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Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

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109. Who Are You Becoming?

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Who are you becoming? It’s a good question, right? The thing is, most people don’t ever ask themselves this. They don’t spend any time thinking about who they really want to become. This …

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Podcast Transcript

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 109 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners today, who are you becoming? Who are you becoming? It’s a good question, right? The thing is, most people don’t ever ask themselves this question. They don’t spend any time thinking about who they really want to become. This is a problem.

If you don’t know where you’re going, how are you supposed to get there? If you don’t know who you want to become in the future, chances are pretty good that you’re going to stay stuck, right where you are right now. So in this episode, I’m going to talk about the importance of contemplating this powerful question, Who am I becoming, and then I’m going to talk about how to start working toward becoming that exact version of yourself. Cool, this will be fun, I think it’s gonna be a good one.

First, if you like this podcast, come check out the Running Lean Podcast community on Facebook. This is a group of like-minded people who come to share their experience,to share their encouragement, to share their inspiration, and to post selfies of them running. And it’s a lot of fun, we have a lot of fun in the community, I post challenges in there, sometimes, I’ll occasionally do a training or a coaching session in there. And it’s all designed to be a positive encouraging place to go. People say they love the Facebook community, we’d love to have you over there. So just search for Running Lean Community on Facebook, and come join us.

And then listen, all this talk about nutrition and weight loss and fueling for running and becoming the best version of yourself. All this stuff can be confusing, it can feel overwhelming, can feel frustrating. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there. figuring it all out on your own can be very challenging.

But listen, if you want to hit the easy button, one on one coaching with me might be just the thing for you. With coaching, you get the knowledge, the expert guidance, the support, the encouragement, the accountability, you get someone there, who knows what you’re going through, who knows how to get you to your goals, somebody that’s there to give you feedback, to help you figure out what’s working, what’s not what to do next, someone in your corner who’s always there for you who’s always got your back.

This is like you and I working closely together to help you become that badass future version of yourself. You know, the one who’s lean and strong, the one who feels good about yourself. The best part is all helped you develop the mindset to make all this something that you do for life. It’s one thing to like lose weight or hit a running goal. It’s another thing to be healthy to be a healthy, strong human being and make it last for life. That’s the work we do together. So who are you becoming? And let’s get you there together. You can apply for coaching over at runningleanpodcast.com/apply. Let’s make 2022 the year that you changed your life for good.
Cool. All right, I am so excited about talking about this today. I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while now. And I’ve touched on this in several different ways in the past, but I really want to put this together in a way that really is simple and makes sense for you. Okay.

And so there’s this question of who are you becoming? And the reason I’m talking about this today is because most people seem to feel like they’re stuck where they are. They don’t feel like they have any direction. Right? They don’t really have an idea of who they want to become.

Even people that are like, Oh yeah, I want to be healthier, like what does that mean for you? And sometimes they’re like, I don’t know. I just want to feel healthier. Well, you got to know what that means. But if you don’t know who you want to become, if you don’t have a clear vision of who it is you want to become, how are you going to get there? I’m telling you right now, you’re not going to get there because You’re a boat without a rudder, you’re just like going aimlessly right? Through your life.

You’re not going to get anywhere and nothing is ever going to work for you, you’re not going to experience the growth and the change that you really want for yourself. And you’re just going to kind of stay stuck where you are right now. And there’s nothing wrong with any of this if that’s what you want for yourself.

If you’re cool with where you are right now, and you’re like, I’m good, Patrick, I don’t, I don’t want to like be better. I don’t want to be healthier. I don’t want to get stronger, or leaner or run faster, or like do my first ultra-marathon or push myself and see what I’m capable of.

If you’re fine with where you are right now. That’s amazing. You do you. But I know you. I know the people that listen to this podcast are like, ‘No, Patrick, I’m on board with this, I want more for myself, I want to see what I’m capable of, I want to become more.’ But you have to have a very clear vision of what that means for you.

Okay, so most people just don’t have that vision, they don’t have the direction, they don’t really know what they want for themselves. So you got to have that very clear vision of who it is you want to become okay. Another reason I’m talking about this is that I get asked questions all the time from people on social media, in the Facebook group, and they’ll ask me questions, like, ‘What foods should I eat? What foods should I not eat? How do I fuel for running? How many carbs should I eat? How often should I be running? How many times a week? Should I lift weights? How should I structure these workouts? What should my macros look like?’

And on and on and on? Right? All these questions and they’re good questions. And we do want to, you know, focus on those at some point. You know that is part of the equation here. But I think from the get-go, you’re kind of focusing on the wrong things.

First, well, first of all, I have to say this, that the answer to all those questions is always it depends. Nobody likes to hear that answer either. I’m like, ‘Well, it depends. Like, what are your goals? What’s your lifestyle look like? What are your likes and dislikes? What do you what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to change your body composition? Are you trying to get stronger? Are you trying to run your first ultra-marathon?’

Like what is it that you want for yourself? It ultimately comes down to answering that question, Who are you becoming? And most people are just not focused on this. They just want me to tell them what to do. They just want somebody to say, do this and not that. And I’m telling you right now that unless you have this other deeper, more powerful question figured out, who do you want to become; what you’re doing isn’t going to make a lot of sense.

When you can answer that question, oh, this is who I want to become in the future. This is what I want for myself. This is what I want my life to look like, this is what I want my body to look like, this is how and where I want my running to be. When you can answer those questions very clearly, then what you do becomes much more obvious. It’s much more obvious, much easier to answer those questions for yourself.

Okay. Here’s another reason why I want to talk about this today. Most coaches and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have had other types of coaches, either dieticians, they’ve worked with nutrition coaches, personal trainers, running coaches, and almost every person I talked to tells me that their coaches always focus on what to do.

So they’re just like, here’s your plan, this is what you need to do. Don’t do this, do this over here, boom, done. And they may talk about goals, they may say like, ‘Oh, you want to run faster? Okay, well, here’s what you’re going to do.’ And that’s about it. That’s about as deep as it goes.

But I have to tell you, that there’s this much deeper and much more powerful force at work within you. And I want to help you to tap into that force. When you ignore this powerful force within you. You kind of leave a lot on the table.

And so with me and my clients and the people that I coach and the people that I work with, we work very closely together on creating a vision for who they want to become we really focus on this because here’s the thing, this powerful force within you. This powerful force that is driving you forward, is this it’s that as a human being, you must act consistently with how you define yourself.

And when I say how you define yourself, I’m saying how you define yourself now and how you define who you are becoming in the future. Most people do not spend any time on this at all, most coaches don’t spend any time on this at all. They just said, ‘Oh, you want to run faster, here’s what you need to do.’ And they’re not looking at that internal driving force that’s really powering, whether you’re going to accomplish these goals or not.

So we spend a lot of time working on that vision that we have for ourselves. And everything we do, is focused on getting you closer and closer to that version of yourself. Because when you have a very clear picture of who you want to become, you know, like I said earlier, like, knowing what to do becomes much easier, it’s much easier to stick with it, it’s much easier to see if you’re making progress towards that goal, because you have it all well defined, right?

Most people just never do this work of defining who they are, who they want to become. So most people are operating from what they’ve done in the past. Most people are focused on how things have gone for them in the past, whether they’ve been able to do something or not. And they kind of focus all of this on whether they are able to do this today.

For example, one thing I talk to people about all the time is like, ‘Hey, when you’ve tried in the past to, you know, lose weight, let’s say, what’s not worked for you?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, this and this and that. And that’s why it never works for me. And that’s why I can’t do this today. And that’s why I’m stuck here today is because, you know, I’ve tried this in the past, I’ve tried all these different diets, I’ve never been able to stick with anything. I always gained the weight back. Nothing is ever worked for me.’

And they’re stuck in this loop of repeating that exact past, today. Can you relate to this? I think we all can to some degree, where we’ve said, ‘Well, I’ve never been able to make this work in the past. What’s different about today? How can I possibly do anything differently? If it’s never worked for me in the past, I’ve never been able to run faster than this speed for a half marathon, how can I possibly run faster than that? I’ve tried, it’s never worked.’

And all of that stuff in your past, all the experiences, all the failures, all the even all the good stuff like this is just where you were, this is what got you to where you are today. But if you keep focused on your past, that’s where you’re going to stay. If you can’t think feel or behave differently than the way you’ve done things in the past, this is your only frame of reference, then you are going to keep repeating all those same things, those same behaviors, the same thought and feeling patterns, and you’re just going to stay stuck doing the same things over and over again. You’re never going to grow, you’re never going to become anything more than what you’ve already done.

Now, I talked about this in-depth in Episode 91, called Breaking the Habit of Being You. So this is a similar concept here. Okay. So definitely go check out that episode. It really goes into this concept with a lot more detail. But if you can’t think past what you’ve already accomplished, that’s all you’re ever going to accomplish. That’s all you’re ever going to be.

If you can’t think bigger than your past, you’re never going to be bigger than your past. And it’s kind of depressing when you think about it, right? It’s like, oh my god, I better start thinking about my future. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying here. You’ve got to start thinking about who you want to become. This is such a huge, powerful, amazing, life-changing, transformational question that you have to answer for yourself.

So the better way to do this is to approach your life from the perspective of the future you. You’ve got to ask yourself who you want to become. You have to spend time on this. You have to spend time answering this question in great detail for yourself.

What do you really want for yourself? Do you want to be where you are a year from now? Because that’s an option for you? Or do you want to be stronger, leaner? More fit, healthier? Do you want running to be easier? Or do you want to just be where you are today? The choice is yours. It really is. The first step is defining who you want to be in the future. Who are you becoming? So spend some time on this question. Answer this question in great detail.

Okay. What does that future version of you look like? What have you accomplished? How do you feel about yourself? What are those changes that you want to make to your health and fitness? You know, how do you look in those clothes? How do you look in that bikini, you get to decide, you get to decide, isn’t that awesome? I think that’s amazing. How empowering is that?

So make a decision, have a crystal clear vision of who you are becoming so that you know where you’re going. And every day you make decisions that move you closer and closer to that version of yourself. And I talk about this concept called remembering your future. We remember our past, we’re good at that we can remember all the stuff we’ve done. And all the times we screwed up and all the failures we’ve ever, you know, done in the past. Like, we’re good at remembering our past.

I want you to start remembering your future, you’ve got to know where you’re going. You’ve got to know who you’re becoming. So that you can start doing things today that are in alignment with that future version of yourself. So instead of operating from your past, remembering everything from your past, and repeating all that over and over and over again, start remembering your future, start remembering that future version of yourself that awesome, healthy, badass version of yourself. Start remembering that, spend some time thinking about it.

That’s what it really means to remember, to spend time thinking about it. What does it feel like to be that future version of yourself? And remember that who you are becoming is just, it’s completely up to you, you get to decide, and you get to work towards that every single day. And then it just becomes a series of decisions that you’re making each day.

Am I moving closer to that vision of myself? That future? That person I’m becoming? Or am I moving further away? is usually a pretty cut and dry picture of that, right? It’s usually very clear is this decision I’m making? If I shove these donuts in my mouth right now, is that moving me closer to my goal? Or is it kind of further away? It’s pretty obvious, right?

It’s the difference between just keep repeating what you’ve done in the past and only getting where you’ve gotten to and staying stuck where you are, versus creating this new version of yourself, reinventing yourself transforming yourself based on who you want to become in the future.

Okay. Like I said, my clients and I, we spend a lot of time on this, we talk about it all the time, it’s so important to be future-focused, we don’t really dwell on the past. In fact, the past is just done, it’s over with you can’t change it. So just put it behind you.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve not been able to do in the past, it doesn’t matter that you’ve tried every diet and they’ve never worked for you. We’re going to try something different. You know, and we’re going to get you there. There’s no reason why we can’t make something work going forward. No reason. Unless you’re focused on what you’ve not been able to do in the past.

So everything we do, we want to focus on becoming that amazing, badass version of ourselves, right? Spend time on this, spend time thinking about this. Spend time, like thinking about who it is you want to become but really how that how you want to feel? How do you want to feel in the future? What does that future version of you feel like?

This is one of the most important questions you can ask yourself some of the most important work you can do for yourself. It really sets the foundation for everything that you do. If you don’t have this question figured out if you don’t have a clear picture of who you want to become – you’re just kind of like going through the motions. You’re sort of aimless, right, a rudderless ship, we don’t want to be a rudderless ship, we want to want to have that rudder going, keeping us moving in the right direction, okay?

You’ve got to get you got to practice this. But when you practice it and you keep living into that future version of yourself, you get good at it, just like anything else that you practice you the more you practice it, the more it becomes the reality that you want for yourself. But you’ve got to start thinking about it and start feeling it and really living into who you’re becoming.

And then it just becomes inevitable. Getting there is just like, ‘Oh, of course, I’m going to get there because it’s just this is who I am and this is what I do.’ Remember, you always get what you focus on. You always get more and more of what you focus on. So focus on who it is that you really want to become. Cool. You got this, my friends.

And listen if you ever want a little help out with this just go over to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and let’s talk about hitting that easy button on all this for you. Alright love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll 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.

91. Breaking the Habit of Being You

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One of the most important principles that I teach here on the podcast, and work on with my clients is the principle of becoming the best, healthiest, most badass version of yourself. This is not …

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Podcast Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one’s from Apple’s mama who says, “Continual and incremental steps for real results. This is my go-to podcast to listen to while running. Patrick teaches not only mindset but also actionable and incremental steps for continual health improvement. Thank you, Patrick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

69. 5 Ways You Sabotage Your Own Success

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Honestly, there are probably more than 5 ways you sabotage your own success, but in this special edition of the Running Lean podcast, I’m talking about the BIG ones. I coach a lot of runners on …

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Podcast Transcript

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 69 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray and today I’m talking about five ways you sabotage your own success. Honestly, there are probably more than five ways you sabotage your own success. But in this special edition of the Running Lean podcast, I’m talking about the big ones.

So I coach a lot of runners on nutrition, weight loss, overall health, and fitness. And I see the same self-sabotaging behavior over and over again. Why do you do these things to yourself? Why can’t you ever seem to make any significant progress towards your goals? Why do you always seem to sabotage your own success?

So I mentioned that this is a special edition of the podcast because this episode is actually a recording of a live coaching session that I did recently over in the Running Lean podcast community on Facebook. So each Sunday, I go live in the Facebook group, and I do a little coaching and a little training, maybe dole out a little tough love.

And this particular session that I did last week received a lot of really positive feedback. So I thought it would be fun to share it with you here on the podcast. Speaking of the Facebook group, come and join us if you haven’t done so already. This is a group of runners that all share similar health and fitness goals.

It’s a great place to feel supported, encouraged, inspired, motivated, you can ask questions and get answers. And it’s just a fun group of people. We have a lot of fun over there. So just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. And click join us.

Here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one came from Karen recently and she says, “Top notch. Each week when I listen to Patrick’s podcast, I feel like he is directly talking to me. He is full of knowledge and truly has a passion for his field and his followers. His messages motivate me to sign up for my first half marathon and give up sugar and begin food journaling.”

That’s a lot of awesome stuff, Karen. Awesome, awesome, awesome. You won’t be disappointed. Thank you so much, Karen. And I would love it. If you would submit a five-star review of the podcast, wherever you listen to your podcast, whether it’s Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Play, whatever it is, wherever you can leave a review, I would love it means a lot to me if you did that. So thank you. Thank you very much for doing that.

And you know, I know I talk a lot about all this diet, nutrition, weight loss, even self-sabotage, talk about all this stuff. And it can seem it can be awesome and super helpful. But also it can feel a little overwhelming. And you probably want to know like, how do I just how do I get started? How do I make all this work for me? Well, I got you covered as a one-on-one coach.

This is what I do, I can help you make sense of all this. I can help you apply these principles to your own life. Listen, we’re all so different. We all have different metabolisms. We all have different body types, different genetics, different goals, and different likes and dislikes. And there’s just not one approach that works perfectly for everyone. It would be awesome.

If there was it would make my job a lot easier, but there’s not okay, there’s not one way. So the way my coaching works is we work together you and me to work up a metabolic profile for you. We clearly define your health and fitness goals. Then we put together a plan that is specifically tailored for you specifically designed to help you reach your particular goals.

I work with people who want to lose 30 pounds and run their first marathon. And they know they can’t do it carrying around all that extra weight. I work with people who want to lose 60, 80, or 100 pounds and can’t even run anymore. They just want to get back to running. They have to fix their diet first.

I work with some people who are already lean, and they want to get stronger and more powerful and maybe qualify for Boston or run their first ultra-marathon. And they understand the hugely important role that nutrition plays in their performance. So whatever your weight loss goals or running goals, I’m here to help you get there to learn more and apply for coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply.

Okay, so like I said earlier, this is a recording of a recent Facebook Live I did over in the face Running Lean community on Facebook. So I’m just going to play this episode right now. I think you’re gonna love it. I got a lot of great feedback on this. So I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.

Hey, there Facebook friends. Hey there Running Lean community on Facebook. How’s everybody doing this fine Sunday afternoon? I hope you’re all enjoying the weather. I hope you’re getting some good weather wherever you are. Here in Cincinnati, it is a beautiful day. I have been going pretty hard with the running lately. And so I decided to take a day off today.

Usually, I don’t run on Sundays anyway. But I took a long walk today and listened to some cool podcasts. And I was just walking through the park and the sun was shining. And I just took my time and went all over the place ended up being about three miles or so. And man, just gorgeous outside. So if you haven’t been outside yet, get out there it is. Amazing.

So here’s what we’re doing, today is Sunday. And that means we’re gonna do a little coaching today, I got a little bold, tough love for you guys today. Okay. Because here’s what I want to talk about. We tend to sabotage our own success in multiple ways. There are many, many, many ways that we sabotage our own success.

And I’ve talked about a few of these things before, or I’ve talked about other ways that we sabotage ourselves. But I came up with these five because I’ve been seeing some trends recently with people and I’m like, you know what, I’m going to talk about this, I’m going to kind of point out these five things that we all do, I’ve done them. And but these five things are like they’re sabotaging what we want for ourselves. They’re thwarting our progress, and we need to make some changes, okay.

So what I’m going to do here is talk about these five things today, and hopefully, through the process, give you some insights and some tips to maybe not do these things, and some things to do instead. For the new people, I want to make sure that you guys are subscribed to the podcast. So definitely do that.

Even if you’re not new if you just haven’t subscribed to the podcast, what’s the matter with you? Get on that. It’s good. It’s good stuff. And here’s an ask for you guys today. I would love it if you could leave a review of the podcast. So I don’t know what platforms allow reviews other than Apple podcasts.

So if you’re an Apple podcast user, and you scroll down to the podcast, and you just tap the five stars, because you know five stars is that’s what you want to do right there. Right? And just leave a quick review. Letting other people know how much you love the podcast would mean a lot to me.

You know, I put a lot of work into this stuff that I do for you guys here. And occasionally I’m gonna ask you for things like, Hey, if you could leave a review, that would be amazing. And I’ll take you like two minutes. And it would really mean a lot to me. Okay. So Apple podcasts, leave a review, that would be awesome.

Also, if you haven’t done it already, there’s a free training that I created at the top of this group, it’s called How to Become A Lean Running Machine. Definitely check that out. It lays the foundation for the stuff that I teach here in this in this group and on the podcast, too. Okay. I also want you to participate in this group.

So if you’re one of these people that that comes and kind of lurks around, you’re just kind of like seeing what everybody’s doing and maybe get a little bit of inspiration and things like that. That’s awesome. But I would encourage you to participate to share a post, tell us a little something about yourself. What are you working on? What are you trying to accomplish? How can we help you?

Tell us something good, maybe you had a win this week, share that with us, we would love to hear about stuff like that or a struggle. And we can help you with that too. And encourage other people, post on other people’s comments on other people’s posts, you know, and engage with the group okay.

And then the last thing we’ll talk about before we get into today’s topic is that people have been asking how to directly work with me like I get messages on Instagram messenger and Facebook Messenger asking what do I do? If you want to work with me directly and have me as your coach this is probably the most effective way to get the results that you want with your health and fitness to make big changes and make them last to quit. Get a new mindset so that you can do this thing. Stick to your diet, you know, run a marathon, whatever it is you want for yourself.

I’ll help you, I’d love to help you, this is what I do. So all you got to do is go to runningleancoaching.com and then click on the link at the very top that says, work with me. And then you’ll have to apply and we’ll get on a Zoom call, and we’ll talk about it and see what your goals are, and see if this is actually a good fit for you.

But I would love to work with you this is what I do. This is what I’m good at. What I’m really good at is helping people figure out their nutrition dialed in their nutrition to support their weight loss to support their overall health and fitness and to support their running. And there are a lot of weight loss coaches out there, but they don’t have this focus on runners.

You know, I think they just think that runners are like good to go like, Oh, they run so they’re fine. Hey, we’re not fine. We need help, too. So that’s what I’m here for. Okay, just go to runningleancoaching.com and then click on work with me. I’d be glad to have a conversation with you and see if this is a good fit for you. It’s not a good fit for everybody. I totally acknowledge that. But for those that want the help. It’s pretty awesome.

So here’s my question for you guys as everybody’s jumping on. Hi, Amy. Hi, Joy. Hi, Candace. Hi, Laura. Hello, everybody. It’s so good to see you guys on here. I love this so much. It’s so fun. One of the reasons I created this Facebook group is because I wanted to be able to communicate with you guys.

You know, and the podcast is such a one-way thing I just talked him to a microphone and then you listen to it. But this is like we get to ask questions, and I get to hear from you and I get to engage with you. So this is really fun. I love this. And here’s my question for you today. All you people that are listening live right now, I want you to answer this question for me because I really want to know, what’s one way you sabotage yourself?

Like what is one thing you do that always sabotages your own success? How do you screw it up for yourself? What is it that you do that sabotages your success? Answer that question in the comments. And I’m going to get to those in a minute. Because I want to, I do want to answer those questions.

And I want to hear what you guys have to say about this. Because I want to actually address some of the things that you talk about here. And maybe what you have to share isn’t one of the five things that I’m gonna be talking about. So I would love to hear what you guys got. Okay, so what’s one way you sabotage your own success?

And this could be anything, it could be with work-related stuff with health and fitness with, you know, trying to stick to a diet, lose weight, trying to stick to a workout schedule, whatever it is, okay? Let me know. Alright, so while you guys are thinking about that, I’m going to dive into the topic here. Okay.

So the reason I’m talking about this like I mentioned at the top of this live is that I’ve been seeing some trends from people lately, I have a lot of conversations with people every single day. And whether they’re my clients or potential clients, or friends, whatever, I talk about this stuff every single day, and this is what I do.

And I hear people and I keep hearing the same things come up. And I ask people this question all the time. Like, why can’t you get x results on your own? How come you can’t seem to make this work for yourself? And I love asking people this question because it really gives me an insight into what people need really, what do they need help with the most?

Okay, so, when I ask that question, like, why can’t you make this work? Like what’s the reason why you haven’t been successful with you know, losing weight in the past? And it really uncovers what’s going on with people. And when I ask this question a lot, I start to see some trends. And I’ve noticed these five things.

So number one, the number one reason but not the number one reason but the first one I’m going to talk about is these are in no particular order. Okay. But the first reason that people seem to sabotage themselves is that they are not living up to their true potential you are capable of so much more.

I know it, other people know it. Other people can probably see it other people have probably told you that before have you ever been told you have so much potential? And you’re like yeah, whatever. That was always me. I always heard that from bosses and teachers and stuff like that. Early on in my life like you have so much potential but you’re not living up to your potential, you’re giving it your all, but you’re not tapping into that potential.

And we sort of carry this through our whole lives, you know, sometimes we get set up early on, and we think that you’re that we’re not capable of much like we can only do so much, we can only make so much money, we can only be so lean, we can only run so far. And I want to call BS on all of that, right here now.

Because like David Goggins talks about this 40% rule, you know, we’re living in about 40% of our potential, we’re living up to about 40% of our potential, most of us about 40%. I don’t know about you, but 40% is below average, and not even mediocre like it’s below mediocre if you ask me.

So the fact that most people in this world are only tapping into about 40% of what they’re capable of, sort of blows my mind a little bit. And I’m here to tell you, that you are capable of so much more than you give yourself credit for. And you’re, you’re hanging back, and you’re waiting for something to happen.

And you’re not going for this thing that you really want for yourself. I can’t tell you how many times I talk to people and I say, what do you really want for yourself, like, who do you want to become? And we have these emotional conversations where they tell me, you know, I’ve been heavy all my life, and I’ve struggled with my weight for so long. And I just want to be this, this lean, fit runner and I can see myself as this, you know, super healthy eater, and that’s what I want to be I want to work out all the time, I want to.

And then and then I say like, okay, now, what are you doing to get there? Nothing. Right? They want more for themselves, but they’re not doing anything about it. They’re only tapping into that 40%. They’re living in about 40%, 60% of the time, they’re like sitting on the couch, eating cookies, thinking about being healthy, and running is not going to work for you. Okay. 40% is not good enough. Not for me, not for you. Not for any of us. Okay?

Now, I’m not saying we got to live up to 100%. Like, we’re capable of so much more than we can even fathom. Yeah, but you know what it gets scary. Right? It’s scary when you start tapping into that untapped potential. What about 60%? What about 70%? What if you aim for just like 10% better?

What could you accomplish? If you could tap into just 10% more of your own tapped potential? Think about that. This is powerful. Right? I am always striving for more I say this all the time, like my goal in life. My goal in life is not to be happy. My goal is to become more. My goal in life is not to, you know, make a million dollars or you know, be this like zen you know, person with no worries or anything like that.

I want to become more and becoming more means that we get uncomfortable means we deal with unhappiness, sometimes we deal with all these human emotions, right? And, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with doing what it takes to become more. Okay, so for me, I’m always moving in the direction of more. So I don’t know what percentage I’m tapping into. But it’s more than 40% at this point in my life. Right? And it requires you to like, dig down deep sometimes. And get there but you can do it. Okay.

So, the first thing I want to say to you is you’ve got to want to become more. You have to want that for yourself. Okay, I want that for you. You need to want it for you. Right, so 40% It’s not good enough, right? Let’s go for more. Okay, that’s number one. That’s number one. I’m just looking to see if there’s anything I want to talk about here. Huh?

Amy says, thinking that if I go off my plan with one thing then I may as well have a free pass to eat whatever I want for the rest of the day. Yep. Laura says I tell myself I’m just gonna have a bite of my kid’s snack and then I say eff it. I’m just going to finish the bag now. Yep.

Marla says rewarding myself with a treat after each workout. Yep. Debbie says doubting my abilities. Yes. Right there. Right there, Debbie is the 40% talking, okay? You’re doubting your abilities, you’re doubting your capability to give more to become more. Okay, so these are great you guys.

And this whole idea of like rewarding ourselves, like, I’m going to eat really healthy. And then, you know, once I do that for a couple of weeks straight, I’m gonna reward myself with a really crappy meal of a bunch of sugar. Does this make any sense? No, it doesn’t make any sense. Okay?

It’s like saying to the alcoholic, hey, you haven’t drank for like three months, you know what you should do? Reward yourself and get good and drunk? Not a good idea. Okay. Okay, so number one is not living up to your true potential, 40%. We need more.

Number two is procrastination. I’ll do it later. We say this all the time. This is one thing that I hear from people. And it drives me crazy. Because again, I say like who is it that you want to become? All I want to become is this healthy person, I want to become this fit person. I want to lose this weight. I want to get started. I’m like, so ready to do this. Okay.

All right, let’s do it. Let’s do some coaching. Like, you know, it costs a little bit of money. You know, let’s do it. Let’s sign you up. Let’s get started. You know, let’s, oh, you know what? I’m, I’ll do it later. I don’t really have the money right now. I don’t really have the time right now. You know or I’ve got something going on. I’ve got this project at work, I need to finish first, you know, or, or my daughter’s getting married. Here.

Like, I mean, there are a million excuses, we can come up with why we need to put something off until later. Later, later, later. I’m going to do it later. We just keep saying that to ourselves, though. You never get anywhere, you never do anything later. You might as well just say never. Okay, later is the killer of more hopes and dreams.

Because you’re delaying something, you know, you feel good about something right now you feel motivated, you want to take action today. And then you say, you know what, though, maybe later I’ll do it. And I’ll think about it. And then you end up just never doing anything, you never take action. And then you just feel bad about yourself.

I see this a lot. I see people that you know, want to work with me or they want to get healthy, they want to lose weight, they want to run a marathon. And then, you know, we talk about that. And we talk about what it’s going to look like to do that. And a lot of times they’re just not ready. I get that.

But you know what, when do you get ready? When are you going to have the time, when you’re going to be ready, when it all one or all the stars gonna align so that there’s nothing else going on where everything’s just gonna work out perfectly? It’s not gonna happen, I promise you, it’s never ever, ever going to happen.

And you know, this idea of like, not having enough money, either. I get that and to invest in something like, like a coach to help you. It’s a little bit of money. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s a little bit of money. And a lot of people say I don’t have the money. When I have some extra money, I’m going to do this for sure.

When do you have extra money? Do you guys ever have extra money? I don’t. I never have extra money. I wish I did. That would be amazing, but I never do. I wish I had extra money. I guarantee though, if your car needed, like new tires, or if your dishwasher broke, and you needed a new one you could come up with, you know, $1200 bucks today to do that. Right?

Because that’s important to you and like, you know, you’ve got to have transportation or you got to have a dishwasher. Actually, you don’t have to have a dishwasher. I have a dishwasher. You can see it right back there. I haven’t used it in a year, because it’s just me. What am I gonna do put one dish in there and turn it on? No, by the time I fill it up. I don’t have any dishes to use. So I just wash them as I go.

Anyhow, you can get along just fine without a dishwasher, but I guarantee you, you could find the time the money whatever you need to do for things that you deem important to you. What about your health? Isn’t that important to you? You? What about losing that 50 pounds? Isn’t that important to you?

What about getting to become that person you ultimately want to become? Isn’t that important to you? I say yes, it is. Let me give you an example of something that I just did recently because this was one of these things where I was procrastinating on this, okay.

I haven’t taken a vacation. I haven’t taken any time off from work in like a year and a half like I have not stopped. I have not been out of Cincinnati, in a year and a half. Okay. And I know a lot of us are in the same boat, especially since the lockdown, but I’ve been itching to get out of here and take a trip. I love going to the beach.

So I have been thinking about this beach trip. And I was like, ah, when I have more money when I have the time when this happens when that happens. And I finally found myself, you know, procrastinating and saying later and using all these things to delay this thing that I really wanted for myself.

And so today, this morning, I was like, screw it. I’m just gonna take this trip got on Airbnb or VRBO, whatever it was booked to place, got my plane tickets. I’m good to go. It’s all good. I’m going over Memorial Day weekend, I’m going to have a good time going on a little vacation. And I feel so good about it because I stopped saying later. Right?

So if you want something and it’s important to you, you’ve gotta take action on it. Okay, there’s no better time than right now. I promise you. Delay is a killer delay that will kill you. Okay, so stop procrastinating.

Okay, so number three is a good one. I’ve talked a lot about this topic. And number three, the third reason why we sabotage our own success is because we quit when things get uncomfortable. Have you ever quit because something got uncomfortable? I have. I tried so hard to lose weight so many times. And as soon as it got uncomfortable, or I had to do something I didn’t want to do you know, or give up certain foods I didn’t want to give up. I gotta tell you, I just quit. I was like, screw this. If I can’t eat, you know, ice cream, and pizza and tacos all the time? Is it worth it? What is life, if I can’t eat donuts whenever I want to.

Because it’s uncomfortable to make big changes like this, okay. I know people that are training for ultra marathons and training for marathons. And they’re willing to get uncomfortable. Because they know in order to succeed with this thing they want to do you know, if you want to run a 50k or 100 miles.

I’ve got this one friend who’s training for the grand canyon from rim to rim to rim. So you go down and up the other side and then back down and back up again. Right. I don’t know something like 43 miles total, but the elevation gain is crazy. And like you got to do this in one day, you know, got to do it before it gets dark out. And that’s a hell of an ultra to prepare for. You know, do you think he’s getting uncomfortable training for this thing? Absolutely.

He’s running up. He keeps finding more hills around him and he just keeps running up. Okay, today I did six hills or a seven or eight or nine or ten whatever it is, and he keeps increasing the number of hills he’s running. I think it’s awesome and sounds terrible. But he’s like willing to get uncomfortable, right?

Because here’s the thing you guys, all this stuff that you want that you don’t have already is outside your comfort zone. Everything that you want for yourself, but don’t have yet is going to require you to get uncomfortable to get it. Discomfort is the currency for success. Discomfort is the cost. It’s what you have to pay in order to to be successful. In order to accomplish whatever big thing you want to accomplish.

Discomfort is the price you pay. It’s non-negotiable. You have to get uncomfortable. If it was comfortable and easy. You already have it. Anything you want. This person you want to become this person you see yourself as this thin, lean, strong runner, this powerful runner who’s lost all the weight and feels amazing about herself. That’s going require you to get uncomfortable to get there.

Are you willing to do that? Most people say yes. But most people, when it starts to really get uncomfortable quit. Most people can’t handle it once they get out there. And when I tell people things are gonna get uncomfortable, they say I’m all in, Patrick. Like yeah, let’s do it. I’m ready to get uncomfortable.

And then things start to get uncomfortable. And they’re like, well, well, well, well, that this is not what I signed up for. I’m like, hey, remember, I said it was gonna get uncomfortable. This is what we’re talking about. It is literally uncomfortable. Right? We don’t like it. We don’t like to be uncomfortable.

But you guys, whatever it is you want it’s going to require you to go through some period of discomfort to get it. Okay. Losing weight is not an easy thing to do. For most people, the way I do it with people, there’s a short discomfort period, there’s a short, uncomfortable period. But it’s pretty short, though. I promise you. But then I have this philosophy with my clients, and I want losing weight to be enjoyable and relatively effortless. And fun. Yes, fun.

We don’t have to suffer through our weight loss journey. We don’t have to suffer our way to good health. It doesn’t have to be that way. It can be fun. It can be enjoyable. Is there some discomfort? Yes. Do we also work on making it enjoyable and fun? Yes, we do. Okay, but you have to be willing to endure the discomfort and not quit. Most people can’t do that though.

And I get it. It’s hard. It’s hard to do. It’s hard to do on your own. I acknowledge that. This is one of the main reasons I come on here and talk to you guys is one of the main reasons I have this podcast. This is the main reason that I do my one-on-one coaching with people is because when it gets uncomfortable, most people quit.

When things aren’t working, when they face challenges, when maybe their weight loss stalls or their running sucks for a period of time. Most people just quit. They’re like, I can’t do it. It’s too hard. But when you got me there, in your cheering squad, I’m your little cheering squad. But I’m also there to kick in the butt a little bit and keep you moving with love. Right?

There’s a little, a little tough love going on. And kind of like what I’m doing out here today. You know, just a little bit of tough love. Right? Okay, so let’s recap where we are. So far, five ways we sabotage our success number one, not living up to your true potential, 40% – it’s not good enough. Number two, procrastination later, is the killer of hopes and dreams. Three, we quit because it gets uncomfortable.

Number four, you don’t honor the commitments you make to yourself. This is a big one, you guys, if you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you say I’m not eating cookies today, don’t eat cookies today. Because here’s what happens. Every time you say I’m not going to eat cookies today, and then you eat the cookies anyway; you train your brain that you can just do whatever the f you want.

Anytime you feel like you have this urge to eat some cookies, you’re training your brain that you’re just gonna reward that urge with some cookies. And you’re gonna get really good at that. Right, you get good at what you practice, right? When you don’t honor the commitments you make to yourself. You just get good at not honoring commitments, you get good at giving in. You get good at caving under the pressure. Okay. This will definitely sabotage your success.

One of the big, big, big things you have to do if you’re going to take on something big, like losing too much weight training for some big event, whatever it is, like you have to got to have a plan, right? You got to have a plan. And then you have to commit to the plan. And then you have to follow through with the commitment.

That’s the important part is the following through with the commitment. Anybody can have a plan. Anybody can put it on their calendar. Anybody can write it down on a piece of paper. Do you do it? Because if you don’t, you’re just going to fail. You’re going to continue to fail after time and time and time again. And you’re going to train yourself that it’s okay to do that. This is not good enough, in my opinion. You have to honor the commitments you make to yourself when you do when you say I’m not eating cookies today, and then, you know, there comes a point in the day where you’re like, I would really love some cookies, but not going to do it.

When you interrupt that pattern, when you don’t eat the cookies, even though you want them, oh, that’s cool, because now you’re training your brain that you don’t reward it. When it wants something like that. Then you’re training your brain, hey, I honor commitments I make to myself, this is beautiful when you can do this good.

You guys, when you practice doing this over and over and over again. And it takes a lot of practice. But when you get good at this, you build trust in yourself. You build resilience, you build confidence. And you build this relationship with yourself that like you can do any frickin thing that you want to. Okay?

Because when you give in all the time, you’re just telling yourself, you’re like that 40% rule, right? You’re just like giving in. I can’t do it. I’m not good enough. I can only give about 40% 60% of the time, I’m just gonna say screw it. No, no, no, no, you got to honor those commitments you make to yourself. Okay, when you do you build so much confidence and trust in yourself. And it’s like, that’s where you become this total badass, right?

Because, you know, you can show up and you can get through anything, you go out to dinner with friends. And they’re all like eating bread, or dessert, or whatever it is, you can be like, I’m good. I don’t need any of that stuff. I don’t eat that anymore. And they’re gonna be like, whoa, what is up with you? What’s gotten into you? And you’re gonna be like, I’m good over here.

You know, I’m just gonna eat this big ol’ steak. Alright, so we’re either building ourselves up and building up resilience and building up confidence in ourselves, or we’re like tearing ourselves down. We’re like letting ourselves down every day, we got to stop doing that. Okay?

Honor the commitments you make to yourself. It’s great that you make commitments to yourself, honor those commitments, okay? Train yourself that you can do this over and over again, right? Practice doing that, okay.

And then the last way that we sabotage our own success. And this one, this is a big one. And this is a very, this is a tough one. But here’s what we do we compare ourselves to others, we have to stop doing that. We have to stop comparing ourselves to others. There’s a lot of pressure out there to look a certain way, be a certain way. Especially in the health and fitness industry, health and fitness world.

You know, if you scroll through Instagram, you’re gonna see, you know, dudes with just rockhard, six-pack abs and giant arms and, you know, super lean, thin women. And whatever it is, you know, lots of big butts, you know, this is what Instagram looks like when I scroll through my feed or whatever. And it’s really easy to compare ourselves to others and look and say, oh, that person looks better than me. Or that person can run faster than me, or that person is thinner than me. Or that person was able to lose the weight easily, and so hard for me.

We can get really down on ourselves when we compare ourselves to other people. Here’s the thing we don’t really know what’s going on with anybody else. I think some of these posts that people put on Instagram, then look at me, and they, they’ll be like, eight weeks difference. And it’ll be like this big, you know, very overweight person, and then this completely rockhard person over here, you know.

They lost all the weight and I’m just like, I don’t know about that. You know, I’ve worked with a lot of people we help people lose a lot of weight and I’ve never seen anything quite like that. So anyway, I think there’s some of that is a little BS but here’s the thing.

We have this like ideal out there that we’re trying to all aspire to. And we’ve just got to stop doing that. All right, because you the way you are right now in this moment, I’m going to tell you something, you better listen to me right now. You are amazing. You’re beautiful. I love you and you are just capable of so much. I love you exactly the way that you are because you are freaking amazing and unique. And you have so much to offer. That’s what I believe about you.

You need to believe that about you too and stop comparing yourself to somebody else. I’ve done it. I look at all these other people you know, I’m working on getting like a little more built-up or whatever but I have little arms still. You know I’m not a big giant burly dude. I’m working on it though. Right?

But I don’t compare myself to other people. I know that I’m amazing just the way that I am right now. And I have so much to offer in this world. And I’m not afraid to come here in front of you guys and be vulnerable with you and share this stuff with you. Because I think it’s important.

You know, I’m not comparing myself to what other people are doing. There are other people that do stuff like what I do that, that have these great big podcasts with millions of followers, and they have, you know, they’re coaching people and whatever, I don’t really care, I’m doing things my own way.

I don’t walk around looking at what other people are doing, I try not to, when I’m scrolling through Instagram or Facebook, I’m looking for funny stuff. Usually, I’m looking for funny memes. And I just want to like, get out of my head for a minute and just laugh about something.

I might scroll through the news and just see like, you know if there’s an asteroid coming or anything like that, but for the most part, I don’t, I don’t read the news. It’s too depressing. It’s very negative, I don’t want to get caught up and all that stuff. And I don’t want to get caught up comparing myself to other people. I just want to be here in my own skin, and be comfortable with who I am here today.

Okay, and I want to encourage you to do the same thing. It is totally okay to love yourself exactly as you are right here now. And it is totally okay to love yourself exactly as you are and want to better yourself want to become healthier, want to lose some weight, want to run further run faster like you couldn’t want more for yourself.

But you got to love yourself through that process. You can’t hate yourself thin, you have to love yourself just as you are. Stop comparing yourself to other people, you don’t know what’s going on with them. Also, just keep that in mind. A lot of times we see these people, and we think there have these amazing lives, and they might be miserable inside, you know, you never know what people are going through. Okay.

So when we say we’re not as fast as other people are, we’re not as thin as other people, or we’re not as beautiful as other people. Or we’re not as far along in our weight loss journey as other people. That doesn’t do us any good at all. There’s no point in doing any of that stuff. Okay, so stop doing that. This is my final suggestion for you guys today.

And because it’s serious, like we can really thwart our progress when we keep comparing ourselves, I should be here and I’m not, you know, I should lose two pounds a week, every single week, or I’m a piece of crap. No, you’re not. And no, it’s not supposed to work that way. It’s all over the board as far as how much you’re going to lose or whatever. Don’t compare yourself. Stop doing that. Okay?

So those are five things, you’re not living up to your true potential. Procrastination, we keep saying later. Don’t say later. Do it now. Whatever you want to do start today start now telling you, you’re gonna feel so much better about yourself. If you just take action today. We quit because it gets uncomfortable. We don’t honor the commitments we make to ourselves, we make the commandments, but we don’t honor them. And we compare ourselves to others. Those are the five things, the five biggest ways that we sabotage ourselves.

Okay, so I hope you guys got something out of this today. I’m going to just scroll through a few of these comments really quickly you guys, okay. Lots of good comments, you guys. Let’s see.

Debbie says I’ve been very disciplined for over three years, and I’ve lost 95 pounds. What? That’s amazing, Debbie, so proud of you. Recently, I’ve allowed myself to cave off makes me feel like such a failure. Yeah. Why are you allowing yourself to cave? That’s a question you want to ask yourself? Why are you thinking it’s okay to cave?

And we get into this mindset of like, oh, you know, weight loss is this thing you do and then once you get there, you just do whatever you want. No, it doesn’t work that way. What I do with my clients is I train them well, I help to train them to eat healthy for the rest of their life. All right, it’s a big change that we make. And it’s something that we need to do forever.

Okay, it’s not a short-term thing. It’s like, how can we make this sustainable for the rest of our lives and it’s a little different for everybody. There’s not like one formula that works for every person. But what I do has helped them get to the point where, when they’re done working with me, they know what they need to just stay doing that for the rest of their life. It’s not a short-term thing, it’s not a destination you’re trying to get to, you know, you lost 95 pounds. Debbie, that is so amazing.

Sometimes the harder part is like to keep it off, right? Because you don’t have this mindset of like, I’m trying to lose anymore. And so you can kind of thwart yourself by getting into this mindset of like, I can do whatever I want. I can cave. Okay? Can you though?

Maybe you’re the kind of person that like, shouldn’t cave because whatever that means for you means that you’re gonna start gaining weight again. I know that’s the case for me. If I go back to doing what I was doing before, I’m gonna start gaining weight again. I’m gonna get fat again. I don’t want to be that person anymore. So I’m okay with just doing this. I’ve made this a lifestyle change right.

Baelor says I lost 80 pounds when the pandemic started just by not eating fast food. Okay, that is amazing. That is amazing. Good job. Yeah. Total lifestyle change there. Ballerina mark. Candice was talking about negative self-talk. And yeah, this is something we do. Yeah. Good stuff, you guys. Really good stuff.

And I’m glad you guys are here for this today. I’ll go through and look through if there are any more comments and answer them in the comments myself, okay. But I hope you got something out of this today. And again, if you wouldn’t mind, I would love it. If you could find the Running Lean podcast on Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It means so much to me, just as a way of saying thank you, that would be awesome and amazing. Okay.

So these five things I talked about today, I want to encourage you to stop doing them. Okay? Just like we got to like, shift our mindset, okay. And we got to like, notice that we’re doing these things. That’s just the first step just notice that you do these things, you’ll start to see them, you’ll start to see yourself doing these things.

That is such an amazing first step awareness is so amazing. Once you see that you’re procrastinating, or you see that you’re, you quit because things get uncomfortable or you’re not honoring those commitments to yourself or you’re not living up to your full potential. Are you find yourself comparing yourself to others. When you see yourself doing this, just acknowledge that oh, that’s me comparing myself to somebody else. Oh, this is me not tapping into my full potential. Just be aware. That’s the first step. Right. Cool. Awesome, you guys. Great hanging out with you today.

I’ll drop in the comments and answer other questions. But hope you all have an amazing rest of your day. Get out there and enjoy the beautiful sunshine. If it’s sunny where you are hope it is. Love you. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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 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 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 a lean running machine.

52. Looking Back and Moving Forward

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Contrary to what I see plastered all over social media, I don’t think 2020 was that bad of a year, at least it wasn’t for me. I accomplished more in my life this year than in the last 5 years …

Continue Reading about 52. Looking Back and Moving Forward →

Podcast Transcript

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 52 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, the topic is looking back and moving forward. I want to take a look back over lessons learned in 2020. And I want to talk about what it means to move forward into this new year 2021.

And contrary to what I see, plastered all over social media, I don’t think 2020 was that bad of a year. At least it wasn’t for me. I accomplished more in my life this past year. I feel like I’ve grown more in this past year than I have in like the last five years combined. Yes, I had to overcome a lot of personal struggles this year. And yes, I had to blow past my own limitations this year. But regardless of all that, I’m not choosing to look back on this year as a dumpster fire.

You know, I’m not looking at 2020 as the worst year ever. In fact, I want to say that I think 2020 has been one of the best years of my life. So in this episode, I’m going to be looking back at 2020, I’m going to share some of the valuable lessons that I learned. And I hope you’ve learned as well. And I’ll be focusing on and I’ll be talking about what I will be focusing on as I move forward into 2021. And some things that you can start thinking about focusing on as you move forward into the next year.

Before we get into all that though, please come check us out on Facebook, just search for the Running Lean community, it’s a bunch of cool people is what it is. All hanging out, talking about running, sharing stories, encouraging each other, supporting each other. It’s a very positive group of people. And you should definitely come check us out just search for Running Lean community on Facebook.

Also, I wanted to let you guys know that starting January 3, I’m opening the doors to the Running Lean monthly coaching group. Right. This is my monthly coaching program, where you get access to all of my online courses, including my flagship, my flagship program, called the weight loss training course for runners, that shows you exactly how to become an efficient fat-burning machine. You also get live coaching calls with me and fellow runners.

So if you want coaching and encouragement and support and accountability, so that you can hit your goals going into this new year, this is the group for you. Also, we’re going to be doing this cool and very powerful goal-setting workshop called achieving the impossible in 2021. That you definitely don’t want to miss so you can find out information about this just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.

I want you to make 2021 your year, make it your best year yet become that badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. Join the monthly coaching group and I will help you get there and so will your other runners. Okay, runningleanpodcast.com/join. Okay, let’s talk about this past year. First of all, I wanted to mention this. This is episode number 52 of the podcast which means that we have now a full year’s worth of podcasts if you listen to one each week. So the first episode came out the first week of January last year.

So we are coming up on the anniversary. But basically, we’ve got a whole year of podcasts under our belt. Oh my gosh, that is so fun. This is very exciting. You know, most podcasters when they start out. I think the average is something like they get to like episode number seven, and then they just quit.

That’s not how I roll. That is not how I roll. So I feel good about the content that I’m sharing with you guys. I hope you enjoy these podcast episodes. I know I have a lot of fun making them. I love sharing these ideas. And I hope it’s helpful in some way. And if you find it helpful, you could always hit up iTunes and leave a quick review and tell everybody else how much you love it.

But yeah, a whole year of podcasts. That’s very, very cool. So let’s talk about lessons learned. Let’s talk about the lessons that I’ve learned in 2020 and this is not everything I’ve learned. But these are some of the key lessons that I learned that I want to share with you that I think you can probably relate to.

So the first lesson I learned in 2020, was that I am stronger than I thought I was and that I am a much stronger person than I give myself credit for. You know, I struggled a lot with adversity at the beginning of this year, I was going through a divorce, I got a couple of work furloughs, I got furloughed from two jobs. There was a lot of financial insecurity happening in my world. We were in, we had just started this global pandemic, and everything was shutting down. And it was this was hard.

For me, this was a very challenging time. For me, this was a very emotional time for me. And here’s the thing, though, I can look back on all that now and say, wow, I made it through all of that. And I feel like I’m in a better place now. I feel stronger now than I did at the beginning of this year, for sure. I feel like I’m a different person now than I was the beginning of 2020.

And all that emotional stuff that I had to deal with, I had to learn how to kind of experience all those emotions, how to feel my feelings. And I learned also that, you know, your emotions can’t kill you. That it’s just a feeling you feel in your body. And they do pass, sometimes it takes a while.

But things like, you know, going through a divorce, that was very tough on me, it forced me very much forced me out of my comfort zone. Right, I was kind of forced to start over. Right here I was on my own and just got to figure everything out again, and starting from scratch in a way.

But what was cool is that I decided early on this year, that I wasn’t going to let this break me. I wasn’t going to let this thing that was happening in my life. You know, damage me or, or weaken me, I was going to get through it. And I was going to be stronger on the other side of that.

It’s like when you go to the gym, and you and you, you have to lift weights and like tear down your muscles in order to build them back up again, right? It’s kind of the same thing. Sometimes you have to go through this tough stuff, mentally and emotionally. So that you can kind of build that mental and emotional strength that you need to get stronger.

Because, you know, if everything’s just going hunky-dory in your life, you don’t have to really work those mental and emotional muscles, right? So, this kind of adversity that I was going through these tough times that I was going through, forced me to become mentally and emotionally stronger. I had to endure some pain.

But I decided I wasn’t going to wallow in it, I wasn’t going to indulge in it. I was going to allow that pain to be there, process it, and move through it. And I found out something interesting about me that I can get through a lot of stuff. I’ve been through a lot of stuff in my life. I’ve quit drinking, I went, that was my second divorce. But I had cancer, I’ve been divorced twice, I quit drinking, I was you know, drinking too much and had to stop that was very challenging. All these things that I’ve gone through. And each time I go through something like that, I come out on the other side. I feel like I get a little bit stronger.

And this year, there was a lot going on, then I think I got much stronger. I think I’m much stronger than I thought I was. I don’t give myself enough credit sometimes for how strong I am. You know, and earlier this year, I would have told you that I can’t handle this. There were times where I was literally like thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to do here. I can’t handle this.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been there in that place. It’s a terrible place to be, honestly feels terrible. But I did handle it. Somehow I managed to get through one day at a time. And then here I am, you know 12 months later, and I feel amazing today. I’m in a really good place today.

And I kind of look back at these tough times and say I’m sort of glad that happened. Now, isn’t that crazy that we can say that? Like we go through things that are terrible, and we wish for anything that they could just be different. Just make all this pain go away. But that’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. That’s how you become more of who you want to be. So that was a very, very profound lesson that I had to learn this year, that I am much stronger than I give myself credit for.

Another big lesson I learned this past year, is all about what I can and what I can control. So here’s what I’ve learned that I can control: I can control my own thoughts, my own feelings and my own actions, what I think, how I feel, and what I do, that’s what I can control. You know, what I can control.

Everything else that I didn’t just mention. That includes what other people think, what emotions other people have, when other people do it, that includes what other people think about me, or how they feel about me? Or what they do or don’t do to me, you know, all this stuff? Like? It sounds so simple, right? And I think we all kind of understand this intellectually, right?

That you can’t control other people, but do you believe it? Do you really believe it? Do you live it? Or are you always just wishing people would do things your way? I know, that’s the way I was living for a long time. I was a pro, I tried to control other people, especially my partner for the last nine years.

You know, I didn’t really see it at the time. But looking back on it, I can, I can very clearly see. I was always trying to get her to think and act my way. And if she would just do that, everything would be fine. Right? If they would just do things our way then everything would just be perfect.

But trust me, I have to tell you something, it does not work. The only person that was miserable and frustrated all that time was me. Okay, so really, I had to take control of the things that I could control my own thoughts, feelings, and actions.

And this was how I was able to finally lose weight. I mean, this is how I was able to, you know, do things like run a marathon this year and run an ultra marathon this year. Because I wasn’t blaming other people.

And that leads me to my next lesson, the next lesson I learned this past year, which is that not only do I know what I can and can’t control, but I’ve learned how to take radical responsibility for everything in my life. Radical responsibility for everything in my life. I have this t shirt. And it says in giant, a black T shirt, it says in giant white letters, it’s all my fault.

And some people see that and they don’t understand what it means. But here’s what it means. It means that everything I have in my life, everything that’s happening to me every result that I get in my life, whether it’s good or bad, it’s all my fault. You know, if I’m having a good day, that’s my fault. If I’m having a bad day, it’s my fault.

And here’s the thing, people think, oh, that’s terrible. How’s everything your fault? But I have to tell you, this is bad news. Yeah, but it’s also good news. It’s bad news. Because, well, here’s the thing, you can’t blame anybody else anymore. For how you feel. Now things are going with you. It’s good news because you get all your power back.

You are in control. Right. And this kind of goes along with taking control of your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, taking radical responsibility for everything that you have in your life. So when I’m constantly blaming other people, and I did this for so long, you just you’re in a place of blame.

You’re in a place of shunning responsibility, everything is happening to you, and you have no control. It’s a very disempowering place to be. So for example, when I found myself 40 pounds overweight at the beginning of this past year, I was trying to figure out how to lose weight. I was trying all these different things.

And you know, one of the things that I remember thinking to myself was, and she was my partner at the time, you know, she would just stop stressing me out all the time. I could build and stick to my eating plan. You know, if, if things were just different here in this relationship, maybe I wouldn’t be so stressed out all the time. And I could just stay on track here. I wasn’t taking ownership of my actions. And I wasn’t taking ownership of the results either.

Because for the past few years, I had kept putting on weight and kind of blaming other people for that very disempowering place to be in giving all my power away to somebody else. But when I decided to take responsibility, when I decided to be the cause of all of my results, in other words, I’m looking at myself in the mirror and looking at these extra 40 pounds on me, I’m like, this is your fault. This is your fault.

This is a very empowering place to be. Because now I have the power to change that. But when you’re always blaming somebody else for where you are, you give all your power away. They’re in control, you’re giving control to somebody else, this is not a good idea. And I hear this a lot of times from clients who tell me why they can’t stay on their eating plan. And they give me all these excuses.

And they talk about, you know, work is very stressful, or, you know, my husband is very unsupportive, or, you know, I just had a bad day, or whatever it is, and there is always there all external circumstances, people, usually other people, my boss yelled at me, my husband was being a jerk, whatever it is. And they’re basically saying, Okay, I can’t do what I really want to do here my life because of what somebody else said.

And then that’s just a very victim kind of place to be and you don’t want to live your life that way. You know, when I stopped blaming other people, and I started asking myself, Hey, okay, why have you gained 40 pounds? What are you going to do? How can I take 100% responsibility for where I am? And for where I want to be? How can I take 100% responsibility and make this happen for me? How can I lose this weight? What am I going to do?

It doesn’t matter what other people think, or other people say, or other people do. None of the other stuff matters. I wanted to be the cause, not the cause of where I am, the cause of where I wanted to be. How can I make this all my fault? This is a crazy mindset shift.

Honestly, think about this, if you stop blaming, and just start taking responsibility for everything in your life. How good running is going for you whether or not you’re injured. If you’re losing weight or not, if you stay on your food plan or not. How you’re doing with work with your business, with your kids, with your relationships.

When you take 100% responsibility, it is a game-changer. It’s a crazy, crazy mindset shift. Not something a lot of people think about. People just want to blame others all the time. You don’t have to do that. Big, big lesson learned for me this year. Here’s another one.

This one looking back on it, I was like, I didn’t even realize this is a thing. But here’s the lesson I learned. I can change anytime I want. I can always change my mind about anything. So can you. So I’m 54 years old now. For the past 15 years, I’ve been vegetarian and then plant-based. And this was, you know, working for me. I thought this is the best way to go for me.

Until it kind of stopped working right, I was eating a lot of processed foods, I was eating way too much sugar. I gained all this weight. I was still running a lot but it wasn’t working. Wondering, running was not helping me lose weight. I wanted to feel good about what I was eating. I wanted to just go back to eating real food, whole foods as close to nature as possible food their ancestors would have eaten.

And I decided that I was going to make a big change. And I went back to eating meat again. And I thought like I could never do that like that’s just not who I am. What are people gonna think of me? What am I going to think of myself? You know? And I have to tell you that it was like one of the most liberating things I’ve ever done to just say screw it. I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I’m going to do what I think is best for me. There’s a radical concept. Right?

But I can always change I can change my mind about anything I want at any time, I don’t have to be so dogmatic about this stuff, and that was stressing me out, I felt very dogmatic about being a plant-based athlete, you know. And like I was gonna get ostracized from some club if I started eating meat again.

And you know, there are probably people out there that have like, unfollowed, me or whatever you want to call it, I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing what I think is best for me. So I went back to eating meat again. And I’ve never felt better. I lost the 40 pounds, and I feel great. I’m stronger than ever. Running has been amazing for me this year.

So it really doesn’t matter how old you are, how long you’ve been doing the same things, you can change any time you want. You can change your mind. You can always learn new stuff, you can grow, you can evolve, you can become anything in anyone that you want in your life, you don’t even have to have a good reason to do it. You just have to feel good about it. Okay.

So this was a big one for me. And, and I love this because it’s kind of freeing because it means like I can change again, what am I going to do this year? I don’t know, who knows. But the thing is that we don’t have to be stuck where we are, we can always make different choices and change.

Alright, here’s another lesson I learned. And this is a big one. That failure is not optional. It’s actually required. Now, this might sound counterintuitive, because I know a lot of people, you know, have these T-shirts and memes that say like failure is not an option. And I’m like, no, I think failure is completely an option. I think it’s actually a requirement.

And for me anytime I set out to accomplish some big goal. You know, for example, when I became a fat-adapted runner, this took me a long time. But I felt terrible for a long time, every time I went out for a run. When I stopped eating sugar, I felt terrible. And I had no gas in the tank, you know, my body was not used to running on fat. And it took me a long time before I started feeling better and before running got easier.

But every time I went out there to run, and my legs felt heavy. And I was like, this feels awful. This is not working. This sucks. Like I feel like a failure. This went on for weeks. By the way, I had a lot of what you would call failures. I think it took me like over eight weeks to become fully fat-adapted to where my body was an efficient fat burner. And running started becoming super easy and actually much, much better.

But had I like given up at some point, I’d never be where I am today. You know, I’ve done some pretty amazing things this year. Because I am fat-adapted, you know, I ran a marathon and ran a 50k with zero calories. And was able to do that because I’m such an efficient fat burner.

Now, there’s this quote, I don’t know who said it. But it’s like, every success is built upon a pile of failures. I love that quote. Because what it means is that if you want to accomplish something big if you want to succeed, you have to sort of fail your way there. Now, a lot of people don’t like to even use the word failure.

They’re like, oh, well, that morning, talk about there’s no such thing as failure. And I’m like, yeah, there is; you try something, it doesn’t work, that’s a fail. And it’s fine. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything bad. All it means is that you did something that didn’t work. And I see this with my clients all the time, who are trying to, you know, change their diet, and they’re trying stuff and it’s not working.

And they feel like a failure, and they just want to quit and I’m like, we just learned something that didn’t work. Let’s try something else now. How many times are you willing to fail? Because if you decide ahead of time, that failure is a requirement to succeed, that it’s not optional, that it will happen, you will fail, and that is how you get to that big goal that you want.

Then you learn to embrace the failure. When I set out to do something big I know that there are going to be failures along the way. And that’s cool. I plan on it. I look forward to it now. And I know it sounds stupid. Oh, I look forward to failing, but in a way it’s like let’s get these out of the way. Let’s learn what we need to learn so that I can get to this big goal. So I have learned that failure is not an option. It’s actually required, I’m not afraid of failure. I plan it, I look forward to it. And it’s just part of the process.

You know, another big lesson I learned is that it is the challenges that actually change. So when we go through these big challenges we grow. The harder the challenge, though, the more we grow. I hate that it works that way. But it does. You know, if you just go through tiny little challenges, you grow a tiny, little bit.

But when you have to face big challenges, then you grow in a big way. And I’ve learned to embrace these challenges. And I’ve learned to embrace the discomfort. Because I know that when I do that I become more I become more of who I want to be. And I can’t tell you how many people avoid this. They avoid discomfort at all costs, they want to just stay in their comfort zone. Because it’s scary out there. It’s uncomfortable.

So they only do these little easy, tiny things. But what does that do for you, you don’t really grow, you don’t have this expansion of yourself. So for example, I was going to stay small this year. And halfway through the year, becoming fat-adapted, I’m starting to feel better. I’m running with some friends.

They’re training for a marathon. But I’m like, I’m only doing a half marathon. I don’t do marathons anymore. This is these are too hard. Marathons are too hard. I’m not doing that anymore. And it felt like it was outside my comfort zone. I didn’t run a marathon last year, I ran just one half, or maybe two half marathons last year.

But I haven’t run a full marathon and a couple of years. And it just seemed like something I didn’t want to do. Too hard, too uncomfortable. I didn’t want to go there. But at some point, I just made a decision. You know what? Screw that I want to be more. I want to push myself, I want to see what I could do. I want to blow my own mind.

So you know what? I’m in. I’m going to run this marathon with you guys. So I trained for it. I ran it. It was amazing. And then like seriously, like just about a month later, I find myself running a 50k. And I’m like, okay, well, this is hard. This is something that’s big. And I didn’t think I was going to be doing it again.

I mean, here I am earlier this year thinking I’m never going to run a full marathon again. And I ran a marathon and a 50k within the span of like five weeks. It’s crazy, right? Why? Because I decided that it was these big things that the hard things are what I embraced that I that make me bigger and better.

It’s the big challenges that change us in big ways. In the beginning of this year, I completely changed my diet, you know, I stopped eating all that plant-based stuff, all the processed foods, stopped eating sugar and started eating meat again, and all this stuff. This is a big huge change. This was very challenging for me at first, I didn’t know what to eat, I hadn’t eaten meat in like 15 years.

That big change though is what got me to where I am today. It’s how I became who I am today. It’s why I do what I do today. Because I went through this massive shift in my diet and the way I looked at food, my relationship with food, the way I look at exercise, all of that stuff. The bigger the challenge, the bigger, the change. It’s the challenges that change us, and why not go big?

Alright, that was another amazing lesson I learned. And then one other lesson I learned. And this is the last one I’ll talk about. There were other lessons I learned too. But these are just the key ones, the ones that really stuck out with me. The last one was this. I can do anything I set my mind to. I can do hard things, I can accomplish some big ass goals.

I figured out that if I adopt the right mindset that I can do anything I want. And so can you. You know, for so long, I struggled with my weight. I just felt gross. I looked at myself in the mirror and I was fat. And I felt doughy and I was ashamed of myself. I’m this like ultra runner, and I can’t even button my pants anymore. I didn’t have any love for myself at all. My self-esteem was down the toilet. And every time I tried to lose weight I failed. The struggle was real.

I knew that if I really wanted to lose weight, then if I really wanted to keep it off for good, which I did. I wanted to completely change how I looked at food and everything. I knew that in order to do that I would have to develop this entirely new relationship with food. And so I kind of asked myself, like, what would that mindset look like? Who would I have to become?

If I wanted to have a whole new relationship with food because I knew the only way I was going to sustain this was that I had to change the way I looked at food, the way I thought about food the way I felt about food.

And I was able to do it. But I had to get my mind right first. I had to, I had to, like adopt this new identity of like, I’m a person who eats this way. I was no longer a person who eats four bowls of cereal in the morning, I was a person who eats bacon and eggs. And now this is just who I am. This is the way I eat. This is what I do. It’s a habit, a way of life. It’s simple, easy, effortless, really, it is.

And I feel like there’s this incredible freedom. Knowing that with the right mindset, I can create anything I want in my life, any result that I want, any goal that I want. It all starts and ends with mindset. So I can do anything I set my mind to. And you know what a crappy mindset will get you crappy results every single time. But an expansive positive creative mindset will get you amazing positive results every single time.

So you can do anything you want. Just gotta have the right mindset. So those are the big lessons I learned in 2020. I’m going to take all these lessons and slide into 2021. And armed with these lessons and make this just an amazing year. I’m very excited. And so here’s a couple of things moving forward that I want to talk about. Here are a couple of things I’m going to be focusing on going into 2021.

First of all, I want to focus on the idea of accomplishing the impossible. So I want to do things next year, that seems so big and so crazy, that they just seem impossible. So I have running goals, I have fitness goals, I have business goals, I have personal goals, and I have all these different goals. And for each one of these, I have something that seems impossible for me. Because here’s the thing, why aim for tiny little goals? Because what if you get them? Why don’t you for big, huge, impossible goals? Because what if you get them?

So here’s one of my goals. I’m not going to share all these with you right now. Some of these I’m not ready to share with people. But I am going to share this one because I’ve been posting about it on Facebook. So I have this goal. This is one of the fitness goals I’m going to learn how to do a handstand. So why do I want to do this?

Well, for me, this seems impossible. I think it is super hard. When I see people that can do handstands. I’m like that person is a total badass. It’s super hard. It requires arm strength, shoulder strength, and core strength. It requires balance, and coordination. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of practice. And I’ve never been able to do something like this.

I wasn’t into gymnastics or anything like that, you know. And this is just something that’s way outside my comfort zone and has always seemed impossible for me. But I think it’s just so badass. So I am practicing doing handstands every single day. I’m learning what it takes. I’m practicing a little bit every day. I’m working on building strength, building core strength, building balance, all these things.

And I will be honest with you, I’m failing a lot. This is one of those things where I’m like, literally falling on my face quite often. So and this is just one of my goals. But this is just an example of something that I’ve set out to do. And you know what I’m going to keep you guys posted on the handstand progress and how I’m doing because it is fun.

And I feel like I can get there. It’s going to take a while though. I’m still working on the whole, being comfortable being upside down. Like that just doesn’t feel normal to me. And I’m really off balance. So I’m building my strength but the balance will that’s going to take a while. So think about what you want for an impossible goal.

Maybe you want to run a half marathon or a full marathon. Maybe you want to do your first ultra like a 50k or maybe you want to do like something you’ve never thought possible like run 100k or 50 miles or 100 miles, maybe you want to lose a lot of weight. Instead of thinking, oh me, I could probably lose 10 pounds, why not shoot for like 30 pounds, or 40 or 50 or 100 pounds.

Maybe like, you want to quit eating sugar, totally get off of that or quit drinking alcohol. Whatever it is. It should be big, it should be something that feels impossible for you. But I want you to think about that, because I don’t want you to, like settle for some small goal, some small accomplishment, I want you to think big.

Think about something that seems way outside your comfort zone. And then I want you to go all-in on that goal. Because you know what you can do anything you set your mind to, why not set it on something big. So going into 2021 accomplishing the impossible.

That is one thing I’m really focused on. I’m also going to get even better at failing, like, since failing is how we succeed, I’m gonna get really good at failing to embrace a lot of failure, I’m going to anticipate it plan on it, and build up a huge pile of failures with everything that I do.

Because I know that every time I fail, I move on. And for example, this handstand thing I’m doing is a lot of failures, I am literally falling on my face or my butt like many times a day. It doesn’t scare me as much it scared me at first, like falling and stuff like that. But now I’m kind of getting the hang of it.

And I just think it’s hilarious that I’m this like grown man like trying to do something and just falling down and just cracking myself up. But the more I do it, the better. I’m getting at it. Like the more I do it. The stronger I get, the more I do it and fail, the more I learn how not to do it, and what doesn’t work. And I’m getting better. And I’m making progress.

So failing is something I’m just going to embrace even more, and I want to get really good at failing. And then the other thing about this coming year is that I want to continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to change and continue to become more of who I want to be.

I love, love, love learning. I’m always reading books. I’m always learning something new. I always want to expand who I am. You know, I said this earlier, like I’m a different person now than I was a year ago. And I look back over that. And I can point to all the reasons why all the challenges I’ve faced the books, I’ve read the podcasts, I’ve listened to the people I’ve coached.

All the training that I’ve done, the certifications I’ve gotten, all the stuff that I’ve done and learned has helped me to grow and change and become who I am today. I am not the same person today, as I was at the beginning of this year. And I don’t want to be the same person at the end of 2021 that I am right now.

So I want to be more. Very, very excited about this next year. I really am. I can’t wait to see what I can do. I can’t wait to see what you can do. So here’s the thing you get to make 2021 Whatever you want it to be for you. Why not make it like the most amazing year of growth yet for yourself? Because you know what?

You get to decide, take radical responsibility for all of your results make the impossible happen next year. What would that look like for you? What would it look like to go all-in on yourself on some big-ass goal? How would that feel? Does that scare you a little bit? It should scare you because that means you’re kind of getting out of your comfort zone. This stuff scares me to do it anyway.

Because when you get out of your comfort zone, you push past that fear and everything. That’s where you become more, that’s where all the good stuff is. Okay, remember January 3, the Running Lean monthly coaching group opens up we’re going to be doing the achieving the impossible workshop.

We got that weight loss training course for runners that you’ll have access to you’ll learn exactly how to become a lean fat-burning machine. You get those live group coaching calls with me go all in on yourself in 2021 Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join get on the list.

And hey, this has been an amazing year. I look back at this year and I love love. Love it. I love 2020 It was amazing. Thank you guys for listening and supporting me and just being a part of my tribe here. I love each and every one of you keep on Running Lean. 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.

50. How to Create Unstoppable Motivation

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One of the most common issues I hear from clients is they’ve lost their motivation to keep going. They’re doing fine for a while, sticking to their food plan, losing weight, feeling great, and then …

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Podcast Transcript

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 50 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And I can’t believe we’re at episode number 50 already. This is amazing. So today, I’m going to be talking about how to create unstoppable motivation for yourself.

One of the most common issues that I get from my clients is that they tell me they lost their motivation, whether they’re trying to stick to their food plan, or you know, trying to lose weight. Or maybe it’s a running schedule, they don’t do it because they just don’t feel like it.

They feel like they’ve lost their mojo. So they might be doing fine for a while they might, you know, things might be working for a while, but then all of a sudden, their motivation just disappears. Okay, so they no longer feel motivated to stick to the plan. So they find themselves eating whatever, not running, not getting up to run whatever it is, they just end up quitting on themselves.

And if this sounds like you, if you’ve ever done this before, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Whether it’s trying to stick to a food plan or trying to stick to a running schedule, you need motivation to make it happen. And so in this episode, I’m gonna explain where you find that motivation where motivation really comes from. And I’m going to offer some tips on how you can create unstoppable, unstoppable motivation for yourself. So you can continue to stick to your plan so you can hit your goals. Cool.

First, I wanted to just invite you guys to join our Running Lean community on Facebook, if you haven’t already done so, come and hang out with us. It’s fun, we’re doing a fun challenge the month of December, up until January 1, we’re challenging each other and motivating each other or like trying to, to run a mile each day between Thanksgiving Day and New Year’s Day.

And so we’re having a lot of fun over there. I do weekly talks, kind of like the podcast trainings and things like that, in the Facebook group, the Facebook group and this podcast kind of go hand in hand, so come check us out.

Also, I want to let you guys know something that because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this by popular demand, I’m going to be opening the doors to the Running Lean monthly coaching group. So I’m going to be opening the door starting January 3.

This is my monthly coaching program, where you get first you get access to all of my online courses, including the weight loss training course for runners is going to show you exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat burning machine, okay, but you also get live group coaching calls with me and your fellow runners.

So you’ll get the encouragement and support not only from me, but from the group. And this will help you to stay on track. This will make sure you are able to hit your goals for 2021 the accountability factor alone totally worth it.

Also, in January we’re gonna be doing in the group, we’re going to be doing a powerful goal setting workshop so we can all get started on this year on the right track. You do not want to miss this. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and make 2021 your year. Let’s put 2020 behind us.

I want to help you become the badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. And by joining the monthly coaching group, this is how you do it. Okay, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and join the monthly coaching group. It’s going to be awesome.

Okay, so let’s talk about how to create unstoppable motivation. First, let’s talk about what motivation actually is. So if you look up the Google definition of motivation, it says the general desire or willingness of someone to do something. So motivation is a desire hire to do something. That’s it. And motivation or desire is a feeling.

All right. Now, if you have been paying attention here on the podcast at all, I talk a lot about feelings. Let’s talk about our feelings. I talk about how our feelings our emotions are always created by our thoughts. Okay?

So if you’re talking about motivation, as a feeling, because it is created by your thoughts. You don’t find motivation outside of yourself. You don’t get it by looking outside of yourself, you create motivation, with your mind with your thinking. So motivation is not something that’s outside of you. It’s not like somebody grants you motivation.

Motivation is not bestowed upon you by some, you know, Royal Majesty or whatever. Motivation is created by you. It’s 100%. An inside job. Okay, so I just want to make sure we understand this. First and foremost here, motivation is created by you. So you might see something that gets you motivated, hear something that gets you motivated, you might read motivational quotes, or listen to podcasts, listening to this podcast might get you motivated.

But I’m here to tell you something. It’s not because of the words you’re reading or the words you’re hearing. Because those words are just barked, right? They don’t mean anything until you decide they mean something for you. And all of us kind of get motivated a little differently.

Different things will motivate us, depending on where we’re coming from, what our goals are, and all this other stuff. So just know that when you maybe I get motivated by watching documentaries on running, like these people that do these amazing feats, or even stuff like, what’s it called? Free Solo, if you guys haven’t seen this movie, this is crazy.

This guy climbed El Capitan, without any ropes or anything like that, like I would never ever do anything like that. But that is so motivating to me to see somebody do something that amazing, then I think, oh, I’m just gonna go out and run 26.2 miles, no big deal.

But that’s because I’m looking at what this person is doing. And I’m interpreting that with my own thoughts and feelings, I’m looking at it through my lens, my model of the world, and I’m deciding what I want that to mean to me. And I’m deciding that seeing somebody do something crazy, like scaling El Capitan, without any kind of ropes at all, is so huge and so crazy, that what I’m doing maybe running a 50k or something like that is no big deal.

Okay, so that’s what motivation is, it’s not something that’s out there. But what you see out there might, you know, get you it might spur something inside you it might get you start thinking about how this relates to you, or what it means to you, okay? You create your own motivation, so it is important to understand this.

Okay, but and I, but I get it, you know, a lot of us are gonna say, well, I don’t have any motivation, how do I create my own motivation? And that’s what we’re going to be talking about here. So the first thing I want you to do is this, I want you to start taking responsibility for creating your own motivation. Okay.

Instead of using phrases like I lost my mojo, or, you know, I’m not thinking, you know, I don’t, I don’t feel motivated. I just didn’t feel motivated to get a bit. I want you to change that thinking and change what you’re saying to yourself about this, change your language around it.

Maybe start saying things like, I’m not creating my own motivation, or I’m not thinking very much motivational thoughts right now. I want you to take responsibility for creating your own motivation.

Instead of asking something like, why have I lost my motivation? Because that’s a terrible question. It’s a terrible question because your brain will come up with all kinds of reasons why you’ve lost your motivation. But is this really doing you any good?

Now, here’s a better question to ask yourself. How can I create motivation for myself right now? What thoughts can I start thinking that are going to get me to feel motivated right now? Remember, motivation, it’s always an inside job. You taking responsibility for creating your own motivation is so, so powerful.

Because you can create motivation, when you don’t feel like you have any you can create it, you just have to look at your thoughts, you have to look at what you’re thinking. So my first tip for you, is to just take responsibility, take the responsibility and own it.

Know that this is your job to create your own motivation. It’s not anybody else’s job out there. Okay. So that’s my, my first tip is to take responsibility for your own motivation.

And then number two, practice thinking, motivating thoughts. What thoughts get you fired up when you think them? Think about that. I’m a big fan of journaling. So I write a lot. I do this for this reason, because when I can get all the stuff that’s swirling around in my head, and there’s a lot of it, by the way, there’s a lot of thoughts swirling around this head of mine.

But when I can get those out of my head and onto the page, I can look at them, when I can look at them. I have like a snapshot of what my brain looks like in this moment. Okay, this is a very powerful practice.

And if you’re not doing any kind of journaling, even if it’s just thought downloads, which is just dumping out all the garbage, all the whatever thinking your your is going on in your brain, just get it all on the page, even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it’s like, you know, jumbled up and distorted or whatever.

Just get it all out there and look and see what thoughts keep reoccurring for you. It’s very, very powerful to do this. I actually encourage all my clients to journal, they journal, their food plan, they journal what they eat, they journal, their thoughts, and we talk about that stuff. Okay?

Now, you need to start looking at what you’re thinking regularly, and start thinking about what thoughts you’re thinking about your thoughts, right? So meta, you need to think about what thoughts get you motivated. So for me, I think about thoughts like this, like, I am an example of what’s possible for others. This is my mission in life, right? This is like my calling.

And I talked about this. In the last podcast, I talked about being an example of what’s possible. I’m an example of what’s possible. That gets me motivated, that makes me feel like it likes that fire inside me. Right. Another thing that I like to think is that I can do hard things.

And I’ve done a lot of really hard things in the past, you know, I’ve overcome cancer, I’ve changed my health, I was very overweight, and very sick. And I completely changed my life. For the better. I quit drinking. You know, I drank too much. It wasn’t working for me. And I quit that. I quit smoking some years ago, that was hard to do.

So, of course, I’ve done other hard things like, gone through divorce, I’ve, you know, run 50 miles, I’ve run 100 miles, I’ve done an Ironman, I do hard things, I actually choose to do hard things now. Because I know that it’s in that process of doing the hard things that I become more and that I grow.

Thinking that thought right there, ‘I do hard things’, this gets me fired up, it really does. Another thought that I have is just that I got this. You know, this is one of my favorite things to tell my clients is like you got this because I want them to know that they do have it.

Like we all got this we can do this we can get through whatever it is going on. So thinking I got this gives me that feeling of like power and confidence. I got this, I can do this. That gets me motivated. Another one is that this is how I become more. Whatever it is I’m going through right now whatever this tough thing is that I’m looking at, this is how I become more.

This is the way that gets me really fired up so these are some thoughts that I have that I practice on a regular basis. Whenever I need some motivation. These are very meaningful to me. They’re very personal to me and very meaningful for me.

Now I have other thoughts that get me motivated, I can fill a whole page with these thoughts. And I want to encourage you to do that, to do this exercise, I know you probably listen to these podcasts, maybe while you’re running, and you’re like, yeah, whatever, I’m just gonna listen. But I don’t want you to skip this one, I want you to do this writing exercise, it’s so powerful.

Because you’re gonna, you’re gonna use this later. And so this is how you do it, grab a notebook, you know, just grab a piece of notebook paper, whatever it is, give yourself 15 or 20 minutes. And then start thinking about all the thoughts that get you fired up, that like that fire inside you that get you feeling motivated, whatever that looks like for you.

And I want you to fill a whole page, right? I don’t know how many lines are on a typical notebook page, 50, whatever it is, fill up the page. And if you can’t, if you get stuck, at some point, put it down, come back to it. Anytime you have a motivating thought, throughout the day, add it to your list. Okay, this is a cool, cool thing to do.

Then what I want you to do, so you’re gonna have this page that’s just full of things that gets you fired up full of thoughts that you think that are personal to you meaningful to you that get you fired up, then what I want you to do is open up that notebook and read it every single day.

Start your day this way, make some coffee, have a seat. Light some candles, listen to some music, whatever you do, but just like pull it out and read it. Read those thoughts every single day. Because when you do this, you start practicing thinking these thoughts, they become habit for you.

They become powerful for you, they become very motivational for you. Because they’re your thoughts. They’re in your words, there’s nothing more powerful than your own, your own ideas, your own thoughts, written in your own words, right? This really drills this stuff into your subconscious, right, and you start to create new thought patterns, new neural pathways, these become your automatic thoughts.

And you don’t have to, like, go out there searching for motivation anymore. Like you can create it simply by remembering these thoughts. I can just sit here and think about a thought like, I can do hard things. And this whole story, all these stories of what I’ve done in the past comes rushing back to me, and I’m immediately motivated. Right, super cool.

So you want to make these thoughts automatic, and the way you do it is by writing them down, and then reading them. Do it every day. We have a lot of automatic thoughts, wouldn’t you rather that they were these positive, encouraging motivating thoughts rather than the frustrating and defeating thoughts that we think most of the time, isn’t that crazy, we use our brains to create anxiety and stress and make ourselves frustrated and feel defeated.

We do this all the time with our brains, we have all these automatic thought patterns, these old patterns that we run through our brains just that are constantly keeping us stuck or making us feel terrible. You can change that. Okay, start creating new thought patterns. Just practice thinking new thoughts, okay?

These thought patterns will get ingrained into your subconscious and you’ll find yourself like never seeking motivation, okay, you’ll have it, you’ll be able to create it, you’ll be able to conjure it up whenever you want it. train your brain to do this. And you’ll have it whenever you need it. Okay, so that was my second suggestion, which is to practice thinking motivational thoughts.

Number three is to choose what you get better at. When you do the same things over and over and over again, you get better at them right when you practice that makes perfect, right? When you practice thinking motivating thoughts, you’ll get better at motivating yourself. Okay, this is just simple logic.

The problem though, like I was just kind of talking about, is that a lot of us don’t practice positive motivating thoughts. We practice negative, discouraging thoughts. So we’re constantly focused on maybe past failures, you know, oh, I’ve tried all these other diets. I just can’t do it. anything to lose weight, nothing ever works for me. And people beat themselves up for narrowing, and never having been able to do something like that, in the past never being able to lose weight in the past.

And what you want to do is choose things that you can get better at so that you can change your future. Okay, so let’s say, for example, you’ve given up eating sugar and flour, because you’re determined to, you know, get off the sugar wagon and, and really do something serious about your weight. And maybe you’re also doing some sort of intermittent fasting, right? These are things that are pretty common ways of losing weight.

So let’s say you’ve just quit snacking between meals, that’s a pretty easy way to do some kind of intermittent fasting, right, just give up snacks between meals. All right, so you’re not eating sugar, and flour, and you’re not eating snacks, and it’s like three o’clock in the afternoon. And you’re not gonna be eating dinner till like six o’clock.

And so you’re feeling a little urge to eat something, maybe you’re at work, and you know, there’s doughnuts in the break room, or you just find yourself, maybe you’re working from home, and you’re standing there with the pantry doors open and drooling over all the cookies that are in the pantry, okay.

So you have a choice in that moment, right, you can give in to that urge and eat the doughnut, or eat cookies, right. And when you give in to that urge, you get better at giving in to the urge, right? Every time you give in to an urge like that, against your better judgment, you get better at giving in, that you’re training yourself, that the way you’re going to deal with this urge to eat some sugar is to eat sugar.

And the crazy thing is, is that it feels terrible. Because you know, you’re not supposed to be doing that you’re like, I don’t want to eat this, I can’t believe I’m eating this doughnut right now. And this is very demotivating, you will feel incredibly demotivated when you continue to take action that you know is not moving you closer to your goals. Right?

You’re getting better at demotivating yourself if and when you do this, okay? So instead of training your brain to constantly give in to the urge, because that’s what you’re gonna get better at, you want to do the alternative, you want to do the opposite, you want to do something that will motivate you.

And that is to feel that urge, that feeling, allow it to be there and don’t do anything about it. Because here’s the thing, you won’t die, you’re going to be eating a meal in a couple of hours. So the answer is just don’t do anything about it. When you do this, you get better at allowing urges without giving into them.

When you get better at this, this is incredibly motivating for you. Because you get better at sticking to your plan. This becomes your new habit sticking to your plan is like the key to this whole deal. Right? If you’re trying to lose weight, you know what to do. Most of all, most of us know what to do. If you don’t ask me, I’ll tell you.

But sticking to your plan is like the main part of this, right? Like you just got to plan on what you’re going to eat and when and then stick to the plan. Right? It seems so simple. But it was very hard. It’s very challenging for a lot of people.

But when you do that, when you get better at sticking to your plan, you build all this confidence in yourself. You have your own back, you’re honoring your commitments to yourself, and it creates this like motivational flywheel that starts turning because you start making progress towards your goals.

You can see the scale going down, you’re like losing weight, because you’re sticking to your plan. And then you feel better about yourself. And then you’re losing some more weight. And then you’re honoring your commitments again and you’re sticking to your plan and like you just keep this motivation flywheel turning, it feels really good.

So you make a commitment to yourself. You honor it no matter what. And you build this self confidence and trust and you create this motivation that just even when things get hard and challenging, you’ve got it like you’ve got your own back. Okay, incredibly motivating. Choose what you get better at, get better at the things that are moving you towards your goal. This is Very, very motivating.

The other thing that I want to talk about so that was number three, to choose what you get better at and the number four tip for creating unstoppable motivation is remember your Why. Why are you doing this? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to run that marathon? Why is this important to you? This is such a great question. It’s such a powerful question.

But most people don’t really take the time to think about this. Or maybe they just don’t really have a good reason why. Your reason why you’re doing something, especially when you’re trying to accomplish a big goal is incredibly important. Your reason why has to be big and bold and epic and powerful. It has to make you feel something inside a powerful why is extremely motivating. Right?

A powerful why is what gets you out of bed on a very cold Saturday morning to go outside and run in the cold and the rain. Right? A powerful why is what keeps you sticking to your food plan, even when there’s doughnuts in the break room, even when there’s cookies in the pantry. So why is this important to you?

Think about this, this is a really good question. I have two why’s. And I’m going to share these with you here. The first why is this: I used to be very overweight, very sick, very unhealthy, I had cancer, I was drinking too much. I just kind of talked about this, right, but my life was a hot mess, I was going through a divorce.

And I have this picture of myself actually I saw a picture of myself with my shirt off. And very overweight. And I was like oh my god, who is that person? And so I have this image of what I used to look like.

And I can remember what I used to feel like, and how sick I was and how unhealthy I was, and how I just was like, I was miserable all the time. I never want to go back to being that guy again. This is very motivating for me.

And this is what we call an away motivation. I am very, very motivated to move away from that old version of myself. I’m very motivated to never want to be that person. Again. I’m propelled away from who I used to be. Okay, so that is one of my why’s. I am motivated away from that gross, terrible version of myself that I never want to be again.

Okay, so when I started to gain a couple of pounds or something like that, and this was this, this was powerful for me earlier this year, when I began, you know, really seriously about losing the weight for the last time, I had gained 40 pounds. And I was like very, very close to the 200 pound mark again, like I was at 199 or something like that. 198, 199.

And I was like, Oh my God, I was getting close to that other version of myself at my heaviest. I think it was like 230. But getting into the two hundreds again was like, nope, I am not going there again. So that was very, very motivating for me. I do not want to be that version of myself again.

And I have another why. My other why is who I want to be in the future. So I’m determined to become the strongest and most healthy version of myself yet. This is one of the reasons why I’m here talking to you right now. This is why I created Running Lean, and the podcast and my programs.

That’s why I’m sharing all this stuff with you. Because I want to become more. I’m becoming this amazing, healthy, strong, new person, the most badass version of myself yet. This is who I want to become, I have this very clear picture of who I want to be.

So I have a clear picture of who I don’t want to be from my past. And I want to move away from that. And I have this very clear picture of who I do want to be in my future. And I’m moving toward that. That’s called toward motivation. Right? I’m moving toward the vision that I have for my future self.

Now here’s something that is very cool when you have both of these types of motivation. When you have an away motivation and a toward motivation, this is like rocket fuel. This is how you create unstoppable, powerful motivation for yourself. Because you’re propelled away from one thing and you’re propelled towards something else. Very, very powerful. Okay?

So I want you to think about this. Why are you doing this? Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to run that marathon? Why is this important to you? Is there something you’re moving away from or maybe who you used to be? Or are you afraid, you know, of who you’ll never become?

Or is there some goal that you’re moving toward? What is it for you? It’s different for all of us, right? But what is it that’s going to get you out of bed on a cold Saturday morning, when you really, really don’t feel like because it has to be something powerful that makes you feel something inside? Right?

When you remember your why when you have a very powerful why you create this unstoppable motivation for yourself. Okay, so think about that. Think about what it is that is moving you What are you moving away from? What are you moving toward? And remember that every single day?

All right, so that was number four, remembering your why. Number five is this, what would your future self tell you right now? So think about that future version of yourself, that person that you want to become? You know, let’s say you want to lose 40 pounds. And you have this vision of your future self. Right, you’ve reached your goal, you’re at your ideal weight.

Now, think about how you got there. How did you do it? Did you get there by giving up on yourself when things got hard? Did you get there by sleeping in on Saturday mornings? Did you get there by standing in front of the pantry and eating all the cookies? Probably not.

I mean, if you did, that’s awesome, but probably not. Think about that future version of you. And think about that future version of you. giving you advice today. What would you say to yourself right now? You should probably just quit, you’ll never lose the weight. Yeah, what makes you think you can run a marathon? You know, you’ve never been able to do that before? No, this is not what your future self would say to you. This is what we say to ourselves in the present, though, right? We say these things to ourselves all the time. It’s terrible, very motivating.

What would your future self who’s already achieved the goal say to you probably say something like, Hey, I know what you’re doing right now feels hard. And I know it feels like it may not be working. But I promise you, if you stick to it, if you get through this, you aren’t going to be so amazed at what you can accomplish, you’re going to feel so confident, you’re going to feel so much love for yourself, I know you can do this, you have to trust me, I’ve already done it. I’m already there.

That’s what your future self needs to be saying to you right now. Think about it like this. There’s like, two versions of you. Okay, there’s the one in the future, who’s already done it right, already reached the goal, already lost the weight, lost the 40 pounds. Then there’s the current version of you standing in front of the pantry whose not really sure if they can do it or not.

You’re not sure if you have what it takes in this moment. Right. So there’s the future you already there. And there’s current you wondering if you should eat the cookies or not? Here’s the question you should ask yourself. What’s the difference?

What’s the difference between who you are now? And who you want to be? What’s the difference in your thinking between where you are right now? And what got you there? What’s the difference in the actions that you’re taking? Or not taking between now? And then? Because there’s that version of you that’s already hit the goal way, right?

Then there’s this version of you that’s like wondering if eating the cookies is going to get you there. What you do in this moment, can be decided by asking yourself honestly, what’s the difference? What would future me do in this moment? I know that sounds a little weird, but it is very powerful little brain trick because what you’re doing is you’re going out into the future.

You’ve already accomplished this goal. And you’re looking back at where you are right now. Like through the lens of your own experiences and stuff. And you can actually motivate yourself to do what it takes, even though it’s hard by just thinking about the future, and how you accomplish this. Okay, so what would the future you tell you right now? So, that was number five.

And then the last thing I want to say is this, this is number six, this is my last tip for creating unstoppable motivation. And this may be trademarked by Nike, but just do it. That’s not really what I want to say. What I want to say is just start. So sometimes you just don’t feel motivated to do something. I experienced this quite a bit.

When it’s cold and raining outside, and I’ve got like an eight mile run on my schedule. And I’m looking outside, I’m looking at my weather app, I’m looking at the radar. And the rain just keeps coming and just keeps coming. And it’s still only, you know, 34 degrees. And I’m like, I don’t feel like doing this, I don’t feel like going out and running in the cold and the rain.

So here’s what I do, I just start, I put on my running shoes, I put on my rain jacket. And I head out the door. And as I’m walking down the stairs of my building here, and I’m starting my watch, and I’m heading outside and it’s raining on me, I still don’t feel motivated. But you know what happens, it’s kind of crazy.

I’ll start running. And after a mile or two, the motivation sort of starts creeping in. And pretty soon I’m feeling super motivated. I’ve created my own motivation by just starting. So that’s something I just want to encourage you to do. And we can apply the same thing for you know, if you’re if you’re conflicted about eating or, or not sticking to your plan.

Sometimes you don’t feel like sticking to your plan. But I promise you, if you just do what it takes, in the moment, just start. And sometimes this means like, I’m just going to start, you know, a new way of eating, I’m going to change my diet. And you may not feel motivated to do it. But when you start and you stick to it for a couple of days, even the motivation will come.

Just getting started often is the thing that propels you into that place of feeling motivated of creating your own motivation. Okay. So remember, motivation is always an inside job, you’re creating it every day, if you want it. Okay, don’t look outside for motivation. Look inside, create the motivation that you need. And you’ll always have it because you can’t rely on outside motivation.

When you do that, when you rely on other people or other things to get you motivated, they’re going to be let down a lot of times, because you can’t rely on them or those things that are outside of you. To keep you motivated when you don’t feel like it, create your own motivation and carry it with you all the time.

You got this, my friends, I want to remind you to think about making 2021 tour year. Join the monthly coaching group and I want to help you become the badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be that lean fat burning machine.

Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join and I hope you’ll join the monthly coaching group. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, 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.

46. Love Yourself Unconditionally

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If you’re anything like me and you’ve struggled with your weight, then you probably know what it feels like to kind of hate yourself. You hate how you look, you hate how you feel, you hate how …

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Podcast Transcript

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 46. of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today, we’re going over another one of the guiding principles from the Running Lean manifesto. And this one is: love yourself unconditionally.

So if you’re anything like me, and you’ve struggled with your weight ever, then you probably know what it feels like to kind of hate yourself. You know, you might hate how you look, you hate how you feel. You hate how you’ve let yourself go. You hate who you have become.

Wow, this is a very negative and very sad place to be. I know how it feels I’ve been there. But here’s the thing, you can’t accomplish anything positive from such a negative state of mind. When you feel like super crappy about yourself, you know, it’s almost impossible for you to do anything good to lose weight to feel better about yourself, you just can’t do it.

So in this episode, I’m going to be talking about how to break out of this negative mindset and how to stop hating yourself. Because the answer is to have unconditional love for yourself, to love yourself unconditionally. So I’m gonna explain how to do it.

But first, if you like this podcast, you need to come check out our Facebook group. It’s the Running Lean community on Facebook. And just to get you excited about this, I got a new challenge coming up in November. So starting Thanksgiving Day, we’re going to do a new challenge called running through the holidays. And I haven’t even talked to anybody about this yet.

So I’m not going to tell you what it is. But it’s going to be a fun way for us to all get through the holidays together to maintain our sanity and our health and to feel good about ourselves during the holidays. So I’m not gonna. I’m just teasing this right now, I’m not going to tell you all about it. So come to the Facebook group. And I’ll explain it all in there.

And we will be running this challenge through the Facebook group from starting on Thanksgiving Day here in 2020. Okay, cool. Just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. And you will find us there.

All right, so we’ve been talking about the principles from the Running Lean manifesto. So this is a set of guiding principles that I put together, that I want it to be our North Star, I wanted us to rally around some principles, some concepts, some values, some ideas that can kind of keep us grounded, that can kind of keep us moving towards our goals. These are like our North Star.

And I love that analogy of it’s always guiding the way. So the Running Lean manifesto is eight guiding principles and they are this: Number one is to eat real food. Number two is to live vibrantly. Number three is to thrive in your body. Number four is to embrace discomfort. Number five is to run because you love it. Number six is to love yourself unconditionally. Number seven, think, feel and act with purpose. And then eight be an example of what’s possible.

So we’ve already covered a bunch of these. Today we’re talking about how to love yourself unconditionally and why this is important and how to do it. But listen, these principles are some some things that you can kind of rally around and really understand these and really embrace these because when you do, this is like the key to living a healthy, vibrant, fulfilled life.

And it’s not rocket science. This isn’t super complicated, but it does take a little hard work and a little dedication. So just commit yourself to living by these principles. Like I’ve committed myself to living by these principles and just see What kinds of things you can accomplish in your life? I think you might just blow your own mind.

Okay, so today we’ve got principle number six from the Running Lean manifesto, and that is to love yourself unconditionally. Now, before I get into this topic, I just want to say this, this might seem like kind of a woowoo topic for some of you, you might be like, love yourself, unconditionally, Patrick, come on, but I want you to be open minded about this, I want you to just listen, and, and be open to these concepts, because they are important.

And all too often, we don’t like to talk about our feelings, we don’t like to talk about our emotions, we don’t want to talk about how we may not like ourselves, or how we may hate ourselves, or how we maybe should work on loving ourselves more like this is stuff that kind of feels uncomfortable to talk about sometimes. But you know what, I don’t care. I’m talking about it. And I want you guys just to be open to it. Cool. Are we on the same page?

Alright, let’s get into this. So here’s what we do. We beat ourselves up a lot. As human beings, we’re just naturally really good at this. You know, we engage in a lot of negative self talk. So we have something like 60,000 thoughts a day that run through our heads? We have these conversations that are constantly running in our minds, like there is constantly a dialogue, running chatter going on in our heads, right?

Can you relate to this? Does this sound like you? Because I hope so. Because I know, it’s not just me. But I have this going on all the time. I have these thoughts, these conversations, I have conversations with other people, complete conversations in my mind. Or I have a conversation with myself in my mind. That’s kind of bizarre.

I’m like, who’s talking? And who’s listening? And who’s watching all this happen? Like, is this all me? It’s all me. Anyway, so we have these conversations going on, we have all this chatter going on in our brain. And it’s typically kind of crappy, it’s kind of negative, right?

We have a lot of negative self talk, even if you don’t, even if you’re not conscious of it. And you don’t like consciously notice that happening in the moment. It might be running in the background, right? It’s kind of like there’s a, there’s a radio station playing in the background. And it’s like, you’re not good enough, you can’t do that. Who do you think you are? Look at you, you look at how much weight you’ve gained, you’re fat, you’re ugly, you know, we have all this stuff going on in our brains. And it’s like, it just never shuts off. Okay.

And a lot of this negative self talk that we have a lot of this chatter going on this negative Chatter is because we, we regret a lot of things from our past, you know, we have, we’ve done things in the past that we regret, or that we’re ashamed of, or that we’re embarrassed by. And we feel like we failed a bunch of times in the past.

And we keep replaying these scenarios over and over and over again, in our heads. So one of the things that we do, one of the lines of negative thoughts that we keep having negative self talk has to do with the past, okay?

Another stream of negative self talk is about the future, constantly thinking about how we’re going to fail in the future, or how we’re not where we want to be, and how, you know, I’m never going to get to my goal weight. And I’m never going to be able to stop overeating, and I’m never going to be able to give up sugar. And I’m never going to be able to, you know, run a marathon, because I just, I just can never do it.

I can never commit to whatever it is, we fail ahead of time. You know, we constantly tell ourselves how we can’t do X, Y or Z. So when we’re focused on all the negative negativity from our past, we’re looking at our future as being you know, some negative thing.

We cannot live in the present. We cannot have contentment, peace. We can’t love ourselves in the present, right? All we do is we just kind of hate where we are and who we are. And what happens is, we can really set ourselves up for a lot of not only disappointment, but we set ourselves up to fail in so many ways. And we don’t even realize it.

But our negative thinking, this like idea of hating ourselves, over time can really put us into a negative state that creates these terrible results in our life. For example, earlier this year, I found myself 40 pounds overweight, I found myself getting divorced, you know, my wife said she wanted to leave me, leave the marriage, or end the marriage, let’s just put it that way.

And I found myself delivering food at night, just to make ends meet. And I had gotten to this place where I had been beating myself up for so long, and kind of hating on myself for so long, that it manifested into all these circumstances I found myself in my life.

You know, the negative self talk I was doing got me 40 pounds overweight, the negative self talk I kept doing about not being able to lose weight, and it was too hard, and I can’t do it, that just kept me at that, at that weight, or kept me gaining weight. You know, and I would argue that my negative view of myself over the years, contributed to this marriage that just, you know, that came to an end.

You know, I’m not blaming her, I’m not blaming myself, 100% we all have our roles and these kinds of things. But I have to say that, you know, having such a negative view of myself contributed to that, you know, I think I felt like I was a bad person, you know, there was something wrong with me.

And, you know, that kind of contributed to that, playing out the way that it did. And then I found myself delivering food at night and thinking, man, my whole life is a failure, I am a failure. I kind of hated who I had become. And this is a terrible place to operate from. Nothing good is gonna come out of this, okay. But this pattern of hating on myself had been going on for a long time, for years.

You know, hating on myself got me where I was. It got me overweight, it got me to this divorce, it got me to delivering food at night. And it was this big eye opening moment for me. That hating on myself for all my past failures. And all the things I hadn’t accomplished and all the things I didn’t do, all the mistakes that I made, and hating where I was headed or my future, because it looked like it was so bleak and grim for me, you know, look, I’m overweight, I’m getting divorce, I don’t have, you know, a regular job.

I just had no love for myself in the present, I have been so focused on past failures, and so focused on this grim future that I couldn’t love myself in the present. So this is a very powerful form of self sabotage. When you hate yourself, how do you think you’re going to act? How are you going to show up? What are you going to do or not?

You know, how do you show up for yourself? When you don’t have any love for yourself? Do you keep moving toward your big dreams and your goals? Probably not. Do you stick to your food plan? You know, I said I’m gonna eat this. And this is exactly what I’m going to do. I feel so good about the…no, you’re not gonna feel terrible. Do you stick to your training schedule? So you’re training for that marathon?

No. Because it’s just this powerful self sabotage of hating on yourself. It keeps you stuck or sends you backwards. You get lazy, you say screw it, you start gaining weight, you stop running, whatever it is. And all this kind of self hatred comes from this constant stream of negative self talk negative thoughts that you just keep replaying over and over and over in your mind.

You know, thoughts are just sentences we say to ourselves in our minds, but we believe them, and we give them so much power, especially the negative ones. Negative thoughts lead to feeling negatively about ourselves. And negative feelings lead us to take negative actions or to take no action at all, inaction.

So we don’t stick to our food plan. We don’t get back to our workout schedule, we say, eff it a lot more. So you just eat whatever, whenever you feel like it. And all this stuff just leads to crappy results, you gain weight, you don’t hit your goals. You can’t accomplish good things from this state. You can’t hate yourself thin, I say this all the time.

So if you keep thinking, I’m a failure, I always fail, I can’t do it, this isn’t gonna work for me, then you’re gonna get all of those results. Keep thinking that over and over and over again, keep telling yourself that you’re gonna fail and guess what you will fail. Keep telling yourself, you can’t do it.

And guess what, you won’t do it, keep telling yourself, this won’t work for me. And guess what, it will not work for you. You cannot hate yourself thin, you have to love yourself through all of this. You have to have your own back. I talk about this concept a lot with my clients having your own back. And I want to explain what this means to you so that you understand this too, because this is a cool concept.

So what does it mean to have your own back? So imagine you’re out running with a friend. And you could be in a race, maybe you’re helping a friend get through their first half marathon, right? And you’ve done this a million times. And so you feel pretty confident you’re just out there to support them.

You’re helping them get through the tough part of this run. How would you show up for that friend? What would you say to them? I think you’d say things like, hey, I’m here for you, you got this, you can do it, you are a badass, come on, keep going, you’re doing great, you look great.

You can do hard things, you are crushing it out here, you are almost there. Come on, let’s go. Right, you’d be there to support them to encourage them to keep them motivated. You point out all the positive things you can about them, you’d push them, you’d make sure that they finished strong. So this is what it looks like to have someone’s back.

And when you do this, for someone else, it feels really good. Right? It feels good to be the one that’s doing the encouraging, the one that’s doling out all that love, all that positive Mojo, it feels good to be that person, right? Because you’re helping them do something big, you’re helping them get through something that’s uncomfortable. And it feels good to do this.

It’s very invigorating. I love doing this. I love helping people. That’s why I love coaching so much. You know, it’s such a big part of coaching is to give people encouragement and motivation and all that positive Mojo doling out the love, right. So you can dig deep within yourself when you need to help someone else, right?

You can dig deep within yourself and find that love and that encouragement to help push someone further even when it’s very challenging for them even when things are going very tough for them. Right.

So it’s very easy for us to do for others. But it’s very hard for us to do for ourselves. Why is that? You know, it’s it’s interesting, isn’t it? That it’s hard for us to do that for ourselves, even though we can do it so easily for others. But here’s the thing, you can do it, it works just as well, when you do it for yourself. Right? It feels just as good.

The answer here is that it’s not harder to love ourselves. It’s not harder to have our own back. But we just have all this negative self talk that’s always getting in the way. You know, if you can do this for someone else, which you can, I know you can. I know you’ve done this before, then you can do it for yourself. It just takes a little practice.

So some of the things you can practice is instead of practicing negative self talk, practice positive self talk. You know, instead of practicing feeling discouraged all the time, practice encouraging yourself. Instead of practicing thinking about all the ways that you’re going to fail or all the ways that you suck, practice thinking about all the ways you are going to succeed and all the ways that you are awesome.

And you can do this by just writing it down on a piece of paper. This is the easiest little exercise you can do. Write down all the things you love about yourself. Write down words of encouragement for yourself. Write down ways you can motivate yourself, just like you’d be motivating that person you’re running with to help them get across the finish line.

Do that for yourself. And I promise you, I promise you that when you start practicing this, when you write it down, when you read it every morning, and you start practicing, that, you know, showing this unconditional love for yourself, you’re going to start to feel so much more empowered, so much more confident, so much better about yourself.

You’ll stop living out in the past, living out those past failures, you’ll become excited about your future, you’ll begin to feel alive, and happy and confident right here in the present moment. And here’s the most important piece of this. Loving yourself unconditionally means without condition, so the unconditional part is important. Okay?

That means that you love yourself exactly as you are right now. It means that you love yourself at your current weight, no matter what that is. It means that you love your body, every inch of it right now. It means you love how you look in the mirror. It means having a positive self image, a holistic positive self image, you love your whole body, your mind, your feelings, your soul.

Unconditional love does not mean I love myself, but I hate my thighs, or I love myself, but I wish my belly was smaller, or I love myself, but I hate that number on the scale. Unconditional means without any conditions, period.

So I want to make sure we’re on the same page with this. This concept right here, you can love yourself exactly as you are right now and still want to change. You can have unconditional love for yourself and still want to lose weight.

You know, you can love yourself just as you are right now, and still want smaller thighs or to get rid of a belly, that’s totally fine. Right? It doesn’t mean you don’t want to improve yourself, right? You can love yourself and respect yourself right now and be constantly working to improve yourself.

Wanting to improve yourself doesn’t mean you have to hate yourself the way you are now, or that there’s anything wrong with you now, it just means that you’re always growing, you’re always improving, you’re always becoming more. So today, I practiced loving myself unconditionally, and I’m not perfect at it, I’ll be honest with you.

I don’t do a perfect job of this, but I practice it. You know, and, and there’s things about myself that I want to change, like, I’m still working on getting stronger and building some muscle. So I’m going to the gym and I’m lifting weights, you know, I can look at myself in the mirror and go, hey, hey, you, you look pretty good.

But at the same time, I’m like, I’d like to see my arms get a little bigger, get my chest a little bigger, you know, I want to look like just like I got some muscle on me, you know. And I’ve never been able to do that in my life. And so I’m like really working on that.

And I’ve seen some improvements over the last couple of months. Okay. So um, that’s something where I love myself now. And I can want to change, I can want to get better, I can want to improve, you know, my physical strength or my running endurance, okay? I love myself as I am. I don’t hate what I see when I look in the mirror anymore.

Okay, I don’t hate who I have become, I love who I have become. And I’m always becoming more. This is such a beautiful concept. I think that we can love ourselves now and want to become more. I love, love, love this. When you can begin to love yourself unconditionally. Even just practicing this a little bit you can begin to operate from a place of confidence and contentment and peace and power.

You have this abundance of confidence where you can see that you can actually achieve anything that you set your mind to. You’re not afraid to do things, you’re not afraid to feel like a failure or feel like a loser because you know that no matter what happens if you try something and you fail, that you have your own back.

To me, this is like having a superpower. This is why I’ve included it in the Running Lean manifesto. This is why it’s one of the important guiding principles of our life. It’s why it’s such an important piece of all the mindset work that you have to do. Because without unconditional love for yourself, if you want to become anything more than what you are, and who you are, right now, it’s gonna be really hard to do almost impossible. Okay?

So I want you to just start practicing this, start practicing, loving yourself unconditionally. And you do that by practicing positive self talk, write it down. Practice, having your own back, just like you’d have a friend’s back.

And here’s a little exercise you can do practice looking in the mirror, and loving and accepting every bit of who you are right now, every bit of your body, every bit of how you look, and every bit of who you are in this moment. That’s a tough one to do. But it’s powerful. And when you do these things, I promise you, you are going to begin to feel like there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.

There’s nothing you can’t do. Cool. Next week, I’m going to be covering the next principle from the manifesto, which is to think, feel and act with purpose. That’s going to be a good one. You don’t want to miss that. You got this, my friends, lots of unconditional love to each and every one of you. Keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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