91. Breaking the Habit of Being You

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 91 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today we’re talking about breaking the habit of being you. One of the most important principles that I teach here on the podcast and one of the most important principles that I work on with my clients is the idea of becoming the best, the healthiest the most badass version of yourself.

And this is not meant to imply that there’s anything wrong with who you are right now, it just means that you have the desire to become more. That means that who you are right now is not the finish line, that you’re not done learning and growing and evolving. So in this episode, I’m going to show you how more than anything else your habits are responsible for who you have become up to this point in your life.

And if you want to change who you become in the future, it requires breaking the habit of being you strap in for this one, because it’s going to challenge you to think about yourself in a whole new way.

But first, if you like this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. This is a community of like-minded people who share their experience, their expertise at times their strength, their encouragement, their motivation, their positivity. And it gives you a voice. It’s a place where you can ask questions and get answers.

So the podcast and the Facebook group go hand in hand, just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and come over there and join in the fun, I do some weekly trainings over there. On Sunday afternoons, we do a little live and we have a lot of fun doing it. Love to see you over there.

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Well, thank you Apple’s mama for sharing that I really do appreciate it. And the reason I read these reviews and I encourage you to leave a review is because it helps me to know that I’m on track with the message that I’m sharing with you guys. So I so so appreciate that.

And then if you’re interested in digging a little bit deeper and getting a little bit more people asking how they can work with me. And one way of doing that is by joining the Running Lean coaching group. And so each week we do a different each week, we have a weekly group Zoom call where you can ask questions and get answers and, and on those calls. I do some teaching and training and coaching.

And each month we have a different focus in this month of September, we’ve been doing fat- and how to become a fat-adapted runner. And next month in October, we’re talking all about strength and flexibility. So that’s going to be the focus of our coaching and training for the month of October, building strength becoming more flexible as a runner.

Running injuries are so common upwards of like 56% of recreational runners experienced some sort of an injury every year. So injuries are very preventable though. Okay, so I’ve got some special guests coming in. I’m going to be doing some teaching and coaching on this topic. But I got some special guests coming in to share their thoughts and ideas and teach you how to get stronger, how to become more flexible.

We’re going to talk about exercises, different modalities that you can use for strength and flexibility so that you can become a stronger more powerful runner and keep running injury-free. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and we’ll see you over there in the Running Lean coaching group. We have a lot of fun over there by the way.

And then you can always work with me one on one I’m a coach, this is what I do. Working with me one on one is probably the best way to get the results that you’re looking for. You know what we’ll look at your goals we’ll set actionable steps to help you get to those goals. And I can help you become the most badass version of yourself.

This is what I do. I love doing this I really do. And it kind of goes along with what I’m talking about today which is becoming a different version of you. You know if who you are up to this point is not where you want to stop like if you think there’s more than you want for yourself have one on one coaching is probably the best way to help get you there. And to apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast,com/apply, you and I will jump on a Zoom together, we’ll talk about the coaching program and see if this is a good fit for you.

Alright, let’s get into this topic today because I’m so excited about this. So one of the most influential books I’ve ever read is a book by Dr. Joe Dispenza. And the book is titled breaking the habit of being yourself. And so that’s kind of where I got the title of this episode from.

So I’m going to take some of the things that he talks about in the book and sort of, I’ve kind of like, tweaked this over the years to kind of fit in with my coaching style and with the principles that I teach.

But these are concepts that have been around for a while. And I first read this book several years ago, and the book just had a profound impact on me, it really changed my life, it really showed me that who I am today is just a result of habitual thinking and habitual emotional responses and habitual behaviors. Okay?

And that if you want to create a different version of you’ve got to start, firstly, you have to understand, like what you’ve become up to this point and how you got here, then you can start to kind of dismantle that and break those old habits and start becoming the new version of yourself, okay. But more than just about any other book I’ve ever read, this thing has helped me to become who I am today. And so I’m going to be sharing my thoughts about today, what it means to break the habit of being you. Okay?

So we humans, we’re creatures of habit. Like we love doing the same things over and over and over again. And if you’re an older adult, you know, not old, but if you are an experienced adult, let’s put it that way. If you have some experience being an adult, then you’ve probably been doing the same things for decades, right? You’ve got the same routines, the same work, you’ve been doing the same relationships, the same way you interact with your family, like, we approach everything the way that we just have. And this is just what we do, right? This is who we are now, this is what we believe this is how we think this is how we feel.

And so our habits make up the majority of what we do, how we think how we feel. And so we’ve basically become our habits. Who we are today is just a set of repeated thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And most of these things we do unconsciously, we’re not even aware that we’re thinking, feeling, and doing what we think, feel, and do on a regular basis, okay.

But here’s the thing, if you want to change who you are, like if you want to become somebody else, if you want to become a different version of yourself in the future, if you want to make positive changes in your life, if you want to lose weight, if you want to run a faster marathon, if you want to run an ultra marathon, you want to run your first 5k, you want to become a runner, whatever it is that you want for yourself, whatever is challenging you could be you wanting a new relationship, or you want a better career, you want to start your own business, whatever big thing you want for yourself, you have to change who you are today to get there.

You have to break the old habit of being you that you’ve become up to this point, you have to start creating a whole new version of yourself. So don’t worry, I’m going to break down kind of how we do this and what this looks like. Okay, I know this might sound a little out there right now.

So what is a habit? A habit is just a redundant set of automatic and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you’ve acquired through repetition. It’s just stuff you’ve been doing over and over and over again, it’s the way you’ve been thinking and feeling and responding emotionally to events and the behaviors you’ve been doing.

It’s gotten to the point where you’re not even consciously aware that this is happening right your body does it like you’re doing things and you don’t know when really consciously aware, kind of like when you’re you know, taking a shower, brushing your teeth or something like that, right? It’s sort of an unconscious habit, your body does it better than your mind.

So an example of what this looks like. So a lot of people live their life in the past. And here’s what I mean by that. People wake up and they start thinking about their problems. Right? Your problems are just memories of like past situations, past issues, past stressors, past trauma. So you start each day living in the past. You’re thinking about oh, this thing that happened to me a while back, you know. And we call these things problems, or memories, whatever it is, you’re consciously back there in the past. So you start each day just like living in the past. And each one of these past memories has an emotion tied to it.

So you immediately begin your day feeling. Maybe you’re really feeling the unhappiness or the hurt or their unworthiness or the stress or the anger that you experienced in the past, just thinking about that situation now brings up the same emotional response, right? How you think and feel, creates your present state of being who you are, in this moment, is a result of how you’re thinking and feeling right now.

And most people start their day feeling all these negative emotions from the past. And so they’re just living in the past, your familiar past, the thing that you know, that you keep repeating over and over and over again, in your mind becomes who you are today. And it just goes on and on. And your familiar past becomes your predictable future.

So who you were in the past, you’re just going to continue to create more and more of that. You just become more and more of who you already are. You can’t go beyond who you used to be. You can’t get beyond who you are up to this point. Because that’s all you know. And that’s what you’re ruminating on. And that’s what you’re thinking about. And that’s the emotions that you’re experiencing right now. So your emotional state right now is the past.

And all you can think about is the future for your future is how you’re feeling right now. When all your feelings and all of your thoughts and your whole being is focused on who you used to be in the past like that’s who you are right now, that’s just going to be what you keep creating more and more and more for yourself, okay? This is what it looks like to be stuck in the habit of being you.

Now listen, there’s nothing wrong with this, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or you’re doing something wrong. This is the way most of us have just kind of conditioned ourselves to operate in, it’s okay. But if you want something more for yourself, if you want to continue to learn and grow and evolve and become that badass version of yourself that I always like to say that phrase, I love it, becoming the most badass version of yourself. If that’s what you want for yourself, then you’ve got to break this habit of being who you are today, you got to get out of being who you are so that you can become more.

I told you, you’re gonna have to strap in for this one because it’s mind-blowing, right? Here’s a crazy stat – 95% of who you are, by the time you’re 35 years old, it’s just a memorized set of repeated thoughts, emotional reactions, beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, actions. 95% of who you are.

So you might be saying to yourself, you know, well, I want to lose weight. So I’m gonna change once and for all, but you’re like, only 5% of you is sort of onboard with making this change. Because 95% of you is still stuck on the repeated unconscious habits of who you believe yourself to be today. You’ve become your habits, you’ve become your habitual thinking and feeling. Here’s what this looks like, you have an emotional reaction to something, let’s say you get angry about something. And you allow that emotional reaction to last for hours or sometimes days. And you call this a mood, right? Oh, I’m in a mood. Yeah, this thing happened five days ago. So I’m still in a bad mood about it. I’m still angry about it.

It’s just like one long drawn-out emotional response to an event. And if you keep this up, if you keep up this mood for weeks or months, then it becomes your temperament. Oh, yeah, he’s got a temperament. You know he’s just in that mood most of the time. But when it goes on for years, it just becomes your personality, like, oh, yeah, that person, they’re their personality. They’re just an angry person. Right?

And this is because you just keep replaying these past experiences. Why would you keep reliving negative past experiences? Why do you keep doing this? One of the reasons we do it is that you’re kind of addicted to it, you’re addicted to the chemicals released in the response, the emotions you’re feeling.

So when you have an emotional response to something, let’s say you get really resentful about something. Okay. Let’s say you have a super stressful event happen in your life. Like, your husband says he’s leaving you for his secretary. Okay, this is a huge stressful event. And you release you know, you get very emotional about it. And when you get very emotional there’s going to be emotions like anger and hurt, and, you know, resentment. And, you know, you’re gonna want to don’t want to hurt somebody, you know, like you get all fired up about this right?

Well with that emotional response comes this release of hormones and chemicals in your brain like cortisol and adrenaline it gives you this like rush of chemicals, okay? So every time you relive this experience in your mind, it’s just like it’s happening all over again. So you have the same emotional response, just by thinking about, you know, your husband, with that secretary will get you all fired up again, it gets you all angry again, it gets you all resentful again.

And to your brain, it feels like it’s happening right now all over again. And so you get the same chemical response that happens, the same chemicals get released. And you get that rush that you get from the adrenaline and the cortisol and all these other things, right? Your mind doesn’t know that the situation happened years ago. It just thinks it’s happening right now.

When you imagine something really vividly, and you really feel it emotionally. It’s like it’s happening right now, your brain doesn’t know the difference. So you’d think it really makes sense to release the anger and resentment don’t hold on to that stuff, right? But we do we keep replaying these situations in our minds, even though they make us feel terrible, but we do it because we’re sort of, we’ve sort of programmed ourselves to want that chemical reaction.

We want to feel the chemicals, even though it’s a negative experience, we still want that chemical response. Okay, this is kind of why we keep reliving these past negative emotional experiences, all right. And I hope you’re not thinking that this is all super depressing right now. Because it’s not meant to be, I just want you to see how your brain and your body work together, I want you to see mostly how your brain is sort of keeping you stuck where you are, and how you might feel like you can never get anywhere.

Or maybe you feel like you can’t make any progress toward a goal, I just want you to understand that it’s not necessarily like your fault, or you don’t have any willpower, or it’s too hard for you, and you can’t do it, it’s never gonna work for you. It’s nothing like that at all.

It’s just your brain doing what it does, you sort of conditioned yourself, you know, to become this certain version of you, and no matter how much you think about wanting to break out of that, you know, you just can’t seem to do it.

Okay, in order to break that habit of being you. It’s important that you understand how you got here in the first place. So that’s why I’m sort of breaking this down this way. Okay. You have to start looking at all the habitual things that you’ve been thinking, feeling, and doing for years. So that when you put all these things together, you have what we call you, like you’ve become what we call the person that is you today, right?

So there’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that you’ve been living a familiar past. And if you keep doing it, you’re just going to create the same predictable future, who you are today is who you’re going to be tomorrow. And not much will ever change for you.

The good news is now you understand what’s happening, and you can do something about it. Right? It’s like seeing the matrix, once you take the red pill, you can never go back. Now you can make a conscious choice to do something about it. You don’t have to be stuck here. That’s the good news. Right, you can do something to change.

So what do we do to change is how do we begin to break the habit of being ourselves in the moment, right? How do we become that different version of ourselves? And this is a great question. And in the book, Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about a daily meditation practice, okay, where you practice, being in the present moment, and you practice imagining the future that you want for yourself, you imagine the person that you want to become that you might be thinking, I don’t know about this? Hoo, ha, hokey, meditation stuff, whatever.

But listen, when you imagined something really vividly like I was saying earlier, your brain doesn’t know that it’s just something you imagined, you subconsciously believe that this is happening to you right now. Visualization exercises are super powerful and a lot of professional athletes practice some sort of mental imagery or visualization before any sort of big event.

And they’ve done these experiments with athletes and this one that I found to be very fascinating was the free-throw experiment. So there was an Australian psychologist named Alan Richardson. And he wanted to prove that mental imagery or visualization was beneficial in improving athletic performance. So he did this study, and he took three different groups of college students.

And they were going to practice free throws, you know, to show how they could improve their free-throw shooting on the basketball court. So the first group practice basketball, free throws for 20 minutes a day, for 20 straight days. And then the second and third groups only shot free throws on the first day and the last day of the 20 day period.

However, the second group spent 20 minutes a day, visualizing shooting, free throws, so they didn’t actually pick up a basketball except for the first and last day. But they spent each day visualizing themselves shooting free throws. And the results were fascinating.

So the first group, the people who actually practiced shooting, the free throws for 20 minutes a day for 20 days, improved by 24%, from the first day to the last day. The third group, you know, this is the so the first group improved 24% over the third group who did nothing, they did not practice at all, they just shot on the first day in the last day, and they didn’t make any improvements at all.

But the second group, the mental imagery group, the one that’s like just did the visualization for 20 minutes a day improved 23%, almost the exact same amount as the ones that actually shot the free throws. This is fascinating to me. So it just goes to show you that your brain can actually you can create new neural pathways by just visualizing doing something.

And they’ve done other experiments with people doing like piano drills, like people that don’t know how to play the piano. And they found that just visualizing themselves, like practicing piano drills, fingering drills, like they can actually get as good as people that actually practice every day.

So anyway, very fascinating stuff. So an example of visualization is to imagine yourself like crossing the finish line of your marathon and hitting your PR, like, let’s say, this is a goal for you, like you want to hit, you know, you want to break a four-hour marathon or something like that, right?

You have to visualize that that is really happening for you right now in this moment. And to do it, you need to do it in vivid detail, right, you need to use all your senses. So you know, the way you could do this, is you kind of close your eyes and spend a little bit of time just kind of relaxing, and then all of a sudden you are approaching the finish line and you’re in your body, you’re seeing this through your eyes, you see the crowd, you see the time on the clock.

You see the photographers up ahead of you, you hear the crowd cheering, you hear them calling your name, you hear the loud rock music playing, you can smell and taste the sweat on your lips, and you feel the soreness in your body and the rush of adrenaline. And then you feel this flood of emotions you feel accomplishment, pride and relief, and joy and ecstasy.

And this vivid visceral mental imagery exercise is going to wire your brain to think like this is happening for you right now. And it’s going to help you to hit that goal. And this is something that elite athletes do because it gives them an edge. And most runners, they just don’t do this kind of stuff. They’re like yeah, whatever.

But you know what, what I just taught you right there, this can be your secret weapon, this can give you a competitive advantage. Especially if you’re trying to, you know, you’re trying to PR by just a couple of minutes or something like that. This can be the thing that helps you get over the edge. Okay? So don’t dismiss this, do it.

Another way to start breaking the habit of being you is is through journaling exercises and I know what you’re thinking like journaling writing, like a dear diary, and whatever. Patrick a lot of people have a bias against writing and I don’t understand why but I think maybe they just are not used to it right and so maybe they just think it’s hokey or weird or, or just doesn’t work or I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it works. I think you should try it anyway.

And writing about your own thoughts and feelings is a very powerful way to make changes in your life. Okay? If done properly, right. And there are two ways that I can think of that you can benefit from a daily writing practice. And listen, these things I’m talking about here, like the visualization and the writing, it’s got to be done daily, like, it’s something you have to do for a while, you can’t just do it once and think, well, I’m good, no, you got to, you got to do it.

So that you’re sort of rewiring those neural pathways in your brain, okay, so it’s something you have to get into the practice of doing on a regular basis. And I promise you, it’s gonna help you it’s going to make changes, it’s going to help you to become a different version of yourself.

Okay. So one way I can think of that writing will help you is to just get all the junk out of your head and onto the page. So you can just start to get all these crazy negative thoughts that are swirling around your head, get them out of your head and onto the piece of paper, right, you can begin to identify thought patterns that are keeping you stuck, you can start to sort out all the habits you’ve created over the years because you can see it, you can see it on the page, right?

Without this self-awareness, it’s really hard to make changes, like without knowing what habits you want to change, you first have to have the self-awareness of what your habits are in the first place. And the easiest way to do this is something I’ve talked about before here, and it’s called the thought download.

So just get everything out of your head and get it onto the page, write it all down, no filter, no analyzing, just do a brain dump, write all the random thoughts that you have, get them on a piece of paper, keep asking yourself, what else? What else? What else as many times as necessary.

And then once you feel like you’ve got it all out of your head, and you can see all your thoughts in front of you on the page, just look over it. Look over what you just wrote, what patterns do you see? What thoughts are like limiting you, holding you back, keeping you stuck? And when you’re armed with this information, you can actually start making changes to break those old habits and start working on who it is you really want to become.

Which leads me to the second way writing can benefit you. So besides just dumping out all of your thoughts, start writing about who it is that you want to become. So this is similar to the visualization exercise, you know, but you’re going to do it by writing about it instead of like just closing your eyes and imagining it. They’re both very powerful. And if you do both of them, it’s even more powerful.

So write about like, who do you want to become? What does she look like? How does she act? How does she feel about herself? What has she accomplished this future version of you? How does she show up for others? What big goals is she focused on? What fears and obstacles has she overcome?

How is this future version of you more motivated? How is she more confident? How is she more excited about her life? What is she more excited about? Write it all out, get it in as much vivid detail as you can, and really feel what it would feel like to be that future version of yourself to be the healthiest, the best, the most badass version of yourself and write it all down.

And by the way, when we talk about doing writing exercises like this, this is just for you, you don’t have to share them with anyone else. And if you’re concerned about somebody seeing this stuff, just throw away the page when you’re done, burn it, shred it, type it into a document and then delete the document, whatever you need to do, you don’t have to like keep the stuff around.

I just happen to do all my writing in these notebooks. And I just throw them in a drawer when I’m done. And eventually, my drawers get full of these notebooks and I just pitch them like it’s no big deal. I live alone too. So it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s reading any of my stuff.

So when it comes to breaking the habit of being you, some of the best things you can do to change that. Number one is you have to have the awareness of how you’ve become you. You want to understand the habits, the emotional responses, the living in the past, the feelings, the thoughts, the repeated behaviors that all add up to become who you are today.

And then doing this, this meditation or visualization, mental imagery exercises, the journaling exercises, these are amazing ways to start deconditioning yourself of becoming who you are and helping you to condition yourself to become someone else to break out of the habit of being the past version of you. That version of you that feels stuck here. And to start creating a better, more badass future version of you. I want to encourage you guys to try this. I think it would be an incredibly powerful thing for you to do.

Alright, remember October is strength and flexibility month over in the Running Lean coaching group. We’re going to be talking about building strength and becoming more flexible. I’ve got some special guests I’m going to be bringing into the group to share some stuff with you. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And I hope you got something out of this episode today. If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. And as always, I love you all. Keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.

If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.