Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
One of the biggest problems I see with people who attempt to make big changes in their life is a total lack of belief in themselves. If you set out to accomplish a big goal like losing weight or …
Continue Reading about 99. Overcoming Your Limiting Beliefs →
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 99 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. I can’t believe we’re at 99 episodes already, how fun is that I got something special coming for episode 100. So be sure to check that one out.
Today I’m talking about overcoming your limiting beliefs. One of the biggest problems I see with people who go and attempt to make some big changes in their life is a total lack of belief in themselves, they just don’t think they can do it.
So if you’re one of these people, and you’re setting out to accomplish some big goal, like losing weight or running a faster marathon, whatever it is, it’s going to require you to believe that you can do it.
Instead, what most people do is they have all these beliefs about why they can’t do it. They say things like, Oh, it’s too hard for me, I always fail, I can never do something like that. And these are called limiting beliefs, their beliefs that absolutely limit your ability to reach your goals.
So in this episode, I’m going to take a deep dive into limiting beliefs, I’m going to explain what they are, how they’re keeping you stuck. And I’ll offer up some practical tips on overcoming your limiting beliefs.
But first, if you like this podcast, you have to come check out the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. And just a heads up beginning on Thanksgiving Day, I believe that is the 25th of November, we are going to start the running through the holidays challenge we did this last couple of years. And it’s a lot of fun.
And basically what it is is a challenge for you to run every day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day. So I believe this year, it’s going to be a total of like 38 straight days of running. And I’ll talk all about the sort of rules around this. There’s not really rules.
But you know, there are some guidelines that I want you to follow. And I’m going to do a Facebook Live in the Facebook group this Sunday at 4pm. Eastern Time, and I’m going to give you a rundown on what this challenge is all about and invite you to join in the fun. Okay, so just search for Running Lean community on facebook and join us and definitely join us for the running through the holidays challenge. It’s a lot of fun.
And then here’s a message I received a while back from Kathy, I just wanted to share this with you guys. She said, “I found your podcast and Facebook group a little over a month ago and absolutely love them decided to watch your training video. And I think it is such a great breakdown of what we all need to hear and do to become fit and healthy in our body and mind. That is what I love so much about your podcast and your training is that you address the state of mind as well as what we need to do. Physically. Thank you again, I feel like you’re talking directly to me, every time I listen to you. Cheers, Kathy.”
Thank you, Kathy, you’re very, very sweet for for sharing that. And I love getting messages like this because it helps me to see that the message is resonating with you guys. And I love doing this, I’m having a lot of fun.
And then people ask how they can get more how they can work with me. And there’s two ways to do that. There’s the Running Lean coaching group. And this is a group that meets once a week, we do a group Zoom call where you can ask questions, you can you know get support, get help get guidance.
And then of course you get access to all my online training materials. I have the weight loss training course for runners, I have a new course I just created called Getting It All Done. It’s all about planning everything in your life so that you accomplish all of your goals. Achieving the impossible is another course that I have in there. That is all about setting big, huge impossible goals for yourself and then how to accomplish them. So there’s tons of learning material in the group.
And the really the aspect that everybody loves most about it is the the group calls where we get to do a little coaching and teaching but we get to support each other here, what’s working, what’s not working, what did we do to overcome issues and things like that.
So the Running Lean coaching group is a great way to get through and accomplish these big goals that you want for yourself. So if you’re interested in learning more, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
And then if you’re looking for a little more help, a little more one on one coaching. That’s what I do. I can offer you the expert guidance, support, encouragement, accountability, tough love to help you reach whatever health and fitness goals that you want for yourself.
Whether it’s losing a bunch of weight, or running a faster marathon, or just becoming the most badass version of yourself, I can help you get there. So just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply, you can apply for coaching you and I will jump on a Zoom call.
We’ll talk about the coaching program and just see if this is a good fit for you. Cool.
Alright, let’s get into this topic today overcoming your limiting beliefs. So first of all, what are beliefs, what are beliefs? In general beliefs are just thoughts that you keep thinking over and over again. So beliefs are just things that you have been thinking in your mind over and over again, for years or decades that this is just what a belief is, okay?
When we talk about the beliefs, I need you to understand something, because people fight me on this all the time. And I have to tell you, your beliefs are true for you. They’re not necessarily true for everyone.
So your beliefs come from your model of the world. Your model of the world is your past experiences, your upbringing, your family of origin, has an influence on your model of the world, the culture that you live in the geographic location that you live in, all of these things combine to create the way that you see the world. Your reality is created by the way you see the world.
I want you to understand this, I’m going to say this, again, because this is very, very important. Your reality is created by you. Your reality, the way you see things, is not necessarily the way other people see things, the way you see things is unique to you based on your past experiences, your upbringing, your geographical location, your model, your upbringing, your family of origin, all those things, your model of the world determines your reality, and your model of the world determines what you believe.
Alright, so now that we understand that, you have to understand that you are creating your own set of beliefs, okay, they’re not necessarily true for everyone. So I just want to make sure that we are both, we are both on the same page, you and me are both on the same page with this concept, okay.
So there are basically two types of beliefs. And the two that I’m going to talk about here today would be empowering beliefs. These are beliefs that help you, they’re what we would consider to be positive beliefs, they help you to become more they help you, you know, reach your goals.
They help to give you agency over your own life. And these could be things you believe about yourself about others about the world. These are beliefs that give you power.
And then we have limiting beliefs. limiting beliefs are things that you believe that hold you back, that prevent you from reaching your goals that prevent you from moving forward that prevents you from growing and learning. These are beliefs that keep you stuck and move you further away from your goals.
Okay, empowering beliefs. We want more of those limiting beliefs, we need to address these and this is what I’m talking about today, here. Okay. And then I found this quote that I super love from Henry Ford, you guys have probably heard this before. He says, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
And I’m going to paraphrase this a little bit and say whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right. Same thing. So you get to believe what you want. If you believe you can do something, you most likely can do that. If you absolutely believe you can’t, you’re going to be right in that instance as well. Okay.
Now, there are three kind of areas where we have limiting beliefs. So we have limiting beliefs about other people, what we believe about other people. We have limiting beliefs about the world in general. And then we have limiting beliefs about ourselves.
So let me let me talk about these a little bit here. So limiting beliefs about other people. What you believe about other people can affect you negatively. And this, this goes to the topic of like comparing ourselves to others when we’re comparing ourselves to others.
And we’re coming out on the losing end of that comparison, which happens very, very often, then we are choosing to believe something that is limiting us limiting our potential limiting our growth, you know, and limiting how we see ourselves.
So if you’re, if you’re looking at other people and thinking, Oh, they’re better than me, they run faster than me. They can do things that I can’t do, they’re thinner than me, or prettier than me or more fit than me, they make more money than me, they’re more successful than me, like, all of these things are just limiting your beliefs about yourself, that you’re putting yourself down with all of these comparisons, right?
So you have these limiting beliefs about others, that really affect you negatively, okay, we also do the same thing about the world in general, you know, you might think, like, you may change your diet and start eating, you know, you stop eating sugar. Let’s give that example.
Okay, so let’s say you stop eating sugar. And you’re getting this feedback that this is not normal, according to the world, right? This is not the way you’re supposed to do things. Right? Or, you know, maybe it’s, it’s in a relationship, and you’re just thinking, like, Oh, I’m supposed to find an amazing partner, fall madly in love, get married, have kids, blah, blah, blah, but I’m finding myself single. So I’m not doing things the way I’m supposed to, according to the world.
You know, you’re basing your life on what you believe, is true about the world in general about what the world wants for you. I want to have this perfect body according to what you’re, you know, you’re seeing on social media.
And I have to tell you, this one sort of breaks my heart because there’s this, like barrage of stereotypes that we’re being forced fed, you scroll through Instagram, and all you see is, you know, quote, unquote, like perfect bodies.
And we compare ourselves to that and think that we don’t live up to that ideal, and that you know, what other people in the world are doing, and the way they look is good. And what we’re doing and the way we look is bad.
And so we do this thing, where we look at the societal norms, and we compare ourselves and we come out on the losing end of that. These are beliefs that you’re choosing about the world, about what’s normal. And this can be very limiting and very damaging to our mental well being, and really holds you back from becoming the person that you want to become.
And then we have limiting beliefs about ourselves. I hear these all the time, when I’m working with people, you know, I hear people say, you know, I’m just not I’m not a real runner. I could never do that I could never run a marathon, I could never run an ultra marathon. I can never lose weight, every time I try to lose weight, I fail. This never works for me. I’ll never be that way again. You know, I’m too old. I love that one. I’m in the best shape of my life. And I consider myself to be kind of an old guy, you know, 55 years old now.
And then you know things about relationships, I’ll never find a partner, I’ll always be alone. You know, whatever it is that you’re saying about yourself. These limiting beliefs that you have about yourself are absolutely keeping you stuck. And they’re keeping you from achieving your goals. And they’re keeping you feeling terrible about yourself and about your abilities.
And I know there’s things that you want for yourself, there’s goals that you have for yourself, maybe you want to lose some weight, maybe you want to run a faster marathon, maybe you want to find the love of your life, whatever it is, whatever you want for yourself. These beliefs that you have are just keeping you stuck and holding you back. That’s why they call it limiting beliefs because they’re limiting your potential.
So why do we have these limiting beliefs? Why do we even do this? If it’s not good for us? If it moves us away from our goals and keeps us stuck and feeling terrible, why do we do this? Why do we have these limiting beliefs?
And really, this is just you just goes back to your brain wanting to protect you. You know, your human brain wants you to be safe and happy and wants you to experience pleasure and to avoid pain once to keep you comfortable and avoid any kind of discomfort.
And limiting beliefs can be a way that you sort of protect yourself from pain from hurt from disappointment from failure from feelings of unworthiness. Limiting beliefs can keep you from trying, so that you don’t have to worry about failing.
Because if you don’t try, if you just say, I could never run a marathon. And, and so that’s a limiting belief that you have. And so you don’t even have to try, then you don’t have to worry about failing.
So limiting beliefs that can give you an instant out, you can just say like, you know what, I’ve tried to lose weight before it never works for me. So boom, I don’t even have to try. It’s more comfortable. Because trying something, experiencing that discomfort of trying something. And then what if you fail? Hmm.
So when you limit yourself, you don’t even have to try. Or you know we’re talking about relationships a little bit to here. So let’s say you’re like, I’ll never find a partner who loves me unconditionally. Nobody ever accepts me the way I am. Why even bother?
In reality, what you’re doing here is you’re just, you’re you want to avoid the pain of being hurt. If you never make yourself vulnerable in a relationship, you’ll never have to experience rejection, you’ll never have to experience hurt feelings. You know saying that you could never run a marathon, you know, is just a way of avoiding all the pain of like training, and the possibility of failing.
Because when you train for a marathon, there’s a lot of pain and discomfort involved, right? Got to get up early, you got to do these long runs, you know, maybe your knees hurt, maybe you got to run in the cold, and wind in the rain. And if you just say, you know what, I could never do that, then you don’t have to experience any of that discomfort, you can just avoid all of that by just telling yourself, you know, it’s too hard. I could never do that.
But is that what you want for yourself? Is that really what you want for yourself? Because the beliefs that you have about what you can and can’t do, might be holding you back from doing the things that you really, really want for yourself.
I want you to ask yourself this question like, what is it that you really want for yourself? And how are your limiting beliefs keeping you from achieving that or even starting?
Now, I want to say this, because I’ve kind of get some pushback on this sometimes from people they’re like, well, I don’t really have a desire to run a marathon, okay, fine, then, you know, if you don’t have any desire to do that, then, you know, telling yourself you could never do that isn’t really a limiting belief. This has to be around things that you actually want for yourself, okay.
For example, I have no desire to go bungee jumping. I have no desire to sing opera on stage. So for me, to avoid these things, it’s really not a limiting belief. You know, I can say to myself, like, I don’t believe I’ll ever be an opera singer. And that’s not a limiting belief, because I don’t want to be an opera singer. And trust me, you don’t want me to be an opera singer, either, okay? You really don’t. Nobody wants that.
But for this thing to be a limiting belief, I would have to want that for myself. So let’s say I really wanted to, and I was, you know, this is my dream is to sing opera on stage, or to jump off a bridge, you know, bungee jump, or whatever. I have no desire to bungee jump, you guys.
So I just want you to know that no desire, you know, the fear that’s involved with that is just a little too overwhelming for me. I just don’t want to do it. And so I might say, like, you know, what, I just don’t want to do that I’m afraid or, you know, scary and fine, no big deal. It’s not a limiting belief.
So just understand that, you know, these are things that you want for yourself that you’re choosing to believe, that are holding you back, and you’re choosing these beliefs that are keeping you stuck there choosing beliefs that are keeping you from starting, those are the kinds of things I’m talking about here, okay.
And listen, I’ve had my share of limiting beliefs. I believed at one point that running 100 miles was impossible for me, I couldn’t do it. There’s no way I could do it. I even was doing some ultra marathons. I was doing a bunch of 50K’s and I even ran a 50 miler, and after that 50 miler, I was like there’s no freaking way that I will ever be able to run 100 miles, it’s just too far. It’s too hard.
50 was almost impossible and I’m just too old, this training would be too much. I don’t have the time, blah, blah, blah. And, and then one day for whatever reason, I don’t even know why.
But I just asked myself a different question. I was like, what if I could run 100 miles? What if I wasn’t too old? What if I made the time for the training? And just making this little mental shift of like, what if I created a shift within myself, and I started to believe, some different things.
I started to believe that maybe I could do this, maybe I could make the time for the training, maybe I could, you know, show up and do the work. And I could actually accomplish something huge like this, something that seems absolutely impossible.
For me, something that has seemed impossible for me for years. And now I’m starting to think maybe, just maybe I could, that little shift in my belief about my potential changed everything for me. And I did.
I set out to do the training. And I put in the work, and I had to believe in myself in order to accomplish that. And I want this for you, too. When it comes to overcoming your limiting beliefs, that takes a bit of work.
The beliefs that you have about yourself, especially when you’re like, you know, I’ve tried, it just doesn’t work for me. These kinds of beliefs are hardwired into your brain. These are things that are deeply rooted, they’re things that you absolutely believe to be true about yourself.
Because you’ve been thinking these thoughts over and over and over and over for years and decades. And you’ve probably never questioned them before, you’ve just always said, I can’t do it. I’m not good enough. I’m not capable. It never works for me.
But here’s the thing, I want you to start questioning all of these beliefs, your beliefs about the world, your beliefs about other people, and especially the things that you’re choosing to believe about yourself, because you get to choose what you believe about everything.
You choose your beliefs, they’re not thrust upon you. THis is probably something you’ve never thought about before. But I want you to know that this is absolutely available to you to choose what you believe. You’re doing it anyway, you’re choosing all these beliefs about yourself.
Anyway, everything you believe, is a choice. And you’ve probably never, like really thought about this before. And that’s fine. But listen, your beliefs, our decisions, everything you believe, is something that you are choosing to believe.
So with each belief that you have, there’s probably some moment in time where you made a decision to believe it, you know, could have been when you were a kid, maybe you got bullied, and you decided you would never speak up again, you want to stay small, and it’s safer that way. And so there’s no risk involved. And, you know, that’s just one example. Right?
So even today, you know, you’ve been believing this your whole life, it’s just better to stay small and don’t speak up. Because it’s safer. One of my coaches used to say, whenever I’d say something like, oh, here’s what I believe this is the truth. This person would say, when did you decide that?
And I always was like, I hate it when you say that. But it’s the truth. When did you decide that? When did you decide to start believing that you get to decide what you want for yourself?
And so I want you I want to encourage you to start making better decisions about everything about what you’re choosing to believe. So these limiting beliefs that we have, have been decisions that we’ve been making over and over and over again, okay.
And here’s, here’s another way of saying this, I love this little quote that I read in a book once and it was like, “You have to believe it to see it, not the other way around.”
So you have to believe in yourself, you have to believe you can accomplish your goal in order to accomplish your goal. But we think it’s the other way around. We think oh, as soon as I accomplish this goal, then I’ll know that I can do it, then you know, I need to see the evidence. I need to see the result in order to believe that I can do something like that.
And we got that backwards. Right? You don’t see it to believe that you believe it and then you’ll see it. You’ve got to believe in yourself, and then you can accomplish your goals. You have to change the belief first.
You can’t expect to accomplish some big goal like this, you want to lose a bunch of weight or run an ultra marathon or PR or you know, run Boston qualifying time, you’re not going to accomplish something like that.
If you have all these limiting beliefs, like it’s too hard, I can’t do this. This has never worked for me, those kinds of beliefs will not get you there, I promise you, they will not get you there. You have to believe in yourself first.
So I want you to think about this. What beliefs are holding you back? How are the things that you believe about yourself, limiting your potential? Or how are the things that you’re believing about others or the world, like, start looking at all of the things that you believe, and I want you to challenge all of them. Every single one.
You get to believe whatever you want, you can choose to believe that you’ll never lose weight, that this will never work for you that this is too hard that you can’t do it, you’re not good enough. But what good is that doing you? It’s terrible.
It’s a terrible thing to believe about yourself. It doesn’t do you any good at all. It’s keeping you stuck. It’s keeping you small. It’s keeping you from reaching your goals keeping you from achieving big things that you want for yourself.
So, since you get to choose your beliefs, why not choose the beliefs that help you, but choose beliefs that will get you to your goals, choose whatever you want for yourself, choose a belief like I will absolutely get to my goal weight, no matter how long it takes. Damn, that’s an empowering belief right there that will get you to your goal, that kind of belief in yourself will get you to that goal.
I am going to PR my next marathon, I’m going to put in the work and get there no matter what. When you believe that you’ll get there. I want you to practice this. And you know like everything else, it takes practice, right?
You can’t just like say at one time, like I’m going to run this marathon and then you’re going to do it. No, you’ve got to practice these things daily. So what is it that you want for yourself?
You want to get leaner, you want to get stronger? You want to run a faster marathon, you want to run 100 miles? What is it that you want for yourself? Do you want to change your relationship with food? Do you want to change your relationship with alcohol? Do you want to have an amazing relationship with a human being?
Do you want to experience deep meaningful love and passion and connection with somebody? Whatever it is you want for yourself? Choose to believe that you can do it. And question all the beliefs you have around this thing.
Ask yourself why you think you can’t do it? This is a good question. Why do I think I can’t do this? What’s holding you back? Why won’t this work for me? What’s stacked against me, these are these are going to start to identify your limiting beliefs, and then start choosing better thoughts. Your beliefs are just thoughts that you think over and over again.
So start choosing better ones. Start with the opposite of these, you know, you have a belief that you know, what’s holding me back, oh, this never works for me, what’s the opposite of that? This will absolutely work for me. You know, like, just start looking at reframing your negative beliefs into positive beliefs.
And practice this, you’ver got to practice this on a daily basis. This is not a one and done, this is ongoing work that we have to do. And these beliefs will come up that it’s you know, in surprising ways. And you’ll you’ll find yourself saying things to yourself like, oh, you know, I don’t know, this just never works for me. So why bother?
Like, oh, wait, wait a minute, what does that look at that question that confront those limiting beliefs and start changing them, okay. The only limits you have in your life are the ones you choose to believe.
I want you to choose to become limitless instead. Okay. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean. I will 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.
I’ve seen a lot of social media posts and comments lately where people are sharing their frustration around the scale. They weigh themselves and if the scale hasn’t moved in the right direction, …
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 66 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, sports nutritionist personal trainer health, and fitness expert, and weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’ve got a very fun topic. Very fun, I’m being a little sarcastic. You may not think this is very fun. I think it’s fun. Eliminating scale drama.
So I’ve seen a lot of social media posts and, and comments on posts lately where people are talking about the scale. And they’re sharing their frustration around the scale. So people are weighing themselves and if the scale isn’t moving in the right direction, they get all down on themselves, they feel depressed, they feel disappointed. And and a lot of times they just give up. All right.
So they’re creating all this drama for themselves because of a number on a device that is used to measure your body weight. Right? And then the suggested solution to the problem is to just don’t weigh yourself, you know, weigh yourself less often or don’t do it at all. And to me, this doesn’t make any sense.
If you’re having an emotional experience around a number on the scale. Does avoiding the scale really solve anything? No. So in this episode of the podcast, I’m going to dole out a little bit of tough love. I love you guys, but sometimes I gotta get tough with you. I want to explain exactly what scale drama is, how it is impacting your life, and how to eliminate all of that scale drama for good. All right, stay with me, you’re gonna like this one or not. It’s okay though.
If you haven’t already done it, please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a fun group of positive runners who are there to support each other, and encourage each other. We talk about our goals, we share our experiences, we ask questions, and it’s fun, and we have a good time. So just come find us on Facebook. The podcast and the Facebook group kind of go hand in hand.
So I do a little bit of teaching in the Facebook group as well it kind of goes along with the stuff I teach you on the podcast. So definitely check out the Facebook group because you’ll get a good well-rounded feel for exactly what it is I’m teaching here and it’s a good adjunct to the podcast.
Also, spring enrollment is now open for the Running Lean monthly coaching group. This is my monthly membership program. In a support group where you get everything you need to make lasting changes to your health and fitness. We’re talking about knowledge, support, and accountability.
I talked about these three things last week in the podcast, right. And the Running Lean monthly coaching group, I created because it has all three of those things in one place. So you get the knowledge, which is my entire library of online training materials, and self-paced videos that you can go through and learn at your own pace.
Like the weight loss training course for runners, this is like everything you need to know about becoming fat-adapted, what to eat, what not to eat, how to break through weight-loss plateaus, how to manage hunger, and cravings, and so much more. You can go through all of this at your own pace. And then start implementing what you learned and start getting some results.
But then, if you have questions or struggles or something doesn’t make sense to you, you can bring all of that to the group, okay. And that’s where the support piece comes in. So we have this group of people that are all in this together, right, we’re all doing this together.
Of course, you get my expertise and my experience as a sports nutritionist, a personal trainer, and a master life coach, but it’s not just about me, it’s about the support from a community of people like you. Some people have some good experiences they can share.
You know, we share our experience, our strength is our hope with each other, you know, we’re vulnerable, we share with what we’re struggling with, and we offer our support or encouragement, and we lift each other up, and we help each other. This is the power of the group.
When we do try to do some hard things on our own. It’s hard. It’s challenging, it’s frustrating, but when we do hard things together, it’s motivating. It’s energizing, we’re much more likely to succeed.
And then the third piece is the accountability piece. Showing up in this group means you’re going to be held accountable to stay on track and move towards your goals. You know, if you want to make changes last you have to have accountability. You’re much more likely to stick with a healthy eating plan or an exercise regimen if you have to report to the group and say, yeah, I did what I said I was going to do. That’s powerful.
Okay, so the three biggest reasons why I created this group is because it has the knowledge, support, and accountability all in one place. All right, we do live group coaching via zoom. All the group coaching calls are recorded and archived. So you can always go back and watch something you missed, or rewatch something.
And we have a lot of fun, I believe, and making big changes in our lives, like changing our diet, losing weight, you know, getting stronger, getting faster can be fun, and enjoyable. We don’t have to suffer our way to good health. Right. So the group aspect of this program makes all of this a lot more fun.
So the spring enrollment is open. Now, I don’t open this group very often, maybe once a quarter. So if you want to take advantage of this, is this something you’ve been thinking about? Now’s the time to do it. Okay, I’m going to be closing the doors at the end of the day. On Sunday, April, the fourth, so 11:59 pm, Sunday, April 4, done for a few months.
Start today, and think about how much further you will be in three or four months. Right? Do you want to just be where you are today in three or four months? Or do you want to be like three or four months into a healthy eating regimen? The choice is yours. Always. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
Learn how to dial in your nutrition, make healthy eating a way of life, become a badass fat-adapted, bonk-proof runner, and have fun doing it. I promise you it is fun. runningleanpodcast.com/join and join us. It’ll be fun, I promise.
Okay, let’s get into this topic today, which is eliminating scale drama. Like I said earlier, sometimes I gotta be a little tough with you guys got to dole out a little bit of tough love. And today is one of those days.
So I’ve been seeing a lot of posts out there in the Facebook group and on other Facebook groups and just in on social media in general posts and comments about the scale. You know, why you should or should not weigh yourself and how often you should weigh yourself.
Even people suggest that you never weigh yourself just stop doing it. It’s too frustrating. And I have these conversations at least once a day with people, sometimes clients who get frustrated. And today I want to make my stance on this topic very clear. Right? Not everyone is going to agree with me on my approach. And that’s totally fine with me.
We all have our own opinions, we get to decide what’s best for ourselves. Okay, if you have a different idea, a different way of doing it. Awesome. You do you, but at least be open to hearing me out today. Because I think I think we could all use a little help around this issue, this issue of scale drama.
So what is scale drama? Scale, drama is all that stuff. You tell yourself what the number on the scale means about you. So let’s say you start eating healthier, you’re exercising, you’re making some healthy changes in your life, and you’re starting to feel pretty good, right? You’re feeling pretty good about yourself.
And then you step on the scale, and you haven’t lost any weight. You know, let’s say your goal is to lose 40 pounds. And you’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks and you feel good. And you get on the scale and it hasn’t moved. Or maybe it went up a pound. And then this is where all the drama comes in.
You have all these stories that you start telling yourself all these thoughts come up all these feelings come up. It’s so frustrating. This is not working. Oh no, I’m gonna have a bad day. This is so disappointing. This is depressing. This whole thing is just stupid. Screw it, I give up. And have you ever had any of these thoughts or feelings about the number that you see on the scale? I know you have, we all have.
I started so many different diets and quit them because I was having all these frustrating feelings. It was depressing to me. It didn’t I didn’t think it was working. And I did that I like stopped weighing myself, man.
Maybe I weighed myself once a week. And then then I was just frustrated that one time a week. You know what I mean? It didn’t help. So this is where this is what I’m talking about when I talk about scale drama. It’s all the stories and all the stuff we make up about what all this means about us. Okay.
So when people start doling out this advice, like only weigh yourself once a week or only weigh yourself once a month. only weigh yourself right after you’ve run 20 miles because that always looks good. Or just stop weighing yourself at all. Their intentions are good with this kind of advice. But honestly, I think this is misguided.
The idea here is that if you only weigh yourself every now and then you’re only going to feel disappointed or frustrated or depressed every now and then. Right? So it’s like, if you avoid the scale, except for once a month, you can like sneak up on it. When all the stars are aligned and you’ll hopefully get the number that will make you finally feel good about yourself.
So you wait a month, and you’re doing all the right things. At least you think you are. And then you step on the scale. You’re like, you sneak up on it, you step on it really fast. And you’re like, dang it, I’m up two pounds, then all that frustration comes back, the disappointment comes back, the depression all comes rushing back.
But you’re only doing it once a month. So like this is a much better plan, right? No, this is dumb to me, right? I don’t think this makes any sense at all. You can’t sneak up on the scale, right? You’re not looking at this from the right place, you’re not looking at the problem, the scale is not the real problem.
I don’t even say your current weight isn’t even the problem has nothing to do with how much you weigh. The real problem is how you think, and how you feel about yourself. All of this drama that you have around the scale, that’s all you. You create the drama, all the sadness, all the frustration, all the disappointment you’re experiencing. Those are all emotions.
And we know that emotions are always caused by thoughts. So if we’re feeling emotions about ourselves, it’s because we have these thoughts about ourselves. This is such a pervasive issue. I get it and these emotions are very strong, right?
They even create issues around your self-worth. I hear people say things like this all the time, like, they don’t feel like they’re good enough. Based on a number on a scale, you know, they’re comparing themselves to other people, or to where they think they should be.
You know, because they gained three pounds, they’re not good enough, you end up basing your own worthiness, your self-worth, on a number on a bodyweight measuring device, this is insane. A number on a scale cannot tell you how worthy you are. Because here’s a fact, for all of you. You were 100% born worthy. What the scale can tell you as the scale can tell you how much you weigh like it’s just a tool to measure the weight of your entire body.
The scale can tell you how much your bones, your skin, your organs, your muscles, your blood, your fat, and your hair weigh, that’s it. And every part of your body is made up of water, your body is actually 60% water at least sometimes up to 70% water. So 60% of the weight we’re looking at is actually water anyway, right?
So how much your bones and your skin and your organs weigh has nothing to do with your worthiness as a human being. It has nothing to do with how beautiful and amazing you are. It has nothing to do with whether or not you are enough. Because you were born enough. How much do you weigh? It’s just a data point, right?
It’s just a fact like your shoe size or how tall you are doesn’t mean you’re a good person or a bad person. It’s just data unless you make it mean something. It’s like saying, oh, my feet are so big. And I’m so short. It’s so frustrating. I’m like a hobbit, by the way. The hobbits were the real heroes of that story.
Okay, at the end of Return of the King, after Eric Aragorn gets crowned king, everybody’s bowing to him, and he looks to the hobbits and he says, my friends, you bow to no one. Oh my god, that gives me chills every time I love, love, love that movie.
Doesn’t mean anything. But what are you making it mean? What are you making that number on the scale mean about you? We have these thoughts like it’s not working. I’m a failure. I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. I’ll never lose weight. But none of this is true unless you make it true.
None of this is true unless you believe it. You always have a choice in what you believe about yourself. Right? If you believe it It’s not working, you’ll find evidence that it’s not working like a number on a scale, it went up, and so you quit. If you believe you’ll never lose weight, you won’t, promise you.
If you believe you’re a failure, you will always fail. Always. I hope you’re starting to see that this all sounds pretty insane. If you’re experiencing any of this drama, and I know we all have at some point or another if you’re having a good day or a bad day, and you’re determining your self-worth, based on some arbitrary number on a $29 bathroom scale, we’ve got to fix this. Okay, we have to fix this.
The scale is just a measuring device. There are other measuring devices out there. Like if you really want to know about body composition, you can do girth measurements, where you measure your waist and arms and thighs, you do some calculations, you can do skinfold thickness measurements, bioelectrical impedance, hydrostatic weighing, like a bod pod, you can do a DEXA scan, all of these things will give you data. They’re all just numbers. Again, they don’t mean anything about you.
But having this info can help you to make decisions about what’s working, what’s working with your nutrition and exercise program, and what isn’t. But that’s all I can do. It can’t tell you whether you’re a good person or a bad person, it can’t determine if you’re going to have a good day or a bad day. Why do we do this to ourselves?
What do we do about this, though? Like, how do we eliminate the scale drama? So the first thing I’ll tell you is just stop it, stop doing it. Stop making that number on the scale mean something about you, it doesn’t mean anything about you. Okay, it’s just a number. It’s just data. And we’ll talk about this in a minute, like what we can do with that data, but just stop making it mean something, okay?
So here’s how we do it like, this is where people will disagree with me. My suggestion to you is this, weigh yourself every single day, do it at the same time every day, record your weight in a log or a journal or an app, whatever is easy for you.
And then you’re going to this stuff is going to come up, you’re going to feel disappointed, frustrated, depressed, whatever, just sit back and like, let that stuff come up. Okay, it will come up, and that’s fine.
But here’s what I want you to understand. This is important. Every single day, your weight will fluctuate every single day. It always will from now until the end of time, your weight will go up, and it will go down every single day. You just have to accept this. I have never seen anybody lose weight, whether it was five pounds, or 50 pounds, or 100 pounds, and I’ve helped people lose all that kind of weight; I’ve never seen it just go straight down from one day to the next.
Always down, down, down down. Never ever, ever works that way. Okay, so let’s just accept this. I’ve been recording my weight every day for like a year now. And it still goes up and down. One to three pounds every single day. But I’ve maintained the same weight for months and months and months.
Like it’s just not a problem. But it does go up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down. Sometimes I know why sometimes I have no idea why. And at first, it used to freak me out. It’s like, oh, my gosh, you went up. What does this mean? And maybe it’s not working? Maybe I need to change something. But then it goes down again. And I’m like, oh, okay, good. Yeah.
But then it just keeps happening and keeps happening and keeps happening. And you’re like, what? A year later, it still happens every single day. I still write down my weight every single morning. Do you think I make it mean anything now? Heck, no, I do not. It means nothing. Your weight will fluctuate every single day.
So what let’s just embrace it, let’s just accept this fact. Okay. And it has to do with water retention, whether you’re dehydrated or not hormonal changes, hormonal responses, and a slew of other things that I just can’t explain. But just know that it’s normal. It is perfectly normal for the scale to go up and down for your way to go up and down.
So instead of avoiding the scale, here’s my advice to you embrace it. Instead of sneaking up on the scale, face it head-on every single day, and build up some resilience to it. I promise you, if you do this every single day, you’re gonna see that it’s totally normal for that number to go up and down.
And losing weight is never linear. It’ll always go up and down. Alright, always, always, always; don’t avoid it. Let’s start accepting it. Just create some acceptance around that. And it takes repetition, you just have to keep doing it. Now, of course, you have to deal with the drama. Right? The drama will still be there in the beginning, it’ll get better, but you’re going to have to deal with it, right?
So step one is to just weigh yourself every day, except the fact that your weight will fluctuate every single day, it should trend down, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’re doing it the right way, the way that I recommend. Everybody that works with me, they trend down, it goes up and down, but they’re trending down.
We don’t gain weight. You know, in this nutrition regimen that I help people with, they don’t gain weight, we can keep ratcheting that weight down. But it does go up and down. But over time, it’s trending down. Okay. So step one, weigh yourself every day.
Step two, deal with the drama, get the drama out of your head, and get it onto a piece of paper. Right, think about what you’re making this number mean? What does it mean to you? What’s coming up for you? What do you? What stories are you telling yourself about this? What thoughts and feelings are coming up for you?
Oh, it’s depressing. It’s not working, I’m frustrated, like, Whatever, whatever is coming up, just write it all down, get it all down on the page, we’re creating massive awareness, here’s what we’re doing.
Okay, you’re gonna start to see all these negative thoughts, all these negative emotions you’re experiencing around the scale, you’re gonna see all the drama. And you’re gonna see what your brain is doing. And once you see what your brain is doing, all those stories are making up about this number and what it means about you and doesn’t mean about you, then you can start to deal with it right?
But you have to get it all out. First, you got to see what you’re thinking, right? You got to see what you’re feeling, get it out on the page, and then ask yourself, is this true? Is any of this true? Chances are no, it’s not true.
Also, ask yourself this question. This is a good one. This is a powerful question. What else could this mean about me? So maybe my weight went up? What does that mean? What else could it mean? If it doesn’t mean, it’s not working? What else could it mean? Maybe it means losing weight will take a little more time than I originally thought. Maybe it means that I’m a normal human being.
Maybe it means that I’m committed to making this work no matter what, even if it does go up every now and then. Maybe it means I need to change something. Oh, now we’re onto something here. Okay. We want to use the scale as a tool. I encourage people to weigh themselves every day, create awareness, and see that your weight will fluctuate over time. But then we also use it as a tool to make changes, right.
So if you hit some sort of stall and your weight loss, and you’re trying to break through a stall, and by the way, a true plateau in weight loss is like if you stay at the same number for like two straight weeks. Usually, if you’re at the same number for a couple of days, that’s not a plateau.
People tell me this all the time. They’re like, my weight hasn’t changed in three days, I’ve hit a plateau. I’m like, no, you haven’t. Let’s give it two weeks. And then we change something. Okay. So if you hit a stall, a true stall, you know, where it’s like two weeks and nothing changes, then we need to make a change, then we’re going to change something, right?
We can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results, right? We got to make some changes. So we use the scales feedback. But we can’t see this, this change if we weigh ourselves, you know, once a week or once a month, we won’t be able to keep track of these things, right?
So if we don’t see any changes in two weeks, we’ll change what we eat. We’re changing our macros. We’re changing how much we’re eating, how often we’re eating, what times are eating, whatever we need to change, we’ll make changes.
I’m always tweaking my clients’ nutrition regimen when we hit some sort of stall, and we know this will happen. I know it will happen. It happens with every single person, I expect it. It’s all part of the process. You know, my favorite thing with clients? They probably hate it. But it’s like, this is all a fun experiment, isn’t it? But it’s true. It’s just a fun experiment.
There’s not one solution that works for everyone. So we keep working on it. We keep tweaking things, we keep making changes until we get the results we’re after. We never ever, ever give up. We always use that data as feedback and then we course correct. This is why it’s so important to weigh yourself every day.
You got to notice these trends, and then we can make changes accordingly. If you weigh yourself once a month or whatever, it’s just not enough data. Right? It’s just not going to tell us the whole story. So we want the data so we can, like, you know, do science, you know, this is basically like how we do science where we have a hypothesis, we set up an experiment, we test it, we measure our results, and then we make changes. And we try a different experiment.
Right? There’s no drama in science. There’s no crying in baseball, there’s no drama in science, right? Here’s what I want you to do instead of all the drama. So let’s say we’ve started weighing ourselves every day, we’re starting to get used to it. You know, you start writing down all these feelings that are coming up, you start getting used to that, like you’re starting to, like, see what’s happening with your mind.
And you’re starting to, you know, have a little bit of resilience around all this stuff. We also want to focus on all the other things. Let’s forget about the scale for a minute. Right, your weight going down is just one indicator that you’re becoming healthier. It’s one data point, what about all the other stuff?
You know, we tend to focus just on weight, how much we weigh, but your weight is often the last thing to change. Like there are a number of cool things happening in your body hormones being regulated, blood sugars leveling out, insulin levels coming down. Fat is being used as an energy source. All these things are happening, these amazing changes in your body.
Losing weight is usually the last thing to change. So let’s focus on some of the nonscale victories. You know, you’re feeling better, you’re less bloated, you’re less inflamed, you have more energy, you’re sleeping better. Running is getting easier, your workouts are improving, you’re starting to run faster, and your endurance is improving.
You’re recovering faster from these harder workouts. Your clothes are fitting better, looser, starting to get a little loose, you’re not so hungry all the time. You have improved focus and concentration, maybe you just feel happier. Maybe you just feel better about yourself. These are all amazing, healthy changes.
But we just tend to focus on the scale and then we create all this drama around it. So I want you to stop it with all the scale drama. Okay, just stop it. And hope you still love me. I mean, sometimes I gotta drop a little bit of tough love on you guys. But I hope you still can love me through this stuff.
Stop it with the scale drama. Weigh yourself every day, just get used to it right accept the fact that your weight will fluctuate every day. This is normal, it means you’re a normal human being. How about that doesn’t mean anything negative about you at all. You’re beautiful, you’re worthy, you’re more than good enough. You’re amazing. Focus on the good stuff. Okay. As always, lots of love to every single one of you. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
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The only things you have control over in this world are your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. No matter how hard you try, you cannot control what other people think, how they feel, or what they …
Continue Reading about 48. Think, Feel, and Act With Purpose →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 48 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. How are you doing today? I am doing fantastic. Today I want to talk about how to think, feel and act with purpose. So we’re still talking about our Running Lean manifesto, the principles that we choose to live our life by here in the Running Lean community.
And here’s something interesting, the only things you have control over in this world are your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. No matter how hard you try, you cannot control what other people think, you cannot control how they feel, and you cannot control what they do. No matter how hard you try.
The problem is that most people don’t understand how all this works. Most people just feel terrible all the time. And they blame it on other people. They blame it on the outside circumstances, they blame it on everything and everyone except for it themselves.
But here’s the thing, if you want anything different in your life, anything different than what you already have, you have to look at what is actually creating those results in your life. If you’re getting good results or bad results in your life, whatever it is you’re getting, it’s always been created by your own thoughts, feelings and actions.
For example, losing weight and keeping it off. It requires that you learn how to think, feel, and act with purpose. So don’t worry, I’m gonna explain how all of this works today here on the podcast, so that you can start applying this to your own life so you can start getting the results that you really want.
But first, come check us out on Facebook, we have this amazing community of runners called the Running Lean community. It is a supportive group, energetic group and encouraging group of runners. It goes hand in hand with the podcast, we got this big challenge that we just started on Thanksgiving Day.
And it’s called running through the holidays, it’s not too late for you to get in on the action. Just come and join us. What we’re doing is we’re running at least a mile a day, every day from Thanksgiving Day, through New Year’s Day. Running is an amazing stress reliever. And who doesn’t want a stress reliever this time of the year? We could all use a little reduction in stress.
So come check us out the Running Lean community on Facebook, join us for the running through the holidays challenge is going to be fun, we are all doing it together. We’re challenging ourselves to show up every day and run at least a mile from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day. It’ll be fun, come check it out.
Okay, like I said, we are working our way through the Running Lean manifesto. And today I want to talk about, think, feel and act with purpose. So remember the Running Lean manifesto, this is a set of guiding principles that we can live our life by. And if you adopt these principles into your life, if you use these principles as your north star, then you can have an amazing life.
That’s it. It’s that simple. Just do what I say. You can have an amazing life. It really is that simple. It’s not easy. It’s simple. But so today we’re talking about how to think, feel and act with purpose because most of us don’t understand that we can do this and that this is an option for us.
I think this is absolutely life changing. This one principle alone has changed my life more than anything else I have done in my life like this has changed so much for me. And I’m gonna get into why and how this works and everything in just a minute.
But I just want you to know that of all the principles I’ve been talking about here. If you just adopt this one principle, I guarantee you that you will start getting different, more positive results in your life, like your life will continue to get infinitely better if you adopt this one principle and if you practice it and if you get good at it, okay. And the principle is to think, feel and act with purpose. If you get good at doing that, you’re unstoppable, you become super powerful.
So here’s how this works. Here, I’m gonna break this down a little bit for you here. Most people live their life, as if life is just happening to them. Like they have no control, like they are living at the effect of other people and other circumstances. They have no control over their thoughts. It feels their thoughts feel automatic, they have no control over their emotions, their feelings feel automatic.
And a lot of times they feel like they don’t even have control over what they do. So a lot of people will say, I don’t even know I just started eating all the Oreos, it’s like, no, you know, you chose to do that, like you actually have control over that. But they feel like they have no self control.
So for most people, their thoughts, feelings and actions feel out of control, like they are not in control of those things. Most people feel like they can’t get what they want. And so they blame everything but themselves. They blame other people, or circumstances, they have reasons, they have stories, they have excuses for why things just don’t go their way, or why they can’t stick to their diet plan or why they can’t stick to their running schedule.
Most people just think if they could control all these things outside of themselves, if people would just do what I think they should do, if work wasn’t so stressful all the time. You know, if everything around me would just like fall into place, then I could feel good about myself, then I could get the results that I want.
And most people live their whole lives this way, trying to manipulate control, change everything but themselves. And it’s frustrating, because it doesn’t work. The only thing this does is it causes you to feel terrible, all the time. If you try to spend your whole life trying to controlling the uncontrollable, the things that you absolutely cannot control.
If you spend your whole life trying to manipulate and control those things, you are just going to spend your whole life feeling miserable. Right, the only things you can control are your own thoughts, feelings and actions. That’s it, you cannot control anything else, period. End of story.
When you accept this, when you accept this universal truth it is incredibly freeing because it changes everything. It changes how you see things, it changes how you think about things, it changes how you feel about things, changes what you do, and it absolutely will change the results that you get in your life.
It changes how you experience other people, and how you experience everything that happens in the world around you. When you learn how to take control of your own thoughts, feelings and actions, anything becomes possible for you, there’s nothing that you can’t do. There’s nothing that you aren’t willing to experience.
So I’ve talked about this before, but I want to break this down a little bit for you. So that we have a good understanding of the foundation of how this all works. So we have these things that happen in our life. We call these things circumstances, circumstances, things that happen in our life are always, always neutral.
Nothing can happen in your life, and have any kind of meaning to you until you assign meaning to it. Nothing happens in the world that affects you unless you first have a thought about it. Circumstances: the things that are happening outside of you, you know, stuff your boss says at work, stuff your spouse says to you, what the kids are doing.
None of that stuff means anything until you have a thought about it until you assign meaning to it. Your circumstances are always neutral. They don’t mean anything until you tell yourself a story about what this thing that’s happening, what that means to you, okay? This is very important to understand.
Your circumstances are always 100% of the time neutral until you have a thought about it. Okay, now, once you have a thought about something, then that thing has meaning for you. You know, if your spouse speaks to you, and says some words to you that cause you to feel, you know, upset or whatever. And then you’re assigning meaning to what those words mean to you, okay?
But you know, the circumstances that this person is just saying words, okay? But once you have a thought, then this thing has meaning to you. Your thoughts are just sentences that you’re saying in your mind about something.
That’s it, we have like 60,000 thoughts a day. So basically, you’re saying like 60,000 sentences to yourself, in your mind over and over again. So your thoughts about your circumstances, you’re gonna have all kinds of thoughts about what’s going on in your life. We do we think about the past, we think about the future, we think about what’s happening right now.
We are cars, our minds are constantly racing, we constantly have all these thoughts. And they are always your thoughts. Your thoughts are based on your own experiences, your own beliefs, your past experiences, your values, your model of the world, we all see the world differently based on our beliefs, past experiences, our own values, all that stuff.
We all create our own version of reality, if you will. So your thoughts about a circumstance might be different than somebody else’s. Which is the truth? Is it yours or theirs? I love this example of two people standing at the ocean, you know, the waves are crashing, and they’re both standing on the beach, and they’re looking over the ocean.
And one person looks at the ocean, and it fills them with fear. Because this person had a near drowning accident, when they were a child, they almost drowned in the ocean. And so the ocean is a dangerous place to them, the ocean brings a feeling of dread and fear.
The person standing next to this person surfs every day and loves the ocean, it’s there. It’s the most magical place for them, it’s where they feel the most alive. So there’s these two examples of two different people experiencing the exact same thing: the ocean is neutral.
But for one, it has a completely different meaning. The ocean is a dangerous, terrible place and should be avoided at all costs. And for the other person experiencing the exact same ocean. It is beautiful, magical, and fills them with delight, and should be utilized every single day and shouldn’t be experienced every single day.
So this is how we each have our own model of the world, we each have our own version of reality. So your thoughts about a circumstance will be different than others. So which is true, yours or theirs? Well, both, both are true for them. And neither one is true. There isn’t one universal truth.
So if you believe it, then it’s true for you. So if you really believe something, if you really believe the ocean is dangerous, then that is going to be your truth. That is what’s true for you. If this other person believes with their whole heart that the ocean is amazing and enjoys it, then that’s what they’re going to believe. And that’s what’s true for them. Okay.
So this is just our thoughts. We have circumstances that happen in our life, and they don’t mean anything really until we assign meaning to them. Okay? Now, once we have thoughts about our circumstances, we will typically get an emotion based on those thoughts.
So your thoughts cause your feelings, your thoughts cause you to experience an emotion, always, you cannot experience an emotion without a thought first, every emotion you feel is first created by a thought in your mind. So you think a thought and then you feel something, you think a thought in your mind, and then you feel it in your body.
That’s where we experience our emotions, we feel them in our body. So you don’t feel something without a thought about it. You might experience something you have a quick thought about and then you have this emotion, it happens very quickly. You think it’s like automatic, you think it’s the circumstance outside of you that’s causing this emotional response. But it’s really a thought in your head.
It’s always a thought in your head that’s causing your emotional response. It’s never what that person is saying or doing or anything else like that. It’s always a thought about it. This is really critical to understand because you want to catch yourself when you have an emotion.
When you start to feel like a negative emotion. Like let’s say you’re feeling stress. quickly ask yourself, why am I feeling this? What is the thought that I’m having that’s causing me to feel this way? And just start to create some awareness around that. I’ll talk more about that in just a minute about what we can do to start to change some of these thoughts and feelings that we have, okay?
So circumstances in our life are always neutral. They don’t mean anything until we assign meaning to them. And we do that by a thought we have a thought about something. And those thoughts cause us to feel an emotion. Now our feelings, our emotions drive our actions, we always take actions based on our emotional state.
You know, if we feel motivated, we’ll probably do this thing. If we feel frustrated, we’re probably gonna do something different. We’re gonna do this thing over here. You know, if you find yourself staying in the kitchen, binge eating Oreos, and you can’t figure out how it happened.
Know that it’s because you had some thoughts and feelings. And those thoughts and feelings are causing you to take the action of binging on Oreos, okay? It wasn’t what happened at work. It wasn’t what your spouse said to you that caused you to eat Oreos, it’s because you had thoughts and feelings about what your spouse said, or you had thoughts and things about what happened at work.
Okay, the action that you take standing there eating Oreos, might feel totally out of your control. Like it’s just happening, unconsciously. But the truth is, it’s always under your control, you just haven’t learned how to take back the control, you just haven’t learned to recognize what’s actually happening.
And this is so crucial to all this thought work is to have awareness of what’s happening, okay? Because it’s not your circumstances causing you to feel this way. It’s not, it’s not the stress at work. It’s not what’s happening at work that’s causing you to binge eat. It’s your thoughts and feelings about work.
So when you take action, you get results, every time you get some kind of result in your life, it’s because of some actions that you’re taking, okay. And if you’re taking actions based on positive emotions, you know, you’re taking actions that are probably in alignment with your goals, like sticking to your food plan, you’re sticking to your running schedule. So no matter what happens, like you’re probably going to crush those goals, because you’re, you’re sticking to those things no matter what.
But if you constantly take action from a place of negative emotion, you know, if you’re always feeling frustrated and stressed out, you’re probably going to take different actions or no action, you know, you might just go sit on the couch watching Netflix instead of run, you might just say screw it and eat all the Oreos, instead of sticking to your food plan.
Those actions you’re taking, the things you’re doing, the behaviors you’re engaging in, you’re doing because of how you feel you’re doing it based on your emotional state, which is caused by your thoughts, right?
So a lot of times, we blame our results on our circumstances. I can’t lose weight, because I have this stressful job. You know, I can’t stick to my plan, because my spouse doesn’t support me. Those things are not true. You know, your spouse might say some things or do some things, but you have control over your thoughts about those things you have control over how you feel about those things.
And then what you do, the actions that you take or don’t take, okay? Circumstances are always neutral. Until we have a thought about it, our thoughts cause our feelings. Our feelings drive our actions. And it’s from taking actions that we get results or don’t get results. Okay, so that’s how this all works.
So any kind of result that you want in your life is basically created with a thought first, you have to have a thought about it. First, whether it’s a positive result or a negative result, it’s coming from your thoughts. So here’s an example of how this all works.
I want to I know, I’m kind of like talking about these concepts. And this may be foreign to you, you may have never heard of any of this stuff before. And I want to give you an example of what this looks like. So here’s a statement that I hear all the time, like literally every day I hear this from someone.
Work is stressful. And so I can’t stick to my food plan. Work is stressful. Well, in reality work does not cause you to feel stress. Okay, it’s your thoughts about work to cause you to feel stress. Stress is an emotion, right? That’s a feeling. It’s always caused by a thought.
So what is the circumstance? What happened at work, to cause you to feel stress or you know, to cause you to choose to feel stress? Oh, well, my boss only gave me two weeks to finish this big project. Okay, so that’s the circumstance, right? The boss gave me two weeks to finish a big project.
And, okay, well, what are your thoughts about that? Well, my thoughts are that she doesn’t support me, she doesn’t care about me, she should do things differently. These are all just thoughts. Right? About the circumstance “project is due in two weeks”.
We can all agree that that is true, but doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just those thoughts that cause you to feel stress, she doesn’t care about me, she doesn’t support me, she should do things differently. Right? That’s what’s causing you to feel stressed because you have thoughts about it.
And so what do you do when you feel stressed? You get home, and you eat a bunch of Oreos, because you just don’t feel like doing this work. Because you’re all stressed out, right? Now, here’s another way of looking at this, you might have somebody else on your team that says, oh, we only have to work two weeks to get this work done. Great. I work best on a short timeline, let’s do this.
So they might feel excited. Those thoughts like “I work best on a short timeline”, that would make them feel excited and motivated, to get the work to get cracking on this project. So that would fire them up, they would start taking action right away, they start checking off things off their task list, you know, they get motivated, and they just jump right in and start doing these things.
Same exact circumstance, you have two weeks to get this project done. Two different people with different thoughts, different feelings, different actions, different results. Okay. And I hear this so, so often, you know, work is really stressful. So I can’t stick to my food plan, you know, I have all this stress at work.
So when I get home, I just don’t feel like eating anything healthy. So instead, I just open up the pantry and start eating all the Oreos. So in your mind, stress at work is causing this thing you’re eating Oreos, like that’s what’s causing it. But in reality, you are causing the stress you’re feeling based on your own thoughts about work.
And because you’re feeling stressed out, you’re choosing an action, not in alignment with your goals, you’re choosing this action of binge eating Oreos. Based on that negative emotion, that negative emotion that you created with your thoughts.
You always take action based on how you feel. And if you always feel stressed out, you’re probably gonna do a lot of binge eating, you probably never lose weight. Those are the results you’re gonna get. If you’re always stressed out, it’s probably going to be very hard for you to lose weight, right, because you can be doing a lot of emotional eating.
But when you learn to take control of your thoughts and feelings and actions, when you can feel excited, and you can feel motivated, you’ll start to do things differently. You’ll want to stick to your plan, you’ll come home and eat a salad and a piece of salmon instead of the Oreos. And you’ll start to get the results that you want.
You know, you’ll keep losing weight. This whole concept, though, of thinking, feeling and acting with purpose, it’s not the norm. I get it like this is not something we’re taught. Can you imagine, though, if we taught this to our children, like how amazing would that be?
If I had learned this, I only learned this in the last couple of years. But if I had learned this 20, 30, 40 years ago, how much different my life would be. Because since I’ve learned this, my life has changed dramatically for the better.
But we go through our whole lives thinking that we can’t control our thoughts and feelings like all this stuff is just happening to us, right? You blame the results that you get on your external circumstances, whatever good results, bad results.
And we’re always living at the effect of our surroundings. We blame others, we have all kinds of excuses why things don’t work for us. We have these stories. And when you do this, you’re just giving away all your power. You become powerless. I want you to take back your power.
And you do this by taking control of your own thoughts, feelings and actions. Stop trying to manipulate and control other people and circumstances outside of your control. That does not work. I have tried this. Believe me it does not work.
I was always blaming other people for how I felt. I was always trying to control what other people were doing or saying or thinking so that like I could feel better about myself. You know, if my wife would say, if my wife would only say these things in this way, then I’d feel better. I’d like her more, I’d feel more confident or more secure in this relationship, you know, she’d only do things this way, then I’d feel more loving to her.
But since she’s not, then you know, I’m gonna hold back, my love. I was always trying to control her, manipulate her and change what she was doing. And you know what that got me? I felt miserable all the time, didn’t change, and she never changed, she’s not going to change, you can’t change other people.
I wish we could, that would be amazing, but we can’t. But when I finally accepted this, this universal truth, that I could not change anything else, that I could control my own thoughts, feelings and action, though, when I accepted this, I was free, I started to see everything in my life differently.
It was like seeing the matrix. Like for the first time in my life, I could, I could think, thoughts that would cause me to feel positive emotions. And I would take these positive actions based on that, and I would start getting these positive results, it was crazy.
You know, like, sticking to my eating plan got way easier. You know, I couldn’t lose weight. Until I got the mindset piece right. I finally started to lose weight when I understood that my emotional eating wasn’t caused by what other people were doing. Or my stress outside of me, that I was creating all of this with my own thoughts and feelings.
But I’ve started to feel more at peace, I still do, I still feel so much more at peace now, because I understand what’s happening in my mind. And I practice this every day, I’m not perfect at it. It’s a daily practice, I’m always aware that my thoughts create my feelings. And my feelings drive my actions.
I’m always, always always aware of that. Because here’s the thing, your thoughts create the reality that you’re living in everything that you have right now in your life, or everything that you don’t have, as a result of a thought it was first a thought, like, if you think I want to run a marathon, yeah, I can do that.
I want to do that. I’m going to run a marathon, that’s going to make you feel motivated, you’re going to train consistently, and then like, bam, you’re gonna cross the finish line. Result achieved, and you did it because you kept thinking, I can do it, I want to do that. I’m going to do that.
You know, your current weight. Whatever you weigh right now, is the direct result of your thinking. Well, if you keep thinking thoughts, like ‘I can’t lose weight, it never works for me, I’m always going to be this weight, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. It’s easier for other people, I always gain the weight back.’
If you keep thinking these thoughts over and over and over again, this is going to cause you to create an emotional state for yourself. You’re just going to feel terrible, frustrated, sad, dejected, you’re going to feel like a failure. You’re going to feel like you’re not good enough. And when you feel that way, what do you do?
You got it, you come home, and you eat a whole bag of Oreos, because that’s what feels good. And that’s, you know, why bother? And then when you do that, when you eat the Oreos, instead of eating what you know you should be eating, What results do you get, you get the exact results, you kept focusing on those thoughts.
You kept thinking over and over again, that’s what you get, it is hard. It doesn’t work for you. You can’t lose the weight, you always gain the weight back. You can’t do it, it doesn’t work. So what I want you to do, is I want you to just start being aware of your thoughts.
Anytime you experience an emotion anytime you experience a negative emotion, so you start to feel stressed out or bored or frustrated, lonely, sad, ashamed, you know, angry. Whatever emotion you’re experiencing, that should be an alarm that goes off and and you want to look at your thoughts.
What is the thought that’s causing me to feel this emotion? Okay, that’s step one. Be aware of your thoughts, what thoughts are you habitually thinking? And then notice that those thoughts are causing these emotions in you, okay? When you feel that way, when you feel that emotion, what do you want to do? What do you do or what do you not do? What actions are you taking or not taking?
Because instead of reacting to the world around you, I want you to respond thoughtfully with intention with purpose. Awareness is the key though. You have to begin to think, with purpose, with intention that will help you to feel with purpose and intention. And then you will act with purpose and intention.
And when you’re acting with purpose and intention, that’s when you start to get the results that you want in your life, you can become super powerful. You can get anything you want, honestly. So whether you know it or not, you are always creating the results that you’re getting in your life. Right now.
You’re always creating results with your thoughts, feelings and actions. They may not be the results that you want, but you’re creating them. Negative thoughts, feelings and actions will produce negative results. Positive thoughts, feelings and actions will produce positive results.
So decide what you want. And then create it on purpose. Begin to choose your thoughts with intention, begin to create your feelings, and begin to take action with purpose, think, feel and act with purpose. It’s a daily practice, but you can do it.
You got this, my friends. All right, join us in the Facebook group for the running through the holidays challenge we’re going to be running every single day, at least a mile. From Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s Day. We’re gonna run our way through the holidays and we’re going to feel good, we’re going to slide into 2021 Feeling damn good about ourselves. As always, lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
The way you make big changes is by consistently doing new things - showing up day after day with drive, determination, and perseverance. In other words...creating new habits. Breaking old habits …
Continue Reading about 45. The 5 Habits Runners Must Have to Lose Weight →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 45 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I am talking about the five habits that runners must have in order to lose weight. The way you make big changes in your life is by consistently doing new things.
That means showing up day after day with drive, determination, and perseverance doing these new things. Another way of saying this, is you have to create new habits, you’ve got to break old habits and create new ones. And this just might be the single most important thing you can do for yourself. It’s really the only way that you can make meaningful, lasting changes in your life.
It’s how you become anything more than who you are right now. Let’s say you want to become a marathon runner, you’ll have to break the old habit of sitting on the couch every morning watching Netflix, you’ll have to get into a new habit of running in the morning instead of watching Netflix, even when you don’t feel like it.
Creating habits like this, it’s not easy to do, it’s hard to do. That’s why most people don’t do it. So why most people never change is why most people don’t run marathons. It’s why most people will always be overweight and feel unhappy about it. Because most people aren’t willing to do the hard work of creating new habits.
So today I’m sharing with you the five habits that all runners must have if you want to lose weight, and keep it off for good. But first, if you liked this podcast, please come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It is a fun group of energetic, positive, and like minded runners who all have the same kind of goals.
We’re all trying to become fat-adapted, we’re all trying to lose weight, and run better, just make running more fun, more enjoyable to push ourselves to become more, come check us out Running Lean community on Facebook. Now we just want to get right into this today.
The five habits that runners must have in order to lose weight and number one is you got to get into the habit of eating real food. And I say this all the time, you can’t outrun a bad diet, right? Running is great. It helps to build strength, it helps to build endurance, it feels good to run, keep running, it’s just not a very good way to lose weight.
Weight loss is almost entirely an issue of diet. If you want to lose weight, you have to change your diet, you’ve got to get in the habit of eating real food. You know, for most of us, the problem really is the carbohydrates and sugar are like the most concentrated form of carbohydrate.
So we’ve got to like stop eating so much sugar because what happens is you eat a lot of sugar and carbs that raises your blood sugar, which you know, makes your insulin levels go up.
When your insulin is high, your appetite is increased, your hunger is increased, you never feel full and your body is put into this fat storage mode. And fat storage mode is not what we want. If you want to lose weight. If you want to lose weight you got to get your body into fat burning mode, right. So in order to do that, you have to get off the sugar and the carbs. Put your body into a state of a to become a more efficient fat-burner.
When you start eating real food, the kind of food that we humans have evolved to eat over the last couple of million years, you begin to lower your blood sugar. You begin to lower the insulin, you begin to regulate all those hormones that are causing you to hold on to fat and you begin to metabolize fat more efficiently.
So eat real food, eat food as close to nature as possible foods that our ancestors would have eaten. So the first habit you have to adopt in order to lose weight and keep it off is you got to get into this habit of eating real food and once you get into this habit and you’re eating real food consistently it’s just becomes a part of who you are, it becomes easy and effortless to maintain, it’s just becomes part of your lifestyle. So that’s number one.
Number two, is you have to practice meal spacing. The other habit that you have to get into is not eating all the time, because that will also contribute to putting your body into that fat storage mode. Because every time you eat any kind of food whatsoever, your blood sugar goes up, and insulin goes up, and then boom, you’re back into that fat storage mode, right.
But if you’re eating constantly, your body is constantly in that fat storage mode. So if you can limit the amount of times you’re eating throughout the day, you know, we do stuff called intermittent fasting, or you can call it meal spacing, whatever you want to call it.
When you just have some periods throughout the day, where you’re not eating food, then you give your body a break from all that insulin, you give your body a break from being in that fat storage mode, and you put your body into fat burning mode for more of the day.
So if you’re eating six, seven times a day, like let’s say you eat three meals a day, you eat snacks in between all those meals you’re eating dessert, then you’re basically going to be constantly holding on to body fat, you’re always your body’s just always going to be in that fat storage mode.
That’s just what happens, it’s almost impossible to lose weight this way, if you’re eating all the time. And one of the awesome benefits of spacing out your meals and having some time without bringing in any external fuel is that you become fat-adapted much faster. So that whole fat-adaptation process can be kind of challenging, you know, running is a struggle for a few weeks while your body’s switching over from burning sugar to burning fat.
And when you can extend the amount of time that your body doesn’t have that external fuel coming in. In other words, not eating anything, you kind of force your body to use stored body fat for fuel, which is good, we want this, this is when you begin to start metabolizing that body fat more efficiently and faster.
So this really helps to speed up the fat adaptation process. And it helps to shorten the amount of time that running sucks, while you’re going through this process, okay, so it’s really, you get sort of a couple of good benefits when you practice some meal spacing.
So that’s the second habit that we have to adopt that you have to just create in your life is to practice meal spacing, it gives your body a break from the blood sugar spikes, because your body a break from insulin, gets your body out of fat storage mode and into fat burning mode and keeps you there and get you through that tough period a lot faster. So that’s number two.
Number three, the third habit runners have to adopt if you want to lose weight, is you have to reduce stress in your life. This is one of the hidden issues around weight loss. For a lot of people, a lot of people have a really hard time losing weight, who are really stressed out.
Stress plays a huge role in keeping your body in that fat storage mode. This is like the third part of the insulin trifecta, you know the bad trifecta. It’s not a good trifecta. Because what stress does is it releases cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
And along with that is glucose is released from your liver and stress and constantly having that cortisol in your body and constantly having high levels of cortisol and glucose will spike your blood sugar and raise insulin levels as well.
So even though you may not be eating anything, even if you may be eating a good, pretty solid, clean diet, you can still be in that fat storage mode just from putting your body under constant stress. So here’s kind of what’s happening. Here’s the background.
We’ve evolved as humans to deal with stress pretty effectively. You know, back in the day, a saber toothed Tiger would come along and our body would see that and go into fight or flight mode. And we’d release the stress hormone cortisol, adrenaline gets produced, glucose gets produced, increases our blood sugar, insulin goes up, all that stuff happens, right?
These hormones are all working the way they’re supposed to, by the way, because they’re getting your body ready for fight or flight to fight the saber toothed tiger or run away So you would have all this extra energy in your body to fight this animal off or run away.
And I would run away for sure. I mean, that’s how I would probably deal with this situation, right, but either way you would use up that energy by fighting or running away, and then the danger would be gone. And then everything would regulate and everything would go back to normal. Okay, that’s good.
That’s the way our bodies are designed to work. But here’s the thing today, there is no saber toothed Tiger. But we have all this other quote unquote, quote, unquote, stress in our life, we have a boss who yells at us, we have traffic that we’re sitting in, and we got the kids screaming at us, we got COVID, you know, we’ve got the husband who’s not helping around the house, we got credit card debt, you know, we all have all this constant anxiety in society today.
And we have this constant, high levels of cortisol and glucose and adrenaline and insulin, and we’re on this, we’re all in this chronic state of, of stress. And so we’re in a chronic state of fat storage mode. You know, stress is literally making us fat.
And they actually have this synthetic form of the stress hormone cortisol, it’s called prednisone. And when people take this, they gain weight, all the time. So I always ask my clients, I’m like, how’s your stress level? You know, what are you doing about it? Because you have to have some sort of a daily plan, a daily practice for reducing stress, it’s not a one and done kind of a thing.
It has to be an intentional daily practice that has to become a habit. So Habit number three is to reduce stress in your life. If you don’t do this, your body’s just going to stay in that fat storage mode, you need to have a daily stress reduction practice, where you’ll have a very hard time losing weight. So that’s habit number three.
Habit number four, is to build strength and endurance. So why is strength training so important for runners? Well, strength training is actually essential. If you want to be a successful runner, even a long distance runner. And a lot of runners don’t do this. They don’t pay attention to strength training, they just don’t do it.
They’re like I run, I’m good, you know. But what happens is when you put your muscles under stress, the kind of not not the kind of stress, I was just talking about the kind of stress that stimulates muscle growth, you build more muscle, you build more lean mass, and you become a stronger runner.
Building strength also helps you to maintain good running form, and more consistent power output, especially as you begin to fatigue during longer runs, you know, endurance athletes that are over 40 will especially benefit from strength training, because as you get older, your strength declines faster than your endurance.
So your endurance might be there, but your strength won’t. So you need to keep up with the strength training as you go or you need to develop this habit. High intensity strength training also produces an anti-aging effect by helping you to preserve lean muscle mass and it helps you to optimize these adaptive hormones.
Being a lean runner means you’re a strong runner, so building strength in your muscles also helps you to build endurance. Because as a stronger runner, you can run further without getting fatigued, you can become more of a bonk proof runner when you build more strength. So practice some sort of strength training on a regular basis.
This has to become a habit. It helps you to build stronger muscles, stronger connective tissues, that absolutely helps you to burn fat more effectively. When you have more lean muscle mass, you’re a more effective fat burner, and you’ll lose weight more effectively. It’ll help you to increase your overall metabolism, meaning it just speeds up the whole fat adaptation process right.
Also cool to note is that when you build more strength, you increase your power to weight ratio. So that means you are a more powerful runner, you’re leaner, you’re stronger, you’re more powerful, you can run faster, and you can run longer. So habit number four is that you have to adopt is to build strength and endurance.
Strength training helps you to become fat-adapted, helps to increase your metabolism, helps you to lose weight, and helps you to get ripped and look awesome. And it makes you a more powerful, long distance runner.
And then habit number five that you have to adopt if you want to lose weight and keep it off for good. And this is probably the most important one and most overlooked habit. But you have to manage your mind. It’s so important. I probably should have mentioned this first. But I’m mentioning it last because I saved the best for last. That’s why I did it. Yeah.
But basically it underpins everything else that I just talked about. Without the right mindset, you really can’t create these other habits very effectively. You know, mastering your mindset is incredibly important and incredibly powerful. And mindset is one of my key areas of expertise as a certified Master Life Coach and a Master Practitioner of NLP, which is Neuro Linguistic Programming.
I’ve studied the human mind in depth for many years. And I’ve learned that when you’re armed with the right mindset, you can basically do anything you want. Seriously, you can do anything you want. And every single day I coach people on managing their mind and creating a more powerful mindset so they can get the results that they want.
You know, they know what to do, their mind is just in the way. Here’s the thing, your thoughts, create everything you have in your life, the good stuff, the bad stuff, all of it. Knowing this is key, it is critical to creating the life that you want for yourself.
Here’s an example. If you constantly have the thought, ‘I can’t lose weight, I always fail. This never works for me.’ If you keep thinking this over and over and over and over and over again, this becomes a thought habit. It becomes a deep seated belief.
And that belief, that thought habit, is going to cause you to constantly feel discouraged, it’s going to cause you to constantly feel frustrated. And feeling discouraged and frustrated, will cause you to go off plan, it’ll cause you to just say like, ‘screw it, why should I even bother, I always fail anyway. It never works for me.’
And this is just a thought habit. You know, it’s a thought that has created your current results. It’s a thought habit that’s created your current weight. Your thoughts always create your weight. Think about that.
If you change your thoughts, you can change your weight. When you learn how to manage your mind, when you create new thought habits, new thought patterns. You can deal with setbacks, you can deal with failures, you can deal with disappointments, you can deal with all kinds of frustrating things, without quitting on yourself.
When you manage your mind and you create these new, more empowering beliefs, and you practice those, instead, you start to build trust in yourself, you start to become incredibly confident in yourself. You find that you have the mental strength and the motivation you need to keep you going even when things get tough, because I promise you things will get tough, they always do.
So managing your mind is probably the most important habit that you need to adopt. If you want to have success in running, and losing weight, and really everything in your life. Now, these five habits are all required.
If you want to make meaningful, lasting changes in your life, kind-of sort-of doing one or two of these, it’s just not going to work. It’s not good enough, it’s not going to give you the results that you want. And I know that trying to figure out all this stuff for yourself can be very challenging.
I mean, if it was easy, if you knew how to do all this perfectly, you probably wouldn’t be listening to this right now. Here’s the thing. I’ve already done the hard part, I figured all this out. I’ve already made all the mistakes so you don’t have to.
And I coach people on how to get these results and how to do these five habits and how to create these new five habits in their life every single day. And here’s something I’m excited about and I’m gonna share this with you right now. I’ve created a new program that lays out exactly how to do all of this step by step.
It’s called Running Lean: The Weight Loss Training Course for Runners. In this new program, you will learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean, fat burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without the calorie counting, and develop all the habits required to make this last a lifetime.
I’ve taken everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve been trained on, everything I’ve been coaching my clients on, and I’ve packaged it all up into this online training course that you can go through that your own pace. Now, all this stuff, it can feel very confusing, very overwhelming.
So what I did was, I put it all together into this like, framework, it’s very easy to understand. It’s a framework that you can just learn and begin to implement for yourself. It’s an online self paced training course. It has like over 40 video lessons to guide you step by step, it’ll show you exactly how to create all these habits that you have to have, in order to become an efficient fat burner.
You become fat-adapted, and then of course, you begin to lose weight, which is amazing. It’s a nice little side benefit. This is a comprehensive training course, you will learn how to break the sugar addiction and get off of the refined carbs.
So you can start burning fat, which means you’ll lose weight fast, you can become a fat-adapted runner, so you can run farther than you ever thought possible. You can stop feeling hungry all the time. So you can take back control of what you eat. And when you eat.
You’ll learn how to develop your own nutrition plan that works for you. That includes foods that you love to eat, you’ll learn how to fine tune that nutrition plan so you can hit your exact goal weight, you’ll learn how to properly fuel for those long runs and for races so that you can achieve peak performance at every single workout.
Most importantly, you will develop the mindset required to make all of this sustainable. And I want to make something very clear. This is not a diet. This is not something that you’ve done in the past. This is a transformational training program.
And it’s designed specifically for runners and it will permanently change your approach to nutrition and to running into weight loss and all that stuff I want for you, I want you to stop feeling frustrated, I want you to stop feeling defeated because you keep hitting the wall in your weight loss goals or in your running whatever.
Instead, I want you to start feeling so energized and so confident that you could run all day. And just think about how much easier running will be when you aren’t carrying around all that extra weight.
I can tell you from experience after losing 40 pounds this year, that running is much better. You know, if I strapped a 40 pound weight to myself right now it’d be like, damn, that is crazy. I can’t believe I was running with that much extra weight.
But becoming a fat-adapted runner means you are an efficient fat burner. And this is the goal. This is what we’re trying to get to here. To become a fat burning machine. It means that you have this almost unlimited source of fuel on board at all times your own body fat. Running is so much easier when you’re fueled by fat.
I just ran a marathon this weekend I did it fasted, meaning I did not have any calories before the run I hadn’t eaten for like 12 hours before running a marathon. And then during the marathon I took in zero calories. I was efficiently burning my own body fat for fuel.
And I had one of the best marathon experiences I’ve ever had. I actually got faster later on the run. My fastest splits were the last six miles. This is not normal for me at all. But because I’ve become an efficient fat burner, I’ve increased my running performance by a lot. So in this program, I break it all down for you. I’ll show you exactly how to do it, how to become a fat adapted runner. And so you can start experiencing those kinds of results for yourself.
Oh, and there’s a cool little side effect. When you become an efficient fat burner you lose weight, right? You can’t lose weight when you’re burning sugar for fuel, you only lose weight by burning fat. So in this program, I break it all down and show you exactly how to do it.
I have to say that I’m pretty sure this is the most comprehensive online fat adaptation training course for runners that’s ever been created. In fact, it might be the only one. I know that no one is teaching this material this way. No one out there is combining fat adaptation with building the habits of stress reduction, strength training, explosive workouts and mindset that you have to have in order to make all this work.
I know nobody else is doing it this way. And I’m going to encourage you to jump on this opportunity right now to enroll in this class, because enrollment is open now into this training course. But it closes in a couple of days, I’ve only got it open until Sunday, November the 8th at 11:59pm.
After that, I gotta close the doors for this session. And then I don’t know when I’m going to be running this course again. Okay, so you just have to make a decision. Do you want to keep reliving your same old past? Stuck in all those old habits that got you where you are here today, doing the same things over and over again, that you have been doing and getting the same results like some sort of terrible Groundhog Day?
Or do you want something more for yourself for your future? Who is it that you want to become? Because that future version of you would encourage you to do something to take some action now, the only way you can become more, the only way you can become that future version of yourself is if you do something different today, if you start creating new habits today, because nothing changes, if nothing changes.
Now, a lot of people have been asking me about this. And I typically don’t talk about pricing and stuff like that, because I don’t want to, I don’t want to be salesy, okay, but I’m going to just tell you this right now, this course is worth well over the $1000. This is like thousands of dollars of material here that you will learn it is amazing.
In fact, similar courses like this sell for about one thousand bucks. I was teaching this course earlier this year, I was teaching it live to a small group of people, and it was around seven hundred bucks. And people were glad to pay. That was an amazing bargain at that.
But I want to remove money as a barrier for you. So I decided that I was going to make the investment into this program, a no brainer for you. So enrollment into the weight loss training course right now, just until Sunday is only $297 bucks, this is a one time payment, and then you’re in for life.
That’s it, I want it to be a no no brainer. And I think it is. Oh, and I have something else to announce. When you enroll in the weight loss training course, you can also join the Running Lean monthly coaching group. So your monthly membership gets you bi-weekly live coaching sessions with me.
So you get personalized guidance and feedback, which means you’ll always be able to stay on track. This is a group coaching program. So we do it over Zoom. And we all get to share our stories and stuff together. So you get the supporting encouragement from this small community of like minded runners, so you can learn from their experience, you get accountability.
So you start really showing up and you keep moving towards your goals, right. And then if you happen to miss any of the live coaching calls that we do over Zoom, I record them all and put them on a membership website. So you’ll have 24/7 access to all the recorded calls. This is really like the most cost effective way if you want to get some coaching and work with me.
And here’s something cool just for you guys. I’m giving you a first, your first month free, you can actually try out the monthly coaching group for free for your first month. Just check it out and see what you think. If you don’t love it, you will I know you’ll love it, but if you don’t meet this – no big deal, you can just opt out.
But after that it’s only $39 bucks a month. That’s it. That’s another total no brainer if you ask me. So again, I feel like I need to say this. I’m not here talking to you about all this stuff, and offering you this program because I want to sell you something that is not what I’m trying to do here. I’m offering you this program because I know it will change your life.
You’ve been asking me Patrick, how do I do all this? How do I become a fat-adapted runner? I want to know how to do it. How do I lose the weight when everything I have ever tried has always failed? You know, how do I figure out how many carbs I should eat so that I can run and lose weight? You know, how do I fuel for these long runs?
You ask me all these amazing questions. And so I’ve put all those answers together into this program. I want you to become more. That’s why I’m talking about this today. I honestly don’t care if you purchase this or not. That’s fine. If you want to make that investment into yourself, I think that’s an amazing choice for you to make.
If you don’t, I think that’s fine. I know that this program is life changing and it will get you the results that you want. If you want to go and enroll right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/course and you can get right in.
I want to quickly address a couple of common reasons why people choose not to do something like this. Because I’ve gotten some. I’ve been on some phone calls with people. And we’ve talked about coaching and stuff. And here’s, here’s a couple of the things that they tell me that I want to share with you, because you might be thinking the same things.
The first is, I’m not ready for this, maybe later. How many times have you wanted something? You know, you want to lose the weight, but you’ve said, You know what, I’m just not ready, maybe later. Maybe later is like the number one killer of people’s hopes and dreams.
How long have you wanted to lose weight? Probably a long time. How long have you wanted to change how you feel about yourself? Probably a long time. I don’t want later to turn into never for you. So that’s why I’m curious or encouraging you to take action today.
That’s why the enrollment for this program is only open for a few days, because I want you to just make the decision now. Just do it, I want this for you, I want you to want it for yourself. Because you deserve this, you’re worth it. Your long term health and happiness is worth it. And so I’m encouraging you to just make that decision. Now, don’t say later, do it now.
Another thing people say is I’m just gonna figure this out myself. I’ll just go figure it out, I’ll you know, go on Google, or something. And I’ll just try to figure it all out. And that’s fine, you can do that you can save a few dollars and spend all your time struggling to try to figure it out yourself.
Or you can just spend that little bit of money now. Save yourself all that time, all the effort, save yourself from all that struggling to figure it all out yourself. skip all that skip all the struggle, strip out, skip all the overwhelming confusion and learn it from somebody who’s already made all the mistakes and figured it out.
Because I’ll have you know if you can simply pay a couple hundred bucks and have all this figured out for you is not a no brainer, I think it is for me. I gladly pay for courses, where someone else has spent years learning what works and what doesn’t, figuring it all out, putting together a system or a framework that shows you exactly how to do it all, then I can come along and just pay a few hundred bucks and boom, I get the whole system.
I don’t have to deal with all the struggling, I get instant access to all those years of knowledge. It’s like boom, knowledge download instantly. I love that and I gladly pay for that all the time.
And another thing people say that I just want to address is they’re like, you know, this sounds good. Patrick, I totally agree with you. This sounds amazing, but I just can’t afford it. And I just want you to know that if you’re listening to this now, and you’re thinking about this, and you’re thinking I really need a program like this, because I haven’t been able to do this on my own.
But you think oh, I don’t think I can afford this right now. Here’s the thing, here’s, I’m going to tell you something that is probably the most important thing you need to hear about losing weight about becoming the best version of yourself.
If you feel like you want to enroll in this program, and you think you can’t afford it, then you’re in this place called desirability versus feasibility meaning that you desire to lose weight, to become a fat-adapted runner, to be healthier, and to become that amazing, happier, more confident future version of yourself. But you don’t think it’s financially feasible for you. So what you do next, will ultimately determine what happens in your life. Because thinking it’s not feasible, is actually a form of self-sabotage, that you probably didn’t even realize you’re doing until I just pointed it out to you.
Here’s the truth, you have to ask yourself this vital question to determine whether or not you really want to become that fat-adapted runner or whether you want to really lose weight. And the question is this: am I going to be 100% responsible for my own health and happiness, or am I not?
You know, that’s where you are today. Because you’ve done the things you’ve always done. And if you really want something to change in your life, if you really want to lose the weight and become a lean runner, then you have to do something different. You have to choose to make that happen for yourself.
So the question isn’t, can I afford it? The question is, how can I be 100% responsible and make this happen for me? If you choose to do nothing here, that’s fine. Just means you aren’t willing to get out of your comfort zone. It means you’re probably driven by fear. And you’re probably not going to get there, you’re probably not going to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, which is fine.
You’re just going to probably continue to struggle with your weight, just like you’ve always done. So let’s go back to that important question you have to ask yourself right now, are you going to be 100% responsible for your own health and happiness? If yes, then just enroll in this program. It’s a no brainer.
Again, do you want more of your past or more of your future? My hope for you is that you choose to go all in on yourself, that you make the decision to become the person you’ve wanted to be for so long now that you take action now and start working on becoming more because your future self will thank you because you made this commitment today.
To enroll, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/course. Now, if you’re still unsure about whether or not this program is right for you join me in the Running Lean community on Facebook this Sunday at 4pm. I’ll be hosting a live q&a session where you can ask any question you want, I’ll answer everything for you. They’re cool. I really hope you’ll join me it will absolutely change your life. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, gonna talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
There's a lot of uncertainty happening in our lives right now. Are we going to get sick? Will someone we know get sick? Do I still have a job? Will my 401k ever recover? How are we going to pay the …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the life coach for runners. And I teach runners like you how to stop struggling and start getting the results that you want in your life. And that’s what I’m doing here on the podcast, I want to teach you how to manage your mind and take back control of your life. So you can stop overeating, or quit drinking, or stop feeling so unsure of yourself all the time.
I want to teach you how you can start achieving more and start becoming the badass runner that you were always meant to be. Listen, you get to choose, you decide who you want to be. So start making better decisions. Alright, today I’m talking about making peace with uncertainty. And this is kind of a follow up to a recent podcast that I did called how to manage your mind during uncertain times. And that’s episode number 11.
And to find that, you can just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/11. And you can actually find all the episodes that way, just go to the running mind podcast.com/ and then whatever number of the podcast. So for instance, this is podcast number 17. But anyway, in that episode, I talked about how your thoughts cause your feelings, and how you can take ownership of those thoughts so you can feel better and choose how you want to show up in your life, especially during this global pandemic during this global crisis that we are all involved in right now.
So today, I want to take a little deeper dive specifically into this issue of uncertainty because this has been coming up a lot. Lately, I hear a lot of people talking about how uncertain things are. You know, I hear people saying like, am I gonna get sick? Well, somebody I know gets sick. We don’t want our business, our business is going to have to reopen again. I gotta get my hair and my nails done, we’re gonna get back to running with my group. Will my 401k ever recover?
Well, all my races will be canceled this year. Well, I have a job. How am I gonna pay the rent? You know, what do we do about all this homeschool time? When are things gonna get back to normal? When are we gonna be able to buy toilet paper again? So there’s all this uncertainty, all these thoughts about uncertainty. And when we think all these thoughts, and think about all of this uncertainty, how is that affecting us?
Well, it’s creating a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, stress, worry, doubt. All of these thoughts, these thoughts about the future is uncertain, are causing all of these unwanted feelings inside of us. And we’re making ourselves miserable. Why do we do this? And then what happens when we think these thoughts and we feel all this fear and stress and anxiety like we feel all these unwanted feelings? What do we do? You know, how do we behave?
What actions are we taking when we feel this way? Well, for a lot of us, we go to the fridge, you know we eat over it, we drink a lot more. We veg out in front of the TV, we just want to numb out you know, maybe we get angry, we yell at the kids, we have a fight with our husband. Or maybe for some of us we just don’t do anything at all. We just sort of check out, we avoid and ignore and just check out completely, ignore everyone and ignore everything.
So how is all this working out for you? You know if this is you, if any of this resonates with you at all, how’s this working out for you result? What results are you getting from taking these actions or not taking any action? Probably terrible results.
You know, I know a lot of people are gaining weight. They feel hungover all the time. They’re not getting enough sleep. You know, they’re not getting any work done. Their kids are afraid of them. Their husband doesn’t want to talk to them. Work sucks. Running sucks. Life sucks. And then you can say see because of all this uncertainty, my life sucks.
All this uncertainty is making me eat too much. It’s making me drink too much and making me angry all the time. This damn coronavirus lock down is making my kids and my husband hate me. You get the exact results that you are focused on. When your thinking is terrible, you feel terrible. And you take terrible actions and you get terrible results. Your results are always directly related to your thoughts.
But here’s the truth that so many of us are not seeing right now. Life is always uncertain. Your life has always been 100% uncertain, your future is always uncertain. There’s no such thing as certainty, ever. It’s a myth. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There are two things that are certain number one, you are a human being alive on the planet Earth right now. And number two, you will die. These two things are certain. But only these two things.
Everything else is uncertain. It’s unknown, everything else is up for grabs. Now think about it this way. Think back to a few months ago. Were you certain about what you’d be doing right now? My guess is you probably felt pretty certain about where you’d be right now. You are probably you’d have, if somebody asked you three, four months ago, you’re probably you know, very certain that you’d be like running your spring marathon right now, maybe even this weekend, you’d be going to work every day, you’d be making the same amount of money, you’d be paying your mortgage just like normal.
You might have been going on that vacation, or at the very least going out to dinner with friends and hanging out at Starbucks, having a coffee. But guess what? You are wrong about all that. You thought you had all this certainty, but it’s just an illusion. The truth is, life is always uncertain.
And I’ve experienced this profoundly lately, if you’d asked me five or six months ago, where I’d be today, I would have told you with 100% certainty that I’d be married, I’d still be living with my wife. I’d be running with my friends, I’d be coaching the running group, I’d be getting ready for the Flying Pig this weekend.
I’d be working my day job, I’d be going out for coffee and dinner with friends, I’d be working out at the gym. And all of that would have been dead wrong. You know, today I’m separated from my wife, I’m living alone in my own place. I’m about to get divorced. I’m not running with friends. I’m not coaching the training group, there are no training groups, there is no spring marathon.
My job, my day job has been canceled. Two, the gyms are closed, the restaurants are closed. There’s a global pandemic and I have to wear a face mask every time I go to the grocery store. I never in a million years would have predicted any of this stuff. All of this is 100% different than what I thought my life was going to be like.
I was so certain about everything, so certain about what things were gonna look like today, and I was wrong. And here’s what you have to wrap your head around, your life is always uncertain. We have no idea what’s going to happen three months from now or three weeks from now or even three days from now. And all the worrying about the future, all the fear, the anxiety, the stress, it’s making us miserable.
We need to accept the fact that life is uncertain. We need to make peace with all of this uncertainty. And we need to acknowledge and accept that there is no such thing as certainty ever. There never was, and there never will be. So stop thinking and worrying about your future. It’s not serving you. It’s making you miserable and your life sucks because of it.
Start accepting that life is uncertain and then move on. It’s like start practicing radical acceptance of everything that’s happening around you. And then get on with living your life right here and right now. Now, I’m not suggesting that you don’t plan anything for the future ever. Just give up on your dreams and goals. Not at all. Make your plans, set your goals. Keep the dream alive.
Get your training plan together, visualize the future that you want and go after that. But just know that anything could happen between now and then. And you have to be able to roll with it. So by all means, prepare, plan, schedule, but then be ready to go with the flow. Life is always uncertain, you have to make peace with the uncertainty.
If you’re constantly thinking the thought like life is uncertain, and all these terrible things might happen to me and my family. Thinking this thought over and over and over again. It’s going to cause all kinds of internal misery, misery, the fear, the anxiety, the stress, the worry, the doubt, thinking these thoughts constantly is going to cause you so much internal suffering. Because what you’re doing is you’re trying to control your future. And it doesn’t work. It never works. It just creates a lot of inner turmoil.
So how about trying on a new thought like, life is always uncertain. And no matter what it brings, I can handle it, bring it on. Damn. How do you think you’d feel if you focused on this thought over and over again? You’d probably feel a lot more secure, confident and at peace with what is you wouldn’t have all this internal suffering and be a better human to be around, you know.
You’d get more done, you’d be able to show up for your work and be able to show up for your kids for your husband, be a lot happier. Listen, when you can manage your thoughts, you create so much inner peace. All this uncertainty just becomes a part of your life, it doesn’t matter anymore. You can be at peace with all of it. You can handle any curve balls that life throws at you, you can become a real mental badass.
Lose your job, no big deal. I’ll find another one. Maybe even a better one. Wife wants a divorce. No problem, I’ll find another one. Maybe even a better one. Unsure of how you’re going to pay the rent this month? I got it. I’ll figure it out. I always do. I’m super creative. I’m tenacious, I’m driven. I got this. This is such a powerful concept.
I hope you’re grasping this. And you can apply this to everything in your life. No matter what the circumstances out there, whatever’s going on outside of you around you always know that the future is always uncertain. And if you just accept this fact, and make peace with the uncertainty, there’s nothing that you can’t do.
You know, think about this, what could you accomplish, if you just stopped trying to predict and control the future and just accepted all of it. And then you did your best, you showed up, you suit it up and you did your best no matter what. My guess is that you’d be a lot happier, your life would be a lot less stressful, you’d probably be a lot more fun to be around, you’d get more done, you’d probably sleep better.
The choice is yours. You always get to choose. You can keep trying to predict, control everything in the future, live in a state of constant worry and anxiety and fear and suffering. Or you can make peace with all of it. Make peace with the uncertainty, practice radical acceptance of all of it. And then live your life fully, show up every day more confidently knowing that no matter what happens today, tomorrow, six months from now that you got this you can handle all of it.
There’s nothing you can’t do. There’s nothing that will phase you. There’s nothing you can’t handle. Bring it on. Okay. That’s all I got for you today. I wanted to make this short and sweet. I want to leave you with that. Okay, and I’d love to hear what you think about this. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Are you confused? You have questions? Reach out anytime. hello@innerfiretribe.com. And much love to you my friends. I’ll see you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Today I'm talking about the right way vs. the wrong way to set goals. The problem is most people pick some random goal, it's usually too small, and they kinda sorta come up with a plan for making it …
Continue Reading about 16. The Secrets to Achieving Any Goal →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host, and the life coach for runners. And I teach you how to stop struggling and start getting the results that you want in your life. And that’s what I teach here on the podcast is how to manage your mind.
So you can take control of your life. So you can do things like lose weight, and stop drinking, and become the most badass version of yourself. Because you know what? You can do, be, and have anything you want in this world, you are capable of so much more, you are capable of magnificence. And once you really, really believe this, there’s nothing you can’t do.
This is kind of what I’m talking about today, how to set big, powerful goals for yourself, for your life, and how to make them happen. How to achieve whatever it is that you want. And so here’s the problem with the way most people set goals. So most people, they just pick some random goal out of the air, maybe it’s something they think they shouldn’t do, like, a lot of other people are qualifying for Boston, maybe I should do that.
And so they think, okay, I’ll do that. Or maybe they’re, you know, overweight, and they’re like, hey, I should probably lose 40 pounds, there’s a goal, I’ll just do that. You know, or maybe I’m kind of unhappy with my job, maybe I’ll just like, become an entrepreneur, I’ll start my own business. So they pick something, right?
And then they pick a date, and they’re like, okay, I’m gonna accomplish this by, you know, in six months, or whatever, some random date in the future. And then they might have some vague idea in their head of what they’re supposed to do to reach that goal. So they might kind of like, do a training program, if they’re trying to qualify, or the, you know, like I should pick some diet to try to lose some weight, or, you know, maybe they’ll watch some YouTube videos on how to be an entrepreneur or something like that.
And so they kind of sorta take some action, and then, you know, kind of work toward that goal. Doesn’t that sound terrible? The way I’m explaining this, saying this out loud actually sounds kind of depressing to me right now, honestly. But here’s the thing, this is the way most people do it.
And they think that they’re doing it the right way. They don’t really know any better, it’s fine. Not calling anybody out here. But then they don’t hit the goal. And then they feel like they are a failure. And goal setting doesn’t work. I’m a failure, they get down on themselves. And they just quit and just go about their life. And they never get anything done. They never accomplish anything great. They never reach any kind of goals.
And I’m saying all this because this, this was me. Like I know exactly what this feels like I’ve done all of this so many times. I’ve picked some goals, I’ve kind of set some, you know, put some action steps in place to try to get those goals and I’ve done it so many times, and then I’ve failed. And then I just continually beat myself up over it. And I figure I’m just a failure and I can’t accomplish anything.
I’ve learned the hard way that is a terrible way of setting and accomplishing anything. This way of goal setting is broken and has to be changed. So today, I’m going to walk you through a better way of setting goals. But more importantly, I’m going to teach you how to achieve those goals.
And it doesn’t matter what they are, the process is the same for whatever goal we’re talking about here. And a quick little side note on the word goal versus outcome. I like the word outcome better than goal. And here’s why. From NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming words, we believe that words are very important. Okay.
So when we say the word goal, our brain, our subconscious mind especially comes up with this pick that’s sure of something that’s way out in the future, something that we have not achieved yet. Something that’s, you know, out there somewhere, it seems far away. Whereas when we say the word outcome, this is almost like past tense, okay, it has been done, it has been accomplished.
And the subconscious mind paints a picture of you having achieved that outcome. So I can see it, I can hear it, I can feel it. And this is kind of a better way of thinking about it. So, I prefer the word outcome. And maybe you can start adopting that when we start talking about goals.
Okay, so this is what we’re talking about today, how to set and achieve all of your outcomes. So strap in, is going to be fun. So the first thing I want to encourage you to do, the first step in achieving outcomes, is to pick an uncomfortable goal. Most people think, too small, they pick a goal, that seems like something they could do.
And the problem with this is that we never grow, when we stay comfortable. When we stay inside our comfort zone, we don’t grow. And if you want to get somewhere else, somewhere different from where you are right now, you have to think big. You know, think about what you really want.
And when you think about that thing that you really want, it should make you feel somewhat uncomfortable. If it feels too easy and too comfortable. It’s not a big enough goal, okay? In order to grow beyond who you are, right now, in this moment, you have to do things you’ve never done before. But this scares people because they’re like, well, I don’t know how to do it.
And of course you don’t, because you’ve never done it before. The way you learn how to do it, is to do it. So you gotta get outside of that comfort, comfortable bubble that you’re in, okay? And think about this, what do you really want? Who do you want to be? What do you want to accomplish, let’s say in six months, or a year. So we’re really good at coming up with little tiny goals that we can achieve. Because it’s almost like we know we can do it. But what about those things you don’t know, those things that you’re afraid you may not be able to accomplish? Those are the things we want to be focused on. Okay.
So set a big, uncomfortable goal. Get outside your comfort zone, and then start, you know, your subconscious mind will start moving you towards that thing. And this is where all the beautiful things happen in our life. This is where we grow, where we learn, nothing happens in our comfort zone, nothing really good happens that way and we just stay where we are. Okay, so number one is pick an uncomfortable goal, something that makes you feel uncomfortable when you think about it.
Number two, is you have to have a compelling why. You need to know why this goal, this outcome that you want is so important to you take some time to really figure this out. So maybe you want to lose those 40 pounds, so you don’t end up dead at 45 from a heart attack. You know, you want to be there to play with your kids and to play with your grandkids.
You know, maybe you want to quit drinking so you can stop feeling hungover every morning and stop all the obsessing about when you’re going to get that next drink. You want to experience the freedom that comes from breaking habits like overeating and over drinking. These are very compelling reasons why you would want to change why you want to accomplish that goal.
So have a compelling reason why and your why has to move you. You have to feel it in your bones. It has to be something bigger than you. When you think about why you want to accomplish this. It has to create, there has to be, an emotional response inside you. Okay, if it does, and if you don’t feel it, it’s not big enough. The goal is not big enough, your reason is not strong enough.
So you need a compelling reason why this is important to you. This is the thing, this reason, this is the thing that’s going to keep you going when it gets tough because it will get tough. If you’re setting a big uncomfortable goal. Every step along the way is good. An uncomfortable goal is going to challenge you, it’s going to be difficult, there’s going to be difficult, there’s going to be failures all along the way, having that compelling reason why will help keep you going, okay?
Number three, you have to believe in yourself. First, you have to believe it, before you see it. You have to have the confidence and trust in yourself to know that you will get there no matter what. And the way you do this is by becoming who you need to be in order to get that outcome that you’re looking for.
We get this backwards a lot, we don’t get the goal, then become the kind of person that could get a goal like that. We become the kind of person first and then we get the goal. For example, when I was training for Iron Man, I had to become an Iron Man, I had to become an Iron Man finisher. If I wanted to be an Ironman finisher, does that make sense?
In my mind, in my heart, I had to become an Iron Man, in order to be the kind of person that I needed to be to do the kind of things I needed to do to get those results. So I had to adopt the identity of being an Iron Man, and start thinking and acting like an Iron Man, what would Iron Man do?
You know, my values had to be in alignment with my goals. So training became super important to me, I was sticking to my training schedule, no matter what that became something that was really important to me. My beliefs had to be in alignment with my goal, I had to believe without a doubt that I was going to accomplish this.
And that I had everything it takes to be an Ironman finisher, I had to tap into new potentials, I had to learn new things, I had to be the kind of person that read the kind of books that an Iron Man would read, I listened to the kind of podcasts an Iron Man would listen to. I did the research about the sport, like I researched everything about the sport, I’m a passionate researcher.
I did all of these things so that I could learn as much as I could and tap into that potential. My daily schedule of the things that I did, my behaviors, my actions, I changed all this stuff, because I became who I needed to be. So I could accomplish this huge goal. So in order to achieve that outcome, finishing an Ironman, first I had to become an Ironman. And this is where we get things backwards.
Typically, we think we need to do things in order to get results so that we can become who we want to be. Instead, we need to become who we need to be. So that we can do what we need to do to get the results that we want in our lives. And when you do it this way, all of your values, the things that are important to you become clear, your beliefs become clearer, the actions you take become clearer. And you’re almost guaranteed to get the results that you’re looking for.
Alright, the next thing you need to do is write down all the steps you need to take to achieve your outcome. This sounds pretty simple. At first, but a lot of people will say to me, well, Patrick, I don’t know all the steps. If I knew all the steps, I would do it but you know what you do know?
And here’s how you do it, you just get a blank page out, grab a pen, and do what we call a thought download. You just write down everything you can think of that you would need to do to get from where you are today to where you need to be to where you achieve this goal, which is get it all out on the page. And just keep asking yourself, what else would I need to do? What else would I need to do?
So we’re looking for all those tiny little action steps that you need to take so that you can achieve this outcome. Get it all out on the page once you get it all out on the page. And you should have a lot of stuff on there.
The next thing you do is just take all those steps and put each one on your calendar. That becomes an appointment on your calendar. And then, and this is the most important thing, is do every one of those things on your calendar. This is the key to achieving any outcome that you want. You put an appointment on your calendar, and it becomes a commitment that you make to yourself. You know, the path from where you are to where you want to be is paved with steps. Achieving a big goal is just a series of small steps that gets you from where you are to where you want to be.
There’s just small actions we’re talking about here. But once you do each one, once you achieve them all, then you have reached your goal. I like the analogy of like, you know, hiking up a mountain, you’re walking up a mountain, and you just keep taking one step after another one step after another. They’re tiny steps when you look at each one. But combined, they get you up to the top of the mountain. And the view from up there is pretty amazing. Okay, so get everything down on the page and get it all on your calendar, and then do them all.
Alright, the next thing is identifying obstacles. So when you write all this stuff down, and you start putting all this stuff on your calendar, all this resistance is going to come up, you’re gonna start to feel a lot of fear, and a lot of anxiety. And you’re gonna start coming up with all these excuses. And all these reasons why this stuff is never going to work or that you can’t do it, you’re going to come up with this huge list of all the possible things that will, you know, could possibly go wrong, okay, this is completely normal, it’s part of the process, we want to embrace this part of the process.
Normally, we start thinking about all these obstacles and stuff, and we kind of freak out and we just want to pretend like they don’t exist and just kind of move on. But this is not the right way to do it, we want to embrace the obstacles, okay. So the way we do this is we do another thought download, so we grab another piece of paper, and then we start writing down all the obstacles that we can think of, we just get them all out on the page.
This is a kind of a painful process, honestly, you start writing down all these things that could possibly go wrong, or get in your way, you know, maybe, you know, so and so, you know, thinks I’m stupid for trying to do this, or, you know, my family isn’t going to be on board with this, or I’m afraid of what people will think of me, or I’ve tried stuff like this before, and it’s never worked. Or I think this is going to be too hard, or whatever it is, come up with all those obstacles, get them all down on the page.
And then for each one of these obstacles, come up with a strategy for overcoming that obstacle. All right, and this is like magic right here. So if you’re looking at, you know, your obstacles, and one of them is, I’m afraid of what people will think of me. You know, maybe your strategy for overcoming that is working on your mindset, you know, creating thoughts around those thoughts.
Like, it doesn’t matter what other people think, I believe in myself. That’s what’s most important to me, like, that’s a much better thought, then, you know, other people will will think I’m stupid, or think I can’t do this. So for every obstacle that comes up, write down a strategy for overcoming that obstacle. And then every obstacle just ends up being a rung on the ladder to success to your goal. It’s really powerful exercise to do.
Okay, then after you’ve got your obstacle ladder, so to speak. The next thing is to follow through. And this is the difference between people who achieve goals and people who don’t is whether or not they actually do what they say they’re going to do. You need to learn to count on yourself to do what you said you’re gonna do. You need to practice making promises to yourself and keeping them you know, every action step goes on your calendar, right? And then you’re gonna have this huge list of stuff, this huge calendar full of stuff that you need to do. And you’ve said yourself, here’s the goal that I want, here are all the steps I need to take. They’re on my calendar now. I just got to do them, right? And you just do them.
But what happens is you’re going to come to that day and that time and you’re going to say you know what, I really don’t feel like doing this one thing you know, maybe I’ll just go watch Netflix for a while. I’m I’m kind of tired. I don’t really feel like training today. I don’t really feel like doing the work to build my business today. I don’t really feel like sticking To my protocol, my eating protocol, I think I’ll just, you know, go ahead and eat this whole pizza. I’ve been there, I know what it feels like.
But the way we build self confidence is is that we make promises to ourselves, we make commitments to ourselves, and then we follow through on those commitments, even when you don’t feel like it. So you make a promise to yourself, and you follow through, you make a promise to yourself, and you follow through, you make a promise, and you follow through and you keep doing this.
When you do this, you build this amazing amount of trust in yourself. You build unshakable confidence in yourself, to where you feel like you can achieve anything that you want. So this is what we call honoring the calendar no matter what. So everything you’re you’re going to do becomes an action item on your calendar. And you do them even if you don’t feel like it. Okay.
The last piece of this is failure. I want you to embrace failure. What did you just say? That’s right, I said, I want you to embrace failure. So what happens if you fail? Most people, what do they do when they fail? They just give up right? Honestly, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a failure. I just think there’s stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t work. In NLP, we say there is no failure. There’s only feedback.
This thing I tried, did it work? Yes or no? What’s the feedback? Did it work? Yes, it did. Okay, cool. I’ll do more of that. Did it work? No, it did not. Why didn’t it work? What can I learn? What do I need to change? How can I do things differently next time so that I get a different result?
And we just keep practicing. Now we try something, it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, we try something else. And here’s the secret. Just keep doing this. There really is no such thing as failure. There’s only quitting. So people really don’t fail, they just quit, they give up. But the more times you do something and fail, the more confidence you build, because you keep overcoming this failures. So I encourage you to fail. I encourage you to plan on failing, plan on failing a bunch of times before you get things right.
No one’s ever really achieved anything of significance by succeeding every single step of the way. You get to success by creating a huge pile of failures. Failing is how you do it. It’s how you get there. I always say success is a terrible teacher, you don’t learn anything by getting everything right all the time. You learn by failing, and trying something else, and learning from those mistakes. So fail often.
So, quick recap. To achieve any goal, any outcome that you want. First thing is pick an uncomfortable goal, get outside your comfort zone has to be bigger than you. Number two have a compelling why. Why do you want to accomplish this, what’s going to keep you going when it gets tough? Number three, believe it first, believe it and then you’ll see it. Number four, get all the steps and get them all on your calendar. Number five, identify all the obstacles you can think of and then create strategies for overcoming each one of those. And this just becomes a ladder to your success. Number six, follow through. Honor your calendar no matter what, do what you say you’re going to do. And then number seven, embrace failure, fail often. And that’s it. That’s how you achieve anything you want in your life.
I know this might sound a little daunting to you just listening to this right now. And I will tell you, it can be challenging to do this on your own. And that’s what having a good coach does for you is to help you with every single one of these steps. And this is the work that I do with all of my clients. We look at every step I just laid out. And we make sure that we are always on track.
And I help my clients identify those things that they cannot see themselves. It’s really hard to to see yourself it’s hard to you know, see those your blind spots, you know, so that’s what a good coach will do to help you to see those things that you cannot see for yourself. So whether you want to lose weight, whether you want to quit drinking, you get the accountability, the follow through, you get the strategies, all of this by working with a coach.
You don’t want to create a pile of failures. And I help my clients work through all of that so they can achieve the result that they want in their life. Well, I’d love to hear what you thought about this particular topic, you can always reach out to me with questions or comments Hello at inner fire tribe.com And that’s all I got for you today. I hope to see you soon. Much love to each and every one of you.
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