Surprise Yourself - The Free Life

Surprise Yourself

Overcoming a behavior, pattern, or belief system that kept you stuck for years creates the confidence that you can do so much more than you ever believed before. There is nothing more empowering then surprising yourself over what you are capable of. Having faith when you go all in and commit to change in one area is the ripple effect that changes your life forever. 

Show Notes

In this episode, I’m talking all about how to:

 

  • The number one thing I hear women say to me daily. 
  • How overcoming the battle with food and weight will give you confidence in many areas
  • Set a mission to challenge your ideas of what you are capable of.
  • How I surprised myself and all the great changes that came from it. 
  • How to build yourself off that triggers don’t sway you to fall back but empower you to keep going. 

Podcast Transcript

Do you know the number one thing that I hear from women when it comes to developing a healthy relationship with food? “I doubt my ability to do it.” I believe it is possible for others but not me. Today I want to talk about surprising yourself. What if you put all of that energy into doubting your ability to do it and you put it into surprising yourself to see what you are capable of doing. Setting higher goals and seeing a greater vision so baby steps are tied to a bigger purpose. 

(01:20)
Why take years to overcome your struggle with food when it can be done in eight weeks? That does not mean that after eight weeks there’s not more work to do and everything’s perfect.  You can feel what it’s like to be free from food and still have more work to grow. You can rewrite your beliefs and have a different relationship with food. You can stop binging. You have things that trigger you when it’s more difficult to practice but you lean into them because you have the tools. You have a system knowing you will only improve and go up from here. Believing this is going to be a hard journey and take many years is not motivating. I disagree because I see the success all the time.

 (02:11)
 I’ve been doing this for 17 years with thousands of thousands of women and it’s not true. And the truth of the matter is that when I was running the nutrition department at the eating disorder clinic in the beginning when my skills were not what they are today, I did believe it needed to take longer. But the truth was the people struggling longer just weren’t ready and were invested in the story of the struggle. They needed to fall down a little bit more. They didn’t learn enough lessons. They weren’t as committed or ready for the change. It wasn’t the right timing based on their situation. Also, I did not have confidence in my skills and my ability to guide them. There were blind spots in my work.  I did help them, but we all have to start somewhere. I’ve been doing this for 17 years, but there was a day one, there was a day two, there was a day three, there was a first client, a second client, a third client. And with each one, they truly became my teacher as much as I was there to help guide them. But the one thing that I have learned for myself and for my clients is the gift of surprising yourself.

(03:58)
When you are able to overcome a habit, behavior, belief, a pattern that is overwhelming and makes you feel stuck or makes you doubt yourself, when you’re able to overcome that, you gain unshakable confidence. You think if I can do that, what else can I do? But in order to get that, you need to decide that you can surprise yourself and it’s possible for you. You have to have faith in something that you don’t feel or see right away. This is why it is important to celebrate baby steps. Those small moments when you have a minute or two minutes or 30 minutes where you’re not thinking about food, you feel free, you left a bite of food or walked by a mirror and you didn’t bash yourself.  These moments need to be celebrated because they are proof that it is possible and the wins are only skimming the surface.

 (05:08)
One of the first times I surprised myself was when I wanted to move on from my job at the eating disorder clinic and start my own business but I had never done it before. I had all the reasons I doubted myself to do it and was focusing my attention on what and why it wouldn’t work instead of how is it going to work. I left my job to start my private practice and I went back to my job two months later when they called saying my position was still open. I thought this is a sign I need to take the job back. As soon as I took the job back, I knew that that was not the right choice. So I set another date to leave and build up my practice. My business did not take off or replace my income until I fully left and just burned the boat.  I made it so I had no other choice but to make it work.

Then other opportunities started arriving. I realized that one of my weaknesses in the business was sales. The way I looked at sales was like the car salesman trying to convince someone of something and that felt awful.  It had nothing to do with serving, adding value, or building relationships. We don’t learn those skills in college, classes, or courses. I learned them in the office, in one on one sessions, and from practice.  

I decided to join a network marketing company to learn sales. A book I read said you’re not going to get any better training in sales than that.  I looked at different companies and picked one I felt like had a good future. Within my first two weeks, I did everything they said. I sent out the emails and thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. So I quit and felt relief for a moment until I felt sad for the loss of my dream.

 (08:43)
Anytime you start something and then get a little resistance so you pull back and look for evidence that it’s not the right path for you. It is easier to talk yourself out of it for fear to lose hope. I didn’t want to go through it and fail because I have all of this hope of what could be and sometimes it feels better to have that hope than to learn that everything you wanted is not possible.

(09:31)
I felt like I was giving up on some something that lit me up.The vision of what it was going to look like after I learned this skill and how empowered I would feel. And so I decided to just smash the scale and go all in. I was going to do whatever it took to learn no matter how uncomfortable it was. And I wasn’t going to stop until I figured it out. And that is when within six months I realized I loved it. I loved building a team. I loved helping people with the business aspect because it was very similar to the food and body image work.

Speaker 1: (10:18)
It was that same mindset, fears, and coaching. It was just in a different arena. It was developing my skills even more. It really built my confidence that I can transfer my skills. I began to ask how else can I push myself? How else can I push the boundaries of what’s possible? And from that point on, I have done so much that I never would’ve thought of in my life. I grew the business to hit seven figures. I sold it. We moved to Costa Rica and lived abroad for a year. I started my website. I’ve traveled to Europe for the first time. 

(11:13)
My new program is licensing, training and coaching people in the method that I have used over the past 17 years so they can get up and running and start their own business coaching women. Without any experience, they will have a system that works, a mentor, and be able to learn the skills needed to be successful. So many people share my mission and I don’t believe that we should not wage war on the diet culture and instead lift each other up by aligning with this mission. Understanding that generational legacy is something we choose to pass down and can control the messages we put out there and the work that we do.

(12:17)
Healing one woman heals another woman. This ripple effect will create more of this message being spread out there. It is my hope it will drown out the other noise with all of the goodness that this does for people. Mental wellness is the future over the weight loss space. Hands down. I will stand by that statement. Stress is the number one contributor to disease as of 2017. The American Medical Association said 60% of illnesses that come into the doctor’s office derive from stress. And how much stress do we have in our lives from thinking about food all the time, trying to shrink ourselves, hiding until we are to have shrunk ourselves? 

 (13:26)
Consuming information is not going to solve the problem. Transformation comes from actually doing the work and implementing it. Get uncomfortable and use the tools. This action will surprise you more than you can even imagine. It unlocks a world of possibilities. You gain so much back in terms of energy, vitality, clarity,  focus, confidence, and empowerment. 

 (15:37)
Build up your belief and confidence so strong that when someone comes along and challenges your new belief you don’t forget what your old patterns have done to you. Working on your foundation of mental wellness and why these patterns arose will change your life permanently. A meal plan or system doesn’t work in the long run because it skips the critical component of why it all began. If you are not strong in your mission, what works for you, and what you’re capable of, then it can pull you back down. You can start to doubt yourself. You start to forget that you were well on your way to your goals and feeling happier until this situation came up.

Doing this work every day helps you to focus on what works. You will avoid falling into the cycle and trap. You hope that it’s the answer for them, but you know it’s not the answer for you. It is not about convincing them to come over to your belief system. It’s just loving them where they’re at and moving on with what works for you to help those who also feel tired of the chaos. 

 (17:25)
Surprise yourself this year. We have six months left in 2019 and you can end this year in a completely different place than you are at right now. You can shift your environment on a dime. It’s not something that has to take a long time to do. As soon as you make a decision to go in a direction, suddenly you get the support of likeminded people. You start attracting people who want the same things as you and you don’t feel alone or lost. You get to reinvent your story and start writing the next chapter, however you want it to look. 

 

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