Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
What do marathons, pickleball, and publishing have in common? Well, for Lisa Marie Garcia, they are all arenas where discipline, passion and purpose intersect. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to understand how fitness is far more than a health routine. For Lisa Marie, it is a connector to fulfillment in her career, family, faith, and legacy. Lisa Marie, welcome to the Life Fulfilled podcast.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:00:33]:
Thank you, Bernie. Thank you very much.
Bernie Borges [00:00:35]:
So glad to have you. And so I want to do just a quick introduction here and then I want to get into it because you are a dynamic entrepreneur. You are a publisher, you’re a speaker, and you lead a company called CEO Book Publishing. You help authors publish with purpose and professionalism. I love that. You’ve got a background in technology. You’ve got a heart grounded in faith. I love that.
Bernie Borges [00:00:58]:
That and you bring a unique blend of both business acumen and personal conviction. You’re also a passionate athlete. I love that about you. You’re a marathon runner, you’re a competitive pickleball player, and just someone who understands how physical fitness fuels every area of life. So let’s start there. I really want to unpack that because I really enjoyed that in our planning conversation. In fact, it happened at the end of our recording when I was featured on your podcast. So thank you for having me.
Bernie Borges [00:01:29]:
It look forward to that publishing soon. Let’s just begin with this high level opening question, the role of fitness in your life. Let’s start there.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:01:38]:
Well, mission critical. For all those things you said I did and I do, there’s only one way that I’m able to do them, and that is to keep my attitude straight, to keep my mindset straight. And that is what athletic, sport fitness is about. You’ve got, for me, I have got to have a physical outlet and a lot of other things that for it to do and feed me, I have to have that or I can’t accomplish what I need to accomplish every day.
Bernie Borges [00:02:06]:
Okay, well, Lisa Marie, as you know, fitness is one of my five life pillars, right? Health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy. And I’m often asked, why is fitness its own pillar? Why is it a part of health? And I’ve explained that a million times. Health is big enough, so fitness needs to be its own standalone pillar. So give us a little bit of your backstory, because I remember one of the things you told me that really impressed me was that your dad is very athletic, and that seems to have had some impact on you. So why don’t you tell us about that?
Liza Marie Garcia [00:02:39]:
It definitely did. You know, the, the idea which Is truth that, you know, you are those five people you surround yourself with, right? So as you’re a child, if you’re fortunate enough to have great parents and parents that you can watch their actions and you do model yourself around them. And I remember when I was very young, my father having a goal to run 30 marathons before he was 30. And I grew up then with the weight room in our home that had these pictures were, you know, big pictures of him running these marathons. And he was an excellent marathon runner, meaning under three hours, you know, qualified and ran the Boston. That, that time frame, now that I know what it means is just insane. Mine was maybe two more hours more than that, but anyhow, so. But I.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:03:25]:
I grew up with that. I grew up seeing my dad knowing that he would maybe come and give me kids in the morning while he was going out for early run. So I saw that being modeled, but definitely gave me the instinct to have a goal to run a full marathon, which I did, as you talked about. But also I was put in sports at an early age. I was on the swim team, and I remember being the youngest person on the swim team, and my parents would take me to the swim meet. I played tennis when I was very young, and my parents hired a tennis club. So, you know, and interestingly enough, not much team sports, which we might get into a little bit about, you know, what you gain, what you gain in sports and knowing to be on a sports team and those characteristics, but individual sports, but enough that it just became a part of who I was. And I got to see what the benefits were for my mental health very early on.
Bernie Borges [00:04:15]:
So, because this is the Life Fulfilled podcast. Lisa Marie, let’s talk about that connection between your passion for fitness, your lifelong journey, you know, and I love the fact that your dad has been a tremendous inspiration. I mean, wow, you know, what an inspiration he provided. But where’s the connection to fulfillment? Why don’t you unpack that for us a little bit?
Liza Marie Garcia [00:04:41]:
So what I noticed in my career being, you know, I am a little bit older if I’ve had many years in career. And when I started my career, I was an IBM engineer. I was right in IBM Big Blue at the time as a, you know, very young, right out of college, my first job, a very young woman, also Latina, very minority. Ish. And what I noticed was I was many times one of the only females in the room or in a conference, in a meeting or on a project, especially being in tech. But what I figured out was it seemed like There was a secret ish relationship or a secret communication between the males versus the females. Not anything that I saw as negative or anything that would, you know, I fully recognize at the time. But what I learned after it was it seems like men learned a lot about the fundamentals of teamwork and had stuff and maybe that came from being on team sports is what I deduced later.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:05:38]:
And so what I loved about being athletic and being in sports is that you do learn some valuable, very valuable lessons about being a part of a team. And as you know, I think the best professionals are those that have those skills.
Bernie Borges [00:05:52]:
Yeah, no, I agree. I played baseball in my youth and a little bit of hockey, not a whole lot of hockey, although I’m a big hockey fan. But baseball was the one that I played the most as an organized sport, to your point, the team aspect of it. You know, the other thing, Lisa Marie, is that I also coached baseball because it’s the sport that I probably know the best from a technical standpoint. So I coached it at the little league level, you know, with kids. But boy, you’d be surprised. Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised how competitive the kids are and their parents. But I don’t want to digress too much on that.
Bernie Borges [00:06:26]:
But so connect a little bit more. Let’s unpack that a little bit more on how fitness and athletics has touched all of your pillars. I mean even, even your faith pillar. I mean, when you and I had this conversation initially, I was kind of surprised by how big it is for you. Like it really touches every area of your life. So unpack that a little bit more.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:06:48]:
It definitely does. And you know, I am a faith based professional, so that is the big umbrella of which I live my life in all areas. But you know, one of the other aspects of sports and athletic and fitness is that it really takes your goal, it really grabbed onto your goal setting part of you. And most, again, most successful professionals are goal, you know, the risk takers. But the risk is usually helps them achieve a goal that they have. And I am very much that person. Yes, I’m a person that at the first the year has my New Year’s resolutions. And yes, because I owned a business for several years, I mean, I’m always the two quarters ahead, right.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:07:26]:
Looking at to see, okay, what are we accomplishing by summer of this coming year. So it’s always a goal in front of me, always. Where are we going to go next? Well, what sports also allows me to focus on is what are my goals within the sport, you know, is it that I’m on a USTA tennis team or we want to make it to sectional, we. I shared with you now how pickleball is my total jam these days. And I’m frustrated at the level that I’m at, and so I’m stepping it up. And yesterday during my practice, which I was happy I went yesterday, I said I was talking to another athlete. I said, so here’s what my goal is. Specifically this goal to get to that.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:08:03]:
So, you know, sports and fitness, athletics, that really helps me embrace that part of who I am already professionally. I love that. And when you kind of base down what. What it takes to get there, it’s discipline, you know, so, again, the discipline that you have in your life to accomplish anything and everything, you know, it all starts with that discipline. And I’m a person that also loves the Olympics, right? I love that time of the year we’re watching, whether it’s Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics, because it’s so inspiring to watch those athletes at that level achieve what they’re achieving. And then I love, too, when you get to hear the backstory and we’ve all heard the backstories of, it’s not, you know, 20 times or 20,000 hours or, you know, it’s 20 years. I mean, it’s 200. It’s 2 million minutes of something.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:08:58]:
I mean, it’s just the levels of discipline that they had are just untouched, which is why they’re Olympic athletes, of course. So just on a basic level, so someone like myself that just wants to up the pickleball game still, I know that’s the discipline I need to follow that will get me there. And that holds true for every area of my life and what I want to accomplish.
Bernie Borges [00:09:20]:
You said a lot there. And there’s something that I want to actually dig into with you. With you a little bit, because one aspect of being an athlete, one aspect especially, well, it’s not unique to team sports. It can be an individual sport, is that you win some and you lose some. So how does being an athlete train you for when we lose something in life? Right. Because we don’t win every day in life.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:09:50]:
So my favorite quote, which is going to go against what I. What my answer is going to be, but I’m sorry. Sorry. I kind of like, you know, my dad has these dad jokes. And so here’s my kind of thing. I just always say, which is that, you know, favorite quote from Tiger woods that says second place is first place, loser. Okay, I’m. I’m kidding about that, but that is a favorite joke of mine.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:10:08]:
When I, when I lose it, I’m not happy, you know, but it, but the real answer is what every entrepreneur knows and every successful person knows, that every failure is just the step that takes you to the right, the better step. Right. I said it wrong. I didn’t say it so smoothly. But we all know that really, for the most part, you’re going to lose most of the time. You know, talking about the Olympic athletes, I mean, that.00% of who they are in their sport that gets to that level is 0.00s. So you know it. As I talked to my young daughter, they have two daughters in college right now.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:10:41]:
And as I say to them, you’re going to make the very best decision you can right now based on all that, you know, based on the circumstance, you know, and you’re going to make that decision, and then if it’s the wrong one, you’re going to recover from it and make another one and just almost preparing them for it’s probably going to not work out. And that’s the thing with sports. You’re probably not going to win. Most of the time you don’t win. So that it does make it sweeter when you do win. I love it when I win a match and I was at the top of my game and everything was flowing and I got those shots in that I don’t normally get in, those high percentage shots that I probably shouldn’t take, but I did and they, they went in that is like, I don’t know. That’s not even any time I played as that happened. So, you know, it’s, it’s good for us to understand that for the most part it’s going to be rough.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:11:26]:
You know, for the most part we’re going to fail, and for the most part we’re not going to win the matches. And you know, so if. And we can live that way without it being a big heavy weight and without us being a negative person, we can just live that way, being then grateful, you know, for the times that it does work out our way and we do win and then just, just not letting things throw us so much. And I think if anything in my older wisdom of every part of my life is that I can definitely take the bad stuff that comes in much, much better because I know that tomorrow is another day and things will work out and there’s usually that he’s falling that way.
Bernie Borges [00:12:03]:
So earlier you said that it takes discipline, and so I agree with you on that. And I’ll share a quick example and then I want to bring it back to you. So once a month I meet with a group of guys. I don’t organize it. Some guy named Jeff organizes it. Not some guy, a buddy of mine named Jeff organizes it. And it starts around 5:30pm I don’t know how late they go because I’m always the first one to leave. The reason I’m always the first one to leave somewhere around 8:00′, clock, 8:30, that kind of thing is because I need, I want to.
Bernie Borges [00:12:34]:
I choose to be in bed by 10pm because I choose to have my alarm go off at 4:45am to go to the gym Monday through Friday. That’s my discipline. So I’m always the first to leave and I have no idea how late they stay. So what do you say to the person listening who either doesn’t have that discipline or hasn’t taken the step of scheduling their fitness routine, if you want to call it a routine or fitness commitment, into their calendar?
Liza Marie Garcia [00:13:03]:
So you know the sentence we make priority. What is priority? Period? And so, you know, people say they want to lose weight, but they don’t want to do those things that help them lose weight. People say they want to be a lawyer, but they don’t, you know, apply for law school. And that, I mean, so if it truly is something that you want to do, I truly want to up my game. I’m really, I’m really not happy at the level I’ve been in for a while. So then that means that I’m going to make the time to schedule and whatever that looks like, it doesn’t get. It’s not getting up at 4:45, but it is getting up before I hit the snooze a couple times, like sometimes I’m prone to do. So, you know, we all know what works for us.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:13:43]:
Some of us work great with time blocking in our calendars. Others work great with accountability. When I’ve lived in Seattle, I had a couple running friends and I used to think about those times where I either would wear like, what is that? Like this, the, the head, head light thing. Because it was like dark in the middle of the night kind of, but it was in their mornings. Fine. But I would meet a friend of mine and that was the motivation to know that I can’t sleep in because Jeanette’s going to show up and we’re going to, you know, do our runs for the marathon. So again, part of the discipline, part of the routine, you know, nothing changes unless you Change. I mean those things are said commonly, but they’re really meaningful.
Bernie Borges [00:14:20]:
Yeah. And I think one of the things that you and I share in common as it relates to fitness and the role that it plays in our life is that we don’t compartmentalize it. You know, we, we don’t say it’s this thing off to the side. Like I don’t say that. It’s just what I do early in the morning before I start my work day. I, to me it’s if, if I don’t do that, I mean sure, if I have the flu, I’m not going to go to the gym. If I couldn’t get to bed by 10 o’ clock and for some reason I didn’t get to bed till midnight because I didn’t have control over it, it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to get up at 4:45.
Bernie Borges [00:14:55]:
But absent those anomalies, it’s, it’s not compartmentalized. It is who I am and that’s how I start my day. Now. I know people that do it. At the end of the day, that’s just how I do it. You said yourself, we all know ourselves, so speak to that. The fact that it’s not compartmentalized, it’s not this thing that you put in a box somewhere. So what does that mean to you?
Liza Marie Garcia [00:15:17]:
Well, it also kind of to transition a little bit into the faith, you know, element of it. You’re a whole person, you know, you are one being. And I, fortunately, I haven’t really been impacted by this, but I have learned that you can’t, you know, have gone through something in your life and just shove it down into a little corner and think that the rest of you is going to be okay. Right? You can’t because it’s you, it affected you, you moved through it. You need to figure out how to work with it. So, you know, just like faith. In my previous tech company starting with IBM, I always thought that your faith was separate from business. Never the two shall twine.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:15:59]:
I completely disagree with that. And it’s not who I am now as a faith based professional. And what I learned was I am who I am. If I am a believer of Jesus, which I am, if I’m a Christian, then I truly am that in everything that I do, whether that is sports or whether that is business. And I better make sure that the values that I believe in are the values that I live by and live through. So I definitely learned that lesson in my career and in my growth as A human that it’s all encompassing. And so as we talk about fitness and sport, it’s very important to me to make sure that I keep that element where it needs to be because it definitely feeds me in many ways.
Bernie Borges [00:16:47]:
You remind me of a few things in that point. When I talk about fulfillment, I say that fulfillment is one of my favorite F words. And I say one of them because it’s not the only favorite F word of mine. There’s family, there’s fun, there’s Friday, there’s fitness and there’s faith. And so how, how do you integrate faith? I mean, I think, you know, I’m a person of faith as well. And while I don’t hide it, I also don’t wear it on my sleeve. But I never deny it by any means. But how do you integrate your faith into your fitness journey? Because, you know, you’re also a busy CEO, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a mom, right? So, so how does that all mesh together for you?
Liza Marie Garcia [00:17:31]:
I’m laughing inside because I’ll tell you, some of the most trying times that I’ve had would be when I am on the court or when I am in a match and I feel like someone has cheated by calling a ball out that wasn’t out that I feel like someone is misrepresenting the score. When I feel like someone’s being completely inappropriately aggressive. It’s so funny because I’m just thinking about that and at those moments is really when I call on internally one of the fruits of the spirit, which is self control and, and, and also making sure that my interactions are in a loving manner. As Jesus teaches us, love God and love each other. That means we need to be kind to each other. So it’s a great training ground. I just thought about this. It’s a great training sport for me to strengthen my faith in a, in a faith based person.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:18:25]:
But again, it’s just really that, that idea that, you know, we are who we are in and all the have make us and you know the saying we used to teach my daughters when they were young, that saying that hurt people, hurt people, you know that it’s just, it’s so true. And so I’m probably one of the positive people that you’ve met. And I really am blessed, I think, to always have had that outcome. But it doesn’t mean that everything’s fantastically great and beautiful in my life. Of course not. I don’t know anyone that has that in their life. But the way that I help being that Way or the way that I protect that mindset has a lot to do with my faith in all areas, in looking outward from that point of faith inward and knowing what I know from reading the Bible and knowing what I know from the space that I come from with my faith. So that, like I said, I have to, like, give myself a little check on the cord, saying, come on, get over it.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:19:28]:
There’s my internal, you know, my internal self talking. Say, get over it, Lisa. Let it go. It’s not the Olympics for pickleball. You’re not on YouTube. You can decide that he’s wrong and calling that fallout, but just move on and go to the next point. Right? Just go to the next one.
Bernie Borges [00:19:44]:
So, okay, that. That’s a good reminder. And I like your point. I’m going to paraphrase, sort of surmise that what I hear you saying is walk the walk. And I think that that’s something that, you know, even for people who are not people of faith, is just to walk the walk of, you know, being kind to people and what is secularly known as the golden rule. Right. Which, of course, comes from the Bible. Okay, closing reflection here, full circle.
Bernie Borges [00:20:12]:
Lisa Marie, Fitness, your fitness journey and fulfillment. You know, just give us your closing thought on that.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:20:19]:
Closing thought is the energy that it takes to live a productive, happy, joyful, and successful life. And that is what my fitness helps me with, is keeping that energy level high, feeding my mind, because I’ve got an outlet, a physical outlet that washes away the cerebral part of myself, which is always trying to figure out what the next thing is and always trying to figure out to solve a problem. So the physical part releases that energy and just how important it is to have fun. You brought up the F word. For me, my fitness is my fun. It is my place of happiness. And so I need it. I need it like, you know, like.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:21:00]:
Like water and air. And so for me, I’ve learned that that has to be an important element of my life. And I think it’s really important for everyone to find out what their fun is in fitness and what feeds them into it.
Bernie Borges [00:21:12]:
Yes, I agree. I agree. I’ll even.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:21:15]:
I’ll.
Bernie Borges [00:21:15]:
I’ll even add amen to that. So.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:21:17]:
Amen.
Bernie Borges [00:21:18]:
Yeah. All right, Lisa Marie, let’s wrap it here. Please tell us, just briefly, a little bit about CEO book publishing, your podcast, and how people can connect with you.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:21:28]:
Well, thank you. So, yes, we met on the what no One Knows podcast, and we also have a podcast called now conversations. But in CEO book publishing, we publish about 80 some books and 200 some authors were passed on that year. Now, so we do traditional book publishing mainly for business professionals and nonprofit professionals. And people can reach me through CEO book publishing and also Lisa Marie Garcia.com and, and everything name related.
Bernie Borges [00:21:54]:
Fantastic. Well, I love all that. I love how you’re, you’re petting your puppy below to try to keep him or her calm. But that’s okay. That’s just, that’s just life. That’s just life. We, we roll with it on the Life Fulfilled podcast. But I just want to thank you, Lisa Marie, for joining me for this episode of the Life of Phil podcast.
Bernie Borges [00:22:13]:
I love this topic. It really resonates with me and all the different dimensions of it that we discussed. And just look forward to staying in touch and doing some good things together.
Liza Marie Garcia [00:22:23]:
Keep up the great work. Thank you, Bernie.
Bernie Borges [00:22:26]:
Thank you. Thank you.
