Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey, even the stuff you don’t want to hear. Why have you failed? Often we think that our failures are the opposite of us succeeding, but that’s just not the case. And if you really think about some of the people you idolize, your role models, the great people out there, they have probably failed more times than you ever have. And the more I failed, the more I realized how valuable a learning experience it really is, because we can ultimately see things as an obstacle or an opportunity. Success really is struggle and failures are a part of that success. And it’s not fun. It’s not something we often want to own, but the more we can really see that we only hold ourselves back when we don’t see the opportunity in those failures, the more we can constantly learn and grow and truly move forward faster.

(00:53):
Again, all those people that we idolize often have failed even more times than they technically succeeded. It’s just that they’ve succeeded so greatly because of those failures. And I was trying to think of a way to explain how we can change our perception of failure. And I saw a video that Ashley had sent me when she was dog sitting, kiwi and sushi, and she had zoomed in on Kiwi scratching at the glass on the door and Kiwi scratching the glass, whining to come into the room, whining, whining, whining. I’m like, oh gosh, she’s going to scratch up the glass. What are you doing, Ashley? And then Ashley zooms out, and here is Kiwi standing at the glass when the door is wide open because it’s a sliding door, it’s wide open. She and sushi could have just gone around, but hey, she’s just standing there with no clue as to what’s going on, watching Kiwi scratch at it and Kiwi scratching as if she can’t get in.

(01:40):
She’s putting this roadblock in her own way when she could go around the door. And finally Ashley persuaded them to come in. But I think this is almost how we often look at failure. We see it as the door being closed on us. We can’t go around it when really the door is wide open. We could go around, we’re putting this roadblock that we see as immovable in our own way, and sometimes we need an outside perspective to help us around. Sometimes we just need to pause and step back. But the more we don’t see failures as the end, something that we can’t come back from, something that we can’t grow from, the more we can really help ourselves move forward. So I would urge you, if you’re looking at a door that you feel like isn’t open to go through, really assess what is this door telling you?

(02:19):
What is it telling you about what you’ve done currently that might be not allowing you to seemingly move forward on this one path? What is this teaching you as to what might actually work? Because I think a lot of times in our failures we think, okay, this doesn’t work. But then the opposite might be true. If that doesn’t work, what’s the opposite action I could have taken that could really move me forward? And I found this quote that I thought was really good that I wanted to share with you guys. The best inventors often arrive at amazing ideas precisely because their original plans failed. Think about how many times you’ve had a great day, a great experience you’ve made, even a recipe that tasted better and you actually made a mistake when you were doing that thing. I can tell you I’ve had so many instances like the things didn’t work out exactly as I planned and the day ended up being better or the restaurant experience ended up being better or the recipe ended up being better.

(03:09):
Cooking not quite as much, but there’s always those situations where you do something even accidentally wrong and you don’t realize till after and things turn out better because those mistakes that we have happen, those setbacks are truly, and I keep saying this, but learning experiences, they are opportunities to step back and assess, Hey, what did I do and why did or didn’t it work? I actually thought it was really interesting, a story by the founder, Spanx. She had her dad ask her every single day, what did you fail at today? And actually be disappointed if she didn’t come up with something. And I think that’s such a great way to frame failures in our own head because those experiences we demonize, we feel bad for because we don’t like looking like we messed up or we’re not perfect, but we’re not perfect. And so often, again, if you think about the people you idolize, they have failed the most, struggled the most.

(03:58):
And so the more we can see that in ourselves and step back and treat ourselves like a friend, when we do struggle, the better off we’re going to be. So because success is struggle and it can be hard to step back, I think it’s really key that we have a few questions sort of in our repertoire to ask ourselves when we do hit those hard points. And so I was thinking about what is failure? How failing isn’t failure unless we actually give up and looking at those situations to assess them. So some questions I like to ask myself are, why did that happen? Why did the actual thing happen? Was it that I actually didn’t implement the plan? Was it that I didn’t implement the plan and it didn’t match my priorities right? Now, is this something that really is against a non-negotiable I have in my life or a value that I have in my life?

(04:40):
Or did I not fully embrace it to actually go all in? Because I think a lot of times too, we’ll be making changes. We’ll be saying we’re tracking our macros and we’re tracking our food, but we’re not actually shifting our portions to hit our new macros. And so we say macro tracking didn’t work, but when we stepped back, we assess, oh, I was tracking and that felt hard alone, but I didn’t change my portion. So of course if I didn’t adjust my portions, I’m not going to see results. So why did that happen? Really dive into even the mindsets behind the actual actions to see where your resistance might have been to fully implementing and then think, are there triggers I can note to avoid it happening again, especially with patterns, we tend to repeat. We come home from work after a long day, we’re stressed, we go to the cabinet, we grab out 20 Oreos, and before we even know we’re sitting on the couch with all of them gone, maybe that’s just me.

(05:28):
But have you ever done something like that where you just repeat this pattern almost unconsciously, and before you know it, you’re feeling guilty about it because you’ve done it. Shifting your environment or noting a trigger earlier in the day can really help you. Where if you know, Hey, on stressful days like this, if I just go straight home, I’m going to repeat that pattern. How can I change that? Maybe I’m going to go for a walk instead. Or hey, I usually go in the front door, put my bag down in this way and go straight to the cabinet. I’m actually going to go in through the garage, which will make me have to go upstairs first or something that changes. The environment changes exactly. The routine that you follow can be that little mental reminder so that we don’t just fall back into that pattern.

(06:06):
So note triggers even in reflection. So often right away, we can’t catch yourself in the act of something, but right after it happens, as soon as we really see that a pattern has repeated, we’ve failed how to step back, step back and say, okay, what can I learn from this that also reframes the event in your head to not feel so guilty about it or not see it so negatively, but step back and then say, what other ways can I notice this might be happening before it happens to catch myself? Because that’s where you start to get a little more proactive. You change things even saying, Hey, I just know that this week is going to be a stressful week, so I’m going to change my behaviors before it even gets stressful. And so maybe you out of stress wouldn’t have repeated that pattern, but you don’t even have to worry about it because you notice that, hey, this is going to be a stressful week.

(06:48):
I know what stress, I can repeat this pattern, so I’m going to completely change everything and even make something fun out of this to help reduce some stress in a different way. And then really think, what can I learn to move forward from it? Again, seeing everything as learning experience, failures are just learning with frustration. And the more we value them for that, the more we can move forward. So what can I really learn from this? Don’t beat yourself up. You’re going to learn the most from this experience because you don’t want to repeat it. So often we breeze past the learning experiences and good things because it worked out. We don’t reflect, which we should also do more of, but it isn’t as painful. And if we just sort of push failures aside and never learn from them, we are way more bound to repeat them and we don’t want to repeat them.

(07:27):
And then also in trying to do potentially exactly the opposite, we hold ourselves back from seeing the opportunity in what we were already doing. We can make ourselves feel broken, guilty, and only mentally sabotage ourselves more. So really seek that learning experience from everything and see it as a positive. Because again, a lot of times the feelings we associate with events are what can hold us back even more. If you see going to the cabinet, repeating that cycle where you had even one Oreo and then you slash the other three tires because you got that flat, right? And then you go eat all the other Oreos, and that’s like sitting by the side of the road flat tire, instead of fixing it, you slash the other three, you don’t want to do that, right? But in doing that, you could feel guilty or you could say, Hey, what can I learn from this?

(08:04):
And even in stepping back and releasing that emotion, it’s going to make it way easier to not repeat it because there’s not that guilt involved. So think of this as also seeing the opportunity and in a positive way that you can disassociate some of those feelings, feeling of guilt, especially to beat ourselves up, which will make you more and more open to moving forward faster and faster, which will help you see results faster and faster. And then what did this teach me about myself? Not only recognizing the environment, the patterns, but I think we need to dive a lot deeper a lot of times because there’s often an underlying emotion and underlying belief or boundaries set for ourselves. If we don’t question deeper, we’re bound to repeat the same mistake in a different way. I call it the circle of hard. Often we hit the hard, right?

(08:48):
We go this direction towards our goals and we hit an edge of the circle and then we say, oh, this is too hard, or this doesn’t work. And we go back and then we basically go a different direction. But because there’s a circle of heart around us, we’re sort of always hitting the same hard, it’s just labeled in a different way. That’s why we might do keto and feel like, oh, well, it’s low carb, that doesn’t work for me. So then we do another diet that restricts something else, but we’re really repeating the same pattern of restriction and we haven’t really assessed, okay, why does restriction do this to me? What are my non-negotiables? What are my values? What are my priorities? How can I work with my lifestyle to really make a change? And so we basically hit the same hard just going in the circle, keeping ourselves constantly stuck within these boundaries.

(09:24):
So really assess what did I learn about myself and my own patterns and my own handling of different things, my own routines, my own mindsets? Because the more you do that internal reflection and really ask why, the more you’re going to assess what you need and truly need to move forward. And sometimes it’s that habits you’ve been doing just now don’t fit your lifestyle. And the more you assess, okay, well, where is my mind right now? What am I evaluating? What am I prioritizing? The more you can even evolve those habits to match really where you’re at right now because something doesn’t work for us forever, even over the course of a year. So I want you to ask those questions and especially the last question, because I think everything is really an opportunity to learn more about ourselves to then tweak. Because habits in one form don’t fit us and fit us forever.

(10:07):
Routines and patterns will shift. We are constantly evolving. We just want to control the direction that we are changing in, and we can better do that by pausing to reflect. Reflection is all about taking ownership, and the more we take ownership, the more we can shift our perspective, how we view the events, see opportunity or obstacle in the failures, because people who succeed the most, those people we idolize, didn’t not fail. They just always saw the opportunity or the learning experience and everything to eventually move forward. So I really want you to think, why have I failed? And then do those assessments. Think about any event that you’ve sort of even tried to hide from and go back and learn from it.

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.

Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey, even the stuff you don’t want to hear. I am incredibly lazy and I own it, and I actually credit this with the fact that I’ve become more disciplined because of my ownership of my own laziness. So let me explain. We are creatures of comfort and convenience and ease. When we think about the habits that we repeat, they’re often easy. They’re unconscious. They have solved a problem for us, and they’ve become so innate they don’t take any willpower or thought to really replicate. It’s why it’s really hard to break some of those habits, like maybe coming home from work and going straight to the cabinet. We’ve ingrained that pattern so much so that we don’t even think about it. It’s convenient, comfortable, and easy, but this same fact of the fact that we are creatures or comfort, convenience and ease is why new habits are so hard.

(00:53):
Because a lot of times they take thought they’re uncomfortable, they’re different than what we’ve always done. There might be a learning process which is hard involved. And so when we’re thinking about this, the more we can embrace that we are the creatures of comfort, or as I like to put it lazy, the more we can break down those new habits we’re trying to implement, and even the habits we’re trying to unlearn in a way that allows us to steer into this and make it more comfortable, easier. So when we think about habit change, it’s the unlearning process of habits that might be there and the learning process of new habits. New habits might be easier to implement because there isn’t an unlearning process that has to go there. So if you’re trying to implement a totally new habit that you don’t have any bad habits with, you might be like, okay, great.

(01:33):
I can easily do this new thing. It fits in right away. It’s comfortable enough and convenient enough, no problem, right? There’s no unlearning. Unlearning is what makes things often hard in that we have to make that conscious break that pattern as we’re creating that new pattern, which often also clashes with what is easy, comfortable, and convenient. So when we think about this, the first step might be to make things so small that we make that habit. We’re repeating that we want to stop a little bit harder because by just doing that, all of a sudden we’re building towards the other habit. Or by implementing the new habit, we might want to break it down into such a small component that it also helps us stop the other one. So things that really can work are shifts in our environment, especially for old habits and routines.

(02:15):
You might’ve heard me use this example in the past, but it’s something that’s so silly in nature, but made such a huge impact. So we don’t have to think about these things being super dramatic, but I had a problem with what I called the one more game where if I started eating a piece of candy and I had multiple little mini candy bars, I felt like I just always ate the entire bag. And so I wanted to stop this pattern. So when I did get it and I wanted to have a few pieces, I would put some now out in the cabinet and instead of leaving the container of all the other candy, the bag of the candy in the cabinet as well, I put in the freezer. Candy in the freezer tastes just as good, if not arguably better than in the cabinet. But just shifting that so that it was in the freezer, I felt like it was there whenever I wanted it would last.

(02:56):
Now eons even longer. It stopped me from feeling the need to have more of it, and sometimes now I still take it out of the freezer and eat right from there, but I’m not as tempted because it’s a different pattern interrupt for me, it’s a change in my environment, which may not work for you may seem very silly because again, it’s still just as good, if not arguably better. But that changed the routine from being something unconscious to enough of a discomfort, a new hard, just a little bit more difficult and a little bit more out of mind that it helped me. Same thing with learning new habits. You might say, Hey, for my goal to see results as fast as possible, I know tracking macros is great, but it’s overwhelming. It seems tedious. It seems just like something I can’t do. It’s so hard.

(03:37):
So you mentally resist it, even if you could potentially physically do it. So instead of just going straight to trying to force that which ends up making you feel restricted, you push it back even mentally more, which makes it even harder and uncomfortable. Think about what is the easiest, most comfortable thing to do with that. Maybe you’re like, Hey, I’m okay tracking as long as I don’t have to actually make any changes to start. Or, hey, maybe I’ll write down my food or maybe I’ll take pictures of my food, or maybe I’ll even focus on specific things at each meal to hold myself accountable and track in that way. One habit doesn’t have to be done in one way and won’t be done in one way by everybody or even by ourselves over the course of our life. But we want to think about how we can make those habits we want to break harder and the habits we want to implement even easier.

(04:19):
Recognizing even maybe the ideal habit we want to build towards knowing we’re taking those steps because the more we just go right against that hard, we bash our head into a wall. Basically trying to make that habit change the more we are going to push back against it and not want to do it again. Owning our own laziness, what can I be lazy with? Hey, I want to hit macros, so I’m going to map out one day of macros and track one day and create meal prep or even buy meal prep to make it real easy. I love having meal prep. Yes, I do like cooking. I think it’s great to working all these different things, but I also know that I am lazy and at the end of the day, if something takes longer than five minutes to microwave, there are days I won’t do what I should do, what I really want to do in terms of my goals, and I’ll make a choice that I won’t be proud of later.

(05:00):
So instead, I have that frozen meal prep. I can microwave in under five minutes and I can go. So the more you think about, Hey, I’m lazy, let’s own this so that my energy can go to the priorities I really want to focus on. The more you’re going to find ways to make those habits that you want to break a little bit harder and those habits you want to implement a little bit easier, and then find the fun in it. If something is feeling like too much effort, how can you break it down? Because maybe your priorities have shifted. How can you find something new to invigorate it? Maybe you don’t like foam rolling, but you really love listening to the podcasts. Listen to the podcast as you foam roll. Connect those habits, but find ways to steer into making things a little bit more comfortable, convenient, and easy when you want to implement them or a little bit harder uncomfortable and just not as convenient when you want to break them, but own your own laziness and see your discipline actually skyrocket from this.

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.

Cori (00:00):
Welcome to the Redefining Strength Podcast. Everything you need to succeed on your health and fitness journey. Even the stuff you don’t want to hear, habits are like rocks we’re trying to carry across the field. So I was trying to think about making habit changes as we set new goals and how we usually approach habit change and why we often find that we can’t maintain the habits we’re trying to create and the times that we actually are successful. Not to mention even recognizing why certain bad habits are so easy to keep repeating and so hard to break. In thinking about all this, I came up with this visual that really helped me and I wanted to share it with all of you. It was this idea that we have these different size, big rocks, medium stones, small stones and pebbles all sitting in a pile, and we have this bag that we can use and carry about five pounds across this field, and we need to get ’em across the field to reach our goal, and we want to do this as efficiently as possible.

(00:59):
Most of the time, we don’t want to take extra long to reach our goal. So looking at this pile, I think a lot of times we go, okay, well I’m going to carry the big rocks across first, get as many as I can, and that way I’m doing it when I’m freshest, I’m getting these heavy things out of the way. So if we go to picking up the big rocks, which are those habits I think are often hard, most outside our comfort zone. They’re the ones we think, well, I can do this right now. So motivated. They’re the ones that are sacrifices that we feel like we’re kind of will powering our way through. It’s tracking macros when we’ve always said tracking macros is so overwhelming and we’re going to do it perfectly. It’s the two a day workouts. It’s some of these really intense changes that we make.

(01:34):
This all or nothing attitude type habits, those are the big rocks. And so we go and we put a couple in the bag and either A, we can’t pick it up, so we never actually get started. So overwhelmed with the weight of it, or we get halfway across the field and all of a sudden the bag ripped because it couldn’t carry that weight, and now we can’t even go back and start carrying the other rocks across in any efficient manner. That’s how we often approach habit changes, trying to do these big, overhauling heavy changes that weigh us down and ultimately sabotage us when we run out of that initial motivation and willpower. It’s like we had all this passion and then this passion bomb exploded on us and we couldn’t do anymore. So if you go back to that pile, we now have the medium stones, the small stones, the small pebbles, the medium and small stones we could carry a lot more of, but still, again, it might take us a little bit longer to go across.

(02:22):
These habits are things that might be a little uncomfortable but easier to do, or they might take a little bit more effort, be harder to do, but are more comfortable for us. So thinking about things like if you say working out, working out is technically hard, but if you like doing it, you might be like, this is the thing I can always do. I can’t change my diet, but I can change my workouts. Well, you’re comfortable being uncomfortable in that way. It’s technically a hard thing. You’re just comfortable making changes. So we have habits like that. We also have habits that for some reason we really just don’t like doing. We’re not comfortable doing, even though they’re so easy to do. Not even fitness related. I equate this to doing laundry. It’s not really that hard to do, not even that time consuming, but I hate doing it.

(03:05):
So we all have those habits. It might be meal prepping for you, it might be drinking more water, but those are sort of the medium stones and small stones, and we can get those across. But if we’re only carrying those across, it’s not that efficient. There’s times where we put too much weight in and we bog ourselves down or results don’t happen fast enough, so we lose motivation and we give up because we feel like we’re not there yet. Same thing can sort of be said for those small pebbles. These are the habits that barely push your comfort zone. They’re the really easy 1% changes, and while they can really add up, but we might even be able to carry a whole lot of them across in one go. This is often where we’re like, unless we’re really embracing sustainable changes, we’re like, Ugh, nothing’s adding up because these aren’t sexy.

(03:45):
They don’t feel like these massive changes for us. So it doesn’t give us that feeling of doing more. It’s often the things we really need to do, but again, it makes us not as efficient or create as fast a change. It’s sustainable, but we still have those other hard habits we might need to embrace. Sometimes it can help us work our way up to them, but we still have all this diversity of habit change we have to make. And we have only so much willpower. We have only so much motivation. We have only so many ways we can shift our priorities. So how can we manage to make habit changes that actually last? This is where you have to think about efficiency in that bag. What’s one hard habit change you can make? Put that into the bag. How can I fit some medium stones and small stones of bear on that big rock?

(04:28):
So how can I include some habit changes that are maybe a little less comfortable but easy to do technically or a little harder to do, but I’m more comfortable with sort of around that? And then how can I put in some 1% changes around that for maybe one of the other big rocks I can’t carry yet? So I’m using all that space efficiently. If I’m combining all these different types of habits into one bag, I’m going to make it across the field as fast as possible. And I might even be able to then say, Hey, I can actually take two of these big rocks. They’re not quite as big in the next go. And you might be able to do a little bit more, be willing to make a few more sacrifices. You are really motivated, or you might hit a time of year, be a little fatigued carrying the rocks across and recognize, Hey, I don’t have the same focus and intensity.

(05:12):
I’m fatigued mentally, even fatigued with the habit changes. I’m going to carry a few more small pebbles in this go. But that way you’re always moving across and you’re moving across as efficiently as possible. You’re keeping that forward with momentum towards your goal. Well, recognizing that different habits have different hard for us and that we can’t just always go at one speed, carrying only one weight of a habit, and that that’s also what sabotaged us. And along the way, we might get lucky and even find a sledgehammer where we can break down some of the big rocks into smaller stones that are more manageable for us to get across. But the more we look at our habit changes not just as one size, one type of habit, but as this diversity, the more we can really assess who we are, what we need, even at this stage season of life, time of the year, to be able to carry across those habits, to be able to use those habits to move forward towards our goal in the most efficient manner possible.

(06:05):
Love to hear your thoughts on this. Hope this really helped you embrace habit changes and even assess some of the habits you’re currently doing to see are these big rocks that are really hard and am I doing too many of them to sabotage myself and overwhelm myself and run out of willpower? Or am I only sticking with the small pebbles? And that’s maybe why, yes, this feels sustainable, but I’m not seeing results snowball as fast as I’d like, and I’m losing motivation because of that. Can I incorporate some of the small stones and some of the medium stones into this to really be efficient in how I’m seeing results happen and be able to get everything moving forward towards my goal a little bit faster?

*Note: This transcript is autogenerated there may be some unintended errors.