A Chance to Learn About Your Natural Instinct in Emergencies

I have to be honest... my week has been all over the place. I am feeling much better physically, but this week was definitely one for the emotions.

With that being said, I want to tell you about what happened this past Thursday night.

We were all sound asleep. At 2:00am, our house alarm went off. It has never gone off on its own in the middle of the night (thank goodness).

When I heard the alarm, my eyes popped open. I jumped out of bed, only to smash my shin into the heavy wood of our bed frame. I fell to the ground. My adrenaline was pumping so I leaped up and ran down the stairs.

I checked the 3 doorways... and they all appeared closed. What the heck?!

With 5 seconds remaining until the cops would be automatically called, I managed to disarm the system. Guardian Protection had called my cell phone and said that it was coming from the garage.

Well... what do you know. The door leading into the house from the garage had come ajar. Phew. Everything was fine. They asked for our secret code... and sure enough, I remembered it. 

I sat on the steps, took a breath, and noticed that I had a contusion the size of a softball on my shin. And it was painful. The pain radiated to my hip. I was sure that I had done some damage.

But - everything was fine. Nothing had gone wrong.

As I reflected, I thought back to my many nights on call working in the NICU. Never once had I fallen out of bed and hurt myself while running to a code, but the response was similar. I was confident that I was going to show up - I was going to arrive as fast as possible. - I was going to make a difference.

Long ago, my father taught me that the worst thing you can do in an emergency is nothing. I think those words have impacted me significantly.

And as I sat on the steps... I felt very proud. Feeling proud is something that we don’t celebrate enough. I felt proud that I would do anything to protect my family. I felt proud that instinctually, I take action. I felt proud of myself.

I didn’t talk about this pride to anyone. So - I felt that it was super important to remind you to feel proud. There are so many things that make you uniquely you... which of those things can we celebrate today?

Feeling proud is a beautiful, human thing. Let’s stop missing opportunities to celebrate this.

Today, I want you to take a minute and answer this. What are you proud of???

Sending you love and strength….

More of my own advice...

Something very strange happened this week.

Everything was going absolutely fine until last Friday, when I started to feel the sensation of having to cough.

Now before I tell you more, let me tell you how we have been living the past year. We work from home, kids are virtually schooled, we get our groceries delivered, and we do not see any other humans.

Ok, back to the cough sensation.

I had no other symptoms at all, but I felt as though I was going to get sick. I let it ride out hoping that I would feel better. Because it felt like bronchospasm, I even took some albuterol (I have no history of asthma).

Ok... so 7 days later, I am not better. Not worse... but not better.

So, I called my doc. She ordered some labs and a chest Xray. I was sure something would come up.

The next 24 hours while I waited for results, I had convinced myself that something was very wrong.

But then... the labs and the Xray came back. All normal. Exam - normal. Pulse Ox - 99%. Now, I am very confused. So I did the only thing I knew; I consulted any and every medical professional I could. My brother(s), my dad, my husband, my friends, my clients... hahahaha.

And guess what, they all said the same thing.

My friend Sasha, a cardiac anesthesiologist, said, “Ok. You just need to stop. Your body is telling you to slow down. You cannot be the hero to everyone. You must rest. Stop trying to find a damn diagnosis... and rest.”

She then texted back again and said, “I’m not kidding. I am worried. You need to rest now.”

My friend Ellen, a radiation oncologist said, “Will you take your own advice and stop pouring from an empty cup?”  

So I did a thing. I asked for help.

I cleared my weekend schedule and put my beloved clients in the hands of my trusted team. My biggest fear was letting them down and not being at the Saturday workout or our Sunday check-in. This is a big week for my coaching group, and I want to be there.  

But - I always want to walk the walk. And so I am.

I am resting and I have asked for help. And it feels good. And all of a sudden... I don’t feel like I have to cough anymore. I can celebrate that my work-up was negative. I can celebrate that I have the best friends, the best family, the best team, the best clients… I am so incredibly grateful.

How is this happening for me?

I know how I want to show up for my people, but it starts by showing up for me. I just needed a little reminder. Actually, it was quite a big reminder.  

Today - I want you to carve out some rest time. I am guessing you need it, too.

I finally took my own advice

I don’t always follow my own advice.

My philosophy is less is more, embrace imperfection, progress not perfection, and setting appropriate boundaries. And many days, I am doing way more than I want, not delegating, feeling disappointed that things didn’t go perfectly, focusing on the end goal and not the journey, and allowing every boundary that I ever set to be crossed.

Even though I help others to do the above, I am not immune to my overachieving tendencies that are loaded with limiting beliefs.

So... this week, I took my own advice. I committed to my 3-2-1 rule that I talked about last week. If you don’t remember, the 3-2-1 rule is as follows:

Each day, list 3 things that have to get done, 2 things that you want to do, and 1 thing that you are keeping on the to-do list.

And all I can say is WOW. This practice allowed me to set small, realistic goals, and when I completed them - I felt so good about myself.

In fact, by setting small goals that I was easily able to complete, I felt motivated and accomplished. I didn’t feel behind or overwhelmed.

But... there is more.

3 years ago, I was working 3 jobs, but somehow now with just 1 job, I felt that I had less time. I was putting pressure on myself to accomplish all of these extra things simply because I had more time. It was really unexpected.

You know the old saying... “when you do more- you do more.” So now I had more time - but was doing less and felt pretty bad about it.

I am finding that I am able to complete my 3-2-1 strategy outline in less than 2 minutes each morning... and I can definitely get my 3 to-dos checked off the list in under an hour. 

Then I get to do what I want - and leave something on the to-do list - and it is all ok. This has opened up a ton of space for me to be creative, to create, to connect and reconnect with my passion.

In just one week... I feel excited. I feel encouraged. I do not feel overwhelmed.

I know that my 3-2-1 advice is a keeper. In fact, it is having a positive impact on many of my clients. One of my 1:1 clients loves it so much that she messages me her list every day for accountability... and she is creating tremendous (intentional) space in her life, too.

Wishing you space full of fun and excitement. But also, leave room for the negative feelings - because they are allowed, too!

“I Am Overwhelmed”

What causes overwhelm? Overwhelm is a feeling. For me, overwhelm starts in my chest and radiates into my head. I feel a pressure sensation pushing in on me and there’s nowhere to go. I feel trapped. Overwhelm is a doom and gloom, dark and stormy, grey feeling. It moves slowly, which makes it hard to get past. It seems like it’s going to be there forever.

Now, we all know that our thoughts create our feelings, so let’s talk about some of the thoughts that can make us feel overwhelmed.

●      There’s too much to do.

●      There’s no one to help me.

●      I have no choice.

●      Everyone’s depending on me.

●      I have to do this perfectly.

Typically thoughts of the “all or none” variety lead us toward overwhelm. Because overwhelm creates a tremendous amount of pressure. And when do you feel pressure? Well, when you have to get things done quickly and efficiently, and you’re managing a lot at once. We’re all wearing so many hats: doctor, partner, parent, friend, daughter, pet owner.

If this resonates with you, know that you can decrease the intensity of overwhelm just by admitting that you have a lot on your plate. Because here is the kicker: overwhelm is a choice. We just don’t know that we’re choosing to feel overwhelmed because of something called automatic thoughts.

Automatic Thoughts

All of these thoughts we have that make us feel overwhelmed are automatic, ingrained in our psyche. Our job today is to start identifying what these automatic thoughts are for you. To start, you can sit down for five minutes and write down every thought that is coming up for you. When you start to see the same thoughts again and again, you know that those are the ones to work on. Because all of our results ultimately come from our thoughts. If we want different results and feelings and actions, we have to have different thoughts.

Long-Term Solution and Buy-In

You may think hiring a coach is about somebody telling you what actions to take. But the truth is that if you don’t have thoughts that support and make you feel a certain way to help you do what your action plan says, then you’ll do it for a week or two until your willpower runs out. It’s not a long-term solution.

You have to remember that any time we set goals for ourselves, we need to start thinking about them in terms of long-term solution. And long-term solution is all about creating a system. If something isn’t working, it’s just the system that’s not right, because you’re not able to get your thoughts around it. So either you can change your thoughts and buy into the system you’ve adopted, which will take more time because you have to retrain your brain, or you can modify the system in a way that you can get your thoughts behind it. Either way, you have to have the buy-in. You need to believe that you have the choice to be overwhelmed or not overwhelmed.

Content

Now let’s look at the opposite emotion. When you’re not overwhelmed, maybe you’re content. What would it take for you to feel content today? Content for me is right in my chest. It’s airy and light blue. It feels fun. Here are the thoughts that make me feel content:

●      I have a realistic plan.

●      I’m choosing to do things that I want to do today.

●      Everything is happening exactly as it should.

●      Everything is just as it should be.

 High achievers tend to flip easily from content to overwhelm, but that means you can just as easily flip back. All it takes is the awareness that it’s happening and that you can change it. It’s about owning the idea that you have the choice. When you believe that you have control of your emotions, that’s called emotional adulthood.

Emotional Adulthood

Emotional adulthood is when we take ourselves out of the victim role and say, “I’m in charge here. I have the ability to be content or overwhelmed. No circumstance can make me feel. It’s my thoughts about these things that create a feeling.”

The relationships that tend to be most uplifting and not draining are ones between two people who accept emotional adulthood. That’s a thought-provoking relationship, one that’s primed for growth and causes less conflict.

On the other hand, emotional childhood is when you’re constantly putting yourself in the victim role, thinking, “This happened to me. Nothing good ever happens.” Everyone’s human. We all live in emotional childhood sometimes and emotional adulthood sometimes. It’s all about choosing where you want to live.

Scarcity and Abundance

In overwhelm, you start believing you don’t have time, money, or friends. You jump into this scarcity zone. But a scarcity mindset can cause you to have even less time, money, and friends because you’re believing that’s how it is. In contrast, if you can maintain an abundant mindset, overwhelm, by default, will decrease. 

If we believe that we have just the right amount of money, we can start thinking about our money situation as abundant. A lot of the time, people will say, “I just don’t have the money.” But I want to challenge you to think about if you choose to have the money for this thing or not.

It’s the same way with time. Because when we talk about time, our all-or-none mentality takes full effect and we think we need hours upon hours to dedicate to this one thing. But what if I told you you only need five minutes to make a tiny step in the right direction? It’s all about progress over perfection. The perfection zone is the all or none zone. The progress zone will keep you in the content mode.

When people set big goals, like putting on ten pounds of muscle, there are so many variables to manage: time, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and relationships. There are so many moving components that can lead you to overwhelm. Automatically, you’ll have feelings of overwhelm before you’re able to even scratch the surface of your goal.

So it’s all about progress. What is one step you can take to get there?

The 3-2-1 Rule

Here’s something you can implement immediately to start cracking down on incremental progress to create contentment right here and now and choose to stay out of the overwhelm.

I recommend giving yourself five minutes in the morning to write down:

●      Three things that need to get done today, outside of having to go to work

●      Two things you want to do today for yourself. You may not think you have time for yourself every day, but you do, even if it’s just a few minutes.

●      One thing you think you have to get done today but will leave for tomorrow. This will help you get comfortable with the fact that our to-do lists never end.

Here’s my list for today:

Need:

●      Pay the bills

●      Schedule an appointment

●      Take an hour to plan out my month

Want:

●      Sit in my massage chair

●      Take a walk outside

Leave:

●      Leave 1 thing on the todo list and be ok with it. The truth is - the to do list doesn’t end- so let’s just be ok with it.

We choose if we want to stay in overwhelm or not. Feeling overwhelmed comes from our thoughts. A simple strategy like 3-2-1 can help us own our contentment right here and now. If you implement 3-2-1, it will slow down time for you. You can choose to jump out of the overwhelm and into the contentment.

Are You Ready For Change?

I want to discuss the process of change with you today.

So often, we set lofty goals that we don’t plan to follow through on because we are just not aware of how ready we are to make change.

Let’s discuss the stages of change.

Stage One: Pre-Contemplation

Pre-contemplation. If your goal is to gain muscle, your pre-contemplation phase may be realizing that you can’t carry your groceries into the house and you want to be stronger. It’s recognizing there is a perceived problem.

Stage Two: Contemplation

Contemplation is when we are considering doing something about it. We haven’t committed yet but we’re considering it. For me, this happens all the time. I proceed from pre-contemplation to contemplation pretty quickly. This phase is all about collecting data and seeing what options are out there. Maybe it’s Googling or speaking to a coach about what needs to happen for you to get stronger.

Stage Three: Planning

Planning is putting the plan into place. It’s saying that based on the studies, it looks like if you do strength training and hit the big muscle groups three times a week, and fuel your body properly, you can gain muscle. Ideally, we’ll be very careful to create a realistic plan.

Stage Four: Take Action

The next step is taking action and executing your plan. Note that if we pick something that’s more than we can handle, we’re likely to lose motivation right away. Not being able to stick to your plan can create feelings of failure that crush our motivation. We have thoughts of, “I can’t do this. Why did I think I could do this?”, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

Stage Five: Maintenance 

When it comes to goals and health, sustainability is my favorite word. Anybody can try something and get results and move on, but we want to sustain our results forever. Many of us think it’s too late for us, that we’re past our prime. But I think we’re just getting started.

Where are you in this process?

If you are having trouble making a plan... I suggest you listen to my podcast, “I Am Overwhelmed.” This is where I discuss my 3-2-1 principle. It will help you create space in your day to start moving toward making the changes that you want. You can listen here.

“Exercise is Stalling My Weight loss”

Is it true that exercise can cause weight gain or stall weight loss? Yes. There is some truth to it. One of the biggest reasons is that when we start an exercise program, we often burn more calories. Exercise can account for about 15 to 30 percent of our total daily calorie burn, and exercise can increase our appetite. As a result, we may take more food in. If you’re exercising a lot and fueling your body appropriately, you may potentially have some weight gain. 

Another factor is that when we exercise extremely or excessively, we can throw our hormones off. There are many hormones that are affected by exercise. We can stress our bodies pretty significantly when we over-exercise. 

What Are Your Goals?

Maybe you’re asking, “How do I get around this?”. And it all starts with what goal we’re trying to ultimately achieve. What do we really want? 

I have clients who are less concerned with body composition. All they want is to continue to drop scale weight. My recommendation is that exercise is non-negotiable because of the tremendous amount of health benefits it has. But it’s all about using it wisely. 

It’s recommended that the average American get about 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, which works out to thirty minutes five days a week. So what do you do? 

If you want to lose weight, ideally, you’ll do something that keeps your appetite at bay. Walking is a great, low-intensity option that burns calories but won’t have a huge afterburn effect. Note that some studies say that if you walk fasted, it can increase your fat burn, but it may also increase your hunger. 

Walking half an hour a day, enjoying yourself, and getting all of the benefits of exercise, doing that low-intensity exercise is your best friend. 

But what if your goal is body composition change, either increasing muscle mass, decreasing body fat, or doing both? In order to do this, there are two factors. If you don’t want to stimulate your appetite too much, you’ll want to maintain muscle mass and lose fat. To do that, you’ll need to do some strength training. Nothing too intense or vigorous, but something in which you’re stimulating your muscle. 

Things start to shift when we’re talking about gaining muscle. To gain muscle and maintain the same body fat, you will gain weight on the scale. If you gain muscle and lose fat, you’ll either maintain your weight or it will decrease slightly. 

So the big question is if we’re looking for the scale to move or for our body composition to change, because they’re very different approaches. When a client is okay with the scale maybe moving up a bit, the conversation is about stressing the muscle. We have to break the muscle down and cause micro-tears in order to build it back up. It may sound intense, but it can be very fun. We just have to be committed to the scale potentially going up at first or staying the same. Photos can be a great way to track our results even if our weight doesn’t change or even goes up. 

Putting it All Together

Let’s say you do want to change your body composition. Some questions come up. How much strength training? How much cardio? How often? Well, unless you’re a fitness competitor or a bodybuilder, it’s best to have a realistic time frame, which means you can go slower. The next question is how much time you’re willing to commit. 

Strength Training

If you’re new to the world of weight training, you won’t want to do it seven days a week and do maximum cardio because your body learns quickly. It won’t continue to change. Less is more, especially to start. We want to do the smallest amount we can and still see results. Typically my clients start with three strength training sessions per week with a full-body approach. This allows us to maximize the results we can get with minimal work. 

Then we observe and see what happens. At the two-week mark, if we’re serious about continuing on and making changes and improvements, we’ll tweak something. Maybe the duration, number, or style of the workouts. Every two weeks, we’ll think about changing something, always staying one step ahead of the body before it can catch onto us. That’s why having a coach can be so helpful.

Cardio

Again, the idea is to start off with the least amount of cardio you can do and still see results. Typically, I start my clients who want to make a body transformation off with 15 to 20 minutes of cardio three times a week, tacked onto the strength training workout or alternated with strength days. It’s up to you if you want to work out six days a week or have more days off.

Depending on how fast you want to do this, you can strategize and see what your body responds to best. Maybe you have a greater fat burn effect by doing fasted cardio in the morning, having a meal, and then doing your strength training routine. You can get it all done in one day and repeat three times a week. Or you can do your weight lifting first, empty out your glycogen, and then do your cardio, which will make your body have to burn fat for fuel.

If this all works and you see changes, we keep it right here until we stop seeing changes. Maybe we increase the weight you lift. Maybe you decrease the rest time between sets. All of these are tweaks we can make to maximize what we’re doing without adding more days of exercise in a week. Once we’ve exhausted that option, we can look at adding more days. 

So, sure, exercise may stall your weight loss. But many clients of mine start seeing the positive changes - more muscle, better fitness, better endurance, more energy - and want to keep going regardless of what happens on the scale. For so long, we’ve focused on our weight, and so many of us are tired of it. We’re starting to realize that weight isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t define our health.

Most importantly, what do you really want for yourself? Not for what other people think. How do you want to proceed? Any result you want, you can have.

A Reason Many Avoid the Gym

When you think of the gym, you may imagine lots of in-shape people walking around in designer fitness wear, laughing with their friends. It’s a big community full of beautiful people.

And if we don’t believe that we’re a part of that crew, we already believe we don’t belong there.

Having a certain image in mind of how we’ll have to look in order to allow ourselves to go to the gym will only create more judgment.

We all have an image of people that are “allowed” in the gym. Imagine you’re at the gym in the current shape you’re in. Picture yourself there. What’s happening? Do you feel nervous? Does it seem like people are looking at you? Worrying about what others are thinking is human nature.

But we don’t have to care what others think. We can choose not to, it just takes a bit of work. 

The reality is that nobody at the gym cares how much you’re lifting. They don’t care how fast your treadmill is going. They don’t care what you’re wearing. They simply don’t notice. If somebody does care, it’s more a projection of their own thoughts about themselves than anything to do with you. 

Part of the solution to overcome the constant feeling of being judged is to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there again and again, and realize that nothing bad is going to happen.

The minute we decide to be vulnerable and present, we feel calm, relaxed, and believe we can show up anywhere and work out.

If we can believe that we’re perfect as is, having that self-love and self-acceptance, we stop allowing others’ judgment to take over our lives.

At the end of the day, there’s no requirement to enter a gym other than that you want to be there and better yourself. It has nothing to do with how you look, how much you can lift, or anything of that type.

This concept also applies to bathing suits and public beach and pool settings.  We can put all of this energy to better use.

What would your life be like if you were 100000% confident in your own skin? The opportunities are endless in this space.

Remember... You are beautiful and perfect just as you are... so don’t go hiding any longer.

“I Don’t Understand Macros”

In this article, we’ll talk about what macros are, why we care, how we can use them, and why counting macros isn’t necessarily for everyone. Because while there are some major benefits to calculating macros, there’s also a real case to be made for combining intuition with a gentle approach to macros, which is what we do in my Mindful Macro program.

The Three Macronutrients

The three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Generally, calculating macros requires a balanced diet with all three macronutrients. That being said, if you’re following keto or low-carb, you can still calculate your macros but you’ll be using different percentages.

The Broad Picture

We all have a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), which includes our basal metabolic rate (the calories our body burns just by being itself), the thermic effect of food (which accounts for about 10% of our TDEE), and exercise and activity (about 15 to 30% of our TDEE). This is why exercise isn’t the number one way to create a calorie deficit. 

Protein

Protein helps so many different things in our body, like the growth of muscle and skin. When you combine protein with carbohydrates and fat, you’ll be able to blunt your insulin response. That means that eating protein helps your blood sugar stay more stable than if you just eat carbohydrates. Often when we don’t get enough protein, especially if we’re engaging in lots of exercise, we’ll experience hunger and even cravings.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are our body’s quick and slow energy. Many people think carbohydrates make us gain weight, but in order to make a body composition change, you’ll need to put a good amount of demand on your body. Moving and stressing your muscle is necessary for body composition change. And to have enough energy to put in the work, you’ll need fuel. Carbohydrates give us that fuel.

If you’re diabetic, pre-diabetic, or have insulin resistance, you can absolutely still include carbohydrates in your macros. It’ll require more of a low-carbohydrate diet than a no-carbohydrate diet, and you’ll still be able to get all the benefits you need from those carbohydrates. And note that strength training can actually improve our insulin sensitivity so we’re simultaneously making amazing changes while improving our health parameters.

If we eat the right carbohydrates, we’ll get lots of good stuff, like fiber and B-vitamins. It’s about looking at food as medicine and fuel rather than as “bad foods.” Processed carbohydrates aren’t as healthy for us, but many of them can do good things for us.

Fat

“Fat” is not most people’s favorite word, and it was especially the enemy in the late 80s and 90s. But fat is so necessary. Poly- and monounsaturated fats are considered good, and you want to stay away from saturated and trans fats, even if you’re doing low-carb high-fat. 

Saturated fats have been shown to increase hemoglobin A1C in people who are doing low-carb dieting. It has a lot to do with genetics, but it is a phenomenon. To reverse this, it’s important to make sure your fats are coming from healthy sources. 

Fat supports hormones, which control everything. Somebody who over-exercises and drops body fat may stop menstruating, and their hormone levels can be off. Often there is an issue with the amount of dietary fat they’re eating. 

Fat also supports healthy tissues and lets us have nice skin and shiny hair. Fat has the lowest glycemic load of the three macronutrients, which slows the absorption of protein and carbohydrates, allowing us to blunt the insulin response when we eat a balanced meal.

Counting Macros

There is a protocol called If It Fits Your Macros that tells you anything is fair game as long as you stick to your chosen macronutrient ratios. But I like to focus on optimal health, with more of an emphasis on nutritious foods. These are what I call all-the-time foods (note: not bad foods!), which feel really good in our body and serve us really well. In contrast, “sometimes foods” are more processed but taste good - and you don’t have to stop eating them. The idea is you can fit all these foods in macros if you’re calculating them. 

If you have somebody calculate your macros, they’ll usually give you percentages. One very balanced way to do it is 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 30% fat (also known as the Zone diet). These percentages are calculated from your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. 

Another option is to eat one gram of protein for every pound of lean body mass you have. From there, you keep fat at about 30% and carbohydrates make up the rest. It’s really just about doing the math. The important part is that after you get a jumping-off point, you observe and see what’s happening. 

Macros Aren’t for Everybody

Counting macros may sound great, but it requires weighing, measuring, and food prepping your food. It can get pretty tedious, which may not make you want to do it long term. I certainly don’t. So a couple of years ago, I invented a program called Mindful Macros which allows you to eyeball and estimate how much of each food to eat to make up a balanced meal. It’s turned out to be very effective, especially for body transformation and quality of life.

Following our intuition, knowing when we’re hungry, and stopping when we’re full, combined with Mindful Macros, is a very appropriate for those of us who aren’t looking to competing on a fitness stage. People like me, who have a family, a business - a lot going on. For me, flexibility is the most important.  I rely on my intuition, hunger scale, and eyeballs. Together, these two approaches allow me to have an exciting, flexible, and free plan.

I’ve been following this for nearly eight years now, and I’ll never go back to calculating my macros every day. I love the flexibility. I’m within a healthy weight range and optimal healthy zone. I want freedom and results, so I meet myself halfway in the middle. It works for me. What will work for you?

“I Am Not Motivated to Improve My Health”

The scenario typically goes something like this. We know what we want to do. We’ve done it before and it’s worked. But something holds us back from doing it. The bottom line? We’re lacking motivation. 

Before we can proceed, we need to talk about what’s going on and what thoughts are coming up. Often, based on past experience, we draw an over-generalized conclusion on how it’s going to go.

Let’s say to get healthier, your goal is to lose weight. If you’ve lost weight in the past and it wasn’t super pleasant, you probably won’t be too excited to do it again. That’s why if you’re a person who’s done several diets in their lifetime, whenever there’s a new fad diet, it’s exciting. We think it might be different since we haven’t tried it, that this might be the missing piece. So we go ahead and try it and, often, it doesn’t work like we want, and that’s how cyclical, yo-yo dieting comes in.

The Process of Change

To understand motivation, you have to understand how change happens. That way, you can apply it.

Stage One: Pre-Contemplation

Pre-contemplation is when you recognize that there’s a problem. Maybe you have a patient who is a lifelong smoker with high blood pressure. They say their mother smoked for 80 years and lived to be 105, so smoking doesn’t affect their family and they’re not worried. Your strategy as a clinician is to help them see how things could affect their health. In the pre-contemplation phase, the patient would say, “I know smoking is bad.” 

If your goal is to gain muscle, your pre-contemplation phase may be realizing that you can’t carry your groceries into the house and you want to be stronger. It’s recognizing there is a perceived problem.

Stage Two: Contemplation

Contemplation is when we are considering doing something about it. We haven’t committed yet but we’re considering it. For me, this happens all the time. I proceed from pre-contemplation to contemplation pretty quickly. This phase is all about collecting data and seeing what options are out there. Maybe it’s Googling or speaking to a coach about what needs to happen for you to get stronger.

Stage Three: Planning

Planning is putting the plan into place. It’s saying that based on the studies, it looks like if you do strength training and hit the big muscle groups three times a week and fuel your body properly, you can gain muscle. Ideally, we’ll be very careful to create a realistic plan.

Stage Four: Take Action

The next step is taking action and executing your plan. Note that if we pick something that’s more than we can handle, we’re likely to lose motivation right away. Not being able to stick to your plan can create feelings of failure that crush our motivation. We have thoughts of, “I can’t do this. Why did I think I could do this?”, which makes it hard to stay motivated.

Stage Five: Maintenance 

When it comes to goals and health, sustainability is my favorite word. Anybody can try something and get results and move on, but we want to sustain our results forever. Many of us think it’s too late for us, that we’re past our prime. But I think we’re just getting started. 

This fifth stage is why creating a realistic plan that we can put into action and that we enjoy is so important. If we enjoy the journey, we’ll want to keep doing it, and we’ll be able to sustain it. 

When we make a habit change, it’ll take about six months to solidify. We have to set things up for success so that we can become motivated. The alternative of committing to an intense, complicated plan will make it much harder to make it through the action step to maintenance. We feel discouraged, not motivated.

Taking the Action

I have a client, Andrea, who successfully maintained a 55 pound weight loss for two years. One time, she told me about an article she read about motivation. The article said we sometimes hesitate to take an action because we’re afraid to fail. 

But in terms of habit creation, if we can show up every day and commit to the action that gets us to the end result, we’ll find the positives in showing up. By taking the action, we create new thoughts. Those new thoughts create feelings that drive the action even more. Ultimately, we’ll get the result we want. 

If we can have a very simple plan, if we just start and do something, even ten minutes once a week, we start to feel better and do it more and more. Committing to a baseline minimum, the smallest amount you’re willing to commit to, just doing it, may be the key to unlocking motivation. 

If you have limiting beliefs from past experiences in which you haven’t succeeded, it’s time to say, “That was then; this is now.” You can go through the change model and add the bonus feature of going right to the action, focusing on the beauty of the moment of action. 

The action can be fun! It makes you feel good and strong. It gives you thoughts of, “I’m worth it. This is worth it. This is working. I feel good,” thoughts that create motivation and drive you to continue taking action to get you to the result that you want.

I believe you can get any result that you want in your life. It just takes a bit of time, organization, and setting yourself up for success.

“I Can’t Have Food Freedom and Achieve Results.”

My Story

Have you ever had diet mentality? It may have affected you if you’ve ever been on a diet that gave you specific rules and restrictions. That’s the whole industry; there are certain rules and approaches and plans that you have to follow. There’s so much information out there that it can be so incredibly overwhelming, yet we fall into it. For the first 20 years of my life, I certainly did, for at least 15 or 16 of those years. When I was 5 I can already remember being on my first diet. 

When I was 5, one of my friend’s mothers told me that I was bigger than the other girls, that I’ll need to lose weight, and that I should go on a diet. I can still remember it. Although based on the growth chart I was actually a normal kid, it was already in my head that something was wrong with me. Over the years, that belief led me to find more evidence for why I wasn’t the same as my friends, that I should change and try to be different. That’s how I started experimenting with all the different diets out there: the Zone, Atkins, keto, Suzanne Somers, Weight Watchers, intermittent fasting, the 8-minute diet - you name it, I tried it.

The truth is that all of them will work, but to sustain the results that you get with them, you have to be able to continue doing them. Why did it take me until I was 25 to realize this? 

Freedom

Biologically, humans crave freedom. We don’t want others to tell us what to do. So what happens when we hear, “You can’t have that cake?”. The idea that we can’t do it just makes us want it even more. 

If you have any dieting history, you might think back about all the diets you’ve been on and how hard they were. Yet we somehow still believe that because it was difficult, it’s going to work. It’s the heaven’s reward fallacy, a thought distortion that tells us that the harder we work, the bigger the reward should be. It’s definitely an idea we hear often in clinical practice. As a result, the whole concept of having trust in ourselves goes out the window. 

But in order to find food freedom and get results, we have to start by trusting ourselves.

Defining Food Freedom

Often, when I say “food freedom” to people, they get freaked out. They say, “I can’t eat all the cake and candy and ice cream and pizza and fries I want and still get a six-pack. What are you talking about?” So we have to define what food freedom means to you. Is food freedom really just eating every single thing you’ve been told you shouldn’t have?

In reality, food freedom is tapping into your intuition. It’s noting when you’re hungry and when you’re full. It’s getting in touch with your natural hunger cues and your full signals. It’s asking your body what it wants and needs to feel healthy and vibrant. 

Here is an experiment I want you to do this week. If you’re losing fat, what do you crave? I crave fat. Makes sense, doesn’t it? When I’ve been doing a lot of weight training, my body craves protein. The signs are there. You’ll find freedom when you start listening to the signs. That’s how you’ll get results.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Hunger

First, we listen and start to notice. We want to get good at understanding when we’re hungry. We want to eat when we’re hungry, but before we get to the hangry zone when we can’t even focus. 

It’s important to discover and describe what hunger feels like for you in your body. Next time you’re hungry, think about what your body feels. For me, it’s a burning, radiating feeling in my stomach and esophagus. 

Now, I look for that feeling right before I’m ready to eat, but at a level that I could wait another half hour or so if I wanted to. That’s the prime opportunity to ask your body what it wants to eat.

Fullness

The next step is knowing when you’re full. Stopping to eat when we’re full can be hard and overwhelming for some people. You have to get comfortable with the slow feeling and empty space of being full.

Emotional Eating

Eliminating emotional eating takes a lot of work. It requires allowing the feelings deep inside your body and realizing that everything is going to be okay. If you can eliminate the extra food that comes in when you’re not hungry, you’ll move even closer to a space that your optimal health body wants to be at.

Notice I don’t mention what your goals should be. We’re talking about optimal health, which will look different for every person. You get to determine what your optimal health is. It doesn’t have to involve a scale number. You can choose how to define optimal health for yourself. 

Movement

Another piece of this is loving movement, remembering why movement is present in our lives and all the benefits we get out of movement besides how it can potentially make us look. That’s just another thing that will happen over time as we stay consistent.

Think about the movements that you love doing, because those are the ones that you’ll do again and again. Think about what you love about them. What do you feel as you’re doing these exercises? Creating a mind-body connection will allow you to be in the moment. That’s when exercise can reduce stress, and that’s how we learn to love movement.

Perfectionism

Many women physicians struggle with perfectionism. But if we try to be perfect, it’s hard to trust ourselves. When we constantly set high expectations and don’t meet them, we’re no longer perfect in our own eyes. We believe we did something to let ourselves down. Little by little, we start to lose trust in ourselves. When we lose self-trust, we don’t believe we have the ability to know what we need so we can have freedom and achieve the goals and results we really want.

Gentle Nutrition

When we’re really going for certain results, like total body transformation, gentle nutrition has to come into the equation. Typically when we try to build muscle mass to shift our body fat percentage, we need to have balanced meals that have some macronutrient combining involved. 

Freedom for me is being able to know how to combine foods my way, not having to be at the mercy of a food scale or exact macros. It’s being able to pick exactly what I want to eat and not having to follow a prescribed plan. 

I recommend working within a ten-pound weight range that your body may be in. The lower end is when you’re really dialling it in, having a specific goal and working extra hard to get there, focusing on your hunger scale and keeping your meals balanced and healthy. The other end is about following the intuitive piece but not being so specific about how honed in things are. Ultimately, you can be anywhere in that ten-pound range that you want to be and feel really comfortable and free with it.

The bottom line? We can find food freedom and get the exact results we want to have. It’s all about self-trust and being completely realistic, taking the time to talk to your body. 

Food Freedom and Results?

This week in my coaching groups, we talked all about freedom and results.

What do I mean by this?

You know how you want to have freedom... things like eating what sounds good to you, exercising the way you want to, going out to dinner without always having to avoid the bread.  Essentially throwing away the rules that we have carried with us for years.

There is this common misconception that we have to be so strict with our food and follow all these restrictive diets in order to actually get healthier. Even more than this, that you can’t possibly eat what your body craves without gaining weight.

Let’s talk about why this is absolutely not the case!

You can have total food freedom while still hitting your goals and achieving the results you want. In fact, when you learn to trust your body and pick up on the cues it gives you, your goals will actually be way easier to hit. Not to mention way less restrictive.

Food freedom is all about tapping into your intuition and listening to your body. Eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full. If these are completely new concepts to you, it really is all about slowing down and paying attention.

A good example is that I know I’m in fat-burning mode when my body is craving fattier foods. Similarly, if I’ve been going really hard in the gym, I know that I will need to up my protein intake to nourish my muscles.

So many of us eat when we’re not hungry, for whatever reason. Sometimes, that reason is actually anxiety, which can mimic hunger signals. That’s why it’s important to get really in tune with your body’s wants and needs.

What I’d really encourage you to do is figure out what optimal health looks and feels like for you. Not what some exercise program or diet tells you is right, but what actually feels good. Included in this might be a ten-pound weight range where that fluctuates based on your body’s needs at the time.

If you do want to achieve some more specific body results, I’d recommend combining intuitive eating with a gentle nutrition approach. This way, you eat what’s best for your body while still fueling it with the nutrients it needs to perform best.

There are many gentle nutrition programs out there. My program, Mindful Macros, is a gentle nutrition strategy that allows you to estimate the ideal macronutrients for your body. Stay tuned, I have a whole podcast episode being released later this month.

We have signs.

The signs are there.

You will find food freedom when you start listening to the signs.

You will get results by tapping into your freedom when you’re listening to the signs.

You got this, my friend.

“I Don’t Lose Weight As Fast As Others”

The Thought Model

When I think, “I don’t lose weight as fast as other people,” my feeling is concerned. I feel like there must be something wrong with me, which also makes me concerned. It turns into a negative thought spiral, all of which creates the same feeling, making our concern get more and more intense. 

When we feel concerned, we analyze everything we’ve ever done, all the times we’ve failed at losing weight. We go on social media and look at all the other “successful” people and compare ourselves. We feel hopeless. As a result, we feel like it’s way too hard to do anything to get us closer to our goals and give up.

Of course it will feel hard if we have self-defeating thoughts. When you feel defeated, you’re not going to keep doing things that you think are hard. You think, “Well, it’s not working anyway, so why should I waste my time?”

The Individual You

The reality is that there can be truth in the comment “I don’t lose weight as fast as other people.” That can be a scientific fact.

You can draw some light conclusions on how you’ll respond to losing weight based on your body type. I’m mostly a mesomorph, which means I put on muscle easily. I know when I move my body, eat toward my hunger scale, and make good, balanced decisions, I’m not necessarily going to lose weight on the scale. But maybe my ectomorph friend who has the same habits would drop weight. Or an endomorph may gain a couple of pounds. There are so many different scenarios here. It’s all about understanding how your body works and what it responds to.

So maybe you do lose weight slower than some. And maybe you lose weight faster than others. But at the end of the day, the actions you’re taking and your lifestyle have more of an impact on your ability to lose weight than the make-up of your body.

Sure, we all have different tolerance to carbohydrates and different insulin and hunger hormone sensitivities. Nonetheless, most of us can work around these things. 

The first thing to do is to stop the comparison. Stop the over-generalization. Ultimately, what does it matter how fast this process of weight loss goes if you’re having fun doing it? What if losing weight was so fun? Would you want it to go fast? Probably not. We’re too concerned with the speed at which we’re achieving our goal. We think if we get there faster, we’ll be happier. So we forget to start off with being happy with who we are as a unique person. 

If we can consider releasing the expectation that we would ever have to compare our bodies to anybody else, what’s the next step? If there’s nobody to compare ourselves to, we may be a little bored. We feel restless when there’s nothing to complain about. But maybe we can put this energy into understanding ourselves - our body type, how foods sit in our body, how we feel when we exercise - a bit more. 

Commitment and Sustainability

The most important question is, “Do you like what you’re doing?” Consistency is always going to be the answer for us to achieve sustainable results. 

What matters more than how quickly you lose (or gain) weight and how that compares to others is where you are right now, if you love where you are right now, what you know about your body type and lifestyle, and what you want. 

Fueling your body well and moving will improve your long-term health. It will allow you to carry your groceries when you’re 80 and prevent common diseases. If you can make a plan based on improving your health and enjoying what you’re doing, you’ll want to keep at it. It’ll become part of your life. You’ll exercise, eat healthy, and be accountable to yourself and others because you want to and you enjoy it.

If you’re thinking there’s nothing that sounds good long term, you’re probably setting too big of an expectation on yourself. If you have the thought, ”I can’t work out every day so it’s not worth it,” you’ll feel defeated and you won’t work out at all. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What if instead, you believe, “Ten minutes is better than nothing?” You’ll feel curious. You’ll experiment with exercising more. It’ll feel good so you’ll do it again the next day and the next. This is how you develop a lifestyle, by focusing on how exercise feels in your body but not setting the expectation too high. 

We want to create confidence and build our relationship with ourselves. It’s all about understanding who we are and pursuing being the best versions of ourselves.

Maybe you don’t even want to lose weight. Maybe the problem isn’t the food, the exercise, or the weight. Maybe there’s something else you haven’t worked through yet. It’s all a discovery process. Maybe you can start noticing your limiting beliefs and see what happens when you don’t believe them. 

If you are trying to lose weight for your health, stay in your own lane. Don’t worry about anyone else around you. This is your time to find out exactly what will work for you and what you love doing. The secret to weight loss maintenance is to do things your way so you can be consistent.

The bottom line is that you are perfect just as you are today. I don’t care if you have a little tummy or if your thighs rub together. I don’t care if you keep the same skinny jeans hoping that one day they’ll fit just a little differently. You’re worthy. All I’m asking you to do is decide what you want. What makes sense for your life? With self-love and compassion, I want you to find the next first step you can take to make your dreams a reality. 

“I Need To Be In Better Shape To Go To The Gym”

If you’ve felt that you need to be in better shape to go to the gym, don’t feel bad; you’re not alone. I’ve felt this way, too. It’s human nature: we want to be accepted. We believe that if we go to the gym and we’re not in the kind of shape that we think we should be, we’ll be judged - by other and by ourselves, too.

See, the reality is that we tend to judge ourselves for everything. In fact, we may not even know we’re doing it. But any time we think there’s something we should or shouldn’t have done, that’s a self-judgment. This belief that something has gone wrong and we haven’t lived up to an expectation is just that: a belief and a thought distortion - not a reality.

The Gym

When you think of the gym, you may imagine lots of in-shape people walking around in designer fitness wear, laughing with their friends. It’s a big community full of beautiful people. And if we don’t believe that we’re a part of that crew, we already believe we don’t belong there. Having a certain image in mind of how we’ll have to look in order to allow ourselves to go to the gym will only create more judgment.

We all have an image of people that are “allowed” in the gym. Imagine you’re at the gym in the current shape you’re in. Picture yourself there. What’s happening? Do you feel nervous? Does it seem like people are looking at you? Worrying about what others are thinking is human nature. But we don’t have to care what others think. We can choose not to, it just takes a bit of work.

The reality is that nobody at the gym cares how much you’re lifting. They don’t care how fast your treadmill is going. They don’t care what you’re wearing. They simply don’t notice. If somebody does care, it’s more a projection of their own thoughts about themselves than anything to do with you. 

Part of the solution to overcome the constant feeling of being judged is to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there again and again, and realize that nothing bad is going to happen. The minute we decide to be vulnerable and present, we feel calm, relaxed, and believe we can show up anywhere and work out. If we can believe that we’re perfect as is, having that self-love and self-acceptance, we stop allowing others’ judgment to take over our lives.

At the end of the day, there’s no requirement to enter a gym other than that you want to be there and better yourself. It has nothing to do with how you look, how much you can lift, or anything of that type.

Eating

One of the things that comes up all the time is worry about others judging what we’re eating. This comes up often with my clients who want to lose weight for their health. They’re very concerned about not wanting to be seen eating a “bad’ food because they’re worried they will be judged. They say, “If somebody sees me eating pizza, they’ll think I don’t care about my health or I’m not trying hard enough.” 

But nobody has ever actually said that to them. We create these thoughts based on what we think. Maybe that means that when we see others eating pizza, we’re judging them. See, how we talk to ourselves reflects how we see the world. It’s not something to feel bad about; it’s just the way our brains work. The beautiful thing is that we can correct it; it’s all about noticing that judgment in ourselves. 

This is where the diet mentality - classifying foods as “good” and “bad” - comes in. Suddenly, we’re not just judging ourselves; we’re judging our food, too. Alternatively, with intuitive eating, you dial into your body’s unique and natural hunger cues to decide what food will serve your body best at any given moment. Eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re satisfied will allow you to arrive at your body’s natural healthy weight. 

The beauty of intuitive eating is that we get to honor our unique bodies and achieve optimum health. We stop judging food. We heal our relationship with our bodies. We determine which foods are “sometimes” and which are “all the time” foods, but there’s room for all foods. That’s what is sustainable.

Seeing People After You’ve Gained Weight

Many of my clients have been chronic dieters for years, losing and gaining weight again and again, and they often worry about what others will think when they see them again after a while and they’ve maybe gained some weight for any variety of reasons. We start judging ourselves for having gained weight. We think it says something negative about us and we assume others are judging us in the same way. 

We create the story that others are judging us with the same exact words we judge ourselves with. But that’s impossible because no two people think exactly alike. Chances are, the people you care about don’t even notice the fluctuations in your body. And the more you accept your own unique body, the less fearful you’ll feel of other people and their judgments. 

Finding Freedom

When you don’t judge yourself, you won’t assume others are judging you either. It all starts with us. Whether it’s about going to the gym, how we’re eating, our weight gain, or our clothing choices, we have to come to terms with what we’re doing, what we want, and who we are. Then the other voices around us cease to matter. When we can believe in how we’re showing up, we become free.

When you’re free of judgment, anything can be going on in your life - unemployment, weight gain, anything - and you’ll maintain your self-love. If we can accept and honor where we are in our journey, that’s freedom. When we can release that judgment, we won’t be worried about how others perceive what we’re doing. The first step is to love, accept, and own ourselves and our decisions. 

It’s not about never judging yourself. It’s about recognizing when we do. That’s what will lead you to freedom.

“I Have No Grace For Myself Over The Holidays”

In general, it’s already hard enough to give ourselves grace in everyday life. In general, we always think that we “should” do it better. Now add the holidays: expectations are higher, you’re busier, and there are more triggers going on. We’re already primed to give ourselves even less grace over the holidays. 

Perfectionism

Let’s talk about perfectionism. Maybe it’s gotten us pretty far in our careers. It’s allowed us to provide good care for patients even when we’re exhausted and sleep-deprived. But as the years go by and we work more and more, that perfectionism can spill into all areas of our lives. 

Perfectionism tells us we have to be perfect, but there is no such thing as perfect. You’ll only think you’re perfect when you have 100% nailed the very high expectations you or somebody else had for you. 

Perfectionists live in the all or none zone. If they think a goal isn’t hard enough, they believe it isn’t worthwhile. The grey zone is difficult. But when we set expectations, all or none thinking won’t serve us. It’ll lead us to an unhappy place of pressure that builds and builds until we can’t take it anymore, pop the valve, and release it somehow, usually through one of various buffering behaviors such as over-eating, over-thinking, or over-shopping.

Exercise Goals Over the Holidays

It’s time to evaluate whatever goal you’ve set for your health this holiday season. Maybe you want to work out for two hours every day over the holiday break. Is this realistic? Can you 100% meet this goal? If not, consider a different goal.

Think about the concept of “baseline minimum,” when you set a minimum amount of exercise that you plan to accomplish during the holiday season. That is what you commit to doing. If you commit to five minutes five days a week, you celebrate that accomplishment. If you want to start living in the grey zone, where you can find contentment all day long, it’s about setting smaller goals. 

Part of giving yourself grace is coming to terms with not every goal having to be a mega marathon goal. It means committing to something you’re willing and wanting to do and then doing it. That way, there’s no room to beat yourself up.

But let’s say you shoot a little high, wanting to work out 45 minutes, three times a week throughout the entire holiday season. And let’s say you fall short. That’s an opportunity to give yourself grace by reevaluating. All you have to do is reevaluate and then choose to move forward with a new plan. 

Maybe you’ve been in a situation when you haven’t made an exercise plan. You get ten days into the holiday season but you haven’t worked out. And you think, “Well, New Years is almost here. I’ll just start on January 1st.” This is a pretty popular way of thinking.

If you’re heading into this holiday season and you don’t exercise, I want to put out there the fact that there are many benefits to it. Something as simple as walking is amazing. Those endorphins alone will help you feel better and give your brain the space to create new thoughts that allow you to find unconditional love and ultimate grace for yourself.

Eating During the Holidays

What if you could be the person who never worried about eating during the holidays or on vacation? It’s not about being perfect, but rather how good you feel when you follow a nutrition style that makes you feel healthy. 

When we set high standards of avoiding every potentially indulgent thing during the holiday season, we better have a good reason for it. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure because you probably won’t meet that expectation. This is where we want to set realistic nutrition goals during this holiday season.

My style is a combination of intuitive eating with gentle nutrition. Intuitive eating means knowing your hunger cues: when you’re hungry, when your full, and what your body is asking for. It’s not a diet plan. It’s about you getting in touch with your body, whether it prefers to eat carbs or not, to be five pounds heavier or five pounds lighter. When we’re willing to honor our unique body, we can have complete food freedom. Then you’ll enjoy the holidays, vacations, and every day. 

The Hunger Scale

The hunger scale will allow you to get through the holiday season open-minded to listen to what your body is telling you, finding a new love for yourself. It’s less important what the food you eat is, and more about your ability to say when you’re hungry and full.

It’s all about getting hungry first and stopping when you’re satisfied. Before you eat, ask yourself if you’re hungry. (If the answer is no and you eat anyway, it’s a perfect opportunity to give yourself grace.) 

It’s okay to stop eating when you’re full. We don’t have to eat everything because it’s there. But if you do overeat, take a grace period to reevaluate and make a plan for next time, when you wait until your body is hungry to eat again. 

When you do this and realize nothing has gone wrong, that you can keep it going year-round, you’ll get in the zone, stop restricting, give yourself grace, and realize you don’t want to overeat or indulge anymore.

If this is a new concept for you and you’re used to sticking to a certain plan to get results, ask yourself if the plan has worked for you. Has it been sustainable? Whatever you’ve done in the past, don’t judge it. Judgment is the opposite of grace. 

Everything you’ve done in the past - whether it included yo-yo dieting or extreme exercise - it’s all okay. You didn’t waste any time. It got you to this point, where you can find your sweet spot- that space where you can achieve what you want your way. 

It takes evaluation of your body type, your food preferences, and movement. But if you can stop judging, realizing your past has given you data and knowledge, you’ll learn that every new minute is a clean slate. You don’t have to wait until New Years’; you have a clean slate right now. What is the next best step forward? That is giving grace. 

Reevaluate where you are now. Look at the past with non-judgment. And look at the future with hope. Everything you’re doing is amazing. I hope you have the most amazing holiday season full of love and grace.

“I Am Dreading The Holidays”

Holiday dread starts even before Halloween. What will we do with all of our leftover Halloween candy? Will we have time to make our children costumes? How will we celebrate during the COVID-19 pandemic? How will the holidays shake out with our work schedule? Will we have time off?

Holidays tend to come with a lot of stress because we put extreme expectations on ourselves and others. But if we do a few key things, we can get our minds in the right place to cruise into this upcoming holiday season feeling great both mentally and physically. 

Having a Plan

When we have a plan, we think, “I have it all figured out.” We feel content. As a result, we’re grateful for having a plan, whatever it may be. As long as you know what to expect, you set yourself up for success. 

So think about the holidays you’ll be celebrating over the next few months. Get a calendar. Mark the time you have off and note anything else relevant. Have conversations with the people who will be involved in your celebration. Communicate so there is no guessing. 

Planning the holiday season will free time up for you and allow you to enjoy the experience even more.

Mental Planning

One great habit to develop is to do a simple thought download. It’s essentially a journal entry where you dump your thoughts down on paper and see what thoughts are coming up. There’s something magical about seeing your thoughts written down. 

Starting now, give yourself three minutes every day to dump all your thoughts down on paper. After a few days, you’ll start to see some trends. You’ll notice what’s really going on for you.

Try this exercise. Pick one person you’ll be seeing during the holidays. Maybe this is a person who typically disappoints you. Write down all the ways that they disappoint you and what expectations you have of them. Once you can see things more clearly, you can decide if you want to communicate what these expectations are. When you do that, you may realize that your expectations are unrealistic or that you never communicated them. This can open the door to improving your relationships with the people you care about. 

Another practice you can adopt is asking yourself “what do I need?”. That simple question will help you understand what you need to enjoy the holiday season instead of stressing about it. 

Physical Planning

Food

Many of my clients find the holidays difficult when it comes to their health goals. They want to enjoy all of the foods and drinks that come as part of their holiday celebrations. And there’s no reason why you can’t do that while continuing to pursue your health goals. It’s all about expectations and planning. 

You have to be honest with yourself about whether or not it’s realistic to stick to your food plan during the holidays. If you know you’ll be at Aunt Betty’s for Hanukkah and you can’t resist her lasagna and triple chocolate delight, you can plan to have it. It’s much better to plan for that than to insist on resisting it and disappoint yourself when you show up to Betty’s house and struggle to meet your unrealistic expectations. 

If you have a plan that you’ll go and enjoy some of your favorite things, you’re keeping the promise you made to yourself. But if you make a different promise and don’t keep it, you’ll be really disappointed in yourself, which is the last thing you want during an already stressful and packed holiday season. In fact, your disappointment may be the very thing that leads you to throw your plan out the window during the next celebration, thinking, “I already messed up so I’ll just go crazy now and try to be good again after the new year.”

One of your most powerful tools during the holiday season will be following your intuition when it comes to food. Learn to determine if you’re hungry. If you are, you should eat. Learn to determine when you’re full. If you’re comfortably full, you should stop eating. These two simple rules will allow your body to tell you what it needs without making any specific foods off-limits.

That way, you can enjoy family and food and all of the things that make the holidays so special while also feeling confident that you don’t have to have strict guidelines and rules in order to achieve progress. All it requires is trust.

Exercise 

We all know that during the holidays, we may be a bit more tired. Maybe we stayed up late. Maybe the wine was flowing. So sometimes we wake up and decide that we’ll save the exercise for next year.

This year, try to make a plan instead. Choose a minimum amount of activity you’ll do during the holiday season. Choose a realistic exercise routine that you’ll be able to stick to during the holidays. It can be as simple as going on walks with your family, going skiing, or doing some laps in an indoor pool. You can get a great workout doing so many different things. Use that to your advantage. It’s not about changing how your body looks. It’s about doing movement that feels good for you.

Accountability 

You have to be accountable to yourself first. The way to make any habits sustainable long-term is to be our own best accountability partner. It’s about continuing to cultivate the relationship you have with yourself by keeping your word to yourself. Show up for yourself like how you would for a friend. Do this because you’re worth it. You don’t need other people checking over your shoulder. 

The more you can keep yourself accountable, the more consistent you’ll be. As a result, others will know what to expect from you. This will help you create the boundaries you want.

Boundaries

There will be situations during the holiday season that will require you to communicate boundaries. It may not be super comfortable. Challenge yourself to set boundaries for yourself and others.

Maybe you want to make a conscious decision to decrease the amount of time you spend on social media on your phone. Sticking to that boundary will give you confidence that you can maintain boundaries with others, too. The first step is to be rock solid with the boundaries you set for yourself. 

If you can plan, set boundaries, and stay accountable to yourself (and others), you can cruise through the holiday season achieving any result that you want. 

“The Holidays Are So Challenging”

In this article, we’ll focus on two of the most common challenges that come up during the holidays: our health and comments from others. 

Exercise

There are a couple of things that typically pose a challenge to exercising during the holidays:  there’s less time and we’re in a place without our usual exercise equipment. But these challenges are surmountable as long as you create a realistic exercise plan.

Sit down and think about a realistic amount of time you can commit to exercise during the whole holiday season. Write out your plan and decide the minimum amount of exercise you can commit to no matter what. Schedule in what works for you.

Let’s say you’ll be with family on Thanksgiving. Maybe Thanksgiving day itself will be a rest day for you. Or, if not, maybe you’ll fit in twenty minutes in the morning before the festivities begin. 

Scheduling in your exercise is how you’ll get past the roadblock of not having enough time or the right equipment. You can get creative with your exercise. You don’t need something elaborate; walking works. Jogging is great. 

Once you commit to a holiday season exercise schedule, make it non-negotiable. It’ll help you enter the new year feeling energetic and amazing.

Food

We know this challenge well: there is so much food everywhere during the holidays. But maybe that’s something to be grateful for. When we come from a place of gratitude, we can savor and enjoy our food. 

If you approach the food situation with gratitude, you don’t have to stress and worry about temptation. Gratitude will put you in a more mindful place and help you eat intuitively. It’s all about asking yourself if you’re hungry or full, and what your body needs in any given moment. 

Commit to one goal: only eat when you’re hungry. If you can live by that rule, you will be so much happier during the holidays. You’ll cruise through the season and even make progress. You can start this habit today and carry it with you forever.

If you’re new to this, you may not have a strong sense of your natural hunger cues. If you’ve been on diets, it can take time to redevelop this sense. But it’s possible to regain that ability, and it’s worth trying. 

Drinking

Festive holiday drinks are so fun, but it can get a little crazy. That’s why it comes down to having a plan. 

Try to really decide ahead of time how much you’re willing to drink. Focus on how you feel after you have a large quantity of alcohol. How are you sleeping? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Yes, in the moment, drinking will be fun. But how will it affect you long-term? Keeping that in mind will allow you to make a better plan for you.

If you know ahead of time that your family likes to bring out the spiked eggnog and frosted martinis for Christmas, you’ll want to plan for that. If you want to partake, own it ahead of time so you can enjoy it. You don’t have to be restrictive, but you do need to have a plan. Every sip of every drink should be worth it to you. 

You don’t have to take the food and alcohol out of the experience and have a boring holiday in order to be healthier. You’re welcome to have whatever you want. Just get hungry first, plan your alcohol, and keep water nearby to double hydrate whatever you’re drinking. That will allow you to feel better and stick to your exercise plan.

Comments from Other People

When it comes to comments from other people, you have three choices. You can be prepared ahead of time, deciding how you’re going to respond and feel. You can be prepared to set a boundary when these comments come up. Or you can just avoid the party and the comments altogether.

Maybe your Aunt Betty will comment on why you’re not eating dessert. You know that Aunt Betty shows love through food and you don’t want to hurt her feelings. You’ll think, “She feels bad that I’m not having dessert, which makes me feel bad.” Then you start considering having the pie that you already planned not to have. Instead, you can say something gracious like, “Everything has been amazing and I’m so full. I’m going to wait until I get hungry again.” Nobody can argue with that.

Or maybe at the dinner table, you’re comfortably full, so you stop eating. And then somebody will ask, “Aren’t you going to finish that?”. Again, you can go back to, “The food has been so amazing. I’m not hungry at all. I’m going to wait until I’m hungry again and I can really enjoy it.” You can own it.

If you haven’t seen your family members for a while, they may notice you look a little different and pay more attention to what you eat. They may say, “You barely ate anything.” This is a great opportunity to educate your family with, “I’m just really listening to my body and I’m not hungry right now.” It may even motivate and inspire other family members to get curious about intuitive eating and food freedom.

Or somebody may flat out comment on your body and ask, “Have you lost weight? You look so thin.” or “Have you gained weight?”. This can be triggering for many of us, so it may be a good time to set a boundary. Maybe you’ll say, “I’ve been really trying to listen to my body.” Or maybe you’ll set a boundary and say, “You tend to focus on my body and it makes me really uncomfortable. I’d prefer if you stop doing that.” Most often, people will listen to you.

I hope these tips will allow you to have the holiday you deserve knowing you’re in complete control.

“I Feel So Alone”

The Feeling of Loneliness

Loneliness tends to hit you right in the pit of the stomach. It radiates to the heart. It’s darker in color. It’s a slower emotion, which is why it can feel like it’s never going to go away. It’s heavy.

What thoughts make us feel this way? “I’m isolated. I have no one. Nobody understands me. No one is there to help me.”

The truth is that loneliness isn’t cured by having tons of relationships and friendships and being around people all the time. Instead, we can combat it by having deep connections. 

Relationships versus Connections

You could have a hundred friends and still be lonely. For example, maybe you have dozens of sorority sisters, but you don’t connect with any of them. An outsider looking into the situation would think that you’re not lonely at all. How could you be? You have sisterhood and camaraderie. But inside, you may be feeling alone because you haven’t made deep, quality connections. 

Resolving Loneliness

Dealing with loneliness all starts with us loving ourselves, being confident, and finding strength within ourselves. When we do this, that can be our first deep connection. If you’re deeply connected to who you are, you can eliminate loneliness by yourself. 

How to Foster Your Connection With Yourself

Awareness

Step one of fostering your connection with yourself is self-awareness: understanding who you are, why you’re here, and what you want. 

There are so many things you can do to learn more about yourself. Don’t be afraid to explore that. You can do a reading with an astrologer. You can do an Enneagram personality test. You can play a get to know you game to get feedback from others.

Anything that can give you more self-awareness is powerful. Ultimately, we’re not who we were yesterday; we’re who we are today. And how we show up today has a hand in deciding who we will be in the future. We have total control in deciding how things will go from here on out. 

Knowing who we are and how we’re unique is really powerful. We start to respect ourselves more when we understand ourselves more. When we don’t know who we are, we aimlessly wander and hope something sticks. In contrast, when we really know who we are, we start taking action, making change, and taking our life in the direction we want.

Acceptance

Step two is self-acceptance. “This is who I am. I was made perfectly imperfect and I can love that.” There’s no such thing as perfection and no need to chase after it. If you try to chase it, you’ll just get frustrated and give up. So accept who you are as you are. You have permission to love yourself as you are today. That’s how you stop feeling lonely. 

When we feel lonely, we wonder who we can find to make us feel better. We feel like we have no one. But you can have yourself. It’s just a matter of starting the process of believing that. You have to do the work to make yourself believe that you are enough as you are to give yourself everything you need.

When you have a solid relationship with yourself, you’ll be able to build stronger relationships with others. When you come into a deeply connected relationship with another person, it will no longer be about you running from your loneliness. It’ll be about how you show up to the relationship with love for yourself and a knowledge of what you want.

If you hold yourself to these standards of how you want to show up for yourself, you’ll attract people that are doing the same thing for themselves, instead of attracting people who always want more and more from you, which may make you retract and stop pursuing finding a relationship.

How to Build Confidence

When you have the confidence to start putting yourself out there into the world to attract deep, meaningful relationships, you can enhance the ability to experience life with other people. 

Take Care of Your Physical Health

By taking care of your physical health and establishing an exercise routine, you can decrease feelings of loneliness. It’s all about confidence building, understanding your unique body, understanding what you want for yourself, and showing up for yourself. 

In fact, some of the strongest relationships I ever had came from sports teams. That’s because, through activity, you’ll gain confidence and meet other people who show up for themselves. Gyms and classes are a supportive, community environment where you can build strength from within and externally with others who want the same thing. When you confidently move your body and create a complete awareness of who you are, it feels safe. Those types of relationships take off. 

Take Care of Your Mental Health

There’s also the facet of mental exercise, constantly challenging yourself to be aware of your thoughts and how they show up. Our thoughts create our feelings, our actions, and our results. We can reevaluate our thoughts, create new beliefs, and create the results we want based on a belief. This takes time, work, and commitment, but it can be one of the best things you can do to combat loneliness.

Set Small Goals

2021 is coming up. Instead of making all or none goals for the new year like “I’m going to eat perfectly,” set a small goal for yourself - any goal that will help you overcome any resistance you’re feeling. Go to the place that feels heavy and then pick the smallest goal possible, the smallest step forward, to get out of that situation. 

Maybe what feels heavy is that you feel overscheduled. You commit to too many things on the weekends. You want to have the flexibility to sit around if you want to. Instead of committing to not scheduling anything every Saturday for the rest of your life, try to pick one Saturday this month to have two hours of unscheduled time. Own it. Show up. Try it and see how it feels. If it feels good, do it again. Keep building until you hit it just where you want it. 

This is how we change and develop new habits. This is how we’ll stop feeling lonely. It’ll give us the confidence we need to believe in who we are to have an improved relationship with ourselves so that we are willing to create deep and meaningful relationships with other people. 

“I Can’t Let Go of My Anger”

You know that stirring feeling deep in your body that won’t go away? Mostly, it doesn’t feel good... But there’s a littlepart of it that does feel nice, which makes us want to hold on. That’s anger.

Anger is typically located in your chest, and it radiates to all different areas like your head. It’s fast and aggressive. It’s gnawing. It’s bright red or orange. 

Back in the day, when homo sapiens survived based on their ability to vanquish enemies and bring food home to their tribes, those who made it tended to have dopamine released when they were angry. That’s why sometimes anger can feel really good and be hard to let go of… Could that be because we have good reason to feel angry? 

What Anger Does

Why is it a problem when you can’t let your anger go? What is the problem with holding onto anger? Let’s say anger is the circumstance. Your thought is, “I should not still be mad about this.” So what comes up? Typically, when we say “should,” it can bring up a good amount of anxiety. Because what it says is, “Where I am right now is not okay.” When we feel anxious, what actions do we take?

We ruminate. We think about the scenario again and again. We relive it. We’re irritable and snappy and in a bad mood. Some blame comes up, maybe for yourself or the other person in the situation. It becomes this drawn-out drama. Typically, our anger makes us want to do something. But we can’t go out and do the physical things anger makes us want to do, because it’s not socially appropriate. So what do we do? We bottle it in. The result is a mess. We don’t want to feel this way but we don’t know how to get past it.

Anger is Your Friend

But what if I told you holding onto anger is actually your friend? What if anger were our little buddy that reminded us that we have the ability and right to keep our boundaries? Maybe it’s the voice that protects you from other people stepping past your boundaries.

So let’s say instead of thinking, “I should not still be mad about this,” we think, “Anger is here to protect me. Anger is trying to remind me to not ignore it.” What feeling comes up? Relaxation. I feel like I can let my guard down. One of my actions is that I’m not so uptight. I can let everything be. I’m not afraid of confrontation or others trying to cross my boundaries. In fact, I’ll probably respect other people’s boundaries even more. The result is that anger can stay. It’s welcome any time.

Embracing Anger

Let me offer a personal example. Once, I hired somebody and was working with them on a project. We had clear conversations about my expectations. Not all of them were in writing, but I had trust and open-mindedness that things would go as we discussed. But as the months went on, the things that were promised verbally weren’t happening and I started to have a gut feeling that something wasn’t right.

Four months in, I knew it was time to move on. I spoke to the individual. And in the end, we agreed. But after all was said and done, I was angry at myself. I thought that I should have stood up for myself even more. But this was all-or-none thinking. I had stood up for myself. Did I say every single thing I could have said? No. But maybe that is how it was supposed to go. Maybe the positive end result was that I knew what the next step was.

When I started to look at it that way, and realized it was my dear friend anger that pointed out to me that my boundaries were being crossed, it changed everything. I started to open my eyes to all the other places in my life that I was letting boundaries slip and slide. I realized that for me to be able to serve my family and clients and self, I needed to be much clearer about these things.

I started deciding how I wanted things to go, and I noticed that every time I was just starting to make a decision, I paused and thought, “But what would so-and-so think about this? Wouldn’t it make them feel bad?”. 

Then, my coach dropped a life-changing truth bomb on me: “Your life and your business is not a democracy.” This powerful and clear thought allowed me to take ownership of what I really want and not be afraid of my anger.

My word for 2020 was boundaries. And it’s just now, two months before the end of the year, that it’s all starting to fall into place. So now, as we’re starting to approach the end of this year, it’s time to look toward choosing a word for 2021. What do you want for yourself? What can you commit to? 

“I Can’t Be Happy Unless I leave Clinical Medicine”

My Story

I am a neonatologist by training. After I graduated fellowship, I just had my first baby and I was ready to start a brand-new job. I signed on to stay at the institution I trained at. It was more time than I wanted, but I was so tied to my training institution that I couldn’t imagine leaving. 

Thanks to my mother-in-law, who essentially became our live-in nanny, things went smoother than they usually do. But I was away from my baby nearly all the time. I was either working full days and coming home to see her for just a couple of hours, or I worked overnight shifts. And that’s not to mention the other responsibilities of the job like research and projects. 

I realized three months in that I wasn’t sure I took the right job. I would even go in and stalk the schedule of the other institution I interviewed for on AmIOn. And it looked great. I thought it could work for me. And I second-guessed why I hadn’t taken that job in the first place. 

I thought I had to leave my current job for a different job to get the result of having the life I wanted. So I interviewed with the director of the new hospital that I was hoping to work at. It seemed like a great fit. I was ready to go.

When I took the job, I felt relieved. I loved my colleagues. I loved being back into the delivery units. I loved every second of it. 

But we will always find reasons why we can’t be happy. Just switching the circumstance alone will never improve everything. And even though my schedule was improved in terms of time, I noticed I had to work more on weekends and holidays. 

The truth is, there are trade-offs no matter what we do. But at the time, I didn’t realize it. About four years into that job, I started feeling like things weren’t right, and I heard a pretty big corporation was looking for a neonatologist. I’d have set hours. No weekends or holidays. An increased salary. 

I believed that a set schedule with no holidays and weekends was what I wanted. So I changed my circumstance yet again. I took the job. I thought this would be the thing that would finally make me happy. I started the job. It was a very steep learning curve.

Around this time, I found coaching. It was a huge epiphany for me. I learned that we really do have control over our thoughts and situations. I realized I couldn’t just keep trialing a bunch of different positions with the hope that I’d eventually be happy. I had to find contentment from within and then make the decision to move on if I wanted to.

I decided that I wanted to be a coach. I went to coach training. I started coaching as a side gig. I was loving it. I wasn’t sure where it would go, but I started to see that this could be what I do all the time. Yet I realized I couldn’t just jump straight into having my own business. I couldn’t just change the circumstance without first getting really clear on a few things: how I want to feel and what result I wanted.

What happened? The coaching felt natural and good. I kept going. I took more clients. I created programs. I gained a great group of women physicians. They saw progress. The momentum moved. It felt right. I got so busy with my business that I didn’t’ know what to do with my full-time job.

Ultimately, I made the decision to leave my full-time non-clinical job because I found happiness. I wasn’t running away from it. But I had found what was driving me. Things made sense. I found clarity. I made the decision that I wanted to go in a different direction. 

That’s how you have to make decisions and changes. It’s about doing it because you’re ready to move forward with an open mind and go for it. Not running away or changing something in hope that things will get better elsewhere.

You Can Find Happiness Today

At this point, you’ve probably figured out the lesson of my story. Just changing a circumstance and leaving medicine won’t make you happier. That happiness has to come from the work you do within. 

Think about it. Whatever circumstance you find yourself in, how can you find contentment today? No matter what’s going on at work, with your boss, with your colleagues, with your patients, how can you find some kind of contentment right now?

The answer is working on your thoughts, choosing what you want to believe so you can gain the feeling that you want to feel. 

I promise you can find contentment somehow right here, right now, today. The question is are you willing to do so? We often indulge in thoughts that keep us trapped. It’s difficult to let go of the thoughts that are protecting our ego, like “I’m right. This shouldn’t have happened to me.” 

But all that does is create more pressure. It holds us back. It prevents us from finding the contentment we’re really seeking. While you may choose to leave your current situation, the first step is having a conversation with yourself saying, “I can find contentment today from within. How will I do that?”. 

When this comes together, the amount of mental space you’ll create will blow your mind. Our chief complaint for today was, “I can't be happy unless I leave clinical medicine. I can’t find contentment in my current situation.” But you can.

How to Find Contentment Today

So let’s find contentment today for right here and now. We can do that by finding a belief that creates contentment. For me, content is soft blue. It radiates from my chest. It’s slow and smooth. When I feel content, I want to pause. I want to smell the roses. I want to be intentional and deliberate. I want to honor all of the amazing things that I have in front of me here and now. I want to enjoy my life. 

I generate all these things I want to do by feeling content. From there, I can work backward and find the thought that’s making me feel content. For me, it’s, “This journey is going exactly as it’s supposed to. Everything that I’ve done has led me to this point. I had to go through all of this to learn that contentment has been staring me in the face all along.” As a result, I believe that I’m living my life on purpose. 

I hope you can find that contentment for yourself, too. 

“No-one can do it as well as me”

Do you have trouble delegating and asking for help? Do you say that you’re doing too much because nobody else can do it other than you? I personally do, and here’s why.

Asking for Help is Hard

What happens when you think that no one can do it and only you can? For me, it makes me feel a lot of pressure. I take the action of yelling and saying things I don’t want to say. I dwell. As a result, I believe that I’m really the only one who can do it. 

Sure, there will be certain things you’re the best at. But there are also thing that other people can do just as well as you. Maybe they won’t do it exactly like you, but you can probably train them to do it well enough.

To do so, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable that something might get done not exactly as you’d have wanted it. As long as you can accept that, or you’re ready to have the conversation about how you want something to be done, it’ll be okay.

If you’re trying to grow as a person, to bring joy back into your life, to unload some of the unnecessaries, it’s worth the discomfort to see what’s on the other side. 

For example, about two years ago I started noticing that it was very difficult for me to keep up with the laundry. I asked myself why I wasn’t asking for help. It wasn’t that I thought I was the best person to do laundry. I was just afraid of the unknown. It was all a matter of me not being as flexible as I could be. 

In the end, I ended up going out of my comfort zone, asking around, and finding an amazing woman to do the laundry. And it completely changed my life. By being open to something that was uncomfortable, I learned a lot and overcame my hesitation to ask for help.

Why We Have Difficuty Asking for Help

Even though my husband Mark wants to help me, time and time again, I avoid asking him. Why? In my mind, I’m protecting him by not asking him to do something. I’m not willing to give up the control of knowing that if I do it, it’s going to get done. 

But by doing this, I’m not helping Mark. I’m setting myself up to resent Mark. In my mind, I’ve protected him, but I’m actually developing some irritation or resentment, because I’m thinking, “Why can’t he be doing this?”. 

I’m also enabling him. Because I can’t ask Mark for help, he’s more likely to rely on me. In return I start to resent him for not knowing how to do it himself. And all of this has nothing to do with him.

So maybe by “protecting” other people, we’re really hurting them. In fact, asking for help can really help the other person.

If you find it hard to ask for help, think about why. Does it lead to thoughts like, “I should be able to do this?” and “This shouldn’t be a big deal”? Often we think we’ll be weak if we can’t do it all. That it makes us not enough. 

But what if you just started by asking for help with something small? Even just something like pairing the socks. You might be surprised with how well it goes. After you do that, you’ll gain comfort with asking for help. It’ll make you feel empowered, not weak. 

It’ll create a sense of partnership, equality, and positivity in your relationships. Because part of relationship building is give and take. And it helps your loved ones feel more comfortable asking for help when they need it. By asking for help, you set an example and inspire others to do the same.

Obstacles to Asking for Help

When we believe we have to do everything, it’s a choice. But you have to overcome the belief that you have to do everything and give up control. You might find that watching somebody else do it will even be preferable or advantageous to doing it your own way. 

If we want to make a change and give others a chance to show that they too can do things, we have to communicate directly and give the other person the space to try. We have to express our needs.

How to Ask for Help

Nobody’s a mind reader. In order for somebody to help you how you want to be helped, you have to be ready to have conversations. 

For example, I recently started working with a new coach. It became immediately evident that we have very different styles. It made me uncomfortable. So I had to do something brave: I had to have a conversation. I had to ask what his vision was and be honest that I didn’t believe we see eye to eye. 

It was a straightforward conversation with a lot of silence and pauses. But it grew our ability to work together more. When we met each other halfway, the magic started flowing. We both had to be patient with each other, do the mature thing, and come together.

My thought of “nobody can do it right. I have to do it myself” came up in the situation. I could have stayed there. But I realized it wouldn’t be helpful to me or the people I serve to do so. I wanted to grow. And to grow, you have to let go. For me, letting go is getting rid of the desire for control. It’s communicating to work toward a mutual goal. 

The conversation is hard. We don’t want to hurt people. We don’t want to create discomfort. But if we’re willing to be open in conversation, we can achieve so much. 

If you need more help in your life, what’s holding you back? If you can get past this obstacle and ask for help, what could your life look like? What if you were willing to watch somebody else do the task instead of you? What if you gave them that trust? What if it worked out? 

There are people out there who want to help you the same way that you want to help people. If you’re scared, evaluate it. Start small. Go all in. Ask for he