minutes of movement a day, and 50% are doing zero minutes of movement.
Discipline leads to freedom. Share on XThat discipline and understanding what’s on the other side of discipline. You mentioned earlier, and some people say that health and wellness might be easy or whatever, but regaining and reclaiming your health is not. The first three months are really tough. Hope people know that. However, on the other side of that, there’s gold there. There’s another community, other connections, a mentor, and we just need to get through those first three months.
I’d want to remind myself of that because I’d start and stop often. Of course, anything that’s breath-based. Nature, I wasn’t going into nature. Nature is such a beautiful ally in terms of health and wellness. Another one is that Steve would often say, “Depression is like walking through a forest at night.” It’s scary. That same dark and scary forest walking with, it doesn’t have to be your best friend, but somebody who trusts you, changes the whole experience, laughing through that same forest. Please don’t do this alone.
The one I’m talking about is personal development. Going inside, asking the deeper questions. Who am I behind the ego and the masks and the personas? What is my mission? What is my vision? All those kinds of deeper questions. Find your tribe. It can be one person, it can be five people. It doesn’t have to be 150 people. I have a starting five now with my mental health, and I reach out. I used to isolate a lot. Now I reach out and I’ll call them.
The second I start to doubt or fear, I feel that energy taking over of the ambivalence or the paralysis I was talking about earlier. Don’t go down the health path alone. Find somebody who’s walking the path with you or has walked the path with you before. Once you’re on the path, there’s no hierarchy. We’re just all on the same path together, and we need more people walking it.
I love it. There’s so much of what you said. It’s rich in suggestions, discipline equals freedom. I love that. I would ask my audience, especially my young adult audience, to think about what they are disciplined in. In your life right now, what do you consider that you have that’s disciplined? To me, hear Scott, hear me say things like, “When you connect with stuff like that, that health, that power you get from pushing through those three months, it’s really hard to put into words.” You did a great job, but it’s really hard to put into words what you get from that. Again, I wish I knew that when I was nineteen, but I didn’t.
We’re passing information, and that’s what this podcast is all about. I think in many ways you’ve taught us a lot. I appreciate all of your information, Scott. I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this, but you’ve been kind enough to give us some of your time. I really appreciate it. One more question for you. Normalize It Forward. The way I’ve created this system is that I like the conversation to keep moving forward. I usually ask my guests to nominate a friend, a coworker, a relative, someone who would be good for me to interview in the future. Any thoughts anyone has in mind?
The Power Of Your “Starting Five”: Don’t Go It Alone
Can I give you two?
Of course. Yeah, absolutely.
Two wonderful friends of mine who are on my starting five. People I call any minute, any day. Josef Kasz and Dunia Darwiche, two wonderful human beings who are part of the Be Human Club as well. Without them, once again, walking through the forest would have been very scary without these beautiful human beings at my side.
I so appreciate that. I’ll get their contact from you offline, Scott. I just want to highlight, I love that phrase, “My starting five.” I have a starting five myself, and I think in many ways, it takes a while. It takes a while to figure out who should be on that team. Again, young adults who are tuning in, think about it. Here are two adults who rely on that. It’s not a coincidence. That’s a really important system to have around you, and support is immense. You cannot get past it. It’s immense.
A quick thing on that, if I were going to the Olympics for mental health, facing up against all my demons, who would be my starting five? I’m on basketball, and sports are definitely my thing. I’d even probably have a 6/9 there.
There you go. Have as many people on that team as you can. I think in this world, we cannot go it alone. Scott, I appreciate your connection. I’m hoping that you and I can stay connected. You’re a wonderful individual and full of knowledge and information, and I appreciate your humanness. Keep up your work and continue doing what you’re doing. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Have a good evening, Scott. Take care.
You too.
Important Links
- Scott Simons on LinkedIn
- Scott Simons on Instagram
- Scott@scottsimonsinc.com
- Be Human Club
- Be Human Club on Instagram
- Be Human Club on Facebook
- Josef Kasz on LinkedIn
- Dunia Darwiche on LinkedIn
About Scott Simons
I’m a professional speaker, wellness strategist, mindset coach and purpose-driven entrepreneur who helps leaders and teams proactively elevate their clarity, resilience, and capacity to thrive.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve delivered more than 300 conferences and workshops, partnered with 350+ organizations, and inspired thousands of employees to take ownership over their health and performance. My work blends the latest in behavioural science, performance psychology, and human-centred leadership into experiences that are energizing, evidence-based, and action oriented.
I’ve cofounded four social impact ventures including the Padua Community Wellness Center, DESTA Black Community Network, Organik Corporate Health, and the Be Human Club, all grounded in a single belief: well-being isn’t a luxury. It’s a leadership strategy. The more proactive we are about it, the stronger we lead, connect, and perform.
My talks spark more than inspiration. They spark action. Whether I’m speaking to C-suites, HR leaders, or entire organizations, I help teams move from reactive to proactive, taking responsibility over their health. We are building cultures where well-being drives results, not just relief.
This is more than theory, it’s my life’s work. I’ve navigated addiction, mental health challenges, and the high-stakes pressure of building purpose-driven businesses from the ground up. My daily practice is the foundation that keeps me grounded, clear, and resilient—and every tool I share is shaped by this journey.
If your organization is ready to go beyond wellness perks and start building a culture of presence, purpose, and performance, I’d be honoured to help inspire that shift.
Reading about mental health is hard. Let’s schedule a free consultation.