Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 203 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! You’re looking good out there! I mean I can’t see you but it feels good to hear it doesn’t it? Remember that when you see someone and think they look great…remember to say it. You could put a bounce in their step that’s contagious….Nothing to do with my topic but I was thinking about that today…
I have a question for you… How many of you ever see someone super successful at something and think…they must have something I don’t have. They had opportunities I don’t have, they must be superhuman, they didn’t have my upbringing, they’ve not been through the trauma I’ve been through. How many times do you look at them and think “I could never do that”. I’m gonna challenge that for you today, by the end of this episode when you hear what I have to say, you’re going to be like “man she’s right”.
I was doing Hotworx the other day. Do you guys have Hotworx where you are? I love it. You’re in this little 8’ sauna all to yourself and they have a video class with an instructor teaching a yoga class or a Pilates class. You can set the temperature to 130 degrees if you can stand it…I love it anyway, I usually do it once or twice a week along with my other routines. Let me tell you, sometimes those instructors inspire me as much with their words as they do with their ability to work hard. That happened the other day. We were in a particularly hard pose and the instructor said “Don’t you dare give up, giving up can easily become a habit”. I was like oh snap, she’s right and I kept going even though my brain wanted to quit.
But think about that. If you’re constantly doing something, it becomes a habit doesn’t it? Good or bad.
But some of the things we do can be so subtle that you don’t realize how much it affects you and giving up easily is one of those things.
I was listening to a lady talk about her weight loss and she said she hadn’t reached her goal and she was now thinking “well I don’t really NEED to lose the weight” meaning she was kind of giving herself an out so that she could feel good about stopping, but when asked how that thought made her feel, she said “disappointed”. You see deep down she wants to lose the weight but she doesn’t believe it’s possible for her so she comes up with ways to justify quitting. We all do this, don’t we? We find ways to justify when we want to give up. But you know as well as I do how that goes. She is going to be starting her diet again soon because she has a desire to lose weight and that desire isn’t going away because she quits. If you’ve had weight loss as a goal, you know that. For me I feel like from the time I hit about 28 up to a few years ago, It was a real struggle and I was constantly trying new things because my desire to feel and look a certain way was very strong until something clicked in my head and I just decided “This is who I am”. And I found a plan that works for me. It wasn’t easy but it is now. I went to college as an adult for my interior design degree. My husband and I had a conversation before I started and he said it’s going to be harder than you think, you are going to want to quit but just promise me you won’t. That promise I made to him and the example I was setting for my baby sister were two of the things that kept me going when it got super hard. It would have been easy to quit but I would have still wanted that degree, that wouldn’t go away if I quit. I could have justified it away, I could have numbed it away, I could have distracted it away for a while, but it would come back.
This has been a theme in the last few episodes….You aren’t going to stop wanting the things you want. They just show back up in another area or another time. When the scale doesn’t say the right thing? We throw in the towel, but that doesn’t make us stop wanting it. When the money doesn’t come, we throw in the towel. When the lover doesn’t come, we want to give up dating forever. That’s your brain trying to protect you but it isn’t protecting you…it’s just prolonging the pain. Because that thing you want? Yeah, you’re still gonna want it even if you throw in the towel. It’s not going anywhere.
And the really bad news is neither are the self doubt thoughts that have you giving up. Every single human being on this planet has negative self-talk, even Eckart Tolle and Tony Robbins; they just catch it immediately when it happens. So having the thought of It’s too hard, it’s too painful, it’s too risky, I’m not good enough, I’ll never succeed, Everyone else is so good at it but I’m not. Understand…These are very normal thoughts. So if those are all very normal thoughts and we all have them…why are some people so darn successful and others aren’t?
That’s a BIG question and I hope you are as stoked about the answer as I am. Why are some so successful while others aren’t? They act anyway. They take action in spite of those thoughts. They keep going in spite of the scale going up, they keep trying even though that Facebook ad didn’t work AGAIN, they keep going in spite of the fear of embarrassment, the fear of failure, the fear of looking silly. We all have those fears. It didn’t feel good when I started my podcast, having 3 listeners 2 of them being my husband and my sister, the other one being me. But I kept going. It’s still not where I want it to be…of course, I’m human, we are all human and we will always desire more. But I was nervous when I started it….Mel Robbins says “Feeling nervous is normal, stopping because of it is a choice”.
So when you have a desire to make a video and put it out for the world to see, you’re going to be nervous about it. That’s normal, deleting it and not putting it out there is a choice. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is their willingness to act in spite of fear.
Successful people have all the same doubts and fears and thoughts as unsuccessful people; they just don’t let those thoughts and feelings stop them…they act anyway. Go listen to any success story and behind it you’ll hear the ways in which their brain tried to get them to quit. And they don’t just keep going once, they do it over and over and over. And the failures they have along the way, those are just stepping stones. Those are part of what makes success so sweet is knowing you continued in spite of it being hard. They know that persistence pays off. They don’t start taking scores too soon, they look at the score and then figure out a way to do it better so that next time the score would go up and they keep doing that.
We are living in a most interesting time to me. It’s as if giving up is almost cheered. The whole “healthy at any size” movement cheers those that flaunt their weight while criticizing those that show their desire to lose weight or get healthy. Jenna Kutcher became very famous because she was a blogger who wrote an article about her weight. She has a husband who is extremely fit and she is very overweight. She gained a huge following due to this and when she started a weight loss effort, she was criticized, saying that gave the wrong message. We give everyone a trophy just for playing. I’ve even heard they are trying to stop giving failing grades because it hurts kids feelings, I got news for you….They’re just prolonging the pain. We have to learn to fail so that we realize the more we fail, the more likely we succeed because that means you are continuing to try.
We have come to think of failure as the enemy of success, we can let failure discourage us or we can use it to be better, we can learn from it. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the only true failure is quitting.
Society teaches us it’s ok to just be average. And they are correct, if average is what you’re going for. I’m not and you’re listening to a podcast entitled “Wildly Successful Lifestyle” so it’s safe to say you’re not either.
My challenge to you for this week is to get honest with yourself. Where are you quitting? Is it with your nutrition? Is it your workouts? Is it your business? Find one area where you’re quitting on yourself and make a decision right now, no matter what, you are going to keep going. No matter what your brain comes up with, just laugh and tell your brain, I hear you and I know it’s hard, I know it’s uncomfortable but we’re doing this. Life isn’t supposed to be comfortable, if it was none of us would ever be motivated to do anything.
The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is one simple thing. Successful people have those self limiting thoughts AND they act anyway. Think about it this week whenever something gets hard, Tell yourself “Of course it’s hard, of course it’s uncomfortable, I’m doing something new, I’m doing something that’s going to make me grow, and then keep going. Don’t stop. Winston Churchill said “When you’re going through hell, keep going”.
Share this episode with 3 people, it’s timely and it’s powerful. You’ve got this. I love you guys and I’ll talk to you in a few days.
