Ep #149: Confidence as a Byproduct

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

What is happening? 149. We are one away from 150. I can't even believe it. Now think about this: 52 weeks in a year. We are just about at three years. We have been together every week. I know that there's so many of you that have been with me that whole time. I am so honored and thrilled and excited, and I can't believe how fast that time went by.

I was thinking about ... I first remember recording this in my kitchen and then getting all the fancy equipment. Now I have an office in my house that's all rigged up with all sorts of podcasting stuff. I'm just so thrilled. Pavel’s been with me the whole entire time, editing every single session. We laugh because I'm very attached to him. I need him to always take care of me and my podcast.

Let's talk about today. Today is our last podcast in a series on resilience. The name of this one is Confidence As a Byproduct of Resilience. For those of you who have been really doing this work, I know all of you and the Self-Coaching Scholars, you've been working through your study guide on resilience. I think that this is one of the components of a compelling reason of why to be willing to set big goals for yourself on purpose.

The thing that's interesting is we get a compelling reason and we make a commitment, and then we use courage to take action towards that commitment. If we set a big goal for us, if it's a worthy goal, we're going to feel a little bit afraid. In order to get through that fear, we have to use courage.

The secret is not to not be afraid. The secret is to use courage to overcome that fear. Then we increase and create capability from taking action from courage to overcome our fear. Let me slow that down. You make a commitment then you feel afraid. Then you use courage to overcome your fear and then you start taking action.

Now as you start taking action towards a new goal, you're going to be doing new things. As you do those new things, you're going to create capability, so commitment, courage, and then capability. The more capability you create for yourself, the more confidence you will end up having.

That is the reason why I'm always pushing you guys to evolve, I'm always asking you to set and keep big commitments to yourself, not necessarily because of the end product, not necessarily because of having more money or being at your ideal weight or a bigger house or a better relationship, but because of who you'll need to become, how much you'll need to overcome and go through in order to get that result in your life. It's that capability that you'll create and ultimately the confidence. Then when you get the confidence then you want to make more commitment.

Here's the problem with resilience. We want to build resilience, we want to build the confidence, but it is defined as your ability to overcome adversity. Let's think about that for a minute. If I want to become more resilient, I have to have more adversity. I can't just sit around and become more resilient. I have to have adversity. I have to have the challenge to overcome in order to build that resilience and ultimately the confidence. The way that we do that is by presenting ourselves with challenges, challenging ourselves not to overeat, not to overdrink, challenging ourselves to achieve a certain level of success beyond where we are right now.

It may sound like I'm encouraging you to experience adversity, and you would be right because I'm asking you to actually set yourself up to have to overcome it, because resilience is built by overcoming adversity. Adversity is school. It's the playing field for practicing resilience, and resilience is worth it because it begets confidence.

Think about it this way, you guys. You set this goal for yourselves. You know that it's going to be challenging. You're freaking out about it. You know you're going to fall down. You know you're going to fail in certain ways. Most of us anticipate that failure and then we just fail ahead of time, we just don't even go there, but when you look at all the adversity and you look at all the challenges you're going to face and you see that as an opportunity to become resilient, to become strong, to become more confident, then you move towards the adversity instead of away from it.
It's almost like you're going into the weight room and seeing all those heavy weights. Instead of saying, "Whoa! Those are going to be really heavy to lift," you're glad that they're heavy to lift. The more you workout, the heavier weight you can do. The more resilient you get, the bigger goals you can accomplish. The adversity is a good part of it. It doesn't mean run away, it means move towards and use adversity to make yourself stronger.

When you look at adversity and you know that you won't give up on yourself, that's when you start to trust yourself. You don't see adversity as a reason to quit, you don't see adversity as suffering, you see it as an opportunity, you see it as school. When you see it as school, you see that you can trust yourself to overcome it. "Whatever comes my way, I'm going to overcome it. Whatever shortcoming, whatever challenge, whatever unanticipated obstacle, I'll get myself ready for it. Whatever anticipated obstacle, I'll be ready for it."

When you trust yourself to follow through, that begets confidence. The more you know how resilient you are, the more confident you are. It's like, "I'm going to set this big goal, and I know that there's going to be a lot of stuff to come my way, but I trust myself to be able to handle it. That's what I've always done before." You don't ever have to worry about adversity when you have resilience.

I talked about this in the last podcast. We create resilience by setting bigger goals for ourselves, but we also get the benefit of having resilience when things come our way that were unanticipated outside of our goals. When any kind of tragedy or challenge comes up in our life that we couldn't ever anticipate or plan, we have built up our capability to live in the world in a way that is resilient, instead of losing our mind and overeating everything in the house and overdrinking everything in the house.

An example of this could be I had a client several years ago who was completely devastated when her mother passed away. She gained 100 pounds when her mother passed away. One of the things that we talked about was how important it is to build up tools to be able to cope with adversity, to be able to cope with negative emotion, to be able to cope with unexpected tragedy. How she felt once she had built up that resilience, she knew that the next person in her life that she cared about, when they died, she knew she wouldn't gain 100 pounds because she had the way of getting herself back up after she'd been knocked down by something like that.

For those of you who come back and say, "I don't need to have big goals in my life. I don't need to have all these huge success things that you have, Brooke," that's totally fine, but whatever it is in your life that challenges you, I want to encourage you to have that be your goal. I want you to challenge yourself on purpose as a way of preparing yourself and being in the world and not always being reactive and afraid of what might happen to you, but instead being confident and resilient and knowing whatever happens in the world, you can manage it.

There's two secrets I want to share with you. One is you need to learn how to be at peace with imperfection. A lot of you are perfectionists. It sounds like that's a good thing, but I want to tell you that perfectionism is for scared people. If you have to be perfect, you never have to take action. If it has to be perfect, you'll never put it out into the world. If you have to be perfect, it's because you don't want anyone to be able to criticize you. You don't want anyone to be able to point out a flaw. You don't want anyone to be able to email you about a typo or something like that because it's so intolerable for you to handle.

I was just working with one of my students on this. I said, "You either have to accept being imperfect or you have to change your definition of perfection." That's what we did with her. She said, "I wanted to be perfect." I said, "Okay. Then you have to define what perfect means. You have to already accept yourself as perfect," because I think the world and the universe and the way it's set up is perfect. There's perfection in the creation, and inside that perfection is the contrast, is the negativity because the perfection of that is there is no positivity without negativity.

Some of us are so shocked when there's negative things in the world. We're like, "Oh, my gosh. There shouldn't be anything bad, there shouldn't be anything ugly, there shouldn't be anything tragic," but that's not really true. First of all, arguing with the reality of what is, you'll always lose, as Byron Katie says, but also the things that are tragic, the things that are ugly, the things that are awful make the other things possible. They don't exist without that contrast. When we spend so much time resisting things that aren't "perfect", meaning positive and perfect, we only make those things bigger instead of accepting them as part of our lives.

The second secret is we create inspiration and motivation from within regardless of results. Those are two of my ... If I was to send you off into the world to achieve your goals, I would say don't try and be perfect and make sure you create your inspiration and motivation from within, regardless of the results that are happening out there.

Too many of us want to rely on approval from other people and results immediately in order to continue. What I want to teach you is if you can make your motivation and inspiration come from within you, regardless of your results, you will keep going forward and those results will appear. We are used to instant results and we want to use the results as the motivation.

For example, you go on a new protocol of something you want to eat and you lose 10 pounds in the first week, you're going to be very motivated to keep going. What I want to teach you is that you go on your protocol and you don't lose any weight the first week, and you're still motivated and inspired. You don't rely on instant results, instant feedback, instant approval from the world in order to keep moving forward. You depend on yourself.

I look at a lot of situations in my life where I didn't get instant results. When I first tried to lose weight, I didn't lose one pound for six weeks. I relied on my internal motivation, my internal inspiration to get me through those six weeks. Then I dropped 10 pounds in those six weeks. Instead of looking outside of yourself or someone to tell you that you're doing a good job, because oftentimes they won't, you need to depend on that from within yourself.

It's imperative that we work on our minds to fuel our action. Resilience is not just taking massive action, despite stress and fear, and forcing our way through it. We don't want to force our way through adversity with stress and fear. We want to use courage. We want to manage our mind so we can fuel our action that takes us through adversity with determination, with excitement, with inspiration.

Next month I'm doing a whole series on feelings. We will talk about how to use our feelings, to choose our feelings, to create the feelings that we want, and also how to manage the other ones that are inevitable as contrasts as we go through bigger goals in our lives. It's about continuing our thought work and taking massive action while at the same time increasing confidence and peace.

If you try and get to your goal through fear and anxiety, you will be exhausted. That's how you know if you're doing it well is you're still moving forward, you're still creating results, you're still taking action, and you're feeling confident and you're feeling peaceful. If you're feeling afraid and you're feeling freaked out, that doesn't mean to stop taking action; it just means that you have some thought work to do while you're moving forward.

One of the mistakes I see students doing is, "Oh, my gosh. I'm afraid. I better stop and do some thought work." No. Do some thought work for sure, but keep moving. Keep moving forward.

The biggest robbers of our peace as we go on for our bigger commitments are confusion, doubt, and overwhelm. Those are always unnecessary emotions. They seem to indicate that something's gone terribly wrong, but really they've only been brought up as part of the growing process.

One of the ways that I overcome a lot of those things is I always tell myself I learn what to do as I take action. When you have confusion and you stop, you perpetuate confusion. When you have confusion and you take action, you learn what does and doesn't work. The answer to confusion is action, letting yourself know you always know.

I also focus on doing B-minus work. I'd get the work done at a B-minus level, which frees up all of my perfectionism chatter. It doesn't matter if I have a typo right now, it doesn't matter if this sounds perfect right now, I just need to get it complete within the hours I put on my schedule. That frees me up to complete work, overcome the adversity. Now I can always go back and check for perfection stuff, I can have someone else proofread it, that sort of thing, but in the beginning you want to keep that action moving forward, you want to keep that momentum going.

Use challenges as an opportunity to build strategies. You want to build your resilience. You want to build your confidence. Adversity is necessary in order for that to happen. Obstacles are raw materials for growth. Without obstacles, you would already be there.

This is what happens. Somebody says, "I want to make $100,000 a year," and they see that it's possible and they do the math and they figure out how they want to do it. Then immediately they hit an obstacle, which makes sense. If you're not making $100,000 a year, it's because there's obstacles, mental obstacles, between you and $100,000 a year.

How do you make $100,000? You overcome the obstacles, but, first, you have to figure out what they are. The way that you figure out what they are is by going out there and trying to make $100,000 with all of your might. Then what presents itself as your obstacle is your classroom. That's the work you knew. Then as you overcome each obstacle, you build the strength, the confidence, the courage and you recognize everything that you've done then determines that you are in alignment and ready for the $100,000 a year.

This is why you can take someone that is making $100,000 in one company and put them in a new company to make $100,000. It's so easy for them because they already know the obstacles that they need to overcome in order to achieve that. Just recognize what's between you and your goal are obstacles that need to be overcome on purpose. Setbacks make most people quit. If you can use you setbacks to deepen your resolve then you will become more resilient and more confident.

If I have two people at the starting line of a goal and one of the people is anticipating lots of obstacles and is going to use that to make themselves stronger, and one person is not anticipating any problems, just wants a straight run, in the beginning, the person who is not anticipating any obstacles is going to be much more excited. "This is going to be fun. This is going to be easy. This is going to be great." The person that's anticipating obstacles is probably a little bit more serious, a little bit more thoughtful.

We send them off to the race. The first obstacle comes up. The person that didn't anticipate it and the person that was excited is immediately defeated. The person that knew that there would be obstacles, knew that there would be adversity is ready. "This is part of the deal. This will make me stronger. This will increase my resolve. This will increase my resilience. This will increase my confidence." That person is going to win because that person will finish.

The best way and the truest way to build your confidence is to accumulate and overcome challenges. When you know this, you're going to set bigger goals. Many people think they're confident because of their accomplishments, but really they are confident because of the obstacles they overcame to achieve their goal. Think about that.

I'll be talking to a student and she'll say, "I know I can do that because I've done it before," or they'll say, "I don't think I can do it because I've never done it before." I always giggle a little bit when someone says that. How can you achieve something if the only way you're willing to achieve it is if you've done it before?

For example, my clients that are trying to lose weight. They'll come to me and they'll say, "I've never been able to lose weight before." I'll say, "What does that have to do with what you're doing now? If you had already been able to lose weight before, you wouldn't be here."
w
We need to understand where you are now, what is your goal weight, and what is in between there. That's great information. That's great adversity. That's a great challenge. People will laugh at me all the time. My students laugh at me all the time. Whenever they're presented with a challenge, I'm excited for them. I mean it’s an opportunity to get strong, an opportunity to overcome.

I had a student. She was talking to me about the holidays and how she was so worried that when she went into the holidays, they would be so challenging and so hard and she wouldn't be able to stay on her protocol and she would be overeating the whole time. I said, "No. Holidays are an opportunity for you to build confidence, to build resilience, to build your strength, to learn how to cope with your emotions." We've been invited to the classroom. You don't want to just steal down and try to survive it. You want to use it as an opportunity to get stronger.

I think the main goal in this podcast for me to teach you is that resilience can't be built without adversity. We seek out adversity by creating big goals, and we don't freak out when adversity comes. We don't make excuses, we don't back down. We use it to grow. We use it to get stronger.

Let's say your commitment is to lose 50 pounds and let's say your compelling reason is because you want to be able to run around with your kids and you want to be healthy, live a long life. One of your obstacles may be overeating at night. It seems beyond your control, it seems impossible to stop. The urges are intense, the reaction is fast, and the weight gain is inevitable. Those are the obstacles that you are going to face as you go to accomplish your goal.

Now when you look at those things, you may say, "Those are the reasons why I won't succeed," but what I want to suggest is those obstacles are the reasons you're going to get stronger, you're going to get more resilient, you're going to get more confident. When you learn how food and you eating it is totally within your control, when you see that it's absolutely possible to stop eating, when you learn how to manage your urges without getting reactive, and when you learn how to not gain weight by not overeating at night, those adversities then become your skill sets. They become your strategies.

You know that you won't ever overeat at night. You know that you come home, you have dinner, and that's it. You don't snack, you don't overeat, you don't eat while you're preparing food. All of a sudden you have worked to create this change in your life. What have you learned as you've done it? You've learned how to create results by changing your weight, you've learned how to manage your behavior, you've learned how to manage and feel your emotions, you've learned how to manage your mind.

During that process, while you're learning how to do that, you will tell yourself it's impossible. You will tell yourself you can't do it, you will tell yourself that it's not worth it. That will be the adversity that you will go through, and you will be able to make a choice whether you give into those things and give in to those old patterns or you change them. What I've watched my students do that have stopped overeating is take off in terms of their confidence, take off in terms of their ability to create results for themselves, to be able to manage their thoughts, their feelings, all of their actions and ultimately their results.

When I talk to my students about losing weight, I teach them, "This isn't about losing weight. This is about learning how to live deliberately." Instead of saying, "I can't control myself at night," you can say, "I'm always in control of myself, I'm always the one making the choice, I'm always the one deciding. I'm always the one thinking and deciding what to think. I'm always the one feeling and deciding what to feel, or processing an emotion that's appeared. I'm always the one that picks up the food or doesn't. Therefore, I'm the one that creates my results in my life." It's very powerful. When you use the model, it's a very powerful combination to be able to direct our lives in exactly the way we want them to go without force.

For those of you who are in the Self-Coaching Scholars, if you go to page 44, there's some repeating questions there. I have you write your commitment again. I have you write your compelling reason again. I think sometimes we might see that is redundant, not necessary. I want to make sure that you know that every question I've put in these books, every question I ask you when I'm coaching you on the live calls is important.

Repetition is the mother of skill. Repetition is what creates the neural pathways in our brain. For those of you who listen to my podcast, I repeat myself constantly, and that is on purpose and by design, so you can learn new ideas, so you can learn new ways of thinking by hearing it multiple times. I know that many of you listen to my podcasts on loop. You listen to them, especially the ones that have been really helpful. That is a really powerful thing for you to do because as you listen to the same message over and over and over, you memorize it so it's available to you in your brain.
Think about that. When you need to recall something in your brain and it's right there, it's because you've repeated it enough time that you've created an actual neural pathway in your brain. That's what we want to do. The questions that I've designed in these workbooks are repetitive on purpose. Make sure you write out the answer. Make sure you put it in a journal or you put it in this book that I sent to you.

If you're local US, I've sent you a book and you just write it in there as many times as I ask you to write it. Don't try and do this stuff in your head, do it on paper. There is something that happens when you see something existing in the world versus just seeing it exist in your brain.

Okay, you guys. That's what I have for you this week. That is the end of our series on resilience. We're going to move into feelings, and some really good feelings that I'm going to teach you how to process, some negative emotions we'll be talking about on the podcast in detail I'm very excited about.

For those of you who are interested, we have another weight loss coach who is coming up after the outro, Corinne Crabtree. She has an amazing business over at Phit-N-Phat. She's an amazing, amazing woman. She's lost 100 pounds herself. She's a great coach. She's had some fantastic ideas, has a huge following over at her website.

She has added a podcast here, All About Planning. I've talked a lot about planning on the podcast. She really breaks it down into detail and gives you a really useful podcast. Even for those of you who aren't overweight, if you listen to this podcast, I'm sure that you'll gather a lot of great information about planning and thinking ahead and how important that is.

One of the things she talks about that's really, I think, significant here is setting yourself up for success. If you want to learn how to trust yourself, honor your commitments. If you make a little commitment and you honor it, and then you make a plan to do another commitment and you honor it, then you plan to do another commitment and you honor it, you start accumulating trust with yourself. You know that when you say something that you'll do it.
You don't want to start with too big of a commitment in the beginning, if you aren't willing to have a compelling reason to follow through because that will really take a hit to your integrity with yourself. It'll take a hit to your trust with yourself. She breaks that down really well in the following podcast. Please enjoy and I'll talk to you all next week. Take care. Bye bye.

Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out Self-Coaching Scholars. It's my monthly coaching program where we take all this material and we apply it, we take it to the next level and we study it. Join me over at thelifecoachschool.com/join. Make sure you type in thelifecoachschool.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in Self-Coaching Scholars. See you there.

Podcast Feature: Corinne Crabtree

Hi, my name is Corinne Crabtree. I am a Master Weight Loss Coach Instructor from Brooke Castillo's The Life Coach School. A little bit about me is I lost 100 pounds 12 years ago. I was always overweight my entire life and one day just woke up knowing that it was time to change.

I was looking at a one-year-old who I couldn't keep up with, exhausted with life. I knew right then that I had no clue as to what I would do, but that I finally was at that point where I was going to lose weight. I knew I would figure it out and I knew that I was committed to trying. Over the course of about 18 months, that's exactly what I did.

In this podcast, I want to talk to you about one of the most important tools that I have found, which is planning. If you'd like to visit my website, you can visit www.pnp411.com. You can download a free video course on exactly what I'm going to talk to you today about. I give you a lot of tools, a workbook, and everything you need to know to get planning done in your life. I know it can help you because it has helped me and hundreds of women that I coach.

A lot of women come to me and the first thing they want is for me to design them a meal plan and then they want me to give them some type of exercise plan that's going to whip them in shape. I used to do that. It dawned on me after training so many women online that they didn't really need meal plans and exercise plans near as much as they needed some guidance to learn how to create their own plans.

My problem when I was losing weight and trying to lose weight over and over and over again was that I never really learned what I actually needed. I was the classic program hopper. I tried Weight Watchers, I tried all kinds of gym memberships, I did trainers, anything you can think of. All it really taught me was how to do something so far removed from where I was ready to start that it would cause me to just keep breaking promises to myself. I got into the habit of it being okay to start and stop diets, start and stop gym memberships, start and stop exercise plans.

I would start each Monday gung-ho with my new plan that somebody else had written or that I'd found in the latest magazine or book, and I'd never really thought about the rest of the week. I just knew that on Monday I would start in this diet. By Wednesday, it normally would fall apart for me.

What was really missing for me was that I never sat down and thought about what I truly wanted, when it would fit in my life, what I was willing to do, and if I was willing to meet myself where I was at. I think I spent so many years shaming myself about being so overweight that starting with reasonable, doable things, I would talk myself into that being beneath me.

I decided that I was going to change that, and that's what I teach people now, that planning and being able to craft a plan that works for you is the ultimate key to your weight loss success. It changes everything in the way you think about food, in the way you think about movement. It teaches you how to show up for yourself. It just gives you so much. Today I really want to go over what you need in a plan, when do you do it, and what you need to be thinking about.

One of the first things that I like for you to think about is when you are starting a new plan, craft one that starts with whens. That really has to be in the forefront of your mind. It really needs to be all about what do I know I can put on this calendar that without a shadow of a doubt I could get it done?
I always ask my clients to do this test. Anything that's on their calendar for the week that they commit to eating and moving and anything in the realm of their health and fitness, on a scale of one to 10, how committed are you to it? How do you know you will get it done?

If they're an eight or better and they say, "Corinne, I'm an eight or better. I can do this," then I'm solid. If they come back and they're like, "I'm kind of like five. Sometimes life happens. Sometimes my kids need to go to soccer practice," I tell them to rework the plan. The last thing anybody needs when they're first starting out on a diet or an exercise plan is an opportunity to break a promise to themselves. Start your initial plans where you are and be honest with yourself about where you are. Be realistic.

My first huge tip for everybody, when you're going to start all your planning, is to get in the habit of thinking ahead. Look at your week. A lot of weight loss has everything to do with your ability to actually visualize the next week ahead of you and put things on the plan you know you want done and that you will do.

That's why I like everybody to get into a habit of planning an entire week with the mindset of, "I'm making the best decisions for myself ahead of time. I'm looking at my calendar. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do this. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to eat this." All of those things are made from that place of, "I've got my own back." When you do that the rest of the week, you only have to negotiate simply showing up.

There's no planning the rest of the week. There's no trying to decide what we're having for dinner, trying to decide when I'm not going to go work out. All of that's exhausting. I mean every one of us can agree that we make a ton of decisions every single day. When you're trying to every day make a decision about your weight loss, it gets tiring. That's why we get sick and tired of dieting all the time. You think about, "What is it that I want for this week? I'm making my decisions right now knowing that there's no reason these things shouldn't happen."

I think that's the key. I mean when you look at your entire week and you go ahead and decide what are you going to eat this week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? What snacks do you need? What is my schedule like? Where am I going to be going out to lunch? If you're going out to lunch with, say, your friends, you want to make sure that you know you're doing that, that you thought ahead, that you've made the decision now what kind of a healthy choice you're going to make. You think about your exercise.

When you plan ahead like that, your mental muscle gets strong. The rest of the week, the only thing you have to think about is pushing through urges to not do what you have on the plan. If you did a plan that was exactly where you're at and ready for now then you don't have to try so hard even through the urges. Those urges are what keep us from losing our way. You need all your energy to deal with those, not trying to make decisions in the moment.

I'm going to talk to you about the process. This is the process that I do myself, that I have my clients do. I think it's a great process. It asks you a lot of good questions and it's something that you can easily implement.

I typically will sit down on a Sunday morning, before my family wakes up, with a cup of coffee and my plan, and I use that as my time. That is almost sacred to me because it is for me self-care. It is me taking care of me. The rest of the week is about me taking care of usually other people, and I don't have a lot left over from me in the moment. My Sunday morning planning makes sure that I get on my own calendar and that I am well taken care of.

In a minute, we're going to go over what goes on that plan, but this is what I want you to be thinking about. When you sit down, before you write down anything like what you're going to eat and where you're going to exercise and all that good stuff, I want you to just ask yourself a simple question: what is it that you want this week from your health and your fitness? Is it to lose X amount, like a pound or two pounds? Is it to exercise so many days of this week? Is it to have a certain feeling by the end of the week? Whatever it may be, really write it down so that it's in front of you, because it needs to be the guiding principle around everything that goes on the plan. That's the way you frame it in your mind about what you want.

When you do your plan, it's going to support those goals, what you really want this week. Then I always right it at the top of my plan because I think it's really powerful to see what Sunday Corinne wanted for ourselves all week long, because sometimes Thursday Corinne is tired, she wants a glass of wine, and she's exhausted, she doesn't want to go to the gym, but when I look at my goals for the week and when I look at what I was thinking about on Sunday morning, when I had the time to truly process everything and all the negotiating little things in my head were gone, it's a lot easier to stick to my plan. It's just a lot easier.

You have to know what you want on your plan. Having that's just going to keep you very focused. It's going to get you in the right mindset. It's going to help you avoid short term fixes because you've got your long term vision well thought of and well laid out.

This is what goes on my calendar and this is the way I do mine. I actually use the calendar on my computer that syncs up with my phone and everything. I put down the times that I need to do things. Most of my entire day is planned that way, even down to I have a two-hour block every afternoon that is reserved for my child. That's my kid time. That's the time that I spend with my little boy. His name is Logan. I pick him up from school.

It's undistracted time. I don't plan phone calls during that time. When we get home, I don't check my email. This is the time that I have carved out for him because, just like I want intentional exercise time and intentional food prep time, I also want intentional time with the people that mean the most to me. I think that getting into the practice of planning everything that's important to you is just such a life skill that can't be replaced.

On your plan, you're going to put down what day and time will you food prep. For me, Sundays from 12 to three is my food prep time. You can take it to the bank that if you showed up at my house between 12 and three on a Sunday afternoon, short of me being in the air, flying home from vacation, I will be in the kitchen doing food prep. That's time I don't schedule phone calls with friends or anything. That's food prep time. That includes cleaning up my kitchen. It includes everything.

My food doesn't take three hours, but I enjoy it so I stretch it out a little longer sometimes. I put on good music. I really make it an experience. I want you to put down when you're going to do food prep.

If you don't know much about food prep, my website has plenty of information on it for you when it comes to making food prep that is easy for a busy mom or a busy executive. It doesn't have to be a Pinterest beauty thing, but food prep is one of those things where it takes out so much decisions. It's such a good plan. I mean I can't tell you how many weeks are so much easier for me because I simply have all the food decisions for my entire family made ahead of time. It's just nice.

Then do you need an appointment each day with yourself around what time you're going to pack your lunch? A lot of my clients prefer to take something to eat for lunch every single day. Even though they may go out to lunch sometimes, they still like to have their food with them. Worst case scenario is you bring it home.

I like to have my clients have time on their calendar when they're going to prepare themselves for the next day. That means if any gym bags need to be packed, lunches need to be packed for you or your family, if you need to lay out your clothes, if you workout at home, all of that stuff. You need a specific time of day that you know that no matter what, you have an appointment with yourself, and this is when it gets done.

Then put on your calendar when you actually will move. Anytime that you're going to be needing to go to the gym or workout from home, whatever, put that on your calendar, and be realistic. A lot of my clients never work out more than three days a week. That's not their priority, not their jam. They would rather spend more time doing food prep on a Sunday and less time working out during the week, and that's fine. It just needs to be on the calendar, and whatever it is that you put down, that's what you agree to do.
Then I also have my clients put down what they're eating each day. They think about it ahead of time. They think about lunches, they think about dinners, they think about anything where if they're going out for a family dinner, anything that they need to think ahead about, they go ahead and flesh it out.

It doesn't mean that things are always going to fall perfectly like this, but I promise you that if you think ahead and you visualize what a successful weight loss week looks like for you, when changes happen, it's so much easier to roll with the punches versus having some loosey-goosey idea in your head of how the week should go and what your results should be, and you're just reacting all week long. This takes reaction out. This is you taking control of your life.

I also have my clients schedule an appointment with themselves to journal their food every single day. I just think it's important. I don't care what kind of journal you keep, but I think knowing what you eat is uber important. I have them journal that time also.

Everything on your counter needs to support your goals. I'm a big believer in having a calendar that breaks down daily everything that I'm doing. I have my clients really look at what they've been doing the last few days outside of just their food and their exercise. Then I ask them about the things that are important in life. If they have a bunch of stuff that they're doing that doesn't support being healthy, doesn't support being a loving wife and all these things, I ask them, "Why are you doing it?" That's a powerful question.

I'd write about it. I would do one of Brooke's famous thought downloads. My clients do them all the time. I would write down exactly why things are on your calendar that have nothing to do with what you truly want out of life. There's a lot of magic in doing that little tip. Then I would just read it, I would highlight the things you love and highlight the thing you don't love, and ask, "Do I like my answer? Do I like the answer I'm providing about why I have things on my calendar that have nothing to do with the goals I have in life?"

The last thing I want to talk about is how to recap your week. It's not just all about the planning and the showing up. There's a ton of magic in looking back at your week. I've included, as part of a freebie for this podcast, the exact planner tool that my clients use. It's a one-page, it's a keep it simple. On the left-hand side is the plan for the week with all the little squares that you need to fill in. On the right-hand side is the recap of the week.

You go through the worksheet and you ask yourself, "Did I do all these things?" and you check it off. If you didn't do what was on the plan, you write down what you did do and then you ask yourself, "Why did I change things? What happened? Why am I not fulfilling these things on my calendar?"

What I ask my clients to do is to list all the excuses they have, because most of the time, I'm just going to be honest, when we're not following our plan, we are jackloaded with excuses. It has a lot more to do with that than it has anything to do with actual, "I went to the emergency room," "My cat got run over." It's rarely do we have big emergencies. Most of the time what we have are, "I just didn't feel like it. I had to work late. By the time I got home, I didn't want to pack my lunches." Then that turns into two or three days of not doing our plan.

List all of your excuses and then go through and look at them and then decide, "Do I like my excuses?" If you don't like your excuses, you know you have to work harder on your commitment and you need to work a little bit more on planning realistically.

That's the other part that I would do is I would start asking myself things like, "Am I still trying to plan too much?" Maybe you're not planning enough. Who knows? But you are such a wise woman. We all have an inner gut. When we decide that we're going to tell the truth, we will. You'll feel it in you. You'll know if you're just coming up with excuses, if you're falling into old habits, if you're not doing what you wanted to do on Sunday, that woman that was sitting there who had big dreams for what it would be like the next Sunday.

Really just go through all of it and just do a gut check. That's really all it is. It's just a willingness to look at it, be honest, and decide, "This next plan, I want to make sure it's executable, it's doable, it's reasonable, and that I can cut through my own crap the rest of the week if I need to."
Planning just allows you to show up for yourself. It's the best habit, I think, anybody who is getting on the weight loss bandwagon can start. I think planning takes a lot of the decision fatigue out for you. I think it helps you think about what you want most. I think it gives you a vision of where you want to go. It just gives you that habit of showing up for yourself. That is such a powerful skill to get weight off, being able to say, "I don't break promises to myself, I show up, so I plan ways that I can show up." That's your best weight loss tool, in my opinion.

I hope you enjoyed my podcast and my lesson on planning. If you would like to have my free video course with the workbook, again, just visit my website at www.pnp411.com. I would love to send you that workbook, the videos, and dive deeper into the whole planning process.